Life. The Universe. Pie.

If we believe our goals are just, we have a duty to achieve them. But it seems that good people handicap themselves by their own morality. Immoral people can do whatever is most effective, but aren’t moral people constantly constrained in what they can do, and doesn’t this make them less effective? (Tenth in a series that starts here , and how did this get so out of hand anyway?) Since the start of Obama’s presidency, for example, the Left has been in a conversation about whether we’re more committed to winning—getting legislation through Congress—or to maintaining the norms and procedures that have kept the country going until now—such as the filibuster in the Senate. We, at this point in time anyway, like to see ourselves as defending democratic traditions against those philistines on the other side. Isn’t there merit to this position? No, says Sri Krishna. I read the Mahabharata not long ago, and this not only comes up, it turns out to be one of the well-known puzzles of the...

There’s a lot of angst on the left about whether the performance of strength is counterproductive, inviting a backlash, leading to a spiral of escalating violence, and alienating people who might have been allies. Maybe. But I think the concern can be overblown, and I think there’s a real argument to be made on the other side. (Ninth in a series that starts here ) It puzzles me and my friends on the Left why so many people buy into Trump’s bluster and bombast, but it shouldn’t. He may be a weak man, but he performs strength. For many people that’s enough. And it’s not just Trump or the Right—someone recently challenged Joe Biden in an open meeting about his age and Hunter Biden’s problems, and a video surfaced of Joe yelling at the guy and challenging him to a push-up contest. All my allies on the Left cringed over it but Joe lost nothing in the polls and I’m willing to bet there’s a large (male) swathe of the country that loved every minute of it. Joe was defending himself and ...

The performance of a virtue—victory or strength or what have you—feels wrong to me and I think to many on the Left. I think many on the Left distrust strength and displays of strength, perhaps because it seems to run counter to values of pacifism, perhaps because it’s generally those with institutional power who perform strength against those with less privilege. And they distrust the display of strength because it feels like bluster. But I’m a martial artist too, which means that one of my tribes makes a distinction between peace and pacifism and sees strength and the ability to use it as a path to peace. I think there’s a truth there that is worth studying. (Eighth in a series that starts here ) When the Allies won in WW II they weren’t just victorious, they performed victory. They occupied the land, took over and restructured the governments, put key leaders on trial. In the case of the Japanese Emperor renouncing his divinity, they told the population how to think. They impo...

Leaving a tribe that has lost its way, abandoning the group entirely, is always an option. But it’s an isolated response in that it rescues the person but not the tribe. Is there any way to recover a tribe that has drifted towards evil? I think sifting through historical examples actually offers some hope. (Seventh in a series that starts here ) Case in point, Nazi Germany. We didn’t just end the war, we conquered the Nazis. We occupied the country and dissolved the government and put the leaders on trial. We left no doubt that the country was defeated and their leaders had failed. We set up new systems—and then we turned them back over to the Germans. And the Germans did the hard work of facing their failings, recognizing their faults, and building up a new society that would not repeat the errors of the old. Same thing in Imperial Japan. They didn’t do as well as the Germans in facing up to the problems of the old order, but after a total defeat and occupation that included t...

So to sum up: It seems that people make their choices and in those choices are blind to the consequences, since no one can see the future. But the consequences are latent in the choice. A person’s own character makes one choice congenial over another, one tribe congenial over another. Because the choice to be is intertwined with the choice of tribe. Perry Smith chose to be a murderer and sought a tribe to join that would reflect and further his choice—and ended up with Richard Hickock. Robert Mueller chose to be an upright lawman and joined a tribe that would help him do so. We are social beings and work out our destiny in concert with others.

I’d like to look a little more closely at my last example: if your tribe is leading you into conflict with a person of integrity, should this not be a signal that you have gone off the rails? If we are known by the company we keep, we hold each other’s values and integrity in trust. I depend on my community to notice when I stray and pull me back, and vice versa. Despite all our individual failings, and recognizing that any of us can stumble, still we are moral touchstones for each other.

I choose my tribe because it is congenial to me. I  like  being a nerd; I  like  finding out the intricate details of this or that body of knowledge. I like martial arts. I like, overall, the Left.   (Fourth in a series that starts  >here< .) But the match isn’t perfect. I mentioned before that when the Left starts censoring its songs to be less ableist, so we can no longer “stand up” and fight, they’ve lost me. But they haven’t lost  me —I laugh, and I’m a bit annoyed, and I put up with it. Because in the end it’s a minor point and I agree with the major goal of inclusivity. It’s an example of tribes tending to be self-reinforcing and getting more extreme. I think this is a bit too extreme, but extreme in the service of a worthwhile goal. And I expect that once they’ve played with it a while the community will come to the same conclusion and back off a bit. So an important aspect of the tribe is the values around which it coheres. Values...

So much of our woldview is determined by the tribe of which we are a part. Disagreeing with your tribe is difficult and painful. So if on the Left they decide that we can’t sing about “standing up” against injustice because it’s ableist—not everyone  can  literally stand up—and I think that’s stupid, it creates a disconnect. Same with my martial arts friends on the Right—I like you, I like working with you, but your ideas are bonkers. It’s hard to feel community in those circumstances. (Third in a series that starts  here .) But if the tribe I choose influences my worldview, it’s still the tribe I  chose . So a critical element of all this is, how did I choose? Why is the society of nerds congenial but the society of sports fans or frat boys less so? What are the attractive elements of the tribe and what are the dealbreakers that will prevent my joining? Take the Right. There’s a lot in the espoused values of the Right which I find attractive. Personal respons...

One of the ways we choose between good and evil is by choosing our tribe—the people who are like us, and we want to be like, and who influence us and our way of thinking. (Second in a series that starts > here <) Turning to evil as an Individual is one thing, but most of us aren’t as individual as all that. Most of us join a tribe somewhere along the way. If I’m a technical nerd, I join the other nerds. We talk jargon to each other. We drill deep into odd issues that no one else cares about. We tell obscure jokes to each other and laugh out of proportion to the joke. The same politically. If I’m on the Left, I have a set of attitudes which attracted me to the Left in the first place. But then it’s a self-reinforcing cycle. I make a community with others on the Left. We tell jokes and communicate opinions to each other. If my opinion reinforces our mutual world view, others praise me. I like that—it shows me that I must have been right, and it feels good to have my communit...

I’m not much interested in the problem of evil as generally understood: why a good God allows evil to exist. It’s clear to me that evil comes from people, not from God. What interests me is how people choose to become evil. Because it seems clear that evil is a choice, nearly always. People don’t become evil without a deliberate decision and without working at it. My pattern from understanding this is the murderers in  In Cold Blood . Richard Hickock seems to have been a straight-up psychopath, at least in Capote’s telling; but Perry Smith was not. He’s the guy who got the sympathy of the jail warden and for whom the jailer’s wife made pies. There’s a bit where Hickock and Smith are getting to know each other and Smith brags about killing a guy. It seems likely that he made this up—that Smith was making himself out to be more badass than he was. And there’s the thing. He’s working at being evil. He’s setting himself up as more evil than he is—and then he has to work to live...