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Sunday, July 13, 2003
Cows, Chickens
Am I the only one bothered by this long-running Chik-fil-A ad campaign featuring cows trying to talk people into not eating them and eating the chickens instead? I'm not a vegetarian, and I love Chik-fil-A sandwiches. Chik-fil-A employees are the best in the fast food business, as far as I have seen. And I even admire the organization for keeping to their tradition of observing the Christian Sabbath and for offering college scholarships. It creeps me out, however, that we are supposed to find it funny that a creature would put on a little soft shoe to keep from being devoured. And please, please forgive me for asking "what about the children?", but, really, what about the children? To laugh at something bargaining for its existence seems to me to be the ethos of the bully. (Uday Hussein comes to mind.)
I'm sounding like a moralizing prig, so I'll stop here.
Eddie 5:47 PM
Saturday, July 12, 2003
More Silliness
I thought about writing about the Randall Simon horror, but stopped when I realized I couldn't outdo a fan in Milwaukee who came up with a punishment to fit the crime:
An apology was not enough for Mark Johnson of Middleton, though.
"He's a professional athlete. He should be a role model," Johnson said Thursday. "I think they should dress him up as the hot dog in the sausage race. Nobody ever likes the hot dog."
Eddie 9:58 AM
Thursday, July 10, 2003
Finally
...an advocacy group I can stand behind fight beside!
...a gift that keeps on giving!
...and a contest I finally have a chance at!
Eddie 9:18 PM
Honesty
The "Bush lied" attack is so thin and such a house of cards that it is no wonder that the Democratic politicians are mainly leaving it to their "journalists" to push it forward. While I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Bush administration made claims in support of the war that don't stack up, the real position of the administration has been fairly clear and consistent. I would summarize it as follows:
1. As pretty much everyone agrees, Hussein had attempted to manufacture WMDs in the past, and would continue to do so if he could get away with it.
2. The only thing limiting this development was the inspections process.
3. The inspections process was shut down by Hussein, and nobody did anything about it. The process only restarted once the U.S. and its real allies started mobilizing for war.
4. Hussein didn't come clean on gaps in the records and continued to frustrate the process where possible.
5. War mobilization cannot exist indefinitely. We are experiencing difficulty rotating in troops as it is. How long do people think that we could have sustained an effort of wait and see? And if we backed off of the mobilization, does anyone really believe that Hussein would not have shut down inspections again? Really, does anyone?
I don't see a gap in the logic, and I don't remember the Bush administration presenting a big picture that strayed from this line of argument. No, I didn't believe at the time that every claim made was highly credible. For example, I doubted a connection between Hussein and bin Laden (although I actually give it more credence now). Regardless, the argument generally was not hard to follow. And the fact that Bush's popular support doesn't seem too hurt by this attack suggests that many people feel the same way, or else didn't need much reason to kick Hussein's ass to begin with.
Eddie 8:49 PM
Crisis
I just turned 37 this past weekend, and I've been telling people that I'm gearing up for my mid-life crisis. A number of them have responded that it is still a bit early for that, but I don't understand. Just how long do people think they are going to live? If the average life expectancy in the U.S. is around 77, then it looks to me like I'm right on schedule. What optimism to begin your mid-life crisis in your 40s!
Assuming the timing issue is settled, the most important question is what form the crisis should take. My wife has ruled out other women, which would be the most obvious direction, leaving me scratching my head about alternatives. I'm not interested in risking my life, so there goes motorcycles, rock climbing, flying, and other activities that reportedly make you feel more alive and help you not think about the future. I'm also not especially interested in travel, at least not enough to fit the grandeur of this occasion.
I could change occupations, like our now non-blogging friend Jim, but I don't have any skills that I can think of and I have become very comfortable with the hours of a college professor. It is the most tempting of the options so far, but it is hard to imagine it being for me a good choice.
When I was younger, I thought it a little pathetic that someone might reach middle-age and suddenly feel ill-at-ease with it all. What an indictment of their life, my presumptuous younger self thought. Now, I see it a little differently, although it may still be a little pathetic. There is something disturbing about being able to see yourself doing the same thing for the rest of your life. When people talk about the straight and narrow, I had always thought that the narrow part was the difficulty. I now think it is the straight, because who really wants to be able to see so well where the road is going? A few more twists in the road please!
Eddie 3:15 AM
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
Nature
In my post on gay marriage from two weeks ago, I argued that conservatism may have the most fruitful debate on the matter, because liberalism is ill-equipped to understand marriage in any terms other than the rights of individuals. Since marriage is a form of social recognition, and it is unreasonable to demand how others recognize you, coming at the issue simply in the terms of individual rights is a non-starter. It is necessary for those arguing for recognition to convince others that they are indeed worthy of it.
I concluded that, on balance, the argument for recognition is persuasive, and that conservatives should support some form of union for gays, whether it be marriage or something like "civil union." In response, J. David Camm offered an important rejoinder that I want to consider more closely. In his last comment, he says the following:
Our primary argument therefore seems to revolve around the proper definition of nature. While you hold for a somewhat relativistic notion determined by the subject's level of bodily satisfaction, I appeal to an objective reality ordered toward human flourishing rationally considered. The normative understanding of nature, as in Aristotle's conception, was based on the observable phenomenon that all forms of being have teloi. While physical satisfaction or pleasure might be a positive side effect of pursuing the telos, it is not a necessary or essential component. A nature ordered according to satisfaction is always subject to revision while a nature ordered to the human good, rational activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, is constant from generation to generation.
David raises the question of nature, and considers it relevant to the question of the moral status of homosexuality. One response (as seen by a comment left by someone else) is to suggest that the concept of human nature is an arbitrary one used to promote particular values, i.e., whatever is conventional seems natural. That is not my response, so I want to explore the concept of nature a little and try to show why I think it is consistent with my position on the issue of homosexuality.
In affirming the notion of a human nature, I would assert the following:
1. That what is good for us is rooted in our biology. Contrary to the Marxist vision, human beings are not utterly plastic.
2. While there may be important variations within the species, what is a good for one person is generally a good for all. These goods can be discerned from experience. Taking these two statements together, we can say that there is an objective human nature.
3. That there is a human nature should not be taken to mean necessarily that human beings reach their potential "naturally," i.e., without intervention. Culture cultivates; just as agriculture can develop crops that are bigger and stronger than their ancestors in the wild, so human culture can help develop human beings to reach the fulfillment of their nature. Corrupt culture, likewise, can stunt human development.
I won't pretend that I have proven any of this, nor that any of these in and of themselves decide very much. Everyone will grant that biology matters to some extent. The questions therefore are in what way and to what extent, and these must be argued for on a case by case basis.
When David says that I am holding "for a somewhat relativistic notion determined by the subject's level of bodily satisfaction," he is referring to statements of mine like the following: "my experience does not suggest that gay people are especially unhappy except insofar as they are excluded from various parts of society." In saying this, however, I am not establishing pleasure as the ultimate standard of morality; I am engaging in the empirical task of trying to answer the question of nature. Aren't pleasure and pain fairly reliable signs of the health or distress of an organism? If gay people report to us straights that they are really ok being gay, and our observations of their life don't suggest anything too different, what other evidence are we going to find to suggest that homosexuality is something bad for them? Pleasure may be a "side effect" of good living, as both David and Aristotle would say, but it is one well worth paying attention to. Moreover, Aristotle would make the stronger point that a life without pleasure is not a happy (or "flourishing") one, regardless of its other accomplishments.
The teleological argument about reproduction doesn't seem to me to be able to bear the weight that is being placed upon it. Surely reproduction is fundamental to our survival as a species, and the sex act is how our species pulls reproduction off. Accordingly, sex as reproduction surely deserves respect and protection. It is characteristic of human culture, however, to take activities fundamental to our animal nature and transform them into activities that reinforce social bonds, and there is remarkable flexibility in how that happens. Eating everywhere is a social activity, but there are enough differences in cultural (and subcultural) practices to make a person nervous in a foreign environment. Likewise, sex is generally used to strengthen intimacy. This function can assist the reproductive function of sex, but it is hard to see why it must, just as sometimes people eat to be social even when they are not really hungry.
Eddie 4:45 PM
Monday, July 07, 2003
Void (Reprise)
I'm back in town and can reliably access my comments again. I thought I would say a few more words about my post from last week in which I called into question the Newtonian concept of mass.
Alexis brought me into the 21st century with talk of things like point particles and other stuff that doesn't make sense to me. Assuming this account works, I have the following question: if these concepts are needed to make sense of Newtonian mass, was the concept of mass intelligible when Newton proposed it? Could a Newtonian respond to my problem with the Chinese boxes?
Eddie 2:41 AM
Friday, July 04, 2003
Report
I'm still in the North Georgia mountains (near Clayton) at my wife's parents place. We'll be returning Sunday. It is nice to be up here, but it has cut down on my internet capabilities, partly because dial-up limits when I might do it and partly because my mother-in-law's computer acts a little strange. It seems to have some kind of sticky memory for web pages: almost always I have to refresh when I link to a page because the browser is showing me the page as I saw it the last time. Plus my access to my comments is still erratic, so I'll probably wait until my return to respond to some points.
One thing I have had a chance to do is a little star-gazing. I'm a rank amateur, and all I have is a 7x50 pair of binoculars, but that is enough for now. I'm starting to learn the summer sky. Tonight I located Bootes, the Northern Crown, and the Keystone of Hercules. I also tried to pick up a galaxy near the tip of the Big Dipper, but I couldn't find it. I don't know whether it was the moisture in the air or my equipment or both. Last night my wife and I did find a globular cluster off the tail of Scorpio. I couldn't get enough clarity to fix on any stars in the cluster, but my eyes would pick up individual stars briefly as I scanned them across the area. The effect created was that the stars seemed to be popping out at me! Pretty cool.
I doubt that I'll plunk down the money anytime soon, but I'd be interested in finding out if anyone has a favorite beginner's telescope. Cost and ease of use are important. (Remember, I'm still using Blogger!) Also, I don't know yet if I'm more interested in planets and such or deep-space objects, so I guess I don't want anything that favors one too much over the other. Like I said, I can't imagine buying one right now, but if I had a sense of what was good, I might keep an eye on Ebay to see what comes up.
Eddie 12:29 AM
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Void
I have an interest in the history of science, although I wouldn't claim to know a great deal of that history. There are multiple reasons for this interest, I suppose. One is that I just enjoy watching science in its amateur days. Also, I have found that I understand the theories of science when I can trace them from their origins. Science education usually proceeds by presenting the student with theory and a few observations, either observations that can be replicated in a school lab or key observations in the field. When observation and theory are given as a package, it is difficult to separate one from the other. It is only when there are competing theories that it becomes clear what the actual evidence is, prior to its interpretation.
Unfortunately, my tracing of the history of the science has not made it very far or been very thorough, so I'm not much better off grasping contemporary theories than anyone else. In fact, it is even worse than that, because sometimes I find myself drawn to older theories that have long been left in the proverbial dustbin. For example, I find myself to be a fan of the ether, whatever the Michelson-Morley experiment might have shown. And over the past month, I've found myself increasingly sympathetic to Descartes' conception of matter and critical of the Newtonian concept of mass.
Descartes said that matter was simply extension, i.e., substance that fills a certain volume. By effectively equating matter with volume, Descartes was ruling out the notion of mass, which suggests that a given volume can hold different amounts of matter. The greater the amount of matter relative to a given volume, the greater the mass.
The notion of mass seems to fit with our common experience. If something is hard, we imagine that there is more matter there to resist what is moving against it, while the soft gives way. And although the concept of mass is not identical to the concept of weight, it makes sense that harder things are generally heavier than softer things: the harder things have more matter, and thus more attraction to the earth.
And yet, as I was trying to imagine how Descartes was seeing the world, the concept of mass became more fuzzy for me. Let me explain why and hopefully some of you who have actually studied science into the 21st century can help me out.
Imagine raking leaves and putting them into a bag. As we all know, at some point you press down on the leaves in the bag to make them more compact so that you can fit more leaves in. As you do so, you often can feel the air that is being pushed out as you push down. Let us imagine that we have done this a couple of times and now have a fairly heavy bag full of leaves. Let us also imagine that we have not actually stretched the bag in the process, i.e., the volume of the bag has remained constant.
This process of putting more leaves into the bag seems to accord with the notion of increasing mass. I am taking a given volume and adding more matter to it. And, as expected, the bag becomes harder and heavier. It looks like Descartes loses.
But think about this. As I push down the leaves, a volume of air rushes out of the bag. If I fill the bag with leaves up to the point it was at before I pushed it down, I can see that I have displaced a certain volume of one material (air) with another (leaves). In fact, given that the bag volume is a constant, I can safely say that the total volume of leaves + air in the bag is a constant as well. Every cubic inch of leaves displaces an identical cubic inch of air.
If I am displacing equal volumes of material, why should we think that there is more material when we add leaves at the expense of the air? The explanation that comes to mind for me is this: it is because the leaves themselves have more mass than the air. The problem, however, is that this appears to me to just be pushing the problem back a step. If mass is akin to stuffing more matter into a given volume, then it would seem that we should be able to explain it on the level of the leaves and the air. If I start to talk about the mass of the leaves, however, I have just created a new volume to stuff matter into. And won't I end up with the same question?
To see this more clearly, let's just think about the mass of leaves. Presumably some leaves have greater mass than other leaves. If we were to somehow increase the mass of a given leaf, wouldn't we again be displacing one material with another, each of equal volume? To explain this, are we going to make the same assertion as before, that the leaf with more mass has more mass because its parts have more mass? Where does it end?
This looks like a Chinese box to me. Help me out.
Eddie 1:48 AM
Friday, June 27, 2003
Blogger
No, this isn't another post bashing Blogger and praising Movable Type or something like it. On the contrary, I want to go against the grain and remind everyone of how important Blogger is for the blogging world. I don't really like blogging about blogging very much, but I thought this should be said.
First of all, Blogger is very easy to start with. I tried to start with MT, and downloaded all these files, but didn't have a clue what to do with them. Only later did I realize that I was going to have someone set the files up on a server and I was going to have to buy a domain name. (And maybe even these aren't true, but the point is that I couldn't tell up from down.) Ease of entry is no small matter.
Second, the blogging world draws strength from numbers. Most of what we do is pretty trivial and interesting only to ourselves, but occasionally a topic will come up that we know something about, either through past experience or proximity. With so many people blogging, it is almost always the case that issues of the day have a blogger to give insight beyond traditional journalism. And it is Blogger that is largely responsible for such a wide range of blogging. Lately, for example, Sullivan and others have been drawing a lot of attention to Iranian bloggers. All the ones I've looked at are using Blogger. Salam Pax did too.
Finally, however Blogger might compare unfavorably to other entities, the only serious downside that I see is the dreaded archive problem. Working archives are important so that other people can link to you, and this has been tempting me to make the switch. But I don't really have a strong sense of how much this is a problem. I hear a lot of complaints, but since so many people use Blogger to begin with, it is hard to determine proportions. There are still some people using Blogger who get tons of hits a day, so these problems must not be regularly catastrophic.
To sum up, I don't see why every switch away from Blogger should be treated as some kind of religious conversion. It reminds me of the Mac devotees who imagine Microsoft to be the root of all evil.
Update: I've been trying to post this for a while, but I'm getting a message saying "Transfer error." #@!*ing Blogger!
Eddie 4:15 PM
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Independence
Via Instapundit is this article that reports on a mathematician's analysis of Supreme Court decisions. The conclusion reached is that the Court members are not making decisions that are statistically independent of one another: "Dr. Sirovich calculates, based on information theory, that 4.68 ideal justices would have produced the same diversity of decision making." This is truly shocking. In a related analysis, it turns out that the American population as a whole shows little independence on the issue of the pleasure of having hemorrhoids. Based on information theory, 1.03 ideal Americans would have produced the same diversity of decision making.
Eddie 3:54 AM
Gay Marriage
There has been an interesting exchange this week with Sullivan and various members of the Corner on the topic of gay marriage. Sullivan, of course, believes strongly that civic equality and basic human decency demand a recognition of marriage for gays. At the Corner, no one has taken that strong a stance, but Andrew Stuttaford and Jonah Goldberg have given a qualified defense for some notion of civil union, while Stanley Kurtz and John Derbyshire have attacked both gay marriage and civil unions on the grounds that either would undermine marriage and the family altogether.
It seems right for this debate to emerge within conservatism, because conservatism has the best sensitivities for what is at stake. Liberalism began as an effort to free individuals from social control, whether that control be exercised directly through the law or indirectly through majority opinion. From the perspective of classical liberalism, that effort in the United States has largely been a success. And even welfare liberalism, with its emphasis on a level playing field, is still largely oriented toward freedom for the individual, even if pursuing a level playing field paradoxically ends up limiting the freedom of others. While many Americans are uncomfortable with homosexuality, for the most part, especially in urban areas, homosexuals are free as individuals to choose their sexual partners and express their point of view. Marriage, however, is not, strictly speaking, an individual right, not because it involves two people, but because it involves the whole society. Society may decide, for the sake of individual liberty, not to ask questions about people's private behavior, but surely it is under no obligation to recognize just any claim of union as a marriage. An individual cannot demand that others recognize him in a certain way on the basis of an individual right. For this reason, liberalism has little to contribute to the argument, except to argue that policies directed toward married people (such as filing jointly to the IRS) be extended to all unions.
Conservatives, however, understands how much is at stake in this question. The Italian philosopher Vico argued that at the founding of the tribal order are three institutions: religion, marriage, and burial. These three institutions are older than our collective memory, and we can only speculate on what homo sapien was like without them. Furthermore, while the modern instinct is to put all power in the state, conservatives realize that the church and the family have a power independent of the state and are ultimately stronger than it. The state may be the final arbiter in the modern world, but there is always the chance that the church or the family may just decide to walk away from the table. The bond of citizenship has never been strong enough to consistently trump these other loyalties. In short, these ancient institutions are not to be taken lightly.
Given the seriousness of these matters, there is a temptation to say that we shouldn't take any chances with the unknown. In fact, some might identify this attitude as being the conservative position in all matters, and there are plenty of people who think of themselves as conservatives who would agree. At the very least, we should recognize the position as a conservative impulse. Nonetheless, conservatism can be more robust than that; it can direct its energies not simply to holding on to the past but to identifying what in our past has given us our strength. Sullivan's argument has this form, to my mind. After thinking about how marriage bonds heterosexuals to each other and the community generally, he argues that homosexual life is made worse by not having this same option. And some of the things that make social conservatives flinch, say the promiscuity of gay males, can be argued to be not a sign of deviance but a sign of what happens when this option is not available. If heterosexuals could not marry, the argument goes, we would see a lot more promiscuity among heterosexual males as well.
I am highly sympathetic to Sullivan's arguments. It is not my opinion that gays are miserable because of their sexual desire, except insofar as it estranges them from others. In one sense of natural, therefore, it seems quite natural, i.e., it seems legitimately to describe how some pursue completion. And, surprising as it would be to some, I'm guessing that most conservatives who have followed this debate on the internet would agree, since the net draws a younger conservative whose leanings are typically more libertarian. Thus, I feel compelled to point out some aspects of Kurtz's and Derbyshire's position that I think must be taken seriously.
1. We really don't know what effect opening up marriage would have on the institution of marriage generally. Even if we can confidentially say that it will make gay life better, we are not thereby in a position to assert that it will be good for society as a whole. It is possible that something might bring completion to the individual's life while not being good for society generally. A fairly powerful argument could be made that philosophy is an example of this.
The country's origins in classical liberalism give most everyone good motive to allow this experiment to move forward. Nonetheless, it would be fair to recognize that it is an experiment, and we should go into it with some sense of what signs there would be that the experiment has failed.
2. Given what seems to be a stronger impulse for promiscuity in males (straight or gay), it could be argued that social pressure is only partly responsible for maintaining fidelity in heterosexual marriages. The other part is that one of married partners is a woman. This is further evidence of the old claim that women are the civilizers of men. If true, we might have good reason to doubt that a gay male's life would change much just by having the option to marry, although a lesbian's might. Furthermore, if gay males create a culture where marriage and promiscuity exist openly together, that might weaken (or at least alter) the social pressure for fidelity generally. Heterosexual women might suffer from this, but the obvious concern is for the welfare of children. (That I could talk about marriage for this many paragraphs and not mention children could be taken as evidence in itself that gay marriage would have worsening effect on the institution.)
There are good arguments in response to this, but I don't know how anyone could say with any certainty that this outcome is not a possibility. I think a lot of men might find it tempting to live in a society that has a weaker support for sexual fidelity. I don't see how this could be a good thing. From this point of view, we might say that marriage is not entirely natural. Rather, it qualifies and conditions certain natural impulses, moving us toward a life more distinctively human. As something that conditions natural impulse, it might be particularly vulnerable to alterations that are less demanding.
Conservatives have a lot to chew on. American conservatism must be responsive to the classical liberal foundations of American society, and therefore must take seriously the promotion of the individual good. Our history is much older, however, and so the ancient claims about religion and family must be taken seriously as well.
Eddie 3:03 AM
Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Self-Consciousness
In our everyday way of speaking, it is undesirable to be made self-conscious. It indicates that there is something about you that you don't want others to see, and that thinking about how others see you is disorienting. For example, the last thing I want while teaching is to hear myself speak. I want, in some sense, to be "inside" the speaking, not "outside" listening in, if for no other reason than listening in is actually a distraction from the speaking in the first place. When it does happen, it is usually in cases where I sense that absolutely no one is paying attention, and I'm just filling time because it is what I'm paid to do. It is truly awful, thus, to my mind, the common prejudice against being self-conscious is well-placed.
On the other hand, it is my belief that philosophy is the supreme act of self-consciousness. How then can I consider philosophy to be a worthy activity? The easy approach perhaps would be to just say that the term self-consciousness is being used here in different ways. While I think there is some truth to that, I think it worth investigating further what self-consciousness might mean.
For anyone who has philosophized even a little, it is clear that doing so makes you think about yourself. In the Platonic dialogue Laches, Nicias makes this point to Laches and others. No matter what the conversation starts out being about, says Nicias, if you are talking to Socrates, you will always end up talking about yourself. The most straight-forward reason is that Socrates constantly asks you what you think, what that means, and why you believe it to be so. He forces you to search within yourself, often to the point where you become speechless because you have lost the ability to say what you mean. Consequently, you become very aware of yourself. On some occasions, people in the dialogues become angry or annoyed with Socrates, because he has made them self-conscious in exactly the way I described in the first paragraph.
Nietzsche apparently was unable to forgive Socrates for this. A great believer in instinct, Nietzsche thought that Socratic philosophy brought about a kind of paralysis that inhibited the mind, when what was needed was something to sharpen it and make it more productive. As he says in Twilight of the Idols, there is something indecent about pushing someone to provide reasons, or even in providing them oneself. It is a bit like flashing: "I'll show you my reasons if you show me yours." A more noble person will rely simply on a sense of another's character, and let propositions (about what is and what is not) go hang themselves.
I am increasingly and surprisingly sympathetic to Nietzsche's critique, but in defense of Socrates, Socrates seems to genuinely believe that his line of questioning can be productive, and not just by showing everyone that they don't know anything. Socrates seems to believe that our common opinions, while not entirely trustworthy, are oriented toward the truth and therefore can be made to bear fruit. Truth-seeking then is the shaping up of common opinion, not the rejection of it. Of course, to shape opinion up, it is necessary to become aware of what your opinions are, which requires the painful act of self-consciousness.
There is another view of self-consciousness that is quite different. Francis Bacon begins the New Organon by saying that our common opinions are so untrustworthy that we should discard them and begin again. By beginning again, he has in mind the new science of experimentation. An important training for this new science is becoming aware of how our natural ways of thinking can lead us astray. To help avoid these pitfalls, we can turn to a scientific method. Bacon represents for me the modern thought that self-consciousness is fundamentally an act of suspicion. We are interested not in shaping up our common opinion, i.e., our prejudices, but rather in uprooting them and replacing them with something more respectable.
Since my last post, I've been thinking and reading more about the idea of white studies. To be sure, there is an interest in self-consciousness here, but what kind of self-consciousness is it? Does white studies presume that our instincts are largely trustworthy, but that they need to be sharpened and perfected? Or does it treat our common opinions with suspicion, believing them to be corrupt and needful of wholesale change?
Given what I've read from some of the sites promoting white studies, I believe it to be the latter of the two. Thus I stand opposed to it and any other form of inquiry that presupposes our basic sense of things to be mistaken. What can you trust if you can't trust yourself? Isn't this exactly the problem of ideology, that it replaces our experience and intuition with formula for what the world is and what it should be? If you want to see these formula trotted out, go look for yourself.
In my teaching, I strive to encourage self-consciousness, with what success I don't know. Like Socrates, I try to challenge my students, and, while I may want them to doubt themselves about some particular, my teaching approach depends upon them staying in touch with their basic sensibilities about the world. For that reason, I try to avoid anything that might be too disorienting. I discourage them from playing devil's advocate, because it is enough work for them to come to terms with their own point of view. I'm not interested in watching them botch someone else's. Also, I avoid the thought experiment, which seems still to be a significant part of the contemporary philosopher's practice. In fact, I avoid them even for myself. Imagination begins with the image, the concrete, and begins to fail as it removes itself from the familiar. Would I be disappointed to discover that I'm just a brain in a vat, or that all the people I've been talking to are really just elaborate machines, or to find that I hold a true opinion about some matter, with good reasons, but my good reasons have nothing to do with the actual truth of the situation? I suppose so, but how the hell can I really know, and why would I want to hang much on what I guess my reaction would be?
I am coming to side more and more with Nietzsche's point of view. While I think he is wrong about Socrates, his concern is well-founded. If thinking causes paralysis, it would be best to think better, to get past the paralysis. But if better thinking isn't to be found, next best would be to stop thinking about the matter altogether. We can live with error a lot easier than the demand that we be fully transparent to ourselves.
Eddie 3:33 AM
Friday, June 20, 2003
Privilege
Sullivan, in his Friday Dish, links to this article on the "white studies" movement taking place in some universities. White studies is not like other ethnic studies, as David Horowitz points out in a quotation in the article: ""Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil." More charitably, white studies can be described as an attempt to bring to consciousness, especially the consciousness of whites, the existence of white "privilege".
Am I privileged? I'm very fortunate, I know that. I'm fortunate to be a citizen of the United States in the 21st century, which means that I have the reasonable expectation of living well (in both senses of the term) into my 70s. I am also fortunate to have had the parents I had. My mother was not college educated; her father did not consider it important for a woman to have that education. My father almost finished his college education, but dropped out when my older siblings were born. My step-father had a learning disability and was lucky to finish high school; he worked all of his life as a mechanic. And my step-mother came from a part of rural Georgia where no one had much schooling beyond high school. Nonetheless, each and every one of these people encouraged and supported my education. My mother decided when I was in the 7th grade that I would be better served by a private education. The school I went to cost the same as the school I'm sending my daughter to now, and that was over 20 years ago. There were three incomes to draw from (my mother's, my step-father's, and my father's), but it was no small sacrifice. They paid for my college education as well. To my credit, I took advantage of what they offered me, but it is far from true for me to say that I have deserved everything that I have received.
I hope to do the same for my children, although it is hard to imagine that I will sacrifice as much for their well-being as my parents did for mine. Isn't that the American dream, to get ahead in life to the point where your children have it better than you? And, while I don't want anyone else to suffer harm, I certainly want to help my children avoid the harm that I see other parents bringing to their own. I want to be a better parent than many of the parents I see. Doesn't that mean I am privileging my children in relation to theirs?
Those who hold to the notion of white privilege would not, I hope, object to these kinds of privileging, except perhaps to say that my parents could succeed in ways that other parents could not simply because of the color of their skin. In a sense this is true, especially for the people of my parent's generation. In what sense, however, can my parents be said to have benefited from America's history of racism? Is not being harmed the same as being helped? To put it differently, am I better off now than I would have been if America didn't have this history?
It seems clear to me that I am not better off than I would have been otherwise. We all benefit from those who are productive. Insofar as racism has diminished the productivity of many Americans, the country has suffered, as a whole. To believe otherwise is to believe that wealth and dignity are zero-sum games, where I can only get something if someone else is denied it. I suspect this is indeed a supposition of those who engage in leftist projects like white studies, but it is not supported by reality. In reality, the wealth and dignity of a country grow according to the resourcefulness and character of its people. That this is true about wealth is clear to anyone who has given it any thought (just look at the expanding wealth of human beings globally), but it is true about dignity as well. White supremacists may believe that they augment their dignity by diminishing the dignity of others, but this is literally a juvenile way of seeing the world. As most of us are well aware, the mistreatment of blacks has diminished the dignity of whites, not raised it.
Of course, to say that the country, as a whole, has suffered from racism is not to say that everyone has suffered from it equally. For some, this is the only point that matters. Nonetheless, when faced with the notion of white privilege, I think it important to state forcefully that my parents were not helped by the racist culture they lived in. What they did for me deserves the highest praise, and is a model for myself and everyone else. To put a stain upon that achievement does a disservice to them, but also to ourselves, because it denies us an image of what a good society should look like. A good society would be one where everyone can contribute meaningfully to their own betterment and the betterment of their offspring. When we find people who have pulled that off, we should be figuring out how to imitate them, not how to blame them. We should be figuring out how to make it possible for everyone to be like them.
White studies seems to be a low point in the politics of resentment, although I doubt we have plumbed the full depths of that sentiment. And the refutation of this movement follows, I believe, from asking the question that I've pursued already: has racism made whites better off than they would have been if there had not been racism? If the answer is no, as I believe it is, then there is no point in disparaging the genuine accomplishments of many because of the terrible obstacles placed in the way of others. It would be like, in the midst of a plague, getting upset at those who were only mildly infected. And if the answer is yes, that white Americans have been made better by racism, then the white studies people would be prudent to keep that information to themselves. For if our identities are so tied to our race, as the white studies people claim, it would hardly make sense to make whites aware of how much they stand to gain from the mistreatment of others.
Arlene Avakian, the chairman of the U-Mass. women's studies department, is quoted in the article as saying "The desire to always feel comfortable in their skin is something white people feel entitled to." My son, who is adopted, is bi-racial. I hope that he never meets someone who seeks to make him uncomfortable in his own skin, which I expect to be quite a few shades darker than my own, at least not until he is ready to despise them instead of himself. I intend also to keep him from these people as best I can, which means avoiding all kinds of racists, including those who chair academic departments.
Eddie 3:08 PM
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
Painful
As much as I value The New Republic, it is getting harder and harder to read. I am not unhappy to read intelligent criticism of this administration, and there are plenty of grounds for doing so, but TNR lately has been underwhelming in its editorials. In the edition I just received today (June 23 edition), we have yet more of Peter Beinart's favorite attack ("They say one thing and do another!"), this time in relation to Liberia. Even more perturbing, however, is a short piece in the Notebook section entitled "Time Line". Responding to a Pentagon complaint that critics are not giving the U.S. enough time to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the editors respond:
We hate to be unsympathetic [really!], but it's not the critics who have changed their stripes. It was the Bush administration that demanded speedy evidence of Iraq's failure to disarm from the U.N. team even though inspectors reported progress and wanted a few more months to complete their work. "This is a matter of weeks, not months," President Bush declared on January 31. "Any attempt to drag the process on for months will be resisted by the United States." It hardly seems hypocritical for administration critics to argue that it should be held to its own standard. After all, the Pentagon has a few advantages the U.N. inspectors did not -- military control of Iraq, more than 100,000 troops in the country, and no evil dictator to obstruct the process, to name but a few. Still, Clarke pleads for time: "We have an extensive effort under way. Let's allow our team to finish the job before drawing conclusions." Somewhere, Hans Blix is laughing.
From this piece, you would have thought that TNR had supported the endless inspection process. But as that magazine at one time understood, the burden of proof was always upon Saddam Hussein to account for the many weapons whose existence was at one time documented but for which there was no record of them ever having been surrendered or destroyed. Presumably Saddam's government did know what had happened to these weapons, so there was no need for a lengthy process to discover them. Either Saddam owned up to what he had done with them or he did not, and not doing so constituted a material breach. The cat-and-mouse game that Hans Blix represented was not in the spirit of the latest U.N. resolutions, and the timetable necessary to complete that endeavor was not relevant then and it is not relevant to the search for these weapons now. Furthermore, it was obvious to all that the lengthy inspection process was intended to weaken American capabilities, either by giving enough time for Blair to be removed from office or by keeping American troops in too long a period of readiness. Should we presume that TNR's senior editors are on vacation?
Eddie 1:30 PM
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
Packer
While reading around about Greg Packer, the Zelig-like "man on the street," (see kausfiles, Sunday June 15, for background and links), I was struck by this statement from him:
"My expertise is being a psycho-fan," he says. "My opinion is always valid, and I always have an answer for everything."
I know that attacking the intelligence and integrity of journalists is the proverbial shooting fish in a barrel, but who can resist? Isn't Packer the scientific proof for a prejudice many of us have harbored? We could improve the quality of the American intellect a hundredfold just by eliminating schools of journalism and education.
Eddie 10:01 PM
Sunday, June 15, 2003
The Sequel
This is a follow-up to my last post on the increasing frequency with which we hear people openly wishing death upon the tyrants of other places. There are many reasons a person might be uncomfortable with this language. One, it might rub against his religious sensibilities. Second, he might consider such speech to be an impediment to effective diplomacy. Even those who consider themselves our friends might not care for a cavalier attitude about who deserves to live and who deserves to die.
For myself, I think that what bothers me is the pettiness of it all. As Ted said in the comments to my post, there is a sense in which such language echoes the "death to America" speech heard from many quarters. (Actually, Ted used the phrase "Marg ba Amrika," which I had to Google to make sense of. Thanks Ted!) That sounds right to me and points to a problem. We expect the people of the Middle East to enjoy the fantasy of the West being crushed by Allah's will; it is the fantasy of the weak everywhere. But why should we engage in it? Why do we need to take such pleasures?
For people without power, being serious has no great advantages, and may even make life more painful. What else could explain the frivolous political comments that blow down from Canada? But we are a people with power, and being serious is necessary for the fruitful and respectable use of that power. Hussein was a villain, and therefore could be appropriately vilified, but such vilification is not necessarily conducive to the serious endeavor of foreign policy, except perhaps as a way of bringing everyone on board. It is better to realize that he was a problem that was not going to solve itself, and that we needed to find the solution. Cold calculation is the best form of contempt.
Eddie 5:33 PM
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