I keep putting away my warm clothes with undue optimism, hoping we’ve seen the last of the cold, damp weather.
We have passed the vernal equinox — why am I still wearing a wool coat and scarf?
(Well, today was lovely, in fact, but yesterday was wintery, and I was having these thoughts yesterday.)
So Benjamin and I were tired of spending this nominal spring indoors. We put on our warm clothes and headed into the woods. It was windy and chilly, and I was feeling foolish, but by the time we got to the bend in the creek where Benjamin likes to look for interesting-looking rocks, the clouds had parted for a while, and we were able to sit in the sun by the "chatter and bubble," and I took out my Kindle and read to Benjamin from the The Wind in the Willows, which opens in spring, with Mole suddenly unable to remain indoors. He abandons his spring cleaning and heads up and out into an unfamiliar world:
Be warned, though: after reading his MEMOIRS, you may find your cultural habits changed forever. You will never again feel the need to acquire an opinion of Tom Friedman’s latest essay in best-selling globaloney so as not to be caught short at the next round of cocktail-party Book-of-the-Moment-Club “conversation.” You will never again think of an Ivy League graduate or a Ph.D. on the one hand, and an educated mind on the other, as being in any way synonymous – even in theory. And you will never, even for a moment, confuse your daily NEW YORK TIMES habit with an instrument of mental cultivation – if, in fact, you retain it at all. And you may find yourself doubled over in helpless laughter the next time some Volvo-driving professional describes the programming on NPR as “serious intellectual radio.” And you will leave your first astonished reading of Nock with a silent question, addressed to every teacher and writer to whom you have hitherto entrusted the fertilization of your mind: “Where (or why) have you been hiding Albert Jay Nock all my life?”
Yesterday morning, Benjamin read us the Last Supper scene from his children’s bible, then I read the same scene from the Gospel of Mark. Mark is good when you want the shortest version of a story shared across the synoptic gospels. My wife and I wondered what to follow up with for our grown-up "bible study."
Because Judas plays such a pivotal role in the Last Supper, we decided on Bart D. Ehrman’s The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which opens with a description of Ehrman’s time in Switzerland as part of the team assembled by National Geographic to assess the authenticity of the 1,700-year-old codex of this lost Gnostic gospel. That story is itself so interesting that we decided that for our weekly “Dinner and a Documentary” we’d watch the National Geographic special made about Judas and this long-lost document from early Christianity.
[T]here has been a well-established and heartfelt desire on the more moderate left to claim that Orwell was indeed a genuine socialist whose warning was aimed at totalitarianism in general, not at the left per se.
I was reared and schooled by the kinds of leftists who embraced Orwell and taught me that 1984 was about totalitarianism in general, not socialism per se. I even thought of the book as an attack on the Reagan administration, and argued with my (neo)conservative girlfriend about it in high school. A few years later, I was very embarrassed by my easy acceptance of the interpretation I had been taught.
Benjamin wanted to watch Charlotte’s Web (the animated version from the early 1970s) for Friday-night dinner and a movie. Many of the book’s greatest lines are preserved in the script. Here’s one of my favorites:
“I didn’t know you could lay eggs,” said Wilbur in amazement.
“Oh, sure,” said the spider. “I’m versatile.”
“What does ‘versatile’ mean — full of eggs?” asked Wilbur.
The whole family was at the bank yesterday afternoon, signing papers. Mother and father took turns hanging out with Benjamin in the lobby while the other parent visited with one of the bankers.
During my turn in the lobby, I read to Benjamin from the second Artemis Fowl novel: The Arctic Incident. I was doing my best to switch back and forth between American, Irish, and Russian accents, when another banker, not the one we were dealing with, came out of his office with a big smile and said, “Excuse me. I just had to interrupt. You’re reading Artemis Fowl? My daughter loved that series. She read the whole thing; then she made me read the whole thing. It’s just great!”
And then he disappeared back into his office.
I guess you can consider that a sort of book review.
Old books plus new technology can make modern-day liberalism the most refreshing and interesting movement around, giving the thoughtful young person a welcome alternative to the smug, hidebound intellectualism of the Left and the proud anti-intellectualism of the Right.
Do we see signs of Austrianism in Egyptology and marketing?
I don’t think Barbara Mertz is a praxeologist, by which I mean that I don’t assume she would accept the claims of a priori laws concerning social phenomena, but she certainly shares Mises’s methodological dualism.
After a discussion of some standard causal theories about the rise and decline of civilization, Mertz concludes,
This has been a very superficial, limited probing of some of the types of problems we encounter when we talk about causes in history. We have not even settled the important question of whether there are causes. Yet we will probably go right on looking for them, and talking about them. The intellectual climate of our own era asks for explanations. We would like, if we could, to reduce all phenomena to systems of logical sequence. In part this is the effect of the prestige of the physical sciences, and this effect is not always for the good. History may be “scientific” in its approach, and the social studies may be “social sciences” in the sense that they apply dispassionate, critical, and rigorously logical analyses to the subjects of their discourse. But the disciplines that deal with man and his peculiar affairs cannot expect to use the methods, or anticipate the results, of the physical sciences. The human experiment will not reproduce itself under laboratory conditions; we can never control our specimens to such a degree that we can isolate a pertinent stimulus or determine a specific conclusion. My personal antipathy toward the use of the term “scientific” in the humanistic disciplines is that the very application of the word sometimes suggests to the user that such isolation and such determination are possible. Sometimes I wish they were.
We have a more personal need, in our time, to dissect the past in search of its pathology, for according to some historians our own culture is showing disturbing signs of disease. However you define the developmental stages of civilization, and upon what ever step you put us here, in this twenty-first century of the Christian Era, it seems unlikely that we are at the beginning of a process. This leaves us with the dismal possibility that we may be nearing the end. If so, it behooves us to discover, insofar as we are able, where we are, and why. If there are universal causes, and if we are able to see them plainly, we may learn how to avoid their more disastrous consequences.
That is one of the reasons why we look for reasons. Whether we have any grounds for supposing that we will find them is another question. At the moment, it appears that our only recourse, if we are about to fall, is to go down gracefully.
Barbara Mertz continues to delight me. Here’s this morning’s contribution:
Thutmose III, everybody agrees, was the greatest warrior Egypt ever produced. He has been compared with Alexander and Napoleon, particularly the latter; for when Thutmose’s mummy was found and examined, the anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith reported that he was a little fellow, slightly over five feet tall — pretty short, even for an ancient Egyptian. This led to the usual psychological cliches about little men and their need to prove their manhood. It wasn’t until fairly recently that someone actually took another look at the mummy and pointed out that the feet were missing. Remeasurements and recalculations resulted in quite a different figure. Thutmose was of average height for an Egyptian — approximately five feet seven inches.
This is a relatively minor point, I suppose, but I mention it because it is further proof of the advantages of revisionism. To claim that Thutmose’s accomplishments were “compensation” for a subconscious sense of inadequacy or frustration is a cheap explanation.
I keep putting away my warm clothes with undue optimism, hoping we’ve seen the last of the cold, damp weather. 
Yesterday morning, Benjamin read us the Last Supper scene from his children’s bible, then I read the same scene from the Gospel of Mark. Mark is good when you want the shortest version of a story shared across the synoptic gospels. My wife and I wondered what to follow up with for our grown-up "bible study." 
This article
Do we see signs of Austrianism in Egyptology and marketing?
Barbara Mertz continues to delight me. Here’s this morning’s contribution:
