A Belated Answer to a Riddle

I don't know why I never followed up on this pangrammatical riddle: What is to hurt as light is to dark?

It's not as easy as I had thought, anyway. One might think it's "balm", but this gives pride of place to hurting. A balm is a "healing ointment" or, metaphorically, a "restorative agency". By contrast, light is not first and foremost an antidote to darkness, it does not just restore what darkness takes away. We run into the same problem with "heal", i.e., to ameliorate hurt, but here etymology gives us a clue. To heal is to "make whole".

So perhaps our answer is this: Whole is to hurt as light is to dark. The problem is that "whole" is already so dialectically (but not necessarily pangrammatically, I now think) wedded to "part". What about his: Weal is to hurt as light is to dark.

Another option is "wield", which evokes "strength". I'll think about it some more.

What We Have and What We Want

True science is the process by which we discover what we have. Just politics is the process by which decide what we want. Science, when it's done right, we might say, lets us see what we have, while politics, again when it's done right, lets us do what we want.

Neither is automatic. It's our struggle to know that brings what we have to presence, and it's our struggle for mastery that brings what we want to presence.

Sometimes we struggle against each other. We can't always all do what we want. We can't always all see what we have. In order for some of us to do what we want, others must do without. Likewise, for some of us to see what we have, others must remain in the dark.

[Update: as a reader has pointed out in the comments, that last paragraph is pretty "harsh". I don't really believe it. I think it is perfectly possible for everyone to do what they want and see what they have. In fact, it is entirely likely that they depend on each other. If we could all see what we have we'd all be able to do what we want. If we could all do what we wanted, we'd all be able to see what we have. That this is not how it is is a function of the imperfections of our political practices and scientific theories. Which violate and obscure our experience.]

To Have and to Want Not

The pangrammatical analogue of doing what you want is seeing what you have. Sometimes one worries that it is the role of the State to keep people from doing what they want and seeing what they have. Thereafter "business" takes over. Managers get people to do things they don't want to do, while advertisers show them things they don't have.

Where did the presumption come from that it would be madness to let people do what they want? (The idea that if individuals did what they wanted the results would be undesirable for society.) And how does this relate to the practice of keeping people from seeing what they have?

Science and Scripture

(A "Devil's dictionary" entry of sorts, I guess.)

Secularization n. the process by which humanity deposes an external authority in matters of the spirit without achieving self-awareness once and for all, replacing instead the old authority with another "for a time" (to wit, the Latin root, saecularis). Most recently, God's law, as expressed in scripture, has been replaced with the laws of nature, as expressed by science. Thus, an incomplete understanding of the suffering of the soul has been replaced with an incomplete understanding of the workings of the brain. Our ignorance of our own damnable selves remains complete, of course.

Conformity Nient'altro

"The only reason this problem has not received the attention it deserves is because the scale of it is so enormous that ordinary people simply cannot see it. It's not just stealing by reaching a hand into your pocket and taking out money, but stealing in which banks can hit a few keystrokes and magically make whatever's in your pocket worth less. This is corruption at the molecular level of the economy, Space Age stealing – and it's only just coming into view." (Matt Taibbi)

"not of course that we advocate —
and yet petty larceny
in a regime based on grand larceny
might rank as conformity nient' altro" (Ezra Pound)