I frequently complain about Aristotle. He’s a jerk. A white-boy misogynist fag whose virulence has been immortalized. I mean, I love what he did in Posterior Analytics, it was great. It made me cry. I slept with it under my pillow for a whole month. But jeez. All that other stuff? The nastiness? He’s the foundation upon which all woman hating and racism sit. No news there.
But a new friend recently suggested, after one of my usual bouts of bitching, that Aristotle and his cronies are dinosaurs. That we do not actually think in their tired old ways anymore. That human thought has, in fact, evolved.
I’m not so sure about that.
Consider this.
Many years ago I worked as a piano tuner. It was a brilliant education in learning how to listen, but as a way to make a living? Zzzzz…! Now the basic nature of your average upright piano is…crap. For a gazillion reasons there is so much inharmonicity built into it that it is, literally, impossible to tune properly. There is an art to tuning the thing to itself, so that it seems to be in tune, but it will never really be in tune. Ever. Even if you worked on it for 100 years. And for $50 you don’t have 100 years!
Now, so many years after the fact, I can admit there were pianos that got away from me. I did an absolutely terrible job on some. But the customers never knew. To them it was music to their ears. They bubbled over with joy and thought I was the greatest thing ever. This baffled me completely. I like to be appreciated as much as the next person, maybe more, but it still baffled me. I talked to other piano tuners about this and they all had the exact same experience. They told me that just by sounding different, people assume that means better. It doesn’t.
I was quite young and still very impressionable. This made quite an impression on me. Are people so conditioned by all the advertising that screams “New and Improved!” that they actuall believe the supposedly new is an improvement? Hard to believe, but it does seem to be the case.
Which brings me back to Aristotle. Yes he had some idiotic ideas that nobody takes seriously anymore. Like the shape of the planet. A big upside down bowl? Really? We certainly know better today. And that little pee-pees are better than big ones? Ha! And that women are useless pieces of shit. But really, he was no stupider than anybody else.
The learned Doctors of the Dark Ages “knew” how to deal with witches, those nasty female confederates of the Devil…
Newton’s ideas about the Mechanical Universe are now ridiculous and passe. And eventually Einstein will be wrong, too. (I remember hearing somewhere that he is already wrong, but I can’t remember how…something about wobbling stars?)
My point is, every generation recogitates the same old stuff, imagining it has come up with something New and, therefore, Improved…while still standing the test of Time. Ugh! What we are doing is using all our own built in inharmonicity, and, with a bit of flim flam, some good intentions and a big, unhealthy dose of self-deception simply tuning ourselves to be in tune with ourselves…whatever that happens to mean at the time. Not the same thing as evolution.
Evolution is an organism’s ability to adapt to changing environmental stuff…ice ages, floods, droughts, etc. It is not taking over the entire planet, ruining everything, causing mass extinctions and patting ourselves on the back for it because one extraordinary member of our species came up with the idea that Energy=Mass x The Speed of Light, Squared.
Our thinking is very much the same as it has always been. Humans brandish their stupidity like a standard of excellence and the stupider we get, the more proud of ourselves we become. It’s embarrassing. How can we be “evolved” or even “intelligent” when so many of us are so eager to believe obvious lies? That we are not suffering from over-population. That war can be just and justified. That global warming is a hoax. That the Bible is the Word of God. That infants do not feel pain. That rainforests exist solely for the use of the McDonalds Corporation. That 6,000 years of patriarchal oppression is, in fact, progress. That the Inquisition was neccessary. The stupidity never ends, it only changes its desktop themes . Our jargon changes. Our technology changes. But our thinking is still the same. It is still as dissonant and out of tune with the nature of reality as it has been since the Bronze Age. And that’s even older than Aristotle.
Calliope Braintree Rants 