My mid-summer nervous breakdown taught me that physical pain is preferable to mental distress and that being critical of the world doesn’t mean we needs must leave the world.
Anyway, I am disappointed with the blog over the past few months, but I don’t want to quit. So I am going to try a soft re-boot here and get back online.
The things I used to care about, what I really tend to think are important are less interesting than political critiques. I believe I have found my political tribe, though, among the anarchists. Anarchism is a negative political philosophy. It points out what ought not to be very well, but is pretty confused about what ought to be. Part of the problem, I think, is that the anarchist agenda starts from a political frame of reference but, if successful, emerges onto a cultural tabula rasa. Culture is the problem. If you want to change the political system, change the culture.
Back to the positive agenda. As an amateur philosopher, I’m mostly interested in figuring out what makes for a good life.
What is it about human beings that makes us care about fairness? There’s no logical necessity for it. Children develop a sensitivity to fairness at a very young age. They’re rather single-minded about it. How much of our morality is based on this impulse? My dog doesn’t seem to care if he doesn’t have as nice a bed as the dog the next door. He doesn’t think it’s unfair that he’s smaller than some other dog. It’s a pretty strange thing when you think about it. We know life is unfair. It’s rather arbitrary and often brutally unfair (just look at Somalia right now). And it doesn’t matter if you’re coming from the left or the right, from privilege or poverty. The rich man thinks it’s really fucking unfair if you try to take his inheritance away and give it somebody else. The poor man thinks it’s really fucking unfair that the rich man won’t pay him enough to pay for health insurance. But why do we care about this so much? Would human beings be more well adapted if we didn’t? Would we accept our lot in life cheerfully if we weren’t obsessed about fairness?
Back when this thing got started about a year ago I had an ironic agenda: to start an online religion. I take LUCK or Tyche to be the only deity worthy of worship. I still like the idea and am open to anyone interested in playing around with this. It’s a pretty big sandbox with lots of cool toys…
I like my blogroll. In particular I am grateful to Prof. Sartwell for giving me a link a while back. I still read his stuff daily (although his anarchist cred seems to be greatly diminished lately after he revealed his support for American Imperialism). Mr. Oxtrot knows his shit and flings it around very well though he is not as intense as Mr. Crow who seems to be vying for the position of next IOZ. I also think Adam is a brilliant commenter (and his blog is very funny — though don’t open it up at work). JRB is at times brilliant. I envy his recent aphoristic style. I don’t visit Cogitamus much these days, but it’s a good place to go to get the party line from what’s left of the left (ugh) and I like their musical choices a lot. There are others that I lurk on now and then.
Time to blog. As the Buddhists say, I am a householder. Which means the majority of my energy at this stage of my life is supposed to be directed toward the care and feeding of my family. So I often experience a vague feeling of guilt while I am surfing around reading blogs instead of doing something more productive.
