Somewhere, some people have accused Gus of being a grumpy old man... I could not agree more. To some extend, I don't sleep at night and that tends to make me a grumpy philosopher, unlike Alain de Botton who seems to be very well balanced, serene and happy with himself, his fortune and a bed of rose petals... Good for him...

And of course I am often annoyed by thinking I know too much whilst nobody wants to know — or I am too pigheaded to appreciate the subtle beauty of Proust's elegant writing...

I know. And let me apologise here for finding Proust's output slightly hypocritical or quite schizophrenically double-faced — I feel the elegance of his turn of phrase is somewhat akin to someone looking at their own arse with a golden-framed mirror. That was my thought for the night...

Beyond this, I find religion quite like potty-training... Once you mastered the art of wiping your butt, you don't need the instruction manual anymore — unless you've got Alzheimer's, then you might require some necessary help... 

All this to say that I am angry...

Anger is a healthy beautiful emotion when under control and shifted into a positive framework... Anger contains a lot more energy than boredom, I can tell you... As long as you know how to channel the power of positive anger, nothing will be destroyed, nobody will get hurt and a lot will be achieved — quietly...

But why achieve something complicated when one can loaf alla Proust and write beautiful prose and poetry... admired around the world over? Ah, the complication of simplicity and success...

From Alain de Botton...

...

For a start, the great majority of acts that end up described as hypocritical don’t spring from an attempt to deceive; they come from an aspiration to be virtuous that goes wrong. The background to accusations of hypocrisy is ambition and often very nice ambition, for example, to do good for your country, to be a kind and caring parent, to be a truth seeking broadcaster or a chef interested in healthy eating. The problem is, human nature is inconstant, we are weak and therefore, given enough time, gaps will always appear between our ideals and sides of our reality. A man intensely devoted to the ideal of family will have an affair on a business trip, a politician devoted to meritocracy will, in a moment of poor judgement, slip a job to an old chum, a chef who has talked so much about organic farming will stop off at a road side restaurant and eat a hamburger. A tempting response, to news of these incongruous behaviours, is to say that the ideals were therefore all a complete lie and a slip is the truth. The chef doesn’t care about healthy eating, the politician was just a power driven nepotist, and the adulterer couldn’t give a monkey’s about his family. But we could choose to reject this comforting cynicism and accept that it is possible to be both morally ambitious, and weak, and that it may be better to have a shot at virtue, than never to aspire to it at all.

It often seems as if people are getting more hypocritical than ever but the truth is that we’re all simply under greater scrutiny than ever. No man is a hero to his valet, wrote Montaigne, suggesting that the closer you live to someone the more you will notice discrepancies between their ideals and their day-to-day reality. Thanks to modern technology, the media give us all a ringside seat on others’ lives and under such a spotlight, as valets know, the reality isn’t always delightful.

Most super injunctions are a response to super intolerance. A moralistic response to the desire for super injunctions is to ban super injunctions. A more mature one is to argue against the moralistic atmosphere that makes super injunctions necessary in the first place.

We should also be aware that stories of apparent hypocrisy by public figures delight us because they let us off the hook. In an egalitarian society, where we don’t really do deference, it can feel humiliating that some people hold to high ideals.  Their claims to virtue irk us, and make us feel small, therefore how pleasing if they turn out to be flawed after all. At last we’re not the only ones to sleep around, be lazy and vain, but my feeling is it is better to have an ideal to live up to 90 % of the time, than to have no ideal at all. So, let’s keep being ambitious about how we want to be, even if we can’t get there all of the time, and let’s not immediately beat up everyone who hasn’t conquered their passion or frailties, none of us have.

http://www.footdown.com/4240/unadulterated-hypocrisy-alain-de-botton/

Yes, we all know that hell is paved with good intentions, but there is also a factor that influence humankind: in order to survive, the weak human species basically had to become a deceitful, sociopathic, psychopathic species... to itself and to other species. The human species is "survival-faulty" compared to most streamlined animals. We are deficient should we be left individually to our own device or without a sense of stealing. Birds that become too fat, don't fly so they die, caught by the fox. We are our own inter-predator at most times. 

Life is about stealing protein from something else... It's its basic construct.

In the human world, in general, the rich will prey on the poor while the poor pray to god so that they will have another meal.

Lucky, our social constructs have tempered to a degree these traits of deceit, though they often lurk below our behaviour. Our social construct have instituted ways to limit the damage — by necessity of coexistence, not of individualistic temperament.

Very few are those pure of hearts, though we all strive to adhere to the code that have been devised for the survival of the group... by fear of punishment or by desire of a reward. Nothing wrong with this, but our altruism is very thin overall. 

De Botton is living with the pixies — the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

He struts the stage as if there was no ill-will out there, even in those who deliberately manipulate our goodwill and steal from our wallet... But with of all this, including the communication speed, one has to consider that there are a many devious characters, including preachers in the USA who have fallen for the flesh and then have begged for forgiveness, mainly because the affair affected the gold coins in the collection plate.

Hypocrisy has become a way of life for many people... And there is a level of non care at which we'll walk over other people to get in front.

More than a quarter of British children have seen distressing videos of animal cruelty online, according to research that reveals how little parents know about their offspring’s internet habits. The figure means animal-harm videos are now the most commonly viewed inappropriate content by under-16s.

Two thirds of youngsters have had a negative web experience, but only one in five parents realise this, according to the parenting website Netmums. More than 800 children, aged seven to 16, and 1,127 parents were interviewed in the study, published on Wednesday.

The psychological impact of exposure to disturbing online content was revealed by the comments children made about upsetting experiences. One child recalled that they had seen “a beaten-up dog all bleeding and some guy with a hammer laughing”. Another said: “When Facebook got hacked lots of pictures of animals being hurt were popping up.”

One video, viewed by thousands online, shows a young woman drowning a bucket of puppies in a river by throwing them in one by one.

Sometimes shocking content depicting animals being hurt is deliberately listed as something benign, such as “cute puppy”, on sharing sites such as Tumblr, in an effort to lure in unsuspecting viewers.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/children-lured-to-watch-animal-cruelty-online-8598178.html

This item in relation to Proust's rats... See at top...

From de Botton

You often hear it said that "museums of art are our new churches." In other words, in a secularising world, art has replaced religion as a touchstone of our reverence and devotion. It's an intriguing idea - part of the broader ambition that culture should replace scripture - but in practice art museums often abdicate much of their potential to function as new churches (places of consolation, meaning, sanctuary, redemption) through the way they handle the collections entrusted to them. While exposing us to objects of genuine importance, they nevertheless seem unable to frame them in a way that links them powerfully to our inner needs.

The problem is that modern museums of art fail to tell people directly why art matters, because Modernist aesthetics (in which curators are trained) is so deeply suspicious of any hint of an instrumental approach to culture. To have an answer anyone could grasp as to the question of why art matters is too quickly viewed as "reductive."

We have too easily swallowed the Modernist idea that art which aims to change or help or console its audience must by definition be "bad art" (Soviet art is routinely trotted out here as an example) and that only art which wants nothing too clearly of us can be good. Hence the all-too-frequent question with which we leave the modern museum of art: what did thatmean?

Why should this veneration of ambiguity continue? Why should confusion be a central aesthetic emotion? Is an emptiness of intent on the part of an art work really a sign of its importance? Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to teach us how to live, what to love and what to be afraid of. Such art is extremely simple at the level of its purpose, however complex and subtle it is at the level of its execution.

Christian art amounts to a range of geniuses saying such incredibly basic but extremely vital things as: "Look at that picture of Mary if you want to remember what tenderness is like." "Look at that painting of the cross if you want a lesson in courage." "Look at that Last Supper to train yourself not to be a coward and a liar." The crucial point is that the simplicity of the message implies nothing whatsoever about the quality of the work itself as a piece of art. Instead of refuting instrumentalism by citing the case of Soviet art, we could more convincingly defend it with reference to Mantegna and Bellini.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/10/09/3865535.htm

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Gus: Well well well... I would not spew my dinner here on something by De Botton — something that is quite reactionary... De Botton needs to understand images with a simple mind. He needs to associate art with the run of the mill and the already known — the trodden predictable path.

It is difficult to discover and accept the unknown and De Botton is not prepared to do this.... It can be an uncomfortable leap into a multitude of ways to express either the same messages or new ones... But he likes sweets and candy wrappers.

Art is many things including bad art, but it still is art. Art is a form of expression that can communicate or not. Why should I like beautiful (or ugly) shapes and curves more or less that a Christian icon in which a godly message has been entered? 

The Christian message is simplistic. The christian message has been deliberately manipulative to impress upon us ideas that are ludicrous — and for many centuries we have learnt to accept this message... It goes hand in hand with the images of glorious halos and beatitude... Yet the message is not there to give us sensation of tenderness and courage but it uses these emotional twists to access our ability to submit to the message — whether the message is correct or not. We have developed — in the west — such relationship with the neo-reality of the images that does not exist in the Muslim world for example... De Botton and his acolyte in book writing only express a very waspish whitey view of art...

Picasso studied African art in order to develop his own expression.

Abstract Aboriginal art can have a greater grip on emotions than any representations of the Virgin Mary... 

I could go on demolishing De Botton's arguments, but, as dilettante rich philosopher, De Botton looses the plot by being bourgeois... A petit bourgeois to say the least.

How to Think about Sex, How Proust can Change your Life, Status Anxiety and Religion for Atheists are just a few of the subjects Alain de Botton has addressed in his books (his first work, Essays in love, written at 23, sold two million copies). His prolific writing, TV programmes and media presence have made him an internationally popular philosopher, a label with which he has no problem. “The elites have a ridiculous suspicion of popularity”, he told a packed audience at the Edinburgh international books festival.

Dismissed as a self-help evangelist, shallow and obvious, with smarmy and banal ideas by critics in this newspaper, he divides opinions and is certainly intriguing. His latest work, The News: a User’s Manual, is an exploration of contemporary media and the impact of the 24-hour news bombardment. Whether he offers much new is up for discussion, but he is nothing if not quotable. Here are 10 of his provocations:

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/10/alain-de-botton-in-quotes-the-news-promotes-a-toxic-society-of-envy

Easy for Alain de Botton to talk about envy... He is loaded. May be he should try living in the gutter for a couple of months... May be he has tried it... Yes, De Botton has the knack to show our shallowness and our banality, that we obviously know about and some of us enjoy it... And he may like to know that the media at large is slowly breaking down. Yes "we follow the news" but not like a religion, Alain. We follow (some of) the news mostly to see what sort of crap our masters are planning for us, so we can counteract their neo-fascist deeds. Of course a lot of people fall for the tits and bums glittering in the media, but this is being replaced by the inanity of twittered communication while driving and creating accidents...

Heroes? We lost our heroes a long time ago, when they entered the Roman arena to fight the lions...

We live with our illusions and we press buttons... Modern society is no more toxic than it ever was... Kings and queens made sure the toxicity was never seen but toiled. Some people used to be slaves... And a lot of religions, mostly fanatical, rules the roost still, from the fundamentalists Christians in the US to the Muslim extremists in the middle east. Our present inanity is designed to make sure our little wars are fought somewhere else but in our backyards where the snags are being gently burnt on our stainless steel barbecues...

Read from top...

Englund called him “a kind of Marcel Proust for our time” but with caveats. “This is a very different project from the one Proust once undertook. One of the central themes of Modiano’s work are the problems of reaching back, not reaching back, not understanding, not getting to grips with it.”

Modiano’s win was not a complete surprise. The bookmakers Ladbrokes had him as fourth favourite with odds of 10/1 – he was 100/1 several months ago – while the overall favourite had been the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

The choice, announced in Stockholm, will disappoint anyone hoping for a writer who was not – once again – white, European and male, although the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro was last year’s winner.

Englund said of course Modiano was a white, European male but he was one who wrote great literature. “We don’t work according to quotas, we are just trying to give the prize to excellence and we don’t concern ourselves too much with ‘well, now we should have someone from this continent or that gender’. It would make our work impossible.”

Modiano’s work is infused with his own unhappy childhood. Born in Paris in 1945 his father was Albert Modiano, an Italian Jew who survived the war thanks to black market business deals with the Gestapo. He largely abandoned the family and Modiano once said of his mother, a Belgian actor called Louisa Colpeyn, that her heart was so cold that her lap dog leaped from a window to its death. It is also said that he does not know where his father is buried.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/09/nobel-prize-literature-winer-patrick-modiano-hailed-modern-marcel-proust

Anyone who mentions Proust and they get thrown into this column... Read from top... Never read anything from Modiano, though... I am nominating myself for the next Nobel prize of Blog writing, thank you for seconding.

De botton is an arm chair philosopher who is full of niceties... For those who have read the comments and articles in this line of blog, I find de Botton quite annoyingly nice, like a cup of tea where half a ton of sugar has fallen into.  His latest foray into motivation is as best naive, at worse very wrong. Here he goes:

Organisations are constantly playing around with the levers of financial motivation - offering or withholding money as an inducement or a threat. They use individual and team bonuses, cash rewards, profit sharing and company stock as ways of using economic factors to enhance motivation.

But there are some striking examples of motivation outside this system. The military is a central case. In the armed forces, often for very modest pay, people will do extraordinary things. Even die. It's an astonishing contrast. You can pay someone $38,000 a year to die for you. But you struggle to pay someone $45,000 a year to sit in a room and fill in forms.

This tells us that motivation simply cannot be primarily financial. People can be moved by money, but they can be moved and motivated more by other things. The armed forces also tell us something about where the strongest kinds of motivation come from.

In the army, the soldier doesn't just think they are serving their own interests; they see themselves as serving the best interests of their nation. They believe that what they are doing is right and deeply important. The intensity of their motivation is tied to their conviction of the great value of what they are involved in. It isn't for money that they are ready to suffer hardship and expose themselves to grave danger; it's for their country's honour or to protect the people they love.

BULLSHIT. That is a lot of bull of course. Men in the trenches during WWI were shot for deserting because they had enough of defending their loved ones, by living in hell. Men were sent to their death while drunk under orders. If you think this does not happen anymore, think again. Most pilots during the second Gulf War and those in Afghanistan were on a regimen of amphetamines and sleeping pills. The army is in general quite INEFFICIENT. It can take several thousands bullets to get rid of one "bad" guy. Even with the best accuracy in the world, the best armies have not managed to get rid of the "baddies", even if they are committed and brainwashed to die in protecting their loved ones, often from 8,000 miles away. It does not make sense. The paperwork is horrendous and short cuts are rife, many mistakes are made covered up by the hierarchy which wants to appear on top of things. Bollocks. So in short armies are efficient ONLY in their routine salutes, but on the playing field they stink. Concludes de Botton:

But already we can see the shape of the future of capitalism: a world where we get better at learning to make money from the Good - and where we learn how to make the Good more visible to employees and the world; so that one is working for money, but, as importantly, one can see that one is working to make a slightly better world, one elegant paper clip at a time.

Obviously de Botton is taking the publishers of his garbage as fools for publishing it. Capitalism is resisting doing anything good for the planet on global warming for example. Capitalism resides in the bosom of greed and greed is a sin according to the bible. De Botton is either a baffoon or taking the piss while spending his inheritance on sipping champagne and writing crap.

Good luck to him, but I am not buying. Zero. Read from top.

For more than 55 years, Summit Ministries has held conferences at its headquarters in Manitou Springs, Colo., and across the nation, training nearly a half-million young Christians to become leaders in their schools, communities, churches, families, and country. But the group has had to cancel its June 10-23 and June 24-July 7 sessions at Biola University near Los Angeles due to concerns that California will forbid some of what it teaches.

At issue is AB2943, a bill recently passed by the state Assembly and likely to be passed by the Senate, that seeks to insert provisions into the state’s Business and Professions Code to the effect that goods and services “offering to engage in, or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual” constitute deceptive business practices, and are subject to fines and penalties.

The proposed law includes a prohibition of “efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions, or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.”

“Summit’s program helps students develop an intelligent, defensible Christian worldview before they go to college,” Summit President Jeff Myers explained. “Our speakers are leading Christian experts who base their presentations on theology as well as sociology, psychology and science. But the wording of AB2943 is a dog whistle to the left that intelligent Christians holding traditional views are fair game for discrimination, smears and frivolous lawsuits.”

Read more:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christians-scared-away-fro...

Read from top... and yes Proust was a loafer, in love with his mum and suffering from "a renouncement of the present moment in order not to forget the past"...

Meanwhile in Aussie Nazi country:

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt has given a bizarre, combative interview over a recent push within the Liberal Party for gay conversion therapy, insisting his ABC interviewer state her beliefs about free speech.

Mr Hunt, a Victorian, was being asked about a now-dumped motion that was to be put to the Victorian Liberal Party's state council meeting calling on the state government to ensure better access to "counselling out of same-sex attraction or gender transitioning".

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/i-hope-you-run-it-in-full-greg-h...

The main protagonist of “À la recherche” – which was published between 1913 and 1927 – is a Jewish character, Swann. In parsing Proust’s treatment of Swann, Shilony notes the parallel that Proust makes in volume 2, “Swann in Love,” between his eponymous character and the Hebrew prophet Moses.

Like his creator, and like Moses, dying beyond the reach of the Promised Land, Swann “dies with his passion to lend meaning to his life through creative work still beyond his reach,” according to Shilony. Yet also like Moses, Swann, as Proust writes, has gained “a sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life and which, one after another, his mortal illness, the Dreyfus case and the anti-Semitic propaganda had reawakened.”

In contrast to the conservative, Catholic circles in which he was socially immersed, Proust was not only sympathetic to the disgraced Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, he also became actively involved in his defense, and his sentiments are reflected both in Swann and Jean Santeuil, the protagonist of his first, unfinished novel.

Proust identified with Dreyfus not because the victim of justice was a Jew, but because he understood that he had been framed, and that the implications of the case for French society were grave.

https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2016-07-10/ty-article/.premium/proust-is-born-will-have-mixed-feelings-about-jewish-heritage/0000017f-db29-d3a5-af7f-fbaf5acb0000

DeSantis, Haley Present Themselves to GOP Jews as Trump’s Top Challengers

Speaking to a receptive audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas, the Florida governor and former U.N. ambassador played up their bona fides on Israel.

LAS VEGAS – Gov. Ron DeSantis and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley headlined the final night of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual confab in Nevada, aiming to send a clear message to Donald Trump and GOP voters that they are the party’s future.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2022-11-20/ty-article/.premium/desantis-haley-present-themselves-to-gop-jews-as-trumps-top-challengers/00000184-9460-d86c-a1f7-f670e2410000

SHOULD WE CRY OR LAUGH? 

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 FROM CHRIS EDGES — READING PROUST IN TIME WAR....

...

Proust has a dark view of human nature. Those who carry out acts of charity and kindness in the novel almost always have ulterior or, at best, mixed motives. We betray people for bagatelles. We surrender our professed morality for self-advancement. We are indifferent to human suffering. We attack the faults of others but succumb to the same faults if “sufficiently intoxicated by circumstances.”

But because Proust expects so little from us, he extends pity, compassion and forgiveness to even the most loathsome of his characters, as they fade away at the end of the novel in a danse macabre. Our inner life, he concludes, is finally unfathomable, for it is always in flux. As we age we become shells, faded masks identifiable only by our names. Human folly, however, is redeemed because of our childlike yearning for the impossibility of the eternal and the absolute in the face of the destructive maw of time. 

Proust reminds us of who we are and who we are to become. Lifting the veil on our pretensions, he calls us to see ourselves in our neighbor. By immortalizing his vanished world, Proust exposes, and makes sacred, the vanishing world around us. His perceptions were a balm, a deep comfort, in the madness of war, where the mob bays for blood, death strikes at random, delusion is mistaken for reality and the impermanence of existence is terrifyingly palpable.

NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/20/chris-hedges-reading-proust-in-war/

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PROUST IS AN ANNOYING WRITER (he extends pity, compassion and forgiveness to even the most loathsome of his characters). PHEW! WE ARE FORGIVEN FOR BEING IDIOTS! ... AND HIS FICTION TELLS US THAT WE NEVER REACH OUR GOALS… (Swann “dies with his passion to lend meaning to his life through creative work still beyond his reach…) AS IF NOT KNOWING THE "MEANING OF LIFE" WAS A PROBLEM, RATHER THAN AN EXISTENTIAL PART OF LIVING… ONE OF THE CREATIVE TRICKS OF SOME ARTISTS (ME) IS TO NEVER FINISH ANYTHING, ALWAYS LEAVING ROOM FOR “IMPROVEMENTS” UNTIL WE CAN DO NO MORE. 

WHEN DO THE BIRDS DECIDE THAT THE NEST IS FINISHED? WHY IS OUR DNA LETTING US DOWN AS WE AGE TOWARDS SENILITY OR SILENT WISDOM? IS THE WORLD VANISHING AROUND US OR ARE OUR NEW PERCEPTIONS INTERFERING WITH THE MEMORY OF OUR PAST ILLUSIONS? 

…a balm, a deep comfort, in the madness of war, where the mob bays for blood, death strikes at random, delusion is mistaken for reality and the impermanence of existence is terrifyingly palpable…

YES WE KNOW. BUT I DO NOT NEED TO BE TERRIFIED BY THE IMPERMANENCE OF EXISTENCE… 

SO SHOULD WE GIVE UP ACTIONS AND MOVE TO THE TOP OF A MOUNTAIN OF ILLUSIONARY WISDOM LIKE A STARVING GURU —  OR FIGHT LIKE HELL TO MAKE RELATIVE SENSE OF OUR JOURNEY DURING WHICH WE CAN HAVE FUN, JOYS, AMAZEMENT AND WONDER? 

SHOULD WE MINIMISE PAIN, AVOID DELUSIONS AND BE HAPPY, SURFING ON TOP OF A FADING CREST IN THE SUNSET? 

IS THERE ANOTHER MEAL AFTER THIS ONE? WHY DOES IT TAKE US TWO GO’S AT TRYING TO OPEN A PACKET OF CHIPS? OR WHY CAN’T WE FIND THE CORRECT CASCADE OF MENUS TO A SMARTPHONE, WHILE A YOUNG KID DOES IT IN UNDER THREE SECONDS?

ARE WE EASILY SUPERSEDED?… SURE. BUT IT'S US. THERE IS NO HOLY GRAIL...

READ FROM TOP.

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW AND LISTEN TO ERIC SATIE'S MUSIC.........