Maverick Philosopher

The Futility of Debating Atheists

Would you discuss music with the tone deaf or colors with the color blind? Literature with the illiterate? Poetry with the terminally prosaic? Number theory with the innumerate? Conscience with a psychopath? Would you discuss anything with anyone who lacked the experiences pertaining to the relevant subject matter?

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

Top o' the Stack. 

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendants (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: the individual, though not the species, can exist quite well without them.

I mention pros and cons of dangling anthropologically.

Why are People so Easy to Swindle?

My answer at Substack.

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre

Substack latest

Which is Seeming, which Being?

In the vitality of the moment, in the pride of life, in the grip of surging lust, the trinkets that distract us seem so concrete, so compelling, and so real.  God and the soul seem by contrast like bloodless abstractions, mere thoughts, the impotent projections of weak minds incapable of facing 'reality' and of being satisfied with the only world there is.

Homo Homini Lupus

Top o' the Stack. Opening paragraph:

A 28-year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets.  The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man.  What lessons are to be learned from this?

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

Joe Odegaard comments:

This is from Dante's Inferno, Canto 26:

 

"Consider your origin: you were not made to live like brutes, but to

follow virtue and knowledge."

 

Considerate la vostra semenza:

  fatti non foste a viver come bruti,

  ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'

 

Some people don't try.

The Relative Unreality of Social Transactions

An excerpt from  a journal entry dated 21 July 1985 followed by a comment.

There is often little or no personal reality in human relationships. They are often nothing more than formulaic transactions. When I saw C.T.K. on Friday I told him, sincerely, that he looked good, healthy. He felt obliged to return the compliment -- he couldn't just graciously accept it; he had to interpret it as the opening move in a social transaction.

I would like to think that it is possible to instantiate social roles, playing them, as we must, but without being played by them, that is, without allowing oneself to succumb to the illusion of being identical to them.

It may be that some people are social-transactional, and thus pure social surface all the way down. In such people there appears to be no person beneath the personae, nothing below the masks, poses, roles, no spiritual substance. Social interaction has lifted them above the merely animalic, and so they count as human in one sense, but they have never glimpsed the possibility of a further step from the merely social to the truly individual.

The project of radical self-individuation is beyond their ken.  I had a colleague like that, a man stuck at the level of ego-games and oneupsmanship.  In a 'conversation' with him I never had the sense that any communication was taking place.  So it came as no surprise when, in one of our 'conversations,' he asserted that a person is just the sum-total of his social roles. Nor was it a surprise  when I learned that he was working toward a second Ph. D. in sociology!  

The Main Argument against Secular Humanism

Humans.

Forgiveness and Self-Justification

One feels justified in not forgiving. "Why should I forgive the bastard? He wronged me, and not just once!"

"Don't you need forgiveness? You must forgive because you yourself need to be forgiven for what  you have done to others!"

"There is a part of me that can appreciate your fine Sunday School sentiment.  But to survive in this ugly and brutal world I had to become tough and unfeeling; I had to learn how to be unjust and how to wrong people. And of course I had to practice on the weak and vulnerable if I was to make any progress and not be killed right away."

A Reason for Reserve

The less I know of you, the more highly I can think of you.

A Reason to Live Long

There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here. It may be that at death soul-making stops and one is stuck at the moral, intellectual, and spiritual level one has attained in the precincts of the sublunary. This could prove problematic if one survives one's bodily death.  Are you sure that you don't? 

With Detachment from the Outcome

There are games and there is life, and life is not a game. But life is like a game, and sufficiently so to warrant application of the same principle: play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.

In chess, and not just in chess, it is 'unsporting' not to try to defeat the opponent by all legal means.  It shows a lack of respect for the opponent and for the game to not do one's best. 

In life as in chess, play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.

If the above reminds you of the Bhagavad Gita, that's a feather in your cap.

Related: Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

The Optics of Compassion

We make a brave attempt at seeing the best in one another. The attempt is aided by not looking too closely.

Self-Deprecation

A little self-deprecation is good, but more is not better. Nobody likes the boaster. Take self-deprecation too far, however, and people will have contempt for you.

Wife and Life, Truth and Practice

My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking,  gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital. 

Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some people. The world is ugly, but there is also beauty in it. Life can seem meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and yet it also at times appears under the aspect of ultimate Sense and Rightness.

You will have to decide which of these seemings to live by. Try both and see which is more conducive to happiness. The one that makes you happier has a solid claim on being the truer. That the truth should in the end thwart us strikes me as implausible.  But the question cannot be resolved theoretically. You resolve it by living, thoughtful living, each for himself and by himself. 

Titans once bestrode Harvard Yard.** Josiah Royce was one, William James the other. The latter held that truth is "the good in the way of belief." I commend that thought to your delectation, examination, and practical implementation. 

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*Time was, when the lion's share of something was the whole of it. Despite my linguistic conservatism, I have acquiesced in the latter-day usage according to which the lion's share of something is most of it. If lions could speak, they would protest the semantic dilution.

**Pygmies now rule.

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

Substack latest.

The Truth of Life and the Art of Life

We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding.  They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.

The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that  "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)

The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.

How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

Here is a possible attitude for examination.

Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from the proximate, and unfits one for the only life that is sure. Accept finitude, for we are not made for anything more.

But even this train of thought is dangerous. To ride it is already to forsake short views and to speculate fruitlessly about views and about which is best. That view alone is truly short which is accepted thoughtlessly and thus not as a view. The truly short view is no view. If you so much as ask whether the life lived in sensuous immediacy is the truest or best, the worm of inquiry  -- call him Skepsis -- has already entered your head. Or perhaps he was there all along and now you are feeding him.  

But it is too late. You are on the path of inquiry and there is no turning back. Forward you shall go to points unknown. Will you proceed resolutely or in the desultory way of wishy-washy worldlings?

But is it really too late? Why can't one just stop? The trick is to do so without explanation or justification. The example of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that this is impossible. Philosophical Investigations,  309:

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all the inconclusiveness and endlessness that that entails. He should have just walked away from philosophy.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It is not clear that it can be done, but you can try.  I'm not saying it should be done.  On the contrary.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  That would be like copulating your way to chastity.  For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

Just walk away, Rene.

On Thinking for Oneself

You must think for yourself while never forgetting that the wild and troubling and contention-stoking diversity of opinions abroad in the world is due to people thinking for themselves. The herd animal may be stampeded into a slot canyon where he drowns; the maverick may end up in the same place and meet the same fate on his own.

If only there were an utterly reliable teaching authority available to us here and now. Some say there is. See my longish entry, Michael Liccione on Private and Collective Judgment.

I Know My Limits

I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know.   Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. 

(Note how 'I' is used above.  It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?" 

And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic.  He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?

Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style.  But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode. 

Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk.  There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below.   As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft,  "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

Hard and Soft

You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa  must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation.  Self-individuation is a task, not a given. 

Pleasure in the Petty

We humans are ineluctably petty in various ways. It can't helped. And so we can't be faulted for the occasional pleasure we take in the petty particulars of the quotidian round, such as the way the towels are arranged on the rack or the way the lazy cats are splayed upon the bed.

The Less I Know of You . . .

. . . the more highly I can think of you. And the more highly I think of myself, the less I know of myself.

Servility Will Cower to Force

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:

For my part, I am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power. The only means to prevent men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the sure method of debasing them. (Quoted in Zbigniew Janowski, Homo Americanus, p. 15)

No man, and no group of men. We need checks and balances all up and down the line.  

And yes the people are ovine and servile and will cower to power. That has been amply demonstrated of late by the masses' mindless donning of useless masks. Don we now our fey apparel! Let us signal our specious virtue and adherence to the party line of Lord Fauci and his minions.  And when the party line shifts, we shift with it!

The other day I espied a lady, driving alone, windows rolled up, wearing a big black mask. But I was in a charitable mood. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe she just left a doctor's office where entrance required the fashion accessory in question, and she forgot to take it off." But then I waxed rather less charitable. "Is she so oblivious to the mechanics of respiration that she would leave that rag around her face when alone?"

As for Dr. Fauci, RFK Jr. has his number. You all should read his The Real Anthony Fauci.  Look it up. Buy it. Study it.  The author's an outlier, a decent Dem, like Tulsi Gabbard.

Human Relationships

The good ones require differences, but the differences must be complementary, not contradictory, like the halves of a natural whole that  make up the whole, complementing but not contradicting each other.

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.  The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

Disingenuousness

One politician accuses another of being disingenuous. But isn't such an accusation itself disingenuous inasmuch as disingenuousness is itself necessary for polite, politic, civil, political behavior? Could one have diplomacy and  civility without fakery and phoniness?  Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"

The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know  what 'trust' means.

One root of Trump hatred is his refusal or inability to play the political game in the conventional way. In a world that runs on appearances, social success demands more than a modicum of fakery, dissembling, white lies, and such.  If Trump could learn to play the game in a more conventional way, but without any reduction in the size and efficacy of his political cojones, he would be unstoppable.

But this world in which there is more seeming than being is also a world of severe limitations.  You cannot expect a man of action with a popular appeal to be also sensitive, articulate, refined, and literary. And vice versa. Those who are the latter tend to be of the milquetoast sort.  Someone as précieux, as 'precious,' as Bill Kristol is not cut out to lead.  

Preciosity does not suit the populist.

 

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

________________

*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The passage of years has made of a man on the make a man of wisdom. He stands on a street corner, a spectator of the passing scene. An old flame from his cocky youth passes by.  Gloria Mundi sees him but without acknowledgement. The old man thinks to himself, "What did I ever see in her?"

Such Sweet Sorrow

Part of what makes "parting such sweet sorrow" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) is the realization that one may never see the beloved again alive. Death presides over all of life; in leave-taking he steps out of the shadows. You see the glint of his scythe from the corner of the eye.

In the twilight glow, I see her
Blue eyes crying in the rain;
As we kissed goodbye and parted,
I knew we'd never meet again.

Love is like a dying ember,
Only memories remain;
Through the ages I'll remember,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Now my hair has turned to silver,
All my life I've loved in vain;
I can see her star in heaven,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder,
We'll stroll hand in hand again;
And in a land that knows no parting,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Written by Fred Rose and first recorded by Roy Acuff in 1947. Numerous covers.

A little known version by Ramblin' Jack Elliot.

Man is a Project

To believe in oneself is to believe beyond the evidence.

Too Many of Us

Surface all the way down. Centerlessly peripheral. All fringe, no focus. Spiritually centrifugal. Swallowed by the social. Dis-tracted. Unaware without a care. Swamped by the flesh. Oblivious. Vain, vacant, vacillating. Thoughtlessly full of useless thoughts. Incontinent in every way except micturition.

Too many of us are like this.

Once More on Envy

His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might -- and make the father look small.

Envy Again

How little you must know about me to envy me!

Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target?

Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which, if not a sin is nonetheless ugly -- and deadly.

Envy

How little you must be to envy me!

Study history to know yourself and what you are capable of

In this important video, Jordan Peterson explains how history describes you.

Part of what he is doing is railing against the pernicious leftist displacement of evil onto external conditions, social and economic, and its removal from its original and true locus, the foul and diseased heart of the human animal. For your own good, please pay close attention to the whole talk.

Most assuredly, you would have been a Nazi had you been a German in Germany 1933-1945.

And you will be a 'woke' totalitarian commie if we don't get this country back on track. You will go along to get long. You will fall in line out of fear and the instinct of self-preservation. You will snitch on your neighbors. You will practice self-censorship. You will acquiesce in the pronoun nonsense oblivious as you are to the power of language to guide and mis-guide thought.  You will submit to absurd health mandates. You will sell your birthright for a mess of pottage. And you will have no trouble rationalizing and justifying your compliance. "I have a family to support." And in other more creative ways.  The capacity for rationalization in humans is near-infinite.

READINGS FOR DARK TIMES

When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America.  But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.  The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost, liberty-wise. Consider what is happening in Australia of all places.

What was it like to live in the Third Reich?  What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017

All of these are easy reading, especially the second two.

Related: Theodor Haecker entries.

The Long and the Short of It

The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it.  This suggests that the old who lose themselves  in the quotidian round  may avoid the view from above and cultivate thereby a life-enhancing illusion.

Not filed under Sage Advice, but under Art of Life.

The Write-Off

I wrote him off at an early age but then never wrote him back on again.

Unjust! But then it is hard to be just even to oneself. And sometimes justice to self requires injustice towards others.  Such is our predicament in this dimly-lit slot canyon with unscalable walls and a flash flood coming, but you know not when.

Polarization and Flotation in Politics

Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield.  A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is.   A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen.  He will know that, in the end, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no time left for 'penmanship.'

How Strange!

How strange it would be if death were to leave us all in the dark as to the ultimate why and wherefore!  How strange if no one knows, no one ever knew, and no one will ever know what it's all about.  And not because the Answer is hidden, but because there is none.

If you say that it could be like that, I won't disagree. There is presumably and prima vista no presumption in favor of point, purpose, intelligibility and sense. But if you find nothing strange about this putative state of affairs, then I will view you and your spiritual vacancy with a mixture of pity and contempt.

An Advantage of Childlessness

Our parents and relatives cared about us enough to judge us, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. They understood us and they didn't. Their intentions were mainly good, but their misunderstanding was a burden. They were wrapped up in their own lives and troubles; ours were relatively unreal to them. "What do you have to worry about?" a parent may say to a child drifting in the horse latitudes of teenage alienation, aimlessness, and cognitive dissonance. With their passing our burden of their misunderstanding was lifted. And they too were lifted -- beyond the reach of our critical judgments. 

Childlessness has this advantage: there is no one left to judge us. We are free. I am not an anti-natalist. I am merely pointing out an advantage to having reached a temporal 'space' in which some of us are safe from being boxed-in by the judgments of  well-meaning but uncomprehending kith and kin.  

Enemies Have Their Uses

You may do your level best to hide your faults and defects, but others will expose them. Even if they do so maliciously they perform a service to those who are open to correction. An enemy is sometimes to be preferred to a friend in tacit collusion with one's moral complacency.

An Admiring but Critical Note on an Edmund Burke Quotation

A quotation and a question:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to [of] justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791, bolding added.

A fine statement to which I largely agree, but I have one reservation. An  external check upon the wills and appetites of individuals who will not check themselves is necessary if there is to be civil order.  But the administrators of the external check are cut from the same crooked timber as the rest of us.  Our trust in them must therefore be cautious and as limited as the power we grant them. The conservative assessment of human nature is sober and realistic: every true conservative knows that power goes to the heads of its possessors, and this regardless of how paltry the power may be. 

Who checks the checkers? Who keeps them in check?  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  The checkers cannot be expected to check themselves any more that the Roman Catholic hierarchy can be expected to check the concupiscence of its clerics and punish priestly paedophiles and ephebophiles with sufficient severity. They will protect their own first, setting the interests of the institution above the interests of those  they are supposed to serve.  The same goes for government which can degenerate into a self-serving hustle like any hustle.  So-called civil servants too often serve themselves first and those they are supposed to serve second if at all.

A sound conservatism must advocate checks and balances across the board with every individual and group kept in check and keeping in check.  For one example, armed civilians are needed to keep both the criminal element and government in check, just as government is need to keep armed civilians in check via the enactment and enforcement of reasonable gun laws.

A sound conservatism will not succumb to the authoritarian temptation; it must take on board as much of classical liberalism as is necessary to stymy the drift toward the totalitarian. The true conservative treads the via media between knee-pad Toryism and anything-goes libertarianism. 

Practical Types

Practical types look down on speculation, but we are not just animals with stomachs. We have eyes and not just in the head. Mundane grubbing and hassling for property and pelf are  necessary but if not kept within limits will dim spiritual sight. We are not here to pile up loot and land.

Good Relations and Deep Relations

Given the limitations of our postlapsarian predicament, good relations with others must needs be limited relations. Familiarity breeds contempt. Propinquity militates against politeness. Conservatives understand that a certain formality in our relations with others, both within and without the family, helps maintain respect. Formality helps keep in check the incivility bred of familiarity.  Reserve has a preservative effect.   Saying less more often accrues to our benefit than saying more. How often have you brought trouble upon your head by simply keeping your mouth shut? 

So much for good relations. Deep relations are another story. In them we court danger. We go deep, we probe, we 'let it all hang out' after midnight of the work-a-day round. You should run the risk from time to time.  Risk rejection and worse. Otherwise, when it comes time to die, you won't be able to say that you really squeezed the fruit of the lemon tree. 

Ingredients of Happiness

What makes for happiness?

Acceptance is a good part of it: acceptance of self, of one's ineluctable  limitations, of others and their limitations, of one's lot in life, of one's place in the natural hierarchy of prowess and intellect and spiritual capacity, acceptance of the inevitable in the world at large. 

Gratitude is another ingredient in happiness: one cultivates gratitude for and appreciation of what one has here and now without comparisons to an idealized past, a feared future, or to the lots of others.  No regret, resentment, worry, or comparison.  Comparison breeds envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Be your incomparable self. If you are not yet incomparable, take up self-individuation as a life project. Realize yourself. Your life is more a task than a given, a task of transmuting givens into accomplishments.  It is the task of becoming actually the unique person you are potentially. But no hankering for what is out of reach. No false ideals. No consorting with the utopian.  No Lennon-esque imagining of the impossible. No dreaming impossible dreams. 

You were born somewhere in the natural hierarchy of physical endowment, moral and affective and aesthetic sensitivity, mental power, spiritual capacity, and strength of will. But your place in the hierarchy allows for development. Know your place but press against its upper limits.

But of course happiness is not just a matter of attitude and exertion but also rests on contingency and luck.  We need, but cannot command, the world's cooperation. Happenstance holds happiness hostage.  You were dealt a bad hand? Suck it up and play it the best you can for as long as you can.

Conservatives emphasize attitude and exertion, leftists happenstance. Both have a point.  "The harder I work, the luckier I become" is a conservative exaggeration, but a life-enhancing one.  It is however the foolish conservative who thinks he is self-made and not the beneficiary of a myriad of forces and factors far beyond his control.  There is truth in Phil Ochs' lament, "There but for fortune go you or I," but not such truth as to trump the conservative's exaggeration.  Weathering "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) he will slog on, per aspera ad astra.

 

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

David Horowitz, Radical Son:

Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is and must remain forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. (Emphasis added)

The world is imperfect, and it cannot be perfected by us either individually or collectively. This is a defining truth of conservatism. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes, dreams, and desires, a reality from which he must learn what is possible and what is not. The conservative is not opposed to such  piecemeal ameliorations as are possible, but he does not conflate the possible with what he can dream up or imagine.  He is rightly unmoved by the utopian imaginings of a leftist like John Lennon in his song Imagine, imaginings that presuppose human perfectibility and the possibility of a quasi-religious immanentization of the eschaton. But of course Lennon's leftist imaginings are not mere imaginings but veiled prescriptions for such destructive actions as the suppression and ultimate eradication of religion together with the eradication of the belief that we as individuals have a spiritual origin and destiny; the spread of a smiley-faced half-way nihilism, that of Nietzsche's Last Man ("noting to kill or die for") which, while denying genuine transcendence does not reject this life but degrades it to a life of self-indulgence; the levelling of all differences and the ultimately futile assault on natural hierarchies which of course reassert themselves in the end. In short:

• Humans are imperfect. They are structurally flawed and in such a way as to disallow any possibility of perfection.
• Being imperfectible, they cannot be improved in any fundamental ways by human effort whether individual or collective.
• The failure of leftists to understand these truths and their consequent misguided attempts at perfecting the imperfectible have led to an over-all worsening of the human condition. And that is to put it mildly: in the 20th century alone communist governments murdered over 100 million. That is a lot of eggs to break for an impossible omelet.
• Leftists are reality-deniers who refuse the tutelage of experience.

 

Know Thyself!

He who knows himself know someone who inevitably in many a particular is not worth knowing. And he who knows this knows something worth knowing and someone who in at least one particular is worth knowing.

Inadequacy and Self Knowledge

I bemoan my faults and limitations, both intellectual and moral, but my bemoaning them shows that I am aware of them, which in turn shows that I possess self-knowledge, which is nothing to bemoan!