blood of the covenant

What's really surprising, however, is what we're now learning about how spiders use their webbing to actually think through problems. When a spider sits at the hub of its web, it isn't just passively waiting for vibrations. It is actively tugging and loosening different strands, manipulating the web in subtle ways.

Research has shown that these manipulations are how to tell where a spider is paying attention. When it tenses one strand of webbing, that strand becomes more sensitive to vibrations. It's essentially the equivalent of a spider cupping its ears to hear better in a certain direction.

Aren’t we all so sick of looking stuff up? You know what, maybe I go to a restaurant and it’s bad. Maybe I don’t know what’s good on the menu before I get there. Maybe I throw caution to the wind and put something in the dishwasher without googling if it’s dishwasher safe. Maybe I get a flip phone and get comfortable saying, “I don't know.” While you’re looking down at Google Maps, the love of your life is walking past you on the street. To feel sexy, we need risk and spontaneity. Our phones kill both.

Sexy things are fleeting. The internet is forever. The kind of virile, salty life so many of us crave is incompatible with our sanded-down, stagnant, sanitized online existence. The chance encounter, the pregnant pause, the flirtatious touch, the generous laugh—these are the sexy, ephemeral moments of life. The scroll is endless. What’s sexy is always here and now, not somewhere, out there, forever.

To me it’s historically unmatched. I have never read or heard of a period like this one. Now, I have read about many historical periods. But not one in which you can talk to young people the way you can at the college level today, and find out that they believe… nothing. Want… nothing. Hope… nothing. Expect… nothing. Dream… nothing. Desire… nothing. Push ’em far enough and they’ll say: “Yeah, I gotta get a job. Spent a lot of money at Duke.” That’s not what I am talking about here. They hope nothing. Expect nothing. Dream nothing. Desire nothing.

And it is a fair question to ask whether a society that produces this reaction in its young is worthy of existence at all. It really is. It’s worth asking that. Whether it’s worth being here at all. And my criticism of this society couldn’t get more bitter than it is in that case. It couldn’t possibly be. Remember, I am talking about the young I have encountered at Duke. These are privileged youth. At an elite southern school. Mostly white, mostly upper-middle to upper class. Now, imagine what the attitudes are like on the streets of DC if you are from another race or another social class. Is it surprising – at all surprising – that our cities resemble Beirut?

Banalisation is a way to reduce complexity. It’s also a systematic way to be an idiot. And I have to say this, many of our complaints about the educational system fall under the critique of Marcuse as well. Where we produce student after student in this condition I have described. Which is not really despair, because it’s beneath that level. In other words they would have to be more excited to be in despair. They’d have to be like more thrilled to be forlorn. Like they’d have to be in love with something before they could have their heart broken, to make a more simple example out of it. No, it’s beneath that level. It’s frighteningly beneath it. It cannot be defended.

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’ head as he writhed in pain – “King of the Jews” – was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’ crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but that actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the racked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time. The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God” – a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome – could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

To the Romans, gender not only depended more on one’s ability to procreate than anything else, but it was subject to change. Greek and Roman medical texts from the time describe gender not as fixed, but fluid depending on humors like heat and moisture in the body. According to them, these factors could determine an infant’s sex during pregnancy, and they could also change one’s gender after birth. While the terminology was not there in the same way it is today, all of this points to the existence and tacit acceptance of a third gender in Ancient Rome, even if they did not have the same citizenship or property rights as their cisgender (and procreating) neighbors.

[...] Castrated or not, Gallai throughout the Roman Empire dressed, worshiped, and lived as women. They were noted for their saffron gowns, long hair, heavy makeup, and extravagant jewelry. They existed in every part of the Greco-Roman world at every level of society and were mentioned by Ovid, Seneca, Persius, Martial, and Statius as a common sight in the first century. Apuleius even described them in The Golden Ass:

“The following day they went out, wearing various colored undergarments with turbans and saffron robes and linen garments thrown over them, and every one hideously made up, their faces crazy with muddy paints and their eyes artfully lined.”

In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.

So anyway, that’s one way a society can break down. My own view of the United States government is that it has no legitimacy now in the classical political sense. That means it is not supported by a democratic majority of its people; it has no classic political legitimacy. I mean I take that to be an empirical fact. I bet you could probably do a factoid on CNN about it and banalise it. You’ll all go “Big deal, so what” Well so what? You don’t have a damn democracy, you have been lied to since you were born, well that’s no problem, we are used to it. That’s cynical reason at work, I mean; it’s just utterly the situation I think we are finding ourselves in. This scepticism includes scepticism concerning history… and this has not been a diatribe up here against reason, it’s been a diatribe against instrumental reason. Clearly the uses of a more comprehensive reason to try to figure out where we are would be important and could be used, but there is a general cynicism about it.

For the Reality, he is as the pupil is for the eye through which the act of seeing takes place. Thus he is called insan [meaning both man and pupil], for it is by him that the Reality looks on His creation and bestows the Mercy [of existence] on them.

But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all the points of space?

“In Ireland, you go to someone's house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you're really just fine. She asks if you're sure. You say of course you're sure, really, you don't need a thing. Except they pronounce it ting. You don't need a ting. Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn't mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it's no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don't get any damned tea. I liked the Irish way better.”