Some 19th Century Rules for Social Intercourse

The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among men must do so with his maxims at the ready if he values his peace of mind.

Herewith, a faithful transcription from a 19th century work, The CorsairA Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty, Volume 1, Nathaniel Parker WillisTimothy O. Porter 1839,  831 pages. (Obviously, not to be confused with the Danish publication that pilloried Kierkegaard):

Never discuss politics or religion with those who hold opinions opposite to yours; they are topics that heat in handling, until they burn your fingers; never talk learnedly on topics you know, it makes people afraid of you; never talk on subjects you don't know, it makes people despise you; never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing, and the better your reasoning the more obstinate people become; never pun on a man's words; it is as bad as spitting in his face. In short, whenever practicable, let others perform and do you look on: a seat in the dress circle is preferable to a part in the play. — This is my rule.

A pretty good rule, one of what Schopenhauer calls Weltweisheit, worldly wisdom. In a fallen world, one needs such maxims. Did you know that Schopenhauer believed in something like Original Sin despite his being an atheist? 

"Never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing."  This is sage advice for almost all social situations.

I would add: never in general correct anyone's grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes unless it is your job to do so; the exception of course is serious discourse among serious and well-qualified people. Avoid talk of money if you don't want to be taken to be either poor-mouthing or bragging. Sex-tinged jokes can get you into trouble.  And so on.

Pascal 2Should we go all the way with  Pascal? “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

To paraphrase a line often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:

 

Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.

That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths.  The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.

My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed. 

Related: Safe Speech

Now if you bear all of the above in mind, you may safely sally forth into society as long as your sojourn is brief and your maxims are 'cocked and locked.'

Vote. Confirm.

A powerful statement by Malcolm Pollack, at once both personal and objective. I recommend in particular the penultimate paragraph:

We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how precarious, order and peace and safety are — how easily they are lost, and what sacrifices, and what sense of duty and gratitude, are necessary to sustain them. We just take it all for granted — this astonishing edifice of law and tradition and culture and trade and agriculture and innovation and justice and security — as if it was simply a pre-existing and eternal feature of the world. We imagine, lately, that we can just pick at it as we please, pull pieces out of it and burn them, hack away at its foundations, rip out its beams and joists, and crack its pillars without causing it, someday very soon, to come crashing down on our heads.

One does well to recall the wisdom at Hosea 8:7: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

And never forget who has the guns. Is that a threat? No, it's a warning. You do not want a civil war. You will not like it.

Please exercise your historically-informed imagination now so that you won't have to rely on perception later.

Be Skeptical of Activists’ Claims

Here's a tip for you. 

When some activist or advocate makes a claim, be skeptical and run the numbers, especially when the advocate has a vested interest in promoting his cause.  

Do you remember Mitch Snyder the advocate for the homeless who hanged himself in 1990?  I heard him make a wild claim sometime in the '80s to the effect that the number of homeless in the U. S. was three million.  At the time the population of the U.S. was around 220 million.  So I rounded that up to 300 million and divided by three million.  And then I knew that Snyder's claim was bogus, and probably fabricated by Snyder, as was later shown to be the case.  It is simply not credible that one in 100 in the U. S. is a homeless person.

When Snyder admitted to Ted Koppel that he made up his number, advocates for the homeless defended his tactic as "lying for justice."  See here. A nice illustration of the leftist principle that the end justifies the means.  Obama implemented the principle when he  lied some 30 times about the Affordable Care Act .  But let's not go over that again.

Philosophy needs no social justification. But one of the salutary social byproducts of its study and practice is the honing of one's critical thinking skills.  I am assuming that the philosophy in question is broadly analytic and not the crapulous crapola  of such later Continentals as Derrida.

Twin Mistakes

If something is good, more is better.  For example, there are people who think one cannot drink too much water.  False. Hyponatremia can be induced by excessive water consumption especially if the water is pure or near-pure.  You flush out your electrolytes and die. 

If something is bad in large quantities, it is bad in small quantities as well. False.  Exposure to sunlight.

The Young and the Reckless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan

To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher  McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan:

Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.

“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.

They were often proved right.

[. . .]

Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement offers astute commentary (bolding added)

Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted….I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” This rosy view of humanity suffuses Austin's blog: “Malawians and Zambians are fantastically friendly people.” And: “All throughout western Europe, when folks asked us where we were headed and we'd say Albania, their faces would drop and they'd start muttering 'Oh, no, no, no.' Albania, they'd tell us, is dangerous. The people of Albania will steal your spleen….The Albanians we come across are perhaps the warmest, friendliest, smiliest…people we've met on the continent.”

Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being[s] than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative. This is apparently a comment on the South African government's current expropriation of white farmers' land without compensation. (To be sure, when a friendly Afrikaans man advises Austin and Geoghegan to move their tent because they've pitched it too close to a black settlement and may antagonize the locals, they're quick to let him lead them to a safer spot.)

[. . .]

The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments. 

[. . .]

Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists….This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.

Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal….But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

[. . .]

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday

Kant Can SoImmanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 40 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 40 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 294th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

A Budding Thomist Seeks Advice

This from a reader:

I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.

As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.

Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?

Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.

One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:

Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?

Graduate School and Self-Confidence

Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities?

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated. 

To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:

Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation. 

It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.

More on this in The Academic Job Market in the 'Sixties.

Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.  

I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career.  The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.

How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.

Safe Speech

"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)

Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike.  Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's  mouth shut.  That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in  – she construed it as sexual harassment.  You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble. 

In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion.  To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be.  Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?

Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed.  Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals.  Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior.  The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the kid's 'culture.'

You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them.  My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.

The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs.  But I will.  Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose. 

Companion post: Idle Talk

Rules for Men

Keith Burgess-Jackson offers six items of sound advice, each both prudential and moral. Here is #1:

Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).

I would add a qualification: unless she is your wife and you have a loving relationship. (And if you don't share a loving relationship, why are you still married to her?)

That is a good point about the nature of consent, by the way.

I would say that the above, even with my qualification, is a rule of thumb (rule of hand?), which is to say that it is broadly accurate. 

Suppose you are seated opposite a woman not your wife whom you find attractive and with whom you are enjoying a tête-à-tête. She strokes your hand. She has given you a signal that may justify your touching her in a similar way even without explicit consent.

Prudent? Moral? The near occasion of sin? You decide!

In any case, don't be an Al Franken. Where is his hand? And what can be inferred from the gal's 'goosey' expression?

  Franken's hand