If we are honest, most of us admit we don’t know everything. Indeed, we hardly know anything. Much of what we soak up from our cultures amounts to an imponderable danger we might label ‘fuckall-squared’. The contents of this imponderable may include abilities to be teased by Mozart, come out of Beethoven’s 9th with a hard on, fashion dug-out canoes, believe in the communities’ gods and so on. ‘Fuckall-squared’ is present in the esoteric and good and bad manners. It is soaked-up as we go along. We can organise World Cups, Olympics and Royal Weddings, but not the eradication of poverty and the poverty of life that gawps at celebrity, is celebrity and wants celebrity.
There comes a point in thinking (at least for a few), when one has to wonder what it is that misleads in the head-banging one has to do – not least whether one has become addicted to the pain and depression of head upon wall. One can see one is living through the inevitability of Royal crap and that the poor are always there as the unchangeable. Bringing decency and freedom to human existence is merely a laughable ideal. One should focus, as a cog in the wheel, on something small enough to be answerable, not engage in a pointless tour de force or world change.
Truth could well be a laughable creature, a woodworm getting its kicks eating into the foundations on which authority is stacked. Science has little authority, released to most only through the scented rituals of fuckall-squared on breakfast television, education and varieties of war and war by other means. Actual science remains a cabal.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy, led by a man once a Nazi (as many of us may have been had our fuckall-squareds been different), covered-up church-paedo and with a penchant for wearing dresses and silly hats, now makes a not-long-dead-Pope saintly. Most of the world is not democratic, that that is following the corrupt Athens version’s worst.
Around me, I find scholars hacking out critiques of scientific realism as though it matters. I like the tunes, all variations on inevitable uncertainty. If bothered, I could, no doubt, find papers with emphasis on the issue that this is questioning of questions not amenable to answer.
The key issue in authority, is that we would all have (morally) to follow it. Where we follow clowns (like Popes and gurus), blowing up their foundations seems fair play. Yet if the replacing authority is not available to those we ‘free’, how is any such action justifiable? For some the creation of free speech situations is emancipating, with the only force in play that of Reason. It is also the power-play of a bunch of clever-dicks seizing power. Reason slips easily into rationalization, words easily mask what is actually going on, emotions …
My guess is that the weight through time of scientific knowledge now pressurized, challenges not just obvious inanities like Popes, but all legitimization. Lyotard hacked this out in 1979. Our courts, government and so on do not work by Reason, only its pretence. Even medicine works in mysterious ways. If we think multi-cultural society is a grim failure, we have missed the issue that scientific values are much further removed from all ethnic fuckall-squared, than any ethnicity is from another.
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