Yes, I’m a progressive. I am a reader of Think Progress who writes articles for a publication with a well-established reputation for leftist thought.
I have chosen to live in a metropolis, New York City, rather than in a rural area, because I enjoy watching the world change and I feel like I have a better vantage point from which to do that here. My taste in aesthetics leans to retro-futurism.
I find myself in arguments against preservationists over issues like regulation of skyscraper heights. I think our cities should grow larger and taller. I relish the vision of human beings living in the sky.
I am atheist primarily, I would say, because I like the idea that we humans should not rely on the traditions of our past to make our decisions about the future. Also, my favorite contemporary artist is the avant garde musical genius Kanye West.
All that said, there is one subject about which I am unreservedly conservative, backward-thinking, stuck-in-mud with my head in the sand.
Do not put chocolate in my pecan pie.
Pecan pie is my No 1 very favorite dessert in the entire world. I enjoy lots of food, and love many desserts that incorporate chocolate into other flavors. But there is not a single bite of food available on this planet that makes my eyes roll back in my head like a great white shark during a feeding frenzy like what comes from the combination of Karo syrup, salt and toasted pecans. (With a little brown sugar and vanilla, I think, in my ultimate preference.)
Please, do not tamper with this perfection.
It has become popular, of late, for ambitious chefs to try to improve on the traditional pecan pie.
In a recent recipe for a modified pecan pie she ran in the New York Times, Melissa Clark wrote:
Here is a pie that might make Thanksgiving purists shake their heads. Chocolate and pecan? But bear with us. The bittersweet chocolate adds depth to what is traditionally an achingly sweet pie, and the bourbon gives it a grownup finish.
No. I’m sorry. But I will not bear with you, Melissa, though I am sure you are a very nice and well-meaning person. I have tried these additions to pecan pie on numerous occasions. I always come away disappointed, regretting my open-minded spirit of adventurousness because it just cost me some valuable stomach space.
There is no need for chocolate or bourbon in pecan pie. If your pie is too achingly sweet (it can indeed happen!), use less brown sugar or add more salt or butter or pecans to adjust. Work within the basic framework. Do not add chocolate or bourbon to a pecan pie, nor tuna fish or kimchi.
One of my favorite philosophers is the late Princeton liberal pragmatist Richard Rorty. His 1989 book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, had about as large an impact on my thinking as anything I’ve ever read. It presents a powerful stance against traditionalism, essentialism and the concept of a priori truth that I have, basically, embraced and built my thinking around. Here is a quote:
There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.
There is no center, there is no god, there is no essence.
Other than pecan pie. This is what I’m saying: pecan pie is the closest thing we have to an absolute truth. Do not be a heretic. Do not put chocolate in your pecan pie. You think you can soar to the sun on your manmade wings of wax and feathers. You cannot. Like Icarus, doomed by hubris, you will fall from the sky and plummet to your death on the cold hard earth, and your soul will burn in the flames of eternal hell.
Some things are not man’s to change.
Rating for traditional pecan pie: 5 stars
Rating for chocolate pecan pie: 1 star
Rating system
5 stars: Objective proof of the existence of the divine
4 stars: Flaky pie crust that tastes more of butter than sugar
3 stars: Coldplay
2 stars: Apple pie
1 stars: The Ninth Circle of Dante’s Hell (reserved for, fittingly, treachery)
