This whole affair was a very bad idea. She wasn’t onto me, and even if she was she would not break up with her boyfriend because of it, and even if she did we’d probably not turn out a good match. But then my shrink insisted that i should tell. I insisted back it was not a good idea, but to no avail. So i picked an anti-strategic moment, one that simply could not work (in a PUA sense), an occasion where this could be somewhat like an disinterested transmission of information, and told the girl i was kinda falling for her.

And after that, i was still breathless. I could still see the world full of light, i could still swim into the poetry of the moment. I went walking and the wind in the trees was to me a spectacle.

I turned it into an experiment, about whether we can live life with the same intensity of passion of falling for someone. After a while it waned, and it was extremely tiresome, but what i found out was that in a way my love for this one girl was a part of me, not a part of her. And that there are a lot of demands in love, but apart from all the demands there is something else, a part of loving that does not make any demands, and that this one part of love makes your life more beautiful, and it makes you stronger, even if the other person disappears.

Compare to this other one: I try to kiss a girl, she says “Let’s pretend this never happened!” I had never heard this one, even though it is a fairly default turn down, so what happens is i start lecturing her! Something like: “No, let’s not pretend. I tried to get you. You dumped me. I can live with that. But it did happen. It was part of our lives. Why should we pretend it didn’t happen?” Complete moron, gets turned down and still thinks a lot of himself…

So, anyway, platonic love. It is not a bad thing. But you should tell, you should say to the person anyway, and not try to erase your love, and after you said and you accepted nothing is gonna happen, the feeling will be a strange kind of gratitude and wonderment with the universe.

(By the way, this was the one before the last, the last time the person just came over and picked me up! How awesome is that? And even then, my feeling makes my life better, independent of what the other person feels…)

That comes after i, grudgingly, reluctantly, finally came to accept that i am not, and should not be, a feminist. For most of my life i, a man, had been more of a riot grrrrl than mos of my girlfriends. I’d been enraged again and again for what i saw as submissive attitudes of them, even ones that could equally well be read as submission to me. In more than one way, i wanted the role of the girl: I wanted to be approached instead of to approach, i wanted to be seduced instead of seducing, i wanted to accommodate to their lives instead of providing a grand narrative for them to accommodate to. I actually felt that the two people in a relationship should do a bit of each, and it pissed me to no end that no woman at all accepted to. Lazy, prideless girls, i thought. But i came to realize it does not make any sense for them to do any of that, and it came together with me realizing feminism is not an answer to anything.

But feminism has been useful to me, in very personal ways, and i want to give thanks.

First of all, feminist has allowed me to understand that circumcision is mutilation. That the most sensitive part of my body has been cut off, that true sexual pleasure has been denied to me in an irreversible manner by a society that will have me as a stud, but not as a lover.

So, ironically, feminism has allowed me to perceive the frailty of the human male in our world.

But this is not so surprising. As any exercise of relativism, feminism assumes a given point-of-view in order to enhance comprehension. It assumes the p.o.v. of the woman to reveal things about society. And it has been exceedingly successful in that. But this society is the same for man and woman, and it would be foolish to assume man had nothing to learn from it.

Feminism, though, risks taking the p.o.v. of the female as normative, as unquestionably normal. In that, feminism devolves from relativism into ideology. Which is very, very different from being anti-male: Feminism does not want to fight males, it just puts itself in a position where the male perspective is incommensurable. Still, the confusion is very, very understandable.

For example, people talk about how female artists have to struggle to be recognized, and fail to see all the male artists that are never recognized at all. One book even went so far as to compare Claudel with Van Gogh, as if the man had not died in poverty and anonymity. In fact the same book insisted that some women were persecuted, even when these women affirmed in interviews that they were not. But once the ideology of feminism takes hold, it seems you can’t see things differently.

Subjected populations are forced to pay more attention to their rulers than the other way around. The maid has to pay attention to the chief, but not necessarily the other way around. So supposedly every woman must know out of necessity how it is to be a male, but no male ever stops to wonder how it is to be a woman. I believed on that for quite some time. But i’m not so sure any more.

I was born rich and a man. Being rich is mostly good, there are downsides but very minor in the overall scheme of things. Being a man is not so good. It has good sides, but it also has bad ones. It is mostly neutral. It does not at all seem to be a privilege. There is a lot of suck to it. Being male in a family mostly dominated by strong female personalities had a lot of suck. Nevertheless, for the longest time i accepted as a basic fact that traditional family was organized with man as ruler and woman as ruled upon. For a child this seems to make some sense. But as usual things are way more complicated. Living life is messy, and most couples do share the basic uncertainty of finding their way through life without an instructions manual. That means that most everyone most of the time was trying to do stuff that were agreeable to everyone. When the woman was “constrained to the kitchen” (so to say) that was something that seemed to make sense to most of the people around. It seemed to be a sensible arrangement. My grandmother, for example, left most of the money decisions to my grandfather, though she made some very important ones by herself, like turning his scientific discoveries into a family business that basically is the reason i’m rich. When she wanted to do something with money she could, but it was more comfortable to leave it to granddad. The point being that these arrangements were basically flexible. Males and females were not enemies, they were just individuals trapped into a society with a lot of weirdness and awkward to it. Society sucks in many, basically, to be straight. So it is very easy to find ways that women are being put down and repressed, but this also happens to the men, and it happens in ways that we can’t really compare, and that we could never really balance. That’s just how things are. And even more, this whole «society» thing sucks in ways that are hard to understand. Like people are slaves to their jobs but they at the same time fear losing their jobs more than anything else. The «man × woman» tension is there, somewhere, for sure, but it is certainly not a conspiracy against females. It is more like a fractal power game, where every force that becomes too predominant can be tricked. So we must not ask ourselves “what is right” in the relationship between the genders, what is the “right way” for women or man, “what do people really want”, and so on. Instead, i prefer to wonder whether there could be happier ways to play this game.

To bring it back to a personal (real) dimension, another example: Often women justify their lack of initiative as fear of being seen as sluts. Girls must be good and feminism takes this to be a kind of cage. But lets see the other side. The man does not fear being taken as a dickhead if he initiates. He knows he will be taken as a dickhead. He just hopes that the girl will like him despite it, because that is his only chance, since of course no woman will approach him anyway.

The name-calling cuts both ways. Feminism tells us it is seen as good for man to be womanizers. That a promiscuous men is well regarded. But “you’re thinking with your balls” sounds very aggressive to me. If some guy wants something with a girl he will never try to convince her that he’s had plenty of cases before, this is not something that enhances his chances, and if the issue comes up it will most certainly be in the form of him apologizing to her and saying something like he is changed.

My own perspective, as a very shy, fatherless boy, that simply couldn’t be rude to a girl even if i wanted. People didn’t go so far as to tell me i should be a dick, and in fact the only time someone actually did (urged by my mother) it sounded very, very weird.

The thing is, in a game where no one wants to take the first step, for fear of looking desperate, the side that is forced is the one that can less afford to lose. And that is boys. Boys need girls more than girls need boys. And not in the sense that boys are desperate for sex (all adolescents are), but in the sense that a man without a woman is more screwed than a woman without a man. That sounds stupid, maybe. Basically, everyone needs someone. But boys are the ones who need to make a move. And everyone hates to go begging for love. For some reason, women can force men to do so.

This is something that only feminism can show you, because of course the power play in this case, if you are a boy, is to pretend that you have everything you need. As is, for that matter, for a girl.

I’ve tried to say something along these lines to feminist friends and they responded very rudely. In their view man is the powerful side, and that’s that.

Back in 1975 a gay man named Oliver Sipple avoided an assassination attempt at the president of the USA. His sexuality was up till then a secret to his family and work. He asked reporters to keep it off-the-record, but (supposedly) gay-rights activist Harvey Milk tried to use the event to show gays could also be heros, thus changing public perception and stereotyping. But actually, in doing so, Harvey Milk screwed Oliver Sipple. It basically destroyed his life. The problem was not that he was gay, or how gay people were treated, it was the way his own personal choices became entangled with and used for other purposes. To politicize sexuality is always extremely dangerous, and hardly ever goes the way that is expected.

In turn, this is why i now fear feminism is very bad for women: I believe feminism creates an antagonism that didn’t exist before, and in such a way that can’t be good for women.

Imagine a girl that likes art, in a small farm village, in the middle of nowhere, before feminism. Her art would be despised and repressed, not because she’s a woman, but because art is not something this community can afford. And the same goes if she wants to be an engineer and inventor.

Feminism wasn’t a challenge on men. It was a challenge to the whole society. It wanted to force, in a large scale, a kind of development that was hard even for the individual. It wanted women to develop as full human beings. To develop into a full human being is hard, both for males and females. It is good but difficult. Society at large is more focused into making people survive, the full development thing is bound to create some tension. But this is not a tension against women, it is a general trend. But out of this, feminism creates the scapegoat of the cruel chauvinist conspiracy of the male who wants no woman as human. In fact, both traditional men and traditional women reacted to feminism as a challenge to society. It was never about man × woman, it was something like tradition × post-modernism. But if you stick to the labels, to the boxes people are supposed to fit in, it is way too easy to believe women is the victim, as the losing side of the struggle. To hold too tightly to the label of «woman» or «feminist» in fact amounts to creating an opposition, it is exactly the strategy of dislocating the tension into identity politics, in order to activate «US against THEM» behaviour in people. And then it creates the illusion of the opposition, that there is such a thing as a hard-liner old-stile «Chauvinist Man» who feels threatened by a fully developed woman. He does not, he feels challenged by the idea that society ought to be more than just feeding people, that people should be grown into this full human beings thing. This is only so natural, since it is indeed a very tall order. It is a much harder and riskier task than most acknowledge, certainly more than the typical riot grrrrl does acknowledge. But once this opposition is created, once this tension is present, a girl with a taste for art becomes more than just frivolity, it becomes rebellion, and once you divert a woman’s normal life and aspirations into a kind of rebellion you also creates the chance her choices will get her into a cage — not because Man is against Woman, just because deviant behaviour is deviant behaviour.

Our girl in the small farm village is no more a quirky dreamy girl, she is a girl being actually repressed.

But, you say, what if she wanted to be a cow-girl? That wasn’t a frivolity. Well, my old aunts, who lived in the farm, they certainly knew how to do all the manly chores of a cowboy, that is their husbands’ chores. That was not seen as a bad thing. Without the ideology, a woman trying for greatness is just a problem of over-qualification, a problem, of course, but not something to be repressed.

But i fall to the same flaw of feminism, making woman the victim, saying feminism is bad because it hurts women.

My goal now is to understand what does heal men. I’m a man, so it stands to reason. Women need healing, but so do men. Feminists may do whatever they please.

I want to, but i don’t know how.

Though i’m very convinced SlutWalks and feminist theory wont help much. Because, in spite of their self-styled rebellion, their naive radicalism, those trends reinforce the current MO of gender relations. In other words, feminism (both the old-style one and the po-mo SlutWalker one) works from inside gender stereotypes. It wants to destroy said stereotypes, but since it can’t simply destroy the old thought-habits (even if it was to take power), it works as an alternative. Feminism never stands out by itself, it is always something extra, something that stands by the side of, a complement. And being so, it makes the stereotypes more defined. Exactly because it makes those stereotypes easier to unfollow it also makes them easier to follow.

And yes, the current status-quo does suck. Relationships today are forms of mutual exploitation. They also happen to be passionate mutual exploitation, as opposed to past relationships of bland collaboration. Somehow we as a society decided we needed to feel, that simply going on with life was not enough. That we wanted burning love instead of boring companionship. That means basically feminism won, that it’s request for “full human beings” basically got accepted as normal and as normative. That also means that the mechanisms regulating relationships between people were all thrown away. Supposedly new ones just took their places, but: Really? We boast of being a liberal society, well acquainted to sex and the things of life, but at the end of the day we still get spooked by any kind of unfamiliar behaviour. Even ones that unfamiliarly mild! We are all bound and gagged, tighter than we know, and in ways whose importance we can not escape. Like in forming families. Every girl at her 20 somethings goes crazy about having children, because her body wants it but her head tells her that her life is still not stable enough to adequately support these kids. And she is right! Because having kids was the first and foremost reason for family in the boring old ways, but now we must have passion and kids. Not works. Just doesn’t. And of course, the boys also do get crazy, but they tend to end up so straddled by the girls’ paranoia that they mostly coast along, any chance that their added pair of eyeballs would expand the couple’s perspective totally destroyed by his (justified) fear of being left alone without the kids, which he loves as much as her but are definitely her property. Because in the end man can’t do kids by himself. And this makes men vulnerable. What you need can be used against you. And since we are all balls of meat, we do need kids. But this whole society thing gets on the way. Because the basal human biology is very much at odds with the whole arrangement, nuclear families are a strategy to deal with war-time Europe, not with peaceful African savannah. Minus society, we all do have sex with everyone, and no one makes a lot of fuss over it, but if you try to apply this where society has already arrived, society will just destroy you. No hard feelings, you see, this is just what society needs to do in order to survive. And we, inside society, must act social. Which means being bitches each other.

And pragmatism begs us to ask not what should be, but what can we do. There is no right™ way to solve this, no natural™ way to have relationships. But any choice we could possibly make will be influenced by the world around us. This messy complicated world i was talking about.

So, of course, girls will keep on exploiting their biological superiority. Which means they will continue to be exploitative bitches, will continue to treat boys as cattle, will continue to act shallow, will continue to prefer to not talk about their feelings, will keep the real game undercover and impervious to negotiation, and will generally keep on thinking with their balls (or with their ovaries, if you prefer, but those are probably balls too). Basically, women will not give up their upper hand. And why should they? It’s much easier to pretend they are flowers, waiting to be plucked, and keep with their sly deceitful ways.

It’s even worse than that. They are usually quite unable to admit they have an upper hand.

Women will actually panic when told they have any influence over their destiny. As exemplified by the SlutWalk: A policeman tells girls they are dressing provocatively and that in his view this makes them more likely to be targets for rape. Consequence? They create a parade (which turns into a global movement, no less!) to assert once and for all that no, their behaviour is not able to influence guys, that their fate is not their fault, that they refuse at all costs to take responsibility for their lives. And they want to push blame into rapists, a class of people that was already considered the worst of the worst, a class of people that even in prisons risk being murdered because other criminals think rape is too gross, a class of people that is already over-prosecuted as shown by 19 year-olds who get stigmatized for life as sex-predators for having consensual sex with their 17 year girlfriends.

That is the height of current po-mo feminism: SlutWalk, a clean farewell to all the complexities of the feminist theory, an embrace of moralism. All the relativism that feminism ever conjured gets thrown in the garbage.

But even then, the big question is actually: Is it sex-positive? Does the SlutWalk take sex as a good thing? Because, at the end of the day, if we focus on consequences, even a shallow ideology that allowed us to abandon all the posing and cruelty of current relationships could be a good thing. So if you have women walking topless in a parade it had to be a good thing, right? I’m not so sure. It keeps on saying no to rape, but it never once says that if sex was easier to get there would be less reason to rape. Exactly as the easing of prudishness in the 60s made prostitutes cheaper.

Also, even if we can say that sex is good, and thus fall to a weird kind of pro-sex moralism, we can not pretend that this would be any more peaceful or open or free. There is a secret wish for a idealized kind of «nature™» that could lead us even as we give up (or fail) control, but that is another kind of control, just as problematic, and less responsible.

No solutions are being offered here, to be sure. But once we give up on the strategy of solving thing, we can focus on tactics. Namely the tactics of turning the whole mess to our benefit. Stepping out of the carrot-and-stick arrangement might just give us the required leverage.

The trick is to try to see why we are in this particular mess. Of course it didn’t happen by itself, out of nothing. There are reasons there.

Namely: slavery and violence. Red lipstick is not meant to resemble an apple, but blood. The veiled cruelty of everyday relations comes out of a society whose basic business is to use and abuse human beings and suck out of them the raw power of violence. We are not toiling to fight the soil into giving us dinner, we are fighting other human beings, and we want their blood and tears, we want to turn their lives into energy for our own, in a big game where no one really wins, where the 1% actually die sooner from excess stress, having travelled the whole world over never seeing anything but hotel lobbies. And i’m not talking about capitalism, or money, or religion. Those are intermediaries. Exploitation is older and more subtle then any of that. Human beings are just the most magical things in this planet, and this means they are the ones more valuable too. The whole cruelty just comes from who we are, in a very deep sense.

And gender is part of it, not because it is good, but because it is a technique. Learning to play with our sexuality, learning the spells of our inner fluids, learning to sail our inner currents, learning to focus our desire, learning to soothe our aching hearts, learning to make our brains burn with passion, learning to make our muscles smart. All this we can do.

Those are techniques. Body technology. The magic of our very selves.

Feminism didn’t give me any of that. I didn’t learn to dance in a gender studies group. I didn’t even learn self-defence there. But feminism did help me to prepare to learn these things.

So: Thanks. And: goodbie.

So keep the following in mind: You’ve never gone to Brasília, you saw pictures maybe, you have no idea about it’s importance as for history of architecture. Should you go there?

You sure can see big concrete buildings at many other places. And there are way too many cool trips to be had in Brazil. But.

But Brasília is a city like no other. As such, it can be both a very revealing experience and a very difficult one to understand.

Maybe the best answer is: Go if you have the right guide.

Brasília is the result of a very particular way to think a city, one that may have many failings (and that is something to be long argued about), but that certainly dared to think outside of the box. Brasília defies expectations. Most importantly, it creates a relationship with space which is probably impossible to understand except there.

The parts of the city made for living are the wings. There, every building has a hollow first floor. The buildings stand above pillars. That means you don’t have to go around them, you can go right through them. And that in turn means that when you want to go somewhere, you just point in that direction and go. You don’t think about which road you must take, you think about directions. And thus the city is more like a big grassy field than like a maze.

The code for that in architecture is garden-city, and as many sins as modernist urbanism might have committed, Brasília certainly is a city that feels like a big garden.

So, this is Brasília. Should you go? Maybe. All of this, and everything else i could say about Brasília, are things you’d take for granted if you lived there, but that are very puzzling for outsiders.

It is not that Brasília is difficult. Actually it is way too easy. Like addresses in Brasília are coordinates. They can be decoded to x and y positions. So that you do know where it is, even if you never actually went there. That ends up giving you a certain trust you can go anywhere.

Again, not something you’d feel in one visit. But what you’d might come to realize is just how much all the other cities are alike one another. How many conventions you take for granted to navigate these other cities, even ones you’d never been to. How many expectations you didn’t even realize you had.

Of course, this is because Brasília breaks these expectations. That is why the bitch from the hostel hated it.

Brasília has to be decoded. Every city has, but Brasília had a different idea of which codes to use. Without a key, it can be painful. And these keys are sometimes things people will not tell you exactly because for them it is obvious. A key is needed, but it does not look like a keyhole. That is why you should not go to Brasília without the right guide.

So, a kind of a visual guide…

image shamelessly stolen from google maps

In the middle of the wings runs the “Eixão”, or “Big Axis”, officially the “Highway Axis”, which is four lanes each way — it shows in red in my picture (it is not that wide, it’s just there are lanes of trees between the roads themselves). It forms a cross with the “Eixo Monumental” or “Monument Axis”, six lanes wide each way, shown in pink. These two big roads define the basic form of the city, the “airplane”.

Now look at the blue squares. Each one is a superblock, each has its own number. The units show how far they are from the Monument Axis, so 102 is the closest to the crossing of the two axes and 116 is the farthest. And the hundreds part of the number shows which row of superblocks it is. Just there is this weirdness that odd hundreds are west of the Eixão and even ones are East, but not too difficult, is it?

And the other wing is a mirror image of it.

Also, since each superblock is roughly 500 meters on a side, you can guess the distances easily.

Right now, i feel like my time in Brasília is spent. So that i can’t really be anyone’s guide. Which also means all this rant is in a way for naught. In stead of a guide, then, the best i can offer are some tips.

• Stay at some place near the wings. That is surprisingly easy to overlook, for example, the HI Hostel in Brasília is located at a totally remote and unreachable place. Bad. And CouchSurfers might be inclined to stay at more luxurious houses on the Lakes-part of town. Also not good. These options would require you to have a car. But to understand Brasília without walking is nigh-impossible. (The Hotel Zones, orange-y on my picture, are pretty much central, probably more expensive than a backpacker would be used to, but it’s an option. There are more shabby places close to a street called W3).
• Go to 508 Sul (that is 508 South superblock). That is the model housing block, that entails the very idea of the city.
• Underneath the “3 powers square” which you’d go to anyway there is a scale model of the city, good for understanding the overall plan. Also close-by, the visit to Itamaraty Palace is a can’t miss.
• Subway: Don’t. Just don’t. Public transportation in Brasília is really bad, so you should plan around it.
• If it is not vacations time, i’d recommend a visit to the campus of University of Brasília, there are all sorts of weird buildings there… The Library looks Blade Runner-y and there is a building that is almost 1 Km long, called “the big worm”.
• Brasília is a ver foody place, there are dozens and dozens of things to eat, from Northeast Brazilian food to World Fuzion food. Lots of expensive stuff, but also affordable ones, if you look for it.
• If you can find a bike rental, riding a bike in Brasília is simple amazing.

Brasília is a city for free-souls, in a desperate need of free souls to live there. Do not believe everything you hear about it.

Understanding people might sound like knowing how to make them do what you want, how to get what you want from them, but it was never like that to me. I am never very much aware of other people’s weaknesses, or at least it is not fun to me to explore this. There is a whole lot of this looking into people that is painful to me, where i am very much aware of the pain lines, of the negativity, of the unaware violence, of the words that cut.

And also i usually do not read people in specific ways, i can’t describe anyone in few phrases, i don’t see qualities and defects in stand-alone mode. People to me are always messy tangles of ideas and pressures and sensitivities.

What i usually can do is i have an idea of where someone can shine, where their potential lies.

I realized this while working with (or on, or about, whatever) CONE Design {which is a kind of design students political organization}, that i usually knew who was going to be a good member of the shebang, who was going to keep on being clueless, who could do lots but didn’t care about it enough, and also who just wanted the attention. When you’re dealing with groups you have to guess at these questions all the time. Surprisingly, i used to be right about my guesses. And i also realized i was more right then the other people around — even though they would not say so.

Other people in the CONE didn’t see the same things in people i saw. And i guess most of it came from a different look at it. Not only a different point-of-view, but a different what-is-it-you-want-to-know. I never much cared for who was “responsible” or not, or who was hard-working, or who was right or wrong. I guess mostly i cared only for what did drive these people, what did turn they on at this work.

Depending on how you look at it, it can be a very shallow way to see. Because everything that is serious, everything that is responsibility, everything that is supposed to be important does not appear clearly looking through this filter. But the thing is: It helps you see how this what-is-important comes to be, how people create their opinions of what matters, of what is urgent.

I guess i have a sensibility for the complexity of people.

I guess i can see people as becoming (such a fashionable word, by the way), how they make themselves into what they are.

So i see people as open-ended, i don’t know what they are gonna say, but usually i can come up with good questions. I can’t exactly reproduce their opinion of everything, but i have a feeling for what parts of their worldview are still an enigma for me, finding out where their point-of-view contrasts with mine. I am a good explorer of people. That is why i know they are so fscking complex. That is why i give so much importance to incommensurability. That is why i like travelling but i find touristic attractions boring. That is why i think there is no truth. And it might even be the root of my ease with language.

Another way to say this might be: To me there is a very big difference between evaluating people, measuring them, exploring them, and judging people, checking whether or not they fit into your model of what people should be. A lot of my preaching about avoiding expectations and relativizing might come from this visceral way of looking at people, instead of this way coming from all the ideology.

Or maybe not. How do you read this in me?

Now on the other side of the intellectual ocean people like Foucault went nuts over the whole thing, claiming it was a sort of dictatorial attempt at nullifying subjectivity. Since mostly i sit firmly in this side of the fence, being a silly fanboy of Derrida, i usually sound very derisive of the first bunch, but as of now i’d like to try and make amends.

Reason got conflated with a very specific (and somewhat misguided) shade of science, that was indeed a little hasty. But maybe instead of this “reason” we could just have lucidity.

Before there was good ethnography, of the kind that tries to understand other cultures through their indigenous logic, there was a somewhat imperialist anthropology that just shoved European concepts (and modes of life) down native’s throats. That is so, mostly, because it is very hard to be a relativist. It is very hard to see your own assumptions. That is just the way things are. It is because the Empire endeavour assigned people to go over and study aboriginals (to ease the domination) that we came to understand all the cruelty inherent there. We couldn’t even see it before.

A very similar thing does happen in other sciences. This idea that truth is a universal permanent larger-than-life thing (or at least more stable than life, but this distinction carries much less difference than it should) to be sought for (suspiciously like Catholicism’s god, at that) fueled a “how” of science that was hasty and crude, you know the kind that used dynamite to uncover dinosaur fossils. It is the same attitude that makes, for example, Mr. Yudkowsky physiologically unable to understand that his work is part of Mathematics and Computer Science (he’s into AI) and that it does not generalize into Sociology or into Philosophy (assuming the derisive and clearly offensive stance that “everything else is just politics”).

But none of that does mean that the Enlightenment has failed. After all, what does it even mean for a set of ideas to fail?

In other words, regardless of their respective merits or blames (and this is a very unproductive discussion!) both Enlightenment folks and Po-mo folks are part of our culture, of our thinking heritage. It’s better to try to find the common ground between those two groups, even though they seem bound to the game of mud-throwing at each other.

And they do both seem to strive to something that, even if it feels and looks very different from each one’s perspective, could maybe be encompassed by the word lucidity.

The etymology of such word is very close to “Enlightenment”, and it carries shades of “clarity” and “transparency”, and those are very dangerous, as they do seem to propose (or suppose) there is a land-of-plenty where we are devoid of bias, where human opinion becomes totally pure, totally invisible. The problem of course is that to be opinion it has to be opinionated, and interested. An opinion is only possible to a historical, contingent, opaque being. To be reasonable is not to achieve perfect knowledge, but instead to be able to navigate in a universe where knowledge is by definition imperfect.

Of course the opposite stance is also dangerous, as it tends to turn the arguments into a moral issue, basically trying to make Enlightenment sound like tyranny. Po-mo moralizes the issue, when for example it construes the building of Brasília as an attempt at isolating citizens (which happens to be totally at odds with actually happens when you live in this city). There certainly is a lot of symbol-violence in the whole science and contemporary culture, but it is not like there is any culture that is devoid of such cruelty. In other words, it is empty to accuse “reason”, to make a straw-man out of it, this tactic does not solve any problems, it does not lead us into a balanced society.

In my opinion, much of this problem stems from some awkward first steps into the Enlightenment attempt. Namely, that from Kant’s perspective, and Husserl’s and Marx’s and so on, Logic was more a part of “Reason” than psychology or sociology. That is to say, these thinkers tended to see Mathematic as better than Rhetoric. Since much of the assumptions leading there were inherited from ancient Greeks, whose main difference from so-called Barbarians (muttering people) was their form of geometry, this is understandable. Geometry is very useful for a certain kind of problems, and if you (politically) elect those problems as the most important, then Maths becomes the tits. That later Newton, through his own very complex prejudices, equated Alchemy with Calculus, is just part of the problem when you come to think of it (and thus the whole bashing of Descartes is boring).

As you might guess, my feeling is that these first steps took a very dim picture of Intelligence. They thought, basically, that if you could do Mathematics you could to everything. This turns out to not be the case. This is the whole point of a thing called Moravec’s Paradox: You can easily use computers to solve logic problems and do calculations, but everyday things (like taking a step, or focusing your eye, or gossiping, basically all the things you take for granted but that a baby struggles to learn all the time) are very hard in terms of Mathematics. That is not because they are hard, but because Intelligence is much more complex than that.

But Intelligence is a good tool, and so is Mathematics. Tools amongst many others. And we are concrete, real people trying to navigate a complex weird world, and we need all the tools we can have. Even more so when, besides the physical world, we must traverse the world of other people.

There we bump into incommensurability, the fact that i can’t really understand you in your own terms. I can’t see the world from your eyes just as much as two objects can’t occupy the same place at the same time.

As a subjective being, i see the world from my very own perspective. I can’t really adopt your perspective, and also that means i can’t adopt a perspective that is neutral or universal. Therefore misunderstanding is not a problem, nor an exception, it is a given, a constant thing to be accounted for all the time. What i can do is to enhance my perspective, to try to see things from different sides, to look further and deeper.

Enhancing the perspective we eventually get to a point where there is common ground. And here, even though each one of us is talking in his own language, and no one really deep down understands each other, we can co-operate, act together.

If this acting together is not to devolve into hate-mongering and group-think, we need clarity. We need the effort to avoid our own biases. We need this bigger view of Intelligence, that sane subjective pragmatic committed capacity to deal with the world.

We need lucidity.

With tear in my eyes i post this on facebuk, and 16 random people “like” it!