Thinking About Rosettes

There is the pragmatic side of the rosette -- actually doing the inlay into the soundboard of the guitar -- but there is the aesthetic side of it as well.  Beyond the actual choice of tone wood for the top, the rosette is the luthier's signature.   Consequently, I have been thinking about rosettes a bit lately, and if you'll pardon a bit of philosophy, I always come down on the side of simplicity.  As a devotee of Fretboard Journal, those guitars with elaborate inlays for the rosette and headboard, do not much appeal to me.  I can admire the skill (and it is much beyond me) but let's face it -- some are just gaudy.

Simplicity, for me, means nothing but wood (ok, and the BW perfling strips from LMI).  So, the rosette I have planned will be a simple affair, just a BW perfling line, followed by 1/2 of padauk inlay, followed by a WB perfling line.  There are two reasons for the padauk.  One, I have some scraps and off cuts that I've rescued from the flood.  It's the sort of thing that one can't bear to throw out, even if it has been soaked in pooh water, as my son puts it.  Two, I think the color complements and off sets the redwood that I'm using for the soundboards.  The perfling, with the white against the padauk, the black against the redwood, creates a border, and highlights it.  It's an irresistible combination.

Beyond that, there is an embellishment I have been contemplating.  Once the hardwood for the rosette is in place, it might be interesting to cut a channel in that, filling it with turquoise or another finely ground stone, drizzle it with CNA, then grind it smooth.  I don't think I'd want to put it directly in the redwood, in part because I think the grinding might damage it.  We'll see.

Radius Cutter

I found a little time to mess around in my shop this morning, and I came up with this radius cutter that I will use to cut my rosettes.  I was able to get into the school shop, and we have a great band saw with a re-sawing blade.  It cut the redwood like butter.  I will begin work on the soundboard, beginning with the rosette.  I have something in mind, but don't know how well it will work.  I'll give it a whirl and let you know if it does. 

The construction of the radius cutter is fairly simple.  I had some 1/4 inch oak scrap left over from the bench, so I cut a 1/4 in dado in the sides of the cuter, and at the same time, cut for the end pieces and the slide, but did them on both sides.  The pieces are laid out on my bench.
 

The slide works fairly well.  I took a section of what I'd cut for the end pieces, enlarged the dado slightly.  I drilled a 5/16th hole for the blade, and squared it off with my 1/4 inch chisel.  I drilled a 1/4 inch hole for the carriage bolt, then cut it in half with my gent's saw, pushing the blade up against one side of the dado.  The slide is held in place by the carriage bolt, which pinches the two pieces against the interior slats, and the blade is held in place with a small shaped piece of the slat.  It all pivots on a 1/4 metal pin that goes in the hole on the right. 

The blade is made from an old jig saw blade.  I did some very preliminary work on the grinder, but it will need some additional shaping.  I have in mind a chisel point so I can turn it in both directions, and will work on some when I get up in the a.m.  I should be able to do that without waking my wife and our guests.  Even with the point only partially sharpened, however, it did cut a good groove in a scrap of birch ply, at about 1/32 of an inch wide.

Re-Sawing Prep

I didn't spend a lot of time in the shop on Sunday.  Lora wanted to get out of the house, and so we went for a movie (the new Sherlock Holmes movie -- fun, but no depth) and Chinese food (a moment of nostalgia for the restaurants in Chicago -- so much better). 

I did, however, put together what I will need to do my re-sawing.  On the left, is a tall fence.  I used it in making the raised panels for apothecary cabinet as well.  I clamp the panel to it, then run it across my table saw with the blade set at a 15 degree angle or so.  For re-sawing, I clamp it to the bandsaw fence, adjust the table so it is perfectly square to the blade, then back it away 3/16ths or so from the blade and slowly, slowly, slowly feed the stock.  In front of it are my thickness calipers (will be buying a better soon) and a push tool.  The push tool I put together from off cuts left from the bench.  Next is the piece of redwood that I hope to re-saw, the template, and scrap perforated hardboard that I will tape over the re-sawed plates to protect them.

The redwood I found at Owl lumber back in Lombard.  It was originally intended as decking, but someone recognized the grain and set it aside (and marked it up).  When you rap the plank with your knuckles, it rings, so I believe it has good acoustic properties.  It book matches beautifully, and finishes well.  I don't know how it will go, re-sawing the wood at my school, but we'll give it a shot.  I want to make some progress on an actual guitar.  I'll also check on the parts for my bandsaw today.  It should be relatively quiet at work -- most people already away for the Christmas holiday.  Peace on earth, good will toward people. 

Go Bar Deck & Molds

Yesterday, I fiddled around with a radius cutter, similar to the Lie-Nielsen tool, but I did not get anything approaching satisfactory results, so I set it aside.  The next big projects, though I won't likely work on it much until after the holidays, will be the Go Bar Deck, the Mold, and a clamping station.   

The Go Bar Deck should be a simple affair.  I visualize a plywood base and a plywood canopy of approximately 24 x 24 inches.  In the corner of each, a  3/8th or 1/2 inch threaded rod with a pair of bolts in each corner to hold everything together and allow for height adjustment.  LMI sells the go bars (CLGO), but they are a bit pricey at about four bucks a pop.  McMaster-Carr also sells 3/16 fiberglass rods at 5 foot lengths (8543K28) for about 2.50.  I will go with the McMaster-Carr, and if they don't quite work out, will order from LMI later.     

The base provides something to think about.  It's easy enough to have a 1/4 dowel in the center to capture the radius dish, and a second (not through the dish) to keep it from spinning like a lazy susan.  I have been wondering, however, should I make the base so it can serve as a sort of supplemental work station?  It's not an original idea, but what I have in mind is a two level base, with one side covered with carpet remnant, the other bare or covered with sandpaper.  The advantage would be a covered work surface that wouldn't mar the surface of the guitar while doing things like trimming bracing.  It would also, so far as the go-bar-deck itself is concerned, make it a bit more convenient to attach the base.  I will likely go for simplicity.

I have been procrastinating on the mold for a while, but have decided to press ahead at the next opportunity.  I intend to do it much the same way that I did the blanks for the radius dishes.  First, with a 1/4 spiral up-cut bit in my router, along with a brass bearing closest to that 1/4 inch diameter, I will trace the outline of the guitar into the MDF at approximately 1/4 inch depth.  That will provide two things, the inside contour of the mold, and the outside contour of a clamping station as well as the pressure pads for the mold itself once complete.   I will clean them up with the pattern bit.  Then do it again until I have enough pieces to stack 4 deep on each side, or a 3 inch thick mold.   I clean up the outside edges on the table saw.  I will talk about the design of the mold as I built it, so I can use photos to illustrate, but it too is a relatively simple affair.

I use the clamping station for a variety of purposes, not least as a test when bending the sides or binding.  It could also be used for a mold when bending sides with a heat blanket.  I have never used that method, so won't attest to it, but I have seen it illustrated a number of times.  I built my first on Sloane's advice, where the sides are essentially boiled soft, then quickly clamped in place.  I never found that workable, but like his model, I use spring loaded clamps when I want to use it for actual clamping -- e.g. letting a side rest after bending freehand.  Here again, it's a relatively simple affair, but I will talk more about the design as I build it.  I figure, if you're building the molds, might as well build the clamping station at the same time and save some scrap.

In the meantime, I have a piece of redwood that I have been using for guitar tops.  Since the parts have still not come in for my band saw, I have set up a time Tuesday to use the one at the school where I administer to re-saw some plates.  The responsible dean found it all very amusing, the Provost in the wood shop, and wanted to be there with camera should I happen to cut off a finger.  I can get a start on some sound-boards while slowly putting everything else together.   I've made the jointing jig, and I will likely use the zip flex pearl from LMI for the rosette itself, along with some perfling material.  I'll likely order all that after the holidays.

 
      

Radius Dishes Continued

I have pretty much followed through on my plan for the radius dishes.  I had enough scrap ply left from the shop cabinets to build the jig that I used to cut the plates.  There are a couple of things that I should mention up front.  It makes an unholy mess of MDF dust.  Wear a respirator.  If I were making these dishes for a living, I would have figured out some method of dust collection, but for the two-off that that I'm making, I assumed clean up would be easier than rigging some elaborate method of dust collection.

Pictured, you can see the Xmas Tree Stand that serves as the base, the two end pieces to the right, the two rails for the router on the left, and the two sides on the foreground.  The 1/4 inch MDF attached to the one side is a template for the radius that will be cut into the side piece.  I have a nice one inch pattern bit that cuts such things like a champ and the template was an excuse to use it.  Since we're not talking a ton of material that has to be removed, you could join the two side pieces together, scribe the arch, then remove the material with a belt or bench sander.  Either way, it would work, but I recommend the investment in the bit.

Pictured, you can see the dish blank mounted on the Xmas Tree Stand.  It's a rather simple affair.  Use a wooden dowel.  I used a 1/4 inch dowel.  Your router bit is going to hit it, and you don't want to waste a router bit on this project.   To make the blank, I did as described.  I cut the MDF to size into two 22 inches squares.  I then used a very simple circle jig.  In a scrap of 1/4 MDF, I cut a hole large enough to accept a brass bearing on my router.  The measurement is to the outside edge of the bit -- in this case a 1/4 inch spiral upcut -- and I marked the location on the MDF for a 21 inch circle (10 and 1/2 inches from the edge of the bit).  I drove a finish nail through the MDF at the radius mark into the center of the dish, and viola!  A circle cutting jig.  It's pictured in my previous post.  I cut the circle in the MDF to a depth of about 1/4 inch, then used my jig saw to cut the majority of the scrap away.  On the router table, I finished the edges of the blank using my pattern bit running the bearing against the circle cut with the  router.  Since MDF chips easily, I rounded over the bottom of the dish with a 1/4 round over bit.

Pictured, you can see the router channel assembled.  It didn't work exactly as I had imagined.  With classic engineering oversight, on the length of the box, I had taken into account the width of the of the router base in determining the long end of the box, and so cut it only 3 and 3/4  inches longer than the 11 inch radius.  I didn't take into account the handles on my router base.  Also, I profiled the radius only on the long end of the box to the center marker.  In another well-duh! moment, I messed up the measurements on the first go round and didn't take into account the off-set of the long end.  I cut the radius from the center line of the side, not the center-line of the Xmas Tree Stand.  I disassembled, trimmed it off and started over, but you can easily see that you would want the center line over the center of the dish not the side and the 1/4 deflection (or 1/8th) should be at the edge of the dish not the end of the side.

Here you can see the whole set up put together and ready to rout.  Again, it makes an unholy mess of MDF dust, so use a respirator or something to protect your lungs.  On the router, I used a 3/4 inch straight bit.  The router wants to throw and spin the dish for you, but I could easily hold the router, hold and control the dish, and slowly advance the router from the outside to the center while turning the dish.  The rubber pads on the clamps helped with that.  I lightly pushed them against the dish and that too helped against the tendency to spin.  I had thought of taking the handles off the router to make it fit the channel better, but thought better of it, and was glad I didn't.

When the dish comes out of the jig, you'll want to sand down the ridge on the edge and take away the router marks.  But it worked, and I now have two radius dishes, one for the back and the other for the soundboard.  The stuff in the jar is a mixture of titebond glue and water at about 50/50 mix.  It's mostly just glue from nearly empty glue bottles.  I rinse out the bottles and save the remnants.  For lack of a better term, I call it sizing and I use it to harden MDF for sanding and just generally.  I'll also put a coat of poly on them.        

 

 

Shop Cabinets & Radius Dish

I did dig through my available plates, and unfortunately I didn't have one that would allow me to get a start on an actual guitar -- mostly scraps saved for various purposes, but mostly because I couldn't bear to throw out exotics, no matter how badly stained by the flood water.  So, I am still awaiting parts for my band saw.  I'll be able to re-saw some redwood for a soundboard, and I will probably buy the back and sides from LMI.

In the meantime, I have decided to go ahead and build a couple more shop cabinets.  I had gone to the Depot to get what I needed to make my radius dishes, but they had cabinet grade ply on sale for a little over twenty bucks, so I took the opportunity.  I will have scraps sufficient to make the router jig, and I did buy the 3/4 MDF that will be the dishes.   The shop cabinets are relatively simple affairs.  They are basically plywood boxes, joined with a tongue and groove -- that is, I cut a 1/4 groove on the sides of the cabinet, and a tongue on the top and bottom ends to fit the groove.  One will be used for my routers, and the other will be used for miscellaneous power tools.

As I was building the lattice jig, I did get a start on the jig to cut the radius dishes.  The plan is this:  I built what I am calling a Xmas Tree Stand, which is basically just a plywood X with each arm 22 inches long.  The MDF dishes will spin on this base.  The router jig will be similar to the one used to shape the drum for the thickness sander with a couple of exceptions.  My router base happens to be 6 inches wide, so two end pieces will be cut at 6 inches wide by about 8 inches tall.  The sides will about 6 inches wide as well (conservation of scrap) and about 25 inches long.  One end of the jig will be attached to the Xmas Tree Stand and the other will overhang about three inches or the radius of my router plate.


I plan to profile the sides with the arch on one side for the back using my router and a flush cut bit.  The first step is the creation of a template for the arch.  I use my metal shop ruler to create the arch.  I c-clamp a small block of scrap to the back-side of the rule, then clamp that down at the center of the arch.  I then deflect the ends up to create the arch, scribe it, then sand to the line on 1/4 inch MDF.    Remember, the low point of the arch should be over the center of the Xmas Tree Stand, and should allow enough clearance to attach the sides of the jig to the ends.  To accommodate that, I measure in 3/4 inches from one end of the side (where it will attach to the fixed side) then 11 and 22 inches from that mark.  The 11 inch mark is the center, and I deflect the rule up 1/4 inch on each of the other marks.  I then double stick the template to the side, and cut with the pattern bit.

The amount of deflection at either end can be easily calculated (though I had to be reminded of high school geometry and algebra to do it).  Take the radius of the dish (in my case, 11 inches) and square it (121 inches).  Take the radius of the back and square it (in my case, 20' or 240 inches, squared is 57,600).  Imagine a line tangent to circle 20' in diameter.  Now, imagine a point 11 inches out on that line from the point where it intersects the circle.  Using the Pythagorean theorem (a squared + b squared = c squared), you can calculate the distance between the point 11 inches out and the center of the circle (in my case the square root of (121 + 57,600) or the square root of 57,721, or 240.25195, which I rounded to 240.25).  The difference between the radius of the back (or the distance to the point where the circle intersects the tangent) and the distance to the point 11 inches out on the tangent line is .25 or 1/4 inch.  So each end needs to be deflected up 1/4 inch.  For the soundboard, I'm going with 1/8th inch.

When I have the arches correct, I will attach a 7 and 1/2 inch wide strip of thin ply to the arch with screws.  I'll clamp the ends to the sides so I can get the width exactly right, and then I will attach it to the Xmas Tree Stand so there is sufficient clearance for the MDF dish.  Before I cut the dish, I will cut the slot in the 1/4 ply for the router bit, put the dish in place, and cut up and back to the center mark while spinning the dish slowly. 

I finished the shop cabinets, but didn't get as far beyond that as I had imagined -- focus on one thing at a time.  So the dishes are a project for next weekend.  I will let you know how it really went.


    

Lattice Jig

Granddaughter and kids went home yesterday.  We went to Lowe's where Lora bought a white Christmas tree (something she has always wanted) and I bought a quarter sheet of birch ply (something I can always use).  I adjusted the platen on my thickness sander, and put a coat of poly on the drum.  I will put another coat on today, then during the week, I'll install the sandpaper, and all is for the good.

The lattice jig is really a rather simple affair, though it is somewhat ingenious, and I don't know who to credit for that ingenuity.   I took my design from LMI, and simplified it.   It is used for joining the plates for the back and soundboard.  I'll picture its work when I get to joining the plates for my next guitar,

It consists of two lattices, each of which consists of two rails (thinking of the rail road analogy again) and three ties (with a bad pun on ties).  It is assembled using standard wood-working techniques.  I cut 2 inch strips to length, then set up my dado blade to cut over-lapping notches.  I cut them slightly deep, at about an inch and an eighth, so I could keep it all perfectly flat during glue up.

The bottom lattice required the most work.  Between the notches for the two rails, I removed enough material to accommodate 1/4 inch MDF and some sheet plastic.  It provides the base against which the top rails bear, keeping the plates flat at the seam.

On one side, the rope is knotted into a single hole, and on the other, once it is crossed back and forth over the plates, it is snaked through the three holes pictured.  Drill the holes before assembly.  I glued and pinned it on my table saw, so it would be perfectly flat, threaded the rope and tested it on some scrap 1/8th ply.  It worked as advertised, so I can actually begin work on the guitar.  I will need to dig through my wood, but I believe I salvaged the mahogany for the back and sides, along with a book-matched piece of redwood for the soundboard.

If not, I will need to wait for the pieces needed to repair my band saw come from the manufacturer, and there is another project that I can tackle -- a circle cutter to define the rosette channel.  For that, I need a 1/4 inch brass rod (about 12 inches).  I have the necessary screws and inserts -- those I did salvage from the flood -- and the body I can make from oak off-cuts left over from the bench.  I could also continue making my shop cabinets.  I have in mind a router cabinet and another to hold my hand held power tools.  Never a lack of things to do.         

Thickness Sander and Lattice Jig

I have given this some thought on and off over the holiday, between games with my granddaughter, and remembered something that was implicit in my design for the thickness sander all along, though I wasn't completely cognizant of it. The cross member that holds the hinge is not structural and was unintentionally, or perhaps intentionally behind the white noise that usually fills my head, set up to allow for adjustment. Consequently, I have resolved on the plan to withdraw the screws that hold the hinge support in place on the out-feed side. With the adjustment screw fully extended, I will then bring the hinge end of the platen up until it touches all the way across the drum, and screw the hinge support back into place. I've taken a straight edge to the drum, and it reasonably flat along its length all the way around its diameter, so to continue down my current path would simply distort the drum, making the radius smaller on one side than on the other. I will do this Saturday, when the kids and granddaughter return to Boise.

Also, in the meantime, I have been giving some thought to the first step in actually building the guitar, the plate joining for the soundboard and back. I have used the method that Sloane describes. After getting a good light-tight joint, on a work-board, one places a dowel or metal rod under the plates, taps nails along the two edges of the plates (not into the plates, but abutting them), removes the nails and presses the plates flat against the work-board, places a caul over the joint, and then weights that down. For weight, I used edger bricks wrapped in duct tape, but about anything suitably heavy would do. This works reasonably well -- that is to say, it works -- but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. A couple of reasons, the most important being that you can't really see the joint as it is coming together and its difficult to get even pressure along the length of the joint with the caul, so there have been occasions where plates, perfectly thicknessed, have not come together sufficiently flat at the seam. I have had to cut them apart, re-joint the plates, and go through the steps again.

Consequently, I have been thinking about jigs to join the plates, and the one that holds the most promise is the lattice jig. I call it that for lack of a better term, but it is the jig sold by LMI. Though it has nice features, the price is a bit steep, and I think LMI, in particular, sets prices on such things as if to say, "look, if you're too lazy or impatient to build your own jigs, then you shouldn't be building guitars." Regardless, my next project will be the lattice jig. I will build it from birch ply, cutting strips about 2.5 inches in width and about 22 inches long. It will consist of basically two lattices (think a section rail road tracks with three ties) put together with interlocking notches. On the bottom lattice, on the ties, between the notches for the rails, I plan to remove about 3/8ths. This will accommodate 1/4 MDF and sheet plastic, that will provide a solid flat surface. On each end of the rails, I plan to drill three holes, large enough to thread rope. The three holes should provide enough friction to lock the rope in place, but if not, the exposed loop can be clamped to hold it. To use it, the plates are sandwiched between the two lattices, rope is crossed over the rails, locked into place, and then to provide clamping pressure, a wedge is tapped under the crossed ropes. The lattice holds the plates flat while the ropes provide pressure not only against the edges of the plates, but also to lattice. The trick to this will be keeping the lattice perfectly flat during construction.

A quarter sheet of birch ply should provide enough to build the lattice jig, with enough left over to build the jig that will build the radius dishes for sanding and gluing the braces on the sound board and backs.

Thickness Sander Continued

I was able to accomplish more than I had anticipated, in part because my wife and granddaughter took longer than expected to travel from Boise. The almost finished sander is pictured from the in-feed side, and you can see the simple adjustment that raises and lowers the platen. The eye-screw is threaded through an insert and pushes against a mending plate, which helps prevent the screw from digging into the MDF.

I say, "almost finished," for a couple of reasons. The drum still needs to be rounded over completely and adjusted to the platen. Viewed from the in-feed side, it is between 1/32 and 1/64th of an inch higher on the right side. I am rounding and making the adjustment by running a sheet of sandpaper attached to a piece of scrap ply through the sander as it turns. It may be quicker to back the screw out and tap up the right side of the platen, but we will see where my patience takes me.

Also, of course, once adjusted, I will need to attach the sandpaper to the drum. I have ordered adhesive back sandpaper from Amazon, and I think it will do the trick, but here again, we shall see. It hasn't arrived yet, perhaps to my benefit, because I would have been tempted to put it on before rounding and adjusting the drum. If not, I have a back-up plan for a pair of hold downs on either side of the drum, but I am hoping they will not be necessary.



A couple of problems did emerge. Pictured is the power-train for the drum. The belt runs between two pullies, the one attached to the arbor of my table saw is a one inch diameter, the one attached to the drum is a two inch. The rotational speed of the drum seems about right -- not sure what it is exactly -- but the bottom pully had to be modified to fit on my saw arbor. I had to cut away the set screw. Since it was aluminum, it cut away easily.

Also, on the right side, during the trail run, the bearing on the right side grew very hot -- literally smoking hot. The problem was a small set screw that holds the interior sleeve of the bearing firm against the arbor. It is visible in the photo. There were two on each bearing, and on the right, one of the set screws wouldn't remain set. It had backed out and was turning against the housing generating the heat. I removed it, and now things seem to be fine.

Finally, when the bearing over-heated, the drum came loose on the arbor. The two events were most likely not connected. It is held firm to the arbor by two bolts on either end which are cranked in against either end of the drum. It seems to be holding fine now, but if necessary, I will pin the drum through the arbor. Here again, I am reluctant to do so, because that too will require dis-assembly, but will do so if necessary.

Thickness Sander Continued

The pieces of the platen are pictured. I'll begin this morning by gluing the edge pieces up to the platen, and while that dries, I'll begin work on the base. I have a 2/6 piece of construction lumber that will serve as the base. It's been in my shop for a while, so it should be about as stable as possible for the humidity of the area. Today, I'll prep the lumber -- cut off the factory rounded edges, and run it through my thickness planer until I get clean surfaces -- and cut everything to length.

The assembly will be rather straight forward. There will be two sides, which hold the bearings, and two cross members. I will use half lap joints for the cross members, gluing and screwing them into place. At the front of the sander, where the platen is hinged to tilt up to the drum, I want to have a cross member, butt jointed into place with screws. I want to set it so the hinged platen is about 1.5 inches from the drum when it is fully flat. That should leave enough clearance for other sorts of projects, beyond the guitar (my wife has her eye set on "tea-boxes" that could be sold at the open market this coming summer). In the back, set at the same height, will be another cross member, through which the height adjustment screw will be threaded. The width of my table saw will determine the length of the base -- approximately 30 inches -- which will leave sufficient over-hang for the operation of the adjustment screw. The width of the platen will determine the width of the base. I'll make adjustments as necessary.

The object is to keep the construction as simple as possible. I had in mind another "sliding" method of adjusting the platen, but gave up on it for the sake of simplicity.

Thickness Sander Continued

As I've said in an earlier post, there is an order of precedence in the building of a guitar. It isn't minutely exact, but from my perspective at least, it is exact enough. It begins with the sound board then moves to the back plate. For the sound board, there are essentially five steps (1) re-sawing the plate to an approximate thickness, (2) edge gluing, (3) refining the thickness, (4) installing the rosette, and (5) gluing on and shaping the ribs.

Re-sawing is a common woodworking operation, so I won't comment at length here. Besides, I think, most buy their plates from LMI or others at the approximate thickness. I do have some redwood, however, that I rescued from the lumber yard that I want to use for plates. Someone must have recognized it as special and pulled it from a decking pile. The grain is close, tight, and the board rings when tapped with a knuckle. I have cut several plates from it, and I plan to use a set soon.

The drum sander is used at step two, refining the thickness. I have used planes and sanding planes in the past. They work well, of course, but planes have their limitations on highly figured wood, and sanding planes are, well, tedious. I prefer to relegate them to the job of finish sanding, working up through the intermediate grits, then finishing with a sanding block on the fine grits. I have made the drum wide enough to accept the full width of the guitar, so I can edge glue the book-marked plates before refining the thickness.

The next step in the construction of the drum sander itself will be the adjustable platen. It should be relatively simple. I see it as a 20x30 laminated piece of 3/4 MDF and 1/4 hardboard, the latter replaceable if damaged. The design consideration was this: the drum itself is 20 inches wide, and my table saw is 30 inches wide. Since I envision the drum being turned by my table saw motor, that seemed appropriate. I will run a rib along the 30 inch side of the platen at about 2.5 inches thick, this to insure the MDF remains flat along its length, with a notch cut where the bolts secure the drum to the arbor. Since my wife will be in Boise this evening, fetching our grand daughter for the holidays, I hope to stop at the Depot or Lowes on the way home and get what I need to make the platen.

Thickness Sander

I have begun work on the thickness sander. Actually, I had begun work a couple of weeks ago on the drum. It began as scraps of birch ply (left over from the apothecary cabinet and the shop cabinets you see hanging in the background) cut to 4x4. I drilled the 5/8th inch hole for the arbor in the center of each and glued them up on the arbor in three sections, then glued up the three sections. MDF would, perhaps, have been better, and if I were buying the materials specifically for the sander, I would have gone with MDF, but the ply, I think, will do and eliminated a number of scraps that would have otherwise cluttered my shop. Once glued up, I then nipped the corners off the squares, as close to the finished diameter as possible, then set up my router lathe.

It too was made from scraps around my shop and consisted of two end pieces, slightly wider than the widest spot on the now octagonal drum. I drilled a 5/8 inch hole about an inch down centered on the end pieces to support the arbor. For the sides of the lathe, I ran a quarter inch groove along the length, then screwed the sides to the end pieces so the groove was about a quarter inch above the drum. I then made a base for my router out of quarter inch hardboard, sized to slide in the two grooves, then rounded over the drum by sliding the router back and forth in the groove as I turned the drum beneath it. The process is a bit tedious, in part because you don't want to crank the router down and take too big a bite, and would perhaps have gone more quickly had I cut circles instead of squares, but my bandsaw is still out of commission from the flood in Chicago. I received the motor, but it did not come, as I had anticipated, with the mounting plate, so now I am awaiting that. Altogether an exercise in patience.

Apothecary Cabinet & Bench

I have finished two new projects for my wife, the apothecary cabinet and a bench to match the dining room table. Both were accomplished with more or less standard woodworking techniques.

On the apothecary cabinet, I built the carcass, then fit the drawers and doors to the cabinet. The cabinet was slightly out of square, so that required some fiddling, but it came together adequate for my wife's purpose -- having many drawers to store the sorts of things that one can't find when one needs them, everything from batteries to dog brushes. Since it was a utility cabinet, I made it from the cheapest materials possible, standard construction grade white pine. The multi-colored finish was my wife's contribution.



On the bench, it is basic mission style, with perhaps the exception of the through tenon on the stretcher. It is a compromise between mission style chairs and a dining room table with a trestle base, which has a similar through tenon (intended to imitate a Japanese joinery technique.

Order of Precedence

There is an order of precedence in building a guitar. For me, it begins with the soundboard, goes to the back, then the sides, all of which come together into the body of the guitar. Then comes the neck, the fretboard, the saddle, and the set up. I will go through all the steps in order, but the first is the soundboard. I have some plates that have survived the flood so I will not need to re-saw additional plates, and I use a rather traditional method of joining the plates, but in the meantime there are are several things that should be done first. I will need, in order, templates for the guitar, a shooting jig, a work-board, and a thickness sander. I laid out the templates yesterday on 0.25 hardboard, and will cut them out today. Progress was hampered a bit as my wife and I painted an apothecary cabinet that I had built for her, and I didn't want dust to contaminate and pock the finish. It should go into the house today, and so my goal is to cut out the templates -- not a particularly ambitious goal, but a goal.

In the meantime, I had ordered and several of the parts for the thickness sander have arrived -- two pullies (one three inch, one two inch), two pillow bearings, and a 5/8-11 threaded rod. It is the beginning of the thickness sander. The plan is relatively simple -- a bed, hinged to a frame, that rises against a spinning drum. The 5/8-11 threaded rod will be the arbor for the drum, the larger pully will be attached to the arbor, the smaller to the arbor of my table saw, which will supply the power. The idea of using the table saw is not my own. It originates with Shop Notes. My design, however, is much simpler. There is virtue in simplicity, so long as it works.

The Great Flood

I have, or had, all the tools to build guitars. I say had because we have recently moved from Lombard, IL, a suburb of Chicago, to Draper, UT, a suburb of Salt Lake City. The move itself was not a happy one. It was motivated by the loss of my job and set in motion by a flood. It put our house, and my shop, under about six foot of water, and left chaos as it ebbed. I was able to salvage many of the tools, but not all. The motors on my table saw and band saw seized solid with rust. I've replaced the motor on the table saw, and with patience, and plenty of WD40 and wet-dry sandpaper, I've brought it back almost to new. The same with the band saw, with the exception that, as I write, the motor is on back order. All of the templates, jigs, and molds, however, were lost. In effect, I am starting from scratch, and will approach my path to the perfect guitar with a beginner's mind.

Perfect Guitar

I have resolved recently to build a perfect guitar. It's silly, really, when you think about it, but I try not to think about it too much (I already think about too many things too much). I doubt, of course, that I will bring my resolve to any resolution. Perfection is an elusive standard, particularly when there is likely to be no consensus up front on just what would count as perfection. No matter, it is my resolve, and it is what it is, and one must begin any journey with a bit of faith that the destination is out there to be reached.

Public Higher Education

As scholars of human activity, we should distinguish between means and ends – instrumentalities, and governing intentionalities. Too often, particularly within higher education, we conflate means and ends. We want to see education as a purpose unto itself, learning for the sake of learning, and if not for its own sake, then for a purpose best left unspecified. This is, perhaps, not surprising. If we focus the discussion on the one being educated, the student as an individual, a strong liberal tradition would insist that the student is not a means to an end, but an end unto him or herself, and while education might be instrumental, it is instrumental to the development of the student as an individual. The social and economic milieu cannot be ignored, and education is, of course, charged with the social and economic development of the student, but the developmental path itself, the instrumentality of education to a governing intentionality, remains essentially a private matter

Hence, we have statements like that of Howard Gardner, who writes that:

Stripped to its essentials, postsecondary education – and, specifically, the traditional form of education termed liberal arts – exists to convey to students the most important intellectual knowledge and skills that have been developed to the present moment; to develop in students deep disciplinary knowledge in at least one area; to foster critical thinking, analysis, and expression across a range of topics; to contemplate the relation between accumulated knowledge and skills, on the hand, and the issues facing contemporary society, on the other; to prepare students – in a broad rather than narrow sense – for civic life and productive work. A tall order! [Declining by Degrees]

The devil is in the details, and Gardner, at once a champion of human diversity and the liberal arts, must insist upon the “broad rather than narrow sense” because any attempt to define either “civic life” or “productive work” with any degree of specificity brings us perilously close to defining the student, not as an individual, not as an end unto themselves, but as a commodity – seeing them, that is, as subject to a governing civic or economic purpose that at once transcends individuals as individuals and renders them mere instrumentalities. The developmental path of the individual and the education that helps effectuate that development become essentially a public matter open to public disputation. Setting aside questions of personal preference, is “deep disciplinary knowledge” in, let us say, English literature, in and of itself, conducive either to “civic life” or “productive work?” Even if the question is answered in the affirmative, it begs the question, “how so?” and then prompts the follow on question, “Could that same end be served more effectively, more efficiently, in another way?” To inquire after the efficacy of the liberal arts in this way, particularly for those who have committed to its study, is dispiriting. The value of a liberal education is, or should be, a truth self-evident and self-contained, and to inquire too closely after its efficacy relative to a purpose, is to diminish it and, along with it, humanity.

Yet this question, “to what end?” is being asked on several fronts, if not explicitly, then implicitly in the assumptions brought to bear. On one side of the pyramid, students themselves answer the question pragmatically – higher education is a means to get a “better job.” There is survey data galore to support this assertion, but the answer is easily replicated on the first day of any class. Ask, “Why are you here?” and the answer for most is inevitably a “better job.” A fair number know, of course, that such an answer is limited and limiting, and they will answer along the lines of a “better life,” but when pressed, that “better job” is central to the conception of a “better life.” Since many are already working, most within the lowest tiers of the service industry, just what constitutes “better” would seem eminently self-explanatory. Collegiate administrators collude in this thinking. Anthony Carnevale, Jeff Stroh, and Michele Melton answer the question, “what’s it worth?” with a simple percentage, “84%.” That is, on average, “how much more money a full-time, full-year worker with a Bachelor’s degree can expect to earn over a lifetime” compared to one “who has no better than a high school diploma.” [Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.] There are other ways of answering the question, “what’s it worth?” than a simple reference to earning potential, and I am sure the authors of the report would concur with many of those answers. Those answers are a bit less dismissive of the liberal arts, but the bottom line remains – “more money” – the answer that is, for the moment, most persuasive with students, their parents, and others who bear the increasing cost of a collegiate education.

A sideways glance at those “others” who bear the cost of public higher education, the taxpayers and the state legislators that represent their interests, it is perhaps not surprising to find a state appropriations committee suggesting that “the legislature intends that institutions [of higher education] review the return on the taxpayer’s investment,” and to propose “ways to maximize the return by providing students with the skills necessary to enter the workforce.” For private non-profit higher education, particularly those institutions dominating the top spots on the US News & World Reports’ list of the “best institutions,” there seem to be few questions about the return on investment for students. Institutional prestige answers the question, and institutional prestige is self-perpetuating, driven by and affirmed in the enormous competition for admission. Regardless of the education they provide, or how they provide it, those who invest in Princeton or Harvard are expected to experience good returns with minimal risk, and the expectations are for the most part borne out. The attendees, as they say, have won the genetic lottery, having drawn parents with wealth or native intelligence to pass forward. In this context, it seems a bit gauche to discuss employability or earning capacity, in part because both are seen as a foregone conclusion, answered at admission.

The for-profit sector has, of course, marketed directly to the career interests of students. For profits are competitive, within a competitive marketplace, but it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that the for-profit sector is private enterprise. They are competing for public subsidies in the form of federally subsidized grants and loans, and not unlike the defense industry, for profit education would wither and die without the influx of federal tax dollars. Nevertheless, despite tuition costs approaching the private non-profits, and the loan debt associated with those tuitions, they have been successful in part because they promise students precisely what they want to hear. Granted they have not always done so with probity, and the Gainful Employment Act is intended to address the often-egregious disparities between the advertised promises of “high paying jobs” and the subsequent realities faced by students, but the act itself is a double-edged sword, acknowledging the vocational focus of higher education on the hand and on the other, as a condition of federal financial aide, putting in place measures directly tied to a student’s earnings after schooling. Although limited for the moment to for-profits and the community college sector, it is not in the least inconceivable that the provisions of the act might be extended to those other sectors of higher education who proffer, as one legislator in my state put it, “degrees to nowhere” meaning those degrees in the humanities and social sciences that hang at the bottom of the Georgetown scale – those degrees in the liberal arts for which the question, “What’s it worth?” returns the answer “Not much” if the concern is centered principally on earnings.

Higher education has become vocational education, and I am not so sure the revaluation is wholly a bad thing. Education has become, not an end unto itself, but an instrumental path to a career, and our relationships with our careers are as complex as any we might imagine. There is, of course, our relationship with money. We work for money, and even our hypocrisy would blush if we suggested that money was not an interest, at the very least to a level of necessity – the “middle-class wage” that frees us from the scrabble of relative poverty. Aristotle was perhaps repeating common wisdom when he pointed out that “the life of money making is one of constraint, and wealth manifestly is not the good we are seeking, because it is for use, that is, for the sake of something further,” and that something further Aristotle suggested was eudaimonia, if not happiness, per se, then perhaps, the full flourishing of well-being. Much contributes to our well-being beyond the transient pleasures of consumption, the getting and spending that dominates the popular media, but nodding to those students who recognize that one’s well-being might include a sense of investment in relationships with others that does not reduce them to objects of predation, career nevertheless remains near the center of concern. For the vast majority of us, we are what we do, and while we may round out the picture with our interests and our relationships beyond career, an increasing portion of our lives are defined within and by our professions. The choice of career becomes, not simply a pecuniary question, but an ethical question in the proper sense of the word. It answers, for the most part, the question, “How shall I live?”

I am more than willing to concede the legitimacy of my students’ interests in career, but I would also point out that it is principally a “private,” not a “public” interest. Let me take my cue from a conservative thinker on this point. Milton Friedman writes that

public expenditures on higher schooling can be justified as a means of training youngsters for citizenship and for community leadership – though I hasten to add that the large fraction of current expenditure that goes for strictly vocational training cannot be justified in this way, or indeed, as we shall see, in any other.”

I would not want to be quite so categorical, but it does set up the paradoxical circumstance of a conservative thinker admitting public subsidies for the liberal arts that prepare a student for “citizenship and community leadership,” but not for the vocational training that prepares students for their immediate entry into the workforce. How well (or perhaps more precisely how appropriately) the liberal arts prepare a student for “citizenship and community leadership” might well be a subject for some debate, particularly in the ideologically charged atmosphere of the present, but with “vocational training” it seems clear enough to Friedman that the benefit accrues principally to the private individual. As he goes on to point out, vocational training

is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of non-human capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being. If it does so, the individual is rewarded in a free enterprise society by receiving a higher return for his services than he would otherwise be able to command.

The humanist in me bristles a bit at the analogy, but Friedman’s distinction between public and private is not identical to the distinction between the social and the personal, the economic and the human. Subsidizing vocational education, of course, provides some social and economic benefit to employers, but this is mostly about higher education’s emergent role as a mediator between the private interests of the students and the private interests of the employers. If anything, as private actors, students and employers should bear the cost of the vocational training that serves their mutual interests. The marketplace would determine the appropriate share to be invested by each.

Preparing people for work, even socially or economically meaningful work, does not provide a fully meaningful answer to the question, “What is the public purpose of public education?” Friedman touches on the answer with the longest standing – “a stable and democratic society is impossible without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens and without widespread acceptance of some common set of values.” Insofar as democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people, it needs at least a contingent of well-educated citizens who possess the skills and knowledge necessary to engage the on-going public debate over public policy. There is a certain level of idealism implicit in such assertions, most often advanced as a self-evident truth. Who after all wants a poorly informed electorate? The difficulty, however, is the obvious one. If the public purpose of public higher education is the “widespread acceptance of some common set of values,” just what are those values exactly? If one believes, as I imagine many do, that the business of America is business, and that what is good for Microsoft and Citicorp is good for America, then we are back where we started, the public purpose of public higher education is to shape, if not citizens per se, then good corporate citizens, and at its most ambitious, corporate leadership. Not a trivial task, and one that might well require some infusion of the mental habits associated with the liberal arts, but I am not sure that even Friedman had in mind “corporate values” when he suggested the need for “widespread acceptance of some common set of values.” It is contingent not only on a conflation of “democracy” with “free-market capitalism” of the sort explicit in Friedman’s and Hyack’s and others accounts, but the subsequent conflation of “free-market capitalism” with the ascendancy of the modern corporation, a governance (if not government) of the shareholder, by the shareholder, and for the shareholder. After all, as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, put it, “the people who own the country ought to govern it” [Chomsky 46].

I am simply suggesting that the public purpose of public higher education might go beyond staffing the cubicles of corporate America with the next generation of Dilberts. Any suggestion to the contrary – those emergent from the so-called liberal bias of the liberal arts with its emphasis on “critical thinking” – critical in both the academic and popular sense – thinking deeply analytical with an eye toward alternatives to the existing order – does not seem possible in today’s ideologically polarized political discourse. As an educational end, a general education outcome, critical thinking, as such, has lost much of its allure. Problem solving still has some sway, if they are the right problems within he right context, uncritical of presumptive, ideologically charged values. The critical thinker, however, has always been the bane of the ideologue, whether on the left or the right, and equally the bane of simplistic pieties. The growing distrust of higher education – the growing insistence that it be on the one hand increasingly vocational in its orientation and on the other increasingly private in its funding – the growing antipathy to the traditional accoutrements of the professoriate like “tenure” (why, after all, shouldn’t the professors as professionals suffer the same conditions of employment as their corporate counterparts?) – all might be traced back to the ideologue’s distrust of critical thinking. While employers might want graduates who can solve problems, they want graduates who solve their problems, in their context, those related to productivity and profit within a corporate setting. They want a professoriate that contributes to economic and workforce development. They most certainly do not want either graduates or a professoriate who might see the corporate employer themselves as the problem to be solved, who might agree with Jefferson, when he wrote to Tom Logan that he hoped to “crush in its birth aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

There is another problem in placing the public purpose of public higher education in the need of democratic societies for a well-educated citizenry. It is the problem of democracy itself, or at least the prevailing two party system as it has evolved within the United States. The entrenched fractiousness between the parties runs roughly between ‘freedom’ on the one side and ‘justice’ on the other. To value ‘freedom’ is to compromise ‘justice,’ and to value ‘justice’ is to compromise ‘freedom.’ Despite occasional assertions to the contrary, thee has no wholly satisfactory philosophical bridge between the two parties of the sort that could provide a set of common core values that is often adduced, rarely specified. Rawl’s account and Sen’s critique of his account have more to do with the nature of the compromise than with any synthetic reconciliation of one to the other. The so-called conservative wing has positioned itself as the champion of ‘freedom’ and has entered into an ex-ante compromise with ‘justice’ – that is to say, an emphasis on ‘equal opportunity’ rather than ‘ex-post’ equality of result, a position that might be palatable if indeed all were created equal and it was merely a matter of predilection and talent that produced the disproportionate result – if indeed all were situated equally at the outset and it was merely a matter of pluck and luck that differentiated winners and losers. The so-called liberal wing has positioned itself as the champion of ‘justice’ and entered into a negative compromise with ‘freedom’ – that is to say, an emphasis on what one has been freed from rather than one’s positive freedom to act more or less as one chooses, a position that might be palatable if each ‘freedom from’ did not entail another’s deprivation – a deprivation that might be palatable, in the name of charity, if so many of the beneficiaries did not seem, on the face of it, so unworthy, so unreasonably entitled.

It is not quite that neat, of course, as it plays out in the legislative arena, and both parties have the hypocrisies inherent to compromise within compromise. Social conservatism, particularly the alliance with Christian evangelicalism, would do away with a very broad swath of personal freedom and the positive ability to define one’s self and one’s happiness in ways that are not purely economically driven. It is perhaps not surprising that higher education, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, have not been able to embrace the social conservative legislative agenda. It is fundamentally prescriptive, as the recent controversy over the “Marriage Vow: a Declaration of Dependence upon Marriage and Family” demonstrates. It references the “debased currency of marriage” and goes on to say “the debasement continues as a function of adultery; quickie divorce; physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-committal co-habitation, pervasive infidelity and ‘unwed cheating’ among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color …” It goes on, and it does so in the nature of a polemic. It would make little difference to the authors of the piece to suggest that not all of the listed items are equally obvious. I doubt that one would find many supporters for those who perpetrate “physical and verbal spousal abuse” and advocate for their right to do so either as a matter of personal choice or irresistible “inclination.” Homosexuality is another matter. The authors of the Vow would insist that homosexuality is a personal choice, an ethical and moral choice, but a choice that people should no more be free to practice homosexuality than one should be free to practice spousal abuse. The flaws in the argument are apparent enough, and despite my own academic inclinations to debunk it, the “Marriage Vow” is not intended to open, but to shut down critical discourse and dialectic, to demand assent through diatribe to what would appear to some, to me, as a series of covert and overt bigotries. I doubt that “empirical evidence” showing homosexuality to be genetically determined, if it were provided, would suffice in this context than the empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s grand theory has sufficed in the context of the biological sciences. If preparing students to “live with diversity” is a goal of higher education, and diversity includes “sexual preference,” then the disconnection is apparent enough.

An ability to communicate, as one of the professed goals of higher education, implies something worthy of communication, but most of our public discourse has been reduced to infotainment of the most venal sort, or to a sophistry worse than Plato could possibly have imagined. There is too little in the way of rational discourse, at least not of the sort one might imagine for an educated leadership addressing an educated public. It is clear enough why the authors of the Vow would not favor the sorts of Socratic inquiry as a goal of high education, at least not in the way that Martha Nussbaum and others have imagined, in part because it opens the possibility that one might think otherwise. The danger, of course, is a converse sanctimony. If there is something ante-apocalyptic in conservative discourse, dire predictions of impending doom, there is something post-apocalyptic in the post-modern – the devaluing of ‘logo-centric discourse’ – the various and sundry victimizations that tend to stymie almost any action, any exercise of positive freedom, even those undertaken on behalf those victimized – an easy relativism masquerading as tolerant profundity – the reduction of all thing, even the physical sciences, to an epistemological subjectivity, within which the assertion “I believe” is both sufficient unto itself and utterly meaningless. I will not rehearse the arguments here, and much has been made of political correctness, but I would tend to agree with those more conservative critics of higher education, like Bloom, who bemoan the absence of any real “correctness” or standards of “truth” beyond the sorts of Google-algorithms that have elevated group think to a truly global scope. It closes down the American mind as effectively, if not more effectively, than any outright bigotry because there seems, sadly, little beyond it. It is perhaps not surprising that various fundamentalism have rushed in to fill the resulting void, to include an economic fundamentalism, an overweening faith in the so-called market.

In the end, it is difficult to imagine much agreement on what an education prepared students for citizenship and community leadership might look like, and so we are left with the sorts of “strictly vocational training” that are important enough, but do not quite rise to provide a public purpose for public higher education. Those who need employees and those who want to be employees need to sort it out the arrangement in the market place. If higher education is an “investment in human capital,” as is endlessly pointed out, it nevertheless remains something of a good investment, providing higher incomes and a greater likelihood of employment. It provides a more satisfactory answer to the question “what to make of a diminished thing?” One should not conflate a free market with a free society. Positive freedom, the freedom to act, is contingent upon the means to act, and with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the freedom to act in meaningful ways is likewise concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Although programmatically, the immediate interests of a plurality of Americans would be served by one or another form of redistributive justice – as Paul Krugman put it in a recent New York Times editorial, “direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers” – one is not likely to see it in the immediate future. The lack of meaningful reform following the recent financial crises points to the entrenched interest of the emerging oligarchy. Too big to fail is also too big to effectively regulate or tax, and so government, perhaps despite itself, finds itself subordinate to those self-same corporate individuals who precipitated the crises and profited from it. As Krugman goes on to point out, what our economy “very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.” The word will not get out soon. The self-same interests have the means available to act within the realm of public discourse, and with Citizens United, the Supreme Court has opened the door to a huge influx of private money into public discourse, the effects of which on electoral politics are just beginning to be felt, but it is clear enough that the effects will not be neutral. The corporation as individual has been uniquely positioned to usurp the individual per se, not by any overt act that might limit free speech rights, but by placing those rights within the prevailing economic context. I am as free to speak as ever, but it is enormously unlikely that my voice will be heard, and even if heard, will be as persuasive as the amplified voices heard on Rupert Murdock’s Fox News. In the meantime, one can expect public support for public higher education to continue its slow decline. One can expect the increased privatization of higher education, with a greater and greater share of the cost transferred to students through tuition and a greater and greater demand for one or another form of vocational training that rounds out the investment in human capital.

Rawls in Eden

John Rawl's postulation of an 'original position,' is a brilliant, but once made, startlingly obvious philosophical move. As I understand it, the 'original position' begins with a thought experiment -- that is to say, imagine a group of rational people trying to devise a government, or perhaps more precisely, to negotiate a contract which forms 'a more perfect union.' The trick, however, is this: those deliberating are kept behind a 'veil of ignorance.' They are devising a government, and they will be subject to all the legal and social and economic implicature that follow from just that government, but they do not know, during the process of deliberation, just how they will be subject. When they have finished their deliberations, so to speak, each will be more or less randomly assigned a place within the resulting society, and because they do not know their status in advance, we can make reasonable assumptions that reasonable people will make certain sorts of decisions (and not others). A system of slavery would be unlikely because, not knowing a priori whether one would be placed as master or slave, it would be contrary to the individual self-interest of each member of the group (and thereby irrational) to risk being assigned as a slave.
As a thought experiment, there is something very American about Rawl's 'original position' -- not only that it seems, inevitably, to result in a constitutional democracy similar to that found in the United States, but in its marriage of the wholly practical (despite Sen's assertions to the contrary) with the wholly speculative in a point of origin. The group is gathered together, not to theorize ideal justice, but to write the contract for a government that will subsequently shape the lives of people not unlike thee and me in a world not unlike our own. Within the 'original position,' the deliberations are contingent upon rationality, but it is, in the end, a rather mundane form of rationality, predicated on little more than a consciousness of self-interest and causal inference of the 'common-sensical' sort. It is, however, a self-interest divested of contingency, and therein lies the crux of the difficulty (and the core of Sen's objection). We are not at a pure point of origin. We have come belatedly into a world fraught with self-interest, and self-interested calculation, but it is a self-interest already implicated within the world such as it is. It is self-interest from a particular vantage relative to a world with an already determined history. Our progenitor's labor, that is, brings us forth into a world long since fallen from grace. Nevertheless, in part because postulates little of reason beyond an instrumental self-interest capable of getting by in the world, and in part because it has purified that same self-interest of contingency (postulates a self-interest sublimated within a social activity where 'selfishness,' seeking personal advantage of one sort or another, has lost its utility) the 'original position' is, in Kantian terms, the 'adequate to furnish categorical imperatives' that is to say, practical laws sufficient to serve as 'a principle of morality,' both in criticizing extant social contracts, but also as a 'point of departure' within which the human endeavor to form 'more perfect unions' might reasonably be situated.
Again, as a thought experiment, there is something very American about Rawls' 'original position.' It insists upon means, not ends, and in doing so reveals an almost visceral distrust of what he calls 'comprehensive doctrines,' those religious or political doctrines that rationalize themselves against a utopian eschatology. The result, as I've suggested above, will inevitably be something that resembles American constitutional democracy in its Manichaean struggle to maximize and reconcile two competing values -- liberty and justice. That liberty and justice are competing, not complementary, values, I and others have argued elsewhere, and I will not repeat the argument here, except to say that, in almost all respects, I think Rawls is correct too in assigning 'freedom' primacy -- that is to say, for those deliberating within the original position, if in doubt, choose freedom over justice. I and others have also argued elsewhere that liberty and justice are self-defeating values considered in isolation each from the other. Absolute freedom for all, without the mitigating effects of justice, ends in absolute freedom for one, the Promethean uber-mensch that makes best use of his freedom to secure from thee and me at our expense the means necessary to his freedom. It ends, that is, in the violence of totalitarianism. Absolute justice for all, on the other hand, ends in what Kant called 'mechanism,' the complete subordination of human agency and the human will to a redistributive system that would make demands on and subsequently act on behalf of all equally. It ends, that is, in the denial of our individual human agency as moral and ethical beings. If the former is the teleological failure of unfettered 'capitalism,' with the corporate CEO as promethean hero, the latter represents the teleological failure of unfettered 'socialism,' with the state bureaucracy functioning as moral agent, and between competing ends, the Manichaean conflict, the world-historical dialectic of the late 19th and 20th century played itself out to the apparent triumph of the former over the latter, although it should be little cause for celebration. As Judt reminds us:
the world appears to be entering upon a new cycle, one with which our nineteenth-century forebears were familiar but of which we in the West have no recent experience. In the coming years, as visible disparities of wealth increase and struggles over the terms of trade, the location of employment, and the control of scarce natural resources all become more acute, we are likely to hear more, not less, about inequality, injustice, unfairness, and exploitation -- at home but especially abroad. And thus, as we lose sight of Communism ... the moral appeal of some refurbished version of Marxism is likely to grow.
Twentieth century Communism, as it played out across Russia and central Europe, clearly had its many abuses horrors, and as Judt implies, neither would it do well for us to 'forget' that the Marxist teleology was compelling for so many, despite the horrors of its state bureaucracy and the gulag, because it gave a philosophical structure and vocabulary to our altogether human concerns with justice.
The fundamental question before us, one that has perhaps always been before us, is this: if not within some form of refurbished Marxism, how then do we speak of justice? A number of things should be clear enough. There is a growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and insofar as wealth translates easily enough into the more efficacious forms of political influence, I suspect the recent quibbling over the terms of trade between the US and China, although reminiscent of the cold-war ideological struggles, is at fundament a struggle between competing oligarchies. That it is reminiscent of ideological struggles past, however, might serve to remind us on the one hand, that there is no necessary connection between capitalism, as such, and the sorts of distracted and placated representative democracies we have in the West, and on the other hand, that the sand castle of the nation-state has not completely dissolved under the rising tide of globalism. On the one hand, although we taut our form representative democracy for its protection of freedom, those most vociferously on the side of unfettered freedom are those who possess the greatest capability for efficacious action. It is the oligarch's (not the people's) freedom that must be protected, and the recent demise of Mubarik in Egypt might serve as a cautionary tale. It is less a tale about freedom, per se, more a tale about the oligarth's one compelling obligation -- to keep the people distracted and placated -- if not bread and circuses proper, then McDonald's and iPads, both of which are, in the end, anodyne sources of profit. On the other hand, I suspect Mubarik's real mistake, his structural mistake, was the conflation of the oligarchy with the nation state in a single person, in a kleptocracy. Increasingly the role of the national government is to protect the oligarch, and our own government's hesitancy to embrace the popular uprising against autocracy might also serve as a cautionary tale. It is less a tale about ideological alignment with an emergent 'free government,' per se, more a tale about role confusion.
Sen is perhaps correct when he asserts hat famine is less possible in representative democracies, insofar as the people must be violently repressed to tolerate a famine, particularly when free speech rights make it clear top the broader populace that the famine is merely a matter of food distribution. And there are, after a tipping point of difference, all sorts of relative famine as the 'visible disparities in wealth increase,' providing what Veblen called the invidious comparison. And it is perhaps the invidious comparison that toppled Mubarek, not a yearning to be free, as such, but a clear apprehension of having 'less' and wanting 'more' -- not an endorsement of western style capitalism, much less an endorsement of American style capitalism, as such, but a demand for 'justice,' a more equitable redistribution of wealth. Our own government was torn between its obligation to support what was, to all appearances, a popular uprising demanding the sorts of human rights implicit to western democracy and its competing obligation to protect what might be called an accumulated capability, the actual freedom of the oligarch captured in the rights to property. It was as though the hissing serpent of redistributive justice had raised its head to beguile us with the stuff of capitalist dogma, its reflexive defense of freedom for all, which in actuality is freedom for the few, those with the accumulated means, the accumulated capability, to act with some assurance in the world. It was heresy against one of the deepest and most formative of American mythologies It was heresy because the party so reflexively attuned to American freedom has also been the party of choice for our most fundamentalist Christianity mythology and the revolution at hand, of course, is a Muslim revolution. When ideologies fail, mythologies fill the vacuum left behind, and it is perhaps not surprising, with the lapsing of the great ideological conflicts between Marxism and Capital, that the intramural and extramural conflicts within our politics have taken on a mythological tone. The connection between 'free marketers' and the religious right is perhaps less abstruse than it might at first appear. One can suffer any number of indignities, one can lose one's job, one's home, one's possibility of support into a comforted old age, all of which reveal one's political and economic haplessness in this world, such as it is, with the rejoinder, 'well at least I know I'm free.'
Our most fundamental (and fundamentalist Christian) American mythology is centered in Eden. All are, or so I would hope, familiar with the narrative arch of the Christian creation tale, so I need not repeat it here, but there are a few features of the story that bear pointing out. First, and perhaps foremost, it is contingent upon choice, free choice. The tale would have been meaningless had God simply created the world, placed Adam and Eve in paradise, and kept the tree of the knowledge of good and evil well outside the gates of Eden. Second, along that line, the moral imperative -- to avoid knowledge of good and evil -- to maintain innocence -- does not emerge from or within choice, but exists prior to choice and is the imposition of of the divine. One can, that is, choose obedience or disobedience, but one cannot chose the moral imperative itself. Third, the enjoined choice is negative. One must say, like Bartleby, 'I prefer not,' but unlike Bartleby, it is not a preference emergent from experiential knowledge, but for Adam and Eve a preference that must be maintained behind a veil of ignorance that, of innocence that, once lost, is lost forever. Most undergraduates recognize that the innocence of ignorance is a poor defense against the importunities of Satan. Implicit to the narrative arch is a sense of post-lapsarian resentment for those choices, not necessarily one's own, that have precipitated the fall from grace the obverse side of which is an sense of nostalgia for more innocent times. Here again, choice is crucial to the possibility of salvation. One must choose the mediating grace of Christ -- a choice at once positive and negative. It is positive insofar as one chooses to accept (or not) God's grace, negative insofar as the choice itself entails conformity within a form of life, one that would have been puzzling to the historical Christ, but one that that is deeply American in the redeeming value of the punishment levied upon Adam and Eve for their original disobedience -- that is to say, the redeeming value ascribed to labor and the rewards of the same.
I should probably point out that there is nothing of the ideological in what I am describing, nor is there much of the theological, if by ideological or theological we mean the rhetorical appeal to a consistent set of reasoned ideas. Indeed, at least some of the contentiousness of contemporary political discourse emerges from the liberal appeal to logos -- if not a 'refurbished version of Marxism,' then at least 'the moral appeal' of a pragmatic ideology consistent with those failed ideologies of the recent past that aimed at something resembling ideal justice -- while the conservatives appeal to a mythos and a form of life more consistent with a post-modernist, a post-structuralist, post-ideological world. Timothy Beal, writing on Jon Shields in a summary article on American evangelical churches, notes, for example, that the Christian right leaders
have successfully mobilized conservative evangelical Christians not by appealing to a commonly shared ideology but by inculcating the very 'deliberative norms' that are idealized by political activists across the spectrum, including the New Left. Those norms, which include the practice of civility, the cultivation of dialogue, the use of moral reasoning, and the rejection of appeals to theology, enable the Christian right movement to maintain a degree of effective unity despite the many theological and political differences among its adherents.
Here we might note, however, that the practice of civility reserved for those who have made the 'right' choice and subordinated their moral authority to what I called in passing 'a form of life.' I use Wittgenstein's locution with some trepidation, in part because Wittgenstein was not explicitly concerned with ethical philosophy, nor the questions that trouble me here, and in part because, as I would understand it, a 'form of life' is not merely conventional, but exists before convention and organizes convention. A 'form of life' provides an ethical core, what it means to be a human being of a certain sort, of the right sort, and while a form of life can be learned, and demands that its attitudinal conventions be accepted (attitudes relative to the so called litmus test issues, like abortion,among them) it cannot be learned solely through the conventions, but is more akin to being accepted into a tribe. Free choice remains central to the moral being, but in as much as moral authority already resides within the 'form of life,' the choice is neatly divided between conformity and apostasy. Moreover, it is a choice that must be reaffirmed. The cultivation of dialogue is important as a means of reinforcing forms of life, playing down ideological differences and, as Beal also remarks, fencing 'the table, so to speak, from those who could not conform,' or more to my point, fencing Eden from the apostates. Dialogue is not dialectic, however, and the use of moral reasoning strikes an academic more as moral rationalization precisely because it lacks a frame of reference, a theory or ideology, that makes it cohere into a consistent 'moral view' or 'world view' against which one aligns instrumental means against predetermined moral and ethical ends. Dialogue is rather an idealized process, 'deliberative norms' within which one affirms and reaffirms one's moral autonomy and authority to make the 'right' choices, and the pun on 'right' is more or less deliberate.
In this context, the leap to the political is not particularly difficult, and it is perhaps useful to differentiate mainstream from more militant or eccentric strains of Evangelical Christianity. The latter, insofar as they derive their moral authority from a single issue (abortion or racial supremacy) or a single charismatic leader (Jonestown or Waco) are not easily assimilated to what has become the formative elements in the evangelical form of life, the moral authority residing in an idealized nostalgia for the middle-class suburban nuclear family. It is not Revolutionary Road, but Happy Days, though the unmasking of the psycho-sexual stress implicit in maintaining the pretensions of the idealized suburban life, the lapses of faith that result in alienation from one's work and the distractions of alcoholism and adultery that one finds in Revolutionary Road in its way simply affirms the moral authority of the prevailing form of life. Though the film would send an alternative message, it is clear enough that much of the protagonists' misery, the couples disaffection each with the other and their internal expulsion from their Edenic suburban surround, stems from their their loss of faith, their indulgence in a much more sophisticated view of life, but ultimately an indulgence less conducive to the happiness then the Cunningham's Happy Days as an embodiment of American Christian virtue in all its good humored and nostalgic innocence. Although no doubt not exactly what Jefferson had in mind when he set out 'the pursuit of happiness' as an inalienable right, yet the happiness of Happy Days is the vision of happiness that ought to be pursued, and the vision of happiness that the body politic ought to facilitate against the beguiling but antagonistic pressures of contemporary life.
Insofar as the democratic process resembles the practice of affirmation and reaffirmation of norms through deliberation, and insofar as one can maintain the undergirding assumption that the US was founded as a Christian nation, the constitution and the constitutionally guaranteed rights are afforded the same status as the Bible. If the left, however, values 'deliberative norms' as the occasion for an analytic -- and by analytic one means a deeper understanding of or a more thorough-going knowledge of the formal elements in a form of life, not for its affirmation, but its amendment relative to a vision of greater 'justice for all' -- the right values 'deliberative norms' as the occasion for sponsorship -- and by sponsorship one means affirmation and reaffirmation of the formative elements in the form of life already afforded moral authority, not for a greater understanding, but to support and prevent one from slipping into one or another of the forms of apostasy. The implied analogy to the alcoholics anonymous sponsor is intended, and reflects a post-lapsarian vision of collective and individual human nature that is already addicted to its own self-destructive behavior, to the various forms of governmental largess that undermine the redemptive engagement in labor, and the body politic, if it is functioning as it should, acts as in loco parentis, not to make choices for individuals and divest them of moral autonomy and authority, nor to protect individuals from the debilitating consequence of bad choices should they pursue their addictions individually or collectively, but to affirm and reaffirm the redemptive value of labor (both reproductive and economic) within a form of life that embodies an edenic vision of Christian virtue without the complicating and conflicting need for either the textual ideologies that emerge from careful Biblical exegesis or the coherent understanding of 'church' and its role in the body politic as the embodiment of a particular theology, a form of life that is uniquely American.
Labor is god's retribution. Acquiescence to the conditions of labor is the path to redemption. The recovery of a pre-lapsarian paradise, or a version of it both spiritually and materially, if one accepts the condition of guilt and the expiation of guilt in labor. One wants to argue the difference between redemption and reward, particularly economic reward, but conflation is a hallmark of conservative evangelical thinking. As Weber and others have long noted, the rewards one reaps, particularly the economic rewards, signal the depth and breadth of god's redemptive grace. It is, perhaps, important to note that the mythos of redemption and reward is, first and foremost, individual and familial, not social in the proper sense of the sense of the word -- that is to say, I work hard for myself and my family, and if you work hard for yourself and your family, the social will, as it were, take care of itself. The difficulty, of course, in pragmatic terms, is that labor is not equally available, nor is it equally "redemptive" when it is available. Bob Herbert captures the sentiment in a recent Times editorial (2.22.11) when he quotes the wife of an unemployed contractor -- "all we want to do is work hard and pay our bills. We're not sure that part of the American Dream is still possible anymore." From a conservative evangelical perspective, centered on the moral autonomy and consequent culpability of the individual, there is something wrong with the man if he finds himself "now suddenly thrust into the lower middle class." Attitudinally, that "something wrong" justifies not only continued exclusion from the sorts of social safety net benefits that go to encourage moral turpitude, but even the possibility of future employment. Herbert goes on to note that,
according to the National Employment Law Project, a trend is growing among employers to not even consider the applications of the unemployed for jobs that become available. Among examples offered by the project were a phone manufacturer that posted a job announcement with the message: 'No Unemployed Candidate Will Be Considered At All" and a Texas electronics company that announced online that it would 'not consider/review anyone NOT currently employed regardless of the reason.'
While it might be a bit glib to suggest the parallel between the populist uprisings in the Middle East and the union protests in the Mid West -- there are, after all, many differences that would need to be taken fully into account -- the basic structural dissatisfactions are the same, the on-going appropriation of wealth from the many to the few and the growing sense of betrayal and alienation of those who see their position within the social compact eroded. Both Bush and Obama are a ways from the comic book villains of a Mubarek or a Quadaffi. While we might disagree, even vehemently, with their public agendas, it is not quite clear that their over-throw would have much appreciable effect. One difference is the political process itself, and the practiced art of "orderly overthrow" that we have mastered within our electoral process, one that insists we focus on "issues" and the abstraction of villains. The unions have been the traditional voice of equity between labor and its redemptive rewards, a check to the balance sheets of the corporate giants, but "collective bargaining" has long since lost any moral authority, in part because they have succumbed to their own forms of corruption, but also in part because they are "collective" and coercively so. In their constitution, and in their protection of individuals with little regard to their contribution or culpability, they violate individual autonomy and moral accountability -- justice conceived as "rendering to each his due." The emergent voice of conservative evangelicalism in secular guise, the so-called tea party, with its anti-union, anti-regulatory, and anti-taxation message, a visceral reaction against government appropriation of the redemptive reward due their labor and its distribution to others, is the voice of individual autonomy and moral authority. Unfortunately, they are also the voice of corporate autonomy and moral authority, insofar as those collective business entities are defined under the law as "individuals." Although corporate autonomy is unlikely to be what the tea-party has in mind -- thinking perhaps of individuals as individual human actors -- don't tread on me and my family -- it is most likely the reason those same corporate individuals are funneling money through non-profits to those political candidates channeling their message. They will contribute in their own way to the transfer of wealth, not through appropriation and redistribution, but through the steady erosion of their labor's value. It has bought, and will buy, less and less redemption.
I am suggesting that the ideological conflicts that shaped the twentieth century -- those pitting free market capitalism against the left and right hand versions of the totalitarian state, with the apparent triumph of the former, a triumph repeating itself belatedly in the middle east as I write -- did not portend the end of history as some suggested. In Rawls' terms, it settled only one issue -- the primacy of individual freedom -- though not exactly as Rawls himself might have conceptualized individual freedom. It has not so much signaled the triumph of the individual human actor as moral agent, but the corporate individual. Here too, we should be cautious not to mistake the corporate individual for what our 18th century forebears might have called "we the people" acting concertedly as moral agents within a rational -- that is to say, self-consciously articulated -- social compact that serves to promulgate justice within the state. The corporate individual exists, for the most part, outside the state. The rebellions throughout the middle east mimic our own American Revolution, popular uprisings against corrupt and confiscatory states, but they will differ in two respects. First, however successful they might be in creating a new state in Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, they have left largely unscathed those "corporate individuals" that exist outside and above the state. They are no longer colonized by one or another European state, but they continue to be colonized by the interests of corporate oil, individual players in the panoply of individual corporate players. If the individual human being, acting as an autonomous moral agent, acts in deference to other individual human beings -- that is to say, behaves justly -- the corporate individual, acting as an autonomous moral agent, acts in deference to other corporate individuals. The genius of Rawls' formulation of the "original position," its persuasiveness, lies not only in its theoretical simplicity, but the way in which it positions autonomous self-interest as deference to others, establishes justice within deliberative norms without a necessary appeal to an a priori (and arbitrary) ideological or theological moral authority. Nevertheless, and this brings me to the second difference. Rawls' formulation is persuasive in part because it appeals to a particularly protestant, and a particularly American mythos. It conflates a version of our constitutional congress with an idealized (and unrealized) version of its result, suggesting that we can, to one degree or another, recapture an American Eden of justice for all. Although I find Sen's critique more or less irrelevant to Rawls' motivating concerns, his insistence on the pragmatic difficulties of creating justice in the world we know does point hint at a concern. Even setting aside the idealism of the 'original position,' it is easy enough to imagine how autonomous human individuals might act in deference to others, and it is also easy enough to imagine how the autonomous corporate individuals might act in deference to one another, it is much more difficult to imagine how the former can be aligned with the latter, and that disjuncture may well be the 'original sin' of the emergent American future. The difficulties are post-lapsarian. It is easy enough to imagine how autonomous human individuals might submit to and achieve redemption through labor, how one might make the right choices to "work hard and pay one's bills," somewhat more difficult to imagine how autonomous corporate individuals might submit to and achieve redemption through labor, but virtually impossible to imagine how one might achieve equity between the former and the latter.