Maverick Philosopher

The Company We Keep Away From

The company we keep away from is as salient for our flourishing as the company we keep.

The World's Criterion of Worth

Something is worth doing if and only if one is paid to do it.

The theme is developed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.

Man's Greatness Deducible From his Wretchedness

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

Man's greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals is wretchedness in man, thus recognizing that, if his nature is today like that of the animals, he must have fallen from some better state which was once his own. (Pensées, Penguin, p. 59, #117, tr. Krailsheimer)

"What is nature in animals is wretchedness in man."  That is a profound insight brilliantly expressed, although I don't think anyone lacking a religious sensibility could receive it as such.  The very notion of wretchedness is religious.  If it resonates within you, you have a religious nature.  If, and only if.

Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as healthy and well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in Pascalian divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. Pascal writes that we "must have fallen from some better state."  That is not obvious.  But the fact remains that we are in a dire state from which we need salvation, a salvation we are incapable of achieving by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

How do we know that?  From thousands of years of collective experience. 

Related articles

Is a Thinking Man's Afterlife Conceivable?

Schopenhauer on Islam, "The Saddest and Poorest Form of Theism"

Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

No Resting Place in Any Earthly Desire

Who is a Friend?

A friend is someone with whom one can disagree in the way one diagrees with oneself: gently and without rancour.

A Callable Loan

We who thrive get used to being alive, and forget we have our lives on loan, a loan that can be called  on the spot without advance notice.  Compare James 4:13-17 (NIV):

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

Up or Out!

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I tend to think of life like that: either up or out, either promotion to a Higher Life or annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this vale of probation.

In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out! It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding cryonics and the transhumanist fantasies that subserve this hare-brained scheme. The possibilities of fraud and foul play seem endless.  Some controversies reported here.   But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in case of a power outage.

Related (and rather more substantive) post:  Will Science Put Religion out of Business? A Preliminary Tilt at Transhumanism

Related articles

Cryogenics' Big Problem, or: How Not to Become a Zombie

Et in Arcadia Ego

Neighbors and Relatives

It doesn't bother me in the least that my neighbors and casual acquaintances do not engage me where I live.  I expect such relations to be superficial and conventional.  But I expect more from relatives even though this expectation is irrational.

I have no trouble accepting that propinquity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity.  Why then do I suppose that consanguinity should be such a guarantee?

Blood is thicker than water, but for a Luftmensch,  pneuma is what counts.

Related articles

Propinquity and Social Distance

Relations With Relatives

Our relations with our relatives are too often like the relations of Arabs and Israelis: too much past, no future.  But with the Arabs and Israelis it is even worse: too much history, not enough geography.

Worldly Success: How Much is Enough?

You have enough world success if it enables you to advance the project of self-realization on the important fronts including the moral, the intellectual, and the spiritual.  The vita contemplativa cannot be well lived by the grindingly poor, the sick, the politically and socially oppressed, the sorely afflicted and tormented.  Boethius wrote his Consolations of Philosophy in prison, but you are not Boethius.

You have too much worldly success when it becomes a snare and a burden and a distraction. 

We need some social acceptance and human contact, but fame is worse than obscurity.  Reflect for a moment on the character of those who enjoy fame and the character of those whose fickle regard confers it.

We need a modicum of worldly wherewithal to live well, but more is not better. Only the terminally deluded could believe, as the saying goes, that "You can't be too thin or too rich."  You could be anorexic or like unto the New Testament camel who couldn't pass through the eye of a needle.

We need health but not hypertrophy.

We need power, but not the power over others that corrupts but the power over oneself that does not.

On the Brevity of Life

The lament comes down through the centuries: Vita brevis est.  What is the point of this observation?  There are two main possible points.

A.  One point, call it classical,  is to warn people that this life is not ultimate, that it is preliminary and probationary if not positively punitive, that it is not an end in itself, that it is pilgrimage and preparation for what lies beyond the portals of death.  One part of the  idea is that the brevity of life shows life's non-ultimacy as to reality and value.  Back of this is the Platonic sense, found also in Buddhism,  that impermanence argues (relative) unreality and (relative) lack of value.  Brevity entails vanity, emptiness.  This life is empty and insubstantial, a vanishing quantity, a vain play  of interdependent appearances.  That which vanishes is vain, empty of self-nature, ontologically and axiologically deficient, if not utterly nonexistent.  And all finite things must vanish.  Vanity  and vanishment are inscribed into their very nature.

The other part of the classical idea is that the vanity of life hides a reality the attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves in this vale of soul-making behind the veil of sense-induced ignorance (avidya).  Since life is short, we must work out our salvation with diligence while the sun shines.  For it is soon to set.  It is later than we think in a world whose temporal determinations are indices of its relative unreality.

The brevity of life thus points both to its vanity and to the necessity of doing the work necessary to transcend it, toil possible only while caught within its coils.  To put it in the form of a little ditty:

 

 

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So renounce it we must.

B.  The other point of vita brevis est, call it modern,  is to advise people to make the most of life.  Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  Make the most of it because there is not much of it but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon.

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what might be.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Which of these attitudes should one adopt toward the brevity of life?  At the end of the day it comes down to a free decision on the part of the individual.  After all the arguments and counterarguments have been canvassed, you must decide which to credit and which to reject, what to believe and how to live.  Or as a gastroenterologist once said,"It depends on the liver."

Related articles

If Everyone Goes Straight to Heaven . . .

Realpolitik

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Measurement by Regrets

We are measurable by the nature of our regrets.  What do you regret?  Not having drunk enough good wine?  Not having amassed more wealth?  Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places?  Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?

We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.

Delicious Obscurity

We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it.  It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken, and left, for an average schlep.  A little recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs.  Fame can be a curse.   The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.

The value of fame may also be inferred from the moral and intellectual quality of those who confer it.

The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.

UPDATE:  By this metric, however, I count as famous.  Well, we live in an age of low standards.

What It Takes to Appreciate Nature

Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage setting for what they take to be the really real, the social tragi-comedy. The same goes for the windshield tourists who, seated in air-conditioned comfort, merely look upon nature as upon a pretty picture.

The true acolyte of nature must combine in one person a robust and energetic physique, a contemplative mind, and a healthy measure of contempt for the world of the human-all-too-human, or to transpose into a positive key, a deep love of solitude.  One thinks of Henry David Thoreau, who famously remarked, "I have no walks to throw away on company." Of the same type, but not on the same lofty plane: Edward Abbey.

Compensation for Decline

I tune in to CNN and hear about some academic who is taking a conspiracy line on the Sandy Hook massacre.  Deplorable, but in compensation there is the fascination of watching one's country unravel.  We owls of Minerva may not welcome the onset of dusk, but it is the time when we spread our wings.  And there is the consolation of knowing that one is fairly well insulated from the effects of the unraveling, both spatially and temporally.  Spatially, in that one can afford to live in a safe and defensible enclave.  Temporally, in that one can reasonably hope to be dead before things reach their nadir.

Am I depressed? Not in the least. I wake up rarin' to go at another day of banging my head against this predicament we call life.  It's all grist for the mill of Minerva: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent.

Related articles

The Owl of Minerva Spreads its Wings at Dusk

Bread, Circuses, and Decline

Dalrymple on Inhumanity

Here. Excerpt:

Nevertheless, no one could read this book [Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross] without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency and kindness, whereas the evidence presented in this book is that, once legal and social restraints are removed, Man becomes an utter savage.

Exactly right.  One of the most pernicious illusions of the Left is that human beings are basically good and decent, and that society has corrupted them. 

According to Gross, people of all social strata in Poland gladly, even joyfully, plundered their Jewish neighbours; if so, they were not unique in having done so, for it happened across Europe during Nazi occupation, while in Rwanda, in 1994, ordinary Hutus happily and without conscience appropriated the property of their erstwhile but now massacred Tutsi neighbours.

Related articles

A School of Humility?

On Being 26 Rather Than 62

W. K. writes,

You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.

I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative.  The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.

So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs.  Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering.  I don't relish making that journey.  Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over.  As I said in that post-election post,

One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart.  Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil.  When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.

I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime.  But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata.  Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan.  We are in deep trouble.

But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it.  We shall hope on and fight on.

Related articles

Liberty Forever?

How Did We Get to be So Proud?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

A School of Humility?

Perhaps we are here to be taught humility.  Some indications that this could be so:

1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it.  A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity.  It is an excellent bet that there will be wars as long as there are human beings.  There are wars within families and between tribes and nations and gangs and interest groups.    There is class warfare  and racial hatred and the battle of the sexes.  There are inter-generational tensions ("Don't trust anyone over 30!")  and intrapsychic conflicts.  There is inter-species predation.  Not only is man a wolf to man, wolves are wolves to men, and men to wolves.  If extraterrestrials should show up it is a good bet that a 'war of the worlds' would ensue.  If they came to serve man, it would be to serve him for dinner, as in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man."

Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.

"I will not weaponize space," said Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep
lack of understanding of the human condition.  Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can   bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard.  And whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?

Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:

     Si vis pacem, para bellum.

     If you want peace, prepare for war.

2. At the level of ideas there is unending controversy, often acrimonious, in almost every field.  There is the strife of systems, not to mention the strife of the systematic with the anti-systematic. (Hegel versus Kierkegaard, for example.)   Despite invincible ignorance ignorant of itself as ignorance, contentious humans proudly proclaim their 'knowledge' -- and are contradicted by fools of opposing stripes.

3.  My third point is subsumable under my first, but so important that it deserves separate mention.  Homo homini lupus.  Never eradicated, man's inhumanity to man is seemingly ineradicable.  As we speak, people are being poisoned, shot, stabbed for the flimsiest of reasons or no reason at all.   Girls are being raped and sold into slavery.  The abortion 'doctors' are slaughtering innocent human beings while apologists whose intellects have been suborned by their lusts cook up justifications. The Iranian head of state calls for the destruction of Israel and its inhabitants. Meanwhile benighted leftists ignore the threat of radical Islam and label 'islamophobic' those who see straight. Every hour of every day extends the litany of the 'lupine.' And there is not much we can do about it.

4.  And then there is the eventual if not present corruption of all the institutions that are supposed to ameliorate the human condition: the churches, the criminal justice system, the U. N., governments. The reformers reform until they too become corrupted.  And there is little we can do about it.

5. Let's not leave out our animal nature that insures fragility, sickness, death and untold miseries.  Transhumanist fantasies aside, there is not much we can do about it.  (We can do something, and we have, and that is good; but sickness, old age, and death are as much with us as in the days of the Buddha.)

Meditating on such points as these one might hazard the inference that this world is a vale of soul-making wherein a chief virtue to be learned is that of humility.  Our minds are dark, our wills weak, our hearts foul.  What is to be so proud about?

The other side of the coin:  Proud to be a Human Being.

 

On Socializing

He who avoids socializing avoids pointless conversations, some of which are worse than pointless.  For example, chatting with a stranger can turn ugly very quickly if it happens that you differ politically.  Still, socializing is not all bad.  Like whisky, a little is good now and again.  But more is not better.

 

Related articles

Propinquity and Social Distance

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

The Killer Mountains Strike Again: Jesse Capen's Remains Found

The Superstitions are not called the Killer Mountains for nothing.  Many a man has been lured to his death in this rugged wilderness by lust for gold. A few days ago, what appear to be the remains of Jesse Capen were finally found after nearly three years of searching.  Another obsessive Dutchman Hunter in quest of a nonexistent object,  he went missing in December of 2009.

I've seen the movie and it ain't bad. And of course any self-respecting aficionado of the legends and lore, tales and trails of the magnificent Superstitions must see it.  Tom Kollenborn comments in Lust for Gold I and Lust for Gold II.

 

 As I wrote in Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold,

. . . to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached. But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us. Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.

Related articles

Body of man who hunted legendary 'Lost Dutchman's' gold mine believed to be found in Arizona- Remains of man missing from 2011 found in Arizona

Another Hiker Lost in the Superstitions

Human Height

True human height is not measured in feet and inches but in the altitude  of the thoughts we think and the problems we engage.  The higher the problems, the higher the man.

Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects.  When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing.  In the end he swindles himself.

How is it, for example, that Bernie Madoff 'made off' with so much loot?  You have  otherwise intelligent people who are lazy, greedy and vain: too lazy to do their own research and exercise due diligence, too greedy to be satisfied with the going rate of return, and too vain to think that anything bad can happen to such high-placed and sophisticated investors as themselves.

Or take the Enron employees.  They invested their 401 K money in the very firm that that paid their salaries!  Now how stupid is that?  But they weren't stupid; they stupified themselves by allowing the subornation of their good sense by their vices.

The older I get the more I appreciate that our problems, most of them and at bottom, are moral in nature.  Why, for example, are we and our government in dangerous debt?  A lack of money?  No, a lack of virtue.  People cannot curtail desire, defer gratification, be satisfied with what they have, control their lower natures, pursue truly choice-worthy ends.

False Modesty

To appear modest, some of us preface our remarks with, "Correct me if I'm wrong."  But we say it only when we know we are not.

Human Perversity

People want sympathy and understanding.  But we must be careful how we show them. "I understand exactly how you feel" may earn the response, "You have no idea how I feel, how the hell could you?"

No Man is a Beast Merely

It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is -- more than a beast.

Obama the Feckless

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Having demonstrated his domestic incompetence, Obama is now showing us his fecklessness in matters foreign.  Is it 1979 all over again?  As a certain American philosopher of Spanish extraction is supposed to have said . . . .

One can hope that Romney will play Reagan to Obama's Carter.  For the good of all of us, those who understand these matters, and the liberal fools who don't.

 

At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal

And here we have an animal who aspires.  Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end.  Or so it seems.  If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?

Looking Beyond for Meaning

We look beyond the moments of this life for meaning.  And we must look beyond the 'moment' of this life as a whole if this life is to have meaning.

Relatives

Some want to stay in touch, not on the basis of what one actually and presently is, but on the basis of what one was or was imagined by them to be.  And so I rarely visit the homes of my relatives.  For, as Emerson brilliantly quips in a related connection, "I do not want to be alone."

On Living Too Long

Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country.  One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.

Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine

Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.  What follows is a post from 13 June 2009.

....................

Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:

. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.

He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely
warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.

The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.

Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation.  The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression.  One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust.  To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm  shows a mind unhinged.  Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus.  Nunc et in hora mortis.

There is Beauty in the World

I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise.  There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it.  There is also beauty and nobility in human nature.  It peeps out now and again.  A young man took a bullet during the Aurora massacre to shield his girlfriend.

It can be a moral challenge to avoid misanthropy.  But avoid it we must.  The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free.  Or is the rosiness of this Arizona sunrise biasing me toward too optimistic a view?

The hardest task in the world is to achieve a just view of things and people and their good and evil.

What is Man?

Peter Geach quotes Tennyson: "Man is an immortal spirit charged with the control and taming of a beast." (Truth and Hope, p. 18)

This Life

We sometimes speak of this life.  For example, some assert that this life is all there is.  The ability to thematize and question the whole of life may not prove, but it does suggest, that we are more than beings confined to this life.  Even the average schlep, enmired in the mundane, his fledgling metaphysical organs numbed by the the onslaught of quotidiana, will at some point, when the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" pay him a visit, exclaim, "What the hell is this life all about?"

Milton Praises the Strenuous Life

Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice,"  he quotes Milton:

     I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
     unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
     slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
     for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
     into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
     us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.

The passage bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's remarks about being in the arena.

I like especially the last sentence of the Milton quotation.  We are born corrupt, not innocent.  We are not here (mainly) to improve the world, but (mainly) to be improved by it.  The world's a vale of soul-making.  Since this world is a vanishing quantity, it makes little sense to expend energy trying to improve it: when your house is burning down, you don't spruce up the facade.  You don't swab the decks of a sinking ship.  It makes more sense to spend time and effort  on what has a chance of outlasting the transitory.  This world's use is to build something that outlasts it.

But this will, pace Milton, require some flight from the world into the cloister where perhaps alone the virtues can be developed that will need testing later in the world.

Self-Effacement and Self-Importance

To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance?  I am thinking of Simone Weil.   In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself.  "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit my own personal nothingness face to face with Truth?"

The ego, wily 'structure' that it is, usually (always?) finds a way to affirm itself.

Moral Failure

Repeated moral failure has at least this salutary effect: it teaches us to be humble.  Moral success can have the opposite effect of conducing toward spiritual pride -- which undermines the very success of which it is the upshot.  So, while regretting one's failures, one can derive a little consolation from the realization that they are contributing to one's humility.

Adapted from Pascal

There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.

Vanity Plates

I reckon most motorists find vanity plates distasteful.   Upon seeing a plate bearing the letters 'Ph.D.' or 'M.D.' or 'J.D.,' the response is likely to be: BFD! In any case, who needs vanity plates when one can have for free one's very own vanity blog? And weblogs have this advantage: they are not in people's faces. You must freely decide to visit a site, and if you don't like what you find there, you bear at least half of the blame.

A Sucker is Born Every Minute

And so is a hustler.  Before you rush out and buy Richard Lustig's book about winning the lottery, ask yourself a simple question: why is this guy hawking a book if he has the winning lottery method?  Writing a book is a lot more work than buying lottery tickets.  His surname smacks of an aptronym: lustig in German means 'merry.'  One imagines him laughing all the way to the bank with his book receipts. 

The lottery is a fool's 'investment,' a self-imposed fool's tax: you willingly fork over money to the government beyond what they coercively take so that they will have even more  wherewithal for all their wise and wonderful projects.  And it is regressive: it affects mainly the the poor and innumerate, thereby insuring that they will remain poor and innumerate.

There are moral questions as well.  It would be nice if we could agree on the principle primum non nocere, first do no harm, and nicer still if we could agree that that applies to the state as well as to individuals. State-run lotteries harm the populace as I have argued many times over the years.  State-run casinos are even worse.  But I know I am but a vox clamantis in deserto in a country filled with idiots becoming stupider and cruder by the minute.

Regalia

Regalia, as its etymology suggests (from L. rex, regis), are the king's insignia. By a natural extension, anyone's insignia, colors, banners. We like to fly the colors to the point of identifying with them. We identify with flags and labels and logos and certain words. There is a stupid satisfaction one gets from flaunting logos like 'Trek' and 'Jeep.' See? Me ride Trek bike. Just like Lance Armstrong.

The name of my Bell bicycle helmet model is 'Paradox.' That clinched the purchase for me.

Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox.

Cooperation and Competition

Liberals tend to oppose cooperation to competition, and vice versa, as if they excluded each other. "We need more cooperation and less competition." One frequently hears that from liberals. But competition is a form of cooperation. As such, it cannot be opposed to cooperation. One cannot oppose a species to its genus.

Consider competitive games and sports. The chess player aims to beat his opponent, and he expects his opponent to share this aim: No serious player enjoys beating someone who is not doing his best to   beat him. But the competition is predicated upon cooperation and is impossible without it. There are the rules of the game and the various protocols governing behavior at the board. These are agreed upon and respected by the players and they form the cooperative context in which the competition unfolds. We must work together (co-operate) for one of us to emerge the victor. And in this competitive cooperation both of us are benefited.

Is there any competitive game or sport for which this does not hold? At the Boston Marathon in 1980, a meshuggeneh lady by the name of Rosie Ruiz jumped into the race ahead of the female leaders and before the finish line. She seemed to many to have won the race in the female category.  But she was soon disqualified. She wasn't competing because she wasn't cooperating.  Cooperation is a necessary condition of competition.

In the business world, competition is fierce indeed. But even here it presupposes cooperation. Fed Ex aims to cut into UPS'  business -- but not by assassinating their drivers. If Fed Ex did this, it would be out of business. It would lose favor with the public, and the police and regulatory agencies would be on its case. The refusal to cooperate would make it uncompetitive. 'Cut throat' competition does not pay in the long run and makes the 'cut throat' uncompetitive.

If you and I are competing for the same job, are we cooperating with each other? Yes, in the sense that our behavior is rule-governed. We agree to accept the rules and we work together so that the better of us gets the appointment. The prosecution and the defense, though in opposition to each other, must cooperate if the trial is to proceed. And similarly in other cases.

Is assassination or war a counterexample to my thesis? Suppose two warring factions are 'competing' for Lebensraum in a no-holds-barred manner. If this counts as a case of competition, then this may be a counterexample to my thesis. But it is not that clear that the Nazis, say, were competing with the Poles for Lebensraum. This needs further thought. Of course, if the counterexample is judged to be genuine, I can simply restrict my thesis to forms of competition short of all-out annihilatory war.  Or I could say that rule-governed competition is a species of cooperation.

Competition, then, contrary to liberal dogma, is not opposed to cooperation. Moreover, competition is good in that it breeds excellence, a point unappreciated, or insufficiently appreciated, by liberals. This marvellous technology we bloggers use every day -- how do our liberal friends think it arose? Do they have any idea why it is so inexpensive?  Competition!

Not only does competition make you better than you would have been without it, it humbles you.  It puts you in your place.  It assigns you your rightful position in life's hierarchy.  And life is hierarchical.  The levellers may not like it but hierarchies have a way of reestablishing themselves. 

Compensations of Advancing Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancour or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might be:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauean transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, one is more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

The Wild Diversity of Human Types: Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart

Zelda lived and died for fashion, collapsing at age 95 in the front row of a fashion show.  Dolores, though starting off in the vain precincts of glitz and glamour, gave it up for God and the soul.  This life is vain whether or not God and the soul are illusions. Should we conclude that to live for fashion is to throw one's life away for the trinkets of phenomenality, the bagatelles of transience? That to die while worshipping idols at the altar of fashion is a frightful way to die?  These mere suggestions will elicit vociferous objection from some, for whom it is self-evident that to retreat to a nunnery is to throw one's life away for an escapist fantasy.  But that is but another indication of the wild diversity of human types.  The case for the vanity of human existence is well made in Ecclesiastes.  See A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2.

It Passes All the Same

No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and contain the dissipation wrought by time's diaspora and the mind's incontinence -- it passes all the same.

Idle Talk

Time was when I felt superior to those who lose themselves for hours in idle talk,  the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.  But superior to that superiority is benign indifference to the idlers, an indifference so indifferent that it permits a bit of engagement with them, not condescendingly, but in acknowledgement of our common humanity.

Kennedy, Clinton, and the Sex Business

George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102:

This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals -- minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens' backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come near his food. He is not called upon to support his offpsring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience!

Being like the animals is of course no solution, even if it were possible. A strange fix we're in: it is our spiritual nature that enables both our sinking below, and our rising above, the level of the animal.

The delusive power of the sex drive is made all the more delusive and dangerous when aided  and abetted by personal magnetism and great political power. Kennedy and Clinton are two examples of how power corrupts.

The Fragility of Patience

A while back we had to deal with a difficult person.  Afterwards, wanting to praise me for my patience, my wife said, "Thank you for trying to be patient."  At that I lost my patience. "I wasn't trying to be patient, I was succeeding!"  Until that moment.