169. Eisenhower

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Eisenhower

Here's something I missed first time around,
p33 That concept -- conquering your own soul -- was a significant one in the moral ecology in which Eisenhower grew up. It was based on the the idea that deep inside we are dual in our nature. We are fallen, but also splendidly endowed. We have a side to our nature that is sinful -- selfish, deceiving, and self-serving -- but we have another side to our nature that is in God's image, that seeks transcendence and virtue. The essential drama of life is the drama to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good. The cultivation of Adam II was seen as a necessary foundation for Adam I to flourish.

Adam2 as essential for Adam1 - Let me start with that bit at the end. This makes much more sense to me than seeing Adam2 as seeking a more profound connection with the meaning of life. The goal here is to create better, more successful bourgeoisie.

God's image - Now back to what first attracted my attention to this passage. What if our nature isn't "dual" at all? What if we haven't "fallen?" What if we are just naturally "sinful" in these terms, and the purpose of religion is to create, out of whole cloth, this other side of our nature that is in "God's image?" Not only do we invent God but we invent a nature for ourselves that is not really natural in any meaningful sense of the word.

I can't think of any argument against this kind of moral indoctrination... up to the point where the indoctrination starts to include hate and intolerance. Ida Eisenhower, as she is presented here, is actually the perfect exemplar for this interpretation of religion, down to her own tolerance and refusal to wear a silly bonnet.

p36 He goes on to talk about the importance of and cures for various sins in a community like Abilene, Kansas. He starts with anger (Dwight's problem) and lust. This pairing makes me think of Dmitri Karamazov. Dostoevsky would agree with Brooks about sin. And we can see in Dmitri a life at the mercy of his uncontrollable tendency to sin -- his Karamazov nature. And then there's lovely young Lise, the poster child for sin run wild. Dostoevsky does a poor job of making Russian Orthodox Christianity seem like the cure for sin in the Russian people. It almost looks like sin thrives in that context. 

...adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order... 

And speaking of the social and economic order, neither of these authors really addresses the correlation between behavior and the economic realities people exist in. In Russia this included the master and serf dynamic but also the status of women, not to mention the rising middle class influence Dostoevsky hated so much.

And then we get a picture of Dwight in the military that makes it sound like all this upbringing did him little if any good. Still struggling with his anger. Not particularly happy in his own skin. Certainly not a person I would want to be.


Moderation
p69 I actually stopped reading this section yesterday to resume fresh today, because I wasn't getting what Brooks meant by moderation. In political terms he's talking about something very similar to Edmund Burke's position, where the danger of going to extremes is so... extreme that you have to seek a middle course that isn't too radical or too reactionary. Conservative in the true (my) sense of the term.

But, interestingly, he's going beyond this macro level to a micro level of the personal commonwealth, as it were. A radical personality like Dmitri can't achieve anything because he is swept away by his passions. But a person who completely locks down his passions can't achieve anything either. You need a middle position where the passions are harnessed. That's if you want to achieve anything significant. 

I have to credit Brooks here as I hadn't thought of moderation in these terms before. On the other hand, it may have been the Gay Pride festivities over the weekend that brought to my attention that much of what Brooks has said about character "building" and "pruning" would apply to closeted homosexuals not letting their true character show. If you re-read this chapter substituting "gay feelings" for "sin" you get a playbook for gay conversion therapy.

And having said what I did above about moderation and Burke, it should come as no surprise that I agree with Eisenhower's moderation vs JFK's optimism in their respective speeches in January 1961. Kennedy's inauguration speech did what such a speech is supposed to do, inspire the electorate toward the creation of a better nation and world. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, the scientific-technological elite, and warned, "avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow." Look who was playing Casandra?

And look how easy it is to see Faust in this. What Eisenhower warned against (and Dostoevsky, too) was the middle class, Faustian striving with its ever ignored or downplayed unintended consequences/side effects/collateral damage. And isn't JFK a perfect Faust? Ambitious, striving for both exuberant life and great achievements. Willing to make unscrupulous compromises for power (like staying in Vietnam.)

Next - 170. Dorothy Day

168. Francis Perkins

Previous - 167. A new start

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Little Me vs The Big Me & crooked timber

p5-6 Little Me vs The Big Me, another dichotomy this book is supposed to be about. I'm not going to quote as much of this as I should, but you can probably get the idea that people today are Big Me characters while in the past they were Little Mes -- secondary to the more important family or community or organization. This seems to me to be primarily a religious thing, though you would think we wouldn't be so much less Christian today (compared to before WW2) given the popularity of Christianity in America today. I agree -- viscerally -- with some of this, but how to defend it outside religion? And do we want to encourage the already Christian to be even more so? 

History, even Plutarch's list of exemplars, is full of Big Me personalities: Alcibiades, Alexander, Sulla. We love seeing Big Me personalities taken down a peg, but we put up with them when they are playing for our team, Patton leaps to mind here.

p11 And now we get the "crooked timber,"

...Moral realists are aware that we are built from "crooked timber" -- From Immanuel Kant's famous line, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made." People in this "crooked timber" school of humanity have an acute awareness of their own flaws and believe that character is built in the struggle against their own weaknesses. As Thomas Merton wrote, "Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers."

At least in the context of military history, I certainly see that this is true. Sheridan might have been the best commander of the American Civil War but the war ended before he could be fully tested, so it's hard to look past Sherman, who had so many more opportunities. 

Frances Perkins & Mount Holyoke College

I've always assumed a Classical education was built on studying the Classics, learning Greek and Latin so you could learn the lessons of a thousand years of literate civilization. That with this foundation of knowledge you can then go on to learn anything you please. This account of Holyoke suggests that, at least here, the character building aspect went even deeper. The Christian form this character building took is obvious for a region settled by Puritans, but I wonder if men's colleges were so very different? (I don't know.) I imagine many of them also had Christian aspects and that even those that didn't probably followed similar practices in being more concerned with building the character of undergraduates than in determining their personal strengths. I would have found this frustrating, but I can see the point of it. I can see why Brooks praises this approach.

I wonder if the Great Books colleges keep this aspect of education in mind? Do they include books that will challenge the students as well as inform them? When I dream up lists of books that I would want these programs to teach, I tend to go with titles I think would be the most approachable and entertaining. Maybe this is a mistake. God knows I learned more from trudging through Fernand Braudel's dry and endless prose than I learned from any number of more user friendly books.

But what was the end purpose of this character building? The obvious answer is to populate John Winthrop's "city upon a hill." As he wrote, "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us." So, again, you can't really remove this sense of "character" from it's Puritan context.

This sense of character, which we will see repeated in Dorothy Day, is even markedly different from the Russian Orthodox sense of religious character represented by Zosima. This is a more Protestant, Calvinist, Jansenist; a more bourgeois interpretation of character than Dostoevsky favored, which is why Brooks need to go all the way back to Augustine.

It's also why the author has to be very careful about even glancing in the National Socialism/Communism direction. Could be why he mentions Tolstoy and Dostoevsky but never Thomas Mann.

It is worth noting, however, that a great many of the Christians who spent the centuries following Luther savagely killing each other, had wonderfully developed characters in the sense Brooks advocates here. And it's probably hard to find an Islamic suicide bomber who hasn't found his "calling" or her "vocation." It's easy to imagine a version of this book edited for an Islamic State audience.


Perkins and FDR
Something that is very rarely commented on is that the New Deal was unsuccessful in breaking the Great Depression. Many fine programs resulted but you can't cure a crisis of capitalism with a socialist band-aid. It was the war, by giving work to everyone in America who could work, that brought back the happy times.

p44 She [Perkins] also reflected on a distinction that had once seemed unimportant to her. When a person gives a poor man shoes, does he do it for the poor man or for God? He should do it for God, she decided. The poor will often be ungrateful, and you will lose heart if you rely on immediate emotional rewards for your work. But if you do it for God, you will never grow discouraged... The person thus is performing a task because it is intrinsically good, not for what it produces.

This is, of course, the same logic that allowed true believers to participate in Stalin's genocide in the Ukraine and Hitler's Final Solution, with a clear conscience. 

And is this really what the average person means by "intrinsically good?" If you burn me at the stake to save my soul, I suppose we have to give you credit for feeling good about it, but is any real good done? Is an act good because it makes the doer feel good about themselves regardless of the effect on the receiver of this good? I just don't see that Brooks has completely thought any of this through.

For both Perkins and Day, the consequences of their good works -- the outcomes for the poor people who will always be with us -- seem secondary and almost accidental. The real point is not to do good but to be holy. 

That said, however, I suspect they probably have a better chance of doing actual good than the bureaucratic social worker who is just following procedures and doesn't care at all. I can't help thinking that the best solution to the "homeless" problem I see everyday on our streets is something very like the monasticism that became popular as the Roman Empire in the West was collapsing. This may be the only place where Dostoevsky, Day, and I see eye to eye.

Next - 169. Eisenhower

167. A new start

Previous - 166. Montaigne

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The Road to Character: Take two

pxii Now I'm in a much better position to see what's important here in the Introduction. Brooks associates what he calls "resume" values with Adam I, and "eulogy" values with Adam II. Here's a key passage, 

Adam II lives by an inverse logic. It's a moral logic, not an economic one. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer your desire to get what you crave. Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself.

To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.

I have mixed feelings about this -- ignoring for a moment the bit in bold. I've never been a career oriented, Adam I type person. I've always been more interested in values and self-discovery. So this should get an enthusiastic "Amen!" from me, but, now, with Brooks's Adam II exemplars in mind (Francis Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower and his mother, Dorothy Day, George Marshall, A. Philip Randolph & Bayard Rustin, George Eliot, Augustine, Samuel Johnson & Montaigne), I'm mostly just confused. 

In The Brothers Karamazov it was obvious who exemplified the values important to Dostoevsky -- and these values would sound very similar to these resume values. Zosima, of course, but also his mentor and Zosima's brother. Even Alyosha. (And particularly Lizaveta, but that may just be my view.) I can't imagine Dostoevsky making any more sense of Brooks's list than I can. Less, actually, since I don't assume all American's are busy paving the road to hell. In fact, I think he would see this list as proof that America was so depraved now that we can no longer even distinguish bad from good. 

Brooks is looking at character building, or at least forming, but to what end he seems not to care as much about. I'm kind of appalled to find myself defending Dostoevsky's position here, but what I see is character building in support of resume values. The end product is more productive middle class strivers. And this is why Montaigne stands out -- from my perspective in a good way -- on this list.

Now for the bit in bold. One of the first books referred to by Brooks is Man's Search for Meaning by Frankl and this is also at the heart of this book. Brooks only talks about religion, Augustine in particular, but also Day, but there is, in my opinion, a huge hole in this book where he fails to explicitly mention National Socialism and Communism, the other ways man commonly found meaning in the 20th century. 

I can almost believe that an American could write a book about values that is blind to the middle class world order, but that anyone can write a book on values so early in this new century that ignores the main plot points of the previous century seems odd, to say the least.


I'm trying to apply this character building to myself, with limited success. I struggled unsuccessfully against three different foreign languages and all I learned was that I'm not good with languages. I struggled with Scholastic Philosophy and learned that cult dogma is not my thing -- though I might have a little more success with the subject now than I did in my early twenties... but not much more, if I'm being honest. I struggled with conventional notions of sin and lust in my younger days, even after I lost faith in the religions that were the basis of those notions, but I always struggled in vain -- which is the point, from the view of the religious institution as clever con. The house always wins. 

I did learn from, and don't regret, my football playing days, but I'm not sure learning to hit the other person harder than he hits you is really character building. From struggling with technical writing I learned that other people are probably better suited to that line of work, except when I'm uniquely qualified, which is rarely the case. I have learned a great deal from a lifetime of making mistakes in almost any realm you can think of, which makes me better at many things, but not necessarily a better person.

Perhaps I haven't risked enough. If fact I'm almost certain that's true, but it's still hard for me to view common sense as a moral failing. Did Dante envision a circle of hell for people guilty of sins of omission? What would that be like? 

I did think of one thing that might possible apply, my being forced to go to the gym by my back problem. There's no way I would have done this on my own but have stuck with it now for about 25 years. But I'm not too impressed with this change as I'm pretty damn sure I wouldn't continue if I weren't worried about my back and keeping in shape for my trash sorting and hauling work. 

I'm like a Viennese Jew with a serious weakness for rich German bakery items, who lost weight and grew healthier in the camps. I appreciate the silver lining but can't take much personal credit.


pxiii This book is about Adam II. It's about how some people have cultivated strong character. It's about one mindset that people through the centuries have adopted to put iron in their core and to cultivate a wise heart...

A moment ago I was reading about Syria and the al-Assad family. Now there are some people who have cultivated strong character and put iron in their core. It isn't easy to rule an assemblage of peoples when you come from a minority tribe and minority religious group. This may have come easier to Hafez, as a military man, but for Bashar, who was trained as a doctor, it must have been a struggle. Perhaps this would be a good point in time to try to sell Game of Thrones virtues like those Bashar has learned, but I still think it would be a hard sell. And would we call these "eulogy" values? 

Isn't it more correct to say that the people in this book started with significant personality weaknesses that they found a way of overcoming or dealing with. In some cases, they really only lacked a direction for their lives which they eventually found.

Here's what I think Brooks is actually writing about, and it is interesting enough: When I was reading the biographies of Admirals Nimitz, Halsey, and Spruance, I noticed that the U.S. Navy took some trouble to put young -- promising -- officers in circumstances that would challenge them. Halsey left the Academy as a football player and discipline problem so he was given M.P. duties early on and then sent to not only the Naval War College, but the Army War College as well. (That he ended up as naval commander under MacArthur in the South Pacific during WW2 looks almost like divine intervention, though Nimitz was likely the divinity in question.) The more intellectual (for the Navy) Spruance had a problem dealing with less cerebral officers, so the Navy kept assigning him to particularly dim and difficult superior officers until he found a way of working with them.

In the interest of creating better officers, the Navy forced these young officers to grow as people so they would be in a position to excel in their military careers. The care the Navy seemed to take in this task is surprising and impressive, if also supremely self-serving.

Since Plutarch's Parallel Lives is mentioned, and is an obvious inspiration for a collection of biographies like this, it's worth noting that Plutarch could have chosen to pair up his subjects quite differently. Instead of similar Greek and Roman biographies, he could have paired two Romans or two Greeks living in very different eras and contrasted the virtues each exemplified. Camillus may have been George Washington's model of virtue, but he would not have been a success in the age of Sulla and Caesar. The Younger Cato's problem was that his virtues were already out-of-step with his times, though I'm not sure he would have been any happier really in an earlier age. 

Next - 168. Francis Perkins

166. Montaigne

Previous - 165. George Eliot, revisited

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The Road to Character

Samuel Johnson & Michel de Montaigne

Never been a big Johnson fan and, while it's interesting to learn more about him and to see what the more social side of Grub street looked like (as opposed to what Gissing showed us in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft), I'm not warming to him now. Montaigne, on the other hand, interests me.

p231 ..."if others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off -- though I don't know." Exactly.

One day, one of his servants, who was riding behind him, took off at full gallop and crashed right into Montaigne and his horse. Montaigne was thrown ten paces behind his horse and lay unconscious, spread on the ground, as if dead. His terrified servants began carrying his lifeless form back to the castle. As they did, he began to come to. His servants later told him how he had behaved -- gasping for air, scratching furiously at his chest, ripping at his clothes as if to free himself, apparently in agony. Inside, though, the mental scene was quite different. "I felt infinite sweetness and repose," he recalled, and took pleasure in "growing languid and letting myself go." He had the sensation of being carried aloft on a magic carpet.

What a difference, Montaigne later reflected, between the outward appearance and the inner experience. How astonishing. One sanguine lesson he drew is that nobody has to bother learning how to die: "If you don't know how to die, don't worry; Nature will tell you what to do in the spot, fully and adequately. She will do the job perfectly for you; don't bother your head about it."

What he doesn't say, but I think is implied here, is that he, like me on a few occasions, experienced his seeming unconsciousness as a conscious process.

Also, that description of the accident is nonsensical. I suppose the servant's horse bolted, startled Montaigne's horse (or attacked Montaigne's horse, horses don't just run into each other), and Montaigne fell off or was thrown from his horse.

Previously, Brooks describes the difficulty Montaigne has, when trying to be introspective, of finding his true self instead of a passing progression of conscious instants -- the ephemeral nature of self we've run into several times. Brooks doesn't quote it here, but I would imagine Montaigne must also have been struck by his experience of consciousness while apparently unconscious.

p232 Better and better, He's a slow reader, so he focuses on just a few books. He's a little lazy, so he learns to relax... Montaigne's mind naturally wanders, so he takes advantage and learns to see things from multiple perspectives. Every flaw comes with its own compensation.

The ardent and the self-demanding have never admired Montaigne... they conclude that his pervasive skepticism and self-acceptance just leads to self-satisfaction, even a tinge of nihilism. They dismiss him as the master of emotional distance and conflict avoidance.

Hear, hear!

He's also the only character in this book who doesn't come from the middle classes. (Marxists would argue, but Augustine's background might as well have been middle class.) He is not striving to build his character or to find meaning in his life. I'm thinking here of what class meant to Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, but also to Ford Madox Ford. 

It is curious though, that so much of the development of science -- which is so often viewed as the domain of the middle classes -- was due to the genius of fairly isolated members of the gentry in so many different European nations. Would some of them have dropped the matter if they had understood the consequences of their work?

Next - 167. A new start

165. George Eliot, revisted

Previous - 164. The Road to Character

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The Road to Character

For the second time in recent books, there's a chapter on George Eliot, who I've still never read. I keep forgetting that she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity -- which I'm having trouble getting my hands on. Brooks is focusing in this chapter on love, and this time its romantic love.

I'm just over half through the book and I'm already thinking I'm going to be very critical of his "Adam I and Adam II" thesis by the end, but I'm surprisingly impressed by his dissection, to borrow Tisdale's term, of romantic love. The joyful self-indulgence of pleasing the beloved is wonderfully described. And I can't help applying what he writes to Swann in love, where it fits perfectly. But when it comes to Marcel in love (with Albert/Albertine) Brooks's view falls short. And that kind of "lacerating" love is even more evident in The Brothers Karamazov, with that whole soap opera around Dmitri. 

Brooks argues that, "...love open[s] up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered state of consciousness..." similar to the mystical, religious love experienced by Zosima and anyone approaching death in The Brothers K. But this ignores the appeal suffering has for so many people, and not just in Russian novels. But the desire to feel deeply, regardless of the cost, is probably shared by both romantics and religious people, so Brooks is not entirely wrong.

p177 Eliot and Lewes run off to Europe together. Okay, what's curious here is that this sounds so much like Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Here Eliot is representing romantic love and all I can imagine is Dorothy Day screaming, "NO! Not Anna."

p183  Many of her characters... begin their adulthood with an ardent moral ambition. They want to achieve some great good, like a Saint Teresa, but they don't know what it is or what their vocation might be... Their attention is fixed on some pure ideal, some distant horizon. Eliot was a Victorian; she believed in moral improvement. But she used her novels to critique such lofty and otherworldly moral goals... 

But Dorothy Day again...

I wonder if Brooks separated the chapters on Day and Eliot because he didn't want us to compare them or because he realized the reader would do all the work of comparing them in any case. If Day had written a novel about Eliot I have no doubt her character would have ended up under a train, just as Tolstoy dealt with Anna -- her brother, Oblonsky, was allowed to live because he had a wife to suffer in his place, I suppose.

I'm glad Brooks doesn't let us forget about Eliot's problem with depression, which never subsided even in her happy marriage. She sought solace in married love (such a strange notion) where Day threw herself into a "lacerating" faith. Eliot's "marriage" was a stunning success while Day's mirror image situation (her actual husband living with another woman) was a painful flop. Praise Jesus!

And I love that Eliot was translating Feuerbach while they were contemplating their break with propriety. Again, you couldn't make this shit up.
 

Random

Just now I was walking down the posh stretch of Grant street and noticed a gentleman enjoying Care in the Community. To be specific, he was engaging, through speech and gestures, with one of the manikins in a shop window. The Valentino shop, no less. As I approached I thought I would see a clerk inside -- perhaps in a shop like this they are called "brand representatives" -- but, no. It was just a manikin that had drawn the guys attention.


I shouldn't be so quick to cast aspersions. Really to doubt someone's ability to interact successfully with the world. This week I've been conducting some financial maneuvers which, in a more gentile age, would have been conducted in a business-like office with me saying, "I wish to to this." And my distinguished agent saying, "Certainly. That transfer will be made by the end of the business day. Is there anything else?" But, of course we, or anyway I, don't live in such a gentile world. Instead I was on the phone with customer service representatives, and most of the time was spent with such agents walking me through online screens where you can quickly and easily perform mistakes that take days to set right. 

On Tuesday I wanted to connect my brokerage IRA account with my bank. Instead, we transferred the funds to another account that was already linked to my bank. Focused on this task, and not having given the whole transaction a great deal of thought, I clicked through the options for withholding taxes on this distribution. By Wednesday I had realized my mistake and called in again to see if this could be edited/revised. No. All they could suggest was transferring the funds back where they started and then doing it all over.

This seemed stupid to me so I called the IRS to see about doing the withholding separately. There's probably a way to do this, but the process of finding it and then doing it was going to be worse than the brokerage do-over approach. So on Thursday I did that. Today, Friday, the funds had registered back in their original home account so I did the transfer again -- unassisted -- and now I'm finally in position to make the brokerage to bank transfer.

And that was just one transaction. I was closing out a second account at another fund which was not linked to my bank at all. Before I quite realized what the women on the phone was doing she processed the transaction with the funds to be mailed to me in the form of a check. The check arrived safely with yesterdays post, and I quickly walked it down to my neighborhood ATM and deposited it. No problem. But from the time I hung up with the customer service person and the time it arrived in the mail I worried about this large check sailing through the postal system. It was even larger than the mortgage deposit check I had, nervously, transported across town to the title company when I bought my condo. At these times I imagine myself with a sign on my back saying "Carrying thousands of dollars. Think of all the drugs you could buy if you robbed this clown."

Postscript

This morning the brokerage house contacted me about needing me to sign a form about the 60-day rollover (when I had to transfer the funds back into their original account so I could do the withholding properly.) I printed out the form, filled it out, scanned it, and was in the process of attaching it to a message when their software told me it might contain a virus so they were not accepting it. Just put it in the mail with a good old traditional stamp.

Next - 166. Montaigne

164. The Road to Character

Previous - 162. It's been a while

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Sports!

Back by no demand.

As usual, I'm writing not as the normal fan but in response to something remarkable. Our local basketball team, the Warriors, are in the Finals for the third straight year against the same other team -- the Cleveland Cavaliers. They won in 2015. They suffered a painful loss in 2016. Now they're doing "best 2 out of 3." 

After the loss in the seventh game last year, the team when out and acquired one of the best players in basketball to fill the "three" position where they had been weakest. (Confusingly, the three position is also known as "small forward" but Kevin Durant, the new three is one of the taller players on the court.) KD, as he is commonly referred to, got an amazing amount of criticism for leaving his previous team, the competitive Oklahoma City Thunder, where he had been one of the two core stars. At GSW (Golden State Warriors), he is one of the four core stars -- if you can describe all but one of the starters as a "core." This is now an All-Star team at virtually every position except the five (center.) But the five is where it gets interesting for me. But let's stick with KD for a moment.

The notion that an athlete should make employment decisions based on preserving competitiveness in the league is odd. I can't imagine anyone actually doing that. The league might come up with rules that have that effect, but the player is always going to do what seems to be in his own best interest. In this case, KD seems to have believed that joining GSW would give him the best chance of getting a ring (winning a Championship) while also making him a better player by helping him improve on defense -- a strength of GSW. 

And, listening to the analysis of the first two games which GSW have won decisively, what you most hear is what a revelation KD's play on defense has been. Nearly everyone says something like, "We all knew he was one of the best scorers in basketball but the way he is dominating as a defender is something new." And when the commentators are players -- either retired or stars who's teams have already been eliminated -- they are clear that the reason for KD's excellence is that on his new team he isn't expected to do everything himself. Surrounded by players who also excel at defense, he can do more with less. 

His decision to join GSW is looking more and more like the no-brainer I always thought it was. Any player with his talent would have been a fool not to have made the decision to join what is generally accepted to be the best run team in the league.

And that brings us to the five position. To sign KD GSW had to part ways with all the players who had previously played center for them and to acquire new players at mostly bargain basement salaries. David West was an experienced older player who cared more about a shot at a ring than money. JaVale McGee had become a joke for his absentminded play and GSW signed him on an almost "what the hell, we'll give him a look" whim. Both of these players, along with the wonderfully named Zaza Pachulia, have managed to find ways to contribute to GSW's success and JaVale has even become a fan favorite for his enthusiastic play. While GSW is now much stronger at the three because of KD, it seems to be largely overlooked how much stronger they are at the five with these new members of the team.

And there are some younger players who've found ways to contribute. The world may see the Warriors as four All-Stars, but the role players -- older or new to the league -- are an important part of the picture. When GSW is dominating a game at the end of the third quarter, they can put in their reserves who almost always can hold their own, giving the starters time to rest for much of the final quarter. 

The other thing about this team is that they have a lot of fun, which is fun to watch. 

Thanks to my delay in publishing this, GSW has now gone to win the championship four games vs one loss. KD was the unanimous selection for Most Valuable Player in the series. 

The Road to Character by David Brooks

Random House 2015

Chapter four is about Dorothy Day who is explained in terms of the "Dostoyevskan" vs the "Tolstoyan". This must require a familiarity with these authors that goes beyond The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina -- the only novels I've read recently -- because this makes no sense to me. 

While there is something of Levin to Day -- her determined seeking after some greater truth and more supportive life -- I would just stick with a comparison with the Karamazov boys. She seems to be a curious mix of Dmitri and Alyosha. But mostly Dmitri. She is what Dmitri dreams of becoming while locked up at the end of the novel. And just as he doubts his ability to really change his life, Day never really seems to find the peace she keeps seeking. Ivan would tear her to pieces... and this despite her being familiar with his Grand Inquisitor.

What she actually reminds me of, even more than a Karamazov, is a heroin addict. She is always in need of support even as that support grows less effective. Even if she switched to methadone, and became a determined methadonian, she would need occasionally to add some real heroin to the mix. 

What I can't see is her putting herself in the hands of an Elder. Her's seems to have been a very self-willed life of "obedience, servitude, and self-surrender" and sacrifice. I'm self-willed, too, but I'm not trying to turn my life over to God. 


Yesterday I worked the Sikh Parade and Festival here. Aside from the distinctive dress, it was similar to many other events we work, with lots of food generating lots of (mostly compost) waste. By chance, it was a cold and windy day and, after we had secured our eco-station trash boxes to trees to prevent them blowing away, we were informed that wasn't allowed. So rather than doing my usual roving sorting of a bunch of busy stations, I was stuck at one station (that looked to be the busiest) as I was both monitoring the station and preventing it from blowing away. We had to have a person at each un-secured station -- which meant there weren't enough people to do roving sorting in other areas, and those stations (the ones I had put up, as it happens) got completely trashed.

But why this is going here is that unlike Dorothy Day, I realized while standing at my station for most of the day, correcting the sorting mistakes of the crowd, I do what I do because of the WORK not because of the people. 

I would say she was motivated by her own need to help others, rather than their need. This works well for both parties as the people being "helped" often have no interest in changing, which means the "helpers" will never run out of people to enable, I mean "help."

But let's say I'm wrong about that. Maybe God really loves these people whose lives he has fucked up and God, the helper, and the helpee (?) all benefit from these good works. My motivation is quite different. There are two different ways of looking (justifying) what I do, but neither of them has anything to do with people exactly.

My goal when I work an event is to divert as much waste from the landfill as possible. (Also, to keep the event working smoothly, which means no over-flowing trash containers.) If I ever thought you could educate people (and especially vendors) to do their own sorting, it was a long time ago. I will explain as much as I can to the public (and the vendors) because it's part of my job, and I think I'm pretty good at it. But I don't expect them to give a shit. I'm more interested in getting the compost and recycling out than in transforming the crowd into environmentalists. My job satisfaction comes from looking at well sorted dumpsters at the end of the day. That's the first aspect of "the work."

Unfortunately, just as in my coding and technical writing career, I don't have complete control over the fate of my work. I've heard about the composting facilities where our dumpsters of food and paper get sent to, but I've never visited one and don't know how good of a job they really do. I don't even know for sure that all our dumpsters get sent there. And at some events I bag but don't dump the bags into the dumpsters, so, despite my bag labeling, all I can say is that I've done a super job of collecting a well sorted bag (usually of compost.) 

Just as some of my best coding and best writing was for projects I either didn't care about or that were aborted before completion, I'm still satisfied with my work when the actual diversion rate falls short of what I would have hoped for, due to circumstances. 

Of course, Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa may have felt the same way about their work.


Apotheosis
p102 Finally reading the end of the section of Dorothy Day and we're explicitly into how she, in the 1960s, was opposed both to the "bourgeois culture of commerce" and the "bohemian culture... [of] self-gratification." 

p103 Day's life... was about the surrender of self and ultimately the transcendence of self... Through The Long Loneliness and her other writings she practiced a sort of public confession... Day's confessions were theological, too. Her attempts to understand herself and humanity were really efforts to understand God.
...

p104 [Shortly before she died to Robert Coles] ...I was going to try to make a summary [of her life] for myself, write what mattered most -- but I couldn't do it. I just sat there and thought of our Lord, His visit to us all those centuries ago, and I said to myself that my great luck was to have had Him on my mind for so long in my life!

Coles wrote, "I heard the catch in her voice as she spoke, and soon her eyes were a little most, but she quickly started talking of her great love for Tolstoy..."

I need to add something here from earlier in the chapter,

p79 She protested on behalf of the working classes. But the most vital dramas of her life were going on inside. She had become an even more avid reader, especially of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (sic). 

It's hard now to recapture how seriously people took novel reading then, or at least how seriously Day and others took it -- reading important works as wisdom literature, believing that supreme artists possessed insights that could be handed down as revelation, trying to mold one's life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it.

...Day was "moved to the depths of my being" by Dostoyevsky... 

Maybe I should re-title my blog, "Wisdom Literature." Maybe the author chose to focus on the Russians (this chapter really does assume a good deal from the reader), but I'm surprised she wasn't also influenced by The Magic Mountain, though that may have been too dry and cerebral. It's Father Zossima, not Ivan or Alyosha that attracted her in The Brothers Karamazov. A quick search on "Dorothy Day" and "The Magic Mountain" doesn't reveal much.

Do Millennials (or Gen Y or even Gen X) read novels the same way we did? Since "we" was a tiny fraction of my (and previous) generations, I suspect there are still some people who do. I think fiction is a perfectly reasonable way to do philosophy and a better than average way to expose others to philosophy. And it even is educational in two directions, the author has to consider what will attract an audience. I'm surprised The Magic Mountain was as influential as it was, but it's obvious why people read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and metaphysics was the least of it. 

Neighborhood characters

There's this small, older but not elderly, woman who is almost always walking, standing, or sitting somewhere on the three blocks of the street just below my building. She's probably a couple inches shorter than she started out, and I have a morbid curiosity to see what an X-ray of her spine would look like. The reason I notice her is that she is always smoking. I'm also curious as to whether she is on the street to smoke or if smoking just gives her something to do as she roams these blocks. I'm pretty sure she lives in a building in about the middle of her range, but that's just because I most frequently see her there.

If I were the police -- and if I really cared about neighborhood policing -- I would be on good terms with her since she probably sees everything that happens on that section of street.


The second character I see much less frequently, only when I go to my second favorite pizzeria (this is not based on the quality of the pizza, neither my first nor second pizzerias have particularly good pizza). She seems to spend most of her time in this restaurant which she treats as her home. She opens and closes windows to suit herself. She makes them change what's on the TV to suit herself. She seems "personable" and knows everyone's name, but she drives me nuts and if I worked there I would poison her.

And she's both loud and chatty, which is why I've left the pizzeria and am finishing this at Starbuck's.

Next - 165. George Eliot, revisited

163. It's been a while

Previous - 162. Becoming Wise

Link to Table of Contents

Sorry to leave you hanging if you were at all interested in Becoming Wise. This pause was not planned.

Becoming Wise

p162 Western Christianity lost some of the cleansing power of mystery when it became a bedfellow with empire and later, again, in its headlock with science. I sensed a discomfort in my grandfather at his own large and active mind, a nervous reluctance to acknowledge things the Bible did not or could not explain. For they might be delivered over to science's godless certainties, and then they were lost to the faithful forever...

p163 As this century opened, physicists, cosmologists, and astronomers were no longer pushing mystery out, but welcoming it back in...

p226  Shane Claybourne claims that "spittin' image" is shorthand for "the spirit and image." I like that. But does it really work if no one remembers that's what it means?


What I'm getting in all this is that Tippett -- even more perhaps than Lamott -- sees faith as a tribal human characteristic. It's something that binds groups together, often in opposition with other groups. The Amish and Ultra Orthodox Jews and Wahabi Arab women are like the tribal peoples who wear neck-rings or lip-plates. The fashions they use to distinguish themselves from others are arbitrary -- as are all fashions. What is important is that they adhere to the tribal fashion.

The tricky part when it comes to religion is, how to you sell the fashion to the young of the tribe without making judgements against outsiders? Can you say, "This is completely meaningless and stupid but it's this thing we do"?

And beyond that, can you say, Our religion and our God is this wonderful thing we've made up and we're better for believing it, but, you know, don't try to peek behind the curtains?


And she never does even touch on the problem of evil. To be fair, the kind of faith described in the previous paragraph doesn't require confronting that problem. Religion is simply one of the ways we deal with the evil we run into. If your God is pretend you can sidestep so many tiresome meta-ethical problems. 

She does talk very briefly about people who were recent victims of evil, secular martyrs. (Secular in that they didn't suffer and die for their faith, exactly.) Still, I don't think -- in a book like this -- you can just pass over evil without comment. 

Dostoevsky was not arguing for a pretend God, so he, through Ivan Karamazov, spent a great deal of time talking about evil. But did he come up with a neat explanation or justification? Didn't he just leave it at mystery? Both Dostoevsky and Tippett I think hope the problem will go away when people get in touch with their inner vulnerability. To which Michel Foucault says, "Ha!" Or to stick to The Brothers Karamazov, Pavel, de Sade's stand-in (or the straw-man representing de Sade), says, "Ha!" 

Martha Grimes mysteries

Here's something I can't explain, when I put back the books on my "featured fiction" shelf, there wasn't room for them all. I had to pick a title to remove and noticed a Richard Jury mystery, The Lamorna Wink that I didn't remember. I'm reading it now and I really don't think I've read it before. I'm around a third into it and so far Jury has not really been in it, it's all about Melrose Plant. 

In every Jury mystery Grimes has to visit her characters in Northants and in London, and we just wrapped our short visit to London where everyone, including Cyril the cat, are mostly just waiting for Jury to reappear. 

I'm not complaining, I was wondering when we would see Cyril, and it was nice to finally get some crucial backstory on Melrose. There's a murder and a disappeared person and we still haven't a clue what Jury is doing in Ireland. All that is fine, I'm reading slowly and just enjoying going where Grimes wants to take me. 
 

Photo update

Time passes. Here's how Salesforce Tower has progressed,

Before.

Now.

And here's how the work on the Van Ness BRT is coming along. The median is entirely removed and paved over except where the few trees are being preserved. It looks pretty silly,

Before.

Now.

The Road to Character by David Brooks

I'm still not sure how best to deal with this book. This is why I have not been posting for a while now. I want to build up a backlog so I can post regularly once I start up again, but wasn't sure how much detail I wanted to get into. 

This book is building up and cross-pollinating in a way that I'm not even sure is conscious to the author. Either he is being very stealthy about bringing up some interesting theological concepts, or he is accidentally bumping into things that I see connections between but he doesn't. The smart thing would be to wait until I've read it all and then go back and blog as I make a second pass through the material... so that's off the table.

I'm going to go ahead and post what I have as I complete my first pass with the understanding that I will be coming back to some of this later. My other problem is that Christian minutia relating to Augustine and Jansen (that I have so little interest in parsing) seems to be as central to this as are the more interesting (to me) religious ideas of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. And if I can paraphrase Clausewitz, this book could be viewed as The Magic Mountain's "regieren" by other means. And with Brooks arguing Naphtha's position. 

Again, I can't tell how conscious the author is of all this. I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky would be appalled by some of the people presented as exemplars. Though this would be less true of Naphtha. (I'm almost at the end now and am even more puzzled by Brooks's actual position. Either he's oblivious or using misdirection to prevent us from seeing what he's actually arguing for.)

In any event, I can promise you a return of the Port Royal gang, or at least some of their core ideas, yet another questioning of the secular, bourgeois world order, another pass at George Eliot, and some great stuff about Montaigne -- who keeps popping up, or rather who has occasionally shouted something or other from off-stage, but now can finally take a bow.

Next - 164. The Road to Character