Hello valued bistro customers,

My apologies for not having a fresh dish prepared just for the bistro today. I’ve been cooking up a couple, but I had to delay them because I was so busy sorting out an odd story about Lincoln, which I posted at my own blog:

http://brandonclaycomb.com/2013/misc/the-true-tale-of-grandma-rathbone-an-odd-coincidence-at-lincolns-birth-and-death/

I’ll have more good mental roughage for you next Monday. Until then, keep chewing!

Brandon

Late in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, the Dude (Jeff Bridges) corrects Walter (John Goodman), informing him that the three German men threatening to hurt them are nihilists, not Nazis. Walter replies with typical profanity,

Nihilists! **** me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least its an ethos. 

Walter was right, and there’s some interesting recent social science research backing him up. As this article in Slate explains, Nazism seems to have spread fastest in those German communities with the greatest concentration of voluntary civic organizations – choral groups, athletic teams, associations of animal breeders, and so on. The stronger the bonds between individuals in a community, the easier it was for one of them to convince others to come along and join the Nazi party. (My own experience playing on a softball team during my year in Germany serves as counter-evidence, but of course this was well into the post-Nazi era and we literally could not even turn a double play, so there was no danger of us ever annexing the Sudetenland. But I digress.)

The point I take from this analysis is simple: social power is not good in and of itself, any more than electricity is. Power is the ability to effect change in the world. The more that power is used to good ends, the better. The more its used to bad ends, the worse. The gasoline that fuels your car when you drive your child to the emergency room is power used well. You can also gas up with the expressed intent to run someone else’s child down. That’s power used poorly.

This point is so simple that I could understand someone questioning why it’s worth bringing up. The answer is that I think we often forget it when we make a standard critique of our contemporary world. As the Slate piece notes, political scientist Robert Putnam’s 1995 book Bowling Alone has been only one of the most prominent attempts to argue that Americans have largely ceased to take part in voluntary civic organizations that build trust, form relationships bigger than circles of friends, and make it easier for people to assemble spontaneously to take on a common problem. That is a shame, if we really are getting worse at building these sorts of attachments. That sounds like a recipe for greater loneliness and isolation. But even if such relationships are good in themselves – and I think they are – they might be used for ill purposes as well as worthy ones.

So the next time you see someone who seems like a total loner – the kind of person who will never join a bowling league – it may seem counter-intuitive, yet it might be right to say, “Well, at least s/he probably isn’t likely to ever become a Nazi.” Nihilists aren’t suited for an ethos.

So I turned 42 today. It feels like I’m getting into the groove of this being over forty thing. Actually turning forty seemed like a novelty. Forty-one was just more of the same. But forty-two? I can see the pattern now.

There’s something so cocky about calling this “middle age,” as if the universe owed me a good forty more years. But they didn’t call it “The Thirty Years War” until the war was over. They didn’t finish year fifteen and say, “Well, we’re half done now.” Things end when they end and you don’t know when. One of our girls got her front teeth slightly loosened on a festival ride the other day and had to go get a late night X-ray. (She’s fine.) When her sister found out that she had to go to bed while her sister got to stay up late having fun at the dentist’s office, she said, “That’s not fair.” I laughed and said, “I don’t think that’s what that word means.” But I guess I’d feel a similarly misplaced sense of injustice if I discovered that I was closer to the end of my stay here on earth than to the middle. Maybe that’s a bad attitude. Back when he was only mildly insufferable, way back when he co-hosted ESPN’s “The Big Show” with Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann had a standard line when he had to report that a slightly injured baseball player was listed as “day-to-day”: “We’re all day-to-day.” So we are. Might as well face it.

I don’t honestly remember the event, but my first conscious experience of mortality must have been when my Great Grandfather Burt Thurman (“Mr. Burt”) decided he wanted to ride his horse one more time and got thrown. He lasted a little while in the hospital but the fall basically killed him. The whole family had been watching his ride, including me, just three years old. As they were getting ready to drive him to the hospital, I took it upon myself to cheer him up by saying, “Mr. Burt, a lot of people think it’s awfully funny, an old man like you falling off a horse.” They told me he laughed about it later, but he wasn’t very happy at the time. I like to think that I was just trying to give him a little perspective.

About three years later I received my second exposure to death. Mom and I came home from school on a hot early June day and found our sheep dog Morton had strangled himself trying to get to his water. Mom ran inside. At the time I thought she was upset, but now I’m pretty sure she was running to call for help. In any case, the screen door slammed behind her and stuck, so I couldn’t get in. I had to stand there for what seemed like a long time right beside my dead dog. I didn’t like that.

But while I’m sad that Morton died so painfully and that Mr. Burt got hurt falling off his horse, I appreciate a little better now why we all have to move on. There’s a time to bloom and grow and a time to decay and fade, to make room for the next season’s blooms. I do like to imagine that every day in every way I’m getting better and better, but there’s increasing evidence that it isn’t so. If I’m improving at anything, it’s accepting that the roller coaster doesn’t only go up, and that most of the fun is in the coming down. So, as much as my planning counts for – which might not be much – I plan to be around for a lot more of this ride. But I may have already passed the peak. And that’s alright. Do not rage against the dimming of the light. Go gently in, and then sleep tight.

One staple of Philosophy is that we human beings inhabit (at least) two worlds: the one in which events are determined by physical causes and the other in which actions are governed by reasons.

Wilfrid Sellars

Most books in pictures of professors like this are cardboard fakes from IKEA. Colleges and universities hand them out when faculty are hired.

The 20th century American Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars invented the phrase “The Game of Giving and Asking for Reasons” to describe aspects of the second world, and I’m adapting it here.

No, no. Wrong game. In the Game or Reasons you don’t win or die – you’re just right or wrong.

As I’ve mentioned in some other dishes here at the Bistro, there’s ample evidence that our reasoning doesn’t always function in our lives the way we like to think it does. We’d like to believe that our reasons are the causes of our behavior rather than just their after-the-fact rationalizations and excuses, but the evidence indicates that this is true only in certain controlled circumstances. Nevertheless, learning to play the Game of Reasons remains essential to our humanity in two respects: first, if we ever want to overcome our worst impulses – whatever they are – good reasoning will play a necessary role; and second, if we don’t want to overcome those impulses, but also don’t want to be blamed for acting on them, reasons will come in handy then too.

That’s why I’m always pleased to see my step-daughters hitting the ball off the reasoning tee. Here’s one of my favorite examples. Last fall A was sick and had to stay home while her twin sister B went to school. Around noon I needed to run some errands and took A with me. We stopped to get some cash and A said, “Look, it’s a McDonald’s.” I agreed that the building next to us was, indeed, a McDonald’s, and A continued by saying, “I sure would love some McNuggets right now.”

But I knew that didn’t tell the whole story. McNuggets, as you likely know, are sufficiently nasty by themselves. I can’t remember or find the exact account, so I hope I’m not making this up, but I seem to recall Anthony Bourdain – author of Kitchen Confidential author and star of shows such as No Reservations – being asked in an interview the strangest food he had ever eaten and answered “unwashed warthog anus.” (I’ll give you a second to reread that last phrase. Now let’s move on.) Oddly, the interviewer followed up by asking what was the most disgusting food he’d ever eaten, and without pausing Bourdain responded, “A McNugget.” The girls’ mother and I agree in principle, but on the rare occasions when we do take them to McDonald’s as a special treat they kick the gross factor up a notch by ordering vanilla ice cream cones and dipping the McNuggets in the ice cream. Keep in mind that these are people who mix virtually no foods. If we put vegetables in their eggs, they react like LL Cool J’s character in Toys. But this combination works for them. My arteries seize up in sympathy just watching this meal.

Fortunately, I had an answer. “Honey,” I said, because I talk that way, “I need to go to The Grange to get some hay and pellets for Turbo.” (And yes, we have a guinea pig named Turbo. Don’t judge us.) “That’s near the Chocolate Factory and I thought we could go there and pick out some candy for you and your sister.”

You don’t need a golden ticket.

A pondered this proposal for a moment as I pulled out onto Gilman Boulevard and said, “Well, if you think about it, I still have candy left over from last year’s Halloween and this year’s is coming up again soon. I don’t really need any more candy. I’d rather have the McNuggets.”

Well argued, I thought to myself. But I had an ace up my sleeve. “That makes sense, honey. But I know you’ll want ice cream with your McNuggets, and I don’t know a good way to get ice cream home for your sister.”

Again A thought this over as I continued on toward The Grange and the Chocolate Factory. “Well,” she said, “we don’t have to tell her.” 

“That’s true,” I responded, doing my very best not to laugh, “but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. Think about if the situation were reversed and your sister got to go to McDonald’s and you didn’t, and we didn’t tell you. I don’t think you’d like that very much if you ever found out.”

We crossed the last major street before our destination and I thought I had won. Then A played her last card. “One time last summer J (our neighbor) gave us all candy bars, except for T (her son), and she told us not to tell him.” I looked in the rear view mirror. A looked back at me calmly. She didn’t yet know the phrase, “So there’s precedent,” but I could tell she got the concept. I turned around. We went to McDonald’s. It was as gross as ever, watching that deep fried breading dip into the sugary white goo. And I knew that I was rewarding problematic behavior. No amount of explaining exactly why I turned the car around would convince the Dopamine receptors in A’s brain – which at that very moment were marinating in all that oily, bready goo – that it was reasoning I meant to reward, and not duplicity. But I decided it didn’t matter. As usual, what was most important to me was that we were playing together – and one of my favorite games. We would work later on playing the Game of Reasons right. Right then, I was just so happy watching her take a smooth swing and make contact.

Photo credit: Cynthia Freeland, Bantam, Boehm’s.