The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel

Really, It’s Just KFC.

In general terms, this post is just a celebration of Neal Stephenson’s mastery with words and the fun he has with thunderous incongruities. I’m going to do that in two ways—both from The Diamond Age.


First, I want to place the utter centrality of Kentucky Fried Chicken in Shanghai, several decades into our future. Judge Fang, Constable Chang, and Miss Pao are the participants in this spoof. They are trying a little boy named Harvard for assaulting a rich young engineer and stealing some of his possessions. Up to this point the trial has been conducted in English.
At this point, the three revert to Chinese.

“The hour of noon has passed,” said Judge Fang. “Let us go and get some Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

“As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Chang.

“As you wish, Judge Fang,” said Miss Pao.

Judge Fang switched back to English. “Your case is very serious,” he said to the boy. “We will go and consult the ancient authorities. You will wait here until we return.”
The House of the Venerable and Inscrutable Colonel was what they called it when they were speaking Chinese. “Venerable” because of his goatee, white as the dogwood blossom, a badge of unimpeachable credibility in Confucian eyes. “Inscrutable” because he had gone to his grave without divulging the Secret of the Eleven Herbs and Spices.

I think I have not passed a KFC for a decade or more without some version of the “House of the Venerable and Unscrutable Colonel” passing through my mind.

Today’s second celebration of Neal Stephenson will be made up of my notes on some of the words he introduced me to. I’ll pick my favorite five for today. I give Stephenson’s use first; then whatever I have come up with as the meaning.

7. coenobitical
Page 25: There were a bunch of coenobitical phyles—religious tribes—that took people of all races, but most of they weren’t very powerful and didn’t have turf in the Leased Territories.
This isn’t as weird as it looks. The dictionary cites cenobite, which solves the oe- problem and getting from cenobite to cenobitical is a short trip. A cenobite is a member of a religious order living in a monastery or convent. This distinguishes them from anchorites, who were hermits. Cenobite is a version of the Greek koinos, “common” and bios, “life.” There are later forms, of course, such as the Late Latin coenobium, “a cloister.” The prefix is pronounced SEE-no, as in evil.
9. coarcted
Page 30: All the other thetes, coarcted into their tacky little claves belonging to their synthetic phyles, turning up their own mediatrons to drown out the Senderos…
This is an unfamiliar word that really adds something. It is just right. The meaning of the adjective coarctate in biology is “compressed or constricted” or “rigidly enclosed in the last larval skin: said of certain insect pupae.” Stephenson, with the verb coarcted gets not only the cramming together but the insect image as well. “Crammed together as tight as the final skin on a larva” is the clout he gets out of this word.
7. phyles
Phyle (Greek φυλή phulē, "clan, race, people", derived from ancient Greek φύεσθαι "to descend, to originate") is an ancient Greek term for clan or tribe. They were usually ruled by a basileus. Some of them can be classified by their geographic location: the Geleontes, the Argadeis, the Hopletes, and the Agikoreis, in Ionia ; the Hylleans, the Pamphyles, the Dymanes, in the Dorian region. [Wikipedia]
41. decussating
Page 341: The unmarked decussating paths would have been confusing to anyone but a native.
Decussating paths cross in the form of an X. How that’s different from an ordinary intersection, I’m not sure. The Latin is decis, “10.” That’s 10 as in X, since it’s a Roman numeral. Decussare means “to cross in the form of an X,” which is, apparently, what “decussating paths” do.
33. glacis
Page 258: “…who would struggle their way up the vast glacis separating wage slaves from Equity Participants.”
I am shocked to find that this word is pronounced like “glasses,” except the final s- is also sibilant. It looks so French. A glacis is a gradually slope. It doesn’t have any particular temperature, although it shares the root of the Latin glacialis, “frozen.” I think it’s the connotation he wants. A glacis can be part of a fortress; the embankment sloping gradually up to a fortification so that anyone attacking it will be exposed to gunfire the whole way. I think that’s the picture he wants us to have of wage slaves trying to become Equity Participants.

Debt-Limit Chicken--And Worse

July 27, 2011. It is now less than a week until the United States of America tells the people who have loaned money to us that we were, after all, a bad risk. The debt limit confrontation has been pictured as a game of chicken between President Obama and Speaker John Boehner, the only presiding official in the Congress who opposes him. Sen. McConnell will have to wait his turn.

So…a game of chicken. We drive our cars toward each other at high speeds. In the best outcome, you flinch and turn aside and I win. In the second best outcome, I flinch and you win. In the least good outcome, neither of us turns and we kill each other. But now that I have gone that I realize that there is an outcome even worse. We both flinch and turn into each other (that would be to the right for you and to the left for me—how very familiar that sounds!) and reveals ourselves not only as cowards but as incompetent cowards. That would be worse.
I’m not sure that chicken captures all the elements of this contest, however, so I would like to try several others. How about Russian Roulette? You spin the cylinder, put the gun to your head, and pull the trigger. You have five chances out of six of surviving—if you do it one time. If you do it over and over—I’m not at all good at calculating cumulative probabilities—the odds get worse.

So let’s consider the roulette elements of the present situation. President Obama can’t control the Democratic votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers. Speaker Boehner can’t control the Republican votes he needs to pass the compromise he prefers, which, until recently, was the same one the President preferred. The two parties are highly ideological. Votes which pitted 80% of Democrats voting one way against 80% of Republicans voting the other way were once unusual; now they are the commonest kind of vote. The new Tea Party-backed Republican House members believe they owe intransigence to their constituents—it is their sworn duty—and that intransigence has now been turned against the leader of their own party. This has led Eric Cantor, the Number 2 man in the House to tell them to “Grow up,” a sentiment also found on the lips of the President. How awkward is that?

This is highly unstable. Now we approach this brink over and over. The probability of hitting the live chamber, by this analogy, goes up radically as you do it over and over. Eventually, you will hit the live chamber—that would be the House in the present scenario—and you blow your brains out. Actually, that might have happened in the 2010 elections; it’s still too soon to tell.

The third scenario, one which captures yet another aspect of this impending disaster, is a champion battle. I’m thinking of David and Goliath as an example. I’m not really sure, now that I think of it, what was supposed to happen to the army of the defeated contestant. Were they supposed to be massacred? To be slaves? To be put in internment camps? I really don’t know. But it doesn’t really matter, because the notion of “champion” is all I need. Theoretically, if David wins, it is good news for the Israelites. If Goliath wins, it is good news for the Philistines. But fiscal default isn’t really like that. If we default, both David and Goliath lose. And all the people David and Goliath represent also lose. All of us are killed or enslaved or put in camps, or whatever. The cost to anyone of borrowing money for anything will go up, for instance. You don’t need to be on the losing side to suffer this defeat because both sides are the losing sides—not just the champions but the armies and not just the armies but the civilian populations. Everyone—litigators, bundlers of financial instruments and off-shore hiders of revenue and Chainsaw Al personnel departments—loses.

These three images together give us a fuller picture, I think, of what
we’re up against. This account sounds crude and contemporary to my ears,
however. This is how Lincoln put it.

“On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were
anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to
avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place,
devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and
divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them
would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would
accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

The Two Tournaments

Today, I want to follow up the perspective on aging and dying that I called “rising above decline.” As I promised, I will be using a tennis tournament to point to the differences that strike me.

But first, a word from my sponsor. I’ve been playing around, for the last several weeks with a WordPress-supported blog. A number of people had told me that WordPress is a better provider than BlogSpot and after experimenting for a while, I have concluded that they are right.

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Now about the tennis tournament. To make this work, I am going to follow a particular player through a tournament. Since I was sure that Roger Federer was going to win Wimbledon this year (he didn’t: Jo-Wilfred Tsongas defeated him), I’m going to imagine that he gains, at each stage, what Erik Erikson says he would gain if “life” were a tennis tournament.

I’m going to come back to the tournament metaphor several times, I think All of them are going to imagine that Roger Federer won Wimbledon this year, which, alas, he did not do. I like the tournament metaphor, though, because it is familiar and graphic and goes in the general direction of my argument. I always consider that last one a plus.

Here are the two parts for today. If you distinguish, as I proposed in “Rising Above Decline,” the trajectories of the body and of the “self,” we see how different those trajectories are—or, rather, how different they might be. In the first application, I will trace a body through the tournament. It loses. Not to spoil the suspense. In the second application, I will trace a self through the tournament. You could win this one. The goal of the opponents you will face in this tournament isn’t to kill you; it is to defeat you. There is no reason why you have to be defeated. That’s what I think, anyway, and I have played enough really bad sets that I think you ought to listen to me.

If you imagine life as a tournament and your body as an entrant in the tournament, you can easily pick out opponents. Events and conditions that damage your body are opponents. Your body never recovers from having lost the use of arms and legs in a car crash. “You” might; there are perfectly happy quadriplegics; but your body doesn’t. You can survive measles with no adverse effects at all. You won that round. You can live with persistently high levels of stress. You win that round too, but you are disadvantaged by it in later rounds. But at some round or another, an enemy will defeat you (your body) and you will drop out of the tournament. Erickson has eight stages (about which, more later) and the tournament metaphor recognizes that you could lose at any of them.

The most substantial point to be made of the bodily tournament is that you will lose. No one wins this tournament. You can to better than expected, but eventually you will meet an opponent who is tougher than you are—cancer, say, or pneumonia, or heart attack—and you will drop from the bracket. In saying all that, I have used the tournament bracket to define “mortality;” nothing more.

If, on the other hand, you picture your “self,” rather than your body, as the entrant in the tournament, then everything is different. You still face opponents. One of the great values of Erikson’s system is that you know what opponents you are going to face. And you might lose to any of those opponents. If you come up against “role-confusion” as an opponent, for instance—and in Erikson’s Stage 5, you will—you could play a bad game and lose. The result of losing to that opponent is that you really don’t formulate a notion of who you are that you can accept and commit to. You don’t form, in words I have come to like a great deal, “an accurate and acceptable self-image.” On the other hand, you could beat all these opponents and face, in the finals, “despair.” That’s the last opponent, as Erikson conceives of it.

But you don’t have to lose even this final match. You can win and you can be undefeated even at the very last when your self goes away. So the trajectory of the tournament in which your self plays could be entirely different from the tournament in which your body plays. The body will inevitably decline, but “you” may rise above it. It will lose, but “you” need not.

Enough, probably too much, about mortality. It is the other tournament that will concern us from here on out. I’m in Stage 8. According to Erikson, the opponent I am currently battling is “stagnation.” I’m doing pretty well, but I got banged up some in several of the earlier rounds so we’ll have to see how it goes.

Rising Above Decline

Today, I want to think about dying and about not dying. It’s pretty simple in a way, but I have quite a few posts I would like to write about getting old and about people who have written persuasively about what is involved—B. F. Skinner and Erik Erikson are the ones I will be following—and I find myself blocked because I have not said the few simple things that need to be said first.

Let’s start with “self.” In my line of work, a self is a social construction: I have a work self and a running self and a punning self and so on. And when I say “my self,” that is what people ordinarily refer to. [Footnote 1 English has come to use person as the crucial word. There is an irony there because person once referred to the theater masks used in Greek drama, so that dramatis personae didn’t mean so much “cast of characters,” i.e., the actors and actresses, as it meant the range of masks to be used. The derivation per-, “through” + sonare, “to sound,” shows the dramatic origins of the term and also why an actor would “sound through” whatever mask he was wearing.]But when I say “myself,” I mean me. I mean all of me and my close identification with myself as someone who has a past and who has done some things and who is so substantial that it is legally liable. Since a self is socially required, “myself” is socially liable as well, of course.

Myself includes my body. My self does not. From the standpoint of my self, my body is “it.” I am still fully engaged in this conversation but “it” is exhausted and will go to sleep no matter what I want it to do.[Footnote 2 None of this is meant to imply that I believe the body and the other part (self, soul, essence) are independent entities. The body is the host to the neurons, the interaction of which generates the possibility of selfhood. I know this is controversial in some settings, but since I believe the self requires a supporting cast of connected neurons, I also believe that when the neurons go, I go. I am, in this sense, a psychosomatic unity and neither element works alone. Surprisingly, The Matrix is very good about this. As is The Bible, in a very different way.]

OK, that was the hard part. “It,” i.e., my body, is in a state of extended and predictable decline. Nothing works as well as it used to and things are going to keep on declining. Mostly, I’m fine with that. But I don’t think “I” need to follow along too closely. The analog of bodily death, it seems to me, is personal despair. I got that from Erikson and eventually, I’d like to write a little more about how I understand him and how I feel about it. I do need to die—or, to say it another way, “it” needs to—but I don’t need to despair.

The best summary of this I have ever seen was the title of an article about the kinds of economic uses schools could be put to when there were no children to put in them. The population of the district was declining and the business manager was looking for a way to turn a profit on the empty buildings. The article was called “Rising Above Decline.” So I think “it” will decline, but I think “I” can rise above it. [Footnote 3 I will still think that when I get to the question of pervasive dementia, but that isn’t the focus of today’s piece.] There is a good reason to die, but there is not a good reason to despair.

My body has a predictable arc of decline. About 60% of adult males, age 50, can do this; 40% at age 60; 20% at age 80, and so on. That’s a social assessment of who can do what. I have my own assessment as well and any number of metrics could be called into play here. I think I’ll use running times. I always wanted to run a 10K under 41 minutes. Never did. I got to 41:12 once and to 41:15 twice. After a while, I started just being sure that whatever the course was, I was in under 45 minutes. Then under an hour. My Wildwood Trail times for a mile have gone from 9:15/mile to 10 minutes. My standard time these days is about 13 minutes, although that includes some walking, and I do sometimes run the last mile or so under 12 minutes. Each.

I am illustrating “decline.” I’m perfectly contented with these times if they are all I am capable of. I keep pushing on the edges to see if bad things happen when I push. When they don’t, I push a little harder; when they do, I count myself satisfied. Sometimes more than satisfied, although I wouldn’t want to have to justify how good I feel when I have done what I am capable of. I call it “leaving it all on the trail,” a version of the “leave it all on the floor” of my early basketball days.

When I have pushed my body to do what it is capable of that day, I am really tired and entirely content at the end of the day. If it took me an hour and twenty minutes to run the six mile course and that’s the best I could do that day, I’m proud of myself. If I think I really could have run it in an hour and fifteen minutes and just didn’t have the guts to do it, I am disappointed in myself.
I win nearly all the time because I keep adjusting the goals down so that I have a decent chance at achieving them. I like winning, but I like to set the goals where they demand my best performance to reach them, so being disappointed today is the price I pay for really believing in my satisfaction the next time.

If this works out right, the next post in this series will imagine the “stages of life” (Erikson) as a tennis tournament, like Wimbledon, in which each victory gives you the opportunity to play someone better than the guy you just beat, but which also gives you additional tools for the next match. Now that I think of it, it is even more like the New Wilmington (Pennsylvania) summer tennis tournaments, where each player brought a new can of balls to the match and the winner got to keep the unopened can.

Owning Less

I own a lot of books and I own different ones for different reasons. I’m going to have to get rid of nearly all of them soon and I find myself stumbling over how different those reasons are from each other. That’s what this post is about.

The default date Bette and I have chosen for moving out of our home here in Southwest Portland and moving into a retirement center of some sort is 2017. That isn’t a hard date. It’s the time when we want to be ready to move—we’ve chosen a place and made some early payments and located ourselves at the top of whatever list we want to be on—not the time when we absolutely will move. Still, I am mindful of my father’s often-repeated maxim that it is good to “pre-think the inevitable.”

Wherever we move, we will have something like a fifth of the space for books that is currently occupied by books where we live now. We need to get rid of four fifths of our books. It’s hard to say it out loud and take it seriously.

That brings me to the question of why I have the books I have. Some of the books I have are biographically significant. I have the revised edition of Dolbeare and Edelman’s American government text, which has a nice little recognition of me in the acknowledgements and the substantially different treatment of the federal bureaucracy that I had asked for. That doesn’t seem like a book I should get rid of. I have the copy of Jim Davies’ Human Nature and Politics which I was reading when I called him at the University of Oregon and told him I was blown away by the book and wanted to do doctoral studies with him. That’s what got me to Oregon. I have my brother John’s signed copy of Galápagos, which, in addition to being a well-conceived, well-written, and beautiful book, acknowedges my contributions to its present form. I’m not going to give books like that to the Salvation Army.

I have reference books. I have a lot of reference books. Most of them are biblical commentaries or cribs of one kind or another. Some are etymological collections I couldn’t find elsewhere.. And there are some reference books that you really need to have within arm’s reach, even if you could go to the library and find them.

I have books I read over and over. If I designed a graphic like this Venn diagram, the red spot would be a great deal larger. I read The Lord of the Rings over and over. I read the four Lord and Lady Peter Wimsey books quite a bit. I read Ursula LeGuin's Hainish Trilogy and EarthSea books. And other, less respectable collections as well. I want to keep the books I read over and over, no matter how big the red spot gets.

The political science books that I have kept around as markers for a path I might be moved to take some time will have to go. It won’t be hard to do without the books, but it will be hard to say out loud that I will never actually pursue this or that very interesting path of inquiry. Evolutionary psychology will probably fall into that category, as will brain studies, world culture conflicts, and nearly everything about contemporary politics. The books on the psychology and sociology of intimate relationships, about dating and true love (not the same thing, in my experience), and histories of marriage in the West since the Industrial Revolution, will have to go. I will make an exception of Gary Chapman’s The Five Languages of Love because it has been such a good book for Bette and me and because it is about the need to find and learn the language your partner understands best.

No more new novels in paper form. Probably Kindle books or whatever has replaced Kindle by that time. Or I will buy them and read them and pass them along. And then if I have to read them again (that red spot), I will try to get one from the library.

So—as you can see—it isn’t the books that make this hard. It’s the rationales. I have become the person I am in large part by reading and internalizing the information and the arguments in these books. Now I’m going to have to find out how well I do without the books. The reasons for having books are so powerful; the reasons for not having them seem, somehow, weaker.

Well Dad, it’s time to “pre-think the inevitable.” Maybe I’ll start on it tomorrow.

Forgiving Debts

We are a credit-driven society. We know all about debts. You see something you want to buy, you give the merchant your credit card (thereby acquiring a debt) and when, eventually, the bill comes, you pay it, thus discharging the debt. That’s how it goes. Being “forgiven” this debt is nearly inconceivable . Even bankruptcy doesn’t do that.

It is our individualism that makes this so clear. If you didn’t buy it, then you don’t owe a debt for it. But we weren’t always so individualistic and our notions of forgiveness come from a setting that was much more collectivist than we are. The people of Israel were bound in a covenant with God. You don’t get much more collectivist than that.

A part of this covenant with God was that there was a collectivity (a tribe, let’s say) that owed a debt. It was an obligation. Often it was clear how the debt was to be discharged, but it was not always clear just who was to do the discharging. That’s where forgiveness comes in.
Let me give a simple example. Redemption was a part of the Israelite covenant. Leviticus 25 offers a good example. Every Israelite properly belonged to God, therefore there would have to be some limits put on the length of time anyone could be a slave, even if he sold himself into slavery. Selling yourself into slavery is like hocking yourself at the pawnshop. You probably shouldn’t have allowed things to get that bad, but you did. You screwed up so badly, let’s say, that you really don’t deserve to be redeemed. We can imagine that, can’t we?

The interesting thing about the Israelite covenant is that it really didn’t matter whether you deserved to be redeemed or not. You belong to God. You are not, to use an expression with New Testament overtones, your own. God deserves for you to be redeemed, to be restored to Him. You may not deserve it, but God deserves it. And for that reason, someone has a debt. It is not a debt to you. It is a debt to God. The debt is discharged when someone—probably a close kinsman—goes to the man who owns you and pays him the money he demands to release his claims on your labor. You have now been redeemed. You don’t belong to yourself now because you never belonged to yourself. You belong to God again, and not to the slave owner to whom you had hocked yourself.

We are now in a position to reconsider the forgiveness of debts. Raymond E. Brown, in a lecture on the beginnings of the church, says that he thinks that Matthew’s “debts” is historically richer than Luke’s “trespasses.” Brown’s idea is that you “trespass against” someone by committing an act against him or her. “Trespass” is a clear act. But you can owe a “debt” to someone you don’t know. Brown thinks that Matthew had the covenant obligations in mind. I might “owe you” redemption, for instance. If you are from my tribe and if you were sold into slavery and if I am your closest kinsman, then I owe you your freedom. I may not know you. If I know you, I may not like you. But because we both belong to the covenant of God and because you should have no other owner than God, I have a debt to you. I am to find you and make the transaction with your owner that will restore you to God.

I have a debt to God, but because of that debt, I owe an action to you. If I did not take that action for whatever reason, I would need to be forgiven by you and by God, since I had transgressed against both. It is for that reason, Brown argues, that “forgive us our debts” reaches so deeply into the community.

As Christians, we don’t have the covenant obligations our Israelite forbears had. In fact, the apostle Paul struggled over and over with the question of just what we did owe each other. Paul thought that living the life of the Spirit ought to make questions of what Christians owed each other practically obsolete. But Paul was a pastor, so he knew these questions weren’t obsolete. What do the strong in faith owe the overscrupulous? What do husbands owe wives? What do those with the charism of administration owe to their congregations?

Whatever specific behavior we owe—or the attitudes that support the behavior—we owe to people who “belong with us” because they “belong to God.” The debt we owe, using Matthew’s phrasing, is a debt of action and not taking the needed action is failing to discharge our debt. Anyone who has been given the gift of encouragement and who withholds encouragement from a brother or sister has not paid the debt he owes . Anyone who has been given the gift of administering the affairs of the church and who has not done so has not paid the debt he owes.
The conclusion here is that owing an action to a brother or sister is not quite as straightforward as owing a debt on your credit card. When we pray “forgive us our debts,” we mean “forgive us the debts we have not paid.” We mean, “forgive us the debts of which we have already defaulted.”

It’s a very pushy notion. That is one of the many reasons I like Pay It Forward. It isn’t about divine grace, but there is a divine sort of pushiness about it. As the attorney says, “You accepted the gift. You’re obligated.”

And how are we feeling today?

The question I want to ask today is this: “How do you know how you are feeling?”

But as I was thinking about it, a scene came to mind. I don’t know what it’s a scene from. Maybe the scene is such a cliché that it isn’t worth asking about. In this scene, a man is in a bed in his hospital room and a nurse comes in and asks, “How are we feeling today, Mr. Jones?” What is that “we” doing there? It isn’t the royal “we.” It isn’t a collective “we,” as if the patient and the nurse had some way the two of them were feeling. Is there some advantage to the “we” form: it’s more empathic, less intrusive, more hopeful? I don’t see it. By the way, "Naughty Nurse" is one of the images you get when you google "How are we feeling today" so I guess it meets the cliche test.)

I want to say that we don’t really know how we are feeling, ordinarily, because there is always a context and what we know takes that context into account. So let’s say that I’m the guy in the hospital bed and when the nurse asks me “the question,” I say, “Let’s find out. I will need to consult the oracle.” The oracle I would have in mind, if I said that, would be my body.

But don’t you just know how your body feels? No. I read a really interesting piece of research about endurance. They were studying cyclists and what happens as they drive these cyclists to exhaustion. The treatment that worked best in staving off exhaustion was rinsing the mouth with sugar water. You might want to stop and read that again. No sugar intake. No new calories. What there was was the promise of new calories. It was the promise, not the calories, that released the extra energy.

How would that be? There is, it turns out, a center in your brain that decides whether the very last drop of energy should be released for use by the muscles. It’s a pretty conservative center—in my own mind, I picture the Federal Reserve System—and it hangs onto (does not release for your use) quite a bit of energy. “It” has the energy and “you” do not. You have to stop and catch that division. When you get the sugar water rinse, this center believes that new energy resources are going to be available soon (they are not) and releases a substantial part of its reserve, which you now get to use.

So my body tells me what it wants to tell me and, having no alternative source of information, I take its word. I always imagine that I am asking the “how am I feeling” question in absolute terms. Like taking a temperature. My temperature is 99.1 degrees: end of story. So if I imagined there were a “feeling good” scale (let’s say 100 points and anything above 80 is really good), I would be expecting a number. The oracle says, “You are currently at 67.”

The dilemma I am digging at is that I really don’t think that the oracle has an absolute scale in mind. I think it has a relative scale in mind. Even if I ask “how am I feeling today,” it answers “you are feeling well enough to/not well enough to” do something in particular. So I ask how I am feeling and the oracle says, “Well, you’ve got three meetings this morning and you don’t really want to go to any of them so you’re not feeling very well.” Or I ask how I’m feeling and it says, as it did this morning, “You’re going to go to church and teach an adult education course that you have been thinking about nonstop for about three weeks. You feel fantastic! I’ll give you a 90.”

In this way of thinking about it, the oracle consults what it knows about what I have to get up for, how I feel about those things, and gives me the number I asked for. It gives me a number (65) that sounds as if it belonged on an absolute scale, but it calculates that number by scanning through my physical and emotional systems and comparing them to the upcoming tasks. Then it gives me the number. And if a nurse were actually asking, I would say, “Oh, 65.” Actually, I’d say, “Oh, not all that well yet.”

Does the oracle distinguish between physical and emotional challenges? Let’s say I slept badly last night and the work I have to do in the morning is mostly physical. The oracle knows my schedule and says, “85, get right to work.” If I slept badly and the morning’s work is to deal with a line of students who are not happy about their grades, the oracle might say, “60. This is going to be a really tough morning.” In this speculation, the oracle matches my sleep-deprived state against the physical work and sees no difficulty (hence 85) and against the emotional strains of dealing with unhappy students and sees a lot of difficulty (hence 60).

If the oracle is going to do a schedule-based scan and report to me an absolute-looking number and if I don’t have any alternative source of information, what should I do? Maybe I should take the oracle’s way of coming to a conclusion a little more seriously. Maybe I just don’t answer the question “How are we feeling today?” or even “How am I feeling today?” Maybe I look first at the work there is to do—that sounds stoic, I suppose—and ask “Do I feel well enough to do THAT?” The oracle’s answer, I’d imagine, would almost always be, “Yes, you feel well enough to do that.”

So then I get up and do it. Would that work, do you think? Or is outpsyching the oracle mostly a waste of time?

One -cize Fits All

As a regular part of our reading and listening and speaking, we blow by the most amazing caches of information. As a practical matter, we would all agree that the price of attending to this is that we are forced to ignore that. And that and that and that. That is most often just the right thing to do. If you can’t hold an intention in mind and screen out “distracting” information, you probably can’t work effectively. On the other hand, it is good to take a look, now and again, at what you are passing by.

I want to think about what we mean when we say that something has been “politicized.” Let’s start with “personalized” greeting cards. First there were greetings that I sent to you. Then there were “depersonalized” cards. These cards were commercially available and, because they had been depersonalized, cheap to produce. “Personalized cards” say “Happy graduation, dear daughter” or “Peace on Earth from Our Family to Yours.” The question these cards pass over is this: what were they before they were “personalized?” To answer that, you need to have a word that fits into a question like this one. “No, this batch hasn’t been personalized yet; they are still just __________________.”

It’s a little bit of a puzzle. I used to run without socks. I liked the feel of my foot in the shoe. Then, when I had to wear an orthotic, I had to wear a sock on that foot. But, since I still didn’t like socks, I didn’t wear one on the other foot. Friends would rag me about it sometimes. “Look” they would call, “ You have one sock on and one sock off.” If I was running well at the time, I just smiled and waved and kept on running. If I needed a break, I would stop and try to carry the topic a little further. “Well,” would say, “you are right when you say I am wearing only one sock. But when you raise the question of how many socks I am not wearing, you have moved into one of the dark regions of philosophy.” Generally, that was long enough to catch my breath, and I went on down the road—usually, not being chased by angry villagers.

No one likes to have something “politicized.” If you like opening a question to the preferences of all the people who will be affected by the decision, you call it something else. Accountability? Democracy? Neighborliness? Most commonly, we call it “the way it should have been done.”
It should have been done by the bureaucrats who, after all, know how to write rules that don’t contradict themselves. It should have been done by the judges who, after all, know what the Constitution says. It should have been done by the President and the Speaker in a private meeting. The All Stars in the recent, hugely underwatched Major League All Star game should have been chosen by the managers, not the fans.

Why does everything have to be “politicized?”

I think there’s a pretty good set of answers to that question, but they are legion and they are long. Here, I will content myself with pointing out that the virtue of the “politicize” charge is that is passes over the question of what it was—what was the decision rule—before it was “-cized.”

Salad Days

When we started dating, the metaphor I first tried to sell to Bette was "a good marriage is like a high performance engine." She wanted to like it. She tried to like it. But she wasn't able. She didn't like the analogy between machines and relationships. I thought, at first, that I could explain it to her if I could match up the fine points, but I know next to nothing about internal combustion engines of any kind, so that didn't work either. Besides, the principal use I had in mind for that metaphor was that if you want the engine to run right, you don't run it on cheap gas.

Eventually I gave up on the engine analogy and Bette and I are working together on a new one. A good marriage is like a garden. I have added a look at our current garden so you will get the idea. The dilemma with metaphors is that you want a few of the major points to match, but you don't want to turn it into an allegory. Oddly, Bette is the one who wants to allegorize. As far as I really want to go with the garden metaphor is that nothing you can do can make up for the failure to have really good soil. Good soil is rich enough to feed the plants. It drains well. It is placed where it can get enough, but not too much, sun.

That's really all I know. I do know it is really hard to start with bad soil and turn it into good soil. That's what dating is for, I guess. I know that if you have bad soil and get, as a result, bad crops, most of the things you are likely to do first are not good things to do. If you want to make fundamental improvements, you are going to have to move the garden to the right place and/or amend the soil so that it will support the crops you want to grow and/or so that it will drain properly.

Bette has been relentless about this particular garden. She didn't do anything until she had the soil the way she wanted it. These beds are at the south and west sides of our house so it gets a lot of sun. There is a lot of the food the plants like best in the soil. Bette can irrigate to her heart's content, because the soil drains really well all the way down to the clay level. Whatever you might want to say about Bette's metaphors, there is nothing wrong with her garden.

The beds you are looking at are beets, peas, lettuce, arugula, spinach, bell peppers, carrots, onions. The edge of the jungle you see to the right is all tomatoes. We are eating really well right now

Learning From Mistakes

Learning is always a good idea, but I'm not sure we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. I think it might be better to say that we learn different things.

During the terms I teach at Portland State, I show up at the transit center to take the express bus (#94) to the university. By that time in the morning, I might or might not have had my coffee. For that reason, I have sometimes taken the #64 bus instead. That "take" is a "mis-take." What did I learn? I learned that if the bus goes out of the center and turns left, I should get off as soon as possible. If it turns right, I probably won't even notice it because I expected it to turn right and I am already deep into my New York Times by then.

So taking the #94 when I intended to take the #94 is not a "mis-take." It is a success. What do I learn from it? Smaller things, I think. I learn, for instance, whether at that hour of the morning the #12 bus, which follows the same route but stops for anyone who is headed downtown, is much slower than the #94. That's worth knowing, because there are a lot more #12s than there are #94s. I learn whether at that hour the express bus is more or less crowded than the 12; whether the lights are on during the trip or not; whether the group of commuters who are always talking about something in a spirited way, are still talking to each other.

It might be better, then, to say that we learn big things--you're going the wrong way--from our mistakes and little things--it's only five minutes slower and they leave the lights on--from our successes. If you are interested in learning as much as you can about the way you want to go, I'd think that successes would be preferable. They are often less painful as well, which is another reason to choose them.

And finally, two of my three children were mistakes--well, unscheduled arrivals--and I have learned at least as much as I have from the one we had on purpose.

Selling the New Job to Men

I read in the New York Times the other day that it is still hard to get men to do their share of the work at home and I want to think about that a little today. Just to give you a sense of how this is going to line up, let me say that as a political scientist, I have studied power relations for many years. Since “micropolitics” was just getting popular when I was just starting doctoral work, I studied a lot about power between persons. Also, I have been attracted for some years now to gender studies. The fact that some persons are men and some women makes a huge difference in how problems come up, how they are defined, and how they are resolved.

Now I want to start somewhere else. Imagine that this is a “sermon” on power and gender and that I am going to start with three important texts.

Text 1: Vaseline makes skin products for men and for women. They are advertised separately to men and to women, which suggests to me that Unilever knows something about how products are chosen than ordinary mortals do. The Vaseline products for women claim to make women’s skin soft. The Vaseline products for men claim to make men’s skin strong.

Text 2: John Gray has developed a special relationship with gender. Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus was first published in 1992. Today, nearly twenty years later, it’s hard to tell whether he is changing any minds any more or whether people who like the way he handles gender—different but complementary—eventually find his books. In any case, Gray knows what Unilever knows. Men buy products—and arguments—for different reasons than women do. Not all kinds of arguments, probably, but arguments that bear on values or behaviors that are associated with being a man or being a woman.

Here’s Gray: “The instincts that sent warriors boldly into battle to defend themselves and protect their loved ones come into play when a modern man tries to listen to a modern woman. To prevail, he must learn to duck and dodge.” [For context, the issue here is how men should respond when they are receiving blame and criticism from women. In this setting, he probably has husbands and wives in mind.] “Instead of reacting to blame and criticism, a man learns to hear the correct loving message in her words and responds in ways that diminish friction and conflict. Ducking and dodging allow a man to keep his cool and respond respectfully to a woman’s need to communicate.”

Just to make this easier to visualize, picture the “blame and criticism” as a rolling pin. The woman is beating on the man with the rolling pin—this is her blame and criticism”—but he is not getting hurt because he is ducking and dodging. This is something evolution prepared him for, you see. Going boldly into battle and surviving requires that you learn how to duck and dodge. Nothing is said here about counterthrusts. And if you duck and dodge successfully, you will “prevail” just as your warrior ancestors did.

Text 3: Let me introduce the author first this time. This is Peter N. Stearns, Heinz Professor of History at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1979, when this book was published. Here are the beginnings of several consecutive paragraphs. “While men returned to the family in a real sense in the twentieth century, they did not return in traditional male style for several reasons. It was obviously difficult to regain control over children who were substantially trained in school and lured by the company of their peers.” And a few lines later: “A rethinking of paternal purpose was almost inevitable when the continuity in work between father and son was disrupted. And in the larger setting it was easy to think of one’s sons, and daughters as well, as people to woo.”
“The renewal of familial interest among men inevitably encountered the entrenched position of women in the home. Even women dissatisfied with their domestic role or those who had entered the workforce could attempt to exclude the husband from the day-to-day authority in the family—including, of course, authority over the children—that served as their power base and the most obvious source of their self-definition.”

Those are the texts: Unilever, Gray, and Stearns. Let’s take as the problem to be solved, the problem Stearns describes. In the modern era, the men “come home” from the previously exclusive focus on their jobs, and find that they don’t know what to do. The men are now “sharing the breadwinning function” in a sense. He works at Nordstroms and she at Weiden and Kennedy. And the women are now “sharing the homemaking and childrearing function” but this is at the same place. One place. The breadwinning business takes them apart, but the homemaking/childrearing business throws them together. And on this field, the women are the home team, complete with loyal fans, and the men are the visitors.

The women aren’t any better prepared for the presence of the men than the men are to define themselves by their time at home. At a retirement presentation, either mine or Bette’s—I’ve forgotten now—the speaker warned the women that when their husbands retired, they would have “twice as much husband and half as much kitchen.” There was laughter throughout the crowd, but it wasn’t uproarious laughter. The women’s first reaction is to be delighted to have the help. The work is set up as it had been, the decisions are hers (as they had been) the standards to be used are hers (as they had been) and the manpower is doubled. Does anything about that definition of the situation look unlikely to you? No? Then wonder whether it would look unlikely to a man who had spent his adulthood studying gender relations and the uses of power.

Two questions remain: what are the options and how can they be sold?

The question of options looks simple at the beginning. If the question is about what work—from here on out, “work” will include both maintaining the house and raising the kids—is to done at home, then he decides or she decides or they decide. It’s easy to look at that list and pick “they decide” as the best one, and it might be. Even so, there are good decisions and bad ones and if “they” decide by compromising their separate standards, the result will be ugly.

You would think it wouldn’t be that hard, but each of these adults is used to making decisions. And each comes from a history in which certain tasks were done in certain ways and belonged to certain roles within the family. It doesn’t make any sense to think that will all go away, particularly if the two central options—the ones on the basis of which the compromise will be crafted—are my way and your way.

Fortunately, there is another kind of compromise. The man and woman can set aside their own ways, as best they can. It won’t be very good. Then they can devise a problem that needs to be addressed. The crucial characteristic of the problem is that it is over there. We are here and “it” is there. The problem no longer lies between us, as if the game were tug-of-war. It is now a problem of our devising and we will succeed together or fail together.

So that’s how to decide it. The remaining question is how to sell it. At this point, I’m going to collapse the question and deal with only one side. Since the original question had to do with housework, I’m going to say that the man is the one it is going to have to be sold to. Part of the work has already been done. Women who are eager to have their husbands share the work must be willing to share the power.

Let’s say the question involves cleaning up the kitchen. I pick that one because Bette and I have had some conversations about it. The questions that follow haven’t been culled from any transcript of our conversations; they are just things I thought of at the time. By when does the kitchen need to be clean? Within half an hour of the end of the meal? Before we go to bed? Is tomorrow morning good enough? What is the value of clear counters as opposed to clean counters when only one can be done? How clean is “clean?” What products are going to be used to get the job done?

Sharing the power and sharing the work are two aspects of the same transaction.

The gender problem Stearns addressed has these elements: men respond to the new definitions (new since the end of the Industrial Revolution) of work and domesticity by coming home to a setting they don’t understand and with highly suspect skill levels. The children have nothing to learn from him so the traditional power base is gone. There are “peer groups” now. He is going to have to sell himself to his own children as a “good guy” and hope they like him. He is going to have to either negotiate a power sharing with his wife or withdraw from the work at home so he won’t have to be dictated to.
What does Unilever know that would help us? They know that men, by and large, will not buy a product that promises them softer skin. They are hanging on to their masculinity with one hand already; they don’t need softer skin. Stronger skin, now, is another matter. It’s not too hard to persuade a man that being strong is a good idea. Nor would it be that hard to define any number of tasks by the strength they take rather than by the skill they take. I remember when men started carrying babies in “backpacks” as if they were burdens. Men are all over bearing burdens. It might be the woman’s job to “carry the child” but it is the man’s job to “bear the burden.” I expected any day to see a baby carrier with racing stripes.
What does John Gray know that would help us? The same thing, really. The reason I treasure Gray’s picture of the husband/warrior ducking and dodging so that he is still in the fight when his wife has worn herself out with the rolling pin is that it is so terminally silly. Men need to be smart enough and strong enough to absorb whatever punishment their wives are going to dish out in the first fifteen minutes. Knowing that accepting it without hostility and without retaliation will allow their wives to say what they really want to say, makes it worth doing. This woman has important things to say, she just isn’t able to say them first and if her husband goes away or turns it into a contest, she will never get it said and he will never hear it.
Listening to her long enough to hear what she has on her mind is the smart thing to do and the loving thing to do. What Gray has decided is that smart and loving aren’t enough; it has to be “the manly thing to do” also and if it is the manly thing, a lot of husbands will do it who would not do it otherwise. The warrior/husband seems way too much to me, but I would be a fool to put my notions of what will sell the product up against Gray, who has, after all, sold a lot of product.

SGO: Dog Poop

This leg of the Small Government Odyssey was suggested by an article in yesterday’s New York Times. Here’s the article, but the dilemma itself doesn’t require a lot of thought. Local dog owners are thoughtlessly leaving their dog’s excrement on your lawn or sidewalk.
I call it a dilemma because, in the context of the SGO—in which the game is to retain conflicts within the society or the economy and not let them bleed over into the polity—you must make a choice of solutions. The social sector solution would include things like caring about your neighbors or anticipating that if you do that to them, they will do it to you. From the standpoint of keeping the issue safely within the social sector, the one is as good as the other.

This might be the time to do away with the alternative that is superior to all others: character. If you lived in a neighborhood where people simply wouldn’t do that kind of thing to their neighbors, the issue would be resolved without any further fuss. Except that you have to ask where people of that character would come from. They come from families that teach good behavior toward the neighbors; and the families live where what they teach is generalized and amplified by the community. And, of course, the neighborhood takes steps to keep “outsiders” safely “out” because who knows whether the ethics of passersby match up with the ethics of locals.


The rules of SGO have, to this point, precluded an appeal to character so that the focus will be on keeping the conflicts at home, rather than allowing them to drift toward national government. Theoretically, there would be nothing wrong with passing an ordinance against allowing your dog to poop on your neighbor’s property and providing the necessary enforcement. I’m thinking of Poop Police (local police: I’m not thinking of adding another task to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) and maybe a culture of snitching, so that the police could be assured that the dogs who were not caught in the act would nevertheless be apprehended by vigilant neighbors.

That passes muster technically, because it doesn’t engage the national government. It does require local governments to use the law and its enforcement to prevent canine crime, however, and that really isn’t in the spirit of the Odyssey.

There is a way, though, to solve this problem without vigilant neighbors and without political interference. It is to export it to the economy. Here’s how it works.

Everyone who owns a dog in her complex, Timberwood Commons in Lebanon, N.H., must submit a sample of its DNA, taken by rubbing a cotton swab around inside the animal’s mouth. The swab is sent to BioPet Vet Lab, a Knoxville, Tenn., company that enters it into a worldwide database. If Ms. Violette finds an unscooped pile, she can take a sample, mail it to Knoxville and use a DNA match to identify the offending owner
.
Called PooPrints, the system costs $29.99 for the swabbing kit, $10 for a vial to hold the samples and $50 to analyze them, which usually takes a week or two. The company says that about two dozen apartment complexes around the country have signed up for the service.


Now, no one has to live at Timberwood Commons. But it you do and if you have a pet, you do have to have the pet’s DNA registered. Ms. Violette finds the offending pile, sends the sample in, determines the culprit, and fines the culprit’s owner. Unless the culprit’s owner sues (juridifying the issue, if you recall Frank Heard’s categories from the first SGO post), there is no governmental involvement at all. There are no neighborhood vigilantes because there is no need to catch the offending pet in the act. Well after the act is still plenty of time for PooPrints.

The angry neighbors are transmuted into knowledgeable onlookers. They need only wait for justice to be done. The “bad neighborliness” is turned into an economic opportunity for the BioPet Vet Lab. The offending pet’s owner knows he has only himself to blame and in order to avoid future penalties will comply with the rule. The hope of getting away unidentified is now a forlorn hope.

Again, good character is a better solution in every way except adding to the Gross Domestic Product (such an apt name in this instance). Good character would have the residents at Timberwood Commons take care of their animal’s scat because it is the right thing to do. It is but one instance of a robust regard for the good opinion of the neighbors and a willingness to be a community-affirming member rather than a limits-testing member. But failing “good character,” there is PooPrints.

When the Light Comes On

There are so many physical feelings we have no names for at all. What does the interim feel like between the time you stub your toe and the time it starts to hurt? What is the feeling you get just before a muscle begins to cramp? What’s a good name for the way the oak flavor of a red wine differs from the last little burn of the tannins?

I have some mental events I’d like to have names for. What do you call it when you almost remember something? What is the little signal you get when you might have reversed the digits in a number and you have to look to be sure?

Since I like puns, one of my favorite “mental events” has to do with available meanings. Since this matters to me, I have had to call it something. I have invented a way to describe this event. I don’t know what relationship it has to the actual mental event. They both have a sequence, I guess. One thing comes before another. One thing predicts another. That’s probably all.


I call it a red light. I think I have in mind something like the “Check Engine” light on a car dashboard. Something like this picture, but without the speedometer. The value of it is that I can tell when it is on and when it is not. If it is on, the word I will need at the end of the sentence—the word that will hijack the meaning the sentence would otherwise have had—will be there by the time I get to the end of the sentence. There is nothing about this light coming on that tells me what the word is. The light tells me that it will be there when I need it.

Over the years, I have come to trust it. I don’t remember that it has ever disappointed me. Still, I do feel the tension of it. I have to overcome something to keep myself lurching toward the end of the sentence without knowing what the word is. I remember dealing myself into a conversation about fishing, for instance. I didn’t know when I started that I was going to borrow the “unreasonable sturgeon seizure” clause of the Fourth Amendment to talk about fishing. I just headed down the path, knowing something would be there for me at the end of it, and when I got there, I heard “unreasonable sturgeon seizure” at the same time everyone else did. It felt like hearing a joke told by someone else.

I haven’t ever had an “out of body experience.” This mysterious red light is likely as close as I am going to get. Still, it’s pleasant. It may very well be unique. After all these years I do trust it. Part of that trust, I am sure, comes from the fact that I have no control over it at all. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know when it will come on. I don’t know whether it will be a witty or an atrocious pun.

But when the red light comes on, Ihave faith.