Hot coffee come closer
And kiss thirsty lips.
Be welcomed with love
At each of your sips.
You can change the world,
At least for this man.
Fulfill your potential.
Then do it again.
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.
This is an excerpt from my interview with Dr. Brad Birzer in which we discuss the definition of conservatism. -P
Penjammin: Let's talk about mischaracterizations, what conservatism is and what it's not. So we've kind of been looking at [conservatism] from a bunch of different angles. I was kind of trying to identify the thing and then try to analyze it, see what it is that makes it conservative and what's more accidental. Now let's try to do some contrast. What is conservative accused of being, compared to what it is?
Brad: Yeah, I think the biggest thing, and this would be in terms of conservatism as well as libertarianism, I think the biggest criticism is that we're selfish, that we're only thinking about the self and we're not thinking about others. And to me, when we look at everything from the American founding all the way up to Russell Kirk, we're really looking at our relations with one another. So it's not just Brad and Pen. It is two human beings who are interacting with one another, and we bring out the best hope in one another. That's what we're trying to do. So when I engage my daughters or I engage my students, I'm not trying to make them little Brad's. I'm trying to make them who and what they were meant to be . . . We make them better for what they are meant to be, which either God or nature (or both probably) has defined.
For more, check out The Imaginative Conservative. Also, hear the whole episode here:
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.
This is an excerpt from my interview with Dr. Winfried Corduan in which we discuss the Christmas-famous Magi. Hear the whole thing here. -P
Penjammin: You hear people talking about the Magi all the time. It's like, “oh, well, they they had some contact with material in Numbers or they had contact with material in Genesis or [especially] Daniel.” They'll say that Daniel was their leader once upon a time, and so he left his Magi in his place (when he was in Babylon). And those guys would have known the scriptures, and they could have done math and figured out prophecies that [implied]: here comes the king-of-the-Jews time. Now, that you hear all the time, but this is different . . .
Win Corduan: Well, here's the thing that I have become increasingly convinced of. About three years ago, I may have said something along the line of why, precisely, they went to Judea and Jerusalem and then on to Bethlehem. That remains a mystery. Well, I have been more and more convinced that the theory that Zoroaster had had contact with the Israelites in exile, that theory has a lot of merit to it. Now I realize that most scholarship over the last hundred years has gone in the other direction, that some of the Jews learned about their religion from the Persians, but there really isn't enough overlap there to make that plausible at all. But it is plausible that (okay, I'm saying Israelites, not Jews, but) the so-called ten lost tribes who were deported into what at the time was then the Assyrian Empire with their belief in one God (assuming that they repented from all their idolatry). It was very likely that Zoroaster came in contact with some of them and that he picked up the idea of one God, possibly. And I'm saying, with greater probability than I used to think, [that] he picked it up from the Israelites and then incorporated it as he carried out the very much needed reformation of the original Persian polytheism.
For more, find Win's compilation of relevant blog posts here and hear the whole interview here.
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.
This is an excerpt from my talk with Monistic Idealism. We discuss Idealism, Berkeley, and his new livestream series Idealism Forever. -P
Penjammin: That's the part that stood out to me there. Would you explain to people why is it that they wouldn't know that their experience of this physical world (on a dualist or materialist view). . . why should they think that it is not as the world actually is? It seems like common sense that, “Hey, there's a bus coming. I see a bus coming. That means that there's a bus coming.” And they would take [that] as just a direct correspondence between the actual world and what they observe. But Locke and others have said that maybe that's not the case. Why is that?
Jordan / Monistic Idealism: Great question. Um, so Berkeley answers this. Reality is experience. If that's what an object is (just an experience) and if I'm experiencing it, well, then I am perceiving reality the way it really is. But if you think the world is physical or material, or you're a dualist and you think it's more than experience, then How could you ever know? would be the question. You're putting yourself in a skeptical scenario. So you have your experiences, but you're saying there's a world beyond your experiences. You're saying there's more. There's this physical world out there, beyond all of our experiences. And so the question is, well, how would you actually know that? I mean, you couldn't you couldn't appeal to your experiences because you're saying reality is more, [that] it's somehow different. But if you're an idealist, you can say, yes, reality is what I'm experiencing. And that's the point George Berkeley made. He said, if you are an idealist, now you really can affirm common sense, right? But if you're not an idealist, now you're not affirming common sense, because you've put yourself in this skeptical scenario where you're not really sure if anything you're seeing is really real… because the physical world is different than experience. So how do you really know?
For more, follow Jordan on twitter, on youtube and listen below.
Also Jordan made a fun video version of this episode with illustrations.
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.
This is part two of my interview with the Culinary Libertarian. Our interview went over, and we just kept talking, kinda freestyle without any subject in particular to get to. So it's that kind of fun. (Hense the dvd-esc title.) We talk about benefit of the doubt, conservatism, family and more. There's an excerpt below. Get the whole thing, along with my eletter, here.
Dann: . . . There's more than two sides. But to keep the discussion simple, there's side A and side B, and there's propaganda on both sides A and B. If you think your side is free of propaganda and if you think your side of history is all sunshine and roses, then you're the problem, not the history. . . . It's hard to emotionally and mentally get yourself around the idea that my side did bad things and I accept that. That's a very difficult position to be in.
Penjammin: And that brings up a point about conservatism, too. (Yeah, I defend conservatism but probably not of a kind that everybody agrees with.) In principle, to me, [conservatism] is cultivating the inherited good. And I think, by definition, that has to be unobjectionable. Now, if that's actually what conservatives are doing, that's a completely different question. Often they're not. Often they're just, you know, driving liberal agenda by the speed limit as they say. But conservatism proper, I think, is cultivating the inherited good. But part of that process is discerning what you've inherited; what is good, what's the baby [and] what's the bathwater. And slavery… that inherited cultural institution needed to go. That's great, but other things maybe need to stay and you cultivate that. So with that sense of it, I think you're exactly right. Where are you coming from (your people, your tribe, whatever you identify with)? What's inherited in there? What have you received? And then Where is it good? Where is it bad?” That's the introspective self-evaluation you're talking about. What do you think about that? I know, you might have some opinions on that… Feel free to speak your peace.
Dann: Well, it's an interesting idea, and cultivating the inherited good, comes with the stated (we'll call it a principle for now) principle that there was an inherited good. What if there wasn't? What if there was not good and really not good?
Penjammin: So, it's all inherited bad, huh? Okay.
Dann: What if?
Penjammin: Okay. Just hypothetically, why not?
Dann: What if that's the case? What if there isn't inherited good. There's just inherited levels of not good to really, really, really not good. So we brought up the Constitution before, uh, and I think it requires more than just reading the document. It was written by a bunch of lawyers who were very crafty and clever with their words to make a government that protected them from the masses. It was sold as something to protect the masses from the government. But that certainly hasn't worked out to be the case in 238 years. We can certainly say today that that's not the case. So somewhere along the way it went off the rails. My question is, what if it was designed never to be on the rails to begin with?
Penjammin: So what you're saying is- if I'm hearing you're right. (I'm not going to do the Karen Newman whatever. Um, Cathy Newman, “what you're saying is” [laughs].) IF I'm hearing you right… (I not going to assume that I am-)
Dann: Jordan, his composure during that interview really was-
Penjammin: Inspiring, among other things. Yeah.
Dann: Yes.
Penjammin: But yeah. So, IF this is what you're saying, that here's something, the constitution, which is taken to be a good that's been inherited, and even it is not so good (there may be somethings [we could take out of it] but it's really, you say, muddy and very much not good), then what is their [the conservative’s] inherited good? And I would put to you that perhaps the sphere of politics would be the most minute social sphere of which conservatism is interested. That's one thing that bugs me a lot when people talk about conservatism is that it's almost defined by Republicans. And why would on earth would you let them define what this is for you? It's about family, which does not necessarily have to do with politics. It has to do with faith and other things which people are [about separating] church and state. So it seems like there are so many things that are bigger, more intimate, and have more to do with it. I think historically even politics has been peripheral at best. So now it's becoming definitive. And so yes, that might be one place; maybe everything in politics is inherited bad to some degree (just for sake of argument), but then you got to say family is good, even if it's imperfect.
Dann: So I don't disagree with you, but this is one of those things. So, um. Family. Do you remember? You're probably old enough to remember… I can't remember the actress- Candice Bergen Show. There was a news show, and as an actress, she got very hot under the collar over Dan Quail's version of family. Mother, father, two kids and half . . .
Get the whole discussion, along with my eletter, here.
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves and lived every moment marinated in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… See About for full story, and get his eletter at penjams.com/subscribe.