Philosophy: January 2003 Archive Page

"The Geezer loves film noir. These dark, taut, black and white films give the lie to the illusion that the forties and fifties were upbeat, positive decades. I like that." The Geezer --The Geezer Speaks WeblogGeezerSpeaks.com)

An amusing personal website... and by a Geezer, too.

Cranky avant-garde novelist Kurt Vonnegut on George W. Bush: "He's in the same business I'm in. He's telling stories. It turns out this is the simplest of all stories to tell. I mean, I want to hold attention when I write something. What he wants to be is interesting. And revenge is interesting. I've said there are two radical ideas that have been introduced into human thought. One of them is that energy and matter are pretty much the same sort of stuff. That's Einstein. The other is that revenge is a bad idea. It's an enormously popular idea but, of course, Jesus came along with the radical idea of forgiveness. That was radical. If you're insulted, you have to square accounts. So this invention by Jesus is as radical as Einstein's." --Vonnegut at 80Nuvo)

Thanks for the link, Jim. It is very hard to think of forgiveness when faced with images of North Korea's concentration camps.

"[T]he promise of a pill for every ill remains, as it always will, unfulfilled. Anyone who had read his Shakespeare would not have been surprised by this disappointment. When Macbeth asks a physician:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

"The physician replies laconically: 'Therein the patient / Must minister to himself.'

"Every day, several patients ask me Macbeth's question with regard to themselves-in less elevated language, to be sure-and they expect a positive answer: but four centuries before neurochemistry was even thought of, and before any of the touted advances in neurosciences that allegedly gave us a new and better understanding of ourselves, Shakespeare knew something that we are increasingly loath to acknowledge. There is no technical fix for the problems of humanity." Theodore Dalrymple --Why Shakespeare is for All TimeCity Journal)

"The evidence that mother-only families contribute to crime is powerful. When two scholars studied data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found that, after holding income constant, young people in father-absent families were twice as likely to be in jail as were those in two-parent families. And their lives did not improve if their mother had acquired a stepfather. Fill-in dads don't improve matters any more than do fatter government checks." James Q. Wilson

--The Family Way: Treating Fathers as Optional has Brought Big Social CostsOpinion Journal)

Some bold statements that you don't hear people making every day; one hopes that this article won't simply be dismissed as being "reactionary", and that the important pro-fatherhood message won't be drowned out by voices accusing the author of wanting to bring the woman-oppressing 50s back. Of course there are families that are better off without a father, but most single mothers aren't Rosie O'Donnell or Jodie Foster. This article calls for active, involved fathers, not lord-of-the-manor breadwinners who demand the food on the table when they come home from the local bar so that they can spend the evening reading the paper and watching sports.

Google didn't find anything on the "National Longitudinal Study of Youth," but it did return a National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. It's annoying that I can't check Wilson's sources -- it wouldn't have taken up much space to give the names of the two scholars he mentions.

The article also paraphrases advice from William Galston, a former assistant to Clinton: "To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are 20 years old. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor." Wilson's use of the statistics seems to confuse causality with correlation, which is something I'm sure Wilson wouldn't permit his philosophical opponents to do. Still, it sure looks like a strong correlation.

"Throughout the 1990s, my basic philosophy was this: Work=Boring, but Work+Speed+Risk=Cool. Speed and risk transformed the experience into something so stimulating, so exciting, so intense, that we began to believe that those qualities defined 'good work.' Now, betrayed by the reality of economic uncertainty and global instability, we're casting about for what really matters when it comes to work." Po Bronson --What Should I Do With My LifeFast Company)

This essay wins my prize for "best cultural reflection written by somebody sharing the name of a Teletubbie."