Ecce! The Bourgeois Boomer

The life of the mind is fraught with labor, not chiefly cogitation but rather searching, seeking after veritable examples of ideas. It's consuming work and the models are rarely perfect, but we proceed, poring over random political correspondence, obscure Renaissance treatises, and ancient marginalia. Then one day a walking archetype stumbles into our lives and. . . voila. Enter the Bourgeois Boomer via The Huffington Post.

Now to be sure I don't know whether the author himself qualifies as a true Bourgeois Boomer or he's just pandering to a stereotype. I suspect the latter, that's he's just playing to a host of sentiments which few people hold but which do form a somewhat consistent constellation of attitudes which is termed Middle Class Baby Boomer. Real or manufactured, though, the persona of the author and the audience at which he aims typifies the stereotype. Read the article when you're at home so you can wash the pandering off your trousers.

The opening is classic: our dear author is baffled by modern technology. Can't you picture the man, a good soul to be sure, pressing the buttons on his phone in escalating frustration. He's lost in an "endless maze" of technology. This never happened when Suzie Q-Tip, who lived just down the road, was the operator and well she just put you right on through. 

But there aren't any operators left. Or receptionists. Or secretaries. Or typists. Or any number of dozens of jobs that used to be available for millions of people to earn a living.

 O Tempora! O Mores! Suzie's been outsourced! And forget those overseas folks working for pennies so our dear author, a hard worker, can afford this service in the first place.

Then the long awaited reference comes, that to ordinary people. Pardon me, "ordinary people." The quotations in this context need some translation because they indicate we're talking about a particular, special, group of people. They should read,

You know these folks right? Of course you do, you're one of us aren't you? Sure you are, come on in. 

This is nothing but an appalling appeal to people like you. Then we get a twofer, a real doozie in learning about these,

average Americans who needed to make a living wage to live the decent middle-class life that defines what makes our country great.

Not smart people, or kind people, or people with any concrete virtue whatsoever, but average people. Average folks like G. Harrold Carswell, who was not in fact the Mayor of Mayberry but a judge, an average man and an average judge for an average American. And Americans should be represented by their peers. Not by their betters, surely, for that would reek of meritocracy or worse, aristocracy. Yuck. Excellence. How un-American, right?

Ooh look now, a "living wage." Well-played, author. One must adopt the new lingo. And apparently the "middle class life" is what makes America great. The Middle Classe Life, i.e. your life. Not life as in freedom from being murdered, but life as in way-of-life. America is great not because its citizens are free or virtuous but because the middle class lives a certain way. And don't let anyone tamper with that!

The author's following reference to the opening of the Declaration of Independence is pretty slick. It's been prepared by the previous reference to life we discussed. You see he's defined the term above, therefore the reference here carries the weight of his definition. Had he simply appealed to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," he would have run the risk of even readers considering the traditional, Jeffersonian, libertarian, meaning of the phrase and not his dutiful Rooseveltian one. He's also chosen not to re-define the term too nearby the quotation of the Declaration, lest it actually look like he is commandeering or re-writing it. Clever author!

But in today's brave new world, too often driven by Wall Street values, there is no more room for most of these people. As Thomas Friedman, the prestigious bestselling New York Times columnist recently wrote: "every boss ... has cheaper, easier, faster access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. That means the old average is over. Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives. ... the skill required for every decent job is rising as is the necessity of lifelong learning."

On no, we're in a "Brave new world!" Of emails and smart phones, presumably. And that world is driven by "Wall Street values," i.e. not "Main Street values." Now our author quotes the Sage of the Times, Thomas Friedman, who ushers in a new age of thought with the observation that people need to add more value to their jobs than people or machines which add less value. My world is rocked.

Aren't we charmed, though, by the outrage of his response:

Well this mediocre ("old average") citizen is relieved to be retired from a job market that demands that every worker has to continually show they can "add value better" than others. And as for the "necessity of lifelong learning," I'd like to know who just is doing all that lifelong teaching?

Translation: I'm not going to prove that I'm better than someone else at my job and I'm not going to learn unless someone teaches me!

I just can't wait to hire this guy.

Now we get the obligatory reference to a New York Times fact that corporate profits are up. Oh no! He continues:

corporate profits are thriving despite -- or more likely because of -- high unemployment. Even if you consider corporations as people -- as the Supreme Court recently declared -- this isn't good news for most of the rest of us people.

This is bizarre in two ways.

First, even if corporations have legal standing tantamount to that of an individual, which one can sensibly argue they should not, it's not as if the corporation is an actual person taking the money. There's no Matrix-like mainframe somewhere hoarding the money. Real, flesh-and-bones people have the money. This observation then, ignorant as it may be, is just a thinly veiled attack at people with more money than that hard-working good-souled Main Street American citizen.

Second, the notion that high unemployment, which we ought read as high American unemployment, is profiting American companies is misleading. It could profit a company outsourcing labor which is more expensive in the US, but the author has conflated total unemployment with employment due to outsourcing, and implied that it is the unemployment itself which benefits the corporations and not the hiring of cheaper labor which results in unemployment. Yes, the unemployment is transitively beneficial, but the sentence could have easily been reworded had the author not wished to make corporations seem nefarious and opposed to average Americans.

Also, consider a few points. First, anyone who fears being displaced could settle for a lesser salary. . . although that would diminish his sacred, "decent middle-class life that defines what makes our country great." We can't have that. We can't have employers deciding how much money their business should make them. Raise the protectionist tariffs! Second, middle class Americans with their savings invested in the stock market often benefit when corporations profit because they're invested in said corporations.

Finally, never mind pesky statistics about older people not retiring and keeping the youth out of the work force, youth unemployment in general, and monetary policy which punishes savings. Pay no attention to such things. Also, ignore the actual effects of automation. Certainly don't ask why the people who make higher wages are more important than the shareholders who benefit from increased profits of businesses and the consumers who enjoy less expensive goods. These aren't the ideas you're looking for. Bourgeois-Boomer solidarity is the name of this game.

The author now concludes:

Technology -- probably even that produced by the slimmer, more efficient United Technologies -- is wonderful. Since at heart I'm an optimist, I believe that eventually many, many new jobs will be created, as they were after the early days of the Industrial Revolution, to make up for the ones that are being destroyed.

And now the caveats. The author wishes to make it known that he is neither a Luddite nor a cynic, traits he has already demonstrated. Now "Technology is wonderful" and "I'm an optimist." He says he has "faith" that new "jobs will be created,"but he links to an article which suggests the government is what made the 19th century profitable. "Jobs will be created" he says, in the passive voice, but he hides the "by whom" in the link. So the author seems to be confessing to some beautiful faith in wonderful people freely working together, economics, but is really confessing to a faith in government force and planning.

The author ends with a recapitulation of his opening shtick, the average older American is amazed by the whiz-bang technology these kids make today.

Between the author's skill at offering the progressive paradigm in broadly pleasing and pandering pabulum and the chorus of squawking praise in the comments section, Mr. Bloch should write political speeches. Perhaps that'll leave him enough money to afford a new iPhone as well as the time to read its manual.

Gandalf the. . . Libertarian

Sooner or later every beloved literary character falls victim to some ideologue who tries to shoehorn him into a pet philosophy. My goal here is far more modest: to observe the character of Gandalf as consistent with Tolkien's philosophy of nature. I have chosen the appellation libertarian mostly out of desperation, libertarianism being the only recognizable philosophy with any principled and pervasive antipathy toward the use of force. Tolkien's own opposition to force included the political as well as natural.

"The modern world meant for [Tolkien] essentially the machine. . . He used ["machine"] very compendiously to mean. . . almost any alternative solution to the development of the innate and inherent powers and talents of human beings. The machine means, for him. . . the wrong solution: the attempt to actualize our desires, like our desire to fly. It meant coercion, domination, for him the great enemy. Coercion of other minds and other wills. This is tyranny. But he also saw the characteristic activity of the modern world is the coercion, the tyrannous reformation of the earth, our place." – Christopher Tolkien

We see in Middle Earth, then, tyranny in the obvious form of Sauron's political control of the free peoples, but also from Saruman, and it is in fact this tyranny which is more instructive insofar as it is multifaceted.

1. He controlled the land via his industrious machines.
2. He sought political domination, by way of the One Ring, to order all things according to his special wisdom. 
3. He through his extraordinary powers of persuasion sought to coerce people for his own ends. Tolkien calls him subtle in speech but we might appropriately call him in Greek δεινός/deinos, or great and terrible with respect to speech.
4. He assumed political authority in heading the White Council. 

In each instance Gandalf is opposed to Saruman.

1. Where Saruman controlled the land, Gandalf was itinerant.
2. Where Saruman sought the One Ring, Gandalf rejected it. Moreover, while he possessed the ring Narya, its power and purpose were not domination but of preservation and rekindling hearts, Gandalf's mission.
3. Where Saruman seeks to persuade Gandalf finds common cause and mutual self-interest (if that's not too libertarian for you) as in the case of the quest for Erebor.
4. Gandalf refused to head the White Council, rejecting political means and preferring to have "no ties and no allegiance" except to those who sent him.

Most different of all, though, Saruman studied the "devices of Sauron of old" and the Rings of Power, their making and history. Even though he earlier sought to learn with the purpose of destroying evil, Tolkien describes Saruman's "desire of mastery" as having grown great. We cannot say for certain whether only the knowledge itself corrupted him, but surely knowing the arts of evil contributed to his downfall. Elrond's statements that, "The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman." and, "Nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." suggest the corrupting influence of power. As soon as one ponders the ways of domination, they work their way into once noble plans.

We should pause on that for a moment, the perversion of noble plans. It is facile to say that "power corrupts" and "plans go awry," but think of how truly sad it is to fall from grace, to see the flame of the good die. How pitiful for a skilled and brilliant spirit tasked with the highest good, a sacred good, to have fallen to the uttermost depths of lust and tyranny and to have perverted himself and his trust. Howard Shore brought out the gravity of Saruman's fall in his score to Gandalf's confrontation with the fallen wizard in Peter Jackson's 2001 film adaptation. Jackson, not without reason, played the scene for a laugh with the dueling geezers, but Shore picked up on the profane thread of Saruman's transformation, the unholy perversion of the good.

In contrast, Gandalf tried to fulfill his limited role of "messenger" to the peoples of Middle Earth and to move, "all living things of good will to valiant deeds." Indeed Gandalf seems to be reminding Saruman of his mission when, after Saruman confesses his plans to rule with the ring, Gandalf responds that he has only heard such folly from the emissaries of Mordor, suggesting that Saruman's proposal is the very antithesis of their mission. It was not the wizards' job to to coerce, either Sauron directly or the free peoples to oppose Sauron, but to kindle, that is to cultivate, the good which would by nature oppose evil. In contrast to Saruman's obsession with means, Gandalf brought purity of purpose and, instead of a desire to oppose force with might, a faith in the agency of the good and meek.

Consider Gandalf's proposal to Elrond that Merry and Pippin be permitted to go with the ring-bearer instead of some great elf lord:

this quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. . . it would be well to trust to their friendship rather than to great wisdom.

How striking, to put all hope not in force, not in conscripting men to fight Sauron nor in matching the Dark Lord in might, but in a bond of love and fealty. To venture slightly off-canon, in his film of The Hobbit, writer-director Peter Jackson gives Gandalf a few lines which seem to sum up the wizard, and libertarian, philosophy:

Saruman believes that it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I find. I've found it is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keeps the darkness at bay, simple acts of kindness and love. Why Bilbo Baggins? Perhaps it is because I am afraid, and he gives me courage. 

No grand plans, no machines and spies and lies and craft. No system of force, just people doing good. And how beautiful that Gandalf should take courage, what he was meant to kindle, from Bilbo, in whom the wizard awoke something Tookish and adventurous, some spirit willing to take a personal risk for the good.

A Friend of Mine: Beyond Polyphony

As any APLV readers know, the classical music greats feature prominently on the blog. Please don't think, though, that we neglect that modern music which speaks straight to the heart. Right here we have a great 20th century hit which cuts past those nasty fugal complexities behind us for some toe-tapping elation. In a way this is purer song, finer expression through its liberation from complex harmonies and expressive means. Listen.

First, hear how the symmetry of those opening notes, three pairs of two, is broken by the seventh, lone note. One does not simply write such a groovy theme. One is inspired. Likewise, notice the triplet figure in the bass rolling on and on, as if eternally, reminiscent of a great passacaglia from Bach, Purcell, or Buxtehude. See lastly how yet another figure theme lays atop the bass, there.

Naturally we cannot ignore the text, which is deliberately emphasized by the lack of musical development. The text features rhyming couplets, emphasizing contrasting pairs such as different and same by their end-stopped placement and important concepts such as name, and same by the end-rhyme. Lastly, the imagery references everything from the ancient myth of Actaeon. "Once I tried to run," to the modern morality tales of Dudley-Do-Right, "He is like a Mountie, he always gets his man."

Complemented by the timeless look of leather vests and pelvic swaying, this video is simply electrifying. Zap!

Six Bach Dances: Part II: The B Minor Mass

And so flung wide are the doors of heaven.

IV. Gloria: Cum Sancto Spiritu

This festive trumpets-and-drums finale closes the ring of the Gloria which kicked off with another dancing D major fanfare. We begin vivace in 3/4 time with one of Bach's most rhythmically potent figures in the first of three sections of free declamatory material which sandwich the two fugues.

In the free sections dancing figures in the accompaniment leap and bound over sustained notes on patris  or ride virtuosic waves of ecstatic thirty-second notes on gloria, producing contrasts of texture and symbolism.

The two fugues utilize a variant of the opening figure for a theme against which he throws, "an animated countersubject, a weaving, conjunct idea on the word 'Amen,' which acts as a perfect foil for the leap filled main subject." [Stauffer, 93-94] The fervor and flurry of second fugue is charged by doubling instruments and false fugal entries, producing a feeling of spontaneous exuberance and, as Stauffer wisely observes, liberation.

It is one of soul's purest pleasures to be carried off in the glory of the Cum sancto stretti as they overflow into the rivers of amens and one grand affirmation: In gloria Dei Patris.

V. Credo: Et Resurrexit

Where the Cum Sancto Spiritu flowed easily and graciously from the noble bass aria Quoniam tu solus Dominus, the trumpets-and-drums Et Resurrexit is an epoch-making break from "the crown of thorns" that was the dissonant Crucifixus.

If the swelling elan of this movement, with rising figures every which way and a positively irresistible downbeat, don't quicken your pulse, check it. Bach has here combined the dignity of regal galanterie and the verve of spontaneous festal feast into a hymn of purest praise.

VI. Credo: Et Expecto

Like the Cum Sancto the Et Expecto flows without delay from the previous movement and like the Et Resurrexit this follows one of great gravity. Bach links the movements with an adagio bridge where a simple and declaratory anapestic figure on A in the first soprano which no sooner begins to fall through the voices than it falls into tempo Vivace e Allegro against a rising fanfare as the movement proper begins. 

After the orchestral ritornello of the fanfare figure the voices rejoin for a short fugato and every factor conspires to paint a clear sense of gesture, space, and scale. First, the leap of a fifth in the figure itself suggest the raising of one's senses to the celestial and divine. Second the rising entrances from the tenor to the second soprano draws the scale and gives a sense of graded escalation while the leap from the bass to first soprano suggests a spiritual vaulting to the heavens. 

The final fugal section achieves a similar sense of space and scale but here a contrast in both sustained and melismatic lines on saeculi, suggesting both the roll of ages and the constancy of the eternal firmament, all complemented by the heraldry of the paired fanfares in the trumpets above.

–

Bibliography

Stauffer, George B. Bach: The Mass in B Minor: The Great Catholic Mass. Yale University Press. 2003.

Six Bach Dances: Part I: Passion Sarabandes

The rhythms of dance are at once wax earthly and celestial, calling the listener to join his corporeal form to a timeless continuance. No dance wants to end and no composer understood this innate property better than Bach, whose dances not only in suites but also sacred choral works remain sculptures of rhythmic perpetuity as they within hold the most expressive harmonies. 

Here on this Good Friday I would take a look at three movements from Bach's two surviving Passions. All three are built on sarabande rhythms in 3/4 time and make use of the room within the sarabande for both gentility and passion.

I. St. John Passion, BWV.245: Tenor Aria, Ach mein Sinn

Score & Text @ Bach Cantatas Site

The St. John Passion's counterpart to Matthew's more famous Erbarme dich, the tenor aria Ach mein Sinn is Peter's turmoil after his threefold denial of Jesus. Yet where the Erbarme dich is a haunting, twining torment in the memory, Ach mein Sinn is an extroverted display of furious self abasement. Where the twists and turns in the Erbarme dich seem as Peter's sin again and again trickling into his mind, they here seem daggers amidst the din of dissonance, halting dotted rhythms, and rising and falling phrases. 

II. St. John Passion, BWV.245: Chorus: Ruht wohl

Score & Text @ Bach Cantatas Site

The stately sarabandes which close both of Bach's surviving passions have been variously referred to as  lullaby-like. This is somewhat appropriate, given the gentle flute and oboe parts above and the falling figures, suggestive of laying-down, which both pieces also share. Rising-and-falling figures, the lullaby-rocking, if you will, also contribute to the soporific mood, but the grieving leaps in the chorus and descending chromatic bass are bitter contrast to the sweet gentility of the rhythm.

III. St. Matthew Passion, BWV.244: Chorus: Wir setzen uns

Score & Text @ Bach Cantatas Site

Here the more regular sarabande rhythm creates a more persistent, sepulchral tone while the sudden shifts into dissonance draw an expressive interiority within the scene-painting of Christ's burial. The contrasting emotions of grandeur in the sarabande rhythm and tenderness in the falling figures, of personal grieving in leaps and communal grieving in vertical dissonance, and the death of Jesus the Man and Christ the Lord coalesce into one unfolding both immanent and transcendent.

–

Bibliography

Little, Meridith & Jenne, Natalie. Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach. Indiana University Press. 1991, 2001.

Stapert, Calvin R. My Only Comfort: Death, Deliverance, and Discipleship in the Music of Bach. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. Co. 2000.

Steinberg, Michael. Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide. Oxford University Press. 2005.

Changing Your Avatar, Political Edition

So when I got home from work yesterday I noticed on the social media that many folks had changed their Facebook and Twitter avatars to a pretty red equal sign, evidently in support of something. I found this reaction incredible and impossible to take serious for a few reasons.

The first is the unrestricted nature of the claim. Outside of a philosophical context, Christian or humanist or legalistic, this is simply a platitude. Yet instead of "equal because of Christ's suffering" or "equal because of equal nature" or "equal under the law," we're all just "equal."

The second is the lockstep into which these folks have fallen with the news cycle, persuaded that Tuesday was some landmark moment. There's little more pitiful to a conservative than someone who lives so much in the moment, let alone one so fraudulent and patently manufactured.

Thirdly, it's embarrassing after umpteen administrations, supreme courts, and congresses usurping and riding roughshod over liberties, to snuggle up to these monopolists whenever they look willing to throw you a bone. Tuesday's effusions demonstrate not spontaneous solidarity on the battlement but hopeless sycophancy to power and indifference to all but the matter of the moment.

Lastly, it's hard to accept the furious and exclusively political bent of some people. Many people seem to think that because much activity occurs in some political context, i.e. in society, that the nature of such activity is chiefly political. Even when persecuted, you can be principled without having a cause, and vice versa.

On Dressing Down

It is no revelation to observe that a man reveals himself in what excites him, yet one instance of this banal principle reveals. Why oh why do people get so excited when they're allowed to "dress down?" Now I'm not talking about the habitually disheveled or congenitally unkempt, but those who would seem to pride themselves on a tidy and appropriate appearance. Nor do I refer to some mild excitement: these people are ecstatic as if some Sisyphean vestmental duty has been lifted from their shoulders. What gives?

Is dressing well such a burden? Are a collared shirt, tie, and pressed pants really so hard to put on? Perhaps it is the upkeep, although as far as I know the washing machines do all the work these days, and dry cleaning is affordable. Perhaps business and light formal attire is thought expensive. Of course it can be, but so is the fashionable grunge-wear hocked by Ambercrombie et al. And what of the dress shoe's recent demotion? Sneakers are for sporting, boat shoes for boating, sandals for the beach, and boots for messy business. The humble dress shoe is king.

Aside from practical concerns, though, is dressing well such a penance? Can this finery, and finery it is although many today can afford it, truly displease us? It's not as if we're talking about 18th century galanterie formalwear stiff enough set you upright all by itself. Today's materials are soft, flexible, and resilient. And is dressing up not fun? A crisp collar, the delicate dress socks and laces, the supple leather of the shoes and that moment when the trousers fall on them at just the right place. And I should be grateful for the right to slide on a pair of shorts or aptly dubbed dungarees?

It's not as if in ditching proper attire we're removing layers of Baroque frippery to unveil some buried Vitruvian perfection, rather we replace the dignified and complementary with the shabby. Doing such doesn't mean we've embraced austerity or simplicity or comfort, but rather that we've lost the ability to take pleasure in the exquisite.

Aesthetics of Scale

After today's early tea, I came across an illuminating comparison of the two largest ocean liners of their ages, the infamous HMS Titanic and her modern counterpart, the Allure of the Seas. The image, alas for me, says most if not all: standards for size have changed. This at first might seem like progress. Surely Allure achieves commendable economies of scale which allow travelers of modest means to book passage. Too, today's sea queen boasts finer amenities and luxuries for all on board than the most posh of Titanic's rooms and decks. Look at the picture to the right, though. Isn't something amiss?

I think so: beauty. Allure of the Seas is a massive, ungainly vessel. Look how she seems to overflow from her prow and how the decks look slapped and storied atop one another. Look, below, at the carnival of bulbous, glassed-in theaters that festoon the top deck.

In contrast, observe the relative austerity of Titanic, how the top decks, protruding forward slightly, seem to cap off the prow. What dignified simplicity in the contrast of colors. Each ship is massive, but Allure looks overgrown, whereas Titanic looks consistent with itself: harmonized. Titanic impresses where Allure imposes.

What irony in the names, then. Titanic is a frank attempt to denote gravity and immensity, yet her design reflects an aesthetic. The name Allure is supposed to entice us, to charm us by natural appeal, and yet beauty here has been overlooked, or worse, disregarded.

Maybe the difference is of purpose. Titanic had just one, to carry passengers in luxury, whereas Allure is a floating amusement park attempting to be everything to everyone. Where Titanic achieved a noble simplicity of purpose and elegance of execution, Allure is a meretricious cash cow. Perhaps that's why, for all of their engineering feats and affordable accommodations, we take today's luxury liners for granted. They don't allure, they don't capture the imagination. They simply roll on, servicing the bourgeois as hi tech testaments to the tawdry and tasteless.

Gratitude and. . . Capitalism?

Few words these days come with as much baggage as the dreaded moniker capitalist. Synonymous for many with greedy bastard, most defenses of the free market begin with some attempt to reclaim the title. My association with the appellation is perhaps the least expected: gratitude. How can this be? Well, the answer is pretty simple.

I'm not a world-class chef, nor am I a barber. I also can't make furniture, or microprocessors. Nor can I repair arteries, engines, or bridges. Moreover, my mortal self will never live so long as to learn, let alone perfect, those crafts. Setting skills aside, then, I don't even own the materials to make any of the aforementioned. Not copper or lumber or oil or silicon or wool. Moreover, I don't even have the property on which to store or from which to extract the materials. As you might imagine, then, I'm pretty grateful to sit in a house, at a desk, typing at a computer.

"That's all well and good," you might say, "but what does that have to do with money? People could make those things anyway." True, true. Imagine this for me, though.

I ask my neighbor, a master woodworker, to make me a desk. I tell him that I want it quite large and ornately adorned. He agrees, but quotes me no price and goes ahead to make the desk. I come back a few weeks later to pick up my desk and learn he has spent the whole month working solely on my desk. How honored I am, and what a desk!  So honored that I offer him $100, all I can afford for it. What can he do? I have no more money, although he can refuse to sell it to me. Either way, he's lost not only the resources, but the opportunity to have covered costs and made a profit. Now here's my particular point here: he needs the profit to buy food and gas and pay his mortgage and so forth, and he needs to buy those things because he can't make them, and he can't make them because he's a carpenter. He's a carpenter because he's good at it, so he takes the risk of refining his skill in the hope that people prefer his expertise to their own, or to not having crafted wood products at all.

Yes, at all. Well who else is going to make the desks? The dentist, the lawyer, the cook, the classicist? Of course not, the carpenter does, in the hope that he can make enough money to buy the things he can't make for himself. I say hope because he might not be able to do anything else.

Now without setting a price for his material and labor, how will he know how to use his limited time and limited resources to make enough money to afford what he needs. The fancy desk which takes a month to make and earns him $100 doesn't buy him what he needs so that plan won't work, but maybe if he can make a simpler desk in three days and sell it for $150, it profits him. That equilibrium is his to find, his equation to balance.  It is his burden to figure out how to serve as many patrons as he can with his limited skills so that he can support himself. No one can force him to make a certain price, but no one can give him the formula for success either. So how does gratitude fit into all of this?

I'm grateful that so many people can balance that equation not only well enough to support themselves, but with such ferocious ingenuity that I can afford such a fine desk and dual-core marvel of a computer, amidst other wonders. The next time you bemoan the stupidity of mankind, and we all do in our haughty, self-satisfied moments, look around at the thousands of people doing things you can't do. Look at the curves of the keys on your keyboard or the stitching on your shirt. It's actually pretty humbling, especially when you consider the alternative: everyone doing everything ourselves, most of it badly. Out the window goes excellence because no one can specialize and get good at anything because we're busy doing a little of everything. So no more phones, cars, or computers. "Fine," say the aesthetes who reject such pedestrian concerns, and whom I ask: would you prefer that Mozart, DaVinci, and Shakespeare have spent more time farming?

That's not all the gratitude, though, because I'm also grateful whenever people want my own services. First, I'm grateful they've chosen me over other people offering the same work. Second, I'm honored they're bringing something I make or do into their lives. In fact, I'm no less honored that a man lets me teach him Latin than I would be if he hung a portrait I painted in his living room. Customers have taken a part of their lives, the time they spent working for the money they paid me, and trusted me to fill it. Wow. Lastly, I'm grateful they're supporting me. Without them, I'd be out of luck, and money. They are my patrons.

All of this gratitude also engenders two other emotions. The first is the humility which comes when you realize you cannot, in fact, do everyone else's job, and that even if you could, you could never do all of them at the same time. Even if you can do the job of the bag boy or cashier, you have your own job to do, remember? So out the window goes the contempt for so-called "menial" jobs.

The second feeling is respect, both for the people whose money you have taken, your patrons, and for those you patronize. The former support you with money and the later support you with goods. Remember the money is useless unless you exchange it for something you want for its own sake. So it's all support, then, and that realization is what makes some libertarians, in my experience, such jolly and gracious people. They don't feel entitled to certain profits or see exploitation around every corner, but rather they see the serendipitous confluence of interests in the free exchanges of free people. Now that's something to be grateful for, and something beautiful too.

On Re-Forming

Reform. The innocent word pops up at every changing-of-the-guard, the most recent of which being the election of Pope Francis. Will he reform the church? Ought he? Amidst the endless blabber and inane speculation, I ask, what does it mean to reform? We're rather liberal in our use of this little word, most often meaning simply to improve. This is of course not quite right and even progressives and reformers will admit that not all change is for the good. So perhaps we mean just, to change.

Yet many degrees of change present are possible. I may change my shirt, or my hairstyle, or where I live. I may also, though, change my philosophy of life. My mood changes as well. Can my character? Ought it? Curious that we don't use reform with reference to ourselves anymore. We used to. "He's reformed," they would say of a man after he served his jail sentence. There was in that use a sense of the gravity of the change. He's re-formed. He's a different man. They acknowledged the change as significant and, in this case, desirable.

Today, reform is used almost exclusively to refer to institutions and societies, not men. Society, we readily say, is a wreck. It's the politicians, the bankers, the immigrants. It's unions, it's the Tea Party, it's this or that president. Something's wrong with them. Society needs reform, that is, change by law, by fiat. We, however, are ourselves perfected, or perfect in imperfection. Never simply imperfect, though. Do we no longer think of changing ourselves? That we can, or ought to? Or do we simply glory in our noble, raw forms?  We educate minds, we rehabilitate physical health, but we don't reform. Maybe we don't re-form because we don't form, but how can we reform society if not ourselves?

So we'll reform society. We'll to reform "healthcare." We'll reform "education." We want the pope to reform the church. The president wants to "fundamentally transform" the nation. We have great expectations yet we casually speak of reform as if we're remodeling a living room or patching a few roofing shingles, hammering out a few kinks. Individuals who would not tinker with their stoves and who refuse to change themselves champion reform of nearly everything else.

Now reform might technically be the proper word, but what I think we mean is reconstitute, that is, to change the rules, to change the agreement and the system. We want to shuffle the deck for a new deal. We want to constituere, to set up, to decide anew. Re-form indeed. And we say this casually. It'll take just a few more laws, a little managerial tinkering, a little more authority in the right hands, and, naturally, more funding.

So near, so simple. Only it's not, of course, because we're still talking about changing people.

Sometimes reform is needed, but it's a grave thing, best started at home, and wherever, best without the conceit that one can both reform and conserve.