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In The Accidental Connoisseur, Lawrence Osborne writes at one point of a winemaker who describes the modern world as an acceleration, that we are like children without patience, with childish appetites. Hence, for example, the proliferation of screw-tops for wine bottles. Osborne asks, is the search for taste a search for adulthood? In fact, a general theme of the book might be the question of whether connoisseurship (in anything) is one of the markers of adulthood.

This winemaker also says, “too much wine refers not to where it came from, but where it wants to be. See the difference?” For me, this relates to my sense of my own maturity over time, as I’ve learned I live too often in future, imagined moments, rather than being present where I actually am. I desire to to challenge myself to think less of some future “when I’ll be who I want to be,” but instead to think, “if I were in that imagined place and time, what would I be doing?” and then say, “Why not just do it now?”

At the same time, there’s something to be said for children playing at being adults, being too serious and not thinking enough of “what might be.” Perhaps losing the positive aspects of childhood: playfulness, a cheerful unattachment to tradition, things like that. As in wine, many of its traditions are relatively young and were brought about by almost revolutionary change.

Moving on…

I recently watched The Limey, and Cleo from 5 to 7, and Breathless. All make use of clever editing to cut up what would otherwise be perceived as “continuous” scenes. The Limey goes particularly far, overlaying audio from one scene on visuals from another, often disassociating people and events from linear time completely. For me each film, especially the first two, delightfully represent a truth about how we experience reality: how our memories are cut-up pastiches of feelings and moments, informing our choices with non-linear irrationality. Our experience of life is not continuous, any more than a film is not composed of still pictures viewed in rapid succession. And we make ourselves up as we go along.

Also…

I am reading some Richard Rorty, whose contribution to philosophy extends the work of the likes of Nietsche, Foucault, and Dewey. He basically argues a so-called “relativistic” view of reality, my reading being that, sure, there’s a real world out there, but we are a part of it and can only tell our stories about it. He exhorts us to “take care of freedom, and truth will take care of itself.” He even suggests that pragmatist, non-Platonic thinkers need to reject even the language of Platonic dualism and invent a whole new language to communicate their ideas, for reasons reminding me of George Lakoff and the concept of frames, but moreso reminding me of the next thing…

Which is…

Kristina’s anthropology studies are reminding me of E. E. Evans-Pritchard and the early British anthropologists. He argued that anthropology should be placed in the humanities, rather than the natural sciences, and argued that the main issue facing anthropologists was one of translation – finding a way to translate one’s own thoughts into the world of another culture and thus manage to come to understand it, and then to translate this understanding back so as to explain it to people of one’s own culture. And this strikes me as exactly correct, and in fact, strangely resonant on a personal level as I’ve often felt myself drawn to figuring out how other people understand the world, and the challenge of trying to use that understanding to communicate about my understanding, or even someone else’s. But I digress, and grow incoherent.

I have recently been discovering how wedded I have always been to ideas of hard science and rationality. I was so because I felt there were definitely perfect choices. Best choices. And hard facts about reality. There’s a current of American culture, and geek culture, which is definitely in love with this. Reason! Objectivity! Etc.

Well, for some things, there kinda are “bests” and “truths,” etc., and we can get some sense of them over time. I believe there is definitely a “true” reality… but we’re all embedded in it, and it’s bigger than all of us, and the best we can do is illuminate everything as best we can, and for many things the scientific method is the best tool. But it’s a means to an end: to aid in better decision-making and to better engineer our world. In fact, why do we do anything at all except with the aim of improving ourselves and our institutions such that our descendants will be still better able to trust and cooperate, and will be more decent, happy people than we ourselves have managed to be?

This is Rorty’s argument: science not as an end, but as one means amongst many to the great ends of humanity, which begins and ends with trust, social cooperation, and social hope.

I begin to find myself drawn even more to social & cultural anthropology – the only field that consciously uses subjective narrative to unravel understanding of different peoples’ experiences and existences, and, well, simply, describe humanity and what it is to be human. It’s practically a “non-fiction literary discipline,” an extension of the humanities that keeps us informed as to who we are, constantly telling us an absolutely liberating truth: we can be who and what we want to be. We can choose our own culture, write our own story.

A screw-top might preserve the wine better, but perhaps experience tells us we just don’t care. Uncorking a bottle might be uniquely pleasurable.

And then what ultimately interests me: how do you teach each new generation that it’s all just scripts and they can do what they want? While maintaining a reasonably stable, free, egalitarian society, itself made up of scripts?

Rorty, in discussing “our chances of achieving a democratic utopia,” writes, “For various reasons [...] I think these chances are pretty dim. But I do not think that is a reason to change our political goal. There is no more worthy project at hand; we have nothing better to do with our lives.”

Too right!

And, not unrelated, as Eddie Argos says, “Pop music transmits all of our culture’s most valued ideals from one generation to the next; let’s make sure we get it right. Vive le Resistance!”