Judged Good

I've been chewing on an existential question for the last few months, and have not made any serious headway on it. I'm not even sure it's a legitimate question, but it keeps popping up in my contemplations. The line of thinking goes something like this:

1. In order to know what you should be doing right now, you should know what you want to ultimately achieve in your life. It's the whole Steven Covey, "start with the end in mind" principle: you can't pick a sensible direction if you don't know where you want to end up.
2. In order to formulate a goal for one's entire life, you need to establish an absolute standard for what a good life would be. In other words, you need to know how you are going to judge a good life.
3. What, then, is the proper standard for judging a good life? Ostensibly, this is the sort of question the Self Knowledge Symposium is supposed to help people answer, and it's precisely here that my theology starts to break down.

There are a couple ways to answer #3. The classic theistic response is surrender to a higher power: "I'll do whatever God wants me to do." That's a whole new can of worms, with lots of underlying assumptions to root out:

• For many, that answer also entails: "...because then God will love me and reward me eternally for my faithfulness." And I'm a little sketchy about the whole "eternal rewards" thing. If there is anything remotely like an afterlife, I don't think it's an everlasting, fully funded retirement.
• It also assumes that God has something specific for you to do, apart from your own dreams and desires. It is entirely possible that you could ask God, and he would say, "I dunno . . . what do you want to do? What would make you happy?" If that seems implausible, consider the fact that this is exactly the position most earthly parents take. Would a heavenly father wish anything different?

So . . . if you decide that there is no judging God in heaven (either because there is no personified God to begin with, or because He's just not the judging type), how then will you formulate your life mission? Now you are thrown back on your own resources to answer the question. And that's a mess to sort out as well:

• Your desires and aspirations are a conflicting mess. The whole reason you wanted a mission was to organize your desires into something consistent and sensible.
• You could reduce all your desires and aspirations to, as your parents say, "whatever makes you happy." But that seems to resolve to a blunt sort of hedonism: "whatever makes you feel good." And that seems like a lousy, very unreflective standard upon which to base one's life. That approach defines self-centeredness, which feels like a dead end.

Comments are welcome. I haven't completely finished all the different lines of thought I have on this, but this is the basic shape.

Inequity and social justice

"Growing inequality" keeps reappearing in the news cycle, as regularly and uneventfully as rising obesity rates, falling test scores, and evidence of global warming. While most reporters stick to the facts, the unstated implication in all these reports is that inequality is bad, and a cause for moral concern. I give the BBC kudos for at least recognizing the assumption in their last round of coverage, when they spoke with some people from the Ayn Rand Foundation, for whom "egalitarian" is not considered a compliment.

I don't know what to think on the matter. On the one hand, I'm a staunch free-market capitalist. I believe that freedom inevitably creates economic inequality, and that people (both rich and poor) value having that freedom more than they value the wealth itself. Class warfare political rhetoric consistently fails to get any traction with voters primarily because everyone wants to believe that someday they will be rich.

On the other hand, I struggle with the usual upper-middle-class low-level angst about social inequalities. You only need a few stories about Indians working for fifty cents a day to wonder at your own relative wealth, and question the fairness of it all. The usual antidotes -- personal generosity, increased charitable giving of time and energy-- are only partially effective without a consistent philosophy about what's really for the greatest good. In college I dabbled with John Rawls' Theory of Justice to come up with a more consistent rationale for what society ought to be like. I liked his "veil of ignorance" standard: create a society in which you would be willing to participate, without knowing what your lot in that society is destined to be. For all its hypothetical impracticality, it's a clean standard that allows for lots of inequality but not too much. I have some problems with Rawls, too -- I am, at heart, still a meritocrat. I believe that the intelligent, diligent, and hardworking should prosper, and the stupid, lazy and slothful should sink . . . even though I can take no more credit for my native talents than any other environmental factor in my good fortune.

In the end I wind up where I began. I believe our society is the best model, or at least has the greatest chance of all models of getting things right. I think even my own questions and uncertainty about it are themselves a part of the model, and a part of what makes it work.

Service (with or without the smile)

When he spoke to the SKS last week, Fleet Maull had said that "service work is an essential part of a spiritual path -- not just a good idea, not just a by-product, but an essential part of the path." I think most spiritual practicioners would agree . . . in theory. But the only question is: what qualifies as "sevice work"?

Say "service work" to the average American college student and their minds jump to one of three or four categories of charitable activity: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, Habitat for Humanity, and maybe hospice. They think Mother Theresa: helping people at the absolute bottom of the heap. And why not? Isn't it just, that our impulse is to serve "the least of these?" And the people working in those realms, the Mother Theresas and Fleet Maulls of the world, have testified to the powerful experience of making a human connection to people radically different from oneself. When you serve those who you aren't even especially likeable, you discover both the unity of the human condition, and the divinity of love that transcends mere preference.

But I can't help but notice that so much of the charitable service that has sprung up in the world is not about serving people far removed from our circumstance. It's usually just the opposite: we spontaneously want to serve those who are most like ourselves. If (God forbid) my son was killed by a drunk driver, I will feel instant solidarity with anyone and everyone else who has lost a child, and spontaneously want to help them in their need. No medical charity ever sprang into existence without someone's child or spouse falling gravely ill. The recovering alcoholics reach out to other alcoholics. We can't help ourselves: once we see ourselves in other people, those are the ones we want to help.

If you are serving others, and transcending your own egocentric perspective in the process, then I suppose that's spiritual. Fleet would certainly agree that mindfulness and compassion should be manifesting in your everyday life, and changing the way you relate to your spouse, your kids, your coworkers. But is it really spiritual to "serve your own?" If you're kind and helpful to to the people who surround you . . . is that enough? Complacency could so easily creep in . . . I sense that its called service work for a reason: it ought to be stretch, going beyond the bounds you normally live in.

Please remain calm

"Kevin, I don't know what you're taking to remain so calm," I said to my client, a VP of Sales for manufacturing company. I had been through the wringer over the last three days. We had a dozen salesmen fly in from all over the country, almost all them needing major work on their computers to roll out a new CRM package. A couple machines teetered on the edge of unrecoverable after some OS upgrades blew up. We made some compromises on the training just to get everything finished in time for them to leave. A few big requirements for reporting and off-line printing came up within the training, and for which we weren't prepared.

All of this chaos provoked different reactions in the people present. Some of the IT staff reacted with indifference, then angry annoyance. The salesmen (like most salesmen) remained polite but pushy, continually lobbying to get their machines up and running as soon as possible. The marketing manager was quietly but visibly freaking out, imagining the worst. I was putting a brave face on it, but verging on freaking out myself. I expected that at any moment people would explode in angry accusations.

But Kevin was cool as a cucumber. Neither apathetic nor overwrought, he did everything he could do to keep things moving forward, and accepted the setbacks without complaint. At one point he turned to the marketing manager, smiled and said, "Tessa, it's just a job. Relax."

How can someone who works as hard as he, with as much bottom-line responsibility as he has, have such relaxed detachment? You'd think he was either a slacker or independently wealthy. But I suspect that he just had clarity. He knew what was important and what wasn't, and he knew that in the big picture, a rough roll-out of a computer system was not that important. It was one of the few times when I saw someone genuinely care more about his people than the things those people did, or the circumstances they faced.

And . . . it worked. I didn't freak out. We finished the job. And I have a slightly different idea of what it means to be a mensch.

Blood from a stone

I gave blood yesterday afternoon. I would like to imagine that I gave blood because I'm that kind of guy, a mensch who does his small part to make the world a better place. One my better days, that is probably the case. But mostly it was because they were bugging the shit out me. I could expect a call from the Red Cross about once a week, reminding me how critically low the blood supply had become and could I please make an appointment to give? For a while I ducked the calls, and made excuses, and then I made and broke a few appointments, and over the holidays I made an appointment and then couldn't keep it because I couldn't find the damn Blood Center in Durham. So when the called me earlier in the week, I finally said screw it, I'll make an appointment on the weekend and just get it done.

I had forgotten how much giving blood takes out of me. I came home feeling wonky and tired, and wound up going to bed early. None of which would be so bad, except that I have other obligations crashing down around my ears and can't really afford to knock off early in the middle of a crunch. I suppose it's even possible that I gave blood to avoid having to face the stress of dealing with everything else in my life.

So here I am, with a genuinely worthy act under my belt, and feeling like a loser. Virtue is often like that. Even when we do the right thing, we don't always do it for the right reasons. Making a commitment to give blood, or build a community, or be present with the family, sometimes just leaves you frustrated and tired, and conscious of all the things you didn't do instead.

But . . . and here's the surprising thing . . . it's still good. Somebody, somewhere, who is undoubtedly having a worse day than me, will use my blood. I doubt they will care much about the mixed-up thoughts and feelings of the donor.

They also serve who take no stand

I'm still batting around the notions of tolerance and taking a moral stand that were introduced in Remains of the Day. I implied yesterday that being tolerant of reactionary Islamic dogma might be the moral equivalent of shaking hands with Hitler -- that at some point, we need to voice our disagreement and take a stand on such things, and not pretend that real differences are not present.

But I also kept coming back to the scene in Remains of the Day when a young gentleman asks the butler Stevens, "But . . . did you agree with [Lord Darlington's] politics [of appeasing Hitler]?" And Stevens replied, "I was his butler. I wasn't there to agree, or disagree, but to serve." Some people take that to be Stevens' damnation: he wouldn't take a stand on important moral matters, but clung to his out-moded notion of ideal service.

But I see something else in that scene. I see the detachment and reserve that is necessary for civil society and the rule of law. A good judge could have said pretty much the same thing: "I'm a judge. I'm not here to agree, or disagree, but to interpret the law." Of course, some people think that judges should express their moral beliefs in their decisions and attempt to shape the world for the better with their judgements. But most, I think, see such judicial activism as out of place in the scheme of things.

The same argument carries over to all hierarchies of duty and order. Police make arrests when laws have been broken . . . regardless of whether they agree with the law. Soldiers follow orders, without concerning themselves with the ultimate consequences. Citizens pay their taxes, even if they vehemently disagree with the way those tax dollars are being spent. We are all, to some degree, deferring moral responsibility to others all the time. And this isn't altogether a bad thing.
The same detachment is what ultimately provides the basis for universal love, and it's manifestions in the larger society. We accord basic human rights to all criminals, regardless of their crimes. We accord everyone certain freedoms, in spite of the wrongheadedness of their beliefs. We do not have to pick a fight with every person (or every country) that disagrees with us. There is, however, a significant difference between agreeing to disagree, and pretending that no disagreement exists.

A really truthful engine

We were visiting my brother-in-law last week, seeing their new baby boy, and I among the books I was reading to the kids was "Thomas Breaks a Promise." What was curious about it was the subtitle: "(previously published as 'Thomas Tells a Lie')". That was enough to pique my interest: what was the lie, and what was the promise, and why did they change their minds about the title?

Sir Topham Hat tasked Thomas the Train Engine with checking all the signal lights on a new stretch of track. Thomas started the job but then became distracted when he came across a carnival. Thomas only remembers his lapse when he hears Sir Topham Hat talking to another engine about the new route at the end of the day. Thomas doesn't volunteer the information that he didn't finish checking the track. If he had fingers, we would probably have crossed them, and hoped that nothing bad would happen. But, as it happens, something bad does (almost) happen, and Sir Topham Hat dresses him down for his lapse, and Thomas is a reformed, safety-obsessed little train after that.

"Telling the truth" and "keeping a promise" are two principles that are frequently confused. Witgenstein came up with the whole notion of "language games" to help explain the difference. He found the language of science to be an incomplete way to engage the world, because sometimes we care about more than just descriptive truth. The rules for keeping a promise are similar to the rules for telling the truth -- both require a certain kind of integrity -- but they aren't the same.

So: is it more important that you tell the truth, even when it's painful, or that you do what you say you're going to do? It's a toughie, because you want your kids to feel free to tell you the truth, even when it might compromise their position, so you might be tempted to focus on the disclosure and not the original shortfall. People will always "sin", in the original sense of the word ("missing the mark"), but at least they can be honest and forthcoming about it. And yet, in the end, what you do matters a lot more than what you say, truthful or otherwise, and you could view the entire endeavor of raising kids to be teaching them how to make and keep committments. On the other hand . . . a lot of commitments get broken because people weren't honest enough to face the truth to begin with.

I think I'll go with the publisher's revision: the original sin, and the more significant one, is that Thomas failed to keep his commitment. The cover-up was secondary. If you keep your commitments, you won't find yourself in a position of needing to lie about it.

Next time: "Thomas Commits Perjury," previously published as "Thomas Fails to Fully Disclose."

Programming Karma

A couple people commented on my post yesterday about Programming Support by Google, and I wanted to clarify a few things. Mostly, just soften my position.

Both Janet and Kenny pointed out that giving help to others online, with little realistic expectation of being remembered, was pretty altruistic. One of the fundamental rules of building community is that people give as well as get; and if I benefit from the postings of others, I have karmic debt to repay. Not only should I feel free to post my discoveries (no matter how ego-motivated they may be) but I have a moral obligation to do so. That karma is bigger than just the geeky world of programming; all of society is ultimately based on collective action, and we can't expect to have world peace and justice unless people give in to the urge to help others just because it's the right thing to do.

There are also perfectly rational (but still self-serving) reasons to share one's knowledge. Most of the people who maintain blogs or post in newsgroups are consultants like me, programmers for hire who want to generate attention for themselves and demonstrate their chops. There is no pretense that they are sharing their code out of the goodness of their hearts, unless you're hanging out with the Richard Stallman crowd of GNUbies and think proprietary code is evil. The posters are just out stumping for their new book, or their professional services, or just doing their jobs as technical evangelists. So it isn't just cheap ego-thrills -- it's just good business.

And besides, it's not always the ego boost that you expect it to be. Often people will post to say that your code doesn't work for them, or doesn't work in all situations, or even that it's a retarded way to do it and you should try this instead. Those with superior knowledge will trump you constantly. The feedback can be bracing.

The best motivations are probably the predominant ones: sympathy, and enthusiasm. You, also, have suffered with intractable problems, and felt relief and gratitude when you found the answer thoughtfully prepared by someone else. It makes you feel good to know you can make someone's day, recover their lost weekend, and maybe save their marriage by your gift. But that's hardly ever spoken. It's the enthusiasm, the naked thrill of technology, that has voice: "Isn't this cool?!"

Kosher . . . ?

Every now and then, you want to cheat. (No, not cheat-cheat, honey . . . now put down that frying pan.) My schedule has worked quite well for me, and I've kept to my routine of sleep, writing, and exercise, and work with very few lapses. But the hard part about such resolutions is knowing when it break it. Having a set bed-time is a wonderful thing . . . except when your in-laws call in the middle of the night because they're in labor. Well, obviously, you think, that's an exception. But then there's the SKS meeting that runs late . . . well, that's something really worthwhile, so it's easy enough to bend the rules. Then there's the time you stay up late watching La Femme Nikita because, well, it's Friday and you have company and you never have any fun anyway so why not? If you keep making "reasonable" exceptions to the resolution, you may wind up right back where you started -- reactively justifying everything you do, and having no discernable order at all. That was always my problem before: what was right in front of me always seemed more important than anything else I ought to be doing, and my ability to correctly discern priorities in the moment of action really sucks.

I have more sympathy for the Orthodox Jews now. I used to mock the ways they embraced the demanding disciplines of rabbinic law, and then set about defining the law as minutely as possible so they can find loopholes and exceptions. Can't turn on the stove on the Shabat? Hey, let's put it on a timer! Sometimes it's a lot easier to keep the letter of the law than the spirit, especially when there's debate on what the spirit of the law really is.

So . . . what's the principle on following principles? When is the exception better than the rule? Some thoughts:

• Obviously, it helps to have some flexibility built into the rules. Instead of hard-and-fast limits, it's better to have an ideal target with some stretch in it. My schedule can bend about half an hour in either direction without suffering too terribly. I can feel the difference between going to bed at 11:00 pm instead of 10:30 pm, but not enough to jeopardize everything else. By defining how much something can bend, it's easier to know when it will outright break.
• Define hierarchies of value (i.e. priorities) as well as rules. It's a lot easier to know how to break the rules if you know which are the most important rules. That means that some rules will be sacred and inviolable, with no exceptions allowed, while others will be more flexible. For me, writing every day is probably the most sacred, followed by bedtime and exercise.
• Define the intent and purpose of your rules. Any rule can be transcended if you can demonstrate a different path to the goal. This is the Budget principle -- you can rearrange all kinds of revenue and spending, so long as the bottom line remains the same. In my case, I can sometimes stay up late . . . but not without consciously planning on when the sleep will actually happen within the same day.
• Make exceptions exceptional. The more faithfully you follow a regime, the easier it is to make sensible exceptions when circumstances merit. If you find yourself breaking the rules more often than keeping them, you're in trouble. How often is too often? I'm going to hazard a guess of 5%. If you do the right thing nineteen times out of twenty, you've probably got a strong habit that can bear a few exceptions. More often than that, and you're in slippery-slope land. And you need to especially watch out for consecutive exceptions; break the same rule twice in a row, and you're in deep doo, because now you've started a trend in the wrong direction.
• When in doubt, ask someone else. Other people are much better at seeing through your blatent rationalizations. That, after all, is why we have rabbis.

Executive Pay, Backdated Options, and Ethics

I've been a little confused by the Wall Street Journal's mixed messages on the recent issues of executive pay and backdated options. As you may have heard, many companies got into trouble recently for backdating stock options for its executives -- that is, lying about when the options were granted, so that the executives got the most money possible out of the grant.

At first, the Journal was out in front in breaking the story: their own analysts had crunched the numbers of various stock option grants and determined, Freakonomics-style, that many executives had been too "lucky" with their options dates, and that overwhelming statistical evidence suggested they had cheated. After the story ran, the SEC followed up with their own investigations. Yup, they had cheated. Some CEOs and board members were fired. Looked like a good chance to run some fatcats out on a rail. The Wall Street Journal has generally been good about standing up for the rights of the investor, and makes a fuss about overpaid executives on a regular basis.

But then Steve Jobs, the darling CEO of the darling Apple, was caught with his hand in the cookie jar as well. And not just a little in . . . a lot in. There were some middle men at Apple to take the fall for him, but at Pixar he was very directly involved at setting his options dates. Suddenly the mood changed. Nobody wanted to run Steve out on a rail. He was too popular. We love The Incredibles on our iPods too much. And, unlike so many CEOSs, whose mediocre performance hardly seemed to warrent the millions of dollars they were paid, Steve Jobs was clearly vital to his company. And, on balance, investors would rather keep their brilliant but slightly ethics-challenged CEO than lose huge chunks of stockholder value if he's sent down the river.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page suddenly joined in the excuse-making. "Welllllllll . . . the stock options were only a tiny portion of his overall pay. What's a million dollars more or less to Steve Jobs? That's pocket change to him. The board knew what it was doing, the board can pay him whatever it likes, let's not make too big a deal out this."

The incident is akin to finding out that a close and trusted associate, someone you've known for years and welcomed into your home regularly, stole a magnet off your refrigerator. On the one hand, you don't want to destroy a close friendship over a nearly worthless refrigerator magnet. On the other hand, goddammit, he stole something from my house. What else is he taking from me? And worse yet, do I want to hang around someone whose sense of entitlement is so great that they just help themselves to whatever they want, big or small, with no regard to whether it's right or wrong?

I have seen that same mentality prevail with certain rich people. My mother once noted that her richest clients for her landscaping business were often the ones who were the slowest to pay. "For some reason they seem to think that because they have so much, paying me is a trivial matter beneath their attention." Like a celebrity that walks into the bar and everyone jumps up to buy them a drink, they have somehow come to believe that they are so special that the rules don't apply to them anymore.

I don't think Steve Jobs should be fired. It was a small part of his compensation. (And, if you must know, I was the person who stole a refrigerator magnet from a friend's house. But that's another story.) But what he did was wrong, wrong, wrong, and we need to keep pointing that out. Rules matter. Honesty matters.

Politics & Philanthropy don't mix

I got a direct mail piece from Oxfam USA last week. Because my wife and I have previously given to a variety of standard causes (e.g. CARE) and not-so-standard causes (e.g. Family at Home Network, the monks of Mepkin Abbey), we tend to wind up on everyone's solicitation list, especially for the year-end holiday appeals.

Many such appeals go straight in the trash, but Oxfam got a second look because it featured prominently in a philosophy lecture I've given several times over the years, about the nature of moral imperatives. I prep the students with a book review from The New Yorker, which poses a classic moral conundrum: if you see a child drowning in a wading pool, and you do nothing to stop it, you would be morally culpable in her death, yes? But you could just as easily save a life by giving some money to Oxfam . . . and yet you haven't. Shouldn't that make you equally morally culpable? The book review discusses some attempts to answer the question, but my point with the lecture is to make it as personal as possible for the audience: "I'm not talking about, 'Why don't people give to Oxfam?' I'm asking, 'Why haven't you given to Oxfam?' Because I'm also asking myself, 'Why haven't I given to Oxfam?' "

So, lo and behold, after invoking their name in a few lectures, I got an actual appeal from Oxfam last year. "It must be a sign," I thought. I was prepared to give them some money. But then I started reading the brochure, and what I read was a typical liberal-minded rant against the War on Terror. Somehow the Oxfam development officer had gotten it in his head that outrage over our recent wars would propel people to greater generosity. I didn't given them any money. It wasn't that I necessarily disagreed with them about the war; what offended me was the thoughtless assumption that anyone who is kind and generous must be a liberal.

(Side-note: even Law and Order has noticed this "kindness=liberal" assumption. Detective Munch asks his partner Fin (played by Ice-T), "Surely you have some dark personal secret your hiding." Fin replies, "Yeah. I'm a Republican." )

This year, I got almost the identical mailpiece from Oxfam. This time, the politics were gone. If anything, they had refocused on a conservative-minded take on their work: "This isn't a hand-out. We help the poor help themselves." Especially in light of the recent research that shows that conservatives give more to charity than their liberal counterparts (which I wrote about earlier), I found this switch remarkable. It makes me wonder if they actually have two different letters going out, and someone had set the conservative flag to "No" on my record by mistake last year.

In any case, I gave them some money. Dollar votes, baby.

High Noon

For years I had heard Augie talk about High Noon as the quintessential story of honor, duty, and good old-fashioned manhood triumphing over self-interested rationality. I finally watched it, as was somewhat surprised that the line he always attributed to it -- "a man's gotta do what man's gotta do" -- was, in fact, not in the movie at all. (Though pretty close: the line belonged to John Wayne in Stagecoach.)

It's a really great movie. I could extol its many virtues -- like the dramatic tension of unfolding in real time -- but I doubt I could say it as well as so many others have likely done in film classes for the last fifty years. But Will Kane's decision to face four gunmen and near-certain death, despite everyone in town abandoning him, really is the stuff of mythic heroism.

From a philosophic perspective, what I liked the most about the movie was the fact that Marshall Kane's virtue was essentially non-rational. When his new wife asks him, "Why do you have to go back?" he says, "I don't know why. But I have to go back." Later he comes back with more sound logical reasons: "He'll hunt us down whereever we go. If there's going to be trouble, better to have it here." But even that's not the real reason. In the end, his commitment has little to do with the town's well-being, or his own physical well-being, but rather with the integrity of his soul. "I never ran away from a thing in my life, and now they're trying to make me run away."

What also struck me is that the quality that Kane is willing to die for is somewhat indefinable, and remains that way throughout the movie. It's clear that it doesn't make rational sense. Even the treacherous barman says, "I'll give Kane this much -- he's got guts, if not much brains." And Mrs. Ramirez says, when asked why Kane is staying, says, "If you have to ask me, then I can't explain it to you." And earlier, she says, simply, "Kane is a man, and it takes more than broad shoulders to be a man."

The most telling point is when, at the end, Kane tosses his marshall's badge into the dust. Here is where it's most clear: he didn't do it for the townspeople, or for the honor of the office of marshall. He did it because that's the kind of man he is. Even the office itself was eventually unworthy of someone of his moral stature.

The Good and the Unique

My thinking about meaning and purpose has an overemphasis on uniqueness. I would like to be able to do something special and unique, something unlike anything else, something no one else has done. In science it's relatively easy to find that kind of thing because, by definition, science is about learning things no one else knew before. Art has similar aspirations. Few artists are interested in just painting pretty pictures; they want to make something new, and they want that newness to ripple out from themselves and affect others.

This all sounds good on paper, and yet in the real world it is remarkable rare. Most scientists and artists are not the ground-breakers they would like to be. They are more like ants in the ant-mound, struggling to carry their one little bit of leaf back to the hive. Collectively the scientific enterprise is managing to do good things, but the individual's contributions are relatively modest. I can speak less authoritatively about the artists, but I imagine they are having an even harder time of it.

And what of the millions of others, who aren't even within shooting distance of a claim to uniqueness? What about the bus drivers, the warehouse workers, the office administrators, and and everyone who "gets things done?" Their aspirations seem a lot more realistic: to do good. Built a good product. Deliver a good service. Be a good employee. It's not dramatic, but it would be truly snooty, not to say naive, to believe that it's not a real good.

But how many people go through life saying, "I was put on this planet by God Almighty to stack boxes" ? Not many. Which leads me to the conclusion: either not many people are thinking about meaning and purpose (at least the way I think about it) or they are finding their meaning elsewhere. Or maybe they are looking for meaning and not finding it and living miserable meaningless lives. All three options seem quite plausible. Judging from the sales of The Purpose-Driven Life, I think there are lot more people hungry for it than you might first guess. So what's the answer?

Foley artist

After several days of press coverage, I've about had it with the whole Foley flap. I don't feel particularly inclined to defend the guy, since what he did was certainly sleezy. But the fact that no legal body can find any legal grounds to press any charges only proves that he was merely sleezy.

I can find no internal consistency in our society's attitudes about sexuality. Teens have sex with other teens, and we shrug it off. People sleep with each others' wives, and we seem to think that's their "private lives." We douse ourselves in media that has gone beyond suggestive into obscene. And then we are shocked, shocked to hear that someone sent suggestive messages to someone else that they shouldn't have sent. It's not that there wasn't a line crossed -- it's just that our reaction seems profoundly out of whack with everything else that's going on. If sixteen-year-olds need that much defending against sexual predation, then can't we defend them from each other, for God's sake?