For Trinity Sunday

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. I’m just back from Mass. It’s a nice day here on Long Island. I’m minded to put a chaise longue out in the sun, lie back with a good book, and just laze away the day, but… well, you know me. Too full of words. They have to come out now and then.

     One of the more pleasant things about having written so much over so many years is that I can frequently revive pieces I wrote long ago. I often do that with pieces about Christianity, especially its more important doctrines and feast days. I’m about to do it again, but first, a quick snippet from one of my novels:

     “I never really got that part,” Christine said.
     Ray nodded. “Understandably so. It seems paradoxical. I don’t really think we’re expected to ‘get’ it. Just accept it on the evidence.”
     The room had grown dim. It had gotten quite late, but neither Ray nor Christine was in any hurry to conclude their chat.
     “What makes it hard for most people,” Ray said, “is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He’s not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them.” He sat back and reflected for a moment. “So our time-dependent language about ‘choosing’ and ‘knowing’ gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God.”
     “You know,” Christine said, “that would go a long way toward explaining the Trinity, too.”
     “Hm? How so?”
     “Well, why is the Trinity a tough nut to crack? Because people can’t be in more than one place at a time, right? Wherever you go, there you are, and you’re still you.”
     “Uh...” Am I getting in over my head here? “That could be part of it.”
     She leaned toward him, intensity and delight merging in her expression. “But if you take the Gospels as factual, then the evidence says there were three divine Persons, even if that’s tough for us time-bound types to imagine. You don’t have to figure out how you could pull it off. You just have to allow that He can do that sort of thing even if we can’t!”
     Ray opened his mouth, closed it without speaking. Christine frowned.
     “Did I say something wrong, Father?”
     “Not at all, dear,” he said. “In fact, I think you’ve been teaching me my trade.” He grimaced in rueful remembrance. “I used to think more about these things when I was a teen. Talks like this one were why I wanted to become a priest. Then I got caught up in all the social activism nonsense that infects the church these days. You know, the stuff Father Schliemann disdained and that I tried to bring here with me.”
     The stuff that drove you away.
“The social welfare crap is a lot easier than being a man of God,” he said. “That’s probably why it seduces so many priests away from their real responsibilities.” Ray rose and ambled aimlessly around the sitting room. “After all, when you spend your time distributing food, or clothing, or fliers for some rally or demonstration, you know exactly what you’re doing. You can count up your results, even if it’s just in pounds of bread or sheets of paper. Preaching the Christian faith, proclaiming the love of God and the importance of Christ’s New Covenant, getting people to accept that it’s vitally important even though you can’t prove it, is a lot harder to enter into a spreadsheet.”

     In the above, Christine does something a lot of us have trouble with. She accepts an unprovable proposition that lacks a human-comprehensible rationale, based on the evidence for it. She doesn’t demand to know “how” or “why.” She accepts that “He can do it even if we can’t.” “He,” of course, being God.

     Her interlocutor, Father Raymond Altomare, the pastor of Onteora parish, makes a critical admission: that helping his parishioners to deal with the several mysteries of Christianity is much harder than social activism. Yet as a priest of Christ, he has responsibilities in both realms. For many priests, that causes them to prefer the “social activism nonsense” and to downplay the faith itself. And that weakens the Church.

     The faith promulgated by the Church is the reason for Christians to conduct ourselves according to the norms promulgated by the Church. If we lose hold of the faith, what reason remains to cleave to the norms? Neighborliness? Self-promotion? Identity management?

     We do as we do because we believe as we believe.

* * *

     I’ve written several times about the mystery of the Trinity. I’m going to repost one of those pieces right now. It first appeared on Trinity Sunday 2012:

---

"God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind."

[Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons]

Some years ago, when my gift of faith reasserted itself and I returned to the Church, I realized that I had yet to confront the core mysteries of Christianity, much less to accept them as beyond question. That sort of acceptance is more difficult for me than anything else I could name.

Being what I am, I had to allow my intellect its time at bat. Allowing unconditional pronouncements from a self-authorizing source to pinch-hit for my reason would have been unthinkable. Insistence by such self-nominated authorities on prefabricated dogma was part of what had separated me from God as a young man; I wasn't about to let that happen again.

Some of the Christian mysteries rest on particular postulates about the nature of God: His omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence. If you can bring yourself to accept the existence of a Supreme Being -- which I do -- those characteristics are consistent with His Supremacy. So such mysteries aren't much of a problem.

But not all the Christian mysteries are that simply resolved. The one we celebrate today is one such.

Today is the Feast of the Holy Trinity, upon which Christians celebrate and praise the Three Persons of God. No tenet of Christianity involves more intellectual suspension of disbelief than that one. Christ born of a virgin? Naah, too easy. Resurrection of the body? Child's play. God knowing all yet Man having free will? Once you stop thinking of time as we perceive it as the only sort of time there is, that one cracks in a jiffy. But three Persons, yet one God?

Give me a minute for that one.

***

Your deeds can open the door for your words; nothing else will. And when that door is opened to you, you must speak. You must tell your story -- without embarrassment or fear -- and you must learn how to reassure others who haven't "gotten there" yet that their stories still have a few chapters to run. -- Duyen Ky

It strikes me as odd that the invention of abstract categories, the foundation upon which all other reasoning rests, should be traceable only as far back as classical Greece. That concept, so critical to organized thought, makes its first appearance in recorded history in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers with radically different attitudes toward it. The Aristotelian approach, based upon his approach to definition, is the underpinning for virtually the whole of Western analytical thought.

But categories and definition have their limitations too. Indeed, they're premised on the existence of limitations to all things that are less than the totality of existence, the All. A category must have a genus and a differentia, else it is without definition, and therefore useless. You cannot reason about something unless you can say both what it is and what it is not.

But it follows from those requirements that the All as we know it, and whatever might envelop it from some higher plane we cannot access, are beyond all our categories. We might learn something of it -- we might be able to say with fair confidence that certain assertions about it can or cannot be true -- but we cannot grasp it whole, for we are too small for it. The old Qualifying Exam gag, "Define the universe. Give two examples," has much point.

This seems to me to be the case with the arguments over the Trinity: whether it's factual or metaphorical; whether the Persons are merely manifestations of an unchanging Unity, or whether we ought to throw the whole thing aside as beyond resolution by human reason. But for one to whom comprehension seems a necessity, the frustration involved is very hard to bear.

***

Doubt is inseparable from faith. We cannot have either one without the other. Most persons, the overwhelming majority throughout history, have not merely had faith but have wanted to have it. If we desire faith we must learn to tolerate and endure that which makes us doubt.

In that connection, the Trinitarian conception of God might be the most important of all the posers presented by Christianity.

But in the Gospels we read of manifestations of all three Persons to human perception. We read of God the Father speaking of Jesus as "My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." We read of Jesus's miracles, and His Passion and Resurrection. We read of the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary and the eleven Apostles, granting them the gift of tongues that every man might hear them in the language most familiar to him. These aren't mysteries themselves, but narrated events the accuracy of which one must take or leave as they are.

If the events recorded in the Gospels occurred as they're set down there, the Trinity is real. Or some super-race with a really good cloaking device and a cruel sense of humor is playing a two-thousand-year-long joke on us. You pays your money and you takes your choice; I've made mine.

***

Trinity Sunday often brings out the worst in a Mass celebrant. Far too many priests attempt to explain the inexplicable: to make lucid to minds inextricably locked into temporal bondage a phenomenon that pertains to a supra-temporal Entity. I've endured several such sermons, and have tried my best not to cringe.

Rather than tackle the how of the Trinity, which is impervious to mortal understanding, perhaps we should confront the why: Why did God elect to manifest three divine Persons, rather than to maintain the Unity that seems intuitively obvious about a Supreme Being?

C. S. Lewis once tossed off a comment about how the Trinity allows God to incorporate love right into His nature. As an obscure writer of little-known novels and stories once said, isn't it pretty to think so? But in a rare episode of dissent from the views of the greatest lay Christian apologist of recent years, I think that's fundamentally irrelevant to the Divine purpose in this connection. Being an old engineer, I prefer a functional approach.

Personhood is about personality.

The three divine Persons have dramatically different Personalities, at least in the appearance they present to Man:

• The Father: The Lawgiver, who has decreed the laws that govern all things, who sees all ages as a single gestalt, and who will preside over our ultimate fates.
• The Son: The Emissary, who points us in the way we should go and intercedes for us before the Lawgiver’s judgment.
• The Holy Spirit: The Defender, who empowers us to restrain ourselves from what is wrong, and steels us to confront and accept our duties, however trying they may appear.

These three Personalities regard Man from the standpoints appropriate to their respective roles in the creation, maintenance, and ultimate disposal of all things. We experience them in that way: through the functions each has taken up, and the attributes they manifest in fulfilling those purposes. This is a part of the divine Gift to Man, which makes our relations to and with God more comprehensible, and thus more reassuring, than would otherwise be the case.

One of the least appreciated phrases in theology is the one that would provide the most assurance in the face of this mystery: Holy Trinity. For holiness always pertains to wholeness: unity, integrity, and internal consistency. The Three are holy because they are, from the supra-temporal standpoint, also One.

Persons of other creeds have often denigrated Christianity on the basis of the Trinity. The above is my answer to them, with the following as a grace note:

"You, who claim to know God so much better than I, have committed a critical error: you have arrogantly imposed one of your limitations upon Him. But He stands above you, not only in this way but in many others your limited vision would deny. A temporal creature attempting to comprehend the infinite and the eternal should exhibit more humility. May God guide your thoughts and your steps henceforward."

May God bless and keep you all.

---

     The doctrine of the Trinity is fundamental to Christianity. The faith can go nowhere without it. Note that the Old Testament makes no mention of it. Yet much of the Old Testament points directly to the New one, through its many prophecies of the coming of a Messiah who would raise the Chosen People from their sinful ways to their rightful estates. Yet the majority of the Jews of Jesus’s time rejected Him. They were expecting a temporal leader, not a spiritual one. They weren’t willing to set their expectations aside for the sake of this itinerant preacher who nattered on about His Father in heaven or the Holy Spirit whom He would dispatch to guide them after His Ascension.

     The Trinity is a great part of the reason so many Jews rejected Him. They wanted explanations, rationales. Jesus didn’t do a lot of that. He traveled, preached, healed, and drove out demons. That wasn’t enough for a people who would argue for centuries over the meaning of a single word. Even coming back from death, as He had promised that He would do, wasn’t enough for a lot of them.

     It’s enough for two billion people now living. Is it enough for you?

     May God in His Three Persons:

• The Father, who creates and decrees the laws of creation;
• The Son, who came to lift the Mosaic law from our backs and redeem us from our sins;
• The Holy Spirit, given us to enlighten us and protect us from the snares of Satan;

     …bless and keep you all.

Elections, Mathematics, And The Woke

     I’m a long-time admirer of Virginia State Assemblyman Nick Freitas. He exemplifies something the rest of the Republican Party lacks: courage. He speaks plainly and forthrightly, and he hews to his convictions. There aren’t many other Republicans of whom that could be honestly said.

     (Of course, it’s hard to stand up for something if you lack a spine. A great percentage of Republican politicians appear to have had that organ removed. In all candor, when your overriding priorities are to get re-elected and keep the media from denouncing you in boldface, convictions tend to look like a luxury item. But I digress.)

     Freitas recently had an illuminating conversation with political analyst Christian Hines about the recent leak of the Democrats’ unreleased assessment of why they lost the 2024 presidential election, and a lot of down-ticket races besides:

     If you don’t have thirteen minutes to spare for the video – entirely understandable; I’d never criticize you for it – here’s the gist:

The base of the Democrat Party is insane.

     That assessment – charmingly, Hines calls it an autopsy – could not be released because it says that and nothing else:

     …it's not just that they did crazy stuff; they allowed themselves to be more and more defined by the crazy stuff, and they do seem to understand that to a point within the autopsy. The problem is that they've created a situation within the Democratic party where if you actually implement some of the things, not even all of them, just some of the things that this autopsy is suggesting that they should – to for instance reach out to men or reach out to working-class people – it would devastate the modern Democrat base and the modern Democrat coalition.

     I’ve written about coalition politics several times before. The Democrat strategists’ approach to presidential politics is coalition-based: assemble interest groups, promising to advance their interests, until you reach 50% plus one of the voting populace. This has been the Dems’ approach to national elections since the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Yet of the 17 presidential elections since then, they’ve won only 8 and lost 9 – and one victory was over a “caretaker” president, and two of the losses were to a political outsider who lacked the full backing of his party. From that tally, you might think they’d be looking for an improvement on their approach. The leaked autopsy tells that tale fairly clearly.

     But that autopsy was deliberately suppressed. It was suppressed because its authors were aware that if it were published, the party’s base would rise in a fury. The base is composed of a coalition of hard-left “woke” activists from the furthest reaches of the Democrat Party: the segment that dominates issue activism, fundraising, and primary elections. Alienating any significant fraction of the base would be crippling in the near term. The strategists can’t bear the thought.

     But the base is the problem. The base chooses the party’s nominees. Thus, the nominees are satisfactory to the base, but wholly unpalatable to the larger electorate. They’re especially unattractive to unaligned and weakly aligned voters, who may be as much as 40% of the whole. The mathematics of America’s two-stage elections processes is hostile to that approach.

     The Dems are thus caught in a bind of their own making. That they can’t discuss it openly among themselves is a clear giveaway.

     While the problem manifests most clearly at the presidential level, it can have impact locally as well. State demographics are changing rapidly. This is especially visible in California, which by enacting a 5% wealth tax on billionaires – “We’re only going to do it this once! Cross our hearts and hope to die!” – has driven its wealthiest residents to relocate in massive numbers. A great many are hopping over Lake Tahoe to resettle in Nevada, which has no individual income tax, no corporate income tax, and no capital-gains tax. Given Muslim-socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani’s open hostility toward the wealthy, I would expect the best-heeled residents of New York City to follow suit.

     This may sound like unalloyed good news to conservatives and Republican partisans. It isn’t. If the Democrat Party becomes nationally uncompetitive because of its capture by the “woke,” what incentive will remain for Republican politicians to seek to please its conservative allegiants? Remember also that America’s plutocrats, with a few notable exceptions, have trended politically leftward in recent decades. Their relocation to “red” states isn’t guaranteed to be without unpleasant secondary effects.

     This is something to watch and ponder.

Associations

     I haven’t got much, just now, but I hate to let this place get idle, especially after all the encouraging email and comments I’ve received lately, so I figure I’d drop at least a few lines.

     The arguments about artificial intelligence (AI) continue to rage. They may never end. A goodly portion concern the matter of consciousness or, alternately, sentience. These concepts are not definable in the Aristotelian fashion. For the moment, all we have are the assertions of living men that “I am conscious”… when they’re awake and responsive, at least.

     So we have humans, who have only a tenuous grasp on what it means to be conscious, arguing about whether software, driven by a rule-based architecture to assemble sentences from a combination of training and voluminous input, can ever be truly conscious. I can’t see an exit from this labyrinth. Frankly, we might as well debate whether a program can dream.

     All that having been said, I had an interesting conscious experience a little while ago. It may have some relevance to the debates over AI.

     I was going through my morning checklist of websites, which includes YouTube among others. That site presented me, no doubt “at random,” with a short video of a German musician, Carolina Eyck, playing and singing one of cinema’s most memorable bits of music: Ennio Morricone’s brilliant score to the three-way standoff that climaxes The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly:

     Extraordinary. I was once a theremin player, so I know how difficult it is to get exact notes out of that instrument. Add her voice to that, and it’s clear that Carolina Eyck has a great gift. But let me not digress.

     Eyck’s rendition of that memorable tune practically forced me to look for a clip of the scene itself. The cascade of memories that followed was too rich to describe in detail. Let it suffice to say that I relived much of the experience of long ago, when I first saw that movie. I felt blessed.

     Human memory is poorly understood. It’s unlikely to have any similarity to digital memory. In particular, surges of memory into one’s conscious thought stream are exceedingly difficult to explain. That may be because we lack the information required to trace the chain of associations that triggers them. Or it may be that they’re “random.”

     Randomicity is something else we have a hard time with. We observe certain phenomena in nature and, unable to place them in a firm cause-and-effect chain, we say they’re random. Are they? God alone knows. We do know this: we can’t generate “random” events. It’s not possible to do so consciously… and there’s that word again.

     Our efforts to know the world from top to bottom will always be limited by our own, innately human limits. Consciousness is one of the things that limits us. A conscious mind can never grasp a process that generates a random sequence of events, if indeed there is such a process. The two are antithetical to one another. In consequence, the word random will always be a label for things and events we fail to understand.

     But one thing we do know from top to bottom is how software operates… and AI is software. Software is inevitably procedural. Everything any program does can be traced to an originating input from which a chain of predictable decisions and actions leads to a predictable output. “Random” simply doesn’t apply to software. (No nonsense about “random-number generators;” you know perfectly well there’s no such thing.)

     That seems to exclude an AI from having the sort of experience I had this morning. The input, Carolina Eyck’s performance clip, was the fruit of a process that I choose, from my human limitations, to call random. The output was many-faceted, determined by my store of memories and my actions that followed. Even if we postulate that at some misty future time, an AI could be given a comparable experience, can we imagine that it would experience the sense of gratitude that came to me?

     I can’t see it – and that leads me to conclude that what we call “artificial intelligence” will forever lack the true gift of consciousness.

     Now, this may be mere human provinciality. Or it may be that our language, developed by conscious minds for the purposes of consciousness, is simply ill-fitted to grappling with phenomena that underlie consciousness. But if I’m seeing clearly, “artificial intelligences” will forever be distinct from human ones. They may be able to do things we can’t do, but I feel certain that the reverse is true and always will be.

     All that to one side, have an imagining: You, a great researcher and thinker, have discovered a remarkable phenomenon: two objects that produce streams of output that appear to be both completely random and completely identical. Can you think of a use for such a thing? Would using it require that you learn how to reproduce it? What if you never learn how to do that; could you make use of it then?

     Just a little early-morning food for thought.

Please Be Patient

     I’m having some severe troubles just now and am currently finding it difficult to produce material for this site. I’m not going away, but I do need some time to work on other things.

     If you have the bandwidth, please pray for me.

The Things That Endure

     It often seems that men become genuinely eloquent only when the subject is some form of combat:

     "All of the noise and all of the glamour, all of the color, all of the excitement... all of the rings and all of the money. These are the things that linger only in the memory. But the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win, these are the things that endure." – Vince Lombardi

     There’s a lot of power in those few words – but look at the subject matter: football! An hour of rigidly stylized ritual combat with a meaningless prize! Is there anything more disposable than that?

     There are innumerable things more important than football. One of the tragedies of contemporary life is that so many of us give football more attention than any of them. (Pipe down, you devotees of soccer. Your fetish isn’t important either.)

     Yes, Gentle Reader: I’m off on another of those tirades. Hey, my Curmudgeonliness has to express itself now and then. Return your seat to the upright position, close your tray table, and belt yourself in securely.

* * *

     Some years ago, I encountered this striking illustration of the importance of setting priorities. Note the conclusion:

     What are the big rocks in your life? A project that you want to accomplish? Time with your loved ones? Your faith, your education, your finances? A cause? Teaching or mentoring others? Remember to put these 'Big Rocks' in first or you’ll never get them in at all.

     The “big rocks” Dr. Covey cites are not necessarily your “big rocks.” Moreover, we must allow that priorities can change as time passes. Today’s “big rocks” may seem laughable to you twenty years hence. Yet even while immersed in our juvenile follies we must set priorities, for without them, life becomes a disorganized, chaotic mess. From such a mess, nothing we achieve will endure.

     One of the foremost responsibilities of parenthood is that of teaching your progeny about what endures. If you fail to do that, you’ll fail as a parent. A great part of that process involves demonstrating to the young folk what doesn’t endure, and why.

     The major problems in that undertaking are major indeed. Life itself does not endure. That recognition is a stumbling block for many. Emphasizing it leads to a “Why should I care?” conclusion. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may” and “Eat, drink, and be merry” are its principal implications. Given that young people are in thrall to the strongest sub-rational biological imperatives known to science, getting past those inherently bleak maxims is a huge challenge.

     As if more were required, the challenge persists throughout one’s life.

* * *

     In Roger Zelazny’s masterpiece Lord of Light, his protagonist Sam gives us the following insight into a man’s nature:

     A man is a thing of many divisions, not a pure, clear flame such as you once were. His intellect often wars with his emotions, his will with his desires…his ideals are at odds with his environment, and if he follows them, he knows keenly the loss of that which was old— but if he does not follow them, he feels the pain of having forsaken a new and noble dream. Whatever he does represents both a gain and a loss, an arrival and a departure. Always he mourns that which is gone and fears some part of that which is new. Reason opposes tradition. Emotions oppose the restrictions his fellow men lay upon him. Always, from the friction of these things, there arises the thing you called the curse of man and mocked— guilt!

     Sam renders that insight to the demon Taraka, a disembodied sentience that knows only desire, no ideals and no constraints except for the limits on its power. Taraka has possessed Sam, and has used his body to indulge in pleasures only humans can experience. But those pleasures have dwindled with repetition. Taraka is perplexed, for he does not understand that being human involves more than gratifying “the belly and the phallus.” How could he, “a pure, clear flame” that had previously known only desire?

     A lot of young men have more in common with Taraka than with Sam.

* * *

     We are confounded by the question of what endures. If life itself must end, what, then, is worth striving for? That’s the appeal of absolute hedonism. Only in appealing to a standard outside human life does any other posture become sustainable.

     The problem here, of course, is that of all religions: unverifiability. Living human beings cannot prove that anything beyond the veil of Time “really exists.” Those of us who’ve had private experiences to that effect cannot use those experiences as evidence with which to persuade others. If those others become interested in our faith, all we can do is point to historical records that the hardened skeptic can always dismiss.

     Robert A. Heinlein, who was dismissive of religion as such, nevertheless strove to find something beyond a man’s limited temporal existence in which to have faith:

     "It would seem obvious to me," Rembert continued, "that the only rational personal philosophy based on a conviction that we die dead, never to rise again, is a philosophy of complete hedonism. Such a hedonist might seek his pleasure in life in very subtle, indirect, and sublimated fashions; nevertheless pleasure must be his only rational purpose-no matter how lofty his conduct may appear to be. On the other hand, the possibility of something more to life than the short span we see opens up an unlimited possibility of evaluations other than hedonistic. It seems to me a fit subject to investigate."

     [From Beyond this Horizon]

     Note the cleavage: If we die dead, never to rise again. If even an absolute rationalist feels such an urge to find things that endure, the problem is real and the need is imperative.

* * *

     If Time conquers all – and it does – then in the ultimate assessment, nothing endures. Not achievements, nor reputations, nor families, nor institutions, nor nations, nor the Earth, nor the universe itself. Despite that, we are driven to choose things that will endure sufficiently for us. If we can’t find any, that life of chaos is where we’ll end up.

     What becomes plain to anyone who lives to age 35 is that what is pressed on us most frequently and most vociferously are pleasures as ephemeral as a soap bubble. Sex. Possessions. Occupational advancement. “Image.” If you have any familiarity with the great literature of India, you might recognize the following snippet of dialogue:

     Yama said: Choose sons and grandsons who shall live a hundred years; choose elephants, horses, herds of cattle and gold. Choose a vast domain on earth; live here as many years as you desire.
     If you deem any other boon equal to that, choose it; choose wealth and a long life. Be the king, O Nachiketa, of the wide earth. I will make you the enjoyer of all desires.
     Whatever desires are difficult to satisfy in this world of mortals, choose them as you wish: these fair maidens, with their chariots and musical instruments — men cannot obtain them. I give them to you and they shall wait upon you. But do not ask me about death.
     Nachiketa said: But, O Death, these endure only till tomorrow. Furthermore, they exhaust the vigour of all the sense organs. Even the longest life is short indeed. Keep your horses, dances and songs for yourself.

[Katha Upanishad]

     It has never been put better. What endures “only till tomorrow” is hardly worth one’s consideration. Whatever your personal assessment of what matters enough to earn a share of your effort and devotion, let it be something that will survive longer than that.

* * *

     Remember: This is an old Curmudgeon talking. I like questions such as the one addressed above. I don’t claim to be able to answer them in a definitive way. Even so, they’re worth everyone’s attention.

     Vince Lombardi had the right idea: Give your highest priority to things that endure. Determining what they are is the next question. It’s a question I wish I’d given more time and thought half a century ago.

Love And Consensus

     Among the most dangerous of things, politically, economically, and socially, the false consensus must rank high. Half of Mankind is dominated by consensus thinking. Women find it extremely difficult to depart from the current “women’s consensus.” Thus, they can be misdirected by a false consensus, with results that are sometimes catastrophic.

     Men are not immune to consensus, but we have somewhat more ability to resist them, especially those of us who perceive clearly and accurately. Moreover, men’s innate proclivity for doing things by and for ourselves can also countervail a seeming consensus. All the same, there is danger in a pseudo-consensus for men as well as for women.

     (Nota Bene: I just tried to look up the plural form of consensus, and found nothing. As it’s derived from the Latin verb consentire, “to agree,” there is no etymologically correct plural for it. English speakers tend to avoid trying to pluralize it. Clearly, there is no consensus about the plural of consensus. Just so you know.)

     The deceivers among us strive to create seeming consensus that will direct us into their preferred channels. It’s especially significant in politics, from which we get the terms grass-roots and astroturf movements. Brilliant individuals have been badly misled by their impressions of “what everybody else is thinking.”

     Now we come to the title of this piece.

     My Gentle Readers don’t need to be told about the malaise that afflicts male-female relations. It’s bruited about sufficiently in the media, to say nothing of all the “self-help” books on the subject. And it’s kept men and women apart to a tragic extent. But if I may judge from experience, the reasons for that estrangement lie in exaggeration and anecdotes.

     Few men are really self-absorbed scalp-hunters and bedpost-notchers. Few women are really man-hating termagants incapable of satisfaction. Just because you married one such means almost nothing, socially. But as seems to be the rule, tales of such persons get much wider circulation than stories of happily mated couples. Ironically, it’s the good men and good women who are principally guilty of spreading them.

     The general belief in those false notions is keeping love-starved Americans apart. The frequent, heavily promoted diatribes about fortune-hunting women and “men going their own way” are the cause. The reality is considerably more benign. It just gets less air time and fewer column-inches.

     In concert with those false consensus, we have the problem of elevated expectations. Men seek magazine-cover dream girls. Women seek six-foot-three Adonises on horseback. A great deal of popular literature urges us to think they’re out there waiting for us. It ain’t so, and when we’re in our right minds we know it perfectly well.

     There’s a lot of money to be made from spreading tales of “romance predators:” men who use women for their bodies; women who only want to be supported like royalty. Romance novels often feature a male predator as an antagonist. Prenuptial agreements exist because well-to-do men fear women who have it in mind to “divorce rich.” And there are some of each roaming about. But though the general consensus suggests that they’re the majority, in truth they’re exceptions, and not even popular among their fellows.

     Singles who can bring their dreams back to Earth can find compatible mates. They can get the love, companionship, loyalty, and support they seek, if they’re willing to give them as well. All things have their prices, and the price of marital happiness is that you must provide it if you wish to receive it. Relationships in which those things are reciprocated are the kind that endure.

     Time was, that was more widely understood. But there’s that nasty consensus ringing in the backs of our heads. Surely it’s based on something. Dare a young, unmated American act as if it’s all twaddle?

     I have nothing supremely wise to say on this subject. It’s mainly a suggestion to look beneath and beyond the consensus. But if you’d like to see a delightful movie about such things and how they could work out for those who are realistic and candid, try The Ugly Truth. Gerard Butler and Katherine Heigl will get you laughing so hard you’ll hurt yourself. Trust me.

Does Size Matter?

     The arguments over political systems, what makes them possible, what undermines them, and so forth are doomed to go on until Man is no more. Some of the most basic ones – the fundamental questions beneath all political discourse – arise from considerations of size: How large or small should a political unit be to attain stability?

     The arguments over whether to tolerate “globalization,” and to what extent, are part of this. Commercial currents that flow above political units confound many people’s notions. Businesses that operate internationally seem to flout some of our political aspirations. Or perhaps it’s that they flout the aspirations of politicians; that’s equally likely.

     I’ve long held that bigness in business requires bigness of governments. There may be exceptions, but they would be cases where truly huge amounts of capital and labor are required to pursue such enterprises. However, when power-wielders turn their voracious attentions to business, it’s the biggest players that they go after first. Also, really big businesses tend to need more competition than the marketplace will naturally provide them; Alfred Sloan recognized that when he arranged for the divisions within General Motors to compete against one another. All this suggests that bigness, even if it confers an advantage in certain fields, comes with compensating disadvantages that limit its value.

     Many of the dynamics that characterize businesses in competition also apply to political units – governments. But governments are loath to admit it. The European Union came into existence mainly because of politicians’ desires to rule a nation larger than their homelands, a nation that could compete politically and economically with the United States. American politicians, analysts, and influential commentators encouraged it for reasons of their own, some of which are unclear to me.

     Large or small? World-girdling or localized? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? The questions are pressed in many fora. But answers are slow to appear.

     The following first appeared here on May 14, 2020.

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     Wes Rhinier at NC Renegade has penned a short piece about what he foresees for America. His expectations are bleak. In particular, he’s troubled by the many plaintive calls for “a leader” for “the coming civil war.” Here’s the part that plucked at my fiddlestrings:

     We are all too divided. We all have our own ideas. It’s always been a problem in this liberty movement.

     I think a Balkanization is more likely to happen. Or maybe small confederations happen.

     For me, this called to mind the conclusion of Poul Anderson’s Hugo-winning novella “No Truce With Kings.” It concerns the efforts of an alien race to engineer a specific sociopolitical outcome for Man on Earth…by subterfuge and the use of alien technology to promote one faction in a distributed, multi-participant war over the others:

     “You wanted to re-establish the centralized state, didn’t you? Did you ever stop to think that maybe feudalism is what suits Man? Some one place to call our own, and belong to, and be part of; a community with traditions and honor; a chance for the individual to make decisions that count; a bulwark for liberty against the central overlords, who’ll always want more and more power; a thousand different ways to live. We’ve always built supercountries, here on Earth, and we’ve always knocked them apart again. I think maybe the whole idea is wrong. And maybe this time we’ll try something better. Why not a world of little states, too well rooted to dissolve in a nation, too small to do much harm—slowly rising above petty jealousies and spite, but keeping their identities—a thousand separate approaches to our problems. Maybe then we can solve a few of them…for ourselves!”

     The idea of federalism was an attempt to harmonize the large nation – by virtue of its size capable of standing against other, more rapacious nations – with the small community of independent identity. Federalism proposed a way of having many small, largely autonomous regions within a central structure with sharply limited powers that would defend all of them against invasion. But governments always suck power from smaller units toward larger ones, and from peripheral loci toward central ones. We might not have known about that dynamic two and a half centuries ago – we didn’t have that many examples of it to study back then – but we have no excuse for not knowing about it now.

     However, there’s more than one view about these things. Here’s another angle, from Tom Kratman’s very best novel:

     “Do you know why we band together into nations, girl?”
     The question seemed so totally out of the blue that Maricel didn’t really even comprehend it. She shook her head, a gesture that meant, in this case, I don’t understand.
     Aida took it wrongly, assuming the girl meant she didn’t know why. She answered the question herself. Pointing towards the flames, she said, “We band into nations for just that reason. In the real world, little tribes like TCS are destroyed. They can’t compete against determined bands of raiders. It takes more power than that to defend yourself against people like yourself, people with no law above themselves.”
     Ah, now Maricel understood the question. She wasn’t sure she understood the answer and, given that she was going to die, the answer didn’t really matter anyway.
     “It’s the flaw in some utopian schemes,” the woman continued. She looked at Maricel’s uncomprehending face and said, “You don’t understand that word, do you?”
     “No.” Sniffle. Just get on with it, will you?
     “Never mind; here’s the truth, a truth I’ve been trying to find for the last . . . well, for the last good long while. People band into nations, real nations—not travesties like TCS, gangs that fancy themselves nations—to defend themselves. It requires an emotional commitment. The limits of nations are not how far their borders can reach, but how far their hearts can. People with tiny hearts, people like TCS, can never reach very far, can never gather enough similar hearts together to defend themselves. Only real people, and real countries or causes, can do that. That’s why TCS is going to die tonight.”

     [Tom Kratman, Countdown: H Hour]

     Perhaps the question is multivariate, in which case the answers will be multivariate as well. At the very least, it’s not simply What do we seek for ourselves and how can we get it? but Are we able to do what it will take and endure what we must to remain that way? That all sociopolitical arrangements are inherently unstable doesn’t mean that all are equally desirable.

     Freedom is not the only good people seek from their political alignments and arrangements, as we should all know far too well. They also seek prosperity for themselves and their families, and security against threats, both actual and potential. And some – there will always be some – have a vision of “the good” that requires others to bend their knees and their necks:

     One female (most were men, but women made up for it in silliness) had a long list she wanted made permanent laws—about private matters. No more plural marriage of any sort. No divorces. No “fornication”—had to look that one up. No drinks stronger than 4% beer. Church services only on Saturdays and all else to stop that day. (Air and temperature and pressure engineering, lady? Phones and capsules?) A long list of drugs to be prohibited and a shorter list dispensed only by licensed physicians. (What is a “licensed physician”? Healer I go to has a sign reading “practical doctor”—makes book on side, which is why I go to him. Look, lady, aren’t any medical schools in Luna!) (Then, I mean.) She even wanted to make gambling illegal. If a Loonie couldn’t roll double or nothing, he would go to a shop that would, even if dice were loaded.
     Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws—always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.” Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them “for their own good”—not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.

     [Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]

     Are Anderson’s mini-states impossible by Kratman’s logic? Or are Kratman’s larger nations doomed to deteriorate into tyrannies owing to the dynamic of power-seeking as Anderson has pinned it? And what about the people – “crazy as a Cyborg” or otherwise – who insist that the State compel others to bend to their preferences?

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     The questions are inclusive and eternal. The answers are idiosyncratic and fleeting. The arguments never cease.

     And some of us just want to be left alone.

     “Politics and business… I don’t pay them no mind.” (Jesse Colin Young, The Wine Song)