160. "Moral hazard"

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With the Greek bailouts and the Wall Street shenanigans we're certainly seeing a lot more references to a "moral hazard" than we did.  

Wikipedia tells us that in economic theory "a moral hazard is a situation where there is a tendency to take undue risks because the costs are not borne by the party taking the risk."

The hazard part is clear.  It's to the party bearing the cost and "hazard" is the right word.  It says to insurers (the people the theory was devised for), "Indemnify people who become more reckless after they're insured and you'll get hurt."  It's like a sign on a hiking path:  "Danger here."

What does "moral" say?  Enough to keep you thinking about it all week.  It seems to say, "These reckless people are immoral."  You hear it and say, "Oh yes, on this path we have physical hazards, falling rocks, and spiritual hazards, decaying ethics."  It's unethical to take chances with other people's money. The word makes recklessness a character fault or, in the old vocabulary, a sin.  And, if the recklessness is deliberate, a grave sin, fraud.

But apparently you'll only hear it say and do that if you are living in the past and are hypersensitive to words.  I say "hypersensitive" because many people now who are sensitive to words in every other connection are not sensitive to this one in this connection.  To the analysts on CNBC "moral hazard" regularly means only "commercial hazard" — on the way, maybe, to just "hazard."  "Moral" is dead, a throw-in.

How did it die?  We learn, from the same Wikipedia article, that for the actuaries who first spoke of this hazard "moral" still "carried negative connotations."  It implied "fraud or immoral behavior."  And we learn that economists of the sixties dropped such connotations in their use of the expression.  "Moral hazard" just referred to "inefficiencies" in the system.  The judgment adjective was dead.

Judgment words are not killed easily.  Would you like to know how it's done?  How to strangle an adjective, like "moral," that has come down to us with so much life?  There's a demonstration right in front of us, in that Wikipedia article.  There we're told that moral hazard, as understood by economists, is "a special case of information asymmetry" in which, most broadly, "the party [to a transaction] with more information about its actions or intentions has a tendency or incentive to behave inappropriately from the perspective of the party with less information." 

See how it's done?  First you quietly make a human being into a "party to a transaction," then you have that party, instead of making a choice, have a "tendency or incentive," and finally you call the result "inappropriate behavior."  "Moral" falls limp but, just to make sure ("inappropriate" does suggest a standard) you note that by "inappropriate" you mean only "from the perspective of the party with less information."  There goes the last twitch of judgment.

Kill the word, though, and you kill the past.  And oh what bodies lie on the field around this one.  Bodies of the judgmental.  There are all the Victorians who thought that if you gave money to the "undeserving poor" (the reckless, the freeloading) you'd encourage bad character.  That was the hazard they saw, and would have called "moral."  There, strangle-marks still on their throats, are all the Protestant preachers who for years had encouraged that view.

And don't I see (hypersensitivity alert!) a lot of other spokesmen for Christian ethics?  In literature?  Isn't that Henry James, the author who spoke to the fictional aunt about to bail out her spendthrift nephew: "I think if he made the debts himself he should pay the debts himself."  And Dante.  Talk about judgment.  Remember the way his underworld judge assigned con artists to their place of punishment: "You.  Fraud.  Eighth Circle.  Next?"  And oh Milton.  Do you think the reckless (his sinners) just show "poor judgment" and should have a second chance?  Remember what God's messenger told Adam after he argues please, please to be allowed to stay in Eden: "Out."  You think you know judges?  Try God.

One thing about those figures from the past, though: if you're a banker trying to slip your shenanigans past the public, you'd better keep them out.  And you'd better damp down the sensitivity that breathes life into them.  They'll get you thrown out of the Garden.  You could wind up in Hell.  But no doubt, with your PR skills, you know what to do.  Or at least where to start: with that damn word "moral" some dumbbell let slip into a perfectly scientific discussion.

159. Baseball Anxiety

    Anxiety in baseball is generated by the fact that the outcome of a game can be determined by such little things.  A catcher turns the wrong way going back after a foul pop, the ball drops, and the batter hits the next pitch over the fence and three runs score.  There's the ballgame.

The thing is, you never know which little thing is going to be a ballgame turner.  Your team scores ten runs in the last three innings who cares that the catcher missed the pop?  But in the preceding six innings you don't know that.  In those innings you see the anxiety of the caring fan, uptight through all those innings the laid-back fan finds dull. Every missed bunt, every failure to move the runner over, every error or balk that lets the other guys do this, can cost you the game.  But you don't know this yet.  So you're anxious.

Now anxiety is a good thing here because without the pain of it you'd never have the pleasure of relieved anxiety, one of the greatest pleasures a fan (maybe anybody?) can feel.  

Who is the most pleasured fan?  The one who knows how much can go wrong with a play, how much damage it can do, how far-reaching the consequences can be. The fan who feels the greatest total pleasure will be the one who has suffered the most on the greatest number of occasions.

This means that many who appear to be having pleasure, those settling back in their seats with their beer and their bratwurst, those watching happily in the sun, or wandering off to the souvenir stand, or doing the wave, are not having pleasure at all.  Not baseball pleasure.  They are not prepared for it, and probably are not capable of it.  They are not anxious.  So they can't experience the great relief.

In the course of a game players have so many chances to relieve a fan's anxiety.  When there are opponents on base every grounder is a thing to worry about.  Handle it and we've got a double play, the threat behind us.  Muff it and we face runners on second and third with just one out.  Things can get out of control so quickly.  The pitcher gets upset, misses his spots, walks, balks, mishandles a bunt and before you know it they have six runs on the board and the ballgame.  All that riding on one ball bouncing toward your rookie shortstop.  Ah, the catch, the flip, the DP, ooooh does that beer you can now sip taste good.

All that is denied the carefree fan.  Carefree fans are like carefree bridge players.  They don't, if you'll excuse me, know what the hell the game is all about.  What games are all about.  Winning.  And that means anxiety.  A game that doesn't generate anxiety in you isn't worth playing.  And it's no more worth watching than a tragedy that doesn't generate anxiety.  (What Aristotle thought a tragedy had to have; he called it "terror.")

I am writing this at a moment of greatly relieved anxiety.  The Reds this year are a team of many weaknesses.  The on-base percentage at the top of the batting order is very low, there's only one really reliable hitter in the clean-up positions, Joey Votto (hitting .342; the highest of the others is Brandon Phillips at .287), the bench (relied on mainly for pinch-hitting) is weak, and the percentage of successful sacrifice bunts must be the lowest in the league.  What has saved them is good pitching.  Very good.  Third best in the league.  With that and Votto they managed to climb into first place and even stay there through eleven games on the West Coast against those tough teams.

Now the anxiety and what raised it so high: we come back from the coast, stay ahead of the surging Pirates by extending our winning streak to six games then boom, Votto gets hurt (lost for 3-4 weeks) and the pitching falls apart.  The Arizona Diamondbacks, who had lost nine of their preceding twelve games, pound us in two of the first three games of the series and through six innings of yesterday's game, leading 6-0.  Seasons can fall apart just as innings fall apart, especially with young teams.  Everybody gets rattled or down on themselves, loses the poise so essential to winning in baseball, and there you go.  It's so easy for a team with a record of losing (only one of the Reds' last eleven seasons has been a winning one) to say, "Here we go again."  And I was afraid that's what I was going to have to say.

So what happens?  The young guys suck it up, Phillips hits a homer in the sixth with two on, hits a double in the seventh that ties it, and rookie Todd Frazier knocks him in with a single.  We lead 7-6.  Sean Marshall masters a two-on threat in the 8th, Aroldis Chapman, great rookie pitcher if he's not wild, comes on and blows away three hitters in the ninth, and we walk off the field with a very rare comeback ("My God, down 6-0 in the sixth? That's a 40-1 chance!") that keeps us in first place.

OK, if you understand that my essential worry was about the character of this team you'll understand my relief.  I've had a good sign that they're not going to fall apart, that they'll keep their poise.  And if you're an experienced fan, the passionate kind, you'll understand that this relief is only temporary and that I know it.  Baseball teaches that things can fall apart at any time and that even if they don't you can still lose — to a team with even better poise, or just more talent.  Full relief, elsewhere called joy, can come only when the season is over ("Call no man happy till he's dead") and, with the Reds, veteran fans know that now we're very unlikely to feel joy.  Odds are we'll never get through a month without Votto, however well the rookies maintain their poise.  Years of baseball teach you to look realistically at the odds.

158. Handling Testosterone: Through the Ages

Is the history of the West just a history of well-handled or poorly handled testosterone? 

If you start with Athens Thucydides makes you think so.  There's Pericles warning his eager countrymen to stay within their walls.  "Wait out the Spartans; they'll smash you if you don't."  There's Alcibiades, coming along with his call for an expedition to Sicily, a call to the blood.  There's the Athenian army, smashed to the ground at Syracuse.

Jump to Queen Elizabeth (preceding Post) because she's such a contrast with Alcibiades.  One after another her eager English lords get themselves to the Continent with what they hope will be a conquering army and she cuts off their funds.  "War costs too much."  What about our honor, our pride?  "Sorry, the loss of it is not worth the loss in lives and treasure."

You can't hear that without thinking of those nineteenth-century British cabinets, finding it "unthinkable" that the Royal Navy "might be deployed and then not used effectively," of the "loss of honor" if "we abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force (Post #157)." Think of sensitivity to honor there and you have to think of France's war party in 1870, unable to bear Prussia's snubbing of their ambassador (same post).  Neither England's queen nor France's emperor could handle that testosterone.

The good handler isn't always a restrainer, of course.  Elizabeth wasn't before the Armada and Wellington wasn't before Waterloo.  "Up Guards, and at them!"  "Once more into the breach..."   "We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the airfields...."

The stronger the let-'er-rip people are the more strength it takes to restrain them.  We're talking about moral strength, social strength, face-to-face strength, Raymond Spruance looking at Bull Halsey and saying, "Keep the planes aboard, we're going back."  In World War I it would have meant saying to generals with armies mobilized at the borders, "Stand down" — what honor prevented every ruler or general from saying at the time.  You know what I hear Elizabeth saying?  "Mobilized, schmobilized.  This is going to cost too much."

And you know, at the end of history I think that she'd have a lot of admiring men around her, the most perceptive men, the men most capable of appreciating conference-room courage.  Bull Halsey and George Patton, men who knew what it took to rebuke them.  "What balls she must have had."

What's the most dangerous kind of testosterone?  No doubt about it: holy testosterone, testosterone serving God, testosterone that wars against Evil.  You have to fear this kind most because it's beyond rational deterrence and it goes all the way.  Serve your country and you take seriously the cost-benefit calculation rational people make before they go to war.   Serve God and you set that aside.  If your opponent is Evil there's no reason to stop short in anything you do to him.  If your God likes martyrdom you can scorn death and even seek it.  Give this kind nuclear weapons and instant massive retaliation means only instant, massive martyrdom.

What kind of testosterone is hardest to handle?  I guess it would be free-floating testosterone, the kind waiting to attach itself to a cause. Poolroom testosterone, the testosterone of the undrafted and inexperienced, is this kind of testosterone.  It's got to show that it's there and as potent as anybody's.  It's hard to handle because it's so diffuse.  Touchy testosterone, the kind honor-conscious ambassadors and generals have, is right in front of you, there at the conference or mobilized at the border.  You can give it orders, as Elizabeth did.  Poolroom testosterone is spread through the country, which, if the country is a democracy, lets it power war parties.  From far in the background.  Who do you give orders to?

It's possible that free-floating testosterone is more dangerous than holy testosterone.  It looks, especially at first, as if symbolic gestures — a carrier sent here, some missiles installed there, a few soldiers landed to show the flag — could satisfy it.  And sometimes, with the right rhetoric, they do.  A feeling of potency is all the boys in the poolroom really want and a show of hardness is often enough to give it to them.  Remember the advantage being "hard on communism" used to give candidates at the polls?  (Or was that just a reflection of what the other candidate's softness cost him?)  Anyway that, in the long decades of the Cold War, was most of the time harmless.  And a lot of it, now, looks comical, politicians walking around perpetually hard just to get the poolroom vote.

The trouble is that sometimes symbol becomes substance, as President Reagan discovered after the force he sent to Beirut was cut down in one explosion.  "You know that 'peace-keeping force' that couldn't really be a peace-keeping force because it exerted no force, the one we sent to show the flag, the symbol of our might?  Well those were real people in that force!  They died!"  And there you have a new and far more difficult reality to deal with.

Viet Nam was far more complicated than Beirut but you don't have to be a Walter Lippmann to see how much of our entry there was pushed by symbol-need, behind which was this vague hard-on-soft-on testosterone need.  Or to see how much testosterone need added to the push, through symbols, that took us into other real quagmires.

"You've gone too far.  There were good reasons to enter Viet Nam and Afghanistan and possibly good reasons to enter Iraq.  And as for your 'poolroom testosterone,' it behooves every country to have a reservoir of male hormones ready to tap.  How, otherwise, will armadas be defeated and holocausts avoided?"

All right, until I can argue in detail I'll say only this about testosterone: that it interferes with the cost-benefit calculations that tell us how to handle it.  And since these are often about life-or-death matters, and always complicated, such interference can be disastrous.  Testosterone should be treated, then, as if it truly is what Michael Gilbert (in The Disposable Male) called it: "the most dangerous chemical in the world."

157. Handling Testosterone: Elizabeth I.

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OK, here's how you do it.  You, ruler of England, have this gung-ho general over in the Netherlands going way beyond his orders.  He's going to put you in a big war in no time.  You're a woman who's not supposed to know much about these things.  You were educated in classical languages, for Heaven's sake, Latin and Greek.  He's been brought up to be a warrior, as were all these bloods around you — Raleigh, Drake, Essex.  What, with them listening, do you say to him?  Here's what, in the next letter by emissary:

We could never have imagined...that a man raised up by ourself and extraordinarily favoured by us...would have in so contemptible a sort broken our commandment in a cause that so greatly touches us in honour....And therefore our express pleasure and commandment is that, all delays and excuses laid apart, you do presently upon the duty of your allegiance obey and fulfill whatsoever the bearer hereof shall direct you to do in our name. Whereof fail you not, as you will answer the contrary at your utmost peril.^[109]

In short, "Bottle it, Leicester."  And did it work?  You bet it did.  Leicester had to stand there while the emissary read out the whole letter, including the above words, before the Dutch Council of State.  That was her commandment.

All right, that's turning off the testosterone.  How about turning it on?  We know (from the preceding Post, #156) how necessary that might be at times.  Here's Elizabeth at a time when the need, by the known circumstances, could hardly have appeared greater: the Spanish Armada is bearing down on England.  A landing is expected at any time.  The troops are gathered at Tilbury, near the coast.  Elizabeth appears before them "wearing a silver breastplate over a white velvet dress."  Imagine yourself a young lord, mounted before your company.  I'm going to keep an eye on your testosterone gauge, male readers, as she speaks:

I am come amongst you as you see at this time, not for my recreation and disport, but being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live or die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honor and my blood, even in the dust.  I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm.

Are you not banging on your shield?  I am.  I, an American in the 21st century.  How much louder, then, will those aristocrats in the age of chivalry, looking there at the frail woman who needs their protection, be pounding. 

Now, the intelligenc.  It's easy, with Elizabeth, to miss the full range.  You already know that she was hard as nails.  She had to be, right from the beginning.  Declared illegitimate, imprisoned, her life threatened, she comes, at the age of 23, to the throne of an England torn by faction and plagued with plots, many against her.  Her world, the one she learned to survive in, is not just "a man's world" in the sense that every important world before recent times was a man's world; it's "a man's world" in the sense that expression has when we rebuke somebody for their illusions.  "You expect pity on Wall Street? at the bank? from NATO?  Those are real worlds, free of sentiment — you know, free of what women are always bringing in."

We have Elizabeth, then, walking into a man's world and playing the game played there realistically and coolly and, yes, ruthlessly.  Threaten her throne and she, though not quick to do it, will take off your head.  It's not surprising then that, in the crowd of medieval and renaissance women, she, for feminists, stands out like a giant.  She was no poor-little-me-needing-protection. 

"But wasn't she a poor-little-me before her knights at Tilbury?" 

Of course, but that was no slide back into old roles, that was a move in the game, a very powerful one, and it showed her resourcefulness.   Got some knights?  Use them.  Tap that testosterone.  You can say she' s using feminine wiles but you can't say she's backsliding, no more than you can say that a female reporter who bats her eyes at a male Congressman to get an interview ahead of a male reporter is backsliding. That's the way the game is played.  It's a man's world, you work every angle, and the female reporter is never more of a "man" than when she bats her eyes.

156. If Smart Women Ran Countries

"If rulers are smart what do you care whether they're men or women? Don't smarts give you all you want?"

They would if it weren't for hormones.  The male one, testosterone, can make a difference.  Not much, maybe, if a ruler is really smart, but in the choices that matter most, the ones that take a country into war, often there is very little difference between the choice that leads to ruin and the one that leads to safety.  I fear that squirt of testosterone that will push rulers the wrong way.

"Yes, and how about when you need that squirt?  Valley Forge.  Gettysburg.  Midway.  How about the Brits' need for it when they stood alone against Hitler?  Don't you wish they'd had more of it when Hitler first moved into the Rhineland?  How many civilized cities have longed for it when the barbarians were at the gates?  Testosterone may bring us disaster but more often it's the only thing between us and disaster."

That's where the smarts come in.  "What do we need here?" the smart ruler asks.  "What does the particular situation call for?"  He doesn't know until he sees how each choice might play out, long-term and short term. If the chance for success (which, this being war, he has to measure against ruin) is high enough, he says, "Release the testosterone!"  The other way round he says, "Bottle it."  Dumb rulers say one or the other without calculation.

"I see.  And you're talking about a calculation that will be testosterone-free?"

As much as it can be.  The choice that turns on the testosterone is best made by somebody free of it.  That's why I think you're safer with a woman running a country. 

"A woman can be free of testosterone and still act as if she has it, especially if voters want to see signs of it.  She can want to be an Iron Lady."

Oh yes, just as low-testosterone men do.  I know that you've got to watch out for people like that.   A ruler faking testosterone can be more dangerous — on television, at a conference — than one simply ruled by it.  The fake can't relax long enough to do the calculations.  But, aside from the occasional fake, and given the smarts, I trust women to do them.  And make better choices than men. 

"With very little in history to go on.  You'll understand if I find your trust rather quick, if not naive."

Maybe you don't understand how limited my trust is, and what a small difference it is based on.  Eliminate all but the critical case.  You're down to the casus belli, the thing that finally justifies going to war — the firing on Sumter, the blowing up of the Maine, the firing on a destroyer in the Tonkin Gulf, the possession of weapons of mass destruction.     Everything depends on the ruler's standard of evidence.  (You know "standard of evidence."  It's what made physicists wait so long before they'd say they'd really found the Higgs boson.  "Chance of error less than 1:3,500,000?  OK, we've got it.")

Do you have the picture?  If so, you're ready for my hormone experiment.  Put two rulers with equal smarts into position to make the final decision on war.  After all the calculations have been made and come out even give one a squirt of testosterone.  Watch his standard-of-evidence-dial.  Woops, there it goes.  Down to 1: 50.  Still going.  1:40. 1:30.  This fellow wants to go to war.

"But that fellow has diplomats, and he himself has to be a diplomat.  Diplomats control their testosterone.   They at least hide it.  And there you are, seeing it in them so clearly.  On a dial for heaven's sake."

All right, try listening.  Tune your ears.  Listen to those diplomats taking Britain into the Crimea: "I don't see," says the ambassador to Turkey (Stratford), "how we can with honor abstain longer from entering the Black Sea in force."  Honor, honor, manly honor.  The honor of the Royal Navy.  "It was unthinkable that it might be deployed and then not used effectively," says our historian, Trevor Royle, explaining the unused Navy's action after Russia had given in.  All testosterone.

Tune in on the diplomatic exchanges of that time and you're ready for the others leading up to World War I.  What was that at Ems?  The Prussian king insulted?  The French ambassador snubbed?  Grounds for war, sir.  France goes at Prussia and suffers losses it pines to repair until 1918, when it "gets satisfaction."  Sounds like an aristocrat speaking of a duel.  I hear testosterone speaking through the whole Great Power era.  High blood in a biker bar.

"That's certainly vivid but, excuse me, you must see how over-simple it is. Testosterone may generate a lot more than war.  How about the accomplishments that seem to accompany great conquests — Athenian, Roman, and, yes, British.  Darwin.  The voyage of the Beagle.  Bottle testosterone and you could lose Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare.  Maybe it's just the energy that at times whangs out in all directions — including the military."

All right, it's a gamble.  Substitute estrogen and we could lose Shakespeare.  But you know, I'm still inclined to bet on women — on the throne, in the White House.

"You have more data?  Better data?"

No, it's intuitive, and I'm not sure what I'm drawing on.  But when I think back to a ruler making those war-peace calculations — imagining the consequences of each choice— I feel that women have an advantage we haven't considered yet: they're better at imagining the suffering consequence.  I don't know why this should be, but men are slow at this.  They seem to have to be there — for the blood, the groans, the cries of "Mother, mother, help me!" — and women can see it ahead of time.

"I know what you're talking about.  It's well established that severely wounded men, dying men — doughboys hung up on barbed wire outside the trenches, Marines being hoisted out of landing craft, the toughest of the tough — call on their mothers.  But I don't see how women could see this ahead of time any better than men can."

I don't either.  But there's this about women.  They carry around inside themselves this three-inch pouch that babies come out of.  And that pouch, through the hormones that go with it, must make them think about the babies and their future — even before the future is on them.

"'Think about the future.'  That doesn't mean 'foresee.'"

I know.  This is not rational.  It's an intuition, with no possible base except in observation of women I have known: that somehow women can hear those cries of "Mother, mother, help me" before they are uttered.

155. Art at Home: Rules

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The first rule for painters, as for doctors, is "Do no harm."  Paintings do harm when they call attention to themselves without providing a reward equal to what they have interrupted, like a dinner-table conversation. 

You best discover the rewards of a painting when you look at it by yourself, after the party's over.  When you have a painting that your eyes go back to, and see new things, you know you've got a winner, and you can be glad you bought it. 

I don't know what makes a winner, exactly, but I do know that with me the winner is nearly always going to be a painting you can look into, one with several dimensions.  That stimulates me to imagine new angles, myself, and sort of get into the painting.  It's a pleasure.

Do I want to talk about it?  Not likely.  I don't have the words, and I doubt that my friends will have them either.  It's too mysterious, and you don't need them for the pleasure.

Winners belong in the living room, where your easy chair is and where, before the party, there's not likely to be much for conversation about paintings to interrupt.  In the dining room you want pleasant non-competitors, guests who never substitute their own topic for an ongoing topic — as Andy Warhol's can of Campbell's soup did. 

"Harmless paintings, harmless guests.  You need to justify such an unexciting prospect.  What exactly is it that you're protecting from harm?"

Well, if you can't guess it I doubt that I will be able to say it.  It would be easier if you were a follower of Socrates.  Then when I said, "I'm trying to protect the good life" you would see him trying to live well and you'd understand.  Living well meant speaking well.  The good life was a talking life.  It's an elusive thing but at a dinner table I think you have a better chance at it — seeing what it is, understanding it, contributing to it, enjoying it — than you do anyplace else.

"But aren't paintings part of the good life?  Don't they contribute to it?"

Oh, they do.  If an active imagination is part of the good life (and I feel sure it is when I sit in my easy chair moved to go further and further into a painting) then paintings and other works of art contribute to the good life.  They may make you a better contributor at the dinner table!  But contributions vary and you don't want a lesser one interfering with a greater one.  Conversation contributes more — has a chance of contributing more, anyway — than painting does.  So you put the disruptive painting in the living room.

"'Disruptive.'  I can imagine a conversation in which the Warhol painting would not be a disruption: a conversation about movements in painting."

That would be a specialist or professional conversation.  If your party is all art historians, OK.  If not, if it's amateurs, no go.  You don't want any painting that says, "Hey, look at me.  I'm making a statement about earlier paintings."  Or about any of those special subjects. really.  Socratic, dinner-table conversation is amateur conversation, its subject is life, and it's rude for professionals to interrupt it.  Or even, if they are painters, to speak loudly on their own.  A dining-room wall is no place for them to talk to each other.

"You call your people 'amateurs' but they sound to me like philosophers.  That makes them rather special, doesn't it?  And, excuse me, possibly dull?"

Agh, I've misled you.  Choice of words again.  I said "talk about life." "About" made you think of philosophers, standing above life."  If had said, "talk close to life" you could have thought of your neighbors, people in the middle of life, the life you live, and, like you, lovers of it, amateurs, interested in anything rising out of it.  Put them at a dinner table and the resulting conversation is the one I'm calling "amateur."

"And that's the conversation you don't want to interrupt.  So you put the Warhol painting in the living room.  With the rest of the paintings that call attention to themselves?"

Yes, but with Warhol you've still got the problem of reward.  Can you go into the painting later or did it say all it has to say the first time?  If further contemplation of the can label (or the dots, or the monochrome canvas, or any of scores of other such things) does nothing for you after the party, then you might as well get the painting out of the house.

"Into a museum, maybe?  Where it can at least illustrate a movement?  Or a gallery, where people who aren't so concerned about dinner parties can buy it?"

That would be fine.  In museums you can hear fascinating conversations — painters talking to each other, curators getting them together for talk, curators talking to each other, curators talking to society, and so much else that will interest you.  And you can see the paintings you'd like to have but can't afford.  In galleries you can see the value other people put on them — if you're interested in those values, and you want to take the time.

"Why wouldn't you be interested in those values and be willing to take the time?  Why wouldn't any educated person be interested in learning what our best-educated people think is the best in art?"

The question is not interest but degree of interest, measured against competing interests.  I can be interested in going to an exhibition to see if I've missed anything in a painter that others can show me and I can still stay home — if I'm more interested in what I've got going there.

"Like what?"

Like what can be found in any home: life, dealing with it, exploring it, enjoying it, the life of the imagination, the life of words, talk, parties, the talk of those up close to life, the wisdom of the dinner table.  Is anybody closer to life than a man and a woman, parents, talking babies at a dinner table?  Is anybody more capable of wisdom?  If you don't think so, why gamble on a trip across town to see what paintings or curators or dealers can tell you? 

"Or performers?"

Unless you mean "performers in a play," God yes.  Anybody willing to go three blocks to see what, if he had any imagination, he could see more significantly in his own neighborhood, all the great "happenings" there, just doesn't know how to economize.

"What is this, home economics?  Household management?"

No, it's life management.  Prioritizing.  Recognizing that life is short.  Seeing what's worth spending time on and what isn't.  Knowing what you value, what you need to protect.  Avoiding harm to it.

"And that's where your rule comes in.  You want artists to help?"

Yes.  Artists and curators and historians and anybody whose work is so fascinating it might distract people from this that they're pursuing, which, however they see it, Socrates would see as "the good life."

Note: This subject is also treated in Post #2, "Do We Need the Word 'Art'?"