My series of Random Thoughts started randomly one day almost two years ago. I would wait until the exact two year anniversary of that first post, but that wouldn't be random, now would it? Add in a pandemic and some random memes, and here we are: Random Thoughts, Part 16: Dune the Random Things!
360. I’ve never really felt super close to the “mainstream” of philosophy as a discipline. But I’d also be lying if I said I’d ever cared to put much effort into getting that close to it.
361. Liking things but also finding aspects of those things problematic was something I assumed everybody understood until I started spending time online.
362. The popularity of denigrating the South as an entire region is an odd thing to do for people who claim to value critical thinking and open mindedness, but it’s also a pretty convenient way for people (especially white leftists) in other parts of the country to avoid taking a hard look at the ignorance and racism in their own backyards.
363. Students these days have experienced a lot of testing and assessment, but relatively little education.
364. Outcomes assessment and other administrative metrics that seek to reduce education to quantifiable, measurable data are all the rage in education these days, but one reason they don’t work well for humanities courses is that studying the humanities might change students’ thinking or values or character suddenly within that semester, or it might do so gradually months, years, or decades later. The humanities pay off in a human being’s whole life long after they earn a grade or are granted a degree. This is difficult, if not impossible, to adequately measure within the artificial bounds of academic calendars and quantifiable data that fit the procrustean bed of administrative initiatives.
365. There must be a hell realm where you do nothing but respond to copyeditor's queries on the references of a paper you wrote three years ago.
366. People seem to assume that Plato had some specific things he wanted readers of the Republic to believe about ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, etc. But what if his aim was more to encourage his readers to think about these topics in new ways for themselves?
367. Part of my increasing tendency to read philosophical texts as more continuous with literature (especially science fiction) is to read them less as declaring, “here’s how things are” and more as asking, “what if you thought about things like this?”
368. I find dogmatic pronouncements among historians of philosophy to be amusing, as if I completely understand things that my colleagues down the hall write much less things written by people temporally and culturally far removed from my own context.
369. A lot of my time as a college philosophy teacher is spent convincing students to rethink the strict dichotomies they’re taught earlier in their education: fact vs. opinion, research vs. argument, subjective vs. objective, etc. I think it’s partly because the philosophical demand for independent arguments (opinions) backed up by research and reasons is largely foreign to our K-12 educational system and much of our broader culture.
370. Maybe not a terribly novel thought: slashers are death. Always pursuing you, and whether it gets you today, tomorrow, on Friday the 13th, Halloween, or even while you’re asleep, there is no escape no matter how many sequels, remakes, and reboots you get.
371. If you post a link to an article or blog post on social media, there is an 87% chance someone will leave a comment on social media without having read the article or blog post. If the title of the article or blog post is a question, there is a 100% chance someone will answer the question in a social media comment without reading the article or blog post.
372. There are more than two types of people, but one of them is the type for whom if you send them an invitation to something more than two weeks ahead of time, it might as well be happening in a decade.
373. I don’t so much mind that many students have relativist views, but I find it odd that so many of them think these views are somehow simultaneously obvious and novel, when in fact they are neither.
374. It’s often weird to see students outside of class, because if you meet me in class, even in an online class, I might seem like an affable, warm, and goofy person, but if you meet me in the wild in public I might seem like a hermit who wandered off my mountain and has not interacted with another human being in decades.
375. Aside from being objectionably Eurocentric and historically suspicious, the tendency to declare that ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is part of “our” tradition or part of some recognizable kind of “Western philosophy” makes these texts too familiar to students. It undermines the potential for these texts to estrange students from their familiar and taken-for-granted assumptions, to encourage them to try to momentarily inhabit alien worldviews. It takes away a lot of what makes these texts interesting, both historically and philosophically. If part of the benefit of studying philosophy is to think aboutthe concepts you normally think with, then historical estrangement is one way to get there. It’s good that ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is weird to 21st century Americans college students.
376. Teaching Plato and Aristotle always gets me thinking just how much work you have to do to understand these texts, and how difficult it is to get students to radically question assumptions about American individualism when reading the Republic or happiness when reading Nicomachean Ethics. Some of this is translation issues, but it’s also amazing how thoroughly a lot of 21st century American assumptions are baked into students’ young minds.
377. My secret hope is that the success of Dune (2021) will be part of what undoes the hegemony of Marvel over mainstream science fiction cinema. I have nothing against Marvel as one kind of big budget science fiction movie (those movies are fun!), but it shouldn’t be the only kind of science fiction movie we get.
378. I thought I had made peace with the hegemony of the MCU over mainstream science fiction movies, but then Eternals pushed Dune out of all of my local IMAX theaters and now I’m not so sure.
379. I think I think all of these things simultaneously, and but I also think these things might all be true contradictory though they may seem.
· Engaging with terms like “political correctness” or its more recent descendants like “wokeness,” “cancel culture,” or worries about “critical race theory” is ceding too much territory to the right in the Culture Wars because these terms bring with them a battery of conceptual cookie cutters that organize everything into recognizable Culture War tropes (this is why the “anti-woke” left is deeply puzzling to me).
· The right has already set the parameters of the current battlefields in the Culture Wars, and we’re all fighting on their terms whether we admit it or not.
· Engaging directly, doubling down with (self-)righteous indignation doesn’t seem to help, as it encourages the other side to dig their trenches and do the same, thus entrenching and lengthening the damage of the Culture Wars.
· Disengaging with detached mockery or simply ignoring the Culture Wars doesn’t seem to work, either, as the right wing Culture War outrage machine churns on whether one engages with it or not.
· We need a new strategy in the Culture Wars, something between furious engagement and aloof contempt, something other than these bellicose metaphors, some new way of talking about how to sift the real from imagined issues, but given our current cultural landscape it’s hard to image anything other than fury or detachment catching on.
380. The second half of 2021 has been weird in many places in the US: the people exercising their freedom to not wear a mask or get vaccinated have thereby reduced the freedom of those of us who think that we would be freer if almost everyone wore a mask and got vaccinated. So in effect, the exercise of freedom of the maskless and unvaccinated has made the rest of us less free to go places safely and in the long term we will probably never entirely free from this virus because of their actions. But you know, it’s about our freedom!
381. Aside from the political and epidemiological annoyances, I also experience a deep moral sadness when I go places and see hardly any masks indoors or learn that something like 40 some percent of people in my county are unvaccinated, as if my neighbors are signaling directly that they don’t care about each other. “But they don’t see it that way, you can’t blame them,” someone might say. Sure, but the fact that they don’t see it that way is itself a massive failure of trust and community.
382. Sometimes I get exhausted just reading social media updates from other academics about how much they’re thinking about and working on. Don’t y’all ever take a break?
383. I think someday I will write something called "Does 'Western philosophy' exist?" just to annoy people.
384. One of the most tragic things about humanity is that we have the resources to make this planet a paradise for every one of us, yet we consistently choose not to.
385. The trick of doing reflective history of philosophy (or history of anything else): to learn from the past without being limited by it.
386. “I can’t believe I have to do this again already.” – Me every time I have clipped my fingernails in my entire life.
387. Given where we have been as a country in the US in recent years, politicizing masks and vaccines during a deadly pandemic was as inevitable as it was totally fucking stupid.
388. Sometimes I feel like I must be the last person in the universe with the following reaction upon opening a link: “Shit, I have to watch a video instead of reading text? No thanks. Close tab.”
389. Philosophy, the discipline which seems like it ought to take deep discussions about its own methodology extremely seriously, seems remarkably disinclined to do so, at least in its academic forms.
390. One harm of factionalizing politicization is that it steers conversation toward the factions themselves rather than the thing they disagree about. Hence, we talk about the type of person who gets a vaccine or doesn’t rather than why people should get vaccinated.
391. The greatest lesson I learned when I was injured and convalescing for a couple months: most of the time nothing bad actually happens if you do stuff late.
392. Sometimes when I watch The Simpsons I remember that when the show started I was a couple years older than Bart and now I’m several years older than Homer.
393. The mocking use of the Facebook laughing reaction is one of the weirdest ways conservatives have of trying to “own the libs” these days. Laughing at articles about disease, death, and suffering doesn’t own anyone. It just makes you look like a callous asshole.
394. A random puzzle on a random day: people who walk in the street on streets with perfectly good sidewalks.
395. As if I haven’t marginalized myself enough within the discipline of philosophy, lately I have come to have less desire to do “comparative philosophy,” which seems to be the most respectable way to do “non-Western” philosophy these days. Instead, I think people should just work on philosophy in any tradition without feeling the need to filter it through analytic, continental, or the history of “Western” philosophy.
396. I’m not afraid of dying, but it makes me sad to think of all the books I’ll never read.
397. I think I gravitate towards history of philosophy because I’ve never completely agreed with any philosopher I’ve ever read. I’ve never felt that any philosophical theory is ultimately coherent, and I have personally given up hope of finding such a thing. Yet I also feel like I have something to learn from philosophy despite all this.
398. All philosophers are wrong (including me), but philosophers in the past were wrong in more interesting ways.
399. Every time I encounter the fact that the scientific name for domestic cats is Felis Catus, I feel like this must be some Harry Potter Latin.
400. "Who assigned all this stuff, anyway?" - Me every semester when I have to grade finals
401. One of my most un-American sentiments, which has been greatly exacerbated by the pandemic: There’s nothing inherently morally praiseworthy about being busy.
"395. As if I haven’t marginalized myself enough within the discipline of philosophy, lately I have come to have less desire to do “comparative philosophy,” which seems to be the most respectable way to do “non-Western” philosophy these days". Man, I feel you.
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