Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Coffee, afternoon,
Daley Plaza, Picasso,
Kids laughing, sliding.
Tired, harried lawyer
Walking fast, shirttail half out.
Thirty years, for this?
Hipster, purple shirt,
pinstripe pants, too young to know,
He can get fired too.
Young women. Skirts. Shorts.
Bare legs. Thighs. Knees. Calves. Ankles.
Here, there, everywhere.
Non-leftists spend a lot of time these days telling leftists that the leftists are “elitist.” Leftists usually respond with something like this:
But somehow these born-into-wealth aristocrats get away with calling people who advocate for, say a living wage, or universal health care, or decent public education “elites.”
Translation: We leftists are not elitist because we do things for the economically non-rich that we leftists believe to be in the best interest of the non-rich. Elitists only do things that leftists believe to be in the interest of the rich.
By the leftist definition of elitism, we could live in an absolutist, hereditary aristocracy and still not have an elitist government as long as the aristocrats made decisions that, in the opinion of leftists, benefited the poor.
The leftists are wrong. Elitism isn’t defined by who benefits, elitism is defined by who decides.
I started this post as a comment to Dan’s previous post but it grew overly long so I decided to make it a separate post. Dan asked an important question:
…do people of this generation or people in general seem to show more pride in today’s era than in past eras? Or do you think I am noticing something that isn’t there?
Most of the world’s traditional religious and secular moral systems view pride as the most dangerous emotion. Modern research bears this out. I think the dynamics of modern life make us very prone as individuals to rationalize our unearned pride.
There’s something primal about play: it’s instinctual, it’s intuitive, it puts us in the moment.
And it’s where we learn competition and collaboration, strategy and spontaneity, bluff and honor — “poker face” and “fair play” alike.
Once you start thinking of play as a significant category in its own right – not just as what kids can do with their free time, but as the very essence of freedom – correlations between games and current affairs take on a whole new coloration. From a Jungian perspective, you might say that our play time strikes an archetypal chord in us: it carries profound and generally unrecognized meaning.
Our games are as close as peace can get to war, while remaining peace – and when the whole wide world plays games, our feelings can get mightily involved.
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I also think, for similar reasons, that it’s important to notice when games and play meet religion.
Back when I was Editor-at-Large for The Cursor, a magazine for game designers, I wrote a piece which was the featured article in their April 1997 issue under the title “Doom Goes to Church” — (there’s a version titled Games Lamas Play still available online). Edward Castronova recently hosted a discussion of “virtual communion” on Terra Nova – and just a couple of days ago, Lisa Poisso posted an interview with a Lutheran pastor titled When WoW meets real-world religion on WoW Insider.
I am reminded …
And Hesse’s contemporary, the historian Johan Huizinga, tells us something of the power of sacred play when he writes in Homo Ludens:
But with the end of the play its effect is not lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a wholesome influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community until the sacred play-season comes round again.
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So when I read yesterday that the Commonwealth Games scheduled to take place in New Delhi in ten days had been threatened by the “Indian Mujahideen” who recently attacked the Jama Masjid, I was concerned at the volatile mix of games and religious warfare on the world stage.
I was particularly struck by the jihadists’ phrasing, “We will now rightfully play Holi with your blood” – a reference to the Spring festival of Holi, in which Hindus douse one another playfully in colored water in memory of a devotee named Prahalad, until they are literally and metaphorically awash in the “colors of devotion”. The jihadists consider their Hindu fellow-countrymen to be “Indian idol-worshippers”
Also relevant, it seems to me, is this ruling on India’s equivalent of the disputed Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem — the Ayodhya Babri mosque / Ram Janambhoomi dispute:
Indian Court Delays Ruling on Mosque Site
India’s Supreme Court on Thursday postponed a ruling on whether Hindus or Muslims would control the country’s most disputed religious site.
A lower court had been scheduled to issue a verdict on Friday, and the Indian government had issued national appeals for calm. The case involved the site of the former Babri mosque, which was destroyed by Hindu activists in 1992, sparking riots that killed about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. The Supreme Court’s intervention came in response to legal appeals arguing that the mosque ruling could incite a new wave of violence as India is preparing to play host to the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi for two weeks starting Oct. 3.
We can only watch and pray.
In the past ten months there has been measured progress in the Afghan National Security Force (ANSF); in quality as well as quantity. Since last November, NATO Training Mission Afghanistan has supported the Afghan Ministries of Interior and Defense to recruit, train and assign over 100,000 soldiers and police, an incredible feat. To achieve this, the training capacity was increased, moving from under 10,000 seats for police training alone to almost 15,000.
William Caldwell (Small Wars Journal)
The NGO community in Afghanistan has grown into an industry where a large part of aid budgets is spent on security, and money gets frittered away on pointless projects. Afghans are becoming increasingly skeptical about the foreign organizations that are supposed to be rebuilding their country.