Eyes of Flesh, Eyes of Fire

““What,” it will be Question’d, “When the Sun rises, do you not sea round disc of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.””

— William Blake

“The shaman, then, is one who knows that there is more to be seen of reality than the waking eye sees. Besides our eyes of flesh, there are eyes of fire that burn through the ordinariness of the world and perceive the wonders and terrors beyond. In the superconsciousness of the shaman, nothing is simply a dead object, a stupid creature; rather, all the things of this earth are swayed by sacred meanings. ”

— Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture (1969)

Being and Being Made to Be

“We see that in fact everybody who still has life and energy is continually manifesting some natural force and is today facing an unnatural coercion. And now, in some apparently trivial issue that nevertheless is a key, he draws the line! The next step for him to take is not obscure or difficult, it presents itself at once; it is even forcibly presented by Society! Modern society does not let one be–it is too total–it forces one’s hand.”

— Paul Goodman in Drawing the Line (1977)

“I ... go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn’t any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles.”

— Saul Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March (1949)

When Knowledgeable Men Talk

“When knowledgeable men talk, they no longer talk of substances and accidents, of being and spirit, of virtue and vice, of sin and salvation, of deities and demons. Instead, we have a vocabulary filled with nebulous quantities of things that have every appearance of precise calibration, and decorated with vaguely mechanistic-mathematical terms like “parameters,” “structures,” “variables,” “inputs and outputs,” “correlations,” “inventories,” “maximizations,” and “optimizations.” The terminology derives from involuted statistical procedures and methodological mysteries to which only graduate education gives access. The more such language and numerology one packs into a document, the more “objective” the document becomes–which normally means the less morally abrasive to the sources that have subsidized the research or to any sources that might conceivably subsidize one’s research at any time in the future. The vocabulary and the methodology mask the root ethical assumptions of policy or neatly transcribe them into a depersonalized rhetoric which provides a gloss of military or political necessity. To think and to talk in such terms becomes the sure sign of being a certified realist, a “hard research” man. Thus to bomb more hell out of a tiny Asian country in one year than was bombed out of Europe in the whole Second World War becomes “escalation.” Threatening to burn and blast to death several million civilians in an enemy country is called “deterrence.” Turing a city into radioactive rubble is called “taking out” a city. A concentration camp (already a euphemism for a political prison) becomes a “strategic hamlet.” A comparison of the slaughter on both sides in a war is called a “kill ratio.” Totalling up the corpses is called a “body count.” Running the blacks out of town is called “urban renewal.” Discovering ingenious new ways to bilk the public is called “market research.” Outflanking the discontent of employees is called “personnel management.” Wherever possible, hideous realities are referred to by cryptic initials and formula-like phrases: ICBM, CBR, mega-deaths, or “operation” this, “operation” that. On the other hand, one can be certain that where more colourful, emotive terms are used–”the war on poverty,” “the war for the hearts and minds of men,” “the race for space,” “the New Frontier,” “the Great Society”–the matters referred to exist only as propagandistic fictions or pure distraction.”

— Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture (1969)

A legal factory of death in your pocket

As of today, it is legal for any person in British Columbia older than 18 to carry up to a combined 2.5 g of cocaine (crack and powder), methamphetamine, MDMA, and opioids (including fentanyl, heroin, and morphine) for personal consumption. Let us pause to consider that the lethal dose of fentanyl is approximately 2 mg (see photo above for an illustration of what that quantity looks like.) Therefore, 2.5 g of pure fentanyl could kill 1,250 people. The BC Coroner’s Office has just released a report finding that 2,272 people died from illicit drug consumption in British Columbia in 2022—all of whom could have been killed by less than a single person’s legal stock of fentanyl over 2 days (4.54 g.) And yet there are “experts,” users, and advocates declaiming that the limit of 2.5 g is not high enough and that decriminalization is only a “half measure.”

No escaping history

“In philosophy there is no escaping history. Ideally, I sometimes think, I would just like to tell my students the truth about a question and send them home. But such a totally unhistorical approach tends to produce philosophical superficiality. We have to know how it came about historically that we have the questions we do and what sorts of answers our ancestors gave to these questions.”

— John Searle in Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004)

See also:

• What is Education?

• The Gossip That Feeds on Sporadic and Superficial Reading