Mondaugen’s Miscellany
The past is what we make out of it
The future is unwritten
Avoid over-serious people and seek the genuine smile
What have you thought about today?
(A collection of personal essays on travel, life events, and thought experiments, aiming to engage, amuse, befuddle, and inspire)
October 19, 2026
My wife and I went to the No Kings protest in Greenfield, MA yesterday. We found a big crowd, reportedly about 3000 people. I am not good at estimating crowds, but the number was plausible. Lots of signs against fascism, for unity and diversity. Lots of smiles at being among like-thinkers. Many signs about fear. No public anger. A speech or two stating the obvious, that we need to resist our country’s slide into dictatorship. My favorite sign was “Free The Books”, but that’s perhaps because I’m bookish.
There was no counter protest in favor of Trump and his policies that we saw. After we left, as we walked down a nearly empty street, a single car drove by quickly and we heard the driver shout “Trump!” and “He’s staying!”
While it is good to stand up and be counted, the event felt mostly like sermons to the converted. None of the signs seemed to address believers in MAGA with any of the “peace, love and understanding” that is supposedly the foundation of the resistance. Perhaps this event was not meant to be a bridge to bring us together, but simply to make a strong statement to our leaders that America is Not Happy.
But where then, are the bridges to bring us together? I wanted to find signs that might get MAGA supporters to pause and think. Maybe: “We feel your pain and anger, but let’s not cause more pain through anger.” Or “Trump is Not the Solution to Our Problems. He Will Not Deliver What He Promises.” Or “Don’t listen to what he says, watch what he does.” I mean, these are simple, and obvious, but perhaps 1% more constructive than “No Kings” is to a MAGA supporter. And aren’t they the ones who need to be convinced not to vote for him or his party?
The Revolution will not be televised, yes, but it will also make no sense in how it evolves. We are peculiar creatures, we human beings, so often destroying ourselves when driven by self-interest. Where is out 2025 Thomas Jefferson? Our 2025 Winston Churchill? They must be alive, and have the power to lead people to a truly better place. And yet, I feel I haven’t heard them yet. For our country’s better interest, MAGA and their fascist tendencies cannot win—but we also cannot go back to a Democrat-controlled government the way it was, either, for that spurred this upswelling of MAGA anger and gave Trump his platform. If we are truly to all live together, we have to listen to each other, and even respect each other. Do we even know what that looks like across our broad social diversity, from deepest South to deepest North? I hope that is possible one day and soon.
October 16, 2025
It is always good to come across a writer, Danny Hillis, who articulates ideas that have rummaged vaguely in my head. As he does, I’ve come to think that the foundation of modern Western culture, developed during the Enlightenment, has cracked and subsided beyond repair, and that the West is in the midst of a revolution. Hillis focuses on technology as the child of the Enlightenment, its undoing, and our future. I can’t say he’s wrong, but I see something for more foundational, which is a moral revolution. I look to one of the Enlightenment’s most powerful, and reviled, thinkers, the Marquis de Sade, for an understanding of this new revolution. It’s an insight many of us sense, but largely refuse to admit beyond lip service, and we certainly don’t contemplate what consequences it leads us to: that if God is dead, then man is free to act proportional to the power he has, with no other constraint.
The moral philosophies of the Enlightenment— from the natural rights of man, to our essential equality, the inherent goodness of mankind, the value of good for goodness sake, justice, truth, and mercy— are just as invented and imposed upon us as rules of the imaginary friend in the sky whom we name God. If we don’t feel their pressures to act within their rules, then we are free to create whatever social universe we wish. In Sade’s novels, he explores this as personal and sexual expression—whatever he can do to another person is fine, if he has the power to do it, and the other person doesn’t have the power to stop him. The Russian Soviets and German Nazis explored this power politically. A moral appeal to the truth is laughable to the person who doesn’t believe the truth has either the backing of God or the natural order of things. And so today, we have politicians who lie to our faces. As Solzhenitsyn put it, we know they are lying. They know they are lying. They know we know they are lying. Etc. But they lie because lies are powerful, and they have the power to lie, and we don’t have the power to stop them.
What is our future in which the power dynamics between people are not mediated by a higher power of any kind, not a God, nor the moral philosophies of the Enlightenment? Will any new, imposed, set of shared values emerge to guide us? What will it look like? Truly, no one is coming to save us. It really is up to us, our power limited only by physical reality.
I do think that new shared values will emerge, based in love. This is not so much naive optimism as what history and biology teaches. The basic unit of the tribe has never been broken in human history, the social unit of about 75 or fewer people of close kin. The bond of mother and child is the starting place, the love of our children. We don’t want bad things to happen to them, if even only because our selfish genes want to replicate through the generations. And we extend this core bond to the kin who we feel will help us, as we help them. We will invent new rules with a new basis to protect them, and whomever else seems to fit our definition of kin. Perhaps the Enlightenment’s core failure was overreach, deciding that all mankind was kin, no matter what. This was an even greater reach than Christianity and Islam, offering kinship to anyone who believes (but no one else). Ambitious, laudable, but now failing after about a 300 year trial period.
Will our current fragmentation grow back, after strife, into something equally inclusive to what the Enlightenment gave us? I only have hope it will, if the betting odds are for something else.
How can we convince ourselves to be kind to each other, especially strangers? How can we turn our backs on the attractive power of anger, fear and hatred? We need modern philosophers of every stripe to work on a new way forward, for clinging to, and making appeals to, the “natural rights” of man is clearly not convincing to the many who have the power to do as they wish to us.
September 7, 2025
I’m listening to a fragment of an interview on Star Talk, Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s podcast. I’m getting annoyed.
Now, I’m not annoyed with Tyson or his guest. Both are thoughtful people discussing interesting things.
They’re asking “are we intelligent enough to understand the universe?” It’s a lovely and important question. What are the limits of our understanding, if there are any? Will we constantly refine our understanding of life and the universe, ever getting closer to full comprehension? Or will some things forever elude us? And why?
I have thoughts on this. Will I ever be invited to speak on Tyson’s podcast? Ha, no. Why not? The same reason none of you will be invited, unless you’re a famous physicist or other credentialed expert. I accept this entirely. Relying on experts for their accumulated knowledge and insights is a good system to keep loudmouthed, blinking idiots from projecting authority and misleading everyone who doesn’t know the topic (not that the US has a problem with this). Experts can be relied on to have thought deeply on their area of expertise, and so should be able to offer in-depth answers.
But I remain annoyed.
Because we will forever get in our own way.
Because they’re making assumptions that undermine the foundation of all human insight. Their very expertise blinkers them to the need for a paradigm shift. They’re asking the wrong people. To get out-of-the-box answers you have to ask out-of-the-box people.
I am no expert on anything, but I read. Over 60 years ago, Thomas Kuhn’s woke us up to a fundamental way in which science works. Normal science works within a paradigm, a general system of understanding of how things work. Normal science involves discovery within the limits of its paradigm, however, in the process, discovers anomalies that don’t fit the paradigm. When enough anomalies accumulate, only revolutionary science can resolve them, producing a new paradigm that accounts for all the old data and the anomalies. Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, each offered us a new way to understand the universe, new paradigms that have been progressively more accurate in their ability to predict phenomena.
We live in an era of normal science in which so many anomalies and paradoxes have accumulated, that it is all we can talk about. In the quantum realm, observations affect outcomes, entangled particles communicate with each other faster than the speed of light, and the future affects the past. We need revolutionary science, a new paradigm to make all of this “understandable” to us. It may all fit the Standard Model, but the Standard Model is incomprehensible.
No one discusses where the next paradigm shift has to come from. It seems so blinkingly obvious to me, a mere woodworker, that I can only assume the experts’ siloed expertise prevents them from asking it. And it’s just a question, a relatively simple one.
The question is to question the nature of conscious thought itself. Is language the right tool to “understand” the physical world?
If conscious understanding and communication depend on representational, symbolic systems (language and mathematics), don’t these systems have limits to understand and communicate the natural world? Or are these systems infinite their capacity to refine and perfect themselves, and eventually equal to all that is in the universe? Can we make a map, as Borges explored, that is equal to the country it describes?
The 17th and 18th-centuries in the West saw a huge frustration in how languages shift and change over time, directly related to the rise of science. How, in essence, nobody really understood anyone else, or anything? What is the color “red”, after all? Aren’t there hundreds of types of reds, if not more? Do each have names, or qualifications? Dark crimson. Light pink. Etc. How can we know a thing if we can’t name it? Interest grew in perfecting language, especially discovering the original or Adamic language, in which every word was a perfect representation of reality, offering no possible misunderstanding. From John Wilkins to Jonathan Swift, the hope and despair was fully explored, and ridiculed.
We long ago abandoned these schemes (Esperanto a pale version towards social harmony…), leaving us… with Bill Clinton’s lawyers asking what “the definition of ‘is’ is” to ensure we all believed what they said, not what we saw with our own eyes. Aristophanes is in the clouds, laughing.
Please pause and let this sink in—just how fluid, changing, and open to interpretation even the most basic elements of language are. When we say “a photon is a particle and a wave” what the in the eternal dipstick do we mean? How can this be “understanding” of any kind?
Math is supposedly a pure language, and yet 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = 1, while 1/3 = 0.33… and 0.33…+0.33…+0.33…=0.99… therefore 1 = 0.99… Is this an artifact of an imperfect representational system in mathematics, or something else? Our mind thinks of 0.99… as almost but not quite 1. What else in math is not quite what our mind thinks it is, and is this a failure of math and our thinking or an inadequate explanation of reality that match will eventually explain?
I’m not sure we can base an “understanding” of anything, especially the laws of the universe, in the quicksand of ever-imprecise, ever shifting language, or even mathematics. We can make huge headway, and discover amazing features, repeatable through the disciplines of science, but are we not fundamentally limited?
If we ever hope to understand quantum weirdness, and everything else beyond our comparative experience, the paradigm shift we need has to be found in questioning and refining our reliance on language as the structure of our conscious understanding. But can we “improve” language and thereby conscious verbal understanding to such a degree? Or is it possible to transcend language, and think and understand without words?
I don’t think the answers to quantum paradoxes will be found in supercolliders. They will add new elements and grow the confusion. We have a chance at resolving quantum paradoxes, however, through exploring how to understand or think without language. (If this sounds ridiculous, please consider all the real, repeatable, “ridiculous” science we have already found).
We may never be able to escape the limits of our system of linguistic representational conscious thought and communication. We may forever have to talk of photons as waves that act like particles because we have no natural word for what they are. The “past” and the “future” are also conceptually inadequate to describe the quantum world. And so we fumble along with the crude tools of words, never able to make true sense of any of it.
There are different ways of knowing things. Could one of them be equal to the task of truly understanding quantum weirdness, for starters, if “understanding” is an adequate concept to express what higher levels of knowing could be? Perhaps prediction and manipulation are more meaningful tests of our intelligence? If we can make something do something, regardless of the words used, do we not demonstrate an understanding of that thing?
How about it Mr. Tyson? Maybe ask the hard questions about “what is understanding” in science? But who would you ask who has looked into this as an expert? Bring a physicist, a linguist, and a cognitive neuroscientist together as a start, if their pride allowed them to truly aim to “undertsanding: how each of their fields affect the other’s work.
Just askin’, as a complete non-expert.
September 6, 2025
A political piece:
Today I read a Democratic legislator bemoan the seeming indifference of the American people towards Trump’s short march into autocracy. She wondered where the outrage was. I was saddened to see one more sign of our first two lines of defense from dictatorship (the judiciary and the legislature) shrug, and shuffle responsibility onto the average citizen—a third of whom are in love with the idea of a Trump autocracy (with little understanding of what it will really be), a third who express public outrage whether through a protest or otherwise, and a third who are simply afraid and don’t know what to do, silence apparently the safest option.
I’ll remind our befuddled non-MAGA legislators, judges, employees of the executive branch, and military officers, that they have the power to oppose and even correct Trump’s non-constitutional actions and preserve democracy, through powers given to them by the Constitution. All the average citizen has is the moral power of non-cooperation and civil disobedience when told to perform or applaud atrocity.
Meanwhile, I will reread Dark Side of the Moon after I finish The Gulag Archipelago. History reminds us what we are capable of doing to one another in the name of glorious-sounding ideals, such as making America great again.
A well-meaning friend once tried to refine the difference between an idealist and an ideologue, of course beginning with the idea that one does good and the other does harm. He admitted that both have a strict adherence to a set of principles. He wondered if the absence of a moral code to inform those principles made the foundational difference. His argument collapsed in the end, however, beyond the gambit of one-man’s-freedom-fighter-is-another-man’s-terrorist, when he realized that mankind lives through practical considerations only. The realm of ideals, principles, and even morals can only be clear guides when they disregard humanity’s imperfect complexity. Beliefs and faith are of the mind, not the hand. Perfect ideals can never be achieved with imperfect people, so heads must roll to make the people fit… We might label a man such as Gandhi as an idealist, but a closer look finds a deeply wise, and therefore practical man, famous for what he did and how he did it, not so much for the ideals he could articulate. I could say the same about a poet whose work I adore, G.M.Hopkins. As a Catholic priest, and therefore an idealist, he died young serving the poor. What he believed is secondary to the fact of his good works. This is apparent in his poetry, so beautifully crafted from his loving understanding of human frailty. Glory be to god for dappled things.
We have a choice. Of what we do. We always have a choice.
Who or what would you hurt in the name of an ideal?