Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!

Present-Day Epicureans and Stoics in Academia

At around 6:45 in this podcast of The Majority Report with Sam Seder,



Nathan J Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs (a wonderful magazine, by the way) says:

"There is a kind of sense among many academics that engaging with the public is something that is at best optional, and at worst, actually, almost anti-intellectual."

Sam and Nathan are discussing how it is that pseudo-intellectuals such as Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are able to pass themselves off as geniuses and have great success engaging with the public. Nathan points to the disconnect between academic journals and more popular media, and the resulting lack of push-back against frauds and/or fools (it isn't always easy to see which is which) like Peterson and Harris. Many academics, Nathan is saying, see their task as involving academic journals and book publishers in their specialty, and their lives as being located in somewhat closed communities of their peers, and are quite simply not particularly interested in, or are even disdainful of, the wider public. Their ivory towers can be quite comfortable, quite blissfully calm compared to the strife of public life and politics, and they can see little reason to venture outside.

In short, many of them are Epicureans.

There are other academics who actively fight against the sort of nonsense being spread by people like Peterson and Harris, and like Stephen Greenblatt, at least when Greenblatt ventures outside of his specialty of English Renaissance literature, and spreads sheer hair-raising nonsense about ancient Latin literature and its transmission, as he does in his huge bestseller The Swerve. The ones who try to stand up for academia in public, who denounce the charlatans and half-wits posing as intellectuals, are thoroughly Stoic in their outlook: the work of their disciplines is important, they feel, and it is important that the public not be grossly misinformed about it.

Nathan J Robinson, somewhat plugged into the academic world, has spoken to neuroscientists and asked them what they think of Sam Harris, and found that often they have never heard of Harris. This is somewhat surprising in that Harris is the most famous living neuroscientist in the world, and somewhat distressing in that he has sold millions of copies of books full of positions on neuroscience which have little to no credibility among those neuroscientists who have bothered to look into Harris' work. (Harris, with a BA in philosophy from Stanford in 2000 and a PhD in neuroscience from UCLA in 2009, has published a total of 2 peer-reviewed papers as well as his 7 "popular" books.) Similarly, Jordan Peterson has sold millions of books in which he pretends to be expert not only in his academic specialty of psychology, but also in philosophy and evolutionary biology and other fields as well, and, similar to Harris when it comes to philosophy or neuroscience, and similar to Greenblatt on the subject of ancient Latin literature and its transmission, Peterson rarely says or writes anything with which a scholar competent in those fields would agree.

Some academics seem, at least at first blush, to be Epicureans and Stoics at the same time. For example, Bart Ehrman is a respected specialist in the history of early Christianity who has published well-received scholarly papers and books, and has also published "popular" books aimed at the general public, which offer a sort of watered-down version of his "academic" books: no footnotes, less detail.

Such a split of one and the same scholar into "academic" and "popular" publishing, gives short shrift to the Stoic side. It implies that the public can't really handle the good stuff, unadulterated. It contains a bit of the contemptuousness of the Epicurean.

I have often been greatly tempted to follow the Epicurean path, and leave the big dumb ugly world to blow itself up. And perhaps I'm a fool not to have followed that path. Who can truly say how much we change the world, how much of the grim effort to change the world is a waste? Be that as it may: as a Stoically-minded person outside of academia, but with great interest in academia, I wish more academics would attempt to shine more of the full light of their learning into the public arena, both to expose pseudo-intellectuals to whom many of them have until now abandoned the stoa, the public marketplace of ideas, and also to be more sharing with the full delight of truly learned discourse.

The Origins of Philosophy

From the Hellenistic age down to our own, Aristotle and Plato have been very widely studied in "the West." Aristotle studied under Plato; Plato and others sat adoringly at the feet of Socrates; Socrates learned among the last of the pre-Socratics; and the first pre-Socratics, as we all know, sprang, fully-formed and philosophizing away, from the brow of Zeus.

What?! There was no philosophy before the pre-Socratics? Yes, that's exactly what it says here, on p 10 of Wisdom of the West by Bertrand Russell, London, 1959:

"Philosophy and science, as we now know them, are Greek inventions[...]Philosophy and science begin with Thales of Miletus in the early sixth century BC."

Okay then. That's all cleared up. And what exactly is philosophy? Russell covers that too, same book, same page:

"Philosophy begins when someone asks a general question."

Got it!

Seriously, though: although I find Russell to be eminently sensible almost all of the time, what he is saying here is absurd. Even though, as far as I have been able to determine -- I don't know how far that is -- very few "Western" scholars seem to be saying anything different about how philosophy, or at least "Western" philosophy, began.

One of the few exceptions is Arthur Schopenhauer. In his Parerga und Paralipomena, part I, in the chapter "Fragmente zur Geschichte der Philosophie," in the section on the Pre-Socratics (Saemtliche Werke, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt aM, 4th printing, 1996, vol 4, pp 45-56), Schopenhauer points out how some of the positions of the pre-Socratics are anticipated in Egypt and in the Brahmanic philosophy of the Vedas. He even mentions (p 56) Apuleius' assertion that Pythagoras had traveled as far as India, and been personally schooled by Brahmans.

You might say that it's absurd to accept Apuleius' account, written well over half a millennium after Pythagoras' death, as anything more than an amusing anecdote. And you might be right about that. But is it more absurd than assuming that no Brahmanic, or Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Babylonian, or other philosophy found its way to Greece before the career of Thales was over?

I submit that what began with the Greek pre-Socratics is that the individual tidbits of wisdom began to be preserved in connection with the names of individual wise people. A very significant development, and even more so to authors concerned about receiving the proper credit for their work than it may be to the public at large.

But to arbitrarily advance several thousand large steps past that and flatly assert that before Thlaes, no-one, anywhere, had ever stopped and asked what it all means, is, I must say so in all directness, thoroughly absurd.

And I say so even though I have only found one Western philosopher, Schopenhauer, who also says so. I have found many "Eastern" scholars, and laypeople from all parts of the Earth, who agree with me on this point. It's not the only point in which I feel that Schopenhauer and I are a bit lonely. There's also the matter of Hegel. There are so very many perfectly intelligent scholars who admire Hegel so very much. And yet, when I read Hegel, I see what Schopenhauer describes: an empty-headed charlatan, a pseudo-intellectual par excellence, a sheer horse's ass who is shamelessly wasting everybody's time. A Sam Harris of the early 19th century.

There is yet another point where I find myself and many, many other laypeople on one side, and almost every single Western scholar on the other: the scholars almost all state quite flatly that it is quite certain that Jesus existed, and is not merely a fictional character in a myth, a character perhaps cobbled together from the biographies of John the Baptist and some other real people.

I do not take it at all lightly when the academic consensus is so overwhelmingly against me. It troubles me, it truly does. But no academic consensus will persuade me to stop thinking for myself.

Who is Jordan Peterson and Why Have 7 of My Previous 8 Posts Been About Him?

(8 out of 9 if you count this one.) I'm so glad you asked!

Jordan Peterson

is a Canadian professor of psychology who is one year younger than I am and specializes in myths and their Jungian interpretation. For example, he points out that in some myths males represent order and females represent chaos. So far so good, that is an accurate description of those myths.

But then, instead of pointing out that such myths (developed and propounded mostly by males, of course, with very little consultation of female viewpoints) are descriptive of the psychology of the myth-tellers, he actually claims that they are literally accurate. He insists that males are ordered and that females are chaotic. All 4 billion or so human males, Peterson says, are ordered, and all 4 billion or so human females are chaotic.

And furthermore, he insists that male and female are the only 2 human genders which exist. (Any real experts in myth who never heard of Peterson before this blog post are already beginning to sense how much myth Peterson has to ignore in order to keep his worldview intact.) And this leads to the way in which Peterson became famous: by objecting, in 2016, to the the 2nd clause of Bill C-16, which reads:

This enactment amends the Canadian Human Rights Act to add gender identity and gender expression to the list of prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The enactment also amends the Criminal Code to extend the protection against hate propaganda set out in that Act to any section of the public that is distinguished by gender identity or expression and to clearly set out that evidence that an offence was motivated by bias, prejudice or hate based on gender identity or expression constitutes an aggravating circumstance that a court must take into consideration when it imposes a sentence.

Peterson objects to this because, he claims, it will infringe upon his freedom of speech by forcing him to use pronouns other than "he" and "she" when referring to persons.

As far as I know, Peterson has not yet faced any criminal or civil prosecution because of his use of pronouns. Still, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he is claiming to have been victimized when no-one has done anything to him.

That's what made him famous. That, and some very popular YouTube videos in which he spews his right-wing viewpoints which, in tried-and-true right-wing fashion, he claims are not right-wing, but Classical-Liberal (or, as we would say in the United States, libertarian.) And also his book which followed very quickly upon his sudden fame as a martyr against pronoun abuse, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. (Remember: as mentioned above, Peterson says that males are orderly, females are chaotic, and that no further human genders exist.)

Peterson is a far-right-wing nut. He checks all the boxes: He claims that women need (and secretly want) to be dominated and controlled by men. He says that postmodern neo-Marxists have (again, secretly, as the postmodernists deny that they are Marxists and the Marxists deny that they are postmodern) swarmed into the faculties of our universities, where they are trying their best to enslave the minds of our young people in preparation for marching all of us off to the gulag. He is a climate-change skeptic. He says that white privilege doesn't exist. He's against women's right to choose with no if's and's or but's. He's against casual sex and gay marriage.

And he's passing himself off in many -- by no means all -- mainstream media outlets as not being right-wing at all. And he has a huge following among incels and other groups of misogynistic young men. And, annoying to me personally as a real intellectual, very many people, even including some generally-sensible Leftists, keep referring to this doofus as an intellectual. Does this help answer your question about why I've been posting about him?

12 Rules to Change Your Life and Make it Swell

1. There is no such list of rules anywhere. There is much too much diversity among human personalities, bodies and predicaments for one book to be able to help all of them. The whole self-help industry is a scam. Which doesn't mean that none of the self-help gurus are sincere. The sincere ones are fooling themselves as well as their followers.

Repeat Rule #1 11 more times if necessary.

2. Now that we've got that nonsense out of the way, there are 11 more slots in which I can say something interesting, edifying or otherwise useful (to some).

I wonder whether the world is divided up into Giorgio Moroder fans and Dario Argento fans? Moroder and Argento were both born in 1940 in Italy and they both compose music and produce musical recordings, although you might not know it from Argento's Wikipedia entry. Moroder has produced albums by the Bee Gees (disco version), Donna Summer, Blondie, David Bowie, Janet Jackson and many others, as well as composing and producing some movie soundtracks. "Stayin' Alive" and "I Feel Love," that's him. The soundtracks to Cat People, Scarface and DC Cab, that's him too.

Argento, on the other hand, may be more well known as a movie director than for his music. He made the soundtracks for some of the movies he directed and for some movies directed by others, notably, George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

Anyway, back when I used to hang with a bunch of film aficionados, it seemed we were divided into those who liked Moroder and those who liked Argento. And I can't remember anyone from that group except me who liked Moroder. Anyway, it just seems to me that it would be very difficult to really like them both.

3. There's a squirrel who lives outside my house who's as black as the blackest black-eyed cat you ever saw.

4. I had schwaerma for the first time yesterday. It was okay, I'll probably get it again. I first heard about schwaerma toward the end of the first Robert Downey Jr -- Scarlett Johannson Avengers movie. I wonder how many other people first heard about Schwaerma this way. (It is also spelled shawarma and other ways.)

5. I spend a significant amount of time, maybe too much time, worrying about whether the populations of cities are measured in ways which are similar enough around the world that people from one part of the world can get a good idea of the sizes of cities in other parts of the world without quite a lot of world travel and attention to population statistics. For example, the population of Detroit is around 700,000, or a little under 4 million , or a little more than 4 million, or almost 6 million, depending on how you define it. Which means that Detroit has less then half the population of Phoenix, or almost as many people as the entire state of Arizona, depending how you measure it. Forget other countries -- is Phoenix measuring even close to the same way Detroit does?

6. I finally figured out, a little while before I stopped hanging with New Atheists, that New Atheists define religions much more strictly than most of the adherents of those religions do. A New Atheist may well insist, "A Christian literally believes that an old man in the sky created the entire universe, and gave souls to humans but not to any other forms of life, and that there is no life anywhere in the universe except Earth, and that Jesus was born without his mother becoming pregnant or having sex, and that Jesus died and then rose from the dead, which was necessary to give humans a chance of not spending an eternity in Hell [...]" and they may go on in this vein for quite a while, adding more and more items to the list of things which Christians, they say, literally believe, when in fact many people who identify as Christian don't believe any of those things.

7. I keep reading the figure 750,000 for the number of copies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules has sold. I think that figure might be out of date. Or maybe it only counts US sales. The damn thing is still selling, #52 just now on the Amazon bestsellers' list, and hasn't yet come out in paperback, I believe. Peterson has claimed sales of over 2 million (perhaps he was referring to worldwide sales), threatened to sue one reviewer for a negative review and to slap another one.

8. By the end of WWII over 40 countries were at war with Nazi Germany.

9. When Pulp Fiction was filmed, there were no Red Apple cigarettes and there was no restaurant named Jack Rabbit Slim's. Since then, several bars and taverns have opened which are called Jack Rabbit Slim's. I do not know whether Quentin Tarantino has sued or slapped any of the people who opened those establishments.

10. With few exceptions, mostly within the Soviet bloc, cars have only been exported in significant numbers from companies headquartered in the US, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Korea, Japan and China.

11. Some of the earliest watches were made in Switzerland, and they say it had something to do with Calvinism. (Make as much much money as you can but be sure not to enjoy it? I don't know.)

12. More than 7% of the electricity generated in Germany is solar.

While I Was Busy Making Other Plans

I'm looking at a copy of The Best American Essays 2017, editor: Leslie Jameson. The name didn't ring a bell -- is she the woman who wrote that ridiculous piece in The Atlantic praising Jordan Peterson and dissing The Left? No, that was Caitlin Flanagan.

Paging through the volume, an author's name catches my eye: June Thunderstorm. Her essay is against anti-smoking laws, maintaining that they have always been "about social control." A former smoker who might very well have died from emphysema if I hadn't quit over 20 years ago, I rolled my eyes and was about to dismiss her and everything she ever stood for before reading the entire first page of her essay, but then I remembered that, on this very blog, I did something similar with an essay by Thoreau on Lincoln, and then later found out that I was mistaken to do so, because the essay begins ironically, with Thoreau posing as the sort of insufferable upperclass American twit, who sneered at Lincoln, which the majority of the text of the essay actually denounces while praising Lincoln highly. Then it also occurred to me that June Thunderstorm might be a Native American, and therefore entitled to some attitudes toward tobacco which are foreign to me. Anyway, I don't feel like reading her entire essay right now, but I won't diss it before I do. Learned my lesson with Thoreau. I can't remember whether I've yet added the necessary PS and apology to that essay.

Inside the front cover are listed 32 editors of The Best American Essays, 1986 to 2017. I recognized 17 of those names. I've dissed at least three of them in this blog: Susan Sontag, Cynthia Ozick and Christopher Hitchens. One of those 17, Edward Hoagland, I admire very much,

and several more have some level of my respect.

After I'd first looked at that list of 32 celebrity editors for a minute or so, it occurred to me that all 32 of them, and surely either all or almost all of the essayists whose work is printed in this volume, and surely many if not most of the hundreds of other authors whom Robert Atwan mentions in the back of the volume as having also written notable essays published during the year under review, and many if not most of thousands more writers either printed or mentioned in the other annual volumes of The Best American Essays published since the late 1980's, have one thing in common: they've written entire volumes which were published long before they reached age 57. I'm 57, and I'd always planned to become a big-time celebrity writer long before I got this old.

Life is what happens to us while we're busy making other plans, as William Gaddis or Readers' Digest or someone else first pointed out. (John Lennon wasn't the first.) Although I feel perfectly justified in dissing Sontag or Ozick or Hitchens as if I could do better, because I think I could, I think I can, I think I do, I think I have for quite a while -- nevertheless, I have absolutely zero credentials to support this attitude. And you, you either agree with me, or you regard me as a conceited crank, which really wouldn't bother me, which you may or may not believe. But not being published, not having any entire published volumes written all by me, that really irks me.

Some people have suggested to me that I self-publish a volume. I don't think that really counts as being published, nor does blogging, which anyone can do. Being published means that a publisher has selected your work and approved and that it gets published and that you get paid for it.

Historia Augusta, Eusebius, Gibbon, Burckhardt

The Historia Augusta, written in Latin, claim to be a collection of biographies of Roman Emperors written by 6 authors in the 3rd century AD. Many or most historians of ancient Rome now consider them to be the work of one author in the late 4th century, which perhaps was not meant to be read as history at all, but belongs to some other genre -- perhaps historical fiction, perhaps parody of historical writing. In the opinion of most specialists, the identity of the author of the Historia Augusta remains unknown. A notable exception is the French historian Stéphane Ratti, who says that he has established that the Historia Augusta was written by the elder Nicomachus Flavianus, friend of the illustrious Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, statesman and courageous, albeit unsuccessful defender of the traditional Roman religions against the encroachment of Christianity. If there is a substantial school of thought which follows Ratti in this, it has thus far escaped my (amateur) attention.

The Historia Ecclesiastica is a history of Christianity written in Greek by Eusebius, Bishop of Caesaria, who lived from ca AD 265 to 339 or 340. Which means that the subjects of these first two paragraphs are in the wrong chronological order. They're in the order they were thought for many many centuries to follow.

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was written in English by Edward Gibbon and published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. It covers the period from the late 1st century AD until after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453, with some remarks referring to the period right down to Gibbon's own life.

Die Zeit Konstantin des Grossen (The Time of Constantine the Great) was written in German by Jacob Burckhardt, published in 1853 and revised several times over the next several decades.

Both Gibbon and Burckhardt repeatedly complain about the unreliability of both the Historia Augusta (neither suspecting that it might not actually be historical writing at all) and Eusebius. And both judge Eusebius more harshly. Burckhardt, who usually in his many works of history, art history and culutural criticism writes in a conventionally composed scholarly style, completely loses his composure when referring to Eusebius, not only calling him completely dishonest, the first thoroughly dishonest historian of the ancient world (and Burckhardt was under the impression that the Historia Augusta were written before Eusebius' lifetime), but also becoming quite personal and repeatedly calling him disgusting, the most disgusting liar imaginable, and so forth.

Gibbon was among the earliest European authors who took very little trouble to conceal that they were atheists; Burckhardt rudely abused a highly revered historian of early Christianity. From their own times to the present, without interruption, Christian historians have accused Gibbon and Burckhardt of anti-Christian bias, of having less faith in Christian sources because they were Christian, and more faith in non-Christian sources because they were non-Christian. In their turn, these Christian historians have been accused of being biased in exactly the opposite direction. It has not always been Christians who have attacked Gibbon and Burckhardt and non-Christians who've defended them.

For my part, I find it impossible to imagine an historian who is 100% free of bias. The best we can hope for in reading historical accounts is that the historian we're reading might be less biased than some others.

I find that Gibbon and Burckhardt were at the absolute cutting edges of their times when it came to historical accuracy and insight, to separating the valuable information from the nonsense in the texts they read, out of which they made their own texts. I find that there is still much of value in their work. You may or may not find me quite silly for thinking so.

But, of course, the work of historians constantly continues. We build upon the work of those historians whom we consider to be the best, and we improve their work in the light of new information. This can sometimes be painful to admit, if one has developed a personal fondness for an historian of a previous time. But to expect Gibbon to out-do the historians of the 21st century in all things would be somewhat like believing that a watch made during Gibbon's lifetime

could outperform a quality 21-st century watch

in every way. It would be cuckoo-bananas. Aside from the entire thicket of Eusebius' honesty and Burckhardt's opinion of Eusebius and Burckhardt's objectivity and the objectivity of someone impuning Burckhardt's objectivity, and countless other questions from which it would be somewhere between very difficult and impossible to remove the last trace of prejudice, there are objective advances. Things are discovered, artifacts and texts. The historical picture is revised in the light of new information.

Or it is figured out, by no means with total certainty yet, but approaching it steadily, that what was thought to be a collection of historical writings is... not. That it may be a parody of historical writing. Or perhaps a glimpse into a non-Christian culture which persisted, but went into hiding as the Christians took over the Empire. Or perhaps something else. You see how in this case historians and Classicists, by arriving at an unexpected answer, have multiplied rather than reduced the number of open questions.