Alasdair MacIntyre crossed my radar when I was reading Francis Wheen’s Idiot Proof this winter. Wheen, writing as a defender of Enlightenment rationalism, trashed MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue as a thin polemic in favour of enforcing conservative social values under the guise of promoting “virtue”.
MacIntyre is a difficult academic writer. His ideas run in odd directions, and off at tangents. (I found a summary of After Virtue, dense work in itself). He can fairly be called a social and political conservative in his writing after 1968, and his writing underlies much of the writing by modern conservatives about the virtues. He is admired by the conservative Catholic intellectuals at First Things magazine. For instance in 1996 Edward Oakes wrote a favourable evaluation of his work. Conservative Catholics like the fact that he converted from Marxism to Catholicism and has been trying to revive the moral philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and perhaps some of the medieval Scholastics.
In 1966 while he was still a Marxist, and still teaching sociology in England, he lectured at Columbia with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. The lectures were published in a short book called The Religious Significance of Atheism. The first of MacIntyre’s lectures was called The Fate of Theism. His perspective was neither Marxist nor Thomistic at that stage. His approach was more that of the philosopher, social critic and intellectual historian than the professional sociologist.
Philosophy or Religion
My review of Edward Craig’s Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction summarized his loose description of philosophy, which talked about understanding mystery. At the risk of embellishing his carefully elliptical description of the venture, he was talking about the great mystery of self-aware minds, awake in ape-like bodies, living among similiar beings with similiar physical and mental needs and powers, living in societies speaking the same languages, living in finite space and time, living within the safety and danger of the natural world, living subject to the actions of other people, and living with the ability to do things that affect other people and the course of events. How do such beings understand themselves and make decisions about what to do?
The word mystery suggests a religious project, but philosophy is aimed at understanding mystery without trusting the stories of priests,prophets and gurus who claim to have had the mystery revealed to them or to have mastered a tradition based on revelation allegedly subjectively experienced by some individual person or persons in history. Religion rests on trusting stories of revelation and miracles presented by other human beings.
Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction
Philosophy, A Very Short Introduction (ISBN 0-19-285421-6)by Edward Craig, is one of the Oxford University Press’s excellent Very Short Introductions.
A few years ago I started to read Simon Blackburn’s Think. I was thrown off by a few of the later chapters and never finished it. I have gone back into reading philosophy by way of some of Mortimer Adler’s books. Adler likes to go back to Aristotle, and is hard on most of the philosophers since the Enlightenment. For reasons that I don’t really understand, I have been finding that religious writing and serious theology, no matter how elegantly written and reasoned, does not carry a coherent vision. I am accepting that I am who I am – a stubborn and skeptical person.
Craig’s approach is to explain the project of philosophy and to examine a few of the problems that philosophy has addressed.
Belonging
I am going to say is something about the way people are. I suspect that other people have said the same thing, or something very close. People do not function well or feel well unless they have a sense of being connected to other people. People are born into social situations. Infants and children survive because adult humans want children and care for children compulsively. Children survive and thrive by learning language and culture. We live bonded by basic but complex basic needs to connect and communicate and to know where we stand in relation to other people, and by needs for intimacy and trust. People need to feel they belong.
People’s sense of belonging in any particular relationship or their status in any particular group or society may be unrealistic or fragile, but they have to have it, or they will be sad, bitter or just plain crazy. The sense of belonging isn’t innocent or sweet, even sugar-coated in the terminology of dignity and respect. People need a sense of safety, status and power. If in real life they are in low status, boring jobs, they may pour their energy into family life, church, political party, community club, sports organization, or any group that will let them in and give them a place and a voice.
People will learn new stories about themselves, life and the nature of reality, to belong to an accepting group. People will accept – indeed embrace – new social and economic arrangements in a group that gives them a sense of authentic belonging. That is what we see when people get religion in a strong way, particularly when their religious group identifies itself as holding to values that set it outside of the general cultural range of values. It also happens in many other social contexts – a heightened awareness of political, social, artistic issues through starting to belong to a group can lead to a radical change of life. People are able to adopt a radically different way of relating to the world to be able to belong to political communes, sect, cults, and their families and friends experience a sense of radical disconnection – a sense that the convert has snapped old social bonds.
The need to belong is a vulnerability, routinely exploited by lovers, parents, teachers, employers, salemen, politicians, priests, and gurus. They teach conformity to their story of the world and subordination to their wishes and needs. They need resources, status, and power. They get what they want and need by controlling a group by manipulating the need to belong. They reward with a sense of belonging – in some relationships a sense of intimate belonging and pure love.
Rating the Great Thinkers
From the news – a story in the (London) Times online about the BBC poll to find the greatest philosopher of all time. Marx has surged to the top of the list. He was the BBC’s Great Thinker of the Millenium in 1999. The old Left has not lost its will to live after all.
The BBC poll site has its explanation for this exercise, and some resources including noted ideas, and expert appraisals. Useful, actually, but not as much fun as the song in Monty Python’s Australian Philosophy department sketch. “Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar, he’d drink you under the table, Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, I drink therefore I am.”
Addiction 106
This entry adds my series on entries on Addiction. (In February 2005 I wrote several consecutive entries on addiction in the Culture category, starting with Addiction 100). This morning, the Free Press carried a story from CanWest News Service about an article in the latest – that would be the June 2005 – issue of The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry publishing a study of Internet addiction as a mental health issue. The idea that internet use can be considered an addiction has been kicked around since at least 1996 when Kimberly S. Young presented a paper at the American Psychological Association’s convention. That issue isn’t online yet, so my comments will have to come later.
The Journal has a public online archive of recent issues. A review of a book on self-help groups and addiction fit with some of what I had been saying about addictions and addictions treatment. The review is called Substance Abuse, by Dr. Douglas H. Frayn. The book is Circles of Recovery: Self-Help Organizations for Addictions by Keith Humphreys.
There’s another review at the American Journal of Psychiatry. Dr. William R. Flynn reviews Dr. Robert L. Dupont’s book The Selfish Brain: Learning From Addiction. It makes a couple of points that I found to be true from my own experience. He makes the point that younger people starting to experiment with drugs, with Internet access find pro-drug propaganda on the Internet to support and rationalize their impulses. That was n. in the summer and fall of 2002 and the winter of 2002-2003. He also deals with parents who enable addiction when they believe the excuses and lies their addicted kids throw at them. That’s something that was very hard to manage.
Whose Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt’s little book On Bullshit seems to have been selling briskly. I have seen it listed as a bestseller on some of the lists in any given week. Bullshit is becoming a fertile tool for fashionable social criticism, although it seems to be falling back into its old usage of an epithet. People are jumping on the honeywagon, talking about the things things they don’t agree with as “bullshit”. Do some kinds of bullshit smell worse than others?
A couple of weeks ago, the Free Press published a review of Laura Penny’s book Your Call is Important to Us – The Truth about Bullshit. According to the reviewer, Penny quotes Frankfurt and applies the idea of bullshit to the way companies and bureaucracies treat their customers and clients, and to American politics, foreign and domestic. She is politically on the left, vaguely anti-American.
The book is being promoted like a new book, but it’s actually a quality paperback release, by McLelland & Stewart of a book originally published Your Call Is Important to Us: So Why Isn’t Anyone Answering? published by Macfarlane, Walter & Ross as (ISBN ISBN 1-55199-092-X). Macfarlane, Walter & Ross was a non-fiction publisher, sold by Stoddard to McLelland and Stewart before some of the turmoil in the Canadian book trade in the last decade. M&S announced it was shutting down that division in April 2003. I haven’t been able to find when the original edition of Your Call is Important to Us was published. Most bookstores don’t list it, or list it as unavailable. Some bookstore catalogues have obviously incorrect publication dates – they are in the future. Some pages that say it was published in April or September 2004, which may be more accurate. It’s a nearly dead Canadian book on the back list, revived by good marketing, riding the bullshit wave. The author owes something to some of the business bullshit of her publisher and agent.
Wet Butt Paddle
Saturday (June 4) was cloudy and humid, with occasional light drizzle. In the morning, I read a newspaper article about a Paddle Manitoba urban paddling event. Paddlers would be able to put in from the sloping shore on the north bank by the footbridge in Assiniboine Park, paddle to the Forks, and get a bus ride back to the Park. I didn’t want to get involved with the logistics of getting back to the Park to get my car and then getting to the Forks to get my boat, but reading the story was enough to break my inertia.
Pasta Sauces – Clam, etc
Pasta and sauce is a good meal. There are many pre-mixed pasta sauces for sale, packaged in jars, cans and pouches – and the sauces aren’t often either bland or overseasoned. They tend to be sweet and heavy on basil and sweet-smelling herbs.
I found a recipe in the Winnipeg Folk Festival Cook book that pointed the way to making a good homemade sauce. It takes a few minutes chopping vegetables and cooking the raw ingredients – but it’s easy and worthwhile
I followed – and played with – Pierre Guerin’s recipe for clam sauce.
It calls for a can of baby clams. I used the 284 ml/10 oz size. It calls for a can of tomato sauce. I used a 398 ml (14 oz) can and a 213 ml (7.5 oz). I think a 14 oz can would be ok, but I was able to simmer this for a while to get a thick sauce. It calls for a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic. A large onion doesn’t hurt, and 2 cloves of garlic is too bland. Use 4-6. The onions and garlic should be chopped fine, and sautéed in light oil in a large skillet. When the onions are soft, add the clams. Drain the clams first, rinsing them doesn’t hurt. Cook for a few more minutes. Add the tomato sauce. At this point I added a cup of red wine. The recipe called for unstated amounts of oregano, black pepper and parsley. One teaspoon of oregano is good. Parsley is not meant to be eaten, but it seems to be a standard ingredient. I skipped it. I thought a touch of basil wouldn’t hurt – a quarter teaspoon, and a quarter teaspoon of tarragon. I went heavy on the pepper. I use peppercorns in a grater, and I was liberal with both black and mixed peppercorns, perhaps half a teaspoon each – which may be a little intense. Also, a tablespoon or two of grated parmesan. Guerin also suggested a little sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatos. I thought the basil, tarragon and wine did fine. If I hadn’t used the wine, it would have been an idea.
Simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally. Relax. Have a beer. Heat the water for pasta slowly. Clam sauce is good on linguine noodles. Clam sauce is supposed to be eaten fresh, not refrigerated for too long.
Guerin’s notes suggested the recipe works as a Bolognese sauce with 300-500 grams of lean ground beef instead of clams. He suggested adding the beef to the onions as in the clam recipe above. A different idea – if you don’t mind an extra pan to wash – is to brown the beef in a separate skillet, and remove it with a slotted spoon and add it to the onions and garlic. That leaves some fat behind. However, it also makes for a less robust dish. Bolognese is a tomato and meat sauce, good on spaghetti. Choices, choices.
Claire had been making a similiar dish with spicy Italian sausage – a fresh sausage we get at our local supermarket. She starts with onions and garlic and adds sausage chunks. She uses a can of diced tomatos and a small can of tomato sauce. I think she uses some oregano, but she lets the sausage supply the other spices.
I haven’t tried to cost out the ingredients for these sauces against packaged sauces. It’s not expensive – onions, garlic, tomato sauce, and clams/ground beef/sausage/etc. If you have a good chef’s knife and washable cutting board, it’s pretty easy. It cooks in short stages, and there is time to to do other chores or read as it simmers. it’s hard to go wrong, and you can get something you really like instead of someone else’s idea of Italian.
The Folk Festival cookbook is fun. There are a few recipes from the cooks who prepare the meals for the volunteers just for information, like borscht for 1,500. There some interesting regional dishes and some delightful eccentricities. Queen Ida’s Poulet Gumbo (Queen Ida is a Zydeco musician from Louisiana). Stan Roger’s Hot mustard (start with 3 jars of Keens’ and add Tabasco, cayenne, garlic and Madras curry.) Spotted Dick with Hard Sauce? Visions of Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey. The less of two weevils.
Voluntary Simplicity
Voluntary Simplicity, has been around for 25 years, the first edition having been published in 1981. The author, Duane Elgin, describes himself as a former senior social scientist connected with an institution in California, and his biography mentions a business degree and an MA in economic history. He seems to presently support himself as a writer and motivational speaker. There is a political or moral dimension to his work, but his metier is self-improvement and spirituality. For a sample of his recent writing, there is an article at a site called Soulful Living.
I read a copy of the 1993 edition of Voluntary Simplicity which incorporates the findings of his simplicity survey, and has an Introduction by Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert.