Where did I find it? In a fine analysis of the concept of charm by Joseph Epstein. Here is a taste that features the word under definition:
Some people I talked with thought charm was synonymous with “cool.” In fact, the two, charm and cool, are all but opposed. Cool aims for detachment, distance; charm is social, bordering on the intimate. Cool is icy; charm warm. Cool is costive; charm often ebullient. Cool doesn’t require approval; charm hopes to win it. Cool began life in jazz under the great saxophonist Lester Young, who first used the term, but it soon descended to the argot of drugs. Cool gave way to hip and hep. In Dave Frishberg’s song “I’m Hip,” the singer proclaims that he watches “arty French flicks with [his] shades on” and is so hip “I call my girlfriend ‘Man.’ ” Miles Davis was cool, Louis Armstrong charming.
How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays. The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use. Use 'em or lose 'em.
The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among men must do so with his maxims at the ready if he values his peace of mind.
Herewith, a faithful transcription from a 19th century work, The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty, Volume 1, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Timothy O. Porter 1839, 831 pages. (Obviously, not to be confused with the Danish publication that pilloried Kierkegaard):
Never discuss politics or religion with those who hold opinions opposite to yours; they are topics that heat in handling, until they burn your fingers; never talk learnedly on topics you know, it makes people afraid of you; never talk on subjects you don't know, it makes people despise you; never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing, and the better your reasoning the more obstinate people become; never pun on a man's words; it is as bad as spitting in his face. In short, whenever practicable, let others perform and do you look on: a seat in the dress circle is preferable to a part in the play. -- This is my rule.
A pretty good rule, one of what Schopenhauer calls Weltweisheit, worldly wisdom. In a fallen world, one needs such maxims. Did you know that Schopenhauer believed in something like Original Sin despite his being an atheist?
"Never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing." This is sage advice for almost all social situations.
I would add: never in general correct anyone's grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes unless it is your job to do so; the exception of course is serious discourse among serious and well-qualified people. Avoid talk of money if you don't want to be taken to be either poor-mouthing or bragging. Sex-tinged jokes can get you into trouble. And so on.
Should we go all the way with Pascal? “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées
To paraphrase a line often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:
Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.
That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths. The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.
My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
Now if you bear all of the above in mind, you may safely sally forth into society as long as your sojourn is brief and your maxims are 'cocked and locked.'
A powerful statement by Malcolm Pollack, at once both personal and objective. I recommend in particular the penultimate paragraph:
We who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century have lived our whole lives in such ease and peace and prosperity that we have mostly forgotten, I think, how rare, and how precarious, order and peace and safety are — how easily they are lost, and what sacrifices, and what sense of duty and gratitude, are necessary to sustain them. We just take it all for granted — this astonishing edifice of law and tradition and culture and trade and agriculture and innovation and justice and security — as if it was simply a pre-existing and eternal feature of the world. We imagine, lately, that we can just pick at it as we please, pull pieces out of it and burn them, hack away at its foundations, rip out its beams and joists, and crack its pillars without causing it, someday very soon, to come crashing down on our heads.
One does well to recall the wisdom at Hosea 8:7: Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
And never forget who has the guns. Is that a threat? No, it's a warning. You do not want a civil war. You will not like it.
Please exercise your historically-informed imagination now so that you won't have to rely on perception later.
When some activist or advocate makes a claim, be skeptical and run the numbers, especially when the advocate has a vested interest in promoting his cause.
Do you remember Mitch Snyder the advocate for the homeless who hanged himself in 1990? I heard him make a wild claim sometime in the '80s to the effect that the number of homeless in the U. S. was three million. At the time the population of the U.S. was around 220 million. So I rounded that up to 300 million and divided by three million. And then I knew that Snyder's claim was bogus, and probably fabricated by Snyder, as was later shown to be the case. It is simply not credible that one in 100 in the U. S. is a homeless person.
When Snyder admitted to Ted Koppel that he made up his number, advocates for the homeless defended his tactic as "lying for justice." See here. A nice illustration of the leftist principle that the end justifies the means. Obama implemented the principle when he lied some 30 times about the Affordable Care Act . But let's not go over that again.
Philosophy needs no social justification. But one of the salutary social byproducts of its study and practice is the honing of one's critical thinking skills. I am assuming that the philosophy in question is broadly analytic and not the crapulous crapola of such later Continentals as Derrida.
If something is good, more is better. For example, there are people who think one cannot drink too much water. False. Hyponatremia can be induced by excessive water consumption especially if the water is pure or near-pure. You flush out your electrolytes and die.
If something is bad in large quantities, it is bad in small quantities as well. False. Exposure to sunlight.
To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan:
Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.
“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.
They were often proved right.
[. . .]
Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.
Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted....I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” This rosy view of humanity suffuses Austin's blog: “Malawians and Zambians are fantastically friendly people.” And: “All throughout western Europe, when folks asked us where we were headed and we'd say Albania, their faces would drop and they'd start muttering 'Oh, no, no, no.' Albania, they'd tell us, is dangerous. The people of Albania will steal your spleen....The Albanians we come across are perhaps the warmest, friendliest, smiliest...people we've met on the continent.”
Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being[s] than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative. This is apparently a comment on the South African government's current expropriation of white farmers' land without compensation. (To be sure, when a friendly Afrikaans man advises Austin and Geoghegan to move their tent because they've pitched it too close to a black settlement and may antagonize the locals, they're quick to let him lead them to a safer spot.)
[. . .]
The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments.
[. . .]
Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists....This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.
Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal....But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan....Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”
[. . .]
Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.
Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 40 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978. But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 40 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)
So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.
Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 294th birthday. Sapere aude!
I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.
As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.
Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?
Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.
One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:
Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated.
To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:
Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation.
It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.
Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.
I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career. The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.
How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.
One measure of success is how far you've gotten, and the other is how far you've come.
The second is the better measure.
On the occasions when you feel you haven't gotten very far in life, tell yourself, "But look where you started from, and what you had to work with, and the obstacles you had to overcome."
"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)
Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in -- she construed it as sexual harassment. You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble.
In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion. To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be. Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?
Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed. Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals. Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior. The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the kid's 'culture.'
You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them. My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs. But I will. Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.
Good people are even better in small doses. Enjoy their quality in moderation for best results. If familiarity breeds contempt, reserve builds respect.
Keith Burgess-Jackson offers six items of sound advice, each both prudential and moral. Here is #1:
Don't touch a woman without her specific consent. Consent, to be consent, must be informed. Don't resort to trickery, subterfuge, dissimulation, or manipulation (including getting her drunk or high).
I would add a qualification: unless she is your wife and you have a loving relationship. (And if you don't share a loving relationship, why are you still married to her?)
That is a good point about the nature of consent, by the way.
I would say that the above, even with my qualification, is a rule of thumb (rule of hand?), which is to say that it is broadly accurate.
Suppose you are seated opposite a woman not your wife whom you find attractive and with whom you are enjoying a tête-à-tête. She strokes your hand. She has given you a signal that may justify your touching her in a similar way even without explicit consent.
Prudent? Moral? The near occasion of sin? You decide!
In any case, don't be an Al Franken. Where is his hand? And what can be inferred from the gal's 'goosey' expression?
It would be desirable to be able to survey one's faults and limitations with an equanimity that does not give way to acceptance, but combines with both a gentle resolve to work at self-improvement, and a detachment from the outcome of such work.
If you want to be annoyed, life supplies the materials. But if you value peace of mind, you are free to sweep the irritant dust right out of your mind. Even better is to not let it in. A good maxim:
The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the merely possible. It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry. But it is not probable.
Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out. People don't change. They are what they are. The few exceptions prove the rule. The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities. "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12)
It is foolish to gamble with your happiness. We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose. So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that you will change her. You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.
The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.
Do you regret in the morning the spare supper of the night before or the foregoing of the useless dessert? Do you feel bad that you now feel good and are not hung over? You missed the party and with it the ambiguity and unseriousness and dissipation of idle talk. Are you now troubled by your spiritual continence?
As for idle talk, here is something good from Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:
In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.
I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything important in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’ An expression of boredom, it does little to alleviate it.
The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.
Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk? That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme. It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'
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.
You may spoil your success if you compare it with someone else's. Beware of comparison. Not all comparison is invidious, but the potential for envy is there. Invidia is the Latin for 'envy.' An invidious comparison, then, is one that elicits envy. One can avoid envy by avoiding comparison. To feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the accomplishments of another is the mark of a loser.
One ought to celebrate the accomplishments of others since in many cases they redound to one's own benefit.
If you cannot be satisfied with who you are and what you have, you will never be content. And if you are never content, then never happy. There is more to happiness than contentment, but the latter is an ingredient in the former.
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 15, Part II, p. 76, #316:
He will maintain a proper equilibrium between being aware of what is happening in the world, remaining in touch with it, and being imperturbable towards it, inwardly unaffected and inwardly detached from it.
Small is the number of those who can appreciate this as an ideal, and smaller still those capable of attaining it. Smallest of all is the number of those who attain it.
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?
The first is one that serves as a criterion to distinguish conservative from liberal. The latter lives and dies in the pious belief that people are inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself. The conservative knows better: human nature is deeply flawed, structurally flawed, flawed beyond the hope of merely human amelioration. The conservative takes seriously the idea of original sin, if not the particulars of any particular doctrinal formulation. Even the atheist Schopenhauer was well-disposed toward the doctrine.
Though capable of near- angelic goodness, man is capable of near-diabolical evil. History records it, and only the foolish ignore it. The fact of radical evil cannot be gainsaid, as even the Enlightenment philosopher Kant (1781-1804) deeply appreciated. The timber of humanity is crooked, and of crooked timber no perfectly straight thing has ever been made. (Be it noted en passant that conservatives need to be careful when they generalize about the Enlightenment and wax critical of it. They might want to check their generalizations against the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophers, the Sage of Koenigsberg.)
My second point will elicit howls of rage from liberals, but their howling is music to my ears. The victim must bear some moral responsibility for the crime, albeit a much lower degree of responsibility than the perpetrator. For he allowed himself to be victimized by failing to make use of his faculties. (I assume the 85 year-old was not senile.) He did not think: "What could an attractive young woman see in a decrepit old specimen like me? What is she after?" He let his vanity and ego swamp and suborn his good judgment. He had a long life to learn the lesson that romantic love is more illusion than reality, but he failed to apply his knowledge. Blaming the victim is, up to a point, justified.
So man is a wolf to man and man is a lamb to man. Wolf and lamb 'need' each other. Be neither. You have a moral obligation to be neither.
We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?
"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence. One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"
Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know? Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?
I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:
Dolce Far Niente
Sweet To Do Nothing
which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.
So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.
And that explains why I arise at 2:00 AM. The morning is a most excellent time to do nothing, and so a huge quantity of morning must be allotted to this 'activity.' All practitioners agree that meditation goes best in the morning. It is also the best time to put into practice Thoreau's admonition to "Read not The Times, but the Eternities." As for traipsing around in the local mountains, you want to be on the trail before sunrise to greet its arrival as it kisses with golden light the peaks and spires, and to avoid the varmints of the two-legged kind whose palaver and very presence often prove an annoyance and a distraction.
If I am wearing a shirt with pockets, I almost always carry a 3 X 5 notebook and a pen in my top left pocket. People sometimes ask why I carry it. I have a prepared response:
It's in case I get a good idea. Haven't had one yet, but you never know.
And if I am out walking around, another element of my schtick is my stick which is distinctive and also elicits questions. Ask me why I carry it and I have a line at the ready:
Time was when I needed it to beat off women; but now I just need it to keep from toppling over.
I have found that the second line doesn't go over as well. While both involve self-deprecation, which will often endear you to people, or at least blunt the blade of their hidden hostility, the self-deprecation in the second line comes too late for some.
So I cannot recommend the second line in all circumstances. The perceived machismo of the first clause of the second line will sometimes stick in the craw of a humorless feminist.
Perhaps the best advice I could give is to paraphrase a line attributed to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:
Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.
That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths. The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.
My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
The barfly and the gambler, the flâneur and the floozy, fritter away their time. And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois.
But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's dissipation, are equally time-wasting. Prayer, meditation, study for its own sake, translation and transmission of culture, the vita contemplativa, Pieperian leisure, otium liberale, moral scrupulosity, mindfulness, the various disciplines of palate and penis, heart and memory, working out one's salvation with diligence -- all will evoke a smile from the worldly bourgeois fellow, the man of substance solidly planted in the self-satisfied somnolence of middle-class mediocrity.
He's tolerant of course, and superficially respectful, but the respect becomes real only after the time-waster has managed to turn a buck or secure a livelihood from his time-wasting by becoming a teacher in a college, say, or a pastor of a church.
So today being St. Patrick's Day I think I will engage in some 'cultural appropriation.' I have been invited to a street party at which corned beef and cabbage will be served, and I shall partake. I'm not big on parties, but a little socializing with one's neighbors is conducive to comity.
The wise do not multiply enemies beyond necessity; neither do they ignore easy opportunities to strengthen social relations. We are social animals whether we like it or not.
An hour of my time, beer and banter, some Irish grub, and then back to the inner citadel.
Robert Blake is back in the news, which fact justifies, as if justification is needed, a re-post from 18 May 2011.
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Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:
I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)
Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise -- except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.
Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."
Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career. Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.
This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks. Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely.
I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits. But positive methods are often superior to negative ones. If you want to lose weight, for example, it is better to exercise and burn more calories, while holding your caloric intake constant, than to eat less while holding steady on caloric expenditure. (Aside from the optimal course which is to do both at the same time.) Part of the reason for this is that it is harder to break an old habit than to begin a new one.
Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this. The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct deposit some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over.
Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $400- $500 cash in rebates for the use of a couple of cards which charge me no fee for their use. The credit lines are huge but I go nowhere near them, and the interest rates I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is at my disposal in a cash reserve account earning interest.
Suppose you are a leftist knucklehead who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?
So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget. Or is this a false alternative?
When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. That was in Boston, one expensive town. And then I got a job which paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everything. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.
The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.
You are well-advised to view your life as a self-improvement project, but beware of viewing the lives of others likewise. I mean: as your improvement project. If you are drawn to a member of the opposite sex, be sure you are drawn to her for what she is, not for what you fancy you can make of her. The few exceptions prove the rule: people do not change.
There are 'fixer-upper' houses but no 'fixer-upper' wives.
He who seeks a "fundamental transformation" does not love that which he seeks fundamentally to transform. Wherein lies a proof that Obama and his ilk are not patriots.
Here is a good article on the topic addressed to law enforcement officers, but useful for the ordinary citizen.
Under ORANGE below read 'if possible' for 'if necessary.'
Condition White is fine while in your house, assuming your house is well-secured. The minute you step out your door you should move to Condition Yellow, whether you are carrying or not. Train yourself to stay in Yellow as long as you are out and about.
I came close to being mugged in New Orleans' French Quarter in '90 or '91. I was there to read a paper at an A. P. A. meeting. Early one morning I left the hotel to sample the local color and grab some breakfast. Striding along Bourbon street, I noticed a couple of black dudes on the other side of the street. I was wearing a beret, which may have suggested to the loiterers that I was a foreigner and an easy mark. One dude approached and commented on my shoes in an obvious attempt ti distract me and throw me off my guard. My situational awareness saved me. That, my stern mien, height, leather jacket and purposeful stride. I gave the punk a hard look, increased my pace, and blew him off.
Profiling is part of situational awareness. Profiling is just common sense, which is why liberal fools oppose it. A couple of black youths loitering in a touristy area are probably up to no good. If common sense makes me a racist, then we should all be racists, including decent black folk.
Your body is your vehicle on the highways and byways of the mundus sensibilis. Does it not make sense to keep it ever roadworthy? Is it not morally incumbent upon you to do so? Either maintain it or get it off the road.
Most people have pitifully limited vocabularies. It is due to laziness in most cases. Don't pass over words you don't know. Write them down. Look them up. Compile lists. Review the lists.
You don't really want to go to that Christmas party where you will eat what you don't need to eat, drink what you don't need to drink, and dissipate your inwardness in pointless chit-chat. But you were invited and your non-attendance may be taken amiss. So you remind yourself that self-denial is good and that it is useful from time to time to practice the art of donning and wearing the mask of a 'regular guy.'
For the step into the social is by dissimulation. Necessary to the art of life is knowing how to negotiate the social world and pass yourself off under various guises and disguises.
All visible tattoos deliver the same message: I am not interested in being hired for any position that involves interacting with the public. Tattoos on the neck and face deliver the message in capital letters.
Time was when tattoos were found mainly only among the demimonde of grifters, members of outlaw motorcycle gangs, rough trade, a certain segment of merchant seamen, and other denizens of the dark side.
I tend to take a dim view of tattoos, seeing them as the graffiti of the human body, and as yet another, perhaps minor, ingredient in the Decline of the West. Christians who believe that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit ought to consider whether tattoos deface the temple. But I do not dogmatize on this topic. You can reasonably attack my graffiti analogy, and if you insist that tattoos are beautiful, not ugly, I won't be able to refute you. Or at least I won't be able to persuade you.
If you argue that there is no, or needn't be, a connection between tattoos and cultural decline, you may have a case. You might even be able reasonably to maintain that the bodily temple is sometimes beautified by judicious inking. Leviticus 19:28 forbids the practice, but that text does not settle the matter. I tend to think that fascination with the ugly and grotesque does not ennoble us. The connection between the aesthetic and the moral needs to be explored.
But I celebrate the liberty of the individual and tolerate the tattooer and the tatttoed.
I only advise caution: permanent or semi-permanent modifications of the mortal coil are to be made only after due deliberation. You might want to consider such things as: the signal you're sending, your future employability, and, for the distaff contingent, how ugly that tattoo will look on your calf when you are 45 as opposed to 20 and the ink is cheek-by-jowl with varicose veins and cellulite. Cute baristas in hip huggers with tattoos on their lower backs bending over the espresso machine invite impertinent questions as to how far down the pattern extends. "Does it come up the other side?"
If you are thinking of a career in public relations, a bone through the nose is definitely out, as are facial hardware and a Charley Manson-style swastika tattooed onto the forehead. And if you sport a 'tramp stamp,' keep it covered.
Something you allude to, but don’t completely address, is the allure of fashion, and its strange nature. Fashion has a lifetime of at most ten years, usually in a way that what once conferred stature and gravitas turns into the ludicrous. Fortunately we can discard clothes, and change our hairstyle. This is more difficult with tattoos.
I.e. it’s not just that the tattoo will look ugly when the ink is ‘cheek-by-jowl with varicose veins and cellulite’. It’s that it will look ugly and ridiculous in itself.
I haven’t seen any theory that neatly explains the transformative power of time over fashion. Those of us who are older and have been through a few cycles of such changes are aware of it, and are somewhat, though not completely, impervious to it. It is philosophically challenging. How can the very same thing turn almost into its exact opposite? Moreover, when you look at what is now most ridiculous about the fashion, it was the very thing which in a bygone era was the most fascinating and important.
Some things do not date, and perhaps that is the essence of great art. I also think writing dates much slower. I mean, you can read Strawson or Moore and you don’t have a strong sense that it was written 50 or 100 years ago. Then you look at pictures of the writers, and they look quite silly in tweeds or glasses or smoking a pipe.
Fascinating questions. Why are people swayed in their sartorial choices by what is clearly ridiculous and non-functional? Ghetto blacks strutting around in baggy cargo shorts hanging half-way off their butts; women prancing in high heels; stout lesbians stomping around in work boots at a poetry reading; Beltway boys in their bow ties. The absurd corsets and bustles of yesteryear. Statement-making and sexual signaling are part of what's going on.
The Opponent seems to be suggesting that tattoos will go out of fashion and come to look ridiculous. I don't know.
Don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism. Although happiness involves activity as Aristotle observed, it also involves rest, appreciation, enjoyment, gratitude, contentment, and contemplation. These, especially the last five, are deeply conservative. And they lie beyond the political.
We conservatives should be politically active only to the extent that it is necessary to beat back the totalitarians for whom the political is all.
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.
Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.
Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
Catholicism is true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance for many, many people. So if you are a lapsed Catholic, you could do far worse than to return to the arms of Holy Mother the Church. And this despite the deep post-Vatican II corruption. Better such a reversion than to persist in one's worldly ways like St. Augustine who, at age 30, confessed that he was "still caught fast in the same mire by a greed for enjoying present things that both fled me and debased me." (Confessions, Bk. 6, Ch. 11, Ryan tr., p. 149)
But if you are a Protestant like Tim McGrew or James Anderson, should you 'swim the Tiber'? Some branches of Protestantism are also good enough and true enough to provide moral guidance and spiritual sustenance. And this despite the problems of Protestantism.
I should think that practice is more important than doctrine. Better to remove the lust from your heart than to write an erudite blog entry about it. The doctrines will always be debated and contested. Does the Incarnation make logical sense? Is it perhaps true whether or not it makes sense to the discursive intellect? We will never know here below.
Would it not be folly to postpone the reform of one's life until one had solved intellectual difficulties that we have good reason to believe cannot be solved in our present state? Orthopraxy trumps orthodoxy. Three elements of Christian orthopraxy: follow the Ten Commandments; avoid the Seven Deadly Sins; try to live by the Two Greatest Commandments.You won't get very far without grace, but the trying may precipitate the grace.
Blacks need to learn from Jews, Italians, the Irish, and others who have faced abuse. Don't whine, don't complain, don't seek a government program. Don't try to cash in on your 'victim' status, when the truth is that you are a 'victim' of liberal victimology. Get the needle out of your arm, and that soul-killing rap noise out of your ears. Listen to the late Beethoven piano sonatas. May I recommend Opus #s 109, 110, and 111? We honkies want you to be successful. And we don't care what color you are. It's not about color anyway. It's about behavior. Work hard, practice the ancient virtues, and be successful. If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. Don't let Brother Jesse tell you otherwise. Don't get mad, be like Rudy Giuliani. Can you imagine him making a big deal about being called a greaseball, dago, goombah, wop, guinea . . . ? Do you see him protesting Soprano-style depictions of Italian-Americans as mafiosi?
C.J. F. Williams told me a [Richard] Swinburne story. Swinburne offered to give him a lift to some philosophy conference, but warned him ‘I only drive at 30 miles an hour’. Christopher thought he meant that he strictly abided by the urban 30 mph speed limit, and accepted the lift.
It turned out that Swinburne never ever drove more than 30 mph, even on the freeway, where in the UK the limit is 70 mph. It took a while to get to there.
Slow is not safe on freeways. Swinburne is lucky to have lived long enough to be insulted by the Society of Christian Philosophers.
I have heard rumors to the effect that David Lewis was 'automotively challenged.'
My old friend Quentin Smith didn't drive at all.
One of the reasons that philosophers from Thales on have been the laughingstock of Thracian maids and other members of hoi polloi is that many of them are incompetent in practical matters.
Quentin was just hopeless in mundane matters. The tales I could tell, the telling of which loyalty forbids.
Me? I'm an excellent driver, a good cook, a pretty good shot, competent in elementary plumbing, electrical, and automotive change-outs and repairs, and well-versed in personal finance.
A life well-lived is a balanced life. You should strive to develop all sides of your personality: intellectual, spiritual, artistic, emotional, and physical.
Addenda
Here is an obituary of C. J. F. Williams by Richard Swinburne.
It came as news to me that Williams spent most of his life in a wheelchair. It testifies to the possibilities of the human spirit that great adversity for some is no impediment to achievement. I think also of Stephen Hawking, Charles Krauthammer, and FDR.
So stop whining and be grateful for what you have. You could be in a bloody wheelchair!
Your blog post "Philosophers as Bad Drivers" brought back to memory a philosophy professor that I had as an undergrad and a story he told us about himself.
Dr. Ken Ferguson (https://www.ecu.edu/cs-acad/ugcat/philFaculty.cfm) told us a story one day about his time in one of the branches of the military. While serving, an officer instructed him to move a jeep. Ferguson says he objected and explained to the officer that he simply could not drive. The officer wasn't sympathetic to his excuse and doubled down on his request. Ferguson said that he attempted to follow the orders and ended up wrecking the jeep and some other equipment. He was not asked to drive again.
Ferguson said that he simply does not drive. Multiple times I remember seeing him walking down one of the main streets leading to campus in what I suspect was a distance of at least over two miles in the morning, and while always wearing a full suit at that!
Thanks for the story! Ferguson is a counterexample to the famous Stirling Moss quotation: “There are two things no man will admit he cannot do well: drive and make love.”
One of the reasons philosophy and philosophers get such bad press among the general public is because of the high number of oddballs and incompetents in philosophy. Your former professor mught have had a number of good reasons for never learning how to drive. But I would argue that there are certain things every man ought to know how to do and they include knowing how to drive cars and trucks of various sizes and operate a stick shift. Like it or not, we are material beings in a material world and knowing how to negotiate this world is important for us and those with whom we come into contact.
We should develop ourselves as fully and many-sidedly as possible so as to be worthy acolytes of our noble mistress, fair Philosophia. We represent her to the public.
Our tendency is to drift through life. If life is a sea, too many of us are rudderless vessels, at the mercy of the prevailing winds of social suggestion. Death in its impending brings us up short: it forces us to confront the whole of one's life and the question of its meaning. Death is thus instrumentally good: it demands that we get serious. To face it is to puncture the illusion that one has all the time in the world.
You might be dead before nightfall. In what state would you like death to find you?
East and West, death has served as the muse of philosophy and of existential seriousness.
Gotama the Buddha: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (said to be the Tathagata’s last words.)
Plato: "nothing which is subject to change...has any truth" (Phaedo St 83).
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