Cup & Words
“That way you’ll understand in future days, when there’s a profit to be gained from theft, you’ll learn that it’s not good to be in love with every kind of monetary gain. You’ll know more men are ruined than are saved when they earn profits from dishonest schemes.” Sophocles, Antigone
The Cup is in full swing. Unfortunately, needing to be mentioned first, FIFA’s complete desecration of the game in allowing “hydration breaks” – a stopping to sell commercials. FIFA, Fox, and the US – the beautiful game meets some of today’s very ugly realities.
The US clocked a not very good Paraguay, but historically, a not very good S. American squad beats most anything from N. America. Best, the US born, London raised, Nigerian Folarin Balogun became the first US player in Cup history to score two goals in one game.
Balogun could have played for the Englanders. A Nigerian I sent this info to replied he probably couldn’t have made the English team. The Nigerians always have far too much respect for the Brits. When I've confronted this Nigerian Brit veneration in the past, I always replied the best thing the United States ever did was kick the Brits out two and half centuries ago.
S. Africa looked so bad it was hard to judge the Mexicans. Cote d’Ivoire stole a win from Ecuador in the 90th minute. Morocco played the Brazilians well, Japan and the Dutch an excellent match. On we go.
Words – I was watching a Yale and Columbia Prof talk about Hannah Arendt’s, The Human Condition. Not great. It made me think about words and importantly how words can never convey the rigor, many, most especially philosophers, would like. Words are “organic,” their meaning constantly shaped and interpreted. These processes in and of themselves offer meaning.
The great challenge here is, until recently, from when homo sapiens first started talking, words ruled. Even more so when a few millennia ago, we learned to write, wrongly believing written words held a new rigor they never possessed. (See Dinesen's comment in Out of Africa of how pre-literate Kenyans could be greatly skeptical of any verbal communication, but when confronted with anything written, attributed it the greatest accuracy.)
In science, words require a certain rigor, though never as precise a rigor as provided by the simplest number. However, as science grew more complex, it needed numbers not so rigorously defined, for example infinitesimals. No one should underestimate the power of numeric imprecision.
One of the great challenges we face today is the rigor of technology, better conceived here as rigidity. Technologies impose a rigidity in their designs, their functions, and their interactions with people. A rigidity both too little understood and even less appreciated. This becomes especially problematic with compute's increasing automation of formerly exclusively human actions. Such processes instill a certain rigidity that can become imprisoning without the ability, call it a vigorous feedback process, of allowing redefinition of the technology and its processes just as human interactions demand a certain organicity with words.
Which gets back to academia and Arendt. In the discussion on The Human Condition, there was a somewhat dismissive look at what is essential to Arendt’s political thinking concerning private and public. Arendt got this dichotomy from the Greeks, believing both aspects complementary and necessary for a well lived life. The problem, and it’s a big one, is ancient Greece was an agrarian society, where the definition of private could be confined to what happened in your home or on your land. Over time, and most especially with our scientific and technological Industrial Revolution, any sort of definition of private was completely shattered. What is the private land of an apartment dweller or the privacy of a home filled with gadgets, clothes, and food all produced outside it? Just as imperatively, industrialism completely redefined public, no more radically so than collective economic enterprises. Here, I speak specifically of the corporations, redefined to be private concerns.
In regards to revitalizing politics in the 21st century, we don’t even have the words.