The human mind works by association. One thought leads to another.

In formal logic, we connect premises. In other words, we see what happens when two premises have a common term (the same subject or same predicate). If so, logic tells us, we may be able to discover something interesting about the other (the unconnected) terms. Of course, this discovery only happens when one premise has the same term as the other. The common term serves as the “bridge” between premises.

We mentally build bridges between thoughts all the time. If our intellectual world was filled with random statements, unassociated in any way, we couldn’t build anything. Our mental world would be like a stack of bricks without mortar ... it couldn’t stand up.

Ideas need to be associated. Stories do the job.

A story connects ideas … not to mention emotions, feelings, facts, events, previous convictions, perceptions, and so on. Our entire mental awareness is a result of complex associations. Stories connect all of our mental contents into a manageable pattern. Stories make the world make sense.

Morality requires making sense of complex events and how they affect people. So, morality often depends on story.

OK, let's concede the obligatory disclaimer, that when you pass a law (especially one as large and complex as ObamaCare), it makes sense to inform the public what exactly has changed. If the government passes a law about nuclear waste disposal, only a few people need to know about it. But with a massive law affecting one sixth of the economy, everyone needs to know what the changes are.

Fine. Disclaimer done.

However, it strikes me as exceedingly arrogant to sign a PR deal promoting a law that is under constitutional review by the Supreme Court, and may very well get struck down. Maybe they thought they could fill in the details later, letting the information campaign take shape after the SC review, in case the Court upholds but alters the law. Maybe.

More likely, this is just another case of Obama arrogance ... we won, we're doing things our way, criticism be damned.

You may have heard of them last week. They're the group that runs the school that forfeited a baseball game rather than face a team that had a girl on it.

Note the headline: Phoenix Catholic school ...  well, not entirely.

Excellent article. Weigel gets at the heart of it when he identifies the state as one, but not the only (or even the supreme) social institution in American life.

American government was described by the fable of three independent landowners, who discover a swamp growing on their property. They hire a servant to solve the common problem. Never do they turn over their property to the servant, nor do they install the servant as a collective master over them. Instead, they give servant has a specified job to do, and that's all he's allowed to do.

Government is the servant who addresses specified common problems at the behest of citizens. When the Constitution enumerated what the servant was allowed to do, that didn't make the servant master of us all. The servant played a role; an important role, a crucial role, to be sure - but not the only or even the supreme role. 

When government tells churches what qualifies as a ministry, they're servants who think they control everything. But we need to remind them to get back to the swamp.

No, that's way too simplistic. There are lots of reasons for the drop, and politics is hardly the major one. 

Besides, the Jesuits' public persona was highly political long before the dropoff started occurring in haste around Vatican II. If people were repulsed by left-wing politics, you wouldn't have seen that bottom drop out all at once like it did, since the political stance hadn't changed much at all. 

Maybe. But I'm holding on to the idea that the Catholic laity aren't meek little sheep. They're fully aware, and some of them can stand toe-to-toe with any cleric.

And ... the bishop is still the religious authority. That's why they give him the big stick. So long as the school claims to be Catholic, whether it's run by lay people or ordained clergy, the bishop is still ultimately responsible for what's taught.

The big difference (I think) is that clergy take a vow of obedience. The bishop can command a cleric's conscience in a very powerful way. (After all, a cleric goes celibate precisely to serve the church at the command of the bishop; why surrender so much if you're not going to serve and follow commands?)

Lay people have a "charism" all their own. It's different than a vowed cleric, but it's no less filled with grace.

Maybe the church, as a whole, needs to make some adjustments to lay leadership of traditional Catholic institutions. After all, experience shows it's not an automatic "evolution."

There's a dimension of this that needs reflection.

Yesterday I spent the day with my best friend, a Jesuit who is stationed elsewhere but who's visiting in-province for a couple weeks.

He confirmed that the rank-and-file Jesuits are all over the board, some supporting, some against. But he said something that really caught my attention. Except for the Campus Minister, none of the Georgetown administration is a Jesuit. A few years ago, you had a Jesuit president, a Jesuit provost, and so on. Now, they're all lay people. Of course, Georgetown’s been “liberal” for years, even when actual Jesuits were leading it.  

But for the most part, all of these administrative decisions were made by lay people.

If the Catholic archbishop of Washington, DC wants to object to Georgetown’s direction, he won’t be making his complaint to the Jesuit residence where he can invoke obedience. Of Georgetown's Board of Directors (30+), only 5 are Jesuit, and two of those live overseas. The same holds true for most Catholic schools.

So here’s a question … how do you hold lay Catholics accountable?

I'm all in favor of this, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm curious. Why bother with a lawsuit that the Supreme Court is going to decide anyway ... in a few weeks? Is this protection against the possibility that the Supreme Court might allow too much wiggle room?

If the Court strikes down the mandate, the game is won. But if the Court upholds the mandate, this suit seems superfluous. So, what's the strategy here?

This is a job for ... [dramatic pause] ... Christie.

Polygamy’s the other side of the SSM debate.

Marriage has traditionally had two purposes. The first is to formalize the relationship between the spouses, and the second is to formalize the procreation of children. (Awkward way to phrase that, but it’s Monday morning – cut me a break.) Neither purpose is sufficient. Both are necessary. Unless you have both, you don’t have the fullness of what we consider marriage.

• Same-sex marriage drops procreation from the marriage definition. Although two gays can raise a child, they can’t procreate together. The fact that the child comes from the married spouses is important. It matters. But to have SSM, we’d have to drop that from the marriage definition. (I'd vote not to.)
• The argument for polygamy, on the other hand, does exactly the opposite. It’s what happens when procreation is considered the only (or superior) purpose for marriage. The wife and child are taken care of, but the husband never pledges to forsake all others. The spousal relationship is not equal to procreation.

Our culture insists on both, as equal. I'd like to leave it that way.

Well, I know that I've broken ... um ... um ....

Don't take this the wrong way, EJ, but it occurs to me that this is like a job application when the interviewer asks you what your greatest fault is. (Now we all know that we should never admit such things, so it's just an idiot test. The correct answer is "I sometimes just work too damned hard.")

For all our friends listening from the FBI, I want to say happy Saturday, and that gosh, I can't think of a single thing ... except maybe I was too loud  in celebrating our American way of life.

I'll say the obvious. Carson was funny. And he knew funny.

Several comedians have talked about how fulfilling their lives became because Johnny waved them over to the couch after their standup. Then the comedians would tell that Johnny would give them advice. The advice was always the same: more jokes. 

Boy, I wish they'd take that advice today. I'm bored with snark, bored with attitude, bored with edginess ... more jokes.

If I want politics, I'll watch Krauthammer. If I want philosophy, I'll read Quine. If I want social criticism ... I'll write something myself.

When I watch a comedian, I want jokes. I want to laugh. More jokes. 

We used to have 3 TV stations. Now we have an infinity of them ... and still can't find anything to watch. I think the same dynamic is likely to overcome "social media" also.

A couple years ago, I started on Facebook. I happened to catch up with a lot of friends from grade school and high school, and I enjoyed meeting them all over again. But the interest didn't really last.

See, when I was going to school or playing football or hanging out at parties with those people, I was sharing life. We were going through experiences together. Facebook isn't an experience. You can't share it. Talking about your recent experience to others isn't itself an experience. So, you're not really sharing life. You're sharing notes about life.

I'm convinced that after all the technology comes and goes, all the fads and IPOs, the fun in life will always remain sharing life with real, live people.  Nothing can replace that. 

I posted this elsewhere, but it also belongs here. Not all of the Jesuits agree with Georgetown's decision. Here's a particular favorite Jesuit with his response.

So, not only will it be an interesting fight between university and diocese ... but the fight inside the Jesuits looks pretty fun as well.

The state of war is not the same thing. In the war "theme," one's gain can only come at another's loss. Not so in a market. A war is a zero-sum game, but a market isn't. 

OK. That helped.

The answer (or my answer, anyway) is found by looking at a market. In a market, each individual seeks his own self-interest. Players in the market aren’t angels. They look for the maximum return from the minimum contribution.

Is a single expert (call him a “market king”) capable of knowing what the correct price would be? No, he’s as ignorant about it as everyone else. Then how do decisions get made, if no one knows anything? The trick is to structure a market to produce equilibrium between self-interests. The decisions happen naturally.

In Hobbes’ formulation, someone has to have knowledge. It can either be the masses (fat chance) or a king (the Leviathan).  But from markets, we’ve learned that it isn’t necessary for anyone to know anything, other than their immediate self-interests. The “decisions” come about, all by themselves.

The mistake of liberalism is that government requires someone to have knowledge.

No, it doesn’t.