Thursday, September 26, 2013

A sublime excuse for procrastination

Everything, says Spinoza, endeavors to persist in its own being. Among things with a drive for persistence we must include the ephemeral collection of electrical impulses in the flesh enclosed in the skull, the software we accumulate as our hardware meanders around.

Just as most of us negligently omit to backup important files on our computers, we also make no effort to preserve the contents of the mind so that it will survive the demise of the fragile organism that sustains it. I know I’m procrastinating the difficult task of capturing the essence of my mind in art and writing. I’m busy making things that bear not my stamp, but only the stamp of the marketplace. I never preserve the foremost virtues of my mind for the future. Why does the fiction of an afterlife persist even though I know it’s scientifically implausible? Because I can’t bear the thought that my procrastination will be fatal, that the contents of my mind will be forever lost.

But the contents of my mind will indeed be lost if I remain too lazy and timid to attempt to capture them in a form more enduring than flesh. The fiction of an afterlife is fatal to intellectual life. It gives me a ready-made excuse for my procrastination. Imagining I have infinite time, I postpone the backup indefinitely. It never gets done. And everything in my mind that might have been worth preserving is irretrievably lost.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

Shopping as a civic duty

Madison Avenue has persuaded us to make superfluous comforts and conveniences higher priorities than the basic needs of other human beings. Its success in manipulating us into irrational behavior is testified by the consumer’s neglect even of human beings closely related to him. In fact, he has learned even to neglect his future self. The channels of communication owned by capitalists are filled with their messages of prodigality and gluttony. In private we must counter them with messages of thrift and charity. We cannot silence those who would mislead us. But we can argue with them. Seductive marketers tell us money spent accelerates the economy, while money saved retards it. They attempt to transform prodigality and gluttony into civic virtues, and thrift and charity into antisocial vices. Their arguments are patently false. A dollar I spend to help the less fortunate goes into the economy just as surely as a dollar I spend on frivolous luxury. When I buy shares of agricultural enterprises, farmers spend it on tractors, warehouses, and other durable infrastructure of production. We are fond of ridiculing miserliness as a vice. But how it is a vice to spend money on productive assets, rather than assets with no purpose other than to display our wealth? The idea that there is a civic duty to consume rather than to save and give is merely a thin and flimsy rationalization for our prodigality and gluttony.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Two kinds of paperwork

In Anna Karenina, Oblonsky says “Paperwork is the soul of Russia.” But, Tolstoy tells us, the usual forms of paperwork are the wrong kind of paperwork. Tolstoy is intent on showing us a better kind. The problem is, the joy of artistic creation is not accessible to everyone. Most of us have to settle for bookkeeping. Tolstoy is opposed to privilege. But to set aside commerce and direct our attention to virtue and art—this privilege is reserved for aristocrats like him. Therein lies the paradox.

One possible resolution of Tolstoy’s paradox is asceticism. The ascetic, by learning how little he needs from others, is able to demand less of others. He gradually frees himself from the encumbrance of economic ties. He cultivates human ties. He concentrates on perfecting his behavior and his art.

Another possible resolution of Tolstoy’s paradox is to refuse to sunder virtue and art from the economic sphere. This means we work within the economic system, but we do not work for rewards. We work for the sake of work itself.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Two kinds of relativist

It might be helpful to distinguish two categories of relativist. The first says "All truth is relative to culture and social environment. We must accept that we are part of a certain culture and social environment. Things too foreign cannot be seriously entertained." A good example in this category is Richard Rorty. The second category of relativist says, "All truth is relative to culture and social environment. We must expose ourselves to a variety of cultures and social environments by reading books from a wide variety of times and places. Only this will allow us to correct for the bias we have for our own." A good example in this category is Nietzsche. The first kind of relativist accepts our limitation to our own time and place, even celebrates it. The second sort acknowledges relativism only to go on to combat it. Nietzsche advocates taking the questions posed by the great thinkers of history seriously, and not sanguinely supposing we have answered them. He is often classified as a relativist of the first category, when he is really of the second. Like all great thinkers, he aspires to be cosmopolitan and untimely, to transcend merely personal ties, to cultivate a pathos of distance from his own place and time in order to understand it. He never repudiates the philosopher’s passion to discover and bear witness to the truth, but rather turns the passion inward upon itself to discover its origins.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

The courage to think

Aristotle distinguishes between vices of deficiency and vices of excess. Cowardice is a vice of deficiency. Rashness is a vice of excess. Homer tells the story of Odysseus, who ties himself to the mast as he listens to the Sirens. In the realm of thought, there can be no excess of courage. As long as I tie myself to the mast—as long as I do and say nothing—I can be courageous without limit. When we talk about the courage to think, there is no need to talk about limits. Shakespeare calls genius the ally of madness. What these allies share is their courage to think. What one has and the other lacks is the ability to tie oneself securely to the mast.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Monuments to virtue

When I was young I would gawk at the mansions of the wealthy, not because I wanted luxury and finery for myself, but because the palaces seemed to me monuments to virtue. In fact what the mansions monumentalize is not virtue. It is the impostor that, as we lower our expectations on what man is and might be, we have put in its place. Productivity ought to be a virtue. But if I squander what I produce on luxury and vanity rather than reserving it for philanthropy, it is at best half a virtue, a mere torso of virtue, from which love, the head of all virtue, has been expeditiously removed.

The economic activity of man now runs smoothly on the prosaic fuel of self-interest. Minds capable of sublimer motives—passion for truth, love for fellow men—must stand aside. We say we have merely lowered our expectations to a realistic level. But once the system has adapted itself to run smoothly with base motives, it begins to demand base motives, and ends up elevating them into the new virtues.

Some say that justice demands we give our fellow men freedom to trade, and let them keep the gains from their enterprise. Perhaps they are right. But it is certainly unjust to praise those who squander these gains building monuments to vanity. Those clever enough to produce more must also be clever enough to figure out how to consume less. My youthful admiration of mansions testifies to an intellectual defect, and, as I now see it, ought to be a source of shame.

Friday, September 6, 2013

The Gospel of Consumption

We laugh at the idea of salvation. But in practice we order our lives and our rituals precisely as if we believed in salvation by comfort and convenience. We don’t like to talk about our theology—no more than lay Christians like to talk about the Trinity. We leave this up to our religious experts, in Hollywood. The large flat panel screen before which we worship six hours each day shows us brilliantly crafted sermons to consumption. Our saints of consumption, role models for all our daily activities, consume resources and make high quality video recordings of the process.

Alternatives to the gospel of consumption have, in the course of time, been forgotten. The ideal of Socrates was to dedicate each day to thinking and questioning, sharing dialectical conversation with our fellow men. The ideal of Jesus was to dedicate each day to loving and sharing joy with our fellow men. Of course Hollywood pays homage to these forgotten ideals too. But it always treats them as musty relics from another era, to be included as supplements to the serious business of consumption, not, as they were originally intended, as alternatives.