tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67177172024-03-13T06:03:16.537-07:00De Nihilo NihilTyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.comBlogger344125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-11737440239031023252023-11-11T10:57:00.001-08:002023-11-11T10:57:33.723-08:00Should we not, at least, enjoy the wake?<p><span style="font-size: medium;"> <span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman; text-align: justify;">Fernando is off on a week-long trip to Argentina. His mom’s eightieth birthday is today, so he flew home to surprise her. Opportunities have to be seized when they present themselves.</span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Of course, Argentina is in crisis. It has been for much of the time that we’ve been together—a few days over twenty-seven years—and, honestly, for most of his life. It’s still almost unbelievable to me that he grew up in a dictatorship or that I’ve walked and talked, with him, with women who lost their children to that dictatorship’s “dirty war”.</span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Now the crisis is financial and political. Inflation is out of control. The peso is worth about a tenth of a cent, while it wasn’t that many years ago that it was pegged to exactly one dollar. There is a second round in the presidential elections coming where the people will choose between someone much too tied to the current clientelist left-of-center regime and a madman who worships Murray Rothbard and hungers after the good old days of the junta. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">But, Fernando tells me, the restaurants are full and people are out and about enjoying their lives, even as they complain about the disastrous times in which they live. That’s the way it’s always been, at least since we’ve been together: so many amazing—and meat- and wine-filled—dinners over conversation late into the night about the never-fulfilled promise of the Argentine. I’ve rarely met anyone there who didn’t see clearly the national situation, but I’ve even more rarely met anyone who was unable to enjoy a meal and time spent with friends.</span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I think they’re getting something right. One way or another, we are all heading to our doom. Every life, every human pursuit, every love is a tragedy. They all end, one way or another, badly. At a minimum, they all end in death and grief. </span></span></p><p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p>
<p style="font-family: Palatino; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font-style: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Palatino-Roman;"><span style="font-size: medium;">That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t enjoy what we have when we have it. The funeral and burial are always going to be dismal affairs, but should we not, at least, enjoy the wake?</span></span></p>Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-15681915079283321932022-12-13T15:54:00.002-08:002022-12-13T15:54:38.695-08:00Cultivation and the small life<p style="text-align: justify;"> When I was a teenager, my mom sang in our parish choir. One night each week they practiced. I think I remember that it was Wednesday after the evening mass. I would go to mass and then stay in church reading or doing homework during their practice—sometimes, I would take a long walk around town. As much as I sing, I have never been much good, so there was little temptation for me to join in.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">When practice was over, a small group of choir members, mostly somewhere in age between my parents and grandparents, would go to the local Dairy Queen for burgers or ice cream and an hour or two of gossip. I usually went along. I was a strange child and adolescent.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">The Dairy Queen was usually pretty busy on those nights, mostly with people who had been at other weeknight meetings at other churches around my small hometown. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">There was one couple I remember almost always being there when we’d arrive. They were almost always there when we left, too. They were an older married couple, in their fifties or sixties. That is, they seemed older to me then. I really can’t remember whether they were formally married, but they had been together for decades, so it was as good as if they were. He was part of the custodial staff at the junior high I’d attended. I don’t know whether she worked or not. They were both a little “slow”, as people said at the time. They were probably a little poorer than we were: being an assistant janitor for decades didn’t pay all that well. Like my grandmother’s family, they were Appalachian. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">They would sit in a booth across from each other, each with a cup of coffee. It seems to me that they rarely had much else (but memories fade and reformulate over more than three decades). They were always dressed up, though not well. He would always wear a tie and often a jacket. She would be in a long skirt or a dress, her hair in two braids on the side. Their clothes were old and worn, but they clearly made an effort on their appearance. They’d almost certainly come from some church or other. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">Between them, they would have a stack of several piano exercise books. They weren’t particularly advanced books, certainly nothing beyond what I had gotten to in the years I had taken lessons. One of the books would be open and they would be studying it intently. They would pore over the pieces and talk to one another about the tune and notes and how to play it. They rarely, if ever, spoke to anyone else beyond exchanging greetings. They were engrossed in the sheets in front of them.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">I don’t know what made me think of them this week. Maybe it was because I was talking about the meaning of life in one of my classes. Whatever the reason, there’s something instructive in that little bit of their lives that I know about and that I’ve recounted here. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">They were, by every normal worldly measure, people who did not matter very much. In most ways they were on the edge of society even in a place as out of the way and insignificant as my hometown. They were dedicating their evenings to something that neither one of them was ever going to become very good at. I don’t even know that they had a piano at home to play, and they weren’t looking at difficult pieces. That activity, as little as it mattered to anyone else, mattered to them. They had a real artistic interest and they showed a real dedication to it and to getting better at it, to understanding the playing of music. </p><p style="text-align: justify;">They were cultivating themselves. That cultivation seems to have created a beauty and sweetness in their lives, even if no one else could share in it or benefit from it. From the outside, it certainly seemed that they were leading small lives, but small lives can be flourishing ones as much as great lives can be. Sometimes, it may just be enough to tend one’s one garden and tend it well. </p>Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-86316181877070065122022-07-02T10:10:00.002-07:002022-07-02T10:10:51.774-07:00The justification of the state<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcH0W3KbkkE7gT5oQLTptkGCPRRVXOawMrggq-pXxkMzZDRlZzNH-7GSgP7SJkqtlWz2VlOicfSK9c3yp4BizxePZs7bcdoMJ--Kevn3bxmTZ5DdfvYWYePu6y2A_UA-8eRpfcj-SLX9W4uGU4e_YHBdkfABdtZzI3-JoOeXlV6WwJ1mL7Tio/s524/F9BC376B-FA5C-4DEF-93EE-39307AF61041.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="524" data-original-width="372" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcH0W3KbkkE7gT5oQLTptkGCPRRVXOawMrggq-pXxkMzZDRlZzNH-7GSgP7SJkqtlWz2VlOicfSK9c3yp4BizxePZs7bcdoMJ--Kevn3bxmTZ5DdfvYWYePu6y2A_UA-8eRpfcj-SLX9W4uGU4e_YHBdkfABdtZzI3-JoOeXlV6WwJ1mL7Tio/s320/F9BC376B-FA5C-4DEF-93EE-39307AF61041.jpeg" width="227" /></a></div> The state is a form of organized violence or the threat of such violence. This is among its essential and defining features. I can imagine a community or a society that didn’t have the power to punish or to fight against enemies—there are pacifist communities, after all—but I can’t imagine such a state. I don’t think that’s just a failure of imagination on my part. At least in one long political tradition, police and defensive powers are definitive of the state; I’m thinking of Plato’s auxiliaries, the power to punish in Aquinas, the role of the Sovereign in Hobbes, the magistrate and the powers<br /> he’s been given in Locke, …. What is law without the power of compulsion? <p></p><p>Other than those pacifists, most people hold that, at least in some cases, violence can be justified. There aren’t many people who would deny the right to violence in self-defense. I hold the view that self-defense isn’t sufficient to justify taking a life. From conversations with students and my husband, I know that this is not a very common view—it might even seem outlandish—but even I think mere self-defense justifies some lesser forms of violence. (For what it’s worth, I think other-defense alone can justify taking a life.)</p><p>So, if violence can, in some cases, be justified, the most important question about the state in general or any particular state or particular state action—in ethics and politics, it is really the particular and concrete rather than the general and abstract that matters—is whether it is justified in this case, here and now. That is the most important question, the question of moral status. Whether it’s justified or not is not, of course, the only question: it is often prudentially advisable to comply when threatened with violence, even if that violence isn’t justified, maybe especially then.</p><p><br /></p>Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-49201794711762824772021-12-21T15:44:00.001-08:002021-12-21T15:44:09.511-08:00Some thoughts inspired by the end of another semester<p> After such a long time out of the regular face-to-face classroom—here’s hoping it wasn’t just an interlude before a return to Zoom—it was regenerating to be back in the classroom with real people with real bodies, even if I couldn’t quite see their faces. Maybe because I was a bit out of practice or just because I was as tired at the end of the semester as all my students so obviously were, the last day in most of my classes was just a here-have-some-cookies-I-baked-and-let’s-chat-about-the-exam day. Students had few questions about the exam but in all of my classes a large proportion of those who came that last day stayed until the end of class time. I like to tell myself that they liked my company enough that they wanted a bit more of it. It’s much more likely that they liked the company of their fellows or that they just didn’t have anything else to do until the next period began.</p><p>One of my classes turned into an AMA. I used to take the approach that I would, under almost no circumstances, let students know my own views on anything, the better to <i>appear</i> evenhanded. As I’ve gotten older and had more years in the classroom, I’ve changed approaches. Now, I am more likely to let students know what views I think are most plausible or implausible. I still do my best to give the strongest arguments for those views that I think are wrong; in fact, I often give more charity to those I’m least sympathetic to and am more critical of those I find appealing. It’s best to trust the students to evaluate my presentation of different views with the background information of where I stand or which way I lean. Anyway, that’s what I’ve come to believe. This change was partly motivated by a student of probably close to a decade ago who asked me in class what I <i>professed</i>, since I was, after all, a <i>professor</i>. Of course, I’m not a professor, but merely an <i>instructor</i>, if I’ve got my current title right, but the point was a good one nonetheless.</p><p>So, I was answering questions ranging from what my favorite movie is to what ethical theory I think is closest to right to whether I believe in God or not. Answers to that last one probably disappointed half the class and surprised the other. I don’t know whether it’s because of the way faculty are presented in the contemporary media or because of dross like those <i>God Is Not Dead </i>movies, but students have very clear expectations for what sort of beliefs and ethical and political commitments their professors, especially those in the social sciences, liberal arts, and humanities, are likely to have. As with so much else of our contemporary culture, those commitments are, it seems, supposed to be derived from a very particular party political identity. </p><p>There’s something sad in this, I think, as there is in all pigeonholing. Assumptions about what other people must certainly believe make it harder to connect with them or to learn from them. It flattens others and removes from them their very reasonableness. It’s hard—and maybe harder than before—to see the person in one another, but we have to. </p>Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-6566905572575884552020-08-02T16:57:00.008-07:002020-08-02T17:02:56.600-07:00On political loyalty<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>During political campaigns, you see the expression of party loyalties. The way we live our lives online these days, even more during the slow, devastating burn of the pandemic, means that we publish those loyalties more broadly than the short-lived yard sign or the too-long-lived bumper sticker. And, in this era, campaign season is the only season. </font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Maybe because of the ubiquity of this political signaling, it seems we identify ourselves to ourselves and others in terms of party loyalty more than we used to. I don’t have proof that this is so, but when I was a young Hoosier, there was something slightly shameful about being heavily invested in a party. I remember my mom deriding another relative for being a “red-hot Republican” with the emphasis on “red-hot”. My grandma used to tell a story about a couple playing cards with (I think) her aunt and uncle during the Great Depression. Her uncle joked that someone ought to “take care” of Roosevelt. The other couple reported him to the government; that led to a fruitless, though frightening, investigation. The point of the story was that it was embarrassing to be more deeply committed to a party than to your friends and neighbors. Loyalty was due to your loved ones and your community and even your country, but not to something like a party. </font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>There is something suspect and confused in the very idea of party loyalty. I want to be clear that there is nothing wrong with commitment to values and principles and political goals; this is often—depending on the valued and principle and goals—admirable and good. But, values and principles and goals are only incidentally and contingently embodied in political parties. I think that Simone Weil was largely right in <i>On the Abolition of Political Parties</i> to identify the entire purpose of political parties as the gaining and maintenance of power. This means that a party may, at some points, include as a part of its platform some laudatory goal, like prison reform or support for families or the expansion of voting rights or some other policy that you think is right and good. They include it because doing so will mean power. Perhaps this is cynicism, or perhaps it is realistic. </font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The history of political parties—not just in this country—is one of changing positions, including central ones. How do you go from the Lost Cause politics of Woodrow Wilson through the Dixiecrats to the embracing of civil rights legislation among the Democrats? How do you go from the drive to preserve the union through federal power and unease about slavery to Reconstruction to the adoption of the “southern strategy” and the (selective) states’ rights and libertarian positions of the Republicans? How do parties flip on foreign intervention or trade? How do you get the fluid positions on same-sex marriage or abortion or guns that then calcify into partisan orthodoxies? You might claim that each party has come to realize through time what position its core commitments logically entailed. While there might be a few core beliefs that stand relatively firm, overall that’s too optimistic. </font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Party leaders are interested in building coalitions that give them power. This means adopting positions that will allow them to raise money and win elections. They adopt positions that allow them to build coalitions and some of those positions mean shedding other parts of their former coalitions. Partisan politicians mostly follow the trends they predict from the zeitgeist; rarely do they lead. Of course, there are crusading political reformers, but they are usually outside of the mainstream of their parties, if they identify themselves with one at all. Leading is left to others: activists, community leaders, the occasional thinker. The logic of a political party is Darwinian, as read by Nietzsche. That is, the party wants to survive and have power. There’s nothing more.</font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This is why there is something wrong with the idea of being loyal to a party. Since we’re stuck with parties, we should view them in terms of their utility. Because a party wants to survive, we can try to push it to adopt the positions that we take to be the morally and politically correct ones and, when one will work for more of those than the other, it makes sense to support that party. When it no longer does, it makes sense not to support it. </font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Our attitude to a political party ought to mirror a party’s attitude towards its members. That is, we ought to be mercenary: use it when it serves our interest and can be bent to our ends, but abandon when it no longer does. We absolutely ought not to feel a sense of loyalty to it, nor—and this is a more serious problem, perhaps—should we derive our belief about ends from a party. I ought never to believe anything “as a Republican” or “as a Democrat” or “as a Green” or “as a Democratic Socialist”, though it makes a good deal of sense to believe things as a republican or democrat or socialist or communalist or someone who cares about the environment. The latter are identities from which it makes sense to draw substantive conclusions precisely because they are tied up with substantive commitments about the good and ends, but the former are little more than team names. It’s sad when people feel loyal to a team that would gladly abandon their city for more lucrative pastures somewhere else and uses that fact to squeeze concessions from taxpayers. It’s say when people feel loyal to a party that would abandon their interests if it meant more votes. </font></p>
<p style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px; text-align: justify;"><font face="georgia"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Loyalty should be saved for things that have inherent, rather than merely instrumental value: friendships, loving relationships, the communities that nourish us. </font></p>Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-75078201337202659422020-06-05T13:34:00.000-07:002020-06-05T13:34:20.559-07:00Memorials<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Lambdin_P._Milligan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="223" data-original-width="164" height="320" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Lambdin_P._Milligan.jpg" width="235" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Memorials to slavery are in the news again as protestors tear them down and redecorate them with graffiti. We are seeing the old defenses of them as monuments to those who died for the Confederacy and to Southern history and culture, as we always do. Of course, the raison d’être of the Confederacy was the preservation of slavery: one need only read the instruments of secession. The Southern history and culture being celebrated is the history and culture of the defense of slavery. That is, they are just memorials to slavery. In the same way that we don’t and shouldn’t raise memorials to the architects of genocide, there is nothing right or appropriate in raising—or allowing to stand—memorials to the genocidal project of American slavery.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s easy, though, to think of this as a primarily Southern problem. It’s not—not even remotely. On the four sides of the county courthouse in my hometown in northern Indiana when I was growing up, there were plaques honoring prominent local citizens. After he was elected when I was in high school, two of those honored Dan Quayle, as a local son become Vice President. On the other two sides were plaques honoring a prominent local attorney of the mid- to late-nineteenth century named Lambdin P Milligan. He was honored for his part in <i>Ex parte Milligan</i>, in which it was decided that military commissions had no authority in areas where the civilian courts were still operating. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">What wasn’t mentioned on the plaque was why he had been arrested and tried in the first place. As a member of the Order of the American Knights, he had called for open rebellion against Lincoln’s government and had been involved in a plot to liberate Confederate prisoners-of-war.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">After the war, appeal and release from military prison, he returned to my hometown where he was received as a hero and had a successful, lucrative career as a lawyer. More than a century later, we were still honoring him. It wasn’t even the only monument to him. There was also, inexplicably and without context, a preserved part of his original property: a small stone hut that he had used to hold—or, so went the story—runaway slaves to be returned to the South. This was never presented as a blight on his name or the town, but just an interesting fact about both. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The hut, I’m told by my mom, has now been removed. This last year the current mayor had it dismantled in the night. Otherwise, I’m sure, there would have been protests to preserve the town’s (pro-slavery) heritage. </span></span></div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-21261667740652044332020-04-05T17:32:00.000-07:002020-04-05T17:32:27.431-07:00Which came first: the me or the we?<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">So, I am asked to stay home in order that the curve of the pandemic might be flattened. Businesses and parks are closed. Churches don’t meet. We’re dissuaded even from being outside much, unless it is in our own yards. Those of us who have no yards are to stay indoors as much as possible. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Already in week four (where I am) people are starting to bristle at the not-very-stringent conditions under which we are living. Some of this is a desire to see people again and to return to routine. I feel the same things. I want to joke around at the gym, I want to go out dancing, and I even want to go to a bar. One of those I would normally do daily, one only once or twice a year now, and the last almost never since I stopped tending bar myself.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Some of it, too, comes from a different place. People are saying that <i>they’re </i>willing to risk it, so why shouldn’t they be allowed to gather or party or open their businesses or patronize those of others? Those who are most at risk can opt to stay at home. Beyond the assumption that we can know who is most likely to become infected or whom is most likely to be seriously affected, this is the voice of the <i>individual</i>. We can, it says, each look out for ourselves and, really, that is the only responsibility we have. I’m not saying I’m immune to this voice, either.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The response to this individualism is to talk of our obligations to the community, but such talk is dissonant to our ears. I think this is so because of the way we have resolved the tension between the individual and community through a peculiar metaphysics of community.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">At least since Locke in the English-speaking world—maybe it’s Hobbes in his state of nature—we’ve taken society or the community to be metaphysically and conceptually posterior to the individual. Individuals exist first and then they come together voluntarily to make up societies and communities and states. Those groupings have whatever value they do only because of the service they are able to offer the individuals who make them up. So, the metaphysical priority leads to an ethical one. Even Locke’s account of the rights of parents and obligations of children makes it appear that the family exists for the production of more individuals.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">That the causal and historical direction goes from community to individual is obvious. There was a different we before there could be an I. We’re born into and raised by communities. They form us, for better or worse. They sustain us. Whatever some survivalists and perpetual adolescents may think, we are not the kinds of beings that can survive without communities. Of course, we leave some kinds of communities behind us, too. Our actions profoundly affect what those communities are like, so that we are at least causally responsible for them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Those facts lead some to reverse the metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical priorities. There can be no individuals without communities in which they come to be, they say,. Individuals inherit all the good that exists within their communities and leave traces in the communities they inhabit. It is the community that is most important; it is the community that transcends. So, communities have rights to which individual rights are subsidiary.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">That latter approach is so foreign to our way of thinking to appear self-evidently wrong. I don’t put much weight on what is self-evident, but I do think the solution lies somewhere else.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">The individualistic observation that communities are made up of individuals and must be evaluated in terms of the good they do to individuals is correct. This is why we can talk of bad and good societies, of nourishing and toxic communities and groups. The communitarian insight that there are no individuals without communities and that individuals benefit from them and owe something for that benefit and to the community that will succeed them is as correct. This is why we can see people as ungrateful and why we excoriate the anti-social.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is no priority, but only mutuality. The individual and the community are together in their birth, the individual is an individual only within a community and the community exists only because of the individuals who make it up. The community owed nourishment and nurturing and support to the individual and the individual owes concern and respect and effort and even resources to the community, both conceived as a collection of individuals and something that transcends those particular individuals. A community is something for which it makes sense to sacrifice, but only if that communities feeds and makes possible the flourishing of the individual. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It’s this lack of metaphysical, conceptual, and ethical priority that makes so difficult questions about what I owe to my community in times of crisis and what is owed to me. As this crisis deepens, those questions are only going to become more difficult, but recognizing the tension as necessary—unable to be definitively resolved in either direction—is essential to arriving at the right answers and right balance. </span></span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-62033363492697630122020-03-25T16:51:00.002-07:002020-03-25T16:52:06.175-07:00Astrology<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Economists are our astrologers. Like the astrologers of old, they prognosticate with reference to undoubtedly real phenomena: exchange and markets and production for them and the motion of stars and planets for the other. Sometimes their investigations increase our knowledge. Astronomy grew because of the astrologers’ need for accurate maps of the heavens and economists occasionally teach us new things, though it seems many economic discoveries are discoveries in the same sense as were Columbus’s travels. Like the astrologers of old, they are trusted by the rulers of this world whose decisions are rarely taken without their advice and approval. Like the astrologers of old they are held to be sages with access to esoteric knowledge. Like the astrologers of old, their pronouncements have the power to radically alter our lives. More and more it seems like the astrologers of old, they have no idea what they’re talking about.</span></span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-14108111612241158852020-03-20T18:38:00.000-07:002020-03-20T18:44:23.526-07:00Against a return to normal<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What we all want right now is a return to normal. That makes total sense, but I think it’s partly a mistake. Of course, I want to be able to see my students again. I don’t want to have people avoid getting within six feet of me. I want grocery stores with food in them. I want to see Violeta to get my hair cut. I want to shoot the shit with my colleagues in person. I very much want to go to the gym. I want local stores to open back up and survive. I want people to keep their jobs. I want people not to be sick or be afraid of getting sick. I want people not to die.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">A crisis like this, though, can be an inflection point and we shouldn’t come out of it without staying focused on what was wrong with normal and what we shouldn’t return to. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We have a healthcare system that is inadequate to our society’s quotidian needs—let alone those that arise in a pandemic—and that is inaccessible to too many of us. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We’ve become inured to the fact that people live on our streets, in our canyons, under bridges, becoming visibly shocked by this only when we can score a partisan point, but all the while ignoring that these are people with as much dignity as we have, but whom we allow to live in ways we would find too horrible for our pets.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We have an economy that serves the most well off, who are quite happy to accept—that is, demand— the help of government but are unwilling to do anything for society absent their direct benefit. As the phrase has it, they socialize risk and privatize profit. We’ve come to accept that we live for the economy, rather than believing the economy exists to serve all human flourishing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We’ve internalized the lesson that we are all and always in competition. We’ve created an all-encompassing Hobbesian—or, is it just capitalistic—mindset whereby what matters most is that I have more than enough toilet paper or food or money or space or cars or whatever even if it means that others basic needs go unmet.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We’ve all but killed off any sense of a community, of an us. We complain about social distancing not because we lose the kind of social contact that we need to thrive, but because we can’t do the things we really like to do. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We take no responsibility in either the sense of blame or that of obligation, but instead look to blame and vilify others—Others—and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. After all, no one’s luck is my fault and I pulled myself up by the bootstraps that I myself fashioned out of nothing.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We admire and celebrate the shallowest of celebrities and confuse fame with depth and integrity and wisdom. We treat wealth as if it were virtue.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We confuse our own worth and that of others with what they have.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We engage in politics that is little more than <i>ressentiment</i>. We’re happy enough if we see the right people hurt, even if there is no benefit to us.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Of course, we aren’t all or always like this. I know that, at least sometimes, I am. I hope when this is all over and things return to normal that we can leave those parts of normal behind. </span></span></div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-43010944341790915532020-03-20T09:40:00.001-07:002020-03-20T18:12:27.909-07:00Time for reflection<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In times like these it’s worth asking whether the philosophy by which we live is up to the task. Different philosophies have met that challenge for different people. I’m not going to plop for one particular one here.</span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But, the consumerism that has driven so much of contemporary life isn’t it. </span></span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-67811985760580240462020-03-15T19:28:00.000-07:002020-03-15T19:37:09.745-07:00Festina lente<div style="font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In one of the essays he composed in the paralysis that preceded his death, Tony Judt described himself as a conservative <i>because</i> he was a leftist. That has stuck with me since I first read it. His idea was that radical changes are often worst for those at the bottom of society. Those with means can usually weather them. Even in a revolution, they are able to emigrate. Justice can never wait, but in every advance and every seeming progress, we should be aware of what may be lost and who may be harmed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I think about that partly because we have spent several decades worshiping disruption and innovation as if they were good things and as if those harmed by the new were responsible for not having kept up and now would just have to learn to live in the altered landscape. Learn to code!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;">I’m thinking about it particularly these days because I think we are on the cusp of the kind of massive disruption that changes everything. If COVID-19 is as bad as the models predict we are going to come out the other side into a very different world as different, I think, as the world of 1920 was to the world of 1914. </span></span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: large;">If that happens—or even if it doesn’t—those of us who come out relatively unscathed have an obligation to look out for and take care of those who are not well fit for what follows. It may well be a wild ride; we need to make sure everybody gets to the end. </span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-39152930206854888182019-09-12T14:21:00.000-07:002019-09-12T14:21:14.531-07:00Story Time<span style="font-size: large;">This week, I participated in a story-telling event at USD. The theme was "Bang," but that was to be interpreted however one wanted in the context of some personal story. Here is the prepared text—I diverged and embellished and cried—of that story:</span><br />
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When Professor Bowman asked if I’d be willing to tell a story, I said, “yes,” because that’s what I tend to do. I agreed to do Mortar Board’s Last Lecture one year without knowing what it was and went to the end of the year celebration for Beta without realizing that I was being honored. But, I didn’t know what story to tell. I have a lot of stories that I tell students in class, but those tend to be very short and everyone has heard them multiple times.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I finally figured out what to tell you today when I was reading <i>The Shining</i> at the end of the summer. I’m not going to tell you a horror story, but my story will be about a little boy and family and it partly takes place in Colorado.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And, I’m not sure the story is going to have the kind of bang the theme calls for, but it does deal with something that has hit me with a bang several times throughout my life.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>When I was a very small boy, my parents broke up. They never really should have married each other and everyone around them knew that before they got married. But they did and if they hadn’t, there’d be no me. So it’s a good thing, I suppose, that they did. They were separated when I was still a baby and divorced when I was two. Not long after they divorced, my dad moved out of our small hometown to the “big city” of Fort Wayne, Indiana, about a half hour away. I would visit him every other weekend and sometimes he would be in town seeing his family. But, already there was a good deal of distance between us.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>After a few years, he remarried and he and his new wife moved to Denver. The emotional distance was enhanced with physical distance.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The summer after kindergarten, he arranged for me to come and visit for two weeks. I should say that I have never liked being away from home. I still find even the best vacations difficult because I’m not in my own bed around my own things following my routine. Still, this was a big adventure for a little kid.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, my mom and grandparents drove me to the airport in Fort Wayne. I flew for the first time. This was when flying was a lot more pleasant than it is now: big seats, full meals with real plates and flatware, the whole deal. And, if you were a kid flying alone, you got wings and to visit the cockpit and the cabin crew checked up on you all of the time, like a VIP, all of it very exciting for six-year-old towheaded me. I remember being excited and I remember the man who sat next to me. He talked to me through the whole flight and entertained me. I remember him teaching me how to write my name in Korean, even though it must have been exasperating being seated next to a little kid.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Anyway, I got to Denver and my dad picked me up at the old Stapleton airport. I don’t remember much about the time I was there on that visit. I remember more about later trips, including one where the trip out was by Greyhound, but I do remember going to work with him a few times on that first trip. He was a schoolteacher, but he hadn’t found a teaching job yet, so, at the time, he was driving a bookmobile. I can still picture the old school bus that had been painted sky blue with a scene of clouds and balloons and filled with shelves of children’s books.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What I can remember vividly is how miserable I was. I didn’t like what I was fed; they made me eat breakfast and it always involved both eggs and syrup either on pancakes or waffles or French toast, none of which I was used to eating. I’m still not much for a daily breakfast. And, my dad’s wife really like to attempt Chinese food. Nothing was like I was used to and I wasn’t at home.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span> I cried. A lot. I cried when I was trying to fall asleep at night, but I also cried a lot during the day. I was homesick and there was nothing my dad could do about it. We aren’t a particularly demonstrative or talkative people; I don’t think he knew what to do or what to say. And, though we’re obviously related, we just weren’t family to each other.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>He had tried as well as he could, but it didn’t work. And, he was mad.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>We’ve gone through long periods, once almost two decades, where we haven’t talked to each other at all. But now we’re perfectly happy to be in the same room almost talking.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>So, he called my mom. That wasn’t easy. She had gone to the lake cabin of a coworker, a pretty big vacation for her. In the era before cellphones or even answering machines, it took some effort to get ahold of her and to arrange my early return. Instead of a two-week stay, I was on my way back home after just a week.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I remember getting home, after the flight and the drive from the airport, and getting back to my neighborhood. I grew up on a street that only ran two blocks between the two main streets in my small hometown. It was a quiet street and I was an only child of a single mother when that was still an uncommon thing, so I spent most of my free time going from house to house and hanging out with adults. Next door to us lived the Tacketts, Uncle Ben and Aunt Ginger, and their two daughters who used to watch me when mom was at work. Next to them were the Dolbys, who I called the Doblys. She taught me to read when I was three. There were other Dolbys across the street, his brother. Mrs. Johnson whose husband had gone to prison forty years before—a thing no one forgets in a small town—was directly across the street. She used to give me the toys out of cereal she bought for her visiting grandchildren. Then there was the house on the corner with old Mr Ray. He had had a stroke and I would walk over on summer nights and sit with him on their front porch and talk to him. He never talked back, but he’d smile at me with his eyes. And, I haven’t thought about him in four decades.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Anyway, the first thing I asked for when I got back home was to see Uncle Ben. I had gotten a new bicycle earlier in the year, for my birthday I think. It was a sweet red Schwinn, with a sparkled paint job. We’d gotten it for free because the owner of the bike shop had a habit of not cashing checks. But, the bike still had its training wheels. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">I wanted Uncle Ben because I wanted him to take them off. I wanted to really ride my bike. And, he did. And, I did. I don’t know whether I wanted to show that I was growing up even though I hadn’t been grown up enough to go away for two weeks, but it was super important to me to show that I could ride that bike.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It wasn’t just my mom that I had missed, though I’m sure my dad thought I was a mama’s boy. She lives in San Diego now, so maybe. It wasn’t just my house or my things or my routine. It was my family that was missing. And, that family wasn’t just people I was related to. It was the people around me who mattered and to whom I mattered. They were the people I belonged to. They were home.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Through most of my life, I’ve felt like I didn’t quite belong in the way I was supposed to, but there’ve always been people around who felt like, and were, family. At least sometimes, to bastardize Madonna, family’s where you find it. </span></span></div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-19688318772052036582019-08-24T14:42:00.000-07:002019-08-24T14:58:47.139-07:00Thoughts on jury duty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This last week I went to jury duty. I think I’ve been called four times now. Only once was I selected for a (civil) jury, a two-week experience that was a waste of the time of everyone involved. This time I was called to a courtroom together with seventy-two other people, but I was dismissed in a peremptory challenge on the second day. This last experience got me thinking about a number of things, some having to do with local circumstances, others with the way we think about the law more generally.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In San Diego, you can be called every year, though you get a three-year break if you are selected for a jury. When you get your summons, assuming you don’t ask for a delay or have an excuse, you have to show up at 7:45 AM at the courthouse downtown. You sit around for two hours, during which you watch a movie about the jury system bordering on fantasy and hear a short presentation by one of the judges and fill out a very short form. The actual randomized selection of people for jury selection doesn’t begin until almost 10:00 AM. Two hours are spent doing what could easily be done in twenty minutes on a computer at home or in a public library. Of course, this makes jury duty a burden, one that people with children or other responsibilities are likely to be unable to undertake, whatever claims we might want to make about civic duty.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>If someone is selected for a jury, they are reimbursed for their time, at a rate of $15 per day, starting on the second day. That is about enough to buy lunch in the vicinity of the court house. The first day you get nothing; likely this is because they make many more people show up than they could possibly need, because it all must be done in person, rather than online or on-call. There is no law in California that an employer must pay an employee for time they are on juries, so that means again that many, many people are simply unable to sit on juries. In San Diego, you also get reimbursement for travel, at a rate of $0.34 a mile, again starting on the second day. The first day, you’re on your own. There is also no free parking. Alternatively, you can get a transit pass for each day that you serve, again starting on the second day.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What effect does this have on the court system? It is obvious when you look around a court room after prospective jurors have been seated. In my courtroom the majority of prospective jurors fell into one of the three groups: college students, retirees, or middle-aged professionals. Almost all appeared to be upper-middle-class and the group skewed heavily white. San Diego is, however, a very diverse city and county. It was a room of lawyers, doctors, nurses, a few academics, executives, a whole bunch of engineers, and the retirees and students. Many others had been excused from service because of economic hardship. Those who remained are those who could <i>afford</i> to be there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The defendant in the case for which I was in the selection pool was a young, heavily tattooed Latino man who appeared to be working class. He didn’t look like much of anybody in the jury pool. Once anyone who had ever had a negative experience with police officers was removed for cause, the pool looked even less like the defendant.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>This all connects to the other thing I was thinking about during selection and after. Prospective jurors are asked again and again whether they can be objective and impartial. The answer that is expected is a resounding, “Yes.” A response of even, “I can try to be,” results in an admonishment from the judge. The pool is further instructed that they cannot feel or be guided by sympathy or feeling either for the defendant or his victims. Nothing about the appearances or backgrounds or anything else about any participants can have any bearing. They must be guided only by evidence. And, importantly, they cannot let any thought of possible punishments effect their judgments. Nor, of course, can they think about the law, only the facts. This was perhaps most striking when several prospective jurors who were lawyers, including one who was an Assistant Attorney General, were asked whether they would be able to look at the evidence as laypersons.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It seems to me that this is very high-minded bullshit, but it’s bullshit nonetheless. It is asking us to go behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance to make our judgments. How precisely will the lawyer cordon off her legal knowledge when hearing the case? How will the juror for whom tattoos are a sign of gang affiliation forget that? How will I make sure that my sympathies, identity, concerns about the justice of prisons, etc., do not touch on my judging the evidence? I don’t mean to say that I can’t work to minimize those effects, but I can’t do that by pretending that I am capable of absolute objectivity and impartiality, as if I were retreating to my heated room to consider the Evil Demon. Rather, I’ll have to be aware of my subjectivity to fight it. Pretending that I am capable of absolute objectivity and impartiality will only make me more likely to act on my unexamined prejudices. And, if we were capable of objectivity and impartiality, we wouldn’t need a jury of twelve. One would suffice or maybe three to be on the safe side. Nor would we be concerned that the jury be a jury of one’s peers. Any old people would do. This is absolutely essential, I think: if we are going to treat defendants as innocent until proven otherwise, they need to be judged by their peers. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>It’s not a jury of his peers that this case’s defendant ended up with. The economic incentives guarantee that it can’t be. In a system where the resources of the “people” are much greater than those of the public defender system that matters. He was at numerous disadvantages.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>In the end, I was dismissed. I had been Juror 36 and then I was briefly Juror 8 before the defense thanked me for my service and dismissed me. I don’t know whether it was because I had shared that family members of mine had been victims of crimes similar in some respects to those he was accused of or because a middle-aged, white, gay man who generally looks angry, in spite of his actual emotions, didn’t seem like a sympathetic juror. </span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>I don’t know what they outcome will be and he may very well be guilty, but I’m not more trusting in the fairness of our system—the orientation film explaining the benefits of our unique(!) system just wasn’t enough—especially towards those without power, wealth, and influence.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Some other time I’ll worry about what a reasonable doubt is. </span></div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-75739065745778194272019-01-29T13:04:00.000-08:002019-01-29T13:05:01.293-08:00Thinking about absurdity and individualism<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: "Helvetica Neue"; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z09ecZe4LZk/XFC_g6_oTaI/AAAAAAAAAhk/GNPOuZW2HewEWvrd9oS0p1bcW8V_ZGFdACLcBGAs/s1600/sartre.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="655" height="244" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-z09ecZe4LZk/XFC_g6_oTaI/AAAAAAAAAhk/GNPOuZW2HewEWvrd9oS0p1bcW8V_ZGFdACLcBGAs/s320/sartre.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">I was thinking this morning about the role of the absurdity of human life in the existentialism of Sartre and the absurdism of Camus and those around and influenced by and influencing them. At least for Sartre and Camus, the non-existence of God plays a large part in the account of absurdity. Because there is no God, there can be no objective meaning to our lives. Because there is no objective purpose—and because all our plans and accomplishments come to an end with our deaths and disappearance into nothingness—our lives are absurd. They serve no purpose. And, we are, at best, like dear old Sisyphus.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;">But, can we hold onto this kind of absurdity for more than a moment, if we avoid the modern trap of seeing ourselves as atomistic individuals? (I’ll merely mention here that there’s also something precious and luxurious in this flavor of concern with absurdity.) What I mean is just this: My life undoubtedly appears or is absurd if it begins <i>ex nihilo</i>—in effect, though not in fact—with my conception or birth or first <i>choice</i> and ends wholly and finally at my death. Leaving aside questions of religion and survival, this is an extremely impoverished idea of a human being or life. Regardless of whether there is a God or whether I go on in some personal way after death, I am part of something larger than myself. I come from a family and a community and I contribute to at least one of those in ways that will continue after I am dead and long-forgotten. I’m unlikely to be remembered for long, but even if that’s correct, some almost-almost-indiscernible effect of my having been here with remain in what does remain. If that’s right, the idea that my life is absurd or a cosmic joke is harder to maintain.</span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-90820034704308861102018-12-26T21:54:00.003-08:002018-12-26T21:54:44.945-08:00Some thoughts about the Queen and her piano<div style="text-align: justify;">
We live in a time when people get upset about a lot of things. People always got upset (or, outraged) but we share it more often, so maybe we're just more aware of others' grievances and griping. Sometimes the increase in anger may be a good thing; there were many intolerable things that people were made to tolerate for too long. Sometimes we may just be addicted to the outrage itself; some sorts of upset are really silly at best or nefarious at worst.</div>
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At the moment, some corners of the world are upset at the appearances of the <a href="https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a25577377/queen-elizabeth-christmas-message-transcript-2018/" target="_blank">Queen's Christmas address</a>. The problem is supposed to be the opulence of the setting and the golden piano in the background in a time of inequality and unease in Britain and the world in general and, of course, in a speech in honor of the poor Babe of Bethlehem. On the other side, people are saying that, of course the Queen is wealthy, and that without such display tourism would fall and the point of the monarchy would, in some important senses, be lost.</div>
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<a href="https://twitter.com/MichaelMcGough3/status/1077781059255918592" target="_blank">One such defense the other night</a> got me thinking about the broader implications. The comparison was to the "stripping of the altars" that occurred during the Reformation. <a href="https://twitter.com/tylerhower/status/1077782477094043648" target="_blank">My initial response</a> was to say that it mattered that in this case we have a secular rather than religious stripping, and that matters.</div>
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That response might have been to quick, though I think something almost like it is correct. There's a common kind of argument made, usually by atheists or agnostics or certain types of utilitarians, that concludes that it is manifestly unjust, for instance, that there are great treasures in the Vatican while there are people who are starving. The claim is that all these goods (the Pietà, Bernini's baldacchino, St. Peter's itself, ...) ought to be sold and the proceeds given to the poor. If taken to its logical conclusion—and uncolored <i>just</i> by anti-religious feeling—this argument should also mean that all museums should be emptied. The Louvre also should sell the Mona Lisa and give that money to the poor.</div>
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In that latter case, we tend not to draw that conclusion. I think we're right not to. We don't for two related reasons: 1)We think that there is a common good that is served by keeping great artworks available for the public; and, 2) We think that art has a value beyond just the economic or what the economic value could do to help even the worst off. There's a little bit of "you will always have the poor with you" about it.</div>
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But those two reasons apply also in the case of the Vatican's treasures or those of any beautiful church or synagogue or mosque or temple. The beauty is shared among many more people than could ever appreciate it were in private hands and—at least for the believer—there is a transcendent value; it points to something beyond. For what it's worth, I think it can be seen to point to something beyond even for the non- or other-believer, if only the Kantian sublime.</div>
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All art, of whatever sort, is extravagant and profligate.</div>
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So, what about the Queen and her art and golden pianos and all the rest? It depends entirely on what we think the Queen is. If she is just a person, then there can be little question that her wealth is obscene. If, instead, she is the <i>Crown</i> or the embodiment of the same, something that not only transcends the particular individual but also transcends the citizens over whom she reigns and something whose beauty or wealth or existence or style-of-life can be enjoyed either vicariously or as spectacle by many, then there's nothing out of sorts about her pianos or pictures or palaces.</div>
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I'm not saying that the Queen does play this role, nor am I defending her lifestyle—or that of popes or cardinals or presidents or anyone else—but I do think we can oversimplify these cases in ways that ignore the complexities of our relation to institutions and values beyond the utilitarian or, even, beyond the merely moral.</div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-62711980802033391562018-12-19T08:40:00.001-08:002018-12-19T08:40:40.330-08:00The Rottweiler woman<div style="text-align: justify;">
There's a woman in my neighborhood I call "the Rottweiler woman." She lives near me, but she doesn't have a home. She lives on the street, napping during the day in a parking lot near a pharmacy and grocery store and storage facility, and sleeping in entryways of banks or the patio of a coffee shop. She has a unit in the storage facility, so she's able to change clothes and keep some goods. She must get some sort of disability or social security or other form of income. She's able to keep body and soul together. She neither begs nor scavenges. At least, I've never seen her doing either.</div>
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I call her "the Rottweiler woman," because she has the sweetest—he's also a bit scary if you don't know them—middle-aged Rottweiler. She also has a beautiful parrot who lives in his cage on her cart. She loves them and feeds them and grooms them. The Rottweiler sleeps beside her on the ground when she's napping or bedded down for the night. He watches over her and protects her, as any dog would do.</div>
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The Rottweiler woman isn't visibly more ill than most of the people I see every day, though I don't know all her problems or history. She reminds me of people I knew and worked with in the year between university and grad school, when I volunteered at a clinic for the homeless and a soup kitchen. So many of those people were just on the edge of keeping their lives together. They could make it if they got the right sort of support, but if too many demands were put on them, things would fall apart.</div>
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I don't know if that's her situation or not. I talk to her regularly. We talk about our dogs and she lets me see glimpses of her past, but it's not my place to pry. I hope I do get to know more about her, maybe even her name.</div>
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Yesterday, I stopped to talk to her as she was eating her lunch and I was on my way to mine. We chatted for a few minutes about her dog and the younger of mine and injuries they've suffered. She talked to me of the efficacy of her prayers in the past. And, she apologized for taking up my time, as if my time were more valuable than hers or she wasn't worth human interaction. (It's perhaps worth noting that she doesn't seem to have a network of other homeless people as many on the streets do.) As I left my lunch, she was still on the patio and I chatted a little more. Her dog came to smell my pants, picking up the scent of my dogs. She apologized again. As I was leaving, she chided the dog softly for not letting her talk to people.</div>
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I don't have some overarching point in this story, except to remind myself and whoever might read this of two things: a society in which people live on the streets is objectively a bad society (this is something Plato recognized in the <i>Republic</i>) and those people who live on the streets are people.</div>
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There is a tradition in at least some forms of Buddhism to see the Buddha-nature in everyone you meet. There is a tradition in at least some forms of Christianity to see Christ in everyone you meet. There are, I take it, similar tropes in other religions and traditions. I think they get something both very right and a little bit wrong. What they get right is to see the inherent value in every human being—that kernel of Kantian dignity that Schopenhauer couldn't find—and I think it is all too easy to look past certain people—the homeless, the suffering, the elderly, the disabled, the unloved, the discriminated against, the stranger, the poor, the prisoner—and by averting our eyes deny them their dignity and their place in community with us. I'm not sure the right way to do this is by seeing Christ or Buddha in them, though. That's too abstract, too mystical. We need to see the <i>them</i> in them, the particularity, but also the value in that particularity.</div>
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I think a lot about loneliness. I think it's perhaps the defining characteristic of human life. Maybe it's not the only one. Maybe it's only a characteristic of a certain kind of modern, deracinated life. But, we are the kinds of beings who need connection and, I think, we're the kinds of beings who realize that we are individuals. That is, we are self-conscious in a way other animals don't seem to be.</div>
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I'm lonely and I'm surrounded with people much of the time. These are people who are required to pay me respect and attention. I go home to a comfortable home—I live in comfort while others live on the streets—and I have a husband who loves me. And, there are the two dogs.</div>
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We have a duty not only to see the dignity in others, but to bridge our divides and help the lonely to be less lonely. To help all of us be, at the least, alone together. Or, as EM Forster had it, to "Only Connect."</div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-20429468053127650312018-12-14T09:54:00.002-08:002018-12-14T09:54:19.184-08:00Another semester in the books<div style="text-align: justify;">
Another semester draws to a close. In the brief time between the last class and the deluge of assignments and exams to be graded there's space for reflection. What did I do well? What did I do poorly? How did I connect and fail to connect with students and their concerns and needs?</div>
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I tend to focus most on the ways things haven't gone well. I'm usually better at thinking about failures than I am successes. Imposter syndrome—assuming it's a syndrome and I'm not really an imposter—also has a role here.</div>
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This post isn't about being maudlin, though. There's a lot more end-of-the-year reflection to come and much of that will be penitential in nature. Instead, I want to say a couple of things about the beauty of doing what I do.</div>
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I don't know that I'm a great teacher. I know I get things wrong. I know I can bore students. I know I care deeply about things that don't interest them. I said this wasn't going to reflect on my failings, so I also know that I get to interact with young, creative, reflective, curious minds. I don't know how much of an impact I make. I don't necessarily think that many of my students will remember me particularly after a few years. </div>
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Someone I follow on Twitter who teaches theology mused this week on how being forgotten was a sort of blessing; it also requires a certain kind of discipline. But, as Freud noticed, transience enhances rather than detracts from beauty, from value.</div>
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I hope, though, that some little thing we've talked about or some discussion we've had or some comment one of them has made will rest in their minds or in their memories and germinate later in their lives or careers. Even though I teach one of the more <i>useful</i> parts of philosophy—most of my classes are ethics of one sort or another—it is still part of one of the clearly least <i>useful</i> disciplines. Hell, we even pride ourselves on that fact. So, it's not as if they will be consciously using what we've talked about as they design new vehicles or logistical systems or command troops or make hiring decisions or do whatever it is that people in the real world do.</div>
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What I know is that every semester my students touch and change me. If there's anything like grace, that's a bit of it. </div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-36615070452239609932018-02-13T14:38:00.004-08:002018-02-17T16:17:07.997-08:00Class thoughts on desire and impermanence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">In one of my classes yesterday, we were finishing up our much-too-quick discussion of the basic Buddhist account of the human condition. It’s a class in which students are always asking the right sorts of questions. As I was reiterating the purported relationship between desire or craving and suffering—one that almost appeals to me for Stoic reasons—a student offered the objection that desire can also make our lives better. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">I had been using as an example the way social media and our exposure to the perfectly curated lives of others can make us unhappy. For instance, I had been arguing, when I see the perfect vacation another has taken or I see the interminable post-gym selfies, I can be made unhappy because I have no such vacation but now I desire it or I think my body doesn’t look as good and my desire to look better makes me unhappy.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">His response was that, desire at least in the latter case, can be a drive to improvement. Seeing someone else’s success in the gym—though it might also be in a dozen other ways: the publication of their book, a new job, an award—and the desire that follows from it can serve as a goad to effort. That effort itself can lead to greater fitness and the attainment of what one had desired. Surely, in that, there is nothing to cause suffering.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">He was right, in a way. There is nothing wrong in ambition or desire insofar as it can lead us to the better if not the good. Epictetus says somewhere in the <i>Enchiridion</i> that we ought to strive but we ought to be realistic about what that striving will cost us and how likely it is that we might fail (and how we will feel if and when we do).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">There remains another problem, I said, and that’s impermanence. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Now, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I injured a shoulder almost three months ago and, though I think it’s finally on the mend after a late trip to the doctor, it has caused me no end of problems physically. And, because the gym plays the role of therapist for me—it is the one hour of the day when I feel totally in control and where I feel like I achieve something—it has caused me quite a bit of emotional distress. It’s not good to be the not-funny kind of obsessive-compulsive.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">Whatever your desire leads you to achieve won’t last. The better body will fade with age. The book will be forgotten or surpassed. The next promotion might not come. You will die.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: medium;">What’s the answer? To enjoy what you have while you have it and even when you’re striving, I suppose, but not to be so attached that you will suffer when it’s gone, or in the case of love to accept the future suffering as part of the enjoyment now. Is that possible? Dunno.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: xx-small;">Anyhow, the student had been concerned that the outlook was too pessimistic. I probably took it further.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: xx-small;">Tomorrow, for what it’s worth, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Ecclesiastes are on tap. Always uplifting!</span></span></div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-17802684215151751092017-11-11T15:14:00.000-08:002017-11-11T15:14:07.816-08:00Beginning to think through some things about giving meaning to<div style="text-align: justify;">
Drawing on Nietzsche and his own harrowing experiences in the concentration camps to which he lost his family, Viktor Frankl re-emphasized the importance of finding meaning of some sort in order to survive. We are meaning-needing creatures. I don't know that this is unique to us. Domesticated animals, at least, can become listless, bored, and depressed without some directed activity. Most of us have also seen animals in the zoo pacing a dirt-path in their enclosures perhaps because the activity toward which their lives would normally be directed or devoted have been taken from them.</div>
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We can <i>give</i> meaning to the world and to objects in it. This is more plausibly unique to us as a species. We are not only need-ers of, but also creators of, meaning. And, we can give meaning not just to words, but also to objects and places and any number of things. A trivial example: I have a small pebble, blood-colored and roughly in the shape of a heart. It has a meaning <i>for me</i>, though it of course has no meaning in itself, no natural meaning. (That's saying nothing more than objects in the world are not <i>intentional</i> unless they are given intentionality by semantic monsters like us.)</div>
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What I've been puzzling over recently is the difficulty of <i>giving </i>meaning to an object. The pebble for instance has a meaning that I gave to it, but I wasn't able to do that as a pure act of the will. It should be clear that I'm playing loosely with the notion of meaning, thinking about denotation and connotation and various other members of the family of <i>meanings</i>, but it seems to me in any case, an individual isn't enough to give something meaning. There's Wittgenstein's private language argument in the <i>Investigations</i>—unless there is no such argument to be found—but there's also a more general sense in which I think one individual cannot create meaning out of whole cloth. The pebble has the kind of meaning it does<i> for me</i> because of some of its own characteristics (shape, color, etc.) and the context of its being found by me while walking my dog Mateo and the subsequent events of Mateo's death shortly thereafter. None of these is sufficient for it to have any kind of meaning; though a human is necessary to give meaning even if—as in this case—the meaning is in a sense private—a meaning only for me—I don't think I could give whatever meaning I wished to whatever object or word or experience just by an act of the will, by fiat. That's the sense, it seems to me, in which the perhaps-illusory private language argument is correct: no individual by herself is sufficient to create meaning, because meaning has to be answerable to some other constraint in order really to be meaning. </div>
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Even in the case of language, I'm not sure that constraint has to be another language user.</div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-32988236663995968292017-09-27T17:49:00.002-07:002018-02-13T14:48:01.715-08:00mother!, connection, and a few other things<div style="font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal; text-align: justify;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-family: inherit;">I left Darren Aronofsy’s new film <i>mother!</i> with a lot to think about. Don’t worry, this isn't going to be a movie review; I have neither the interest nor the chops needed to provide one of those.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">A lot of people I know and respect hated the movie and I understand why one would have that response. Among its failings has to be counted a marketing campaign that positioned it as a horror film. While horrifying, that isn’t what it is. I liked it—I might want to say I loved it, but, as with really difficult theater, I’m not sure that’s quite an emotion one can sustain toward this piece. I suspect it’s a movie that, in spite of its high-powered cast might have been better placed in arthouse cinemas than the AMC cineplex I saw it in. It has more in common with a move like Almodóvar’s <i>The Skin I Live In</i> than than <i>IT</i>. When we were walking back to the car, Fernando noted the way it felt like a story by Cortázar. That, too, seems right.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">The movie’s best (or maybe, most easily) seen as an allegory. As with the best allegories, it operates at different levels. At the most obvious level, we have a stark and unsympathetic retelling of Christian salvation history with its Garden of Eden, Fall, the murder of Abel by Cain, Incarnation and Redemption, and even Apocalypse. A student told me that he thought the movie “tried too hard,” and maybe the allegory is a little on the nose at this level. I don’t think so, but opinions may vary.</span></div>
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<a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/Mother!2017.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="220" height="640" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/94/Mother!2017.jpg" width="408" /></span></a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">At another level, though, Bardem is not God—nor even the lesser creative mind he might represent at yet another level of allegory—but instead might represent any one of us. He stands for a perennial facet of the human condition that finds more expression in our world of immediate and total connection.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Bardem’s Him has someone in Lawrence’s mother! who loves him completely. She lives for Him, has created a world for Him, serves Him, and, as we see, is willing to die for Him and give Him her love as her ultimate gift. Only her child is able to compete with Him for her devotion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">Alas, it is not enough. As Bardem’s character says, “It is never enough.” That’s not a situation peculiar to a God who creates a world in order to be loved and who wants even the worst of His creatures to love him. It’s a situation many, if not all, of us find ourselves, one that’s exacerbated by the connectedness of our world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">As much as Him, I find myself searching for the approbation of people I barely know or who merely barely know people I barely know. Too often, I do that at the cost of appreciating and returning the real love and affection of those few who are closest to me, those few who invest their energies and lives in me.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">That’s not new. As long as there have been crowds, we’ve looked for the superficial and fickle love of the crowds over the deeper, more constant, and therefore more real love of our true intimates. No matter the axiom, the birds in the bush are more attractive than the one in hand because they are yet to be captured.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-kerning: none;">For the first time in human history, however, most of us in the technologically advanced world have the real ability to chase a crowd. An insignificant fellow like myself could never have gathered more than a handful of people around himself before the last decade or so. Now, I can reach out to scores or hundreds of “followers” or “friends” on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Snapchat or whatever will come in their wake. Because their approval, their likes, their retweets, their shares are outside my control, it can be tempting to work harder for them than I ought. It can be just as tempting to overvalue them, to be too buoyed when I get them and too hard hit when I don’t. The energy, whether positive or negative, that’s expended and created in this chase can only come at the cost of other social interactions. Whatever else might be said about me—about us—our emotional capacities are limited. To paraphrase one of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity for another purpose—I think I’m getting this right—he who loves everyone, loves no one. Or, as Aristotle had it, one cannot have more than a few friends and expect them actually to be friends. In chasing a million interactions as though they were the most important, I run the risk of losing the ones that are most important. In making sure than I’m not alone, I might just end up that way.</span></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-family: inherit;">That might just be me, but I think it might also be a more general truth. </span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-28013076705253634292017-07-08T14:22:00.002-07:002017-07-08T14:23:30.591-07:00Some passing thoughts on Nietzsche, velvet ropes, and marriage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eQMVflmWdFE/Tl7MpDwP0OI/AAAAAAAABmQ/cR1aYMJGeGk/s1600/thewhippic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="975" data-original-width="815" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eQMVflmWdFE/Tl7MpDwP0OI/AAAAAAAABmQ/cR1aYMJGeGk/s320/thewhippic.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Ressentiment</i> is a characteristic of all “slave moralities,” according to Nietzsche’s picture in <i>Genealogy of Morals</i>. Roughly, <i>ressentiment</i> is an emotion of imagined revenge felt and nurtured by the underclass against those who do or are felt to oppress them. Because part of what it is to be in the underclass is to be powerless, those at the bottom of society have no real way to lash out at those above them and so they imagine a punishment, whether that is the inevitable revolution or karma or the punishments of hell. “Though we may be downtrodden now, you will get yours in the days or world to come,” the oppressed mutter under their breath and it makes them feel better, even as it poisons the world for them.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Nietzsche gathers many examples of <i>ressentiment</i> in action, but one that has always stuck with me is drawn from Aquinas. In the Supplement to the Summa (question 94), Aquinas considers the ways in which those in Heaven will rejoice in their knowledge that others will be damned. Nietzsche is, perhaps, too harsh on this passage—Christianity is his <i>bête noire</i>—and Aquinas does say that the saved will not rejoice in the punishment of others as such, but only in knowing what could have happened to them but did not and <i>in seeing Divine justice done</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">That is, at least from the modern perspective, fairly dark stuff and Nietzsche uses it to argue that the religion of Love is actually a religion of Hate. I’m not endorsing dear Friedrich’s conclusions, but he points out something interesting here about traditional Christian conceptions of Hell and Heaven. Part of the joy of Heaven consists—even if it is indirectly so—in the fact that there are others in Hell, others who did not get in and have to suffer. You see this even today among those conservative Christians—I know mostly of Catholics—who get extremely angry when one of their co-religionists suggests that Hell will be not empty but very sparsely populated.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">I think of this as a the velvet-rope theory of Heaven: it’s really only valuable if others can’t have it. If you take away its exclusivity, it isn't worth much. (Someone of a more biblical or theological bent might want to think through this is in the context of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">What, you might ask, has me thinking about this? Debates about marriage, I might reply.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">It seems quite likely to me that same-sex marriage has a short future in the United States, at least in any sense stronger than just a license with no attendant rights or responsibilities. There are many arguments against state recognition of same-sex marriage and they come from different backgrounds. Some are full-throated religious arguments. Some rely heavily on tradition. Some rely on old-fashioned natural law. Many rely on the weird hybrid theory that is the new natural law. But many of them have as at least part of their content, a claim that the recognition—in civil law alone—is a harm to the institution of marriage and their own marriages. (See, for instance, <a href="https://politicsandprosperity.com/2011/10/14/the-myth-that-same-sex-marriage-causes-no-harm/" target="_blank">link</a>, but there are many more examples.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none;"><span style="font-size: large;">Some of these last sort of arguments are worth thinking through even if we disagree with them, but very many of them amount to little more than a velvet-rope theory of marriage: if you let those people in, it will cheapen mine. We saw a version of this, of course, in arguments against miscegenation. Even if some opponents are right that same-sex marriage decreases the attractiveness of traditional marriage, it’s important to ask why that is.</span></span></div>
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Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-60126821448178548022017-01-29T16:08:00.002-08:002017-01-29T16:09:46.601-08:00One quick thought about atomistic moral minimalism<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: medium;">Americans at least tend to elide the distinction between the law and ethics. Students, I find, often have a hard time maintaining the distinction and, when questioned about the morality of some action or practice, will respond by asking what the law says about it. Of course, there are important connections between the law and morality. Murder and theft and battery are all illegal and they are immoral.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">But, this elision leads to a common problem in our moral thinking. Quite rightly, our laws are premised on negative rights. That is, I have a (legal) right to life and this means that ceteris paribus you may not kill me. I have a legal right to property and this means that ceteris paribus you may not take my property away from me. These rights give me no legal claim for your assistance in my living nor in the acquisition or maintenance of my property. I have relatively few positive (legal) rights.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">If you take that as the basis of your moral thinking—if you can't distinguish between legal and moral thinking—you end up with an extremely atomistic account of morality. You end up with a moral minimalism that is indistinguishable from ethical egoism. You end up thinking that my only obligation to another person is to keep out of their way and that there is no deeper connection between us except that requirement.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;">I fear that's where we've gotten as a society. I think this prevents any real kind of human flourishing. I think it vastly underestimates our intrinsic sociality and the obligations we have to the society through which we have come to be. To put it in the word of a now-prominent figure, I think it is: "Sad!"</span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-86765576708707517912016-12-16T14:35:00.001-08:002016-12-16T14:35:57.582-08:00Remembering some things about the real America<div style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal;">
<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: large;">We’ve heard a lot recently about the real America and how it has been overlooked and forgotten recently. Pundits tell us we misunderstand it and sleight it at our own risk. Most of those pundits have never spent more than a week in any one part of it and know nothing of it, by the way. Nonetheless, they are writing a mythology of that magical place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: large;">I’m from that real America. I grew up in the same area that (part of) my family had been in for just over 140 years at my birth. Granted, some of the rest of my family were incomers, but all from other parts of that great real America, all of them having settled somewhere in middle America—if we include Appalachia—well before the Civil War and many before the Revolution.</span></div>
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<span style="font-kerning: none; font-size: large;">My hometown was a great place to grow up, with some important caveats and for only some groups. But there’s a tendency now to talk about places like Huntington as if they are citadels of virtue to be contrasted with the Babylons and Sodoms of the big cities and the coasts. That’s just not the case. I’ve been thinking about just some of what went on in my town. Here, I give a partial list:</span></div>
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<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">The son of my first grade teacher got into an argument outside a drug store with another boy from the high school. He was beaten so badly that, though he continued to age, he returned to the mentality of a mere child.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">My elementary school had a fourth-grade teacher who regularly had male students sit on his lap. Everybody knew about it. Everybody talked about it. Everyone warned their boys about it. No one did anything about it.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">When I was in elementary school or junior high, a man killed his father after his father “looked at him wrong.” They were cutting wood at the time. So, he hacked him to death.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">When I was in high school, three boys went to the home of an eccentric and probably gay businessman, ostensibly to rob him. Well, maybe two of them thought it was a robbery or they were going to settle some dispute the third of them had had with the man. In fact, that man also ended up being axed to death by the third boy.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Also, when I was in high school, there was a rash—I mean it seemed like an epidemic if such things could be catching—of men being found hanged at one of our local reservoirs. They had hanged themselves in the pursuit of the perfect orgasm through autoerotic asphyxiation. They, of course, were not the only ones pursuing release at the reservoirs.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">There was another fellow who was arrested numerous times for criminal trespass. It seems he couldn’t resist the wiles of a group of llamas living on another person’s farm.</span></span></li>
<li style="-webkit-text-stroke-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); -webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; font-family: Garamond; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; line-height: normal;"></span><span style="font-kerning: none;">Another man recruited men for his surgery hobby. How this was possible in the days before Craigslist, I don’t quite know. Anyway, he offered them amateur castrations., effected with everyday tools. Several men took him up on this. He kept the fruits of his labors in jars. He was only caught and jailed when the girlfriend of a recruit found out what he was offering.</span></span></li>
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<span style="-webkit-font-kerning: none; font-size: large;">That’s not all, but it’s enough to get to my point. What’s my point? There’s no real America. There’s no idyllic place where everything is perfect and virtue still reigns. That’s not because everything is horrible. And, it’s not a denial that there are or might be better and worse places, but humans are everywhere and the evils of human life and the goods of human are everywhere where humans are. Seeing one part of the country as either the only real one or a cesspool is not only unhelpful, it’s a reflection of an unwillingness to think much about anything, especially the political.</span></div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-35882911005629395392016-12-15T09:35:00.000-08:002016-12-15T09:35:13.688-08:00A quick thought about a liberal arts education<div style="text-align: justify;">
Before the very idea of a liberal arts education becomes entirely subsumed in concerns about marketability and utility and the the equally horrid buzzwords of twenty-first century <i>pedagogy</i>, it's important to remember something that was distinctive about it once upon a time. </div>
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Its goal was never the same thing as that of professional education. If you study business, you are doing so in order to go into business. And, that's right and good. </div>
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But, that's not what studying literature or philosophy is in the first instance. Sure, lots of people get degrees in philosophy and then go on to study more philosophy in graduate school. That's fine. And, it satisfies to some small degree that hated and hateful question: "What are you going to do with a degree in <i>that</i>?"</div>
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No, the point of a liberal arts education, once upon a time, was the education of a person, a person who could go on to do a lot of different things. That person was a person who was going to be able to think liberally and philosophically and humanistically (and mathematically and logically and ...). (Such a person would be an intellectual in the best sense, not that we have any value for intellectuals these days.) That education involved a specialization, but as Oakeshott argued, that specialization was itself a training in the ability to delve into a subject, to explore more deeply, to dedicate oneself. It wasn't, or didn't have to be, a commitment to do this thing professionally or for the rest of one's life.</div>
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I don't know how many people recognize this as valuable anymore or how many realize the importance of leisure and non-utilitarian, non-box-checking approaches to the world to this pursuit, but I think we are paying a price and will continue paying a price in the <i>polis</i> for the loss of this idea of education.</div>
<br />Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6717717.post-8920682620617934092016-11-24T09:52:00.001-08:002016-11-24T09:52:33.270-08:00Some Thanksgiving thoughts about perspectives and the search for truth<div style="text-align: justify;">
I've been reading Scruton's, <i><a href="http://www.warwicks.com/book/9781472924001" target="_blank">How to Be a Conservative</a></i>, both because I find a certain kind of conservative <i>theory</i> interesting and because it's important to read people and ideas with which you don't necessarily agree. In his consideration of multiculturalism ("The Truth in Multiculturalism"), Scruton faults this approach as turning into a kind of cultural relativism. He finds the philosophical grounding of relativism in the perspectivism of Nietzsche and its adoption by "postmodern" thinkers. </div>
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Elsewhere, he has praise for some of Nietzsche's thought, but the belief that there are no truths and only perspectives he calls both self-refuting—"What then is this, a truth or not?" he asks—and the basis of our inability to stand up for or against any cultural practice. I think the claim that dear Friedrich has unwittingly contradicted himself is too quick, but what is more interesting to me is a common understanding that Nietzsche is introducing his denial of <b>TRUTH</b> ex nihilo. </div>
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This isn't the way he seems to understand himself, nor is it the right way to understand the genesis of his approach. He sees himself as showing the endpoint of philosophy and, most especially, Christianity. To paraphrase: Christ tells us the truth will set us free and, at the end of the day, it sets us free of itself. He's taking things to what he thinks are their logical conclusions. He might be showing his reader the way forward or he might be providing a <i>reductio</i>, but he doesn't think of himself as fully breaking with the tradition he's critiquing.</div>
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I don't know whether that full historical path can be fairly traced, but perspectivism and its denial of truth can be seen as having its roots in Kant and his distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal. If that's right—I so rarely am—then we have Hume to blame for awakening Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. Hume's own skeptical project only makes sense in the context of the search for absolute certainty with which René Descartes begins modern philosophy. Descartes—for all his smuggling of philosophical method and terminology—does see himself as a rupture with the philosophy that went before.</div>
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So, my point? It's become a commonplace to criticize relativism and postmodernism and to locate their genesis in Nietzsche; but, if you want to find the error, you have to go back further. Once you go down the certainty-seeking skeptical rabbit-hole with Descartes, you're going to end up at either solipsism or perspectivism. </div>
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Also, Happy Thanksgiving!</div>
Tyler Howerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14582328854031848627noreply@blogger.com0