The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Worth Reading Carefully

Posted on | May 10, 2015 | 75 Comments

“The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

It is not often you’ll find me quoting a New Englander like Emerson, whose philosophy was typical of how the Yankees — who in the 17th century had hanged witches and whose penchant for fanaticism gave rise to every manner of antinomian heretical sect in subsequent generations — by the mid-19th century came to prefer secular moralism to anything that might be learned from the Bible. Well, Ideas Have Consequences, but at this point in our nation’s descent into degenerate anarchy, there’s no need to resurrect ancient grudges and lost causes. Everyone who is willing to fight against the onlaught of terror is a potential ally, and is welcome to join the Camp of the Saints.

“We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

Do the young read Emerson anymore? Do they know anything about Teddy Roosevelt? Are they taught anything at all about our nation’s actual history and cultural traditions? We have abundant evidence that youth have been plunged into Stygian darkness, an endless night of permanent and incurable ignorance. Not only do they know almost nothing, they have no curiosity about any of the things they do not know — which, as I say, is nearly everything. Rarely does one meet a person under 40 who isn’t virtually destitute in terms of actual knowledge.

Youth nowadays believe they don’t need to know anything, because they have what educational bureaucrats call “learning skills.” As long as they are capable of finding something with a Google search, what does it matter whether or not they ever actually do Google it? Their entire mental life is built around the idea expressed by every apathetic student taking a required course in college: “Is this going to be on the exam?”

So we have many millions of allegedly “educated” Americans, people with college degrees who haven’t opened a book since they received their diploma. They went to college in order to obtain a credential that would qualify them for an office job with a salary, benefits, paid vacation and everything else deemed necessary to middle-class life. Once they got the requisite credential, their interest in “education” ended, and so they spend their leisure watching Netflix or playing XBox or in some other amusement. Read a book? Why would anyone want to read a book?

“Is this going to be on the exam?”

Speculative philosophy never really interested me. If I learned anything in college about Plato or Rousseau, it was only enough to pass a test. Other people’s opinions don’t impress me much. Just give me the facts, and I can form my own opinions, thank you. This is also why I don’t read much fiction. History has always fascinated me. Literature? Meh.

Anyway, a commenter quoted that Emerson passage in response my post about “Feminism’s Mirage of Equality.” His point about intellectual “duplicity and falsehood” as a sort of counterfeiting — “a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults” — struck me as quite relevant to the way feminists parasitically defraud “the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.”

The piling up of theory as a substitute for actual knowledge is the characteristic humbug of our age. We are expected to heed feminist gender theory about the development of human identity when the authors of these theories typically have never raised a child and, quite often, are temperamentally averse to participation in the natural process by which human offspring are generated. Today is Mother’s Day, and what the average mom knows about “gender” as a natural fact is far more trustworthy than any feminist professor’s intellectual theory.

 

Comments

75 Responses to “Worth Reading Carefully”

  1. Bob Belvedere
    May 10th, 2015 @ 5:29 pm

    Bravo! Damn well put.

  2. Dr. Cerralgine
    May 10th, 2015 @ 5:29 pm

    Is this going to be on the test?

  3. Bob Belvedere
    May 10th, 2015 @ 5:33 pm

    The ignorance of the young has been appalling me since the 1980’s when the present attitude really swung into high gear with the generation after mine.

    People think I’m a bloody ‘Brain’ when I reference History or The Arts, and it bugs the Hell out of me. All I’m doing is being what a citizen of a Republic should be.

    If I truly make a grand insight or grand connection with the Past, then, yes, the praise would be much appreciated, but doing so when I merely act Normal is insulting in a way.

  4. concern00
    May 10th, 2015 @ 5:49 pm

    Destitution of knowledge in the under 40’s causes a disparate impact, providing me with a fantastic advantage in trivia quizzes.

  5. RKae
    May 10th, 2015 @ 6:25 pm

    …what does it matter whether or not they ever actually do Google it?

    And, as we have seen, Google is run by die-hard leftists who will manipulate the results to fit their agenda.

  6. RKae
    May 10th, 2015 @ 6:27 pm

    The kids I work with ask me why I don’t have a smartphone. I say, “What do I need it for? You use yours to check on everything I say, and it always turns out that I’m right.”

  7. Mike G.
    May 10th, 2015 @ 6:57 pm

    Your statement about a person having never raised a child struck me as very relevent to my previous life.

    My dear departed stepmother, never having kids of her own, nor having the ability, God bless her, thought it in her preview to tell me how to raise my own.

    Generally I blew her off as not knowing what she was talking about. But then over the years, as I thought about bit, I began to think perhaps she was a redneck feminist. Whatever that means.

  8. RS
    May 10th, 2015 @ 7:04 pm

    While I certainly agree that what some of us consider very basic knowledge in all areas is sorely lacking among the younger generations, I must dissent from your views on Philosophy and Literature.

    With respect to Philosophy, as you know, “ideas have consequences.” Philosophy is nothing if not “ideas:” ideas about reality, how we know what reality is, who we as individuals and our purpose within the universe and how we live within that universe. Your series/book on Feminism is chock full of philosophy whether you believe it or not. Further, forming your own opinions from facts necessitates a philosophical foundation of some sort for those opinions.

    As for literature, as with all art, we learn about ourselves as well as the times in which the art or novel or literature was created. In other words, literature assists us in learning history, Indeed, we perhaps learn more about our past through literature of the time and such literature forms some of the primary sources of our knowledge of history.

  9. postaldog
    May 10th, 2015 @ 7:28 pm

    Indeed! We have seen in the last two Presidential elections, an electorate (especially the millenials) who despite having more information at their fingertips than anytime in our history, are still the most unsophisticated electorate in my lifetime. The often heard “bumper-sticker” mentality.
    See also the effects of not teaching American history in schools vis a vis our Constitution. Anyone with an understanding of what the colonists were fighting against and fleeing from would understand why the founding documents are the way they are. Instead, when we have a President who says the Constitution is fundamentally flawed because it does not contain entitlement language, we get an entire generation yelling “That’s right!”

  10. Lamprotatia
    May 10th, 2015 @ 8:39 pm

    One thing I noticed in high school (in the 90s) was that the honors level classes read the classics, while the mainstream and remedial classes read tons of social justice warrior political message literature. So yes, I read Emerson (and Thoreau, and Hawthorne, and even Cotton Mather) in Honors US History and Literature. My peers who were in just plain junior English read a bunch of Maya Angelou and then-trendy Rigoberta Menchu, Toni Morrison, etc. Senior year in Honors, we started with the Odyssey and moved through other Greek and Latin works into Chaucer and Shakespeare and Voltaire and Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot. Kids in senior English read The Color Purple and The Bluest Eye and a whole bucket full of other trendy grievance lit that I have now forgotten about, because it was of the moment and forgettable.

    I don’t know why it was that way. But I think the situation at my school reflected a trend, and that trend has had obvious consequences. For me, learning these things instilled a love for Classics as a discipline, which steered me to the one department at my liberal arts college that was staffed by awesome old-fashioned conservative intellectuals instead of touchy liberals with an axe to grind, and even though I eventually went through a very flamboyant “progressive” stage, the seeds were planted for sanity and I had somewhere to which I could return. If all you have had put in your head is trendy nonsense, what then?

  11. Quartermaster
    May 10th, 2015 @ 8:52 pm

    As we used to say in the Navy, “You will see this material again.”

    I would add, “again, and again, and again….”

  12. robertstacymccain
    May 10th, 2015 @ 9:18 pm

    If all you have had put in your head is trendy nonsense, what then?

    Blue hair, a nose ring, tattoos and a resentful sense of indignation — it’s a syndrome.

  13. Prime Director
    May 10th, 2015 @ 9:23 pm

    Youth nowadays

    With their crazy music and their dungarees…

    Get off my lawn!

  14. DeadMessenger
    May 10th, 2015 @ 9:33 pm

    When I was young, reading was considered a good thing, so long as you still got fresh air and exercise. Nowadays people ask me why I’ve always got my nose in a book, and the honest answer is, “Because it’s more interesting than you are.” (Though I don’t actually say that. Usually. Depends on whether they mock me as a “brainiac” or not.)

  15. DeadMessenger
    May 10th, 2015 @ 9:35 pm

    Indeed. Which is why the combination of Google and Wikipedia can actually suck knowledge out of your brain and replace it with stupid.

  16. robertstacymccain
    May 10th, 2015 @ 9:48 pm

    I don’t mean that philosophy is not useful, but I was a natural-born Cynic of sorts. By the time I was in college, I was profoundly skeptical about absorbing any particular pre-digested system of thought. For example, I never bought into Freudian psychology. “Oedipus complex,” really? It’s absurd. It was many years later that someone pointed out to me the basic problem with psychology: It’s based on the study of crazy people. That is to say, rather than looking at healthy, happy people as a basis for understanding the human mind, psychological theory was developed by studying those patients who presented themselves for treatment. If your theories of personality development are based on lunatics (on the one hand) and affluent neurotics (on the other), this is going to skew your theory.

    A similar thing with “gender studies”: It’s a project developed to justify deviant behavior, and many of the “scholars” promoting it are themselves deviants. Yet nobody in academia, evidently, is permitted to point this out!

    Anyway, I don’t derogate the utility of philosophy, per se, but my own philosophy is eclectic, based on my own experience and knowledge. I have probably read more philosophy than most college graduates, but I never studied it systematically because I find it tedious and/or annoying. I mean, Rousseau? Give me a break. And dear God, Nietzsche! I was in my 30s when I first read a bit of Nietzsche. The man was simply insane. His books should come with a warning label: “THIS MAN WAS A LUNATIC. DON’T BELIEVE A WORD HE SAYS.”

  17. Shawn Smith
    May 10th, 2015 @ 9:54 pm

    It increasingly seems that public education is designed to create ignorance and apathy in its subjects.

  18. robertstacymccain
    May 10th, 2015 @ 10:09 pm

    The old Jonathan Edwards song “Sunshine”:

    He can’t even run his own life.
    I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine.

    Don’t take advice from people whose authority is not evident. We see this over and over in the Internet Age, the young pundit whose only qualification is (a) he’s young and (b) he’s got opinions. Fine. Let’s allow Matt Yglesias to tell us how to run the world because … why, exactly?

    This is not to say that Yglesias and the other Smart Young Pundits aren’t intelligent, it’s just that they’ve got no actual experience at anything other than being an Internet pundit. By the time Ann Coulter became famous, she had clerked for an Appeals Court judge, worked in a New York law firm and served as a staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Now? Any clever college kid can publish her feminist rants and bask in the warm digital applause of feminists everywhere when the only “achievement” the kid can claim as a qualification is that … well, she’s in college and she’s got opinions..

  19. Brett
    May 10th, 2015 @ 11:08 pm

    I hope you get past your distaste for literature. We never needed the discipline of psychology; we already had great novelists.

  20. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:16 am

    If there’s an answer “all of the above” or “none of the above,” take it.

    Or “when in doubt, Charlie out.”

    Wait a minute, what do you mean life isn’t a multiple choice test?

  21. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:17 am

    Well, okay, it is. It’s just that it doesn’t come at you with A-B-C-D choices.

  22. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:28 am

    Your observations on not needing knowledge because you can always Google it reminds me of the early days of the VCR. Masterpiece Theatre was full of socially relevant programs we were all obligated (by Our Betters in the Coastal Media Elite) to watch and discuss.

    Having a VCR gave a useful dodge. You could say “Nicholas Nickleby? Haven’t watched it yet, but it’s on my VCR.” And it would count! You got to be one of the Smart Ones, just by virtue of having programmed your VCR to record a certain channel at a certain time. Or at least claiming you had done so.

  23. Prime Director
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:30 am

    The following is a valid argument:

    All dogs are cucumbers
    All cucumbers are diamonds
    Therefore all dogs are diamonds

    Or
    If P then Q
    If Q then R
    Therefore if P then R

    All the premises are false but the deductive form of the argument (hypothetical syllogism) is sound

    If all the premises were true, then this would be a sound, valid argument, but whatever. The relationships between the premises is valid no matter what. You could just substitute letters and treat it like algebra. Its very clean analysis, the best. Its beautiful.

    Symbolic logic is a sublime tool, that allows the user to cut through a score of bad arguments sharing the same form (e.g. affirming the antecedent, denying the consequent) in once stroke, a true force multiplier.

    It’s subject matter is right at the boundary of philosophy and mathematics, but again whatever… the most I ever got out of any class ever. Period.

  24. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:31 am

    Rousseau is number two on my list of Great Thinkers who have produced the most disastrous ideas for humanity. Number one is Marx. Three is Neitzsche.

    Although I do enjoy quoting Neitzsche to those who do not know me. It freaks them out as they frantically wonder “OMG, is he serious?”

  25. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:33 am

    Actually I consider psychology to be a legitimate science. Psychiatry, on the other hand, is modern day shamanism.

    The former is the study of how the human brain works, the latter is babbling about feces and incest.

  26. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 12:35 am

    And a lifetime of resentment that being a barista is your highest professional calling.

  27. Daniel Freeman
    May 11th, 2015 @ 1:11 am

    You might already know this, but they’ve been developing a psychology of mental health (as opposed to sickness) for at least 25 years. One form is called “positive psychology,” and I highly recommend both Learned Optimism and Authentic Happiness by Dr. Martin Seligman. A related field called “emotional intelligence” is at least 20 years old, and I do indeed recommend the book of the same name by Daniel Goleman.

  28. Daniel Freeman
    May 11th, 2015 @ 1:24 am

    I respectfully disagree with you on three points: I don’t think it’s all that bad, I think you have them reversed, and the lines are getting blurred. Psychiatrists are the ones that can prescribe medications, but psychologists also have a natural interest in neuroscience, that sometimes leads them to truths.

  29. Prime Director
    May 11th, 2015 @ 2:55 am

    Game theory was also fun.

  30. Prime Director
    May 11th, 2015 @ 3:00 am

    All the premises are false but the deductive form of the argument (hypothetical syllogism) is sound

    I meant valid, not sound.

  31. The original Mr. X
    May 11th, 2015 @ 3:37 am

    I was in my 30s when I first read a bit of Nietzsche. The man was simply insane. His books should come with a warning label: “THIS MAN WAS A LUNATIC. DON’T BELIEVE A WORD HE SAYS.”
    True, but I think he’s interesting as perhaps the only atheist philosopher who’s ever actually worked out the implications of his own worldview.

  32. Prime Director
    May 11th, 2015 @ 4:58 am

    modern day shamanism

    Totally. TOTALLY.

    Plastic medicine men are EVERYWHERE.

    We’re still just savages who blindly repeat rituals to invoke magic in some form or another; and when we can’t make the ritual work, we to turn to seers and mediums for guidance.

    I’m not too ashamed to admit that I lack a fundamental understanding of MOST of the forces that civilization puts at my disposal.

    Physicians, auto mechanics, accountants, nutricianists, those geeks at the Genius Bar… they’re all shaman, right?

  33. Dana
    May 11th, 2015 @ 5:30 am

    Our esteemed host asked:

    Do the young read Emerson anymore? Do they know anything about Teddy Roosevelt? Are they taught anything at all about our nation’s actual history and cultural traditions?

    Messrs Emerson and Roosevelt are just Dead White Men.

    I started rereading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the THird Reich yesterday, and a wry smile escaped me when I saw the author’s description of some of Adolf Hitler’s early allies included “homosexual perverts”, noting that der Führer might not have liked queers, but was willing to use such men to further his purposes, until he didn’t need them any more. I tried to imagine what the editors would have said had Mr Shirer presented his manuscript today with the phrase “homosexual perverts” included.

  34. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 6:25 am

    At least you’re respectful, but still… disagreement? On the internet?

    I may need a lie down. Where’s my safe space?

    Anyway, all seriousness aside, it was reading the gyrations the APA went through in developing the DSM-V that eradicated the last vestiges of respect I had for psychiatry. Diagnoses appear to be chosen through a combination of politically correct consensus building, and a desire to keep them opaque to the unwashed masses. Your remark that psychiatrists can prescribe medications is of course correct, as they must be MDs, but I don’t find that reassuring given that their base assumptions shift with the political winds. Were I an grade school today they’d have me pumped full of Ritalin.

  35. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 6:26 am

    You laugh, but catching my auto mechanic smearing chicken blood all over the carburetor is what induced me to get the Chilton’s manual for my car, and a Snap-On set.

  36. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 6:31 am

    Last psychology book I’ve read is Cleckley’s classic The Mask of Sanity, even today probably the best introduction to the psychopath.

    Face it, it’s what goes wrong that’s most interesting. Batman without the tightly channeled angst is just a guy in tights and a mask. What goes in behind the Joker’s eyes, Nicholson’s or Ledger’s take your pick?

  37. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 6:32 am

    Interesting or entertaining, you’ve got something there. He’s fun to read so long as you don’t take him seriously. Last guy who did was probably Adolph Hitler.

    Well, discounting Kevin Kline’s character in A Fish Called Wanda.

  38. Steve Skubinna
    May 11th, 2015 @ 6:34 am

    These days I am wondering if it was simply coincidence that Ernst Roehm was gay. Today’s organized gay movement seems to have taken a page from his book.

  39. WhoBeen
    May 11th, 2015 @ 7:26 am

    No comment but definetly worth cross-posting.
    http://normanhooben.blogspot.com/2015/05/is-this-going-to-be-on-exam.html
    Thanks!

  40. Scoob
    May 11th, 2015 @ 7:43 am

    The feminist research of distorting one journal after another until they arrive at their world view reminds me how the Supreme Court uses stare decisis to bastardize the Constitution by using one case after the next to derive a new Constitutional meaning.

  41. RS
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:11 am

    One of the upsides to studying philosophy systematically is that it allows one to place ostensibly “new” ideas and movements in an historical context. It’s not a question of becoming a convert to some “pre-digested” set of beliefs. It’s a question of knowing what those beliefs are to be able to test them empirically as much as possible. Further, most of these questions have been asked and answered and perhaps refuted a long time ago.

    As an example, there are a number of nominally “Christian” sects which dismiss the concept of the Trinity. It helps to know that such heresies fall under the rubric of “Arianism” and were denounced in A.D. 325. Or, how much of today’s environmental movement can be traced to Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists? Google “Tiny House Movement” and you’ll find a bunch of people trying to find their own Walden Pond.

    The point is, all of the things which you rightly bemoan about the current state of knowledge among young people are interrelated. History, Philosophy, Literature, Science, Theology, Rhetoric are all parts of a whole and overlap to significant degrees. The segregation of those areas of inquiry–an artificial segregation to begin with–leaves a hole in one’s knowledge and a deficiency in one’s ability to analyze the world properly.

  42. Bob Belvedere
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:22 am

    Bingo!

    Welcome to Leftist Prep World!

  43. Bob Belvedere
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:23 am

    Such Ideologies appeal to the Abnormal – of all types.

  44. Bob Belvedere
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:25 am

    To be allowed into The Camp Of The Saints, you must work at it, you must study Human Nature and Life As It Is, so you can be well-armed and, thus, ready to defend The Beloved City.

  45. RS
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:30 am

    The change you note began to occur in the ’70s. The reasons for it (all nefarious in various ways) are too numerous for a comment here, but the change is one manifestation of the Progressives’ “Long March” through our institutions. Consider: my father graduated from a high school in the Ozarks in 1937. He had four years of Latin. He could read Julius Caesar and quote long passages of The Aeneid until the day he died. Query how many high school seniors today have even heard of Virgil?

  46. Finrod Felagund
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:49 am

    Back during my grad student days, one of my fellow TAs, when he reviewed the answer key for the multiple choice final exam, didn’t realize until the exam had already been set that he had made 11 consecutive problems where the correct answer was B.

  47. M. Thompson
    May 11th, 2015 @ 8:51 am

    Having written exams, I’m not surprised that has happened. I think I spent as much time on ensuring there was no pattern to the answers as writing it.

  48. RS
    May 11th, 2015 @ 9:35 am

    That’s why God invented essay questions.

  49. Jeanette Victoria
    May 11th, 2015 @ 9:36 am

    Just how may generations have now been taught that feelings trump facts and anything they do and feel is absolutely wonderful?

  50. Jeanette Victoria
    May 11th, 2015 @ 9:40 am

    LOL after years in the psych industry I have little respect for it. It’s pretty much all junk exept fo the psychotropic meds which really do work.

    Really if folks just RAISED their kid with discipline there would be fewer loons on the street and on Tumblr!