Open Source Book Proposal

Posted on October 4, 2012 by ehurst

Let’s write a book!

First of all, I am grateful to you, Dear Reader, simply because you are reading this. While I would be content muttering to myself, the mere existence of other people reading my mutterings indicates a possibility of interaction. So much as a simple “Like” now and then is helpful. It means a lot to me, indicating I’m not alone, not entirely out here in space mentally. So allow me to waste a bit more of your precious time today.

Some of you even have an interest, and comment from time to time. It blesses me. Even when people offer objections and complaints, it blesses me. So far, I’ve not faced anything for which I don’t have a ready answer. “C’mon, people! I don’t even have to think to answer you.” Okay, maybe not so provocatively, but it’s been pretty lightweight so far. It doesn’t mean they understand my answers, but there isn’t much I can do about that in most cases. People tend to believe what they believe, and we are never quite sure where it comes from, since every individual is different.

Sometimes that difference is really important. With just one other person’s input, I can better gauge whether any part of my blathering is actually being processed. With the input of many, we might struggle to say anything at all, but with just a few, we can usually do a lot of good work in terms of getting a message across. I want collaborators; I want your help. I’m not worried too much about the kinds of contribution. Sure, I could do it all by myself, but that almost guarantees my reach is more limited than with your help. Whatever part you want to play is fine with me. God uses anyone willing, and I can’t argue with His choices.

“Get to the point, man.”

I claim to be a prophet of Jehovah. I have a message that burns like fire. Some of you have already tasted the burnt remains and found it palatable. So help me make some more of these burnt offerings. There is no limit to the subject matter I’ll touch, but there is an obvious reference point for how it is addressed. Ingredients aren’t really the issue; it’s the fire. Nothing cooks like the fire of God. Obviously we have to agree on certain working concepts about God, but this isn’t really about theology.

The reason for wanting to write a book is to challenge that very thing, in part. As I say often enough, I won’t pretend to know what your response ought to be to the calling of God in your life, which includes how you organize your own thinking. However, having tasted enough spiritual failure in mainstream Christian organizations, I discovered there has to be a way to meet the needs of folks like me who get pushed out the door. We still need Christ and we need to taste Him in the lives of other people, but the current structures offered don’t meet our needs. Indeed, having examined the matter, I’ve found the failure reaches far, far back in time and culture and to the very foundation of thinking itself. For me, the failure starts with the assumptions people make about reality itself.

So far, a thin scattering of folks around the world have tasted my work and have come back for more. Hey, I even have over 70 subscribers on this blog! WOOHOO! And on Facebook, I’ve got a few dozen friends, but almost all of them are family and established friends. I’m not interested in building a cult, a new religion, or even a fan base. I’m hoping to spill my fire into the lives of a lot of folks who happen to be looking for it, and don’t know where to find it. Since eschewing traditional religious structures means eschewing their methods, that doesn’t leave us much. Do you suppose if we published a e-book, we might reach a bigger audience? I’m willing to try, but I’d rather not do it alone.

Working Title: The Mind of Christ

Concept: With all the various parabolic approaches we might offer, perhaps the idea we can gain a piece of our Savior’s intellectual point of view would be effective. My hope is the title is evocative without being too provocative. I tend to shy away from the idea of something with heavy footnotes and aimed at scholars only. Indeed, part of the message itself is the whole business of footnoting is an obsession which gets in the way. There is an element in which, if it doesn’t seem self-evident, if it doesn’t grab you, it may be a waste of your time anyway. There’s no pretense this is for everyone. It’s for people who can’t get what they need from the standard outlets. Sure, we’ll challenge the Establishment, but that’s not really the point.

The point is the Truth. Christ claimed, in so many words, He was as close to God as any human could be. Get to know Him and you’ll know as much of God as anyone can. From our distance in time and space, our options for knowing Him are limited. Let’s make sure what we do with this is faithful to the original, as much as possible. Too many people assume they have that already, and that’s what I found to be so badly broken. The whole mess is in some ways proof the question hasn’t really been answered to everyone’s satisfaction. I won’t presume too much on how we can identify those left out in cold, but I believe it’s worth trying to find folks like us who aren’t likely to wander around to this or other blogs, etc.

I don’t want to charge, but places like Amazon won’t place a Kindle book without a minimal charge. So we’ll offer it for the minimum at Amazon, and for free other places. What happens if people actually buy this thing? If you are involved, you get to have a say in that. I don’t need money in that sense, but like anyone else, I’ll find a use for it. The money isn’t the point, so I surrender control up front. Get involved and you can decide. At any rate, I hope to offer it in as many formats as possible.

Over the next few days and weeks, I’m going to put up an outline and some writing toward the project. We can chat here, or you can arrange private communication any way you like — email me using my eddie account on my domain, soulkiln.org (domain is gone). If/when email becomes impractical, there are other ways to do this. Meanwhile, if all you want is to watch, that’s fine.

Interested? Future posts on this topic will include the abbreviation TMOC (The Mind of Christ).

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Open Line Thursday

Posted on October 3, 2012 by ehurst

I’m posting this early to give folks a head start.
Here’s hoping some of you have questions to ask. If you aren’t sure what’s appropriate, I would prefer you err on the side of taking risks. Simple stuff I’ll post below, and more complex issues will require a separate post.

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The Solution to Net Rudeness

Posted on October 3, 2012 by ehurst

The problems on the Net are people problems.
There are no problems with the Internet; all the perceived problems are what people bring to the Net. They were the same problems offline as they are online. The Internet is, as designed, a medium inherently uninhibited. The place for social inhibitions is inside people’s heads, not on the Net itself. The solution to Net rudeness is the same solution for rudeness anywhere else: fix society and you’ll fix Net rudeness.
Any attempt to regulate the Net breaks the Net; it is an existential attack and cannot be perceived otherwise. Review World of Ends and you’ll understand.
The Internet is a network of devices. Behind those devices are people. Beyond that, a very significant portion of humanity view the Net through an abstraction layer, a portal via their cellphones. They consume the Net without significant interaction. Barring a precious few geeks with highly independent cellphone operating systems complete with serious tools, you cannot use a smartphone to actually do anything on the Net. All you get is a small portal to view it from a distance. The place to regulate the majority of problem people is there.
The second most likely place of regulation is with those who rent ramp space onto the Internet. We call them ISPs, but in order for them to profitable, they have to do all they can to avoid regulation. That’s the nature of the beast. Crack down too hard on the big boys and they’ll sublease to independent jobbers who won’t be subject to such controls. At the same time, the big boys will lobby and defang your political efforts. At any rate, this issue will resolve itself by making the Internet so hideously troublesome to access no one will bother and the big ISPs will wither and die.
You can’t change the Internet itself without breaking it and destroying it. Get a clue. Laws applying to the Internet reached their optimum more than a decade ago. Making it a crime to do certain nefarious acts on the Internet came early, but has always been poorly enforced in the extreme, and selectively at that. Because law enforcement is utterly corrupt and comically incompetent, they demand more controls so they can really screw things up.
The real problem is our damned Post-Modern Western culture (literally damned). It’s getting worse and the Internet simply makes this more obvious.

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A Theory of Net Rudeness

Posted on October 3, 2012 by ehurst

The question has arisen repeatedly over the years: Why are people more rude on the Net than in person?
The question itself is a problem. Are people actually that much worse in their online personas than in real life? There is anecdotal evidence of it, in that a great many people are known to act better (more civil) face to face than online. Some have noted in the past it’s the same with driving, where people are far less restrained behind the wheel of a vehicle than during the rest of their waking hours. However, there are varying portions of any given population who aren’t drivers, and aren’t online.
Methinks therein lies the source of the problem. First, we are dealing with the sort of folks who spend any significant time online, and among those, people who bother to interact with others in such as a way as to be evaluated for rudeness. That’s a pretty narrow slice of humanity.
Next, it’s probably a good idea to filter out subjective response. That is, the medium lends itself to variable interpretations. Without all those normal cues we expect from meat space — tone of voice, facial expressions, etc. — it’s hard to tell for sure. Can you detect subtle sarcasm unless you happen to know the writer well?
So if we winnow out all that chaff, we find there is still a surprisingly large number of obviously pugnacious personal remarks between perfect strangers living in different parts of the world. The WSJ article notes friendships are broken which weren’t built online. The single greatest factor is what sort of person gets involved in these flame wars in the first place. The Net did not come out of nowhere; it was built up and made into something useful by a certain group of folks who are very different from your average Joe. More than one wag has noted these folks are so very good at computers because they weren’t that good with people in the first place. Computer nerds created a meeting place of sorts and gave it a pretty odd flavor.
The rest of us simply came along and picked up on the underlying rudeness. The real issue here is most people lack sufficient character to differentiate themselves. They just try to fit into the herd, perhaps picking a slight variation, but still embracing something they found at hand which appealed to them. Along with this are a raft of unspoken assumptions about the nature of the medium itself, and you get a herd of commentators with an inflated sense of privilege they would never dream of holding anywhere else. As time goes on, it naturally gets worse with each new opportunity, as people tend to push the envelope as a basic human trait.
What the WSJ offers is hardly a new answer, the shallow assessment it’s simply anonymity. Anonymity has little to do with Facebook fights. This false answer becomes the Nanny State’s favorite excuse, of course, to justify draconian controls on the Net and privacy invasions. I charge the author, Elizabeth Bernstein, with intellectual dishonesty (how rude!), if not from herself, echoing that handed to her. It’s shallow reasoning offered from the plutocrats who actually hold us all in contempt. These plutocrats actually want us to act that way; it’s the results of the shallow culture they’ve been striving to create so we are more easily controlled.
Rudeness is built into the mere existence of the Net. Survivors will simply grow a thick skin, and everyone else needs to find another place to hang out. Really, just let them fight it out because it’s not that important. Give it a short time and the marketers will create yet another new social media opportunity for the whiny bunch to waste their time spilling way too much information about themselves, to the marketers’ glee, and life will continue as before in its long decline. Civility was dying before the Net came into existence, and had a lot to do with the interest in such things in the first place. We can be sure global networking will continue, but it will be hijacked more and more, until the original underlying network is dead.
Enjoy it while you can, because the Net carries the seeds of its own destruction.

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Waiting for the Crash

Posted on October 2, 2012 by ehurst

We have lots of crashes predicted.
You’ve no doubt heard from many sources how most of the world is on the verge of an economic crash. Personally, I’m not too sure it’s going to be a sudden thing. I tend to believe the system is bound up and grinding to a halt, but it would be more like a long slow and very painful process. It will be drug out endlessly by those pulling the levers. It will be less like a crash and more like withering.
Of course, parallel to, and perhaps dependent upon, that crash is the expected political crash. That remains a fairly real threat, but only because there are too many different teams among the plutocrats trying to pull their own chains their own ways. At any given moment, the trauma faction could win. Still, there are several others planning to let this crap keep sliding farther and farther in naked oppression. I rather suspect the latter outnumber the former.
Don’t get me wrong — we’ll have riots and serious disturbances bursting forth all over the place as we go along. We’ll probably have some more 9-11 type events, though I wonder if we’ll ever see anything that well coordinated again. When you aren’t running around in panic mode, you tend to see things differently, and I’m not in panic mode. Yes, we could use the term “crash” for a lot of things, but it’s just a figure of speech. Different features of our modern world will explode, but the underlying mechanisms of life themselves seldom do.
Even our social structure will implode, but I doubt it’s all at once. Civilizations seldom disappear suddenly, except as viewed by those who weren’t there. Stuff like Pompey is the exception to the human narrative in recorded history.
Rather, I’m more interested in the collapse of modern Western Christianity. Again, not really a sudden crash, though it’s actually quite possible. That’s because it’s frankly far more fragile than the examples above. Indeed, for most of it, something as simple as Israel coming apart would be a major earthquake in religion. Perhaps you’ve read the recent quote from Kissinger, suggesting Israel would be but a memory a decade from now. Perhaps you know several US intel shops agree with that, more or less. With the massive influence of Zionism on so much of American Christianity, I wonder how much of what we now see will come apart when Israel does. Given she only survives because of the US money and military, and those things are fading quickly, and that modern Zionist theology is one big fat lie, you have to know it won’t keep going forever.
I joked yesterday about a new religion called YANR, but I was half-serious in the sense I fully expect to see something in my lifetime currently unimaginable in religion. Honestly, I rather think I’m going to be part of whatever that is, though it’s too incoherent right now to guess how.
Waiting is hard work.

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YANR: Yet Another New Religion

Posted on October 1, 2012 by ehurst

It is, but then it isn’t.
I don’t take myself seriously enough to suggest this is the original thing, the most ancient, etc. There’s no way to prove that, anyway. I do claim it inherits a lot from ancient times, but it’s definitely new in the sense almost no one else is doing it, nor has been doing much like it in recent history. In other words, over several decades of research, I’ve not found anything very close to it.
I suppose the one other thing we can say for sure is it should be called a religion. It does call for a rather distinct set of practices which set it apart from purely rational behavior. I doubt it will get official recognition without a proper name, and so far as I can see, no significant membership. Here, let me make it plain. How do you become a member of my religion? Just say you are. That’s it. Not that many folks are going to know, and most won’t care, but there it is.
There is honestly no proper descriptive name anyone will take seriously, so I took a cue from the Open Source development community and called it something humorous: YANR. I suppose we can pronounce that “yanner”. Then we can come up with a silly chant like, “yanners have gone bananners” or something. You write one.
Are we missing anything else? I’m not in the mood to draw up a logo; that’ll have to wait until someone gets inspired or simply tired of not having one. I’m not the leader. There is no human figurehead, but I get to play official spokesman for now. No real estate, no budget, no membership list, none of the other trappings. Just some teaching and a funny name.
That should do it.

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The Parable of Boundaries

Posted on September 30, 2012 by ehurst

If you haven’t spent time alone with yourself, feeling for your personal boundaries, you aren’t ready for life.
We could rephrase that for Christians as spending time in God’s presence, in prayer and meditation, but on the human plane the difference is nil. A spiritual awareness simply adds another level of imperative.
In many ways, the signal difference between childhood and adulthood is taking responsibility for yourself. You can’t do that unless you’ve spent time with yourself with a level of disengagement, detachment. You have to be out of your mind to usefully return to your senses. Infants have no ego boundaries. The awareness develops of itself, but means nothing without contextual teaching. We teach children by degrees how to disengage, but no one can do it for them. If they don’t have a sense of how they impact the rest of the world, and that it matters for its own sake, they remain children. We call this developing an ego, a sense of self-awareness.
By the same token, identifying the boundaries between egos also means identifying sane limits. Not in the sense we avoid crossing those boundaries; they will be crossed or humans don’t communicate. We can’t transgress them meaningfully without understanding them. We can’t take our place in this world until we sense the moral boundaries of human limitations. We already have too many people honestly incapable of rising above childhood without people simply failing or refusing. Children typically have an inflated yet fragile ego, and sanity means fixing that.
Whatever it is we imagine life is for, whether you believe in God or the Fall or whatever, we have to understand where other people are. Even if we choose to reject everyone else’s sensibilities, we still have to know what they are. The alternative is a madness to which we already stand too close.
There are a very large number of people yet gripped in their childhood mythology. They want reality to change to meet them, and stumble along with varying measures of success because too many people humor them entirely too much. Most of humanity are too polite in places where rudeness is demanded, and too rude where it really serves no purpose. That doesn’t leave too many of us sane people to shake things up. This is no crusade, but if you choose to sally forth against insanity, you’ll need this minimum consideration behind you. You have to change, at least in the sense of dumping everyone else’s fantasies for your own.
Most of those pulling the levers of social and political control are demanding you embrace a very bad fantasy. This won’t be easy. Strategically it won’t matter whether they actually believe those fantasies; it affects only tactics in the context. The problem is the fantasy itself, and their demands for uniformity.
So you’ll often encounter people who simply don’t grasp sanity, and some will be more annoying than others. Given our economic insanity, you may well have to share a lot of time and space with idiots. They’ll gnaw at your boundaries. They are so egregiously silly, they aren’t satisfied with ignoring them, but openly attack them, taking it as a personal insult you are different. God has all the power in the universe, and more, but He may not authorize you to escape them directly in time and space. That means creating a space internally, a space in effect. You can’t control them, but you can control yourself and learn to make them respect your boundaries to varying degrees.
The default is a detached regard. Attack the problem, not the person. Getting you to hate them is part of their attack; don’t surrender that. Don’t permit them significance until they earn it. Make it insanely expensive. Respond functionally to the issue when it arises, with a detached examination of how they respond back. Learn the tactics of boundary management as a normal measure of existence. Even a measure of dread is a win for them. “Sure, act stupid all you like. I have all the time in the world to shut you out. I do this every day.”
It’s an art to discern the fatal flaw in another person’s madness, but it’s enough to simply know what you have to do to pass through this life. If you can’t, then don’t deal with certain things. This is why I suggest violence does have a place, even if it sits in a low priority position. Without any discernible passion, punch their lights out and remark on why and how to avoid it the next time. What does it take to keep them a safe distance? Meanwhile, develop your armor. If physical violence is too improbable for whatever reason, there are various measures of noncooperation which serve the same purpose. People with too much power still have their own limits, and you can find ways to negotiate boundary collisions. Be the smart one in the problem and you’ll suffer less.
Still, don’t surrender more than you can afford. You are the only one who knows what that is at any given time. That’s why you need a frequent dose of human isolation, to reset and make those inevitable readjustments, or at least reaching out there and feeling for those boundaries again.

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Game: Power and Pursuit

Posted on September 30, 2012 by ehurst

Humans are adaptable. This is what puts them at the top of the food chain. Losing adaptability makes you prey. Surrendering it intentionally makes you stupid prey, including prey for the demons.
Men are adaptable, but there are limits. This is because God’s calling of manhood requires a certain amount of intransigence. Without that, there can be no defense of moral imperatives. Some things are most assuredly worth dying for, some things worth killing for, and men lacking a sense for such things aren’t really men.
Women are more adaptable, more deeply, and over a wider range of things than men. Their mission from God is a little different. Protecting the nest and the brood requires that; we call it mothering. It’s a good thing, a critical thing.
In social interactions, we are dealing with how the Fall and several millennia of human failure have sometimes nearly smothered our God-given instincts. The reason Game Theory is such a growing interest on the Net is because it explains the disjuncture between cultural mythology and observable fact. While most writings in the Manosphere fail to examine the ancient biblical understanding of such things, they do at least offer an antidote to the ocean of poisonous lies.
The loss of innocence in the Fall means an inherent blindness to truth. What would be obvious to an innocent moral consciousness requires now a redemptive act of revelation. Given enough time and determination, we are permitted to see beyond the outer shell of the revelation, and contemplate the deeper and broader meanings. While often difficult to put into words, we rightly keep trying to find more parables for the ineffable truth until it becomes obvious to whatever audience we are trying to reach. We participate in revelation and redemption.
Fallen women crave power and control over things which affect their nesting. Rise above the merely literal here. Try to think of nesting broadly as the instinctive behavior of women, regardless what the individual women consider their nest eggs. While a woman’s environment may shape what she values most, how she acts is broadly consistent with every other woman in the world throughout history. A woman awakened to truth, having tasted revelation and redemption, will be more conscious about the moral imperatives and understand her own instincts better, but these tend to be the slimmest, tiny minority wherever we go.
Women vary in their conscious recognition of what goes on inside that instinctive wiring. Post-Modern Western feminists will demand control over every detail of their personal lives. Whatever it is they may say they want, you can identify that underlying thread of instinct to control. Think about the politics of women voting and how family courts treat men. They speak of human rights, but the fire is completely personal. What’s personal becomes political. They want a bigger club with which to hammer the men in their lives, and government is about as big as it gets.
Give her power voluntarily, and she’ll treat you as an ally, but she will not respect you. Charming, manipulation, activism — all forms of feminine power flexing. Show her they don’t work, that she has no power at all over you, and while she may consciously be angry, something in her wiring is drawn to you. Most these days will take it as a personal insult, will harass you endlessly, because they can’t let it rest. That’s instinctive.
Power in our modern context is not what it would be in ancient biblical times, men. For most of us today, we flex our God-given calling by building a character which includes a willingness to cut our losses without much sign of emotion. If she can’t make you hurt, she has no power.
Marriage properly happens when the peculiar mix of conscious choices and instinctive wiring makes for a stable and lasting partnership. This includes the probability of parallel growth in understanding and the response to that greater wisdom. Marriage is unstable at best when you build on any other approach.
The Western mythology of man pursuing his bride is not in Scripture. There is an apparent reference to it in places like the Song of Solomon, but the words translated into English do not capture the entirely different perspective of the Hebrew mind. For example, the idea of simply dating around until you find a decent match would never happen in ancient times. A man in search of a bride would always be working through intermediaries. Always; it’s almost a form of peace treaty negotiation between clans and tribes. So obvious is this to ancient Hebrew minds, they seldom bothered to mention it. In our Western world, where none of that exists, pursuing a women hands her too much power. Don’t do it.
Make her come to you. Do not supplicate; make her the supplicant for your attention. Don’t be needy. A woman worth having will be drawn to your mission and power, men. You may need to work at being perceptive about it, but God takes care of more loose ends than you can imagine when you are faithful to His ways. Ladies, prepare your minds and hearts to carefully measure when a man displays the godly power of your shepherd. Nothing else you desire should stand in the fore; it all should depend on the man. Decide what you can and cannot tolerate as he is when you find him, because God is the one who makes and changes hearts, not you. Your instinct to see potential is mostly a lie, unless you’ve studied this issue at length.
That we are adaptable means we can study His ways and grow wiser against our own fallen natures.

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Habakkuk 2

Posted on September 29, 2012 by ehurst

Wisely does Habakkuk announce he will wait on God to answer, for the Lord does all things in His own good time. We struggle to understand how the Hebrew mind viewed time so differently. The hand of God moves when time is ripe, not according to predetermined scheduling. It is neither clock-driven nor event-driven, but justice-driven. Wise men understand larger events only seem caused by great men, or men in great numbers. In reality, it is God who works through the hearts of both good and evil. But there is a difference in how the just and unjust see the things God does. The prophet knows he’ll be corrected, and prepares his heart to respond appropriately.
Pedantic literalism misses the point here. God warns Habakkuk he could write the revelation on stone without fear it would be wrong. He could make sure it was publicized to any and all, and not be embarrassed by how it turns out later. The real challenge is not the message, but waiting on God. Men are the most impatient of creatures. To us, it seems God is heartless in delaying the revelation of His truth, but in His eyes the problem is our truculent folly. It’s not as if God isn’t aware of our time sense, but is hardly moved by it. Thus, He restates the general principle: An upright heart will always find God faithful, but an unjust man will never get what he really wants. It’s not about events and property, but about communion with God.
So Habakkuk should expect to see the Babylonians insatiable and utterly rapacious. They will consume like a fire and never get enough, yet in the end, this very thing will become a joke. This signature lack of contentment will be what destroys them, because they won’t be able to keep any of their plunder very long. The Babylonian Empire stood less than a century. There was nothing wrong with their learning, nor any failure in the genius of her rulers, but her dark soul was empty and dead even while she lived.
God will never allow His glory to be muted. Even when it seems all the world assails His Name, He rules. Is it not odd how so many take advantage of human weakness to dominate and oppress, and forget their own vulnerabilities? Whatever human talent can raise up, God can easily trump when He’s ready. You cannot exploit His Creation without His justice noting whether you seek His glory or your own. Humanity so quickly forgets and worships their own hands, or what those hands can produce. How quickly Creation forgets and wipes away the greatest accomplishments of humanity, yet bows reflexively to the Creator!

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Taste and Art

Posted on September 29, 2012 by ehurst

I know what I like. You can lock me in a chair where I have to listen to your favorite music, but even after days and weeks of this torture, I’m not likely to appreciate your taste in music.
Humans tend to calcify their tastes rather early in life. As the current trends in which their awareness developed drift farther afield, they become less interested. But that’s pop music, and we do have a body of scientific research which has identified a type of music which is of such genius, it manages to work for just about everyone at any time in history after its publication. This sort of thing comes from people who don’t suffer that developmental calcification.
Head-bangers can be made to tolerate, even appreciate, carefully selected Classical pieces. I’ve done it myself. It’s the same musical pieces Chinese audiences in remote regions still like.
When you ask the aficionados, you aren’t likely to get a safe consensus on what’s truly genius in art. Too many of them are unable to pull back with that separate category of genius which notices the human response. They only understand the depth of passion with which they are moved, and simply do not accept the idea you aren’t so moved. Thus, a huge swath of good art is really just popular with the “in” crowd who are allowed to announce their tastes. This is why many “great” novels are boring, because politics had much to do with their selection. Yet I can sit down children from almost any subculture which understands my American English tongue, read Dickens, and they’ll be absorbed. (Okay, I do have some skill with dramatic reading.) Dickens tends to be actually great, drawing approval across generations and cultures. He even translates well into other languages, I’m told. Simply because we understand the part played by some “great” writers during the various periods of English Literature does not mean they are going to reach across the ages of the English language and entertain everyone. We don’t deny the greatness of their art, only note it’s not quite in the same class of genius.
It won’t matter what the experts say from within the field of a given art form, if no one else pays any attention. It’s not a matter of my tastes, either. It’s the question of how easily we can draw at least a modicum of interest across cultural barriers. This eliminates mere passing fashion and taste as a factor. Perhaps the artists themselves would not be able to tell you how they did it, but we recognize Beethoven as one of them, along with Dickens, da Vinci, and so forth.
It’s okay for you to ignore the experts. Don’t let them intimidate you; their position is often wholly political in nature. Politics is more often wrong than right, and when right, often so completely by accident, as if it were some sort of error.

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