Steven Parmenius

  There are public intellectuals who are decorous in debate, nuanced and careful in their arguments, cautious in their assertions and meticulous in researching the subjects they comment on. Then there is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is a man with a megaphone who models, lavishly models, basic intellectual irresponsibility. Like Ben Shapiro (his right wing equivalent) he cultivates radical stupidity and sells it to the public as cutting edge intelligence.   Years ago when I first picked up the God Delusion I realized not five pages in that it was the work of an intellectual fraud (this is because religion and philosophy are my ACADEMIC specialties- sorry to pull rank).   I have no reason to think this fraudulence extends further than his popular works on religion and other topics. Dawkins is famous because he published a book with selfish in the title at the cusp of the Reagan/Thatcher era. It was read and admired, I am told, by CEO’s who suddenly found their narcissism and gr...

  In philosophy we have a series of idealized positions and arguments about which we argue like nominalism, realism, idealism, materialism and so on. This is both good and bad. It is bad because the use of such categories often distorts the complexity of individual thinkers. Historical positions aren't pure examples of idealized conceptual stances. A rationalist may have empirical elements in his thought and vice versa. One person’s realism or nominalism may be more radical than another’s and a philosopher, who after all is not an all knowing machine, may build doubts and hesitations into his position. He may even have unresolved contradictions. He may even have contradictions he does not WANT to resolve as (after all) what is a contradiction but an unfinished thought? That said it is sometimes necessary to paint in broader strokes as all analysis can’t be carried out at the individual level. This is as much as to say that in history there are broad movements that cohere over time ...

                  Protestants  and atheists (with a smattering of Thomists) do this thing called analytic philosophy of religion in which I have very little interest. It is rigorously discursive, highly formalized and, as far as I can tell, utterly a-historical. As a historicist, then, it does not get to first base philosophically, at least where I am concerned. There are those with a taste for such things but I, alas, am not one of them. Nor will I EVER be one of them. That said, I do recall one bit of discussion generated by Plantinga et.al. and that concerned the Great Pumpkin from the Peanuts cartoon strip. Plantinga held that certain beliefs could be ‘properly basic’. A properly basic belief might be a belief in something like the principle of induction: i.e. that we can generalize from experience. Notoriously, post-Hume, there is no agreed on ‘proof’ of the principle of induction which does not presuppose the principle of inductio...

  Right now I am listening to Piano and String Quartet by American composer Morton Feldman. It is well over an hour which is actually short by the standards of his later works, some of which extend to Wagnerian length. We are used to thinking about music as, at very least, some kind of event. By this I mean an exciting, interesting, diverting, consoling event. This event is embodied in certain patterns. One of these is melody. Alas, there is almost nothing in the Piano Quintet that could be called a melody even in the most basic sense of that word. Well, we also like rich satisfying harmonies, at least if we are of European extraction. There are only the barest outlines of harmony in this piece. There is a pulse, I suppose, though it is not the kind of pulse we could consider a discernible rhythm. There is nothing to hum here and nothing to dance or even move to. A composer of the last century would expect complex and innovative musical forms using advanced compositional techniques...

        1.   Humor is often very satisfied with itself. It is the weapon of the self-assured. One evident source of this kind of smugness currently is the self-certainty and self- satisfaction of the bourgeois. As the bearer of a universal empirical, utilitarian and mercantile culture the bourgeois is above all spiritualistic, sentimental nonsense. In short he is what Arnold and others labeled the philistine; hence his smirking satisfaction at any and all forms of disenchantment whether of religion, or love or art. A great deal of modern comedy, superficially supposed to be ‘subversive’, is in this vein and is, as such, a defense of the status quo. Even the absurdism of Monty Python (which I enjoy as much as the next person) is about how any and all claims to ‘seriousness’ are just stuff and nonsense. Absurdism is a very conservative form of comedy (all critique is neutralized as ‘serious’) and that is both its strength and its vitiating flaw: conservatis...

  By magical thinking I here intend the colloquial sense not the historical sense I have discussed previously in my ruminations on animism in the Renaissance. Each day as I scan progressive publications like the Salon or Guardian I increasingly get the impression that progressives (and in particular American ones) have run out of real options for fighting fascism and are turning increasingly to magical ones. You can tell this is the case because they propose that we fight fascism by striking poses or attitudes that have no relation to any actual policy and can have no other predictable result than to reinforce fascists in their mad convictions. Thus, we have Clintonite Chauncey DeVega ( https://www.salon.com/2021/09/22/hillary-clinton-tried-to-warn-us--and-paid-the-price-lets-at-least-call-what-they-are/ ) who fights fascism by declaring to all and sundry that he is so DONE with Trumpists and their whining. [1] We have Amanda Marcotte who says that, after all, it is all down to ...

Listening to a mass (with Latin text!) by Machaut I have to marvel at the strangeness of the 16th Century inquisition going back in time and changing the words of a composer (who had long been forgotten anyway) into Latin from whatever the original language was. This reminds us, of course, of the basic weakness of conspiratorial thinking which is, that while picking random flaws in the ‘official’ story, it cannot tell a coherent story of its own. If someone claims all mediaeval and ancient Latin is fake I would like to know the who, what, when, where, why and how of so extraordinary a feat. Here is where the conspiracy theorist always fails to deliver for whatever problems there are with the received story are dwarfed by the incoherence and arbitrariness of the ‘alternative’ one. Worse, if the official sources can be so comprehensively misleading and systematically deceptive what grounds are there for thinking the ‘alternative’ sources are any different? But, of course, this is the rea...