Muddled thoughts about Cathedrals

I'm still reading "Second Nature " by Michael Pollan. And in it, Pollan suggests that cathedrals are an attempts to replicate the feeling of being a sacred grove. The idea being that the tall pillars replicate tree trunks and the hushed sound and subdued lighting replicates the dabbled light through leaves and quiet of the grove.

I don't dispute the similarity. But by contrast the modern civilized ideas of religion are deliberately non-participatory, non-interactive. You sit in the pews and listen to the minister speak to you of God. The idea that the congregation would have something to say about the understanding of the sacred, is itself a blasphemy. Because the worshipper is a sheep and priest is a shepherd.

And the morality of civilization contains a madonna/whore complex regarding wilderness. Note the term: virgin woodland. Again, don't touch. Don't interact. The idea of the witch with her garden of herbs in every village. The idea of personal vision quests. Participation in a living religion is very dangerous to an established power structure.

Hierarchy is a pyramid. And we use pyramids to house dead things. Which tells you everything you need to know. Everything important goes in the pyramid, in the tomb, in the mausoleum. Embalm Lenin. Mummify Pharoah. Build a rendition of Lincoln, carve his visage in stone to stop time.

And we do the same thing with ideas. The idea that new ages might require new ideas is sacrilege. The priest and pharoah  hand down the correct ideas to masses, the flock of obedient sheep. And inevitably these ideological concepts are anthropomorphic, because we assume humans are the top of the pyramid, the Pharoah in the tomb. One step below god in the cathedral. We assume top-down order, a chain of command in a hierarchy, almost without fail.

And because we assume order is hierarchical we also assume that natural laws must be prohibitions and restrictions laid down by some divine creator. If we are forced to live under a king, clearly God must also be a king. And if kings rule by decree, then so must God. And with these incorrect ideas we caused ecological disasters that killed Empire upon Empire. Because the laws are actually laws of cause and effect like the laws of motion described centuries ago. And we don't care that these ideas don't work when applied to the real world, because we have faith in the idea. We are loyal to the doctrine. Heaven gains precedence over earth, scripture overrules skill.

The tyranny of ideological purity, assuming that ideas are more important than the messy physical world, originates from an underlying assumption that ideas predate the physical world rather than the spring from it. And what does this gain the Pharoah at the top of the pyramid?

Control. Control of the medium. Control of the message. This is why the Pope feared Martin Luther, and why the German Princes sought to control and exploit his efforts. Under civilization, power rises up the pyramid, driven by an abstracting of knowledge from nature and an encouraging of a sterility and helplessness masquerading as purity.

And this is why kings prefer cathedrals to sacred groves and why shepherds like sheep.

Life is short.
Work is crap.
Join my cult.
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Getting Mad at Michael Pollan

A decade ago or so, I don't recall precisely, I read Michael Pollan's book " In Defense of Food ", and it's companion book "Food Rules ". I found it quite interesting, despite not agreeing with some of his more interesting assertions. And a number its basic tenants have added to the form of the grand conspiracy I'm building here. His book "Botany of Desire ", has been used at multiple points in the building of this grand master plan.

So it was with a great deal of confidence that I picked up his book "Second Nature ". I have a horrible black thumb, and have been attempting to correct my deficiency in the garden, given the necessity of being able to grow one's own food as a requirement to be considered independent. And unfortunately I have found that, like cookbooks, gardening books expect a certain amount of base knowledge that most beginners something don't have but which the books assume people have by some inborn natural ability. And I felt that if anybody could demystify the process of learning to garden and point me in the right direction it would be Michael Pollan.

I was wrong.

Pollen uses one of the most annoying and cowardly defenses in this book, that most useless kind of mystification whereby an experienced person acts as though their knowledge isn't something that can be put into words and isn't something that they'd ever learned but something they just knew through an ineffable ...something. That they have a connection to the skill in question.

And of course this is all rubbish. The process of learning a skill has been well studied and is at this point well understood. A self-taught person may well be unable to put into words what they have learned through their long experience, but none of it arrives through some natural inborn talent. None of it arrived through a non physical connection with some magic pool of talent ether.

And skilled people know this, and so does Michael Pollan. And when his book is willing to admit this and point it out, his writing is at its best. But too often, his bias against modern science seem to compel him to back himself into a corner, fists up, and use this cowardly pseudo mystical defense against a strong man caricature of science that he has disingenuously created. And then none of this is useful to the reader.

At this point the reader is probably being tempted to point out that I self-identify as a chaos made, and where do I get off attacking somebody's useless mysticism? And the key word here is useless. As I've often said, I don't care if the fairytale is true, I care if the fairytale is useful. This mystical smokescreen that experts, and Michael Pollan, throw up in the face of questions regarding process is used to defend their position as expert against competition from the beginner. In his interview with Tim Ferris, former Mr. Olympia Arnold Schwarzenegger admitted to giving younger bodybuilders bad advice to prevent them from becoming a threat to him in competition.   And the broad smokescreen put up by Michael Pollan in this book is the same thing, albeit on a lesser scale.

When somebody with experience resorts to such rubbish as the idea of inborn talent, or a mystical connection to some deeper understanding, they are really saying that if you are not the lucky one who just seems to get it then tough beans. But the fact is, that science has learned and dissected natural Talent. And it turns out 'Natural Talent ' is acquired by hard work and time, without fail. Disregarding such factors as height in basketball and weight in sumo wrestling, talent is acquired as a skill little by little. Talent is the accumulation of small understandings adding up to deeper insights.

Now, attempting to be fair to an author who's writing I generally love and the experienced person unable to explain their skill to others, I must point out that being skilled at something is no guarantee that one is able to explain either how that skill was acquired or the pieces that must be assembled for another to display that skill. Many skilled craftsmen for instance- carpenters, auto mechanics, painters, musicians- have acquired the various requisite pieces of their skill tools kit through non verbal linguistic methods. They didn't sit through classes. They didn't read manuals. They didn't write dissertations. They hammered on thumbs. They squeaked their way through embarrassing music recitals. They over tightened bolts. They learn the hard way by trial and error in the physical world again and again. And so when these experienced talented people try to explain the source of their talent, having not acquire their skill through words and potentially not having training in the skill of using words, they fall back on mysticism to try and explain things. Michael Pollan has no such excuse. Words are Michael Pollan's profession. And so if he is throwing up a mystical smoke screen around the gardening profession, and he is, then he's either being a lazy author or he is doing so with deliberate intent. And that is disappointing.

I don't want this to end with a kick at a favored author, so I'll end by pointing out but this is all a very good thing in the broad sense. All skills are acquirable. Most have already been dissected, and most are already available in step by step guys. The basics of most professions takes around 200 hours to acquire. To become competent at most professions takes 2000 hours. Conscious practice on the correct skills is all that is required. No mystical connection or inborn Talent is needed. And barring hard physical traits such as height in basketball maybe setbacks or limitations, very few skill sets are beyond the reach of any individual.