Orwell on socialist sex maniacs

Ah, YouTube. This morning it brought me to an unaired clip from the British panel show QI, in which the inestimable and inimitable Stephen Fry quotes from George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1936):

"'Socialism draws towards it with magnetic force every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, nature-cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.' [Orwell] also talks about 'vegetarians with wilting beards', 'outer suburban creeping Jesus' eager to begin yoga exercises,' and 'that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers who come flocking toward the smell of progress like bluebottles to a dead cat.'" [transcript]

I wonder what justice there is in Orwell's cranky depiction of figures we probably all recognize through the distortions of his caricature. There is an n-dimension graph whose axes represent openness toward or rejection of different conceptual possibilities -- spirituality, personal perfectability, political perfectability, and so on -- and in this graph space, we should be able to identify the overlapping domains of "socialism", "individualism", "bohemianism", "veganism", and so on. Would the result be a disordered pell-mell without order? Or would some kind of informative structure emerge, to tell us about the people who reject theism but embrace socialism, who embrace fascism but reject spiritualism, and so on? Where will we find the bluebottle types, or the skeptics, or the Eric Blairs? What if these each turn out to be categorical cousins, to no one's greater surprise than their own?

Fly your flags high

Proposed (but never officially adopted) logo for the now defunct Atheist Discussion Group, a Boston-area enterprise active from 1998 on. The Latin above means "Christians for the flavor's sake."

A charming limerick from the young Saki (H.H. Munro, 1870-1916):

There was a young lady O'Brien,
Who sang Sunday hymns to a lion.
Of that lady there's some
In the lion's tum-tum,
And the rest is an angel in Zion.

Louis CK on practical epistemology

In his feature-length stand-up show Live at the Beacon Theater, comedian Louis CK lays bare an oft-overlooked fact concerning the relationship between belief and behavior:

I have a lot of beliefs, and I live by none of them. That's just the way I am. They're just my beliefs. I just like believing them. They're my little believies.

The show is available on Netflix (at around 6 minutes in) and may well be on YouTube.

*

Don't doubt for a moment that there is an ethical dimension to the lack of conformation between what one believes and what one does. As a good introduction, dial over to Infidels.org, and read William Clifford's 1877 essay, "The Ethics of Belief." The infamous, and terrifically portable, summary of his position on the matter: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." A corollary: Since humans are all always guilty in one way or another of holding beliefs (of some sort or scope) that aren't warranted by sufficient evidence that we ourselves have worked through, it is the case that we (yes, all of us) are living always in a state of epistemic failure (here I almost wrote, "epistemic sin!). Knowing this is the beginning of rationality.

*

A corollary from Oscar Wilde: “The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.” Contrast this to the wisdom theme of H.P. Lovecraft's tale, “The Call of Cthulhu”: “ he most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” If there were a divinity of perfect rationality, would we not have to call this being either insensate as a stone, or wholly mad? (See also Borges' story "Funes the Memorious" for a case example of how a perfect omnimnemonic could not in practice survive with his reason intact, free to live a life we could call human.)