juxtapositions

Nothing Was Inevitable

By in books, eric hoffer, juxtapositions No Comments

Howe’s prediction rests on a model that at its core is timeless and simple. In fact, it can be summed up by a four-line Internet meme: “hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.” Howe’s version manages to fill most of 500 pages with further nuance, however.

At least in the Anglo-American world that Howe has surveyed, history appears to move in predictable cycles of about 80 to 100 years that, resurrecting a Roman term for the concept, he calls a saeculum. These cycles each have four distinct phases—or “Turnings”—of around 20 to 25 years that always flow in the same order: a “High,” an “Awakening,” an “Unraveling,” and a “Crisis.” Turnings are driven by the changing of generations, or those portions of the population whose collective character was shaped by coming of age amid the societal conditions specific to a previous turning. Each generation’s character, embodied by one of four generational archetypes (“Artists,” “Prophets,” “Nomads,” and “Heroes”) is largely determined by its proximity to the last Crisis. Howe goes into great detail about each generation, but for our purposes all you really need to know is that Prophets, coming of age knowing only the softness of a spring High, begin to dream of utopia during a hotheaded summer Awakening and rebel against the world that their Hero fathers built, seeking to tear it all down during a quarter-century-long autumn Unraveling. This process culminates in a winter of true Crisis (a Fourth Turning), which a new generation of Heroes must struggle to resolve, after which they establish a new order, leading to another High. And yes: the baby boomers of the 1960s counterculture are our most recent Prophets, which means the millennials will have to be our Heroes.

Don’t be (too) alarmed, Howe urges his readers. We’ve been here before, multiple times in fact, and managed not only to survive but also to thrive. Previous Fourth Turning crises (each occurring about a century apart) have included the Great Depression and World War II, the Civil War, and the American Revolution. Before that: England’s Glorious Revolution, the Spanish Armada Crisis, and the War of the Roses. Each was preceded by the same societal trends we’re seeing now, he argues, offering supporting data. But each cyclical crisis, in the end, gave birth to stronger nations.

Howe is grimly adamant, however, that “sometime before the mid-2030s, America will pass through a great gate in history” commensurate with these past crises.

— N.S Lyons, “Present at the Destruction”

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Once events have taken place, a horde of learned commentators demonstrate that the unexpected was inevitable. Actually, chance, stupidity, and cowardice were chief factors. Nothing was inevitable.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Cosmic Libretto

By in atheism, juxtapositions, religion No Comments

The reason new atheism has lost its mojo is that it has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from. What will fill that void? Religious people have their answer. Do the rest of us?

— Konstantin Kisin, “The Atheism Delusion”

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Recognizing the hollowness of the Enlightenment quest for some absolute and perspectiveless objectivity, the pragmatist is content to make do with all that is left — which, of course, was all there ever was from the very start — which is that ‘we think of our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such sharing.’

— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

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As for the meaning of life, I do not believe that it has any: I do not at all ask what it is, for I suspect it has none, and this is a source of great comfort to me – we make of it what we can, and that is all there is about it. Those who seek for some deep, cosmic, all-embracing, teleologically arguable libretto or god are, believe me, pathetically mistaken.

— Isaiah Berlin, letter to Irving Singer, In Search of Isaiah Berlin: A Literary Adventure

Human Judgment About Nature

By in animals, juxtapositions No Comments

I don’t think too much about factory farming. It’s depressing. But I sometimes feel compelled to give the topic some attention. This isn’t an issue on which I’ve changed my mind over time. Ever since I first heard the arguments against what we do to animals as a teenager, I’ve thought there is no way that the way we produce meat could be morally justified. I just think about the subject more or less at different times of my life. At one point I managed to be a vegetarian for a few months when I was much younger, but that’s pretty much been the extent of my sacrifice. I’ve at times slightly adjusted my eating habits towards beef over chicken and shrimp, but the universe is cruel, which is why the most ethically fraught foods are the best sources of lean protein.

That being said, I’m not a vegan. Why? Well, I like the way animals taste, and I want to be in good physical condition. If it was just about taste I would probably find a way to get everything I needed from plants, but a diet filled with meat is the only one that can provide what I find to be an acceptable calorie-to-protein ratio while allowing me to avoid overeating.

One of Adam Smith’s many insights is that the world’s most enlightened philosopher would care more about losing his little finger than an earthquake that swallowed all of China, and those of us who accept the ethical arguments for veganism while continuing to eat meat, like much of the rest of the world, prove him correct every day.

— Richard Hanania

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Earlier in the season, a cardinal was at my feeder. He took off, miscalculated in mid-flight, and collided with the window next to my desk. It was a devastating mistake; he should have seen me behind the glass but failed to make the turn in time. Now he was lying on his back, wings outstretched, motionless.

By the time I reached him, he still hadn’t moved, and he didn’t protest when I lifted him into a cardboard box. He only twitched his head, his black eyes staring emptily into space. A friend and bird expert advised us to close the box, poke some holes for air, and give the bird several hours: If nothing was broken, he would likely fly again. By the end of the day, he was able to flutter away but then took hours to finally fly. His chances in the wild seemed slim.

But he found a mate — I was certain he was the same bird we had rescued, a feather on his back remained forever crooked. They nested in our boxwood bush, the first cardinal nest we had ever seen in our yard. Anyone who has witnessed this marvel knows the sheer joy it brings, especially to children. The gaping beaks were visible from a bedroom window. A couple feet over, a robin family set up their home as well.

Then one day the cardinal babies were gone. Far too young for flight, there was no question they were dead.

A few days later, the robin mother was screeching, helplessly witnessing the slaughter of her children as the rat snake, a type of constrictor, was about to strangle one of them. My wife was working in the garden, her own mother instincts swiftly reacting to the cry. A stick as her only tool, she hoped to beat the living daylights out of the serpent, which eventually but reluctantly retreated. All efforts to fortify the bush against the intruder with rose brambles were useless. The next morning, the robin babies were gone, their mother occasionally returning to mourn her loss.

This is why I killed the snake. It was a ruthless killer, a voracious glutton, a vicious beast whose contempt for helpless fledgling life knew no bounds. And the cardinal, whose life my window almost ended and whom I had saved, lost all he had. I owed him.

— Samuel Matlack

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The birds left the nest. One day they were scrawny beaks cheeping incessantly when the parent showed up with grub (which was, probably, grub) and then they were big, too big for the nest, it seemed. Then they were out! When I came home from work and looked up – the nest is directly kitty-corner from where I sit – I saw one sitting on the beam.

The other three were gone. One returned. One parent returned with some food, out of duty. Sara was worried that the one on the beam would have to fly low to get out, once it tried to fly, and I told her not to worry. Literally, don’t worry about birds. It’s not like Natalie is out for the first time with a driver’s license.

We were sitting around after dinner chatting in the gazebo, when the bird decided to try. It fluttered down, and perhaps it was a foot too low because its starting point wasn’t way up in the trees.

Birch got it.

I mean, why wouldn’t he? It’s moving, it’s alive, it’s small, it’s right there, it’s the chance to get a bird, and he took it. I chased him and he dropped the bird – wasn’t the morsel he expected, maybe, too feathery, ick. The poor bird laid on the grass and I could tell he was a goner.

Well, Sara was inconsolate, and I understand, and felt the same way. We’d watched these guys from the start of the nest to their great escape into the world, and felt protective of them as you do with anything alive and non-invasive and interesting. You can’t be mad at the dog, but of course you’re dismayed when NATURE asserts itself in its usual calculations and indifference.

What was the worst, perhaps, was that all the other members of the robin family were around, it seemed, the other hatchlings and the parents, because from every direction there was a wild mad chatter of dismay and distress – fury, fear, anger, whatever rote noise the situation provoked. It was, to be honest, a horrible, damning sound.

I tried to say some consoling things – three out of the four made it! We don’t know if this one would’ve been picked off by a hawk out of our sight. And so on.

I note now, sitting in the gazebo, that there are two still hanging around in a nearby tree. If they are the hatchlings. Of course they are birds and do not remember any of this, for which you’re glad.

The nest is empty. I suppose I’ll glove up and take it down tomorrow, although my wife will probably want to do it. I know that whenever she sees a robin around here this summer, she’ll think it was one of the ones that hatched up there and made for a fortnight of watching them grow, and she’ll think of the one that didn’t make it.

The mother – if it is the mother – just appeared and sat on the edge of a chair and cheeped, looking around. It just flew to a tree and did the same, then flew to another tree and cheeped some more.

Then it flew away.

— James Lileks

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In a digression on human exceptionalism, Baddiel seems to suggest that the strongest argument for atheism is not that God is a reaction against our dread of nothingness. Instead, it is that God promises immortality only for our own species. I could not agree more strongly. Who wants an afterlife without our fellow animals?

— John Gray

Forget the Hearse, ‘Cause We’ll Never Die

By in juxtapositions, the big sleep 2 Comments

The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever.

— Anatole France, The Revolt of the Angels

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You wasted life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?

— Modest Mouse

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So you want this lovely consciousness of yours to last forever? Is that not immodest? Are you not mindful of all the other things which would then be obliged to endure you to all eternity, as they have endured you up to now with a more than Christian patience? Or do you think to inspire them with an everlasting sense of pleasure at your existence? A single immortal man on earth would be enough to drive everything else on earth to a universal rage for death and suicide out of satiety with him! And you earth-dwellers, with your petty conception of a couple of thousand little minutes, want to burden eternal existence with yourselves everlastingly! Could anything be more importunate! Finally, let us be indulgent with a being of a mere seventy years! He has not been able to imagine the everlasting boredom he himself would experience – he has not had enough time to do so!

— Nietzsche, Daybreak

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A disclaimer: I’m no medical researcher. I’m a fiction writer. While I do routinely stick my nose into a host of nonfiction subjects that are none of a fantasist’s business, I’m still in no position to analyze the prospects of success for cryonics, stem-cell therapy, nanotechnology, telomere extension, transhumanism (which foresees the uploading of consciousness to more-durable synthetic bodies or computers), the eradication of senescent cells, or the life-sustaining effects of living a hundred days underwater. But I’m as qualified as anyone to wonder: Why is the clichéd search for a fountain of youth accelerating, with no apparent sense of embarrassment? Is the ambition to hang about indefinitely healthy or warped? What might be the up- and downsides of living for hundreds if not thousands of years? And what could a greatly protracted or veritably infinite life be like?

…With only about 80 years to play with, plenty of people already have difficulty coming to grips with what they’re here for and what they want to accomplish. Many a mortal already finds life meaningless. In the face of an indefinite ellipsis, of being and being and being, the burden of finding purpose and meaning could grow unbearable. Why, today’s longevity crusaders derive their own senses of usefulness and direction by fixating on the defeat of death. Were they to succeed — job done, no one dies — what would they do with themselves? They’d need a whole new quest.

— Lionel Shriver, “The Modern Quest for Immortality“

Private Thoughts

By in books, juxtapositions No Comments

This is for a nook in a library, and to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend, who may take pleasure in associating and conversing with me again in this image. Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.

— Montaigne, “On Giving the Lie”

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More than once, too, I have pleased myself with the notion that somewhere there is good Company which will like this small sententious Book—these Thoughts (if I may call them so) dipped up from that phantasmagoria or phosphorescence which, by some unexplained process of combustion, flickers over the large lump of gray soft matter in the bowl of my skull.

— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms

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The musical progressives of his time, their ears and minds full of Wagner’s epochal agenda for opera and art and humanity, condemned Brahms’s art as “the private thoughts of a clever man,” writing only for the private thoughts of his listeners. But after the betrayals of this century by one epochal agenda after another, the private thoughts of a private craftsman may be the best thing we have left.

— Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography

Scaling Up the Heights of Folly

By in extraordinary popular delusions, juxtapositions 4 Comments

Let us suppose that you were to develop into a being that has posthuman healthspan and posthuman cognitive and emotional capacities. At the early steps of this process, you enjoy your enhanced capacities. You cherish your improved health: you feel stronger, more energetic, and more balanced. Your skin looks younger and is more elastic. A minor ailment in your knee is cured. You also discover a greater clarity of mind. You can concentrate on difficult material more easily and it begins making sense to you. You start seeing connections that eluded you before. You are astounded to realize how many beliefs you had been holding without ever really thinking about them or considering whether the evidence supports them. You can follow lines of thinking and intricate argumentation farther without losing your foothold. Your mind is able to recall facts, names, and concepts just when you need them. You are able to sprinkle your conversation with witty remarks and poignant anecdotes. Your friends remark on how much more fun you are to be around. Your experiences seem more vivid. When you listen to music you perceive layers of structure and a kind of musical logic to which you were previously oblivious; this gives you great joy. You continue to find the gossip magazines you used to read amusing, albeit in a different way than before; but you discover that you can get more out of reading Proust and Nature. You begin to treasure almost every moment of life; you go about your business with zest; and you feel a deeper warmth and affection for those you love, but you can still be upset and even angry on occasions where upset or anger is truly justified and constructive.

As you yourself are changing you may also begin to change the way you spend your time. Instead of spending four hours each day watching television, you may now prefer to play the saxophone in a jazz band and to have fun working on your first novel. Instead of spending the weekends hanging out in the pub with your old buddies talking about football, you acquire new friends with whom you can discuss things that now seem to you to be of greater significance than sport. Together with some of these new friends, you set up a local chapter of an international non-profit to help draw attention to the plight of political prisoners. By any reasonable criteria, your life improves as you take these initial steps towards becoming posthuman. But thus far your capacities have improved only within the natural human range. You can still partake in human culture and find company to engage you in meaningful conversation. Consider now a more advanced stage in the transformation process…

You have just celebrated your 170th birthday and you feel stronger than ever. Each day is a joy. You have invented entirely new art forms, which exploit the new kinds of cognitive capacities and sensibilities you have developed. You still listen to music – music that is to Mozart what Mozart is to bad Muzak. You are communicating with your contemporaries using a language that has grown out of English over the past century and that has a vocabulary and expressive power that enables you to share and discuss thoughts and feelings that unaugmented humans could not even think or experience. You play a certain new kind of game which combines VR-mediated artistic expression, dance, humor, interpersonal dynamics, and various novel faculties and the emergent phenomena they make possible, and which is more fun than anything you ever did during the first hundred years of your existence. When you are playing this game with your friends, you feel how every fiber of your body and mind is stretched to its limit in the most creative and imaginative way, and you are creating new realms of abstract and concrete beauty that humans could never (concretely) dream of. You are always ready to feel with those who suffer misfortunes, and to work hard to help them get back on their feet. You are also involved in a large voluntary organization that works to reduce suffering of animals in their natural environment in ways that permit ecologies to continue to function in traditional ways; this involves political efforts combined with advanced science and information processing services. Things are getting better, but already each day is fantastic.

— Nick Bostrom, “Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up”

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All forms of life, such as the cultivation of land, the planning of human habitations, the building of theaters, the methods of socially educating children, the solution of scientific problems, the creation of new styles, will finally engross all and everyone. People will divide into ‘parties’ over the question of a new gigantic canal, or the distribution of oases in the Sahara (such a question will exist too), over the regulation of the weather and the climate, over a new theater, over chemical hypotheses, over two competing tendencies in music, and over a best system of sports. Such parties will not be poisoned by greed of class or caste. All will be equally interested in the success of the whole. The struggle will have a purely ideological character. It will have no running after profits, it will have nothing mean, no betrayals, no bribery, none of the things that form the soul of competition in a society divided into classes. But this will in no way hinder the struggle from being absorbing, dramatic and passionate. And as all problems in a Socialist society – the problems of life which formerly were solved spontaneously and automatically, and the problems of art which were in the custody of special priestly castes – will become the property of all people, one can say with certainty that collective interests and passions, and individual competition will have the widest scope and the most unlimited opportunity.

In a struggle so disinterested and tense, which will take place in a culture whose foundations are steadily rising, the human personality, with its invaluable basic trait of continual discontent, will grow and become polished at all its points. In truth, we have no reason to fear that there will be a decline of individuality or an impoverishment of art in a Socialist society …

It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.

— Leon Trotsky,  Literature and Revolution

Mediocre Talents

By in books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, nietzsche No Comments

The only fault one can impute to genuinely fine writings is that they are usually the cause of very many bad or mediocre ones.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books

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[Beethoven] quoted a contemporary comment on artists: “Unfortunately, mediocre talents are condemned to imitate the faults of the great masters without appreciating their beauties: from thence comes the harm that Michelangelo does to painting, Shakespeare to drama and, in our day, Beethoven to music.”

— Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph

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Andrew Tate seems to fancy himself as a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, a strong, powerful individual that has risen above society’s norms and become the best version of himself. But besides both men being accused of misogyny, there is nothing else the two share in outlook. Asceticism and a love for eternal, idealised archetypes at the expense of the ever-changing and evolving world of the senses would have left Nietzsche distinctly unimpressed.

— Alexis Papazoglo, “Andrew Tate, Nietzsche and the Matrix“

To Strive With Difficulties and to Conquer Them

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, juxtapositions 2 Comments

That kind of life is most happy which affords us most opportunities of gaining our own esteem; and what can any man infer in his own favour from a condition to which, however prosperous, he contributed nothing, and which the vilest and weakest of the species would have obtained by the same right, had he happened to be the son of the same father?

To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; and if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility.

— Samuel Johnson, “The Pleasures and Advantages of Industry”

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The greatest and most understated benefit of strength training beyond just lifting heavy weights is that you’ve completed a task you couldn’t do previously. Let’s say I’m working with some 50-year-old trainee who has to squat 275 for two sets of five reps. He’s got a task to complete. Based on the outcomes of prior training sessions, he doesn’t know whether he can do that last rep of that second set of 275. This trainee has a choice. He does the first set, completes all five reps, racks it, and sits down. He then realizes he has to do it again. Now he’s on that fourth rep of the second set and it’s hard — he may get stuck at the bottom of this, he may get hurt. Does he continue for a fifth rep or rack it? His spotter is right there.

The decision he makes teaches him something about himself. This decision transforms people. There are few instances in the modern world when we get to make such a decision. I’ve had people who have been training for years tell me that they’ve noticed people treating them differently. Something has changed in them. What was it? Well, now they know that they can complete tasks with uncertain outcomes that depended entirely on their efforts. This is terribly important for people of all ages, something that you owe it to yourself to experience.

Do you have the guts to try the last rep? If you can make yourself do it, you have proven that you have that courage. This is one of the few ways you can still learn that kind of lesson. Learn it under the bar, then watch it carry over into everything you do for the rest of your life. How can this be any harder than that fifth rep of that second set with 275 pounds? Now you welcome the challenges of the world. You don’t cower.

— Mark Rippetoe

Complexity Appeals to Stupid People

By in foolosophy, juxtapositions, lin yutang No Comments

Complexity appeals to stupid people — it makes them feel superior intellectually, even if they’re making no real progress.

— Mark Rippetoe

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The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained. The first idea may really be very outré or specialist; it may really be very difficult to express to ordinary people. But because the man is trying to express it, it is most probable that there is something in it, after all. The honest man is he who is always trying to utter the unutterable, to describe the indescribable; but the quack lives not by plunging into mystery, but by refusing to come out of it.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Mystagogue”

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I like William James because he speaks of his “raids into philosophy.” He considers common life — a day in Saratoga, for instance — his real feeding ground, and only conducts raids into philosophy to find out what he can get out of it. His mind was far too curious for it to be shut up behind the gray plastered walls of philosophy. I believe I can understand what the professors are talking about in their long words, but I like to see occasional sallies of real insight and horse sense.

— Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist

Even When They Won They Always Lost Themselves to the Sideways Glances

By in foolosophy, juxtapositions No Comments

So Derek Thompson wants to outsource his research, and, as we saw yesterday, Noah Smith wants to outsource his writing. Is this boredom or frustration with the basic elements of their work universal among journalists these days?

I hope I’m not the only one, but just for the record: I like researching, and I like writing. I like the hard work of making my prose more clear and vivid. I like overcoming my ignorance. I like synthesizing the disparate things I read and then trying to present that synthesis to my readers. I like it all.

— Alan Jacobs

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One of the most brutal and difficult parts of any Zen retreat is that part right in the middle. You’re too far in to just get up and go home. Yet you’ve still got several hours or days of doing the most boring thing in the world — literally staring at a wall — to get through.

That’s the time when your mind really starts pulling out all the stunts it can come up with to escape. The only real escape you have at that point is fantasy. Your mind can spin out endless places you’d rather be and endless things you’d rather do. What’s worse, your mind can come up with lots of places you could be and things you could do if only you weren’t stuck there watching the paint dry. You experience real psychological pain.

And yet, it’s these moments that are the most instructive and valuable. You come to realize that you really have only two choices. You can get up and leave. Or you can settle into this boring moment completely.

If you can learn to do that on a Zen retreat, you can learn to do that anywhere.

Then you’ll stop missing out on 75% of your life. You’ll stop wishing to get your time on Earth over with quicker. You’ll actually live longer, no matter how long you end up living, because you’re really all there.

— Brad Warner

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