On Reading, Writing, and Theodore Dalrymple

In the few months since I've started writing here again I have also read a great deal more of. . . well, there seems no decorous way of referring to writing published exclusively on the internet. Surely not the vulgar digital content, or banal web writing. Perhaps it is a sign. At any rate I've read a great deal more of it than the nearly nil I read in the first year after moving into our new house and staying home with our daughter full time. The writing has brought me more pleasure than I thought, the reading less so.

The writing, though laborious, is a near pure pleasure, excepting those frustrating moments of editing when I must part with a beloved phrase (which I will of course forget about by the next hour) and when I simply cannot decide just what exactly I am saying. Writing is as pure an exercise of unrestrained liberty as one can imagine, with the myriad possibilities only delimited by the prudence of my conscience and aesthetic sense, which occasionally speak through the wisdom of my wife.

One limitation that has always frustrated me though, is my reluctance to let what I write cause grievous offense to someone I know, thus risking our peaceful relation. Since I write much, though not chiefly, about my experiences, I have many essays that will go unpublished for a while, presuming I have at age thirty-two some plenty of years left. On the other hand—the use of this correlative that I surely use too much because of my Classical background brings to my mind this time an anecdote: one of the first errors in my writing which my wife corrected was an instance of saying on the one hand several times in a row. My defense remains that the article was ghost-written by one of the Hekatonkheires of Greek myth (Centimanes in Latin), a few of whose heads and hands moonlight while he guards Tartaros.

Anyway, on the other hand, that act of self-censorship has no doubt reformed the character of a querulous and often petty man. If I had written as a teen or college student, it probably would have resembled this ghastly piece—ghastly in content and style—on Jordan Peterson. Reading such pieces saddens me because I cannot help assume either that the person has been bought out or is deeply troubled. Worse, it seems to me that writing would invariably reform one's character. How can you write and not make use of the seemingly infinite opportunities for reflection and self-examination? The process has pricked my conscience more times than I could ever remember. I have written some unkind and uninformed things that never saw the light of day because the sight of them displeased and embarrassed me. Not fully, of course, am I reformed, and writing has precipitated a few new occasions for poor behavior.

It is a cheap pleasure of mine to refer to a piece I've written and, even more so, to have the excuse to re-state my case. I too especially enjoy the tactful praise of liberal friends, "I love your movie reviews."  How amused I am also when someone refers approvingly to something I have written, but has clearly only read the opening paragraph, which was meant in irony. They really do mean well but can't bring themselves to run the full course. Their error is similar in spirit to one that recurred among my Latin students when I would for one reason or another truncate a portion of a passage for an exam: how often I found it translated on a test anyway! Clearly it appeared by the inspiration of the Muses, or perhaps some as-of-yet unnamed goddess of the internet.

Truly, though, writing has been a healthful pleasure both on account of the good change it has precipitated, even in failure, and the kindness and generosity of friends, family, and readers who have supported my meager talents and overlooked my errors.

I wish I could say that reading has brought me such pleasure of late. More often than not I feel preached to, lectured, or chicaned. Everybody, so it seems, is hocking his ideology or his personality. They lust after my clicks, likes, follows, and subscribes, to use the terms of their cheap currency. They pander to what they hope are my weaknesses. There is precious little that is all honest, good, and necessary. Even people of apparent good character and sound mind nonetheless seem desperate to cash in on their virtues. This is perhaps inevitable and even good, for I certainly should not like the opposite situation, in which ideas are compelled, suppressed, or absent, or virtues bring people unnecessary suffering. Perhaps it is a Golden Age of Discourse. To me it feels gilded and cheap. It seems that there is no self-censorship. Everything must be said so that it can be repeated, therefore it is short, overstated, lacking in explication, and, usually, crude.

The only prominent author who seems exempt from this cheapening, and I think fully so,  is Theodore Dalrymple. Perhaps his writing remains pristine because he does not write to sustain himself or perhaps he has by his uncommon learning, significant in both the sciences and humanities, and his uncommon experiences—of the bad and worse, both at home and abroad—tempered himself and his writing just so, but it seems to me he writes in as ideal a way as possible: reflecting humbly on life, with reason but also humanity, without the purpose of proving an ideology. For my part, I have surely not merited such commendations.

He is no publication's "go-to man" for any one idea, a fact which confuses casual readers. Watch with horror as he gets scorned on Taki-Mag for showing the slightest empathy, fondness, or respect for the non-Westerners he has met in his travels. Some years ago he was swarmed with rabid libertarians for his review in The New Criterion where he had the temerity to criticize Ayn Rand. When he wrote for Pajamas Media, it seems patently so that the prose was above the heads of the readers. City Journal, Salisbury Review, and the Law and Liberty Site each pick up parts of his work to the delight of their readers, but it is perhaps unsurprising that thoughts varied, subtle, and restrained do not find a perfect home in an age characterized by, to borrow from his many inimitable artful joinings, incontinent public confession. Rather than esteem (I have in mind here Latin's diligo: select, pick, single out, love, value, esteem, approve, aspire to, appreciate) someone who in true conservative fashion considers a matter alongside life's many others, the right prefers the company of loudmouth single-minded ideologues, usually evangelists of soft-headed religion and gaudy business.

It seems beyond wishful thinking to hope that the hearts and minds of the left will ever find room for Dr. Dalrymple since, despite his work for the poor and wretched—experience oddly but consistently in short supply among the poor's most tender-hearted and self-appointed advocates—he will not sign their prescriptions for remedies that he, with regrets, finds do more harm than good. Rather than be seen to trot with an independent thinker or risk having its conscience pricked, the left, it seems, would rather exchange platitudes with the peddlers of righteous cliche-ridden activism in a morass that Dalrymple's words describe best: an orgy of sentimentality.

I have probably made Dr. Dalrymple, who has for many years written prolifically and been respected with many well-reviewed books long in print and been often sought after as a speaker or expert, seem less famous and dear to his readers than he is. Surely too his critics betoken his notoriety. I have probably brought down his status to put it within my reach. I am frank in admitting he has been and remains a great influence.

How fortunate are all his readers, though, that he continues to share his wisdom in such a vigorous yet civilized manner. In its moderation and proportion, both in style and content, his is the prose of this age in which I feel most at home, and for that I am grateful, as I am for all things good and beautiful.

Advice for Myself: Outside

Of the outside world first, when you are young, pay as much attention as you need to understand yourself. Have adventures, though know they are with risks. Then, when you are established, pay attention to the world such that you can find a spouse. Next, pay only so much as you need to sustain and protect your family. Finally, pay it attention proportionate to your ability to help it.

Minding the Children

There is some resurgence of faith in the notion that children raised with the full-time attention of one parent are better off. I too think it is so, quite broadly but perhaps not completely, for a variety of reasons. Some of those reasons are empirical and some based on my experience, but those from my experience tell me it is not only because school and daycare are such bad places.

Instead I would emphasize that parents who spend a lot of time with their children are by the sheer volume of time spent with them given more opportunities to be changed by them, by which I mean to orient themselves emotionally toward them, by which I mean to fall in love with them.

In contrast it seems plain to me that parents who try to add children to their existing lifestyle, spending with them only a few hours a day (if that), not only have fewer opportunities to experience that reorientation, but struggle more to make use of the few they have.

When the day's time is first squeezed down first by work and school, then by homework and domestic duties, there is not much time left. Still, it is possible to flourish in that remaining time, if it is left truly free and used wisely to cultivate the family, but more often than not it is filled with distractions and out-of-the-house social engagements.

Now limited time is surely a barrier toward having loving time with children, but it is not I think the only one. Equally influential but more pernicious is the resentment that can bubble up from so squeezing your kids into your old life. When you spend most of your day the way you used to before you had kids (i.e. working) and then need to start tending to them during the few hours you are home in the evening—when you formerly relaxed and when the kids now want and need much attention—which hours do you think you will resent: the old ways or the new? It's hard to open up to someone when, deep down and beneath your comprehension, you resent them.

Of course, some adults simply refuse to let the children change them even though they spend a lot of time with them. Too, some people even don't let their spouses change them. Such people don't want marriage so much as they want a merger of assets and they don't want children so much as obedient little reproductions of themselves to reflect well upon them, shower them with affection, and trot off when told.

I am not saying the change is easily forthcoming simply because you spend a lot of time with them. Sometimes we spend a lot of time with them but at every available moment turn our minds away.

Cell phones and television will distract you. Being fussy about housekeeping and domestic responsibilities will distract you. Not having your affairs in order, such as business arrangements and finance, will cause you worry and distract you. Poor relations with your spouse will distract you. Even high-minded thoughts and philosophizing will intrude and thereby distract you. The more you are attuned to other things, even necessary and good things, the farther you really are from your children, even when physically present.

Time, then, is merely the condition for change, not a cause of it. In my experience perception and reception are the essentials, or at least are of a great importance. Watch your children, with as devoted attention as you can muster, and their love for you will be self-evident, and by nature you will reach out to them with love in return. When you have prepared the way, a transcendent touch will happen and the branches of your lives will begin to entangle. In that moment, reaching out is the easiest and most natural thing in the world, but getting yourself and your life to the point where it can happen is difficult.

In fact it is not just difficult, but painful. As with learning, as Jordan Peterson has often pointed out, part of you has to die and you have to be the one who willingly kills it. You have to repudiate some part of your former self and embrace a better you—or at least a you which is better for your new circumstances—which takes courage. Life is not an additive process by which you acquire a spouse, house, children, and so on, improving in linear progression without loss. It is a process of transformation throughout which you gain and leave behind different things at different times.

This does not mean we should dote on and obsess over our children while neglecting all else, but that we should be mindful of our connection to them and sense when we are more stretched apart and when we are especially close. The former is a part of the relationship too, but why would anyone neglect latter?

This does not mean that you can't love them if you're not home with them all the time—and as I said, being home is no guarantee—but I think you are setting up roadblocks if you simply try to squeeze your children into your old ways. Parents, I think, know they are setting up these roadblocks and tend to justify them with explanations to which they hope you will assent. They point to how much time and money they spend on their children and see there demonstrations of their love, effort, and sacrifice.

This is how conscientious and dutiful people often look at the matter and they are not wholly wrong. Their commitment is commendable but the paradigm is wrong because what they are sacrificing is a portion of their old life, a life which they continue to let rule the family. They are giving up something, to be sure, but not what is needed, and because it is still a hard sacrifice, they think that it is enough. When such dutiful people say, as they seem invariably to do, that they would do anything for their children, I would like to add—but do not, for what parent has ever taken correction?—is except that which you have not considered.

I used to hold much anger for such parents, but now the thought of their predicament makes me quite sad. They have taken in the dogmas of the day: cliches about happiness, success, and fulfillment. They are lost and unhappy. Too they are hard to help, partly because of hubris and partly because it is a challenge, impossible for some people, to admit they have failed or are failing their children. Maybe they can be jolted out of their ways by a profound emotional experience, but their circles seem ferociously to reinforce the prevailing trends. So they plod on, ignoring the sadness in their hearts as they pretend to take pleasure in putting their children in that esteemed position of first priority.

But it is not enough to place them first among many priorities: you really do need some sense of their mystical connection to you. Only with that experience will the upheaval of selling your house, quitting your job, negotiating with your spouse, moving, drastically cutting your expenses, or doing whatever you need to do to be with your kids, seem surmountable.

You can't force a realization of such a thing, but you can at least start by being with them with a clear mind and open heart.

Mozart's C Minor Mass Choreographed by Scholz

I came across the late Uwe Scholz's ballet to Mozart's C minor mass on the Classic Arts Showcase a couple of years ago. (I miss the eclectic channel, but it is available online now.) The particular clip I saw was of the Cum Sancto Spiritu, which left me awestruck. I hadn't experienced the piece so strongly since I first discovered it. 

I can't find a selection of that particular part (discs of the performance seem to be getting hard to find, but it is available for digital purchase/rental), but take a look at the Kyrie here, which too demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to the subtitles of the music.

Advice to Myself: Wind in the Sails

Neither keep yourself weak nor abuse power.

The sailboat that has not caught the wind is neither safe itself nor harmless to others. Uncontrolled, it will go about at random and risk harm to itself, to those in its path, and those who try to help it. The boat is said to be "in irons" for a reason: because it is powerless.

Yet when you have caught the wind, never abuse your power. The wind you have now will not be the wind on which you coast in at the end of your journey. You will not be able to sail right at your target, but will need to adjust again and again. The wind is ever changing in strength and direction, and if you don't adjust your sails, you may find yourself suddenly without power or violently twisted about as the circumstances adjust you.

Quote: Lewis on the Intellectus and Ratio

From The Discarded Image, by C. S. Lewis:

We are enjoying intellectus when we 'just see' a self-evident truth; we are exercising ratio when we proceed step by step to prove a truth which is not self-evident. A cognitive life in which all truth can be simply 'seen' would be the life of an intelligentsia, an angel. A life of unmitigated ratio where nothing was simply 'seen' and all had to be proved, would presumably be impossible; for nothing can be proved if nothing is self-evident. Man's mental life is spent in laboriously connecting those frequent, but momentary, flashes of intelligentsia which constitute intellectus. [Ch. 7: Sec. D]

Classics: Dead and Loving It

There are days, maybe one a week, on which I try to catch up on news in the Classics field in some detail. On those days without fail I come to the conclusion not that Classics should remain without revival but in fact that it is not dead enough. Maybe this says more about me than about the discipline. I don't talk a lot about my own academic experience because I have a Paul Bunyan-sized ax to grind with every school I attended and I don't think I can bring much unbiased reflection to the table. So take what I say about the field with this in mind: I am an angry outlier to the world of Classical studies.

What set me off today was something that epitomizes the source of my frustration with Classics: its utterly tone-deaf self-promotion.

I'm rarely speechless but I sat here for five minutes tongue-tied in frustration. I'm usually only this gobsmacked when I walk around a mall or watch people eat. But you have 280 characters and this is what you write?! Memo, via, versus, and bona fide! Then you sell it with a lead-in fit for a multivitamin and slap that ridiculous picture underneath?

That's it. We're done. Everyone pack up and go home. Classicists should be paid to stay home in silence and count gerunds.

Advice to Myself: On Meals

Neither be so abstemious that you are always hungry nor eat to excess. In both cases your appetite will control you and impede your work, either by distracting pangs of hunger or the torpor of digestion.

Of timing, do not follow too closely either the clock on the wall or the clock of your stomach, but don't ignore them either. Have meals prudently spaced through the day and take them at the same time each day as much as possible. In this way your body will never remind you by hunger and you will never impose what is not yet necessary.

Of quality, be neither a fuss nor a brute. Take simple food regularly, but do not be insensitive to finery and delicate touches.

Of variety, take some, but not to the point where you are ever on the hunt for something new.

Lessons for Teachers #8: The Performance

Some teachers adore the cliche that a teacher's presentation in the classroom is artistic or theatrical. These people are often very needy and teaching is probably one of the worst professions they could enter. Such people make dangerous teachers because they are flattered not only by the idea that all eyes are upon them but also by the pretense of artistic creativity, for both elevate what may be an inglorious and mundane profession. Such teachers should beware: do not seek favor or attention from your students and dot not make yourself the center of attention. This is a path to personal and professional catastrophe. Teaching is not a performance because you are the star or the genius, but it is a performance for two reasons.

First, like an actor you have to control yourself. Completely. If you cuss a lot, you need to cut it out. If you are short-tempered, grow patient. If you easily lose your train of thought or need frequent breaks, learn to follow through. If you are disorganized, get organized. If you are easily distracted, learn to focus. And so on and so on. Obviously you can take this too far and make yourself a bundle of nerves, but realize some behaviors just won't cut it for a classroom teacher. I can't list them all, but watch how your students respond to you and search your heart. Does your temperament suit the kind of class you are trying to create? Can you change it?

You can't change everything at once, but you most certainly cannot do the opposite either, and the opposite is another cliche, be yourself. In fact, that's probably the worst thing you can do.

Second, teaching is performative because ideally the teacher should disappear and the impression left upon the minds of the students should be that of the material. This doesn't mean that your zeal, style, and unique take on the material are irrelevant, but that they should serve the understanding of the content and not take center stage.

Here too are the extremes instructive. Some teachers are too much of a presence in the class. Too much talking, interference, jokes, asides, theatricality, and so on. Although they are usually enthusiastic about the material, they overwhelm it. Other teachers are nonentities in the room. Usually by lack of discipline or just by being boring, they don't bring the material out of the realm of concepts into the real world. The lesson is dead on arrival. Now you don't need to be a cheerleader, but kids need to see some heart.

In a nutshell, students need to see someone animated by the knowledge that they are articulating. They need to see only those parts of you, and those parts controlled, that let the ideas shine out. Like an actor on the ancient Greek stage, some of you will disappear behind the mask and some of you will be the medium for the ideas. Unlike the actor, though, you have no physical mask and you need to possess the understanding of yourself to decide which parts of you may and should come forth for the sake of learning.

It is a tall order and its prerequisites are not vanity and narcissism but discipline and self-knowledge, but through such teaching "performance" students will see ideas neither dull and etherized for dissection on the table, nor just barely peeking out from under your personality, but alive, present, and deserving attention and concern. In this way the teacher transforms the knowledge, the student, and himself.

Quote: Pepys on the Lord's Day 13 Nov. 1664

From the diary of Samuel Pepys:

The morning to church, where mighty sport to hear our Clerk sing out of tune, though his master sits by him that begins and keeps the tune aloud for the parish. Dined at home very well. And spent all the afternoon with my wife within doors—and getting a speech out of Hamlett, "to bee or not to bee," without book. In the evening, to sing psalms; and in came Mr. Hill to see me, and then he and I and the boy finely to sing; and so anon broke up after much pleasure. He gone, I to supper and so to prayers and to bed.

Sour Grapes

As I get older I find that three things are more and more the case.

First, I am secure enough to admit that my life is good but not perfect, that there are things I want to be so that are not. More precisely, I can admit that there are things I cannot attain because I have chosen others. More importantly, I can admit that those things I cannot attain are still good.

Second, I find simple and traditional wisdom immediately helpful more often than complex philosophizing. The deep thinking is necessary for arriving at the right action as well as articulating it, but for help you can't turn to it in a pinch.

Third, I often find traditional wisdom congruous with deep thinking. Take the case of Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes.

Who cannot sympathize with the fox, pining after the lofty grapes, and who does not see himself within that furry exterior, assuming that which he cannot attain must surely be rotten? It is a feeling of disdain born not from reasoned consideration of evidence, but of weakness. It is an attempt to devalue something so that you are raised. It is envy.

It might seem at first erroneous to call the fox's feeling envy since no one else is getting the grapes, but another person is surely implied, for it is not the lack of desiderata that makes one envious, but rather it is their presence in the hands of others. No one would assume, for example, that there is nothing atop a mountain or that climbing it is foolish, simply because he wants to climb it and cannot. He simply regards the situation as impossible, and no one is bothered by what cannot be changed and cannot have been any other way. Rather it is the fact that someone else can or may climb the mountain that can makes one envious (if one wanted to climb it) because one realizes that it is possible for the but not for me.

Such demonstrates the genius of Aristotle's definition of envy: pain at the sight of the good not with the idea of getting it for ourselves, but because other people have it. (1387b) Aristotle offers a catalog of who feels envy, but one sentence from his Rhetoric seems to capture the whole of the emotion:

We envy those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question; this annoys us, and excites envy in us. (1388a)

There are two brilliant chords in this definition.

First, that we feel envy toward equals, be it of age, birth, wealth, or disposition. We  do not care about the success of inferiors or superiors because we understand our situations to be so different from theirs that the outcomes are incomparable. Yet when we see someone who is so much the same, except more successful in one or more things, we wonder why our peer has surpassed us. With frightening speed our minds turn afoul: he has cheated, someone has helped him, he is only pretending success, his achievement is somehow incomplete or corrupted.

Second, that envy is pain. Pain of perhaps the deepest and most afflicting kind because it is comes from an existential insult. Since there are many reasons not to do most things and plenty of reasons not to like most things, what one chooses to have and do very much make up the man. As a result, every action and act of possession is an affirmation of one thing and a rejection of others.

Now we understand that very different people are just that, so their live invite little comparison to ours and therefore trouble us little. However, when we see an equal who lives differently than we do, we feel repudiated. When the difference is small we question our judgment, when it is great we feel that our character, will, and self—in essence our whole life and existence—have been repudiated. Such is why we find peace and calm in the presence of people who are like us: that they affirm that being who we are is good.

Such a high degree of envy is liable to take on a different character, that of disgust, and such a combination is called contempt. When we are disgusted neither evidence nor even the characters of others matter in our appraisal. So deep is the insult to us that we reject the offending thing or deed as a contagion. The offense and its perpetrator or owner are incompatible with us and must be avoided as a disease. It is fitting that Aesop's fox calls the grapes sour, that is, bitter, the essence of what repels us.

This condition seldom confines itself. "Contempt," Dr. Johnson in his Life of Blackmore writes, "is a kind of gangrene which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees." It spreads and spreads until you are unrecognizable to the world, with nothing of you in it nor it in you. Anything that is not already of you, or about you, sanctioned by you, or for you, is not just undesirable, but taboo. This madness is disgust at all otherness, which severs the last ties with reality. An ending ripe for tragedy.

Marxist University Press?

Perhaps, "Carolus illuminatio mea" ?

A few days ago I received via email and advertisement from Oxford University Press about their 50% Holiday Sale. That email came to me out of the blue, by the way, the first to have arrived at my inbox from OUP since I ordered my Oxford Latin Dictionary and Liddell Scott Greek Lexicon in college over a decade ago. Anyway I perused the titles and quickly noticed a particular bent.

Take a few examples along with the descriptions from OUP, which are often hilariously cliche-ridden. I'm not sure whether we can handle any more "explorations" or the earth any more "ground-breaking."

The Long Reach of the Sixties by Laura Kalman

The Warren Court of the 1950s and 1960s was the most liberal in American history. Yet within a few short years, new appointments redirected the Court in a more conservative direction, a trend that continued for decades.

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery by Daniel B. Rood

Offers a new version of capitalism, technology and slavery that differs from the Cotton South version that dominates nineteenth-century history. [Ed. That is, 19th century capitalism was "racial capitalism," i.e. "the process of deriving social and economic value from racial identity."]

Unequal by Sandra F. Sperino and Suja A. Thomas

A ground-breaking analysis of why most employment discrimination cases are dismissed, despite evident discrimination.

Healthier: Fifty Thoughts on the Foundations of Population Health by Sandro Galea

A trenchant argument for the urgency of population-level interventions in health -- and a strong rebuttal to those who question it.

Deep Equality in an Era of Religious Diversity by Lori G. Beaman

Rigid identity imaginings, especially religious identities, block our vision to the complexities of social life and press us into corners that trap us in identities that we often ourselves do not recognize, want, or know how to escape.

Beethoven & Freedom by Daniel K. L. Chua

By exploring the musical philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno through a wide range of the composer's music, Beethoven and Freedom arrives at a markedly different vision of freedom. Author Daniel KL Chua suggests that a more human and fragile concept of freedom can be found in the music that has less to do with the autonomy of the will and its stoical corollary than with questions of human relation, donation, and a yielding to radical alterity.

The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy by Sanford F. Schram

As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued in the early seventies, in a capitalist economy, social welfare policies alternatingly serve political and economic ends as circumstances dictate. In moments of political stability, governments emphasize a capitalistic work ethic (even if it means working a job that will leave one impoverished); when times are less politically stable, states liberalize welfare policies to recreate the conditions for political acquiescence. Sanford Schram argues in this new book that each shift produces its own path dependency even as it represents yet another iteration of what he (somewhat ironically) calls "ordinary capitalism," where the changes in market logic inevitably produce changes in the structure of the state. In today's ordinary capitalism, neoliberalism is the prevailing political-economic logic that has contributed significantly to unprecedented levels of inequality in an already unequal society.

Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism by Charles W. Mills

Mills argues that rather than bracket as an anomaly the role of racism in the development of liberal theory, we should see it as shaping that theory in fundamental ways. As feminists have urged us to see the dominant form of liberalism as a patriarchal liberalism, so too Mills suggests we should see it as a racialized liberalism. It is unsurprising, then, if contemporary liberalism has yet to deliver on the recognition of black rights and the correction of white wrongs.

Limits to Globalization The Disruptive Geographies of Capitalist Development by Eric Sheppard

...globalizing capitalism tends to reproduce social and spatial inequality; poverty's persistence is due to the ways in which wealth creation in some places results in impoverishment elsewhere.

Black Natural Law by Vincent W. Lloyd

A Black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the Black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today's gross racial inequities.

Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises by Anwar Shaikh

Competition and conflict are intrinsic features of modern societies, inequality is persistent, and booms and busts are recurrent outcomes throughout capitalist history. State intervention modifies modified these patterns but does not abolish them. My book is an attempt to show that one can explain these and many other observed patterns as results of intrinsic forces that shape and channel outcomes. Social and institutional factors play an important role, but at the same time, the factors are themselves limited by the dominant forces arising from "gain-seeking" behavior, of which the profit motive is the most important. (Description via http://www.anwarshaikhecon.org/)

–

Two books seem non-Marxist:

Pieces of Tradition: An Analysis of Contemporary Tonal Music by Daniel Harrison

Jenkins of Mexico: How a Southern Farm Boy Became a Mexican Magnate by Andrew Paxman

Plenty of the books seem apolitical, but I can't account for the lack of non-leftist politics. I don't know, either, just what the apparent disparity might indicate. Perhaps left-leaning books are disproportionately printed at OUP, perhaps non-Marxist authors are being turned away or are not sought, perhaps non-Marxists authors seek publication elsewhere, or maybe the liberal stuff is just what's new, popular, put forward, or on sale.

I'm not sure that any of that is good news.

Quote: The Ordinary Course of Latin

From the preface to Edwin N. Brown's 1894 Treasury of Latin Gems:

In the arrangement of the ordinary course in Latin, the first four years is commonly apportioned somewhat as follows: Beginning Book and Grammar, Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War, Cicero's Orations in the Senate, and Vergil's Aeneid; and so closely and exclusively is the course pursued that not a few pupils have been known to leave school at the end of the course with the idea that there were only three Latin writers, and that they had read them all. It requires but a moment's reflection to observe that such a course as the one just described is about the equivalent in breadth, interest, and richness of thought to a course like the following for a foreign student desiring to enter upon a four years' study of English: Beginning Book and Grammar, Grant's Memoirs of the Rebellion, Clay's Congressional Speeches, and Milton's Paradise Lost. If to this should be added a year of Shakespeare and a year of Tennyson, we should perhaps have a college course in English of about the same quality and breadth as that commonly pursued in Latin.

We have no disposition to criticise the ordinary course in Latin...which, with certain modifications, is doubtless as good, all things considered, as any that might be suggested. We do however maintain emphatically that the course should be supplemented by constant reference to other writers...

There are many who, for various reasons, do not continue the study of Latin more than two or three years; and such receive comparatively little that is really rich in thought... If the student has only a few years to spend in the study of Latin, it is so much more important that he be introduced to as much rich Latin thought as possible. 

Advice to Myself: Small Things

When you fail at something, do not sulk, that is, do not spiral down into powerlessness. If you know the causes of your defeat, prepare and try again. If you do not, then stop to reflect and while you reevaluate your failure, go succeed at something else, even if it is small. Write an article, clean the gutters, put in a nail in something, but give yourself some small success.

When you succeed at something, do not gloat, i.e. be excessively satisfied. Measure your success against the value you have made, what it has cost you, and what you owe in thanks to fortune and to others. While you seek a new project, do small things well to stay humble.

Advice to Myself: What Twitter is Not

Twitter is not a tool to gain the favor of people by praising them or their work. Nor is it a place for you to maneuver your own work to their attention. Your blog likewise ought to be inhospitable to such flattery.

Such use will reduce the purpose of everything you write to gaining popularity, either for fame itself or for money, and all the more often will you turn away from your life and toward these online places for satisfaction.

Look to what foolishness even solid minds and good men have been reduced! Picking fights with strangers, spending hours crafting insults, arguing with no hope of resolution, betraying their life's privacy. . . if only they could see what the vain hope of popularity has taken from them, or perhaps the void which such pursuit has filled.

So what is Twitter and your blog to you? A place to reflect wisely on what matters most to you. Let not reflecting on life—a very good and necessary thing—become all of life, and let not the business of sharing those reflections overshadow them.

Even the philosopher, if you are such a thing, is not only a philosopher.

Advice to Myself: Splinters

One of the most necessary lessons of moral philosophy is contained in this question: why do you see the straw in the eye of your brother and not in your own? It is, however, a great and ongoing challenge to apply this lesson wisdom.

On the one hand, it is very easy to pardon the errors of another when they are the same as yours. This is so first because such errors are obvious to us and second because by forgiving others we hope to welcome our own absolution. Yet it is no less important, and much more difficult, to forgive a man for falling into those errors from which you have yourself steered clear. It is easy to look at a man overcome by lust or gluttony and say, "What a weak-willed fool!" simply because you have overcome such weaknesses, if you were even tempted by them.

Yet what about your inability to curb your tongue or your temper? Or to treat others generously or be patient? "What a weak-willed fool!" you should be called for those struggles of yours if you fail to see that each man struggles with a different part of life.

On the other hand, it is easy from this position to fall to the facile conclusion that no judgments are possible. Given the gravity of man's life, it would be desirable if we could abdicate judgment and permanently defer to a higher authority. For man's soul we can do this, for it will be judged by a perfect wisdom.

We do not, however, have recourse to that perfect wisdom regarding every matter on this earth, and to defer all judgments would lead to utter immorality and disorder. The affairs of this world require choices, so instead of refusing to judge, undertake the responsibility of judging wisely, that is to say, with clemency, impartiality, and the humility to realize that even the wise and good do not sit so high above others that they may not err in judgment, especially if they judge without the aforementioned virtues or if they judge without full knowledge of the facts.

Both of those situations are quite likely, too, so also be not so eager to throw down the fates of others, but judge to bring about the good. That is, neither judge nor spare judgment to flatter your sense or superiority, but do each in the service of some other good.

The Alt-Right Owns Antiquity?

I've been meaning to write about this matter for a while, but this article by Curtis Dozier of Vassar College in Eidolon, an "online journal for scholarly writing about Classics that isn’t formal scholarship," edited by Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Donna Zuckerberg, got me thinking anew: where is the politics of Classics in 2017?

Eidolon's article, in its jejune way, raises some red flags when it asserts that, "the alt-right owns antiquity online," as its justification for compiling a database "to stand up against hateful appropriations of antiquity online."

On the one hand, this seems like a tempest in a teapot. My sense of the situation, unscientific to be sure, is that the left, especially the academic left, is spooked by the political rumblings of the last year and is trying to exorcise and purify its domains. With great reluctance it is realizing that it does not own the internet.

On the other hand, the matter may be quite serious.

First, the statement that "the alt-right owns antiquity online" is a probably a substantial exaggeration. Classics online, or anywhere, is not vital at all, it seems to me. (By vital I mean something that is healthy, active, and growing.)

Second, with respect to interest, it might be possible that the alt-right is right now more passionate about classics than is the left today.

Third, I'm not sure whether compiling a database will do more harm than good. A few weeks ago Jordan B. Peterson asked via a Twitter poll whether a website, and I am paraphrasing from memory, that would catalog neo-Marxist courses online, would do more good or harm. The giddy, hysterical, adolescent tone (and content) of the Eidolon article suggests to me the creators of "Pharos" have not publicly asked this crucial question.

Will a database work, ultimately, for or against debate, for or against free speech? Dozier wrote that he wanted to respond "Not to try to change the minds of those we were responding to, but so that the curious public would have access to a better way of understanding the past," but to what demand of public curiosity will Pharos respond? Too, in the absence of such curiosity, what will Pharos become?  Finally, why not try to engage people and change their minds? Why wouldn't that be preferable?

Maybe instead of compiling a database for the explicit purpose of not engaging ones adversaries, Dozier, Zuckerberg, and the staff of Eidolon should get out in the trenches, summon up the blood, bring their vaunted knowledge of the ancient world to their tongues, and debate their opposition in public in the real world in the spirit of antiquity.

Lessons for Teachers #7: Five Cheating Anecdotes

To close out the topic of cheating in this series, here are a few cheating-related anecdotes from my years teaching Latin.

1. in flagrante delicto

One of the most memorable incidents occurred early in my teaching career when a student tried to cheat using his cell phone. When I walked toward him he proceeded, hilariously frantic, to pull the phone out from its hidden position, rip off its cover, and pluck out the battery. Even he chuckled when he realized what he had done. I wish I had taken the opportunity to teach the phrase in flagrante delicto.

2. A Pair of Nickers

I once taught two juniors who were thick as thieves and, as I look back, alarmingly devious. When I contemplate their antics, today I would cross the street to avoid them. The catch is that one had a grade of A and the other was failing, with the former abetting the other. As a neophyte teacher I fell prey to some clever gimmicks. The funniest was when the failing student completed a test so sloppily that it was illegible and who, when questioned, replied that he completed the test with a monstrously broken pencil, which he produced in all its mangled glory. The worst scam was when that same student didn't hand in a test and alleged I had lost it. Both I and an administrator were taken aback at his temerity.

Eventually I had them figured out, but in the end they got the better of me when they conspired to cheat during the final exam, correctly surmising that they could pull the wool over the eyes of the proctor. The failing student hadn't passed many tests that year, but he did manage to score 100% on the final!

3. New Leaves

The same year I taught the above juniors I caught two freshman cheating a few weeks before the end of the year. My clever ruse, of which I was very proud, was that, having spied their cheating off of paper on their seats, I would ask them to get up and open a window. They were, in fact, good kids who had made a bad choice to cheat but they were not deceitful by nature, so when I deployed my scheme they complied and let the chips fall. They were mortified and apologized repeatedly and profusely, but they grew up to be gentleman and scholars I'm proud to have taught.

4. Lost Keys

I handed out the key with the test not once, but twice. The first time it was promptly returned to me by a first rate student who was holding it at a distance, averting his eyes. His integrity impressed the whole class. He also was, I think, one of the best students and young men who walked through the doors of that school in my years there.

Now for the cheating. The second time I handed out the key I had to retrieve it, but also from an A+ student. He was otherwise a good kid, but he had that key tucked under his test and blushed when I came to get it. Still disappoints me.

5. Quintus Cicero's Guide to Engineering

At the very beginning of one student's freshman year, I accidentally left review material projected on the board as I handed out the quiz. It was the frantic attempt of this student greedily copying down answers that alerted me to my error.

Later, in his junior year, I returned a guided reading assignment on Cicero. All the student had to do was fill in the blanks of a summary of an article on Cicero. The article included a comment on Quintus Cicero, the brother of the famous orator, and the pamphlet Quintus had written about how to get elected, aka the process of electioneering.

I had known something odd was going on with the take-home assignments, but I could not pin down exactly what it was until I graded the project of this particular student, who had filled in one particular blank, "Cicero's brother Quintus wrote a guide to engineering for his brother..."

Upon reading that I realized that the odd answers I had been noticing on the projects were the results of students copying the work of others, but misreading their sloppy handwriting and thus writing down answers that read as nonsense in the context.

–

If there is an upside to cheating it is that the results are usually futile and quite funny.

Quote: The Carthaginian Who Said No to War

from Livy's Ab Urbe Condita. Book 21.

Translation by Bruce J. Butterfield

21.3 ... The soldiers led the way by bringing the young Hannibal forthwith to the palace and proclaiming him their commander-in-chief amidst universal applause. Their action was followed by the plebs. Whilst little more than a boy, Hasdrubal had written to invite Hannibal to come to him in Spain, and the matter had actually been discussed in the senate. The Barcines wanted Hannibal to become familiar with military service; Hanno, the leader of the opposite party, resisted this. "Hasdrubal's request," he said, "appears a reasonable one, and yet I do not think we ought to grant it" This paradoxical utterance aroused the attention of the whole senate. 

He continued: "The youthful beauty which Hasdrubal surrendered to Hannibal's father he considers he has a fair claim to ask for in return from the son. It ill becomes us, however, to habituate our youths to the lust of our commanders, by way of military training. Are we afraid that it will be too long before Hamilcar's son surveys the extravagant power and the pageant of royalty which his father assumed, and that there will be undue delay in our becoming the slaves of the despot to whose son-in-law our armies have been bequeathed as though they were his patrimony? I, for my part, consider that this youth ought to be kept at home and taught to live in obedience to the laws and the magistrates on an equality with his fellow-citizens; if not, this small fire will some day or other kindle a vast conflagration." 

21.4 Hanno's proposal received but slight support, though almost all the best men in the council were with him, but as usual, numbers carried the day against reason. 

21.10 The result was that, beyond being received and heard by the Carthaginian senate, the embassy found its mission a failure. Hanno alone, against the whole senate, spoke in favour of observing the treaty, and his speech was listened to in silence out of respect to his personal authority, not because his hearers approved of his sentiments. He appealed to them in the name of the gods, who are the witnesses and arbiters of treaties, not to provoke a war with Rome in addition to the one with Saguntum. "I urged you," he said, "and warned you not to send Hamilcar's son to the army. That man's spirit, that man's offspring cannot rest; as long as any single representative of the blood and name of Barca survives our treaty with Rome will never remain unimperilled.

You have sent to the army, as though supplying fuel to the fire, a young man who is consumed with a passion for sovereign power, and who recognises that the only way to it lies in passing his life surrounded by armed legions and perpetually stirring up fresh wars. It is you, therefore, who have fed this fire which is now scorching you. 

Advice to Myself: Spare Yourself

Spare yourself concern for the comings and goings of inferiors. To follow them and resent their unwise but carefree wanderings is a dark path. So is resenting them the praise that other fools lavish upon them. What do you want with the praise of fools? Spare yourself this madness.

Yet driven as we all are by desire for praise, seek neither to court the favor of great men. You will grow to resent a life you do not understand and which is complete without you.

Instead, seek out those who are good and alike to you in virtue. In them, or in that one, you will have nothing sweeter. Wherever you turn, it will be present for you. So supported you will raise each other's spirits.

Quote: Vox Populi, Vox Dei

from Our Culture, What's Left of It, by Theodore Dalrymple

The crudity of which I complain results form the poisonous combination of an ideologically inspired (and therefore insincere) admiration for all that is demotic, on the one hand, and intellectual snobbery, on the other. In a democratic age, vox populi, vox dei: the multitude can do no wrong; and to suggest that there is or ought to be cultural activity from which large numbers of people might be excluded by virtue of their lack of mental cultivation is deemed elitist and, by definition, reprehensible. Coarseness is the tribute that intellectuals pay, if not to the proletariat, exactly, then to their own schematic, inaccurate, and condescending idea of the proletariat. Intellectuals prove the purity of their political sentiment by the foulness of their productions.

Six Frames from Stranger Things 2: Episode 6

Spoilers

I was skeptical of this thread thread introduced in the pilot, but it fit fairly well with Eleven's search for a family. The urban environment is cliché, yes, but the director made clever use of the background text, mostly graffiti, to comment on the scenes.

1. Spiritual Isor

As we see the vengeful anger of Eleven's "sister."

2. Pawn

As we see Eleven about to be used for her powers.

3. Wicked

4. Mek

That is, meek: with great power but choosing not to exercise it, after Eleven does just that.

5. O' Bedlam

Bedlam, that is, an insane asylum, from the popular name for the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in London.

6.  Multidirectional Arrow

This image recurs and reflects Eleven being pulled in different directions, one of which is deformed.

Lessons for Teachers #6: Why Cheat?

Now that we have discussed why it is necessary to prevent cheating in the classroom we ought to address the next important matter on the subject: why does a student cheat?  One factor chiefly figures in determining whether a student will cheat, namely, whether it is easier than the alternatives.

Yes, before you ask, many kids find cheating abhorrent. They have been well raised and I have been honored to teach many such students. Of those who will cheat, some are devious and immoral and others simply succumb to despair and temptation. The former will always consider cheating a possible option and the latter will weigh with greater care to see if it is a viable alternative.

The first and most infamous of those alternatives is failing and needing to attend summer school. Don't underestimate how many summer school programs know this and make short and easy, and thus popular, summer courses. Those courses make failing a class a serious option for kids whose parents can afford it. For many though, the embarrassment and inconvenience of summer school is a deterrent.

The next alternative is the penalty for cheating. If either the amount of effort it would take to get away with cheating or the penalty for getting caught, which includes becoming known as a cheater, are too high, many students will reconsider trying to cheat. I say many and not most because cheaters are notorious for spending such amounts of time on ludicrous methods of cheating that it would have been easier simply to learn the material. Yet they may be tempted if left the opportunity.

If you are known not to care or if the administration is known to not support teachers' policies, cheaters have the opportunity. If you are known to police cheating but they think they can get away with it when, say, someone else proctors your midterm, cheaters have the opportunity. If you give a lot of work to be completed at home, that's their opportunity. If you don't evaluate assignments in detail, that's their opportunity. If you park yourself at your desk and browse the internet when you give tests, which is sadly very common, that's their opportunity.

The final alternative is learning the material. Because some classes and teachers are so bad it is necessary to say one thing bluntly: don't make your class such a mess that the students are bewildered and, having no idea what's going on, grow desperate to pass and turn to cheating. If I hadn't seen it, I wouldn't say it.

Worse is that many of those bad teachers know their classes are disasters and instead of making improvements, simply make the classes so easy that no one can fail. Administrators often know this too but don't care because they don't get complaints from parents, and they don't get complaints because parents rarely complain about anything besides failures. It is easy to see a kid caught in a dilemma between parents and teachers who should know better.

Most students who cheat, however, simply find themselves in hot water and then see cheating as a way out. Such is why students tend to cheat a few weeks before the end of a marking period or before some kind of evaluation is sent home to parents, that is, they cheat when they realize they are doing poorly but there is not enough time to learn the material. At that time, kids get desperate; so tell them often how they are doing. Teachers are notorious for not posting grades, not giving work back, and not being clear and objective about how students are doing. What's a kid supposed to do? So tell them, either verbally, with evaluations, or with progress reports, but tell them. It's part of the job: help them learn and help them know that they are learning.

In conclusion, make that learning the most attractive option. There are enough natural barriers to learning such as the difficulty of the material, student ability, and the vicissitudes of life, so as obvious as it sounds: do everything you can to facilitate learning. Have such quantity, quality, and variety in your teaching and evaluating that cheating becomes unnecessary. Be so persuasive and enthusiastic that cheating becomes unattractive.

The more attention you give to teaching, the less you will have to give to the problem of cheating. The situation is as with lawns: the best defense against weeds is healthy turf. You'll never be able to drive cheating out completely, but you can create an atmosphere in which it cannot thrive.

Lessons for Teachers #5: Policing Cheating

When it comes to dealing with cheating, teachers fall into three categories. The first consists of those who refuse to do anything about the problem. Sometimes these teachers say that they are taking the high road, that to police cheating is to detract from teaching. Other times such teachers frankly admit the task is beneath them because it is unrelated to teaching. We should ask, then, whether it is necessary to police cheating.

I propose it is necessary for a number of reasons. First, you might not like giving grades, but you are responsible for making them accurately represent student competence. That's a tall order and you need to fill it a variety of ways, one of which is policing cheating. Second, students prospering by cheating is an injustice against good students. Additionally, if you make good students look like fools for trying hard, you'll tempt them either to cheat or to give up. Third, you don't want to deal with dishonest people in life in general. Can you really have a good conversation in class, or even look at a student, whom you permit to cheat with impunity?

Fourth, students prospering by cheating will check out of class and damage class discipline. Fifth, you may be contractually obligated to police cheating. Sixth, you'll develop a reputation for not caring that will spread and be hard to erase. Seventh, you skew the student's statistics such that parents, guidance counselors, administration, and other teachers wonder why a student is doing well in your class and failing others. The answer is, "Because you let him cheat!" Eighth, you poison the student's expectations because he becomes resentful of the other teachers on whose tests he cannot cheat.

Ninth, you consign yourself to permitting cheating into the future, not only because you'll lack the credibility to start policing, but also because if you start, then parents, administration, etc. will wonder why students suddenly started failing your class. Tenth, you damage the credibility of the whole school and its graduates when the school is known to send students out into the world with a diploma which you have made, in part, a lie.

Advice to Myself: Eager Martyrs

When choosing a course of action, do not choose a path simply because it forces you to relinquish something significant: this purpose flatters your vanity. You will probably become resentful because in your eagerness to sacrifice you overestimate what your sacrifice means to others.

Sometimes we act to prove we are martyrs regardless of what good is actually accomplished. Choose your path in accordance with reason, aiming at virtue, and for virtue risk what you judge to be beneath its value.

Quote: A Roman Military Blunder

Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Ayrault Dodge (1842-1909), military historian and United States Army officer of the Union during the American Civil War, describes in his 1889 study of Hannibal Barca the first major engagement between the Romans and the Carthaginians under Hannibal in the Second Punic War at the Battle of the Trebia River, December 218 BC:

The day was raw; snow was falling; the [Roman] troops had not yet eaten their morning meal; yet, though they had been under arms for several hours, [Roman General Tiberius Sempronius Longus] pushed them across the fords of the Trebia, with the water breast-high and icy-cold. Arrived on the farther side, the Roman soldiers were so chilled that they could scarcely hold their weapons. 

Hannibal was ready to receive them. His men had eaten, rubbed themselves with oil before their camp-fires, and prepared their weapons. He might have attacked the Roman army when half of it was across, with even greater chances of success. But when he saw his ruse succeeding, he bethought him that he could produce a vastly greater moral effect on the new Gallic allies, as well as win a more decisive victory, by engaging the whole army on his own terms.

Lessons for Teachers #4: One Chance

One of the great delights of teaching is growing old with the craft. Every year you get wiser, you know the material in greater depth and with greater subtlety, and you perfect your style. Most of all, you learn to teach a greater variety of students. While not a given, some improvement is probable for even the weakest teachers. The flip-side to this rich opportunity is the temptation, in your ability to improve next year, to put off improving until next year. Or the year after, or the year after. Especially if you are making a career of teaching, you may feel that you have all the time in the world. So why work now? Yet as the horizon continues to recede, you will find yourself stale and listless. Old but not matured.

Worse is the crime against your students who, unlike you, do not have years and years to improve. In fact, they may only study the subject of your course once in their lives. You may be their only hope and opportunity of gaining this knowledge!

As a Latin teacher, I always that knew few if any of my students knew much about Latin coming into my class and few if any would ever read Latin again. Whatever I did with them was all they would know, and I wanted it to be good. My responsibility was twofold.

First, I resolved never to waste their time. Mainly this means two things: always show up and never show up unprepared. Regarding the first point, it's sad how many teachers are eager for any interruption to class time. Snow, sports, assemblies, late buses, some teachers welcome any intrusion. The pinnacle of this malaise is the jaded teacher--and who hasn't known a few--who is already counting down the days until June when it's only October.

Regarding the second point, once everyone is in class, make it count. Don't waste time–and teachers are notorious for this–by being inefficient when you do things like give back tests, hand out materials, put problems on the board, and so on.

This requires a great deal of organization and planning, but it doesn't mean you should be a task master. Neither you nor the students should be frantic trying to get too much done, but all should know what they need to do and be working on it at a pace appropriate to the class, material, calendar, and common sense adjustments to life. In the words of Marcus Aurelius, know when to ease up and when to push on. A good test of your success is whether you and they are proud of the day's work.

Second, don't disrespect the material. I appreciated the potential and history of the Latin language, the genius of its finest authors, and the importance of their writings, far to much ever to risk letting my students see them in a negative light. So no fumbles. Never let your work look shoddy or cheap. Don't cut corners or let things be out of date.

Don't ever give the impression that you don't care, because that impression will spread like poison through your class and even, possibly, through your career. Of course you must understand that students have many hardships and obligations, as do you, but during the class the material has to feel as if it were the most important thing in the world. Never give the impression–and disgruntled employees in all jobs are notorious for this–that you would rather be doing something else. If you would rather be somewhere else, they will too.

Some days will go bad, but you can make up for mistakes. Don't be obsessive and oppressed by the weight of your goals, rather let them urge you.

They only have one chance. Don't screw it up.

Quote: A Poet In Your Pocket

From John Adams, by David McCullough

[Adams] read Cicero, Tacitus, and others of his Roman heroes in Latin, and Plato and Thucydides in the original Greek, which he considered the supreme language. But in his need to fathom the "labyrinth" of human nature, as he said, he was drawn to Shakespeare and Swift, and likely to carry Cervantes or a volume of English poetry with him on his journeys. "You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket," he would tell his son Johnny.

Imperfect Knowledge

After wisdom and love, knowledge is perhaps the most sought after of human values. For such a precious thing, though, it is amazing what you can do without it. After all, most of what we do we do with imperfect knowledge. I'm not talking about ignorance of natural laws and phenomena which all proceed without any consideration from me whatsoever, but the deeds of daily life.

When I walk or drive down the street I don't have the positions of every other person constantly mapped with perfect accuracy. Rather, I have learned through trial and error how far apart everyone should be; what things look like when they are going as they should, and what things situations look like when they are dangerous.

When I shop, who can say what book will strike my fancy? When I eat, I don't really know what or how much I should consume before I sit down. I don't know just when I'll need to sleep or just how tired any given activity will make me. I do know all of these things, though, just well enough to get through the day.

Dealing with other people, of course, is a greater challenge. I know what kind of behavior most people will tolerate, so I smile, give thanks, hold doors, leave people their privacy, and so forth. Now some people need more or less of these things, and customs for observing such norms vary from time and place, but generally most of us can navigate society.

This sounds dreary, but perhaps ignorance is bliss, for who would want to know exactly how much he should eat, and just what book to read, and just how much a person does not really appreciate your gratitude or that you held the door for him? This is not so for intimates, though.

Habit fortunately fine tunes this heuristical, trial-and-error learning, and we know our loved ones well, so well do we read their signs. I can tell from the slightest look or intonation whether my wife or daughter are not themselves and, in the privacy of my home, I can scarcely camouflage my true feelings.

All of this is all well and good, then: we know how to interact with our friends and family very well and with strangers well enough, but what about when we have a lot of new variables we need to process quickly? Let us consider, for example, the seemingly daily onslaught of allegations of sexual misconduct in the news.

On the one hand, so many of these charges are so heinous that they trigger an immediate disgust response, bypassing our desire to evaluate the situation any further. One avoids anything associated with such matters as one does a contagious disease or poison. Is it legitimate to let our visceral reaction be the judge or are we obliged to use reason? If we are obliged to reason, then we have to consider the method. What should, for example, Alabama voters do in choosing between Doug Jones (D) and Roy Moore (R), the latter facing "an accusation that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with a minor years ago."  (Also via The Washington Post)

Generally we rely on a large system of established protocols, aka the criminal justice system, to navigate these complex issues. It is a great luxury to be able to declare someone innocent until proven guilty and to defer judgment to a legal system that will adjudicate the matter based on objective, or at least defined, premises and processes. This system takes time, however, and what if we ourselves need to choose?

In assessing an accusation it seems our judgment will be based on three things. The first and most ideal would be evidence, but evidence needs to scrupulously to be gathered, verified, and analyzed, a time-consuming process. That process would be an investigation and a fine thing, but absent it, we stitch together the evidence in our own way, a way which will usually be cursory and unsystematic since we rarely have the time, inclination, or ability to do better.

Usually, we simply try to piece together what type of person or incident, a process invariably based on our experiences. If the accused is a lawyer, our judgment will be based on our experience with lawyers. If the other is tall it will reflect our experiences with tall people, and so on. We all make such judgments, though they are far from scrupulous and unbiased. Such processes may help us cross the street, but are unreliable in dealing with situations with so many new variables. Yet such methods are not unreasonable if better options of inquiry and investigation are unavailable.

Consider a few variables based on recent news:

1. Do multiple allegations make guilt more or less likely, or neither?
2. Does the fact the press seeks out potential victims and not the other way around make either party more or less trustworthy?
3. Does when the accusers come forward make them more or less trustworthy?
4. Do a person's gender, look, occupations, etc. contribute to anything?
5. Does denial make the accused look innocent, or admittance better?
6. Are the witnesses, and witnesses in general, reliable?
7. Do ridiculous defenses harm the defense?
8. Is the reporting source more or less credible from particular sources?

That's a lot to evaluate systematically or heuristically, but Alabama voters, for example, are deciding. Considering that case: is it preferable to presume Moore is innocent and risk bringing the upset to governance that a trial against him as a sitting official would bring, and worse, a disgrace to the office, state, and people and offense to the victims, if he is guilty? Or do you rule Moore out, and risk setting a precedent that such an accusation is sufficiently grave that it can can be used as a weapon. The middle path is the toughest: wading through all the facts you can gather and judging as best you can. It is a necessary if imperfect task we usually leave to jurors, who fortunately have more time and guidance, and a difficulty whose price we rarely bear ourselves, both in terms of the responsibility of getting the verdict right and in terms of defending our judgment.

—

We evaluate complex matters casually all the time and such informs our sense of life, that is, our basic appraisal of things. Such is why trials that become public tend to provoke strong responses, because disagreement is not merely about the facts of the case, but about the facts of life. Indeed, my eight questions above probably seem biased. Disagreement here is as meaningful and acrimonious as debate about taste in art, which also reflects one's sense of life.

When a verdict comes, will we revisit the case and change our judgment? What if all these accusations of recent months fade away and we never examine them? We may find that we tune out accusations like noise, which has its benefits. Is it better to live in a society where all accusations and epithets were hurled with abandon, and thus are routine and discounted, or one where such accusations are rare, but then in need of great scrutiny?

We seem to be somewhere in between, which is usually the hardest place to navigate.

P.S. This article in the National Review is some of the worst writing I've seen in a long time, but I think it illustrates a number of my points.

Advice to Myself: Don't Lash Out

Wise men urge us to know ourselves, and this is certainly true. They too give many fine reasons why, but here is one in particular you should heed: know the cause of your negative emotions--anger, enmity, fear, shame, indignation--and take great care to direct your attempts at resolution toward the just and proper ends. It is of course wise to know the cause of all of our emotions, but the negative ones--excepting enmity--flare up without warning and easily hurt the innocent.

Before you know the cause you will be tempted to lash out at the wrong people or remedy the wrong situation. In fact, you will often be tempted to lash out at something very good in blind reaction to that which has disappointed you but which you have yet to identify.

After you identify the cause, you will be tempted again. On the one hand, you may be tempted to act rashly. On the other hand, you may wish to avoid confronting an unpleasant truth. (In reacting deficiently, sometimes we concoct mealy excuses that we an others scarcely even believe, but sometimes we are too clever for ourselves and create elaborate rationalizations.) Both of these extreme reactions show that you do not have one or more of your priories arranged clearly enough.

If what is troubling you is important, you may need to pursue its solution with vigor, perhaps even risking other goods, whose value you also need to know in order to risk them. If what troubles you is not important, then you recognize it as inferior to other goods, which outweigh your trouble such that you may endure it.

The small man has little and is angry at many because, insecure, he is easily reminded of his smallness and thus is easily threatened. The magnanimous man, however, not only expresses anger sparingly, but rather is beneficent, so wisely and harmoniously has he arranged his soul, and his soul with his actions.

Quote: Joseph Campbell on 'The Magic of the Rite'

From Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By:

For it is the rite, the ritual and its imagery, that counts in religion, and where that is missing the words are mere carriers of concepts that may or may not make contemporary sense. A ritual is an organization of mythological symbols; and by participating in the drama of the rite one is brought directly in touch with these, not as verbal reports or historic events, either past, present or to be, but as revelations, here and now, of what is always and forever.

Where the synagogues and churches go wrong is by telling what their symbols "mean." The value of an effective rite is that it leaves everyone to his own thoughts, which dogma and definitions only confuse. Dogma and definitions rationally insisted upon are inevitably hindrances, not aids, to religious meditation, since no one's sense of the presence of God can be anything more than a function of his own spiritual capacity. 

Having your image of God–the most intimate, hidden mystery of your life–defined for you in terms contrived by some council of bishops back, say, in the fifth century or so: what good is that? But a contemplation of the crucifix works; the odor of incense works; so do, also, hieratic attires, the tones of well-sung Gregorian chants, intoned and mumbled Introits, Kyries, heard and unheard consecrations.

What has the "affect value" of wonders of this kind to do with the definitions of councils, or whether we quite catch the precise meaning of such words as 'Oramus te, Domine, per merita Sanctorum tuorum?' If we are curious for meanings, they are there, translated in the other column of the prayerbook. But if the magic of the rite is gone. . . .

Mini-Review: Stranger Things 2, Ep. 4

Spoilers

Netflix's runaway hit Stranger Things gained its popularity in part by patiently building a foreboding tone and slowly dipping into the horror well. Season 1 nurtured a buildup not unlike the great season-long slow-burns of Homeland. Season 2 has the same content, but it doesn't seem stitched together so well. The fourth episode of Season 2, however, broke the mold of the show by adding drama that was too good for the surrounding stories.

By now Sheriff Hopper (David Harbour) has taken in secret the orphaned Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown), hunted by the scientists who know of her telekinetic powers, as ward. In fact, he has taken his job at safeguarding her so far as to have essentially imprisoned her in a far off cabin in the woods. On the edge of adolescence, however, Eleven has grown impatient and not only ventured out, but been seen. Their ensuing confrontation is far more frightening than any supernatural boogeyman the show has yet thrown at us.

As in all arguments, the two start off justifying their positions and blaming the other for violating their agreement. Then they construe the worst of the other: one is lying, the other is willful. Each step of they way they cut off the path to peace. Punishments become threats, complaints turn to epithets.

We grow more and more afraid because both characters have power over each other. Hopper, as the adult and sheriff, has great power of authority, physical strength, and the ability to be cruel. Yet Elven too is a threat since she is not powerless but, untutored, in the possession of potent telekinetic abilities. As we see both in the grip of anger and frustration fail to calm the situation and allow themselves to get provoked into anger, we fear what each might do.

We also pity them, for both characters hurtle toward voluntarily destroying someone who has filled a painful emptiness in their lives. In their new relationship as father and daughter they have begun to make a life together.

Yet the past skews their new roles. Hopper in his outburst becomes tyrannical, like Eleven's real father, overcompensating for the protection he could not provide his own daughter. Eleven, in turn, flies out of Hopper's control–as did his real daughter, in effect, by her death–overcompensating for her suffering under her tyrannical biological father. Both turn into monstrous forms of themselves, abusing the unspoken love which has been given them and which they have begun to cherish.

This scene is great drama and by its end I could not have cared less about the supernatural monsters. The real ones are far more frightening.

Advice to Myself: On Challenges

Some men seek out challenges because they expect to grow stronger, wealthier, or wiser by the doing. This is necessary and good if done with prudence, but do not, even if you have the wisdom to gain from failure, meet so many challenges that you exhaust your mind and body. He who undertakes too much grows weary and worn in body by excessive exercise and his mind grows febrile because of care and constant change. He is bloodied by his relentless pursuit of progress.

Other men refuse all challenges in the vain hope of protecting their life as it is. This man may wisely avoid ill-considered progress, but his inertia withers him until at last the most basic functions of life are tortuous routines. He is reddened not with blood, but rust.

Just as a tree protected indoors without breezes will never grow to full health or will grow and topple, and just as it needs wind to press its trunk and compel it to grow the new wood that with strengthen it, so man needs adversity to spur his maturation. Yet as a great wind will topple a tree, too much strain will topple a man.

Unlike a tree, though, man is not stuck in place, fated to suffer and endure whatever chance weather blows at him, rather by his prudence and intelligence he may seek some challenges and avoid others. His fate is to choose his challenge: good from good, good from bad, bad from bad.

Quote: Three Theories on Postmodern Jargon

Jordan B. Peterson:

After explaining how the zebra's stripes camouflage it not against the foliage but against the herd, which confuses predators who, unable to distinguish one zebra from the other, constantly lose track of their
targeted prey, he continues:

One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities and then they share a language and the language unites them. And as long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves they know that there isn't anybody in the coterie that's going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd.

And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It's group-protection strategy...it's the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. [Link to Source]

Camille Paglia:

Instead of quoting Paglia's famous discursive style verbatim, permit me to paraphrase:

The inscrutable texts are, first, blatantly careerist attempts at grabbing power in academia: the postmodernists created an impenetrable language whose complex technicalities only they could understand. Second, that language was an, "absurd, absolutely ludicrous" imitation by "amateurs" of Lacan's attempt by to break up neoclassical French formulations, an attempt unnecessary for the vital English language. [Link to Source]

Roger Scruton:

It is an exercise in meaning Nothing, in presenting Nothing as something that can and should be meant, and as the true meaning of every text. . . Meaning is chased through the text from sign to sign, always vanishing as we seem to reach it. . . The effect of such cryptic ideas is to introduce not a critical reading of a text, but a series of spells, by which meaning is first imprisoned, and then extinguished. . .  

Deconstruction is neither a method nor an argument. It should be understood on the model of magic incantation. . . The deconstructionist critic is. . . the guardian and oracle of the text's sacred meaning. . . the god of deconstruction is not a 'real presence', in the Christian sense, but an absence. . . The revelation of the god is a revelation, so to speak, of a transcendental emptiness, an unmeaning, where meaning  should have been.

A 'substantified void' is the Real Presence of Nothing: and this is the content of this strange religion.

(Selections from pages 137-144 of Scruton's, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. St. Augustine's Press. 2000)

Advice to Myself: Know Your Role

We are inclined to glorify our circumstances when we fancy them the products of our own design–usually this is when life goes well–and likewise demonize them when we feel weak. Therefore first distinguish your role in arriving at present circumstances from other causes such as fortune and the influence of others. Give no cause more or less credit than it is due.

Advice to Myself: Plants and Habits

Like the plant that from a seed grows, so do our habits. Tend them so they provide shade and beauty for your character. Some plants, though, outgrow their pots, and so some habits overtake the man.

Quote: The Humiliation of the Britons

1066 and All That. Chapter II: Britain Conquered Again.

The brutal Saxon invaders drove the Britons westward into Wales and compelled them to become Welsh; it is now considered doubtful whether this was a Good Thing. Memorable among the Saxon warriors were Hengist and his wife (? or horse), Horsa. Hengist made himself King in the South. Thus Hengist was the first English King and his wife (or horse), Horsa, the first English Queen (or horse). The country was now almost entirely inhabited by Saxons and was therefore renamed England, and thus (naturally) soon became C. of E. This was a Good Thing, because previously the Saxons had worshipped some dreadful gods of their own called Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

Advice to Myself: On Seizing Days

Some time ago I began to write down, like the venerable Marcus Aurelius, exhortations to myself in the hopes of urging myself toward the good. These writings were not intended for publication because I hoped that by abandoning scrupulous reference and explication I might distill a variety of learning into simple, practical wisdom I could regularly revisit and follow.

I have decided to post them here, with the additional caveat that they were conceived in Latin, so please pardon the fact that they feel somewhat stiff and translated. I make no pretense of originality—you will find many familiar thoughts throughout—but only claim an often desperate desire to correct what often seems to be the incorrigible, that is, myself.

—

Fix the tempo of the day by your design and do not let it be set by the mood in which you wake up. Contend with the variations and challenges of the day to make your mark. That said, some days are unlucky and go against you: do not fight such days and attempt to impress your designs on the wind and water crashing about you. Get out with your skin intact!

Most days are an admixture: seize a morning, afternoon, or evening, but do not demand all three.

Quote: Mises on Socialist Control of Industry

Mises, Ludwig von. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Translated by J. Hakane. Liberty Fund, Inc. 1981. p. 187