Cobb

My Three Favorite Americans

This is a hard question for me. That’s because one of my rules is “Only be a fan of the dead.” That way you’re never disappointed by their possible future behavior. Also, there are things that I care about that few people do, and it wouldn’t be helpful if I talked about the T50 . The T50 are wise writers who are alive and I want to read every book they write. The last person I added is not American.

So what is it about an American that would make them a favorite keeping in mind that I need to feel that they are uniquely American? Well there’s too much to list. Still, I know it when I see it.

So my three favorite Americans are:

• Joe Rogan
• Mike Rowe
• Neal Stephenson

Why:
Joe Rogan is the kind of person you might want to dismiss as a knucklehead. He is the direct opposite. Like all great standup comedians, he entertains the bizarre and he has an excellent grasp of what makes people tick of ‘ordinary psychology’. He has a tangible ethos about what he listens to, an excellent bullshit detector and a winning way with communications. His life journey has gone in weird unexpected directions and he has emerged sane, admirable and curious. I’m sure this dude has some of the greatest stories to tell, ever.

 

Mike Rowe is just a winner. I love everything about his wit, his self-deprecation, his attitude and his grace. He’s a good guy, personified. He knows how to lay the smackdown on nonsense and hypocrisy without being a nag or an asshole. Kind of directly opposite of Joe Rogan who would be the first to admit he’s an asshole (but my kind of asshole), Mike tries and succeeds at being a gentleman. Not prissy, but a real honest stand up guy who also doesn’t go for false modesty. Plus his name is Mike. That’s American as it gets.

 

Neal Stephenson is the right kind of intellectual. He has discipline and imagination, and dammit he’s just really smart. He’s an outstanding writer and he loves the big, the huge and the ginormous. He is one of the few rationally grounded writers who can do excellent historical fiction and excellent real-world reporting. He’s brainy and intellectually adventurous, but he’s not a revolutionary. He, like Rowe, appreciates the skills that ordinary people develop and understands what happens when that body of knowledge clashes with the knowledge of experts and geniuses. He paints worlds. He loves swords.

These are my three favorite Americans. I’d love to see them in the same room.

Thou Art That

So imagine you put a couple phrases together. Bear with me on this because it is so deep that it's almost obvious. I hope you actually see it, and once seen cannot be unseen.

"Thou art that". Take the history of physics and the history of religion and consider the heresies and tangents, because only one familiar with the heresies and tangents truly understands what might evolve. We're just in a desert now where intellectuals stumble over weak misinterpretations, like rebels hate business thinking it's all evil.

"Thou art that" means god is in the prayer. God is self and the prayer of prayer is both prayer and prayee. Thus prayer is both meditation and public declaration.

Which kids get math in school? The few. The dedicated. Those blessed with a talent. And they start seeing numbers everywhere. Then what of the spiritual talent? They see god in self and in others and try to use what has been passed down to get others involved in self-improvement, which is just clarification of the ultimate truth that the ultimate human soul has its own perfection we try to reach.

The song says 'rise and shine and give god the glory'. Testimony is just teaching. You find your keys you say 'praise god' but it is nothing more than an acknowledgement that your conscience is always looking out for yourself and your keys. So you tag it publicly with #God. So you just discovered it, and you overuse it a bit and people with no vision beat you up about it. You don't have to say #self. It's just as reasonable to assume god as assume self. Was Descartes *really* philosophically consistent, considering what we still don't know about how the brain makes a self? Maybe a shortcut is acceptable after all. Call it god. Billions have. Billions have lived without physics. Was their world any different? Billions have lived without god. Was their world any different? Why search for god? Why search for more? Why search for understanding? Indeed why curse the sojourner?

What if i could give you a pill that shortcuts your mental processes and delivers you to a state of increased perception? What if god were at the end of that tunnel? But it's actually just the self? What if the overwhelming compulsion to discover ultimate meaning in god is nothing more than the mind finally appreciating and recognizing it's own instinct for self-preservation, self-discovery and self-regard? What if worship of god were nothing other than the ultimate expression of self-esteem. What if that comes with the implicit understanding that 'Thou art that'? You just didn't know you were god's creature. And now you know. And it's yourself. And it's myself. And it's ourselves.

We are not alone in the universe. We regard it and it changes the mind of god.

Hmm. I'm just reminded of the puzzle that was finally solved in Iain Banks' The Algebraist. So simple.

What is the greatest discovery of physics? Some might say The Bomb. It has got to be up there. Was religion the reason that the bomb was invented, or did this just come with the territory of the universe? Minds come with the territory of the universe, don’t they? Everything can be reduced to atomic transactions, right? Yeah until you get to the quantum level, then it goes all haywire. So maybe there’s that limit to mind, and understanding and god. And yet at the abstract level above the quantum level, it can be explained simply. Minds get it. But how many get the quantum level. What if there is a true explanation of god that exists, but minds can only grasp it above a quantum level. That would kind of prove Goedel right, right? A mind cannot consistently and completely describe itself. We need an abstract cheat. Therefore god is perpetually mysterious. It’s the name of the gap, not the falsity that implies everything. It’s the inside of the black hole, but its existence doesn’t defy the universe. We just don’t get to see it.

If a human mind is capable of describing an ethical universe, or a Platonic perfection of the human value, then there is a theoretical framework for achieving that. Let’s get asymptotic to that. ‘Thou art that’ is the convergence at infinity.

Modern vs Tribal

The way I look at history, there was a period in time over which the way Westerners changed the way they looked at all people. That was the birth of ‘modernism’. Modernism builds upon the premise, long established in monotheism, that every human being has a soul. And because every human being has a soul, that human being has value in the eyes of god. Now if you reject the one true god, then you don’t have a soul worth saving, you will be a heathen and a savage and you will lack any proper moral discipline. There’s a lot to be said about that, but it is tangential here. The point is that since every soul is equal in the eyes of god, what accounts for the differences among men? Well it is their access to and usage of civilization, and in particular obedience to laws and customs which all come from the traditions originally established by religious moral discipline.

This is to say that even if you are born in some mud hut in India, your access to and usage of English civilization will in fact civilize you and make you more worthy in society than before. You can, in fact, earn and deserve the privileges of rank in society. In other words, in a modern society, meritocracy is available to all. Compare this to the caste system of India where once a Dalit, always a Dalit (untouchable). Compare that to various forms of Islam in which the ‘infidel’ is considered unworthy of life.

Today we have gone even further with this notion of modernism. But understand that without modernism, without this idea that humans are all equal at the level of the soul, no meritocracy is possible. We have extended it beyond ethnicity, beyond citizenship to the everyone. It is the fulfillment of an old idea. So yes we do actually have a global economy.

I like to use three examples of modernism. The people of Germany who build BMW automobiles have no idea to whom they are selling. A BMW rolling off the assembly line is built for no one in particular. It is built for anyone who can buy it. That is modernism. The pizzaria in NYC bakes pies and sells them by the slice. The pizza is built for no one in particular. It is built for anyone who can buy it. That is modernism. The people in San Francisco who make Gap jeans. They sell them in every size for everyone in general and nobody in particular.

So you ask the question of what happens to the outliers. By this, I presume you mean people who do not want modernism. Because the opposite of modernism is tribalism. When desire to reject the idea of a single god, a single moral code for all human beings; when you desire to weigh the soul of someone different than you at a greater or lesser value; when you say that things built by one 'kind' of person is not suitable for another 'kind' of person, then you are being tribal. When you first try to figure out the value of a human being by determining their group, you are being anti-modern, you are being tribal.

So the question for today's society is whether or not they trust modern institutions, laws, commerce and governments, or if they would rather go tribal. I think it is self-evident that many people wish to go tribal. Think how many people you know who would tattoo something other than their national flag on their body, and would actually be repulsed by the idea of being a patriotic citizen. Instead they pledge allegiance to something smaller than an ancient religion, or something smaller than a nation. Which way do they go? They go exactly where you think, they try to grow their own food rather than shop at the modern supermarket. They try to participate in everything 'alternative' rather than 'mainstream'. They seek to highlight how they are different from everyone else and how everyone else does not deserve their attention and respect. They have contempt for tradition. They seek what I call 'radical autonomy'.

There are consequences of all sorts when considerable numbers of people abandon national traditions, laws and customs. Some are small and some are critical. What happens when millions of Mexicans abandon Mexico? What happens when millions of Brazilians want to live anywhere but Brazil. What happens when millions call themselves ex-Catholics? What happens when some groups of people decide that a nation's laws don't apply to them? They all become tribes. Sometimes those tribes are elites, sometimes they are refugees. But in the end, they withdraw their support from modernism.

It is possible of course, for modernism to fail. It couldn't happen all at once, but one can certainly see the tides change. The BMW people say "Our cars are not for these people over here". The pizzaria says "You can only have this kind of slice". But essentially for all of modernism to fail, the fundamental idea of Western civilization has to fail. One law for all people has to fail or be erased. The very idea of the soul has to be erased. What are the chances? I say the chances are slim. But we do live in a multipolar world. We live in a world that is not all Western and where countries compete and their ideas and concepts of humanity bump heads.

We may have a global economy, but we do not have a global society. Could go this way, could go that way. Either way it will take generations.

The Black Country

Q: Can the blacks in America create a country?

A: Blacks in America are not interested in creating a country. The most intense period I was able to witness, during the late 1960s, demonstrated interest in emigration from America to countries like Brazil and Haiti. But this was primarily the sentiment of a small but influential cadre of intellectuals.

The fundamentals of the Black Consciousness Movement, however, did put emphasis on a global black identity. As this evolved into Pan-Africanism, there was some hope that Africans around the world would establish relations both cultural and political. This worked hand in hand with assumptions from the Cold War and global Marxism. So the direction of the independence movements of the establishment of a post-colonial balance of power was seen to be beneficial to black Americans.

Independently of this but part of the same dynamic was the influcence of Islam. The Nation of Islam was founded here in America and of course Malcolm X became very influential in it. However as he fell out favor with the leadership and changed allegiances after his Hajj, he fell more in line with Pan-Africanists through his OAAU

Many black Americans turned to Rastafarianism as well, and tended to revere black political leaders in the former colonial states. Nkruma was popular here, as well as Haile Selassie. Egypt’s Nasser and India’s Nehru were also seen as revolutionary figures for American blacks to emulate and idolize.

Despite the rise in the American counter-culture during the Vietnam era, more black Americans turned to crossover rather than separatism. By the 1980s when the Anti-Apartheid movement became strong and Americans heeded Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela, there were no black Americans seeking their fortunes in a future outside of America.

For a short period in the late 80s and early 90s, some younger black Americans turned to a version of Afrocentrism led by Molefi Asante. There remain still some small tradition of changing from Western names to West African names, although it’s considered something of a joke, surely more as a joke by Africans than of black Americans. More seriously though is an adaptation of African inspired hairstyles and bright clothing including Kinte cloth.

Today black Americans have, by various means and measure, mostly their own, have carved out space in America that was unexpected by prior generations. The integration has been successful and it is very unlikely to reverse. In 1960 there were 20 million black Americans, most of them living below middle class standards. Today there are about 42 million and most of them are solidly middle class. One might say that there may still be 10 million black Americans living in poverty, the same as 50 years ago, but they are not the core as they once were. Many political ideologies seek to highlight this seeming contradiction, and you will see many media portrayals (as well as music videos) harp on this point. But they all danced in the streets when Barack Obama was elected president.

People pretend that black American families like those of Obama are under deep threat in 2018. That is paranoia. Black Americans are doing fine and getting stronger despite the fraction that remains poor. The upside still remains. The destiny of black Americans remains with and in America. It takes something the world hasn’t yet seen to make Americans into refugees.

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But there still remains the question. Could black Americans create a country? I think the answer is yes, theoretically. If one could wave a magic wand and deport all 42 millions to some other spot on the globe, would they have the skill and wherewithal to be a recognized country? Yes. The reason is actually rather simple. It is because black Americans have inherited and come to expect liberty in American, Western terms. And just as the world, with its exceptions, have come to respect governments structured as Constitutional republics with democratic political institutions, an expatriate black America would expect nothing less and the world would embrace them.

The most difficult thing, of course, would be dissent within such a community. Even as I illustrate above, there was no single way black Americans expressed themselves politically, religiously or culturally. That will always be the case.