House of Eratosthenes

Phil and Severian were kind enough to copy me on a lengthy e-mail exchange about dialectics and sophists. It’s a “lengthy” exchange only in the sense that it isn’t really long in terms of number of messages back-and-forth, but rather in the size of each. I didn’t realize how much fresh meat there was until Saturday morning when I loaded them into a text editor, and took the time over a cup of copy to read them word for word. Fascinating stuff. Hope they “go public” with it sometime soon.

The bottom line is, sophistry — boiled down to its crude essentials — is winning the argument, period. Not quite so much at the expense of the winning argument being a useful one, but more like, with complete apathy toward that. An example would be…well, we can go back to the last time I blogged about something. A dead lawn looking cool — there isn’t much truth involved in that, since dead lawns look like shit. But the statement has a good shot at being the winning argument, if the value embraced has something to do with laziness. No need to water a dead lawn; no need to cut one either. A dead lawn is the lawn of a do-nothing. It is also the lawn of a sophist. You get to look cool (even if your lawn doesn’t), and act smug.

It is the contrast between the Architects and the Medicators, the former of whom think about things the way one must think about them, when one sets about the task of trying to build things that will actually work. And, to the latter of whom, the point of life is to be happy. The former demands thought, the latter involves feeling.

Now that election season is in full swing — and I’m viciously opposed to that, this early in the game, but whaddya gonna do? — I’m recognizing once again how cleanly the American Left and Right slip into this. There must be a way to exploit this to make things easier for people; like, for example, the visitors from abroad who will occasionally be heard to inquire, What’s the difference? Poor brave souls, you can hear it in their voices they’ve already figured out it’s a contentious issue, and the answer they get back & the conversation that ensues vary greatly with whom they ask.

With same-sex marriage, it is only just lately that The Left has discovered the broad and intense appeal of leaving people alone. It’s almost cute. Of course they don’t really mean it. I was referring to this, indirectly, when I noticed how easy it is to tell the Left and Right apart when you imagine a specimen of one of those, or the other, intoning “Because fuck you, that’s why!” Now — what could that person be doing? And I came up with some examples of each. And in each example, a person from The Left saying that, was interfering with someone else; and a person from The Right, was…not. Such clean distinctions often depart from the plane of reality. But this one doesn’t. The Left tells people to go fuck themselves when it’s interfering; The Right says the same thing, more in the spirit of “If you have a problem with me doing it, it must say more about you than it does about me, because this really has no effect on you.” The three examples I found for that were, eating meat, heading to the gun range with hardware that holds more than ten rounds, and wandering out to one’s own patio in one’s underwear for a cold bottle of beer.

As of the time of my scribbling that, I may have been engaged in 33% of those.

An acquaintance wandered into view to disrupt the flow of thought (on Facebook, thank goodness, not on my patio), merely for the purpose of disrupting it evidently; she offered rebuttal but without foundation. It’s a thought that has been regurgitated before in settings such as this, and perhaps it should be distilled into a single word: LeftAndRightExactlyTheSame. What an odd time in which to be asserting such a thing. The Left, today, has precisely one example to offer of their own saying “Fuck You” in the context of leaving people alone, and that’s same sex marriage. Except their position is that the Kentucky County Clerk should be sent to jail for defying their will, and they clearly expect to impose similar penalties on others who pose such a problem, so it doesn’t hold. The Left knows about as much about leaving people alone as your dumbest childhood pet knew about trigonometry.

This is a feeling, not a thought; and you can tell it is one, because when it goes out dressed up as a thought, the costuming is bad. It doesn’t act like a thought; doesn’t stay still long enough to be tested. LeftAndRightExactlyTheSame is a chestnut bandied about by leftists, and as leftists, they have found reasons to be leftists. Good luck persuading them to stop being leftists, for even a fraction of a second. So no, they’re not acting like it’s true, and their argument that it’s true, with all the bovine fecal matter stripped away from it, comes down to being a prohibition against anyone within earshot or line-of-sight doubting it or hesitating to accept it. Other than this proposed taboo and the penalties that would come with it, they offer no reason for this idea to win out over its opposition, none. It’s pure sophistry.

A feeling dressed up as a thought, won’t stay in one place when challenged. Like the jello being nailed to the tree, it jiggles, wriggles, loses composition, regains it again at its own convenience. It’s the difference between the static and the dynamic. LeftAndRightExactlyTheSame…until it’s time to show what a good person I am, by siding with the spotted owl against the loggers, or pushing same-sex marriage, or prattling away with the latest spin about climate change. And then they’re as different as night and day.

I have long been spooked by this sort of attitude, this casual approach to truth, this non-dialectic. “I think X simply because it makes me happy to think X — and, what, shouldn’t that be enough?” I suppose the answer to that is up to the person thinking it. As an upholding of the importance of feeling over the importance of thought, it wouldn’t work for me because any triumph in the upholding of feeling would be defeated by the lingering discomfort: But how do I know that is true? I haven’t done anything to test it, and the contradictions are so glaring if I merely open my eyes to the fact that they’re there. The one about LeftAndRightExactlyTheSame, but, the left is so much better in so many ways — that one, just by way of example, is resplendent. So much so, it occurs to me that there must be considerable difficulty involved in ignoring it. It impresses me as the sort of lie that honest people can only get into the habit of telling, after they’ve had a lot of practice lying to themselves about it first.

I miss your writings when I don’t see them often. It amazes me how often we are on the same ‘topic’ in our heads. Unfortunately I go for the cheap shot, assuming a fact sledgehammer will suffice. You are the surgeon that goes deep and gets all the detail right.

Cheers from the bathrobe bleachers.
- tracycoyle | 09/23/2015 @ 14:43
[…] happens, the Elite get what they want. Just like in modern America. With all due respect to the blogfather, there really is no difference between Left and Right… not down there where the cheese […]
- Hail Caesar | Rotten Chestnuts | 09/24/2015 @ 16:16
[…] victims deserve to be believed” thing. Awhile back, off-line in the e-mails, a couple of my blog brethren and I delved a bit deeply into the difference between the sophists and the dialectics, and how each one of those two sides […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/24/2015 @ 06:15

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The Static and the DynamicWednesday, September 23rd, 2015

The Static and the Dynamic
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2015