Hattie's Web

Kant, Hume and the Enlightenment

I believe in the Enlightenment. It is the highest accomplishment of Western thought. Here is Hume's wonderful statement from  Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

"If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

This is an extreme statement of course: It leaves out many fine things: beauty, art, fine stories, spirituality, etc. But to me it is clear that what all these fine things cannot give us are systems of knowledge. That is the cultural advantage of the West, the ability to change the material world through science. Like it or not, this powerful tool for knowledge was what gave the West its dominance.

Earlier systems of wisdom and knowledge are pre-science.  These are often brilliant and even beautiful structures, but they have no explanatory value, and they can't make things. Castles in the air are fine, but you can't live in them. Such systems  offer people a good deal of consolation and even some excellent guides for self management but they are not the truth in the strict sense that enlightenment values demand.  Such is the neediness of us humans that a mythology has, unfortunately, grown up even around science telling us that we can go where no one has gone before. This is an illusion. The pathetic Heaven's Gate people believed they would be resurrected on the far side of the moon, but they just died, that's all. They really had pre-scientific minds, infantile.

Genuine science does what it does. It proceeds cautiously and empirically. It organizes empirical data into theory. It creates theory and searches for empirical proof.  Science lacks charisma, because it is not all inclusive and it seldom tells us what we want to hear. We don't want to hear that we are born, live, and die. We want to hear that we are transcendent beings who will live forever. We are infantile if we believe such things, and as Kant said,most people are infantile. People who are !00% dependent on science and technology ignore the material underpinnings of their lives, or take them for granted, imagining themselves to be natural beings uncontaminated by mere things.

Even after centuries of scientific inquiry, this is still so. We don't want the truth, if it is hard. We would rather be ignorant if knowledge means discomfort or change.

Real science is such a powerful thing. And enough for me as a guiding force in life, or at any rate what I regard as at least the best chance of reaching for the truth. What are minds for, if not to know? If I find myself liking ideas and feeling nice about them, I know I am in the realm of falsehood. If ideas disturb me, I pursue them, because that is the way to truth.

Native Hawaiians confront the County

Oh good heavens! Just lease the land over to them.  If people want to pursue property rights claims in court, let them, but open up the land now. Provide services, so that Hawaiians can build homes, do sustainable agriculture, etc. with decent access to electricity, water, and sewage systems.  Keep in mind: perpetrators forget, victims, never.

But of course I'm just a dreamer. There will never be a sensible solution in this matter.

Today's harvest

Sharwill avocado, starfruit, passion fruit (purple lilikoi), Kona oranges (navel oranges). I also found several orchids in bloom and potted some orchids. I have run out of room for orchid plants and no longer buy new ones.

Weeds! You don't want to know! It's year-round here. So if the end of the growing season's got you down, reflect on that!

Looks like health care reform is over the first hurdle. What a battle.  Any Brits or Canadians reading this: rejoice that you don't have so many divisive issues to deal with as we do. I know it's not perfect where you are, but you do put a social welfare floor under most people.

Breaking up

One thing hard times causes is marriage failure. Just in the last two days, two friends of ours have informed us that they are divorcing their spouses. They can tell you what they say the causes are, but I see no reason why these perfectly OK couples  could not have stayed together. In my opinion, money was at the root of the problem in both cases.

Can you believe this?

Before leaving due to the unbearable goings on around me, I listened to some of the testimony going on in the County Council chambers.  People have moved into Puna, a cheap area of the Big Island. in droves, and now they need basic services. The county has no money to provide said services, and everyone knows that.

What? You want running water? It's a luxury, says Brenda Ford. And so the standards continue to get defined down. 

One thing for sure: pressuring the local government will not help at all.  What will help, I can't say, since it seems that people can't think their way out of this dilemma but instead just fall back on this plantation mentality of how it's up to the Man to fix things for them. They don't seem to have any notions of coming up with solutions. I just don't understand this. They elected a woman dumb as a rock to represent them, who was honeymooning on Kauai instead of doing the job they hired her for. Not even there that day.

Property taxes are a joke  here, practically nothing, and they are the only source of tax revenue for the County (schools are State run). Where do they think the County can get the money to put in a water line? I would certainly be willing to pay more than the $400.00 or so we pay if it meant water for Puna!!! But all these people would scream no more taxes. I don't really think people have it coming to them, but sometimes...

At the same time, residents of this area are very worried that their kids will become autistic from vaccinations!

And reading the current Nation Magazine does not improve my mood. Unemployment among the young is running over 20% and is 40% in some minority demographics. That's awful. What are we supposed to do?

Gotta go pick up my husband at the airport. I feel like I live somewhere between affluence and the Third World here, and this makes me very uneasy. We live on an island and so can't ignore the increasing poverty, which is passing over from funky to just plain squalid for many.

Want to get published? Here's how, ladies!

Inspired By Colson Whitehead's tips on writing.

Be a very young and pretty woman registered at, or a graduate of, an Ivy League university. Write a thinly disguised autobiographical novel about your screwed up family and your tortured adolescence. Poverty and ethnic problems will enhance your chances of scoring big.

Be the daughter of a famous  male writer, preferably an alcoholic. Write a memoir about your horrible childhood and adolescence, all redeemed by the greatness of DAD.

Write a book about your terrible mother, the rich hotel heiress, movie star or some other such personage. Show how you triumphed over this hellion in the end to become the successful wife, mom, and author you are today.

Write a book about maternal neglect in your trailer trash or lower middle class family. This only works if you have established some reputation as a writer and so have transcended your early handicaps to become beautiful, successful, and a great mom.

Write a tell all or thinly disguised autobiographical novel about that rich family you were a nanny for or that successful magazine publisher or editor who enslaved you. This should win you a movie contract.

Topics to avoid: How you succeeded. No one cares about that! Only losers talk about how successful they are. You can, however, mention all the people who stood in the way of your "success."

Memoirs: You will never get published unless you are rich and famous. You aren't rich and famous, are you? Self publishing is the way to go for these. Your friends will be fascinated, or they at least will not hurt your feelings by telling you what they really think about your work.

New age or religious revelations. Self help. Yawn.

My cancer or other illness. Ditto. Only interesting to other sick people, unless you are a famous actress or something. This also goes for old age, maternal madness, divorce, terrible accidents and all other woes of humanity.

You get the idea. Now get to work!

Reading around

Kindle has changed my reading habits. Now I'm all up with the latest in fiction and non-fiction. There is so much good stuff being published right now; fiction and non-fiction for the general reader abounds. I no longer review work, because I think reviews are a waste of time and mostly an excuse to show off how erudite one is. I no longer care about that! So it's more or less, I liked it, didn't like it, or it was OK or not OK.

So here's my recent reading list:

Colson Whitehead: Sag Harbor. I enjoyed reading this book a lot. It was fun. He's just so freewheeling and funny.

Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake: a fully developed SF novel which goes beyond genre. Intelligent and fascinating.

Margaret Atwood: Sequel to Oryx and Crake:  The Year of the Flood. Could not get through it. Another dystopia. Yawn. Don't know why she wrote it.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Bright -Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Undermined America. I like Barbara Ehrenreich. Lots of insights. Hard truths with a dose of humor to make them go down a little easier.

Gail Collins: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. Lots of historical background and stuff I had forgotten. Well worth reading.

Max Blumenthal: Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. Ouch that stings. I'm glad I'm not a Republican.

Gotta go walk the dog and come back and finish the Blumenthal book!

More: Publisher's Weekly may think they can influence the way people read, but they have come up with a really boring, all male authors top ten books of the year.

How women lost their moral authority

Just yesterday as I was driving past a downtown bank, I saw a very satisfied gentleman urinating in their planter box. At the County Council meeting this a.m. I saw a woman with major bedhead and her equally bedheaded suckling three year old (still in [disposable] diapers) who yelled every time she withdrew her nipple.

What were these people doing out in public? In the good old days, Puritan disapproval, mostly dispensed by older women,  would have provided some check on this sort of public behavior. These days you just don't dare.

I assume that people of this sort just act the same everywhere.This goes beyond the usual stuff: the cigarette out the window making the world one's ashtray, the cutting pedestrians off in the crosswalks, the swearing, the obstructing sidewalks and so on, the yelling at kids: that I am used to.

We ought to recruit some mean old German Hausfraus to straighten things out here.

Excitement right here in Hilo Town

 I was sitting right here where I am now, a couple of hours ago, when I heard a tremendous noise, as of metal falling out of a garbage truck, say, and the whole house shook. I thought, oh it's our neighbors with all their comings and goings and did not take much notice. I took my breakfast out on the deck later, and looking over, I spotted this in the driveway:

Abandoning my breakfast for the moment, I walked down to the street, where I saw this very hot pit bull waiting by the mailbox:

Then, I saw it:

 
 
 

My downslope neighbor's house, with a pick-up truck sticking out of it! The driver's brakes failed as he backed out of the driveway next to ours, hence the debris that flew into our driveway.

The owners had just moved out the day before, after living in the place for 26 years. Truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction, such a coincidence. They were quite old, in their 80's and had to move back to the Mainland to be next to their kids. Lucky they were gone, because this would have been the death of them. The caregiver, Debbie, was in the house and fled as she heard and saw the truck bearing down on her. It went right through the front yard into the bathroom. She was shaken but not hurt The pit bull, who had been in the truck bed, was in distress. The driver was there, the cops were there, the real estate agent was there, the insurance agent hadn't got there yet. I don't think the house will survive. It's on soft soil over a drop to the Bay, which is so undermined that part of the house is floating in space. I'm sure it will be condemned now.

Here the truck, full of green waste (our neighborhood speciality, is being extracted from the bathroom of the house.

 

 

 

 

What a disaster!

Junk

I was just reading a blog new to me, TravelSkite, on the subject of trash and recycling faux pas that she has observed on her travels. Here is the historic Tiber, from a bridge in Rome, as we saw it  last month.

 
On the Big Island, the ocean currents wash mounds of trash onto the beaches near South Point. Local clean-ups can't deal with the volume of just plain junk from everywhere. Once upon a time it would have been glass floats and driftwood and such; now it's mostly plastic garbage. One time on a hike  we found heavy copper oxygen canisters we speculated might have come from a plane crash. They were too heavy to cart out, but what with what copper's worth these days they were probably valuable.