Month: August 2012

It seems to me these two are two sides of the same coin, which I have likely said before.  What I see now is that in general anger is expressed outwardly, and fear inwardly.  And on the inside we do not call it fear.  It exists not so much as a recognized attribute of our experience so much as an absence: the absence of innocent joy; the absence of trust; the absence of spontaneity; the absence of dance.

In this sense sadomasochism is sex plus fear.  That is perhaps the simplest way of showing why it is wrong: it is by definition unhealthy, being the product of undesirable emotions.

So much of our culture induces fear.  That is the role of alleged “news” programs which, if they were worth a damn, would regularly do in-depth analyses of the various cultural maladies of which the “news” is merely a temporal manifestation.  Someone got shot.  The interesting question is why.  Why were they poor?  Why were they so angry?  Why were they in a gang?

Few drive by thoughts.

Does it not seem sometimes as if we are in an interstitial period, located between History and for all we know Catastrophe?  We lionize people like Steven Tyler, who were quite revolutionary 30 years ago, but whose principle virtue today is having survived.  Scan  your radio dial.  How much is new, and how much old?

Does it seem as if our society has a direction it is traveling?  Do you feel a strong sense of direction, and faith that the world will be more or less the same when you have traversed your way?

Obama is in some ways the Timelessness President.  He exists on TV screens.  He exists in interviews.  But who IS he?  Much of America doesn’t seem to care.  Whoever he WAS, he exists today on the TV.  His Presence is eternal, and his past is irrelevant.  This is not just the result of conscious campaign choices by his handlers, but an aspect of our culture as it exists today.  So much change happens, that things seem to stand still, at least to my eye.  It is so many clouds puffing up, filling the sky, then being blown away by the wind, to be replaced by new ones.

This is a vague sense I have.  It is what I at times call the “de Chirico” sense, after the Italian much admired by the Surrealists.  Here is a pictorial representation–not, I think, the first on this site–of what I feel:

Oyweh.  Wrote this in response to this article, and if the past is any indication, it may never appear.  I’m Rodney Dangerfield, or something.  Actually, speaking of Rodney Dangerfield, this is funny. 

As always, if I take the time to write the damn thing, I like to make sure it appears SOMEWHERE.

I wrote a piece on Goodness dealing with this rough topic, which I
will link at the end of this post.  In my view, the academic search for
singular best answers in the moral realm is futile, just as it is futile
to search for final qualitative gestalts in any realm of human
endeavor.  We live in a universe without a top or bottom, in which up is
defined solely by the presence of gravity.  We must reason, then, as
bubbles in an endless ocean.  Our advantages are that we are self aware
bubbles, and we are aware of one another.

Logically, in any
purposive activity, one must define one’s goal.  The simplest and most
obvious goal in human life is happiness.  The next question is: are
there grades and types of happiness?  My answer is that, yes, there
are.  The happiness of a parent seeing a child succeed is in my view
qualitatively higher than spending time with a prostitute.  The pride of
success in a long, hard fought battle is better than intoxication.
Logically,
since I cannot inhabit other people’s minds, all such reason must
proceed from my own experience.  If my experiences are shared, then I
will generate recognition in others.  I am not stipulating general
rules; I am, rather, saying “this is true for ME, and I believe that you
will find it true for YOU also.”  Such a thing may be an approximate
general rule, with exceptions.

In my view, there is no room for
ontology, per se, but rather for tendencies and directions and
approximations.  I call a moral order a Telearchy: it is an order–a
complex order, a formally “chaotic” order–based upon chosen aims and
principles.

Within my own moral ecology all moral decisions are
local, imperfect, and necessary.  It will not be necessary for me to
render a decision on whether or not to eat my cat until the cat dies. 
And if I simply choose not to eat my cat because I don’t want to, that
is fine.  Nothing further need be said, as this is not even an important
decision.

Your capacity to pursue your own rational self
interest–a combination of temporal simple pleasures and higher grade,
more difficult “flow” sorts of experiences–is dictated by your
character.  In many cases, it is easier to make a decision which does
not best support your own long term best interests.  This means that a
properly moral disposition will have the capacity to reject self pity,
and the capacity to persevere in the face of difficulty.  I therefore
make these two habits immutable principles within my own creed.

My
third core principle is what I call Perceptual Breathing, which is the
constant habit of reconciling abstractions with concrete realities, and
more generally constantly pursuing UNDERSTANDING on all the levels on
which it operates: kinesthetic, emotional, cognitive (both in terms of
patterns of thinking and actual knowledge) and in my view spiritual.

Thus,
in answer to your question as to whether or not moral reasoning can be
improved, I would say both no and yes.  No, because I don’t think you
can “do” morality in the abstract.  I do not think it is a useful
activity.  Yes, because characters can be improved, judgement improved,
knowledge gained.  But what is being improved is a complex moral gestalt
that is unstable, but oriented through movement in a chosen direction.
Few
thoughts.  My piece (I hesitate to call it an essay) is here:
http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/dean%20rosengarten%20reply–modified.pdf

You
may find the rest of the website of some interest as well.  Morality is
the rough subtext of everything on there.  Even when I deal with
economics, I am trying to develop a better understanding of the effects
of specific types of policies on generalized human well being.  That
website is http://www.goodnessmovement.com

I think some sort of milestone has been reached when you can look demons in the face and laugh at them. In the end, they are never outside of you.

 I posted this as a response to this article, arguing in favor of affairs. I will add that I understand what they are saying, and have honestly thought more than once that if prostitution were more legal, that it’s quite possible more marriages would survive.  I am no prude on this topic, but feel that in the end it is always best to subordinate your behavior, by and large, to principles you choose.  Perhaps I am mistaken, but feel one must be who one chooses to be, or one is at a minimum confused, and more likely self loathing.  Since the cure for self loathing is finding someone to tell you how wonderful you are, infidelity is in some respects a self reinforcing cycle.  I am in this case speaking of several people I know.

To live a secret life, you have to segment your personality.  You have
to learn to repress all spontaneous expressions, lest your secret be
revealed.  You have to learn to be cautious in what you say, and guarded
in how you interact with the person who, in the end, you are lying to,
either actively, or by definition by omission.

Your spontaneity you reserve for your lover.  How can this but diminish
the rewards of asking for and receiving the loyalty of someone over the
course of a life?

I do not think sex, per se, makes anyone happy.  I think it is the
opening up to spontaneous emotions, to the unity and presence of
momentary experience, to giving in a spirit of genuine generosity.  All
of these things are possible within marriage.  I think things do not get
old, at least if you are with someone with whom you have ever felt a
deep connection: rather, I think people get lazy.

In the end, then, I think this is a rationalization of laziness and torpor, for which the prescribed remedy is betrayal.

Clearly, there may be couples who can manage the complicated dance of
open marriages.  I suspect at least one partner in most such
arrangements feels secretly hurt, but out of love is willing to tolerate
the straying of the other.  This does, however, make the other person
selfish, since they are willing to hurt the other person.

Personally, I am divorced, and waiting for the right woman.  I have had
many short term sexual relationships, and have found consistently both a
hollowness in pursuing sex for its own sake, and an utter revulsion
with the idea of indulging in short term passions at the cost of my long
term, self defining principles.  To use people is to lower oneself,
also, to the role of an object.  I refuse to do it.

Phrase popped in my head today. This is the point of political propaganda.  Jacques Ellul makes this point well in his excellent book Propagandas (If memory serves, it was plural in French, and singular in English, which pissed him off).

How do you weaponize hate?  You arrange it in lines and rows, and you learn how to turn it on and off.  You find people who are content to be told what to think, what to wear, and who are easily moved to the madness of hatred just by seeing a name put on a glossy sheet posted in a special place.

That is all Leftists do.

With regard to Paul Ryan, the interesting problem they face is they are trying to demonize someone whose voice they cannot silence.  He can speak for himself, and does so articulately and from a basis of considered and informed opinion.  In my view, goose stepping to the beat of the old playbook is not only not going to work, it is going to reduce the effectiveness of that tactic considerably. 

In propaganda, you never, ever, ever want people to be able to compare the view you are spouting with an articulated reality.  Not only do you not carry the day, people stop listening to you. Obama, quite simply, does not have sufficient control of the media for this to work, which means that the more Ryan talks, the more certain a victory in November becomes.

The Queen exercised good judgment not going.  The English, depending on how you define them, have perhaps 1,500 years of history.  They have an Isaac Newton, and a Handel (they can claim).  They have Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and Milton.

All the words, they scattered them like so much trash on the cars and ground.  All the history, they left it alone.  Judging from the acts, only the last 30 years of British history matter, and those were precisely the years when they were rehearsing the Clockwork Orange, and the degradation of their culture to a circus clown act.

Pink Floyd?  When the world is watching?  Fashion models?  Fatboy Slim, with all the raves he’s encouraged, with all the Ecstacy use that came with it?  A completely gray Brian May?

They could have trotted out Stephen Hawking.  They could have had an Oxford Don parade.

Yes, I know it was a celebration, but does anyone seriously think that the athletes went there primarily to party?  No, they got wild several hours later, listening to very different music.

So why not respect your own culture, your own achievements, while the world is watching?  As de facto guardian of British culture–to the minute extent she is able–the Queen made what must have been quite an easy, correct decision.

Word I use quite seldom, although I do feel it.

The last couple of days I have been trying to look at people not as they are, but as who they are POTENTIALLY, given a boost.  It makes it much easier to love them.

And I think that people need a space to move.  You need to create a gap right under their feet, such that they fall into something new.  That gap begins with humility–I have felt my way into that–and ends with a vision for them, a new way of seeing them, such that they realize who they can become.

This is a feeling, as I said.  It’s not concrete, and I’m not entirely sure how to describe it.  This is my stab at it.  When I get it more clearly, well, hell, I’ll do it better.

It is of course difficult to say, but I get the impression sometimes that some people are afraid to speak their minds since they are worried about winding up on some government watch list, or somehow getting called publicly one of the abuse words left-wingers like to use: homophobe, bigot, racist, intolerant.

I would submit that voluntary self restraint amounts to appeasement in the face of a movement which fully intends to eradicate the freedom of speech–which is to say the freedom of thought in the public domain–entirely.  They want to eradicate religion.  They want to eradicate the principled use of reason, and the capacity for rational dialogue outright.  It never favors them.

Appeasement, as Churchill said, is negotiating with a crocodile in the hope it will eat you last.  But eat you it will, if not stopped.  Witness the use the Nazis made of Jewish leaders in organizing the Holocaust.  They told them they were safe, if they just released the names of all Jews in their districts. They complied, and were rewarded by getting sent to the gas chambers and work camps last.  Some reward.

If we are unable to prevent the descent of America–and by logical extension the world–into Fascist/Communist/Fabian Statist tyranny, then no one is safe.  You do not earn safety, merely a delay in your reckoning.

And I remember the doctor played by Daniel Day Lewis in “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” saying that once you stop speaking your mind, once you stop standing up, you lose the habit.  Everything becomes justifiable.  Silence, somehow, always comes to seem more “prudent” than speaking up, than calling things intolerable and awful and wrong.

And as Benjamin Franklin said: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Do not appease bastards. Resist them early, constantly, and until you physically cannot do otherwise.  That is the only choice of anyone possessing both courage and integrity.  Speak up.  Act.  Never, never, never, never quit.

I think pets serve for many as welcome respites from the bullshit that people spout out all day long.  They are a refuge for misanthropes, and a destination for feelings of emotional warmth and openness that many people are uncomfortable expressing with actual people.

Go to your pet shelter, and watch how people talk to animals.  It is amusing, but also instructive.  People have all these latent energies that just don’t seem to get out any other way; or which, at least, help them maintain emotional elasticity and related coping skills.

I will add that of course dogs and cats are glad to see you: you are needed for food, for access to “outside”, and to pet them.  They need your affection far more than they are granting it selflessly to you.  Yet, this neediness is honest, and I suppose this makes up for it.