Anomie

Should we invite the neighbors over for dinner? Their politics so different from ours. All the more reason. Combat anomie! He's worried the town's losing population but opposes immigration. I like immigrants but hate passing people on my morning walk. The whole mountainous western region of the state is losing population at a rate of 1% per annum. The young move out, the old stay put but young artists priced out of big cities move in looking for affordable studio space. How low can the population go as long as rents stay low? We did agree about the fire department expansion being premature (him) or unnecessary (me). He argued we should renovate the high school first the roof is caving in and walls crumbling. But you can teach under a spreading chestnut tree or baobab and science needs the world for a laboratory. I teach at the old 2nd St. jail in Pittsfield a town that doesn't know if it's coming up or going down. A few shootings last month, no deaths. They're holding their breath but also trying to attract life science businesses to the industrial park. The local bank's expanding, buying smaller banks in neighboring civilizations. Eventually our fire department got the vote they wanted, just called another meeting and packed the auditorium. The final winning argument was we can do the school, the fire house and the police station all at once. Don't accept defeat, limitations. Defeat anomie! Anomie means lawlessness and purposeless in Greek so that's not exactly what we're trying to defeat. It's the mismatch between our aspirations and resources, no, the dissonance between our tribe and nation, the individual as sexual animal and intellectual, the farmer and the banker, the loved one and the litter, whatever happens to you after you die and belief in reincarnation. For me, it always boils down to mortality every conversation, which is why no one comes to dinner. Whether the fire department buys an exorbitant parcel at the expense of a future school renovation in a town slightly losing population but still viable with a college, bank, artists and a few working farms is everything and nothing, as Borges says. Deutsch says death ought to be curable. The new high school or fire station, conditions like anomie v. democracy, new life forms, self-conscious species from the laboratory or the biome. How de body? Today ok. Tomorrow I don't know. Potential energy, lover, killer, anomie. Karl Popper had such faith in the rational whereas Niebuhr acknowledged man's ego is uncontrollable except by force. Conflict is inevitable. But at dinner we agree it doesn't always have to be violent or terminal. We can do the fire department, police station, the school and anomie.