But I also enjoy the altruism of churchgoers, and the recognition of other values than $s.

Cheney must sometimes do this, also. He must break out into a cold sweat and wonder what evil deity would have stranded him on a such a weird planet that its intelligent beings would be capable of producing a document like the Magna Carta.

From a structural point of view, we have a constitution that provides for how laws are to be written. Yet it seems that Cheney, Addington, et al preferred to roll their own laws altogether. What angered me the most, when this all began to go down, was that they were willing to send grunts to life terms in the brig as a political expedient, but none of them were willing to take responsibility themselves.

Morality should be closely tied to the animal feelings of love and shared experience that burn in each of us (even people like Cheney). But love itself can become twisted into hatred if we perceive a threat to those whom we privilege with our love.

Perhaps the real problem is that humanity itself cannot scale – that we’re simply not cut out to exist in the vast numbers that we do. But we do exist in those numbers, and we do muddle through. Nicholas Mosely calls love a “system of impossibilities”. As he puts it “Stories are the symbols we use to hold the impossibilities.”

For me, our entire human world is a system of impossibilities. Yet we manage to juggle all of this and we keep getting through.