My Preoccupied Mind: Blogging and Research

I haven’t been posting as much to my blog lately. I wanted to explain my reasons, in case anyone cared to know.

I’ve been thinking a lot about some related things.

A while back, I started a post about the radicalism of the Enlightenment. Many people, especially conservatives, forget how violently the traditional social order was overturned, in order to create the world we know today. Modern capitalist society may be many things, but it has nothing to do with any traditional social order and the same goes for modern conservatism that aligns itself with capitalism.

That led me to other topics. I was reminded, among other things, to some of my earlier thinking on the Axial Age, Julian Jayne’s breakdown of the bicameral mind, etc. I’ve always sensed a hidden connection between that earlier era of transformation and the radicalism of the Enlightenment, the latter being a greater expression and fulfillment of what first emerged more than two millennia ago.

With all of that in mind, I was looking many different articles and books. My curiosity has been in full gear ever since. I’m in research mode, which for me can be quite an obsessive and time-consuming activity.

This was made worse because I got into a discussion about shame. While putting the radicalism post on the back burner, I looked into this other topic, as I had never explored it before. It turned out that shame is a lot more fascinating than I had considered.

My investigation into the meaning of shame once again led me back in the same direction that the issue of radicalism had brought me.

Julian Jaynes had written about the comparison of shame and guilt cultures. He was influenced in by E. R. Dodds. Combined with the earlier philological work of Bruno Snell, Dodds in turn based some of his own thinking about the Greeks on the work of Ruth Benedict. She originated the shame and guilt culture comparison in her writings on Japan and the United States. Benedict, like Margaret Mead, had been taught by Franz Boas. Boas developed some of the early anthropological thinking that saw societies as distinct cultures.

Connected to these thinkers, I was reading Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes the World. I realized a connection to my own speculations about symbolic conflation, about which I recently wrote a post. I explored that in a fair amount of detail, but it only touched upon one area of my mind’s focus as of late.

As you can see, I was exploring the connections of scholarly thought, but also the connections of different time periods. The past speaks to the present, whether the past of centuries before or millennia before.

At the same time, I feel like I have a family obligation to finish up the genealogy research I started years ago. I got distracted by other things. I do enjoy genealogy, but it is difficult and requires total focus. I have barely even started on my father’s side of the family.

I have my hands full. I enjoy blogging and will continue to do so, but it might be sporadic in the immediate future. I’m not sure what I might blog about, when I do get around to it. I’m known for being easily distracted and writing about such distractions.

Faith in the Power of Knowledge

I was continuing to think more about knowledge, learning and communication.

I’m always reading and researching. One thing I love about my Kindle is that it allows me to do a search of terms across all of my books, excluding the physical books on my shelves. I have enough ebooks now that doing searches is more fun activity.

That is how I was wasting my time recently. I was doing various searches just to see what would come up. I was looking up terms like “Anti-Federalism” and “Articles of Confederation”, but also terms such as “eligible” combined with “vote”. Doing this kind of activity reminds me of how much there is to know and how little I know in comparison.

With those last search terms, I found my way to Liberty in America’s Founding by Howard Schwartz. I always have so many books I’m meaning to start reading or finish that it is nice to have books brought back to my attention. This particular book I had almost entirely forgotten about. My search first brought me to a section on Jefferson and Locke, and then looking at the table of contents I noticed the author had a section on John Dickinson. Oh, what a lovely find/rediscovery.

Just reading a few short sections really did get me excited. The author was presenting a very original perspective. The guy is obviously well informed and he brings so much together. It is books like this that demonstrate the power of knowledge to shift one’s perspective. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if knowledge were to shift the perspective of our entire society, a shift to a new understanding, maybe even an entirely new paradigm.

That is why I so often return to the Axial Age, the Enlightenment, and the Revolutionary Era. Those were fulcrum points in history when entire worldviews shifted like plate tectonics. At the heart of those shifts were new understandings and perspectives. Beginning with the Axial Age in particular, books were what much of that hinged upon, books as a technology to transfer knowledge and insight from one mind to another, across boundaries of nations, religions and ethnicities.

I read and write so much because I have this genuine faith in the power of knowledge. I wish I had endless amounts of time to do nothing but read and write.

Fighting Ignorance With a Love of Learning

I sometimes write long posts, as anyone knows who has visited my blog. I don’t just ramble endlessly because I like to hear my own voice. The motivation is that I’m in a constant state of reading and learning, and my blog is the main way I process my own thinking and give it form. I do want to communicate in a way that can be understood by others, but that is a secondary process that arises from the act of writing itself.

Still, I sometimes wonder who may actually be paying attention, assuming anyone is. Most of my posts don’t necessarily get a ton of views or comments. Most don’t get any comments at all, although others get more comments than I know what to do with. I’m not sure why I feel like I need to justify my rambling posts to anyone. I know the rule of blogging, if you want a popular following, is to keep it short. But that ain’t me. My mind rambles… always has done and probably always will. I like my rambling mind, even if others don’t appreciate it as much.

I get so excited by things I learn that I want to share them. Learning is just plain awesome.

Just these past few days I’ve come to understand some things I hadn’t really understood before. For my entire adult life, I’ve heard quotes of Thomas Jefferson writing about dissent such as watering the tree of liberty, but I never really understood it. In reading about Anti-Federalists, I suddenly grasp the larger context of what dissent meant back then. It is kind of strange that an aristocrat like Jefferson would advocate dissent when many of the other founding elites were less welcoming to dissent and its relationship to agrarianism. The pieces came together in my mind and now I better understand something I didn’t fully understand before.

That makes me happy. I’m a tiny bit less ignorant today than I was yesterday. Fighting ignorance one day at a time.

I wish I was better at communicating my excitement about learning. Sometimes it is hard to express why a particular issue or quote fascinates me so much or, as I like to say, gets caught in my craw. I try to connect my thinking about larger issues to a more grounded level, abstract issues to subjective experience, historical issues to present realities. But I suspect I fail more often than I succeed. My rambling mind is my Achille’s Heel. When I ramble, I can really ramble. My mind just goes on and on and on, one thought leading to a thousand other thoughts, one book leading to book after book. My mind vomits out quotes and thoughts, ideas and observations… worthy or not. They are just there in my head and they want to be free.

To most people, I suppose subjects like history are boring. I used to be like that when I was younger. No one was able to communicate to my younger self why history mattered. I was raised to appreciate education, but it took me to leave school before I could develop a genuine love of learning. I’d love to inspire more people toward such a curiosity-driven attitude. The world, past and present, really is an endlessly fascinating place.

Even so, the ignorance in the world sure can be frustrating at times. Ignorance is everywhere, including within myself. It is precisely because our ignorance is greater than our knowledge that one never has to worry about running out of things to learn. I sometimes want to devour the entire world with my mind. There is too much to know for too little time.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 46,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 11 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

Marmalade’s New Blogs

Posted on Jan 3rd, 2009 by

Marmalade

This blog is a continuation of an earlier blog about blogging:

Blogging Options

I’ve continued to have blogging sites on my mind, but my focus has been renewed. I thought that getting a new blog started would be a good new year’s resolution. Actually, I’ve had a number of blogs started for a long while. I just haven’t done anything with them.

I’ve been playing around with these blogs. I wanted to experiment with their options. All have similar functions for my purposes.

WordPress has pages that can be altered which the others don’t, but Blogger has categories that can be used in a similar way as pages. The concensus is that WordPress is the best option if you are willing to pay for self-hosting and put a lot of effort into developing it. As for hosted sites, Blogger seems to be better than WordPress… for most non-professional bloggers. I’m not interested in self-hosting, but still the hosted WordPress isn’t a bad option. It does have a lot of capability.

There are two blogs I had before my Gaia blog, but have only posted on either a couple of times. Live Journal and My Opera are different in that they emphasize the social aspect and have types of functions you won’t find on many blogging platforms. Both are major sites, and Live Journal in particular is very well established.

I joined Live Journal because of people I knew from MBTI forums. I belong to some groups on Live Journal, but I haven’t visited them in a long time. Live Journal is very basic in how it looks. However, I care more about functionality than looks and Live Journal has much to offer.

My Opera was the blog I started right before this one. I joined there because my favorite blogger (Quentin S. Crisp) posts there. The downside I found was that there were a fair number of non-English blogs, but that could be seen as a positive in that it attracts an international crowd. Even though My Opera is not very well known, its a major site that is quite impressive. I’m surprised that it rarely gets brought up in comparisons between Blogger and WordPress.

There are really good bloggers using all of these. A good blogger is a good blogger even on a simple blogging site, and vice versa. I want to explore other people’s blogs on these sites to see what others are doing. I’m also going to start posting on my own new blogs.

Here are the links to the 4 blogs I’m now focused on:

https://benjamindavidsteele.wordpress.com/

http://benjamindavidsteele.blogspot.com/

http://marminfp.livejournal.com/

http://my.opera.com/MarmaladeINFP/blog/

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Tagged with: blog, platforms, sites, hosted, WordPress, Blogger, Blogspot, Live Journal, My Opera

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