What blogging should be about - and sometimes is

Last week the "secular right" blogger ZMan - who I had been reading regularly for several years - apparently died suddenly of natural causes; and I find that has saddened me more than might be expected.

The reason seems related to this strange and recent literary form of blogging, which I have been reading for more than twenty years, and myself doing regularly for fifteen.

In particular to the distinctive relationship that may develop (inwardly, perhaps wholly in imagination) between a blogger and his readers - and vice versa.   

To read and get-something-from a blog, it really needs to be a personal thing - either frequent, or else extensive. This is because there needs to be a persona behind the blog; we need to be aware of a person behind the opinions. 

(On the flip side; for a blogger to sustain his work sufficiently; he must himself be motivated by the process of blogging - and by its opportunity for presenting miscellaneous ideas freshly, and without being subject to overview.)

And - while there obviously must be a significant degree of common interest to keep reading a blog; there need not be any very complete "agreement". For instance, several of my long-term favourite bloggers long-term have been orthodox and traditional Roman Catholics - people such such as Bonald at the Orthosphere, who I've been reading for a couple of decades. 

Instead there has to be some kind of basic affinity with the blog persona - but especially with the person we infer behind that persona. I say infer, because we don't need to know much specifically about the blogger "in real life" - so long as what we do know is honest and unpretentious.

I personally find it very irritating/ intolerable when bloggers are trying to impress me, especially when they try to stimulate may admiration or envy!  - no matter what other valuable qualities they have. And there are many such bloggers, and unfortunately their need to brag seems to feed upon itself, and get worse.

In other words, we keep reading a blog attentively because (to use an English phrase) we have come to believe that the blogger is Basically A Good Bloke. That is far more important than a close fit of specific convictions or opinions.

But, as the pretentiousness/ bragging aspects makes clear - bloggers change; and someone we begin liking may evolve into somebody we find intolerable - and so we bale out from readership. 

Beyond that, because blogging needs to be relatively high volume, interest is maintained by insights - and a good blogger needs to generate plenty of these to sustain attention. 

Blogging is, I think, mainly a stimulus; rather than a medium for conclusive argument. So, a blogger like ZMan kept me reading partly because he had many insights that seemed personal rather than (as with mainstream journalism) merely parroted; and partly because I found what he wrote stimulating.

Even though I often disagreed with it both ultimately and superficially; and even though I think his blogging was constrained by the constraint of monetization and pseudonymity, which prevented it from achieving the highest levels of the form.

(I have come to believe that professional writers very seldom generate first rate work, although they may produce a large amount of second and third rank work - furthermore I think all the greatest writers did something else, worked some other "job", before they wrote their greatest work. Writers who have done nothing but write as adults; never, I think, attain the highest levels.) 

I think readers usually judge a blog by its best, rather than its average, level - just so long as the gaps between the good stuff is not too great. So long as we retain our basic liking for the blogger - we don't much mind the duds. 

And in fact we cannot have the peaks without the troughs, as we see from the history of even the greatest artists. Even so supreme and natural and artists as Mozart, for instance, continued to produce dud operas and concertos even during his greatest phases of achievement and right up to his death. 

To do our best, we must take risks; and when we take risks we shall sometimes (or often) fail. And we can learn much from acknowledging our failures - but first the failures have t happen.   

At any rate, blogging benefits from a careless attitude of freedo-, and the ability to shrug-off those times when posts don't take-off or just don't gel.

As an example of a recent example of the kind of blog post I like best; here is (non-famous) blogger Irish Papist; with a very personal and honest, free-associational development of ideas on the theme: Everything comes back to religion. 

As often said: writing is thinking (or it can be); and here you can sense AP thinking as he writes; and share his excitement at the insights as they emerge from the exploration.

I've been sampling Irish Papist on-and-off for several years - long enough to have decided he is a Good Bloke; and from this assumption I find that he produces a stimulating post every so often, that seems to set off associations and notions in myself. 

And this perhaps is what good blogging is about; and why regular readers come to care - at least somewhat - about our favourite bloggers; and miss them when they are gone.  

When nobody believes what everybody believes - more on Word Spells

In response to Francis Berger's comment on Word Spells in Christian theology

Maybe it's like this... 

If someone becomes convinced by the usual-mainstream-modern assumption that truth is objectively located in the external world ("truth is out-there"), and our job is just to perceive and recognize this external truth...

Then such a person never has to convince himself of truth. 

He feels more confident of some proposition only secondarily, not inwardly; e.g. by re-reading and reciting it, by propagating and defending it in public discourse. 

This way of thinking may explain how arguments that cannot really convince, become perpetuated over centuries. 

It happens because, when truth is out-there, reasoning does not even need to convince.

Indeed, nobody ever needs personally to be convinced! 

So we get a world (and this is our actual world, and the world of historical past) where everybody claims/ argues and acts-like they believe some-thing... some-thing that - inwardly - literally nobody believes!

Word Spells in Christian theology - We absolutely need simplicity and clarity concerning what it is to be a Christian

When "explanations" get complex or highly abstract, they become Word Spells, and people think a question has been answered when they have actually just been lulled to sleep. 

This is perhaps why questions asked of witnesses in court, and their answers, need to be short and simple. 

(But this is misleading if the assumptions behind the questions, the assumptions within-which the questions arise; are wrong.) 

That's perhaps functionally OK... if it works. 

But Word Spells may work only temporarily, or in certain contexts. For instance; the complex and abstract Word Spells of Trinitarianism were not designed to answer questions; but to stop Christians persecuting and killing each other in the early Christology disputes, by employing a kind of hypnosis. 

This, more or less, worked... for a while - until the soothing enchantment was broken by the rise of Islam 

(Which was, I think, substantially rooted in a clear, simple, rational rejection of the literal non-sense of Trinitarian Word Spelling.)  

Other initially successful examples of word-spelling include the crucial areas of the necessity for Jesus Christ, the nature of free-will, and the origins of evil - in a world that is defined as the product of an omnipotent and omniscient God who created everything from nothing. The traditional answers to these questions work insofar as they complexify and abstract; until the problem is lost-sight-of and/or the irrelevance or insufficiency of the answer is lost-sight-of. 

But in Christian theology, the traditional Word Spells clearly do not work anymore, and has not worked for several generations. 

Word-spelling comes with the price that everybody is then asleep or dazed, insofar as they are Christian. 

Since they are deeply and ineradicably confused and disorientated by the abstractness and complexity their theology; Christians are not strongly motivated. they are in a state of permanent uncertainty as to what they are supposed to have as their primary priorities and fundamental convictions and desires.

Therefore Christians have, by default, become passively-assimilated to worldly evil and; and now Christian churches support the Satanic totalitarian agenda - as became explicitly evident in 2020 and since.

Any viable answer must include a refusal and rejection of theological Word Spells; and the inexorable demand for simplicity and clarity concerning what it is to be a Christian, what is entailed by becoming a follower of Jesus. 

A suitable answer must, like any truthful answer, depend on valid assumptions concerning the nature of reality. 

But it must also be the kind of short, simple, and concrete answer that would be acceptable in a law court.  

**

Note: This post was developed from a comment I made at Francis Berger's blog.