Category: Manners and Mores

Social Distance and Good Relations

Social distance aids in the preservation of good relations with people. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, disrespect. In the famiglia, especially. Conventional usages, phony and formulaic as they often are, have their uses. They allow for civil interaction while preserving distance. "Good morning." "After you, sir." We all want respect even while aware of how little we deserve it and how insincere are those who show it.

A figure from Schopenhauer comes to mind. We are like porcupines on a cold night. They come together to stay warm but then prick one another and move apart. Trial and error leads to the optimal spatial adjustment.

The art of life, with its trials and errors, is learned by living, and learned best by living long. 

Why Typos Don’t Matter Much and the Musical Watershed of the ‘Fifties

This is a re-post from 21 September 2011. I dust it off in dedication to my friend Dr. Vito Caiati, historian and old-school scholar who is excessively worried about typographical errors in his missives to me. He is not alone; he has recently been joined by long-time blogger buddy Tony Flood who shares Vito's worry. I forebear to mention still others. We scholarly types are punctilious, and rightly so; but this here's a blog, and a dedicated blogger maintains a pace that allows for stumbles and falls.

Don't get me wrong: love and respect for our alma mater,  our dear mother, the English language, mistress and muse, enabler of our thoughts, demands that we try to avoid errors typographical and otherwise. But let's not obsess over them.

Transmission of sense is the name of the game, and if that has occurred, then communication has taken place.

…………………………..

An old friend from college, who has a Masters in English, regularly sends me stuff like this which I have no trouble understanding:

 

Continue reading “Why Typos Don’t Matter Much and the Musical Watershed of the ‘Fifties”

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

Top o' the Stack.

Related: Our Little Barbarians. Excerpts:

Recently, an establishment called Nettie's House of Spaghetti in New Jersey announced they will no longer allow children under 10 to dine at their restaurant.

The move caused controversy, with some respondents applauding the policy and others accusing Nettie’s staff of being “child haters.” But the top commenter at MSN.com summed the issue up succinctly:

“We don't hate your kids,” she wrote. “We hate your parenting.”

[. . .]

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” Benjamin Franklin observed. “As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Failing to recognize this truth is deadly. President Ronald Reagan once warned that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction”; focusing on freedom, however, as so many today do exclusively, is to put the cart before the horse. For Reagan’s statement is only true insofar as virtue is never more than one generation away from extinction.

[. . .]

Ancient Greek philosopher Plato spoke about this when saying that a child should ideally be raised in an atmosphere of nobility and grace (i.e., our modern culture’s antithesis) so that he can develop an “erotic” — as in emotional, not sexual — attachment to virtue. Once accomplished, he’ll be more likely to accept the dictates of reason upon reaching the age of reason.

Would it kill the writer to insert a parenthetical reference to the passage in Plato where the philosopher makes the claim attributed to him?  More importantly, 'erotic' in a Platonic context, while it does not mean sexual, is not well glossed as 'emotional.' 'Aspirational' would be much better. Eros is the love of the lower for the higher, the love by one who lacks for that which he lacks. Socrates' love of wisdom is erotic or rather 'erothetic': God's love of Socrates is agape, the love of the higher for the lower, a love predicated on fullness.  The love of friends who are equals is philia.  Each of these three different forms of love is different from sexual love, if you want to call sex love.

[. . .]

So take heed, because the brats running around in restaurants today will be running, and ruining, the country tomorrow — and those who’ve not mastered themselves will be mastered by tyrants.

The truth of the first independent clause is exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That this narcissistic tweeting twit, this know-nothing, this overgrown teenage girl can be elected (twice) to  the Congress of the greatest nation that has ever existed presages the soon-to-occur fall of said nation.  I predict that it will occur before the Earth is rendered uninhabitable by 'climate change' including the "boiling oceans" Al Gore warned us about recently at Davos, Switzerland, a country with enforced borders.

"But she was elected by the people!" True, assuming no electoral 'irregularities' (to put it euphemistically); but a democracy in which the people lack the virtue to vote wisely is no better than a monarchy  and in many cases far worse. 

Here you will find the latest moronic outburst by the tweeting twit.

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.
 
Impersonality in the minimalist style typically takes the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.
 
The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.
 
One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.
 
"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"

Tucker Carlson on the Tulsi Gabbard Show

Long, but good.  

Tony Flood comments:

Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.  

Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction.  I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.'  Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.

There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention.  The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.

One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:

Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.

The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.

Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.

And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.

Half-Way Cultural Appropriation

You appropriate our science and technology, why not then appropriate the values, virtues, attitudes, and behaviors that led to the science and technology? Here are some of them: hard work, self-control, self-knowledge, deferral of gratification, focus, protracted study, objectivity, rational thinking, coherent speech, respect for legitimate authorities, respect for elders, and punctuality.
 
Why the half-way cultural appropriation? Go all the way, and you will benefit yourself enormously.
 
There is nothing 'white' about the above values and virtues, attitudes and behaviors. After all, Asians implement them as well as Caucasians, if not better. The values and virtues, attitudes and behaviors, are normatively universal and good for everyone. No race or ethnicity owns them. They are common goods. 

“Not Hung Up on the Completion Thing”

In grad school  I knew people who fit the above description. I used to joke about them ending up graduate student emeriti.  Desultory and undisciplined, and allowed to take incompletes in their courses, they took them in spades. And so the above line from The Big Chill (1983) stuck with me.

William Hurt has died at age 71. Here he is in a memorable scene from that memorable movie.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940’s Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights.  Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

The Introvert Advantage

Social distancing?  I've been doing it all my life. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!  Happy solitude, the sole beatitude. How sweet it is, and made sweeter still by a little socializing.

Full lockdown?  I could easily take it, and put it to good use.  It provides an excellent excuse to avoid meaningless holiday socializing with its empty and idle talk. 

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing,  talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't  make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests. 

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Christmas Cards and Virtue Signalling

The cards are coming in. While I lack the power to peer into souls to discern motivations, I suspect that many who send pictures of themselves in masks are signalling their politically correct virtue. Or maybe it's a fashion statement they are making.
 
In a restaurant a while back I espied a couple of classy gals, mask-less, engaged in a heavy-duty tête-à-tête, leaning in close while eating and talking. Lunch over, they donned their designer masks and strolled out into the open air.
 
It makes sense to a leftist!

Women Need to ‘Man Up’

A member of the distaff contingent advises.  If men are too 'cocky,' then perhaps the female equivalent is the answer rather than the cultivation of grievances:

How did we create an entire class of highly privileged, mostly affluent young women who feel unsafe on campus, microaggressed at every turn, utterly unable to cope with the garden-variety misdemeanours of boys and men, who have been behaving badly since time began despite our many efforts (most quite successful) to civilize them?

Well, you know the answer. The universities are hothouses for a grievance culture that sees racism, sexism and misogyny under every rug. Many of the faculty derive their livelihoods from it. These institutions have constructed increasingly elaborate codes of conduct and large administrative apparatuses to detect and uproot these evils, however subtle and invisible they may be to ordinary people.

The Upside of the Shutdown: A Salutary Slowdown

A strange vibe supervened the other morning during a leisurely meander over the local hills. It was as if the world's volume had been dialed down. Things had become calmer and quieter. Or so it seemed. "An upside of the shutdown," I said to myself.

The typical American's life is frantic, frenetic, and hyperkinetic. For any really good reason? What's the rush?  Quo vadis? Whither goest thou, thoughtless hustler? 

Meditation the same morning was long and unusually peaceful. The mind-works ground to a halt. I did not want to rise from the mat. After a 70-minute session I did. I reckon that fine long sitting had something to do with the dial-down vibe.

I will speculate further on the improvement of the social atmosphere and its causes.  There is an analog of contagion in the spread of attitude.

I do not hide from myself the fact that some will die of the Chinese disease and that many, many more will have their lives and livelihoods wrecked by the politically-motivated draconian measures of the overzealous.

But why not appreciate whatever good presents itself in any situation?

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.

Impersonality in the minimalist style may take the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better still is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.

The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.

One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.

"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"