Let's Say the Things That Should Go Without Saying

Should go without saying, but many things that should go without saying must be said and repeated in 21st century America.

Here's another of them. The Yale philosophy professor Brand Blanshard said, “Science … means more than a set of conclusions; it means also a set of methods and intellectual habits. The most important of these habits is adherence to a rule that is felt to be at once intellectual and moral, the rule of adjusting one’s assent to the evidence.”

That obvious principle — that reality requires you to accept the plain evidence before you, not try to hide it or pervert it — was once taken for granted by all even minimally educated children in this nation. Now tens of millions of adults, maybe even a majority of Americans, willfully ignore it. To our great shame. To our profound peril.

You see, intellectual honesty is not merely admirable. It’s the necessary precondition that permits civilization to survive.

The Big Picture

Christopher Isherwood

Every time you desire, or fear, or hate; every time you boast or indulge your vanity; every time you struggle to get something for yourself, you are really asserting: “I am a separate, unique individual, I stand apart from everything else in this universe.” … Try to overcome this possessive attitude towards your actions. Stop taking credit for your successes. Stop bemoaning your failures, and making excuses for them. Stop worrying so much about results. Just do the best you can. Work for work’s sake.

— The English author Christopher Isherwood, from a 1939 diary entry quoted in Isherwood by Peter Parker

Disappointments and Satisfactions

By Dan Hagen

This arrived from a former student: “Today I had the opportunity to present on sports journalism for print and broadcast for the southwest suburban conference journalism workshop hosted by my high school, and I got so much positive feedback from the students afterward that I educated and inspired them. Now I know what it's like to be you for a day.”

Painting by Charmain P Jackson

After seven years teaching journalism full-time at a state university, I’ve learned that the university — in the corporate-poisoned 21^st century — is not a last bastion of human civilization, as I had hoped, but often just a place where careerists career. Given absolute freedom to defend what’s most important, the people at universities instead may find it easier to play at pompous shams and petty political ploys.

Nevertheless, there’s nothing in all that to stop me from doing the job I think is entailed in the term “professor,” and reaping rewards like that note I just quoted. Universities may only pay lip service to excellent teaching, but at least they still permit it when it happens. And there’s a lot to like within that latitude.

Supermarket at Night

Art by Andy Warhol

The supermarket is still open. It won’t close till midnight. It is brilliantly bright. Its brightness offers sanctuary from loneliness and the dark. You could spend hours of your life here, in a state of suspended insecurity, meditating on the multiplicity of things to eat. Oh dear, there is so much! So many brands in shiny boxes, all of them promising you good appetite. Every article on the shelves cries out to you, take me, take me; and the mere competition of their appeals can make you imagine yourself wanted, even loved. But beware — when you get back to your empty room, you’ll find that the false flattering self of the advertisement has eluded you; what remains is only cardboard, cellophane and food. And you have lost the heart to be hungry.

This bright place isn’t really a sanctuary. For, ambushed among its bottles and cartons and cans, are shockingly vivid memories of meals shopped for, cooked, eaten with Jim. They stab out at George as he passes, pushing his shopping-cart. Should we ever feel truly lonely if we never ate alone?

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man, 1964

And This is How You Do Critical Thinking. Don't Bother With People Who Refuse to Engage in It.

My implicit rules of discussion.

And Now for a Word from the National Socialist Review

By Dan Hagen

Here, the late Bill Buckley's National Review magazine praises Nazism, peeking out of the fascist closet where it has huddled hidden for so long. They write: "Nazism may have been an ideology to which the United States was — and to which the president is — implacably opposed, but it is hardly 'senseless.' By the early 1930s, the Nazi party had hundreds of thousands of devoted members and repeatedly attracted a third of the votes in German elections; its political leaders campaigned on a platform comprising 25 non-senseless points, including the 'unification of all Germans,' a demand for 'land and territory for the sustenance of our people,' and an assertion that 'no Jew can be a member of the race.' Suffice it to say, many sensible Germans were persuaded."

They're aren't full-blown Nazis, but I think the 21st Century American right wingers  started to sweat when people began identifying them correctly as fascists, so the Frank Luntz bunch decided to destroy the word "fascism." Make it mean everything so it means nothing. Simple. 

So we got nonsense terms like "Islamofascism" and "liberal fascism" — anything to distract people from the reality of fascism, which is marked by nationalism, militarism, sexism, racism, repression of labor, worship of corporate power, controlled mass media, contempt for intellectuals and education, religiosity used for political manipulation, rampant cronyism and corruption, fraudulent elections, obsession with national security and the destruction of civil liberties.

They can’t have people recognizing the suspects in that criminal lineup.