Facing the Limen
Limen (df) “a threshold below which a stimulus is not perceived or is not distinguished from another”
By: Peter Dale Scott
i The Logic of Yin
C.S. Lewis spoke not just for me but for all my best friends two hemispheres of my mind the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow rationalism. Lewis, Surprised by Joy 171-72 This focus on yin and yang logically calls to mind Milosz’s distinction within his inner doubleness between two distinct voices Naphta his inner dreamer and Settembrini his inner humanist Scott Milosz, “To Albert Einstein” opposed tendencies we all normally have Milosz Witness 69 and of course McGilchrist’s 588 pages on The Divided Brain The Master and His Emissary that ignored Ivan’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor followed by Alyosha’s kiss Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov which in turn calls up Pascal’s Wager an early example of game theory Kolokoltsov, Understanding Game Theory, 28 his mathematical advice on how to win Siegfried, Beautiful Math, 197 If you gain, you gain all if you lose, you lose nothing Wager, then, without hesitation that He is Pascal Pensées, III, §233 referring to that presence those few who mind most feel outside of our selves on the side of love. As we face disruption maybe even a nuclear World War Three the same logic applies we can either collapse in despair or we can act in the hope that unprecedented violence and death will once again be followed by yet another minimal advancement towards a better world
ii. The Guilt of Civilization
The two sons of Bernie Madoff the Ponzi master having turned him in to the FBI died shortly afterward one by hanging himself the other by galloping cancer You and I are inclined to feel sorry for them in their grief but if we think about it shouldn’t we too be touched more than we dare to dwell on by awful twinges of guilt that our leisure we think of as freedom to see and read about this depends on the wage-slave labor in offshore factories like Longhua ideal for making iPhones long workdays harsh managers and in just one year 18 reported suicide attempts and 14 confirmed right there in the factory its buildings looped with nets to catch falling bodies with long queues of men outside the walls hoping to get hired Guardian, 6/18/17 cf. Chan Slavery has always been the price of freedom and refinement as in Athens and Rome our exemplars in antiquity of freedom leisure culture and unprecedented hordes of slaves The solstice of classical urban culture was also the zenith of slavery Anderson and also of order as they knew it in which injustice went unpunished Socrates and Cicero murdered like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and unlike the big bank tycoons in the financial crisis of 2008 which led to the death of smaller banks innocent of high crimes while ordinary Americans lost $9.8 trillion in wealth as their home values plummeted Washington Post, 9/10/18 The debts of the big tycoons were settled by our first black president while Bernie in contrast was just a one-off and to universal acclaim quickly received a sentence of life in prison like the sacrificial goat once driven into the wilderness to ease the conscience of devout ancient Jews
iii Facing the Limen
Right now in this early light millions of naked people -- many more outside my time zone -- are like me putting on elaborate disguises for our unwritten roles in the vast unfinished drama Ethogeny cultural evolution that at its highest level is biased towards hope on the playground of certain death.
Notes
i The Logic of Yin
Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: Verso, 1978), 21-22: “The solstice of classical urban culture always also witnessed the zenith of slavery; and the decline of one, in Hellenistic Greece or Christian Rome, was likewise invariably marked by the setting of the other;” cf. Peter Dale Scott, Reading the Dream: A Post-Secular History of Enmindment (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), 127.
Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, Pun Ngai, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China's Workers (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020).
Guardian: Brian Merchant, “Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city,” Guardian, June 18, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract.
Washington Post: Renae Merle, “A guide to the financial crisis — 10 years later,” Washington Post, September 10, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-guide-to-the-financial-crisis--10-years-later/2018/09/10/114b76ba-af10-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html.
ii. The Guilt of Civilization
Vassili Kolokoltsov and O. A. Malafeev, Understanding Game Theory: Introduction to the Analysis of Many Agent Systems with Competition and Cooperation (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2021), 28.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, (San Diego, 1955), 171-72: “The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side, a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow rationalism. Nearly all that I loved I thought to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
Peter Dale Scott, “Milosz’s Poem ‘To Albert Einstein’ and His Commitment to History,” MS essay.
Tom Siegfried, Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature (Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press, 2006), 197.
Thank you, Aaron. Your work has been important to my understanding of "Crackpot Realism." Once comprehended as a cynically genocidal and anti-human system, the overtly failed illusions of our American Empire's "exceptionalism" can't be unseen. I'd love to talk to you sometime.