Some short pieces I’ve written: Traveler’s Tales Who is most intelligent? (A Fable) Ken Starr meets Dr. Seuss (A poem: someone else (who?) wrote an earlier version of this, which I extended and (I think) improved) Words that don’t exist, but ought to Great Thoughts The things a person wants, and the things that will make that person happy, are hardly ever the same things. And this remains true, even if you know it to be true. So much frustration and disappointment could be avoided if people could learn this simple principle, and adjust accordingly their overall strategy for the pursuit of happiness. We have free speech in America, and this means (among other things) that anyone who likes may stand in the public square and declare what he thinks women should be. But considering the audacity of such a pronouncement, unless he has a much more plausible claim to authority than the Miss America Committee, such a one deserves only to be laughed at or ignored. Watch network television for a few hours, and reflect upon the fact that it is paid entirely through advertising, which necessitates that tens of millions of people must be watching it continually. This proves that people do not play enough chess. Now that we have Viagra to increase the libido late in life, perhaps someone will someone invent something to decrease the libido early in life. A hundred years ago puberty typically began in the late teens -- if that could be put in a bottle (or into the drinking fountains at schools, surreptitiously), we’d really see improved SAT scores. “Do as I say, not as I do:” this is considered the very motto of hypocrisy. But does anyone believe that having a good character is as easy as wanting it? If virtue is as difficult as other excellences, there must be few or none who are perfectly virtuous. If the rest of us are not even to talk about virtue or express admiration for it, how shall anyone improve? A hypocrite is one who claims virtue beyond what he possesses, not one who recommends virtue beyond what he claims. If a man’s principles are no better than his character, it is less likely to be a sign of an exemplary character than a sign of debased principles. So many advertisements nowadays cajole us to buy their indulgences because, as they say, we deserve it. How humble people must be who scruple at enjoying a luxury because they don’t feel worthy of it! And how meritorious, that they feel worthy of so many delightful things! Now me, I’m so far gone that I’ll consume a bowl of ice cream quite shamelessly, without giving a second thought to whether I deserve it. What is liberty? Liberty means being willing to accept certain inconveniences, annoyances, and misfortunes, without looking to government for relief. Too many people now expect the government to protect them from practically everything, including the consequences of their own folly. A duck that didn’t like to swim wouldn’t be normal. A monkey that didn’t like to swing through trees wouldn’t be normal. A tiger that didn’t like to hunt wouldn’t be normal. And a human being who doesn’t like to think and learn isn’t normal. I maintain that this definition of human normality is proper, even if statistics show that most people are not, in this sense, normal. If that’s so something is terribly wrong, but the problem is not with this definition. What I like about Mensa is that though everyone there is different (and not everyone to my taste, any more than I am to theirs), everyone is normal. Many people have an idea that mankind will soon outgrow wars, that wars are fought because of ignorance or immaturity, because nations distrust or misunderstand one another, or simply because they enjoy fighting. Apart from wishful thinking I can’t see where anyone gets such an idea. Wars are fought when two nations both want something only one of them can have. They understand each other only too well. Another commonly-expressed idea is that there would be fewer wars if women occupied the top government roles. England under Margaret Thatcher, Israel under Golda Meir, India under Indira Ghandi -- much can be said for these leaders, but as for avoiding war? Now that calculators can do arithmetic more accurately than people can (the theory goes), perfecting the arithmetic skills of children is unnecessary. This is folly, because algebra is the generalization of arithmetic. Herbert Spencer, thinking of the sciences, explained it more than a century ago: “General formulas which men have devised to express groups of details, and which have severally simplified their conceptions by uniting many facts into one fact, they have supposed must simplify the conceptions of a child also. They have forgotten that a generalisation is simple only in comparison with the whole mass of particular truths it comprehends -- that it is more complex than any one of these truths taken singly -- that only after many of these single truths have been acquired does the generalisation ease the memory and help the reason -- and that to a mind not possessing these single truths it is necessarily a mystery.” -- “Intellectual Education,” in Herbert Spencer on Education, p. 167, ed. Andreas M. Kazamias, Teachers College Press, 1966. Spencer is out of favor among modern educationists, of course. When Hollywood is criticized for giving us movies with gutter language and graphic violence, the unanswerable reply is that movies must, after all, depict real life. Now you can’t argue with that. Obviously an industry that routinely shows us men breaking in doors by banging their shoulders against them, and shows us that when people are given blows to the head -- say, by a bottle or flowerpot that shatters from the impact -- or even an uppercut to the chin, they are always knocked unconscious but never seriously injured, and that a man who delivers such an uppercut does no injury to his hand, and that automobile collisions inevitably result in flaming explosions, and that a woman, if she is young and has a liberated outlook on life, can usually defeat a male opponent in a hand-to-hand fight, and that men and women who like one another generally sleep together within 24 hours of their first meeting -- I say, obviously such an industry has to be very concerned about depicting real life. A good omen: a spate of movies made from Shakespearean plays and Austen novels have been hugely popular among filmgoers -- and also (as it does not go without saying) among filmmakers. Apparently Hollywood has developed enough sense to tell its scriptwriters that if they can’t write something better than Blink or The Piano their services will not be required. Rightly so: you could do endless remakes of great works of literature without ever needing to produce stuff like Seven. People who imagine children to be mainly innocent have something wrong with their memories. From the earliest years, children are as wicked as they know how to be. Only their limited abilities prevent them from doing as much harm as adults. They are not innocent, only incompetent. Another oddly common view is that young people are more open to change than their elders. If anyone wants to see resistance to change, take over a high school classroom in late September and pretend to be a substitute teacher with instructions to implement a new seating chart, after the students have had four weeks to get used to their old one. I’d be interested in seeing a Nexus search on how many times the words “raging” and “hormones” appear within three words of one other. As usage, “raging hormones” is merely trite, but an assumption about the limitations of adolescents, it’s an outrageous insult. The “raging hormones” theory, after all, is that teenagers are animals: they can’t be expected to restrain themselves, even if their lives depend on it. Admittedly condoms are second-best to abstinence, but since we can’t expect teens to behave rationally, tossing prophylactics their way is all we can hope to do for them. Happily, by abstaining in ever-greater numbers, today’s teenagers are giving the lie to this put-down which the 60’s generation has laid on them. Surely no generation has ever had parents who expected so little of them, and behaved so well. Many people fret nowadays that “exclusive language” in Scripture, using masculine pronouns to refer to God, alienates females. Actually, the problem runs much deeper. The Bible is full of references to God’s “right hand” and “right arm” as being superior to His left, thereby alienating left-handers (see e.g. Matt 25:33, Psalm 16:11, 17:7, Eccl 10:2). In places Scripture speaks anthropomorphically about God “seeing” events on earth (see Gen 1:4), thereby suggesting inappropriately that blind people are less like Him than sighted folk are. And Psalm 121:4 says that God never sleeps; now, how do you think that makes narcoleptics feel? Socrates became known as one of the greatest teachers of all time. As we see from the dialogues of Plato, his theory was that the first duty of any educator is to prepare his students to learn by tearing down their self-esteem. Modern American education is based on the opposite idea; could this be part of our problem? If you want to be famous in the little world of educational psychology, identify something that everyone knows is true. Describe your fact in suitably technical language, and present it in a scholarly paper or book. Then, if the fact you chose was sufficiently incontrovertible, and the language you dressed it in sufficiently learned, the educrats will hold up your theory as the salvation of American education. For about 10-15 years. Then the continuing failure of American education will force them to turn to something else. Whenever I hear someone pronounce a judgment upon life in general, such as “Life is unfair,” or “Life is exciting,” I always think, “Compared to what?” Creativity and structure, originality and formalism, imagination and reason, are not at odds. Only an extravagantly romantic age would think they were. The wisest thing anyone could say has been said on Star Trek: TNG: “The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth.” More great thoughts |
