Pith and Wit
Archive for the ‘concepts’ Category.
Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.
If you believe that Liberals stand in the center while Conservatives occupy the far distant fringes of the right, reflect on this: Thinking “Hitler” all the time and never thinking “Stalin” when the subject is political orientation is like evaluating the humor of Laurel and Hardy without Hardy.
Two people are talking about wine, jazz. Postmodernism and cinema with striking knowledgeability. One is actually sophisticated and the other is a phony. How do we tell which is which? The phony regards his lore as a possession and is always compelled to uphold and defend its validity. The true sophisticate thinks of learning as discovery; he often changes his opinion and is absolutely the antithesis of egocentric.
Perhaps the multiculturalists have a point. What entitles us to the arrogant belief that Western Civilization is the way to go? We ought always to seek to better our condition by learning how other cultures do things. Let’s adopt the educational standards of the Ivory Coast, the culinary hygiene of New Guinea, the judicial-system fairness of Saudi Arabia, the religious tolerance of Sri Lanka, the imaginative television programming of Mongolia, the political liberties of Myanmar, the urban sciences of India, the high-tech infrastructure of Tajikistan, the after-school programs in Brazil, the foreign affairs genius of North Korea, the child-labor policies of Bangladesh, the social justice of Zimbabwe, the common-ground ethnic togetherness of Cyprus, the engineering ingenuity of Samoa, the freedom of dissent of Iran, the sell-your-daughter-into-prostitution ethos of Thailand, the marital relations of Pakistan, the pollution-control zeal of Mexico, the table manners of Micronesia, the philosophy of the Eskimos, the University-studies rationale of Azerbaijan, the cinema of Malaysia, the musical sophistication of Easter Island, the anti-corruption policies of the Philippines, the comedy sketches of Somalia, the legislative shrewdness of Rarotonga, the contemplative politics of South Korea and Taiwan, the relaxed code of leisure of Japan, the public defecation facilities of China, the rationalized traffic control of Ecuador, the fine art of Borneo, the literary distinctions of Tierra del Fuego, the prisoner-rehabilitation policies of Turkey, the pluralistic harmony of Rwanda, plus clitorectomy, and we’ll see how it goes.
The artist and the intellectual ought to fear decadence more than ignorance. Ignorance is a quality that enlightenment may ameliorate, whereas decadence is a condition curable only by despair following a catastrophe.
The ritualistic courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese stems from their societies being overcrowded; absent an objectified code of personal interaction their countries would descend into violent chaos. America’s not overpopulated, but we have a much lower threshold for angry and irrational resentment than the Orientals, thanks to our having become infantile after 40 years of unrestricted self-indulgence, the evaporation of our educational process and the aberrant notion that we can heal our spiritual malaise by purchasing high-profile merchandise. There are simply no spurs to empathetic understanding in a nation whose religious worship consists of thanking God for easy credit and whose standard greeting runs, “Get out of my face, you fucking asshole.”
Political correctness is not about acceptance of the other, tolerance, affirmative action, doing the right thing or any other cultural or social issue. It’s a moral salve for the consciences of people who refuse to endure the strictures on behavior of a personal moral code. Imagine a woman who breaks her arm and goes to work as a municipal plasterer instead of seeing a doctor, on the grounds that “confining my limb to a plaster cast infringes on my individual freedom.” The more unbearable her pain becomes, the more civic wall-space she slathers with her featureless goo, crippled but convinced that she is beautifying the city.
Values are principles that control behavior. They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves. Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time. Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists. Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil. Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved. Soi brave, mon enfant!
By its rigidity and its disconcerting intensity, we understand that political correctness is an ideology, and we note that it has been adopted universally by the country’s intellectual elites. It is quite literally senseless to try to reason with these people; and not just because they’re arrogant and self-righteous, but because their irrational poppycock disguises a cold-eyed determination to eviscerate American culture by incapacitating our children for becoming free-standing individualists. Political correctness is tyrannical to the core— the only form of diversity it refuses to embrace is diversity of opinion. From kindergarten to graduate school the sons and daughters of Gramsci are busy every day indoctrinating our young people in the lexicography of drivel, while flying squads of scholar-poseurs are equally diligent in bolstering the claptrap by filling journal after journal with unscientific absurdities. The politically correct apparatchiki are bole weevils masquerading as butterflies. They thrive because of our lazy self-absorption and our misplaced trust in institutions we have let run amok, and they are killing the crops beneath our very eyes. If we permit them to continue, the civilization they have been subverting for the last forty years will eventually not be able to perpetuate itself.
Whatever Happened to Harmonic Dissonance? II: That a person could even utter a statement like, “I don’t need to read the newspaper because nothing in it interests me,” or, “I’ve never eaten Korean food because I know I wouldn’t like it,” betokens a breakdown of the speaker’s most basic associative operations (his mind “throwing a rod”); and it yields a proposition that is ridiculous—that we can judge the value or utility of an experience without having tried it. I remember when this fallacy typified the thinking of teenagers in the early Eighties. Now we hear it from adults every day. The disconnect occurs to people who haven’t managed to objectify, assimilate and conceptualize the elements and forces of contemporary existence; coping in desperation with incessant shotgun blasts of minutiae stresses them so completely that their minds simply shut down rather than entertain the thought of taking on something new and different. Neglecting one’s mental capacities is not the wisest preparation for life inside a kaleidoscope.
The vital intellectual component of humanity issues from the ability to objectify, interpret and analyze the features of our array of contexts and our subjective reactions to the contexts’ properties and dynamics. When we reject the basis of objectification, therefore, as by abandoning confidence in the existence of uniformly occurring verities and their methods of operation, and as by substituting feeling for thinking as our singular instrument of “understanding,” we not only disable our intellect, we undo our selves.
Obligations don’t mean anything today. They have become tactical ploys instead of strategic parameters.
The lack of a sense of responsibility leads to self-deception, and this is one of a slew of contemporary American “behaviors” (i.e., behavioral syndromes) against which the sweet-reason approach is powerless to effect change and therefore pointless to employ; others are depression (resulting from the long-term repression of impulses), addiction (escapism masquerading as courageous self-discovery or outrageous self-expression), the chronic inability to keep a promise (“I lied,” “things change,” “I’m moving on”), blaming someone or something other than oneself, saying that one has a disease in order to show that “I couldn’t help it.” The problem is that these sad and threadbare devices are defensive mechanisms applied when people actually need to assert themselves to overcome the fear arising from the insecurity that typifies society so conspicuously. The rising popularity of “extreme sports,” in which people fling themselves off thousand-foot cliffs, for example, with no great assurance that they’re going to land on the ground as anything but a splat, signals the severity of our anxiety. Those of us who don’t leap experience the right impulse (close your eyes and jump) but are afraid to act on it lest we wimp out or look stupid, which we really are for not responding; but we’re not in a condition to appreciate that. And because of our own insecurity we want to cut the clearly maladjusted plenty of slack—we “empower” them, to use another current catch phrase. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional syndrome we adopt metastasizes along with our unabated insecurity until we’re offering even greater slack to those guilty of committing actual crimes; fully crediting them for any of those blame-deflecting excuses cited above they care to indicate, because we believe (however absurdly) that we could well stand in their shoes some day and be in need of all the slack that we can get. The moral of this unhappy exposition is that society is crippled for everybody when a large enough number of its members refuse to accept the discomfort and inconvenience of self-investigation and behavior change as the price of putting an end to the pathology. America’s prosperity, which makes it easy to dissociate cause and effect, insures that this is going to be the way things are for a long time to come.
Providing yourself with an admirable self-image is only half the deal. You also have to match it in reality. The “true you” is not an icon.
Envy is a displacement of the gnawing fear that if we attempted to do something as exceptional as the other person did, we wouldn’t be able to bring it off. Jealousy is a displacement of the crippling fear that we do not deserve our good fortune.
Understanding something yields knowledge. Understanding something in more ways than one yields sophistication. The sophisticated application of knowledge to experience yields wisdom.
The Ideational Wild Boar: Some tragic ironies are all-pervasive and therefore unperceived. In the nation founded on and dedicated to the primacy of the individual, the very last thing a modern American wants to do is “stand out”.
Salesmanship consists of convincing a person that he needs to buy something. Good salesmanship consists of ensuring that the need is a legitimate one. Selling is just a technique. Whether its use is good or bad depends on the character of the salesman.
Ideology differs from philosophy in that its terms are closed. They contain no growth matter and cannot be extrapolated in any sense other than mechanically. They are precepts and simple assertions rather than active principles.
A mind-set manifests itself in different ways in different circumstances. Psychologically, there is no difference between the 1920s small-town reverend and the head of a contemporary women’s studies department. They are both authoritarian Puritan fanatics.