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Monday, July 21, 2003
Captivity
In Plato's dialogues there is an interesting tension between Socrates and the sophists. From the trial of Socrates, it is apparent that, to many Athenians, Socrates and the sophists looked a lot alike. They were all teachers of some sort, and they didn't just recite Homer or prop up common opinion.
An important source of distrust of the sophists was that many of these men were not natives of Athens. The sophists tended to travel from town to town, picking up students for pay where they could. As such, there lives had a mercenary aspect, and this showed up in many of their teachings. Since they didn't belong to any town, their teachings were more cosmopolitan, adaptable to any locality. And the teaching that is most adaptable is teaching about power. Tradition tends to limit power and spread it around, sometimes in ways that are difficult to detect. (Women did have some political power before they could vote, for example.) Many of the sophists, however, taught skills in rhetoric that would enable those possessed of the skills to increase their power. Plain speaking gave way to smooth talking, and we are living with the consequences up to today. How extraordinary that it is considered foolish for someone to represent themselves in a court of law! Even an account of ourselves must be handed over to the experts.
It is sometimes thought that the problem of the sophists was that they would only teach for money. Socrates does make reference to this point, partly to help distinguish himself from them. Money is a problem, however, because it is a sign of the lack of loyalty that the teachers had for their students, and vice versa. To an Athenian traditionalist, teaching is something that benefits everyone, because it instills the civic virtues that keep the city strong. To desire payment is to suggest that the strength of the city is not really your concern.
It is not surprising then that Socrates would want to distinguish himself from this crowd. Anyone paying attention would see the difference: Socrates didn't travel from Athens, he didn't take money, and in some sense he didn't have a teaching at all. Socrates was unconventional, but he was not unAthenian.
Today, most who are considered teachers are paid professionals, which gives the appearance that sophistry has won the day. Of course, there is a quite a bit of sophistry in it all, but being paid is more a function of the division of labor that characterizes modern economies. It is inefficient for parents to be responsible for the education of their children, so we have people trained to do it instead.
Another difference is that teachers in our society don't compete for students in quite the same way that the sophists did. Our institutions of learning provide a middle point between teacher and student. Sometimes in the university you hear it said that the syllabus is a contract between professor and student, which is a claim that betrays an ignorance of this point, as well as an ignorance of what constitutes a contract. Both professors and students contract with the institution; it would be considered now immoral for them to contract with each other directly.
The mediation of the teaching institution can be seen as an advance over the practice of the sophists for many reasons, if for no other reason than that teachers feel less compelled to say what their students want to hear. Presumably, teachers can be more independent under such a system, and hold their students to higher standards.
I must say, however, that I would welcome a little of the old sophistry. Whatever the virtues of the modern university, there is something corrupting about teaching to a captive audience. On the one hand, there is very little pressure on the professor to say anything compelling. The students will show up one way or another, and mostly they aren't there except to jump through a necessary hoop. On the other hand, there is little pressure on the students to actually become knowledgeable. Students are made to work, to be sure, but no one can reasonably expect students to take an actual interest in their studies, even in their major.
The effect, on both sides, is to dull the senses and the intellect, and to pervert social relations. The sophists were engaged in trade, and trade encourages a kind of honesty. Teaching today has only the appearance of a trade, and everyone learns easily enough how to get along without demanding anything of themselves and others. In fact, it isn't clear that being demanding is even all that rational, given the returns.
This is my tenure year. If you've spent any time around academics, you'll realize what a focal point this piece of security is for them. I won't turn it down if offered, but I have become painfully aware of the price of security.
Eddie 3:33 AM
Sunday, July 20, 2003
Marshall
...continues to be all over the "Bush Lied!" story, except he has yet to mention Blair's speech or look into Blair's insistence that the uranium purchase info was legit. Maybe he is too busy working on his dissertation.
Eddie 4:31 AM
Saturday, July 19, 2003
Also
David and I are still arguing about gay marriage, if anyone else remains interested. Access to my comments seems unreliable lately, so my apologies to anyone trying and not getting through.
Eddie 4:44 AM
Culture Clash
When I was in Annapolis earlier in the summer, I was attending a workshop oriented toward studying various classics, mainly in the area of physics and astronomy. Each school had three people present at the workshop: a humanist, i.e., someone teaching in the humanities, a scientist, and an administrator. In most cases, the administrator was a humanist too, so the scientists were in the minority.
It was striking to see how each group dealt with these texts, and the inherent limitations of the education of each.
The humanists, for example, were having to grapple with mathematical and scientific demonstration, and it was clear that most did not have much experience. In the humanities, the instinct is to draw from as many sources as possible, however personal or obscure they might be. These mathematical/scientific texts, however, narrow the phenomena quite a bit, but then pursue very demanding lines of thought associated with each. Euclid isn't concerned with interesting historical instances of triangles, or triangles that have moved you, or how the idea of the triangle influences the religious conception of the divine. He is interested in a kind of three-sided figure, and while there is a generality to that figure, its possibilities are fairly well demarcated in advance. This determinacy of the concept is what makes the proof possible; you don't expect a new kind of triangle to pop out of the woodwork and throw everything out of kilter.
The humanists often floundered in this environment, and turned whenever possible to more familiar domains. They would talk about the rhetoric of the piece or how it fit into a larger historical landscape. Many did put in real effort to grasp the proofs, and a fair number did so with accomplishment, but it was clear that this was not their comfort zone. Watching this made me wonder how many people in the humanities have ever really dealt with matters where there is such a definite connection between evidence and conclusion. And what must it be like to not have had this experience?
It is reported that Plato had above the entrance to his Academy a sign warning anyone away who had not studied geometry first. The Republic suggests as well that a mathematical education should precede one in philosophy. It isn't obvious as to why this should be the case, but one strong possibility is that mathematics and science sharpen the intellect in a way that is difficult to encounter elsewhere. I don't believe that they are actually more precise than other areas of study, but they are areas of study where precision is more readily apprehended. And while it would be a grave mistake to think that other studies should hold mathematics and science as strict models for inquiry, I think it would be beneficial for people in the humanities to deal with at least one subject where you can't say just anything and get away with it.
The scientists, on the other hand, had a different problem. They were more or less comfortable with the subject matter, but their education had done little to prepare them to appreciate texts. Especially for the physicists, the temptation was unavoidable to translate these classic texts into the science that they were well familiar with. In a different way it was just as difficult for them to deal with these geometrical demonstrations as it was the humanists, because geometry isn't the dominant form of mathematical expression anymore. In fact, it seemed to me that the humanists had more success grasping these texts on their own terms; most of the scientists seemed to think it unnecessary to learn a form of demonstration no longer in use and in the service of theories that had long been either replaced or developed into more contemporary accounts.
This insensitivity to the tradition is remarkable, and reminds us once again why we can't simply turn over society to the "experts." There are too many matters that are not simply settled in the course of time. And even in the domain of science itself, it seemed to me that this clumsiness of interpretation is a real deficiency. The scientific desire to just move along, to take up concepts in a rough and ready fashion as the situation demands, leads to a kind of bandwagon mentality that must be difficult to resist. I think we have seen this with the greenhouse science. One would expect that in the sciences that experience would have more weight than authority, but the appeal to authority seems much worse to me in science than it does in the humanities. Most scientists are not challenging fundamental assumptions; they are filling in the niches as they become available. (Kuhn's work was important for showing this.) Humanists are definitely niche-fillers too, but I think they have greater awareness of the fragility of the edifice that they are working away in.
The limitations of the humanists and the scientists should give conservatives a sense of what they are up against. On the one hand, those who have a sense of history have a tendency toward some kind of relativism, whether it be historical or cultural or whatever. To deal with questions that are never settled, at least settled in the minds of most, can push one in the direction of not taking truth too seriously. On the other hand, those who take truth seriously have a tendency to believe that everything is "new and improved." The idea that our history might contain hard truths that we have let pass by is something that not many are receptive to.
Update: Dave Jansing has some further thoughts on his own blog Temperentia R3, and has indicated as much in the comments, but Enetation is having server trouble so the counter isn't updating. Click on the comments or go here.
Second update: It looks like the counter is working now.
Eddie 4:00 AM
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Ends
Aristotle opens his Nicomachean Ethics with a small but powerful argument. All activity, he says, is done towards some end (goal). Many ends are simply instrumental, that is, they are done for the sake of something else. For example, if I go to the hardware store to buy materials to fix something, my trip to the store was not done for the sheer joy of going to the store. For instrumental ends to be meaningful, however, it must be the case that there are some ends that are chosen for their own sake. Otherwise, we have an infinite chain of activity that ultimately accomplishes nothing of worth.
Like many others, I came to this realization intuitively, in my case when I was in high school. I reached the point where I kept asking the question: why am I doing this? what end does this serve? It turns out to be a hard question for a young man to answer, and more and more I stopped doing things that couldn't be justified either in themselves or by how they made possible other things good in themselves. In fact, this brought me to a career in philosophy by default, because philosophy is the one area where being paralyzed by the question "why am I doing this?" is actually doing it.
What was striking to me then, and is still striking to me today, is how many people fail to take up the question of what things are actually good in themselves. Indeed, I was brought up in an environment where it was a tad bit shameful to even be doing something that was good in itself. There is work to be done; this is no time to be enjoying yourself. Actually, no one made me do much of anything, but there was definitely a perceived moral advantage to having your time consumed by doing things you didn't actually want to be doing. It was a kind of martyrdom, I suppose, and it gave the impression of being serious.
This is high foolishness, and Aristotle strikes it down before you can turn the first page. While I think it excessive to maintain the contemporary demand that we always identify with our work and find it continually life-affirming, surely we should carry with us some sense of what that work amounts to. Rousseau says that modern man is always outside of himself, always looking beyond the moment to something not yet done. Such a man is a creature whose activities are purely instrumental.
To put it differently, we must confront the problem of time. Instrumental thinking is always forward looking, figuring out what needs next to be done. Something that is done for its own sake, however, is enjoyed in the doing of it, in the present.
Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, writes of Don Giovanni (Don Juan), the great seducer of women. The Don Giovanni that Kierkegaard is interested in is not a deceiver, which would be a perversion of social relations; he is a charmer, oblivious to our normal world of instrumentality. This Don Giovanni seeks pleasure in itself, and his desire is infectious, unlike the deceiver, whose pleasure comes from a sense of power over another. And unlike the seducer who is a deceiver, this Don Giovanni does not want to hide or cloak himself; he wants not power over another but to share the power that courses through him. He offers no false promises, because he offers no promises at all. Promises are for those who are thinking about the future.
It is not too hard to see that even this Don Giovanni has a moral deficiency. Deceiver or not, his love does not build. It is playful to a fault. And yet, as Kierkegaard points out, the ethical world must maintain something of the character of this Don Giovanni, or else it is like the chain of endless instrumentality mentioned before. Within the gravity of our world of promises and obligations, there must be something of the playful joy of the moment.
This is a hard thing to pull off, and Kierkegaard's answer is somewhat controversial, in that he wants to invoke a different sense of the present, that is, the present as the presence of the eternal. I'll leave that aside. The problem, however, is real. How do we keep ourselves in the present when we are constantly beyond ourselves?
We enjoy the rascals like Don Giovanni, I believe, because they remind us of this need. Their moral deficiency makes them even more exemplary, in that they offer no distractions from the image of enjoying life in the present. In art, we enjoy them without shame. In the flesh, we have more trepidation, but we enjoy them still.
Eddie 5:44 AM
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
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