It’s especially weird since the entire argument behind banning him was to limit the reach of his posts, but I’ve seen 15 different screencaps of his Hutchinson thing. Everyone wants to share it themselves. https://t.co/lncD0k4uY0
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) June 28, 2022
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Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
A positive thing about academic life is that it affords us the possibility of specialization. But this positive is at the same time also a negative, because the specialization of departments and the delimitation of knowledge mean that, when someone tries to understand an issue in an interdisciplinary, global way, it is in the very nature of academia to protest. Though I place this book within political philosophy and the philosophy of history, my analysis walks among many academic disciplines—philosophy, philology, history, sociology, political science. And when someone pays a visit to several departments, but then after a brief time leaves again in order to see the larger whole, it is almost inevitable that he will be accused of not being serious. An interdisciplinary approach will often, therefore, require a certain ruthlessness in tearing down, for at least a little while, the walls that keep neighboring areas apart. Members of the various departments will often resent encroachment on their turfs, since they spent so many years of hard labor to become initiates themselves.
— Benedict Beckeld, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations
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The grey beards wag, the bald heads nod,
And gather thick as bees,
To talk electrons, gases, God,
Old nebulae, new fleas.
Each specialist, each dry-as-dust
And professorial oaf,
Holds up his little crumb of crust
And cries, “Behold the loaf!”
— Eden Phillpotts, “Miniature”
Without philosophy the mind is sickly, and the body, too, though it may be very powerful, is strong only as that of a madman or a lunatic is strong. This, then, is the sort of health you should primarily cultivate; the other kind of health comes second, and will involve little effort, if you wish to be well physically. It is indeed foolish, my dear Lucilius, and very unsuitable for a cultivated man, to work hard over developing the muscles and broadening the shoulders and strengthening the lungs. For although your heavy feeding produce good results and your sinews grow solid, you can never be a match, either in strength or in weight, for a first-class bull. Besides, by overloading the body with food you strangle the soul and render it less active. Accordingly, limit the flesh as much as possible, and allow free play to the spirit.
— Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 15
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Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not. As humanity has developed throughout history, physical strength has become less critical to our daily existence, but no less important to our lives. Our strength, more than any other thing we possess, still determines the quality and the quantity of our time here in these bodies. Whereas previously our physical strength determined how much food we ate and how warm and dry we stayed, it now merely determines how well we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has accumulated. But we are still animals – our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that actually matters. A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.
— Mark Rippetoe, Starting Strength
I shook hands with a billionaire today. In a couple of weeks, we’ll have a meeting where he says I can, and I quote, “tell me what you need.” This is it, fellows. This is my chance to pitch someone on my lifelong dream of becoming an ornamental hermit. “Yes, sir, I’ve been thinking it over, and I’m going to need a grotto, a folly or two, a custom-built library…”
The invention of printing has done more to change the content of the average man’s mind than anything else. That content is one of the most curious and terrifying phenomena of the modern age. We know too much and too little. We all have a mass of information and opinions on world-wide topics, from Hitler’s schizophrenia to Mussolini’s daughter, from the rise of Kemal Pasha to the proper breeding of turkeys. And yet we really know very little on these subjects. What’s in our minds resembles what’s in the town gossip’s, widened to cover the world. It is as if we were looking at a remote landscape through a field glass that brings just enough details to justify all sorts of exciting speculations. We are all suffering from a surfeit of undigested information, and all floating blissfully on the surface of imaginary, and rather undependable, borrowed opinions. Nobody knows anything any more. The more I read the more ignorant I become. The choice today before any educated man is between unread innocence and well-read ignorance.
— Lin Yutang, “500th Anniversary of Printing,” With Love and Irony
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Grant me, indulgent heaven, a rural seat,
Rather contemptible than great;
Where, though I taste life’s sweets, still I may be
Athirst for immortality.
I would have business, but exempt from strife;
A private, but an active, life;
A conscience bold, and punctual to his charge,;
My stock of health, or patience, large.
Some books I’d have, and some acquaintance too,
But very good, and very few.
Then (if one mortal two such grants may crave)
From silent life I’d steal into my grave.
— Nahum Tate, “The Choice”
For the past four days, several journalists at The Washington Post Montessori School have been doing the Twitter equivalent of hair-pulling, biting, kicking and scratching one another, which started when one of them did the Twitter equivalent of chuckling at a “problematic” joke. By way of comparison, on that same day, several of us at work were telling offensive and profane jokes about a guy we know who stands roughly three feet tall, and somehow we all got on with our lives. Forget education, income, and all those sociological markers; the real divide in the workplace is over humor.
I’m at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, where about 30 Amazon employees are staging a die-in during Amazon’s Pride Flag raising ceremony in protest of the company’s continued sale of what they say are transphobic books. pic.twitter.com/Pz0Pyy0Mzi
— Katherine Long (@_katya_long) June 1, 2022
For some odd reason, I often find myself these days remembering an anecdote about Bruce Lee:
Bruce had me up to three miles a day, really at a good pace. We’d run the three miles in twenty-one or twenty-two minutes. Just under eight minutes a mile. So this morning he said to me “We’re going to go five.” I said, “Bruce, I can’t go five. I’m a helluva lot older than you are, and I can’t do five.” He said, “When we get to three, we’ll shift gears and it’s only two more and you’ll do it.” I said “Okay, hell, I’ll go for it.” So we get to three, we go into the fourth mile and I’m okay for three or four minutes, and then I really begin to give out. I’m tired, my heart’s pounding, I can’t go any more and so I say to him, “Bruce, if I run any more,” —and we’re still running—”if I run any more I’m liable to have a heart attack and die.” He said, “Then die.” It made me so mad that I went the full five miles.
— John Little, Bruce Lee: The Art of Expressing the Human Body
As Louis CK might say, of course we shouldn’t say something like that to those who use performative fragility as a form of manipulation. Of course not. But maybe…
In fact, absurdity or irony must surely strike us as a distinctly misplaced and immature response. Why be absurd or ironic in any kind of unnaturally determined and sustained way about something that is precious and fragile and, above all, based on our best approximation of a central truth about our lives? A sense of vigilant gratitude would seem a more apt response, rooted in an honest and undeluded appreciation of the incorrigibly imperfect, frequently cruel, often wilfully destructive, yet infinitely unpredictable, occasionally exquisite and not entirely unhopeful world many of us still find ourselves occupying.
— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin
Today, I received a book which I ordered one week ago, on the 24th. I noticed when I checked the tracking information that it was being shipped from Johannesburg, South Africa. A couple of days after that, it passed through France, then England, before arriving stateside in Indianapolis. By Saturday, it was slightly north of here. Had it not been for the holiday, I might have even gotten it then, or on Monday.
Obviously, this was a routine transaction, one that we do all the time without thinking about it. Still, I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on just how great it is that we live in a world where it is both fast and affordable to discover the existence of a book, order a copy, and have it delivered to your door from halfway around the world. What would our great-grandparents have made of this?
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The best social philosophies do not claim any greater objective than that the individual human beings living under such a regime shall have happy individual lives. If there are social philosophies which deny the happiness of the individual life as the final goal and aim of civilization, those philosophies are the product of a sick and unbalanced mind.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living
In an age which suffers from this universal education, to what an unnatural, artificial and in any case unworthy state must the most truthful of all sciences, the honest naked goddess philosophy, be reduced! In such a world of compelled external uniformity it must remain the learned monologue of the solitary walker, the individual’s chance capture, the hidden secret of the chamber, or the harmless chatter of academic old men and children. No one dares venture to fulfill the philosophical law in himself, no one lives philosophically with that simple loyalty that constrained a man of antiquity to bear himself as a Stoic wherever he was, whatever he did, once he had affirmed his loyalty to the Stoa. All modern philosophizing is political and official, limited by governments, churches, academies, customs and the cowardice of men to the appearance of scholarship; it sighs ‘if only’ or knows ‘there once was’ and does nothing else.
— Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, ” Untimely Meditations
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It seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it can’t be helped. Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult things simple. In spite of names like “materialism,” “humanism,” “transcendentalism,” “pluralism,” and all the other longwinded “isms,” I contend that these systems are no deeper than my own philosophy. Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-bye to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching one’s neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves. What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the more confused we become.
— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living