Interesting to see you expand this idea, David, which you've touched upon before.
I think it slightly problematic to rehabilitate Dahl villains - whether in your way, or in the manner of the makers of the musical (which I have not seen). Miss Trunchbull, I would remind everyone, is implied to have murdered Miss Honey's father, and without question illegally usurped her inheritance, and is certainly not a bastion of order in the book. This is a difficult character to defend, as are all Dahl's villains by virtue of the post-Grimm narrative form he pioneered.
For myself, the keenest insight into Dahl's psyche is Danny, The Champion of the World, with its quasi-ethical defence of poaching against the vacuity of wealth accumulated by greed. Dahl does not have enough history stowed away to get at the origins of this in the enclosure of the commons, which in some respects marks out the trajectory of society that remains quite explanatory even today.
What drove the humanities mad was that the love of Foucault was more easily reconciled with demolishing the existing social order than it was with providing any tools for imagining how to replace it. Somehow the tensions in the philosophy of the existentialists were circumvented by this Foucauldian tearing down of the Wizard's curtain in Oz, such that everyone just pretended existentialism represented a ready-made solution rather than a problem, indeed a set of problems, that have been grappled with not one whit since de Beauviour and Merleau-Ponty. It was ready-made only in the sense of the artwork by Duchamp.
Likewise, in the backlash against 'queering gender' (the vanguard of contemporary 'existentialism lite'), it is seldom recognised that Judith Butler is and was not pursuing 'pseudoscience' (as the rebuttal always presumes), but actually understood Foucault all too well. While I genuinely do not understand how she can think the revolution she has fostered could ever be deemed a success, by presuming there was nothing but vapour to her philosophy the reaction presumes we will all simply move a few squares back and everything will be right as rain again. This is not what can possibly happen from here. You at least, David, appreciate this, perhaps in part because you too have a firm grasp of the implications of Foucault.
How strange it is to see the inheritors of enclosure shirk any sense that they might have responsibilities by manoeuvring everyone else to shirk theirs. The Age of Distraction is fast becoming the Age of Denial.
There's a past, to which I'd assume most of us wouldn't want to return, with kids cleaning chimneys (which I assume is unhealthy and dangerous) and very little formal education. But the nature of Progressivism means the future is relentlessly fluid. So how do we even talk about a point where things are OK and don't need to be changed much? This seems to be a genuine built-in advantage for progressive utopianism. An unpopular past versus a pick-your-own ideas future that no one can nail down.
Critical is your observation: "the purpose of life is to be who you really are, as though who you really are is a discernible feature of your psyche that can be made actual if only reality can be forced to bend sufficiently to your will." Difficult topic. As I see it, our society is wrecked to begin with, and the solutions are no solutions at all. Although the desirable qualities you describe are indeed desirable, the sort of industrialised world we serve right now do nothing for personal fulfilment, and I believe that is what needs addressing. We are living wrong, and folks seem to understand that, but keep misdiagnosing the trouble.
That was terrific. My only slight reservation is that I think the musical starts by laughing at the parent who thinks their child is a ‘little miracle’. So the writers maybe have at least a bit of sympathy with what you are saying
I am one of the few who never read Matilda, although did love Boy. And as a therapist it's an interesting conundrum - patients are so often either unsure of what they want to do that to 'follow your dreams' is pretty useless advice. It's important to self-actualise, but that also includes the reality of accepting your dreams of being a gender compliance animal balloons consultant might have to be abandoned is all part of that. Life remains about survival; and no amount of indulgent 'being paid to do what you love doing' is going to change that.
'Toe the line' usually does mean, doing what you're told, following the rules. But perhaps it is worth noting here a what that implies in the context of a hammer throwing contest. "You have to stay inside the circle all the time". That is, following the rules, but at the limit, getting as close to the edge for that extra inch of advantage, but no further. "Find the bally line, and toe it
and relevant in particular to: "And ‘finding the bally line and toeing it’ is a message that young boys in particular need to hear" The feminisation of education, the lack of firm but fair boundaries for boys to try themselves against: safety rather than learning to live with li risk.
I have done many things in my life, including being exposed to multiple Nobel Prize winning scientists, some absolutely top quality musicians, multimillionaire entrepreneurs, absolute genius horticulturalists and the like.
I disagree with you fundamentally about 'only those who have achieved great things should give advice about careers'.
Why do I disagree with you?
Giving career advice requires people to have understood what it takes to succeed and by that I mean that they understand full well that the mantra 'I succeeded this way, so it's the way to succeed' is the advice of the intellectual pygmy, even if they are an Olympic champion.
Giving advice well means gaining understanding of the nature of the person receiving the advice. There's no point just saying 'work hard and you will succeed'. That is total and utter lies. It is necessary but not sufficient to work hard. You also have to have sufficient talent and you have to have an emotional psyche compatible with the environment in which you are required to work.
Saying 'toughen up' is akin to child abuse if the child you exhort that with was abandoned at birth and had zero emotional support. They toughened up in year one of life at the expense of shutting down a wide range of emotional avenues. To succeed. they need an environment where it safe for them to open up again and that, when they do, their emotions are treated with the tenderness of the immaturity that they will still display.
Many of the best research scientists I came across had never encountered any problems in their lives and were often appalling mentors to anyone who actually needed some practical mentoring.
One of the reasons I never became a maths teacher was that I knew that I had had zero problems with a single facet of school maths and was uniquely incapable of putting myself into the minds of those that had. For those who would be like me, why was I needed? I could just hand their parents a text book and tell them to let their son/daughter teach themselves at home.
I was a very good teacher of practical molecular biology to those with 5 A's at A level but verging on descending into depression at their inability to instantly master an artesanal activity with dozens of potential banana skins in every long-winded manual protocol. Those people had worked hard and would make you, a Professor, feel very slow and inadequate. But they too had unique weaknesses that the less intellectual and more practical usually sneer at.
Some children need encouragement and some children need to made to experience their own limitations. The most intelligent are usually more than aware of their limitations and their own mental anxieties are likely to be more of a block to success than any intrinsic ability. The hard-boiled rugger buggers probably need a bit of serjeant major-style advice and a good slap across the face if they start openly leering and wolf-whistling at 17 year old girls' chests.
Sometimes the best career advice is: 'this country hates your type of person, so emigrate'. The UK absolutely hates those who won't become peep-show perverts in the MI5/6 spying rings. Absolutely hates them. It's a country that venerates parasitic psychopaths crushing and controlling the most intellectually gifted in the country. Amazing that undergraduates plagiarising get kicked out of University but Senior Professors hacking computers University-wide see it as part of their job description, isn't it??
It may not have crossed your mind but hard work doesn't require military-style discipline. The best mentor I ever had in my life never once raised his voice to me. He completely transformed my violin playing in a way that amazed UK 'experts' who had given up on me. He put them all to shame, quite frankly. He dealt with the issues of the psyche, the technical and let nature take its course. He was wise enough to realise that I was open to hard work if I thought it was worth it, but I'd done 10 years of fruitless 'hard work' being forced by ignorant and incompetent pushers in the UK. He was like a master gardener knowing how to germinate seeds, let young seedlings grow and only plant them out when the time was ripe.
Other kinds of youngster to me will need very different approaches.
It all depends on their family growing up, their own unique temperaments and the nation in which they live. Even the part of the country they live in, sometimes.
There's no one solution to careers advice and just as the best footballers often don't make the best managers, individual achievement isn't necessarily correlated with the ability to give good advice to others.
Interesting to see you expand this idea, David, which you've touched upon before.
I think it slightly problematic to rehabilitate Dahl villains - whether in your way, or in the manner of the makers of the musical (which I have not seen). Miss Trunchbull, I would remind everyone, is implied to have murdered Miss Honey's father, and without question illegally usurped her inheritance, and is certainly not a bastion of order in the book. This is a difficult character to defend, as are all Dahl's villains by virtue of the post-Grimm narrative form he pioneered.
For myself, the keenest insight into Dahl's psyche is Danny, The Champion of the World, with its quasi-ethical defence of poaching against the vacuity of wealth accumulated by greed. Dahl does not have enough history stowed away to get at the origins of this in the enclosure of the commons, which in some respects marks out the trajectory of society that remains quite explanatory even today.
What drove the humanities mad was that the love of Foucault was more easily reconciled with demolishing the existing social order than it was with providing any tools for imagining how to replace it. Somehow the tensions in the philosophy of the existentialists were circumvented by this Foucauldian tearing down of the Wizard's curtain in Oz, such that everyone just pretended existentialism represented a ready-made solution rather than a problem, indeed a set of problems, that have been grappled with not one whit since de Beauviour and Merleau-Ponty. It was ready-made only in the sense of the artwork by Duchamp.
Likewise, in the backlash against 'queering gender' (the vanguard of contemporary 'existentialism lite'), it is seldom recognised that Judith Butler is and was not pursuing 'pseudoscience' (as the rebuttal always presumes), but actually understood Foucault all too well. While I genuinely do not understand how she can think the revolution she has fostered could ever be deemed a success, by presuming there was nothing but vapour to her philosophy the reaction presumes we will all simply move a few squares back and everything will be right as rain again. This is not what can possibly happen from here. You at least, David, appreciate this, perhaps in part because you too have a firm grasp of the implications of Foucault.
How strange it is to see the inheritors of enclosure shirk any sense that they might have responsibilities by manoeuvring everyone else to shirk theirs. The Age of Distraction is fast becoming the Age of Denial.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
There's a past, to which I'd assume most of us wouldn't want to return, with kids cleaning chimneys (which I assume is unhealthy and dangerous) and very little formal education. But the nature of Progressivism means the future is relentlessly fluid. So how do we even talk about a point where things are OK and don't need to be changed much? This seems to be a genuine built-in advantage for progressive utopianism. An unpopular past versus a pick-your-own ideas future that no one can nail down.
Yes - what you're driving at here is fundamental, I think. We don't appear to have a way of reining in modernity's drive towards totalisation.
Critical is your observation: "the purpose of life is to be who you really are, as though who you really are is a discernible feature of your psyche that can be made actual if only reality can be forced to bend sufficiently to your will." Difficult topic. As I see it, our society is wrecked to begin with, and the solutions are no solutions at all. Although the desirable qualities you describe are indeed desirable, the sort of industrialised world we serve right now do nothing for personal fulfilment, and I believe that is what needs addressing. We are living wrong, and folks seem to understand that, but keep misdiagnosing the trouble.
That was terrific. My only slight reservation is that I think the musical starts by laughing at the parent who thinks their child is a ‘little miracle’. So the writers maybe have at least a bit of sympathy with what you are saying
Good point - there may be some self awareness there.
I am one of the few who never read Matilda, although did love Boy. And as a therapist it's an interesting conundrum - patients are so often either unsure of what they want to do that to 'follow your dreams' is pretty useless advice. It's important to self-actualise, but that also includes the reality of accepting your dreams of being a gender compliance animal balloons consultant might have to be abandoned is all part of that. Life remains about survival; and no amount of indulgent 'being paid to do what you love doing' is going to change that.
'Toe the line' usually does mean, doing what you're told, following the rules. But perhaps it is worth noting here a what that implies in the context of a hammer throwing contest. "You have to stay inside the circle all the time". That is, following the rules, but at the limit, getting as close to the edge for that extra inch of advantage, but no further. "Find the bally line, and toe it
And always keep your feet inside the line".
Yes, good observation!
and relevant in particular to: "And ‘finding the bally line and toeing it’ is a message that young boys in particular need to hear" The feminisation of education, the lack of firm but fair boundaries for boys to try themselves against: safety rather than learning to live with li risk.
Professor
I have done many things in my life, including being exposed to multiple Nobel Prize winning scientists, some absolutely top quality musicians, multimillionaire entrepreneurs, absolute genius horticulturalists and the like.
I disagree with you fundamentally about 'only those who have achieved great things should give advice about careers'.
Why do I disagree with you?
Giving career advice requires people to have understood what it takes to succeed and by that I mean that they understand full well that the mantra 'I succeeded this way, so it's the way to succeed' is the advice of the intellectual pygmy, even if they are an Olympic champion.
Giving advice well means gaining understanding of the nature of the person receiving the advice. There's no point just saying 'work hard and you will succeed'. That is total and utter lies. It is necessary but not sufficient to work hard. You also have to have sufficient talent and you have to have an emotional psyche compatible with the environment in which you are required to work.
Saying 'toughen up' is akin to child abuse if the child you exhort that with was abandoned at birth and had zero emotional support. They toughened up in year one of life at the expense of shutting down a wide range of emotional avenues. To succeed. they need an environment where it safe for them to open up again and that, when they do, their emotions are treated with the tenderness of the immaturity that they will still display.
Many of the best research scientists I came across had never encountered any problems in their lives and were often appalling mentors to anyone who actually needed some practical mentoring.
One of the reasons I never became a maths teacher was that I knew that I had had zero problems with a single facet of school maths and was uniquely incapable of putting myself into the minds of those that had. For those who would be like me, why was I needed? I could just hand their parents a text book and tell them to let their son/daughter teach themselves at home.
I was a very good teacher of practical molecular biology to those with 5 A's at A level but verging on descending into depression at their inability to instantly master an artesanal activity with dozens of potential banana skins in every long-winded manual protocol. Those people had worked hard and would make you, a Professor, feel very slow and inadequate. But they too had unique weaknesses that the less intellectual and more practical usually sneer at.
Some children need encouragement and some children need to made to experience their own limitations. The most intelligent are usually more than aware of their limitations and their own mental anxieties are likely to be more of a block to success than any intrinsic ability. The hard-boiled rugger buggers probably need a bit of serjeant major-style advice and a good slap across the face if they start openly leering and wolf-whistling at 17 year old girls' chests.
Sometimes the best career advice is: 'this country hates your type of person, so emigrate'. The UK absolutely hates those who won't become peep-show perverts in the MI5/6 spying rings. Absolutely hates them. It's a country that venerates parasitic psychopaths crushing and controlling the most intellectually gifted in the country. Amazing that undergraduates plagiarising get kicked out of University but Senior Professors hacking computers University-wide see it as part of their job description, isn't it??
It may not have crossed your mind but hard work doesn't require military-style discipline. The best mentor I ever had in my life never once raised his voice to me. He completely transformed my violin playing in a way that amazed UK 'experts' who had given up on me. He put them all to shame, quite frankly. He dealt with the issues of the psyche, the technical and let nature take its course. He was wise enough to realise that I was open to hard work if I thought it was worth it, but I'd done 10 years of fruitless 'hard work' being forced by ignorant and incompetent pushers in the UK. He was like a master gardener knowing how to germinate seeds, let young seedlings grow and only plant them out when the time was ripe.
Other kinds of youngster to me will need very different approaches.
It all depends on their family growing up, their own unique temperaments and the nation in which they live. Even the part of the country they live in, sometimes.
There's no one solution to careers advice and just as the best footballers often don't make the best managers, individual achievement isn't necessarily correlated with the ability to give good advice to others.