A pós-verdade

Our current moment tends to misunderstand the Enlightenment, which challenged a world governed by epistemic dogma, handed down by religion and royalty, that held truth as something frozen, complete, and beyond debate. The Enlightenment was an effort to treat truth as something that wasn’t a given but needed to be worked on, and could be failed at. The experience of the Enlightenment was and remains itself a crisis of reality.  

Epistemic uncertainty isn’t something we are newly experiencing. It has, again, lingered through modernity. The modern rise of science and democracy, the industrial revolutions, globalization, the furthering of transportation, urbanism, and mass media all multiply that uncertainty by providing access to other cultures, ideas, and ways of knowing. Technology warps what we think is real faster than we can cope, which continues to bring both possibility and despair. Truth’s contestability means that the meaning of your life, or anyone else’s, is a question that is possible to ask, and possible to get wrong. You can fail to become the person you’re supposed to be. Truth, in short, was and continues to be radically contested. That was always the point.

 (...)

 So many journalists and pundits have failed to describe our world accurately, and the inability to outline a coherent account of our reality can be felt as the impossibility of coherence at all. But the world isn’t really as blurry as their cloudy vision. Maybe we’d prefer if current political conditions were all a cruel joke or surreal dream, but the motives that shape our world are sincere and their effects are abundantly clear. Rather than ascribe Trump’s victory to postmodern bogeymen, it seems more accurate to point out that he won because he is openly racist and that stance has been popular enough. Perhaps “post-truth” is the condition of being wrong multiplied by your own sense of expertise.

Nathan Jurgenson, Faked out. Vale a pena ler na íntegra. 

Domingo no mundo (84)

Santiago Roussiñol, Girona, c.1907-15.

Domingo no mundo (83)

Carrying our words

We travel carrying our words.
We arrive at the ocean.
With our words we are able to speak
of the sounds of thunderous waves.
We speak of how majestic it is,
of the ocean power that gifts us songs.
We sing of our respect
and call it our relative.

Ofelia Zepeda

Domingo no mundo (82)

Sybil Barham, Martinmas, s/d.

Domingo no mundo (81)

George Morland, Breaking the ice, 1792.

Rapazes & raparigas

A young girl is presented with a lockable diary on Christmas; she addresses it as “Dear Diary” or even by a particular name: Anne Frank's diary was her “Dear Kitty.” Millions of such diaries survive in shoeboxes along with elementary school autograph books; millions of others have perished in late adolescent Kinderdammerungs. Oh, my God, how could I have written this? the seventeen-year-old cries, and off into the wastebasket goes her book. Twenty years later, when shame over youth's inanities has been utterly overpowered by the simple desire to have back youth itself, she wishes she had kept it.

The generic he gives way to she in these paragraphs, because the secret-keeping adolescent diary is, or certainly has been, pre-eminently a female genre. We are still not likely to give boys diaries at Christmas. Later on, when they're suitably professional and significant, they can start them; then they will be important "records." But to write in one's ‘secret friend’ on all the ordinary days of childhood is not seemly for a boy: inner lives are for little girls; baseball is for their brothers. A subtle, even unconscious, indoctrination has probably always been going on in the presentation of these diaries to girls (those with locks still sold in the five-and-ten never carry a boy's picture on them; it's always a girl's). The little girl is being trained to appreciate dailiness, and ordinariness: her lot in life is the quotidian; her brother will do whatever transcending there is to be done.

But the bright little girl soon enough recognizes that the cultivated inner life can be a much more powerful and dangerous weapon with which to repel intruders than any baseball bat. It may be in her diary that she discovers how to keep part of herself back, and to take revenge on those who have wounded what part of her has been exposed. She learns things about herself faster than her brother, and when he tries to read her diary — and of course he will — it will not be just to torment her with the news that he's done so, and not just out of animal curiosity, but also because he's jealous. No one likes anything to be kept from him; and certainly no one likes to be talked about without the chance to reply.

Thomas Mallon, A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries.