how teutonic of you

yo popski

There are certain aspects of my childhood where I’ve determined my parents did a good job and where they did a bad job. It’s 5:00am and really, I should be sleeping, but if I don’t get this down on paper, I know I’m going to forget this. These are almost like rules for my unborn son.

• Brushing your teeth: When my parents told me to brush my teeth, their persuasive skills were all rhetoric, no reason: “you will brush your teeth because I said so!” To be a good parent, you must be tyrannical (to an extent). It has to be your way or the highway. But in my old age, I’ve come to realize that there could have been far better ways to get me to brush my teeth. It could have been phrased like this: “brush your teeth, because when you’re out wandering Antarctica in your mid-twenties, there won’t be any dentists that can patch up those cavities.”

Shit! Ok, ok! I’m going, I’m going!

How frightening to think of the telelogical implications of telling your kid - when she’s at an age where he’ll believe there’s a Santa if you let her know, or a Satan if you rearrange the letters - that, above all else, he must follow these two guidelines in life:

1. You must be kind to everyone
2. The most rebellious act is to remain invisible and have an incendiary imagination able to fire salvo after salvo of skeptical reason at every ideological belief sent in your direction.

I think this is really funny. There are ads out there advertising an online Ph.D from Liberty University in Theology. This is Jerry Fallwell’s touted academic system - the one where he hires URI Geology Ph.D students who study marine reptiles that existed 65 million years ago yet still retain a fervent belief in intelligent design as a better method than evolution. How does this happen? A strong, strong belief - one which I can’t come to comprehend. But as a Rhetoric student, I think I have to respect.

From the ad:

Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary’s Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Theology and Apologetics provides advanced training in the fields of Christian theology and apologetics, equipping students to become leaders in academics and ministry and providing direct interaction with leaders in theology and apologetics while also offering practical opportunities to write and teach in the field. This degree will qualify the student to teach at the university or graduate level, while also providing insight and information useful to the professional minister.

Technical Requirements:
Internet connection, web browser, email account, windows 98 or better, 120 MHz, 64 Meg RAM. Adobe Acrobat

On-Campus Requirement:
There are no on-campus requirements for online programs.

Interpretive Demonstration Of The Fact That There is No Such Thing As A Private Language

David Foster Wallace (from footnote 23 in “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over English” in the April 2001 Harper’s Magazine)

It’s sometimes tempting to imagine that there can be such a thing as a Private Language. Many of us are prone to lay-philosophizing about the weird privacy of our own mental states, for example, and from the fact that when my knee hurts only I can feel it, it’s tempting to conclude that fo me the word pain has a very subjective internal meaning that only I can truly understand. This line of thinking is sort of like the adolescent pot-smoker’s terror that his own inner experience is both private and unverifiable, a syndrome that is technically known as Cannabic Solipsism. Eating Chips Ahoy! and staring very intently at the television’s network PGA event, for instance, the adolescent pot-smoker is struck by the ghastly possibility that e.g., what he sees as the color green and what other people call “the color green” may in fact not be the same color experiences at all: The fact that both he and someone else call Pebble Beach’s fairways green and a stoplight’s GO signal green appears to guarantee only that there is a similar consistency in their color experience of fairways and GO lights, not that hte actual subjective quality of those color experiences is the same; it could be that what the adolescent pot-smoker experiences as green everyone else actually experiences as blue, and what we “mean” by the word blue is what he “means” by green, etc. etc., until the whole line of thinking gets so vexed and exhausting that the a.p.-s ends up slumped crumb strewn and paralyzed in his chair.

The point here is that the idea of a Private Language, like Private Colors and most of the other solipsistic conceits with which this particular reviewer has at various times been aflicted, is both deluded and demonstrably false.

In the case of Private Language, the delusion is usually based on the belief that a word such as “pain” has the meaning it does because it is somehow “connected” to a feeling in my knee. But as Mr. L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations proved in the 1950s, words actually have the meanings they do because of certain rules and verification tests that are imposed on us from outside our own subjectivities, viz., by the community in which we have to get along and communicate with other people. Wittgenstein’s argument, which is admittedly very complex and gnomic and opaque, basically centers on the fact that a word like “pain” means what it does for me because of the way the community I’m part of has tacitly agreed to use “pain”.

If you’re thinking that all this seems not only abstract but also pretty irrelevant to the Usage Wars or to anything you have any real interest in at all, you are very much mistaken. If words’ meanings depend on transpersonal rules and these rules on community consensus, language is not only conceptually non-Private but also irreducibly “public”, “political”, and “ideological”. This means that questions about our national consensus on grammar and usage are actually bound up with every last social issue that millennial America’s about - class, race, gender, morality, tolerance, pluralism, cohesion, equality, fairness, money: You name it.