Category: Sage Advice

Do Not Multiply Enemies Beyond Necessity

Suppose you value an old friend, a neighbor, a family member, a hiking companion, but differ with him or her on one  or more points of ideology.  As a general rule, one admitting of exceptions, I recommend assiduously avoiding the points of difference and cleaving to the uncontroversial.  Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity!  It is a sound conservative principle.  We conservatives have no illusions about human nature or its improvability.  People are what they are, and they do not and will not change.  You cannot improve their thinking or their morals, not by much leastways, but you can make things worse by adding unnecessarily to the hostility in the world, hostility that can come back to bite you.

I once had a chess and hiking partner name of 'Bill.'  We were two miles into the 9.1 mile Black Mesa Loop in the western Superstitions when he came out with a remark of such incomparable moral and intellectual obtuseness that  my Italian blood began to boil.  He said that a prenatal human being is "just tissue."

As someone who has thought deeply and rigorously about this topic (see Abortion category), I had at my command a full arsenal of responses.  But I knew I would be wasting my time on the fellow.  Only a very few are teachable.  You can't make a piston out of ice.

So I said, "Bill, we have a long way to go in this unforgiving wilderness.  In the interests of a pleasant hike, I suggest we not talk about this topic."

As so we had a good day, and parted friends. 

Worldly Success

Seek only as much worldly success as is necessary for the pursuit of unworldly ends.  What the deeper natures want, this world cannot provide.  It cannot offer ultimate satisfaction or true happiness.

You say there is no ultimate satisfaction or true happiness? My point stands nonetheless.  This world cannot supply them.  To think otherwise is delusional.

Letting Go of the Past

Since the past is no longer, to let go of the past is to let go of thoughts of the past.  But these thoughts, like all thoughts, are in the present. So we are brought back again to the importance of cultivating the ability to let go of thoughts  here and now.  Mind control in the present automatically takes care of the two nonpresent temporal modes.

Be Gracious

Does someone want to do something for you? Buy you lunch?  Give you a gift?  Bring something to the dinner? 

Be gracious.  Don't say, "You don't have to buy me lunch,"  or "Let me buy you lunch," or "You didn't have to bring that."  Humbly accept and grant the donor the pleasure of being a donor.

Lack of graciousness often bespeaks an excess of ego.

We were re-hydrating at a bar in Tortilla Flat, Arizona, after an ankle-busting hike up a stream bed.  I offered to buy Alex a drink.  Instead of graciously accepting my hospitality, he had the chutzpah to ask me to lend him money so that he could buy me a drink!

Another type of ungraciousness is replying 'Thank you' to 'Thank you.'  If I thank you for something, say 'You're welcome,' not 'Thank You.'  Graciously acquiesce in the fact that I have done you a favor.  Don't try to get the upper hand by thanking me.

I grant that there are situations in which mutual thanking is appropriate.

Some people feel that they must 'reciprocate.'  Why exactly?  I gave you a little Christmas present because I felt like it.  And now you feel you must give me one in return?  Is this a tit for tat game? 

Suppose I compliment you sincerely.  Will you throw the compliment back in my face by denigrating that which I complimented you for, thereby impugning my judgment?

Related entry: On Applauding While Being Applauded

How To Be a Curmudgeon

The Constructive Curmudgeon waxes instructive:

1. Care about truth.
2. Care about grammar.
3. Care about eloquence in speaking.

4. Develop refined tastes in everything you can.
5. Develop a masterful BS detector.
6. Speak truths that no one else will, but which need to be heard.
7. Never flatter.
8. Don't sell character for success.
9. Be skeptical of whatever "the herd" likes.
10. Do not watch TV. In fact, turn them off whenever possible.
11. Lament stupidity, inanity, and insanity. They are everywhere.

Excellent advice, though #10 is in need of qualification.  See my Confessions of a Former Anti-TV Elitist.

UPDATE:  Seldom Seen Slim writes to point out that the CC does not practice in #10 what he preaches in #2.

Related articles
The Constructive Curmudgeon

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Epicurus Has Some Sex Advice for General Petraeus, et al.

Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:

I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb   well-established customs, harm any
one of your neighbors, injure  your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked  by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets  any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not  receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)

Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the  centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise — except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.

Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath  no fury like a woman scorned."

More recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career.  Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.

And let's not forget Eliot Spitzer and now Generals Petraeus and Allen.

This litany of career-ending, family-destroying woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not
Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks. 

Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the  earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman."

And conversely.

A Reader Wants an Introduction to Philosophy

M. T. writes,

I've followed your blog for a few months now.  I feel compelled to say thank you for the content of your posts.  They are usually trenchant, always interesting, and occasionally they lead me to delve into topics and categories that I have never explored previously.

Some background: I'm an Arabic linguist for the Navy.  I currently live in Georgia, but was born and reared in Florida.  I pretty much agree with everything you've said on political topics.

A question for you: I didn't study philosophy, but am extremely well read in history and politics (particularly ancient history).  You obviously were a academician, but if I wanted to get grounded in the current state of philosophy, where do I start?  The field is so vast, so opaque and confusing.  Am I better off just reading Plato and perhaps William James?

Again, thank you for a wonderful blog.  I always try to learn something new every day, and your writing makes it easier for me to accomplish that task.

I of course appreciate the kind words, and the regular arrival of letters like this in my mail box is emolument aplenty for my pro bono efforts.

First of all, I wouldn't worry too much about the current state of philosophy because much that is current is ephemeral and even foolish.  I would concern myself more with an introduction to the perennial problems of philosophy.  To understand the sometimes strange things that philosophers say one  must first understand the questions that perplexed them and the problems they were trying to solve.  With that in mind I recommend two short well-written books, the first from 1912 and the second from 1987:  Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy; Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?  I commend the following advice to you from p. 4 of Nagel's book:

The center of philosophy lies in certain questions which the reflective human mind finds naturally puzzling, and the best way to begin the study of philosophy is to think about them directly.  Once you've done that, you are in a better position to apprecdiate the work of others who have tried to solve the same problems.

Sage advice.  There is no point in studying philosophy unless there are some questions that 'bug' you and to which you want and need answers. Think about them directly, and try to answer them for yourself.  Then test your answers against the answers more experienced thinkers have proposed.

For example, suppose you are interested in the question of the freedom of the will.  Formulated as a problem, it is the problem of reconciling the freedom of the will presupposed by ascriptions of moral responsibility with the apparent determinism of the natural world of which the agent is a part.  So you think about it. You don't get very far on your own, so you seek help.  You turn to Schopenhauer's magisterial On the Freedom of the Will for orientation.  You get that and more: data, distinctions, the history of the problem and the various solutions, and Schopenhauer's own solution.  And so it goes.

The ComBox is open in case anyone wants to suggest titles for my reader. 

Why Keep a Journal?

It was 42 years ago today that I first began keeping a regular journal. Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals. Why maintain a journal? When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I
didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is still my thought. The unrecorded life is not worth living. For we have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living, and how examined could an undocumented life be?


The maintenance of a journal aids mightily in the project of self-individuation. Like that prodigious journal writer Søren Kierkegaard, I believe we are here to become actually the individuals we are potentially. Our individuation is not ready-made or given, but a task to be accomplished. The world is a vale of soul-making; we are not here to improve it, but to be improved by it. 


Thoreau journalHenry David Thoreau, another of the world's great journal writers,  said in Walden that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I  would only add that without a journal, one's life is one of quiet dissipation. One's life dribbles away, day by day, unreflected on, unexamined, unrecorded, and thus fundamentally unlived. Living, for us, is not just a biological process; it is fundamentally a spiritual unfolding. To mean anything it has to add up to something, and that something cannot be expressed with a dollar sign.

I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence. In my early twenties, I spoke of the supreme desideratum of a focused existence.  What bothered me about the people around me, fellow students in particular, was the mere aestheticism of their existence: their aimless drifting hither and yon, their lack of commitment, their unseriousness, their refusal to engage the arduous task of   self-definition and self-individuation, their willingness to be guided and mis-guided by social suggestions. In one's journal one collects and re-collects oneself; one makes war against the lower self and the
forces of dispersion.

Another advantage to a journal and its regular maintenance is that one thereby learns how to write, and how to think. An unwritten thought is still a half-baked thought: proper concretion is achieved only by  expressing thoughts in writing and developing them. Always write as well as you can, in complete sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors. Develop the sentences into paragraphs, and if the  Muse is with you those paragraphs may one day issue in essays, articles, and chapters of books.

Finally, there is the pleasure of re-reading from a substantial temporal distance.  Two years ago I began re-reading my journal in order, month by month, at a 40 year distance.  So of course  now I am up to October 1972.  40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.