Against a return to normal

What we all want right now is a return to normal. That makes total sense, but I think it’s partly a mistake. Of course, I want to be able to see my students again. I don’t want to have people avoid getting within six feet of me. I want grocery stores with food in them. I want to see Violeta to get my hair cut. I want to shoot the shit with my colleagues in person. I very much want to go to the gym. I want local stores to open back up and survive. I want people to keep their jobs. I want people not to be sick or be afraid of getting sick. I want people not to die.

A crisis like this, though, can be an inflection point and we shouldn’t come out of it without staying focused on what was wrong with normal and what we shouldn’t return to. 

We have a healthcare system that is inadequate to our society’s quotidian needs—let alone those that arise in a pandemic—and that is inaccessible to too many of us. 

We’ve become inured to the fact that people live on our streets, in our canyons, under bridges, becoming visibly shocked by this only when we can score a partisan point, but all the while ignoring that these are people with as much dignity as we have, but whom we allow to live in ways we would find too horrible for our pets.

We have an economy that serves the most well off, who are quite happy to accept—that is, demand— the help of government but are unwilling to do anything for society absent their direct benefit. As the phrase has it, they socialize risk and privatize profit. We’ve come to accept that we live for the economy, rather than believing the economy exists to serve all human flourishing.

We’ve internalized the lesson that we are all and always in competition. We’ve created an all-encompassing Hobbesian—or, is it just capitalistic—mindset whereby what matters most is that I have more than enough toilet paper or food or money or space or cars or whatever even if it means that others basic needs go unmet.

We’ve all but killed off any sense of a community, of an us. We complain about social distancing not because we lose the kind of social contact that we need to thrive, but because we can’t do the things we really like to do. 

We take no responsibility in either the sense of blame or that of obligation, but instead look to blame and vilify others—Others—and leave everyone else to fend for themselves. After all, no one’s luck is my fault and I pulled myself up by the bootstraps that I myself fashioned out of nothing.

We admire and celebrate the shallowest of celebrities and confuse fame with depth and integrity and wisdom. We treat wealth as if it were virtue.

We confuse our own worth and that of others with what they have.

We engage in politics that is little more than ressentiment. We’re happy enough if we see the right people hurt, even if there is no benefit to us.

Of course, we aren’t all or always like this. I know that, at least sometimes, I am. I hope when this is all over and things return to normal that we can leave those parts of normal behind. 

Class thoughts on desire and impermanence

In one of my classes yesterday, we were finishing up our much-too-quick discussion of the basic Buddhist account of the human condition. It’s a class in which students are always asking the right sorts of questions. As I was reiterating the purported relationship between desire or craving and suffering—one that almost appeals to me for Stoic reasons—a student offered the objection that desire can also make our lives better. 

I had been using as an example the way social media and our exposure to the perfectly curated lives of others can make us unhappy. For instance, I had been arguing, when I see the perfect vacation another has taken or I see the interminable post-gym selfies, I can be made unhappy because I have no such vacation but now I desire it or I think my body doesn’t look as good and my desire to look better makes me unhappy.

His response was that, desire at least in the latter case, can be a drive to improvement. Seeing someone else’s success in the gym—though it might also be in a dozen other ways: the publication of their book, a new job, an award—and the desire that follows from it can serve as a goad to effort. That effort itself can lead to greater fitness and the attainment of what one had desired. Surely, in that, there is nothing to cause suffering.

He was right, in a way. There is nothing wrong in ambition or desire insofar as it can lead us to the better if not the good. Epictetus says somewhere in the Enchiridion that we ought to strive but we ought to be realistic about what that striving will cost us and how likely it is that we might fail (and how we will feel if and when we do).

There remains another problem, I said, and that’s impermanence. 

Now, I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently because I injured a shoulder almost three months ago and, though I think it’s finally on the mend after a late trip to the doctor, it has caused me no end of problems physically. And, because the gym plays the role of therapist for me—it is the one hour of the day when I feel totally in control and where I feel like I achieve something—it has caused me quite a bit of emotional distress. It’s not good to be the not-funny kind of obsessive-compulsive.

Whatever your desire leads you to achieve won’t last. The better body will fade with age. The book will be forgotten or surpassed. The next promotion might not come. You will die.

What’s the answer? To enjoy what you have while you have it and even when you’re striving, I suppose, but not to be so attached that you will suffer when it’s gone, or in the case of love to accept the future suffering as part of the enjoyment now. Is that possible? Dunno.

Anyhow, the student had been concerned that the outlook was too pessimistic. I probably took it further.

Tomorrow, for what it’s worth, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, and Ecclesiastes are on tap. Always uplifting!

On thinking about natural law in the shower

I first learned to think and do philosophy as part of a tradition, a fairly conservative Catholic tradition that took both Aristotle and Aquinas seriously. My graduate training was very different, but the effects of that initial training are still in me. I might be a very bad and marginal member of that tradition, but I am still in it in some ways. One way that I remain is in a general respect for virtue theory and—oddly enough for an avowed homosexual—natural law approaches to ethics. I still take Aristotle and Aquinas seriously and I think their approaches to the good life, to flourishing, to what is good for us still speak to us.

If there is something odd about this it is because natural law moralists, in particular, have been at the forefront of objections to the decriminalization of homosexuality and to recognition of same-sex marriages. I'm not interested in debating whether modern advocates of natural law are in the right here. But I do want to note one important thing. Both virtue theory and natural law theory are meant to be empirically grounded theories. They make pronouncements about what is good for beings like us and what would amount to a good life for beings like us based on facts about our biology and psychology.

It is a basic assumption of both sorts of accounts that humans have some immutable nature. I think this is probably right, at least in the medium term; what might happen to that nature over evolutionary time is a different issue. But, many modern proponents of each of these theories seem to assume that our knowledge of this nature is also immutable. What I mean is this: Contemporary natural law theorists operate under the assumption that Aristotle and Aquinas had a complete and completely correct account of human nature, in its biological and psychological aspects. Thus, they believe not only that human nature is immutable, but that we have known all there is to know about it for at least almost a millennium. 

What we have learned about human biology and human psychology and the nature of human interactions since the middle ages is or seems to be of almost no interest to many practitioners of both virtue theory and natural law ethics. You see them quoting Aquinas as authoritative on all such matters.

Now, I think that Aquinas understood quite a bit about human psychology, but I don't think he got it all. And, his biology was pretty bad. Similarly, I think Aristotle understood human motivation and psychological development and society pretty well, but he was missing out on some pretty important pieces, pieces which have partially been supplied by further exploration in the ensuing years. 

Mostly, I think that Aquinas and Aristotle and others in this tradition were right to base an ethic on what we are like and what will lead to happy and fulfilling and flourishing lives for creatures like us. They were also right to think that is largely an empirical question. But this empirical question is an empirical one, not an a priori one or one that was settled in the high middle ages. If we discover new things about ourselves—say about sexuality or human interaction or the family—then our theory has to respond to that.

If virtue theory or natural law is just a constant rehashing of what people thought 900 or 2300 years ago, it isn't philosophy, it isn't even virtue theory or natural law, it's just a dead orthodoxy. And, that's exactly how it should be treated: as dead and irrelevant. 

(I should mention one exception to the immutability of the theory here: Almost all such theorists have discovered that lending at interest is morally acceptable; that we learned something about economics that Aquinas wouldn't have known, since he roundly condemned this practice as usury and a violation of the natural law. This exception may be self-serving or might be a realization that the theory needs to evolve.)

The Sound of Silence: the most terrifying sound of all

We live in a more constantly cacophonous world than humans probably ever have, both literally and metaphorically. Any store or mall or office or elevator is likely to have music playing. We are talked to and sung at even when waiting to talk to someone on the phone. We wear headphones or earbuds while walking the dog or working out or even when sitting at our desks. I have to fight with students to take their earbuds out—both of them—when they are in lecture; some of them request that they be allowed to use them when they are taking exams. We chatter at one another about the most meaningless of things all the time: reality television, sporting events that we aren't even interested in, the details of celebrities' lives, what we've purchased or intend to purchase, the weather or lack of it. We turn on the television to give us background noise, we set our radios to sleep so that we have noise with which to fall asleep, as much to cover the quiet as to block out any noises. It is almost as if we cannot stand silence. Rather, it is quite literally that we cannot stand silence. By way of illustration, the gym I go to most days plays no music; it is maddening.

We cannot even stand the figurative silence of not being distracted. Left without anything to entertain us, we log onto Facebook or Twitter or Google-+ (well, not that), to engage in virtual conversation. But, again, these aren't conversations about anything, unless 17 things that will change the way you think about cruciferous vegetables is really a topic any more interesting than the gastrointestinal health of your great aunt. And, yet, try to go a day without engaging in them. Try to get students to go fifty-five minutes without checking Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or Tinder or their text messages. Or watch as parents put an iPad in front of their child at a restaurant. 

(Another day, I will have to think about why we prefer these virtual conversations to ones with the real people around us.)

In moments of silence, we are left with nothing more than ourselves and our own thoughts. We are left in a certain kind of solitude. Historically, this was often thought a good thing. Aristotle in the Ethics could think of nothing better than to be allowed just to think, self-sufficiently. Nietzsche in the Genealogy said that ascetics fled to the desert so that they could avoid being distracted and be left alone with their own thoughts, the things they really loved, as an expectant mother loves the child growing in her. But both of these stances require that we like our own thoughts, that we find something interesting and fruitful in them, that we find them to be of value. They require that when we look inside we find something there, and that we are not ashamed of what we find. 

If we dread silence, what does this say about our own relationship to ourselves and our thoughts? I fear it means either that we find nothing inside ourselves—that we are the Abyss to ourselves—or that we cannot bear what we do find and so need constantly to be distracted from it. As Simon says in Lord of the Flies, we discover that we are the Beast and we don't want to be left alone with it. Whether we find ourselves boring or terrifying, it cannot be a good sign. And, what else can our dread of silence mean?

Why does Aristotle have to be so bad on human nature?

Yesterday I finished up my discussion of Aristotle in two of this semester's classes. I am sympathetic to much in the Aristotelian tradition. So, I always try to make him appealing; there is a lot to say in favor of his ethical theory and his theory of the soul comports much more with modern thought and scientific accounts of the place of humans in the animal kingdom than theories of much more recent thinkers. In short, I like him a lot. And, I think he has a lot to offer my students.

But, if we are going to talk about Aristotle's view of human nature, we have to talk about the dark side of his view, too. This is a thinker who thought that women—being men who hadn't fully formed—and "natural slaves" were not fully in possession of reason, the distinguishing mark and telos of humans. Because of this, they can never be fully happy—those men who are capable of such happiness thus have obligations to take care of and correctly utilize women and these slaves and to give them as large a share in human happiness as possible—and we have to say that they really aren't fully human or that they aren't and can't be flourishing humans. That is a sort of elitism that is deeply troubling.

And, this raises two problems: one general and pedagogical and the other more specifically philosophical. 

The first one is how to talk about thinkers or figures who—having had the misfortune of having been born human—were deeply flawed. It is hard to talk about any historical figure let alone a philosophical one—it is the job of philosophers to have opinions—who doesn't have truly horrible skeletons in his or her closet. How can we honestly present them without having the negative parts of their views overshadow the main thrust of their ideas in the minds of students new to their thought? 

The temptation is to gloss over those bumps. At least, I know that is my temptation. But at some point, either during the class or after, at least one student will discover that Heidegger unapologetically joined the Nazi Party, or that Socrates praised Sparta—and that is wasn't quite the same city as that portrayed in 300—or that Mill seemed to favor imperialism, or ... some other view that it was too uncomfortable to cover in class. And, they will wonder then whether there is any point in thinking about them and why exactly I hid it from them. I am assuming that at least some students will continue to think about what we've discussed; that may seem optimistic, but this rare optimism has been borne out in the past.

I don't have a solution, other than to honestly present the warts and try to tease out, with the students' help, whether we can separate the wheat from the chaff. Sometimes, we are able to, sometimes we are not; in either case, some pedagogical purpose might have been served.

The second problem has to do with giving accounts of human nature, so it is both a more narrow question and one with broader implications, i.e., it matters even if we don't spend much time behind a lectern. Since it is probably more important, I have left it to last and will have less substantive to say about it; such is my way. 

Aristotle, like quite a few philosophers, focused his account of human nature—of what is essential about us, what separates us from the rest of the animals—in the faculty of reason. We have reason and the other animals do not. Of course, others have placed that difference somewhere else, whether in language, abstract thought, or someplace else. A problem with any such defining characteristic, apart from a merely biological one, is that it will admit of degrees: some people are more capable of reasoning than others, some people gain only rudimentary language, and so on. If our account of humanity—or personhood, to make it clearly not just biological—ties it to some characteristic that only humans have what does that say about those humans who don't have it or who have it to a lesser degree? In other words, can we give an account of human nature that doesn't end up, as Aristotle's does, being a graded account of that very humanity? How can we make it work—as most surely we must—that even those who don't share to a very high degree in reason or communication or even emotionality—are still fully human and fully persons?

There are a few strategies that have been tried here. One can say that even the person who does not, in fact, share in the capability or characteristic still has it potentially. How that is supposed to work I never quite understand. If I lack a capability and it is, in fact, impossible for me to develop that capability, the fact that my conspecifics have it doesn't mean that I have it potentially. I don't inherit a potential talent for musicality from the fact that some humans have it; yes, it is a characteristic of the species, but not of this member. 

Alternatively, one can try to solve this problem by adverting to souls or spirits. Of course, there are important problems with that as a philosophical move, but let me point out just one. Since I have no evidence of any souls except for maybe my own, the existence of souls will never tell me of a difference between humans and any other animals. I have as much reason to think that my dog has an immortal, or merely mortal, soul as that my partner does, unless I am basing my judgment of soul possession on some other characteristic, but then we are right back to our initial difficulty.

So, the question becomes whether we can give an account of humanity that captures all humans but excludes the animals or whether we are stuck with one of what seem to be two equally unpalatable options: a graded approach even within the species that counts some humans as more human than others; or, the view of Peter Singer and others, that we can make no important distinctions between all humans and the rest of the animals on which we might be able to base, for instance, moral considerations.

Greek passion

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

Boredom

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.