I so badly wanted to comment on “pomocons, Freddie, and god.”
I rationalized this desire by telling myself that the comment section is badly missing the token ignorant religious fundamentalist and who better to fulfill that roll but me? The little boy in me is squealing “pick me, pick me.” I so badly want to get in the game.
But I did not for two reasons. The first one is that I don’t have the time. The second is that I have never failed to regret participating in a comment section. I take myself way too seriously to be a good commenter.
As it is, I wasted way too much time thinking about how I would reply to it. I was going to try to exorcise my mind and spew all those thoughts onto my own web site, but it turned out not be necessary. Since I did not have time to write my thoughts out during my productive hours, I had to sit down and try to write it out when I was dead tired. You would be amazed at how well the desire to go to bed can make your desire to toot your own horn go away.
Plus, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I would have to spend a lot of time regurgitating things I had already articulated in The Aesthetic of Despair and Spinoza, Einstein, and the Failure of Reason. Why go through all that again?
I might still have given it a go if the parts that I was going regurgitate from those two essays were in any way germane to what Freddie said. The only reason I would need to regurgitate them was to establish where I was coming from. Whenever you need to go through that much work to establish where you are coming from, you have a lost cause already.
For those who are curious, my comments on “pomocons, Freddie, and god” would have run roughly like this….
As I see It, Freddie’s point is simple. There is no meaning/authority without God and yet a God you can choose has no meaning/authority. To these points I can only say Amen. But in the process of making these points, Freddie reveals flaws in his thought process that are just crying out to be addressed.
You see, Freddie is an Existentialist. In other words, he understands the failure of reason and at the same time he recognizes that truth exists. But Freddie succumbs to the arrogance of Nietzsche instead of sticking to the basic understanding that Kierkegaard expressed. That is to say, Kierkegaard saw the great chasm and understood that it was fundamental to the human condition. Nietzsche saw the great chasm and thought he was a prophet.
In other words, I see Freddie as setting up post-moderns as being some kind of Nietzschian type supermen. By setting up post moderns as being different from pre moderns, Freddie betrays the basic truth that underlies Existentialist positions and shuts himself off from fruitful lines of inquiry.
Of course I would have used a lot more words then that. Each one of those points is worth an essay all by its self if you really want to do it right. Also I was planning on working in a demonstration of the fact that Rod Dreher and Will Wilkinson’s positions are exactly the same from an Existentialist perspective. This would not really have been a critique of Freddie so much as a natural extension of his argument.
As such, it did not really fit in with the rest of my argument. But I liked the idea of demonstrating that two people who seemed to be on the opposite end of the spectrum were in fact demonstrating the exact same conception of authority and meaning. Maybe I will make a post on the subject someday when I have more time.
But I decided that for now, I needed my sleep more than the world needed my thoughts on Freddie’s post or the similarities between Rod Dreher and Will Wilkinson. Besides, as one of those de-evolved ignorant religious fundamentalists, I have better things to do then to help some godless atheist pick on those who believe in motherhood, apple pie, and, well, something.
Speaking of wasting thought, I was listening to Joel Dueck’s latest podcast, and I was struck by how perfectly he describes the reason that I never have any time in spite of not being that busy. In his case, he was talking about why he is not a good framing carpenter, but for me it is the story of my life.
The problem particularly bothers me when I am writing. I my mind is always skipping ahead to where I am going and never focusing on what I need to be writing at the time. It drives me nuts and makes it take far longer for me to write something then it should. But I can’t seem to stop myself.
Speaking of Joel Dueck’s podcast, I am so disgusted with myself for not guessing whose biography he was reading out of. In hind sight, it was so obvious to anyone with a half-way decent knowledge of American history. My only excuse is that I immediately thought of Samuel Johnson and this false trail used up quite a bit of time needed to come with the right answer. Once it became clear for various reasons that it could not be Samuel Johnson and that it had to be an American, my mind went blank and I could not think of another answer fast enough.
So know that you know that it has to be an American, why don’t you listen to and see if you can guess the right answer. I hope you fail. It will make me feel better.