Healthcare Reform: Watch the Birdy
One of the lynchpin assertions of the health care wonk-reformers is that we pay more for healthcare than other countries, and get a poorer “result”. They cite statistics like life-expectancy. The wonks go on to argue that there are enough excessive costs in the system to reduce our expenditures to European levels, cover everyone, and still be healthier than we are today.
But the politician-reformers (as opposed to the wonks, on whose analysis they rely) add: and you will keep all the freedom you now have. The last part is not true, and they know it. They say it to get past the point of no return.
The easiest part of the entire equation is universal coverage. It has all the political payoff. Most people who support the present agenda, when asked about “health care reform”, mentally translate that phrase into “cover everybody”, and vote yes. None of the hard decisions are in this stage of the game. Everybody wants to get something from the government, when the government is everybody else. This is the response – pardon me – of the common people.
“Government Regulation”
Is it too much to ask that journalists recognize root distinctions and discuss root questions? Since the subject at this moment in American economics is government intervention in markets, aren’t some distinctions salient, like the distinction between government regulation whose purpose is to reduce market risk and regulation whose purpose is to prevent fraud?
Minimalism versus simplicity
“But I notice that the minimalist mood — wherever it appears — eventually kills all joy.”
I made this statement here and then spent some time defending it in an internal debate, because I like some aesthetics that are often called “minimalistic”. They seem, well, artistic. Traditional Japanese aesthetic is often called minimalist, for example, and I love the look of a tea room, with its natural materials and its discipline of excluding unnecessary implements.
Seems to me there is a nuance of a difference between the modern mood that wants to strip the physical world down to its skeleton, and the traditional love of simplicity. The first is a joyless cynicism: this mind has been betrayed by objects and people and wants as few of them as possible. The second contains a pleasure in the individual object, so much so that it wants to contemplate and savor a few, free from the distraction of clutter. The first — the “contemporary” mind — has no joy in any particular thing. The second – the “traditional” mind — finds great joy in the rough wooden bowl for the tea, and wants to really see the grain of the wood, and this vision is so deep and full it requires an empty room to contain.
“Minimalist” and “simple” seem to be perfectly appropriate terms for these two distinct and opposite moods. Though they seem similar at a superficial glance, the “minimalist” is the diseased cousin of the “simple”.
Form Follows Function?
One day I noticed that the ugliest buildings in town are at the art gallery, so I began pondering modern design. How could the people most aware of the Beautiful veer so forcefully into making things ugly? Since modernism is all about shifting blame to root causes, I wanted to be fair to the artist community by blaming a root cause. So I’ve decided that the poverty of modern plastic design is rooted in a failure of poetic vocabulary.
“Form follows function” seems to be a guiding epigram of the modern aesthetic. And this produces minimalism. It produces what we now call “contemporary style”. But no art can survive long in minimalism, since the most fundamental function is simple survival. Art is always an extraneous object from the point of view of mere survival; it is the very opposite of minimalism. So the post-modern artist, in order to overcome the inevitable ennui that comes attached to modernism in all disciplines, resorts to what some call “whimsy” — although, as I say the word, I want to restate it, since “whimsy” is a positive word, with an element of joy, and it is useful. But I notice that the minimalist mood — wherever it appears — eventually kills all joy. (more on Minimalism versus Simplicity)
So, what does the artist and critic mean by “whimsy”, really? They mean “random”. What the post-modern artist actually cultivates is randomnity of form. Yet, the true random event has, by definition, no designer, so this path logically ends either in abandoning art entirely or in suicide. Or spend your life designing forms that go against other forms — avoidance of pattern, anti-form. (I know, I know, the lack of insight is breathtaking, but I’m just reporting here.)
But this stance is not new; we’ve seen it somewhere before…let’s see…let’s see…ah, it is old as adolescence. The definition of oneself by adopting anything random that is new and is not what your elders did — to define yourself in contrast to others — is the adolescent pose. What a sad spectacle is this: high intelligence, such as God gave an artist, harnessed to the end of intentionally avoiding order or value. Unspeakable tragedy.
So that doesn’t work. It produces the ultimate absurdity: the ugly art gallery. What makes more sense? Well, in the real world, form and function are intertwined inseparably, of course, but we do need to express their relationship in a verb, or we have no guide whatsoever for formal (design) decisions. The problem is in the verb “follows”, which connotes passivity. It relegates “form” to a passive role, which is eventually always a death. The minute we choose the verb “follows” in the epigram, and let that relationship be the way we think about form and function, we start down a road to random form. Bad poetic vocabulary locks us in bad thought, and bad work.
Better: “Form REJOICES in function”. This gives both nouns something to do. Within the building this architect is drawing, real people work. Let the form rejoice in that work, not just accomodate it. If Form rejoices in the function it facilitates, then it will be something worthy of beholding in its own right. Art. And the artist — the architect’s job is to rejoice.
A poet would know that if the wrong word sneaks into the communal mind, it can kill for generations an entire discipline.
Notes from church: July 5, 2009
Loss of the capacity to believe in anything beyond the senses, leads to loss of belief in the universe as a moral construct, leads to all theories of salvation sounding abstract, leads to the poverty of having only romance as a filter to approach God, leads to contemporary worship music.
*****************************************************************************
The Old Testament injunction to “Remember God” is the equivalent of the New Testament “faith”.
*******************************************************************************************
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. 25 Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. 26 So I do not run aimlessly; I do not box as one beating the air. 27 But I discipline my body and keep it under control, [2] lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.
This passage simply does not reflect that beloved evangelical dichotomy and shelter: “… a relationship with God based on forgiveness as opposed to one based on performance.” Well, I guess the larger NT does. If you discount all the passages that don’t.
****************************************************************************************
“Eternal perspective” as used in evangelical preaching, usually amounts to docetism. Only what is done for Christ will last, and so on. The implication — intended or not, people imbibe it — is that only the ghostly souls of men will pass into the next age; spend as little work as possible on things like art, engineering, plumbing. Hay and straw, to be burned up on the last day.
Politics as slander
Thesis 1: Jesus is the end of ethics. I mean, the summit of ethical deliberation is in the New Testament principle “All the law is in this one saying: love your neighbor as yourself.” The purpose of God’s love in Jesus is to restore the human soul for an ethical end — to love. This restoration is prior to any human ethical act, but has no other purpose than human ethical transformation.
Thesis 2: Power is useless to the lover.
Thesis 3: You cannot love someone and intentionally make them look bad to a third party. Love does not highlight the sin, but highlights the good of the neighbor. To speak of my neighbor’s fault in order to diminish him in others’ sight is functionally indistinguishable from hate. Read more »
