Hildegarde

I wonder how many people out there remember a movie called Night of the Lepus.

It was a horror movie about gigantic, carnivorous rabbits.

Rabbits.

And in the end, gigantic or not, carnivorous or not, they were still rabbits.

But it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m in that odd position where I’ve got people coming and not enough chairs.

I’ve got a turkey but no celery.

I’ve got–well, you get the picture. 

In a couple of minutes, I’m going to run out to the store and pick up the celery, and then I’m going to come back and stuff the turkey.

My older son is home, which we were not entirely sure was going to happen this year, so there’s that.  That makes me happy.

But I’ve gotten stale.  For some reason, I don’t look forward to this kind of thing as much as I used to.

Maybe it’s because my life seems to be in some kind of holding pattern.  I’ve got a half dozen serious problems that need some kind of resolution, and there are no resolutions in sight.

Of course, there are also no particular bad things in sight, either. 

I’ve had periods in my life when everything has been falling apart and I’ve thought that I was going to crash and burn–that we were all going to crash and burn–but this is not like this.

There are bad things and better things and good things that will happen eventually, it’s just that none of them has happened in months, and none of them looks set to happen in the next few months.

That is, I think, one of the reasons I don’t seem to be able to make up my mind about what to do about teaching, or to finish the Georgia Xenakis novel. 

Or even find a title for it.  I really do have to figure out the title thing.

With so much up in the air, it just feels like there’s something wrong with making a definite decision about anything.

This is not the kind of thing that’s good for me, and I’ll shake out of it in a month or so.

But–sheesh.

Of course, turkey is one of my favorite foods, and actually stuffing one is even better. 

So there’s that.

And I’ve got a lot of Poirot novels in the house, and no reason to set the alarm for the rest of the week-end.

So there’s that, too.

Come Monday, I’ll have to start making some sense.

But that’s four days away.

Happy Thanksgiving for those of you who are having it.

The rest of you should find an excuse for a four day week-end of your own.

Actually, the only turkey I was referring to here yesterday was the one in my refrigerator, which is very large and requires mushrooms, onions, celery, chestnuts, butter and breadcrumbs to get stuffed for Thanksgiving. 

I didn’t think Robert was complaining I didn’t write enough.  I thought he was worried I was sick again–which I don’t seem to be, thank God–but it freaked me a little, because I thought I’d been posting a lot.

The manuscript, however, did get off, so there’s that done.  And today is my last day of teaching before the week-end. 

I had a momentary thrill there for a few moments, because it looked like our last week of class was going to be next week–and then, of course, it turned out I’d read the schedule wrong.

Although you never know, at our place.  I can never figure out what they use to determine what our schedules are.

For the moment, though, I just want to point out one thing.

A couple of days ago–might be nearly a week now–I posted a link to an article I found on Arts and Letters Daily about people who buy research and other papers–buy the services of somebody who writes those papers from scratch.

I don’t know how many people followed that link and read the article, but it was thoroughly depressing on a lot of levels.

And there was one thing I could take some comfort in–most of the students in my classes, and most of the ones taking courses where I teach (even non-remedial ones) don’t use services like this, because they can’t afford them and because they don’t know they exist.

When my kids cheat, they do it by going on the Internet and copying and pasting wholesale.

That said, one thing in the article rang true–the colleges this guy’s clients attend are not interested in education, only in evaluation.

Actually, the word these days is “assessment.”

But it comes down to the same thing.

Unless you’re attending something in the first tier–and sometimes even then–nobody is going to bother you with what Robert calls “the required reading list.”  Nobody is going to care if you’ve read Aristotle or Shakespeare or Kant.  

All they’re going to care about is whether you managed to follow directions and do what you were told. 

The issue is not to mold your taste, or to introduce you to the Great Conversation, or to introduce you to your academic field, or to teach you how to think.

Nobody cares if you’re right wing, left wing, or anything in between.

Nobody cares if you can actually read, write or think.

All that matters is the credentialing.

And the guy who wrote that article is right.  Teachers know when students are teaching.  They by and large no longer care.  Bringing a charge of plagarism has gotten to be so complicated–in one place in this area, it triggers an automatic appeal and a full faculty board hearing–that it isn’t worth it, and teachers are very aware that the administration doesn’t give a damn either.

All the issues we talk about here, all the articles about speech codes and indoctrination in the classroom and wild charges of offense brought against speakers with the “wrong” ideas–all those things are restricted to a very small subsection of institutions who get the very best students.

It’s the top twenty and the flagship state universities where you have those problems.

Everywhere else, it’s just a matter of processing bodies through the system, certifying them “educated” and then passing them into the world of work. 

Our third and fourth tier colleges and universities–the places where people go to get nursing degrees and “degrees” in things like “computer assisted design” and “sports management” and “automotive science”–have become what our high schools were a generation ago.  They’re place holders with a fancy piece of paper at the end of them, certifying competence where none exists.

And I think that we can’t avoid the racial aspect here, because there is one.  It’s true, as Cathy, I think, said, that educators assume stupidity in poor whites from Appalachia just as much as they do in poor blacks from the inner city.

The difference is that every college and university receiving federal funds has to keep records on race, and those records are made available to the EOC, and the EOC is more than willing to go to court on charges of racial discrimination if those records show too much of a “disparate impact” in assessment policies.

So if you’re university has a large population from the inner city, and the schools in the inner city are rat crap that teach virtually nothing, then you’re stuck with a problem–any honest assessment program will end with your having a record that shows that black kids are failing at far higher rates than white kids.

This is not because the black kids are stupid, because they’re not.  This is because the black kids went to school where math ended at pre-Algebra and nobody ever assigned a paper longer than a single page and “history” consisted of some old guy with tenure showing movies while he sat at his desk and picked his fingernails.

In the meantime, even your poor white kids most likely went to one of the surrounding suburban schools where the standards for even the worst of students were considerably higher than that, and where they were surrounded by kids who did take education seriously.  Or at least semi-seriously.

So there you are–do your assessment tests show three quarters of black kids being shoved into remedial programs and only one quarter of white kids?  Racism!  And racism you can take to court, too.

And if none of the kids or parents is willing to sue, the EOC will do it on its own sometimes. 

There is only one possible safe haven in this mess, and that is to make sure your numbers fit what the bureaucracies expect to see. 

So, that’s what everybody does.

We’re in the middle of a big project to send everybody to “college,” but barely 10% of our kids are going to “college” as we understood it in the Sixties and Seventies.

The rest of those kids are doing what I’m talking about here.

At Dartmouth, you worry about political correctness.

At places like mine, you worry about whether, when they graduate, the kids will be able to read the directions on the back of a packet of jello. 

And it’s not going to get fixed any time soon, because there’s no incentive to fix it.

And on that note, off I go.

I was a little startled to get an e-mail this morning complaining that posts on the blog had been rather scarce lately–it didn’t seem that way to me, since I thought I’d been writing nearly every day. 

But maybe it’s true.  If it is, it’s nothing in particular–I’ve got a copyedited manuscript that I’m late getting back because having the cold for that long put me behind, and it’s the end of the term at my place so everybody is freaking, and Thanksgiving is coming up and I have to wrestle with chestnuts.

If anybody knows how to get roasted chestnuts out of their shells without leaving on just tons of that fuzzy crap, I’d like to hear it.  Martha Stewart does hers in the microwave, and I’m thinking of trying it this year.

So if I haven’t been writing much, that’s why, and I’ll get back to it in a day or two. 

And the really odd thing is, I keep wanting to get around to something else:  why it is you can’t say I ever decided that I didn’t (or did) believe in God, and why I do, in fact, deliberately read things that I think might change my mind on that subject (and on several others I’d call seminal to my “philosophy of life”) on a regular basis.

But it’s a very long story, and it’s six o’clock and it’s running late.

Meaning, of course: and now for something completely different.

At least, completely different from what we’ve been doing lately.  I meant to do this last year, and then I got worried that I’d sound hectoring, so I didn’t.

But this year I keep running across stuff–hard to explain it any other way–and I thought I’d do it.

In the meantime, you might want to look here

http://www.frankfuredi.com/index.php/site/article/its_time_to_stand_up_for_courage_and_conviction/

which is a link I found at Arts and Letters Daily this morning.

It nears some relation to all this, if only peripherally.

So, what am I on about?

The holiday season is here, no matter what holidays you celebrate, and with it there are dozens of people and dozens of organizations that all want us to do something.

And, as far as I’m concerned, we should do something.

I’m not a romantic.  I’ve dealth with “targetted populations” long enough, and consistently enough, to understand that “the homeless” aren’t the pitiful victims of chance and circumstance that the volunteer organizations like to portray them as.  I know that not everybody who shows up at the food bank is short on groceries because they just haven’t been able to find a job in this economy.

I know it, and I don’t care.  One of the most startlingly impressive things I ever read in my life was a Latin essay–I don’t remember by whom, a minor writer, not somebody you’d recognize–written in around 200 or so AD/CE, explaining that the people were much drawn to the Christians because they gave charity without inquiring into the merit of those who needed it.

In other words, they fed the deserving poor and the bums alike, they tended the sick whether the sick were that way because they’d been struck by a rare disease or driven their health into the ground on vino.

So, as far as I’m concerned, charity–real charity–is a good thing, and we all ought to be engaged in it.

That said, I have some suggestions.

The first thing is that the best thing you can give is time.  Food banks, food pantries, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, toy drives all need people to man the cafeteria lines and to drive stuff here and there.

They especially need those things near or on the holidays.  Almost all soup kitchens serve Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner at some other time than actual Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner because most people want to be home with their own families when the holiday comes.

And I’m one of them, mostly.  We only did one year where we served Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving afternoon and one where we did Christmas, but late–we had Christmas dinner at noon at home and then did a round in the evening.

And Bill was still alive both those times, so you can figure out how long ago that was.

I want to be home for the holidays, you want to be home for the holidays.  But the poor and the homeless want to be home for the holidays, too, and it’s a great thing when the local soup kitchen can find enough people willing to work on the day to be able to serve on the day. 

So look into ways you can give your time, and if you’re stranded this holiday, see if you can’t find someplace that’s looking to do the holiday on the holiday for the people who otherwise wouldn’t have it.

Oh, and while we’re at it–Meals on Wheels has a lot of trouble finding people this time of year, at least some places.  They’re a good group to go to to give some time.

But on the subject of old people, the best thing you can do is invite one you know who’s alone–the old lady down the street, whoever–or go to visit if they can’t get out. 

The second thing is that, if you’re giving stuff, rather than time, and you’re contributing to an organization that works directly feeding and clothing the poor, give money.

I mean it. 

Most soup kitchens and food pantries are part of national networks that make it possible for them to buy food in bulk.  They may have drives for your cans and bottles, but they’ll be more than happy for money instead and they’ll do a lot more with it than you will.   Our local places up here say they can get enough food for 17 Thanksgiving dinners for $5. 

And while we’re at it: if you work at a food pantry or soup kitchen, or you just give to them, I wish you’d give some thought to solving the “please sir, can I have some more” problem that is endemic to the holidays.

By that I mean the fact that most of these places just don’t collect enough food or money to manage second helpings, even for children. 

And yes, I know why that problem is there and no, I don’t know how to solve it–but I wish I did.

Third, if you do give cans and bottles to things like a Boy Scout or a police drive, let me suggest this:  don’t just clean out your cabinets of everything you don’t want.  Go get some stuff you’d want and give that instead.

A lot of stores around here have two for one and three for one sales around this time of year–buy one, get one free; buy one, get two free. Go to those and give the “and free” to the drive.

People with little or no food will be grateful for what they can get, but they’re human.  Kidney beans and canned stewed tomatoes are all well and good, but it’s Thanksgiving.  Cranberry sauce and sweet corn would be nice. 

Finally, the holidays will come and go, and the rest of the year will be out there waiting.  And there’s a lot of the rest of the year. 

Time is short, and we’ve all got to make a living.

But, you know. 

Okay.

End of hectoring rant.

Sometimes I do something so incredibly boneheaded and clueless, I can’t believe I can walk and talk at the same time.

To tell you all the truth, it hadn’t occurred to me, yesterday, to think about the “unified field theory of everything.” And it should have.  I’ve certainly heard about it enough.

But when I was talking about how we’ve lost the idea that the universe is a whole, and all of it’s connected, I was thinking of something considerably more modest.

When Alberti talks about the relationship of mathematics to painting, he does indeed go on–at great length–about how geometry relates to perspective (something he’s credited for being the “inventor” of, although that’s probably not quite accurate).

But what else he does is to assume that the standards for art–what makes a work of art “good” or “bad”–are also related to mathematics.

Most Medieval and Renaissance moral philosophers, when they talked about morality and conscience, did not simply say “this is what God said,” but assumed that right conduct was that conduct that fulfilled the purposes of nature.

To use the most obvious example:  the Medieval identification of homosexual practice with sin came from the Bible, but its identification of homosexual practice as wrong came from the assumption that nature’s purpose in sex was to produce babies. 

All the other reasons why people might have sex–lust, for instance, or orgasms–were morally wrong because they were not “ordered to nature” as Aquinas would say.

I’m not saying that we should adopt such a standard ourselves.

And I’m not unaware that there are problems with the standard as the writers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance understood it–hell, even as Aristotle understood it.

There are complicated reasons why both Aristotle and Aquinas–both the Greek rationalist and the Medieval Christian traditions–treated pleasure as superfluous to sex, but I’m not sure they would (or should) hold water today. 

Both societies had a screamingly wrong conception of what happened in conception, too, which didn’t help any.

But it’s interesting that neither society fell into the naturalistic fallacy–at the same time they both saw conformity with nature as good, they both thought of a lot of what we would consider “natural” behavior to be unnatural. 

They saw man as being the one creature who could deny nature, so to speak.  Nature decreed that sex was for making babies.  Man decided it would be a good idea to screw goats because it made him feel temporarily good.

The temporarily is important.

I’m doing that thing again where I wander around blithering. 

But what I was getting at was the idea that if we think of nature as a whole–rather than a collection of discrete and largely unrelated parts–then we think about the parts differently. 

We don’t have to have a unified field theory of everything.  The concept is simpler and much more obvious.  We are all here together–the physics, the chemistry, the biology, the anatomy, the poetry, the music, the lobster thermidor.

I could not eliminate physics and still have this world. 

But I couldn’t eliminate poetry, either–I could eliminate a particular poem, or a poetic tradition (say, the sonnet, or haiku)–

But all people everywhere have had poetry.  And all of them have had narrative.  Look at the existence of poetry and narrative over time, and what we see looks a lot like poetry not as something people do, but as something people feel compelled to do. 

And yes, of course, if we eliminated people, we would still have a world–it just wouldn’t be this world. 

Nor was I asking that we should all become “experts” in everything.  In terms of the kind of holistic understand of the world as a whole that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance strove to achieve, our “expertise” would be more of a hindrance than a help.

A lot of what we call expertise is fragmented knowledge of bits and pieces and parts of things that is only of any use when we bring it together with the equally fragmented knowledge held by other people.  And a lot of it is of very little interest to much of anybody.  I really like the idea of quarks going in and out of existence at will, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with the “knowledge.”

I don’t have to be an expert in physics to understand that the physical properties of the material world constrain my action in that world.  I don’t need to be an expert mathematician to understand how the rules of geometry underpin perspective.

I am not a big fan of the cult of expertise–in case you haven’t already noticed–and that’s at least partially because it often seems to me as if it is a cult.

But what I’ve been talking about here is something else–it’s the possibility that the designation that some poetry (or painting, or music or literature) is “good” may rely on its congruence with things we now think of as “outside” the field.

If that makes sense.

I’m going to do that thing again, and remind anybody reading of the problem we’re having with COMMENTING ON THE BLOG:

So.

While we’ve been going over the morality stuff, I’ve been reading a tiny little book called On Painting, by Leon Battista Alberti.

These days, we wouldn’t even call it a book, or, if we did, we’d publish it with big type and lots of white space.  My Penguin edition only makes it to the almost-book category with an extensive introduction, plus a whole bunch of notes and that sort of thing.

Alberti, though, wasn’t writing these days.  He wrote in the early Renaissance, and this little book represents the first time anybody had tried to produce a theoretical explanation of painting. 

And it was an enormously influential book, too, informing the work of Piero della Francesca, among others.  Alberti published it in both Latin and the vernacular Italian to make sure it could be read by actual practicing painters as well as by scholars, and it was.

Later, it informed the work–both in painting, and in writing–of Leonardo da Vinci. 

Alberti is an interesting character in some ways.  His writing had enormous impact on the actual practice of painting and architecture in Florence and Rome in the Renaissance, and yet he was not a very successful painter or a very successful architect.  These days, I suppose we’d call him an idea man.

But here’s what always struck me–and does still–when I picked up this book to consider reading it:

There’s a lot of math.

Alberti was successful as an idea man, I think, because he was good at doing something both the Middle Ages and the (at least early) Renaissance valued:  presenting all the aspects of “learning” as a single coherent whole.

I put “learning” in quotes like that to signal something:  for Alberti and his contemporaries, art and architecture, painting and sculpture, music and poetry, chemistry and astronomy, philosophy and theology,  were all “sciences.”   It hadn’t occurred to anybody that these were different kinds of things with different rules, or that they might ever be in conflict.

Maybe because the Christian church was as much the child of Rome as it was of Jerusalem, Christian thinkers tended to stress–from the very beginning–that there was no incompatibility between “learning” and religion.  Augustine declared that any time we think we’ve found a contradiction between science and scripture, we’d misread scripture.  He probably find today’s Christian fundamentalists completely stupefying.

Or maybe he’d just find them heretics, since they’ve separated from Mother Church.

The real point here, however, is that there is a lot of math in Alberti’s book because Alberti is working to prove that painting has its foundation in mathematics, and especially in geometry. 

The idea was to discover the underlying harmony, the essential coherence and design, under the apparent diversity of temporal things. 

That there was such harmony, that there was such coherent design, was a central intellectual truism for the ancient Greeks and largely accepted by the Romans.  The Christian Middle Ages adopted the idea because it fit so well with Christian theology.  A benevolent God would not produce unintelligble chaos for us to live in.  We could know God–if only in outline–by knowing his works.

Along with this conviction came another one, and that was that you could understand nature by understanding what it was for.  Each thing, each person, each blade of grass and rock and stone and star and cat, had its proper place and function in the world. 

Morality, then, could be discovered, by understanding what man’s proper function was and what it would take to follow it.  This was the sense in which both Aristotle and Aquinas assumed that any man, using his reason, could discover–not invent but discover–the moral law by honest and sustained inquiry into the nature of it.

I want to stress that “discover.”  Mique wrote yesterday that he thought morality was “made by” us, but I don’t think it is.  I don’t think we can invent morality.  I think we can only discover it.  I think we discover the laws of morality in the same way we discover the laws of physics.  It’s out there, beyond our ability to change it, waiting for us to figure it out.  We’ll never know it perfectly and with finality.

The classical world would, of course, have been astonished at the idea that knowledge would always be tentative or that we’d never come to an end of needing to know more, and the Middle Ages and the Renaissance wouldn’t have liked the idea either.

But that matters less than the fact that the assumption that all of Creation was essential one–that all knowledge was connected to all other knowledge, that the whole fit together like a jigsaw puzzle–provided a basis for both Medieval moral philosophy and Renaissance forays into our kind of “science” that has now been largely lost.

Because one of the things that has definitely happened–one of the things that helped kick start the scientific revolution–is the entrenchment of the idea that the various branches of human learning are radically separate.  Nobody who writes about art these days would bother to spend 3000 words explaining its foundation in mathematics, because nobody who writes about painting these days would assume that painting was founded in mathematics.  Isn’t that one of the stereotypes about the art major?  Can’t do enough math to balance his own checkbook.

I think what has me reading all this stuff at the moment, though, is that I’m beginning to think we’ve lost something in the fragmentation.

There are certainly advantages–good, practical advantages–to at least starting with the assumption that fields are radically separate.

But I think that what started out as methodological fragmentation has become existential fragmentation.

That is, I think that we started out separating fields because that provided us with a good method to pursue research.  Then we forgot it was just a method, and came to be something we automatically believed to be actually true about the nature of the world we live in.

And the more I think about this, the more absurd it seems. 

If, like me, you do not that there is any world other than this one.  If you don’t think there are “supernatural” beings or ghosts or miracles–

Then coming up with an explanation of how a world came into existence with no rhyme or reason to it, no underlying patterns, no necessary connections between its parts–

Is going to be a lot harder than justifying blood liquefying every January in an Italian church. 

For any atheist, the interconnectedness of all things, including all fields of human endeavor, ought to be a given.  And it ought to be a given without the scientistic assumption that we are making the supreme kind of sense when we engage in absolutist reductionism.

Blech.  I’ve started tripping over myself.  It’s that time of the morning.

I’ll get back to this the next time I post, and in the meantime I want to do only two things.

First, to point out to JD that I do, indeed, mean to say that no technologically advanced civilization existed before somewhere aroung the Renaissance, but 1880 would be a good bet, too–why wouldn’t I say that?  It’s true.

The real cut-off, for me, isn’t the germ theory of disease or antibiotics per se, but the point at which human beings stopped assuming that death was always around the corner, that any of us could be “taken” at any moment, for no reason anybody could make out.

And that was indeed helped along by the germ theory and by antibiotics, but actually starts with the first big public health pushes a little earlier.

But I’ll say again what I’ve said here before–nobody living now can understand the way in which people in earlier times faced the possibility of death.  None of us have ever lived in that kind of world.  And that kind of world is different in kind–not just in degree–from what came before.

The second thing is to make the little statement about POSTING COMMENTS TO THE BLOG:

Which is what we’ve got a lot of outside my window.  I’ve started sitting around wishing plaintively that we’d have just a day or two of half decent weather so that the cold, now mostly on the way out, won’t just come back again.

Of course, there are students, so there’s that.

I’m feeling, this morning, a little flabbergasted.

The ten commandments, the most famous moral code in the world, is suddenly not morality at all, but “rules for behavior,” which is somehow different from morality.

What?

A moral code is a set of rules for behavior.  That’s what it is. 

I’d say that those rules always have an objective basis in the facts of human nature, relative to the teleological framework they’re meant to express.

In other words, morality isn’t anything we want it to be, willy nilly, because we feel like it on Thursday.

It’s the engineering for a specific project–to obey the will of God, to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, to recognize the status of human beings as radically individual…

There are a lot of proposed teleological frameworks, but the teleological frameworks are not morality.   Morality is the rules for human behavior, derived (objectively) from the facts of human nature, meant to express those frameworks.

The study of human nature is the science.  Morality is the engineering.  The teleological framework is the decision of what to build:  a bridge, a house, a road, a garden.

Back a few posts ago, I said it drove me crazy when everybody started jumping the gun, going from the first steps in this outline to the last.

And that’s what going for the teleological framework is–it’s the end point of a longer discussion. 

But it’s very important, I think, to keep the various strains of the discussion separate. 

The teleological framework is not morality.  It is the decision about what kind of morality to have. 

But there’s nothing odd about this, and nothing peculiar to philosophical questions.  The laws of physics won’t tell you if you should build a bridge or a house, and neither will the rules of engineering.  Before you know what the proper rules are, you have to make a decision to build something in particular.

But the laws of physics remain objective, as do the rules of engineering.

But here’s the thing:  I don’t think the choice of a teleological framework is entirely subjective, either. 

For one thing, for all the superficial variety, I think that the available teleological choices are actually rather small, and the available teleological choices that will not result in what is essentially a form of suicide are even smaller.

For one thing, as I said, even if we look at just the rules, there’s actually less variety in them than there seems to be on the surface.

Part of the problem is that societies tend to throw everything but the kitchen sink into their “morality,” including a lot that isn’t actually morality at all.

In most areas of study, we prune away this kind of thing and define the field.  For some reason, we just accept anything anybody anywhere says is “morality” and then fret that there’s nothing but chaos and nothing makes any sense.

I don’t know why we do this. We don’t find it difficult to see what makes this sort of laisseiz faire attitude counterproductive in most fields.  We don’t care if the Strange Colorful Hill People declare that finding the spiritual dimensions of toothache is a form of chemistry.  We don’t declare that it’s impossible to know what chemistry really is since the SCHP feel this way.  We just point out that they’re wrong, and why, and get on with it.

That said, there are indeed some moral rules that are close to universal, and that are universal in every literate society.  As somebody pointed out, there’s always a version of the Golden Rule.  There are also almost always strictures on the sexual activity of women (not always of men, but always–until very recently, and then only in the secular West–of women.) There are rules against murder, and theft, and rape. 

And these rules come in varieties, yes, and the terms of defined differently–when murder is murder and when it is not, for instance.

But the real differences between the basic level of moral code isn’t in the idiosyncracies in those codes.

The idiosyncracies are largely explained by something else:  by how and what the codes define as “human.”

The human race has been remarkable consistent about what behavior we owe other human beings.

Where it has been varied is in the field of people who are defined as actually human.

When you begin to look at the anthropology that way, you find far less variation than you’d think. 

Aristotle had a point–and so did Aquinas.  There does seem to be some kind of internal clockwork in most people that tracks the moral law, a kind of basic conscience.

What there isn’t is a universally acknowledged, single definition of “human being.”

And now it’s raining, and I’ve got to run.

I’m going to just sort of wander around today.  For one thing, I writing from school, where I’m supposed to be having office hours.  Actually, I am having office hours.  It’s just that nobody is here, and nobody is going to be here.  So I’ve got to think of something to do with myself.

To respond to Lymaree, first–“minimizing pain to conscious beings” is not a moral rule.  It’s a goal-statement–a teleogical premise.  Once you have that premise, you can THEN devise moral rules that will bring you closer to realizing it.

But the moral rules will have an objective basis in human nature.  If you study human nature, you will eventually find out what rules you need to install to make it more likely that people will reach the goal of “minimizing pain to conscious beings.”

To go back to the bridge–there are objectively based rules for building a bridge, but the decision to build a bridge does not need to be itself objectively based. 

I’ve said it before–what most of you have a problem with is not the objective basis for morality, but the objective basis (or lack of it) for teleology.

And, I’m sorry, I don’t find that a legitimate objection to the fact that morality has an objective basis.  Morality is rules for individual behavior, and those rules will be objectively derived from human nature or they will be wrong (and unworkable).

But we don’t say that there is no objective basis for the rules of engineering because the decision about what to build–bridge, house, road, gigant unicorn statue–is not compelled by those rules, or by any rules.

Teleology–the decision to build a bridge instead of a road, to build a healthy human being with long life in a society that provides him with science and technology–is another issue.

And I don’t think it’s as arbitrary as most of you want it to be. 

But it’s a different discussion.  It has nothing to do with whether or not morality (moral rules) have an objective basis.

That said, morality is about the individual and politics is about societies.  Of course, individual morality will impact the way a society functions.  It has to.  A society in which most people feel that rape is morally justifiable will function differently than one in which it is considered unjustified in any case, no matter what the laws are.

But.  A society very often must a) not legislate moral wrongs and b) actively tolerate moral wrongs in order for it to function well. 

For instance–

A society that desires to be a nation of free people cannot use its government to enforce the use of the blood and skin and bone (actual physical body) of one person for the use and benefit of another against that first person’s will.

That’s the functional definition of slavery.  And, of course, they can try it–but they screw themselve up badly in the long run when they do try it, they retard their own progress (see history, universally–no slave state has ever developed significant science of technology), and they eventually come to a point where the contradiction kicks their butts.

See Gettysburg.

But if the government cannot compel me to put my body to the use of my neighbor for the sake of his need for a new kidney, it equally cannot compel me to put my body to the use of a fetus in my womb. 

The analogy is exact–either I’m a free human being whose body may not be used without my consent, or I’m a thing to be put to the use of other people whether I like it or not.

But although that is, I think, an unassailble politic argument against government interference in the decision of a woman to abort a pregnancy, it is not a moral argument in favor of abortion.

In fact, I could make a very good moral case that abortion is never justified except possibly to save the physical life of the mother, and even then I think it would be iffy.

There are lots of cases like this, most of them considerably less contentious than abortion–and lots of cases in which the law deals with areas that are morally neutral.

The perceived morality or immorality of something should never be the reason for enshrining it, or enjoining it, in law. 

That’s why, if you’re going to talk me out of my support for gay marriage, you’re going to have to convince me that it would in some way endanger the functioning of the Republic, not that homosexuality is morally wrong.

I’ve got no idea if I’m being clear.

I often think I am, only to find later that I seem to be talking right past people. 

I’ll get to the teleological thing later–but “I do not see any objective way to decide that we want a humane society instead of a cannabilistic one” is NOT evidence against the objective basis for morality.

Morality–moral rules–are means.

Teleology is about ends, and that above is a statement about ends, which is a different issue.

But not quite so random as it appears.

But more on that later.

Let me recommend a book:  The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America, by Daniel Hannan.  I’m having a very good time with it.

And remember.  If you have trouble making COMMENTS and get that “Invalid Registration Status” message, or any other one, e-mail me and we’ll fix it on this end.

Okay, before I get going, I’d like to recommend this

http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/125329/

that I picked up on Arts and Letters Daily today.  Because, when I get back to “college” education…well.  Read it and you’ll see what I mean.

But as to the comments:

There are only “many ways to build a bridge” if you define “bridge” as broadly and as fuzzily as possible.

If I say, “we want to build a bridge across the Cuyahoga River at exactly this point, in such a way that it will be able to carry this traffic at peak usage hours and last this many year”

then the ways to build a bridge are very limited. 

And the optimal way to build that bridge will be even more limited.

Yes, we may not be able to get to optimal because we lack knowledge that we will only discover later–but that doesn’t change the fact that the optimal answer to that question above is not “many ways” but “very few ways, and possibly only one.”

What’s more, the very few ways to build that bridge will share a few things in common:  they will have a common set of things that cannot be done. 

Some things that you can try will fail, because they will defy the laws of physics.  The objective basis of this set of rules for building this particular bridge cannot be defied at all. 

That’s why we say the rules of engineering are objectively based.

Those things that cannot be done are the “thou shalt nots.” 

The thing about “life” is similar–although it’s more like all the talk of “successful” and “thriving” societies.

It all depends on what you mean by “life.”

If you go to Rand, what she would say is this:

Human beings survive to the extent that they practice a particular set of moral rules.

If you, yourself, do not obey these rules, you have two choices:  find somebody else who is and use his work and effort to save yourself, or die.

If your society privileges the people who appropriate the work of others to survive, your society will get so far and no farther.  The extent to which producers are able to produce without punishment will determine how far you will get.

If your society looks like indigenous aboriginal Australian culture before the arrival of the Europeans, it is breaking a lot of moral rules.  If it looks like New York in 1950, it’s breaking a lot fewer.

She goes into it in much more detail, and since her moral rules are mostly not about things like sex–for Rand, morality is about honesty, integrity, and productivity–the system makes sense. 

As other people besides me have pointed out here, I think Rand is the only person ever to have made even a half successful attempt at constructing an entirely secular moral system.

But to get back to the issue at hand:

Cheryl points out that scientific knowledge is tentative.

Yes, of course it is–and knowledge of morality must be tentative, too.  In fact, it can only be tentative. 

Our knowledge of anything we must discover rather than invent will be subject to the limitations of time and place.   We learn, we try, we learn some more, we change.

But I do think that the radicalism of such change gets exaggerated quite often, and it gets ridiculously exaggerated when it comes to the rules of engineering–the thou shalts and the thou shalt nots.

We may have changed out understanding of what an atom looks like on the subatomic level, but that hasn’t much affected the rules for engineering those bridges.

When something does come along to affect those rules, it tends to be something new in the technology–we have this neat new material now, tempered steel, and it doesn’t work like iron, so we need rules that take it into account.

This is how we go about discovering the laws of nature and applying those laws to contemporary purposes–to building bridges and houses, to making pudding, to find our way to the North Pole or the Moon.

There is no reason at all why we should not go about discovering moral rules in exactly the same way, and everything to say that doing it would be an advance over where we are now.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are some ways you simply cannot build a bridge, any bridge–or a house, or a pudding.  There are limits to what will work on any level at all.

And of the ways left to build a bridge, some of them will be bad ways–inefficient, unstable, overly expensive, unworkable.

And at the base of it all will be a list of thou shalt nots that will be unbudgeable no matter what you do.

Ack.

I’m going to post the thing about comments and go get some work done.

It’s Monday.

Whee!

ABOUT COMMENTS: 

I got up late.  Well, latish.  For me.  And I’m feeling better, so I have my fingers crossed.

But I just wanted to jump in on three points.

First, I’m sure there really are cases out there where kids are so extremely jumpy and distracted that we’re looking at an honest  problem in mental functioning.

I’m also sure that those kids never comprise a quarter of any middle school, or over half of all males in any middle school–numbers Connecticut got quite close to in the 1990s. 

A lot of this was definitely driven by parents, as I’ve noted here before.  Upper middle class parents are on a crusade to make sure they never have to accept the unpalatable news that their offspring are…well…not exactly academically inclined.

This is a group of people in a generation of people for whom “smart” was the most important thing, and “smart” meant “good at school.” 

What’s more, these are people who believe in setting goals and doing everything possible to go after them, and who are convinced that if they do that they will always succeed.

When junior arrives on the scene more interested in Monster Trucks than getting into AP Calculus–well, that won’t do, there must be something wrong with him. 

And, you  know, if that was all it was–parents going nuts on this level–I’d feel sorry for the kids and let it go.

But the fact is that once the fad got started, the teachers got started with it, and it suddenly became fashionable to “diagnose” any kid not behaving the way teachers wanted him to.  And I  want to stress the “him.”

And even then I would be okay with it if it had not come to attempts by the school to threaten and bully parents into putting the kids on Ritalin whether the parents wanted the kids to be on it or not.  The threats and bullying were not idle.  They included being reported to Child Protective Services for neglect–he needs medicine and the parents are withholding it!–and quite a lot of other nastiness.

The second thing is that when I said “lecture,” I was using a code for a larger problem.  I don’t mind actual lectures, myself.  What I do mind, and what I’m increasingly beginning to think is counterproductive, is this:

It doesn’t matter what the “subject” is.  You go into a classroom and sit at a desk.  The teacher outlines material in the front of the room.   She asks questions of the class and the class raises its hands and tries to answer them.  There are right and wrong answers about everything, including things it is not actually possible for anybody to know the answers to. 

Then papers are assigned, and everybody writes one, five to ten pages, with a works cited list.  They have to get their topics approved first.  Their topics are things like “Guilt and Innocence in Crime and Punishment” or “Plato’s Concept of the Good.” 

At the end of the term, there is an exam.  It’s probably an essay exam.  It asks things like “Compare and contrast the concept of the ‘social contract’ in the works of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

Now, there’s nothing wrong with all that–except that it’s the only way we ever teach anything these days. 

That is, assuming we teach it at all. 

I tried to outline a pretty good approach, here.  I’m just complaining that it’s the only one we use. 

It’s not the way I got into the Great Conversation myself, and I don’t think it’s the way most people actually get into it.  What they do, instead, is start asking the questions and then stumble across the fact that other people have been asking them for a long time. 

To me there seems to be something almost perverse in the idea that you can use the great conversation as the basis for credentialing people to–what?  Go to law school?

Like I said, we’re so used to the idea that this is how we learn and teach things, we don’t realize that there might be other ways of doing it that do NOT entail this scenario. 

And I can see why a fair number of people who are in fact interested in the Great Conversation might not be interested in doing that kind of thing.

Third, there’s that thing about “arriving at a satisfactory philosophy of life.”

I’ll have to say that not only have I never done that, but that I’ve never been interested in doing it.

I don’t want to find a philosophy that’s satisfactory, or satisfying, to me.

I want to know what is in fact objectively true.