What stood out to me most after two viewings of Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt is how unprepared the world was to think about the moral phenomenon of Nazism. It simply lacked the conceptual resources to think about what happened.

Whenever we lack conceptual resources to think through a problem, the tendency is to think them out with the conceptual resources we do have, distorting or nullifying ill-fitting data the best we can –gently if possible, aggressively if necessary.

Hannah Arendt, being a persistent and insistent source of ill-fitting data, became an object of offense to those who remained committed to old conceptions of evil.

Aggravating the problem is the subject itself: evil. The question of evil is bound up with our most fundamental understandings of the world: the good self with the good ally and the evil enemy. Hannah Arendt showed how attitudes that many of us celebrate as everyday virtues, under certain circumstances can be complicit in evil of the grandest scale. It seems counter-intuitive, and out of scale — almost a butterfly-effect in morality.

But it might be the invisible corollary of “banality of evil” that really gets under our skin. If evil is at least partly banal, what does this imply about goodness? What is required to be good in a milieu that has gone evil?

And then there is the issue of what “going evil” is. I am convinced that we still do not grasp what that is. I accept Arendt’s view that banal evil is akin to empathic failure — a sort of willful autism — a practical solipsism that wants “the mind to be its own place” and systematically fails to grasp anything of the world that is not a factual arti-fact of their own minds. Evil and ideology are complementary, if not identical.

According to Arendt’s understanding, morality is not a matter of good ideology versus bad ideology — it is a matter of thought versus ideology.

But for many people, and perhaps the majority of people passionately committed to a Good that stands in opposition to Evil, good ideologies are goodness itself. Such people celebrate “faith” of willful and uncompromising adherence to beliefs (and the conceptual repertoire that makes these beliefs intuitive and self-evident), despite evidence and in defiance of counterarguments. Whoever refuses to take sides in these ideological battles is a relativist, an even more insidious enemy of truth than a straightforward liar. And who can tell them other than what they know, and what they know how to know? This requires an inconceivable kind of goodness, the very thing ideologues find most intolerable.

“The varieties of dehumanization. — To strip a person of humanity, either deify or diabolize that person. It does not matter which. Both are equally effective. Nobody owes a god or devil justice.”

The problem with abstraction is not abstractness per se.

The problem is with staleness of abstraction. Staleness increases with each degree of remove from concrete reality, as we make abstractions from abstractions: Abstractions of abstractions of abstractions.  are stale and lifelessly irrelevant.

Stale abstractions feel “abstract”. Fresh abstractions are indistinguishable from reality itself.

Fresh abstractions are drawn from lived experience with concrete realities.

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When we try to use our imaginations and ingenuity to come up with new ideas about realities we know second-hand at best, our thoughts are bound imperceptibly by what people from the past viewed as relevant, conceptualized for intelligibility and outfitted with communicability. This is why people in different places have the same ideas over and over again. They build their ideas from the same limited set of conceptual blocks.

For new thoughts, abstract from the concrete.

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Wittgenstein (slightly out of context): “Back to the rough ground!”

Nietzsche (entirely in context): “When a poet is not in love with reality his muse will consequently not be reality, and she will then bear him hollow-eyed and fragile-limbed children.”

Latest diagrams for my art pamphlet The 10,000 Everythings, to be printed later this year.

Scientific evidence can (and often has been) a bludgeon used to beat down dissenters and coerce colleagues to adopt true facts.

But science also can (and ought to be) an olive branch to carry into conversation — a sign of respect, not only for factual truth but for our neighbor, to whom we owe explanations for the whys of our beliefs and a thorough hearing of the whys of theirs.

Science is a practice of strict and thorough respect conducted through the medium of our shared — and, like it or not, very real — material world.

I’ve heard that people who lose their sense of smell experience something like an odor of burning rubber. The scent of nothingness is noxious.

Migraines have taught me that nothingness looks like boiling chrome, not darkness.

The absence of all desire is felt as ennui.

The incapacity to love is felt as depression.

These nothingness experiences are akin to phantom limbs: a seeming something where there is nothing.

Phantom experiences are afterlives summoned by human nature’s abhorrence of vacuums.

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If it is possible to know nothing about nothingness, these phantom experiences of nothingness suggest that this ignorance is unlikely to be experienced as a lack of knowledge.

Is it possible that something in our common sense knowledge — something we all think we all know — is actually a phantom knowledge — a something standing in for an inconceivable nothing?

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Let us hope none of these experiences indicate what it is like to become nonexistent.

I’m bad with names, but that’s OK, because I’m great with pronouns.

You move from everything to everything, flashing across expanses of nothing.

Landing, standing on firm ground of particularity, blindness clings to your heels. The shadow you cast is perfect: nothing is there, and nothing is missing.

Then you leave, sealing time behind you. Wherever you have gone, once you leave, you were there all along. Only moving through your moments can preserve the befores and afters of your comings and goings. Travel, movement, comparison: this is your common sense.

As I travel, face me forward. Help me slip through the blinds and skim above or even beneath the churning chrome, turning neither toward lightness, nor toward darkness, nor around toward the entangling, dappled shade behind us.

Lead me to where doubt fails.

When someone tells me about how they’ve made peace with someone who hurt them by understanding them in a new and different way, and finding a place of forgiveness and compassion, and maybe even gratitude or love, etc. I cannot perceive it as wise or benevolent. I perceive delusion and violence.

It is impossible for me to trust a person capable of mistaking this kind of feeling for anything akin to love.

Perhaps the trauma damaged them and distorted their sense of what love is. But if that person conceived of love this way prior to their traumatic relationship, I will automatically suspect that they were the cause of the conflict. It is a serious thing to reduce another human being to how you experience and interpret them, and refusing to allow a person to be more than that to you is profoundly offensive and highly likely to bring out the very worst in a person.

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Attempting to reconcile with an estranged friend or loved one without that person’s active participation cannot succeed. The attempt will either fail to bring any sense of closure, or it will succeed in bringing closure through the opposite of reconciliation — alienation.

Reconciliation is something that happens between two people who each want the other person to exist to them in a way that transcends interpretation, as an independent, respected other.

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This does not mean that I think we must work with anyone who hurts us and reconcile with them. All I am saying is finding a place of peace toward someone who hurts us without involving them is amputating the relationship not healing it. Whatever feeling that remains behind in your heart is a phantom limb.

This year I am going to try to do a better job of communicating my communication needs.

I do not know why I am this way, but I have a painful sensitivity to communication obstructions. I do not think the sensitivity per se is unusual. The intensity of the pain probably is.

I am beginning to think it is partly caused by being an adult child of an autistic parent. It also did not help that I was transplanted at age 7 and grew up in an alien culture, and had very little parental help in figuring out how to navigate the sea of otherness into which I was dropped without flotation devices. And the condition has been intensified by the effort I have applied to learning from the best minds of history and acquiring many different ways of understanding the world. All this work has yielded what I believe are crucially important insights. It is depressing when people I consider friends treat what I have worked so hard to understand as insignificant.

Here are some examples of what I experience as painful obstructions:

• When attempts at communication — emails, messages, calls — are left unanswered.
• When I’m repeatedly interrupted when I am trying to get a complex point across.
• When someone is distracted or inattentive or changes the subject when I’m trying to discuss something important.
• In issues of differing worldview, when the other person refuses to cooperate dialogically to establish mutual understanding prior to debating individual points of fact.
• When the other person uses ad hominem arguments to invalidate my perspectives on the basis of how they’ve decided to categorize me. This includes the category “privileged”.
• When conversations I’ve indicated are important to me are repeatedly postponed, dropped or forgotten.
• When I am not given the benefit of the doubt that what I am trying to convey is at least partially-new and worth learning, and instead approaching the material as probably already known or not worth knowing.
• When others make gestures intended to deflate my over-inflated sense of self-importance or undermine my faith in the importance of the kinds of knowledge I pursue. This especially includes delivering destructive cynicism in the guise of humor.

These behaviors are not in themselves unacceptable or immoral. From acquantances or strangers, they are normal and should be expected.

But friendship requires more than normality. Friendship means caring about the meaning and impact of one’s behavior from the point of view of the friend, even — or especially — if the significance or impact is different for you.

It is precisely in honoring the peculiar differences that respect in its truest form occurs. “Re- back; “-spect” look. A friend is someone who believes that his friend looks back at him and sees something, knows something and feels something different and important from what he sees.

It is precisely when a friend seems to make little or no sense that a person’s faithfulness to friendship activates. Where you can appeal to this faith, there is friendship. Where the appeal cannot be made, the limits of friendship have been crossed.

To be a friend is to be able to make an appeal on any of these points knowing that the appeal will be taken seriously. This does no mean the appeal is automatically accepted at face value and obeyed. This would be destructive. It only means the appeal is treated as valid and important and deserving serious attention. Such appeals cannot be ignored, dismissed, explained away or deferred indefinitely.

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This year I am going to do a combination of several things to try to get some peace in the area of communication:

1. Set the context for any especially non-casual conversations, to increase the odds that it will be productive.
2. Try to explain myself and my communication needs to people I consider actual or potential friends, to see how far the appeal to friendship is effective with them. Sharing this article might be a start.
3. Getting realistic about who can and will be a friend, and who ought to be regarded more as a friendly acquaintance, or as an adversary. I need this clarity.

And, of course, I will continue to monitor myself and try to do these things I’ve listed to others as little as possible and to catch myself as quickly as possible when I do do them. If I do any of them to you, and you are my friend, you can make an appeal, and I will make every effort to change.

And even more importantly, if I am your friend and I do things that bother you — especially things that make no sense to me — help me understand and adjust.

Or failing that, let’s accept non-friendship. Isn’t that better than falseness?

I wandered into a new age shop in Little Five Points. As I examined cool polished stones with miraculous powers to heal and stimulate creative powers, I overheard a conversation behind me. A young female voice explained how each person must choose either either love or fear. I’d heard this idea before, and there seems to be truth in it. But I wondered if love and fear are really separable like that. Can an “or” be set between them, so that we can take one and leave the other? It seems to me that in the realm of lived reality love and fear come together, and that only imagined abstractions can be loved purely or feared purely.

If an individual were able to keep a diary from infancy to old age, that diary would contain truths of many kinds. If a reader wished to understand the text, each stage of development would require a different mode of interpretation. Making coherent sense of the diarist’s life as a whole would require at least one more interpretation, if not a dozen.

The same is true of a people chronicling its existence, generation upon generation, over the course of millennia.

To impose one interpretive mode upon the entirety of the record would lead to major errors. One might misread the earliest dreamworld experiences from the perspective of relative maturity — or one might read mature reflections on a life of experience (that spans multiple interpretive epochs) from the perspective of a small child.

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I do consider myself a Christian — but one who believes that the truths in the Bible and the many traditions to which the Bible belongs are as profoundly heterogeneous as they are profound. The effort to understand what is said through the Bible requires the discovery of many modes of interpretation and ways of understanding, each able to say truth other modes cannot. The truths revealed through this process of pursuit are written and overwritten in layers across a perpetually transfiguring world — a divine palimpsest.