by Demosophist » Tue Jul 12, 2022 11:40 pm
Hi:
I've been watching the Thunderbolts videos for some time, and have seen about all of them. I recently read Worlds in Collision and think that the broad strokes of Velikovsky's analysis is quite sound. I earned my doctorate under the advisorship of political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, and was also RA to Thelma Z. Lavine on Method in the Social Sciences (also on my committee), so am quite familiar with the comparative method, re. Mattei Dogan, et al.. It's a very powerful and useful analytical tool in the social sciences, and Velikovsky marshals it quite well. I'm currently almost finished with Mankind in Amnesia.
One of the things that has surprised me is the degree to which many of my over-educated friends regard Velikovsky as a "nut" and caution against any involvement with him or his ideas. Some of these people have never read him, but at least one long-time friend has, and still holds that opinion. He's normally very open to new approaches, so I suspect he may be lying to me about how carefully or completely he has read Velikovsky, which is a disappointment. However, I can't think of a coherent reason to reject Velikovsky's thesis, at least as a broad brush. Granted he wasn't a physicist and didn't offer any real physical analysis, in WIC, of how his scenario could have come about. But he did prove rather conclusively that something happened that doesn't comport with any standard model of physics based on gravity or mass attraction as a constant, so I'm at a loss as to why someone would reject him en masse, as a kook. (He also writes extremely well, especially for someone for whom English is a second language.)
I should also say that since receiving my PhD in 1998 I have worked very little in academia, although I was briefly Research Director for the National Association of Scholars until the founder of that organization, Steve Balch, retired. I have also done a lot of research on K-12 education with my research partner (also on my dissertation committee) David J. Armor, so am quite familiar with the miserable state of education across the board. Clearly something has to change, so I'm laying down a marker for anyone with any ideas about alternative approaches to the process.
Finally, I should also say that I've been a student of Herbert Marshall McLuhan for some time, and think that at least part of the reason for the enormous resistance to Velikovsky's ideas, to say nothing of EU Theory, is traceable to the side effects of media on mentality and perception. McLuhan's approach, which he outlines in many books (especially the book he wrote with Barrington Nevitt, titled Take Today), is that percepts always trump concepts. According to this insight, then, the problem isn't with the deficiencies of EU as a concept, but with a perceptual lag that has origins in what McLuhan called "the balance of the senses" or the ratio of the senses within the human sensorium. This would include both interior and exterior senses, and in this case the trouble seems to lie mostly with the ratio of imagination to memory, which are two of the four primary interior senses according to medieval pre-Gutenberg philosophy. (These also include aestimative or cogitative reason and something called "sensus communis," which is also key. Electrical mass media tends to enhance imagination at the expense of memory, so everything has an immediacy value that always manages to occult memory, or that can at least be used to occult memory if the controllers of media so desire. As a result there is no "sync up" between concepts like those of Velikovsky or EU, and memory. Memory and imagination are closely related in that they both involve something called "phantasm," but the difference is that true memory has a ground, while false memory as derived from imagination does not. So the perception of a valid concept relies on true memory being at least minimally available if not in the forefront of the sensorium. (The role of sensus communis is also critical, but beyond the scope of a forum post.)
But here's the saving grace. This mass media effect (electrical since the mid-19th century) based on what McLuhan calls the "resonant interval," is now in the throes of a transition to a *distributive electrical medium* which re-establishes memory within the sensorium. Thus, the current socio-cultural upheavals we are experiencing have their roots in this transition such that the one-way influencing through the resonant interval of the imagination of a subject, used to suppress memory since at least the mid 19th century and probably since the Gutenberg revolution in the 15th, is giving way to a many-to-many paradigmatic shift in perception (called distributive or distributative) that rehabilitates memory as part of the human sense-MAKING arsenal. (Sense-making as apposed to sense-matching, in the words of Barry Nevitt.)
So, is this sort of approach interesting to anyone and are there research opportunities outside of conventional academia for such a heretic as myself?
Hi:
I've been watching the Thunderbolts videos for some time, and have seen about all of them. I recently read [i]Worlds in Collision[/i] and think that the broad strokes of Velikovsky's analysis is quite sound. I earned my doctorate under the advisorship of political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, and was also RA to Thelma Z. Lavine on [i]Method in the Social Sciences[/i] (also on my committee), so am quite familiar with the comparative method, re. Mattei Dogan, et al.. It's a very powerful and useful analytical tool in the social sciences, and Velikovsky marshals it quite well. I'm currently almost finished with [i]Mankind in Amnesia[/i].
One of the things that has surprised me is the degree to which many of my over-educated friends regard Velikovsky as a "nut" and caution against any involvement with him or his ideas. Some of these people have never read him, but at least one long-time friend has, and still holds that opinion. He's normally very open to new approaches, so I suspect he may be lying to me about how carefully or completely he has read Velikovsky, which is a disappointment. However, I can't think of a coherent reason to reject Velikovsky's thesis, at least as a broad brush. Granted he wasn't a physicist and didn't offer any real physical analysis, in WIC, of how his scenario could have come about. But he did prove rather conclusively that [i]something happened[/i] that doesn't comport with any standard model of physics based on gravity or mass attraction as a constant, so I'm at a loss as to why someone would reject him en masse, as a kook. (He also writes extremely well, especially for someone for whom English is a second language.)
I should also say that since receiving my PhD in 1998 I have worked very little in academia, although I was briefly Research Director for the National Association of Scholars until the founder of that organization, Steve Balch, retired. I have also done a lot of research on K-12 education with my research partner (also on my dissertation committee) David J. Armor, so am quite familiar with the miserable state of education across the board. Clearly something has to change, so I'm laying down a marker for anyone with any ideas about alternative approaches to the process.
Finally, I should also say that I've been a student of Herbert Marshall McLuhan for some time, and think that at least part of the reason for the enormous resistance to Velikovsky's ideas, to say nothing of EU Theory, is traceable to the side effects of media on mentality and perception. McLuhan's approach, which he outlines in many books (especially the book he wrote with Barrington Nevitt, titled [i]Take Today[/i]), is that percepts [i]always[/i] trump concepts. According to this insight, then, the problem isn't with the deficiencies of EU as a concept, but with a perceptual lag that has origins in what McLuhan called "the balance of the senses" or the ratio of the senses within the human sensorium. This would include both interior and exterior senses, and in this case the trouble seems to lie mostly with the ratio of [i]imagination to memory[/i], which are two of the four primary interior senses according to medieval pre-Gutenberg philosophy. (These also include aestimative or cogitative reason and something called "sensus communis," which is also key. Electrical mass media tends to enhance imagination at the expense of memory, so everything has an immediacy value that always manages to occult memory, or that can at least be used to occult memory if the controllers of media so desire. As a result there is no "sync up" between concepts like those of Velikovsky or EU, and memory. Memory and imagination are closely related in that they both involve something called "phantasm," but the difference is that true memory [i]has a ground[/i], while false memory as derived from imagination does not. So the perception of a valid concept relies on true memory being at least minimally available if not in the forefront of the sensorium. (The role of sensus communis is also critical, but beyond the scope of a forum post.)
But here's the saving grace. This mass media effect (electrical since the mid-19th century) based on what McLuhan calls the "resonant interval," is now in the throes of a transition to a *distributive electrical medium* which re-establishes memory within the sensorium. Thus, the current socio-cultural upheavals we are experiencing have their roots in this transition such that the one-way influencing through the resonant interval of the imagination of a subject, used to suppress memory since at least the mid 19th century and probably since the Gutenberg revolution in the 15th, is giving way to a [i]many-to-many[/i] paradigmatic shift in perception (called distributive or distributative) that rehabilitates memory as part of the human sense-MAKING arsenal. (Sense-making as apposed to sense-matching, in the words of Barry Nevitt.)
So, is this sort of approach interesting to anyone and are there research opportunities outside of conventional academia for such a heretic as myself?