It is perpetually night here. Why should I open the curtains when all that stares back is black night, my own reflection in some giant glazed-over dead eye? Today there was a glimpse of sun for a while--the first in over a week--but it only appeared to taunt me, and was taken away before I could do anything about it. After work me and the South African wandered around in a neon wasteland of sex shops, casinos, and small Turkish fast food places in search of a respectable place to sit down and eat. Finally the Shanghai Restaurant made an appearance. It was pretty respectable in all the usual ways, and the bill supported this conclusion. I had a Tsing Tao Chinese beer and we talked about dogmatic thought. Occasional talks about dogmatic thought are necessary and if you think otherwise then you are just plain old wrong.
When someone comes out with an absolute statement of any kind these days, I am just amused. Verbal dinosaur bones. Intelligent people have no business with such things anymore--they're rules designed to cripple the analytic mind in order to reach a quick conclusion, something I guess we needed in the past to survive mammoth attacks, peasant uprisings, world wars, etc. If you want to construct your own personal rule system then be my guest. But please don't inform me matter-of-factly that margarine is better than butter or that the difference between science and non-science is that the former contains theories which are falsifiable by possible outcomes. Or at least precede them with the words "I think." If you detach any human statement from the human context and you get nonsense, I should think that this is obvious. Even our greatest abstractions (in mathematics perhaps) will never be anything more than symptomatic of the human condition, and to imagine that we are somehow discovering truths that exist "out there" is a crock. We are discovering ourselves and nothing more.
Posted by Alan at November 9, 2002 12:15 AM