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.

league tables

Among the excellences of goodness is this: that goodness is interesting. And that suggests a sort of fertile game: to rank important characteristics against the degree to which they imply or disimply another among them. Persistence is ordinarily not interesting, even though much of persistence is good.

vade-mecum

When I am unhappy, I find solace and play in the sounds of words wove into draping sentences.

crooked timber

"There is something wrong with me." A person who does not think this thought on occasion - with a flat, leaden sincerity - is a person I will not trust.

vote then pause

Discussion, like a sentence, requires punctuation. In a democratic polity or representative organ, the period ends with a vote. If the interval from that period to the resumption of discussion (of the same subject) is known or felt by the franchised, one has a building block of political coherence. A decision-making body must have some editorial sensibility to induce periodicity. This is not (merely) an aesthetic need - political coherence requires it.

possibility

To ask how we should live and organize ourselves in view of our ends, needs and desires is not to say that the achievement of any is actually possible. It is only to insist that the question not be answered with an eye only to my usefulness or our overall usefulness to an end (such as the glory of God or the conquest of another land). It is instead to insist that we have and hold our share of the ways to pursue our own ends.

desires - individual and community

We want to live life to a natural conclusion with the comfort of friends and a substantial degree of safety. We want scope for our actions, interests and thoughts. We want to believe that we do not exist in vain. We do not want to be ever in pain or fear. We want, now and then, moments of wonder or transcendence.

These being so - how should we live and organize ourselves?

fresh fish

Is it possible that the key is to start selling intrinsic goods in a manner that people will buy? That there must be two parts, each complicated? First, the finding of good and the molding of related goods. Second, the adjustment and presentation of those goods so as to retain all or most or much -- or some? -- of the goodness, but to render them desirable.

I could make a fortune selling self-discipline if I could only make seem to be a cheeseburger.

pivot

.

baseline

You will misunderstand me and my understanding of you and others unless you realize this: until or in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I assume that any individual or human grouping - national, temporal, familial, religious, professional or otherwise - is exactly half good, half bad. Thus my first inquisitive goal is to find out more and my first communicative goal is to nudge you off the 50-yard line.

equity

One's sense of fairness is difficult to get right because the best posture with respect to fairness is so very unstable: one must constantly modulate experiences, purposes and presentation.

Fairness is an essential communitarian and political ideal because it reduces bloodshed and misery. (It is also, but more subtly, the precondition and chief patron of most worthy institutions.) But since, in these contexts, it is vital that that ideal be shared, we immediately care about how it will be commonly be motivated. And that is the function of pointing out and promoting that externalized insight of self-interest we tend to call the Golden Rule.

But the Golden Rule is excellent only in its ease of appreciation. It is meant, to be blunt, for children-in-fact and children-in-effect. It is as clumsy (but as vital in its place) as training wheels on a bicycle; and it is hopeless as a predictor even though the primary symptom of its application is an almost irrepresible translation of the rule into an expectation.

It is in those latter functions that fairness has no simple role, if any role. But to appreciate this, a person has to jettison the Golden Rule for something more truthful.

And that threatens the polity unless done well. And most people will not do it well and many people cannot do it well. Training wheels.

So there will be a fairness-grounded vantage from which behavior will be clumsy but safe, but experiences will be frustrating at least and probably inscrutable, too. Religion or a sense of wonder best addresses this frustration.

And then there will be a experience-grounded vantage from which behavior may be better tuned but more dangerous if it is not well handled. From that vantage, the need for preserving and navigating a polity shot through with basic intuitions of fairness will be frustrating but not necessarily inscrutable. Pleasures or a sense of purpose best address this frustration.

(I realize that one's concept of fairness can be deepened and elaborated to address any deficiency. That's fine, just imagine that I'm talking about the word you left behind to describe the (to you) cruder fairness I'm considering.)

does that cut down trees

Of course life is not about money, but the various means to thrive are central to living. Money is just one of those means, but in my time and place, the fundamental one. Status, relations, credentials, profession, health and so forth form still more of the composite means to thrive, and their relative relevance varies by one's era, place and path and interact amongst themselves.

translated

Who does not want, once in a while, to be seized of a passion and carried off?

imbibe

Why do I like wine and scotch best? Partly because I like salt and astringency more than sweetness and fizz. But is it also because I like to have something to drink that I can talk about in my head?

governance

Equal in importance to the search for truth is the determination of embedded sources of distortion. This determination is important not only for the sake of enabling the search for truth - though it is necessary to that end - but also for the sake of self-settlement.

A related subsidiary point: A important text is to be considered not only for its intended meanings but also for the misreadings which it enables or to which it is susceptible. How a good text breaks down is as important as how it works.

This is as vital to creativity as it is to perception. Form follows function. I accept that maxim in what I do and how I judge the doing of others. But failure is part of function. How an object fails is a co-equal part, alongside how that object is intended to perform, of what an object is. Failure forms function.

The reason I have to emphasize this is that people fail to analyze failure into its parts. There are extrinsic "acts of God" that are indeed unimportant to understanding an object. But how a train may fly off the rails is more fundamental to what the tracks are than are their gage, load and placement.

arbitron

General systematics is the unattainable ideal that orients the attainable.

grand old parties

The shortest and most achievable path to a substantial improvement in American political discourse would be to tilt the communicative and financial playing field back toward the two main parties and away from everybody else except elected officials. If the DNC and GOP dominated, say, 15% of political discourse, we'd be better off than we are now with their occupying 3% of political discourse. (Parties shouldn't have much more than 15%, mind you, but that's a problem we don't have. I'm talking about the one we do have.)

Our two political parties are the most important piece of good fortune this nation has ever had by way of political power structures. They are a bolt-on super-senate to the constitutional structure, whose total inadequacy to a country of the scale and complexity that America rapidly became has always been masked by the addition of parties. They are like the Hubble repairs that way.

They extend the digestive capacity of our republic in a democracy. It's because of the parties that we can get political nutrition out of common grass, chew our cud in the media, and stay healthy. When the parties are weak, it is obvious by the increase in ill-digested ideas belched by the body politic. When the parties are strong, our passions get ground up and composed into something capable of sustaining good governance and virtuous force.

To circle back to a passing thought and emphasize it: without two strong political parties over the decades, Americans would have been unable to sustain the illusion that we have a wondrously effective Constitution. And that illusion is both evidence of what a gift the parties are, and a valuable civic gift unto itself. I dread the day we lose our civic faith. Scoundrels in America wrap themselves in the flag, and that is so much better than the alternatives.

stymie

I need to figure out how to leverage my lack of ambition.

liberal arts

Much of what I believe turns on this: that truth indeed is sharper than any two-edged sword, that it is needful and that -- since for us it must be seated in our consciousness and used chiefly upon other conscious persons -- it may morph in the conception of the subject or object at the moment of contact, robbing the intention towards truth of the effect of truth so wielded.

The point is not that truth is elusive or mutable -- my point would not vary even if truth were either -- but rather that truth is razorlike in its danger and utility, razorlike in the skill and discernment required to use it well upon other beings or one's self, razorlike in that one must take always into account the maneuvering of the thinking subjects who see you bringing it upon them.

And even this says nothing of the discernment of truth, or the special dangers of half-truths and the like.

more sturdy

It is a difficult thing to maintain, in the making of human institutions, that balance between harnessing the good in humankind and buttressing against the bad. And to build on the benefits of time (stability, experience) while building against the harms (decay, forgetfulness): that is difficult but right, too.

Another heuristic: I begin with the assumption that any group of people, or any individual, is exactly half good and half bad, and that this mixture is evenly diffused through the whole, and that the good and bad are each mixed with the other, but not dissolved together into some third grey thing. I begin by assuming the same about any time period, any religion, any country.

And then: if the facts lead me to conclude that a complex subject is 55% good, 45% bad (I mean the percentages as an analogy for the moment -- you do not need to agree with me that good and bad are fairly-often measurable, though I do believe that for reasons I'll leave aside for the moment) -- I say, if the facts lead me to conclude that a complex subject is 55% good, 45% bad, then I believe such a subject is good by a landslide. Simple subjects may be good or bad by very high percentages. But if a complex subject -- a person, era or culture -- is actually nine-tenths good or better, I consider it almost worthy of worship. And if a complex subject is bad by a similar ratio - well, I draw a similarly strong conclusion that I will not say aloud.

one atmosphere

I don't build the sort of internal pressure that would motivate a writer by way of subject matter. Of much. What would motivate me to write would be the shaping of sentences and language craft. But I would rather be a writer than a composer or visual artist. The constraint of meaning is the trellis my vine-like writing needs to develop. That is, I like writing for the same reason I like calligraphy: letter forms and word forms are the substrate I opalesce.

pruning

Restraint in propagation is excercised, on balance, by those most able to provide for new shoots. The result is unhappy.

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.

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.

feeling

I do not live through my emotions; likely some others do. I live in my emotions, as I live in my body. I feel emotions as sensations, as physical feelings. On the nape of my neck, or the pit of my stomach, or toes, or (of course) more privily. The question is whether or not to step in for a moment, as if into a bordello, or to stand apart. Usually, that is. Shame is the only feeling with which I have much experience of being compelled to feel -- of being interrupted, stopped and taken. The feeling of shame is exactly that of growing faint -- reduced field of vision, a ringing tone in the ears, prickling skin, a heavy stomach, and wobbliness. I feel that about twice a year over something or other. Compelling, interrupting feelings that are not shame have come to me only very rarely -- grief, maybe three times in the last decade.

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.