We’ve never heard the best singers, singers that we would enjoy, would enjoy more than we do our favorite performers. Why haven’t we heard them? Why are they not recorded? Why have they never been heard except in their hometown church or local night spots? Many reasons come to mind. For whatever reason, there may be things that they count as more important CDs, celebrity, being professional entertainers twenty-four-seven.
But if they wish they were on the charts, yet have never made it–I know a young man like that like that–the main reason is that they can’t make it on their own. No one can. Becoming a musical star is always a cooperative process. Someone has to write the songs. The songwriter is part of the winning team. The singer himself has to find ways to be heard beyond the local scene. Encouragers are essential. The musical accompaniment is crucial to the process. The quality and professionalism of the recording session and the studio can make all the difference. So can the personality of the singer, her ability to connect, communicate, and to entertain her audience. Showmanship matters.
All of this, however, can be the best. The singer and the band may develop a distinctive and compelling voice, phrasing and style. Yet we will never hear from them unless someone promotes this singer and his recorded songs. Our favorites won out over better performers because they had better producers and marketers. That’s what it takes to succeed (not as a singer, nor as a musician) in the music business. Although all the other components of the process must be in place, in the end, salesmanship wins over everything else. Or perhaps a better way to say it is: salesmanship is what brings it all to us.
The same is true in almost any kind of business.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
There Has To Be a Reason
In the Thurlos’ White Thunder, an apparently random attack has been made on Ella Clah’s life. Of this, the Thurlos write: "The dark side of human nature seldom made sense to her. Malicious behavior all too often existed in defiance of logic." That’s the way it often seems. Things just don’t make sense. Often there appears to be no logical explanation for things that happen or the way people are. But, l as we all know, things are not always what they seem to be; appearance can be deceptive; reality can remain hidden from our eyes and our minds.
When my wife, our daughters, and I moved to Texas thirty-five years ago, I began noticing an unusual, but apparently very popular, bumper sticker: There has to be a reason. This both interested and confused me. It interested me because I am a teacher of logic. Logic is the study of reasoning. I readily agreed that there must be a reason. No matter how enigmatic anything may seem to be, there is a reason for everything. Nothing happens without a cause. But the bumper confused me because that was all it had to say. There was no fine print. There were no images. Just the philosophical statement: There has to be a reason.
I doubted that this was a particularly philosophical town I had moved to. Why would cars by the dozen have a bumper sticker that was merely philosophical. This didn’t make sense to me. The day finally came when, in a parking lot, I saw a lady getting out of a car with the ubiquitous bumper statement. I stepped over and asked her for an explanation.
She said it was to arouse curiosity and cause people like to me to ask for the meaning. The answer was that this was an incomplete statement. It required a living person to complete it. She completed it for me: "There must be a reason why everyone banks at the First National Bank." I guess that was good enough for me; I have banked there as the institution has gone through five different names. At present, it is Bank of America. There must be reasons for these changes.
No, Ellen Clah, the dark side of human behavior, malicious behavior, is neither senseless, not does it defy logic. I’ve said there are reasons for everything. Everything can be understood logically. I found, that for me, logic is both simply and comprehensively understood as: "The study of what follows."
The attempt on her life followed someone’s intentional decision. It could be anything from revenge to part of a rite of initiation into a violent gang. If it was not preceded by some intentional decision, then it was an accident. Accidents, however, follow some kind of failure: carelessness, a break in the steering linkage of a vehicle, or a hunter mistaking her for a deer. Something lay behind it the threat to Inspector Clah’s life. Some perverse premises, or accidental premises led to the conclusion that almost caused her death. She understood none of this at the time, when Clah has done enough investigation, she will understand that someone had a logical reason to want her dead.
The main reason we fail to see the logic in things is that we have our own beliefs and ways of seeing the world, ways that cause us to prejudge what can and cannot make sense. Therefore, we find it hard to realize how much difference the experience of reality can be if people have different beliefs and ways of seeing the world than we do. If we can’t see where they are coming from, many things do seem to defy logic.
Everything is logical, but it always depends on where things are coming from, depends on what premises we are prepared to accept. For instance, the mentally ill commonly think more logically that most of us. The problem is not with their logic, but with their beliefs and the way in which they see the world. If we accepted their premises, we would see how all their behavior makes good sense. The rocket scientist has a different worldview from the safecracker; their actions will follow from that worldview.
If you were to ask me what might be the major premise from which malice and evil arise, I must confess that I left in ultimate mystery. I am prepared to consider the entire dialectic of explanations that have been given. Nonetheless, none of our words of explanation will be the last word. There is more to be said than we can understand. The major premise lies hidden in mystery.
When my wife, our daughters, and I moved to Texas thirty-five years ago, I began noticing an unusual, but apparently very popular, bumper sticker: There has to be a reason. This both interested and confused me. It interested me because I am a teacher of logic. Logic is the study of reasoning. I readily agreed that there must be a reason. No matter how enigmatic anything may seem to be, there is a reason for everything. Nothing happens without a cause. But the bumper confused me because that was all it had to say. There was no fine print. There were no images. Just the philosophical statement: There has to be a reason.
I doubted that this was a particularly philosophical town I had moved to. Why would cars by the dozen have a bumper sticker that was merely philosophical. This didn’t make sense to me. The day finally came when, in a parking lot, I saw a lady getting out of a car with the ubiquitous bumper statement. I stepped over and asked her for an explanation.
She said it was to arouse curiosity and cause people like to me to ask for the meaning. The answer was that this was an incomplete statement. It required a living person to complete it. She completed it for me: "There must be a reason why everyone banks at the First National Bank." I guess that was good enough for me; I have banked there as the institution has gone through five different names. At present, it is Bank of America. There must be reasons for these changes.
No, Ellen Clah, the dark side of human behavior, malicious behavior, is neither senseless, not does it defy logic. I’ve said there are reasons for everything. Everything can be understood logically. I found, that for me, logic is both simply and comprehensively understood as: "The study of what follows."
The attempt on her life followed someone’s intentional decision. It could be anything from revenge to part of a rite of initiation into a violent gang. If it was not preceded by some intentional decision, then it was an accident. Accidents, however, follow some kind of failure: carelessness, a break in the steering linkage of a vehicle, or a hunter mistaking her for a deer. Something lay behind it the threat to Inspector Clah’s life. Some perverse premises, or accidental premises led to the conclusion that almost caused her death. She understood none of this at the time, when Clah has done enough investigation, she will understand that someone had a logical reason to want her dead.
The main reason we fail to see the logic in things is that we have our own beliefs and ways of seeing the world, ways that cause us to prejudge what can and cannot make sense. Therefore, we find it hard to realize how much difference the experience of reality can be if people have different beliefs and ways of seeing the world than we do. If we can’t see where they are coming from, many things do seem to defy logic.
Everything is logical, but it always depends on where things are coming from, depends on what premises we are prepared to accept. For instance, the mentally ill commonly think more logically that most of us. The problem is not with their logic, but with their beliefs and the way in which they see the world. If we accepted their premises, we would see how all their behavior makes good sense. The rocket scientist has a different worldview from the safecracker; their actions will follow from that worldview.
If you were to ask me what might be the major premise from which malice and evil arise, I must confess that I left in ultimate mystery. I am prepared to consider the entire dialectic of explanations that have been given. Nonetheless, none of our words of explanation will be the last word. There is more to be said than we can understand. The major premise lies hidden in mystery.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Conjunctions not Periods
When we write, we must end our sentences with a period, a question mark, or sometimes an exclamation point. Not so with dialectical thinking. Good thinkers punctuate their thinking with conjunctions, commas, colons, semi-colons, dashes, or ellipses. Some writers use up a lot of phrases before they deem it necessary to come to a "full stop," the British term for a period. Nonetheless, they terminate their sentences with an appropriate punctuation mark.
Most English speakers find the German language hard to read. Their sentences tend to be confusingly complex. In the theological writing of Karl Barth, I have found German sentences that traveled more than a full page of fine print before coming to a halt
However, it remains true that writers must use terminal punctuation for their sentences. Good thinkers, however, punctuate their thinking with conjunctions and a variety of punctuational pauses, but never come to a full stop until they encounter the need to act on their thought.
Dialectical thinkers can bring their thought to termination. Thinkers can act. They know the entire point of thinking (unless they are playing intellectual games) is to determine the best course of action at a given point in time and space. But until they must act, their thought continues as they connect one idea to still other considerations.
This is a simple picture of the punctuation of good thinking.
My wife and I are thinking about attending a dulcimer festival in a few weeks, but we question whether we can afford it, however, (please try to read this entire, but admittedly interminable, sentence) for our psychological well-being, it might forestall greater expense in the future, thus we have reserved a room at a Bed and Breakfast establishment for Saturday night–the festival begins on a Friday and concludes Sunday noon–meanwhile my wife is suggesting we fork out the money for another night’s lodging so that we may be there for the entire festival since this is all the vacation we will have this year (have you begun to get the point?), even though we admitted in the beginning that if we go at all, it will take a small bite out of our retirement investment, and that would be a dangerous precedent, especially in a time of major recession (2009) so we don’t know what would be the wise course of action because there are so many things to consider on the one hand, but on the other hand. . . .
We all know that a sentence is a series of words that begins with a capital letter, then proceeds through . . . and ends with full stop punctuation. Remember however, that although sentences must have terminal punctuation, good thoughts end only when they must. Until then they end with conjunctions that link to further considerations. Conjunctions constitute the core of the grammar of the dialectic.
Most English speakers find the German language hard to read. Their sentences tend to be confusingly complex. In the theological writing of Karl Barth, I have found German sentences that traveled more than a full page of fine print before coming to a halt
However, it remains true that writers must use terminal punctuation for their sentences. Good thinkers, however, punctuate their thinking with conjunctions and a variety of punctuational pauses, but never come to a full stop until they encounter the need to act on their thought.
Dialectical thinkers can bring their thought to termination. Thinkers can act. They know the entire point of thinking (unless they are playing intellectual games) is to determine the best course of action at a given point in time and space. But until they must act, their thought continues as they connect one idea to still other considerations.
This is a simple picture of the punctuation of good thinking.
My wife and I are thinking about attending a dulcimer festival in a few weeks, but we question whether we can afford it, however, (please try to read this entire, but admittedly interminable, sentence) for our psychological well-being, it might forestall greater expense in the future, thus we have reserved a room at a Bed and Breakfast establishment for Saturday night–the festival begins on a Friday and concludes Sunday noon–meanwhile my wife is suggesting we fork out the money for another night’s lodging so that we may be there for the entire festival since this is all the vacation we will have this year (have you begun to get the point?), even though we admitted in the beginning that if we go at all, it will take a small bite out of our retirement investment, and that would be a dangerous precedent, especially in a time of major recession (2009) so we don’t know what would be the wise course of action because there are so many things to consider on the one hand, but on the other hand. . . .
We all know that a sentence is a series of words that begins with a capital letter, then proceeds through . . . and ends with full stop punctuation. Remember however, that although sentences must have terminal punctuation, good thoughts end only when they must. Until then they end with conjunctions that link to further considerations. Conjunctions constitute the core of the grammar of the dialectic.
Friday, March 13, 2009
Lie that Reveals Truth
When, back 1958, I entered the Christian ministry, my pastor father advised me to read all kinds of books. He said, "Don’t limit your reading to theology and biblical commentaries; read everything." "But," he said, "don’t waste your time on fiction." Fiction, as everyone knows, is by definition, not true. It was years later, studying philosophy under John Newport, that I learned Daddy was wrong. Novels, fictional short stories, drama, painting, and other art forms do present truth to those of us who have eyes and ears, minds and hearts, to re-cognize them.
As Picasso said, "Art is a lie that reveals the truth." A particular painting, story, or ballad may not represent actual events, persons, or empirical facts of any sort. Yet, in the presence of true art, we find that the art-ifice, awakens us to wider, deeper realities we had never before noticed. Art captures our attention, holds it, and demonstrates to us something of the world with which we are involved.
As we watch The Color Purple, listen to Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof, or read John Grisham, some of us find ourselves wiping tears from the corners of our eyes. On one hand, we are fully aware that none of this is real. Yet, perhaps unconsciously, we are moved by the existence of a human sadness of which we had been only vaguely aware, or never even suspected.
It is fiction, thus artificial, thus not true, but in it we have encountered layers of reality we had never before faced.
Consider the possibility that anywhere, anytime, we may find ourselves face to face with experiences, on the face of which, we find nothing out of the ordinary, but that, if we are sensitive and alert, may awaken us to a more intimate appreciation of the mystery of this thing we call life.
As Picasso said, "Art is a lie that reveals the truth." A particular painting, story, or ballad may not represent actual events, persons, or empirical facts of any sort. Yet, in the presence of true art, we find that the art-ifice, awakens us to wider, deeper realities we had never before noticed. Art captures our attention, holds it, and demonstrates to us something of the world with which we are involved.
As we watch The Color Purple, listen to Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof, or read John Grisham, some of us find ourselves wiping tears from the corners of our eyes. On one hand, we are fully aware that none of this is real. Yet, perhaps unconsciously, we are moved by the existence of a human sadness of which we had been only vaguely aware, or never even suspected.
It is fiction, thus artificial, thus not true, but in it we have encountered layers of reality we had never before faced.
Consider the possibility that anywhere, anytime, we may find ourselves face to face with experiences, on the face of which, we find nothing out of the ordinary, but that, if we are sensitive and alert, may awaken us to a more intimate appreciation of the mystery of this thing we call life.
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