Mirror Stage: Infinite Reflections on the Public Good‪.‬

As citizens, we are often harangued about the "obvious solutions" and the "clear choices" before us -- things we should be able to discern, unless there is something terribly wrong with us. But in a world as complex as ours, one has to wonder about this enduring notion of crystal-clear decisions. Since ancient times, myriad dear-eyed citizens hove been hopelessly at odds, while the majority of their fellow democrats look with uncertainty porn one facet of reality to the next. After all these centuries, we should perhaps know better. History has stubbornly refused to end, and we are faced with the exhausting and exhilarating prospect that the citizen's work is never done. Socrates, that great hero of public discourse, remarks somewhere in one of Plato's dialogues that "an excess of precision is a mark of ill-breeding." Maybe it is in the Theaetetus. Or maybe in one of those works nobody actually reads, like the Charmides or the Lesser Hippias. I could tell you, but I won't: bad manners. And of course it is possible Socrates was just kidding anyway. Precision is God's gift to philosophers, after all, and if a taste for it, once acquired, occasionally leads them to spend whole afternoons discussing the logically modal differences between the ordinary language conditionals "if it was" and "if it were," well then, so be it. It keeps them happy and off the streets, where they might do damage to somebody innocent. I could begin by suggesting that more philosophers should get back on the streets, and that people on the streets should perhaps get more philosophy, but I want to begin instead by applying what I trust is only a well-bred modicum of precision to our chosen topic.