Not Even Not Traveling 75: Canada - Front Porch Ruckus

Canada - Back to Queensborough

The next day, I built a shelf unit. 

Donna's house has books - a lot of them. In time, she will divest herself of many of the big hardbacks, I expect. It takes thought, though, to pare down a collection. First, Donna has to see them so she can think about them. When I finished the kit, I spun the standing shelf to verify everything worked. And I asked her where to put it, which turned out to be a corner of her master bedroom.

Then I resumed my part-time job of stacking the woodpile.

#

The Front Porch Ruckus

In the afternoon, Donna took us to the "Front Porch Ruckus" music festival in downtown Tweed. Now, Tweed is a small place but it seems to be on the rebound. Its city council actively recruits people to visit and, for that matter, the town seems to be looking for new residents. You can move into Tweed; and you can be part of renovating the town; and it looks worthwhile.

We met a man who had revived an empty courtyard between row homes. Once, a building had apparently stood there. After it got taken down, the lot remained vacant. So he moved in, bought an adjacent building and the lot, and turned it all into an art installation. Aside from the beauty of the landscaping, he mixed painted plants and real plants, painted windows and real windows, and a painted door (although there is no real door). These stand on the other side of a cast iron gate. The red, painted bars around the gate keep people from entering the courtyard and messing with the fussy, careful arrangement.

I had been the driver for trips into town before. But for the music festival, Donna took us in her red, stickshift Toyota. She parked at the fair grounds, next to a polka band. She aimed for them deliberately because I said I thought they would probably be interesting - I've heard plenty enough folk singers with guitars - and we strolled up to the brick-colored picnic shelter and listened to a big band number. A moment later, the band played dixieland jazz.

Donna somehow persuaded the band to let us sing along.

This is not a normal thing. As a singer, I can say we do not usually invite anyone up to give it their best. Rock bands tend to throw their musical volunteers off the stage. It shocked me a little to find myself singing with the local horn section. One piece we performed, rather quickly, was 'You Are My Moonshine,' a parody I wrote years ago (for Mother's Day) of 'You Are My Sunshine.' The band members seemed to genuinely enjoy the new lyrics. They acted as pleasantly shocked by our performance as I was. But also, they stayed relaxed and pleasant.

We sang nine or ten songs with them and that’s a pretty long time. Toward the end of their long set, they played something that made me exclaim, “That’s a great arrangement!”

One of the horn players had written the arrangement herself. She beamed, smugly, while the others told me she'd written it. Everyone seemed awfully pleased. After we heard another piece and said, somewhat reluctantly, we had to go hear the rest of the "Front Porch Ruckus" show, the musicians invited us to circle back. They said we could come to them at the close of the day and sing along at their invitation.

They were great sports.

We wandered around Tweed and listened to (and talked with) the other street performers for an hour or two. They were mostly folk and blues guitar players, some of them singers-songwriters, most of them part-timers who were making a little money on the side to play the standards, as they usually did.  

And we did, in fact, circle back for a few more songs with the brass band. 

Past the end of the event, we dodged into a popular cafe in Tweed's downtown. We got there early, before the indoor music started. As we sat, debating whether or not to stay for the performance, the clouds rolled in outside. They rumbled, dark and silvery. Then the skies let loose. Suddenly, all the musicians and music fans scrambled into the cafe with us. Everyone wanted to be under a roof while the rain poured down in sheets. 

After a few minutes, the regularly scheduled folk singer turned on his microphone. He realized he was about to play to a more-than-full house, many of them fellow musicians. And fellow musicians can be judgemental. You could see he wasn't sure what to expect. He played a few folk standards and got hearty applause, which allowed him to relax. 

Then he played 'Country Roads.'

Everyone sang. Right on the first verse. The guitarist hesitated for a moment, thrown off his rhythm before he recovered and leaned into what was happening. Since I may have started the audience participation (after my wife slapped me in the shoulder and hissed, "Sing!"), I was happy to see everyone else knew the lyrics, too. How many folk musicians were drinking coffee and waiting for their food? Twenty? Most of them had been paid to perform this one a dozen times. 

The performer liked the participation so much, he tried to get everyone involved again with other, reasonably popular folk songs. But there were none to quite match 'Country Roads.' Mostly, we chatted and sang in unison choruses until there was a break in the clouds. Then, under the brightening evening sky, we dashed to our car. 

Not Even Not Traveling 74: Canada - Tweed Pt. 1

Canada - Tweed 

We alternated between being tourists in the area - Donna being our expert guide - and giving Donna some help around her house. Since it was a busy time at work back in the DC area - and I mean at both offices I participate in - I spent a few hours each day doing telework, too. It cut into my chores but, since some of the work was billable, it also extended my Canada vacation.

For the next little while, I concentrated on cleaning the house. And I tried out the shower nozzle I'd fixed. It worked perfectly.

In the late morning, we all took a break. Donna directed us into Tweed for a game of golf with Paul and his wife. Paul was friend of Donna's in high school. They had managed to stay in touch despite all the time and, often, lots of distance. The golf course Paul chose for us was called Nine. Not surprisingly, we played nine holes, not a full game. Paul had to teach me to chip, to choose clubs correctly, and more. I knew I was getting good advice (even though I sailed a chip shot across the green and into the rough). In fact, Paul could not be a more relaxed, more fun golf teacher.

It was especially impressive for someone who introduced himself by saying, "I'm not a golf teacher."

All five of us kept an eye on the golfers behind us and ahead of us, aware we were beginners and therefore slow. Eventually, the game degenerated into a match that was basically a coaching session, just Paul and me. Our lady friends entertained themselves by speeding around with the golf carts and planning our lunch, including our strawberry margaritas.

I think my level of play could be described by three of Paul's remarks.

"Wow, that was a pro shot!" he shouted as my drive sailed down the middle for three hundred fifty yards.

"Wow, that's ... something. I wonder what happened." He said as I hooked one into the water.

"Wow, we're not going to find that one." He pointed to the reeds, or perhaps the forest, or perhaps a distant ocean.

When I did get my scheduled lessons two days later, the golf pro made pretty nearly the same remarks. We were on a different course. He taught me chip shots, to start with, at my request, because I knew I was bad. Then he taught us putting. When we finally got to the driving range, he found my drives appalling and entertaining in equal measure, with sprinkle of 'wow.'

"Wow, did you play little league baseball?" he asked.

"Yeah." Every boy in North America had, around 1972. But I didn't want to say that to someone born in 2006.

"Looks like it, Good contact," he said encouragingly as I sliced high into the net that protected the real golfers. I was apparently developing a sort of consistency, meaning I was reliably inconsistent. And for someone who was old enough to be my grandchild, my pro seemed often patient, sometimes amused, and sometimes extra determined to be patient.

 

Not Even Not Traveling 73: Canada - Queensborough

Canada Trip, 2026 


At the end of June, I drove up to see a friend from my undergraduate days.

Donna lives in Queensborough, which has a population of about a hundred, depending on the relatives visiting. A century ago it was a bustling logging village with a railroad stop nearby. Nowadays, it's officially a hamlet. People are moving back in, buying up the old churches and the hotel and turning them into homes. It's keeping the town (okay, hamlet) alive. It is also, undeniably, changing it.

For anything resembling shopping, the residents of Queensborough have to look to Madoc, a thriving metropolis of over a thousand. It boasts two grocery stores, one of which is a package store. The drive takes twenty minutes and it's lovely. But we made the trip in June. I imagine it gets less charming in January.

Officially, Queensborough and Madoc are both unincorporated so they are part of the municipality of Tweed, population six thousand. Tweed has a full-featured downtown with banks, restaurants, and galleries. During our week there, Donna took us to a music festival in Tweed.

More on that later. Because, in truth, we'd come on a vacation with the intent to do chores.

Diane had a plan. Donna had a gazebo kit. Between them, they had worked out how I would help assemble a tasteful outdoor structure, put up a mosquito blanket around it, and sip iced tea while teleworking via my laptop on a sunny day. In reality, the mosquitoes to showed up to the construction site like it was a scheduled event and I was late. They buzzed with impatience. My wife took one look at the situation — me with a half-dozen scout-mosquitoes conducting test raids — and she suggested, not unkindly, that I go be useful somewhere else. 

When I popped back indoors covered with the blood of the bloodsuckers, Donna remarked, "They must really like you."

They really do.

I dressed in layers even though it was summer. Long pants. Long socks. I slathered on an insect repellent lotion. I stepped out to the foyer to spray myself with an odious spray. You would think, by then, I had to be thoroughly repellent. But I was back inside the foyer a minute later, spraying spots I'd missed on my clothes.

“They really, really like you,” said Donna.

Finally, I was safe enough to work on the woodpile. Donna's firewood had arrived two weeks before, about a cord of it. The supplier had dumped it in front of the shed with the confidence of knowing he had not been paid to stack it. Instead, that service was supplied by me. Fortunately, wood does not care about your feelings or your mosquito bites, You just move it, log by log, until the pile in front of the shed becomes a stack inside the shed.

When I had about a third of the woodpile relocated, I went inside to deal with one of the showers. A downstairs shower-bath had developed a problem that can be summarized as "it's in several pieces, but they used to be one piece." Something in the manufacturing had gone sideways and parts of the fixture had popped apart. The threads of them looked like they were never really meant to go together in the first place. But that wouldn't matter because Donna had stocked her house supplies with marine-grade epoxy. It would give us the adhesive, waterproof strength we needed.

The fix didn’t take long, which was a pity. I enjoy the the epoxy-making process. Apparently, I'm one of those people who doesn't get globs of glue or paint where they don't belong. Those types of jobs tend to go smoothly for me - until someone distracts me for a microsecond.

“Let’s go hit a bucket of balls at a golf course," Donna suggested. She knew I had been asked to play in a charity tournament for work. And I had never played.

#

Donna had researched golf courses, including one in Tweed. In the trunk of our car, I'd brought the bag of clubs I got for $40. (Customs agents don't regard pieces of golf equipment as weapons, no matter how bad you are with them.) My first step, aside from learning how the golf bag worked, was figuring out how to rent a bucket of golf balls. The teenager behind the desk thought we were clueless and, because we were, I told him to give me a golf lesson.

"Uh, you need a golf pro," he said.

"Right, I've got a lesson time reserved. That's for two days from now. I'm hitting golf balls today, right now. You just rented me the bucket. Tell me what to do."

"Okay." He took thirty seconds to tell us the main secrets of golf, most of them involving how to stand, which I thought I already knew (but as it turns out, not quite). Basically: take a baseball or karate stance, slightly bent at the knees. Square up your alignment with the ball, parallel to the target. Use a baseball grip, overlapping grip, or interlocking grip. (Overlapping felt right for me.) If you're right handed, bring your left arm back, like in a baseball swing, but keep it straight at the elbow.

Swing and hit the ball. Success! Maybe.

This left out a lot of important pointers but I found the basics to be useful enough. I could hit drives - of a sort - using any of my cheap clubs. Most of the shots went forward, too, which is basically where they should go. Diane and Donna could make shots move forward, too, and they were also beginning golfers.

Special sports note: The three of us originally thought we would go kayaking and take nature hikes between house chores. But I am, as mentioned, a mosquito magnet. The Queensborough area has a lot of biting insects, especially along the hiking trails. In contrast, golf courses take care to eliminate the most annoying insects. So golf ended up being a good answer to the question of how I could spend time outdoors.

At the driving range, I succeeded (if that's the right word) in slicing a ball so far that it cleared the hundred-foot-high shielding net that protected the golfers on the course from idiots on the driving range. Fortunately, there was no one on the course when my ball sailed over. Same with the other three times. Man, I was looking forward to lessons from a golf pro. But first we had to do more house chores. And Donna had arranged for us to play actual golf with a friend of hers, who, we hoped, could be persuaded to give me lessons. Or at least not point and laugh.
 

Not Even Not Zen 448: Poem - Things They Say

Things They Say

When you're young,
they say 'follow your passion,’
but my father puffed blue smoke from his cigar
and responded, "Yeah,
you'll make big money writing poetry."

When you're hurt,
they say, 'Everything happens for a reason'
but my mother in her gardening shirt
glanced at my ankle and said in a slow breath,
"Stop jumping off the roof."

When you’re impatient they say,
'good things come to those who wait'
but after my grandmother said it,
my grandfather looked at me with contempt and added,
"Why aren’t you just doing it?"

They say, "There's no 'I' in team"
and it's literally true but
there is no 'we' in "Who's getting the credit?"
so sometimes we have to speak up
to make sure we do.
It's okay - my wife reminds me.

Sometimes when you’re lonely they say
"It’s the dark night of the soul"
but actually, visibility is pretty good.
I see what I'm doing, no excuses,
I could have helped more
and I know I should do better.

They say 'you’ll always change your mind'
and maybe I agree with that one
because I'm wearing the purple shirt
I used to despise.
So it's just a matter of time.
We'll have to check back about this one later.
 

 

 - Eric Gallagher 

Not Even Not Zen 447: Poem - You Shouldn't Have Asked

You Shouldn't Have Asked

You asked why,
why could I possibly love you.

And I have bad news.

The sun rose in a purple morning sky. 
And that’s why I love you.

And it does that every day.

 - Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 446: Biomythography - Note 152, No One Converts, Pt. 3

No One Converts, Part III

The world feels holy. 

That's stupid, and yet there are times when simply walking alone in the woods or strolling along a dirt road with friends, or almost any other ordinary thing can bring us a feeling of, more or less, 'this place is sacred.' It can happen suddenly. My friend Michael's comments made it impossible not to remember some of those moments in my life.

Despite our rational approach, despite how my talks with Michael about the reasons behind belief in God (and non-belief) were supposed to be about what's provable, we were left with a difference in our underlying experiences. It wasn't even a big difference in outlook. We both felt holiness around us. We interpreted it differently.

Michael had been raised in a private, Jesuit boarding school. Perhaps it's not much of a surprise that the Jesuits converted him. The conversion from Judaism to Catholicism came to him as a revelation, apparently, as a series of visions of God. He got dream visitations from an actual, white-haired, bearded holy man. He loved the Jesuit priests' rational approach to it all. That's why Michael thought he could prove God must exist. For sure, he told me at length how believing in the Catholic trinity made the most sense.

For my part, I came from a tradition that included some family Catholic church membership, some Methodist, some Baptist, but mostly a bunch of Quaker church ceremonies as part of my schooling. And the biggest spiritual influence of all was reading about Buddhism and about pre-Socratic philosophies (which I often compared to Buddhism, especially the Epicurean school). 

The rational approach, at least for the two of us, seemed to come from a need to explain our sense of holiness. If someone notices a heaviness or lightness in the air, they might search the trees or the skies or look to a nearby river to try to find the cause. We were doing something similar on a spiritual and emotional level. We sensed something. Where was a source?

That's why it was such a disappointment for Michael to finally admit, "I guess there's no rational reason to believe in God."

I remember feeling a slight sense of shock. I hadn't expected to convert him. I'd helped with a conversion before but with a girlfriend. That's suspicious because of all the love and affection and trying to please each other. With a religiously-oriented friend, even a good friend, I had no reason to expect it. And I had no reason to be suspicious of it. 

The next day, when I saw Michael, he seemed depressed. But non-belief can affect people like that. It had depressed me, at first. We discussed the lack of God for a little while that day but I didn't see any reason to try to talk him out of his mood. He had to come to terms with non-belief in his own way. 
 
When we ate dinner together, Michael remained quiet. He didn't want to debate. Then, almost abruptly, I didn't see him for two days. Eventually, at another dinner with friends in the cafeteria, he said he wanted to talk. Almost immediately, before we even walked out of the dorms on our hike across campus, he revealed that he believed in God again.

"Eric, he came to me," Michael said. "He was a sturdy older man, sort of, with a flowing white beard and a voice. And the voice talked to me. I could feel Him. I felt His presence."

"Okay," I conceded. Rationality was not going to win over such a personal, powerful experience. "So really, you still believe."

"Sorry, I thought it was rational. But it's more than that. I can feel God."

We walked in silence for a while. 

"Fair enough," I said. And we started talking about black and white photography and whether it was really art. It was easy to talk with him. 

#

Conclusion

Michael converted back to his beliefs after a few days. Other friends lasted longer, some more than twenty years. But I think everyone I knew who converted from a form of Christianity to atheism has since converted back to the sort of Christianity they'd grown up with. 

Because I was young and fervent, maybe, I could seemingly help people convert themselves. But I think, in almost everyone, conversions are unlikely to last. There's no good way to measure it historically, but I suspect that thousands of years ago, maybe two to five percent of people were non-believers in their local religion. It's a rational thing to be. But more than being rational, it's an underlying judgement of people, a basic sense of experience. You have to determine whether or not other people might be fooling themselves. No one wants to die. Therefore, people might fool themselves about it. And nowadays, it's probably the same two to five percent making essentially the same judgement.

I'm sure the self-reporting has changed. In the middle ages, you might not want to come out and say everyone else is wrong. In the early days of Rome, you might not want to risk your life by saying Zeus is a figment of everyone's imagination. You might keep your opinion to yourself. But I suspect that, throughout the ages and throughout the religions, the proportions of doubters is roughly the same. 

Not Even Not Zen 445: Biomythography - Note 151, No One Converts, Pt. 2

Biomythography 151
No One Converts, Part II

Here, roughly, are the arguments for belief in God as written by Thomas Aquinas. I remember these not as the starting point of the conversation between Michael and I, nor the end, but as a mid-point of sorts. We spent considerable time walking and talking about these concepts, the way you do when you're trying to solve the universe and you're nineteen years old.

**Argument from the First Mover** — posits that there must be an initial source of motion that itself was not moved.

This is a misunderstanding of physics (just think of virtual particles, which appear wherever they want and do whatever they want until they bump into something) and it fails on the initial look, even without physics. If there's a first movement, great. There's no need for a god involved, just a first movement. I mean, what makes God move? Is he finally getting up to change the channel?

Beyond that, it's a lack of calculus. Aquinas objects to infinity because it's infinite and, to him, it can't add up to anything, which is absurd. Well, the objection is absurd itself — not everything needs to add up — and anyway calculus shows us that many infinities do reach a knowable total. On all fronts, this is the worst of arguments, and I've heard plenty of other bad arguments (including one where two people agreed at increasing volume until one stormed out of the room).

**Argument from Universal Causation** — everything that exists has a cause, leading to a first cause, which is God.

Ugh, this is the same as the first argument wearing a mustache and hoping we won't notice. Michael pretty much had to acknowledge the duplication. Also, even as a six-year-old, I could ask, "Well, what caused God?" — which is the kind of question six-year-olds are by nature required to ask, right after "why." 

**Argument from Contingency** — because things exist that could "not exist," there must be a necessary being that causes existence.

Yeah, you could "not exist" instead of existing. Buddhists would say, in fact, your existence is an illusion. You don't actually exist. Conan the Barbarian had an answer to that, which was basically, "fine." Aquinas was definitely not comfortable with such an answer.

Aquinas would have hated the Multiverse Theory in physics. Non-existence, ephemeral existence, and multiple potential existences are all accepted explanations, nowadays.

**Argument from Degree** — varying degrees of qualities (like goodness) imply the existence of a perfect being as their source.

This is stolen from Plato's ideal forms, which isn't an argument against the concept, but the idea itself isn't an argument for anything. That there are degrees of qualities we perceive ("Whoa, this chair is even more green than the couch!") is part of our sensory perception, plus our ability to assign qualities and idealize them.

It's a good argument for humans being interesting. It's not an argument for holiness, except maybe for the delicacy of our perceptions being awe-inspiring.

**Teleological Argument** (the watchmaker argument) — order and purpose in the world indicate a designer.

I find this one the most compelling. As humans, we make things. It's very nearly our defining characteristic, second only to complaining about the things someone else made. It's natural for us to look at a hammer and think about its creator. We tend to imagine creators whether there are any or not — is this stone a tool? Did someone shape it? For sure, it's comforting to think about creations and the purpose of them, and to imagine ourselves, and humanity as a whole, as having a purpose rather than just being a ambitious species of ape that discovered fire and never really calmed down.

Being created for a purpose is a pleasing idea. It doesn't look like it's true, but it's attractive to me because I think our senses of purpose and shared imagination are what enabled us to built civilizations.

Not Even Not Zen 444: Biomythography - Note 150, No One Converts, Pt. 1

Biomythography 150

No One Converts, Part I

They say there’s no point in trying to convince anyone about religion. No one ever converts. Except they do, sometimes.

When I was in college and believed deeply and fervently in my version of atheism, I was always happy to talk. I could go on and on about it. I thought I could convince anyone, really, if they were interested in the truth. Atheism isn't comforting at first but it is a truth and it's a gateway to more important truths. So I was always interested in finding like-minded life explorers.

It's important to have friends with views opposed to yours. Nevertheless, it establishes a bond of friendship to go on a mental journey together, to search for the truth, as much as friendships happen during a physical journey. Literature is full of stories about heading abroad to accomplish a common mission. It's the plot of the Dirty Dozen, O Brother Where Art Thou, Lord of the Rings, and many others. The theme of going on a mission to resolve a coherent philosophy isn't as popular. But, for friendship, it's still as good.

Here's the thing: if you're raised in a Jesuit school, like my friend Michael, and you take philosophical debate seriously, you're a good candidate for the mental journey. And if you're raised by a philosophy major father and you read a lot of his library out of boredom, it's much the same; you’re a good candidate. Together, Michael and I tended to drift from talking about food at the dining table to talking about philosophy.

We were the philosophy geeks at our college, often to the surprise and annoyance of others at our table. Finally, Michael proposed that we set aside time for better discussion

“You like rationality,” he said. “Well, I can describe a rational proof of God.”

I had heard them all, I thought. I had not only been raised on Aristotle, Plato, the pre-Socratics, Dogun, D.T. Suzuki, Paul Reps, and Alan Watts but I had decided on my own to invest in books like Critiques of God. Still, I had to admit there might be arguments or demonstrations of divinity I had missed.

Instead of dominating dinner conversations because we couldn’t shut up about our beliefs, we waited. After dinner, we walked the halls of our dorm and talked about the logic of a philosopher in the Catholic church, Thomas Aquinas. After a couple evenings like that, Michael grew impatient with the people around us. He didn't like the constraints of the dorms. Traveling from wing to wing meant passing through the bathrooms.

The next week, after dinner or late classes, we hiked on the sidewalks between the campus dorms. Our conversations grew longer and more detailed. We roamed farther. We marched from the sidewalks to the dirt paths and outlying roads, talking. We strolled in the purple dusk of sunset. We debated under cloudy skies and next, under a clear, cold starlight. Within two weeks, our debates lasted so long we had to do laps around the campus.

We were true believers. And in a religious sense, our talks were exciting. I didn’t always have immediate answers for Michael's questions. Sometimes I had to think for so long I would put off an answer until our next walk. Michael did, too, because I posed questions of my own and gave answers he didn't seem to expect. For my part, at least, I was inexperienced in such a deep level of debate. And surprised to have the friendship of such an earnest seeker for the truth.

After the first few days I started to recognize every twist and turn in the arguments of Thomas Aquinas. I knew Michael had found them convincing. They were ancient reasonings, though, and had been thoroughly refuted in the ages since. I had, years before, educated myself on some of the logical refutations and added my own notes.

Michael found Pascal's wager someone compelling, too - or at least enough to try it on me. But it wasn't a wager I would make myself. There's no particular logic against it other than my judgement that it's a pointless guess and morally suspect. We both agreed, actually, that God probably wouldn't be too flattered by someone believing in Him for an "eh, why not" sort of reason.

Interestingly, it was my own thoughts that seemed the most compelling to Michael, just as his personal views on a very personal God were the most moving for me. Our logic wasn't pointless - it was the way we both worked as we tried to make sense of our lives - but every logical system has to ground itself on judgements and observations about the world. Some of our observations weren't the same.

“I can feel God,” he said one night as we turned a corner in the road near the Enfield Mods. He stretched out is arm, almost pleading. “Can’t you?”

“I do feel something,” I admitted. For me, it was a sense of calling beyond humanity and even beyond life itself. It was a nebulous sensation but it was there, a duty to humankind, a sense of holiness around me.

In fact, the sensation of holiness was a driver in my search for the truth. In some ways, I was looking for an explanation for why I felt it.

(to be continued)

Not Even Not Zen 443: Biomythography - Note 149, People or Politics

People or Politics

We were socializing over the sort of game that doesn’t take much attention. We had time to discuss politics.

This was in college. Half of us were guests in a group living arrangement called the Prescott Mods that always looked to me like the sort of condos you would find around a ski lodge. The buildings had high-angled metal roofs. Inside them, the many-bedroom units were spacious and, despite the college furnishings and modular furniture, they felt comfy. Our discussions about politics tended to fill the common areas. Everyone walking through joined in for a little while. Our concepts remained idealistic, of course. I'd assumed we had all worked jobs for a few years, at least, but we were still young enough for us to imagine every political system functioning if people wanted it.

The ‘if people wanted it’ problem was larger than anyone knew. It is, essentially, the most serious problem in economics. Most of the fiscal judgments that appear to be about math are really about incentives and other estimations of human nature. But our judgments of other people were about what one might expect from college students.

“Communism does work,” a young man said from the sidelines. He hadn't joined the board game. He was a roommate on his way to the kitchen. His political contribution came from his experiences in his previous year, which he had spent in communal living. “Just because the Soviets are corrupt doesn’t mean the Czechs are corrupt. Or the Chinese. They're making things work.”

Across from me, my friend Al made a skeptical sound. He thought America was full of crooks. And we all, everyone around the table and elsewhere around the room, thought the Soviets were corrupt. The Chinese government seemed idealistic but also full of power-mad people at the top who were happy to murder one another and sometimes kill swathes of their own countrymen.

“It sort of works,” a couple of us allowed. I snuck a peek at my game cards.

“But it assumes people are honest,” Al commented. "That's the flaw."

At some point during our game, we ended up in a half-hour argument about capitalism, specifically the part where it eventually curdles into monopolies, like milk left out on the counter of Free Enterprise. Then we tried to tackle socialism, except nobody at the table could actually agree on what socialism was, which did not stop half the young men from having extremely strong opinions about it. This is, I believe, a requirement for being a college student: you must be prepared to argue passionately about things you cannot coherently define.

Eventually it dawned on me that the real design flaw in every political system ever invented is the people running it. Specifically, their tendency to get corrupted, which is basically a law of human nature on par with a law of physics.

This, I decided, is probably why the United States has muddled through as well as it has. It showed up to the philosophy party before capitalism, socialism, and communism brought in the serious drugs and ruined the nation-building vibe. Humanity had already spent several thousand years watching leaders get corrupted, so the founders had time to think about that part of things. And that's maybe the most important part. The political theories that came after our founding seem to operate on the assumption that people are rational and well-intentioned, which is an assumption I would not make about my best friends, let alone a large government.

Even today, actual functioning countries are basically political system smoothies - a blend of everything, yes, but with one of the main ingredients still being 'try to stop people from being terrible.'

As I sat with my friends, I had a sudden vision, as I often had back then, of moving parts, of organizations in action, and of the people in and around them. I realized I could make any political system work. It didn't matter if I had to implement communism, capitalism, socialism, anarchy (so popular then among teenagers), theocracy, or pretty much any other thing. The system didn't matter.

It was always about the people. Which, frankly, explains a lot.

If I had the right people, I could form a business. I could form a tribal government; run a farm; do anything constructive I wanted to do. What's more, the right people were always the same people. They're the people who will make any system function because they're hard workers who are willing to be responsible for themselves and others.

And I knew who they were. I built a list in my head with Al's girlfriend, Donna, at the top. The list totalled four or five people at most. That, I found discouraging. I could add a few others who weren't the right people, exactly, but who wouldn't go against the team effort. They could work under the influence of the great souls. The list grew to eight or nine people.

But for the ones who mattered most, there were at best five people out of the (roughly) thousand I knew.

In contrast, I was aware there are people who excuse themselves from responsibility under any system. They cause any politics to fail and die in corruption. I thought those were rare, maybe one or two out of a hundred. But that estimate made the great souls even more rare than the selfish ones. I tried not to think about those proportions.

I focused on the list and what it meant. It's the people, not the politics, that make efforts succeed or fail. Good people - not just well-intentioned ones, but folks actively working and doing good deeds - were at the root of every success I'd heard about. With good souls, I knew I could build any organization.

About a minute later, I realized it would probably all fall apart in the next generation. Any system that depended on good people driving it would fall apart on the next regression to the mean, on the tendency of children not to be quite like their parents.

The progeny of saints are not saints themselves.

So while it was obvious that a society built on good people is a good idea — right up there with "exercise more" and "stop eating the entire sleeve of Oreos" — I circled back to a slightly less comfortable realization: a well-run society can't just hope everyone behaves. It has to actively lean on people. It needs to reward the good citizens, ideally with something better than a certificate of appreciation. It needs to punish the bad ones. It probably needs public shaming. And corporal punishment, maybe, for people who can't be shamed but the society doesn't want to outright kill.

Basically, a society has to do all the awkward, unglamorous things that every successful nation has always done. Corruption, of course, never fully goes away — it's less a problem you solve and more a raccoon you continually manage — but in the early days of any effort, before the checks and balances are in place, success really comes down to the people involved. The quality of the people determines the quality of the victory.

It's a concept that could be deeply inspiring or deeply terrifying, depending on who you're standing next to at the time. For me back then, it was inspiring.
 

Not Even Not Zen 442: Biomythography - Note 148, Equations of the Sun

Equations of the Sun

It was a homework assignment. My professor was the curly-haired Herbert Bernstein. He liked to stride across the front of the classroom with chalk in his hand, and sometimes with both hands behind his back. As he thought about the assignment, his face broke out in a wide smile.

He turned and finished his set of equations on the chalkboard. Although we were only a couple weeks into his quantum mechanics course, I was finding his enthusiasm to be infectious. This was my favorite class.

"These are what we see, roughly, coming out of our nearest star, the sun," he told us. His eyes swept the room. He swiveled and tapped the slate next to what he'd written. "According to our best measurements, here it is. These are the results of whatever is going on in there."

"Nothing more?" someone asked, the young, blonde man who had dropped out of Princeton and returned to college here.

"Nothing of significance," Herb put his hands behind his back. He shrugged. "This is pretty much it. So your homework is to explore. Tell me, with equations, what you think is going on inside the sun to produce these results on the surface."

Dutifully, I copied the results. As I did, I started thinking backwards. What was the previous reaction step? Or really, what were the set of previous reactions that would produce this? Some of them could be simple. Maybe most of the results came from hydrogen and helium. The odds and ends in the equations could come from the traces of other light elements reacting in the plasma.

Next to me, one of my classmates, a young woman who spoke up with keen questions, pulled back her kinky blonde hair and jotted the assignment down on her page more quickly than I did. When she finished, she slapped her pencil down. She noticed me staring at her and flashed me a smile. I put my head down for a few seconds, embarrassed, and checked my equations.

It was my first semester at Hampshire College.

I'd made a few acquaintances but no close friends yet. And since I had a routine of working late into the night and getting up early to exercise, I could make lots of time for homework, especially writing. I was working on a novel, bit by bit. I was composing notes for my Division I linguistics paper. Naturally, I spent an hour on the equations for the interior chemical reactions of the sun. In fact, I spent another block of time on the problem on Saturday morning.

On Sunday, the young woman from my quantum mechanics class found me as we were passing through the halls. It was an odd chance, very welcome, but I had thought she didn't live near me. In our conversation, I found I was mostly right. She revealed her room was two floors up and two sections north of me, although conveniently we were both in the Dakin building.

“Did you make any progress on the homework?” she asked. The light in the hall was dim. It made her golden hair seem browner, but her blue eyes shone.

“Yeah.” I thought about where I had given up. I had not been able to make my forward-looking solution and backward-looking solution join together. “But it doesn’t quite balance.”

“Let’s meet up and go over it.” She gave me a determined look, based on the slight crease in her brow, but with a hopeful, uncertain grin beneath. It seemed like a challenge.

I had been thinking of her as the bright girl. She was smart and fairly quick-witted. She spoke in a feminine but slightly rough voice. For the first time, in the hall with her, I really looked at her upturned nose and her freckles and thought about how cute she was. She would later tell me she hated the bump in her nose although, if she had one, it was essentially invisible. As far as her freckles, she would tell me she hated them. She never told me she hated being smart. That, I think she felt good about.

In the afternoon, we sat down together and got out our notebooks. On hers, she had written a few lines. She appeared to have lost interest early. Maybe she figured out quicker than I did that we didn't have much of a sense of direction, in our group, about the chemical reactions in plasma even though we had spent most of a class on them.

So far, I had filled three pages with equations and maybe a sixth of another. I had given up, too, when I had gotten enough sense of the bigger problem. I had started to develop opinions about how the output from the sun should theoretically appear. I was able to contrast it with how the results actually appeared and see a significant gap. I suspected something was wrong with our starting point. Everyone was sure about the starting point, apparently, because we knew the proportions of elements in our sun, but I was starting to guess our picture had to be wrong somehow - or at least incomplete.

"Explain this," said the young woman. She put a finger down on the second step in my equations.

Line by line, we stepped through my work in the first two pages. She listened to my thinking. Twice, she jotted down notes in her own notebook. She checked my math. When she reached the middle, she tapped her chin. She sat, lost in her thoughts for a moment.

With awkward smiles and confusing body language, we said goodbye before dinner. On Monday, we met again in our quantum mechanics class. There, I discovered how little I had written compared to another student, the blonde young man who had dropped out from Princeton. He had returned to academics here at Hampshire College. He had filled page after page, nearly twenty pages, before he gave up getting the reactions to balance between the starting elements and the finished products. He seemed consumed by the project. However, he was kind enough to read my work a little and see I had tried a different direction, which seemed to frustrate him, please him, and make him want to resume. He really wanted Professor Bernstein to reveal the answer.

"There is no answer yet," Herb Bernstein told us. "No one has solved this."

That made everyone a little happier with how far we had gotten. This wasn't a trivial problem.

"The important part," Herb continued, "Is the thinking about it. The question of particle reactions in our sun is an interesting one. I think we can all see the math doesn't work out. Either it's tremendously complicated, more than humans can do, or there's something we don't know. And I think there's something we don't know."

Our classmate from Princeton seemed frustrated but he obviously felt happier, too, and more relaxed. I think he was discovering that he hated required courses and the pressure of exams but he actually liked learning. He loved the process.

I think I was coming to the same sort of understanding. When all the external forces and distractions were removed, as they mostly had been at Hampshire, I loved to learn. I wanted to figure out solutions to problems. And I wanted to make things.