Maybe at that point it’s not bullshit any more. Maybe culture works like that all the time. — Jamal

Maybe. Native Americans are aware that their own cultures are mostly lost and replaced by an all-purpose image that's Siouxan: the teepees, feathered headresses and so forth.

Are you saying that every generation is served up a dose of bullshit with the facts about their heritage?

I’m saying that every culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be, both by insiders and outsiders.

I think I did.

I was going to start a thread on The Voice, but baulked because, you know, what first nations folk really need is more white fellas to tell 'em about themselves. Promulgating, or even addressing, the myth that they do not have their own history, isn't going to be helpful. Indeed, another criticism of Dark Emu is its failure to recognise the divergence in aboriginal culture.

I grew up on Anaiwan land, and was taught that the locals had been eliminated or moved to the coast. To some extent that was so, but there is now a strong community reestablishing Nganyaywana, and enough social history to fill a few books. It's tragic, yes, but it's quite unhelpful to simply dismiss the efforts of the many small local groups across Australia to maintain their integrity by lame claims from foreigners that they are appropriating each other's culture.

culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be — Jamal

Yep. It's not what it was before the whites came, but it's not a blur of Gamilaraay, Wiradjuri, or other Koori cultures. Frank's comment is — unhelpful, in belittling those efforts.

I’m saying that every culture is determined partly by what it is thought to be, both by insiders and outsiders. — Jamal

Sure. The same happens with individuals. If I expect the worst of you, I'll communicate that in various ways. Then it comes down to how open you are to suggestion.

In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad.

The Voice — Banno

I’m showing my ignorance here, but do you mean the Indigenous Voice to Parliament?

In the case of the aboriginals, it would be as if someone misinterpreted some Scottish document and went on to create a fanciful story about your ancestors' beliefs. This narrative becomes popular, and since the oral traditions have broken down, you accept the mistake as your heritage. It's kind of sad. — frank

Funny you should mention that, because that’s pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture.

Funny you should mention that, because that’s pretty much what did happen with Scottish culture. — Jamal

How so?

Yep.


One way the "the oral traditions (are) broken down" is by pretending they are not there. That a people chooses not to tell you about their oral tradition does not mean they have none. So someone from outside suggesting that what is happening to Australian aboriginal peoples is the same as happened to American aboriginal peoples or Scottish aboriginal peoples is fraught.

There are many dimensions to it. One is about the Stuarts and Jacobitism (there’s a book about this called “The Invention of Scotland”); the massive influence of the epic poems of Ossian, which were fabricated in the 18th century; the mythologizing of Scottish history by Walter Scott (who has been called “the man who invented Scottish identity”); and generally the disproportionate weight given to Highland culture at the expense of the Lowlands.

Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis.

Another thing: kilts. It’s not about our ancestors’ beliefs but it’s in the same ballpark. Many Scots believe that each tartan has been associated with a particular clan for centuries. This is untrue. Also, they didn’t wear kilts.

I get the impression that you aren't aware of the mistakes that were made with regard to "dreamtime." Surely not.

Or maybe you didn't notice that I was specifically referencing that to explain my desire to go straight to scholars and bypass amateurs.

I have an unending hunger to know about human cultures. Wrong information just gets in my way.

Much if it was a response to the Union with England. An identity crisis. — Jamal

Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool.

I think of it like food. What is authentic Indian food? Does it include chilis? But chilis were taken to India by the Portuguese, so .. :chin:

(that risks trivializing it but you get the point I trust)

I have an unending hunger to know about human cultures. Wrong information just gets in my way. — frank

Sure. But this isn't about you.

These are not an academic exercise.

It all goes back to food.

Sure. But this isn't about you.

These are not an academic exercises. — Banno

Funny you said that. My unspoken opinion was that both you and the author you mentioned were making the issue all about yourselves.

Cheers. Love you too.

I'll leave it at that.

Wow. I didn't realize that. Cool. — frank

Crucially though, I can carry on wearing my kilt without feeling like I'm perpetuating a fake culture.

Crucially though, I can carry on wearing my kilt without feeling like I'm perpetuating a fake culture. — Jamal

With or without underwear?

Love you too. — Banno

Just keeping it real, man.

can we repudiate the enlightenment? — Moliere

I can claim to be unenlightened at least, but I have to live in a post enlightenment world, being no angel.

If we are magic, and we're still around to say, then the dis-enchantment must be some kind of an illusion. — Moliere

I think that's right. We speak a nihilist language of moral subjectivity and subjectivity eliminationism. But this self negation must obviously fail. I am determined not to be, therefore I am. The Nazis failed and the capitalists will fail because when the Monopoly is complete, the money game is over, but the world remains.

One feels on all sides these limits of objective science We are still talking about the workings of brains more that 2000 years dead. There can be no logical or scientific explanation for that. There is meaning that communicates across millennia , and to deny it is to affirm it. There is value, and we discover the cost of denying it.

Any minute now I'm going to be talking about not living on bread alone, and rich men not getting into heaven. We are still waiting for the double blind trials on these...

"People are stupid.", says @Banno

I think we have been stupefied, not by conspiracy, but by the veneration of blindness in the name of objectivity, and we have been selling our souls for a mess of pottage. And all of this has been down to the failure of Western philosophy to defend the good.

And from the enlightenment comes the white man, conquerer of the world and civiliser of Johnny Foreigner with his kilts and scarification and dreadful table manners. I don't know if it worked the same with the plaid, but the tradition with Aran knitting was that each village had its own pattern so that bodies washed up further along the coast could be identified. So I heard.

I visited Culloden in my youth and found it a very haunted place. There were several large mounds with my name on the stone.

Those interested should read Black skin white masks. It might even be worth a thread. It's a difficult book, but goes right into the way the white man having destroyed the indigenous culture then sentimentalises it and tries to preserve it, while the remaining natives try desperately to adapt, giving rise to a second inverted conflict, rather like the way Cecil Sharpe and other aristocrats tried to preserve the English folk traditions in music, while the peasants moved on to Music-hall and other travesties. Hence an ongoing conflict between the 'traditionalists' and those dreadful innovators who dare to use electric instruments. See Bob Dylan, and the infamous cry of 'Judas', for example.

:clap:

There's a good Dylan song about a kid who goes looking for his native american father, only to be disillusioned by what he finds. The refraim is a quasi native chant sort of combined with a European sound.

"My mother took me aside
and tried to change my mind
she said there's nothing
nothing
left to find."

Just to chime in, I think organized religions' insistence on supernatural explanations and supernatural language is part of the reason for their decline.

There is, in the Christian context, no reason to assume that anything supernatural occurs in the Bible. Setting a bush ablaze can be done through natural means. Bringing someone back to life can also be accomplished. Revelations doesn't show people coming back to life in some sort of spirit world, but instead being brought back with bodies, in the new Earth. "Everything is made new," not "everything is made magical." A sufficiently advanced 3D printer could accomplish this, provided consciousness is caused by physical system states.

Likewise, the Big Bang and evolution of Earth are explained in natural terms already.

The insistence on the supernatural seems to turn God into somewhat of a trickster, a deity who shows us a rational world guided by certain invariant principles, but who then uses magic at any key moments.

Even a God who exists outside the sphere of our observable universe isn't necessarily anti-naturalist. God can be behind an epistemic viel without being behind a magical one.

But there is nothing explicitly to rule out Christian naturalism, and indeed, Aristotle's somewhat enchanted naturalism was Catholic doctrine for centuries.

I can claim to be unenlightened at least, but I have to live in a post enlightenment world, being no angel. — unenlightened

I wouldn't question your namesake. Only you get to talk about that, at least in my philosophy. (A rule or a spell?)

But for me, for us, for the world, the enlightenment has a way of living on as a magic of sorts.

I think we can make claims about ourselves without invoking powers or spells. Or, in the set up I started, we are formed of magic, and powers or spells or demons act on us. I'd say I am not the enlightenment, for instance, though it keeps coming up in my memory (hauntings), and even in the here and now.

I think that's right. We speak a nihilist language of moral subjectivity and subjectivity eliminationism. But this self negation must obviously fail. I am determined not to be, therefore I am. The Nazis failed and the capitalists will fail because when the Monopoly is complete, the money game is over, but the world remains.

One feels on all sides these limits of objective science We are still talking about the workings of brains more that 2000 years dead. There can be no logical or scientific explanation for that. There is meaning that communicates across millennia , and to deny it is to affirm it. There is value, and we discover the cost of denying it.

Any minute now I'm going to be talking about not living on bread alone, and rich men not getting into heaven. We are still waiting for the double blind trials on these... — unenlightened

Meaning is a magic -- thinking about dis-enchantment, and how it can dispell meaning into language as a series of barks. I think that qualifies as one of these pseudo-places @Jamal, at least for me. I really do believe when I read things that they mean something because it's as obvious as my senses. But as soon as I think about how it's possible to feel like I know what Aristotle means by the mean between extremes, without being fluent in ancient Greek, that is wild to think about in terms of a phenomena to be explained. Why should the various signifiers I utilize have anything to do with the mind of a man long dead?

"People are stupid.", says Banno

I think we have been stupefied, not by conspiracy, but by the veneration of blindness in the name of objectivity, and we have been selling our souls for a mess of pottage. And all of this has been down to the failure of Western philosophy to defend the good.

I feel experimental, and stupefied. I've rewritten a response here many times now :D.

I've no explanation as of yet.



I've tried that book before. I didn't finish, but I know I'll do it again and finish it. Frantz Fanon should be more widely read.

I wonder if anyone here has read or knows of A General Theory of Magic, by Marcel Mauss, French sociologist?

The jacket blurb is

First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, A General Theory of Magic gained a wide new readership when republished by Mauss in 1950. As a study of magic in 'primitive' societies and its survival today in our thoughts and social actions, it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss called, in an introduction to that edition, the astonishing modernity of the mind of one of the century's greatest thinkers. The book offers a fascinating snapshot of magic throughout various cultures as well as deep sociological and religious insights still very much relevant today. At a period when art, magic and science appear to be crossing paths once again, A General Theory of Magic presents itself as a classic for our times.

(I noted with amusement one of the reader reviews in Amazon was 'I bought this book to learn magic tricks and there are none in there! It's a rip-off'.)

I think we can make claims about ourselves without invoking powers or spells. — Moliere

There is, in the Christian context, no reason to assume that anything supernatural occurs in the Bible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There are at this moment, soldiers in trenches in Ukraine trying to kill and being killed without invoking powers or spells, and without assuming anything supernatural occurs. For what are they killing and dying? We do not know and cannot ask in general, and I invoke them here only to show that a claim of nationality, or of religious or cultural tradition, has more power (word in thread title) over the secular such as your good selves than you seem to think. Whatever explanation you might put forward, it will not do to rely on avowed nonsense as a motive force, because that would be irrational, wouldn't it?

Your fear, your anger, or your love can be invoked, or evoked, as can mine, by the feeble power of a troll, for example, who, impotent in the world, works a little mischief by way of self assertion. Multiply by millions, and there is the war. The war is not something different, or outside the mind.

Speaking of trolls... Water into wine is difficult, but water into blood...

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood" — Enoch Powell

(quoting Virgil)

Now blood is certainly a magical substance. According to tradition, one spills it to assert and preserve its purity, Here the noble invokes it to rouse the rabble to a cause that still obsesses them, and is still being used to sway them to vote for Brexit, and perhaps soon to abandon the human rights act.

I'm not sure I follow. Religion and nationalism clearly exist in the world, so why would they be necessarily supernatural in any respect?

"Ukraine," "communism," "the universal church," don't not exist or only exist supernaturally just because their existence is diffuse in space or time, and hard for us to locate.

There is a reason that, when totalitarian states want to erase a culture, they destroy books and architecture, kill members of that culture or take their children away for re-education, etc. rather than hiring sorcerers to magic the culture out of existence, and presumably this is because cultures, nations, etc. are natural.

I think I'm just lost at a certain point, and don't know what else to say. These are conceptual distinctions rather than reasons why the secular is somehow immune. All are vulnerable whether we are secular, non-secular, "modern", or "primitive" -- each has a fear, an anger, a love that can be invoked or evoked. Are the emotions the self which spells work upon? Do they evoke the emotions within a self to change the self, or to re-direct it? Or is the self a spell of the secular put inside me that someone else can see better than myself?

It's this latter that seems odd to me. If we are magic, and there be magicians, then it seems quite possible that I am under a spell of some sorts. In fact it would be odd if I weren't. But then, what is magic if it's just what I am? Am I the synthesis of Daddy-Mommy-Me that the secular magician can pick apart, move, and change who I am?

What I think I'd like to say is that such spells can re-direct us, but there's always the possibility of waking up from the spell. After all, we are magic -- not just the magicians. And I have a hard time understanding what a power even is if it doesn't act on something, even if that something is itself a magic power.

I think of Freud as a kind of archetype of secular magician: the psychologist that can see you better than you can see yourself is a kind of Seer or Oracle. And generally speaking I think that the way scientists are treated is similar to the way priests were treated: they perform arcane rituals which eventually result in powers which persuade us that they must know something.

This isn't a narrative of the supremacy of the individual, though, or even of secular societies. These are just conceptual distinctions only for us to talk about these things. I'm trying to think of what would be the necessary conditions of a working magical spell: how is it that dis-enchantment came to be? From what to what? And, given that dis-enchantment is an illusion -- holding to point 1 that we are magic -- there must be at least two somethings to account for the change, from enchanted to dis-enchanted.

So I posit two somethings: a self and a spell. The spell works on the self to dis-enchant the self. And I gather from what we've said so far, @unenlightened, that said dis-enchantment is an illusion. So there is a self, a spell, and the distinction between appearance and reality. Philosophically speaking here.

I have too much to say, but I’ll say it all anyway. It’s not really in the spirit of discussion to make such a massive post that’s not responding directly to other contributors, but maybe someone will find it interesting.

In a spirit of Enlightenment, I’m breaking things down as follows:

Disenchantment: the loss of a unified total system of meaning and value, especially that which happened in Western society with the unseating of Christianity from its central and foundational position.

Re-enchantment: the return of meaning, which however might only be occasional and partial, rather than forming a total system.

Ideology: legitimation of the social order (the state, the economy, class hierarchy, etc) by means of enchantment

Magic and magical thinking: the beating heart of enchantment and ideology.


Magic

I’m now thinking that magic or magical thinking is something that we should not revile. It’s the element of enchantment that we should want to retain or revive. This is the route to the secular sacredness that I was briefly talking about with @Wayfarer. My thought is roughly that we can break the spells that bewitch us without abandoning magical thinking as such.

To try and make that work, I’m thinking of magic in the way it's described by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In that book, magic is a practice in which the object, such as a mountain, a raven, or a tree, is imbued with inherent meaning, animated by its own spirit, and is not reducible to an instantiation of a general type, a mere specimen of a species. A respect for the thisness of the object is what differentiates magic from myth, religion, and especially Enlightenment, in which classification and conceptualization serve to abstract away from individuals in an attempt to form a unified system of science and philosophy.

Thisness—which is also known by medieval philosophers as haecceity—has its own special version in the work of Adorno, namely the non-identical. It’s the part of the thing that remains unique to it when you bring it under a category or think of it in terms of concepts, but which is lost sight of in this process. The singular thing is non-identical with the specimen, the latter being an instantiation, an example defined by categories, universals, or concepts. But the thing is not exhausted by any category you put it in, any abstract universal you bring it under, or any set of concepts you apply to describe it.

Therefore conceptual thinking, though indispensable, has to proceed carefully so as to avoid losing sight of the very thing it attempts to understand.

There's a difficulty with trying to theorize about this. Adorno doesn’t use the word “haecceity” or explicitly define the non-identical, because to do so would once again bring the singular individual under a universal concept (e.g., the universal kind called "singular individuality"). Thus Adorno’s project begins to look, not only difficult, but also somewhat paradoxical. The solution to this problem, I think, is to see the non-identical as akin to the thing-in-itself in Kant's philosophy, i.e., as a limit-concept about which we don’t want to say too much. It’s a correction by means of a negation (the "non" in non-identical), rather than positive ampliative knowledge.

Now we can see that magical thinking, which is an appreciation of the singular life of things, is an important counterweight to conceptual thinking. This is what Adorno described positively about Hegel’s philosophy:

[Hegel’s] impulse to elevate spirit, however deluded, draws its strength from a resistance to dead knowledge. — Adorno, Experiential Content

By “dead knowledge,” he means … well, the way I think about it is like the difference between the living giant squid, with its shimmering colours and graceful movements, and the ugly dead specimen in the laboratory.

Incidentally, I don't think of this as a complete rejection of science or the Enlightenment, more like a correction or a warning.

science establishes ... concepts and makes its judgments without regard for the fact that the life of the subject matter for which the concept is intended does not exhaust itself in conceptual specification. What furnishes the canon for Hegelian idealism is ... the need to grasp...what the matter at hand actually is and what essential and by no means mutually harmonious moments it contains. — Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

This might all seem ridiculously abstract, but consider the real-world example of wolves and dogs. The model of the wolf pack as led by an alpha male is now outdated, and was based on studies of wolves in captivity, where their behaviour is very different from wild behaviour. And if this popular concept is wrong for wolves, it’s even wronger for dogs. This is why dog behaviourists have been trying to demolish the myth of alpha-dominance in dog training for years. From personal experience, it’s only getting through to people slowly.

You might just say it was bad science and that the concepts were wrong, not that science or conceptual thinking in general were at fault, but I see it more dialectically: science corrected its worst instincts, by paying more attention to the uniqueness of things, getting closer to what they are.

Am I saying that we should think of wolves and dogs as unique spirits with their own life-forces? It sounds a bit woo, but I think I am. Many and perhaps most people who live with dogs do this anyway: a dog is effectively a kind of person, and so personhood seems almost like the source of the magical thinking that I’m advocating: we do think of each other as unique and as animated by our own spirits.

This brings me to scientism, arguably an aspect of disenchantment and instrumental rationality. It's what leads to the denigration of personhood and irreducible singularity more generally:

There is no science of morality, or subjectivity, or aesthetics or value, therefore these things do not exist — unenlightened

So although people, even eliminative materialists, treat others in their everyday lives as persons and ends in themselves, this has been somewhat reduced by scientism to mere sentiment or even illusion.

Another way of looking at magic:

Theology, metaphysics, socialism, parliaments, democracy, universal suffrage, republics, progress, and what have you, are quite as irrational as anything primitives believe in, in that they are the product of faith and sentiment, and not of experiment and reasoning. — E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhl’s Theory of Primitive Mentality

I take issue with Evans-Pritchard’s assumed rationality-sentiment dichotomy, which is related to an underlying emotivist fact-value distinction that I’m not on board with; and in any case, his separation of rationality and emotion might be untenable (see Damasio). But leaving that aside, the quotation does highlight the continuing relevance of magical thinking in societies in which magic seems to have been replaced or marginalized. I think this ties in with several of the posts by @unenligtened and @Moliere.

Thinking that the primary way to keep alive what is good in magical thinking is art, I looked into the connection and came across a letter from Van Gogh to his brother, which contains this:

It seems that in the book, My Religion, Tolstoy implies that whatever happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born, or rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the Christian religion used to. — Vincent Van Gogh

There’s much more to say about magic in art, and I’m guessing that was a big motivation for Adorno’s aesthetic theory, but I’ll leave that for the moment.


Power

The OP grew from my interpretation of Nietzsche as describing a disenchantment of power. It turns out that Weber has a theory of authority that lines up quite nicely with this. There are three kinds of authority: charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational. The latter is characteristic of a modern rationalized society and therefore of disenchantment, so it’s not a stretch to talk as I did of the disenchantment of power, or of the desacralization of power as an aspect of disenchantment, even though Weber did not use the term in quite that way, as far as I know.

There are two different kinds of charisma. One is about an individual’s personal qualities and abilities, and the other is institutional charisma...

... which can be inherited, or passed along with accession to an office, or invested in an institution. This is the charisma that gives an aura of sacred power to whomever has the right to wear the bishop's robe, or sit in the king's throne, regardless of their actual personal characteristics. — Charles Lindholm, Charisma

It’s clear that charisma of both types was what Nietzsche was identifying as lacking in the “captains of industry” and “generic bores”.

This aspect of the legal-rationalization of power was not a good thing in Nietzsche’s view, but it can be viewed positively, as opening up a space for critique.


Critique

In a disenchanted society, there remains ideological enchantment, where ideology is understood as the legitimizing ideas of the social order. In the view of critical theorists, critique of ideology is one of the central tasks of philosophy.

To that end, disenchantment can be understood and used in two ways:

• Negatively, as a lack—the lack of inherent meaning to be found in nature, society, history, and so on
• Positively, as a deliberate critique of ideology—we can disenchant the way the world is (capitalism, state power, nationalism, or whatever else we see as the primary problem), revealing the truth that it works to the detriment of people and obfuscates itself with ideology.

This latter is what I’m calling critical disenchantment.

Is this anything more than another name for the critique of ideology? Possibly. It is an enrichment of the concept, or one aspect of it. Or maybe it’s a radicalization, taking disenchantment out of the hands of the social scientists for whom it is merely a historical fact, and turning it into praxis, part of an attempt to change the world.

Another way to view disenchantment positively is as opening up the space for progress:

Society was no longer viewed as immutably anchored in tradition or God’s will. The idea of social design, the desire to create a better or perfect world, is a crucial characteristic of the modern way of thinking. — Maastricht University

And that leads us back to socialism. Nietzsche’s observation, as I interpreted it, that socialism resulted from the desacralization of power, leads us to Marx’s comments about critique:

The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.

It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics. — A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

Marx here refers to the move from the disenchantment of the Enlightenment, when the "holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked," to the critique of the law and politics as ideologies of capitalism. The word “disillusion” parallels the double aspect of disenchantment: to be disillusioned in one sense is bad, an unhappy state in which you realize something is worse than you thought; but in another sense it’s a good thing because you no longer perceive or believe falsely.

What we have now in postmodernity (or “liquid modernity”) is the negative disenchantment, without much of the positive, critical disenchantment, which was at its height with the socialist challenge to capitalism and the supporting Marxist theoretical challenge to ideology.

Given everything I’ve said here, I guess it looks like I’m advocating magical neo-Marxism. I’m not sure if that’s a thing.