The necessary fiction in the US now is that there are only a few people being craven and excessive in matters of power and greed. This is the nature of scapegoating, and it is one of the things that gives the objects of the exercise their peculiar powers of political influence.
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, "You'll all be drowned!"
They called aloud, "Our Sieve ain't big,
But we don't care a button! we don't care a fig!
In a Sieve we'll go to sea!"
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.(Edward Lear)
I go mad, I go mad, I shall wear my trousers plaid...
Again, I only joke about going completely mad because the threadbare leprechauns pacing the ceiling seem to expect it. In fact, they worked it into the coronation oath.
It would be a mistake to think too much on the current politics. Like going to see a movie when there's work to be done. Actually, when I was doing Ph.D. work, the company that offered absurdly cheap movie passes launched, and I considered it, as the Sbux I walked three miles to in order to work on a stack of books had a movie theatre next door, but it was a bit like the philosophy professor who welcomed graduate students by suggesting that they spend their first year reading novels -- in the abstract, something to be thought about. Given the work at hand, quite mad. I have the daily queue, and the books I hope to get through in the coming days, but it can be a bit of a slog, especially with all the piecework.
The one good bit about the current rooms is a having a good kitchen table in a quiet room. The present location was a bit of a misstep. I'm not sure which is more disturbing in the evenings, the sounds of the barking dogs, or the sounds of the guns hopefully shooting above the barking dogs. It's an interesting place. But in the off-season, the sea isn't much use. At any rate, the air is cleaner than in the large cities, which was a significant factor in the choice. In the Balkans in January and February, the cities can be a problem.
Ora et labora.
Nietzsche, 1888: "It is not the victory of science that marks this nineteenth century of ours, but the victory of method over science."
Method: also the early modern English Christians smuggling prayer manuals printed by hidden presses in the shires among the endlessly sermonized parishioners of the established church. A substitution of a private and personal domination for a political domination.
Which then perhaps recursively appeared in the public space.
Absent notions of individual rights and basic fair play, the formal appearance of things simply reconstitutes itself in each generation, using some fraction of the population. It then becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
Given notions of individual rights and fair play, the appearance of things is falsified, but in a good way, by the material nature of the shared life; the nature of the shared life, shared by all, becomes the meaning and justification of the shared life.
An authentic society reveals the forms of things to be secondary; if the forms of society ever become the essence of society, it is virtually certain that a fraction of the population has simply been discarded.
Perhaps.
I can only say that I've sat at the desk all day (with the occasional break, like King Zog, as reported in Time magazine, for calisthenics) and that I never stopped working. I will assume that the disparity in time devoted and tasks accomplished reveals something about space and time that I've not yet understood.
The state universities, despite the intuitive Saturday-football notions of what it must be like to be there, are actually peculiarly dangerous places to be now. The reason for this is that they are consciously creating a social mechanism with some portion of the students who are in attendance. This has very little to do with scholarship, as one usually thinks of scholarship. (Outside of scientific technology, in which the university is explicitly committed to fostering discrete social mechanisms outside of the university.)
Part of the difficulty in the humanities is the imitation of positivism. (The disciples of Comte were angry at how broadly that term was used in the academy in the context of other fields.) Since scientific papers analyzing materials according to the assumptions of a particular field are knowledge for that field, the form of those papers is taken to be a verification of intrinsic value by those in other fields. The danger comes in the fact that the explicit purpose of the exercise is now the creation of the social mechanism, so this art of pseudo-postivism has been refined by explicitly political social networks as a social form in itself. And as the social form is entirely artifice, there's a significant danger of corruption.
But if you sidestep the frenzied mimetic in which you simply use the same words as the others and say things that make you popular there, it's possible to use your time there to do some real work using the legacy assets of the place, such as the (book) libraries and (basketball) gymnasia.
The danger is particular to the state universities because, to put it bluntly, there is usually a great mass of fungible students to be dealt with according to the rules of the place, largely without concern for external social networks or internal mechanisms contrary to the prevailing norms. In America, the state universities exist to teach the young folks a lesson or two. Mostly by faculties recruited from the more prestigious schools to the east or the west.
But the work can be done. Just don't expect it to be recognized. For the simple reason that no one will be looking to find it. They have different purposes in mind.
(Preemption: this is not the Aesopian sour grapes from being refused a dissertation defense -- the point is that there were always two completely different sets of grapes at issue.)
Interesting politboro machinations perceptible from nomadic exile: targeting an agency whose organic authority seems to come from executive act, and which operates in a sphere of authority (foreign affairs) in which the courts usually handle questions of presidential authority with kid gloves seems well thought-through. The real target seems opaque. The agency has only two of the three letters of another agency working in the service of democracy abroad, so unknown trip wires might or might not be found at various levels of access. Ultimately, though, this is where the authority of the executive is at its height, so this is the vehicle they'd probably want to take to the courts, rather than the goings-on at Treasury, for example. The best counter-argument is the appropriations authority, but the theory there would be that the existence of the agency is necessary to the mandate, and that's both a question of fact, and not the best ground on which to plan the battle. Apolitical, as always. Interesting times.
Christian outposts in the southern Balkans, perhaps for the obvious historical reasons, seem to be in the mountains. And as soon as I understood where I had landed in this latest jump, I did have the strong urge to flee to the Bulgarian mountains. The present country is generally thought of as a bad place to be, and although I try not to let these generally held perceptions affect my thinking, the physical aspects of the place do genuinely make it an unpleasant place to walk down the street. And that's right next to the ocean, inaccessible behind wall-like private developments, with platoons of strays guarding the street-level in the evening hours.
Man, flee!
And yet, one interesting aspect. This sort of place seems to traditionally be the place where the less well-off of Central Europe go to the sea when they manage to get away, and there's a chance that the ancestors, perhaps proximate ones, spent some time here in the summers. So less a nostalgie de la boue than a sort of solidarity.
From the propaedeutic session of a seminar I recently listened in on: Bad philosophers point out the errors in others' philosophies. Good philosophers find the merits in others' philosophies. Great philosophers find the reasons for the errors and meritorious aspects of others' philosophies.
Bit historicist and possibly Hegelian, but no less true for that. Plato didn't argue against his interlocutors, he led them to their own strengths.
There is a correlative to travelling through these societies. Just as you can see the direction of the wind from the way the trees have fallen after a storm, the great north-south and east-west currents of history have marked the peninsula. I don't think you can understand the present nature of this city without knowing that it was an important place on the road from Rome to Constantinople, and one that fell under the control of the Sublime Porte. Just as you can't understand the 14th c. mass conversions slightly inland further up the coast without realizing that the military forces from the south would invade within a century. And forces from the east, west, and north have left similar traces.
The challenge is to fashion individual lives of fullness within these world-historical lines of force. One you get past the Hegelian fallacy that since the nation can do things that individuals can't do, it is therefore the grounding for the individual, you cease to look to these winds for actual sustenance or even ultimate spiritual purpose. But, and this is where the greater reading comes in, it was the greatness of those times, and offers a dimension of experience to the present. And the challenge is to bring these spiritual purposes forward in time within a culture that values individual human lives a bit more. (Without identifying that with a wind from any direction -- it must come from the place simpliciter.)
The richness of earth, but lifted a bit more out of the mud.
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