Month: September 2009

I Must Not be a Serious Blogger

On the Typepad start-up page, there is the following come-on:

Are You a Serious Blogger? Prove it. Put ads on your blog to get paid for your hard work and give it a more professional look.

The underlying assumption is curious:  an activity is serious if it makes make money and because it makes money; the very same activity is unserious if it does not.  I expand on this theme in Work, Money, Living and Livelihood.  You will have guessed that I reject the assumption.

Not that I have anything against money or its (ordinate) pursuit.  Nor do I have anything against economic inequality. If your talent and hard work and good fortune have led you by legal means to a net worth  thousands of times greater than mine, then I salute you.  The notion that a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution is a socialist abomination and of late an 'Obamination.'   I fail to see any good reason to accept John Rawl's Difference Principle, the thesis that socioeconomic inequalities are justified only if they make the worse off better off than they would have been without the inequalities.  There is no problem with economic inequality as such. 'Economic justice' is a junk phrase on a par with 'social justice.'

So my objection to the above assumption does not stem from any aversion to the lean green or its unequal distribution.  What I object to is a conceit found as much on the Left as on the Right, namely, that 'seriousness' and 'success' are spelled with dollar signs, that the only value is economic value.

Finally, the notion that ads give a blog a more professional look is absurd.  They are just so much distracting clutter.  And if they move,  it is even worse.  Ads are gimmicks to turn a buck; they make a site appear less professional and less serious.

A Method of Study

From a reader:

I have a few questions, they're very practical in nature. I was hoping if you could give me a brief outline of your method of study  and how  you read books? How do you keep track of such a vast amount of resources? I'm on information overload because, well, I'm a 21st century twenty-something who likes to read blogs, books etc.

Anyway, I enjoy your blog. Hope you can help! Thanks.

A great deal could be said on this topic. Here are a few thoughts that may be helpful. Test them against your own experience.

Continue reading “A Method of Study”

Is Glenn Beck Good for Conservatism?

Glenn Beck is doing good work and he is effective.  Van Jones is out and ACORN has been defunded.  But Beck can exaggerate and misrespresent as in his attack on Cass Sunstein.  So is he a liability to the conservative cause as, I have maintained, Ann Coulter is?  David Frum and David Horowitz discuss the question here.  Excerpts from Horowitz directed at Frum:

. . . there are conservatives – you are one, David Brooks is another — who think that if everyone on our team only behaved better, there would be no targets for the neo-Stalinist left to attack. Not a chance. If they were able to demonize George Bush as a liar, a murderer, an idiot, and a religious nut they can do that to anyone. So-called liberals have shown themselves to be shameless, unprincipled, bigoted, intolerant and determined to personally destroy any conservative whom they consider to be politically effective and therefore dangerous to their agendas. That’s where we really differ. If you understood this or believed it, you would not attack a Glenn Beck in the scorched-earth manner in which you did.  

[. . .]

In fact, this is an exemplary case of exactly what I think is wrong with the conservative movement in contrast to what you think. Franken is now a U.S. Senator in part because conservatives of whom you are typical want to conduct politics by the Marquis of Queensberry rules when the other side is in it as war in which destruction of the enemy is the game. Franken calls us evil. You call him mistaken (and unfunny). And you want other conservatives to do the same. The more conservatives who follow your advice the more we will lose. Personally, I am thrilled with what is happening now in the conservative movement – our aggressive media like Fox and talk radio, the emergence of enraged conservative masses – the tea baggers – as leftist half-wits like to dismiss them. It is this energized, unapologetic, in-your-face (but also civilized and intelligent) conservative base on whom the future not only of the movement but the country depends.

Ronald Radosh, another red diaper baby who saw the light — I highly recommend his Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left –  weighs in here. 

Deformation by Experience

Thought aspires to objectivity and universality, but it must struggle against the brute onesidedness of experience. We are so impressed by our particular experiences that argument against them will usually prove unavailing. Our experiences form us and deform us.

I once knew a white woman who disliked blacks. I inquired why. She explained that she had grown up in a neighborhood with a lot of blacks, and that the black kids routinely harrassed her and her friends on their way to school. My arguments in mitigation of her generalized prejudice were of course unavailing in the teeth of her experiences.

Just as you can't argue against a man's sensibility, you can't argue against his exeriences. He knows what he's seen, what he's felt, what he's suffered. Argumentative abstraction is just so much gossamer by comparison.

This is a general rule admitting of exceptions. The vividness of the experiences is no match for the faint murmurings of sweet reason. We are formed by our experiences but also deformed by them.

We are made of crooked timber, and the warping of experience adds the final rude touch.

On Writing Well: The Example of William James

From the mail bag:

I've recently discovered your weblog and have enjoyed combing through its archives these past several days. Your writing is remarkably lucid and straightforward — quite a rarity both in philosophy and on the web these days. I was wondering if perhaps you had any advice to share for a young person, such as myself, on the subject of writing well.

To write well, read well. Read good books, which are often, but not always, old books. If you carefully read, say, William James' Varieties of Religious Experience, you will learn something of the expository potential of the English language from a master of thought and expression. If time is short, study one of his popular essays such as "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life."  Here is a characteristic paragraph:

Continue reading “On Writing Well: The Example of William James”

The Meno Paradox and the Difference Between Paradoxes and Arguments

S. C. e-mails:

I stumbled onto a question in my studies today that I am not sure how to resolve and you seem like just the person to ask. The question is this: what, exactly, makes a paradox different from a regular old argument? Consider: we tend to call paradoxes those arguments which seem sound and yet whose conclusions we are not inclined to accept. Hence, what one of my professors calls Meno’s Paradox is not a paradox in Meno’s eyes. For him it’s simply an argument that shows we can’t come to know things.  I think the same can be said for Zeno’s paradoxes. Zeno was not trying to conclude with contradictions for us to be puzzled over—he was trying to give reductio ad absurdum arguments against motion and time. If Zeno was right about time and motion then none of his arguments are paradoxes any more than the problem of evil is a paradox for the atheist. It seems to me that the only thing that makes a paradox a paradox is that the consumer is unwilling to accept its conclusion (or has independent reason to think the conclusion must be wrong). Am I missing something here?

What is the difference between a paradox and an argument?  An excellent question the answer to which depends on how 'paradox' and 'argument' are defined.  Following Nicholas Rescher, I would define a paradox as a set of individually plausible but collectively inconsistent propositions.   Meno's paradox, also known as the paradox of inquiry, is an example.  It can be cast in the form of the following aporetic tetrad:

Continue reading “The Meno Paradox and the Difference Between Paradoxes and Arguments”

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mary Travers

Peter-paul-mary-670-l

Mary Travers of the popular 1960's folk trio "Peter, Paul and Mary" passed away on Wednesday, from leukemia, at age 72.  Travers and Co. did perhaps as much as anyone to popularize the songs of the young Bob Dylan.  The best known of them is 'Blowin' in the Wind," which became an anthem of the civil rights movement. 

Here it is in a 1966 live performance.

Unlike Travers and Joan Baez, who knew how to make Dylan's songs sound beautiful — as witness this version of "Farewell Angelina" — Dylan soon distanced himself from the politics of the Left as he 'explains' in "My Back Pages" an electrified and electrifying version of which is here. "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

It would be a mistake to think that the Left owns Dylan.  The case for Dylan as conservative is argued at RightWingBob.com.

Though the news accounts don't mention it, Mary Travers was a red diaper baby.  Here is another red diaper baby, David Horowitz, on Travers and her fellow travelers:

At a Freedom Forum conference on 1968, Life magazine editor and former Sixties activist Robert Friedman claimed that most student protestors were not simply trying to avoid the draft (a thesis I have elsewhere maintained), but were "motivated by something beyond that was weighing on us." Folksinger (and former Sixties activist) Mary Travers explained the "something" as idealism. Then she said this:

"I think sometimes that that was the last generation who believed in the American dream and its myths. These kids had gotten involved in the civil-rights movement and they were on the side of the angels, they were going to make America the country that it’s always said it was."

Referring to oneself in the third person is a characteristic evasion, but it is only the beginning of the bullshit. Come off it Mary. Your diapers were red. Your father was a hack novelist for the Communist Party, USA. When other kids were going to Frank Sinatra concerts you were headed for the Party’s annual May Day parade to march against the Wall Street war-mongers and to show your solidarity with the peace-loving commissars of the Soviet police state and their beneficent leader Joe Stalin. In the Sixties, you didn’t believe in the American dream. You lusted after the vision of a Communist utopia, mid-wived by armies of bearded guerrillas or carried on the wings of a MIG-21. Why all the liberal fol-de-rol? Why can’t you just tell it like it was?

Although the music of the 1960's was great, the idealism was much of it tainted and misdirected.  Some sober reflection on what really 'went down' during those heady years is a salutary counterbalance to the misty-eyed nostalgia we '60s veterans are wont to indulge in as our heroes fall one by one into oblivion.

Rorty’s Definition of ‘Relativism’ and its Illiberal Consequences

Richard Rorty's writings put me off for several reasons, not the least of which is the way he distorts issues and definitions for his own benefit. The man is obviously a relativist as anyone can see, but he doesn't want to accept that label. So what does he do? He redefines the term so that it applies to no one:

"Relativism" is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps about any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinions on an important topic are equally good. The philosophers who get called "relativists" are those who say that the grounds for choosing between such opinions are less algorithmic than had been thought.

[. . .]

So the real issue is not between people who think that one view is as good as another and people who do not. It is between those think our culture, or purposes, or intuitions, cannot be supported except conversationally, and people who still hope for other sorts of support. (Consequences of Pragmatism, U. of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 166-167.)

Continue reading “Rorty’s Definition of ‘Relativism’ and its Illiberal Consequences”

Does He Lie?

A fine piece by Charles Krauthammer.  Excerpt:

And then there's the famous contretemps about health insurance for illegal immigrants. Obama said they would not be insured. Well, all four committee-passed bills in Congress allow illegal immigrants to take part in the proposed Health Insurance Exchange.

But more importantly, the problem is that laws are not self-enforcing. If they were, we'd have no illegal immigrants because, as I understand it, it's illegal to enter the United States illegally. We have laws against burglary, too. But we also provide for cops and jails on the assumption that most burglars don't voluntarily turn themselves in.

When Republicans proposed requiring proof of citizenship, the Democrats twice voted that down in committee. Indeed, after Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" shout-out, the Senate Finance Committee revisited the language of its bill to prevent illegal immigrants from getting any federal benefits. Why would the Finance Committee fix a nonexistent problem?

‘He’s Only Reading’

This just over the transom from Londiniensis:

Your last post puts me in mind of the hoary old story of the timid student hovering outside his tutor’s door not knowing whether to knock and disturb the great man.  At that moment one of the college servants walks past: “Oh, it’s all right dear, you can go in. The professor’s not doing anything, he’s only reading”.

Ambivalence towards reading and other activities in the life of the mind reflects the fact that we are embodied spirits.  As spirits, we dream and imagine, think and question, doubt and despair.  We ask what is real and what is not.  It is no surprise, then, that we question the reality and importance of reading and writing and study when these activities are not geared to what is immediate and utilitarian such as the earning of money.  Our doubts are fueled in no small measure by the lethargy and hebetude of the body with its oppressive presence and incessant demands.  The spectator of all time and existence, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Plato's Republic, should  fully expect to be deemed  one who is 'not really doing anything' by the denizens of the Cave.

The bias against the spirit is reflected in the phrase 'gainful employment.'  What is intended is pecuniary gain, as if there is no other kind.  The bias, however, is not without  its justification, as we are embodied beings subject to all the vicissitudes and debilities of material beings generally.

Companion post:  Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood

Books and Reality and Books

I am as confirmed a bibliophile as I am a scribbler. But books and bookishness can appear in an unfavorable light. I may call myself a bibliophile, but others will say 'bookworm.' My mother, seeing me reading, more than once recommended that I go outside and do something. What the old lady didn't appreciate was that mine was a higher doing, and that I was preparing myself to live by my wits and avoid grunt jobs, which is what I succeeded in doing.

All things human are ambiguous and so it is with books and bookishness by which I mean their reading, writing, buying, selling, trading, admiring, collecting, cataloging, treasuring, fingering, storing, and protecting. Verbiage, endless verbiage! Dusty tomes and dry paper from floor to ceiling! Whether written or spoken, words appear at one or more removes from reality, assuming one knows what that is.

But what exactly is it, and where is it to be found? In raw sensation? In thoughtless action? In contemplative inaction? In amoral animal vitality? In the fool's paradise of travel? In the diaspora of entertainment and amusement? In the piling up of consumer goods? In finite competitive selfhood? In the quest for name and fame? Is it to be found at all, or rather made? Is it to be discovered or decided?

It appears that we are back to our 'unreal' questions about reality and the real, questions that are asked and answered at the level of thought and written about in books, books, and more books . . . .