Hegel??

"After decades of trying and utterly failing to see what could possibly be worthwhile in Hegel's philosophy, I believe I've had a breakthrough."

That's the first paragraph of an essay I posted here on December 11, 2023. 4 months later, it seems more and more likely that what I understood was a YouTube which purported to be about Hegel. Does that video actually have anything to do with Hegel? I don't know. I don't have any Earthly. I can't even. 

 

What we have here, now as before, is failure to communicate. We're back to where we were before last December. I am not getting the message from Hegel's texts. 

Unless I am. Unless Schopenhauer was right about Hegel's philosophy: that it was pseudo-intellectual gibberish successfully passing itself off as philosophy. But I can't be sure about that anymore. 

It's not that I am afraid to assail the reputation of a celebrated thinker and purported genius. Every word Susan Sontag published or said on a broadcast was pseudo-intellectual garbage, delivered with that smug grin William Gaddis warned us about. Spengler is, im Grunde genommen, pretty silly, and hugely overrated. But at least much more entertaining than Sontag.

It's not that I can't follow philosophers in general. With those up to and including Hegel's most celebrated immediate forerunner Kant, and also with those following him, although I must often read very slowly and repeat certain passages, I don't get this feeling I get with Hegel. Not with Kant himself, not with Heidegger, not with Adorno. Not with the world's most famous Hegelian, Marx. 

Well, as Kierkegaard said -- Kierkegaard, who has often delighted me, often made me shake my head chidingly, but never puzzled me: enten -- eller. Either Hegel has fooled a great number of very smart people, who regard him as a great genius, but not me, or Schopenhauer, or Kierkegaard -- or all of those people have significantly smarter than all three of us, at least in this regard.

I can easily admit it when a single person is clearly more intelligent than I  -- okay, not easily, but I can admit it. When an entire group is outdoing me, it's disturbing. 

It sort of reminds me of the historical Jesus question. I've studied it pretty thoroughly. Most of the people who have studied it pretty thoroughly say that it's pretty obvious that a person named Jesus preached in Galilee and Jerusalem in the 20's, 30's or 40's AD, that he said many of the things in the text we today call the Sermon on the Mount, and that he was crucified on Pilate's orders. 

Well, it's still not obvious at all to me. That light bulb above my head, which is supposed to go on when I see how the evidence all adds up to Jesus having really lived and preached and been crucified by Pilate -- that light bulb is not on, it has not begun to flicker. The Biblical scholars go over the evidence, and to me, they're making the case that it's possible Jesus existed, the case that it's conceivable -- and then they say, so you see, it's really certain that he existed! And I shout wearily: No! I don't see!

I also don't see how I'm not keeping up with what those Biblical scholars are saying. Let's take the example of another famous controversy: were the writers of the New Testament wrong when they said that a virgin birth was prophesied by Isaiah? Yes. They were wrong. Bart Ehrman explained this to me in less than half a minute. To make a short story even shorter: read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7, and as Ehrman said: shame on all of us supposedly brilliant people for not already having read the entire chapter. It's not long. The Hebrew word can mean "virgin," or simply "young women," somewhat like the English term "maiden." Reading Isaiah 7, the entire short chapter, makes it clear that the Greek New Testament authors were mistaking in translating the word as "virgin" instead of simply "young woman."

I had zero trouble keeping up with that. But understanding what is so great about Hegel...

Clubs, By Someone Who Knows Nothing About Clubs

There are two kinds of people: people who seriously say that there are two kinds of people, and those like me, who only say it when we are joking. So imagine my surprise when it occurred to me just now that there ARE two kinds of people: those who don't go to clubs, and those who talk about going to clubs as if it were a necessary part of life.

I don't think I've EVER been to a club. Surely I would have remembered. I remember countless times I've walked past long lines of people hoping to get into a club, feeling sorry for them because I assumed it couldn't be good enough to justify going to so much trouble. Although how would I know, right? Although I've never stood in those lines and never gotten past those bouncers, I've known enough people who have to know they'd feel sorry for me if they knew I'd never been. And some would probably have a very difficult time believing I don't envy them.

I've seen countless fictional depictions of clubs in TV shows and movies, with the pretty young women dancing, the expensively-dressed young men at the bar drinking, and the international crime lords at the dimly-lit large round tables in back or up a flight a stairs. 

I've been in business establishments, called bars or discos, where there was drinking and dancing, but they didn't have those long lines of people trying to get past those huge bouncers, so I don't think you call them clubs. If you do, then I was wrong, and yeah, I've been in clubs. Cause I'm a dancin' machine.

I loved the TV series "Alias,"

but that part where 80% or so of the world's most evil supercriminals seemed to have their offices in clubs, either in the back or up a flight of stairs -- that part never seemed the least bit realistic to me, but how would I know, I've never been there.

Of course, there are at least two kinds of clubs: the dancing, yuppie, crimelord, bouncer type we've been discussing, and then the sort which used to be called gentlemen's clubs, and no, I don't mean strip clubs, which are often these days called "gentlemen's club's," making a running total of at least three kinds of clubs -- I mean the kind of club where, a century ago, only men, and almost only wealthy WASP's, would go and drink, but very quietly, and also smoked cigars and secretly ran the country, and they were all sitting in big leather armchairs. For a description of what "gentlemen's club" used to mean before it meant "strip club" -- and what it may still mean, except that they would have to have another name for it now, and they may be a bit more ethnically- and gender-inclusive these days -- see pp 18-19 of G William Donhoff's Who Rules America, 1st edition, 1967. Are many of these old type of clubs really still men-only? Really, it's so very hard for me to care. I'm certain that Jordan Peterson cares enough for himself and me and many other people, and would never begin to believe, if he knew me, that I don't envy him.

Perhaps the two types of clubs have much more in common than I would have thought at first. Besides the huge obvious differences in decibel levels and aerobic calorie-burning, they both are defined by exclusivity. The one type keeps people out with huge bouncers, the other kept them out with social and ethnic and gender prejudice.

And I'm sure lots of clubbers of both types would never believe how little they impress me. They'd be convinced I just can't bear to admit how much I envy them. Hmm. What do you think?

Message to a Fellow Atheist About Atheism, Veganism and Feminism

Okay. I'm going to try to explain to you -- AGAIN -- why I sometimes get annoyed with you on the subject of religion.

This post may be annoying to you, too -- but suck it up, it'll be good for you, if you let it. If you freaking LISTEN.

It's not because you're an atheist. I'm an atheist too. I hope you realize that. I really hope you do. And I hope you also realize that other atheists probably have the same problem with you. And, for example, with Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher and Sam Harris and Stephen Fry.

 

 

Except that they're not trying so freaking hard to HELP. They won't go to the excruciating effort to try to explain it to you. They'll just stop talking to you.

This time, I will try to explain by comparing atheists, vegans and feminists.

Probably, most people you meet who are vegans will never mention it to you. But there are a few who who are a huge pain in the ass about it. Even if you agree with them that veganism could solve the climate crisis and wipe out human poverty if every human became vegan.

 

You might agree with them about that. You might agree with them about many more benefits of veganism. You could BE a vegan, and still find them to be a huge pain in the ass the same way you and I do, and for the very same reason: over and over again, whether the subject is politics or history or technology or whatever, as soon as they see a connection to veganism, they make the entire conversation about veganism.

The same thing can happen with feminism. You could be a huge, committed feminist. You could believe that feminism is the most important topic that humans could possibly discuss. And I might just completely agree. And still, it could be between extremely difficult and impossible to stand talking to you sometimes, if you made conversations grind to a halt by making them all about feminism. 

Some conversations ARE all about feminism. But some aren't. Some conversations are all about veganism, but others aren't. Until they're highjacked by some pain in the ass who is incapable of discussing anything else. Then the conversations grind to a halt, unless two or more such pains in the ass happen to be present. Everyone else will leave and find something much, much, much more interesting to do.

This brings us back to you, and the subject of religion. Religion, which has permeated human life for most of the time that there have been humans. So that it's fairly hard to discuss history, archaeology, anthropology, politics, economics or sociology while entirely avoiding the subject of religion. But some people will try anyway, if you're around. Because the conversation was interesting and they wanted it to continue.

Okay. I tried. Again. I guess I'll try again. Even though it's exhausting and a huge pain in the ass. Because the odds are very slim that, this, time, you got it.

The Ongoing Uphill Battle Against Nonsense

The other day I was in an online discussion which had been started by someone who said that we had no primary sources for 7th-century European history. This amounted to asserting that nothing written in Europe during the 7th century has survived to our day -- or, if one were inclined to be especially generous to them, one could understand them as having said that no historical writing had survived from the 7th century.

The assertion was completely wrong either way, of course. They replied to me by moving the goalposts and saying that we had very few primary sources for the 7th century, and that any given century during the Roman Empire was better-known to us today. I replied that I wasn't sure that the 3rd century wasn't even more poorly attested than the 7th. As an example, I mentioned the Augustan Histories, a purported collection of biographies of Emperors by six different authors, focusing mainly on the 3rd century, upon which both Gibbon and Burckhardt had relied heavily for the period, although both of them were utterly exasperated by its many inaccuracies. There simply wasn't much more writing to be consulted for the 3rd century -- and there still isn't, I added, although today almost all scholars agree that the Augustan histories are the work of one author, not six, and a growing number are coming to suspect that the work is not really history at all, but something more like a parody of historical writing. 

 

At this point someone else said that Gibbon and Burckhardt were very antiquated, and that we today had access to many more sources of 3rd century history than they did.

All fake innocence, I replied that I was fascinated to hear this, and asked them to list some of these sources. I was partly convinced that they were talking out of their butt, and partly curious about whether they actually knew of some 3rd-century sources I hadn't yet heard of. 

They did not. Their reply listed a few Latin authors, all of whom are cited by both Gibbon and Burckhardt, and some of whom are much later than 3rd century and therefore not primary sources. They added that we had Greek sources as well! Not to mention an enormous amount of Roman legal writing and court cases.

Gibbon and Burckhardt were both quite fluent in Greek and cited Greek authors very frequently in their works, and Gibbon, at least, consulted sources in still other ancient languages. Whether he read these untranslated, or had someone translate them for him, I'm not certain. Gibbon greatly advanced the practice of adhering to primary sources, and  Burckhardt was a Musterbeispiel of it. 

And the amount of Roman legal writing we have is not enormous. We have the Corpus Juris Civilis, a summary compiled by Justinian in the 6th century in the 6th century, and a few more items. Romans did not preserve records of every single court case that way we do.

And in any case, Gibbon and Burckhardt had access to these legal writings. 

Other than inscriptions and coins (some classify coins as inscriptions, some don't) which have been discovered and catalogued since their time, and the mostly Greek papyri discovered mostly at Oxyrhynchus, there is in fact very little writing about the Roman Empire which we have and Gibbon and Burckhardt didn't.

And this guy didn't know it. They were saying they "couldn't remember at the moment" all the details of Gibbon and Burckhardt, while making it pretty clear to those have have read Gibbon and Burckhardt, that they haven't.

So what? Happens all the time, somebody talking out of their butt on the Internet. What was different about this time?

This time it made me sad. And also a little ashamed, because this person reminded me a little bit of me: half-bright enough to get away with some of his BS.  I try to talk nonsense less than I used to, but I don't know that I've actually stopped yet. It's hard to stop a train.

Of course, BS doesn't fool everybody. Most of the people who know you're full of it just stop talking to you. 

But not all of them. Over the past couple of years another person on the Internet has corrected me over and over on points of Latin and subjects related in one way or another to Latin literature. It's a new experience for me, and very annoying. I don't know whether they're too young to realize how annoying the corrections are, or too autistic, or what.

Annoying or not, I realize that the corrections are good for me. They help me learn -- you know? So I thank them, and do my best to hide my annoyance.

PC Language Rules, Part Deux

I'm Leftist: I believe in affirmative action and other legal protections for women, ethnic minorities and non-cis-hets. I believe in higher taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, and more spending, much more, on the social safety net, education, the transition to carbon-free energy, modernizing the grid, reforestation, afforestation, restoration of wetlands, getting Nazis off of police forces and innocent people out of prison, etc, etc. I'm completely in favor of more care, love and respect, much more, for those who are outcast, neglected and abused.

I am NOT in step with most leftists when it comes to PC language rules. Telling people that there is a politically-correct and a politically-incorrect way of phrasing things is not helpful with any of the goals listed in the previous paragraph. It's not helpful with anything at all, except for the power of those who impose the PC rules on the rest of us. It's a huge waste of time and energy for everyone else.

Political correctness is so stupid, and so many people submit to it, with conviction or out of fear, that it provides a lot of political ammunition to the Right. They can claim they they're not allowed to say this and that. That's nonsense, of course, like most of what the Right says. Everyone can say whatever they want, and take the consequences, now as always. The consequences now do not include imprisonment. Political correctness has not actually enacted any laws. But so many people voluntarily submit to its rules that the Right can claim that they're not allowed to say this or that without getting laughed out of most rooms.

In the mid-20th century, when there were actual laws against saying or writing certain words, Lenny Bruce and others heroically protested. Lenny spent a lot of time in jail for the sake of free speech. 

 

It was done then, it can be done again. For the time being, it can even be done without risking going to jail for it.

We really need to take the issue of free speech back from the Right. They're doin' it wrong. It shouldn't be something that's good only for those who already have the most power.

EV Drivers

One thing that reactionary yahoos have long said about EV drivers is that they are smug. Well, I've been driving an EV for a while now, and, strangely, I AM smug about it. I DO feel superior to the drivers of the noisy, smelly dinosaur-burners all around me, as I dart nearly silently among them. Intellectually superior, morally superior, and definitely sexier! Superior every which way. I am the dog's biscuits. 

I can't open the rear doors yet, but I've googled it, and it's just a matter of settings and interior buttons. It'll come. I'll figure it out. I don't know why that overhead light comes on all the time, even in the brightest parts of the sunniest days, but I'll figure that out too! Just the same that I figured out where the radio's volume knob was! My brother helped with the volume knob. He's literally a rocket scientist and is wicked smart. With his help I'll get the charging situation sorted out. 

And you would not BELIEVE how smug I feel about it all. And I'm a person who's rarely felt smug about anything. Apparently I occasionally appear to be smug. People have sometimes accused me of smugness, but they've been wrong. Now they're right.

As the old saying goes: even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The yahoos were bound to be right about something eventually.  

I'm not saying that these feelings of superiority are accurate, just that I'm feeling them. For several months before the EV, I was without any sort of  personal-transportation vehicle. I walked or I took the bus. And I definitely THINK that those who do so are better than all of us who drive, no matter what we drive. 

But I didn't have this smirking, smug FEELING when I was on foot.

Can anyone else out there relate? Are we right to feel this way? Are we being manipulated by Big Something? Are are we the Vanguard of the Future? Are we silly? Maybe a little from Column A and a little from Column B?

Continuing Education on YouTube

Stefan Milo is a British archaeologist who lives with his family in Murrka and has a great YouTube channel called, wittily enough, Stefan Milo: 

Well. There was supposed to be a link to Stefan's YouTube channel here. But we seem to be having even more technical difficulties. I repeat: it's on YouTube, it's called Stefan Milo and it's great.

I don't know what sort of archaeologist Milo is. He's very self-deprecating about his intellect and his academic accomplishments -- too much so, I would guess. He regularly talks to world-leading archaeologists on his channel, and he seems to keep up them pretty well. He has a degree in Archaeology from the University of Sheffield, but I don't know whether it's a Doctorate or some lesser degree.

I don't know whether he's published a lot of peer-reviewed papers. He's published a children's book about archaeology; he talks about that book a lot on his channel. 

I do feel that I've learned a lot about archaeology from Milo's channel after a few weeks of binge-watching his videos. That is in large part because I find his videos pleasant to watch: he has an engaging personality and his videos have good production values. 

For just a little while I said to myself: since Milo didn't make a career in academia, now he has to be an academic and a performer as well. And then suddenly it struck me: all teachers are performers. Some are good performers, some aren't. Milo is one of the ones who are more effective because they're more engaging and likeable.

I don't know why it took me until I was 62 years old to grasp this, but it's been grasped. Of course teachers who fascinate their students are more effective than those who repel them. And some teachers started showing slides decades ago, if not centuries, and some of them have been very good with the visual aids, and that doesn't hurt a bit when it comes to actual task of education.

Milo makes a great contrast here to Bart Ehrman, probably the world's most famous living academic authority on the subject of Jesus and early Christianity. Ehrman can be seen as having at least three separate careers: as an author of academic books, which contain footnotes and multilingual bibliographies and are peer-reviewed; an author of popular books, which eschew the footnotes and bibliographies, are aimed at the "general public," and sell several times as much as the academic books, routinely making bestseller lists; and also as a teacher who stands in front of students and talks.

Nowadays, of course, teaching is done not only in classrooms, but also in front of cameras, in the making of various kinds of videos. I've watched quite a few of Ehrman's videos lately, and... and I like his academic books very much.  So do many academics. And his popular books must have hundreds of thousands of ardent fans among the "general public" by now. If not actually millions.

Ehrman also appears on many YouTube channels, some seem to be run in part by him, and he's a guest on many others, and the videos get millions and millions and millions of views.

Would they get so many views without the books? I really have to wonder. There are probably some people who find Ehrman to be the epitome of charisma, because when there are millions and millions and millions of views, there will be every conceivable opinion. 

I watch the videos for Ehrman's knowledge. I have to put up with a lot of teeth-grittingly annoying behavior in order to get to that knowledge. One channel which Ehrman seems to at least partly control, is actually hosted by a British woman, and every video starts with her asking "Bart" about the latest in his private life, and why?! "Bart" never says anything edifying or remotely interesting in these intros, and I've taken to skipping ahead to where they're actually talking about Jeebus.

What a huge contrast to Stefan Milo's video, where the occasional glimpses of his wife and baby girl are actually charming, and sometimes even tied in relevantly to to the archaeological content.

Ehrman has said many times that his students in North Carolina are from North Carolina, and therefore are often fundamentalists, and therefore are often quite astonished by what he has to teach them. He's said this many times just that I've seen. How many times has he insulted his students in pretty much the identical way in his entire life?! It boggles the boggles. Why not try some new material for a change, and tell the world about the most surprisingly clever things he's heard from his students lately? 

And his laugh. Ehrman's laugh just sets my teeth on edge. it literally sounds like "Hyuck hyuck hyuck!"

Anyhow. Stefan Milo's videos on YouTube, and Bart Ehrman's academic books, the ones with the footnotes and bibliographies, are what I recommend. 

Also, since I'm sure some of you are wondering now that I've mentioned Ehrman: no, I am still not convinced that Jesus existed. I agree with Ehrman that most of the most prominent living mythicists, Price and Carrier and Freke and Gandy and Fitzgerald et al, are bozos as well as unpleasant people, I agree with him that Atlantis was not real and that the Egyptians and Mayas built all of those amazing buildings all by themselves, with no extra-terrestrial help whatsoever. I will almost always side with the academic consensus in the sciences and humanities. "Academic cover-up" strikes me as an oxymoron. I agree with Ehrman that there is no reason to doubt that Socrates and Caesar and Alexander the Great and Pilate and Herod Antipater and John the Baptist and Saul/Paul of Taurus were real people, and I trust Ehrman's opinion about which of the Pauline epistles were written by Paul and which of the Platonic dialogues were written by Plato, and about many, many other things. 

But I still haven't had that  "AHA!"-moment where it suddenly makes sense what Ehrman and almost all other academics say about Jesus: that he certainly existed. I'm also not certain that he never existed, the way I am with, for example, King Arthur. When it comes to Jesus' existence, I'm on the fence, where I've been for at least 30 years.