A HUMBLE BLOGGER

why do i blog?

one reason is because, as i found out, writing is hard. it is good brain exercise. even as a prosecutor i do it; i write out everything, my voir dire,opening, directs and crosses of witnesses, my closing.

i don't so much outline police reports as i copy them over in my own words.

i do all this, including blogging, because it forces me to slow down and to think.

it also helps improve my vocabulary.

but, so why not just keep a diary or make this blog non-public? because i would not have the discipline to keep at it in those forms.

every medium of communication has it's own particular psychological effect. we talk in a completely different way than we write.

we email in a different way than the pre-internet equivalent, letter-writing.

when i first started this blog i realized that only by making it public would i be able to keep at it because just knowing that the POSSIBILITY existed that someone might read it (1) made me want to keep it current and (2) made me a little more thoughtful in what i wrote.

for every war-post that i actually publish, for example, i leave another or more in draft.

but god, publishing a public blog makes you humble.

i have now been at it 2+ years so i have a body of "work" to look back on and read over.

i feel so, so passionately about the post-9/11 world and i have tried so hard to think deeply about these issues and write thoughtfully.

but when i go back in my archives and read what i've written i get humble. depressed. sick to my stomach. because i've not written well or persuasively, i've come up with no original thoughts; noone is going to read what i've written and think "god, this blogger, this amateur, is really onto something here!"

i've just finished reading WAR AND PEACE, one of the central conclusions of which is that, human events, even individual histories are determined by a larger something so that events are (1) not determined by anything that we intend, and (2) we cannot even understand them; in fact when we do try to understand evemts with our puny tools like science and logic, we get it all wrong.

i have written passionately, bitterly and angrily about the post-9/11 world. i am a middle aged white male. i am therefore the "angry white male" of stereotype. do i have these views inevitably as a consequence of my demographics?

by all measures, i am a reasonably bright, well-educated individual. i am also viewed as more intelligent than most others by most others. why then, despite all my efforts, and some reading to brace my thoughts, have i been able to come up with nothing--forget original--that even convinces my friends?

am i a modern day babbit, locked in genetic mediocrity, destined by demographics to hold the views that i hold, determined by psychological makeup to feel the necessity of inflicting these views on others?

am i living proof of tocueville's warnings about giving voice to those of such modest gifts that all would be better off if they were left voiceless?

i know that one of the pathognomonic signs of schizophrenia grandiose-type is believing that one is correct and the rest of the world is wrong.

the words of john kenneth galbraith that i read 25 years ago in THE NEW REPUBLIC--a critique of whom i do not remember, that "he has the certainty, not of one who knows, but of one who doesn't know that he doesn't know,"--those words often recur to me.

am i the village idiot with only the idiot's hope that sometimes the village idiot is right?

as epileptic fits are sometimes brought on suddenly when the sufferer hears a particular noise, this bilious catharsis was caused by having read my post on "international federalism" that i posted on june 30, 2002.

i worked weeks on that. i see a doctrinal gap in american foreign policy that i consider dangerous. i tried to provide a new doctrine, something like george kennan's famous "mr. x" article that made containment the doctrine of the cold war.

i've felt so strongly about the need for a new doctrinethat i've emailed real thinkers about it, people like david brooks, richard perle, maureen dowd, charles krauthammer. got no response of course.

i've felt so strongly that i've considered advertising my blog, to get someone to read it--not necessarily "international federalism" but my yell that we need a new doctrine-- in the hopes they'd see what i see or at least be stimulated to do something on their own.

but when i re-read "international federalism" it struck me as just vacuous pretension. i would have been embarassed if i had advertised public occurrences and smart people had read it. re-reading it, i am glad that this blog's readership consists only of lost wayfarers on the information highway.

maybe in the future i can point to the current post when the men in white coats come after me with a butterfly net as proof to them that i "am too!" aware of the nature of my mental illness and am not in need of involuntary hospitalization.

but maybe not.


-benjamin harris