WWADWWAD Newsletter - February 13th, 2022 Edition
I spoke to Noam Chomsky and am feeling the love this Valentine's
February 13th, 2022 - Anchorage, AK - Issue 8
This month’s newsletter comes in a time of high anxiety for me. This is such a gritty month of the year in Alaska, and to ramp up the pressure I’ve been drinking a lot of strong green tea and two days ago I had the opportunity to ask Noam Chomsky a couple questions. Oh and I would be remiss if I did not mention the threat of nuclear war!
Back to the exciting bit though, you can listen to the full interview with Noam Chomsky, which was an episode of my partner’s podcast he and his cohosts were kind enough to let me join in on, at ourthoughtstonight.com . What I want to include here is Professor Chomsky’s answer to my second question, a question I thought long and hard about, and while he did not entirely indulge me my eager laymen’s perspective, he did at the same time actually indulge me a bit when I asked him the following question about approaching the world so as to learn from it.
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Episode 4 Season 4, Our Thoughts Tonight Podcast - Noam Chomsky Interview: Russia-Ukraine Conflict & Linguistics, Recorded on February 11th, 2022
Me: “Having arrived where you are politically, likely through your research into linguistics, do you have any hints for those of us trying to learn how to interact with the world so as to learn from it? Could it be, as the artist Tim Minchin has said, that we could stand to adopt a little neuropsychological humility?”
Professor Chomsky: “Well, the work on the nature of language and thought doesn't directly give any indications of how you should interact with the world, how you can teach people and so on. But if you look, if you think about it more broadly, there is a connection. And in fact, the connection was widely discussed during the Enlightenment. People like Wilhelm von Humboldt , one of the founders of classical liberalism of the modern research university, and also a very important linguist who was working within the tradition that I described, Identified Language and Thought, wrote about education and social life, and connected the two. The basic connection was the idea that at the core of human nature is what is sometimes called a basic instinct for freedom. You see it very clearly in language (where the core property of language is what Galileo and others noticed), our ability to create independently new thoughts, never appeared before , and even to convey to others the workings of our mind (and they can understand it ), that is the core human ability. (What essentially distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world) It’s a creative capacity.
Well that had an implication for education in society. The implication is, anything that interferes with this creative capacity is illegitimate . So in teaching, what's now called Teach To Test, (Totally illegitimate, they ridiculed that in the Enlightenment as like pouring water into a vessel, and then some of the water comes out) but that's the worst possible form of education, nothing stays in your mind. The right form of education is a little bit like what Rousseau talked about, or what Humboldt talked about, trying to stimulate, encourage the natural tendency of students, children, graduate students to inquire, to create, to pursue their own concerns and capacities in cooperation with others. That would be real education.
And the same is true in social organization altogether. Anything in the structure of society that inhibits the natural exercise of the right for freedom and independence has to be questioned. Now that doesn't mean what's called libertarianism here. That's just a ridiculous misinterpretation of it, but it does mean something like what's now called social democracy or more serious moves towards what used to be understood as socialism, meaning workers’ control over their enterprises, democratic control over communities and cooperation among them, and so on. All of those ideas are right in the Enlightenment and they do have a connection, a loose connection, with the conception that the fundamental property of human beings, distinguishing them from animals, is this creative capacity manifested most clearly in normal use of language. So there is that kind of connection. It's not a logical connection. It's a connection of sort of spirit.”
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What, naturally, is to follow is a discussion of Pete Davidson.
At any rate, proceed at your own risk here, and happy Valentine’s Day! (Because while consumerist holidays can rot, the meaningfulness of love is eternal)
I now present to you:
In Defense Of Pete Davidson, the Absurdity of Love
I love Pete Davidson.
I’m just the experience of this consciousness, so take everything I’m about to say here with a grain of salt, but every experience has something to report, and this is what I have to say of mine.
And I’m not assuming I see him the way everyone else sees him or that I’ve fixated on the same details of him that everyone else has, but I nonetheless do want to take a clear stance on the phenomenology of Pete Davidson.
In fact, when I first started messing with the idea of writing about him, I was like hm, I should look him up, make sure I’m understanding him right. My rationale for this was that maybe he’s done something reprehensible that could be construed as an affront and therefore make me sound like an apologist for something (by virtue of my love for him of course).
This is a very fraught contemporary impulse, one which I’m learning to critically introspect about, and nonetheless in this case I decided against the dirt digging. I realized it is not information I need to know to continue the defense of my position.
Pete Davidson’s past actions are irrelevant to the point I want to make about him (that we should all love him). (And mind you this is love not in the way that would make my partner, specifically, my partner in a monogamous relationship, uneasy.) This is because the same mindset that informs my love for him informs my mentality towards harm too.
Absurdism helps me grapple with many things, one of which is harm. I choose not to extend harm beyond the definition of it (to damage or injure physically or mentally) but to leave it there and set it down as an unfortunate thing, but nonetheless just a thing that happens because we lose our metric for it, when we have ourselves experienced it.
If you strongly believe Pete Davidson caused harm for some reason that is currently beyond my knowledge, that is okay, I still love him. I hope he’s engaging in restorative measures if so but I’m really not hung up on the label of “harmful”, because I think to some extent it describes literally all of us.
Moving past this caveat (which has become necessary in this moment when what we say in earnest online can be rabidly attacked by anonymous entities), I nonetheless wanted to provide it, in a time so certainty deluded we stop saying we love things, and people out of fear of being identified with harm. Since it seems to me like to some extent we all are, I’m advocating we give this up.
No one has a good complete explanation for everything, so until we do, we need to recognize our fucked up but sometimes intrinsically beautiful selves have a responsibility to other fucked up but sometimes intrinsically beautiful selves. We need to stop having a scarcity mindset towards goodness. We’re all a little good. We’re all a little harmful. We should take restorative measures to reduce harm but we cannot over moralize it, as research into trauma precludes us from being able to this with sound basis. Pete Davidson just strikes me as being a little good, a little funny, odd and delusional levels of familiar, and generally an absurd king.
It is no wonder Kim K ended up with him, she is, as Gabi Abrão says, an actual doll, so of course she needs the absurd king to balance her out! And this needs to be put onto the internet for discussion, but I say once you welcome absurdity into your perspective it permeates so deep as even your romantic proclivities. You can choose to look for any one of a great many things in a partner but there really is something to be said for incorporating a healthy dose of “he makes me laugh” or something simple like that, and embracing the absurd of being with someone solely because there is some quality of suitability that is not particularly definable through our traditional framework for describing suitable partners. (Some cultures are better than others at this) (But ultimately, we are animals with fancy communication capabilities, but that doesn’t mean we have ironed out all the incompatibilities of definition. The way we define a partner, like the way we define respect, can look quite different from person to person.) Kim Kardashian found herself a reliable nervous system caretaker, and personally that’s exactly what I’m looking for in a man.
I welcome absurd kings. I wish we had more of them, as they are an antidote to nihilism.
I think Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD known for research in psychology and neuroscience says it near to best in an interview she did with Andrew Huberman. In it she says :
“Your brain is preparing itself to try to learn something new, trying to correct or add to an internal model, so it can predict better in the future. So think about life now, think about how many people in this country have bankrupt body budgets. Think about how much you face in a day that is filled with ambiguity and uncertainty. Basically what I would say, is that people have trouble focusing attention because they’re metabolically encumbered, they don’t experience themselves to be metabolically encumbered, what they feel like is that they’re anxious and depressed, I’m not trying to diminish that feeling, what I’m trying to say is that when you are encumbered in this way it’s very hard to pay attention to details and focus on them in order to learn them. What is the most expensive thing your brain can do? Move your body, or learn something new. Learning something new usually involves focusing your attention to concentrate. I think partly, it is partly that we’re training ourselves with all these little screens and so on, and partly, we are swimming in a sea of ambiguity, and that is really hard on a human nervous system, I just have to say.”
What a position of absurdism does is it frees you up from having to draw conclusions. And that is what Pete Davidson represents for me, he is the living embodiment of freedom from drawing conclusions. I personally, am put very much at ease by humans who live with little pretense for the absurd existence they are experiencing.
Pete Davidson really seems to me to act in earnest. I read somewhere that he credits Kid Cudi’s music with saving his life when he was a teenager struggling with depression. As someone who did not have their life saved by Kid Cudi per se, but who did nonetheless also encounter Kid Cudi as a teenager and have their world a bit rocked, I respect it! A healthy dose of earnest takes can make for good company in an already quite chaotic world. There has also been public discussion of his substance use and mental health, something I think novices to these topics mistakenly equate with him not having it all together. I personally think mental health struggles and sobriety reckonings to be par for the course in 2022, and that we should all talk more about ours. All this and then the obvious piece that I will always point to as an alluring quality in fellow humans which is the sense that I get that he most definitely does not take himself too seriously.
I love him and I dare everyone who doesn’t to tell me exactly why that is and I think their foundational basis will immediately dissolve, at least if they are at all indulging me my solace of absurdity.
Join me on the other side, the peaceful place where we expect uncertainty, instead of avoiding it.
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Upcoming Events
(both National/Worldwide
and Local Anchorage) :
National/Worldwide/Online:
Elizabeth Peratrovich Day - February 16th, 2022
Elizabeth Peratrovich Zoom Event- UAA Native Student Services February 16th, 2022 2pm-3pm AKST - Celebrate the life of Elizabeth Peratrovich, member of the Tlingit nation and civil rights activist, and discuss together the Tlingit value of 'Be strong in mind, body, spirit.’ https://www.uaa.alaska.edu/students/native-student-services/
Healing Trauma With Self Compassion - Online Retreat with Gabor Mate - $299- Register at https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/webinar/healing-trauma-with-self-compassion
Compassionate Inquiry Circles - Beginning week of April 1st, Registration closes March 2nd, $400-800 CAD, not suitable for individuals in active addiction to substances or severe mental illness, https://compassionateinquiry.com/ci-circles/
Treating Addiction, Trauma, and Emotional Loss Together Somatically Amidst a Toxic Culture - USAPB, February 21st, 9:00AM-11:30AM, Zoom Event- Registration: https://usabp.org/event-4574720 Non Member: $45
"For the Rights of All: Ending Jim Crow in Alaska" Screening & Discussion, February 16th, 2022 at 1PM, The Alaska Center, Register: https://bit.ly/PeratrovichDay
Special Circumstances & The Other Death Penalty- by #DropLWOP Coalition, February 23rd, 5:30PM-7PM, Register: bit.ly/DL-FEB23
Local, AKST Time:
PFD Application Deadline: March 31st
Iditarod Ceremonial Start, March 5th, 2022 at 10AM
Alaskan Indigenous Leaders: Visions for the Future - Women’s Day Panel, Beartooth Theatrepub, March 8th, 2022 at 2PM, Tickets: www.alaskaworldaffairs.org/events/alaskan-indigenous-leaders-visions-for-the-future-womens-day-panel
Upcoming Anchorage Bus Holidays: President’s Day, March 21st, 2022
Our Schools, Our Voice: Anchorage School Board Candidate Forum, February 24th, 2022 at 6:30PM, The Alaska Center on Facebook, no link available
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Semi-recent Substack Articles I’ve Found Interesting:
Reliably imperialist bias-less discussion of the Russia-Ukraine-U.S. conflict:
Still thinking about this article after reading it about a month ago:
Excellent book review that inspired me to give Julia May Jonas a thorough read at my earliest opportunity to do so:
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