We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Vanderleun rates Van Morrison one of the great souls of our time. So do I. I have heard "Brown-Eyed Girl" more than enough times, but not "These are the Days." If you don't know that tune, find it. Read Vanderleun's piece, and listen, if you wish, to this YouTube long version of T.B. Sheets he posted:
Where your treasure is, there will also be your heart. Matthew 6:21
Americans are the most giving, generous people in the world. They may hate giving money at gunpoint (taxes), but they take great joy in giving by choice.
If you feel the desire to give either money or time this Christmas, I highly recommend The Salvation Army to you as a worthy recipient.
(Full disclosure: Besides various local charities and my usual membership donations to orgs like the NRA, The Ruffed Grouse Society, and many others, this year I am giving larger checks to The Salvation Army, my prep school, The Nature Conservancy, my church, Ducks Unlimited, World Vision, Doctors Without Borders, and the Marine Corps Scholarship Fund)
Another one from Nashville, on Blair Boulevard. Even though this house is one of the few on the rapidly gentrifying street (a 20s era streetcar suburb) that has not been repaired and renovated, its charm and authenticity are undeniable. For anyone who's thinking about moving to town, this place was just put on the market for $400,000, as is.
A teleology is a basic component of most religions. As I understand it, Darwinian evolution contains no teleology and is based on random variation which "leads" nowhere.
However, even our non-scientific use of the word "evolution" connotes a sense of "progress." Philosophical naturalism cannot speak of progress, or "success" or "need" or "purpose" - only of temporary adaptations and maladaptations to conditions based on accidental genetic events.
As the very lame Wikipedia entry says correctly:
Teleology would argue that a person has eyes because he has the need of eyesight, form follows function, while naturalism is the reverse of this position: it would say that a person has sight simply because he has eyes, or that function follows form (eyesight follows from having eyes).
Auster discusses this in a short piece on the subject (The Intellectual Fraud which is Darwinism). Fact is, people have a tendency to fallaciously (via the pathetic, or anthropomorphic fallacy -or more specifically, personification) apply human notions like intent or direction to a Darwinian world-view which entirely lacks intent or purpose - but which does contain design (as humans comprehend it - eg snowflakes). Thus they impose a religious-like teleology upon a theoretically meaningless, purposeless and indifferent nature. This has no source in Darwin or in modern evolutionary theory, which reject any meaning or purpose in nature.
In fact, the source of the teleology in science is the human desire to impose human notions of purpose on nature.
Now one might argue that the use of animating figures of speech is nothing more that a way of making something dead feel more vivid and compelling - and that may be the case - but I believe that the figures of speech we use reflect how we really think about things.
Tropes, with repetition, aquire a sort of pseudo-substance - a mental substantiality in the absense of reality. This is termed "reification." Reified tropes may be the origins of religious ideas.
In that way, our animation of an indifferent nature with delusions of purpose and direction permits us to extend the notion of evolution to history, society, human activity, and even to the notion of human perfectability - as if "things" were "leading" anywhere: that is closer to religion than to Darwinism.
But is it even possible to talk or think effectively without using figures of speech, without tropes (outside of math and formal logic, which may also be tropes of a different sort)? And is it possible for a human being to not reify some of their tropes, resulting in a religious-like belief or faith in them? ("My raspberries like full sun," "The earth has a fever," "Mankind and society are stumblingly evolving towards better, kinder realities," "Species seek adaptation," and so forth. Doesn't such language form a teleological foundation for a primitive religion? I say "primitive" because based on a "Ghost in the Machine" category error.)
This is long enough, but these sophomoric musings could go on and on. (Mind you, this is written mainly from the standpoint of philosophical naturalism/materialism, as if that were the ground I stand on. It's not. When I hear the Messiah - or even listen to Alicia Keys, I cannot stand on that ground. And that's my point - no-one really can for very long unless they deaden their brain.)
Many thanks to Ed Driscoll for finding this highly enjoyable talk by Tom Wolfe at Duke last year, titled "What is Southern Today?" (It's about an hour, but well worth it.) Also, thanks to Ed Driscoll for introducing us to FORA.tv.
Best quote: Young writers are told "Write what you know." OK, but what do you know?
The Internet is a wonderful mess. I use it for most everything, including my livelihood now. I am deathly sick of about 90% of it, but that's OK, as you'd have to live to be a thousand to look at 10% of it anyway.
There is an infantile sense of humor on the tubes that I find endearing. There's a really nasty sort of discourse that is its fellow traveler, so you have to sort of pan for your comedy gold, but it's there. And it's not always for the meek.
Anyway, the Internet has decided that Hitler is funny. I applaud this derision. There's a kind of psychosis that goes along with it that we could do without --that decidedly milquetoast politicians or the former CEOs of software companies or people that try to stop you from stealing movies on bittorrent sites are Hitler, who is not funny at all when you're a very emo commenter on webpages looking to get the silly comparison meter to go to eleven. Hitler is very bad when George Bush is Hitler, and very funny the rest of the time, apparently.
It's not new to make fun of Hitler. During WWII, Hitler was made sport of by everybody from Charlie Chaplin to the Three Stooges. In a way, I suppose the dead bastard would prefer to be remembered like he is in Germany -- spoken in a serious whisper with a sense of dread, by law. I like it much better to watch an old Looney Tunes cartoon and see a bunch of Jews in Hollywood make a mockery of him.
Our blog friend Theo is taking a sabbatical after having run into problems with Google's Blogger. As a reliable purveyor of wit, art, and military aircraft, we will miss him and hope he comes back soon. For a sample of his famous photographic art collection, we offer this Odalisque below:
We first posted this piece by Dr. Bliss on July 14, 2005. Since that time, many have written on the same topic. Sometimes it's interesting for us to see what we were thinking a couple of years ago.
We who try to be reasonable are befuddled by why the American and European Left have a reflex to defend the Jihadists, and to oppose combating them. The fact that they do so is amply demonstrated, endlessly, by the Great Horowitz, among others.
My theory is that the Left is nihilistic at heart. For whatever reasons, they have passed criticism and have come to hate their own civilization, which is admittedly imperfect but which, at the same time, cannot be matched anywhere, anytime, in history in its freedom, opportunity, safety, stability, and idealism. (Yale's famous rejection of the Bass donation was a high-water mark of this self-hating trend.)
The consequence is an anti-Western bias, but they refuse to offer an alternative, either because they do not have one, or because any offered would be rejected by voters. My belief is that our civilization is a fragile sculpture, a rare and precious thing, and that our Western Civilization is one of the most amazing things that humans have created, with, at its core, the idea that every individual human matters, as a child of God. That’s the core of it all, and it is at the core of Western medical practice and medical ethics too, since Hippocrates. We care for their injured in our hospitals, and they behead their prisoners. That is a big difference, one which relegates them to the barbarian category. “All men are created equal…”
It was not my brief on Maggie’s to get into politics, but I cannot ignore this one. What is behind the Left’s apologizing for Jihadists? Why does England welcome them? Why does the US welcome them? Why France and Germany and Sweden? Why does Canada welcome them? Why welcome your destroyers into your home?
I wrote a piece on Evil several months ago, but it had no political content. Hatred and destructiveness can derive from hundreds of sources, but most of the time social norms and rules prevent us from acting on such impulses. They are very human evils, or sins, if you will. If you live in a culture, or subculture, which endorses them, many will be pleased to follow – see Nazi Germany, the Mafia, the Weathermen, or any number of murderous, sadistic civilizations and cultures and subcultures throughout history - and relieved to be given a sanctioned outlet for such emotions. Humans are natural-born killers, after all, just like chimps, and it takes a heck of a lot of civilization to keep us on the right side of the road.
It’s clear to me from all that I have read that the Jihadists have long identified Jews and Christians as the “other” – sub-humans occupying potentially Islamic space. We do not do the same to them – on the contrary, we in the West bend over backwards to make them welcome and to accommodate their ways. Their denial of our humanity is their evil, even if it is endorsed by their culture and their religion, and their using our generosity and tolerance for their own purposes is evil as well, though they see it as justified by Mohammed. Fooling an Infidel is not a sin, and we "nice" infidels are too eager to be fooled.
So we quickly arrive at the religious core of morals and ethics, from whence they derive. The Jihadist believes that war on the West is demanded of him by God. I refuse to get morally relativistic and multicultural about that about that - leave that to the anthropologists. To me that is evil. Why does the Western Left like to ally themselves with this? One might imagine that woman-hating, fascistic, anti-human rights, primitively-capitalistic, oil and opium-dependent, hyper-religious movements would be anathema to them.
But no. They are apologists. And I do not think it is as simple as the anti-Semitism of the Left, although that does exist, I believe.
My take on it all is that the Left longs for chaos, for trouble, for failure and failure of confidence, for cultural breakdown, to undermine the fabric of our culture. Thus the Left has a reflex to be contrary to all tradition, including moral, religious and patriotic traditions - and including the tradition of self-defense. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”I suspect that they imagine that with adequate turmoil, they will prevail and create our socialist heaven on earth with them, of course, in control. However, they would create a nightmare – whether their own statist vision, or the Jihadist theocracy, where their women would be the first to be stoned to death in the stadium, and the men would be next in line. Jihad does not tolerate free-thinkers.
Thus hatred of their own civilization, and contempt for its defenders, seems to have become the hallmark of the Left. I view it as a cultural death-wish. I can understand the Jihadists – their individual evil impulses are culturally- and religiously-endorsed, promoted and rewarded, from childhood, thanks to the Saudi-supported Wahabist schools.But whence the West's cultural-suicide wish from within?
There are only two possibilities: they either believe the illusion that they might prevail following social catastrophe, or they operate in a near-insane denial of the capacity for evil and destructiveness in mankind – the wishful, childish notion that everyone is “nice underneath,” which is psychological nonsense, as reality and honest introspection reveal to us daily. I suspect mostly the former, since the Left has no trouble attributing evil to the defenders of our civilization, and virtue to themselves.
As for the social reality underlying this general feeling of decline, a number of conservative commentators, concentrating especially on the areas of crime, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy, undertook the task of quantifying and analyzing the available evidence. The most notable such effort was by William J. Bennett, who in March 1993 released a report entitled The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.
Over the course of the preceding three decades, Bennett wrote, the United States had indeed experienced “substantial social regression.” About this, the data were unequivocal. Since 1960, there had been a more than 500-percent increase in violent crime; a more than 400-percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores. To Bennett, the conclusion was inescapable: “the forces of social decomposition [in America] are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition.”
Just when cultural decay seemed hopeless, these things began to change. They conclude:
Culture itself, finally, exhibits an ebb and flow as surely as economies pass through cycles of ups and downs. In The Great Disruption (1999), Francis Fukuyama cited historical examples of societies undergoing periods of moral decline followed by periods of moral recovery. In our case, too, he argued, the aftermath of the cultural breakdown of the 1960’s had already triggered and was now giving way to a reassessment and recovery of social and moral norms. Such “re-norming” will not occur in every social class all at once; in some instances it may take hold in one stratum but not in another. That is partial progress, but progress nevertheless.
Despite persistent anomalies and backslidings, some species of cultural re-norming certainly seems to have been occurring in this country over the past decade-and-a-half, and it is fascinating to observe in whose hearts its effects have registered most strongly. In attitudes toward education, drugs, abortion, religion, marriage, and divorce, the current generation of teenagers and young adults appears in many respects to be more culturally conservative than its immediate predecessors. To any who may have written off American society as incorrigibly corrupt and adrift, these young people offer a powerful reminder of the boundless inner resources still at our disposal, and of our constantly surprising national resilience.
This unusual Japanese-styled bungalow comes from the Highlands neighborhood of Birmingham, AL. I have seen a few foursquare houses with roofs designed in a vaguely oriental style in Nashville, but no bungalows with anything close to this level of Asian influence. Surprisingly, the Japanese styling is a good fit for the quintessentially American bungalow, which shares the traditional Japanese emphasis on asymmetry, overhanging eaves, and exposed beams and rafters.
Just finished reading Marianne Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher, about which the San Francisco Chronicle said:
The Shadow Catcher tells two different stories set in two different times. The first is about famed Western photographer Edward S. Curtis. It's told by his wife, who finally divorced him after bearing his children and suffering his neglect. He preferred the open skies of the outdoors to family life. The second story is told by a writer named Marianne Wiggins, who is writing a novel about Curtis. She's also investigating the man who stole her father's identity, a man who committed suicide years earlier. As the writer digs deeper into both stories, she finds that they intersect. The Shadow Catcher has received mixed reviews with the San Francisco Chronicle saying, "Wiggins' net effect is vertiginously enjoyable, a rambunctious puzzle-box that rewards dives into murky interpretive waters: The more effort you devote to thinking the book through, the greater its rewards."
I am not advising you to read the book. However, it did spark my interest in the famous turn-of-the-century photographer Edward S. Curtis, best known for his photos of the West and especially his Indian portraits. (He also was the photographer for Alice Roosevelt's wedding.)
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You can read about Curtis here. One interesting but unsurprising aspect of his excellent Indian photos is that they were taken well after the days of the "wild Indians." These were reservation Indians who he asked to dress up in the old style and to pose for the photos. The photo of the old Crow Warrior, above, was taken in 1908. Samples of his photos at Curtis' Wiki entry above, and more here, whence we borrowed the image.
Today, new big flat monitor, new potent Dell box/server, new everything -perfect for a blog editor and busy human being (but one who is a bred-in-the-bone Yankee and hates to spend money). Thanks to the Mrs. Bird Dog and to Larry The Local Tech Genius for the delightful surprise. I did not know what "fast" meant until this afternoon. Backed up automatically too, on the accessory hard drive, which has been a major headache in the past for some of my projects.
Where your treasure is, there will also be your heart. Matthew 6:21
A teleology is a basic component of most religions. As I understand it, Darwinian evolution contains no teleology and is based on random variation which "leads" nowhere.
I am an Internaut.
Just finished reading Marianne Wiggins'