Burn It Down

My thoughts on the most recent attempt by the US Federal Government to control how I look after my personal health.

I embrace the wolf. Let him come and rape the sheep, driving us out to pasture somewhere else (as our current enclosure becomes a killing field for bureaucrats in middle-management and their power-hungry bosses). Let him destroy the rotten healthcare system in the US with his overbearing plans, his impossible schemes requiring infinite resources and a crystal ball showing the future in precise detail (such that he can make projections that pan out in real life, keeping his bloated bureaucracy alive and raking in the dough needed to pay for my place in his bread-line). Let Nero burn Rome down and fiddle while he blames the Jesus freaks (and maybe crucifies a few for good measure).

But as for me and my house, we will be waiting for the black market. We will be looking for doctors who provide services to patients, not bureaucracies, for prices that patients can pay (without any help from those pestilent bureaucracies, which always drive the market away from the cheap towards the expensive). We will not go the emergency room for colds. We will not get our teeth cleaned, our prescriptions filled, our kids medicated, our yearly mammograms, our "recommended" colonscopies (WTF?), or any other services that we do not absolutely need--as in, "I just cut off my arm with a chainsaw; I should probably see a surgeon before I die in the next few minutes."  That is real need, folks.

Insurance used to be something cheap the individual got so that his buddies could help him out when the chainsaw attacked. In this form, it was useful: I paid pennies to save dollars. Today, insurance is a mafia racket: I cannot say "Boo!" to a doctor in a hospital without paying $100s and $1000s to bureaucrats (who want to know all about my personal medical history, so that they can charge me more when they notice that I don't follow the diets endorsed by the USDA or the AMA, or any of these stupid organizations that claim to understand human health even when research consistently reveals their understanding to be dangerous bullshit). Screw this mess. I hope Obamacare passes. I hope it succeeds in ruining an industry that desperately needs to be ruined. It could be the forest fire that resets our ecology, allowing us to build from its ashes a healthcare industry that will actually give a damn about the health of patients (instead of looking for big bucks in taxation and "sophisticated" medical intervention, mostly pharmaceuticals, to keep paper-pushers rich at the expense of both patients and the doctors who actually care about doing their job well).

The Demise of Masculinity?

People nowadays occasionally talk about the demise of masculinity.  While I don't really believe in this (or disbelieve in it), I do have some thoughts to offer (piles of poop that might contain a few pearls on closer inspection).

Males are disproportionately represented at the poles of human experience (e.g. as alpha leaders and omega losers): testosterone is all about taking huge risks, which yield crud at least as often as gold. Males are thus always losing (to each other and females), from prehistoric times until now. We are the expendable gender, the one Nature can play wild games with without killing the species in one generation.

The most problematic things about modern society that I see hurting males can be summed up as "education." The modern educational establishment often crushes humanity--not just masculinity, but masculinity suffers more in proportion as the particular enemy that the modern educational establishment wants to destroy is randomness (luck, gambling, inequality--in a word, masculinity).

What happens when your kid (more likely your little boy) doesn't want to sit quiet for hours doing stupid "work" at a desk? You drug him into submission. What happens when your little kid (more likely your little boy) wants to try jumping off a high rock in the park or play-fight with his friends? You drug him into submission. What happens when your little kid (more likely your little boy) wants to run and shout and throw things? You drug him into submission. What happens when he resents the drugs and the socialization and the submission and cannot find any outlet for the randomness that Nature plants inside him? What happens when your school chains him to the desk, cancels the wrestling program (because it isn't as cool as stupid football), and expects him to kiss other people's butts for reasons that he doesn't understand or respect? What happens when you demand that he believe in transparent fallacies as though they were absolute realities--neglecting to gamble with his own life and turning that responsibility over to somebody else, indefinitely (perhaps forever)?

Well, all kinds of s*** happens. Some boys become derelicts (angry rebels resenting society's denial and suppression of their humanity). Some become doormats (depressed and defeated cubicle-dwellers bowing and scraping and begging their masters to give more treats than beatings). Some learn how to game the system (findng ways to remain masculine by luck and skill). Some become homicidal maniacs (and you hear about them on the news when they storm into a local school or theater spraying bullets). All these options are not new: we see them recurring throughout history (in every society). Modernization is not novel, in this respect: we just do everything our forefathers did on a grander scale (such that we make more dangerous males whose capacity for destruction is greater).

The solution, as I see it, is to find some way of dealing with randomness (masculinity, testosterone) that doesn't involve trying to suppress it utterly (as many social institutions, particularly educational ones, have a tendency to do). If your kid doesn't like the desks, take him somewhere else. Don't make us all play or watch football. Don't send the homicidal maniacs to school by law: give them and their families options outside the current system. Don't be a soccer mom (or dad). If your kid likes fighting, put him in a ring somewhere and let him get beaten up. If he likes dirty work, give him jobs doing it. Don't make him go to school. Don't make him be something he isn't. Don't resent him for failing to be the all-American hero that people want their boys to be. Not everyone is a hero the same way, remember. We have to find a way to let people (mostly males) lose without destroying themselves and society in the process.

In short, we men are losers. We need the freedom to learn and practice losing, so that we can do it well. Society as it exists currently does not provide a safe environment for this. It punishes losing so viciously and reactively that people who fail (mostly boys) tend to fail really catastrophically (more than they would without intervention) and (the crucial point) miss opportunities to learn from failure (which is what people with lots of testosterone are built to do).

Feminism is a red herring here, in my opinion. Of course women are people too, and should be treated with human dignity (i.e. allowed to wear pants, learn trades, run companies, command armies, and take responsibility for their own wagers with Nature). Treating women like human beings in no way disenfranchises men.

The real enemy is not either gender, but the people of both who want to kill randomness (making life regular such that there are no winners or losers, and we "learn" from failure by pretending we can engineer a world in which it doesn't exist). The enemies of masculinity include many men--among them many chauvinists who would scorn to be called feminists. (Myself, I don't mind being labelled a feminist, though I prefer the term humanist, with the stipulation that women are human, too--just as human as men, and just as entitled to human autonomy.)

Gods on Earth

The problem with God is not one of truth or falsehood.  The nature of reality is to exist beyond our ability to grasp it.  We cannot see the past clearly, and the future is even more opaque, resisting every human effort to predict or control.  Some people call this opacity (which is an inalienable part of human experience) God, and I am fine with that.  (More than fine.  When I speak of God, this opacity is the reality at which I point.)

In this sense, God's existence is not up for debate.  (If you are the kind of person who cringes and raves every time somebody uses the word God, then replace it with Nature: my meaning will remain unchanged.)  God is not true or false.  He is not existent or non-existent.  We are here--reading and writing, talking and doing, living and dying--so obviously God exists.  But don't celebrate (or lament) my conversion to religious nuttiness prematurely.  Let me finish speaking before you break out the holy water (or beg me to read another book by Richard Dawkins).

The problem with God is that people speak for him (it, them, her if you like to think of Mother Nature).  People look into the world around them, see whatever they see, and then use their perception as a tool for relating to me.  That is fine (unavoidable: I cannot escape the reality that people use their perceptive powers to guide their relationships, including relationships they have with me).  But there is a right way to relate to others and a wrong way, and God's most vocal advocates (I say as an historian) show a tendency to prefer the wrong way.

Historically, God's most vocal spokesmen are rather stuck-up.  They think they see further into life's opacity than other people.  They think their vision is so much better than mine that I should rely on them to make all meaningful decisions for me.  Rather than live with my own experience and learn from it (the good and the bad), I should just take their word for everything and do what they would do--always and uncritically, no matter what happens to me.  If they tell me to jump off a cliff in God's name, then by God I had better do that (or be cast out of all polite society as some kind of pariah).  If they tell me to pay taxes, then I had better pay up and never mind where the money goes: that's God's business, not mine.  If God wants to build giant luxury malls in Salt Lake City or bail out a bunch of dead companies on Wall Street that nobody else has any earthly use for, then my place is to help him do it--without questions, without criticism, without anything that God's faithful stewards might possibly construe as arrogance or insubordination.

This is where I have a problem.  I don't mind that Apollo comes to you in dreams and tells you what to do.  I mind when he comes to you in dreams and sends you to tell me what to do.  How convenient that God, a mystery I can never perfectly know, orders me to become your abject slave!  What a beautiful thing!  (For you, eh?  If you are the kind of person who likes having saps wait on you hand and foot, begging you to put a good word in for them to the scary Reality out there that none of us really understands.)

When I refuse to submit abjectly to uppity priests of Apollo, they often resort to vague threats.  Supposedly, the entire fabric of polite society will unravel utterly if I don't pay them their protection money.  Apollo will get really, really mad and send a plague to ruin me and all those who act like me.  This might well happen (plagues are historical realities that strike unpredictably).  But it could still happen if I accepted the premise that I should spend my entire life bowing and scraping to a bunch of men in suits.  These men don't control plagues any more than I do.  They don't necessarily understand more than I do.  They don't know me better than I know myself.  They are not necessarily better judges of my circumstances than I am.  And contrary to the threats they utter when I shake off the chains of abject obedience with which they want to load me, I do not lose the ability to be polite and appropriately deferent merely because I am not entirely under their thumbs.  I am not polite merely because I am scared stiff of what Apollo might do to me should I be gratuitously rude.  I am polite because I like manners.  I like society.  I like pleasing people and having people strive to please me.  I like cooperation.  I like trade.  I like honest business, in which the terms are clearly negotiated between peers who respect one another as equals.

Real peers understand that equality is not about looking the same--speaking the same words, reading the same books, eating the same foods, having the same kind of sex, having the same kind of family, and so on.  It is about expressing thoughtful and cultivated humanity.  We all have humanity in us, and we all express it differently.  Real peers see the utility inherent in that difference and respect it where it offers more potential for benefit than for harm.  Real peers have enough experience with humanity to know what kinds of it are really dangerous.  They don't waste time attacking harmless things (like gay people, feminists, or intellectuals).  They save their righteous wrath for the really dangerous stuff (Apollo's prophets, priests, and kings--CEOs, CFOs, and commanders-in-chief, along with their endless task-forces of diligent, self-important bureaucrats).  They also recognize that there are smart and stupid ways to be angry.  They avoid stupid rebellions--like loud protests occupying this or that, or political rallies in which we pretend that the solution to all our problems is to pick more a beneficent bully to collect Apollo's protection money, as though mafia politics magically become harmless when the enforcer professes to have "traditional values."  I couldn't care less what values you profess, until you expect me to profess them exactly as you do or lose my ability to participate in society.  Then I get upset, not because of your values (per se), but because of you (you might profess the values of Gandhi or Jesus, but if you profess them as a domineering bully, then I don't like you: you are the problem, not your irrelevant values).

Believe in Apollo.  Believe in Odin.  Believe in Jesus.  Believe in Allah.  Believe in your American dream.  Believe in Richard Dawkins.  But don't make me believe the way you do.  Don't pretend that the only way to be polite is the particular way you happened upon.  Don't go around trying to make me ashamed merely because I don't exist precisely the way you do.  Maybe I don't sacrifice goats at the right altar.  Maybe I don't attend the right church on the right day.  Maybe I don't wear a burkha (or make my wife wear one).  Maybe I don't think bailing out bad businesses represents a good way to save America (or anybody).  Maybe I don't think Dawkins really is the brilliant, original iconoclast that he pretends to be.  So what?  I can still be a good member of society--a good person whom other good people will want to do business with.  Bad stuff will still happen, to me and everybody else.  That is the nature of life, something that nobody can ever change (no matter how we all pray to Apollo to hold the plagues).  Life is built out of death.  Each generation makes way for the next, and all animal species of record eventually go extinct. 

Maybe there is some kind of afterlife (or alternative life outside the narrow spectrum of experience we currently reside in without being remotely able to comprehend).  Who knows?  The precise nature of its putative existence is irrelevant to the way we deal with one another here and now.  We have to be polite here and now not because of what Apollo may or may not do, but in spite of it.  We have to live with one another politely because we love civility, not because some men claiming to speak for God will blow our heads off otherwise (or because we think being nice gets us into Apollo's good graces: historically, this is just wrong; the good die young).

Really polite society exists indifferent to external circumstances outside human control.  It is polite because it loves civility, generous because it loves generosity, loving because it is love.  I don't wake up and decide to love my family (my darling wife and my two little kids, my parents and siblings, my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins) because of some dream from Apollo, or some tough guys in suits who claim to speak for Apollo.  I love my family because I am love.  That is what I do.  The love is there: I look into my heart and it is there, instantly and absolutely.  It doesn't need to be "protected" by laws or guns or offerings on the altar dedicated by Apollo's only true and living henchmen.  When I look into history, what I see is that efforts to protect it inevitably damage more than they help.  (Maybe that is wrong, but I cannot help seeing it.) 

From my limited and limiting perspective, the best way to cultivate love is to let it express itself freely where it exists.  It won't exist everywhere.  Sometimes, it turns very quickly to destructive hate (and then it must be arrested, restrained--maybe even jailed or killed in some circumstances, but we should strive to make our interventions as rare as possible rather than look for excuses to invoke harsh penalties).  The really good priests are those who offer themselves as useful peers to those looking for ways to express the love they discover inside themselves.  Not all priests are made to serve all men.  Some of us won't be able to help others deal with Apollo.  That is OK.  The smart person goes through life looking for priests (peers) who can help him (or her).  He doesn't blame or punish those who cannot help.  He doesn't demand from them the help they are not capable of giving.  (If they don't want to participate in his marriage, he would never force them to.  But he would seek to solemnize that marriage elsewhere, with a different priest--one who can offer what he needs to create his own unique and cultured response to life's opacity.)

We are all artists, making art of our lives as we respond to the mystery that none of us understands (opacity, Nature, God, Apollo).  My art doesn't have to be the only art.  You can paint in one style while I paint in another.  My paintings might not be very good.  They might never grace a museum.  People who happen to see them might come away mocking ("what trash this loser makes! what a worthless life he has! they should outlaw this kind of stupidity!").  That is OK, too, in my view.  But the line must be drawn somewhere.  I must be free to display my worthless garbage of an artistic oeuvre somewhere, if only on the inside of the refrigerator box where I am currently living.  I have to exist somewhere.  My art has to have a place somewhere.  It isn't the kind of art created by really dangerous predators (the serial killers, banksters, politicians, or journalists).  To condemn my art utterly, such that I am not allowed to make or enjoy it anywhere, is to kill me.  I don't want to die.  I don't want to kill you (or anyone).  I am perfectly content to let you make your art, and display it wherever you have opportunity to do so.  The worst you will get from me are a few caustic comments (which you are always free to ignore).  Why should you expect more than that?  Why demand that everyone make or love the same art?  Even if we wanted this to happen (as we don't), reality would flout our fond daydream, since we are not all cut out to make or enjoy the same kind of art.  God does not make us that way.  Presumably he is OK with what he himself makes.  If he is not, then at the very least he is capable of doing his own enforcing, pouring out his own plagues upon the just and the unjust without working through committees of bureaucratic busybodies eager to pronounce authoritative judgement on the lives of their fellowmen.

Make your own art.  Not mine.  Worship your own god.  Not mine.  Give yourself commandments to aid you moment to moment (with every little decision you make).  Don't give me those commandments (they don't help me, since my life is not yours, my god is not yours, my art is not yours). If you really want to be helpful to other artists, give advice ("this is how I make art; feel free to use my art to help with yours, if you like").  That is the basic message of this interminable essay. 

The Wisdom of Mirth

Friedrich Nietzsche.  Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.  Trans. W. Kaufmann.  New York: Modern Library, 1995.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.  ISBN: 1400067820.

It was mere coincidence that I happened to read these two books together, coincidence that almost makes you believe in deity (since they go together so well, with Taleb even recommending Nietzsche's writings as containing some of the clearest anticipations of his ideas that he has uncovered). There is much I could say about either book, and maybe later I will try, but here I just want to talk about one thought that I have after finishing both.

It seems to me that the take-home message from both is that people cannot control outcomes, individually or collectively, but that they can and should aspire to own (and embrace) their destiny.  I cannot control whether I get cancer, but I can and should aspire to bear cancer nobly if it falls to my lot (as it might, in spite of all that I or anyone else might do to prevent it).  We cannot make society safe (from crime or war or drugs or death in any number of forms), but we can and should aspire to make it love nobility.  We can publicly worship those people and values that we love for the good they have done, and we can publicly pillory those we hate (for the good they think they have done, to our harm).  We can show others the gods we worship, and let them decide to worship with us or revile.  If they worship, then we respect their contribution as they make it (demanding nothing from them that they are not comfortable providing).  If they revile, then we respect that contribution (demanding nothing from them that we aren't willing to give them ourselves: they can live in peace, doing whatever nonsense they please, as long as they don't expect us to worship them for it or take any active part ourselves in stupid stuff we don't believe in).

Society isn't about bringing us all together in one big happy family, in which everyone gets along perfectly with everyone else.  Society is about reconciling us all to the fact that this will never happen.  We don't all see eye to eye.  We never have.  We never will.  Some of us have the courage to stand for what we believe in, even when others make that very painful for us.  These people are heroes.  Some of us prefer to wait for someone else to tell us what to believe, what to fight for, how to live.  These people are the mob (who might be scum).

What separates heroes from the mob isn't necessarily what they do (not that that isn't important at all, of course).  It is how they do it.  We all fight for causes, somehow, someway.  Are you a noble fighter?  Do you have respect for those who abstain from your fight for their own noble reasons?  For those who fight on the opposite side because they are convinced that you are a dangerous idiot who deserves to go to hell?  Do you love such people, more than the mob who fancy themselves your friends because they happen to fight on your side--not because it is theirs but because they want to cool?  If so, then you are a hero (no matter what church you belong to, what beliefs you have or don't, what politics you espouse, or what you do for a living: heroism is about playing strong and fair, not being "right" or "winning" or some other such nonsense).

We are all, individually and collectively, characters in stories that we tell one another (and ourselves).  What kind of characters should we be?  Heroes, we say (and so I assume, for the moment: in any case, we all approach the business of storytelling from an egocentric point of view, wondering how we fit in and what good, heroic deeds we should do).  So what kind of heroes should we be?

In my experience, there are two kinds of hero.  One is the tragic hero, who faces the reality that he cannot control outcomes by killing himself in attempt to do so anyway.  ("Damn the torpedoes!  Full speed ahead!")  This kind of heroism can be very inspiring (very purely, nobly heroic).  It can also cause a lot of pain and anguish that are not (strictly speaking) necessary (from a point of view like mine: here we enter into my personal views on the best kind of heroism).  If we aspire to become tragic heroes, we run the risk of enhancing our suffering, and perhaps the suffering of those around us.  (The tragic hero wears hair shirts to mortify his flesh when he gets too frisky with joie de vivre.  He puts out his eyes rather than see evil.  He does not take it well when he learns that he has killed his father, slept with his mother, or otherwise broken any custom in the moral code he holds sacred.  He would much rather die than be dishonored.)  That path, noble as I can see that it is (in the examples of men and legends around me, including the legend of Jesus), is not for me.  I prefer another.

My path is the path of the comic hero.  This kind of heroism is not immediately as prepossessing as the tragic variety.  Where the tragic hero faces insuperable odds with Stoic calm and resignation (waiting to commit suicide like Cato when the inevitable happens and Caesar wins), the comic hero prefers jokes and an optimistic cynicism. ("We're really screwed here, but maybe something new turns up unexpectedly to save our sorry butts!")  Humor is the key here, any humor.  Gallows humor.  Slapstick.  The point is to make the show go on.  You can do everything the tragic hero does, if you must, but your attitude is one of cheerful defiance (not heroic resignation).  Instead of acting like Achilles (e.g. Sylvester Stallone in "Rambo"), you emulate Odysseus (e.g. Clint Eastwood in "Dirty Harry").  Talk is cheap.  So you talk, a lot, and game the system that the tragic hero refuses to dignify with any response other than laconic contempt.  You know you don't control your outcome utterly, but you don't really care.  Instead of tapping your mom and ripping out your eyes, you ride that dung beetle to the throne of Zeus with gusto, and cheerfully accept whatever reception waits.  ("I get to do battle with Ares?  Great!  Sleep with Aphrodite?  Even better!")

Tragedy makes your focus narrow.  You are drawn inexorably toward the doom you cannot avoid, the doom that is written all over your entire world (your family, your people, the stars, and so on and so forth).  You are impotent, but you still stand bloody and unbowed, confidently awaiting the Black Swan that is going to ruin you once and for all.  Comedy, on the other hand, leaves you wide open.  You aren't drawn anywhere.  Who knows what ridiculous prank the universe is going to play on you next?  The most you can do is try to keep your shirt on while Zeus throws the dice again.  Maybe this time you won't end up with egg on your face, but as long as it is there, you might as well laugh, right?  Maybe today you are stuck fighting some interminable, awful war on foreign shores, but tomorrow you could be bedding a goddess.  Better take that shower after all.  You might need it!  You are always waiting for the Black Swan that is going to save you (whether from some really bad guys or just a really bad movie script, because comedy has room for the small as well as the large).

Heroism works best by adapting us to the situations we face--allowing us to give each problem our best shot without feeling too bad about the results (which are never entirely in our control).  Comic heroism, I think, makes it easier for us to adapt than does the tragic (even as the tragic is intuitively easier to understand and even emulate: many a man who struggles to live as a hero has little problem dying as one).  Laughter really is the best medicine, the gift that lets us embrace and transcend our own smallness and meanness--the pettiness that comes with thinking that your individual thoughts are somehow intricately bound up with the meaning and purpose of the entire universe.  Of course they are!  Just like your bowel movements, and the bowel movements of other living things (including small and large cattle: we need bullshit to live, honestly!).

Life is funny.  It would be insufferably tragic, if it weren't also so ridiculous, so unexpected and absurd.  A series of mistakes and stop-gaps, compounding over time, a hopeless tangle of purposes and cross-purposes canceling each other out, and out of it all comes this ape pretending to explain everything with a bedtime story (wait, I mean a gajillion bedtime stories).  The earth is impossibly old!  No, wait, she is incredibly young.  Her wrinkles clearly prove ... that the Intelligent Designer went to fashion school?  Nay, that she was once a dragon, and we live on her corpse!  (Or was it a turtle?  In fact, it may be turtles all the way down!)  In ancient times, the first man was made of mud.  (Or was it blood?  Maybe we should kill a bunch of heretics to find out.  If they bleed red liquid, we'll know we're right!)  And then the Lord made woman.  (From mud, or from a rib?  More importantly, why on earth would he do such a thing?  Why make something that doesn't have a penis?  Well, it has boobs!  Point taken!  Clearly we must save it from doing anything that might shake those things too much when we're not around to gape at them.  Shut them up at home, for goodness' sake!)  And then they made more people.  (People!  How did they make people?  Are we old enough to have this discussion yet?  Probably not.  Let's say a stork gave them babies!)  And then the people were wicked.  (Wicked?  What means that?  Well, they fought, and ate, and farted, and had babies, and got sick, and died, and other stuff.  Wait, why is eating bad?  And babies--what's wrong with getting those from storks?  It makes sense that war be something bad, but what makes it happen?  Hell, kids, you ask too many questions!  Let's just say there was this evil dude named Satan who did it all.  Or was his name Ahriman?  Loki?  Was he a dude dude, with a thingy, or was he maybe something else, like a snake?  So many questions!  Maybe we should just make Satan a mad scientist and be done with it.  But how does that make him different from God?)  And then we had to punish the wicked so that others wouldn't be like them.  (Because punching you when you're sick means that I won't get sick, right?  No.  Stop taking everything out of context!  But is there really any other way to take it?  Snap!)  And so on, and so forth.  We are only ever telling the same story over and over, varying the particulars as some among us accidentally learn a few "new" things (forgetting that there is really nothing new or old for those who cannot tell the difference) and attempt to convey understanding of them with old words.

All religions are true.  All are false as well.  What matters is not so much which one you believe, as whether you live well.  Do you tell your lies sincerely, and live by your code well?  Could you die today and wake up happy, even if you were in hell?  If you can say yes to that, then I approve of you (not that you care or ought to, but you have my approval whether you want it or not).  Life is first about what we do, second about how we do it, and only last (and least) about the words that we or others use to tell stories about it.  It doesn't matter who the storyteller is (whether he is a man or a woman, a paleolithic shaman or a modern scientist): the story will always be incomplete--a pale reflection of things that are more real than it is, helpful in some ways but in others worse than useless.  Some of us worship the stories.  We worship them wildly, madly, destructively, with a passion that cankers all that is most noble and heroic in our souls.  Nietzsche and Taleb call us away from such fanaticism, away from the worship of stories--into the clear, cool light of day, where we must make our choice and meet our doom the hero's way (without knowing or caring how results turn out after we've given our best).  You can meet your doom however you please.  I don't know what it will be any more than I know my own, but I do know this: whenever mine finds me, I will be laughing.  Vale!          

My Personal Canon

I have been thinking I should post a list of books that really speak to my soul.  Here, in no particular order, are books that I find uniquely inspiring as I pursue moral excellence.

Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth).  This book is the only part of the Old Testament that I still take really seriously as an inspiring commentary on the human condition.  (Some of the Proverbs and Psalms are good, too, but others are not.  I can also appreciate aspects of some of the prophets, especially Isaiah, but they also contain a lot of old-school mythology that doesn't really speak to me any more.)

Epistle of James.  This is the only book in the New Testament that I really like any more.  It is all about real ethical problems and workable solutions.  (The Gospels contain a lot of myth disguised as history, as does Acts, and Paul is a bit too polemical for my taste.  Revelation is an interesting kookfest, but its ethical relevance is pretty much nil, at least for me.)

Doctrine and Covenants 121.  This section of the D&C is a favorite of mine.  I still like the image of leadership that it presents (one that strives to inspire emulation rather than demand obedience).  If Joseph Smith had done a better job of living up to this, he might not have died so early.

Seeds of Contemplation.  This gem from Thomas Merton (published in 1961) has been a real source of inspiration for me.  Every chapter is quotable (and useful in real moral dilemmas that I have).  The Christianity practiced by the author is an ethical system that I definitely believe in.

What Makes You Not a Buddhist.  This introduction to Buddhism by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (from Bhutan) has become another book that I look to repeatedly for insight into the human condition.  I have really enjoyed reading it over and over again, noting my reaction to the four truths: (1) all compounded things are impermanent; (2) all emotions are pain; (3) all things have no inherent existence; (4) nirvana is beyond concepts.  If I have an old-school credo (map of "ultimate reality"), this might be one of the most accessible statements of it that I have stumbled across.

War and Peace; Anna Karenina.  I have read both of these books multiple times over my life (especially the former, but the latter is also really, really good).  I am always impressed at the insight into humanity (rich and poor, working and lazy, intelligent and not, civilized and savage) that both contain.  Of the Russian writers, Tolstoy is the only one that has always spoken to me (though I really like Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, which should probably also be in this canon).  War and Peace is everything one could want in a book: comprehensive, entertaining (light-hearted at times, but deadly serious too), and very long (it is one of the few books over 1000 pages that I routinely wish were longer).  Anna Karenina shows us all aspects of sin, including the humanity (and human goodness) of the sinner.  Together, I think they provide more useful insight into your average human reality than any ancient mythology.

Dao De Jing.  This ancient Chinese text is a recent addition to my canon.  (I would not have understood it as a young[er] man, back when I approached everything in terms of Platonic forms, confounding the abstract with the concrete.)  I discovered it while working on the problem of organic wisdom (as opposed to absolute knowledge), and I have really fallen in love with it.  Life (and human ethics) is about process, not results, and everything we do is fluid.  Nothing is ever set in stone (unless it is meant to be broken).

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  As a young college student, I was drawn to the Greeks and Greek philosophy, and I could never figure out why.  I also wanted to achieve a kind of personal excellence in other fields of endeavor that were important to me, but was not really interested in competition or what most moderns categorize as "success" (money, power, prestige, technical brilliance, etc.).  Robert Pirsig's book (published in 1974) is one of the clearest expressions of my own longing for "quality" (my own authentic, integral experience with reality) that I have ever found.  As I read it, something inside me said, "Yes! Yes! That's just what I have been feeling.  That's precisely why I hate my relationship with machines and am obsessed with studies that yield no obvious external rewards!"  The book is excellent.

Never Let Go.  This quirky collection of strength-training tips and life advice created by Dan John (and published in 2009) is included here because it speaks to my conviction that human ethics involve the whole individual, with physical health laying the groundwork for moral excellence (and all other emergent properties of the human condition that we sometimes refer to with words like "spirituality").  Dan believes this too (as far as I can tell), and his book is refreshingly honest, simple, and packed with great strength-training advice (including knowing references to most of the other authors I have read in my search for top-notch health tips).  Rather than pad my list with a bunch of stuff about strength and health, I include Dan as a concession to that part of my life (which continues to be important).  Also, I find his brutal honesty and humility as refreshing as they are funny.  (Seriously, how many strength books do you know that give you real insight into being healthy and strong and make you laugh at the same time?  Not many, I'm guessing.) 

Fooled By Randomness; The Black Swan; The Bed of Procrustes.  I have read Taleb's books several times (including the last, a collection of modern proverbs).  I find them continually entertaining and insightful (despite what some critics think).  They never fail to put me in touch with the reality of my own ignorance (which is what every good book should do, in my opinion).  I really like them.

These are all the obvious titles that come to mind today.  Of course I may expand the list, as time goes by.  My canon is completely open.

Society of Fools

Karl R. Popper.  The Open Society and Its Enemies.  2 vols.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962.  ISBN 0691019681.

My first encounter with Karl Popper occurred in a college class dedicated to Greek political thought, where the teacher noted that "Popper's approach to Plato is just wrong."  I was intrigued (in addition to being a little contrarian), and so when Nassim Taleb mentioned Popper with approval, I was ready to dig into The Open Society.  I was not disappointed.

Popper and Taleb have the same problem with "experts" who pretend to possess absolute truth when in fact they have no idea what they are talking about.  But where Taleb (in the two books I already discussed briefly) focuses on this phenomenon as it appears in modern economics and philosophy, Popper spends a good deal of time stuck in antiquity, arguing against Plato (particularly the arguments presented in the Republic and the Laws).  Against Plato's arguments (1) that there are eternal forms of goodness (and other abstract virtues) whose perfection can be channeled by adept philosophers, and (2) that said philosophers should make decisions binding on the rest of society, Popper shows that theorizing the existence of such forms and trying to implement them forcibly leads to totalitarianism (creating what he calls "the closed society," a social group defined by the absolute submission of subordinates to leaders).  The ideal blueprints of this society appear in Plato as Kallipolis (Republic) and Magnesia (Laws), each of which is controlled by a select group of absolute rulers (philosopher-kings in Kallipolis; the nocturnal council in Magnesia).  Historical attempts to realize this ideal begin with a bunch of failed Greek tyrannies, and include the fascist and communist regimes of the last century (whose tactics and philosophies, particularly that of Hegel, Popper treats with disdain).

A major problem with the closed society arises from the fact that it is built on a lie ("the lordly lie" in Popper's translation of Plato's Greek on page 414b/c in the Republic), a mythology whose purpose is not to make the citizens more aware or more capable of dealing with their own problems, but to make them obedient slaves.  This lie perpetuates a viewpoint from which the absolute rulers of the closed society appear all-knowing and beneficent.  It emphasizes the weakness of the lower castes (who lack the "knowledge" necessary to make wise decisions about futurity) and the strength of the upper castes (who through their access to eternal forms are supposed to have an answer for everything).  Those who accept this lie live happily under the absolute rulers' administration, convinced that they have surrendered their ability to solve social problems to rulers more qualified than they are.  In Plato's dream world, this situation continues on unruffled ad infinitum.  In real life, it collapses when the society is hit by an unexpected catastrophe (Taleb's black swan), something the "experts" do not see (until after the fact) because they are only human after all, subject to the same biases and stupidities as the rest of us.

Where does that leave us?  Instead of Plato's closed society, Popper proposes another model, which he bases on the portrait of classical Athens that the Greek historian Thucydides puts in the mouth of the Athenian statesman Pericles (see History of the Peloponnesian War 2.35-46).  The society described by Pericles and Popper is "open" to new ideas: visions of truth that debunk or reconstruct what others have seen or see in the phenomena around them.  It is also "open" to new leadership: people do not have to suffer the same dumb leadership year after year.  They can pick a new (stupid) leader!  Instead of coming up with myths to justify sticking with the status quo until the black swan hits and we all go "boom!" the open society looks for propositions that can be falsified ("all swans are white;" "modern economic theory works"), and organizes itself to make use of these until they prove false.  Rather than explore knowledge, this society aims to expose ignorance (which it assumes to be endemic everywhere).

Personally, I prefer the open society to the closed.  As an idiot among idiots, I want the right to protest loudly when others are stupid and the right to be corrected when I am the dumb one.  No specious "mantle of leadership" should come between my stupid brain and cold hard facts out there in the real world.  No illusion of "absolute truth" (guaranteed to be non-falsifiable) should lull me into fake security while the outside world is preparing another black swan.  If at any moment any one of us is liable to torpedo the ship and destroy society, at least give all of us the choice of recognizing and publicizing other options!

Confession of a Dumb Bird-Watcher

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets.  New York: Random House, 2004.  ISBN 0812975219.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  New York: Random House, 2007.  ISBN 1400063515.

This essay takes me a little distance down memory lane, since I encountered Nassim Taleb before my crisis of faith had become truly critical.  Still not really concerned by the cognitive dissonance that would eventually become unbearable, I was happily engaged in my graduate school work, taking classes and preparing for examinations.  As an outlet for stress, I maintained an active lifestyle and sought the best information I could find on human health and performance.  I had knocked around enough to know that the people from whom I had the most to learn were older athletes who maintained high activity levels: they had something I wanted.  So I found myself visiting the web site of Clarence Bass, who introduced me (figuratively speaking) to economist Arthur De Vany and his brain-child "Evolutionary Fitness".  De Vany's ideas about complex systems (of which the human body provides one instance) are very interesting and changed my thinking in many ways (before his blog became available by subscription only; as a poor student, I have little cash to spare).  It was on De Vany's blog that I first learned of Taleb, whom (as I recall) De Vany approved as presenting a useful model for understanding how the real world works.  I was intrigued enough that I tracked down some cheap copies of Taleb's books and began reading.

In both of his books, Taleb outlines a world very different from the over-determined one in which I grew up.  Who can say when my dalliance with determinism began?  I remember my mother putting me to bed one night, back when I was about four years old.  I looked up at her and asked, with real emotion, "Mama, why does everybody do what they do?"  Maybe that was the beginning.  In any case, I spent the next several years learning from a deterministic point of view.  When I studied palaeontology as a nine-year-old, I tended to assume that dinosaurs (and other extinct life-forms) evolved a certain way out of necessity, adapting in some definite way to meet a definite need.  When I read the Book of Mormon as an eleven-year-old and experienced a very powerful emotional conversion, dinosaurs and evolution receded into the background (for several years I rejected evolution entirely!), but deterministic thinking remained: God had a plan which he played out in human life; free will in this plan existed from our point of view (since we were not coerced into making decisions), but not really from his (since he knew in advance what decisions we would make).  So life was controlled by prophecies.  There was the uncomfortable fact that many of these prophecies seemed to come "true" in so many different times, and in so many different ways.  Could God really have deliberately intended so much?  Taleb makes it really hard to think he did, particularly if you think of God as a glorified man, which as a good Mormon (and Christian, though some will doubtless protest) I once did.

Instead of writing about "the great chain of being" in some form, with all life ultimately determined by some Aristotelian unmoved mover (whether God or "nature" or anything else you please), Taleb writes about man, i.e. homo sapiens, though when you are knee-deep in Taleb's work he looks a lot more like homo stultus.  For Taleb's man is not the pinnacle of evolutionary history or the capstone of God's creation.  He is a garrulous fool with a penchant for telling stories to explain why things happen.  Caught between a rock and a hard place, Taleb's man does not reason our way out step by logical step: like any good cowboy, he takes a gut check and gets the hell out of Dodge!  Then, seated at a cozy table with friends, he tells the story of his escape as though he had calculated every step precisely, as though his salvation were determined by consummate skill (or calculated divine intervention) instead of dumb luck.  The rational element is here completely subservient to the emotional, which provides the real, unexamined, unexplained source for human action.  I was fascinated by this (for me) new vision of humanity, to the point that I decided to follow a hint from Taleb and take a special examination in ancient astrology, comparing it to modern economics as practiced by the big-shots that have been going broke recently (and using the government's muscle to take food from my children's mouths to get back on their feet). It is uncanny to me how similar ancient astrologers (still extant in old manuscripts that few people read) are to modern economists: both use the language of science (geometry, mathematics) to speak a kind of hyper-articulate gibberish that always makes perfect sense of the (determined) past but cannot say anything really telling about the (undetermined) future. The bogus nature of their predictions is revealed when something really unexpected happens (the unfolding economic crisis, for example): Taleb refers to these unlooked-for events as "black swans", drawing on the old European notion that all swans are white, a notion which persisted until the late 17th century, when black swans were discovered in western Australia. 

Someone has come up with a nice parable that illustrates what reading Taleb did for me.  Imagine the human mind as a house full of windows to the outside.  As long as you are in the house, your understanding of the outside is dependent on your access to the windows.  Assuming the outside is important to you, would you not want access to as many windows as possible, preferably clean ones?  Reading Taleb showed me (1) that there were many windows in my house, not just the one or two I had been using, and (2) that all of them were very dirty, such that it was better to talk about the potential rather than the actual when speaking of things outside.  Essentially, reading Taleb turned me into an epistemological agnostic: I became more aware of the powers and limitations of my mind, and consequently less certain of everything; some things dropped off my radar almost entirely.  Why talk seriously about saving the universe or some eternal essence of me long-term when I do not even know how to save the bacon here and now?  I began to shut up and listen even more than I used to; other points of view became valuable when they disagreed rationally with an emotional judgment of mine, and useless when they made emotional appeals against my rational judgment.  Returning to the parable of the house helps make sense of what was going on.  Before I knew about the multitude of windows, I had only one or two (that were really dirty, remember), so when someone said, "Look, there's a little pink unicorn in the garden!" I would peer through the glass, get a glimpse of something and think to myself, "Yeah, that could be a unicorn, and it does look rather pink."  After Taleb took me on the grand tour of the house, the process of verification became more complicated.  I had to visit all the windows before making a pronouncement.  Comparing one view with another, I would say something like this: "Yeah, the smudge on this window creates a blotch that makes whatever-it-is look horned, and the tinge of the dirt makes it seem pink, but that other window upstairs has a different pattern of smudges in different colors, and everyone up there is convinced we have a brown rabbit in the garden, rather than a pink unicorn.  Seen from the west wing it looks more like a blue panda."  A quicker way to convey this shift in perspective is to emend the famous quote from Descartes, who should have said cogito, ergo idiota sum ("I think, therefore I am an idiot").  Thinking no longer confirms what I already know (in my gut); instead, it provides evidence that I don't really know anything (because gut-sense is really nonsense; unfortunately, it is also the inalienable factor in most human decisions).

So, there you have it.  Before reading Taleb, I was living out my life as just another philosophical footnote to Plato, chasing a vision of "absolute truth" whose reality I was prepared to rationalize any way I could.  After reading Taleb, "absolute truth" disappeared as a meaningful variable on my epistemological map of the world. Though I still went through perfunctory motions of "believing" in it, I ceased using it as a heuristic in dealing with new data input: it became the relic of an irrecoverable past.  Little by little, I shed the persona of the know-it-all expert, crafted in the image of God with clear insight into eternal reality, and recognized that I was just a dumb bird-watcher with a knack for leaping to unjustified (and unjustifiable) conclusions.  Like many prognosticators before, I looked around and saw omens: eagles, meteors, planetary conjunctions, stock quotes, sacred books, a burning in the bosom, etc.  Sometimes I read the omens "correctly" (meaning I got the outcomes I wanted after seeing the holy birds and making the proper sacrifices), and sometimes I did not.  Then one day I saw a black swan.  I have never really looked at the world the same way since.