My long-running random thoughts series continues with Part 19! And since this is Part 19 and I'm a huge fan of Stephen King's Dark Tower series (where this number figures heavily, at least in the later books), I figured I would riff on my favorite line from the series (even though this quote randomly comes from the first book well before the 19 stuff took off... but that's more fittingly random, I suppose).
I haven't posted one of these since May, and the random thoughts stop for no blog, so I have even more random thoughts than usual. It looks like I got up to the totally random number of 502 with this post! How random!
And as always: plenty of memes for your random memetic enjoyment! Enjoy!
464. I’m not a religious person myself. Still, I resent how the religious right in the US has coopted the very concept of “Christianity” and even “religion,” so that when people are critical of “Christianity” or “religion” they often mean a narrowly conceived conservative American Christianity.
465. If all religious people were more like Quakers and less like Jerry Falwell, I think this would be good for the world. The problem isn’t religion per se.
466. One of the many mysteries of conservative Christianity: if you believe that God is love, wouldn’t you want more love and more kinds of love in the world?
467. Ethics can become complicated, but I think the world would be transformed if most people accepted a basic principle: treat all people like people.
468. If I’m being completely honest, Christianity makes the least sense to me of any of the major world religions: its conception of a personal God, the trinity, atonement, original sin, personal immortality, the concept of hell, and so on. But the one thing that does make sense to me is the emphasis on love for all our fellow humans. Why can’t we have more of that?
469. When did all nerdy media come to be seen as primarily about processing trauma? I’m not even arguing against this idea. Trauma has to be processed somehow, I guess. Just wondering when it became nearly ubiquitous to think this was the main purpose of art as opposed to say, raising interesting questions, creating beauty, confronting the sublime, or being just plain fun.
470. The Boys is an over-the-top show about superheroes. It also happens to be the most accurate representation of current-day American culture and politics that I’ve seen yet.
471. Imagine thinking that all the philosophical issues and solutions that are or will be only exist in a single small tradition from one tiny corner of the world that mostly lives on in a single demographic in elite universities in just a few parts of the world! The folly! The hubris!
472. I’m conservative in the sense that I think we can learn from the past, but I’m progressive in the sense that I think we need not be limited by it.
473. Sometimes when I need to amuse myself, I remember the time I saw a vanity "Don't Tread on Me" license plate on a minivan.
474. I’m too tired and unhip to follow the Discourse, or to even really know what it is. Luckily most of it blows over in a couple days, while I keep doing my own weird things.
475. It’s a bit baffling to me that philosophy, which seems to be especially well-suited to lessening dogmatism, most often seems to bolster it instead.
476. I have the wrong PhD, the wrong specialization, and the wrong job to ever be part of the mainstream of the academic philosophy discipline, but I also lack the desire to be part of it. I genuinely enjoy working on the academic margins, which seems way more open and fun, anyway.
477. There’s no a priori reason that secondary world fantasy has to be vaguely based on medieval Europe or take place in a misogynist society.
478. I’ve never understood why it’s a radical idea that we should use our vast resources and human ingenuity to make the world minimally decent for everybody.
479. It’s funny how Twitter began as a compact phrase-sharing medium and became a list of blog posts you are forced to read half a sentence at a time.
480. I haven’t done the historical work to back this up, but I suspect that if anyone bothered to do a historical genealogy of the concept of “Western philosophy,” it would have its roots in early modern European conceptions of race. It would be particularly amusing to make this case to the type of person who would be annoyed by it.
481. Elitist pretentiousness and smug dogmatism are two of my least favorite characteristics in people. Which makes it kind of weird that I went into academia, where these characteristics are not only permitted but encouraged.
482. People who use their power to be deliberately cruel to those with less power than themselves… there’s something deeply morally heinous about such people, common though they may be.
483. I think “skepticism” is a perfectly fine way to describe what I mean, but most of my colleagues in philosophy are limited by their paradoxically dogmatic conception of “skepticism,” so maybe I will start calling it “open-mindedness” or “being receptive to new things” or “not being closed off by old concepts and experiences.” In doing so I may well be embodying the very attitude I mean to describe. Or maybe not!
484. I think monarchy, nobility, and related elitisms make me uncomfortable because the very idea that some kinds of people are better than others seems to me to be the source of a great deal of human suffering.
485. I find most arguments against caring about history of philosophy deeply amusing, because if you apply those same arguments to present-day philosophy from the perspective of future philosophers, present-day philosophy may be just as bad. Alas, maybe one needs some historical understanding to grasp this point about the future!
486. Today’s “real philosophy” is tomorrow’s history of philosophy.
487. A lesson that has not always been easy for me, but seems increasingly in need of repeating: just because someone is nice to some people doesn’t mean they can’t be abusive toward others, and this in, in fact, the standard pattern of most abusers, especially those privileged in and enabled by their social contexts.
488. Debates about history of philosophy are often disagreements about what philosophy is. Historically incurious philosophers are just weird to me as I see no real distinction between "philosophy" and "history of philosophy." I'd rather ask: why is the discipline so Eurocentric?
489. We need not belabor intractable differences of intellectual taste. For example: I understand reading Plato, Zhuangzi, Vasubandhu, etc. and saying, "I disagree," but I literally can't understand liking philosophy and saying, "I got nothing out of that." Weird.
490. I’m a middle-aged adult with a PhD. I love Beavis and Butt-Head. I am large, I contain multitudes.
491. This year most of my students are loving the Zhuangzi. In past years, many students couldn’t stand it. This is called the transformation of things.
492. It’s weird that philosophy is a contemporary academic discipline, and this is a sad fact about contemporary academic disciplines.
493. When I was a kid, I saw a sign that said, “Expect the unexpected.” I’ve been puzzled by this paradox ever since. It’s probably why I became a philosopher.
494. Correspondence I would like to receive from political campaigns: "Give $5 and we'll stop contacting you for a week. For $100, you won't hear from us until 2024."
495. Probably the hardest thing about communicating my take on skepticism is that I see skepticism as a fundamentally open-minded way of engaging humbly with a reality bigger than our cognitive nets can capture, whereas most philosophers see skepticism—for good or for ill—as a curmudgeonly way of closing off from reality within a cognitive fortress of our own conceptual proliferations.
496. Me: I would like a sugar-free soda that's not Diet Coke.
My campus, and much of the world: LOL.
497. I assume people who complain about how it’s “unrealistic” when “characters do stupid things” in fiction have somehow forgotten all the stupid things they and others have done in real life.
498. A thought experiment: imagine some currently beloved science fiction or fantasy film or TV franchise being released for the first time today. And then imagine the complaints about “bad writing” and “plot holes” and the like that would inevitably follow.
499. Few things make me glad for my peripheral place in the philosophy discipline like Twitter.
500. There’s a fine line between efficiency and laziness, and I often work hard to justify the latter with the former.
501. One major US party supports patriarchal white Christian fascism and forced birth and keeps getting worse. The other major party is a bit bumbling and isn’t going to jumpstart the Revolution anytime soon, but they might kinda legalize weed, forgive some student loans, and make life easier for some people. They are also, like it or not, the only power in this country capable of slowing down the other major party via traditional political means. I don’t see why this is a difficult decision.
502. I don’t insist that fiction always make sense to me, precisely because reality doesn’t always make sense to me. Who am I that reality--real or imagined--must make sense to me all the time?
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