Before conclusions

We have no reason to believe that we are living in the end times. None.

Get out your Bible, painful though it may be, and read Matthew 24. Stick with it at least through verse 36. See? No one knows the date. The angels don't know; only God the father knows. Only Him.

This gets on my nerves as much as anything else my brothers and sisters in Christ get up to. "We can tell from the signs that we're living in the end times!" No, we can't. We fit what we notice into Biblical teachings, but that's no different from seeing animal shapes in the clouds. Partly it's how our brains are wired, and partly we do it for the thrill. And sometimes we do it with a conscious agenda of lighting a fire under sluggish Christians, which is probably the worst motive of all.

The end will come when it comes. Our job is to live as though we expect it one second from now. But we have zero, and I mean zero, and let me underscore zero, rational basis for saying it'll be in the next year, next ten years, in our lifetimes, or even in this millennium. If Christ tarries until the year ten thousand, that's His call. So enough with the scraped up solemnity and suspense over the end times. Really; enough already.

Toward justice

I just was treated to a bad argument that I enjoyed enormously. And I don't mean "enjoyed" in the sense of belittling it, but rather that I wanted badly to agree with it, and wished that it weren't such a bad argument. I'm putting it here just so I can come back later and marvel at its damaged beauty:

Juries and judges in capital cases should be instructed that if the defendant is sentenced to death, the sentence is carried out, and the defendant is subsequently proved innocent, then the judge and the entire jury will be put on trial for murder.

Wow. Terrible reasoning, but I love it. Why oh why can't it make sense?

Along sidelines

I have to confess that I don't get cheerleading, and in particular competitive cheerleading. Cheerleading originally had as its purpose whipping up the crowd so the players could feed off their excitement and play harder as a result. The fact that cheerleading is itself a competitive sport seems absurd to me. Often, the cheerleaders ride to the contest site in fifteen passenger vans, so should we make fifteen passenger van driving a sport? Have van drill teams? Have the drivers do ballet moves as they climb out of the van and close the door with the perfect measure of loudness, calibrated down to the last decibel? That doesn't seem any less silly to me than judged cheerleading contests.

More importantly, it strikes me that the move in this direction is one symptom of a very serious sickness in our culture, whether we tag it declining social capital, or alienation, or any of a dozen other labels. At the beginning, cheerleaders interacted with the crowd: they projected excitement and enthusiasm, and they led fans to encourage, vocally, the players on the field. What do they lead now? Some places don't even call it cheerleading anymore; they just call it cheer, as in "cheer camp." And now it's all about performance, all about "we'll leech some of your attention away from the field and show off our dance and gymnastics moves." It's atomized, not collective; it's not about putting fans and athletes together into one cohesive group, but rather about letting fans channel-surf from the game to the dance recital and back again.

I have a niece who's very active in cheer, and I suspect she wouldn't agree with much of this. I know the participants enjoy it, and as a performance style I know it has its fans. So why not completely decouple it from athletic events and stage cheer recitals? Why not give it another name -- "cheerdancing," say -- and go back to actual cheerleading at the games? Then those who turned out for the recitals could make up a community of people who appreciate the performance style, and the actual cheerleaders would return to building up cohesion between players and spectators, and instead of fragmenting and pulverizing, everyone could celebrate what they all mutually enjoyed again.

Following form

So there's this so-called imponderable question that makes the rounds in all the lists: why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets? I've seen various answers -- Cecil Adams said it was to keep their heads warm in open cockpits, while Marilyn vos Savant said it was because they didn't really want to face what they were about to do -- but as far as I'm concerned, the answer is pretty obvious.

Much of Japanese culture is based on 型, pronounced kata, which means the proper way of doing something. They have a proper way to do everything, from wrapping presents to greeting strangers. And when I say that the way is proper, I don't mean that it's normal or typical or expected, because all cultures have a normal way to give a present or offer a greeting. In Japanese culture, there are fine, precise details to those and other tasks, and there's a good deal of pride, and a good deal of cultural capital, available to those who execute them perfectly.

One way this shows up is in wearing the proper clothing for whatever one is doing. To play golf, you must wear golf clothes. To hike, you must have a hiking outfit. If your clothes aren't consciously and carefully matched to your activity, then the activity itself is less worthy, less satisfactory.

Therefore, if you're going to pilot a plane to your country's glory, you've got to be decked out in proper pilot attire. And what do pilots wear on their heads? (Or, what did they in the 1940s?) An aviator's helmet. Kamikaze pilots wore helmets so they would look the part, which is vitally important from one end of Japanese culture to the other.

Against Facebook

This was originally a Facebook note. I posted it to explain why I was cutting back from 400+ friends to about a tenth that many.

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1. My take on communication technology is that balance is everything, and for most folks, there’s a tech-facilitated path that they won’t have an easy time keeping balanced. I see mothers yack on cellphones while ignoring their infants, I see teens who text obsessively and can’t pay attention to their professors or to traffic, and I see my own struggles keeping Facebook in healthy balance. I tend to hover over it and throw unhealthy amounts of the day into it. That’s been behind my decision to shut it down when school is in session for the past few terms. The problem is, that hovering isn’t any healthier during the summer; I need to be productive during the summer, and even when it’s time to relax, I don’t relax very successfully when I’m Facebook-tethered. I’ve never been a smoker, drug-taker or heavy drinker, but the Facebook dopamine squirt gives me trouble, and I’m convinced that the healthiest way to reach balance is to muscle my way to it with no half measures.
2. I take seriously the privacy concerns people are reporting, and I’m very sure we haven’t seen the whole picture. Facebook is not providing all its geegaws as a public service; they are in this to make money, and they are continually working behind the scenes to make it more profitable than it is. Today’s Facebook is effectively already yesterday’s Facebook. While the loss of privacy might seem to be a latent threat, it disturbs me that if it were an active threat and I was at risk, I would have no way of knowing it. I keep my privacy settings fairly tight, but more and more I feel like someone driving on a busy highway who gives the road no more than half their attention; it’s not enough, and I need to drive a lot more defensively.
3. Finally, I’m more or less sure Facebook has passed its peak. More and more people use it less and less, and the bulk of material that’s even marginally interesting comes from a handful of my four-hundred-plus friends. For a while, I thought that was seasonal, but I’m growing more sure it isn’t. What was once pretty robust and enjoyable has become thin gruel, so it’s a good time to cut way back before my expectations are dashed any further.

There are little reasons, little annoyances, that add an ounce or two of pressure on top of the above, but those three are the major driving forces. Because of them, I’ve arrived at a tentative plan to go on a mass un-friending, and cut back only to people in three categories:

• Family
  
• Graduates from my department
  
• A handful of people who were hard to find, and I don’t want to lose again.

Before I do that, I’ll collect a lot of email addresses of other people, just so I have a way to contact them. But it’s time to become one of the low-activity Facebook users and move to using it for a purpose, not just for the sake of using it.