“If you can keep it”

Franklin’s famous phrase is somewhat opposed to the current meme “rule of law.” In some sense, any organized society lives under a kind of rule of law – laws determined by whoever is in charge, even if the “law” is “I can do whatever I want and you must obey me” .

The founders considered a republic to be based on rights grounded in ideas of liberty. Laws which infringed on that liberty were wrong and should be unenforceable.

Those founders did not see much difference between liberty and “rights” owed to any adult white males living in the country. Those folks were supposed to preserve the idea of liberty (even if they treated women, slaves, etc differently.) Fundamental rights included being able to defend oneself, protect property and contracts, and think and say what you wanted. In a libertarian manner – they did not initially see any need to explicitly enumerate a bill of rights – freedom to do anything that doesn’t harm someone else .

All would of course be forever preserved by the innate virtue of the ruling elite. After the founders finished laughing, they constructed a complicated federal system of checks and balances. Alas, over the years, we have deconstructed most of that in the name of “pure democracy” – what the founders called mob rule.

We may be in the final stages of a semblance of a republic. It was, for a while, a nice nearly working dream .

“Life is short, art is long”

“Life is short, but art is long” is one of those old Roman sayings that seem to make sense until we think about it. Up to a few hundred years ago, people conceived of time much differently than we do. Aboriginal tribes existed in a perpetual present, surrounded by “dreamtime” past and future. Civilized folks considered the past as a few hundred or thousand years – back to the Egyptians or some mythical beginning. Deep philosophers assumed the world to always have been as it is, possibly cycling through various stages .

More than that – in direct opposition to current ideas of progress – that past was always better, golden, inhabited by gods or semi-gods. Ancient art was always to be copied or imitated since the degenerate present could not compete. Thus “art is long”.

Now we laugh at a few thousand years. We know the world goes back a few billion, amazing creatures hundreds of millions, people like us over 100,000. And the world keeps changing. And “new improved” is demonstrably better than the old junk .

As for art … well it’s really as “short” as life. Useful for a generation or so at most. Like any legacy, soon gone with the wind, without even the solace of a grave marker .

As for other ” wise”, “golden”, sayings, ideas, and ideals of classic ancient cultures – don’t get me started .

Latin and Calculus

Striving suburban schools in the early ’60s would push Latin and calculus on “college track” students. The idea was – as it had been for centuries – that at least it would develop logic skills, language flexibility, and help us think more clearly .

Nowadays these courses are rarely taught in public schools. For one thing there is less overt “tracking” of students supposedly brighter than others. But mostly, Latin and calculus are seen as pretty useless compared to all the things kids “really need to know“.

I admit I’ve rarely used Latin and never touched calculus in almost 70 years. In that sense, I suppose it was wasted time. And yet …

It is good to get a firm logical base. Video games, wrapped in sensory candy, do not have quite the same applicability. The dry, hard exercises of calculus forced one to confront bare bones rules. Latin required a completely new and foreign manner of thinking and writing .

I have over my lifetime frequently felt the effects of that intellectual workout during my adolescence. Clear logic and formal observation of patterns have stayed with me and enriched my consciousness .

I know it’s not for everyone, possibly gone for anyone, but perhaps another meaningful cultural loss in our downward spiral .

Almost Right

People like to seize on the clearest and simplest explanations of phenomena. Things fall to earth because they “want to be nearer to it”. The Earth is flat. Those explanations are, actually, almost right. They are good enough for everyday life. They only fail if one is trying to predict something or control it. Malaria was associated, rightly, with bad air and swamps. Which just happened to also be filled with disease carrying mosquitoes. Avoiding the bad air in season almost worked very well. But it was useless for an eventual solution which required either draining or spraying the swamps.

I’m reminded of this with the MAHA fanatics, who once again want clean, simple explanations to complex problems. They point out that “science was wrong” in believing that COVID 19 was spread by infected air particles (largely able to be stopped by masks) when it was actually conveyed by tiny free floating viruses (against which most masks were useless). MAHA doesn’t believe science should ever be wrong _ if science gives incorrect advice it’s because scientists have nasty secret agendas .

Probably science has become much too complicated for most of us to understand. And it is still notably wrong or incoherent or provisional in many matters of health. So if flat earth and bad air were good enough for our grandparents, folks are sure they should be good enough for us .

Plato

Now that rich white men have seized power, studying dead white men is all the rage. Mostly it’s a social signal to show who has “merit.” Among the things one must know to be admitted to the club is a gloss of Plato .

I’ve read Plato. I found him a boring ignorant old fool. As are the philosophical musings of anything written before the 19th century – particularly before Darwin and Einstein who finally placed humans properly in the universe .

I enthusiastically enjoy history. I freely admit that any human over the last 50,000 years could think as well as I do, experience life just as deeply. People are complex, amazing, and deal with existence in miraculous ways .

But logic – Plato is very logical, for example – is a tricky tool. Useful but easily dangerous. Politicians, preachers, and various madmen are always able to construct wonderful logical castles on completely wrong and stupid foundations. Plato sees visions of “real ideal” and imagines fairy tale perfect men who wisely use logic to rule everything. He includes souls and reincarnation. In fact, he has no idea of everything we actually know about – well – everything .

Oh, there are major things still unknown and maybe unknowable. The nature of time, the meaning of consciousness, the purpose (if any) of life. None of that related to the cold dead weight of writings such as the Republic.

Wage Slaves

Pre-Civil war plantation owners often claimed that their slaves were better off than the “wage slaves” toiling in northern factories. Of course the main difference was that Southern slaves were permanently slaves, unto the last generation, and had no rights at all outside of being a valuable piece of property .

But I wonder if those gentlemen have a point in the modern world. Not long ago we would laugh at the notion of wage slaves. The world was fat in America, companies took care of employees even providing good health care, and there were always alternate possibilities to escape to .

Now? Not so much .

Medical coverage is frightful. Unions are weak and often destroyed by corporate power. Non-compete clauses are enforced. Entrance certifications are insane. More hours are demanded, more severe effort is demanded, each minute is monitored like in an old Charlie Chaplin film. There is no stability, loyalty, pride, or hope. Any worker can be “sold down the river” by email, gone with no trace at the end of the day . And forbidden to work at the same type of job for years.

There is still a mythology of work in the United States, but it is fraying rapidly. Successful entrepreneurs and the billionaire inheritors are the new plantation owners. It’s a very mean world.

I wonder how long the center holds .

Taxes

The Roman Empire ran government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich. Wealthy individuals were required to pay a lot for government positions, in the expectation that they would be more than reimbursed (by bribes, extortion, etc, within reason). It worked remarkably well .

The Roman Empire mostly ignored individual taxes. Entities like cities and provinces were expected to pay decreed amounts, and were free to raise money any way they wanted. If they failed to do so, the legions went in and looted it. That also worked well for hundreds of years .

Modern government is more “enlightened”. It is run “for the people” meaning, by definition, the poor. It is paid for by multiple … well, the problem is that it really is not paid for. The wealthy, as always, have ways to protect their wealth. Their bribes go to preventing taxation, sometimes by illegal evasion, more often by legal maneuvers like “exemptions” or “investment”. The result is increasingly government by debt

In an age when everything will be made by machine and billions of humans helplessly consume, all bets are off. The very idea of paying for scarce items may be obsolete.

But, of course, that land of cockaigne remains ever over the hill, far away, and in the future .

Hot Shower

This morning I pulled myself from my comfortable clean insect-free bed. Heated instant coffee in a microwave, drank it gratefully in a soft chair as I watched birds fly against a blue sky behind budding maple branches. Wrote in a journal with a ball-point pen, checked news on the internet. Woke up with a hot shower, shave, brushing teeth. Put on warm clothes, brought in the emptied trash cans and newspaper … and on and on .

Every one of these things would seem miraculous to most humans living over a hundred years ago. Many are still unavailable to many people today. All taken for granted by me .

Electricity! Water! Safety! But you can complete the endless list without help.

A sad note is that we rarely notice how wonderful all this is. From the top down, everyone loves to complain. Our leaders scream that we live in a hell hole surrounded by horrible aliens. Neighbors worry that their house is too old and small, their yards too filled with dust, perhaps their children less than perfect. Ignore the wonderful, concentrate on whatever bothers us (this moment).

I’ve always been a little too complacent and content, more so now that I am elder and retired. I’m amazed that the sun rises, electricity works, and that I am so much alive. And that hot morning shower remains a treat worthy of gods – which in some ways we are .

Ghosts

As I stroll through this cold, wet spring, I notice wild garlic sprouting, roadside daffodils in bloom, lawns greening, and trees laden with buds. But amidst all this rebirth, I am surrounded by ghosts .

Oh, not so much people, although there are a few of those, some dead, some merely gone away, others changed. I here speak of the ghosts of things and situations passed – dead trees removed, houses decayed or rebuilt, shorelines mutated, and on and on. I remember also who I was those other times, a person with sharper attributes and stronger drives, inhabiting a truly different world. Those ancient images overlay all that I actually experience now, and they sometimes haunt me .

Enchantment remains, the moments are wonderful. The memories are simply depth. This spring is a lovely time, the universe is infinitely, fractally magnificent. And yet …

The actual recollections are quite vivid, and on occasion it feels like that world was better, once upon a time, not so long ago. It even occasionally feels wrong to replace the old visions with fresh overlays .

Then I snap out of it, enjoy the sunshine breeze, and glory in simply and happily existing well. Ghosts and all .

Dirt of Ages

After a great tragedy, Notre-Dame cathedral has been restored. Cleaned, polished, “better than ever”. Yet, somehow, the shiny new stones and woodwork have lost their aura of magic. The “dirt of ages” is missing, and more than mere grime has vanished .

There was a feeling – as there often is in older places – of the weight of time. The countless years of visitors and worshipers weighed on the soul. True, most tourists neglected to know that the place had been vandalized during the revolution and reimagined by Violet Le Duc. But it was dignified, solemn, and quite different from a magnificent modern edifice.

This is an era that prizes only the new, even as it restlessly searches for meaning and roots – which it destroys every day in the name of progress. Sometimes with reason. A new church is far more comfortable than the chilly, dark, rigid old structures .

Mostly, I’m just as caught up in shiny new as anyone else. More than many, however, I try to take time to venerate the old, respect the past, be awed by the ancient. Like many experiences, that mood is enhanced by odd details, including wear, nicks, and dirt. It seems more real, truly authentic .

Glad I got to visit Notre Dame before Mr Clean arrived .