plane poem

I order bloody mary mix on planes every time:
It's free and it says I'm up in the air, I'm flying.
Give me a window to look through and
Headphones to hear public-radio Vivaldi through.
It is good up here, where so much has been
Fouled to lift me.
We're a greedy and tangled people,
But we make great cans.

bright with dullness

The glory of the modern world is that is teeming with small groups of experts, hotel conference rooms hashing out how to model auto insurance audit variance. It is the sort of thing that is lovely to me.

ecclesia

One of the benefits of having grown up a baptist in a church that took congregational decision making as seriously as it did, is that I had many years, hundreds of meetings, and about twenty important issues over which to observe how groups work well and work badly.

To be sure, it was a particular kind of group. We knew each other, we shared a common faith and our values did not range widely. We believed it was our job to discern what was right, not fight for what we wanted. The pastoring was muted by a plural leadership and good deal of commitment to the congregational ideal. (If I ever see a pastor's name on the sign of my old church, even in small letters, I will know it is not the church I grew up in.)

So it was a fairly functional and disciplined group. But it was still a group. And what one saw is that the virtues of a group are conservative -- group decision making is very goods at filtering out individual bad ideas that were bad when proposed. But groups without leadership do not reach out well for risky but needed work, nor do they effectively prune ideas that were good at the time, but which have grown unneeded, or bad, or which although good in isolation, interfere with other members of the set of things the group is about.

Consensus. It is good at some things, but not at others. In a society, though, consensus is one of the two workable models for avoiding bloodshed. The other is an iron state of some sort. I chafe under the limits of consensus, I really do. Consensus is oppressive, prevents all sorts of good things from coming to fruition, and makes a cynic of anyone who thinks hard about how consensus will ever give the below average the upper hand over those who would, in a perfect world, have the reins. (I leave aside the methods available to the able to harness their apparent masters: the majority.)

But if consensus is oppressive, an iron state is more so. The choice is fundamentally between consensus or a violently free world, which is free largely for those who are all of: strong, violent and lucky. And not for others.

Consensus is a yoke, but relatively the lighter one, and whatever my will to run free, I could not wish that on my neighbors, and I do not wish to find out whether I am one of the winners of war, or among their spoils, or simply the small dust underfoot.

inverse

I cannot tell whether it is flaw or merely a trait, but I find that love of individuals is so easy, and love of groups is so hard.

back to thinner

So back to thinner - the world we actually have is a world of shifting materialism, which is, plainly enough, livable. The livability is not borne of neutralization -- it is not that the decreasingly materialistic aspects are cancelling out the increase. Rather it is that the particularity of the increases limits their badness somewhat, and there are plenty of good things in the word that are not about changes in materialism. The decrease of materialisms now passe contributes very little to the goodness of the world, in either direction, except by making space.

measure

One relatively reliable proxy for the overall quality of an adult is the objectivity of their sense of personal safety. There are heedless (and paranoid) persons otherwise of quality here and there, but that is not my point. Few other particular traits seem to me to meaningfully correlate with overall merit.

thinner

Life is truly not about money, or getting. But if it were and had always been so, the world would be a better place. (Now, if it hadn't been, but became so, the world would be an awful place. That's what we're really talking about when we decry commercialism or the almighty dollar: the ugliness of growing materialism.) Static materialism, if it were pre-established and sufficiently robust, would probably be livable and humane, and almost certainly beautiful.

why Brooks

Because of the use of bleach out, and the sense to make it tell. Because of the placement of the usage, in the last sentence, but not the end of the last sentence, so as to pack the wallop but not crack the tone of reasonableness set up by the first half of the column.

vengeance

Justice is among those concepts - perhaps chief among those concepts - that, once pushed beyond its intuitive meaning, becomes dangerous.

(I am tempted to add: No serious conception of the human world can avoid including a conceptual view of justice. Therefore all serious conceptions of the human world are dangerous. Dangerous things are not bad, but must be handled with understanding and care, or else shrouded in protective lore and myth. Therefore all serious conceptions of the human world must be either elitist or mystic - or both.)

more warm

That I am so pleased by the weather tells me truths about my composition that had grown dim.

warmer

Passing strangers' stoops last night the yellow glow of doorbells said peace to me.

corporeal

One of the most useful lies we tell ourselves is that we are not, in the main, our bodies. The trouble with being sick is not only the physical ailment but also the decreased transparency of our body to our perception. It is not that we are more bodily when ill than otherwise. It is that the useful self-deception that minimizes our physicality is undone.