For as long as I can remember, many so-called liberals have flagellated our "western values", demeaning 2,500 years of intellectual and cultural growth as that of "dead white males". They spout what is wrong with us. But do THEY truly have an absolute value system or are they posturing to get power for themselves?
By "Western" values I mean those that predominate in developed nations such as the US, Canada, and Europe (all of Europe including the east); perhaps Japan and urban areas in South America and a few other nations qualify, too. I don't know enough to set the boundary line.
What have Western values accomplished in the past 1,000 years? Let me list some successes: unprecedented human freedom, elimination of tribal prejudices, emancipation of all people, and particularly women, and by empirical observation, unprecedented human happiness, compared to the non-Western areas. How do I adduce the latter? The observed desire of people to move physically and (if permitted) emigrate to nations with those western values.
What still exists in the non-Western regimes? The predominate cultures still are tribal and virtually enslave women; some are often dominated by religious cultures that limit human thought. For Western cultures, tribalism has ceased to be a social factor for at least 1,000 years and religious oppression began to disappear slowly about 500 years ago. Slavery disappeared about almost 150 years ago. Freedom for women became predominate about 80 years ago.
Since then, the economic and technological growth has been enormous. What else would one expect, when the chains are loosed from over half the people in the West, letting them strive for the benefits of themselves and their own families?
In much of "the east", virtual slavery of women still exists. An full page article in the Financial Times of Monday, July 11, describes the slavery of huge numbers of women in India, China, Vietnam and other nations of Asia: they are "bought" while young and forced to bear children for the sons of more wealthy, those same people who have been aborting girls from their own marriages in a cultural preference for sons. Millions of women are living in virtual slavery. And in places like Saudi Arabia, women are virtual household slaves, being denied the right to drive a car. Similar religious oppression of women exists in much of northern Africa and south Asia.
Yet, where are the shouts and protests of the liberals and human rights activists in the US and Europe? It's so silent I can hear the crickets.
Tribalism predominates relations, too, in much of those areas. Caste bigotry prevents modern economic activity for all.
A nation cannot overcome poverty while losing the productive output of more than 1/2 of its people. A nation cannot overcome poverty without breaking tribal and caste barriers that limit free exchange of ideas, goods and service.
We need to be proud of our values and should endeavor to export them. Too long people in the west, seduced by desires for power or money, have countenanced those despicable cultural values. Let's stop it and proclaim all that is good about how we live.
Our values make us what we are, and it is truly pointless to send aid without coupling it to instructions, yes, instructions, about how thoses places need to change in order to join the modern world.
Actions
After a week of study of charts, earnings, and review of general prospects, Mrs. B sold some stocks Friday morning that were performing with high mediocrity. Krypto's model did not give a signal, but she wanted to clean her portfolio. The funds went to cash to await better prices for either equities or municipal bonds, whichever comes first.
Word of the Day
"Recherché" - adjective [$10]
Recherché means 1. carefully sought out, rare, exotic; 2. far fetched, obscure.
Sentence: (A) [from Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, page 148 re the poem from Four Quartets, "The Dry Salvages"] "... it bristles with recherché words, such as 'haruspicate' or 'scry', 'sortilege' ..." (B) Bunkerman's Word of the Day may soon descend to recherché words as 4+ years of daily words have used many of the more 'common' $10 words, or he'll have to start re-using them.
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture. Show all posts
Monday, July 18, 2011
Thursday, December 30, 2010
We Survived 2010
Despite all the high paid pundits and bloviators, 2010 was NOT a national disaster. Roubini, Meredith Molotova and that ilk were wrong. The stock markets made good gains. The economy stopped going down. Unemployment stopped going up. Massive new defaults have NOT occurred. The corporate bond market rallied hugely. The commercial real estate market stabilized and has rallied some.
Not all is good.
Housing prices are bouncing along the ground: no rebound is in sight, but price levels are rather affordable so further large drops will likely be temporary foreclosure rinses.
Europe is still sorting out possible solutions ... and ignoring the obvious solution, viz. becoming a United States of Europe.
Farmers & miners are making fine profits after decades of suffering; and people are griping about that.
Congress continues to be a comedy show ... or is it a cage match? No serious debate occurs regarding what kind of nation we want to be and become.
Obama is playing in Hawaii; he's now had two years in office and has shown zero ideas or leadership.
The Republicans want to turn the financial and corporate Vikings loose to raid on all of us.
The Democrats wants to turn all of us into government employees.
Neither party talks about a vision - an eschaton - for America in the 21st century.
How can "reform" or "change" be discussed rationally without knowing the end point for our path? How can "reform" or "change" be discussed rationally without knowing where we are now?
Our "leaders" have lost their way. Is any Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan on the horizon? Nope. Those people has visions of where they wanted to lead the nation; they had good understanding of what the problems were in their time.
I will give you two metaphors for a paradigm of what America need to do.
First, from John Bunyan's great book, Pilgrim's Progress. The pilgrim recognized the problems where he was and knew where he wanted to go, viz. to the great city of salvation. He struggled along a path with many, many traps and pitfalls and evildoers. This book was read by the great leaders who created and saved America: Franklin, Washington, Lincoln. Its allegory applies now.
Second, from science and the work of Richard Feynman (cf. the book, A Path Integral Approach to Quantum Mechanics or his seminal paper, Feynman, R. P. (1948). "The Space-Time Formulation of Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics". "Reviews of Modern Physics" 20: 367–387. A particle - ANY particle, with its beginning and end states set, combines all possible paths (and I do mean all - over all of space and time) to take the optimal path.
The metaphors here are definitive, spanning faith AND science: The US people - and especially its leaders - must study where we are and have vision where we want to be, and then choose the optimal path. We must combine epistemology - the study of knowledge - with ontology, the study of being - to find our path. True leadership does not come from the technocracy; it's not from technology. It's not from sloganeering. Good Leadership - the adjective is crucial - is really applied metaphysics: it applies knowledge of where we are and where we want to be in the future, then chooses the optimal path.
All these ideas are from the classics of the past 2,000+ years: Aristotle, Bunyan, Feynman. They knew these concepts that drive both the physical world and the world of the minds of men. We don't have to invent them; all we - the people - have to do is read, learn and do. Three little action verbs have the answers.
Read, learn & do.
Next year I will start with a series of posts on reform.
Word of the Day
"Zaftig" - adjective [$100] slang
Zaftig means 1. (of a woman) having a pleasantly plump figure; 2. full bodied, well proportioned. [from Yiddish 1935-40 literally juicy, succulent]
Sentence: That great beauty of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, had a zaftig build that modern culture might regard as fat. That's just wrong. Men - heterosexual men - are hard wired to like curves. The modern culture of excessive thinness is learned behavior from the fashion magazines that have been dominated by gay designers, who prefer boyish figures, for decades. That culture needs to be rejected; it harms young women and causes much unhappiness and pain as people try to do the unnatural. Some fat is good.
Not all is good.
Housing prices are bouncing along the ground: no rebound is in sight, but price levels are rather affordable so further large drops will likely be temporary foreclosure rinses.
Europe is still sorting out possible solutions ... and ignoring the obvious solution, viz. becoming a United States of Europe.
Farmers & miners are making fine profits after decades of suffering; and people are griping about that.
Congress continues to be a comedy show ... or is it a cage match? No serious debate occurs regarding what kind of nation we want to be and become.
Obama is playing in Hawaii; he's now had two years in office and has shown zero ideas or leadership.
The Republicans want to turn the financial and corporate Vikings loose to raid on all of us.
The Democrats wants to turn all of us into government employees.
Neither party talks about a vision - an eschaton - for America in the 21st century.
How can "reform" or "change" be discussed rationally without knowing the end point for our path? How can "reform" or "change" be discussed rationally without knowing where we are now?
Our "leaders" have lost their way. Is any Teddy Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan on the horizon? Nope. Those people has visions of where they wanted to lead the nation; they had good understanding of what the problems were in their time.
I will give you two metaphors for a paradigm of what America need to do.
First, from John Bunyan's great book, Pilgrim's Progress. The pilgrim recognized the problems where he was and knew where he wanted to go, viz. to the great city of salvation. He struggled along a path with many, many traps and pitfalls and evildoers. This book was read by the great leaders who created and saved America: Franklin, Washington, Lincoln. Its allegory applies now.
Second, from science and the work of Richard Feynman (cf. the book, A Path Integral Approach to Quantum Mechanics or his seminal paper, Feynman, R. P. (1948). "The Space-Time Formulation of Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics". "Reviews of Modern Physics" 20: 367–387. A particle - ANY particle, with its beginning and end states set, combines all possible paths (and I do mean all - over all of space and time) to take the optimal path.
The metaphors here are definitive, spanning faith AND science: The US people - and especially its leaders - must study where we are and have vision where we want to be, and then choose the optimal path. We must combine epistemology - the study of knowledge - with ontology, the study of being - to find our path. True leadership does not come from the technocracy; it's not from technology. It's not from sloganeering. Good Leadership - the adjective is crucial - is really applied metaphysics: it applies knowledge of where we are and where we want to be in the future, then chooses the optimal path.
All these ideas are from the classics of the past 2,000+ years: Aristotle, Bunyan, Feynman. They knew these concepts that drive both the physical world and the world of the minds of men. We don't have to invent them; all we - the people - have to do is read, learn and do. Three little action verbs have the answers.
Read, learn & do.
Next year I will start with a series of posts on reform.
Word of the Day
"Zaftig" - adjective [$100] slang
Zaftig means 1. (of a woman) having a pleasantly plump figure; 2. full bodied, well proportioned. [from Yiddish 1935-40 literally juicy, succulent]
Sentence: That great beauty of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, had a zaftig build that modern culture might regard as fat. That's just wrong. Men - heterosexual men - are hard wired to like curves. The modern culture of excessive thinness is learned behavior from the fashion magazines that have been dominated by gay designers, who prefer boyish figures, for decades. That culture needs to be rejected; it harms young women and causes much unhappiness and pain as people try to do the unnatural. Some fat is good.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Problems in Poetry
Modern poetry has lost its bearings. One can't even call many published poems poetry anymore. They read more like prose arranged to fit a visual pattern, and perhaps are more like a form of word art now. They lack any rhyme or meter or internal poetic structures such as alliteration, assonance or consonance. The verses and stanzas seems unconnected to their clause or sentence structures, as visual word patterns govern.
Here's an example from a poem in this quarter's Paris Review: I quote the last line and first line of two stanzas.
From stanzas #1 to #2 -
...
against a stranger. Looming
looming up through
...
From stanzas #2 to #3 -
...
the Thames, at once
murky and aflame, I watched
...
Now why is the stanza broken there - intra sentence? Normally one would pause reading in such a break. But from the words and thoughts, there is no reason or rational or even emotion to cause a pause. My last clause [bold, italics] was more poetic that than the poem, having both alliteration and rhyme. Much modern poetry seems to be just prose arranged in a visual pattern, like crappy modern art.
Poetry should be the best words in the best places. Poetry is anchored by how it sounds when read or spoken, not how the words look on a page. Thus much "modern" poetry is not poetry at all.
An original modern poem like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land contains much intricate rhyming and is littered with poetic devices, as well as meanings and allusions. Prose can have meanings via metaphors or allegory and make allusions for emphasis, but it's still prose until structured with poetic devices to sound good when read.
Calling a bunch of words of prose arranged on a page, a "poem", does not make it a poem. Poets: learn some prosody and read your poems aloud. If it sounds like a poem, it's a poem. If not, you're just writing visually artistic prose.
Word of the Day
"Caesura" - noun (plural caesuras) [$10] Prosody
Caesura means 1. (in Greek or Latin verse) a break between words within a metrical foot; 2. (in modern verse) a pause near the middle of the line. [shown on a page as the second part of the line being dropped down to the next line]
Here's an example from Wordsworth's famous poem, Tintern Abbey (I put in underlines to fill the space as the blog editor automatically strips out spaces beginning a line):
...
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
___________________Nor perhance
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
...
There's a reason for that break: the prior thought/sentence ends and a new one begins midline. It's a real pause in the reading, not simply a visual construct.
Sentence: Too many modern poets use caesura for visual reasons when the construct should be confined to aural purposes.
Here's an example from a poem in this quarter's Paris Review: I quote the last line and first line of two stanzas.
From stanzas #1 to #2 -
...
against a stranger. Looming
looming up through
...
From stanzas #2 to #3 -
...
the Thames, at once
murky and aflame, I watched
...
Now why is the stanza broken there - intra sentence? Normally one would pause reading in such a break. But from the words and thoughts, there is no reason or rational or even emotion to cause a pause. My last clause [bold, italics] was more poetic that than the poem, having both alliteration and rhyme. Much modern poetry seems to be just prose arranged in a visual pattern, like crappy modern art.
Poetry should be the best words in the best places. Poetry is anchored by how it sounds when read or spoken, not how the words look on a page. Thus much "modern" poetry is not poetry at all.
An original modern poem like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land contains much intricate rhyming and is littered with poetic devices, as well as meanings and allusions. Prose can have meanings via metaphors or allegory and make allusions for emphasis, but it's still prose until structured with poetic devices to sound good when read.
Calling a bunch of words of prose arranged on a page, a "poem", does not make it a poem. Poets: learn some prosody and read your poems aloud. If it sounds like a poem, it's a poem. If not, you're just writing visually artistic prose.
Word of the Day
"Caesura" - noun (plural caesuras) [$10] Prosody
Caesura means 1. (in Greek or Latin verse) a break between words within a metrical foot; 2. (in modern verse) a pause near the middle of the line. [shown on a page as the second part of the line being dropped down to the next line]
Here's an example from Wordsworth's famous poem, Tintern Abbey (I put in underlines to fill the space as the blog editor automatically strips out spaces beginning a line):
...
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
___________________Nor perhance
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
...
There's a reason for that break: the prior thought/sentence ends and a new one begins midline. It's a real pause in the reading, not simply a visual construct.
Sentence: Too many modern poets use caesura for visual reasons when the construct should be confined to aural purposes.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Rough Edges
Yes, that's me bringing some wood to the campfire; my tomahawk is carried on my belt. Having a pioneer mentality, being a male with a Ph. D. in a hard physical science makes my having many, many "rough edges" no surprise. In the domain of culture, I admit freely to having none until recent years. The only bit that I had was due to a course requirement in the humanities at Harvard College. I fulfilled that one by taking a famous course [Humanities 3] in Greek literature by Prof. John Finley. That distribution requirement did work, though, as it exposed me to a crack of light from a universe of culture that I would have otherwise never recognized existed. War.
How does a guy smooth out his rough edges? Read. Learn. How?
Courses in the humanities by the Teaching Company help: see http://www.teach12.com/. My current course is "Classics of British Literature". There are plenty of good courses on music, art, philosophy and literature available from them.
Read BOOKS. The Internet is a culture wasteland - you don't know what you are seeing unless from a reliable source. Classic books provide reliable places to learn culture, places that have endured decades, centuries or millenia.
Read good literary magazines. I expanded my magazine universe over the past two years and can recommend two: Lapham's Quarterly and The Paris Review. The former provides great writing from classical and even recent authors on gathered on particular subjects - the current issue is titled, "The City". The Paris Review offers good selections of current fiction and poetry. You need someone to select good material for you, or you will waste huge amounts of time with junk. The editors of these two quarterly journals do a good job, in my "humble" opinion ;)
Learn a foreign language - at least to be "literate" in it. Fluency is very, very hard to achieve as an adult, but literacy is doable and gives you the cultural exposure you need. I suggest Italian or French or both. Both have much great original literature in the language and are often used in English writing in snippets.
If you devote an hour a day to this program, in a couple years you'll have enough culture to not seem to be a troglodyte or a barbarian.
Word of the Day
"Belletristic" - adjective [$1000]; "Belletrist" - noun [$1000] and "belles-lettres" - substantive, plural [$10]
Belles-lettres means elegant or polite literature or literary studies.
Belletristic means of or pertaining to belles-lettres.
Belletrist means one devoted to belles-lettres.Sentence: Being a wee bit literate in Italian or French helps one read belletristic English language writings, as quite often quotes or epigrams in those languages appea
Monday, March 19, 2007
Some Movies
We subscribe to NetFlix and get about four movies a week. Cable TV is a wasteland, so it's essential along with Tivo to have anything good to watch when you want it.
We recently finished watching all the original "Avengers" series with Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel. Those shows are excellent with Mrs. Peel being a smart, beautiful and cultured "talented amateur" partner of the 'top pro' agent, John Steed played by Patrick McNee.
For movies, we saw "Tony Rome" and "Lady in Cement" where Frank Sinatra plays Tony Rome, a private detective. The setting is Miami in the early 1960s period. Both are fun & interesting to see how the US worked then. Then we saw "Walk the Line" - about the life of Johnny Cash and his long simmering romance with June Carter. At the end, they are happily married as they stayed for 35 years in real life. I remember that from the 1960s when I was a boy. Our household then watched the Johnny Cash show on TV regularly and I remember his marriage to June Carter and his redemption.
We had a laugh talking about that movie. I was reminiscing about Johnny Cash with Mrs. Bunker & she piped up that living in the NYC, the "Johnny Cash Show" wasn't her childhood household TV fare. Neither were "Green Acres", "Hee Haw" or the "Beverly Hillbillies", all of which my family watched every evening in our rural small town. Oh well, I always thought Arnold the Pig was a pretty funny character.
:-)
We recently finished watching all the original "Avengers" series with Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel. Those shows are excellent with Mrs. Peel being a smart, beautiful and cultured "talented amateur" partner of the 'top pro' agent, John Steed played by Patrick McNee.
For movies, we saw "Tony Rome" and "Lady in Cement" where Frank Sinatra plays Tony Rome, a private detective. The setting is Miami in the early 1960s period. Both are fun & interesting to see how the US worked then. Then we saw "Walk the Line" - about the life of Johnny Cash and his long simmering romance with June Carter. At the end, they are happily married as they stayed for 35 years in real life. I remember that from the 1960s when I was a boy. Our household then watched the Johnny Cash show on TV regularly and I remember his marriage to June Carter and his redemption.
We had a laugh talking about that movie. I was reminiscing about Johnny Cash with Mrs. Bunker & she piped up that living in the NYC, the "Johnny Cash Show" wasn't her childhood household TV fare. Neither were "Green Acres", "Hee Haw" or the "Beverly Hillbillies", all of which my family watched every evening in our rural small town. Oh well, I always thought Arnold the Pig was a pretty funny character.
:-)
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