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My long-running series of Random Thoughts continues! See the previous entry here.
We've arrived at Part 9, which is the first part to happen after the COVID-19 crisis was officially declared a global pandemic in March. But the thoughts are still random enough that not every thought is about the pandemic, although many of them are. You can find my more elaborated, but still random thoughts in my recent journal entries.
It looks like I'm up to 199 Random Thoughts here. I'll have to think of something especially profound and random for #200...
178. Skepticism doesn’t necessarily rule out being politically conservative, but neither does it, as many seem to think, imply that one ought to be conservative.
179. Maybe COVID-19 will put the Protestant Work Ethic in self-quarantine for a while.
180. I think I don’t like video conference calls for much the same reason I generally dislike live albums: I like the real, in-person thing (social interaction, live music) and I like the distance, technological thing (text-based communication, studio recorded music), but the half-way measures that are trying, but failing, to be the real thing are just awkward and unfulfilling.
181. March 2020: The month the human race came together and collectively sighed, “Well, fuck.”
182. Is it possible for most people to exercise caution without panic? Or must the two always go together for most humans? Or to put it another way, can we do what we need to do without freaking the fuck out?
183. My attitude toward technology: sometimes it helps, so good. Sometimes it doesn’t help. Sometimes it creates more problems than it solves. Sometimes you have to ask, to loosely paraphrase Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, “Just because you can, does that mean you should?”
184. “I’m not on Facebook” has become the new “I don’t watch television.” “I don’t use Zoom” will soon become the new “I’m not on Facebook.”
185. Bibliophile problems: When you’re trying to watch the news to get informed about the global pandemic, but you’re distracted by looking at the books on everybody’s home bookshelves.
186. I’m almost constitutionally uninterested in things like the latest trends, the hottest gossip, the newest big thing, what’s hip, who’s popular, which generation hates which other generation, which apps everyone is using, … This means that I kind of do my own thing, which I’m fine with, but it also makes it hard for me to know what’s going on and who’s who, which means I’ll never be an academic star with a hip Twitter feed or a popular blogger (if anyone cares about blogs anymore?). I’ll never have my finger anywhere near the pulse of popular culture (even though I consume a lot of popular culture). I’m likely to go against the grain not so much because I’m some sort of romantic outlaw, but because I don’t really know what the grain was in the first place, or if I did know, I didn’t care. …
187. Skepticism ought to make one more open-minded. I don’t know why it often has the opposite effect of making people into negative dogmatists.
188. One good thing about a few decades of tsundoku (the practice of collecting books you don’t read) is that I have enough unread books at home for at least 12 years of quarantine.
189. We are all learning new things about ourselves during the pandemic. For example, I learned that it takes more than a global pandemic to keep me from buying discount Easter candy at Walgreens.
190. I don’t know if this makes me more or less postmodern, but I’m basically incredulous towards all narratives, meta- or otherwise.
191. One of my main intellectual annoyances: when people insist on cramming complex contemporary or historical phenomena into preformed narratives. Some of the worst offenders: science versus religion, “political correctness run amok,” reason versus religion, my way versus the highway, etc.
192. If you think about it, it’s a very Buddhist thing to be skeptical about narratives that try to pound your experience into some preconceived shape. Such narratives cause suffering when they inevitably unravel. This is why Buddhist skepticism makes perfect sense.
193. I hope we will rethink things in light of the pandemic. I doubt we will.
194. An imagined dialogue....
Me: So I’m saying Nāgārjuna could be taken as a skeptic in Sense 2.
Objection: But Nāgārjuna can’t be a skeptic.
Me: Why not?
Obj: Because he’s not a skeptic in Sense 1.
Me: But I never claimed he is. He could be read as a skeptic in Sense 2.
Obj: No.
Me: Why not?
Obj: Because he’s not a skeptic in Sense 1.
Me: Well …. There’s this other sense of skepticism, Sense 2. I’ve written articles and a whole book about it.
Obj: Yes, but why are you saying he’s 100% a skeptic in Sense 1 and all other interpretations are definitely wrong?
Me: I didn’t say any of that. I’m not sure about this. The meaning of the text is underdetermined. But Sense 2 can make sense of the text. That’s all I’m saying.
Obj: Yes, I’m definitely listening to you, but … Sense 1, so no.
Me: ….
(The preceding dramatization explains why I am going to give up spending much time in further defense and articulation of the idea of skepticism about philosophy and its application to classical philosophers. Philosophers, the people who should be most open to rethinking basic terms and definitions, seem curiously set against doing so in this case. I give up.)
195. There are many ways that Zoom office hours are not like regular office hours, but there is one way they are exactly the same: I'm usually surprised when students drop by.
196. I wonder if people with PhDs in other disciplines misspell the name of the discipline in which they are allegedly experts as frequently as I do.
197. One good thing about working from home: You can eat something with a bunch of raw onions for lunch and then immediately go to a conference while only annoying the people who are already used to your bullshit.
198. What We Do in the Shadows: because vampire comedy is just what we need when everything sucks.
199. Philosophy teaches us that there are problems that are not entirely clear and whose solutions are not immediately obvious, but it also shows us that everyone has the capacity to think creatively and critically about possible solutions to these problems. I suspect—in fact, I hope—that we will have to rethink a lot of things about our society in the near future.
Random Thoughts 200+ .... coming soon!
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