                           19970726.00
Dear Chuck,

     I took your advice and reread your letters and apologize for
having taken your words out of context as a platform for my own
exposition. As I have said apologetically on this list before, my
contributions are tidbits (smuler) of thought with a logic of
their own, a logic that often leads to conclusions that seem
strange and sometimes unacceptable to me.

     The substantive issues of disagreement between us, issues on
which I may well be in the wrong, are my conviction that virtue
(the good) is inapparent; because truth is subjective and the
truth is inward, that therefore, a fortiori, that which appears
good (almost) never is, and if our faith in the good is not to
falter, we must search for it as appearing under the guise of its
opposite. I am, as you can infer, not a fan of Madison Avenue.

     I am persuaded by your distinction between foolishness and
absurdity. My interest in that distinction however has yet
another dimension; I interpret it as an example of the kind of
nominalism that attempts to assign to any given word a fixed,
immutable meaning, thereby fashioning a kind of pseudo-
objectivity.  I think an early example are the definition
exercises in Plato's "Sophist". Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics
is structured around fixed definitions of various virtues and
vices, between which lies the desideratum, the golden mean. I
think the Scholastics expended much effort with the purportedly
conclusive definition of terms.  Schopenhauer endowed with a
genius for language, propounded impressively persuasive
definitions; but so far as I am concerned, Kant wins the prize
with his distinctions between Vernunft, (reason) Verstand
(understanding) and Anschauung (intuition); entities, so far as I
am concerned, that have their genesis solely in language, that
exist only in the academic study of their author's philosophy,
entities none of which I have ever been able to discern in my own
experience.

     The second area of disagreement between us regards the
psychology of crime.  I think that Socrates was on the right
track when he said that no man willingly does wrong.  With
respect to the cold blooded killers on death row among whom I
should be searching for Jesus, if I search for him at all, there
will be some who, like David, killed to satisfy their lust, or
like Hamlet, who killed (Polonius) in despair, there will be some
like Othello who killed in passion, there will be some like
Macbeth who killed to satify their wives' ambitions, there will
be some, most terrorists and brave conscientious individuals like
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who believed that they were conspiring to
kill in a good cause, as I happen to think Bonhoeffer was, but
no, please no contemporary terrorists on any airplane that
carries me or any member of my family. (Please remember that
subjectivity is truth.) and there will be many who killed from
paranoia, who believed that the sheriff, the FBI, the IRS, the
CIA, the NIS or inner Beltway or outerspace aliens were out to
get them.  But I think the majority of those among whom I must
look for Jesus, if I decide to look for him, are those who, not
unlike children, did not and do not understand the (existential)
consequences of their acts.  (Please remember that subjectivity
is truth.)

     I am presently spending much time playing with children, an
activity that has clearly affected my mental functions.  A
charming four-year old, of whom I am very fond, whenever I give
him a look of which he does not approve, says to me "I will cut
your head off," and given his natural adventurousness, he would
probably proceed to do so, if I did not place the knife out of
his reach.  (Please remember that it is people, not guns that
kill people.)  In a few months, perhaps in a few weeks, he will
have outgrown this expression of his aggressiveness; but not all
of us do.  Some of us remain physically or mentally stunted; from
a physician's point of view, the femur or the maxilla, the macula
or the cochlea, the limbic structures, the thalamus or the
cerebral cortex may not mature as they normally do. Therefore,
when we authorize our judicial system to kill individuals whose
real "crime" is that they are mentally defective or spiritually
stunted, we are engaging in a kind of backhanded eugenics.  The
irony of purporting to process juvenile offenders as adults is in
the fact that most, if not all serious criminals are, sub specie
aeternitatis, juveniles; Socrates, be my witness!  and it is not
they who are to blame, but we, who have been too indolent, too
self-righteous, or just plain too stupid, to put the knife out of
their reach.

     The third point of disagreement with you is that I am a
literalist when it comes to the injunction: Judge not that ye be
not judged. My parents brought me up on the Rilkean admonition:
    "Das was geschieht, hat einen solchen Vorsprung
    vor unserem Meinen, dasz wir's nie einholen,
    und nie erfahren, wie es wirklich aussah."
    Whatever happens has such a jump on our conjectures,
    that we never catch up with it, and never find out
    what it really looked like.

     Everywhere I look I see Nathan's outstretched arm pointing
at me, and saying, as he did to David: "Thou art the man."
especially pertinent, when it comes to the image of the cold-
blooded killer, an epithet that applies to David both when he
killed Uriah and when he killed Goliath. (Killing in combat is so
routine in the Old Testament as to be beneath comment; by the New
Testament and its propagandists such killing is discretely
ignored.)

     Perhaps it reflects some mental incapacity on my part, - cf.
supra  - that the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate
killing seems to me a conundrum, a slippery slope which only the
self-righteous negotiate with assurance.  If one of our men blows
up a government building in Baghdad, he becomes a hero, his
rating in the polls rises to the point where he has a good chance
to be elected or re-elected president.  If the same man blows up
a goverment building in Oklahoma, which happened to be the
destination of the long day's journey into the night in Kafkas
novel "Amerika", he becomes an arch-criminal, an anti-hero to be
sacrificed on the altar of our collective domestic security;
where the truth is that we have all been terrorists all along, at
least to the native Americans, ever since the first European set
foot on a Caribbean island, and to Africans ever since the first
slave ship discharged its merchandise on our shores.

     Even more paradoxical is the stigma attached to an action
done in "cold blood". That's not just a characteristic of persons
who rob banks. It's just as much a quality of individuals who
sell cocaine or nicotine, who run gambling casinos and state
lotteries, who go hunting for squirrel and quail, who manage for-
profit (and not for-profit) hospital corporations, who buy and
sells platinum and gold, stocks and bonds, livestock futures and
pork bellies. It's all done, and it _can_ only be done, in cold
blood. As a matter of fact, the life-blood of the bureaucracies
both public and private by which we live could hardly be
chillier; and if the bureaucrats who control our lives were by
some miracle to become passionate, subjective, ethically
sensitive human beings, responsible for the consequences of their
actions rather than for obeying orders and complying with
regulations, if such a miracle happened, no, we would not be in
paradise, our society would be chaos, our government would
collapse, our judicial system would dissolve, our prisons would
open, and, perhaps most frightening, our universities would
disband.

     So what the country needs even more desperately than an
anti-missile defense is a fool-proof fail-safe system of
hypocrisy, a conscience-immune ideology of self-deception totally
transparent to all would-be Kierkegaards, a collective mythology
that enables us to have it both ways: to preen ourselves in self-
satisfaction with our Christian virtues and to reap even more
handsome and of course non-taxable profits from our individual
and collective crimes.

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