CURIOUS TO SEE what the lefty magazines were saying to do what they almost instinctively seem to do,* tearing down Democrats and stupidly enabling Republicans, I saw that Katha Pollitt has a short review of the crackpot kook cult figure, Jordan Peterson's new book which she apparently has read so I don't have to. Not that I had any intention of doing so. Having heard Peterson and knowing that he's a total fraud of the kind who mine the ignorance of the college-credentialed numbskulls (absurd entymological claims about lobsters, Darwinism and a cartoonish, cable-TV Flintstones level ignorance of evolution and biology are his bread and butter) I'm not interested in laying out money for his book or spending anymore of my time reading him.
I am, actually, more interested in Pollitt who is smarter and more honest than the University of Toronto pseudo-scientist (psych prof) and huckster. She is capable of saying some really intelligent things as well as some extremely stupid ones, most of the stupidest things she has said are due to her hatred of religion. It was interesting to see her idea of an alternative to the Incel-boys' meat-headed guru.
When it comes to stern and sober life advice, the best book is still Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which has been guiding people through the struggles of life for at least a thousand years and is, moreover, well-written and short. Its advice can be summarized as follows. Rule 1: Try as hard as you can to be a good, responsible, serious person. Rule 2: Be aware that much of life is out of your control. Rule 3: In any case, soon you will be dead.
My first reaction is to doubt that there has ever been anyone, including Marcus Aurelius who has been able to conduct their lives according to it. I rather doubt that apart from an aphorism here and there, it holds together as a coherent program and a lot of it self-contradictory and certainly not advice that a Roman emperor lived by.
What is most ironic in it being the anti-religious Pollitt who gives that advice is that both what we have as the book, even its name, is due to the efforts of Christians. I don't know the extent to which Pollitt indulges in the atheist discrediting of the Christian gospels due to the absence of a hand-written first-hand manuscript of any of it being available until those fragments and the first full copies but that's entirely closer to the original than we get with the "Meditations" which are not mentioned in any available source until the 10th century when Arethas of Caesarea a Greek bishop in Cappadocia had his old and tattered copy of it copied. We know of it first because he recommended it to the Byzantine Emperor, Leo the Wise, along with one of a large number of classical Greek texts that survive, likely due to this one Bishop among many who preserved much of classical literature.
You can go looking through the text as is translated by various translators and find all kinds of ambiguous advice. In my reading of it, you're both to love and care for your children and be remarkably uninterested in them at the same time. You are apparently supposed to both love them and be indifferent to them. And apparently you're to take every day as if you have no experience to draw on. Here in what's given as #47
XLVII. Keep thyself to the first bare and naked apprehensions of things, as they present themselves unto thee, and add not unto them. It is reported unto thee, that such a one speaketh ill of thee. Well; that he speaketh ill of thee, so much is reported. But that thou art hurt thereby, is not reported: that is the addition of opinion, which thou must exclude.
Which proved to be such a stupid attitude on the part of that cool guy, Barack Obama when he was under attack. I have a feeling that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius never really took that route as he survived a relatively long time in the snake pit of Roman politics.
I see that my child is sick. That he is sick, I see, but that he is in danger of his life also, I see it not.
So, no trips to the emergency room? I can't imagine anyone responsible advising that during this pandemic if your child came down with what were, at first, mild symptoms. This is not good child-rearing advice and seems to me to be more interested in the parents emotional detachment than in the child's welfare.
Thus thou must use to keep thyself to the first motions and apprehensions of things, as they present themselves outwardly; and add not unto them from within thyself through mere conceit and opinion. Or rather add unto them: but as one that understandeth the true nature of all things that happen in the world.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, doublespeak. You're not to bring your life's experience to bear on things? What does he think he's doing in writing his bromides and aphorisms and handy-hints?
While it's my experience of life that it's just the ones who are most conceited and opinionated to believe themselves to be "one that understandeth the true nature of all things," it's also possible for someone to take such advice to stand in cowardly indecision as things fall apart around them. Does anyone believe Trump didn't think he was the smartest person in the country? Or that the stoic granitic monument Robert Mueller took every opportunity he could to not hold him accountable, striking that disgusting pose in front of the Congressional oversight committees when he finally deigned to appear before them?
It's tempting to go through more of the famous advice and it would be fun to subject it to reality testing, something which I would guess such as have advised letting the Meditations rule your life have never started to do. I have to wonder if Katha Pollitt, like most such people, have never really read it.
I can tell you one thing, if I were Marcus's kids and needed some advice from an older, more experienced person, he wouldn't have been someone I'd expect to get it from.
What Peterson's cultists, the Incel boys need isn't some Marcus Aurelius, it's some hard, physical labor in their lives, get them away from all the screens and each others' whining self-pitying tantrums. Hard work that wears you out enough to sleep and a cold shower when you start getting horny, Grow up and maybe someone will want to put up with you and even have sex with you. And if you want to see someone who is seriously fucked up, that would be Jordan Peterson who wanting to push his dopey daughter's meat diet scheme got into some seriously screwed up stuff.
What has, presumably, ruled Jordan Peterson's life, psychology is a pseudo-scientific superstition of the materialist-atheist "enlightenment" as it rots into the kind of thing I noted a week or so back Bertrand Russell predicted was coming as the real science of physics came up against the limits of human possibility. My first piece of advice apart from that is to be skeptical of anything any university psychology teacher claims. Any advice that they give will be sound on a purely chance basis.
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