Geoff's Miscellany

A couple of days ago my wife wrote a post about becoming a morning person. Go read it. In the first paragraph she makes this observation:

I've always admired people who can get up and enjoy the early morning hours. I've admired their discipline and craved the fruits of what they enjoy--the peace and solitude and freshness of a day in its infancy. Really, there's nothing quite like the morning time. Apart from the the grogginess it brought, I have always had an appreciation for the morning...when I've woken up early enough to enjoy it.That's the kicker.

When I was younger, people would be amazed at how much I could read. But I used to work night jobs, which meant on days off or when I got home around midnight or later, I would simply read all night and sleep until about 11AM and get on with my day feeling exhausted until evening. And, btw, if I did wake up before 10AM, I was usually quite energized until the afternoon. In all seriousness, even on days when I worked mornings, I could stay up until a couple of hours before work, take a nap, and work and not feel any different than I would feel if I had slept eight hours.

Writing about this passage is something I often do with great trepidation because it sounds like I’m deradicalizing it. But here I am, rock you like a hurricane, I guess.

Text 38 Ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη, ὀφθαλμὸν ἀντὶ ὀφθαλμοῦ καὶ ὀδόντα ἀντὶ ὀδόντος. 39 ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν μὴ ἀντιστῆναι τῷ πονηρῷ· ἀλλ’ ὅστις σε ῥαπίζει εἰς τὴν δεξιὰν σιαγόνα, στρέψον αὐτῷ καὶ τὴν ἄλλην· 40 καὶ τῷ θέλοντί σοι κριθῆναι καὶ τὸν χιτῶνά σου λαβεῖν, ἄφες αὐτῷ καὶ τὸ ἱμάτιον· 41 καὶ ὅστις σε ἀγγαρεύσει μίλιον ἕν, ὕπαγε μετ’ αὐτοῦ δύο. 42 τῷ αἰτοῦντί σε δός, καὶ τὸν θέλοντα ἀπὸ σοῦ δανίσασθαι μὴ ἀποστραφῇς.

Over at his blog, Mike Bird, posted this quote from Alvin Plantinga’s tome Warranted Christian Belief:

We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch’. When the term is used in this way, no definition of it is ordinarily given. (If you called someone a sumbitch, would you feel obliged first to define the term?) Still, there is a bit more to the meaning of ‘fundamentalist’ (in this widely current use): it isn’t simply a term of abuse. In addition to its emotive force, it does have some cognitive content, and ordinarily denotes relatively conservative theological views. That makes it more like ‘stupid sumbitch’ (or maybe ‘fascist sumbitch’?) than ‘sumbitch’ simpliciter. It isn’t exactly like that term either, however, because its cognitive content can expand and contract on demand; its content seems to depend on who is using it. In the mouths of certain liberal theologians, for example, it tends to denote any who accept traditional Christianity, including Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Barth; in the mouths of devout secularists like Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett, it tends to denote anyone who believes there is such a person as God. The explanation is that the term has a certain indexical element: its cognitive content is given by the phrase ‘considerably to the right, theologically speaking, of me and my enlightened friends.’ The full meaning of the term, therefore (in this use), can be given by something like ‘stupid sumbitch whose theological opinions are considerably to the right of mine’.

Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: 2000),  245.

This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. “The best” are no longer able to fully engage, while “the worst” engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalists. It is here that Yeats’s diagnosis falls short of the present predicament: the passionate intensity of a mob bears witness to a lack of true conviction. Deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction-their violent outbursts are proof of it. How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only make them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that secretly they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true “racist” conviction of one’s own superiority.”

Here is a metal-esque song that really only exists to listen to prior to or during intense exercise:

I highly recommend this song for getting pumped up for a heavy set of squats or dead lift, but it’s also a good “getting to the gym by car” song.

Any other gym music recommendations?

Thing to remember for this read: Mindset is the collection of attitudes and processes one uses to evaluate oneself or the circumstances of life.

You probably enjoy a good compliment. I do. I love them. I can be like Sherlock Holmes when it comes to compliments or worse, like Mark Twain:

Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat. - Mark Twain - Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906

Studies of seventh grade math students, as well as college students in calculus and computer science, revealed a gender gap in performance, but only for those females who believed math ability was a gift. These are the girls who drop out of the economics classes -- and who, as women, may avoid working in areas that require a strong growth mindset, like economics, math and computer science.

I’m above calling my son names – even Yiddish ones – but not always able to resist doling out disappointment, even for tiny mistakes like dropping a hot dog. I felt the words stepping up to the batter’s box in my head.

“Come on!”

When I was younger I really like the song Paint it Black. I now almost never listen to the radio, but right after telling my wife that I liked it as a kid, it came on when I turned the radio on on a lark the next day. Then later that day it came on the radio at the gym. I listened to it when I did my heaviest set on dead lift.

One of the most interesting features of the book of Proverbs is that despite the fact that the Proverbs themselves try to help the individual to be oriented toward others, the book appeals primarily to self-interest. This is very important. I’ll probably write more about it later (I still need to finish my series on the common topics). But when our self-interest is appealed to, our desire to survive, thrive, and experience happiness Christians often feel embarrassed or feel the need to correct the Bible with comments like, “Jesus offers these gifts, but really we should be self-less.” Check out the Prologue to Proverbs:

One of my favorite poems is Paradise Lost. Naturally, this means that I enjoy The Desert is on Fire by Murder by Death.

The song takes place in a concept album wherein the devil was visiting a bar in Mexico and tried to make a few extra bucks on a drug deal. The other dealer double crosses him and shoots him in the back. When the devil gets out of prison he goes on a rampage against the entire village and when he confronts the villagers, he reminds them, “I fought off angels with my hands back, I set the heavens on fire.” It’s an exciting song with a fairly epic tone. If you want to know how the story ends you’ll need to listen to the whole album.

One of the persistent themes of recent psychological literature on success is the inner voice. Thought it has many names, the inner voice describes sort of things we tell ourselves to psych ourselves up, out, or distract ourselves from ourselves. The Christian tradition, especially the Puritan and Greek Orthodox branches of soul care, did not leave these sorts of questions out. For examples of writing about using the inner monolog to grow in virtue I highly recommend the works of Evagrius of Pontus and, Thomas Brooks, and Richard Baxter.

Introduction

Anyhow, well over a year later, I was working on a writing project (still am) and was looking for a more practical application of Carol Dweck’s mindset ideas that I had found in her book on motivation in education. In the process, I came across Mike Cernovich’s book Gorilla Mindset. It had a title that seemed cheesy, although most people want the things it claims to provide. I found, a preview on Scribd (or was it a pirated version?). After I looked through the exercises at the end of each chapter and saw how similar they were in design to the ones I was writing for something else, I went ahead and bought a kindle edition of the book. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the book. It didn’t merely provide a model for what I was trying to do myself, but it provided legitimately helpful insight into improving one’s life and happiness.