Children

In my lonely single life, I find myself loving children more and more--especially in their impertinence. Children require adults to provide the loving guidance and education that only we adults can give them as they become themselves despite our best efforts. In the redundancy of the ordinary day to day life that we present, children are a blessing in their sheer newness.

It is true that we live in the present with our enlightened morality of free choice and individual self creation, and we are attempting to make the next generation so free that choice becomes an end in itself. We love something called autonomy. However, let's hope that "nature" will reassert itself and have nothing to do with our contemporary cleverness. The '60s and '70s and '80s were all about "rock 'n roll" and "punk rock" and thinking that one can make it alone. This thinking that one can make it alone leaves one thrown back on oneself, and in a strange Tocquevillian move leads one to follow what everyone else does. One's own self creation becomes conformity--how else to explain the ubiquity of tattoos these days?

You may say, "Presnall, you're full of shit. I've got a job, and it's important. I do (or even make) things, and in my activity (or productivity) I do something at least useful to myself. At least I make a paycheck." Let me suggest that your work is simply the flip side of the coin to your rock 'n roll autonomy. Your job is probably an abstraction--like most jobs these days. You can measure your life according to what television or other credentialized agencies consider to be rigorous self assessment. You and your company may even claim to "bring good things to light." However, what do you presently hold in custodianship that is worth holding for all time? What have you inherited that is worthwhile? What do you have to pass on--other than the skills which you yourself admit are damned for the planned obsolescence that you yourself have set up?

So, outside of theology or philosophy, children become the key to happiness in our time as it has been always. As one gets older--if there are no young ones around (especially young ones of one's own)--life becomes a meaningless game and one might as well commit suicide. Let me make a caveat for priests who find God, philosophers who find truth, and tyrants who find rule. The rest is pale pragmatism calculating the best way to stay alive for no other reason than that one fears death--it's a perfectly ordinary Hobbesianism.

Children--on the other hand--are by definition impertinent, and as a consequence they are a rebuke to any so-called postmodern self-creation. They're beyond the grandiosity of autonomy and production.

Children are fecundity too, and when they are one's own they provide an impermeable barrier to the seemingly inevitable growth of what Alexandre Kojeve called the Universal and Homogeneous State where each is recognized equally in his autonomy and productivity--a condition that Leo Strauss said had the potential of becoming a universal tyranny. So get philosophy, God, or children now! Fight the inevitable tyranny and defend one's own. Besides, with our aging population, who will care for us when we're elderly (i.e., dependent and unproductive) if not those impertinent children--whether or not they are our own?

Otherwise we're lucky if our fate becomes something similar to Sol's (Edward G. Robinson's) in Soylent Green. And this is a fate, despite its expressions of love, that is worthwhile avoiding.

Marshall Crenshaw

Listening to hipster music has led me to listening to music that is not worth hearing. It must be that I hear some tune that represents what is the most music on the edge. It used to be Radiohead as the most interesting. Coldplay, Dinosaur jr., or the Cure. There are New Zealand band which must be the latest of rock 'n roll. My friend Britt who eternally must be on the cutting edge of music (let's hope they are from New Zealand , and that they have done lots of heroin.)

So you may as well listen to that nonsense. Right now I'm listening to Allman Brothers. So that lame story can be made fun of, but I can change the song right now. For instance, I have now presented Matthew Sweet "Do It Again." Needless to say you guys suck regarding your deep meaning of making the lies about how cool I am.

Kalev Pehme's Blog: Poetry, Philosophy, Slow and Close Reading

Kalev Pehme has decided to blog. This doesn't mean that he will tell us every detail of his life. Rather it means that he will provide rich reflections on philosophy. He has offered an initial taste of what it means to blog in Pehmeian manner. Indeed, that manner is something he calls "anti-blogging."

What is an anti-blog? Mr Pehme has already indicated what it is with four slow and close readings of Leo Strauss' account of Plato's Republic--from The City and Man. In these posts he addresses important things Socratic and Platonic. In his running commentary, he stops to ask some obvious questions that are rhetorically implicit in Strauss' writing. For instance, the first piece has some instructive remarks about irony and the nature of Platonic and Socratic speech--a theme which Strauss himself makes explicit.

In sum, Mr. Pehme is providing some worthwhile blogging--or anti-blogging as he would have it.

I also like the picture of the tree lined path that he uses as the masthead. This picture is indicative of the kind of contemplative thought that one can only have while on a journey.

Check it out.

Thoughts on Our Present Discontent

The first thing that should be said in debates regarding what is good these days is that no argument is authoritative, and hence anyone bearing credentials of authority is merely another instance of the game of garnering authority through power. To be sure, one should always argue in terms of the Constitution if one is arguing a serious issue in American politics. As Tocqueville said, in America all political questions become legal questions. Likewise, if one is arguing in terms of the Catholic Church, then one should rely on doctrine, canon law, and the authority of the church, which in the end relies on papal encyclicals. But these things have become mere historical curiosities these days. One wonders if the constitution and the church as authoritative institutions are merely regnant of some antecedent belief in morality that has been destroyed by the belief that all men are created equal--or at least by a bastardized version of equality understood as relativism which is nothing other than the application of democracy to moral thought itself. This relativism, it seems, is the truth of things today.

But to return to the first thing, if the polity or the church are no longer authoritative these days then neither is anything else. This includes science--even with its demonstrative rhetoric of "studies show." It is true that the church, the polity, and the modern research institution--in terms of their own definition--allow for disagreement within themselves (and serious disagreement at that). They provided in the past the very place of disagreement. They provided a place of legitimacy for argument itself. However, nowadays those places no longer exist as a place. The polity, the church or the university are riddled with self-seeking placement, and they replicate this reality through sophistical reasons defending their power as truth. Instead of loci for serious debate and discussion, disagreement within and between these institutions has been these days securely been placed under the aegis of Hobbes's notion of the state of nature. This is a place with no common judge, and a place where each and every one can say and do what is what. Who are you to tell me what to do? becomes the mantra of this age as each person figures out what is right for his or herself. Following this Hobbesian logic, each sector of former institutional authority must Leviathan-like subdue the other children of pride. It goes without saying that in this scenario there is no truth without aspiration to absolute power.

At this point--enter the mass media. The media have become the definition of debate. They are a marketplace of ideas as Holmes had it. This situation becomes the contemporary understanding of democracy as one reads it from the New York Times--the religious ritual of those who are correct thinking as Thoreau had it. John Rawls, the good liberal that he was, tried to make a theory of democracy on this basis. He argued that there can be a modus vivendi amongst these different institutional worldviews without at the same time endorsing any comprehensive doctrine. Behind a veil of ignorance one can still come up with a common good that makes for an overlapping consensus. Yet, this consensus--overlapping or otherwise (general will?)--is merely a way of restating Hobbes's Leviathan in the technocratic language of the higher journalism, e.g. The New York Review of Each Other's Books.

I recognize that many--like Marx and Nietzsche and Freud and Foucault in their different ways--point out the impossibility of this "market" which allows for a "self" that can say what is what in relation to others. Each of these writers in his own way points out that no one is saying what is said. As Nietzsche put it, I don't think. It thinks. Perhaps this is true--but it is still the I that thinks that the I doesn't think. All these proto post-modern thinkers simply carry over the Hobbesean state of nature to new and future circumstances. What remains central to their project is that there is no common judge and each and every one can say and do what is what.

So this brings me to a conversation I had the other night with my friend Roger. We were drinking a few beers at the local watering hole. We got onto the question of happiness and how one finds it--especially in terms of human sexuality (or eros). Is there a a solution to human erotic longing? It came to light in a discussion about movies, but it was also a discussion that was interspersed with saying hello to various acquaintances, as well as to occasional comments about the typical clientele at this bar. It was a privileged position, which if the first thing is to be remembered, has no authority. In other words, we were bullshitting.

I made the point that there are no rules regarding love and lust these days. Male or female, romantic or cynic, gay or straight, traditionalist or liberationist--it is an open world. If there is a rule, it seems to be the central command of contemporary culture that we must enjoy this situation (cf. Slavoj Zizek). However, there used to be a time when the command was to follow the unwritten rules handed down from time immemorial. This old fashioned way led to all kinds of pain and suffering. The young woman had to choose safety over love. The young man had to divest himself from his charm for the boredom of matrimony. The homosexual was forced to live a life of lies. I could add others, but regardless, this is where the unwritten but nonetheless inscribed rules left one. It led to all sorts of unhappiness--and who knows if it led all kinds of "mental illness" (to use the invented term that the very last generation which seriously dealt with these tensions called it). Nonetheless, the folks that lived in terms of the old rules were the ones who fought wars, worked hard, raised families, and didn't bitch too much about their unhappiness--though their grievances were easily read between the lines in the best of their literature.

This sense of old fashioned rules is obviously not our scene these days. Old fashioned rules are shunned, even if they are missed as indicative in the various retro arty scenes. However, let me submit that it is a good thing that the old rules are gone. They led to all sorts of--once again to borrow the lingo of that last generation--neuroses. That said, the old rules prescribed behavior that was known by all, whereas the new way is anything goes. There was a good reason to get rid of the old rules, it seems to me, even if their rejection wasn't thought all the way through. The old rules required duty, self-sacrifice and hard work. The new rules were simply pleasure, freedom, and doing your own thing. The old rules made doing the right thing painful. The new rules allowed you to follow your bliss, and this was considered to be the right thing. To be sure, this following of bliss did not mean irresponsibility, but it allowed you to make it up as you went. This led to the beautiful array of human types to show themselves, but in the absence of rules there was a problem without a form to give them a material sense of what made one complete. It led to arbitrariness (on a side note, if you wonder why the TV show Lost ultimately sucked it was because of the application of the new rules of pure potentiality as arbitrary decision to things like plot and character). The new good was pure pragmatism--and on the most intimate and erotic level. The sexual revolution destroyed the old rules in the name of a free making of the rules. It wrought--amongst other things--feminism, abortion, two member working households, single moms, broken homes, doing your own thing, latch-key children, and the sensitive new age guy (i.e., the SNAG).

So, it seems to me, the sexual revolution is part and parcel of Hobbes's notion of each and every one being his or her own authority (or should I say following Nietzsche/Freud "its" own authority).

We are free to do so many things today. We have demolished those old rules. However, are we happier? I suspect that we are more confused and insecure. Those who say otherwise have either not heard the news, or are willfully blind. No one or no thing has authority over another. Remember, this is the first thing, but it is also the last thing.

The true question--given this circumstance--is whether the Leviathan has made such a situation possible (my opinion), or whether the Leviathan is our one and only future (the opinion of those who think their opinions still matter).

One must seriously study ways out of this predicament--i.e., Plato or the Bible. Either way would be better than this contemporary nonsense, but most these days would rely on their belief in therapy. Studies show, as it is said, that only therapy works. Or even better, the Prozac Nation of psycho-pharmaceuticals. If this is the solution, send me to the madhouse now!

For the time being, here the Modern Lovers speak of a norm (all irony included) with which I'm willing to live.

Beneath My Pay Grade or Above My Gay Parade?

I wonder about figures of speech. I refuse to let speech become some abstract realm above my capacity to speak meaning, but perhaps my refusal has no point. Structuralist theorists speak of polysemeny. In this way anyone's personal meaning means as much as anyone's else. This is a shame bcacuse one cannot mean what one says. It is always determined by the other. Relativism becomes the democracy of thought or vice versa.

This leads to a situation where meaning is understood in terms of what is other than intended. It is irony as way a life--like Charles Williams spoke of in The Figure of Beatrice. Regardless of one's own irony, postmodern life has become a conflict of theological perspectives none of which a thinking man wishes to hold. One has one's reason or revelation as absolute moral truth. Fuck you, if you disagree with ME--but I only mean this ironically (surely not in some Polemarchus or Carl Schmitt kinda way).

Where is the philosopher who can defuse and diffuse such dogmatic assertions of the day? No one will let you alone, but no one gives you the tools (as if they existed) to defend yourself, and all of those tools would be (as if they existed) subjective preferences anyway. When everyone is equal there is no meaning other than what the crowd speaks--as Tocqueville would have it. The crowd is impressed with what one can say above one's pay grade. If you don't like this then you can at least stick to your specialty. At the least, it will get you a job. If you can't do any of this then you must be gay.

In this way, the democratic relativistic song enjoins you to follow the gay parade because everyone else knows what this means anyway. It is simple. This is where the sexual revolution has left us. I can't speak above my pay grade--what Weber (borrowing from Goethe) called specialists without spirit--but if I must I will speak my heart, which must in advance always mean that which is idiosyncratic--which is to say that I must announce my pay grade as the gay parade. Strangely, I think such heartfelt speech is what Weber meant by the voluptuary without heart. This sucks.

Needless to say, contemporary mores are fucked up. To say the least, if you are happy today then you are part of the tyranny which assigns roles to that which you do not know. Socrates, on the other hand, spoke of eros as a god. He had a wise woman--Diotima--teach him his wisdom regarding eros. Socrates was always beneath his pay grade, and so he would be forced into the gay parade these days. Aristophanes is surely a part of this, what with his perfect halves meeting each other--this is the ideology of straights and gays alike. Socrates is truer with a ladder that rises above oneself. Aristophanes was the first accuser of Socrates--before Meletus and Anytus. Given such a scenario, no wonder Socrates was sentenced to death.

Few these days understand the erotic desire for the infinite of which Socrates speaks in Plato's Symposium. To sound unfortunately like Heidegger, the many (or the One) only know what has been taught in the detailed everyday education of stupid music. The many (or the One)--the THEY/das Man--seems not to know the music that teaches the beauty of the infinite--to borrow David Bentley Hart's felicitous phrase. One should look for music above one's pay grade and outside of the gay parade.

I hate to end with such snobbery, but where else can one end?

But who am I to speak? Please give me suggestions for music that is open to the infinite in terms of beauty rather than sublimity--and asininity.

As Husker Du sings, I'm hardly getting over it. But then I have a Lust For Life too. However, if you see me I may just Walk On By.

Thoughts on The Republic

Over at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen, one Rufus F. has some interesting thoughts on Plato's Republic. He offers good introductory reflections on important issues in the dialogue. These are hardly the most noteworthy or scholarly remarks, but Rufus demonstrates that a person can turn to a classic, albeit immensely difficult text, and see it as provocative of thought on issues of immense importance--issues such as the question of human flourishing and the difficulties that lie in the way of its achievement.

I thought I'd direct your attention to them.

The first post discusses the role of poetry in the city and in the education of the soul, as well as Socrates' call for censorship. The second post discusses the role of men and women in the city in speech. The third post discusses the analogy of city and soul, the divided line and the philosopher kings. (If you read the comments to the third post you will see some thoughts by a certain John.)

The Best Defense is a Good Offense

HERE IT IS! (Thanks Garett.)

It is Super Bowl Weekend. Who'da thunk that that who 'dat team the Saints would have ever made it this far? Here are some thoughts on football from several years back. Please remember the context of several years back in which they were written.

The best defense is a good offense.

From a football perspective, it is a hard truth to swallow. We have heard for years that the best offense is a good defense. One team must stop the other from scoring. This is the key to victory--we hear it over and over again. "Defenses win championships," it is often said.

Hence we have Pittsburgh's "Steel Curtain" (redolent of Cold War rhetoric) and the Dallas Cowboy's "Doomsday Defense" (an ambiguous name which proves that offense is somewhat important, but which is nonetheless defensive to the bitter end--and which is also a throwback term to the Cold War). Recently the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl on the basis of their defense, or so said the commentators.

I think "the best offense is a good defense" adage is simply a remnant of the Cold War--what with all its first strike and second strike strategic mentality. After all, this was the age that gave us MAD--mutually assured destruction. We must survive at all costs in a cave with scientists and big titty hot chicks, as Dr. Strangelove had it. No wonder football has such good looking cheerleaders!

To be sure, the best defense is the best offense makes a kind of sense, in that he who can survive will survive. It becomes survival at all costs, but I wonder if that is not a pyhrric victory. A football game requires victory for the team that has the most points at the end, and that is hardly pyhrric. In other words, one team wins the Super Bowl or the NCAA championship, and the other team loses. The team that was able to put up the most points wins. That team probably had the best offense.

Everyone remembers Vince Young. Who were the defensive stars on USC or UT? I'm sure they were there, but I can't remember their names. However, Matt Leinert (quarterback for USC and Heisman Trophy winner) lost the game.

I have seen football games won by defense. The sad story that is the Houston Texans actually has had several shining moments. One of those was a victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers from about two years (I almost said two tears) ago. They won the game because they were able to run two (!) interceptions back for touchdowns. In this case the offense did nothing and the defense did everything.

However, I would argue that, in this case, the defense became the offense. Offense scores points, defense prevents points from being scored. This game was an anomaly. At best, it is not wise to rely on your defense to be offense, i.e., to rely on it to win games. Better to have a good running and passing game.

It is a wonder that people still think the best offense is a good defense. I know that it is more nuanced than this, given the necessity of good field position and all that that entails. Nonetheless, the typical adage is asinine.

Football fans don't see it that way, but these are people who think (if one is to believe the commentators hired to give expert opinion) that a good analysis of a typical game is one where it is said that the reason a particular team won was because they were able to get the most points on the board. That is the very definition of victory in football. It's tautological. It's like saying the reason the equation equalled four was because there was a an antecedent two plus two.

I don't know why football fans (and commentators) try to translate real life into a game that is intransigently zero sum. It doesn't work. No doubt, in real life there is something to be said for mere survival, but in a football game victory is everything. People who spout off the usual nonsense about a good defense are trying to make football into life. They are able to do this because there is "always" next season. Moreoever, on "any given" Saturday or Sunday any team can win. But more often than not, the team that wins is the one with the best offense.

Now in real life, I think that the survivors who have mastered their defense may ultimately win out in the end. Hegel and Marx call it the victory of the slaves. The slaves have perseverance, and besides they are the ones who have made themselves through making the world as we know it. The masters just sat on their fat asses drinking mint juleps. This may all be true.

It's one reason why "democracy" is the only legitimate form of government in the world these days.

Nietszche claims that the victory of the slaves is the victory of the "last man." He's the man who only needs and desires to be entertained during Super Bowl Weekend. Is this what millennia of history have wrought? Once the world that we have built is free for the building, once the world that we live in is a world where defense is the same as offense, there need not be any more victory. At that time, we can then sit around and bitch about whether a running game or a passing game is more important. Just as long as no one scores a touchdown. But in the meantime...

what happened to the big titty hot chicks?

I think these cold warrior sons of bitches who sit around and talk about defense and such things, are no better than your run of the mill Marxists. Good Americans and Good Communists both want a world without risk. As a consequence, we get a Terrell Owens instead of a Lynn Swan, a Jerry Rice, or even a Michael Irvin. We get a Tom Brady instead of a Joe Montana or a Brett Favre. In this light, Terrell Owens is a "voluptary without heart," and Tom Brady is a "specialist without spirit." Last men all.

This is probably old age and bad taste speaking, but I had to say it. If you're still reading at this point, bravo!

All of this is a way of saying why I was against the Iraq war from the beginning. We think we can win with defense. We may have called the initial bombing campaign "Shock and Awe," but look where it has left us, viz. looking for exit strategies. We're playing defense in a game that we think is zero sum, but that our opponents think is one of survival. All the big titty bitches must be in Iraq.

I suppose in the real world defense can be a pretty good offense--but not in football.

Meanwhile the commentators speak of defense to a country that thinks the best offense is a good defense. It's time to pull out, but we've already blown our load on the belly of the middle east.

There will be an evil spawn from this fuck up.

Luckily, there is "next" Sunday!

Okay, so much of this is crudely overstated, and recent events could prove (and probably have proved) it wrong. Nonetheless, regarding football it is still correct.

Geaux Saints! Especially Drew Brees and everyone else on their offense. (Yet, one must admit that Peyton Manning is one of the best OFFENSIVE players ever to play. It will be a tough match. Let's hope for a close, high scoring, offensive game.)

Nick Lowe spoke of the best defense as a good offense when he sang "Cruel to be Kind."

Update: Here's an interesting acoustic version of the same song with Nick Lowe and Daryl Hall (alas, no Oates).

Update II: Frank Caliendo not doing what you'd think, but he says "Careful defendant, flattery will get you everywhere."