near term

Dealing with near term unpredictability is one of the areas in which the uncontrolled, inborn aspects of our nature plays the most complete and interesting role. Reason stands taller in one's view of the farther future and the present. But in setting one's self up for this afternoon or tomorrow, it is not reason, but our nature, that both takes the lead and shows itself more fully.

getting Jesus

Any truly shameful personal failure that both humiliates and frightens the actor opens one up to a religious experience. There is a transcendence to a certain kind of self-destruction: the kind where the fearsome realization of peril comes only after, and the road to sin was paved with blithe habit and appetite. "My God! What I've done could have, or may yet, ruin me and those I love!"

Brooks

What he isn't willing to say is that our democracy would function better if it had a intergenerationally-stable elite whose ranks were moderately permeable, in both directions, in accord with merit.

tea party

There is a natural, though ever wavering, balance between the fear of being interfered with and the fear of being abandoned. But when one loses the fear of ever being abandoned, there is no balance, and the only thing managing the maladies springing from the fear of being interfered with is the temper or the times and the presence or absence of frightening things. And who can say that the times aren't bad or that there are no fearsome things about?

Come at from a different angle - there is a profound need for less participation and more representation in a democracy constructed like that of the United States, but wide-open, instant and easy communication pushes in exactly the wrong direction. In fact the internet produces a profoundly strange effect: it creates a new reason for the older, parliamentary approach. Born of chaos, rather than founding reason, parliament better harnesses multiple forces from myriad fronts. Our approach was founded on the hope that elitism and ever-spreading education would carry the day. That hope was largely unfounded. Instead, we have long had the costly blessing of being, in one way or another, bifurcated, which produces such fundamentally stable politics that even our odd system could function.

Put a little differently, the Constitution, fundamentally a structuring document, is rightly to be judged on the function of the structure created. And the only points at which that structure has served (instead of merely failing to disserve) are those at which it has jammed up, and made it impossible to do things that, in retrospect, we are glad we didn't do.

The things that our governmental structure has positively done, by means of structure, are things that are don't right past the Constitution, such as judicially mandated desegregation, which has everything to do with Marshall and Lincoln, and not a lot to do with Philadelphia (though more than nothing, since Article III is fully an article of the sort I and II are, rather than of the sort IV through VII are, and that is a pregnant peculiarity).

the aesthete

One great evil - rare but potent - is the man with the misbegotten artistic courage to treat his fellow man according to their measure against his own aesthetic.

more safety

My way of thinking is an attempt to reconcile, within the facilities of reason and thought, three great thrusts: my desire for beauty/pleasure; my desire for safety/success; all that I take in. The latter thrust is of course directed into me from without uninvited, and the first two thrusts are simultaneously parries and thrusts unto themselves. That they are both simultaneously is the beginning of the reconciliation.

safety

Safety conditions what is supportable in practice, and thereby even what thought should be encouraged. To take two examples (that are safe to think about), I have no problem - in the abstract - with the death penalty for the incorrigibly murderous, or even with compulsory abortions in the case of the unborn who would indubitably live short lives of unremitting misery. But it is the hedging in that sentence ("incorrigibly", "indubitably") that tip my hand: I don't trust humankind to wield those powers sufficiently well to entrust them to anyone, or any human culture. If there were a perfect, all-knowing, all-compassionate, all-just God, I would trust that God with these powers, and be thankful for their deployment.

All of which leads to this: I cannot deny that I believe in a kind of thought police. And having admitted that much, I am, inevitably, some sort of elitist. The question is: what sort? (The best sort?)

You won't be able to guess that, so I'll just have to tell you outright: I'm the merit-driven democratic sort of elitist. The drawback is the ultimate incoherence of the stance; the outweighing benefit is that meritocratic elitism seduces the nearly-able into striving, which simultaneously harnesses them, satisfies their inner needs - chiefly hope - and neuters what is otherwise the most threatening non-elite segment of humankind.

emotion

Emotionally, the Olympics - the opening ceremony, mostly - grab me every time. That's despite their being hokum. But it really is the closest thing we have to a shared shallow sigh at a beach sunset, and it is surprising and sweet that we have that. Pomp and circumstance. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. If it were possible to have the US President inaugurated in Europe you might end up with something having the same effect: it would be daft and it would make me choke up.

three wishes

Some great purpose. Money. To go a little mad.

ark

I cannot hear the word solution without seeing the shadows of death. The wise and lively soul is a motivated jellybean amping along an uneven and elastic surface, tossing in its minor motions, but tracing, over time, an arc.

nightmare

One occasionally has the unsettling sense that truth - in addition to its other and more obvious defects - is biased, partisan. That may seem a contradiction with nothing said, so let me adjust the adjectives: the fear is that, often and in important segments, truth may have a thrust. I occasionally went to a daft but amusing Christian riff on the Boy Scouts called AWANA growing up and they had an hymn-like anthem whose last line was "Truth, on the March!"

And that is the fear: that some truths are inherently martial, and that one who disciplines oneself into a neutral, ballasted, detached frame of mind - whether by temperamental predisposition, aesthetic preference, or precisely a love of truth - that such a person is rendered incapable of receiving certain truths.

A symptom of the reality of this nightmare: not my near certainty that John Brown knew things I don't know, but my equal confidence that some of those things he knew I am incapable of knowing.

abuse

Abuse is really - and not just semantically - misuse. Misuse, for a time, can be a form of investigation, though we must generally know this only after the fact. A book must be understood by the misunderstandings it enables, as well as through the clearer streams of productive thought it carries. So too with sex, food, friends, self. The productivity of misuse is at an end when it just touches the surface of contempt, past which the harm of it - for the actor - begins. The return from that bottom is properly not a second sailing - not an Aristotelian return - but a reset. A use of the mental gift of repositioning oneself without passage. It is that next step after catching on, and the conditioned, subsequent propriety, that makes a knowing life better than a righteous life, and capitalizes on the destructive risks of abuse.

From a different stance: the beginning found in humiliation as an end to a laboured wrong is treasure.

the garden

Voltaire and Bernstein have it as nearly right as may be. Work to the betterment and beauty of that which is adjacent, with neither hope nor despair.