For Heaven and the future's sakes
Apr. 10th, 2008 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 8. High today: 11. Nearly 20 yesterday; supposed to be 5 tomorrow.
I am glad that the Tibetans have brought to our attention that the Olympic torch relay is a Nazi invention, so that the purity of future Olympics will not be sullied by Nazi torch relays.
Here is something I find very odd about the current Olympic business: the refrain that the Olympics shouldn't have anything to do with politics. If the Olympics didn't have anything to do with politics, there would be no Olympics. Nobody is going to fund shot-putters and lugers if they are not bringing glory to their polities.
(A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around a student gathering-place at York because it looked like a couple of groups were squaring off for an Israeli-Palestinian fight--an Israeli group had built a replica Security Fence in part of the space so that they could impress upon passersby the virtues of the Security Fence, and a Palestinian-looking group was assembling near them, and there was some sort of TV camera floating around. But it turned out that the Palestinian-looking group was actually there for a demonstration on behalf of a former York student who was being deported. A middle-aged woman approached me and gave me a leaflet and asked me to sign their petition. I told her that I had thought that the two groups were squaring off for a fight. She told me that, no, what the group she was with was doing had nothing to do with politics; it was just about doing what was right.)
It's hard to get over the whiff of hypocrisy hanging over the half-maybe-sort-of-boycott stuff. Imagine a real boycott of China, like South Africa: there goes the world economy. But, well, so what, right? Why not have our Tibetan cake and eat our fabulous cheap crap too? What's the point of keeping your hands clean?
There's the idea around that you can get to the Chinese by offending their honour--so, we don't need to even think about an economic boycott, because the real way to stick it to 'em is to bring shame to their Olympics. It is remarkable that a post-Marxist country could be driven by thumos and not by appetite.
I've been thinking for a long time now that HRC has no chance of coming back if she keeps seeming tired. If she was an athlete, I'd say the thing that seems to be costing her the contest more than anything is poor conditioning--she wore out fast. But I wonder now, and this is bugging me: how much does her being a woman have to do with my perceiving her as seeming tired? Women aren't allowed to get away with all kinds of things that men are allowed to get away with, and being tired is one of them. Having a hoarse voice, looking pale, bags under your eyes. John Kerry was born tired, right?
I often feel like women are pretending to do things that are traditionally male things to do. I get this feeling from female sports broadcasters and commentators all the time. I'd be a bit more worried about this if it wasn't for the fact that I sometimes get the same feeling from some male sports commentators. (Like on the sports panel Paikin used to have on Studio 2, which I referred to as the "sports dorks" segment.) But yesterday I was listening to some guy on the radio--it was some sort of scientician, and he was talking in that condescending, sing-song kind of way that people talk in when they apparently don't take what they're saying, or at least the task of saying it, all that seriously but are rather concerned with the performance of saying it--and it occurred to me that if it was a woman talking in that sort of way, I'd probably immediately have the feeling she was pretending, whereas with the male voice I don't get it automatically. But it's hard to tell. It would stand to reason that a lot of women would feel self-conscious doing things that women aren't expected to do, and when you do something self-consciously, you look like you're pretending--in a way, you are pretending.
While I'm revealing my inner sexism, let me say that I enjoyed this article on Ivy League chastity crusaders quite a lot, particularly the part where the female co-president of the Junior Anti-Sex League is shocked and horrified that the male co-president actually has to battle with himself.
In my second-year Renaissance Literature class, the (female) prof assigned us to read a couple of poems by a female renaissance poet(esse). Then in class she told us that she had had us read them to show how boring they were, and that they were boring because renaissance women--at least the privileged ones in a position to be writing poetry--didn't do anything, and therefore did not have interesting experiences, and therefore did not have anything interesting to say. This is something that I worry about from time to time--that I may not have anything interesting to say.
I noticed recently that the APA's "advice for jobseekers" blurb advises that you'll be better-positioned if you have an area of academic expertise outside philosophy. I find this surprising, and I think it's probably false generally (though true in specific and mostly faddish areas). Job-strategics aside, it's a tough question: how good a philosopher can you be if you don't commit yourself fully to philosophy? How good a philosopher can you be if you do commit yourself fully to philosophy? The answer is probably "it depends". There are kinds of philosophy that seem as if they can operate without extra-philosophical concerns. The most obvious of these is logic--but it pains me that so many people don't understand that logic is not a self-contained and magical system but a description of how the things we can say fit together.
I have been meaning for months now to say something about Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope, and the Crow Indians. Well: Radical Hope is Jonathan Lear's book about what happened to the Crow Indians and their last chief, Plenty Coups, during and after the time of the end of the buffalo. It's a book of philosophy, not of history; it relies on history done by others. Lear is concerned to explain what Plenty Coups could have meant when he told an anthropologist that after the buffalo disappeared and the Crow went onto a reservation, "nothing happened'. Lear's story is that what it means to say that "nothing happened" is that the integrated form of life that gave meaning to anything any Crow Indian did had ended; the telos or teloi of Crow life was gone, nothing the Crow did was for anything anymore, and so the future-directedness of their lives was gone: time, for them, was over.
I mentioned in the fall that I'd gone to a talk by Lear about this stuff. I read the book a couple of months ago. Last week, I read a hatchet-job in The New Criterion, not on the book, but on a review of the book by Charles Taylor that appeared in the New York Review of Books last spring. The hatchet-job was hacking at Taylor--the ivory-tower egghead, scholar of the philosopher Hegel--for mourning the end of Crow life, when actually Crow life was awful, and it's better for it to be over. The main point is not that Crow life was awful for the Crow, although the hatcheteer implies that too; the main point is that what Crow life was mainly about was war.
This is one of the things that fascinated me about Lear's talk and his book: he is describing and analyzing what is a tragedy from the point of view of the Crow, but from just about any modern Westerner's point of view (or at least any modern Westerner who is publicly taken seriously), the Crow way of life was awful--the Crow were awful. It fascinated me at the talk because he gained the unreserved sympathy of the lefty-liberal audience for the plight of people who, if they were simply told what those people did, they would think were monsters. (This reminds me of the unpopularity of Habermas's proposition that preserving cultures is not a good thing per se; there are cultures that ought to die out.) But, of course, neither Lear nor Taylor says anything in favour of the Crow way of life or even of preserving it (which, obviously, was impossible anyway); they're concerned, with varying emphases, with what happens when you take a way of life away from people. The practical thrust of Taylor's review is that we ought to find some way of anticipating cultural collapse and helping people whose cultures have collapsed into a new one--but this in light of the fact that our efforts hitherto have generally been more harmful than helpful.
There is no clear practical thrust of Lear's book. In the question period at the talk, the question was raised whether there are analogies to be drawn with the holocaust. I have a hard time now even seeing why that's a good question. I have been interested lately in the fact that Jews seem to have retained their religion-rooted culture (and even the religion-rootedness of their culture) despite widespread lack of belief in their god, which Christians have not managed to do very well at all. (I have lately been fond of thinking that post-Christian Westerners are the first people who ever repudiated their culture because they no longer believed in their gods.) To me, the interesting question is whether we Westerners generally are in the position of the Crow at the meltdown of their way of life. (The interesting question about the book is whether Lear intends to raise this question.) Lear says that everything the Crow did had meaning because it was directed toward the hunt or toward war. The example he gives is that a woman stirring a pot over a fire could say, when asked what she's doing, that she's preparing for the hunt. When there are no more buffalo, when asked what she's doing, she could say that she's not doing anything. (How often do we reply, when asked what we're doing, "nothing"? Ask kids what they're doing and they'll almost always say "nothing". Is this meaningful?)
At the talk, which was last fall when I was unemployed and feeling absolutely uncertain of my academic future, I was thinking about how, when I left the talk and went back over to the library to read, it would not be clear for me what I was doing--I would be reading philosophy as part of some future-directed project, but with the future uncertain, it would be uncertain whether there even was a project. If there was no project, then, reading in the library, I could be said to be doing nothing. (There is this vertiginousness to academic work, which must be the same for any work in which one might play for mortal stakes, from the fact that it is largely accidental whether or how much one is paid to do things that one would do or would want to do anyway--and if one is not paid to do them or not paid much, then one is in some senses only killing time, while the same work, paid, is work and ennobled.) (This was also at the time that I'd just found out that that bit of work had been taken away from me, so I was fighting that venom, and I didn't like that my reaction to what Lear was saying was personal--he was talking about cultural devastation, and I was thinking of it in terms of my petty situation. "If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door," I thought, and I keep thinking.)
Taylor explicitly, but not too emphatically, brings out the implications for the (post)modern West. He refers to a book the title of which I was quite sure was The Conservative Character but which appears to actually be The Corrosion of Character, which I'm reading (at the same time as I'm fitfully reading Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History) now. Taylor basically says that we've so gotten used to being in the situation of the Crow at cultural meltdown that we can't recognize it as being bad for us, nor can we recognize cultural devastation when we see it--we see it as liberation. But Taylor hasn't so gotten used to it.
There is much else to be said, but, well: for someone with so little future, I'm always getting there too quickly.
I am glad that the Tibetans have brought to our attention that the Olympic torch relay is a Nazi invention, so that the purity of future Olympics will not be sullied by Nazi torch relays.
Here is something I find very odd about the current Olympic business: the refrain that the Olympics shouldn't have anything to do with politics. If the Olympics didn't have anything to do with politics, there would be no Olympics. Nobody is going to fund shot-putters and lugers if they are not bringing glory to their polities.
(A couple of weeks ago, I was hanging around a student gathering-place at York because it looked like a couple of groups were squaring off for an Israeli-Palestinian fight--an Israeli group had built a replica Security Fence in part of the space so that they could impress upon passersby the virtues of the Security Fence, and a Palestinian-looking group was assembling near them, and there was some sort of TV camera floating around. But it turned out that the Palestinian-looking group was actually there for a demonstration on behalf of a former York student who was being deported. A middle-aged woman approached me and gave me a leaflet and asked me to sign their petition. I told her that I had thought that the two groups were squaring off for a fight. She told me that, no, what the group she was with was doing had nothing to do with politics; it was just about doing what was right.)
It's hard to get over the whiff of hypocrisy hanging over the half-maybe-sort-of-boycott stuff. Imagine a real boycott of China, like South Africa: there goes the world economy. But, well, so what, right? Why not have our Tibetan cake and eat our fabulous cheap crap too? What's the point of keeping your hands clean?
There's the idea around that you can get to the Chinese by offending their honour--so, we don't need to even think about an economic boycott, because the real way to stick it to 'em is to bring shame to their Olympics. It is remarkable that a post-Marxist country could be driven by thumos and not by appetite.
I've been thinking for a long time now that HRC has no chance of coming back if she keeps seeming tired. If she was an athlete, I'd say the thing that seems to be costing her the contest more than anything is poor conditioning--she wore out fast. But I wonder now, and this is bugging me: how much does her being a woman have to do with my perceiving her as seeming tired? Women aren't allowed to get away with all kinds of things that men are allowed to get away with, and being tired is one of them. Having a hoarse voice, looking pale, bags under your eyes. John Kerry was born tired, right?
I often feel like women are pretending to do things that are traditionally male things to do. I get this feeling from female sports broadcasters and commentators all the time. I'd be a bit more worried about this if it wasn't for the fact that I sometimes get the same feeling from some male sports commentators. (Like on the sports panel Paikin used to have on Studio 2, which I referred to as the "sports dorks" segment.) But yesterday I was listening to some guy on the radio--it was some sort of scientician, and he was talking in that condescending, sing-song kind of way that people talk in when they apparently don't take what they're saying, or at least the task of saying it, all that seriously but are rather concerned with the performance of saying it--and it occurred to me that if it was a woman talking in that sort of way, I'd probably immediately have the feeling she was pretending, whereas with the male voice I don't get it automatically. But it's hard to tell. It would stand to reason that a lot of women would feel self-conscious doing things that women aren't expected to do, and when you do something self-consciously, you look like you're pretending--in a way, you are pretending.
While I'm revealing my inner sexism, let me say that I enjoyed this article on Ivy League chastity crusaders quite a lot, particularly the part where the female co-president of the Junior Anti-Sex League is shocked and horrified that the male co-president actually has to battle with himself.
In my second-year Renaissance Literature class, the (female) prof assigned us to read a couple of poems by a female renaissance poet(esse). Then in class she told us that she had had us read them to show how boring they were, and that they were boring because renaissance women--at least the privileged ones in a position to be writing poetry--didn't do anything, and therefore did not have interesting experiences, and therefore did not have anything interesting to say. This is something that I worry about from time to time--that I may not have anything interesting to say.
I noticed recently that the APA's "advice for jobseekers" blurb advises that you'll be better-positioned if you have an area of academic expertise outside philosophy. I find this surprising, and I think it's probably false generally (though true in specific and mostly faddish areas). Job-strategics aside, it's a tough question: how good a philosopher can you be if you don't commit yourself fully to philosophy? How good a philosopher can you be if you do commit yourself fully to philosophy? The answer is probably "it depends". There are kinds of philosophy that seem as if they can operate without extra-philosophical concerns. The most obvious of these is logic--but it pains me that so many people don't understand that logic is not a self-contained and magical system but a description of how the things we can say fit together.
I have been meaning for months now to say something about Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope, and the Crow Indians. Well: Radical Hope is Jonathan Lear's book about what happened to the Crow Indians and their last chief, Plenty Coups, during and after the time of the end of the buffalo. It's a book of philosophy, not of history; it relies on history done by others. Lear is concerned to explain what Plenty Coups could have meant when he told an anthropologist that after the buffalo disappeared and the Crow went onto a reservation, "nothing happened'. Lear's story is that what it means to say that "nothing happened" is that the integrated form of life that gave meaning to anything any Crow Indian did had ended; the telos or teloi of Crow life was gone, nothing the Crow did was for anything anymore, and so the future-directedness of their lives was gone: time, for them, was over.
I mentioned in the fall that I'd gone to a talk by Lear about this stuff. I read the book a couple of months ago. Last week, I read a hatchet-job in The New Criterion, not on the book, but on a review of the book by Charles Taylor that appeared in the New York Review of Books last spring. The hatchet-job was hacking at Taylor--the ivory-tower egghead, scholar of the philosopher Hegel--for mourning the end of Crow life, when actually Crow life was awful, and it's better for it to be over. The main point is not that Crow life was awful for the Crow, although the hatcheteer implies that too; the main point is that what Crow life was mainly about was war.
This is one of the things that fascinated me about Lear's talk and his book: he is describing and analyzing what is a tragedy from the point of view of the Crow, but from just about any modern Westerner's point of view (or at least any modern Westerner who is publicly taken seriously), the Crow way of life was awful--the Crow were awful. It fascinated me at the talk because he gained the unreserved sympathy of the lefty-liberal audience for the plight of people who, if they were simply told what those people did, they would think were monsters. (This reminds me of the unpopularity of Habermas's proposition that preserving cultures is not a good thing per se; there are cultures that ought to die out.) But, of course, neither Lear nor Taylor says anything in favour of the Crow way of life or even of preserving it (which, obviously, was impossible anyway); they're concerned, with varying emphases, with what happens when you take a way of life away from people. The practical thrust of Taylor's review is that we ought to find some way of anticipating cultural collapse and helping people whose cultures have collapsed into a new one--but this in light of the fact that our efforts hitherto have generally been more harmful than helpful.
There is no clear practical thrust of Lear's book. In the question period at the talk, the question was raised whether there are analogies to be drawn with the holocaust. I have a hard time now even seeing why that's a good question. I have been interested lately in the fact that Jews seem to have retained their religion-rooted culture (and even the religion-rootedness of their culture) despite widespread lack of belief in their god, which Christians have not managed to do very well at all. (I have lately been fond of thinking that post-Christian Westerners are the first people who ever repudiated their culture because they no longer believed in their gods.) To me, the interesting question is whether we Westerners generally are in the position of the Crow at the meltdown of their way of life. (The interesting question about the book is whether Lear intends to raise this question.) Lear says that everything the Crow did had meaning because it was directed toward the hunt or toward war. The example he gives is that a woman stirring a pot over a fire could say, when asked what she's doing, that she's preparing for the hunt. When there are no more buffalo, when asked what she's doing, she could say that she's not doing anything. (How often do we reply, when asked what we're doing, "nothing"? Ask kids what they're doing and they'll almost always say "nothing". Is this meaningful?)
At the talk, which was last fall when I was unemployed and feeling absolutely uncertain of my academic future, I was thinking about how, when I left the talk and went back over to the library to read, it would not be clear for me what I was doing--I would be reading philosophy as part of some future-directed project, but with the future uncertain, it would be uncertain whether there even was a project. If there was no project, then, reading in the library, I could be said to be doing nothing. (There is this vertiginousness to academic work, which must be the same for any work in which one might play for mortal stakes, from the fact that it is largely accidental whether or how much one is paid to do things that one would do or would want to do anyway--and if one is not paid to do them or not paid much, then one is in some senses only killing time, while the same work, paid, is work and ennobled.) (This was also at the time that I'd just found out that that bit of work had been taken away from me, so I was fighting that venom, and I didn't like that my reaction to what Lear was saying was personal--he was talking about cultural devastation, and I was thinking of it in terms of my petty situation. "If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door," I thought, and I keep thinking.)
Taylor explicitly, but not too emphatically, brings out the implications for the (post)modern West. He refers to a book the title of which I was quite sure was The Conservative Character but which appears to actually be The Corrosion of Character, which I'm reading (at the same time as I'm fitfully reading Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History) now. Taylor basically says that we've so gotten used to being in the situation of the Crow at cultural meltdown that we can't recognize it as being bad for us, nor can we recognize cultural devastation when we see it--we see it as liberation. But Taylor hasn't so gotten used to it.
There is much else to be said, but, well: for someone with so little future, I'm always getting there too quickly.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-11 02:03 pm (UTC)I was thinking about that, and that only time I ever say "nothing" is when I'm concentrating so hard I don't want to be interrupted by having to explain it to somebody.
I do say "noodling" when I am doing something that I know is completely pointless. (Like say, playing solitaire compulsively when I know I'm tired but can't find the impetus to get up from the computer and go to bed.)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-04 03:41 pm (UTC)One of the things I looked at in college was what happens to a belief system when your gods have obviously abandoned you. And the interesting answer is, that hardly ever happens. When the white man was spreading like wildfire across America, you might thing some natives would go, hey, our gods aren't there for us, we're getting slaughtered, let's ditch them. But that didn't happen. While some did turn to Christianity, that had more about turning to rather than away from (the persuasive powers of the Christian missionaries have always been superb, especially when backed by the full force of an invading culture). But another interesting phenomenon was that of the Ghost Dance - as Western culture tried to solidify its hold over the natives at the end of the 19th century a movement arose, spreading across numerous tribes. In some places this movement was simply for peace with the white man, but in others it prophesied that the gods would come and wipe the white man away. In other words, the response to a potentially shaken religious belief was *stronger belief*. (The Ghost Dance movement led directly to the massacre at Wounded Knee, which shows how much good it did.)
It is possible that the Jewish faith is so abiding *because* it has so often been threatened. Christianity, on the other hand, could be seen as being gradually abandoned by western culture because it is no longer necessary in an era of general peace and prosperity. Our major cultural influences today are capitalism and individualism.