A ruined spendor evokes both memories of an enchanted past and intimations of mortality. Life is good and it ends.

The late summer garden can be a challenge. The largest plants are reaching maturity–and a gardener’s life sometimes becomes a relentless round of staking things, moving water under the hottest sun of the year, spotting weeds hidden in the luxuriant growth, threatening to go to seed. Sometimes, it feels that trouble is escalating–drought, overgrown beds, unmanaged weeds. Then nights begin to cool, and then the days and things slow down and the garden is glorious beyond description.

Soon enough, frost turns edges of leaves brown. Most things slow or stop growing.  The world continues cooling, there seems relatively little that has to be done, and the chores that remain are not urgent. My relationship to the garden becomes more relaxed, more reflective,  more elegiac.

There are enough remnants of spendor to provide joy–but little can be done or should be done. It’s enough. The end is coming. Wisdom whispers, relax, go with it.

For gardeners, decadence may be experienced as a phase. The rhythm of seasons is integral to gardening. Autumn is followed by winter, which is followed by spring–and yet. Everything is dying. The labor was for naught. What is coming cannot be stopped.

The gradual change from life toward death can transfix us with glimpses of what-is-not invading what-is.

The garden is not decadent, of course. It is merely decaying. But being amid it, one can sense the temptation to decadence–that recurring human response to loss of faith–a way of taking the decay not as a transitory phase but instead as a choice and a meaning. Decadence does not tempt when death is strong and life is only struggle. Instead, it comes while life is vigorous and vivid in its trouble, a sense of choice lingering over everything. The sense of possibility, which is the sense of life, fastens on an abdication of longevity and an endless future. It chooses the now of decay.

One can imagine both what was and what will be, and time's arrow moves in one direction.

Decadence is an affectation of carelessness more than any profound revelation of anything very true. It seems to permit a giving up on disciplines and sacrifices–the digging and replanting, the weeding, the long vision. Decadents, unlike revolutionaries, do not revolt against the wrongness of society. They are transfixed by a freedom-like aura radiating through their view of wrongness. The release from endless life they hope involves, somehow, a release from goodness, which is care, which is trouble.

In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann describes the character Hans Castorp, a tubercular young man, as “half in love with easeful death.”

The decadent phase evokes memory of past splendors along with a strong sense of mortality. Nothing is as it was, and all of it is rapidly being lost.

Much is wrong and what is one to do? Stories end and promises are forgotten. Reform is folly–commanding the tide to stop. Without faith we yield to fatalism, to pessimism, to despair, to yielding. Here. Now. So many things to want falling and fading. Hurry, now, something whispers. Now.

For the gardener, the end time is not a time for reform. None of that will work. It is a time for planning, for preparation, for another spring which will always come.

Mere decay has its beauty and its place. In decadence, though, pessimism and despair become palpable. Young people, new to the story, have to take the cycle somewhat on faith. They see the fading splendor and tend to commit to here and now–to savor passing pleasures which may never come again. Without faith the future is foreshortened. The possibilities of renewal are subverted. Fatalism re-emerges, sapping the will to push back at trouble. What can be done? The end truly does come.

There are, of course, cycles of drought and climate change that are larger than seasons. In human history, there are ages of optimism and movement upward, and ages of decline. Modernity has lived on a moral and intellectual capital that it has not renewed, and we are now within sight of modernity’s end.

What comes next will be better than all that’s gone before. But first, winter.

The characters must act, both alone and together, in a hostile world.

True Grit opens with a courtroom scene followed quickly by a public hanging. Both scenes end in uncertainty as to what the truth really is and who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

In court, what appears to be a classic confrontation between a cagey, one-eyed lawman and a slick lawyer, twisting words to free his low-life client, ends with the hero unable to speak coherently, probably because he killed an unarmed man then fibbed to cover it up.

At the hanging, two of the condemned men give their final speeches, casting doubt on whether the law is punishing the right men. When the third man, a Native American, begins his speech, he is rudely cut off as the executioner jerks a death hood over his face and the gallows floor swings open. Had anyone ever heard his side of the story?

The frontier town may be struggling to establish justice in difficult circumstances, but we are given little sign that it’s a clear success. Into the midst of these proceedings, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) comes–confident, brisk and precocious–looking for help. She intends to bring her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), to justice or to take justice to him.

Her incandescent certainty does not flicker at the setting, where truth is uncertain and elusive, making justice seem no more than a gamble. She knows the truth–what happened and who did what. The film’s opening epigraph cites the proverb, “The wicked flee when no one pursues.” She does not flee, but she does pursue.

Through will and wit, Mattie manages to hire the craggy and drunken U.S. Marshall, Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), to join her quest. Before they begin, Cogburn partners up with LaBoeff, a high-minded Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who wants to bring Chaney back to his own state where he can claim the reward. This conflicts with Mattie’s goal, which requires that Chaney be held accountable for her father’s death rather than standing trial for murdering some Texas senator. For her, this is not the abstract justice of nation states, but the personal justice that precedes it.

The three characters with their divergent and mixed goals don’t readily cohere into a team. Nonetheless, they do cohere, held together by a mixture of the men’s self-interest, their pride, a rough nobility, and an undeniable though always coy sense of chivalry. (Their comedic banter, which really is funny, highlights sharp differences that at times drive them apart. The dialogue is witty and sharp, and one of the film’s delights is an old-fashioned English of impressive poetry and subtlety, which Barry Pepper, who plays outlaw “Lucky Pepper” in the film, calls “hillbilly Shakespeare.” Author of the original novel, Charles Portis, said he learned it while studying old Arkansas newspapers, from an age when people learned to read using the King James Bible and Shakespeare.)

There’s also Mattie’s attractiveness. At the beginning, LaBoeff is tempted to “steal a kiss,” and though Mattie suggests she would find that as unpleasant as the spanking he is also tempted to give her, her pure determination continues to light up the dark wilderness where the two men find that her plight and her quest have become their own.

They make their way through a western state of nature, populated mainly by violent gangs and individual misfits. It’s a state before civilization, where when a man dies people matter-of-factly convert his body to a commodity for possible trade. Nothing there is sacred. Mattie tells us that “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.” The sky and the rain might come through God’s grace, but as for justice, someone was going to have to pay the cost. Mattie, on her own, decides that she will pay that cost.

The story’s power emerges from her ability to attract both strong men into her battle, and from their willingness to be drawn in. Rooster deals with the world as it comes, and when Mattie comes, he doesn’t always hide his delight. Though her intelligence, courage, resourcefulness and aggression make her formidable on her own, as the story unfolds she loses control of the situation and finds herself facing trouble that’s more formidable than she is. But she also finds that her quest is no longer hers alone.

The men she has somewhat unaccountably found both put their considerable strength and skill in service to her quest, at great personal risk. At key moments they find themselves–through luck or providence–just where they need to be to help each other. They form a little community that exists, barely sometimes, at a level of grace somewhat higher than the other communities they encounter–where a man kills his partner to gain a temporary advantage, where when the chips are down a gang abandons one of its members according to selfish calculations.

The three characters get little reprieve from struggles against real trouble. They pay quite steep costs–moving as they do in a world of ambushes, snakepits and the like–but slowly and painfully, they reveal to us that justice is also possible, for those who choose it.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him. Revelation 12:9

One thing I wish we could teach young people is the truth about dragons. It has to be taught indirectly, through metaphor, because the unseen world is–well, unseen. Some people who read this might become a little annoyed because something doesn’t want them to believe it. I think that sort of anger is the dragon’s breath, warning them away.

The primary mission of dragons is simply to keep people from the truth, particularly those truths that lead most directly and surely to joy. This is mainly because dragons are not themselves happy, having chosen to follow the theory that joy could be theirs as an entitlement rather than as what it always has been and always will be–a momentary balance requiring eternal care.

So now they wander the dark regions, trying to vindicate themselves by blocking the way of others to rather simple moments that unaccountably become forever.

I’ve acquired a taste for meeting dragons–often quite suddenly–because I’ve learned, slowly and after long, torturous detours, that, first, dragons are a sure sign of treasure–some truth that’s new to me is close at hand–and, second, dragons are mainly bluff. They have no real power–except the power of illusion and dread. It’s true that they often trick people into doing awful things, which is their only way to make anything happen. The easiest way to defeat a dragon (though not always the people who have been deceived by one) is to ignore it, and boldly to step forward as though endless joy were your right. I admit that it isn’t as simple as it sounds. It’s simpler.

The treasure, as I said, is always the truth–though I don’t mean truth in the way that scientists usually use the word. Their brand of truth is okay–very useful and very powerful–but it’s concerned with inventing props and manipulating the setting–it cannot discern the plot.

The kind of truth I mean is the truth of stories, the truth for which we live, the sum and good of our desire.

Truths of this sort have to be created–not out of nothing, but out of the stories we become, out of life itself. Is it true that you live in a happy family? Is it true that you have faithful friends? Is it true that you are kind and generous? If so, then these are truths that you have made more than they are truths that you have discovered. The important truths we create, mainly by making and remembering promises–some of them to ourselves, some of them to God, many of them to people we want with us sharing the special kingdom we are making of our lives.

Dragons may be found anywhere, but one predictable abode is near the hearts of young girls. The truth they are guarding has to do with what young girls want. What young women want most is to be loved by an admirable man. This is not a selfish or a petty thing, properly understood, so much as it is one of the attributes of godliness–every good kingdom is held together by love, and so being lovely is part of God’s design for our joy.

Unfortunately, the desire to be lovely makes some young girls vulnerable to insinuations that loveliness must be bought–all the fragrances, and face paints, and costly costumes. Or, it leads them to settle for attracting counterfeit forms of love–attention, lust, and all that–by dressing and speaking immodestly, as though the treasure of their truest being were some sort of joke.

So for them, that’s what it becomes.

Fortunately, the counterfeits are only that. Love is also real. This is what most torments dragons. They come here from a reality before the world where they believed that power alone was enough to create a kingdom worth having. What really enrages them is when an admirable young man enters the story who wants the young woman for more than a game–who sees in her the source of a better life, a true partner in making of the world a kingdom governed by love.

The reason that dragons are so often associated with knights is because nothing upsets them more than an admirable young man. The very existence of such men gives the lie to everything dragons have stood for, because what such young men truly want is not power or money or a high score in Modern Warfare but the admiration of a beautiful woman.

Unfortunately, this desire to be admired leaves young men vulnerable to all sorts of foolish ambitions. Where there is a chance to demonstrate their strength, or skill, or smarts, or daring they are likely to be found snowboarding off cliffs, sticking their heads in the mouths of alligators, or strapping themselves to rockets. Dragons enjoy such spectacles but they don’t get involved.

Dragons do get involved when an admirable young man sets out to demonstrate his worth to a lovely young woman. Trouble comes, often through the usual human weaknesses: doubt, selfishness, pettiness, impatience, deception, jealousy.

Such moments, properly understood, become little or nothing.

Which is not the same as saying the tests are not real, or that they require of us less than courage, nobility, and genuine heroism. Dragons, remember, work through dread, and though dread is an illusion it is an illusion as deep as consciousness itself, and it can only be dissolved by a faith that is equally deep.

There is no avoiding it. A moment will come when wisdom requires us to move past the point of no return, push all our chips to the center of the table, put everything on the line, and risk it all. That’s our fundamental choice: dread or faith.

Dragons are dragons because they choose dread. Knights and princesses live happily ever after because they don’t.

Last winter I turned off the lights late one evening and leaned on the sill and pushed my face a little out into the night, gazing for a long moment at snow falling through cottonwoods along Mission Creek and snow falling on my winter garden. Snowflakes on my cheek felt like pricks of life.

A kind of knowing has been handed down to me through American culture from Puritans who saw the material world related to the spiritual world in such a way that any moment correctly observed and understood contains all moments.

When, as Puritans, they encountered the New England coast, they did not see stones shaped by geologic forces over millions of years or waves rising and falling according to laws of physics that stretched backward and forward through infinity without change. What they did see was a stage upon which a cosmic drama of sin and redemption was enacted in every moment. They saw in all of it a provident God whose story gave time a beginning and an end, extending moment by moment in unimaginably vast patterns that both repeated and unfolded more fully.

In learning to see their own lives as stories, types within the unfolding plan, they became skilled metaphorical thinkers, adept at seeing in quite different details the same patterns, which were revelatory of the underlying truth from which existence unfolded. Their own grand errand to the wilderness was also the Israelites’ journey through wilderness toward the promised land.

Every event and aspect of nature was at once itself and a remembrancer of more. History was not chronology but an intelligible order in which prophets had discerned and described both past and future. The smallest of stories resonated without end.

Later, such ones as Thoreau, Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne separated the Puritan’s metaphorical facility from faith in the God of the Bible, making symbols that suggested transcendence. This worked for a while. It still felt that every time and place might somehow be an instance of every other time and place. One could still see eternity in a grain of sand.

But then, in a moment, it vanished.

The cosmos was empty and dead. In “The Snow Man” Wallace Stevens said that to face the meaningless arrangements and rearrangements of patterns that make up modernity, “one must have a mind of winter.” Only then can one behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

It’s true that few of us really do have minds of winter. The covers of best sellers are graced with images of Egyptian pyramids or South American temples or Stonehenge. People keep looking beyond cold nothing.

Still, an awareness of nothing has creeped into our schools and offices. What does it matter which building in which edge city reached by which highway one goes to through morning gridlock to ride the same elevator to the same hallway to the same room filled with purplish gray fabric-covered cubicles, personalized with photocopied jokes?

In such places, the contemporary concern with “sense of place” emerged.

I think that the longing for a sense of place has grown from a longing for meaning, which is in part a longing for a way of being understood and loved, as a way of being together. Many of us no longer have a sense of living among all our grandmothers and grandfathers and all our children and grandchildren, some not yet born–and yet we are not ready to completely inhabit the cold empty sense that all we have been amounts to only the melting and shattering of vibrating bits.

The longing for a sense of place is, I think, a longing for the cosmos at the scale of home. It’s a longing for meaning and connections that prove that we are alive and that we matter. It’s a powerful longing. It leads people to crave drugs, to join gangs, to get pregnant, to prepare speeches and workshops. . .

Just before I opened the window to look out through silences of falling snow, I had been reading an argument by a theoretical physicist that time is an illusion created by the way our consciousness organizes perceptual data. As I watched the night, a thick swirl of heavy snowflakes catching the yellow light of the streetlights across the creek, where in the near distance I saw two cars moving, slowly as it seemed to me, through whatever night they were to encounter.

I knew that the empty spaces between protons and electrons were a million billion times larger than the particles themselves, I knew that the solidity of the birch window sill was an illusion created in part by force fields within which electrons and protons danced, and I knew that nobody knew what the forces fields were, and that the electrons themselves were made of even smaller particles, emerging from waves of a not-nothing that was prior to energy and flooding the universe with being.

My two-year old grandson toddled to my knee and tugged on my trousers. “Can I see?”

I lifted him to my window on the night. Yes. Here a little and there a little. Yes.

We have our big projects, planned by corporate or government oligarchies, and we have our assignments and our policy manuals, and our rules, our reports, our overseers–and of course, our predictions of arrival at, if not heaven, exactly, then at least, um, change, just a paradigm or two away. It’s quite a marvel of design and framing, though to be honest fewer of us this year than last take it seriously, any more than self-interest dictates, and at the end of the day, thinking outside the box and focusing on actionable solutions, the bottom line is mainly incentivized babble, now available as a mobile app 24/7.

We know this isn’t the way to heaven. But we don’t know what to do, so we think about vacations and long for retirement, wanting out while watching as less and less of the world remains outside the projects.

So far as possible, I’ve chosen the other vision–the one about being unafraid under my own vine and fig tree: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid” (Micah 4:3-4).

It is not a vision of a man alone. Indeed, it’s mainly a vision of a life surrounded by family, which includes the many who are present now, but also those who came before and prepared so much, as well as those who are not yet here, but whose lives will be nonetheless dependent on work we do today. The work of living well and in peace isn’t lonely or solitary, in the way that employees are so often on their own in today’s projects, where they are viewed mainly as the means to ends not of their choosing. Unlike Grandma, they are never more significant than their usefulness.

Furthermore, each family in the vine and fig tree vision is connected by neighborliness and trade with other families who share an understanding of the many ways their plight is mutual. It’s true enough that like other ideals, this one has never been fully realized. Still, It has been much more successfully brought to life than those who would organize us into their grand plans want to admit. Norman Rockwell didn’t imagine all those scenes. He did pick them out from other, less heart-warming moments, but he didn’t make them up. He didn’t need to. They were there.

Such scenes seem more and more fantastical, though, as the great men continue organizing us into their schemes. They frame their plans by talking about what they are going to do for us, of course, as they take our money and command our compliance, systematically weakening alternatives to their vision–weakening, eventually, the ability to even imagine that there could be alternatives. What they have built becomes tangible while what might have been seems chimerical.

People imagine that if FDR had not sold America on Social Security, that old people today would be as poor as some old people were during the Great Depression. FDR sold social security to the public by describing it as insurance. In 1934, he told Congress “I am convinced that social insurance should be national in scope, although the several States should meet at least a large portion of the cost of management, leaving to the Federal Government the responsibility of investing, maintaining and safeguarding the funds constituting the necessary insurance reserves.” Privately, he admitted the new program was not really insurance but was in fact a new tax. By 1939, Social Security was a pay-as-you-go system with current taxpayers funding the benefits of current retirees, with no money set aside or invested for the future. This freed the money that flooded in to be spent immediately, which worked well for politicians but turned the entire program into a giant Ponzi scheme with vast unfunded liabilities that made inevitable that a day of reckoning would come.

That day has arrived. Politicians sometimes still talk about a “trust fund” as though there is actual money somewhere. In fact, all that exists of any trust fund are piles of IOUs–for vast sums–from the government. As our unfunded liabilities have increased, nobody any longer believes there is any way the government’s promises can be kept. Money is spent somewhat faster than it comes in, and new promises are as American as elections and baseball.

The program has been successful at fostering greater dependency on the government. Fewer and fewer Americans remain unafraid enough to live and speak as the independent freemen envisioned by the Founders. More and more elections are decided by fear of losing yet more money. Those who work fear taxes while those who don’t fear reduced benefits. Other issues, such as national security, get displaced by anxiety over what our own government might do. People act as though the ancient relationship between wealth and the ability of states to defend themselves has been repealed, though it hasn’t.

And ironically, Americans have no true rights when it comes to what the government might bestow. We are entitled only to what Congress decides, month by month. No matter how many dollars a person pays into the system, he never arrives at ownership. At most, we get promises–backed only by the integrity of Congress. Arguments about the crisis increasingly focus on who is going to suffer the inevitable unfairness.

Especially significant to my way of thinking is that I can’t pass on to my heirs the money taken by social security as is commonly the case with private investment funds. Hundreds of thousand of dollars that could go to building family wealth across generations disappear into federal monuments to vain senators and bridges to nowhere. Families remain forever dependent on state welfare that remains forever threatened.

In the vine and fig tree vision, families take primary responsibility for caring for the elderly, paying the costs of health care, and providing education for the young. They do this because it is what they want to do, what they live to do, and because they can afford it.

I had actually begun college before I enlisted, intending to major in physics, but when I came home, believing I had been organized into perpetuating a large-scale evil, the questions that motivated me could not be answered by science. I turned to the humanities–philosophy and literature.

Since “Amerikans are Nazis” was a common sixties trope, it seemed natural to look to what happened in Germany under Hitler for understanding of how it could happen that a well-educated, cultured, and highly literate nation could be re-formed into a criminal enterprise. It would oversimplify my experience of being young and at a university with a large library and having time to study to say that I was preoccupied with understanding the rise of the Third Reich–I was not merely gathering information; I was scaling mountains and shifting my cognitive horizons and recreating my categories of consciousness–but I was also searching for clues as to what had happened in Germany by way of seeing what was happening in America.

It became a rather large project that I have not finished. The question–how did a civilized state descend so rapidly into barbarism?–should be at the center of the current age’s educational project of teaching the next generation what is most crucial for them to understand. The emergence in different cultures and different nations–Germany, Russia, China, and others–of regimes that practiced mass murder against their own citizenry using the apparatus of vast modern bureaucracies–is the big story of the last century. It is folly to ignore it or to falsify it.

I have found some answers–though of the sort that lead to more and harder questions. The most ironic thing I learned was that the radicals who spoke propaganda and stirred up mass demonstrations against the bourgeoisie order of America acted out of a political vision more similar to that of National Socialism and Marxism than to the aspirations of those they hoped to displace. They have systematically tried to blur the similarities between the political visions of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao–granting that Marxism was a leftist political philosophy while insisting that fascism was a right wing political philosophy. The effort is failing, as more and more people see the connections between early Twentieth Century American progressivism and the movements in Russia and Germany.

At a more mundane level, maybe, I also came to believe that the big important secret of how it all happened was not so mysterious or so secret at all. Most Germans who cooperated with the Nazis did so out of the careerist ambitions and insecurities that are everywhere in plain sight today. They were just obeying directives, pleasing superiors, looking for promotions and raises, protecting their jobs, and trying to get through the day. The New York Times, in the pussy-footing way it tends to deal with such stories, has taken notice of the way all those German bureaucrats did what they did, knowing they were doing it, but quite committed to their modernity and efficiency:

The economy and civil society were instrumentalized by the Nazis. Of course, many people knew what was happening to the Jews. But there was a kind of collective seduction.

The major trend in American education today is away the exploration of enduring questions from literature and history and toward instrumental thinking–how to succeed in modern bureaucracies, how to get money, how make a name for oneself. As we increasingly nationalize our schools–a process greatly advanced by Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. Department of Education in 1979–our cultural pluralism leads us to increasingly ignore moral questions. We cannot agree even on the important questions, let alone the answers. Who’s to say? we say.

We curtailed religion in schools years ago, and now we increasingly direct our attention away from great books and enduring questions, focusing on using modern tools and on skills likely to further individual career success.  The de facto philosophy of public education is materialism–the universe officially has no spiritual dimension–and the de facto philosophy of American government is utilitarianism–the common good will be defined by experts and evaluated by their statistics. They will decide what sacrifices they will force us to make.

This does not mean we are becoming Nazis, of course. It does mean we have weakened our best defenses against the propaganda and widespread corruption organizers of mass movements have used to criminalize the state in the past.

I suppose the purpose of our life is to find our way back to the garden, where we are told we began. In the beginning, we did not need to care for the garden–it was a gift. So it wasn’t really ours. We couldn’t stay there, except at the cost of never being fully human.

The way back to the garden is to create it around us. Then it will be ours, and we will be able to keep it because we understand it.

When God finished creating the earth, he said that it was good. What did he mean by that? I’ve been thinking quite a lot about what “goodness” means, or how to talk intelligibly about what it means, because I meet a lot of young people these days who do not have any very useful understanding of what it means, who are not even sure it is something they should want.

They tend to confuse “goodness” with obeying a list of rules. This is understandable, since teaching an understanding of goodness often begins with teaching rules.

But to understand goodness we need to go deeper than a list of rules. Goodness is a vision of the world–a vision of people living with each other in all the little and big ways that support happiness. Fully realized, the vision is a vast and complex ecological order, quite beyond the comprehension of children.

So we begin with signposts that point the way.  With children we teach little rules that both preserve the order and make visible its principles. Our rules are not meant to deprive our children of freedom. Quite the opposite–they are meant to be the stepping stones that keep us safe, that preserve us from the cold, swirling forces we traverse moment by moment as tiny, fragile beings in vast universe.

When my own children were small, exploring the world with hands and mouth, my wife, Valerie, and I kept a philodendron on the coffee table, within easy reach of the toddlers. Predictably, the poor plant got dumped on the floor or had its leaves torn off before we could intervene. Over and over we gently stopped little hands and said “No!” It would have been easier, no doubt, to simply to move the plant out of reach until the children were older, but that would be a controller’s strategy–to turn our home into a huge cocoon in which everything was either child-proof or out of reach.

Sure, we put cleaning solvents, prescription medicines, and other items that could cause genuine danger out of reach, but the philodendron was sacrificed to an ideal: it is better to awaken children than to pad the rooms where they are sleepwalking. We are teachers, not controllers. What we awaken them to is nothing less than the order that surrounds them, which is the order of our lives, which is our best approximation so far of our vision of goodness.

So it was that we sometimes encountered a gleeful daughter wildly shredding the leaves of our forlorn-looking philodendron. Such moments, we knew, were teaching opportunities. But what was it when I firmly slapped my daughter’s hand and said “No!” that I wanted her to learn?

I would have been disappointed if she had learned that plants are not to be touched, though from her child’s perspective that must at first have seemed to be my intent. In fact, I wanted her to learn things she could not then understand. “Thou shalt not touch the philodendron” was a signpost, a little rule that pointed toward a deeper law that might be expressed “Thou shalt respect living things” or “Thou shalt live in a house of order.” And beyond these laws were higher realities: Thou shalt love plants. Thou shalt love beauty. Thou shalt care for the earth.

In a sense, we wanted our children to learn to live in a garden, which is to say we wanted them to understand the earth and the processes of life, and we wanted them to care for the world in wise ways. We wanted them to recognize and desire goodness.

That’s quite a bit to learn. So we started with simple things: don’t touch the philodendron. We knew our daughter would question the rule, and we knew that as her questioning spirit became more mature, our answers, both implicit and explicit, would lead her toward understanding what we really wanted. In time, we allowed her to help with such tasks as watering the plant. As she grew, we negotiated new responsibilities and freedoms to keep pace with the endless dawn of her powerful understanding.

The philodendron rule became irrelevant and she discovered that plants not only could be touched, but they could be pruned, re-potted, fertilized and enjoyed. Within the philodendron rule lay profound principles, more difficult to understand but more liberating to live. Within the philodendron rule lay deeper principles of wisdom, which are identical with the principles of goodness.

Wise traditions teach goodness by giving rules, because life is complicated in much the way ecosystems are complicated, and inexperienced people are likely to make decisions that damage or destroy their chances at happiness without understanding the long-term consequences of what they do. Good rules help keep people safe while they are still learning how life works. But good laws given by a loving parent are not meant to destroy freedom–they are meant to reveal it. Someone lost and confused in a disordered place is not free. Order and understanding of that order are the basics of freedom.

The rules of morality are guidelines to long-term practicality. In many cases, they are summaries of centuries of experience about what sorts of actions tend toward misery and of what sorts of actions contribute to happiness.

Goodness is closely related to wisdom, since happiness in this world will be fleeting unless our thoughts and actions are in harmony with the way things really are.

“Truth” is our name for such harmony.

A happy life is similar to a garden–it is a thing of beauty made out of the materials of this life, arranged in harmony with both the laws of science and the principles of beauty. It is an emblem of care, and an embodiment of joy. It includes a long history of things learned and remembered, and a long future of things desired and hoped.

And it is here. It is now. A moment, but an eternal moment.

They are like paintings–abstract compositions with an unchanging quality, maintained at a moment of perfection.

I don’t dislike these plant designs–actually I enjoy them quite a lot, finding them a huge improvement over the asphalt and concrete expanses that characterize poorer places. But they have much in common with silk and plastic flower bouquets that present an image of flowers without quite capturing the essence of flowers. The dimension of time–the unfolding, developing, blossoming, fading, drying and decaying–that inform the gardener’s vision is, as far as possible, absent, leaving an aesthetic dimension somewhat emptied of meaning. Though such plantings are alive they are somewhat not living.

Typically, they rely heavily on annuals grown in greenhouses then transported to the location and set in place already blooming. This normally limits the palette to shallow-rooted and fast-growing flowers likely to flourish in spite of the disruption and to flowers that bloom all summer. Pansies, marigolds, petunias and geraniums are common, but rarely does one encounter columbines, lupines, or surprises.

Sturdy shrubs with trouble-free mulch exemplify the low-maintenance aesthetic, which is driven by converting care, the gardener’s joy, into maintenance, usually measured in dollars and understood as a cost. They are ironic constructs, in the sense that a carefree garden is, to some degree, an invisible garden. What is visible is not a garden so much as the image of a garden, in somewhat the way that what is present in a Pizza Hut is not Italy but a sense of Italy.

And so we create a world that has its beauty, but the beauty more of a modern mall than that of a centuries-old village. Such places do not evoke a sense of the people who made them and keep them. In such spaces, we are oddly alone, no presiding presence of a gardener or of life beyond our own breaking the spell.

Of course, the modern mall is the archetypal modern garden, organized to entice and compel the primary function of urban humans: wanting. We move through an aura of wealth and well-being maintained by unseen care and stripped of any sense of time as transience. We pass by a constructed now, going on with our dreamy business, undistracted by care. We are left, sometimes, with a vague sense of wanting something we can’t quite name.

After the usual questions–is there scientific evidence to support that all the claims were in fact caused by exposure to toxic dust on 9-11? are the guidelines determining who is covered and who is not just and equitable?–there are the more fundamental questions about how such special legislation affects the rule of law.

Rule of law is rule of principle, and one of the basic principles is that the law should apply equally to everyone. Special legislation that specifies the particular group or locality to which the law applies is in effect a waiver of the rule of law.

If Congress wanted to take care of the first responders in New York but also adhere to the rule of law, they would have specified the criteria that needed to be met for the law to apply: responding in the line of duty, suffering harms not already provided for in existing health benefits, etc. To pass such a law, it is necessary to think through what principles we are choosing to be governed by, because once the law is passed, it will apply to everyone who meets whatever criteria the law establishes.

Simply naming the group the law covers leads to unequal treatment. A rural firefighter in Idaho who enters a fire set by an arsonist and saves a little girl, and who suffers because of toxic fumes he breathed during the incident, will not be eligible for assistance from the fund established for 911 responders, even if his suffering turns out to be worse than many of those who are eligible.

The more we meet problems with special legislation rather than sticking to the rule of law, the lumpier things become. Less and less are we governed by principles we all know and agree to, and more and more is our plight determined by the political access granted to our group. The 911 first responders had enormous political clout. The Idaho firefighter has none. Being politically connected begins to matter more than having a just cause.

The erosion of public understanding of what it means to be governed by the rule of law has been accomplished mainly through popular laws–earmarks to build community theaters, special legislation to assist the victims of disasters, and the like.  It happens mainly because most of us want to help, through our government, when unanticipated or unusual events create very bad circumstances for some of us that can be greatly mitigated if we all pitch in.

Nonetheless, one needn’t be especially prescient to see trouble down the road. Rule of law at its best provides an alternative to “good old boy” networks where the politically powerful scratch one anothers’ backs. Politicians accustomed to gaining authorization to spend vast sums of money by articulating some good cause and citizens accustomed to government acting on the basis of emotional appeals more than on carefully articulated universal principles will lead to abuse as certainly as water runs down hill.

The conflict between rule of law–following procedures to apply rules strictly–and a more communitarian ethos that seeks outcomes favorable to a shared community purpose–probably can’t be resolved satisfactorily in a pluralistic culture where different groups have fundamentally different visions of the good community.  The Twentieth Century is now part of our history, so we should be deeply aware of the suffocating and totalitarian possibilities of allowing central authorities to make decisions based on supposedly shared common values. That horrible things can be done in the name of sharing and compassion is not mere conjecture or paranoia.

But people tangled up in doing evil are different. Evil is never creative. It expresses itself through destruction. Its enterprises are parodies of goodness. Evil’s main passion is to tear down and destroy. Bad people attack other people more or less constantly (though not always overtly). They don’t only attack good people, either. In fact, most long-standing disputes are not between good and evil but between evil and evil. Bad people feel themselves in competition with everyone else.

Part of what this means is good people sometimes create a lot more negative buzz than bad people. One thing often unites lots of bad people: the coming on stage of a good person. Nothing provokes the ire of lousy people like the presence of someone who really isn’t lousy. So one of signs that often accompanies the action of a good person is that all the creeps and goons begin howling and screeching like monkeys in the trees when a jaguar passes below. The sense I get when I look at who is emoting sheer hatred at Palin is that she is very threatening to precisely the people I don’t trust much.

The louder they scream the more I like her.