Wittgenstein's Shame

Nazi ideology breeds coercion, just as Evangelical Fundamentalism breeds coercion, just as Koch Industries breeds coercion, just as America's coercive actions over the last 150 years throughout South and Central America, Asia, and the Middle East have bred little more than coercion. By coercion, I mean the attempt to manipulate or dominate a person or group of persons ability to choose. The most severe cases of coercion include exploitation, emotional manipulation, rape, murder, and genocide.

The more insidious version of coercion is shame or stigma. It's quicksand, an imposition used to scare us into obedience through unspoken threats that evoke our deepest fears. Southern Hospitality is one such language. The threat of what happens to those who are impolite is implicit with every breathless nicety.

One important distinction is that ideas aren't inherently coercive, it is people that use them as such. Forgetting or refusing our limitations, scientists, preachers, and philosophers have all claimed their own various systems as authoritative, which is another way of saying, get in line or else. Bush 2 couldn't recognize the lessons of the War on Drugs, that you can't declare war on human desire and get anything but more of that desire, albeit evolved in new and different ways. The War on Terror repeated this mistake, but instead of a hypocritical misdirection which stoked the flames of violence throughout South America, it was a societal act of vengeance.

The practice of using substances to alter our experience is something that humans will likely participate in for as long as we exist. Some substances lead to death quickly, some less so. But vengeance is like living with radiation poisoning. It affects every aspect of our experience, it reduces our being physiologically, psychologically, and the fancy new blend of both, neurologically.

In the same vein but on another level, in our coercive grip of the Middle-East used, abused, and ultimately discarded people that we had trained, like Bin Laden. We played them against the Russians, as the Russians and Chinese played the Vietnamese against us. Afghans and the Vietnamese had legitimate grievances, as any and all pawns do. Unfortunately they're drowned out by the noise of the machinery of competing superpowers, playing global chess with human pieces that never chose where to be born or even to play the game. Most of the world is still stuck in Plato's cave, watching relative shadows through smoke, not even aware they have a voice to use, which of course plays to the interests of the Oligarchs and their government lackeys.

We trained Bin Laden to do against the Russians what he did against us. So why did they attack us? Mostly Betrayal. We discarded 'assets' as the TV shows call them these days, left and right, with little to no regard of the resulting consequences. We exploited their lives, their lands and their families, then left many of them in the very lands where they had just turned against their neighbors. Why? So that we could maintain control of the global economic levers, as well as the Suez Canal and its nearby oil fields. Where else in the world is there a concentration of Oil, so close to such a crucial passageway? All of Europe's earliest expeditions were attempts to find a similar passageway that provided access to China, and the unknown. As one of President Clinton's advisers quipped, "it's the economy stupid".

You cannot defeat guerrillas if you aren't willing to kill civilians, and if you kill civilians you're only going to strengthen the guerrillas. This is the downward spiraling cycle of violence, and we use human shields just as much as they do. The reason the cold war remained cold was that each country was basically a punching bag, able to take multiple hits and still keep hitting back whether from land, air, or sea. I wonder what would have happened if we were the size of the UK, and/or closer to the USSR.

What we are fighting over is not Truth, nor even truth, but the space in which to exist, to be without feeling or being coerced. Violence is the front door of coercion, while shame comes in through the back. The space we all long for cannot come through shame any more than peace can come through violence. Civil rights in the UK, the US, and especially the South African Council on Peace and Reconciliation are all unfinished examples of shame being overwhelmed by neutral spaces of peace and forgiveness. When compared with other racial or ethnic conflicts, South Africa has come the furthest in the shortest amount of time, so far. We all have a lot further to go in overcoming racism, especially in the US.

The result of W.'s work is the understanding that all language is relational, arbitrary, contextual, and has the power to dominate or persuade. Language is symbol, contextualized. Most of his peers could not except this as it flattened out most of their 'unique' conclusions as merely different expressions of the same thing. This seems to me why some of his closest pupils gave up academics. It was all mostly smoke and mirrors.

Words have no inherent meaning. Here, one could sarcastically ask, "well then, what do you mean"? And I'd ask them to share their thoughts on my meaning and intentions, and dialectically, given the willingness of both parties to remain generous, we could most likely come to a functional understanding on which to build further. We intuit rules. The closer we are in linguistic approximation and geographical distance to one another the more likely our conversation will proceed into complexity. This is the process of language. Developed language games, like baseball, bodily codes that result in the patterns of baseball, its movement, the noises, the colors, the food, all of the organized elements.

The dynamic nature of language is seen in the evolution of dictionaries. A dictionary will change over time, or else it will become meaningless, which is to say useless. The task of 'defining' or 'naming' is much more complex than is normally appreciated.

We don't know everything (we can't as finite beings [3.5llb brains]), and we've been wrong before. By wrong I mean not only ignorant of a thing or whatever, but that our perception has been grossly different from common sense, to things like gravity, and attraction. If you need help imagining this, think about that first time you put ice skates on, tried to ski, or looked at an excel spreadsheet. Our knowledge is imperfect. Scientific 'proof' (like the need for blame) is a matter of degree, perception, and often times a matter of context.

After the Christian religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries ravaged most of Europe, centers of information transferred from Europe's Christian denominational centers, to universities with increasing independence from the church. The new anti-faith, of 'secularism', itself a faith,was born as increasingly helpful findings were offered to people independent of the Church. People's needs were met and quality of life improved, including deaths related to pregnancy.



One of the most fundamental forces that humans have named is gravity. Its workings were thought by the disciples of Newton to be unchanging, unchangeable, as in a closed system where everything is determined, philosophically speaking. Renee Descartes had just provided the philosophical under girding in previous years, so Newton's ideas had a narrative home and an epistemology to use. Rules of a new game had been established.

As questions were addressed with increasing reliance upon external means of verification, checks and balances, and by basically just writing more things down with greater care and complexity, new questions became possible. Human beings were conceived as autonomous knowers of Truth. It is in this vein, where a truth claim is as individual as the person making it, and where everyone dies for lack of whatever, might makes right.

Eventually Nietzsche realized this. He, before anyone, saw the speeding freight train of subjectivity, lacking any and all moral brakes with the ultimate human dancing on the roof, intent on securing any and all resources necessary for their autonomous survival. Conrad's Heart of Darkness paints a fair picture of the Belgian Congo and the kind of dehumanization which goes hand in hand with coercive exploitation. It's Vietnam era Reboot gave a modern touch to the same story of madness, one which denies us choice, and chokes out all opportunity.Human, animal, and plant life were arbitrarily judged and treated as less valuable than the resources which they slaved to refine so that modern industry could continue on unimpeded.

Nietzsche predicted the rise of independent moral, economic, and political power bases before they really emerged as separate entities. He further predicted that our mortal need for resources created a might makes right situation. Given the Cartesian, "I think, therefore I am", he was right... or rather, he was consistent with the direction of the Cartesian 'Scientfic' story. The problem is the Cartesian way of knowing things is useless. It's like trying to jump in zero gravity. The result is that instead of everyone handing their brains over to familiarity on principle, now every human walks around as their own authority, secretly brainwashed into thinking they've chosen to think what they think. This is the great lie and comfort of never leaving familiarity.

Unfortunately, this left Nietzsche outside of most narratives. He was in unknown territory, outcast, and angry. He would have fit right in with the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The moral norms and the brutal hypocrisy that he was critiquing were the same kinds of things we protest today. Colonial Christianity was one of the most brutal languages in human history. All the world's economic powers were fluent in these brutal practices based on Augustine, Anselm, Acquinas, and Luther. None of these paid serious attention to the issues of Torah beyond the effort to proof text their own ideas. It's not simple, but it's not too complex either. To get a fair testimony presentable in a court, a Detective has to go to the scene of the crime. I'm saying Christianity never made it that far.

Most of Western theology is thinly veiled Platonism. It's why modern Christianity is so drastically different in thought and practice from Judaism. It's also why Christians have been killing Jews since Christendom started. It's hard to think there isn't something at work on another plain of existence when you look at the history of the Jewish people. The stigma against Jews, their dispersion across the 2nd century Roman empire, and mutual distrust prevented Christians from gaining the access they needed to understand the stories which Jesus based his teaching on. This is not how communication works. I can't just make up rules that you don't know about and start operating in them, with the expectation that, not only will you know the rules without my having communicated them to you, but you'll be proficient at the game. It is clear to me, even from just the structure of the resulting document of the Council of Nicea (325 CE), that little attention was paid to the wealth of life and information that Jesus chose to encode himself in, which were the Judaisms of his time. My point is further strengthened by the fact that no Jewish Christians were invited to the council, as well as Paul's consistent efforts throughout his letters to try and establish the space in which Jewish believers in the Messianic Jesus, and Gentiles of the same belief could live together in Sabbath peace.

So, given the picture I've just painted...

Let's assume that Christianity has been embroiled in red herrings for its entire theological life, post-Constantine. The writers of the gospels draw from various events of Jesus' life, his influences, and their own thoughts. These were Torah, rabbinical interpretation of Torah, and rabbinical practice of Torah. These were the first boundaries within which Christian language emerged. As the events of the following centuries unfolded, Jews were increasingly shamed for being Jewish, and gentile Christian relations with both Christian and non-Christian Jews went downhill. This disconnect prevented any meaningful connection between the Torah ideals now seen to be leaping off the pages of the New Testament, and the later Christian Church Fathers active from 300 on. Any system will stray away from its origin given a lack of connection. The further it strays from its most significant points of emergence, the more arbitrary and up for grabs it becomes. Propaganda efforts of the last century were often based on the reality of disconnection from the outside world. I remember a scene in Band of Brothers in which a German officer is yelling over a loud speaker that the "Statue of Liberty es Kaput". As ridiculous as that sounds, to a freezing soldier in the Arden forest, or wherever, it might be the psychological straw that breaks him.

In the late 200s and early 300s Constantine was conquering and uniting the Roman empire under the symbol of the cross. This was a symbol which he had no prior loyalty to before the giant vision he claims to have had of it up in the sky. He took this symbol, a Cross representing the growing tide of Christianity as an assurance of victory, and that's his story of why he won. I can't understand the logic considering that Jesus' non-violent submission to execution was the greatest victory over violence ever recorded.

Before Constantine's emergence, Christianity had spread like wildfire through Rome's provinces. Finally someone had stood against violence without also directly spreading its disease. There was an example of one who refused to quit valuing himself as he valued others. I believe the story of Abraham and Moses depicts an economics devoted to the justice of the prophetic Sabbath. Though depictions of genocide and murder are present, Torah depicts them nonetheless. It doesn't hide them, and because the questions are not hidden among the Jewish people, they can be asked. Like a child's delight breaks out at the simple act of blowing bubbles and seeing them float away, we can take actions that allow important and delightful things to emerge. Torah is a testimony of the fact that you can accomplish more by valuing life than by devaluing it.

So let's also assume that the 'gospel' is really about living in peace with your neighbor, and not much more. The book of 1 Samuel, chapter 8 reveals the political aspirations of Israel's last judge, the last leader before God 'relented' and gave them a human King. The life of Israel before this was a jumble of waxing and waning Levitical Sabbath living.

...... in progress....
After Newton, came Einstein's theory of relativity accompanied by its philosophical cousin. Recently, we have Quantum Mechanics messing with the most fundamental beliefs about the 'hardness' of the hardest sciences.

Despite the false confidence that we have most things figured out, the more we've come to accept as 'understood' the more questions we've been left with. Emotions, behavior, and outlook have all been found to be deeply tied to the genes we receive from our ancestors. The human genome is not static, nor is it without error. Every cell in the human body is rebuilt every 7 years. If you try to account for variables like choice, trauma, or any of the other x factors of the human experience, it's easy to see how little control we can have over our mood, perception, and choices. The habits we form often look or function like those of our parents. I recently heard an acquaintance remark, "My dad is really really dismissive, and I've paid a lot of attention to it, So I can't be dismissive"... he said... dismissively. But with enough effort, there can be change. 

The most important thing any human can do is to attempt to identify the ways in which we speak and choose. Most, if not all, the work in the early years of this task is internal. The goal is to be able to speak and hear for yourself, whilst coercive languages attempt to stifle any annoying spark of curiosity.

The field of advertising is one of the most linguistically developed fields on the planet. Increasingly psychological, car makers and fast food vendors spend billions of dollars in research and development to find ways of getting you to ignore the fact that the American auto industry is as corrupt as their cars are built to fail, and that fast food is merely cancer-causing, diabetes-inducing fake food that kills the ground it grows on.

All those (like B. Russel) who sought proof for things, failed from the outset to fully embrace what was present in the first sentences of the Tractatus. That is that, the Cartesian epistemology had failed, and that function within context is a helpful determination of meaning. In other words, to participate in the context and get an embodied experience of the language being played, 'adds' to the definition of each element. All of the sudden what you knew intellectually locates itself in your movements, and catching a fly ball, the exhilaration, the joy, etc.. all contextual, the whole experience named 'catching a fly ball' has a thicker, broader presence within you.

Shame is the cudgel by which tyrants rule. Though never feeling the freedom which the logic of his work made possible, Wittgenstein brought shame to its linguistic knees, showing it to be needless, arbitrary, and a hellish attempt at controlling human agency, infecting all involved.