De Nihilo Nihil

Teaching and self-revelation

2011-09-23T16:14:00.000-07:00

Episodes yesterday and today have me thinking about how much of myself I reveal in the classroom and how much I should.

My teaching style is pretty conversational. I try to keep discussion going, I try to keep things mildly entertaining, I try to be energetic. Keep in mind that these are things I try to do; that doesn't mean that I always succeed. So, in my lectures and discussions, I reveal some things about my life, but about others I remain quiet or vague.

For instance, I am usually pretty reticent about my views on most issues, no matter what we happen to be talking about. When we discuss God, I do not tell them whether I am a theist, agnostic, atheist or what I probably actually am. When we discuss abortion, I do not tell them my position. And, when I talk about my personal life, I do so in vague terms. I talk about my dog and my spouse and my house and goings on in my neighborhood and, but I never go into more detail than that. Particularly, I rarely say that my spouse is a man rather than a woman.

Not divulging my ethical and philosophical positions and leaving my personal life vague might seem like two very different issues, but they seem—or have seemed—of a piece to me. After all, I teach philosophy, and we are supposed to care only about reason(s) and argument, not about the person who makes the argument. If I am to aim at objectivity, I should hide my own views so students can judge for themselves and I should try to make my personality so that they can focus on the arguments and not on the person presenting them, even if not advocating for them.

Today, after my early introductory class, I had an exchange with a student about what moral view I think is correct. I started to outline why I thought that some sense can be made of objective morality, but I told him that we would have to wait until we discussed Aristotle for me to tell him just how I thought this could work. Ten minutes after I got back to my office, I had an email from the student—a very intelligent and very active student—telling me that he wasn't trying to falsify my beliefs, he just wanted to know what I thought and not just what some other philosophers thought and his other philosophy professors never gave him straight answers about what they believe themselves.

I responded, but it got me thinking about whether it makes sense for me to hide my beliefs. The fact that I don't tell them what they are doesn't mean that they don't exist. And, knowing them might actually allow them to be a little more skeptical of my arguments when it comes to those views and competing ones. It might actually help them do philosophy better. I believe I am very even-handed, but if I am then it can hardly hurt for them to know where I stand on issues, assuming that I don't require that they agree with me.

Orthogonally, I am supposed to be teaching them something and, biased though I might be, I have thought about many of the issues we discuss for longer than they have, indeed longer than most of them have been alive, so shouldn't I have something to profess about the issues that we discuss together?

On a closely related note, a funny thing happened in class last night. With no provocation and while I was talking about the virtues of virtue theory, a student in the front row said to me, "You said you're married but you wear your wedding ring on the right hand. Why's that?"

The man sitting next to her replied, "You can't tell?" And then he went on a bit, without cluing her into what it was that she couldn't tell.

Now, I don't wear my wedding ring on my right hand because I'm gay-married. I have other, less fascinating reasons. But after class, the male student told me that, of course, he had realized the first day and my mannerisms, references, jokes all made it perfectly clear.

This told me both that I'm not obviously gay—my partner disagrees: "You are obviously gay, but not effeminate"—and that I am obviously gay. But it also made me think about how this is the kind of thing about which there is no point worrying. I do sometimes worry that if students realize I'm gay, they might discount what I'm teaching them or think that I only hold the positions (in some areas) because of my sexuality. Of course, should they think this they would have missed pretty much all the point of philosophy.

Without proselytizing or going into detail about my personal life, fascinating though it may be, shouldn't I be revealing more of who I am philosophically and humanly in my teaching? I tell them that it is important to know the context and something of the biographies of the people we discuss while warning them off the genetic fallacy; is that not true of me, too?

Of course, I don't have the benefit of tenure and that bears on the matter to some degree, but thinking pedagogically and philosophically, I think I may have been aiming for the wrong targets.

An open and, probably, pointless letter to Target

2011-07-20T19:34:00.000-07:00

Sir or Madam:

As a stockholder and a gay man, I continue to be surprised and upset by the way in which the leadership of Target Corporation continues to spend money—my money—on political campaigns to support anti-gay, anti-gay marriage and anti-canvassing legislation and litigation. Not only does this offend me because it is the money of stockholders—of which I am one—being used to harm gays and lesbians, many of whom own stock in Target and many more of whom have been faithful and continuous customers of Target, but is equally offensive as Target stock prices continue to fall.

The job of the executives of Target and its board is to make the company profitable and more valuable. It makes absolutely no sense to advertise and market the company as progressive and modern and spend money at the same time on retrograde political agendas, agendas which earn Target bad press. I realize that the board is tired of hearing about their spending of our money on these campaigns, but the right way to stop having to hear it is to stop spending the money.

Owning stock in Target has become not only an embarrassment, but also a losing financial decision. How about you stop worrying about gays and lesbians—who otherwise would spend more money at Target stores—and start worrying more about profits, dividends and stock prices? In other words, do your jobs and leave the counterproductive moral posturing to fringe politicians and evangelists, who can amply fund themselves.

Yours,

Tyler Hower

Self-ownership

2011-06-21T17:22:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about some issues in libertarian thought today and I'm finding myself particularly confused about the notion of self-ownership that underlies (most?) libertarianism. For more on that notion, see Libertarianism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

There seem to be at least two important issues with this notion:

First, there's something decidedly odd in taking the ground of our morality from the relationship that we have to things we own, because whatever sense we might be able to make out of owning ourselves, our primary notion of ownership is our ownership of external objects. The idea that we own ourselves is taken by analogy from that epistemologically primary notion of ownership.

Second, ownership looks like a two place relationship, one that must take two different things for its arguments. That is, ownership appears, at least in the normal case to be Oxy, where x≠y and Oxy>¬Oyx. This, at any rate, is the way the notion operates in the normal case; to allow self-ownership seems to be introducing a new notion that will be called "ownership" but that has little or nothing to do with ownership.

A thought on the Seven Deadly Sins

2011-06-12T22:26:00.000-07:00

As another politician falls to the sin of Lust, but none seem ever to be shamed for their dedication to Greed, Envy, Pride, Wrath, Sloth and Gluttony, I cannot help but be taken by the religious and moral outlook that informs so much of our public discourse.

Our moral scolds only care about certain of the sins, because their Jesus—and it generally is Jesus—is one who is seriously and always concerned about sexual morality, but no other sort, that is, He is clearly not the Jesus who appears anywhere in the Bible they so gladly and conveniently thump but never read or ponder.

How to write a Dan Brown novel: Inspired by a viewing of Angels and Demons

2011-06-07T14:26:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Have a barely literate, preferably drunken teenager recount to you his half-remembered reading of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, The Name of the Rose or Baudolino—all great novels dealing with esoteric distinctions in theological history, battles that these caused, conspiracy theories, secret societies both real and imagined, etc., and all undergirded by research—while paying as little attention as possible. This will replace you having to actually think up a plot or do research of your own.

Step 2: Read some New Age reinterpretations of either medieval mystics or "Eastern thought". While you are at it, learn everything you can about science from blogs on the Web—this might help you to think that 17th century scientists believed in the four elements. Come to think of it, you can do your research about religion on the Web, too.

Step 3: Forget everything you have ever known about the way that actual people act or talk. It is essential that you avoid all real human motivation.

Step 4: Invent a ridiculous academic discipline. Brown's choice is "Symbology", but you can pick your own. Just make sure that this discipline has an honored chair at Harvard, Princeton, Oxbridge, somewhere famous. Also, make sure that people respect the professors of this discipline; this is called "suspension of disbelief", since professors of disciplines are not respected. Finally, make sure that the deep wisdom this discipline makes available is of the sort to deliver common-sense wisdom and obvious pieces of information, while everyone else is totally unaware of what is nearly smacking them in the face. This helps the reader/viewer feel intelligent.

Step 5: Take some Ambien, don't let yourself fall asleep and begin writing.

Step 6: Wait for Tom Hanks and Ron Howard to call.

Rick Perry and cognitive dissonance

2011-04-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

So, it seems that it was only a year ago that Rick Perry, Governor of the Lone Star State—the state of my own birth—was claiming that Texas could secede from the Union, that it had some special agreement that no other state had, allowing it to do this at will. Now, this absolutely ignores that Civil War, or the facts as confirmed by state historians in Texas. Of course, Perry's false claims are really about that old bugaboo, states' rights, and playing to a fringe of his own Republican Party.

But, it seems that now Perry is more than happy to call for federal relief money to help with the very real disaster of the wind-stoked fires across his state. Now, Texas already comes really close to breaking even with regard to money sent to and received from Washington. I surely hope that Perry isn't expecting the rest of us, like those in the northeast or those in California, who do not come close, but end up shifting much of their federal tax burden to other states—largely anti-big government states, for what that's worth—to pay for relief and rebuilding in Texas, because that sounds dangerously like the kind of tax and spend, liberal socialism that he and his ilk so disdain. If we really aren't in any sense a community responsible for one another, we can hardly be responsible for anyone's decisions to live in Texas.

So, you have an option, Governor Perry, stop bitching about Washington or stop asking it for help. Otherwise, you are just a whiny teenager who doesn't like Dad's rules, but wants more of his money.

Rights and obligations

2011-04-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

Primary disclaimer: If you are not interested in philosophy, this will probably not be of interest.

Secondary disclaimer: This will probably not be of interest to those interested in philosophy.

One of my topics for in-class discussion this week—even if I was the only one engaged in the discussion—was the ethics of rights. Of course, as part of this, one must discuss the relationship between rights and obligations or duties.

So, I was thinking yesterday of a particular sort of situation in which normally an obligation and a right go hand-in-hand. As a rule, if someone lends me money, I have an obligation to repay them and they have a right to be repaid. I take that to be a pretty straightforward case of my obligation creating a right for the lender. Or, if you don't want to think of it being my obligation that creates the right, we might want to say that our agreement and the situation into which we have entered together have created both the obligation and the right. In either case, though, it seems that the right ultimately flows from the borrowing and the borrower as the initiator of the borrowing. Contrast the situation of giving someone an unasked for gift; there it seems that there is no obligation or duty.

But does borrowing always create this right to repayment? Consider the following situation:

Marvin and Meredith are friends, perhaps they are siblings. In any case they are more than mere acquaintances, but there relationship is not so close that either one can expect the financial support of the other as any sort of right.

Marvin is going through a rough patch. In fact, Marvin is going through a rougher patch in the midst of a number of rough patches. After all, we are in an ongoing recession. Though he would rather not, he asks Meredith for a loan of a medium-sized amount, enough that Meredith will feel it but not so much that it will seriously affect his life.

Meredith is aware of Marvin's financial situation and because of his general affection for Marvin is willing to give the money to him. He knows that Marvin will likely be unable to pay the money back in any time in the near future and would gladly offer the money as a gift, though he also knows that Marvin will only accept it as a loan.

Thus, Meredith gives the money to Marvin. Marvin promises to repay, but Meredith doesn't expect repayment and does not intend ever to request repayment. He writes the loan off, as it were.

The questions: Does Marvin have a moral obligation to repay? Does Meredith have a right to repayment?

My intuition says that Marvin does have an obligation to repay when he is able but that Meredith has no corresponding right to that repayment whether Marvin can or cannot repay. Does that seem right?

A thought from a discussion

2011-04-05T16:25:00.001-07:00

From a Facebook discussion today following on my dismay that a student asked me if it were indeed true that the US is currently militarily involved in Libya, because someone had just told him that today, in which a friend told me that it is after all my job to educate them, a thought:

Indeed, but education at the college/university level and in a subject like philosophy assumes that the students already have a grounding in a more general and more basic education, some knowledge of the world and some general interest in the world around them.

As we move more and more to a society in which reality stars displace reality as the topic of interest and everything is filtered through the music that we are simultaneously listening to on our own private sound systems and we can't listen to an entire sentence that someone else is speaking with checking to see if we got another text, that task becomes harder and harder and nigh on impossible—for at least some students.

A sweet bit of nostalgia

2011-04-04T19:21:00.000-07:00

I just turned thirty-eight and there is a fair amount in my life that hasn't gone according to plan.

But today I was reading a review of an collection of Tony Judt's essays, written while he was immobilized by ALS and one theme mentioned—and that I have read in Judt's essays, myself—is his appreciation for the place of King's College Cambridge in his life and the opportunity he had as a lower-middle-class Jewish boy to go and study with the elite of the England of the early 60s.

Now, I'm not Oxbridge educated, nor did I attend even one of the Ivies, but I did get a very fine undergraduate education at the University of Notre Dame, very fine for a working-class Hoosier boy, just a few generations removed from the farm. And, almost every day there is some thing discussed or read or touched upon in one of my classes, often classes that were not in my major or particularly useful in any straightforward way, that comes back to me, as grist for my reflective mill.

And, then I think how lucky I was, and I wonder what students who constantly ask what they will ever use some concept or technique for are really getting out of their college or university experience. Or, am I just an old romantic about what an education can be?

A short query about personal identity

2011-04-03T18:22:00.000-07:00

So, in one of my courses, we are in the middle of the standard run through theories of and problems with personal identity. This always makes me reflect on a long-ago graduate/undergraduate seminar on identity with Calvin Normore and a poor, misguided undergraduate—doubtless a tenured professor somewhere now—who wrote a paper with the closing line: "The lion has spoken and I have understood him."

[The lion was his kitty and it spoke while it was on his lap and I'm still not sure whether that counts as any sort of argument against Wittgenstein's point, but I'm not sure Ludwig was ever altered in the ways that this young man might have been. I believe I have digressed.]

But, more importantly, or more pointedly, I was musing this week on our uses of the word "same". And, what we mean when we claim to be the same person. For instance, I say that I have lived in the same house for the last five years. And, this is true. And, we all know what it means. And, I also say that I have the same sunken eyes as my grandfather. And, this is true. And, we all know what it means. And, without going crazily polysemous. We know that the "same" in the two statements means the same thing in different ways in each case. That is, in part, that the relationship that "same" picks out is context-dependent.

How does the context determine the relationship in the statement: "I am the same person I once was"? Or, "I am the same man you met in the late '90s"? Is this more like the sameness of my house or the sameness of my eyes?

A thought about leveling

2011-02-24T15:28:00.000-08:00

How well have our betters manipulated us such that, when we hear that public-sector employees have better benefit packages than do we, our reaction is to take those benefits away from them, rather than to ask why we don't have them ourselves?

Quite apart from one's views about any sort of labor disputes—manufactured or not—that are currently occurring, when we see what we take to be injustice shouldn't our natural reaction—or our reasoned one—be to raise up those who are lower rather than (just) to lower those who are higher. To bring everyone down to a lower level is the idea of the smallest of men. And it is beyond ironic that those on the right often level this charge at those they call "socialists" but it's the right that's leveling now.

Living on a prayer

2011-01-23T17:24:00.000-08:00

One of last semester's students, a seminarian finishing what used to be called "philosophy" in the seminary, sent me an email today in which he told me:

He enjoyed my class very much; and,
He had put my name on a list of recommended instructors for other seminarians finishing their actual philosophy requirements; so,
I would be getting a lot more seminarians in my classes; and,
He hoped that this would lead to my conversion to Catholicism.

Had he told me that he hoped that I would convert from my life of sin or my skepticism or any number of other things, I might have understood, but now I find myself wondering what beliefs he thinks I have or what I may have said in a survey class on the philosophy of mind—other than that appeals to God don't help one in philosophy—that led him to believe that I was raised in no religion or another religion.

I mean, I could return to Catholicism in some sense, but I couldn't be converted to it. Why did he think that I chided him one day outside class on his lack of knowledge of Aquinas?

One half of an exchange

2011-01-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

I received a message from a former student and current acquaintance today asking me whether he ought to be worried about 2012, specifically because of concerns about the Mayan calendar. On one hand, I was a little disappointed that he would take this seriously at all, but not all that surprised given the way our minds work, the general level of superstition—including my own beloved ones—and the hype that the media gives to every worry.

So here was my response:

Well, for one thing, the Mayan calendar was cyclical. The fact that it ends is supposed to mean in fact that it just begins over, not that the world ends. For another thing, if we are to think of the Mayans as somehow prescient, they didn't foresee their own downfall or at least the general downfall of their culture, they didn't seem to foresee the much later coming of Europeans, etc. So, I'm not sure, even if they were predicting the end of the world—and they weren't—they really weren't the best at predicting the future, even the immediate future, so I'm not sure they should get much more credence than the Tarot readers on El Cajon Boulevard.

On questions of value

2011-01-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

In the period between semesters, I spend free moments—a moment is free if and only if it is not occupied by responding in the negative to some request to raise a grade, ignoring a request from someone to crash a course or explaining why it really did matter to a final grade that the papers were not turned in or were not the work of the student—thinking about issues that I have discussed in class and that I would like to discuss differently. Because most of my classes, even the ones that are more focused and at a higher level, are really introductory classes and have between twenty and forty students, much discussion must be perfunctory. And, yet, I think we touch on a number of issues that provide food for thought. They certainly do for me and I hope that they do for at least some of my students.

With all that introduction out of the way, I was thinking about the canned version of existentialism that I give my students. Honestly, I think I do a pretty good job with existentialism, if only because I do best on views that are a little or a lot pessimistic. In particular, I was thinking about the notion of value and the existentialist claim that our lives can have no objective value, because there is no value giver outside ourselves to give such a value.

Now, in class, I make clear that this assumes that there is no God, but I offer them the consideration of Nagel's that even the existence of God could not give our lives value for us but only for God, unless we made a subjective decision to take that value as our own. And, then we are able to move on—and back in time—to Kierkegaard.

But, with all the recent talk by relative crazies like Ron Paul about the need to get away from fiat money and back onto the gold standard, because gold, unlike paper money has an intrinsic value, I have been thinking more generally about the relation between intrinsic and objective value. Of course, these are not quite the same notion of value. Something is intrinsically valuable, if it is valuable in and of itself, and not for some other thing of value that it can be used to obtain and something is objectively valuable just in case it is valuable independently of whether it is in fact valued. For what it's worth, gold is neither of these—it has been subjectively valued for most of human history but it is not inconceivable that it not be so valued, as More considered in his Utopia, and it is almost always valued for other things that it can be used to get, such as food and shelter—but that might be a discussion for another day. Gold, however, like any commodity inessential for human life seems to be valuable only because of contingent historical facts.

What I started to wonder was whether there was anything that might truly be said to be either objectively or intrinsically valuable, that is, valuable in and of itself and entirely independently of whether anyone actually does value it. And, perhaps because I come after the existentialists, but I am not sure that there is any such thing.

Un-Christmassy thoughts

2010-12-17T10:20:00.000-08:00

What does it say that a tradition founded on the stone the builders rejected continues apace in rejecting others and sees itself all to often as a small minority against not just the world but its people?

There are days when I understand all to well why Kierkegaard allied himself with Denmark's atheists and not its Christians.

Philosophical query: to be ignored by almost all

2010-12-04T22:26:00.000-08:00

Let X be an action, such that to X is morally forbidden, but not because Xing is intrinsically evil but rather because there is a high probability of harm to others and/or to self were one to X. In fact, let us assume that there is nothing evil per se at all in Xing. There might even be near possible worlds in which Xing would not be evil at all. That is, X is extrinsically, but not intrinsically evil. In addition, Xing is enjoyable.

Is it morally wrong to revel in thoughts of Xing? If so, why? Is it merely because one could not morally X?

Music?

2010-11-28T00:58:00.000-08:00

So, Kanye West has a song yclept "Runaway". It is a song that he has performed on Saturday Night Live and on the VMAs, both times wearing a red suit, numerous gold chains and backed by women in tutus who act less like backing dancers than those annoying "statues" that have become ubiquitous at every street festival since 1995. Of course, since it is a sung piece and not a rap, he is autotuned in a way that can only make one think of Cher or the very worst musical number on television. And, as should be obvious, he always seems quite satisfied with himself during his performances.

My question is simple: When he sings, in this song, "toast for the douchebags, toast for the assholes, toast for the scumbags" is he smart enough or self-aware enough to be ironic, or does he really not know he's singing about himself?

Passions

2010-11-22T19:55:00.000-08:00

In the last couple of weeks, a friend of mine did something objectively irrational—one might say stupid—something that put his life at risk. But, as we discussed it briefly, it became apparent that he did what he did not in a drug- or alcohol-induced haze but in another sort of haze, that sort of place in which one loses oneself in passion.

In our society, we value passion, we value devotion, we value going all in. And, although we do not put it quite this way, there is a long tradition in many of the cultures that feed into our own, of valuing losing oneself, whether in meditation in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, in a mystical union with or experience of the Godhead in mystical traditions in all the Abrahamic religions, becoming one with ones actions in varieties of Zen and Taoist thought, losing oneself in action in literary figures (e.g., Hans Castorp at the end of The Magic Mountain) and so on.

And, while I am cautious—probably overcautious—and was raised to mistrust this kind of loss of control and rationality, there is something admirable about diving so deeply, even when risks are involved, about embracing the Dionysian and letting Apollo be damned.

Of course, I'll remain on the Apollonian side, but I can see the appeal of the other way.

Relationships

2010-11-21T18:13:00.000-08:00

This morning, I woke up to one of those emails telling me that a couple that we both know is having problems and one of them has moved out of the house they bought about a year ago. Whenever something like this happens, I have an initial thought: I'm not sure how they ever worked together as a couple. It's important to say that this is always my reaction. And, because I know that this is always the way that I react, I immediately remember that, from the outside, our relationship has to be pretty inexplicable.

I think that this is usually the case with any relationship. We've been together for just over fourteen years now—and that's a lot in gay years, still—but for more than a decade, I have heard people say to my partner that he could do better and tell me that I'm too good for him and, occasionally, the same sort of thing to me. Of course, some of those have been cases where people were interested in one or the other of us or people were just being generally destructive. But, many of them were saying what they thought: that our relationship just didn't make sense. And, while I am scrupulous not to do the same sort of thing, it is definitely the case that while I can tell that people do work well together and that they make each other happy and even care about one another, I often am unable to make sense of the mechanics, given what I know about the people involved.

Hell, sometimes I don't understand how the two of us work together. So, maybe it just is a mystery how any two people ever enter into any sort of relationship. Forster wanted us only to connect; how do we do that?

The worst thing about getting older

2010-11-18T21:42:00.000-08:00

Besides approaching average life expectancy for the beginning of the twentieth century or finally being old enough to be the father to many of my students, the worst part of getting older is having multiple friends and colleagues with serious illness and seeing people I think of as being part of my cohort—and younger—die. I lost my father-in-law just shy of two years ago, two friends of mine—both younger—that I met when I used to bartend in the last year and a half, a friend from high school recently went into remission, a colleague is battling a mysterious case of wasting, a colleague of my partner's just had a lumpectomy with the removal of twenty-five lymph nodes, another colleague of his lost his wife, the women who takes our dog once a week has breast and ovarian cancer and the list continues.

I'm barely middle-aged and, yet, I realize every day more and more just how close death is to us all the time.

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

Good moments

2010-11-17T21:58:00.000-08:00

So, in many ways this week's classes, because I am longing for break and haven't had a real one in a pretty long time, have been a hard slog. But, today, a student saw a connection between Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds and Hindu metaphysics, a connection that I had never directly mentioned in class—is it one that I had noticed in those terms?—in the middle of a review section. That's some kind of achievement.

Alone together

2010-11-17T21:16:00.000-08:00

It is rarely my intention here to say anything original. This is for two reasons: I am not sure that I have many original thoughts that would be worth sharing and much of what is thought of as original—especially in philosophy where, for instance, that great turning point of modern philosophy, Descartes' Cogito in a philosophy that is supposed to start from nothing, is really just a reiteration of a point Augustine made more than a millennium earlier in his Confessions—is really just someone else's idea the source of which is forgotten.

So, for quite a while, I have been thinking about a theme which seems to recur in numerous philosophical and religious contexts throughout quite a bit of human history, viz., the juxtaposition of the solitary and the communal. Think of the sadhus of Hinduism or the forest monks of Theravada Buddhism, mountain sages of Taoism, Diogenes of Sinope in his tub in the city, John the Baptist in the New Testament, the Desert Fathers of early Egyptian Christianity, the medieval anchorites living in hermitages or walled into parish churches, the startsy of Russian Orthodoxy, the Carthusians living as hermits in a community, Wittgenstein in his hut in Norway and his cottage in Ireland and in both cases engaged in extensive correspondence.

In each of these cases—and each is thought of as an example of wisdom in the tradition from which it comes—we see a person or persons who both ache for and/or embrace solitude and, at the very same time, are engaged in deeply social behavior.

This, I think, suggests something important and central to the human condition. We are social beings, as Aristotle noted in the Ethics, but we also recognize ourselves as apart. As many psychologists and philosophers now think, one of the thing that distinguishes us from (most of the) other animals is that we have a theory of mind. That is, we are able to see that others also have perspectives on the world, as we do. But, this also implies that we realize that there are other perspectives on us. This, in part is why, unlike almost all the other animals, we can recognize ourselves in mirrors; we realize that there are other perspectives than our own and those perspectives are also perspectives on us. But, this means that we have a unique perspective, one that is unsharable.

We are, at one and the same time, naturally social—to leave society is, all too often, in Aristotle's terms, to become a beast—and prevented from full social sharing. We are called to and barred from community by our natures. And this, I think, makes human life a paradox. One that is insoluble except through embracing it as so many sages have attempted to do. Most of us, I fear, are unwilling to do just this.

Arghhhhh

2010-11-17T13:15:00.000-08:00

For all their value at the graduate level, in which one often needs a few weeks just to get familiar with a topic before even being close to a position to think about a paper, semesters are generally horrible at the undergraduate level. At week twelve—I think that's where I am now—I have discussed as much about certain topics as either I can stand or—much more obviously—my students can. Of course, the autumn is especially bad with its dearth of breaks and its bunching of the one big break at the end.
There are things that can seem full of wonder in week one that by week nine or ten have lost their gloss except for those who are very committed. And, while I am very committed to all sorts of issues in, for instance, the debate between internalists and externalists about content, it can be much to expect students, especially those whose interests lie in continental philosophy—as most of mine do—or who have no general interest in philosophy at all.
Not just for them, but for me, the break cannot come soon enough.

On heresies that aren't even realized

2010-10-24T18:37:00.000-07:00

I teach at a Catholic university. And, I was raised and educated in a very Catholic milieu. And, whatever my beliefs about God—and they fail to be orthodox in a number of ways, veering from the Stoic to the Kierkegaardian/Wittgensteinian—I have a deep respect for the Catholic tradition. This is in spite of the ways in which many representatives of that tradition feel and argue about my kind.

In any case, I am often surprised—or am I just saddened?—when student of mine report in papers and essays and reflection pieces on their own beliefs. I am not surprised that they believe what they do; generally, discovering what they believe only saddens me, being a mishmash of conservative ideology on some points with MTV-morality on others and New Age spirituality with the name "Jesus" thrown in here and there, but I am always surprised that they think that what they believe falls somewhere within the Christian or Catholic tradition.

For instance, in several reflections I was reading this evening in which students were supposed to set out and respond to Aristotelian teleology, students began paragraphs with some variation on "Coming from the Christian perspective" followed by things that only Joel Osteen would think were Christian ideas, such as that God just wants us to be happy and there are all sorts of ways to be happy and that happiness is really just subjective.

When I read these things, it becomes clearer to me just why discussion of the various strains in the Christian tradition is so troubling to them; many of them have no real idea of anything like Christian thought (or any thought) before about 1960.

Of course, for fairness' sake, their ignorance of Christianity is more than matched by their ignorance of science. I also had several students claiming that "from a biological perspective" humans have only the purpose to survive and reproduce, losing sight of the fact that purpose is a necessarily normative and teleological concept that doesn't make much sense from an evolutionary perspective. Though drives might be drives toward something, it is still more than a little sketchy to talk about them as purposes of whole organisms.

Not everything need be preserved

2010-10-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

My grandfather was raised by two German speakers in a largely German-speaking community. His family had been in the United States for just under a century when he was born. They came in 1830, he was born in 1923, but they were still speaking German at home and they weren't embarrassed by being German speaker or having come from Swabia.

I am proud of my family and proud of our heritage—to the degree that anyone can be proud of those things for which he is not responsible—but I am also proud that my grandfather, unlike this ass from Ohio who wishes to sit in Congress knew the difference between valuable parts of German culture and the Nazis and the SS. Just to be clear, the Waffen-SS were not common soldiers, they were part of an incontrovertibly evil movement. And, among other things, they were responsible for killing off Jews and Roma and Slavs and other "undesirables" in occupied areas. No matter how many endorsements his website may have claiming that he is "pro-Jewish"—how many people who respect or value either Judaism or the Jewish people spend any time in SS uniforms, for enjoyment? isn't the claim that he is "pro-Jewish" just an effort to make this go away? and anyone who has read the excellent Nazi Doctors of Robert Jay Lifton should be aware that even the most adamant Nazis thought there were one or two decent Jews—he clearly has some of the worst judgment possible. Should I want someone who pretends to be someone who was responsible for killing undesirables like me to be sitting in Congress? I think not, for some reason. Call me silly.

And, as my partner reminded me this evening, one cannot receive a visa to visit the US without disclaiming any relation to the National Socialist Party—65 years after their defeat—so one probably ought not to be sitting in the House if one finds it this important to understand the SS experience. Would acting out the death camps help?

Perpetual Peace and Neoconservatives

2010-10-11T18:26:00.000-07:00

A friend and former student of mine used to like to argue with me that Kant's work supported the American "intervention" in Iraq and the more general neoconservative project of "exporting" democracy around the world, because only in such a world would peace be possible. Of course, I'm no Kantian, so I wasn't precisely sure why that was supposed to convince me of anything.

Today, in reading Kant's "Perpetual Peace" to prepare for class, I was reminded of how strange and silly it is to think that Kant's sketch of peace could be used to justify war—particularly inasmuch as he is concerned in this essay to undermine the very notion of a just war. Kant does think that perpetual peace is only possible in a world of republics—not democracies, of which he is not particularly fond, thinking them naturally despotic—but he is adamant that there can be no justification in invading another country in order to change its internal structure, no matter what that structure may be—no overthrowing Husseins or Allendes—except in a very few cases. And, one of his most stringent conditions is that there be no relations of debtor and lender between states. Combined with his claim that the inability of sovereign states to put themselves under another authority is one of the highest bars to peace, it is hard to see exactly how he can be drafted to this particular cause.

RIP Professor Foot

2010-10-10T21:23:00.001-07:00

How many steps

2010-10-10T21:04:00.000-07:00

How many steps is it from the New York GOP gubernatorial candidate attacking gays and pandering to religious conservatives to the abduction and torture of three men thought to be gay by nine others? Just the distance from Brooklyn to the Bronx.

Apothegm

2010-10-09T22:44:00.001-07:00

By the time I'm done listing my own faults, I don't have time to consider yours.

It's all fun and games until someone jumps off a bridge

2010-09-29T18:47:00.000-07:00

Technology may have the ability to make our lives easier and help us to keep in touch with others. But it also has the ability to take actions that we haven't fully thought through all the way from initial impulse to final effect in the same amount of time that it once would have taken us even to set a chain of events in motion. In this respect, it has robbed us of our impulse to reflect and has coarsened many of us.

We have all sent the email that, had it been a letter, would have been torn up before we reached a mailbox. Many of us have posted a comment that, had we to say it to someone's face, we would reconsider.

And, two young people at Rutgers secretly webcast the romantic fumblings of Tyler Clementi, the roommate of one and the dormmate of the other. And that young man is now dead.

I don't think that these two people thought they were doing much more than playing a sort of prank. They surely hadn't planned on leading someone to commit suicide. But, especially in a world that moves so fast and via the medium of the internet, a small evil can quickly lead to a much greater one.

Not only asinine but dangerous

2010-09-27T16:36:00.000-07:00

The owner of the company that manufactures the Segway vehicle(?) died over the weekend in a Segway accident.

I remember when the world waited with baited breath for the announcement of a new device that was going to revolutionize the way we lived in cities, that was going to replace cars and—to put it succinctly—change everything. Many an hour did I spend discussing with Jim Schmiedeler in the Larkins gym at OSU just what this device could be.

Of course, the actual Segway was a horrible disappointment. And, other than being a vehicle that George Bush was able to fall off of and allowing for a new and annoying way for people and tour companies to use the sidewalk, I thought it was a harmless waste of money. But, as it turns out, Segways and cliffs don't mesh.

What the octogenarian who lives two doors down is saying right now

2010-09-19T12:35:00.000-07:00

"That's an interception, asshole."

"My team has the ball now."

"Go back to Texas, you fuckers."

A problem with living in the land of eternal summer is that people keep their doors and windows open all the time. A problem with having a slightly off and elderly neighbor—besides being asked to unclog her toilet on occasion and sometimes being talked about as if my partner and I were metaphysically indistinct—is that she yells on the telephone and to her television and I get to hear it all.

Visual enjoyment

2010-09-19T10:46:00.000-07:00

Because I was listening to a podcast (History of the World in 100 Objects) on which it was discussed this week, I thought I would share Albrecht Dürer's Rhinoceros.

One more thing that I don't like about big box bookstores

2010-09-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

Christopher Isherwood

Yesterday, after picking up a new pair of adultish shoes in which I can look sufficiently professional—and as if I were born into the prep-school-attending class, as it happens—when lecturing on the vagaries of anomalous monism, I dragged my other half into Borders because I wanted to see if they had a copy of Christopher Isherwood's A Single Man. We recently rented Tom Ford's movie of the book and were both bowled over not only by the style and acting of the film but also by the story. So, because I have enjoyed Isherwood in the past, I wanted to pick up a copy as well as see if they had any of the later volumes of The Escapist, since I am currently running through Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Generally, I buy most of my books from Amazon or at one of the local secondhand bookstores or I pick them up from piles of discarded books that find themselves in my pathways. And, I have a fair number of books; there are just over six hundred in the latest update of my home library catalogue. But, I thought I should check the Borders since I was there. First, I looked through the Literature section, but there was no Isherwood to be found; not only was A Single Man not there, but there were no Berlin Stories, nor Christopher and His Kind. Nothing.

To the in-store computer I trod and found that the only book of Isherwood's they did have—it was said to be "Likely in Store", an unhelpful bit of help if ever there was—was in fact the book I was looking for. All of Isherwood's other work could be ordered but wasn't in the store. But, it wasn't to be found in Literature; if it was there, it would be in Gay/Lesbian Literature.

Now, I know that there might be good reasons for divvying up literary genres. There might, in fact, be books that are primarily of interest to African Americans, so maybe it makes sense from a marketing perspective to have a section, as Borders does, labeled African American Literature. And, the same might be said for books of primary interest to gays and lesbians, to Asian Americans, to Hispanic Americans, etc., although not all these groups get their own areas. But, once we start down this road, where do we stop in the increasing ghettoization of literature and interests? (Perhaps, on another day, I will rant about how the same thing often happens in the Academy.) Is Maya Angelou of interest only to African Americans? Should Kazuo Ishiguro be in a section aimed at Asian readers? He gets to be in Literature. Should Thomas Mann go in Literature or Gay/Lesbian Literature or European Literature or Bisexual European Who Also Lived in America but Always Wrote in German Literature? And, if we are dividing Literature this way, why not think there is something essentially foreign about different philosophers? Why not Gay Philosophers, too? And why think gays and lesbians belong together?

It's literature or its not. I read and enjoy Jane Austen—thank you Alasdair MacIntyre—but I will never be a Regency period Englishwoman looking for a husband. How can I enjoy it? Because good literature speaks to universal themes about the human condition. It places them in specific contexts, but it needn't speak only to those who are themselves in those contexts. The fact that we have come to assume that this is the case is sad. It's no social progress or victory if only African Americans read novels in which African American characters appear, nor if only gays and lesbians—again, why should they be together under such a categorization of the genres?—read novels with gay and lesbian characters. I surely do not read only novels with gay characters or with white, gay characters from the Midwest, who teach college.

So, at least, when I'm buying from the behemoth that is Amazon, I don't have to feel that I reading something that only the gays like, even the suggestions aren't that segregated.

On the vice of cleverness

2010-09-13T18:34:00.000-07:00

I have a number of students this semester who seem to mistake cleverness for an intellectual virtue. Now, by "cleverness", I mean that display of wit or intellect that is not other-directed or other-interested—except insofar as an audience is necessary for their performance—or at all concerned with forwarding a discussion. This is the sort of participation that is really about scoring a point, that is evidenced by the hand that raises with an objection before a point is even made. And, I can't help wondering whether I was that same student.

A simple thought

2010-09-03T22:02:00.000-07:00

For those who think that the Muslim world has nothing to do with the West or that the only relationship between Islam and the West is one of antagonism, of Crusades and Jihad, I have to repeat a thought oft-emphasized by Alasdair MacIntyre—no liberal or friend of relativism and a strong believer in the community and tradition—in classes with him oh so many years ago that without Islam and its efforts, there is no Aquinas (his synthesis of Aristotle and Christianity relied on the Islamic preservation of Aristotle), there is no university (centers of learning that granted doctorates/universal authority to teach are there in the Islamic world in Cairo and Fez and Baghdad before Paris or Bologna or Oxford), there is no intellectual tradition in the West that goes much beyond Plato. And without this tradition, there isn't a Western civilization, including that part that reacted to scholasticism and gave us the Enlightenment.

The Clash of Civilizations, pace Samuel Huntington, can only be conceptualized by those who think of civilizations and cultures in exactly the same simplistic way that leads those of shallow thought to relativism.

Like a horse and carriage

2010-08-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

It is inevitable that in the prolonged debate that is going on about same sex marriage not just in the United States but throughout Europe and the Western Hemisphere, people are going to have to talk about the relationship between love and marriage. Of course, Frank Sinatra told us just how deeply the two were connected, but it isn't always clear that they are so closely intertwined.

We all know of "loveless" marriages and even unions in which the partners seem more connected by their disdain for one another than their affection. After all, all those movies in which marital partners are constantly at one another—and not only when they try to destroy one another as in War of the Roses—are entertaining because of the sometimes uncomfortable way in which they limn the world we know. But even though we often think of such marriages as unhappy and better exited than endured, we almost never think that they should be automatically dissolved for their lack of love. So, one might argue, love and marriage need not be connected.

Moreover, there are those—Jonathan Rauch is particularly good here and I often have students read his arguments—who argue that given the long history of marriage, in which love was an afterthought if anything, and our legal tradition, which makes no mention of love as one of the requirements for marriage, we ought to stop talking as if there really was a connection between the two.

And, in the actual debate on the ground, whatever its rational value, you get people on either side saying that marriage is or is not about love.

"It's about the freedom to love whom I love."

"Marriage isn't about 'love' it's about children and society."

"No love is wrong."

Etc.

There are, I think, a couple of issues here. One thing that we have to note is that we don't require of two people when they marry that they feel any particular sort of emotion for one another. That is, neither as a society nor in the majority (any?) of our religious traditions do we ask for proof of affection or evidence that there is a certain sort of feeling for one another. We don't ask for a quantification of love, because we cannot even name the quality when it is felt by others who are not ourselves. This is a slightly odd version of the problem of other minds or the privacy of subjective mental content, but there is just absolutely no way for me to know what you feel when you are in love or love someone else. So, even if it were desirable to make some love requirement, we couldn't do it. (Some budding neoroscientists might try to claim that we can map emotions to the locations in which they occur in the brain; be that as it may, we still will not have gotten to anything like the way love feels.)

This might lead us to think that love shouldn't have anything to do with the way that we conceptualize (secular civil) marriage as a society. But, there's a danger in taking this position, too. For, if there is really no connection between love and marriage then there is surely no good reason to allow people of the same sex to marry one another nor is there any good reason to allow any two particular people to marry, since there could then be no argument that one had a right to marry whom they loved—the two concepts being divorced—as long as they had a right to marry some other person. In other words, if love and marriage really have nothing to do with one another, then the conservative argument that gays and lesbians really do have the same rights as others—namely, the right to marry—but just not the right to marry people of the same sex would start to have some teeth.

So, it seems, we need a conception of love that is related to marriage but that doesn't mean that those "loveless" marriages or marriages in which people have to learn to love one another aren't real marriages. I aim to provide the skeleton of that here.

(For more on "loveless" marriages, see the video below.)

New Law Would Ban Marriages Between People Who Don't Love Each Other

I think the right answer is the combination of at least two different things. One is an idea that I first heard put well by Dan Savage. The gist of his claim was that love—at least the sort of long-term, forever love that we claim informs our marriages and partnerships and families—is a sort of lie that we tell one another. That is, we don't know today that we will love another for the rest of our lives, so when we say that we will we are committing ourselves to the truth of a statement that we cannot know to be true. But, that's okay, because we aren't really making a statement. We are making a commitment to live today as if we are going to be together for the rest of our lives and to do the same thing tomorrow. Without getting too sappy, being together forever is just being together now again and again. But this is to say that love is not (just) a feeling, but a commitment, an act of will, to act towards the other person in a certain way.

If this first claim is true, then there are only going to be certain people to whom I could relatively easily make this kind of commitment and who these people are is going to be governed, in part, by my orientation. There are some lies that it is harder to get myself to believe and, among those, would be that I could be committed to a woman in the sort of way that could become lasting. (This is also why, even if some would regard same-sex marriages as second-best in general, they must be viewed as the best for those like me.)

The second thing to consider is the silly way that modern people tend to think about love. Nothing brings this out more clearly than the way that people will say things like "I love him, but I'm not in love with him." Now, I don't want to deny that love is based on and has as a part, even an essential part, an emotional and affective state. But, I don't think that state is very closely aligned, even if causally and temporally related to, the state of being in love. Being in love is like having a crush. It is that initial magical state that exists at the beginning of a relationship and, for some people, never again. But this is more like passion.

And, here I'd like to point to one of the lessons one can learn by growing up among seemingly cold, Germanic midwesterners. I remember my maternal grandmother once giving me advice on marriage: "If you get married, you should have children soon, because the passions dies quickly." That can seem horribly cold and when I was a young man, I thought it was. But she was pointing to an important distinction, that between passion or emotive feeling and something else that is better termed love. A marriage or any relationship based just on passion, on emotion, on the thrill is bound not to go too long. Why is this? Because something else, be it children or some other sort of shared project, that is, a shared life, a common thing, is needed to hold it together. And this sharing of some project, some conception of the good, some life-centering object, is really a huge part of what love is.

The other thing I learned from my family is that there is a huge difference between displays of love and love. In our family, it was never to common to hear someone say that they loved you, but it was nonetheless apparent through action that they did. The actions of love, in which you felt that others took responsibility for you and that you were responsible to them, were there. Of course, it is nice to hear the words, but hearing the words need not mean anything; the actions are meaningful.

My point then is this: Love is essential to a marriage, but it is essential in the following ways. Love is a willed commitment to another person, a sharing of a common life project and a commitment to act in ways that demonstrate care and responsibility for and to one another. And, it is this that we make people promise when they enter civil marriages, not some affective state. Can this commitment exist outside of marriage? Yes. But, when two people who are not already so committed to another and are not already connected to one another in ways that create such responsibilities wish to make this commitment, is there a good reason to prevent it?

A question with only one answer

2010-08-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

Apparently, among the questions eharmony.com asks its ~~victims~~ customers is this doozy: "Are you self aware?" The company prides itself on the depth of this question so much that it includes in its ads a woman who is amazed that no other matchmaking site had ever asked her this before.

But let's think about this for a second. If you fail to be self-aware, you will fail to be aware of this failing of yours and will answer, "Yes, I am self aware." If you are self-aware, you will answer, "Yes, I am self aware." So, how would this question differentiate between site-members.

Answer: It wouldn't. What it would do is make those people who had kicked some money to the site feel that, contrary to fact, they were actually being evaluated based on their character traits, character traits that can be evaluated according to a questionnaire—an empty set if ever there was. I suspect that matchmaking websites have slightly less depth than the psychic around the corner.

NB: In the case of the actually self-aware, this person might actually see themselves as being less than ideally self-aware. So, if anything, there would be a negative correlation between claims to self-awareness and actual self-awareness.

On being the villain of the piece

2010-08-06T13:16:00.000-07:00

In many ways, I am fairly conservative. If I had to put myself somewhere on the political spectrum, I belong with most Indiana Democrats. For anyone reading this who isn't a Hoosier, that might not mean much. But, in Indiana, there's really not much difference between a Democrat and that vanishing (or is it now extinct except for those few whom the party faithful term RINOs?) breed, the moderate Republican. I am even, in many instances, socially conservative. I am an admirer of some members of the GOP, in fact. I think that there has always been a lot to say for Richard Lugar and there used to be a good deal to say for Lindsey Graham, before he jumped on the bandwagon to repeal the 14th Amendment. And, I have in the past voted for Republicans and even could imagine myself doing so again, except for the fact that the GOP has decided, by and large, that I am the enemy.

Consider, for instance, that rising star of the Tea Party and new GOP, Sharron Angle. Ms Angle is committed to the barring of adoption by gays, local control of the schools, the teaching of creationism/intelligent design as science, the empowering of churches to endorse political candidates while maintaining their tax-exempt status, etc., ad nauseam. Though she would once have been on the fringes of her own party, she is now a sort of heroine of a new and rising wing of the GOP, the wing headed by Sarah Palin.

But, we have to notice that this new wing is one that defines itself against an enemy. And, by and large, I am that enemy. I am gay and we cannot be trusted; we certainly cannot be trusted with children and, apparently, we are doing all that we possibly can to bring down all the sacred institutions of America. I am one of those people who fears that with continued local control of all aspects of education, we end up with Texas-style school books, in which the Founding Fathers become evangelicals and the influence of Thomas Aquinas (!) on the founding of the Republic is to be emphasized. I believe in evolution, because there is scientific evidence for it, evidence that cannot be explained in any other way, whatever its problems as a theory. I am also someone who knows that science always gives us theories, supported theories and that "theory" like "progressive" or "liberal" needn't be a term of derision. I also know enough about history, a subject I was taught largely by conservative Republican school teachers in Indiana, to know that there was a time when schools were more locally controlled and when churches had a larger role in political and governmental life, and that time was a time when my ancestors weren't considered real Americans because we were Catholics and the schools were controlled by Protestant majorities who misrepresented both American and European history. In short, I have a little bit of education and I think a critical eye is always necessary, but this makes me the enemy of the Tea Party. And, I worry that if churches gain the right that Angle et al. believe they have to endorse political candidates and remain tax-exempt this means that I have to support them; since others' donations to them are erased from their taxes, my relative tax burden increases, effectively to support activities I disagree with and that may well be directed against me. That's not democracy, nor is it just. But, I don't really think that Angle believes that voices that disagree with her have a place in democracy. (Of course, any church or other current non-profit has the right to endorse whomever it pleases; they need simply relinquish their tax-exempt status.)

If the educated, the questioning, the reasonable—in both the sense that they are guided by reason and open to reasons given by those with whom they disagree—and critical are enemies; and, if gays are enemies; and, I see no way to construe the trajectory of the GOP in a way that these people are not its enemies; then I am the GOPs targeted enemy and there's simply no way that I, nor my friends, can ever find their candidates compelling.

Nothing human is foreign to me

2010-08-03T18:54:00.000-07:00

I am clearly biased. After all, I teach philosophy for a living. I went to University and graduate school in philosophy. So, I am likely to be fond of the humanities in general and philosophy in particular.

But, I have to say, more than fifteen years after I graduated, I almost daily come back to some question, work, discussion or issue that I was introduced to in some humanities class, whether humanities itself or theology or Russian literature or philosophy. The fact that I still feed on those morsels says something to be about the human—not the economic or employment or market—value of the humanities. After all, we are humans, right?

For some of those other values, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum's, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

Greek passion

2010-07-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

I was reading someone's profile somewhere online this week and I read through his selection of quotes and inspirational sayings. I almost always drudge through this part of an online profile, only because I find it interesting to see in what way people want other people to view them—I don't take too seriously the idea that people actually guide their own lives by the quotes and ideas they select; I assume rather that they are portraying an ideal self or at least a self that they want others to see, even if they don't want to become that self—and because I like to see the list of quotes that are misattributed and not even in keeping with what the supposed quoted actually thought. Among those most often misquoted are Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, the Buddha and a handful of recognizably great but sufficiently foreign characters to whom anything plausibly, it seems, can be credited.

The thought that caught my idea this particular day was something to the following effect: The ancient Greeks asked only one question when a man died, "Did he live with passion?"

Now, I understand the idea here. This fellow thinks or wants us to think that he thinks that a life that isn't filled with passion is a value-less life. All well and good. But, as someone who has worried a lot both about the ancient Greeks and the passions, I'd love to know which of the ancient Greeks thought this. The Homeric ones, the Platonists, the Aristotelians, the Spartans, the dramatists, the Hellenists? Sure, it must seem that I'm being pedantic and bitchy, but there's actually a serious problem here. Or, there might be a couple.

In contemporary society, to be passionate about something is often thought to be a good thing. It is to be deeply committed to it, to feel a deep emotional attachment that drives one on in ones pursuit of that thing or idea or whatever. This is, however, a very modern conception, probably tied to something like Kierkegaard's nineteenth-century distinction between objective and subjective truth. Most of the Greeks about whom we know felt pretty differently about passion. "Passion" comes from the same word that gives us "pathetic", a base word that means to suffer. This is why Christians talk about the Passion of Christ—it is His suffering that is being discussed, not His dedication. So, for the Greeks, to be passionate was to be suffering an emotion. And, for pretty much all of the Greeks, suffering was a bad thing, except in those cases where it was necessary to suffer some evil to prevent some other evil. One would never willingly choose to live a life where one was the constant victim of passions, where one was constantly driven by forces beyond ones control.

Think of the way that even we conceptualize passionate love as something that one is in the throes of, something in which one might lose herself, etc. These are not the sorts of things the Greeks, so far as we know, valued. They generally seem to have thought that the emotions were something that should be kept in check and that very bad things happened when they were not; the dramatic canon is partly about what happens when the emotions aren't controlled.

Am I saying that the Greeks were right about this? No. Do I think they largely were? Yes, but that's not my point here.

Instead, I think using this kind of spurious account of the ancients or quote of an ancient sage demonstrates two important problems in thought, even as it avoids a third.

1)A belief that whatever we think about life can only be right if we are able to find some ancient forebear who believes exactly the same thing. This is just simply wrongheaded. I think that we have a lot to learn from the past. In fact, I think that much of what is wrong in the world is partially a result of not seriously considering the wisdom of those who have gone before. However, the past might just be wrong. And, when it is, or when we believe it is, we ought to accept that we disagree with the ancient Greeks or with the Buddha or with whomever. (I'm sort of a Stoic and sort of an Aristotelian, but I disagree with both schools in numerous ways.) If we really thought that everything there was to say of interest had been said in the past, then we should all just be historians.

2) A belief that those who lived in the past were exactly like us in every respect. Thus, they would feel as we do about the passions. But, the ancient Greeks lived in a society (or a set of societies) that were more warlike, much smaller, often slave-holding, agrarian, etc., etc. They were alike us in that they were humans, in that we can understand them, we can make sense of them, they can speak to us—we should avoid the other extreme of saying that they were so much unlike us that we can never understand them—but they weren't us, even if we do agree with what they say.

So, when we're looking for the past to underwrite what we believe, we owe it to the past and to ourselves to get the past right and to understand whether they could even have been worried about what gets us so worked up.

PS Many of the ancient Greeks do seem to have thought that there was only one question relevant at the end of a life. But that question was: Was his life a happy life? Some other day, we can worry about what they meant by happiness, because it wasn't our happiness, either

A thought inspired by "social networking"

2010-06-25T22:49:00.001-07:00

Respect is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for friendship.

A question of parenting

2010-06-13T10:54:00.000-07:00

Imagine that I were a working- or lower-middle-class parent who sent my sixteen-year-old daughter across the country, driving alone because she liked to drive so much and she was such a good driver and I wanted her to express her independence. Imagine further that on the trip she had a horrible accident or was raped or killed. What kind of parent would I be? Who would be responsible? Who would we blame?

Now, imagine that I were a wealthy parent who put my child in an expensive sailboat and sent her around the world to sail, because she was such a good sailor and enjoyed sailing and I wanted her to express her autonomy. Imagine further that she got into trouble about halfway through her trip—quelle surprise—and that another country's government had to charter a passenger plane to try to find her and then had to rescue her. Would I be a good parent? Would it be just to ask that country's citizens to pick up the tab for my parenting decisions? Who should be blamed for the mess?

In short, what makes the second real parent better than the first hypothetical parent? And, what makes either of them better than the "Balloon Boy" parents?

Debate and discussion

2010-06-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

In my own life—partly real and partly virtual—and in my observation of what passes for discourse in modern culture, I find myself thinking about the difference between debate and discussion. This is largely because, while I was trained and care to discuss, most people want to debate.

It seems to me that there is a lot of truth—and a lot of Aristotelianism and Thomism—in the notion that any activity is defined partly and largely by the good or end at which it aims. For instance, the difference between a marriage and a fling is in part defined by what the two are for.

Debate, it seems to me, aims primarily at winning. Winning might be defined in different ways: in an Oxford-style debate, it is defined by net change in opinion in an audience; in a political debate, it is decided by pundits and pollsters and ultimately voters; in a forensics debate, it is determined by judges. Of course, related to winning in this sense is convincing—or exhibiting convincingness—but this sort of convincing takes it as a given that the debaters will not themselves be swayed. Like Luther, they stand where they are and can do no other.

Discussion, on the other hand, seems to aim at truth. Of course, truth is an abstract thing to be aiming at. But in a genuine discussion—a dialectic, even—the parties are aiming to get to some best view. And, it is inherent in this pursuit that each recognizes that he may not already have the truth himself, that his discussion partner may have some of it or even all of it on her side. Discussion, that is, relies on a recognition of one's own fallibility in a way that discussion doesn't, but this also means that discussion has the possibility of moving both parties to somewhere new. And, that somewhere new might even be knowledge. Debate won't take one there.

We live in a society of debate it seems, where convincing is king, as it was for the sophists. It's a shame we've given up on discussion.

No, dude, I was just kidding

2010-06-09T21:53:00.000-07:00

In many ways in contemporary society, we are less civil and more forward than we have been in a long time. Or, at least, we are so in many more contexts. There are so many things said to me by students, for example, that utterly surprise me for no other reason than I cannot have imagined myself having said anything similar when I was in college.

But, we seem to have adopted a new strategy, both in person and in the virtual realm: the strategy of saying "just kidding" or "I was only joking".

This seems to get used in two different but related contexts. In one case, a person will say something utterly insulting or indefensible or factually insupportable or sexist or racist or clearly uncalled for and then follow it with "just kidding". In the other, a person makes a statement and then, afraid that they might be wrong, following it with the same.

Though the situations are very different, it seems in both cases there is both a statement of one's real character or knowledge or ignorance and then a wish that it wasn't so. If you know who are and aren't happy about it or ashamed about it, it seems that you have two choices: fix yourself or own up to it. This attempt to have it both ways, I think, shows the basest lack of character.

Since the semester has ended: Or, pragmatically unadvisable emails

2010-05-29T17:23:00.000-07:00

A collection of some recent email missives from students and perspective students:

"I was just wondering if the grade I was givin was correct. Would missing the first midterm really impact my grade?" (A complete message)

In said course, each midterm was worth 20% of the grade, so missing one and not making it up is likely to have an effect on a final grade.

"hi i really want to take this class and wondering if i can get an add code thank you." (Another complete message)

Note the simplicity, the challenging nature of asking me to figure out what the class is and who the correspondent is and to whom the email was meant to go. And, the class doesn't begin for another month. The best strategy is probably to come to the actual class and ask then—oh, and to treat me as if I'm not a friend to whom you are sending a text.

"After I took the test today, I believe that if I calculated it out right, i'll be making a grade of somewhere in the 70's (I hope). With that being said, is there anything I can do to improve that final grade? I know I missed a whole paper, and that is what's really affecting me right now. Is there anyway I could write it and get half credit??" (Message edited to protect the identity of the student)

Yes, yes, I would enjoy doing extra work at the end of the semester because you were unwilling to do it during the semester and now are worried about your grade. And, after all, the point of thinking about philosophy and writing the paper was just to get points.

Is it not telling?

2010-05-01T10:30:00.000-07:00

Doesn't it say something about modernity that, when questioned about their responsibility to disclose the real value of securities they were selling and the positions (i.e., betting that these same securities would fail) they were taking, executives of Goldman Sachs—here standing in for many in financial and other sectors—were unable to think of any sort of responsibility other than legal responsibility? Their defense was that they had not violated the law, so they had done nothing wrong, whatever the effects of their actions on their clients, the national and international economies or indeed whatever their deceptive intentions had been.

Even good old Adam Smith, famed but not sole progenitor of capitalist theory—but whom I doubt would recognize much of what goes on on Wall Street and elsewhere as anything like capitalism—thought that capitalism could only work, could only make sense, could only be justified against a background of shared moral belief and, yes, social justice.

Our place in nature

2010-04-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

I am a humanist, which is to say at least two things: I've spent more than half my life in the humanities; and, while I don't know that we always get the right result, I believe that moral questions must be addressed from the human perspective—after all, there is no other perspective we can successfully take. (This is not to say either that only humans matter or, in the style of secular humanists, that religious values cannot be discussed or considered.)

But the right kind of humanism cannot be that sort in fact exhibited by those who claim to be religious (and often deride humanism) but demonstrate in many of their beliefs an inheritance from the Enlightenment and its immediate intellectual forebears, namely a vision of humans as divorced wholly from the rest of nature. I call this, too, a kind of humanism inasmuch as it replaces a presumed God of creation with a God of humanity. If that's not humanism of a sort, it's hard to know what it is.

Consider two fonts of this sort of view: Descartes and Kant. In his dualism, Descartes endows humans with a mind. He is at pains to distinguish this from the soul (the anima that animates all animals). He goes out of his way to deny this mind is shared at all by the (other) animals. Here, in a new way, we are separated from the rest of nature. Nature is simply a mechanistic body devoid wholly of mind, while we are minds. Of course, we have bodies, but this is not essential to us.

In Kant's conception of the human being, we are defined by two characteristics: our will and our reason. It is these two things that make us what we are and it is their lacking in the natural world that makes that world morally irrelevant. The natural world, the phenomenal world, is deterministic and unreasoning. Only we are free and reasoning and only as we are conceived in the noumenal world, not the world we sense. And, for all the sublimity with which Kant enchants the natural world, this is nothing more than a power to create an effect in us.

I'll not delve too deeply into the consequences these views have for treatment of nature and animals. But, it should be obvious that on such views, nothing can be wrong per se in any treatment of the non-human world, except as it affects humans. Torturing a dog like Heathcliff is wrong not because of the dog's suffering, but only because if might lead to insensitivity to human suffering.

Rather the pervasive problem is in seeing us as divorced from nature. This contrasts an older tradition—that tradition against which Descartes rebelled—that sees humans as ensconced in nature. Even Plato for all his hatred of the physical world, sometimes hints that the physical world's other inhabitants might have a deeper connection to us; or, at least one might infer this from some of his considerations of metempsychosis. Surely Aristotle, in his views of the souls we share with other living things: the vegetative and animal—and in his tying together of form and (physical) matter and placing us between, but sharing in the natures, both of God and the animals, places us as much more firmly in nature. This is a theme mirrored in the Stoic belief that all living things share in a piece of the fire that permeates the Universe as well as the ancient and medieval mindsets in which humans can learn moral lessons from natural history and bestiaries.

I'm not just being an old codger here nor am I arguing that animals stand on the same level in moral consideration as we do—I am, after all, claiming to be a humanist, to place humans first. But there is something disconcerting about having to argue with University students who firmly believe that "All humans are animals" is false; with people who tell me that something ought to be done about the birds—the parrots, the hummingbirds, the eagles and hawks, etc.—on campus, because they have the temerity to defecate on car hoods; to watching student overcome with disgust and fear at the lizards, possums, raccoons, mice, rats, etc. that come up from the canyons on the side of campus (it's lucky they don't see the coyotes in the daytime); at having students strenuously deny the possibility of natural selection less out of religious conviction that out of concern over human dignity; and, at having those students who accept evolution conversely claim that because we are a different species, we may exploit all the rest of nature.

What am I claiming? Just that a view of humanity that sees us as apart from nature is an impoverished one, impoverished in its appreciation of the natural world—not just in zoos and botanical gardens—as a good in itself and impoverished in its appreciation of what we are as part of that same nature. To see ourselves as angels trapped in bodies is as wrong and harmful as to see ourselves as merely clever pigs. Perhaps we need a return to the Great Chain of Being—in a modified form—to see our place in relation to and in nature.

How we live now

2010-04-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

Reason requires discussion. Socrates knew this.

Discussion requires listening.

We no longer—in the political realm, in the classroom, in our personal lives, in our so-called social networking sites—have any interest in listening to anyone not ourselves.

Thus, no discussion, thus no possibility of reasoning, thus no possible improvement, as opposed to mere change, in our doxastic states.

We only yell at one another, and there is nothing social about this.

Liaisons, oh my!

2010-04-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

Last week, I finished reading Choderlos de Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses (in translation, of course). And, though I couldn't help picturing Glenn Close and John Malkovich while reading—Keanu Reeves, luckily, did not appear on my mind's stage—I found the story much more delightfully nasty and amoral than even the movie was. With the translator/editor (Parmeé), I found myself questioning whether the military officer and later Jacobin was really portraying a debauched aristocracy for our righteous indignation or for our envy, but mostly, I found myself thinking that for all the ways in which the epistolary format allows for an omnipotent narrator or, rather, the omnipotence of the reader—leaving aside how all the letters are to have been collected together—we should all be grateful that other structure of the novel quickly displaced this one. Reading hundreds of letters may have been imaginable in a much earlier age, but (sadly?) it is no longer to our taste. The repetition of salutations and closings alone is enough to drive one crazy.

Days of silence and lost voices

2010-04-18T13:00:00.000-07:00

Last Friday was the annual Day of Silence, the day when gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered persons, etc., and allies are asked not to speak in order to make clear how their voices so often go unheard. Now, I believe that I have opined on the strangeness of this before—among other things, it seems strange to me that I, of course, have to speak on such days while well-meaning straight allies can take a stand against an oppression they have never felt by refusing to speak in class: I don't have the option of being silent—but the bigger problem with the very concept of a day of silence is the way that it addresses a problem by exacerbating the same problem.

Contrast a day of silence with walkouts. Take, for instance, the idea of a day without Mexicans popularized in southern California. Such a walkout makes an impact. It does this by addressing the way the presence of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans (and other Latin Americans) is ignored by replacing it with absence: you don't see us when we are here, notice us when we are not and are not doing the jobs you need done! This was also the old strategy of homemakers going on strike: you think I do nothing, wait until I do nothing!

A day of silence, it seems, should work this way, but it differs importantly. In a walkout, there is valued work that goes undone and so is missed. It is only in its absence that the presence is noticed. In a day of silence, the very claim is that the voice (not merely the work or the presence) of a group is ignored and undervalued and so the response is to not speak. But, if the voice is not valued or noticed, to withdraw it is to acquiesce to that very ignoring and disvaluing.

But why doesn't its absence in this case draw attention to its presence? I think because gays and lesbians and transgendered people are never going to be a large enough group or a concentrated enough group in any university or college or other institution to be missed on one day. (Sure musical theater might disappear without gays and the LPGA might cease to exist without lesbians—of course, I am kidding—but this is not like the effect on agriculture or construction that would be felt if we really did deport everyone with a questionable immigration history.)

So what is better? If there is too little recognition of speech and voice, put so much voice and speech out that it cannot be ignored. Make them pay attention; don't be silent.

The Catholic League's red herring

2010-03-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

According to Bill Donohue of the Catholic League—an organization that likes to portray itself as the Catholic B'nai B'rith—there has been no pedophilia crisis in the Catholic Church. Really, he says in an ad in this week's New York Times, it's a "homosexual crisis".

Now, whether coverage in the Times and elsewhere has been fair or evenhanded or not—and there may be good reason to think it hasn't been and that Maureen Dowd's columns may also be over the top—somehow coming to the conclusion that because more of the incidents have involved boys than girls indicates that the perpetrating priests are homosexuals (not pedophiles, per se, apparently), is a beautifully executed red herring.

It's not pedophilia, there's no problem with coverups, it's just those damned gays again. What do you expect? It couldn't be that pedophiles in the priesthood—and again, there are probably no more per capita than in the general population, indicating the real problem is the culture of coverup—just had more access to boys rather than girls? No, that's not possible. It's just that homosexuals can't control themselves.

I've known some homosexual priests, and none of them were child-rapists. Why? Because molestation and sex aren't the same thing and pedophilia and homosexuality aren't the same thing. No matter how comforting it may be for some conservative Catholics to blame all their problems on gays, we won't be and can't be the scapegoats for this one. Put down the stones and look at yourselves, fellows.

Family values

2010-03-29T23:09:00.000-07:00

I know people who occasionally get a drink at Voyeur though I never have and can't imagine myself doing so, but none of them claim to support family values and probably almost none of them are donating to the GOP. I guess we can trust the RNC to protect traditional values because they say they will.

Nothing to be proud of

2010-03-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

So, Ricky Martin has come out. His career in undetectable, everyone has known he is gay for at least a decade—a friend of mine in South Beach was hit on him eleven years ago in a department store—and the only possible reason for his coming out at this point is to get on the gay party circuit.

Had he come out when there was some cost to him, it might have been noteworthy or praiseworthy. As it is, given his past stories of having an imaginary girlfriend, he is in Sean Hayes and Rosie O'Donnell territory, willing to lie and obfuscate until it just doesn't matter anymore or is utterly impossible. Ellen came out when it cost her something. You didn't. When it mattered, you lied. Now it doesn't and I don't care.

If it doesn't cost you anything, you don't earn anything.

On the possibility of considering oneself Catholic

2010-03-27T21:53:00.000-07:00

Cardinal Caffarra of the Catholic Church's Pontifical Council for the Family recently stated that it is impossible to consider oneself Catholic if one believes that there is a right in any way—presumably, given the context of his statement, even in the merely civil sense both of "marriage" and of "right"—to same-sex marriage.

Since I consider myself Catholic and yet I believe that, in the strictly civil sense of both terms, there is a right to same-sex unions and marriages, he is wrong about this possibility. Anything that is, is possible.

But, much more importantly, it is interesting, to say the very least, that one apparently can think that one is a Catholic at the same time one is covering up the abuse of children. In fact, as in the case of Cardinal Law, one can even be promoted to Archpriest of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, having done that very thing and then having done everything but lie under oath about it.

Of course, I am very aware that the powers that be both in the Vatican and in the diocesan chanceries around the world are busy blaming the sex-abuse crisis either on gays or on Vatican II or on secularization of society—ignoring the fact that it is isn't openly gay men who are molesting children, but men who claimed to be regular, old heterosexuals; that, for instance, the case most recently come to light in Wisconsin of a priest who molested at least 200 deaf boys began in 1950, more than a decade before Vatican II, a not atypical case; and, that the massive molestation and abuse in Ireland, covered in the Ryan and Murphy Reports, occurred in the most religious (i.e., least secularized) country in Western Europe, the only one in which lay people were likely to trust the clergy, and went back many decades, including systematic abuse of a non-sexual nature in the Magdalene laundries—but this is nothing more than a red herring, designed to pretend that the real problem isn't the way that bishops in power have done all they can to protect the Church, by which they mean themselves and not the people. Clearly they are wolves positioning themselves as shepherds.

There are probably no more molesters in the Church than there are in the general population, and I am genuinely sad for all those who have dedicated themselves to the Church and have now had themselves put under suspicion for nothing more than their vocation. The problem—and the one that the pope and others are unwilling to address—is that the hierarchy has acted like so many American CEO's, protecting the leadership, acting in the interest of the corporation, and blaming all failings on a few and never on the structure of unconnected, uninterested, power-hungry leadership.

Most recently, there has been a spate of claims that every institution, whether it is a school or a scout organization, has the same culture of coverup and corporate-think, as if the claim to represent the teaching and body of Christ is absolutely meaningless, as if the Church shouldn't be held to a higher standard, as if it really were just a corporation that should be expected to fail and shouldn't even feel particularly bad about it, because, after all, such things happen.

Now, I'm not a Donatist, but before members of the hierarchy start telling me which moral and political beliefs I may have and still be a Catholic, they may want to get their own moral house in order. Ordination and consecration may have sacramental effects, but moral authority doesn't come with imposition of hands or the donning of the purple. It must be earned; and not many are earning it these days.

Christ said, "But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea."

Good title for something (arising in class discussion)

2010-03-16T17:48:00.000-07:00

Searching for Kant

A depressing black-and-white foreign film perhaps?

2010-02-16T20:55:00.001-08:00

The problem with vitriol is that it burns and erodes everything it touches, all too often the one throwing it, as well.

The real threat of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell

2010-02-02T20:46:00.000-08:00

When Senators McCain and Sessions get all worked up about the very idea of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, they couch their objections in terms of unit cohesion and making sure that units don't become sexualized. Now, of course, arguments centering on unit cohesion are exactly the arguments made against desegregating the armed forces. And, anyone who believes that units are currently sexualized has never spent time in groups of young men in any context: the military, a college dorm, a bar (of any type) on a weekend night.

So, what is the real threat of repeal. I propose that it is just this: if you let soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen know that there are gays among them—and let me tell you, there are lots of gays and lesbians among them, living in a military town and being gay makes this abundantly clear—they might actually realize that gays and lesbians aren't any different than anyone else. If you spend time with Blacks, you realize that Blacks and Whites aren't really that different; if you spend time with Latinos, you realize that Latinos and Anglos really aren't that different; and, if you spend time with gays, you might just realize that they aren't so different either. And, if that happens, what will the culture warriors do. I mean, if people actually start to know people who are different from them, it gets harder to hate them and oppose their equality. I've no doubt that desegregation of the military helped the Civil Rights movement. And, repealing DADT might just make anti-gay legislation harder to pass and make gays less useful in winning elections. Could that be the real fear?

2010-01-27T11:35:00.000-08:00

The tenor of political debate in this country has made me think that it is really quite fortuitous, that—in spite of their different roots—"ideologue" and "idiot" sound so similar in English. There seem to be fewer and fewer instances in which the two words are not interchangeable without change of meaning.

Logical implications of extending the Bill of Rights to fictive persons

2010-01-22T19:51:00.000-08:00

Corporations have always been fictive persons—or at least fictive bodies, given the root—in some sense or another. For profit corporations are fictive persons for financial purposes. If Corporation X owes me money and goes into default, I only have a right to some share of Corporation X's assets, as the fictive person involved, and not to the assets of all the shareholders of Corporation X. This is much like the idea that if you owe me money, I may be able to get it from your spouse in some states—because, in one legal sense, you really are one body, one corporate being with shared assets—but I cannot attempt to attach the assets of your parents or siblings or best friend, since they are distinct legal persons. So, the shareholders and even officers of a corporation are legally distinct from the fictive person of the corporation.

But, (five of) the Supreme Court Justices have told us that corporations and other fictive persons are persons with respect to the Bill of Rights. Inasmuch as they are such, it would seem to follow that they have the other rights (and responsibilities) of persons. It is important to note that the operative concept in both the common and the civil law is person and not human being, so we needn't worry about the fact that corporations are not humans.

So, quite apart from worrying about whether Coca-Cola has registered for the draft—wait, they are beyond that age now—we should ask our corporations to forego the middlemen of lobbyists and campaign contributions and merely run for office themselves. I offer for your consideration, the Senator from the State of California, Apple, the Mayor of New York, The Bloomberg Corporation (only a small step), and our new President, Berkshire Hathaway.

Name-calling

2010-01-22T17:21:00.001-08:00

Within the American political context, if you call your opponent, left or right, a Communist or a Nazi or a Stalinist or, honestly, even a Socialist, you have made it clear that you have no idea what any of those terms mean.

And, if you talk about dictatorship, it is clear that you have never lived under one or even visited a country that ever had one.

Logical implications of the identity of money and speech

2010-01-21T19:03:00.000-08:00

If, as the five justice majority of SCOTUS again ruled today, money really is speech, then why can one arrested for solicitation of prostitution not mount a defense claiming that he was merely doing the same thing as anyone trying to pick up a sexual partner in a bar, at a party or elsewhere.

The normal mode of pick-up is to talk to someone until such a time as they might be willing to engage in sex. Of course, it normally helps if one is attractive but we all know of cases where charm evinced through speech was enough to seal the deal.

Now, a john is offering money for a sexual act that he would not normally get. This is just what prostitution is. But, if money is speech in political contexts, why is it not speech in this context? And, if it is, the john is guilty of nothing more than speaking his way to sex. And that is mere fornication (or adultery), which is a crime almost nowhere these days.

By the same token, if a person accused of a crime has the right to argue his innocence—a clear instance of speech—why may he not simply pay the judge or jury a sum—money being speech—to make that charge disappear? Or do we already have that system?

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T10:47:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly?

2009-11-27T23:04:00.000-08:00

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that fame or reputation cannot be the greatest good, because we want to be known for our virtues and accomplishments. That may have been true in his day, but in this time of the Kardashian sisters, the insufferable parents of Balloon Boy and a couple of near-bankrupt socialites who, in the interest of getting themselves on reality television, crash a state dinner, I wonder whether he would still be right.

Celebrity and fame used to be the result of something: X was famous for y. Now, Z is simply famous for being famous. Maybe we have Warhol to blame for making us aware of this, but we only have ourselves to blame for making it possible. We honor the famous for being famous and so fame has become an end in itself. So, instead of universally damning people who put their own notoriety above a state visit of the head of state of the largest democracy on earth, we wait to hear their side of the story with the crypt keeper of fame, Larry King.

The problem may just be power

2009-11-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

After three years, the Murphy Report, a study of pedophilia and its intense, over-three-decade coverup in and by the Archdiocese of Dublin has been released. Conservatives within the Church are sure, whenever they mention it—this is usually not often—to blame it on homosexuality within the priesthood and the liberalization of the Church after Vatican II.

Beside the fact that this ignores that many of the guilty were ordained long before the reforms of the Council took effect in the late 60s and that almost none of the men would have identified themselves as gay or homosexual and probably still don't it ignores the very real problem of power.

(For what it's worth, pedophilia is a problem across society, including in public schools, in religious organizations of all stripes, etc. And, in those cases where the victims are boys, the men almost always identify as heterosexual. This is why, pace the Pope's directives, expelling those who realize that they are gay from the seminaries will do nothing to prevent molestation; it's not the openly gay men you have to worry about.)

But back to power, because the problem of pedophilia isn't unique to the Church, but the response has been. Many parents of the hundreds of victims went to the Archbishop (four of them, in fact) and his staff and the police and in almost every case, the Church and the Irish state agreed to ignore what was happening. Of course, their reasoning was simply that such accusations might derail the very real work that the Church did and does. But this is exactly reasoning that the ends justify the means, a proposition hated by the Church, but one that is all too easy to accept when the Church has too much temporal and financial power.

Surely, that's not the kind of power Christ came to give. That kind of power almost never sits well with virtue and certainly undercuts any moral authority those wielding it might have laid claim to for other, more spiritual, reasons.

Father confessor

2009-11-10T21:51:00.001-08:00

For the n-th time this semester, a student has taken it upon himself to unload his burdens on me. I'm now up to four confessed abortions for the semester—a new record. Apparently, I should have gone to seminary after all, since I put people at ease in ways that never am.

In the course of a forty-five minute conversation with a student today, only about ten minutes of which were actually about course materials, we discussed abortion, the way that pro-life groups seem to focus on clinics in white areas and what it is like to have to decide whether to shoot children and women who may or may not be involved in insurgency or jihad in Iraq. At the end of this conversation with this very damaged human being who I am in no way competent either to help or certainly to judge, I found myself wondering why the hell it is that the class that decides when to send our troops to war almost never actually has to, or is willing to, fight them. Why are our hawks of the Cheney/Bush model? What happened to the idea that you shouldn't be sending people to wars you wouldn't be willing to fight? I know that there are ample arguments against the draft, but I wonder whether re-instituting it—with no exemptions—might make us much less likely to fight wars or at least more deliberate about entering them. And, in the spirit of the finest period of the Roman Republic, it seems only right that Senators ride out with the troops.

Cognitive dissonance, anew

2009-10-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

A man at the gym was wearing a t-shirt on the front of which was emblazoned the Von Dutch logo—oh, how much less disgusting was that than Ed Hardy—and on the back of which was "Fuck the Fake".

Now, I realize that this shirt was in fact responding to issues of intellectual(?) property and trademark, but there is something so delectably ironic about a Von Dutch shirt espousing the virtues of authenticity.

God, the deceiver

2009-09-30T20:21:00.000-07:00

One of the brighter students in one of my classes was hanging around after class the other day and we began to talk about various kinds of idealism. I began to describe the views of Bishop Berkeley, who believed that there are only minds and ideas. That is, he denied that the physical world existed as a physical entity or collection of entities. She was really understanding the view and some of the intricacies of his theory.

So, I wanted to introduce some of the problems beyond the obvious counterintuitiveness of the view. So, I mentioned that Berkeley, as a Christian was committed to the goodness of God. But, I explained, Berkeleyan idealism committed one to viewing God as having endowed our minds with apparent sensory faculties that would naturally lead us to believing that a physical world existed, even though it doesn't on the view. This, I said, would make God into a deceiver.

She responded, "That's sort of like the problem with astrology."

Confusedly, I asked, "What do you mean?"

"You know, like the way that science tells us that the Universe is really old and about the Big Bang, but"

" Oh, you mean, astronomy," I cut in. "So, you mean that the Universe is really much younger, in spite of what science says?"

"Yeah."

Then, I realized that she is a young earth creationist. Now, I have respect for this young woman's intellect and for her hard work and for her ambition to make something of her life.

But, even as I tried to explain to her that, at least as far back as St Augustine, serious Christians have thought that the creation accounts in Genesis cannot possibly taken literally, I was wondering whether it was pointless. I wanted to get her to see that if her religious beliefs require her to believe things that are clearly empirically false, she needs to consider the way in which she holds those beliefs.

But I also realized that when I tried to get them to see the value in seeking the truth, in being reflective, in examining our beliefs and lives, most of my students either don't pay any attention or have so sequestered their lives that some beliefs are not at all revisable.

And, I was sad.

Boredom

2009-09-20T17:16:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, having gone to Office Max to pick up some identity badges and a stamp for an upcoming conference my partner is planning, we stopped at a sandwich shop in the same strip mall to get some lunch. After we ordered and he had his sandwich, we sat down for him to eat and for me to wait for the grill to finish mine.

Across the aisle from us was a not atypical American family: two somewhat rotund thirty-somethings with what must have been their only child, a girl of three or four. As the parents ate their sandwiches and filled out a comment card, their daughter watched some cartoon involving moose and other animals on a portable DVD player that the parents had brought in with them.

Now, I am curmudgeonly in all sorts of ways, so this may sound like an old man grumbling about what we had to do without back when I was a child and had to trudge through the snow uphill both ways to school, etc. But, that's not really my point.

This little girl is being taught, as we all are in contemporary society, that we must be entertained at all moments, that we ought never to be bored, that we have a right not to be. The great and pessimistic philosopher Schopenhauer defined human nature partly in terms of our capacity for boredom. Alone among the animals—excluding, perhaps, those we have domesticated—we can have all our (basic) desires fulfilled, but when we do we become bored, a state that none of the other (non-domesticated) animals suffer. To be human is to be bored some or much of the time. And to deal with our humanity fully is to realize and deal with this fact about ourselves.

It's not an easy fact to deal with. I am reminded daily by my students who expect every lecture to be thrilling and entertaining from beginning to end—their expectations are not often met. I am reminded in my own case when I look for distraction or try to get through my work so that I can do something more fun.

Now, I'm no anti-government nut, but

2009-09-19T11:56:00.000-07:00

Is it really necessary that the San Diego Sheriff's Department, usually noted for breaking up political parties in people's homes, possess a sonic weapon used in Iraq to break up gatherings of protesters? What actual law enforcement purpose could this have? What are the crowds we are worried about?

And, given that the county is not exactly rolling in money, is this the wisest way to spend what it does have? Instead of, I don't know, hiring more deputies? Or training them so that they know which complaints are legitimate criminal complaints and which will involve them in political investigations?

Time for a random picture from my summer vacation

2009-09-16T19:28:00.000-07:00

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up, after all.

Reasons for leaving Facebook, part the second

2009-09-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

Surely there are cases in which anonymity is a good thing. I'll leave you to supply those cases for yourself, but there is a pernicious sort of anonymity on the web, the kind that leads to trolls and others who post comments on fora, on blogs, on websites for no more reason than to cause aggravation in others and a delectable Schadenfreude for themselves. This very sort of anonymity infects even social networking sites, so that people who claim to be friends will post—from the distance of the web and the pseudo-privacy it affords—comments that they would never utter if they had to defend themselves or face another person as they did. This, I think, is another way that virtual friendship and communication can coarsen human relations and erode civility. We all have Tourette's now.

In the more personal case, I came to see people that I liked and respected acting (virtually) towards others in a way that took me from enjoying the prospect of seeing or talking to them to hoping I might never have to talk to them again. Comments directed at me never much bothered me; I bartended for five years, I'm gay, I teach college students, so insults and snide remarks I can handle. But seeing people pounce on innocent others and judge from the height of their digital tower, I enjoy not so much. Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but I don't need a website to provide me with that kind of interaction. I can get that much easier.

I remember once being told not to say anything that I wouldn't say within my mother's hearing. An apt corollary for the web might be not to type anything you wouldn't say to the person in person.

Social conventions

2009-09-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday in one of my classes a student sitting in the front row took out a Q-tip to clean his ears as I lectured. I know that there has been a lot of talk about the coarsening of American society in the context of screaming "you lie" during a joint session of Congress, portraying Obama as Hitler, the blatant racism of many of the tea-baggers—God, I love that phrase—and the town halls. But I really wonder in a world where men and women walk down the street picking their teeth and students clean their ears in class and no one ever removes their Bluetooth devices—seriously, you are not that important—what we should expect.

2009-09-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

In the midst of the every-Sunday preparation for the week's lectures I was just re-reading Appendix I of Hume's Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. I often disagree with Hume and there's a lot that I hope he is wrong about. But, there's almost no philosopher as invigorating to read.

Reasons for leaving Facebook, part the first

2009-09-07T21:00:00.001-07:00

At the end of last week, I made a not very momentous decision to de-activate—only because one cannot delete—my Facebook account. Now, I am sure that almost no one, except for the anonymous readers who tell me that I am dumb, reads this blog, but in the next few days I will be talking about some of the reasons that I decided to delete my account.

Social networking sites (help to) turn friendship into a passive enterprise. Whereas a real friendship involves taking an active interest in another person, spending time with that person, putting effort into a relationship and more—that is, a friendship is an active endeavor—a social networking "friendship" involves occasionally reading the postings of another, reading another's status updates and acting as if this is a connection. (Of course, this allows for the extremely awkward moments when a friend or acquaintance brings up something posted months earlier and never personally shared and makes one wonder how the hell the other person could have known that.) If this is friendship, then I am friends with Paul Krugman, several extremely conservative Catholics and a number of politicians, none of whom would recognize me.

Friendship is work, as are almost all things worthwhile.

2009-07-25T05:10:00.000-07:00

I've read about numerous people, geniuses all, who either because of insomnia or because of the heat with which their brains burnt, needed almost no sleep and worked and thought and wrote throughout the dark hours of the night, not to mention those of the soul. Why is it, then, that when I wake at 3 AM unable to sleep, the only thought I can muster and fully form is a curse of my damnable luck?

2009-07-13T17:40:00.000-07:00

It is an amazing fact—amazing to me, anyway—that after much experience over many years and often having earned it, I can still not stand not to be liked, or rather to be actively disliked. I'm sure there's a deep or shallow psychological explanation for it and I'm fairly certain I know what the (correct) explanation is. But, my mood and happiness are constantly in the hands of not just those I care about but almost anyone with whom I interact, since I apparently care enough about them to care that they not dislike me. Thus I am a bad debater fearing always that I might give offense, in spite of my temper I don't object even when I treated in egregious ways, I can't negotiate, I constantly want nothing more than to be liked. And that is a fault in so many ways.

Mourn the ones who count

2009-06-25T15:46:00.000-07:00

Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Ed McMahon have all died and much of the USA and some other parts of the world seem to be atwitter. Meanwhile, a defender of family values and southern governor who screwed around on his State's dime will quickly be forgotten. But even more importantly—much, much more importantly—real people who have as much real connection to any of us as any celebrity and whose actions could actually affect the future of the world are dying in the streets in Tehran and I suspect that with the latest mortal activity in the celebrity sphere they will be forgotten. We all die, but some deaths matter.

2009-06-19T17:48:00.000-07:00

One of the great pleasures of owning a big, energetic, demanding dog is that I am forced to walk him somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half each day. I am trying to intersperse some rollerblading with him to break it up and give him a different kind of exercise, but pretty much it's walking. This means that I actually have a sense of my (very extended) neighborhood and a feeling of being a neighbor. On our afternoon walk today, we were greeted with a beautiful and huge smile by one of the ladies working on El Cajon, we got into a discussion with our UPS man who was delivering ten blocks away but couldn't leave a package because of a barking dog who commented on how that's never a problem with Mateo and we were greeted by and greeted several other people, eliciting smiles all around. To quote Forster's epigraph to Howard's End, "only connect".

2009-06-19T16:29:00.000-07:00

Love is something of which most of us are totally unsure. That's why we like to be told that we are loved and why, when we aren't told enough, we start asking, "Do you love me?" We just aren't that sure and hearing it said reassures us—or almost does, because there is something cheapening in having to hear it so often and, maybe, in hearing it so often. The same thing goes, I think, for saying it: so often when we repeat the words "I love you" too often, we are just reassuring ourselves as well as others that we really do love them, perhaps because we really aren't so sure that we do.

Social awkwardness

2009-05-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

I am connoisseur, because a common recipient, of the unvite, the invitation made for purely formal reasons but which is never meant to be taken. It comes in many varieties.

There is the invitation to a party when the inviter knows for certain that you have a prior engagement or are going to be out of town. This is the province of the amateur.

The better variety is the invitation that comes just a little too late, say just the day before the event. Of course, this variety leaves open the possibility that the invitee might actually attend, but it is just this that makes this unvite a classier variety than the invitation that arrives after the event has already occurred or begun.

There is a hybrid—the work phone or work email unvite—in which the invitation is made via a message that won't be retrieved until after event though, for the honor of the inviter, the invitation was technically made before the event.

Another flavor is the misdirected invitation, sent to the wrong address, to the wrong voicemail, to the wrong email and its cousin, the "I told N. to invite you, didn't she?"

But perhaps my favorite is the invitation that gets to the invitee—or unvitee—with just enough time to plan to attend but not quite enough information. The time is missing, the address is incomplete or it's assumed that you know where it is when clearly you don't, it's unclear what sort of event exactly it is or what you're supposed to bring or whether you can bring a guest and everything is just unclear enough that you feel uncomfortable asking and so are guaranteed not to show.

This is probably the most masterful move. The invitee won't come, the invitation was made and the inviter will later get the social upper hand in expressing how much he was missed or asking why he didn't come.

A thought about universities

2009-05-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

In the last several months, there has been a good deal of discussion within a certain subset of the blogosphere about whether my alma mater can still claim to be a Catholic university if it gives an honorary doctorate to a pro-abortion politician—or a pro-choice politician, depending on one's views. And, in the most recent edition of the student newspaper at my employer a former student of mine argued that my employer can no longer claim to be a Catholic university because not all members of the theology department are fully orthodox, many students engage in premarital sex and the liturgies are too progressive and perhaps not entirely rubrical. Leaving aside whether even in the high middle ages the students at the great universities were chaste—Chaucer, at least, gives us good reason to think that they were not—or orthodox—history tells us that there were major theological debates and that even Aquinas was thought to be unorthodox at the University of Paris—there is another issue in both sets of concerns.

What makes a university? Is the administration a university? This seems that it cannot be right. If it were, then the universities were extremely conservative and supportive of the government in the Sixties. But no one thinks this. Is the faculty a university? This seems hardly better. Are the students? The real answer is that universities are complex and organic institutions. They were the original corporations, i.e., bodies. It can be hard to tell what a university's views or positions or ideological slants are. And this is simply because universities are complex institutions, too complex to be judged by single actions or single years or single Presidents or classes.

Walling

2009-04-21T18:47:00.000-07:00

I, for one, do not care one whit whether "walling"—it's okay, they were flexible, fake walls that the questioned were being whipped into— and "waterboarding"—it's okay because we didn't really drown them—of detainees in secret prisons and black sites, etc., did or did not provide us with useful information. That is, I don't care whether Cheney or Obama is right about the effectiveness of such treatment, i.e., torture. It might very well be the case that we could get very good information out of all sorts of suspects if, for instance, we raped and tortured their families in front of them and then mutilated and murdered those families, but that wouldn't make it the right thing to do.

Why? Because there are things that are wrong, no matter what good consequence they may provide—side note: it is very funny that some of the same people who think torture is justified because it might provide good information (ends justifying means), think the use of destined-to-be-discarded embryos is morally repugnant no matter what medical breakthroughs might be possible (ends not justifying means).

There are certain actions that are beneath a civilized person, a civilized nation, a human being. There are certain things that make those who engage in them beasts. There are worse fates than the loss of life.

Two questions for Holy Week

2009-04-09T12:17:00.000-07:00

First: At what historical point did "moral" come to mean "chaste" and "virtuous" "sexually moral"? It seems that there was a time when it took quite a bit more to be moral than just to use one's naughty bits in the prescribed fashion. Indeed, it seems that sexual morality was but a rather uninteresting piece of the moral life.

In the same vein, we seem to be—at least by the BBC's lights—entering an era in which "ethical" means "having a small carbon footprint". How is it that the moral or ethical life—presumably an integrated life—has come to be so limited?

Second: Why or how exactly did it come to be that being economically or socially liberal meant that one had to support abortion on demand? There is no natural affinity between these two sets of beliefs, nor is it clear what other forms of sexual liberation really have to do with this.

Discuss

2009-04-06T09:45:00.001-07:00

When parking my car this morning--and already frustrated because the parking people had stopped me to check my permit and the occurrence of both a funeral and Holy Week on campus had meant that there was very little parking available--I parked behind a H2 with Arizona plates, but not normal plates, "Save our environment" plates. Discuss.

The ease of criticism

2009-04-03T06:27:00.000-07:00

It is enjoyable to see the conservative Catholic blogosphere and many of the bishops of the United States, most of whom have had absolutely no interest in Notre Dame—which, for better or worse is the premier Catholic university in the United States—except perhaps to watch football games, all the sudden be very, very interested in its Catholic character after having invited Barack Obama to speak at graduation (as they have invited every newly elected President for decades).

Critical morality is ever so much easier than the positive variety.

I believe

2009-03-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

that any prostitute working El Cajon Boulevard has more class and more intrinsic dignity than does any person—male or female—who has appeared on any of the iterations of The Real Housewives of ... .

It's time we stop respecting wealth and the ability to spend money, no?

A considered proposal for financial independence, or, Too sexy to fail

2009-03-18T17:18:00.001-07:00

In this time of financial distress, my daily perusal of the newspapers has given me a plan for my own financial health. Of course, given my field of employment, you might think that my options are limited, but AIG has given me an idea. So, here's my plan.

Step 1: In the future, I will teach a tissue of falsehoods. Now, I do not plan on teaching all and only false things. Rather, I am going to develop a rather involved, coherent and consistent story to tell in each of my classes.

Step 2: At some point, a student will come up against another professor who will inform the student that what I have said is false. As more questions are asked, it will become apparent that I have really messed these students up.

Step 3: No one except me will know in exactly which ways I have messed the students up. They won't know for instance, whether I merely represented Descartes as an empiricist, whether I taught them that modus ponens is a fallacy, whether I presented them with Aquinas' argument in favor of same-sex marriage. Only I will know exactly what has gone on. I will make this apparent to whichever dean I am faced with.

Step 4: I will demand a bonus—let's call it a "retention bonus"—arguing that since I got the students into this mess, only I know how to get them out of it. Of course, I know that I won't be able to spend the rest of my career untangling the web of false beliefs, so the bonus will have to be sufficiently large, something on the order of several million dollars, guaranteed for six or seven years. That seems only fair.

Life

2009-03-17T16:22:00.001-07:00

Too often, life is punctuated crisis.

On the death of the agent

2009-03-16T11:18:00.000-07:00

In the past months, the world has watched as people from all walks of life, all socio-economic levels, all ethnic and moral and religious backgrounds have positioned themselves as so much flotsam and jetsam tossed around by forces wholly unrelated to themselves.
"I took the loan because it was offered to me."
"We sold the derivatives because someone wanted them."
"I encouraged people to look at financial markets as get-rich schemes because there was a market for what I was selling and the market demands satisfaction."
"We paid massive bonuses because that is what is required by the system."
The "because" is taken not as a reason but as a real cause.
These kinds of moves have caused a lot of people to talk about responsibility. I think this is right, though I suspect that many of those calling for responsibility are really calling for someone to be punished. While I respect this call, it doesn't, I think, get to the more basic issue: we have ceased to think of ourselves as agents in any meaningful way.
There was talk, most of it from fairly nasty sorts, in the Eighties and Nineties about cultures of victimhood and poverty. While those enamoured of such terminology were generally using it to absolve themselves of any responsibility towards the suffering other, they were also pointing to something real.
There is a disturbing tendency in America and perhaps in the rest of the world to paint ourselves as the products of our neuroses, of our childhoods, of our situations, of world forces, of our addictions, of our relationships, in such a way that what happens, happens, but we don't do it. Chris Brown beats Rihanna because he grew up in a home and a culture of abuse, friends of mine end up in hospitals because they are addicts, their relationships tumble because of their psychological hangups, and no where at all is there anyone doing anything.
I don't want to discount the way in which our choices are constrained by forces outside our control, certainly almost every thinking person from the ancients with their belief in Fate to even the Existentialists have recognized that, but if there is to be any meaningful sense in which I exist, in which there is an I, it had better mean that I take my decisions as my own, that I endorse them and stop seeing myself as a victim of the world.
This means, among other things, that I have to see myself as much uglier than I would like, since my bad actions are not just psychoses or addictions or what have you, they are things that I do. But if I cannot do this, then I cannot see a point of any sort in living.

A matter of fairness?

2009-03-13T19:53:00.000-07:00

My tax dollars go to provide the health benefits for the spouses of federal employees even in those cases where, for religious or philosophical or moral or political reasons, I do not approve of their marriages—for instance, when they are third or fourth marriages, where they are marriages of persons who had previously been adulterously involved, where there are no children, etc.

No one objects that such marriages, which lie outside the realm of traditional marriage, should thereby not qualify the spouses for benefits.

By parity of reasoning, your tax dollars should go to provide benefits for same-sex spouses or partners of federal employees.

It is time, perhaps, for an even broader definition of something like civil partnerships. I am thinking here of something like the solution tried by the Archdiocese of San Francisco in 1997—if I recall correctly—when faced with a city law that would require them to provide benefits to same-sex partners in spite of the way that this flies in the face of Church teaching about marriage and sexual morality. The solution? They decided that every employee could designate one other adult, beside any dependent children, who could be the recipient of benefits. This could be a spouse, a partner, a relative, a friend. Since every employee got to designate one person, it was utterly fair and no one had to approve of any marriages that they found morally reprehensible.

Quite apart from the religious uses of marriage, one great benefit of marriages and partnerships and even deep friendships is that they tie us more closely together and thus make us all more stable members of society.

Link

Advisory oppression

2009-03-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

In several instances in the past few weeks ranging from experiences in the gym, at the grocery store, at school, on the internet, I have been presented with unsolicited advice. Now, often when we give advice to others, to help them when they are not doing something in the way we think best, we think of ourselves as being angels of mercy, helping someone out of the very greatness of our heart.

But it seems to me that particularly when the relationship between the advisor and the advisee is not a particularly intimate one and when the advice is unsolicited, it cannot help but come across as a deliverance from on high. In other words, unsolicited advice is presented as a piece of wisdom from someone who knows better and this is often going to be felt as belittling the person being advised.

To use a parallel, it seems that unsolicited advice is more akin to the vice of pity than to the virtue of sympathy, in that it underscores a difference in knowledge or wisdom or power between the two participants

It can always be worse

2009-03-12T18:21:00.000-07:00

I have been reading quite a bit of the Roman Stoics recently and reminding myself that I should not be too happy when Fortune goes my way—and honestly, she often does—nor too unhappy when she turns against me. I tend to overemphasize in my own life the way that Fortune turns against me. So, I have also been thinking about the ways in which lives goes well and go poorly.

I was thinking about these very issues and reading some Seneca this week when a student came to talk to me about some problems in logic. In the process of figuring out just what she was having a problem with, she told me an amusing story about her childhood, involving her parents and one of her siblings. I asked her how her brother remembered the story and she shook her head: "No, they are all gone. They all died in the war."

She was talking about one of a series of civil wars in her homeland. Then, I realized. Even at its lowest, my life has never been bad. There are depths of suffering that I cannot fathom.

On the inconsistency of moral outrage

2009-03-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

I have mentioned this before, but I am always surprised that many religious and other conservatives profess to have a moral problem with embryonic stem cell research while professing no such concern with in vitro fertilization, a process which almost always results in the creation of embryos that will either be frozen indefinitely or will be destroyed. Other than in cases like the "octomom" there are more embryos than can be implanted and quite often many of the implanted embryos, if they are viable, are "selectively reduced", i.e., aborted.

If you believe that morally relevant human life begins at conception then you ought to be troubled by embryonic stem cell research but you ought to be just as troubled—probably more troubled because of its breadth as a practice and the relatively small good that comes out of it—by the entire practice of IVF. This is, for instance, the conservative Catholic view.

If you are going to engage in moral outrage, you ought to be consistent.

In the interest of full disclosure, I find both morally objectionable, though for slightly more complex reasons.

Scylla and Charybdis

2009-03-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

Socialism and capitalism, absent an underlying moral theory, are equally inhuman.

On the one hand, socialism is an attempt to absolve us from our responsibilities to one another, moving this responsibility to the state. In this way, after years of even the mildest forms of socialism, people begin to question why they even have the minimal obligations to one another that paying their taxes for a social safety net seems to impose upon them. This is an effect I see in my students. It is good, in this regard, to recall that Dickens’ Scrooge is a thoroughgoing socialist: he objects to charity because there are already poorhouses that his taxes support.

On the other hand, capitalism absolves us from responsibility by claiming either that the markets will take care of all the needs that there are or that the economic world is a Darwinian—nay, a Malthusian—struggle in which the weak must suffer.

What is missing in both of these, though it need not be, is an underlying account of the very real obligations that we do have to one another. With such an account, certain socialist practices and policies can be seen as ways via a state of carrying out our obligations. With such an account, capitalism can be seen as something that takes care of only one part of our lives, the economic part, while realizing—as did Adam Smith—that there is a large part of our lives that is not economic. Pace Hayek and others, it isn’t all economic.

But I fear in our time we have ignored the advice of Forster to “only connect” and Aristotle’s claim that we are essentially social and thrown them over for the Thatcherite claim that there is no society. So we no longer see ourselves as people in any kind of community and whether we are tempted to socialism or capitalism, we are never tempted to care.

Beauty is a predator

2009-02-19T21:04:00.000-08:00

Who cares?

2009-02-10T16:01:00.001-08:00

The joys of owning pets

2009-01-27T16:36:00.001-08:00

Because Fernando is home this week, helping his mom make the unimaginable transition to a life without her husband of forty-five years, I am alone—well, not alone, I am left with Mateo and Margarita. This morning, something was going on with Mateo's stomach. It was making that loud liquid sound, loud enough that it woke me up. And, all I could think was, "He's gonna vomit ... or worse." And, he was obviously uncomfortable.

So, up I got. At 4:20. To take him out. We went out. He peed, he smelled, he did what else he needed to do. We came back in. But his stomach was still loud and the cat was awake, demanding food—eleven years after we rescued her from the Columbus park where she'd been abandoned already an adult cat, she has decided that some food is beneath her. I fed her, but now it was 5:00 and I'm getting up at 5:30 this semester. So, as I told Mateo, he had robbed me of more than an hour of sleep.

They are supposed to comfort you, I think, but sometimes they are like having two particularly hairy children.

Off to clean the box!

In memoriam

2009-01-25T13:47:00.001-08:00

Last night, Juan Carlos Bosco, Fernando's father, died after a period of illness, at home in bed with his wife, Nilda. He was a very loving man, always smiling and full of joy, quick with a joke, generous and will be missed by all those who knew him and especially his family, among whom he counted me. ¡Te extrañamos, Juanca!

A sad development

2009-01-21T17:05:00.001-08:00

It occurred to me last night, in the midst of a class discussion about world poverty and the responsibilities those of us in the developed world might have towards the horribly poor of the world, that I have witnessed a sea change in the attitudes of students in my relatively short career in the classroom. About a decade ago, when I first started teaching ethics sections, the majority of students thought that we had some obligation to others—both near and far—though many of them wondered whether there was any effective way to meet them.

Then, there were a few students who more or less claimed that each of us was out for himself. But these voices were in the minority. Now, even as my students are more nominally religious, even as I teach in a religious context, even as many are willing to make claims as to the supremacy of Christianity and the necessity of something like traditional sexual morality—at least insofar as it applies to homosexuals and adulterers, though not to the case of fornication—many more of them are unwilling to think that we have any obligation whatsoever to the poor or to our fellow humans. They deny often that there is any such thing as a human community or any positive obligation to members of such a community or even human rights as opposed to merely civil rights.

It might just be that I don't do a good enough job motivating such an obligation, but I think that something more severe has happened. I fear that we have become a nation of people who are so isolated that the idea of morality—which is after all about the obligations that I have to others—has become foreign to us. Individualism has trumped any connection and we are all perfectly happy to go back to our homes and sit in front of our televisions or computers and interact only with those we choose often through the medium of a screen.

And that makes me sadder even than usual.