#293

The importance of the divides between experiential evidence, experimental evidence, and anecdotal evidence has always existed. It can be hazarded, and I will do so, that most people's worldviews throughout the winding course of our (from an individual's perspective) vast shared history is composed of utile and applied experiential evidence combined with anecdotal evidence which amounts to a materially invalid but socially encouraged set of opinions. Experimental evidence is a truly rare and expensive gem, and, like the gems we dig up from the living earth, is valued at even more than it is worth. Again, like gems, more people hear about it or see it in the possession of a select few than are able to touch, use, or own it themselves. Again, like gems, many fakes exist, some very difficult to distinguish from the real thing, some enshrined as the legitimate article. Now more than ever. 

Now more than ever. I truly loathe that construction. Part of that loathing is its legitimate applicability.

How much does it matter to a person who will never travel further than two hundred miles away from where they squat on the daily whether the planet is round, flat, or an irregular spheroid? They're not gonna try to sail a boat to wherever the fuck. They don't have to triangulate or plot jack shit on any chart. How much does the exact speed of the planet hurtling through space--or its static majesty as it sits in state at the precise center of the universe--actually affect how you get your next meal, or deal with local levels of precipitation and humidity?

The quality of the average person's life is so rarely affected by what scientists fight about. Well, formerly. Applied sciences have jacked us into a technological dystopia, and experimental evidence is rammed right up our collective asshole. The idea that science might be a conspiracy is reserved for those who literally cannot perform a simple calculation, one that a man naked underneath his toga could do with a standing pole and its shadow thousands of years ago. Poles still cast shadows, and unless calculators are a conspiracy, the math is easier to perform than ever.

This is still not to say that experiential evidence has lost its primacy. Who in the vast aggregate really gives a fuck about quantum computers? Solid-state physics? Learning a martial art, or stonemasonry--there's news you can use. I love science, history, all the nerd shit--love it--but as I make my way through life, I can't help but think that the world consistently demonstrates to me that these are playthings for me and for people like me; that the root of life is very far removed from these castles in the air. What good is an advanced society if it requires and produces extreme unhappiness even for its most lavished beneficiaries, and worse from those consigned to serve them? Some good, but rather less than optimal potentialities. Who is happier than someone with no idea that a new smartphone is necessary for happiness? No one infected by the concept, I deem.

Yet, we bring these castles to ground, force them into the life-root position, and while the case is very cogent for all the wonderful things we have accomplished with this thing of ours of sharing the results of our experiments, the case that life is extremely close to being completely fucking ruined for everyone, human and non-human, is equally cogent. One thing I feel comfortable stating unequivocally is that we moved too fast, too heedless, with too narrow of a field of vision and too linear an idea of progress.

Agriculture was once an experiment. Maybe Cain wasn't the best dude, but maybe he got a raw deal. Ursula K. Le Guin, when writing about the many possible ways once could conceive of and determine what could be classified a highly developed society or civilization, mentioned the possibility of paleolithic technology and a highly developed and communal contemplative philosophy. We have the exact opposite, and I think we're pretty developed, but what we have simply seems less durable in the long run and less desirable in the first place, at least to me.

Well, we'll see what happens. I'm not really trying to make a point or anything. You know how it is around here. 

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Oh, I guess my point initially was going to be that people are infuriating when they pretend that hearing about proof is the same as obtaining it for themselves. But I suppose that fury is immaturity on my own part. People are gonna do what they're gonna do. A wise man said: to see the truth, discard all opinions. Think I'm paraphrasing several wise folk. At any rate, I should take that advice myself, perhaps moreso than the people to whom I'm prescribing it.

Damn, what a useless post. Sorry everybody. 

--JL