The Dilettante's Dilemma

Why is that? What, exactly, have I done to “deserve” a break today?

The thing I like best about etymology is not that it tells us what a word “really means.” [1] It is that it tells us how it got to where it is now—what it means to us—from where it was. In our modern use of “seduce,” for instance, we mean no more than “persuade,” where the “persuasion” has been to some view we disapprove of. But the -duce of “seduce” means to lead and the prefix se- means “aside” or “astray.” And the clear implication of “astray” is that there is a right way to go and the person in question is being led away from that right way. In “persuade,” we lose that picture entirely.

That’s why I like etymology.

That brings me to the modern meaning of “deserve.”[2] It is a wonderful thing to be able to argue that a hamburger (as in the McDonald’s use of the slogan we started with), something you will have to buy, is something you “deserve.” To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet argued that I ought to get mine free on the grounds that it is something I deserve. The question we are moving toward (just what is it you have done to deserve it?) gets a shortcut in this case because “having money” is what you have done. In simple commercial uses like this one, “deserve” and “afford” are nearly the same thing.

Would you be surprised to learn that at the beginning of its career as a word, the prefix de- meant only “fully, completely” and the root “-serve” meant what you think it means? The meaning of the prefix means something more specific in the context of service; it means “to serve well, zealously.” And a reward is coming to you because of your zealous and complete service. And this will be a reward that you (watch how this works) “de-serve.” Clearly de- does not mean un- in this context. The baron was granted all these lands by the king for his faithful service in the battle. That kind of de-serve.

Let’s play with this a little. I was told early in the days of my interest in etymology that “tip” as in “tipping the waiter” was built on the acronym T.I.P.—“to insure promptness.” [3] They don’t think anymore that that is the source of the word, but it does have the advantage of retaining the “reward for service” link. Think “You deserve a tip today.”

But a “break” is not a “tip.” What could one do to “deserve a break?” I would have much less difficulty with “would profit from a break.” Everyone has seen people doing hard physical labor (I am writing this during the NFL post-season) and doing a much better job after a rest. People who have to think hard similarly benefit or people who have to make difficult decisions. I saw a study in which judges handed out more lenient sentences after a lunch break, suggesting that those who are charged “get a break” whether they deserve it or not.

There is no denying the beneficial effects of a rest at the right time, but there is also no way to associate that break with the desert (deserving-ness) of the recipient. And if there were, it wouldn’t sell hamburgers or hair coloring kits, as the “I’m worth it” campaign imagines.

No, I think the best way to understand it is that people seem to like the broad implication that they are worthwhile persons and/or have done something meritorious. And if I am a really valuable person, then I deserve a break today and if I can afford it, bring that hamburger on. With fries. And a large drink.

[1] It is only an irony to be enjoyed that the word “etymology” means “true meaning.”
[2] And points out the loss of “desert” to mean “what one deserves.” It forces us to some patched-together form like “deservingness,” which really ought not to be necessary, but which really is. Trust me.
[3] The idea that “tip” meant “to insure promptness” is no older than 1909 and a reviewer said about the book in which it appeared “We deprecate the careless repetition of popular etymologies such as the notion that ‘tip’ originated from an abbreviated inscription on a box placed on the sideboard in old coaching-inns, the full meaning of which was ‘To Insure Promptitude.”

I have not heard anything good about “black and white thinking” for a long time. In fact, I haven’t heard anything good about discrimination of any kind for a long time.

The discrimination problem is easier to understand. It is what I call an “aphetic expression.” It is what is left of a longer expression, the rest of which has just disappeared. Back when, there was an expression “invidious discrimination” where invidious meant “envy producing.” You can see why that kind of discrimination would get a bad name. But after a while, when “discrimination” itself came to have a bad smell, “invidious” really didn’t add anything and we dropped it. “Discrimination” simply presumed that it was “invidious.” [1]

“Black and white” as a criticism as in “we seem to be mired in black and white thinking,” presupposed that “the truth” is somewhere in the middle or that “the truth” cannot be usefully separated from error. It’s a “mystery” or a “paradox” or something. In that way, “black and white” as a criticism specifies the shape of the truth that is there to be found. It is indistinguishable from or it is intermediate between the two poles.

But it would be surprising if the only important differences here were to be found in the nature of the data. And, in fact, they are found also in the nature of the data collectors. Two common names for kinds of data collectors are “lumpers” and “splitters.”

Lumpers can be said to assign examples to broad categories, judging that the differences between the entities are not as important as the similarities. That is not what lumpers look like to splitters, of course. To splitters, lumpers treat as the same, instances that lose their meaning without differentiation. Splitters always think there are crucial differences between the instances that are being lumped together.

Splitters use narrower and more tightly defined categories. That is why they need so many more categories. And to a lumper, most of those categories are needless because the most prominent characteristics are very nearly the same.

Take for instance, the question of self-esteem. If you are embedded in a conversation about people who think they are considerably better than they are [2] then it is easy to say that people would be better off if they had less self-esteem. It might be said that they had a notable lack of “humility.”
If a splitter were to point out that “show a little humility” is terrible advice for someone who has too little self esteem to start with, a lumper would say he was talking about “people in general” and that it is true about “people in general.”

I was once part of discussion that carried across several years. It was about a bumper sticker that said “Wag more. Bark less.” My position on this advice was that is was really good for people who barked too much, but it was truly terrible advice for people who already didn’t bark as much as they should. I was accused of being a splitter, but I didn’t take it as much of a criticism.

I recently read a series of articles about personal traits in the New York Times. Maggie Jackson wrote glowingly about uncertainty. She cited tests that measured “uncertainty intolerance.” So far as this one column is concerned, the more uncertainty, we can tolerate, the better. Uncertainty brings us some valuable rewards, such as making new scientific discoveries.

But it isn’t just that. Jackson cites Michael Dugas. a professor of psychology as saying “Life is inherently uncertain, and if you have difficulty dealing with that, you will have difficulty dealing with life,” Apparently, the more uncertainty you have, the better off you will be. That is not the “teaching” of the column. It is the presupposition.

Now I, as a splitter, would wonder immediately if having too little uncertainty would be a problem and I would wonder that for the same reason I wondered whether wagging more was always a good idea.

Christina Caron, on the other hand, wrote a column about anxiety. “The emotion of anxiety and the underlying physiological stress response evolved to protect us,” Wendy Suzuki, a neuroscientist and the author of “Good Anxiety,” said. In her book, Dr. Suzuki explains that managing stress may be more useful than banishing it.

That way of approaching the topics made instant sense to me. The idea that there is an optimal level of anxiety seems right. If there is too little, you will not be alert to some categories of important things. If there is too much, you will find it toxic and difficult. You situations will fluctuate from one time to another so the “right level” of anxiety will fluctuate. Saying that “anxiety” is good or bad seems as odd to me as saying that “uncertainty” is good or bad.

Black and white

There is a tendency, it seems to me, to criticize splitters who value clarity—and who find that clarity in many discrete categories—as “black and white thinkers.” The pejorative hit of “black and white” comes from the inclusion of some data and the exclusion of other data into the set of categories that are organized to make important distinctions. If the distinctions are not important, all the care needed to manage them properly is care wasted. It is simply inefficient. But noting the existence of all those categories is not the same as showing that there are too many of them. Let’s see, first, if they pay for themselves by the clarity they provide for both parties in the discussion.

[1] Similarly, “reached” is all that is left of the baseball announcer’s expression, “reached first base.” Since “reached” always meant the same thing, they just dropped the rest of the expression, so we hear now that the leadoff hitter “reached” in the first and fourth innings.
[2] Most drivers, I have heard, say they are “above average” drivers. What does it mean when 80% of the drivers are better than “most drivers?”

This is about the achievement of two women, Ayo and Mead. They live in the village of Woodedge on one of the islands with which Ursula LeGuin has populated her world, EarthSea. Let me describe the achievement first, then I will describe the circumstances.

“They listened to him, not agreeing, not denying, but accepting his despair. His words went into their listening silence, and rested there for days, and came back to him changed.”

This is the kind of graphic description at which LeGuin excels. In this vision, the silence that is maintained by the women has an effect on the words. The words “rest” in this silence and by doing so are changed and when they return to the speaker, they mean something more than they did when he spoke them.

The speaker is a man who, in this part of the story [1] is called Otter. A woman he met under brutal conditions has saved his life and he had been unable to save hers in return. The woman’s use name was Flag. Ayo was her mother and Mead her aunt.

“Whatever I am,” said Otter, “whatever I can do, it’s not enough.” He has the terrible power of the wizards and the corrupt venality of the kings of EarthSea in mind. “Gelluk’s gone,” he says in reference to the wizard he has just killed, “and maybe Losen [one of the corrupt kings] will follow. Will it make any difference?

Mead hears “It’s not enough” and responds, “It’s never enough, and what can anyone do alone.” She has a point and she knows what she is talking about because she is one of the Women of the Hand, a very quiet and tightly woven resistance movement. But Otter can’t hear her. His experience has been so raw and so recent. He is still learning to see how bad things are. He follows his first question, will it make a difference, with three additional questions. Will the slaves go free? Will beggars eat? Will justice be done?

It is those words and many more like them that go into the listening silence the women create and maintain. They do not express agreement with what he is saying although they do agree. They do not deny his argument although they find it inadequate. Instead, they accept his despair. That is what makes up the listening silence and, I would add, the healing silence as well.

And when the words come back to Otter, they carry with them the sense of Mead’s question, “What can anyone do alone?” And Otter has a wonderful idea. “We can’t do anything without each other,” he said, “But it’s the greedy ones and the cruel ones who hold together and strengthen each other. And those who won’t join them stand each alone,”
.
I really want another round of the conversation. I always want too much. LeGuin knows not to give us the next round. In this other round, Otter would ask how it is possible for “those who won’t join them” to be together and to act together. And Ayo would have given Otter the sign used by the Women of the Hand and he would know that the answer to his question is trust. It was the radical trust Flag offered to him and that he offered to her when they were both slaves that freed them. It is what saved Otter’s life from the wizard and nearly saved Flag’s life. [2]

I was struck by the way the generous healing silence these women offer as a place for the anguished words Otter has. It cannot be easy to accept such despair, not agreeing and not denying, but it is that healing quiet that allowed the words to return to Otter rich with meaning—his own meaning—and ready to go to work.

[1] The story is called “The Finder.” It is the first, and to my mind, the best of the stories in LeGuin’s Tales of EarthSea.
[2] Here is how LeGuin describes the sign. “She held up her first finger; raised the other fingers and clenched them into a fist; then slowly turned her wrist and opened her hand palm out, as if in offering,”

For many years, we read Auden’s “For the Time Being” at or near the date of Epiphany. Then that practice fell, as did many others, into the COVID 19 hole. This year, Bette and I climbed out of that hole and invited a bunch of friends to join us in reading it again.

I have read this poem many times, but there is always something that captures my attention in a different way. This year, it was Mary’s response to Gabriel.

Gabriel casts the event of which Mary is to be a part in the broadest possible way. Mary is to be the new Eve. [1]

Here is what Gabriel says:

When Eve, in love with her own will,
Denied the will of Love and fell,
She turned the flesh Love knew so well
To knowledge of her love until
Both love and knowledge were of sin:
What her negation wounded, may
Your affirmation heal today;

“Eve, in love with her own will… turned the flesh Love knew so well…until both love and knowledge were of sin.” This is fundamental. Eve denied the will of God [Love] the effect of which was the both how we know and how we love are saturated with sin. That is Gabriel’s view of Eve.

This is Gabriel’s view of Mary. What her negation wounded, may your affirmation—just say Yes—heal today.

And Eve says Yes is some of the most glorious language I know. I am going to give you the whole response, then I will try to say what I saw in it this year.

My flesh in terror and fire
Rejoices that the Word
Who utters the world out of nothing,
As a pledge of His word to love her
Against her will, and to turn
Her desperate longing to love,
Should ask to wear me,
From now to their wedding day,
For an engagement ring.

If that language is new to you, you might want to just sit with it a little.

Here is what I saw this year. I am going to change “Word” to “God,” John’s text in the Prologue notwithstanding. God has pledged to love the world—that is us, all humankind. Moving directly to God’s pledge skips over creation, but some skipping is going to be necessary to see what the bones of this response look like.

What is the pledge? It is to love us (line 3) and to turn that inarticulate longing we have (line 5) into real love of God in return.

The God who is doing this understands that there must be a symbol of this great Intention and God has chosen Mary as the symbol. The great consummation of the love we have for God (now felt only as a longing for something) is still in the future, but the engagement ring is right now. It is what Incarnation is all about. [2]

And God asks to wear Mary as “an engagement ring,” as the symbol of the consummation to come, when love will be known and mutual and restored to its original wholeness.

That is hard for me to grasp as an onlooker. I am reading a poem full of religious imagery. But Mary, in this poem, is talking about herself. The Word asks to wear ME–that is what the picture captures–as the symbol of their wedding, the great consummation to come. And I say Yes. I say “My soul in terror and in fire rejoices.”

Every year there is something. This was this year’s take. I have begun looking forward to Epiphany in 2025.

[1] Paul casts Jesus as the new Adam, but Auden takes a few new steps in casting Mary as a new Eve.

[2] There is no reason why Mary ought to be pictured as beautiful, let alone as light skinned and European-looking, but I think the look really captures what Gabriel was after.

I’ve been reading a good deal about “self-care” recently. I have read so much, in fact, that I am beginning to think about it. If you wanted to glance over a series of images about self care and you put the phrase “self care” in the search bar, you would eventually get to a picture of a man. You would be more than ninety images into the search, but eventually, you would find one.

Does that tell us anything about “self care” and gender? I think it does. I think it tells us that men who take care of themselves call it something else. I’m not sure what they call it .[1] What if they called it “maintaining the optimal conditions for long-term health and productivity?” Not much of a bumper sticker, I grant you, but if those were the common terms men used in thinking about “burnout,” it would take a long time to find it in a literature oriented to self-care.

A common notion is that we begin each day with an attention budget. That isn’t a bad way to begin, but it leads to the idea that everything you pay attention to is a drain on the budget—a withdrawal. But that isn’t true. Some of the things we pay attention to restore our attention balance—they are deposits. Everybody knows this. Think for a minute about the sense it makes to urge people who are on the edge of burnout, to pay attention to themselves for a little while. If “paying” attention [2] costs you, why would it not cost you also to pay attention to the condition you are in? The idea in paying attention to whether you need a break is that if you decide that you do, you will do something about it.

Nothing against taking a break, but I’d like to take a look at the step before that. Is it really true that “paying attention” depletes your store of attention? I think that depends a great deal on how you think of what you are doing. Let’s say you are “watching the kids.” That phrasing was chosen, I am sure, by someone who does not find it rewarding. If he had found it rewarding, he would have called it something else. Are there rewarding and fulfilling ways to watch the kids? Of course. Some people, men and women, do a good deal of it and find it rewarding and full-filling. (That extra l- and the hyphen make the point a good deal clearer.)

If you are watching the kids in a way that leaves you drained, maybe you are thinking of it the wrong way. Think, for instance, about what you get out of spending time with the kids. And I don’t mean what you think you ought to get; I am thinking about what you actually do get out of it. I am thinking about doing things you like to do as one of the ways you watch the kids.

You wouldn’t have to think of it that way, of course. You could define that time as work in which you have responsibilities and obligations and when you have met them, you have accomplished the task. There is no positive value for you in “meeting your responsibilities and obligations.” There is the threat of negative value, of course. That is the point of “obligations.” There is a cost for failing to meet your obligations, but there is no reward for meeting them. It is a game you can lose, but not a game you can win. No wonder it feels costly.

And right away, you wonder, who chose this game? And after that, you wonder whether it is possible for you to watch the kids in a way that makes a positive difference to your attention budget. And if a big part of self care is not overspending your attention budget, then doing some particular task in a way that makes deposits to that budget rather than withdrawals, seem like a good idea.

And that would be the case even if there were another person involved who insists that the task be defined and pursued in ways that are personally costly. It is doesn’t cost you, according to this logic, then you are not really doing the job right. It seems to me that a great deal of parenting has been inadvertently redefined in this way. The demands have been raised. The parents receive these new demands as part of some generalized social obligation, rather than deciding what kind of parents they want to be. The cost of failure to parent “correctly” keeps going up and the old sources of interactive pleasure keep going down.

So we see a lot of really “good” parents whose parenting costs them more than they can afford and there are other things they could have spared some attention for. Even in the middle of things, they know that. The attention budget gets expended early and often and the sources of replenishment are limited to “not withdrawing so much” rather than to parenting in a more rewarding way.

Needless to say, the examples could be multiplied, but there is no way that “self care” is going to keep up with the rising demands for attention and the declining resources to add capacity and enjoyment. And it is not at all hard to imagine that people who are used to deploying their attention in this way will simply turn the need for self care into another demand.

It seems to me that if we organized our tasks so that they were rewarding—as well, of course, as effective, we would have taken a long step toward restoring our attention budget.

[1] I am not referring to men as “them” because I am not a man. I am using the word “them” to refer to men because I am coming at this question as someone who reads a good bit about attention and even more about what “selves” are and how they should function. If I actually did any research, I would call myself a researcher.
[2] There is such insight built into the notion that attention is costly, that we actually do “pay” and that it actually does

The whole notion of “living in an illusion” and then of being “disillusioned” is a commonplace. Even if from the outside, it can be seen as swapping one plausibility structure for another, from the inside, it doesn’t feel like that. It can feel like a roller coaster ride. And even worse, when you think of the health and viability of a plausibility structure as requiring constant and innovative commitment, it can feel that if it is really true, it shouldn’t take this much work. If it is really true, we think, why does it keep fading away?

“It just doesn’t work any more.”

In hundreds of dramas, someone accounts for the dissolution of a marriage, by saying it just doesn’t work anymore. Of course, that could be said of every car that works really well until it runs out of gas. Or even better, for an electric car, when the battery runs down. The solution for the electric car is particularly instructive. It needs to be recharged. For the marriage, it is not so clear. And for all the kinds of relationship, including religious commitments, for which marriage is the metaphor I am using in this essay, it is definitely not straightforward.

In the development of this argument, now three installments long, we began by discarding the idea of “growing out of an illusion.” In the first place, relying on the notion of “illusion” raises the question of accuracy; accuracy raises the question of plausibility structures; plausibility structures shift the argument to reasons to believe in something and people to believe in it with you. Besides, saying that you “don’t believe in that kind of thing” anymore is way too easy if what it requires at the moment is the discernment to see the problem and the courage to work on it.

Why do marriages get old? (You can tell by the breadth of the question that the answer is going to be rich in stereotypes.) It isn’t that as the relationship gets old, you stop doing what made it a success in the first place. The very challenging truth is that what made it a success in the first place isn’t going to keep it viable. Neither you nor your partner are the people they were “in the first place” and the relationship is not either.

Instead, what is needed is not “restoring the illusion of those early days,” but finding out what will make the relationship work in its current maturity as well as it did in the beginning. Or, to be candid, “the way you remember it worked in the beginning.” Looking back fondly is only another way to postpone the work that needs to be done right now.

If we want to keep using the language of illusion, the “illusion” is that there is a recipe for the health and success of a commitment and you used to know what it was.

I offer, in this essay, the solution. Oddly, my solution is “disillusionment.” There never was a recipe. That was an illusion. You did gladly and with energy the things the relationship required. Continuing to do those things—those same things— will not sustain the current relationship. There are new things that will, but you need to find them and begin to explore them. That is where the courage comes in.

Commitment

The great value of a commitment is that it is a solution to the short-term lapse in motivation. It is hard to do the demanding work of discernment in a relationship that is not very satisfying anymore. Harder still if you suspect that what true discernment will bring you is a set of demands that you do things differently. But if you are committed to the relationship—remember that marriage is serving here also as a model for religious commitment—then the question is not whether you find it satisfying. The question is what you need to do to make it satisfying.

Having said that, it is important to establish that it is not within your ability—you, acting alone— to make a relationship satisfying, whole, and productive. You have a part to play, of course, but a substantial piece of it is inviting the other, the others, to play their parts. [1] Restoring a plausibility structure to health is not something you can do by yourself since it is made up of the presuppositions, actions, and fellowship of colleagues.

Obviously, that is where the courage comes in. Claiming that you once labored under an illusion and now you have been “disillusioned” is relatively easy. Recognizing that being the person you now are in a relationship that gives vitality is a matter, instead, of humility, honesty, and hard work.

So it seems worth doing.

Having said all that, I would like to return to the many friends I have had who claim to be “disillusioned.” The context I provided for that statement when I first introduced it, was religious and I want to end these reflections in the same way. These people never seem to be saying that the illusion that misled them was provided by God. It always seems to have been provided by people—often parents—speaking on God’s behalf. And very often, that particular illusion of relationship with God richly deserves to be dissed [2]

But having done that, what view of yourself and the world will you formulate in its place? What frame of reference will you establish as unchallengeably true? What implications for the meaning of your life will be provided by this new frame?

You can’t have no frame of reference.

And complaining about your period of being illusioned does not give you one. For me, I think it would be better to put my energies toward restoring the frame I know and becoming the person it now—not back then—needs for me to be. That’s the part that takes the courage.

[1] Using a human relationship as a stand in for a religious commitment does run into problems here and there. The problem here is partly capitalization,. I could say that I “invite the Other,” (using the capital). But that places the whole notion of mutuality in a very precarious place.

[2] Only a very small smile there to recognize “disillusionment.

I took the argument far enough in Part I to say that one might declare an earlier view to be “illusory” for any number of reasons. What you took to be the factual underpinnings may have eroded. They almost certainly have become less fashionable, no matter what they were. The collection of crucial colleagues may have dissipated. These are people who make up the largest part of what sociologist Peter L. Berger calls a “plausibility structure.” [1] If you are an intellectually active adult, you now live within a different plausibility structure, interacting with different people, taking different things for granted.

Plausibility structures don’t establish what is true. They establish the frame of reference within which the goals that deserve your commitment are established and they establish the criteria by which these people, but not those people, should be treated as colleagues.

That being said, one of the simplest ways to separate yourself from a discarded plausibility structure is to say that it has been shown not to be true. “Factually true,” that is. This is simple because you really have no choice. You cannot continue to be guided by a plausibility structure that is based on falsehood. But is not straightforward because “not true after all” is the judgment of your present colleagues on the beliefs and practices of your former colleagues.

I guarantee you that your next set of colleagues will have the same attitude toward the colleagues you have now. This endless availability of new plausibility structures clarifies to what extent “what you once believed” can be called an “illusion” and therefore also clarifies what you might mean by declaring yourself to have been, at last, “disillusioned.”

Prince Rillian

These things are always dealt with so much more clearly in the world of magic. Let’s examine the paired notions of “disillusionment” and “courage” in the context of Prince Rillian in C. S. Lewis’s story The Silver Chair. [2] When the children from England enter the magic land of Narnia, they are joined by a Marshwiggle named Puddleglum. The trio encounters a handsome young prince and a beautiful woman. The prince tells the Narnians a very challenging truth. Every day, he says, for the space of one hour, he goes absolutely crazy and says crazy things. He is, for that hour, tied to a silver chair and he begs the children and the Marshwiggle to ignore the ridiculous things he says during that hour. He is, to place his dilemma within our frame of reference, “illusioned” during this hour. But it only lasts for a little while and he is “disillusioned” afterwards and can be taken seriously again.

Let me pause briefly here to point out that Prince Rillian is a member of two sharply discrepant plausibility structures. The only colleague he has in the one is the lady—who is, to no one’s surprise, a terrible witch—and the only colleagues in the other, the children and the Marshwiggle. In our own lives, we grow up and move from one plausibility structure to another, then we discard the earlier one as childish wish fulfillment. Prince Rillian experiences both structures every day and part of every day, he knows it.

That’s why I like the world of fantasy for clarifying messy questions like this. Rillian is tied to the silver chair. He can tell the Narnians the truth and he does. He can plead for them to release him and he does. But he has also warned the children that he will be speaking absolute nonsense during that hour and he has pled with them already to ignore everything he says while he is under a strange spell for that hour.

So, briefly, the children can conclude that the prince tied to the chair is telling the truth and that all the rest of his life is illusory, but only they can act on that truth. The prince is disillusioned for only one hour. Or they can conclude that the prince, living all the rest of his life and with the compassionate support of the beautiful lady, is telling the truth and that they should just allow his illusion of being captive and “spell-bound” [3] to pass.

Disillusionment and Courage

(In all honesty, this is the point in the essay where I realize there will have to be a Part III. Oh well.)

The courage that is required is required of the Narnian children because only they can act. So they cut the Prince free and then they kill the horrible witch (who conveniently becomes a serpent when Rillian is disillusioned) and escape and go home. But in the lives we have been considering, it is our courage that is required, not someone else’s, and the courage is required because we do not know—we cannot know—whether the premises on which we are relying are true. We cannot even know if they are adequate.

We can know, however, that if we do not commit to these and to the people who are our colleagues, these premises will grow remote and finally, will not support the weight we are putting on them. When that happens, we may summon up the courage to reinvest in the presuppositions and the people who will make our lives make sense. Or we may discard that now remote set of beliefs and relationships and take on a new set. The act of discarding is considerably easier if you imagine that you are now living in no plausibility structure at all—completely disillusioned—rather than having swapped an old one for a new one.

That brings me to what I now see is going to have to be Part III. Keeping a plausibility structure fresh and powerful and relevant and keeping intimate contact with the people who are engaged in the same struggle you are engaged in—that is why they are “colleagues”—will require a good deal of courage as well as a great deal of effort. And you can never know whether you are making the right choice or whether you are making a fool of yourself. There is no shortage of people who are willing to tell you that, especially former colleagues, who in belittling your efforts are shoring up their own new commitments.

Using language like that leads me inevitably to keeping a relationship fresh powerful and relevant. My most directly applicable experiences of that issue are in marriage, which I know for a fact can be allowed to lapse and can be restored to vigor. This brief overview seems to image that it is something I can do by myself, but of course, I cannot. For everything I might do to support the fading relationship, others will have to say, “Yes. I want to do that too.” [4] And if this is a religious relationship in which the “partner” to whom I am committing (recommitting) is God, then more courage is required. All my transactions are “mediate,” if you see what I mean, but they are the means by which the relationship with a Partner is “mediated.”

So let’s talk about marriages and plausibility structures and the experience of mediated realities and, of course, disillusionment and courage.

[1] A plausibility structure is not a set of conclusions. It is the taken for granted world on which our daily actions and interactions are based. And as these interactions “work” every day, they passively confirm the taken for granted world.
[2] The Silver Chair is one of the seven novels Lewis has set in Narnia. The entire set is called, by people who take it much more seriously than I do, “the Narniad.”
[3] Every now and then a word means exactly what it says and I am surprised that I never noticed it before.
[4] Or, conversely, I will have to see what the act of a colleague means and be the one who says, “Yes, I want to do that too.” I always experience myself as taking the first step, even when I know it is not true.

Everyone who was raised within a culture that believed something important about human life runs the risk of coming to a time in their life where they proclaim that they are “disillusioned.” I was raised in a conservative Christian culture, so most of the people I hear or read saying that they have been disillusioned, are people who believe they have finally discovered and escaped the illusions of their childhood. I am in a somewhat different place myself. I believe that I have finally discovered the truth about “disillusionment.” Here’s the bad news. Disillusionment is an illusion.

This is a peeling the onion kind of problem and the outer layer is the notion that truth and illusion are at war with each other in principle. The idea is that I was told that X attitude toward life and meaning was “true” but now I know that it is not true. The Recently Disillusioned Person (hereafter RDP) need not say that something else actually is true; only that what they were taught is not. They are free, of course, to say that they have discovered that Y is true instead of X or they are free to say that the whole idea of “true” is fallacious.

But this is a precarious position to take. Let’s move on to the next layer of the onion. Let’s say that I have a progressive form of dementia and I have, in my currently sound mind, the conviction that I do not want any heroic measures taken to prolong my life. I sign a paper to that effect. I have it notarized. Then, dementia having taken its course, I come to the medical decision to take heroic measures and at that moment, it seems like a good idea. “I,” the person I am then, say,s “Wait, I have changed my mind. I do want those measures taken.”

I, the self who signed the paper, see things in a certain way and “I” (note the quotation marks) see things in a different way. There is no reason that “I” could not claim that I have, at long last been disillusioned. The family will very likely believe that the current view of things, the demented view, is the illusion and that the earlier view, taken with full command of their facilities, was the authentic view.

It is not true that the later person, the one I can been calling “I,” now knows the truth and that the “truth” they once believed was always an illusion. In fact, neither of these positions about what to do at the end of a physical life can be said to be “true.” They can be said to proceed authentically from a functioning self, an agent. Or not. The reason the person who discovers that their mind will not continue to be under their control signs the paper in the first place is that they know they will become increasingly dominated by an illusion. In fact, dementia may be thought of as a web of illusions, some stable, some transitory. What the agent believes will, in this case, be counted as authentic; what the patient believes will be discounted as illusory and that is true even if the patient declares that he has at last been disillusioned.

We have time for one more layer of onion. I can see that this is going to require more than one post. Let’s consider martyrdom next. Etymologically a martyr is a witness. The word comes from Greek and has been adopted into most Germanic languages, including English. The common representation is that a belief is proclaimed over many years. Then there is a time of reckoning. The believer can continue to hold to the belief or practice that is now in disfavor and suffer grievous harm or they can declare it to have been an illusion, to declare further that they are now “disillusioned” and have adopted the new required view. They have become a RDP.

Traditionally the “grievous harm” in prospect is death, often a painful and humiliating death, but for our inquiry there is no reason it needs to be that. It needs to be bad enough that it requires that the RDP learn to sing a new song. [2] It could be being forced to leave your home; it could be being forced to take a menial and low paying job; it could be having all public facilities made off limits to you. Any of those might, in some circumstances, cause a person to say that their early teaching was all an illusion and that they are now disillusioned.

But really, is the view they first adopted an illusion? None of the causes we have surveyed says so. And is the new view being taken on the grounds that is wholeheartedly accepted? Does that mean that they have been disillusioned and no longer hold the old view? None of these scenarios asks the question of what is true, imagining that “illusion” is taken to be the opposite. Is a view which still makes sense to someone, but that increasingly costs them a price they are unwilling to pay, suddenly an illusion? Really? Would it require more of something to continue to affirm the original view? More stubbornness? More data? More courage?

I’d like to pick that dilemma up next and we will look also at C. S. Lewis’s classic case, Prince Rilian of The Silver Chair.

[1] Interestingly,Norse used a native formation pislarvattr, literally “torture-witness”—one who suffers death or grievous loss in defense or on behalf of any belief or cause” (love, etc.)
[2] Just kidding. The canto = “to sing” root suggested “recant” to me. I know it means other things in other settings.

On the principle that it takes a village to raise a child, I would like to pursue the thought that it takes as much as 156 milligrams of hippocampus to remember who directed a film that is nearly everyone’s favorite.

Now for those of you who are conversant with adjusted average hippocampal weights, you are prepared already to turn the page, metaphorically speaking, because you know there has never been a hippocampus that weighs anywhere near that much.

And you are right.

But here’s what I am thinking. Bette and I live in a senior center where a good deal of the social activity goes on in the dining room. As is true in many other settings, “meeting for dinner” is a common way to keep up with events in the lives of friends. It is true here as well.

And one of the common features—no pun intended—of our dining room is that is has tables large enough to seat six people. “Six top” tables, they are called, for reasons I have never understood [1]. They are tables intended to serve six people. And very often at dinner at such a table, a question will come up about a movie everyone has seen and liked. We remember the actor who played the lead, but not the name of the character she played. We remember the name of the producer, but not the director. We remember the name of the town where the events are supposed to have taken place, but not the name of the county. That last one is especially prominent for movies set in Ireland.

What to do?

Well, remembering that the hippocampus is the seat of explicit memory, we could look there for help. The hippocampus mediates our recall of specific events—names, dates, places. It is therefore the part of the brain that is being called on at our table when we all remember something—some the character, some the place of filming, some the date of issue—but no one remembers what we are trying to remember.

You could, of course, say that this is the kind of problem that bedevils old people, but what is the value of a description like that? I say let’s regard it as a problem caused by an inadequate hippocampus. The standard 26 milligram hippocampus is just not up to addressing this problem. Fortunately at our table, a six top, there is roughly 156 milligrams (26 X 6) of hippocampal weight to be directed toward the problem. That ought to be enough, don’t you think?

And eventually it is. Someone remembers that this actor has a brother who starred in a different Irish film. Someone else remembers that the film the brother starred in was released only five years after the film we are trying to remember. Someone else remarks that it was one of the highest grossing films of the summer in the year it was released. That has nothing at all to do with our common problem, but it gets said anyway. We’re a bunch of old people.

Eventually, bringing to bear 6X the power of one normal hippocampus, someone remembers the right name and everyone else says they were just right at the edge of remembering it themselves and that they know it is correct.

This illustrates the same principle embodied in “it takes a village to raise a child” as applied, in this case to remembering who played the lead in a film everyone at the table had seen and liked.

[1] “Restaurant slang” was the speculation of the only source I found that was willing even to speculate.

I want to tell you this morning about my favorite “Merry Christmas.” There is no joy is this “greeting.” It is said in an intimate tone, although as you see in the picture, it is said by a judge presiding over a courtroom. This is the Honorable Henry Harper, played by Robert Prosky in the 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street. Every other utterance he has made from that exalted seat has been formal and procedural. He disallows an objection by counsel, he warns the courtroom to be quiet, he orders that a reindeer brought in as a witness (an object lesson, really) be removed from the court. Judge-ly things.

This “Merry Christmas” is not that. In looking at the dollar bill in his hand, he sees that “In God We Trust” has been circled with a red felt tip pen and he realizes that he does not have to sentence Santa Claus, who is seated in his courtroom as the defendant to a life of custodial care courtesy of the state of New York.

Until he was handed this dollar bill, which was clipped to a home made Christmas card a little girl gave him, he saw the future clearly. He was going to rule against Santa Claus and pay the price for the rest of his professional career. Or he was going to acquit a perfectly ordinary looking man sitting in his courtroom and who persists in claiming that he is Santa Claus—a professional violation he would never live down. When he was handed the bill, he realized suddenly what it meant,

He spends some time later, explaining to the courtroom just what the logic was by which he could declare the defendant, one Kriss Kringle, not guilty. But we don’t need to go that far. The shift from the formal reading of a proclamation that would have found Kriss mentally incompetent, to the quiet and profound relief we hear in Judge Harper’s voice tells viewers everything we need to know. This is a voice of a man who has just realized that he does not, after all, have to choose between personal or professional humiliation. It is, consequently, a voice full to bursting with gratitude and relief. It is right at the border of joy. There is a chuckle in it. The chuckle is not quite expressed, but it adds a tone to the words he speaks as if it were an additional acoustical layer. And the chuckle, being almost there, is lovely.

Before Judge Harper, my favorite Merry Christmas was provided by Luke’s account of the aged Simeon in the Temple. He was told to come to the Temple and he came. He had been told that he would not die until he had seen “the Christ of the Lord.” That’s Luke’s language. Simeon would have heard it as “the Messiah whom God has finally sent to save us.” “Finally,” I say, because Simeon had lived a long time and he was so ready to be received by death. It looked to him like being able, at last, to rest.

So the little child was handed to him and he let go all the tension that he had needed to get through the day after day after day of his very old life. He let it all go, as I hear him, and shifts into the chuckle-imbued relief Judge Harper uses and he says, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” [1]

Or, as we would say today, “Merry Christmas.”

[1] Simeon was very old, so the King James language came naturally to him.