foolosophy

We Also Know There Are Known Unknowns

By in books, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, writing

Chris Graham:

The problem for the librarian, no less than for the career consultant, the occupational health and safety supervisor, and the beleaguered investment banker, is that the notion of a “work-life balance” is a terrible false dichotomy, the Marxist equivalent of giving all your chips away before the deck is even shuffled and then borrowing from the dealer to buy a round for the table. It is manifestly impossible to divide one’s life into neat or even approximately spherical compartments (how many New York Times crossword puzzles have been completed with a “Eureka!” exclaimed while on the family dog’s midnight promenade), and the decision to deny the obvious is generally employed by those who actually know better, which is why they are forever unsatisfied with the level of the scales. While it is plainly true that one can read a book more or less closely (substitute a beach blanket and a daiquiri for a pencil and a desk), it is equally true that something of everything we read is retained, to be recalled, by chance more often than design, on some or another future occasion, a dinner conversation, a tutorial essay, or a game of Trivial Pursuit. As every student who has written an examination knows all too well, it is impossible to predict when the most felicitous recollections – legend has it, the essential ingredients in the making of a “Congratulatory First” – will occur, but the chances are most assuredly increased in direct proportion to the number of books we read.
Even, just for pleasure.
As Heywood once said about spelling ability, I would say about intellectual ability — there’s no substitute for always having your nose in a book. The more you read, even if “only” for pleasure, the more you’re exposed to different ways of thinking and expression, to references that lead to further illumination after striking your curiosity. I’m continually surprised at how many forgotten words, phrases, passages, books, and blog posts spring to my attention from somewhere deep in my subconscious at just the slightest oblique trigger. The more you read, the more stuff you have in your mental basement waiting to be hauled out and dusted off.
But the phrase “reading for pleasure” itself has a little bit of a sneer to it, an implicit conviction that stuff we really like isn’t good for us, and vice versa. The “blood, sweat and tears” school of intellectual achievement. The angry, suspicious ghost of John Calvin, hostile to anything pleasurable, warning of idle hands – or minds, as the case may be – doing the devil’s work. But as Graham says, we often don’t know what’s going to make the deepest impression on us, what’s going to become an important hub in a wheel of thoughts. I’ve read scholarly books that I honestly can’t say enhanced my understanding of a subject at all, whereas there have been comics documentary, graphic nonfiction books that have given me those “Eureka!” moments he mentioned. And I will always name Calvin & Hobbes as one of my biggest intellectual influences.
Even then, I don’t mean to sound like I’m saying that it’s tolerable to read less weighty material as long as you manage to achieve some practical result from doing so. Sometimes, you need to just read for fun. For the entertainment of a good story and language. For the pure, exuberant fuck of it. I mix my serious reading with Forgotten Realms fantasy novels or Simpsons comics all the time.
And really, I’ve found that nothing makes reading feel like work more than a terrible writer, regardless of the topic. If you’re really interested in a subject, and you find a writer who can make it come to life with engaging prose, well, then! You’ve got it made. I remember reading one of Isaiah Berlin’s books in a veterinarian’s office once, and she asked me if I was reading it for school or something. When I said no, she gave me the most incredulous look and asked why I would bother. I guess it would have been insulting if it hadn’t been so funny, the way she almost acted affronted by it. Why would anyone think or read if they weren’t being forced to?! Oh, well, her loss.

At Least It’s an Ethos

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy, waiting for the barbarians

Julian Young:

What, according to the fourth Meditation, is wrong with modernity? It is, Nietzsche observes, vulgar (gemein) and money-grubbing, its denizens exhausted by overwork so that the typical demeanor of the passer-by in the city street is one of being ‘harried’. This is partly because, whereas formerly we looked at life from the eternal point of view, we now live in a newspaper (media) culture which barrages us with the events and agitations of the moment. Modern culture is permeated by boredom, ‘industrious boredom’ — because presumably (a) work is what we do nearly all of the time, and (b) modern work practices are intrinsically unsatisfying. That we are bored work-slaves generates a specific kind of art, in particular theater. It is forced to become a ‘lascivious antidote’ to the worker’s exhaustion and boredom. What the audience wants – and gets – is ‘bedazzlement, not art’.
…This is what modern German sociologists call the Erlebnisgesellschaft: the society of the frenzied quest for ‘experiences’, for cheap thrills. Without a communal ethos to give aspiration and meaning to one’s life, the only way of keeping boredom at bay is in the frenzied search for cheap thrills.
What, however, is actually wrong with ‘post-modernism, with being dominated by the ‘critical-historical’ spirit? Why should such a spirit be culture-destroying? What is wrong, Nietzsche says, is that by presenting us with a smörgåsbord of lifestyle options but with no evaluative ranking of them, it produces a mood of irony, cynicism and bewilderment which turns us into spectators rather than actors. Our culture becomes ‘senile’ since the critical-historical spirit destroys life’s ‘plastic powers’ — its ability to employ its past so as to nourish its future.
It’s kind of funny to see how the first paragraph describes one of the four essays of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations. Not very untimely anymore, is it? Who hasn’t complained like that at some point? Hell, some people have made a literary name for themselves doing it.
And yet, although I don’t substantially disagree with any of the observations, I’ve never been sympathetic to what I see as the excessively romantic, backwards-looking mentality that almost inevitably accompanies them, especially when it becomes tangled up in some form of nationalism. Young’s book attempts to situate Nietzsche’s thoughts on religion within the context of nineteenth-century German völkisch thought. Of course, we all know what the negative aspect of that tradition eventually wrought upon the world. And how else can you see Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin’s current “restoring honor” project but as the last-ditch attempt of the American völk – i.e. white, socially conservative, middle-to-lower-class Protestants – to stave off their inevitable demographic decline (their cultural decline having been ongoing for a long time now)? Clearly, the answer is not to band together with people who look, talk and dress like me in hope of finding some sort of strength through homogeneity.
Are we just too knowledgeable and sophisticated now to go for these sorts of communal identifications or grandiose ideas? Have we reached a point where “existential meaning” for us simply amounts to living as comfortably as we can while giving as little offense as possible, tiptoeing through life in order to arrive safely at death, having been pleasantly amused, distracted and sated along the way? We can’t think our way back to naïveté or innocence, just like how it’s futile in my late thirties to daydream about recapturing some of the optimism and energy of my late teens. Those days are gone, and we have to move forward with what we know.
Have we ever even had an American culture, for that matter? Aside from the aforementioned white middle-class American Dream, which would have still probably been too shallow, pedestrian and money-grubbing for someone like Nietzsche, has there ever really been a binding myth that could be said to constitute the American identity? I guess what I’m asking is, is there really anything to regenerate in the first place? Or, speaking of Berman, did he have it right in his The Twilight of American Culture, and those of us with different values and visions are just going to have to retreat into semi-solitude, in the society but not of it?

Athena Shrugged

By in augean stables, foolosophy, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies, psychology

What does it take to be a Megan McArdle? I’m really, truly fascinated by this phenomenon. What kind of psychological contortions must you put yourself through in order to suffer this kind of humiliation on a regular basis without losing faith in your intellectual abilities?

Bear in mind, those are just examples from the last couple of weeks. She’s been getting pantsed like this for years. There’s a whole subgenre of the blogosphere devoted to razzing her. How can you possibly be exposed to that many people on a daily basis telling you in loving, annotated detail how completely full of shit you are without ever taking any of it to heart?

Our Father Who Ain’t in Heaven

By in atheism, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, philosophy, religion, science

Calvin: Why do you suppose we’re here?

Hobbes: Because we walked here.
Calvin: No, no. I mean here on Earth.
Hobbes: Because Earth can support life.
Calvin: No, I mean why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?
Hobbes: Because we were born.
Calvin: Forget it.
Hobbes: I will, thank you.
Rev. Robert Barron says that Stephen Hawking should shut up about philosophy and theology since all he knows is physics…and then proceeds to talk as if he understands physics based on the excerpt from Hawking’s new book that everyone is talking about, where he says that science makes God irrelevant when it comes to the “how” of the universe’s existence.

The classical philosophical tradition gives us an adage that is still hard to improve upon: ex nihilo nihil fit (from nothing comes nothing). Any teacher worth his salt would take a student to task if, in trying to explain why and how a given phenomenon occurred, the student were to say, “well, it just spontaneously happened.” Yet we are expected to be satisfied with precisely that explanation when it comes to the most pressing and fascinating question of all: why is there something rather than nothing?

‘Tis a mystery. One that isn’t solved or explained by postulating a God about whom nothing tangible can be said or understood. Why do you act as if you’re owed an explanation for metaphysical puzzles anyway?
You and I are contingent in the measure that we had parents, that we eat and drink, and that we breathe. In a word, we don’t explain ourselves. Now if we want to understand why we exist, we cannot go on endlessly appealing to other contingent things. We must come finally to some reality which exists through the power of its own essence, some power whose very nature it is to be.
But that whose very nature it is to be cannot, in any sense, be limited or imperfect in being, and this is precisely why Catholic philosophy has identified this non-contingent ground of contingency, this ultimate explanation of the being of the universe, as “God.”
Three things:
1) Many Buddhists would be happy to explain to you how we can “go on endlessly appealing to other contingent things” to understand our existence. You’ll notice I didn’t say they will explain why we exist, which leads us to the next point.
2) The very question “Why do we exist?” is inherently invalid, resting as it does upon the unquestioned assumption that our existence itself is teleological by nature, something that is unclear and unproven, to put it mildly. “Purpose” is a human concept, a tool we use, not a built-in feature of life itself.
3) Anselm? Really?

Kiss My Grits

By in augean stables, education, foolosophy, ohferfucksake, old dixie, race, tribalism, waiting for the barbarians

You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.

– Blazing Saddles

I said before that one of the reasons I wasn’t all that impressed with Joe Bageant was that he just struck me as a more affable James Howard Kunstler. Heywood crystallizes one of the other reasons for me: he also makes me picture a slightly more avuncular Dave “Mudcat” Saunders. Can you tell which one is which?

1)
I have bitched and moaned for years about the lack of tolerance in the elitist wing of the Democratic Party, or what I refer to as the “Metropolitan Opera Wing”. These are the people who talk of tolerance but the only true tolerance they ever exhibit is for their own pseudo-intellectual arrogance.
–snip–
I am certain I will get personally attacked for this next statement, but in all honesty, I don’t care what the “Metropolitan Wing” of my party thinks. I don’t like them. The damage the pseudo-intellectuals have done to my party by abandoning tolerance, combined with their erroneous stereotyping of my people and culture, is something that brings out my incivility. In his column, Joe said, “…the smart stuff is being drowned out by a fierce, bullying, often witless tone of intolerance that has overtaken the left-wing sector of the blogosphere.” Amen. I must add that this same intellectual arrogance and intolerance overtook the party years ago, and for that very reason, my people in rural America left the tent.
So to those bloggers who believe in a straight-forward dialogue and exchange of ideas, God bless you and thank you. Together, you’re coming up with a lot of good stuff, and frankly, much of it has been helpful to me. At the same time, those Democratic bloggers, who have appointed themselves as intellectually superior and believe the only way to win an argument is to shot the loudest with personal attacks, you can go to Hell.
2)
Most educated American liberals, however, believe simply being progressive makes them, by default, the nation’s saviors — morally and intellectually right in all things. As proof, they read more and, allegedly, are more open minded than most conservatives, except when it comes to their daughter dating a redneck named Ernest who lives in a trailer court behind the strip mall. They are certainly among the educated class in a country known for its lousy schools and a dull, sated and unquestioning public. Education and access to education are now our fundamental class delineators. Higher education is now for the privileged. And that privilege, almost regardless of profession or career, is a future that depends on government. Liberal or conservative, it matters little. In fact, this privileged class votes Democratic more predictably than the working class, Hispanics or Blacks.
So when educated liberals look up from their copy of The Nation or the Jon Stewart show, they behold a chilling sight: Beefy mobs waving teabags and demanding tax cuts to help pay for new schools and bridges, Sarah Palin emerging from the ashes of the McCain campaign to become the high priestess of the uncurried tribes, with a Mormon named Glenn Beck exhorting millions of fundamentalists to seize the country. They feel that something has gone terribly wrong with America.
Immediately they conclude that it is the American people’s fault through their backwardness, incomprehension and misdirected anger, and that maybe it serves them right for not rallying behind the flying progressive standard…”Ah yes,” they wailed, the people have let us down. They are absolutely disgusting!” liberals agreed. And they still agree. Read the comments on Huffington Post or Daily Kos.
Or look at the arrogance of Barack Obama’s characterization of American heartlanders “clinging to God and guns.” Which we do. However, implicit in his statement was that both God and guns are indicators of an ignorant loser class. When opponents scalded him for his remarks, he justified them by pointing out he had said, “what everybody knows is true.” Meaning everybody in his class, the educated liberal class.
Fellows, err, excuse me, “fellers”, I’m a fairly ordinary guy myself. I generally wear t-shirts and ragged cargo shorts (or jeans in the cold months). I don’t even own a dress shirt, slacks or shoes, and I’m not sure where I last saw my one tie. Got me a scruffy beard and longish hair that only gets trimmed every several months. Never owned a new car in my life; my current ride has over 400K on the original engine. I’ve repeatedly chosen to do grunt work rather than take higher-paying office jobs. I may listen to opera and classical music, but I have Southern rock and old blues on my iPod too. I’ve lived in your home state of Virginia my whole life, and I currently live in a small redneck town that makes Mudcat’s hometown of Roanoke look cosmopolitan by comparison, so I’ll measure my gen-yew-wine Southern bona fides against y’alls any time you want, and I’m here to say: you’re both full of shit.
Where to even begin? Mudcat, ol’ buddy, it’s amusing to read this Foxworthy-in-a-foul-mood article from a couple years ago and see how ridiculously, stupidly wrong you were. Obama was going to lose Virginia for not pandering more to appeal to rural whites? Wrong. His efforts to get out the vote via the Internet were quixotic? Wrong again. And you get paid to be a political consultant?
Bonus fun: he apparently thinks Obama actually gave a shit, deep down in his heart of hearts, about “social justice and economic fairness”, and just failed to articulate that well enough. Yet another progressive who insists on projecting what they want to see onto the man, only to act shocked when he acts like the pro-corporate, bought-and-paid-for tool of Wall Street he’s always been. Then, this self-appointed Southern spokesman, with his battle-flag bedspread and one-piece jammies with the ass flap hanging open, acts like Democrats are the ones to blame for the “cultural wedge” between them and the Scots-Irish vote. Motherfucker, there’s no way you could possibly be that goddamned ignorant, so I’m forced to conclude you’re being disingenuous on purpose. Nixon correctly saw that idiots like the rural Saltine crackers you so desperately want to idealize would happily ignore their own financial well-being if they could at least feel superior to faggots, feminazis, furriners and niggers, that they would be so busy taking the crumbs from Republican hands to feed their insatiable, resentful, inferiority complex that they’d hardly notice their jobs all being shipped overseas by the same people who pat them on the head and praise them for being the moral backbone of society. Hell, it’s hard to begrudge the man for seeing a golden opportunity and grabbing it with both hands. And I’m still waiting to hear someone reconcile this fabled common-sense, no-bullshit, straight-shooting, deep-fried heartland wisdom that I’m supposed to genuflect before with the fact that these people have shelves sagging under the weight of countless bottles of snake oil, and pockets perpetually empty by means of every shell game, sleight of hand, cheap card trick and distracting shiny object that hucksters flash in front of their faces.
Joe, ol’ pal, if you honestly think the legions of imbeciles and Randroids at Glenn Beck’s bizarro-MLK rally in Washington today, these Rip Van Winkles who snoozed through eight years of the big-government, profligate-spending Bush administration, only to conveniently wake up in mid-January 2009 with some throbbing, fiscal-conservative morning wood, give a drizzling shit about tax cuts for schools and bridges rather than simply wanting to make sure that those you-know-whos don’t get their swarthy mitts on any government money, then I’m afraid you’ve spent too much time in the Central American sun without a floppy hat. Fucksakes, man, most of them think public schools are fascist-communist indoctrination camps where children are taught how to desecrate the Bible and have orgies with barnyard animals! And goddamnit, I’m really getting sick of having to defend Obama here, but it was clear at the time that his comment about “clinging to God and guns” referred to the same phenomenon we just addressed: people who spend their time in mortal fear of nonexistent federal stormtroopers coming to confiscate their Bibles and hunting rifles, never managing to notice that the people spreading these rumors are the same ones whose economic philosophy is responsible for there being no more decent manufacturing jobs available for them. But oh, yes, by all means, don’t say anything that might suggest that you think people could stand to rethink some convictions or change anything about themselves, you fancy-pants, big-city, add-your-preferred-gay-baiting-epithet-here liberal. Don’t challenge the gospel of Southern exceptionalism, nawsir. I swear by the treasonous bones of Bobby Lee, I wish someone would show me the uptight P.C. liberal who is anywhere near as insecure and hypersensitive as your typical “Southern by the grace of God” yahoos.
And can we finally dispense with the idea that education is something to act ashamed of? Well, first, actually, let’s define our terms more clearly. Most of what passes for “higher education”, that is, most of what people go to college in order to achieve, is a meaningless diploma that will allow them access to a world of pointless office work and imaginary numbers where they can earn enough of a paycheck to start paying down the massive debt accrued in the process of earning that meaningless diploma in the first place. Okay, perhaps there is a reason to be a bit ashamed at having bought into this scam in the first place.
But I never went to a four-year college. I took classes for fun at community college for a few years, for a grand total of less than a thousand dollars altogether. But aside from the enjoyment I got out of philosophy class, I don’t consider that time to be all that important. Most of my education, such as it is, has been self-directed. Yes, it’s true, I sit at home on weekends and read books that no one else within a few neighboring counties would be interested in rather than hanging out at the general store shooting the shit about guns, NASCAR and Jeebus. I don’t make an issue of it, but if that ruffles your feathers, if that somehow offends you and makes you want to spit in the dirt at my feet, squint and grumble, “Boy, yew think yer better’n me?”, well, fuck the hell out of you, Festus. I don’t have time or patience to worry about validating your delicate self-esteem. I accept, like Socrates, that the only thing I really know is how little I actually know (gosh, should I apologize for referencing some faggoty-ass Greek philosopher instead of Lynyrd Skynyrd?) But I do my best to try to know what I’m talking about on any topic I want to bring up, and I’m always aware that I could be wrong.
Simple, right? Aren’t all adults like this? But as Heywood says so well, the problem with the “uneducated” folk isn’t that they don’t hold an advanced degree, or that they don’t read obscure political or philosophical tracts, it’s that they have a narcissistic, childish mindset that insists on reality reshaping itself in accordance with their inchoate wishes. Higher education isn’t necessary to live a good life or be an intelligent person, but pulling your head out of your ass most certainly is. And therein lies the rub: they really do believe, contra the received wisdom, that they are entitled to their own facts, not just their own opinions. They act like brainwashed cult members, only seeing and hearing what they want to see and hear, deriding anything that tells them differently, however gently, as enemy-liberal-queer propaganda by definition, proudly asserting that they knew all that’s worth knowing by third grade, and to top it all off, they demand to be respected and approved of for being fatuous, cement-headed morons. It’s not enough to let them be themselves and do their own thing. You have to constantly agree that yes, your knee-jerk prejudices and half-baked opinions are far superior to anything I’ve read in a book or thought up myself. You’re right, I’m some kind of pathetic city-slicker because I’m not interested in car engines or chewing tobacco. Lincoln’s bewildered complaint from a century and a half ago about slavery still rings true:
Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them?
Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.
The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only let them alone, but we must, somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. [Applause.] This, we know by experience is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches, we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.
These natural and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only; cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly — done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated — we must place ourselves avowedly with them.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.
I once briefly worked with a pair of rednecks, Alan and Phil, the middle and youngest, respectively, of three brothers. One day, they came in to work positively jubilant, bragging about something they’d accomplished. It seems they’d pulled off a scheme to frame their eldest brother for something so that Phil could steal his girlfriend while he was in jail. But wait! There’s more! The reason they were so gleeful about it was that they had peddled their story to Jerry Springer’s people and had been contacted about appearing on the show (I don’t know if that ever panned out for them). This was their dream, to throw chairs and punches at each other on national TV in front of a crowd of howling fucktards. But I’m supposed to act embarrassed over knowing how to read and think beyond the confines of clannish identity politics. Right.
To further flesh out the character of these fine, upstanding salt-of-the-earth Myrrhkins, let me add that I once had the dubious pleasure of hearing Alan pontificate one day, shortly before the 2000 election, about how Ronald Reagan was the greatest president we’d ever had. I wonder if Bageant or Mudcat would care to take a stab at guessing what this inbred cretin could have possibly found appealing about a president who did absolutely nothing to benefit him or his kinfolk? I’m sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with race, I can tell you that.
I could have easily enough been like that. Like I said, I live right in the epicenter of it. My immediate family, while not ignorant rednecks, are the most rabid, insane teabaggers you could ever hope to avoid. Don’t even fucking try to tell me about arrogance and intolerance. No amount of joking about cousins marrying or trailer parks comes close to being as stifling and oppressive as living among these people while daring to be different.

Hungry Ghosts

By in foolosophy, work

I’ll dedicate myself to pissing on John Calvin’s grave for as long as I live. I still think he’s one of the most malignant influences on American culture, period. But it’s only fair to acknowledge that he may not be entirely to blame for our insane attitude regarding work, as a new book asserts:

People in the U.S. often pride themselves for working more than our European counterparts. Why do we work so much in the first place?
There aren’t any historical or cultural reasons for it. Americans famously had more leisure time than the Japanese back in the 1960s. I would say if you did a survey of most people who are in their late 50s or 60s, they will tell you that they take fewer vacations than their parents did. Now why did that change? It wasn’t because of the Pilgrims. People work hard in America, but there was a period where leisure time was increasing. I quoted Linda Bell and Richard Freeman in an article they wrote about what happened during the ‘90s. There was nobody to stop you from working longer. There was no government check, there was no union check as there is on excessive work as there is in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. These institutional checks are gone. So people feel like lab rats: “If I work an extra 10 minutes over the person in the cubicle next to me, then I’m less likely to get laid off.” It’s a very rational response.

Room 101

By in atheism, foolosophy, nietzsche, philosophy, religion

In a recent post,”On Christian Horror and Atheist Dread” author Mike Duran makes the rather broad and erroneous claim that Atheist horror centers around the fear of “The Great Void.”
“A world without meaning and purpose is the ultimate horror. A universe that arose by chance, exists without meaning, where lives plummet toward annihilation is the worst kind of horror.”
I would, in fact, assert that the fear he describes is at the heart of Christian Horror and in the entire Christian faith if not all faiths. It is what drives the religious screaming to their church pews and confessionals, clutching their bibles to their bosom. It is what makes them cling to faith and stubbornly resist reason. The atheist simply accepts the void as reality and moves on with his or her life.
…There is nothing to fear from non-existence because you will never experience it. You cannot experience nothingness. You will never “feel” not being. So what’s to fear?
Or, to invoke one of my favorite ancient Greeks again:

Epicurus also believed (contra Aristotle) that death was not to be feared. When a man dies, he does not feel the pain of death because he no longer is and he therefore feels nothing. Therefore, as Epicurus famously said, “death is nothing to us.” When we exist death is not, and when death exists we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the false belief that in death there is awareness.

This is such a simple idea, but paradoxically so hard for people to adjust themselves to. I was raised, like most people, to accept the idea of a soul and an afterlife as perfectly obvious (my mom was a typical lapsed Catholic of her generation, who found the casual, hazy, nonjudgmental, nondenominational religious beliefs of the New Age movement to be much more to her liking). I remember how jarring it felt to me at first to be forced to consider a materialist point of view, and like a lot of people, I took my initial knee-jerk aversion to what I perceived as a “meaningless” worldview to be a worthy objection, as if any affront to my vanity was ipso facto invalid. You still hear this all the time from people who reject the idea of atheism or materialism, that it was too depressing for them to contemplate for very long. But I say as gently as I can to them: the universe does not need your personal permission to be what it is.
How many there are who still conclude: “life could not be endured if there were no God!” (Or, as it is put among the idealists: “life could not be endured if its foundation lacked an ethical significance!”) – therefore there must be a God (or existence must have an ethical significance)! The truth, however, is merely that he who is accustomed to these notions does not desire a life without them: that these notions may therefore be necessary to him and for his preservation – but what presumption it is to decree that whatever is necessary for my preservation must actually exist! As if my preservation were something necessary! How if others felt in the opposite way! If those two articles of faith were precisely the conditions under which they no longer found life worth living! And that is how things are now!
– Nietzsche
The sticking point seems to be that we take for granted, probably as a lingering inheritance of our monotheistic history, that meaning is something that has to be given to us (by a god, obviously), that has to be bestowed upon the raw clay of matter; otherwise, matter just sits there, inert and lifeless. But meaning does exist. It exists as an ongoing project between us, a social reality. Isn’t this obvious? Think about the things that have made your life worth living. Why should they be any less enjoyable or meaningful just because they’re not absolutely guaranteed to exist forever in some form? Why should the fact that something ends cancel out the fact that it began and endured in the first place? Life itself has no inherent meaning, in the sense that life itself is not a symbol of something else. It isn’t a signpost pointing the way to someplace else. It just is. And yet, the basic material conditions of life, supposedly so desolate and hostile, have produced at least one type of creature with a certain type of brain capable of thinking conceptually and symbolically, capable of living lives devoted to concepts like art, beauty and love. We grew and developed out of those conditions, and we dissolve back into them. Fearing what it will be like after you’re dead is akin to fearing what it was like before you were born. It’s just a confused way of projecting yourself into situations where “you” can’t even exist.

Philia

By in foolosophy, philosophy, sex-you-all

In an excellent essay on the often-underappreciated value of friendship and the high estimation intellectuals have placed on it throughout the centuries, Daniel Akst works in references to Asimov, Aristotle, Emerson, Thoreau, Byron, Freud, Cicero, Goethe, Bacon, Montaigne, Wordsworth, the Beatles and Tony Soprano, just to name a baker’s dozen, but somehow manages to ignore Epicurus! As Ebonmuse once summarized it:

Epicureanism put the emphasis on pleasure, not as mindless hedonism but as reasonable indulgence in the good things available in life. Valuing intellectual pleasure more highly than sensual pleasure, it recommends the cultivation of friendship, an ethic of simplicity, and an attitude of tranquility in the face of life’s trials. Ironically, “epicure” in popular parlance has come to refer to a connoisseur of food and drink, which Epicurus arguably considered the least important of life’s pleasures.

But that’s a minor quibble. It really is a great essay; there’s too many good parts to even excerpt.
I agree that Barbara Ehrenreich’s “cult of conspicuous busyness” is the most corrosive factor that prevents people from developing and maintaining more meaningful relationships outside of their immediate families and spouses; hell, I think it’s responsible for ruining all sorts of leisurely pursuits, from artistic appreciation to writing worthwhile letters. I nodded vigorously and murmured, “Preach it, my brutha”, as he decried the “remorseless eroticization of human relations that was bequeathed to us by Sigmund Freud.” I huzzahed to see him turn his attention to our “wildly inflated view of matrimony”, i.e. our ridiculous romantic notions that our spouse should be our soulmate, our One True Everything. And I was pleasantly surprised to see someone else suggest that it might not be completely crazy to turn down a chance at a higher-paying job if it meant having to move and leave a close circle of friends behind. I used to think that as a teenager, and quickly dismissed it as me being weird.
Part of what I like so much about the Epicurean mindset is that it avoids idealizing friendship out of an ascetic aversion to all that icky, earthy sex. There’s nothing “higher”, “better” or “deeper” about love that doesn’t involve sex, it just emphasizes different aspects of human interaction, and for some people, intellectual stimulation is just as, if not more important, than physical infatuation. The impulse to reproduce oneself is conjoined with the impulse to preserve oneself as the most basic, preprogrammed urges common to all life. And while humans are just as much animals as any other species, conscious reflection and selective choosing among pleasures is much more refined, for those of us who enjoy taking a little bit of elitist pride in ourselves now and again. If need be, sex is something you can have with a total stranger you pick up in a nightclub. But it’s a lot more rare and valuable to find people who can alternately invigorate and challenge you intellectually while resonating with you emotionally.

Postmodern Love

By in foolosophy, marriage, socmed, technology

What’s good about both the Stanford study and the durability of even not-so-cool sites like eHarmony is that being proactive about connection is no longer viewed as unromantic or loserish. Somewhere along the line, enough friends and friends-of-friends started meeting cool people and even falling in love to make the “Let’s just say we met at the deli” cover story moot.
But as eHarmony’s new campaign makes clear, love — or even a really good hookup — isn’t always a simple matter of what matches up perfectly on a survey. “What if you were loved for you?” it asks. What if? What if we had a way of finding people who share our interests and like our pictures, so we could be out dancing instead of sitting at home lonely? And what if, along with all the practicality and purposefulness and monthly fees the Internet brings, it turns out we still hope, in our hearts, for something approaching magic?
A friend of mine semi-shamefully admitted to me once that she had tried eHarmony out, like she was half-expecting me to burst out laughing and flash the L-for-loser sign at her. My attitude about online dating has always been, why the hell not? Her biggest complaint about it was that “people lie” about themselves in that environment. Yeah? And? Like they don’t do that anywhere else?
More than half of all marriages end in divorce, and who knows how many serious, committed relationships don’t even make it to marriage before they dissolve. Basically, the odds are overwhelming that whoever you’re currently with is not The One For You. Of course, the biggest problem with that is the idea that people meeting in their twenties or thirties and staying together for several more decades till death does them part is normal, but anyway. The point is, most traditionally-formed relationships are doomed to collapse at some point, so why stigmatize those who want to try to take a slightly more scientific approach to dating?
Most of us probably meet our prospective partners either through work or mutual friends, which in many instances can provide a paltry enough dating pool. Shy people who don’t necessarily enjoy making the social scene are even more screwed. Whereas on the Internet, you can easily find groups devoted to whatever bizarre hobby or fetish you enjoy. Whatever constellation of traits and beliefs are most important to you, there’s almost certainly people out there who match up pretty well with them. Of course there’s much more to a relationship than how it shapes up on paper, but I can’t help but think it’s an improvement to already know you have so much common ground to get started on.

The Center Cannot Hold

By in foolosophy, history, waiting for the barbarians

Morris Berman:

I have always been a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-Jewish-British political scientist who spent his life cautioning the West about the dangers of coercive systems such as that of the former Soviet Union. In his famous Oxford University inaugural lecture of 1958, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin defined “negative freedom” as freedom from; it is the freedom to do what the heck you please as long as you don’t infringe on anyone else. “Positive freedom,” on the other hand, is freedom to; it is the freedom of a directive ideal, one that holds up a vision of the good life (whatever that might be) and encourages–or forces–people to conform to that image. Going back to at least the 17th century, negative freedom is the Anglo-Saxon conception of what it means to be free; and as far as Berlin was concerned (as a good British subject–he became Sir Isaiah the year before his inaugural lecture), that was the only freedom around; the other variety, he believed, was inevitably dangerous. The only problem is, without a positive vision of the good life, the good society, what are we? How could we be anything else except a ship without a rudder? This, to me, is the Achilles heel in the Berlinian edifice, for negative freedom finally affirms nothing–as the example of contemporary America clearly demonstrates…

There is no doubt, of course, that “vision” can get out of hand; this was Isaiah Berlin’s whole point. But what Berlin failed to understand was that lack of vision can also get out of hand, as Harvey Mansfield makes abundantly clear.

I don’t think Berlin “failed to understand” that point; I think he simply accepted that we might not be able to hammer out any sort of consensus on what the good life is, how we can achieve it, or what we need to do and when we need to do it. Just like how it was understood early on that a functioning democracy required an informed and engaged citizenry, the possibility (or even likelihood) of failure was always part of the deal. The price of freedom and all that.

And of course, Berlin wasn’t merely focused on extreme examples like the former Soviet Union; his point was that when an Enlightenment-derived faith in the ability of reason and science starts to assume that social questions can be investigated and their answers determined with the same sort of accurate practical results that the natural sciences had demonstrated, a refusal or inability to get with the program in any way would eventually lead to some sort of oppression “for your own good”, since you were obviously too mentally ill or otherwise deviant to clearly see what you needed to do to fulfill your proper role in the scheme of things. It’s the same reason why Sam Harris’s latest endeavor has caused such a furious uproar.

Agreement on the nature of the “good life” and the means of living it is never going to be workable beyond small groups anyway, in my opinion; certainly not on the level of a modern nation-state. How could it?

Corpulent Punishment

By in foolosophy, moralizing

I heard someone earlier ranting about how often you see obese people in Walmart riding around on those electric mobility scooters, sometimes even having the audacity to be buying groceries despite being fat enough already, and it got me thinking.

It’s no surprise, is it, that the states with the highest obesity rates so closely track with the poorest states in the nation? I mean, it’s fairly obvious when you think about it, that poor people with shitty jobs (if any) and much less control over their own lives often have to settle for eating whatever’s cheapest and most convenient. Poor people don’t always have time to exercise regularly. For some reason, they can often be depressed, if you can believe that, so in addition to sapping much of their vim and vigor, it may lead them to binge on comfort foods for momentary pleasure, which makes them feel worse about themselves, and on and on it goes. Yet some people think the problem is that we don’t do enough to shame fat people. Because if you just constantly remind them they’re fat, you see, (something that frequently slips their mind) they’ll be motivated to lose weight. I suspect this is the brainchild of those gifted psychologists who think that calling depressed people whiners and losers will cheer them up.

I used to work in a shipping warehouse with a female truck driver who was, to put it clinically, morbidly obese. She was also very pleasant and friendly, and despite the fact that my farouche nature makes it so that I would be just peachy, thanksmuch, if we could do away with small talk and vapid pleasantries, her cheerfulness was infectious enough that I didn’t mind reciprocating her hellos and good mornings.

Having come in for criticism all my life for my aforementioned farouche nature, I would have expected that my coworkers would have been even more kindly disposed toward Janet and her attempts to warmly engage everybody she saw. I would have also been wrong. Most of them grunted in response to her greetings, contemptuously refusing to even turn in her direction. They looked for excuses to blame her for being late arriving, even though we all knew full well that unpredictability in this business was the norm. I guess her excessive weight was slowing the truck down or something. She used to make a little noise when exerting herself lifting, something between a gasp and a wheeze, and this was cause for no end of mirth among those who nudged each other and waited eagerly to hear it so they could snort and snicker and sarcastically imitate it sotto voce. She had to have been aware of all this, but to her credit, she never gave the bastards the satisfaction of seeing it bother her.
Too aloof, too fat. Too gay, too foreign, too black, too whatever. Assholes will seize on any pretext they can to be all the asshole they can be. The supposed trigger is often irrelevant or interchangeable. Some people just can’t be happy unless they’re in a pack, attacking someone who doesn’t fit in, reflexively punishing people who run afoul of cultural norms.
I enjoy staying in shape. I feel better when I exercise, and having been through a lengthy period of time with untreated rheumatoid arthritis, where the inflammation plus the cortisone injections left me feeling bloated and lethargic and depressed, I was all the more determined to take advantage of my ability to work out once medication made it possible to do so again. You might think that I could easily be one of the evangelistic type of fitness enthusiasts who have no sympathy for anyone overweight — if I could sculpt myself back into top shape after all that, what’s your major malfunction, fatass? But you’d be wrong.
Put simply, part of not being a Christian, to me, means not giving a shit about the supposed seven deadly sins. Gluttony may give you all sorts of health problems, and it may make your mundane daily activities much more difficult than they need to be, but how does that adversely affect me? You’re the one suffering from it, why in the world should I take it personally? I just stare in amazement at tossers like this who foam at the mouth over something that doesn’t impact their own lives in the slightest, using a pretense of moral superiority to thunder and rage like a good little Puritan. I get annoyed by laziness when someone I’m personally depending on lets me down somehow because of it. But what kind of zealot gets outraged about laziness as a general principle?

Die Hinzu-Lügner

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, religion, samesecks

Reading Ross Douthat’s astoundingly feeble attempt to justify opposition to gay marriage only made me think of a passage from Nietzsche:

[O]ne lied, mendaciously inventing reasons for these laws, simply to avoid admitting that one had become used to these laws and no longer wanted things to be different. The same process occurs, and always has occurred, in every prevalent morality and religion: the reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

Accept No Invitations

By in foolosophy, psychology, Ω

And introverts are better at thinking in their heads than on their feet. However, even if you contribute to advances in the sciences, technology, the arts, and the humanities, just being an introvert comes with a stigma. You may be passed up for a promotion because you don’t speak up more, or seen as a snob because you don’t attend a social event, or assumed to be depressed because you want to reflect rather than talk.
Introversion and extraversion have long been seen as normal variations of personality, and there’s physiological evidence for these differences. Research shows that the brains of introverts are more active than those of extraverts. This explains why introverts limit how much comes in, while extraverts go where the action is.
I’ve been thought to be everything from rude to depressed to mentally retarded as a result of being introverted, but I’m glad to see that science has finally confirmed what I intuitively knew all along, that I’m just a goddamned genius, bored to tears by the banality of the chattering monkeys all around me.
Seriously, though, I’m also what I like to think of as the positive manifestation of the omega male. I’ve done a lot of what society expects of you: maintained a long-term relationship, fulfilled responsibilities, achieved reasonable success, and so on, but I never deeply identified with that role, and consequently feel free to reject it now. I’m not competing with anyone for anything. I’m indifferent to status. I’m content with my little routine, and that’s all that matters. So I’m not really bothered by the fact that introverts don’t get their due; why would we want the attention and intrusion that would accompany acceptance?
The thing is, the majority of what constitutes relationships is simply companionship. Most people just want someone else around to share even the most ordinary experiences. Romance quickly loses its flash and euphoria and settles into sitting around taking each other for granted, and friends provide a way to be distracted from thinking about anything substantial. Me, I’m enough of a loner that I just really don’t need much companionship at all. I enjoy other people’s company, but only to the extent that it’s stimulating; otherwise, it doesn’t take long for me to get irritated by the imposition on my personal space. There’s enough cavernous space in my head for me to live there quite comfortably, thank you. Like Machiavelli, I’m content to be left alone with books and music:

When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient court, of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them.

Everywhere in Chains

By in environment, foolosophy, spiritual-not-religious

Phil Oliver states a truism:

Happiness is more likely to flow from simplicity and richness of experience than from the accumulation of material possessions.

But Steve Hagen preemptively asked exactly what we mean when we talk about “simplicity”:

I once spoke at a retreat in which people had gathered to examine, among other things, the idea of simplicity — more precisely, living the “simple life”. One of the speakers was a woman who had spent a number of years living in the countryside in Wisconsin, raising a family. Many years ago, she and her husband decided that they would go off to the country and live a simple life. By choice they didn’t have a phone. They didn’t have electricity. They didn’t have plumbing. They raised two children. And they surely led a simple life because, having so limited their activity, they made few demands upon their environment and upon the world.

Most of us at the retreat probably had a clear sense of what is meant by a “simple life”. It meant living unpretentiously, humbly, and efficiently; above all, it meant being self-sufficient and not tied into or dependent on some massive, external “infrastructure”. Yes, we all knew what the simple life was, even those of us who didn’t live so “simply”. But as we discussed the idea of simplicity, we began to see a great deal of complexity in it. After all, here were our friends, clearly leading a simple life – we all recognized that they did – but when it was time to do the dishes, they had to have already cut some firewood, which had to already have been cured and hauled into the house. They then had to stoke a fire, pump their water from the well, heat the water on the stove, pour it into a pan, and regulate its temperature by mixing it with more cool water from the well. Then they could do their dishes — after adding some homemade soap.
By contrast, those of us who don’t live quite this “simply” load our dishes into the dishwasher, add store-bought soap and push a button. Yet we most often think of the lifestyle which includes a dishwasher as being the more hectic and complicated one. We call the first lifestyle the simple life, the second a rat race. But where’s the simplicity? Where’s the complexity? Clearly they are two. But if they are two, how are they two?
I’ve known people who quit the rat race to go live on a hippie commune or take up some similar kind of back-to-basics lifestyle, only to still be plagued by the same old frustrations and unhappiness, which always told me that simplicity was a state of mind, not necessarily related to external circumstances. You can find contentment almost anywhere, but if you don’t already have it in your mind, sitting in a cabin in the woods with nothing to do but grow and prepare your food, among other menial chores, isn’t going to magically make you feel that way, especially once the novelty wears off. Self-sufficiency itself is one of the biggest illusions there is. You’d think more reflective people would realize this, given as they are to contemplating the myriad ways all things are connected.

The Recline of Western Civilization

By in buried alive, foolosophy, fresh hell, socmed, technology, writing

Richard is talking primarily about the China blogosphere, but what he says is of course applicable to blogging in general, and it reflects a similar sentiment I’ve started to see expressed with increasing frequency; namely, that blogging itself is outdated, obsolete and generally not what the cool kids are doing anymore (in the comments, his exchange with Bob Page fleshes out the theme a little more).

Twitter has obliterated what I used to use the blog for, namely sharing links and offering some commentary. And the China blogosphere is so fragmented it’s much harder to be heard above the din. The fact that I’m caught up in my own issues (I’m planning to launch my own small business soon; I’ll keep you posted) hasn’t helped make this blog more productive. But even if I were as productive as in 2003, the site would be in decline. China blogs are too many, and blogging in general is becoming increasingly antique.

I do miss the “golden age,” from 2003-2005, when I could open a thread before bedtime and wake up to 300 comments. But that required full-time posting and, at its peak, the help of three or four other bloggers all putting up copy throughout the day.

I was running down the blogroll last week, and I saw where Micah Ian Wright of the Propaganda Remix Project had stopped the site’s blog over three years ago:

C’mon… this blog is, like, dead, already
Come Join Me On FacebookI found blogging on Facebook to just be a LOT easier than using Blogger… maybe if I get super famous or something I’ll start a -real- blog, but if you’re just a friend or a fan (or an enemy) looking to touch base, Facebook is the site where you’ll find me.

My first thought was, what the fuck does “easier” have to do with it? Where does “effort” enter into this format at all? You mean I have to save a totally different bookmark for Blogger? And then I have to log in and everything, even if I let my browser save my ID and password? OH GODS THE PAIN MY CLICKY FINGER CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Seriously, I remember way back in the mist-enshrouded days of, oh, just under a decade ago when a couple friends and I were talking about building a blog/website from scratch, and what a godsend it seemed like by comparison to go to Blogspot with a name in mind, get a URL, choose a template, and start blogging five minutes later. I can understand people simply preferring Facebook for whatever reason, but it seems insanely spoiled and lazy to act as if it’s too much trouble for people to come to a blog to read your thoughts as opposed to a Facebook wall, just like it flabbergasts me to see how people act as if emailing is a laborious chore when you could just be texting instead. If only we could have electrodes implanted in our brains that would process and distribute our thoughts for us so we didn’t have to go to the excruciating effort of typing them by hand…!

Like I was just saying about the prophesying of the printed book’s extinction, I think we’ve always been infatuated with portentously declaring the death of traditions and trends, when often all we mean is that they don’t have their glitzy novelty anymore. I can understand why people would say that about blogs, but to be honest, I rarely find the mega-blogs worth reading anyway, so I really don’t care if they start to suffer precipitous drop-offs in traffic and commentary (comments at huge political blogs are comparable to YouTube for sheer inanity) as users flock to newer social media. They tend to be lowest-common-denominator sinkholes who only link to other members of the blogosphere’s upper-class, so good riddance in any event. (Though if someone like Atrios started posting exclusively on Twitter, would it even make a difference in his writing style?)

At any rate, it greatly amuses me to think that I could already be some sort of dinosaur by preferring to stick to blogging and email for communication. A digital Luddite. But I prefer a small audience anyway, which is why I make zero effort to promote this space. Aside from the apparent correlation between number of commenters and lack of intelligent discussion, I like being able to actually talk back and forth with those who do comment; I wouldn’t want to have to take a removed role of regulating trolls and refereeing fights. And I imagine I can’t be the only one who prefers a format that allows us to attempt to make Proust look like a haiku poet with our witless ramblings. Hasn’t anyone considered what will become of all the windbags if no one reads blogs anymore? We’ll be right back to bothering you in person again, that’s what.

Let the majority move on to twatting and friending each other silly. Those of us who remain can possibly settle down to making blogging into something more artistic and substantial, free of trendy, superficial attention.

Cruel and Unusual

By in crime and punishment, foolosophy, the big sleep

Speaking of support for capital punishment, approximately 60 percent of Americans still support the death penalty. Why does it persist in this country when the majority of developed nations have abandoned it?
It’s becoming clear to many people in this country that we have a very high number of people in prison and that we are using capital punishment more than many Western nations. When you add it all up, the United States is really quite a punitive nation. And yet, many of the people who created the foundation for this country were sent as slaves, convicts and indentured servants. Our society was built on that — like Australia, it’s very much a part of our DNA. But we don’t want to acknowledge that. We want to put our prisons out of sight, out of mind, and have executions that seem to not be causing any pain and are carried out out of the public gaze because it doesn’t square with our notion of who we are.
– Salon
Is it just me, or did that not really answer the question? We defy world opinion on the death penalty because we won’t accept that we’re a nation of convicts and other undesirables? Huh?
Anyway, I’ve often wondered about that myself, and while you might think I would seize a golden opportunity to condemn Myrrhkins as ignorant, bloodthirsty barbarians, I’m actually sympathetic to the pro-capital punishment crowd in certain respects. Of course there are myriad issues with the system itself that make the case for a moral opposition to the death penalty, and I’ve argued it many times myself against conservatives. You don’t have to look far to find yet another story of someone who was freed from death row or a life sentence after DNA evidence exonerated them. Then you even have Kafkaesque situations where DNA isn’t even involved, and eyewitnesses retract their testimony, or even admit dishonesty, yet the conviction and sentence are somehow allowed to stand. That’s all on top of the class issue, where poor people may primarily be guilty of not being able to afford competent attorneys, or they may have run afoul of laws reflecting cultural hysteria that disproportionately affect certain people more than others (only 18 to 1 is an improvement?) There are plenty of solid reasons to oppose the entire idea on principle.
But since the constitutional issue of cruel and unusual punishment always comes up in this discussion, I wonder about the seemingly casual way that people can accept a sentence of life without the possibility of parole as being some sort of humane alternative. If you’re willing to accept the idea that there are some people who are clearly guilty and remorseless about it, unable to ever be rehabilitated and reintroduced into society, well, who is it benefiting to keep them alive? I don’t ask facetiously; I myself would rather die than spend decades locked in a small cell or building. People seem to have allowed the Christian notion that human life is inherently sacred to blind them to the fact that pure existence itself, for its own sake, is meaningless. What are we living for?
I remember when Ted Kaczynski tried to hang himself with his own underwear during his trial rather than face the possibility of being stuck in a cage for the rest of his life. I don’t recall clearly, but he may have even asked for the death penalty at one point. Seeing news reports happily describing his new life in a Supermax prison in Colorado, confined to a small cell 23 hours a day, viscerally repulsed me more than the idea that he might possibly feel pain during lethal injection. The man wants to die. He’s never going to be free again. But we’re going to force him to live as long as he can to satisfy our own pointless vengeance.
The idea that a certain number of innocent people will die every year to provide you with comfortable illusions of justice and safety is most certainly one that advocates should force themselves to consider deeply. What does it say about you if you accept that trade-off? But equally imperative is the need to consider what it says about us when we’re willing to prolong a person’s punishment and torment when there’s nothing to be gained from it, the need to consider what it really means to live, suffer and die.
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