#jason blakely

[apesoformythoughts]

[apesoformythoughts]

I am repulsed by how fake broad swaths of popular culture are today—deep fake, shallow fake, “augmented reality”, filtered fake… Has there been any human cohort in recent memory as free-floating from contact with reality? From other people? From the flow of time? From nature?

Reality does not require "augmentation"—you need only open your full perceptual awareness & self to receiving it.

We protect ourselves from the intensity of its manifestation but reality itself continually exceed us. That's why Eliot says that *humankind cannot bear much reality*

We think it's an idle, an entertainment or perhaps a mere problem of productivity & mental health. But it goes far deeper than that. The inability to be in front of reality does not bode well for the human situation in the next half century. It is a kind of mass morbidity.

— Jason Blakely

[apesoformythoughts]

[apesoformythoughts]

[apesoformythoughts]

“Contemporary social science is a veritable factory of meanings, every bit as dynamic, poetical, and fecund as a creative writing department. Contemporary social science has also helped spread the scientism that now dominates many of our most powerful institutions and even the minutiae of our personal lives. These themes shape the central thesis of this book: that social science rarely simply neutrally describes the world, but rather plays a role in constructing and shaping it. In other words, the social sciences are not like the classic natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), in which descriptions of the world do not directly alter and reshape it. Because humans inhabit worlds of meaning, and social scientific theories are in part expressions of novel meanings, those theories can always penetrate human understanding and radically alter the very societies they seek to describe.”

— Jason Blakely: We Built Reality

[apesoformythoughts]

[apesoformythoughts]

«Viewed from the outside, Catholicism’s social teachings appear to be a perplexing gamut of unreasonably extreme positions lacking in any overall coherence. Sharp criticisms of laissez-faire capitalism and militarism sit side-by-side with denouncements of pornography and divorce. A preference for the material poor is joined to a veneration of spiritual hierarchy. Condemnations of prison conditions and ecological devastation are paired with opposition to abortion and moral relativism. Particularly when seen through the eyes of the contemporary American culture war, the Catholic Church appears erratic, even raving in its moral passions.

One small way to begin discerning some philosophical coherence in Catholic political theology is to recognize that the Church is radically demanding on what she sees as the infinite worth and dignity of the human person…»

— Jason Blakely: “A Plague of Catholic Cafeteria Consequentialism”

[apesoformythoughts]

«The deeper problem…is not that social science failed to prepare the public for a Trump victory [in 2016] but that the very theories that failed to predict the election were the same ones that helped to create the problems that led to its outcome. In [Jason] Blakely’s hands, this seemingly small shift in perspective unlocks an entire array of insights about how the very tools we human beings use to try to understand the world in fact end up constructing it.

Readers can expect a few repetitions before this inversion starts to sink in. But when it does—when we start to see how contemporary social science is not in fact the dispassionate, mechanical description of the world it pretends to be but “a veritable factory of meanings, every bit as dynamic, poetical, and fecund as a creative writing department”—it is then that the fireworks start. But a further few words about the theory Blakely is using here may be helpful in seeing them…»

— “We created our present-day crises. It’s uncomfortable but not unfixable.” | A review of Jason Blakely’s We Built Reality