Heterodoxy, Dabbling, and the Dilettante

After my last posting yesterday, I went out for my three margarita lunch. I did two good things after returning home, I thought about the answers to the questions I posed in my last posting and I resisted the urge to write about it. Today, I’d rather avoid discussing the whole thing at all, but what the heck, it’s snowing, I’m stuck on my other writing, and when in doubt, just make stuff up and write it in your blog.

The heterodox thinkers, the ones trying to invent the next new thing, are blogging instead of sitting in the libraries. And why not? Blogging is fun. The library can be depressing. You know, all those homeless people sitting around pretending to read the newspapers, and really seeking refuge from the snow and cold.

Now, any standard of rigor for writing a blog is enforced by one’s hopes for an occasional reader to stop by. Other than that, the blog is the refuge for the dabbler and dilettante inside the writer. I am stuck with the erudition I’ve accumulated. I’m also stuck with the critical, rhetorical, and imaginative skills I possess at the moment I write these words. It’s trivial and banal to say so, except when spoken by a dilettante.

The dabbler and dilettante live inside me as the personae of homunculi. My personality is not split, it’s fractured into many pieces.

I was directed to the books I am currently reading via the Internet. It does not mean I have relaxed the standards for what I read. In fact, blogs may have raised my already high standards. My blog favorites folder represents an eclectic mix of voices and concerns. I add to the list almost everyday.

Of course, some topics become wearisome after awhile. My position on destroying Social Security remains the same. I want my money when it comes due and I want a fair return on it too. I am open to changing my desire, but no one has convinced me to do so. Sometimes you have to climb out of the rumble seat. Writing about Social Security as I just did is a way to crawl out of the rumble seat.

When does heterodoxy devolve into chaos or vapid eclecticism? Let’s approach that question with another related question. Should publication credit be given to academics who write “serious” blogs? The answer might be that an institution can reward their employees anyway they want. The issue then becomes the institution’s credibility.

What I find interesting about the blogosphere is that there are so many good writers writing interesting blogs. Dabbling and dilettantism have value. The blogosphere makes it possible to extract the value. How people get rewarded is another story, one not completely written.

Most of the “how to write books” recommend the writer not use money as their primary motivation for writing. I’m a sometimes Epicurean, so the words sound comforting to me. Epicurus’s admonitions about excessively pursuing wealth and power have fallen upon mostly deaf ears through the millennia, my ears included. My primary motive for writing anything at all is to become good enough at it so that one day someone will pay me money to do it.

And I can’t be anymore serious and honest than that, dabbler and dilettante though I am.