Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Friends...?
Can I call anyone a friend these days and mean more than simply "acquaintance" or "co-worker"? Have I ever had friends that mattered? ("Mattered" at what level, Iohann? Many have, actually.)
Have I systematically cut myself off from friends and possible friends?
Who can I relax with? Who can I open up to? Who can I go to when I'm upset? Family only.
Perhaps that's appropriate at my age.
The Bling and the Bleak
BLING & BLEAK!!!
These are the two heads of modern American testosterone-fueled barbarism - "bling", ornament, shock, attitude, success, and "bleak", nihilism, winner-ism, crime-as-way-of-life-ism, "get over it"-ism.
Not so different from other places, other times.
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Athletics and Stoicism
The old Stoics were often practiced Athletes and Soldiers and so on. How important were these visceral but disciplined activities to their practice of living?
I think they must have been critical - one had to become pretty hard-boiled to pursue the contrarian path of philosophy. For a lot of us, we cannot learn exertion without miserable struggle, cannot do more than we thought we could without being pushed and pulled, internally and externally. Such knowledge and discipline - the literal physical discipline of struggling on when your Self wants to quit, when one is tempted to falter, are necessary for any advancement in life. "Keeping at it"; to "ganbaru" (in Japanese). Persistence and application. Even in philosophy itself, the attempt to regulate and devalue the passions, it is probably a general need.
In this way, the competitive and brutal becomes a basis for the moral. (What a world! as the old Witch of the West said.)
We are various to begin with; we begin as merely what we are. We learn what we are when we fail or crash, and we learn what we are when we succeed - the two have to blend, and the result is never simple and complete, and certainly not changeless. For myself, hitting bottom and having to reconstruct myself after each fall has been my formative pattern. I find myself ill-gifted for the world of achievement; when young, my reponse to "challenges" that I felt I was going to fail at was to give up, to fall by the side. This meant a lack of sustained hardship, or RESPONDING to sustained demands; it has left me weak in important areas, both animal and moral. More physical discipline, the necessity or unavoidability of it - requiring exercise, regulation, effort - would have left me better in pursuing life and sustaining change.
The successful person takes up appearances and works on them, and with them, and through them - but he or she works. A favorite Bill Cosby quote (not verbatim) is pertinent here: "You have to want it more than you're afraid of it." But this is crucial: Why did I fall by the wayside in younger years? Because of fear - not a specific or rational fear, but a geneal, inborn and automatic DREAD of people and of interaction with people ( ). This condition alone tends to ensure that the subject will never learn much or ever excel in things that are taught socially, by the herd or by the team. Add to this condition Distractedness and Laziness and you have a perfect recipe for habitual failure and idleness.
But while team-disicipline would have helped me become more of a man sooner, would it have made me "better"? There is always the problem of "Winnerism", the necessary athletic creed, that
I think they must have been critical - one had to become pretty hard-boiled to pursue the contrarian path of philosophy. For a lot of us, we cannot learn exertion without miserable struggle, cannot do more than we thought we could without being pushed and pulled, internally and externally. Such knowledge and discipline - the literal physical discipline of struggling on when your Self wants to quit, when one is tempted to falter, are necessary for any advancement in life. "Keeping at it"; to "ganbaru" (in Japanese). Persistence and application. Even in philosophy itself, the attempt to regulate and devalue the passions, it is probably a general need.
In this way, the competitive and brutal becomes a basis for the moral. (What a world! as the old Witch of the West said.)
We are various to begin with; we begin as merely what we are. We learn what we are when we fail or crash, and we learn what we are when we succeed - the two have to blend, and the result is never simple and complete, and certainly not changeless. For myself, hitting bottom and having to reconstruct myself after each fall has been my formative pattern. I find myself ill-gifted for the world of achievement; when young, my reponse to "challenges" that I felt I was going to fail at was to give up, to fall by the side. This meant a lack of sustained hardship, or RESPONDING to sustained demands; it has left me weak in important areas, both animal and moral. More physical discipline, the necessity or unavoidability of it - requiring exercise, regulation, effort - would have left me better in pursuing life and sustaining change.
The successful person takes up appearances and works on them, and with them, and through them - but he or she works. A favorite Bill Cosby quote (not verbatim) is pertinent here: "You have to want it more than you're afraid of it." But this is crucial: Why did I fall by the wayside in younger years? Because of fear - not a specific or rational fear, but a geneal, inborn and automatic DREAD of people and of interaction with people ( ). This condition alone tends to ensure that the subject will never learn much or ever excel in things that are taught socially, by the herd or by the team. Add to this condition Distractedness and Laziness and you have a perfect recipe for habitual failure and idleness.
But while team-disicipline would have helped me become more of a man sooner, would it have made me "better"? There is always the problem of "Winnerism", the necessary athletic creed, that
"Winning is not the important thing, it's the ONLY thing."Yet we know that that kind of zeal can also be corrupting to our better selves, not to mention redolent of NAZIs and Death Squads. So, must we identify with the Team above all else, above decency? Will the binary of Winning with the Team or Losing Alone become the measure of everything? Must the Team be the limit of our awareness and determine our lives? It often looks that way, what with work, business, politics, government, neighborhoods, military service, the world-wide-economy. When is esprit de corps just? Or are chaos and violence, strength and cunning, the only kind of justice on this earth? (What a world!)
Friday, June 7, 2013
Ideology, Revolution, Conformity, Love
I've just read a couple of brief bits from Communion: The Female Search for Love, a book by a woman named Bell Hooks (her affectation is to spell her name "bell hooks", all lower case). She's a Feminist, apparently African-American, and so on. A lot of what she says is rational, but even with the little bit I've read, a couple of things emerged that I found hard to approve of.
1. First off: Her mission, reiterated as a basis of criticism of mainstream-ish stuff, is that the whole world must be converted to Feminism. (She even wrote a book called, Feminism is for Everybody.) To redress injustice, yes, that's Feminism's essential contribution; but to insist that only Feminist ideology should be allowed puts her in the same league as the Republicans, the Baptists, the Communists, or even over-zealous Catholics - the parties of Ideological Purity. To rephrase an acquaintance's motto, "Beware the woman of a single book." From the adherents of this or that Christian sect or those of of the Koran, to those of the Communist Manifesto, one-bookers are necessarily myopic - purveyors of Either/Or thinking - and too often violent, although I doubt that that's Bell's angle.
2. Second: The book's subject is love, specifically the search of women for love. This is what interested me in the book, that persepective. But ultimately she abuses it: Male reticence is identified not as a moral failure or as a bad tactic, but as "terrorism". Because men are often different than women, she claims that when men are remote, incommunicative (or unresponsive in the way a woman wishes them to be) they are guilty of a kind of domestic "terrorism". (Honestly, the same could be said of some feminine traits.) In other words, by failing to be susceptible to love on the woman's terms, a man - even a Feminist man - becomes a counter-revolutionary, and anti-woman. While there's no doubt that actual male violence against women counts as real terrorism, to use that word as she's done is to cheapen its real meaning. To simply label a man's natural reaction of remoteness as "terrorism" is (a) a failure to understand human nature or to allow for it, and (b) ideological in nature. It's name-calling and ideological excess.
But, having said that, and to temper my criticism, let me say that I think she has simply fallen into a rhetorical trap, one that people with an ideological agenda necessarily fall into now and again, one into which I have certainly fallen at times. So I think that, hearing it from an ardent Feminist, we can take it in stride.
3. Third: A specific bone to pick: She rides roughshod all over Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus books - she dismisses them as defending the patriarchy; she finds them counterrevolutionary and incompatible with Feminist theory. That they do not jive with Feminist Theory I can admit.
But I am, in fact, a defender (with caveats) of Gray's books. I find them to be helpful; they are clarifications of - and therapy for - the chaos of normal cross-gender relations. They are books to help people generally to cope and - hopefully - find and maintain love across the gender line. They are not to be taken as a "one book" meant to explain and define everything - I surely doubt that their author would claim such certainty for himself.
But for Hook, Gray fails not only to be a Feminist, he fails to be revolutionary, and for a revolutionary like Ms. Hooks, if you're not 100 percent "with us", then you're against us. She feels that allowing the world to be itself is negligent, that it is simply aiding and abetting patriarchy. I see the logic, but I don't find it valid: No one, not even the Feminists, have a monopoly on truth and insight. Feminist theory is not God. Women are not the whole story. Gray, in fact, achieves much success by explaining in simple terms:
Phew! A lot of blather from me. But I'd like to end with a very good quote from Bell Hooks:
"Justice demands integrity. It's to have a moral universe - not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting."
1. First off: Her mission, reiterated as a basis of criticism of mainstream-ish stuff, is that the whole world must be converted to Feminism. (She even wrote a book called, Feminism is for Everybody.) To redress injustice, yes, that's Feminism's essential contribution; but to insist that only Feminist ideology should be allowed puts her in the same league as the Republicans, the Baptists, the Communists, or even over-zealous Catholics - the parties of Ideological Purity. To rephrase an acquaintance's motto, "Beware the woman of a single book." From the adherents of this or that Christian sect or those of of the Koran, to those of the Communist Manifesto, one-bookers are necessarily myopic - purveyors of Either/Or thinking - and too often violent, although I doubt that that's Bell's angle.
2. Second: The book's subject is love, specifically the search of women for love. This is what interested me in the book, that persepective. But ultimately she abuses it: Male reticence is identified not as a moral failure or as a bad tactic, but as "terrorism". Because men are often different than women, she claims that when men are remote, incommunicative (or unresponsive in the way a woman wishes them to be) they are guilty of a kind of domestic "terrorism". (Honestly, the same could be said of some feminine traits.) In other words, by failing to be susceptible to love on the woman's terms, a man - even a Feminist man - becomes a counter-revolutionary, and anti-woman. While there's no doubt that actual male violence against women counts as real terrorism, to use that word as she's done is to cheapen its real meaning. To simply label a man's natural reaction of remoteness as "terrorism" is (a) a failure to understand human nature or to allow for it, and (b) ideological in nature. It's name-calling and ideological excess.
But, having said that, and to temper my criticism, let me say that I think she has simply fallen into a rhetorical trap, one that people with an ideological agenda necessarily fall into now and again, one into which I have certainly fallen at times. So I think that, hearing it from an ardent Feminist, we can take it in stride.
3. Third: A specific bone to pick: She rides roughshod all over Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus books - she dismisses them as defending the patriarchy; she finds them counterrevolutionary and incompatible with Feminist theory. That they do not jive with Feminist Theory I can admit.
But I am, in fact, a defender (with caveats) of Gray's books. I find them to be helpful; they are clarifications of - and therapy for - the chaos of normal cross-gender relations. They are books to help people generally to cope and - hopefully - find and maintain love across the gender line. They are not to be taken as a "one book" meant to explain and define everything - I surely doubt that their author would claim such certainty for himself.
But for Hook, Gray fails not only to be a Feminist, he fails to be revolutionary, and for a revolutionary like Ms. Hooks, if you're not 100 percent "with us", then you're against us. She feels that allowing the world to be itself is negligent, that it is simply aiding and abetting patriarchy. I see the logic, but I don't find it valid: No one, not even the Feminists, have a monopoly on truth and insight. Feminist theory is not God. Women are not the whole story. Gray, in fact, achieves much success by explaining in simple terms:
- a great deal about how people presently behave;
- how to avoid pitfalls - such as a man clamming up or reacting with utter frustration (the domain she labeled as "terrorist") - and
- how to avoid breakdown of communication, and sets forth some basic techniques that a lot of men and women may not know by default.
Phew! A lot of blather from me. But I'd like to end with a very good quote from Bell Hooks:
"Justice demands integrity. It's to have a moral universe - not only know what is right or wrong but to put things in perspective, weigh things. Justice is different from violence and retribution; it requires complex accounting."
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