Category Archives: Politics

Illiberal delusions of depth

Politics

In general, the social sciences teach us more about societies of social scientists than it does society in general.

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Show me an example of political or sociological “realism” — a claim of inalterable facts — and I’ll show you an ideologue with an investment in society being some particular way. It might even be the key to an intellectual’s soul.

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Once the foundations of liberalism erode away, and public opinion starts asking hard questions of public truths grown complacent through luxuriation in universal acceptance, the truth of liberal values are anything but self-evident. They epitomize vapid conventionality, and all-too-conveniently, most of the people who continue to uphold them do so through inertia and timidity.

In times like these it almost requires a radical’s personality to excavate the layers of pious dust and quotidian debris that settle over generally accepted moral facts and to burrow into the ground where the wellsprings of liberal morality still flow clear. It turns out, these apparent self-evident (that is, long unexamined) moral principles, such as the ultimate value of the individual, the importance of free speech, thought and action, the exercise of reason, and above all, pluralism are not in the least self-evident once they are flooded in long-suppressed illiberal light and tag-team interrogated by left-wing and the right-wing inquisitors.

Fact is, liberalism was never the natural and inevitable state of society once tyrants are removed from the scene, but rather humankind’s hardest-won accomplishment. But the belief that liberalism exists with mere removal of impediments has led to the neglect of liberal education, and especially a self-aware philosophical explanation of morality.

Instead, the last several generation were rigorously trained to emote on demand: to sympathize as intensely as possible at sacred signifiers of its tribe (generally of categories of people) and to produce anger in equal amounts at the tribe’s categorical enemies, who are those who fail to produce the requisite emotions at key symbolic stimuli. Every tribe can produce its own elaborate supporting theories, including its own homegrown theories on why the other tribe’s theories are nonsensical and the result of nefarious influences.

And bystanders who decided to spare themselves all indoctrination and believe themselves independent observers fared no better. In fending off miseducation, they fend off necessary education as well, and fall into ideological traps they are ill-prepared to detect or to escape once they learn whatever “the truth” their habitual reading conceptually habituates them to understand.

At this point I am interested neither in expounding nor defending my views for people who are by nature or second-nature unsympathetic to liberalism. Instead, I plan to continue my private project of exposing the wellsprings of liberalism to those who have already learned to love them. And I do mean learn to love, because love of liberalism is either learned or latent, never accessible to naive or misled minds.

But it is true: as a liberal I do owe my fellow-citizens an account. But I do not owe it on their philosophical terms or their schedule. These are the things you learn when you work at education, which is another word for allowing learning to change you.

Mark Lilla on the trajectory of ideologies

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Shipwrecked Mind: “Successful ideologies follow a certain trajectory. They are first developed in narrow sects whose adherents share obsessions and principles, and see themselves as voices in the wilderness. To have any political effect, though, these groups must learn to work together. That’s difficult for obsessive, principled people, which is why at the political fringes one always finds little factions squabbling futilely with each other. But for an ideology to really reshape politics it must cease being a set of principles and become instead a vaguer general outlook that new information and events only strengthen. You really know when an ideology has matured when every event, present and past, is taken as confirmation of it.”

Mark Lilla on political thought today

Philosophy, Politics

From Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind (2nd edition): “Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West seemed so shallow, so clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in Western societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts and even vocabulary for describing the world we now find ourselves in. More worrisome still, we lack awareness that we lack them. A cloud of willful unknowing seems to have settled on our intellectual life. This, it seems to me, is the most significant development since The Reckless Mind was published [on September 9, 2001], and the first thing we need to understand about the present.”

I cannot wait to read Lilla’s latest book, The Once and Future Liberal, due August 15, 2017.

Bodies and categories

Ethics, Politics

If an individual elects to be part of a political body, then that individual shares responsibility for those who act on behalf of that body. It is fair to hold people responsible for what their political bodies do.

But if you classify a person as belonging to some category of person, and on that basis hold that person responsible for the actions of others who (according to you) also belong to that category, you are committing a grave sin against liberalism.

The line between belonging to a political body and being assigned to a category is a blurry and crooked one. No simple formulas exist to sharpen it. The line is not traced along the boundaries explicit declarations of membership: people are often cagy or deluded about the political significance of their actions. But neither are the lines those gridded out by ideology: every theorist has his correct schema.

The lines must be surveyed case by case through dialogue between the disputants.

Overcoming ressentiment

Ethics, Politics

I’ve been thinking a lot about ressentiment lately. It saturates the news, art, conversations, nearly everything. Or so my eyes tell me.

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What is ressentiment? It is not as some (including me) an exact synonym of resentment, but a distinct flavor of resentment. I had been blurring them into synonymity, but the differences are important enough that I intend to start using the terms more precisely. According to Wikipedia,

Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, that is, an assignment of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. This value system is then used as a means of justifying one’s own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defense mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

So my understanding is that ressentiment blames others not only for specific grievances but for one’s own existential state — how one is and how one habitually feels about life. I view it as both analogous and connected to Heidegger’s beautiful distinction between fear and angst. Fear has an object. Angst might seem to have an object, but in fact angst belongs to the subject. Remove the object of fear and the fear dissipates. Remove the object of angst and the angst must find another object. Resentments can be resolved by addressing the object of resentment. Ressentiment is insatiable.

The Dhammapada gets this right:

The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased.

The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified.

Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.

Most people never realize that all of us here shall one day perish. But those who do realize that truth settle their quarrels peacefully. (I included this last stanza for the Heideggerians.)

Another problem: Ressentiment generates an aggressive ugliness that radiates and discolors everything and everyone around it. Sadly this ugliness is not confined to the eye of the beholder, but somehow reflects into the eyes of those beheld, which leads directly to the next point.

Ressentiment is counterproductive. The objects (the alleged causes) of ressentiment are only agitated and energized when approached with ressentiment. Resentment breeds resentment, and the infection spreads and intensifies. In combatting ressentiment it is necessary to cultivate lightness, cheer and buoyancy, and to resist succumbing to ressentiment’s natural darkness, dourness and deadweight. (Does this smell like Nietzsche to you? That is because it is Nietzsche. It is the cornerstone of his moral vision.)

All this should make it clear why I’ve recommitted to rooting out ressentiment in my own soul. Unfortunately, I have accumulated a great deal of it over the last decade. It will take some work to clean myself out. One key element of this effort has been to limit my exposure to other people’s ressentiment, especially those two antithetical ressentiment philosophies which have seemed into the mainstream from the fringes, and which have become the substance of popular politics. Staying away from social media has helped a lot.

A political suspicion

Politics

Reading Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal, I am beginning to question my belief that my objections to what I’ve called left-illiberalism is really (as I had thought) bound up with its excessively egalitarian demands. Frank now has me wondering if my concerns might have more to do with an insufficient commitment to equality, and with the tonal side-effects of preserving one form of inequality through redirection of attention toward other alleged injustices.

It seems possible, if not likely, that a strong preference for diagnosing political conflicts in subtle psychological terms (of prejudices, conscious or unconscious, multiplied over innumerable judgments and biased interactions) could in fact be an evasion tactic for neglecting blunter policy issues that do not involve attempts at controlling what goes on inside other people’s heads — a jurisdiction that is, on principle, out of bounds, and protected in liberal democracies.

Could it be that obsessive preoccupations with racism, sexism, and the other prejudicial -isms might serve as a big stinky red herring that draws attention away from a thoroughly self-serving classism, the classism of a new class whose good conscience depends on not recognizing its own existence and its stake in preserving inequality? I’ve got to admit, Thomas Frank’s exposition of a self-deluded “professional class” strikes me as vastly more credible than the unconscious race-/sex-/orientation-interest narrative so popular in the vulgar left ditto-sphere.

Anyway, Thomas Frank has succeeded in making me question my 3rd Way centrist worldview and and interesting me in revisiting the New Deal. He’s also making me extra-extra-bitter that Bernie didn’t get the nomination.

Equalities

Philosophy, Politics

It seems true to me that the kind of equality that matters most is legal equality — equality before the law. 

To secure full, enduring equality before the law it is necessary that some degree of social equality be maintained. Severe social inequality will lead to unjust legislation and distorted law enforcement. This principle is demonstrated dramatically in America’s “war on drugs“. 

 But I so not see legal equality as a means to acheive actual social equality. At most it is a means to potential social equality — rough (and no more than rough) equality of opportunity. It is social equality that is the means to the end of equality before the law. This priority makes me hostile to any distinctions between categories of citizen in policy.

(Just to confuse things more,  legal and social equality are different from political equality. Political equality is equality in ability to influence our collective actions, including our ability to move toward greater legal and/or social equality. Political equality also depends on social equality and preserving the right of citizens to organize in ways other than economic or governmental. Unions and public assemblies are vital to preserving or correcting the other kinds of equality. )

I think the stance I just outlined is basically conservative, but my concerns about social inequality interfering with legal (and political) equality pushes me past the middle point, into left-leaning regions of the political spectrum. At least, that is what I think. 

America is philosophically diseased

Chord, Ideas, Philosophy, Politics

America is philosophically diseased.

Most Americans perceive, believe and intuit using 19th and 20th century modes of understanding which are 1) are incompatible and irreconcilable with the others, 2) mutually hostile, and 3) inadequate for making theoretical, practical and moral sense of the realities we face.

And every one of these obsolete and broken-down philosophies assures the mind it binds that there is no need for philosophizing. Doing, not thinking, is what is needed now! Thinking is useless enough, but thinking about thinking? — That is the most pointlessly abstract, idle and meaningless thing any person could do.

The only way out of the crisis we face — (a crisis much worse than an unphilosophical mind can know how to know!) — is to learn to conceive truth very differently than we do today. We are desperate for a new popular philosophical platform, not to make us all come to the same conclusions, but to support our differences and to help us navigate them peacefully and productively.

We need, at minimum, an upgrade in a) our epistemology (and ontology), b) our ethics (and metaphysics) and c) our political practices. My own prescription is a) Bruno Latour, b) Emmanuel Levinas, c) Chantal Mouffe. But before we can build we need demolition (Friedrich Nietzsche) and ground clearing (Richard J. Bernstein).

I look at this list of thinkers, and I love seeing them together like vertebrae in a backbone.

Here is a suggested core curriculum for regeneration of philosophy for our times:

 

The privileged SJW

Politics

From my own experience, privilege manifests primarily in two ways, which apply equally to all people of every demographic:

  1. Incuriosity: Not feeling obligated to understand what your fellow citizens are trying to tell you. “I see clearly that I see things the right way, and that your view is distorted.”
  2. Imperiousness: Not feeling obligated to win the assent of your fellow citizens before doing things that affect their lives. “I don’t have to convince you.”

Privilege is not something that automatically deludes certain categories of people, nor does disprivilege enlighten other categories.

The epistemological and ethical self-privileging of our own inexhautibly irritable illiberal left fringe was in fact an effect of privilege (or perceived privilege). A set of folks thought they possessed sufficient political power (due to numbers and the thrust of history, not to mention the overwhelming privilege of the social status one gains from a degree from an elite university) to steamroll anyone who disagreed with them. They “checked their privilege” when “dialoguing” with token representatives of their favored categories, but when talking to examples of “privileged” categories, took the most privileged position possible and condescendently lectured them on how great they actually had it compared to other unfortunate categories. Or they just discharged their resentment on any demographically qualified human lightning rod that happened to be handy when it was time for lightning to strike.

Our illiberal Left did not care how people felt about “finally having the tables turned on them.”  They didn’t bother listening to opposing views because their vulgar marxoid false consciousness theories explained away the objections of dissenters to their own personal satisfaction.

The sole difference between this gang of ideologues and any other gang of conspiracy theorists is that this gang sort of favored the same people and policies we left-liberals did. Their passion was useful, so we accepted them as allies. We ought to feel ashamed that fewer of us called out their “calling out” — until it cost us what might be the most important election in this nation’s history. Now we are full of remorse and desire to self-reflect on what we were doing wrong. A year ago this self-scrutiny would have gone much further.

So we can complain all day about the Right not being vocal enough about denouncing their fringe, but how did the Left do when we felt secure in our power?

If the Right stands up to marginalize the KKK, they will have demonstrated true moral superiority to the Left, who did far too little to marginalize our SJW.

 

Pluralistic insight

Politics, Pragmatism

We use whatever concepts we have available to us to understand our experiences. When facing an unfamiliar situation, we intuitively choose a conceptualization that seems to fit in an attempt to make sense of it. And if the first pick fails to give us a handle on the situation, we might “try on” another — if one is available to us.

Having a larger conceptual repertoire gives us more options for understanding. It also raises our expectations with regard to conceptual fit. Perhaps most importantly, the practice of trying out different ways of conceiving subjects us to first-hand experience of contasting experiences of understanding, which produces the insight we conceptualize as pluralism: multiple approaches to understanding always exist, even though it seems only one truth is possible.

Inducing the pluralistic insight, and equipping citizens with a large repertoire of concepts for reaching understandings satisfactory to the greatest possible number of people is the most important function of education in a liberal-democratic society.

Those who make use of a limited set of concepts for understanding the world will be accustomed to making do with semi-adequate understandings. They lack all experience of pluralism: the world they experience is a mysterious and arbitrary world where thinking is barely relevant because it rarely does much good.

One strong argument for public education is ensuring children are taught by teachers who have a reasonably large conceptual repertoire to teach. You cannot give what you do not have. Or to put it differently “if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch” — usually the ditch of fundamentalism.

 

 

 

 

Life is unfair

Ethics, Politics, Symbols and diagrams

fairness

This scale is an attempt to diagram a framework I posted to Facebook.

Lately, I’ve been hearing more and more people declaring that “Life is unfair.” I actually grew up hearing that.

I’m starting to believe this statement is the essence of right-wing politics. Degree of renunciation of fairness is what defines the right-wing spectrum:

Centrism views fairness as one legitimate political goal, but acknowledges practical limits to the degree of achievable fairness. Centrism sees over-reaching attempts at fairness to be artifacts of naive partiality with distorted self-serving conceptions of fairness. To the degree a centrist leans right, he sees increasing levels of unfairness as inevitable and acceptable.

Middle right believes that fairness should not enter the discussion. Fairness is an inappropriate goal for politics, and an inadequate framework for thinking about it. Politics should be thought about in terms of other dynamics (such as economics). These dynamics naturally produce a healthy equilibrium which are in fact the best possible political outcomes. The distorting lens of “fairness” demands that we “fix” precisely that which is not broken (and conversely, that we preserve the hacks intended to produce fairness, but which destroy natural equilibrium).

Hard right believes that inequality is necessary — that establishing proper rank is required for the health of a society. The strongest, or wisest, or smartest or the most righteous should have more power than the weak, foolish, unintelligent, vicious masses.

I can see the self-consistent logic and validity of these positions. But as a left-leaning person, I believe the elimination of fairness from political discourse is a disaster. To say “life is unfair” is to misrepresent a moral intention as a natural fact. It pretends to say “perfect fairness is not an achievable goal” but really means: “I have no intention of treating you fairly.” I do not believe I can credibly ask a person to trust me if I do not intend to treat them fairly.

But, with all that being said, here is a troubling question: can right-wingers actually trust the left to treat them fairly? Because being fair means making the question “what is fair?” an open question for discussion, and I am not at all sure this is the case with many Clinton and Sanders supporters, who seem to have already decided unilaterally for themselves what is fair.

When asked for the left half of the scale, I added:

Hard left wants to maximize fairness by ensuring that everyone has exactly the same resources. Middle left believes politics is essentially about achieving maximum fairness. Centrism, as it leans leftward, sees fairness as one key condition of freedom for all. Fairness and freedom will never be perfect, but we are obligated to pursue it.

I do not care what you think

Philosophy, Politics

It is easy to disregard what someone thinks if that person lacks the resources to make you feel the consequences of your disrespect and disregard. We only say “I don’t give a shit how you feel” to people who are powerless either to help us or to harm us.

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A person or a group we treat as a powerless nobody will seek opportunities to return and confront us as a powerful somebody — as somebody who can command our attention, or our respect, or — and God help us if it comes to this — to make us feel what it is like to be a powerless nobody.

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Perhaps the biggest difference between left and right comes down to the question: Which segment of the poor and powerless mass deserves to be courted and which deserves to be despised?

Political orientations

Philosophy, Politics

Does the world need another political categorization scheme? Nope — so here’s one I just thought up:

Political orientations can be categorized according to two original social experiences:

  • A) early feelings of membership in one’s society;
  • B) early feelings of alienation from one’s society.

From the original feeling, political views can develop a variety of ways.

With respect to one’s own pursuit of membership/alienation:

  • C) pursue increased degree of membership in one’s society;
  • D) pursue increased degree of alienation from one’s society;
  • E) maintain current degree of membership/alienation.

With respect to cultivation of membership/alienation feelings:

  • F) toward intensifying feelings of membership for those who feel membership;
  • G) toward intensifying feelings of alienation for those who feel alienated;
  • H) toward deintensifying feelings of membership and alienation.

With respect to enlistment of actors into belonging/alienated camps:

  • I) toward increasing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging, while reducing the number of people who feel alienated;
  • J) toward increasing the number of people who feel alienated, and reducing the number of people who feel (actual or possible) belonging;
  • K) toward maintaining the numbers of those who feel belonging and alienation.

And finally, with respect to attitudes toward change:

  • L) hope – optimistic belief that one’s life can be changed for the better;
  • M) fear – pessimistic belief that one’s life will be changed for the worse;
  • N) resignation – belief that things will happen however they happen and that one has little or no control over it;
  • O) skepticism – things can be changed, but the consequences are radically unpredictable.

My own classification would be B.C.H.I.O.

I might need to make a political quiz.

 

Moral types

Ethics, Politics

Some people listen carefully to others, learning from them how they perceive, think and act, and try to hear beneath it who this person is, what kind of life they live, what kind of world they inhabit, what might interest and benefit them.

Some live by the rules of reason. They look for compelling logical arguments and if they see that they have been overpowered, they proudly yield.

Others live by the rules of their ethos. They do what they ought to according to prevailing norms, in loyalty to that which gives their reality structure, substance and meaning.

Yet others follow rules for practical reasons. They avoid breaking rules in order to avoid the consequences of breaking them. They answer primarily to coercive social forces.

Finally, there are those who know only physical force. Everything that seems coercively social is only a few degrees away from physical force. They are barely removed from a state of war.

Each of these types represents a different relationship with transcendence.

Principle of compromise

Politics

When I hear grandstanding imitation Martin Luthers or Martin Luther Kings — and there are so many of them — proclaiming unwillingness to compromise on their favorite principle, it makes me worry about America’s future. Whatever truth there is in these principles, it is all undone by disdain for compromise.

Since when is compromise despicable? Compromise is the core principle of liberal-democracy. If there is one place where Americans must be uncompromising, it is in our commitment to compromise.

No principle that exalts itself above the requirement to compromise has any place in a liberal democracy like the United States of America. If your favorite political principle prohibits faithful adherence to the higher principle of compromise, you are a shitty American. You do not understand the profound demands American patriotism makes on its citizens. You belong in some other more backwards country with a more primitive forms of loyalty, not here.

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If we seriously want to get back to what makes this country great, let’s imitate the Constitutional Convention. Let’s proudly make a point of respectfully disagreeing with those who view things very differently, then work hard and patiently at designing peaceful agreements, persevering as long as it takes to succeed.

And if you are one of those many people who think there is no greatness to get back to — that this country was corrupt from the very beginning and will remain corrupt to the end — please be as loudly outspoken on this point as possible so the rest of us know to what to do with your political views.

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I’ve been working on a bibliography of political writings to help those who have a taste for cultivating respect find the best specimens of various political stances. I’m collecting the very best specimens of liberal, neoliberal, democratic socialist and conservative thought. Let me know if you’re interested, and I might post it.

Pluritarian Pluriversalism

Anthropology, Biography, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas, Judaism, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

To someone born into an autistic universe controlled by a single set of strictly logical natural laws, the experience of empathy and the subsequent revelation of an empathic pluriverse redefines the meaning of miracle, and of transcendence, and of religion.

Before, miracles were exceptions to the laws of nature. After, miracles are the irruption of something in the midst of nothingness: other minds, each with a world of its own — each with the power to change the meaning of one’s own world.

Before, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond the finite objective world.  After, transcendence was defined in terms of an infinite reality standing beyond myriad finite objective worlds, each rooted in the elastic mind of a subject.

Before, religion was the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers. After, religion was still the attempt for an individual to commune with a transcendent reality with miraculous powers, but the change in conceptions of transcendence and miracle means that it is the individual and the individual’s world that is transcended, and this means the route to transcendence is not around the world and one’s neighbors, but through them and their worlds. The activity of loving, respecting and learning from one’s neighbors is intrinsic to loving, respecting and learning from the infinite God who cannot be confined to any one world, however vast.

Myriad worship practices are needed to worship myriad aspects of an inexhaustible and inexhaustibly meaningful God. By this understanding, empathy is worship.

Central questions

Politics

The question at the heart of liberalism is: “Who decides?”

The question at the heart of democracy is: “Who speaks for whom?”

Is there a single question at the heart of liberal-democracy?

Souls

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Every soul is the size of the entire known universe, containing every known thing within it, endures for all time from the earliest known pre-history to the most distant imaginable future, and encompasses every conceivable possibility. Therefore, no two souls are alike. 

Souls vary in size, density, variety and complexity. Souls overlap in reality, but weave through realities differently, touching, entangling, moving and being moved by different beings. 

Some souls have space in them for your soul, and are happy to extend you hospitality. Some souls seek your hospitality. Other souls need your soul locked up inside your silent body.

Postenlightenment harmony

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

Tillich (from The Courage to Be):

The whole [Enlightenment] period believed in the principle of “harmony” — harmony being the law of the universe according to which the activities of the individual, however individualistically conceived and performed, lead “behind the back” of the single actor to a harmonious whole, to a truth in which at least a large majority can agree, to a good in which more and more people can participate, to a conformity which is based on the free activity of every individual. The individual can be free without destroying the group. The functioning of economic liberalism seemed to confirm this view: the laws of the market produce, behind the backs of the competitors in the market, the greatest possible amount of goods for everybody. The functioning of liberal democracy showed that the freedom of the individual to decide politically does not necessarily destroy political conformity. Scientific progress showed that individual research and the freedom for individual scientific convictions do not prevent a large measure of scientific agreement. Education showed that emphasis on the free development of the individual child does not reduce the chances of his becoming an active member of a conformist society. And the history of Protestantism confirmed the belief of the Reformers that the free encounter of everybody with the Bible can create an ecclesiastical conformity in spite of individual and even denominational differences. Therefore it was by no means absurd when Leibnitz formulated the law of preestablished harmony by teaching that the monads of which all things consist, although they have no doors and windows that open toward each other, participate in the same world which is present in each of them, whether it be dimly or clearly perceived. The problem of individualization and participation seemed to be solved philosophically as well as practically.

It is the belief in a preexisting harmony that separates the classical Enlightenment view from a Postenlightenment view. I believe in disharmonious reasons, which is another way of saying that I believe in Pluralism. To extend the music analogy, reason does not produce chords, it produces a chromatic scale, from which harmonies can be made, but only if sour reasonable notes are muted, at least until the melody progresses and the key changes, making the formerly sour note sweet. A harmonious truth must be designed, and design always means making good tradeoffs.

Pop ideology how-to guide

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Here is how to build a popular ideology:

Do rock-solid factual investigation. Satisfy the requirements of the critical mind.

Present the facts of the investigation in compelling stories that win over the heart, too. Adhere to the facts.

Encourage the heart and the mind to believe together for once. And what a relief wholehearted belief is in these fragmentary contradictory times. This rare peace is reason enough to believe.

Build fact and feeling together, higher and higher, to moral heights where gravity weakens and earth loosens its grip. Up here ideas are lighter and can be piled one upon the other with only sporadic logical spot welding.

The heart has the mind’s endorsement now, the newly unified soul hangs on your verdict.

Now is poetry’s moment. Passionate declarations, inspired insinuations, elegant analogies, and flights of spirit move mountains arguments cannot even touch.

Set your conclusion at the tip of the crescendo.

Then drop to earth again. Plant your feet where all can see where they are rooted. Return to facts. Build a second edifice like the first and crown it with the same conclusion. Then drop.

Repeat a third time, then a fourth.

Spread your conclusive points over the breadth of the sky. Now it is a worldview, supported on columns of excellent journalism. Readers will rise with you to hold it up, united in heart and mind, with themselves, with each other, as a community, as a collective mind, as a political body ready to act on behalf of your faith.

Nobody will notice the heavenly roof is suspended by nothing but  a desire for sheltering unity. Nobody can believe the sky is not attached to the ground.

The columns of fact and argument bear no load.  They are decorative stumps. They are monuments to the idea of reason.

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If you teach your poetry ventriloquism, when you let the facts speak for themselves they say what your heart wants to hear. This is doubly true if you think a complete knowledge of facts points to a single moral conclusion.

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The formula: Journalism; poetic ethical interlude; journalism; poetic ethical interlude…

miracle occurs