My Random Thoughts series continues. Randomly, we are now at Part 23, which is an extra large helping of random thoughts and even better: it comes with an extra large helping of random memes (although I should warn you, dear reader, that the Dune memes have been flowing more strongly with the release of Dune Part Two). Enjoy!
598. Sometimes being a professor is going down a rabbit hole of reading to over-prepare for a single class discussion while your students just want you to finish grading and give them the next assignment prompt.
599. I’m often confused that phenomena like problematic artists, systems of oppression that we all participate in to some degree or other, privileges based on aspects of one’s identity beyond one’s control, etc. cause some people so much knee-jerk consternation. I think it’s that most people think that guilt is a feeling to be avoided at all costs, even if those costs include massive self-imposed denial (“sexism/racism/homophobia doesn’t exist”), theoretical subversion (“no ethical consumption under capitalism” or “separate the art from the artist”), or a resolute anti-intellectualism of “I just don’t think about that.” But guilt can’t be entirely removed. It’s a basic existential condition, a byproduct of being a sufficiently thoughtful and compassionate human being. Guilt is not to be removed, but to be used, hopefully to work toward the creation of a world where people will have less to be guilty about.
600. One day you’re young and hip, and then some day you find yourself attracted to the people in ads for laundry detergent.
601. I care deeply about individual humans and about humanity as a whole, but I often find it difficult to care about groups in the same way, especially when one group is pitted against another and caring about one is thought to entail not caring about the other.
602. Every day I work from home, I sit down after breakfast to "look at my email." Then I look up and it's three hours later.
603. Some people think the job of philosophy is to give answers to philosophical questions, even if these answers are incomplete or not strictly knowable, and to show how our answers to philosophical issues can shape our lives. Other people look at philosophy as a way to deepen and expand the questions we ask, and to show that these questions are often lurking even where we think our answers are most assured. Am I the second type?
604. Sure, life is hellscape of suffering leading to oblivion, but on the other hand, cake is pretty good.
605. A game I like to play on my walks: Dead snake or discarded hair extension?
606. A terrible confession: I often think “modern retellings” of Grimm’s fairy tales, Greek mythology, Bible stories, etc. are kind of boring. I’d generally rather hear a new story. It also sometimes encourages a kind of “winking at the audience” cleverness and pretentious references in the place of interesting ideas.
607. Between the high speed limits, unnecessarily giant death machine trucks, road rage, and lack of safe walkable spaces, it almost seems the United States is deliberately trying to kill pedestrians. And if the cars don’t kill you, the guns, drugs, or lack of affordable healthcare might do the job. Anyway, fun things I think about on my walks.
608. Imagine if I told you that pedestrians need to see your turn signals, too?
609. A funny thing: When you tell people you love heavy metal and/or horror, they often immediately inform you that they don’t personally care for that type of thing. Honestly, for me this is part of the appeal of both metal and horror.
610. Peak winter break is when you run out of milk, so you use Bailey’s instead.
611. All I want is for all violence and oppression to stop, for everyone to have their basic needs met, to have a good chance for human flourishing. I’ve been told that I’m supposed to stop wanting that sort of thing as I get older, less naïve, and more hardened to the world. Yet all the hardness and experience and disappointment of my life have just made me want this more.
612. It's weird when people imply that war, violence, and exploitation are “practical” by claiming that nonviolence and justice are “impractical.”
613. Cats teach us a lot about how to relax. One example: If you can’t tell whether you’re “taking a nap” or “going back to bed,” then you’re relaxing in cat-mode.
614. There are a lot of TBD’s on my syllabi, because it seems hasty to let whatever whims strike me in the first week of January dictate the entire spring semester.
615. I love André 3000’s flute album. Releasing a New Age flute album after being half of one of the greatest hip hop duos of all time is honestly probably the most André 3000 thing he could do. A creative inspiration to us all!
616. January 2024 is the time of year for updating the math whenever I need to remind myself that things that "weren't that long ago" really were "that long ago." For example: the other day I did the math, and it turns out that 1999 was 25 years ago. As Neo said in The Matrix (1999): Whoa.
617. Philosophy is not really a single academic discipline, but rather a loose collection of separate but occasionally overlapping communities of separate but occasionally overlapping individuals.
618. I’m fond of saying, “Everything is more complicated than you think it is.” Perhaps another way to say this: “The universe is not contained by your ideas, wishes, or conceptual schemes.”
619. An MLK Day thought: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” is a great line and people are right to quote it frequently, but lately I've been thinking a lot about the idea of an “inescapable network of mutuality.”
620. One of the many fun things about teaching world philosophies or really any class not totally bound by “the Western tradition” (whatever that is): you get to learn new and cool stuff about various peoples, cultures, languages, and histories. Why should teachers’ insecurities about “being an expert” ruin good educational fun, both for us and for our students? Why do we let academia tamp down the love of learning new things that brought most of us into academic pursuits in the first place?
621. Skepticism without open-mindedness leads to curmudgeonly egoism. Open-mindedness without skepticism leads to foolish credulity.
622. There’s a lot of talk about leadership these days. And somewhat less talk about being a follower. But I’m not particularly interested in being either a leader or a follower. Why not just be a weirdo who does their own thing, occasionally intersecting with other weirdos but without pressure to lead or follow? Must all human interactions be so hierarchical?
623. Why aim for leadership when you can have friendship?
624. For people who occasionally brag about how “anyone can find anything now” due to the internet and how this makes us much more enlightened than people in the pre-internet past, my younger students are often seemingly incapable of finding easily available information on the syllabus and course website.
625. If anything, I think the internet has made things worse: you can find a lot of information, but the internet also makes us remarkably disinclined to do so. It gives people a false sense that the information they do find is the only information that exists—a bizarre kind of relativistic digital idealism.
626. When you are young, your friends are flaky mostly because they make plans at the last minute. As you get older, your friends become flaky mostly because they cancel plans at the last minute.
627. It has always been weird to me how the concept of gender is such a big organizing part of most people’s identities, shaping their ideas about who they hang out with, who they are allowed to admire, the activities they can do… I’m not talking about the social aspects of gender, which affect all of us whether we want them to or not. As I sometimes say, I don’t have any personal interest in the idea of “being a man,” but masculinity has an interest in me. But really what weirds me out is that most people seem to consciously choose to acquiesce to a gender concept: “I do this because I’m a man/woman.” But these choices are in turn based on the largely unwitting and unexamined concepts of gender that shape all of us, subtly influencing the very idea of “conscious choice,” so that I’m not making a moral judgment here. The constructs drive the choice as much as the choice drives the constructs. But like so many things people do, it’s just weird to me. This is maybe also why I really enjoy the increasing popularity of questioning gender paradigms that has been driving gender traditionalists batty in recent decades.
628. Deliberately and unproblematically choosing a broad category to define one’s identity is strange to me: “I do this because I’m this gender, this generation, from this place, etc.” Of course, these categories shape all of us, but not in such straightforward determining ways that shouldn’t be constantly questioned. To put it in Buddhist terms, these categories are conventional conceptual constructions that are merely a small part of the innumerable causal conditions that make us who we are. Such categories not worth being too attached to, especially insofar as doing so solidifies an attachment to the idea of self.
629. Apparently “normal people” just think things and then keep thinking those things without a constant barrage of self-questioning and new thoughts coming to undermine the old ones. I’ve long been deeply puzzled by this. But now I’m coming to think many people’s lack of self-reflection also explains a lot about the world we live in.
630. The phrase “strong woman” has always sounded odd to me, because it implies that the natural or normal state for women is to be weak, and this has never been my experience.
631. I’m never quite sure what people mean by “strong characters” when discussing fiction, film, or TV (often about “strong female characters”). Is it a person who dominates others? Dominates themselves? Must strength be identified with domination?
632. It’s not that when you’re born doesn’t shape your experiences and thus who you are as a person, but I don’t think that generations are quite the uniquely determining factors we seem to have decided they are. And the idea that different generations have nothing to learn from each other and no possibility of common experiences is actually kind of bad for all of us.
633. I guess some of my antipathy toward sorting people into large categories is that I’ve never felt that I’ve comfortably fit into any category.
634. Everyone is weird in their own weird little way, and that’s a beautiful thing.
635. The red state-blue state narrative makes some people in blue states smug and complacent and some in red states demoralized and apathetic. Neither attitude is helpful.
636. A lot of modern conservatism results from a lack of imagination: we can’t have a living wage or basic rights for entire groups of people because powerful people can’t or won’t imagine anything else. The irony is that this lack of imagination simply channels the currents of change into making our future society worse for most of us by exacerbating and solidifying present-day inequalities and hierarchies.
637. The fundamental incoherence of political conservatism is that the past or the present simply can’t be conserved. The question is not whether we will change, but how.
638. Contemporary conservatism (especially here in the US, but perhaps elsewhere, too) isn’t really conservatism in the literal sense of conserving traditions of past so much as it’s a nostalgia for a past that never was in the form of a vision of a dystopian future.
639. Ultimately my love of both philosophy and speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc.) have the same root: the hunch that developing the ability to imagine different ways of being, doing, and thinking is essential to one’s humanity.
640. When I say war is unnecessary, I don’t mean that one group may not occasionally have to defend themselves from another. I mean that in a vaster sense beyond sides, factions, armies, and so forth, war is always a failure of leadership somewhere and a hardening of hearts to the fact that war always causes tremendous suffering for those who had no part in starting the war.
641. I always stop to talk to cats. And if they don’t immediately run away, I feel as if I’ve made a breakthrough in inter-species understanding.
642. A big part of the charm of cats is that their little kitty minds are somewhat inscrutable, beyond humans’ understanding and control. Will they ignore you and sleep for 15 hours? Go on a rampage around the house? Curl up on your lap? Climb the curtains? Demand pets? These adorable little chaos furballs keep you guessing, which is a good lesson for anyone trying to be alive in this universe.
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