Why Americans Hate Politicians (And Why We Can’t Live Without Them)

“We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.” – Frank Hubbard

“Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.” – Saul Bellow

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

“Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.” – W.C. Fields

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“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” – Plato

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Plato seeded the Western political tradition that treats political action as a necessary evil. After seeing his mentor, Socrates, sentenced to death for revealing his fellow citizens’ ignorance, Plato founded the Academy as a refuge from the hostile, anti-philosophical public. To Socrates and to those before him, political engagement was the highest human activity, enabled by the material surplus that granted freedom from striving for sustenance. From Plato onwards, politics became a subordinate realm to academia, itself a way of organizing society such that philosophers could escape the necessity of politics, experience truth, and find intellectual fulfillment.

In modern America, we have instead subordinated the political to the economic, with the consequence that many of our brightest minds find more attraction in investment banking than in politics. Our accepted measure of success is no longer areté, Greek “prowess,” by which one became worthy of public remembrance, but accumulated wealth, the monetary value assigned to your actions by market forces. Indeed, though we may each consider ourselves as beholden to non-economic values, we consider other people’s finances as distinctly separate from and superior to public considerations. So-called “social issues,” like same-sex marriage, religion in schools, medical marijuana, and physician assisted suicide are considered valid political questions, because supposedly who one loves, which god (if any) one worships, which pain relievers one uses, and one’s very continued existence are matters on which society ought have a say. How one disposes of an amassed fortune, on the other hand, is a largely secretive affair, even among otherwise public figures, as Romney’s ongoing tax return saga attests. At the same time, we view government as essentially a steward of the economy, with personal real income growth the best predictor of presidential vote tallies and highly correlated with presidential approval ratings.

The nexus of the cult of wealth and its emancipation from political action forces politicians to adopt a strange double life. They are private, economic individuals, judged largely on their professional success. We tend to elect disproportionately wealthy politicians not only because they have more time and resources for campaigning than other candidates, but also because we attach implicit respect to the accumulation of wealth over the course of a professional career. We relate to, partially envy, and understand the private, quiet figure cut by the economic side of the politician. At the same time, however, we elect our representatives into institutions that are designed with Athenian-style prowess in mind, to speak and persuade and act in a public. What it takes to govern is different than what it takes to earn money: government is a luxury, money-making is essential for survival. Governance is noisy, messy, and unpredictable. In contrast to the economic laws of animal necessity, the political laws of spontaneity embody and lay bare the very essence of humanity.

A person can stand in one of three relations to a democratic system: an agent of action, a voter for action, and an observer of action. The entire voting population falls into the second category, and does not often engage in politics in the proper sense of persuasion in a public forum. Instead, this second category elects from amongst its own willing members agents of government who act as the sole actors the political system, debating, issuing, enforcing, revising, and repealing laws. We simultaneously respect and detest these individuals’ uncommon tenacity. We hold them to the standards of economic behaviors in which we ourselves engage while demanding that they handle the distinctly non-economic affairs of politics. Faced with this impossible double-standard, politicians can do nothing but attempt to please their constituents as best they can by reinforcing the image of government as a primarily economic agent, by bragging about their achievements bringing money to their districts, creating local jobs, and supporting local businesses. By removing government from politics, they further the dissolution of human spontaneity and the broader acceptance of economic standards of behavior.

Thus, without government, our economic system suffers, but against government our economic impulses rebel. Perhaps the best man is never a candidate, and the dumb engage in politics, only because we prejudge political worth and acumen by definitively apolitical expectations.

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(Photo courtesy of house.gov)

Why Conservatives Are (Partially) Right About “Marriage Equality”

We are all biased by the particular experiences of our lives, experiences that shape our social roles, our self-perceptions, and our political agendas. Educated and socialized within a preexisting human context, we are at best only partly in control of our underlying beliefs. It should thus come as no surprise that I, studying at a notoriously leftist college preaching above all equality of condition, and taking for granted equality before the law, should favor the legal recognition of same-sex marriages.

We are not, however, automatons, and our perceptions of one another are as limited as our perceptions of truth. Presuming others’ motives risks fundamentally misjudging their characters. To collapse pro- and anti-marriage equality advocates into the broader categories of “liberal” and “conservative” is to devalue the subtlety of human thought and action. While we cannot all express it, we do in fact share a common humanity, a common perspective, insofar as our modes of experiencing and shaping the world remain much the same across space and generations. I therefore urge against this bifurcation, this belief in inherent difference based on political categories, which, in truth, reflect only a fundamental tension evident in all of our lives.

The push for “marriage equality” is misnamed, for true and universal equality of marriage rights would require the abolition of all institutions that govern marriages, both social and legal. Efforts to legalize same-sex marriage generally do not recognize the legitimation of polygamy or of repeated divorce. Rather, they denounce these practices as aberrations, which disgrace and de-sanctify marriage, in an attempt to justify the inclusion of same-sex marriage within the existing legal and social institutions of marriage. Their mission is not to destroy the “sanctity of marriage” as such, but rather to revise popular and legal conceptions of “sanctity” such that it no longer excludes same-sex couples but continues to exclude other forms of relationships. In other words, the movement towards legitimating same-sex marriage is not an effort to emancipate socio-legal institutions from intimate relationships, but rather an effort to emancipate marriage from sexual orientation.

Such emancipation challenges the institutional norms that provide reference points by which we constitute and through which we express our identities. The relation of a powerful institution to a particular behavior or characteristic provides such a reference point, as, for example, the denial of same-sex marriage both draws on and reinforces the naturalization of the nuclear, heterosexual family. Thus, members of nuclear families are described as such in part due to the powerful influence of the heterosexual marriage norm, and also can point to this norm to legitimize their particular familial structure and to firmly ground their social identities. As these reference points are eroded, either by elimination or by evolution, so too must social identities shift and change. The expansion of marriage rights is thus more than the extension of certain social privileges to a previously excluded group; it is also a direct challenge to the entrenched self-perceptions of an entire section of society raised with and judged by the standards of heterosexual marriage norms.

All emancipation of choice from institutional judgment similarly challenges traditional identity constructs, and the legitimate conservative fear is that the ultimate emancipation of institutions from all personal choices will eliminate all universal reference points for social identity, splintering society into only so many atomistic individuals with little or no sense of membership in, or responsibility to, a larger community. Common values and beliefs constitute the public space through which we relate to one another; social institutions are the permanent fabric against which our individual accomplishments are stenciled out. Without these permanent structures, the achievements of any one individual are as mortal as their creator, and each successive generation must start from scratch with the menial labor needed for mere survival. With a public space, we can transmit progress – in science, capital, or thought – across time and space. As the technological interconnectedness of humankind increasingly globalizes both our highest and our lowest potentialities, such communal bonds appear increasingly necessary at least to preserve our existence as a species, and at best to attain a higher plane of existence and a better life for each individual.

The mistake of modern conservatives has been their reactionary and populist rhetoric, playing on fears of the absolute destruction of traditional social roles without appreciating the limits and humility of the actual threat. What we today call “liberals” in America are timid relative to their name: they do not seek to liberate anyone from socio-legal institutions, but rather to include in, and therefore subordinate to those institutions, ever larger elements of humanity. At the theoretical conclusion of modern liberalism is the ultimate subordination of all humans to an ideal institution of humanity, the ultimate reference point being the ultimate vision of what a human is and ought be. The conservative can rightly object that this universalism in turn subordinates the human spirit and, totalizing in its vision, is antithetical to the very freedom and equality it seeks to promote. But instead of engaging emancipation on this ground, instead of reasserting the predominant importance of social institutions, modern conservatives turn to the state to defend traditional social roles by means of its monopoly on the use of force, all while imposing a counter vision of the ideal human, especially that of the religious conservative, as one inherently worthy of institutionalized respect. That is, modern conservatism seeks to use political and legal means to enforce societal expectations. This contradicts their populist-libertarian message. There is therefore no self-consistent conservative ideology in the American political mainstream. Instead, we have conflict between liberals (ironically) seeking gradually to delimit institutional power and conservatives (ironically) seeking its expansion, the former totalizing humans as such, the latter totalizing humans as they are seen to exist in the here and now.

At the end of the liberal ideology, however, there exists still room for pluralistic identities. For when the state is delimited, and its use of force confined merely to preventing systemic and societal violence, such questions of identity cease to be political in nature and instead become social, and, in turn, the lines between the two become blurred. The state ceases to be a totalitarian force in waiting and increasingly becomes an impartial referee between social forces, setting the terms of the debate, but having nothing to do with the content. This I find preferable to the enforcement, potentially violent, of a single vision of humanity, and therefore I advise that the emancipation of the law from social identities continue apace, as in the extension of same-sex marriage rights. To be self-consistent, and, indeed, to avoid the ultimate conclusion of a totalitarian regime, conservative movements ought shift their attentions from the legal to the social sphere, arguing not for the state to insert itself into the private affairs of citizens, but convincing citizens that they ought care and identify by a particular set of socially valuable, traditional norms. This apolitical, social conservatism would, true to its name, preach incrementalism, not institutional coercion; caution, not fear. In this way can conservatism engage modern issues at the core, not merely on their surface, and avoid its internal contradiction in ends.

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(Photo courtesy of thinkprogress.org)

“America the Philosophical” Essay Review

“Ye shall fight your own wars, wage your own battles, and for your own thoughts! And when your thought be conquered, your honesty shall shout victory over it!” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Thanks to my grandpa for providing this interesting link to an article by Ursinus College Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Carlin Romano, adapted from his new book, America the Philosophical. According to Professor Romano, the United States represents the pinnacle of philosophical culture in the contemporary world.

In my view, philosophy is fundamentally the pursuit of wisdom. Romano can of course claim that I’m just putting off the challenge of defining philosophy by leaving murky the meaning of “wisdom;” but here “wisdom” is deliberately nebulous, dialectically determined, and decisively messy. The practice of philosophy is itself all of these things, as indeed it must with such an obscure object of study. But the question, “What is philosophy?” cannot be answered by defining its aim any more than the question, “What is baseball?” can be answered by defining a “run scored.” The function of a goal is to inspire action, with the nature of the action the chief characteristic of the activity; as baseball can be played only by knowing the mechanism by which a run is scored, without precisely defining a “run” (indeed, a run is defined entirely by its scoring mechanism, and a baseball game is entirely the conduct of that mechanism), so too is philosophy conducted without precisely defining wisdom. The emphasis here is not on wisdom per se, but on its pursuit, and in particular on the manner in which this pursuit is conducted – with careful argument, rigorous presentation of facts, and the intellectual honesty to admit it and move on when one is clearly mistaken. Philosophy is not wisdom, but the pursuit of wisdom, just as baseball is not runs, but the pursuit of runs. Without care, one may say much but advance little; without rigor, one may advance much but in the wrong direction; without honesty, one mistake spells the end of the productive enterprise. Thus, I repeat: philosophy is the pursuit of wisdom.

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Working from this perspective, I believe that Romano’s thesis is prima facie false. Romano, however, disagrees, and pushes three main propositions in support of “America the Philosophical”:

1) America is at the forefront of academic philosophy.

2) The conventional process of justification is a “metaphorical scam of moribund yet still breathing philosophy,” better replaced by “the view of Habermas, Germany’s foremost philosopher, that truth issues only from deliberation conducted under maximum conditions of openness and freedom, or the view of Rorty, America’s most important recent philosopher, that better conceptual vocabularies rather than firmer truths should be our aim.”

3) American culture fulfills this philosophical vision better than any other culture in the world.

We can see immediately that the first line of argument stands rather independent of the latter two, and it is admittedly difficult to refute. Despite our difficulties with primary and secondary education (more on education reform in future posts), US higher education, and especially its research institutions, stand at the forefront of academia. One professor recently advised me that fluency in a foreign language was unnecessary in academic philosophy because almost all major philosophical publications are now in English.

As the latter two premises are fundamentally interwoven insofar as they advance and then claim the fulfillment of the same philosophical paradigm, I will address them together.

Romano believes that America should be judged by a new, modern standard of philosophy that includes “the openness of its dialogue, the quantity of its arguments, the diversity of its viewpoints, the cockiness with which its citizens express their opinions, the vastness of its First Amendment freedoms, the intensity of its hunt for evidence and information, the widespread rejection of truths imposed by authority or tradition alone, the resistance to false claims of justification and legitimacy, [and] the embrace of Web communication with an alacrity that intimidates the world” – in other words, a standard that treats America’s existing public discourse as philosophical. However, mere chatter is not the same as philosophical discourse. In my view, Romano’s standard sacrifices what we most value in philosophy – its rigor, profundity, and intellectual integrity.

The “cockiness with which [Americans] express their opinions” is no more than the uncritical assertion of bias. When presented with two conflicting views, the philosophical thinker suspends judgment and investigates; the stereotypically cocky American picks one, both, or neither view, as best suit his interests, and declares that he is wise. I do not believe that most Americans fit this extreme description, but those who most vocally participate in our public discourse do not fear embracing contradictory opinions. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare!” is perhaps the most pungent example, but everything from Democrats’ “the health insurance mandate is legally a tax but not actually” to Republicans’ “Obamacare is creeping socialism, but Romneycare is good business” stinks of hopeless demagoguery. No, most Americans don’t promote these absurdities unless challenged, but polling data and expert analysis imply that enough people believe them to sway major elections.

Stereotypical Americans don’t just choose their preferred perspectives, they choose their preferred facts. The information they hunt is information that supports their preconceived notions. Our first amendment freedoms and democratic process are construed to mean that your lies are as good as my facts, your vast wealth as good as another’s vast wisdom. Though occasionally rebellious (more American Catholics favor than oppose marriage equality), those rebellions tend to be  limited relative to other industrialized societies. The authorities and traditions that we reject are generally those which are marshaled against us, and people primarily use the web and other media to communicate with people with whom they already agree (in fact, ideological echo chambers like Fox News make people less informed than following no news at all). In sum, American culture reverses honest philosophy. It uses opinions to inform the truth rather than truth to inform opinions.

Romano cannot legitimately use the work of Habermas to claim that such contradictions are merely apparent from a “musty” cultural perspective, because Habermas is not a relativist. His theory of communicative rationality asserts that standards of rationality derive from agreements (usually tacit) on norms of speech. Since negation is innate in modern languages (can you think of someone who denies the validity of the concept of “not”?), it is also innate in modern standards of rationality. Disjunction exists as a valid logical relationship within communicative rationality, so the Principle of Contradiction applies to tell us that one concept or object cannot simultaneously possess two contradictory qualities.

If, following Kant, we accept that logic is the absolute negative condition on truth, and if we take seriously the idea that philosophy is the love of knowledge of the truth, then illogical claims cannot be philosophical. At best, an illogical argument serves by its refutation to close off a faulty train of thought; when it is so, a lover of knowledge will not only concede defeat, but thank his interlocutor for correcting his mistake. Government welfare programs cannot simultaneously be inherently harmful and essential to social well-being, a tax cannot simultaneously be not a tax, and two substantively congruous laws cannot be ideological opposites. People who claim otherwise are irrational, and irrational claims are nonsense, not philosophy.

While I am sympathetic to Rorty’s view insofar as a multiplicity of categories enriches and nuances our understanding, I do not believe Rorty would have us sacrifice rigor for the sake of diversity. While approaching the world from diverse perspectives no doubt enriches the subjective experience of truth, an approach that includes two contradictory perspectives destroys it by robbing it of internal consistency. The state of American public discourse is predominantly one-directional: media outlets produce, and people consume information. Interpretations are not thought out from multiple perspectives, but dictated by external thinkers. While the web holds out some hope for multi-dimensional “crowd sourcing” (blogs like this are surely one of Romano’s examples of a rich public discourse), multi-lateral conversations remain relatively scarce, and the web risks devolving into the same kinds of echo chambers as cable news. Since people can consume whatever online content they want, and since people tend to consume content that matches their preconceived notions, it seems plausible that our “diverse opinions” will remain largely segregated, with rich philosophical discourse continuing only at the relatively small margins of society.

I moreover doubt that American culture actually does broaden the conceptual vocabularies that Rorty would have us seek. Reading comprehension, primarily a test of the ability to conceptualize complex patters, is at a 20-year low among young adults. Media coverage of major events speaks in convenient binaries and favors sensationalism over facts. The Wall Street Journal is written to an eleventh grade reading level, higher than To Kill a Mockingbird, which comes in at 6.0, but substantially lower than the Declaration of Independence (15.1), the Constitution (17.8), and the Federalist Papers (17.1). The average American reads at approximately the level expected of an eight-grader, putting us in 14th place out of the 34 rich countries in the OECD.

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Ultimately, Romano seems to interpret as philosophical a more general distrust of authority, and as cleverly intellectual a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. He misses the mark when he refashions philosophical culture as the mere presence of strong, diverse opinions, and again when he idealizes American culture beyond the support of empirical fact. This, indeed, might be his confusing philosophical enquiry with political practice, only the latter of which actually took place in the agora. Insofar as American culture is different than other societies’, it can certainly be said to be superlative somehow. Insofar as we have many philosophers, and exchange many ideas, one may even assert that America is broadly “philosophical.” And I will even grant that Romano might successfully defend a somewhat weaker, more tenable claim: that America is uniquely conducive to philosophy, although its full potential remains unrealized. To claim that America is the most philosophical country in history, however, is frankly a disservice to the intellectual integrity of philosophy itself.

A public forum is not a philosophical just because it is loud. Sometimes noise really is just noise.

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(Photo courtesy of dispatch.com)

Human Needs Pt. 1 – Filters

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” – Mark Twain

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The most mundane daily activities skate by unnoticed, but they may help us to analyze our own understanding.

Consider rolling out of bed at 6 am, cursing your alarm, and hobbling to the shower. When you turn on the tap, you doubtless don’t think about the maze of pipes running through your home, the vast supply chain between a fresh water source and your water heater, or the economics of drought and conservation. What you care about is your shower, and what it means for your day – your appearance, your smell, your feeling clean and energetic. If you run out of hot water, your likely reaction is to jump out of the cold shower, not to recite the laws of thermodynamics.

Now consider an outsider, without knowledge of showers or their purpose, who stumbles upon this contraption with no understanding of its human uses. This outsider might tear out the wall, examine the plumbing, discover the flow of water, and fiddle with various controls. It might chart, catalogue, and deconstruct the entire water supply system, and gain a perfect knowledge of how it functions; but this observer would have no understanding at all of why the system exists, what its purpose is. To the uninformed observer, the entire setup is arbitrary and meaningless, a complicated web of parts that simply is.

Our needs, therefore, both dictate what we view to be relevant and provide contextual understanding for that information. They act as mental filters, sometimes conscious, sometimes not. And they carry profound consequence.

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“Prejudice” has become a dirty word in America, connoting bigotry, often racial. But “prejudice” definitively describes just that process whereby we “pre-judge” which information is relevant to our needs. Without any pre-judgment, when all information is relevant, we are asked to confront the totality of the world at every instant, to sort and re-sort it and our understanding with every passing moment and every observation. Without prejudice in this broad sense, it is insufficient to find that the shower water is cold – one must simultaneously observe all causes and effects, the pipes, the knobs, their sensory appearance, their logical connections, their physical properties. Without some prejudice, the world just stops making sense.

In segregated America (and, sadly, in many communities both inside and outside of the United States today), race was one such piece of relevant information: it suited the needs of white Americans to maintain what they saw as a favorable status quo, and it suited the needs of activists like MLK and Malcolm X to organize resistance against racial discrimination.

Prejudice is thus broadly necessary to engage the world, but also can entrench injustice. Nobody (or at least nobody sane) would argue that it is morally good to perpetuate systemic injustice against a segment of society. However, when we consider human needs in the first-person only – “What are my goals?” – we often create prejudices that support injustice by prioritizing facts according to selfish ends. Racist policies are an extreme example, but ambitious people constantly undercut general human welfare by considering only themselves – a criminal robs a gas station; a businessman buys congressional favors; a student hides the library book the whole class needs to study. Money, prestige, and grades are the goals, and information not pertinent to attaining those goals is irrelevant to decision-making. Only by considering human needs generally – “What ought be the goals of humanity?” – can we liberate ourselves from harmful selfishness and incorporate a sense of justice into the innate psychology of understanding.

Subjugation of others for personal gain is an unfortunate theme of history up to and including the present. It is a process of understanding that gives order to the world according to a narrow perspective. Human psychology demands such order. We can therefore simultaneously achieve order and justice only by broadening our perspective. If we make the effort to consider human needs in the plural, then we can engage in a constructive and enriching conversation about what really matters in our daily affairs.

That conversation will be difficult. It will require that we move beyond the “me”-centrism of unadulterated capitalism, that we actively seek out knowledge of and empathy for other people, and that we set aside driving ambition in favor of the general good. We are seldom reminded today that the U.S. Constitution was written just as much to “promote the general welfare” as to “secure the blessings of liberty.”

No amount of reflection or travel can eliminate prejudice, but it can inform us as to the right prejudices, the right values, and the right filters for pursuing legitimate human needs.

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Part 2: Outputs, coming soon.

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(Photo courtesy of cmgww.com)

Why Blog?

“[A] political question of the first order… can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.” – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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When the ancient Greeks built city-states, they centered on a public meeting place, or agora, where the citizens (slave-owning males) would meet to discuss the affairs of the city. Indeed, it was the nature of the citizen to own slaves, not because he needed to show mastery, but because only a man so emancipated from working the land could participate in a genuine act of politics. One who must pursue basic animal sustenance cannot, at the same time, transcend selfish needs and address abstract questions of state. It is no wonder that even today, the poor vote less and engage in fewer political activities than their wealthier fellow-citizens. It’s not just that the poor have less money than the rich – they also have less time and energy. For people living from paycheck to paycheck, immediate practical concerns are just more important than long-term, abstract political ideals.

In the U.S. and other wealthy democracies, there exist relatively few people who are incapable of political participation, but the propensity for engagement remains strongly correlated with income and wealth. At the same time, our civilization has stretched far beyond the geographical confines of a small city, incentivizing political hermitage and overcrowding modern political forums. As being heard among the masses has become increasingly difficult, more and more people choose not to try; as the affairs of state become ever broader and more abstract, a class of professional politicians and bureaucrats has arisen to replace the citizen-senators of the past. Put another way, the opportunity cost of efficacious political action has risen beyond the ken of many of our citizens. They have become the political equivalent of Greek slaves – the surplus from the labor of the poor enables the political participation of the wealthy.

The “democratic ideal” presumes that every member of society can be politically efficacious. We now allow most residents of our country the rights of citizenship. However, despite the dramatic broadening of the franchise, some segment of the citizenry may always be subject to de facto alienation from the centers of power. If there exists inequality, then there exist some people who can exercise their disproportionate influence at the expense of others; if the resources of each citizen are exactly equal, then the huge number of modern citizens makes all of politics a giant collective action problem – any single person has approximately zero power and therefore approximately zero incentive to act, even though everyone benefits from an organized polity.

Perhaps a very small degree of inequality is necessary, then, to motivate political action. The Internet has become a political forum as well as an academic, social, and commercial one, and those with a close connection to it, a strong understanding of it, and a healthy respect for it can bring themselves closer to the levers of power. The human mind is at its best when it mutually influences the minds of others (a subject for a later post), and this influence I term political (as distinct from legal or governmental) action. Blogs are one way to engage in ongoing conversations about the abstract interests of a variegated society. My hope is that this blog will serve first as a forum of exchange, second as an organized record of my thoughts for later use. Combined, these two functions both constitute and enhance political action.

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(Photo courtesy of denniskam.blogspot.com)