Santayana: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

*

An estranged couple went on a road trip. Fearing a meltdown they avoided the subject of where they were going. Instead they bickered about one another’s driving. “You’re driving too fast.” “Stop riding the clutch.” “You’re making the car lurch with your heavy brake-foot.” “You keep weaving into the shoulder.” “Your music is making my head throb.”

Whenever he got control of the wheel he headed toward Las Vegas. Whenever it was her turn she headed toward Vermont.

*

America, founded at the height of the Enlightenment on the principles of the Enlightenment, puts its full faith in methods.

We’ve always been deists. We believe the clockmaker God, as witnessed to by our Founding Fathers, his philosophe-saints.

We believe in a holy trinity of systems: the scientific method, the free market and the system of government outlined in the United States Constitution. These three systems, operating by mechanical principles, automatically crank out truth, prosperity and goodness, respectively.

The mechanism can only be gummed up by the bloody subjective mess contained in human hearts.

*

In politics we don’t talk about how we want our lives to be. At our best we talk about what policies are effective or ineffective, and at our worst we talk about what policies are innately good and innately evil. And then we measure key indicators of a success none of us have reflected on in the terms that matter: the quality of our daily lives.

In education we don’t think about the kinds of people we wish to cultivate. We argue about what educational theory is most effective in practice and which ones are pure theory and wishful thinking. Or we fret that we’re teaching our children excessive obedience or/and excessive disrespect for authority. We administer standardized tests to help us measure whether we’ve achieved our end-goal, which increasingly is defined by whether the students are scoring well on standardized tests.

In commerce, we don’t ask ourselves what the success and prosperity we pursue means to our lives as we live them. We especially don’t think about the bulk of our waking hours we spend working. The trials and tribulations of work-life will be rewarded in the after-work-life: little weekends and the big retirement. Each company sets success metrics, by which it judges how it is doing. How each company does is a tributary which flows into how the nation is doing. The better things go the better things are. The numbers tell us precisely how much better or worse everything is.

*

Practical advice: If you don’t know the answer to the question “Why?” answer instead the question “What?” or “How?” Most people are more sensitive to texture than text, and will notice only that what sounded like a question was followed by what sounded like an answer

To really close the matter support your answer with quantitative measurements. Cover any question with six feet of data, and it will be as silent as if it had been put to rest.

*

If we were each to lay out and clarify what we really value and need and we were to talk in good faith about practical possibilities would we end up despising each other more than we do when we keep everything private and hidden?

*

Can a person who talks about an all-powerful invisible hand really be called a rationalist?

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” — 1 Corinthians