I dreamed an old-fashioned general of the French type and his intelligent friend were seated at an outdoor cafe, talking.

“Young officers who are wild are better than young officers who are spiritless,” the general said  [I think I read this somewhere recently].  “The wild ones you can sometimes teach self-discipline too.  The spiritless ones cannot be taught spirit.”

“But wouldn’t it be better if you could teach them spirit?  That would be wonderful.”

The general is shocked.  “Why?  You don’t like the wild officers?”

“No, no, that part is fine.  But if you could have *all* your officers have both spirit and self-discipline, what a fantastic force you would be.”

The general is deeply shocked by the suggestion.  “Absolutely not.  It would never do.  The great mass of bland officers, we rely on them to keep the spirited ones checked.  A whole force full of self-disciplined officers with vigor and dash and self-purpose, it staggers my imagination.  It would be chaos, sir.  Chaos.  The Army would dissolve.  The nation would dissolve.  The world, sir, the world would dissolve.”

The friend is deeply disappointed in what this reveals about his old friend the general.  “Yes,” he said, and then certain words of remonstrance that I do not now recall.

Repentance is the path to greatness. That is the path we have to choose.

We could also say it is our path to glory or goodness or heaven. All true. We were meant for greatness but we are not yet great. We are too illformed as yet. So we must change.

We can imagine someone who doesn’t need to be change to be great. They only need to develop further who they are inwardly. Christ was like that, I think. We are partly like that too. We were meant for greatness, the seeds are already there, we are just unfolding them. But for us it also means changing who we are. We have contradictions inside us.

Where we are, and where we have to go to get to our destination explains why ‘strait is the gate and narrow the way.’ We will all wander. But if we wish to arrive at greatness, eventually we are going to have to choose a path that leads there. “Why can’t I be saved in my sins?” is morphologically the same question as “why can’t I go to Paris without having to go to France?” (more…)

I’m no fan of Romney. Among his other failings, he hasn’t been very astute politically.

But credit where credit is due, this Romney-Cotton proposal to raise the minimum wage while verifying legal employment is smart politics, to the extent that there can be smart politics among the ruins.

I read a Nevil Shute book awhile back, the one where everyone dies from radiation, On the Beach.  I thought it was cheap and fearmongering.

Recently someone prompted me to take a second look at his stuff.  He writes extremely competently.  This is middle-brow done right.

There are great books and there are books that are great–for you.  No one would say that a factory-made garment has the quality of a tailored one, but sometimes you find something off the rack that still fits you like it had been adjusted down to the sixteenth of an inch.    Pastoral is the latter  kind of book.  It fit me just right.

I have one of those stormy marriages. We have patches of rough weather and patches of placid seas. But just now for no good reason we have been having one of those intensely romantic interludes, as if beyond the calmer waters were the Western Isles of the Blessed. And then I read Pastoral. It is a romance, basically. And the man and the woman are me and my wife. They have the same spirits that we do. I felt like I was reading about us in another time.

That’s it, that’s the point I wanted to make. Oh, uh, its a book about a RAF WWII bomber pilot flying out of a rural air base. I can add some actual insight, but that is secondary to what really moved me deeply about the book. Here it is: for the thoughtful reader, the book has some very interesting reflections about the collapse of social courtship customs. Not consciously. But its there. You see how much benefited everyone is by a goverment policy that has the side effect of bringing young men and young women together, and the benefit they get from having older people taking a hand in the younger folks’ proceedings.

There are those passages in D&C 19 where God says something like ‘endless punishment doesn’t mean punishment without end, it means divine punishment, because Endless is my name”.  We usually take it to mean that God is proclaiming that his punishment is temporally bound.  But He doesn’t actually say that.  Its a puzzling passage, but I think a better reading is that he is telling us that we if we are concerned about how long His punishment is, we are asking the wrong question.  The better question is Whose.

Like when I put my kids in time-out because they have been quarrelling.  If the first question they ask is ‘how long?’ I know they need to be in for awhile, because they are not yet in a penitent mood.

To make sense of endless punishment, remember that you are amphibious with respect to time.  You swim in it and will forever, but you also breathe the air of eternity.  (More here).  So the punishment you experience at any one time will have an end at a future time–it is not endless–but that punishment will also be present with you always in eternity–it is Endless.

Punishment being God’s punishment means that it is terrifying.  The real punishment is that you have displeased Him.  Punishment being God’s punishment means that it is being administered lovingly–He wants all things to turn for your good.  Punishment being God’s punishment means that you can repent–what He has put out He can draw back.

I read a talk recently by Elder Oaks.  The whole thing is great but you would love it if only for the first three lines.

Joy is more than happiness. It comes from being complete. . . and in harmony with our Creator and his eternal laws.

The opposite of joy is misery. Misery is more than unhappiness, sorrow, or suffering. Misery is the ultimate state of disharmony with God and his laws.

Joy and misery are eternal emotions whose ultimate extent we are not likely to experience in mortality.

Also from the Sunday afternoon session of the October 1991 General Conference

Marilyn Nielson Find relief in charity

Reap.

Behold, the field is white already to harvest; therefore, whoso desireth to reap let him thrust in his sickle with his might, and reap while the day lasts, that he may treasure up for his soul everlasting salvation in the kingdom of God.

 Yea, whosoever will thrust in his sickle and reap, the same is called of God.

Therefore, if you will ask of me you shall receive; if you will knock it shall be opened unto you.

There is nothing to indicate here that harvest is a metaphor for missionary work alone.

The world’s field is overflowing with ripe excellences.  You only need to claim them as yours for God to claim you as His.  Ask, and He will give to you.  But you must ask with your whole soul.  You must ask with your time and with your deeds.

I don’t always link to Scott Alexander, but when I do its because he’s built up a head of steam rant about education in this country, so called.  (Scroll way the heck down to “III” or else where you see the ALL CAPS).

He’s especially right about all the idiotic homework, and the vast waste of time, and how we start kids on it way earlier than need be.

At the palatial G estate, we don’t let our children learn to read until they are at least 5 which is nothing special, but makes us like freaks among our peers.  Yet our children read more than their children because our children like it.

If you want the Spirit to come to you, you must be willing to let the Spirit come through you.

My trash reading lately has been older scifi.  You can get a LOT of it real cheap.

Sometime in the 50s or 60s the stories all started being about psi powers.

I just noticed that the psi powers are mostly a way to  justify a group feeling the saintliness of being a victim while also being superior to everyone else.  It’s deeply offputting once you realize it.

I am following up on my post yesterday about the Eternal Imperative.  I riffed off of Kant’s Categoral Imperative to offer a basic rule for morality, in three different formulations.

*Act as if you were part of a story that involves your ancestors and your posterity.

*Act as if you were working towards an ultimate goal that you could will everyone would be working towards.

*Act as if you eventually would come into a relationship with everyone past, present, and future.

Here are two more formula that I think are equivalent to those three.  But they are not obvious.

Act as if you had zero time preference.

(more…)

I was daydreaming about better laws.  Laws that treated families like real organizations and that tried to encourage family independence and identity.

All adults pay 10% of their income to their married parents (and something also to the place where they grew up?).  Along with a bare minimum means-tested subsistence scheme for the truly destitute elderly, this is what Social Security should have been.

Home purchase a tax deduction up to $100k.

Productive assets deductible and/or amortizable for families.

Parental aid to children in paying for maternity expenses or new home purchase also deductible.

Deductions or subsidies for energy independence and emergency preparedness.  Home solar plus batteries or neighbhorhood mini-nuclear reactors.  Every neighborhood should have its own CNC mill for turning out parts.  Subsidies for gardens and food storage and trees and animals.

Kant’s Categorical Imperative had a bit of the right idea, but along the wrong dimension.

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.

It is too universal.  It abstracts away from the embodiment of being in a particular time and place.  It is all blandness and universal solvent.  It acts as if time need not exist.

(more…)

A French-American tries to explain some things to the Credential-American community.

Since we care so much about ideas, I would note that the United States Constitution begins with the proclamation that American citizens are a people, and that, among other things, their government’s job is to promote the general welfare of that people. Not of “ideas” but of citizens—that is to say, actual living and breathing human beings, who (or so it is to be hoped) are grateful for the legacy of their ancestors and want to pass it on to their children, and their children’s children.

Recently people in high places have been astonishingly candid and honest.  They come in for their share of lumps from me but here I have to admit they are better men than I–were I in their place I would not dare to be so honest.

Rich businessmen and powerful leftists admit they ran a shadow collaboration to, ah, guide the 2020 election outcome.

A Washington Post journalist goes on the record that journalists are powerful and can promote people they like and damage people they don’t (and they should be able to, because democracy is important).

Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel. . . .  [T]he Post could offer the carrot of great exposure to those who needed it, but also, always, the stick of negative coverage to those who spurned them.

I can only hope to have half so much integrity.

A father was out with a giant chipper feeding it brush and cuttings. The small stuff slipped down between the cogs and was ground down.  The large stuff got caught between the cogs and was ground down.  But one straight piece around the thickness of a finger bounced off the cogs, bounced around for a bit, and then went hurtling out the other side like a javelin.

The dad was hugely delighted.  He grabbed another little limb about the same size and tossed it in.  It bounced and was hurled.  Wow!  Again!

His son was out playing in the field and when he heard his dad laughing with glee came running.  Unfortunately he came running straight down the path that the sticks were hurled.

The dad yelled, “Out! Out!  No!  The sticks!” and suddenly the boy realized what was coming.  He turned ashen, span around, and started running away.

“No!” his dad yelled, “run to the side, to the side!”  By some father-son chemistry or through a long habit of obedience the son, even in the crisis, was able to understand his father and turned to the side.  He had only gone a step or two sideways when a stick came hurtling through the space where he had been.

Moral: It can better to dodge than to flee.