Last night I went to Cricketers and ended up having a three hour long conversation with a maintenence worker from Pittsburgh who's married to an elementary teacher and working on a criminal justice degree. It was one of those conversations that forcefully reminds you that there are millions and millions of good people wandering around, and if you wait long enough you'll run into a them.

Here's a 300-pound, 6-4, 45 year old straight man talking about how much he loves his wife and his kids and how he quit a more lucrative job in Pennsylvania and moved down here so he could spend more time with them. He kept talking about how much he loves his lesbian sister and gay cousins (After a few jello shots, he said contemplatively, "Life's hard enough just being heterosexual. I don't get why some people need to be heterosexuals who run around hating everyone.") We sipped beers and watched the Devil Rays game (against the Diamondbacks; we won 11-4, 10th win in a row, a franchise record) and chatted about Michigan. I hope I run into Dave again.

My politics, while totally inchoate and probably not enough based on things I read or experience, are still important to me. I often find myself caught between thinking that politics is purely a matter of culture and a vague belief that humans' innate moral sense trumps all under certain circumstances.

How do you account for John Brown's storming of slaveholder states' arms depots? Cognitive dissonance? People can sustain belief- say, belief in the immorality of slavery- in the face of counterarguments forever without performing suicide missions on behalf of one view or the other.

Some think moral belief acts as a corrective for inefficient or unequal economics: to continue with John Brown, the South's economic structure was inherently wasteful. For one thing, the watchmen required watchmen. For awhile slavery entailed a severe shortage of industrial labor and artisans, making it dependent on the North for manufactures goods. I'll bet to some this sort of situation provides enough of an explanation for Brown's sorties.

I don't buy it, though.

"The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations."