Category: Varia

Survivalism

Almost anything can be made into a 'religion.'  (I am using the term very loosely!)  Survivalism, for example.  See J. W. Rawles' SurvivalBlog.com for a taste.  This post provides some insight into the mentality of a distaff survivalist.  It is quite revealing, I think, of both the 'logic' and the propensity for extremism of the survivalist type.  But extremism is everywhere, in the longevity fanatic, the muscular hypertrophy nut, and so on.

But don't get me wrong.  A wise man, while hoping  for the best,  prepares for the worst.  But the prepping is kept within reason, where part of being reasonable is maintaining a balanced perspective.  A balanced approach, for me, does not extend to the homemade rain barrels that the linked-to survivalist lady mentions.  But I do keep a lot of bottled water and other non-alcoholic potables on hand.  Here are some questions you should ask yourself.

1. Are you prepared to repel a home invasion?
2. Do you have sufficient food and water to keep you and your family alive for say three weeks?
3. Do you have the battery-operated devices you will need to survive the collapse of the power grid, and enough fresh batteries?
4. Can you put out a fire on your own? 
5. Do you have a sufficient supply of the medications you will need should there be no access to pharmacies?

These are just some of the questions to consider.  But how far will you go with these preparations?  Will you sacrifice the certain present preparing for a disastrous future that may not materialize?  Wouldn't that be foolish?  Wouldn't it be as foolish as the ostrich-like refusal to consider questions like the above?

And then there is the question of suicide, which you ought to confront head on. Do you want to live in the state of nature after the collapse of civil society?  Under what conditions is life worth living?  Civilization is thin ice, a crust easy  to break through, beneath which is  a hell of misery.  (Yes, I know I'm mixing my metaphors.)  When the going gets unbearable, can you see your way clear to shooting your spouse and then yourself?  Are there good moral objections to such a course of action?

Think about these things now while you have time and enjoy peace of mind.

In Defense of Eclecticism

From an English reader:

The extraordinary eclecticism of the Maverick Philosopher blog has struck me with unusual force just recently. This diversity of interest  is what keeps me reading – though sometimes I stare at your commentaries in ignorant awe.

I'll never get up to speed with many of your discussions, and give up on some of them. I've wondered how many of your readers are capable of understanding at whatever level you choose to communicate.

Although the kind reader praises my eclecticism, his comment provides me an occasion to mount a defense of it.

I've had people ask me why I don't just stick to one thing, philosophy, or, more narrowly, my areas of expertise in philosophy.  Some like my philosophy posts but cannot abide my politics.  And given the overwhelming preponderance of liberals and leftists in academe, my outspoken conservatism not only reduces my readership but also injures my credibility among many.  I am aware of that, and I accept it.  Leftists, being the bigots that many of them are, cannot take seriously anything a conservative says.  But conservatives ought nevertheless  to exercise their free speech rights and exercise them fearlessly, standing up for what believe to be right.  Surely, if liberals are serious about diversity, they will want a diversity of ideas discussed!  Or is it only racial and sex diversity that concern them? 

I should add that I do not hold it against any young conservative person trying to make his way in a world that is becoming ever more dangerously polarized that he hide his social and political views.  It is easy for a tenured individual, or one like me who has established himself in independence, to criticize those who hide behind pseudonyms.   I hesitate to criticize, not being exposed to the dangers they are exposed to.  That being said, I hate pseudonyms.  Do you have something to say?  Say it like a man (or a woman) in your own name.  Pseudonyms are for wimps and cyberpunks, generally speaking.  I am reminded of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signatory to the Declaration of Independence.  He signed his name 'Charles Carroll of Carrollton' which leaves little doubt  about his identity. There is such a thing as civil courage.

My weblog is not about just one thing because my life is not about just one thing.  As wretched as politics is, one ought to stand up for what's right and do one's bit to promote enlightenment.  Too many philosophers abdicate, retreating into their academic specialties. (Cf. The Abdication of Philosophy: Philosophy and the Public Good,  ed. Freeman, Open Court, 1976)  Not that I am sanguine about what people like me can do.  But philosophers can contribute modestly to the clarification of issues and arguments and the debunking of various sorts of nonsense.  Besides, the pleasures of analysis and commentary are not inconsiderable.

"But why the polemical tone?"

I say polemics has no place in philosophy.  But it does have a place in politics.  Political discourse is unavoidably polemical. The zoon politikon must needs be a zoon polemikon. ‘Polemical’ is from the Greek polemos, war, strife. According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, strife is the father of all: polemos panton men pater esti . . . (Fr. 53) I don't know about the 'all,' but strife  is certainly at the root of politics.  Politics is polemical because it is a form of warfare: the point is to defeat the opponent and remove him from power, whether or not one can rationally persuade him of what one takes to be the truth. It is practical rather than theoretical in that the aim is to implement what one takes to be the truth rather than contemplate it.  'What one takes to be the truth': that is the problem in a nutshell.  Conservatives and leftists disagree fundamentally and nonnegotiably.  We won't be able to achieve much if anything by way of convincing each other; but we will clarify our differences thereby coming to understand ourselves and our opponents better.  And we may even find a bit of common ground.

"OK, you've explained the admixture of politics.  But you talk about such a wide range of philosophical topics.  Isn't there something unprofessional about that?  Surely you are not an expert with respect to every topic you address!"   

There is no good philosophy without a certain amount of specialization and 'technique.'  Not all technical pilosophy is good, but most good philosophy is technical.  Too many outsiders wrongly dismiss technical philosophy as logic-chopping and hairsplitting.  That being understood, however, specialization can quickly lead to overspecialization and a concomitant loss of focus on the ultimate issues that brought one to philosophy in the first place, or ought to have brought one to philosophy in the first place.  There is something absurd about someone who calls himself a philosopher and yet devotes most of his energy to the investigation of anaphora or epistemic closure principles.  There is nothing wrong with immersing oneself in arcana: to each his own.  But don't call it philosophy if burrowing in some scholarly cubbyhole becomes your be-all and end-all.

Study EVERYTHING, join nothing.

From the Inside of a Fortune Cookie

"Mental activity keeps you busy at this time."  Only at this time?

"All happiness is in the mind."  This is an example of a half-truth the believing of which is pragmatically very useful.

"If you chase two rabbits, both will escape."  Reminds me of the Lovin' Spoonful tune Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your MInd?

"If you think you're too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito."  Does this have a sexual meaning?

For the New Year

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. — I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Nietzsche found it very difficult to let looking away be his only negation.  And so shall I.

Professor Mondo

Looking for some high-quality conservative culture critique anent the antics of the late Captain Beefheart who died last week, I typed 'New Criterion Captain Beefheart' into the Google engine. I was forthwith conducted to the stoa of Professor Mondo, presumably because he links to New Criterion and recently posted about Beefheart.  Noting that he also links to me, I thought it would be nice to direct some traffic his way.

Mondo's self-description:

I’m a medievalist at a small college in a small college town. I like reading, writing, music, and thinking — practicing any of these individually or in combination. Turnoffs include Brussels sprouts, bad music, and creeping totalitarianism.

As for the Brussels sprouts, de gustibus non est disputandum; but steaming  the hell out of them and drenching them in a good Hollandaise sauce laced with Tabasco works wonders for me.  Ditto for broccoli and other stinkweeds.

UPDATE 12/21:  Apparently my linkage caused a 'Mav-alanche' at Mondo's site.  My pleasure.

 

What Ever Happened to Linda Lovelace?

Her real name was Linda Boreman. The daughter of a New York City cop, she was raised in Yonkers and attended Catholic school where she was known as "Miss Holy Holy" because of her noli me tangere attitude. She died in April of 2002. Read her sad story here.

Her case and that of others, Kerouac for one, point us to what I will call the problem of the inefficacy of religion for moral improvement.  Linda Boreman attended Catholic school and ended up a porno star.  Kerouac, for all his Catholicism and Buddhism, two ascetic religions, ended up most unascetically destroying his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, with sex and drugs and booze. 

Of course, the counter-question can and must be asked: How much worse would we be if not for the moral teachings we have received from religion?  And even if you yourself got no such instruction in your impressionable years, you were buoyed up by a society in which those teachings were partially, if inadequately and often hypocritically, embodied.  (The hypocrite at least pays lip service to high standards, lip service being better than no service at all.)   The boneheads of the New Atheism cannot of course understand this.  They would sweep religion aside without considering what good it has done, and how the genuine problems it addresses will be solved without it.

Ned Polsky, Maverick Sociologist

Polsky book Reader Ray Stahl of Port Angeles, Washington, kindly mailed me a copy of Ned Polsky, Hustlers, Beats, and Others.  It is a work of sociology by a maverick sociologist, academically trained, but decidedly his own man.  I wasn't aware of it or him until a few days ago.  The preface already has me convinced that this is a book I will read and digest. A writer who writes like this is a writer to read:

Many readers of this book will feel that I object to the views of other scholars in terms that are overly fierce. These days the more usual mode in academia, thronged as it is with arrivistes aspiring to be gentlemen, is to voice such objections oleaginously. But luckily I cut an eyetooth on that masterpiece of English prose, A. E. Housman's introduction to his edition  of Manilius, and so am forever immune to the notion that polemical writing and scholarly writing shouldn't mix. I believe that polemical scholarship improves the quality of intellectual life — sharpens the mind, helps get issues settled faster — by forcing genteel discussion to become genuine debate.

(Hyperlinks added. Obviously.  But it raises a curiously pedantic question: By what right does one tamper with a text in this way?  Pedantic the question, I leave it to the pedants.)

Polsky died in 2000.  Here is an obituary.  You will have to scroll down to find it.

Apologies to E-Mailers

If you have e-mailed me and haven't received a response, I apologize.  During the last three days I have been revamping my 'work station,' including configuring and getting used to a new computer.  It may be a day or two before I figure out how to access my e-mail account.  There are some old e-mails that it looks as if I will not be able to answer.  I don't have the time or energy to answer everything, and I do have a life away from the computer.

Time was when I couldn't understand how people could fail to respond to e-mail.  "It's so easy; just click on reply and type something.  The least the guy could do is acknowledge receipt." Now I understand, having become what I criticized – there is just too much of it and too many other self- and other-imposed tasks to contend with. 

Innumeracy in the Check-Out Line

The Sarah Lee frozen pies were on sale, three for $10, at the local supermarket. I bought two, but they rang up as $4.99 each. I pointed out to the check-out girl that this was wrong, and she sent a 'gofer' to confirm my claim. Right I was. But now the lass was perplexed, having to input the correct amount by hand and brain. She had to ask me what 10 divided by 3 is. I was nice, not rude, and just gave her the answer sparing her any commentary.

(It's a crappy job, standing up eight hours per day, in a confined space, an appendage of a machine. I make a point of trying to relate to the attendants, male and female, as persons, at the back of my mind recalling a passage in Martin Buber's I-Thou in which he says such a relation is possible even in the heat of a commute between passenger and bus driver.)

But now I can be peevish. They learn how to put on condoms in these liberal-run schools but not how to add, subtract, multiply and divide? And how many times have I encountered pretty young things in bars and restaurants who are clueless when it comes to weights and measures?  At a P. F. Chang's the other day I asked whether the beer I wanted to order was 22 oz.  The girl said it was a pint, "whatever that is." This was near Arizona State and it is a good bet that she was a student there.  How can such people not know that there are two pints in a quart, that a pint is 16 fluid ounces, that four quarts make a gallon , . . . , that a light-year is a measure of distance not of time, . . . .

Can we blame this one on libruls too?  You betcha!  A librul is one who has never met a standard he didn't want to undermine.

You many enjoy John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy.  In case it isn't obvious, innumeracy is the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy.