Strange Doctrines

Nick Burns Blogging

My mother is a remarkable, strong, intelligent and beautiful woman, and I love her to death. But so help me, I just spent about 134 minutes on the phone with her, trying to explain to her how to copy and paste a url into an email. [1]

Two conclusions. One, my mother might need some remedial work on her computer chops before she sends her resume to Sergey Brin.

Two, I should never, ever work in tech support.

NOTES
1. Yes, I am taking some narrative license. The url-copying and -pasting incompletion component of the call actually only spanned 19 minutes. But the entire call comprised multiple discrete, similarly painstaking and abortive episodes. Plus, as I now know, 19 equals 134 in tech support years.

Java Jeopardy

Q&A earlier today at an undisclosed popular coffee purveyor:

Q: What is the difference between the African blend and the South American blend?
A: It's where the beans are grown.

"Archaischer Torso Apollos"

"Archaischer Torso Apollos" ("Archaic Torso of Apollo")
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated (with apologies) by Michael Drake

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt,
darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber
sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber,
in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt,

sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug
der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen
der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen
zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug.

We could not know his noble head,
with eyes like buds so ripened. Of this in spite,
his torso glows like candlelight,
whose brilliance, in its stead,

grips and gleams. Else could the bow
of his breast not dazzle, nor the gentle turn
of his loins smile as if in return
to that center, from which generations flow.

Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kurz
unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz
und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle;

und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern
aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle,
die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dein Leben ändern.

Else this stone would stand formless and fleeting
under these shoulders’ lucid fall
and not flicker like a panther's skin;

and not radiate from every border
like a star: for there is here no margin
that cannot see you. You must change who you are.

(H/T Grumbly Stu, in a comment here.)

Sentence of the Day

Grumbly Stu (here at March 24, 2009 02:47 AM), on an earlier commenter's comparing Nietzsche's musings  in Daybreak 128 with Freud: "Freud came in later, and left sooner."

On the Possibility of Multitasking

Shorter Roger Scruton: Humanism used to be about walking; now it's only about chewing gum.

Shorter Roger Scruton II: It is so negative to speak out against bad things.

Then there's this comment (3.10.09 @ 8:34AM): "If I wasn't a Christian, I think I wouldn't care about humanity because I don't see the point of morality - with no deity to offend, what's the point?"

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

UPDATE: I am being about 37 percent unfair to Scruton, and the entire article is worth a read.

Einmal ist Keinmal

Just because one must imagine Sisyphus happy doesn't mean one must be Sisyphus to be happy.

Apparently, Charles Murray did not get the memo.

Ironically, it is in reading his speech [1] that one directly confronts the fact that many forms of suffering really are just pointless.

(Via Brad DeLong.)

NOTES

1. The speech can (which is not to say should) be read here. [2]

2. I demoted the link to an appropriately qualifying footnote in response to Paul Gowder's fitting grievance here.

Believing What Comes Naturally

In his critique here of the "new atheism," Julian Baggini is right on one important point [1]: the new atheists "attribut[e] to reason a power it does not have." Though I think I have in mind a point slightly different from Baggini's. [2]

Independence

The Rosenkranz Amendment, alternate version: The Constitution shall not be construed as incorporating a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.

Against Narrativity

[Life] is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
--William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Maybe it's just a bad stretch, but I'm beginning to think reality might have a Macbethian bias.

Fanatical Compromise

Ross Douthat: "Pro-lifers are often damned for being uncompromising zealots."

Martin Luther King, Jr., I seem to recall, was pretty uncompromising. So I'm pretty sure the problem is the "zealot" part.

By the way, is there such a thing as a compromising zealot?

A Sort of Homecoming

My stepfather's life has stubbornly yielded to these last eight years. He is in the hospital (again), near three weeks now, each day mostly a little worse -- though he's never any less a prince to the random strangers who show up to turn, probe and wash his abdicate body.

"How are you today, Mr. Hale? I'm going to check your blood pressure now, okay?"

"Great! Thank you." And I'll be goddamned if he doesn't mean it.

On Sunday, I drove down to the hospital to visit. (It's in San Diego.) Pop was mouthing what still looked like language, but all that issued was a kind of silence.

Today I spoke to Mom. She said that all day he's only said two words. Help. And home.

I'm driving down again in the morning. I guess to bring Pop home.

Why Free Will is Good, Reason No. 1.1417 x 1037,015

Josef F., "the 73-year-old Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children with her." Allegedly.

The Big Questions

Why are there marching bands?

On the Moral Insignificance of Killing "Humans"

Membership to a particular species is rather obviously neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for rights or moral standing to attach.

It is not a necessary condition: If Flipper or Klaatu existed, they would (or ought to) be accorded rights or moral standing. And if blacks, whites and Asians (to be grossly racial) were all discovered to be distinct species, they would (or ought to) be accorded rights or moral standing.

It is not a sufficient condition: Given the choice between gratuitously boiling a newly-hatched chick alive and gratuitously boiling a newly-laid chicken egg alive, no sane, healthy person would opt to boil the newly-hatched chick alive. This is evidence that the newly-hatched chick has in our eyes a higher degree of moral standing than the chicken embryo. More generally, it is an example of how in adopting moral attitudes toward organisms, we routinely consider their level of development.

The conclusion to draw seems to be that moral standing is grounded in certain characteristics that stand outside or transcend species categories. In particular, there is no a priori reason to suppose that human blastocysts have any such characteristics.

(Originally posted as a comment at Balkinization.)

Fidélité, Pureté, Autorité

Jonathan Haidt in Prospect on "Obama's Moral Majority":

A scientific consensus is emerging that human moral psychology was shaped by multiple evolutionary forces and that our minds therefore detect many—sometimes conflicting—properties of social situations. The two best studied moral senses pertain to harm (including our capacities for sympathy and nurturing) and fairness (including anger at injustice)....

Political conservatives in the US, Britain and many other nations value three additional sets of moral concerns...: loyalty to the in-group (which political party cares most about flags and borders?), authority (which side demands respect for parents and teachers?) and spiritual purity (which side most wants to restrict homosexuality and drug use?). It's as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning....

This hypothesis doesn't mean that liberals are wrong or defective, but it does mean that they often have more trouble understanding conservatives than vice versa. Liberals tend to relate most moral issues to potential harms and injustices. They therefore can't understand why anyone—including the majority of Americans—would oppose gay marriage, for example, because legalising gay marriage would hurt nobody and end an injustice.

It's also possible, of course, that liberals simply have different qualitative conceptions along those same three dimensions -- viz., about the appropriate objects of loyalty, the purity of love, the authority of conscience, reason or integrity. I don't think I've seen anything in Haidt's popular writing that suggests he's controlled for this possibility in his work, and see no reason a priori to suppose that the three "conservative" dimensions actually commend conservatism.

(H/T Rob Sica.)

Signs

Conrad H. Roth espied this one during a recent stroll through London:

PROSTITUTES BEWARE. YOU ARE BEING WATCH BY OVERT CCTV

I guess they must be watching the johns covertly.

Greatest Philosopher of the Twentieth Century

No, no, no. The correct answer, of course, is Deepak Chopra.

Conservatives Are Wingnuttier Than Liberals

Speaking of differentials, here's Ta-Nehisi Coates on why reality continues to have a left-wing bias:

I keep thinking about the big things that have always kept me from being a conservative--the knee-jerk worship of a past that branded me half a man, the elevation of the loud imbeciles who think science teachers should be using the Bible, the toleration and baiting of bigots who cloaked themselves in the garb of "States Rights," and now run under the garb of "protecting marriage." The common denominator here is an unreflective veneration of what was, a belief that tradition, no matter how backwards, can heal all. Thus it's only right, that Steele, Gingrich and Limbaugh make up the leadership.

It's not that I think liberals are without flaw, but to argue that our most strident members should be our public face, would seem silly. As Ross intimates, if most liberals thought it was good idea for Howard Zinn Randall Robinson, or Noam Chomsky to be a spokesperson for the Democratic Party, I'd think we'd all gone insane.

(Via Brad DeLong.)

Expressive Differential in the Arts

I have never seen a work of visual art that has moved me aesthetically as much as I am moved aesthetically by a beautiful natural landscape.

Whereas I have never heard a natural soundscape that has moved me aesthetically as much as I am moved aesthetically by a beautiful work of sonic art.

I don't know what, if anything, this asymmetry means.

Against Venomous Harridans

For my female readers, some sage advice.