This cold but lovely (Black) Friday morning, I took our dog Lola to the Rutgers Ecological Preserve for a run. Unfortunately, the Preserve was closed. The parking lot had signs and some plastic blockades barring entrance and the side entrance had a blockade in front of it as well. I assumed this was because of the recent coyote attacks (and I was right). But I also assumed that the attacks were over, because the aggressive coyote had been euthanized by some Rutgers police. And the coyote was tested and came up negative for rabies. So I figured it was safe to head into the preserve, despite the signs and blockades. There were rumors that there was entire coyote den on the premises, but coyotes were nocturnal-- plus, Lola is a tank. She would run them off.
After running for about twenty minutes, I stumbled over a root obscured by fallen leaves and went flying face-forward into the mud. Luckily, I was wearing gloves, so I was able to somewhat break my fall. My bad shoulder held up, I didn't sprain my wrists, and I didn't cut my hands. The only thing to suffer was my left knee.
I really did hit the ground hard, and I must admit-- and this appropriately dates me-- that just after I hit, this is what I thought to myself:
This is just what you deserve, sneaking into the preserve when it's obviously closed to the public-- now you've broken your neck and no one is coming to help you, no one is going to stumble across you and save you-- because the preserve is closed-- and for good reason!-- and you ignored the signs and now you're going to be eaten by coyotes, ironically less than a mile from the technologically miraculous Bridge Evaluation and Accelerated Structural Testing lab-- which is affectionately known by the acronym The BEAST®-- maybe Lola will protect me, but for how long? and the nights will be cold . . . I'll have to drag my way down the trail to the road . . . etc. etc.
It totally skipped my mind that I was listening to my podcast (Flash Forward: Time After Time) on my cellphone, a device which enabled me to communicate and interact by various means with the world outside of the Rutgers Preserve. I got up, dusted myself off, and started running again-- thinking that I had just evaded certain death . . . and it didn't dawn on me until twenty-five minutes later, when I got back to the parking lot next to The BEAST®, that I had not evaded certain death-- that I owned a cellphone -- mainly because my mother called just as I was loading the dog into the back of the car and this reminded me that my podcast and music player also had communication capabilities.
As a side note, there's still some weird coyote stuff going on in the vicinity of the preserve. A small dog was mauled a couple days ago, after the original aggressive coyote was euthanized. So maybe I was in some danger. If a pack of coyotes got to me before I remembered that I had a cellphone, I might have been eaten alive (while listening to my podcast).
I'm sure I've been radicalized and brainwashed by a leftist-socialist-environmentalist media sphere, but Leah Sottile's sequel to Bundyville-- this "season" of podcasts and articles is subtitled The Remnant-- is once again an exceptional and compelling portrait of religious/anti-government/apocalypse/white-supremacist/conspiracy-theorist/hyper-patriotic/gun-toting militia folks that is so outside my purview it seems like science-fiction; this fits right into Tara Boyle's world of Educated . . . a much wilder West than most of us liberal Easterners can imagine-- and while the piece starts with an explosion in Panaca, Nevada and eventually finds itself in the "American Redoubt— the nickname survivalists and preppers have given Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming"-- the real home of this piece is the internet, where fact-free-fringe-theories and conspiracies persuade and propagate . . . a place that our President panders to . . . and while Sottile finally meditates on the intractable paradox: how much tolerance do you afford the intolerant?
she also hears from rational people who believe that the government does have too much power, that after 9/11 the fear of terrorism allowed federal and local law enforcement to ramp up violence and surveillance on suspects and that this is a cycle that will only be met with more violence-- Sottile and I both think the answer may be sunlight, we have to just keep shining a bright logical light on all these fringe-apocalypse-fundamentalist-religious-conspiratorial extremists and their words and logic until they shrivel and decay, we've got to talk it out and keep talking, the government needs to be up front about what it's doing and what is happening, and we have to understand that there's going to be some explosions along the way and some radical extremism, which is part of the cost of having a country with a strong First Amendment, checks and balances in the government, and a sometimes too-powerful federal presence . . . that presence can drive people, especially people ready to be radicalized, out to the fringe-- events like Waco, and the shooting of LaVoy Finnicum and the Ruby Ridge siege; for me, it was absolutely shocking to hear folks proposing an all-white, all-Christian 51st state where the chosen could live out their days training and praying, waiting for the end-of-times . . . but maybe I'm too sheltered, living here in a tame, intellectual, multi-cultural town in central New Jersey, and I need a dose of the real American West, which is wilder than ever; Sottile brings up the fact that, of late, right-wing extremists have accounted for the bulk of the terrorism in the United States, and The Atlantic breaks it down:
"From 2009 through 2018, right-wing extremists accounted for 73 percent of such killings, according to the ADL, compared with 23 percent for Islamists and 3 percent for left-wing extremists . . . in other words, most terrorist attacks in the United States, and most deaths from terrorist attacks, are caused by white extremists . . . but they do not cause the sort of nationwide panic that helped Trump win the 2016 election and helped the GOP expand its Senate majority in the midterms."
Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World resets the default narrative of world history, with Western Europe as the main character, and instead places the Mediterranean Sea at the center of the story; he argues that the most significant dynamic force in the last two thousand years has been the trade routes that connect the East and the West; this web of interconnected cities, ports, and trading hubs allowed for the flow of goods, services, ideas, religions, conflict, disease, technology, and tactics . . . his book combats what Edward Said termed "orientalism," the presumption that the Middle East and beyond is inscrutable and exotic, a place that lies outside of time, space, progress, and Western logic; the book is comprehensive, starting with the spread of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism along the Silk Roads (before 600 A.D.) and ending with the West's modern political misadventures in Iran Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the economic rise of China, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan . . . over here in the West, we've got to strap ourselves in for a new world order, with the East becoming more significant than ever-- both economically and politically-- the British Ministry of Defense sums it up tidily: the period of time until 2040 "will be a time of transition" with challenges such as "the reality of a changing climate, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, resurgence in ideology, and shifts in power from West to East."
Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads: A New History of the World resets the default narrative of world history, with Western Europe as the main character, and instead places the Mediterranean Sea at the center of the story; he argues that the most significant dynamic force in the last two thousand years has been the trade routes that connect the East and the West; this web of interconnected cities, ports, and trading hubs allowed for the flow of goods, services, ideas, religions, conflict, disease, technology, and tactics . . . his book combats what Edward Said termed "orientalism," the presumption that the Middle East and beyond is inscrutable and exotic, a place that lies outside of time, space, progress, and Western logic; the book is comprehensive, starting with the spread of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism along the Silk Roads (before 600 A.D.) and ending with the West's modern political misadventures in Iran Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the economic rise of China, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Uzbekistan . . . over here in the West, we've got to strap ourselves in for a new world order, with the East becoming more significant than ever-- both economically and politically-- the British Ministry of Defense sums it up tidily: the period of time until 2040 "will be a time of transition" with challenges such as "the reality of a changing climate, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, resurgence in ideology, and shifts in power from West to East."
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood . . . which one do you take?
You have time to ponder. You're not being chased by a lion, tiger, or bear. So do you choose the road less traveled by? Or head down the well trodden one? Either way, your choice will make all the difference.
Steven Johnson discusses these life-altering moments in his new book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions That Matter the Most. He thinks we are woefully unprepared for these kinds of choices. He's probably right. We read "The Road Not Taken" in my Creative Writing class, and then we discuss times when we made these kinds of decisions. We all readily concede that once you journey down a particular fork in the road, you probably won't backtrack and take another path, but I don't advise them prescriptively on how to navigate these crucial moments. Instead, I present them with a literary example. We read it, discuss it, and run through the variables and options. It turns out-- according to Steven Johnson-- that this may be the best tactic imaginable.
Aunt Belle's Two Roads
I use an example from a book of anecdotes and recipes called Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. It's not fiction, but for folks in suburban New Jersey in 2019, it might as well be. It's damn close to a time travel story. If you haven't guessed, Mildred Armstrong Kalish is very old. She's 96. Coincidentally, my grandmother also goes by Mildred (though her Christian name is Carmella) and she's also 96.
When Mildred was a child, Aunt Belle tells her a story.
Once, before Aunt Belle died, I got up enough courage to ask her a very personal question.
"Aunt Belle, how come you never got married?"
She looked at me for a long time. She was standing by the kitchen stove, her delicate hands clasping and unclasping the stove handle, and she told me the following story:
"Well, I did have one beau. He told Art (her brother and my grandpa) to tell me Barkis is willin' and that he would be over Saturday night. Well, that made me so mad! I thought he had a lot of nerve asking me to marry him through Art like that! So when he came over Saturday night I wouldn't take his hat; I wouldn't take his coat. I wouldn't ask him to sit down. I treated him just as cold. I treated him so bad he never came back."
She stood absolutely still for a long time; then she continued:
"I'm kind of sorry I was so cold to him; he went and married Abbie Cross, made her a good home and was a good husband to her. They had a nice family."
She remained contemplative for a while and then continued, "It's been kind of lonesome sometimes."
Talk about roads not taken.
Aunt Belle obviously regrets her decision. She made it out of spite, and-- by choosing a moment of indignant retribution over a lifetime of possible happiness/contentedness -- she impulsively inverts Pascal's famous wager. After we read this, I remind my students that they are lucky to live in a densely populated area, where they will have plenty of opportunities for courtship and marriage. They probably won't have to resort to marrying a first cousin (which is apparently legal in New Jersey) but in Depression-era Iowa the pickin's were slim.
We're Talking About Practice
Big decisions are tough. We don't get enough practice. Most people only get married once . . . or twice . . . but rarely thrice. The same goes for buying a home. I got lucky with my marriage, but we all know the divorce rates; marriage is a coin-flip. Buying a home is similar (and often simultaneous). If I had more practice with home buying, I would have checked out the concrete more thoroughly. I would have been more annoyed by the basement crawl space. I would have found the roof suspect. I would have known just what an ordeal it is to redo a kitchen. But I knew none of this, and simply liked the location and the deck. Next time . . . if there is one, I will be more discerning.
I learned an easy technique to help with this decision-making-dilemma on The Art of Manliness (Podcast #465: The Powerful Questions That Will Help You Decide, Create, Connect, and Lead) The guest, Warren Berger, suggests imagining yourself in the new scenario-- whether it be a new house, a new marriage, a new location, a new wife, a new job. Really vividly imagine this new life. And then ask yourself: would you go back to your old life? Would you make the switch in reverse?
Many times we get hung up on the small details and anxiety of change, and fail to think about the consequences of the actual decision. Aunt Belle got hung up on the way Art asked her to marry, but she never imagined married life with Art and compared this long-term scenario to spinster-life on a farm in Depression-era Iowa. If she had done that, she might have overlooked Art's graceless go-between proposal and thought more about the big picture.
Advice for the President
The most notable thing about Steven Johnson's Farsighted is that he lauds the power of literary novels to help us imagine and simulate these big decisions. Johnson also has more typical fare in the book: the history of weather forecasting and the theoretical, strategic, and tactical planning of the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But his main example is George Eliot's Middlemarch.
I'm an English teacher, and I often wonder if my job is bullshit. Do kids really need to read Beowulf? The answer might be no. Lately, the Language Arts curriculum has been moving toward more practical coursework, non-fiction texts, and synthesis essays. I see the value in this. But the Johnson book validates the traditional inclination of English class: reading novels. The ideas he presents feel groundbreaking and pushing them on both my students and my colleagues. Sometimes we need a reminder of why it's worth it to read literature with kids. While there is a myriad of reasons to do this, Johnson makes the compelling case that people faced with big decisions should hone their skills by reading literary fiction. I'll explain why later in the post, but someone should pass this advice along to our fearless leader, Donald Trump. According to this list, Trump is not a fan of fiction, literary or otherwise.
Victorian Spoilers Ahead!
Johnson made Middlemarch sound so intriguing-- despite the fact that it's a 900 page Victorian novel-- that I decided to read it in tandem with Farsighted. This was no easy task, and while I recommend Middlemarch, I definitely had to use the internet to understand several parts. It's often dense. The sentences are beautiful, but often long and wandering. I'm guessing you're not going to read it (and the synopsis in Farsighted will suffice) but I still should warn you that there will be spoilers ahead.
Many years ago, my friend and colleague Dan saw me reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. I was five hundred pages in.
"Why are you reading that?" he asked me. "She's just going to throw herself in front of a train."
"What? Why did you tell me that!"
"Everyone knows that," he said.
I did not know that.
When in Doubt, Wait and Think Anew
The biggest decision (among many big decisions) in Middlemarch is whether recently widowed Dorothea Casaubon should follow the codicil in her dead husband's will and lose her fortune, or ignore the codicil and marry the man she truly loves . . . a man her dead husband despised. Mary Anne Evans doesn't make it easy. She details all the forces that might weigh on a life decision of this magnitude. Johnson explains charts these forces:
At its core, Dorothea's choice is simply binary: Should she marry Ladislaw or not? But Eliot allows us to see the rich web of influence and consequences that surrounds that decision. A full spectrum map of the novel would look something like this:
MIND → FAMILY → CAREER → COMMUNITY → ECONOMY → TECHNOLOGY → HISTORY
In Middlemarch, each of these levels plays a defining role in the story.
Johnson then points out the difference in scope between Middlemarch and a more narrowly bound (but still wonderful) literary novel like Pride and Prejudice. We get insight into the personal lives of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, but we are "limited to the upper realm of the scale diagram: the emotional connections between the two lovers, and the apparent approval or disapproval of their immediate family and a handful of neighbors." Mary Anne Evans goes all the way. Things get so complicated that all we can do is what Dorothea does: "wait and think anew."
Great novels don't give us prescriptions for what to do in complex situations. They are not morality plays or fables. There is no set of invariable rules. Once again, Johnson explains this better than I can:
Great novels-- or at least novels that are not didactic in their moralizing-- give us something fundamentally similar to what we get out of simulations of war games or ensemble forecasts: they let us experience parallel lives, and see the complexity of those experiences in vivid detail. They let us see the choice in all its intricacies. They map all the thread-like pressures; they chart the impact pathways as the choice ripples through families, communities, and the wider society. They give us practice, not prepackaged instructions.
It's a lot easier to read literary novels than it is to amass the experiences within them. My buddy Whitney recently reflected on these moments in a numerically epic post . . . he's lived a life that might encompass several novels, and so he's got more moments like this under his belt than most folks. Most of us don't get this much practice, and Johnson suggests that the next best thing is to ingest fiction, things that never happened.
Just the Fiction, Ma'am
Why fiction? Why not stick to the facts? We could spend out lives in the world of reality, watching documentaries and reading non-fiction, and never want for compelling stories. Why involve ourselves in lives and worlds and decisions that don't exist? Johnson takes a guess: "Stories exercise and rehearse the facility for juggling different frames of truth, in part, because they themselves occupy a complicated position on the map of truth and falsehood, and in part because stories often involve us observing other (fictional) beings going through their own juggling act."
Glitch in the Matrix?
We can run our limited perspective through many other minds and fictional lives, hypothesizing both about the reality of truthfulness of that world and the reality and truthfulness of the decision making within it. It's why I love Middlemarch and Brothers Karamazov and it's why I think the TV show Ozark -- though it's well acted, set in an interesting location, and looks like quality work-- might be totally stupid. Something is off with the simulation. There's a glitch in the matrix. There's something foggy floating in the suspension of disbelief.
The new novel An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, by Hank Green, handles this in an incredibly in-your-face manner. While the book is ostensibly a first-contact, robots-from-space sci-fi story, the irony is that the weirdest, most alien technology is actually the social-media-verse created by the humans. April May, the heroically awkward anti-hero, has to navigate her viral first contact fame and make several big decisions about the arc of her life. The novel inhabits the same space maturity-wise as the works by John Green, the author's brother. The story is sophisticated enough for adults to enjoy it, but the portrayal of politics and the dialogue can be a little schlocky. And the ending devolves into more of a Ready Player One puzzle-fest. While the book is probably more suited for a an advanced young-adult reader, I still like how it tackles decision-making . . . it literally exemplifies Johnson's reason for reading fiction. Here's how April May breaks down her first big moment: Option 1 (the sane option):
I could detach from all this as much as possible. Stop doing TV things, definitely do not meet a strange science girl at Walmart in Southern California to buy smoke detectors, never do anything on the internet again, pay off my loans. Buy a big house with a gate with the licensing revenue that would, no doubt, if this were real, keep flowing for the entire rest of my life, and have dinner parties with clever people until I died. Option 2 (the not-sane option):
Keep doing TV, spice up my Twitter and my Instagram and have opinions. Basically, use the platform that I was given by random chance to have a voice and maybe make a difference. What kind of difference? I had no idea, but I did know another chance wasn't going to come along . . . ever.
Hank Green
Don't Be Shallow and Pedantic
I'm going to let Steven Johnson finish this post off, with an especially long passage that I really think you should read. I made my students read it, and I gave it to a number of English teachers in my department. It's a great explanation of why we should spend time reading novels . . . literary novels. What designates a "literary" novel is another question for another post, but for now we can use the same benchmark that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart used to recognize hard-core pornography. He said he couldn't easily define it but, "I know it when I see it." The same goes for literature. As long as it's not "shallow and pedantic," then I think anything goes.
The novel is a better tool for simulating decision-making than a movie or TV show. Images move too fast and we never get to truly inhabit the interior of a character's mind. A novel allows for turning back and contemplation. It allows you to stop and hypothesize whenever you like. It's literally your world. Netflix tried to emulate a bit of this contemplative freedom with the choose-your-own-adventure Black Mirror episode "Bandersnatch", and while it was fun to make the choices, the story felt a bit contrived, and you never felt the threads and pressures that George Eliot portrays with such accuracy. You just picked a path so you could see what happened. The stakes were low. But when you invest in a challenging novel, and really live inside it, then profound things might happen.
This is the other reason novel reading turns out to enhance our decision-making skills . . . many studies have confirmed that a lifelong habit of reading literary fiction correlates strongly with an enhanced theory of mind skills. We don't know if other-minded people are drawn to literary fiction, or if the act of reading actually improves their ability to build those mental models. Most likely, it is a bit of both. But whatever the causal relationship, it is clear that one of the defining experiences of reading literary novels involves the immersion in an alternate subjectivity . . . The novel is an empathy machine. We can imagine all sorts of half-truths and hypotheticals: what-she-will-think-if-this-happens, what-he-thinks-I'm-feeling. Reading literary novels trains the mind for that kind of analysis. You can't run a thousand parallel simulations of your own life, the way meteorologists do, but you can read a thousand novels over the course of that life. It's true that the stories that unfold in those novels do not directly mirror the stories in our own lives. Most of us will never confront a choice between our late husband's estate and the matrimonial bliss with our radical lover. But the point of reading this kind of literary fiction is not to acquire a ready-made formula for your own hard choices. If you are contemplating a move to the suburbs, Middlemarch does not tell you what to do. No form of outside advice-- whether it takes the form of a novel or a cognitive science study or pop-psychology paperback-- can tell you what to do on these kinds of situations, because these situations contain, by definition, their own unique configuration of threadlike pressures. What the novel--along with some of the other forms of mapping and simulating that we have explored-- does teach you to do is to see the situation with what Eliot called "a keen vision and feeling," and keep you from the tendency to "walk about well wadded with stupidity." The novel doesn't give you answers. But it does make you better at following the threads . . . more than any other creative form, novels give us an opportunity to simulate and rehearse the hard choices of life before we actually make one ourselves. They give us an unrivaled vista into the interior life of someone wrestling with a complex, multi-layered choice, even if the choice happens to be a fictional one . . . the path of a human life, changing and being changed by the world around it.
Aristotle's advice on how to lead a happy, virtuous life holds up pretty well. Like the Buddha, Aristotle was interested in the middle path, the mean between excess and deficiency. And like the Buddha, Aristotle saw the pursuit of the good life as an ever-changing journey. Also, Aristotle and the Buddha are two people who have never been in my kitchen . . . if they had been, and I were to buttonhole either one of them, I'd have a certain gripe to discuss. Why else would I bring them up? To enlighten you? If you're looking for that sort of thing, the most I can do is recommend The Celestine Prophesy.
Aristotle was not Belgian! The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself!"
But before we get to my complaints with the golden mean, we need to understand how Aristotle defines happiness. He does a fine job with it. Happiness, according to Aristotle, is not just pure hedonistic pleasure, but as flourishing. A state of Eudaimonia. And this sort of happiness is the end goal of all pursuits. Aristotle was certainly not a Belgian, but there is a sort of "every man for himself" quality to his ethics. So Otto wasn't completely off base. But Aristotle explains why a you should be mainly concerned with your own path to happiness and not particularly worried about other people. He posits that if a person uses his method of the middle path to attain a state of happiness, it will follow that this virtuous person will have true friendships with people of similar virtuous character. This will be good for society. Take care of your own happiness, and the people you wish to associate with will be reflective of your virtuous ethics. Thus, there will be a flourishing society of good people (except for women and slaves . . . he wasn't so keen on their potential). He explains this in Book I of Nichomachean Ethics:
Now we call that which is in itself worthy of pursuit more final than that which is worthy of pursuit for the sake of something else, and that which is never desirable for the sake of something else more final than the things that are desirable both in themselves and for the sake of that other thing, and therefore we call final without qualification that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else. Now such a thing happiness, above all else, is held to be; for this we choose always for itself and never for the sake of something else . . ."
So happiness is the thing that we don't seek in order to acquire something else. Happiness is the something else, the ultimate aim. We seek money in order to use it for things that make us flourish, not to roll around in it (unless you're Scrooge McDuck). We seek a nice car so we can drive our friends around; spending time with our friends (at high speeds, listening to music on a bangin' system) makes us happy.
Aristotle lived a long time ago-- he wrote the Nichomachean Ethics in 340 B.C.-- and so he would probably struggle with paradoxical post-modern folks who do seek happiness in order to acquire something else . . . these are the people who seek happiness so they can post pictures of themselves-- super-fucking-happy pictures of themselves-- on social media so that their ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends from high school can witness just how fucking-super-happy they are and then these ex-boyfriends and girlfriends will get really jealous and finally realize exactly what they missed out on by dumping these super-happy people. But that kind of behavior is probably only possible with the internet, so we can't blame Aristotle for not predicting just how bananas people would become once they had access to platforms like Facebook and Snapchat and felt the need to show the world just how happy they are (despite the Zoloft). So let's consider these people who seek happiness in order to rub it in other people's faces outliers and move on with our lives. Because if you're reading this blog, then you're definitely not the sort who likes to infinitely scroll through Facebook pictures, right?
Aristotle sees virtue as habitual action: "Moral virtue is the outcome of habit." He is a consequentialist, unconcerned with deontological principles (e.g. Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative). Good people deliberately commit good behaviors. That is their purpose. He is a teleologist. Or so says my neighbor's dog.
We are defined by our actions: "It is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing courageous acts that we become courageous." But how do we figure out what is just, temperate, and courageous? Aristotle concedes that it's not easy. We need to seek the mean between the excess and deficiency. And not the mathematical average, but the mean relative to ourselves.
If being "courageous" is the target trait and the deficiency of courage is cowardice and the excess is being foolhardy, then Aristotle believes we need to chose actions that are neither "neither too much or too little." There are so many ways of doing it wrong, and only one way of doing it right. And it's partially determined by who you are. If you're a soldier, then your level of expected courage is so much higher than if you're a dude prone to motion-sickness at an amusement park. A soldier may need to fearlessly charge at a machine gun nest. Perhaps he shouldn't throw himself on a grenade during the charge-- that might be foolhardy because he could just run away from the grande and direct others to do the same-- but he can't not charge with his company. That's what he's trained for. The dude at the amusement park needs to take a Dramamine and ride the looper with his children, but he doesn't need to go beyond that . . . he doesn't need to forego his seat belt. That would be foolhardy (though it's intrinsically less dangerous to charging a machine gun nest. It's all relative).
Aristotle adds another rule. There are certain characteristics that are simply evil. There's no middle path with those. There's no right amount of betrayal or adultery. So there are traits to be avoided. Even positive traits provide difficulty. It's incredibly difficult to find the mean in anything. According to Aristotle, it takes a man of science. He also believes it is "only a man of science, who can find the mean or center of a circle," so apparently most Greek laymen did not have access to a compass.
All of us can understand this struggle. My teenage teenage children desire "pleasantness of amusement" but the waver between the deficiency and the excess, what Aristotle terms as "buffoonery" and "boorishness." Only occasionally are they "witty." The great divide in American politics is essentially defined by this conflict over money: "anybody can give or spend money, but to give it to the right persons, to give the right amount of it and to give it at the right time and for the right cause and in the right way, this is not what anybody can do, nor is it easy."
Americans tend to carom back and forth between the extremes. Last week, I had to cook dinner every night (a birthday gift for my wife) and this led to some over-indulgence in alcohol. I swore this week that I would abstain completely. But that's unrealistic. And so I found the middle ground between dipsomania and tee-totaling. Moderation. Moderate alcohol consumption is fueling this post.
The problem with this Aristotelean method of trying to attain the mean is that it's two-dimensional. Our lives don't operate on a line, they operate in a three-dimensional space. Whenever we work on some two-dimensional triplet continuum, there is some other force pulling on this line. So say we want to work on eating healthy. The deficiency of healthy eating is gluttony. Stuffing your face with Oreos and pudding. The excess of healthiness is anorexic obsessiveness. Only eating kale. You want to be in the middle, eating in a smaller window of time, no late-night snacking, fewer carbs, more protein and vegetables. So you end up eating a shitload of meat. Every kind of animal in the barn and then some. Bacon . . . ham . . . pork chops.
And you don't want to do that, but it's a consequence of trying to stop eating crap. When you're fixing your golf swing, you can only work on one thing at a time. But the other things screw up the one thing you're working on. It's a conundrum. And Aristotle didn't really offer any help. Physics does . . . sort of. My analogy for this dilemma (trilemma?) is called the "three body problem." If you need to compute how two bodies will move in relation to one another, say the earth and the moon, this is relatively easy (for a mathematician . . . I have enough trouble tracking down a high fly ball in left field). But when you add a third body to the system, the problem becomes notoriously difficult to analyze and solve.Wired unravels it in this article. Good luck. And for an extremely detailed narrative look at the consequences of the chaos endured by a planet orbiting a three-body star system, check out Cixin Liu's sci-fi masterpiece The Three-Body Problem (or wait a few years and watch the Amazon series based on the trilogy).
The way I see it, it's pretty easy to compute the relative mean between two extremes. There's complete abstinence of alcohol. Prohibition. No drinks. There's excess. Ten drinks a night. And then there's moderation. A beer or two a couple nights a week. Maybe a few more on the weekend. But then add the pull of a third body. The holiday season and multiple parties. This throws a monkey wrench in things. You need to socialize. What is the mean of socializing? The deficiency is introverted reclusion. Avoiding people entirely. Then you could control your drinking perfectly. The excess is extroverted delirium. You need to attend everything. You have a fear of missing out on anything. And the mean is some sort of convivial participation. But this is going to screw with your plan on drinking moderately. And the drinking screws with the eating. And the next thing you know, it's January and you've gained ten pounds and the gym is packed.
Basically, once you add a third body to a relationship, it's extremely difficult to compute the forces and understand what habitual actions you should take. Which is why people like categorical rules. It's often easier. When you're pressed to order at a restaurant, it's difficult to fulfill both your ketogenic diet and your green ethics.
The Hidden Brain episode "A Founding Contradiction: Thomas Jefferson's Stance on Slavery" investigates an infinitely controversial historical example of the moral three body problem. There is no question that in the realm of politics, Jefferson flourished in the virtuous mean between oppressive monarch and reckless anarchist. He forged documents and laws designed to give the right amount of freedom to the man in the middle. He revised property laws, wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, outlined the proper relationship between the Church and the State, and generally conceived ideas and policies that were built to last. And during this fruitful period, he owned 175 slaves and fathered six children with one of them (Sally Hemings).
Jefferson clearly spoke against slavery (though he considered himself a "good and benevolent" slave owner).
"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it, for man is an imitative animal."
In 1807, three weeks before Britain did the same, Jefferson signed a law banning the importation of slaves into the United States, effectively banning the slave trade. Yet Jefferson only freed a few slaves during his life; when he died, 130 of his slaves were sold as part of the Monticello estate.
Jefferson knew slavery was wrong and must end, but he wasn't ready to expend the personal capital to end it. He was working on a lot of other things. So he never computed the Aristotelian triplet on slavery that would lead him to habitual moral action. Perhaps the excess is "slave master" and the deficiency is "wanton sluggard" and somewhere in the middle is "cooperative employer." He felt the pull of the immoral nature of slavery, just as I know eating factory farmed animals is wrong-- these animals are the slaves of our time-- but if I'm going to be working on my own diet and fitness, I'm going to be eating animals.
This is not to minimize, as I would never do, the depredations of the institution of slavery - but I imagine, 100 years from now, people are going to look back at certain things that we do and say, why didn't people understand? You know, why didn't people do something? And there are a lot of things - there are a lot of times human beings don't act according to what they know is the right thing to do. Monticello was Jefferson's place. This was his way of life. It's what he knew. And he felt that he helped to found a country. He helped the United States come into existence. Breaking with Great Britain, setting up a government, that was a pretty big deal, and that the next generation of people had something to do, as well, and that was to make the progress on the issue of slavery that he thought could be made. Now, we're not satisfied with that because we say, you had the talent to do this thing. Why didn't you use the talent to do the other thing? But that's not, you know, what he thought he was here to do. The American Revolution was the most important thing in his life. And the tragedy is he couldn't see that, after the union is formed, that the thing that would split it apart would be the institution of slavery.
It's easy to espouse theoretical, deontological rules, but habitual action is hard. While it's difficult to argue for relative ethics-- I'm never going to excuse clitoral castration-- it's also difficult to universally condemn Jefferson for owning slaves. He was trapped within an economic and social machine reliant on slaves. And so while he wrote like an abolitionist, he also framed a pragmatic triplet that we might find abominable and contradictory. Jefferson saw that the excess as a slaveholder was to be a "cruel overlord" and the deficiency was to be an "apathetic and irresponsible patriarch." You couldn't just free your slaves, you also had to provide for them. There was no system in place. (Sally Hemings was freed but then negotiated to return to slavery at Monticello, but with "extraordinary privileges.") So Jefferson arrived at the mean . . . what he considered to be "benevolent ownership." We find it repugnant, but people in the future will laugh sardonically at our attempt to be environmental by foregoing plastic straws, while we drive our gas guzzling vehicles from store to store buying plastic gewgaws.
Jefferson was busy building the framework for many, many progressive policies . . . policies that were far-ranging and significant. The Louisiana Purchase. He did what he could, and did it well. We need to remember that sometimes we can't change a habitual action without the help of technology. As far as slavery goes, we have it easy now . . . it's not even an option (unless you're in the sex slave trade . . . and then, shame on you!) We would never go back to slavery now that we have better agricultural technology. It's not even a moral choice. Jefferson couldn't see a simple way to attack the problem, and there would be no simple way until the plantation system-- a system of which he was a participant-- was completely dismantled.
People in the future may look back at us as savages because we tortured so many pigs and cows and sheep and chickens. We created huge cesspools of fecal waste and huge clouds of methane. But these future folk will be sitting on high, criticizing our evil ways, while they partake in delicious lab grown beef. No animals harmed, no animal waste, and no habitual action to compute. The Impossible Burger may solve this problem sooner than later. It's apparently "hyper-realistic" and bleeds just like real meat. It's a hell of a lot easier to fall into a virtuous habit when it's widely available and cheap.
So this is my gripe with Aristotle's middle path, the mean between excess and deficiency. It's nearly impossible to tread. There are always other virtues pulling you off course. Like a tennis serve or a golf swing, you can only work on one improvement at a time . . . you can't fix everything at once. And these traits operate in a three-dimensional space, and each attempt at moving toward the mean influences the other attempts. We can't figure it all out. And our willpower might be a limited resource. This works on a larger scale as well. As a technological society, we are struggling with free speech on the internet. The excess of free speech allows every hateful opinion and every fake news story. The deficiency of free speech is censorship . . . as the internet operates in China. So we try to plot the mean, some sort of middle ground where speech is free as long as it isn't malevolent fictitious propaganda or hate speech directed to incite riot and violence. But then toss in another dilemma to solve, say how much the government should regulate big tech monopolies-- the institutions that are controlling the platforms where this conflict is occurring-- and you've created a many-body problem that's incalculable. Who should control what we read? How free should our speech be? Who should monitor this? Should tech companies have more power than the government over our First Amendment Rights?
Who knows?
That's the end of the line for me. We need a modern Aristotle to figure this one out.
Eleven years ago, I started writing a blog called Sentence of Dave.The premise was simple: rain or shine, I would write one sentence per day. The sentence might be short and sweet or it might run on and on. And while I didn't initially recognize the pun in the title, I soon realized that I had committed myself to a weird sort of imprisonment of chronology and structure. I generally embraced and enjoyed my self-imposed sentence-writing experiment (and I was always inspired by my fans, commenters, and critics).
Recently, however, writing the sentence became onerous, another chore. And I felt limited and rushed. So I'm trying something new. I'm going to take it slow and write some longer posts. I'm going to revise, ruminate, and procrastinate. Move at my own pace. Stall. Use periods. Park the bus.
The first post I wrote over at Sentence of Dave was dedicated to my loving wife. Here it is, in its entirety:
I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car.
For good luck, I am once again dedicating this first post at Park the Bus to my wife. She is a wonderful woman: beautiful, loyal, smart, funny, and adventurous. I am lucky to have her. Unfortunately, she is also reckless and irresponsible, something of a menace. I need this longer format to truly explain what I mean.
To all appearances, my wife seems to be a diligent and dedicated elementary school teacher and mother. She helps run the community garden. She's a great cook with a green thumb. She eats healthy, works out, dresses sharp, and donates her time to charitable causes. But she's also the kind of person who will leave you a car with an empty gas tank. Below the line. No fuel at all. Not because she doesn't care about you-- I think most people would agree that she's a caring person. She will leave you the car on empty because she drives it around on empty. She's too busy running important errands for our family and the gardening club and her students and the elderly to stop for gas. And if you switch cars with her, and nearly run out of gas on the way to work ( while you are sitting in traffic because of construction) and call her-- your tone a little perturbed-- and give her a piece of your mind, and later on, text her some information, some completely innocuous and objective information about the consequences of using an internal combustion engine with very little gas in the tank, information about burnt out fuel pumps and kicking up sediment, then, oddly, you're the one who's going to be in trouble.
I'm a high school English teacher and my students-- despite the fact that they don't always read the assigned texts-- are often wise beyond their years in the ways of relationships. They vehemently advised me against sending those texts about sediment and fuel pumps to my wife. They told me it wasn't worth it. I explained to them that our Honda CRV was the second most expensive item our family-owned (a distant second behind our house) and it was my responsibility to inform my wife about these sorts of things. Because she was reckless. Not that she was alone in this manner of recklessness . . . I did an informal poll and though my evidence is anecdotal, I'm fairly sure that the world is equally divided into two kinds of people: sane folks who gas up when their tank gets down to 1/4 full and lunatics who drive around on fumes until their anxiety finally gets the better of them . . . or they actually run out of gas.
I could go on and on. My wife fills her coffee up far beyond what is normal or necessary. She walks around the kitchen with a meniscus of steaming hot liquid sloshing above the rim of the mug. Drinking coffee is supposed to be relaxing, a morning treat. A warm and tasty pick-me-up. Not an invitation for second-degree burns.
She does something similar (but less dangerous) with the dog's water bowl: she fills it up until the water is hovering above the brim and then cavalierly carries it across the room. She fills up the recycling bin in our kitchen so far above the rim that it's impossible to pull out the garbage/recycling drawer. For many years, she put large knives in the sink amongst all the dirty dishes (because she likes a clean counter). I actually broke her of this habit (but it took some bloodshed). Why does she do these things? Because she's got an incorrigibly reckless soul.
A quick mathematical aside: the relationship between a person's sanity and the amount of coffee they pour into their cup is the same as the relationship between a person's insanity and the amount of gas they have in their tank. I know formulas can be off-putting, but I think these equations are fairly simple and common-sensical.
the percentage you are sane = amount of gas in tank/full tank of gas
the percentage you are insane = amount coffee in cup/full cup of coffee
Running on fumes? Mathematically, you are 1% sane. Coffee cup filled to the absolute maximum? You are 100% insane.
The camera on the roof of the car; the empty gas tank; the overly full coffee cup, the overly full dog bowl, and the overly full recycling bin: these should all be entered as background evidence. What I really want to discuss is something that happened a few days ago. I was about to start teaching class, when my phone buzzed. There was a text from my wife and an accompanying photo. The text explained that our dog Lola had chewed up a bunch of papers that she had in her school bag. Student papers. Graded student papers. Essentially, the teacher's dog had eaten the students' homework. Damn close to Alfred Harmsmith's dream headline: "man bites dog."
I informed my class of the bad news . . . which was especially bad for me because I am in charge of training our new dog and if she behaves badly then the responsibility is mine. This is not particularly fair-- I'm no dog whisperer-- but my wife does take on a lot of responsibility in the house, so I can't complain. If Lola screws up, I'm to bear the brunt of it. And my wife is still partial to our old dog, Sirius, who shuffled off this mortal coil last March. So there was no winning this one. Lola had screwed the pooch, and I was to take the heat for it.
The first text message my wife sent me about the paper-eating incident was light: she recognized and enjoyed the whole "our dog ate the students' homework!" aspect of the scene. But then she instructed me that if I left the house when everyone was still sleeping, as I did on Wednesday, then I should bring the dog back upstairs and close the gate so she couldn't roam the house and chew on things. She made it clear who was culpable for the chewing. Me.
The final reckless thing I'd like to discuss about my wonderful and loving wife is that she does not zip her bags. She does not zip her purse. She does not zip her school bag. She doesn't zip her laptop case. She doesn't believe in zipping. She likes the convenience of easy entry. (Insert filthy joke here).
I'm constantly zipping my wife's purse shut. Sometimes because it's hanging by a thread on a hook with seven other jackets. Or it's teetering over the center console in the car. She should have zipped her school bag shut. We have a young Rhodesian/lab rescue in the house, and she likes to chew things. When I noticed the unzipped bag in the photo, I asked my class if I should bring this to my wife's attention. This wasn't my fault! This could have been prevented! If she had taken precautions, if she had zipped her bag shut, if she had utilized Whitcomb L. Judson's marvelously pragmatic invention, then the dog wouldn't have chewed up her papers. I presented this argument. My students' answer was still a resounding "NO!" I should NOT text her about the unzipped bag.
I explained to them about the purse and the gas tank and the recycling bin and the coffee. They didn't care. It's not worth it, they informed me. Even my sophomores understood this. They were so adamant that I sort of followed their advice.
I am proud that I did not text my wife about the unzipped bag. I patiently waited to bring it up until later in the afternoon. It was Thanksgiving Eve, and once we had imbibed a bit, I pounced, the same way our dog Lola pounces on her rubber bone when you toss it across the room. It was a much better method than texting. My students were right. You can't text about something as delicate as this (I learned that during the whole gas tank incident). But I wasn't going to completely ignore the situation. I knew it wouldn't change anything, but my voice had to be heard. It's the same reason I sat down and wrote this long-winded post. It feels good to take notes, organize your thoughts, and get it all out. People need to know. My wife needed to know. And I will give her credit: she took it like a champ. She may have called me a few choice names, but then she was over it. We went out to the bar, saw our friends, and I had a story to tell.
I'd like to thank my wife Catherine for the inspiration and the material . . . your irrational behavior makes me love you all the more.
Catherine and I went our separate ways today; she took the boys and a friend to Comic Con at the Javits Center in NYC (apparently it's a vast venue and after lunch she let them go off by themselves while she wandered alone and collected free stuff and at 3:30 PM she sent me a text that said, "Going to the parking deck now . . . Boys are gone," which scared the crap out of me until I realized she meant to text "done," not "gone") and meanwhile I had another schizophrenic day . . . early this morning I took the dog to the beach-- her first time there-- and it went extremely well: she didn't get carsick (I sat her in the front seat, kept the window open and gave her a Swedish fish at the beginning and middle of each ride, all internet tips that seemed to do the trick) and she loved the sea and sand and surf . . . the water was so warm that I took a swim; then I headed home because our washer/dryer died and I needed to drag four giant baskets of laundry to Wayne's Wash World III, a laundromat "conveniently" located right in the middle of town, so there's not much parking . . . no spaces in the little lot in the back so I had to settle for a spot right across from the place, but on the other side of Route 27, which is quite busy on Sunday; so I lugged the four baskets across the road, washed them, dried them, and then carried them back across the street; my second time doing this I had some serious attitude when I plunged into traffic, I was hot and bothered from digging around in the giant dryer and basically tempting someone to hit me and my laundry . . . perhaps the money from the lawsuit would pay for the new appliances; then I rushed home to meet the guy who needed to flush out our tankless hot water heater and when we cleared some space for him to get to the equipment and hook up his lines, I noticed that under the box that held my wife's wedding dress, there was a bunch of black mold . . . but the beach was beautiful, as was our walk from Ocean Grove into Asbury, it's just unfortunate that it didn't happen in the reverse order (because now all I'm thinking about is cleaning that mold in the basement, instead of the warm surf . . . but at least I have a couple photos to refresh my memory . . . and after doing all that stuff, I went and coached my travel soccer team, which has merged with my friend Phil's team, and Phil carried the ball bag from the goal over to the bench and then he asked me what the deal was-- he said the bag smelled like vomit and so I told him that was because my dog puked on it and I hadn't washed it yet . . . but that was two weeks ago, hopefully-- with a Swedish fish or two-- Lola won't be doing that anymore).
Franklin Foer begins his essay collection of selections from the New Republic (Insurrections of the Mind: 100 Years of Politics and Culture in America) with a piece from 1914-- World War I had just begun-- by Rebecca West (who wrote the massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, a travelogue and history of the Balkans) and while she's ostensibly speaking about literary criticism, there's a lot more going on and I certainly agree that "the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before" to grapple with what's happening in our country and our planet . . . I feel like I have been stumbling across bad news everywhere I turn-- I don't really follow the news day-to-day, but when I catch up, it's all bad-- I hadn't heard about Trump's stubborn refusal to lower the flag to half mast for John McCain until after it happened and it just mad me embarrassed and sad, and then I listened to "The Measure of a Tragedy" about Venezuela's economic implosion-- inflation has been so rampant that working a day at minimum wage (which is the median salary for the country) can buy you 900 calories (in the US, working a day at minimum wage can buy you over 100,000 calories) and so Venezuelans have lost, on average, 24 pounds and there is a mass migration of Syrian proportions out of the country, and then I listened to the new episode of The Weeds, about how we've lowered all our immigration numbers-- despite what's happening (and I'm still angry and sad about what happened to my cleaning lady and her husband, who are being sent back to Nicaragua despite the fact that they've had work-permits since 2006 and have kids in the school system and parents and sisters who are citizens-- they are a hard-working couple and a boon to the economy, but the government is over a decade behind on dealing with citizenship applications) and then there's all the environmental stuff-- permanent ice in Greenland is gone, Trump is pushing coal despite carbon emissions and particulate matter pollution, we could have curbed global warming back when George H.W. Bush was president-- he was a proponent and wanted the world to cooperate-- but then things got political and the lobbyists won out (listen to this episode of The Daily to learn about this lost moment in time) and --like with smoking-- we plunged into a corporate fueled era of darkness and denial . . . but like with smoking, there is hope that the science will eventually prevail, just not any time soon . . . anyway, here are the first two paragraphs of "The Duty of Harsh Criticism," her words are far more powerful than mine:
Today in England we think as little of art as though we had been caught up from earth and set in some windy side street of the universe among the stars. Disgust at the daily deathbed which is Europe has made us hunger and thirst for the kindly ways of righteousness, and we want to save our souls. And the immediate result of this desire will probably be a devastating reaction towards conservatism of thought and intellectual stagnation. Not unnaturally we shall scuttle for safety towards militarism and orthodoxy. Life will be lived as it might be in some white village among English elms; while the boys are drilling on the green we shall look up at the church spire and take it as proven that it is pointing to God with final accuracy.
And so we might go on very placidly, just as we were doing three months ago, until the undrained marshes of human thought stirred again and emitted some other monstrous beast, ugly with primal slime and belligerent with obscene greeds. Decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind. Indeed, if we want to save our souls, the mind must lead a more athletic life than it has ever done before, and must more passionately than ever practise and rejoice in art. For only through art can we cultivate annoyance with inessentials, powerful and exasperated reactions against ugliness, a ravenous appetite for beauty; and these are the true guardians of the soul.
Perhaps because of the enormous vacuum in my life due to lack of World Cup games until Friday, or perhaps because we like to humor mom once a year . . . whatever the reason, we decided to go out to breakfast this morning-- and we are not an out-to-breakfast-family . . . you know this kind of family, jovial, chubby and good-natured, drinking orange juice while waiting for their pancakes kind of people . . . every once in a while Catherine decides we should be that family and go out to breakfast and it never works out-- this morning Ian and I played tennis and it was hot and he took a game from me again (it's getting frustrating) and then we jumped in the pool and then we decided to bike to the Hangar B Eatery, a critically acclaimed hipster breakfast joint located at the Chatham Airport-- we started biking at 9:30 AM, made out way down the Chatham Rail Trail spur and get to the place at 10 AM and it was small and packed-- we thought everyone would be at the parade but that was not the case-- and we were hungry . . . which is one of the reasons we're not an out-to-breakfast family, as the boys and I get really hangry, but we decided to endure the 35-minute wait and we killed some time listening to a pilot tell us about the biplane and the biplane tours (apparently, this biplane is built from the 1930 specs-- though some of the materials are modernized-- but it's still impressive that some guys in 1930 designed something as complicated as an airplane that well) and we saw a helicopter take off and then we were seated and I think they lost our ticket or got slammed or something because it took a good forty minutes for us to get our food and it was hot inside-- they did give us a free donut and apologized-- but we didn't get our food until after 11 AM and I was really proud of myself and the boys, no one complained and we all endured the wait stoically, despite our hangry status . . . and I thought the food-- when it finally came-- was quite good, but Catherine didn't love her meal and I doubt she'll try to get us to go out to breakfast for a long time.
Mark Manson's breezy, philosophical and surprisingly profound millennial self-help guide The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life might be less surprising if you're a cynical Generation X'er like me: life is pain, so don't try to avoid it-- just focus and prioritize on problems you can solve or at least take a crack at . . . avoid distractions, lower the bar, figure out what you truly value and stop comparing yourself to everyone else on social media, stop obsessing about all the things and instead give a fuck about a few things that you truly deem important and forget the rest . . . I've built a happy life on these precepts-- I give a fuck about spending time with my wife and kids and playing guitar/recording music/podcasts and reading books and writing this blog and coaching soccer and doing as many sports as I can with my kids and colleagues and trying to get together with friends to drink beer-- and though these things often stress me out and beat up my body and mind, I know that I value social interaction and physical and mental exercise more than I do money and expensive items and political power and this will always be the case: Manson has just learned this-- he recognizes that after a peripatetic tour of the world that included 55 different countries, that visiting a few countries opens your mind and changes your perspective, but the 51st and 52nd country don't add much to the experience . . . and sometimes lack of choice and commitment is the best choice of all, because certain things can only be experienced when you live in the same place for five years or ten years; anyway, the book is full of crude language and entertaining anecdotes, and it's such a quick read that you won't even realizing you're examining your values and your philosophy of life until you've turned the last page (and it might be a sneaky way to get your children to read something deep-- I just gave it to my son Alex and he read 25 pages and came downstairs all excited about how much he likes it-- especially the story of Charles Bukowski).
The literary term "juxtaposition" is a favorite of sophomores the world over, mainly because it applies to nearly any two things placed side-by-side that elicit some sort of irony or contrast . . . it's easy to identify, sounds smart, and-- along with foreshadowing-- it's the most popular term thrown about by wannabe high school literary scholars . . . but sometimes things are hackneyed and cliche for good reason, and a really excellent ironic juxtaposition is a wonderful thing: my wife and I are watchingBreaking Bad with the kids and we finally got to season 5 and my two favorite episodes: "Dead Freight" and "Buyout"; during "Dead Freight," Walter, Mike, Pinkman and Todd engineer a methylamine train heist-- a heist that will occur unbeknowst to the train conductor-- and despite a few hiccups and a lot of stressful moments, they pull it off with great success-- until the last moments of the episode, when the gang pays a very heavy price for their actions . . . the next episode deals with the aftermath, and features the greatest dinner scene in TV history, the first time that Pinkman, Skyler and Walt really sit down together and interact-- the tension is so unbearable it's funny-- Pinkman tries to make small talk in an absolutely untenable situation . . . even if you've never seen Breaking Bad and don't want to commit to five seasons, you can watch these two episodes as a stand-alone unit, they are magical, awkward, and capture everything great about the show.
If you're reading this blog, then you are probably a secular liberal like me (and you're most definitely WEIRD like me: Western and educated, from an industrialized, rich, democratic nation) and you probably need to read Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion . . . I've written about Haidt's basic ideas here in previous posts, but his book goes into much greater detail and also describes the experiments and readings that helped him to understand the different moral matrices that liberals and conservatives use to understand the world; essentially, conservatives care about more stuff than liberals-- while liberals tend to base their morality on the principles of fairness and harm, conservatives-- who do care about those values-- are also concerned with authority, purity and loyalty . . . so conservatives tend to understand how liberals view things better than liberals understand how conservatives view things; most of these moral characteristics are due to deep-seated personality traits, which are mainly genetic-- things like being open to new experiences and agreeable and neurotic, so there seem to be differences in liberals and conservatives at the most basic level; the book really enlightened me about the benefits of religion-- I wish I were religious, but like a typical liberal, I consider it a bunch of supernatural mumbo-jumbo that wastes your time and money-- but while religion may have started because we have a natural proclivity to see agency everywhere, whether it's a face in the tree or gods behind the thunder-- it has become a valuable asset for members, who experience happiness and social capital, give more to charity, belong to an in group, and have costly rules of purity and sanctity which bond them to other members of the group . . . while it will never work for me, I can see how groups of humans that had religion could have outcompeted groups that did not have religion (and Haidt presents an argument against the principles of the Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins new-atheist crowd, who see religion as a parasite that takes over human brain and eventually leads to things like suicide bombers-- Haidt makes a compelling argument that suicide bombers, who might need insipration from an in-group, are historically only in response to boots on the ground appression and more of a military tactic from a tribe than a radical response based on belief) anyway, the WEIRDER you are the more you see the world as individual objects and not groups until you might eventually try to boil everything down to one set of utilitarian rules, as Jeremy Bentham did . . . Haidt speculates that Bentham might have been autistic, a high-functioning systemizer with very little empathy that made morality into a formulaic algorithm which computes the greater good but does not think about the individual moral emotions within the context of the decision-- while this method might be a decent way to formulate policy, it's often political suicide (economists know that immigrants lead to a net gain in the economy, but apparently many conservatives don't care-- they are more considered with the rule of law and the sanctity of our borders) and it took a long trip to India for Haidt to recognize that other people and cultures place a much greater value on group morality, while everyone cares about liberty/oppression and fairness/cheating and care/harm, only conservatives truly care about loyalty/betrayal and authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation . . . and these are all more important to the group . . . at first, Haidt had a typical WEIRD view of India-- it had rigid social classes and gender roles, it was a sexist society that had limited mobility and a lot of unnecessary rules about eating and prayer, but then he saw that though things weren't as fair as in the West, the connections and order between groups was strong and that was what was valued . . . it's really hard, as a liberal, to put yourself into a conservative's shoes . . . it's hard to feel sanctity towards a religious text or a symbol or an institution that you think is silly, it's hard to find a love for authority when your deepest desire is to see authority subverted, and it's hard to value loyalty when you think it leads to racism and oppression, but if the liberals in our country don't come to understand this, then they are going to destroy their chances of making utilitarian policy changes that can lead to the greater good and instead will remain mired in partisan ugliness . . . Trump is easily explained in this context-- he wants to make America pure and great again, and return us to rule of law, he's an authoritarian figure, totally loyal to our country and nothing else . . . Haidt gives liberals a tool to understand that conservatives are not all insane racist lunatics, and are quite sincere in the things that they care about, things which often do increase social capital, especially in groups . . . it's not my cup of tea, but at least I understand things a bit more after reading this book and can empathize with the conservative point of view . . . and I can see the roots of my genetics in my children, who are open to experience and care about fairness and harm, but couldn't give two shits about loyalty, sanctity, and authority . . . even though my wife and I sort of try to value these virtues, as most parents do, even at the basic level of don't cheat, respect your teachers, and stop picking your nose . . . but none of it is working with them and they're going to end up as WEIRD secular liberals just like their mom and dad.
Yesterday, for my wife's birthday, we went on a West Village food tour that transmogrified into a West Village bar crawl; here is the itinerary, in case you want to replicate it without a guide (and without all the historical anecdotes about the neighborhood, which our tour guide provided; they were quite fascinating: astronomical real estate prices, gay pride landmarks, the site of Operation Midnight Climax, the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the Friends apartment, and lots of 18th and 19th century landmark building) so to begin, we took the 8:48 AM train with two other couples (Mel/Ed and Ann/Craig) and took the subway down to Christopher Street and met our tour guide (Ian) and then we ate rice balls and soppressata at Faicco's Italian Specialties (super delicious) wandered the neighborhood a bit and then had some sensational empanadas and plantain chips and a very expensive mojito at Havana Alma de Cuba, next was Hudson Bagel for an everything bagel with cream cheese, which seemed silly to us, but the other folks on the tour, who hailed from Mississippi, were very impressed and said they were much better than the bagels at Kroger; then we took a detour through Washington Square Park, listened to some outdoor piano, and saw the new Ai Weiwei sculpture under the arch; then falafel and lamb shawarma at the original Mamoun's Falafel-- a place we are familiar with because there is a franchise in New Brunswick -- and the main thing to remember about Mamoun's is do not eat the hot sauce, it's very very hot . . . of course, I always break this rule, in honor of manliness, and yesterday was no exception, and I will say that the falafel at the original location did taste a bit better than the stuff they offer in New Brunswick, at this stage Cat went rogue and ran next door and bought some Belgian pomme frites for the group to share, and this made everyone very happy (and quite full) but we had to stuff in a sliver of artichoke pizza from the eponymously named Artichoke Basille's Pizza (which we all agreed was tasty but very rich, a sliver was more than enough) and a cupcake from Molly's Cupcakes; we all agreed the food tour was a lot of fun, and we also agreed that it was really strange to see just how many food and walking tours were ambling through the Village (with aspiring actors as guides) and it made us realize that though the city is only a fourteen dollar train ride away and we totally take it for granted and mainly complain about the crowds and the prices, it's a place that people from all over the world come to visit; the strangest moment on the food tour was when the young woman from the Mississippi crew showed us a weird picture of what looked like an S&M dungeon and explained how it was her favorite bar in New Orleans because some horrific murders had taken place there in the 18th century; she went into great detail about this, and it would have been creepy, except that she described the place in a wonderfully serene Deep Southern drawl-- cognitive dissonance-- anyway, after that we went to a number of bars: Fat Cat, which was a weird and grungy underground space with live jazz, pool, shuffleboard, and ping-pong; then the Duplex, a flamboyant lounge with 80's music videos and excellent cocktails, then we ate more food (Tacombi . . . delicious fish and chorizo tacos) and finished the night at The Garret, a packed speakeasy style joint that you have to enter by walking through the Five Guys (turn left by the fryer) and by the time we left, fairly soused from all the Norse Whisperers and Full Brazilans, there was a long line to get in, which ran parallel to the line for burgers-- weird-- and on the way home we found out that Ann had gone to highschool with one of my fraternity brothers-- my little brother, in fact-- so that fact provided us with much amusement until we got back to New Brunswick and mustered strenght for the walk across the bridge and up the hill . . . I was a little groggy today and a lot poorer-- alcoholic beverages cost an arm and a leg in these areas-- but it was a great reminder of all the things packed into a small space in New York (next time we go to that area, we're going to drag the kids along and make them go to the Tenement Museum, so they can see a historically accurate sweatshop and get inspired to attend college).
It makes me extremely jealous that women have so many fabulous choices on how to accessorize their outfits-- scarves and brooches, feather boas and scrunchies, bangles and handbags-- so, to combat mundanity, I've added a couple of items to my fashion arsenal:
1) with my battery powered headlamp, not only am I a shining beacon of coolness in the 6 AM darkness, but I also don't trip on the uneven pavement near my house (the streetlight on our corner is out) and I'm able to let my dog pursue his interests (chasing deer in the park) without losing him . . . so shine on, you crazy fashionable Dave . . .
2) around the house, in the driveway, and even in the car on a quick errand, I am sporting a pair of OOFOS OOClogs to help my feet recover from plantar fasciitis . . . my wife is not smitten with these-- in fact, she called them "the world's ugliest pair of shoes," but I should point out that she has a long history of clog-hating (when she met my friend and rugby phenom Brian Hightower for the first time, she was not impressed, mainly because he was wearing a pair of hideous black clogs-- but also because he's short with a big head; Hightower let me try on the clogs and I really liked them, they were comfortable and easy to slip into; Catherine made some derogatory comments about the clogs and the type of men that wear them and then we went out and got drunk and I forgot all about the entire incident, but Whitney didn't, and a year later he gave me a pair of them for my birthday-- to Catherine's chagrin-- and I wore them until they fell apart . . . I'll never forget that gift, as it was both incredibly thoughtful and incredibly vengeful in equal measures).
If you'd like some anti-Trump fodder with more policy analysis and less ad hominem rhetoric, listen to the new episode of Freakonomics:"Why Larry Summers is the Economist Everyone Hates to Love" . . . Summers is the abrasive genius who has acted as US Treasury Secretary, chief economist for the Obama administration and the world bank, and president of Harvard-- until some remarks he made were deemed sexist and he resigned . . . anyway, Summers explains why many of Trump's economic policies are misguided, why his credibility (or lack thereof) is important to economic issues, and why we can't streamline the government to the extent that conservatives would like; here are a couple of things that I liked:
1) Summers thinks Trump is right in principle about corporate tax reform, though the administration hasn't implemented any policy on this (and Summers has no confidence that they have the know-how to do so) and he uses this wonderful library analogy to explain what we've been doing for the past seven years with corporate taxes:
Permit me an analogy here. Imagine that you are running a library and that there is a substantial volume of overdue books. You might offer amnesty to get people to return the books. You might announce you will never offer amnesty, so people will take fines seriously and return the books. Only an idiot would put a sign on the door saying, “No amnesty now, but we’re thinking hard about amnesty for next month.
You laugh, but American corporations have $2 trillion-plus overseas. If they bring that cash back right now, they pay 35 percent. If you’ve picked up any newspaper in the last seven years, you’ll know that Congress has been actively debating changes to that policy—for seven years. Just like the sign on the door of the library saying they’re thinking about amnesty for next month. It would be hard to conceive a policy better designed to keep that cash outside the US and not invested in the US than the policy we have pursued. That’s why I stress business tax reform as important for economic growth.
2) Summers explains why the government can't be downsized . . . he has several reasons, all of which he explains on his blog-- the piece is short and worth reading-- but the most telling statistic is that the relative price of a TV and a day in the hospital has changed by a factor of 100 since the 1980's;
3) I also like this piece about how "America needs its unions more than ever" about how the balance in power has shifted dramatically from the employee to the employer, and that's not changing any time soon (case in point, my groceries were delivered at 4:45 AM this morning, it was pitch black and the dog started barking when a guy in an Amazon Fresh truck pulled up, got out with a flashlight, and exchanged the containers on our porch . . . all hail Amazon . . . but I hope that guy was getting some overtime pay).
I'm in too deep to stop, but it would be hard for me to recommend Callum Roberts' book The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea-- it's just too depressing-- though he tries to keep the tone as hopeful as possible, the weight of the evidence is overwhelming: our oceans, the life within them, and the complex food-chains and filters of our planet are in dire jeopardy, unless we collectively start doing things very differently; here are some awful things I've learned so far:
1) the ocean is absorbing much of the carbon dioxide emitted when we burn fossil fuels, and this is causing a usurious problem that has been overlooked until recently: ocean acidification . . . to an extent that hasn't been seen in 300 million years-- at the end of the Permian, when there was a mass extinction; many corals, marine plants, and shelled animals need "dissolved carbonate minerals" and the lower pH makes it harder for these animals to "crystallize carbonate" out of a solution;
2) a cool fact, a pint of seawater contains two billion viruses, and they are helping to slow the rate at which the ocean is acidifying, but no one knows at what level of pH those tiny organisms won't be able to function-- or if they function too well, then there is an increase in global warming, because they recycle the the nutrients in sunlit waters-- keeping carbon in the cycle, instead of letting it sink into the deep sea;
3) nutrients, fertilizer and run-offs are causing toxic algal blooms at a much greater intensity and rate, red tides and other toxic phytoplankton which, when ingested, can cause hallucinations, nightmares, nerve-damage, cancer, birth defects, and tumors (especially in sea turtles) and the increase of big storms with high-winds has exacerbated airborne instances of sickness and contact, the "storms churn the sea into a spray which can be inhaled," resulting in rashes and lung inflammation . . . but what's bad for us is good for one creature-- the "triple combination of nutrient enrichment, low oxygen, and overfishing" is wonderful for jellyfish, so if you're taking a trip to the beach, make sure you bring meat tenderizer;
4) persistent organic pollutants (POPs for short) are building up in water and ice and animal fat all over the world, chemicals like DDT and PCBs are especially deleterious-- the toxic load carried by male dolphins in Sarasota Bay makes their flesh equivalent to biohazard . . . females have lower amounts of toxins because they pass much of the bad stuff to their offspring through pregnancy and breast feeding . . . and these toxins are making their way up the food chain, into large animals like whales and humans, and there are thousands of new chemicals wending their way through the waters and polar ice and food chains and we don't even know the consequences, so get used to the acronyms, there will be more to come;
5) if the chemicals don't get you, the heavy metals will-- the most toxic is mercury, and the main culprit for mercury pollution are coal-fired power plants . . . Asian plants produce over half of the world's mercury pollution, and it seems they are "hell-bent on building more" such plants . . . and if Trump has his way with deregulation, maybe we'll see more coal burning in America as well . . . anyway, my son loves sushi, but he really shouldn't be eating it, as tuna often exceeds safe levels of mercury . . . but the FDA also recommends that children and pregnant women don't eat swordfish, king mackerel, tilefish, and shark . . .
and I'm not even halfway done with the book, so sorry, but there will be more bad news to come.
Chuck Klosterman concludes his book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past with this thought: "I'm ready for a new tomorrow, but only if it's pretty much like yesterday" and while this is a pleasant thought, there's very little chance of it happening; before he gets to this romantic notion, he speculates on just how much the future will be different from the now, and how that will change the lens through which those future people view our time . . . and he also recognizes that not much will survive the test of time and that we have little to no chance of predicting what those things will be:
1) it's very difficult to predict what band will become the John Philip Sousa of rock'n'roll . . . no one can name another march music composer (and Klosterman points out that in one hundred years Bob Marley and reggae will be synonymous) so you can speculate: Chuck Berry? Led Zeppelin? The Beatles? The Rolling Stones? Def Leppard? who knows?
2) once a genre becomes insular and arcane, it's the "weirdos" who get to curate the art form, and select what is great;
3) American football now seems to be on the outs, as everyone educated knows that the sport is too dangerous because of the head injuries-- but Klosterman points out that this is because football is trying to become the sport for everyone . . . everyone watches a game or two, and almost everyone belongs to some kind of fantasy league or pool and everyone watches the Super Bowl . . . so this is too much exposure for something so dangerous, but there are plenty of sports that are more dangerous-- auto racing, UFC, base-jumping-- but they don't command such a large audience, so football may become less popular, and that may save it-- it may have a core group of diehard fans and to them, the sport will represent valor and fortitude and toughness and all kinds of conservative values, and the rest of society will look upon it like auto-racing . . . or it may be deemed too dangerous and expensive it may die at the youth levels and go the way of boxing and the dodo . . . we won't know until the future;
4) folks in the future may look at The Matrix as a seminal film not because of the groundbreaking "bullet time" effects, but because the Wachowski Brothers transitioned and became the Wachowski Sisters, and so the world-within-a-world theme takes on an entirely new (and possibly more compelling) spin for future generations;
5) Klosterman concedes that important art from our time should reflect the most important elements of our time and he gives a list of these possibilities, while admitting that we see these through the cloudy and low vantage point of the present, but here are a few . . . and while I don't use quotes, I am usually using his exact words, just truncated: the psychological impact of the internet, the prevailing acceptance of nontraditional sexual identities, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, an unclear definition of privacy, a hatred of the wealthiest one percent, the artistic elevation of television, the recession of rock'n'roll and the ascension of hip-hop, a distrust of objective storytelling, the prolonging of adolescence;
BUT, while I love Klosterman and had a great time navigating his ambiguous, philosophical arguments about how we can't predict the future, or how the future will view our present, Kevin Kelly does present a convincing counter-argument in his new book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future . . . I'll save the summary of his most interesting predictions for another sentence, but, Chuck Klosterman, I'm warning you: tomorrow is going to be nothing like today, and the day after that is going to be exponentially even more wild . . . we've leapt over the edge and into the realm of the zillions . . . zillions of bits of interconnected information, zillions of smart objects, zillions of interconnected screens, zillions of hyperlinked pages, zillions of sprawling dendritic tendrils, stretching across the earth, in an ever-expanding, self-revising smart tangle of digitally connected humanity, so strap yourself in and get ready for a wild ride: we'll be in the future before you know it.
