Let's hear from the spleen.

There's a woman I have known for a number of years, and the odd thing about her is that while she has changed many things about herself, she has herself remained unchanged. I'm not sure that's a good thing. 

In a way it shows consistency, but it may be of the hobgoblin-of-little-minds variety. I am not without any respect for her, so I'll say it's somewhere in between consistency and a failure to learn.

Everything about her seems to have changed in many ways, including attitudes, religions, politics, dietary preferences, work ambitions, and on and on, but they're all keyed into the fact that she is ruled by the heart. Intellectually it looks like she's all over the map -- and not a well-drawn map either -- but emotionally I think she's straight as an arrow, following a rule of kindness and love. It seems to me that without the intellectual virtues of prudence and justice, this kind of compass can lead to horrible whimsical decisions, and also hatred for those who get in its path, ending in destruction and misery. 

Then again, my wife thinks I am a logical person, and I've heaped my buffet plate with my share of destruction and misery too. So who knows what's best?

And yet whenever someone uses that aggressively stupid expression "The heart wants what it wants," I chime in with "Could you at least please give the head a vote?"

They might be better off if they polled all the organs, in fact, rather than just cave in to whatever that ignorant thumping dumdum in the chest says all the time. I'm sure the other organs might have interesting counsel. Like:

STOMACH -- "I don't care. When do we eat? Not now? In a little while? How about now? Not yet?"

GENITALIA -- "Who? That person? That GORGEOUS SEXY THANG? YES! LET'S GO! LET'S -- What? We're just here to compare home equity loans? DANG wake us when its over."

LUNGS -- "This nonsense leaves me breathless, although everything does in time. On that note, don't listen to the genitals. They just want to get into everyone's pancreas."

Pancreas: "Hardy har har, lungs."

LIVER -- "I'm just sick of this behavior. I always have to clean up your stupid mistakes, whether it's the Beer Pong World Championships or the Nuclear Wings Cookout or the gas-station nigiri. How about we just say no to everything for a couple of weeks and let me catch up?"

KIDNEYS -- "We are down with Liver on this, as we are with many things, and for the same reason -- we always have to deal with the fallout. Sorry to rain on your parade. Don't even ask Bladder; he never says anything unless he's all full of himself.”

LARGE INTESTINE -- "I think I speak for my partner Smalls when I say we are just flushed with relief. It bowels us over. Let's move on with this decision right away."

SPLEEN -- "What do I think? I think I'm furious, that's what! And if I don't start doing some venting, there's gonna be trouble around here!"

ISLETS OF LANGERHANS -- "Well, gee, thanks for asking! After all, I'm not really an organ, just a group of pancreatic cells, but since you -- Hey! Where're you going?"

Dog walking and the limits of book learning.

Bear with me on this one.

I've been reading a famous essay by the late Michael Oakeshott called "Rationalism in Politics"---reading may be too strong a verb, as working through may be more accurate. I have absorbed this much: that Rationalism is different from Logic, although both spring from the well of Reason (Man's capacity for deduction and inference). Rationalism produces what Oakeshott calls technique, the insidious notion that by reducing human experience to a technological experience is it easily taught and absorbed by intelligent people. In other words, that you can learn anything from a properly crafted book of instructions.

Oakeshott takes great pains in disabusing us of that idea, but I knew all about it in grammar school. I was going to a birthday party in a bowling alley and had never bowled before, so I got a book out of the school library about bowling and read it. I couldn't wait to demonstrate my skill. Got down there and threw balls straight into the gutter all day. (There were no gutter bumpers for kiddies back then.)

We think of technique as the mass of little skills an individual develops at a task, but Oakeshott used the word in almost the opposite sense---of the most basic requirements to performance. All woodcarvers had to know X to carve wood competently; X is the technique. Y is everything the woodcarver really needs to know to do a decent job. It is the sum of knowledge in the field, developed from experience and tradition, and is essentially unteachable in books.

Like how to not throw the ball into the gutter when you're seven years old and you've never held a bowling ball before. I still know the technique of throwing a hook, a curve, a straight ball, but they seldom go where I expect them to.

Knowledge is complicated, and anyone who says he can reduce all you need to know to an easy-to-learn system is a liar. That's why we have a learning curve -- and why it is so steep, it sometimes feels like a perpendicular wall.

Take dog walking. Logic might say that walking three dogs is three times as difficult as walking one dog. But experience teaches that it depends on a million things. These guys in the picture were all older dogs, well trained, good disposition, familiar with the terrain, and were led by a lady who knew what she was doing.

Whereas my puppy is bigger than all three of them combined and would have been fighting every inch so he could sniff every bit of the street. He has a great disposition but he's crazy for fun and forgets what he's learned when he gets excited. When it comes to dogs, I have been a fly on the windshield of my learning curve.

Oakeshott's upshot in "Rationalism in Politics" is that we're being led by people who think they can read a book and govern a great nation, generally beginning with the idea that everything that has gone before must be cleared away so a great new era of grand new ideas may begin. How's that working out for ya?

Interestingly, Oakeshott died in 1990, a year before the first of the long-running "For Dummies" series of books was published. I wonder if he knew they were coming, and that's what killed him? I wonder if a bunch of our elites in D.C and its environs have copies of Governing for Dummies shoved under their mattresses?