Practical Sainthood

In Dadaland, the world of the future, artists have successfully manipulated cultural climate change so that senseless mass slaughter on battlefields never occurs, despite the heroic efforts of people who like that sort of thing. The artists will sometimes become paranoid that they might get perceived as "saints," you know, the guys who are so clueless about the unspeakable joys of murder, theft and rape. They get told all the time, "You are such a saint." Then they get nervous, because they remember their art history courses, where they were exposed to paintings of Saint Agnes, Saint Catherine, Saint Sebastian, Saint Joan, all depicted as suffering horrible death by torture. Then there were all the sainted disciples of Jesus, to say nothing of Jesus himself. If one is Catholic, one can experience this paranoia before taking any art history courses.

In Dadaland, it is highly likely that the artists will begin to contemplate how to avoid being perceived as "saints," thus avoiding crucificixion, barbecuing and the like. As Dadaland will require a large number of artists to do the enormous task of cultural climate change, the International Dada Centennial Committee wishes that people do not avoid becoming artists in order to avoid slow, horrible death that is traditional among saints. So we will be offering occasional practical advice about how to avoid slow horrible death from being perceived as a saint, even if one actually is a saint.

1. If one finds that one's saintly lifestyle inadvertantly results in a collection of fawning sycophants, this is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. They will probably be more trouble to the "saint" than they are worth in ego strokes, but it is often the case that without their "saint," the lives of these fawning sycophants would seem empty, dreary and meaningless, leading to blowing their brains out, and worse, leaving a note that names the rejection by the "saint" as cause. So if one is stuck with a collection of fawning sycophants, it is highly inadvisable to refer to them as "disciples." Preferable is "homies." One can get away with this better if one is visibly of African ancestry, or, lacking that, speaks with a Black accent. A Black accent can be acquired by going through a heroin addiction treatmen program. The IDCC knows of no such program that requires applicants to prove that they are actually heroin addicts, so do not worry about getting busted for imperonating a junkie.

2. To be continued.

Dadaland

In Dadaland, a land of the future, the artists have successfully manipulated cultural climate change so that any human who wakes up one morning and declares, "Hey! The sun is shining, the birds are singing, my wife is cooking bacon! What a great day to go out and start a war!" will find that no matter what he does, war mysteriously never results. No plunder, no pillage, no carpet bombings, no rape of twelve year old girls in front of their parents, no torture, no nukes, no nothing. He goes to the shrink.

"Doc, I am frustrated. I want to be the next Hitler, the next Pol Pot, the next Napoleon, the next Mao Tse Tung. What am I doing wrong?"

The shrink convinces him that he might consider becoming a successful vacuum cleaner salesman like neo-Nazi leader David Duke.

The International Dada Centennial Committee speculates about whether artists will try to blend in with the populace so that no frustrated vacuum cleaner salesman comes to the door, looks around as he makes his spiel, notices paint, easel, and the smell of turpentine, and detonates the suicide bomb hidden inside his sales kit.

"Take that, you...you... you ARTIST!" he screams as he flips the switch. Pieces of vacuum cleaner salesman, artist, arty wife, arty children, arty dog, arty furniture, organic food, tubes of sugar free toothpaste, tubes of paint, all go flying through the shattered walls and out into the neighborhood.

Artists in Dadaland may be well advised to not use oil paint, since the smell of turpentine is a dead giveaway. Also they may be well advised to live somewhere so remote that vacuum cleaner salesmen are unlikely to come. Do not, however dream of Jehovah's Witnesses also being unlikely to come. Rest assured that there is no such place in the Solar System.

What is wrong with this picture?

Cultural Terrorist is beginning to conceive of the International Dada Centennial Committee as a piece of abstract art. This is fitting, since Cultural Terrorist did, after all, major in abstract art. But if the IDCC is a piece of abstract art, it is not the sort that has squiggles of paint on it. It is composed of actual abstractions...you know... the kind that can not be seen, e.g., Basic Rights, Traditional Values, Non-Basic Rights, Social Justice, Antisocial Justice, Non-Traditional Values, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, Life, Liberty, and the Capture of Happiness, Tall, Dark and Handsome, etc. That said, I will now proceed to do what artists do: look at the piece and ask, "What is wrong with this picture?"

Oh no! It is Shabbes! I am not supposed to do any creative work today! Ah, but, but, but....maybe asking the question "What is wrong with this picture?" is not making art, but merely indulging in art appreciation. Yeah, like the rabbis decided that while one must not compose music on Shabbes, it is okay to play the piano. And while one must not lift 165 pounds, on Shabbes, it is okay to jog your body of that same weight around the track in the interest of living long enough to hear your grandchildren tell you that they wish their father were as nice as you are.

So, we have been exploring the idea of artists becoming the dominant life form on Earth so that they can more effectively manipulate humans into not nuking themselves into oblivion. But, considering the universal corruptibility of Earthly sentient life, one suspects that the main motivation for the artists fostering the continued existence of humans is so that humans will continue to pay artists for their art, or, lacking anyone who wants to buy it, continue to give the artists grants to make art that no one wants to buy. Self interest, in other words.

Ah, but is there any interest that is not self interest? When I was a child, I got twenty five cents weekly allowance. I once tossed the entire quarter into the basket of a blind beggar while accompanying my mother on a shopping trip to Jamaica Avenue. It felt good to give my entire allowance to a blind beggar. So there was self interests involved....you know... making oneself feel good.

So. We are again exploring the idea of artists becoming the dominant life form on Earth. Sweet. The humans look at us and feel resentful that we, putting Dada into practice, manipulate cultural climate change so that human not only do not nuke themselves into oblivion, but actually fight no wars at all. In fact, due to the arcane work of the artist, humans no longer murder, steal, rape, torture....no longer do a great many things humans once believed to be loads of fun.

Do humans have any fun at all? Oh sure. they live much the same as middle class suburbarnites of today. They have loads of fun. In fact, they do not even notice that they are being manipulated by the artists into not committing senseless mass slaughter etc. Oh, but with six billion humans on the planet, surely one or two will notice and start kvetching. You know, like Hitler kvetched about how the Jews controlled everything. I wish. Such a non-murderous people.... don't get me started.

So perhaps the prime directive of Post Human Ethics is Thou Shalt Not Let Humans Know That They Are Being Manipulated By Artists Into Not Committing Senseless Mass Slaughter Because It Will Make Them Feel Bad And Then Come To Your House To Kill You And All Of Us. Is this a sort of forbidden fruit in the middle of a sort of Garden of Eden, tended by a sort of newly created intelligent life form, just waiting for a serpent subtle enough to successfully tempt some Eve to eat and feed her Adam the forbidden fruit? To be continued.

"Right" and "Wrong."

The last post was entitled "Post Human Ethics." Yet it seems to not deal with the traditional subjects of ethics, which is, roughly, the ideas of "Right" and "Wrong." Instead, it seems to focus upon the problem of resentment and violence against artists who conspire to become the dominant life form on Earth so that they can more effectively continue to trick humans into not committing senseless mass slaughter on battlefields. What has this got to do with ethics?

Well. We have already established that this series of speculations arises from the celebration of the centennial of Dada, the movement that declared that art had failed in its task of civilizing Humans, as evidenced by the senseless mass slaughter on the battlefields of France in WWI. And this movement introduced the idea that artists actually have a task beyond simply getting famous and therefore rich by selling paintings and such. And that this task was to civilize humans into not committing senseless mass slaughter on battlefields. I would like to introduce the perhaps radical idea that "Right" and "Wrong" cannot be separated from "Survival." And "Survival" cannot be separated from "Death." And "Death" cannot be separated from "Senseless Mass Slaughter on Battlefields." So artists who define themselves as the civilizers of humans, by means of preventing mass slaughter on battlefields, and then find them selves in danger of being killed by from those same humans who resent being manipulated into not committing senseless mass slaughter on battlefields or off of battlefields , when asked, "Is senseless mass slaughter 'wrong?'" are very likely to answer 'You bet your ass'. I am not sure what I just said.

Let us now consider the idea that "Right" and "Wrong" cannot be separated from "Survival."
Imagine, if you will, the statement "Abortion is wrong." Change the previous period to an exclamation mark , if you wish. Let us try to separate this idea from the idea of "Survival." I speak here only of survival of entire societies. The reason is that people who tend to say "Abortion is Wrong" tend to be the sort of people who claim that they "believe in traditional values." And the only way a value can become traditional is that it is passed on for so many generations that no one can remember when it first appeared, and the society that passes it on has managed to survive to pass it on. So it is not possible to separate "traditional values" from the survival of a society long enough for the particular value to become "traditional."

So. Back to the separation of "Abortion is Wrong" from "Survival." Time marches on. "We" witness significant numbers of societies come and go and notice that societies that hold to the traditional value "Abortion is Wrong" have a seriously tendency to disintegrate and disappear. And societies that hold to the traditional value "Abortion is Right" have a serious tendency to survive for thousands of years. What does it mean, in this context, to say "Abortion is Wrong?" It means, in part, that we are willing for our society to disintegrate and disappear. Yeah, yeah, I know, "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is a fallacy. But I still ask the question. Get over it.

So: I am tired. I don't feel like going on with this any more.

Post Human Ethics

Cultural Terrorist has apparently been hibernating. In the interim, he has realized that the very small number of people who have looked at his blog make it an excellent venue for writing things that he does not want anyone to see. I am not talking about weird sexual fantasies or anything so predictable. I am talking about Post Human Ethics.

In a previous post, we considered the notion that, in the distant future (the word "future," no longer in current use, may be roughly translated as "going forward") , when artists become so good at engineering cultural climate change that they consider themselves a superior life form, they then refuse to date non-artists and become thereby so genetically different from humans that they actually are a different life form, in the conventional sense of the term. That is to say they are no longer able to interbreed with humans and produce fertile offspring. We also considered the notion that humans, now feeling depressed over no longer being the most highly evolved form of life, as well as over being consistently manipulated by the artists, rebel by refusing, en masse, to reproduce at all and go extinct, leaving artists, with no one to support them, alone to learn to hunt, gather, and make their own beer. A problem I see with this is that now that I have mentioned it, the artists will try to prevent the voluntary extinction of their human benefactors by being very, very nice to them. This is the field of Post Human Ethics. It applies to that period of time before humans go extinct, and planet Earth hosts two sentient species, Homo Sapiens and Homo Artificialis, each eying the other with suspicion.

That said, the first specific instance of the problem of humans feeling depressed about being manipulated by artists via engineered cultural climate change is right here: If any non artists read this, they may feel depressed just from the speculations about their future as a sort of domesticated herd of highly intelligent beasts, roaming "Pasture Earth," getting up early, going to school and job, maintaining industrial production of enormous amounts of largely unneccesary goods and services, taking orders from idiots, and prevented from nuking each other into oblivion by their domesticaters, the all mighty artists. So Post Human Ethics must be researched and developed right away. One never knows when the humans will do something drastic after reading this, like killing off all the artists before it is too late. Stranger things have happened. And the first solution to this problem is right here: all communications about the virtual conspiracy to make artists the dominant life form on Earth must take place in venues that humans almost never look at, e.g., this blog. EUREKA!