Month: March 2011

I have two degrees in the Humanities, both from top notch schools. As I think about it, very little of what I learned then has proven the least bit useful, either practically, or in terms of helping me be a better person.

On the contrary, what happens in most Humanities departments in the country is the OPPOSITE: people are taught to be nasty to ideological Others–conservatives–and to believe ideas about foreign policy and economics that are diametrically WRONG. Our kids are literally taught to be stupider, and to be worse citizens, who are less responsible, less able to engage in rational debate, and less able to draw cause and effect lessons in arenas that actually matter.

Here, then, is my proposal: rate all academic subjects in terms of their economic usefulness, then pair the tuition with the return on investment.. Biology, Computer Science, Engineering: all of those rate really well. French, English, History, Political Science: not so much. Frankly, it is hard to see ANY usefulness. I don’t see it.

Most of our public universities are stressed, are they not? Taxpayer dollars are spent subsidizing students across the board, but we could make it so useful professional studies are HEAVILY subsidized–even making certain subjects free for qualified candidates; and students of less useful, useless, or counterproductive fields of study would either be asked to pay the full, actual cost of their “education”, or even to subsidize the people who won’t be working in coffee shops, complaining about rich people, and giving their money to Michael Moore to make more movies about the evils of making money.

This actually could be done. What would likely happen is that most Humanities Departments would be decimated, and those that survived would have to actually produce a useful product: graduates able to think well, express themselves well, and able to locate themselves contextually in the world the rest of us live in.

I will add that the most useful things for me in terms of learning to think have been aggressively going out and finding people who disagreed with me, to debate with; reading the work of Edward de Bono; and doing manual labor. There is something about having a concrete task to accomplish which is either done or not done, and physically there, that has been very useful to me.

Actually, here’s another idea: all new buildings have to be built by students. That would be interesting, if impractical.

This really needs to be appended to my post two down. Cultural Supply Lines, I think I called it.

It is a truism that not all people live out their allotted lives. Many quit trying, quit caring, quit risking, quit learning, and just trudge through their days. Leftism is a sparkling facade, covered in bright shiny colors, and rubies and diamonds and emeralds, that promises to solve that problem. Leftists flip–the flip happens when you stop caring about the results of your actions–then they flip others.

But engaging with an idea is not really the same as engaging with life, is it? You have created something fixed, stable, and unreactive. No real physical structure is like that in the universe; nor is any living mental structure. In the sense in which I believe Maimonides used it, it is an idol. It is meant to stand in for something real, but instead comes to worshipped in its own right.

The term moral suicide refers simply to a disengagement with life: with chance, with circumstance, with reason, with love, with pain. Where are the zombie parades the most popular? As far as I can tell, the places where the Left lives. It is a species of quantitatively diversity in a monocultural zone.

The obvious point I am trying to make is that yes, you can kill yourself physically. But you can also stop trying, and die inside, as measured by the reactive impulses generating from within you relative to actual stimuli outside yourself. If the only thing you react to originates within you, then you are dead; and if you choose to remain that way, you have killed yourself.

This is perhaps a subtle point. I don’t know. It seems obvious to me.

I will add that I myself am often lost and confused. The line I follow moves in the wind, and could never be drawn with ink. When that happens, though, I find myself again, in a new place.

And I never doubt that my task is to improve the world in whatever ways God has seen fit to enable me to, large or small.

I posted this in response to this article

As I think about it, it seems to me that demonstration shows more than what he intended: is there, in the end, any difference between sex with a machine, and sex with another human being from whom you are withholding yourself emotionally?

No amount of sex can equal love. And when you have sex in lieu of love, you cannot maintain an emotional equilibrium. If you are not moving forwards, you are moving backwards. If you are not moving towards emotional intimacy, you are protecting yourself from vulnerability, which creates emotional gaps at the precise moments when defensiveness ought to least warranted.

One sees these lost women, who have come to view their bodies not as an extension of their selves, their souls, but their sense of self as an extension of their bodies. Only in that world can being penetrated equal any form of love, which here is conflated with hormones and the evolutionarily dictated reproductive urge.

I have said this before, and will again: don’t bother with Freud. Read William James “Principles of Psychology”. It is by far the most clever work on the topic I have read.

It is a truism that “armchair generals discuss strategy; professionals discuss logistics.” All competent generals focus not just on tactical defeat of their enemies on the battlefield, but upon attacking their supply lines, and capacity to fight. An army without bullets or food cannot win on courage alone.

We are, it is often said, in a cultural war. Depending on where one stands on that field of battle, it might be religion against atheism, or reaction against progression, or tradition versus flippancy.

In my own view, it is a battle between whether to be or not to be. Read the soliloquy, again, with new eyes.

What is he asking? Why live at all, when you can your “quietus make” with a simple knife? You can slit your wrists, bleed out, and end the oppressions in your life. But what is death? We don’t really know. Thus “conscience doth make cowards of us all”. Brilliant. The human condition in a nutshell.

The war we are fighting is whether we human beings want to continue existing, or not. Do we want to make plans for the future, as if the human race will still be alive 100 years from now, and free; or is it best to let the natural human tendencies towards conformity and authoritarianism run their course?

I have said often that no man can tell a lie to any woman and get away with it, unless she chooses to ignore her own instincts–unless she wants to be lied to.

One does not have to look long or hard to see leftists of apparent capability, good nature, and good will. Yes, confronted they will get nasty, but in their own natural settings–coffee houses, playhouses, nice restaurants, kitchens–they are quite amiable and congenial. They are nice. They are friendly.

But in my view, on some level they know they are embracing a lie. Deep in their hearts, they see that the policies they pursue will damage our freedom in the long run, damage our moral fiber, ruin our economy, and prevent an amicable future from emerging from our present difficulties. This is what they want. They want to run from the responsibility of creating meaning from nothing. Confronting the primal wind, they seek shelter. They give up.

And one can do this articulately. Dashing young professors, and serious young women can go about giving speeches on social responsibility, and social justice, and global peace, and environmental crises and the like. Earnest, engaged, knowledgeable, articulate: they are still wrong, and they should know they are wrong.

To fight an army, one need not hate the soldiers. One need merely point and fire one’s weapon accurately.

To the point here, what are the weapons in a cultural war? What are the analogies with conventional war? Self evidently, not actual weapons. It was frankly nauseating to me to see the immediate political use to which the assassination of a conservative 9th District judge–and attempted assassination of a House Rep.–was put. None of us are calling for violence. Violence is not the answer. Reform is the answer, and that is done within a political and legal structure.

Herein lies the answer: the battlefield is in the realm of ideas. The essence of conservatism is continuity. Conservatism is not opposed to change. It is simply opposed to radical change done quickly and without the time to see if it is prudent. It takes time to make a proper soup. You have to let the ingredients blend and mellow. You can’t do it in one minute simply because you are impatient.

Reform in our modern world will be a move back towards meaning derived outside of radical leftist politics. Religious people are of no concern. Their cultural system provides continuity. The people whose system does not are those who want to overthrow our system and implement a tyranny which will deliver them from their own failed meaning formation, their own moral gaps and failings–their lack of faith in the future, lack of stolidity, lack of courage; their pusillanimity.

This is the aggression. This is the forward movement. From whence, though, are our opponents resupplied? The answer can only be in the acculturation process itself, in the environments in which new Americans grow up. This means TV and Radio, internet, and our educational system.

How do we attack these supply lines? Our opponents, of course, are as brilliant in their tactics as they are defective in their strategy. They have long sought after the cultural distribution centers, and won many of them. These are the thought leaders out there, the figurative lights on the hill.

Retaking our society, redirecting it towards a sustainable future, will then involve the persuasion of centrally placed people to reconsider their views. Towards this end what are needed are coherent, intelligent ideas as to how they might accomplish the aims they claim to want, differently.

At root, this will involve attacking moral pessimism, in favor of what I suppose could and should be called moral optimism. Meaning can be formed. It can be stable. Homes can be built that can be lived in across lifetimes.

This is the project I have set myself, and which I would encourage any readers I may have to pursue as well. Victory is possible. Human civilization the world over 100 years from now can be peaceful, vibrantly happy, and sustainable.

But we have to want to make that happen, and we have to be intelligent about it. This will require everyone to get smarter, not smart people to rule over us. People get smarter when they are free, and when they are given challenges they have reason to expect they can meet.

This is the task. Go to it.

Listen to this song, sung by George Jones: These Days I Barely Get By.

My goodness, could it be any more sad?

I have many of the songs George Jones recorded, and all the songs Hank Williams recorded. Yet, sometimes I’m not in the mood for them. How much sadness do you need in your life?

It occurred to me yesterday, though, that the value of these songs is that enable you to convert the pain of resentment to JUST sadness. This is progress.

The other night, doing some manual work I really didn’t want to do after a long day, I was having a first rate pity party. All but the most fortunate of you (I’m assuming plural readers, which in turn implies A reader; if I’m wrong, I’ll never know) have had the experience of bottled rage and resentment and anger and destructive impulses as a result of wounded vanity. Why do I have to do this? It’s stupid. It’s not fair. Things should be some other way. That’s what I deserve. I could just punch something. I want to break something. I want to scream.

As I have often commented, evil is born in this basic impulse. Is it not wanting more than others, just because you are you? Is it not lying, cheating and stealing to get it? Is it not taking pleasure in others submission to you? And is taking from others, and working to gain power over them a form of destruction? Are you not destroying trust, and love? Are you not taking both the tangible and the intangible?

Anyway, it occurred to me that country music helps to mute this impulse. Take George Jones: in the popular myth, at any rate, he was for many years a drunk. From what I understand, he was at times a bully. Country music is not for sophisticated people. It is not for people whose lives are full and complete and working really, really well, in general.

It is for people who get up early every day and go work a job that is tedious and at times painful. It is for people who have no reason to expect anything but a slow descent into physical decrepitude and a penurious old age. These people are not saints. I am in no way glorifying this lifestyle, except in this one respect: if you endure hardship without complaint, you grow. You will always grow. This is in my view the nature of the universe.

Thus to the extent country music enables people to avoid bitterness, it is immensely useful. You can bear sadness. It is very hard to bear bitterness.

Happiness, of course, is the ideal. For happy times, there is happy music. My personal favorite is probably Louis Prima.

Few thoughts on a Woden’s Day. I will stop doing that when it ceases to amuse and educate me. Interesting point here: according to them (and this is a site edited in large measure by precocious teenagers), Woden is related to the German word “Wut”, which means rage.

One can scarcely imagine the northern Europeans enjoying their lives in the cold and wet up there. Would this not be frustrating? Would enduring anger not be an obvious result? Given no reason not to, why NOT make your main god a personification of rage, and why not offer human sacrifices to him, as the Vikings did? You hurt, so someone else is going to hurt too. This is a very human impulse, to be seen the world over. In my view, this is in no small measure the impulse behind many wars. It is the impulse behind both Communism and Fascism.