It has been... interesting to observe how the word disinterested, which means impartial; has become co-opted as a synonym of uninterested - which means not having one's mind, feelings or motivation engaged by a thing.
Properly speaking, a good judge in a court of law ought to be disinterested, but not uninterested.
That is; a good judge ought to be impartial about the guilt of the accused, and guided by the legal process and its evidences. But the judge needs to be interested in the sense of engaged with the case, paying attention, and giving it active thought.
Such a slovenly destruction of meaning as has happened to disinterested, is typical of a society in which people are uninterested - on a massive scale; from top to bottom of social institutions and discussion.
Our society is one in which an immense and increasing amount of "data" is hosed upon people 24/7, most of which is untruthful (lies, distortions, manipulation), and concerning matters about which hardly anybody has any interest - but for which there is a demand that "everyone" forms a judgment - and is ready to express and defend it.
Such everyday judgment is profoundly uninterested - as is necessarily so with such large amounts of stuff. And by the fact that nobody lifts a finger to verify the validity of what is discussed: neither by application of common sense nor personal experience; not by reasoning, not by seeking-out further and better information.
On top of this there has been the totalitarian takeover of all major functional social institutions under a single multi-national bureaucracy-media-complex.
Such that nowadays no sensible person would expect a judge to be disinterested; because any personal motivation a judge may have with respect to The Law (which concept he probably would not recognize as autonomously valid) will be subordinated to pursuit of the Establishment agenda.
Yet an ideal and good judge would be disinterested about a case, while being intensely interested in the case; exactly because he was strongly motivated by the desire that justice be done in accordance with the spirit and letter of The Law.
Likewise in what used to be science and the arts...
Science used to be - when it really-was science - disinterestedly evaluated by a small group of individual scientists, each of whom was truthful and whose main interest was the same species of scientific truth.
The disinterestedness of scientific evaluation, was therefore a product of intense interest in truth.
Now that science is a mass bureaucracy manned by officials and functionaries who are uninterested by the truths they pretend to pursue; the guiding evaluations are provided top-down - by those who manage the system in accordance with ideologies provided by a totalitarian leadership class (in accordance with priorities that have nothing to do with real-truth - but only with manipulation).
Scientists no longer run professional science, and it has been decades since they did; consequently, "science" has nothing to do with truth.
And, since truth-seeking/speaking scientists are grit in The Machine; over the decades, scientists have been eliminated from the system (except sometimes, as isolated individuals, at a low and system-powerless level).
When the arts were good, artistic evaluations (eg. of music, poetry, fine arts) were dominated by those few individuals who were intensely interested by the species of aesthetic beauty that the particular art provided.
Therefore, the arts could be disinterested in their evaluations of quality, exactly because there were powerful and personal artistic interests driving them.
Now that the arts are incorporated in the state systems of bureaucracy and the corporate worlds of trading. I mean especially the visual fine arts; painting, sculpture and the like) - where nobody involved is genuinely interested-in and motivated-by aesthetic beauty.
Disinterestedness does not happen in the fine arts now.
The evaluations of fine arts are based on interest - and the strongest interest now is a not-artistic mixture of finance, ideology, careerism, and the usual human corruptions (e.g. sexual).
Artistic evaluations are nowadays utterly worthless with respect to aesthetic beauty - whether these evaluations come from (so called) artists, academics, critics, galleries, auctioneers, investors - or whoever.
In sum: Uninterest in art among those who evaluate art systemically, has led to the loss of disinterested evaluation throughout the institutions of the arts. It also leads to the astonishing degree of aesthetic-incompetence among those who evaluate the fine arts; which is evident in all areas - awards and prizes, prices in sales, content of exhibitions, and the high prevalence of forgeries and fakes. Competence requires motivation, and therefore is also a product of genuine interest.
In sum; genuine interest enables disinterestedness; while lack of interest is the same thing as uninterested.
In the world of the uninterested, disinterestedness is impossible and becomes extinct.
So... mass linguistic absorption of the word disinterested into meaning simply lack of interest-in, has paralleled the disappearance of interested-impartiality from public discourse.
Why? Because motivations are what determine systems; and motivations derive from our world view... from our beliefs about the basic structure and purpose of reality.
When it has been generally decided that reality has no purpose - and when that truth has sunk-in fully and everywhere (which took a few generations); then deep and powerful motivations become impossible; and we get the present world where people function in terms of superficial, labile and short-term motivations - which are easily manipulated top-down....
Which is why disinterestedness has been - deliberately - driven to extinction.
It has now reached the point where many people cannot even conceive of the world that actually-existed 50-plus years ago, and more so in the more remote past; and deny that it ever existed or was possible.
It seems impossible, because it was a world where it was normal for many people to be so interested by some-thing that they could - sometimes - be dis-interested about it.
A good way forward can only come from revealing and challenging those fundamental (metaphysical) assumptions about the nature of reality that have so annihilated deep motivation as to render it unimaginable.
No comments:
Post a Comment