Reflections on Aphorisms #60

I’ve been keeping up with this as a daily thing for two months now. It’s given me a great opportunity to know myself better, but it’s also helped me process what I’ve learned and what other people have said better.

I am also becoming increasingly anxious that I will repeat myself unwittingly. I find it difficult to believe, since it’s not like I haven’t taken these quotes and thought about them and written about them at length, but at the same time my memory isn’t always great. That some of my writing gets done while my brain in the littoral boundaries between wake and sleep probably doesn’t help. I think I’m going to try to move my writing more into the morning to overcome this.

Aphorism 95

Prudery is a form of avarice.

Stendhal

Interpretation

I belong to a fairly conservative religious tradition (at least inasmuch as standards of modesty are concerned; we’re a Wesleyan off-shoot), and one of the things that I found myself overcoming as I went from a youth to being a man was the difference between legalism and devotion.

One of the things that I found when I was younger is that I would object to people doing things because they were forbidden.

Now, obviously I’m faithful in the religious sense and I follow these codes in my own life (being body-shy, I can’t claim any virtue in it, and I’m not going to move anyone to prurient thoughts in any sane attire), but I think that Stendhal’s point here can be more generally directed toward legalism.

My theory, since this is what it wound up being in my own life, is that legalism is generally a product of having a code of morality, but not having the detachment from desire that is needed to follow it. If you find yourself lacking in moral virtue, it’s easier to project that failure onto others and paint them as the problem with society than it is to address the problem in your own life. This is particularly true if the lack of moral virtue exists within what Jung would refer to as the “shadow” of the personality.

Demanding that one’s code, even an absolute moral code, be applied to others by force is a sign that one has not mastered one’s own desires. Now, this isn’t necessarily a universal statement (after all, there are religions and philosophies that demand absolute worldwide devotion and make this a goal of the faithful), but in general if a desire to control others stems from emotion it’s a result of a failure to control the self.

Another element here can be wanting pleasure only for oneself. Basically the “stop having fun” front. I think that this is basically a second manifestation of the first, with perhaps a little more greed because there’s not as much of a moral foundation underneath it.

I’m not necessarily anti-prude (e.g. I don’t care for public displays of affection), but I also understand that people ought to have freedom, within only the most minimal constraints.

Resolution

Don’t be the fox who curses the grapes that grow on the high vine, out of reach.

Obey the rules laid out for me without resenting them.

Contemplate the reasons for morality, not the violations.

Aphorism 96

Progress is the mother of problems.

Chesterton

Interpretation

One of the things that I heard once is that the process of scientific advancement has been to discover new problems to replace the ones we’ve solved.

Chesterton’s what might be considered a dogmatic conservative. He’s not as stuffy and annoying as we might assume based on that title, but he still has a certain blind spot to the values and merits of change.

So with that said I don’t think he’s necessarily in agreement that attempts to improve the world generally do.

I’m more mixed in my own approach: the problem is that we see change as good when we do it, even when it’s definitely not good, and bad when other people do it, which is usually correct.

The secret is to master both agency and humility. Following this path one can actively seek to make change, but one also avoids the dangers and pitfalls of hubris.

Chesterton is a reactionary, opposed to the society-destroying changes of the early 20th century, and I think he’s actually quite a wise figure. Going against the zeitgeist, he manages to keep some semblance of sanity when everything else goes crazy, though he’s far from perfect.

I think, however, that Chesterton is after something deeper here.

Chesterton was one of the people who felt a very deep, almost mystical, spiritual connection to God, and saw the society around him losing that same connection.

This is something that we see repeated a lot in various ways, and even in a strictly secular sense something of the spiritual nature of humanity has been suppressed by modern society. Of course, you can argue all you want that spirituality is nonsense and irrational, but the counterpart to it is that we’ve also lived with spirituality being an integral part of the average person’s life from the beginning of history to the 20th century.

Part of the problem with spirituality, from the perspective of those who seek progress, is that the answers it contains are timeless. We can aspire for greater knowledge and enlightenment, but even then it remains the case that in the world of spirituality it is the timeless and eternal that is pursued, not the novel and changing. Even in times of transition in how we understand the world on a fundamental level, the goals and the imperatives of the collective unconscious, to borrow Jung’s term for it, will change at best at a glacial pace and typically not at all. It’s more of a biological part of us than we think.

Resolution

Don’t abandon the timeless truth for the fleeting passion.

There is nothing new under the sun, not in the literal sense but the metaphorical one.

A problem may go away, but problems will never be gone. (Christ: “The poor will always be with you.”)

Reflections on Aphorisms #42

After a day of dubious productivity, sometimes the best you can do is resolve to be better the next day. Today was one of those days.

I’m hoping to get some good sleep and make sure to get a walk in first thing in the morning so that I can really energize and prepare to get some stuff done tomorrow.

Aphorism 66

Truths turn into dogmas the instant they are disputed.

Chesterton

Interpretation

Truth is a funny thing. Everyone thinks they’ve got it, even if they say they don’t, and usually they don’t actually have it.

The problem is that a lot of our truths are wrong.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

I see three great threats to truth (there are other ones, but they’re not immediately significant).

The first is our own human limitation. We form concepts based on what we think we know, but these are actually quite shaky and fluid. They reconfigure themselves to fit the situation, and they’re not nearly as detailed as we think they are.

Put frankly, we don’t know as much as we think we know, and even though we’re very good at faking it on a practical day-to-day basis, we’re not so good at faking it in the big picture. This is why the characteristics that lead to success are universal attributes (e.g. determination) and not usually a particular bit of knowledge or fluke of circumstance.

There’s a lot going on around us that we can’t even perceive, and the best we can do is hope that we’ve got it right.

Second is the society in which we live. We’ve got a limitation in terms of information that is available to us, and we generally rely on others.

This is wise. Everyone gathers information, and bringing lots of independent sources together is valuable. However, information propagates both ways, and it’s almost certain that one will wind up in a bubble, or an echo chamber, or any other sort of social structure that leads to misinformation growing stronger.

It’s not a question of whether one is in a bubble, but how they are. Just today, undercover reporting showed that Google is politically manipulating search results (not that this is much of a surprise).

Last but not least is the sum limit of human information. Carl Jung has interesting theories about this, but I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with him in substance regarding the evolution of human knowledge over the years. I think it likely that people have more or less the same level of knowledge as they have had historically, but where that knowledge lies is very different.

Because we’re social creatures, it looks like society has learned, when we really have more specialized individuals who all have more or less the same amount of information. Actually, better nutrition and childhood medicine may actually have improved modern peoples’ intelligence versus historical people, just as it has increased height, but this isn’t a radical shift as opposed to something that could have happened at any point.

However, even with so many people, there’s still a finite amount of knowledge in the world, and infinite (or effectively infinite) things to know. We’re always going to be playing catch-up.

Resolution

Respice post te. Hominem te memento.

Avoid relying too much on those I trust without considering whether they come from every sphere.

Never assume that everyone collectively knows everything.

Aphorism 67

Money is human happiness in the abstract: he, then, who is no longer capable of enjoying human happiness in the concrete devotes himself utterly to money.

Schopenhauer

Interpretation

The image that springs to mind (metaphorically speaking; thanks aphantasia!) is of a miserly dragon looking over a hoard of gold.

Hayek talks about the role that individuals play in creating value, and Jeffrey Tucker also talks about this quite a bit (sadly, his book A Beautiful Anarchy, which I recommend, no longer seems to be in print).

One of the things about money is that it’s an intangible holder of value. If there’s an exchange of money, it’s a way of saying that one appreciates the work that someone has done.

This is the idea that fuels capitalism. One person makes something and receives something in exchange. That system can’t govern literally everything (since, after all, you will have people who don’t want to follow the rules and no single system can provide for the totality of human existence), but it’s a great way of exchanging goods and services.

The idea that one hoards money comes from two possible desires: fear and greed.

Fear is, I think, more common than others point out. I’ve got experiences with fear (thanks to a couple phobias and an entirely reasonable fear of heights), and I think that it satisfies Schopenhauer’s points in a way that might not be immediately apparent.

When you’re close to a source of your phobia, your number one response is aversion. Even if you exist right at the edge of your comfort zone, you can’t contemplate the source of your distress. I find myself averting my focus from such things when I encounter them, and no amount of logical reason can make me do anything more than philosophical contemplation at an existence. Actually physically engaging with a source of a phobia requires pressing need, and is accompanied by the same stress that a much more dangerous situation would induce.

If you fear not having money, you’ve lost the plot. You’re not able to use it for its intended purpose because the transfer of money away from yourself becomes something to be feared and reviled. The happiness it should buy (within its limited capacity to do so) is eclipsed by a desire that does not bear fruit.

Likewise, greed is a focus on money, rather than its utility.

The importance of all things is their utility, though utility need not be merely materialistic.

Resolution

Never forget the purpose of things.

Fear and greed both kill value, and not only of their object.

Cultivate humble pleasures.