I had hoped to have my weekly essay ready for today, but the start of the holidays has probably pushed that off until Monday.  For today, then, some sharp observations of society from that great early 20th century wit, GK Chesterton:

Chesterton had a running criticism of HG Wells, the futurist writer who gave us The Time Machine, among many other popular titles.  This look towards the future, said Chesterton, was a bit of modern cowardice - for it brushed away the deeds of the past in favor of some abstract notion of the future.  The past, he  said, was not filled with things that were tried and found wanting; rather, it is filled with ideals and experiments of society that were tried and then cast aside before they were close to fulfillment.  Christianity is one of the greatest of these, for, as we have often heard, it's a great idea that has never been fully practiced.  We did not throw off Christendom because we tired of it, but because it was never correctly implemented.  The ideal still stands, but we have pushed it away, not for something brighter, but because we lack the stamina to try to perfect it in our societies.  We look then to an uncomplicated future because we fear we do not have the guts to perfect the better ideas of the past.  

Another observation of modern cowardice: people pat themselves on the back for throwing off the hoary superstitions of the past - whatever we as a society have proclaimed as such - but tremble at pushing away the superstitions - that is, the shallow - of the  present.  It is to those people who do so that we can attribute courage, for it is these who face public condemnation for criticizing our cherished, but short-sighted, ideas.  This strikes home immediately - for instance, we thrill to someone who might decry racism, but that is already past - it takes no courage.  But to those who decry against (and I only pick these for the notoriety) abortion or gay marriage or, on the other side, the car culture and conspicuous consumption, this is where courage is necessary - where one disagrees with the fashions of the elite.  

And on the elite - and here he hits home - many of their attempts to throw aside "hoary superstition" are only workable for those with the excess income to do so.   A millionaire actress can proudly have several children by several lovers without a hint of a marriage contract; but for the poor or working woman, this leads almost always to dysfunction, poverty and/or disaster (it is hard to believe, but this attitude of "doing your own thing" was current in 1920's aristocratic England).  This, it seems to me, is the outstanding superstition of our times: that we may pleasantly follow the elite in casting off our old traditions.  Much of this leads to the superstitions of our current age - and woe to the the "ignorant" who oppose them.  We must have, as Chesterton said, courage - and a clear sight into what is real and what is childish ego fulfillment.  There are many things to change from our past - but there are many things to preserve.  How to decide must be based on more than what the elite might want for their own immediate pleasure, or for the pleasure of forcing a pet utopia built not from the best promises of the past, but on their rubble.

On to Turkey Day, part II.  FK    
          

If readers are wondering why the blog is concerned recently with totalitarianism, it is because of the recent book already mentioned by George Roberts on natural law - by which is defined the state's relationship with the individual - and another that I am now finishing, "The Garden of Beasts," by Erick Larson.  While the former is decidedly conservative, the latter is a fascinating anecdotal history concerning the Dodd family's stay in Berlin in 1933-34, the father being a history professor surprisingly appointed as ambassador to Germany for those years.  By the time he arrived in June of 1933, Hitler had been chancellor for 6 months, and the changes brought to Germany in that time he found astonishing.  Having attended the University of Leipzig before WWI, he knew of what he spoke - that, like magic, Germans were saluting Hitler everywhere, Brownshirts ran rampant and unchecked throughout the cities, and the German people had generally become docile in the face of a rule that alarmed, immediately, all the world.  

Cal Roeker's comment on humans as occasionally intersecting vectors is the view that we might characterize as the American Way.  The Founders, in contrast to Thomas Hobbes' idea that government (codified society) is what held people back from anarchy and a "constant state of war," went instead to the more benign notion of the individual.  Given that we were all endowed by our creator with certain "goods" - and as such were essentially good in a natural sense - they saw that it was the tyranny of government more than anything else that caused harm to human society.  Thus, limited government; thus the primacy of the individual.  In this they did NOT forbid others to found communal societies; rather it was up to the individual to find his source of happiness under liberty.  In this sense, neither individualism or collectivism is necessarily the end - but rather, that the individual has an un-coerced choice to make regarding his personal obligations (beyond that of the necessary structure to insure that others could not take away that choice.)

Yes, I know I step into deep waters, and will steer away towards something both lighter and deeper still: what is the natural path for humans?  What is, as the old Chinese would say, the will of heaven?

The Tao looked to the activities of nature to determine the natural in man.  The importance of this struck me one day when one of my brothers said, "but [this certain law] is not in line with the laws of nature!"  But what laws of nature?  From the Darwinian perspective came social Darwinism, where human society should reflect the struggle for fitness that evolutionists saw in the natural world.  Late 19th century American industrialists made the identification with creating the American Rose - that is, they claimed that to make the perfect rose, the inferior roses had to be clipped away.  This notion brought us the infamous monopolies of that era, which once in place controlled prices any which way they desired.  Acting against the American tradition of limited government, but for the idea of American freedom, Teddy Roosevelt enacted laws against such monopolies (and I believe they improved the nation as we headed into the industrial age).   Thus, we saw that the after effects of naked capitalism could lead to its reverse - the lack of competition and the laws of supply and demand.  But did we then transgress the rule of nature?  By this, did we go against the will of heaven?

Coming out of the deep waters, I will rely on my own views of nature, supplanted by views from people who lived without government authority.  Rousseau, against Hobbes, viewed the primitives as people living as they should in a veritable Garden of Eden, in peace and well-being.  While we of the past several centuries could never witness people truly beyond at least some influence of civilization, we can, I think, infer from the myths of primitives a good notion of their relation with nature and other people.  As it turns out, these relationships were far more complex than one might think: some of the "gods" were bad; some animals turned into devious, although not necessarily evil, tricksters; people killed one another and men rose over women.  In this primitive mythological view, nature was not evil nor entirely good, but deceptive and slippery - what we might call "real."  But ultimately, it was filled with wonder.  If one word could be used to encapsulate the primitive concept of nature, it would be 'wonder.'

This might teach one to follow the will of heaven by opening up to wonder - which would be the power of spirit that suffuses everything, beyond the means to empirically understand it all.  But how might that govern our behavior?  How might that determine which is the best form of government?   

I see in nature, besides its ultimate magical wonder, attributes that we might attribute to both Darwin and Rousseau.  Darwin in that nature can be absolutely brutal.  Look at your cat playing with he dying mouse; look at chickens and their vicious pecking order; and don't even look at the insect world!  And yet, nature is not out to get anyone - it and its animals simply do what they are supposed to do and seldom any more.  Bears don't mount attacks against humans for dominance any more than hurricanes search for human settlements before landing.  No, they just go their own route, and with rational observation, humans can pretty much avoid the worst, at least until old age takes us.  There is in nature no more compelling order than to do what comes naturally - with those things that don't being culled by the steady demands of survival.  

This says to me that humans should, just as the Founders thought, seek out their own paths to happiness provided, as Hobbes would have it, that we don't keep others from THEIR path in the process.  This, too me, speaks of the naturalness of individual freedom and dignity, even if this freedom causes the individual to willingly give up the centrality of his individuality.   The latter is a move of spirit - and should be free from government intrusion or coercion - just as the US Constitution would have it.  

Finally - is harmony part of the will of heaven?  Yes, by definition, but what is that harmony?  For geese it would be to flock; for bears, it would be to disperse.  Which is it for humans?  Again, I side with the Founders - that the human route is to find happiness.  And if harmony for humans is seeking one's personal happiness while allowing others to do so as well, maybe we don't have to consider either individualism or collectivism in our scheme.  Maybe the lone prophet in the wilderness is as sacred as the guru in his village.  I think, at bottom, it is finding what will make one truly happy - and I believe that to be harmony of spirit.   But that is our journey, to find this out.  If we follow the golden rule, we should all be left to do so - free of Big Brother as well as the American Rose.  FK             

Talking of imposed utopias in the last blog, I recognized something that was unrealized in my book Dream Weaver.  Some three quarters of the way  through, I wrote the Chapter "Back to the Garden" about my visit to one of the few successful hippie communes, this one numbering over one thousand people in central Tennessee.  This was not an imposed utopia; the people there had the spirit and you could feel it.  Their communal lifestyle  was a result of the collective spirit, not the other way around.  It was as it should be and is among monastic and religious orders and such groups as the Amish (who give their young the option of becoming "English," as they put it).  It was, I thought at the time, what I was looking for, but I realized after a week there that I was an individualist - that is, an ordinary American who put his own life, liberty and pursuit of happiness above the group.  This, as I understood it and still do, was not a bad thing - rather, it was appropriate to the spirit that I then had, and still do.


I left the commune, and in the first paragraph of the next chapter I wrote, "There [at the commune] it had become clear that any community of place, any community that would outlast the generations, could only be obtained through the sacrifice of the individual.  Since I had learned that this was beyond me, any amount of self-reflection would have shown that my greatest reason for life on the road was a chimera.  What place was left  now?"  What was meant by "community" was exactly the communal unity, and I had learned that it was not my cup of tea.  Why then was I still on the road?  What then was I still looking for?


What was I looking for?  In the few chapters that remained, I again experienced religious communities of other stripes and again rejected them for the same reason - my individuality.  And I was right to do so.  The inner self, the spirit, was not there for the task.  And what I should have  learned - and  gradually  did - was that transformation must first come from within.  It is cliched, I know, but usually treated far too casually.   What I was looking for was still externalized by me.  It took decades after returning to normal life to fully appreciate this.  Further, it explains to myself, which is sometimes left in the dark as to the movement of its own inner spirit, why I have come to detest top-down collectivism.  It is, first and foremost, a violation of spirit - which is a direct violation of human dignity.  The ends do not only not justify the means in matters like this, but the means never reach the end.  Force cannot change the spirit in this way.  And  Marxists are wrong - the means or modes or ownership of production cannot do this alone, either.  Spirit must be brought out, not beaten into shape.  This can be done  by free reason and by example - or through the sheer brilliance of those few rare people who emanate great spirit - but never through force or trickery.  This results in a confinement of the spirit, and with it, resentment and violence.   With spirit, the means and the ends must be the same.  One cannot violate the first and achieve a greater version of the second.


A criticism of my book has been that I left a great potential - the accumulated experiences of my prolonged hitchhiking ordeal - unfinished.  This is true.  But I was unfinished at the time (and in regards to many things, still am); to make a conclusion would have been dishonest, which is also a trick, a violation of spirit.  No, we often don't know some things, and we never know everything.  And anyone who brings you to a utopia against your will, or who tricks you into believing in one, is being dishonest: he is saying he knows better than you, and in the end, knows everything.  George Orwell called that person "Big Brother."  


I could say now to "look within" for spirit, for that is what I know and think.  By it I do not mean to force one to do so; it is merely my honest statement.  But if the spirit moves you, I would also say to "look without."  In reflection, I have done this too, through my readings, through my attendance in church services and so on.  In fact, look where your spirit guides you.  If freedom and dignity is on the path, it could be the path you should take.  FK 




       

Today an essay, "Katie Says..." under Essays in the website.  FK

It happens this time of year.  Although November is probably the ugliest and most hopeless of all the months - March at least has the promise of spring - it brings with it the first cold skies, new to us in Wisconsin after half a year of humidity.  I notice this as I go to the mailbox and look above the stubble of corn, and in walks through the fields, but most of all, on Nick's Hill.  

It is not officially or even locally known as Nick's Hill, but just among we three at the house because of a fellow student of our son's who lives on it and happens to be named Nick.  It really is a ridge a few miles long that runs parallel to our road and is necessarily crossed by the state highway in its anxious need to run east-west instead of north-south, and it rises from corn and soy flat lands on both sides, making it moderately unique in the immediate area.  I have to cross it going to and from town, and it is on the return when it sometimes becomes so special.  As it gradually slopes up, one feels as if lifted by waves, and one wants to drive as fast as possible - witnessed by the fact that police are regularly posted there to catch speeders.  I usually restrain myself, because the best is yet to come on the other side, especially at dusk.  When one reaches the top, there suddenly is the setting sun, or the just-set sun illuminating the colors, the oranges and purples and reds, of the horizon, and there, to the south (left) is a great plain of marsh, hundreds of acres of cattails and reeds that bleed into vast, shallow Lake Koshkonong a distant mile or so away.  On ordinary days, the view is pleasing.  On other days it is, as the poets say, sublime.

Such it was yesterday as I drove back from the store, luxuriously cushioned by the shocks of the new car, rolling up the hill like a surfer in the zone, there at the peak to get the full effects of that clear autumn sky and colored horizon and darkening swamp and icily sparkling black water.  It was then, as it sometimes happened, that it slipped, or rather my perception was changed, from the beautiful to the sublime.  It was then, for ten or fifteen seconds, that the facts and hardness of this world became distant shadows, overcome by the sense of a greater reality that made the 'normal' so ghostly and unreal.  I wanted to make words of it, to call it "shattering beauty," but they would not suffice.  Nothing less than a transformation had occurred, where for a few brief moments something else, another entire way of living, opened.  

It then closed, as it always does, and will remain so for another week or month or whenever whatever does this decides to tease or please me again.  But the memory - not so much the feeling, but the truth of it - always remains, staying behind like the odor of bacon and coffee from a morning breakfast.  And the truth of it is: nothing short of death and pain matters; social standing, success, money and all the pleasures and gratifications they can bring fade into something immature and immaterial.  There is in this truth BEING, fulfilled as it is, needing nothing but the commonplace needs of survival to continue.  With this comes an understanding of how it was done for so many millennium, how our most ancient ancestors lived so fully with such simple lives; and also how those people dedicated to the spirit of this other world survive to this day in monastic or purposefully simple communities.  With this sense, with this presence of the other world - a world that is this, but seen in so much greater completeness - the needs of history are blown away.  With this sense, heaven is within reach, one mortal touch away.  With this sense, all but the most elemental problems of life and death are solved.  

But why aren't we given this sense all the time?  Why has it been chosen - or why have we chosen - this incomplete world that requires everything that makes us emotionally miserable?  It is with this sense that I understand those who are antiquarian - who despise the notion of "progress" as we understand it, for it is not progress towards this other world that we have, but something away from it, dependent as it is on the unfulfilled world view that spawns it.  For me, yes, I would like the world of Star Trek - and as such I will not say 'no' to our great innovations and scientific promise.  But still - in that other world, those things are at best small, and at worst, contributors to our misery.  In that other world there is complete, instant fulfillment and with it, compassion, for there is nothing to conquer or to fight.  If we could only stay there...

But we can't.  St Paul spoke often of it, of living in the spirit, and with it he was willing to suffer and die so that others might live it, too.  But most of us, like myself, are not saints.  We fall back into the world of needs and wants so quickly, with only those brief reminders that we are something more.  Why only this short time?, I ask again.  Why are we given this brief touch but rarely the full grasp?  

No, I don't resent Star Trek - that is, our progress in understanding and controlling the forces of nature, as long as this is not made the golden calf.  But this I fear: that in our desire to make this other, better world permanent, we substitute the form for substance; that is, that we enforce a communal life style before we are joined by the spirit of this greater world.  It is the spirit of this other world that makes the communal life natural and freely chosen, but without it, this sort of life quickly becomes a totalitarian nightmare.  The communal life is not meant for those of this ordinary world, and does violence to the spirit of the ordinary world.  This greater spirit - that of this other world - cannot be made.  It can be recognized and sought, but it cannot be made by the hands that make this world.  

If I could impart two things I have learned from my brief experiences, it would be exactly those two just stated.   We know how to seek this greater world - it is to seek the spirit that is behind the good.  We also know that all other goods flow from this, but the good can never be achieved from the top down.  The ends do not justify the means, for the mere implementation of this destroys the spirit that must exist to create the ends.  Our brave new world might have star ships, but never, I hope, an imposed utopia.  FK        

One of the worst punishments of my youth was Catechism, a two hour (or was it 50?) mandate every Saturday morning to be terrified by the nuns - who in those good old days were truly terrifying (and have probably led to more people from my generation leaving the Church than anything else).  But some of the lessons taught went deep.  One compared sins to nails in a board - forgiveness took away the nails, but the holes - oh yes, God could still see the holes!  Another, and the one relevant  to this discussion, was the adoration of the martyrs.  No holds were barred as the nuns went into ecstasy describing the tortures of those who had willingly died for their faith.  In that context, we were often asked how we would react if the communists took over and forced us to renounce our faith.  Would we die, boldly looking towards heaven as the atheists did unspeakable things to us, or would we take the coward's way out?  In class I recall that most, if not all, of us remained silent, but it gave us a great topic for discussion after class.  We loved describing the tortures and making up some of our own - literally child's play compared to the great sadists of our world - but everyone as far as I recall admitted that he would not die for his faith.  Why, we would say, why not go along with the idiots and go back to your normal life afterwards!
Of course, real suppression is not like that - it is relentless and pursued on many levels to eradicate what the government does not want - but the point remains: would you suffer the horrors of the body for pie in the sky, a spirit that you cannot even see, much less feel? 

I try to read as little about the Holocaust as I can for obvious reasons - such inhumanity - but it is impossible  to ignore over many years, and in that time I remember something special and, in a way, more tragic than anything else: the guilt among the survivors.  There is always survivors guilt, or so I have read, but in the death camps it was compounded, as it was meant to be.  Entire families were put together and starved and worked to death slowly but inevitably under a rule of complete contempt.  Frozen with fear and wracked with the pain of starvation, most did many selfish things to survive, even at the expense of those they were supposed to protect.  There lies the real guilt, an awful thing to contemplate.  Yet, if it is any consolation, with the same honesty I had as a child, I must admit that I would become selfish for survival myself.  It is a rare person, after all, who does not struggle against drowning, pulling others down with him, and the conditions of the camp were like slow-motion drowning.  We are, most of us, strong for this world and weak of spirit.

In the military, the troops are drilled over and over again so that they will react instinctively under conditions in which the normal person would panic.  They admit to feeling fear, too, but in fear we naturally go to a programmed response (and thus the different nature of military society).  Without training, it is to scream and run; with training, it is to scream and shoot.  But we are all afraid.

In the North Korean death camps, one of the rare escapees told of a time when the authorities were testing poison gas on the subjects - whole families, as is the gentle custom of the Kim regime.  The aggressors were shocked when the parents of little children abandoned their own welfare to try to keep the children from breathing in the lethal air.  It was futile, of course, but the officials were stunned that such "non persons" as they were designated had such human qualities.  

I would hope that I would react as the Korean parents did, and I think that I might - but I cannot be sure, and hope to never find out.  But in such cases, "pie in the sky" moves on to something more tangible.  Even though the parents probably knew that their efforts were futile -and that maybe death was better than a short, brutal life in the camps - they had to try.  They had to - and that necessity, too, is spirit, for what else could it be?  No longer a thing of children in Catechism, but of spirit moving in this world.

And that is the essence of spirit - the ability to deny the most elemental of life forces, life itself, not for sport but because - because it is right.  I could name dozens more instances of trying times - from the Russian gulag to the deck of the Titanic - and in most I'm afraid that I would fail.  Such is the power of gravity, even though many of us clearly understand that life is only a temporary condition.  Yet it is our fate - the way it has been made - that life clings to itself for no other reason than to continue.  Spirit can raise us above that - such is its power - and the martyrs, as grim as the nuns made them, are not caricatures but rather testimonies to the power of the human spirit.  It is why they say it can move mountains - and certainly can topple the fiercest regime.  

But it is so hard to stand apart from the pull of life - including in how we conduct our everyday lives.  Still, spirit is real, and faith gives us that reality, whether it is faith in a military unit, a family or a religion. Yet, how could it exist in a world based on survival of the fittest?  Sociobiology has tried to answer this, but it could never supply the answer for  the martyrdom of the saints.  And if spirit is stronger than the pull of life itself, what can deny it?  FK    

I was going to start the week with a discussion of natural law - something that is somewhat new to me (it is not used in the social sciences) and is used by people in religion, as well as medical ethics specialists, to judge what is moral and good from what is not.  However, this being Monday, I am going to wait and instead mention a somewhat old movie that I saw for the first time last night, "A Few Good Men."  

You might recall that this is the movie where Jack Nicholson, who plays the guilty, nasty-as-hell Colonel, snarls, "You can't handle the truth!"  This line is more than theatrics - it encapsulates one side of the central argument in the movie: How far should we go to protect ourselves?  And how alien must our military be from domestic society to serve as an effective force in that protective role? 

As Hollywood would have it, we should not go far at all: the accused corporal, once judged innocent of manslaughter charges, is forced to accept his dishonorable discharge from the Marines for 'actions unbecoming a US service man.'  To this he submits, saying, "it's true.  We should have done our best to protect the weak."  

Said as a general statement, this might be true; but said as a marine of another marine, it is, I believe, definitely wrong.  The nasty colonel tell us that we need them (the tough marines) "on the wall, " protecting us from the bad guys, and that to do this, they must be tougher and more relentless and fearless than the opponents.  And he is right.  To allow, in this case, a marine to continue on with his group even though he repeatedly fails physical challenges, is repeatedly late and sloppy, and later goes above his chain of command to complain of a single shot fired at Guantanamo proves that he is a liability to the group, hindering their highest ability to function as a fighting unit.  The colonel, in effect, is right about this, and the film writers wrong.  The colonel, we could say, was cowardly in not admitting his hand in the affair immediately, but he was right about the fighting force.  They require different standards.

The same can be said of the current military, which is being  forced to bow to a certain pinky-fingered etiquette now found in the political world, but that avoids the greater issue: When, if ever, is it moral to be an aggressor?  To kill?

Touching lightly on natural law, the Catholic church claims that it is right to use measured violence when one person, or one nation, is immediately threatened by another (in other words, in immediate self-defense).  As hated as Pope John-Paul was by the left, he did proclaim against the second Iraq war (W. Bush), calling it a war not of protection but of choice.  But will this suffice?  There are various military stratagems, one of which is to attack a  probable  foe before he can effectively attack you - which is the lesson of Munich.  Further, one must be ready for an attack, or to attack before being attacked, at any moment - and therefore, there is a need for a fighting force to be in place even when no high threat is currently foreseeable.   And this fighting force must be aggressive and capable of being ruthless - which would not include shielding the "weak" among them.  

By extension, one might see this readiness as a form of self-defense still covered by Vatican natural law, albeit from a strategic perspective.  I believe it is.  But the question raised by some in our civil society, a society that does not feel threatened by violence (as is the case now in America), is: shouldn't we turn the other cheek?  Even the atheists and the non-Christians among them will often use the Gospels to counter the military mentality.  Shouldn't we all just try to get alone, and love the other as ourselves?  When asked for our tunic, shouldn't we also offer our cloak?  In other words, shouldn't we simply relent to the opposition rather than use violence?

Of course, most on the left do not mean this even if they think they do.  They would fight against imposed tyranny just as they would fight the man who was raping their daughter.  And this is the clash we all have to face - and what the movie brought to the fore before descending into cliche: to what degree do we go with our ethics?  Do we compromise, as the Church as a real-world entity has done, or do we become other-worldly entities unto ourselves?  Would you, for instance, stand by while a biker gang raped your daughter? Or would you instead argue for them to stop?  Would you find a big stick and fight them?  Or would you come prepared, packing a gun, ready beforehand to protect?  And in what category would you want our military to fall - given, that is, that you would want a military at all?  I do not pose these questions as straw men, for they have been raised by the best among us for centuries.  How, in all honesty, would YOU have it?  How far, that is, do we neglect the things of this world for the other?  FK      

The self- it is almost too complex to grasp, but there are the easy things.  Today, for instance, is absolutely beautiful, the first warm and sunny and fairly windless day in quite a while.  Under such circumstances, what to do with some free time was obvious for me - take a hike in the nearby woods and fields.  It was everything I could ask for - the smell of new fallen leaves and hickory nuts and acorns and pine, the slight whiff of someone burning a brush pile, the clarity of the river that ran under the walking bridge, the surprised warnings of the blue jays - all beautiful, the perfect morning.  But others would not choose the same.  Years and years ago, my friend from college, Mike (who appears in my book Dream Weaver, which I now shamelessly plug: Amazon for about $17, and Kindle for $2.99) came up to the family home for a visit in the country.  We drank beer and played poker as usual that night, but by morning he was already bored.  What do you guys do out here?, he asked, disgusted.  Why, hike, I said.  Let's hit the mountains behind the  house - great hike where I had seen a cougar just the year before!  Nothing doing, said Mike - who continued to lounge about for another day before pressing to get out of the country and back to the action, the city.

I recall being incredulous - how could he want to go back to the noise and grime and downright claustrophobia of the city?  I have commented on that lack of imagination of his to my friends since, but criticism was not really warranted; for as much as he hated the country, I hated the city (and still do).  It was merely a choice, not made on purpose, but by some individual design.  Yes, he had been raised in the city and I in the country, but many of my neighbors left the country for the city - New York and Boston figured prominently, because that was where the action was.  And worldwide, people have been flocking to the cities in droves - sometimes for safety and simply for food, but at other times, not for these reasons at all - in fact, many live worse in the cities than in the country ( I have Caracas in mind).  Reading about this phenomena in a  journal, the author went through several rational reasons for this movement of people to the cities, but in the end he had to admit that all of them in combination still did not suffice - and he had to conclude that, like Mike, they merely wanted to be where the action was.  

This can be seen as a part of who we are, for we seldom choose outright what we enjoy - rather, it seems given to us.  This phenomena shows us something  of the intangible nature, but it is superficial.  More important is how we direct the sum total of our actions.  I spoke of the "good" yesterday, and that, I think, is our most important focus.  I believe that each viable society and familial setting bestows on us the idea of the good.  It may well entail the Viking code of spearing babies in raids, but that would not be the focus of the overall Scandinavian society from which they came.  Instead, its focus would be towards social harmony that would depend on feedback loops to restore order from certain predictable perturbations (feuds, warfare, heavy drinking).  The Vikings would stray from this "good," only to be brought back into harmony - and if they did not, their society, families, and very survival would be threatened.  That, this drive towards peace and harmony, is what can best be summarized as the "good."

And it is through our concurrence with this path towards harmony where our deepest selves are to be found.  Does one rebel against the most commonly held mechanisms to maintain harmony?  Does one strive to make them more equitable or efficacious?  Does one dump the whole business and go off into the woods to live off the grid?  Does one purposely violate them simply out of spite?

In another anecdote, my son often hung around with a kid on the margins of society, and whenever he did, something disturbing would happen, but not THAT disturbing.  He was trouble, but of a marginal kind.  His half brother, however (his family life was a mess) was, at the age of 20, already a career criminal.  It was not just that he was rebelling, but purposefully hurting people for a personal sense of power.  On another stint out of jail, he and his girlfriend were smoking crack (this in a small, almost crime-less town) when my son, Jeff, came into the room with his friend.  After several nasty exchanges, Jeff said, "So, I know resorting to morality won't get you to change your ways, but do you really  want to keep sucking the c... of the prison system?  The reply was instant: "I don't give a f..."

He knew what he was doing was not only wrong, but pointless, in that it would destroy just about any personal power that he had. He will, undoubtedly, be in jail most of his life, as he should be.  But what drives him?  Why that choice? - and unlike, say, some bullied kid in a ghetto, he had a choice.  

This, we might say, is how we find our true selves - not only through our inherited or nurtured qualities, but by our choices.  Our free will determines what we are by what we choose to constrain and what we choose to advance.  This is the point that was made about "self mastery" - not a bitter, Puritan restraint of the soul, but a mastery of impulses that leads one to the life that, under careful consideration,  we wish for.  

Maybe that bad guy feels a need for eternal punishment - it is hard to say.  But it is through our own will that we determine, on the most important issues, who we are.  We are born with both good and bad - and we make of ourselves from what we are given who we most truly are.  FK                     

What is the true self?  A huge question raised by philosophers since the beginning of written history, I know.  We find that Plato and Aristotle argued about it - the former, that the "self" is only a mirage of a perfect form found elsewhere, that is, apart from our daily consciousness; and the latter, that truth is inherent even in form - and thus a true nature can be found in this world.  But how?  And it goes further back - to the Chinese, that the "self" is often buried by society, but can rise with attention to what is "deigned by Heaven" - however that might be; to the Bhagavat Gita, where Arjuna excuses himself ( I think it was Arjuna, the archer) as only performing his duty - his nature - by participation in the killing fields of war.  Again, how would we really know what this nature is?  Aren't most of us capable of atrocities, of killing and pillage and all that stuff that our ancestors engaged in?  

To underscore this point, a friend of mine told me of a Viking taunt to a certain of their number, who they called "Olaf the Baby Lover."  His unpardonable offense was that he disliked skewering babies with his spear when sacking villages.  What a wimp!  And now - who among the Swedes and Norwegians and Danes would eagerly skewer babies?  Has their genetic code changed that much?

In a book I am reading, Conscience and Its Enemies, the author, Robert George (an avowed conservative theist and professor at Princeton) claims that the role of philosophy and of liberal arts in general is (or was) to acquaint the student with the facts of history and the thoughts of the Greats so that he might steer his own path to a self that he has chosen.  That is, that knowledge and self inquiry is to provide the student with an idea of the good, and with the self-mastery to overcome elements in himself that he does not want so that he can cultivate those possibilities that he believes will bring him to this "good."  This recognizes what history and the other social sciences underscore: that we, as individuals, are capable of many, many things.  Society and family put limits to some of our potential, while we are left to finesse the rest.  With increased self-mastery, we become capable of making of ourselves what we want to be.  And in doing so, we recognize our true nature, through the act of sustained will towards the good.  

The author continues, siting George Washington's remarks - that he came to be what he was exactly by this self-mastery; and that this attitude was the considered norm for his time.  He did not do what he wanted to do at the moment, but what he wanted to do for a lifetime - that is, to be in accord with what is "right,"

Choosing what is right is an act of free will and thus the driving part of what IS most natural in us -that which, to repeat, is determined by sustained will.  And it is through the "middle way," or golden measure of moderation - that is, in self-mastery - that we are allowed to clunk our way through random desires to find what is right.  

The trend in modernity, however - started, I think, not with Rousseau and his natural man (who is good by nature and twisted by society - but who still must determine for himself to BE good) but with Freud, who believed that society twists us to painful degrees (Society and Its Discontents) to the point where we are all at least somewhat neurotic and miserable.  The solution to this that is now taught at universities (or so says George) is to follow one's desires - that is, to throw off the mores of family and society to become what one "naturally" is.  The trouble with this, however, is obvious: our desires are infinite, varied and often contradictory.  The self, when left to follow every desire, is no self at all, but rather a raft buffeted on wide and turbulent seas.  We MUST decide which actions to allow and which to suppress if we are to have any center at all.  And to choose, we must find within our selves that which is "good" - which will be contingent to a large degree on societal influences and family upbringing.  So it is that society and family give us the footage to find the good.  We ourselves then must find the inner strength  - the will - to follow that design.

The change in modernity, then, is not to free oneself to become oneself - for there is no "oneself" without some form of inner and outer direction - but rather to free oneself of one's background - familial and societal - to follow another, and just as constrained, path to the" good."  The good, then, is being redefined, not miraculously "found" in the ashes of a broken moral code.  The question is: are these new definers of the "good" really good?  Have these new un-ordained priests of the moral code mastered their natures enough to know what is the "good" beyond their own chaotic desires?  Our author thinks not, and I tend to agree.  While some might be more inclined to skewer babies than others, we find that most can be convinced to do so through the dominant ethic - an ethic we now despise.  Do we agree with the dominant ethic now in the intellectual circles?  Is it truly better than the old in most ways?  Does it bring us more towards an inner truth of the "good"?  In concrete terms, are we a more honest, social people than before, or is there more chaos, crime and social and familial malfunction than before?  Off the top of my head, I would have to say that there is more chaos.  

The Chinese would say that the will of heaven brings peace and well-being to those who follow it - which is how one knows that one is on the right path.  Do we now have more peace and well-being? And do we now have a greater will to follow what is right - that is, to follow that which will lead to greater peace and well-being?  FK