Update 2: ‘Genius’ In Contemporary America

America, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Logic, Music, Reason, The Zeitgeist

With the death of objective standards, the assessment of everything from cultural products to moral nature has become near impossible.

Consider: According to author Richard Reeves, classical liberal John Stuart Mill was “learning Greek at three, taking in Plato and Sophocles at ten, and turning, at eleven, to the mastery of Aristotle’s logic.” Indisputably a genius. Genial too, I believe—which goes against the romanticized notion whereby true genius involves eccentricities and crazy behavior. It seldom does.

The slow Morley Safer of “60 Minutes” has repeatedly provided examples of the difficulties fin de siècle America has in assessing genius.

Some time ago, Morely headed over to Julliard, if I recall, to feature a young man touted as a musical prodigy. The boy was full of affectation and acted eccentrically, as he obviously believed a young man of his “abilities” ought to.

Over the course of this most mundane hour, it became obvious that what you had here were pushy parents and their cocky, narcissistic son, who’d managed to eliminate along the way any opinion contrary to theirs with respect to their son’s designation as a musical genius.

One old school Russian master, who was of the opinion that the lad was not particularly good, was subject to complaints, and promptly dismissed. The rest at Julliard simply fell into compliance with the genius designation out of ignorance and pseudo-intellectualism.

Suffice it to say that to listen to the lad’s compositions was to know right away that he had very little to offer. Passion was remiss, other than for himself. Technique was non-existent. He had, however, watched a lot of Leonard Bernstein footage, as he emulated Lenny’s antics. Thing is, the prodigious Lenny, as repugnant a persona as he was, delivered. I myself am inspired to leap up in the air and land as did Lenny when listening to his recording of Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka. Great fire and precision in that interpretation. (Actually I do leap in the air to Petrushka.)

Particularly amusing to this music lover—Bach, any Bach, and chamber music, in particular—was this goddamn-awful self-styled genius’ insistence that, like Bach, he never needed to erase the music he wrote down. I’m not sure this is fact or folklore, but it is said that Bach Senior wrote without having to erase.

Stupid Safer found this very convincing. I found this an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy:

The moron had read that J. S. Bach never corrected the music he wrote. He concluded therefore that if he never erased the crap he transcribed he’d be in his right to lay claim to Bach-like genius.

Listening to this lad’s self-reverential, introspective, crappy, choppy compositions was all one needed to conclude that decades of tutoring with an exacting master would be required to produce a solid piece.

The revolting reality was that the pandering parents and pedagogues surrounding this lad partook in the charade.

Update 1 (April 6): Since it seems some readers have not understood what is meant by post hoc logic, let me try again. If A then B is correct in logic. In Bach’s case: his abilities (A) led to his not needing to rewrite what he wrote (B). The proof was in the pudding too, i.e., the music is heavenly; assessed by objective standards, Bach’s music epitomizes genius.

If B then A is wrong in logic. It is exactly the case of the stupid kid. He refuses to rewrite (B) and improve despite the opinion of people greater than he that this is indeed what is required of him if he is to improve. From the act of not rewriting (B), he and his accomplices have reasoned backwards and concluded that his abilities are Bach-like (A).

Reasoning backwards is an error, illogic, bogus. What this means it that there are many other reasons for his not rewriting. Hubris being one.

What had happened is that the lad had imbibed the story of Bach not rewriting, and concluded that if he did not rewrite (B), he indeed did not need to rewrite (A). That the music doesn’t approach reasonable standards in complexity and beauty certainly suggests that scrapping it and trying again is the first order of the day. That other fine—and thus so fired—teachers have suggested that a great deal of learning and rewriting is what’s required if an improvement is to be attained suggests that there are, if anything, good reasons to rewrite and rewrite a lot.

I’ve explained the post hoc error laboriously. If you fail to get this distinction, I can’t help much more that I already have.

Update 2: I’m delighted that Barely A Blog’s resident musician (settle down ye humorless; that was meant to sound pompous), Professor Ira Newborn, has dilated on the topic of the modern-day genius with his usual flare.

Ira is a well-known, highly-accomplished composer. He may be known more for his popular “motion picture soundtracks,” but I’ve heard some of his more serious compositions. Yeah, baby: those made me leap up in the air too, as does Lenny’s Fire Bird and Petrushka. I only wish the tracts where available to the public. How about it, Ira? How sad that the bad (Wonder Boy) pushes out the good (Ira).

Also, sample Sean Mercer for some of the hottest guitar playing you’ll hear with tight arrangements to match technical skill. The recording, which Sean engineered, is a little dated, but it holds up.

Updated: In Defense Of The Fence

Constitution, Crime, IMMIGRATION, libertarianism, Private Property

Here’s an excerpt from my new WorldNetDaily column for Friday, April 4:

“[T]he Department of Homeland Security [has] proceeded to waive certain environmental laws for various project areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, so as to begin completing, this time apparently in earnest, the 700 miles of fencing mandated by the ‘Secure Fence Act.’”

“The Act was forced on the ruling class in 2006 by a passionately non-partisan American public, sick and tired of the farce on the southwest front. Naturally, after the primping and preening that accompanies the signing of a bill into law just prior to midterm elections, the politicians promptly side-stepped the popular will…”

“That the government has used its discretionary waiver authority to temporarily suspend a few of its countless ‘land management’ laws, never vetted by voters, is no tragedy. In fact, government should waive more superfluous regulations if this means fulfilling its one constitutionally mandated function: defending the nation’s borders…”

Read “In Defense of The Fence” here (or on WND, where we lead the Commentary Page).

Update: In reply to some of the hysterical yelps of “tear down this wall”:

“If you really want to see an immigration liberationist rise on his hind legs, mention a fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. … Irrational minds have transformed a defensive wall à la the Emperor Hadrian’s, intended to keep the ‘barbarians’ out, into the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall, constructed to keep people in.”

A fence is the quintessential non-aggressive method of defense. You don’t attack, arrest, or otherwise molest undesirables, you keep them at bay, away. This is why it’s so dishonest of libertarians to protest the fence. Other than utopian solutions that’ll never come to pass, there is no other option. Libertarians are not that stupid. They know this, which makes their position all the more callous. Even sicker do such people make me when they protest Israel’s security fence. It has cut by over 80 percent the number of Israelis maimed and murdered by suicide bombers.

“Other barriers that fail to move the ‘tear-down-this-wall’ humanitarians to do their St. Vitus Dance are those separating India and Pakistan, Botswana and Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyztan, Thailand and Malaysia, and Turkey and Syria (this one is mined).” And, as Joseph Farah points out in his latest column, Egypt is erecting a fence to keep the bad-tempered Gazans from hurting Egyptians.

I suspect that the kind of person screaming bloody murder about a barrier would change his tune if his property was being traipsed by trespassers day-in-and-out. Here’s the left-liberal Time magazine on the ordeal:

“When the crowds cross the ranches along and near the border, they discard backpacks, empty Gatorade and water bottles and soiled clothes. They turn the land into a vast latrine, leaving behind revolting mounds of personal refuse and enough discarded plastic bags to stock a Wal-Mart. Night after night, they cut fences intended to hold in cattle and horses. Cows that eat the bags must often be killed because the plastic becomes lodged between the first and second stomachs. The immigrants steal vehicles and saddles. They poison dogs to quiet them. The illegal traffic is so heavy that some ranchers, because of the disruptions and noise, get very little sleep at night.”

Or if his beloved fell pray to a member of a group so well-represented among the criminal class:

“Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens.” In 2000 nearly 30 percent of federal prisoners were foreign-born. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants are for illegal aliens. In 1995, already 60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California was illegal. In the Mecklenburg County, where the sheriff recently broke with the country and began to enforce immigration law, “1,200 foreign-born people have been arrested since April, on charges ranging from traffic violations and trespassing to sex crimes, and nearly 600 have been found to be here illegally.”

Bad Dreams From Obama

Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Race

I said it before Ann Coulter did (here and here), and Steve Sailer said it before most: Obama boils with anti-white bile. He’s as dangerous as he is deceptive. Writes Coulter in “Obama’s dime store ‘Mein Kampf’”:

“If characters from “The Hills” were to emote about race, I imagine it would sound like B. Hussein Obama’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father.”

Has anybody read this book? Inasmuch as the book reveals Obama to be a flabbergasting lunatic, I gather the answer is no. Obama is about to be our next president: You might want to take a peek. If only people had read “Mein Kampf.” …

Nearly every page – save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life – is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident….

When his mother expresses concern about Obama’s high school friend being busted for drugs, Obama says he patted his mother’s hand and told her not to worry.

This, too, prompted Obama to share with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved – such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”

First of all, I note that this technique seems to be the basis of Obama’s entire presidential campaign. But moreover – he was talking about his own mother! As Obama says: “Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.” Say, do you think a white person who said that about blacks would be a leading presidential candidate?

The man is stark bonkersville….”

[Snip]

Read on.

Liar, Liar, Obama On Fire

Africa, Barack Obama, Elections 2008, Media, Race

If the media cared to cover the two Democratic candidates fairly, you’d hear more about Obama’s lies. But it so happens that the mindless ones don’t even bother with the appearance of an even reportorial hand with respect to the two.

Hillary’s “A Thousand Arabian Nights” about Serbia have been cast as the tall tales of a pathological liar. Barack’s beefing up his community activist’s résumé—he was never a professor—that’s merely a white lie. (I myself have referred to him by his undeserving honorific, professor.)

Barrack’s false claims-making concerning his “Camelot connection,” and the way in which his parents met—these episodes of amnesia have been framed as an “overstatement” by the Washington Post.

The less than truthful speech Obama gave at Selma is worth attention, replete as it is with his stock-in-trade strident race rhetoric. With respect to this particular biographical tidbit, slavery, colonialism, white hypocrisy, and black victimization (the stuff of Afrocentrism) are front-and-center in his address. Less so the benevolence that brought the elder Obama and other African students to the US.