Westerns! Maybe More.

    I've been trying to say this since 1977. Maybe I can now. Let's see.
    I've been watching westerns all day.  Mostly the Duke; John Wayne.  I love that stuff.
    I love westerns because they are so black and white; so stark.  I don't mean in coloration.  I mean they are such perfect little morality plays. There is right and wrong.  Black and white. I don't believe in "shades of gray".
    Old newspaper photographs used to be composed of a matrix of dots of black and white.  Taken as a whole they produced shades of gray. At the end, they were just a series of black and white. A series of , yes/no questions. A series of ones and zeroes.
    I don't believe ( not just don't think) that in morality, there are shades of gray.  I think seeing it that way is just an intellectual laziness.  I think it's an unwillingness to answer each of those yes/no questions and accept the weight of those answers.  I think our public interactions are all questions of basic morality.
    Now, here's some vanity.  As a young student introduced to the tenets of philosophy and the various philosophers I conceived my own philosophy.  I called it," Intellectual Reductionism". Kinda a grand name don't ya think?  I still like it.  To be honest, expressing it, justifying it, never got much further than this point.
    I always thought I was being too amorphous in my thinking.  Here's the fat news.  I'm typing on a machine and you are reading on a device that relies on exactly that logic of yes/no, 1/0. Our digital world is held to that rigid, inflexible logic. We should follow suit.
    It turns out the Duke get's us in the end. It remains to be seen if we get it.