Background
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If pigs could fly, we'd all eat a lot less bacon.

The Pancake Breakfast Aphorisms, St. Alphonso

I've been sick for the last 3 days. I've been trying to write, but what I've written has come out as a sort of a rambling, jumbled mess. This has all been in response to a couple of articles Steven Den Beste has written entitled Three Way Struggle and Teleology and Solipsism. In my last entry I wrote about waves of crystallization as a metaphor for those kind of "a-ha" moments when suddenly something that has been confusing becomes crystal clear. For me, these articles are the catalyst for a wave of crystallization that has occurred for me regarding political philosophy. I've run into the ideas in Den Beste's articles before in various shapes and forms, but they happened to appear in just the right form at just the right time and were a "seed crystal" for me. Since then I've been writing about some of the other major waves of crystallization that took place on my own journey from being a self-proclaimed Socialist and intellectual elitist to my current position much closer to the end (or ends, if you accept the ideal of a multiple axis description) of the political spectrum. This turned out to be a much larger project than I had anticipated, and seemed to me to require a rather large amount of background information to make sense. It also seems to me to make more sense if one is familiar with the ideas in the two Den Beste articles referenced above. I've had to chop this into sections and am going to post it in serial format like I did with my essay on personal responsibility.

Note: Since I also have this thing about books, and I have a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on my desk, it never occurred to me to look for it on-line, but tonight I found it here.

Background for Waves of Crystallization or How I got to Here

The primary goal of the Church of Reason… is always Socrates' old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it's revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, chapter 13.

I grew up in an educated family. My father has two Masters degrees. My mother has a B.A. and was a teacher. My only aunt had a Masters. My grandmother was a teacher for a while. When my sister and I were growing up, there was never any question whether we were going to college or not. It never occurred to either of us that there was a possibility of not going to college. I would say that it was expected that we would go, except that that doesn't really capture the essence of the situation and sort of implies that there was some sort of pressure. It wasn't like that. I don't remember ever being told I was going to college. It was just something that was going to happen. (Now that I think about it, it may have had something to do with the fact that my parents regularly went to summer school to pick up new qualifications and, in my mother's case, to renew her teaching certificate. As a kid, I spent four summers living in college towns while my folks went to school, so I guess it just seemed like the natural thing to do.)

At some level, I grew up in awe of higher education. I think that is why I am so fond of Pirsig's 'Church of Reason' metaphor for the true University. It implies that there is something special, noble, perhaps even righteous about the quest for knowledge, and I bought into that idea. I very definitely had intellectual pretensions. Metaphorically speaking, I worshipped at the Church of Reason and in fact, worshipped the Church of Reason itself. When you feel that way, school is cool.

And so it was that in high school, I was one of the Science Geeks. My friends were Science Geeks. I did other things too; I was in debate and music and did the lights for the school plays. But mostly it was science and math (and a fair amount of English). I graduated at the top of my class. And if the truth be told, I was just a wee bit smug about my intellectual capabilities. (OK, that's not the truth. I was arrogant as hell. I never thought of myself as a genius, but I thought I was pretty damn smart and pretty damn proud of it.)

So off I went to college and spent a year with a heavy load of the hard sciences. And after a year I didn't know where I was going. Something didn't seem right. Something was missing. So I dropped out.

This is sounding depressingly like an autobiography, and that was not my intent. I was trying to establish where my reverence for the Church of Reason came from and why I started my adult life as an intellectual elitist and considered myself a socialist. (for a discussion of how the two are related see this article by Steven Den Beste.) In the clear light of hindsight, at first it appears that this was inevitable, but I see now that it need not have been so. Careful reflection and introspection about some of my inherited beliefs might have set me on a different path. For instance, I seem to have inherited a populist streak from my farmer grandparents and it appears I also inherited an almost libertarian, contrarian tendency from my mother's father. (When crop subsidies were first introduced, he decided he didn't want the government interfering in his farming, so he refused to plant wheat - and this in Kansas of all places.) But I have always been a collection of contradictions and am strangely comfortable with that, so no heavy introspection was forthcoming.

In spite of the rhetoric and dogma I internalised over the years, I have never shaken the belief that there is an objective reality out there. While I am not comfortable with the ideas of absolute good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, I am convinced that things work because there is an objective reality (I am in many respects, a pragmatist, which goes a long way toward explaining why my behavior changes before my philosophy. I look for things that work, and figure out what I think about them later.) 2+2 equals 4 because it works and it doesn't matter that it might be more aesthetically pleasing or gender sensitive if numbers made of curved lines (i.e. feminine) always added up to sums made of curved lines (e.g. 2+2=5 or 6, even) instead of straight lines (i.e. the male/phallic numbers like 1,4 and 7). And, I was (and am) convinced that some social conventions should be observed, conventions such as a belief that there is such a thing as correct English grammar (my parents were teachers…).

There was one brief moment in the fall of 1979 when I might have discerned the underlying contradiction between my belief in objective reality and the leftist intellectual principles of subjective reality and equality of result (again see Den Beste). I was sitting in an English 102 class listening to the instructor explain that he and the MLA (Modern Language Association) believed that all ethnic and cultural speech patterns were valid and therefore we were to ignore the old rules of English grammar and write the way we talked. I was incensed. But my reverence for the Church of Reason prevented me from thinking critically about any pronouncements by an authority of that Church. I am amused now, that at that time my favorite bumpersticker was the one which said "Question Authority," which I was perfectly willing to do if "they" were sufficiently removed from me, but which I would never have considered doing of an academic figure with whom I had regular contact.

By the way, I have no idea whether that ever was or is the position of the MLA. I was taking the instructor at face value. A current look at the MLA website does not clarify this point, as there is no statement of principles, and the MLA addresses dozens of different types of literature. They do, also, publish the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, suggesting a belief in certain conventions, but then, research is not literature.

I became enamoured with the social sciences; psychology and sociology in particular. After giving up on being a preacher, I decided my mission in life was to HELP PEOPLE. I immersed myself in social theory and quite by accident found myself in a job in corrections. It should be noted that I thought that helping people was something you did to them (an elitist notion if there ever was one). I fully bought into the classic leftist arguments that crime was a matter of Socio-economic status (an inherent feature of the capitalist system), bad socialization (obviously the fault of the State), and oppression (especially racist oppression) by the capitalist machine. I thought I was helping my clients even the odds a bit in their fight against persecution by the state. I truly believed that there are no bad people, only bad socialization.

 

Well, that is probably way more than you wanted to know and may, in fact, be way more than you need to know to make sense out of the coming articles. While I prize elegant solutions (in the engineering sense of the word) I've never been particularly good at them. Likewise, while I firmly believe that very often less is more, I'm not particularly good at that either.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Tuesday, January 13 2004 06:13:11 PM

Waves of Crystallization
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You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, (somewhere in chapter 13)

For the past three days (off and on) I've been looking for a passage from Pirsig (not the one quoted above, I found that one by accident and just like it.). It has been years since I last read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance so the search culminated in a nearly complete re-read of the book. Except that I read the chapters in reverse order because I knew that what I wanted wasn't at the beginning, but I couldn't remember how close to the end it was. This method gives the book a kind of odd spin and I actually found it enjoyable. I'm not sure what that says about the way I think. I eventually found what I was looking for in chapter 15, but I kept going until I ran into the quote above.

I've been reading a lot lately. I'm trying to come to grips with the ongoing ramifications of the paradigm shift I'm going through. I realized that a good portion of what I thought I believed about the world didn't fit with what I know about how the world works. I've hit one of those places where there is an answer out there, just beyond my reach. I'm sure it is there, but when I try to formulate it, it just evaporates. I try to track down the threads of my thoughts and just when I think I've got something nailed down, the other threads escape me (sort of like herding squirrels). I just don't have the words, the structure, the format, something. I'm missing something somehow, somewhere. And after I (figuratively speaking) beat my head against the wall for a while, I do what I always do: dig through other people's ideas.

Eventually I find something; a word, a definition, an idea, something that sets off a chain reaction. One thing falls into place, which causes another to fall into place, which causes another and so on. Pirsig described that something that starts the process as a 'seed crystal.'

Seed Crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.

A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn't crystallize out because the molecules don't know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.

He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.

If you've never seen this process, it truly is amazing. It's been 25 years since I saw it in a Chemistry class, but I think it only took a second or two for the entire beaker to go from liquid to solid crystals. And you really do see them grow, radiating out from the point of first crystallization. I remember this passage because it is the closest metaphor I have ever found to describe what it feels like to me when I finally find that 'thing' that allows the thoughts to come together in a coherent form.

So, I've been looking for seed crystals. I've found a couple, which has given me no small sense of relief, but in the process I've also gained some perspective on how I got from being a self-proclaimed socialist to whatever it is that I am today (I still don't have a label for it, though mostly I seem to fit somewhere between conservative and libertarian). I've realized that these waves of crystallization don't just materialize out of nowhere. The raw material accumulates over months and years and then I find that one seed crystal that changes the way I think in some way. That seems obvious now, but when it was happening (especially when I realized I supported the liberation of Iraq) it took me completely by surprise.

Well, that is as far as I can get tonight.

by Cziltang 
Posted: Sunday, January 11 2004 10:03:58 PM