The Glorious Future

As I've mentioned previously, I'm somewhat obsessed with the advancement of mobile technology. Most of my mythological ponderings involve the creeping repercussions of smart phones, and what I think they represent in terms of the very nature of information and how we interact with the world. It's interesting to me to be on the wave of such rampant technological innovation, and to see how quickly people adapt to the convenience of little magical boxes that would have been the subject of science fiction only ten or twenty years ago. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for example, now basically exists. Evoking the previously unattainable wonder of the Guide reminds us of where we were in the 1980's; to point out that I'm just talking about wikipedia on the iphone brings it immediately back down to the mundane. Oh yeah, I guess I can look up any topic I can think of with my phone...well, I've still got to go pick up the kids and then finish these reports before tomorrow.

Anyway, I just wanted to bring that up to point out something that somebody else made, obviously coming from a similar place. This Spigot isn't as needlessly philosophical as mine tend to be, but it is beautiful. Definitely check this out - explore the options presented by the site. As you're navigating the richly defined menus and musing aloud about what it is that you're looking at, think for a moment about what institutional entity could possibly fund such a professionally branded fictional device. This cost a lot of money, right? How long did they work on this?

And then, when you do find out who's behind this, that's the true gift - the moment where the surreal and the sublime intersect in a perfectly transcendent apex of wonder and confusion.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pomegranate NS08

An Unsolicited Endorsement

I'm not promising anything here - my time on this planet is still stratified among a million different responsibilities, creative urges and necessary expenditures of my daily energy, but I wanted to poke my head in to mention something. This is a little off-tact for my blog, and perhaps a little too pointed for my usual bipartisan call to trivialism, but I'm going to go ahead anyway and recommend that every American should probably read Obama's "The Audacity of Hope."

So before you leave or gloss over entirely, a couple quick points and caveats:
1. Yes, the book title suggests that other names under consideration might have been "The Audacity of Rhetoric," "America: The Genericing," or "Look at me, I'm Barack Obama, I'm So Special, Naa Naa Naa."
2. Yes, if you hate the man now and are already convinced that he's wrong and radical, reading this book through that lens probably isn't going to rock your world (but it might, depending on the lens).
3. Yes, he already won the Presidency, so why am I still bleating on about him?

Well, he is your President now, so you might as well get to know him, right? A lacking familiarity with the man seems to be a common complaint among detractors. Others, subsumed by their adoration for his awesome stage presence would do just as well to read it - because contrary to the title, or the impression it gives of four-hundred pages of sweeping generalizations and feel-good epithets, like some sort of feature-length stump speech, the book is actually really good. If nothing else (and this is a fairly useless caveat to make given his other accomplishments of late), Barack Obama is a startlingly good writer. And more than a manual of political strategy or an egregious exercise in self-promotion, the poorly-named "Audacity of Hope" is a carefully wrought chronicle of the man's worldview, his perspective on everything from the constitution to the economy to what Americans value.

I personally think a more appropriate title would have been "Common Sense II: This Time It's Personal," because much like the works of Locke, the gravity of Obama's thought process is self-evident in his prose - unlike many politicians (and all pundits), Obama is not trying to energize his base or divine some all-encompassing theory; on the contrary, he seems genuinely concerned with finding language that will again allow Americans of different creeds to look each other in the eye, put down their talking points and look toward policies that will allow the country to move forward, guided by a careful consideration of the values that most Americans claim to hold, and yet never seem to agree on. His reflections on campaigning and acting as senator are honest and often self-effacing; he observes the climate of Washington and the immense pressure it imposes on politicians to become cynical, vote down party lines and only pay heed to those issues to which his or her constituents pay due lip service (and campaign contributions). While fully admitting that he is a Democrat and believes in typical Democratic principles, he observes the moral failings of both parties with an eye towards honest analysis and clear communication. At any rate, reading this book has lead me to to the conclusion that though he may be a stirring speaker, Barack Obama is also a brilliant thinker, even-keeled and incredibly circumspect. Some might see this as merely the impressive act of a calculating mind, a man keenly attuned to the machinations of politics and the words that will win him favor. But I think this book actually transcends the localized rhetoric of any one campaign or political cycle. Even if he wasn't a politician, this book would still be awesome.

Anyway, I'll leave it there, with an excerpt chosen to underscore the tone of his writing:

"In every society (and in every individual), these twin strands--the individualistic and the communal, autonomy and solidarity--are in tension, and it has been one of the blessings of America that the circumstances of our nation's birth allowed us to negotiate these tensions better than most. We did not have to go through any of the violent upheavals that Europe was forced to endure as it shed its feudal past. Our passage from an agricultural to an industrial society was eased by the sheer size of the continent, vast tracts of land and abundant resources that allowed new immigrants to continually remake themselves.
"But we cannot avoid these tensions entirely. At times our values collide because in the hands of men each one is subject to distortion and excess. Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves.
"When this happens--when liberty is cited in the defense of a company's decision to dump toxins in our rivers, or when our collective interest in building an upscale new mall is used to justify the destruction of somebody's home--we depend on the strength of countervailing values to temper our judgment and hold such excesses in check.
"Sometimes finding the right balance is relatively easy. We all agree, for instance, that society has a right to constrain individual freedom when it threatens to do harm to others. The First Amendment doesn't give ou the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater; your right to practice your religion doesn't encompass human sacrifice. Likewise, we all agree that there must be limits to the state's power to control our behavior, even if it's for our own good. Not many Americans would feel comfortable with the government monitoring what we eat, no matter how many deaths and how much our medical spending may be due to rising rates of obesity.
"More often though, finding the right balance between our competing values is difficult. Tensions arise not because we have steered a wrong course, but simply because we live in a complex and contradictory world. I firmly believe, for example, that since 9/11, we have played fast and loose with constitutional principles in the fight against terrorism. But I acknowledge that even the wisest president and the most prudent Congress would struggle to balance the critical demands of our collective security against the equally compelling need to uphold civil liberties. I believe our economic policies pay too little attention to the displacement of manufacturing workers and the destruction of manufacturing jobs. But I cannot wish away the sometimes competing demands of economic security and competitiveness.
"Unfortunately, too often in our national debates we don't even get to the point where we weigh these difficult choices. Instead, we either exaggerate the degree to which policies we don't like impinge on our most sacred values, or play dumb when our own preferred policies conflict with important countervailing values. Conservatives, for instance, tend to bristle when it comes to government interference in the marketplace or their right to bear arms. Yet many of these same conservatives show little to no concern when it comes to government wiretapping without a warrant or government attempts to control people's sexual practices. Conversely, it's easy to get most liberals riled up about government encroachments on freedom of the press or a woman's reproductive freedoms. But if you have a conversation with these same liberals about the potential costs of regulation to a small business owner, you will often draw a blank stare.
"In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. This is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedoms as evangelicals do of their right to worship."

Maybe that's a bit more than an excerpt, but I wanted to do justice to what I think this book accomplishes: elaborating on sound-bytes to the advancement of a central political thesis. This passage may still come across as too broad-reaching, but I chose it because it's from the beginning of a chapter, where he's setting an overall context for discourse. Does this sound like the musings of a radical? I hope not.

Legged Creatures

Watch now as I construct for you a complex analogy involving an octopus.

I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason to whether or not something catches my interest, whether I find myself invested in someone else's mythology or not. In the end I don't think there's any one thing that I'm looking for, except maybe a balance of all the different sorts of things that typically constitute fiction. When I'm first experiencing something, my nuance tentacles (or tentacles of nuance) reach out simultaneously to explore the terrain - some are seeking out story and characterization, and wrap their loving tendrils around every morsel they find. Others are looking for backstory, narrative voice, cultural context, political satire, religious symbolism, authorial perspective, literary allusion, twists, gimmicks and clever analogies. All these things. Sometimes there's a glut in one area and nothing offered in others. Typical "fantasy" is often like this, offering volumes of blow-by-blow historical background on people and places whose names have too many k's and not enough vowels. Once my "fake history" and "character archetype" tentacles have gorged themselves (which happens pretty quickly), I find myself with about thirty unsatisfied psychological appendages looking immediately elsewhere for sustenance. There are occasional acts of artistic genius that do meet my every need, and in these times I'm never sure quite what to do with myself. Watchmen was kind of like this.

A medium I have a very tenuous relationship with is video games. By their very nature video games involve world creation and exploration, which gives them huge bonus points on my Mythological Octopus Appreciation Scale (MOAS). But they usually stop there. This certainly isn't a rule, but between computer programmers, deadlines and the attention spans of their target demographic, there isn't much pull in the video game community for characterization or subtle machinations of plot (amazingly, this was much less true of games made in the earlynineties).

I actually find myself more interested in reading about games than playing them, browsing review sites and trailers for the most recent offerings then never thinking about them again. This is a purely unconscious act, and I honestly can't explain what the draw is; surely experiencing the product must be more satisfying than hearing someone else describe it? And yet, the reviews usually score better on the MOAS. Think about it. In a review I get a summary of the whole world of the game; where it starts and what points it hits along the way. I get a sense for what the goal is, and what it was like to accomplish it. If I'm lucky I might even get some insight as to what the game means in a larger context, whether it has any importance to the industry or to the person reviewing it. By comparison, the game itself can hardly compete (I think I'm probably in a niche audience for this sort of experience, but I recently ran across a game that offered commentary on the levels as a little bonus feature. As you ran around the lost temple swinging from ledges and looking for treasure, two of the designers would periodically chime in on what they were going for in the current area - how the puzzles had been paced to produce a certain emotional experience, etc. Needless to say, I was enthralled).

In a perfect world video games would all strive to encompass this much meta data. I often fantasize about such games, and I think it would be fair to call the premises of these creations "high concept." I have about half a dozen of them that rotate through my head on a kind of seasonal basis, each one drenched in totally unnecessary mythological depth (and when I use the word 'mythological' here, understand it to mean 'things I'm personally interested in'). When I'm lost in the pleasant haze of working out all the little details I'm convinced that my games would be immediately successful with everyone who played them. But I'm probably wrong about that.

Here's one of my ideas: the game would suppose the existence of a fictional video game company that had been active since the 1980's, a giant in the field along the lines of a Nintendo. Over the course of two decades and a dozen different gaming systems, this company had nurtured a now-veteran cast of video game protaganists, all of whom had appeared in dozens of titles over the years. In recent years the company's popularity had waned, and its characters, once national icons, were now mostly nostalgia fodder as a new generation of gamers moved on to the high-intensity low-value games of the modern era. This game (the one I'm describing) would be a retrospective on these nearly-forgotten characters, a kind of "Behind the Music" biopic (bio-game?) exploring where they were now. Each 'episode' would take the form of an extended interview with one of these gaming stalwarts - let's say "Flario" in this case. As Flario talks about the ups and downs of his career we get to play a level or two from the games that spanned it, starting with the blocky arcade sequences of his initial 1987 showing and working through time, including the misstep side projects ("Flario vs. Trigonometry" and "Flario Gets Sickle-Cell-Anemia"). His retrospective commentary is running through the levels and changes as we play, chiming in with "This was early in my career move, when they still had me wearing a green hat, they were convinced that was going to be such a big deal...not that you can really tell it's a hat, it's like six pixels..." When you awkwardly jump into a pit he would add, "Yeah, shoot, I've fallen into that specific pit about a thousand times. I wasn't very good at jumping then, and they wouldn't let me grab the ledge or anything, I just had to do that shrug-and-fall-in-front-of-the-screen thing. My contract was pretty restrictive in those days." It might get repetitive over time, but the first time you played it would be mind-blowing.

I've got like a dozen of these concepts if anyone's interested in taking one and running with it; they're all about this unnecessarily involved.

Important side story:

I recently got into a spat with one of my roommates. It was over something small and got blown way out of proportion, to the point where he's not really even living in the house anymore though he's still paying rent. I've been a little haunted about the whole thing the past couple weeks, and often find myself thinking about it as I walk to work, wondering whether I'm in the wrong and should apologize, or whether I acted appropriately and am just feeling codependant, etc. Anyway, when I got home yesterday I took off my work shoes and put them on the rack by the door, like I usually do. I've only had these shoes for about a week and I don't usually think much about shoe racks, so yesterday was the first time that I noticed an eerily similar pair sitting next to mine. On closer inspection, I realized that these were in fact the exact same shoes as mine - same brand, size, color, even the same basic wear-and-tear, so that I honestly couldn't identify which pair I should take as my own. In the same moment I realized that I must have been alternating pairs all week without even thinking about it. I wondered who they belonged to, and of my two other roommates (that I'm not in a spat with), one has smaller feet than me, and the other has gone away for three months to Chicago (where he no doubt took his nice dress shoes with him). This lead me finally to a profound realization, the indisputable fact that I have quite literally walked a mile in the other guy's shoes.

I think somebody's trying to tell me something (but I'm not sure what that is).

Environmentalism (Spoiler Alert: It's a play on words - I don't actually care about the planet)

I tend to think about the future a lot. Not in a goal-seeking, career-growth sort of way; it's really more of an abstract, pointless speculation sort of thing. Give me an entire day in a coffee shop with a notebook, and I'll come away with twelve pages of feverishly scribbled notes on the possible ramifications of the iPhone. When you do this professionally, they call it Futurology.

And there's a lot of hubub in the futurology arena about atoms and bits, how the world as a whole is moving progressively from the former to the latter and there's nothing we can do to stop it. This is a transition so natural that we won't even be aware of it for much longer - the closing of video rental chains because of digital downloads, the death of the DVD (and inevitable stillborn death of BluRay) for the same reasons, the obviation of personal snail-mail, file cabinets and dead-tree books thanks to laptops, e-readers and the Internet, and on and on it goes. People sometimes resist the concept of this movement, holding tenaciously to the mediums they love too much to let go ("People will never stop reading books! Nothing can replace them!"), but this is really just an act of preemptive mourning - there simply is no real debate to be had on the subject.

The cultural repercussions of this are staggering, obviously, and better suited to more robust futurologists than myself (a good discussion can be found in Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital - I think he might've actually invented the Internet). I've been thinking lately about one specific ramification: as more and more commodoties are downloaded directly from the cloud (the current pretentious mot-du-jour term for the Internet), there's obviously less need to sell them in stores. Toasters and blue jeans will obviously never be digitized, but the prevalence of online shopping still means that brick-and-mortar stores can no longer compete with the cloud for either price or selection. Going forward, the only hope that physical retail spaces possibly have for continued existence rests with their ability to provide a shopping experience markedly more enjoyable than sitting at home in front of a computer (or really, sitting anywhere with an iPhone). In the Future (ie 2011), the only physical commodity of any value will be enjoyable environments.

We can already see this fact previsioned by the success of Starbucks, a company that decided to break into the coffee business 2000 years late and somehow came out on top, thanks mostly to earth tones and Jack Johnson. In hip young towns like Tucson, every strip mall is packed with food franchises emulating this strategy, trying to provide food, sure, but also (and maybe more importantly) a pleasant place to be for fourty-five minutes. The only major retail outlet seemingly bucking this trend is Walmart, where pale fluorescent lights bathe uncountable mounds of indiscrimate crap in some infernal representation of capitalism's worst excesses - the whole experience makes me think of Dante and purgatory and how maybe I should quit my life and work an orphanage in Africa to attone for humanity's evils. But I think Walmart's days are numbered (though that number may admittedly be quite high) - just by sheer girth and ubiquity it can compete for now with the cloud for price and selection on many of the cheap, crappy goods that people wouldn't think to buy online. But it's also kind of evil, so I'd like to think that's working against it.

This trend goes much farther than just retail. As globalization makes local community less inherently necessary, traditional stalwarts like churches have found themselves with fewer congregants. I was at a meeting recently where the main presentation was on growth strategy from a pariticularly successful megachurch. The megapastor started by admitting that the goal of his church, to bring people into a closer relationship with God, was actually impossible from an organizational standpoint. You can't just do that to people, and it's impossible to measure the success of your efforts with that well-meaning but totally nebulous yardstick. His conclusion was that the only thing they could even hope to succeed at was providing an environment conducive to forming a closer relationship with God. That's it. Just make the space. And, apparently, it's working. They have many thousands of people attending every week in a time when most community church's count themselves lucky to break fifty. I mean, whatever, I wouldn't want to attend a mega church, but the point stands.

So where's this all headed? I'm not sure. It means that libraries can still exist, even when books don't; people will still need a pleasant place to go and read. Maybe they'll serve coffee, and maybe the large touch screens in each corner of the building will just as easily browse music and appliances as they will books (I'm picturing a kind of iTunes-style CoverFlow thing on a larger scale). So they'll still be there, but maybe you won't be able to tell them apart from a Barnes & Noble or Virgin Records (as if those will still be around).

Of course, this is all assuming that virtual reality doesn't take off in the near future. As far as future-technology goes, it's made surprisingly few leaps in the last few years, but I suppose it's also inevitable. If that happens, maybe we can reclaim all those unsightly strip malls for community gardens. That would be nice.

The Trouble with Mood Lighting

(Ever since renewing my covenant with you, the reader, I have adopted a much more outgoing and socially conscious tone to my entries, speaking at length about the overtly self-serious topics of politics and religion,which many of you no doubt find regretful. But take heart, my hopes and dreams are still firmly anchored in trivial minutiae, and it is to that great cause which I devote this third and final lecture on moral relativity.)

Here's the thing. I do believe in a satisfying, intellectual sort-of-way that most people default to thinking about the world as either black and white or shades of grey, but I also have to accept that this premise is totally refuted by simple observations of American cinema. Generally speaking, people want a hero. Most people (if you exclude the French) feel uninvolved with stories that lack ethical polarity, where characters all mire around in the same indefinable swamp of activity that's neither very good or very bad, but just kind of...morally lame. We don't tend to like anyone in these kinds of fictional worlds, and maybe it's just because they hit a little too close to home - they make for poor allegory or fantasy fodder.

On the other hand, there does seem to be a large cross-section of the viewing public that embraces the opposite: clear moral tales where the good and evil factions are blown out into their opposite extremes. And I think many people rely on films and television for reinforcement and approval of the simplest black and white aspects of their beliefs. And yet, though low-brow action romps (where the Bad Guys are clearly marked as black-cloacked consciousless bastards - usually Asian men wearing sunglasses) may be incredibly popular, hardly anyone would accuse them of being good films, ie films of merit or importance. I would argue that the only films that can really get away with simple morality while still retaining some dignity are aimed at kids - grand epics like Lord of the Rings or Disney's typical offerings. Sure, the best of these attract just as many adults, but adults who are acknowledging at some level that they have chosen to enjoy a children's movie. Black and white ethics are stark and overly-simplified, which is perfect for kids. No one's going to fault them for that.

So if "great films" aren't going to contain obvious morality or a void of morality, where does that leave us? I personally believe that the true common ground, what people are really looking for from their cinematic landscapes, does not lie within the half-hearted swamp of 'somewhere in between,' but firmly in the worlds of both. Moral ambiguity is important - it makes for dramatic intrigue and sophisticated characters, but for whatever reason, the missing ingredient is almost always incomprehensible evil. Good is important too, I guess, but no one really struggles with Good, it's not a subject that keeps people awake at night. No, if Hollywood wants to bolster its sagging profits they'd do well to inject a little more unquantifyable menace into their recipe. And it doesn't have to be a really bad guy vs. a kind of normal guy, no (although this worked remarkably well in No Country for Old Men) - the evil just has to be in there somewhere, and it has to be dramatic.

Let me give you some examples, by illustrating what I consider to be "great" films. There's a risk here, that by showing my hand it leaves my whole argument vulnerable to subjective disagreement, but I'm willing to do it because I know I'm right. And also because these films we're chosen by other people. Here's the top 10 films from IMDB's top 250, as voted by the countless denizens of the Interwebs:

1.	9.1	The Shawshank Redemption (1994)	372,678
2.	9.1	The Godfather (1972)	317,736
3.	9.0	The Dark Knight (2008)	271,151
4.	9.0	The Godfather: Part II (1974)	180,116
5.	8.9	Buono, il brutto, il cattivo., Il (1966)	106,149
6.	8.9	Pulp Fiction (1994)	311,196
7.	8.8	Schindler's List (1993)	206,116
8.	8.8	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)	156,748
9.	8.8	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	217,063
10.	8.8	12 Angry Men (1957)

There are some dark films on that list. And those are the best (I'm going to mentally omit the last two, because I don't like Star Wars and 12 Angry Men kind of undermines my premise) rated films (in theory) of all time. Sampling selectively from the rest of the top twenty-five, we also get Psycho, Fight Club and The Silence of the Lamb, which all feature some pretty potently dark material, beyond the realm of most people's worldview comfort, balanced with a nuanced and very complex perspective on the vagaries of good and evil. Look at just the top three. Here we get multiple instances of confessed criminals, gangsters and vigilantes, all of whom balance poor decisions with good intentions, often trying to just make the right choice at important moments: doing right by their family and friends, fighting larger evils, etc. These films don't fit neatly into my dichotomy at all, and I think that's why they're effective. If you're going to subscribe to their worlds, the ethics aren't handed to you (or denied you altogether) - you've got to mull it over a little bit.

There's something else at work here, though. Ungraspable evil specifically goats most grey-vies, even those who normally find terms like 'good' and 'evil' impossibly over-simplified. If someone is kind of evil, and even if they've done something pretty obviously bad (like sexually assault someone), there's almost always room on the morality scale for sympathy. All you have to do is look further down the spectrum for perspective (ie people who have sexually assaulted lots of people) , and then you can start to think about what unfortunate life events must have lead to this person taking such a regrettable course of action. Well-adjusted, confident people don't spend their time dicking over others; human-on-human violence is almost always the result of fear or trauma or righteous indignation. No one really considers themselves "evil," and one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter, etc. These are all platitudes obviously, but they're true, and doubly so if you've got a bit of divergent grey-ness to your worldview. But take someone who's unapologetically evil, inhumanly unremorseful, someone for whom there is no further on the morality scale to go (if you darken a pitch-black room, can anyone tell?) and that really gives something for everyone to chew on, regardless of ideological bent.

It Doesn't Matter if You're Black or White (Unless You're Into That Sort of Thing)

In my last entry I made the brief (but oh so compelling) argument that I'd found the true difference between liberals and conservatives, the atomic philosophical point that fuels the perpetually antagonistic stalemate of partisan politics and compels the twenty-four hour news channels into unyielding fervor. It is not about gun control, or abortion, or varying emphases on the term "freedom," nor any other conveniently superficial issue. No, it's simply a preference of expression - whether you believe that the 'answers' to the world's 'problems' should be expressed in terms of absolutes or thoughtful relativity, black and white or shades of grey. I'm going to write more about this now (and this time we'll see if I'm familiar with English words other than 'nuance' and 'distinction').

Even if you buy my first premise, you might be asking why I insist on linking the monochrome/greyvie population with the two major political parties. Won't such cavalier oversimplifications of people's hard-fought worldviews satisfy none and alienate all? Maybe. Actually, ironically, I bet that only the monochromes will feel put-off. The grey-vies will probably be pretty into it. Let's continue.

Black and White means Good and Evil, the basic proposition of traditional Judeo-Christian morality. Sure, everyone makes both good and bad decisions throughout their life, but at the end of the day you end up in one of two places: perpetual bliss or eternal damnation. There's no middle ground in finality, despite the middle ground of most people's decision-making career. Perhaps it's a matter of weighting percentages, as in you just need to shoot for 51% good to make the cut, but that seems a little arbitrary. For many it's a matter of having been saved by belief, so that their less-than-perfect track record on Earth is given a dramatic (and some would say unfair) boost in the final tally.

Eastern religion is usually attributed with the 'grey' slant on good and evil - there's no judgment here, both bad and good are necessary aspects of life, caught in an eternal dance where one never surpasses the other and neither ever disappear. This is the ying and yang, Shiva as Creator and Destroyer, and a whole rainbow of reincarnation options when it's all said and done. If you're kind of good, maybe you'll get to be a lion. If you're kind of less good, maybe you'll be a gazelle instead. There's no angst here as to whether the morality switch has been flipped on or off, because it's really more of a dimmer. The mood lighting of the soul. Am I saying that all liberals are Hindu at heart? Well, yes, but that's not very American, so no. I'd go with "kind of Christian," but...forget it, let's just call it Anglican and move on, shall we?

(I do think there is middle ground here, especially if you bring Emanuel Swedenborg into the discussion. Here we have a view of spirituality and the afterlife that seems compatible with both worldviews - DT Suzuki hailed Swedenborg the Buddha of the North for this very reason. This casting of heaven and hell still presents a basic dichotomy: Heaven is Good, and Hell is Bad. But, and here's the rub, there are infinite degrees within heaven and hell. Some people live "on the outskirts of heaven," others in the lower earth, or the desert, or to the north. There's a whole other heaven for polygymast Muslims who had the other nine commandments down. It's a varied place, with many shades.)

So this gets back to the political thing. I don't really care if you or I are grey or monochramtic in how we consider the minutiae of our lives, because we'll work with whatever we've got, but what kind of leader do you want? That's the question that I think most election rhetoric is really trying to get to. Do you want someone who will take a hard line on anything and everything, or someone who will thoughtfully muse on the possible repercussions of a given subject? Warrior chief or a philosopher king?

And I know you think I'm overstating the point, I hear your complaints, but in this case you're wrong. There are such thing as thoughtful conservatives, true. But when a grey-vie is reflecting on a situation, he knows there's no ideal outcome, and has already resigned himself to a compromise based on the various mitigating factors. The final decision is probably something like "okay, the best we could have done under the circumstances." A monochromatic worldview still allows for moral ambiguity, but only in the short term. The goal isn't to reach a compromise, but to make a decision - everything considered, is this good, or is it bad? And 'bad,' in this case, is an all-or-nothing proposition. Once the discussion's over, that thing, whatever it is, is not with us. Therefore, it is most likely against us (if you're unconvinced, just think Freedom Fries). And there's a good reason why most black-or-white decisions fall mostly onto the conservative platform. There are certain concepts that seem *obviously* good, like having babies. When you make the subject more complex, it becomes ambiguous, and there's no obvious good on the other end of the spectrum (not having babies?). If we're just shooting for 51%, this will fall back on the simplest good nine times out of ten. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Now, the next obvious question: aren't there hard-nosed liberals in the world, who make black-or-white statements about those very same ambiguous outcomes? Yes, there are athiests who get together in groups just so they can all not worship a god together. Yes, of course, and these people really are the worst human beings on the planet.

Election Special!

Like many people (specifically the kinds of people who also do this), I spend a lot of my time shoehorning other members of the species into neat little boxes. I’m not in any way proud of this, but when I’m interacting with people I don’t know very well I often find myself sizing them up, cataloging and indexing them for easier future reference. It comes out of insecurity I suppose, as if I need to make sure that their existence won’t shatter my preconceived notions of the world, that I can go on thinking the way I do about society and culture despite the addition of a new and unmeasured variable.

For the sake of efficiency I would really like to know just how many boxes there actually are, and I devote altogether too much mental bandwidth on this specifically fruitless pursuit. In many ways my mythology acts as a kind of workbook for this process, and I have the unfortunate tendency of burdening my characters with entire fundamental philosophies just so I can put them in a room together and watch them hash it out. Unless you’re George Orwell (and you’re probably not), that’s probably one of the surest ways to ring a subject completely dry of any potential nuance or depth.

My favorite classification system is the two-box model, always expressed as a fully contained absolute, as in: “There are two kinds of people in the world: the haves and the have-nots; those who have read Dostoevsky and those who haven’t; people who wash their hands after they pee, and people who don’t pee on their hands, etc.” I enjoy the audacity of these statements, the unapologetic finality of their formulation. There’s something invariably compelling in believing that a two-box declaration could be true, even if it does demean its subject by suggesting that an issue can be neatly divided into two mutually exclusive and polar opposite properties. I believe this is why so many of our foundational institutions are based on the premise of a two-box declaration - liberal or conservative, rich or poor, saved or damned, us or them - because they’re fundamentally easy to grasp.

My two-box-set of choice comes from Borges, who claimed that everyone is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. I often pull this out when I reach an impasse in a debate, because I really do think it encapsulates an insurmountable difference in world view. And if I just can't agree with someone, I content myself with the admission that they're probably just a member of the other group (I'll leave you to guess which party I subscribe to, though I will say that Aristotle strikes me as a bit of a prick). The nuances of the distinction could make a blog entry (or a series of books) on their own, but it basically comes down to this: an Aristotelian believes that meaning and truth are found only in front of the eyes, and a Platonist believes they’re found behind them. Either the world exists on its own, and we’re here to observe it with our limited senses and do our best to describe our findings, or we’re the ones creating and experiencing the meaning all along, and we simply project our creations out onto the world. This is often recast as science vs. faith, or rationalism vs. empiricism (if you're a philosophy dork). Either way, I'm a fan.

In the past couple weeks, however, I’ve stumbled across what may be a new favorite. It’s a fairly basic formulation, but I think it neatly summarizes the national divide that dutifully rears itself every four years (much more often for most people) as Americans again decide whether it’s the Republicans or Democrats who will save/destroy the way of life that they’ve come to enjoy and rely on. Of course, many people are too mature to be goaded into this debate; they’ll tell you that all politicians regardless of title are liars and shameless opportunists, and these people are obviously correct. But for me that makes national politics just another interesting component of the American mythology, be it one that has further reaching implications (arguably) than what’s currently happening on Lost.

And no, my revelation is not that all people are either liberal or conservative. That’s flagrantly obvious and not even true on its face - very few people are explicitly either, though they may back one side or the other when up against the fence. No, I’ll let you guess the parameters of my new divide, as it occurred to me during the first official McCain/Obama debate a few weeks ago, hosted by Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren. When asked at what point a human fetus becomes a human life (which is an ever-so-slightly more nuanced way of rephrasing the pro-choice/pro-life debate), Obama answered,

“Well, I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something I — obviously, the country wrestles with. One thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that there is a moral and ethical element to this issue. And so I think anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention. So that would be point number one. But point number two: I am — I am pro-choice. I believe in Roe v. Wade. And I come to that conclusion not because I’m pro-abortion but because, ultimately, I don’t think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways, in consultation with their pastors, or their spouses, or their doctors [and] their family members. And, so for me, the goal right now should be — and this is where I think we can find common ground — and by the way, I’ve now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform — is: how do we reduce the number of abortions? Because the fact is is that, although we’ve had a President who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down. And that, I think, is something that we have to ...”

And then McCain, for his part, answered:

“At the moment of conception.”

This was basically the tone of the entire debate. And it was useful to me, because it revealed a fundamental difference between the two candidates that I wasn’t expecting to see. That distinction has blossomed in a couple conversations I’ve had since then, to the point where I’m now willing to embrace it (until I’m forced to move on) as probably mostly true, and it goes like this: there are two kinds of people in the world (or at least in this election cycle) - those who believe the world is black and white, and those who believe it’s shades of grey.

Discuss.

I was going to expound on this further, but I think I’ve reached a logical word limit, so I’ll write more in a followup post.