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A good essay, like a good poem, is a complete thought. Books, I think, are food for thought but rarely constitute one themselves. The worst books are those that unnecessarily expand a thought that could have been fully expressed in a page or two. They are neither cogent nor nourishing. They are merely a distraction to occupy the mind when it is too tired to pay attention and too nervous to sleep. A complete thought isn't what we're taught in grade school. It isn't story elucidating a moral lesson. It isn't a symbol for something ineffable. It isn't a puzzle resolved by logic. It isn't an equation, a proof, a synthesis, or a paradox. A complete thought can't be reduced to anything more fundamental, and its parts have no meaning and no reality other than the continuous tension of the whole that runs through them. Science is obsessed with synthesizing thought, of separating thought from the source and observing it as an object. This obsession was, perhaps,...

There's been a lot of new slogans to help us cope with Trump's assault on smug and superior liberalism. One is attributed to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts," which has been reduced to the slogan, "Facts matter. " We who are educated use facts to win arguments and have grown accustomed to shaming enemies simply by citing some authoritative source. But it's a strategy not so very different from religious orthodoxies citing scripture. Scientific facts and academic consensus are perhaps even less self-evident than religious dogma, and it should come as no surprise that the un-initiated at the margins of our cities and college campuses would one day simply refuse to accept our facts as valid and authoritative. But what really irritates the court and its educated courtiers is their refusal to play by the rules, to engage the Inquisition in the rational arguments designed to render the oppo...

Environing Need Organizing Environment Conceptualizing Organism Modeling Conception Subsequent experience informs the simple litany I came up with in my early twenties. I knew then but I know better now how the process repeats and persists at every level and at every step of evolution and transformation. The words will differ, and the details of its calculations will change, but the theme is constant, and includes consciousness as easily as it includes the organism and the nucleated cell, the biosphere and the prokaryotes, mass and gravity, charge and electromagnetic radiation, self and culture. It was unnecessary for civilization to dominate culture. I really don't think of God as a natural consequence of our self-awareness. God has always been an imposition on our common sense, and God's truth has never been self-evident. Truth that can only be known through indoctrination is quite naturally challenged by imaginations nurtured by personal experience. Science and religio...

Personal experience and common sense is all we have. But common sense can be manipulated and personal experience can include manufactured illusions. They're all the same in the metaphysical mind space we call consciousness, and most of us don't even try to distinguish between the two. We are, generally, made to regard our unregulated experience as self-indulgent, and the general principles derived from it as suspect. We've learned to filter and refute experience that contradicts belief, and to defend our orderly world view from disorderly reality. Over the centuries our common sense has been trained to defend the ideal against the real using a diverse and inconsistent arsenal of excuses, but from the very beginning we learned to accept hierarchies as a natural and necessary organizing principle, with the pyramid or ziggurat as the tangible metaphor by which it was assimilated. Age possesses wisdom derived from experience. When the dead began to speak we built altars t...

Civilization claims as its own all that culture has produced. Culture, as I'm beginning to conceive it, is all that a single person can hold in their minds and carry with them. Culture is language, it is all the deep metaphors, named things, organizing principles, and conceptual models that make us uniquely human. Culture is science, which in its pure and uncorrupted state, is conceptual; that is, all of its complexity can be derived from conceptual models and relationships any human mind can comprehend. Civilization is intentionally incomprehensible. It is an unnecessarily complex and inefficient collection of estranged parts that must be choreographed through a hierarchy of authority. It is designed to elicit awe and to make the individual feel powerless. Its perceived power is achieved through the tactics common to all ideologies: the disintegration of culture through expertise, classification, categorization, division, and compartmentalization. I, like most people who ha...

We know the difference between animals and humans, but fail whenever we attempt to say what it is. The difference, as simply and as honestly as I can state it, is that we are a fiction and the animal is a fact. The fact of our physical identity is confounded by the fiction of our metaphysical identity. The physical animal is neglected, like a dog with a distracted owner, like the health and hygiene of a junkie. We are obsessed with our imaginary worlds and metaphysical selves, and we fixate all our energies on their maintenance and improvement, like an old man with a model railroad, like Disney with his Magic Kingdom, like Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Gene Roddenberry, or J.K. Roweling. Our world, the one we call real, and ourselves, those we call authentic, are no more physical and present than Gandalf or Harry Potter. Our lives are narratives with parts played by characters we invent. We are merely the sorcerer who conjures them as surrogates for the warm and real facts from which conscious...

We're alert, I suppose, but that has a narrow connotation, implying a readiness to react to something that would upset our otherwise equanimity. One can be alert without paying attention, and often the two are at odds with one another. Also, we attend to the matter at hand by disregarding and deliberately ignoring things an outsider might regard as relevant. We dutifully complete tasks by disciplining ourselves not to be distracted by details. We believe that by dismissing irrelevancies we discern the general principle, the truth obscured by specificity. The world is filled with baubles, we say, and only the weak allow themselves to be enchanted by such random and meaningless detail as the way light refracts from water cascading over a waterfall, the ephemera of its cool mist, the color of twilight on arid rock, the low growl of well-fed bear. But it's those who spend their days preening their principles and cataloging abstractions that are silly in my estimation. Their th...