Hildegarde

Okay, so maybe just random today.

Let’s start with:  dead men talking.

What made me think of this is that there’s a new Toby Keith song out there, called “Bullets in the Gun,” in which the ballad is sung by the guy who gets shot in the last verse.  The video is a little better, since the guy singing still ends up dead but the woman he’s with gets away.

Okay, I like this thing.  It’s overwrought as hell, but overwrought the way medieval ballads are–a story song where everybody dies.  It’s practically a tradition in English.

It started me thinking, though, about how much there is ought there narrated by dead people.  The most famous of which, of course, is Sunset Boulevard, where the guy is not just dead but–as my older son put it–face down in the pool.

What gets me is that, as a literary device, it seems completely normal–at least, it seems so to me.  I never find myself questioning how this guy is talking.  The idea that somebody could tell you his story while freshly dead seems completely natural.

I don’t think this is just because I’m used to the device.  I wasn’t always used to it, and yet I don’t remember ever being surprised by it.  I do remember thinking it was odd when a teacher in college made a big point of the dead guy narrating in Sunset Boulevard.

Maybe other people are bothered by this and I’m not?  If so, I wonder why not?

The other thing has to do with something Robert said sort of offhandedly about something else.

I once said here that, in terms of the Great Conversation (the long centuries of intellectual thought, in art and philosophy and science and history and whatever) that makes up Western Civilization, Western human beings talking to each other down the centuries about the things that matter to being human–

Okay, I could write a longer sentence than this one is turning out to be but it would be hard.  You catch my drift.

In terms of the Great Conversation, only about ten percent of the school aged population is even capable of doing the intellectual work that would be necessary to that kind of an education.

Well, Robert said, half the ones capable aren’t interested in doing it.

But here’s the thing:  I think they are.  I think they’re just not interested in doing it in school.

There’s a kid like this at our place this term–not a remedial kid, obviously, but a kid who is passionately interested in all the stuff you can through at him, but who has absolutely zip interest in taking college courses in it.   He’s even interested in talking about it.  He’ll read his way through Nietzche and Plato and even Castiglione.   He can give an off the cuff analysis of something like “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” that I’d have been happy to hear from a grad student.   He’s even overjoyed to find people who also like the stuff to talk to about it.

He just doesn’t want to do it in a classroom.  In fact, he seems repelled by the idea.

I might find this more curious than I do if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve got two sons who are very similar, and the younger one is very similar. 

The older one will at least put up with the routine.  The younger one wants nothing to do with “all that,” by which he seems to mean having to sit still in a room at a desk for long periods of time and listen to “idiots.”

Okay, he’s always been smarter than most of his teachers, and surrounded by people who were also smarter than most of his teachers, and he’s an adolescent.

But I’m beginning to sympathize here.

Maybe it’s just that Matt’s in his senior year, and I’ve been at this a long time, but I’m increasingly appalled at what counts for a college education, even in good places, these days.

It’s not just that the approach to the Great Conversation is fragmentary, it’s that it’s often nonexistent, and when it does exist it seems to be used to teach platitudes of one kind or another. 

Or used as decoration.

Maybe it’s just the set up itself that’s become out of date or worse–maybe it’s just that there is something about sitting in a room at a desk while somebody lectures you and then taking a test on it that’s the wrong way to go about this.

More and more often I feel that the point to school these days–not just to college, but to high school and elementary school–is not knowledge, and not introduction to Western civilization, either, but to inculcate certain mental and physical habits:  sit still, be orderly, follow directions exactly, be as little out of the ordinary as possible.

I finally got my hands, recently, on a book I’ve been after for over a year:  Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology.  I haven’t read it yet, and I’m not likely to get to it any time soon.

And, okay, I’ve forgotten the name of the author and it’s in the other room and I’m lazy this morning.  It’s Saturday.

But I did look through it, and one of the things I found was a long section on ADD and ADHD–which includes both all my problems with drugging ten year olds because they won’t pay attention in class, to asking some serious questions about whether or not the syndrome actually exists, at least as its been commonly defined in schools.

It surprised me, because I’ve always understood–at least from the lectures I got from administrators–that there was one of those scientific consensuses around the existence of ADD and ADHD, and that I was being a know-nothing jerk to think that the whole thing sounded to me like nothing more than the resistance of young males to what’s become a hyperfeminized environment.

Okay. maybe I should do more of that when I have my mind on it.  I’m going to repost the thing about commenting on the blog and then go have tea.

IF YOU WANT TO REGISTER TO COMMENT:

Hi–This is sort of not a real post.  I’m tired, I couldn’t sleep, it’s too early in the morning.

But we’ve recently experienced some difficult here, so I’m going to post this, and then I’m going to post the message at the bottom of every regular post until we get it cleared up.

If you try to post a comment and can’t, then try to register a password and end up getting the error message

            Invalid Registration Status

please e-mail me, and we’ll get you into the system manually.

So far, at least four regular contributors have had this problem, and I’m a little worried about new people with no experience of how the system usually works.

So if it happens, it’s just the program screwing up.  E-mail me–if you don’t have the address  you can use the contact form on the web site–and we’ll get you signed in.

Thanks.  Sorry for all the fuss. 

Sometimes I think computer programs are trying to get me.

I don’t know what it is this year.  I’m getting sick more often, and I’m getting sick worse.  This last round has felt like a whiplash–pretty sick for a while, okay sort of, really sick, can’t get it to go completely away.  I did get to sleep a little late this morning, so there’s that.

At the moment, I’m a little floaty, but I’ve got a couple of things.

One is that I was flipping channels last night after we’d watched Band of Brothers through to the end, and I caught Bill O’Reilly on his own show–defending the position that atheistic humanists are not “immoral people.”

I was, by then, very tired, and I got it only at the end of the segment, but he seemed to be doing this in opposition to a guest (young, blonde, but not one of the usual suspects) who was declaring that humanists had to be immoral.

But then, of all these guys, O’Reilly is the one I like the most.  So there’s that.

The other thing is incredibly depressing, but I don’t think I’m ever going to forget it.

And if you’re one of those people who thinks a knowledge of history is important to the health of a nation and a civilization, this will blow your corks.

Yesterday, in class, I had to explain–not to one person, but to several–what a genocide was.

Then I had to convince them that “stuff like that” actually happened.

They’d heard of “the Holocaust,” but had no idea whatsoever what it entailed.  I had to bring up visuals on the computer to convince them I wasn’t making it all up.

They hadn’t heard of Pol Pot or the killing fields.

Which explained why they were having so much trouble with the assignment, since it consisted of the stories of three young men whose families had all immigrated from Cambodia back in the 1970s.  

The young men had never bothered to become American citizens, and they all had felonies, and they were all being deported–but my kids couldn’t untangle any of the issues, or even understand them, because they didn’t know why these families had come to the US to begin with.

Anyway, okay, I admit it–these aren’t the cream of the academic crop.  They aren’t even the middle.

But they are doing better than at least half the kids they graduated from high school with, since they’re in a postsecondary program, no matter how weak.

If they didn’t know, what are the chances the people at home know? 

And this is not like my last jaw-dropping moment, when an adult student in a night class I taught didn’t know that slavery had ever existed outside the US.

That’s because she actually did know, she just hadn’t put the words together in her head.   She was so used to hearing the word “slavery” used in radically different contexts that she hadn’t realized the two were the same thing–the slavery in Egypt in church, the slavery in the US in school.  She’d never connected the dots.

In this case, the kids really didn’t know.  They had no idea that anybody had ever done anything like that.   They’d seen Nazi bad guys in a thousand movies, and had no idea why the Nazis were bad guys, except that they were.  You know, like aliens.  They just were.

I suppose I just sound like I’m doing it again, wailing on and on about how they don’t know anything.

I think that even when I complain that they don’t know anything, I’m internally qualifying the point by going, “except, of course, they know the really obvious things.”

Sometimes, I don’t know how to cope when they don’t know the obvious things.

More and more lately, I don’t know how to cope.

So yesterday, when I left the house, I was feeling a lot better, and pretty sure I was almost over this.  Then I went to school and did my long day–or almost did it.  About twenty minutes into the two twenty class, I started coughing and couldn’t stop.  And that’s when I came home.

By then, of course, I was so fuzzy and out of it that I was barely paying attention to anything.  I was even having trouble following Band of Brothers, which is up on the free on demand again.  And I love Band of Brothers.   I love it because it is, simply, wonderful.  But I also love it because Spielberg and Hanks didn’t try to fix WWII.  There are no African American soldiers in Easy Company–because there weren’t any. 

And there should have been.  And it was not just.  And the segregation of the American Army was a bad idea.

But WWII is WWII, we can’t change it now, and for once the history mattered more than the moral lecture.

But I was sitting on my couch, watching the thing and looking through magazines on the loveseat because my head was too stuffed up for me to concentrate on anything. 

And I came across an article in Free Inquiry about education. 

Actually, I really was addled, so I don’t remember what the entire article was about.  What I do remember is that part of it was about how awful No Child Left Behind is, and how it’s resulted in a dumbing down of elementary and secondary education at all levels.

And I ended up thinking both about my kids–as of the post yesterday–and about what always bugs me about those arguments.

I am not a big fan of No Child Left Behind.  The damned thing set standards without every doing any basic research in what the standards should be, what could reasonably be expected of anybody at any grade level, even what we already were expecting of anybody at any grade level. 

It also represents, to me, another attempt to nationalize American education, which is something I really am not in favor of.  I tend to cheerlead for the opposite of a national curriculum–as many disparate and unconnected parts as possible, with no central control. 

But the one thing that never bothered me about NCLB was the possibility that teachers would start “teaching to the test.”   

It seems to me that if I am a local school district–or even the Department of Education–and I want to make sure that students learn X, then it makes sense for me to test them on X. 

And if the only way teachers can make sure that students learn X is to “teach to the test,” then so be it.  If I want them to learn X, and that’s the only way, then that’s what should be done.

I said this once on a certain Internet discussion forum and got seventeen kinds of wailing indignation landed on my head.  What if the students weren’t learning other things–you’d never know about it!  Well, yes, I never would.  But if I want to make sure they know X, then it makes sense to me to insist that there be some proof that they know X.

And I know a lot about what happens when they don’t know X.  My kids are the ones who don’t. 

And Robert is absolutely right.  If we took them step by step over the course of a few years, some of them could definitely learn to do college work.  We’d just have to make sure they learned to do junior high school work first. 

But we won’t.

Let me try to make clear what’s happening here.

These kids will never be given a few years to catch up.  Either they’ll flunk out entirely, or they’ll be spoon fed through four years of “college” and given a “degree” that everybody in the immediate area knows for exactly what it is worth.

The kids who flunk out will flunk out because they’ll go on to a low-level state four year where the academic standard reaches to about the level of a middling public high school.  Since the year, or at most two, that these kids will get in remedial programs will not bring them even close to that, they’ll just fail.

But in a way, they’ll be lucky.  They’ll at least realize that there are academic standards out there that are higher than they’re able to reach.

The kids who go on to the phone four-year “college” programs won’t even know that.   The level of the work they will be required to do will reach no higher than what was required in class a couple of days ago, and they will leave with their “degree” convinced that academic work is just a con game–nothing important, and something anybody can do, so that the only thing that accounts for why they’re not getting the kinds of jobs they want or why the law and medical schools won’t take them is…well, it must be racism.  The black kids think the only reason they’re getting turned down is that they’re black.  The white kids think the only reason they’re getting turned down is that affirmative action means some black guy had to get it even if his grades were worse.

It is difficult to explain just how much of a sham American “college” education on the lowest level really is. 

Nobody is looking to make these kids competent in research skills.  Nobody is even looking to bring them up to the academic level high school should have.

What this system wants, mostly, is a sort of plausible deniability.  It wants to be able to sit back and go:  failing schools?  But we graduate more than half of our kids, and they go on to college and they even graduate!

And since most Americans have no idea what goes on inside programs like mine,  that even looks plausible on paper.

In the meantime, nobody fixes anything, because in order to fix things you would first have to face the fact that the numbers are going to be wildly skewed by both race and class.

And I am increasingly convinced that the people who will not face that fact are secretly of the opinion that race determines intelligence, at least a little–that my kids are incapable of learning much of anything, so that there’s no real reason to try to teach them. 

And in the meantime, of course, this is costing mostly poor kids and their families a ton of money.  It costs a lot more for one of my kids to finish four years of a phony “college” than it does for just about anybody to finish Johns Hopkins, or Harvard.

Back in the middle of the 19th century, Vassar decided that it would not admit girls who could not pass a standard college entrance exam–the same one they used at Yale–and instead instituted a training program to bring them up to speed before allowing them to attend classes.

My kids could use something like that, but they’re not going to get it.  They’ve only got the two choices–a phony “college” degree that’s worth less than a high school diploma from someplace like Westport, or to be sent defenseless into a poor but halfway honest program which they’ll have very little chance of completing.

The only chance any of them have got is to be able to actually make it through one of those halfway honest programs.

But to do that, they’re going to have to be able to handle research in scholarly journals by next year.

Okay, I really am feeling a little better today, on the have-a-cold-front.

But I’m obviously in a much worse mood.

This is what I think of as a calm week in the middle of the term. 

I used to design courses with an ever-increasing stress level–more work every week, harder assignments every week, tote that barge, lift that bale.

It made sense to me, at least theoretically.  First you do a little, then you do a little more, and if you keep it up, you’re suddenly in a place you never expected yourself to be.

I finally figured out that real life didn’t work that way. Or, at least, it didn’t work that way for “remedial” and “developmental” students, who tend to feel that they’re drowning. 

And a lot of them are drowning.  I’m still wandering around wondering what I’m supposed to do about that, and I don’t really know.  If there’s one thing that drives me crazy about this particular process, it’s the professional-speak with which many of my fellow teachers approach it, full of theory and jargon.  The professional-speak hides from them–as well as from anybody in administration or the state government who wants to look in on the program–the fact that there are substrata of our students for whom it is not working. 

What I did, finally, in order to give everybody a chance to catch his breath before we hit the research project–or the attempt at the research project–was to move a week that used to be early in the course to about now. 

That week is the observation and description paper, which is about the easiest thing we do.  It requires nothing much in the way of cultural context.  The assignment itself isn’t long.  I can bring show and tell that makes people laugh.

This term, it also turned out to be the week when the library ladies wanted to come into the class to do their presentation. 

We schedule two presentations every term for classes like mine, because one of the hardest things we have to do is to convince them that they will in fact have to go to the library, that looking up things online will not be acceptable as college research–at least, not if they stick to those exclusively–and that they will, in fact, eventually have to deal with books.

Most of my kids seem to thing of books as alien artifacts.  They know books exists, but they’ve never had anything to do with them except to carry them around from class to class in high school.   While they were there, their teachers assigned readings, which they didn’t do.  Their teachers then spent class time reading out of the book and recapitulating what was in it. 

In college, therefore, they see very little reason to actually buy their textbooks, and they get highly indignant when they find out their teachers expect them to know things without having been told all about them in class.   Teachers should teach, they insist.  And by that, they mean teachers should read out of the book so that they don’t have to.

But the library ladies wanted to come in this week, and I didn’t see any reason why not, so they did.  And this time, for the first time, I sat in the class while the presentation was going on. 

And I was, quite frankly, stunned.

I’m used to the fact that the teachers around me are basically doing work on a junior high level while describing it in terms that make it sound like a seminar at Oxford, but this was truly and thoroughly incredible.

For one thing, the teaching style was out of fifth grade, if that.   “Misinformation is what we call it when somebody tells us something that is wrong, but they don’t know it’s wrong,” the woman said.  “What do you think disinformation means?”

Then there were the homework handouts, that consisted of little blocks of declarative sentences with one or two blanks the students were supposed to fill it.   An article is more credible if it’s ______, one of them said.  The answer was “peer reviewed.”

The whole thing was astonishing.  I found myself waxing indignant myself, on their behalf.  If anybody had ever come into any of my college classrooms and treated me like that, I would have been furious beyond belief.

But the real kicker was this:  they weren’t furious.  In fact, the longer I watched, the more I realized that this was what they wanted.  It’s what they think “school” should be like.  Encouraging little voice.  Simple little questions.  Everything chopped up and boiled down to a level that would be an insult to a bright ten year old. 

Everything, in fact, that I had fled to college to escape.

And I don’t know what to make of it.  On one level, the presentation was a roaring success.  They all felt they’d learned something, and possibly they had. 

But I’m not too sure how we get there from here.  Now that they know about professional journals and peer-reiviewed articles, how are they going to be able to use them?  What’s going to happen when they pick up a copy of the American Journal of Social Psychology and even the abstract isn’t divided up into easy to swallow little bits, when they have to read page after page of little tiny type on the relationship between expressive behavior and social norms?

I am not, now, talking about introducing them to the Canon, or the Great Conversation, either.  People who need to fill in the blanks this way to learn something are not at a level of competence capable of doing actual college work.  They’re barely at a level of competence capable of doing high school work.

And I do understand that the point is to get them there.  But is this how we get them there?  Can we get them there like this?  At some point, don’t we have to bite the bullet and give it to them straight?

I don’t know.  The throw them in the deep end school of learning to swim isn’t something I’m usually in favor of.

But this is…I don’t know what.

Tomorrow or Thursday, maybe, a bit about readers and vocabulary, techniques and referents, plus controversial subjects.

So here’s the thing.  My older son spent a fair amount of his growing up watching British television, since we were in London.  He didn’t watch Dr. Who, because by then the program was off the air.   When Matt wanted to watch Dr. Who, he had to do it off the dozens of VHS tapes Bill had made especially just to get the whole series.

This was not easy.  Some of those tapes were made from broadcasts on a Connecticut PBS station, and they were usually interspersed with long, weirdly embarrassing fund raising efforts.  The fund raising efforts were always accompanied by a threat:  Dr. Who brought in the most donations of anything they showed on the station.  If you wanted your Dr. Who, you’d better pony up.

Bill always did pony up, but they ended up cancelling Dr. Who on that station anyway.   Maybe this wasn’t surprising, since you could tell–on those long fund raising sessions–that the people doing the fundraising had no idea why something like that would be on their PBS station.

After the station cancelled Dr. Who, Bill stopped watching it, and stopped contributing to it.   Hell, he stopped listening or watching anything on any PBS station.  He wouldn’t even watch British sitcoms, which he missed once we were back in the States for good.

I bring all this up because I sympathize, in a way, with the people doing the fundraising.  I never did “get” Dr. Who. The first year we were in England coincided with Peter Davidson’s reign as the Doctor, and I sat down with Bill and watched the thing on and off.

Davidson was a tidy looking man who wore a stalk of celery in his jacket pocket.  The production values were embarrassingly awful.  The plot lines just mystified me.

Bill was still alive when Steven Spielberg made his bid to buy the series and produce new seasons.  I don’t know if he got what he wanted or not.  There are new seasons, and they’re much better done–and much better written–but watching them over the last couple of days, I wasn’t really catching on to who was making the thing or what the relationships were between the various production companies and sponsoring organizations.

The Canadian Broadcasting Company is involved.  So is the BBC.  So are a number of other people.

Okay, I’ve got a headcold–the winter has hardly started, and it’s already awful–and I wasn’t paying too much attention.

But what I was paying attention to is this:  a remarkable number of the people in my generation who have become successful in entertainment, and especially in movies, have done so by making adult versions of what all the baby boomers loved to watch on television as children.

Rocky and Bullwinkle.  Yogi Bear.  Dr. Who.  The Chipmunks.  I can’t get through the Christmas season any more without running head on into the live action movie of some television show I used to watch when I was nine.

Some of these movies are good.  The first Chipmunks movie was actually rather sweet.  Some of these movies are awful.  The Rocky and Bullwinkle movie was so awful it was hard to sit through. 

In general, by the way, the movies that are good treat the original television shows as if they’d had a brain in their head.  The problem with the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie is that the people who made it apparently never got the fact that the original television show could’t have been completely understood by children in the first place.  I was thirty and watching the thing is reruns before I got half the jokes.

The new Dr. Who series is very good indeed, and I say that as somebody who was just required to sit through a two day marathon of the thing. 

But it does occur to me that this goes back to something I was talking about before.  Increasingly, over the last ten to fifteen years, what has been really successful in entertainment is work aimed at children–or maybe I should say quasi-aimed at children.

I’m not talking about the stuff that is self-consciously made for children–the awful treacly sugaroverdose nonsense like the Care Bears or Rainbow Brite. 

My basic feeling about those is that no self respecting child would touch them.

But think about it–Harry Potter is an obsession in both print and on film with adults as well as children.  Adults read YA titles, and genre titles (at least in mystery) that eschew big words, controversial subjects and too much “realism” do better than the kind of naturalism I was brought up to think of as the only “real” way to write fiction.

I can’t even say that I’m immune. I don’t much hanker after old children’s shows like Rocky and Bullwinkle–although if I want that, I’ll go for the original, and not the recent mess of a movie–but I am completely enamored of the old Perry Mason series.  I’ve got all the available seasons on DVD.  I often decide to watch those instead of whatever is playing on television.

I don’t know what any of this means.  Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.  My sons think I watch the old Perry Mason series because it reminds me of my father, and I miss my father a lot.  And I do.  Miss my father, I mean.

Or maybe it’s what I was talking about a few months ago.  Maybe, with a population that is no longer taught how to read even fairly simple literary devices (like third person multiple viewpoint and extended metaphor), work at least ostensibly written for children is more comprehensible than the stuff that assumes an acquaintance with grown-up references and techniques.

Whatever.

I just think this is very odd.

And thinking about it keeps my mind off the fact that what it sounds like is happening outside my office window is sleet.

I’m not ready for sleet.

Okay, let me see if I can clear this up, given the fact that my head feels like it’s been stuffed with cotton balls.

This is the great inconvenience of teaching.  Students get everything, and they give it all to you.

First, ALL I was trying to say–so far–about an objective basis for morality was this:

a) human beings have a human nature that is largely fixed.  That is, human behavior, just like the human digestive system, is biologically based and outside our ability to change it at base.

Note the at base.  The general rule of thumb in the science is that behavior, intelligence and all the rest of it is 50% heritable–that is, that biology explains 50% of the differences we can see on the surface among populations.

The differences, however, are less malleable than you think.  My favorite example of this is:  most adolescent and young adult males exhibit high levels of aggressive behavior and tend to be both violent and tribal. 

In every society, everywhere, the vast majority of the violence is committed by males between the ages of 15 and 35. 

So what do you do about this?  You can’t just let them run wild, because they wreck everything.  Some societies decide to send them into war. 

We decide to send them into football.

This is not a small difference.  Life is much better for everybody if the potentially volatile, highly violent segment of the population has something to do that satisfies it and yet doesn’t result in raped women and houses burning down. 

But the fact that we successfully channel young male aggression into sports for a significant segment of our young male population does not mean that those young men are no longer aggressive, or that they are no longer violent. 

The core attribute remains.  We’ve just got it aimed better.

And, yes, I know, there are differences among individuals.  Like everything we can say about living things in any aspect of their aliveness, there will be anomalies.  Some people are born with their hearts on the right side.  Some young men are born without the testosterone levels that cause aggression.

On the ground, as in biology, anatomy and physiology, and even engineering, you have to deal with the individual case on an individual basis.

b) The fact that human nature is to a significant extent biologically fixed means that we can study it and describe it. 

We can formulate the rules by which it operates.

I’m NOT talking here about rules of morality.

I’m talking about descriptive rules, like the rules of physics.  “When the testosterone storms hit young males in puberty, we will see rising levels of aggression, physicality, and a heightened sexual drive.”

That kind of rules.

c) Once we know enough of those laws of human nature, we can use them to devise rules of behavior.

There’s nothing different here from, say, engineering.  The objective basis for the rules of building a bridge, or a house, are the laws of physics.

But the laws of physics are not the same thing as the rules for building a house.  They provide the data from which such rules can be derived.

And those rules are objectively based.

d) I think that what actually gets everybody worked up is not the rules themselves, or even the objective basis for the rules, but the core decision:  on what basis do we decide to build a bridge instead of a house or a conning tower.

Once I know the laws of human nature, I have the objective data on which I can base all kinds of sets of rules, depending on what I want to do.

This is, I think, where people really get worked up–they want an objective basis for making the core decision, not for the rules themselves.

For instance, if I take the data on human nature and want to build a warrior society whose highest purpose is to conquer societies around it and expand, then the rules I’m going to derive from the data will be different than the rules I would derive if I wanted to build a society whose highest purpose will be the honoring and maintenance of the old.

But in both cases–and even though the two sets of rules are different–the rules will have an objective basis in the laws of human nature.

The problem, for most people, is not that there is not objective basis for morality–but that they think there is no objective basis for making the choice between different goals that will then decide which objectively based rules to follow.

d) Morality is about individual behavior.  Politics is about societal behavior.  Morality aims to make each individual human being the best he can be as a human being.  Politics aims to keep societies together.

Yes, of course, morality will affect societies–and politics will affect individuals in their quest to be (or not to be) moral–but the fact that the two things affect each other does not make them the same thing. 

It’s more than theoretically possible that the best possible political code will not enshrine the rules of morality as law.  In fact, I’d say any society that tried to do that would kill itself. 

But that’s another discussion.

e) As to thriving societies–I’d say that up until the eighteenth century, there was a ceiling on just how well your society could thrive.  You got so far and no farther.  And everybody pretty much got to the same place if they managed to “thrive” at all.

Egyptian peasant farmers were not slaves, but they were subject to being enslaved at the whim of the Pharaoh, they could be beaten and robbed by the aristocracy without recourse, they could have their possessions taken away from them and their families destroyed.

What’s more, they–and the aristocrats above them–lived in a world where women routinely died in childbirth, where close to half of all children did not live to see adulthood, where epidemics raged through populations unchecked, where something as little as a papercut could mean death at any time, in any place.

And, of course, the poorer you were, the more likely you lived in a miserable mud hut that frozen when the weather got colder, that you huddled next to a fire–hell, the Medieval English kings did that much–when the snow came, that your food supply was uncertain and variable.

I could go on like this, but you must see my point.  I suppose that sort of thing could be described as “thriving” in a world before the scientific revolution–but we’re past the scientific revolution, and the simple fact is that only one kind of society has ever reached that point.

One.  Not thirty six.

There are not lots of different ways you can develop a scientific civilization, at least as far as we know.

g) I only know of one book on Aquinas of the type John is talking about, and it isn’t what he wants–it deals almost entirely with the theology.

But the point of Aquinas is precisely the way he used to go about thinking about these things.  Each argument is laid out carefully as an outline, so that you can see all the gears moving. 

h) As for the Nichomachean Ethics–Aristotle did, in it, for ethics, what he did in his book on natural philosophy for zoology. 

He set about trying to understand his subject by gathering all the available data.

Considering the fact that that was the first time that had ever been done–he could have taken Plato’s tack and just “thought” about it all–I think it’s worth quite a lot.

It may not be the end of the journey, but it is the beginning.  And you have to start somewhere.

I have a cold.

And Dahleks.

I’m at this place again, a place I get to in many of these discussions.

And I’ve decided that I must be doing something wrong, because I keep ending up here time after time after time again.

I start to outline a complex argument that requires me to

1) Make and explain point A

2) Show how point A leads to point B, and make and explain that

3) Show how point B leads to point C, and make and explain that

4) Show how point C leads to point D, and make and explain that

5) Show how point D leads to point E, and make and explain that

6) And finally tie it all together.

And what happens is that I not only never get to Number 6, I never get to Number 2.

That’s because I make Point A, and thirty of you jump on me to complain that that doesn’t explain Point D, and Point D—

And off we go.

The fact is that I know perfectly well that just nailing Point A does not explain or prove Point D on its own–any more than declaring just that Socrates is a man proves that Socrates is mortal.  You have to state the second stage (all men or mortal) before you can get there.

We also continually get off on complete side issues, which I then get blamed for.

One more time.

I wasn’t the one who started talking about “societies.”

Societies have nothing to do with it.  They really don’t. 

The only reason I spoke about societies was because people here kept saying “well, different societies have different moral codes and still thrive.”

I felt like I had to answer the comment, so I answered it, and suddenly I was being told I was saying that we could prove objective moral rules by how they impacted the health of whole societies.

But I never said that.

In fact, so far, I haven’t yet said anything at all about how to derive the actual moral rules. 

If Lymaree can’t figure out how to get from an objective basis for morality to specific moral rules, it MAY be because I haven’t said a single thing about it as of yet.

That’s Point E above, and there’s a lot more ground to be covered before that.

Then there’s the whole thing about the “physical” and the “not physical.”

I’ll repeat–as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing else but the physical. 

It’s not possible for behavior, thoughts or ideas to be something else only “derived from” physical bodies.  Those things are physical events, just as surely as burps and farts.  There’s nothing else for them to be.

And I do think we’ll get to the point where we’ll be able to pinpoint the brain functioning that produces them, and understand how it works.

Which, by the way, would get us back to Sam Harris’s book, about which I still have something to say.

And, I’m sorry, but I do not accept the idea that a society is “thriving” if most of its citizens live in slavery and misery, if there is no advancing of science and technology and medicine,  if “progress” for the few is the result of the brutal suppression of the many.

And that is what Egypt was, it was what the Incas were, it was what the Chinese and Mongol empires turned into by the time we discovered them. 

It is possible to produce a great, oppressive empire in lots of different ways, and if you want to think of that as a society “thriving,” well, good for you.

But it is possible to produce a scientific civilization only one way that we know of, and that way actually thrives, it not only grows and prospers, but that prosperity is broadly shared.  Everybody lives long and more comfortably, not just a tiny minority at the top that gets to steal from everybody else.  Knowledge advances.  Even art advances.

That’s a thriving society.  Pharaonic Egypt was protection racket married to a death cult.

And in the end, it went nowhere. 

And I’m talking about societies again, when morality is not about societies, but about individuals.

And I still can’t get there without going through all the steps. and I can’t get through all the steps when I can’t even get through the first one because I have to run over to the other side of the room and take care of questions about steps I haven’t even outlined yet.

This sort of thing is very frustrating.

I have half a mind to send you all to Thomas Aquinas, who outlined the case for an objective basis for morality better than I ever could–and to Aristotle, who did the same.

At least they didn’t have laryngitis.

Okay, today I’m obsessing, and we’ll get to that in a minute.  It’s a little local obsession, but here I am, and it’s my blog.

To answer a couple of questions from yesterday:  the differences between politics and morality are vast.  Morality has to do with the individual.  Politics has to do with the state.

Of course, morality does impact politics–a world where everybody was relentlessly moral (in my sense of the term) would be a world in which no politics would be necessary.

Or police departments, for that matter.

But politics seeks to keep the peace, to order society in such a way that it can function for the people in it.  And, historically, the governments that do that best do it by being pragmatic rather than moral.  In a good state, a lot that is immoral is legal, and a lot that is illegal is not immoral.  It’s not a matter of morality, for instance, that you have to stop at red lights. 

I only started talking about societies because everybody else was. 

And I don’t think that binary questions are necessarily all that bad, or all that useless.  Ayn Rand did indeed pose one–that morality is your answer to the question: life or death?–and it works coherently with everything that came after.

When I think about morality, my tendency is not to worry about the big picture ways it affects society, but about the small picture ways it affects me.   A moral system that tells you you must put down an old person if she’s sick and dying anyway has very different practical results for my life than a moral system that tells you you may never do that, ever.

It has those results even if the society around it outlaws euthanasia.

Nor do I think that it is necessary for something to be “out there” for there to be an objective basis for anything, never mind morality.  The operations of your internal organs are not “out there,” and yet they provide an objective basis for the rules guiding heart surgery.

The same is true with language.  It’s not “out there” either, and yet there are base rules that apply to all languages and we can discover them.  And there’s a basis in the construction of the brain that says the possible variations are not infinite and that at least a small set of rules may never be broken if a language is going to function at all.

It seems to me that what people want–the ones here, anyway, who are arguing that there can be no objective basis for morality–is something that does not now and has never existed in the universe. 

You want an absolute certainty, without variations or contingencies, without the possibility that anybody anywhere could reject or challenge it. 

But this doesn’t  apply even to the hardest of the hard sciences.  It doesn’t even apply to mathematics. 

You don’t want an objective basis for morality. You want rules written in stone.  Short of that, you want nothing at all.

But the world is not like that.

All our knowledge is tentative–we could always be wrong. 

All our knowledge is partial–we’ll probably never get to the point where we know everything about anything.

Any knowledge that exists–no matter how firmly established–can become a matter of controversy.

Any knowledge that exists about living things is, of necessity, statistical.  That’s as true of what we know about the human digestive system as it is about morality.

So all I’m saying is this:  if  you want to argue that there is no objective basis for morality, then you can’t use a double standard.

You can’t reject such a basis on grounds that you accept as valid for other things.

If you want to say that there is no objective basis for morality because people have different ideas about morality–then you can’t accept evolution, because people have different ideas about evolution.

If you want to say that there is no objective basis for morality because any such basis is subject to anomalies and can only be expressed accurately in statistical terms–then you can’t say we have an objective basis for what we know and teach about human anatomy, either, because that, too, is subject to anomalies.

In almost every case, the arguments people have brought forward here against the idea of an objective basis for morality are arguments they would reject if they were applied to any other subject. 

In the end, the question comes down, to me, of why so many people, on both sides of the political and religious divide, want to apply completely idiosyncratic rules to morality that they would not apply to anything else.

Maybe I’m missing something obvious here, but this seems very strange to me. 

And I forgot all about my local obsession.

That’s all right.

It’s coming to a 24 hour cable news channel near you.

Okay, for a post title, that was bad.

But it’s Wednesday, and there’s a lot of stuff to do, and I have to get out of here early again.  So these are just a couple of notes.

First, an objective basis for morality is just that, an objective basis, not the rules of morality themselves.

The objective basis for building a bridge is the laws of physics, but those laws are not the rules for building a bridge themselves.

And yet, nobody would say that building a bridge is an entirely subjective exercise, or that the rules for doing so are simply made up and derive from nothing in the real world.

And I’ll stick by my previous statement–if it actually is possible that morality derives from nothing, that it is entirely subjective and made up, then it’s being produced by that diembodied soul most of you say you don’t believe in.  Because such a thing–entirely subjective and made up–is not possible in a world without the supernatural.

Second, I’ll stick by my term “stagnant.”  It was accurate–and, by the way, objective. 

The socieites some of you want to label as doing just fine, even prospering and growing, neither had nor were in a position to develop vaccines, air conditioning, antibiotics, central heating, telecommunications systems, space travel.

The full list is a lot longer.

And that inability to develop–ever, at least as far as we know, since those societies not only never did develop those things but never did develop even the first steps towards eventually developing those things–meant that, in all of them, the most common cause of death for women was childbirth, infants had no better than a two in five chance of reaching adulthood, epidemics wiped out legions of people in short periods of time–

And you can go from there.

The idea that such societies were in some way “just as good” as the ones (well, one, the single case) of societies with all that stuff is mostly academic masturbation.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the here and now, when millions of people annually make a judgment on whether or not such societies are “successful.”

It’s why we have an illegal immigration problem in the US and other knds of immigration problems in Europe.

In the third place, the fact that the objective basis of morality must be expressed statistically instead of absolutely does not make that basis subjective.

The fact that some very small subset of human beings have their hearts in the right side of their chests does not stop medical books from saying that human beings have their hearts in the left side of their chests. 

They do.  Life being life, there are sometimes a few anomalies, and we deal with those when they come along.  But we make rules for how to treat heart disease and do heart surgery on the widely general case, and the widely general case does indeed have an objective basis (i.e., most people’s hearts are in the left sides of their chests).

In the same way, it’s possible that a small subset of people will not respond to the existence of slavery in their society by feeling no need to invent the lawn mower–but most people will behave as indeed most people have behaved over the course of millennia.

Which I probably spelled wrong.

This has been entirely too abstract.

I need to go find out who won last night.

I’m getting old.  It used to be I’d stay up all night to find out who won an election for dog catcher.  These days, I have limits even for a Presidential election.

At least there’s tea.