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    An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America
    An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America
    An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America
    Ebook118 pages1 hour

    An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America

    By FJ Rocca

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    About this ebook

    America has suffered a black eye in recent decades. It's time to cure the injury and restore America to greatness. It can be done, but only through a shift of cultural paradigms, which have been subtly altered. These are the observations of FJ Rocca, who believes that even disagreement about this great country can be good if it is sensible disagreement.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateJun 4, 2015
    ISBN9781329191808
    An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America

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      An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America - FJ Rocca

      An Ordinary American on the Culture of Today's America

      AN ORDINARY AMERICAN   ON CULTURE IN TODAY’S AMERICA

      Essays by

      FJ Rocca

      - Candid Bookpress -

      Copyright © 2015 by Francis J. Rocca, All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

      First Printing:  2015

      ISBN:

      You may contact the author at frocca@candiddiscourse.com

      This book is dedicated to Dean Garrison and Tim Brown, two men who have given me more than mere opportunity. They have also given me their friendship, something unmeasurable in ordinary human terms.

      Most of the essays in this book first appeared on D.C. Clothesline and Freedom Outpost. They have been modified to fit this collection, but their intent is preserved herein. This is a book of opinions. Many people may disagree with them, but intelligent debate is the backbone of enlightenment among thinking people. I welcome that debate, providing it is well thought-out and reasoned.

      The making of an autodidact

      My learning and its corollary, my reading, have been varied and strange, a voyage of self-education borne aloft largely on the winds of curiosity, but growing almost wildly, like the branches and roots of a tree, upward, outward and downward at the same time. 

      Don’t misunderstand.  I do not consider myself to be a reader primarily.  I was always more of a thinker and a dreamer than just a reader; reading was a tool, one of several, for resolving the curiosity which always drove my actions.  I read a biographical sketch of Louis L’Amour, the famous writer of Westerns.  It seemed to be mostly a list of all the books he had read and not an accretion of ideas he’d drawn from his experience through his life.  I have a friend in New York whose apartment is impassible for all the books he owns, stacked almost everywhere floor to ceiling, as though one must trip over his wisdom to prove it’s there.  I have owned many, many books in my life, but I’ve kept relatively few of them, only those, in fact, that I still refer to from time to time or those I want to reread. Some of them, I have reread many times, with each reading, finding new light. For me, books are like the plays of a repertory company, to be repeated from time to time and, like a new performance, to divulge new and greater understanding of their meaning. Thus, I mean this essay to be an integrated summary of my self-education, not a list of books I’ve read. Indeed, I have found many academics chained to the footnotes of their vast reading, rather than the distilled ideas from all those pages.

      In this essay, I want to show what I have learned, but more what I have deduced from that learning.  I am with Aldous Huxley, when he said, Experience is not what happens to a man.  It is what a man does with what happens to him.  This, then, is a summary of my experience.

      It took me a long time to figure out how my mind worked.  Since I first awoke and realized that I had a mind, I have wondered why things were so and, more, why I wondered what I wondered.  At some point in life, while I was still quite young, I came to the conclusion mostly through observation that people learned in one of two general ways.  One person plods carefully along well-traveled routes, acquiring facts and taking footnotes and being certain that what he has to learn is already extant, having been learned by someone before.  His mind operates mostly on deductive reasoning, reaching reliable conclusions that are contained in the evidence he has accumulated and footnoted.    Such a person might become an academic, a professor of someone else’s knowledge, a scholar who can ferret out facts from the millennial accumulation of data and cite the precise fact spoken by so-and-so many years before, often giving exact dates and circumstances.  Not only is there nothing wrong with this.  It is commendable, fundamental, in fact, to the progress of civilization, because the great centers of learning would simply shut down without the work of scholars.

      But there is the other type of person whose mind, at least to himself, is incapable of the patience needed to sift through all that data, and to follow the prescribed routes to knowing.  This type of mind does not plod logically and carefully along.  Instead, it explodes in different directions, driven by its burning curiosity, unable to exhibit patience with the didactic methodology of careful deductive thinking. It engages instead in the more speculative and sometimes dangerous, often wrong-headed, process of inductive thinking.  The first type of mind can usually guarantee that it will reach its goal, because it already has in its sights what the next thing is to learn and the best way to learn it.  But the second type of mind does not know where it wants to go.  It is restless and curious and, because it tries to teach itself and to learn by itself, it is often exasperated when it leaps to the occasional faulty conclusion, and is frustrated by wanting to search further for answers to its questions, but not always knowing in which direction to look.  The first is disciplined and predictable. The second appears undisciplined and utterly unpredictable.  I have the second type of mind. To some extent, it is the mind of the autodidact, driven as I said before, by curiosity. 

      But, these definitions are not hard and fast, nor are they mutually exclusive.  Most people have something of both kinds of mind.  Everyone has curiosity.  It’s built into our cognitive function as human beings.  And all of us acquire and accumulate information which we integrate into our experience, thus making it into knowledge.  But the autodidact lacks patience in the learning cycle and often tends to want to shortcut the process by learning and teaching himself. One clarification: autodidacts do not always operate in isolation.  Indeed, one always teaches oneself in the end, whether one gets his information from books or from a lecture in a class.  It’s the motivation and end-result that differentiate an autodidact from someone who depends on being taught by someone else.

      The terms as I use them may be deceptive, intended as they are as descriptions and not definitions of the method employed by the mind to build knowledge.  But the end result of the learning process seems sometimes, ironically, to be the opposite.  The acquisitive intellect tends to have a more pragmatic potential, putting carefully acquired, well-foot-noted knowledge to a practical use (the law, mathematics, science or technology, scholarship) while the implementary intellect often has only the discovery of its own purpose, its own philosophic view of the world and the rest of the universe, as its end-result.  Because the implementary method does not seem on the surface to yield a carefully vetted set of credentials, the work done by a person of implementary intellect can sometimes seem to be unrelated to their capacities.  They don’t always become professors, doctors or lawyers, because their necessary way of learning the world often does not fit into the precast structure for acquiring the necessary credentials for a practical career.  I’ve met merchant seamen, for example, who are so well read that one would expect them to possess Ph.D. degrees and to teach in fine universities.  But they often do not possess any degrees at all.  The explanation I’ve usually been given for their choice of work has been available to them at the time they needed work, and that in the long run it has enabled them to spend a lot of time thinking!   

      Fortunately, for most people, there is a fair mix of both kinds of learning capacity, so they eventually make use of what they know, channeling it into structural processes to yield practical results.  They often go to college later in life to acquire the credentials and other underpinnings for careers in various fields.  Others, probably not so few of us, remain consummate amateurs in our knowledge building and only very late in life put that knowledge to any practical use.  Or, like me, they have spent their lives writing: fiction, non-fiction, philosophy, commentary on politics or history.  It used to be quite respectable for wealthy amateurs to become archeologists (Schliemann), historians (Prescott), mathematicians (Descartes) or poets (Dickenson).  Having some wealth helps. But one has to live, and so, for those of us who have had to work in jobs unrelated to our intellectual hunger, the leisure of retirement presents new, profound possibilities, as it did for Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been a professional sailor, or Charles Ives, who owned an insurance brokerage.

      Thinking philosophically

      When I was a child, I read what children tend to read, where that material presented itself.  However, being the youngest of four siblings who

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