In the Bible, the Third Commandment proscribes taking the Lord’s name in vain—but, judging from the profusion of sound-alike euphemisms in circulation, the impulse must be nigh irrepressible. The canonical pornographic and scatological swears have only a few such euphemisms: “fuck” has “fudge”, while “fucking” has “fricking”, “frigging”, and “freaking” (and even these are questionable in polite company); “shit” has “shoot” and not much else. But just look at all the euphemisms for blasphemy:

Gosh, golly, darn, dang, gadzooks, egad, doggone, dadgum, dagnabbit, goodness, goodness gracious, good grief, gee, geez, gee whiz, gee willikers, jeepers, jeepers creepers, jeez Louise, crikey, criminy, cripes, crying out loud

One thing I love about some of these euphemisms is that you can almost hear their origins. Some father somewhere, within earshot of his kids, starts one way and ends another: “Oh, for Ch[rist’s sake]rying out loud!” or “Je[sus Christ]eez Louise!”

I have a cousin who once invented his own euphemism—“geez o’flippies”—for a particular sacrilegious swear. Being quite young when I first heard it, I asked him why he used such a strange exclamation. “It’s nicer than saying ‘Jesus Fucking Christ’,” he replied. I have to admit that’s true.

Larry Lessig is a great thinker, but even he makes mistakes from time to time. The most recent installment of his Wired Magazine column is a case in point:

In “Crushing Competition” (issue 14.05), the usually razor-sharp Lawrence Lessig mistakes the revocation of a subsidy for the fostering of competition, and thus makes a correct point midst a dense fog of confusion. Byzantine tax regulations are a free lunch for accountants, and their simplification is analogous to closing an oil industry tax loophole or ending soybean subsidies. The state of California is thus right to make its tax forms simpler—but not for the reasons Lessig cites.

Instead, Lessig argues from broken analogies that any competition, even from government, is good. But government is uniquely able to crush its rivals with regulation and subsidize money-losing operations indefinitely through taxation. For example, private emergency services and private schools—two cases Lessig mentions—face ruinous competition from deeply entrenched, subsidized government services. Far from being “outrages”, attempts to cut (the taxes which provide) public funding for such services are laudable efforts to introduce to these industries the very competition Lessig so rightly celebrates.

Michael Hartl
Orange, California

I have a hypothesis that some brilliant writers are afflicted by a kind of linguistic narcissism: their writing is so beautiful that they manage to convince themselves of bad ideas. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, wrote persuasively in favor of the Marxist view of human biology. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, crackling with wit and anecdote, advances the thesis that people are surprisingly good at making snap decisions on precious little information—except when they’re not.

Today I read the obituary of John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist known for his “witty and acid-penned” writing and critiques of consumerism and corporations. The brilliance of his writings may have blinded, not only his readers, but also Galbraith himself, to the flaws in his thinking.

To take one example, Galbraith once said that “I am struck by our superb capacity to manufacture consumer gadgetry, including electronic games, versus our capacity to produce schools.” His apparent astonishment is an indictment of “our” society’s priorities, but a simple rephrasing might ameliorate his confusion: “I am not struck by the superb capacity of private companies to manufacture consumer gadgetry, versus the capacity of governments to produce schools.”

My hypothesis could be wrong, of course; bad ideas might have nothing to do with verbal fluency. There are, after all, plenty of excellent writers whose principal ideas are not obviously wrong. But I suspect that some people’s capacity for self-deception is enhanced by their falling in love with their own (literary) voice.

What is the objective basis for morality? The answer isn’t “God”.

Since I view the existence of God as highly unlikely, God as moral arbiter seems similarly unlikely. Many people are perturbed by this; indeed, many reject atheism partially because they perceive nihilism to be the inevitable result—which, even if true, is simply an appeal to consequences.

But suppose we stipulate to the existence of God. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make moral questions much easier. For how are we to know the Divine Will? God rarely speaks on such matters. Prayer isn’t much good, since even prayerful people disagree. And the holy books of the world both disagree and have spotty coverage at best.

Let’s consider the most popular holy book, the Bible. Even the many Biblical laws don’t cover all the possibilities, and it’s ambiguous to boot. Thou shalt not kill—really? Even in self-defense? There’s plenty of killing in the Bible, of course; the sixth commandment is better rendered as Thou shalt not murder, but that simply begs the question: What, exactly, is murder? In other words, when is killing justified?

It’s justified when people work on the Sabbath, it turns out, and, as a result, nobody really believes in the entirety of Biblical law anyway. (How many Jews or Christians actually support the prescription in Exodus 31:15?) So, on what basis can we accept some laws (proscribing murder and theft, say), but reject others (death to adulterers and Sabbath-workers)?

No, morality isn’t easy, even if God exists.

I’m recovering, but slowly. And since blogging was the first thing to go, it’ll be the last thing to return. Still, I feel bad for not blogging more, especially for such a young blog. I’ll start posting at least once a week starting tomorrow.