Proof that scholarly aspirations can't outclass a sixth grade education and ounce of horsesense

"Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul."

"Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place."
What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us (1899)

"You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."

- Mark Twain

Mark Twain persistently reminds me that my and largely everyone's greatest sin is not something as grandiose as hubris. It is common self-importance, best cured by a daily reminder that everyone's toilet stinks, even in ivory towers.

I need to do more writing that's from the soul, that has more wit and less pretense that I know more than I do (the most important rule of my short life is that almost all people know far less than they pretend). The world is full of people claiming more wisdom than their fair share. That pie is largely taken and would probably give me indigestion besides.

I'm glad I have my straight writing; it makes it clearer for people that I have more than stories and parlor tricks to share and that I honestly care. And that it's not ideas for making things better that are in short supply. It's the courage to face the failures of our older ideas that we eat like comfort food when our supply is running low and we have a craving for empty calories. I offer up my insight even as I bumble through life like every other simpleton with modest abilities and less humble self-opinion. Humor helps me remember better that I nor anyone else is anything more and generally much less than all of that.

I hope my work will impress scholars. But scholars don't build bridges or teach ABC's or make the streets safe. I'm probably better off making sure that a good portion of my work entertains children and makes time go by quicker for adults in other peoples' bathrooms.

Human beings are a sad, sad lot. Someone's got to cheer them up. And let them know that despite themselves, there's hope yet.

Love,
Ben

"The rule is perfect; in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."
Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy (1899)

"Look at the tyranny of party--at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty--a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes--and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master." The Character of Man, Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it. "

"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow."

"Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever."

This is why I don't trust Democrats or Republicans or power

Democrats to start without GOP input

It's typical. It's arrogant. And it's exactly why I don't trust politics to fix most problems.

E.J. Dionne cheerleads these efforts with a recriminatory tone that typifies E.J.'s partisan work, these days. And which typifies why I don't trust so many liberal journalists, activists, nor politicians, these days.

Paublo Friere was so right. One group oppresses another, and the other group wins power only to look to oppress their oppressor. It's an endless, sad, pathetic cycle.

I am convinced that there is no way out of this cycle than to transcend this ugliness, in the same way that Protestants and Catholics found it within themselves to transcend their ugly power battles and civil wars during the 17th century. There is no way out of this cycle, I don't believe, except for looking deep within ourselves for something greater than who we are, today.

And I want no part of either this effort at liberal dominance or any conservative backlash that follows. I don't want to be in between or in the middle.

I want an honest political center that transcends this ugliness for good. I want people and politicians who listen to one another more than they take self-righteous stands. I want political observers and activists and scholars and journalists and leaders who genuinely engage one another with an genuine openness to the idea that they might be wrong and that their knowledge of their propensity to be wrong should be the most important self-check on their tendency to turn to power to resolve problems of any of the checks that they might face in a democracy.

I want all people to hold themselves accountable to the strongest standards of policy thought, where their fallibility figures larger than their propensity to get things right, all the time. And where fixed and rigid methods of handling problems are looked on with much skepticism for this reason.

One line from the Post article captures the problem well:

"For clues about how the Democrats will operate, the spotlight is on the House, where the new 16-seat majority will hold absolute power over the way the chamber operates."

What was it that Lord Acton said about power and absolute power?

He was right.

We can do better. But it means being better and trusting one another to be better more and confusing our cynicism for realism less.

Thomas Hobbes had a fundamental choice in the 17th century: to concede to the cynicism of a world racked by religious self-righteousness, sectarianism, and civil war, or to imagine a better world.

Hobbes chose the only realistic route.

To imagine a better world.

Love,
Ben