I’m currently reading Adam Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” and will be posting thoughts and reflections.
Smith’s primary thesis is that sympathy is the cornerstone of our moral behaviour, the key from which all else flows.
But because sympathy will never be complete, our desires for what we might call authenticity can never be completely fulfilled.
“Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned. The thought of their own safety, that they themselves are not really the sufferers, continually intrudes upon them....
The person principally concerned is sensible of this, and at the same time passionately desires a more complete sympathy. He longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own.
But he can only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him. He must flatten the sharpness of his natural tone in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him.”
Smith sees a benevolence about all of this, but I’m not so confident.
“The mind is rarely so disturbed, but that the company of a friend will restore it to some degree of tranquility and sedateness...we assume less sympathy from a common acquaintance than from a friend...we assume still more tranquility before an assembly of strangers, and we assume, therefore, still more tranquility. Nor is this only an assumed appearance; for if we are at all masters of ourselves, the presence of a mere acquaintance will really compose us, more than that of a friend, and that of an assembly of strangers, still more than that of an acquaintance.”
Again the conflict: it will compose us. But will it comfort us? Certainly Smith isn’t arguing that we would rather spend our time with acquaintances than friends.
I have two answers to that question.
Last year, on break I was sitting at home, chatting with a good friend, Elizabeth, who had come over to visit. The phone rang. I picked it up. I heard my grandfather’s doctor tell me he had died. Elizabeth hugged me and left. I felt far more comforted that she was there than, say, a group of acquaintances: she could indulge me more my emotions than a mere group of acquaintances.
From the days I taught math after-school in a Palo Alto elementary, I think of sensitive six-year-old Sam L. Sam was inclined to whine and start crying – but more likely to continue his out-of-proportion complaints the more I indulged him. And as his mother realized, it was best not to encourage such behaviour. Why? Because a person whose reactions are far out of proportion with others’ will never find sympathy or happiness. He must be constantly indulged.
This hammers at a concept called elasticity.
In economics, elasticity refers to how much the quantity demanded of a good changes in relation to price. Fettucine is a very elastic good: if the price goes up much, I’ll just buy linguini instead, or perhaps ravioli or macaroni. But prescription medications, for example, are less elastic.
The relevant elasticity here is not in the quantity of unsympathizable, overly “sharp-toned” behaviour we exhibit at the moment. It’s about the amount we learn to exhibit.
Sam’s whining and similar self-indulgent behavior was fairly elastic: once I raised the price by establishing that I wouldn’t play with him on break unless he did his mathwork and toned down the complaining, he...toned down the complaining. Over time, similar treatment by his mother will likely lead him to feel less.
But my grief at my grandfather’s death: never having a sympathetic shoulder to cry on may dull the edge of my feeling, but the effect will be less than the effect of his mother on little Sam. In short: my amount of feeling is less elastic. If we could somehow dole out an equal amount of pressure on Sam and I to exhibit less emotion, my felt emotion in death-grief would change less than Sam’s felt emotion in everyday life.
If “feeling elasticity” is high – that is, if we’re able to easily and relatively painlessly adjust our emotions – then we should retool ourselves almost completely to “flatten the sharpness of our natural tone to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those around.”
In this scenario, I should endeavor to feel only the emotions of an impartial spectator at even my grandfather’s death. Changing myself that way will be ‘cheap’ in emotional pain, and I will no longer “passionately desire more complete sympathy” when such events come. I will hurt less, on net.
If “feeling elasticity” is very low – that is, if it’s very difficult and takes much painful pressure to adjust our emotions – then we should reconsider even commonsensical activities like shaping children’s behaviour patterns.
In this scenario, Sam’s mom should ask seriously whether the great pain she’s going to have to cause him is worth the relatively small behavioural adjustment that will occur.
Smith seems to be of the opinion that the former scenario is more descriptive of the world than the latter; that feeling elasticity is fairly high. He’s optimistic than an “equality of temper” – natural concord of one’s emotions with the impartial spectator, is attainable through socialization:
“Society and conversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoring the mind to its tranquility, if, at any time, it has unfortunately lost it; as well as the best preservatives of that equal and happy temper, which is so necessary to self-satisfaction and enjoyment.”
(Quotes are all from Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part 1, Section 1, Chapter IV)
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Saturday, August 25, 2007
marching to the same drummer
In a debate over at Cato Unbound, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
I think Goldberg is onto something here, but moves onto other issues. Any political philosophy - heck, any vision of the world - has to make an argument for what the world should be like. but what will the world be like?
To justify "devising an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord," we then have two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive.
(1). the author invented the explanation of inevitability to persuade himself that his optimism was justified.
Ie, Optimism + "platform X is good" ----> "a course of events where platform X helps/comes about is inevitable."
A happy socialist must conclude that the world is inevitably headed toward socialism, no?
(2). The author cited inevitability as an argumentative tactic; ie, he did it to bring others to fight for platform X.
Inevitability is a powerful argument. If something is inevitable, why fight it? Thinkers from Mises, Hayek, and Popper to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling have all recognized this.
But - and maybe Brink Lindsay makes this argument in Against the Dead Hand, I haven't read it - (1) is an equally powerful reason why such arguments of inevitability get made - self-deception.
I consider myself a libertarian/classical liberal partly because I'm an optimist, and Smithian classical liberalism reconciles what is and what should be. (Sorry, Rand, you weren't the first to bridge is and ought). People are self-interested, even selfish, but that is not bad per se. Choice both enables morality - for how can one be virtuous if one does not freely reject sin? - and prosperity.
So I'm a libertarian because it makes things fit together. And I also happen to be an optimist. Thus, Brink's argument that a more libertarian future is inevitable strikes a deep concord with me, and likely also with Brink. Especially because an optimistic libertarianism will likely believe our Utopia is stable once reached.
And the same is true with any other ideology.
On a more personal note, consider the decision to believe in a religion. I've been exploring a particular one recently, and am currently loosely contemplating conversion. Right now, it makes sense to me - all the doctrines fit together, together with my moral sensibilities. It doesn't, say, punish people who've never heard of the true religion with eternal damnation. But does that make it true? I don't know. I'd like to believe so.
But if the vision of some subjective pieces of information fitting together can lead to flights of fancy, perhaps we ought to be more cautious when we think we see the pieces fit. The Dan Brown genre should stay fiction in our minds.
UPDATE: David Friedman was here first too:
[originally posted 7/26/07]
A warning flag should go up when someone devises an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord. In Against The Dead Hand, Brink chronicles in lucid detail and limpid prose how the very smartest experts of the early 20th century were absolutely convinced that their ideal social policies were confirmed by science, morality and History. There's a similar whiff of hubris coming off libertarians who are not only sure that theirs is the best path, but that it will also be the most successful path.
I think Goldberg is onto something here, but moves onto other issues. Any political philosophy - heck, any vision of the world - has to make an argument for what the world should be like. but what will the world be like?
To justify "devising an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord," we then have two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive.
(1). the author invented the explanation of inevitability to persuade himself that his optimism was justified.
Ie, Optimism + "platform X is good" ----> "a course of events where platform X helps/comes about is inevitable."
A happy socialist must conclude that the world is inevitably headed toward socialism, no?
(2). The author cited inevitability as an argumentative tactic; ie, he did it to bring others to fight for platform X.
Inevitability is a powerful argument. If something is inevitable, why fight it? Thinkers from Mises, Hayek, and Popper to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling have all recognized this.
But - and maybe Brink Lindsay makes this argument in Against the Dead Hand, I haven't read it - (1) is an equally powerful reason why such arguments of inevitability get made - self-deception.
I consider myself a libertarian/classical liberal partly because I'm an optimist, and Smithian classical liberalism reconciles what is and what should be. (Sorry, Rand, you weren't the first to bridge is and ought). People are self-interested, even selfish, but that is not bad per se. Choice both enables morality - for how can one be virtuous if one does not freely reject sin? - and prosperity.
So I'm a libertarian because it makes things fit together. And I also happen to be an optimist. Thus, Brink's argument that a more libertarian future is inevitable strikes a deep concord with me, and likely also with Brink. Especially because an optimistic libertarianism will likely believe our Utopia is stable once reached.
And the same is true with any other ideology.
On a more personal note, consider the decision to believe in a religion. I've been exploring a particular one recently, and am currently loosely contemplating conversion. Right now, it makes sense to me - all the doctrines fit together, together with my moral sensibilities. It doesn't, say, punish people who've never heard of the true religion with eternal damnation. But does that make it true? I don't know. I'd like to believe so.
But if the vision of some subjective pieces of information fitting together can lead to flights of fancy, perhaps we ought to be more cautious when we think we see the pieces fit. The Dan Brown genre should stay fiction in our minds.
UPDATE: David Friedman was here first too:
If I conclude that the rules that would be just are similar to both the rules that exist and the rules that would be efficient, that may simply be evidence that my moral judgments are ex post rationalizations of the world I live in or the conclusions of my economic analysis.
[originally posted 7/26/07]
digital Maoism
It was the first time that I had been utterly demolished in an intellectual argument.
Winter quarter, freshman year, I had innocently joined SLE and written my first paper on how, to (wincingly) quote myself, Paul advocates the “subordination of the individual to the larger Christian community in order to prevent sinfulness,” while Mark and John’s Jesus “preaches liberation of the individual from the repressive and unnecessary Mosaic law.” I was all proud of my argument, even if I had to shove aside a few impertinent details to make my case (“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” Matthew 5:17). Then Suzanne Greenberg, in typical Suzanne-Greenberg-style, completely obliterated me by arguing that the Biblical concept of the individual at the time was completely different from the way in which I used it.
How was I supposed to defend my thesis against that? Though by chance I had been briefly exposed to Focault-style genealogy of thought in the previous quarter (we read Discipline & Punish in my Soviet history class), I was completely at a loss for an answer.
And rightly so. Confusion about what constitutes individuals and collectives play seems to be an easy error to commit; it has crept into the essay “Digital Maoism” by Jaron Lainier, corrupting what is otherwise one of the most insightful essays of the year.
Lainier’s convincingly argued thesis is that certain institutions on the Internet, like Wikipedia and meta-sites, are designed in a way that perverts the Internet into a tool for facilitating a hive mind. “The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people,” writes Lainier. “The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.”
Lainier points out that collectives do have important functions, but that these functions should work hand-in-hand with individuals. “A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition,” he writes. “It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.” But while prices are a result of everyone having input, “when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.” A turn of phrase that should warm the heart of any Rand fan.
Lainier, however, starts to get into logical hot water when he starts to, as I did, use phrases loosely. By a collective he means any body of people that come together to make a decision. But when he fails to make a decision between, for example, the market forces as collective and voting as collective, he misses an important distinction familiar to libertarians: process. If all collectives are equivalent, whence Robert’s Rules of Order? Or, how well would the market work if we all got together and voted on prices, or who gets how much of what good?
While phrased as such, these are not merely abstract questions. Lainier has some very interesting points to make about proper role of collectives: He argues that, for example, collectives function optimally when they don’t formulate their own question, when the quality of their result can easily be evaluated, and when quality-control mechanisms run by individuals are in place. “Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person,” Lainier writes. “Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.”
But perhaps in a bow to traditional ideas about collectives, he is unable to turn a critical enough eye on them. Witness this passage:
“There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective that is reasonably free of manipulation or runaway internal resonances.”
A government bureaucrat’s actions are a stereotypical example of individual behaviour? Only in the obvious sense, in that they were committed by a moral agent. As the fact that Nixon’s price-wage-freezes were approved by Congress should indicate, government decisions are every bit as “collective” as actions of the market. Or more, considering that government consists of people choosing for other people, while the market exemplifies people choosing for themselves.
I wouldn’t complain so much, except that the above quote also made it into the New York Times Magazine, and makes Lainier look a lot dumber than he is. Ideas have consequences, and oversimplification can be dangerous. “We have to be careful here,” as one of my professors loves to say. Beware.
**The piece can be found here: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html **
[imported from Sam's old blog. publication date: 12/15/06]
Winter quarter, freshman year, I had innocently joined SLE and written my first paper on how, to (wincingly) quote myself, Paul advocates the “subordination of the individual to the larger Christian community in order to prevent sinfulness,” while Mark and John’s Jesus “preaches liberation of the individual from the repressive and unnecessary Mosaic law.” I was all proud of my argument, even if I had to shove aside a few impertinent details to make my case (“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil” Matthew 5:17). Then Suzanne Greenberg, in typical Suzanne-Greenberg-style, completely obliterated me by arguing that the Biblical concept of the individual at the time was completely different from the way in which I used it.
How was I supposed to defend my thesis against that? Though by chance I had been briefly exposed to Focault-style genealogy of thought in the previous quarter (we read Discipline & Punish in my Soviet history class), I was completely at a loss for an answer.
And rightly so. Confusion about what constitutes individuals and collectives play seems to be an easy error to commit; it has crept into the essay “Digital Maoism” by Jaron Lainier, corrupting what is otherwise one of the most insightful essays of the year.
Lainier’s convincingly argued thesis is that certain institutions on the Internet, like Wikipedia and meta-sites, are designed in a way that perverts the Internet into a tool for facilitating a hive mind. “The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people,” writes Lainier. “The value is in the other people. If we start to believe that the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.”
Lainier points out that collectives do have important functions, but that these functions should work hand-in-hand with individuals. “A marketplace can't exist only on the basis of having prices determined by competition,” he writes. “It also needs entrepreneurs to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.” But while prices are a result of everyone having input, “when a collective designs a product, you get design by committee, which is a derogatory expression for a reason.” A turn of phrase that should warm the heart of any Rand fan.
Lainier, however, starts to get into logical hot water when he starts to, as I did, use phrases loosely. By a collective he means any body of people that come together to make a decision. But when he fails to make a decision between, for example, the market forces as collective and voting as collective, he misses an important distinction familiar to libertarians: process. If all collectives are equivalent, whence Robert’s Rules of Order? Or, how well would the market work if we all got together and voted on prices, or who gets how much of what good?
While phrased as such, these are not merely abstract questions. Lainier has some very interesting points to make about proper role of collectives: He argues that, for example, collectives function optimally when they don’t formulate their own question, when the quality of their result can easily be evaluated, and when quality-control mechanisms run by individuals are in place. “Under those circumstances, a collective can be smarter than a person,” Lainier writes. “Break any one of those conditions and the collective becomes unreliable or worse.”
But perhaps in a bow to traditional ideas about collectives, he is unable to turn a critical enough eye on them. Witness this passage:
“There are certain types of answers that ought not be provided by an individual. When a government bureaucrat sets a price, for instance, the result is often inferior to the answer that would come from a reasonably informed collective that is reasonably free of manipulation or runaway internal resonances.”
A government bureaucrat’s actions are a stereotypical example of individual behaviour? Only in the obvious sense, in that they were committed by a moral agent. As the fact that Nixon’s price-wage-freezes were approved by Congress should indicate, government decisions are every bit as “collective” as actions of the market. Or more, considering that government consists of people choosing for other people, while the market exemplifies people choosing for themselves.
I wouldn’t complain so much, except that the above quote also made it into the New York Times Magazine, and makes Lainier look a lot dumber than he is. Ideas have consequences, and oversimplification can be dangerous. “We have to be careful here,” as one of my professors loves to say. Beware.
**The piece can be found here: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html **
[imported from Sam's old blog. publication date: 12/15/06]
we know reality is complicated, thanks
A headline on 1A in today's New York Times: "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus; Reality is More Complicated."
I have one reply. Groan.
In television news, you might hear such things. But that's because 'cliche' goes with television news like milk with cookies. Despite desperate attempts..what went wrong when..he was a loving father; she was a loving mother...what started out as, escalated into..police were out in force today; firefighters responded to the scene.
If "reality is more complicated" appears in the story, it's often due to laziness. Searching the Grey Lady's website, I found the phrases "reality is more complicated" or "reality is more complex" appearing each about annually in the paper. (Of course, a standard leftist narrative painting opponents as dumb or simplistic sometimes propels Times stories too.)
We know reality is complex and pay journalists partly to simplify it. Still, twice a year in a paper doesn't seem so bad. But copy desks, which write headlines, are paid almost entirely to distill an already-distilled story down to a 50-character headline.
So "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus; Reality is More Complicated"? Give me a break, or at least something intelligent. Maybe "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus; Monitors Say That's Misleading." Though we could also go with "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus, First Time He Doesn't Mention 9/11," I like that better.
(the story is here, the web headline has been changed to "more complex")
I have one reply. Groan.
In television news, you might hear such things. But that's because 'cliche' goes with television news like milk with cookies. Despite desperate attempts..what went wrong when..he was a loving father; she was a loving mother...what started out as, escalated into..police were out in force today; firefighters responded to the scene.
If "reality is more complicated" appears in the story, it's often due to laziness. Searching the Grey Lady's website, I found the phrases "reality is more complicated" or "reality is more complex" appearing each about annually in the paper. (Of course, a standard leftist narrative painting opponents as dumb or simplistic sometimes propels Times stories too.)
We know reality is complex and pay journalists partly to simplify it. Still, twice a year in a paper doesn't seem so bad. But copy desks, which write headlines, are paid almost entirely to distill an already-distilled story down to a 50-character headline.
So "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus; Reality is More Complicated"? Give me a break, or at least something intelligent. Maybe "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus; Monitors Say That's Misleading." Though we could also go with "Giuliani Boasts of Big Surplus, First Time He Doesn't Mention 9/11," I like that better.
(the story is here, the web headline has been changed to "more complex")
Saturday, August 4, 2007
An Ode to the Local Pub
My family can count themselves among the multitude of the merchants of death; they represent those of the alcohol battalion. My grandfather owns a pub that my mother, my uncle, my late-aunt, and myself work at, and it's a source of pride (and sometimes irritation) for me. My grandfather built his pub with the help of his friend Leo, a businessman who knew everyone in Detroit and was an owner of bars and seedy establishments himself. My grandfather really just wanted a place to drink with his bar buddies of the day, and for more than thirty-five years it has been doing just that.
Alas, all good things must come to pass, and this year will be the last year it will see its doors opened, at least under our banner. After my grandfather's own health problems and the untimely death of my aunt, we've all decided it would be best if it would go so that it's no longer the sinkhole it has become for us. It's not all woes though, because I have so many good memories of that bar. I've met Santa Claus there more times than anywhere else. I practically grew up in that bar. I bonded with my grandfather there. Those with an aversion to drinking or to bars won't really understand, but this is part of my culture. My brother and I caused enough calls from concerned parents about why our mother was taking us to a bar (though in its defense, its legally a restaurant and should be called, and is, a pub).
I got to know a lot of wonderful people through the place, and there were times when it was the only place I could really find any stimulating conversation. There truly is nothing like the local pub. When I was in Ireland, I checked out some of the trendier bars, but they couldn't compare to the local pubs I frequented up and down the land. I'm not the only one who feels this way about the spirit of the local pubs. Bruce Burrows of Modern Drunkard Magazine explored this spirit and wrote a wonderful article about it back in 2004.
Some gems:
Alas, all good things must come to pass, and this year will be the last year it will see its doors opened, at least under our banner. After my grandfather's own health problems and the untimely death of my aunt, we've all decided it would be best if it would go so that it's no longer the sinkhole it has become for us. It's not all woes though, because I have so many good memories of that bar. I've met Santa Claus there more times than anywhere else. I practically grew up in that bar. I bonded with my grandfather there. Those with an aversion to drinking or to bars won't really understand, but this is part of my culture. My brother and I caused enough calls from concerned parents about why our mother was taking us to a bar (though in its defense, its legally a restaurant and should be called, and is, a pub).
I got to know a lot of wonderful people through the place, and there were times when it was the only place I could really find any stimulating conversation. There truly is nothing like the local pub. When I was in Ireland, I checked out some of the trendier bars, but they couldn't compare to the local pubs I frequented up and down the land. I'm not the only one who feels this way about the spirit of the local pubs. Bruce Burrows of Modern Drunkard Magazine explored this spirit and wrote a wonderful article about it back in 2004.
Some gems:
"With the possible exception of the right to bear arms, the philosophies and rights laid out by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are best represented here. Under low light and neon signs, in the mumbled conversations during the one-hand lean at the urinal, what America was and should be is preservedIt's true, and if you want to see a pluralistic America where people of all backgrounds come together, it can often be found in a local pub. It's the only place where I've seen businessmen, labor activists, church-goers, atheists, liberals, conservatives, libertarians, socialists, native-born citizens, immigrants, whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and name whatever group you like, have come and all been tolerated. You can't say the same for college, business, or politics, at least not in my experience.
[...]
A good local bar tolerates nearly everything except intolerance of intolerance, as it were. Who killed Kennedy, why you should never see a doctor, the oil company’s conspiracy against hemp, what to drink for your sour stomach from the night before, why it’s better to smoke menthols instead of regular cigarettes. Go ahead, rant and pontificate; demagogues, revolutionaries, politicians, philosophers, welcome one and all.
[...]
Most important and peculiar to your neighborhood tavern is this fundamental precept of our history. Your past, your income, your social standing does not pass these doors. This is where janitors talk comfortably with vice presidents, where a District Attorney and the man he put away buy each other drinks. A man condemned to insignificance outside these walls can demonstrate Socratic wisdom in this sanctuary. If you plan to make a million dollars by the time you’re 25, great. If you work just enough to buy the next day’s drinks, we don’t care. In here our collective achievements and failures merge into a single shared understanding of why we are here."
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Craigslist does give valuable information sometimes...
Interesting post about friendship, being wanted, and being a man.
In Australia, there is the concept of mates. The word loosely translates as "friend", but the truth is that Americans lack the concept completely. Your mate has your back, and you have his. Your mates help define you, and accept you unconditionally. Once you're in, you're in for life. It's not easy to get in. When I was nine, I had a kid who used to annoy me mercilessly on the playground. One day, I had had enough of his picking on me, and I knocked him over with a punch. He got up, shook himself off, and shook my hand. "We're having a party this weekend. Here's where it is."
I was still really angry, and I didn't immediately understand what he was doing. He wanted to know that I would stick up for myself when provoked. He needed to know if, after he was my mate, I'd stand up for him. Once he found out that I'd stand up for myself, I was in. At that party, everyone there treated me like a mate, and I felt more included than I ever did before, and I never got selected last for any game again at that school.
Thursday, July 26, 2007
A note of skepticism
A belated thanks to Jesse for his introduction. Over the last two or three years since Jesse and I saw each other regularly, I've become much more sure of who I am in several areas, such as joining Jesse in the libertarian camp, and much less sure of who I am in other areas, like religion. Although calling libertarians a camp is like calling Congress a team, or Unitarianism a religion. Sorry Unitarians. Anyway, readers of this blog will have to be satisfied with Jesse's intro.
In a debate over at Cato Unbound, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
I think Goldberg is onto something here, but moves onto other issues. Any political philosophy - heck, any vision of the world - has to make an argument for what the world should be like. but what will the world be like?
To justify "devising an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord," we then have two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive.
(1). the author invented the explanation of inevitability to persuade himself that his optimism was justified.
Ie, Optimism + "platform X is good" ----> "a course of events where platform X helps/comes about is inevitable."
A happy socialist must conclude that the world is inevitably headed toward socialism, no?
(2). The author cited inevitability as an argumentative tactic; ie, he did it to bring others to fight for platform X.
Inevitability is a powerful argument. If something is inevitable, why fight it? Thinkers from Mises, Hayek, and Popper to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling have all recognized this.
But - and maybe Brink Lindsay makes this argument in Against the Dead Hand, I haven't read it - (1) is an equally powerful reason why such arguments of inevitability get made - self-deception.
I consider myself a libertarian/classical liberal partly because I'm an optimist, and Smithian classical liberalism reconciles what is and what should be. (Sorry, Rand, you weren't the first to bridge is and ought). People are self-interested, even selfish, but that is not bad per se. Choice both enables morality - for how can one be virtuous if one does not freely reject sin? - and prosperity.
So I'm a libertarian because it makes things fit together. And I also happen to be an optimist. Thus, Brink's argument that a more libertarian future is inevitable strikes a deep concord with me, and likely also with Brink. Especially because an optimistic libertarianism will likely believe our Utopia is stable once reached.
And the same is true with any other ideology.
On a more personal note, consider the decision to believe in a religion. I've been exploring a particular one recently, and am currently loosely contemplating conversion. Right now, it makes sense to me - all the doctrines fit together, together with my moral sensibilities. It doesn't, say, punish people who've never heard of the true religion with eternal damnation. But does that make it true? I don't know. I'd like to believe so.
But if the vision of some subjective pieces of information fitting together can lead to flights of fancy, perhaps we ought to be more cautious when we think we see the pieces fit. The Dan Brown genre should stay fiction in our minds.
UPDATE: David Friedman was here first too:
In a debate over at Cato Unbound, Jonah Goldberg wrote:
A warning flag should go up when someone devises an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord. In Against The Dead Hand, Brink chronicles in lucid detail and limpid prose how the very smartest experts of the early 20th century were absolutely convinced that their ideal social policies were confirmed by science, morality and History. There's a similar whiff of hubris coming off libertarians who are not only sure that theirs is the best path, but that it will also be the most successful path.
I think Goldberg is onto something here, but moves onto other issues. Any political philosophy - heck, any vision of the world - has to make an argument for what the world should be like. but what will the world be like?
To justify "devising an argument in which the smartest political strategy, historical forces, and his own personal preferences happen to be in almost lockstep accord," we then have two possible explanations, not mutually exclusive.
(1). the author invented the explanation of inevitability to persuade himself that his optimism was justified.
Ie, Optimism + "platform X is good" ----> "a course of events where platform X helps/comes about is inevitable."
A happy socialist must conclude that the world is inevitably headed toward socialism, no?
(2). The author cited inevitability as an argumentative tactic; ie, he did it to bring others to fight for platform X.
Inevitability is a powerful argument. If something is inevitable, why fight it? Thinkers from Mises, Hayek, and Popper to C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling have all recognized this.
But - and maybe Brink Lindsay makes this argument in Against the Dead Hand, I haven't read it - (1) is an equally powerful reason why such arguments of inevitability get made - self-deception.
I consider myself a libertarian/classical liberal partly because I'm an optimist, and Smithian classical liberalism reconciles what is and what should be. (Sorry, Rand, you weren't the first to bridge is and ought). People are self-interested, even selfish, but that is not bad per se. Choice both enables morality - for how can one be virtuous if one does not freely reject sin? - and prosperity.
So I'm a libertarian because it makes things fit together. And I also happen to be an optimist. Thus, Brink's argument that a more libertarian future is inevitable strikes a deep concord with me, and likely also with Brink. Especially because an optimistic libertarianism will likely believe our Utopia is stable once reached.
And the same is true with any other ideology.
On a more personal note, consider the decision to believe in a religion. I've been exploring a particular one recently, and am currently loosely contemplating conversion. Right now, it makes sense to me - all the doctrines fit together, together with my moral sensibilities. It doesn't, say, punish people who've never heard of the true religion with eternal damnation. But does that make it true? I don't know. I'd like to believe so.
But if the vision of some subjective pieces of information fitting together can lead to flights of fancy, perhaps we ought to be more cautious when we think we see the pieces fit. The Dan Brown genre should stay fiction in our minds.
UPDATE: David Friedman was here first too:
If I conclude that the rules that would be just are similar to both the rules that exist and the rules that would be efficient, that may simply be evidence that my moral judgments are ex post rationalizations of the world I live in or the conclusions of my economic analysis.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
I Can't Get No Education
My sister often amazes me with the depth of her knowledge. My parents are often quick to point out that this is in no small part due to the influence I have on her. She's the only 11 year-old I know who knows about the Ukrainian famine and the crimes of the Soviet Union. It took me years to even begin to grasp authoritarianism, which is what she is beginning to get. She has a maturity that simply astounds me (though she's still thankfully a kid at heart).
What I realized about this though is really how stifling the compulsory education system is. My sister picked up, from me, a love of reading and learning, and she's already now starting to see how much she can learn on her own. As we drove back from our grandmother's, she picked up my copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and I had her take a shot at pronouncing the title. She didn't do too bad with big words like that. She was very curious about it, and so I explained what the words meant. She picked up on that immediately. I told her about the guy who wrote it and she wanted to know why Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag. That's when it really hit me about the schooling bit.
If there weren't people to foster her love of learning, she would have either had to develop that fully on her own or just go through the motions at school. While my parents were supportive and taught me a lot, I had to get my love of learning on my own, and I think my heinous awkwardness and introversion pretty much drove me into that direction (two traits my sister lacks). Most people who have read the things I've written in the past are probably attuned to my thoughts on schooling, so when I say things like schooling teaches dumbness, most people who know me know that those beliefs are part of the package deal you get with me and my wacky radical beliefs. To others though, that's an amazing, and uncivic, notion to put forward.
"Schooling teaches dumbness."
My sister is not gifted. She is not a prodigy, as some may be wont to label her. She's a clever girl who catches on quickly because she lives in an environment that has always fostered independent thought. That's not a unique trait, and that's why I say schooling teaches dumbness. The vast majority of kids can be like my sister and learn like this. But when you have an institution with a rigid structure (even if some of our most creative teachers have been able to bend the structure within their own part of the structure, the structure itself still exists), with set times to learn set things in such a rote manner, you encourage dumbness and a lack of wonder. That system tells children that you learn this at this time, and once the bell rings or once that clock strikes that time, the learning of that is done and you learn this new thing. Schooling has had both benevolent and shady intentions, but that's simply intention. The results we have are simply depressing, and no amount of money being thrown at the problem and no amount of bureaucratic management is going to change that. I don't blame the teachers either. I've known both good and bad teachers, but in the end, they are at the merciless direction of superintendents and bureaucrats, which is a notion that, when I examine it, surprises and disturbs me how much it is tolerated and accepted.
The bit about dumbness has also been an idea that I have played around with a lot in the last four years. Being around highly intelligent and "gifted" students awoke me to a reality of intellectual elitism that is prevalent and even fostered in schools. The sense of superiority is just astounding (and it is something that I have fallen victim to in the past). The way some have talked revealed a deep seated prejudice and patronization towards intellectual "inferiors", and while part of these attitudes are in reaction to a school environment that cherishes jocks and popular people over others, they're still irresponsible attitudes to foster, and it encourages the notion that the dumb are hopeless. There are ignorant people out there, and ignorance is a staple of humanity since we all are struck by it at points in our lives, but our institution has created a class of people that need to be 'managed'. By stifling creativity, independent thought, ingenuity, and complete curiosity (an act which should be anathema to everything this country once stood for), we have taken children and made them a class of dependents, fostered a hierarchy that puts "gifted" students above a whole class who can easily be labeled stupid and dumb; the unwashed masses who can't be trusted (and as a cynic, I can say that while I have heard some very ignorant things come out of the mouths of these people, it often pales in comparison to some of the unbelievable ignorance of what comes out of the mouths and minds of intellectuals and intelligent people). I believe that the human mind is innately curious, but schooling and our culture seems to try to do everything it can to stifle it; it's what they call keeping you in your place.
There's a quote from John Taylor Gatto I have often quoted, and while I knew what he was saying before and agreed with it, it didn't really click with me until I noticed how quickly people can catch on if you encourage them to, or give them the opportunity to. My sister is no prodigy, but when I break down concepts for her and explain them as simply as I can, she gets it. I'm convinced that you can do this with the majority of people. Dumbness, for the most part, is taught, like Gatto said.
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
[...]
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
[...]
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order."
Unfortunately, I don't know if there's really any hope for it all. I've often been insulted for being an idealist, but I know my beliefs will not come to fruition beyond the small sphere of influence I may have. Since I do not follow the path of revolutionaries who want to force change at the barrel of a gun or follow the path of bureaucrats and politicians who want to force their personal ideology and agenda through the force of law, all I can hope for is that my ideas, and the ideas of those who inspired me, catch on. I'm an idealist, but I'm not expecting anything. I've never shied away from being called a radical. The word radical is at its root, the Latin word for root. What I see is what I believe to be the root of major problems that we have. A diseased tree that has its branches pruned may look pretty with some work, but it's still a diseased tree. As long as people are content to try variations of the same, tired solution to an old problem, then the best I can do is point out that it's a bad idea. What is true, what you believe might be true, and what you want to be true are all very different things, and it seems like it's becoming so foggy that they're all starting to blur. The best intentions don't excuse the vilest results.
We're not going to get anywhere if we continue to close off discussion towards anything we don't want to hear, or to ideas we're not familiar with or refuse to even consider. The narrowing of what is acceptable thought is hurting us in the schools and in public discourse. What I believe is only going to seem wackier and wackier as this trend continues (though I think some people are starting to wake up) because it's not acceptable thought. It will be dismissed with a wave of the hand, as well as the opinions of others who have their own take on it that doesn't follow the official line. So, I hope my sister asks me questions about the things I believe, I hope that she continues to be open to hearing other opinions. I hope she listens to what other's have to say and learn from them. I hope her mind continues to be as open as it is.
It's just scary when I consider the institutions. H.L. Mencken once said "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"
Who would want to live in an institution? I'm only now just becoming aware of the serious damage institutionalized thinking has caused me. The last three years have been hell for me because I've had to further and further personally isolate myself to numb the pain and understand the damages inside. The cure was never socialization, as some people seem to think it is. Actually, Grace Llewellyn had a good quote for this:
"A healthy social life requires much more than indifferent daily acquaintanceship with three hundred people born the same year you were...[institutional] socialization means bringing an individual under the control of the group. School-style socialization makes a group of people obedient and easily manipulated by peer pressure or "authority"; it makes a nation of idiots who wish they were people on TV since they don't know who they themselves are...As for romance. Affection, intimacy, and passion really are not encouraged to take root in a linoleum room smelling of chalk-dust. A mystery-relationship belongs out in the big mystery-world."
It's been a strange road for me, having gone from being a rabble-rousing firebrand, to a meek and heinously awkward guy who hated himself, to being someone that I think has been humbled enough to principled and committed but not as zealous and more inclined to inquiry. What I realized though, is that through all I've been, the damage that institutionalized thinking caused me was always present.
I should probably clarify though what I mean by institutionalized thinking. I've been in school for as far as I can remember. I was raised to compartmentalize everything. I was raised to know a social order and to believe that only material pursuits or those that advance a career are the only worthwhile things to attain in life. I was taught to believe that this is the way things are, and that the ones who aren't in harmony with the machine are defective. Institutionalized thinking is thinking that causes you to think how do I properly live within an institution. It's the kind of thinking that causes you to believe that your education ends when school is out, that your spiritual life stops the moment you leave the church, that you are your career or that you are your labeled place. It's the kind of thinking that tells you not to think.
That's how damaging it is.
The people I've talked to about it around here, seem to be subconsciously aware of it. It's my own suspicions that our own human nature instinctively rejects it, but when you grow up with it, taught to believe it, accept it, maybe even love it, you start to think that's all there is.
I forgot about the world outside.
Those who caught me mostly in my pessimistic and cynical glory, may be surprised to know that there was a time that I did find a lot of beauty in the world. I had a wonder about things that lost for the last three years. I still had a lot of growing up to then, because I did think I knew everything, but I also had a purpose. I was fighting for something then, and fighting against the damages of my institutional thinking.
It's really astounding, when you sit down to think about it, how often people are proud to not know anything. There's nothing wrong with being a simple person and not being extensively book-learned, I have no problem with that, because I don't think that's ignorance. When I see ignorance, I see it in the person who proudly talks about how they don't like to think. I don't expect us to be a nation of philosophers--I don't even think I would want that--but I think a little more honest discourse is what we need. No one is talking anymore, or rather, people aren't talking about things that really matter, and I don't want to. Getting by with the minimalist effort. In the last part of his book A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto had some interesting things to say about rhetoric and conversations. He talked about the categories of conversation that fill up our daily lives, but how they're ultimately unfulfilling, especially for the younger generations. It was a very interesting point he made, and I think I need to reproduce in its entirety.
"Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where rhetoric was discarded by the philosophy of the Reformation, many of the young look at this interminable future of elaborate social conversation networks that industrial societies find vital to "business culture" with disgust. There is some fundamental and radical difference between the important talk of youth that makes love, friendship, and significance reasonably easy to reach, and the social conversation of older people, in particular of self-important older people, that makes it apparent these life-and-death qualities are very difficult to obtain in later life.
I hope you'll reread that last idea. It will help you understand why attractive young people in the United States, almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the prosperous, kill themselves in record numbers these days. Teenage suicide, occurring as it does in the classes who have "made it", is mute and powerful testimony to how sterile and inhuman a destination "making it" really can be. When children prefer death to the life of the future as they see it being lived by their fathers, mothers, and family friends, it's time to find the problem not in them but in us."
It breaks my heart, and I do suspect that institutionalized thinking has a lot to blame for it. I need to disagree with Emerson who said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"; I would have to say that it's complacency that's the hobgoblin of little minds. We're living in a culture that is quickly reaching a cultural singularity where less and less free thinking will be going on, or at least that seems to be to be what's going on. I'll never forget the first work I read by Kierkegaard, and the quote of his that just jumped out at me. "People often demand freedom of speech in place of the freedom of thought they seldom use."
There's nothing quite like the freedom you feel when you feel like you're shaking it off of your back. You begin to feel compassion again, that your senses are no longer dulled, that there's hope and love in the world, beyond the narrow views of what is love that are often presented to us. You start to feel again.
But in the end, who are you?
Who are you?
Gatto has an excellent essay in A Different Kind of Teacher entitled "What Really Matters?" There are truncated versions of it online, but they just lack the punch of the one that was placed in the book.
"Where do you start? First you have to find yourself. There isn't any other way. If you wait on that you'll be buried even deeper in the artificial programs of others. First you have to strip away decades of programming and overlays and discover your own outline beneath it all. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". Until you know that step there won't be any self to know, just a collection of relays and switches, sensors and twitches that can be manipulated by engineers you can't see. On the other hand, if you know what matters and are willing to fight and even die for it, nothing can colonize your mind and you will be truly a free spirit.
All bold emphasis is my own.
I don't know if I've ever known a generation who seems to be lost without an identity more than my own. An entire generation raised to be special and never knowing what makes them supposedly special; no wonder employer's are at a loss at how to handle employees from my generation, a generation raised without a sense of personal identity and raised completely with a sense of dependency. I've seen the excess of it all. When we didn't accept what the television said--I know it to be true because MTV tells me so--we wandered around like little children in the supermarket, all the way up into our teens and beyond. Waiting to be told to stop, waiting to be told when to go. Turn me on, turn me off, because I don't know how to take care of myself. I must know something because my diploma says I do, but why do I feel so lost? I think that about sums up too many people I have known, including myself. I wasn't surprised for a minute to read that my generation doesn't have an appreciation for the effects of violence or that it's the most materialistic and narcissistic generation yet; how could I be surprised when this was exactly how we were raised to be.
How many of us are acting based purely on impulse? What impressed me about that Gatto quote was what I bolded. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". The stakes are high, especially with being at the doorstep of transhumanism, which will only open up a whole new can of identity issues. If it hurts this much now to recapture yourself just for you, to be that person you are and be completely one and at peace with that, then how are we going to survive down the road, when we don't even seem to be sure who we are most of the time? What caught my attention in Gatto's essay was what he wrote about machines. He noted a couple of things, that we communicate and live through machines now, which denies us a large part of our identity. Part of the exhilaration I've felt from feeling like I had my life back again is that I'm starting to see people again, and I'm much more aware that I'm lost in a world of machines. Everything we do now is dependent on machines, and while I'm not a Luddite, we erred in letting them set up our identities for us. Our identity has become supplanted by the identity of the iPod, the identity of the personal computer, and, the worst culprit of all, the identity of the television. We've let things define who we are. Is it any wonder that there's so much desperation in the nation that has long been considered the capital of progress and prosperity? Is it any wonder that there is a malaise in this country with a psychic sense of decline when we don't feel like we even know who we are anymore, much less who are neighbors and loved ones are?
Who are you?
What has exacerbated the situation for my generation is that we don't know anything practical. I can't take care of myself right now, I lack the ability and knowledge. Our adolescence has become a kind of extended childhood, making us older and older dependents. I do not know the first thing about simply living, and so at the age of 20, nearing 21, I am scrambling to figure out how I can even manage to take care of myself. Oh yeah, I know a lot of things. I had facts and figures crammed into my head, ready to spit out like a living Pez dispenser, but what do I even really know? I forgot about the world outside, having been programmed, and pushed further and further into a box I simply existed in. No wonder Ireland seemed like such a liberating experience for me.
What's going to happen when we further lose our identity in machines? Gatto has some ideas:
"Machines can be stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to the machines they associate with, but men and women must build the meanings of their lives around finding a few, very few, people to touch and love and care for. If you fail in that it doesn't matter how well financed the school you went to was, how healthy the space program is, or how many machines you own--you'll be miserable. If this is so, and I confess it looks that way to me, you'll have to sabotage the global economy to survive as a human being, and you'll have to learn to think for yourself because schools and governments and machine-makers will lie to you about what matters every time."
Bold mine again.
I know my stakes in the matter, and I know what I'm fighting for. I have a better idea of who I am. I know what's right for me. And Gatto was right, it hurt a lot to get here. Friends would occasionally tell me that I would benefit from all of this, and I did. It hurt like hell, it hurt a lot. I was torn apart inside and driven to complete madness. Everytime I thought I was out, I was dragged back into the pit. In the end though, it gave me back who I was, and who I should have been. It had to be done to bring me here, otherwise I would have languished, emotionally crippled and devoid of anymore function in this world. Force of will, love, and compassion have brought me back though, and restored my identity to me. I smile from time to time now.
What I realized about this though is really how stifling the compulsory education system is. My sister picked up, from me, a love of reading and learning, and she's already now starting to see how much she can learn on her own. As we drove back from our grandmother's, she picked up my copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, and I had her take a shot at pronouncing the title. She didn't do too bad with big words like that. She was very curious about it, and so I explained what the words meant. She picked up on that immediately. I told her about the guy who wrote it and she wanted to know why Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag. That's when it really hit me about the schooling bit.
If there weren't people to foster her love of learning, she would have either had to develop that fully on her own or just go through the motions at school. While my parents were supportive and taught me a lot, I had to get my love of learning on my own, and I think my heinous awkwardness and introversion pretty much drove me into that direction (two traits my sister lacks). Most people who have read the things I've written in the past are probably attuned to my thoughts on schooling, so when I say things like schooling teaches dumbness, most people who know me know that those beliefs are part of the package deal you get with me and my wacky radical beliefs. To others though, that's an amazing, and uncivic, notion to put forward.
"Schooling teaches dumbness."
My sister is not gifted. She is not a prodigy, as some may be wont to label her. She's a clever girl who catches on quickly because she lives in an environment that has always fostered independent thought. That's not a unique trait, and that's why I say schooling teaches dumbness. The vast majority of kids can be like my sister and learn like this. But when you have an institution with a rigid structure (even if some of our most creative teachers have been able to bend the structure within their own part of the structure, the structure itself still exists), with set times to learn set things in such a rote manner, you encourage dumbness and a lack of wonder. That system tells children that you learn this at this time, and once the bell rings or once that clock strikes that time, the learning of that is done and you learn this new thing. Schooling has had both benevolent and shady intentions, but that's simply intention. The results we have are simply depressing, and no amount of money being thrown at the problem and no amount of bureaucratic management is going to change that. I don't blame the teachers either. I've known both good and bad teachers, but in the end, they are at the merciless direction of superintendents and bureaucrats, which is a notion that, when I examine it, surprises and disturbs me how much it is tolerated and accepted.
The bit about dumbness has also been an idea that I have played around with a lot in the last four years. Being around highly intelligent and "gifted" students awoke me to a reality of intellectual elitism that is prevalent and even fostered in schools. The sense of superiority is just astounding (and it is something that I have fallen victim to in the past). The way some have talked revealed a deep seated prejudice and patronization towards intellectual "inferiors", and while part of these attitudes are in reaction to a school environment that cherishes jocks and popular people over others, they're still irresponsible attitudes to foster, and it encourages the notion that the dumb are hopeless. There are ignorant people out there, and ignorance is a staple of humanity since we all are struck by it at points in our lives, but our institution has created a class of people that need to be 'managed'. By stifling creativity, independent thought, ingenuity, and complete curiosity (an act which should be anathema to everything this country once stood for), we have taken children and made them a class of dependents, fostered a hierarchy that puts "gifted" students above a whole class who can easily be labeled stupid and dumb; the unwashed masses who can't be trusted (and as a cynic, I can say that while I have heard some very ignorant things come out of the mouths of these people, it often pales in comparison to some of the unbelievable ignorance of what comes out of the mouths and minds of intellectuals and intelligent people). I believe that the human mind is innately curious, but schooling and our culture seems to try to do everything it can to stifle it; it's what they call keeping you in your place.
There's a quote from John Taylor Gatto I have often quoted, and while I knew what he was saying before and agreed with it, it didn't really click with me until I noticed how quickly people can catch on if you encourage them to, or give them the opportunity to. My sister is no prodigy, but when I break down concepts for her and explain them as simply as I can, she gets it. I'm convinced that you can do this with the majority of people. Dumbness, for the most part, is taught, like Gatto said.
"Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
[...]
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
[...]
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn’t taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you’re a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order."
Unfortunately, I don't know if there's really any hope for it all. I've often been insulted for being an idealist, but I know my beliefs will not come to fruition beyond the small sphere of influence I may have. Since I do not follow the path of revolutionaries who want to force change at the barrel of a gun or follow the path of bureaucrats and politicians who want to force their personal ideology and agenda through the force of law, all I can hope for is that my ideas, and the ideas of those who inspired me, catch on. I'm an idealist, but I'm not expecting anything. I've never shied away from being called a radical. The word radical is at its root, the Latin word for root. What I see is what I believe to be the root of major problems that we have. A diseased tree that has its branches pruned may look pretty with some work, but it's still a diseased tree. As long as people are content to try variations of the same, tired solution to an old problem, then the best I can do is point out that it's a bad idea. What is true, what you believe might be true, and what you want to be true are all very different things, and it seems like it's becoming so foggy that they're all starting to blur. The best intentions don't excuse the vilest results.
We're not going to get anywhere if we continue to close off discussion towards anything we don't want to hear, or to ideas we're not familiar with or refuse to even consider. The narrowing of what is acceptable thought is hurting us in the schools and in public discourse. What I believe is only going to seem wackier and wackier as this trend continues (though I think some people are starting to wake up) because it's not acceptable thought. It will be dismissed with a wave of the hand, as well as the opinions of others who have their own take on it that doesn't follow the official line. So, I hope my sister asks me questions about the things I believe, I hope that she continues to be open to hearing other opinions. I hope she listens to what other's have to say and learn from them. I hope her mind continues to be as open as it is.
It's just scary when I consider the institutions. H.L. Mencken once said "Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?"
Who would want to live in an institution? I'm only now just becoming aware of the serious damage institutionalized thinking has caused me. The last three years have been hell for me because I've had to further and further personally isolate myself to numb the pain and understand the damages inside. The cure was never socialization, as some people seem to think it is. Actually, Grace Llewellyn had a good quote for this:
"A healthy social life requires much more than indifferent daily acquaintanceship with three hundred people born the same year you were...[institutional] socialization means bringing an individual under the control of the group. School-style socialization makes a group of people obedient and easily manipulated by peer pressure or "authority"; it makes a nation of idiots who wish they were people on TV since they don't know who they themselves are...As for romance. Affection, intimacy, and passion really are not encouraged to take root in a linoleum room smelling of chalk-dust. A mystery-relationship belongs out in the big mystery-world."
It's been a strange road for me, having gone from being a rabble-rousing firebrand, to a meek and heinously awkward guy who hated himself, to being someone that I think has been humbled enough to principled and committed but not as zealous and more inclined to inquiry. What I realized though, is that through all I've been, the damage that institutionalized thinking caused me was always present.
I should probably clarify though what I mean by institutionalized thinking. I've been in school for as far as I can remember. I was raised to compartmentalize everything. I was raised to know a social order and to believe that only material pursuits or those that advance a career are the only worthwhile things to attain in life. I was taught to believe that this is the way things are, and that the ones who aren't in harmony with the machine are defective. Institutionalized thinking is thinking that causes you to think how do I properly live within an institution. It's the kind of thinking that causes you to believe that your education ends when school is out, that your spiritual life stops the moment you leave the church, that you are your career or that you are your labeled place. It's the kind of thinking that tells you not to think.
That's how damaging it is.
The people I've talked to about it around here, seem to be subconsciously aware of it. It's my own suspicions that our own human nature instinctively rejects it, but when you grow up with it, taught to believe it, accept it, maybe even love it, you start to think that's all there is.
I forgot about the world outside.
Those who caught me mostly in my pessimistic and cynical glory, may be surprised to know that there was a time that I did find a lot of beauty in the world. I had a wonder about things that lost for the last three years. I still had a lot of growing up to then, because I did think I knew everything, but I also had a purpose. I was fighting for something then, and fighting against the damages of my institutional thinking.
It's really astounding, when you sit down to think about it, how often people are proud to not know anything. There's nothing wrong with being a simple person and not being extensively book-learned, I have no problem with that, because I don't think that's ignorance. When I see ignorance, I see it in the person who proudly talks about how they don't like to think. I don't expect us to be a nation of philosophers--I don't even think I would want that--but I think a little more honest discourse is what we need. No one is talking anymore, or rather, people aren't talking about things that really matter, and I don't want to. Getting by with the minimalist effort. In the last part of his book A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto had some interesting things to say about rhetoric and conversations. He talked about the categories of conversation that fill up our daily lives, but how they're ultimately unfulfilling, especially for the younger generations. It was a very interesting point he made, and I think I need to reproduce in its entirety.
"Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, where rhetoric was discarded by the philosophy of the Reformation, many of the young look at this interminable future of elaborate social conversation networks that industrial societies find vital to "business culture" with disgust. There is some fundamental and radical difference between the important talk of youth that makes love, friendship, and significance reasonably easy to reach, and the social conversation of older people, in particular of self-important older people, that makes it apparent these life-and-death qualities are very difficult to obtain in later life.
I hope you'll reread that last idea. It will help you understand why attractive young people in the United States, almost exclusively the sons and daughters of the prosperous, kill themselves in record numbers these days. Teenage suicide, occurring as it does in the classes who have "made it", is mute and powerful testimony to how sterile and inhuman a destination "making it" really can be. When children prefer death to the life of the future as they see it being lived by their fathers, mothers, and family friends, it's time to find the problem not in them but in us."
It breaks my heart, and I do suspect that institutionalized thinking has a lot to blame for it. I need to disagree with Emerson who said that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"; I would have to say that it's complacency that's the hobgoblin of little minds. We're living in a culture that is quickly reaching a cultural singularity where less and less free thinking will be going on, or at least that seems to be to be what's going on. I'll never forget the first work I read by Kierkegaard, and the quote of his that just jumped out at me. "People often demand freedom of speech in place of the freedom of thought they seldom use."
There's nothing quite like the freedom you feel when you feel like you're shaking it off of your back. You begin to feel compassion again, that your senses are no longer dulled, that there's hope and love in the world, beyond the narrow views of what is love that are often presented to us. You start to feel again.
But in the end, who are you?
Who are you?
Gatto has an excellent essay in A Different Kind of Teacher entitled "What Really Matters?" There are truncated versions of it online, but they just lack the punch of the one that was placed in the book.
"Where do you start? First you have to find yourself. There isn't any other way. If you wait on that you'll be buried even deeper in the artificial programs of others. First you have to strip away decades of programming and overlays and discover your own outline beneath it all. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". Until you know that step there won't be any self to know, just a collection of relays and switches, sensors and twitches that can be manipulated by engineers you can't see. On the other hand, if you know what matters and are willing to fight and even die for it, nothing can colonize your mind and you will be truly a free spirit.
All bold emphasis is my own.
I don't know if I've ever known a generation who seems to be lost without an identity more than my own. An entire generation raised to be special and never knowing what makes them supposedly special; no wonder employer's are at a loss at how to handle employees from my generation, a generation raised without a sense of personal identity and raised completely with a sense of dependency. I've seen the excess of it all. When we didn't accept what the television said--I know it to be true because MTV tells me so--we wandered around like little children in the supermarket, all the way up into our teens and beyond. Waiting to be told to stop, waiting to be told when to go. Turn me on, turn me off, because I don't know how to take care of myself. I must know something because my diploma says I do, but why do I feel so lost? I think that about sums up too many people I have known, including myself. I wasn't surprised for a minute to read that my generation doesn't have an appreciation for the effects of violence or that it's the most materialistic and narcissistic generation yet; how could I be surprised when this was exactly how we were raised to be.
How many of us are acting based purely on impulse? What impressed me about that Gatto quote was what I bolded. It hurts to do that. This was once called "knowing yourself". The stakes are high, especially with being at the doorstep of transhumanism, which will only open up a whole new can of identity issues. If it hurts this much now to recapture yourself just for you, to be that person you are and be completely one and at peace with that, then how are we going to survive down the road, when we don't even seem to be sure who we are most of the time? What caught my attention in Gatto's essay was what he wrote about machines. He noted a couple of things, that we communicate and live through machines now, which denies us a large part of our identity. Part of the exhilaration I've felt from feeling like I had my life back again is that I'm starting to see people again, and I'm much more aware that I'm lost in a world of machines. Everything we do now is dependent on machines, and while I'm not a Luddite, we erred in letting them set up our identities for us. Our identity has become supplanted by the identity of the iPod, the identity of the personal computer, and, the worst culprit of all, the identity of the television. We've let things define who we are. Is it any wonder that there's so much desperation in the nation that has long been considered the capital of progress and prosperity? Is it any wonder that there is a malaise in this country with a psychic sense of decline when we don't feel like we even know who we are anymore, much less who are neighbors and loved ones are?
Who are you?
What has exacerbated the situation for my generation is that we don't know anything practical. I can't take care of myself right now, I lack the ability and knowledge. Our adolescence has become a kind of extended childhood, making us older and older dependents. I do not know the first thing about simply living, and so at the age of 20, nearing 21, I am scrambling to figure out how I can even manage to take care of myself. Oh yeah, I know a lot of things. I had facts and figures crammed into my head, ready to spit out like a living Pez dispenser, but what do I even really know? I forgot about the world outside, having been programmed, and pushed further and further into a box I simply existed in. No wonder Ireland seemed like such a liberating experience for me.
What's going to happen when we further lose our identity in machines? Gatto has some ideas:
"Machines can be stored anywhere, can function anywhere, and are indifferent to the machines they associate with, but men and women must build the meanings of their lives around finding a few, very few, people to touch and love and care for. If you fail in that it doesn't matter how well financed the school you went to was, how healthy the space program is, or how many machines you own--you'll be miserable. If this is so, and I confess it looks that way to me, you'll have to sabotage the global economy to survive as a human being, and you'll have to learn to think for yourself because schools and governments and machine-makers will lie to you about what matters every time."
Bold mine again.
I know my stakes in the matter, and I know what I'm fighting for. I have a better idea of who I am. I know what's right for me. And Gatto was right, it hurt a lot to get here. Friends would occasionally tell me that I would benefit from all of this, and I did. It hurt like hell, it hurt a lot. I was torn apart inside and driven to complete madness. Everytime I thought I was out, I was dragged back into the pit. In the end though, it gave me back who I was, and who I should have been. It had to be done to bring me here, otherwise I would have languished, emotionally crippled and devoid of anymore function in this world. Force of will, love, and compassion have brought me back though, and restored my identity to me. I smile from time to time now.
A New Challenger Enters the Arena
Due to writer's block, I haven't written a whole lot on this blog, even though I vowed I would. Another problem is that my upcoming trip to Canada and New England for a week (starting on Sunday) will also resort in me not posting anything, exacerbating the posting situation. All of that is superfluous to this post.
For the few people who read this, and the one or two people who have stumbled here, a new poster has been added to the blogroll of Heartland of Darkness. He doesn't go to a liberal-arts college in the so-called heartland, but he does go to a college and I do know him. His name is Sam, and if he wants to introduce himself proper in anyway, he will, but for now I will introduce him.
His name is Sam.
Anyway.
Sam and I knew each other in high school. He was a grade behind me, but he's two years younger than me due to the fact that he had been bumped up a grade. I first came in contact with Sam through Quiz Bowl (yeah, we were both quiz bowl dorks), where his intelligence was quickly noticed by all. If my memory serves me properly, and it may not, I was still playing on the JV team (where the freshmen and sophomores were relegated to, and I was a sophomore), while Sam the freshman was immediately bumped up to varsity level. It was during my sophomore and junior years that Sam and I became a kind of intellectual rivals with each other, at least when it came to politics. Sam often viewed my beliefs as a bit crazy, and so it went, we debated each other and played Quiz Bowl and often mocked each other in class.
During my junior year was when we were both on the varsity team, and where him and I started to respect and like each other more, greatly due to the fact that we were 2/3s of the team. My junior year didn't yield a lot of varsity quiz bowl players. Normally teams at the very least have four players (the maximum allowed to play at once in the league we played in), but there was only myself, Sam, and our captain Julie; a trio fighting against the odds.
Senior year was when I inherited the title of captain for our varsity team. I got to spend the year leading a rag-tag pack of five other quizbowlers, only one of whom was a senior like me. I might not have been the smartest of the six, but I had to be the stable center and lead all of us on. I also got to prep Sam to take the title of captain for the next year, since I would be gone. I probably failed in this regard and I'm sure Sam just figured it all out on its own, but I like to make up memories of me being a good mentor.
It was also during that year that I was starting to slowly win Sam over to my side. As we debated Frederic Bastiat (he's still a favorite of mine) and laugh along with the inimitable H.L. Mencken, we began to see eye-to-eye much more. Oh, the woe I brought to his parents by radicalizing their son. I just have that effect.
I lost contact with Sam for a while when we were both in college, mostly due to the fact that I went completely crazy and just the general effect of our lives drifting apart from one another, but now we've come in contact with each other again, and I think we've both become surprised at how different the other is. Even though we still find interesting ways to butt heads with each other, we still manage to see eye-to-eye as well.
And that is my terrible introduction for Sam, the other poster at Heartland of Darkness.
For the few people who read this, and the one or two people who have stumbled here, a new poster has been added to the blogroll of Heartland of Darkness. He doesn't go to a liberal-arts college in the so-called heartland, but he does go to a college and I do know him. His name is Sam, and if he wants to introduce himself proper in anyway, he will, but for now I will introduce him.
His name is Sam.
Anyway.
Sam and I knew each other in high school. He was a grade behind me, but he's two years younger than me due to the fact that he had been bumped up a grade. I first came in contact with Sam through Quiz Bowl (yeah, we were both quiz bowl dorks), where his intelligence was quickly noticed by all. If my memory serves me properly, and it may not, I was still playing on the JV team (where the freshmen and sophomores were relegated to, and I was a sophomore), while Sam the freshman was immediately bumped up to varsity level. It was during my sophomore and junior years that Sam and I became a kind of intellectual rivals with each other, at least when it came to politics. Sam often viewed my beliefs as a bit crazy, and so it went, we debated each other and played Quiz Bowl and often mocked each other in class.
During my junior year was when we were both on the varsity team, and where him and I started to respect and like each other more, greatly due to the fact that we were 2/3s of the team. My junior year didn't yield a lot of varsity quiz bowl players. Normally teams at the very least have four players (the maximum allowed to play at once in the league we played in), but there was only myself, Sam, and our captain Julie; a trio fighting against the odds.
Senior year was when I inherited the title of captain for our varsity team. I got to spend the year leading a rag-tag pack of five other quizbowlers, only one of whom was a senior like me. I might not have been the smartest of the six, but I had to be the stable center and lead all of us on. I also got to prep Sam to take the title of captain for the next year, since I would be gone. I probably failed in this regard and I'm sure Sam just figured it all out on its own, but I like to make up memories of me being a good mentor.
It was also during that year that I was starting to slowly win Sam over to my side. As we debated Frederic Bastiat (he's still a favorite of mine) and laugh along with the inimitable H.L. Mencken, we began to see eye-to-eye much more. Oh, the woe I brought to his parents by radicalizing their son. I just have that effect.
I lost contact with Sam for a while when we were both in college, mostly due to the fact that I went completely crazy and just the general effect of our lives drifting apart from one another, but now we've come in contact with each other again, and I think we've both become surprised at how different the other is. Even though we still find interesting ways to butt heads with each other, we still manage to see eye-to-eye as well.
And that is my terrible introduction for Sam, the other poster at Heartland of Darkness.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Mixologist Jesse; Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Drink Until I Can't Feel Anything Anymore
The world is a difficult place to live in sometimes. Or most of the time. Or all the time. Pick your preference, it's all the same to me. When your country feels like it has descended into a collective psychosis, ultimately you feel the urge to go crazy yourself; or drink. People have found other ways to cope, and I applaud them for it, but those two are consistent favorites. I've tasted both myself, and I do enjoy mixing and matching. There's plenty to drive you to that point, such as the recent announcement that Norman Podhoretz has been named Rudy Giuliani's foreign policy adviser. A lot of candidates have been coy about their desire to bomb Iran, but here's a man who has come out and said he wants to bomb Iran, and I guess in that weird "respect your greatest enemy kind of way", you can applaud Podhoretz for saying what others are thinking, as much as it makes you want to reach for a strong drink.
That last sentence right there is what we call a segue, because I'm going to use that to move onto talking about alcoholic drinks, because if there's anything you need when the politicians are turning your trousers brown, it's a strong drink. As Charles Bukowski once said, “So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” So I present ten favorite drinks of mine. They're not ranked in any preference, because I can't even begin to rank them. I've tried many different things before my 21st birthday, which is coming up, and I'm just thankful to have them (as long as I can stomach them).
1. Gin and Tonic
I start things off with an oldie-but-a-goodie. Is there anything more perfect than a well-made gin and tonic? It's a king among summer cocktails, and even with its occasional reputation as an "old person's drink", I can't think of many who have tasted a well-made gin and tonic and have been above drinking it. If you feel you've lived a full life full of purpose and accomplishment, this is the perfect drink to kick off the apocalypse with, as you kick back in your lawn chair and watch two suns in the sunset.
2. Guinness
If you've never had a perfectly poured Guinness in Ireland than you simply don't know what living is. There are those who prefer stronger stouts, but they all lack what Guinness has, and that's the experience of Guinness. You simply cannot replicate it in America and what you can but at the stores will never give you the experience of drinking a Guinness in an Irish pub. Thicker than our piss-poor American beers with a heavenly layer of cream on the top, this is a beer for those who crave something old that is still good in this world of ours that is falling apart.
3. The Bitter Pill
This one is not as well known, and it was one that I discovered on drinksmixer.com, probably the best source for any adventurous mixologist. It's a very simple drink, just mix equal parts Jack Daniels and vodka and mix with Coke. The effect is very interesting, because when mixed properly, the Jack will disguise the vodka, making this beverage quite potent, as my roommate at the time and I found out one night. He observed "you can't even taste the vodka at all" and so on a whim we made these drinks portable and went scouring our liberal-arts campus in search of parties to crash, and by the time we had found one, the Bitter Pill had gone to our heads. The next thing we knew, we had crashed a party in a freshman room, where we entertained the eager-eyed first-years with tales of our college adventures and my roommate's family's tendency for penguin theft. The rest of the night was a flash-forward montage of devious plans, and ended with us waking up in our beds. My roommate wasn't alone in his bed though, and found that he was cuddling a large inflatable banana that we had nabbed at some point during the night.
4. 151 Reasons
151 Reasons is plain and simply a madman's drink. No sane person should be drinking Bacardi 151 in the first place. However, since I'm off on the cusp of madness, I guess I can get away with it at times. I often like to play with the recipe, but the basic recipe is here. The drink was a bit of a hit among my friends at our yearly toga party, and it's existence has become a bit synonymous with me, since I'm really the only one who makes it at the college. I never imagined that orange juice would mix well with any kind of lemon-lime soda, or lemonade, but apparently I was wrong, and when mixed properly it has a kind of tangy taste that really helps with the high-proof of the liquor. Don't expect to really remember anything if you drink more than a single cup of it though. I drank a little too much of it before a pirate themed party in one of the dorms, and the stories revolving around that night have become the stuff of legends.
5. Finlandia
When people ask me what my favorite vodka is (and I do love vodka), the answer I'll most often give is Finlandia. Scratch that, because my favorite vodka is a vodka that for the life of me I can never find (it's called Priviet Vodka, and because of how hard it is to find in my college's area, the vodka has become a bit of a much-desired commodity after I gave it the one-time introduction to the college), so really, my favorite vodka I can find is Finlandia. I love it because it's affordable and it's pretty good as far as vodkas go (if you can't handle drinking vodka straight, than the quality of the vodka really doesn't matter a whole lot in the scheme of things, but I do drink it straight). I also have a strong preference for Finlandia with Lime, which is a couple of dollars cheaper and is infused with my favorite fruit. It's actually been a long time I've had it, and I think in order to celebrate my 21st birthday, I may need to pick up a bottle of it.
6. Arrogant Bastard
I don't think I could do Arrogant Bastard any justice, so I'll let it speak for itself:
"This is an aggressive beer. You probably won't like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appericate an ale of this qualtiy and depth. We would suggest you stick to a safer and more familiar territory-maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it's made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you're mouthing your words as you read this."
It has a high alcohol percentage of 7.2%, traditionally comes in a single 22 oz. bottle, and really, you have to love craft beer to love this strong ale. It is very tasty though, and a wonderful treat after a long week.
7. Cran Vodka
Often times the best drinks are the simplest ones. Cranberry juice and vodka. Simple, to the point. It was actually after trying a cran vodka that I started drinking cranberry juice in the morning. I had an aversion to cranberry juice due to some bad association I had with it, but when I unknowingly tried a cran vodka, the tangy taste of the juice itself won me over. This is an everyman's beverage, something that is cheap and easy to make which anyone can enjoy. This is the drink you drink when the trendiness of our culture reaches ridiculous heights. At the end of the day, you sometimes just need familiarity. Delicious familiarity.
8. Long Island Iced Tea
A classic. I don't know many people who drink them these days, but my father had a pretty humorous story about drinking them when they first became popular. My mother has been a bartender for many years, and she used to know a lot of other bartenders, and when my parents were younger, my father was waiting for my mother at a bar that a friend worked at. The bartender asked my father if he wanted to try a Long Island Iced Tea, and my father did. He drank the first one down and asked for another, telling the bartender to actually put some alcohol in it. My father didn't know anything about Long Island Iced Teas at the time, and after the fourth one, he went to grab his coat, and spent about a minute reaching for it. He hadn't realized that he had gotten drunk on them and had lost all motor skills. My mother had to walk him to the car and drive him home.
9. Tequila Sunrise
I don't even know if I would call this a favorite drink. I hate tequila. I like it in Long Island Iced Teas, but I hate tequila other than that. It's something out of the foulest depths of hell. Somehow though, I became reluctantly fond of tequila sunrises. It's not something I would prefer to drink often. I've found that certain liquors have different effects on me. Wine makes me pensive, gin makes me effervescent, rum and beer make me jovial, vodka is a bit of a wild card and tends to just amplify how I've been feeling the whole day, but tequila makes me very angry. Actually, the only reason it probably made this list is because through it, I've become fond of the tequila sunset. I'm not keen to drink a tequila sunrise until the sun rises, but I do like drinking a tequila sunset when the sun sets on our "new empire in rags" (apologies to New Pornographers).
10. Disgruntled Elf
The last drink is one that my former roommate turned a lot of us onto at the wedding reception for two of our bars. With an open bar at our disposal, he gave to us the Disgruntled Elf. 1 oz. each: Triple Sec, Gin, white Rum, blanco Tequila, 2 oz. of granny smith green apple syrup, and 6 oz. of Sprite. It's a mighty mean drink and it was a hit at the reception. It seems to have the right proportions and it tastes very smooth. The green tint of it also makes it that much more appealing, since it's well-known that color has a strong appeal in what we eat and drink.
Well, after typing all of that, I really want something to drink now.
That last sentence right there is what we call a segue, because I'm going to use that to move onto talking about alcoholic drinks, because if there's anything you need when the politicians are turning your trousers brown, it's a strong drink. As Charles Bukowski once said, “So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” So I present ten favorite drinks of mine. They're not ranked in any preference, because I can't even begin to rank them. I've tried many different things before my 21st birthday, which is coming up, and I'm just thankful to have them (as long as I can stomach them).
1. Gin and Tonic
I start things off with an oldie-but-a-goodie. Is there anything more perfect than a well-made gin and tonic? It's a king among summer cocktails, and even with its occasional reputation as an "old person's drink", I can't think of many who have tasted a well-made gin and tonic and have been above drinking it. If you feel you've lived a full life full of purpose and accomplishment, this is the perfect drink to kick off the apocalypse with, as you kick back in your lawn chair and watch two suns in the sunset.
2. Guinness
If you've never had a perfectly poured Guinness in Ireland than you simply don't know what living is. There are those who prefer stronger stouts, but they all lack what Guinness has, and that's the experience of Guinness. You simply cannot replicate it in America and what you can but at the stores will never give you the experience of drinking a Guinness in an Irish pub. Thicker than our piss-poor American beers with a heavenly layer of cream on the top, this is a beer for those who crave something old that is still good in this world of ours that is falling apart.
3. The Bitter Pill
This one is not as well known, and it was one that I discovered on drinksmixer.com, probably the best source for any adventurous mixologist. It's a very simple drink, just mix equal parts Jack Daniels and vodka and mix with Coke. The effect is very interesting, because when mixed properly, the Jack will disguise the vodka, making this beverage quite potent, as my roommate at the time and I found out one night. He observed "you can't even taste the vodka at all" and so on a whim we made these drinks portable and went scouring our liberal-arts campus in search of parties to crash, and by the time we had found one, the Bitter Pill had gone to our heads. The next thing we knew, we had crashed a party in a freshman room, where we entertained the eager-eyed first-years with tales of our college adventures and my roommate's family's tendency for penguin theft. The rest of the night was a flash-forward montage of devious plans, and ended with us waking up in our beds. My roommate wasn't alone in his bed though, and found that he was cuddling a large inflatable banana that we had nabbed at some point during the night.
4. 151 Reasons
151 Reasons is plain and simply a madman's drink. No sane person should be drinking Bacardi 151 in the first place. However, since I'm off on the cusp of madness, I guess I can get away with it at times. I often like to play with the recipe, but the basic recipe is here. The drink was a bit of a hit among my friends at our yearly toga party, and it's existence has become a bit synonymous with me, since I'm really the only one who makes it at the college. I never imagined that orange juice would mix well with any kind of lemon-lime soda, or lemonade, but apparently I was wrong, and when mixed properly it has a kind of tangy taste that really helps with the high-proof of the liquor. Don't expect to really remember anything if you drink more than a single cup of it though. I drank a little too much of it before a pirate themed party in one of the dorms, and the stories revolving around that night have become the stuff of legends.
5. Finlandia
When people ask me what my favorite vodka is (and I do love vodka), the answer I'll most often give is Finlandia. Scratch that, because my favorite vodka is a vodka that for the life of me I can never find (it's called Priviet Vodka, and because of how hard it is to find in my college's area, the vodka has become a bit of a much-desired commodity after I gave it the one-time introduction to the college), so really, my favorite vodka I can find is Finlandia. I love it because it's affordable and it's pretty good as far as vodkas go (if you can't handle drinking vodka straight, than the quality of the vodka really doesn't matter a whole lot in the scheme of things, but I do drink it straight). I also have a strong preference for Finlandia with Lime, which is a couple of dollars cheaper and is infused with my favorite fruit. It's actually been a long time I've had it, and I think in order to celebrate my 21st birthday, I may need to pick up a bottle of it.
6. Arrogant Bastard
I don't think I could do Arrogant Bastard any justice, so I'll let it speak for itself:
"This is an aggressive beer. You probably won't like it. It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appericate an ale of this qualtiy and depth. We would suggest you stick to a safer and more familiar territory-maybe something with a multi-million dollar ad campaign aimed at convincing you it's made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal. Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better. Perhaps you're mouthing your words as you read this."
It has a high alcohol percentage of 7.2%, traditionally comes in a single 22 oz. bottle, and really, you have to love craft beer to love this strong ale. It is very tasty though, and a wonderful treat after a long week.
7. Cran Vodka
Often times the best drinks are the simplest ones. Cranberry juice and vodka. Simple, to the point. It was actually after trying a cran vodka that I started drinking cranberry juice in the morning. I had an aversion to cranberry juice due to some bad association I had with it, but when I unknowingly tried a cran vodka, the tangy taste of the juice itself won me over. This is an everyman's beverage, something that is cheap and easy to make which anyone can enjoy. This is the drink you drink when the trendiness of our culture reaches ridiculous heights. At the end of the day, you sometimes just need familiarity. Delicious familiarity.
8. Long Island Iced Tea
A classic. I don't know many people who drink them these days, but my father had a pretty humorous story about drinking them when they first became popular. My mother has been a bartender for many years, and she used to know a lot of other bartenders, and when my parents were younger, my father was waiting for my mother at a bar that a friend worked at. The bartender asked my father if he wanted to try a Long Island Iced Tea, and my father did. He drank the first one down and asked for another, telling the bartender to actually put some alcohol in it. My father didn't know anything about Long Island Iced Teas at the time, and after the fourth one, he went to grab his coat, and spent about a minute reaching for it. He hadn't realized that he had gotten drunk on them and had lost all motor skills. My mother had to walk him to the car and drive him home.
9. Tequila Sunrise
I don't even know if I would call this a favorite drink. I hate tequila. I like it in Long Island Iced Teas, but I hate tequila other than that. It's something out of the foulest depths of hell. Somehow though, I became reluctantly fond of tequila sunrises. It's not something I would prefer to drink often. I've found that certain liquors have different effects on me. Wine makes me pensive, gin makes me effervescent, rum and beer make me jovial, vodka is a bit of a wild card and tends to just amplify how I've been feeling the whole day, but tequila makes me very angry. Actually, the only reason it probably made this list is because through it, I've become fond of the tequila sunset. I'm not keen to drink a tequila sunrise until the sun rises, but I do like drinking a tequila sunset when the sun sets on our "new empire in rags" (apologies to New Pornographers).
10. Disgruntled Elf
The last drink is one that my former roommate turned a lot of us onto at the wedding reception for two of our bars. With an open bar at our disposal, he gave to us the Disgruntled Elf. 1 oz. each: Triple Sec, Gin, white Rum, blanco Tequila, 2 oz. of granny smith green apple syrup, and 6 oz. of Sprite. It's a mighty mean drink and it was a hit at the reception. It seems to have the right proportions and it tastes very smooth. The green tint of it also makes it that much more appealing, since it's well-known that color has a strong appeal in what we eat and drink.
Well, after typing all of that, I really want something to drink now.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Strange Talk About Edgar Cayce
My college was founded by the Disciples of Christ, a small Protestant denomination of Christianity that was basically an off-shoot of the Restoration Movement. I could probably do a whole post about that, but that's not what I'm going to write about right now. The Disciples of Christ have given the world some interesting, well, disciples. Some of the well-known people who came out of the Disciples of Christ have been Colonel Sanders, Oscar-winning actress Frances McDormand, and gay bishop Gene Robinson (before he came out and before he became Episcopalian). Also, Ronald Reagan was baptized in the church before he became a Presbyterian later on. There are two disciples though who are much more controversial though. The first is Jim Jones. Yes, that Jim Jones. A lot of people don't know this, but Jim Jones was a minister in the Disciples of Christ, beginning in 1964, and was closely affiliated with the church up to the mass suicide at Jonestown (that embarrassing debacle for the church prompted changes within its structure so that something like that wouldn't happen again).
This post isn't about Jim Jones though, it's about the other controversial disciple; Edgar Cayce. I don't know if this post can even do Edgar Cayce justice. So much has been written on Edgar Cayce, and he has had an enduring influence on the New Age movement, it's difficult to know where to even start. Some view Cayce as a 20th century mystic, while others saw him as a crank. As for what my opinion on him is, I'm pretty much in the "he was a crank" camp, especially since he was the precursor to the odious New Age movements, but he's still a fascinating figure to me regardless.
Some quick biographical information about him. Cayce's early life has little to note. He was born (1877) and raised in Kentucky, was a very devout church-goer and read the Bible every year, all that jazz. Cayce's life changed after he was struck with a pretty bad case of laryngitis, causing him to completely lose the ability to speak. A year later, 1901, a traveling hypnotist attempted to cure Cayce. According to accounts, Cayce's voice returned when he was under a trance but disappeared when he was out of it. After that, a local hypnotist continued to work with Cayce to get his voice to return, which apparently worked, but a peculiarity about the treatment was that in his trance, Cayce used the pronoun "We" instead of "I". Another peculiarity about it was that Cayce could also apparently know the symptoms and cures of other people's ailments when he was under a trance, and so he began to trance heal for free in town. Cayce's fame grew and he started to rely on voluntary donations to support himself and his family as he did his readings.
In 1923, Cayce moved on from simply trance healing to much more weightier topics, and began to delve into reincarnation and people's past lives. From 1925 until his death in 1945, Cayce worked as a professional psychic in Virginia Beach. The reason why that Cayce endures is because of some of the interesting things he predicted and the things he believed. You can find many of those prophecies here, but to sum up, a lot of them were about subjects like Atlantis and the Sphinx, and other paranormal things. Egypt frequently came up with Edgar Cayce, and he believed that records about Atlantis lay somewhere beneath the Sphinx.
Of course, there are the critics.
It's too late though to really delve into the beliefs, predictions, and followers of Edgar Cayce though, so this is a topic I will return to later. Enjoy the night you insomniac Heartlanders.
This post isn't about Jim Jones though, it's about the other controversial disciple; Edgar Cayce. I don't know if this post can even do Edgar Cayce justice. So much has been written on Edgar Cayce, and he has had an enduring influence on the New Age movement, it's difficult to know where to even start. Some view Cayce as a 20th century mystic, while others saw him as a crank. As for what my opinion on him is, I'm pretty much in the "he was a crank" camp, especially since he was the precursor to the odious New Age movements, but he's still a fascinating figure to me regardless.
Some quick biographical information about him. Cayce's early life has little to note. He was born (1877) and raised in Kentucky, was a very devout church-goer and read the Bible every year, all that jazz. Cayce's life changed after he was struck with a pretty bad case of laryngitis, causing him to completely lose the ability to speak. A year later, 1901, a traveling hypnotist attempted to cure Cayce. According to accounts, Cayce's voice returned when he was under a trance but disappeared when he was out of it. After that, a local hypnotist continued to work with Cayce to get his voice to return, which apparently worked, but a peculiarity about the treatment was that in his trance, Cayce used the pronoun "We" instead of "I". Another peculiarity about it was that Cayce could also apparently know the symptoms and cures of other people's ailments when he was under a trance, and so he began to trance heal for free in town. Cayce's fame grew and he started to rely on voluntary donations to support himself and his family as he did his readings.
In 1923, Cayce moved on from simply trance healing to much more weightier topics, and began to delve into reincarnation and people's past lives. From 1925 until his death in 1945, Cayce worked as a professional psychic in Virginia Beach. The reason why that Cayce endures is because of some of the interesting things he predicted and the things he believed. You can find many of those prophecies here, but to sum up, a lot of them were about subjects like Atlantis and the Sphinx, and other paranormal things. Egypt frequently came up with Edgar Cayce, and he believed that records about Atlantis lay somewhere beneath the Sphinx.
Of course, there are the critics.
It's too late though to really delve into the beliefs, predictions, and followers of Edgar Cayce though, so this is a topic I will return to later. Enjoy the night you insomniac Heartlanders.
Nature's Little Monsters: Voodoo Wasps and Zombie Cockroaches
I have a couple of phobias, and one of them is entomophobia, the fear of insects. All insects. Not just spiders (arachnophobia), but any kind of insect or bug, or anything resembling one. Worms too, put them on there. Anything that can be called a bug, or even be incorrectly called a bug but is generally called a bug, I want nothing to do with. They freak me out. I don't like them on me, and I certainly don't like them causing me to wake up by buzzing around my hand when it may or may not be a wasp when I'm busy dreaming important things. Thankfully, that thing I heard about eating spiders while you sleep appears to be a myth, but the thought is unnerving enough.
One part of my hatred of bugs (and my reasons are countless) is that they are simply nature's monsters to me, and I'm not alone in this. Our popular culture is full of evil insects, from the insectoid monsters of Them to Jeff Goldblum. Then, of course, there's T.H. White's analogy between ants and totalitarianism in The Once and Future King and the fact that the Borg were based on and intended to be an insect species. Fiction doesn't hold a candle to fact though, as we've learned time-and-time again, and the darkest parts of human creativity can't compete with nature's.
Possibly vying with the candiru (it's not a myth that it can swim up your urethra, making it the most terrifying fish I have ever heard of) in scariness in concept, is the Emerald cockroach wasp. The short version is this: the wasp preys on cockroaches, makes them into zombies, and plants their eggs in them until their little wasplings burst out of the cockroach in nature's reenactment of Ridley Scott's Alien.
The longer version is that the wasp stings a cockroach and paralyzes it, and then does it's own little form of neurosurgery, rendering the cockroach into its own personal slave. The cockroach's willpower and defense mechanisms are destroyed, allowing the wasp to do whatever it pleases to it. Since the wasp cannot carry a cockroach, it uses the wasps antennas to steer the cockroach to the wasp's little lair; like I said, zombie cockroaches. The funny doesn't end there though, because the wasp plants its egg inside the roach, and when that egg hatches, that larva will feast on the cockroach's innards for the next four weeks, feasting and burrowing its way out. When it's time, a full-grown wasp bursts out of the cockroach, and the cycle of life begins again.
Nature is a very scary place.
You can go here for a more thorough look at the Emerald cockroach wasp, complete with pictures.
Well, there goes my ability to sleep without fear of nightmares tonight.
One part of my hatred of bugs (and my reasons are countless) is that they are simply nature's monsters to me, and I'm not alone in this. Our popular culture is full of evil insects, from the insectoid monsters of Them to Jeff Goldblum. Then, of course, there's T.H. White's analogy between ants and totalitarianism in The Once and Future King and the fact that the Borg were based on and intended to be an insect species. Fiction doesn't hold a candle to fact though, as we've learned time-and-time again, and the darkest parts of human creativity can't compete with nature's.
Possibly vying with the candiru (it's not a myth that it can swim up your urethra, making it the most terrifying fish I have ever heard of) in scariness in concept, is the Emerald cockroach wasp. The short version is this: the wasp preys on cockroaches, makes them into zombies, and plants their eggs in them until their little wasplings burst out of the cockroach in nature's reenactment of Ridley Scott's Alien.
The longer version is that the wasp stings a cockroach and paralyzes it, and then does it's own little form of neurosurgery, rendering the cockroach into its own personal slave. The cockroach's willpower and defense mechanisms are destroyed, allowing the wasp to do whatever it pleases to it. Since the wasp cannot carry a cockroach, it uses the wasps antennas to steer the cockroach to the wasp's little lair; like I said, zombie cockroaches. The funny doesn't end there though, because the wasp plants its egg inside the roach, and when that egg hatches, that larva will feast on the cockroach's innards for the next four weeks, feasting and burrowing its way out. When it's time, a full-grown wasp bursts out of the cockroach, and the cycle of life begins again.
Nature is a very scary place.
You can go here for a more thorough look at the Emerald cockroach wasp, complete with pictures.
Well, there goes my ability to sleep without fear of nightmares tonight.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
People You've Probably Never Heard Of: The Dark World of Emil Cioran
"Tell me, do you just like and do different things just for the sake of being different?"
A neighbor of mine asked me that recently, baffled by the fact that I disagreed with just about everything they said and believed and said things they had never even heard of before. I don't know what it is, other that that it is. There might be some element of truth to it though, since I do like to search out anything obscure and unique. It's not that I think it will make fashionable or trendy, or that I'm indie-than-thou, there's just something refreshing I find about anyone forged their own path, whether or not I agree with them. So, it seems only appropriate to start a new series on this blog, entitled People You've Probably Never Heard Of.
"Society is not a disease, it is a disaster. What a stupid miracle that one can live in it."
In this first installment of People You've Probably Never Heard Of, I present the curious figure of Emil Cioran. If pessimism had a patron saint, Cioran would be it. The Romanian-turned-Frenchman philosopher lived a long life, living into his 80's and dying in the 1990's, while churning out a kind of poetic philosophy that made Schopenhauer look like a sunflower.
"A self-respecting man is a man without a country. A fatherland is birdlime..."
Emil Cioran was born in 1911 in Răşinari, Romania, a small town in the Transylvanian region. His parents were Emilian and Elvira. Emilian Cioran was a Romanian Orthodox priest, as had been many men in the Cioran line. The family later moved to Sibiu, where Emil began to learn the German language and develop the love of language that he would have later on in life.
Even as a kid, and later on as a teen, Cioran seemed to have a very morbid personality. When he was a child in Răşinari, he would entertain himself by playing with skulls in the cemetery, and when he was a teenager, he began to obsess over the morbid aspects of the religious life he had been brought up in. It was around that time that he lost his faith, though he never stopped obsessing over the idea of faith Christianity.
Cioran attended University of Bucharest, where he became close and lifelong friends with the lesser-known Mircea Eliade and the more widely-known Eugene Ionesco. In his more youthful days, Cioran had some sympathies with the ultra-nationalist Iron Guard, though those sympathies appear to have been short-lived. After he graduated from Bucharest, he began to study philosophy in Berlin. It was during this time though that Cioran became incredibly disillusioned with the world and with academic philosophy. His outlook began to become so bleak that his mother told him that if she knew he would be that unhappy, she would have just aborted him.
After a little bit of teaching, Cioran moved to Paris and eked out a living from translating and reading, as well as the charity of other Romanian expatriates living in the city. He also wrote and published several books of his pessimistic philosophy, often wrote in the form of aphorisms, which had become a favorite of Cioran's (and his way of merging the philosopher and the poet).
"Paradise was unendurable, otherwise the first man would have adapted to it; this world is no less so, since here we regret paradise or anticipate another one. What to do? where to go? Do nothing and go nowhere, easy enough."
What does one make of Emil Cioran? It's hard to say. I've read some of his works, and it's almost breathtaking in the bleakness of how he sees the world. He has boiled down everything that was wrong with the 20th century and created a personal philosophy that not only destroyed taboos, but was almost Lovecraftian in its negative scope of living and humanity. Cioran wasn't simply in existential despair, since to despair implies that it's supposed to be another way when it isn't, because he saw the world in terms of not only was it dark and brutal, but it was destined and made to be that way.
His works aren't the kind you're likely to walk into the bookstore and find, so he remains mostly relegated as an intellectual curiosity for those who don't exactly walk on the sunny side of the street.
For further reading:
Little Blue Light
Wikipedia
Spike Magazine
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
I Don't Even Know If I'm Lying
I can't seem to write lately, I seem tapped out, though I know I shouldn't be. I have some kind of skin problem, with some kind of lesions on the side of my body. I thought they were pimples at first, but they've been there too long. I want to write, but I don't have time to write. I'm just wasting time (wasting time wasting time wasting time wasting time...)
I haven't felt right in some time. I'm having trouble keeping it together.
I'm suffering from existential despair. I keep dreaming of a different life, a life far from here that would be so much better. I keep fantasizing of the different person I would be and the friends I would have. I like myself in these false memories. It may just be that I don't fit in with college students at all. I am not spiritually a part of that desired market, the Dane Cook generation, the Family Guy generation, the Quotable Pop Culture generation.
I've been reading Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett; this is my pleasure reading. Writing on Kierkegaard's philosophy, Barrett says: "Despair is the sickness unto death, the sickness in which we long to die but cannot die; thus, it is the extreme emotion in which we seek to escape from ourselves, and it is precisely this latter aspect of despair that makes it such a powerful revelation of what it means to exists as a human individual. We are all in despair, consciously or unconsciously, according to Kierkegaard, and ever means we have of coping with this despair, short of religion, is either unsuccessful or demoniacal. Kierkegaard advances two general principles that are in advance of nearly all current psychologies: (1) Despair is never ultimately over the external object but always over ourselves. A girl loses her sweetheart, and falls into despair; it is not over the lost sweetheart that she despairs, but over herself-without-the-sweetheart: that is, she can no longer escape from herself into the thought or person of the beloved. And so on, for all cases of loss, whether it be money, power, or social rank. The unbearable loss is not really in itself unbearable; what we cannot bear is that in being stripped of an external object we stand denuded and see the intolerable abyss of the self yawn at our feet. (2) The conditions we call a sickness in certain people is, at its center, a form of sinfulness. We are in habit nowadays of labeling morally deficient people as sick, mentally sick, or neurotic. This is true if we look at the neurotic from outside: his neurosis is indeed a sickness, for it prevents him from functioning as he should, either totally or in some particular area of life. But the closer we get to any neurotic the more we are assailed by the sheer human perverseness, the willfulness, of his attitude. If he is a friend, we can up to a point deal with as an object who does not function well, but only up to a point; beyond that if a personal relation exists between us we have to deal with him as a subject, and as such we must find him morally perverse or willfully disagreeable; and we have to make these moral judgments to his face if the friendship is to retain its human content, and not disappear intoa purely clinical relation. At the center of the sickness of the psyche is a sickness of the spirit."
Bolded emphasis is my own.
It may be that it is precisely because I'm neurotic that people here will not deal with me, or fear to deal with me. Of course, there are the empty platitudes of "I'm always here to listen", but even on the occasions that this is true, simply listening is not sufficient. I see so few people actually understanding, or telling me anything that isn't simply grasping for easy answers. I am finding college to be the constant regurgitation of mass media information and repeated slogans, and so little independent and serious thought.
I want to be able to talk again. I'm so silent now because I have nothing to contribute anymore, and when I do open my mouth to talk, I don't feel like I'm really talking.
I am an English major. My relationships with other English majors is often tenuous. Some consider me a hero for the way I stand up to pompous windbags who are obviously more critic than writer (all seeking to be the next Edmund Wilson. Then of course, some of the stars of the English department also can't stand me, or will begrudge me for my philosophies beliefs. Case in point of one girl who was going to try and take me to task for admitting that I was an existentialist during class one time, but was too drunk to put together a coherent sentence.
It would just be nice to have a meaningful conversation again.
The criminally under-appreciated band Too Much Joy. The deeper meaning of quite a few of their songs were often lost in the juvenile humor they would often mask themselves with, but now that their entire catalog is online, it is much easier to see they were too smart for their own good. Their most sincere song, "Half Life", off of their album finally... (but played much better and with more heart on their superb live album Live at Least), is the perfect song for despair in an existentially unsure modern age and the loneliness and isolation that many of us feel. I quoted the song before for my end of post quote, so this time for the end of the post, I would like to post the song's entire lyrics.
There is no space
For what you need to know
I'm the forms that I must fill out.
I'm happiest alone
I'm miserable that way
All this stuff just wants to spill out.
I take pleasure
in the simple things
I love my headphones
and my wedding ring
Are you talking to me now or reading from a script?
What's that supposed to mean you say you wanna be yourself?
I don't think you really know just who the hell that is.
You spend half your life
pretending you're like everybody else.
(like everybody else)
I tell the same joke
many different ways
but you never seem to get it.
You're jerking off
to catalogs
don't you feel a bit pathetic?
You spend half your life remembering your life when you were young
half your life dreaming how much better life can get
well everytime you make a choice, hey half your life is gone
All you've got's a few good dreams
divided into many small regrets.
(like everybody else)
I never take any pictures
just try to remember
all I remember is trying.
Here's a story I like
I think it happened to me
I don't even know
if I'm lying
if I'm lying
if I'm lying
Are you talking to me now or reading from a script?
What's that supposed to mean you say you wanna be yourself?
Well I don't think you really know just who the hell that is
No I don't think you have a clue just who the hell that is
So what's your half life?
So what's your half life?
So what's your half-life?
So what's your half life?
You spend half your life
pretending you're like everybody else.
I haven't felt right in some time. I'm having trouble keeping it together.
I'm suffering from existential despair. I keep dreaming of a different life, a life far from here that would be so much better. I keep fantasizing of the different person I would be and the friends I would have. I like myself in these false memories. It may just be that I don't fit in with college students at all. I am not spiritually a part of that desired market, the Dane Cook generation, the Family Guy generation, the Quotable Pop Culture generation.
I've been reading Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy by William Barrett; this is my pleasure reading. Writing on Kierkegaard's philosophy, Barrett says: "Despair is the sickness unto death, the sickness in which we long to die but cannot die; thus, it is the extreme emotion in which we seek to escape from ourselves, and it is precisely this latter aspect of despair that makes it such a powerful revelation of what it means to exists as a human individual. We are all in despair, consciously or unconsciously, according to Kierkegaard, and ever means we have of coping with this despair, short of religion, is either unsuccessful or demoniacal. Kierkegaard advances two general principles that are in advance of nearly all current psychologies: (1) Despair is never ultimately over the external object but always over ourselves. A girl loses her sweetheart, and falls into despair; it is not over the lost sweetheart that she despairs, but over herself-without-the-sweetheart: that is, she can no longer escape from herself into the thought or person of the beloved. And so on, for all cases of loss, whether it be money, power, or social rank. The unbearable loss is not really in itself unbearable; what we cannot bear is that in being stripped of an external object we stand denuded and see the intolerable abyss of the self yawn at our feet. (2) The conditions we call a sickness in certain people is, at its center, a form of sinfulness. We are in habit nowadays of labeling morally deficient people as sick, mentally sick, or neurotic. This is true if we look at the neurotic from outside: his neurosis is indeed a sickness, for it prevents him from functioning as he should, either totally or in some particular area of life. But the closer we get to any neurotic the more we are assailed by the sheer human perverseness, the willfulness, of his attitude. If he is a friend, we can up to a point deal with as an object who does not function well, but only up to a point; beyond that if a personal relation exists between us we have to deal with him as a subject, and as such we must find him morally perverse or willfully disagreeable; and we have to make these moral judgments to his face if the friendship is to retain its human content, and not disappear intoa purely clinical relation. At the center of the sickness of the psyche is a sickness of the spirit."
Bolded emphasis is my own.
It may be that it is precisely because I'm neurotic that people here will not deal with me, or fear to deal with me. Of course, there are the empty platitudes of "I'm always here to listen", but even on the occasions that this is true, simply listening is not sufficient. I see so few people actually understanding, or telling me anything that isn't simply grasping for easy answers. I am finding college to be the constant regurgitation of mass media information and repeated slogans, and so little independent and serious thought.
I want to be able to talk again. I'm so silent now because I have nothing to contribute anymore, and when I do open my mouth to talk, I don't feel like I'm really talking.
I am an English major. My relationships with other English majors is often tenuous. Some consider me a hero for the way I stand up to pompous windbags who are obviously more critic than writer (all seeking to be the next Edmund Wilson. Then of course, some of the stars of the English department also can't stand me, or will begrudge me for my philosophies beliefs. Case in point of one girl who was going to try and take me to task for admitting that I was an existentialist during class one time, but was too drunk to put together a coherent sentence.
It would just be nice to have a meaningful conversation again.
The criminally under-appreciated band Too Much Joy. The deeper meaning of quite a few of their songs were often lost in the juvenile humor they would often mask themselves with, but now that their entire catalog is online, it is much easier to see they were too smart for their own good. Their most sincere song, "Half Life", off of their album finally... (but played much better and with more heart on their superb live album Live at Least), is the perfect song for despair in an existentially unsure modern age and the loneliness and isolation that many of us feel. I quoted the song before for my end of post quote, so this time for the end of the post, I would like to post the song's entire lyrics.
There is no space
For what you need to know
I'm the forms that I must fill out.
I'm happiest alone
I'm miserable that way
All this stuff just wants to spill out.
I take pleasure
in the simple things
I love my headphones
and my wedding ring
Are you talking to me now or reading from a script?
What's that supposed to mean you say you wanna be yourself?
I don't think you really know just who the hell that is.
You spend half your life
pretending you're like everybody else.
(like everybody else)
I tell the same joke
many different ways
but you never seem to get it.
You're jerking off
to catalogs
don't you feel a bit pathetic?
You spend half your life remembering your life when you were young
half your life dreaming how much better life can get
well everytime you make a choice, hey half your life is gone
All you've got's a few good dreams
divided into many small regrets.
(like everybody else)
I never take any pictures
just try to remember
all I remember is trying.
Here's a story I like
I think it happened to me
I don't even know
if I'm lying
if I'm lying
if I'm lying
Are you talking to me now or reading from a script?
What's that supposed to mean you say you wanna be yourself?
Well I don't think you really know just who the hell that is
No I don't think you have a clue just who the hell that is
So what's your half life?
So what's your half life?
So what's your half-life?
So what's your half life?
You spend half your life
pretending you're like everybody else.
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