Our lovely originalist Supreme Court increasingly assures everyone that “free speech” is an absolute right. The law can never stop you from saying what you want to say. And most of us agree with most of that. But most of us also possess a degree of common sense that there are, in fact, limits.

One historic one has been that you are not allowed to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. But why not? Surely you can shout “fire” on a sidewalk. What difference between stating in a bar conversation that they “should be destroyed” and phoning in a bomb threat?

And then there is the weasel cop out of hate speech. You are apparently free to declaim “”someone should kill my bastard neighbor” but not “someone should kill my Chinese bastard neighbor.” Perhaps a degree of common sense, but tenuous legality.

Mostly we agree that people should be responsible for their actions and the consequences. And that implies that limits to free speech should be indexed to power. Provoking panic in a theater is one example, for everyone will crush at the exits.  The more strongly people react as an individual speaks, the more that person is responsible for what happens. 

The mafia tries to get away with lawyer arguments for the crime boss “hey ,he didn’t kill John Smith, he just suggested it would be great if someone did.” Free speech in action. 

Good material for a movie crime drama. Very bad behavior for someone like a president.

One great attraction of drugs and alcohol _ not to mention fanatic obsessions of all types _ is that they restrict our worries about things distant in time and space. This glass of beer is great, I enjoy talking to you, I can forget the awful boss and the deadline next Friday. 

This is, after all, a culture that glorifies planning for the future by learning from the past. Our media carps on the long-term effects of this and that, science claims to be learning about the birth of the universe. We are aware of floods in Tahiti, and next year’s possible shortage of coffee or computer chips.

Imagination is a fine thing, but the farther away it gets from where we are actually standing, the more it can splinter into possible but increasingly uncertain fragments. We can agree that there is a tree in front of us right now, even argue if it is healthy or beautiful, but it is truly there. What will be here a year or 10 or 100 years from now? Opinions differ.

One mark of sanity is to live primarily focused on a shared immediate existence. One problem is that our electronic social media do not do that and by definition promote insanity. 

It is important to wake up each day and really try to taste the coffee, smell the roses, notice the sky. And to try to maintain some of that awareness all day long.

I have never been a complete rebel. I value social stability and the rules and customs that maintain it. Being polite, the golden rule, obeying the law all seem sane and correct. But pursuing rules into a forest of fashions and styles always seemed ridiculous. That tables should be set “just so”, that hair must be cut this way, that this color does not go with that seem very silly. Possibly because those guidelines change so often, possibly because there are always counter examples. Possibly, just because I didn’t like the cliques of people who follow them as a signal to each other.

The problem only got worse with the arrival of industrial abundance, and the runaway consumer economy. It is not enough to eat well, one must eat just so. The tiniest differences are scrutinized to determine if something is correct or not. Tolerance grows less and less.

Fashion, of course, has always been the curse of the affluent elite. The poor never had time, energy, nor _ especially _ money to be snobbish. They made do with religious signaling, which was usually within their means

Today life is largely unhinged. Like some of those old aristocrats, the only thing we have to define ourselves is fashion and the hope that it will be noticed for fitting us. Sad, but true. The tiniest things are the most important

Avoiding the tides of miniscule fashion undoubtedly can lead to a more contemplated and contented life.  But, of course, being unfashionable brings its own set of problems.

I use Adam Smith only as an example _ in this case of the idea that free enterprise is the best economic system. People like to encapsulate both virtues and evils in the form of heroes or villains. A person becomes a quick lucid symbol of an entire ideology. And, as a symbol, is stripped to the bare essentials. Scholars later point out that all heroes have warts, all ideas are complex. Jefferson owned slaves. Smith allowed for government interference. Then the lesser thinkers among us seize on bits and pieces, quotes or thoughts, to buttress our own, usually logically fragile and factually thin ideologies.

Complex writings of any type _ philosophical, religious, scientific, historic _ are complex. They necessarily consider contradictions, often without easy resolution. But all that is embedded in a larger context frequently ignored by strident acolytes.

My point really is not exactly about Adam Smith per se, but about a tendency surrounding heroes. Educators have taken to claiming that merely learning something is equivalent to knowing something. That is not true  Reading about Adam Smith’s thinking is like reading about Henry the 8th feasting. It will put pictures in your mind, but you will still be hungry and need to eat something real.

Similarly unless you think deeply about what you learn by reading, you will be just as ignorant as you were before. And isolating little snippets to quote does not make you smarter.

I write in the midst of the “hazy lazy crazy days of summer”, still available here in the Northeast this year. I can more or less mindlessly sit in a chair on the beach, swimming occasionally, or walk through dense green woods without a care, or vegetate watching flowers and insects on the backyard patio. Give the worried brain a rest.

There are different degrees of being oblivious, of course, from the profound peace of deep sleep to the intense focus on something locally important. All cut out distant horizons, so we cease worry about the future, the other side of the planet, fevered imagination. We are reminded, if we care to make an analytical effort, that anything beyond our immediate perceptions is an illusion. The more distant _ the more irrelevant. 

There are also differing ways to achieve such a state. Alcohol, drugs, meditation, concentration, sex _ a myriad of methods. All of them can deliver for a short time a release from the too present modern world. 

I do not proclaim that such willful abandonment of the toils of planning should be a life goal. There are other joys besides a hedonistic mindlessness. But like any cool refreshment, a sip of obliviousness now and then can refresh and even add depth and perspective to who we are and how we manage our lives.

Once upon a time,leisure was thought to help us forget cares. Alas, for many, leisure and even play have become work oriented. A struggle to meditate seems a true Zen oxymoron.

No, not the wicked witch kind, although that might be appropriate too. Rather the proverbial bad apple that can rot a whole barrel of good apples. Social interaction seems increasingly poisoned by the dumbest, loudest, most obnoxious person or small group of people who lose all perspective while making sane assembled conversation impossible.

These fanatic crusaders began gaining power and arrogance on social media, ruining civil communities of interesting or meaningful dialogue. Now emboldened, they increasingly disrupt actual meetings in Town Halls, schools, or even library lectures and the like. And by destroying free communication, they fundamentally threaten democracy. 

I don’t much mind if they keep to themselves or are civil in public. But as crusaders they hardly ever are such. After all, they claim, what they believe and want is important, unlike the trivial cares of everyone else. And, by golly, they are going to scream until everyone is forced to agree with them or just gives up arguing rationally.

Unfortunately it only takes one or two to ruin a meeting in an auditorium. More unfortunately, they can now organize flash mobs of dozens or more at any time. Sometimes I think they are folks with nothing else to do with their lives, like religious mendicants of old.

I’d feel sorry for them _ it’s no way to live happily _ but that is very hard when they make my life and our times so miserable.

Somebody is always clamoring for “moral reform.” Often it is not so much that people are evil as that they should be better. There is an assumption of social entropy _ a golden age has given way to silver and so on down to the low clay age we inhabit. 

The simplest morality, of course, is the golden rule. But that is easily warped by time and circumstance _ what I wish to do unto others is different if I am well-fed or starving. And all bets are off if two opposing traits _ say rich and poor, boy or girl _ meet one another. What each wishes for or from the other may have no congruence at all.

Moral codes must vary with situation. It’s okay to hurt someone trying to kill me, or a loved one, or _ well _ so many exceptions. Is it a relative or a stranger? Is it for social stability or personal gain? And very quickly simple, strict, consistent morality becomes either mush or enforced tyranny.

The other thing I notice about many moral reformers is that they assume being moral should be a struggle against a bad inner tendency. And they usually project their own tendencies onto everyone. The sex obsessed think everyone else must be so. 

Like most people, I consider myself moral enough, most of the time and within limits. I tend to be less concerned with reforming people who might be threats than simply keeping them under control.  

Finally, I find moral reform a pretty dull subject and its proponents usually crashing bores. 

Diogenes went around town with a lantern looking for an honest man whom he, presumably, never found. A lot of the problem is definitions, as in the proverbial differences between “truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Not only how honest, but how relevant is it to me.

For example, I recently bought a new cell phone at the Verizon store. Three hours later my family had three new phones to replace our 8-year-old ones and a not too much more expanded data plan. All very pleasant, well within what I expected to pay, no haggling or whining. I suppose maybe a little taken advantage of but I’d rather assume not. 

People see the world through their own lenses. The guilty flee where no man pursueth. Crooks see everyone else as a dishonest crook. I prefer to try to stay internally honest and, at least within bounds, see most other people as reasonably honest as well. For 70-odd years such an approach has worked adequately for me. 

In spite of Spencerian Darwinism, ecologies exhibit a great deal of balance, particularly within species. A degree of cooperation works well for herds and wolves as well. In society, it can drain a great deal of happiness and energy to be suspicious all the time, and in my perception is usually not worth the effort.

So I set my limits, go forth, and am often pleasantly surprised. An old fool, but a contented one.

America was founded on and grew by celebrating risk. Western Europe had immersed ideology in the “wheel of fortune,” only mitigated by the idea that earthly life was simply a temporary test leading to an eternal jackpot. Luck gave good and ill indiscriminately, God dispensed favors via an ineffable plan of his own. Anyone riding high today might suddenly be cast down tomorrow.

The wheel of fortune, like death, is a great leveler. Those who are up may be down tomorrow, and vice versa. And it is strangely comforting that this happens despite one’s plans and efforts. Calvinism achieved the same goal with its view of predestination, as we merely play at what has been ordained in heaven.

But, of course, our current mythology left all that behind with the coming of industrialization. Now, we believe, risk is ever present and _ if well planned and executed _ inevitably leads to social gains. Even individual failure is merely training for the next attempt. Luck plays only a transient short-term role and we deserve whatever we make of it.

Except _ well _ it’s just another mythology. Plenty of people remain trapped on the wheel of fortune, or subject to heaven’s whim. This is now the great divide in outlook between the rich and poor. And an even greater divide between the brazen promoters and those “sheep” just trying to live a decent life.

But that wheel still turns.

“History is written by the winners,” but history is also, by definition, written by those living in later times. Most historians cannot avoid the moralizing bias of their own environment, seeking lessons in the past to apply to their perception of current problems. 

So I find it refreshing to read historians from former ages, who are not nearly so ignorant as some suppose. Right now I am enjoying the extremely long and detailed History of the French and English in America by Francis Parkman, author of the well-known Oregon Trail. This history is a vivid portrait of the early wilderness and its inhabitants, and a refreshing counterpunch to those who like to magnify certain parts of the past, ignore harsh realities, and see it as a romantic golden age.

In 1550, Canadian forests were dark, filled with mosquitoes, and although wild game was abundant in summer, aborigines often starved in winter. Society was vicious, capricious, uncertain, and insanely cruel. Life was so harsh that the best way to endure it was with childish enthusiasm (and fear) mixed with inert complacent stoicism.

I’ve always been extremely grateful to inhabit my own era. Now I am a septuagenarian who can live like a 20-year-old of days gone by. And I have food, heat, water, comfort, and basic security.

Best of times, indeed. The “snowflakes” of today, caught up in petty victimhood and anger, will never understand.