Do I have your attention now?

I’m using this blog post to clear up some ideas which have been flitting around my head, within my head, in the heads of others; so, in other words, I’m going to speculate and ruminate, and I don’t expect to follow a clear path.  I’m just considering paths, so many crossing paths.  A little of what I have in mind is sure to be controversial.  I am going to talk about White Power.

speculate: from the Latin specere, to look at

ruminate: from the Latin ruminare, from rumen, throat

controversy: from the Latin contra- + vertere, to turn against

One recent commenter at Phatic Communion has accused me of raping the language, but he is not aware of my general modus operandi or my philosophy.  I like following linguistic paths backward because I believe that our use of language often contains these paths even if we are unaware of the connections we are making on our journey.  Language is an attempt at logic even if logic is rarely consciously used by speakers. We often speak to make sense of what we have witnessed, and the logic of our words is the logic of our sight and our seeing.  Much of our witnessing has been witnessed before and spoken before; thus, we often fall back on the old logic when we seek to describe what we have witnessed — Language requires us to share logics, or we could not communicate. However, historically, languages have been raped repeatedly, for many reasons and in many ways, and this has led to mongrel children and new races; or, mongrel logics and new logics. Finding the straight line is notoriously hard, particularly when we attempt to isolate it from the speech used by our contemporaries; complicating matters, many of our contemporaries believe that Language is there for the raping — ad agencies do it, politicians and pundits use euphemisms, poets bend it at will. I doubt I can rape it any more than it has been raped.

We witness — speculate — and take what we see into us; there, we grind it in our metaphorical throats — ruminate — before we spit it back out as language.  This mixes things we have seen into new conglomerate masses, or strings of conglomerate masses.  The mixing together may combine normally disparate items, leading to controversy, since our cud chewing turns things against each other; yes, but those who hear our language may believe the mixture runs counter to their own logic.  You see, after they have speculated and ruminated what we have given them — along with other things they have seen — they may not be able to produce a similar cohering mass or a similar string of conglomerate masses.  Their string may run in a direction counter to our own.

But I said I was going to speak of White Power.  Do you think you know what I mean by that term?

Controverting Ideologies

Recently, blogfriend Dan at tdaxp explored the role of liberal education in our society.  I had previously linked three posts in his series and wondered at the virulent leftism which he seemed to address (or was it liberalism?)  The fourth installment has opened the door wide enough for authentic controversy to be found:

The golden age of liberal education was a boom-time of memes and ideologies, when the focus is on reproduction and not competition. Like a virgin land, the soil of the human mind in a society beginning to liberally educate seems to give enough for everybody.

But that ends. Liberal education will cease being a revolutionary force as it becomes a status quo. Ideologies will focus more on fighting each other for valuable resources and less on cultivating new lands….[The Mitochondrial Peace]

I’m not sure I understand this well enough; but he seems to be saying here that the rise of liberal education encouraged many experiments in assembling thought-tapestries (the creation of ideologies) without forcing distinct patterns into live-or-die competition with one another.  I.e., little Johnny was free create his idiosyncratic ideology without much fear that his ideology would be contested by another: he would not be forced to change his own or destroy another, by another.  Because we know that disputes have happened throughout the ages, I do not think we should assume Dan means that no controversy happened.  However, given the explosion in the number of fields of study, his thought has special significance.  Many of these new fields have encouraged self-referential thought: i.e., human behavior was studied through the narrow lens of psychology, or of chemistry, or of philosophy, or of evolutionary biology, etc.  Each field may have offered insights used by the other, there may have been some overlap, but whatever overlap occurred would take on the role of being a supporting footnote to the primary pursuit — or, primary ideology, way of speculating, way of ruminating.  Recent attempts at cross-disciplinary studies leave me believing that Dan’s prediction of the demise of multifarious liberal studies may be correct, since cross-disciplinary studies are sure to produce contro-versies as disparate ideologies are brought into frictional states.

These dynamics are playing out everywhere we look, as globalization and connectivity continue apace; I’ve explored the friction of globalization:

With an increased complexity of interactions, or of networking between parties — or of flow between parties — various paradigmatic elements began to also flow between parties at a greater rate. This has led to a destabilization of static world views. Taking again from the scientific view, we might consider what happens when new data is introduced which conflicts or modifies prior knowledge of a given event or substance: controversies occur at first, then new models are created to account for the new information, and these models persist until another introduction of new and controversial data arrives to upset that model. With greater connectivity between societies (and even, within societies), static world views also undergo such perturbations… [The Gaps in “Globalism”]

As with globalization, the increase in cross-disciplinary studies, if carried out to the very end, will tend to produce warring sets of proponents of ideologies embattled in the process of controversy. “Ideologies will focus more on fighting each other for valuable resources and less on cultivating new lands….” [Dan] The globe has precious few “new lands,” and I can easily suppose that liberal education is running out of new disciplines.  Any fundamentalist proponent of a relatively insular discipline will not like the cross-disciplinary encroach on his territory, or the implication that his territory is only part of the story.  As cross-disciplinary studies prove the inadequacy of a single-disciplinary approach, the proponents of the single-disciplinary approach will need to incorporate aspects of other disciplines; and this alone could lead to the demise of the single-disciplinary approach.  Thus, as Dan says elsewhere,

From an evolutionary standpoint, the fate of liberal education is clear. It will be subverted by an ideology that will cover up the path it came in by.

Dan proposed  an “ultimate ideology” that would come to encompass many subspecies but have no outside competition, an ideology that would require integrity of its subspecies — The new ideology will allow critical thinking only so long as it does not threaten the ideology itself. [Dan] — and so I wonder, what will be the final cud?

Insularity and Connection

Incidentally, I am not sure of what I have just written, even though it seems to make much sense.  Dan’s use of the phase “valuable resources” opens up a pandora’s box, really, as we must consider what those resources are before we can contemplate the meaning behind his thoughts, and we are likely to dispute over “valuable resources.”  I have glossed the idea by equating “resources” with land (globalization) and discipline (education); but that is a gloss.  There should be no surprise that the word “discipline” has a word for fundamentalist adherents: disciples. But what resources do these disciples protect, particularly those in the business of education? Personal authority? The integrity of their discipline? Their methods of research, reasoning, etc.?  Or is their resource a human resource; do they protect their pool of potential adherents?  All of the above?

So I am not yet decided, because there is room for questioning.

In the comments to Dan’s post, I offered an opportunity for controversy by controverting his diagramming of the relationship of Folk - Kin - Trade to personal identity and to one another.  You will have to go to his site to see what he and I mean by those terms. [They are not my focus today, and would not have been if not for the fact that Dan gave them some focus in his posts on liberal education. Even so, given the fact that I’m talking about White Power in this blog post, his terms might seem relevant….  Okay, maybe they are; but I’m not there yet…]  But I also controverted another series of ideas:

[Dan] “Human ideologies were allowed to thrive when the rise of learned rulesets caused by liberal education weakened the human cognitive immune system. The human mind went from thinking concretely about issues like folk, kin, and trade…to thinking abstractly, one open for any number of rulesets”

These statements are pregnant with hidden logic.  In my comments, I pointed out that his “human cognitive immune system” was really insularity.  The friction created by multifarious ideologies coming into contact can be averted if insularity is sought and achieved.  On a global scale, we might look at various dictatorships and anti-globalist regimes who want to stave off the threat of having to compete with foreign rule sets (educational, economic, political.)  At a smaller level, we could look at the drive to home-school students.  At still a smaller level, we could consider various hermits and misers — or, we could consider anyone who purposely avoids certain novels, art, television programs, etc., by sticking to viewing their preferred genres only — or, we might wonder at our own preference for a handful of nightclubs when so many possibilities exist.

The apple that falls close to the tree is not going to spread its genes very far.  But then, the species who eat the apples might do that for them.

If educators spread memes, they spread these through their students.

In the last part of Dan’s statement, he offered for our rumination a conflict between two processes for thinking: the concrete and the abstract.  We might more accurately say that he proposed a shift in focus, from thinking concretely to thinking abstractly.  In my comments, I pointed out that one can never think concretely; all our thoughts are abstract.  (Of course, if our thinking is a biochemical process, we only think concretely…) I’m going to transcribe part of my comments here, because they pertain to White Power:

How does one think “concretely?” Answer: one doesn’t. However, I think you mean by that a certain pre-awareness of patterns which have already occurred. That is, concepts of KIN, FOLK, and TRADE which are traditional have had their concrete results throughout general and personal history, and “thinking concretely” merely means a focus on all those past results when one thinks about kin, folk, and trade. One can predict where one is going, because so many examples exist; so, one does not think about it too much, but just does it. “Thinking abstractly,” however, would be the use of imagination to create results within the mind which do not have a historical basis. Therefore, we could consider gay marriages, global government, and cross-national anarcho-syndicates, if we “think abstractly” about kin, folk, and trade. By requiring a commitment to a career path, higher liberal education tends to focus the mind on career choices and away from the “concrete” memories of FOLK and KIN. In fact, the career choices themselves may be largely abstract, especially at first if the student is considering an occupation not followed by Mother and Father and so many cousins. By requiring a set field, liberal education tends to isolate the other two horses into another field. Even lower liberal education does this, by requiring the student to focus on algebra, literature, etc., which may be things not “concretely” witnessed in personal histories. These things might be considered “white noise” — until later in the educational system, when a career path must be chosen, and a concrete shape must be made out of that white noise. So…

White [Light/Noise/Power]

At last I am getting to it.  The thing I thought while commenting on Dan’s post has finally exited as this cud.  While trying to release the cud, I decided to speculate further by searching for “white noise” on Google.  The Wikipedia search result for that term is highly technical, and I suppose I’m a cross-disciplinary kind of guy.  Via Google, I found a simple explanation of white noise at Howstuffworks:

The adjective “white” is used to describe this type of noise because of the way white light works. White light is light that is made up of all of the different colors (frequencies) of light combined together (a prism or a rainbow separates white light back into its component colors). In the same way, white noise is a combination of all of the different frequencies of sound. You can think of white noise as 20,000 tones all playing at the same time.

From this, then, we might consider White Power: White Power is what happens when all sorts of power are combined.

Now I know that a historical definition of White Power can be said to be something else altogether — or even, exactly this, since so many levels of power were used to ensure that historical “white power.”  But not all levels and types of power were combined; some were excluded.  It was not White.

As the Howstuffworks article states, white noise makes isolating one frequency in white noise very difficult for our brain; in fact, our brain cannot discern the different frequencies of light in white light unless some are first removed. If we consider power through this lens, we might say that different frequencies of power cannot be isolated from White Power by the human brain — but first we should wonder if “White Power” can be experienced, or if it even exists: what is it?

I do not have the answer to that question, but the subject has interested me in light of the questions already raised in the previous section of this blog post and elsewhere.  In truth, we do not have a very clear concept of “power” — there is concrete power (bombs, falling trees, gravity) and abstract powers (love, truth, lies) — and trying to isolate it is very difficult (particularly the latter form; but given recent theories of quantum mechanics, etc., we should wonder about our ability to isolate the former form).  We see the machinations of politicians who deliver their ruminations on what they have witnessed as they compete for the power to direct this country and other countries; and, it would be easy to suppose that warring disciples attempt the same within the educational system or from pulpits. What seems even clearer: just as white noise is annoying, and white light must be broken down for us to be able to visually discern our physical environment, power also must be isolated to prevent annoyance and confusion.

I mentioned the difficulty experienced by the student who must isolate a career path out of the metaphorical “white noise” of disconnected disciplines and the push in higher education for the same.  Well, we often have warnings about not dissipating our energies (power) by trying too many things: Power must be directed, we think.  We really mean that the human is not capable of wielding White Power.

The question should perhaps be, Can humanity wield White Power?, not, Can a human wield White Power? The warring ideologies are attempts at channeling power, and they often operate by destroying opposing channels.  I.e., to draw these thoughts out at last and stop stumbling about, I believe that the push for insularity and the drive for creating a preeminent ideology are attempts to forestall the confusion that a blending of so many powers may create for us.  We do not know what “White Power” would be like, or even if it exists or may exist; but the liberal, democratic, multiculturalist tendency to combine all things equally frightens us because it makes things confusing for us.  Cross-disciplinary studies threaten us with complexity, or by a multiplication of factors to be weighed; competing political ideologies confuse our application of power if we do not reject some in favor of one; multiculturalist tendencies require us to ask how we shall interrelate (and utilize power) with our neighbors who may have very different channels.  So we build walls, keep it simple, and fight intruders off.  Or, we go to our potential enemies and fight them there before they can come here. — We must have a concept of power in order to have a concept of security.

This is not to make any specific moral judgment; I only want to point out the need for a sense of security and the corresponding need to define power so that we can see far enough into the future and judge our chances for security.  If I may trackback — er, backtrack — a bit to the discussion concerning Folk, Kin, and Trade:  members of our tribe are far more dependable, because we have some ability to judge their future activity; we share modus operandi. (This includes ways of making and doing as well as motivations, histories, knowledge, ideologies, superstitions, you name it.)  When these groupings become ambiguous, we suffer more trepidation.

The Great Big Cog

This blog post was also inspired by another thread at tdaxp and recent comments there.  The subject was Homosexualism v Homosexuality. Dan makes a historical argument that homosexuality as now conceived is a relatively new phenomenon — an ongoing controversy among academics, and perhaps among theologians and politicians — and suggests that “homosexualism” would be a better term.  I have a personal distaste for choosing “homosexualist” as the term to describe myself — but unless you knew what I meant by White Power before I explained my meaning, don’t jump so quickly now to understanding this statement!  I am more inclined to combine the two terms.  If we look at the historical record, we will actually find hints that the ancients believed in a natural occurrence of what we call homosexuality, and that some ancient homosexuals knew they were of a different sexual class; but these are generally hints, and the argument against a long-standing concept similar to ours is very good.  But the ancients did not need to define it as much as we need to define it, or to make a straight line through the chaos, through the white noise.  I mentioned Magic Clouds and White Noise in comments to that thread —

Dan, try thinking in terms of Magic Clouds…

Or, consider White Noise, and the insularity our modern society forces us to choose…

—and these are important considerations when considering homosexual[ity/ism].  A Magic Cloud includes so many sub-processes that it becomes complex and confusing; we know these processes exist, but we do not know exactly what they are or how they work.  We still do not know why some people are gay, how much of it is nature and how much nurture.  Dan says homosexuality is “worthlessly vague” as a term — it includes pederasty and situational homosexuality — and I am inclined to believe that it is worthless because we do not know how to channel it into a reasonable conveyor of power if it is vague.  I mentioned in the thread that “heterosexuality” is similarly vague, since at least as many forms of it exist as exist for homosexuality —

But to ground it down into your present terminology is to make “heterosexuality” hopelessly vague, since pederasty etc etc and so many forms of heterosexuality also exist. And if you insist on using “faute-de-mieux” for your arguments, I will be forced to use it as well: *Brokeback Mountain* and many non-cinematic examples in our society would support the theory that situational heterosexuality occurs. If social norms “imprison” gays in the heterosexual model — they fear to do otherwise — they may marry women and have children.

— but I failed to draw the argument out to its conclusion.  Heterosexuality has traditionally symbolized a very definite channel for powers: into Kin and Folk and Trade, not to mention religious congregations.  But we do not know why a man might be predisposed to having sex with a woman, a young girl, a young boy, another man, or an animal, or all of these.  We know that some are.  Historically, we have evidence for all of these.  Even if the ancients did not have the term “homosexual” or “lolita” or “pederasty” or “bestiality.”  But they had the terms “husband” and “wife.”  In comments to Dan’s series on liberal education, I gave a timeline for the influences of Kin, Folk, and Trade; here, I would only point out that the family unit has been very strong, historically, and often formed the basis for Folk and Trade, but has gradually been weakening as these other two have grown stronger.

Surely, that last statement will be found agreeable, somewhat at least, even by those who do not believe in homosexuality.

Dan responded to my comment by positing another:

But to rephrase my earlier point, the main question is why homosexualism has suddenly appeared. That is currently exists is undeniable. /Why/ it now exists, and formerly didn’t, is much more questionable.

The -ism term should only need a little explaining.  The commenter who inspired my participation in that thread — one Dr. Carlos Diaz Lujan — gave a good explanation:

The suffix “ity” means an “attribute, a cause or quality of being”; it refers to a “characteristic or state of being,” whereas the suffix “ism” means an “attitude, idea, or concept”; it refers to a behavior or a practice. That is why we do not say “cannibality,” but rather “cannibalism.”

No doubt, some homosexualists would recoil at the inclusion of cannibalism into the argument.  But I won’t. The Doctor was not entirely right, however, since the suffix can also mean “State; condition; quality: pauperism.” [American Heritage Dictionary.]  (Gigantism, albinism, infantilism; these are negatives, or peculiarities.)  The -ist suffix can also mean “One that is characterized by a specified trait or quality: romanticist.”  Are you a romanticist, or do you do romantics?  But these facile exercises in verbal gymnastics would be pointless if we did not look deeper to find how our ideology influences our activity and how our being influences our ideology and how our ideology influences our being.  The question was why homosexualism — let’s say, the open advocacy for a set of actions which are somehow related by the Magic Cloud of homosexuality — is now occurring but did not before the modern era.

I mentioned “situational heterosexuality” which would be a chosen path for those who might prefer one of their own sex but choose to join with the opposite in marriage, as an analogue to imprisoned heterosexual men who might, because of circumstances, choose to be sexually active with other men.  We have a tendency to recognize certain expressions of power, certain channels, even if we do not always understand them.  In Ancient Greece, for instance, men who wanted to be sexually active with boys could do so without as much threat of being ostracized within their society.  In actuality, excessive preference for young boys would have caused problems, especially if marriage to a woman was entirely overlooked in the pursuit of boys.  But dabbling was no big deal.  Some have said it was a power relation, since Greek aristocrats could choose young boys, slaves of either sex, and women, without losing their position in society. Other examples from antiquity exist, and examples not so distant in time, of expressions of lust and/or love between members of the same sex, which did not threaten the social structure of the societies in which it occurred.  But more to the point: it did not threaten the person who engaged in such expressions of lust and/or love.

I am too tempted to bring up the Kinsey Scale; but I do not like that scale.  It is a linear expression for a larger Magic Cloud, and as such it would obfuscate what is occurring.  The truth is, as a gay man I myself do not know why I am gay; but I do know that occasionally I am extremely attracted — in a very similar way — to certain women.  I wrote to Dan, consider White Noise, and the insularity our modern society forces us to choose… and since writing it, I have been wondering at the white noise of my own condition, since I am occasionally confused by my desire for certain women but much less confused by my desire for certain men.  I am sometimes even confused by my lack of desire for certain men; much more rarely, my lack of desire for certain women.  I might ask myself if I have chosen one insularity over another, and why.

There is the song by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with lyrics by Rice, from Evita: I’d Be Surprisingly Good for You. However we feel about love and relationships, we are not likely to overlook whether relationships will be good for us, bad for us, or neutral, although we may often misjudge them.  Historically, material considerations weighed heavily on decisions of whether to form relationships; and these material considerations included, at their core, the issue of power projection, our own and the power projected by others.  Power is the Great Cog that made the machinery of society work, and no one wanted to be trapped and crushed by it.  So of course, in societies which ostracized homosexuals, and particularly in those which punished all forms of homosex activity, all people would strictly follow the model which promised more help from the Great Cog — or at least, appear to.  No one wanted to be crushed by that Cog, though some inevitably misjudged it.  At the same time, in societies where homosex activity was allowed in some form, no one would need to declare exclusive identity on the basis of the desire for homosex activity; they could dabble, as long as they dabbled within certain parameters, while also utilizing the Great Cog.

It is this dabbling that has the current American Religious Right so scared.  If sexuality is a Magic Cloud — the Social Right can only say heterosexuality is the form God intended, or is Natural, without really explaining it — then the possibility exists that some married men might begin to dabble in homosex.  Some hitherto “heterosexual” men might dabble, if only once.  Or twice.  (As if none already have…)  How might power be unleashed, if the Magic Cloud of sexuality is allowed to disintegrate into White Noise — i.e., if more people than Curtis Gale Weeks began to listen to so many disconnected signals of sexual desire, involving men, involving women, of varying intensities?  And so, as a defense against White Noise, power must be focused, an ideology must be formed, insularity must be maintained.

Why is “homosexualism” now so active?  It is because the strictures put in place by Judeo-Islamo-Christianity millenia ago have been weakened. The Great Cog no longer wields all the power; the power has been dispersed in our democracy; and there remain those who believe in the Cog’s authoritarian dictates to humanity and those who put that Cog to the test; there are so many cogs.  Do not be quick to define It.  Imagine the forces of power which have hitherto held sway over society — religion, kinship, tribalism — and add to the list whatever seems appropriate. But we seem to be holding onto those cogs, or holding to our concept of their manner of influence, because we are still creating new ideologies in their image.  Judeo-Islamo-Christianity gave absolute lines through the white noise which are questioned; they are not lines many want to follow or even believe; so we create another line, many lines, which seem to controvert Judeo-Islamo-Christianity.  Homosexualism (like Atheism, like Anarchism, like Heterosexism, like so many others) is a simplification.  It is the choosing of an insularity — a path through the White Noise — within a culture which has so long demanded insularity, or the straight path.

But there is the Magic Cloud to be considered, and White Power, and the question of concrete powers which are not so easily defined away, or controverted.