I am back to fighting off loneliness and depression. For a cheerful hobbit I do that often. Last night I resisted being irrational. I accepted the tough truth that the universe doesn’t care what you think is the way it should be. Making you feel good is a reason to be extra skeptical. You can’t turn off your prejudices but you can try and work around them. I’ll never be a Vulcan, I’ll fail sometimes, but I can keep it as a goal.
What is it with me and pointy-eared fictional races? I have trouble accepting that hobbits and elves have pointy ears, they are never mentioned in the published works even when it would make sense to. Did the half-elven have pointed ears? Wouldn’t that be a way of seeing if they were human or elf? Instead of thinking Pippin was a Big Person child wouldn’t the people of Gondor say, “Hey that little guy has pointed ears like an elf? But in letters Tolkien explicitly said that elves have pointed ears as do hobbits, but not as pointed as elves.
I put that aside in because it’s the kind of thing I think about often. I explore fictional worlds; it’s the reason I love the History of Middle Earth series by Christopher Tolkien.
I do the same thing with religion, I wonder what God was doing in the eternity before he created the heaven and the earth. There’s a story that someone asked St. Augustine that and he replied, “Creating hell for people that ask questions like that.” St. Augustine wouldn’t like me. I’m an atheist but I still ask those kinds of things, why shouldn’t I? I don’t believe in elves and hobbits either. Just because a world is the work of a person doesn’t make it a topic unfit for thought. The only thing that makes sense to me is that God made an infinite number of universes. It’s an idea that C.S. Lewis would have been happy with. It sits behind the Chronicles of Narnia.
St. Augustine might have rejected such thinking about physicists and cosmologist don’t. They often speculate on what happened before the big bang. The multiverse is not just a science fiction concept, there are actual theories behind it. If I were working on it I’d call it the universe, and what we live in the locaverse, our neighborhood of the universe. Any cosmologist reading this, feel free to use the terminology.
Now for something completely different, a man with a tape recorder up his nose. That’s not true but a Monty Python reference is always a good way an anchoring a random segue.
There are lines of thought that I can extend back to my schooldays. One has to do with nationalism. When studying European history through the 19th century the nationalists were presented as the good guys, the ones brining progress. I have hardly come across them since high school but the Italian nationalists, Mazzini and Garibaldi were presented as heroes. They still strike me as heroes. The 20th century Italian Nationalist, Mussolini, was a villain. Is nationalism a good thing or a bad thing? The answer I came up with was; it depends. The difference is that Mazzini and Garibaldi so nationalism as opposed to provincialism. Till the 19th century, Italy was divided up into many independent states, that saw each other as rivals and would make war on each other. Where the provincialist saw a fractured land with loyalty to the local prince the nationalists saw a united Italy.
Mussolini was the opposite. He didn’t see a family of nations in Europe but rivals to be opposed and made war on. Till the 20th century nationalism was about increasing who was perceived as us. Since the 20th century, nationalism was about limiting who is perceived as us; the emphasis is on the rivalry and dangers of them. Without it ever being explicitly said to me, I have always felt as expanding we as a virtue and contracting it an evil.
On a personal level it’s common morality, it’s a virtue to be selfless and a sin to be selfish. Somehow people don’t see that when it comes to politics. Even some progressives don’t see it. The rise of international trade allowed hundreds of millions, many times the population of the entire United States, to rise out of extreme poverty. I heard one progressive say, “Those people are China and India’s problem, now ours.” As the ghost of Jacob Marley said, “Humanity should have been my business.”
Now there is a rise of nationalism throughout the world; Trump in the US, Putin in Russian, Erdoğan (Erd-o-won) in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Xi in China, and the Brexiters in the UK. They see international relations as a zero-sum game that they are out to win. It is selfishness as a political philosophy.
I am a universalist. I can’t say “internationalist” as the nationalists use that as a code word for Jew. I am never comfortable saying that this person’s welfare is more important than that persons. I’m still a patriot and I’m proud that our Declaration of Independence says, “All men are created equal.” It’s a truth that should be self-evident, but isn’t.
That equality even extends to nationalists. I don’t agree with them. I think the belief is harmful, but they are still people. I had a disagreement about this when it comes to Trump. I had this exchange in a response to a comment by me on a friend’s post. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
Me: Imagine a Republican saying, :You think Obama deserves the same respect as Bush? It’s how they felt. You can’t argue, be we are right and they are wrong. They feel the opposite. Respect is not deserved, it is inherent to being human.
X: I can not consider nine nickels as human. Nope.
Me: X, Then don’t call yourself a progressive. Denying anyone’s humanity is the antithesis of liberalism. Trump is a miserable human being, but he’s a human being.
Y: Jesus, [me]. No one is “denying his humanity” like he denies others’ humanity. False equivalency and hyperbolic and I *think* you know that. This 👇is denying others’ humanity
Z: Jesus, [me]. No one is “denying his humanity”
3 comments up is “I can not consider nine nickels as human”
This is not both-sidesism. The denial of humanity is not the core of the progressive movement; it’s not something the leaders say. I’m just showing how easy it is to fall into this kind of thinking and I don’t want the left to commit the same sins. I don’t want it to commit any sins.
And now, the larch.
Remember how I felt bad that I couldn’t put up the shelf the other day? The super is having exactly the same problems. There is concrete too close to the plaster wall to let the screws go in deep enough. He’s been working on it with masonry bits and a hammer and nails and he’s just fighting the wall to a standstill. I’m rooting for him. He already cleared me of incompetence. I get to keep my self-respect. I owe him.
Wise Madness 