slick

That peculiar and universal sense of groove: the massive internal inertia in the face of a large project, and then - well, not yet - almost - ok, then - things just start moving.

cash value

Mostly, an abstract or "philosophical" bent is of meager use in my profession, or those of others.

But there are bits of advantage to be had from being abstract, that partly compensate for my feeble bits.

Here's a profitable triplet of abstract habits:

• Identifying the salient unit.
• Knowing the difference between a material units and mere measure of extension.
• Accounting for radical differences between one of, or two of, or more than two of the same thing.

equine

Outside my midtown office,
Wet hoofprints on the sidewalk,
Trace a path to the ATM.

joints

Growing old is, my grandmother tells me, partly the increasing experience of one's body as a source of irritations.

phobias

So far as I know, I am afraid of two things only: prison and torture. I dread pain and sickness, sure, but I don't fear them. And really nothing else even comes to mind.

Ligeti at the Philharmonic

A lawyer easily appreciates the special excellence of a professional who excels beyond the intrinsic quality of the material he has to work from. That's what happened last night: great, wide-winged, beautiful birds, straining to hoist a plate of lead.

too human

Intellectual motivation navigates between its two poles: interest and salience.

Physical motivation navigates between its two poles: ease and work.

Emotional motivation navigates between its two poles: steadfastness and attraction.

Animal motivation navigates between its two twin poles: rest\shelter and food\reproduction.

Moral motivation navigates between its two twin poles: judgment and merit.

that is

The proper setting is a precondition to an individual's actualization. It is often possible for one to know which settings are wrong from the start, but one can only know which settings are right in hindsight. Adams (any of them) would have been a nobody in South Carolina. Calhoun would might well have turned out to have been a prominent transcendentalist, rather than an evil genius, had he been set in Massachusetts.

Darlington, Wisconsin

A country judge of reasonable intellegence, secure in his community, open in his thinking to the world, steeped in the law and committed to the good order and liberty of that jurisdiction -- this is a beautiful possibility. That it is so often actualized in our world and in our country -- well, I honor such judges.

It also gives me a little window into what Jefferson was getting at with his agrarianism, which, overall, has always struck me (and I think struck most of his contemporaries) as loopy. The insight is this: when Jefferson glorifies the agrarian life, he is not thinking of the farmhand -- the population or citizenry -- but the manor, the petty gentry, and their freedom from institutional compression.

And the type is utterly charming: the able, honest judge in a remote county seat, doing justice. But that judge isn't in any way better than the overworked, neurotic, vaguely shifty urban judge: bring the rural judge into the city and the results will be disappointing.

What is wonderful is the correspondence between the individual, the profession, and the setting. Yes, I basked in it on Tuesday.

go fish (a tart one)

You must be very clear headed about what you are doing when you occupy yourself with more of politics or world affairs than you are actually using in your political participation. Perhaps you are entertaining yourself. Perhaps you are simply heaping ashes on your head. Probably you are indulging your tribalism. Or perhaps you are, after all, pursuing knowledge and wisdom out of the love of higher things.

But the heart is deceitful above all things: how are you to tell whether your newspaper reading is good or bad? A pretty good test: are you a follower of hard sciences, too? Or some similar apolitical subject that is constantly developing (that is, not philosophy)? And how do you go about reading the hard sciences? Are you reading Nature (or Science)?*

Another test: are you partisan beyond the extent of your actual participation? Thought so. You're just a sports fan, actually less than.

Partisanship is not bad in itself if it is coextensive with actual participation. Partisanship in excess of actual participation is almost impossible to justify or consider as neutral.


*You should.

Sam Adams

All else equal, which is better - a revolution whose popular ferment precedes its leaders, or the reverse?

smells and bells

Any movement for public (or family, or group) morality has ever, and quickly, confronted the problem that vice is, relatively and usually, tastier, more colorful, more fun.

There are two coordinate pairs of basic tactical responses.

One pair is that of rewards and punishments: the virtue of this pair is that there isn't any confusion about the difficulty (say) of a particular virtue, or the gratification (say) of a particular vice. We link the difficult virtue with a separate and second thing, a gratifying reward. We link the gratifying vice to a separate and second thing, a painful punishment.

The main benefit of this first pair is that the vice and virtue are distinct, and that can lead to a growth of systematic thinking -- of seeing that good and evil are important in themselves, over and above the pleasure and pain of the stimuli we linked. The problem is that folks will attempt to evade or game the linkage, and will generally be able to do so unless we make the setting and the links so rigid that this very rigidity creates its own problems.

I call this first pair the moral pair.

The second and other pair or approaches is that of improving the desirability of the virtue, in itself, and of making the vices noxious: thus the great cathedrals have visual beauty, hymns and pipe organs, the wafting scent of the ages and the incense. And vices can be rendered bitterly shameful, risky to health, and furtive. We culture the vices and virtues, hybridizing them into new strains that mitigate the astringency of pure virtue and the devil-may-care blitheness of pure vices. We make the virtues more hardy and colorful; we make the vices feebler and more distasteful.

The benefit of this second pair is that it operates directly on the virtuous and vicious objects and is much harder to evade. The problem is that by so doing, we require that people not see through what we have done, to unravel it by too much moral analysis. (Failed rewards and punishments are easier to repair or replace; failed culturations of virtue and vice are disastrously difficult to address.)

I call this second pair the cultural pair.

Imagine a 2x2 grid of these two pairs, and plotting approaches within it. You would end up with one descriptor of approaches to public morality: that of the Mormons, or of the YMCA, or of the Soviets, and so on.

And we can add a third dimension - that of whether the emphasis was more on the heightening of virtue - a flowering vision of the dancing, dizzying arts - or on the subduing of vice - a severe and Cromwellian formality.

Will virtue become more earthy and voluptuous (Vatican City) or will vice be evaporated into the airy lightness and sublimity of the formalist's vision (the Shakers)? I have always tended toward the latter - but with a sidelong and sighing ache for the former. That is, I am transported by a Quaker foursquare church more than by a Botticelli, but, ah, glory to Botticelli!

That 2x2x2 cube is what I have in mind when I talk about the differences among serious approaches to public morality.

word work

She was seized of a passion.
She was seized of a purpose.
She was seized of a person.
She was seized of a glory.
She was seized of something.

talisman

A well-worn red-letter edition of the King James is one of the keys to understanding America. I don't mean the English words at all, I mean the artifact.

wine

The power of wine is that of a sort of etching: it cuts away and heightens what remains: in my case, a desire to worship, and a painful lack of worshipful objects.

pei

Form Follows Structure.

millennium

A related point: a truly virtuous population would have to restrict its birth rate to avoid a crisis within a few generations. Vices prune the human vine, after all.

discount

I wonder how many lives have been saved by petty vices (whether those of the person spared or else those of others who would have intentionally or unintentionally killed the person spared).

Probably not as many lives are spared as lost to petty vices (so long as we include those lives lost to easy exacerbation of petty vices into woebegone vices, as we should). But I don't know. Probably the ratio tips positive at some point with very petty vices - where the only harm is shiftlessness, etc.

Adjacent subject: how many lives are spared by the pursuit of ordinary pleasures (eating, drinking, friendly conversation, and so forth)?

I don't know, but I'll bet: very many.

Warner Bros. may have saved more lives than the Red Cross. Maybe.

a you-absorbed one

If I am certain of anything, it is this: that to be agnostic is the only possibly justifiable position, taking into account commonly available evidence by means of our ordinary human faculties.

And yet I find understandable the myriad reasons why people are certain of God, and also the handful of reasons why some people are certain of their atheism. More than that: I see the benefit of either belief or unbelief to most who positively do, or absolutely do not, believe. I think most people are better off - and better for those around them - because of their certainty. (To be sure, I also believe that a significant minority of people who are the primary source of trouble in our world are so - as much as anything - because of their confident belief or unbelief in God.)

And this is one reason I don't write serious stuff: I would have to explain myself as believing with conviction that people are better off believing things I am certain are unjustifiable (I did not say are untrue) than they would be holding certain views I personally hold and find fully and exclusively justifiable.

I am convinced that, even on the meagre scale of non-fiction sales, the expression of my view would not be a very successful or useful activity. Or, more darkly, that if it somehow my views were to gain traction or adherence, that this would be more harmful than good.

Let this one theistic example stand for the many views I hold but do not express because 1) they won't entertain you, 2) they won't convince hardly anybody and 3) they'd come to no good.

And even explaining my reticence - even in the thumbnail way I just have - is pretty repellent and smacks of paternalism and error, no?

Better, far, to tend to my profession and work, my friends and family, and a few simple matters of ordinary enjoyment.

a self-absorbed one

It is in thinking about grammatical and philosophical topics that I am ever the adolescent, the playful, the inept, the misanthropic.

It is in my work and my relationships that I am adult, loving, productive.

These posts are a sort of sign on my shop door that reads "Gon Fishin." Or maybe they are polaroids of the small fry I caught but released, too immature to bring back home, regulations and permits being what they are. But, no worry, I'll be back in a bit to my lawyering and my home life. Back from here, I mean.

pronouns

The perceived difference, to the speaker, between "I" and "you" is the difference between a experience-with-the-permanence-of-a-thing and a thing-with-the-activity-of-an-experience.

But enough Winnie the Pooh. Let's put the pronouns on a scale, starting with the ones that feel the most like actions, events or experiences, and ending with the ones that feel the most like things, stabiles or personalities. (We're only talking about people here, so no reference to it.)

I
we
you (s)
you (p)
he/she
they

Why, it's the conventional scale! Action is seen up close. Personality is seen at at distance. I see my own experiences. You see my personality. Or, if you live with me over a long time, you see - in the place of personality - my patterns of behavior and savoir-faire.

Personality is the external objectification of a particular human experience, with a slant towards the actions expressed by the subject and away from the actions impinging on the subject. (But of course that slant is far slighter than is commonly supposed.)

priveleged

Just about everything I would give anything to get, I have. Just about everyone I love and want the best for is doing well. In the little pocket garden of my life, the tomatoes are coming in. (Now when do I get to discover there was a chest of doubloons buried beneath all along?)

tricky

I have dark suspicions as to whether courage is a virtue. Certainly it comprises a number of elementary virtues (strength, focus, valor, persistence); it is only the composite that I suspect. But courage is commonly thought of as in itself a single virtue, and I have struggled and failed to account for its virtuousness. (I can account for the approximate virtuousness of most other virtues.)

In fact, I'd venture that most moments in which courage - and not some one or several of its elements - is urged, and in which the urging of nothing else would do, are moments of propaganda and manipulation.

More precisely and bluntly: I have a hard time thinking of an instance (real or invented) in which courage is urged and treated as noncomposite (and for which nothing else would do), that is not actually a cloaked invitation to submission.

(So, keep that in mind, friends of mine, next time I urge you to be courageous!)

uhuhnnui

An aspect of wisdom: to handle the varieties of boredom well.

steps

Nationalism is a crude, rough and dirty thing. But it belongs to the triptych of unifying tablets: race, sect and nation. And as among those three it is by far the most safe (relatively!), the most plastic (relatively!), the least intrusive into daily life and ordinary freedoms (relatively!).

Nationalism is vital equipment for the project of civilization. Not because it is good, but because it is better. And while it is a temperamental and treacherous instrument, a master can play it. One can blow the horn of murder with it, or cry out mercy too.

Nationalism is the steel beam, steam shovel and stoked fire of wreaking civilization upon mankind. Race and sect are so much less useful, and so much more problematic, that they are better classed as what is acted on and against than as an agent of action in the project of civilization.

Look, find the world a superior substitute for nationalism and you will have changed the world. And I'll personally bow at your feet. Until then, the buttressing, harnessing, taming, directing, legalizing and ennoblement of nationalism is what we ought to be about.

remember

Remember: if a speaker is obliged to speak, the listener must ask whether the motivation for what is said is the mere necessity of speaking. We tend to grasp this when listening to videos of POWs denouncing their country, but we sometimes forget it when reading newspapers, listening to television news or browsing the posts of bloggers who makes their livings thereby.

court

Hooray for Elena, and good luck to her.

two pense

The last post gets at it nicely - we want to know what sort of system it is that we must have in the absence of omniscient participation or some other impossibility. And that is a universal adult franchise, for the sake of peace. The cost is great. The resulting inability to make good choices is maddening. And the superstructure (I almost said the rigging) required atop it is a vast and snarled mess.

But overall, it works wonderfully well. An example: there never was a mass murder of southern whites by blacks after all. That there was not is a historical shock. How to explain why such a predictable, almost justifiable calamity - with its inevitable cycles of retribution - never occured? That is better explained by the strong currents of popular democracy than anything else.

That the franchise is there refocuses the deprived mass onto the opportunity that is right there, rather than the wealth that is also right there. Why was there a reaching out for political equality rather than for forcible redistribution or fatal retribution? Why was the dominant race only feebly involved in the Klan and amenable to federal imposition of force? (That is, why did the postbellum murder count directly related to racial injustice amount to only thousands when it could so easily have been vastly more?)

The answer is only partly that there was a sense of right and wrong at play. The answer is, far more, that there was a more practical and alluring and immediately graspable abstraction than righteousness available: the franchise. And a more painlessly extensible worldly good to offer up than the dominant race's hoarded wealth: again, the franchise.

Magical thing.

Simply wonderful that almost every immigrant group and race and troubled but potentially powerful segment of our population that had been able, had it insisted, to demand payment, instead ultimately accepted a dream, which costs us nothing to manufacture and distribute. And more: once installed in the group, this thing that cost us nothing, they begin to pay us dividends of participation and hard labor. Because the American dream really is a very hard taskmaster.

Groups that manage to refuse the American dream are so very few and far between. The Shakers, barely the Amish, slightly some Hasidic communities.

pense

In the abstract, I would be in favor of a system that allowed everyone to vote, but which silently discarded the ballots of anyone not able to carry a basic conversation on the main subjects treated in that election. Unfortunately this would require an omniscient and invisible being to carry out.

Who or what

Conflicts may be analyzed in terms of whether the 1) the cause of the conflict, 2) the means of combat, or 3) both are caused by a failure (on its own terms) of one or both combatants.

Tactics should map accordingly.

well, what now?

The oil-and-vinegar mixture of my resignation and ambition - I suspect this is a trait I share with most other people in the great middle of a free society.

quotidien

I play my daily tunes with gratitude and resignation. I know the rarity of my place and privilege - like an organist at a well-funded manor chapel, paid to turn out agreeable tunes. But I see within myself and behind these ranks of ivory organ stops, so many forces uncalled, resources reserved, all for lack of a reason to shout hosanna, or march to war, or vaunt myself or any other.

Oh for a cause! To have the feelings I used to have singing the mighty hymns, believing them, believing them heard, believing them effective. To strike the mighty chords of strength!

breakage

A theme to my interests is the nature of failure. This is not out of perversity, an interest in pathos, or overmuch pity.

Instead, it is a focus on an element of human (indeed, living) systems. I told a friend long ago that the conviction I had gained during during my first adult years of reading was that "nothing works."

That is not despair, and I'm rarely understood when I say those words, or anything based on that idea.

What I do mean is that, in the realm of human or living things, "everything and everybody breaks or is broken". This is even though our minds, our language, our plans (and our, well, X) are built on the default assumption of function, continuation, appropriateness, and the like.

On the one hand, that gap between our way of dealing with and describing relevant objects and the nature of those objects it itself an instance of brokenness. But on the other hand, brokenness is itself partly an artifact of exactly that gap between the grid of apprehension and the sags, warps and kinks of the things apprehended.

The answer is not to throw out the compass and rule because the sea is rough, the earth is round and the waters are as treacherous as our selves. To the contrary, navigation is about precisely the apt apprehension of the transit from the straight lines used to the draping curves apprehended.

In our human realm, where living things, national plans and familial bonds are our subject - rather than the vastly simpler ocean and sky - the apt apprehension of the transit between our means and our objects becomes a matter for the understanding of breakage in the same way that in navigation it had been a matter for trigonometry.

To know something living is to know its failures. Or to know someone. I do not mean to give a kind of primacy to the breakage, except often a primacy in salience, but rather to point out the less recognized of peer truths.

I say less recognized. But posts like this have been uploaded at least since the penning of Genesis 3 and 4.

timing

One difference, I think, between an plainly organized movement (Obama for President, 2008) and a less entirely organized phenomenon (tea parties, 2010), will be borne out in the midterms. In both instances, there was or is the problem of Peaking Too Soon. I predict the monolithic organization will prove to have been better able to deal with this.

Obliquely related: I can't think of tea parties without thinking of the Cluetrain Manifesto, one of those 'the net makes all things new' absurdities of a decade ago.

natural

I attended a US naturalization ceremony this morning. Naturalization procedure invites new citizens to make the name changes on the day of naturalization because it avoids a subsequent rigmarole and because newly admitted citizens often do want to regularize name spelling, repair mangled name forms imposed by immigration agencies, and the like.

Five of the thirty or so name changes I saw this morning consisted of augmenting an existing name with Islam or a phonetically close variant. The only other pattern discernible in the name changes were six augmentations of of an otherwise Asian name with a Western familiar name ('Jimmy' came up three times).

helms

People will ever care, mostly, about the wrong things. The question is what to do about it. Educate 'em till the problem goes away? Bread and circus but behind the curtain run it despite 'em? Let 'em run the asylum and run? Admit we're 'em and content ourselves with our lot?

A wise and ever-varying mixture of parts of these four, as conditions require? Yes, that's my view.

firebug

Someone wrote a book about the human pattern of bursts of activity spaced like stars in our inert spaces of inactivity - that this is how we work, most of us. Not like machines.

True, true. For me anyhow: I read about this book and felt sure-enough exposed. I've always been a firefighter, who likes to laze around in the ready room of my mind, then go racing off, sirens wailing, to douse the flames of a project. I've even been known to set a project blazing (usually by screwing with the deadlines) just so I can get myself motivated enough, by the thrill of having to put the resulting fire out, to get the damn thing done.

map quest

I'd like to see how articulateness maps across subject matter and groups of people as speakers. People are very articulate about, for example, Jay Leno vs. Conan O'Brien. I'd want to control for the topography of familiarity and salience of course: that people are excellent at excusing their behavior is not what interests me for present purposes. Instead - I'd like to work out what the region of articulateness comprises, and how it varies by the type of person whose articulation is mapped.

I mean to articulate, not to explain, of course. Topics about which people can well articulate implausible explanations count for purposes of the map I want.

hi

Fortunately, I'd be awful at television. That's a temptation I'm better off without.

default thinking

I do think my mind is my central nervous system, yes. And I also think that there's nothing of my conscious being that falls outside of what I have just referred to as mind.

But these are default positions. I hold them only because they are the appropriate starting point and I have neither evidence nor argument by which to advance from square one.

The usual complaint is that I am somehow low-rating mind by treating it, by default, as material. I'm sure this has no merit: wherever did anyone find the limit of material capacity? No such limit is known. I start with the material mind in part because material is, so far as I know, limitless.

Pendant implications hang thick, but I peruse them lightly - it really is only a default view. The first is that animals may well think and feel in the same manner as do we, but with only the tiniest fraction of human mental complexity and extent. That said, the possibility that an approximation might exist - or nearly exist - between a prodigiously thoughtful simian and a very feeble minded person, would not shock me if demonstrated.

And if it were I would be able to take further a guess of mine: that emotion, soul and higher-order aspects of human consciousness are actually vast sheets of ordinary thought folded into the small packets that we experience, in time and situation, as something quite other than thought, logic or recognition. That a feeling of lost love, for example, is really a compact scroll, or, better, folded sheet of thoughts written in tight columns on both sides. A whole book of narrative felt in less than a sentence, expressible in a single sigh. Like having the whole scriptures etched onto a grain of rice, only immediately and simultaneously available to perception. That emotions are, as it were, thoughts, but printed tightly and overlapping into suggestive shape, as if a densely folded origami made from microfiche.

back

At times shy and frightened, but be sure that he'll use his elbows and knees if the law's lid lifts.