The choice of a shipwreck survivor: to clump as much of the floating detritus together, and attempt to survive in the current place for as long as possible, or to assemble a few choice pieces, and start oaring for the shipping lanes in the the distance. A difficult choice. Much would hang on whether the folks likely to make themselves present are there in the context of rescue, or finishing off the survivors.
(Incidentally, that's another bit of flagrantly violating basic norms that seems to be the norm. I was puzzled as to why everyone wasn't talking about how much damage was being done to post-WW2 international norms and laws in the last few years, but then I realized that everyone involved was either working for one of the sides, or hoping to make it into the cadre of the working. Additionally, since the law of war (and law of the path to war) is being talked about much more than it is being adjudicated, it's become a given that one's own country is faultless -- simply the practice of honest client advocacy. In short, many of the old norms have simply been disregarded in this free, populist, television-legitimated, unilateralist approach to foreign conflicts, and the post-WW1 norms, i.e., the basic statements of decency shaped after the catastrophe that defined the end of European aristocratic rule, are now in danger as well. Perhaps there will be an exception carved out for global superpowers acting unchallenged, perhaps somehow under qui tacet consentire videntur. But it's dangerous to make the limitation on state war crimes a fuzzy equitable boundary. These laws that are being erased in boom times might result in a few rogue swinging booms down the road.)
One of my foundational educational experiences was learning constitutional law in Indiana. (Between Indiana and Yeshiva, I have basically the full red--blue spectrum of American legal thought.) The professor, an elderly, honorable fellow who had drafted the state constitution and volunteered on the side with the local public defender's office, made a point on occasion of showing where, even when courts made good law, in their effort to make good law, the actual facts of the matter were sometimes disregarded. One example was the Kennedy's institutionalization of their daughter (not much constitutional law made, admittedly, but somehow it was germane to the legal standards we were talking about.) Apparently, she was quite sane, but the political influence of her family managed to obscure that fact, and the court simply made good law based on false facts. So, you can can have a country with good laws and honorable precepts, but still, when political power chooses, the necessary manipulations can be made. A salutary warning for those of us getting the tar kicked out of us by influential folks, perhaps. And also a more conceptual warning that when the laws (and by extension) the politics are too beautiful, the underlying facts might be drifting further and further away.
The philosophical genius of the rightly treasonous continental cabal in Philadephia was Locke. Consider the phrase "we hold these truths to be self-evident." This is not simply a marker of emphasis. Locke said that there were two kinds of truth -- the deep, transcendental truths that required some thinking about, and were greater than any one person, and then the things that were simply self-evident. Essentially, in speaking about self-evident aspects of liberty, the Founders are steering us away from the swelling patriotic rhetoric that so often served the European tyrant. It is a loyalty to the obvious, and it works best when being spoken about in plain terms. The swelling rhetoric that used to fill the orators' speeches has its correlatives in the war theme music on the television channels.
My only contact with the primary political legitimation of modern politics, the television networks, comes in the morning at the gym, usually before dawn, between weight sets, when I glance at the lines of televisions in front of the treadmills. Virgil was, from all tellings, a great enchanter of ancient Rome. He caused to be built, in the basement of the Capitol, a room of statues, one from each province of the empire. To each, a bell was attached, and when the bell from one of the statues rang, rebellion was simmering in that province. Basically, as I glance up at the array of the political spectrum, I'm looking for any bells. (Usually, when I see them, I read the Times a bit more closely, but they've stopped sending me absurdly cheap promotional subscription offers, so I've shifted to the Guardian.)
In the same section of Chambers Book of Days from which I gleaned that, there is the anecdote of how the Capitol came to ruin. Strange adventurers appeared, with tales of gold, enough to make the golden age -- and it was all buried beneath the Capitol. They convinced the Romans to let them dig deep underneath (deep/self-evident is the thought being referenced here, to make it explicit), and once the Capitol's foundations were undermined, it slowly collapsed.
One of my greatest regrets about the destruction of my library during PhD work from improper asbestos abatement was the loss of my copy of Chambers. It was ex libris from one of the northern universities, Aberdeen, I think. First edition -- very inexpensive, a very lucky acquisition via the UK used books website. And Robert Chambers was a northerner, I think. (Resisting the impulse to ask the Google AI whether that's true, as a fellow having a good conversation over tea at his country house might resist the impulse to call in his empirically-minded secretary to check a fact mid-conversation. The beauty of the thought is what sustains the conversation.) Incidentally, the piece listing the English country house opera seasons in the Times (non-paywalled) a day or two ago was quite envy-inducing. One pines for things of beauty.
The weekend read is very rewarding. From a priest author at a UK university, whose homilies I've heard dozens and dozens of mornings, but the work he's describing sounds even more extraordinary. Particularly to a theatre fellow who is currently working through Hegel's Logics. But not only does NYPL not hold the English translation, but the libraries they're connected to (Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, et al.) seem bereft as well. Odd, as it's a major theological work. Might have to get creative -- I must read this book (these volumes).
So, then, to return to the moral quandary of the shipwrecked one that began this run of thought. Adrift, quite wet, cold, becalmed. To assemble as much of the beauty of the present place as possible, or to set out on a vector for the trade lanes. Well, the American option of the two seems clear, even if my mind is much more on Hegel than Locke these days.
In one of his early essays (obscure, not later anthologized), Dewey, who was trained in (St. Louis, un-alloyed) Hegel, before moderating his tone in line with the Bostonians, criticized one of the works from a reigning Oxford philosopher:
Mr. Wallace is more serious and thorough-going in his methods than Jowett was; but there is the same occasional complete inconsequence, the same occasional sacrifice of ideas to the needs of clever statement, and the same undercurrent of feeling that it is hardly worthy of an English gentleman and scholar to be too anxious about definiteness and precision in thought.
We pine for the beautiful, but then we drift further and further from the shore, from the sure. Make your course for the way things are.