3a) Daily Zensunni

3a) Edited, as found on Reddit

8a) What the Bene Gesserit knew–memes rule.

8a1) In a new study, University of Maine researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics.
        After conducting an extensive review of the literature and evidence of long-term human evolution, scientists Tim Waring and Zach Wood concluded that humans are experiencing a "special evolutionary transition" in which the importance of culture, such as learned knowledge, practices and skills, is surpassing the value of genes as the primary driver of human evolution.
        Culture is an under-appreciated factor in human evolution, Waring says. Like genes, culture helps people adjust to their environment and meet the challenges of survival and reproduction. Culture, however, does so more effectively than genes because the transfer of knowledge is faster and more flexible than the inheritance of genes, according to Waring and Wood.
        Culture is a stronger mechanism of adaptation for a couple of reasons, Waring says. It's faster: gene transfer occurs only once a generation, while cultural practices can be rapidly learned and frequently updated. Culture is also more flexible than genes: gene transfer is rigid and limited to the genetic information of two parents, while cultural transmission is based on flexible human learning and effectively unlimited with the ability to make use of information from peers and experts far beyond parents. As a result, cultural evolution is a stronger type of adaptation than old genetics. 

Researchers: Culture drives human evolution more than genetics at Pys.org

8a2) A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.

The Coda

Frank Herbert – Chapterhouse Dune

8a3) See 060321_2a2

2a) Through a Glass Darkly

2a1) In the spirit of Nietzsche–the textual experience being user defined–here are three recent artifacts that share common threads. Honestly, I sense the golden thread more than I can articulate at the time of this post. Conclusions belong to the future, waiting to coalesce. But with the intent of marking the path in spacetime, here are some white stones to follow.

2a2) Among the forms of “moralistic mendaciousness” that Nietzsche attacked, none repulsed him more than the “ascetic ideal,” the pursuit of “poverty, humility, chastity.” Asceticism was “the harmful ideal par excellence,” for it justified suffering, turning it into a ritualized practice. In Nietzsche’s writing, the aristocratic priests with their “quack-cures” preached asceticism to channel the ressentiment of the dispossessed away from revolt. Asceticism enters “Heaven” through Kojima. We learn that the cheap clothes and humble appearance that mark her for suffering—“my signs,” she calls them—are, unlike the narrator’s eye, entirely self-willed. She has a rich stepfather, whom she despises; her poverty is affected, in solidarity with her biological father, who is virtually destitute and incapable of doing anything about it. Desperate to internalize his “beautiful weakness” as her own, she becomes obsessed with purity and self-abnegation. The narrator watches as she adds new “signs”: she stops eating and bathes less and less, turning into an uncanny, priestly figure, half saint, half monster. She is distraught when the narrator considers corrective surgery for his eye, arguing that he must learn to submit to his bullying:

We’re not just obeying, not anymore. We’re letting it happen. We know exactly what’s going on. We see it, and we let it happen. I don’t think that’s weakness at all. It’s more like strength.

Kojima’s preaching is parried by the bully Momose, the raging spirit of Nietzschean nihilism, ready to dismiss everything Kojima says as “total bullshit.” Good and bad, he tells the narrator, are values determined by the powerful. There is “no beautiful world where everyone thinks the same way,” no God or higher authority to redeem suffering as meaningful:

It’s just that some people can do things, and others can’t. There are things that they want to do and things that they don’t. Everyone has their own likes and dislikes. It couldn’t be any simpler. People do what they can get away with.

Blunt statements like these may come off as juvenile, but a certain immaturity is latent in Kawakami’s source material. “Altered is Zarathustra; a child has Zarathustra become,” Nietzsche writes approvingly, of the prophet’s manner of thought and speech. Like a child, he can think about ideas with divine frankness and unguarded simplicity. Untutored in self-deception, undisciplined by lifelong coercion and punishment in what Nietzsche calls “the morality of custom,” the child remains open to many different meanings of being good. Like the narrator’s eye, the figure of the child is a brilliant device, allowing Kawakami to get away with dissolving elemental ideas into the confusion of adolescent relationships.

Merve Emre – A Japanese Novelist’s Tale of Bullying and Nietzsche

2a3) To the extent that the powerless—however defined—are treated as deserving of greater advantage than the powerful, it seems natural that many will claim and aspire to be powerless. We should expect a commensurate increase in mental health cases amongst the young (who come of age under the principle of “equity”). Since mental health is, in part, a function of what we believe, it is inaccurate to say that an uptick in those claiming to suffer from mental health issues is an expression of fraud or self-deception. Rather, it is accurate to say that a society that grants glory to the inhibited will produce members who compete, paradoxically, for the glory of being incapable of achieving glory.
Zohar Atkins – What is Power? 

2a4) The power of mind is much greater than the power of body. Much, much greater. Our inner realm is a much vaster set of possibilities...and the realm of other human minds is a vaster set of possibilities than even other human bodies. 

Michael Grenke – Michael Grenke on van Boxel's Warspeak and Nietzsche

2a5a) The effect of Taraza’s words startled Odrade. She correctly interpreted the threat but fear left her, spilling out as though it were water poured from a jug. For the first time in her life, Odrade recognized the precise moment of crossing a dividing line. This was a line whose existence she thought few of her Sisters suspected. As she crossed it, she realized that she had always known it was there: a place where she could enter the void and float free. She no longer was vulnerable. She could be killed but she could not be defeated.

Frank Herbert – Heretics of Dune

2a5b) This is obviously out of context if you're not familiar with Herbert's work. Suffice it to say this is one of my favorite passages in the Dune series. Saturated, as I am with Nietzsche as melange, I have a hard time distinguishing what was intentionally Nietzschean in Herbert's work, and what was merely just him tuning into the same wavelength. Which I suppose is the very point of this post. The glass of experience is foggy, filtered, opaque. What matters if we agree on specifics of tone if the harmonic resonance puts us in chorus? All that matters is that like Darwi Odrade above, we seek until we are released into that void where we suffer death, but never defeat. 

2a6) See 060221_5a

4c) Daily Zen

4c1)  

Brian Eno's sole contribution to David Lynch's Dune film score. Wikipedia has an uncited rumor saying Eno had composed a full score. But this is the only track that survives. Toto's score is adequate to the operatic vision of Lynch–Fellini's Satyricon meets DeMille's Ten Commandments, but this track is really the highlight of the score. An odd inclusion, but lucky for us it exists. 

 

And speaking of lucky. It being Monday and all, here's 3 hours of daily Zen.

4c2)

4b) Tunes of Dune

4b1)  

As far as I know, this was not inspired by Dune. But besides being the perfect soundtrack to Fremen wandering across the face of the desert (without rhythm, of course), it's hard not to make the connection to this early cover painting. 

 

4b2)  

Commissioned by CTI record exec, Creed Taylor, David Matthews (no, not that Dave Matthews!) put together a funky jazz and disco-lite album of Dune-related compositions and covers of other SF movie scores.

 

Frank Herbert was not involved, and the album was pulled shortly after being released. Which is unfortunate. David Matthews is a superb arranger and composer. While the link to Herbert's books is little more than in name only, for fans of the sound of CTI, Matthews album is well worth tracking down. Who knew Muad'Dib got jiggy with it?! 

 

4b3)  

French prog-rocker, Richard Pinhas of Heldon, visited the Dune theme more than once. A sample from his 1978 album Chronolyse. 

 

4b4)  

Former member of Tangerine Dream, and krautrockers Ash Ra Tempel and Cosmic Jokers, this is synth wizard Klaus Schulze's entry. 

 

4b5)  

Bernard Szajner, inventor of the laser harp, released a full-length tribute to Herbert's world, Visions of Dune in 1979. Originally released under the name Zed, it was remastered and rereleased in 2014.

 

4b6)  

Walk without rhythm, it won't attract the worm 

Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm 

Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm 

If you walk without rhythm, you never learn 

 

4b7)  

Long before Elon, she was one of us.

4a) I Bless the Rains Down in Africa

4a1) 

4a2a) "Hurry, boy, she's waiting there for you."

 

Paul (Kyle MacLachlan) and Chani (Sean Young) in Dune (1984), Director, David Lynch

 

 

4a2b)

2a) All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

 2a1) “This, however, all poets believe: that whoever pricks up his ears as he lies in the grass or on lonely slopes will find out something about those things that are between heaven and earth. And when they feel tender sentiments stirring, the poets always fancy that nature herself is in love with them; and that she is creeping to their ears to tell them secrets and amorous batteries; and of this they brag and boast before all mortals.        

    “Alas, there are so many things between heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed."

Thus Spoke Zarathustra Second Part, On Poets – Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann - Translator

2a2) 

I like to think (and

the sooner the better!)

of a cybernetic meadow

where mammals and computers

live together in mutually

programming harmony

like pure water

touching clear sky.

I like to think

(right now, please!)

of a cybernetic forest

filled with pines and electronics

where deer stroll peacefully

past computers

as if they were flowers

with spinning blossoms.

I like to think

(it has to be!)

of a cybernetic ecology

where we are free of our labors

and joined back to nature,

returned to our mammal

brothers and sisters,

and all watched over

by machines of loving grace.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace – Richard Brautigan

2a3)
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts (2011), Adam Curtis, Director

2a4) 

O wonder!

How many goodly creatures are there here! 

How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world 

That has such people in’t!

The Tempest Act V, Shakespeare

2a5) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. Clarke

2a5) "... about four hundred years previously, the state of mechanical knowledge was far beyond our own, and was advancing with prodigious rapidity, until one of the most learned professors of hypothetics wrote an extraordinary book (from which I propose to give extracts later on), proving that the machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man, and to become instinct with a vitality as different from, and superior to, that of animals, as animal to vegetable life. So convincing was his reasoning, or unreasoning, to this effect, that he carried the country with him and they made a clean sweep of all machinery that had not been in use for more than two hundred and seventy-one years (which period was arrived at after a series of compromises), and strictly forbade all further improvements and inventions" 

Samuel Butler – Erewhon 

The Butlerian Jihad at the Dune Wiki

2a7)
Ultravox "I Want to Be A Machine"

1a) Neoplatonism and the role of logos as perpetually eternal and infallible

1a1) Why do we assume that text is somehow fathomable and/or absolute in meaning? How do we propose to read the mind of the writer in their own spacetime? Do I know my own mind past the point of writing or typing a thought? On (re)reading and editing, do I not begin to narrativize from memory? The falsifiability of the empirical hypothesis can heuristically curb the outright falsehoods, but what about that frontier between noumena and phenomena?

1a2) Neo-platonism (or Neoplatonism) is a modern term used to designate the period of Platonic philosophy beginning with the work of Plotinus and ending with the closing of the Platonic Academy by the Emperor Justinian in 529 C.E. This brand of Platonism, which is often described as ‘mystical’ or religious in nature, developed outside the mainstream of Academic Platonism.

Neo-Platonism at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

 

1a3) Gnosticism (after gnôsis, the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight”) is the name given to a loosely organized religious and philosophical movement that flourished in the first and second centuries CE. The exact origin(s) of this school of thought cannot be traced, although it is possible to locate influences or sources as far back as the second and first centuries BCE, such as the early treatises of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Jewish Apocalyptic writings, and especially Platonic philosophy and the Hebrew Scriptures themselves.

Gnosticism at The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

1a4) Language is a virus at Wikipedia

1a5) “Throughout our history,” Leto said, “the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: “This is what it meant.”

Frank Herbert – God Emperor of Dune

7a) Biology, the State, and Vocation

7a1) Father Curtis: And this offends you as a Jewish person. 

Jerry: No. It offends me as a comedian!

7a2) The tension between accepting and transcending one’s givens is best captured through the difference between one’s family of origin and one’s family of choice. The tribes represent the idea that genealogy is destiny, or at least, that one has a responsibility (if not simply an involuntary compulsion) to pass on a lineage, to tell one’s family story, to carry on its values, temperaments, genetics and epigenetics. But, the reality of “conversion,” especially as expanded and illuminated by rabbinic Judaism, means that inclusion in the people is not determined exclusively (or even ideally) by biology or history, but by choice.

Unfamiliar Territory @Etz Hasadeh

7a3) “The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another, the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”

Addenda to Orders in Council – The Emperor Paul Muad’Dib, 

Dune Messiah - Frank Herbert

7a4) ...While avoiding the noble savage ideas of Rousseau, we can still hypothesize a sort of communal hierarchy in which the tribe rose or fell by the intent of the group, not the individual. But with the rise of a bureaucratic hierarchy that needed to collect taxes, build public works, and generally keep the members of the state repressed long enough to develop social cohesion, there was also a rise in specialization. It both created and suppressed the idea of the individual experience. 

I would posit that at this time the idea of the individual outside the group was a psychological anathema. Certainly individuals had their own experience. And it would have been enhanced in smaller group settings such as families, gender separation, skill sets, etc. but it was within the service of the group. The repression mechanism was survival. It was the noumena.

The state (phenomena) brought the complexity of anonymity. The state was gathered under a ruler charismatic or powerful enough to attract or capture people from tribal living to a more “civilized” way of life. What they didn’t realize is that they traded the relative freedom of small groups for the hierarchical repression of the bureaucratic state. It was not the they were subject to the ruler–which they were, it was that they were subject to being cogs within a bureaucratic machine. No longer able to recognize their family, their neighbors, their shamans or chiefs, they were nameless, faceless, automatons driving the ship of state. (See Lang’s Metropolis. And Herbert's God Emperor of Dune.)

It is possible that Moses and the Jewish law was a synthesis–in a Hegelian sense–to this problem. From one perspective, the law was a repressive mechanism meant to confound all but the most knowledgeable. This enforces the power of the priests over the people such that the people are essentially forced to follow the rules. Otherwise, disobedience produces consequences. But as a theocracy, the whole Jewish community was subject to the one God. The community rose and/or fell by the adherence of the community to the law that the God had given them. 

Prophets were instruments of the God, meant to keep the community from the consequences of disobedience–exiles and enslavements. Flawed as everyone else, these individuals often sought to subvert the burden the God had placed on them. But in the end, the God always wins and they fulfill his intent to keep the community together by being subject to his law. 

“Whom has ears to hear, let them hear...” We could also posit to the ones who cannot or will not hear the words of God in the mouths of prophets, these  words become “convoluted wording of legalisms.” The mistranslation and obfuscation of intent is not the fault or responsibility of the God or the prophet, but on the part of the people who have made the choice–out of ignorance or rebellion–to follow their own desires. 

In the end, the mechanism may be just as suppressive as the authoritarian king or emperor, but the intent is completely different. The people are both treated as a community, but as individuals capable of working together to decide their fate. The synthesis of thesis (tribe) and antithesis (state) has been accomplished through the God.