Behind Common Sense and Sensationalists
Start from the ground…and see what’s been found
(No audio on this one yet, if ever, but here’s the link to the last few recordings on Spotify)
“Whoa!” someone might be saying now. “Where’s the kinda cute bug and the potentially adorable Rhettie and Wally?”
Well, I’m still unsupervised, so there’s no one around to remind me that the branding and voice(s) here should be clearly consistent. I mean, this entry is consistent, but it might not be clearly consistent — with Bug Stu, Wally, Allie, and others. Maybe it’s one of those fourth wall things like the theater world talks about.
Yes, I guess that’s it. I mean, I’m in this show, but something struck me (again) this weekend on a long drive to and from the eastmost edge of the East Midwest, actually even a little way into Pennsylvania. It kinda reminded me of the beginnings of The Story of Stu, which mostly involved a large version of Bug Stu leading a small version of Rhettie around on a leash. Like this from 2019: (Thanks for the sketches, Jordan Johnson.)
But the point of leading Rhettie around on a leash is mainly so she can notice the small things that make up the big things and even the very biggest imaginable things — like ideas, in new ways. Ideas about everything. Ideas that we then pretend (or have an intentional faith in their ability to-) truly define or govern what should and shouldn’t be, whether we’re the latest Polyamorist Feminists For Freedom Finally or Proponents of Patriarchy and Imperialism or Americans For Amishification or whatever’s beyond and in between.
(I would argue that the very last one there might have the most comprehensive and complex view, not that I’m advocating for it or any of these — sort of — fictional groups.)
Speaking of beyond, and at least touching on the subject here implied by the title (I do my best), the issue of whether or not something, an idea, underlies, or is above, beyond, or behind, our collective common sense, can be important in the consideration of conventional and alternative…sensibilities.
That is, if we suggest there’s something above or beyond our common sense, even if that common sense is not broadly adopted but is more connected to a particular believing community, then the explanation/exploration will have to do with Philosophy and different de facto Theologies (from traditionalists to the cooler contemporary one of Schrodinger’s Cat’s), at least ultimately. We can do better, then build upward, abstractly, without sophistry, with self-awareness, from there.
Still, Utopia-Nopia, as I like to say, and not everyone needs to buy it, or play. But some of us need to put old games away, and leapfrog postmoderns — see a way funner way.
From Bug Stu, I’m pretty sure. 2020, I think
The idea of little Rhettie following Stu around on a leash is that Rhettie would tend to see what Stu sees, and that would give her some insight into how things are actually made from Big Smalls (Stu’s term) right on up to where our humie brains need to kinda reorganize things into understandable narratives — which we then kind of re-impose in a top-down (imaginary but realified) interpretation. I’m not saying it’s never useful.
You say tomato, I say potato, let’s say. I know that’s off, but there’s a whole bunch of stuff that leads to our preferences for tomatoes or potatoes, which we seem kind of afraid to explore. Or maybe it’s just too boring, idk really, but I do have some ideas about why we’re sort of afraid (for lack of a better word or space for several more paragraphs, and I still wouldn’t know for sure anyway). To talk about those tends to get the how-dare-you defenses going, so forget I even mentioned it.
Since this already isn’t seeming all that coherent or maybe interesting anyway, let me add one more thing. If you hang around enough philosophers or read their stuff, and not just from one side (it’s best not to pretend sides don’t exist — even in that sublime knowledge-loving niche), you get to see why we commoners talk past each other, especially when so many of us are grasping for credibility by using hipper-than-thou academia-speak — or just pop-academia-speak.
That is, there’s a line of jokes among serious philosophers (whose musings are pressed for oils and elixirs to be sold by publishers/peddlers for profit, or maybe somehow it’s for the children) around their shared experience that any meetings involve first carefully defining their goals and meanings of the words to be used in the discussion.
When that’s done, they’re out of time, and the meeting is adjourned. I’m not making fun of that, I’m making fun of us for not realizing what’s happened prior to our buying the (dubiously) derived produce, detached from the necessary qualifiers and exasperatingly precise definitions by publishers.
We’re encouraged to buy the above-mentioned oils and elixirs without so much as a warning label, and we do, but it’s not because we’re interested in buying some essential truth. We seem to be buying what we want to be true, without asking why we want it to be true or what the system effects will be if we use it. Do we care?
Do we care. Care. That’s the word. That seems to be the word that’s kind of missing, not that we can’t make costumes that look like it. We’ve got Want down pretty good, but I’m not so sure about genuine Care beyond the Now, a testament to so much of our coaching since the 1970's.
The simplified sequence seems to go from Want, to rationalizing Words, even to putting costumes on outcomes, and it’s all nicely reinforced by someone’s profit, at least on a large cultural scale, at least usually. And the only reference to Care that I see would be one with a TM next to it, for profit, usually monetary, at least somewhere along the line (probably a publisher of some sort — as they position themselves to deliver our next fix — they gotta eat, right?).
Sometimes the goal doesn’t seem to be so much about justification of Wants (or past history, future plans, friends’ preferences) but about the satisfaction of simply coming to a seemingly justified conclusion about what we believe or should believe. I call this decision bias, and it would seem to be strongest when there’s a culture war, or at least the undercurrent of one.
Speaking of Tomatoes and Potatoes
(I mentioned tomatoes/potatoes a few paragraphs up.) Ultimately, at the tiniest scales, it actually makes sense to think of things as binary. This or that, yes or no, one or zero. But that ultimate tiny binary scale is NOT a fractal of what’s above it, even if everybody and their nerdiest friend still want to say fractal all the time. It’s misleading. And that’s relevant to this discussion, or this fourth wall rant-adjacent commentary.
For all the conversational infusions of diversity over the last few decades, we still don’t get that a million different kinds of things on the ground, literally and figuratively, differentially combine, make up, and scale up to abstract thought, which is then simplified and re-imposed top down, usually in an incomplete and binary way, one of which is Right and Wrong. It does have its benefits, but when things get tough, the tough need to start thinking more deeply and completely.
I’m not saying that there is no Right and Wrong, but in this era, this almost-post-postmodern era, a bunch of us need to muster more courage and curiosity about how the stews of what we want, including social affiliation and approval, received tentative and contextual wisdom, and inherited ideas about morality (Lib/Con/Creative), aka Shoulds, can actually be deconstructed with an awareness of systems and interactions, including our biases for short-term effects and even the biases to achieve a conclusion.
I mean, it might be too soon for a conclusion, at least for this courageous and curious crowd. Maybe accepting that it’s too soon is one of the most caring things that could be done right now, at least for those willing to look at the Big Smalls and see how things get built from the ground up.
Meanwhile, a very important meanwhile, there are things we can keep exploring and enjoying, which is sort of what Rhettie is working on with Wally. It’s a potentially important meanwhile activity.
In doing this, and thinking, and considering this week’s 60th anniversary of Silent Spring, the precautionary principle is probably a good place to start, strategic philosophical rhetoric against it notwithstanding. The principle never seems to hurt as much as its opponents claim or fear, and it avoids real hurt. We can talk ourselves into almost anything we want, but that’s not really caring, and that’s not love, a phrase I hear so often now — no matter if we’re tomato lovers or potato lovers or both or neither.
Good grief, Behavioral Economics wasn’t on the radar of reasoning until the early 2000’s. Should that not make us wonder about the received rationale of both the Rationalists and Romanticists in our midst?
Allie Space-Owl, 2020, according to Stu
We know so much more now about what’s in the ground and on the ground, literally and figuratively, in the soil and in our minds, and yet we pretend to examine ideas and motivated conclusions like it’s the metacognitive Wild West of the 18th, 19th, or 20th century. We’re probably better off looking further back, maybe to Copernicus, or maybe to the Greeks, Epicureans included, before anyone had brought tomatoes or potatoes from South America, then adding the 21st century stuff.
Speaking of that, sort of, a key question to ask before we start exploring is whether we’re looking to really understand or looking to find our respective modern tribe’s metaphorical version of Montezuma’s gold or maybe our personal El Dorado. Anxiety over opportunity costs, very speculative stabs at foresaken pleasures, doesn’t seem like it’s worth the culpability and real pain that comes for us and our kids from a lame intellectual legacy. We should know a little about that experience, right?
I swear all that made sense. But I’ll do better next time. Maybe I’ll do a better job of exploring how, if we really care, if we care about the cultural and intellectual legacy we leave, we’ll choose more complete, even if complex, conclusions to pass on. Maybe I’ll work in a more direct explanation of the Sensationalists part of the title instead of just implying it. What a rich word.
Meanwhile, we can spend our musings and mullings in a more imaginative context with Stu, Allie, Rhettie, Wally and a couple of others on their way.
Thanks for reading : ).
Tim
