Revisiting a Dusty Thought

Some office at my highschool, perhaps the newspaper, had a poster “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I remember it without the first two words of the quote, A foolish consistency, and believe the error was on the poster, not in my memory.  But I have written before about memory and I may have misread it at the time or later changed the memory. I recall also that it was attributed to some historical name of some repute, a triple, like Henry David Thoreau or Oliver Wendell Holmes, which I promptly forgot.

I disliked it immediately.  If the qualification of a foolish consistency had been there I might have been have been more generous, but my initial reaction was Here is someone who has been caught out in a contradiction or hypocrisy and is trying to weasel out of it by insult. I was already growing fussy in my OCD fashion about imprecision of thought and delighting in taking down the supposed experts.

All this has remained unchanged over the years, the quote occasionally heard, then stored again in its unnoticed corner of an unused room, associated with some guy from the 19^th or even late 18^th Century – three names, like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Evasive thinking. Nothing ever caused it to jump out and require examination.  Had I ever thought that it was by a Christian or Jewish writer, or by a woman, or a military figure it would have prompted at least fifteen seconds of reconsideration in light of the new information. It seemed of a piece with Walt Whitman’s “Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” I had acquired some understanding that the intent of both was to advocate for intellectual courage, to not be bound by what one said yesterday if one had new understanding today. Where I got this, I don’t know.  It certainly was not from any research or concerted thought on my part.  It must have crept in from bits of context over the decades. And still, the dominant thought was What, are ALL these 19^th C guys defending this lack of rigor, this careless disregard?

The interviewee in the Great Books podcast about Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”, Brenda Wineapple, brought me up a bit short with her reminder of the exact quote – the sort of precision that gets my attention. It is good to have something like such podcasts as a straightforward corrective to the loose information we carry around in our heads.  I got it hammered in that the quote was Emerson’s and heard the full quote, likely for the first time.   

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood. 

Emerson believed that truth might display only unevenly and in contradictions, like a vessel tacking into the wind to make its course.  There is a great deal that is wise and good about the statement when taken in this context, and congenial to the thought of those who recognize that paradox is sometimes the closest we can get to meaning about difficult things.  We all have the divine in us, he thought, and might see one thing today and another tomorrow, both true, as we proceeded on our journey to understanding.  A nice enough thought, and comfortable in our time, however radical it was in his.

It may suffer more from narcissism, as anyone who believes in the "divine in all" must necessarily believe in the divine in oneself. I have long noticed that many – not all – such believers are easily affronted by suggestions that a particular idea of theirs might not be a closer approach to the divine. Emerson was accused in his day of an excessive confidence in his own thinking, and too high a self-regard, but that may not be entirely just.  The ideas themselves bothered people yet he stood by them, which may have led to the charges. He asserted that any common man also had this divinity, and it was a foundation of his strong abolitionist beliefs. On the other, other hand, the characteristic of intellectuals of the era ran strongly to being full of oneself and one's ideas while romantising the common folk, and if Emerson stood out among that group...

Whether he was able to follow through with this regard in practice I don’t know.  He does seem to have thought his circle was rather special, and some comments indicate he thought some were much farther along on the perfectability scale than others. Believers of all sorts think there are some who have got their lessons down better than others, I observe, and this is especially true of smaller movements.

 

And It Reminded Me of This

Art In Place

 James's comment about the half-a-tree reminded me of a local landmark.

Half a Tree

 You can now buy half a Christmas tree. Not the Bee asks:  Genius or Abomination? I'm leaning abomination.

ANOTHER World Record

It has been an amazing year. Lowering a record by 6 seconds is amazing. Though as I mentioned before, having stunning pacers and the colored lights at your feet marking the pace is a big assist. As an illustration of area dominance, the top 500 times ever in this race are by runners from the Great African Rift or a first-generation descendant. The exception is the American Galen Rupp, who still competes and has a half-dozen of those best times.  24th-best is his highest. No one else anywhere.

People will still tell you it's that high-altitude training, though the descendants who live at sea level somehow still manage to be world class. None from the Andes or Himalayas or Rockies or even the Tatras.

Fernet-Branca

I sniff in contempt myself running across an article about a "true insider's" drink, Fernet-Branca. These wink-wink, nod-nod stories are irritating, aimed at posers.  As I read them occasionally myself, I have to wonder what this says about me. Occasional poser? I recall one years ago about how a man who was in the know ordered a Cuba Libre with some special qualification, perhaps the type of rum, so that the bartender would Know this was one cool dude.  He considered himself suitably rewarded when the bartender made his rum-and-coke and a touch of lime very carefully, giving him an impressed nod when serving it. No, it's just a rum-and-coke with some lime.  Though if you really like rum-and-coke but don't like the sidelong glances you get ordering it, you now have a method of disguising it.

That's a very smart bartender, recognising when he can free up considerable tip money with little effort.  The poser seemed not to understand that this is what bartenders do for a living.

So the reference to a liqueur that is "The Bartender's Handshake," given in recognition to other bartenders as a sign of hail-fellow-well-met amused me greatly. Oh, really? I did get the hook caught in my cheek when I saw the ingredient "gentian root," though.  That is a primary ingredient of Moxie, a cult favorite in New England despised by most but treasured by a few.  Including me.  I'm not entirely sure why.  I didn't like it as a child, but got irritated as a dad when my sodas all got quickly scooped by others in the family when we went camping, so picked something that they wouldn't like. That worked for a year, maybe two.  My two oldest, perhaps desperate for any soda after theirs were gone, developed a taste for it and are now members of the Moxie Congress. Gentian root is the usual culprit for Moxie-hating, but I don't hate it, I'm quite fond of it.  The description mentioned that there are other flavorful herbs involved.  I should have read the fine print.

The NH Liquor outlets do have some, scattered about the state, but I wasn't going to plunk down over $30 for a bottle of something that risky.  After all, I've already established that I don't digest even Drambuie all that well and have to go cautiously. There were some half-bottles on closeout sale, but only in Colebrook, on the Canadian border.  Two stores, one in Lakes Region and one on the coast, had miniatures for a few bucks.  My daughter-in-law agreed to pick one up on her way to visit her parents in Jackson.  I asked her to get two.

There's still one on the counter, a couple of week's later.  The stuff is vile.  It is in the true medicinal tradition of the old herbal liqueurs, where they threw in whatever flowers and roots that grew in their valley in Italy, or France, or Germany. In this case it's got aloe, which I believe is now used as a medicine only externally. Also myrrh, and angelica, from a plant the Sami people use for food, medicine, and to make a musical instrument. 

It is extremely rare for me to pour good food or drink down the sink, so I did gradually sip my way through the 2 oz bottle over the course of 48 hours. I am hoping that a friend occurs to me who might like this, but none so far. I have plenty of friends who are adventurous enough to try it, but that's not the same thing.

Jimmy Webb

I have broken down and started asking Alexa to play things.  It is convenient. Yesterday I asked her to play Glen Campbell.  I think I was hoping that "Wichita Lineman" would come up early.  This came up.  I had never heard it before.

I knew immediately it was written by Jimmy Webb. I loved Jimmy Webb when I was young and wanted to be a songwriter myself. After hearing "Macarthur Park" I bought and listened to A Tramp Shining repeatedly. The songs and lyrics were already a bit overlush and Richard Harris doubled down on that to hyperpoignancy, but at 14, that was exactly what I was looking for. Yet there was also the artistry with lyrics I admired and wanted to emulate.

I shall straighten my bent sceptre
And pretend I could have kept her.

Or rhyming "adios" with "grandiose."

Webb was a Baptist preacher's son, moving from Oklahoma to California in childhood, and remaining. He was something of an autodidact, both as a pianist and in literature, exposing himself to complicated things.  I had assumed he must be something of a sci-fi fan because of his song title "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."

Robert Heinlein, was a kind of early mentor of mine. I started reading his books when I was eight years old. ... I guess I was really getting more of my education out of science-fiction than out of public school. I was reading Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and learning a great deal about the patois of the language itself and how these words were being used to create emotions. I was learning this from writers without even knowing it. ... "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" was one of the best titles I've ever heard in my life. I really am guilty of appropriating something from another writer. In this case I had contact with Robert A. Heinlein's attorneys. I said, 'I want to write a song with the title, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Can you ask Mr. Heinlein if it's okay with him?' They called me back and he said he had no objection to it. 

 Except the song is poignant and romantic about the moon being cold.  Nothing to do with the book.

I still sang "Didn't We?" in my solo set until halfway through college.  Apparently that was a good pick, as Frank Sinatra was singing it in concert those years as well.  I never knew, being anti-Frank in those years. It was Webb's influence that had me attempting this sort of rhyming and cadence in my own songs.  In musical theater one could find such things in Cole Porter or Gilbert & Sullivan, but nearly always comic, or at least light. Trying to get away with "For your love's assiduity, denotes promiscuity" might have a chance in a comic piece, but for the sad Lancelot-saying-farewell song I was banging out it was fairly far over-the-top.

Webb may have had this problem himself.  He shows some resentment here at Campbell brightening his songs which were intended to be darker.

 

Yet I think Webb has it wrong here, perhaps underestimating his own lyrical artistry.  I never thought "Galveston" was a merely wistful, patriotic "Gee, I miss Texas" song.  When the line "I am so afraid of dying" comes I expected it.  When Webb sings it, as above, I don't like it nearly as well.  That weight was detectable in Campbell's version, but becomes a burden, almost maudlin in Webb's.  In fairness, I may not be the usual audience here.  Everyone else may have heard it as he feared.  Webb's own renderings and performances were never as popular as others singing his stuff.  (Tom Paxton had the same problem.)

Poking around to research this I see that Jimmy Webb is playing about an hour from here at  The Bull Run, in Shirley, MA in March. The historic inn was built in 1740, and my ancestor, Civil War veteran Joel C Neat is buried nearby. Interestingly, I saw my dad perform in The Fantasticks there (he played Mortimer brilliantly) decades ago, shortly after I reestablished contact with him as I hit adulthood. I've never been again.  It's a dinner club arrangement and I am considering it. 

Where Your Treasure Goes - Obverse

 Matthew 6:21 "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."  Even those of us who know the verse still respond as if only the inverse were true, that we give our treasure to where our heart inclines.  That latter is certainly true, but Jesus is teaching the interesting principle that if we give something, or commit something, our heart is much more likely to follow.  This is why salespeople or charities or organisations try to get you to commit any small thing - even a smile or a nod can be a down payment. 

Churches want to make sure that all is grace and no one is left out for inability to pay - but teachers of adult Sunday School notice that people are more likely to do the homework and participate if they have paid for the book than if you give it for free.  We grow more attached to something if we have bought it rather than received it. There are all sorts of applications - if college students male and female are set across a table from each other and included in their chitchat, are required to confess one secret or slight embarrassment, the find they like each other and have a higher probability for going on a date after than if that requirement is left out.

I wonder about the obverse (I admit I may not be using that word properly here), that if we criticise something or participate in its criticism we are more likely to keep on disliking it. It is not that different from the original principle.  We have invested something of ourselves in the criticism, and our heart goes and stays there.  It would be a bit of a wrench to say "Oh, I was wrong about it, or her, or them." The cost is higher for some than others, but for all of us, we have put treasure in a place and our heart follows it.

I think there is something even stronger, though this is an impression.  I cannot think of any data, nor would I quite know what to look for, other than self-reports.  Once we have made fun of something, we are even more likely to keep on hating it.  It is very difficult to return from that. I did make fun of individual people when I was younger, not usually openly unless it was clearly with affection (and even that can go bad). For a longer period I made fun of groups - including some I now belong to. I don't think I do that much anymore - though there may be an entire sector of mockeries I still engage in, oblivious to any proper self-observation. As near as I can tell, criticisms are easier to repent of than mockings.  Not that those repentings are harder to accomplish once recognised, but that they are harder to see to begin with. When we have derived some emotional gain from expressing ourselves, that source of pleasure protects itself in our brain, heading off threats long before we become aware of them 

This would suggest that if we are habitual scoffers it begins to take over our character, and we become increasingly unable to give up our favorite targets. It has a CS Lewis feel to it, though I can't think of an example of it offhand. I suppose the section in The Great Divorce in which a woman is described who has grumbled so long that there is no longer any self grumbling, but merely a Grumble going on endlessly of its own accord is a bit like it.

Structure of History Influences Content

 I have been listening to British History Podcasts. Two of them take an approach I liked at first but have grown tired of. They are clearly Monty Python influenced, mocking and quite cynical about any supposed good motive than anyone would have had for doing anything. Both gave Alfred the Great considerable credit for his rulership, but it was grudging, and the legacy of his son and grandson, and even at least one of his great-grandsons, Edgar the Peaceful was retold with a fair bit of snark at every possible turn. Not many monarchs can claim such a legacy of decent descendants, but the podcasters seemed intent on pointing out the possible ill motives of all of them for any actions. With Alfred and his descendants that takes an enormous skepticism, as they seemed to have a good run at being decent rulers, in an age long before our Better Angels even started in the 13th C and every tribe was in constant danger of being attacked by neighbors. 

 No one in the church ever did anything from good motive, they always had something to gain. No trade agreement was ever for the good of the country, no alliance was ever built on hope for the nation, no mercy was ever extended for Christian reasons. It is a very 20th C view, with roots extending back to the 19th C and perhaps to Voltaire, to be forever among the wise who can see through all those others. It shows no sign of relenting in the 21st C. To make their histories come alive, they try to give a modern twist to events "It's the equivalent of the queen shacing up with the pool boy." It's largely projecting our understandings back onto the lives of others. In an effort to make them understandable to us, they completely misunderstand them. Their was a world of violence unimaginable to us, where physical cruelty was normal. Heck, that's true of the early part of the 20th C (and many places in the world still), extended back in history worse and worse in every era. 

Their ideas of honor were different than ours, not hypocritical versions of what we think of as honorable now. Their sexual morality bears some relation to ours but is not identical, neither to the 21st C moderns or traditionalists. The concept of individual rights we think of as automatic was unknown to them. We think we would never have put up with what people did then, but of course we would. Snark assumes enormously that the current values of the speaker are the "real" values of human beings. We complain about the 1619 Project and other modern extremities, but they are simply the latest in a long line. Rejecting Founding Fathers because they had views which we now dislike is not multicultural, but unicultural. 

All that to introduce an idea on the presentation of history. When we try and teach history chronologically, we cannot help but do this. Teaching history as kings, dates, and battles steers us powerfully in the direction of imposing our understandings on them. This was true in earlier eras, when our grandparents imposed their ideas on history when passing it along to us, and it is true now. The podcasters, in teaching history in solely chronological fashion, fall naturally into imposing their 21st C snark and cuteness on the past. It is not absolutely necessary, as people do seem able to break out and give us something different from time to time. But when we go from one Mercian or Kentish ruler's battles and marriages and alliances to the next as if that is history, we find ourselves trying to explain something two centuries later and having to go "Oh yes. The economy of the peasants was quite different now. Let me explain." Or "Somewhere in here it became possible for Anglo-Saxon women to own property in their own right, which doesn't seem to have been the case in AD 750. Or maybe it was, but there's no record." Those things matter rather more in understanding history than knowing the succession in Northumberland. 

There are other ways of imposing our views on history, certainly, some of them quite common in the modern academy, such as insisting that everything be viewed through the eyes of race, or women, or class. Those are often worse, because there is little historical or archaeological data, leaving the historian free to impose his assumptions. That is not my topic here now, and seldom is. Others more qualified attack that question. I am actually giving credit to the professional historians here, as there are less likely to get bogged down in that unrelenting chronology that the podcasters fall into. The ironic part is that though these podcasters are quite liberal and modern in their sensibilities, not falling for any of this church or patriotism stuff and insisting that they are going to be quite radical by including women in their reporting of history, as if that idea only occured to people last Wednesday. And then they don't of course, not very much, because they were too busy chronicling Aethelsomething and his brothers who had this "Game of Thrones" relationship. And detailed accounts of battles. Other than the longbow and Agincourt, they don't much notice changes in weaponry and tactics either. 

You will do better understanding history if you come at your topic from the side. David Symons, one of the primary researchers on the Staffordshire Hoard (magnificent stuff - you could lose a couple of hours just looking at it) was very open about how re-enactors had helped the Birmingham Museum understand many of the pieces. Much of the craftsmanship is intricate, using techniques now forgotten. But those who make replica merchandise for whatever the British equivalent of a Renn Fair is were able to reverse engineer some of it, and explain how bits worked, and collaborated nicely with the professionals. Not surprisingly, the craftsmen also drew inspiration from what they were seeing and started working on ways to accomplish methods that had been lost. The re-enactors didn't come to learn kings and battles that much, except as a steppingstone to understanding the culture. 

Similarly, I have learned more social and cultural history of the British Isles from the History of English podcast, which focusses on the development of the language. To explain that, a fair bit of kings 'n battles history has to come in, but keeping those secondary results in more understanding of the lives of the people. Never forget the peasants. The changes are slow and a bit tedious, but they are where real history is. Admittedly, their costumes are nowhere near as cool. 

I will mention again Patrick Wyman's Tides of History, a professional historian who went a bit rogue in order to teach history the way he likes it. He is currently doing prehistory, but his previous effort on the Middle Ages went on for over a hundred episodes. It's not just kings, but shipbuilding, banking, women's roles, disease, marriage customs, banking, and technology. 

So pick the topic you like and research the era in terms of that. For me it has been language and religious ideas. You might prefer to understand cloth, or women and guilds, or early firearms, or musical instruments. But if you study that, you will find that the other pieces all come in on their own, including any number of kings and battles. My wife is not the only person who started her historical knowledge founded on romances, mysteries, and long series of historical fiction. Eventually you know very clearly who Maude and Stephen were and what the argument was about.

Patronage and the Sciences

When we talk about bias in the sciences, we often contrast the hard and soft sciences, with education research being at one extreme and math or physics at the other. While it is true that ideological bias is much stronger in the social sciences, there is another factor that bends research: who pays for it. Even in the soft sciences this is enormous, though it is obscured by the fact that the people controlling the purse strings largely share broad political agreement. Yet it is not pats on the back that people work for as much as a paycheck, and even within this framework there are schools of thought or approaches to a field that are not obviously political. Noam Chomsky was brutal toward those who did not accept his overall framing of Transformational/Universal Grammar, but it was not related to his politics. Both groups tended to be pretty liberal. His attitude toward opposition was the same in politics and linguistics, but that only meant he was always that way. 

I am told – please correct me James – that there was a time when String Theory ate up a disproportionate share of physics research, and folks with different theories had to scramble. Nothing of cultural or political bias in that that I can see, but it was still there. You can call baseball statisticians conservatives because they relied on hard data instead of feelings or call them liberals because they were the new kids in the 1980s pushing the traditionalists aside, but either way there was opposition and fighting over funding. 

Research is sometimes discredited because of who has paid for it. That is partly fair. It certainly helps to know who has footed the bill for bringing in a speaker, or whose house this cocktail party is at. Suspicion is fair. But it is not invalidation. People who fund research may hope for a certain result. They may even be deceitful by suppressing some results while highlighting others. But funding research occurs because people want to get the word out on something they are pretty sure is true, and they try to hire the people with the best credibility to do it. The researchers may be irreproachable. 

It reminds me of patronage in the arts in previous centuries. Artists were hired to paint the portrait of a nobleman or merchant, with a pretty clear understanding they were supposed to make them look good.

The Virgin and Child with Canon van der Paele, by Jan van Eyk, c. 1434. It's a great painting anyway, isn't it?

I didn't put this out with any specific research, art, or advocacy in mind that I want to rescue from being rejected out of hand. Neither Exxon nor Monsanto nor the Iranian government has paid me anything to remind you of this fact.

Doubt

 I listened to a podcast recently about churches needing to accept people who are asking questions, and not come off as unwelcoming, or unwilling to come alongside them.  Even great saints experience doubt, and people in hard places may need support more than even implied criticism.

All entirely true, and I can steer you to churches that don't like questions if you want to see one in action. But there are opposite or divergent truths about churches as well, and these also deserve some attention.  Some churches love questions but don't like answers.  I should say, they don't like religious answers.  Those usually love political and cultural answers. I wrote about this in 2006 when I scoffed at an Episcopalian's assertion that the defining attribute about them is Doubt. Yet when I looked into it, I had to admit he was largely correct, and I was Hoist on my Own Petard. Not only the UU's and Episcopalians, but the mainstream denominations now increasingly shy away from religious answers.  I don't think it is accidental that they are simultaneously embracing political views of stricter or looser wokeness, but that is a different topic.  I see a connection, but that may be an overread on my part.

I am reminded of the bishop in CS Lewis's The Great Divorce who could not accept the idea that in heaven there would no longer be free inquiry into the nature of God.  He wanted to lead discussions in heaven about such things. The person sent to discuss at the very borders his possible repentance and entry into paradise tried to explain that there is no further need to discuss the nature of wetness when one is immersed in water. (He allows there may be further subtleties enjoyed by the wet folks as they seek to understand more deeply, but not that the quality of wetness is anymore up for debate.  Everyone knows what it is there.) The bishop would have none of it, and returned to Hell, humming a hymn. 

Roman Catholics have loved questions for centuries.  They also seem to like answers. It seems about right. My own denomination, formed from a fusion of Lutherans and Pietists, has tried to hew closely to the practice of allowing considerable difference in interpretation of many doctrines, so long as core doctrines are retained.

There is secondly the question of whether these are honest questions are not.  I think most religious questions start out as honest ones.  I believe this both from theory and from practice. Sometimes the questions derive from intellectual objections, sometimes they stem from tragedy or unfairness coming into their lives, sometimes they come from disillusionment with respected figures.  I don't know if I am much tolerant of the honest questions of young people at this point, but there was a time when I was, and gave cautionary advice even to their parents about letting doubt and questioning unfold. I had a minor reputation for it in our circles, likely exaggerated. 

This may no longer be true, because I have seen honest questions turn dishonest too many times.  If you want an answer, then seek an answer. Ambiguity can itself be an honest landing point.  There are things I believe are paradoxes, or elusive, or not easily definable.  The works of GK Chesterton, and Elie Wiesel's Souls on Fire were greatly liberating in this way, though my introduction to the possibility through Tolkien and Lewis likely set me up for understanding this. But if you are still asking the same questions ten years later and are asking everyone else to listen attentively, I have to wonder if you are serious.

That could be badly wrong.  Perhaps questions and doubts have to incubate in their own time, and I am just not of sufficient character to be patient.  

Summary: Yes, churches should be willing to walk alongside those with honest questions (though Jesus was pretty harsh with Nicodemus, come to think of it). Yet what if the churches themselves are avoiding answers for their own reasons?  And what are we to do with dishonest questions?

Amazing Ending

Very rare to see a marathon end with this little distance between them. As a percentage difference that's like 0.3mm in a 100M sprint - the thickness of a sheet of good paper.

Pray For Those That Persecute You

I was disappointed that even from religious sites I was not seeing a groundswell of praying for a sick president and his wife.  Praying for our leaders is commanded, though the Catholics have done better at this, including this in their regular prayers. I have heard and read discussion over the years of what exactly we are to pray for leaders, especially if they are evil, but that is another matter. Yet even if you find Trump evil and dangerous to the country, we are told in no uncertain terms that we are to pray for our enemies. I get distressed when the obvious is missed.

But the finger of accusation works in both directions, doesn’t it?  My first thought was how I might change the attitudes of such people or render them powerless. My thought was to defeat them, not pray for them. This is unfortunately common with me.  I start by wanting to defeat an idea, but it bleeds over quickly into defeating the people who have that idea. The call to defeat God’s enemies is usually much more indirect, and Scripture often cautions that defeating evil is God’s problem, not ours.  I don’t think we need be so extreme as the complete pacifists to recognize that “the battle belongs to the Lord” is a common Biblical theme, even in the OT when Israel was called to go out and do some serious smiting.

I never pretend to know all God’s reasons for his commands, but I can sometimes discern at least one or two of them.  When we pray for our enemies, we are brought up against the uncomfortable reality that they are our enemies.  They are not necessarily God’s enemies, or the enemies of the Church, or of all decent people. We have often made that leap without warrant.  They might simply be mistaken, even about important matters, which a merciful God with an educative bent might regard as no more worrisome than, oh, our mistaken ideas, just as an example.

It is a good thing to come up against the wall of regarding someone as an enemy.  It brings clarity.  We try to reserve the word for deathly opponents, thinking we are being kind and generous thereby.  We are bigger than that, we think.  Yet it is the state, not the amount that defines an enemy. That “kindness” can lead to resentment, carried anger, grudges, and revenge.  The rude customer you are serving is for the moment an enemy, however minor and temporary, and we have our marching orders. 

So I took care today to pray for those who wished Donald and Melania Trump death and suffering.  Will I remember this tomorrow or the next day? History says I will fade fast, but perhaps this time it will be different.

Presidential Approval Ratings

Reprinted from March, 2013. 

My wife, an elementary school librarian, was teaching about presidents and read a short biography of Washington to a kindergarten class for Presidents' Day. Such teaching always involves quizzing, both to reinforce the material and to get them used to interactive learning and paying attention to the key material.  "Do you know who our first president was?  Several voices reported that it was George Washington.

"He's dead, isn't he?" one girl asked. My wife nodded.  There was a serious pause - the belated mourning of an age group which knows that death is a loss but does not have a good grasp of time scales.

"I miss George Washington," one little boy said quietly.  My wife's reply was heartfelt and genuine: "So do I."

Presidential Debates

Or so I hear.  The last one I listened to, I heard Quayle trounce Gore in 1992, only to be told the next day that those who had watched it thought the opposite. I don't think I've ever watched one, nor more than an isolated clip.

Bob Gibson

Someone said the keyboardist was Denny McLain.  Is this true?


He sure looks the same as this guy

The rumor was that the Mafia broke McLain's toe that winter (I forget why) and he was never the same again.

While Bob Gibson's 1968 numbers were certainly better because of pitching off the higher mound, 15" vs 10", it's not like the mound had been 15" since the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869 and just changed because a few pitchers had good years.  It was set back to where it had always been before 1963, when the short pitcher's era of the 1960's began. He was the best pitcher in the National League that year and deserved the accolades.  If they aren't quite what they seem in the historical context doesn't change that he was a dominant pitcher.

The Parting Glass

1. Of all the money that e'er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm I've ever done
Alas it was to none but me
And all I've done for want of wit
To mem'ry now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be to you all


So fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befall
And gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all


2. Of all the comrades that e'er I had
They're sorry for my going away
And all the sweethearts that e'er I had
They'd wish me one more day to stay
But since it fell unto my lot
That I should rise and you should not
I gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all


So fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befall
And gently rise and softly call
Good night and joy be to you all

Signs

When we went through the Upper Valley, the Hanover-Dartmouth area, the signs were all for Democrats.  Correction, there were many Black Lives Matter and Rainbow-lists-on-black-backgrounds as well.  Some people had multiple signs, some had only one.  Single signs might be one of the statement signs, a Biden-Harris, or one of the local races.  I did not recognise most of those.  As we went north, an occasional Sununu (Republican governor) sign mixed in, then some Trump signs. Rarely did those have an entire yardful, though that did happen. Either of those might be very large, and large Biden signs were more common there than I have seen down here.

By the time we reached Orford they were running 2-1 Biden, and by Haverhill, Woodsville, and Bath it looked about 50-50. Up into Monroe things were trending more to Trump, but still the pattern as before: while there were some multi-sign Republican yards, if I saw a collection ahead it was more likely to be Democrat.  Since coming home I have noticed the same thing around here.  Republicans have 1-3 signs, Democrats 2-12.  I do not have an explanation. Both will fill up common areas near rotaries or at important intersections, but in their own yards, there is a different preference. I am not going to make up an idea why this would be.

Littleton was mostly Trump, as were Monroe and Lancaster.  Dalton and anything north of Lancaster was predominantly Trump signs.  I had seen hand-lettered Trump signs before, but saw a few hand-lettered Biden ones for the first time.  By the time we hit Pittsburg it was all Trump signs and lots of them, big and prominent, even lit up at night.  It was only the big races, too, President and Governor.  I didn't notice too many for Executive Council or the houses of the state legislature. If a yard was full it was full of a dozen Trump signs.

Arthur C. Brooks wondered in the college town where he was a professor why people were so aggressive in their political signs in a place where everyone agreed with them. It spurred him to do his original research for the book Who Really Cares, which I reviewed in 2006. I wondered that too, while driving in very-white Hanover and seeing all the Black Lives Matter signs.  Why do they have to announce this to each other?  I have dark suspicions, but that may just be my own prejudices speaking.

And thus the same question in Pittsburg.  If everyone is for Trump, why make such a deal about it with big signs?  Ah, but there is a difference here.  The tourism industry dominates the North Country, and that is doubly so in that last large bit of acreage when NH rises higher than Vermont.  It isn't only locals who will see this, but folks from farther south, including places where Democrats are thicker on the ground. These are all family-owned businesses, right on the few main roads, renting cabins, operating general stores, doing Ski-Doo repairs, but even some of those had the signs out, even though it might offend some potential customers in a tough year.

CP Snow's Two Cultures Today

And the third old post, unedited.  I think this audience might still be interested. From December 2006.

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Scientist and novelist CP Snow declared fifty years ago that the educated classes were becoming two cultures, literary and scientific.

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, law of entropy. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.

This was controversial, not least because literary people felt put down and insulted. Criticism fell into four broad categories: Snow had overstated the case; the divide was not new; a third culture was developing even as he had spoken; and Snow had helped worsen the divide by building fences. Snow came to partially agree with all these, while retaining his original view as essentially correct.

The cultural landscape has changed in the last fifty years, but there remains a core truth in Snow’s proposition. I have been writing much about the Arts & Humanities Tribe over the last few months which bears directly on the issue. For any new readers, a quick review. I was raised in the Arts & Humanities Tribe which is now so anti-Bush, anti-conservative, anti-neocon. Many groups might criticise this administration for other reasons. There are conservative and libertarian criticisms of the current administration, but the critical groups generally consitute the Democrat coalition: government unions, African-Americans, and liberals. The A&H Tribe constitutes much of the proud-to-be-blue-state liberals. I have criticised their position as being founded on emotion and tribalism more than reason. Their criticism of Bush and the red-state voters is often ill-concealed social criticism and cultural disdain.

I am not completely satisfied with my own choice of words in designating this group as the Arts and Humanities Tribe. Those in the social sciences are overwhelmingly in this group, yet many of those have little actual knowledge of arts and letters. Their philosophies are watered-down from A&H originals, and they adopt the language and attitudes of that tribe. Flowing in the other direction, the liberal arts have become suffused with the social sciences: much of history and literature are now warmed-over sociology, anthropology, and bad economics.

Confusing the terms further is the strong grounding many conservatives have in the traditional arts and humanities of Western Intellectual thought. They read history and literature, they know art and music. To exclude William F. Buckley or Victor Davis Hanson from the A&H designation would seem to dissolve the entire construct. In knowledge of literature and history before 1900, in fact, conservatives perhaps exceed liberals.

The enormous tectonic shifts over the last fifty years, and especially the last twenty, have come from the science and technical side of the culture. Science geeks read a lot of science fiction, a much-despised genre that has provided most of the original thought of the second half of the 20^th Century. Certainly, it has provided enormous amounts of crap in the form of half-baked philosophy, formulaic adventure stories with science accessories, and ill-disguised fantasies of omnipotence. But in a world in which technical marvels are increasingly invading the cultural environment and changing behavior, science fiction often provides the only examples of near-future problems even being addressed.

Early on, science fiction was also called “speculative fiction,” and I wish that name had caught on better, as it retains a good deal of what is important. It is science fiction to imagine a mechanism by which someone could read minds and create an adventure about it. It is speculative fiction to try and work through the real consequences in a culture. How would friends and family react? What balances of power would be upset? Could a human personality endure the knowledge? It is one thing to imagine what fun people would have if machines did all our work; quite another to to imagine what this would do to the human character and what we might attempt in response. It is this speculative aspect that makes science fiction important intellectually. It is the lack of this that makes alienation in chicana fiction, or irony in Queer Studies barely worth mentioning. Speculative fiction has wildly explored the alienation of sentient beings which are different life-forms from each other, and societies where there are four distinct sexes, or parthenogenesis. Modern literature and high art seem tepid and timid in comparison, which is why they have needed to rely increasingly on sexual shock, predictably leftist sentiments, and social transgression to attract any attention at all.

Science fiction is predominantly Anglospheric, especially American, as well. The Europhilic and oriental fascination of the A&H crowd derives directly from the transnational nature of their studies. This is much less evident in science fiction, or science in general.

The science and technology crowd has made another enormous inroad into the arts & letters as well. The production of art for audience has become increasingly technical. Music, film, and theater have increasingly required not only technicians, but artists who understand the technology, and technicians who understand the art. It is still possible to carve out a career in the arts with little technical knowledge, but those opportunities are increasingly local. Technology has always driven the arts, but the changes were always slow enough that a person could absorb the necessary technical aspects early on and adapt very little over a career. The changes in acoustics or piano construction over Bach’s long lifetime were incremental, but the Moog synthesizers which were gloriously cutting-edge in the 1970’s are laughable antiques now. You might think that all one has to do is get up and sing, but microphones, lights, synthesizers, monitors, and editing effects are all part of the package. If you the performer do not understand these things, then you are dependent on those who do.

The State of the Discussion of Tribes

This is the second of the old posts brought forward, unedited. From January 2007

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Too much information. But I like it.

Several commenters have advocated that I delineate my tribes according to cognitive styles: left-brain, right-brain; pragmatic, synthesizer. There are a couple of other ways that the "How People Think" pie is sliced, with varying degrees of scientific evidence in support. These are valuable, and I will be integrating them in. They are not strictly tribal, as they de-emphasize, even neglect, the idea of cultural transmission within families and communities. But they are very good at capturing snapshots of what is present in the population right now. That wasn't where I started, but I think I'm going there. I think tribes exist and are important, but this grouping by cognitive style may be where we are headed.

The problem is that we have mostly anecdote and impression, not hard data, about how various groups think. We might think that business people will be pragmatists, artsy people right-brained, and so forth, but no one has actually done much work to measure it. This is going to be speculative enough without adding neuroscience mythology to the mix. But some of this will make it into the final product.

Several other commenters have suggested that there is more independence and individuality than my tribal grouping would suggest. That is both statistically and theoretically true.

One of the jumping-off points for this whole adventure is Joel Garreau's book The Nine Nations of North America. Written in 1984, it captures North American regionalism as 9 geographic groups, each with its own capital, culture, economy. It has been invaluable to me in understanding both national and international events. I will do a whole separate post on that this weekend, imposing yet one more dimension on this discussion.

Yes. Yes it will fragment things beyond recognition. I worry about that, but I press on.

I wondered if, as the country became more interconnected and less regional, whether these regional tribes were giving way to cultures shared across distance. We supposedly know that mass media has homogenised America, but the internet allows people with rare interests to find each other and communicate. Political groups accuse each other of existing in echo chambers, and nutcases of all varieties can now reinforce each other's idiocy. I wondered if we were becoming a nation of tribes in that sense, banding together both in person and online. The tribes I observed bore relation to cultures and subgroups I had grown up with, and seemed to derive from them.

Thus, my original, tentative tribes:
Arts & Humanities - my tribe of origin. It needs to include social sciences
God & Country - a large, loose tribe that most Americans used to belong to
Science & Technology - an ascendant tribe
Business - An older tribe which relies on recruitment as well as family and upbringing
Criminal Underclass - thrown in ill-understood, just because they exist
Military - a small but intense tribe, usually temporary but retaining some hold
Government and Unions and
DIversity.

I do not pretend these are exhaustive.

Into this mix is the Pew Research Center method of dividing the pie:
Enterprisers
Social Conservatives,
Pro-Govt Republicans
Upbeats
Disaffecteds
Bystanders
Conservative Democrats
Disadvantaged Democrats
Liberals

Opening thoughts, while I try to corral all the sheep into the pen:
My Science & Technology and Business tribes look like they have quite an overlap with Pew's Enterprisers, with some in Upbeats as well.

By attitude, everyone but Liberals belongs to the God & Country tribe equally. Therefore, G&C may not turn out to be a useful classification. Liberals, though the largest group at 19% of the population, are outliers on many attitudes and practices.

My A&H tribe is going to overlap strongly with Pew's Liberals, but there are some interesting twists.

There are two interesting male/female splits in tribal allegiance. The numbers would suggest there is a tendency for male Enterprisers to marry female Social Conservatives, and male Disaffecteds have children on but not marry female Disadvantaged Democrats.

Remember, these overlaps and groupings are statistical tendencies, not fully tribal with closed boundaries.

Your New Masters Will Have Asperger’s

For some reason a current reader is going through some of  my earliest posts and commenting.  Thrilling, really. I don't think I have ever reposted for that reason alone, but will bring three of them forward.  This is from January 2006, unedited.

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I gave both Jonathans the new Joel Garreau book Radical Evolution, and of course read it myself before passing it on. That’s the way we do things in my family. The book is divided into 3 sections: the Heaven scenario of all the ways that technical assistance and self-enhancement is going to cure diseases, make us brilliant, and provide for our needs Very Soon; the Hell scenario, in which one of these GRIN technologies (genetic, robotic, information, nanotech) runs amok and does something devastating to us Very Soon; and the Prevail scenario in which some things go wrong with the new technologies, but mankind muddles along anyhow, Like Always.

I could tell this was going to be worrisome when even the Heaven scenario had parts that I thought were bad for humankind. Ray Kurzweil, the prophet of everything will be more ducky than you imagined, is already an eccentric guy and will be signing up for every self-enhancement he can get his mitts on. Facing the possibility that none of us will want our own children to fall behind and fail to become uber-persons, the thought is that a whole lot of folks are going to be enhanced. A subset of us will rocket into superintelligence so quickly that they will be a dominant race. And that’s the Heaven scenario, remember.

There are lots of interesting possible discussions about this, including whether it is at all likely, which I will be posting on over the next few weeks. For the moment, my concern is the comments of the people making these decisions. In all three scenarios, the people inventing and controlling these technologies are strange in a specific way: they have symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome. According to this study reported in the NYTimes, that shouldn’t be very surprising.

My worry is not that they are statistically likely to have Asperger’s, and thus be difficult to work with for the folks around them. My concern is what I actually read -- the childishness of the philosophical underpinnings of their justifications. Like bright sixth-graders who get over-technical and have to correct things said in their presence (That years don’t have 365 days, but 365 days, five hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds, for example), Asperger-y people get stuck on such things and cannot let them go. If you say something is teal, and they think it’s just a little too green for that, there is no reasoning with them about it. They will sound like they are reasoning, they will think in their own minds that they are reasoning. But some glitchy thing in their brain will be telling them it’s not teal, and that glitch is immovable.

Ray Kurzweil sounds frightenly like Weston in the last scenes of CS Lewis's Out of The Silent Planet. I always thought Weston was a poorly-written, bombastic fool, and Lewis himself acknowledged that it was hard to imagine such a buffoon inventing anything, let alone a spaceship. Lewis regretted making the character so unconvincing and exaggerated. Now, 60 years later, here he is, in the flesh. Lewis has again proven prescient as to what the natural extension of a train of thought will be.

This rigidity carries over to ethical and philosophical ideas. A single premise will be held in the face of all reason, for example: It’s better to live long than die young. This genetic flip will make people live longer. Therefore it is good. Any additional pluses or minuses may be given lip-service, but will ultimately carry no weight. A particularly chilling example from real life is from Jaron Lanier. Now Lanier is actually one of the reasonable, moderate, balanced voices from the high-tech crowd. When challenged by a clergyman at a conference that he and others were just boys playing with things they didn’t understand, he went back and thought about it. What he came up with is that the churches had failed to keep up with technology by not coming up with ceremonies for operations and other tech events. Apparently the fascination of all cultures with birth, death, marriage, and coming of age does not capture the essence of life. Essentially, Lanier is angry that the churches have not developed ways of blessing whatever the hell it is that scientists want to do.

Connecticut River

We went far enough up that I could cross it jumping from rock to rock.  My wife waded the ten feet or so. It's about two miles across at its mouth in New Haven 400 miles south.

We had consulted the NH Foliage Tracker, which was entirely deceiving.  As we headed north I kept thinking it was all very disappointing this year, despite some individual moments of beauty, but looked forward to seeing peak foliage in Pittsburg, then waiting for it to work its way down after we got home. But when we got there it was worse than here.  We were arriving in late afternoon and it was a grey day, so I looked forward to morning. It took a bit to realise that the leaves were not merely "not spectacular," but "not there."  There were off the trees a week ago because of the drought.  We left an area that was near peak to visit one long past peak.

I paused a moment and concluded that the foliage tracker is an average, not a record of this year.  Because of the drought, the leaves started changing a full three weeks earlier this year.  Fortunately, leaves were not our primary focus.  And we did get to see good foliage the first two ours of our meandering 8 hours up and last two of our 9 hours back. (A straight shot driving would be only about 3.5 hours, but we stopped and looked at many things along the way. Many, many things, including 12 covered bridges and 20 historical markers, and equal that number of roads we had never been on.) We did get to see a moose, plus some Ruffed Grouse and Snow Buntings. We passed Errol International Airport, which looks sketchy. If they'd had any dramatic incidents I would have heard about it, though, so I guess it must be okay.

All three restaurants in the North Country were disappointing, including the Littleton Diner, famous for its authenticity among diner fans.  They do still serve liver and onions up there, bacon optional, and I considered it twice, but decided that day was past.* Down in this part of the state we kid about how life is different "Above the Notch," which seems to mean both Crawford and Franconia, which are at about the same latitude.  Above the Notch and Proud of it, goes the phrase. But where we were they don't seem to mention any notches, not even famous Dixville Notch (a scenic treat, BTW) which is sixty miles farther north than the others.  When we got above the big notches on the way up, we were only halfway there.  I forget how much more of NH there is above Mt Washington. "What notch?" they might say. It's Arctic Cats, ATV's and fly-fishing up there, not skiing. Poor areas, highly dependent on tourism.

*Chicken livers wrapped in bacon are still barely on my list, though I haven't had them for more than twenty years now.