metapunk

I don’t have time for a full post right now, but I thought I would share a couple of quotes from some of the books I’ve been reading recently, which illustrate what I mean by holodoxy.

The first is from When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger.  The main character, Marid Audran, is narrating his experience in listening to the rumours in his community, the Budayeen:

“The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.”

I think that fairly neatly summarizes the holodox notion of Perspective—the way you kind of have to tease out the truth by listening to as many perspectives as possible.  The “Truth” in such a circumstance, is thus always a little bit fluid, and you have to keep up by always questioning what you think you know for certain.

The second quote is from American Gods, by Neil Gaiman; from a young man in the back of a limo:

“…Tell him that we have fucking reprogrammed reality.  Tell him that language is a virus and that religion is an operating system…”

Indeed, we do live in a programmed (social) reality.  Every day our economic, political, and legal systems; our culture, really, tells us what is acceptable behaviour and what isn’t.  It tells us what we’re supposed to do, and what we’re supposed to want, because we worship gods (or icons / symbols / ideals) of various sorts without even realizing it.

I don’t know if language is a virus, but religion is certainly an operating system.  In fact, you could make that your definition of religion: the cultural operating system underlying your thoughts and behaviour.  It’s something very difficult to escape or even examine, because it embodies everything you take for granted.  Everything you do or say is built on this in layers so deep you can’t even see the foundation.

But religion is also the mystical enterprise: questioning reality—or rather plumbing through these layers to find that foundation and understand it, see it for what it is, and look beyond it to whatever is truly real: the world beyond our beliefs and assumptions.

Well, anyway, it’s an interesting metaphor, well worth contemplating.

Until next time…