Limon da'thirdteen
Last of the Lemonade Lessons and Postscript. Episode 18 by Sparkeye
What makes a difference is what makes everything different....And how we connect it together. Nothing, in fact, even equals itself, except in the ways we connect it.
All things equal are only metaphorically equal... equal in one way or another. What makes a difference is what makes everything different.... And how we connect them.1
There is no truth to be found in any system of representations other than what constitutes an adequate representation. This is what is called a criterion of adequacy.
It is at the core of everyone's game. We judge things according to some personal criteria - and that's what allows us to believe things are connected and have meaning. For us, these meanings are very personal. It is the criterion of adequacy we've used to connect things that is the basis of our feeling of uniqueness and identity.
The very same criterion of adequacy is also at the basis of scientific method, for science and mathematics are also representation systems. But I hardly need to get into that to show that truth has all shapes and no shape.
And you will notice I am speaking in metaphors, like a politician and diarrheatician.
LECTOR: Talking Apocolyptic Diarrhea, maybe. Do you realize this is more nonsensical than anything you've said up to now!!
AUCTOR: I have been leading up to this peak of philosophical prowess throughout the book. You just didn't realize it.
LECTOR: Here I thought we were walking on a flat terrain. Suddenly we're at a precipice. You have led me to a cliff, and it turns out it was a slow uphill climb all along.
AUCTOR: To see the amazing view. What a good description!!
LECTOR: I don't see YOUR view. I just see clouds. And you're asking me to keep walking! Don't be foolish. Throw out this lemon, it's too highbrowed and mistical.
AUCTOR: That's "mystical"
LECTOR You think I don't know what I spelled?! Throw the lemon out!!
AUCTOR: What I wanted to say is that, for people and their meanings, as well as for science and technology, there is no truth other than that which has a test, and every test must be based on a testing criterion, and this is a criterion of adequacy.
And we take the adequacy of this adequacy on faith. It is not all kept in vacuum containers at the National Bureau of Standards. And of course, as the world of technology gets to a more and more microscopic atomic level, what we get from the Bureau of National Standards is based on faith in the principles through which the standards are created.
Which is why I believe there will one day be a theoretical science of equivalencies. In fact, there will have to be one invented just for our technologies. It will be only be a mathematics of metaphor and art.
LECTOR: No, no, NO!! You're going too far. You have wasted your breath on me.
AUCTOR: Chill. It's not as bad as you think.
LECTOR: BALONEY.
AUCTOR: The classes of equivalences I may hasten to add, will be as vast as the sets of trans-finites, and as capable of exploration as the world of fractals. We can leave it to the eggheads.
LECTOR: Excuse me, but is that yolk dripping from your ear, Humpty? Or is it something else, Mister Head-Head?
AUCTOR: May I continue? You know I'm planning on a Nobel for this... or at least $150,000 from the MacArthur Foundation._
LECTOR: (looking at the ceiling and whistling a happy tune. He stops to stifle a fake sneeze) I must be allergic to something around here.
AUCTOR: A logic which demonstrates the categories of equivalence will allow a mathematics of non-equivalences to be built, and will let us grasp how metaphors work, what makes art work, and how respect and trust work, and finally - what makes faith what it is, and why it is so very important.
It puts science in the human world, the felt world. It makes the realities of metaphor and art, our common world of emotion more real and puzzling, and more fragile and important than these experiences ever were --- for suddenly all these "soft" experiences are on a par with the physical laws that hold bridges together, the physical laws that make high energy physics nearly imponderable.
LECTOR: But it is the other way around! You have turned all of our emotions over to the brains and wizards. They'll tell us how it's all figured out, and bamboozle us forever more!
AUCTOR: You've interrupted my ethereal rant.
LECTOR: I thought this was your apocolyptic diarrhea.
AUCTOR: Oh, yeh. That IS what I called it, didn't I? Oh well. I will continue anyway.
LECTOR: It stinks is all I can say.
AUCTOR: A science of equivalences will make the spiritual realities that bind together humanity and our history into a force as real as the sun.
Of course, for many of those wandering around on the planet, these spiritual realities already take a preeminence to the existence of the sun, but that is a different matter.
Thus it is, that even if we learned all there was to learn about life -- even if the giant cyber-brains of the present and future were to figure out more and more and more about life and nature - we will still be stuck in what is important to us, living in a world of emotion and emotional truths... a world of ass-holes and diarrhetorical, of hypocrisy, hopes, dupes and dopes. A world of faith and folly that makes champions and chumps of all of us.
LECTOR: Give me a hint. Does any of this have to do with your writing this book? Is this a book that takes all shapes and no shape at all?
AUCTOR: Yeh, it's the truth!! I swear it!
LECTOR: It's shit, that's what it is!
AUCTOR: That's what I said, didn't I?2
END of The Lemonade Lessons
Postscript
Long before conspiracy theories, a few notable fellows put their -minds to working out why humankind must continually fail to get things together, why they could never win -- and why we must always gamble against the odds. Because, of course, the house keeps the odds.
The Praise of Folly by Erasmus of Rotterdam took the house's view of the world back in 1509, and explained all of the contradictory behaviors which make it quite impossible for people, as groups, to get anything reasonable done.
The Catholic Church took quite a beating for this book, since the Church believed it RAN the House at the time. It is said that this book opened the way for the Reformation. But Erasmus wrote it in the name of the Greek Goddess of Folly who claimed the Catholic Church was one of her biggest followers. The Church was just the biggest player, not the house; whereas the house was us, humankind, as it were. Well, Pope Leo decided The Praise of Folly was a good laugh, and invited Erasmus to work for the Vatican as a propagandist. He didn't, and aside from a few laughs on the church, Erasmus built up a catalog of very common behaviors and beliefs which holds up even today.
In 1605, the Keeper of the Keys to the Kingdom of the Queen (the most Elizabethan queen that ever lived), suggested that our idolatries and mistaken images were not entirely our own fault, but a built-in part of us, which would keep us forever from the Promised Land. He buried this in his book on the Advancement of Learning, for he never said we couldn't improve ourselves, we just couldn't get to the promised land.
Now, when I go back to the original (which I have faithfully appended in a footnote) I find that I have attributed to Sir Francis Bacon somewhat more modern analysis than may be his due. However, I will explain him as I reconstructed him from memory, that is, falsely - but more aptly for our use today:
1. idols of the tribe (our species) were all the values our bodies confused us with,
2. idols of the cave were the values which spoken language would always confuse us with,
3. idols of the market were all the values our current level of technology would confuse us with, and
4. idols of the theatre were all the values our particular culture packaged us with.
In general, though particular idols change, the confusions will remain the same no matter how we educate our children, and no matter how clever we become with our databases. You may choose not to concur, being fully convinced that you are in total control of your perceptions and passions, and that your thinking is correct enough to pass the test of obviousness anywhere among the living.... or at least among those YOU consider as among the living. But if you are in the least bit perplexed as to why things are as messed up as they are, then be reassured, many have come before you.
Forty-seven years after the Advancement to Learning came out, many of the world's ills were put to test in a very big book called The Anatomy of Melancholy, which might otherwise have been entitled, "The General Nature of Insanity" by Robert Burton. This book spares no space in proving that everything that we believe is well-thought and worthwhile, is indeed the product of some form of tainted mind.... that indeed, we are all sick when it comes right down to it. And Burton was not considered a quack, but rather his semi-humorous tongue-in-cheek tome was one of the most published, best-selling volumes among the English for well over a hundred years -- easily into the times of Jefferson and Madison, Adams and Smith, and into that "Age of Enlightenment" when they firmly believed that we shall overcome some day.
Just thinking about what we have going against us, it is enough to discourage any well-meaning person from trying to get people to agree on things and to make things work.
Francis Bacon, who put together the previous view of humankind's problems is also credited with having outlined the future of scientific research, and of developing a formal approach to general education. And just to convince you he was no slouch in modern-day terms, his explanation of how to use binary code for signal transmission is worth a look before you brag about being all that smart today. In those days there weren't many people who believed "progress" was worth talking about, so Bacon had to spend a good hundred pages explaining why "advancing learning" made any sense at all. We take progress for granted, as a bi-product of evolution, yet Bacon seems to have seen through it. His talk of idols debunked the process...and clarified the relentless constraints to making any progress with basic humankind.
He understood that we might learn more, and control more, and eventually enlarge the statistics with which people are fed and clothed -- but we will not change.
Erasmus said it, Bacon said it, Burton said it, and many others before me have said it: the deck is stacked against us changing. And if you take this for granted, enlisting souls to march together for progress is a hard sell indeed. But for some stupid reason, after each one of these books has been published, even more stupid people have taken up the brickbats of progress, or tried to bust down the walls of intolerance and hubris with their bare skulls. Dumb. Dumb! Dumm!!
Note from the future - for as this lemon was written in the 1990’s before I knew better it can be taken with a grain of salt. However, I still will hold by the title which needs no seasoning whatever.
This is an allusion to the Riddle of the Sphincter, from Episode 2