Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age

The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:

No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]

The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.

My Favorite Pascal Quotation

Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to repy, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

On Wasting Time With Philosophy (And a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

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‘Blog’ and ‘Blog Post’

I note that there are still people who confuse 'blog' with 'blog post.'  'Blog' is elliptical for 'weblog.'   They are interchangeable terms.  Presumably, no one will refer to weblog entry as a weblog.  It makes as little sense to refer to a blog entry as a blog.   

A blog is composed of blog posts.  It is not itself a blog post, nor is a blog post a blog.  Roughly, a blog is to its posts as a book to its chapters.  Since you wouldn't refer to a chapter of a book  as a book, you shouldn't refer to a post on a blog as a blog.

Every weblog is a website, but not every website is a weblog. A weblog is a regularly updated website consisting mainly of relatively short entries called 'posts' which are arranged in reverse chronological order.  That's the essence of it.  Hyperlinkage and comments I would not build into the definition, nor would I require daily updating. You are free to differ.  I admit, though, that comments — assuming you can attract people capable of making good ones — and hyperlinks add considerably to a blog's interest.  As a general rule, if you are quoting from a source that is available online, you ought to link to it.

Does the Left Own Dissent?

Battles in the ‘culture war’ are often fought and sometimes won on linguistic ground. Linguistic hijacking is a tried-and-true tactic, one sometimes found on the Right, but more often on the Left: a term whose natural habitat is some neutral semantic space is hijacked and piloted toward a Left Coast semantic subspace.

An example is ‘dissent,' a word in which leftists fancy they have a proprietary interest.  It has two senses, one broad, the other narrow. In its broad usage, to dissent is to withhold assent, or else to differ in opinion. These are not the same, since if I withhold assent from your opinion about X, it does not follow that I hold a different opinion about X: I may suspend judgment by holding no opinion about X.

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Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

Adorno5

The Greek Omphalos  = the German Nabel  = navel. So omphaloscopy is navel-gazing, and an omphaloscopist is one who 'scopes out' his navel. But have there ever been practioners of meditation (Versenkung) who literally gazed at their navels or who came close to doing such a thing? A little gazing at my well-stocked library reveals that something like this practice is recommended in the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention, which tradition attributes to St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople. Referring to the central passage of the Method, the anonymous author of The Jesus Prayer reports:

In order to pray, it is said, the disciple must close the door of his cell, place himself in a state of quiet, sit down, rest his chin against his chest, look towards the middle of his stomach, restrain his breathing, and make a mental effort to find the "place of the heart" while repeating all the time "the epiclesisof Jesus Christ." (p. 47)

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Roots of Leftist Viciousness in Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

One reason that leftists are vicious is that they take to heart Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals  #13:

RULE 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Study Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals if you want to understand the tactics of the Obama administration.

David Horowitz will appear on the Glenn Beck show on 24 August to explain Alinsky's tactics.  See Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and Me.  Excerpt (emphasis added):

So Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives in my experience are all together too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initital stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. Radicals can't really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical — to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky's first rebel (using another of his names — Mephistopheles): "Everything that exists deserves to perish."

This is why ACORN activists for example have such contempt for the election process, why they are so willing to commit fraud. Because just as Lucifer didn't believe in God's kingdom, so the radicals who run ACORN don't believe in the democratic system. To them it's a fraud — an instrument of the ruling class, or as Alinsky prefers to call it, the Haves. If the electoral system doesn't serve all of us, but is only an instrument of the Haves then election fraud is justified, is a means of creating a system that serves the Have-Nots — social justice. Until conservatives begin to understand exactly how dishonest radicals are — dishonest in their core — it is going to be very hard to defend the system that is under attack. For radicals the noble end — creating a new heaven on earth — justifies any means. And if one actually believed it was possible to create heaven on earth who would not willingly destroy any system hitherto created by human beings?

 

The Race Card, the McCarthy Card, and ‘Death Panels’

There are two cards no leftist leaves home without: the race card and the McCarthy card.  The Henry Gates case was a particularly egregious recent example of the playing of the former.  For a recent example of an uncommonly  sleazy deployment of the latter, see Richard Cohen 's attack on Sarah Palin in which he mounts the lunatic thesis that "Palinism" is "an updated version of McCarthyism."

An excellent antidote to Cohen's delusional tripe is provided by Thomas Sowell in Whose Medical Decisions?  Excerpt:

As for a "death panel," no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. "End of life" care under the "guidance" of "some independent group" sounds so much nicer– and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

He said, "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there." He added: "It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

But when you select people like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to give "independent" guidance, you have already chosen a policy through your choice of advisors, who simply provide political cover. The net result can be exactly the same as if those providing that guidance were openly called "death panels."

Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry

In the weight room one day I made the acquaintance of a man from Alaska.  I steered the conversation onto Chris McCandless and others of the wild and crazy crew who seek Something More in the last American frontier. My interlocutor was not familiar with the McCandless story, but he reminded me of the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the tale. And here is his final letter.

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the ummistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or the crotch-grabbing one man melting pot, or some other 'icon.'

Addenda, 19 August: 

1. Theists need to consider whether they are worshipping the true God or a theological fabrication.  There is the almost irresistible tendency to identify God with one's conception of God.  But the two cannot be the same.  There are various conceptions of God, some better than others; but God is obviously not a conception.  It is easy to succumb to the worship of a product of  the human mind, whether it be an individual product, or a collective product such as the conception authorized by a particular cult or church.

2.  The knee-jerk use of 'icon' throughout the media is a good indicator of contemporary idolatry.  What we need is a new iconoclasm.  Memo to self: develop this 'stub.'

The ACLU on the Second Amendment

Aclu_tshirt-p235462473170398647q6xn_400 The following is verbatim from the ACLU website:

The Second Amendment provides: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

ACLU POSITION
Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.

The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.

Two main points. First, the concluding sentence of the quotation, which I have bolded, is so preposterous as to take the breath away. Whether or not there is a right to keep and bear arms is plainly a civil liberties issue.  I would have thought that this would require no argument. Apparently I was wrong: liberals of the ACLU stripe are so preternaturally stupid as to be blind to the obvious.  You will see this if you understand what a civil liberty is.  Here are some definitions:

  • one's freedom to exercise one's rights as guaranteed under the laws of the country
  • fundamental individual right protected by law and expressed as immunity from unwarranted governmental interference
    wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
  • Civil liberties are freedoms that protect an individual from the government of the nation in which they reside. Civil liberties set limits for government so that it cannot abuse its power and interfere unduly with the lives of its citizens.
    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_liberty

    Even if you think of the right to keep and bear arms as a collective right — a right an individual has in virtue of belonging to a militia– it is still a civil liberty by the first and third definitions.

    But, and here is my second point, one cannot correctly infer that the right in question is a collective right from the wording of the Second Amendment.  Carefully read the Second Amendment, quoted above, and note that the subordinate clause provides a reason, which is not the same as the only reason, for the right in question not to be infringed.  One cannot therefore validly infer from the formulation of the Second Amendment that it refers only to a collective right.  ""A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" gives one reason for the protection of gun rights.  This is consistent with there being other reasons.  Three other reasons come readily to mind.  There  is the need for the means of self-defense of oneself and one's family from the criminal element.  There is the need for the means of defense against wild animals. (Would you backpack in grizzly country without any protection?  You might end up bear scat like the benighted Timothy Treadwell.)   And there is the need for the means of defense against a usurpatious government.

    • Five Serious Uses of Argument

    Even among calm and reasonable people, few are persuaded by argument, even when it satisfies the canons of logic. Changes of view under dialectical pressure are seldom seen. Most just dig in and fortify their defenses. This raises questions about the utility of argument, debate, and discussion. Call me sanguine, call me naive – but I believe in their utility. Herewith, a preliminary catalog of the uses of argument.

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    Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

    What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions — say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

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