The Book of Job has a surprising resemblance to a philosophical dialogue and that is probably deliberate.  Although, unlike a traditional philosophical dialogue, Job has bursts of pain and feeling and sometimes contradicts himself in a very human way.

The dialoguing is not the only resemblance to an ancient philosophical text.

the classical understanding, philosophy isn’t a topic about which you can acquire information, like molecular biology, it’s a fundamental way of life. To become a philosopher is to become a different sort of person through what Plato terms a “turning around of the soul.”

The ancients wrote esoterically because esoteric writing is the closest that writing can come to conversation, and the ancients believed that philosophy could only be taught through conversation. Does that shock you? If so, it’s because you come from a culture where philosophy is taken to be propositional knowledge, a set of facts or a list of arguments or a body of knowledge that can be learned. But the ancients considered philosophy to be a kind of process knowledge, like knowing how to dance, or how to ride a bike, or how to do B2B SaaS sales. Imagine trying to learn to play piano by reading a manual but never actually playing any music, that’s how the ancients would think about contemporary academic philosophy. For them, the only way to learn philosophy was to do philosophy with somebody who was already wise — sparring with them verbally, wrestling with them mentally, encountering problems together, solving them together. No text could possibly replace that, but to the extent that any text could, it would have to be a multilayered one. Their works are hard to read because they are fundamentally not designed to directly impart knowledge (!!!), they’re designed to make you, the reader, go through a particular set of mental transitions and moves that imitate the actions of somebody doing philosophy. They’re like the written version of a kung fu movie featuring a multi-tiered pagoda with antagonists of increasing skill on each floor.4 They aren’t training manuals, they are training.

–thus the Psmiths

(more…)

If our society’s understanding of the virtues and vices of manhood are bad, womanhood is worse.

Our society is deeply feminized so, as one would expect, there is no clear understanding or term for vicious womanhood.

But surprisingly, there is also no clear understanding or term for virtuous womanhood either.  Men are bad and woman are good but any attempt to clarify or categorize the actual ways that women are good (there are many) is met with shrieks.

My understanding and our understanding (society’s, the saints’, America’s) of male and female virtue and vice has even more gaps in it than normal.

The normal pattern for gaps in knowledge is to have a strong idea of a virtue and its opposing vice, while having almost no concept at all of the opposing virtue and the distorting vice.  This is natural.  It happens all the time.  A good example is the discussion that started all of this off, the Nameless Virtue.  Here we have a virtue that our society loves and cherishes: authenticity.  And a vice that our society hates so much that its used as a pejorative for everything to the point where it has almost no meaning: hypocrisy.  But the idea that there could be a virtue in the same territory as hypocrisy and that there can be gross or cancerous authenticity is a concept that we struggle to express.  It took me a long essay to get there.

But manliness and womanliness are special cases in that almost everything about it is completely obscure: good, bad, and indifferent.

(more…)

There once was a little aquatic turtle who lived by a small lake in the woods.  The turtle happily swam in the waters eating minnows and basked on a rock.

But one day it got an ambition.  The little turtle decided to change the world.

Since its world consisted of the small body of water and the mysterious forest around it, the turtle’s world-changing scheme was to dam up the outlet for the lake, thus making the beneficent and friendly (for aquatic turtles) lake, and shrinking the domain of the  hostile and unknown (for aquatic turtles) forest.

So the little turtle swam over to where the water left the little lake through a tumble of rocks and set about trying to add more rocks to it.

Almost instantly the turtle was swept away.

(more…)

You listen to a nice Sacrament talk from your daughter on the worth of souls  and in praise of beauty.  You also crave pickles and that deeply-charred fat on a good rich steak.  By Priesthood hour, this craving has mysteriusly transmuted to wanting to hear President Hinckley’s voice again.

So when you get home, you put in your earbuds, push play, and stroll through the trees.  And in some mysterious transmutation, as you hear him speak it is all those long gone Aprils and Octobers again.  Though this particular talk is one you probably never even heard, in the nature of things you certainly never would have heard, as you hear his voice roll on it as if the years have never happened, you are back in 1989, you are back in 1995, you are back in 2005 or 2007,  the harsh summer light of 2026 has given way to the dappled April springs and October falls of all those many years ago, and you are once again a  very young man callow and naive poking his head cautiously into the great unknown future, you are once again a missionary, a student, a young father with his littles clambering on him; and for a few minutes you are forever young and it is 1989 with all its goodness and weakness and naivete, and will be forever.

Here is the talk:

There once was a short little candle getting even shorter as she burned.

“But my flame loves me!” she cried, and no doubt she was right.

I noticed something in reading the scriptures.  There seems to be a distinct pattern where the kings of Israel and Judah sometimes start out well but always end with a caveat.  It’s not just David and Bathsheba and Solomon and his idolatrous wives, it seems to be pretty consistent.

Whereas the Nephite and Lamanite kings sometimes start wicked and get better, but mostly are just nasty or righteous the whole time.    I don’t see the same pattern of kings starting out in reform mode but falling off as they go along.

Real?  Did you notice the same thing?

(more…)

Out in a rough rural county there was a rascally young man who spent his evenings and late nights drinking and getting in fights at dive bars and roadhouses and collections of trucks pulled up around a bonfire out somewhere on a patch of dirt.  It was generally a rascally county with its share of rascally people so he had plenty of company.  As you might expect , the roads were also pretty rough.  Getting from spot to spot in the dark could be a bone-jarring and gut twisting experience–potholes, detours, poorly marked curves, uneven surfaces… But he was not the sort of young man who could much stay in one place, he never quite found what he was looking for.

One evening after a particularly bad set of bounces  one of which smashed his head into the steering wheel, he pulled over and just … quit.  No more, he decided.  He hated himself and the whole experience, he was sick of it, he was done.  He was going to go home, hug his mom, and tell her he was going to be a changed man.

With this resolution, he turned his car around to head home.  But the roads were still the roads and he once again started pounding through potholes in the dark, and once again smashed his head. He was outraged and betrayed.  Wasn’t he now doing the right thing?  Wasn’t he now headed home?

Moral: Good goals don’t patch potholes.

Any ideas what this phrase means?

10 And what cause soever shall come to you of your brethren that dwell in their cities, between blood and blood, between law and commandment, statutes and judgments, ye shall even warn them that they trespass not against the Lord, and so wrath come upon you, and upon your brethren: this do, and ye shall not trespass.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/ot/2-chr/19?lang=eng&id=p10#p10

Greg Matsen had a discussion with Jacob Hansen about Strong’s new book, Torn. This was far more enlightening than anything else I have heard about Strong’s book. The thing that hit me the hardest was Jacob explaining how we are often wasting our time explaining things the way we have for the last two hundred years to Christians. But now we have an audience that either doesn’t believe in Christ, or doesn’t know how to receive His grace and inspiration in a serious way. The problem isn’t a doctrinal issue that merely needs to be cleared up, most of the time. It is an entire worldview built on different assumptions about reality, authority, and human purpose. It one that points people toward the wrong sources of meaning, authority, and happiness.

(more…)

Most of the dumb boomer solutions to social problems amount to “why don’t you simply unilaterally establish an enforceable cooperative equilibrium”

-thus EDJCB

Young Mr. Frog went a’courtin’ but in that region and at that time there were no eligible young misses in the Animal Kingdom who were interested in Mr. Frog.  In frustration he complained to an elder of his kind.

“Well,” the elder said, “have you tried dressing up in a tux, renting a church, and hiring a wedding caterer?”

“What good would that do?” the young frog said in exasperation.

“It sounds to me like you aren’t even trying,” his elder scoffed.

We live in a very feminized society dominated by managerial bureaucracy, but a great many people are miserable and struggling, both male and female. This is not to say it advantages women in the ways they need. It doesn’t appear to do that for anyone other than Elites, and their henchmen.

The current order is not governed by healthy feminine values. It selectively uses traits culturally associated with women—risk sensitivity, relational enforcement, therapeutic language, and aversion to direct conflict—inside institutions built around impersonal power. Used as armor to maintain power. But the more celestial aspects of womanhood are absent.

I am going to note a little history, and make some educated predictions. I fain no vision or prophecy, but I have a wild prediction, which I would like to discuss. I think things will shortly swing to the male-dominated (shortly, meaning within the decade-ish). As with pendulum swings, there will be many who swing too hard. I want to make sure as many of us as possible, end up in a healthier state. I want even the most extreme feminists, to agree that life was better after the correction pendulum swing. But in order for this to happen, we need a vision of what is possible, first.

Because if we don’t, then the pendulum will swing back again to an even more extreme feminized managerial bureaucracy.

(more…)

I have seen the claim, more than once, that if you are an aristocrat you spend as you see fit and then work out how to acquire the means to pay for it.  Whereas if you start with your income and then decide what to spend based on that, you are bourgeois (aka middle class, but the term also includes business owners and such).

One theme of our exploration of virtue sets is that there are certain virtues that are obscure to our society. (e.g., the nameless virtue).

There are certain other virtues that have a strong class or sex link, and so are obscure with respect to the other classes or the other sex.  This is often because the same virtue takes on a somewhat different form across these boundaries and so the assumption is that the virtue must not apply at all across the boundary because it doesn’t apply in exactly the same way. (more…)

I found an old note to myself that reads

“Philosophical dialogue in the Gulags. Generationship. Blog this.”

Neither I nor anyone else will every know what this means.

In the torch-lit castles of old Europe, the Jester had a reputation as a truth-teller.   He could say painful true things because he was so fake.  Ha ha its just a joke.

I don’t know how people are going to take this–I can see an angle for folks to get mad of almost any political persuasion–but I think the same phenomenon is part of Donald Trump’s appeal.  He has a reputation both as a very funny guy and as a blowhard–whether either reputation is justified or not we leave as an exercise for the reader.  Even some of his most ardent supporters will say we take Trump seriously but not literally.  But because of this a big part of his appeal is  he is the guy who will take on third rails and say things that everyone is thinking, that need to be said, but that no one will say.    His people love him because he keeps blowing through the dirty little conspiracies of polite silence.

Children especially young children are the same.  Out of the mouths of babes and little children as the scripture says.  Little children in particular will just say things.  You look fat.  I don’t like your warts.  He’s mean.  But at the same time, they live in a world of play and whimsy.  The same child who told his Aunt she needed to lose a few pounds will also tell her that they are both pink sharks in the lemonade ocean.

Mulling this over, I eventually realized we are looking at a form of the synthesis of two competing virtues  Fact and fiction.  Truth and play.  The synthesis of these virtues reaches its highest form in pageantry, ritual, and sacrament.

Whereas the Devil gravely lies.

I think we have found yet another meaning of the Savior’s teaching to become as a little child.  One of his most inexhaustible sayings.