On being the villain of the piece

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

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

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"

Respect is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for friendship.

A question of parenting

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

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

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.