Hildegarde

I suppose I ought to start by saying that although an individual can make up his mind about what is moral or immoral on the basis of anything at all, I still maintain–and have maintained–that you can’t base a moral code on the Great Tradition.

And studying the Great Tradition won’t make you more moral than you would be otherwise, nor will it teach you how to live, or any of the rest of it.

The Great Tradition is information, and that information will certainly come in useful for all kinds of things, but the kind of information it is–the record of human beings thinking and writing in a particular way–will preclude it from being the basis of a moral code.

What can be the basis of a moral code is a thorough understanding of reality–not only of how human beings think and act as individuals, but how societies progress or regress and develop when they are founded on and run by particular sets of ideas. 

And yes, I think I can get far more of a consensus on that than I could on any religion-based moral code, for the same reason that people of differing religions do indeed accept the germ theory of disease, the heliocentric solar system and the basic principles of engineering as applied to suspension bridges.

I think that if we can prove, factually and materially, that polices a b c produce a society with attributes d e f, while attributes g h i produce a vastly different society with vastly different attributes j k l, more people than not will opt for the arrangement that most increases their prosperity, their physical health and their ability to pursue happiness.

I think DNA has a lot to do with it.  I think most people do indeed make a decision for such an option every day.  That’s why we’re in the period of mass migrations.

You’ll note that, no matter how much the great socialistic dictatorships promised cradle to grave economic security, nobody was banging down their doors to get in. 

People vote with their feet for the very set of assumptions I’ve been talking about.  And it doesn’t require God or ideology to recognize them.  A clear look at the way the world operates will do fine.

But now I’ve got a strange problem, and I’m hoping some of you can help.

This term I assigned some of my students Darrell Huff’s How To Lie About Statistics, in the hope that it would get them to think critically about at least some of what they read.

It’s short, it’s clear, it’s engagingly written, I think it would have been perfect if it hadn’t been for the fact that the book itself was written in the fifties, the examples are all from the fifties, and that means the dollar amounts for things like salaries are…well, from the point of view of my students, ludicrous.

Theoretically, of course, it shouldn’t matterin any logical sense, but it causes a huge hole in the willing suspension of disbelief, if that makes any snse.

Anyway, they can’t get past it.  They get so fixated on the numbers that they find absurd–wow!  some executives make hundreds of thousands in bonuses a year!–to the point the illustration is supposed to make.

So I’ve been wondering if there isn’t something else out there with more contemporary examples that is still, essentially, the same book. 

The extent to which my kids cannot read numbers in any sense, statistics or otherwise, is really incredible. 

Okay.  It’s hot.  I’m miserable.  I have to go listen to multimedia speeches on cat behavior.

Long story.