social

The trouble implicit in the last post plagues comments and blogging. Plenty of truthful things are asocial, and harmful, and would go more nearly unsaid, or better cloaked, if there were not such an easy and asocial form of publication. But of course I expect nobody to read this.

polity

I have an antipathy towards the merely intellegent. I think it is earned, but it is there regardless of justification, and certainly not due to justification. It is a matter of aesthetics. What's repellent is the failure -- probably the incapacity -- to be either effortlessly human or rationally actualized. Aside from being repellent, I find it tempts me towards manipulation, and that's another reason for the antipathy: one does not like those whose characteristics are so tempting towards one's personal lusts towards evil.

mighty square

Google earth shows Mandalay from above and what we see is this magnificent square moat about the royal compound. Burma is the country that subtlety forgot, and Shwedagon Pagoda and Bagan are the usual proof. But that moat is more sublime to a modern eye.

extraterrestrials

The discovery of nonhuman intelligent life elsewhere - or here - would matter only to the extent of reciprocity. Without reciprocity, the discovery would be informational, perhaps disinfect a few stubborn falsehoods, and certainly spawn a few new ones. In short, it would hardly matter. Reciprocity, if minimal or sporadic (or perhaps if localized), would matter in a manner that would track responsible theology. That would be a happy circumstance, in that it would render useful some of the best developed bodies of higher human effort, which religious theologies are. And it would be a happy circumstance, too, in that it would almost certainly elevate a sense of humanity and good action, in the manner of a religious awakening. There would be a (human) Jonathan Edwards. By 'in the manner' I mean that the elevation would be uneven and largely temporary, but with detectable leavening effects that would carry forward many generations with a utility comparable to Puritanism in New England. Whether the interaction was, in itself, good or bad, happy or unhappy, of course, is a matter of particulars. (That Puritanism's tenets were not so did not prevent Puritanism from being greatly useful, on balance. The thought that a mistaken or fraudulent minimal extraterrestrial reciprocity might be similarly useful, on balance, although not genuine, is interesting, but too risky to wish for because the fraudster could not be counted on to do the faking in a manner meant for the common good. Among the differences between cult founders and the beginnings of the higher religions is simply that cult foundings are reliably too deliberate and intended to be useful outcroppings for human development to encrust.)

Now, if the interaction were sustained and general, the effect would not be theological, but simply the end of what we have been, and the beginning of something as new as what we became upon gaining language.

It doesn't matter that, in actuality, all of this is surpassingly unlikely. The thought is itself interesting, since it considers one of the few really important alterations that could occur that is not annihilation or a functional equivalent.

Another, and more likely, important alteration would be a plague that very greatly reduced the human population. Such a plague would be more likely to benefit mankind after a too-terrible interval, than it would be to harm it. But the middle passage, and the not-too-unlikely alternative, that we would be worse off, perhaps worse off indefinitely, makes such a plague repugnant even as a thought experiment.

Yet another, and less likely, important alteration would be a sundering of humankind into parts that did not communicate, or that hardly communicated. This would almost surely be bad. Even that may be understating it -- this would be bad, absent very special, narrow and odd conditions. One of the most complete blunders of the Hebrew (and Christian) scriptures is the tower of Babel story, which casts segregation as the cure. There are ample examples in history of linguistic segregation and desegregation, and the results of such segregation are almost always bad, sometimes very bad, and of desegregation are almost always good, often very good.

The Babel story is one of the most factually falsifiable portions of the Bible. But that falsifiability should not overshadow the additional (not the only additional) defect I have just sketched: that the scattering "cure" is in fact a poor one. It is not even a corrective (good) punishment, only a cruel one, because calamitous and indecipherable.

Which brings insight to the extraterrestrial line of thought: the generalized good of ongoing interaction with extraterrestrials, were there any, would really be that of a sort of desegregation. That is why one can say that such interaction would be more likely to be good than bad without having to posit whether we or they are virtuous or vicious, brilliant or stupid, wise or shallow.

a worldly one

His Nobel speech turns out to have been excellent, remarkable, and really the first noteworthy speech he's given in office. It ranks in the upper second tier of state papers (with the Four Freedoms but below the Second Inaugural) and given the context it could not have ranked higher.

This is despite the fact that the actual choice of recipient was absurd (for many years, anyhow), and the political context could not have been more treacherous. Obama, as a person in power, is honorable, thoughtful, too young, basically moderate. His political characteristics are more interesting: he continues to be one of the great line-skippers of human history (Alexander the Great being even more audacious, and the biblical Jacob comes to mind as a sort of type). Just as important, Obama is his best when cornered. That's interesting.

He also has that sine qua non of political characteristics in common with our last president, and, really, most very successful politicians I can think of: somehow he has a quality that makes people absolutely clamor to help him. What was it that made George H.W. Bush different from his more able brother Jeb, in the end? It was that George H.W. was someone people, very unusual people like Rice, Cheney, Rove and for that matter Laura really, really wanted to help, when any number of other callow sons of privilege attract no such coterie. Obama has this same quality. It is this ability to attract and hold, as if by spiritual force, the support and labour of the best and brightest that makes, ultimately, a president. It is what Hilary lacked and Bill had. It is what Obama has and McCain didn't. The mysterious ability to entrance and employ the best and make them yours. It is a Davidic quality: kingly, really. Needless to say, I do not mean that this quality it is good or bad in itself. I figure Mao had it, too.

Of course, it is usually ambiguous, morally, even when it is undeniable as an intensely possessed quality: Trudeau, Churchill, De Gaulle. People who had this: both Roosevelts, neither Adams, both Bushes, not Nixon or Carter; Obama and Reagan, Truman in part, Eisenhower in spades; not Gingrich but Hastert, Johnson but not Lincoln; Washington above all, Madison of the founders first behind, Jefferson to a degree, Wilson without doubt. McArthur to McClellan to a very dangerous degree, Marshall and Powell, in a militarily useful measure. Greenspan had it to our hurt, Bernanke lacks it to our benefit.

humanist?

Humanist is a word for what I am, but it implies something grander than is true. Maybe I should feel, certainly I would like to be thought of as feeling for all of humanity. But if I do anything on that scale, it is sometimes to think, but not to feel. I can feel fellowship only on a garden's scale. Put me into a stadium and I am only a mob's atom, not a person, a self, or me.

dark ages

Retired athletes have a long way down. I get it. Particular human excllences or capacities are of limited use, limited value, out of all proportion to the immense drain on devotion and effort entailed and the inflamed expectations engendered. Exceptions are exactly that. That is the attraction of money: neither ability nor anything else works so well across so many applications. Money is a middling attribute, but the best possible platform for a really fine attribute.

not me

This full sense that others are what one's self is: fragile, needful. For this we tell good lies of fellowship, give false hopes of national progress, and fight right wars. For this, and to lessen bloodshed. This pair polarizes the human world: the same strain that enables the good and fine holds taut the net between. This is more worthy than personal integrity, individual dignity.

da capo

I doubt greed is good or bad, although I am sure it is dangerous. Put a fence around it. I suppose it is more bad than good, if splayed onto a scaled and measured once. But that is to little point. What I'm sure of is that I am greedy, and that the management of greed is the driving of a wonderful little engine, that propels, or spits fumes, or some mix of both, depending on my care in managing it. To have good digestion and not grow consumptive: that's the beginning. And to look out at the world and drink in: that is the core. And to allow the osmotic transformations that come from selective permeation of within and without: that is the end.

becoming a friend

The acts of becoming, as opposed to being, a friend, are, at their best, stepwise removals of social veils: not a steep drop into casualness, but a deconstruction. Removing each piece deliberately makes each clear, and displays our control of them. That is an assurance as well as a display: an assurance that we can reimpose them as needed. A friend worth having needs to know that we can resume the veil, since a friendship is a contingent social unit. The presentation of self is subsumed, partly, in the presentation of that unit. I do not speak of secret friendships.

the simple

A simple person should tell truths and not lie and be respected for it. But a wise man who does not lie is dangerous. If you must have knives in your pockets, fold them shut or sheathe them before walking about.

This is why we have fora: in the surgery, or the court, there is no sheathing, no lying, and razors stropped to a truthful fatality. The elaborate barriers of evidence, sterilization, ceremony, seniority, and more are testimony to our social understanding of the possibility, utility, and lethality of truth in its concentrated, weaponized, forms.

professions

A profession is remunerative work, undertaken for the general good over the bulk of the individual's productive life, that requires such commitment for the development of requisite ability and judgment. Income is necessary to remove distraction, and thus must be stable and ample, but never large or an enticement. Market-driven income practices eat away professionalism. For example, I am overpaid, both as a matter of fact, and as matter of impedance to professional development. The market more frequently underpays, though, and this is no better: a professional does not grow from a forager's diet. The conviction the market wreaks is that what I do is, after all, a job, not more. That is true, but it is a useless truth that displaces a vitally useful lie. To say that mud is water and dirt does no harm. But to say that an illustration is paper and ink, is harmful truth telling. The wisdom to work with truth and falsehood, neither for their own sake, nor by mechanical sorting, nor with a loss to truthful orientation -- this is the sport of a great soul, and in minute popular dilutions, the tincture that distinguishes professions from jobs.

an old story

Back when I was young and Baptist, one of the wise mothers in the church told me this story as a response to something I've long forgotten. One of her friends was Mormon, and she agreed to read much of the Book of Mormon together with her. Politely, the Baptist mother said that, in the end, she didn't believe the Book of Mormon was the word of God. "Pray," said the Mormon friend, "that the Holy Spirit will tell you what is true." The Baptist mother agreed, and the next week, waiting for laundry, the Mormon friend asked if she had.

"I did."

"Did the Holy Spirit speak to you?"

"It seemed so, but I find it very hard to tell the difference between the voice of the Holy Spirit within myself and my own thoughts voicing themselves within me."

And so it is. We cannot distinguish inward sources with much precision. Are my facts aesthetic preferences after all? And so on, even to the divine. The message matters more than the messenger not because this would be quite so if we knew the messenger, but because we do not.

Is my hatred for hate virtue, or even moral, or a weak stomach? The wrong question.

bodies

One should keep one's distance from one's body and mind - not because they are not fully one's self, but because they are. Better still to vary the distance between consciousness, mind, and body. And best to make the inductive variation in these distances a source not only of energy, but of order, even gladness.

virtue's interest

Virtue and vice are oriented in time: interest later or interest now; cost now or cost later.

flexion

A range of available responses, an area, most usefully measured along the dimension of possible utility. Narrow and shrinking in all, but a good relative measure of any directly human entity. That is, of a small committee or an aunt, not of a law or a park or a parliament.

domesticity

Much of individual thought and activity is aimed at domesticating one's surroundings. That, or at sustaining a personal illusion of domestic safety. But the world is not a home.

love divine

It is not the mystery of existence that turns our thoughts to the divine, to God. The nature or presence of God tells us little to nothing about existence itself. Rather, it is the mysteries of love and knowledge that cry out for the divine, which if present plots all in radial lines and arcs, and charges all with orientation by which loving actions may themselves, moving along, or against. We misdirect ourselves to the mystery of existence because we love it and it lays beneath the mantle of knowledge. Our minds and hearts demand a world that can be a home to them. Thoughts of the divine are, in the main, the desperation of our faculties to domesticate the world in the face of our inability to make smaller homes for them ourselves.

solutions

Responses to stubborn social ills must generally neither be actual solutions, which are too severe on the human environment within which these ills live, nor be surrenders, which make ills too severe and increase their multiplication.

truth and good are not allied

That is the lesson of the sons of Noah and their drunken father's nakedness.

conquers all

Love, like a dog licking a bone, wears away anything hard, whether truth, prejudice, or otherwise. A slow but complete acid, indiscriminate: nonmoral.

disbursement

The buttresses of the walls we build between ourselves and the void press inward. We are not keeping the emptiness out, but holding ourselves in.

chaining desires

Our desires are the source and vary, including in this way: a few desires can link with their kin into chains and structures. The rest are in the main inert, simple, impossible, or destructive in a lower sense. Morally seen, that hoarde of simple desires subsist in a narrow band between pleasures and hazards: birdsong and rusty nails.

But those chaining desires -- these can develop into good and evil. Morality is predictive appreciation of the potential and produce not of all human desires, but of that residue of our desires which can be spun into webs. Not that I want coffee, but that I want to talk to you.

humility ready to ride

Not humility but pride in me drives quiet inaction. In quiet unrelation vaunting self-regard evades real limits, real faults that glare in speech or action. By not writing, I keep safe a high view of my ability to write. Humility may not spur me to act, but can ride happily when other spurs motivate.

humble yourself

Tend your plot, keep silence. Yes, surely, but why?

The trouble and the drive

The trouble is conviction: that there is nothing to say that needs saying, no reason to multiply words; that there is vanity in uninvited speaking. But there is a quiet drive to talk, too: a suspicion that one is alive not in the depths of one's inward thoughts, but at the surface, in the interaction, through communion.