Category: Reading and Writing

My Ideal Reader

A lover of language, precise in its use, respectful of its mothership* of our thoughts, analytic but not conceptually myopic, out for the Sellarsian big picture, non-dogmatic and therefore skeptical in the best sense, which is to say, an inquirer, but not a worldling mesmerized by the sublunary, and therefore spiritually oriented. And his attitude toward academic or professional philosophy? At once both respectful and critical.  And similarly with respect to every institution and everything institutionalized:  respectful but critical.

Where would we be without institutions? And yet they are like the houses around here: they either have termites or will get them.  The right attitude: we fumigate, not demolish, edifices infested with termites.  The Roman Catholic Church, for example, and the universities. And others as well. 

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*A neologism, apparently, one that just occurred to me, crafted in parallel to 'fathership,' a word recognized by Merriam-Webster.  And you call me a sexist? And you think conservatives are stick-in-the-muds opposed to everything new?

Requite Evil with Good?

From The Notebooks of Paul Brunton:

When Confucius was asked his opinion of the injunction to return good for evil, he answered, "With what then will you return good? Return good for good, but justice for evil." Is this not wiser counsel? Does not the other push goodness to an extremist position, rendering it almost ridiculous by condoning bad conduct? (Volume Seven, The Negatives, p. 156, entry 113)

But what is justice? Contemporary liberals, leftists in plain English, have no notion of it. They confuse it with what they call 'equity.' The word is an obfuscatory coinage of the sort one can expect from Orwellian language-abusers. The typical leftist is a stealth ideologue. His near-congenital mendacity disallows an outright call for  equality of outcome or result, and merit be damned; he weasels his 'thought' into sleepy heads with 'equity' in violation of one of the traditional meanings of the word, namely, "justice according to natural law or right." (Merriam-Webster) "Equity' as used by a leftist language-hijacker has a meaning opposite to the traditional one. Hence my accusation of Orwellianism. 

Brunton PaulBrunton's Notebooks are a treasure trove of wisdom. Your humble correspondent owns and has read all seventeen volumes several times over. The man is old-school, writes well, talks sense, speaks the broad truth, makes enough mistakes to keep things interesting, and will introduce you to authors of yesteryear you've never heard of. He is of my grandfather's generation, and of your great, great grandfather's generation.

You absolutely must read old books to be in a position to assess justly the dreck and drivel pumped out by today's politically-correct quill drivers and so-called 'journalists' who wouldn't know a gerund from a participle if their colons depended on it.