"Such is the pathway to the stars."

Newish Bovver Boots

  The written symbol 'career' means something like this : "A long term, rosy cheeked, professional journey through a succession of employment opportunities within a particular industry or field."

  Good luck with that Nancy because the symbol 'career' sounds like : "Make me safe, give me purpose, light my life and I'll role over play dead and do anything for you." As a result, over the generations, we people have tried to create a symbol for 'Help' which as a written form looks something like this : "Chapter One - Morality."

  These vague utterances are not blessed by the precision Russell yearned for in language, but close enough to the game theory our Patron Saint Wittgenstein proffered as his rule of thumb when examining how meaning is exchanged between hominid minds. I've always felt sorry for the innocent, open heartedness of Wittgenstein's lesson planning following his decision, after the second world war, to return to teaching the Cambridge elite. Not only was Wittgenstein a Jew in England with a thick Austrian accent, he'd long ago surrendered his wealth to his search for truth and he'd once tried to explain to his super brilliant, fantastically intelligent, upper crusty next generation of leaders and oligarchs that if the lion could speak English they'd understand no better what the lion was saying.

 Our issue of course has far less to do with a purity of thought that dreams beautiful in its reach for a per ardua ad astra - sic itur ad astra, if you're Canadian - and much more to do with the ten to twenty five years of training a splendidly flexible hominid mind endures as it fits itself into this or that power structure that lies within a set of cultural beliefs that will always work best when totally unsupported by facts.

  Yes indeed - "Give me a red Corvette!"

  The "in the beginning" of faith has the charm of myth, only recently has it included the old testament certainties of "in the beginning was the Chicago School of Economics," what Paul Krugman has referred to as a product of the Dark Ages.

  So why not "Give me a Data Center" and let's open a new chapter in Hell.

The pigmentless Hummingbird doesn't see through blue eyes

Albino Hummingbird is on the left

  We've enjoyed David Hume's more happy-go-lucky attitude, his skeptic at the billiard table, rational grasp of what Individualism might be. The Calvinist, the individual answering to the gates of heaven, definition was in his view a religious nuttery which over the years has caused a damage to our intellect by attempting to create an unwarranted concreteness which Hume, who died in August of 1776, disparaged as humorless, or perhaps humourless, form of sloppiness of confidence which in Hume's view was remedied by a solid breakfast along with a good Tawny Port and lots of it.

  When you look across the savannah - and I don't mean the tourist trap in the North American US State of Georgia where the State Bird is a Brown Thrasher, I mean the notion of freedom as a wilderness floating endless toward the horizons, the occasional thorny tree, a giraffe, lions chasing hartebeast while cheetah laugh as they wonder what you or I might taste like and so on - what you'll see of us people is a head with a big brain on stilts that takes ten to twenty five years to grow into a tool making clever clever with a certificate of achievement that entitles it to a career, it has a union if it's lucky or professional body to preserve its set of living standards, a stability, a zoo for giraffe, lions, hartebeast and cheetah that's sometimes mistaken for an entitlement.

  Entitlement, whether earned or unearned, is, to use the Scottish word as a tribute to Hume, the ball peen beating thinner and thinner with hammer of personal possibilities in the increasingly odious ranges, hills and vales of "I am Blessed" by the deceits that keep me from even trying to be honest. 

  

  

Garden Paths and Battle Plans

Garden Path

  So long as the drowning of government remains fashionable in the higher echelons of western society, individualism's current self defeating personality disorder will never be an officially recognized social ailment. And as a result the standard model of society as a whole remains increasingly welded to the daytime television game show theory of social development. 

   I wanted to mention a World War One battle that began in and around the 4th July of 1918 between Central Power German forces and the Australian Army with help from recently arrived United States Infantry, the Royal Air Force - to the stars and beyond - and Royal Tank Corps. The allied commander was an Australian called John Monash.

  If there is a point about this relatively small battle, it was  the allied commanding officer's use of what's called combined arms, a battle tactic that after almost four years of Trench Warfare was finally adopted by the commanders at the Third Battle of Picardy. And here the thing about Combined Arms, for it to work effectively, commanders have to trust individual soldiers to make decisions, which means soldiers have to be trusted with battle plans.

 As I sit here waiting for the first frosts to relieve me of the burdens of garden chores, I wonder what the battle plans are.

What happened to the slave of reason

Turkey

   If we think about Hume as a happy go lucky person who loved port and cheese, we can pull two strands of his thinking that nicely reflect his world view. The first strand, was his understanding that commerce was a humanizing force. His point was that the desire to improve one's material condition gives a person something useful to do, stops them being "indolent" and it drives the interactions that result in "industry, art and knowledge."

  Hume's second strand was his understanding of 'habit' which he read as a scaffolding of both 'custom and habit' which allowed for the individual who gets useful things done. Hume's list of good things for such an individual, included stable laws and property rights, not because they were divine rights, but because they provided a predictable framework in which human beings could cooperate, and flourish without butchering each other.

  "What happened?"

  The likes of Descartes and that man from Somerset John Locke were of the opinion that we people had a rigid soul. Our core essence was rational and fixed, they argued, we were isolated, autonomous moral actors, we were "absolute" which means our self, the thing that is you or I, doesn't change.

  Hume, on the other hand, with his ever changing bundle of emotions and passions, his constantly fleeting thoughts did not believe that reason alone could even begin to prove the existence of an unchanging self, the existence of God or morality or half the things reason was credited with.

  It was like this : reason and passion are not enemies. But as Hume put it himself : "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions."

  For Hume, commercial activity was something individuals could do that was only valuable because it refined human sociability and made life pleasant without us butchering each other. The moment commercial individualism starts laying down endless no's, destroys social harmony, conversation, and sympathy, Hume would have agreed, commercial individualism begins to defeat its own purpose.