Walker Percy Wednesday 95

walker percy

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Why did good married couples look so glum? Old couples, young couples, thirty-five-year-old Atlanta couples in condos, sixty-five-year-old Ohio couples in villas, each as glum as if one had got stuck with the other at a cocktail party for two hours. Two hours? Ten years! Thirty years!

*****

In his strange new mood he made the following observation: people notice very little indeed, ghost-ridden as they are by themselves. You have to be bleeding from the mouth or throwing a fit for them to take notice. Otherwise, anything you do is no more or less than another part of the world they have to deal with, poor souls.

*****

You want to know what a man is? I’ll tell you. A man is born between an asshole and a peehole. He eats, sleeps, shits, fucks, works, gets old, and dies. And that’s all he does. That’s what a man is.

*****

My equally belated discovery is the total failure, recklessness, and assholedness of people in general and in particular just those people I had looked to.

*****

So much for you. My quarrel with the others can be summed up as a growing disgust with two classes of people. These two classes between them exhaust the class of people in general. That is to say, there are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless.
My belated discovery of the bankruptcy of both classes has made it possible for me to take action. Better late than never.

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Complexity and Stupidity

sam harris

Catching up on Sam Harris’ podcasts — this one is of particular interest. Sam’s guest, David Krakauer, I recall from taking the debut Santa Fe Institute freebie course a few years back run by the excellent Melanie Mitchell. Do check out the SFI’s free programmes, notably SFI’s Complexity Explorer: it beats many a fee-paying university course. In any event, if you really want to become a truly educated person, you no longer need to be subjected to the rationalistically inclined ideologues that plague the humanities and the social sciences, ideologues that will ensure that you are more stupid (i.e. narrow) than when you began their course. Where there is some semblance of intellectual honesty, it still behooves one to supplement your course work with stuff you won’t find on any formal syllabus — and complexity studies fulfills this multidisciplinary evidence-based approach in spades by cutting across economics, sociology, social epistemology, philosophy of social science, computational intelligence and indeed philosophy at large. As David Krakauer points out, uncertainty is pregnant with possibility and this is psychologically discomforting to the closed-minded rationalist technocrats and theoreticians who fail to grasp social complexity: they are under the profound delusion that all can and must be solved without any sense of generating worse unintended consequences.

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The most influential chat show you’ve never heard of

Dave Rubin

We live in a time when being dumb is reward and being smart is counter-culture.

If one makes a claim for harbouring a disinterested approach to truth, then one needs to explore ideas beyond one’s ideological reservation, most of which have long since become barren and infertile through infelicitous activity. It used to be that being liberal was punkishly socially transgressive, pointing out social incoherencies in a given culture and offering genuine (not gestural) remedies. Now so-called “liberals” are anything but — they are REGRESSIVE and ILLIBERAL driven by the inherent superficiality and attendant divisiveness of identity politics.

The Rubin Report is not a vehicle for Dave Rubin — as with many of us that used to comprise a broad centre, he is concerned by the loss of liberal values (intellectual diversity). We are now caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand we have the “regressive” Left and THEIR unwanted newly-born defective baby whose name cannot be mentioned. The Right fills the role of the absent father, having not adequately taken on their epistemic responsibility. To rework John Kennedy Toole’s phrase from A Confederacy of Dunces the unwanted baby is the product of a particularly weak conception on the part of the father whose sperm was emitted in a rather offhand manner — hence they are deemed, in internet parlance, as “cucks.” These two parents frame the shit-storm we find ourselves in.

Don’t be fooled by the word “chat” — The Ruben Report is not some ubiquitous showbiz chat show where someone is on for eight minutes plugging the obligatory film or book, wrapped up in unchallenging soft sparkling repartee and “well-rehearsed spontaneity”. Of course the guests do have books and films but the discussion is genuinely conversational, wide-ranging and most importantly substantive. The guests do not agree on everything — that’s the point. The common cause, though, is the key liberal value of free speech which is conspicuously absent from the parti pris reservation style of thinking that deeply infects mainstream media and their complicitous partners — the political establishment (Right and Left), a whole array of associated vested interests, assisted by the cowardly and disingenuous sniping from the Platonic rationalist generals and their minions on academic reservations.

Now more than ever when we are drowning in a sea of disinformation, the only thing we have (or we’ve ever had) to test the veracity of ideas, is free speech — however unpalatable some of it might be. It’s an epistemic virtue that underpins civil society and Enlightenment values.

Dave, along with Gad Saad and others, is fighting the good fight for liberal values. If you have any regard for truth, you need to expose yourself to a whole range of perspectives, and not get hung up on the branding of demonization. Along with Dave’s programme check out the following channels for thoughtful and nuanced discussion that you won’t get on TV or the traditional press. Of course, it will require putting some time in and not lazily regurgitating (virtue-signaling) some empirically faulty headline. As per Dave’s graphic below, I find that the most interesting people are those that break the stereotype, are independent thinkers, cosmopolitan but not globalist, liberal in experience and high Tory as to what constitutes knowledge, an idea wonderfully articulated by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

The Rubin Report

The Saad Truth

Blogging Heads

Sam Harris

The Factual Feminist

DaveRubinIdentityPolitics

Ip Chun

wing chun

Born on this day and still going. I had the privilege of chi sao‘ing with sigung (master’s master) some 15 years ago in London and afterwards bumming a smoke from him outside. It’s also been three years since the loss of one of my sifus.

Problems at the Intersection of Aesthetics and Ethics

wittgenstein

The very excellent Seth Vannatta in Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship. I’d suggest that readers also think about Wittgenstein’s idea in the Tractatus that ethics and aesthetics are one — on which much has been written. I’d also refer readers to the collection of essays entitled Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection.

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Oakeshott on friendship

michael oakeshott

giphy

Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions; he is somebody who engages the imagination, who excites contemplation, who provokes interest, sympathy, delight and loyalty simply on account of the relationship entered into. One friend cannot replace another; there is all the difference in the world between the death of a friend and the retirement of one’s tailor from business. The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not “progressive.” And what is true of friendship is not less true of other experiences – of patriotism, for example, and of conversation – each of which demands a conservative disposition as a condition of its enjoyment.

— On Being Conservative, Rationalism in Politics

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Largest Private Collection of Islamic Art

art

It’s one of those delicious cultural ironies (of course there are a few other examples) that a significant amount of Islamic art preservation (and more besides) is down to one Nasser Khalili, a Jewish Iranian-born academic and former art dealer.

Ownership is nothing but a myth, we are only a temporary custodian of what we believe we own

About Nasser D. Khalili

Khalili Collections

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Walker Percy Wednesday 94

walker percy

percycovercroppeaIs this an age of belief, he reflected, a great renaissance of faith after a period of crass materialism, atheism, agnosticism, liberalism, scientism? Or is it an age of madness in which everyone believes everything? Which?

Like many Californians, she knew how to expand the particular into the general, turn a hobby into a religion, and what’s more make it credible. It was easy to believe her and see her in the surf, a blond not-so-young Juno, waves foaming at her knees, her swim-coach tank suit well worn and dry, the hem slightly frayed over her strong dark marbled legs, launch happy babes into the Pacific, the Aquarians of a new age. Who knows? Maybe she was right: going back where we came from, back to the primal sea. That was her California principle, leaving the sad failed land life behind and leaving it soon enough and young enough before it screwed you up for good, and going back to the original environment, the ocean (which had the same salt content as blood and the amniotic fluid where we were happy), and, age ten months to ten years to a hundred, frolic like porpoises in the warm Cretaceous sea.

Something was happening. Suddenly, with a little surge of satisfaction under his belt, he knew what it was. Everything had the look about it of coming to an end. There was nothing more he wished to say to the Cupps. There was nothing more for them to say to him. Things do come to an end.

It was the very sort of place, a nondescript weedy triangular public pubic sort of place, to make a sort of love or to die a sort of death.
The silence of the cloud seemed to press in upon the house like cotton.
Did you not then believe, old mole, that these two things alone are real, loving and dying, and since one is so much like the other and there is so little of the one, in the end there remained only the other?
Silence.

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Complexity Explained

complexity

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With my good chum Péter Érdi at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers mega shindig. Check out Peter’s excellent book (the title is as bold as Dennett’s Consciousness Explained) and now that Peter is head honcho for Cognitive Systems Research consider submitting something to them — it’s a very ecumenical journal with a nice balance between the philosophical and the empirical.

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