Hildegarde

Okay, let me come around in a circle here.  And don’t think I don’t know that there are at least a couple of people who read this blog who tell me they’re socialists, and who could make a better case here than I can.

But–let’s get to it.  It’s Saturday.

Robert says that socialism isn’t about equality, but about who gets to control the distribution of resources.

And I think that in any existing socialist state, that’s pretty much what you get–but I wasn’t talking about existing socialist states.

I was talking about the argument people in favor of socialism make to the public at large in order to get socialist policies adopted, and the reason why those people at large accept those policies, when they do.

I don’t really think that all of these people can be hoping to become commissars.  And nothing like all these people believe that their own particular situation will be made better–that they themselves will get a larger share of the resources–under socialist policies.

Socialism presents itself to the public as a moral argument with equality as its basis.  And equality is a very powerful principle in

The evidence of just how powerful is in the fact that even oponents do not usually attempt to deny the principle.  They say the kind of thing Robert did–that socialism may say it’s about equality, but it isn’t really–but that leaves the principle itself intact.  It is a tacit admission that equality is in fact a bottom-line, not to be abrogated moral principle that must be acknowledged by everybody.

The issue is, obviously, more complicated in real life, not only because of the actual history of actual socialist (and Communist) states, but also because “equality” is a word with more than one definition. 

“All men are created equal,” the Declaration says, but it’s hard to fingure out what even Jefferson meant by that.  Even without bringing in the problem of slavery, the m en of Jeffersons era were not equal in a material sense, and they were not equal in terms of natural gifts, either.  We say the Declaration means to install “equality before the law,” which is true enough, but not an end to the argument.

The usual moral–rather than practical–justification for liberty is that liberty is more just than (material) equality because liberty rewards each person according to his or her merit.  Work hard, live prudently, contribute to society and you go up in the world.  Screw around, nap all day, wallow in self indulgence and you go down. 

And, in the cases where poverty and want are the result not of  bad choices but of bad luck–born with cystic fibrosis, crippled by a drunk driver when you were doing everything right behind the wheel–society, in the form of the government, steps in to cushion the blow.

That, right there, is the acceptance of another moral principle–that the rewards of a meritcratic society are just only if they are in fact meritocratic, if they are a matter of personal choices and not blind dumb luck.

And that’s where we get to the pont that keeps bothering me.

It doesn’t matter if we know how to measure talent or not–it ONLY matters that some people are BORN less intelligent, talented and capable than others. 

If that is the case, if some places in the hierarchy of a meritocratic society are fixed by the simple luck of the draw–sorry, Jack, you don’t have the brains to do simple algebra, you were born that way, no astronaut’s training for you, no matter how hard you try–then in what MORAL sense can we defend a meritocratic liberty society.

Note–I said MORAL, not practical.  There are plenty of practical reasons to defend it, and even more practical reasons to choose it.

But in an argument in which one side is appealing to morality and the other is appealing to practicalities, the side appealing to practicalities is always going to lose.

The Republicans may have had “plans” for catastrophic and chronic care–but that was the problem, they had “plans.”  The Democrats were not talking about plans.  They were talking about narratives.  “Here’s this situation here–do you think that’s fair?”  “Here’s this other situation here–do you think that’s fair?”

I heard Keith Olbermann do it last night–in reference to voting for or against the extension of unemployment benefits, he went, “are there no workhouses, are there no prisons?”  It’s a quote from Dickens’ Christmas Carol, but it is not a policy statement.  Its appeal is to the moral and narrative, not to the practical.

And don’t tell me I only think this because the media weren’t reporting on what the Republicans were saying.  I watch Fox as well as MSNBC, I read The National Review, The Weekly Standard and The American Spectator as well as The Nation and Mother Jones and The New York Review of Books.

If Republicans were making a MORAL argument about their preferences for a health care system, if they were defending the private system on MORAL grounds–I would have heard it.

Instead, all I got was policies and plans–wonk, wonk, wonk.

I’m not saying that polices and plans are not important, of course they are.

I am saying that if one side is appealing to a moral imperative and the other is presenting policies and plans, the moral imperative will win out every time.

And this has been the issue from the very beginning of the two Enlightenments–the French, which was always about moral imperatives, and the English, which was always about policies and plans.

But I’ll get to the Enlightenments later.

Actually, what we had yesterday in Connecticut was a whole series of thunderstorms that rolled through the state and seem to have pretty much trashed the city of Bridgeport, maybe via a small tornado.  It’s hard to tell, but there are branches all over my yard this morning and Bridgeport made Fox News.  They’ve declared a state of emergency down there and everybody keeps showing the picture of this three story tall building that looks as if the Seismosaurus from Hell has just taken a bite out of the top of it.  It’s very impressive.

As for me–well, a couple of things.

The first is that it interests me that people who have responded to that last post, in comments and e-mail, have largely ignored the second issue for the first.

That is, they’ve talked about the fact that even people born into disadvantaged circumstances–to alcoholic parents, or poverty, or whatever–sometimes make quite a lot of their lives.

And that’s certainly true.  But the bigger issue, I think, is the second one–that some people are born with more intelligence and more talent than other people, and some people are born with very little of those things indeed.

Yes, Obama’s family was poor, and so was Lincoln’s–but I’d be willing to bet that both of them had IQs above 140.

Think of all the people, born poor and middle class and rich, who struggle to get through basic arithmatic because they just can’t understand it, no matter how hard they work.  Think of the people who cannot make simple inferences about things like the connections among a series of bus routes.  And I do mean CANNOT.  People for whom all the education and training in the world just won’t make it possible for them to understand.

There really are such people in the world, and they’re not mentally retarded.  They’re just not very bright.

Certainly they didn’t choose to be not very bright–it’s not their fault in any way that they are unable to “get” algebra or contextual analysis.

If, in a meritocracy, people are supposed to rise or fall by their merits.

And if, in a meritocracy, we feel the moral need to equalize opportunities as far as possible so that mere accidents of birth like race or being born to jerks do not prevent people from succeeding.

Then why is involuntary lack of talen any different than involuntary membership in a race or a sex?

The lack of talent is just as unchosen as is the race.  It is just as much an accident of birth.

Let me try to be clear here–I do not actually think the luck egalitarians are right here, but why I don’t think they’re right has to do with the practical aspects of the case, not the moral ones.

And it’s the moral ones the luck egalitarians are trying to address.

If, in fact, a meritocracy is legitimized by saying that rewards should go to those who earn them, and further that those rewards should not in any way be dependent on accidents of birth–

Then what makes it acceptable to penalize this particular kind of accident of birth?

Cheryl complains that I’m defining “success” materially, but both the meritocrats and the luck egalitarians do so as well–the issue is, who decides and on what basis is the decision made, who gets more or less of the material resources of any particular society.

If, in all other ways, we resist the idea that biology is destiny–why do we accept the idea that biology is destiny HERE?

In terms of making a moral argument for liberty, this is not a minor issue. 

And I think what got me about that article I posted yesterday was this–one of the prime differences between people who argue for liberty and people who argue for equality is that most of the people who argue for liberty do so on pragmantic grounds, while most of the people who argue for equality do so on moral ones.

This was, I think, a big issue in the health care debate.  The Republicans had a lot of practicaly, commonsense objections to the Obama plan, a lot of which are probably true.

But the question was not, “will this plan work?”  The question was, “a family that’s worked hard and saved and struggled for decades has a kid with cystic fibrosis and ends up getting dumped from their health insurance plan, trashed economically trying to pay for the kid’s treatments and then thrown out on the street when they’ve exhausted all their resources–we think that’s morally wrong.  What is your plan for doing something about it?”

And the Republicans did not, in fact, have such a plan. They had no method at all of addressing that kind of problem, of insuring that accidents of birth or fortune (think about getting hit by a drunk driver when you’re sober yourself) do not destroy whole families financially because of the cost of medical care.

In any argument in which one side is making pragmatic points and the other side is making moral ones, the moral side will almost always win.  For most people, morality trumps pragmatism every time. 

That is, I think, why Ayn Rand was and is so enormously popular as a writer–because she tries to make a case for liberty on moral grounds, not simply on practical ones.  That’s why so many people who reject wholesale whole swaths of her ideas–the atheism; the idea that women’s nature wants to be “mastered” by a man–still call themselves Randians or Objectivists without a problem. 

What that article said to me was that the case for liberty must be made on moral grounds, and not because “God said so.”  If it is not made on moral grounds, it will lose.

And yes, part of making that case will be defining success in such a way that it is not only about material resources.  And part of making that case will be insisting that we all pay attention to the consequences.

But the moral issue will be more important, because men and women in the real world respond more strongly to moral arguments than they ever have, or ever will, to practical ones.

Let me start this off by saying that there are entire days during the summer when I have to do nothing but sit around and remind myself that I don’t REALLY hate pollen.

Today is one of those days.  My head hurts.  Everything itches.  It was miserably hot when I ran out to the grocery store at ten this morning, and it’s going to get nothing but worse for the rest of the day.

I am not a heat person.

What I am, apparently, is somebody who can read through anything, and what I read this morning (aside from the end of the Dante, almost) was this:

http://reviewcanada.ca/reviews/2010/06/01/the-thinking-man-s-marxist/

I ended up looking at this because of a rather misleading link posted today on Arts and Letters Daily.

And from one point of view, it isn’t a very interesting piece.  It’s a book review posted on the website of the Literary Review of Canada, written by somebody named Andy Lamey.

And I just refuse to make all the jokes that come to mind with that one.

The book being reviewed is called “Why Not Socialism,” by G. A. Cohen.  I’d actually heard of the book before, but not of its author, and I’ve never read it.

And the review itself, as I said, is not really all that interesting.  It’s a left wing book being reviewed by a left wing writer in what appears to be a left wing journal–I could probably write it myself, in my sleep, much the way I can usually foresee everything that’s going to be said of right wing books by right wing reviewers in right wing journals.

But in among all the not-very-interesting there are two very interesting things.

The first is something called “luck egalitarianism,” which is apparently a submovement in modern left wing political philosophy.

The second is the claim that Cohen found the arguments in favor of socialism–and against other forms of political organization–to be entirely moral in nature.

First, luck egalitarianism, because it addresses something that’s always nagged at me whenever anybody talks about freedom, equality and the meritocracy.

The felt legitimacy of a meritocracy relies first and foremost on the general agreement that opportunities are equal, so that unequal outcomes are deserved.  That is, it’s all right for Bill Gates to have fifty billion dollars and your brother in law to have only $1.95, because Bill Gates built a huge company and employs millions of people and your brother in law drinks Wild Turkey by the case and robs liquor stores to get it.

In real life, of course, opportunities are not entirely equal, and for many reasons.  The children of Bill Gates did no moe to deserve their good fortune than the children of your brother in law did to deserve their bad luck.

We therefore tend to feel, instinctively, that we should do something to at least attempt to equalize the possibilities for all children.  We build public schools, for instance, and programs that provide money for college for kids who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

But luck egalitarianism goes farther than that, because it faces up to the meritocratic myth–that it is nurture, and not nature, that matters the most in every instance; that people may be brought up unequally, but they are not born unequal in talents and abilities.  We can all of us be whatever we want to become, if we just work hard enough at it.

This is the place to throw in something that matters to anything I’m going to say.  I grew up and went to school largely with rich people.  Although it is true that the ranks of the Ivy League and the successful in general are disproportionately filled by the children of the rich and the educated upper middle class, the fact is that most of the children of the rich and the educated upper middle class do not go on to the Ivy League or to “success” in any form.

I’ve seen plenty of people with “all the advantages” crash and burn through drugs, alcohol, and general inertia, and even more just sort of settle into middle-management dead-end jobness.  I don’t care how much intelligence and talent you’re born with, to get anywhere with it you actually have to do something.

That said, the simple fact is that we’re not all born with equal intelligence and talent, and that intelligence and talent are to a significant extent heritable.  That means that intelligent and talented parents will tend to have intelligent and talented children, and that most people are born with significant limits placed on their ability to realize their aspirations.

Your good for nothing brother in law’s children did nothing to deserve your good for nothing brother in law, but they also did not do anything to deserve their 101 IQs and the fact that when they try to sing, cats commit suicide.

The fact that some people are born less equal than others is the crux of the problem so many people have with the concept of meritocracy.  A kid born with an IQ of 160 might as well have been born with a trust fund.   He might put either advantage to good use, or not, but at least the opportunity is there.  A kid born with an IQ of 98 has vast areas of human endeavor barred to him from the start.  He won’t be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, no matter how hard he works.  Calculus will be beyond him.   So will any substantive understanding of the meaning of most SCOTUS decisions.

Now, a caveat–I’m using “IQ” as shorthand for a certain kind of intelligence.  I am not referring to specific intelligence tests.

The point here should be obvious:  if meritocracy is legitimized by our belief that anybody who works hard enough can “be whatever she wants to be,” and that is not in fact true, then meritocracy begins to look as unjust as any aristocracy ever conceived.

And if you go back to the second point above–that for Cohen (and I suspect most other appeal) the defense of any political system must be made on MORAL grounds–

Then it’s easy to see why large hunks of people think that capitalism is inherently immoral and socialism is inherently moral in spite of the real world historical consequences of each.

Which brings me back to the idea that defenses of political systems must be made on moral grounds.

But I’ll get back to that tomorrow.

There’s supposed to be a storm from hell any minute now.

This is going to be an interesting day.  The pollen count must be up in the stratosphere somewhere–did I just spell that wrong?–and I keep sneezing like I’m a character in an early Disney movie.  I managed to get the writing done for today, but I think I know another reason why I don’t usually write books in the summer.

Let me go back, for a while, to where I was yesterday.

I think part of the problem we have with understanding all this stuff comes from the unstated assumption that to admit that A led to B and nothing else led to B must mean:

a) that A led to B deliberately

b) that A is true.

The modern concept of equality–applying (in some way) to everybody without respect to race, creed, sex, and possibly other things) arose only in those countries which were predominantly Christian, and it arose there because of a specific idea delivered by St. Paul at the very beginning of the Christian era.

Does that mean that that is what Christianity set out to do?

That’s a harder question than you’d think.  St. Paul’s statement seems to say that it did.  The subsequent behavior of the Christian community is a good illustration of how it didn’t on any level we are likely to call significant.

We may all be one in Christ Jesus, but for at least eighteen hundred years or so after that, the Christian Church (and even most of the Protestant) ran on the assumption that that was going to be all very well when we got to heaven, but in the meantime there were going to be hierarchies, and you’d better submit to them.

Still, most of us would say that equality is a good thing.  And it’s obvious that the idea of equality is not a universal characteristic of human societies–in fact, it has only arisen once, and we just don’t know if it could have arisen any other way, because it didn’t.

So…is this an indication that Christianity is true?

No.  At the most, it’s the indication that Christianity had at least one very good idea that we value.  Beyond that, it doesn’t tell us anything.  It doesn’t even tell us whether Christianity has been, on the balance, a force for good or ill in world history.  

The essential point here–and with the science thing–is habits of mind.

Let’s look at the science thing for a minute, and the democracy thing as well.

The Catholic Church was and is a hierarchy, a very well-defined and largely rigid hierarchy.  To put it the way Bill said it was put to him by his father:  the Pope is the boss of the Bishop, the Bishop is the boss of the Priest, the Priest is the boss of the nun, and the nun is the boss of You.

If you read the Bible and think it means one thing and the Pope reads the Bible and thinks it means something else–the Pope is right, and you should just accept it.

If you look at the progression of “natual philosophy” into “modern science” from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation, what you find is not the Catholic Church persecuting scientists for doing science–that didn’t start until the Reformation, and it isn’t what the Galileo thing was actually about.

What you find is the assumption that Aristotle had gifted us with wisdom, and therefore the truth about the material world.  Aristotle was the authority, and if you thought you’d found out something contrary to what he taught–well, you must be wrong.

If you look at the actual intellectual history here, you find that people got into a lot more trouble for challenging the authority of Aristotle than they did for challenging the authority of the Church. 

Deference to authority was a habit of mind–you looked to the Church to interpret scripture for you and to Aristotle to interpret the material world.

What Protestantism did was to bring in the idea that each individual human being was competent to understand and interpret scripture on his own.  Each man and woman was his (or her) own authority, and if he read scripture differently than the pastor, and prayed and studied on it, and still thought he was right and the paster was wrong–well, then, you stuck to it.

By now, there are probably twenty million of you ready to tell me that that wasn’t the way the Protestant Churches actually operated, no matter what they might have said in theory.

But it doesn’t matter.  Someone brought up with the idea that he must bow to authority in both the spiritual and material realm is different in fact–his brain functions differently in fact–from someone who is brought up to think that he’s perfectly capable of understanding the world for himself if he puts his mind to it, and just as likely to be right as any “expert.”

It was societies full of people with that habit of mind that modern science needed to get started, not anything specific to Protestant theology per se. 

And again, that’s not an idea that is universal to human societies.  It has arisen in one place in one specific sequence of intllectual history, and no place else, ever.  They eye is supposed to have evolved several dozen ways over the millions of years of evolution.  This stuff was apparently harder.

Did Protestantism mean to throw up this particular thing, and to launch modern science?

I think we can positively say–no.  In fact, any reading of Luther gives the impression that the first forays in the direction of modern science by Renaissance Popes eager to be patrons of the new Christian Humanism were a good part of why Luther wanted to “reform” the Church. 

“Reason,” Martin Luther said, “is the Devil’s greatest whore…She is and ought to be drowned in baptism.”

 But habits of mind are habits of mind.  Given enough time, they will work themselves out to their logical conclusions.  And those conclusions are often things the initiators of the ideas not only did not intend, but wouldn’t have approved of for a second.

As for democracy–well the core idea of democracy is obviously Greek.  But I’ll stick to my original assertion that successful democracy (and successful representative Republics) require a Protestant habit of mind.

French democracy is a good case in point.  I think most Americans, used to the what we mean by “democratic government” here, would have a hard time accepting that France is democratic at all.  What it is is a meritocratic oligarchy, a country of rule by experts, all of them meticulously credentialed in government-run schools the entry to which is tightly controlled.  Then entry into the ruling bureaucracies is based on whether or not you have the credentials from the schools.

If you don’t like the curriculum–better be ready to go out of the country.  Private schools must follow the state curriculum, and there is no legal homeschooling.  If you want to work more than the state-approved maximum hours per week–nope, going to get into trouble there.  Health care, job policies, education, even entertainment, everything is centrally controlled and administered by school-certified ‘experts,” and  your disagreement is not encouraged or even legitimate.

France runs its country by priesthood, only it calls its priests bureaucrats.   It’s not democracy as democracy is understood in the Anglophone sphere.  It’s really not democracy as democracy is understood in the US. 

It is, however, very Catholic.

I was going to get around to Hart’s Atheist Delusions, because he has an interesting point, and one I don’t have an answer to.

But it’s time to be a grown-up.

More or less.

Okay.  I sat around looking at the comments on yesterdays post this morning, and I was struck, again, by that thing I’m obsessed with–we have as much a need for intellectual history as we do for the history of events.

Let me start with one thing:  there’s a lot about the Texas curriculum standards what is indeed ignorant and bigotted, but there is a lot that is not.  I see nothing ignorant and bigotted about teaching that free enterprise is a good thing and generally has worked better than the alternatives–it’s true.  And we’ve had forty years of skewing American history towards the critical, we could do with a little more tilt on the side of  acknowledging what we’ve done right.  And the issue of international organizations and national sovereignty  IS an issue, a big one.  Why not discuss it as an issue instead of cheerleading for the UN?

But let me go to the two other things–Mary F says that she’s sure that lots of people besides Christians had thought of helping the poor and equality.

And to that I say:

As to feeding the poor:  yes, with qualifications, and the qualifications are important.

As to equality:  no.  Equality as we understand the term, without regard for race or creed or sex, enters the culture with St. Paul.  As far as I know, it has never existed anywhere else, and no culture has ever developed it independently of being influenced by the Christian West.

But everything is complicated, so let me get into some details.

Charity is indeed an old idea, and almost every culture has developed some form of it.  It is certianly very important in Judaism, and it would help to remember that Christianity is, in the end, an aberrant form of Judaism.  It started as as Jewish sect. Its original members were all Jews. 

That said, Christianity’s form of charity was distinct, and especially distinct in the Roman empire.  Pagan civilization saw charity as the obligation of a free man, part of his honor.  He was exhorted to give to increase the honor attached to his name.  He was not urged to give indiscriminately, though.

Pagan civilization definitely made distinctions between the worthy and unworthy poor, and insisted that it was important that the man who gave alms distinguish between them.  What’s more, pagan charity often came with strings attached.  You could have food and shelter if you cleaned up your act.  You could have food and shelter if you agreed to run around praising your benefactor.  Something.

The great peculiarity of charity in the early Christian Church was precisely that it was anonymous (as to individuals) and open to all comers, no strings attached and no questions asked. 

Virtually every ancient author who came into any direct contact with early Christianity at all makes a point of this fact:  that the Christians gave freely to all comers, that they did not put condiitions on their generosity and that they did not look for individual praise for doing it.

It’s an interesting point,  I think, that so much of Christian charity today, especially those organizaed by Christian religious organizations (rather than practiced by individuals) does indeed put all sorts of conditions on its recipients.  It’s also interesting to note that a lot of those conditions result from fear of getting a bad reputation among non-Christians–if you just give these people food and shelter with no quesitons asked, you’re enabling their addictions!

It’s one of the reasons for the explosive growth of Christianity in its early years that it did give so freely and without conditions.  It made the behavior of Christians so distinct, and so counter-intuitive to everything in pagan society, it became a “proof” of the validity of the claims of the Savior in and of itself.

There’s a use for intellectual history for you:  getting young Christian men and women to ask whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that Christian charities now behave exactly like the secular kind, with the name of Jesus thrown in just to spice things up a little, like pepper on Alfredo sauce.

There’s an image.

Now to equality, because this is a really important point.

I think part of the problem is that we’re so used to the idea of equality, and so used to thinking of it as a good thing, that it feels “natural” to us.  Of course all people, everywhere, must have felt the same way, must have seen that it is only right and just that all people should be equal before the law (and sometimes in lots of other ways).

In the real world, however, no civilization before this one has every conceived that kind of equality, and none has ever advocated it.  In the Greek and Roman “society of free men,” it was only men who were to be equal, and not all men.  Aristotle said that some men were born with the souls of slaves. 

And it wasn’t just political  rights that were at stake here.  All ancient civlizations considered some people (aristocrats, the king’s family) as having more worth morally than others, and all men as having more worth morally than women.   The world, the pagans would have said, has a natural hierarchy.  Some human beings are, by definition, less human than others.

The first indication that this was not how we should think of human beings–the first anywhere in history, ever–arrived in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians:  There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.  You are all one in Christ Jeus.  You are all sons of God.

The “sons” is important, and in spite of what twentieth century feminism would say, it’s not sexist.  In ancient societies, and especially in Rome, daughters did not inherit.  Only sons were heirs to anything, never mind heirs to a kingdom. 

In Christianity, for the very first time, anywhere, all human beings by virtue of being human beings and for no other reason were equal in the sight of a God who had recognized them each and every one as sons who would inherit His kingdom.

To say that this principle did not work out to its logical conclusions right away–and probably hasn’t even now–is to state the obvious.

But here’s the thing about intellectual history.  Ideas, like events, have consequences–but where the consequences of events are often immediate (or close to it), the conseqences of ideas can take centuries to work themselves out. 

And those meanings can also be hotly contested, and the meaning of “equality” is.  But that’s another discussion for another time, and we’ll get to it.

Paul’s declaration of equality had some immediate and secondary consequences, in spite of the fact that the man himself couldn’t seem to wrap his mind about what he’d just said. 

And since, contrary to what many of us think today, “equality” in any universalized sense is a deeply unpopular idea, the history of the Christian Church after around, say, 200, is a history of deepening political and social inequalities–of the Church becoming what the world around it already was.

But the idea of “equality” never entirely went away, and it threw up, over time, a number of heretical sects that did indeed treat men and women as well or (more often) treated all people as equal to priests and denied the necessity of the Church, as an institution, to salvation.

And then came the kicker–October 31, 1517, and the start of the Protestant Reformation.

Because the first and most important thing Protestantism did was to declare that any man or woman could interpret the scrptures on his or her own account, by the use of his faith and his reason.  It was good to have learned men to help in this process, but those men were not better or worse than anybody else in the congregation, and the fact that they were called “pastor” didn’t mean that their interpretation of scripture was better than yours.

This idea took a little time to work itself out, too, but it did–and it”s not an accident that every single one of the successful movements towards Republican government (that is, government as a Republic, not the modern political party) over the next three centuries was Protestant in origin.

The  French Revolution failed for a lot of reasons, but one of them is almost certainly that its leaders were Catholics before they ever became anything else.  They thought of the world in terms of the necessity of an elited and separated priesthood.

Okay, THAT would be a good subject for a post some day.

At any rate, the idea of “equality” as we know it (in fact, BOTH of the ideas of “equality” as we know them) came from St. Paul, and the idea of representative government as we know it came not only out of Protestantism but largely out of Puritanism.  This was, after all, a religious movement that expected congregations to “call” their pastors by…electing them to the office.

And then firing them if they didn’t suit.

Representative democracy as we understand it–political equality as we understand it–exists only in those states that were either founded on Protetantism, or deeply committed to Protestantism, or overwhelmingly influenced by Protestantism. 

These ideas have never existed anywhere else under any other conditions, and have never been spontaneously thrown up by any other culture that we know of. 

And, even today, they remain deeply unpopular ideas. 

If I was the Texas Board of Education, I wouldn’t bother with a textbook that pointed all this out–although it’s true, and since it’s true there’s no reason not to point it out that I can see.

I’d just give the students a copy of Locke’s Second Treatise on Government and have them read it.  There’s no question that this was a seminal book for the Founding generation, and it does a very good job of outlining both the Christian roots of the idea of political equality and representative government, and the limitations of any particular set of Christian ideas for those same things.

But then, I come from a tradition where “go to the original sources” is the great rallying cry, so there’s that.

I really need to go get some work done. 

So let me leave everybody with just one very incendiary idea, but an idea which is a fact, whether we like it or not.

Do you know what ELSE exists only in societies that were founded on Protestantism, or deeply committed to Protestantism,  or overwhelmingly influenced by Protestantism?

Science.

The real problem that comes with waking up too early is not the tiredness that comes at the end of the day, but the distractedness that starts at the beginning and never stops.  I get my work done, but after that my brain seems to just float over the landscape without being able to settle on anything.

And that’s too bad, because things keep occuring to me that might be interesting to investigate.

One of them is why Dante waited all the way to the Paradiso to do what most of us would have done from the first second we stepped out of the mortal realm–that is, to ask all those questions (how long ago did Adam live?  how long did he live?  what language did he speak?) that human beings really want the answers to, almost more than we want the answers to things like the meaning of life or the nature of eternal hapiness.

Somebody once called fiction “the higher gossip,” and I think people are always doing that, looking for the little details of other people’s lives.

Another of them is the annoying quality of so many spectators–and jurors–in criminal cases, who are convinced that the wife of the perpetrator MUST have known what he was doing or that the defendant was obvious guilty because she “showed no emotion” when the verdict was read.

Am I really the only person who shuts down on surface emotions when I’m under certain kinds of stress?  And do all these people really think that they’d “just know” if their spouse was out killing girls in the park or robbing banks in the neighborhood (that’s a real case)? 

I don’t know, maybe these people think that the average perp spends his off hours telling his wife and family all about his hobbies–but it seems ridiculous to me.  The bank robbery case seems particularly ridiculous, because in that case you had a stockbroker, a nice middle class guy with a nice middle class family, father a police officer, always been on the straight and narrow. Why WOULD his wife assume he was out robbing banks when he wasn’t at home? 

The last thing that gets to me is the Texas Board of Education, but not for the reasons you think.

In case you haven’t heard, the Texas Board of Education recently passed new statewide standards for social studies courses, that including sweeping changes in what i taught.  They wanted Reagan portrayed as a good guy and the free enterprise system portrayed as a good thing, among other things, and they caused a firestorm that lasted a week in the news.

Okay, it was several weeks ago, but still.  People had fits on national television.  The Board pushed a lot of political hot buttons–requiring students to “compare and contrast” the language of the Establishment Clause with court rulings on separation of church and state (I think the Free Exercise clause would have been more to the point), insisting that social studies and history classes should stress the “Judeo-Christian foundations” of the US Founding, and you know, the usual stuff.

But what gets to me is not that they did it, or even that I don’t agree with a lot of it.

What gets to me is–why did it take them so long?

For the past twenty years, I’ve been listening to conservatives complain that education is skewed to the left, that their children are being taught everything from Marxism to hate-America-first in public schools–why haven’t they done anything about it before now?

Hell, why haven’t they done anything about teacher education and the teacher unions? 

You have states across this country where the governor’s office and the state legislature are in Republican control. You have municipalities that are under Republican control.

Why haven’t any of thse entities taken this on before now?  If they don’t like what’s being taught in their public schools, why don’t they change it? 

There’s nothing written in stone that says they have to buy textbooks whose content they don’t like.  There’s nothing written in stone saying they have to buy textbooks from traditional textbook publishers.  There’s a TON of material out there, from traditional book publishing sources (think The Patriots History of the United States) to computer software that would probably be much more to their liking.  Why don’t they install those?

The backbeat of the Republican movement at least since the 1960s is that the leftward tilt they see in such institutions is being installed and enforced by a small elit and that the vast majority of voters are on their side about this stuff.

Well, if so–why HAS it taken them so long, and why is it just Texas that’ doing it?

No, I DON’T approve of most of the new Texas standards.

But it does seem to me that if you’ve got a grievance and a way to resolve it and you don’t, maybe all you really want to do is bitch.

I really am completely addled here.  I’m going to go–I don’t know what I’m going to go do.

I can’t seem to think that far ahead.

This was going to be a very different post. I was calling it something like “The Meaning of Life,” or whatever, and blithering on about what the meaning of “meaning” is.

Bu in order to do it, I went to the website fo the Council for Secular Humanism to see if the link to the new edition of Free Inquiry was up–it isn’t; they’re still showing the last one–and I found this instead:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/

In case you’re wondering, I’m referring to the long statement beginning “We Need Your Immediate Help,” and it’s a very interesting statement indeed.  There’s also a link to a fact sheet, and that’s interesting, too.

On one level, all this is interesting to me because it would make a pretty good basis for a murder mystery–the mysterious donor with the whacking huge annual gift who prefers to remain anonymous suddenly becoming incommunicado for no reason anybody knows for sure; the apparent forcing out of the Council’s founder.

Yes, a detective story writer could do a lot with that.

But the other reason it’s interesting is the way in which it illuminates just how significant an impact a single person can have on the success of an organization, and of a cause.

I don’t want to exaggerate this.  I don’t really believe that money can buy you anything, that you can make a writer a best seller or get a candidate elected or a referendum passed just because you have the majority of the cash.

There’s certainly a threshhold level, beneath which you just don’t have the resources to get the public’s attention, but after that, if you don’t have something else going for you, you aren’t going to get anywhere.

Kurtz built the Council for Secular Humanism from scratch in the 1960s, and along with it what is now called the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, the Centers for Inquirty, two magazines (Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer) and a book publishing company that is one of the most successful small presses in the nation, Prometheus Books.

(Okay, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry used to have the much cooler name of Committe for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, or CSICOP.)

The movement is not a shell.  It brings in better than two million dollars in donations and other money every year.  It has an expanding membership base (although the numbers are really, really small).  It will survive the loss of this donor.

But it does make me think, again, that individuals are enormously important in history. 

And it makes me think about how many really good set ups there are out there for murder mysteries. 

An Addendum:

For what it’s worth, this

http://curtisclark.org/emusic/

is a link to something called the Internet Renaissance Band, a site with Medieval and Renaissance music, and maybe the second or third site I ever found on the Internet. 

It hasn’t been updated in nearly a decade, but it’s still there.  Curtis Clark, whose site it is, teaches something like biology in the California university system, or state university system.  I couldn’t find the bio he used to have up.

But I really love this site.  One Christmas, I just played midi files from it all morning while I cooked.

Every once in a while, I go through these little fits of needing to Google things right and left, and this past week I have been looking for Medieval Art from Italy.

In a way this is not surprising–I’m reading Dante’s Paradiso, and that’s Medieval literature from Italy, so it makes a certain amount of sense that I’d be interested in checking out the painting.

I even managed to find a really good site with a really good essay on Italian painting in the period, here:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/iptg/hd_iptg.htm

And I found a painting I really love, too, here:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1975.1.58

But the fact is that I read a lot about the Middle Ages, and I read a fair amount of Medieval literature from all over the place.  This doesn’t usually make me feel like I have to spend the afternoon Googling related sites.

I was thinking about why I felt so drawn to do it this time, and I came up with a surprising discovery about myself.

Advanced degrees be damned, I unconsciously associate different periods of history with different national cultures.

Partially because I studied English literature, partially because of years of Sir Walter Scott novels and Robin Hood movies and even more “serious” things like Becket and The Lion in Winter, to me, in my head, the Middle Ages are quintessentially English.

The Renaissance, on the other hand, is definitely Italian, and most especially Florentine.  The Enlightenment tends to be stuck in my head as American, even though the  US was only the result of the Enlightenment and not its source.  But while Europe was going increasingly Baroque, the American colonies and the new American nation had a “plain” style both in writing and in architecture, and that whole period between 1700 and 1860 just “feels” American to me.

Then we hit the Victorians, and we’re back to a period that’s “English” again.

Now, I know, intellectually, that none of this makes any sense.  It especially makes little or no sense in the Middle Ages, when national feeling was nowhere near as clearcut as it is now.   

Not only was this a period when the nation was the king, but it was also a period in which men were encouraged to think of themselves as first and foremost inhabiting something called “Christendom.”

The religious identification was not secondary.  Kings claimed to have their rights and power derived from God Himself, and they accepted the idea that their only access to God Himself was through the Church.

Pope John XXII became a scandal to the world because of his corruption, not the least of which was his habit of excommunicating princes and then only lifting that excommunication when the princes finally offered enough gold to suit him.  These days, such corruption would make most people think that the power was itself illegitimate.  In John XXII’s day, nobody questioned that when he excommunicated somebody, that somebody would go to hell for eternity if he died before the excommunication was lifted. 

This is not to say that the princes took all this lying down, or without trying to maneurver around it.  On a number of occasions, one king or another captured the Pope (and at one point, captured him and moved him from Rome to Avignon, where it would be easier to keep an eye on him). 

But if Stalin had asked his question–how many divisions does the Pope have?–in 1200, he’d have received a resounding answer:  he’s got the keys to Heaven, and he can send you to hell and have you tormented for eternity. 

The unifying effects of a shared religion with a shared and single head were amplified by the fact that Europe also had a single language for official documents and official business, as well as for scholarship and art, right down to the thirteenth century.  Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is famous not only because it is a great work of art, but because it was the first work of “high” art written in the English vernacular, as Dante’s Divine Comedy was the first in the Italian vernacular.

Three hundred years later, most literature and all philosophy, science, and international documents were still being written in Latin, most university students heard their lectures in Latin, and all religious rituals were performed in Latin.  It took the Reformation to change that.

In spite of all this, I really can’t shake the feeling of “Englishness” in my vision of the Middle Ages, any more than I can shake the feeling of “Englishness” of the Victorian period.  I suppose I should be grateful that my vision of the Middle Ages at least recognizes the everybody else that was there.  My vision of the Victorian period is such that, when I am thinking of the Victorian period, or reading about it, or reading Victorian literature, it’s as if, in that period, nobody else existed on earth.

I don’t know, exactly, why I’ve attached the nationalities I have to the periods in question.  The English really were the world’s great power in the Middle Ages, and the Italians really were the great promoters of Humanism in the Renaissance–but the Americans were not the premier anything in the eighteenth century (in fact, we were rather minor and provincial), and England was largely a backwater on the world scene through most of the Middle Ages.

I wonder how much of my understanding of these periods–to the extent that I understand them at all–is affected by my subconscious assignment of them to particular national cultures.  I wonder how much of my attraction to, and dislike of, particular works of art, literature and music from these periods is affected by the same thing.

If you go to the first of the links at the start of this post, you’ll find a page that not only has an essay on it, but that has a series of thumbnail sketches of Italian paintings of the Middle Ages.  When I looked at it, I went completely past the first two–because they looked far too much like Greek icons, a style of art I associate with Greece in general and the Greek Orthodox Church in particular. 

The painting that really struck me is, in fact, the one that looks most like what would come next in Italian painting in the Renaissance.

Whatever.  As a conundrum to have in a life, it’s minor enough.  It’s just the kind of thing I can sometimes talk myself into worrying about.

Some mornings, I get up, get my tea, do my work–and then feel sort of all over the place.  It isn’t that I’m finding it hard to concentrate.  It’s that all the functions of my brain feel like they’re being flown on a kite.  That probably doesn’t make any sense. And  I don’t really know how to explain it.  All  I’ll say is that I’m sorry if what follows doesn’t seem as…solid..as my posts sometimes are.

I’m in the middle of reading Dante’s Paradiso, the third part of the Divine Comedy.  I read Inferno and Purgatorio over the past couple of years, and I finally got to the place where I was ready to do it again.  You have to sort of gear up for Dante, even in translation.   And translation is the good news.  The original Italian is written in something called terza rima, a rhyme scheme that goes

aba
bcb
cdc
ded

and on and on and on, through three line verses almost wthout number–but not quite.  It’s something like 4000 lines.  I think I’d go completely insane trying to read that.

The translation is not in terza rima, of course, because it would be nearly impossible to get it that way given the differences between Italian and English, never mind medieval Italian and modern English.  That means I’m free to concentrate on content, and the content has just thrown up something interesting.

Consider Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.

Or rather, don’t consider him in toto. 

Just consider the Boethius part for a moment.

I first herad of Boethius–or thought I first heard of him–about ten years ago or so.  Boethius lived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, and he ended his life imprisoned, tortured, starving and finally executed, because he ran afoul of the Ostrogoth King Theodoric.

I’d heard of him because he has recently become a secular sant to many people in the Humanist and Freethought movements, with his last written work, called The Consolation of Philosophy, put forward as the last great example of the Stoic tradition, and as nearly an ideal example of how secular people should face the realities of life and death.

I’ll admit that I was not terribly curious.  I did order a copy of the book–which I  haven’t read yet; it’s one of those things–but I had some vague idea of who this person was, and I just let it float.

What I thought I knew was this:  that Boethius, who was called “the last Roman” by a lot of people (even in history), was a pagan persecuted possibly for his refusal to accept Christianity, or something like that, and that when he was imprisoned he fell back on pagan philosophy to soldier through.

This was, pretty much, what the Humanist magazines were putting out, and I had no reason to doubt it, or even think about it, until I got to Dante’s Paradiso.

And there was Boethius again, except that this time he had another name, and I had heard of that one.

It was St. Severinus.

The full name is, as above, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.

Here’s the thing.

Boethius was a Christian theologian, and a campaigner against the Arian heresy, of which Theodoric–the guy who executed him–was an adherent. Down through the ages, until very recently, Boethius’s execution has been attributed to his refusal to abandon the traditional Christian faith in favor of Theodoric’s Arianism.

Boethius left numerous works of theology, and a long list of minor works, partial works, pieces of letters and other records that testify to his steadfast Christian faith over decades. 

And although it’s true enough that Christ is not mentioned in The Consolation of Philosophy, the work was well know immediately after Boethius’s death, and it didn’t stop the Catholic Church from consecrating him a saint as a Christian martyr. 

I don’t know where the revisionist history started that tried to prove either that he wasn’t a Christian at all (hardly credible, given all that theology), or that he’d given up his Christian faith before he died.  I just know that it’s become a favorite subject in Humanist circles.

It’s also almost certainly wrong.  The Consolation of Philosophy does not contradict the Christian faith, even if it doesn’t mention it.  The book was extremely popular with Christians throughout the next centuries, and it remains popular in the Catholic Church today. 

The Humanist assumption seems to be that if the Church is not mentioned it must be rejected, because the Church would not accept that there was any other way than the narrowly “religious” one to face the problems of life.

In other words, it’s a mistake based on that same assumption that Christians are everywhere and always narrow-minded, anti-intellectual and stupid.

But there’s more to this, if you think about it.

No matter who Boethius actually was, he now serves thousands of people in the US alone as the poster child for persecuted intellectualism–the brilliant pagan philosopher tortured and executed by a rapacious, violent and destructive Church. 

It almost doesn’t matter if this is not true, because the lack of truth in it does not stop the image from being accepted and embraced by a lot of people who don’t know better.

And this is not the kind of thing you can expect people to know better about.  Even in the kind of rigorous intellectual history-oriente sort of education I’m in favor of, you’re unlikely to come across much about Boethius.  I think I may have put up The Consolation of Philosopher on The Western Canon According to Me, but mostly as example of a certain kind of philosophical reasoning.  Just reading the book won’t tell you much of anything about Boethius’s life.

And Boethius is hardly the only person in history who has come to stand for something completely opposed to what it was he really was.

My favorite example of this is still Robin Hood, who has gone down through the centuries as the man who “robbed from the rich and gave to the poor,” as if he were some kind of proto-Communist.

What he really did was to rob tax collectors and give the tax money back to the people who’d had to pay it.  He should be the patron saint of Libertarianism.  But everybody “knows” the other thing, and there we are.

A more modern example of this would be all the events around the Scopes trial, which people tend to know only in the version given in Inherit The Wind, where the Scopes character is a well meaning high school teacher just wanting to open minds, and where everybody on the other side is ignorant, stupid, horrifically cruel or just plain crazy. 

In real life, Scopes never taught a single word of Darwin in a classroom, and the whole thing was a set up by Scopes and the ACLU to test the legitimacy of the law.  They were aided in this project by the municipal administration of Dayton, Tennesee, which was as interested in the outcome as they were.

What interests me is this:  does in matter, in PRACTICAL terms, whether the general public has the facts right in cases like these? 

With the Scopes trial, I think we can make a case–but I’m not really sre in the cases of  Boethius and Robin Hood. 

Whoever these people were  in real life, they are somebody else for us now, an the sombody elses they are are what have an impact on the way we live. 

Ack.

I don’t really want to sound as if I don’t care what is true and what is not.  I do care.

It’s just that I think that the impact such people have on us is the impact they have on us.  And that impact may be significant even if its’ wrong.

And that means, I think, that we have to take that wrongness as seriously as if the legends were right.

Bleh.

I’ve stopped knowing how to make this make sense.

I know, I know.

I keep saying I want to talk about Lorenzo de Medici.

And I do.  I still think of him as one of the most fascinating people who have ever lived, if only because he embodies–in his person–the fundamental contradictions of culture and education with human nature.

But something else has come up at the moment, and it fascinates me, too.

About a week ago, a number of American states held primaries.  For those of you outside the US, a primary is an election held to determine which person will stand as candidate for a party for a seat in the coming November elections.

Sometimes candidates are selected by a simply party process.  Sometimes, however, there is no consensus in the party, or lots of people want to run for that seat.  In that case, and election is held, one person gets to be the candidate, and on we go to November.

Most states where primaries are held hold restricted primaries–that is, if you want to vote in the Democratic Party primary for the Connecticut Senate seat up for election in November, you have to be a registered member of the Democratic Party. 

Some states, however, run open primaries.  An open primary are not ones where anybody can run, but ones where anybody can vote for any candidate in spite of  party affiliation.

Therefore, if you’re a Republican and the Democrats are running a primary, you can vote in that primary. 

In case you’re ahead of me here–yes, people have noticed that there is a potential problem with this.  If you’re a Whig, and you have an incumbent Senator (or Representative, or whatever) whom you want to see re elected, and he’s a little weak, and the Tories are having a primary to pick their candidate to run against yours–well, what’s to stop you and a bunch of other Whigs banding together to vote for the weakest guy over there to be the opposition candidate to yours?

It’s confusing.  I know.  It took me awhile.

But here’s the thing–there is the above scenario, and then there is the South Carolina Senate seat now held by Republican Jim Demint.

Now, the South Carolina Republian Party seems to be in some version of free fall.  It’s the Republican governor of that state who suddenly disappeared in the middle of a work week, was announced by his aides to be hiking the Appalachian trail, and was then found in South America with his mistress.

It’s also the case where a deputy assistant state attorney general was found in a cemetary with an eighteen-year-old prostitute–in the middle of the day, mind you–and a bag of sex toys in his car.  When asked about the sex toys, he said, “Oh, I always carry those around.  For emergencies.”

(Disclaimer–I am in no way implying that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be involved in sex scandals.  I’m just pointing out that the South Carolina Repubican Party seems to be on some kind of roll.)

Jim Demint has not been involved in any sex scandals, as far as I know, and he is running in November for the seat he now holds.

What’s interesting is what happened in the Democratic Party primary to choose a candidate to run against him.

There was a fair field of the usual sort of people running to be the candidate, including one state heavyweight who’d been a judge.  And there was this guy, Alvin Greene, whom nobody had ever heard of. 

And  Alvin Greene won. 

Significantly.

So far, so good–right?  It’s not unheard of for candidates to come from behind to win things like this, and Greene was the only African American in the field, in a state with a large African American population. 

At that point, however, the press actually began to look into this guy’s candidacy, and a few things emerged.

The first was that the man had held exactly zero–none–fundraising events of any kind.  There was no record that he had sent out mailings, solicited money house by house, nothing.  He needed $10, 500 just to get himself on the ballot, and he had it, but nobody could figure out where it came from.

The second was that he had done no campaigning.  None at all.  At least, he’d done none that anybody could find any evidence of.

And that was when the trouble started.  But it got a lot worse.

Because the first thing that happened was that Keith Olbermann invited Alvin Greene onto his nightly news commentary show on MSNBC.  The show is called Countdown, and I was actually watching when the interview happened.

You might want to try the MSNBC site and/or YouTube to see if they’ve got a clip of this thing, because it was startling. 

This MIGHT be the URL to the Olbermann interview on YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntlp4fTell4

but since I can’t run YouTube on this computer, I can’t check.  (New computer coming soon–yay!)

If I hadn’t had the students I’ve had over the last ten years, I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at.  For what it’s worth, I think a number of the people who have commented on this situation since have misinterpreted it.

But here’s what happened:  Greene got on television and produced a blank-eyed, unblinking stare.  When he was asked a question, he made no indication at all that he’d even heard it.  The silences would sometimes go on so long that Olbermann would jump in just to end the dead air.

When Greene did answer a question, his words were mumbled and minimal.  What campaigning did you do?  Long, long silence, followed by, “I did campaigning.  I campaigned.”  Back to silence.

Since that interview, at least one South Carolina Democrat has expressed the opinion that Alivin Greene is not intellectually qualified to be a legislator–a nice, if roundabout, way of saying he thinks the man may be mentally retarded.  A number of other people have said that they think Greene was sincere in his run, but being “taken advantage of” by nefarious people in the background–another roundabout way of saying that they think the man is simple, as we used to say when I was growing up.

I don’t know if the man is or not.  He was indeed behaving the way many such people do behave–not the ones with Down Symdrome or Autism, but the ones with subnormal IQs.  On the other hand, I’ve had my share of bright enough students who behave like that when they feel they’re being put under the spotlight. 

It’s not a great defense mechanism as mechanisms go, but it is possible that the man is much brighter than he appears.

Of course, freezing and playing dumb when you’re in the public eye isn’t exactly a great qualification for a US Senator, either, but that’s another thing.

To be going on eith, however, there are other problems here.  The most important is where that $10,500 came from.  When asked, Greene fumbled around and did the stare thing and then said he’d used his own money, that he’d saved up from his time in the service.

If this is true–fine.  If it’s not, and somebody else, or a number of somebody elses, gave it to him, what we’re looking at is a federal felony.  For all the yelling and screaming about machinations behind elections in the US, there’s some fairly tough election law covering things like where you get your money from and how it has to be reported and that kind of thing.  Since Greene did not report any fundraising, and did not release any donor lists, if he did take money from other people, he might very well end up going to jail.

The other thing, of course, is how he won without campaigning–and now we get to asking if that old conspiracy story actually came to pass this time, and a bunch of Republicans voted in the Democratic Party in order to insure that the Democrats had the weakest possible candidate to run against Jim Demint.

And it doesn’t help that South Carolina is still using those old Diebold digital voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail, and there are yet again dozens of complaints from voters about malfunctions of the touch screens and that kind of thing.

It is,  I think, a mess.

And I’m willing to bet it’s going to get messier.