Free Lunch

Okay, managed to squeeze finishing Who Killed Homer in last weekend between finishing projects. In trying to get a little more perspective, I started listening to some of VDH's lectures on YouTube. That led to...

wow

So... you, me, and the homeless guy who sets up in a public library computer stall can effectively take an Ivy League Classics course, complete with reading lists and printed class notes.... just for the asking*?

*blink blink*

Don't tell me you can't make something of yourself in this country. The opportunities for self-betterment these days are just plain astounding. Good Lord do we live in a Golden Age.














* riffing a bit off from one of VDH's off the cuff comments in WKH, I'm starting to think all philosophy courses should come with a disclaimer to sign. Something along the lines of -

"Warning: this course will prove absolutely unintelligible to you until you've buried someone you love (pets don't count), had your heart broken, lost significant worldy goods, and either fell ill, had an bad accident, got in a bad fight, or otherwise looked your own mortality dead in the eyes. Until you've done that, these are all just words."

...Or help to half-a-crown

Taking another break from The Week From Heck.

I'm a little over halfway through "Who killed Homer?" - just past the politics of academia section, and back into the good stuff. Namely - "what is this "Classics" thing and why is it important?" Interesting reading, but not really what's been bouncing around my noggin these last few days.

See, it got touched off by the asinine DHS memo of a week or so ago. You know the one - eeevil Right Wing Extremists, yadda yadda yadda. Yes it was insulting, yes it was dumb to boot. And yet at the same time, I couldn't help but think it's fair wages after some from the right side of the aisle tossed the "terrorist" label onto hard-core environmental folks this last few turns of the wheel.*

And of course conversations with friends (and letters to Congressmen) back when the DHS was being put together came flooding back to - mostly along the lines of "um..... sure it looks shiny now guys, but is this really a power you want to see in the hands of The Other Team? This just doesn't look like a good idea...."

One of these days, this constant caricature (from both sides) of The Other Party as The Enemy Within is gonna bite us but hard.

Pardon though... time to go sow some more wind.







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* Yes, the nutter who torches a subdivision being built is a criminal sure and certain - but he's hardly in the same league as Mohammad Atta.

Springtime in Alaska...

Well, not quite, but breakup's about done with. So cool - it actually rained today! As in, water fell from the sky - as water! wet! Not hard or fluffy!

It's the little things. :)

Other signs of the season - the gulls have been in town a few weeks now, and the ravens mostly hightailed it. Saw a Cessna in the sky this morning dragging a set of floats even! Just little knee-high piles of rotten ice here and there, and the beginning of buds on the trees.

Pretty soon we'll get a whole week or two of spring!

hittin' the books...

Oh, one sign you've been reading civics like crazy? You wake up to discover you've been dreaming being in a debate about universal suffrage. And a couple nights later getting all wrapped up over vector math and bezier curves.

Criminy.

At least unlike college, I can shelve all the writing stuff here for a bit.
Major project underway this weekend. Possible Awesome News soon. Or not.

leaves from historians past.

So tonight I was grabbing an armload of brainfodder from the library, and on a whim picked up a little audio presentation of Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History. I confess to being skeptical, given how easily historical precendent can be twisted to highlight any cause one chooses. Nonetheless, it looked a short little thing so I picked up on a lark anyhow, and set it to play while cleaning house.

Oh. My. Goodness. So far, it is awesome.

Most especially is how utterly charming it is - it's from the mid-40's, and the style is just all full up with that turn-of-the-century feel you get walking through one of the Carnegie-era libraries or wood-and-brick University buildings back East - lots of "the story of (capital-M) Man," lots of Biblical and classical allusions, thrown off in full expectation you'll catch every one, because.. doesn't everyone know this stuff? It's a delight to hear.

Quote for the evening -

"At any moment a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy-turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat; or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangentially -- as some think our planet did a few astronomic moments ago--and fall upon us in a wild embrace ending all grief and pain. We accept these possibilities in our stride, and retort to the cosmos in the words of Pascal: 'When the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.'"

Agree or no... that's just poetry right there.

So.. back to the dishes, and disc 2.


Edit - keep in mind, it's very much a creation of its times - disc one is filled with the echoes of the Eugenicists of a generation earlier, and not a little eagerness to see global governance as a means to expand the "tribe" so as to reduce warfare such had just torn the world apart. Like most any history, it's as fascinating for what it says of the times in which it's written as for what it says of times past itself.

For some reason the word charming just keeps coming to mind.

He is Risen, Indeed.

I don't think I could ever claim to be a good Christian. I'm not terribly good at it at all, to be honest. My basic nature is far more seasonal festivals and celebratory-dance-naked-under-the-moon pagan. Not so much with the polytheism and ritual, but for an overall "plumbline of the soul" - well, there you go. Transcendence is sometimes hard to grasp when Immanence is staring you right between the eyes everywhere you go.

And yet, Easter's always been special. Partly for the echoes of Ostara - that part I grasped intuitively years before I learned the word. The deeper I read of our history though, the more the sacrifice in Jerusalem started to mean. For all the horrors of the last two thousand years - they don't begin to compare with those that came before*.

It's been a rough, uneven road from there to here, full of backsliding and fatal flaws both personal and cultural. Indeed, if the apostles themselves couldn't make their communal society work in Jerusalem, there's no reason to think the earth will ever see a mortal Utopia such as those we keep trying to build. And yet... we're not Assyria either. Nor even Rome. Things that were casually accepted in Christ's time are considered horrifically, inhumanly barbaric today.

I'm still too inclined to think of culture as a nebulous, often fragile thing to say human "progress" means we'll never again see times of widespread slavery, genocide, casual cruelty - or even human sacrifice. And yet to the extent we're spared those things today, I can't help but credit the echoes of the Son of Man, two millennia back. There have been other voices, other sacrifices - but none to match this one.


Happy Easter all.








* Another pitch for Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History" series - the one on Assyria and the later one on slavery come particularly to mind.
"and their hearts were all on evil, all the time..."

Christianity, the Founding, and Suckage.

Oh, people have squabbled for years over which Founders were Christian, who was an atheist (and whether Deists counted), are we a Christian nation, are we not.. that fight's gonna go on for ages.

And this post has nothing to do with that.

Rather, I want to talk about what I think the core assumption to our entire economy and political philosophy is, and why regardless of the faith (or lack thereof) of any particular Founder - that assumption is based on a long-held Christian principle*.

Namely, that People Suck.

It is in men that we must place our hope.

Men.... Men are weak.

Original Sin, the Fallen World, call it what you will. The idea that people as a group are inherently fallible, given to all manner of failings. We can be noble, sure - our greatest heroes, both spiritual and secular, are those who sacrificed everything for others.

But they're our heroes because they're the exception. Because that kind of deep sacrifice - at least for those that aren't family- goes against our basic nature. Think for a moment - are you more likely to be snippy to your partner or cut off someone on the freeway when you're alert and rested? Or when you're too tired to keep up the mantle of politeness?

That's "original sin" in a nutshell. That we are neither perfect nor perfectible in this world - hence the need for a Saviour.

Welcome to about a thousand years of Western thought.

..You're an idealist.

I live in an ideal culture.

Out of the Enlightenment and the rise of capitol-R Reason comes the notion that no, we truly can "make people better." We can make Heaven on Earth.

Contrast our Revolution with the French one. I don't think you'll find a better contrast. Our system is designed around the core assumption that People Suck. Heck, our whole "three branches of government" is like a giant game of "rock-paper-scissors." Executive appoints judicial, judicial overrides legislative, legislative can veto exective... on and on. Everybody's power is counterbalanced against everybody else's because People Suck. Nobody gets absolute power because lots of power makes sucky people suck MORE.

Our economic model is the same. Who hasn't read Smith's most famous line "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages?"

So.. you want a nice cushy life? Find a way to make other people happy, because they won't make your life better out of the goodness of their hearts.

Because People Suck.

And yet... we keep thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time we'll get it right. Maybe it's the Revolutionary Commune, maybe it's Roddenberry's UFP or the hippy martian free-lovin' church in that Heinlein book.

Whatever the setting, there's the underlying belief that this time we can make the New Man. Someone who always acts first from love and charity. Someone who always thinks first of others, and who will never ever take advantage. Someone who Doesn't Suck.

And yet, whenever we try to build a society on that principle, lots of people end up dead. Because even in Utopia.... we still Suck.


Christian doctrine, as I understand it, is that there's no going back to the Unfallen state. We're not capable anymore of being that perfect being we wish we - and each other- could be. It hangs there in our minds eye, the Perfect Us, a beautiful vision of what at our very best we could be, and for a time we can even live up to it.

Until we slip again. Until we're tired and hungry and something hurtful escapes our lips, or we think unkindly on a friend. Gossip about some perceived failing of another, or tell the easy white lie. And that notion of "I could be perfect" comes apart, unattainable once again.

Thus the notion of Redemption. That we're not okay, and that's okay. We try our best, we fall, we forgive each other, and we move on. And we build our political institutions on the notion that there is no Utopia, not in this life.


In God We Trust...All Others Pay Cash, as it were.









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* I'll grant perhaps not unique to Christianity, but nowhere I believe is it as pervasive . Haven't seen many Krishna asking if I've been say-ved anyhow.

Kid Stuff

Note from the north...

... if you were the kind of kid who liked splashing in mud puddles, Alaska in breakup season is the place to be.


SPLASH!

:)

poking Godwin

so... when the (modern) left and right call each other Nazis, is it fair to say the left is seeing the "National" part and the right the "Socialist" part of National Socialism in each other? I know that's awfully simplistic, but ignoring those for whom "Nazi" just means "evil bad scary person" and actually have a rudimentary grasp of the last hundred years.... does it hold any water?

Babe in the woods.

Last week after finishing the "Scots and the Modern World" book* I started on "Closing of the American Mind" (a loan from a friend) and some "Big Names in Philosophy" survey book on the discount rack at Barnes and Noble.

Most of the ideas in that little survey book are familiar, of course - reading it is more a matter of learning so that's who's credited with such and such than learning anything new. More than anything, it's interesting how much as a people we retread the same ground. I remember once when I was little, asking my mother "how do I know the orange I see is the same orange you see?" ... little guessing that same question had been put to world thousands of years before my country existed. Recapitulation in mind, if not body.

I've only poked through the first a bit so far, but the latter is fairly fast going- I'm up to the 17th century since last night.

That section is particularly interesting, because you're already starting to see the principles and modes of thought that anchored our Founders in the Revolution - the immediate precursors to the Paines and Henrys we've read about. Heck, even the "Social Contract" theory so loved (and I'd say misused) by self-styled "Progressives" over the last hundred years long predates our own nation.

That's what stands out the most I think, how much of what's crowed to the rafters as dynamic or new is anything of the sort. And the more I read, the more some of the oldest writings we have come back -

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say,
"Look! This is something new"?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.

There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow.
Ecclesiastes 1:9-14


At some point, I'll feel a little more qualified to talk about the whole Western Civ thing. Not yet, despite growing up in it and four years of undergrad in the humanities. I think after these some early Victor Davis Hanson and some Howard Zinn for counterbalance. After that... Lord only knows.

Yeah, it's been a perplexing few weeks.

I want to get back to Gaelic folklore to go with the bardic/music end of things, but am also getting pushed to learn more about the Founders recently. And and and...

criminy. What I wouldn't give for another four years to do Undergrad again. Forget "youth is wasted on the young" ... education is wasted on the young. There's hardly a thing I had in classes from age 18-22 that I managed (or took advantage of) half so well as I could now.

Of course, I'll prolly say the same thing again in another ten years. Grow or die, I guess.






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* neat discovery for the week for the aviation-minded who are still poking about here -
"tarmac" derives from "tarred macadam" - itself a type of gravel road named for the engineer MacAdam. The things you learn..