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Moderation

“To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail.” As I get older and more burdened with experience, I see more people who forget that carrying only one tool in your nail belt limits your capacity to build.

“… moderation is avoiding extremes and choosing the right tools and materials for a task.”

My first clear lesson in carrying tools came when I left academics and became a construction carpenter for a decade. I was raised on a farm and I thought I knew hammers, saws, and the tools of the building trades but I quickly discovered how unskilled, uninformed, and clumsy I was. Experienced carpenters drive nails smoothly with a few swings of the hammer, sometimes sinking a thorn, as they call a smallish nail, with a tap and a single blow.

Not me.

My first day, I saw the lead carpenter staring at me with his hands on his hips, shaking his head, as I flailed away, missing and bending nails. I’m certain he would have sent me home before lunch if I hadn’t been hired by my cousin to help build his house and was paid only pocket money, not a real wage. I stuck with it for nearly a decade and eventually became a certified journeyman carpenter. A hammer became a natural extension of my hand.

I discovered that for seasoned carpenters, driving nails with their hammers was only an opener. Need to loosen a frozen nut and bolt– careful hammer taps will free it faster with less damage than reaving on it with a wrench. Forget the key to the padlock on the gang box? Grab a come-along, run a cable through the hasp, and put a strain on the lock; tap the lock body with your hammer and pop it open in a jiff.

A less obvious carpentry skill is the chef’s “mise en place.” Carpenters are expected to gather up all the tools and materials they need and take them to the task. Taking the wrong tools, dragging along extra tools, or the wrong materials all get a frown from the foreman.

Which brings me to my subject: moderation is avoiding extremes and choosing the right tools and materials for a task.

Rather than ease into it, I’ll dive straight into the mudhole: capitalism in 2025.

In a previous post, I mentioned that Steve Thomason, dean of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, brought up Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts in a discussion group. His question was whether we are on the verge, or in the midst, of a shift? Given current events and moods, the question is apt. The dean mentioned the possibility of a shift away from corporate capitalism.

When I speak against American corporate capitalism, I am a blazing hypocrite. I live off the returns of investments in stocks and bonds. Before I retired, I attended monthly corporate stock analyst briefings, trying to convince them that my employer was worthy of a “buy” rating instead of a neutral “hold” or the dread “sell.” The quality and profitability of our software products were irrelevant if they did not lead to a “buy” rating for the month.

My employer was likely extreme, but reading the business and tech news, I seldom see anything that contradicts my former employer’s model for corporate America.

But I will risk hypocrisy and speak out. Capitalism– the pursuit of profit through the ownership of private property, organized work, and free markets– is the hammer in the American tool belt. The capitalist hammer can accomplish many things and it would be foolish to throw it away. Woe to the carpenters who enter the jobsite without their hammers, but equally benighted is a sliver-picker who tries to cut a rafter with a hammer instead of a skilsaw.

The murder of Heathcare United’s CEO in December and the scores of false alibis that appeared on Facebook is an example of what happens with the wrong tool. The assassin’s point was valid: a for-profit corporation that lives and dies on its share price is the wrong tool for choosing who receives lifesaving drugs and who does not. Share buy and sell orders do not justify innocent death in any morality.

Nevertheless, corporate capitalism is exactly the right tool for efficiently manufacturing consumer products like automobiles and washing machines with desirable features and low prices.

Moderation, choosing tools carefully, is a far better way for a nation to thrive than thrashing away with the wrong tools. The secret is finding the right tool for the job. That is a challenge for every trade and profession. Moderate choices offer better results for all, but blindly sticking to one tool leads to destructive outcomes.

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We Forget So Easily

We forget so easily where we came from, what we are. Here I am, a solid citizen of Whatcom County who has served on a county board, has voted in every election for the past fifty years, and pays plenty of local, state, and federal taxes.

I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would likely themselves be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.

Last week, the sheriff of Whatcom County announced that the department’s role would be “a collaborative partnership in participating in [federal] Task Forces related to criminal activity that affects our community—not immigration enforcement.”

Our attorney daughter pointed out to me that the announcement was unnecessary because it is a foregone conclusion. Local officials who enforce federal law violate the 10th amendment (the states’ rights amendment). Subsequent supreme court decisions have made the separation clear. She cited Prinz v. U.S. 1997 SCOTUS.

The sheriff’s announcement was publicized in Whatcom News, a popular– at least with me– local news source. I was disappointed that the reader comments on the announcement were mostly unfavorable.

For the most part, the commenters confused the roles of local and federal law enforcement, saying that the sheriff was shirking his constitutional duty, when, in fact, he was correctly stating his constitutional role.

I am repeatedly amazed how personal sentiment changes people’s minds. Not long ago, the same folks who favored immigrant deportation and suppression of minority rights were asserting states’ rights against federal protection manifestos. Now, as the federal pendulum swings, states rights are sent to the back of their agenda.

I am also amazed at the changes in my home, Whatcom County. I can remember (just barely, I admit) when church services in both halves of my German and Dutch immigrant family were regularly held in German and Dutch respectively.

I overheard conversations about deportation and internment camps for Germans that my grandparents feared during World Wars I and II.

My grandfather was born in Minnesota, but his parents were both born in East Prussia, Germany. I vaguely recollect hearing that my great grandfather formally became a U. S. citizen in order to get a U. S. passport that would ensure a safe return home after a visit to Germany, probably in the 1920s. However, until then, my grandfather’s citizenship was from his birth in Wells, Minnesota, not his parents’ citizenship.

My grandmother was born in Germany and was never a documented U.S. citizen. Her citizenship derived from her marriage to my grandfather. In today’s parlance, an undocumented immigrant.

It’s likely that if you were to scratch into the family history of anyone whose Whatcom County roots go deeper than the mid-twentieth century you will find undocumented immigrants among their forebears.

As our daughter points out, the difference is that those Whatcom County immigrants were white, not brown. When I counter that a white at the bottom of the social ladder is still at the bottom of the ladder, she frowns and says its easier to climb to the next step if you don’t have to change your skin color; I have to agree.

I wish that the anti-immigrants of today would realize that a hundred years ago, they would themselves likely be the target of their own anti-immigrant mindset.

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Paradigm Shifting

Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark’s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.

Simply mentioning “paradigm shift” brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.

Up until that class reading, I understood science as a steady progression of discoveries starting from formulating a hypothesis, then confirming or disproving the hypothesis with experiments that eventually led to established scientific law; science forever changing as knowledge accumulates, but a gradual incremental process.

Oh how naive that farm boy was.

Kuhn ended that neat scenario. Instead of a steady progression, he amazed me with a series of revolutions from Aristotle to Galileo, on to Newton and Einstein. Each revolution came as an abrupt change following a period of a growing doubt that the reigning paradigm could answer or explain increasingly pressing issues.

I liked the notion of paradigms so much that twenty years later I jumped on the bandwagon to name one the first software products I designed and developed. We called it “Paradigm Trouble Ticketing.”

A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can’t help myself.) During a shift, the obvious and important is in flux, making paradigm spotting difficult while the shift occurs and seldom plain until the dust has settled.

This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.

G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”

I am afraid that America’s “unconscious democracy” is the paradigm that is going by the wayside, destroyed by the 2024 election. I fear that the assumption of equality that sustained the United States for the previous century has been rejected and replaced by faith in oligarchy, government by the wealthy.

We saw it in the conclave of billionaires at the inauguration, we read it in the executive order to abolish the directive against racial discrimination in federal hiring.

But paradigms don’t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don’t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.