Hildegarde

I have gotten to that point in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that’s good for me to read because it reminds me that nothing is new, especially in American education policy.

And looked at this way, as part of a continuous history rather than a phenomenon of the last few decades, it occurs to me that it’s really a fundamental question about equality in the larger sense–and what is and what should be the goal of a free public education in a democratic society.

Okay, that sounds more convoluted than it actually is.

Let me back up a little.

First, I think most of us would agree that the common school was one of the best ideas New England ever had, and that the project of providing at least a basic education for everyone, without direct charge, is a good thing.

This is a simple idea in theory, but a nearly impossible one in practice.

I think we could manage nearly universal agreement that all children should learn to read, write and figure, and that all American children should learn how American institutions work (how to vote, how Congress passes bills) and how American history unfolded.

We often have different ideas about what these things should mean (is American history a glorious story of a march to freedom or a shabby tale of oppression?), but whether we actually accept that these things should be taught or not, we almost all pay lip service to them.

And that’s fine, as far as it goes.

All children who are not mentally handicapped–and I mean that in the sense it was used 50 years ago, not today’s “everything is autism” regime–can be taught to do these things, to read at least well enough to understand a newspaper, to do accurate addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, to comprehend that the country started in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence and that Congressmen are elected every two years.

My guess is that almost all children could understand a lot more, but that doesn’t matter for the moment.

What does matter is this:

Sooner or later, we will inevitably reach a point where not all children will be able to understand what needs to be taught to go on with a particular subject.

This is inevitably for a variety of reasons–not all children are born with the intellectual talent to understand all subjects at a high level, and some are born not able to understand any subjects at a high level; not all children are motivated; not all children come from families that will allow them to understand any subject at a high level.

If you’re confused about that last one, you need to look into the cases of parents in Appalachia who deliberately prevent their children from learning to read because if the children learn to read they will no longer be classified as “learning disabled” and the family will lose the extra money the federal government provides for learning disabled children.

At any rate, there are reasons, and the reasons will never entirely disappear.

This is not something we can fix, although we pretend we can. 

For better or for worse, intellectual talent is like every other kind of talent.  The highest levels of it will be present in only a very small percentage of the population.

It’s at this point that we run into trouble. 

This would be a problem even if there wasn’t a history of distrust of “fancy education” in this country–and there is such a history.

No matter what any of us think of a rigorous education–calculus, Kant, Shakespeare, John Locke, the intricacies of the history of the American Civil War, foreign languages both ancient and modern, laboratory science–there is no way to create a world in which everybody can “succeed” in “getting it.”

The usual estimate for enough ability to reach the most rigorous levels of this kind of thing is 10% of the population.  The usual estimate for “acceptable” levels is about 25%.  And there are other students–maybe the most numerous–who can reach the highest rigor in one or two subjects and only an acceptable level in the rest.

That’s a very small proportion of the population.  The population at large will get little direct benefit from a rigorous academic curriculum, although their long term secondary benefit may be large.

I am one of those people who thinks that the secondary benefit can be very large. 

Susie Cheerleader may not be intellectually capable of doing advanced mathematics or wrapping her head around the structure of the adrenal system, but the person who does is more likely than she is to figure out how to cure the cancer that pops up in her life when she’s 42.

Even so, there is an argument to be made that in a system of free public education in a democratic society, the emphasis should be on teaching those things that everybody needs and almost everybody can learn.

One of the things rereading the Hofstadter has done for me is to remind me how pervasive such an attitude has been throughout our history and how many times the educational system of one place or another, or the nation as a whole, has tried to install such a product.

When I see this kind of thing happening today, I tend to ascribe it to racial skittishness–given the state of public education in minority-heavy inner cities, installing an intellectually rigorous system would cause racial disparities in outcomes that most of the country would find politically unacceptable.

But many earlier attempts at dumbing down the public school curriculum occured long before racial integretation was even a serious issue.  You can find schemes for this kind of thing going back to 1910, at least. 

Proposals for dumbing down were one of the first public papers produced by the NEA. 

Such proposals weren’t called “dumbing down,” of course.  They had names like “education for democracy.”   And the were usually written in such truly awful pseudo-intellectual jargon that they were nearly impossible to understand.

And, of course, its most famous exponent was John Dewey.

But no matter what it called it self, it came down to this:  not everybody can understand differential equations and the molecular structure of lead and Romeo and Juliet, and since not everybody can understand them, we shouldn’t teach them.

What we should teach instead is what students will find meaningful in their daily lives, which means…

Well, it’s meant a lot of things.  It turns out “relevance” wasn’t invented by the Left in the Sixties.  It’s been around for a hundred and fifty years, if not more.

The version of it Hofstadter was dealing with was called the “life adjustment” movement, where students were processed through a thin line of very attentuated study in academic subjects and otherwise urged to pursue things like home economics and “preparation for marriage.”

I have the Russians to thank for the fact that I missed this lovely little trend.  Sputnik went up and people began to think they ought to get serious about students, you know, actually k nowing some things.

But I remember my parents talking about it–or rather, my father ranting and railing about it.

He wasn’t a fan.

These days we get “critical thinking” and “becoming a lifetime learner,” which sound really great–the educational theorists who come up with this stuff have learned to make it sound better–but it all comes down to the same thing: not everybody can learn the high level stuff, so we shouldn’t be teaching it.

We shouldn’t even acknowledge its existence.

By now, it should be obvious that I’m not a fan of this sort of thing either,  but the question remains, and it isn’t a stupid one.

What is a free public education in a democratic society supposed to do?

Should it be aimed at teaching the basic knowledge everybody needs to know and almost everybody is able to learn?

Or should it be structured to provide high level academics for that very small minority capable of  students capable of taking advantage of them?

Resourses are limited.  No matter how much we want to think we can do both, we probably can’t, both because we lack the money and the high-level teachers to do it with, and because we will constantly run into that wall that says there’s something wrong about spending the community’s resources on something the community cannot use.

Which is a little garbled, there.

But there it is.

And I have things I need to do.

What I intended to do on the blog today was to finish the #bookadaychallenge–to do the second half of the month.  I’ve been sick for a week and I’m still very draggy today, and I thought it would be an easier and gentler way of doing the blog when what I really want to do is sleep.

Unfortunately, when I went to Twitter to find the list of questions, it seemed to have disappeared.  I have no idea if it’s actually disappeared of if I’m just so stupid about Twitter that I can’t find it, but one way or the other I can’t get it, and so I can’t answer the second half of the month’s questions.

What I’ve decided to do instead is to talk about the week, which, being a week when I could make no sense about anything, was also a week when I was watching a lot of television.

Well, not exactly television.  Or rather, television, but not as ordinarily watched.

Here’s what happened:  a couple of years ago, on the recommendation of several of my friends, I started to watch a British production of a thing called Downton Abbey. This is a modern version of Upstairs, Downstairs, a sort of high class soap opera about aristocratic Brits and their servants.

Downton Abbey added a little interest by tying its story to the events of the period, so that the first episode takes place just as the world has received news of the sinking of the Titanic. 

And one of the people who dies on the Titanic is the heir presumptive of the Earl of Grantham, lord of Downtown Abbey and possessed of three daughters and no sons.

If you’ve ever watched this kind of thing, the progress of the plot will be largely predictable. 

Lord Grantham’s daughters are about as well able to handle their affairs as you’d expect, and they get into one great mess after another.

The writers of the show, though, have a remarkable attachment to the idea of killing people off.  The body count on this thing rivals that of Cabot Cove, although not always from murder.

Although there is a murder at one point.

There is also WWI, financial ruin, social ruin, and a one night stand dead of heart failure in an unmarried woman’s bed.  Plus death in childbirth and a car accident.  Plus…

You get the picture.

I started to watch this and then, for no reason I could tell, our local PBS stations stopped putting it up on their FOD.  The show aired at ten o’clock at night, and I almost never stay up until ten, so I was relying on the FOD encores to enable me to see the thing.  For a while this worked well.  Then the episodes became sporadic.  Then they disappeared altogether.

I have no idea why this happened.  It’s entirely possible that PBS stations just stopped showing the thing, although that’s unlikely, since it was having quite a vogue.

Whatever the reason, I couldn’t get the thing any more at all, and I’d missed a whole line of episodes at the beginning of one of the seasons because those hadn’t been put up either.

Just to make everything even more annoying, the program wasn’t available on any of the other platforms that carry this kind of thing, like Netflix or Hulu.

I would go looking for the thing.  My sons would go looking for it.  Nothing.

About the time the being-sick thing got to the point that it was obvious that a) it was going to last a while and b) it was going to make it extremely difficult for me to read while it was going on, one of the boys tried one more time, and there it was.

Not only was it up for free, it was up in its entirety, mostly in the “original British” versions, and that meant I could start at the beinning with Season 1, Episode 1, and go right on to the end of what’s been filmed to date.

I’ve done this with a couple of television shows now–the HBO series The Newsroom for one–and I much prefer it to the usual stop in every week, see each episode separately method.

It’s rare that television shows these days are made as they were in the 50s, where each episode is discreet and isolated from the rest and where there is no overarching narrative about the main characters.

So there I was, with the show back in my orbit, so to speak, and just the way I like it, and all I had to do was conk out on the love seat in the afternoons after work, let the fever rage, and watch the world of Downton Abbey go by.

And that is when the trouble started.

Maybe I was just sick and out of sorts, or something.  Maybe it’s just that the difference between watching something episodically and watching it whole is fundamental to the way you react to the characters.

Whatever it was, I was increasingly annoyed the longer I paid attention, and more and more impatient the better I felt and the better I could pay attention.

Part of it was particular to the series.  There are a tremendous number of really unappetizing characters in this thing, both in the upper class and the servant class.  One sister ruins the reputation of another out of jealousy and spite.  A lady’s maid engineers an accident she expects to cause a miscarriage in her mistress, and it does.  A footman spends all his time trying to sabotage every other servant in the house and manages half the time.  A nanny tries to get one of the Downtown grandchildren to hate the other.

A lot of what goes on is trivial enough, but a lot of it is first class nasty, and none of what is first class nasty ever seems to result in any actual comeuppance. 

I’m not the kind of reader (or viewer) who needs to have everything tied up tidily, to have evil always punished and virtue always rewarded.  The world is not like that, and I do not go to fiction to escape from reality.

The sheer unrelievedness of it all got very oppressive very fast, though.  I continued watching it–I’ll finish up today–but I’ve been carping at it now for a couple of days.

But I think there’s something bigger going on here.

I know that shows like this–and books about the same or similar milieus–are very popular.  I even know that they’re especially popular with people who love PBS, and who tend to be both politically progressive and terribly worried about “income inequality.”

Before I ever watched a single episode of the show, I read a number of different articles in respectably progressive venues about why this might be so.

But for me, I think the bottom line is that I don’t find the heritidary rich all that interesting.

I sometimes find the self-made rich very interesting indeed, depending on how they made their money.   You have to have an unusual kind of mind to get rich honestly, and especially by making something new, and that I can play with all day.

But your ordinary person who inherits a ton of money shallow, clueless and almost patholically insecure. 

I sometimes find it odd that so many people are so entranced by servants and expensive clothes and cars with drivers that they’re willing to put up with all the whining.

And there is always whining.  Sometimes it seems to me as if the born rich do nothing but whine.  What should be the glorious opportunity to do anything–write, paint, work in the ghetto, invent things–ends up being nothing more than an invitation to prove how important you are by proving how miserable you are.

And that description applies as well to even the people counted relatively poor in most of the rich countries.  \

I’m not saying that poverty doesn’t exist in rich countries like the US or France or Sweden, although it’s almost always relative poverty next to what “poor” means in countries worldwide.

I am saying that so many of us in the rich countries are rich enough that we spend our lives bemoaning all the ways in which we feel slighted, ignored, and put upon.

We’ve taken a strong word like “oppressed,” which used to mean being put to death for your religion or not allowed to get an education because of your sex, and applied it to things like people coming up to you and complimenting you on how beautiful your sari is.   In doing that, you see, they mark you out as different, exotice, The Other. 

And anybody who expects you to be able to get a graduate degree or succeed in something competitive in the face of that is part of the problem, because he’s upholding cultural and structural oppression.

Okay, I’ll admit it.

I’m having one of those days.

And it probably means I should stop watching Downton Abbey.

But I won’t.

Every once in a while I get into these odd states where I feel as if I don’t have anything to say, but I want to write anyway. 

Except that that isn’t really it.  It’s more like I have something to say, and I don’t know if it’s very important.   Or if it relates to anything, to use the term my students favor.

Let’s take a look at this for a minute–at the primary challenger who lost to the incumbent and then claimed that the incumbent was actually dead.

I’m going to link here to a local news website for the story:

http://kfor.com/2014/06/26/congressional-candidate-feels-opponent-is-a-body-double/

You can google this thing, if you want, and get much livelier accounts of the whole mess, because the liberal and progressive websites are having a field day, as they should.

The basic facts are this:

Back during this past primary season, an Oklahoma politician named Timothy Ray Murray challenged Republican incumbent Congressman Frank Lucas for the Republican nomination for Congress in the state’s third district.

This is being consistently reported as a “Tea Party” challenge on the left liberal blogs, but that may not be true.  As it turns out, Murray ran for something during the election cycle before this one, and that time he ran as a Democrat.

Democrat or Tea Party, though, is less interesting than what came next.

First, Mr. Murry lost.

And when I say lost, I mean he was bulldozed flat.  Lucas got 82% of the vote.  Not only was it not even close, it wasn’t close enough to call not even close. 

That would probably be the end of it, except for what came next.

What came next was those two letters you can read on the link I gave you, posted on Tim Murray’s web site and stating that:

The person the voters took to be Frank Lucas and voted for because they thought he was Frank Lucas wasn’t really Frank Lucas.

The real Frank Lucas had been executed by the “international court” in the Ukraine “on or about” January 11, 2011, and then been replaced by an android replicant that looked and sounded like Lucas, but wasn’t really Lucas.

What’s more, Lucas wasn’t the only Congressperson who had been executed and replaced by a replicant.

But since Lucas wasn’t actually alive any more, and since replicants were n ot eligible for Congress under the Constitution, Lucas had actually lost the primary and Murray was the proper candidate.

Then there’s this:

This is a situation similar to the Senators’ from Kentucky situation in the 2012 election. I am contesting that this matter has happen since his election was blocked, because of the U.S. Defense Department’s use of Mr. Murray’s DNA. To my knowledge, the U.S. Defense Department has not released to the public that information, as it is their confidential information about many people. Congress is likely wanting me to state that all my DNA used will not result in benefits to people I have never had relations with of a family nature. I have been bound to protect that information unless it causes harm to The People.

If you have any idea what that is supposed to mean, you’re doing better than I am.

Now, a couple of things.

First, the left liberal web presence, on social media and off, has been predictably outraged and horrified at this, often asking why nobody has yet dragooned this man into a psych evaluation.

Every once in a while somebody who knew what it takes to coerce a psych evaluation would point out that the man wasn’t eligible (unless he decided to submit voluntarily), but I’d give the “he should see a shrink and be on medication” people a break.

It certainly does sound pretty damned crazy.

And the howling of “this is what the Tea Party gets you” isn’t entirely unfounded, either, since the Tea Party has thrown up a few distinctly odd candidates across the country.  Think of  Christine O’Donnell, Republican candidate for the US Senate from Delaware in 2010, who ran an ad telling us that she was not a witch.

I’m not joking.  That’s still up on YouTube if you want to see it.

It most certainly hurt the entire party and not just the candidate.  And the party knew it even at the time.

But I’m going to give the Republicans a pass here, too.  If you’re trying to bring in people to run for office who aren’t the usual people–not Ivy graduates, not lawyers, not members of the club–the chances are that you’re going to pull in a few nutcases. 

And, strange as it may seem, some voters on both sides of the divide may think your position on abortion or immigration or half a dozen other things is more important than the fact that you think people still worry about who might be a witch.

What I objected to wa the implication, or outright charge, that Mr. Murray’s beliefs about replicants and dead people running for office were “stupid.”

Because not only were these beliefs not stupid, they weren’t even, in the strictest sense of the word, anti-intellectual.

First, hard as this may be to believe, they’re part of an elaborate and well articulate belief system with tens of thousands of adherents around the world.

It’s the variant of another belief system, this one claiming that the world is run by nonhuman “reptilians” who are the descendants of the coupling of human beings with Satan’s demons, that has an even larger number of adherents, dates back to around the time of the American Revolutionary War, and comes in denomination that cover everything from Catholics and Protestants and Muslims to atheists and agnostics.

If you go looking, you can find web sites and organizations in the thousands not only espousing these things, but doing it articulately and logically.

Not rationally, necessarily, but logically.

Certainly there are, across the world, established religious and ideological systems that are no more or less divorced from reality than Mr. Murray’s ideas seem to be.  

We don’t react as strongly to those as to this because we’re used to them. 

Or because we don’t actually know what they say, but assume they must make sense, because so many people believe in them.

What Mr. Murray is engaging in, no matter how odd it may seem to most of us, is a form of theology.  (And all ideology is theology, so keep that in mind.)

And like all theology–Catholic, Marxist, Freudian–it’s a closed system.  Once you accept its premise, everything else follows automatically.

I am not saying here that I think we should accept Mr. Murray’s ideas as true, or even as ‘true enough to deserve respect.”

I am enormously grateful that Mr. Lucas’s constituents cast their eye over his challenger and decided they really had no interest.

I am saying that these beliefs are neither crazy nor stupid.

They’re just wrong.

And they’re just as representative as the capacity for abstract thought as the theory of relativity.

Here’s where we are.

I started to feel a little ill in a summer cold/maybe flu kind of way on Saturday, and I thought it would be over in no time.

Instead, it’s been getting worse and worse, and today I feel as if I’ve been hit by a Mack truck.

And then it backed up.

I’ve got two links below, both on the question of what is a liberal.

The first one is sort of wishy washy.  The second one is by Charles Murray.

I think what’s going on is that a number of people–Murray among them–are trying to figure out the differences between liberal as it was long understood in the US–and even the world–and what we’ve got now.

I think it’s interesting to note that the pulls of the ideologies we now call “progressive” and “conservative” go all the way back to the founding and before.

But I feel really bad, and I’m going to go away now.

http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/why-liberalism-is-still-the-best-way-to-govern/

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/articles/charles-murray-the-trouble-isnt-liberals-its-progressives-1404170419

Let me start with this: if you don’t understand the reference in this post’s title, you should go immediately and watch Blazing Saddles.   If you have never seen Blazing Saddles, there is something profound missing from your American experience.

Beyond that, I have a few introductory remarks.

This is a post about how we argue vital social issues–gay marriage and abortion most prominently–and how we ended up talking about these things the way we do.

Note that I don’t intend to argue ABOUT gay marriage or abortion, or any other issue.   For the purpose of this post, it doesn’t matter which side of any of these issues you are on, legally or morally. 

This is about HOW the argument goes, when we have the argument, in public or otherwise–the methods we use to defend our positions.

If you look long enough, you will find that there is something very odd about the nature of the conversations we’re having.

And I think I’ve figured out how and why that happened.

Unfortunately, I haven’t miraculously recovered from whatever it is that has got hold of me.  My throat is still sore and I’ve still got hot and cold running chills, if that makes any sense.

If anything, I seem to be worse today than I was yesterday.

So my focus is–ah, a little bit off.

With any luck, some of you will be willing to stick with me long enough for me to make this plain.

First, I want to back up a little, to something I touched on in yesterday’s post.

Some of you will remember that I am in the middle of rereading Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  And I talked yesterday, and got comments yesterday, on how difficult it is for anyone to define “intellectual.”

But I think it might be a lot easier to define “anti-intellectual.”

I think that most of us could say that someone who believes that “book learning” is at least unnecessary and probably bad for you, who believes that being uneducated in the arts and sciences (from classics to chemistry) is to be preferred to people who do for all jobs anywhere (and especially the most important), that an ignorant man will always be more virtuous than an educated one–

I think most of us could call that “anti-intellectual” without fighting too much about it.

And this matters because it was the great argument between the then-standard churches and the evangelical revivalists in the First Great Awakening and every Awakening after it.

Let’s call them the theological and the evangelical churches for the moment.

And let’s stress that I’m talking about the period from just before the American Revolutionary War to the period just before the American Civil War.

The position of the theological churches, and especially of the Calvinist Congregationalists, was that the purpose of a minister was to expound doctrine.

Ministers had to be very highly educated indeed.  They had to be able to read the Bible in more than one language, to read the early Church fathers, to understand the complexities of the matters of faith, like the nature of the Trinity and the workings of predestination.

The function of a minister was to bring his congregants into an understanding of these things as far as they were able, and therefore to head off heresy and apostasy before they could get started.

For the evangelicals, the purpose of the minister was to “bring souls to Christ.” 

The fine points of theology matter not at all if they did not bring the people to conversion and repentance.   In fact, they often got in the way.  The plain, simple man couldn’t understand them and was left confused and without a relationship to God.  The learned minister was seduced by the elegance of the arguments and undermined by the corrosive skepticism the elegant arguments brought with them.

Insisting minister be highly educated in theology, philosophy and the sciences didn’t make better ministers, but worse ones–and any minister having such educational credentials should be automatically suspect.

The actual history is, of course, much more complicated than this, but the book I’m reading quotes passage after passages from the autobiographies of people like Dwight Moody, Charles Grandison Finney, and Peter Cooper, all saying the same thing:  it is far better for your soul to be ignorant than to be educated.  Religion is feeling the movement of God inside yourself.  Nothing else is necessary for preaching, and the lack of such feeling disqualifies anyone from preaching, even if he has a hundred degrees in theology.

Now, there is more to be argued here than this overview provides.

For one thing, the Congregational position that it is the learning that matters rather than the bringing of souls to God makes more sense than it seems to at first when you remember that the Congregationalist were Calvinists and the Calvinists believed that all souls were saved or condemned by God from the beginning of time and nothing anyone could do could ever change that judgment.

There is also the fact that the evangelical denominations were often founded by men who were themselves very well educated (see Wesley and Asbury).  Those denominations–see the Methodists–often went on to have a very conflicted idea of the place of education in religion and later to change their minds and go in for founding colleges, universities and seminiaries.

But if the evangelical denominations of the first half of the American nineteenth century were ambivalent about the rejection of learning and education, the evangelical tradition was not.

Even now, you can find church leaders across the American South, and not just there, making the same arguments against a learned clergy, and against education as a corrosive force, as the pastors and leaders Hofstadter quotes from the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s.

And therein comes the problem I ran up against when I started to think about this yesterday.

For better or for worse, for good or ill, the most significant voices arguing against abortion, against gay marriage, in favor of the reality of God–most of that is coming from people inside the evanglical tradition.

Evangelical churches, most of them still arguing that classical education is corrosive to faith rather than an aid to it, and that reason and logic and (now) science are enemies rather than allies, that what you feel in your heart is more important than what you know in your head–

Evangelical churches and their members or the ones out there in the public square making the arguments for those particular positions.

(Yes, there are also the Catholics, who most definitely have a theological and not an evangelical denomination.  But, for better or worse, the public face of Catholicism is split.  There’s the hierarchy, but there is also Catholics for Free Choice.)

But I think that one of the reasons why the arguments we have about these things are so acidic is this: each side is structuring its arguments in a way that the other side assumes to be completely illegitimate. 

It’s not just that one side thinks abortion is okay and the other doesn’t, or that one side thinks that God exists and the other thinks He is a fairy tale.

That would be bad enough, but it doesn’t even begin to cover it.

The two sides don’t even agree on what constitutes “evidence,” or what it would take to prove their own side wrong.

Looking at all this from the perspective of the here and now, I’d have to say that, given the way society has developed up to this point, it’s the evangelical side that is being hurt worse by the position they’ve taken.

This is not because I think the theological side is actually better educated than the evangelical side in today’s America.

Let us all give a profound moment of silence to Al Gore defining “E Pluribus Unum” as “out of one, many.”

What I am saying is that style matters as much as content does, and we live in a world where the theological style–the resort to discourse that at least sounds educated even if it has its head completely up its ass–just “seems” right to most people, and not being able to argue in that style makes you “seem” wrong.

To make matters worse, not being able to argue in that style and from that set of evidentiary assumptions means it’s almost impossible to to anticipate and answer your opponent’s objections, so that, to undecided people who accept your opponent’s style as “right,” you sound evasive and irrelevant.

Of course, this is also true of the theological tradition’s arguments in respect to the evangelical’s style–but it matters less, because, no matter how unfair it might be, it is the theological style that has become pervasive across the culture.

And it is the culture that both sides are trying to win.

I have no idea what the evangelical side is supposed to do about this. 

It’s not impossible that the original arguments against a “learned clergy” were entirely right–that a learned clergy will always be a skeptical one, that acquaintance with classical learning and science will always corrode faith, that a church that sees the proclamation of Right Doctrine as more important than saved souls is no Christian church at all.

And then, of course, they should stick to doing what they’re doing the way they’re doing it.  They won’t much affect the culture, but they also won’t go to Hell.

So here it is on Sunday, which is, as some of you kn0w, supposed to be my official Day of Rest.

Instead, I worked this morning, meaning I wrote things, and now I’ve got Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata going on behind my head.

Beethoven on early Sunday mornings is always something of an ambiguous sign.   I like Beethoven well enough–especially the Eroica–but he’s a little too enthusiastic and thundering for me first thing in the day, and normally I don’t like the sound of the piano.

Any piano.

Unless it’s played by Thelonius Monk.

But here I am, with the piano pounding, and hence the title of the post.

And outside there is a bird chirping away in an annoyingly regular and unmitigated fashion.

And I’m sort of quasi-sick.

The interview went fine, at least as far as I can tell, but I woke up the next morning with a sore throat and serious aches, and I still have a sort throat and serious aches.

On the other hand, I reserve the perogative to be completely incoherent even when I’m feeling well, so there’s that.

A few things.

First, I decided to give Tolkein one more try, and over the last week I’ve read The Fellowship of the Ring for the first time.

I did rather better with it than I’ve done with it before, meaning I actually read it.  It turns out that the thing I hated about the writing–that it sometimes seems as if Tolkein was getting paid by the semicolon–stops being an issue after the prologue, and the writing afterthat is at worst workmanlike, which isn’t bad at all.

A couple of things.

First, it surprised me just how much was changed for the movie.  It really surprised me just how much was left out. 

I was under the impression, which was apparently wrong, that Peter Jackson had tried to change as little as possible and keep in as much as possible.

It sometimes got more than a little disorienting.

On the other hand, it was an interesting book, and it came with maps, and I’ve got the next to close at hand, and it’s become my reading project for the summer.

The second thing is that many characters are far more attractive (as characters) in the movie than in the book.  Tolkein’s hobbits are whiny and self-absorbed rather than stalwart and heroic.  And everybody seems to faff around a lot rather than getting on with it.

I’m a great supporter of faffing around if there’s some point to it–an insight, a movement in the character’s thinking, something–but in this case there just seems to be a lot of faffing for the sake of faffing.

On the other hand, I don’t tend to see faffing as a deadly sin, so that won’t stop me.

When I finished reading that, I did what I usually do and looked for something completely different to follow it with.

I came up with my old copy of Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

I’ve only just started rereading it, so I don’t want to go into a long song and dance about it,  but I find that I’m surprised at how much I’ve forgotten since my last reading.

I’m also more than a little heartened to see that he hits what’s really anti-rationalism–rather than anti-intellectualism–on the left as on the right.   We get a good beat down of progressive education as well as the First Great Awakening.

I’m becoming more and more convinced that Perry Miller had a valid point when he defined that Awakening as a revolt against Enlightenment reason–a resort to emotion and enthusiasm in religion, and large-scale distain for reasoned argument and scholarly exegesis in sermons and services.

Hofstadter points out that Transcendentalism was also a revolt against reason and in favor of feelings, just dressed up in more aesthetic language.

The other thing is that he’s just like everybody else in that he can’t seem to come up with a solid definition of “intellectual.” 

He abandons the first definition he comes up with without noting that he’s doing it, mostly, I think, because if you stuck to that definition, you wouldn’t have enough people to put into the “intellectual class” to make a book about.

The actual way he uses the word in most of the book corresponds to the way I tend to think about it, so my gut feeling is to leave it alone.

But not quite, and the not quite is making me a little nuts.

Hofstadter’s definition would leave out the Transcendentalists, because they were so vigorously pro-feeling and anti-rational (as a Romantic movement, they would have to be), and I think that intellectual they definitely were, even if muddled and thickheaded.

(“Couldn’t think their way out of a paper bag” is where I think I am with the Transcendentalists.)

But that brings me back to my obsession with New England.

Becuase the Puritans who settled New England brought with them a highly intellectualized religion.  They believed in a learned clergy, in trained theologians, a populace docile to the teaching  of men with high levels of education.

Their organizational descendants are now one half of the “United Church of Christ.”  Their New England churches still make a point of announcing that they remain “Congregationalist.”

They are also the most thoroughly modernist denomination in the country, even more so than the Episcopalians, who are actually split on social issues.

For a while out here, long before anybody had declared gay marriage legal anywhere in the country, they were running ads pointedly aimed at gay people and touting how “inclusive” they were.  They were also performing same sex weddings before anybody was legally recognizing them.

The preachers of the First Great Awakening would have said that this only proved what they contended, that religion aimed at the head instead of the heart was pernicious and false.

I don’t know what we would say now.

I do know that my throat is killing me and I’m getting a minor case of the shakes.

So I’m going to go put on The Emperor’s Concerto and eat some ice cream.

So, a few people sent me this

Before I start this, I should note that I have now spent more than ten hours trying to figure out how to write this post,  and I haven’t really come to any defined approach yet.

In some ways, I find it hard to figure out what I want to say about what happened.   In other ways, it’s easy enough to know what I want to say, but impossible to figure out what I think it means. 

But it does mean something, I’m sure of that.  So I should probably just get started.

On Sunday, I got myself into one of those positions on FB that happen because I am incapable of shutting up.

Starting fairly early in the day, I participated in two threads.  On one of them–the one run by a secular woman who is adamantly pro-choice–I defended the pro-life point of view.  On the other–the one run by a prolife person (more on him in a bit)–I defended the pro-choice point of view.

Yeah, I know.  I can’t help myself, really.

The thread run by the pro-choice woman ended fairly quickly, with a lot of eye rolling in my direction.

The thread run by the pro-life person lasted two days.

The pro-choice person is the son of a friend of mine who is herself very religious.  The son is an ordained Lutheran pastor who works for a pro-life organization as, I think, its communications director.

Whatever it is his position is called, he’s paid to promote the pro-life position in public life. 

Which means he should be a good person to go to to find out what the pro-life position actually is.

And I think I can say that he is, in fact, a good person to go to.

A few other people participated in that thread who were this man’s friends but not, as far as I know, professionally involved in the pro-life movement.  They were all, however, pro-life.

Before I get to what was said and how it changed over the long course of that discussion, let me make two things clear.

First, the bedrock bottom line fundamental principle of my moral code is this: people are ends in themselves.  No person may be used as the means to the ends of someone else without his consent, and this is ESPECIALLY the case when the use involves using the physical body (the blood and skin and bone, NOT the work or time).

Anyone who has taken a philosophy survey course knows that I cribbed that from Kant.   And that’s all right.  I think that, on that particular point, Kant got it absolutely right.

On the matter of abortion, I think there are two aspects.  One is the moral:  whether it is morally acceptable for you to choose to have one.  The other is the legal: whether your government should have the right to forbid you from having one.

On the moral issue, I’ve got a lot of convoluted ideas.  I have never had an abortion, and I can’t imagine that I would ever have had one.  I can’t think of a reason for an abortion–no, not even if I had been raped or the victim of incest–where I think I would have found it morally acceptable for me to have one.

The legal issue is something else. 

If people may not be used as things for the benefit of somebody else against their will,  then the fetus in the womb itself may not use its mother’s body against her consent.

And whatever the moral issue may be between the mother and the child, the LEGAL issue is whether the government can forbid her–can, in fact, force her to become a thing for the use of somebody else.

Because that’s what enforced pregnancy is.  It’s the legal equivalent of declaring that the pregnant woman is not human.  She is a thing.  And her only purpose is to be used as a thing by other people.

Therefore, whether abortion is moral or not, government may not be given the power to forbid it.

If you look carefully at what I have said here, you will notice one thing:  at no point am I saying that it is right to kill a child.

The right is to end the pregnancy only.

At the moment, that is only possible in most cases by using a procedure that does kill the child.  But that doesn’t have to be the way it will be forever. 

Technology marches on.  There’s no reason why we couldn’t develop technology that would terminate a pregnancy while keeping the child alive and capable of growing to maturity.

If there is something I don’t like about a lot of pro-choice rhetoric it is precisely that so much of it is ill-considered.  Some of it is ill-considered because it is: people just aren’t listening to themselves. 

Some of it is ill considered in reaction to people who claim that all women who want abortions are only looking after their “convenience.”

So we hear things like “what if the child is profoundly damaged and will be born handicapped?”

The problem is that those arguments lead easily to a “right to kill the child,” and are so used by moral imbeciles like Peter Singer (and lots of others) to claim a right to “post birth abortion,” where parents would be allowed to kill their children in the first month if those children proved to “lower the quality of life” of the family.

If it really were impossible to defend a right to abortion except by defending a right to kill a child, then it wouldn’t be possible to defend abortion.

But it’s not–it’s perfectly possible to defend the right to terminate a pregnancy without even implying that that means you have the right to kill the child.  Once the child is no longer in the womb, you are no longer pregnant, and would have no right to do anything with it.

This is an important point to remember.

Because one of the characteristics of discussions like this is the fact that everyone in them has had many discussions like them before, and has a firm idea in his or her own head about what the other side of the argument is going to be.

That means they also have stock ideas in their heads about how to counter and disprove what the other side is going to say.

And that can make it very difficult to hear what your opponent is ACTUALLY saying.

I therefore had to go through several rounds of “if I can kill the baby in my womb, why can’t I kill it once I was born?” before I finally got it through everybody’s head that the position I had outlined would not allowed it.

But that wasn’t any big deal.  It’s the kind of thing that happens in these discussions.

What got to me was what started to happen after we’d been at it for several hours, and I think that it might be the result of our having been at it for several hours.

One of the thigns I’m constantly trying to point out to pro choice friends is that the idea that pro life people are only pro life because they want women to punished for having sex is not true.

There are such people in the world, of course, but on the whole, I think most pro life sentiment is mostly based on the fact that “it’s a baby.”

And I still think that.

But by the end of that conversation, I finally understood where so many of my pro choice friends were getting the impression they were getting.

And the entire experience was very, very odd.

First I was told that a pregnant woman who had not been raped had “consented” to the pregnancy because she knew she could get pregnant when she consented to have sex. 

She knew she could get pregnant, so now she had to accept the consequences.

I pointed out that when you go skiing, you know you could end up with a broken leg.  That didn’t mean that if you got a broken leg, you had to just sit there and let nature take its course.  You could go to a doctor and have the leg set.  

With pregnancy, you could accept the consequences by going through with bringing the baby to term, but you also had abortion available to you. 

At that point, a young woman broke in to say that with a broken leg there would be a lot of pain and a long time recovering, but abortion is “instant.”

In other words, the problem with abortion was that it was too easy.  But if that is the problem, then this is what my pro choice friends think it is–a complaint that women aren’t being punished enough, that they don’t hurt enough, when they choose to have sex.

This line of argument was all the more bewildering because it completely contradicted another line of argument being made by the same people at the same time:  that abortion hurts women, that they end up suicidal and in pain for years and years afterwards, so that abortion should be stopped to protect women from all that pain.

But if abortion causes so much pain, then it’s not instant and it’s not easy.

Pick one, you can’t have both.

The discussion went from there in a round of escalating silliness.

The person whose thread it was would outline a scenario–she has sex, she knew she could get pregnant, she just doesn’t feel like being pregnant, so she kills the baby for her convenience.  That’s what you’re advocating, right?

I would repeat my principle–no one may use the physical body of another person agaisnt her consent, and therefore she may end that use for any reason whatsoever–and then I would get.

You’re not answering my question!

But, of course, I was.  Yes.  She may end the pregnancy for conveniece, or for health or because she feels like it on Tuesday.  Nobody may use her body in any way or for any reason if she does not want it to be used.  She has an ABSOLUTE right of refusal, and if the only way to end the use ends up killing somebody–then it does.

Part of the problem was that I was not using the arguments he was used to hearing, so that his automatic responses didn’t fit.  Part of it was that I wasn’t cringing at his formulations.  When he demanded to know if she could “kill her child” for her “convenience,” I said she could terminate the pregnancy for any reason at any time, and I didn’t try to find excuses for silly or shallow reasons.

It doesn’t matter what the reasons are that you don’t want somebody to use your body.  If you don’t want it, you don’t want it.

She’s just being selfish! somebody said.

And I said, yes, she may sometimes be being selfish, in a few different meanings of that word.

We hit about the twenty-seventh round of “you’re not answering my question!” when I seemed to finally get through–but what came out was not an acknowledgement of what I was saying.

It was the demand that he (our host) wished women WOULD stop letting men use them like things.

Then he deleted the thread, and the argument was over.

I came away thinking that we hadn’t actually gotten to his core objection to abortion until that very last bit–that what was really bugging him was that women went out and had sex because they wanted to and seemed to think that doing that was “all right.”

In his mind, they were deluded–they didn’t really want the sex, they were only letting themselves be used as things, which is all the men in their lives saw them as.

Now, I am myself.  I’ve got my vices, but promiscuous fornication was never one of them, and really isn’t at this stage of my life.

On the other hand, I don’t tend to take sex all that seriously.  It’s an activity.  Some people like it more than others.  Some people think it Means a Lot and some people think it’s a hobby. It’s a perfectly natural.  What’s the big deal?

And although I think there’s at least a partial biological explanation for the fact that more women than men take sex seriously, I also know that’s an average.  I have surely known women in my life who just like sex. 

And I can find who bunches of women like that in history without even breathing hard.

It was obvious by the end, though, that this man felt very seriously about sex, and had a lot invested in the (mostly unstated) idea that women never just felt like having sex for fun, that the only reason they would seem to like sex for fun was because some man had duped them into it.

It was, in the end, one of the oddest conversations I’d ever had in my life.

It was one of the oddest conversations I’ve ever had in my life. 

And I now know where my friends get their impressions.

My relationship to music is, I think, a little odd.  Or maybe just a little odd for me.

If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know that I am a person who tends to…what’s the word?…intellectualize stuff.

In fact, I tend to intellectualize almost everything.

That “almost” in the preceding sentence exists mostly because of music.  For some reason, not planned or even considered at the time, when I picked books to read or courses to study or topics to write about, if I considered the arts, the arts I considered were painting and sculpture.

If that makes it look like I was avoiding music and dance, all I can say is that, with dance, I probably was.

Dance has always left me cold. 

Sometimes it does worse than that and outright annoys me. 

Classical ballet bores me, although I do recognize the fact that it’s often very pretty, and I sometimes (as with Swan Lake) like the music very much.

Modern interpretive dance drives me to distraction, and the ultra-modern stuff meant to express political Important stuff often leaves me close to frothing at the mouth.

I agree with the premise, sort of.  Art often expresses and disseminates ideas on which people act.

I just don’t agree that the kind of art that’s going to do that looks anything like interpretive dance. 

I think you’re standard Guatamalan peasant or working class American ex-factory worker is more likely to be politically turned on by Bono or Green Day than by wispy figures in tights and flowing veils leaping around a stage until they crouch into little pretzel balls.

But music was something else.  I have music all around me all the time except when I’m sleeping or writing, and I like all kinds of it. 

What’s more, it’s something I actively sought out from a very early age, like books. 

Unlike books, it was, for a long time, remarkably difficult to find.

My mother sang for a year in the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera, but it wasn’t something you could figure out from the contents of our house.

In spite of the fact that the Fifties saw the first great wave of recorded music of all kinds, and in spite of the fact that we had a then state of the art “hi fi,” there were no LPs in our house, classical or otherwise. 

It says something about the intellectual and temperamental differences between my parents that my father always had the spanky brand-new just out latest thing of everything–we even got some of the first Hula Hoops–and my mother had two ancient, unplayable 72 rpm discs.  One of the had “Sweet Georgia Brown.”  The other had “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

I was in junior high when I first started to get restless about all this.  My father got both my brother and me transistor radios for Christmas one year, but the reception out where we lived was scratchy at best and more often intermittent.

I also didn’t realize there were different kinds of radio stations for different kinds of music.

When we were driving–and we from Connecticut to Florida and back again twice a year–my father favored Dan Ingraham on the rock and roll station, so I knew about Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkle before anybody else I knew.

I don’t mean to imply, here, that there is anything wrong with rock and roll.  I love rock and roll.  I still have albums by Dylan and the Stones and Joni Mitchell.   And I probably always will.

And at the moment, I’m obsessing about a new song put out by, of all people, Blondie.

But it is also the case that “classical” music intrigued me from the beginning, even though I only got to hear snatches of it here and there.

And, finally, when I hit junior high, I decided I had to do something about it. 

If I’d known anything at all about what I was trying to do, I could have saved myself a lot of time.

But I didn’t know, and when my mother talked about music, she never talked about it in a way that shed much light on things like composers or performers or even genres.

When I asked my mother about music, I got a lot of squirming, starry-eyed, ecstatic emotion-talk about how sublime it all was and how much better and higher and greater than all that noise people made with guitars on the radio.

It was the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been very helpful even if it was true, and I rapidly reached the point of realizing that I didn’t think it was true.

That was the discovery of jazz, although I think that might be another story for another time.  Still, thank you, Thelonius Monk.

At any rate, I decided to start fixing my lack of understanding by asking for some records for my birthday.

And having absolutely no idea what I was doing, or where I should start, or even who Beethoven and Bach were, I scoured the record bins at the local Woolworth store until I found…

Rimsky-Korsakov.

I have no idea if that’s how you spell it.

Rimsky-Korsakov was, for me, and enormous let down.  Whatever it was I had been looking for in classical music, that wasn’t it. 

Interestingly enough, at about the same time I started to run into classical music stations, and those stations were playing an awful lot of Rimsky-Korsakov. 

Years later, I had a friend who got a job at one of those classical stations, and he explained to me that programming policy was to play music that listeners would find “soothing.”

That explains so much, it’s hard to believe I didn’t give up on the classical altogether.

Well, maybe I did, at least for a while.  I pretty much ignored the classical stuff all through high school and most of the way through college.  My closest college friend was very musical and sang with one of the college’s a capella groups.  I went to hear her when she was performing. 

Then I went to grad school.  Then I moved to NY.  Then I got married and went to England and France. 

And then, in England, I met a woman, an American, who worked repairing and transporting harpsichords.

That was how I first heard the harpsichord, played by anybody.

I have no idea if that first thing I heard was performed well or badly, or whether those categories made sense given what I was listening to, but I did know I really, really loved it.

In the end, my wider introduction to classical music came with CDs and a couple of “Classical Music Clubs” that let you buy half a dozen CDs at a time for not much money.

I started with the Brandenburg Concertoes, because I’d heard of them, and went from there.

In the end, though, I always came back to the harpsichord, and I still do.

Which is, sort of, where I started with this thing.

One of the things I do in my spare time is lurk on a harpsichord e mail discussion list. 

The people who actively participate on that list are professionals who spend their working lives making, repairing, transporting and sometimes playing harpsichords.

Most of the threads are about building and repair, with a heavy subset of making harpsichords that are as alike certain historical ones as possible, and repairing those historical ones so they sound like they were supposed to in the beginning.

This is because there is a lot of emphasis among harpsichordists in Historically Informed Performance, which sounds like a term invented by a college music program somewhere.

Sometimes there are threads about concerts and CDs.  The list put me on to Frescobaldi, for which I’m grateful.  Sometimes there are threads about performers.  It’s how I first found out about Gustav Leonhardt and Wanda Landowska and became a kind of Leonhardt groupie.

Over the last couple of days, there has been a thread on a topic I’d never considered, but, not that it’s hear, I find myself surprised has never come up before.

The thread is about why it is you almost never hear harpsichord music, on the radio, in the media, or in concerts that are not explicitly designed to be about harpsichords and nothing else.

Not only that, but nobody seems to be coming up to replace the great harpsichordists of the last generation.  Leonhardt announced his retirement a couple of years back, gave a farewell concert in Paris, and died a week later. 

If I was doing more than lurking, I’d give Christophe Rousset as a possible successor–but I’m far too aware of the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about to come out of lurkdom.

The fact remains that harpsichords are a minority taste, and so much of a minority taste that people outside the group don’t even seem to know what harpsichord music is.

One of the posters noted that, having heard that there would be a concert with “harpsichord music” near where he lived, he checked out the program and found that the “harpsichord music” on offer was Pachelbel’s Canon, which is not harpsichord music.

One of the things I try to explain to my kids when I’m not actively trying to killing them is that I can’t assign them things that “interest” them because, at eighteen, they have no idea what “interests” them. 

I don’t think I’d heard of the harpsichord when I was eighteen.  I hadn’t heard of natural law or the categorical imperative or Jose Saramago, either, and they’ve filled up a lot of my life in the years since college.  They’ve filled up more of it since Bill died.

Maybe my friend who worked at the classical radio station had the answer.

Maybe most people who listen to “classical music” just want something that is soothing, undemanding, already familiar, already asleep.

But there are people out there who do wonderful things with harpsichords–making them, performing on them, even composing for them.

I keep thinking there has to be some way to get through the fog of “I know what I like” so that more people can actually hear this stuff.

This morning I learned a new word–emphyteutic, as in “an emphyteutic lease.”

I learned it because I looked it up, stopping my day at the beginning to hit the dictionary when a short paragraph I was reading hit me with the thing, and I couldn’t remember ever having seen it before.

An emphyteutic lease is a very long term one–99 years, say, or even forever–that sometimes comes with requirements that the tenants improve the property and do other services for the landlord.

It was a common arrangement in the disintegrating Byzantine empire of the 7th and later centuries.

It is a much less common arrangement now, but it exists as a category in our law and in English common law, and the English are fairly entranced with the idea.  You can still buy 99 year leases for London real estate, and then sell the remainder of that lease as if you were selling a house.

In case you’re wondering what the point of all this–I don’t have a point about emphyteutic leases. 

I did find it interesting that there is actually a word for an arrangement I’d known about for years.  You have to be very careful, if you’re buying real estate in London, to make sure you’re looking at freeholds and not leases.

Although lots of Londoners like the leases.  Americans, not so much.

My point is that a word came along that I had never sen before, and I learned it because it was there to learn, and I liked learning it, even though the likelihood is great that I will never again need it in my life.

The paragraph I read was in a book about the Byzantine empire that I’m using to tide myself over until I can get to something else. 

The books is a volume in one of those ambitious publishing programs some houses do.  This one has to do with an overall short picture of various eras in various places–Medieval Italy, the Byzantine Empire, I don’t remember what else–meant for a general reader, and accompanied by lots and lots and lots of color plates and black and white photographs both.

I run into these projects every once in a while, and sometimes they can be very helpful.  I have a wonderful little book on Piero della Francesca that includes an essay by one of the Huxleys and, yet again, all those color plates.

This particular book isn’t as interesting as the one on Piero della Francesca, but it’s also not from the same publishing program.

What it is is the kind of generalist overview history that makes most people fall asleep–here’s how the city was run, here’s what the farmers did, here’s a quick overview of a few centuries in which wars and palace intrigues resulted in the change of emperor every year or two.

And, in Byzantium, these intrigues and assassinations occured in little groups of people with clumping names, so you have people named Constantine, Constantius and Constans all battling it out for who would become Emperor until you have to take notes to know who is who.

And even then you’re not 100% sure.

I am not, as you can tell, all that interested in the book.

But I am interested in the word, and that puzzles me in a way.  I’m always interested in the words, and over the years that has not only “expanded my vocabulary” but done it in a way where I have sometimes become less clear to the people around me.

Let’s face it.  If I ever decide to buy one of those emphyteutic leases, I won’t be doing anybody any good–except my solicitor, maybe–if I refer to it that way.

I’m not the only person who does this, of course, and sometimes the word you find is wonderful on many levels.

There’s the word stercoraceous, for instance.  It essentially means “full of shit,” but that isn’t what it sounds like.  What it sounds like is something along the lines of “copacetic,” a compliment, something good you’re saying about somebody.

You have no idea how much trouble that kept me out of in the days when I was endlessly fighting with my mother.

An awful lot of the words I become entranced with, however, have little or no use in my life. 

I just like the way they sound, and I like them better the more polysyllabic they are.

I like the word “polysyllabic.”

And because what I do most of the time on most days, these words I pick up tend to get integrated into my speech and writing before I manage to notice it, so that I end up getting into tangled webs of arguments on things like FB and Internet forums with people who inevitably just think I’m putting it on.

In this case, though, the accusations of putting it on aren’t what bother me.

What bothers me is that as soon as that starts, the discussion has been knocked off course for the remainder of the time it’s got left, and I end up never having made my point.

Even when people aren’t mad at me, we end up doing more word definitions than arguments about the use of the death penalty or whether pigs have wings.

Of course, as soon as I tell myself I have to stop it, one of those wonderful words comes along.

I give you oomphaloskepsis–a word that means “contemplating one’s navel as an aid to medidation,” but that works just as well, and often, as meaning contemplating one’s navel as an act of idiocy.

I sometimes wonder if there was ever a world out there, or part of a world, where groups of people used words like these as a matter of course.

I tend to doubt it.

I think these words exist because there are other people in the world who are as enamored of polysyllabism as I am, and they make them up.

I haven’t made one up myself yet, but inventing a word has always been one of my secret ambitions.

Maybe someday I’ll get around to it.