Hildegarde

So…

Somebody posted to the comments that I should go to jury duty and report.  And I did.  Go to jury duty, that is. 

So here’s the report.

First, you have to understand that I really and truly hate the parking situation at and around the Superior Court.  I’m not interested in parking in the municipal garage half a mile away–and the one place I’ve ever been mugged.  I’ve lived in New York, London, Paris and Detroit, and I got mugged in Connecticut.

I’m also not much interested in parking on the street, where you get forty five minutes and then have to run down from the jury waiting room to plug in quarters again.

So I got my friend Carol to drop me off on her way to work, and my friend Richard to pick me up.  And yes, these are the same Carol and Richard who appear in my acknowledgements pages over and over again because they keep saving my ass in all sorts of ways, and the ones who saved the manuscript of Hardscrabble Road when a virus ate my hard drive.

At any rate, Carol drove me in and dropped me at the Superior Court just before eight thirty.  I signed in and took a seat, and I will admit I was rather surprised at how few people were in the waiting room.   I’m willing to bet there weren’t twenty of us all told.  I know there weren’t as many as thirty.

The fact nagged at me a little, but not as much as it might have, because there was a new wrinkle this time–they let us keep our cell phones.  They used to confiscate them.  They don’t any more. 

So, I had e-mail to check, and lots of the people around me were playing games on their Blackberries.

Then the Clerk of the Court came up and turned the television off–I forgot to mention that this place has the single largest flat screen TV I’ve ever seen so that potential jurors can watch the news while they wait–

Anyway, she turned it off and played a half-hour video tape of instructions on What It Means To Be A Juror.   I’ve seen this video every single time I’ve been on jury duty in Connecticut, which is well over fifteen years now, so it wasn’t like I didn’t know what it said.  I watched anyway, because I didn’t want this woman to decide nobody was paying attention and she had to run it again.

When the tape was over, the Clerk came back, turned off the television set again, and said, “You’re considered to have done your jury duty if you’re here as long as I need you.  If I don’t need you any more and you’re sent home, then you’ve fulfilled your obligation until 2013, no matter now little time you’ve spent here.  I called you in because we needed to pick a jury for a civil case today, but I’ve just been informed that that case has settled.  You can all go home.”

And that was it.

It was nine thirty, and I was calling Matt and Greg at home and Richard at work asking for somebody to spring me, and Richard came along and did it while I sat on the front steps of the courthouse in the heat and got harassed by a pack of little girls who were playing some kind of game that required running around and slamming into people.

Mostly me.

But that was not the end of it.  About an hour after I got home, we went out for a couple of minutes to the grocery store.  And when we got back, the mail was waiting for us.

In that mail, there was a summons to jury duty on September 24th.

It must have been sent out–well, I don’t know when it was sent out.  In the middle of scheduling me for yesterday, though, I’m sure.

They really can’t call you up more than once in four years, and I called the jury administration this morning and pointed out that I’d done my service yesterday, such as it was.  So that’s taken care of.

But still.

The whole thing makes me crazy.  I will never get on a jury in the state of Connecticut.  Between lawyers and judges who were family friends and lawyers and judges I dated in high school and law firms representing people I’ve either sued or been sued by–there just isn’t anybody left.

The one time I was on jury duty in New York, I did get put on a case, and a murder case at that, but the case ended in mistrial and that was that.   That case was interesting on a number of levels, not least of which was the fact that the defendant didn’t speak a word of English and needed an interpreter.  But I never did learn enough about it to make any guesses about what was going on there.

In the meantime, I read my way through a fairly early Agatha Christie novel called Three Act Tragedy.  I don’t remember ever having read it before, and I found it sort of disappointing.

The premise was actually very good, the mystery was pretty solid–but for some reason, the thing is written in a way that brings Poirot into the book almost not at all.

Christie always concentrates more on the suspects than she does on the detective, but this was not like that–Poirot shows up for a few paragraphs in the first third, then a few paragraphs for more in the second third, then gives the solution at the end.

The result was a book that lacked any definable shape.  It isn’t a detective novel in any sense of the word, not even the traditional rely on suspects sense–but it also isn’t any other kind of book.

I’m being vague here.

I will say it was a shame.  The last Christie I read–and only a couple of days ago–was Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and it was first class.  This just felt unsatisfying and drifty, in spite of having, as I’ve said, a really excellent premise and a really excellent mystery.

But I have been noticing something, to take us back to those discussions about what mystery readers are most interested in.

If what you’re concerned with is watching the detective detect, I don’t think Poirot’s your man.  He tends to ruminate a lot, go “ah, but I know,’ and then hit you with the solution in the end.

You can no more watch him detect than you can watch Santa come down the chimney.

I’ve got to run off and get serious.  We had a whole row of thunderstorm early this morning, and more are supposed to be coming.

The good news is that when I woke up this morning, only one of my eyes was welded shut.  It’s still an enormous pain in the rear, and it almost certainly means that I’m  having trouble concentrating, having trouble reading, and having trouble writing.

And I’m finishing a book, and I’m due to go in for jury duty tomorrow. 

Meaning that this is getting to be more than your usual distraction.

But in the meantime–

I wrote here several months ago about a Martha Grimes novel called The Old Wine Shades, about which I had a few complaints, not the least of which was the fact that the murderer was not caught and brought to justice.

We know who he is.  He is supposed to be a crimnal mastermind, and in a lot of ways is.  The basic story was very interesting.  But it bothered me–and it doesn’t always–that the man got away clean.

It turns out, however, that I may have spoken too soon.  The last day or two, I’ve been reading a book called Dust, also by Martha Grimes, and, I think, the sequel to The Old Wine Shades.  In it, our criminal mastermind murderer is back, apparently as a continuing character in what will be a set of subplots where Grimes’s detective, Richard Jury, tries to find some way to pin his crimes on him.

The idea of a criminal mastermind who continually thwarts the detective’s attempts to bring him to justice isn’t new.  Conan Doyle did it with Moriarity, and if I remember correctly there was something like that in the early Ellery Queen.

Okay, don’t quote me on that one, because I don’t really remember.  But you see what I mean.  It’s been around a while.

And yet, for some reason, I find it difficult to accept in this particular set of books.  Maybe the setting is too realistic. 

“Realistic” is the best word I can come up with here, but I don’t exactly know if it’s the one I want.  Grimes’s books are neither terribly realistic nor cutesy-cozy.  No police department in the world would allow Jury’s collaboration with an amateur detective named Melrose Plant, but the relationship is kept very low-key and it doesn’t jar with the more factually-based aspects of the stories. 

And there’s nothing unrealistic about the one that got away.  That happens to real policemen in real police departments all the time. 

The idea of a cop who won’t give up on the one that got away isn’t inherently unrealistic either.  There are enough true crime books out there about just that to make it practically a trope of real life, if real life can have tropes.

And, I have to admit it–I kind of enjoyed having the guy back.  He’s an interesting character on a lot of different levels.

I am, I know, sounding very contradictory and conflicted.  Maybe that’s the eye thing.  I don’t know.

I just know that this isn’t working for me, and I don’t know why. 

And the character does continue to the next book, which seems to be the one that’s out now.  And I’d read that one, except that I had a look through it in the store, and it did that thing with the extra-wide margins and the extra space between lines and the bigger print that publishers do when they want to make a book appear longer than it really is.

I coule have principled objections to something like that, but I don’t, really.  I just find books designed that way to be hard to read, and I’d rather wait forthe paperback and be comfortable.

Of course, sometimes they do that with paperbacks, and then I don’t read the book.

Ack.  My eye is still all gunked up, and I want to go somewhere and put ice on it.

Jury duty tomorrow, which, in Connecticut, lasts only a single day.

Some things, this state does do well.

Yesterday, I had a lot of running around to do, of the drive three hundred places, eat up seven hours and get very little done variety. 

And during that, I took some time off to sit down in the Barnes and Noble cafe and have one of those silly frappacino things, just to sort of sit there to take a breather.  And while I did that, I read through some magazines.

One of the magazines I looked at was the lated (July/August 2010) edition of The Humanist.  Mostly, that’s something I read to give myself a chance to roll my eyes.  I’ve said this here before, but the problem with The Humanist–and the entire American Humanist Association, as far as I can tell–is not that they’re “liberal” or “progressive” or even “left,” but that they’re stuck in 1968 in the worst way possible.

And this edition had a really good example of what drives me so crazy.  It was a special issue on climate change, and it contained the requisite set of articles all proclaiming that there are Rational People Who Accept Science and who therefore not only accept the popular version of climate change but believe we must drastically alter human behavior to reverse it and save the earth–and irrational capitalist ideologues and religious fanatics who deny that reality.

Then there was another article on the ideas of Freeman Dyson–scientist and atheist and rationalist–whose basic idea is that climate change isn’t the issue.  Human well being is the issue.  We should do whatever it takes to make sure everybody is fed, housed and clothed and if that means higher temperatures–so be it.

So, what?  It turns out that you don’t have to be a “capitalist idelogue” or a “religious fanatic” to think that the political prescriptions coming out of the climate change issue are wrong?

Imagine that.

Maybe they should let the rest of their writers in on it.

But it isn’t the climate change stuff I was really caught by.  It was a little sidebar about a project called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” which started as a poster by the cartoonist Molly Norris in response to the censoring of images of and mentions of Mohammed on a South Park episode.

The poster led to an actual campaign for an actual day–May 20, 2010–to draw Mohammed on the Internet.

The sidebar consisted of quotes from a number of people who supported the project, and one of those people was the comedian/commentator Bill Maher.

Now, let me be clear here.  Bill Maher drives me crazy. I think he’s a pompous, bullying  jerk.  Religulous was just as much of a hatchet job as I’d expected. 

As to the content of the politics, we agree on some things (abortion, for instance, probably gay marriage) and disagree on others.

But there’s disagreement and disagreement.  What Maher was quoted as saying was this:

“I’m very glad that Obama is reaching out to the Muslim world and I know Muslims living in America and Europe want their way of life to be assimilated more, but the Western world needs to make it clear:  some things about our culture are not negotiable and can’t change.  And one of them is freedom of speech.  Separation of church and state is another–not negotiable.  Women are allowed to work here and you can’t beat them.  Not negotiable.  This is how we roll.  And this is why our system is better.”

There was more, but nothing that changed the thrust.  And I could have said it myself.

And this is what I meant, a while ago, when I said there were libertarian socialists–people who supported, say, a wide welfare state but who still supported freedom of speech and all the rest of it, and who would resist attempts to make the welfare state into an instrument of violating individual rights.

If I’m in a room full of people who all agree with me and Maher up there, then whether they’re free marketers, welfare staters, or whatever, we’re all friends.  All that other stuff is policy.

The real fight is between people with attitudes like Maher’s and mine and–well, the people who were in my meeting the other day.

Maher is not a danger to my way of life, in spite of being so ideologically extreme in some ways he could make my teeth bleed.

The people in my meeting, though, are a time bomb under everything I hold dear.

P.S.:  By the way, when I said that these people in the meeting weren’t the typical English department, it wasn’t because I thought the typical English department would have thought differently than they did.

It was because no matter what the typical English department thought, it would NOT have been made up of the people in that meeting, most of whom did not have the kind of credentials to qualify.

I need tea.  And Martha Grimes.

It is, in fact, much later in the day than I usually write anything, but it’s been insane from off, and I’m just glad I got Gregor done and in the box (metaphorically, these days) before my allergies exploded and I had to go lie down with ice on my eyes again.

But it’s later in the day, I’ve got a lot of Diet Coke with lime wedges, and…well, here I am.

Annoyed.

The annoyance came a few days ago, actually, at a meeting I was required to attend for reasons that are beyond complicated.  And I won’t go into them.

Part of the meeting was a partial viewing of a PBS documentary called Sentenced Home, about two young men who were immigrants from Cambodia, who had been here since childhood, but who had, in their teen aged years, been members of street gangs and committed crimes for which they were convicted of felonies.

According to the film, changes in immigration law after 9/11 now makes these young men liable to being deported because a) they never bothered to get citizenship (they have green cards) and b) they are felons, although the law at the time they committed their crimes did not make them liable to being deported, and they’ve lived practically exemplary lives ever since.

Now, I’ve got some questions about this–I don’t understand, for instance, why this post-9/11 thing doesn’t qualify as an ex post facto law, which is unConstitutional–but that’s not really what I wanted to complain about.

I didn’t even want to complain about the accompanying “educational module packet” (I swear, English teachers love the word “module” because it sounds “scientific”), which started right out with a timeline declaring that 1492 was the date on which “the genocide of indigenious peoples” started with the arrival of Columbus.

Someday, honest to God, I’m going to take out commercial time on Cable television just to broadcast the actual definition of “genocide.”

But, like I said, that wasn’t it.  That was pretty much par for the course.

What got to me was the comments that went around after we’d seen the clip, which were–well, about as mind bogglingly stupid as anything I’ve ever complained about from students.

But you have to understand something.  By and large, the people who work in this place are not “intellectuals” as we usually use the term here.  Most of them don’t have PhDs, for instance, and most of them would be teaching just about anywhere else if they could manage it.

So I’m not sure  you could use what went on here as an example of what happens in a “normal” English department, because this is not in any way a normal English Department.

But here’s what I learned:

1) In spite of all the complaining they do about Fox News, most of these people are channeling Bill O’Reilly.  They think that the protections in the Constitution–due process, free speech, that sort of thing–only apply to citizens. 

2) They are all convinced that the US is “terrible” in its response to immigrants.  When I pointed out that most countries don’t allow immigrants to become citizens on any terms, they went, mhhhm, hummm, but–

Ah, but that’s when the shit really hit the fan, in the form of a woman, born Jamaican, I think, from the accent, and immigrated here from London, announced that every other country gives a safe haven so immigrants don’t have to fear being imported.

She knew this because she was an immigrant, and also because she had a cousin or a friend or something who was an immigration lawyer, and he’d told her that even if you got your citizenship, they could deport you any time they wanted to.

The whole thing was a truly remarkable performance, exacerbated by the fact that it was hot, they kept turning off the air conditioner so that people could hear the movie, I hadn’t had any sleep and I was ready to commit homicide on this woman by about a third of the way through the process.

One of the things that really got to me was the response to the clips of a woman from INS, who talked about immigration policy in terms of bestowing on people who asked for it a very valuable thing, residency in the US.

The objection to her seemed to be that she thought residency in the US was a very valuable thing.  That was proof positive of the arrogance and insularity of Americans.

So, I have to ask two questions:

1) Since the Cambodian men in the movie were fighting hard not to have to move someplace else–didn’t that mean they thought that residency here was a very valuable thing?

2) All those people who come here every year illegally, risking their lives and spending the last of their money to get across the border–aren’t their actions proof that they think residency here is a very valuable thing?

3) And if every other country in the world will give her a safe haven without having to fear every day that she’ll be deported, unlike here–why in the name of God is this insufferable woman here? 

I’m not talking about love it or leave it, now.  I don’t have a problem with criticism based on facts. 

But I think I was ready to completely explode by the end of the day.

How can I expect my students to know which war Pearl Harbor got us into if their teachers know about as much about anything as I do about changing a tire?

Okay.

Whine over.

I’m sorry to be so incommunicado here lately.  I have this really weird allergic thing that happens to my eyes in very hot weather, and it’s been very hot weather nearly all summer now.  I get up to work on Gregor for a while, and then my eyes swell nearly shut, and I have to go put ice on them.

It makes for a very uneven work day.  And if I have to go outside at all, I’m a complete mess by the end of the day.  And, of course, I do have to go outside.  All the time.

But I have been thinking about those last comments.  And one thing that’s occured to me is that I don’t know a single writer who could pull off an excellent detective story on a consistent basis.

Good enough ones, yes–but that it’s got to be mystifying but then look inevitable when it’s explained thing actually occurs in the field on a very infrequent basis. 

Christie had a couple–The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, At Bertram’s Hotel–but she, like most other detective story writers even in the Golden Age, tended to fall back on what I think of as the Really Complicated Plot.

In The ABC Murders, for instance, it all makes sense, but it assumes a murderer willing to go to Baroque lengths to carry out his scheme.   In A Pocket Full of Rye, the scheme is not only Baroque but full of  complicated confusions about nursery rhymes.

And I do tend to think that the best detective novel is the one where the issue is a really simple and straightforward murder.

And then there’s the problem posed by fair play.  If the writer is really playing fair with the reader, the chances are that at least some of the readers are going to “get it” before the solution is revealed at the end.

And sometimes time moves on, and what wouldn’t have been over obvious when the book was written gets that way.  For instance, in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcass, her readers probably found an exsanguinated body on a rock in the ocean to be totally mystifying.  I went, “Oh, Russian royality, hemophilia” and had the thing figured out before I was halfway through it.

Sometimes the only way to make the thing go at all is to have the detective look like an idiot.  In The Case of the One-Eyed Witness, the police and Perry Mason both blithely assume that a woman wearing a heavy dark veil must naturally be our suspect,  trying to fake an alibi.  The first thing I thought of was, “hmmm, dark veil, you can’t tell who that was,” and had the thing figured out long before the solution.

But dedicated mystery readers will have the crime figured out before the solution, more times than not.  If they didn’t, you’d have to wonder if there was something seriously wrong with them.  This is, after all, a form with its own conventions.  The kind of reader who likes solving puzzles in detective novels is going to have those conventions figured out by the time he’s read a dozen.

As for the detective story making demands on readers–I suppose it does, and I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked any longer when I find out that even readers don’t like to do any work.

But it’s possible to read a detective novel without trying to figure it out, and I once used to know people who did that.

I’ve got to go put ice on this eye.  It’s making me nuts.

Well–let’s start here.  I don’t have a desired word count when I write.  There’s always a minimum, beneath which your publisher doesn’t think you actually have a book, but I get past that without too much trouble.

And no, the mysteries are no more complicated–but then I’ve never read or written mystery novels for the mystery. 

And I want to stress that thing about reading.  I don’t read mysteries for the mysteries.  I read them for the story, which in the best detective novels has to do with the relationships between people, usually the people who are the suspects in the case.

I am, in fact, so thoroughly oblvious to the mystery in a mystery that I often can’t remember it.  A very few mysteries–Murder on the Orient Express; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd–stick in my head so thoroughly that I do remember them, but I read those again anyway, because it doesn’t matter to me if I know who did it.

Which brings me to where I’m at at the moment, which is in the middle of a Perry Mason novel called The Case of the One-Eyed Witness.  I’m reading it hard on the heels of Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.

And although the two writers are very different in some ways, in one they’re exactly alike:  these books are about the detection, period.  Not about the detective (although Perry Mason proposes to Della Street in this one, and she turns him down because she doesn’t want to have to leave work and stay home.  Ah, the Fifties!).

I’m not saying that the books are about their plots–that’s not quite right.  The plots are formulaic, really, and pretty much the same for both. 

What these books are about is the puzzle as a puzzle.  Christie spends time getting you into the lives of the suspects.  Gardner does not.   It almost doesn’t matter, because the primary focus is always on the complicated murder scheme and how it is unraveled.

I don’t think I ever realized how much Golden Age mysteries depend on the mysery.  The last time I read these things, I was very young, and that wasn’t what I took away from them. 

Maybe that’s a good thing, because if I had realized that that was the focus, I might never have written any mysteries of my own. 

I keep thinking about that discussion we had with the people from the other blog.  This seemed to be the kind of thing they said they wanted, but almost no modern day mystery will give it to them. 

The weird thing is, I’m having a really good time.

Maybe this is about what my brain can hold, what with all the other stuff that’s going on.

Maybe it’s just been a long time since I’ve done this.

I wonder why people stopped writing books like this, though, and why nobody seems to want to publish them anymore.

One of the odd things about writing a book–for me, at least–is that I often get to the point of having to stop before I’m ready to stop there.

Which is a sentence which makes very little sense, I know.

I think the problem is that when I start to write a book, the project feels absolutely impossible.  A book is a really long piece of writing,  so long that part of me can’t imagine anybody really doing it. 

And I know I’ve written a lot of books by now, some of them considerably longer than whatever it is I’m writing now.

It just feels impossible, that’s all.  So, when I start working, I find myself  pushing and strainoing to make sure there is “enough” to make a book. 

Then there comes a day when I suddenly seem to have too much.

This sort of silliness has been exacerbated by two factors–on perennial, the other temporary and recent.

The  perennial one is the fact that I never have any sense if a book is good.

I do know when a book is actively bad. I have no trouble noticing active crap, which is why the book that’s out now, Wanting Sheila Dead, was written twice. 

But if a book is better than that, I just don’t know, and won’t know until I read it myself  after it’s been published.

The more temporary and recent thing is the fact that the last two books I’ve written have been written in periods of great personal crisis.  It’s hard to keep a sharp eye on where you are in the manuscript when your mind keeps wandering to the latest disaster.

And the disasters have effects.  I’m usually at this stage in a novel around the month of April.  Now it’s July, and not only is it too hot to work in my office for whole swaths of the day–my office is a sunroom–but my allergies are going absolutely insane.    Some of those allergies affect my eyes, which means that I’m not only unable to see for the customary reason (I’m blind as a bat), but because my eyes keep tearing up.

I don’t really mean to moan and groan here.  The point of this wasn’t to make a complaint, but to state a fact.

This morning, I realized that I was on the home stretch of this one–a nice, complicated one, small town, lots of odd characters with unpleasant natures, and no social issue more complicated than whether or not small towns should have working police radios.

You think I’m kidding, but a small town near here had a referendum on that very subject–and it lost. 

If you want to commit a crime, there are areas of Middlebury, Connecticut where the cops are just not going to get the call.

But I’ve got calls to make, and I’ve just finished a Christie (Mrs. McGinty’s Dead–Poirot, and a good one) and started on an Erle Stanely Garner Perry Mason (The Case of the One-Eyed Witness–complicated opening, too early to tell), and it’s impossible to sit for much longer in this sun room.

Plus, I have tea.

I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to say here today.  Yesterday it was some ridiculous kind of hot, and this morning it’s still pretty awful, and my eyes are getting that weird allergy reaction they have every once in a while.  I managed to get my Gregor work done for the day, but now I can barely see.

So.

Let me try to hit the high points.

When I say that what Peter Unger is doing in the book Living High and Letting Die is not philosophy,  I was going by the traditional definition of philosophy:  the application of reason to human affairs.

Philosohy used to include not only what we call philosophy now–metaphysics, ethics, political theory and that kind of thing–but biology, astronomy, physics and chemistry as well.   The earliest studies in all these subjects were areas of philosophy.

But the operative word, I think, has got to be “reason.”  The application of reason to human affairs.  When you tell me logic does not matter and it’s irrelevant to know if any moral precept is “true,”  then I don’t see  how you can be said to be applying reason to human affairs.

I’m saying Unger specifically, and not Singer, because I haven’t read enough of Singer’s stuff to know whether Singer also want to ignore knowledge and an examination of whether moral precepts are true.  In the essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” he simply assumes that some things are true–such as that relieving suffering must always and everywhere be our primary goal, that fixing starvation now must supercede any other consideration in a situation where famine exists, and all the rest of it.

I’m not even saying that he’s necessarily wrong about these assumptions–or that he’s wrong about them all the time–but since he gives me no basis for them, I also can’t judge the criteria by which he is determining them.  And “starvation is bad!”–which he actually says at the beginning of that essay–isn’t a criterion.

The thing that did strike me, though, is the extent to which both these men are completely clueless about even basic economics.

Singer does manage to mention in passing that it might be the case that if rich countries gave away 40% of their income every year, it would so damage their economies so that they would actually be sending less money to the poor than they would be if they only sent 25% a year–but then he blows it off by pointing out that they barely send 1% now, so this isn’t anything we have to think about.

If you live in the real world, however, this is something you have to think about, because it applies to individual actions as well as governmental ones.  If everybody did what Unger wanted them to do, for instance–no big house, no nice new car, no vacations, no private schools or colleges for the kids–there would soon be widespread unemployment and a financial crisis at home.

This may be why Unger suggests, in his second to last chapter, that when books are written “for the general public” that promote his plan, they not mention things like such draconian self-privation, since it’s the kind of thing that will put people off, or make them stop listening to you whatsoever.

My guess is that neither Singer nor Unger is really interested in getting the West to send tons of money for famine relief–some, yes, certainly, but nothing like that strip-you-life-down-to-almost-nothing level they both suggest.

My guess is that what both these arguments are really aimed at is property rights–the idea that any of us has the right to own anything beyond what is needed for our basis survival if somebody else somewhere in the world needs it.

I think that’s why both these works concentrate so heavily on disasters in the third world. 

First,  because the first world is now wealthy enough that we hardly need to resort to reducing everybody to penury to ensure that all our citizens have access to the minimal levels of food, clothing and shelter needed to survive.  There are homeless people on the streets of American cities, but they’re not there because you insist on buying Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Second, because the third world is far enough away that most readers will not have access to any detailed information about the conditions there.  Unger dimisses worries about those conditions as “distorted futility thinking,” that is, wrongly imagining that your aid will do no good.

But Saddam Hussein took the food from the oil for food program, meant to keep his citizens from starving, and passed it out to himself and his cronies.  The program did not feed the starving, it just kept a dictator in power longer than he might have been. 

If what we’re actually talking about her is relieving the suffering of starvation, then these kinds of things matter.  In fact, they’re vital.

But once you start investigation them, “the west is bad because it wallows in luxury while the third world starves” looks less and less like a rational assessment of what’s going on in the world.

Finally, there’s that matter of the difference between ordinary and heroic virtue, that I meant to get to yesterday and never did.

Christ gave his life to save Mankind from Hell, according to Christianity, and if we want to be imitations of Christ, then we must push ourselves at least as far as martyrdom for the Church or for our friends.

But no ordinary Christian is required to go so far.  And ordinary citizens are required to go even less far than ordinary Christians.

The  hypothetical both Unger and Singer are enamored of goes like this:  you’re passing along on a road and see a small child drowning in a shallow pond.  If you don’t immediately go and save  him, you’re a bad person.

I don’t think much of anybody would disagree with that assessment–but the law wouldn’t hold you to it.  If you cared more about the state of your dress pants than you cared for saving the child, you would be doing nothing illegal to pass him by and let him drown.

And the assessment does not survive when you up the ante.  If you can only save the life of the child by risking your life, you’re still a better person if you give it a shot than if you don’t, but most people would not actually expect you to do it.

And if you could only save the child by your own certain death, nobody would assessed you as morally bad for not doing it. 

Even on the level of casual, undigested and unthoughtful common opinion–which Unger says is what he’s relying on–the hypothetical would not get Singer or Unger where he wants to go.

And now I thnk I ‘ll go off and call the nursing home to find out about my mother, and listen to music of some kind or the other.

Last night, I listened to Cannonball Adderly before going to bed, and I still think it’s a miracle I got to bed.

Did I ever mention that I like saxophones and trumpets almost as much as I like harpsichords.

I just don’t want to learn how to play those.

So, in the middle of all this, I finished reading the Peter Unger book, and I went rummaging around until I found a copy of Current Issues and Enduring Questions, which I knew had a copy of Peter Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality.”

For what it’s worth, that book also reprints Garrett Hardin’s “The Case Against Helping the Poor,” which is an attempt to directly counter Singer’s ideas without actually countering Singer’s–or Unger’s–methods. 

That is, both the essay and the book assume the existence of morality sort of a priori, without bothering to establish a foundation for that morality and largely without bothering to defend their stated core moral principles. 

For all these people, morality “just is.”  We have our Core Moral Principles, or, as Unger puts it, our Primary Moral Values.  We refer everything to them, no matter what they are.

On the other hand, there is something called “moral progress.”  I’m not sure how Unger, for instance, expects us to be able to tell that we are moving in the direction of “progress,” but progress there is supposed to be.  And that is what “philosophers” are for.

I put the word “philosophers” in quotes up there deliberately.  I do not think Unger is a philosopher, even though he has a doctorate in philosophy and works in a university philosophy department.

This is not what Socrates did, or Aristotle, or Liebniz, or Kant, even though Unger likes to refer to Kant a lot, sort of vaguely and in passing.

And I’m not really concerned about whether or not Unger and Singer live the lives of personal privation they declare to be the only decent moral behavior for first world people who should send all their money to starving people in the third world.

My guess is that neither one of them eschews nice houses (or apartments), nice cars and new clothes in order to send every dime to UNICEF and CARE, and Unger at least comes close to admitting that in his last chapter.

For the moment, I’m not even all that interested in the absolute train wreck of the arguments they present.  Unger at least tells us, at the outset, that logic isn’t an important consideration in moral philosophy, which makes it hard to counter his nonsense with, “But if you did that, then–”

Just at the moment, I want to consider just the  Core Moral Principles or Primary Moral Values Singer and Unger declare to be universally applicable, because I think if we do that, we get to a very interesting place.

They go like this:

1) If you know of a case of severe suffering and early death and you have the means to prevent it without at the same time causing harm of an equally immoral kind, then you MUST prevent it.

2) You must prevent it even at the expensive of your own life, if there is more than one life you will save by what you do.

3) You are morally obligated to do this not just for people you know or in your community, but for everybody, everywhere, all the starving children in Africa, all the starving and ailing people all over the word.

4) If the only way you can do this is to cause some harm to other people–say, by stealing their money or taking their property–you are morally obliged to do so.

5) The only criterion here is how many suffering people are saved from suffering, period.

I’m eliding a lot of verbiage, but that’s it.

And I’d like to point something out.

Singer and Unger think principles like those are good arguments for why you and I should give all our money away, down to depriving ourselves of decent food and housing if we have to.

I think principles like those are good arguments for empire.

Seriously.

Think about it.

The North Koreans are starving.  They aren’t starving because of natural disasters or cosmic bad luck.  They’re starving because they live under a government that is systematically starving them.

In fact, almost all the famine in the world for the last fifty years has had a political cause.

What’s more, children are dying in Africa and the Middle East because religious and government authorities spread lies that the vaccines sent by UN organizations are really poisons of one sort or another meant to wipe out blacks (in Africa) or Muslims (in the Middle East).

There is only one way to end all this suffering, famine and death, and that is to dislodge those governments and install others that do not victimize their own peoples in these ways.

And nothing else will actually do the job.

Of course, if you had other kinds of principles, the old fashioned ones that required logic and that sort of things, you’d have other reasons for not taking over the world to make sure the poor are fed and the ignorant are vaccinated.

But Singer and Unger have none.

Mary Agnes’s funeral is today, and it’s a long drive.  To get there, I’m going to have to get into the car and go no later than seven o’clock, and I should leave earlier.  So I’m feeling a little addled.

I agree with a lot of what Robert said about Unger and the myriad problems that all seem to have the same solution, but what I was thinking about were people for whom the very idea that harm might come to anyone, anywhere, wipes out any other kind of thought.  So if I tell you there are children starving in Africa, their reaction is that we must all send food now, and if you bother thinking about things (like, say, Saddam Hussein stealing the food shipments from the oil for food program and letting his people starve) then you have to be a heartless bastard with no morals.

But the issue with Unger, and Singer, is much more complicated than that, and I can’t keep my mind on it at the moment. 

So, I thought I’d propose a little break in the routine.

A couple of nights ago, on FB, a friend of mine posted an exercise:  name the fifteen books that “stick with you.”

You’ll note that the instructions are not to name the fifteen books that you like best.  On my list, there are a couple I don’t like at all.  But I did come up with fifteen books that have just bored themselves into my brain.

My list looked like this: