Today the story that is wasting my time and energy is this story about Ivy League schools taking up rifle teams. Yes, fully ten years ago we had that all out here at the Hall.
[I]f any pale student glued to his desk here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.Francis Parkman wrote that. If you don't know who he was, you should look him up. If you're a Harvard man and you don't know, your school has failed you: as it has if it produced you without teaching you to shoot a rifle or use an oar.
9 comments:
Whether blogging is a waste of time rather depends on why you're doing it.
If you expect it to solve problems that have plagued mankind for centuries, then yes: it's a waste of time. I'm not sure why merely having discussed something should produce change.
I imagine that people blog for all kinds of highly personal reasons. I enjoyed the opportunity to defend and discuss ideas and principles and figure out how to interpret current events. And I thought it was very valuable to have a place where people could discuss important issues, mostly civilly.
What discouraged me about blogging was how often the discussion of very important issues devolved into "they did it first", "their lapses justify mine", etc.: name calling, selective standards (holding the other side to a standard the speaker didn't feel bound to meet), cherry picking: all very human failings. Here, I am more talking about other bloggers than the commenters at VC or anyone here. Generally, I wasn't so much surprised when bloggers did these things. It was more surprise at how many people approved of the tactics, often having just complained about the other side doing the exact same thing.
We've talked before about how rules help create faith in the legitimacy of a system: when people see that a system rewards people for treating each other fairly and punishes them for being unfair, it encourages and reinforces reciprocity/trust. When rules are unevenly or unfairly enforced, people lose faith that they'll be treated fairly and lose respect for the system. Instead of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you", we get "do unto others before they stick it to you".
If there's a sense that blogging is a waste of time, it's that the "do it to them first" ethic seems to be what is reinforced, and that leads to "their wrongs excuse mine".
It's an odd victory that results from adopting the ethics and tactics of your worst enemies.
#notwinning
I think I expected blogging to produce some sort of changes -- not to solve problems, but at least to educate and improve the discussion. Of course, there is always a new generation coming up that doesn't know what we talked about ten years ago. Education must therefore be a continual process.
What concerns me is that many lessons seem to be going unlearned on purpose. It's helpful to treat things as if we didn't know the history, or it's helpful to understand the history in some tendentious way. It's helpful to mishear comments, and to insist on that understanding of what was said in spite of further or better information.
That kind of thing really annoys me, and I don't see it getting better. I'd hoped that blogging would improve it -- the idea, when it was new, was that people who had the best information would come forward and we as a society would therefore be able to leverage expertise in a new and better way. We were supposed to learn something, many things, from this method.
I don't see a lot of evidence that it's worked.
I think I expected blogging to produce some sort of changes -- not to solve problems, but at least to educate and improve the discussion.
By that metric, I'd say your blogging has not been a waste of time. People have been educated about some things, and I'd say there are better discussions at the Hall than most other places.
... the idea, when it was new, was that people who had the best information would come forward and we as a society would therefore be able to leverage expertise in a new and better way. We were supposed to learn something, many things, from this method.
I never really believed that the people who had the best info would be the ones who were listened to. I did believe (and continue to believe) it's better for good information to be available - whether or not the majority pay attention to it - than not.
But I never thought it would overcome human nature, just as I don't expect even the best designed system to prevent bad things from happening.
It's my sense that we as a generation are very spoiled. We live in arguably the best times history has known in terms of security and the ability to live our lives unmolested, yet we ceaselessly complain and are dissatisfied. Our entire frame of reference is so skewed by not having lived through anything like the hard times previous generations did that we can't appreciate what we have.
The tradeoff here is that in the presence of so much abundance and freedom, people make increasingly bad decisions. OK, I never expected the world to save me from myself: just to allow me to live my life.
What I expected from blogging is mostly what I got in lavish abundance: the opportunity to talk with people I like and respect, and to have conversations I can't have IRL. As with everything worth striving for, there was a very high personal cost: thousands and thousands of hours of work, and the effort/time required to run the place after spending several hours a day writing, researching, and responding to comments in addition to a full time job and family responsibilities.
It was all worth it, except when suddenly, it wasn't any more. I still mourn the loss of friendships and conversations, but I've gained something in return: more time for family, work, and my daily life. For every storm cloud, a big silver lining.
Cass- "It's my sense that we as a generation are very spoiled. We live in arguably the best times history has known in terms of security and the ability to live our lives unmolested, yet we ceaselessly complain and are dissatisfied. Our entire frame of reference is so skewed by not having lived through anything like the hard times previous generations did that we can't appreciate what we have."
This , in spades. And they are so ready to give up the civilization that produced it for them.
And Grim- thank you-I have learned a lot here.
I'll third what Cass said. I've learned a great deal here at the Hall, and read things that made me think, sometimes coming to agree, sometimes disagree, sometimes deciding that I just don't know enough about the topic at hand to really have a good, arguable position one way or another . . . yet.
I blog under my pen name in part to lure people into buying my books, and in part to have a place to meditate, cogitate, describe, or occasionally vent. Or yes. :)
LittleRed1
Who is this "we" white girl? My mother, who grew up during the depression, and lost friends in WWII, never ceased to tell us how lucky we were. And she was right, of course. I am sure I could not have it better anywhere than here and now. But what other people think, I don't have any control over that. Freud had a book: "Civilization and its' Discontents" -without even reading it, you can chew over that title and apply it to much that is seen today.
As for shooting at Harvard, I blame video games. How many of these new shooters played "Call of Duty" or something similar? Of course the kids are going to get interested.
Who is this "we" white girl?
Heh. That made me laugh out loud :)
The whole "Civilization and its Discontents" thingy reminds me of a particularly spurious argument I've heard several times about some dumb study about female happiness.
The idea is that a smaller percentage of women say they're happy now than in the past, and that somehow proves women secretly wish we didn't have all this pesky freedom of choice. It's so unnatural. If only we could rechain ourselves to our little pink Easy Bake ovens and bake cupcakes for The Patriarchy as Gaia intended, I'm sure those all important happiness poll stats would go back up.
Deus vult!!! :)
I always thought happiness was pretty much a function of two things: expectations, and the human will.
If your expectations are low and everyone else is in the same boat, it's easier to be "happy" (whatever that is...). On the otter heiny, dissatisfaction has been a pretty productive force in history.
I am a pessimist; that way I can only be pleasantly surprised.
That said, any good Stoic knows it doesn't take much to be happy.
Grim, this place is priceless to me. I come here much of the time to keep my sanity- much like today where work was long and not that interesting, and the other blogs I'd been reading made me feel terribly depressed about the state of things politically. I come here to know that there are more than just the precious few people I know in real life who seek knowledge, good conversation, worthy opponents, and sometimes humility, and all this with a few laughs.
When I first stuck my nose in the door (after reading your posts at B5), it seemed a strange place, all this talk of medieval history and chivalry. Too romantic for rational me. Something kept calling me back, though. I guess it's been about 11 years now I've been coming by. In that time, I've learned much about history, philosophy, ethics, chivalry, food, lots of other varied tidbits and perhaps most importantly, the importance of stories. I single this out because when I first came here, I was the sort of guy who had pretty much turned away from fiction altogether, and was more interested in non-fiction and dry facts. I also had relatively recently become a father, and was hoping I had a clue how to be one.
Between reading to my son (and later my daughter), and reading your thoughts, and your references to fictional or semi-historical works, and hearing you argue for us as a society to tell the right stories- I realized how wrong I had been to turn my back to fiction and narrative. You opened my eyes to the power and inherent truths of those stories, and where I found myself looking for the right kind of stories to steer my children to, your influence helped me work to do just that (beyond what church and family would give them in that regard). Given my son's interest in the fantastic (particularly dragons), stories are the natural way to reach him where he lives.
I could go on, but let me close by saying that I don't know about changing the world, but honestly, I think I can say you've made my life better, and by extension, the lives of those around me. I suppose changing the world is like eating an elephant... one bite at a time.
I Thank you, sir.
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