I work to understand what values we can live by in a world as connected, chaotic, and potentially catastrophic as the present. -- Avram Alpert
Alpert is one of those public intellectuals who manages to straddle the academic, publishing, and actually thinking about what he's thinking about. In some ways, his "work" as a lecturer and Fellow/Lecturer at The New Institute in Hamburg, a Fellow and Lecturer at Princeton and a Lecturer at Rutgers reminds me a bit of Crispin Sartwell. For me, Crispy seems to have the same underlying goal, striving to understand relevant values for this new way of living. Crispin has just chosen a more structured and traditional way of doing that work. Another way to look at it, of course, is that being a Fellow and Lecturer or being a professor of philosophy is their way of having a day job that's relevant to their work. Alpert's new book, The Good Enough Life strikes me as a direct way of doing his work while possibly working at a side gig, being a writer.
One of my High School Teachers, a Diocesan priest who was nicknamed Charlie the Tuna because of an similarity to the protagonist in Starkist's advertising, presented us with a philosophical problem. He said that he was perfect. That got a laugh as well as starting a discussion. He asked if we didn't agree that only God was perfect. It was, after all, a Catholic high school -- and for sake of argument, we agreed. He then asked if we agreed that it was our duty to seek perfection in every way. Bit more complicated, but based on the Baltimore Catechism, we were conditioned to agree. He then asked if that didn't mean we were doomed because we could never achieve the goal of our duty, to seek perfection. Muttering in the crowd. Ok, if we had duty to seek what we could never achieve, how to resolve it? And, if only God is perfect, wasn't our solution to seek to be perfectly imperfect, and he figured that he nailed that one...so?
I have struggled with that particular dogleg for a long time now; as the greatest Country poet of the 20th Century put in his last musical release before he died, "No matter how we struggle and strive, we'll never get out of this world alive." I don't believe Hank Williams was advocating giving up; rather, I think he was suggesting that we recognize as he did that we were here for the struggle, not for the acclaim that comes with the being recognized as the greatest. As soon as we get recognized as that, we're going to fall, because somebody better would come along.
This new book, The Good-Enough Life by Avram Alpert presents a more complex yet simple solution. It should be enough for each of us to be recognized as the greatest something rather than seeking universal acclaim once, and then go on with our work in this life. As another country-music poet, Emmylou Harris, sang "I was born to run/to get ahead of the rest/and all that I wanted was to be best//To live free, and be someone/I was born to be fast, I was born to run."
Alpert credits another writer with the solution to this philosophical and ethical maze. " Michael Walzer’s influential notion of complex equality. Social life, Walzer says, divides itself into many different spheres: business, science, athletics and so forth. We want those spheres to be internally coherent, such that the most recognized athletes are the most athletically talented, the most successful businesspeople are the ones who offer the best products at the best prices, and the most celebrated scientists are those who are the most scientifically brilliant. Accordingly, the spheres should be externally sealed off from each other. Top athletes should not use their celebrity to make millions endorsing sub-par business products. Successful businesspeople should not use their wealth to sway scientific research agendas. Gifted scientists should not figure out how to dope athletes in technically legal ways."
Avram seems to admit that change might be a far reach, but still, if society as well as individuals accepted the "good enough" goal, we might be spared Charles Barkley hawking sandwiches and Doug Flutie supporting Frank Thomas in hyping a Testosterone product.
in re: pence. everyone talks about the indiana religious freedom law. as i've said over and over, i (alone among anyone i've ever talked to) support such laws completely. the idea that you have to get another bakery or florist for your wedding in indianapolis is just not jim crow, or even any actual problem whatsoever, and different sorts of people can be discriminated against, for example on the basis of their religion. you are going to have to show me that there are real costs, or real lack of access to essential services etc to convince me that someone's religious conscience should be violated under legal constraint.
the common core is an extremely good political issue, or an extremely good reason why atomic weaponry should be available to every consumer, every parent, every teacher, and every child. dirtier the better. now, the rhetoric around the damn thing is egalitarian. it was written by the bill and melinda gates foundation, or in other words the egalitarians are turning your child's head over to the very richest man in america. why are they doing that? because egalitarians such as arne duncan and barack obama measure merit in cash money. indeed, the other purpose, besides the 18 billionth disingenuous attempt to equalize us all, is to crank up our capitalism so's we can compete with china. the picture is 'meritocratic' where merit means 'filled in the right little bubbles, so can work for microsoft'. you probably think this is progress!
the other day i was being confronted yet again for the craziness of my anti-statism, and someone asked me: do you think people have a right to an education? well, i don't know. sure. problem is that no one has the right to educate them under compulsion. to read their right to be educated as your right to form their consciousness by force just shows everything dishonest and evil about your political philosophy, which is basically a bunch of la-di-da euphemisms for coercion to create a hierarchy with people like you at the top. your claim to know what they should know and how they should think is an attitude of incredible arrogance and elitism. the political philosophy of american liberalism is as hierarchical or more hierarchical even than, say, laissez-faire capitalism or hereditary aristocracy. but here is one difference; on the leftish side, the extreme enthusiasm for hierarchy is justified by egalitarianism. that is an amazing cognitive accomplishment.
if i go down this road, believe me i know that i am liable to hit a mine. so, i'll begin by saying that the boy scouts should change their policy on gay participation immediately. you just can't profile like that, and you should think about how you would feel or do feel about being tarred with the notion that you might be an abuser on the basis, not of anything you have ever done or thought about doing, but on the basis of your demographic segment. also, if there has been a problem of abuse, i feel that people who are out of the closet are a lot less likely to be the sorts of people who abuse boys than those who are huddled within it, and all these bans ever did was build more closets. any policy with that effect should be repudiated on the spot.
but still, i get a bit sqeamish. i was myself a boy scout and let's just say there were some weird 'your hand's on my knee' moments and unsettling rumors. and...perhaps you might want to think about how some of the gay men you've actually known or been have regarded very young men. oh, the cult of justin timeberlake as it existed a decade or so ago, say. now, you might say that het males are no better with very young women, as we might put it. once i knew a dude with a cheerleader fetish that was extraordinarily disturbing after awhile. right, but then again, as a parent, for example, you wouldn't necessarily be absolutely comfortable if girl scout troops or cheer squads were led by heterosexual men. of course, i am also going to assert that my proclivities don't run in that direction at all, and i am going to be pissed if cast under suspicion just in virtue of being a het male. so i am saying that the other way round too.
this is the sort of thing that turns women, and even men, against men in general, by the way; there and not in orientation is where the people with the problem are clustered.
speaking of beyonce i would say in 2002 that justin timberlake's audience was made up primarily of teenage-or-so girls and, you know, 40-something men. it is an aesthetic alliance worth pondering. now speculating on the basis of inadequate data, i would guess that beyonce's audience is somewhat similar, which is rather surprising in some respects. (yo this gender/identity thing is remarkably complex.) i have as it were exposed the entry below to some of my students. and of course college-age guys think beyonce is the very ultra-concentrated essence of hot. so they have her poster up, even. but is that who eagerly awaits her new release or listens to it over and over, dancing about? or goes to the concert when not encouraged by the gf? also i know nothing about beyonce's currency among gay men, but i am assuming that a drag show is inconceivable without her.
why the agreement on justin and beyonce, and perhaps on a number of other things? here's a notion. paraphrasing eve kosofsky sedgwik, there are two modes of the erotic: who you want to make out with and who you want to be. so, the girls and the gay men both wanted to...kiss timberlake, and they both wanted to be beyonce. not everyone, of course.
we might think of girls and gay men as for some purposes a single group of consumers of mass culture, and it is, not to be nasty about it or anything, rather a consumption-oriented demographic. what someone like me is always going to say is: too much surface, not enough depth; too much appearance, not enough reality; too much spectacle, not enough art; a naive aesthetic on one end, a too-ironic, worse-the-better, exceedingly decadent aesthetic on the other.
now, you should, if you do, enjoy this material. but you can't put it beyond criticism on the sheer ground that it emerges from or appeals to in-other-respects admirable groups; nor can you, i believe, safely chalk up the criticisms to sexism or homophobia, though that could be an element in a given straight dude's response. that doesn't show that you don't, to put it gently, have an extreme sucking problem lurking in your culture. so, you might have an alliance between 60-something women (who were younger in 1970) and gay men on barry manilow. nice! groove. buy. but you're going to have a long day defending that crap. well the coalition has had better moments: bowie, say, though i'm still, with complete sincerity and total commitment, nominating 'space oddity' for worst song ever to chart. or 'glee' is pretty good.
so if i'm ragging on beyonce, it's just who i am. but i'll also say this to any re-visitors. i gave reasons not to like beyonce. so far, i haven't heard much in the way of replies to those, only, "no matter what, beyonce is the greatest." i completely defend your right to like what you like. but there might be some pretty devastating drawbacks, or to be fairer, things you might be missing, or ways you might develop.
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