Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for November 2017

Remembering: Part 2

by Leave a Comment

Previously, I mentioned the bizarre timing. 

Two years ago, around the end of October, I ran into a friend at the bookstore. He was bandaged and seemed rather disheveled. He was wearing a hospital bracelet. A few days or weeks later (I can’t remember), his wife called to let me know that he had disappeared. I figured that he was as good as dead. And so for the past two years, I listen to some of the music he wrote in November and I think briefly about our friendship, what I learned, what I could do better in current friendships, and pray for his family, etc. 

Now, his disappearance could have meant anything. He possessed a powerful intellect. His desk in his home was always riddled with strange old electronic devices he would repair: oscilloscopes, out of production media players, decaying monosynths, disassembled miscellany, and disorganized sundries, etc. But he also had great facility with learning languages, very difficult mathematics, music history/theory, and a vast knowledge of philosophy, theology, the occult, and Jungian psychology. He knew chemistry and sometimes did impressive tricks. And he had a knack for surviving in the wild. His never-ending curiosity was unnerving. But certain desires that drive people can becoming so consuming that they destroy rather than enliven, his was for knowledge. As he would say, unchecked desire could dissolve rather than coagulate.

He always reminded me of Andy Kaufman. He loved the eccentric and would happily take a joke too far just because he enjoyed it. In high school, the song “The Great Beyond” would remind me of him as much as of Kaufman. Part of why I became friends with him guy was our similar sense of the absurd. We were in a band called ECP, the Exploding Chaos Parade. With the exception for four or five people whose opinion he really valued, he was immune to group norms. That immunity to the opinions of others is very freeing.

While I was writing the other post, I had this sudden hopeful thought: what if he came back…what a train wreck that would be, but he’d be alive, be there for his kids (in some capacity) and probably have some wild stories. My natural pessimism reminded me that this isn’t a movie. Anyway, his wife called me a week later, to the day, to tell me his remains had been found.

But what was weird about it all was the day I ran into him, prior to his disappearance, we talked about Carl Jung’s book Synchronicity and potential overlap with Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of morphic resonance. Synchronicity is Jung’s term for coincidences which are not causally related, yet are meaningfully connected. That’s what made the timing of the phone call, the text, and the delayed moment of remembrance of my other friend all so bizarre.

Here’s an example of his music: 

 

Here is an absurdist collage he made for reasons he didn’t even know:

I don’t mean to romanticize my friend. He was a broken man. Everybody is haunted by demons, may God give us the strength to face them. 

Eric Johnson’s Proposal for Christian Reading

by Leave a Comment

 

Eric L. Johnson, Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal[1]

Below is a summary of Johnson’s rules for Christian reading. It’s a useful part of his book. Because these are my own words, anything poorly stated is my own fault, not Johnson’s.

  1. The goal of Christian reading, even leisure reading, is conformity to Christ. Therefore what and how we read matter.
  2. The Holy Spirit is the Christian reading light. This metaphor indicates that while reading, the Christian is cooperating with the Holy Spirit in coming to have self-knowledge, knowledge about what is being read, knowledge about the author, knowledge about the world, and knowledge about God.
  3. New Christians should ask wise guides for help in reading, both what to read, and how to understand it.
  4. There is a natural hierarchy in the texts we read:
    1. The canon of Scripture.
    2. Classic texts of the Christian traditions.
    3. Other quality texts (I would add, classical texts of one’s national, ethnic, or intellectual tradition).
    4. Inferior texts that aren’t worth reading.
    5. Bad texts which draw the readers from what is true, good, or beautiful.
    6. Banned texts, some texts are simply justifiably censured and censored.
  5. Non-Canonical texts need to be read with trust and suspicion.
  6. Reading non-Christian texts wisely increases wisdom and is therefore worthwhile.

References

[1] Eric L. Johnson, Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal (InterVarsity Press, 2007), 222-226.

Vice Promotes Vices?

by Leave a Comment

I don’t make it a habit of reading Vice magazine. But I clicked a link today that referenced a recently released study I had read a few months ago. The author let it be known that her whole point was to try to demonize male self-improvement by associating all masculinity with the dreaded Trumppernaut. But she also made several basic errors, like implicitly supporting socialism, failing to observe that the results aren’t indicative of individual character but policy preferences, or that other things like education among net-contributors also predicts aversion to wealth redistribution. Anyway, when my eyes flitted away from the cacophony of disconnected claims clustered around interview quotes, I saw several Vice headlines: 

Gym Bros More Likely to be Right-Wing Assholes, Science Confirms

Why Smart People Are Lazier than Their Dumb Friends

Only Stupid People Have Lots of Friends

It’s doubtful that with titles like these, the articles in question are not similarly riddled with basic errors. But what’s more interesting is that every other article is about how some apparently innate trait like IQ or gender makes you better than people who work hard, go to the gym, use their time effectively, and so-on. It’s like the whole point of the website is to confirm people in their worst traits and to inculcate in them a fixed mindset. Sad.

 

Goals, Systems, or Virtues?

by Leave a Comment

Scott Adams is of the opinion that goals are for losers and systems are for winners. The reasoning is that goals make it psychologically easy to stop doing everything it took to achieve them once you achieve them (this problem is the main point of the book The Slight Edge). But not only so, goals make it harder to do the needful thing, because every day you haven’t achieved your goal, wake up defeated. So he recommends systems, daily/weekly, monthly tasks that move you in a positive direction regardless of the final outcome. 

This seems right. But, sometimes goals are very important. You might really want to buy a home, dunk a basketball, or make straight A’s. Or you might need to lose weight or get out of debt. So making a goal and achieving it might be very valuable. There are two options. One, change what you desire. Or two, create systems that will take you in the direction of your goal, but only dwell on the systems, not on the end goal (some research literature says that visualizing goal oriented tasks is more valuable than visualizing goal achievement). If you take option 2, I think there is a valuable middle step that gives you option 1 as well. 

I think that between goals and systems is the sort of person you wish to become. In other words, between winning races and training routines is “the sort of person who is good at making training routines and running faster than I used to run.” William Irvine, in A guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, explains the concept of internalizing goals. The Stoics tried to make their sense of peace and joy depend not on outcomes or even task completion, but rather the virtue acquired. And so it’s not just that you implement a system to win races or even that you win them. It’s that you overcome yourself by attaining the virtue of self-mastery with respect to running. So the pattern is something like this:

  1. Determine what you want to do.
  2. Ask yourself if you want to become the sort of person who can do that thing. In other words, is it valuable to be that sort of person even if I do not attain the goal.
  3. Then design a system to make it happen.

Any thoughts?

The American Creed

by Leave a Comment

While I am a Christian and therefore find allegiance to the kingdom of God, the person of Christ, my family, and personal virtue to trump loyalty to a nation or a state, I still really love being American. I went through a brief phase where my interest in Anabaptist theology and concerns for the dangers of statist loyalty and patriotic idolatry caused me to through out any concept of national identity with its abuses. That’s what Seneca and many of the early church fathers did with anger, it’s dangerous, so root it all out. But I do love America. I am, as David Bentley Hart says of himself, something of an american chauvinist. And so this closing salvo from Paul Johnson’s book, A History of the American People was touching to me, if not naive in some respects (I typed it because I wanted the passage to stick in my mind, any errors below are my own). It’s worth reading without my rambling reflections beneath it: 

“…[T]he story of America is essentially one of difficulties being overcome by intelligence and skill, by faith and strength of purpose, by courage and persistence. America today, with its 260 million people, its splendid cities, its vast wealth, and its unrivaled power, is a human achievement without parallel. That achievement-the transformation of a mostly uninhabited wilderness into the supreme national artifact of history-did not come about without heroic sacrifice and great sufferings stoically endured, many costly failures, huge disappointments, defeats, and tragedies. There have indeed been many set-backs in 400 years of American history. As we have seen, many unresolved problems, some of daunting size, remain. But the Americans are, above all, a problem-solving people. They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar to and dominate. The will not give up. Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency, and their democratic skills, they will attack again and again the ills in their society, until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed.  So the ship of state sails on, and mankind still continues to watch its progress, with wonder and amazement and sometimes apprehension, as it moves into the unknown waters of the 21st century and the third millennium. The great American republican experiment is still the cynosure of the world’s eyes. It is still the first, best hope for the human race. Looking back on its past, and forward into its future, the auguries are that it will not disappoint an expectant humanity. (History of the American People 976)

Johnson’s remarkable paean to the American people only indirectly references the government. Instead it is largely about the cultural virtues that typify Americans, broadly. Some of his language is nearly numinous in nature, but it need not be taken that way. In a civic sense, America is exceptional. The question is whether his optimism will be proven well-founded or flimsy.

I think it is stupid for us, as a nation, to look to our past and reject it. To do so is to be lost. But many do just that, and like the baptists who reject church tradition they lose their way in the waves of the culture.

An interesting question to ask for Christians who read passages like the one above is this: are there cultural tools for Christian spiritual formation? Just as each culture has unique combinations of vices, so might each have unique combinations of virtues? For instance, certain cultural emphases might coinhere with the gospel in such a way as to help it be understood even more. My suspicion is that American culture focused a great deal on industriousness and problem solving. This can be seen in technological advancements and in the fact that a form of stoic pragmatist individualism seems to have been our chief philosophical contribution (Emerson and James). And so is there a version of the American creed that is naturally ennobling for American Christians without appealing to baser forms of ‘my country is never wrong’ patriotism? I think so. The idea that Christians tend to believe in ‘America: Right or Wrong’ is silly on its face as many Americans fear that abortion is bringing America under God’s wrath precisely because America is wrong to allow it. 

The Pincer Attack

by Leave a Comment

One of the mostly commonly utilized conceptual weapons in the rhetorical attack on being a normal person is ‘sexual fluidity.’

In a nutshell: “Sexual fluidity is one or more changes in sexuality or sexual identity (sometimes known as sexual orientation identity).”  It’s a favorite concept among third wave feminists, especially those who argue against hetero-normativity (which is another way of saying, ‘reproductively viable intercourse’). It is especially important to these theorizers because sexual fluidity is allegedly very common among women and therefore central to female experience. I suspect it’s actually common due to the difficulty some feminist theorists have finding partners of the opposite sex. 

Anyway, recent findings contradict this notion. One finding inverts a major feminist theory, the other is more sobering.

In the first instance, it turns out that sexual fluidity, if it exists at all, may have evolved due to polygynous household arrangements. The idea is that sexually fluid women were less likely to be competitive if they found one another sexually attractive: 

“…women may have been evolutionarily designed to be sexually fluid in order to allow them to have sex with their cowives in polygynous marriage and thus reduce conflict and tension inherent in such marriage.”

And so women with such propensities supposedly remained in polygynous households longer (see Genesis 16:6), they had more children, and their children survived. Incidentally, unrestrained sexual behavior favors a small number of men in the modern world. So, on college campuses, a much smaller percentage of male students is sexually active with multiple partners from a significantly larger pool of female students who are active with multiple partners. And while this isn’t a polygnous marriage, it would be analogous to the circumstances under which alleged sexual fluidity evolved (multiple female cooperating for the opportunity to have children with resource/charisma rich males). In other words, sexual fluidity is just a way for the patriarchy to have multiple women and for women to have more children. It’s not actually a radical idea against the sexual order. 

In the second place, it appears to be much more rare than previously believed. “The present paper reviews longitudinal studies on sexual attraction which indicate that the great majority of women do not have a fluid sexuality, but have instead stable attractions over time.”

Haha, #science. And etc.