Peter Rudd
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Mike Wallace asked Ayn Rand – the crack pot in chief of American economic and political life – about love. She had a dispensational view: love is reserved for the few who love themselves.
Rand embodied fundamentalism in extremis. It haunted her entire life: she was born into communism and ended her life in Manhattan preaching a new form of fundamentalist capitalism based on greed. Is it any wonder her views on love were so lonely and alienating and final?
Here is a sad excerpt from Wallace’s interview from 1959:
Wallace: ”Christ, and every other important moral leader in man’s history, has taught us that we should love one another. Why then is this kind of love, in your mind, immoral?”
Rand: “It is immoral if it is placed above one’s own self.”
Wallace: “And then if a man is weak or a woman is weak then she or he is beyond love?”
Rand: “He certainly does not deserve — he certainly is beyond.”
Wallace: “There are very few of us that would, by our standards… that are worthy of love — is that your view?”
Rand: “Unfortunately yes — very few.”
Wallace: “You are out to destroy almost every edifice in contemporary American life — our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, rule by the majority will. Other reviewers say that you scorn churches and the concept of God — are they accurate criticisms?”
Rand: “yes.”
1959 interview of Rand by CBS’s Mike Wallace
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: economy, freedom, Karl Polyani, liberalism, market economy, regulation
In 1944 Karl Polyani wrote about good and bad freedoms.
He described bad freedom as:
“the freedom to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains without commensurable service to the community, the freedom to keep technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the freedom to profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private advantage”
And good freedom as:
The market economy under which these freedoms throve also produced freedoms we prize highly: Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s own job.
For Polyani the good freedoms are “by-products of the same economy that was also responsible for the evil freedoms.”
Then he wrote a prescription for a better future; one which is broader, more transparent and inclusive and ultimately more hopeful; one which twins freedom with justice:
The passing of the market economy can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom. Juridical and actual freedom can be made wider and more general than ever before; regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all. Freedom not as an appurtenance of privilege, tainted at the source, but as a prescriptive right extending far beyond the narrow confines of the political sphere into the intimate organization of society itself. Thus will old freedoms and civic rights be added to the fund of new freedoms generated by the leisure and security that industrial society offers to all. Such a society can afford to be both just and free.
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: How To Stay Sane, insanity, Philippa Perry, sanity
You might be insane if you lack self awareness and can’t manage your feelings and are an emotional train wreck. Or you could be too, if you are the opposite: controlled and isolated and repressed.
Apparently there aren’t many or any proper definitions of sanity out there, in the world, readily available, useful now. But Philippa Perry’s new book ‘How to Stay Sane,’ from The School of Life provides a good description. She urges to get out of the two extreme camps of emotionalism and isolation and into a saner middle ground of self awareness and connection.
Here is a description from a book review at School of Life:
Sanity is to be found in the middle ground between two extremes, she says. At one end there’s what she calls ‘chaos’, which is being so at one with one’s feelings and emotions there is no self-awareness. These people stagger through life lurching from catastrophe to catastrophe like off-the-rail trains. They lack the necessary filters and self-awareness to self-soothe, and manage their feelings in healthy ways.
At the other pole is a kind of rigidity where a person’s feelings are boxed up and buried, inhibiting their chances of personal growth or change. The depressed, isolated and reclusive would fall into this category. Between these two poles is where sanity lies, ‘a broad path, with many forks and diversions, and no single ‘right’ way.’
David Waters reviews How To Stay Sane by Philippa Perry
Filed under: departure lounge, the sweet life, unseen world | Tags: dialogue, life, Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics, truth
To live is to converse. Sounds glib, until you ask yourself how many people in your life you have a vital, clear, continuing verbal relationship with. Some people do, but a lot do not; I include myself in the latter. I have short intense wranglings, but rarely life long explications.
There is a history of dialogic relationships – friends who chat – in literature: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Iago and Othello, Holmes and Watson, Vladimir and Estragon, Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern among the best known. A contemporary conversation worth checking out is that between Lars Iyer and W. – a philosophic and funny wrangle between two UK philosophy professors – in Iyer’s books Spurious and Dogma.
Here is a good description – by the philosopher Bakhtin - of how dialogue is the essential act of communion that gives us life, the medium by which we are inducted into it, our ticket to what he calls the world symposium:
“Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction”
“The single adequate form for verbally expressing authentic human life is the open-ended dialogue. Life by its very nature is dialogic. To live means to participate in dialogue: to ask questions, to heed, to respond, to agree, and so forth. In this dialogue a person participates wholly and throughout his life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, with his whole body and deeds. He invests his entire self in discourse, and this discourse enters into the dialogic fabric of human life, into the world symposium.”
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevski’s Poetics
Dialogic Tectonic, Scott Francisco
Filed under: departure lounge, the sweet life, unseen world | Tags: Alice in Wonderland, art, Salvadore Dali, surrealism
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Filed under: departure lounge, the sweet life | Tags: A Liberal Decalogue, Bertrand Russell, education, teaching
My Restoration prof said that, at the end of an undergraduate course you should “know that you know nothing.” Good advice. Here, in the same vein is Bertrand Russell’s rules for teachers.
In his view, a good teacher is a person with little interest in power who uses wit, avoids the use of authority and sometimes subverts it, challenges orthodoxies, is quietly fearless, never obsequious nor pandering, often quirky, rejects passivity, and risks all for the truth.
From Russell’s Decalogue:
Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
- Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
- Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
- Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
- When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
- Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
- Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
- Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
- Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
- Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
- Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
A Liberal Decalogue, Bertrand Russell, December 16, 1951, The New York Times Magazine
from A Liberal Decalogue: Bertrand Russell’s 10 Commandments of Teaching, Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
Have you been to a funeral at which the life of the deceased is ‘celebrated?’ Doesn’t celebrating a life at a funeral crowd out grieving at one? I wonder if we’re meant to really grieve – when someone we love dies – without our grief being confused by other emotions.
I remember when my friend P’s father died. He called to tell me when it happened and described grieving in terms of a dam slowly opening. He said that grief came to him in a controlled flood of pain and loss that subsided as if invisible gates had closed just when he had reached a certain threshold. And later the gates opened again and tested him to a high degree and closed again before he was overwhelmed.
In the letter excerpted below, Wittgenstein recommends letting grief right into your heart. If you approach your grief cerebrally – hold it at arm’s length – it may frighten you, he says. However, if you let it in your heart, you will not be afraid. It’s like letting a god possess you in ecstatic ritual; or keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer.
I was tempted to end this post by saying that grieving unblocks us and allows us to go on living positively in a sort of self help way. No doubt there is more to W’s writing on grief, but in this bit he doesn’t even hint at grief being used to get to another state of being like happiness or contentment. (more…)
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: education, home schooling, Michel de Montaigne
The French Renaissance essayist Montaigne had this to say about homeschooling: to practice it is to abandon our children to foolish, indiscreet and ill conditioned parents. Better to instruct them in the way of the law because the wellbeing of the state depends on it.
Plutarch is admirable throughout, but especially where he judges of human actions. What fine things does he say in the comparison of Lycurgus and Numa upon the subject of our great folly in abandoning children to the care and government of their fathers? The most of our civil governments, as Aristotle says, leave, after the manner of the Cyclops, to every one the ordering of their wives and children, according to their own foolish and indiscreet fancy; and the Lacedaemonian and Cretan are almost the only governments that have committed the education of children to the laws. Who does not see that in a state all depends upon their nurture and bringing up? and yet they are left to the mercy of parents, let them be as foolish and ill conditioned as they may, without any manner of discretion.
Michel de Montaigne, Of Anger
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: Erich Heller, george orwell, George Steiner, Politics and the English Language, The Tongues of Eros
A Chinese sage of the distant past was once asked by his disciples what he would do first if he were given power to set right the affairs of the country. He answered: ‘I should certainly see to it that language is used correctly’. The disciples looked perplexed. ‘Surely’, they said, ‘this is a trivial matter. Why should you deem it so important?’ And the Master replied: ‘If language is not used correctly, then what is said is not meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will be corrupted; if morals and art are corrupted, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion’.
Erich Heller
[copied from Lars Iyer's site Spurious]
And,
“The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. If one gets rid of these habits, one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
George Orwell, 1946, “Politics and the English Language.”
And,
The extinction of languages which we are now witnessing – dozens pass annually into irretrievable silence – is precisely parallel to the ravaging of fauna and flora, but with greater finality. Trees can be replanted, the DNA of animal species can, in part at least, be conserved and perhaps reactivated. A dead language stays dead or survives as a pedagogic relic in the academic zoo. The consequence is a drastic impoverishment in the ecology of the human psyche. The true catastrophe of Babel is not the scattering of tongues. It is the reduction of human speech to a handful of planetary, ‘multinational’ tongues. This reduction formidably fueled by the mass market and information technology, is now reshaping the globe. Military technocratic megalomania, the imperatives of commercial greed, are making of Anglo-American standardized vocabularies and grammars an Esperanto.
George Steiner, The Tongues of Eros
