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.

*

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.

Every individual soul is the size of everything that exists. But different everythings have different sizes, densities, and textures and are held together by different logics.

Let’s define reality as that transcendent everything that contains all possible everythings. 

This transcendent reality has the dreadful habit of surprising souls with new existences that defy the limits of everything and demand re-sizing, re-densifying, re-texturing and re-thinking everything just when everything seems known and under control.

*

Reality is chaos, but this not the chaos of non-order. 

Transcendent reality is a chaos of too many orders. 

“Too many” means too many orders for any finite everything to understand simultaneously. 

Even the greatest human soul is small, and requires intelligent selection and connection of orders to develop an everything capable of functioning among everythings.

We are used to thinking of beliefs as biased. And usually we see the greatest sources of bias coming from unconscious psychological processes or from the willful refusal to admit what we know in our hearts or in our minds.

However, it is not only conclusions that are biased. In fact, I would bet that most bias is rooted in other places. An incomplete list:

1. Categorization schemas that define identity and impute agency.
2. Relevance criteria that systematically focus attention on some empirical data while neglecting other data.
3. Normative logics that invest various phenomena with moral meaning.
4. Epistemic methods for producing what ought to be regarded as universal and binding truths.

Until we grasp these dynamics and stop behaving as if we have settled matters when we have used our own subjective categories, relevance criteria, normative logics and epistemic methods to come to objective conclusions whose self-evident truth is a litmus test for justice — we remain illiberal and are unfit for intellectual and political leadership in liberal-democratic institutions.

*

Arguments based on unconscious psychological bias are as effective and impossible to argue against as arguments based on insidious demonic influences.

*

Liberalism is the most radical practice of the golden rule. It recognizes that what we would have done unto ourselves is respect for our sense of reality — our own finite piece of infinite knowledge of the world — our own personal everything amidst myriad everythings. It recognizes that our most reliable source of the infinite beyondness is the alternative everything of our neighbors. Infinite beyondness induces dread.

*

What we hate in our neighbor is God’s own inherent dread.

Good is understanding that the two highest commandments — love god with your entirety and love your neighbor as yourself — are as discrete and inseparable as the persons of the trinity.

Evil justifies itself by systematically interpreting dread as detection of evil, and the suppression of dread as righteousness.

*

Hell is the confusion of dread and evil.
Hell is the belief that hell is other people.

Several attempts at the same aphorism:

• The narrower an equality gap, the more it galls.
• When it comes to equality, petty discrepancies are more dangerous than gross ones.
• A gas tank full of fumes explodes more violently than one freshly filled. As we approach actual fairness, the remaining unfairness grows more volatile. 

I read this idea somewhere recently, but I can’t recall where. 

The best comedians sacrifice their own dignity to redeem the dignity of others. 

Interview, observation, co-creation & demonstration: the air, earth, fire & water of design research techniques.

It is important to learn where you can and cannot make promises. 

Not only does this help you avoid conflict and alienation, it draws you a map of the public and private regions of your soul. 

The last month has been filled with broken promises of many kinds — explicit and implicit, asserted and implied, formal and informal, word and spirit. I can list at least a half-dozen major examples, and probably a dozen more minor ones. 

*

I am going to be stingier is accepting promises — and in making them. Not all people are worthy of exchanging promises. I can no longer default to trust. I must learn the art of being cheerful about being let down by dishonorable majority. 

*

Wherever you have failed to make your word good, your word is worthless. 

“Form of oath. — ‘If I am now lying I am no longer a decent human being and anyone may tell me so to my face.’ — I recommend this form of oath in place of the judicial oath with its customary invocation of God: it is stronger. Even the pious person has no reason to oppose it: for as soon as the sanction of the oath hitherto in use begins to be applied vainly, the pious person must give ear to his catechism, which prescribes ‘thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!'”

Commitments are predictions we work to make true.

*

A futurist who fails to say true things about the future lacks skill. 

A promiser who fails to say true things about the future lacks integrity. 

Reason is always logical, but logic is not always reasonable. 

Whatever is reasonable is always arguable, but not every argument is reasonable; and therefore arguments alone are not sufficient to distinguish reason from unreason. 

Reason transcends argument. Reason knows it is completed only by what always stands beyond the limits of intelligibility. 

*

To the degree an argument is untested, that argument remains arguable.

To the degree an argument is unaware of the tests that can invalidate it, that argument is naive.

To the degree an argument is unconcerned about tests that can invalidate it, that argument is complacent. 

To the degree an argument is hostile to tests that can invalidate it, that argument is ideological. 

To the degree an argument does not conceive tests that can invalidate it, that argument is blind. 

To the degree an argument conceives the failure to conceive tests that can invalidate it as nonexistence of such tests, that argument is blind to blindness.

To the degree an argument confuses mere arguability with truth, that argument is unreasonable. 

*

Among my unpopular convictions is this one: Religion is essentially reasonable. Ideologies built with logical arguments that reject the cornerstone of reason are not religions; they are fundamentalisms.

Fundamentalism is the dead opposite of religion.

*

A universal scientific method moved by awareness of argumentative limits and of reason’s permanent dependence on mind-transcending realities — an active desire to submit one’s arguments to the judgment of what stands invisibly beyond mind — and consequent mistrust of self-evident certainty — is pious. 

I don’t know if this will hold up or not, but this table describes my current interpretation of post-, neo-, anti- or a non-:

This approach might be even more useful for analyzing relationships between positions than for naming them. Here’s a first crack at naming the relationships:

Art is a thing from an everything — an emissary part from an implied whole. It might be a magical thing that seems to belong to an unknown everything, promising there is more to reality than we have known. Or it maybe an expressive thing that belongs to my own unknown everything, promising I am not alone in weirdness. 

I cannot help but believe that liberalism requires a degree of toughness. Why? Because modern liberalism stands on a foundation of pluralism, and pluralism implies the permanent presence of incommensurable beliefs and radical conflict. Knowing how to represent one’s own positions, while maintaining respect and goodwill, where parties disagree on what the disagreement is and methods for resolving disagreements are themselves contested — in other words, the skills of agonism — this is basic liberal competence. 

People who storm about demanding a public sphere so gentle it favors their kind of delicate development and eventual full flourishing are not liberal. 

*

In a liberal world, one cannot legitimately be offended by the raising of controversial questions — but perhaps we ought to be offended by refusal to participate in their asking. 

“OK, but who decides that?”: this is the liberal question.

Society should be just? Ok, but who decides what justice is? All people should be given an equal chance to flourish? Ok, who decides what equality is? People should be free within reasonable limits. Ok, but… People’s basic rights  should be respected. Ok, but… Etc.

In the realm of liberalism, where assertions of principle are followed by the liberal “ok, but” questions are rarely answered; they are hammered out with the crucial but possible impossible goal of eventual agreement.

(Having goals is more important than achieving them.)

When conducting design research in a team context we uncover general truths about groups of people, but in the process we uncover profound specific truths about our fellow researchers. 

*

To know someone deeply, reflect with that person on the thoughts and behaviors of other people.

*

Maybe this provides us one charitable explanation of the appeal of gossip?: of all conversational genres, gossip gives us the most intimate glimpse into one another’s souls.

At Babel the dust and gravel stands erect, each fragment firm on its foundation, proudly piercing its own low heaven.