One Good Turn

Independence Day

2011-07-04T10:18:00.005-04:00

Independence Day

Churchill has a famous quotation: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Lest we think that Churchill didn't really have disparaging thoughts about democracy, consider this statement attributed to him as well: "The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

The history of philosophy is full of people trying to draw conclusions about the world that have as much certainty as the conclusions of geometry. ("Knowledge" and "science" used to have higher standards than they do now.) Unfortunately, these efforts were generally failures, not because philosophers lacked the conviction of geometers, but because their arguments were too ridiculous to persuade anybody but themselves.

I, however, have succeeded where others have failed. I present the following argument about how bad democracy is and claim that its conclusion is as airtight as any offered in geometry:

1. Democratic elections are significantly affected by the amount of money spent by the candidates. This point is accepted by all, I believe, even if there are disputes about the size of the effect. People wouldn't fight about campaign finance laws if they didn't think that money matters.

2. Campaign advertisements and other forms of solicitation are among the most banal forms of communication that human beings have invented. They are largely devoid of content and untrustworthy to the extent they do have content. This point is perhaps not accepted by all. If you don't believe this already, however, then I'm guessing you struggle with geometry too.

3. Democratic elections are significantly affected by communications that are largely devoid of content and untrustworthy. QED.

Let us celebrate our political independence, as Churchill was right that every other choice is worse. But let us also celebrate a certain independence from politics, which surely makes us all a little stupider than we would be otherwise. We have the Internet for daily evidence of that point, but I won't claim geometric certainty there.

Missing Month

2006-11-01T01:22:00.000-05:00

Missing Month
Yeah, I pretty much sat out the month of October, blogging wise. Apparently I have settled upon my mid-life crisis: I am studying in a number of business-related fields primarily centered around investing and accounting. If nothing else, these studies should help me become a smarter investor and help me to prepare for retirement and whatnot down the road. It is possible too that I might take these studies far enough to go into a different line of work than teaching. I like what I do, but I don't like not having choices. Besides, if I'm honest with myself I think I would have to say that I am in teaching mostly for myself. It gives me the time and situation to think about things that matter to me, but I have doubts about how much of that thought ends up being of benefit to my students. Furthermore, I am in a different place intellectually than I was 20 years ago. It was unthinkable then for me not to focus my energies in philosophy. I had to come to terms with my existence so as not to waste it. Now, I have mostly settled those concerns. In other words, I think my studies in philosophy have accomplished most of what they are likely to accomplish for me. I do it more out of intellectual curiosity now than out of existential need. And this may be a waste of my talents, frankly. So, I am a student again (though still teaching), something I thought would never happen. Isn't that what a mid-life crisis is supposed to do for you?

Sovereignty Again

2006-10-03T15:36:00.000-04:00

Sovereignty Again

[Note: Some time ago I wrote a short blog entry on the concept of sovereignty as it is developed within the tradition of classical liberalism. Tomorrow night I am giving a lecture as part of a political philosophy lecture series on this same topic. Below is the "speech," although I expect to be winging it some. It follows the thoughts of that original post but has a much more extended, and somewhat pedestrian, look at some of the political philosophers of that tradition.]

What is Sovereignty?
To be delivered on Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Since 9/11, the United States has been engaged in extensive military and civil operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, much of it in the name of nation-building. The idea is that healthy, democratic nations will not wish to harbor terrorists and will have the political strength to keep the terrorists from using their land as a base. Of course, to build a nation up requires that whatever is there already be torn down. That the United States would decide which regimes are worthy and which ones are not concerns more than a few people, and this concern is often voiced as a concern about the rights of sovereign nations. It is my intent in this talk to examine the notion of sovereignty as expressed by these critics of our current foreign policy, and to show that it is inconsistent with the tradition of classical liberalism that grounds our own political consciousness. To show an inconsistency is admittedly not the same thing as a refutation, but nonetheless it may open our eyes to what is at stake.

Noam Chomsky, in various lectures, has defined sovereignty as “the right of political entities to follow their own course, which may be benign or may be ugly, and to do so free from external interference.” (“Control of Our Lives,” February 26, 2000, Kiva Auditorium, Albuquerque, New Mexico) Chomsky is certainly a believer in the rights of individuals, but notice the ambiguity in the phrase “political entities.” The right he speaks of is a right between nations, or perhaps between international bodies, like the European Union, or maybe even between tribes, but not apparently a right of individuals. From this point of view, it seems, we have a globe with settled political boundaries, and the right of sovereignty is the right of the ruling power of a nation to act of its own accord as long as it keeps its business within those boundaries. And how is it that these boundaries come to be settled? Presumably, by an act of international recognition. Collectively the nations of the earth decide upon their limits and hold those limits against all encroachment.

I have a different tale to tell, a different way of conceptualizing sovereignty, and I wish to tell my tale by looking at three modern political philosophers: Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.

Let us begin with Machiavelli. Even if you have never read his infamous work, The Prince, which is a series of essays providing advice to an aspiring ruler, you probably know of Machiavelli’s reputation. By reputation, he is a philosopher who recommends power for the sake of power; the end justifies any means, no matter how vile or vicious. If you need an image of what it means to be a Machiavel, you can look at a number of Shakespeare’s villains, such as Edmund in the tragedy of King Lear. Edmund is the perfect Machiavel: to overthrow his half-brother Edgar, he puts on the appearance of virtue, so as to win the trust of his father, while committing acts of betrayal against the brother.

On this matter, perhaps we should turn to Machiavelli’s text directly. In the fifteenth essay of The Prince, Machiavelli writes:

It remains now to see what the modes and government of a prince should be with subjects and with friends. And because I know that many have written of this, I fear that in writing of it again, I may be held presumptuous, especially since in disputing this matter I depart from the orders of others. But since my intent is to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of the thing than to the imagination of it. And many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth; for it is so far from how one lives to how one should live that he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation. For a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good. Hence it is necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity. (p. 61, Mansfield’s translation)

Notice here that the prince must “learn to be able not to be good.” Most of us are probably of the opinion that here is something that we are quite good at already, with no formal instruction whatsoever! Machiavelli’s prince, however, must learn how not to be good, because he must learn how to appear good without actually being so.

Let us hear the words of Machiavelli again:

...it is not necessary for a prince to have all the above-mentioned [virtues] in fact, but it is indeed necessary to appear to have them. Nay, I dare say this, that by having them and always observing them, they are harmful; and by appearing to have them, they are useful, as it is to appear merciful, faithful, humane, honest, and religious, and to be so; but to remain with a spirit built so that, if you need not to be those things, you are able and know how to change to the contrary. This has to be understood: that a prince, and especially a new prince, cannot observe all those things for which men are held good, since he is often under a necessity, to maintain his state, of acting against faith, against charity, against humanity, against religion. And so he needs to have a spirit disposed to change as the winds of fortune and variations of things command him, and as I said above, not depart from good, when possible, but know how to enter into evil, when forced by necessity. (p. 70)

But wait. What does this have to do with the concept of sovereignty? Be patient.

I would like to turn next to the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his great work Leviathan. In the course of this work, Hobbes entertains a very fundamental question: how can it ever be rational for an individual to forfeit his God-given, natural liberty to do whatever he wants in exchange for the constraints of living in society with others? Perhaps you are thinking: I didn’t know I had a choice in the matter. Where on this planet can I live without the constraints of society? For Hobbes, however, the question was very much a real one. Having experienced the reality of civil war, Hobbes was very aware that civil society cannot be taken for granted, and that people can easily fall into what political theoreticians like to call the state of nature, that is, a state of lawlessness. Hobbes’ experience with civil war also provided him with the clear rationale for why one chooses the constraints of civil society over the condition of natural liberty, namely, for the sake of security. Not only does insecurity bring fear, but it also frustrates the healthy impulses of our humanity. Those who are insecure do not trust, and are therefore untrustworthy themselves, thereby diminishing the possibility of communion with others. Those who do not trust are also unlikely to undertake any venture that requires a great deal of time and energy, for who would put themselves into a work that might be taken from them at any moment? So all of the great accomplishments that people are capable of are threatened in the state of nature (the state of lawlessness). What we are left with, in Hobbes’ famous formulation, is a life that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (p. 100, Touchstone edition)

For Hobbes then, civil society is not something that we are simply thrown into, even if most people treat it that way. Instead, civil society has its legitimate foundations in human nature and human reason. If we properly grasp those reasons, then we should realize that we do choose civil society, that is, we have the choice of whether to affirm it or just live within it. In choosing this civil order that we are already a part of, we might be said to be passing from our adolescence into adulthood, leaving behind youthful rebellion and taking up our responsibility. In other words, we should sign the social contract.

What is the social contract? In some sense, it is a fiction like the state of nature. Just as most of us do not find ourselves in a state of lawlessness, so most of us will not sign any actual documents by which we recognize the appropriateness of the power that we give to the state to provide order for our existence. Insofar as it represents the act of maturity that I just mentioned, that is, the act by which we affirm what we are a part of already, then it is no fiction at all. By willing the appropriateness of the state’s power, we make ourselves equals to the original founders, the ones who did sign actual documents outlining the constitution of a new society. Spiritually we re-enact the origins.

If Hobbes had stopped there, I suspect we would praise him without hesitation, whatever we might think of the useful fictions that he employs. But Hobbes goes on to make a claim that rubs most of us the wrong way: he claims that, for the sake of civil order, the signers of the social contract must hand over the authority of the state to a ruler, a sovereign, who is independent of them. (Finally, we hear something about sovereignty! It is about time.) Hobbes reasons that if the sovereign is one of the signers of the social contract that it will just breed faction and dissension. By collectively handing over power to someone outside the contract, the people decide to share the same fate.

To make matters worse (for the contemporary reader), Hobbes goes on to point out the extent to which the sovereign is independent of the commonwealth that he rules. In a chapter entitled “Of the Rights of Sovereigns by Institution,” Hobbes makes the following claims:

1. The subjects cannot change the form of government. If the subjects can change the form of government, they aren’t really bound by anything, right? For Hobbes, this is invitation for civil war, as those who are disaffected with the way things are convince themselves that they are right to overthrow it.

2. Sovereign power cannot be forfeited. Hobbes writes: “…because the right of bearing the person of them all, is given to him they make sovereign, by covenant only of one to another, and not of him to any of them, there can happen no breach of covenant on the part of the sovereign, and consequently none of his subjects, by any pretence of forfeiture, can be freed from subjection.” (p.135) To put it in contemporary English, the contract signed is not between the people and the sovereign; it is between the people themselves. The sovereign is thus bound by no contractual promise.

3. No man can without injustice protest against the institution of the sovereign declared by the major part. Insofar as the sovereign’s power rests with the original covenant of the subjects, to protest the sovereign is to break the covenant. Insofar as the covenant was originally formed as a rational response to the danger of insecurity, however, it cannot be rational to break the contract, even if you happen to dislike the sovereign’s actions.

5. Whatsoever the sovereign doth is unpunishable by the subject. The sovereign, as the guarantor of the security of the state, is the maker of the law. As the maker of the law, he must be free to craft it as he best sees fit, which means that he is not bound by law himself.

At this point in the talk, I have promises left to be fulfilled. I said that I was going to argue for a notion of sovereignty from the tradition of classical liberalism, but so far the liberality of liberalism is hardly present at all. We have Machiavelli advising princes, i.e., sovereigns, to be able to act against virtue, and we have Hobbes defending the rights of sovereigns to act against virtue as well. Where is freedom to be found in this tale I’m telling?

Let us take note of some important points. Notice first the approach that Hobbes takes toward political power. The power of the sovereign is not justified by tradition, or by God’s will. The power of the sovereign is justified only by the rational act of the individual subjects to form a covenant with one another. Whatever we might think of Hobbes’ sovereign, his power is founded upon Hobbes’ consideration of what each person should understand to be in his or her own welfare. To use a term from modern political philosophy, it is the forming of the covenant that gives legitimacy to the power of the sovereign. Hobbes asks each of us to reflect upon our own welfare, and realize that the social contract is essential to that welfare.

Let us take note of another point, one that will bring Machiavelli back into the discussion. Like Machiavelli’s prince, Hobbes’s sovereign is above the law. In Machiavelli’s account, that the prince must sometimes act above the law is something the prince should mainly keep to himself. With Hobbes, however, the sovereign being above the law is a rational consequence of the covenant itself, not something that needs to be covered up. The source of the law cannot itself be bound by the law.

One final point before we move on to Rousseau. I didn’t mention this before, but Hobbes acknowledges that there are different forms of political rule, and thus different forms of sovereignty. Generally speaking, Hobbes refers to the sovereign as if he were speaking of a monarch, but he also discusses the possibility of rule by the few (aristocracy) and rule by the many (democracy). What could it mean, however, to say that a democracy could be sovereign? How could a democracy be both subject and sovereign at the same time? Furthermore, how could a democracy, as sovereign, be above the law? If the people are above the law, who is under it? Hobbes speaks to these matters somewhat, but not enough perhaps to answer all these questions. To find an attempt to answer these questions, we will turn to Rousseau.

One of the most famous of Rousseau’s works is The Social Contract, so we know we are on familiar ground. Like Hobbes, Rousseau raises the question: why would anyone in their right mind give up their natural liberty in exchange for the constraints of society? Rousseau believes, however, that Hobbes has given a poor account of the state of nature. By focusing on civil war, Hobbes is looking not at something prior to the social order but at something that arises from the breakdown of the social order. According to Rousseau, if we were to imagine man before being socialized, we would see a creature who is, in some ways, quite satisfied to be alone. Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short is not such a bad thing, especially since man in the state of nature enjoys his solitude, is ignorant of death, and doesn’t compare himself to others enough to be bothered about being poor or nasty or brutish.

Since the state of nature is not such an abject existence, according to Rousseau, individuals can rationally demand more of the social order than just security. What they can rightfully demand is civil freedom, which is not the natural freedom to do whatever you want, but the freedom to do what you find acceptable for others to do as well. With civil society, human beings lose some of the goods of the state of nature, but they make other gains that make it worth it, such as finding love and a sense of morality and dignity.

It is irrational therefore to hand over everything to an external sovereign. Instead, Rousseau makes an important distinction that we find in the American constitutional tradition as well: a distinction between the sovereign and the ruling power. It is not just that the people give legitimacy to the sovereign; the people are the sovereign. Any ruling power, any government, not based on the sovereignty of the people is illegitimate. Furthermore, it is not enough for a government to be popularly elected. If it fails to protect the civil rights of the individual, the social contract has been broken and the individual has no further obligation to it.

Rousseau’s account of the relation of ruler and ruled is much closer to our ordinary sensibility. The ruler, that is, the government official, is a public servant, and serves as long as the true sovereign, the people, find it reasonable for him to do so.

Nonetheless, Rousseau’s account has some parallels with Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’s that we might find surprising. In chapter 1 of book 2 of The Social Contract, Rousseau makes the claim that sovereignty is inalienable. Since sovereignty is not an external bond, but is rather the internal bond that constitutes the people to begin with, it cannot be taken from the society without the society already having been dissolved. Furthermore, according to Rousseau, that sovereignty is inalienable means that the sovereign can never bind itself toward any future action, for otherwise it would not be the ultimate legitimate source of power. To put it differently, Rousseau’s sovereign, like Machiavelli’s prince and Hobbes’s sovereign, is above the law as well, and for a similar reason: the source of the law cannot be bound by it.

So how can the people be both sovereign, i.e., above the law, and subject to the law as well? For Rousseau, we are above the law as makers of the law, so we are above it whenever we act as a collective body to shape the law, which happens primarily through voting. As individuals, however, we are also subject to the law as crafted by the society generally. Together, the law is not binding upon us – we can always change it as we need to– but individually it is.

Consider the preamble to the United States Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

“We the people” ordain and establish this Constitution. It is not the source of us, but we are the source of it. What started out as the immorality of Machiavelli’s prince becomes ultimately the purest expression of political freedom.

Let us return now to the beginning of this lecture where I described a contemporary notion of sovereignty. In fact, let me repeat myself. Noam Chomsky defined sovereignty as “the right of political entities to follow their own course, which may be benign or may be ugly, and to do so free from external interference.” Then I added:

“The right [Chomsky] speaks of is a right between nations, or perhaps between international bodies, like the European Union, or maybe even between tribes, but not apparently a right of individuals. From this point of view, it seems, we have a globe with settled political boundaries, and the right of sovereignty is the right of the ruling power of a nation to act of its own accord as long as it keeps its business within those boundaries. And how is it that these boundaries come to be settled? Presumably, by an act of international recognition. Collectively the nations of the earth decide upon their limits and hold those limits against all encroachment.”

As someone who affirms the tradition of classical liberalism and the notion of sovereignty that I have tried to show to be a part of it, let me respond directly to this contemporary notion of sovereignty with a series of points.
First, there is no such thing as a nation’s right of sovereignty. Nations rule by the sovereign right of the people, in which case they are legitimate, or they do not and are not. Between nations, however, there is no claim to sovereignty at all, because there is no common people between nations to provide the basis of that claim. As social contract theorists generally recognize, nations are to each other as individuals in the state of nature. It may be prudent or wise for one nation to respect another’s sovereign will, but the notion of sovereignty does not itself demand that that respect be given.

A corollary of this first point is that the concept of international law is an absurdity. There is no sovereign to give such a law its legitimacy. Furthermore, sovereignty is inalienable, so agreements between nations must always be understood as provisional, i.e., each nation will hold to these agreements as long as they construe it in their best interests to do so.

Second, the sovereignty of a nation is not determined primarily by internationally recognized political boundaries. This follows in part from the first point, which is that there is no legitimate international political body in the first place. It also follows, however, from the fact that sovereignty arises from the people themselves, not from the point of view of other nations.

A corollary of this second point is that nations in which the ruling power does not follow from the sovereign will of the people are not sovereign nations. Even if we did take upon ourselves an obligation to show deference to other sovereign nations, we certainly shouldn’t consider ourselves obligated in the same way to nations run by despots and other forms of power that do not represent the popular will. By this standard, I will claim that whatever the wisdom of our presence in Iraq may be, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was most definitely not a disturbance of the sovereignty of Iraq.

I would extend this corollary to those cases where there may be a sovereign political body of some sort but one which is too weak to police the terrorist forces in its midst. In such a case, I would say that the sovereign body is not the ruling power. Consequently, efforts to remove the terrorist element from it constitutes no diminishment to its sovereignty, insofar as its sovereignty did not extend to that element to begin with.

During this so-called war on terror, there has been a great deal of concern about the possibility that, through legislation such as the Patriot Act, we are a greater threat to our own political liberty than the terrorists are. I believe that we should add to this concern a further concern: in the name of world peace and order, we are subverting the concept of sovereignty, which was, in its final development as part of the tradition of classical liberalism, a concept used to justify revolution.

High Hopes

2006-09-17T00:59:00.000-04:00

High Hopes
A week or so ago I went to a party that was composed mainly of academics. In the course of one conversation, someone spoke of Culture and elevated matters such as philosophy. I suppose it could have been worse; at parties with non-academics, saying that I teach philosophy usually brings an awkward pause. Nonetheless, I was struck by this impression that philosophy, or culture generally, is something elevated above ordinary life.

Socrates supposedly said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I don't think I agree, but even so it is worthwhile to consider what is being said here and what is not. Perhaps our humanity only emerges out of a certain thoughtfulness, a kind of thinking that is not problem-solving (the normal mode of being thoughtful) but a gathering-together that brings one's entire existence into view. Perhaps. Even so, it does not follow that the examined life is a life consisting mainly of examination. Philosophy, at least the kind I'm most familiar with, certainly enjoys thinking about itself, but this really can turn into the kind of navel-gazing that some like to criticize it for. I would say instead that philosophy, like other "cultural" acts, intensifies our attention to ordinary life, thereby disrupting our natural consciousness which only pays attention to something when it is going wrong.

In other words, if this world bores you, I don't think philosophy or literature or art are going to rescue it for you. It may well be interesting to be absorbed in someone else's representation of the world for awhile. As Pascal would put it, however, this is just another kind of diversion, no different really from watching television. (Not that I have anything against television!) The philosophical life is not a life of reading philosophy as much as it is a life of finding interest in what too many people overlook -- the mud and hair that Parmenides told Socrates that he needed to consider.

Why do some people think otherwise? How did philosophy get the reputation among some as being an elevated matter?

Frankly, I think much of this opinion comes from the difficulty of philosophy. It is hard to put into words a kind of thoughtfulness that words were not made to describe. It is easy to take pleasure in philosophy's weirdness. (Yes, it is weird to pay a lot of attention to ordinary things. Their being ordinary means, as I said already, that our natural consciousness doesn't consider them worthy of giving energy too.) It is easy to mistake confusion for initiation into the mysteries.

I face this problem sometimes with my students. Non-majors don't like philosophical questions. Majors don't like answers to those questions. Not that I have answers to give, exactly, but they enjoy the search more than any insights that the search might produce. They are enjoying their self-examination -- this could be put more crudely -- but they do not recognize how this examination might open up the world to them. The propositions of philosophy obscure what is being proposed.

More Please

2006-09-05T10:36:00.000-04:00

More Please
Glenn Reynolds has a brief post about a new consequence of McCain-Feingold: the elimination, starting this Thursday, of political speech that is critical of members of Congress up for re-election. Let's hope so. It is hard for me to imagine that such a development wouldn't lead to a challenge that goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and it is hard for me to imagine that this court wouldn't strike it down. Too often our liberty diminishes in small drips. In this case the regulators of free speech have, I believe, overplayed their hand. To use my new-found language from the markets, I look forward to the correction.

Oil

2006-08-30T14:37:00.000-04:00

Oil
Bill Cara provides a valuable link to a government report on the price of oil. (The report can be found here and is worth a read.) In brief, the report argues that a sizable chunk of the rise in oil prices over the past couple of years has come, not from the usual sources of supply and demand, but from increased speculation in oil futures. Basically the rise in prices has been a self-fulfilling prophecy: speculators think the price of future oil deliveries will rise so they buy these deliveries, thereby driving up the price. The report suggests that $20 dollars of the current price (today around $68 a barrel) comes from speculation.

The writers of the report want increased regulation, at least in the form of records kept. I have no strong opinion on whether that is desirable, although my instincts are usually that markets will work themselves out. Every bubble will burst eventually. (Am I being naive? Cara suggests so.) Either way, the report puts forward the real possibility that gas prices will not keep rising over the intermediate term. If the speculation were to be removed from the market, either through regulation or natural market forces, gas might decline more than it has recently.

It doesn't seem that long ago that I read people saying that $3/gallon of gasoline is now a permanent part of our life. Maybe not.

Talking Cures

2006-08-17T10:06:00.000-04:00

Talking Cures
I once heard psychology described as one of the talking cures, i.e., a cure where you don't actually do anything to make someone better, you just somehow talk them out of their problem. I may be wrong, but my sense is that this kind of talking cure is on the decline, as it is being replaced by pharmaceuticals. My students, interestingly enough, are more comfortable telling me about the drugs they take than any therapy they might be receiving, so my estimate may be off. I'm guessing that the drugs do them more good too.

Diplomacy is another example of a talking cure, and the kind of people who distrust psychology are likely to distrust this form of therapy too.

The talking cure I am most familiar with, however, is philosophy. Philosophy looks a lot like psychology from a distance; my father still sometimes is confused about what I have my doctorate in. The difference, I think, is that psychology ultimately aims at getting us to become more bearable for everyone else, whereas philosophy aims at getting everyone else to be more bearable for us. Or, to put that point a little differently, philosophy seeks some kind of reconciliation with the world, some way of dealing with the alienation of the modern world.

Psychology has its materialist counterpart in pharmaceuticals, and diplomacy has its counterpart in war, but I'm not sure what philosophy's counterpart is. Alcohol, perhaps? It might be religion, but that looks like a talking cure too.

I am reminded now of a song from Harry Nilsson called "Coconut":

Brudder bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had anudder one she paid it for de lime
She put de lime in de coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put de lime in de coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put de lime in de coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put de lime in de coconut, she call de doctor, woke 'im up
Said 'Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said 'Doctor, to relieve this belly ache'
I said 'Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said 'Doctor, to relieve this belly ache'
Now lemme get this straight
You put de lime in de coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
You put de lime in de coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
You put de lime in de coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
You put de lime in de coconut, you call your doctor, woke 'im up
Said 'Doctor, ain't there nothing' I can take?'
I said, 'Doctor, to relieve this belly ache'
I said 'Doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said, 'Doctor, to relieve this belly ache'
You put de lime in de coconut, you drink 'em bot' togedder
Put de lime in de coconut and you'll feel better
Put de lime in de coconut, drink 'em bot' up
Put de lime in de coconut and call me in the morning
Woo ooh...
Ooh ooh ooh...

It is a silly song that somehow got some radio play. I read an interview with Nilsson in which he said that he was drawn to the idea that the same thing that caused an ailment would be given as the fix for it.

Philosophy is the lime in the coconut. Where does alienation come from other than a way of thinking that is abstract and critical? And what is philosophy other than this same abstract, critical thought taken to an extreme? Philosophy is the attempt, through much thinking, to solve the problem of much thinking. In this sense it may be the oddest of all the talking cures.

Cara

2006-08-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

Cara
A commenter on my last post thought I should make mention of a blog/website written by Bill Cara, a man who has been in the world of markets and securities for quite some time. Well, why not?

If you are interested in markets, it a great site. Cara is some kind of libertarian, as far as I can tell, and sees himself as providing an education for the little guy, like me. He is a daily read for me now. For the time that I've been following him he seems fairly good at predicting certain market moves, but the greatest value is his discussion of the economy and how we should be positioning ourselves for the coming market bottom. His discussion of how to use options is worth the visit by itself. (Look at the top of the site for a row of topics with extended essays.)

The most peculiar part of Cara's outlook, and the one I hesitate over the most, is his attraction to gold. It is obvious that he has spent a lot of time thinking about all industries that drill and mine beneath the earth, but gold comes up especially often as a topic. Whether he is right or wrong about the positive outlook for gold I couldn't say, but I can't help but think that there is a political position lurking in his assessment. Like all libertarians, he has a distrust of government, and it seems to me that he imagines gold as an alternative currency, one that doesn't depend on the good behavior of any political regime. Perhaps my nose is oversensitive, but I detect a whiff of apocalyptic fantasizing. Not that there is anything wrong with that! Apocalyptic fantasies are some of my favorites.

I must confess that I don't understand the fascination with gold. Oil and plutonium I understand, but gold? In a recent episode of Deadwood, the character George Hearst has a little speech where he says that the human agreement that gold is valuable is the fundamental basis of trust in a civilized order. I took that to mean that if we can't agree on gold being valuable, then we can't really agree on anything. I got the sense that the Hearst character recognized that there is something arbitrary about valuing gold, and that it is precisely the commitment to value this arbitrary element that bespeaks our commitment to society itself. Communal trust is weird that way. You trust that others will trust.

It is a fascinating thought, but I am unpersuaded. If we find ourselves in a position where we genuinely need an alternative currency, I suspect that I won't be much concerned about what my investment portfolio looks like.

Conservative bloggers use to write about the transnational progressives, that is, those progressives who are post-nationalists and yearn for a world of true international law. These are folks who see patriotism as provincial and believe that the opinion of the U.N. matters. Cara and libertarians like him are like some strange mirror image of these progressives. The libertarians don't believe in nations either, but I don't think they would consider the U.N. much of an improvement! Instead, they imagine a kind of transnational society made possible by the internet. (The picture I'm painting is admittedly too extreme: Cara regularly remarks about the need for authorities to crack down on certain kinds of market misbehaviors.)

I'm a bit old-fashioned. I still think that home is where you hang your hat, or rather, where you bury your dead. Nonetheless, my inability to comprehend Cara's insight on gold is trivial next to what I have learned from him.

Catching Up

2006-07-27T16:29:00.000-04:00

Catching Up
I've been away longer than usual, which is saying something. We travelled for a couple of weeks up through north Georgia, southern Indiana, and Milwaukee, seeing friends and family. The past couple of weeks I've been trying to settle back in and get ready for the fall semester, but lately I've been too sick to do anything useful.

Every teacher laments not having more dedicated students. By dedicated I don't mean keeping up with assignments and whatnot. I mean people who dedicate themselves to learning what you have to teach. I guess it is unreasonable to expect people to give themselves over in that way.

It has occurred to me, however, that a dedicated student also has a hard time finding a teacher. I don't have a strong opinion of my ability to teach, but I know that I am a good student. Where, however, would I find a teacher?

For example, on again and off again I have tried to learn an instrument, mainly bass guitar. I'm not interested in taking lessons, partly becaue of the money but also because I don't think that is what I need. I need someone to play with, someone who knows more than I do but has the patience to work with me.

Another example: over the past three or four months I have been trying to learn about the world of investments. I've covered a lot of ground, but I feel like I could gain so much more with an experienced person to guide me. I have taken up correspondence with one kind fellow who is helping me out, but that is a slow way to learn.

People who teach for a living, like I do, expect to get paid for what they do. This is all fine and good, but it is a very different thing from what I'm talking about. A true teacher wants to teach. (Let's not get too sentimental here: a true teacher likes to hear himself talk, and is flattered that someone will listen!) Teaching is a way of being in the world with others, a way that for some brings great fulfillment.

I find myself a teacher looking for students, and a student looking for teachers.

Death

2006-06-26T21:45:00.000-04:00

Death
I was watching a documentary on death tonight and watched every one of the experts make the same claim, namely, that cultures develop forms of meaning, i.e., forms of immortality, as a way of responding to the ineradicable fact of our biological mortality. The symbolic is thus a coping mechanism, a likely story.

I enjoy reductionist accounts as much as the next guy, and usually more, but this one strikes me as fundamentally flawed. To see this flaw, let us imagine that our science allows us to defeat biological death, but only at the expense of these cultural forms of meaning. One of the experts, for example, said that most people require a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves to cope with death. Let us imagine then a biological immortality that comes at the expense of this sense of belonging. If the theory were correct, shouldn't we have a feeling that our false measures had finally been replaced by the real deal? When I look at that bargain, however, what I see is a life that is dead in every way but the cellular one. Indeed, I have a hard time imagining that someone who had made such a bargain would bother to keep themselves alive.

The problem then is not foremost our lack of existence. The problem is fundamentally a problem of meaning. We fear that our lives will lack meaning, that we won't or didn't do all that we might have done, and that what we have done will not endure. Or, to change out of the language of accomplishment, I would say that we fear the end of the world of meaning that has its locus in us. I see the world in a certain way, and sometimes in a beautiful and wondrous way; I do not like to think that this way will pass.

It is through my reading of Heidegger that I understand these matters best, or perhaps at all. The finitude of my life is an issue not because of what I can't imagine, i.e., my non-existence, but what I can imagine, which is all of the things that I have not done in order to give myself to the things that I have done. I cannot have it all, I cannot do it all. Every choice is also a choice against. For those who love life, and love its possibilities, this is the real source of our anxiety. The experts have the whole thing backwards.

Buffett

2006-06-19T13:33:00.000-04:00

Buffett
Since I've been getting my feet wet in the world of investing, you might have thought that this post would be about the legendary Warren Buffett. Although I have encountered the cult of Warren Buffett, I am writing now about another legendary Buffett, with his own cult, namely, Jimmy Buffett.

Here's my question: when did Jimmy Buffett become a country music artist?

My wife has been out of town for awhile, so I sometimes drive her car, and one of the CDs in the disc changer is a Toby Keith CD that my daughter bought. After listening to it some, I was struck by what seemed two clear influences on Toby Keith: Jimmy Buffett and James Taylor. This strikes me as an odd heritage for a country artist. Furthermore, I recall seeing Buffett on "Austin City Limits" some time ago, and it was clear to me that he was gearing his performance to that sophisticated country music audience. (No, that isn't necessarily a contradiction in terms.) I thought it odd then, but it is obvious that Buffett has had an influence on country music and is thought of by many as a country artist. Lately he has been recording with other country artists and hosting country music awards and so forth.

So, again: when did Jimmy Buffett become a country music artist?

It is easy to slip things past me, but I would have thought I would have seen this one happening. I read that he started in Nashville, but he didn't hit it big until he moved to Key West. And, as far as I can remember, the people who listened to Buffett back when he was first big went nowhere near country music.

Nor do I think that Toby Keith is alone. A lot of contemporary country music, which is pretty much pop music, probably draws some inspiration from Buffett. So, once again, why wasn't I notified? What else have the rest of you been keeping to yourselves?

A Nutshell

2006-06-05T09:23:00.000-04:00

A Nutshell
I fly only occasionally, so I never rack up enough frequent flier miles to make good use of them. Instead, every year or so I end up with an offer to get free magazines, which would be great if it were the ones I actually subscribe to, such as the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, or Reason. Instead, I get a list that presumably appeals to people who fly a lot, which is crazy since those folks don't have to squander their frequent flier miles on something like magazines.

Anyway, I say all this to explain why I have a subscription to Seed. Now that I am an Investor, I would probably get a business magazine, but at the time I thought a magazine about science would be the best of poor choices. It has turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, primarily because it plays to a Leftish mindset that considers itself intellectually superior because it believes in evolution and global warming. (I haven't yet read any articles about whether the science of genetics supports the democratic belief in human equality, or whether there are constants of human nature that transcend culture. Not all science fits this mindset.)

In the April/May issue, however, I ran into an article, written by Geoffrey Miller, that grabbed my attention, mainly because it supports what I believe already. The article's title, "Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens," indicates the topic of the article but not its real substance. Let me cite some passages. First, we have his thesis:

I suggest a different, even darker solution to the Paradox. Basically, I think the aliens don't blow themselves up; they just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they're too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don't need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it to themselves, just as we are doing today. Once they turn inwards to chase their shiny pennies of pleasure, they lose the cosmic plot. They become like a self-stimulating rat, pressing a bar to deliver electricity to its brain's ventral tegmental area, which stimulates its nucleus accumbens to release dopamine, which feels…ever so good.

This is of little interest to me except for the underlying basis that he is extrapolating from, namely life on this planet:

The fundamental problem is that an evolved mind must pay attention to indirect cues of biologicalfitness, rather than tracking fitness itself. This was a key insight of evolutionary psychology in the early 1990s; although evolution favors brains that tend to maximize fitness (as measured by numbers of great-grandkids), no brain has capacity enough to do so under every possible circumstance. Evolution simply could never have anticipated the novel environments, such as modern society, that our social primate would come to inhabit. That would be a computationally intractable problem, even for the new IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer that runs 280 trillion operations per second. Even long-term weather prediction is easy when compared to fitness prediction. As a result, brains must evolve short-cuts: fitness-promoting tricks, cons, recipes and heuristics that work, on average, under ancestrally normal conditions.

The result is that we don't seek reproductive success directly; we seek tasty foods that have tended to promote survival, and luscious mates who have tended to produce bright, healthy babies. The modern result? Fast food and pornography. Technology is fairly good at controlling external reality to promote real biological fitness, but it's even better at delivering fake fitness—subjective cues of survival and reproduction without the real-world effects. Having real friends is so much more effort than watching Friends. Actually colonizing the galaxy would be so much harder than pretending to have done it when filming Star Wars or Serenity. The business of humanity has become entertainment, and entertainment is the business of feeding fake fitness cues to our brains.

Given the magazine, I was surprised at how conservative his conclusion is:

Maybe the bright aliens did the same. I suspect that a certain period of fitness-faking narcissism is inevitable after any intelligent life evolves. This is the Great Temptation for any technological species—to shape their subjective reality to provide the cues of survival and reproductive success without the substance. Most bright alien species probably go extinct gradually, allocating more time and resources to their pleasures, and less to their children. They eventually die out when the game behind all games—the Game of Life—says "Game Over; you are out of lives and you forgot to reproduce."

Heritable variation in personality might allow some lineages to resist the Great Temptation and last longer. Some individuals and families may start with an "irrational" Luddite abhorrence of entertainment technology, and they may evolve ever more self-control, conscientiousness and pragmatism. They will evolve a horror of virtual entertainment, psychoactive drugs and contraception. They will stress the values of hard work, delayed gratifica tion, child-rearing and environmental stewardship. They will combine the family values of the religious right with the sustainability values of the Greenpeace left. Their concerns about the Game of Life will baffle the political pollsters who only understand the rhetoric of status and power, individual and society, rights and duties, good and evil, us and them.

This, too, may be happening already. Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and anti-consumerism activists already understand exactly what the Great Temptation is, and how to avoid it. They insulate themselves from our creative-class dreamworlds and our EverQuest economics. They wait patiently for our fitness-faking narcissism to go extinct. Those practical-minded breeders will inherit the Earth as like-minded aliens may have inherited a few other planets. When they finally achieve contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox.

I've quoted more liberally than my reader probably desires or the law allows, but I find so much of the argument compelling. It reinforces for me the recognition that, despite my many leanings toward ancient philosophy and other ancient sources, that I am fundamentally a modern. By this I mean that I have come to support the modern suspicion of our own natural reason. This includes a suspicion of the desires that motivate our reasoning.

The conundrum, however, is that if we learn to work around the ways that we naturally interpret the world and the desires that push us toward that interpretation, we also separate ourselves from our natural ways of belonging to the world. How does it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his very soul?

In Moby Dick, Melville speaks to this point. Ishmael, the narrator, has been spending the day squeezing hardened lumps of spermaceti from a sperm whale to get them back into liquid form. Apparently the smell created a narcotic effect, to the point that Ishmael starts imagining something akin to a hippie community of universal love. He follows with this:

Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti.

There is an odd kind of conservatism that emerges from these modern insights. Miller speaks to this point in those final paragraphs praising the "practical minded breeders." Our techniques for manufacturing pleasure and satisfaction must be reconciled to the more mundane concern of survival. Contrary to Miller's thesis in the article, the species itself may not be in any real danger, but cultural accomplishments within the species certainly are. The Biblical injunction of "be fruitful and multiply" may have been directed towards the entirety of the living world, but it most likely was meant especially for the Jewish community. To prosper is to preserve a way of being in the world, and Miller is right to suggest that some ways of being in the world are instrumental in their own extinction. The classical liberal project of the development of the individual meets its proper limit here.

Rousseau has the following to say about good government in The Social Contract:

...I am continually astonished that a mark [of good government] so simple is not recognized, or that men are of so bad faith as not to admit it. What is the end of political association? The preservation and prosperity of its members. And what is the surest mark of their preservation and prosperity? Their numbers and population. Seek then nowhere else this mark that is in dispute. The rest being equal, the government under which, without external aids, without naturalization or colonies, the citizens increase and multiply most is beyond question the best.

I wouldn't assert this point as boldly as Rousseau does, but it is worth thinking about why we might disagree with him. First, we have a belief that the earth is overpopulated. Even if this were true, it would make little sense to want the populations to decrease in those cultures that share your values. Second, we have a notion that the goods of good government go beyond the birth rate and death rate. I am sympathetic to this point too, but it reveals how our concern for quality of life tends to eclipse everything else.

Part of the modern secular project is the quest to overcome death. This itself may be in keeping with our evolved psychology, but it suggests that there is something left over to make our time count for something. However, insofar as our activity becomes further removed from the struggle for existence, the more likely it is to be a form of fakery, or narcissism, as Miller puts it.

I sometimes imagine myself floating down a stream, spread-eagle upon a raft, looking up at the sky. The timbers of this raft, however, are not attached. It is only my weight and my grasp of the timbers that keeps them all together, so I am as responsible for the raft being a raft as the raft is for keeping me afloat. Were I to daydream too long, entranced by the sky, I might relax my grip and have it all come apart. Or, more likely, I might be tricked into thinking that one of the timbers would itself be enough. But no one timber is enough. None of the goods of life can alone sustain our weight, but all of them can be brought to assistance. We cannot stand upon such a raft, but with skill we will not fall from it either. Most of the time we cannot even see it, which is especially dangerous since we must keep it together. It is a precarious journey.

[This is a confused essay, but I've decided to post it with all its confusion. Perhaps later I will clean it up and remove this postscript.]

Charting

2006-05-25T22:04:00.000-04:00

Charting
My wife and I tend to jump into things with a brief intensity and then moving onto something else. For a while we played in a pool league. At a later date we took up golf. Lately our interest has been the stock market.

At first I was nervous about this move until I had a realization: it isn't all that important that we actually do well. Any money we put into an investment is money we didn't spend, and very little of our spending goes toward anything one would call an asset. So if we invest $500 in a stock and it drops $80, I count us ahead $420. Of course, there is the excitement of compound interest that we would be missing out on, so I really do want us to have some success.

We could have put the money in a safe investment, like CDs or government bonds or something. That, however, would have given little entertainment, and we need some compensation for not spending the money on consumption.

I'm learning quite a bit too, both about markets and myself. Lets skip what I'm learning about markets and just talk about me. The first few weeks of our investing, I was watching the stock screen all day long. I know this is a bad idea, especially for someone who claims to be a long-term investor. (Actually, we don't have a choice; we have too little to invest to handle the commissions from frequent trading.) Still, it was just too mesmerizing, especially since early on we were slowly building some profit. Then the market dropped like a rock over the last two weeks, and "I'm a long-term investor" became a lot easier to say. Now I have cut down to checking 5 or 6 times a day, and sometimes not even that.

I learned too that I'm an impulse buyer and seller, or at least I am when I've been watching the stock screen all day. We had one stock that wasn't doing so well, even when the others were. I told myself that these drops, which were mostly small, didn't matter that much, given that I was still standing by my "thesis" on the stock. (Isn't that a fine figure of speech?) Well, the stock jumped up one day to slightly above what we had paid for it, and I sold it despite all of my best rationalizations. My wife, who was following the market on her computer, was a little surprised, but not unhappy, I think. On another occasion, we had carefully worked out an "entry point" on another stock, but I couldn't help myself and bought well before. It is good to know these things about myself.

I find that I am irrational in this endeavor in a way that I see other's being irrational quite often: I let hope overcome good judgment. This is the same mistake of the people who play the lottery and slot machines, and I thought myself above it, but I was wrong. There is something quite pleasant about acting out of hope, especially when the hope is misplaced. By acting irrationally I demonstrate my fidelity to my hope. How much misery has this sentiment brought to human beings?

I take pride only in still having good judgment to overcome. While I act irrationally, I don't think my judgment has become too clouded. I find amusing the grounds upon which people make comments about the market, even from the professionals. How can it be that we have the metaphor "Monday morning quarterbacking" when it is in this area that I notice the vice the most. I guess in this field nobody backs a loser, so everyone must give the continual impression of wisdom and success. Whatever you might think about Jim Cramer, the circus act on CNBC, you have to give him credit on this point, because he regularly confesses to being wrong on particular stocks.

What I find most amusing, however, is that the whole stock market is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Why, after all, does a share of stock have value? Many stocks pay no dividend and few pay enough to beat what you can get from the bank, so that doesn't seem like the primary basis of value. A share does represent partial ownership in a company, but how really do you value that?

The two basic approaches that I've discovered are fundamentals analysis and technical analysis. The first, which involves figuring out what companies have the best growth possibilities, seems like the sanest, except for the points I just made in the previous paragraph. The second, which involves looking at charts and trying to discern trends, seems to me more like casting stones than it does good business sense, yet many people swear by it, especially the frequent traders.

When reading people defending their own approach, I have discovered a striking pattern: people defend their own by showing how inane the other approach is. This is fine, I suppose, but what if they are all right, which is what I suspect? What then? How can I feel good about retirement knowing that it is based on this suspect scheme?

Rationally, I lean toward the fundamentals approach, because I figure a company that goes out of business is a bad investment, whatever the rationale for how the market functions. I have shown, however, an ability to set reason aside in this venture, and I might just do so again. My mother's grandfather and great-grandfather were astrologers. Maybe I should take up the old family practice, but with different charts.

Modern Times

2006-05-11T16:09:00.000-04:00

Modern Times
Here is one of my favorite quotations from Hegel:

The manner of study in ancient times differed from that of the modern age in that the former was the proper and complete formation of the natural consciousness. Putting itself to the test at every point of its existence, and philosophizing about everything it came across, it made itself into a universality that was active through and through. In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made; the effort to grasp and appropriate it is more the direct driving-forth of what is within and the truncated generation of the universal than it is the emergence of the latter from the concrete variety of existence. Hence the task nowadays consists not so much in purging the individual of an immediate, sensuous mode of apprehension, and making him into a substance that is an object of thought and that thinks, but rather in just the opposite, in freeing determinate thoughts from their fixity so as to give actuality to the universal, and impart to it spiritual life.

Allow me to interpret. In the ancient world, the difficulty for thinking was in developing abstractions. The ancient mind was bound up with the images. It took its wisdom from metaphors and the story-telling that lies behind metaphors. Thus, long before there is philosophy, there are the poets like Homer and the writers of the books of Moses. An early task of philosophy was to develop abstract concepts. In Plato's dialogues, we can see this as the effort to form definitions, which the ancient Greeks were apparently unfamiliar with. A definition strives for a formula that comprehensively speaks to what a certain kind of thing is. For a mind unaccustomed to it, it is a terribly difficult task. To begin, you must identify examples of a thing, and find something in common in the examples. Then, to test the definition, you must strive to see if there are still more examples that won't fit the definition as it has been constructed. All of this is unnatural and somewhat disturbing. If your image of courage is Achilles, you want to honor Achilles when you think of courage. To lump Achilles in with less exemplary forms of courage, in order to construct the universal, might seem an injustice.

There seems to have been, however, among a small group of people, a great deal of energy for this effort of abstraction. A new way had opened up for the mind, and the world, in all its rich particularity, beckoned to be subsumed and organized by rational principle. In Plato's dialogues, when Socrates tries to describe what this process of reasoning looks like as a whole (such as the image of the divided line in the Republic), he tends to resort to a language that sounds more religious and mythic than it does scientific. As Bacon says, we tend to treat these ancient philosophers as wise old men, but in reality they were the youngsters in a new endeavor. The enthusiasm found in those texts for the possibility of wisdom can be likened, I believe, to the enthusiasm of the young generally. I have some recollection of that enthusiasm even with myself!

"In modern times, however, the individual finds the abstract form ready-made...."

How true! Hegel has a related comment that what was once the hard work of the most mature minds has become the games of children. For example, let us marvel once again at the development of a place-based numbering system and the techniques for multiplication that become available with it. Our elementary school children can perform calculations that would have taken great time and expertise in the ancient world. The democratic spirit emerged into the world with constant and intense opposition -- somewhat justified! -- but now our children learn about human equality as if it were the most obvious fact on the planet.

Education for us then is not so much an enthusiastic development of abstract thought as it is the unpacking of an abstract thought already formed. We hear the accounts of the world long before we encounter the world on our own, and many of these accounts are far removed from our ordinary experience. This is an unfortunate necessity. It is necessary because how else can the last three thousand years (or more) of civilization be instilled in a young mind other than by intense training? It is unfortunate because, as Hegel points out, such an education introduces a "fixity" to our concepts and diminishes their vitality.

This last point could use some elaboration. In my experience, most of my students and even many of my colleagues think like flow charts. Concepts become boxes with arrows leading from one box to another. If you introduce a new thought into this array, the student (and colleague) simply attempts to reattach all the broken arrows. The more elaborate one's flow chart is, the longer one can talk about all of the new connections being made.

Contrast the enthusiasm of the flow-charter reconfiguring a conceptual scheme with the enthusiasm of the ancient mind trying to develop abstractions in the first place. The former inherits a more sophisticated understanding of the world, perhaps, but the latter actually lives in the world and responds to it. Here we see the situation from which philosophy makes its ever-present call for wakefulness. To think with boxes and arrows is to carry an older wisdom forward like a corpse marks time in a tomb. The corpse must rise and walk again. There must be new life.

It is hard to articulate what this vitality means, because part of what it means is getting beyond the fixity of concepts, i.e., taking our definitions of concepts less seriously. I approach this by trying to see what someone is looking at as well as what they are saying about what they are looking at. It is important for me to look too. In following this route, we can come to understand why certain things are said and certain things not said. It is like communicating with a friend; so much goes without saying.

All of this is an overblown build up to an observation I have about Melville's Moby Dick. I started reading this last December, and have been picking at it ever since. I have learned to be thankful that I didn't read all of the great works that I thought I should have read by the age of 30. I especially need to forget that I read anything in high school; I have let some wonderful works languish on the stupid supposition that I have already encountered them.

Anyway, Moby Dick isn't what I expected it to be. So far only half the book has been narrative. Furthermore, the symbolic richness of the book is too much, too indigestible.

I hear Melville saying to me: "Ok, you know the great white whale represents something, that there must be some abstraction for which it is the symbol. Now that we've got that part of your brain distracted, let's learn something about whaling."

Finishing (Again)

2006-04-21T15:19:00.000-04:00

Finishing (Again)
I decided to write a post about the idea of finishing strongly. As I tell my students, someone running a race runs through the finish line, not to the finish line. I decided to entitle my post "Finishing." Lo and behold, I found that I wrote on this exact topic with that exact title almost exactly a year ago! Here is a sample from that post:

When I am driving long distances, I notice that the last hour feels much longer than the ones before it. The last hour is so exhausting that I always have the impression of just barely having endured the trip. Since this exhaustion happens on three-hour drives as often as seven-hour ones, however, it stands to reason that the problem is me. There are a number of psychological tricks people play to overcome this problem that I would do well to learn.

Perhaps one such trick is to think of advice that was given to us when I was on the track team in middle school: "don't run to the finish line, run through it." Similar advice is given to kids about running to first base, and the notion of "follow through" that accompanies every sport which swings something fits as well. The end is not the end of all activity, just the end of activity at its fullest.

These thoughts also accord with the idea of grace that I've mentioned before, namely, that being graceful means having more strength than something calls for. To fall down at the finish line might suggest that you've given it your all, but it also suggests that you took on more than you could successfully handle.

To finish without grace, to slow down before the finish line, demeans our accomplishment. Hopefully, we end matters with pride in what we've done, but it is hard to feel that pride when the end seems like such a burden. It is the wrong form of punctuation, or perhaps a lack of punctuation altogether.

Should I take it as a good sign that I think the same thing in the same circumstances? Shouldn't I have grown over that time?

Well, I don't think it is a sign of growth, but it had occurred to me that this metaphor of running through the finish line could be applied to our lives as a whole. Should we not finish life at full speed, at least as much as our enfeebled frame can manage? Put in this perspective, the answer is not so clear.

Montaigne, for example, finds it ridiculous that people conduct themselves in old age as if they weren't going to die:

I want us to be doing things, prolonging life's duties as much as we can; I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening. I once saw a man die who, right to the last, kept lamenting that destiny had cut the thread of the history he was writing when he had only got up to our fifteenth or sixteenth king!

Furthermore, Montaigne sees old age as precisely the occasion for slowing down and reflecting on what has been done:

We have lived enough for others: let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being. Preparing securely for our own withdrawal is no light matter: it gives us enough trouble without introducing other concerns. ...It is time to slip our knots with society now that we can contribute nothing to it.

A difference, I suppose, between the end of the semester and the end of a life is that my students do still have work that needs doing in order to accomplish what they set out to do. The end is also a culmination, but this is not usually the way we think of a human life, especially in our time when there is often a long period between our most productive years and our mortal end. We culminate somewhere toward the end, and then live off of the capital.

Re-enlistment

2006-04-15T20:03:00.000-04:00

Re-enlistment
Glenn Reynolds has yet another post about the army's success in re-enlisting. I'm not slighting Reynolds, but it is a sign of our times that this is noteworthy. When you read accounts of the Second World War and earlier wars, you find that a great many men volunteered to fight in conditions far more lethal than the ones our servicemen find themselves in now. Somehow these men from earlier generations lacked the sophistication to know that fighting for your country is a useless venture or worse.

It is true that the warfare of the 19th and 20th century has properly made cynics of us all. Total war is uncivil. Thankfully, that is not the kind of war we are fighting.

Argument

2006-04-06T14:55:00.000-04:00

Argument
As I wrote a few posts back, I am teaching a class in symbolic logic this semester. My former chair used to teach this course, so this is my first crack at it. I am also teaching a critical thinking course this summer, which we call Logic & Language.

These are nice courses for me to teach. If nothing else, they help me to exercise a part of my brain that I don't normally in my teaching. Usually I am trying to get students to cross boundaries. Logic, on the other hand, is intensely concerned with creating and preserving boundaries. It is enthralled to a certain sense of rigor and precision. Our majors could use at least a little of that rigor. One can bring clarity of expression even to matters that are inherently unclear.

I enjoy these classes too, especially the symbolic logic class, because they return me a little to my roots. I entered college as a mathematics major and thought at one time that I would go on to graduate work in it. In my junior year I made a conscious decision to move away from mathematics and even mathematical, i.e., analytic, philosophy, but my dissertation work brought me back to the question of number and measure. After the dissertation I largely set these concerns aside, but I find now that I still have an interest in them.

A professor of mine in graduate school once made the claim that philosophy doesn't engage in arguments. Now, it is obvious that plenty of people who consider themselves philosophers engage in arguments, and it is also clear that most every figure in the tradition trots out an argument, at least on occasion. I take his claim rather to be that argumentation is not fundamental to philosophy. In time, I have come to agree. I will now give an argument to support my point.

To begin, I take philosophy to be a speculative endeavor, by which I mean that its theoretical claims outstrip the evidence for them. Indeed, I don't know that philosophers ever deal much with evidence. We rely on examples, i.e., that which is exemplary, but we do so to illustrate thought. The concrete makes the abstract thinkable, giving vigor to our ideas. It is all too easy to turn thought into a kind of flow chart (remember those?) with boxes pointing to boxes. I have a colleague who strikes me as insane with theory, and his talk is nothing but boxes.

Insofar as we point to examples to illustrate rather than ground, it doesn't seem like we can describe philosophy as an inductive activity. If it is inductive, the induction takes place in some part of a brain that we are barely privy to.

Next, while there is an order of discovery by which we encounter the wideness of our thinking, the order seems to vary with the individual and is not particularly locatable in the thoughts themselves. In other words, I don't see that the ideas of philosophy have any special priority to them. Having learned how to argue, we learn how to put our ideas in that form, such that we settle upon one principle and then try to use it to make sense of others. It seems to me, however, that these arguments can be taken up in any direction, such that the conclusion of one argument can just as easily be the beginning. Formal logic certainly allows for this to happen.

Aristotle distinguished between the clarity that a thought has for us from the clarity that a thought has in itself. The second category might sound confusing, but his point seems to be that, as our understanding increases, we don't just become clearer about what we meant already, but that we reach ideas that self-evidently have a greater clarity than ones we began with. Insofar as we move from things that are more clear to us (initially) to things that are more clear in themselves, it makes sense to lay out this path in the form of argumentation. Having arrived at that destination, however, the path becomes less important, and the relation of evidence and conclusion becomes less meaningful.

We find support for this idea in Plato's Republic. In the metaphor of the divided line, Socrates divides thoughtfulness into two. The first part, and the lower of the two, is a kind of problem-solving that begins from one stepping stone and then carries itself to another until it reaches a final destination. The second part, and the higher, is described as a movement from form to form, like someone who changes partners in a ballroom dance.

Courage

2006-03-21T08:08:00.000-05:00

Courage
Trying to get an accurate picture of how well the war in Iraq is going seems to depend mainly on who you want to ask. I tend to trust the milbloggers and the conservatives, but I doubt I could persuade anyone else to have that trust if they don't have it already. It is telling to see where people place their faith.

I follow the war, although I don't study it, and my basic sense is that we don't really know how things will turn out. I tend to dismiss those who are confident of our failure as just wishful thinkers, but those who are confident of our success can be guilty of the same, unless you define success in fairly modest terms.

My support for the war, however, does not depend too much on the turn of events on a day to day basis. To withdraw from battle at this time would be a kind of cowardice, if we can speak of cowardice in relation to a nation as a whole. I draw support for my point from Aristotle, who claims that courage involves enduring danger in those times when the outcome is in doubt. A characteristic of the virtuous is that they act with a sense that the future is open, that fate doesn't determine the course of events and social science can't lay it all out in advance. The only certainty that is important is that we should aspire to do what is noble.

There were many good people, including some conservatives, who thought that toppling Hussein was a mistake. I am a big fan of Mickey Kaus, for example, and he did not support the invasion. At this point, however, we have made a commitment, and only in the face of obvious disaster does it make sense to think of retreat. Of course, we also need to think of what counts as success, lest mission creep keep us in neverending conflict. In this venture, however, I feel very strongly that we are just at the beginning, that seeing this through will take a resolve that democracies sometimes struggle to muster. We will need to live with uncertainty. To those who are naturally fearful, uncertainty is simply anxiety. To those who honor courage, however, uncertainty is opportunity.

Division

2006-03-15T21:29:00.000-05:00

Division
In a post that I wrote some time ago (and am too lazy to locate), I wrote about the idea of dividing people into three types: those who would do right regardless of what you do to them, those who would do wrong regardless of what you do for them, and a middle group that will do right or wrong depending on which of the first two groups has more sway in the society. This middle group is by far the largest.

Let's give names to these divisions: the good, the bad, and, assuming the good have more sway, the decent.

We might expect that both the good and the bad share something in common with the decent, which is the middle group, but not with each other. I believe, however, that even the good and the bad have something in common that they do not share with the decent. Let me work through the three possible pairings.

The good and the decent: This pairing is fairly obvious. Both groups generally make positive contributions to the well-being of society.

The decent and the bad: This one is less clear, but I would assert that the decent are selfish in a way similar to the bad. The difference is mainly one of calculation. As Glaucon argues in Plato's Republic, many people do right, not because they intrinsically want to, but because they think it prudent to restrict their own desires if others are willing to do the same. They are then engaged in a social contract, with the bottom line being their own well-being. The bad are also selfish, but they have calculated differently, so are unwilling to practice self-restraint.

The good and the bad: This is the least intuitive of all, but I think there is an important similarity here. The truly good follow social convention mainly so as to not upset the social contract of the decent, not because they value social convention itself. In other words, the good, like the bad, are perfectly comfortable making themselves the arbiters of moral worth. Furthermore, if it seems important enough, the good are quite willing to put social convention aside to do the right thing. In this way they resemble the lawlessness of the bad.

Because of these connections, it is always possible for a member of one group to resemble a member of another. What we have then is not so much a continuum, as I described earlier, but a triangle where each side of the triangle represents a unique connection between two groups.

Without Guile

2006-03-08T03:07:00.000-05:00

Without Guile
I think I have taxed even the limits of my small readership with my sporadic output of uneven quality. A couple of posts ago I wrote about honesty, and one of the points I made there is that honesty requires craft, even if part of its craft is to conceal its craftiness. This gives the appearance of dishonesty, but it is no more dishonest than the way that the gracefulness of excellent dancers makes the dance look effortless.

For some reason, lately my interest in the craft has diminished. I still have ideas that seem blogworthy, but I have been missing the excitement of putting them into shape. I have no explanation for why the excitement is missing. I do not expect that it is gone for good.

In the meantime, I know that some people check in just to see what is going on with me. I thought I would use this prosaic interlude to catch people up.

This semester I am teaching four courses: an introduction to philosophy, an introduction to ethics, symbolic logic, and an honors course. In my introduction to philosophy, I have followed a direction that I attempted last spring as well: I am teaching the whole class as a preparation for their final reading. Last spring, I chose William Pogue Harrison's Forests. It is a difficult book for anyone, even our majors, so it has no place really in an introductory course, but by choosing all of my other texts with that book in mind, I was able to build up to a point where the students were not utterly mystified. The other readings were: Plato's Phaedrus, Gilgamesh, Descartes' Discourse on Method, Vico's New Science, and Thoreau's Walden. Anyone familiar with these texts knows what an odd assortment they are. Nonetheless, many of my students responded positively to the class. As difficult as it was for them, they did get a sense of the wonder of philosophy. This semester, I chose another Harrison book to work toward: The Domain of the Dead. It is an even harder book, in my opinion, but the course so far has been very interesting. The other texts are: Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos, selections from the Iliad, Descartes' Discourse on Method, essays from Heidegger, and Thoreau's Walden. Part of what has been fascinating for me has been to see how Descartes opens up differently in this context than he did in my intro class last semester, which was much more traditional.

My introduction to ethics course is fairly straight-forward, although I have given virtue ethics much greater emphasis than others would. We started with Plato's Republic, subtracting the more political chapters of V-VII and the final chapter. We then read the first four books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and are now reading some of Montaigne's essays. Next we will read the first book of Hobbes' Leviathan to finish our account of virtue. We will finish the course with large selections from stock texts in ethics: Kant's Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, Mill's Utilitarianism, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.

The symbolic logic course has been very interesting for me. We started with Aristotelian logic from a more traditional point of view and are now finishing up our reading from selections of John Buridan's Treatise on Consequences. Next we will read selections from Boole's The Laws of Thought and finish with Quine's small textbook on propositional logic. Anyone familiar with how symbolic logic is normally taught will see how different our more historical approach is. I'm sure we are not the only ones trying to teach logic this way, but I know of no others, and I am not really trained for this myself.

One point should be made to help explain my class designs: since I tend to read only what I am teaching, I try to teach what I want to read. I do keep in mind the abilities of my students, but I figure that my enthusiasm is much more critical than their ability to understand what they are reading without my assistance. When I choose intimidating texts, I know that I will just have to work harder to present them with something they can digest. I have some success at this, and some of the students like the idea that a text that initially seemed impenetrable is, in fact, not.

Outside of teaching, I have continued my interest in genealogy. I recently have seen to the restoration of the headstone of my great-great-grandmother, who I discovered is buried here in Macon. I am also working on photocopying some old typed genealogical notes from a distant, deceased cousin. These notes are of interest to myself, but I am mainly doing it for the sake of his 80 year old widow. It has only been through my genealogical work that I have met her. After figuring out how to successfully copy these notes, I hope to record an interview with her. I heard more old family stories from her on one Saturday afternoon than I had heard from the rest of my family in my lifetime. This week I am also going to make a small detour on our trip to my sister's place in Orlando to try to find the grave of my great-great grandfather, the husband of the woman buried here in Macon.

Another interest that I have developed is sewing. I started last fall by taking classes with my daughter, who I hoped would become interested herself. She did ok with it, and recently helped me hem a pair of her school pants, but for the time being she is not doing it. To develop my skills further, I am now meeting with a friend once a week. Hopefully I can reach the level where I can make clothes. At that point I think I can get my daughter interested again; I think she might take real interest in designing and sewing her own clothing.

Well, enough of this for now.

Some Questions

2006-02-25T23:58:00.000-05:00

Some Questions
I'm not sure if things still work this way, but last summer I was taking a flight to Michigan from Atlanta and was pulled aside in Atlanta for the intensive screening. Right before I was routed to the special line, the airport employee who was looking at tickets highlighted three letters that appeared on my ticket: SSS. Standing in line with other people also pulled aside, we discovered that we all had these letters on our tickets. At the end of the summer, on a different flight, I noticed that my ticket did not have these letters and that I was not pulled aside.

The other day I decided to look into this further. Googling sss boarding pass, I discovered that my experience is far from unique.

Two thoughts:
1. How in the world is this system supposed to catch terrorists if you know when you get your ticket whether you are going to be pulled aside or not? If I were trying to avoid this scrutiny, wouldn't I just keep purchasing tickets until I get one without the dreaded letters?

2. After looking at many web sites where people have indicated that "SSS" gets you pulled aside, I have yet to find a single one that points out the absurdity of it all. Are human beings so accepting of what the experts put into place that they don't realize that this is a farce?

Honesty

2006-02-17T22:04:00.000-05:00

Honesty
I have been thinking some lately about the virtue of honesty. For Montaigne, it may well be the core virtue, but it doesn't seem to be central in the ancient listings of the virtues. I'm struggling to put my thoughts into a coherent order, but there are a number of interesting points that can be made.

1. Honesty is not fundamentally about truth-telling. Someone can speak only the truth and still be hidden from view. It seems more to do with self-disclosure. The honest person is an open person. Truth-telling likely characterizes the open person, but it does not seem to me to be either a necessary or sufficient condition for openness.

2. While honesty takes on the appearance of being uncrafted, to be practiced well, honesty must be crafted. Socrates begins his apology talking about how he is not gifted in speech, and Montaigne opens his essays by describing how he would like to make himself naked in front of all. In each case, however, there is no doubt that what follows is artfully constructed. In trying to proclaim their openness, they fudge the truth. Insofar as each is genuinely open, their deceit is not pernicious, but it is interesting that they would bother with such claims at all.

Why would honesty require craft? Why not just say what comes to mind? I think this is because excellence in self-disclosure requires two important abilities, namely, the ability to grasp oneself and the ability to know how others see you. Just as actors on a stage must shout their lines, even when putting on the appearance of ordinary conversation, so must people practice at showing themselves forth to others. Think about how odd your own voice sounds when you hear it in a recording. This is a sign of how well we see the way others see us.

3. Is it possible for those in power to be honest? I'm not sure it is. For example, my honesty is sometimes more than people want to hear, but it would be far worse if I were in a position of power. I can express my opinion openly because it doesn't really matter what I think. Socrates gives this reason for why he did not pursue public office.

Of course, those in power are not in power toward everyone. Presumably even George Bush has someone, perhaps Laura, whom he can be honest with.

Markers

2006-02-10T00:50:00.000-05:00

Markers
Lately I've been pursuing my interest in my mother's father's family tree. This was the extended family I knew best growing up. For most of my life I couldn't quite see how I was like them, but the past couple of years I've had the thought that maybe I am like my great-grandfather. He was interested in astrology and New Age spiritualism, I believe, which doesn't exactly describe me, but we are playing horseshoes here. Anyway, I decided to try to find things out.

One interesting discovery was that my great-great-grandmother died here in Macon and is buried in a famous local cemetery. Since the family has never lived in these parts, that was unexpected. I found the marker a couple of weeks ago and discovered that it needs repair, which I hope will be done within the next week. She died over a 100 years ago, but I did know her son a little (my great-grandfather died when I was in my teens), so I'm claiming a connection.

In the midst of this my wife and I talked about how many people we know who seem to think they should be cremated. I understand the reasons why, I think, but I must admit that I'm glad my ancestors have places. Last spring I made a trip to Leslie, GA, to see the grave of my great-great-great-grandmother, and just recently found a book with stories about her and talked to someone else who knew these stories too. Somehow the grave site was important to that discovery. I had a place for her before I began to give that place content. I look forward to being able to drive up to Dalton, GA to locate my great-great-great grandfather and his daughter. My great-great-grandfather is a couple of hours south, which should be a good trip too.

I brought up the possibility to my wife that perhaps people can be cremated but still have these markers. That doesn't seem to happen, but I don't know why it couldn't. She made a good point in response: going to a marker without a body wouldn't be the same. I think she's right. Intellectually, it doesn't seem like it should matter, but it does. How odd.

Moderation

2006-01-31T23:32:00.000-05:00

Moderation
In a post I wrote a month ago (which means about 3 posts back), I discussed the idea that the modern world has its own virtues, or at least its own version of the ancient virtues. The primary difference is that ancient virtue is oriented toward endurance, i.e., having a character that can withstand the blows of circumstance, whereas modern virtue is oriented toward flexibility, i.e., having a character that can fruitfully adapt to circumstance.

An interesting example is the virtue of moderation. To the extent that moderation is taken to mean "not overindulging," there is not an important divide between ancient and modern. It seems to me, however, that the ancient virtue also expresses the notion of setting limits not only to bodily desire but to ambition generally. To be moderate is to be definitely this person. We speak sometimes of a person's determination, and take that to be a mark of character. Someone who is determined is someone set upon a certain path or goal.

When you read Jane Austen, you find indeterminacy to be something to avoid. A regular tension in those novels is the uncertainty of what kind of marriage can be made for one's daughters. Marriage is a confidence of one's place in the social order. The better characters manage to hold out for good marriages, but most everyone ultimately is seeking to fix their place. (There are, of course, the social climbers, who are generally viewed as negatively in Austen as they are in Shakespeare.)

When I think about my own existence, however, it is distressing to think that I have found my place. In all likelihood, I have. When I look at my colleagues who are retiring, I see a work being done that greatly resembles the work I am doing now. Doesn't that suggest that what I am doing now is what I will be doing until the end of my productive life? I find little satisfaction in this security. Indeed, by seeing the contours of my life so clearly, it is as if I can read the book of my life in advance. This isn't true, of course, but I find the sensation unsettling nonetheless.

I fight this self-certainty, as many others do, by various acts of self-improvement. It is ridiculous to see the things I pick up and try out for awhile. Out of embarrassment, I won't even make a list. These half-ass efforts bring little accomplishment, but they do provide psychological comfort. I suppose that my unwillingness to put more energy into them is some testimony to the integrity of my life.

The ancient conception of virtue draws its strength from a cultural memory of tribal forms of existence. The virtues themselves might be shaped by the experience of civic engagement, but the assuredness that we are rightfully committed to a larger social order comes from a sentiment that predates the city. In the modern world, these tribal sensibilities have been largely lost. We find ourselves two steps removed from common sense, forming abstractions from abstractions.

Many conservatives see all of this as the corruption that characterizes the modern world. In a sense, I would agree, in that the unreflective way of being clearly has survival value, since it characterizes the great bulk of human history, whereas reflective modernity hasn't really proven its sustainability. On the other hand, perhaps that modern world has simply brought forward truths obscured by Adam's curse. Perhaps the boredom, despair, and anxiety of the modern world speak more to our real condition than we would like to admit.

Civility

2006-01-20T20:58:00.000-05:00

Civility
Apparently the Washington Post has shut down comments on of its blog because of "personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech," among other things.

It seems inevitable that a large site will eventually draw enough riff-raff to diminish the experience for everyone else. I think it is also the case that the internet encourages incivility in a way not found in other venues of expression. I know that I have written things in someone else's comments that I later was a little ashamed of.

In part, the problem is that you don't usually think about a comment very long, so you're more likely to write the first thing that comes to mind. In fact, with some comment sections, you don't want to spend too much time thinking, especially if you are responding to another commenter, for fear that too many comments will come between you and what you want to respond to.

A further problem, and the one I consider the most vexing, is that, when responding to another commenter, all you usually know about them is what they have written in a tiny space. If you strongly disagree with what they have written, then you strongly disagree with everything you know about them. It takes a powerful imagination to remember that there is more to a person than one opinion.

To put it differently, civility is not natural to internet communication. To have civility, we have to import it from other experiences, because it is only in the normal world that we see enough sides of a person to realize that we can live with them -- indeed, often must live with them -- even while having significant disagreements. With family, neighbors, or colleagues, we generally try to find the points of commonality that enable us to look past what we perceive as faults.

Still, the internet is only an extreme version of what is happening throughout the contemporary world. We live a grid-like existence where we move from point to point to fulfill our various functions. At each of those points, we see people in terms of those functions. If they displease us, it is easy to become rude, because there are no real consequences and because we cannot see anything else in them but their present incompetence.

I even fall into this mistake with my colleagues. There are some people I work with who have a significantly different vision of what a liberal arts education should be than I do. When that vision manages to affect policy, I feel very angry and can be dismissive of them. When I stop and think about it, however, I realize that, if I only knew them as neighbors down the street, I would get along with them just fine. Furthermore, there are people whom I get along with well who might be my mortal enemies were I to deal with them in a different context.

Spirit

2006-01-11T14:21:00.000-05:00

Spirit
I recently [recently = two years ago when I started this post] ran across this passage from Hegel in his Philosophy of Mind:

What the child is to learn must therefore be given to him on and with authority; he has the feeling that what is thus given to him is superior to him. This feeling must be carefully fostered in education. For this reason we must describe as completely preposterous the pedagogy which bases itself on play, which proposes that children should be made acquainted with serious things in the form of play and demands that the educator should lower himself to the childish level of intelligence of the pupils instead of lifting them up to an appreciation of the seriousness of the matter in hand. This education by playing at lessons can result in the boy throughout his whole life treating everything disdainfully. Such a regrettable result can also be produced by perpetually stimulating children to indulge in argument and disputation, a method recommended by unintelligent pedagogues; this can easily make children impertinent. Children must, of course, be roused to think for themselves; but the worth of the matter in hand should not be put at the mercy of their immature, vain understanding.

Hegel has some powerful opponents on this point, such as Plato and Rousseau, whom he seems to be calling unintelligent pedagogues, but he also has some fairly weak opponents, such as 20th century philosophies of education, for whom the description might be more apt. Since we are still living with the latter, it is worthwhile to see if Hegel has any grounds for his complaint.

For Hegel, the fundamental purpose of education is to mold our character such that we are properly social beings, and to develop our minds such that we grasp the inherent rationality in our social structures. To define oneself against one's culture is ultimately self-contradictory, and it provides an impoverished notion of individuality. Education does seek to develop strong individuals, but individuals rooted in their world:

Individual souls are distinguished from one another by an infinite number [infinite = indefinite] of contingent modifications, [e.g., temperaments, talents, and so forth.] But this infinity belongs to the spurious kind of infinite. One should not therefore rate the peculiarities of people too highly. On the contrary, the assertion that the teacher should carefully adjust himself to the individuality of each of his pupils, studying and developing it, must be treated as idle chatter. He has simply no time to do this. The peculiarities of children are tolerated within the family circle; but at school there begins a life subject to general regulations, to a rule which applies to all; it is the place where the mind must be brought to lay aside its idiosyncrasies, to know and to desire the universal, to accept the existing general culture. This reshaping of the soul, this alone is what education means. The more educated a man is, the less is there apparent in his behaviour anything peculiar only to him, anything therefore that is merely contingent.

Here's one more helping for good measure:

In the [family], the child is accepted in his immediate individuality, is loved whether his behaviour is good or bad. In school, on the other hand, the immediacy of the child no longer counts; here he is esteemed only according to his worth, according to his achievements, is not merely loved but criticized and guided in accordance with universal principles, moulded by instruction according to fixed rules, in general, subjected to a universal order which forbids many things innocent in themselves because everyone cannot be permitted to do them. The school thus forms the transition from the family into civil society.

Suffice it to say that our democratic culture does not sit comfortably with this. Let me give voice to what those objections might be.

We have the idea that, ideally, students should be internally motivated, or else they will just be imitating what has been taught. Even with Hegel's assumption that we educate children primarily to be good citizens, and thus obedient to the law, we must realize that they will be makers of the law as well. Conformity to the law is therefore insufficient, because one must be able to see beyond what the law is, and see what it points to, in order to continue to craft it. We attempt then to reach students where they are in order to guide them to a self-understanding of the rationality of their own culture. Otherwise they will be strangers in their own land.

My colleagues tell me that we should be educating students to be critical thinkers. While I don't consider critical thought to the be the pinnacle of thoughfulness -- criticism is a way of being homeless -- there is truth enough in what they say. My challenge is to get students to think twice, to hesitate.

We might also object to Hegel's subsumption of the individual to the larger political order. We tend to see the individual as the primary end, with the community being a means to that end. Of course, it is a means to the well-being of every individual, so we are required individually to sacrifice to it in order to enjoy the goods that it secures. Nonetheless, we hold that the common good is not a good over-and-above each individual but is rather the good common to each individual.

These are all fine objections, and good reasons not to pursue Hegel's notion of education very closely. Still, I think Hegel has a worthy point, namely, that our thinking is not truly individual, and that our education should be aware of that.

Let me give two examples that speak against the individuality of thought. The first is that when I assign my students papers that require them to give their own answer to a philosophical problem, I receive in return a very narrow range of opinion. Since we tend to think in dichotomies, there will usually be two approaches that nearly everyone will fall under. They are giving their opinion, but it turns out that their opinion is largely a reflection of the common wisdom of our culture.

My second example is that I think there is a division of labor when it comes to opinion just as much as there is in the economic sphere. I don't mean here the division of thought into different fields and sub-fields. I mean that each of us individually concentrates thought around a few areas that strike the individual as particularly dependent upon him and leaves the other areas to other thinkers.

This becomes clear to me when I spend a lot of time around other conservatives. Generally, I am around people who are politically to the left of me. That's just the way university faculties tend to be. It is easy for me to think of myself as conservative in that context. When around other conservatives, however, or when reading a conservative publication like National Review, I sometimes find myself sticking up for opinions more likely to be asserted by the liberals among us. Around my more leftward colleagues, I will criticize the environmentalists for having some strange pagan faith that doesn't adequately reflect the values of Western democracies. Around conservatives who are joking about eating endangered species, however, I start to cringe.

This tells me that I share opinions with people that I tend to think of as intellectual opponents and that I leave to them the thinking about concerns that are not front and center for me. I do think about the environment some, but I also trust, perhaps unconsciously, our regulatory state to prevent the worst abuses. I'm inclined to think that our regulations go too far, and I really don't trust most environmental organizations, but in the back of my mind I think there is some trust in the regulatory effort. Likewise, in the current debate over surveillance and homeland security, I tend to be deferential to the need to heavily screen suspicious conduct. At the same time, I know I don't want to give carte blanche to these investigatory agencies, because absolute power corrupts absolutely. I don't really worry, however, because I believe, again, perhaps unconsciously, that the civil liberty types will put up enough of a fuss to keep things from going off the deep end.

It seems pretty clear to me that the left does this as well with the issue of national defense. They trust the conservatives to take these matters more seriously than they do, although they are unlikely to admit it. (Evidence for the first part of that claim is that there is a dearth of Democrats well-versed in matters of national security, whereas there are quite a few who have studied extensively health care, poverty, etc.)

In our thinking upon the world, we enter into a conversation that began before we intellectually arrived on the scene. We want something to say and a place to stand, so we pick the points of discussion that strike us as receiving insufficient attention. The attention we give these issues therefore becomes our contribution to the discussion. Furthermore, since these are the areas we concentrate our thought upon, we often make the mistake of believing that our opinion is genuinely directed toward the whole of things, whereas the truth is that we've left much of the thinking to someone else. We make the typical mistake of confusing the part for the whole.

What follows from this recognition is that our conception of critical thinking needs to be revised. Rather than developing the sensibility that the critical thinker should sit in judgment of common opinion, we need to become accustomed to see the critical thinker as a participant in a larger process. We shouldn't engage in intellectual disputes as if they were wars to be won or lost. The tension within the conversation is not a consequence of sin or stupidity, i.e., of something going wrong. The tension is a necessary consequence of the division of labor.

We tend to think of politicians as unprincipled, but it seems to me that they often instinctively understand this better than the rest of us. They fight for particular pieces of legislation, but they also compromise and sometimes accept that they have to let certain things go. The best among them are able to maintain civility and even good will with all of their colleagues who are well-intentioned, even if their political disagreements are extensive. I detect in them what might be called a kind of professionalism. I recognize that there is a dark side to what I'm describing, but it wouldn't hurt the rest of us to learn something about the undesirability of intellectual purity.

Milestones

2005-12-21T13:30:00.000-05:00

Milestones
Speaking of my son, who is two and a half, I thought I should report on some significant recent milestones. (Alas, being sufficiently potty trained is not one of them.) First, he crafted his first argument about a month ago:

"We gotta wear our hats because it's cold outside."

And, a few days ago, he made his first articulation of a philosophical principle:

"Where is Mommy? She's gotta be somewhere."

Next week we will be working on the use of counterfactuals and the reductio ad absurdum.

Tidbits

2005-12-17T13:16:00.000-05:00

Tidbits
Today is the first day of serious potty training for my son. So far, not so good. Apparently he has no shame about peeing straight onto the carpet. At one point he told me, after I inquired, that he did not need to "go potty," and then proceeded to unleash a waterfall, through his training pants, two minutes later. I am learning some things, however. For example, I am discovering that he urinates constantly, probably because he is drinking constantly. I clean up one mess and the next mess is already happening. The things that the modern technologies of diapers have shielded me from!

My sister called me up a little while ago and says: "What's this I hear about your having a blog? What the hell is a blog? I go to a neighborhood party and FIVE different people tell me about your blog." My thought while she's ranting: I have four more readers than I knew about!

So far I don't hate Christmas like I normally do. It may have something to do with the fact that we aren't going anywhere and no one is coming here. OK, maybe this isn't the best evidence that I hate Christmas any less. Another positive: I've done most of my shopping on Ebay, which is a lot more fun than going out into the crowds. Let's hope it all shows up this week.

Good Medicine

2005-12-11T22:12:00.000-05:00

Good Medicine
Shamefully, I have committed scholarship twice this semester. I have gone entire years without soiling myself in this fashion! Thankfully, both ventures have been brief and unlikely to garner any further attention. The second soiling is a paper I will be giving in January at a political science conference in Atlanta. I give it to you here as well.

On Virtue and Medicine: Montaigne’s Complaint

In his book Cosmopolis, Stephen Toulmin presents Montaigne and Descartes as alternative possibilities of modernity. This paper is a brief account of a road not taken.

If we were to follow Socrates’ advice, we probably wouldn’t have a health care crisis in this country. In the Republic, Socrates describes an approach to medicine quite unlike our own:

Then won’t we say that Asclepius, too, knew this and revealed an art of medicine for those whose bodies are by nature and regimen in a healthy condition but have some distinct and definite disease in them? His medicine is for these men and this condition; with drugs and cutting to drive out the diseases, he prescribed their customary regimen so as not to harm the city’s affairs. But with bodies diseased through and through, he made no attempt by regimens… to make a lengthy and bad life for a human being and have him produce offspring likely to be such as he; he didn’t think he should care for the man who’s not able to live in his established round, on the grounds that he’s of no profit to himself or to the city. (Bloom, 407d)

This “statesmanlike Asclepius,” as Adeimantus puts it, acts according to a principle of triage: let the slightly ill and the near-to-death fend for themselves, while restricting care for those who can benefit most, and who can benefit the city most by being healthy. Socrates contrasts this restrictive role of medicine with a decadent care for the body that fails to see the good of the body in relation to the good of the soul and the larger political order. The conjunction of the good of soul and city reflects the classical notion of moral virtue, namely, that virtue is an excellence of the soul directed toward the well-being of the community taken as a whole.

To talk of virtue in our time seems a little quaint, like something from the Victorian age. The idea of virtue is too elitist for an egalitarian world. It is no surprise then that the advice of Socrates about the proper role of medicine would have little ability to challenge our own priorities. Montaigne, however, living in the passage from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, has a different complaint about how the practice of medicine provides an obstacle for the development of virtue. Montaigne’s complaint is harder to dismiss, I believe, because it follows from a conception of virtue more suited to the presuppositions of the modern world.

According to Montaigne, the ancients thought of excellence too much in relation to the extraordinary. Drawing from his own military experience, he reaches a different conclusion:

There is no occupation so pleasant as the military one, an occupation both noble in execution (for the strongest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is valor) and noble in its cause: there is no more just and universal service than the protection of the peace and greatness of your country. You enjoy the company of so many noble, young, active men, …a manly and unceremonious way of life, …the brave harmony of martial music which delights your ear and arouses your soul, the honor of this exercise, [and] even its severity and hardship…. To fear the common risks…, not to dare what so many kinds of souls dare, that is for a heart immeasurably weak and base. …Death is more abject, more lingering and distressing, in bed than in battle; fevers… are as painful and fatal as a [gun] shot. Whoever is prepared to bear valiantly the accidents of everyday life would not have to swell his courage to become a soldier. (III:13, Frame, p. 841)

Extraordinary times call forth extraordinary sentiments and actions. Much more difficult it is to summon your courage in the midst of the mundane. Yet isn’t it the mundane for which we undertake the extraordinary to begin with? Perhaps the ancient warrior wanted to die on the battlefield. We justify war, however, for the sake of peace. To think the extraordinary is the pinnacle of virtue is to invert the relation of means and ends.

Here is Montaigne again:

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most. (ibid., p.851)

What kind of virtues are involved in this composition of character and ordering of conduct? Let me give some examples. Montaigne claims that we should learn the power of habituation, not so that we can hold ourselves to one path of conduct, but so that we can adjust our conduct as circumstance demands. We should learn to take pleasure widely, so that we can enjoy being with others more easily. We should learn the art of rationalization, so that our overactive imagination might find less fuel for its folly. Above all else, we must learn to die. To not think about death requires a distraction that takes away too much, for it robs us of the present. To be overcome by the fear of dying, however, robs us of the present too. To find satisfaction in our mortal allotment demands that we take our dying to be as natural as our living.

It is with this conception of virtue, I think, that we can learn from Montaigne’s complaint about the practice of medicine. He writes often of the uselessness of medicine, and even its harmfulness to the body, points that are easy for us to ignore in our time of medical marvel. Montaigne also writes, however, of how the practice of medicine can harm the soul, and on this point we should play closer attention. Given how much Montaigne valued good health, and how much he thought it necessary for the enjoyment of everything else, his turn away from the medical arts is no small matter.

Let me begin again with some examples, taken from Montaigne, of how medicine harms us spiritually. A first example: doctors treat health as the absence of illness, not vice versa. Thus they regulate our health as much as our disease, diminishing the pleasure of our health with an anxiety over its passing. Our fears of the future magnify our distress, and often we find our fear of an event worse than the event itself. A second example: doctors do not want to accept the blame for their defeats. The fault then must lie in the patient, who has failed to follow the regimen with enough precision. The failing of the body becomes then a failing of character as well, with all the self-recrimination that follows. To avoid this, we submit ourselves ever more passively to the doctor’s authority. A third example: doctors disrupt our routine, replacing a familiar regimen with an unfamiliar one. We become strangers to ourselves, and know not how to read the signs of our new condition. A final example: medicine encourages our rage against death.

The art of medicine then is both a distraction from dying and a preoccupation with it. It is a distraction insofar as it encourages us to see every medical problem as a new battle to be fought, forgetting that the war itself will most definitely be lost. It is a preoccupation, on the other hand, because it robs from us our autonomy, our sense of self, and the pleasures that are available to us now. Furthermore, in a way that perhaps Montaigne himself did not foresee, these problems actually become more acute as the science of medicine becomes more powerful. The better able we are to defeat, or at least subdue, our medical ailments, the more our bad health seems unnecessary and our death a cosmic injustice. So convinced we are of our strength, the more easily we forget how to negotiate our weakness.

If Montaigne represents the road not taken in modernity, perhaps I should say a few words about the road that was, namely, the project for the mastery of nature, which is well represented in the philosophy of Descartes.

Let me say first that, although most recognize Descartes as a key figure in the history of modern philosophy, it seems to me that we have largely forgotten why. We are often so absorbed in his famous meditations that our studies mirror the abstractness and isolation of the “I” in “I think, therefore I am.” Like Descartes, our philosophy, though it takes place in the midst of the great throng of the civilized world, nonetheless resembles “as solitary and as retired a life” as we might find “in the remotest deserts.” (Discourse on Method, Part 3, Cress) Descartes’ meditations, however, are much more important to us than I think they were to him. In a letter to Princess Elizabeth, he instructed her that he limited his thoughts that occupied his imagination to no more than three hours a day, but his thoughts that occupied the intellect alone, such as metaphysics, to no more than three hours a year. (June 28, 1643, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III, p. 226)

We forget how important Descartes was for the natural philosophy of that time. The success of Newtonian physics turned Descartes’ scientific work into a historical footnote. We remember Descartes’ thoughts on method, but we forget the ends for which the method was set forth. Even in his arguments about the existence and nature of God, Descartes sought to stay clear of theological controversy, utilizing no more than needed to ground his first principles of physics.

Descartes' project to master nature is not incidental to the rest of his philosophy, nor to his standing as one of the premier philosophers of early modernity. And, within this project to master nature, what stands forth prominently is the development of a true science of medicine. He writes in Part Six of the Discourse on Method:

[The mastery and possession of nature] is desirable not only for the invention of an infinity of devices that would enable us to enjoy without pain the fruits of the earth…, but also principally for the maintenance of health, which unquestionably is the first good and the foundation of all the other goods in this life; for even the mind depends so greatly upon the temperament and on the disposition of the organs of the body that, were it possible to find some means to make men generally more wise and competent than they have been up until now, I believe that one should look to medicine to find this means. …[W]e might rid ourselves of an infinity of maladies, both of body and mind, and even perhaps also the enfeeblement brought on by old age, were one to have a sufficient knowledge of their causes and of all the remedies that nature has provided us. (Cress)

The pursuit of method is the pursuit of mastery, and the pursuit of mastery is principally the pursuit of good health and long life. The ancients pursued immortality through bodily or spiritual procreation; Descartes pursues it more directly.

Whatever our philosophical differences might be, we continue to live in a world of Cartesian dualism. Witness the dividing line between the physical sciences and the humanities in our universities. We manage that division by distinguishing the is from the ought, the descriptive from the normative. We presume then that our science of the body, and its subsequent arts, can be conducted with no adverse relation to the development of the soul. Furthermore, since we take the material to be the realm of our common experience, and the spiritual to be the realm of our private ego, collectively we pursue the relief of the flesh and leave it to each of us individually to find the relief of the soul. Montaigne instructs us that, whatever theoretical distinctions we draw between body and soul, a care of the body indifferent to the soul will be a care of the body at the expense of the soul.

Group Think

2005-11-30T02:00:00.000-05:00

Group Think
As I wrote in my last post, I am teaching a book by Leon Kass in one of my classes this semester. Yesterday, in an attempt to come up with a final project for the class, I went looking for a dignified, thoughtful criticism of Kass's general positions on bioethics. Given how famous the man has become, I didn't think it would be hard. I certainly didn't think it would be very hard. Other than some congressional testimony from Stephen Pinker, however, which was focused on a topic too narrow for my uses, I found nothing at all.

What I did find was a lot of horse laughs directed at Kass. Kass's views are apparently so far from respectable that all you have to do is report some of them, and your argument is complete. Tell people, for example, that Kass is against in vitro fertilization. Or, if you realize that Kass is no longer opposed, use his change of mind to indicate how stupid he was before and how stupid he will be shown to be on the procedures he continues to be opposed to. Another possibility is to say that Kass is really anti-life because of his concerns about a future where people live much longer than they do now. Finally, you can always reach for the tried and true: a passage from Kass's book The Hungry Soul where he laments the social acceptance of people eating ice cream in public.

There is a wonderful irony here. (I mean "wonderful" literally, not as a synonym for "amusing" or "delicious".) In responding to the supposedly reactionary Kass, his opponents fail to rise above the most primitive of tribal gestures. It is enough to show that Kass is not one of them, and is so far from being one of them that his thought need not be engaged, even though there are many other people who obviously take his thought very seriously. On the other hand, there is Kass, defending taboos and traditions, many of which originate in tribal cultures, by trying to give an account of why these taboos and traditions might have come into being in the first place. To give such arguments, however, is itself a move beyond tradition and tribal culture; a taboo has its force not through reason but through long-established institutes of shaming.

To put the matter differently, Kass is doing what the left says we should all work harder to do, namely, to be open-minded about the viability of beliefs and practices of a foreign culture. If Kass were defending the courtship rituals of a tribesman from New Guinea, he would be praised for expanding our consciousness. If he defends older courtship rituals of our own culture, however, he is a subject of ridicule, which goes to show that the interest in the tribesman from New Guinea was largely instrumental to begin with. We are supposed to learn about other cultures mainly to diminish our native trust in our own; indeed, the fascination with the New Guinea tribesman would extend only so far as differences could be found between him and us. That the study of other cultures might point to universal human concerns would be offensive.

Let's get back to the ice cream. Without bothering to look the passage up myself, I will cut and paste the relevant quotation of Kass's from someone else's blog:

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.

I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior. (The Hungry Soul, 148-149)

I'm a vulgar man, so I don't really want to live in Kass's preferred world. Still, what a fine thought! I should want to live in his world. At the very least, I should be, and am, happy to be challenged by his argument. The loss of the private is one of the most troubling failures of contemporary American culture, and it is easy to forget how thorough that loss has become. But Kass doesn't like people eating ice cream in public, so he must be a loon.

Readings

2005-11-21T15:19:00.000-05:00

Readings
A colleague of mine has started up a departmental newsletter, with one of its features being an "On My Bookshelf" column. He asked me to write the next column. I thought I would submit it here as well.

"On My Bookshelf"

As I said to Dr. Rosental when he asked me if I would write up what I have been reading, “On My Bookshelf” is not a terribly accurate description. If you’ve seen my desk or, rather, the pile on my desk, you would realize that I keep all of my reading very close by. A book on my shelf is in cold storage.

That said, most of what I am reading that is new to me is related to my teaching. Of course, I sometimes teach books just to make myself read them more carefully, but it remains the case that I do little reading during the school year that isn’t class related. I will summarize then some reading I’ve done since the beginning of summer up to the present.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, by Julian Jaynes.

This title has intrigued me ever since I stumbled across it at Barnes & Noble. I have a keen interest in the history of consciousness. If you have read the oldest forms of literature that we possess, such as Homer and Gilgamesh, it is hard to come to the conclusion that people back then think like we do. I don’t mean they seem to have different opinions. I mean that they seem to express themselves in ways very unfamiliar to us. Jaynes’ thesis is that human beings by birth do not have a strong connection between the two hemispheres of the brain. These connections develop because of the culture of the civilized world. In the prehistory of civilization, the two hemispheres worked independently of one another. When the right hemisphere “reported” to the left hemisphere, the experience was literally like hearing a voice. Everyone, in other words, was a schizophrenic.

It is easy to doubt the conclusions of the book, and I don’t think that many people have taken up his line of thought. Even if you find the argument unconvincing, however, the book is excellent for two other reasons. First, it opens with an amazing argument for what consciousness is and is not, including how it could be that human beings could exist without being conscious at all. ("Conscious" here does not mean "awake".) Daniel Dennett has given special praise to this section of the book. Second, even if you disagree with someone’s conclusions, it can be very helpful to see the evidence they have assembled. In this case, I am grateful to how Jaynes has drawn my attention to the Hammurabi code. (A side note: Similarly, some bad books are worth having just for their bibliography.)

Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, by Leon Kass.

Kass gives an excellent defense for the unease many conservatives have with developments in biotechnology. He is an excellent writer too. His conservatism doesn’t exactly square with my own, but I find it impossible to ignore his position about what a respect for human life and dignity requires. He also has an early chapter on the problem of technology that is a wonderful introduction to that question.

Marius the Epicurean, by Walter Pater.

This is a 19th century novel about the spiritual epic of a young Roman in the 2nd century A.D. It moves from Roman paganism to various schools of philosophy, including Epicureanism and stoicism, and ends with Christianity. It has so little plot that it is hard for us to read. Its accomplishment is to look beyond the doctrines of these various forms of thought and reveal the ways of being in the world that accord with those forms. I will be inflicting this book on some Intro students in the spring.

Two Logics, Henry Veatch.

It probably isn’t right for me to include this book since I only managed to read a couple of its chapters, but what I did find time for has stuck with me. As many of you know, we are retooling our symbolic logic class to reflect the history of formal logic. I doubt I will include any of Veatch in the course, but he makes a powerful argument to the effect that there is a tremendous disconnect between the purposes of ancient/medieval logic and the purposes of modern logic. Aristotelian logic is able to speak to essences, what a thing really is, whereas modern logic is able only to compare sets of things. Veatch argues against the contemporary prejudice that ancient logic can simply be expressed in the language of the modern systems.

Upside Down

2005-11-18T21:14:00.000-05:00

Upside Down
I knew it. When Glenn Reynolds talked about paying premium for a hybrid car, I knew that it would put him in a bind. While it is generally rational to prefer lower gas prices, you actually need higher gas prices to justify the extra money paid to drive a hybrid. So, instead of calculating your total costs as being lower with the cost of gas going down, you curse the lower prices for making you wait longer before "paying off" the extra you paid for the vehicle. Today he admits as much.

While we sometimes find ourselves in positions that force us against majority opinion, being contrarian is not something to be pursued for its own sake, even if there is a perverse pleasure in it. Montaigne claims that it is even valuable to learn to like all kinds of foods so that you can enjoy the same things as others and not be picky.

Following this point to its logical conclusion, we must agree that hybrids are sinful.

Take Two

2005-11-17T21:45:00.000-05:00

Take Two
This semester I've been teaching an upper-division course on Montaigne. In designing the course, I was faced with the problem of how I could encourage the students to take the essay form seriously. Having them write the normal college paper on Montaigne might be self-defeating in that it would suggest that the way to comprehend an essay is to seize upon its core thoughts and reconstruct those thoughts in a more traditional form of argumentation. Instead, I decided that I should have the students write essays of their own, but very loosely in the style of Montaigne. I also decided that I would have the students evaluate each other's work and discuss the work in class. This was a painful decision insofar as it forced me to pare down even more the possible reading for the semester, but it seemed a price worth paying.

For the most part, I have found it to be a very satisfying experiment. By the second essay, the students were very critical of each other's work and concerned about whether their own work would hold up to inspection. By the time of the third essay, the slackards had been assaulted enough that even they started to take the writing seriously. As a result, I have had the rare pleasure of seeing students improve in the course of a semester. Our conversations have been less impressive, but still respectable. It is actually difficult to talk about Montaigne, given how our training inclines us always to speak in abstractions.

In a set of student papers that we discussed Tuesday, I noticed that I liked all of them, even though none of them really made any points beyond the familiar. In other classes, I emphasize the need for original thought, by which I mean thought that isn't apparent just from a cursory reading of the text. These papers were not original in that way, but they were interesting nonetheless.

The thought occurred to me that my concern for originality, even in the relaxed sense just described, is perhaps another symptom of the difficulty we have in enjoying the things we already possess. Ideas, like other possessions, lose their excitement over time. The desire for something new, however, is not always, or even usually, rational. The ideas we have might serve us just fine, as does the house we live in and the job we work at. The idea we are about to take up might not serve us so well.

It would be a great service to us then to see with fresh eyes what we have learned long ago. If there is something new to be learned, so be it, but it would do us well simply to rediscover the old. My students have been able to pull this off.

But how to evaluate these papers? When I lean heavily on originality, I am in familiar territory, because I can always judge how far they've pushed an idea, and I always have a sense of where they might push them to extend their own understanding. How to evaluate a work which doesn't move the point so much as bring it back to life is less clear to me.

Windfall

2005-11-10T08:42:00.000-05:00

Windfall
Apparently, my blog is worth $29,356.08. Make me an offer.

Putting Off

2005-11-08T23:16:00.000-05:00

Putting Off
Here is an awkward metaphor: imagine ten wheels rolling down a road toward you. You don't want them to hit you, so what do you do? If you become "pro-active," you have put yourself in position to handle all ten. Better, I say, to wait until the last moment, because most of the wheels will have rolled off of the road already.

An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but what don't get tallied here are all the ounces that were unnecessary.

Furthermore, if you wait for the problem to occur, you have a better idea of its harm and what can be done against it. Our imagination carries us away in fear about the future. Sometimes the reality just isn't that daunting. And even if we are confident that something bad is on its way, it is hard, from a distance, to judge adequately the appropriate response.

I find amusing all of the professors who admonish students to begin their work early. Not only do the professors often fail to follow their own advice, but it isn't clear that the advice is all that good to begin with. The anxiety of a deadline sharpens the mind. Even in graduate school I held off of the actual writing of a paper until the very end, although I usually had begun giving thought to it long before. I don't think I was alone. Professors admonish their students this way to cover their butts. They know that few students will follow the advice, which makes it easier to explain why their work is insufficient: "I told you not to wait until the last minute!" The painful truth is that, by and large, we don't really know how to teach students to write, just as we don't know how to get them to question their assumptions or think interesting thoughts. It is easier to blame their procrastination.

I don't have much faith in planning either. I'm a little tired of writing about politics, so I will contain these thoughts to one paragraph, but it irritates me to read people critical that we didn't plan better the liberation of Iraq. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the criticism has some validity, but what we needed was not so much a plan as a training ground, which is what we got. We now have a military that is learning how to deal with the peculiar challenges of sustained terrorism.

When I played chess in my youth, I would always try to work out a far-ranging plan of attack. Not being able to anticipate my opponent's moves, however, I ended up assuming that my opponent would more or less stay in the same position. It is an absurd assumption, but what else can you do in the face of the unknown? As an adult, I returned briefly to the game, and discovered the art of chess combinations, such as the discovered attack and the fork. These tactics can require forethought to develop, but they don't require any grand expectation of how to get to the end game. A great insight for me came from reading a grandmaster explaining various chess games move by move. At one point, a player moved a rook upon an open file, i.e., a column unobstructed by one's own pawns. The grandmaster did not appeal to the particular placement of the pieces on the board. He just pointed out that moving a rook to an open file is generally a strong move, because it frees the rook from its back row, and that a good player might make such a move without any great forethought at all. I then realized that grandmasters muck about just like the rest of us.

As a testimony to my point, I haven't really given much thought about how to end this post.

Committing Scholarship

2005-10-28T13:09:00.000-04:00

Committing Scholarship
For what seems like a month now I've been battling some kind of low level cold or something that has just enough power to slow me down without stopping me. I've been straddling the line of health so finely this week that I can literally feel my health go down when I push a little too hard and improve when I take my rest. A little tickle in my throat reminds me to go home early to take an afternoon nap, and nicely goes away when the nap is done. If I weren't generally in such a state of low energy, I would consider this an improvement. It would be nice to be able to monitor ourselves so efficiently. Perhaps then I would eat better.

Anyway, this is all to explain why I have been unusually absent. Nonetheless, I have done some writing. This month there is an exhibit at the university concerning Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as the Hollywood versions. Somehow this is related to the more general issue of biotechnology. On Wednesday, the med school hosted a panel to talk about the Frankenstein myth and biotech. They asked for our department to have someone on the panel, and I was the one who said no least loudly. I present to you then the paper that I read. I don't consider it anything special, but maybe it will be of interest. A colleague thinks I should "work" it up to be a journal article. I can't imagine that such an endeavor would be worth my time or anyone else's. So, here goes:

Concept and Image in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates famously chases the poets out of the ideal city, arguing that the poets corrupt the youth by falsely portraying the nature of the gods. It was, of course, an accusation that Plato was very familiar with, since the same charges had been leveled against Socrates and had led to his execution. Who then corrupts the young through impiety, the poets or the philosophers?

The argument of the poets against the philosophers is the argument from tradition: the philosophers act impiously by opening ancient truths to inspection, i.e., for searching for truth below the earth and above the heavens. Folk wisdom has it that some things are best left alone.
Socrates, however, considers the poets guilty of impiety, because they believe that our sufferings come from the gods. The tragic perspective holds that the gods are constantly at war with one another, with human beings caught in the cross-fire. What pleases one god displeases another, so our fate is set. Socrates, however, thinks that if the gods are truly divine, they must be all-good and give us only good things. Indeed, the gods must harmonize to such an extent that polytheism itself comes into question. The thought occurs that perhaps one God will do.

Ancient philosophy attacks poetry further by elevating the concept over the image. To understand this distinction, consider the difference between the concept of triangle and an image of a triangle. The first can be given through a definition, such as “a three-sided plane figure,” while the latter can be given through a particular drawing or act of imagination. The superiority of the concept to the image lies in its universality: there is one definition of a triangle, but an indefinite number of images of a triangle. In other words, the concept grasps the matter as a whole.

In the Platonic dialogues, we find Socrates attempting to elicit the definitions of various concepts, usually related to human virtue. In striving to find the universal, the interlocutors of the dialogue have to overcome their familiar ways of thinking. When defining courage, for example, the Athenians think first about the courage of the soldier. The soldier’s courage is the exemplar of courage, so whatever could be said about courage would need to fit that case especially, but it is important to realize here that what is driving the thinking is an image. We can imagine various acts of courage in warfare, and from that try to determine a definition. As we think about it, however, we realize that we use courage in other cases as well, so we try to include those until we get a definition suitably broad to handle all the cases that seem like genuine courage. In the process, we move beyond the familiar appearances and start to discern what courage really is.

With all this in mind, I hope I can bring you to appreciate how jarring is the distinction between the concept of humanity and the image of humanity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For those of us educated in the myth of Frankenstein from Hollywood, it is surprising to find in Shelley’s work a creature so articulate and insightful. Here, for example, is the creature talking about a moment in his self-education:

But Paradise Lost excited different and deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe, that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was created apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature: but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition; for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me. (p.87, Volume II, Chapter VII, Norton Critical Edition, 1818 text)

If we take the classical definition of man as the rational animal, Frankenstein’s creature is unquestionably a man. True, his appearance is hideous, as Frankenstein made him large, in order to make it easier to work with his parts, and used whatever organic material was available. Here is Victor Frankenstein’s description of his creation:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! -- Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (p. 34)

Nonetheless, if we look beyond the image and at the concept, we see a creature fully rational. The violence of the creature is not counter-evidence, because it is clear that the creature does not simply kill. He murders. That is, he kills for a reason, namely, that his life has been made miserable by the very one who brought him into being. More importantly, we recognize in the creature our own desire as well: to live fruitfully in community. Because of his appearance, however, he cannot join the human world as he finds it, thus his request for Frankenstein to make him a companion.

I’m guessing that most contemporary readers share some sympathy for the creature. Our society has invested a great deal of energy in getting people not to pass judgments based on certain appearances, whether it be skin color, handicap, height, or what have you. Movies like The Elephant Man and Mask – ok, these films date me – encourage us to see even people monstrous in appearance just as people. In so doing, our culture continues the pursuit of the concept over the image that Socrates made famous 2400 years ago.

Let me say a few more words on this point. Shelley presents the disgusting features of the creature as the natural outcome of the disgusting features of the scientific process that went into making the creature. Here is Victor Frankenstein describing his work:

My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hoe which the next day or the next hour might realize. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself, and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a restless, and almost frantic impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit…. I collected bones from the charnel houses; and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and a staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion. (p.32)

In Plato’s diaologue Parmenides, Parmenides scolds the young Socrates for thinking that philosophy should not concern itself with such lowly matters as hair and mud. While Victor Frankenstein’s work takes him into matters more disturbing than just hair and mud, the point to be made is that a true understanding of nature sometimes demands that we set aside the conventional distinction between the clean and the unclean. Francis Bacon, writing at the beginning of the scientific revolution, speaks to the same point:

…as for things that are base, or even filthy, such as one has to apologize for mentioning (as Pliny says), these must be admitted into natural history no less than things of the utmost splendour and price. Nor is natural history polluted thereby, for the sun enters impartially into palaces and sewers, yet is not polluted. For myself, I am not erecting or dedicating some capitol or pyramid to the pride of man, but laying a foundation in the human understanding for a holy temple, modelled on the world. I therefore follow that model, for what is worthy of existence is worthy of being known, knowledge being the image of existence. And base things exist just as much as splendid things. And for that matter, just as some putrid substances like musk or civet yield the best scents, so base and sordid details sometimes provide excellent light and information. (Novum Organum, trans. Peter Urbach, pp. 121-122)

To summarize: science ain’t pretty.

I said before that a contemporary reader might be very sympathetic toward the plight of the creature. Mary Shelley intentionally elicits this sympathy, I believe; nonetheless, she refuses to pull her punches. At no point in the novel does the humanity of the creature dispel the impression that the creature is inhuman. This is best exemplified by the creature’s self-contempt: he recognizes, as a rational animal, that he is grotesque. He is disgusted with himself, and hopes that Victor Frankenstein will make his companion hideous as well in order that it will not reject him. At the end of the novel the creature imagines a peace that will come from the destruction of his own flesh:

“But soon,” he cried, with sad and solemn enthusiasm, “I shall die, and what I now feel be no longer felt. Soon these burning miseries will be extinct. I shall ascend my funeral pile triumphantly, and exult in the agony of the torturing flames. The light of that conflagration will fade away; my ashes will be swept into the sea by the winds. My spirit will sleep in peace; or if it thinks, it will not surely think thus. Farewell.”

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein does not therefore repudiate the larger myth of Frankenstein that builds upon it. Conceptually, the creature is human, but, to all appearances, i.e., according to its image, it is something else, and somehow this is important too.

How can this tension between concept and image be maintained? Given that we live in an age of modern science, an age where the abstract concept flourishes, the question can be put in this form: how is it that myth survives, indeed flourishes, in an age of reason? Is the flourishing of myth a sign of something deeply irrational that somehow manages to coexist?

To help with this question, I would like to return briefly to the philosophical response to myth. Ancient philosophy, I have argued, was largely at war with mythology, its hostility explained in part perhaps by the fact that myth, at that time, retained the upper hand among the populace at large. In the modern world, on the other hand, the ascendancy of rationality, of the concept, has motivated some philosophers to reconsider the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.

For example, in the 18th century, an Italian philosopher named Vico reconceived the relation between image and concept. He described a three-fold distinction of sensation, imagination, and conceptualization. Sensation is always of the particular, and conceptualization is always of the universal, but imagination partakes in both. On the one hand, myths always describe particular, even if fictional, events. On the other hand, the stories themselves are powerful because they speak to more universal truths. Consider the Aesop’s fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” The story is of a particular fictional sequence of events, but there is an underlying moral that can be appreciated even if it is not articulated.

Vico’s contention is that, in earlier ages of human consciousness, the moral of the story was never articulated, because human thought lacked the abstract concepts necessary for such prosaic expression. Instead, there was only the story, the act of imagination, and its moral could only be felt. When the primitive mind encountered particular situations, it turned not to abstract principle but to whatever story seemed to speak to the situation. Thus, before the universality of the concept, there was the universality of the image.

Vico contends further that this historical relationship between image and concept holds still today. Our acts of conceptualization depend upon prior acts of imagination to ground them. When our concepts no longer refer to matters that are familiar, we lose our common ground of humanity and anything becomes possible. Vico relies on the Roman historians, like Tacitus, who were witnesses to the corruption of the Roman empire, to tell this tale, but we can imagine Vico finding plenty of material in the 20th century as well. The problem perhaps can be expressed this way: without the common stories to set boundaries on what is thinkable, human beings can talk themselves into anything. Like Victor Frankenstein, the modern age has been quite capable of generating articulate monsters. We would do well not to take words so seriously.

From this point of view, the myth of Frankenstein, as a fable of modernity, speaks to something that I can only faintly intimate in this prosaic work of mine: the image of humanity is as important as its concept. I say “as important” because I believe that, while the concept has no absolute priority over the image, that the image has no absolute priority over the concept either. Our concepts originate from our acts of imagination, as I discussed earlier when talking about the Socratic form of inquiry, but cannot replace them. At the same time, our images are themselves subject to change according to our rational investigations, as seen with our efforts to make the human community more inclusive.

If we think about the myth of Frankenstein broadly, including the many Hollywood versions, we might remember only the cautionary tale about human beings exceeding their proper bounds. Even the Hollywood stories, however, have more nuance than that. There is, of course, the famous scene of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein taking the flower from the little girl. Furthermore, the peasants who chase Frankenstein are not usually presented in a flattering way. The myth speaks in at least two directions: one, concerning the proper limits of human invention, but, two, also concerning our irrational fear of the unknown.

This second dimension of the myth should not be forgotten. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, these are Victor Frankenstein’s dying words:

Farewell, Walton! Seek happiness in tranquility, and avoid ambition, even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries. Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed. (Frankenstein, p. 152)

Yet another may succeed! Frankenstein dies conflicted, aware of the gravity of his deeds but aware that his failure is not necessarily the final word. A similar story might have a different ending.

I claimed earlier that ancient philosophy set itself against the tragic sensibilities of its time, rejecting the thought that our suffering follows necessarily from the nature of the cosmos. I believe that Mary Shelley, and the myth she spawned, have opened up a new sense of tragedy appropriate for the modern age. The tragedy is this tension that arises from modern science continually creating a world that we cannot envision. The ends of modern science, that is, the maintaining of life and the diminishment of life’s toils, are worthy ends, too worthy to be ignored, yet we have no preparation for how these ends are attained other than a vague sentiment that things are constantly changing. The tension between concept and image may be subject to resolution in particular cases, but it cannot be resolved comprehensively.

I will finish this paper by giving a few, very brief, examples of where I see this conflict before us today. The debate over abortion began with an argument over concepts, i.e., what constitutes a human life? This debate continues, but it seems to me that what is moving public opinion is not the concepts but the images, namely, the images couples routinely get now of their unborn children. As the fetus has become more visible, public opinion has become more conservative, with a majority of Americans of the opinion that aborting a second-semester fetus is not a trivial matter, even if it should be legal.

Another example would be the recent fights over Terry Schiavo. Expert medical opinion found itself up against a stiff opposition that arises from the fact that we simply have a hard time imagining ourselves depriving another being, human in appearance, of sustenance. We don’t altogether trust measurements of life that depend on sophisticated equipment and training . Generally speaking, we would rather err on the side that looks most normal. As a former professor of mine is fond of saying, it isn’t enough that something be true, it must also appear to be true.

More Miers

2005-10-10T10:15:00.000-04:00

More Miers
I've been following the Miers nomination and the surrounding controversy mostly on the law blogs, but I found another great source of information last night: Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Blog. Since Postrel lives in Dallas, she has some insights into Miers that I haven't seen elsewhere, such as:

1. Part of the tension between claims that Miers is a staunch conservative and that Miers is a moderate can be resolved by realizing that Dallas is conservative enough for a staunch conservative to be seen as a moderate.

2. For someone intending to practice law in Dallas, a degree from SMU might be considered more advantageous than a degree from an Ivy League school. That doesn't challenge the point that her education might not be as strong as others, but it might challenge her competitiveness to get into the top law schools.

3. Some of the bad writing samples that bloggers have unearthed come not from her original writing but from Nexis typos.

4. Even among friends, she plays her cards very close to the vest. She holds the belief that others cannot figure her out. A life-long stealth candidate!

Misunderestimating

2005-10-06T15:41:00.000-04:00

Misunderestimating
Matthew 19:3-12 provides a fascinating example of Torah commentary from Jesus:

3 Some Pharisees came to him, and to test him they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?" 4 He answered, "Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning 'made them male and female,' 5 and said, 'For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." 7 They said to him, "Why then did Moses command us to give a certificate of dismissal and to divorce her?" 8 He said to them, "It was because you were so hard-hearted that Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. 9 And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery." 10 His disciples said to him, "If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry." 11 But he said to them, "Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can."

The Pharisees are trying to trap Jesus, but they have a point nonetheless. How can someone argue that divorce is inherently wrong if it is permitted by the Mosaic code?

Jesus's answer is that Moses allowed one sin to keep a greater sin from happening. A glimpse of that greater sin can be seen in the response of the disciples: why take the risk of marriage if you can't get out of a bad one? One can imagine worse misdeeds from people stuck in a bad situation.

Is then divorce an absolute wrong? Since the law of Moses permits it, it is hard to see how such a thing can be said. What Jesus says, however, tells us that divorce always happens in the context of sin. It may be the better of bad options, and can therefore be justified, but it would not happen unless there were already a human failing.

This brings me to the recent Supreme Court nomination. Is the nomination of Harriet Miers another example of human failing, or is it simply a decision that takes place in the context of a broader human failing?

I take for granted here that Miers is manifestly not qualified for the position. Of course, that hasn't kept some from defending her. For example, in an article that Hugh Hewitt called "brilliant," Thomas Lifson has taken on this task. To be honest, on my first read I thought Lifson had written a parody. His title, "Don't Misunderestimate Miers," suggested to me that Lifson was worried that we would underestimate Miers in the wrong way, perhaps by pointing out that we were focused on the wrong set of criteria by which this nomination fails. A second read, however, plus the Hewitt review, convinced me that Lifson's defense is sincere.

Lifson starts out reasonably enough:

Ms. Miers has actually managed a business, a substantial one with hundreds of employees, and has had to meet a payroll and conform to tax, affirmative acttion, and other regulatory demands of the state. She has also been highly active in a White House during wartime, when national security considerations have been a matter of life and death.

Shortly thereafter, things go downhill quickly:

According to a source in her Dallas church quoted by Marvin Olasky, Harriet Miers is someone who "taught children in Sunday School, made coffee, brought donuts: 'Nothing she's asked to do in church is beneath her.' "

As the court’s new junior member, the 60 year old lady Harriet Miers will finally give a break to Stephen Breyer, who has been relegated to closing and opening the door of the conference room, and fetching beverages for his more senior Justices. Her ability to do this type of work with no resentment, no discomfort, and no regrets will at the least endear her to the others. It will also confirm her as the person who cheerfully keeps the group on an even keel, more comfortable than otherwise might be the case with a level of emotional solidarity.

But there is much more to it than group solidarity, important though that ineffable spiritual qualty may be. Ms. Miers embodies the work ethic as few married people ever could. She reportedly often shows up for work at the White House at 5 AM, and doesn’t leave until 9 or 10 PM. I have no doubt that she will continue her extraordinary dedication to work once confirmed to the Court. She will not only win the admiration of those Justices who work shorter hours, she will undoubtedly be appreciated by the law clerks who endure similar hours, working on the research and writing for the Justices. These same law clerks interact with their bosses in private, and their influence intellectual and emotional may be more profound than some Justices might like to admit.

With friends like this....

More charitably, it seems that Bush is interested in candidates who will grant the executive a great deal of latitude in prosecuting the war on terror. As a friend of mine said, however, Miers seems like a heavy price to pay just to be able to keep beating Jose Padilla with a hose.

Anyway, back to my point. Did Bush screw up, or did he rationally respond to an inherently screwed-up situation? Did he realize that the Democrats would filibuster any conservative intellectual with a paper trail, and that he didn't have enough Republicans to remove the filibuster option?

I would like to give Bush the benefit of the doubt and say that he is just giving his best response to a bad situation. Even if true, however, Bush is not absolved, because, if successful, his response is likely to make a bad situation worse. By responding to the threat of the filibuster with such fear, he will likely make the filibuster more of a given. Not every victory is good, and not every defeat is bad.

Even if Miers can fetch beverages without complaint.

ID

2005-09-30T15:33:00.000-04:00

ID
As long-time readers of this blog know, I think that evolutionary theory has profound implications for our understanding of human behavior and morality. It has been interesting, then, to see the discussion surrounding the attempts of the religious right to find equal time for the theory of intelligent design. While I laud the efforts of those who persistently shine the light on the activities of the creationists, I have seen some patterns of argumentation from the evolutionists that need to be addressed. To do so, I will take a look at an article written by Jerry Coyne for The New Republic entitled "The Faith That Dare Not Speak Its Name." (Those looking for a link that doesn't require a subscription can go here.)

Let me begin by saying that Coyne's article is excellent. It is long -- a remarkable 13 pages, when the whole magazine is just 38 pages including ads -- but it is worth the read, especially if you are either unfamiliar with the political situation or the science in question. Of particular value is his account of the elements of Darwinian theory and their supporting evidence. People who finds themselves in regular conversations with creationists ought to commit an outline of those pages to memory. And, while I know less about the details of the intelligent design movement, his account seems strong here as well.

What's not to like? Well, below I identify four mistakes that I think Coyne makes, mistakes that ultimately hurt the evolutionist response to the creationists.

I. The Ad Hominem
Coyne goes to great lengths to show that advocates of intelligent design, the new creationists, are ultimately motivated by religious, not scientific, concerns. Here is a sample:

All of these [Intelligent Design] proponents, save Johnson, are senior fellows at the Center for Science and Culture (CSC), a division of the Discovery Institute, which is a conservative think tank in Seattle. (Johnson is the "program advisor" to the CSC.) The CSC is the nerve center of the intelligent-design movement. Its origins are demonstrably religious: as described by the Discovery Institute, the CSC was designed explicitly "to defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and huamn beings are created by God."

Insofar as Coyne is working out the political background of this movement, the religious motivations of the intelligent design advocates are important to understand. If intelligent design theory really is just a Trojan horse for introducing religion into the classroom, as Coyne claims, then there are legitimate First Amendment issues at stake. Furthermore, it is generally a good idea to have some account to give of why people can draw conclusions if you think those conclusions are seriously misguided.

When it comes to the question of science, however, Coyne's concerns are misplaced. It simply doesn't matter what the motives are for the intelligent design theorists. If they can provide coherent theories that are better supported by the evidence than the evolutionists, or even if they can provide a theory that makes sense of evidence that evolutionary theory does not take into account, then their work will stand and fall on that basis.

If we were to demand that science follow only from disinterested motives, a lot of science woull fall by the wayside. Many ancient and early modern astronomers, for example, thought they were studying the work of God. Newton, in fact, found some encouragement from the thought that gravity might reach out across empty space to pull bodies towards one another. What else could reach across space but a spiritual entity?

Watson's The Double Helix showed the world something else about the motivations of scientists, namely, that scientists are often motivated by the same ambitions as the rest of us: money and respect. Nor would it be shocking to find that people enter some of the sciences, such as environmental studies, because of certain political concerns.

None of it matters. What matters is the work. Furthermore, to make an issue of motives might well backfire on the evolutionists. Can't the creationists call the motives of the evolutionists into question as well? Scientists often have agendas too. To draw upon a legal metaphor, why pound the table when you can pound the evidence?

II. Facts and theories
At a number of places, Coyne wants to correct the perception held by many that evolution is just a theory:

And so evolution has graduated from theory to fact. We know that species on earth today descended from earlier, different species, and that every pair of species had a common ancestor that existed in the past. Most evolutionary change in the features of organisms, moreover, is almost certainly the result of natural selection. But we must also remember that, like all scientific truths, the truth of evolution is provisional: it could conceivably be overturned by future investigations.

The honesty at the end of this passage makes it hard to see what Coyne thinks he is accomplishing by talking of facts and knowing in the first part. It certainly doesn't fit everyday thinking to speak of facts as being provisional.

I'm not a scientist, but, as far as I can tell, scientists don't generally speak of facts in their technical discourse. There is a good reason for not doing so, namely, that it isn't exactly clear what the term refers to.

A basic division can be made between theory and the data that fit or don't fit the theory. Theorizing can be thought of as modeling; you try to come up with some kind of logical structure that makes sense of what has been observed. If your logical structure is interesting, it will suggest further observations that might be made. These predictions generate a research program.

What then is a fact? Is it the theoretical model, or the data collected? Intuitively I think we would tend toward the latter. Something is a fact if it has been seen and reliably corroborated. If this is the case, however, evolution is clearly not a fact, because evolution is a model to explain the data, not the data itself.

Is a fact then the theoretical model? This is far less intuitive; it seems odd to think of a mental construct as a fact. This gets us back to the provisionality of theory.

It is true that as we become more confident with a scientific theory, our minds naturally dissolve this distinction between theory and data. My students, for example, "explain" gravity to me by dropping a pencil. And, of course, insofar as theories are attempts to explain the real world, they are more than mental constructs. Nonetheless, the openness of scientific inquiry demands that the separation of theory and data be always present to mind. That openness is a virtue that the creationists lack. We would do better to emphasize the openness than to compete with the creationists for who can be most certain.

III. Falsifiability
Everywhere you turn, evolutionists worship under the altar of Karl Popper:

Well, if we admit that the designer had a number of means and motives, which can be self-contradictory, arbitrary, improvisatory, and "unguessable," then we are left with a theory that cannot be rejected. Every conceivable observation of nature, including those that support evolution, becomes compatible with ID, for the ways of the designer are unfathomable. And a theory that cannot be rejected is not a scientific theory.

I'll begin here with a quibble. To say that a scientific theory must be falsifiable, i.e., able to be rejected if the world appears one way rather than another, goes hand-in-hand with the claim that scientific theories can never really be proven, only falsified, because, while a universal claim can supposedly be shown false by a single counter-example, there are never enough examples to ground fully a universal claim. Thus it is not quite consistent to say both that evolution is a fact and to use falsifiability as a criteria for something being truly scientific.

Quibbles aside, it is interesting to me that evolutionists find this argument so satisfying. (Coyne actually leans on it far less than others do.) Even if you accept this criteria for what makes science science, you are still left in the position of showing that someone's theory is so slippery that no evidence could possibly speak against it. That is a difficult position to be in, because it basically requires a metaphysical argument to show that a theory is somehow consistent with every possible appearance of the world. Recently I engaged in a brief exchange with someone who was convinced that intelligent design advocates would never be able to come up with a research program. He was taking the limits of his own imagination to be the limits of the world.

Furthermore, as someone interested in philosophy of science, I find it peculiar that falsifiability has somehow entered the drinking water. As a criteria for science, it has its problems, the most glaring perhaps being that it doesn't really seem to fit with the history of science. Copernican theory, for example, had little to recommend it over the Ptolemaic in terms of the evidence. As far as I can tell, its power of persuasion initially stemmed mainly from its elegance. It took Galileo much later to come up with both a terrestrial physics and various observations for the Copernican theory to become generally plausible. In the time of Copernicas, however, you would have to say that his theory had been falsified, that is, it didn't comport with the observations (and the understanding of those observations) of the day, e.g. when we throw things up in the air, why don't they fall down behind us if the earth is spinning?

Or, to use another example, what are we to make of the theoretical implications made by Einstein that could not be verified in his lifetime, some of which (I am told) can still not be verified today? Should the theory be rejected because we do not know how to look at the world in the right way?

Ultimately I object to this line of argument because I strongly distrust the gatekeeping involved. There is a dangerous tendency to treat science as Science and give the institution of science an authority that it does not deserve. It isn't good for science either: the more authority you give to science, the more incentive there will be for the ambitious to control the institution of science for their own ends.

Rather than this play at sophistication, a far better -- better, in part, because it is simpler -- argument would be that the intelligent design advocates have failed to give a clear theoretical model for the history of species and have failed to provide evidence that favors their theory over evolution. As Coyne points out more than once, there does not seem to be a serious research program for intelligent design at this time. This point should be enough. It goes beyond the bounds of reason to claim that no such research program could be invented. Indeed, we should be encouraging the intelligent design researchers to get to work. The religious right will be happy to foot the bill if anything interesting looks like it will develop.

When Darwin was writing, the prevailing philosophy of science was the theory of induction, which stated that scientists first gather a large amount of data and then, by a method of finding similarities and making exclusions, generate abstract principles of nature. In order to gain acceptance for his work, he presented his work as if it had followed that form, when in fact he had hit upon the idea of evolution long before he had accumulated the wealth of evidence in support of it. Let's not limit the practice of science by our best efforts to define it.

IV. Why Anyone Cares
Most scientific theories don't receive this level of attention or create this much political contention. For there to be contention, there must be two sides with something at stake. Coyne's concern seems to be that the introduction of intelligent design into the classroom is a violation of the separation of church and state. As for the religous conservatives, Coyne believes it comes down to morality:

The real issues behind intelligent design and much of creationism are purpose and morality: specifically, the fear that if evolution is true, then we are no different from other animals, not the special objects of God's creation but a contingent product of natural selection, and so we lack real purpose, and our morality is just the law of the jungle.

It would have been nice had Coyne simply argued that the truth should be pursued regardless of its moral implications. Do we really want a morality founded on falsehood? Instead, he offers a series of thin responses to show that the theory of evolution poses no threat:

But the acceptance of evolution need not efface morality or purpose. Evolution is simply a theory about the process and patterns of life's diversification, not a grand philosophical scheme about the meaning of life. Philosophers have argued for years about whether ethics should have a basis in nature. There is certainly no logical connection between evolution and immorality. Nor is there a causal connection: in Europe, religion is far less pervasive than in America, and belief in evolution is more widespread, but somehow the continent remains civilized. Most religious scientists, laymen, and theologians have not found the acceptance of evolution to impede living an upright, meaningful life. And the idea that religion provides the sole foundation for meaning and morality also cannot be right: the world is full of skeptics, agnostics, and atheists who live good and meaningful lives.

After Coyne's careful account of Darwinism, this perfunctory response to the moral problem seems like an afterthought. Perhaps he is more comfortable with the science than the philosophy, but his response boils down basically to this: the theory of evolution has no moral implications because most people haven't drawn them. We should remember, however, that Nietzsche believed European culture to still be Christian even after the death of God. Our current moral sensitivities may well be a vestige of an earlier religious worldview. It would be remarkable if a shift in worldview did not have social consequences.

It would also be remarkable if our evolution had no effect on what we consider moral. For example, I don't know anyone who would deny that pleasure and pain play some role in our happiness. Is it possible that these sensibilities have developed independently of evolution? Our reasonings on such matters may be highly speculative, but it is an obvious direction for thought to go in. Nor should we assume that the conclusions derived from such thought will satisfy either the religious conservatives or the political liberals.

To summarize, a fundamental problem with the creationists is that they are more interested in describing the world as they want it to be than the world as they can provide evidence for. Evolutionists need to avoid making the same mistake.

Between Lines

2005-09-16T10:29:00.000-04:00

Between Lines
It has been interesting to see the New Republic try to maintain its street cred with the Left. After giving so much aid and comfort to the enemy throughout the Clinton years, the magazine evicted its last conservative, Michael Kelly, during the 2000 election season. This hasn't been enough, however, as the Democratic base moves further and further toward the Left. To keep up with the times, the magazine has taken up some of the causes of the lunatic fringe. I believe, however, that the old centrist liberalism remains; it just requires the right decoder ring to find it. Thus, I give you a short article ("War Debt", written by the editors in the September 5 issue), and the appropriate translation. The original text will be blocked off, and my translation in brackets.

What do we owe Cindy Sheehan? That is the question of the moment, as Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq and now a fervent critic of President Bush, has emerged as the most potent symbol of the nascent but growing antiwar movement. At its most basic level, the answer is simple: As the survivor of a service member killed in combat, Sheehan and her family are entitled to death benefits of up to $500,000. But, of course, the answer is not nearly so simple, and the debt owed to Sheehan is in fact much greater than any monetary figure.

[We are grateful for any opportunity to take down the President, but this one could get us into some serious crap if any of our candidates have to stand beside her during the mid-term elections. Read on to hear why.]

Sheehan, like any person who has lost a loved one in service to our country, certainly deserves our compassion. She also deserves the opportunity to meet with our commander-in-chief (yes, it would be her second meeting, but a president who has time for a two-hour bike ride with Lance Armstrong during a five-week vacation has time to meet again with the mother of a man he sent to war and, ultimately, death). Most important, now that Sheehan has injected herself into the political debate, she deserves our respectful treatment.

[She deserves our respect, which she isn't getting from the Republican attack dogs. Let's keep making that point. But we need to respectfully move her along. She did, after all, get what she is asking for, namely, a meeting with the President. Does she really deserve two? Over a thousand soldiers have lost their lives in the war effort. You do the math.]

That, alas, has not always been forthcoming. Ever since Sheehan's vigil outside Bush's vacation home in Crawford, Texas, began drawing press coverage, and her demand that Bush withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq began going out over the wires, she has been subjected to the sort of harsh, brass-knuckles treatment that has been unleashed against seemingly anyone--from John McCain to Richard Clarke to John Kerry--who threatens Bush's primacy. Conservative bloggers have posted court documents about Sheehan's pending divorce; the Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes has called her a "crackpot"; and Rush Limbaugh has declared that her "story is nothing more than forged documents--there's nothing about it that's real."

[Those are the attack dogs I was telling you about. Remember, I am not an attack dog. Step away from the pepper spray.]

Sheehan, to be sure, has engaged in some heated and at times offensive rhetoric of her own. She has called Bush "the biggest terrorist in the world" and a "filth-spewer and warmonger," and she has claimed that the United States is waging nuclear war in Iraq. But, while such words should not necessarily be excused, they should be understood, at least in part, as a product of her grief--a grief that many of her attackers themselves have not experienced. Indeed, one could argue that the Bush supporter who has formulated the most appropriate response to Sheehan is the president himself--who has simply said that he is sorry for her loss, that he respects her right to voice her opinion, and that he respectfully disagrees with that opinion. Of course, it's much easier for Bush to take the high road when his allies are fighting down in the gutter. Moreover, it's representative of this president's intellectual limitations that he can't deliver that response in person, defending his policies face-to-face.

[Good God! Do you really want this woman on national television supporting the Democratic party? Is there a chance in hell we could win any election with her helping us? She makes Michael Moore look sober. See how Bush is handling this? Run far, far away!]

But, if Bush's supporters can be faulted for their treatment of Sheehan, so, too, can the president's critics. Opponents of the war have unquestioningly embraced Sheehan, declaring that, because of her terrible loss, her views are unimpeachable and her moral authority is absolute. This is identity politics masquerading as foreign policy--a phenomenon that, prior to Sheehan's emergence, played a prominent role in Kerry's presidential campaign and will likely be a feature of the 2006 midterm elections, now that Democrats are recruiting Iraq war veterans to run as candidates. When this happens, the merits of the argument regrettably become subsumed by the merits of the person making them.

[Plus, Kerry lost.]

This is not only anti-democratic, it is a dangerous and ultimately dead-end road for liberals to travel. After all, Sheehan is not unique in her personal loss. There are more than 1,800 other families who have suffered a similar bereavement. And a number of these families have views about the war that are diametrically opposed to Sheehan's. Now that Sheehan has become the face of the antiwar movement, supporters of the war have trotted out the parents of slain soldiers who share their views. Camp Casey, the antiwar village Sheehan has erected in Crawford in tribute to her dead son, has been met with Fort Qualls, a pro-war encampment in Crawford that was established by Gary Qualls in honor of his son Louis, a Marine who was killed in Falluja last fall. A debate about the war that devolves into a debate between grieving parents is no debate at all.

[The parents of fallen soldiers who honor their children's sacrifice will touch the hearts of the country a tad more than this woman, don't you think? Do we really want to give them moral authority in this debate?]

What all of us--and particularly people like Sheehan and Qualls, who have paid a direct price for this war--are owed is an honest assessment of the situation in Iraq and a strategy for the war that is informed by that assessment. That we still lack both is a tragedy as deserving of our attention as Cindy Sheehan's.

[Don't forget: we support war in Iraq. Just not with this President.]

Cheating Death

2005-08-31T14:45:00.000-04:00

Cheating Death
I have had some interesting thoughts lately, at least interesting to myself and maybe to others, but it takes awhile to develop them, even for a blog post, so this is something else.

Montaigne writes:

In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot....

That is why all the other actions of our life must be tried and tested by this last act. It is the master day, the day that is judge of all the others. ...I leave it to death to test the fruit of my studies. We shall see then whether my reasonings come from my mouth or from my heart.

In writing this, it seems to me that Montaigne has defeated his very intentions. As he himself notes in many other places, death shakes us less to the core when we think our dying has a larger significance beyond being the end of our existence. By writing his Essays, which made him famous, and then making his death the test of that work, he gave himself a reason to die well, beyond the issue of the tranquillity of his soul. He had, after all, a reputation to protect.

I find the same problem in another, far less important book, namely, Mitch Albom's tuesdays with Morrie. The book tells about the last meetings between Albom and Morrie Schwartz, his mentor from college who died from Lou Gehrig's disease. The book is a book about dying. As Albom puts it:

The last class of my professor's life took place once a week in his house... No grades were given... No books were required... A funeral was held in lieu of graduation. Although no final exam was given, you were expected to produce one long paper on what was learned. That paper is presented here.

Does one really face death, however, by making one's death an object lesson? It strikes me as another form of evasion.

Schwarz, I suspect, would have balked at such a characterization, although I hesitate to attribute too much to a teacher by way of a student, especially one like Albom who is drawn to the sentimental. Montaigne, however, might have taken another view:

Well then, why, out of so many arguments which in various ways persuade men to despise [i.e., show contempt for] death and endure pain, do we not find one that will do for us? And of all the many kinds of fancies which have persuaded others, why doesn't each man apply to himself the one that best suits his humor?

I have a fondness for charlatans, so it pleases me to think that this might have been Montaigne's greatest trick: to confront death so forcefully in his writings that he did not need to do so in his life.

Enlistment

2005-08-23T20:18:00.000-04:00

Enlistment
Instapundit reported on an article from Ralph Peters that the Army is exceeding its goals for enlistment and re-enlistment, but then ran a correction, because Peters was right about the latter and wrong about the former.

Reynolds has commented on the difference in enlistment and re-enlistment rates before, usually to make the claim that the people who serve see the value in what they are doing while those who get their information from the media consider Iraq a failing effort. This may be true.

It would be easy to think that the higher numbers of re-enlistment can compensate for the lower numbers of enlistment, but a student of mine, who served in the military, pointed out something to me that deserves consideration. The promotion of soldiers depends upon people coming in to fill the spots vacated by the people moving up. If the number of people coming in is too low, promotions will stagnate, which will adversely affect re-enlistment in the future. The problem of low enlistment may be more serious than Reynolds and Peters seem to think.

A Curiosity

2005-08-16T01:31:00.000-04:00

A Curiosity
My son, two and a half years old, is now capable of climbing over the baby gate in the doorway of his room. This has become very intriguing for him as it opens up the whole house to his roaming. I think it has also encouraged him to act sometimes in ways deliberately opposed to how we want him to. He is developing a sense of freedom.

The past few mornings he has been getting up around 6:30 am, which is about a half an hour or more earlier than usual. I'm guessing that previously he would have just gone back to sleep, but now he is excited about getting out without supervision. Needless to say, the situation is a little stressful. Not only do I not care for the idea of him running around the house by himself, but, even if I wake up with him, it is hard for me to get ready for the day and watch him too. I don't relish the idea of getting up at 6 am just to stay a step ahead.

Along with these worries, I have had a very strange reaction. When I think about my being asleep and his walking around, I have a sense of fear, but it isn't just fear for him, it is also somehow fear of him. It is preposterous that I am actually afraid of him, but I cannot deny the emotional response to this imaginary event.

I can only speculate that the thought of his moving around while I am asleep triggers some more general fear of intruders in the house. When I was in my twenties, I would sometimes have bad dreams in which I was asleep but hearing the movements of strangers. Even if I managed to wake myself up and realize that the sounds were simply in my mind, I would hear them again just as I returned to sleep.

This experience ended when we got a Rottweiler. It seems that I trust him both to protect the house and to keep it under surveillance. For some reason, however, his presence doesn't seem to do the trick here. Perhaps it is because I know that he wouldn't regard my son's movements as out of place, and so would not act or even make a noise. Of course, this is because he knows my son is not to be feared. Why then do I have that response?

One of the ways that I think women regularly fail to understand men is that they do not recognize how often men prepare themselves to act violently. Women depend upon it, perhaps unconsciously, but I don't believe they think much about it. I haven't been in a fight since elementary school (not counting some hockey incidents), but I regularly imagine one about to break out, depending upon my sense of the surroundings. I presume that in many of these moments that other men are having the same thoughts; when our eyes make brief contact, there seems to be the question in the other's eyes: is this about to get crazy?

When I was around twenty years old, I visited a female friend in London over Christmas break. On New Year's Eve, we walked around the city. We came upon a fight in which two drunk men were beating up on a British police officer. A crowd simply watched. Being young, and being in a foreign country, I struggled to respond. Finally, I found myself moving slowly to action. Just at that time, my friend grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the scene. In my confusion, I let her lead me away. She was trying to protect me, but inside myself I filled with an anger and frustration directed at myself and her and womankind generally. How could I be so weak?

The man nearly forty years old can forgive the one half that age. Nonetheless, I do not want to fail that way again. I do not want to be pulled away, or worse, to pull myself away.

Still Here

2005-08-13T21:08:00.000-04:00

Still Here
I was out of town for about a week and a half and have spent the last week trying to get ready for classes, so my blogging has been non-existent. I haven't even had many of those "that would make a good blog entry" moments, although I did have one last night. I don't remember what it was, however. That happens a lot. I'm sure that the blog I haven't written is much more interesting than the one I have.

Besides, I'm still enjoying looking at my hero.

My Hero

2005-07-27T10:54:00.000-04:00

My Hero
Academics tend to post comic strips on their doors, though I try to resist. I do have one Bill Mauldin cartoon -- the caption should read: "I feel like a fugitive from th' law of averages." -- but I'm pretty much the only one who sees it. A few months ago, however, my wife found this New Yorker cartoon and thought I should have it. I was so enamored with it that I thought I should make an exception and now it is posted on the door to my office.

I dream of a day when I could set my last book aside. I like to imagine that the man in the strip hasn't even finished the book. He just realizes that he has had enough.

Obviously I could throw all my books away right now and never open another one, at least for my own edification. This would be a false gesture. I'm not ready yet to stop reading. I just wish I were.

Wouldn't it be nice to understand your existence so well that you just know what needs to be done? All of us have boundaries and most of us are constantly working to move beyond them. I'm not ruling out the possibility of absolute wisdom, mind you, but we should recognize that we are unlikely to pull it off. How much better then to come to terms with one's own limitations, to find a life worth living that is not ashamed of what it is not.

Even if you think that life is all about learning new things, wouldn't it still be nice to do it without a book? Socrates took up learning how to play an instrument in his old age, but relied on an instructor. I can see the joy in that. Its social and not too serious, a good way to pass the time.

We all have our dreams.

Literally

2005-07-25T11:01:00.000-04:00

Literally
Jacob deceives his father Isaac and cheats his brother Esau out of the birthright due him for being the firstborn. Jacob then flees his land, both to escape Esau's wrath and to find a bride from among his kin. He has his eyes on Rachel, daughter of Laban, and agrees to serve Laban for seven years. At the appointed time, however, Laban pulls off a switch, and Jacob finds himself wedded to Leah, Rachel's older sister, instead. When Jacob complains of the deception, Laban replies (in Robert Alter's translation): "It is not done thus in our place, to give the younger girl before the firstborn." Jacob must then serve another seven years for the bride he wants.

In a footnote to the above line from Laban, Alter has this to say:

Laban is an instrument of dramatic irony: his perfectly natural reference to "our place" has the effect of touching a nerve of guilty consciousness in Jacob, who in his place acted to put the younger before the firstborn.... It has been clearly recognized since late antiquity that the whole story of the switched brides is a meting out of poetic justice to Jacob -- the deceiver deceived, deprived by darkness of the sense of sight as his father is by blindness, relying, like his father, on the misleading sense of touch.

Alter calls this poetic justice, and not justice simply, because presumably the situation with Laban is causally independent of the situation with Isaac. It feels good, and fitting, for Jacob to suffer such a fate, but Laban seems to be acting from his own motives, without awareness of what has gone before.

I would contend that, from the ancient point of view, all justice is poetic justice. The cosmos is inherently a narrative and God (or the gods) composes history from what we would now call an aesthetic basis. It doesn't matter then that Laban's actions do not follow causally from Jacob's deception of Isaac. Jacob must suffer some punishment and the punishment should be fitting, i.e., satisfying, to the Maker and the Maker's audience. The poetic consciousness of early humanity would tend to see everything in terms of these kinds of patterns.

Indeed, the occurrence of poetic justice inspires us still with the thought of the divine; it seems too good to be just coincidence, and only divine agency could pull it off. How many of us continue to think of unfortunate events as the price of some unrelated sin? Likewise, we tell ourselves that we deserve our good luck.

It follows from my contention then that the ancients responded to their myths both as fables and as history. The distinction would have been lost on them, because history for them would not be primarily a causal sequence or one damn thing following another. It would be the pageantry of God.

Sometimes I ask my students to imagine, from the Medieval point of view, that the Earth really is at the center of the universe and that the universe is revolving around it. Imagine, I tell them, what it might feel like to look out at the stars and see directly the importance that God has put upon human beings. Why else would Earth be the center if not to place man as the highpoint of creation? One might argue that such a physical arrangement does not demand such a theological interpretation, but the logic would be emotionally unpersuasive. If you are having trouble imagining the pain that would come from a Copernican shift in theory, read John Donne's "An Anatomy of the World (First Anniversary)."

Today, however, we do not believe the Earth to be the center of the universe; this, plus a host of other truths, inclines us away from the view that the cosmos and the human realm reveal any real poetic harmony. (A harmony of scientific laws is not the same thing.) Even believers have become suspicious of the attempts to discern God's specific actions in the world around us. We have learned that human beings too often see what they want to see.

For us moderns, it seems like we therefore have two options in reading the ancient religious stories: either we take them, as the literalists do, to be unfabulous histories, or we take them, like everyone else, to be unhistorical fables.

The literalists are right to accuse the rest of us of having lost something important by treating the Bible as good literature. To interpret the biblical narrative as being merely symbolic removes the very personal relationship of God with his people. His promises cease to be grounded in His power; they rest instead on the literary ability of the audience to fufill them through an appropriate act of intellect and imagination. "God's will be done" is replaced with "my, that was moving."

The literalists, however, have lost quite a bit as well. To read the Bible as simply historical is to gut it of its poetic logic. It just happens to be the case then that it took God seven days to create the cosmos and that there are ten commandments. We probably shouldn't read too much into Adam's name being the Hebrew word for human being either. God becomes mysterious in a way that, I believe, the ancient Hebrew would not have accepted. In order to deny the Bible as an act of human making, of human poiesis, God's poiesis is denied as well.

It is clear to me now that the Protestant church of my youth taught me to read the Bible as prose. I don't think my background is unusual in this respect either. On the few occasions that I try to get people to see that the Bible might have some nuance to it, I get the same defensive reaction that I used to have in college when my English professors showed me how deficient my plot-centered readings had been. I am still clumsy, too prosaic, in these sorts of things, which gives me even more respect for those, like Alter, who are not.

It would be nice if those who take the Bible literally and those who take it as symbolic could agree that each has simply chosen a different horn of an irresolvable dilemma to be gored upon. There is no way for us to return to a credulity in fabulous histories, nor should we wish for one. We are left to choose between half-truths. Let us have more respect for those who have chosen the other half.

Meticulous

2005-07-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

Meticulous
Today I'm starting to look at sections from Darwin's The Descent of Man, and once again I've begun with the editor's introduction. I was struck by the following passage, which you should keep in mind whenever you think that you may be destined for greatness:

It may be remarked that [Darwin's] diligently kept record of backgammon games with his wife show them roughly evenly matched, with Darwin at one time ahead by 2,795 to 2,490.

I do well to remember which anniversary is coming up.

Expression

2005-07-20T09:30:00.000-04:00

Expression
I'm now reading some of Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and found this passage in an introduction from Paul Ekman:

Most agree that humans manifest at least five distinct emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust and enjoyment....

The odds are against us.

Update: While trying to find a copy of Ekman's professional article "Smiles While Lying," I ran into this 1999 article in Slate trying to decipher George Bush's smirk. It is fairly inconclusive, but you might find some interest in it.

Progress

2005-07-14T08:48:00.000-04:00

Progress
My recovery from surgery is going fairly well. I am now walking without waddling much. I went to the office yesterday and today. I also can sleep on my side again, which is a great relief. The doctor seems satisfied with my progress.

All the same, the recovery takes its toll. I won't be able to lift anything much for another three weeks or so. For an academic, that doesn't sound like much of a sacrifice, but it completely disrupts my routine. I can't walk my dogs because one of them is a Rottweiler. I can't pick up my young son, which means that a number of activities with him I cannot do alone.

Sad to say, I need my routine. Without it, I am forced again to assess the world from scratch; the world does not come out too well. I have made, and continue to make, my peace with the limits of my existence. I have not, however, made my peace with this existence, and I'm not much interested in expending the energy to do so, given that it will be over in a month. Furthermore, I am seeing myself from the outside, like some kind of out-of-body experience, and I don't want to. I need my second nature. Hopefully, when the time comes, I can slip back into it.

A natural response to this self-pity is to think of all the people who have it worse, but this is really beside the point. The fact that our sense of well-being can be elusive even during relatively good times is far more informative, and sobering, than the fact that real misfortune can make life miserable.

RINOs

2005-07-13T10:08:00.000-04:00

RINOs
The Truth Laid Bear, a site that includes one of the main rankings of blog traffic, has added a community feature where like-minded blogs can be listed together and have their recent posts conglomerated. On a lark I decide to join the Raging RINOs, a play on "Republicans in Name Only" which here stands for "Republicans/Independents Not Overdosed (on the Party Kool-Aid)."

I still wonder whether I should have included myself in such a group. For one, I really don't care much for the "Republicans in Name Only," who I identify with what used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans." That strain of the party smacked too much of the patrician class, its social policies inspired from some kind of noblesse oblige. Second, my concerns with this administration, such as its fiscal irresponsibility, are concerns common throughout the party and therefore do not necessitate identifying with a splinter group. Third, I don't really share the anxiety over the affiliation between the Republicans and the religious right, although I do think that the Republicans have milked that relationship about as far as it will go. Basically, I don't think the religious right will ever have enough power to accomplish much more than symbolic victories, and I don't even think of the rank and file members as being terribly political. The Republicans put so much energy into them, not because they constitute a majority of the nation, but simply because they won't turn out to vote otherwise.

The most obvious reason for me not to have joined such a group, however, is that I just don't write about politics as much as I did before the election. In part this reflects a change in where my attention is, and in part it reflects the fact that I don't have much to add to the conversation. My writing lately has been more personal and philosophical.

Nonetheless, I decided to join, and I stand by that still, because I have come to a conclusion over the last three or four years that surprises me, namely, that I am a liberal. When I was a teenager, I identified strongly with Ronald Reagan (and still do), so I learned what it was to be a liberal from his account of it, which was not very flattering. In retrospect, I think Reagan was describing what the term had become, not what it is at its best, and perhaps he longed for a restoration of true liberalism. His fondness for Roosevelt suggests as much.

Anyway, I think of myself as both a conservative and a liberal, which I reconcile by recognizing that this country was founded on classical liberal principles that I wish to conserve. I realize too now that my conservatism has important limits. For example, I am strongly in favor of medical research to greatly expand the human life span. Nothing could be less conservative, because we have no way of knowing what the social and moral consequences of such an advance would be. If we were to live 150 years, for example, I think our sense of the family would change a great deal. I am not certain it would make for a better world, but I am willing for us to give it a try. My willingness to take risks like this is not very conservative, at least if being conservative means a resistant to change.

It may be, however, that this is the wrong definition of conservatism, at least for an American conservative. In The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides writes about the Sicilian Expedition, a military expedition in which the ever-ambitious Athenians decided to conquer Sicily. The expedition was a reach, to be sure, but the downfall of the expedition seems to be that the Athenians wanted to have it both ways: they wanted to take the risk of a difficult invasion but also wanted the security of placing the invasion in the hands of a trusted but somewhat risk-averse general, Nicias. Nicias failed to take advantage of the opportunities as they presented themselves, and the expedition came to ruin, which lead to Athenian weakness at home as well.

In other words, a liberal polity like the United States is a polity whose nature is to take risks. Our economic system brings a fair amount of unhappiness to those who cannot compete or who find themselves dislocated by the constant shifts of capital. Nonetheless, we endorse it because it is so powerful, and because we are not content to live with the world as it is. To change our world, to not just sustain it in its present form, requires a great deal of additional wealth. Socially, we are willing to take risks as well, as can be seen in all of the social liberations of the last century. This is who we are. To resist change would be to resist our nature, to call into doubt our very being. I do not think this is very conservative either.

The Democrats call themselves liberals, at least when they think they can, but I don't believe them. They are a party of critics, who seem to think this country should be anything but what it is. They are concerned about the freedom of individuals only when it means freeing individuals from the reach of more ancient institutions like church and family. Otherwise, they are more than happy to centralize power. They do not trust the country and are quite willing to bind it to international bodies and precedents. Thus I do not vote for them very often.

So, I tend to vote Republican instead, but I recognize that quite often I am at odds with the party itself. I tend to read center-left journals like The New Republic in part because it is less painful to disagree with those writers than to realize how much I disagree with writers at The National Review or The Weekly Standard. My joining the Raging RINOs then is a small gesture of confession.

Afterthought: Reading this post the day after, I realize that I probably should qualify about a dozen or so of the things I've said here, especially concerning the Democratic party. I will leave it to the generosity of the reader to supply them.

Disappointment

2005-07-07T20:41:00.000-04:00

Disappointment
Being in the middle of the deep narcissism of recovery, it doesn't take much for my day to hold real drama. In the middle of the night I managed to stand up and go to the bathroom by myself, which I took to be a stunning victory. Hoping to build on that success, I decided to forego the pain medicine as it didn't seem necessary and was causing me constipation.

Well, by the afternoon, all my hopes had been dashed. Although the pain medicine was causing my constipation, foregoing the former did not prevent the latter, and the pain of the constipation was simply being added to the sharpness of my other pains as the drug left my body. In short, I needed the pain medication, at least in part, to deal with the effects of the pain medication, which is a little depressing.

Depressing or not, taking the medication worked, and my spirits renewed. I'm a little light-headed, to be sure, but the narcotic takes the edge off of reality as well, so who can complain? It works better than sugar or caffeine, which are my normal drugs.

I divide the day too into downstairs and upstairs. I sleep downstairs because I know that I can't sleep through the night and I don't want to be stuck in my normal bed. So I sleep on the sofa and watch a lot of television. I haven't watched so much television since I was a kid, when I watched for hours each day with regularity. I even watched the news about London for awhile, which is the first time in a long time that I received news from the television before receiving it from the internet.

By the afternoon, I am sick of the television, so I slowly walk upstairs, where I read and play on the computer. Reading while drugged is a bit odd; each paragraph is its own island as I drift in and out. Something tells me that I'm not quite getting Darwin's Origin of Species, although each bit is wonderfully lucid.

Moving Slow

2005-07-06T14:49:00.000-04:00

Moving Slow
Yesterday I had surgery for two hernias, which turns out to be a fairly painful recovery. OK, I guess that isn't too surprising. Anyway, I just managed today to make it upstairs where my computer is. Hopefully I can use this down time to do some writing, but it may be a while before I can put anything of substance together. As always, thanks for stopping by.

Old-time Religion

2005-06-28T09:59:00.000-04:00

Old-Time Religion
A friend sent me a clip of a religious service in which a Muslim preaches hatred towards the Jews and blames them for everything wrong in the world. He also predicts that the Muslims will rule us, and the rest of the world, some day. Take a look if you need reminding of what we are up against.

A couple of other points, of lesser importance, struck me. First, I noticed that when he quoted the Koran, he sang the verses. I'm guessing that one could do that with the Old Testament in Hebrew too. Second, there was one point of comfort to be found in the video; the people at the service seemed just as bored as the rest of us when listening to a preacher.

We have to find common ground where we can.

Goodness

2005-06-20T15:00:00.000-04:00

Goodness
Kant says that the only thing that is truly good is a good will. I think Kant is wrong, since his formulation seems to leave out entirely the relevance of moral intelligence, i.e., knowing what is good in a situation, and not just having the will for it, but he has a point. When you meet someone with little good will, someone who is fundamentally ill-disposed to the well-being of others, you realize how little that person's abilities really matter. As Socrates likes to point out, most every strength becomes a liability if put to use in the wrong way.

In holding to the purity of a good will, Kant does battle with those who reduce all morality to self-interest, an argument that modern philosophers seem especially inclined to make. The moderns seem to relish the naughtiness of advancing such a vulgar doctrine against older notions of virtue. Some of my libertarian friends still enjoy this naughtiness, saying "greed is good!" with devilish grins on their faces. Usually I find myself carried away by the lust of others, but in this case I am left cold, perhaps because the lust is mainly theoretical. In other words, my libertarian friends are just as much squares as everyone else. A greed for winning arguments no longer gets my blood flowing.

A property of a good will is that it is not calculating. A good person is like one who plants seeds indiscriminately, letting some fall along the path, on the rocky ground, among thorns, and most anywhere without knowing what, if anything, will grow forth. Goodness then is an act of trust, or faith, if you will.

My borrowed metaphor suggests, however, that the notion of "do the right thing just because it is the right thing" doesn't quite hold up. A person who spreads seeds indiscriminately is still hoping for something to grow. "Duty for duty's sake" is a bit stultifying, and ignores a fundamental point, namely, that goodness overflows. The neo-Platonist Plotinus made the overflowing of goodness into the basis of his account of the creation, which helped solve the difficult conundrum of why God, wholly perfect, would need to create anything at all. God's creation, by this account, was not an act of God, since God does not act, but is instead a consequence of the overabundance of his nature.

To make selflessness central to goodness is just as mistaken as to reduce it to selfishness. A person whose interests are being satisfied is dependable and predictable. To pursue your own interest and others at the same time is to develop shared interests, which tightens all the bonds, moral, political, economic, psychological and otherwise. There is much wisdom in learning to enjoy what others around you find enjoyable. To realize this is to improve upon older notions of virtue that emphasize steadfastness. The soul is capable of quite a few adaptations, which we should use to advantage.

Those angels who want simply to give of themselves do violence to the very community they wish to assist, because the central tenet of every community is that no one stands alone. No one is self-sufficient enough to give without taking. We sow good to reap it. De Toqueville calls this "self-interest, rightly understood."

To be in community suggests that you share a certain fate with others; those who give but cannot, or will not, receive, place themselves above that fate. If your needs are satisfied by some other world, go there and dwell with its inhabitants. I'll know you love me when you need me.

Comments

2005-06-14T22:45:00.000-04:00

Comments
It seems like I've been having problems with comments and didn't know it. I'm going to try to use Blogger comments until the problem at Enetation is solved. I would just make the switch altogether, but I don't want to lose the comments I have already.

Update: The comments seem to be working now.

This and That

2005-06-14T08:47:00.000-04:00

This and That
First, I noticed today that Michael Jackson has been aquitted. I am here to say that, through some minor miracle, I know next to nothing about the trial. What a glorious circumstance! May I always cultivate my ignorance so well.

Second, I found a webpage that has Benjamin Franklin's argument for why a young man should take an older lover. It is wonderfully scandalous, even to the contemporary eye.

Logic

2005-06-08T10:44:00.000-04:00

Logic
Here is Montaigne:

Things in themselves may have their own weights and measures and qualities; but once inside, within us, she allots them their qualities as she sees fit. Death is frightful to Cicero, desirable to Cato, a matter of indifference to Socrates. Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, and their opposites -- all are stripped on entry and receive from the soul new clothing, and the coloring that she chooses -- brown, green, bright, dark, bitter, sweet, deep, superficial -- and which each individual soul chooses; for they have not agreed together on their styles, rules, and forms; each one is queen in her realm. Wherefore let us no longer make the external qualities of things our excuse; it is up to us to reckon them as we will. Our good and our ill depend on ourselves alone.

Montaigne's argument might be taken as a kind of relativism, or subjectivism, if you will. The criticism of relativism that is usually made, and that I make too, is that relativism is a dodge -- you avoid the judgment of others by claiming all truths are peculiar to the observer. Montaigne points out, however, that a certain kind of reliance on objective reality is a dodge as well, since it suggests that we should all see the same things in the same ways and render the same judgments.

Consider the following, from a logic text by Peter Kreeft that I am currently teaching:

When we hear others speaking, or when we read what others have written, we notice two things present in our consciousness: the objective and the subjective, the things said and our emotional reactions to these things. We are bored, interested, moved, scared, irritated, depressed, cheered, disgusted, threatened, or attracted by what we hear or read. It is absolutely essential -- not only for logic but for all education and in fact for civilization, honesty, and sanity -- that we distinguish these two things, the objective and the subjective; that we understand, and concentrate on, not only our own feelings and reactions to what is said but also what is said, what truth claims are contained in this discourse that is spoken or written -- that is, what propositions are being uttered.

I can agree with Kreeft at least this far: it is vitally important, in our education and, generally, in our dealings with others, to realize how others see the world around us, and to find ways of addressing topics such that others can recognize what we are talking about. The inexperience of my students often reveals itself here, because they don't know the difference between what they think and what others think well enough to realize, first of all, what might constitute an interesting addition to the conversation, and, second of all, what others might take as evidence for this addition. In the language of the logicians, they don't know enough to recognize what conclusions they should argue for, i.e., what it is controversial, and what premises they should start their argument from i.e., what is not so controversial.

What I am describing is a prerequisite for the higher forms of civility, but it is not more than this. Profound truths blur this line between the objective and the subjective because a profound truth always reveals the thinker as much as the object of thought, and reveals them together. It is of no great importance, perhaps, for me to report that I have been "interested, moved, scared, irritated, depressed, cheered, disgusted, threatened, or attracted" by something. To put forth an opinion that is moving, however, is highly confrontational; it calls the listener to account. It isn't just a person confronting a truth; it is one person confronting another. When you talk with Socrates, Nicias tells us, you always end up talking about yourself. It is peevish to suggest that truth just stares us right in the face.

Let me give an example. A few years ago I came up for tenure and promotion. The college gives reasonably clear guidelines concerning what counts for tenure and promotion and how they should be weighted. Personally, I find these standards both too much and too little. I find most scholarship to be of limited value, in itself and as a sign of how well someone is qualified to teach in a classroom. I do consider it fundamentally important, however, for a faculty member to have interesting thoughts concerning what a liberal arts education is, yet this standard appears nowhere.

Given my inattention toward meeting these standards, it was not clear to me that I would receive tenure or promotion, but I ended up getting the first and not the second. Coupled with a mild embarrassment, I had a strong sense of disgust, not because it is obvious to me that I excel in the ways my colleagues value, or in any other way, for that matter, but because my application for tenure and promotion was supported with recommendations from two of the leading members of the faculty. That a group of faculty could place more weight on a formula than the word of two highly esteemed professors makes me ill-disposed towards my institution. (I do mean the institution here; the committee deciding promotion was deciding on the basis expected of them. The decision from the tenure committee is the one harder to explain.)

So, I can speak objectively about the institution and what it values. I cannot, however, speak to what I really think its standards are, the way in which they define this place, without invoking the irritation, depression, and disgust that I think rightfully follows from them. And, in doing so, I reveal myself, and make myself vulnerable.

Trust Yourself

2005-06-07T15:02:00.000-04:00

Trust Yourself
Recently, I think via Instapundit, I encountered this blog post on the topic of willing yourself to believe something. The argument centers around some experimental observations which concluded that people's recall of an event is highly influenced by the way in which they are asked about the previous event. In the experiment, people watched a film of a traffic accident, and then were asked questions afterwords. If the question asked the speed of the vehicles "upon contact," people would tend to report lower speeds than if the question asked about the speed of the vehicles when they "crashed." Also, when asked about the accident a week later, a significant portion mentioned seeing broken glass at the site, even though the film didn't show any.

Bryan Caplan, the author of the post, considers this further evidence that people can just choose their beliefs: "If you want to believe something, just describe the relevant event to yourself using appropriately loaded language. Your memory does the rest."

I don't think the experiment supports his point, but I do think that a great deal of our memory is more inference than recall. Imagine pulling out into an intersection and getting hit in the side by another car. Isn't it likely that both drivers would remember the light as being green? I know that I sometimes go through a light and then cannot remember fifteen seconds later what the light was like at all. I assume that the light was green, because I went through it, but I wouldn't make a good witness in a court of law.

Given my poor memory, I may be peculiar in this regard, but I know that I have caught myself more than once with a false memory and realized that it was just my best speculation of what must have happened. I've even caught myself in the act of making the memory up. I also tend to remember things said more than things seen, so I think some of my memories are just my imagination creating a visual image to go along with a stored narrative. Perhaps our memories are like a zipped computer file, where a lot has been extracted to make it more compressed.

If our memories do involve a great deal of inference, it wouldn't be too shocking that answers would vary depending on the question, because someone answering a question will take the wording of the question as a source of further information, which is entirely rational. If someone told me that the cars smashed into one another, I would think they were saying something about the event, not trying to test me, and I would use their observation along with my own to try to form a judgment of speed.

Whatever the merits of the research, however, the author's conclusion is terrible. Even if others can influence the way we perceive the past, it doesn't mean that we can intentionally do it to ourselves. Indeed, I can't imagine a better way to cement an observation in my mind than for me to try to deceive myself about it. We've all tried to forget seeing our parents naked, and we know how that worked out.

More importantly, it seems to me a mistake to think that rationalization is something that we undertake to do. I think Freud was on the right track: our self-consciousness is largely a product of more implicit acts of consciousness. The process can go both ways, but I hazard that our explicit beliefs adapt more to ourselves than we adapt to our explicit beliefs.

Furthermore, I think this is a good thing. It seems to me that the workings of our mind that occur more spontaneously are far more powerful than the workings that we labor so hard over. I trust my instincts far more than I trust my conclusions. As I've said elsewhere, I often give little thought to something until I confront it directly, because I consider that prior thought, that preparation, to be as much obstacle as advantage. My first seven years of teaching, for example, I had remarkably good reasons for using the teaching approach I did, and those reasons are still impressive to me. My teaching style has changed somewhat since then, and my rationale, if anything, looks worse, but I consider myself and my students better off.

Self-consciousness, then, should not burden itself too much with the task of truth. The rest of our mind is more suited to that task. Instead, it would do well just to manage the team, coaxing it toward success and not overcoaching it toward failure. I've wondered sometimes how prolific writers can keep their own words from drowning out their thoughts. Then again, perhaps the best way to rid oneself of a belief is to publish it.

Not Smart

2005-06-02T09:41:00.000-04:00

Not Smart
I seem to be making lists lately, and here is another. This one covers recent events to remind me that I am not always the brightest bulb in the pack. Yes, I do need reminding.

1. My wife, who is in Greece teaching a class, sent me an e-mail (from her mother's account) asking me to change the password of her university e-mail account to a particular word because the keyboard she was using had trouble typing a particular letter. For some reason, the university system would not accept the password she chose, so I chose another one instead. And promptly e-mailed her to let her know what it was.

2. I recently bought a new computer and gave my old one to a neighbor whose computer is even older. To give him more disk space, I removed a lot of programs that would be of no value to him. The operating system kept asking me if I wanted to delete files that were not clearly connected to other programs, but might still be in use by them, and I clicked "yes" every time, and once too often. Somehow I deleted an important file and Windows would no longer boot up. We reinstalled Windows, but now it doesn't recognize the monitor.

3. I just realized, a year away from my 40th birthday, that the word "doobie" is in the middle of Scooby Dooby Doo.

Child Psychology

2005-05-28T10:45:00.000-04:00

Child Psychology
The last few weeks I've had some insights about raising my son, which may hold up over time.

1. My son is at an age where he imitates everything. Last week some neighborhood girls (ages 3 & 5) came by to see him, and they remarked on the point themselves. The youngest girl, whom my son adores, took special fun in saying things so that my son would say them too. As their arrival had come just as I was about to put him to bed, he was especially eager to play along.

As a student of Rousseau, I have mixed feelings about this desire to imitate. On the one hand, I have no doubt that this imitation is vitally important for his socialization and learning of language. Language, like everything else, must be practiced to be developed, and by this I mean "put into practice." On the other hand, I agree with Rousseau -- and most modern educational theory -- that we learn best and are happiest when we can take an interest in the world and follow it according to our own experience and reason.

It disturbs me then to see how much people relish getting children to imitate them, especially in ways that are well beyond a child's understanding. It strikes me as a power play, and an especially ignoble one. To put it differently, it seems like a form of initiation, as if the child has to learn certain words or gestures to be a part of the tribe. I fear that a child, under those conditions, will always be looking at others, and seeing the world through others.

One remedy, perhaps, is that, rather than encouraging my son to imitate me always, I should imitate him instead. Not in all or even most things, to be sure, but in those things which I think are worthy of him focusing his attention on. If he discovers something new, I should follow along and discover it too. By imitating him, I encourage both the socialization and the action himself, and hopefully put in his mind that people will take interest in the things he finds interesting.

2. Another insight came a week ago from taking him down to the river walk here in Macon and letting him ride his tricycle. We went a fair distance, although sometimes he would just walk, and let me carry the tricycle on the back of the stroller, or ride in the stroller himself. After our activity, I took him up the road to a fast food place he likes. Lately he has been difficult in restaurants, but he was quite peaceful and easy to deal with.

It struck me that I was seeing him on a rare occasion where his body was more tired than his mind. During the week, when I pick him up from daycare, he is physically tired but he is mentally drained as well, which is no surprise given that he is dealing with other little children all day long. It is hard to do anything with him at that point because his attention span is shot.

The river walk, by contrast, was quite relaxing, even for him. He hasn't spent much time by the river yet, so he was captivated by the big body of water. The trains across the river grabbed his interest too. After our walk, he didn't have that impulsive energy he sometimes has, but his attention was quite good. I am now on the look-out for ever more natural locations to keep his, and my, interest.

Tidbits

2005-05-18T10:55:00.000-04:00

Tidbits
I haven't written in a while, for various reasons, among them that the various seeds that have come into my head haven't quite sprouted. So, I will offer the seeds instead, and let the rest of you water them within yourself.

1. Irritating arguments have their utility. In the Meno, Meno tells Socrates that learning is impossible, since if you don't know the truth already you won't recognize it when it comes around. Socrates first accuses Meno of using a debater's trick, but he takes the argument seriously nonetheless, as should we all. Relativism is irritating, but also deserves a response. So too with psychological egoism, which claims that all actions are self-interested because they all issue from the interests, loosely construed, of the actor. The arguments are irritating, I believe, because they are all dodges, ways in which the one giving the argument is attempting to avoid inspection, particularly self-inspection. Nonetheless, they are all challenges too, and, for myself, the answers that I have found satisfying to these challenges are more interesting than I would have expected. For Meno's problem, I have been led to think that we can recognize the truth for the first time because we have been living by that truth already. For relativism, there are many things to say, but the most unlikely for me was to recognize that I am, to some extent, a relativist, insofar as I believe that there are competing human goods that cannot be reduced to a common standard. Finally, I have become somewhat comfortable with psychological egoism too, but with the provision that we ought to pass judgment on what people take to be their interest.

2. In reading anything but the most contemporary of sources, you cannot help but be struck by the concern for children to be properly educated in the virtues. It is odd, then, that we have lost this way of thinking and speaking. Some possible reasons: virtue is not democratic; we have given over the education of children primarily to bureaucracies; virtue is too old-fogey; a free society demands toleration, i.e., being non-judgmental; and, finally, that we are training people to be cogs in the machine, not independent sources of thought and action. I suspect I haven't exhausted the possibilities here.

3. Less educated people, and others who are insecure in their opinion, cling to their opinion lest they be shown up as fools, because the only sure sign of foolishness that we accept anymore is when someone confesses to it. It is exactly in this clinging to opinion, however, that their foolishness is revealed. A learned person trusts greatly in his power of thinking, and little in the thoughts themselves. And, in my experience, freely and joyfully admitting your own foolishness is the only reliable way of shaming others.

4. For some time now, I have had a decent amount of debt from school loans. This debt has been largely invisible to me because it has been too big to take on and I have had other, more pressing, financial concerns. Those other concerns have largely been handled now, and I just recently came into an inheritance from my grandfather just a little bit larger than the school loans. After some thought and consultation with a financial planner, the obvious solution was to pay off the loans. In the long run, my finances will be greatly improved, but, rather than feeling gratitude for a burden lifted, the fact that this debt was not part of the landscape of my thought leaves me with a slight uneasiness, as if I have just wasted something. In this way, as in others, do we expose ourselves as unworthy of the generosity that others show us.

Script

2005-05-05T13:59:00.000-04:00

Script
After my step-mother passed away, my younger sister gave me some old photographs and school documents from the few years that I lived with my father and step-mother. I don't remember the time too well, or why I wasn't living with my mother, but it seems like I lived with them when I was five and six years old. Anyway, I put the photographs and documents in the back of my book bag and, having no obvious place to transfer them to, I've just left them in the bag for two years.

Looking at them again, it appears that I had a stellar year in first grade. I had an "A" in all two of my subjects that gave grades, and almost all "Satisfactories" elsewhere. There were two exceptions: in the Fall I received a "Needs Improvement" in handwriting, and in the Spring I apparently needed improvement in "Shows Self-Control".

I'll leave it to others to gauge my progress in the latter, but I will testify to little progress in the former. Somehow I failed to learn the tripod grip, but I can't locate what I do among the inefficient grips either. Let's call it a "pinch grip," because basically I just hold my writing utensils between my thumb and index finger. I do start with the tripod, using my middle finger to push the pen or pencil into position, but then the middle finger drops away. Why this is inferior to the tripod I'm not sure, although I suppose it has to do with a lack of stability, or too many degrees of motion. Whatever the theoretical case might be, the results offer no vindication for it.

As my students were taking their final exam this morning, I spent some time examining the variety of grips and other relevant tactics for penmanship. Most of them employed some variation of the tripod, and a few the quadrupod (also included among the efficient grips), but many sported grips as poor as my own. There was also interesting variation on the angle of the paper. One student held the paper at a right angle to herself, such that she was writing more top to bottom than left to right. I tried out a few of these alternatives myself, and found that my handwriting improved with each, efficient and inefficient included, but I suspect the improvement was due simply to my being more deliberate in my motions. My understanding is that this can be said of all pedagogical innovations; the attention given to the new brings the results expected, allowing the reformers to trumpet their success, but eventually everything returns to its original equilibrium, or worse.

Someone else, it seems, will need to show my son how to hold a pencil. I have had the thought, however, that, when my boy gets a little older, I should teach him to write the letters of the alphabet before giving much emphasis to what the letters mean. In other words, I would teach him how to write before teaching him how to read. This sounds backwards, but it seems to me that the usual order works at cross-purposes, in that it demands of the young mind to see script both as script and as something more than script, i.e., as part of a word, a unit of meaning. To be sure, I expect he would already have a strong sense of what letters are for, but this might make the experience all the more powerful, like when I marvel at Oriental characters that I know mean something but can't make any sense of.

Then, instead of my impatience, which shows forth in my scrawl, my son might develop a piety for writing, and feel the ancient connection between the emblem and the letter.

Situation

2005-04-27T14:15:00.000-04:00

Situation
Epictetus writes:

When you see a person weeping in sorrow either when a child goes abroad or when he is dead, or when the man has lost his property, take care that the appearance does not hurry you away with it.... But straightway make a distinction in your own mind, and be in readiness to say, it is not that which has happened that afflicts this man, for it does not afflict another, but it is the opinion about this thing which afflicts the man. So far as words, then, do not be unwilling to show him sympathy, and even if it happens so, to lament with him. But take care that you do not lament internally also.

My students don't much care for this passage from Epictetus. They don't like Epictetus advocating against the having of sympathy or for the dissemblance in appearing to have it. They see Epictetus as cold and are afraid of what might happen to a person who doesn't give proper outlet to the emotions.

This idea that emotions shouldn't be "bottled up," that they should be "worked through" so that we can "release" them, indicates actually how stoic the modern world is. The disagreement is largely over means, not ends. Part of the difficulty for my students is that they, like myself, have a poor conception of what grieving and lamentation look like in the ancient world. Here is the scene from the Iliad where Achilles finds out about the death of Patroklos:

...the black cloud of sorrow closed upon Achilles. In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance, and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic. And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay at length, and took and tore at his hair with his hands, and defiled it. And the handmaidens Achilles and Patroklos had taken captive, stricken at heart cried out aloud, and came running out of doors about valiant Achilles, and all of them beat their breasts with their hands, and the limbs went slack in each of them. On the other side Antilochus mourned with him, letting the tears fall, and held the hands of Achilles as he grieved in his proud heart, fearing Achilles might cut his throat with the iron.

After Achilles kills Hector, the slayer of Patroklos, Homer gives us a scene of the grieving Priam, the father of Hector:

...storm-footed Iris swept away with the message and came to the house of Priam. There she found outcry and mourning. The sons sitting around their father inside the courtyard made their clothes sodden with their tears, and among them the old man sat veiled, beaten into his mantle. Dung lay thick on the head and the neck of the aged man, for he had been rolling in it, he had gathered and smeared it on with his hands.

When Iris arrives, Hector has been dead twelve days.

My students, who are so put off by the coldness of Epictetus, are equally estranged from this violent grieving. In the ancient world, you might hire someone to assist in the lamentations, for fear of seeming impious, but now we are ashamed to suffer in a way that would leave us unhinged. Time heals all wounds, we say, as if our loss of the past were a sign of health. My students are ultimately reproaching Epictetus, not for being a stoic, but for choosing a poor strategy of stoicism.

I am drawn to the stoic's contempt, but I am not at all at ease with the stoic's cosmopolitanism. The stoic, having detached himself from a particular place, imagines himself free for all places, whereas in truth he has simply lost a sense of place altogether. Home is where he hangs his hat. A hat, however, is what belongs to us, not what we belong to.

My niece bought a house a few years back in a section of my home town. I had not been to that neighborhood before, but when I visited her for the first time I was struck by an older aesthetic of the town that still exists in fragments. In this relatively poor neighborhood, the yards of one house blended in seamlessly with the next. The grass was some kind of short-blade that formed a carpet which, with the lack of boundary between properties, made visible the contour of the land. In some places the natural contour had been obviously augmented with miniature plateaus.

This landscaping (which I somehow associate as English) is evident even in the local nine-hole golf course. When I was younger, the course had no sand traps, but it did have a number of grass bunkers which could impose a minor obstacle for chipping close to the hole. Also, the first three holes of the course were switchback, and there was no effort to delineate one fairway from another. It was all just a series of hills with various placements for tee boxes and greens. It is not a terribly challenging course, but any golf course is a challenge to me, and it is attractive, although less so now that alien sand traps have been added.

Upon attending a birthday party at my niece's recently, I discovered a similar fate had come upon her neighborhood. A number of houses had been added, each of which had replaced the original grass with something else. Furthermore, each house had made an effort to distinguish its landscaping from everything surrounding. Each home individually has its own charm, but the net effect is less.

Although not strictly an example of stoicism, I think the change in the neighborhood (and the golf course) is akin to the stoic ideal of having one's virtue and happiness be fully transportable. We squeeze our existence in among others like someone making a seat for themselves in a crowded church pew.

At some point, there is no turning back. The place, and even the possibility of place, have been lost. Although I consider myself a defender of classical liberalism, I must confess that upon this point liberalism falters, for the position of having everyone do what they want actually makes certain pathways unavailable.

Left Behind

2005-04-20T15:17:00.000-04:00

Left Behind
Matthew Yglesias made a bit of a splash with his post last week concerning the estate tax:

Speaking of which, fuck the small businessman.... I might be an earnest, hardworking dude who works in the store. And somebody might die and give the store to me. The store may be worth millions and millions of dollars. If so, I ought to pay tax on it. Why? Because I've just inherited millions and millions of dollars, that's why. That I'm earnest and hardworking, and that my riches came in the form of a valuable store rather than a heaping plate of gold matters not a whit. What about those sad folks forced to sell the family business? Don't cry for them. Here you are, you inherit a store worth $X. You owe $Y in taxes, with Y being less than X. So you are "forced" to sell the store, and accept "only" $X-Y as your inheritance. Note that X is a figure in the millions, and Y a small proportion of X. This is a very good problem to have, abstracting away from the fact that someone you love has probably died and this is probably a bigger concern of yours that the tax bill. This is, in other words, a non-problem.

To say what should be obvious, this is a perverse view of inheritance. In the comments following Yglesias's post, a number of people indicated that it is thinking like this that drives away the red staters from the Democratic party. The response back was that the Democrats could afford to lose those who are actually affected by the estate tax, which is less than one per cent of the population. It doesn't follow, however, that only someone affected by the estate tax might take a dim view of it, as the size of the disagreement with Yglesias demonstrates. A confiscation of inheritance is inherently objectionable, because it diminishes the tie between one generation and the next.

A similar blindness could be seen in the Terry Shiavo situation. Alongside the real dispute, which concerned whether Terry had previously indicated a desire to not be kept alive past hope of recovery, there was another dispute concerning the propriety of the state being instrumental in ending a life. As a number of people pointed out, the emotional fervor of the pro-life crowd is, in this instance, much easier to understand than the fervor of those who advocate for the right to die. That fervor can be explained, in part, I believe, by the aversion people have to being burdened by others; as fair exchange, they have decided that it is inappropriate for them to be a burden themselves.

What both of these arguments (Yglesias's and the right to die) seem to be missing is the point of view of the parent. It is true that those who inherit often don't deserve their inheritance, but an inheritance isn't simply about justice. To respect inheritance is to respect the dead, and to respect the ambition that drives parents to prosper for the benefit of their children. Similarly, while it might be wrong for someone to burden the children, and sometimes even the spouse, it is quite another thing to say that it is wrong for the child to burden the parent. A parent, who took on the original burden willingly, might see things quite a bit differently.

Life is toil, as we learn from experience and literature. The difficult task of getting by becomes less onerous if you think that your work will contribute to the prosperity of those you hold most dear. I won't defend if this is rational. I will simply point out that it is true.

If I were to enter into the now-famous Persistent Vegetative State, I wouldn't want my children to sacrifice their life to keep mine going. I also wouldn't ask that of my wife, or even society at large. But if it were my child in that condition, I can imagine doing anything possible if there were any hope for recovery. I won't defend this as rational either, but just that it is true.

It is striking to me that a significant part of our population lacks this point of view. Is it simply a failure of imagination, or does it speak to some fundamental shift in how one generation views another? I don't know.

Trailblazing

2005-04-13T13:27:00.000-04:00

Trailblazing
I live a few blocks from Tatnall Square Park, one of the oldest parks in Macon. By my reckoning, I am in that park over 800 times a year, counting twice a day when walking my dogs and then the occasions in which I walk home from work. I am intimately familiar with its landscape, the variety of uses to which it is put, and even many of the regulars who follow patterns like my own.

A month or so ago, I recognized an odd path through two quadrants of the park. The path is still grassy, but the grass is a different color, presumably from wear. What makes the path especially odd, however, is its irrational circuitousness. Most unpaved paths are short-cuts, but this path has curve upon curve, as if the walker had obstacles to dodge that the rest of us cannot see. The paved paths would actually be more direct.

I know of only one person who walks this path, a woman in her 40s or 50s who seems to come through the park around 4 p.m. I assume she comes through in the other direction at a time earlier in the day when I'm not around. Although I've seen the woman a number of times, I've never spoken with her, and I'm not sure that I could with much success. Her dress, the sameness of her dress each time (without regard for season), her aloofness, the path itself, and perhaps other signs suggest to me that she is someone with diminished capacities. Most people, if I don't know them, avoid coming near my largest dog, but I have to make an effort when she's walking of not getting too close to her, because she seems oblivious of me and I'm not sure how my Rottie will react.

I find it strange that one person alone could create a path in the grass, and that path especially. Perhaps it can be said that she now follows the path, but she must have walked the same route for quite awhile before a path appeared at all. Trailblazers are supposed to be people who aren't bound by convention, but the one who made this trail is the one tied to it as well.

I remember as a kid playing the game of "step on a crack, break your mother's back." As soon as you change your step to avoid one crack in the sidewalk, it becomes very hard to stop playing the game. In my experience, in fact, the game is usually not one that you start playing willingly but only in response to the challenge from another, hence the "your" in "your mother's back." What a sublime cruelty from childhood: you feel foolish for being superstitious, but also guilty for considering not keeping to the superstition! Thus the game continues.

Kant, in relation to ethics, and Rousseau, in relation to politics, describe freedom as a law you give yourself. You bind yourself to the law, but, in another sense, you are never bound to it, since your action is only rational insofar as it issues from your freedom. To follow the law because you've become accustomed to it, even if you originally chose it rationally, would be legalism for Kant and, for Rousseau, a forgetfulness that you are the law's sovereign.

I am somewhat uncomfortable with the routine of the woman in the park, but I am not very satisfied either with the idea that I must keep pinching myself to know that I'm free. When I'm in brand new situations, I crave routine, and set myself to creating one without much forethought as to whether it is the best. Indeed, it seems to me as if I can't start thinking about what is best until the routine has been set. Better yet, then, to follow a law made by another, since there is no telling what routine I will manufacture for the moment.

For a year, my daughter would ask me to take her to get ice cream at the exact same point in the driveway out of her school. When they began routing the exiting traffic in a different direction, she stopped asking.

Furthermore, it is hard for me to take seriously the path I have set for myself. I have never developed a skill in cooking, in part because cooking seems to diminish my appetite. I go each work day to the university cafeteria like a child on Christmas morning, looking forward to the surprises in store. When I do the cooking -- which last happened about seven years ago -- I know too much to be excited. A similar story is told about sausages and politics.

Rousseau's saving grace is that you don't actually need to give yourself new law. You can sign the social contract, so to speak, simply by acknowledging the rationality of the existing law and your responsibility for it. I can handle that much.

Form

2005-04-08T14:00:00.000-04:00

Form
The following passage is from Emerson's essay Experience:

Human life is made up of the two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. ...A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is a fool.

To make some sense of this passage, let's imagine a golf swing. A golf swing must deliver power, but also with adequate control to aim the ball in the right direction with the desired spin. One could perhaps collapse the notions of power and control into a single notion of efficiency, but it is helpful to keep them distinct, because often, in developing a swing, a person focuses on one rather than the other.

Emerson speaks of keeping a proportion between the two, but, all too often, we focus on form, it being easier to teach and to learn. Form allows for imitation. As a consequence, the proportion between form and power that we arrive at is determined mainly by our form, in that we supply the power to match the form. This is backwards. We should instead cultivate our power, our strength, and then find a way to shape it most effectively toward a given end. Or, perhaps better put, we should think of form as part of the cultivation of our power. In this way, form would follow from power, rather than being an imitation of what belongs to others.

In Plato's dialogue Meno, Meno asks Socrates how we acquire virtue, whether it be by learning, by nature, by experience, or by something else. As the dialogue progresses, Meno seems to identify virtue with power, which seems odd to the modern reader because virtue suggests self-restraint. Meno, however, has etymology on his side; the Greek word arete, like its English counterpart virtue, has an original connotation of being powerful. Taken in this way, Meno's question could be read as follows: what is the source of our moral strength?

Nietzsche gives us one plausible answer to this question in Twilight of the Idols:

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the excitability of the entire machine: no art results before that happens. All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the oldest and most primitive of intoxication. Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions; the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation.... The essence of intoxication is the feeling of plenitude and increased energy. From out of this feeling one give to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them -- one calls this procedure idealizing.

In my youth, I associated etiquette with Miss Manners, and considered such practices hopelessly formal. I preferred, as more honest and more true, the less practiced ways of associating found among close friends and family. My instincts here were solid, even if my knowledge was lacking. If you read Jane Austen, for example, you will certainly find those for whom etiquette is simply a matter of form, a way of distinguishing the upper class from those lower. You will also find some, like myself, who are largely untouched by manners. The main characters, however, are of a different sort. They don't follow etiquette, they invent it. Their speech and action are pregnant with meaning and possibility. They restrain themselves through deliberate measures as an elaborate play of provocation and arousal. To use Nietzsche's language, they become intoxicated, although not dissolute.

In my college, there has been lately some discussion about our instruction in writing. It is a topic I've thought some about myself over the last few years. My paper assignments now are much more focused as I attempt to develop specific skills. I fear, however, that this is another example of putting form before power. We teach how to write but not why to write. We develop skills but not a hunger, and the result is a predictable competence. We fail then in the most fundamental way possible, because someone with a hunger knows when their hunger is being satisfied, and thus are teachers of themselves. Teaching form without power, we keep our students in a state of dependency. And I have hardly a clue as to how I could do otherwise.

Finishing

2005-04-01T19:32:00.000-05:00

Finishing
Dismal weather has delayed the annual outbreak of spring fever. Of course, dismal weather is excuse enough for students to miss their classes, so the effect is the same. The end of the spring semester is always the hardest time of the year.

I have my doubts as to whether spring is really the main distraction. I suspect it is the end of the academic year itself, with the long summer ahead and the end of schooling for many of those about to graduate. The sloth that emerges in full force during spring emerges before every break we have, even the three-day weekends. Our spring break is a full week, but students mentally start leaving the Wednesday or Thursday before, and bear some resentment to those, like myself, who have the temerity to give exams the Friday before.

When I am driving long distances, I notice that the last hour feels much longer than the ones before it. The last hour is so exhausting that I always have the impression of just barely having endured the trip. Since this exhaustion happens on three-hour drives as often as seven-hour ones, however, it stands to reason that the problem is me. There are a number of psychological tricks people play to overcome this problem that I would do well to learn.

Perhaps one such trick is to think of advice that was given to us when I was on the track team in middle school: "don't run to the finish line, run through it." Similar advice is given to kids about running to first base, and the notion of "follow through" that accompanies every sport which swings something fits as well. The end is not the end of all activity, just the end of activity at its fullest.

These thoughts also accord with the idea of grace that I've mentioned before, namely, that being graceful means having more strength than something calls for. To fall down at the finish line might suggest that you've given it your all, but it also suggests that you took on more than you could successfully handle.

To finish without grace, to slow down before the finish line, demeans our accomplishment. Hopefully, we end matters with pride in what we've done, but it is hard to feel that pride when the end seems like such a burden. It is the wrong form of punctuation, or perhaps a lack of punctuation altogether.

A distinction should be made, however, between stumbling toward the end and taking a pause before the end for the sake of reflection. After I graduated from college, for example, I stayed in Claremont for the summer, working at an institute on campus and finishing up a fellowship I had been awarded. There was something very satisfying about being on campus for a few more months until graduate school began for me back in Atlanta. I had a sense that I might not make it back to southern California many more times. It was a leisurely good-bye, a proper punctuation to a time and place very important to me.

Living well isn't easy. It is its own art, and the culmination of others too.

Hypocrisy

2005-03-28T14:42:00.000-05:00

Hypocrisy
If you haven't been following, Dan and I have been going on at length in the comments to I'm Pouting. I promise to move onto new topics soon, but I thought I would point out again the absurd things some people say about what makes life meaningful. This is from Ann Althouse, via Glenn Reynolds:

I've seen my son John off, and he's on his way back to Ithaca, after his own Spring Break. It was nice to have him home. Both of us were trying to get a lot of work done while enjoying the leisurely pace of a week without law school classes. Of course, as usual, I didn't get half of what I meant to get done done.

If you ever wish you could have more time to get something done, just remember: if you did have more time, you wouldn't get more done. The extra time would melt away, and you'd be back feeling pressure to get it done in too little time. You might as well enjoy the free time and not moan about the things you didn't achieve. Idle moments at the dining table, talking about this and that, are much more your real life than all those grand accomplishments, achieved and unachieved.

This sort of thing sounds nice, and most people would just be polite and nod in agreement, but I find it repugnant. Althouse is a law professor and a fairly big-time blogger. She is obviously ambitious. Ambition is a fine character trait to have, in my opinion, but it doesn't quite fit with putting so much value on idle moments of anything. It fits much more with, say, working hard over Spring Break to get caught up on all the things you've set for yourself to do.

I've known people who genuinely do value idle moments, and what distinguishes them from the likes of Althouse is that they don't do more work than they have to. Instead, they work just enough so that they can then spend time on front porches, in kitchens, in bars, or whatever places people go just to be with one another. Playing music together, cooking together, watching television, etc., and, of course, shooting the breeze -- this is what they do. This seems like a fine thing too.

My point is not that Althouse is wrong about what is important in life. I'm merely pointing out how vapid such discourse can become, even among those with sharp minds. People are least trustworthy on the topic of what matters to them the most.

My Legacy

2005-03-22T20:25:00.000-05:00

My Legacy
A neighbor of mine, Tony Harris, makes his living drawing for various comic books. Lately he has been drawing a new title, Ex Machina, about a superhero who becomes mayor of New York City. Tony decided to use people from the neighborhood as the basis for the characters, and chose me to pose for the very important character of the police chief. No, I don't remember the police chief's name, nor did Tony last time I asked him, but he is very important. At one point, for example, he drops a cup of coffee and stares in amazement while the superhero/mayor swoops out of the sky to pick up a minor character, the police commissioner.

I actually signed a legal document releasing something or another in case the comic book is ever turned into a movie. If they do make it into a movie and try to find actors to resemble the drawn characers, they'll probably get Jason Alexander or Kelsey Grammer to play me, which lets you know where I stand.

Here is a partial picture from one of the comic book covers. I don't think my lips really look like that, but, then again, I don't really look at them very often.

And here are some interviews with Tony about the comic, both text and video.

I'm Pouting

2005-03-19T22:14:00.000-05:00

I'm Pouting
...because no one has written any comments to my last post. I don't care if it isn't particularly well-written or is poorly supported, you've all hurt my feelings. I'm so upset I haven't been able to post in over a week.

Actually, I've been busy, but if you felt any guilt while reading the last paragraph, read my last post again and tell me where I've gone wrong. And if not posting at all doesn't motivate you, maybe I'll start posting two or more times a day, and then you'll regret it!

A Fix

2005-03-08T11:56:00.000-05:00

A Fix
In a post I made two months ago, I wrote of what I consider the problem of happiness, putting the question into religious terms. In this post I want to address the same problem, but without the religious language.

The problem of happiness, as I see it, follows from two fundamental principles. The first is that, as with every organism, our nature has evolved in accordance with one constraint: the survival of the species. The second is that mere survival, including the further propagation of the species, does not satisfy us. Thus we are faced with the tragedy of our existence, namely, that we were not built for happiness.

The first principle I won't argue for, although I will point out that it is often a highly speculative, sometimes ad hoc, effort to explain particular human behaviors by appeal to evolutionary theory. Evolutionary psychology is not a perfectly respectable field. Connecting cultural evolution to biological evolution seems even riskier. Fortunately, for my argument here, a few speculations will suffice.

The second principle, I believe, is not too controversial. While we do possess generally a strong survival instinct and a strong desire to mate, I don't know anyone who sees survival and propagation as sufficient for a happy life. We tend to see survival as a means to other ends, and children as meaningful in terms of our shared existence with them, not just as a continuation of genetic material.

Of course, evolutionary theory suggests that the pursuit of our happiness cannot typically work against our survival. The theory does not demand, however, that our happiness be identical to our survival. Indeed, that the two are not identical helps explain an oft-remarked observation: those who pursue happiness directly are generally unsuccessful. Happiness arrives, when it arrives at all, as a by-product of our activity.

As much as people have worked to articulate "the meaning of life," it is interesting that it remains so elusive. Why shouldn't the satisfaction of our existence be among the clearest and most certain things that we know? To put it differently, if nature has designed us for survival, why isn't survival enough?

One speculation that I will make is that survival may not be best served with us finding satisfaction in mere survival. A restlessness to accumulate power, even when there is not a present need for the power, seems advantageous. Biologically we can only accumulate so much power (energy), but through cultural advancement we can secure quite a bit more. Nature might encourage us then to find pleasure not in nature's end (survival of the species), but in nature's means (power).

As I wrote in that earlier post, this restlessness is an unfortunate impediment for our happiness, whatever it might do for our survival. Our minds are naturally drawn to what is painful; we are constantly aware that something needs doing and that things aren't exactly right. Our satisfactions, however, are fleeting, and all too often arise simply as the cessation of pain.

In addition to the observation on restlessness, I have another speculation to explain the disparity between our happiness and the evolutionary direction toward survival. This speculation rests upon the observation of the remarkable length of time it takes human beings to reach maturity. We do not come into the world prepared to do much within it. How then can nature encourage the development of faculties needed for survival without placing the fairly defenceless child into situations that threaten survival?

The answer, I believe, is that nature gives us pleasure in our own self-development. We develop our faculties through play, away from situations of genuine need, and are encouraged to do so by the fact that play is satisfying in itself. Furthermore, although we ultimately need our faculties to work in concert, we can take pleasure in developing them independently. Thus our play takes many forms, depending on the physical or mental abilities being developed.

Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics with a beautiful argument about the nature of means and ends. In any means/ends relationship, the means are of less significance than the ends, i.e., without the ends, the means would not be worth pursuing. If better means became available for pursuing a given end, the old means would be discarded. Next he points out that some activities are means only, things done only for the sake of something else. For me, grading is like this; most of my work I enjoy, but I only grade because my work demands it. Other activities, such as eating, are both means and ends. We typically enjoy eating, but we also need it for our survival. Aristotle then speculates that there must be some end or ends that are ends only, and not means to something else, lest we have some kind of infinite chain of ends. These ends would be the ultimate ends, things chosen only for their own sake.

From my previous argument, however, it looks like Aristotle was wrong. Because nature has rooted our satisfaction in the development of our capacities, both internal (talents) and external (wealth), our satisfaction comes in things that are both means and ends, not ends only. What nature takes as an end (survival) is for us a means, and what we take as an end (the development of these capacities) is for nature a means. There are no pure ends.

If this inversion were cleaner, then perhaps happiness wouldn't be a problem -- we would pursue our ends and, indirectly, the ends of nature as well. It turns out, however, that we have a sense that our ends are not exactly our ends. We enjoy play, but play doesn't seem serious enough to be the meaning of our existence. Our play then must give way to our serious work, which is mainly the accumulation of wealth. This serious work, however, is obviously a means to something else. Work is one of the curses upon Adam, remember? It isn't something chosen for its own sake. What is it chosen for? Survival? In part, perhaps, but obviously that won't do. Herein lies our perpetual quandary.

For the past eight weeks I have taught a class entitled "In Search of Meaning." Because I was brought on at the last minute to teach the course, I worked with texts, such as Kushner's When All You Ever Wanted Isn't Enough and Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie, that were selected by someone else. Kushner and Albom both play the same trick of pointing out that we are constantly working without a clear awareness of what we are working for. They propose then that if we just become clearer about what Really Matters, we would have a proper sense of perspective. Of course, what they end up saying really matters is remarkably vague and unhelpful, such as "spending time with others" and "having a mission that gives your life meaning." Their arguments are logical but, as the logicians tell us, anything can be derived from a contradiction, which is what we are.

I have written in praise of rationalization before, and I do so again now. As I've said already, happiness comes, if it comes at all, when we're not looking for it. The pursuit of happiness, this natural right of Jefferson's, depends upon a looking without looking, like when you intentionally limit how often you look at a clock in order to keep time from slowing to a crawl. We play, but we know better than to take our play too seriously, for it won't bear the weight. We work, but we know better than to take our work too seriously, for it won't bear the weight either. We spend time with others, knowing that others can't solve our problems, and we take up missions and projects, realizing that these are ultimately just means to other ends as well. In short, because nothing can bear the weight of being an end in-itself, we make sure that all of our activities carry with them the sense of being contributions to something else, even if we don't ask too carefully about what that something else is and whether it can itself bear the weight of our existence. It is all a fantastic shell game.

This is the pickle we are in.

Let's Not

2005-03-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

Let's Not
Following an Instapundit link again, I read this column from Mike Rosen on the miserable Ward Churchill. The thrust of Rosen's essay is as follows:

The debate stimulated by the Churchill affair has escalated into a long overdue exploration into the politics and processes of higher education. The sacred cow of tenure is under review, along with the limits of academic freedom and the shameful lack of ideological balance within college faculties. It's like peeling off the outer layers of an artichoke to get to the heart of the issue.

And this is it: 1) Ideology and politics. As Rorty proudly proclaims, the Left has taken over academe. We want it back. 2) Accountability. Self-important academics believe themselves to be beyond reproach, sitting as philosopher-kings, dispensing their wisdom to the ignorant masses. Nonsense. They're ordinary people, government employees dependent on their customers and the taxpayers for their income, and ultimately accountable to their bosses and the citizens who elect the Board of Regents. Academic freedom is not absolute.

I don't have high hopes for how society might take back the academy. Already the academy suffers from too many interventions, whether they be the fads of professional management, the push towards education as vocation (job training), or constant attempts to package college as another consumer good. Nonetheless, Rosen does have a point. There is no reason for society to lend its support to an institution that lacks faith and piety in the society itself. The critical skills developed within higher education are, simply, skills; the critical attitude does not somehow represent the highest peak we can attain. An education that undermines our ability to affirm is a cure worse than any disease.

In his call for reigning in the university, however, Rosen demonstrates why even conservatives in the academy might not wish to have friends like this:

Whatever the outcome for Churchill, the battle lines have formed and are hardening. Here's what many of us, I hope most, would like to see: substantive change, a revolution even, at the University of Colorado. It must start with electing regents who have a commitment to restoring real, intellectual diversity and an evenhanded exchange of ideas. That means hiring conservative professors to balance the now left-lopsided scales.

It means ending politically correct speech codes for students and the "diversity" and "sensitivity" re-education camps freshmen are forced to attend. It means a housecleaning of administrators, starting with President Betsy Hoffman. It means hiring new administrators with sufficient backbone to take on the entrenched, leftist faculty with knowledge that the regents will stand behind those administrators. If the changing culture disturbs some in the tenured left who preferred their monopoly, let them leave, and good riddance.

Insofar as the leftward turn of the university has come from external forces, then perhaps change is in order to eliminate those influences. For the most part, however, it seems to me that the university has moved to the left on its own. What has been done from within can be undone from within as well. Nothing would be more destructive to the public trust in the university than its "reformation" along partisan principles, even if those principles are close to public opinion. If we fight politicization with more politicization, the high ground will be forever lost. No one will trust anyone's arguments to be anything more than propaganda.

The proper solution to a university too far to the left is the solution that has been naturally developing for years: ignore it. Academics want attention. If you don't think they uphold proper intellectual standards, don't give them that attention. I know a lot of professors who lament how much the culture turns its back on them; some can even remember a time when this wasn't so. For many, this is a sign of how anti-intellectual American culture is, which just strengthens their resolve to turn against it. Others realize, however, that the academy turned its back first. If academics want to regain the influence enjoyed by earlier generations, they will learn to speak in a way that is both instructive and respectful. We don't need the politicos of the right any more than we need the politicos of the left.

Priorities

2005-03-03T14:20:00.000-05:00

Priorities
Yesterday, Glenn Reynolds brought up indications from Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens that he will seek to impose the same indecency standards on cable television as exist for broadcast television. Reynolds linked to Ace of Spades, who enunciated this political principle:

Any party that tries to take away the titty-channels from a red-blooded American man is a party that's looking to go the way of the Whigs.

After a good laugh, I realized that Ace of Spades is right. If Kerry and Bush had run on platforms identical to the ones they did run on, with the exception that Bush was clearly attempting to screw up HBO, I would have voted for Kerry. Everyone has his limits.

Dissolution

2005-03-02T21:25:00.000-05:00

Dissolution
This past Sunday my two year old was invited to a birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese. If you don't know the level of hell that this is, I won't bother to explain it, but I will say that Sunday is a particularly bad day to go. We do take our kids there periodically, but usually during the week when the place is not very full.

We were sitting in the back at one of the rows reserved for parties. There were also parties on both sides of us. At one point Chuck himself came out and led some cheers, which really got the place rocking. While this was going on, I happened to look at one of the parties next to me. There I saw three generations of Indians (Pakistanis?) The kids in that group were completely a part of the mayhem. The parents were less so, but clearly enjoying watching the kids have fun. The grand-parents, however, were completely miserable, and seemed to be looking upon the whole affair as the decadence that it, in fact, is.

What I witnessed fit the standard profile of immigrant families. The first to arrive often have the poorest language skills and hold onto the old ways more tightly than the people back in the mother country. The second generation grow up in two worlds: the family and the society. By the third generation, however, you have people who are fully integrated into the new society. They don't need to speak the old languages, except perhaps to say some words to the grandparents, and they haven't usually been pushed as hard to keep to the older traditions.

I see this pattern, more or less, with a lot of my Indian students. My students are usually the second generation. They fit in fairly easily with the other students, but they are clearly driven to succeed from their family, and almost all of them are pursuing medical school (or pharmacy school). They also usually intend to participate in the traditional wedding process. At the same time, I get the sense that they won't impose these things on their own children.

It seems to me that there is a contradiction in the mentality of these Indian families. On the one hand, the older people clearly desire to keep their family practicing Indian traditions, including a respect for the caste system. (It amazes me how easily these Americanized students can still affirm, to some extent, the ancient prejudices.) On the other hand, everyone seems to know that the family practices will eventually become diluted and lost. As one of my students, who was born in India but moved here as a young child, told me, the third generation is well-known to be "wild." The contradiction is this: if you value tradition so much, how could wealth be enough of an incentive to put your family in a situation where your descendents will end up so different from yourself?

The tension is actually within Indian culture itself, it seems to me, because of the importance placed upon success. If success is critical for reputation, and reputation is almost all-important, and success in the modern world comes through excellence in the capitalist system, the drive for success is also the drive for self-annihilation. The Italian philosopher Vico would have considered this evidence for a divine providence.

Cooperation

2005-02-24T10:48:00.000-05:00

Cooperation
ABC News reports an experimental result that is not exactly surprising but confirms a certain view of the world:

Kurzban and Houser recruited 80 college students, divided them into groups, and gave each participant 50 tokens. The students were told they could keep all of the tokens, or put some of them in a pot that would double in value and then be distributed equally among all the members of the group.

The idea of the experiment was to find out how many of the participants were "cooperators," and would share some of their wealth for the good of the community, and how many were "reciprocators," who would wait and see how much others contributed before deciding how much to toss into the communal pot, and how many were "free riders." We all recognize those characters. Not a single bloody token for the common good.

Here are the results of the experiment:

Now here's the first surprise, perhaps. Most of us aren't cooperators. We're reciprocators by a whopping margin. No matter which participants were assigned to which groups, about 63 percent always waited to see what George was willing to contribute before anteing up themselves. About 20 percent were free riders, refusing to contribute anything at all and about 17 percent were classified as cooperators who were willing to chip in regardless of what anyone else did.

Continuing this level of surprise, the researchers think that cooperators, although in the minority, constituted the most powerful force within the group. They established the level of contribution, and the reciprocators, not willing to be left behind, coughed up an equal amount, maintaining the status quo and enlarging the pot that was to be shared by all.

These results accord with an observation that my step-father shared with me a long time ago, namely, that there are three types of people: those who will do good regardless of what you do to them, those who will do wrong regardless of what you do for them, and those who will follow whichever of the first two groups is socially dominant. Also, as the experimental results suggest, these three groups are different in size. By my step-father's reckoning, there were about as many in the first group as the second, but the third group was where the great majority of people fall.

This observation, I believe, is helpful for our understanding of our system of legal punishments. Typically, we read of three possible reasons for punishment: deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. The first reason, deterrence, falters because of the evidence that changes in the severity of punishment, and even the likelihood of getting caught, do not greatly change the level of crime, perhaps because criminals often don't calculate future interests very well. This is a point made against capital punishment: having executions does not seem to lower the murder rate as compared to giving people life in prison. The second reason, rehabilitation, runs counter to both the evidence and our principles of justice. Incarceration does not seem to make many people better, and it probably makes most people worse. Furthermore, most everyone is committed to the notion that more serious crimes demand more serious punishments, but this principle cannot be supported if rehabilitation is the rationale. Someone who murders a spouse might not ever commit a crime again, thereby needing little rehabilitation, while it might be very difficult to break someone from the habit of stealing. The final reason, retribution, is a difficult position to advance as well. It seems too much like vengeance, and it seems to depend on a peculiar metaphysical notion of desert, as in "we punish someone because they deserve it." It is hard for many, myself included, to think we should punish simply for punishment's sake.

Given the notion of society being divided into these three types, however, our system of punishment becomes more rational. We punish, not to deter the criminal class, but to place a stigma upon them in order to persuade the large majority in the middle (the "reciprocators" in the experiment) not to follow their ways. Punishment is thus a form of social ritual. As a social ritual, it makes sense then to give harsher punishments for more serious crimes, because the levels of harshness help us to remember what kinds of misbehavior society considers most dangerous.

In such a system, deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution have their place. If we can hurt the free-riders enough to get them to cooperate some, so much the better, and if we can straighten someone out, that's good too. As far as retribution goes, by punishing we help satisfy the pre-civil urge for vengeance and thus keep this dangerous desire in check. In a certain sense, however, what becomes of the punished is irrelevant. The punishment itself fulfills the ritual.

I think this helps make sense also of the success over the last decade of the "broken windows" theory that argues for pursuing vigorously certain low-level crimes, such as vandalism and avoiding subway fares, on the grounds that these low-level crimes encourage a sense of defeatism in the cultural environment. The "broken windows" theory realizes that the primary object of concern for any judicial system is not the criminal class, which is highly resistant to change, but the great middle who will do right if they are convinced that those around them will do right too.

Clouds Part

2005-02-19T19:14:00.000-05:00

Clouds Part
Yesterday I had the sleep of kings. It wasn't very long -- no more than thirty minutes -- and it wasn't even uninterrupted, but I woke up with the odd sensation of having energy. To gain so much from so little inspired me to give thought to how I might sleep that way again.

It had nothing to do with sleeping position. I fell asleep watching a show I had taped, and my head was at an odd angle with the pillow. Even as I was falling asleep the thought occurred to me that my neck would hurt later, but that hardly mattered at the time. It did hurt some later, but my initial elation of restedness made the slight pain even slighter.

Perhaps it had something to do with my trying to watch the show. Remarkably, I attempted to fight off the sleep of kings, simply to follow the pilot episode of X-Files. Making yourself fall asleep is notoriously unsuccessful; perhaps fighting sleep while being in a sleeping position is the answer. Will it work, however, if I only pretend to be fighting sleep, when sleep (and good sleep, at that) is really what I want?

I also had the back door open so that my dogs could go outside. The air was a little chilly, but not uncomfortable, and there were the pleasant sounds of the daytime in the background. I'm guessing there were also the unpleasant sounds of my dogs ripping into some trash that had been placed on the back deck, but none of that filtered through the sleep of kings. I discovered their misdeeds only later.

This factor of the open door strikes me as likely relevant. Searching my memory, I can remember only three occasions that were superior to yesterday's sleep.

The first was during a weekend in high school that I spent with my girlfriend and her family at their lake house in Alabama. For some reason, I slept almost the whole weekend away, to the point where her father thought I might be ill. Of all the sleep that weekend, however, I recall a magical slumber in the hammock. There was some sun coming through the trees and a wonderful breeze. I can't really remember my high school graduation, but I can remember that sleep.

The second was also during high school. A small group of us had taken a trip to Chicago. One of our stops was the planetarium. The planetarium was impressive, but none of us saw much of the show. They had these very comfortable chairs with headrests. I think they even rocked back. It was very dark, and it was air-conditioned. I miss it greatly.

The third was three years ago in my mother's hospital room a few days before she passed away. The hospital was in Gainesville, which is in north Georgia and too far away for me to easily drive back and forth from home in a single day. So, to avoid renting a hotel room, I slept in a recliner next to her bed, with my sister sleeping on a cot. I was beside an open window, with the cool, moist north Georgia air. And, to my eternal gratitude, I experienced again the feeling of my mother watching over me.

Something I realize, after reflecting on these four glorious episodes, is that none of them took place in a bed. I have certainly slept well in a bed, but I don't know that I've ever had a great sleep in one. I still regret letting my wife get rid of a sofa I bought before graduate school whose equal I have never seen again. It seemed as long as my 1974 Cutlass Supreme, with a fabric found usually only in places I've never been invited to. The sofa even had a mythic journey that preceded it. I bought it from friends of friends who were selling off their aunt's estate, so three of my buddies and I journeyed in a van to Pensacola, Florida, to make the purchase. It was fairly ugly to look at, but being on it with your eyes open was a waste anyway.

Today, when my son took a nap, I tried to recreate the sleep of kings, even though I was upstairs in my bed with the windows closed. My second attempt exceeded my first, but, in the end, I failed.

P.C.U.

2005-02-15T11:51:00.000-05:00

P.C.U.
Glenn Reynolds links to Paul Campos, who has written an article explaining the Ward Churchill hire as the inevitable consequence of the university's untempered pursuit of affirmative action. It is hard to see how anyone could disagree.

An additional point can be made, however, that I think makes the Churchill situation even clearer. When universities pursue diversity in hiring, they count on certain departments, such as women's studies and african-american studies, as locks for minority hires. Given the small number of minority PhDs in certain fields, it is imperative to take minorities in those fields where the applicant pool has a larger minority share. So, if you have a department of ethnic studies, you would be hard-pressed to hire anyone who wasn't "ethnic." This way, even if you have mainly white males in other departments, the overall numbers will look acceptable.

The hiring of a fraud like Churchill shows one problem with this approach, but another is that these fields become remarkably insular. White males, and conservative white males especially, have little chance of getting jobs in these fields, and so they generally don't enter them to begin with. In this way the pursuit of diversity creates a statistical mirage; there is some diversity overall, but the departments themselves are much more homogenous.

To be honest, I am sympathetic with the need for minority faculty. Too often minorities see higher education as "acting white," a point of view that could only be encouraged by faculties without diversity. Unequal standards, however, make a mess of it all. Not only are some minorities overpromoted by landing jobs at more prestigious institutions than their work qualifies them for, which puts them in the position of looking less able in comparison to more competent colleagues, but then you get clowns like Churchill who shouldn't be in the academy at all. Pretty much everyone loses.

Equal standards would likely not hurt diversity in campuses generally, only at the top. I think we should bite the bullet and allow our elite institutions to have less diversity until the time comes when there are sufficient numbers of strong minority candidates to solve the problem naturally. (Note: I do not consider myself a strong candidate for these positions either.) Unfortunately, no one seems willing to live with that image.

Neighborhood Vigilante

2005-02-13T04:42:00.000-05:00

Neighborhood Vigilante
Wait, no, the actual headline is "Neighborhood Vigilant in Recycling."

We don't take the Macon Telegraph anymore -- part of the recycling effort, in a sense -- but recently they wrote an article in which my back yard received prominent mention. I don't have a copy of the article and the Telegraph charges (!) for viewing archived articles, but here is the opening paragraph:

Fewer recyclables sit at the curb in front of Eddie and Charlotte Thomas' house these days. But those glass bottles, plastic containers and cardboard boxes are not in the garbage. They're in the back yard. The Thomases volunteered space for neighbors in their Huguenin Heights neighborhood to drop off non-paper recyclables in bins by the back fence. About 10 families participate, said neighbor Bob Hargrove, who transports the items to Macon Iron once a week.

The local fame has gone a little to my head, but I must confess that this has been a fairly selfish act of selflessness. Through a design flaw of our own, there is a square patch of back yard that lies outside our fence of little use other than providing space to "park" vehicles that haven't worked in years. [Insert your favorite redneck joke here.] It must have occurred to everyone else in the neighborhood also that the space was being wasted since we were the first to be considered for housing the nine large recycling receptacles (trash cans). It seemed like a cheap way to earn good will, and it would mean that I wouldn't need to lug my own recycling very far at all. In these regards the situation has worked out perfectly.

I have no idea of whether recycling is ultimately worth the effort. I have noticed, however, that I put out substantially less trash for the city to pick up each week, so the city landfill is benefitting, unless somehow Macon Iron is putting out enough trash to offset my reductions.

If anyone knows any other ways of doing good deeds, or at least appearing to do so, while actually doing nothing, please let me know in the comments.

Dvorak Update

2005-02-11T13:24:00.000-05:00

Dvorak Update
Here is a report after two weeks of my odd quest to learn how to type with the Dvorak arrangement:

My first goal was to figure out what my typing speed is under the traditional QWERTY arrangement, with the hope that I could match that in Dvorak by the end of the semester. To that end, I downloaded Kiran's Typing Tutor 1.0, which is free. It turned out to be a good choice, because it not only tracked words per minute but also had typing instructions for Dvorak as well as QWERTY. One-stop non-shopping!

It has been a long time since I have typed for speed. Like most, I suppose, I have fallen into the habit of composing on the computer. I used to consider that sloppy, preferring to think something out thoroughly and committing it to paper before transferring it into a document file. I feared that my typing had slowed down to the pace of my thought.

As it turned out, the program rated my typing about where I would have hoped, somewhere between 40-45 words per minute. With some practice I think I could tune it up around 55, but apparently I don't need even that much. My mother would have scoffed at these low standards; she had secretarial and administrative duties her whole working life, and could type at least 90 WPM, although I might be underestimating by a large margin. She was so fast that she could tie up the keys of an electric typewriter. I don't recall if using the computer brought a degradation in her skills as it did with me.

After working out my benchmark, I then had to figure out what I would do about the actual keys on my keyboard. An actual Dvorak keyboard might be fun, but the expense and hassle of swapping out keyboards ruled that out. Swapping the actual keys around might have worked, but I feared messing the keyboard up, and besides some of the non-letter keys in Dvorak do not have the same shift-characters as on the QWERTY layout. Another consideration was to print out little stickers to place on top of the keys, but I thought these might turn gummy over time. I settled then on the easiest option of just printing out the keyboard arrangement on a sheet of paper, which I could put beside me and refer to when need be. I've actually come to think this a superior option to anything but purchasing a new keyboard, since it keeps you out of the habit of trying to look down at the keyboard as you type.

With my typing sofware, my print-out of the Dvorak arrangement, and having converted (through Windows Control Panel -> Keyboard -> Languages -> Properties -> Dvorak-US) the keyboard over to Dvorak, I finally started my practice. As you might expect, it was initially fairly weird. I know QWERTY so well that I couldn't actually tell you right away where all the keys are; my fingers just find them as needed. With Dvorak, however, I think about every key as I'm hitting it. Although I'm on the steep part of the learning curve, I think this may pose a real obstacle down the road. Part of typing speed, it seems to me, is that the brain learns to look ahead and get fingers moving before the keys actually need to be struck. When I'm typing with Dvorak, however, there is little looking ahead. I most likely won't be hitting this wall for awhile, but to get past it I will need to get to the point where I simply trust my fingers to go to the right place.

After two weeks, I'm fairly satisfied with my typing speed. I can consistently now type 20 WPM with the Dvorak arrangement.

I confess, however, to going against the advice of many by using QWERTY in between my practice with Dvorak. If I'm typing from something printed, I don't mind using Dvorak, even though I'm going at half-speed, but it turns out to be very difficult to compose at the computer and learn a new keyboard arrangement at the same time. (I'm typing with QWERTY now, for example.) It is simply exhausting to be thinking about keys and constructing sentences at the same time. I wrote some very brief e-mails this way and found out that it isn't worth it. This is supposed to be fun.

Syllabi

2005-02-02T13:48:00.000-05:00

Syllabi
A recent article in Inside Higher Ed laments the growth of the syllabus, both in terms of its actual length and the attention given to it by university administrators. The author can remember a time when there was no syllabus at all, at least not as an institutional expectation. My own experience does not go back that far, but I've seen the syllabus take on greater significance even in the last ten years. New faculty undergo training in how to meet the demands of the syllabus, and we all get updates each semester about how to word the paragraphs on students with disabilities or cell phone use.

To explain this growth, the author offers the usual answer of protecting against legal liability, but believes the continued growth is also due to classes being seen as less the province of the professor and more the province of programs. The latter point is intended to be the more controversial of the two, but I actually consider it the more certain. Last fall, in a workshop related to our honor code, a university lawyer spoke and said that universities generally only get in trouble with the law (regarding honor code decisions) when they fail to follow their own policies. I asked her if we should draw the obvious conclusion that the fewer the policies, the fewer the ways we could trip up. She said that we should draw that conclusion, and that her job would be much easier if the university did not prescribe so many rules for itself.

Whether university administrators understand this point or not is unclear. What is clear is that, like everyone else, they look for things to make their jobs easier, and are under the impression that lengthy and specific syllabi will help. Their ideal seems to be that every student grievance can be met by pointing to a specific provision of a syllabi or university policy and then determining exactly how the provision supplies the necessary judgment.

In his essay "On Experience," Montaigne writes:

What have our legislators gained by picking out a hundred thousand particular cases and deeds, and attaching to them a hundred thousand laws? This number bears no relation to the infinite diversity of human actions. ...There is little relation between our actions, which are perpetually changing, and fixed, immutable laws. The most desirable laws are those that are fewest, simplest, and most general; and I even think that it would be better to be without them altogether than to have them in such numbers as we have at present.

I would add that defending against legalism has the unfortunate consequence of making legalism respectable.

The situation, however, is likely even worse than Montaigne thought, because he still lived in a world where actions are perpetually changing. The great danger is that we actually narrow our lives to fit our documents. The past couple of years my university has been pushing us to give a significant grade to each of our students before the 4-week mark to assist them in deciding who needs an intervention. It once was simply a request; now it is a strong request. Within a few years, it will likely be mandatory. For years I also kept no roll. I started to the past couple of years for my own reasons, but I suspect that this choice will vanish soon too. Apparently it is part of my job to help maintain daily surveillance on the students, so that we can track them down if they are not doing what they ought.

Clean Fun

2005-01-31T15:13:00.000-05:00

Clean Fun
This semester I am teaching an honors class, a one-hour requirement for our students in the honors program. Teaching such a class is a little difficult for me for two reasons. One, I don't really believe in the program. It smacks too much of high school and it encourages people to identify themselves in a way I don't consider healthy. Second, no one seems to know for sure what the program is supposed to accomplish. The only guidance I've ever found helpful has been the idea that the class should not be more of the usual, i.e., having the students read a book and then talk about it.

In spite of my misgivings, I teach in the program. Initially, it was to be helpful to a friend who was running the program, but she gave that up some time back, so now my reasons are unclear, other than the slight financial incentive. Fortunately, it is a relatively painless venture.

In the past, I've had the students spend time reading magazines and journals aimed at a college-educated reader in order for them to become acquainted with ways people pursue understanding outside of the classroom. This semester's class is too large to do that profitably, however, so I decided on a different approach altogether. I decided to have each of them come up with something they want to learn about or learn how to do that they do not think they could achieve through their formal education. Each week they will write a journal entry describing their accomplishments of the week. Using Jeffrey Steingarten's The Man Who Ate Everything as a model, I told them that their entries would be evaluated according to how interesting they are, with humor especially encouraged.

I have some hope that the experiment will meet with some success. One student is planning to learn to skateboard, using the 10 year old boys in her neighborhood as her instructors. Another is learning how to whistle, both one-fingered and two-fingered style. Others want to learn quilting, break dancing, portrait painting, and how not to hate Macon.

For myself, I thought that I should play along too, so I have set myself the task of learning how to type on the Dvorak keyboard. The keyboard most everyone is familiar with, of course, is the QWERTY arrangement. The QWERTY arrangement, I found out, is the keyboard arrangement on the first typewriter, which is a bit of a surprise. In the realm of technology, nothing seems to stay the same forever, yet here we have a case where the first attempt seems to have been good enough.

It turns out that not everyone agrees that QWERTY is good enough. In the middle of the 1900s, a man named Dvorak came up with an alternate arrangement of keys, with the main difference being that all of the vowels and some of the most commonly used consonants (D,H,T,N,S) are on the home row. The idea is that the less your fingers need to move from the home row, the less strain you put on the hand and the faster you can type.

Dvorak was convinced that his arrangement was superior and conducted tests to that end, but the Dvorak keyboard never entered the mainstream. Nonetheless, there are still advocates for it, and using it has become quite simple with the computer, since you don't need a different machine to take advantage. In fact, you probably didn't know it but you can make use of the keyboard arrangement on Microsoft Windows by going to the Keyboard program (part of the Control Panel), then selecting Language and Properties and then Dvorak-US.

What makes the issue of QWERTY vs. Dvorak interesting is the economic question of how an inferior arrangement could stay in place for this long. Doesn't a free market tend to promote the superior product? Some see QWERTY vs. Dvorak as the same as VHS vs. Beta and Microsoft vs. Mac. The explanation typically offered is that these are examples of market failures due to network effects. The idea is that some things have their value amplified by being part of a network, thus making it more difficult to replace them even if a superior product is developed. A Mac, so the story goes, is a superior product, but it is also quite inconvenient to have a Mac when everyone else uses PCs, so people buy PCs even when they recognize they are getting an inferior product.

Of course, the argument of network effects depends upon the inferior products really being inferior, a claim not everyone is willing to concede. Thus my project. While far from scientific, I thought I would find out for myself the value of the Dvorak keyboard arrangement. Will the transition be difficult? Will a competency in Dvorak pay noticable dividends? Inquiring minds want to know!

Empty Tomb

2005-01-25T01:41:00.000-05:00

Empty Tomb
I've been reading some from the book of Deuteronomy lately and have been struck by how strongly the Jewish imagination is oriented towards the past. This is Deuteronomy 6, verses 20-24:

"When your son asks you in time to come, "What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the ordinances which the LORD our God has commanded you?," then you shall say to your son, "We were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand; and the LORD showed signs and wonders, great and grievous, against Egypt and against Pharaoh and all his household, before our eyes; and he brought us out from there, that he might bring us in and give us the land which he swore to give to our fathers. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as at this day."

What is the meaning of the Law? Apparently, the meaning is not abstract principles of justice, but instead a specific history covering God's promise to Abraham and the delivery of the Jews from Egypt. To uphold the Law is to hold to that line of descent and the identity that follows from it.

In this context, the story of the empty tomb means more than the resurrection of the dead. It means also a severing from the ancestral burial grounds. "Why seek the living among the dead?" ask the angels at the tomb, a statement that seems like common sense to many of us today but which must have been impious to one who found themselves within the faith of their fathers. Where else could one find the living but among the dead? Certainly you cannot find yourself among the not-yet-born, for no one knows what will happen to them. We are left only with the modern option that we are the makers of ourselves, which is, at best, only a half-truth.

The early Christian community does not seem to have geared itself for the long haul. Of course, the church has endured for two thousand years, but the New Testament is less a founding document than a reminder of what it is to live as if one were waiting for a thief in the night. The church finds itself in the perpetually awkward position of having to look past its own sacred texts. Perhaps this keeps the texts alive, since they stand as a constant rebuke of the earthly concerns of long-standing communities.

Memory has an uncertain place in the faith, especially for Protestants. We exchanged a trust in a tradition for a trust in propositions, which is a little odd when you think about it. Do you believe that Jesus was the son of God, that he died on the cross to save us from our sins, and that he was resurrected from the dead? If so, you can move from one Protestant congregation to another with little friction. Beyond these core beliefs, it is unclear how important the stories of Jesus really are.

Loving Equality

2005-01-18T21:27:00.000-05:00

Loving Equality
An eternal topic -- What do men want in women? -- has resurfaced in the blog world, so why shouldn't I throw my opinion into the mix? And why shouldn't you read it? Well, actually, I don't have a good answer to that one, but it hasn't stopped me yet.

My attention was caught by this paragraph from Ann Althouse:

Yes, those women who are willing to deny themselves and serve men will please men who prefer servants. And if the women are able to believe there is joy in service, isn't it all just a very lovely arrangement? I do consider that inequality, and I think that when a man and a woman find inequality comforting, they suffer a diminishment of themselves as human beings, even if they are too complacent to notice. I believe there is a great loss, even before one takes into account the damage to those other than the happy couple. As long as women are willing to play the comforter role, why should our somnolent male character bother to deal with a relationship with a woman who wants to be treated as an equal? Our somnolent man might want to awaken from his sleepwalking life and ask: What kind of a man does not love equality? What kind of man prefers a servant to an equal? What kind of woman wants a man like that, especially when the deal for her is to be the servant? What a weak and sniveling way to go about living!

Honest to God, I can't imagine much that is less erotic than equality. Someone asking themselves "Am I getting as much as I am giving?" or "Am I giving as much as I am getting?" or "Am I being properly respected according to my true worth?" or "Is my desire to comfort a sniveling act of co-dependence?" is not in the throes of erotic desire, even if the answer to the first three questions is "yes" and to the last one "no".

The ancient Greeks went so far as to make inequality fundamental to erotic desire. There was the lover, who burned with desire, and the object of his affection, the beloved. The beloved wielded power over the lover, but the lover could also be said to be empowered with a divine madness. The beloved tended to be depicted as more sober than the lover, but some of the tales told make clear the intoxication that comes from the power over the lover. The art of seduction is the art of making oneself so desired as to overcome the internal inhibitions of another. There are two forms of drunkenness here, so perhaps that can be called an equality of sorts, but it is safe to say that neither drunkard is much concerned with such details. Do you want to seduce? Do you want to be seduced? A hearty "yes!" to both, and fling equality out the window!

I too can be disgusted with women being servants to men, and with men being servants to women. What disgusts me, however, is not the service, but how often the beloved are so patently unworthy of the beautiful gift being given. Pearls before swine.

Ethics

2005-01-18T13:58:00.000-05:00

Ethics
The last few weeks have been fairly hectic with the start of the new semester. I had five syllabi to put together: three regular courses (an intro, an ethics, and an upper-division class in early modern philosophy), one night class in the continuing ed program (thankfully only 8 weeks long), and one one-hour honors course. The basic syllabi were not much problem to put together, but I had two classes where I needed to comb through the semester's reading finding particular passages. That has been exhausting.

The more painstaking of the two has been for my ethics class. A basic problem confronted me while trying to design the course, namely, that I don't really believe much in ethics as a separate branch of philosophical inquiry. I don't really believe that there are meaningful rules to guide human conduct generally. To my mind, ethics are grounded in institutions, so the real thinking needs to take place at that level. I don't accept conscience or a priori reasoning as reliable sources.

I decided then to begin the course by looking at concrete ethical situations, which I divided accordingly: what do we owe strangers, the dead, parents, spouses, children, fellow citizens, and humanity as a whole. For reading, I am drawing mainly upon Homer and the Bible, in part because these books are a little jarring when set next to our modern ethical sensibilities. For example, when we spoke this past Thursday about what we owe strangers, quite a few students were mystified that Lot would offer to sacrifice his daughters for people he didn't even know! We are further from our ancestors than we usually realize.

After going through these concrete ethical situations, I then intend to look at the ethical theories of Kant and Mill. The main question will be: do these theories have anything to say that will help us make sense of the concrete concerns discussed before? In other words, is there such a thing as a universal ethics? I'll try not to let my own judgments become too apparent.

In the second section of the course, I will look more at the question of character, reading selections from Proverbs, Aristotle, Augustine, and Benjamin Franklin. Again, after considering these accounts of virtue, ranging from ancient Hebrew tradition to modern commercial culture, I will ask whether we can make sense of virtue as a whole.

To end the course, I will look at the question of foundations (meta-ethics, I suppose you might call it) and issues like moral relativism that seek to undermine the discourse into ethics altogether. Hopefully, a good time will be had by all.

Expertise

2005-01-10T05:25:00.000-05:00

Expertise
It seems like I am always at the pediatrician, usually with my infant son. To justify my visits, I try each time to marshall together all of the available evidence and make my amateur prognosis of why one of my children needs medical attention. That way, even if I'm wrong, it looks like I'm not just another overprotective parent.

Most of the time my trips to the pediatrician are warranted. At the same time, my guesses about the causes and kinds of ailments are almost always wrong. This past Saturday I took my son in because of a swelling of his left eyelid, which I credited as being due either to a fall he took or perhaps an insect sting. (I could have sworn I say a little hole in the skin like a sting in the middle of the eyelid.) The pediatrician looked at it for five seconds and diagnosed it as a secondary infection from sinuses and gave us a prescription for an antibiotic. So much for my career in medicine.

The point is this: opinions are a dime a dozen. They are better than nothing, so we work from them, but a little Socratic wisdom is in order too. Know what you know and what you don't know.

For the past two or three months, I have frequently encountered the opinion that torture is wrong not only morally but also because it produces bad information. You see, people will say anything to avoid torture.

I'm guessing that none of the people making the claim have practiced in the field itself. Taken from Mark Bowden's article "The Dark Art of Interrogation" (Atlantic Montly, subscription required), here are some quotations from a more experienced point of view:

Bill Cowan spent three and a half years fighting the war in Vietnam. He was a young Marine captain assigned to the Rung Sat Special Zone, a putrid swamp that begins just south of Saigon. Miles and miles of thick, slurping mud that swallowed soldiers to their waists, it is populated by galaxies of mosquitoes and other biting insects, snakes, crocodiles, and stands of rotting mangrove. It is intersected by the saltwater rivers of the Mekong Delta, and features occasional stretches of flat, open farmland. The Marines knew that several battalions of Vietcong were in the Rung Sat. The enemy would lie low, building strength, and then launch surprise attacks on South Vietnamese or U.S. troops. The soldiers in Cowan's unit played cat-and-mouse with an enemy that melted away at their approach.

So when he captured a Vietcong soldier who could warn of ambushes and lead them to hidden troops but who refused to speak, wires were attached to the man's scrotum with alligator clips and electricity was cranked out of a 110-volt generator.

"It worked like a charm," Cowan told me. "The minute the crank started to turn, he was ready to talk. We never had to do more than make it clear we could deliver a jolt. It was the fear more than the pain that made them talk."

And then Bowden says this based on conversation with Michael Koubi, the former chief interrogator for Israel's General Security Services:

Once a prisoner starts to talk, rapid follow-up is needed to sort fact from fiction, so that the interrogator knows whether his subject is being cooperative or evasive, and can respond accordingly. Interrogation sessions should be closely observed (many rooms designed for this purpose have one-way mirrors), and in a well-run unit a subject's words can sometimes be checked out before the session is over. Being caught so quickly in a lie demonstrates the futility of playing games with the interrogator, and strengthens his hand. It shames and rattles the subject. When information checks out, the interrogator can home in for more details and open up new avenues of exploration.

It seems then that interrogators have found an ingenious method of working against the prisoner's "say anything to avoid pain" mentality. They check the statements against other information already collected!

The point here is not to defend our practices of interrogation. I do not have an absolute moral opposition, but I fear, like many others, the slippery slope that quickly descends from the legitimate cases. Were I to make a decision based on what little I know right now, I would probably decide to severely limit the use of these interrogation techniques. Nonetheless, any decision I would make now would be based on a great deal of ignorance, an ignorance seemingly shared by many others who seem much more confident in their position.

Moralists prefer to not let the facts get in the way, but there are empirical questions here as well as questions of value. What techniques are being used? Who are we using them against? How effective are they, both in terms of quality of information and the ability to use that information to save lives? To what extent do these practices make it more difficult for us to earn the good will of the people we are trying to help? We have some information to these questions, and we should be pursuing answers to all of them, but it will be difficult to make a reasoned judgment until we have reliable answers to them all. And if we must make a judgment before a reasoned one becomes available, so be it -- that's the way life goes most of the time -- but let's not believe stories just because they coincide with what we want to believe.

Fiction

2005-01-09T04:26:00.000-05:00

Fiction
The following is adapted from a daydream I had recently.

A man is terminally ill and spending his last days, as many of us will, in a hospital. With him is his wife. They are speaking of their daughter, who died in her early twenties some time ago in a car accident on her way home from the military base where she was stationed. We pick up the conversation somewhere other than from the beginning.

"You didn't let me see her remains," he noted, as he had from time to time before.

"I didn't think you could handle seeing her that way," she responded matter-of-factly, as she had every time before. She added, "Forgive me."

"You know that I've always thought maybe those remains weren't really hers. I imagine sometimes what she's been doing all this time. You're sure it was her?"

The response is again matter-of-fact, slowly like someone talking to a child, or maybe like someone carefully putting weights on the different pans of a balance: "I was quite certain then, but I know too that you've always had your doubts." Then, with more warmth, "What do you imagine her doing now?"

"Kate liked the water; maybe she's living near the beach, working as a waitress or something where no one would pay much attention. She wouldn't be Kate anymore, I suspect. Maybe Polly," he said, trying to sneak a smile from his wife, Polly being Kate's pretend friend from childhood.

He succeeded. After a moment, she said, "We'll need to forgive her for not letting us know."

"I do, every time. She'd have her reasons."

After another moment, she conjectured, "The military keeps lots of secrets. Maybe she found out something she shouldn't of, and had to go into hiding. She didn't tell us to protect us. Maybe we don't need to forgive her at all."

At this, her husband became visibly excited, suddently distracted from his business. "Yes! I think so!" And then, sinking back into his condition, he summed the matter up. "She always thought of others. She always wanted things to be how others wanted them to be. I remember." And she did too.

Primal Instinct

2005-01-04T01:54:00.000-05:00

Primal Instinct
I have had a few experiences in the last couple of weeks that have connected me more closely (or so I imagine) to our ancestral psyche.

First, once I woke up in the middle of the night and decided to watch a little television. When I sat down, I noticed the moon through one of the windows. Three years ago, I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but ever since I've started paying attention to the motions of the heavenly objects, I have a fairly acute awareness of how my house is situated. I can show you Polaris from my back deck, where the sun rises and sets, and where and when to expect certain constellations. I knew that I would never see the sun through that window, since it faces northwest and has a house adjacent to it across an eight-foot alley. I especially wouldn't see it so close to the winter solstice, since the sun's path takes it on such a low trajectory. Since the moon's path is fairly close to the sun's, I wouldn't have expected to have seen it through that window either. Yet there it was.

Seeing the moon, I had a number of conflicting feelings, which taken collectively could be considered a sense of wonder. There was a curiosity, but there was also a deep, though hardly overpowering, feeling of dread. Intellectually, I knew that my own experience was limited and that the moon, of all the "wandering" stars, strays most from the ecliptic, but I couldn't shake the sense that something might be very wrong. I walked outside to see if I simply was suffering from a mistake in perspective, but outside I had the same response. It wasn't until I went online and confirmed that the moon was especially separated from the ecliptic that my rational mind was able to overcome fully a more primitive fear of apocalypse.

Second, my wife and I spent a little time in Biloxi last week on a little vacation for just the two of us. Again, I found myself experiencing a divide between my intellect and my imagination. Intellectually, I knew that the cards and the dice are simply random events with patterns but no larger purpose. In some of the games, however, especially craps, I simply could not avoid superstition. Once when my wife and I were on an especially good roll, I found myself repeating, upon the throw of the dice, the same phrase, for fear that I would be the one responsible were our luck to run out. I knew better, and it didn't matter.

Make of this what you will.

Sunday School

2004-12-26T16:46:00.000-05:00

Sunday School
I'm not a big fan of Christmas, as I've written in previous years, so I am tempted to write along those lines again, but I've decided instead to give a summary of a "sermon" I delivered about three months ago to my tiny congregation. There is nothing remarkable about my having given a sermon; most of us in the congregation take turns in giving a Sunday message. What some might consider a deficiency in spiritual leadership, we like to think of as low overhead. Anyway, here it is:

In the book of Genesis, God curses Adam and Eve (after the fall) with toil, suffering, and death. These curses are consistent with other ancient mythologies. In the Mesopotamian myths, for example, the gods create human beings to alleviate them from their heavy burden of work. Hard toil, it would seem, is our lot, and happy we are to have moments of respite. The Sabbath is a great blessing.

I do not take any of these stories to be historically accurate and, more importantly, I reject the spirit behind them as well. Work and suffering are neither curses nor the consequences of sin. I would say instead that our capacity for suffering comes from our nature proper, not just our fallen nature. We have evolved as creatures who feel pain more acutely than we feel pleasure, and for longer periods of time too. We tire of particular pleasures all too quickly, but it is very difficult for us to become desensitized to the things that make us suffer.

From the perspective of evolution, this design feature of our psyche is largely a plus, in that our sensitivity to pain keeps us constantly working to improve our conditions. I'm guessing that a creature that is easily self-satisfied would be at a disadvantage in the struggle for existence. Pleasure is essential, else we would probably not strive after anything at all, but fleeting pleasure is probably best.

In short, nature has designed us for survival, not happiness.

Nature, then, is not enough, and must be overcome. Nor is our condition a consequence of sin so, whatever the benefits of avoiding sin might be, we should not expect that avoiding sin will solve for us the problem of our unhappiness.

Jesus saves. This is the gospel, the good news. Whether you accept the news or not, however, there is a point that should be observed, namely, that there is an interest in this good news at all. That good news should be at the forefront of the Biblical narrative runs contrary to our nature, for it is our nature to be more sensitive to the bad news than to the good. Consider, for example, the nightly news. The great majority of its stories will be about things gone wrong or things about to. Some news sources make a conscious effort to include positive stories as well, but it is not natural for writers to look for those stories, and these are not the stories readers want most either. Frankly, such stories rarely seem very serious. We call them "feel-good" with the assumption that anything that feels good can't be too important for us to pay attention to.

Somehow, the gospels pull off this good news. Somehow, our mind/soul/brain/psyche (you name it) is drawn to them seemingly in spite of its own evolution. Whatever we may think of the good news itself, we should learn this about ourselves.

I must confess that I am as skeptical about the Biblical account of the world to come as I am about the Genesis account of its origins. If the good news were simply the hereafter, I don't think I'd be very moved, if for no other reason than that the problem of happiness seems just as much a problem for that world as for this one. If the gospels cannot say more than that there is life eternal, why should I believe that to be anything more than an extension to our suffering?

Christianity is often credited with introducing, for better or worse, a linear notion of time, i.e., that our existence finds its meaning in something that lies ahead of us. I am drawn instead to the vision of the Christian mystics, who take very seriously Christ's claim that the kingdom of God is in our midst. God became incarnate, meaning that the world to come has already been made real, if only in one person. Even when Jesus speaks of his return, the point of emphasis is that each of our moments count, because you never know when He will return like a thief in the night. Sufficient is the day.

The hope I take from the gospels is of the possibility of joy. Joy is an affirmation of what is. Joy is not identical to pleasure and can coexist with pain. You can rejoice at a funeral, taking stock of a life well-lived and which continues to bear fruit after its passing. Joy is eternal, not because we only find our joy in the permanent, but because in joy we triumph over our natural temporality, that restlessness which forgets the past, devalues the present, imagining that the next pleasure will be the one that finally satisfies us.

Dualism

2004-12-16T09:10:00.000-05:00

Dualism
Descartes is everybody's favorite whipping boy, for various reasons, a prominent one being his radical separation of the body and the mind. Descartes himself faced the difficulty of reuniting what he divided, as the human being seems a composite of both body and mind interacting with one another, and his answer of the pineal gland might be taken as a joke were Descartes not such a sincere fellow.

Nonetheless, we ought to admit that the modern world reflects Descartes' insight, as can be seen in the division of the university into the humanities and the natural sciences. There are countless endeavors to cross this divide. The sciences make the attempt through experimental psychology and cognitive science, and the humanities, less often, make the attempt by trying to show science as a social construct and just one more endeavor at interpreting reality. These efforts are largely forced, however, and each side could give them up with little risk to its own activities. We will know that Descartes has been refuted when this division of studies seems just as archaic as the ancient division of mathematics, logic, and rhetoric.

This all came to mind because recently I have been thinking that maybe I need some kind of exercise equipment to help me get into better shape. Since I don't play hockey much anymore, I don't get a lot of exercise beyond the two short walks I take with the dogs. Basically, I don't have as much energy as I would like. I also haven't cut back on my eating, so I fear the inevitable expansion. Of course, no one actually uses exercise equipment for more than a few months, but I'm not letting that get in the way of my deliberations.

How thoroughly have I divided my mind from my body! I need to exercise because I live a largely sedentary existence whose only serious physical demands are connected to my need to think clearly for extended periods of time. As I fall out of shape, I become fatigued more easily, and so I can't engage in the mental activity that is important to me.

The problem goes beyond exercise. If I reflect on my patterns of eating and drinking, it becomes clear that I have developed habits that are directly related to getting my mind properly active for a very specific time frame: the morning to early afternoon period in which I teach. I caffeinate myself in the morning and use a large lunch as a psychic reward for my morning's labors. After lunch I am largely useless, and remain that way until a narrow time frame from 7-9 pm.

A piece of evidence that my regimen is tailored for such narrow purposes is that, on those rare days when I really do need to engage in physical labor, I change from the regimen entirely. In that case, I make sure that I eat early, but fairly lightly, taking in only a modest amount of caffeine. If I were to attempt much physical exertion from my normal routine, I would probably get dizzy and have the shakes.

My life of the mind is not very conducive to the health of my body, which is shortsighted, because my strength of mind is ultimately dependent on my physical strength. "Ultimately" here is a long time; I've had my regimen for quite a while, and I predict that I could continue to have it for quite a while until I reached a point of crisis. Perhaps I could continue it beyond even that, since a consequence of increased fatigue is a low-level state of depression where nothing seems very important and minor pleasures suffice to make it through the day.

To overcome my mind/body dualism, I would have to be able to conceive of the teaching life as itself a kind of physical existence. Nietzsche pulled this off by doing his most serious thinking while walking. I am confident, however, that this solution will not work for me. I pace while I teach to slow my mind down, to distract me from becoming distracted, not to make my thought more profound. Besides, Nietzsche was given to skirmishes, which were probably encouraged by his ambling, but I am not so suited for that style. For better or worse, I am too stolid for that.

If Descartes is to be faulted, I would blame him for treating an insight of his and our time as an eternal truth of the human condition. The ancients don't seem to have had this problem of radically dividing mind and body, at least not until Augustine. I suspect a time will come again when this division makes less sense, although we will probably need to adjust our notion of body as much as our notion of mind. It will take people smarter than me to figure that out. Nonetheless, I will do my part and try to resolve the division within myself, without any appeal to a gland, pineal or otherwise.

Yikes

2004-12-14T16:33:00.000-05:00

Yikes
Following a link from Tim Blair, I found this posting from Michael Moore. Moore is trying to argue that the Democrats don't need to move toward the right, that the country is moving toward the left but that Americans don't throw out sitting Presidents during wartime, so forth and so on. What caught my attention, however, is this letter from a social worker that he included in his post:

Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the ‘new’ language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?"

And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.

They will tell you: Every single day.

The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are looped into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.

...How to break free? Again, the answer is quite simple.

First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don't do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don't do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less if you don't resist and fight back.

Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 57 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you've learned, and that you aren't going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 57 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it's better than the abuse.

...Don't let him dictate the terms or frame the debate (he'll win, not because he's right, but because force works). Sure, we can build a better grassroots campaign, cultivate and raise up better leaders, reform the election system to make it fail-proof, stick to our message, learn from the strategy of the other side. But we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, "loose,” irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct. We have the mandate of the world to back us, and the legacy of oppressed people throughout history.

It is easy to overestimate the importance of Michael Moore and his followers, but it is also easy to see why there has been a call for the Democrats to renounce Moore as well. From Moore's point of view, as expressed by this social worker, politics is not possible. The persuasion of the Republicans is identical to violence, as framing the debate is the same as force.

How do you identify a Democrat, according to this rationale? You look for the victims. This kind of thinking is utter crap and, as I said shortly after the election, a serious disservice to Kerry and most of the people who voted for him. (And, for that matter, to people who really have been victimized by others.) My mother was a lifelong Democrat, but I don't remember her ever being a victim. You don't have to be a victim to think we should show more concern for the environment and working conditions. And if the Democrats do start thinking of themselves as simply a party of victims, they will get their rear ends handed to them election after election, because victimhood does not describe the majority of Americans.

A Thought

2004-12-10T08:05:00.000-05:00

A Thought
I will not presume to know if the war in Iraq is being pursued in the best manner possible (here is a non-Sullivan conservative critique of the war effort that is worth some time looking over), but the criticisms that Bush and Rumsfeld are too insular do not move me. If I were in either men's position, I would want people attuned to the media, but I would severely limit my own exposure. Who could keep a clear head amidst all that chatter? To borrow a metaphor from my wife, it's like trying to drink water from a fire hydrant. There is a difference too between self-examination and self-doubt. The first is necessary, the second paralyzing. Finding someone who can assist you with the former without provoking the latter is no small task, which is partly why the classical political writers spend time on seemingly trivial matters such as what constitutes a good advisor to the court.

Folly

2004-12-05T22:41:00.000-05:00

Folly
In my last post I joked about Nietzsche being ultimately too intense for me, but I was telling the truth too. I grow weary of self-development.

The world is intense enough. We think sometimes that we live in an age that values peace more than the warrior societies of previous times, but our world keeps our nervous systems at too high a level of excitation for there to be anything like peace. Persuasion seems more virtuous than force, so we are proud of our democratic traditions, but persuasion takes a lot more energy. Equality and peace of mind are not compatible. Likewise, we find ourselves encouraged constantly to improve ourselves at any number of tasks, whether it be our jobs or our consumption. I am as caught up in this insanity as much as anyone.

My nineteen month old son is not disadvantaged in this way yet. Tonight we played in his room for about an hour before he went to bed. As he grew tired, he was very peaceful. We looked at a book about animal sounds and tried them all out; he could moo like a cow already, but enjoyed the ssss of the snake for the first time. At one point, his juice cup was empty, at which point he looked at me, pointed into the hallway, and said "water?", a word I did not know that he knew. I could tell throughout the evening that he was enjoying the shared world that we made through play and the rudiments of speech.

I enjoyed it too, of course, but at no point was I entirely free of an impatience to get him to bed so that I could move on to..., well, I don't know exactly. I feel like I am being robbed, or maybe robbing myself. Were I to watch the same scene in a movie, I would be able to give it my complete attention, and I would be moved. Had I videotaped the moment, I suspect that five years from now I would look upon it fully engaged. And as I write about it now, I am not distracted. This is a corruption of the soul.

A couple of weeks ago I read the President saying that history would judge the war in Iraq positively. I think he's probably right, but what a peculiar way of defending yourself, as if we could speak more clearly about today by imagining ourselves speaking about today from some point in the future. Even in Homer the heroes imagine the stories that will be told of them long afterword. Achilles seems, at times, to understand the absurdity in such an existence, but apparently he couldn't successfully imagine an alternative. Only in Hades does he grasp the matter properly, but a realization that only occurs in the shadowy underworld (including this blog) is not much of a realization at all.

Maybe mirrors and cameras steal your soul after all.

Nietzsche

2004-12-03T19:30:00.000-05:00

Nietzsche
Over at the Corner last weekend there was quite a bit of back and forth about whether a conservative could be heavily influenced by Nietzsche. Since I think that I satisfy both conditions, perhaps I can take a stab at showing what Nietzsche has to teach us.

First, a critical eye toward history. Conservatives are an interesting lot: they can detect all the ways in which this country has deviated from the Founding Fathers but somehow still imagine that the Christianity they practice is essentially identical to the old-time religion of the early church. If we think the past has something to teach us, let's not approach it from a position of faith, or we will surely just see ourselves simply reflected within it. Instead, we should arm ourselves with anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, and mythology. Let's not assume that what is most obvious to us is also eternally true.

There is a kind of conservative who understands this point instinctively. We defend our own not because it is clearly the superior, but because it has cultivated us and gives us the best hope of finding our way. Wherever we go, we must start from ourselves.

Second, an awareness that the cultivation of strength is more important than alleviation of suffering. Conservatism, to my mind, should show discrimination toward what it tries to conserve. If we only imitate our ancestors, we fall short of them, for they did not simply imitate those who came before them. Our adulthood, our maturity, comes from taking the reigns ourselves. We look to the past then to identify our strengths. Perhaps we can find new strengths, but we will always know best the strengths we have already. As an American conservative, I see the power of a commercial culture and have respect for it. Were I a Swedish conservative, I might be happy that this commercial culture has not yet taken full root everwhere.

I sometimes run into the claim that a society should be judged by how it treats its lowest members. I find this repulsive. Ancient cultures would expose (kill) their disabled infants, and I cannot fault them for it. We act otherwise, and we are right to do so, but we do so not because we are morally superior but because we are superior in wealth and technology. Those who think we are too materialistic and too indifferent to the poor and the ill should leave the hard thinking to others better suited for it.

Finally, to trust our instincts. Conservatism is a form of rationality, i.e., a form of reason-giving, but conservatives should be aware of how often words fail us. I can only speculate as to why I shouldn't sleep with my close relatives and run around naked. Nonetheless, I don't experience these ancient taboos as a burden; they have become second nature to me. I believe that I should love my neighbor, as Christ commanded, but I can't really say what He meant. I can say that it has worked for me, insofar as I have been able to live up to it, but I can't say exactly how. (Perhaps, as Nietzsche might point out, the ways that I haven't been able to live up to it have worked for me as well, and I suspect he would be right!)

There are limits both to my conservatism and to my attachment to Nietzsche. As to the former, while I wouldn't call myself a futurist, I am deeply interested in new forms of social organization and new ways in which we will master nature, and I am generally optimistic about all of it. As to the latter, to use the language of the stoners, Nietzsche is just a little too intense, man. I want to overcome myself as much as the next guy, I suppose, but I'm not interested in working that hard. I'll let my overcoming come to me, and call it the grace of God.

Yes, Again

2004-11-24T19:51:00.000-05:00

Yes, Again
Yesterday Andrew Sullivan wrote the following:

Here's a frank argument by one Allan Carson, conceding what is now obvious: it is very hard to hold the line against civil marriage for gay couples on the grounds that they cannot procreate. The reason is that civil marriage is available to any straight couple, regardless of their willingness or ability to have chidren. And this national consensus is now decades old....

...The basic problem for the anti-gay marriage forces is that they are upholding a marital standard for gays that no one any longer upholds for straights. And this obvious inequality - recognized even by Scalia, for example - cannot withstand judicial scrutiny under any reasonable standard of equal treatment under the law. Thats why I think it's hyperbole to describe the Massachusetts court of judicial "activism." The argument of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was that gays couldn't marry because they couldn't procreate. Once it was obvious that this standard did not apply to heterosexuals, the court had no choice but to strike down the inequality. It was not a radical decision at all. It was an inescapable one. And that's why even a conservative court like Alaska's upheld it. And that's why you really do have to amend a state constitution to prevent its guarantees of equality from being applied to gay citizens.

The social right's intellectually honest option, then, is obvious. And Carlson deserves praise for airing it. In order to prevent gays from marrying, the state must deny non-procreative straight couples from having the full rights of civil marriage. Maybe these non-reproducers can have civil unions until they reproduce. Maybe they can get married, but have their licenses revoked after five years if no babies are forthcoming.

...And when you see the issue this way, you can see why the current effort to focus only on excluding gay citizens is so unfair. If non-procreative, companionate marriage is the civil norm, then you simply don't have a case against gay couples having marriage licenses. And if you keep this standard for straights, while forcing gays alone to bear the burden of your battle against four decades of marital evolution, then you are being deeply, deeply unfair.

Did I read correctly Sullivan saying that "you really do have to amend a state constitution to prevent its guarantees of equality from being applied to gay citizens"? Wasn't this the very same guy who told us that the FMA was unnecessary? Who praised federalism on the premise that each state could work this out for itself? Would that he had told us he meant each state Supreme Court!

My main point, however, lies elsewhere. Sullivan uses the social acceptability of childless heterosexual marriage as evidence that "non-procreative, companionate marriage is the civil norm." He also suggests that, to be fair, any restrictions against gays concerning marriages should be applied to heterosexual couples as well, perhaps granting marriage certificates only when a couple reproduces.

This is all perfectly rational on its face, but it also involves a peculiar cruelty. While there are plenty of marriages that are intentionally childless, most of the childless marriages that I know of are simply cases where the couple could not manage to conceive. My wife and I are one such couple, in fact, but we decided to adopt. Adoption isn't for everyone, however. Reconciling oneself to not being a parent, to being the end of a lineage, is no trivial matter. It can shake up your whole sense of your life, and it brings some marriages to an end. I have a friend who has been married for twenty years and who has just decided in the last few years or so that he wants children, but his wife understandably does not, partly because of her age and partly because of her career. He is being torn apart.

I doubt then that these couples are happy being used as examples to prove that "non-procreative, companionate marriage" is the norm. To suggest furthermore that these couples be denied the status of marriage because of their infertility is to add insult to injury. (Yes, I know that Sullivan was mainly referring to the arguments of others, but he applauds the logic.)

It is entirely consistent that the fundamental purpose of marriage can be childraising without demanding that every marriage be procreative. As long as the institution primarily serves that purpose, there is no reason to deny it to others who may find other purposes as well. I'm even open to including gay marriage on similar grounds, although I am reluctant to admit an entire community that expresses little interest in the effort of raising future generations. But to accept gay marriage on the grounds that "non-procreative, companionate marriage is the civil norm" is out of the question.

Headlines

2004-11-23T19:38:00.000-05:00

Headlines
I was looking at Google news, and found these headlines in relation to Dan Rather's resignation:

Miami Herald: Rather Announcement Sudden, Long Expected (registration needed)

Most things are.

and Iowa Channel.com: Iowans Sad, Happy Dan Rather Will Step Down

Why are they so sad if he's so happy? Another reason to change the primaries.

and ABC News: Rather Again Finds Himself As News Maker

Isn't this why he had to resign in the first place?