Open meaning
This all started for me when Jeremy at too many topics, too little time. pointed me at ...
Which in turn prompted me to reflect on an article that Beth (who doesn't blog, yet) pointed my way from ...sean cubitt's blog
Thursday, December 20, 2007Crisis in the meaning of meaning
Meaning was the once-natural sequence of being, knowing, interpreting, judging, willing and acting . It is this sequence which no longer operates as it did in earlier times.
...
(Please read the entire post - it is well worth it. -Papa)
Meaning doesn't. Truth isn't. Law does not mean law. Freedom does not mean freedom.Notebook
by Hunter
Sat Dec 01, 2007 at 01:40:42 PM PST
...I had thought we had decided as a nation that internment camp was a monstrous thing. What foolish thought; it needed only a new era, and someone new to exhume it and give it the kiss of diplomacy, and now even that is a reasonable pair of words to utter.
Truth, though, seems the coldest word of all. We have decided that truth does not mean truth, and from that atomic alteration, all the other words reorganize themselves in seismic shifts. If truth does not mean truth, then journalism does not mean journalism, and law does not mean law, and freedom does not mean freedom, and equitable does not mean equitable, and every other word can be decapitated as well, left on the ground like so many fallen soldiers in an unexplainable war. Is one of our presidential candidates secretly a Muslim, and hiding it from us? Who cares, if the accusation can be made? Does a new law have a claimed effect? Who cares what the facts themselves might say, if there is someone to dispute the point?
So am I surprised at all when ...
Finally I stumbled upon this offering from Winston Rand......
The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality In an auditorium of 500, no matter how far my questions went down that garden path, maybe two hands went up. I just could not find a spot on the spectrum that would trigger these kids' morality alarm. They listened to each example, looking at me like I was nuts.
Finally, with mock exasperation, I said, "O.K., let's try one that's a little less complicated: You want a movie or an album. You don't want to pay for it. So you download it."
There it was: the bald-faced, worst-case example, without any nuance or mitigating factors whatsoever.
"Who thinks that might be wrong?"
Two hands out of 500.
...
I don't pretend to know what the solution to the file-sharing issue is. (Although I'm increasingly convinced that copy protection isn't it.)
I do know, though, that the TV, movie and record companies' problems have only just begun. Right now, the customers who can't even *see* why file sharing might be wrong are still young. But 10, 20, 30 years from now, that crowd will be *everybody*. What will happen then?
The Appearance of Governance…
The world is governed more by appearances than realities, so that it is fully as necessary to seem to know something as to know it. — Daniel WebsterThen again, some who neither seem to know anything, nor actually know anything, like to pretend play to be king. They are most dangerous when they really begin to believe that they are above the law of the land, that the Constitution is just a “damned piece of paper”, that they infallible since their words and deeds are directed by their god, and that their own wants and needs come before the wishes of the people they are supposedly governing. Do you know of anyone like that?
Each in their own rite speaks to a form of cultural or social disintegration.
In my simplistic view this is a harbinger of great catastrophe. I believe that as societal and cultural values disintegrate a pervasive fear grows. It is the fear that has served as the foundation for worst of our human atrocities. This fear is not substantial or palpable but just the reverse. This fear is a societal and cultural vacuum, the very absence of values.
History is clear that horrendous things have risen up to fill such vacuums of fear. The Inquisition, Witch Hunts, Racism, the Holocaust, Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing, Terrorist Extremists, and my personal favorite; the "War on Terror". In each case oppression has been the method of resolution. In each case violence has been the tool.
When we as a society and culture surrender the meaning of our language we surrender the meaning of our thinking. Effectively we cannot think. Without the power of our intellect to mitigate the irrationality of our fears we can only react. Unscrupulous and unsavory "leaders" down through history have leveraged this reaction at each turn usually to increase their own power and wealth.
How then can I prevent this disintegration? How can I insure the meaning of my words? How can I safeguard the effectiveness of my thinking? I can do so by bonding my words to my being. My words mean who I am. In turn my life is the manifestation of the meaning of my words. I am charged with the responsibility of upholding the meaning of my words. I am responsible for my actions that are predicated on the meanings of my words.
My word is my bond.
And there is no bond between honest men better than their word.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link. You have pulled together a seemingly diverse set of links and ideas and managed to weave them into whole cloth. Your post has tugged at numerous threads with me, but I must admit that at the moment I am too sated for thinking and conceptualizing. The digestive process requires far too much of our energy to co-exist with intellectual processes... Perhaps later...
Tonight I took down my creative commons licensing on FlickR and went back to Copyright. That's a starting point, I think. My word is my bond too, and there is a huge conversation to be had around shared material, but it didn't start at Stanford with Larry Lessig and it shouldn't end there; and, just because Mickey Mouse is a bad guy, doesn't mean we should throw everything out and start over.
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