Merrie Frances

Our daughter, Merrie Frances Truslow, was born today at 12:54 pm at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia. Merrie Frances is a very sturdy 8 pounds, 8.3 ounces, with a ton of hair, blue eyes and a very nice smile.

Here is a link to the most recent photos shown above.

It's about the drop.

I remember well my drive across the country from Montana to Georgia, especially the day when I passed through Sturgis, South Dakota during the world famous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.

What struck me more than the ear splitting volume (and visual beauty) of the motorcycles was the rich, larger-than-life American subculture that surrounded them. Before me were literally hundreds of thousands of people who were neck deep in an entire universe that I knew nothing about. I felt as if I had been dropped onto another planet. At other points in my life, I've stumbled upon windows into other such strata of American life, observing the activities of friends who were into "fan fiction" or computer programming, or fencing.

Recently, it occurred to me that I have been a part of several of these hidden worlds. The ethics profession is one, to be sure, but that which I enjoy the most is the domain of jugglers. Here there is a shared body of knowledge, language, dress, assemblies, heroes, and sacred days. If you want to get an idea for what it's like, check out my favorite juggling store, Dube.

Awareness test

On Sunday afternoon, I rode my bike for the first time this season. It turns out that I'm fat and out of shape, and nothing says, "worthless and weak" quite like the hills I can't ride.

If you'd like to see details of my ride, click here.

When I roll on surface streets, I spend a third of my time scared of motorized vehicles, and another third verbally assaulting drivers who don't bother to adjust their car's trajectory based on the presence of a large man on a bike.

(Video sent to me by my brother, Mark.)

Shaker Morning Light

"Shaker Morning Light" (Berkeley, 2005), by Paul Martin Lester

Taken shamelessly and without permission from the photographer's website. Paul Lester is an astonishingly cool human being and a thoughtful artist. Take a moment to enjoy his pages.

Words Matter ("Conservative")

The current presidential election, the inanity of which persists at upsetting me on a daily basis, does not provide useful answers to these questions: 1) What is a reasonable set of criteria by which thoughtful citizens might evaluate a candidate for president? and 2) From a societal perspective, what are these elections - now posing as "national dialogs" - trying to resolve?

This blog does not allow readers to post comments, but the Chief Digressor is interested to hear your insights regarding these two questions.

Here I will begin to look at the second of these two questions by setting out a conceptual definition of the term "conservative". In a later post, I will attempt an honest description of "liberal / progressive / radical". If liberal / progressive / radical readers would like to suggest a comprehensive definition, I will consider using it. I seriously doubt that I will ever write on the transient associations between ideological believers and their current party affiliation. What's the point?

Politics has a nasty way of taking a word that has one clear, impartial meaning and turning it into an emotion with several, but this obfuscation makes a meaningful discussion impossible. I am in favor of a debate grounded by shared terms, so let us start with the basics.

In 1953, Russell Kirk wrote what is now considered the indispensable history of modern conservatism, "The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot". In it, he traces the philosophical and political history of conservatism in Great Britain and The United States, pointing out along the way that only these two "among the great nations, have escaped revolution since 1790", a stability he attributes to the conservative nature of these cultures.

Here is Kirk's summary of what "a conservative" believes:

[...] the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine. "What is conservatism?" Abraham Lincoln inquired once. "Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?" It is that, but is more. I think that there are six canons of conservative thought:

1) Belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge called the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs. "Every Tory is a realist, " says Keith Feiling: "He knows that there are great forces in heaven and earth that man's philosophy cannot plumb or fathom." True politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice which ought to prevail in a community of souls.

2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment" - a sense that life is worth living, according to Walter Bagehot "the proper source of an animated Conservatism."

3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a "classless society." With reason, conservatives often have been called "the party of order." If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum. Ultimate equality in the judgment of God, and equality before courts of law, are recognized by conservatives; but equality of condition, they think, means equality in servitude and boredom.

4) Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all. Economic leveling, they maintain, is not economic progress.

5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters, calculators, and economists" who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon the innovator's lust for power.

6) Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress. Society must alter, for prudent change is the means of social preservation; but a statesman must take Providence into his calculations, and a statesman's chief virtue, according to Plato and Burke, is prudence.

Portrait above is of Edmund Burke (1729-1797). I'm sorry that I do not know the artist. I didn't paint it, I assure you.

Growing up.

All grown-ups were children first. (But few remember it.)

Grownups love figures. When you tell them that you have made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you, "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?" Instead, they demand: "How old is he? How many brothers has he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?" Only from those figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

I know a planet where there is a certain red faced gentleman. he has never smelled a flower. He has never looked at a star. He has never loved anyone. He has never done anything in his life but add up figures. And all day he says over and over, just like you: "I am busy with matters of consequence!" And that makes him swell up with pride. But he is not a man - he is a mushroom.

The above is written by Antoine de Saint Exupery, in "The Little Prince". Image taken from the text.

I know, your profession is hard and full of things that contradict you. I can only suggest that perhaps all professions are like that, filled with demands, filled with hostility toward the individual, saturated as it were with the hatred of those who find themselves mute and sullen in an insipid duty. The situation you must live in now is not more heavily burdened with conventions, prejudices, and false ideas than all the other situations, and if there are some that pretend to offer a greater freedom, there is nevertheless none that is, in itself, vast and spacious and connected to the important Things that the truest kind of life consists of.

Even if, outside any position, you had simply tried to find some easy and independent contact with society, this feeling of being hemmed in would not have been spared you. It is like this everywhere; but that is no cause for anxiety or sadness; if there is nothing you can share with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still filled wtih happening, which you can take part in; and children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way - and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

The above is written by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Chapter VI of "Letters to a Young Poet". Image is a portrait of Rilke.