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| Published December 2020 |
Given a choice between a hypothesis and an experience, go with the experience.
“Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,” as a famously clever screenwriter/director/journalist named Ben Hecht once wrote, “is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.”
“Whig” was not just a party-political label but also the name of a climate of opinion, as Daniel Walker Howe characterized it in a classic study, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1979). To Whig reformers the rest of America was not the Wild West but the Wild Everywhere, a bride-short, male-dominated free-for-all scarred by dueling, drinking, whoring, and rioting.
“He was, in fact, saying that the market doesn’t work. He only half recognized it.” For all his grand optimism and ecstatic visions of a fifteen-hour workweek, Keynes remained a Burkean conservative, anxious about actually implementing the changes he believed possible, even those he thought necessary to the preservation of democracy.
You cannot now solve the problem by saying that God chose to create the world at a certain place chosen by Himself in the uniform matter. This is presumably what Thales said: but it is not sense. Unless God had a reason for His choice, it was no choice; it was something of which we have no conception whatever, and calling it a choice is merely throwing dust in our own eyes by pretending to equate it with a familiar human activity, the activity of choosing, which we do not in fact conceive it to have resembled. Choice is choice between alternatives, and these alternatives must be distinguishable, or they are not alternatives; moreover, one must in some way present itself as more attractive than the other, or it cannot be chosen.
A goal defines an outcome you want to achieve; an area of focus establishes activities you want to spend your time doing. A goal is a result; an area of focus is a path. A goal points to a future you intend to reach; an area of focus settles you into the present.
