For months now, this blog has been a shell with nothing inside. It was my intention to provide an introduction that would clearly define my purpose here, but there comes a point where an accidental beginning turns out to be better than no beginning at all.
The introduction can be reduced to five words:
This is what I think.
Like millions of other bloggers, I share the conceit that the activity inside my brain might interest others and though this might turn out to be a baseless vanity, there are in fact well-based reasons why opinions fascinate human beings just as much as other facts.
Consider how common it is that someone will pick up a newspaper such as the New York Times and turn straight to the op-ed page. Is there any good reason why we should be more concerned with what David Brooks or Frank Rich thinks than with what just happened in Mexico City or Baghdad?
Arguably not, but the reflex action here is as old as humanity.
As social animals, we inhabit worlds in which few issues are of more immediate and compelling importance than that we can discover what others think and feel.
The opinion on an opinion page may indeed often be nothing more than empty chatter, yet opinion itself matters supremely because thought shapes action and defines relationships.
Material conditions might be what captures our attention — especially in economically uncertain times — yet ideas and opinion provide the invisible matrix that molds human life.
Thought is the stuff out of which our world is made.
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