08.31.10
Posted in Behavior and motivation, Human nature at 12:48 pm by Administrator
Mona Charen has a Townhall column today that is worth reading for its treatment of its main theme, namely, the lamentable way America is still mired in preoccupation with race.
I’d like to riff off one of her secondary points here, though. In the course of developing her point, she mentions the recent dust-up over Dr. Laura Schlessinger. She – rightly – says that Dr. Laura made a huge error in judgement and taste and is now unsurprisingly having to end her radio show. What cheered me, though, and I say this as a conservative, is her characterization of Dr. Laura as sometimes “flippant and even cruel.” It’s about time somebody said it.
People who call Dr. Laura’s show are generally in desperate straits. Moreover, they generally know that they have goofed up, made poor moral choices, and found themselves where they are as a result. It’s also pretty clear from the ways in which the host treats them that she, in her championing of What’s Right above all else in the world, relishes the opportunity to rub their noses in their plight. She routinely tells people they are utter moral failures. She will stress how difficult it’s going to be for them to turn things around in their lives, Then she’ll pause for effect (As someone who does some radio, her deliberate use of dead air has always unnerved me) and stress it again. I’ve even heard her laugh at people’s plights. She has no room for even the slightest bit of compassion for, say, someone whose live-in lover of fifteen years has left. The couple wasn’t married, and in the doctor’s eyes, that trumps all other aspects of the situation.
Now, having said the foregoing, I sometimes find myself considering the possibility that the reason she comes off like such a buzz-saw of callousness is that, in this age of pervasive moral relativism, we find the asserting of absolutes too bracing for our consideration. In our postmodern culture, we tend to play patty-cake in situations where moral clarity is called for.
Dr. Laura’s overarching moral code is not the problem. For all her training and insight into others, she cannot see that she has a markedly undeveloped aspect to her own personality, that being the ability to cut one’s fellow human being a little slack for being human.
Permalink
08.16.10
Posted in Behavior and motivation, Culture, Economics, Education, Human nature, Spiritual implications of our life choices at 1:48 pm by Administrator
Two pieces appear around the Net this morning that point to a common theme. Kathleen Parker cites a study examining the differences in tuition and academic requirements between Harvard and Lamar University to ask about the real value of elite higher education. Mort Zuckerman looks at the role the dearth of skills relevant to the demands of the hiring marketplace plays in our current demoralizing ecenomic situation.
These times have given me ample opportunity to take a fresh look at a number of considerations, both on the personal level as well as an overall cultural level. I’m an arty guy by nature. My day job is freelance writing, equally divided between arts journalism, business journalism and slice-of-life features – with an occasional opinion column thrown into the mix. I also make some money playing jazz in wine bars, at farmers’ markets and at corporate events, wedding receptions and deck parties. I teach jazz history at the local community college. My occupational profile would not lead to the conclusion that I’m a conservative.
Lately, though, my interest in the very areas in which I’ve immersed myself for the last forty years has lost some steam. I hear about improvisation workshops, or new record labels starting up, or consortiums of musicians, poets, painters and such, and it excites me about as much as the phillips-head screw aisle at Menards. Between the way political correctness, adolescent emotionality, nerdy postmodernism and the need for subsidization have introduced an advanced state of rot to that broad area of human endeavor known as the arts, and the near-total absence of common sense in our society’s discourse about public policy and economics, I have lost the ability to muster excitement for those events and developments which used to occupy the entirity of my attention.
It’s not as if I’m having a road-to-Damascus epiphany that is driving me to apply to engineering school. As I say, my basic orientation as a “creative person” was established about the time Eisenhower was showing Kennedy around the Oval Office.
What I think is happening is that, along with the phenomenon of eighteen-year-olds swelling the enrollment numbers of arts-and-social-change courses and not so much those for analytical geometry, or even American colonial history, art has been so debased, its value so distorted, that it has assumed the status of convenience-store soda pop. It really boils down to the same problem as the dwindling numbers of advanced-science students: no sense that rigor is requisite to a real understanding of the subject matter. Music is now all about learning some chords and “expressing yourself,” rather than learning the major, lydian, mixolydian, harmonic minor, dorian minor, pure minor, lydian dominant, whole-tone, half-diminished and diminished scales, as well as times signatures, clefs and pitch and tone.
As I say, this gets into the realm of the personal for me. What it boils down to is this: For the first time in my life, I’m wondering if I’m a sufficiently serious person. Do I make choices with a proper respect for what is at stake? Is there an opportunity cost to opting for comfort? What indeed makes for a real man? Is it important to move the world as far as possible in the directions of one’s highest notion of the good, or are we to be given an understanding nod for getting tired and letting diversion and small personal pleasures fill more of our hours as we get older?
Such questions have always been around. It just seems that, in light of this summer’s daily relentless stream of dismal economic news, they’ve taken on a fresh relevance. We don’t move off of dead center without something being done differently, without some change in our perspective.
“Reality check” is a hackneyed buzzword, but that’s unfortunate. It’s a fine term, actually. There is after all, such a things as reality, and it ain’t always about unicorns and rainbows.
What, then, is to be done?
Permalink
06.25.10
Posted in Celebrity worship, Government spending, Human nature, human sexuality at 12:24 pm by Administrator
Mona Charen on outgoing budget director Peter Orszag and the two most noteworthy things about him – his disingenuousness in coming up with presentable numbers for FHer-care, and his chaotic sex life. She uses her examination to raise some important cultural points about postmodern morality, the fawning celebrity media, the fallacy of early feminism’s attempt to deny differences between men and women, and postmodern society’s utter disregard for childhood.
Permalink
06.06.10
Posted in Human nature, Religion & Spirituality, human sexuality at 10:39 pm by Administrator
Hoo, boy. Longtime BN readers, or anybody who takes a scroll through the posts in the Religion and Spirituality category, knows that, while I lean toward Christianity, the final sticking points that stand between me and full embrace are knotty indeed. I’ve been working through several of them. The whole Hell thing is something I’m considering in ways I never have, for instance. It’s not easy to look squarely at what committed Christians profess about the subject, but I have had several discussions with myself, the upshot of which have been that dismissiveness will get me nowhere. I’m not saying I buy the whole package, but I’m looking at it with a seriousness I would not have been capable of twenty or thirty years ago.
Then along comes this, and I’m all blasted out of my seat again. Basing a marriage on one verse from Paul’s letters in which he admonishes wives to submit to husbands. I know, I know, as the linked post and several comments and links to be found there point out, one must put that teaching within the context of an entire marriage based on submission to God. Still, this one just comes across like a chain saw starting up in the middle of a Bach concerto.
It’s not the first time I’ve thought about this submission thing as an aspect of what Christians with a capital C are saying. C.S. Lewis refers to it. There’s the “love, honor and obey” snippet in marriage vows one rarely hears anymore.
I’ve even thought about it from an overall anthropological and biological perspective. Religion generally gives primacy to the role of a man. Islam is obviously the handiest example of this to cite, but even the leadership chains in the various strains of Buddhism are exclusively male. We know how gorillas, lions and elephants organize themselves societally. Men have the aggressiveness and upper body strength. They are wired to put fear aside when confronted with a threat. They get horny faster. They’re more analytical.
Still, a female human being is every bit as smart as a man. I’m no fan of Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan, but there was a point to the effort to get society to see that a great swath of human contribution was going to waste by not having women step up and give their say-so and excel in the various fields of human endeavor and fully participate in fashioning a fine and durable, workable society. To have a woman who enters into an intimate, lifetime commitment with a man base it on a “Here’s-how-I’ve-decided-we-will-do-things”/”Yes-dear-you-know-best” motif seems to me to be a recipe for snuffing out the very core of her humanity.
I guess the largest issue I still have that stands in my way of taking the plunge is this recurring meme I encounter along the lines of “I know these core precepts fly in the face of one’s basic sense of justice and even rationality, but we must submit to them because they constitute the way God decreed reality to be.”
Then again, as I say, I’m only leaning toward Christianity. Maybe once you make the full declaration, you see this all differently, and see a depth to Paul’s directive that’s not available to those peering through the crack in the door.
Permalink
05.30.10
Posted in Arts & Culture, Basketball, Culture, Human nature at 1:41 pm by Administrator
For my money, one of the most ennobling and well-wrought scenes in a movie in the last 30 years is the one in Hoosiers in which the team’s coach, played by Gene Hackman, purposely gets one too many technical fouls called against him in a crucial game. Shooter, the former basketball star turned town drunk who has been assisting him for a couple of weeks (and staying sober even though it has taken white-knuckle tenacity to do so), is sitting in the bench. He looks at the coach with an expression of pure panic. The coach looks back with feigned sheppishness; what he is actually conveying with his expression is a sublime belief in Shooter’s ability to rise to the moment. It’s a confirmation of friendship and courage and affirmation of another human being’s potential as eloquently expressed as any I’ve ever seen in a work of art.
And then Shooter collects himself and puts together a series of brilliant plays that win the game.
Permalink
05.09.10
Posted in Culture, Human nature, Public opinion, human sexuality at 10:26 pm by Administrator
There’s a polemical exchange going on between Stacy McCain and a commenter at his blog that sheds much light on at least two levels of cultural implication. The overall subject at hand is the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill. In the second of his posts on the subject, the main thrust of which is to cite Raquel Welch as someone who sees the matter the way he does, he quotes from the commenter’s post in which the latter basically says, “Look, I’m a happily married guy with a wife on the pill, and when we’re ready to have more kids, she’ll go off of it. Now, get off my case.” Stacy uses the opportunity to coin a term I may occasionally pilfer in the future, given its applicability in multiple situations: The Empire of Choice. What he is illustrating could be thought of as the chip on the shoulder of the soft libertarian. He puts it in the form of a syllogism:
- You criticize Practice A.
- I engage in Practice A.
- Ergo, you are attacking me personally.
Not only does it waste time on proving one is not engaging in ad homeniem polemics, it starts us down the road of digression from the subject at hand. In this case, which was the thrust of Stacy McCain’s first post on the subject, that was the cultural destructiveness wrought by the Pill’s advent. It’s an extensive and incredibly comrehensive look at the toxic consequences of that pharmaceutical development, and it’s worthy of serious discussion, not the kind of dismissiveness his commenter treated it with.
Permalink
03.04.10
Posted in Culture, Human nature, human sexuality at 1:01 am by Administrator
Bookworm says she lost respect for people who said they liked the 1990 movie “Pretty Woman.” She uses that as the lead-in to an examination of some statistics about prostitution.
Permalink
01.17.10
Posted in Culture, Economics, Human nature, human sexuality at 4:11 pm by Administrator
Jennifer Robach Morse does a great job of disspelling the libertarian argument that expanding the definition of marriage to include same-gender couples wouldn’t affect society and culture much.
Permalink
01.05.10
Posted in Human nature, Religion & Spirituality, human sexuality at 9:04 pm by Administrator
The Anchoress on Brit Hume on Tiger Woods and by inference Buddhism. She also offers a roundup of other perspectives, ranging from Buddhist to Christian to secular.
What is the relationship between forgiveness and peace of mind?
Permalink
10.06.09
Posted in Culture, Human nature, human sexuality at 1:12 pm by Administrator
Two great Townhall columns today – one by Cal Thomas and one by Bill Murchison - sum up everything I’d have to say about the Polanski and Letterman matters and what they have to say about the relationship between the arts-and-entertainment world and the erosion – as in chunks of the cliff falling into the ocean – of Western civilization.
Permalink
09.24.09
Posted in Culture, Human freedom, Human nature at 2:54 pm by Administrator
Bill Whittle hosts a great ten-minute examination of their divergent visions and their implications for how to organize society at Pajamas TV.
The comment threads here at BN often wind up coming down to debates over the role of self-interest in human affairs. This video makes a worthwhile contribution to that discussion.
HT: The Anchoress.
UPDATE: My link, even though I put in the specific URL for that video, takes you to the general page for free PJTV shows. I’ll leave it up, just to encourage folks to watch all the great stuff available there, but for some reason The Anchoress’s link works directly, so here that is.
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
