We all complain about what we do, but short of being an actual professor, I think I've got about the best job a philosophy/politics geek could want. Here I am (I mean RIGHT NOW), one floor down from my office in the GMU Law School, in a room with Bob Cooter (Yeah!), Gerd Gigerenzer (Yeah!), Robert Frank (Boo!), Cass Sunstein (Double Boo!), Vernon Smith (Double Yeah!), and various other intellectual luminaries arguing with each other about the Law and Economics of Irrational Behavior. Well, that's just cool. In two weeks, I go to St. Louis to eavesdrop on a discussion of Douglass North's new book manuscript. I can't imagine a grad program that could possibly provide me with so much exposure to first rate, bleeding edge, social thought. It's like a moveable interdisciplinary department that has the social science all-stars as the faculty. Or like the intellectual wannabe's version of being a stagehand at Woodstock. Lucky boy!

OK shouldn't be doing this... back to taking notes... Varieties of Internalization via cognitive dissonance or self-perception... OK.

Poetry Wednesday -- Was going through old files and found another good bad poem. Aristotelian metaphysicians will like this one. Enjoy!

Love and Accident

Can I love you if you’re more radiant than stars,
If you’re Sardanapalus rich, or Einstein-minded?
A person is not a property,
Though a single lack may be enough
For unlove.

You are not bald for want of a single hair,
Nor do you disappear having lost faith in Democrats.
Yet neither does a gemlike you-ness abide
Nestled just left of your human rights.

We are packages of accidents, hung upon nothing.
Some swarm in league and cause shambles prised away.
Some molt like skin, lost at no great price.
Which are which, though, is an utter mystery;
Our best efforts merely glancing the lovable core.

In the end there is what you want to be loved for,
And that in you which I love.
O’ Lord I pray, may these sets coextend!
And in the case of disjunction,
May we be ignorant of our reasons
And lucky in corruption.

Whig Out! -- I do believe I'm a whig. As my researches into the self-deceptive grounds of ideological commitment continues, I find ideological identification less and less appealing. The thing about "isms" is that while they may accurately account for most of one's views, avowed identification with an "ism" communicates an emotive commitment to an intellectual/political identity, and not simply agreement with a set of propositions. This is distasteful if your first allegience is to the truth, and you would be willing to give up any proposition whatsoever (and any identity based on its truth) in the face of countervailing evidence. That's why I want to call myself a "whig," since it captures the core of my political views, but does not convey solidarity with a living political/intellectual lifestyle, as "libertarian" might.

Here's Ken Binmore, in his absolutely fascinating and funny Game Theory and The Social Contract, Vol 2: Just Playing, on whigs:

... we whigs are for economic and political freedom, thrift, self-help, and equality of opportunity. Our enemies are either the advocates of big-spending government intent on creating a lickspittle citizenry, or else the corrupt backers of arbitrary government and ancient privelege.

Of course, if too many other people start calling themselves whigs, and turn it into an identity, I'll toss it out. But for now, whiggery rules!