With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
November 17, 2009 - 11:31 a.m.
I haven't left my apartment since I wrote my last entry. So now that I have time to write I don't have anything to write about. That's not true of course my brain didn't stop working. Too bad I don't have a brain.
Here is the last passage from Tolkien that came to me spontaneously. Once again it's from ROTK: Appendix A: part III: Durin's Folk. I'm a geek's geek. This is Gandalf speaking.
"Think what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador, night in Rivendell. There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now hope to return from the victory ere only to ruin and ash. Bt that has been averted – because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance meeting as we say in Middle-earth"
The other day I wrote of Charles Ives and modern music. I want to continue the line of thought that inspired.
Back in the day classical music was pop music. Hayden in his latter years made rock-star money. The audience was largely middle-class and included the rich and poor. The audience consisted of knowledgeable laymen. Musicians wrote for that audience. They were the arbiters of success. Yes the masses made mistakes. Temporary majorities will do that. Mozart was considered a lightweight till late in the 19th century. People get things wrong but the system corrected itself and things worked reasonably well. The same system worked in all the arts.
Then things changed. Music and the visual arts were taken over by a self-appointed elite who derided the audience as bourgeois. Pleasing the audience switched from being a virtue to a vice. Music and art became a closed club not open to the average person. If you didn't like it, it was because of your limitations, not because it didn't please the ear or eye. Pleasing the ear and eye were bourgeois conceits not business of the true artiste.
This never happened to the dramatic arts. Theatre and when it came into being film didn't disdain their audience. Yes there have always been "art films" but that didn't stop main street films from being considered to have artistic merit. Casablanca is the ultimate audience film, and is high art at the same time.
As is not surprising, the music was not a financial success. It couldn't remain a going concern. The orchestras responded by simply not playing modern music. Before the 20th Century the most concerts were of contemporary music, that is no longer true. Yes the Copland and Bernstein and others rebelled against the rebels and wrote music that the audiences liked but that's the exception, not the rule. Of course I don't really know that. Perhaps there are plenty of people composing music that I'd love but they are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. Rejected by the art establishment for being to accessible but avoided by the promoters and masses who stick to what they know they'll like and don't want to be guinea pigs of experimental art. They've grown gun shy of the new.
This is elitism at it's worst. Elitism is what I want to talk about. I'm for it! That might seem in total contradiction to what I've been saying, but it isn't. That's an abuse of elitism. Some key words were "self-appointed elite." There are two evils of elites, elitism that isn't earned and claiming special privileges not related to what makes you elite.
Let's take an example from a field that I always say you can learn everything from, baseball. Major League baseball players are a true elite. The are the best of the best of the best. Tens of millions play baseball and they are in the top 1,000. Stars are far above that elite. I get great pleasure from them. I don't begrudge them a penny of the money they earn, because it is earned. What's wrong is when the stars of baseball, or movie or rock stars act like the rules of society don't apply to them. Having talent gives you rewards, not immunity.
Elites based on birth is one of the great evils in the world. Being born into a ruling class does not make you fit to rule. No ethnic group has a monopoly on wisdom. Believing that they do is false elitism. The people being promoted are not true elites.
What gets me calling myself an elitist is the way that elite has been used by political reactionaries. George W. Bush was the leading exploiter of resentment of the elite but he has been surpassed by Sarah Palin. To them being elite is being educated, being cultured, being intelligent, being well-informed. To them studying a subject deeply and devoting your life to understanding should not give your opinion on that subject more weight than their own gut feeling. They distrust scientists and intellectuals. They are against the elite that is based on merit. Instead without using the term they believe in an elite based on being from the "pro-America" part of America. To them being in the elite is based on having blind faith. To think too deeply is suspect. They are the bad students that make fun of the good ones, the "nerds" grown into adults.
So yes I'm an elitist. I give more weight to the opinion of a scientist on global warming and evolution than I give to a talk radio host. It doesn't mean I believe them blindly, it means that I need a good reason before I disagree on their area of expertise. Being a good student at a top school is a good thing. It isn't a guarantee that you're right or even good at your job but it's a point in the favor in deciding who gets a position. It's far better than basing it on who you'd rather have a beer with.
Of course it isn't just the right that distrusts the meretricious elites. It seems to be waning but there was a strong anti-science bias in some elements of the left. Vacal Havel thought that scientific theories were simply social conventions, and superstitions had equal validity.
The real irony is that Bush is himself an example of a member of the unearned elite. The only reason anyone knew him before he entered politics was that he came from a rich and influential family. It allowed him to go to an elite school without being an elite student.
Let's hope the country is now being run by people that look at being informed on a subject as a good thing, not as evidence of elitism.
Elliott and da Costa are Phrosty - November 22, 2009
I Gave Speace a Chance - November 21, 2009
Oliver Twisted - November 20, 2009
Don't Mind My Body - I Don't - November 19, 2009
Thoughts from the Shower - November 18, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile November 17, 2009
