Dear Audience of Zero: Long Time No Blog!

I know that you, none and all, have been waiting with bated breath for this moment to arrive: more bloggings! I am, as usual, going to attempt to do this more often. I'm going to try to spew at least a few unfinished thought out onto this medium per month, as hard as that is for me to do.

So here's something I was thinking about today. Good, clear thinking is boring. Seriously, in terms of convincing people of almost anything the ability to turn a clever phrase is far more important than precise articulation of ideas and clearly defined terms. Well reasoned, meticulous, and logically supported arguments are often simply to tedious to be truly compelling, and they have relatively little to do with the way humans make decisions or accept or reject ideas. These things are done far more with the emotional faculties than with the rational, even for the most pedantic and academic among us (I might even contend, especially for those).

This is not purely a bad thing; the positive and negative sides must be understood. Here are a few as I see them:

A well-turned phrase can be a a formidable tool for casting truth in an irrefutable light. For example Jim Eliot's statement "He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose" has spread so widely and lasted so long because it reframed the issue of dangerous mission work so effectively and forced people to think in different terms than those they were used to. Reframing and redirecting thought are powerful effects of compelling language.

The ancient Jewish moshelim used to intentionally phrase their sayings tersely and ambiguously to force their audiences to engage them. Short phrases were easier to remember, and tightly packed or ambiguous sayings begged for further reflection and engagement long after they were first heard. Thus clever phrasing can lead to increased engagement from one's audience.

On the other hand, clever use of language can be used effectively to dissuade. It is well known that one of the best ways to cause someone to abandon a belief is to make them feel foolish for believing it, but few people pay attention to exactly how this is done. Many times it has to do with a disconnection between the connotations (emotional loadings) of words and phrases and their explicit meaning. A word or phrase with negative (or better, condescending) connotations is placed within an argument in which its denotative meaning is perfectly appropriate. The audience reacts strongly to the negativity or condescension in the word rather than to the substance of the argument and feel foolish. An example: a friend of mine made an entire classroom at a theological institution very uncomfortable by describing prayer as Christians speaking to an "invisible person". True, most strands of Christian theology hold that God is both personal and invisible. However, when those two words are put together, they take on a meaning that is more than the sum of their parts. They sound irrational, childish, or simply delusional. Why? Because the phrase "invisible person" and more specifically references to speaking to invisible people are most often found in the arena of mental health. In these cases the assumption is that the invisible people are not real, phantoms in the mind of sick, unbalanced people. Surely no rational person would speak to an invisible nonentity. The association with irrationality transfers most readily to the theological statement, and the controversy of the statement then becomes the implication that prayer is communication with a phantom, a nonentity. Most people do not have the critical tools to realize that this is the source of their discomfort, however, and simply feel foolish for speaking to someone who is not there.

I think the last example is the one most often used, seldom intentionally, and most often confused for solid reasoning. The source of the problem is hard to recognize, because it is not in the explicit in the definitions of the terms, and the connotations of said terms (which are far hazier and less easy to pin down) must be examined and confronted.

Scholars walk a thin and dangerous line as they engage in the transmission of knowledge and agenda. When is it appropriate to obscure reasoning in order to communicate a point or convince someone of an idea?

This got real long all of a sudden. I'm done.

I need to work on conclusions.

A Different Perspective

I was watching a news report the other day on Second Life, an online game thing that is basically just that, a second world that shares few of the downsides of this one. People log in and do the same sorts of things that they would in real life. They go shopping, eating out, drinking, dancing. Some even go to virtual jobs. People get as seriously into this as other online addictions, dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year on virtual clothing and accessories for their avatars. I, having wasted a good portion of my childhood playing various video games amd (shudder) MUDing, am generally inclined to frown on sugh things. At best they are a waste of time, one of the myriad petty excesses that distract and pacify people into oblivion.

At the end of the segment, however, there was a bit about a Second Life club for the physically disabled. In the game the club closely resembled any other club, except that many of the patrons were in wheelchairs. In the game, this did not hamper their grooving on the dance floor or their mobility in other parts of the game.

After showing in game pictures of the club, they showed its founder in the real world. A man disfigured by severe cerebral palsy, living in a small London flat. He wore a helmet for his own safety and couldn't leave his wheelchair. His speech was so garbled that subtitles elucidated averything he said. This man used Second Life to gain access to life and social interaction that he probably never experiences in the real world. In this life his body is an obstacle to relating to others; in Second Life, that obstacle is removed. One thing he said really reached me: "In that world I am more myself than I am in this one". There the confines of his body do not limit him; he can be who he really is.

The First or Second Greatest Novel Ever Written

So I finished Les Miserables a few days ago, and since I don't really know anyone else who's read the whole thing, I figure I'll blog about it. Oh blog, you're the only one who understands me...

I say it's the first or second best novel because it's in the running with Anna Karenina. I don't believe that criteria have been invented yet that can prove the superiority of one of these phenomenal books over the other. They will fight it out like two of the gods of yore in the hieghts of my imagination, a victory not given or won by human hands. That said, on to Les Miserables itself.

This book thrives upon its characters. The plotting is superb, but the characters are simply unparalleled. Absolutely brilliant. It is amazing that Hugo can create characters that are at once so believable and so extraordinary. Anyone reading the struggles of Jean Valjean can feel his anguish, and his division of mind, though they will probably never be tempted or tortured in any of the ways that he was. He is a role model in the truest sense, since we can not only relate to his struggles, but aspire to his consistent dedication to righteousness. He is not a character who is simply good because he is good; he does not act out of his nature, but rather continually fights between what is in his self-interest and what is right, and chooses the right because he has been down the dark road of the criminal, but has also been shown the path of grace. His conscience wavers between two aspects of his past: on the one hand the the animal instinct and ruthless self-preservation that he learned in the prisons, and the one beautiful act of mercy that simultaneously rescued him from falling back into that life and
established him for a new one. He takes the strength and fearlessness of his former days and applies them to his reformation. The fearlessness is only partial, however. He does not fear people or pain, but the life of the prisons and the person that that life caused him to become. He fears most of all the loss of Cosette's love, which transformed his life. He is constantly tortured by the knowledge of the past and the uncertainty of the future, yet he always chooses what is right. For this reason he has more to teach than the many other one dimensional good characters. He represents both the light and the dark in humanity, yet he always emerges in the light, following God and the bishop ingrace and mercy to those who may or may not deserve it and taking the consequences upon himself.

Jean Valjean is a character of incredible depth, and he is only one of many in Les Miserables. Javert, Marius, Enjolras, Thenardier, Guillenormand; even the supporting cast are far more that caricatures. Hugo will take pages if necessary to describe in detail even the most minor characters, like Tholomyes and Boulatreille. In fact the only character I really didn't like was the adult Cosette. She was the only one that seemed insubstantial, as if she was purposefully kept that way to be an ideal woman: pretty, charming, and vapid. My, how the ideal woman has changed in the past 150 years. I couldn't help but think as I was reading the book how much I wouldn't like to marry Cosette.

I sometimes refer to Les Mis as the story of a man whose life brings him in contact with a number of long essays. Victor Hugo is not afraid to wax philosophic for pages at a time. Sixty pages on the life and habits of the good bishop, seventy on the battle of Waterloo, fifty on French convents, twenty on the glory of feces and the bizarre history of the Parisian sewers, not counting dozens of three or four page asides on whatever came up. The unifying theme of many of these can be summed up in a single word: progress. The nineteenth century was a time of unbridled optimism in the human race, and Hugo was no exception. Soon the evils of the world would pass away: government would be juxt and benevolent, poverty would cease to exist, and war would disappear from the Earth. One page actually made me laugh out loud, when he stated that the twentieth century would not know war. Not exactly a stellar prediction. Reading this optimism from the 19th century has led me to better understand the brutal pessimism of the twentieth. Faced with the realities of life in the twentieth century after the bold predictions of the nineteenth forced people to face the dark side of humanity: its depth and its pervasive inevitability. Improvements in science and technology will never bring the end of famine or war. Those are the result of something that never changes: the moral composition of the human race.

Les Mis is a brilliant book, whose characters and main theme transcend time and space, though often its peripheral ideas do not. You should read it. Seriously, it's really good.

The First One

Well, I have been compelled to start a blog by urges too terrible and mysterious for words. Or mostly just for writing practice. I want to improve my ability to write lucidly and quickly on any topic that comes to mind. Don't expect anything terribly groundbreaking or wonderful here. I'll probably just write about puppies, sunshine, and moon pies.

Why is it a super secret blog that is only visible to spies on spaceships? A number of reasons. I've always felt like there was something inherently narcissistic about blogging, like blogging would turn me into some sort of weird emotional exhibitionist. I don't think this about other people who have blogs; nevertheless, I would feel like that if all my friends were reading my thoughts weekly on the internet. Second, there i no second. I'm done blogging about beginning blogging. Bye,