The common man

Yet another draft chapter — again posted as a work in progress

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law 1 (1881)

This is the law of male experience: the life of man is binary logic.

Stand in my shoes — as I inescapably must — on the sidewalk, in a conference room, at the threshold of a hotel bar, and let your eyes sweep across the human panorama of the moment. Woman to the left, woman to the right, standing and beckoning. My mind rides into the valley of life.

And now the cascade of binary decisions begins. Would I, could I, should I, will I? — but most of all, Would I? Moment by moment the opening verbal gambit varies. Excuse me. Simply: Hi. Perhaps: Wow. But the logic of words expelled past the rising catch in the throat arises from the same sequence of smaller judgments, all informed by lifelong experience traceable to an inexorable impulse coded well before birth. Every new girl that you meet begins anew the same exercise in binary logic: Would I do her if I could?

Yes.