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Monday, July 28, 2003
Images
As anyone knows who has been reading my site for the past month, I am very sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan's conservative argument for gay marriage. (I can't decide on whether to support some civil union alternative, but I am sympathetic to the argument nonetheless.) Today, Sullivan takes on National Review's support for the Federal Marriage Amendment and, while I agree with him in principle, I think he makes a serious mistake in reasoning. Sullivan says:
I'm not going to rehearse all the arguments here. But I will point out that NR has essentially conceded in this passage that every link to procreation in legal marriage has been gutted already, except the abstract but practically inconsistent association of heterosexuality and procreation. Yet they are not proposing an amendment to make divorce or multiple re-marriage or sperm banks illegal - something that clearly would restore the ancient links between marriage and procreation. Their view is that although heterosexuals have severed the link between procreation and marriage, homosexuals should not be allowed to enter the institution on the same terms. Why? I can't see a real argument, except that somehow admitting gay people would make what is already true too explicit.
Let's assume Sullivan is right on all the details here, that the link between procreation and marriage has already been severed, and that the only reason for barring gays from marriage is to keep this broken link from becoming "too explicit." Does that mean that there is not a real argument to be made here?
To assume otherwise, it seems to me that one must adopt the principle that the truth should always be visible. I can imagine such an argument coming from a liberal position that imagines the polity to be full of rational, self-actualized individuals whose only need for happiness is clarity of communication with others, and who believe that any attempt to be circumspect is a moral failure. I find it remarkable, however, to hear such an argument from a conservative, even from a conservative with strong ties to the liberal tradition like Sullivan.
There are, it seems to me, good reasons for not making everything explicit. Words reflect reality, but they also have the power to transform reality. When words are spoken, everyone is called to account, and there is no telling where that might lead. In some cases, it is healthy to bring things out in the open, but not always. As some senior faculty members have told me from time to time, don't bring something to a vote unless you know how the vote is going to go. Otherwise, the matter is closed, and not in your favor.
Another reason to keep things murky is to avoid the problems of the slippery slope. For example, what does one do with a person whose body is functioning but whose higher brain processes are not? Intellectually, we might conclude quickly that the person is gone, and that there is no reason to sustain the body. Our imagination, however, recoils at the thought of acting in such a way to bring an end to a living, breathing human being. And we ignore our imagination at our own peril, because it is often our intuitive sense of things that keeps our powers of reasoning in line. If you overcome your squeamishness in this case, what other inhibitions might you overcome as well? It seems to me that most of the atrocities human beings commit upon one another begin as failures of imagination.
I remember one time being present at a debate on abortion where an anthropologist defended not only third-trimester abortion but also the killing of young infants. As an anthropologist, he had seen or read about such practices in other cultures, and it seemed to him a peculiar moral hang-up of ours that we thought every infant deserved to be developed into adulthood. As you might imagine, this made the other pro-choice people at the debate a little nervous, because intellectually it was hard to make a distinction between his position and theirs. If it is ok to end the life of a fully formed fetus for whatever reason (rape, incest, ...), then those same reasons could be employed for the newly born. The difference in positions is one of the imagination. (To be fair, pro-life people face a similar problem. A fully-formed fetus grabs our imagination, particularly with the development of ultra-sound imaging, but a small bunch of embryonic cells is not so compelling.)
It is hard to deal with the slipperiness of reality, and simply drawing a line does not suffice, because we will always ask why this line instead of that. We tend, instead, to rely on certain images of what reality is, and then use those images to judge whether deviations are beyond the pale. To come back to the original example, marriage still has an important association with the bearing and raising of children. There are plenty of marriages that fail to do this or to do it well, but they have the social advantage of looking a lot like the marriages that do. Homosexual marriage, however much it would be the same as these other marriages, fails this important concern. Does that mean homosexuals are treated unfairly in denying them marriage under the same conditions that a lot of heterosexual people are married? Yes, it does. But social order often demands small injustices, and that could be the case here.
Of course, the nature of this kind of reasoning is that no one wants to admit to it even while doing it, so it is unlikely that the National Review editors are going to make this argument, even if Sullivan has truthfully discerned what motivates them. Sullivan needs, however, to take the objection more seriously, given his other intellectual commitments.
While I lean more toward civil union than outright marriage, I don't think that civil union is going to do the trick here. While civil union is its own kind of shell game, it is not just the church that needs to affirm the connection between marriage and children. The state needs to do this as well. As Socrates argues in the Republic, the state has no greater concern than the proper education of its youth. (That doesn't mean the state should be doing it, mind you, only that it should show a strong interest in it.) It is not clear to me how the state can affirm the priority of child-raising while also recognizing the important satisfactions that marriage brings just to the two who are brought together, which is why I have tried to take the social conservative position so seriously. Nonetheless, I think it worth our while to make that effort, because to knowingly act with injustice requires heavily compelling grounds, and I'm not convinced those grounds have been made evident either.
Eddie 2:26 PM
Saturday, July 26, 2003
Virtue
I remember a few years back there being an essay supposedly being passed around among our military officers concerning the way that the military is increasingly being asked to perform activities beyond its narrow duties, such as policing, nation building, and disaster relief. The essay was set in the future and described how civilian control of the military had come to an end. The gist was that the military had not seized control but that it ended up with it by default; the American public's trust in the military versus its disgust in the normal political process had reached such an extreme that the military had to step in to handle the crisis in confidence.
As best I can remember, I thought the essay presumed too much about the superior virtue of the military in relation to American culture generally. While we might sigh about Jerry Springer and reality television and the indulgence of the Baby Boomers and so forth, I actually think American culture generally is pretty healthy. It is, to be sure, a democratic culture, which means that there is a constant celebration of the average that one can easily find fault with. At the same time, however, I don't know how anyone can fail to be impressed with its vitality. Whatever judgment you make of its products, Americans work hard and take risks and create things that the rest of the world soaks up. We are beyond ourselves always, which is always a little frightening, but we have learned to live with the uncertainties.
A certain kind of conservatism, the older kind, is always uneasy with the American character, which is why America had to generate its own version of conservatism as well. American conservatism has a faith in individuals and free markets that is not shared by conservatives worldwide. Nonetheless, there is historical precedent. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides tells us about Pericles, the leader of Athens who took them into the long war against Sparta. Pericles was not a conservative in the sense of being slow to move or "resistant to change," to cite the Berkeley psychology paper getting attention across the blogosphere this week. He was conservative in the sense that he understood Athenian culture and tried not to hold it back but rather to shape it toward something more virtuous than it might be otherwise. My support of American culture is similar. I am in awe of its ambition, and while I don't think I would have designed it the way it is if it were up to me, I believe that it has a life that brings forth more good than ill.
I don't think it right then to say that our military culture is superior to civilian culture generally, so the argument of that essay must be qualified. It is striking to me, however, how much superior military culture is to the culture of American politics more specifically. Daily I am impressed by what our military accomplishes, and daily I am in dismay of the juvenile level of our politics. The strength of our system should be in Congress. It is the most representative of our branches of government, and supposedly it is the most deliberative. What a daring proposition! Instead, Congress can only stir itself in relation to the President, whether to support or be in opposition, and more and more it just turns policy matters over to the courts. And American political rhetoric is aimed at a level just below what the average newspaper aims at. (I'm guessing middle school?) If American culture is generally healthy, it is because it considers the political world largely irrelevant.
In a sense then, I think the fears voiced in that essay are real. Part of what 9/11 taught us is that American culture cannot carry on isolated from what is happening in the rest of the world. Most Americans learned where to locate Europe and the Middle East on a map after finding ought out how much they dislike us. There has consequently been an explosion of interest in politics and world affairs, aided to a large extent by the development of the internet. This explosion of interest has not, at least not yet anyway, had much of an effect on the quality of the political process. What has become more evident, however, is just how competent the American military is. Monday morning quarterback military tactics as much as you like, the American military is serious and getting a job done.
While a glass is better half full than wholly empty, what are the long-term implications of having a military so trusted and a political culture so distrusted? How does that make us different from Turkey or some of the countries of South America, where it is the military that must maintain political stability? And what would it take to push Americans over the edge?
We appear to be winning this war on terrorism, or at least on our way to victory. That doesn't mean, however, that we are free from the possibility of serious disaster. We know that there is nuclear material unaccounted for, and that many people with resources would love to get their hands on it, if they haven't already. We know that biological and chemical weapons, while difficult to manufacture and deploy, are still a threat to us. As we push the war on terror forward, we have to expect that at some point we will be hit again, and it is possible that the terrorists have at least one more horrific strike left in them. If that were to happen, could our politics be sustained? Could we really turn to our elected officials to lead us, or would they just end up handing control over to the generals, just as they have handed over control to the courts in domestic matters?
Just wondering.
Eddie 2:41 AM
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Bobby Jones
I was flipping around on the television yesterday and ran across an amazing short film of Bobby Jones giving golf instruction. Apparently Warner Brothers contracted with him to make a series of instructional films, and paid him quite a bit for the effort. I only say two of the films, but a number of things stood out.
First, I think you really could learn something from them, even if people now tend not to take that huge backswing like they used to. Bobby Jones was obviously very thoughtful about the mechanics of the swing, and his presentation is clear and simple. I haven't played golf regularly in years, but my experience is that it is easy to fall into the trap of trying to remember 50 little things to do right when swinging the club. Jones covers a lot of the details, but behind it all is a more general account of using body torque to create clubhead momentum.
Second, the films showed great ingenuity in making visible the verbal instruction. I don't know how old slow-motion photography is, but there was plenty of it. Another trick was to have Jones wear clothing that made visible the body part he was talking about. For example, while you are hearing him talk about the position of the right elbow on the backswing, you see him demonstrate the backswing wearing dark pants and a shirt that is white on the right side and dark on the left. Shot against a dark background, the right arm stands out. Still another trick was to superimpose two dark discs to the left and right of Jones as he goes through the swing. What you see is that his body moves very little laterally during the backswing, but then on the downswing he starts to shift his hips forward, which covers the right disc.
What really caught my attention, however, was the man himself. Bobby Jones has the poise, diction, and accent of the old Southern aristocracy, something which has been largely lost, even here in Macon, GA. I suppose some would cheer its demise, but it seems to me as lamentable as any loss of culture.
You can get some sense of what people think a Southern accent is by watching Hollywood imitate it. Generally speaking, most efforts tend towards the redneck version, like Billy Bob Thornton's, who is not imitating. Push that a little further and you get a more rural accent, like Holly Hunter's, who is not imitating either. When I was younger, I remember talking to people in rural parts of the state and only being able to make out every third word. It was an accent that was thick and harsh. On the other end of the economic and social spectrum, however, was the aristocratic accent, that was clear and melodic. I'm sure there are better examples, but right now I'm thinking of Dixie Carter (the older sister) on the Designing Women TV show.
The Southern accent is both thinning out and become more uniform, as far as I can tell, and I believe television to be the reason for both. I grew up on television, for example, and what little accent I have is a far cry from my previous generation's. (I can put on an accent when it seems relevant, and sometimes I slip into one unconsciously, but for the most part my speech is not distinctive.) As to the accent becoming more uniform, I think there may be an odd effect where Southern children end up imitating the imitations that Hollywood sets before them. (I've seen a similar situation before on my campus. There is a dear man who taught and was an administrator at the school for over thirty years. He has a rural Georgia accent, although not as thick as the kind I was describing earlier. Anyway, over time there developed a standard imitation of this man's speech, usually in good clean fun. At some point, he started speaking in this voice as well; whether he knew he was imitating himself poorly, I don't know.)
Finally, seeing Bobby Jones reminded me of many of the men I knew as a child but who seem largely to have disappeared. There is an expectation now that adults act regularly like adolescents, an expectation I fulfill quite well. Jones was playful at points, but he was always an adult, and occasionally would say something with such gravity that I remembered how this kind of man used to scare me. Jones lived in a time when there was an adult world separate from the child's world. I'm fairly sure that he would not have considered humor as vital to a healthy existence as we do today.
Eddie 10:06 PM
Kudos
...to Bill Clinton for showing some real statesmanship in an interview with Larry King. Clinton graciously puts the foreign intelligence question into proper perspective. (via The Corner)
Eddie 11:01 AM
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
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