Even when I'm being brief, I'm long-winded, apparently

I recently had a chance to offer an opinion on a hot literary topic for the Review-Review. The word limit was 600, I was told. I took it as a challenge to try to cram my usual prolix prose into a smaller vessel. They accepted what I wrote, and it's up now, but I'm still easily the longest-winded of the people on the page. They had to put me at the bottom so I didn't mess up the flow.

I'm capable of saying yes or no with fewer words, of course, but it's very hard to put restraints on all that rhetorical training: the need to cite evidence, build lines of reasoning, establish ethos and anticipate counter-attacks. Anyhow, follow the link to see an example of me being brief. You've now seen another example of the same with me, here, talking about it.

WTF at the movies: a white dude tries to figure out what the hell happened to the last 45 minutes of "Get Out"

I don't normally like scary movies. It's not that I mind being scared; it's that most supposedly scary movies are too dumb to either cause fear or even keep me awake. In order to feel fear, I have to care about a character. That means the movie has to be smart, which most horror films are not. The terror in the film also has to have a correspondence to something we actually fear in real life.

Speaking of things I fear, I am terrified of Sunday afternoons as they turn into Sunday evenings, which bring on the inevitable existential angst of worrying about another week of work, school, bills, and the million ways to fail in life I might yet figure out. So, I grabbed Mrs. Heretic, got in the car, and headed to see Get Out, the new picture written by Key and Peele's Jordan Peele. From the previews, it seemed to meet the criterion of correspondence to a valid, real-world fear, although not a fear I personally have to worry about. It had about a million percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes, and that made it good enough to make it a Sunday distraction.

Spoilers ahead

The first hour lived up to the hype and expectations. It was a smart if slowly developing story built around the understandable fear of young black men in upper-class white surroundings. The tension felt by Chris, a too-cool-for-his-own-good photographer played with quiet understatement by Daniel Kaluuya, is ratcheted up because he's visiting the family of his white girlfriend. Surprise! She didn't tell them her boyfriend was black. Surprise! Her brother's a little bit of a nutcase. Surprise! The house is so secluded, the father boasts of their "total privacy."

The tension mounts as we meet Walter and Georgina, two anachronistically servantile black employees of the Armitage family. Their glassy stares and non-sequitur words let us know something isn't right. It turns out that Chris has showed up during some weird, white-as-rice party, where he is passed from one diarrhea-mouthed micro-aggressor to another. One fondles his muscles and wonders about the size of his phallus. Another asks if he can golf and quickly brings up Tiger Woods. It's like the script followed a Buzzfeed listicle of "Ten Things White People Shouldn't Say to African-Americans."

Chris talks occasionally with his friend Rod, a TSA agent who complains that his boss got mad at him for patting down an older lady. He is sure "the next 9-11 will be geriatric." He has paranoid conspiracy tendencies, and as such, he's kind of like a character from a Key and Peele sketch. He's convinced that Mrs. Armitage has hypnotized not only Chris, but all the other black people Chris is running into.

Shit gets weird

Chris's friend Rod is really just stating the natural suspicion of the audience when he gives his theories. I assumed, since the movie seemed to be a pretty sharp piece, that there was a major twist coming that would undo those assumptions. If the movie was truly great, it would turn not only the script on its head, but the audience's understanding of the racism that drove the mounting fear.

But it turns out, Rod is EXACTLY right about everything. Well, almost. The black men aren't being turned into sex slaves, but...wait for it...are being harvested for their strong, young bodies, into which the brains of older, decrepit and dying white men are put. Now, a tiny bit of the original inhabitant of the body remains, but it's mostly subsumed by the new host until some stimulus (such as a camera flash) brings out what's left of the original person. Chris was actually brought to the house by his girlfriend Rose to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

So I'm thinking, this sucks, right?

As the movie wound to the climax, I became really disinterested. The premise of a brain transplant seemed itself a transplant--in this case, of a B-movie Sci-Fi schlock device into a serious racial drama. Furthermore, Rod has suddenly gone full Kevin Hart, overrunning the bounds of mere minor comic relief and into full comedy movie mode as he gets laughed out of a police station going through his theory of what happened to his friend. The close of the movie is like Mystery Science Theater 3K, a mix of a stupid plot device and occasional comic commentary.

The only movie I can think of that ever pulled this much of a mid-movie switch was the Kevin Costner movie The War, which was 90 minutes of a close character study of a Vietnam vet's relationship with his son that suddenly turned into the end of Home Alone.

What happened to this movie? Did Peele just not know where he was going, so he decided to end it with a sketch that never made it into the show?

Theory of why the movie might not suck #1

As Mrs. Heretic and I drove home and talked about it, we kicked around a few ideas of how the ending of the movie might actually not be that terrible. The first has to do with the title. "Get out!" might be something a black audience in a Key and Peele skit would yell at a horror movie character. It's a stereotypical line in the mouth of the supposedly talkative black movie-goer. "What's wrong with you? Don't go in there? Get out!" Rod seems to echo this idea when he rescues Chris at the end: "I did tell you not to go in the house."

Maybe the idea is that there is no big twist when it comes to the fears of black men. They fear the obvious plot because the obvious plot is exactly what's going on. The movie is saying there is nothing subtle or imaginary about what young black men feel when they enter rich white enclaves.

Theory of why the movie might not suck #2

There is an alternate fear the movie might be playing with. It might not be as dangerous for black men to go into white neighborhoods as it once was, particularly if they are as compliant as Chris, willingly showing his I.D. to a cop who has no reason to ask for it.

The fear is more one of assimilation, of being literally overtaken by a white person living in a black body. Chris is as far from a militant black youth as one could get. He dates a white girl. He takes artsy photographs and knows wealthy art collectors. His name is Chris Washington, for crying out loud. The movie might be as much a commentary on the hypnotic effect of white culture on black self-identity as it is a reference to a threat of violence.

I'm not sure if it's good or just unusual

I'm still puzzling over what I think of this movie. This "review" is more an attempt to catalogue what I think the main three possible ways to think of it for me are. I'm not ready just yet to join the crowd praising it. Something didn't sit right about the answer Chris got from the man who hoped to occupy his body when he asked, "Why us? Why black people?" The man isn't really interested in the question. I feel like this was the movie's chance to give the audience an answer as to what it was about, but the movie itself didn't know the answer.

Maybe it doesn't have to. I suppose if you're in a position where you feel somewhere between uncomfortable and terrified, questions of why aren't that important. Deer don't ask "why" when cars run them over.

No, I don't understand how to do novel query letters, either

I've written a novel. I think it's pretty good, both artistically and from the point-of-view of commercial potential. Every year, thousands of people get to this same point. When we get this far, conventional wisdom is that the best thing to do is to write query letters to literary agents.

I've read half a dozen articles online and the advice from the Writer's Market on how to do this. I've written several versions of a query letter. I've sent off five. I have no idea what I'm doing.

Everyone wants something a little different. Some want the query letter attached to an email. Some say just put it in the body of the email itself. In this latter case, do I try to keep the formal format with the letterhead and everything?

Some want the first few pages of the novel. My book has a short introduction that is really part of the book. Do I start from that or just go to Chapter One?

Examples of "query letters that succeeded" are so all over the map, they're of no more use to me than an article called "novels that succeeded" would be.

All the advice suggests I include some kind of personal link, some "here's why I think you would be great to represent this book" statement. But these seem so obviously false, I can't believe agents really appreciate them. Why did I pick you? Your name was in the book, and I'd really be happy with almost any agent at all right now, that's why. Any agent is better than the no agent I currently have. Can't I just jump to talking about the book?

Then, there are those who want a synopsis. These are just awful to write. They're supposed to be a few pages and include nearly every plot point from the whole book. Most agents don't want them. Or they do, but in some modified form. You have to tell what your book is about, but without any of the magic that hopefully made it interesting. To modify the old saying, it's like trying to write that the New Testament is the story of a Jewish carpenter.

Blake Kimzey, the guy who critiqued my short story for me and whose chapbook I thought was pretty inventive, just finished writing a novel of his own. He had this tweet the other day:

That's about as good as I can give you, too. Nothing about it comes naturally to me. Agents want great work to take to publishers. I get that they might want to give writers a few hoops to jump through to weed out the lazy or the novice. But the querying process just seems made to put writers off their game, making it a pretty good bet that a good number of books that might have done well end up slipping through the cracks. I'm not saying that I'm sitting on top of the great American novel here, although I hope I am, of course. Only that I find querying to be such a different skill from fiction writing, I honestly think one could excel at one and never master the other.

An ethical question to myself

What if...

I were offered a job as a writing instructor in an M.F.A. program? If it were for enough of a salary to make it possible for me to quit my current job, which pays the bills but is a little uninspiring? I've been pretty clear that I don't think much of M.F.A. programs, that they often don't make their students much better writers and almost never pay for themselves. But say I've got an offer in the hand. Let's say it's a job that lets me go back to Ohio, where I'm from. It even gives me an open enough schedule I could fulfill my dream of being able to home school my son. Do I take the job?

Qualifying statement one: I do not at all question the ethics of current M.F.A. instructors, or writing instructors in general. If you believe that writing can be taught and you can teach it, there is no ethical dilemma in being a writing instructor, just as there is no ethical dilemma in being an ordained minister if you believe what your church teaches.

Qualifying statement two: This is entirely hypothetical. I have no such offer. It's just a question that occurs to me now and again.

Qualifying statement three: If I lost my current job and had a decent offer to teach writing and needed that job to feed my family, there is no question. I take the job. This question only has to do with whether I would take such a job if I thought it would improve my life but weren't in a forced position.

And here we go...

Part of me wants to say there is no debate. I don't think writing programs help writers write better or get published, which means they take money--sometimes a lot of money--and don't provide a service in return. They make the quality of life of their users worse, in other words. I have no business teaching writing in a college program.

But then, Herman Melville asks that question he always asks me: Who ain't a slave?

How many jobs on Earth have no ethical downside? Even a doctor or nurse is part of a medical-insurance complex that favors the wealthy, overcharges, mis-charges, and makes mistakes born of cost-cutting. Soldiers are selfless, perhaps, but they can be used as pawns in terrible political machinations. Even if I try to picture the job with the least negative impact in the world I can imagine: organic farmer, say, or massage therapist for cancer patients, if you put your salary in a bank, you are putting it into an investment package that includes stealth bombers, strip mining, and private prison companies. Not that there aren't jobs that more or less directly feed the beast, only that nobody who consumes anything is really totally innocent.  Even an organic farmer has to sell his kale to a few Wall Street crooks.

I have tried several times and failed to write a story about a young man who visits the Holocaust Memorial and draws the conclusion that efficiency is an enemy of man. He feels that society needs lazy and unproductive people to act as a natural drag on the speed of progress. If society is ever headed in the wrong direction, these braking mechanisms help to keep it from going too far. I often attempt to write the character as the head of a lazy yet stubbornly popular cult movement. This character encourages massive under-employment: spending thousands of parental dollars on useless academic degrees followed by long stints in retail, that sort of thing.

Maybe most people are sort of in this under-employed category. We might make better salaries than a stock clerk, but our essential alienation from our labor ensures we're probably never working too terribly hard at it. But in a job like writing teacher, I think there's an assumption on the part of the customer that you do love your job, that it's more a calling than a way to pay the bills. So maybe there's more dishonesty in doing a job like this cynically than there is in working at a job where it's assumed you're living out your Plan B. The main character in my story "Infection"--which, again, I can't apologize enough for being hard to read in the format presented--plays blues music, but insists he can do it without particularly liking the music he plays. He ends up smashing the heart of someone who has a more spiritual and earnest relationship to the music he plays.

On the other hand, maybe one could argue, like Jonas Nightengale in Leap of Faith, that by giving people the hope that they might become writers, you're giving them their money's worth.

It's just a thought experiment, and not one I have a definitive answer to. Maybe one day, after I've published a hundred stories, I'll feel like I actually could teach somebody something. Until then, with my fourth due out in July, it seems a little too dishonest to pretend to sell a platinum package I almost certainly couldn't deliver.

Hope as a commodity: an AWP conference trip report

Having taken more than enough digressions into diverse matters, I'd like to get back to the raison d'etre of this blog, which has something to do, I guess, with establishing a universal esprit d'corps with authors struggling to get published and all the manifold psycho-dramas that come with that struggle.

I've read in a few places that writers' conferences are de rigeur if you're serious about being a writer. Attendance proves you're a professional and you take your writing seriously. Over the last few months as I've been trying to navigate the murky process of getting a novel published, I've read recommendations that you can hook an agent by writing a query letter that starts something like "We spoke at LitCon2016, and I was really intrigued by the creepy way you groped my shoulder as we talked. I'd really like you to represent me with my first novel."

My first conference

I attended the 2017 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference in D.C. this past weekend. What is the AWP ? I actually didn't know the answer to this a month ago. It isn't a union; it's just a professional association. It promises networking for writers and professional guidance for writing instructors. I went for three reasons: 1) Somebody I know had a booth there, 2) Somebody else I know had another booth there, and 3) It was close. The AWP conference is in a new place every year. This year it was in D.C.

What I saw

There were hundreds and hundreds of booths on Saturday, the only day I attended. A rough guesstimate would be that half of them were occupied by MFA programs. Given that this blog is half-dedicated to the proposition that graduate writing programs are a huge waste of money, it wouldn't be hard to guess I walked around the AWP with a bit of skepticism. Many of the other booths were literary journals, including some local ones that only showed up because a backyard conference fit the budget.

The venue seemed to me a little glitzy, but maybe that's because I'm such a Philistine. It was in both the Washington Convention Center and the Marriott Marquis, which are connected underground. Walking through the lobby of the hotel, it took two seconds for me to realize I could never afford to spend a night in it.

Looking around at many of the people there, I couldn't help but think many were in a similar circumstance. There were an awful lot of upper-teen/younger-twenties-looking folks there, full of hope, ostentatiously reading paper books here and there on the margins of the event.

Perhaps many had been sent by their respective MFA programs, and therefore had their rooms and board paid for. In return, perhaps, they manned the booth, showing prospective MFA students the young face that proves what a great idea joining such a program is. To the school, it's well worth paying for an influencer student to stay downtown for a few days if that student can help land one well-heeled student to drop 40K on an MFA. And what better place to find a well-heeled student than a place that almost takes someone well-heeled to even get in?

Because even if you live close to the event like I do, it's not cheap to go. I got the $45 Saturday-only pass, the cheapest way into the show possible. If you wanted to go for the whole four-day affair, it was $200 if you were an AWP member, $300 if you weren't. (A one-year membership is $75, so it obviously pays to get get the membership. In return, you get "opportunities for publishing and networking, services for finding jobs, and a lively exchange of ideas about writing and teaching.") I guess for those who weren't there on the school's dime, if you could afford to take three days off work, maybe you could also afford the entrance fee easily enough.

But maybe not. I'd guess that tucked in among the masses were dreamers spending their precious few discretionary dollars on the hope that the conference might help them in some way to make headway with becoming a professional writer. Whether it was drawing inspiration and tips from some luminary (Rita Dove! Ta-Nehisi Coates!) or networking with publishing houses, there were doubtless hundreds or thousands there hoping the week(end) would provide some kind of breakthrough by osmosis.

A lot of the presentations were directed at writing instructors, true to the "Writing Programs" part of the AWP's name. These tended to have an academic flair to the titles, such as "Magical Realism as an Agent for Social Change," which hoped to show writing instructors "how to guide student use of the genre to confront inequalities of their time and locale."

Many of the lectures sounded an awful lot like something I'd have gone to nearly 20 years ago when I was still in academia. There must have been at least a dozen sessions that dealt with "queering" something or other.

The politics were clearly anti-Trump. Although one seminar featured writers from Appalachia who hoped to tell appropriately complex stories about the "angry, marginalized, and stereotyped" working class people from back home, for the most part, resistance to Trump was assumed.

This was the nine seconds worth of the half hour of chanting that went on in the conference center. I couldn't understand what most of it was saying, but it was anti-Trump. Okay, this is really terrible video. What happened to the sound? But trust me, there were demonstrators.

Basically, the whole event had a college campus vibe. It was also set up to be reassuring: participants were supposed to feel that they, too, could one day be up on that stage. And while it wasn't as crassly commercial as, say, a boat convention, there were plenty of products and services on hand promising to help make that dream come true. Beyond the M.F.A. programs and the presentations on how to get more oomph out of your manuscript, there were books, books everywhere! There was the unspoken belief that if one bought a book from the right person and struck up a conversation, it could open one door just a crack, and that door would lead to another and another and another.

Should you go to a writers' conference? 

Here's why you shouldn't: 

I find it hard to believe that agents really care whether you went to a conference. They want writers who will sell. If your work is marketable, you'll find a place for it. It might just take a while. I don't think you really need to spend the inordinate amounts of money these conferences charge. As a reader on a journal, I would not be the least bit inclined to accept work from someone I'd met more readily than someone else who wrote a better story. I don't even read bios most of the time before the story. Agents reading your query letters or first pages are likely in the same boat.

Writing conferences are there to make money. The venue wants to make money. Many of the presenters are there to make money, if not at the conference itself, then down the road when they get you to trust them to help you make your dreams come true. The main commodity at the conference is the hope of the attendees. Hope is the engine that turns the mills of this factory. Without hope, who would drop $200 just to come in and drop more money with the aim of getting a couple minutes' face time?

Sadly, the economics of the thing state that most of the people in attendance are hoping in vain. Nobody is going to tell you that there, of course. Writing will be treated like a self-evidently beautiful and wonderful thing to do. Of course, you must not give up hope. (If you do, no matter. A new group of the not-yet-disillusioned will arrive next time around to take your place.)

And here's why you should:

That being said, there are a few good reasons to go that I can think of:

1) To meet the editors of a local journal. This year, local journals like The Potomac Review, Baltimore Review, and Little Patuxent Review were there. They don't normally attend the AWP Conference. They only attended this year because the proximity meant the economics made sense. I went to say thank you to the editors for having published me or said nice things about submissions I've made. I believe in showing support to the journals that have supported me. These journals aren't in business to make money. Nothing about their business model is profit-oriented. Most are barely limping along. They were at the conference to get what notice they could so more writers will submit to them and hopefully give them better stuff to print. That's it.

2) If you really want to see a headliner. People pay what I consider stupid amounts of money to go to concerts. If you want to do the same thing to see a luminary of literature, and you're just doing it because you admire the work and want to be part of the energy of being in a crowd of people who feel the same, have at it. Just know that being there is no more likely to make you a writer of equal clout than going to a Metallica concert is likely to make you a rock star. Treat the money you spend at a writing conference like a bad gambler treats money at a poker tournament: you're just paying for the thrill of being there.

3) You just really need to hope. There's nothing wrong with this. Certainly, a big part of my resurgent interest in writing since I turned 40 has had to do with the nagging feeling that just working and providing for my family were, although the most important thing I have to do, also incredibly ephemeral. I needed to hope while grinding away at my profession's version of gears that the thoughts, words, and visions in my head had value outside of my own imagination.

I've made almost no money off of writing since then, but the boost to my spirits from having three-soon-to-be-four stories published can't really be measured in terms of money. On a Monday morning like today was, I'm much more able to face heading off into the wind to my I-can-stand-it-because-it-isn't-my-whole-life job because I know I have a little something else going on the side.

But it is on the side, where it will be for 90-some percent of the aspirants who show up at any conference. Don't lose track of that when calculating the cost-benefit of going.

Damn this chicken is good: a manifesto for a new liberal consensus

Every blogger is entitled to go off-subject once in his life to write the rambling political manifesto he is dying to write. -Erasmus of Rotterdam

The most defining moment in my life was turning away from evangelical Christianity. It's been more influential than the Marine Corps, than college and graduate school, than thirteen years of work as a translator, than traveling or marriage or fatherhood. Nothing has as deep an impact on who I am as the fact that I used to be an evangelical and now I am not. There are few things in the world I claim to know. Trying to understand the world only convinces me that I know very little. The only thing I feel confident about is that the cosmology and epistemology of American evangelicalism are flawed and false. It's not much to go on, but I guess I've felt that at least knowing one thing that wasn't true was as good a bedrock to build on as any.

Which leaves me with a big problem

You'd think that if the only thing I was sure of in the universe was that evangelicals were wrong, I'd be pretty dead-set against the Republican Party, which is heavily influenced by them. I realize, of course, that not every Republican is an evangelical. Probably not even the majority of Republicans belong to one of Protestant churches that teach that the Bible is the literal word of God. But their presence does loom heavily over the entire party, influencing every bit of the Republican platform. Republicans aren't majority evangelical, perhaps, but the party can accomplish little without them. This is why Donald Trump, who never in his many days in the public eye once did anything to suggest, either in word or in deed, that he particularly cared about God's word, made restrictions on abortion one of his first priorities as President. His populist appeal to middle America, where most evangelicals live and where a Christian view of Islam has power, may also inform his recent immigration policy decisions.

So yeah, you'd think I'd be dead-set against Republicans. I am, sort of. I'm registered as a Democrat, although that's partly because here in Maryland, if you ever want your vote to matter in anything local, you have to have a Democratic ticket. And I tend to break with Republicans on those issues that spring most directly from religion, like abortion. But reality has a way of slowing my roll before I claim support for Democrats too enthusiastically.

It's the chicken

Remember when Chick-Fil-A was the bane of all orthodox liberals? You don't? You mean the news cycle in America completely leaves story lines dead once they've moved onto the next thing? Here, let me refresh your memory:

        Fair and balanced memes, a hallmark of liberals since Al Gore invented the Internet

In the summer of 2012, Chick-Fil-A CEO Dan Cathy made a couple of statements indicating he thought about same-sex unions the way every person who believes the first chapter of Romans is the inerrant word of God thinks about them. This led to an LGBT-rights-groups-led attempted boycott that probably backfired. In the short term, the failure of the boycott was related to a Christian-led counter-boycott "buy Chick-Fil-A" campaign, but in the long term, it had everything to do with something far more fundamental: their chicken is good.

It's more than that, actually. Chick-Fil-A is the only fast food place I go to where I regularly feel welcome. I don't know how employees working for between 9-11 dollars an hour summon the will to seem enthusiastic about selling me nuggets, but they do, almost every time. They handle much larger crowds than I see at Wendy's or McDonald's or wherever, and they do it quickly and accurately (usually). The place is clean. My son asks for Chick-Fil-A every other day. So I go there a lot.

(Side note: I knew a whole family that worked at Chick-Fil-A when I was in an evangelical youth group. My strong guess is that through a combination of evangelical networking and shibboleths uttered during interviews, a fairly high percentage of Chick-Fil-A workers are Christians on the evangelical side.)

Christianity was the West's good chicken for a long time

Other things being equal, as Hobbes pointed out long ago, life is nasty, brutish, and short. Modernity is used to saying things like, "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we have robot butlers?" We expect a technology-driven utopia. But for most of human history, managing a society where people scraped by with enough to eat, weren't destroyed by natural disasters, famine or war, and enjoyed some level of social order were enough to far exceed expectations. Life in nature is fragile. For slow-developing animals like humans who rely on all the factors that go into the agricultural cycle, it's more fragile still, despite our many cognitive advantages. So when something works in a society, when it manages to stave off the grimness of life just a little bit, it tends to stick around.

By modern standards, Christianity fell down often as a social system, measured in the secular happiness it brought to those living beneath it. This is a fact Christians have to deal with. They cannot simply write it off by saying the Catholic inquisitors or the Puritan witch-burners weren't "real Christians," anymore than I can claim Democrats who go off half-cocked aren't "real Democrats." Something about Christianity encouraged those kinds of social ills, just as something about what is called liberalism encourages uninformed smugness. These sorts of evils are part of the equation when weighing the social and political benefits of Christianity as an ideology. But weighed against the time in which Christianity became ascendant, it brought many vast improvements. It urged rulers to consider the poor. It urged closing arenas where gladiators fought. It promulgated education. And while some Christian thought lent itself in wicked apologia for slavery, other earnest theologians also argued against it, and eventually won their argument.

I wrote an essay for the Elie Wiesel Ethics Competition in 2000, called "Existentialism and Chocolate Milk," in which I tried to invent an ethics for a post-Christian world. I essentially re-adopted 90% of Christian ethics, and said we should follow them based on the shared human condition of having been given a moral code by a God who didn't follow it himself. It was ethics as spite, if you will. It probably wasn't terribly sound, but it now occurs to me that it was an acceptance that a lot of Christian ethics work fairly well. (I got an honorable mention for it, thus beginning a long writing career of nearly being good enough.)

Skeptics often deny the benefits to Western society Christianity brought. Bertrand Russell, in his History of Western Philosophy, said the only benefit he was aware of that Christianity brought to the world was an improvement in the calendar. This just isn't fair. I don't believe Christianity is a complete social road map. That's not how it was built. And an ideology created thousands of years ago is woefully incomplete to guide us through a modern, technology-driven society. But we don't need to be overly dismissive of its historic benefits. The very tolerance we now accuse conservatives of lacking grew, in part, from Christianity. It also grew from a humanism that was regarded with suspicion from Christian orthodoxy when it emerged, and that humanist tradition ought to be the one we are more attuned to in the modern world, but that humanism very much grew out of Christianity.

Without this man...

We might never have had this man. (Thomas Paine. Don't Google it. It's Tom Paine.)

Some of those benefits survive to this day in the very conservatism we liberals all swear we hate

There are a zillion definitions of conservatism and liberalism. Any can be right in various contexts. I'm using the following:

Conservatism is more of a disposition than a philosophical principle. It is the assumption that things got to be the way they are for a reason. It is a fear that changing things too fast without considering the outcomes can be dangerous. It is the reasonable understanding that every action has unforeseen outcomes. A conservative is fundamentally cautious.

Liberalism is a disposition to question received wisdom, to ask why something that was thought good yesterday is still good today. It doesn't worry as much about possible unforeseen outcomes, figuring the only way to tell is to try. A liberal is fundamentally optimistic.

If a society is pulled too far in a liberal direction, it descends into anarchy. No policies last long enough to build reliability. If society is too conservative, it fails to improve, and it is eclipsed by societies more willing to experiment.

Really, one could be a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican. Trump, with his disdain for received wisdom and willingness to push ahead with never-before-tried policies, may be the most liberal President in American history. And maybe some of this is good: who of us hasn't thought that the government could use a good reboot now and again? What makes him dangerous isn't that he's an ultra-conservative; it's that he's far, far too liberal. Moreover, it's the dangerous kind of liberalism that doesn't carefully and rigorously defend its logic for changing course.


Liberals and conservatives need each other to keep society healthy. I'm not sure why my Facebook feed is full of both wishing for the extinction of the other.

Dubious recommendation for a re-branding

The organization where I work is currently in the middle of a huge re-branding process. Although the leadership constantly assures us that the re-branding and re-naming of things is just the outer shell of what's meant to be an inner change, the changes of names have been the only actual result I've been able to see. So it's probably a terrible idea to suggest liberals re-name themselves. This is particularly true since liberals have also tried a recent re-branding, giving themselves the name "progressives." This is a good try, and it has the advantage of looking to the future, where I think liberals' willingness to improvise holds an advantage. But I think the term has already been taken over by a sect of liberals who aren't representative of the core principles of the group: the anti-vaxxer, anti-GMO, anti-science crowd.

I therefore recommend that the group of people who insist on reason as the basis of social decisions call themselves humanists. Those currently calling themselves conservatives ought to change their name, too: people who aren't that worried about the ecological future of the planet can't really call themselves conservative. But I leave that to them.

Neither the term "liberal" or "conservative" is correct in any way to describe the groups they apply to in modern America. Both groups have taken on agendas over the years that don't jibe with a consistent philosophy. I'm recommending the group that is currently called "liberal" fix this for themselves, in the meantime altering the make-up of the group.

The new humanist consensus

The amorphous mob that currently calls itself "liberals" should start to call themselves "humanists." It can include people who are, by nature, conservative. It can include people who are, by nature, liberal. These are just personality traits, not political philosophies. Humanists are united by the belief that we should look to human reason to solve our problems. It is a group that can include Christians. It is a group that can include atheists. Humanism included nearly all the founding fathers.

What would a humanist consensus look like? This post is already too long, so I'll be as brief as possible in tracing a few characteristics.

-It will be a coalition of intellectuals from what are now the Republican and the Democratic sides, who realize that with reason under attack, their common approach to thinking is more important than their differences in how that approach might lead them to different conclusions.

-Humanists will adopt principles to which they adhere with the strength of religious conviction, because political movements are, sociologically, like religions.

-Among these convictions are that we will never use unsound logical principles such as ad hominem or strawman attacks, even if we believe they might be effective in winning support. We believe the damage in abandoning logical principles outweighs the temporary gain of winning an argument. Elections come and go. You win some, you lose some. We are strategic, not tactical. Politics as  confrontation may allow tactical victories, but strategically, truth always loses. If the goal is to advance truth, then politics as confrontation is a flawed strategy.

                        This, Kevin from Facebook. This is the kind of thing we DON'T say. 

-At the same time, recognizing the need for pragmatism, we will etch out for ourselves a logical approach on when to be ideological and when to be pragmatic. We will let people disagree with us on matters that don't effect political choice. If someone disagrees with us about whether homosexuality is a sin, we do not object to this as long as this belief does not lead to supporting curtailing the freedom of homosexuals. Other people disagreeing with you does not hurt you.We may also decide that things like demanding people be able to use whatever bathroom they want are symbolically disturbing to some people, that the idea is not yet ripe, and that it may cause a voter backlash, so it's possible to put the idea to the side for a time.

-We will emphasize that we only need agree on limited things. Christians can think we're going to hell. We can think they're deluded. Doesn't matter. We're focused on the secular good, which happens to be a thing we can agree on. The less you require articles of orthodoxy, the more people you can bring into a coalition.

Chocolate milk, chicken, now pudding for desert. As in, the proof is in it.

If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?-The Newsroom

Ups and down are part of political life. I suspect they are, in part, a result of humanity's herd instinct that suspects it's dangerous to lean in one direction for too long. So losing one election, or a few, is nothing to be concerned about. But liberals having been losing for so long, it's become a tradition. 

I failed to rebuild morality for a post-theocratic world in my essay 17 years ago. I'm sure I've failed now. Reason is also failing in the world right now. Reason cannot lose.

People can be reasonable in almost all areas and fall down in a few. I know many people much smarter than me who are also evangelical Christians. It is my belief that they are simply wrong in this one area, although they are right in many others, including areas where I am wrong. I need to work together with these people. That doesn't happen through insulting them, or ignoring their many accomplishments. They make damn good chicken. We should be so lucky to prove our worth.