Random Thoughts, Part 5

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A while back I started posting collections of my random thoughts.  You can see the latest collection, Part 4, here.  You can see Part 5 right here, right now, right below!

81. I think I will start referring to philosophy as either South Asian or Non-South Asian. This makes as much sense as carving up philosophy as Western or Non-Western.

82. If you only like philosophers you agree with, then you don’t really like philosophy.

83. Most skinny people don’t deserve to be skinny any more than most rich people deserve to be rich.

84. Almost every reviewer of my academic work has said the same two things: my writing is very clear, and I’m completely wrong.

85. I find it odd that the same intellectual tradition that gave us postmodernism (skepticism about unified essences) also regularly makes use of the idea that a time or culture can be identified by its essential zeitgeist.

86. I often feel I’m just not angry enough for what passes for normal in our current times. I get frustrated, often by little things like excessive packaging or uncomfortable airplane seats, and I do feel a deep anger about things like the treatment of refugees and institutionalized racism. But I feel like I don’t have the red-hot righteous indignation that would lead me to act the way it seems that you’re supposed to perform on social media these days. This type of anger is frequently bolstered as an incitement to action, but I wonder if all too often it becomes an end in itself – I got angry on the internet, so I did my part.

87. I am aware that I say all this from a position of privilege, which makes the anger of my fellow white men all the more puzzling to me, but I do suspect that one’s experience of anger is at least partially a matter of personal temperament. I am all in favor of telling people they are wrong, but I’m personally less interested in telling people they are dumb or evil (even when they probably are one or both of those things). I personally dislike being angry; I’d rather try to take it and turn it into something productive. Maybe other people like being angry for its own sake. Maybe some personalities can’t help it. But who profits from keeping a lot of us non-productively angry? I am not claiming anger is never productive. But I wonder if the type of anger fueled by our contemporary culture actually is.

88. Is your “anger and posting” doing more than “thoughts and prayers”?

89. Another odd incongruity of “postmodernism” (or whatever): how easily “incredulity toward metanarratives” became extreme credulity toward the non-existence of things like truth, natures, etc., how anti-dogmatism became negative dogmatism.

90. Just because something is hard to find does not mean it does not exist.

91. The biggest epistemological mistake both within and without philosophy is to use the human ability to conceptualize or know a thing as a measure for the existence or non-existence of that thing. Such hubris to think the universe owes us anything!

92. One of the more obnoxious and harmful aspects of what tends to pass for “political discourse” these days is that everything must have two opposing sides – winners and losers, us and them, my way or the highway, etc. It makes coalitions, even of groups whose interests are quite closely aligned, much more difficult.

93. The internet and social media were supposed to open us up to the world, connecting us to others around the world, but ironically they have given many people a kind of magnifying glass that allows people to greatly exaggerate the importance and influence of themselves and like-minded people. It has made it simultaneously easier to forget that we exist in a society with diverse viewpoints and entrenched disagreements and harder to see how we might get on with things despite these disagreements.

94. I suspect that in the long run forceful denunciations and righteous indignation have changed fewer hearts and minds than patient listening, serious conversation, and deep questioning. Often proponents of more combative tactics mistake emotional fireworks for something deeper, but intellectual and moral change often happen deep in the caverns of hearts and minds. These caverns are often defended from full-on external attack by barriers of entrenched opinion, but the waters of questioning and self-examination can sometimes (but not always) seep through the cracks, eroding old prejudices and opening new spaces for the mind to breathe. This sort of change can be sudden and dramatic, but more often it is difficult, slow, and imperceptible at first, but far more transformative over time. None of this is absolute, of course. Sometimes forceful denunciation is necessary. But deeper change often requires deeper methods that subvert a person’s way of being from within.

95. One effect of my own mitigated skepticism about philosophy is that I tend to think of philosophical claims as loose hypotheses or rough conjectures rather than mathematical proofs or dogmatic pronouncements.

96. A lot of philosophical errors rest on mistaking prasaṅgas for reductios.

97. Fellow Gen Xers, let’s spare whatever the generation after Millennials is called the kind of idiocy of this whole contrived Boomer vs. Millennial thing. In fact, let’s not call that generation anything. Let’s drop this whole idea of categorizing millions of people by generation, because the idea of generation makes no sense outside of a single family. Or maybe that’s just a Gen-X thing to say?

98. Shows like Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman are sometimes funny, but their pop nihilism is tiresome precisely because it pretends to be telling the audience something new.

99. There is a hidden premise in many arguments in favor of nihilism: either meaning and value are permanent and transcendent or they do not exist, or in Dostoevsky’s version, “Without God all things are permitted.” But why would anyone believe that?

100. “Debates” that are dumb: analytic vs. continental, Boomers vs. Millennials, dog people vs. cat people, any country or region vs. any other country or region, one sport vs. another sport, men vs. women, Star Trek vs. Star Wars, me vs. people who disagree with this list.

101. A lot of human life is trying to figure out how to simultaneously do things similarly enough to other people to be accepted and differently enough to be admired.

102. Everybody is a socialist about something.

103. I was a socialist before it was cool and mainly because I hate thinking about money.

104. I’m not a capitalist, but I’m not really a Marxist, either. I think this is because economics bores me whether it’s done by greedy, narrow-minded Americans who reduce everything to self-interest or cumbersome, loquacious Germans who reduce everything to class struggle.

105. Why did the internet turn everyone into the antagonistic know-it-all who everyone avoids at the end of the bar?