Nuance

Famed 20th century journalist, H.L. Menken, wrote “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”

We see the truth of the “sage of Baltimore’s” words every day these days as the Executive Branch of our national government offers yet another simple—and erroneous—fix to an incredibly complex and bedeviling challenge facing our country and the world.

Take the so-called “zero tolerance” approach to undocumented entry by non-citizens into the US…please!

Seriously, if there’s anything we ought to have “zero tolerance” for it’s the idea that there is a single one-size-fits-all-no-compromise way of dealing with immigration policy, especially one that results in the moral horror of children being separated from their parents who are simply doing what good parents have always done: taking whatever steps are necessary in their minds to provide a better life for their kids!

Instead of examining the root causes of why so many people are willing to make a treacherous journey from their home countries with the slim hope of finding safety and security in a foreign country that, ironically, was built on this very promise (but now, is rejecting that heritage out-of-hand), America’s demagogic “leader” proclaims that there is one and only one way to deal with the issue, as if simplistic stipulations alone were enough to solve problems whose causes are a result of myriad factors and forces with historical, economic, and social dimensions.

Einstein said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them;” that would be particularly apt in this case, except that it’s not obvious that any thinking whatsoever has been employed in crafting this “solution” to the problem.

Remember nuance?  Remember how authentic leaders like Jimmy Carter or Vaclav Havel or even, believe it or not, George H. W. Bush, recognized that sophisticated problems require even more sophisticated responses?

Nowadays, of course, “sophisticated” is a pejorative; oddly enough, a rather nuanced judgment in itself.

Ascetic

Humanity can be divided into two categories: people who wear hats and people who don’t.

Point being: generalizations are arbitrary and not all that illuminating; you can divvy up the world into any number of binary distinctions; the differences will allow you to sort, but the sorting won’t really tell you anything of substance.

Nevertheless, there may be something of value to take from noticing that people’s tastes and inclinations do fall, more or less, along a continuum between asceticism at one end and hedonism at the other.  There are those, in other words, who are disposed more towards self-denial and those whose preference is for self-indulgence.

This is not to suggest that one approach is superior to the other; it is, however, to acknowledge that, given a choice of dinner entrees, some percentage of the population will order the full meal, while some other faction will decline to put in a request at all.

I believe I lean towards the ascetic side; it’s not that I don’t take pleasure in pleasure; rather, it’s that, to some extent, my most pleasurable experiences are not those that produce the most pleasure.  Of course, if that’s the case, then those that don’t do, thereby revealing the contradictory nature of this state of affairs. 

Suffice it to say, I’ll happily take an unpeeled carrot and a shot of rye neat; save the ortolan and Singapore Sling for that outgoing person at the other end of the bar.

The late great Anthony Bourdain embodied the attitude and behavior of the pleasure-seeker; it’s harder to find cultural archetypes of the ascetic sensibility; maybe the Dalai Lama qualifies, but I’ll also take former supermodel, Kate Moss, whose famous quote, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” seems like it captures the paradoxical quality of asceticism’s appeal.

It also highlights the key point that asceticism is different than self-denial; ascetics don’t not do what they want to; they just don’t do what they don’t.