“…frustrated progressives have fallen into a trap of thinking that the answers to policy questions are more obvious than they really are. In a world awash in right-wing nonsense, it becomes easy to think that the obvious wrongness of the right’s policy prescriptions implies that the correct policy ideas are also obvious. But they’re not! Not at all.”

I think this is right, and sometimes so right that it makes it difficult to discuss policy with people who are “on the same side”, ideologically speaking. (And I’m probably guilty of the same simple-mindedness when it comes to foreign policy.) The healthcare debate was a perfect example. Lots of people on the left thought it was baffling that the Obama administration all but ignored a single-payer solution where the government paid healthcare bills directly, rather than through the middle-man of the health insurance industry. But while I don’t think there’s any argument that a system like that can work well (see, you know, Canada, and Medicare in the US for that matter), it would have been incredibly risky from an economic and political standpoint to simply gut the private health insurance industry. It employs thousands and thousands of people directly and probably at least a million from an indirect standpoint. To tell the industry that its days were numbered, especially in a period of economic collapse, would have been a nightmare. That’s not even counting the massive amount of data the government would have to collect from scratch in order to enroll everyone in the country under 65. I wouldn’t have wanted to count on the newly obsolete insurance industry to just hand over the data.

All this said, I think that while the correct policy ideas are far from obvious, the correct politics often are pretty obvious. Democrats seem cursed with the idea that if the best policy ideas are complex, the best way to sell them has to reflect that complexity. This leads to endless amounts of dithering and poor framing. Supporters end up having to sell the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” rather than the “Awesome Healthcare for Americans Act”. Instead of claiming that “Republicans want to sabotage economic recovery” and “Real patriots have to sacrifice for the sake of their fellow Americans”, Democrats fan out around the country saying “Now may not really, actually, probably, well-at-least-in-my-opinion be the time to extend tax cuts for people who make more than $250,000 a year — not that those people aren’t part of our economic engine because some of them own small businesses and are really hurting from the recent economic unpleasantness.”

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises. Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

What a curse is turns out to be far from settled. My computer’s dictionary tells me that it’s a call to the supernatural to bring harm to someone. But that’s certainly not what people are talking about when they talk about Macbeth being cursed. It’s not as if you wish Macbeth upon someone and then they fall into a well or get struck by lightning. The theater tradition of Macbeth‘s curse is something different — something one stumbles into — like a cursed tomb or an unlucky streak.

I had a colleague once who told me that he was studying the notion of “profane spaces”, or the opposite of “sacred spaces”. The curse of the Scottish play is more like this notion of a “profane space” than a retributive curse. Except that a play isn’t a exactly a space so much as an activity, and we don’t give a whole lot of regular thought to profane activities. (Illegal, unethical and immoral activities, sure, but I take it that the profane is somewhat different than the immoral. Also, the idea of an “immoral space” doesn’t sound like it makes much sense.) So a profane activity would be one which, while not being immoral, nevertheless invites great misfortune or even disaster when you get caught up in it. The possibility of misfortune or disaster wouldn’t be enough to make an activity profane, though. Swimming during a lightning storm is stupid, but not profane. Riding in a car is dangerous, but not profane either. Lately it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that running for Congress might indeed be a profane activity.

But why Macbeth?

Why should Macbeth inherit a curse rather than Lear or Faustus? I think it makes a lot of sense when you look at the really chilling part of the play. For most people, that’s somewhere in Acts 2-5, but after you’ve been through the play, I think it’s Act 1 that becomes positively terrifying. Because Macbeth is minding his own business as a victorious general, ready to receive the glory and fame of his King, when he just happens upon the three sisters. And by uttering a few words, they change his perspective on everything. They don’t curse him or wish misfortune on him or call down the gods. They just tell him what’s going to happen. They give away the end (albeit skimping a little on the details). Believing he knows the future is the profane activity. And once Macbeth is there on the blasted heath, there’s little he can do to stop it. He’s trapped for the rest of the play, caught up in the profane activity of thinking he knows what’s going to happen.

It’s a terrible thought, perhaps because it takes free will and makes it into anxiety. We have this sort of ridiculous belief that if we’re certain of what’s going to happen, we’ll have a better chance of changing it, but that thought is as appealing as it is contradictory. If it really is inevitable, making adjustments can only contribute to the inevitable. It robs choices of their potential for making a difference to outcomes. If that’s what knowing the future really gets you, it’s hard not to run as fast as you can towards ignorance. I guess it’s not surprising that the play that brings it to us should inherit some of its profanity.

Bringing things back around to curses, then, I should say that I don’t think there are supernatural reasons not to produce this play. But seeing something as cursed can certainly lead people to view their choices and misfortunes in a way that leads to bad choices and further misfortunes. And in that way, maybe there is something profane about the general energy around Macbeth.

(And to keep everyone safe out there, I learned today that there are two main ways of getting rid of the Macbeth curse. The first one I’d heard before: go outside, turn around three times, spit, and knock until someone lets you back in. The second one was new to me: apparently the Merchant of Venice is a “lucky play”, so if someone messes up, quoting Lorenzo’s line from Act 3, Scene 4 will make all right: “Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you!”. If only it were always so easy.)

I don’t always like Radiolab’s editing, but it’s well worth the time.

Because it’s going to be a little more complicated than Kant makes it sound. For Kant, to be autonomous is to give oneself a law to follow (or, in other words, set an end for oneself). And the hard part is giving yourself a law to follow when nature is urging you to do something else with all of its clever devices. For example, I may really want to eat the large amount of chocolate in my pantry for all sorts of reasons (it’s sweet, pleasurable, comforting), but I can also override that desire by giving myself a different end. I might want to stay a little healthier than gorging on candy would allow, or follow through on a commitment to save the chocolate for someone else.

I’ve been thinking, probably too much, about feelings and emotions lately. The general opposition that Kant gets in a lot of trouble for is the opposition between the reasonable act of setting an end and the tempting lure of emotions or pleasure (in this case, chocolate pleasures). (Kant, of course, siding with reason über alles.) But this opposition really can’t be so clear. Because there are plenty of ends I could set for myself that would not make my will autonomous. For instance, say that, when faced with a choice between eating all of the chocolate in my pantry or saving it, I instead decide to give myself the (apparently) random end of painting a picture of a panda bear. Or I decide to build a bookshelf out of matchsticks or something. These ends, distracting though they might be, don’t seem to make my will autonomous, because they’re not my ends. So simply setting an end doesn’t constitute autonomy.

And that’s good, I think, because we’re not paragons of pure practical reason (angels). Instead, it seems like the ends I set for myself, if I’m going to freely set and pursue my own ends, have to have some kind of connection to me. And that connection can’t just be that I set them for myself. The most natural place to find this connection is in the things I desire or desire to avoid. In order to set my own end, the end has to come from somewhere inside me. But this is a problem for Kant, because we’re not always in control of these desires. On one hand, my desires do a great job of picking out my ends from someone else’s. But on the other hand, they’re not mine because I don’t have full say over them. We may not have enough control over them. So in order to set ends for myself, I need to make reference to my desires, emotions, commitments, etc, but do so in a way that doesn’t make me a slave to them.

We’re more than our emotions, but also not less than them. This may be a good point to consider connecting meaning, or authenticity, and autonomy. I don’t come to have a meaningful life just by following my desires wherever they point me, but by understanding them, embracing or denying them, and readjusting them to fit my character and what I want the story of my life to be. The simple hedonist isn’t fully in control of his or her desires enough for life to be meaningful, but the arch-rationalist doesn’t have any ends that could be considered his or her own. So full autonomy, or setting my own ends, will involve setting ends that I find meaningful. Desire can’t rule the process, but it also can’t be left out. And the safe way to bring it back in to a system like Kant’s seems to necessarily involve making our desires meaningful enough to be our own ends.

Maybe you can’t do ethics-as-autonomy without some notion of meaningfulness.

I know not everyone is looking forward to the humble “light wheat bread” that’s assigned this week, but my circumstances are a little different this time around. I got involved in the challenge in the first place because all of my previous attempts at learning had failed and I wanted to really learn how to make bread, particularly wheat bread. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of supermarket bread for the rest of my life. I wanted the house to smell good at least once a week. I really didn’t care about fruits or nuts or English muffins because my goal was to learn good plain bread. Over the last few weeks, I’ve learned a lot about kneading and gluten development. So I was eager to apply this knowledge to a loaf of utilitarian wheat bread. And here’s the best part: after spending a weekend away, I was all out of bread. For the first time, I didn’t go to the market. I decided just to bake bread myself. In the course of this, I made the first sandwich loaf I’m really proud of. I’m going to go ahead and say it: I think I can bake bread now!

The recipe couldn’t be more simple. Combine ingredients, knead, let rise, shape, proof, bake. And for me, it just worked. I don’t understand why powdered milk was necessary, but the results turned out to taste pretty good, so I’m fine with a little mystery. Here’s the incredibly simple breakdown:

First, I combined all the ingredients into a dough. It seemed like a lot of flour to me, but I didn’t need any additional water to incorporate all of it. I used my trusty plastic spatula for mixing, then used my hands to incorporate the rest of the flour into this:

Then I plunked it into the mixer and kneaded the dough. The mistake I’d always made before was not kneading long enough on a high enough setting. I think I was kind of scared of the speed that I now know as “medium”. But we’re better friends now and I wasn’t satisfied with the gluten development after six minutes (the beginnings of a windowpane, but the dough broke apart too easily), so I kept going for another three minutes. Still not quite enough, so I went for three more minutes and got the following really nice dough:

From there to a bowl to let it double in size. (Only took an hour and a half for me.) Victory:

Then I took the dough out and arranged it into a rectangle as the directions indicated. I was really surprised. For the first time the dough didn’t drastically reduce in size when I did this. So when I got it shaped into a loaf and put it into the pan, it didn’t look like the anemic sandwich loaves I’d made before:

The proof went very quickly, getting done after about 70 minutes. And the height on the risen loaf was everything I’d ever hoped to see at this step!

Finally, I cranked the oven up to 350º and baked it. What emerged was a really great looking loaf of bread:

It took all my energy to let it cool before slicing it open and seeing what lay inside. I was not disappointed! I wouldn’t say the flavor was amazing, but it’s definitely got some and tastes delicious with a little dab of butter.

So now I can honestly say that my own skills are an alternative to going to the supermarket for bread when I’m out. Pretty major victory, if you ask me. (Hey, it only took 15 loaves of practice!) For anyone stuck where I was at the beginning, for me it was all about gluten development. I just wasn’t kneading enough to create the protein web that traps the gases from the yeast necessary to get a good, risen loaf. Without that web of gluten developed, there was no rise, bad crumb, and little taste. With it there, you get, well, good bread. Good luck to all of you coming from where I was before. I can now say that bread isn’t crazy voodoo cooking. It is possible for anyone to figure out!

Final Notations, by Adrienne Rich

it will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart
it will not be long, it will occupy your thought
as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you
you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you
you are taking parts of us into places never planned
you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath
it will not be simple, it will become your will

(Edited, because the formatting went crazy on the line breaks.)

It wasn’t a worry that we’d be attacked again, though there was plenty of worrying on the airwaves about that. (And seriously, cut it out people. Only through the surreal lens of a spin-hungry American media does the question “Could capturing Osama be bad for Obama?” even sound remotely plausible. Ditto for the “This is great political news for Obama” folks.) I was worried about the fist-pumping giddiness at the man’s death that you could almost hear spreading throughout the internet at a hundred Facebook posts a second. It’s probably a good thing that Osama Bin Laden is dead. But not all good things deserve celebration. Some have to be endured.

Don’t get me wrong. The desire for revenge is a natural human emotion. I have it all the time. Piss off someone I care about and see what happens. (Or brake without using your turn signal for that matter.) I’m definitely one of the guys cheering at the end of Airforce One when Harrison Ford kicks Gary Oldman to his death while declaring “Get off my plane!” But there’s a reason why movies end there and never end with kicking the head of the terrorist through the streets of Washington DC. I think the difference has to do with the difference between getting even and rejoicing in revenge. And the latter is the bloodthirstiness that our country doesn’t exactly need more of right now.

I don’t know whether to believe stories about types of animals who get along perfectly well with human beings until they taste blood. It sounds a little suspicious to me. But if it is true, I don’t think we can refrain from considering the idea that we are one of these species. Once we’ve developed a taste, it’s hard to be sated in other ways. (Maybe the white-washing of vampires in recent pop culture shouldn’t be seen as an anomaly?) If that’s true, then the people we get blood from can’t help but want blood in return. It’s a recipe for creating monsters.

We recoil in horror when we see such celebrations in other cultures and it’s no more becoming when it comes from us. It’s probably a good thing that Osama Bin Laden is dead, but his death also threatens to take us to a place that humanity would do best to leave behind. And if we ever want a world at peace with itself, we must leave it behind.

Where are the exemplars that show us how to go on in this new way? I suppose I should be having deeper thoughts about foreign policy implications and Kantian ethical perspectives, and I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I could help thinking about the first Star Wars film. (Yes, it is the first Star Wars film. The other three don’t count because George Lucas is a moron.) In it, Obi-Wan Kenobi dies in a battle with Darth Vader by letting down his guard and letting Vader extinguish him. But before that happens, they have a famous exchange:

Darth Vader: Your powers are weak, old man.

Obi-Wan: You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.

The easy analogy of martyrdom isn’t the one I want to make here. Osama Bin Laden wasn’t a Jedi Master. He was at best a relatively competent terrorist. There is a danger that he’ll make a decent martyr. But leave that to the side. The lesson here is about the effects of violence and cruelty on ourselves. Obi-Wan was giving an example to young Luke, who at that point had yet to buy into the idea that controlling one’s emotions (or at least one’s less pleasant emotions) could give one great power — albeit power that could only be used for good. His lesson was to show Luke that Vader’s unbridled cruelty and desire for power would only lead him to further darkness (killing his old master). The cycle of violence and bloodthirstiness had to be broken. And the lesson worked. Luke goes on to become the Jedi his father — despite enormous promise — never was.

It’s probably a good thing that Osama Bin Laden is dead. But in the midst of deciding whether to celebrate the death of a great enemy, we’d all do well to take a lesson in more poetic form from someone who is a good candidate for a Jedi Master, Martin Luther King Jr., when he said:

“Darkness cannot put out darkness. Only light can do that.”