Knowledge & Knowing
The first speaker was Goshute, his language a fluctuating mix of guttural half-syllables and volumes, some almost whispers mixed with what sounded like a clearing of the throat. It was an interesting prayer, one not understandable to me but yet filling the air with reverence, his eagle feather circling his chest in a show of respect and of giving. In the end, the feather sprinkled water in all four directions, a blessing to all and to mother earth. The crowd was mesmerized. Then came a Navajo speaker, eloquent and mixing only a bit of her language into a well-versed speech given in English, one which talked of welcoming all the various Native American tribes and how they often disagreed but were here now, all in unity and banded together, their nations under threat despite their differences, of how the land and rivers and earth itself was so vital to their ceremonies and its breaking up something so unrecognized by their ancestors...and now the oil rigs and coal mines were coming. My friend and I were gathered at a rally to protect the Bear Ears National Monument, a partner to the Grand Escalante National Monument, lands which are somewhat near to cities but so infrequently visited that most people would not realized that the several hours that had passed driving had taken them through those lands. Tomorrow, President Trump and our state's Senator, Orrin Hatch,* will likely announce the planned reducing of those and perhaps other monuments by an expected 85%. Leaked maps suggest the possible reductions which would open the lands to oil & gas exploration, as well as to cattle ranching. The now-public lands would be readied for private sale. Here's what National Geographic had to say about Grand Staircase: Created Sept. 18, 1996 by President Clinton in southern Utah. Advertised by the Utah state tourism agency as “phenomenal,”
the monument takes its name from a series of plateaus extending over
1.7 million acres that descend like stair-steps from Bryce Canyon in
southwestern Utah to the Grand Canyon and are named for their
distinctive colors -- the Pink Cliffs, Grey Cliffs, White Cliffs,
Vermillion Cliffs and Chocolate Cliffs. At 9,000 feet, the Kaiparowits
Plateau is the highest, most remote part of the monument. It also
contains Utah’s largest coal field. Monument designation stopped a Dutch
mining company from its plan to mine what Utah geologists estimated was
62 billion tons of coal. Then President Obama added 1.35 million acres to that in creating Bear Ears...the planned reduction would bring that figure down to just over 200,000 acres.
Coinciding with that was my reading of a best-selling series of books from the Oxford Press, a series catalogued as Very Short Introductions. Each book is limited to about 120 pages and covers everything from teeth to cryptography (ironically, not sports); so far, the books list over 1200 subjects and plan to expand indefinitely...they have sold over 8 million copies and appear in 49 languages. In a review from The New Yorker, the question became what was this, our quest for knowledge? The larger any compilation of knowledge gets, the more it forces us to confront the question of what, exactly, so much knowledge is for. Is it meant to glorify God? Perhaps, yet it creeps equally close to blasphemy; omniscience, after all, is the purview of the divine. Is it to impress an emperor, or a boss, or a date? Maybe, but there’s a fine line between being full of information and being full of oneself...The classic defense of knowledge, as a hundred thousand inspirational posters will tell you, is that it is power. But, as a hundred thousand cultural theorists will counter, the relationship between those two terms is complicated: power is, among other things, the power to determine what counts as knowledge...Ever since Aristotle, people have argued over whether accurate information produces appropriate action -- that is, whether knowing the right thing reliably makes us do the right thing. It’s profoundly tempting to believe that it does, but, if you attend to the actual workings of the world, it’s also profoundly difficult. Indeed, we live in an era of abundant evidence to the contrary. An Islamophobe won’t necessarily change his mind after reading a very short introduction to Islam, or, for that matter, a very long one; nor will an introduction to Global Warming necessarily reform a climate-change denier. Indeed, study after study shows that encountering information that contradicts people’s preëxisting beliefs often just makes them double down...There’s a reason repressive regimes are notorious for spreading false information. What we think we know can change how we behave—not quickly, not consistently, but often enough to matter. Knowledge is, in that sense, unknowable; it’s impossible to predict what it will or won’t do once released into the world.
Most people outside of the state of Utah have likely never heard of Bear Ears, and at times, there would seem little reason to report on it to make it into a cover story. But listening to the speakers at this rally --the Navajo Nation attorney, a state representative, the Salt Lake City mayor, a 10-year old boy (founder of Kids Speak for Parks), a geologist/archeologist-- one couldn't help but be filled with the passion and enthusiasm so seemingly missing in much of today's news. Today's local news featured one of the Congressional representatives to an area bordering a portion of the Bears Ears monument and his defense of the shrinking of such; too many restrictions, he said, even to get a cell tower put up so that lost hikers can get a signal and be rescued (he did mention the restrictions for cattle ranchers as well). We have to make a living down here, he said. Yet five of the six Navajo Nations are against the monument's reduction, one of their spokespersons saying that such talk is not from conversations had with any of the local residents within the monument's borders. Indeed, Secretary Zinke who made the recommendation, allotted just a single hour to meet with some of the local tribal elders during his four day "evaluation" (the Secretary did meet several times with local commissioner Phil Lyman who organized and led an unauthorized rally of ATVs and armed militia to try and keep open an illegal trail which the Forest Service says led to vandalism and looting of some ancient sites, according to the NY Times...Lyman was given a sentence of 10 days in jail for his actions). At yesterday's rally, Navajo speaker Ethel Branch challenged President Trump to at least take off his shoes and socks and feel the ground of Bear Ears before making his decision...when Secretary Zinke toured the 1.3 million-acre park, it was only by car and horse.
Often the lack of information can be credited to a lack of knowledge. The just-passed 500-page Senate version of the revised tax bill arrived on the desks of many Senators just an hour before the vote, parts of it with last-minute added provisions in type so small that it was nearly impossible to read said Montana Senator, Jon Testor. There was no Senate hearing on the bill and the public was denied access to such as well. The Congressional Budget Office, now with a chance to look at the revised version, said that anyone working full-time and making $14.50 an hour or less will end up with an increase in taxes. Those making up to $500,000 annually did find an increase in their child tax credit (a Senate bill to limit the increase to those "only" making up to $250,000 annually for the credit was rejected). The largest tax reductions will go to those making more than $5 million annually. Tax cuts for corporations would be permanent while tax cuts for individuals would expire within 10 years; the deficit would soar to $30 trillion. But most of that was either hand-written in at the last minute or printed in that small print...all with an hour to read the entire revised bill.
My friend met me for a few holiday nogs and shared his equal love for reading non-fiction, a type of reading one of my other friend's described as reading "to learn and not reading to escape." I admit that I was fascinated to read about the aging (and allegedly homosexual) Leonardo da Vinci feuding with a young Michelangelo in a review in The New Yorker (the article further educated me by saying that Leonardo had no surname, only that his father was from the town of Vinci, Italy, thus...Leonardo of Vinci). Another review was of an ongoing exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Rodin: A team of Met curators led by Denise Allen has installed about fifty bronzes, plasters, terra-cottas, and carvings by Rodin, along with works by related artists, in the grand foyer of the museum’s galleries of nineteenth-century painting and filled one room with a chronological survey of his drawings. The ensemble tells a number of stories, depending on how you proceed and where you focus. I took it randomly, as a picaresque culminating in a visit to the museum’s ground-floor sculpture court. There, permanently on view, is a full-sized cast of Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” (1889), to my mind the most stunning of modern monuments. It depicts six wealthy men who, in 1347, volunteered to be executed by a besieging English force as a price for mercy to their fellow-citizens.
To be candidly honest, I know little about art (or Bear Ears for that matter). I appreciate art and sculpture, but certainly not with the eye of a true art aficionado, one who notices that: ...Rodin wasn’t much for musculature generally. The physical organ that most galvanized him was the skin, not just as the outside limit of the body but as the inner limit of the outer world. It is what excites—and stops—his hand. The effect is timelessly startling. A bandoning the refinement of “The Age of Bronze,” it shrugs off beauty, which requires a degree of detachment. Rodin didn’t behold his subjects or present them for admiration. He had at them, and they have at us. Stepping outside earlier today, I noticed a strange morning sky, the clouds truly blanketing in a dark quilted gray, the brightness struggling to peek through as if its efforts to forestall winter would finally be in vain (the warmest November in recorded history would have been etched in Salt Lake City, a November too warm even for the resorts to make artificial snow thus delaying their planned openings). Tonight most of this will be watched over by a "super" moon, an expanded and opened celestial eye carefully watching what was happening below. Salt Lake won't see it -- our skies will be cloudy with cold and snow expected around midnight. It all reminded me of that classic Ray Bradbury novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. In about 12 hours, the Native Americans and many others of us will find if that would turn out to be true.
*Despite nearing his 84th birthday --many members of our Congress are that age-- and despite his winning-campaign promise last election that he would end his 40-year term in the U.S. Senate, Hatch has announced his plans to break that promise telling one person, "The people need me." If he wins re-election he would become the 5th longest-serving Senator in U.S. history...the longest, Robert Byrd from West Virginia, was so feeble at the end that he was wheeled into the Senate on a stretcher so that he could cast his vote.
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| The rally held in Salt Lake City in support of protecting national monuments |
Coinciding with that was my reading of a best-selling series of books from the Oxford Press, a series catalogued as Very Short Introductions. Each book is limited to about 120 pages and covers everything from teeth to cryptography (ironically, not sports); so far, the books list over 1200 subjects and plan to expand indefinitely...they have sold over 8 million copies and appear in 49 languages. In a review from The New Yorker, the question became what was this, our quest for knowledge? The larger any compilation of knowledge gets, the more it forces us to confront the question of what, exactly, so much knowledge is for. Is it meant to glorify God? Perhaps, yet it creeps equally close to blasphemy; omniscience, after all, is the purview of the divine. Is it to impress an emperor, or a boss, or a date? Maybe, but there’s a fine line between being full of information and being full of oneself...The classic defense of knowledge, as a hundred thousand inspirational posters will tell you, is that it is power. But, as a hundred thousand cultural theorists will counter, the relationship between those two terms is complicated: power is, among other things, the power to determine what counts as knowledge...Ever since Aristotle, people have argued over whether accurate information produces appropriate action -- that is, whether knowing the right thing reliably makes us do the right thing. It’s profoundly tempting to believe that it does, but, if you attend to the actual workings of the world, it’s also profoundly difficult. Indeed, we live in an era of abundant evidence to the contrary. An Islamophobe won’t necessarily change his mind after reading a very short introduction to Islam, or, for that matter, a very long one; nor will an introduction to Global Warming necessarily reform a climate-change denier. Indeed, study after study shows that encountering information that contradicts people’s preëxisting beliefs often just makes them double down...There’s a reason repressive regimes are notorious for spreading false information. What we think we know can change how we behave—not quickly, not consistently, but often enough to matter. Knowledge is, in that sense, unknowable; it’s impossible to predict what it will or won’t do once released into the world.
Most people outside of the state of Utah have likely never heard of Bear Ears, and at times, there would seem little reason to report on it to make it into a cover story. But listening to the speakers at this rally --the Navajo Nation attorney, a state representative, the Salt Lake City mayor, a 10-year old boy (founder of Kids Speak for Parks), a geologist/archeologist-- one couldn't help but be filled with the passion and enthusiasm so seemingly missing in much of today's news. Today's local news featured one of the Congressional representatives to an area bordering a portion of the Bears Ears monument and his defense of the shrinking of such; too many restrictions, he said, even to get a cell tower put up so that lost hikers can get a signal and be rescued (he did mention the restrictions for cattle ranchers as well). We have to make a living down here, he said. Yet five of the six Navajo Nations are against the monument's reduction, one of their spokespersons saying that such talk is not from conversations had with any of the local residents within the monument's borders. Indeed, Secretary Zinke who made the recommendation, allotted just a single hour to meet with some of the local tribal elders during his four day "evaluation" (the Secretary did meet several times with local commissioner Phil Lyman who organized and led an unauthorized rally of ATVs and armed militia to try and keep open an illegal trail which the Forest Service says led to vandalism and looting of some ancient sites, according to the NY Times...Lyman was given a sentence of 10 days in jail for his actions). At yesterday's rally, Navajo speaker Ethel Branch challenged President Trump to at least take off his shoes and socks and feel the ground of Bear Ears before making his decision...when Secretary Zinke toured the 1.3 million-acre park, it was only by car and horse.
Often the lack of information can be credited to a lack of knowledge. The just-passed 500-page Senate version of the revised tax bill arrived on the desks of many Senators just an hour before the vote, parts of it with last-minute added provisions in type so small that it was nearly impossible to read said Montana Senator, Jon Testor. There was no Senate hearing on the bill and the public was denied access to such as well. The Congressional Budget Office, now with a chance to look at the revised version, said that anyone working full-time and making $14.50 an hour or less will end up with an increase in taxes. Those making up to $500,000 annually did find an increase in their child tax credit (a Senate bill to limit the increase to those "only" making up to $250,000 annually for the credit was rejected). The largest tax reductions will go to those making more than $5 million annually. Tax cuts for corporations would be permanent while tax cuts for individuals would expire within 10 years; the deficit would soar to $30 trillion. But most of that was either hand-written in at the last minute or printed in that small print...all with an hour to read the entire revised bill.
My friend met me for a few holiday nogs and shared his equal love for reading non-fiction, a type of reading one of my other friend's described as reading "to learn and not reading to escape." I admit that I was fascinated to read about the aging (and allegedly homosexual) Leonardo da Vinci feuding with a young Michelangelo in a review in The New Yorker (the article further educated me by saying that Leonardo had no surname, only that his father was from the town of Vinci, Italy, thus...Leonardo of Vinci). Another review was of an ongoing exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Rodin: A team of Met curators led by Denise Allen has installed about fifty bronzes, plasters, terra-cottas, and carvings by Rodin, along with works by related artists, in the grand foyer of the museum’s galleries of nineteenth-century painting and filled one room with a chronological survey of his drawings. The ensemble tells a number of stories, depending on how you proceed and where you focus. I took it randomly, as a picaresque culminating in a visit to the museum’s ground-floor sculpture court. There, permanently on view, is a full-sized cast of Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” (1889), to my mind the most stunning of modern monuments. It depicts six wealthy men who, in 1347, volunteered to be executed by a besieging English force as a price for mercy to their fellow-citizens.
To be candidly honest, I know little about art (or Bear Ears for that matter). I appreciate art and sculpture, but certainly not with the eye of a true art aficionado, one who notices that: ...Rodin wasn’t much for musculature generally. The physical organ that most galvanized him was the skin, not just as the outside limit of the body but as the inner limit of the outer world. It is what excites—and stops—his hand. The effect is timelessly startling. A bandoning the refinement of “The Age of Bronze,” it shrugs off beauty, which requires a degree of detachment. Rodin didn’t behold his subjects or present them for admiration. He had at them, and they have at us. Stepping outside earlier today, I noticed a strange morning sky, the clouds truly blanketing in a dark quilted gray, the brightness struggling to peek through as if its efforts to forestall winter would finally be in vain (the warmest November in recorded history would have been etched in Salt Lake City, a November too warm even for the resorts to make artificial snow thus delaying their planned openings). Tonight most of this will be watched over by a "super" moon, an expanded and opened celestial eye carefully watching what was happening below. Salt Lake won't see it -- our skies will be cloudy with cold and snow expected around midnight. It all reminded me of that classic Ray Bradbury novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes. In about 12 hours, the Native Americans and many others of us will find if that would turn out to be true.
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| This morning's sky... |
*Despite nearing his 84th birthday --many members of our Congress are that age-- and despite his winning-campaign promise last election that he would end his 40-year term in the U.S. Senate, Hatch has announced his plans to break that promise telling one person, "The people need me." If he wins re-election he would become the 5th longest-serving Senator in U.S. history...the longest, Robert Byrd from West Virginia, was so feeble at the end that he was wheeled into the Senate on a stretcher so that he could cast his vote.
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