Another Saturday morning, another case of writer's block. We try to write the first draft of The Weekend Eudemon on Friday evening, preferably after a few block-removing beers, but Eric was in charge (not control) of Meg and Max--the spunky four-year-old and wandering two-year-old--by himself last night. His wife and older children were gone. It wasn't an evening for drinking, relaxing, writing, or reading.
We feared we'd have nothing to write about this morning, but our webmaster sent us an e-mail, pointing out that our new site software provides “internal” site stats. The feature basically tells us what has taken place on the site. We have, for instance, created a total of 1,826 posts, the vast bulk of them in the past five months (prior to late February, we posted only weekly or sporadically).
We also found a stat that tracks our tags, so we know the types of posts we created. This stat is a little misleading because we just started using tags about ten weeks ago and we still don't tag many of our posts (if, for instance, the post doesn't fall within a category or we don't feel like dealing with tagging or we simply forget). When we do tag, we currently have 17 categories to choose from. Of the posts we've tagged, here's how they break down:
Ӣ Blogging (4)
Ӣ Books (41)
Ӣ Culture (60)
Ӣ Economics (7)
Ӣ Education (26)
Ӣ Entertainment (43)
Ӣ Family (43)
Ӣ Food and Drink (44)
Ӣ History (29)
Ӣ Humor (44)
Ӣ Love (14)
Ӣ Marketing (9)
Ӣ Philosophy (3)
Ӣ Politics (41)
Ӣ Religion (93)
Ӣ Technology (41)
Ӣ Writing (2)
We were pleased to see these results. We consider ourselves a Christian blog with concentrations in pop culture, religion, history, literature, philosophy, humor, and drinking. All of these categories show a lot of posts, except philosophy, and usually the philosophy is embedded in other posts (especially The Weekly Features Post and The Weekend Eudemon).
We apologize if you find this boring, but our daily visitors count is growing steadily (over 300 visitors on the weekdays), and we thought they might like to know the breakdown. It might also help spread the word about TDE. You could send friends and family this “snapshot” of TDE's content and see if they're interested. If they're Christians with a pop culture and literary bent who like to laugh, they might like this blog.
Life is good. Enjoy your weekend.
Jouvenel is deadly accurate, and any shot at J.S. Mill is a good shot:
“The wise man knows himself for debtor, and his actions will be inspired by a deep sense of obligation.” With this one sentence, [Bertrand de Jouvenel] rejects the Promethean spirit common to all branches of modernity. In particular, Jouvenal sharply dissents from the classical liberal view of freedom and obligation put forward by John Stuart Mill at the beginning of On Liberty. There, Mill asserted that the individual ought to be free in those “parts of his life and conduct which affects only himself.” For Jouvenal, there is something willful, narrow, even infantile about a view that ignores the obvious reality that “the whole of a man's life, whatever society he lives in, is passed in never-ending contact with his fellows; there is not a single action or even word of his which may not prove obnoxious, there is not one which is completely devoid of consequence for someone.”
Daniel J. Mahoney, Bertrand de Jouvenel (ISI Books, 2005), p. 76.
Jouvenel's analysis here is practical. He simply looked at every day society and rightly concluded that we are social beings who need and want each other. As a result, there is nothing we do that doesn't have an impact on others, no matter what Mill and Simon and Garfunkel say.
One of our favorite quotes from Dostoyevsky conveys a similar message, but in a mystical sense. We've quoted it before (link), but it doesn't hurt to repeat it. From The Brothers Karamazov:
For everything is like the ocean, all things flow and are indirectly linked together, and if you push here, something will move at the other end of the world. . . Understand that everything is like the ocean. Then, consumed by eternal love, you will pray to the birds, too. In a state of fervor you will pray to them to forgive you your sins.
