Quotations: God and Evil

“It is our habit to dismiss the Old Testament altogether because Jehovah, or Jahve, does not think or behave like a social worker.”

—Doris Lessing, Shikasta

Paid to Be a Genius

How would you like to receive one half million dollars just for being clever?

If you play the saxophone or invent musical instruments, if you write novels or restore old cathedrals, if you propose “insightful interpretations of hieroglyphic inscriptions and figural art” or design stage lighting, you could be eligible.

There’s only one catch: you have to be the best and you have to be noticed by the MacArthur Foundation.

James McPherson-1981 Fellow

Today the Foundation named 25 new MacArthur Fellows and will award each one $500,000 during the next five years in appreciation of their talents. Jonathan Fanton, President of the Foundation, explains the purpose of this award:

The MacArthur Fellows Program celebrates extraordinarily creative individuals who inspire new heights in human achievement. With their boldness, courage, and uncommon energy, this new group of Fellows, men and women of all ages in diverse fields, exemplifies the boundless nature of the human mind and spirit.

For the Foundation’s press release and the complete list of newly minted Fellows, click here. You might want to congratulate these individuals with a personal email message.

Meanwhile, I’d like to hear from you in response to two questions:

1. Are you personally acquainted with anyone who would be a good candidate for this kind of award?
2. If you could nominate three individuals to be considered by the MacArthur Foundation, who would they be?

How to Get the Most Out of Your Kindle—Tip #4

For all of you Kindle users who like to keep up with favorite blog feeds, the Kindle will help you do that through its Whispernet technology. The Kindle offers several advantages over cell phones and Blackberrys.

• The Kindle screen is much more reader friendly, with its window size, ink technology, and scrolling features.
• All feeds that you download remain on your Kindle as long as you like, and there’s plenty of room (especially with the card slot that allows unlimited storage in small format).
• Bookmarking, highlighting, and note-taking are conveniently available.

So how do you use your Kindle to access your favorite blogs? It all starts with a Google Reader account—which you should have anyway. You can access your Google Reader blog feeds directly through your Kindle.

For clear, step-by-step guidelines, check out the post at The Puget News, titled “Using Google Reader on the Amazon Kindle.”

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Special thanks to David, a regular reader and commentator at this blog, for letting me know about the Puget News post.

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New to Kindle? Check it out here.

Related Posts:

Kindle Your Reading Habits

How to Get the Most Out of Your Kindle—Tip #1

How To Get the Most Out of Your Kindle—Tip #2

How To Get the Most Out of Your Kindle—Tip #3

Critical Thinking—Best Book in This Category

Amazon

I teach philosophy to graduate students. Many of these men and women are married. Wives of the married men often invite me to speak to their group. Some have told me how much they desire to understand what their husbands are studying, and, frankly, to be able to hold their own in argument when their husbands, by dint of their occupation, have a seeming advantage.

There’s one book I’ve been recommending to them. It’s an excellent general introduction to the skills we all need—both for gentle sparring and for serious debate, but also just for organizing our beliefs into cogent perspectives.

Written by D. Q. McInerny, it’s called Being Logical: A Guide to Good Thinking (2005). (I see that it’s also now available in a Kindle edition.)

Charles Osgood offers this poetic endorsement:

Given the shortage of logical thinking,

And the fact that mankind is adrift, if not sinking,

It is vital that all of us learn to think straight.

And this small book by D.Q. McInerny is great.

It follows therefore since we so badly need it,

Everybody should not only buy it, but read it.

That Bookshop in Portland

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What Others Are Saying:

• Think Archimedes
• From the Study

Do You Agree with the Charlie Gibson Doctrine?

What is the “Bush Doctrine”? Who can say? But we now know something about the “Charlie Gibson Doctrine”—which might also be called the “Elite Media Doctrine.”

Charlie Gibson was the first member of the mainstream media to interview Sarah Palin, Republican candidate for the Vice Presidency. I’m only guessing here, but I’d say Gibson was worried about how he would appear to his media colleagues during the interview. This was a much-anticipated interview and news people country-wide were overtly jealous of Gibson. So Gibson knew he was being scrutinized, and he knew what was expected of him by the media. They wanted red meat, and they got it in the form of one question in particular. He asked Governor Palin, “Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?”

This is pandering. Why? Because Gibson wanted to please his media buddies. It’s also dirty pool. Why? Because there is no such thing as “the Bush doctrine.” But Charlie Gibson thinks there is. He stated it as follows:

“The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us. Do you agree with that — the right to preemptive attack of a country that was planning an attack on America?”

Charlie Gibson should be embarrassed, not because he put the candidate on the spot, but because he didn’t know what he was talking about.

Everybody knows that the media would disapprove if Palin answered “yes” to Gibson’s question. You can tell from Gibson’s demeanor that he believed two things: (1) Palin would have to say yes, and (2) if Palin said yes this would cause trouble for the McCain campaign. Remember, Barack Obama’s singular objection to John McCain has been that a vote for McCain would be a vote for a four-year extension of the unpopular presidency of George Bush.

There’s only one other possibility, and that is that Palin wouldn’t know what to say because she didn’t know what the Bush doctrine is. That’s pretty cynical, though, and an upright media professional would simply have stated the so-called doctrine, without attributing it uniquely to President Bush, and asked if the candidate agreed with it. Imagine how things would have seemed if Charlie Gibson had asked his question that way, without trying to bait Sarah Palin into an uneasy association with a currently unpopular president. Palin could have said yes. No harm, no foul. Next question.

I know some astute observers believe that Sarah Palin faltered, ever so slightly, in response to Gibson. But there’s another way to interpret her response. Perhaps Gibson should be grateful that Sarah Palin answered graciously. The presupposition of his question was false, and yet Charlie Gibson believed it. Palin was forbearing. She did not confront him about his naivete.

We should hope that every candidate would answer an undisguised formulation of Gibson’s question in the affirmative, without equivocation or nuance. It would be shameful if a President did not adopt this view.

Teddy Roosevelt accepted it, that’s for sure. So did Abraham Lincoln, and I believe his conduct of the Civil War is evidence of it. Every President during the Cold War held firmly to this view, which is one reason why there was a Cold War.

It’s plausible to suppose that the Monroe Doctrine, stated in James Monroe’s annual message to Congress December 2, 1823, presupposes a similar commitment. Here is a passage from Monroe’s presentation nearly two hundred years ago:

Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it, and to preserve those relations by a frank, firm, and manly policy, meeting in all instances the just claims of every power, submitting to injuries from none. But in regard to those continents circumstances are eminently and conspicuously different. It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness; nor can anyone believe that our southern brethren, if left to themselves, would adopt it of their own accord. It is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form with indifference.

There has been some controversy about whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew beforehand of an imminent attack by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor and deliberately waited for the attack in order to strengthen the grounds for entering the war, which he wanted to do anyway. If the bare suggestion of that possibility is heresy, and beneath the dignity of the President, it is because the so-called “Bush doctrine” is assumed by the American people to be an axiom of American foreign policy.

George Bush, whatever his faults, was right to remind his people that he was duty-bound to protect them from imminent threat with preemptive action. It’s a shame that this required special boldness, especially in the aftermath of 9/11.

Gibson’s question, without its supercilious association with President Bush, ought to be one of the first questions that both Obama and McCain have to answer early in their upcoming debate. Their respective answers could set the tone for the rest of the debate. I wonder what Obama would say. I think we all know what McCain would say.

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Note:

This post was inspired by today’s post by Dennis Prager, who writes:

“All the interview did was reconfirm that Republicans running for office run against both their Democratic opponent and the mainstream news media.

“This year it is more obvious than ever. The press’s beatification of Obama is so obvious, so constant (how many covers of Newsweek and Time has Obama been on?) that media credibility even among many non-conservatives has been hurt.

“Let me put this another way. Charlie Gibson showed far greater hostility toward the Republican vice-presidential candidate than Dan Rather did in his interview with Saddam Hussein or Mike Wallace did in his interview with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

Who can disagree?

David Foster Wallace

He was someone I thought it would be great to meet sometime. Had I known he was living and working only a stone’s throw away, it might have been arranged.

Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. David Foster Wallace hanged himself and was found by his wife when she returned home Friday night, September 12, 2008. He was 46.

Wallace was clever with words. He was inventive. He employed extensive footnotes in his fiction. And he was candid. He went naked onto the page and exposed his soul in ways few novelists do.

His parents were university professors, his father in the department of philosophy at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). David Foster Wallace himself majored in English and philosophy at Amherst College. And it shows in his writings.

His writings reveal something else, too. In his tribute to Wallace, David Gates writes that “we’ll surely be spotting more and more of these clues in his work,” clues of his long-standing depression and contemplation of suicide. I find it hard to believe that Wallace’s readers didn’t suspect it already, because the clues are littered everywhere.

While reading Wallace myself, I would recall the thesis that genius and great art are often accompanied by threatened madness, that great talent and erudition can only be managed with a colossal effort of self-possession that no one else but the artist can know.

In her book, The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice Flaherty examines the mental disorders that frequently haunt the most creative writers. She develops an illuminating theory of “manic hypergraphia.” Kay Redfield Jamison, whose work I’ve recommended on this blog, explores the culverts of this condition in a wonderful book called Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. The treasure of a gifted man’s labor is more precious when understood in the light of this fire.

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As it happens, David Foster Wallace travelled with John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000. He wrote a book about it that came out this past summer. It’s hailed as a journalistic tour de force by someone other than your typical political journalist. It’s called:

McCain’s Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope.

Kindle edition

What Good Writers Do—Best Book in This Category

To be a good writer, you must be able to select the best words, craft sentences, and build paragraphs. This is more than a matter of knowing the rules of punctuation and having a strong vocabulary.