Displacing the air (Desai)

Year by year, his life wasn't amounting to anything at all; in a space that should have included family, friends, he was the only one displacing the air.

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss

Keeps us on the chase (McMahon)

Although natural selection has conditioned us to experience pleasure in activities that contribute to our survival, it disposes us to quickly adapt to them and then to strive for a little more. In this view, enduring satisfaction or permanent contentment would not be conducive to survival. It is in our interest—and so in our genes—always to be slightly wanting, restlessly searching for further satisfaction. A bit of anxiety keeps us on our guard against danger, and a bit of unfulfilled desire keeps us on the chase, ever eager to ensure our survival and that of our kin.

Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History

Unable to see sense or profit

An unbeliever or skeptic, for whom fantasy remains properly restricted to the imagination, is at an inherent disadvantage when religions seek to make war upon one another, being unable to see sense or profit in a slaughter intended to determine the temporary ascendency of one invented folly over another. It seems to such a one of little importance ultimately whether the advocates of the green fairies should triumph over the forces of the blue fairies, and he wonders that it can matter enough to anyone to warrant the resulting violence and suffering and destruction.

The greatest good for the greatest number

The greatest good for the greatest number—this Enlightenment value is the goal that democracy itself was devised to achieve (if we allow for the existence of the “wisdom of the masses,” and presume that the individuals who comprise “the masses” possess an enlightened self-interest sufficient to motivate choices which will regularly produce good outcomes). The democratic solution, however, is based on an interpretation of this measure, “the greatest good for the greatest number,” that is too narrow and restrictive. Democracy is driven by the expressed will of the majority—calculated, at its simplest, at fifty-one percent. Since the minimum number that can qualify as “greatest” is fifty-one percent (when an issue is presented for selection as a binary option), under this interpretation majority rule—by catering to the greatest number it is possible to oblige in the resolution of a binary conflict—satisfies the requirements for producing the greatest possible good.

But is it imaginable that the greatest good can contain as much as forty-nine percent bad? This represents a level of unsatisfactoriness that is virtually identical to the fifty-fifty average of the completely random binary outcome, varying by just one percent! In many cases, of course, given larger majorities, this gap can widen considerably, but it remains an inescapable fact that a binary control structure—even under the fairest system, the self-governing democracy—will necessarily result in significant dissatisfaction among considerable numbers of those it constrains.

This “tyranny of the majority” is unavoidable so long as one takes this narrow view of “the greatest good for the greatest number,” in which the greatest number can be a simple majority. But surely all one has to do to burst the illusion that basic, unmitigated majority rule in fact provides the greatest good for the greatest number is to postulate a means by which a portion of those ill-served by majority rule (a number which can be as high as forty-nine percent in a single case and which is one hundred percent when all cases are aggregated) is satisfied in addition to that majority that already determined its own good through self-determination. If a fifty-one percent majority chooses a certain course on a binary issue and can refrain from imposing its preference upon that minority which it outweighs, then other, secondary and supplemental resolutions become possible for some or all of the minority and that portion need not be consigned to the status of “loser” within the context of the conflict, to have their will imposed upon and their autonomy curtailed. Adding their number to that of the majority would then allow their “good” to composite with that of the majority to create a higher overall value of “greatest good.”

Certainly some choices by their very nature are inherently and exclusively either/or and must apply to all or be invalidated for any, and these may not lend themselves to a more flexible (and equitable) resolution of this type. But it would seem that every case in which the majority could content themselves with choosing only for themselves would produce a greater good for a greater number than majority rule can produce alone. Given that the “greatest good” will always be subject to debate and disagreement, perhaps the key is to focus instead on the “greatest number,” not just as a simple majority but as the largest possible percentage of the population that can be accommodated and left free even of the tyranny of majority rule. A willingness to accept in others that which you don’t approve for yourself could go a long way toward overcoming the inherent injustice of democracy and toward increasing the practical liberty for all that is democracy’s goal.

Retaliation is not progressive

If we allow people to cite historical outrage to justify current aggression and moral transgression, then we authorize literally billions of people to retaliation and devastation on an unprecedented scale.

We don't live in the worlds of the past; we cannot oppose or halt the crimes of those who lived in them. All we can do, and must do, is to try to stop those who would embrace violence and terror as their methods today. We should not be dissuaded from this commitment by the arguments of the apologists who would rationalize their current acts on the basis of narrow, one-sided interpretations of complex events that occurred in the past.

[Crossposted on The Huffington Post]

Why don't we live longer?

It occurs to me that a shorter individual lifespan confers an inherent evolutionary advantage (more generations compressed into the same time period, allowing for greater variation/adaptation) and therefore one would expect shorter lives to develop from once-longer ones over time, all else being equal...

To govern?

So long as "to govern" is interpreted as "to rule" rather than "to guide," tyranny will ensue.

The first thing to understand

The first thing to understand about the world of men is that every man is mad. Women too. Even me. Even you.

What portion?

What portion of an era's distinctive specificities derives from its particular necessities?

O’er all the world the infectious blast of death (Shelley)

Millions to fight compell’d, to fight or die
In mangled heaps on War’s red altar lie . . .
When legal murders swell the lists of pride;
When glory’s views the titled idiot guide.
It is the “cold advisers of yet colder kings” who have “the power to breathe / O’er all the world the infectious blast of death.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley, from Poetical Essay, recently rediscovered after nearly 200 years

clown! varlet! miscreant! hound! (Balzac)

You see nothing there, clown! varlet! miscreant! hound!

Honoré de Balzac, "The Unknown Masterpiece"

Bush & Jesus

Of course Bush is drawn to the story of Jesus, in which an all-powerful father sends his son to lead the lost, only to forsake him when he is overwhelmed by their wicked intransigence and ingratitude, letting them humiliate and ultimately destroy him.

He sees it as his life story.

Several thoughts

If even love is subject to the grim arc of gravity, then what bliss teases and tempts us so relentlessly with the prospect of endless flight? Is it death?

***

If life is accidental, then death must be as well.

***

Even while battered to an unprecedented degree by Change at the crest of her power, no population has ever lived so sheltered from consequence, so removed from so much of what has been the very core of reality to so many.

***

Reason is reason enough.

Rage

            Rage

The impulse
or the urge
to destroy everything
that constrains my liberty
(which is everything),
the need to be freed
—now!—
ends all thought,
rends the heart,
renders the body
helpless, less;
fight and flight collapse,
compact
into a single
seething
surging
hot con-
fusion.

Where am I,
so easy to wash away
in a poisoned pulse?

Salman Rushdie on memory

From a New York Times article on déjà vécu:

Salman Rushdie once observed that memory has its "own special kind" of truth. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies and vilifies also, he wrote in Midnight's Children, but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own.