I haven't made a "Random Thoughts" post since October, but rest assured: the random thoughts have kept coming. Here are a few of them! With memes!
503. I understand that the popular US leftist pastime of Knowing What the Democrats Should Do is a lot of fun, but I don’t see how it’s a particularly helpful political strategy.
504. The more I teach Mencius and Aristotle, the more convinced I become that most modern Western people made a terrible mistake in thinking of ethics as an onerous obligation rather than the means by which we cultivate that which makes us most human.
505. If you have a background in non-Western traditions or even pre-Christian Europe, it becomes obvious that even the most secular or vehemently anti-religious modern Western ethical theory is suffering from a sort of Abrahamic theological hangover. But there are other ways than these.
506. Remember in 2016 when Republicans were talking about a future with taco trucks on every corner as if that wouldn’t be the most awesome thing ever? Racism has the power to make you hate tacos. Unfathomable.
507. Early 21st century white middle class Americans have to be the most well-hydrated demographic in human history.
508. Most of my “hair styles” over the years can be explained by this Rush lyric: “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.”
509. “Philosophically-inclined Dune fans….?” As if there’s any other kind!
510. Public busses in Chattanooga are like wizards: they are never late; they arrive precisely when they mean to.
511. It’s hard to teach a humanities class, especially in philosophy, if students come to me with no concept of the difference between a claim and a reason/argument for that claim. It also reminds me that for a disturbingly large portion of the general public simply repeating or rephrasing or explaining a claim is indistinguishable from a reason or an argument in favor of that claim. This is one of many reasons why critical thinking should be taught starting in elementary school.
512. I don’t know how to teach a humanities class if none of the students are doing the reading. Humanities is, as a professor of mine once said, about reading old books and thinking about them. What happens to the humanities if nobody is reading books anymore? What happens to humanity if nobody is reading books anymore?
513. What annoys me about knee-jerk college student relativism isn’t so much that students say they believe this, but that they believe it so dogmatically.
514. There’s a weird bias in history of philosophy and elsewhere that I call “canonicity,” which is basically a bias for those texts and figures considered to be canonical or influential or “important.” But, weirdo that I am, I think a text or figure could be interesting precisely because they are not considered canonical today. Besides, the very concept of a canon and who/what is included in it is an artifact of itself: things are influential because they are canonical, and canonical because they are influential, and so on and so on… in a weirdly self-reflexive auto-justification.
515. I’ve always been okay to enjoy my weird little interests whether or not anyone else approves or understands. Mostly this works out fine, but I often have trouble talking about my interests to other people because my default assumption is that nobody could possibly care about the same stuff I care about.
516. People are of course free to practice their religions whether I understand them or not, but one religion is particularly baffling to me: college football in the Southeastern USA.
517. I think much of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is unfilmable, and I’m content to enjoy the books as they are. I don’t understand other Dark Tower fans’ deep need to see this series adapted to film and TV (not to mention the interminable “dream casting” … ugh). But if anyone could adapt the Dark Tower, it’s Mike Flanagan.
518. In the past I’ve made fun of myself that my day job is reading stuff and writing things about it, while my main hobbies include… reading stuff and writing things about it. But since I started a side-gig as a first reader or “slush reader” now I can also say that my day job involves evaluating written submissions from a wide variety of people, while my hobby/minimally paying side-gig involves evaluating written submissions from a wide variety of people.
519. Sometimes I think my recent desire to explore non-dualism in philosophy comes from a feeling I’ve had most of my life: I am simultaneously apart from and a part of humanity.
520. I usually don’t really understand other people, but not in hard-hearted way; you can love that which you don’t understand. In fact, this may be the only way to love.
521. In aesthetic matters (and maybe in some others), I wonder if instead of saying “that’s bad,” it makes more sense to say, “I don’t understand that” or “that’s not for me.”
522. A lot of US history makes sense when you remember that the nation was founded by rich white dudes whining about being oppressed.
523. Some of the difficulty of teaching ethics in philosophy classrooms is that like most college students, philosophy teachers have recognized the flaws of thinking there are simplistic cut-and-dried answers in ethics, but they’ve moved beyond this to come to suspect this means there may be complicated answers in ethics, whereas many college students stop at the critique of easy answers and assume this means there are no answers at all or that everything is “subjective” (which is in its own way an incredibly simplistic answer!).
524. If you want to see how petty and irrational people dedicated to the life of the mind can be, get involved in university politics.
525. In academia, one must constantly scry in the Mirror of Galadriel for portents that justify things that were, things that are, and some things that have not yet come to pass (depending on funding).
526. For a long time, I’ve been puzzled that people in Chattanooga drive too slow on the highway and too fast on the side streets. But I think I’ve figured it out: people in Chattanooga want to drive precisely 50mph at all times. It doesn’t matter if they’re on a narrow street in front of a crowded elementary school during recess or a wide-open interstate with a speed limit of 75 on a mild, sunny afternoon. The impulse is always 50mph.
527. Philosophers worry a lot about whether their philosophical positions are able to rule out fascism or other moral evils, but I’m not so sure philosophy can be in itself either the end or beginning of such things. Something as wrong as fascism may be the symptom of a deeper and more heinous moral illness than philosophy can cure on its own. And maybe that’s precisely the conclusion that bothers so many philosophers.
528. These people who think their kids will be indoctrinated into the “gay agenda” merely by learning of the existence of LBGTQ people in books, TV, movies, the internet, etc. seem to be admitting an awful lot about how they think (wrongly!) that it’s easy to indoctrinate kids and how they themselves are trying (and failing!) to indoctrinate their kids to hate people.
529. Being deeply personally invested in rigidly normative categories of gender and sexuality is like confining yourself in a straightjacket (pun intended!) while trying to put straightjackets on other people.
530. My post-tenure years seem to find me drifting toward some weird thoughts considering my job as a philosophy teacher and background in comparative philosophy: grades are basically meaningless and comparative philosophy often prevents us from fully appreciating non-Western philosophy.
531. Imagine dealing with James Bond’s expense reports.
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