Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for June 2017

I loved Adam West’s Batman

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The slap stick Batman of the 1960s is difficult for many to appreciate unless they’re signalling a blasé millennial irony, but as a boy I loved it. I also liked Keaton’s eccentric, deranged, yet god-like Batman. But the omni-competent, James Bond like, self-absorbed to the point of egomania, and utterly goofy Batman of Adam West was simply a joy for me. In honor of Adam West, here are a few favorite clips:


In this clip, Batman presciently described the results of the 2016 presidential campaign process.

This clip needs no explanation.

In my experience, this is literally true.

Batman can dance like no other, a true danse macabre.

Batman, without a hint of sarcasm, irony, or self-awareness opines that “this strange mixing of minds may be the single greatest service ever performed for man.”

I keep reading that his Batman was the best Batman. I disagree. But he was the Batman we needed.

John Piper Doesn’t Understand Strength Training

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In the essay compilation Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, John Piper quizzically wrote:

Consider what is lost when women attempt to assume a more masculine role by appearing physically muscular and aggressive. It is true that there is something sexually stimulating about a muscular, scantily clad young woman pumping iron in a health club. But no woman should be encouraged by this fact. For it probably means the sexual encounter that such an image would lead to is something very hasty and volatile, and in the long run unsatisfying. The image of a masculine musculature may beget arousal in a man, but it does not beget several hours of moonlight walking with significant, caring conversation. The more women can arouse men by doing typically masculine things, the less they can count on receiving from men a sensitivity to typically feminine needs. Mature masculinity will not be reduced to raw desire in sexual relations. It remains alert to the deeper personal needs of a woman and mingles strength and tenderness to make her joy complete. (RECOVERING BIBLICAL MANHOOD & WOMANHOOD, 40-41)

A lot could be said. Suffice to say, I’ve learned a lot from John Piper through the years and when you write that much you’re bound to say strange things (I revel in saying strange things) but this is just weird.

Briefly, I know many women who lift weights. None of them are attempting to be more masculine (I’m sure there’s some of that in Crossfit circles). Most of them are staving off ageing, death, injury, weakness, and so-on. They’re also adding a degree of controllable trauma to their lives in order to avoid an overly plush life.

I obviously agree with some elements in Piper’s book, as I think sex differences are real and those differences matter for happiness in marriage, work, politics, and friendship. But it’s hard to imagine that finishing it would be worthwhile.

Neurotic worldviews and their cure

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An Anxious Worldview

In Alfred Adler‘s essay, The Neurotic’s Picture of the World: A Case Study, he describes the pampered lifestyle of the neurotic:

Extreme discouragement, continuing doubt, hypersensitivity, impatience, exaggerated emotion, and phenomena of retreat, and physical and psychic disturbances showing the signs of weakness and need for support are always evidence that a neurotic patient has not yet abandoned his early-acquired pampered life style. These show that a patient endowed with a comparatively small degree of activity, and not possessing sufficient social interest, has pictured to himself a world in which he is entitled to be first in everything.

Later, when such a favorable situation does not obtain for him, he is not prepared to render any response other than a more or less spiteful accusation of other people, of life, of his parents. This limitation of his activity to a small circle results in his leaving important questions unanswered, and when he is brought face to face with a problem which he is not prepared to cope with, he suffers a shock and responds with a shock reaction. (Superiority and Social Interest 98)

The Neurotic in Scripture

Adler describes the man who won’t accept reality because he has a worldview in which he is secretly the best, the secret king. Sadly, he is unaware that this reality is purely imagined. When contrary evidence arises, he blames everybody but himself. While this constellation of traits can be associated with personality, it can also arise from poor habits of thought and action.  It reminds me of Cain‘s approach to life in Genesis 4, the disciples wanting Jesus to put them in charge, the various potential disciples who would only follow Jesus if Jesus did things their way, or Nabal when he discovered that his wife protected him from David. When we want the world to bend to our will without accepting it first as it is, then it will break us. Not only so, but if we want excellence without effort, we will be frustrated at every turn.

The Neurotic Today

In modern life, political pundits or protesters who cannot emotionally cope with evidence against their ideas (even if they’re right despite that evidence!) seem to fit this type. It’s similar to the student who resents the need for effort to achieve excellence, the parent who resents their children for being imperfect, and so-on. I suspect that the hyper-reality of the internet exacerbates this personality type and develops it in those who otherwise would not experience these negative traits. Dallas Willard once defined reality as, “What you run into when you’re wrong.” The secret king won’t change his mind when this happens, but doubles down. It’s a sad way to live, but it’s a temptation most of us face.

How to stop resenting the world

Those who resent the world do so because its truth doesn’t align with their beliefs about how it ought to function. The tendency is to act on the basis of how we wish the world was before we see what it actually is. Like Abel in Genesis 4, we have to accept that there is chaos, understand fully what that chaos is, and then use it to our advantage to create order (there are weeds…sheep eat weeds!).

According to Proverbs, wisdom is acquired by being exposed to the truth of the world, accepting that truth, and then acting:

  1. The tongue of the wise commends knowledge, but the mouths of fools pour out folly.
    (Proverbs 15:2 ESV)
  2. The heart of him who has understanding seeks knowledge, but the mouths of fools feed on folly. (Proverbs 15:14 ESV)

The wise seeks to understand the world, the fool needs falsehood. Adler, I think, helps us understand why? The fool feeds on folly to maintain his self-image. To overcome this state of being, you must seek and speak the truth as far as you understand it and be open to criticism every single time.

 

 

Cain and Abel: An Interesting Reading

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In almost any commentary from the last century, the Cain and Abel story in Genesis 4 is typically explained as a justification for/explanation of the conflict between agricultural and nomadic life. There’s something to this, but it’s not merely about two modes of food production. The distinction is between two approaches to ethics.

Cain and Abel

When you commentaries enough you just kinda think: Here we go again. I’ve never really read it explained beyond the surface distinction. But in The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture by Yoram Hazony, he explained the distinction in terms of the ethic represented by the two characters. Here it is in full:

The life of the farmer. 

Cain has piously accepted the curse on the soil, and God’s having sent Adam to work the soil, as unchallengeable. His response is to submit, as his father did before him. And within the framework of this submission, he initiates ways of giving up what little he has as an offer of thanksgiving. In the eyes of the biblical author, Cain represents the life of the farmer, the life of pious submission, obeying in gratitude the custom that has been handed down, which alone provides bread so that man may live.

The life of the shepherd.

Abel takes the curse on the soil as a fact, but not as one that possesses any intrinsic merit, so that it should command his allegiance. The fact that God has decreed it, and that his father has submitted to it, does not make it good. His response is the opposite of submission: He resists with ingenuity and daring, risking the anger of man and God to secure the improvement for himself and for his children. Abel represents the life of the shepherd, which is a life of dissent and initiative, whose aim is to find the good life for man, which is presumed to be God’s true will. (108)

Hazony goes on to observe that while God did not command shepherding, God did make man to be good. God told downcast Cain, “If you do well, won’t you be lifted up? (108)” Meaning, “If you have a problem with the world, make the best of it, bucko!”

Hazony’s Omission

Some details in Genesis that he left out make Hazony’s argument tighter. God made man “very good” and commanded man to subdue the earth. So, it doesn’t seem like God wanted man to submit directly to the curse. Instead, he wanted humanity to continue the mission from Genesis 1. The curse did not nullify God’s purpose for creation, it simply made it more difficult to obtain.

It’s Everybody’s Job

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I try to stay off Twitter except for brief times I’ll allow myself to play on it a few days in a row. The temptation to troll is too great for me and the medium has become less fun as people only tend to interact with you if you’re famous or to humiliate you. But I do follw a few feeds as a part of my morning reading. Geoffrey Miller, author of Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior and The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature is an entertaining and informative part of that ritual. A few days weeks back he produced this tweet:

Monday morning, and we all go back to work. We do different jobs, but they’re all really the same job: protect and nurture Civilization. pic.twitter.com/kWVXZOaVBF

— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) May 15, 2017

Over all I agree with this. The bigger question is whether or not our minds are tailored to think on such a grand scale. I think we’re probably not, but if we think on a local, interpersonal scale, we consequently build civilization. Also, from the intellectual framework Miller uses, it’s hard to say why one value (civilization vs individual hedonic pursuit) is objectively better than another. Suicide bombers and Elon Musk are both behaving, as one might put it, as they’ve been selected to. From the point of view of most people, the version of civilization without suicide bombers is best. And indeed, from the point of view of the suicide bombers, so is their vision of civilization (a world in which they’ve been atomized is the world they’ve chosen). Both visions seems self-evident to those who choose them. What then?

From a Christian point of view, seeking the good of civilization, even as an outsider is an imperative:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jeremiah 29:5-7 ESV)

In other words, the imperatives of Genesis 1-2 apply not only to one’s personal pursuit of the good life, but also to the pursuit of civilization over barbarism. While one’s own welfare might be the ultimate goal (the Israelite’s own welfare is the rhetorical hook in the passage), the penultimate goal is the maintenance of civilization itself, even if one finds elements of that culture objectionable.

How to kill a man while he yet lives

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One of the most hilarious results of the last two years of ridiculous media antics was the rise of the word “cuck”* as an insult. But why was it so effective? From an evo-psych point of view (evo-psych may be false in theoretical foundation…but it’s observations are pretty good) one might say that your soul is your consciousness. Your consciousness is the feedback loop for responding to phenomena in a fashion that makes bodily life efficient, pleasant, and reproductively successful. In other words, your soul/existence is deeply connected to your need to reproduce. And your immorality, as an organism, is dependent upon your reproduction. And so from a purely naturalistic point of view (which is incomplete but not untrue) a man’s existential import, sense of meaning, and immorality is found in his allocation of resources for his family. And so the biggest blow to a man would be the person he trusts most to give him immortality (a woman) deceptively diverting his resources to another man’s immortality (soul). With that in mind, read this tragedy:

“The DNA testing lab said they were really sorry, my heart broke,” Jamie told The Liverpool Echo, recalling when he discovered a zero percent DNA match.

“I dropped to my knees, and picked up who I thought was my baby daughter, who was almost two years old at this stage.”

As he handed over the little girl to Darcy’s grandparents, never to see her again, the toddler innocently said, “Bye bye, daddy”.

“That broke me,” he admitted.

The idea that your self, which is impossible to divorce from your perceived purpose in life, has been rendered utterly useless with respect to that purpose by the person who most trust would be utterly devastating. Men and women have found countless ways to hurt each other, but this sort of thing has to be in the top three.

 

*As an insult it is terse, forceful, and can be said with deep disdain. These are all good features, the best. Not only so, but it feeds on the existential fear outlined in my post by applying it by analogy to people who defer to others to the point that their worldview, aims, and aspirations are sacrificed regardless of how good, noble, or true those things are. A Christian, for instance, who in the face of disagreement with a Buddhist, won’t say, “I think this is true” for fear of offense is, by definition, a cuck. They give their emotional and social capital to views at odds with their own.

Featured Picture from: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/1-in-50-british-men-are-unknowingly-raising-a-child-which-isnt-theirs-research-suggests-a6971901.html