Bill's Notes

The Weekly Standardhas an article that brings up one of my all-time favorite books, Neal Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Here's a quote that describes, pre-Internet, how our civilization was doomed DOOOOOMED! to live out a Huxleyian nightmare, thanks to the pervasive and evil medium, television:

no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.

Doomed, I tell you. We were fulfilling that doctrine. And then came the Internet, and then blogs. And then perspective and context and THOUGHT had a fighting chance.

Playing field now leveled, our civilization's fate reverts to our own hands.

Thank God. At least we're reading and writing again.

BTW, this is only slightly tongue in cheek ... I really do believe that television was destroying our culture and our civilization by reducing everything important -- education, politics, news -- to entertainment. Everything was being subsumed to entertainment values, which are emotional.

Nowadays I rarely watch television. A friend of mine, when I hooked up cable, didn't quite understand why I only wanted 15 channels. Because I need TV to watch:

1. The World Series.

2. The NFL playoffs. Lots of fun.

3. The weather if there's a giant snowstorm.

4. CNN news to check up-to-minute scores and spot news.

5. Uh ... that's about it.

Via ZombyBoy I found these questions bouncing around the blogosphere.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

Uh, I never read it. (blush).

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

One better, I fell in love. I spent a good two weeks reading her book every siesta while teaching at USTM, enjoying every minute of it as if she were really in my presence talking to me. I looked forward to our "nooners" where she confessed everything.

When it was over, I missed her. I mean, the hurt was real, like I'd lost a friend. But I got over her and moved on. I've never again fallen in love with a fictional character (and had never done so before).

Who was she? Anna Wulf of The Golden Notebook. She was literary, brilliant, articulate, funny, insecure, ruthlessly honest, promiscuous as hell and crazy in that good way you know leads to great sex and conversation. Which is documented in spades. She does a "day in the life" that explodes Joyce's Ulysses in fewer than 30 pages. Her free fall from Marxist intellectual snobbery and her endearing "not getting it / slowly getting it" [that's probably not even intentional] was endearing. I seriously considered calling up Doris Lessing in England and hitting on her, even if she was in her 70s.

The last book you bought is:
Some diet book. It says eat what you want, as long as it's "real food". Eat well but less of it. Um, believe it or not, I'm doing that and it's working.

The last book you read:
That diet book.

What are you currently reading?
Blogs, mostly.

Over at Father Jake's, I asked:

Is there such a thing a sin? If so, what is it? And how do we know (1) what they are, and (2) that we're guilty of specific sins?

Does the Holy Spirit convict us of sin? How do we know the difference between conviction from the Holy Spirit and a punitive superego or mere guilt from a socially constructed value system from which we have failed to conform?

The question I'm getting at is, "How do you know?"

If the Church is not a source of authority, and not scripture, and not tradition, then what? Reason? But if reason, how do we answer the skeptical tradition from Hume onward, etc. How do we know?

People who read this blog know my answers. But I'm interested in hearing others' answers.

If the church is the source of authority, which church and how do you justify that? If scripture, which scriptures and how do we decide which are still in effect and which aren't? If tradition, which ones and is change possible? If so, on what grounds do we accept change? If reason and none of the others, how can we get from reason to a Jewish carpenter was resurrected from the dead 2,000 years ago, which is simply not a reasonable concept.

What about our experiences? But if our experience is our guide, what about those who have contradictory or contrary experiences and testify just as strongly that we are wrong?

Church, reason, tradition, scripture, experience ... what else do we have?

What about the truth written on our own heart? If so, shouldn't that be widely shared? Why are their widely shared differences and why do they suspiciously break along ethnic grounds?

Here's the thing. Yes, middle class life is probably the best shot most people have at happiness in this world. The problem isn't so much people with white picket fences who sell insurance and raise straight-A organization kids. The problem is that middle-class life and expectations can become a totalizing construct that not only costs you your soul, it could cost your neighbor his or her soul. It's a question of degree and emphasis and just how much you buy in to boojy values.

Now, I'm all in favor of Le Creuset cookware and Wusthof knives and cigars and bison steaks and barbeques and margaritas on the back porch. These are all good things. I don't do margaritas anymore, but I've got some nice things and a decent little house and an investment property and even a little 401(k) and yes a bunch of Le Creusets and Wusthofs and I'll be getting an outdoor grill this summer.

But I feel I can talk about non-bourgeois life because for the first 10 years after graduation from college, I was aggressively non-member of the middle class and lived in various states of marginalization. The idea was the pursuit of excellence (never arrived, alas, but the pursuit was worth it.)

There's a couple of things you should know about boojiness:

1. Bourgeois life drips with vanity and mammon. You cannot serve God and money. Middle class success is Vanity Fair come to life, and yes, I'm referring to Bunyan, not Thackeray here. It is the foul stench of mankind packed together in too close quarters for too long without a shower and then drawing itself up and saying, "Hey, we need to sell more deodorant!"

2. Most middle-class success derives from conformity to its own value set, not excellence. Straight A's can just as easily mask conformity to institutional expectations as mastery of material. Market success can involve excellence, but it's not necessary. And it's not snobbery to point this out. I'm more partial to excellence, obviously.

3. There are alternatives to middle-class life. Vocations to the priesthood, monks and nuns. There are wanderers who are not lost, and there are people writing novels and painting paintings and composing songs, and scientists pursuing pure knowledge, and soldiers in the French foreign legion and people just living out in the margins because for whatever reason their personality and life path doesn't match up with middle class expectations. There are also people smoking a lot of reefer and getting tattooes and making amateur porn, not to mention the entire criminal underclass, but I'm talking about non-criminal valuable non-boojy lifestyles. Granted, it's harder to live life that way. And nothing may come of it. But not everyone wants to live out a by-the-numbers lifestyle.

Those expectations can form a tyranny and a rigidity. That's why most people hate HR people — because HR when done badly is the enforcer of bourgeois expectations. Have gaps in your resume? Don't want to give a sample of your bodily fluids just to sell annuities by phone? Not a self-starter? Need training? Can't get excited about marketing the third-best product in the marketplace? The bourgeois say, Tough. And that just doesn't seem right.

This life is about getting your soul saved before you get into the next world. You don't need a bunch of A's and gold stars to get into heaven. You need to love God with your whole heart, your neighbor as yourself. Nothing about insurance in the Bible as I can recall. First seek the kingdom and His righteousness and this other stuff will be given to you as well. And remember Christianity is more radical than often imagined and cannot be contained in a thoroughly bourgeois culture. Eventually it will start to oppose its complacency, its mediocrity, its platitudes and its comfort.

Middle-class life can be good. But it's not everything. And you'll never get to heaven even if you do everything your mommy tells you.

I quote Ecclesiastes:

This is an evil among all things that are done under the sun, that there is one event unto all: yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope: for a living dog is better than a dead lion.

For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.

Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.

Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.

Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.

Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

Via Erin O'Connor, we have the following discussion of analogies in the New York Times. Relevant quote:

When Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, was on the NPR program "Fresh Air" a while back, he casually made a comparison that left the host, Terry Gross, sputtering in disbelief. "Excuse me," she said. "Did you just ... compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?" Yes, he did.

We are living in the age of the false, and often shameless, analogy. A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a new documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Kenneth Lay compares attacks on his company to the terrorist attacks on the United States.

Intentionally misleading comparisons are becoming the dominant mode of public discourse. The ability to tell true analogies from false ones has never been more important. But to make room for the new essay portion of the SAT that was rolled out this weekend with much fanfare, the College Board has unceremoniously dropped the test's analogy questions, saying blandly that analogical reasoning will still be assessed "in the short and long reading passages."

A thousand times yes. Very little corrupts reasoning quicker than a faulty analogy, and frankly, most people don't reason by analogy well. At all. Even intelligent, educated people who should know better. On any location of the political spectrum.

Reasoning by analogy is difficult to do and easy to refute. That's because things are usually like other things in a specific way, and it's important to clarify the limitations of your comparisons. The reason they corrupt is analogies are often fun and clever and if we've thought of them ourselves, we can become proud of them. Then we hold to them no matter what. Analogies are like traps for our minds, and worse, they descend into grandstanding pretty quickly.

It's important to examine reasoning by analogy in detail. Case law is a great way to study this — courts look at the fact pattern of the precedent with the fact pattern of the instant case and make point-by-point comparisons to see if they're analogous, and thus may be resolved the same way. When I use analogies, I try to show the limits clearly to say that I'm say things are similar in this way. But for the most part I am a debunker of reasoning by analogy because I think it's the least-verifiable and easiest-to-manipulate form of reasoning.

Erin O'Connor thinks Mr. Cohen overstates his point, and regarding the SAT portion of the discussion, I'd agree.

But around the blogosphere I see so many faulty analogies — especially in political discussions — that I sometimes despair. Sometimes I even think the government should require a license to reason by analogy. We could have analogy court, where people have to offer a point-by-point defense of why their comparison was valid.

Someone compare the Holocaust to the estate tax? Okay, let's look at the salient elements of the estate tax, and let's look at the salient elements of the Holocaust. Does estate tax law involve death camps, rounding up of specific ethnicities, and shipping them off to be worked to death? Uh, no. Okay, $50 fine for bad analogy. Write check payable to IndustrialBlog Publications. (Yeah, I'd get to run Analogy Court. At least in my jurisdiction.

Poconos are quite beautiful this morning. The sun is shining. There was a robin, but he's not chirping. And the trees are saying, "Is it time to wake up yet?"

Meanwhile, my computer is hooked up to broadband (why did I wait so long?) and my home workstation is a nice and cozy nook on the second floor landing overlooking the living room. Yes, pictures someday will be forthcoming.

I'm finding I'm a little less political up here.

Alas, now I have to go drive 90 minutes.

Enjoy your day. I'll be busy today. Pax.

I'm getting even more bored with politics than usual.

ho-hum. who cares? the rat bastards only want to ruthlessly tax us and steal the money for their cronies.

and if the meretricious weasel-government don't collect enough, it sends local cops to stop people randomly in traffic and collect $105 from them. Roving tax collectors is what they are. SOBs.

This kind of corporatist bullshit (the bankruptcy bill) is the big reason I remained in the Democratic Party so long.

It's frustrating. Both parties piss me off.

The fundamental problem must be that the people have contradictory impulses and demands that leave politicians trying to square a circle. But then again this has always been so. Leadership is the job of getting people to move in one direction and understand and accept trade-offs.

It's not enough to be right. You have to be able to persuade people to go along with your program. In Washington they're busy dividing us into colors, red v. blue, while they together loot the treasury.

Yes. Two reasons:

1. Bankruptcy bill.

2. Social security.

Here's your chance, Democrats. You've been handed two big hot-button issues. Grab 'em and run.

1. Your angle on the bankruptcy bill ... well, usury is a real thing. Debts must be able to be paid back at reasonable interest rates. The credit card companies, I believer, run a scam where a late payment jacks up your rate to 27%, which is an incredibly difficult rate of interest to pay anything back. That drives your credit balance over the limit, which incurs some kind of regular fee, $35-50. Now you're first $50 goes to fees, the next ton goes to interest, and eventually you're looking at the principle. Bullshit. It's predation by banks, and it needs to be stopped.

2. Social Security. I don't know the Dems' angle, but I don't believe for a moment that "private accounts" are going to do what they promise. Reason: Similar to above: fees. Various kinds of management fees and fund fees and such. Plus, that's a lot of money sitting around just begging to be stolen. I could be proven wrong. But we've had scandals on Wall Street on market-timing and research-report analysis that involved every single major brokerage. I see a scandal coming in 20 years where the brokerage houses esssentially stole the money. Then Congress will let them off the hook, like the S&L scandal.