Walker Percy Wednesday 93

walker percy

percycovercroppea

Lewis knew a great many things, could read signs like an Indian but unlike an Indian he did not know what he could not do. He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn’t. He was a serious but dazed reader. He read Dante and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Freud. He read modern poetry and books on psychiatry. He had taken a degree in English, taught English, fought in a war, returned to teach English, couldn’t, decided to farm, bought a goat farm, managed a Confederate museum in a cave on his property, wrote poetry, went broke, became a golf pro. Lewis showed him some of his poetry once. It was not good. There was one poem called “New Moon over Khe Sanh,” which was typed in the shape of a new moon:

Screen Shot 2016-07-19 at 11.41.10 AMHow could Lewis who could locate others so well, so misplace himself? How could he read signs and people so well, yet want to be a third-rate Rupert Brooke with his rendezvous with death at Khe Sanh? Why would he even want to be a first-rate Rupert Brooke? On the other hand, what was Lewis supposed to do? be an Indian scout? goatherd? English teacher? golf pro? run a Confederate cave? Lewis didn’t seem to know. But what was good about him was that he remained himself despite himself. Books had not spoiled him. He knew a great deal he hadn’t learned from books. The trouble was he didn’t set store by it.

*****

If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?
No, Lewis was even more demented than the believers. Unbelieving Lewis read Dante for the structure. At least, believers were consistent. They might think Dante is a restaurant in Asheville but they don’t read Marx for structure.

*****

Wasn’t it possible to believe in God like Pascal’s cold-blooded bettor, because there was everything to gain if you were right and nothing to lose if you were wrong?

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The wonders of the Ethiopian cuisine

gastronomy

These days I have found Ethiopian cuisine to be the most consistently delicious, generous and well-priced than any other. I haven’t been able to find a suitable cookbook yet but here is a series on Ethiopian cooking broadcast on the Israeli Educational Television. While I don’t understand much, it doesn’t matter: it will suffice until I can get my hands on an English cookbook. The first time I tried Ethiopian was in Israel some 30 years ago but now is pretty much widely available throughout in North America and in some of the most unlikely places. If you like (good) Indian food I suspect Ethiopian will appeal. Ethiopian coffee, beer, their version of steak tartare (Kitfo) are some of my favorites. And there is much to keep vegan/vegetarians happy as well.

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Adam Smith: Pillar of Liberalism

adam smith

Died on this day 226 years ago — check out Propriety and Prosperity: New Studies on the Philosophy of Adam Smith for a collection of specially commissioned chapters from philosophers, economists, and political scientists, focusing on Adam Smith’s two main works Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations with a view to bringing Smith to a mainstream philosophy audience while simultaneously informing Smith’s traditional constituency.

Please also check out this special issue (free download).

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Remembering Robert E. Haskell

robert haskell

rob

Decency was his hallmark

Today marks six years since my chum Rob Haskell’s death — his obit here. Rob was at the forefront of academic freedom/free speech 20 years ago. Not surprisingly, this kind, generous and open-minded academic was treated very shabbily by the lily–livered and bulling commissar regressives — they were out to get him in no uncertain terms. With hindsight, so much of what he told me about university skullduggery now makes perverse sense: little did Rob know just how illliberal things had become. It was a shock to him given his unimpeachable bona fides as a genuine liberal — were no longer valued currency. The following extract is from a publication by Rob. Of course, the Dershowitz talking below is Alan D:

Last semester, says Dershowitz, “a small group of students complained about my teaching…[subject]… from a civil liberties perspective.” I responded that it was important for the students to hear a variety of perspectives about…[subject]…, just as they hear, without objection, about other crimes. I also reminded them that the majority of students who speak in class present the “politically correct” views. I told them that the answer to an offensive argument is not to censor but rather to come up with a better argument. A few days later, one of the students told me that I should expect to be “savaged” in the evaluations that each teacher receives from the students.

Academic Freedom, Tenure, and Student Evaluation of Faculty: Galloping Polls In The 21st Century, Education Policy Analysis Archives Volume 5 Number 6 February 12, 1997. Italics added.

When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism

Jonathan Haidt

Here’s a nuanced and deep analysis on Brexit and extrapolations for a wider phenomenon.

Those who truly want to understand what is happening should carefully consider the complex interplay of globalization, immigration, and changing values.

Since many academics are in the business of activism masquerading as inquiry, I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’d urge the more intellectually honest to read Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. Haidt’s moral psychology is a vindication of E. O. Wilson’s “sociobiology” (people forget that this was a dirty “discredited” term in the ’80s) which in turn is a vindication of Hume’s naturalism (speculative anthropology).

P.S. Pierre Manent on the EU.

While elite opinion in Europe tends to consider Europe as a “nothing,” a space empty of anything common, or at most as a “culture” that is neither religious nor national in character, far from all Europeans agree. After all, despite the efforts of an almost unanimous ruling class over more than half a century, Europeans still live mainly in their old nations, and the prospect of a leap into a post-national Europe, whatever meaning one attaches to that expression, has lost almost all plausibility.

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Why It Took Social Science Years to Correct a Simple Error About ‘Psychoticism’

science

Causality questions aside, you’re still arguing that according to your data impulsive people who dislike rules are more conservative.

Full write up here. (An aside: when the target article was first published, so many of my “sophisticate and rational” friends and academic colleagues predictably revealed their crude confirmation biases via their social media virtue-signaling).

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Chef’s Table: Season Two

gastronomy

Some seven months ago I noted my appreciation of the first season of Chef’s Table. Having just binged out on the second season I’m pleased to report that the standard of outrageous talent and the commitment of the chefs is as high as the first batch. Jointly and severally, the chefs featured in both seasons are a wonderful expression in the most meaningful sense of socio-cultural diversity: bound together by the honest pursuit of excellence, a road paved with profound doubt and significant setbacks, perseverance, of course luck — but most of all, being very much culturally situated beings — their innovation driven by intimations from the past and by entering into a flow of sympathy from the past into the future. Yet another beautiful instantiation of particularism clearly showing up globalist ideologues as no more than vessels of bloodless rationalism, especially when taken on as an article of faith as is typically the case. Even the hollow marketing speak “The World’s Local Bank” (p. 4) has been dumped.

Three philosophers on Brexit

roger scruton

BBC’s A Point of View with Onora O’Neill, Roger Scruton and John Gray. Roger also in Prospect Magazine with “Who are we?“

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Evolving Norms: Cognitive Perspectives in Economics

friedrich hayek

This book presents institutional evolution and individual choice as codependent results of behavioral patterns. Drawing on F.A. Hayek’s concepts of cognition and cultural evolution, Teraji demonstrates how the relationship between the sensory and social orders can allow economists to track social norms and their effects on the global economy. He redirects attention from the conventional focus on what an individual chooses to the changing social order that determines how an individual chooses. Cultural shifts provide the environmental feedback that challenges the mental models governing individual choice, creating a cycle of coevolution. Teraji develops a general framework from which to examine this symbiotic relationship in order to identify predictive patterns. Not just for behavioral economists, this book will also appeal to those who specialize in institutional economics, the philosophy of economics, and economic sociology. — Palgrave

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Walker Percy Wednesday 92

walker percy

percycovercroppea

What to make, reader, of a rich middle-aged American sitting in a German car, holding a German pistol with which he will in all probability blow out his brains, smiling to himself and looking around old Carolina for the Jews whom he imagined had all disappeared?

*****

“Marion thought the Jews, the strange history of the Jews, was a sign of God’s existence. What do you think?”
“Oh wow. With all due respect to Marion, God rest her soul, hopefully we’ve gotten past the idea that God keeps the Jews around suffering to avenge Christ’s death.”

*****

When you leave a house for the last time and take one last look around before closing the door, it is as if you were seeing the house again for the first time. What happened to the five thousand times between?

*****

Was it love or failure of love?
And how did you miss yourself?

*****

Yes, given an ordinary need for death. But not if it’s a love of death. In the case of love, more is better than less, two twice as good as one, and most is best of all. And if the aim is the ecstasy of love, two is closer to infinity than one, especially when the two are twelve-gauge Super-X number-eight shot. And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the little death of everyday fuck-you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold-steel extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for us, the logical and ultimate act of fuck-you love fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and flew apart, flung like stars around the whole dark world.

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