Hildegarde

I wrote nearly an entire blog post earlier today, and then the computer crashed, and there I was, with everything wiped out.

Maybe it was just as well, because that blog post was largely a reaction to Melanie Phillips’s article, and as with a lot of my reactions to things like that, it was pretty scattered.

And that was too bad, because I am near the end of MacIntyre’s book now, and he has returned to stressing what he started:  that any attempt to understand any individual human life, or the life of any community, on moral terms, must exist first and foremost as narrative.

That is, it’s not only that, in the history of the human being on this earth, we have largely passed along our moral codes as stories, rather than as sets of rules, but that we are unable to understand even our own individual lives and the life of the people we live among without identifying them as stories.

I agree with Cheryl and Cathy and the rest of you who have said that the use of the insanity plea in our courts–or at least the courts of the US–is very rare, and resorted to only in cases where the defendant is clearly psychotic.

But it’s the use of “insanity” as an element in the social narrative of such cases that interest me.  Donald Miller’s parents clearly frame their son’s personal history as a story in which the motivating factor was his “mental illness.”   It’s possible that, being his parents, that is the only way they can frame that history without completely breaking down.

But Melanie Phillips has no such intimate connection with James Bulger’s killers.  Even so, it’s obvious from her article that she has a very distinct and maybe unbudgeable narrative about those killings, and about all other violent crime, and that narrative identifies violent behavior as something not-really-natural, the result of “horrendous” childhoods or damaging relationships.  Human beings, if raised well and without abuse, do not resort to violence either as children or as adults.

It’s the narrative I reject here, the implied narrative that underscores almost the entirety of  Phillips’s article and that underscores the narrative of Donald Miller’s parents as well. 

I do not think it takes horrendous childhoods, or physical or sexual abuse, or damaging relationships or any of the rest of it to create killers.  I think human beings have been killing each other for millennia, and will go on doing so until the end of time.  I think that some people have a taste for violence–for killing, yes, but also for torture and rape and other nasty violent things–the way other people have a taste for Vermeer paintings or sex in open fields of wildflowers.

I think our bad impulses are as much a part of us as our good ones.

I think the difference between a killer–or a rapist, or a torturer–and the rest of us is not that he has these feelings, but that he acts on them.  As with any other taste for any other thing, I expect that there are quite a few people out ther with the itch who decide not to scratch it. 

I am less sure about what happens after he’s scratched that itch–I am not sure whether it is possible to learn to restrain oneself after one has indulged, at least if one is an adult when he engaged in violence.  One of the reasons for treating child murderers differently from adults is preciesly the fact that it is possible that they are more likely  at a stage where they could learn self-restraint than an adult is.

But before I’d buy into the narrative of “violence is caused by horrendous childhoods or child abuse or damaging relationships,” before I could accept the idea that “good people are normal and bad people are damaged,” I’d have to have proved to me not that most people who murder have had such backgrounds, but that most people who have such backgrounds go on to murder.

And they don’t.

This is just another version of the Rousseauian fallacy–the idea that we are born blank slates and made into what we are, which means we could be made into something else if the conditions of our upbringing were only changed enough.  The older I get, the more convinced I am that human beings are not really very malleable at all. 

At least, not on the level of their basic impulses.

That said, I agree for other reasons than the above that children should not be treated as adults in matters of crime.  Some of that has to do with their ability to learn better habits, as I said above, but part of it has to do with their tenuous grasp on at least some aspects of reality.  Children take a while before they understand the permanance of their actions, and even longer to get to that stage where they can anticipate the consequences of their actions–or even think of anticipating them.  Children do a remarkable amount of screwing around thoughtlessly and only realizing what they’ve done in the aftermath.

That’s why I never thought it was much of a point in favor of the inherent nastiness of Venables and Thompson that, after they killed Jamie Bulger, they tried to cover it up and make it look like an accident.  I think it’s entirely within the realm of possibility that they started playing around, did a few things without thinking, everything got out of hand and then–well, there’s this dead body, and they can’t even remember how it all started, and they weren’t expecting it, and…

In other words, once it was all over, they could look back at it and realize what it was.  I’m not a hundred percent sure they could, at the ages they were at the time, look forward and see what was coming.

Of course, I think that’s also the case in most violent adult crime, but being able to look forward and guage the consequences is something we expect adults to do because we know adults can do it.  And adults who won’t do it, or who haven’t learned to do it yet, are dangerous to themselves and other people, and not likely to be able to learn to behave differently.

I suppose I have that really terrible conception of human nature that Phillips was talking about. 

And I have it to a high enough degree to agree that there are in many of these cases a sort of lynch mob mentality among the general public.

That said, I doubt if everybody who has reacted so strongly against the release of Venables and Thompson has such a mentality.  I wonder if some of them are simply protesting, in the only way they know how–by demanding that Venables and Thompson should stay in jail for life–against the narrative Phillips’s presents as an explanation for the murder of Jame Bulger.

From what I’ve read that particular narrative has become the default position for courts and legislatures across Europe.

Maybe the populations of Europe, or just the population of the UK, aren’t buying it.

The Phillips article is here, for those of you who haven’t seen it:

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=722

Yesterday, I was sitting on the love seat not doing much of anything when I came across a little true crime segment on a show called “Dateline on ID”–I presume it was a Dateline segment that the ID channel bought for its own use, or rented, or something.

But what is important isn’t that.   And I don’t even know if it’s important.

The thing was, this was the second half of a two part series on a serial killer named Donald Miller, and Donald Miller is the second of the two serial killers who were operating in my vicinity while I was in graduate school.  Miller was actually closer than the first one.

The first one was Theodore Robert Bundy, whom I found out, years after the fact, was in Ann Arbor and on the prowl for victims while I was living there.  It was a little creepy in retrospect, because Bundy was just the kind of man I used to like to date in those days–the right physical type, the right academic interests.

And I think it may be indicative of something sane deep in the heart of me that when I finally married, I married somebody nothing at all like the guys I used to date in graduate school.

Donald Miller was nothing like those guys, but unlike Bundy, I found out about him while he was still killing girls and during the time he was arrested.  I’d been back east over the summer, but I returned to East Lansing to teach while the hunt for the rapist/murderer was at full pitch, and he was caught no more than a couple of weeks after I returned.

It was a huge case in that part of Michigan.  There were, if I remember correctly, six victims, including the younger brother of a girl who managed to escape the attack.  The problem was, even with a surviving victim, there wasn’t enough evidence to actually convict Miller of the other rape murders.

What the police and prosecutors did instead was to charge him on the one attempted rape they could get him on, and then offer him a deal in exchange for information on where he’d buried the other bodies.

There was a lot of outrage in the area at the time, including from women’s groups who accused the police of not taking rape seriously, but it was probably all they could have done.  The only other alternative they had was to charge him on the attempted rape and watch him walk out on bail–which he almost certainly would have done–and then watch him until he killed another girl.  That last didn’t seem very sensible to the authorities at the time and it never seemed very sensible to me.

All that was back in the late 1970s, and I hadn’t heard a word about Miller since.  I did remember that there was concern at the time that the deal would allow him to get out of prison.  But I won’t say I thought much about him, although I never did forget him.  For a while there we were all checking the bushes every time we came home alone, and of course, like most of these guys, he was stalking college girls with long dark hair parted in the middle.

I mean, is there something about serial killers that they always seem to look for college girls with long dark hair parted in the middle?  Bundy liked that, too.

The Dateline on ID program was about Miller’s trial on a charge of having a weapon while in prison, the weapon in this case being a knotted shoelace he’d bought from the prison store.

And the rules of evidence being what they are, the jury was not allowed to hear anything about the crimes Miller was in prison for, all of which involved strangling and some of which involved the use of common household objects (like shoelaces) as weapons.

And it was interesting to me to see him in the courtroom.  Unlike Bundy, he’s not in the least charismatic.  He’s not goodlooking, either, and he doesn’t come off as very bright.

Although he was a criminal justice major in college, which is interesting in itself.

His parents were there, still hoping that they would some day be able to bring him home, and still supporting him.  They seemed like nice people, and they were not in denial about the things he had done.  They knew he had committed the murders he couldn’t be charged with.

Their take was that Miller was mentally ill, which might be true.  I do have a problem with labeling criminals “mentally ill,” though, when the definition only seems to fit if everybody who commits a violent crime is mentally ill by virtue of the fact that he committed the crime.

That is, I think there’s too much in the psychiatric approach to violent criminals that simply assumes that anybody who would resort to violent criminality must have some kind of disease–that violent criminality is always a symptom of a mental disease, because mentally “healthy” people don’t commit violent crimes.

I know I sound like I’m going around in circles, but the people who put out these ideas about criminals are going around in circles themselves.

I’ll stick to my conviction that the only time we are free to choose is when we are free to choose badly.  To imply that mentally “healthy” people are incapable of choosing to do violence or crime is to imply that they’re not free to choose anything at all.

The significance of Donald Miller’s trial for having a weapon in prison was that, if it went against him, it would constitute his fourth felony conviction.  Under  Michigan law, four felony convictions would make Miller an habitual offender, and the judge could put him in prison permanently–the outcome they wanted back in the 70s, and couldn’t get.

Well, they got the conviction.  The judge sentenced Miller to another twenty to forty years, which means it will be twenty years from that date before Miller is eligible to come up for parole.  His parents are in their sixties, and they pointed out to the filmmakers that they will be in their eighties before they have a chance of their son being released.

Part of me wonders if Miller doesn’t particularly want to be relased–if that is, in fact, the reason for the knotted shoelace.  Part of me wonders if the knotted shoelace was, maybe, literally nothing–if he knotted it the way I flip pens when I’m thinking about something and have too much nervous energy.

And part of me wonders about the nature of people who do murder.  I know that that bores the hell out of some of you, but I still find it fascinating.

There’s the case of Mary Bell, for instance, who, at the age of ten, murdered two small children in her neighborhood by strangling them.  She did it quite deliberately, and in fact went to great lengths to lure them into out of the way places in order to kill them.

She went to prison in England and was released at the age of, I think, twenty-five, because, as a juvenile offender under the law of that time (this was in the 50s, I think), she had to be.

She changed her name, moved someplace nobody knew her, got married and had children and has never been in trouble with the law for so much as a traffic ticket since. 

I have absolutely no idea what all that is about.

I’d like to know.

In the meantime, remembering that fall in Michigan, I’m just as glad Donald Miller is away for good or close to it, and maybe I’ll leave it at that.

P.S.  The television miniseries about the Pacific is made by the same guys who did Band of Brothers–Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks.  I don’t know.  For some reason, the Pacific theater never sparked my imagination the way the European theater did.  Maybe because I had family in Europe but not in the Pacific.

An addendum, actual post below.

ACK.

       Okay–I’m going to try t his one more time.

        Mique say–

<<<Sowell is not talking about smart people. 

       I KNOW THAT.

       IT DOESN’T MATTER.

       Sorry to shout, but I’ve got no idea why so many of you find this distinction so hard to understand.

       It doesn’t matter what Sowell is talking about.     
      
       It ONLY matter what people will THINK he’s talking about when they HAVEN’T read his book.

       I’m talking about the creation of a climate.

       Sowell adds to the GENERAL IMPRESSION that Republicans and conservaties hate smart people.

       IT DOESN’T MATTER that the  INSIDE of his book says something else–the people he gives this impression to by using the word “intellectual” in the way he does WON’T READ THE BOOK.

       I’m sorry to do all this shouting, but no matter how many times I try to make this point, people persist in discussing what Sowell actually says INSIDE the book.

       It literally DOESN’T MATTER what he says inside the book.

       All that matters is the  IMPRESSION the mere fact of the title gives people who WON’T read it.

Every once in a while, something happens here that really takes me aback, and the responses to yesterday’s blog are the kind of thing that does it.

Everybody who wrote in with a comment did the same thing–returned to the conception of the problem in Antigone as one of “good” vs “evil” and “right” vs “wrong.”

But MacIntyre’s entire point is that this is NOT what is going on for Sophocles.

For Sophocles, Creon is right to do what he does

AND

Antigone is ALSO right to do what she does.

Antigone does not do what she does because Creon is wrong, or to protest Creon’s tyranny.

Antigone does what she does because that is what she must do as a sister.

The moral rightness of her actions are defined by her ROLE.

In the same way, Creon does what he does because that is what he must do as king.

The moral rightness of his actions are defined by his ROLE.

Both Antigone and Creon do the morally right thing. 

When morality is defined by roles and not by autonomous individuals, it is possible for two people to BOTH be morally right in what they do and yet to be in conflict.

You all gave exactly the kind of modern reading to Antigone that McIntyre was warning against.

If you think about it, this understanding of a way of approaching morality explains a couple of things I’ve always had trouble with.

The first is the abundance of what I would call “double standards” in the classical through Medieal periods.

In a post-Enlightenment world of autonomous individuals, we assume that, as the saying goes, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  Therefore if men are to be indulged in screwing around outside marriage, women should be too–what is okay for the man must be okay for the woman, and what is condemned in the woman must be condemned in the man.

But in a moral universe where what is morally right is determined by how well any individual person fulfills a role, this would not be the case.  It would not even be intelligible.

For much of the Middle Ages, moral worth was determined by roles, not by individual behavior–hell, that’s probably been the case through much of human history.

Therefore, for Mary to be morally good, we have to ask what she is–a mother?  a daughter?  a wife?  a queen? 

Each of those roles have different requirements, and Mary can only be called morally good if she fulfills those requirements.

She is not a barber, so if she fulfills the role of barber it is not to her credit–and if she fulfills the role of barber to the exclusion of her ability to fulfil her real roles, then she will be “morally evil” for doing what an actual barber would be called “morally good” for doing.

I have no idea if I’m getting this across.  I thought I was, yesterday, but the comments didn’t disagree with the point so much as they just ignored it and behaved as if it hadn’t been said, so I’m not sure what’s going on.

It also explains a little why Aristotle made such a mess of the Poetics.

And he did make a mess of it.  When I first read that book–and it’s a very small book–in high school or so (no, not as part of the official curriculum), I imagined Sophocles reacting like all the other playwrights have acted when reading the critics ever since–by rolling his eyes and sighing.

Because although the Poetics is supposed to be basing its aesthetic theory on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, it is in fact a very bad account of that play. 

Aristotle’s explanation for the action was that Oedipus had a “fatal flaw,” something lacking in himself that drove him to his fate–but, in fact, although Oedipus has indeed got such a flaw (and maybe a few of them) what drives him to his fate is…fate.

Oedipus’s assigned role on this earth is to work out this particular fate.  If he accepts it, he will meet it.  If he fights against it, he will still meet it.  He has no choice, and there is no solution to his dilemma.

None.

Oedipus did nothing to deserve his fate, and his father–his real father, the one he kills eventually–did nothing wrong in putting him out to die as an infant.  In fact, it’s exactly what the old king should have done under the circumstances.

Nor is Oedipus wrong to react the way he does when he hears that the murderer of the old king is known.  In fact, had he acted in any other way, he would have committed a moral wrong.  His declared punishment of the wrongdoer is right and just.  It is right and just even though the wrongdoer turns out to be himself.

For Sophocles, the moral rightness or wrongness of any act was in whether or not the person committing it was fulfilling the duties of his assigned role, NOT in whether or not the act itself was intrinsically good or evil on some abstract measure.

For what it’s worth, Aristotle was almost as uncomfortable about this idea of morality as we are.

I say almost, because Aristotle solved the problem mostly by simply denying that people in certain roles could actually be moral at all.

Therefore, the moral person was a free man in a free state with enough means at his disposal to meet the requirement of magnanimity and generosity, and to be free of the burdens of chasing after money to secure his sustenance.

And yes, under this definition, both Aristotle and his teachers, Plato and Socrates, would have found themselves unqualified to aspire to living the life of a good man.

But my point here, I think, is that even Aristotle had to acknowledge the importance of roles to moral standing.  He could not deny what he saw around him, which was that we do not call a wife “good” for doing the same things a warrior does, or vice versa.

We, of course, do not accept this at all, because we do not accept the idea that people are what their roles make them.  We see ourselves, and have seen ourselves since the late Renaissance, as free and autonomous individuals for whom roles are like clothing.  “I’m going to put on my chef’s hat,” we say, when we settle down to cook after a long day working as an accountant. 

For Sophocles, for Aristotle, even for Aquinas, a role was not something you could take on or off.  You belonged to it–it defined who you were, and what was required of you to be good. 

Therefore, it was possible to identify and codify an objective moral code for human beings, because all you were doing was listing the requirements of the roles.

Which is not the same thing as saying that nobody ever legitimately got to change their role–but that’s for a future day, and I want to go listen to some music.

P.S.  I don’t remember who posted the comment, but I knew, even when I was writing those posts, that Sowell was NOT talking about the broad standard definition of “intellectual” when he was using the word “intellectual.”

And that was my problem with him–I’ve read the book by now, and I know what he’s going for, but the man or woman on the street is just going to go, “Hmm.  Sowell. Conservative, isn’t he?  Well, there the conservatives go again, bashing smart people.”

That is the impression that kind of thing gives, and that impression turns off a lot of people who might otherwise vote Republican and/or be conservatives. 

It’s the Republican Party shooting itself in the foot, once again–no matter what Sowell ACTUALLY meant. 

I still say he should find a different word instead of misusing “intellectual.”

Let me go back for a minute to Sophocles’s Antigone, a play about a sister who buries her brother when the King (her uncle) has forbidden that burial. 

That sounds a little dry, put that way, but the play itself isn’t dry.  Over the years it has not only had many productions, but many modern versions, sort of like Romeo and Juliet.  There is in this play something that commends it to modern writers, and especially to modern writers concerned with the Fascism, the Second World War, and, later, Vietnam.

I first read this play in a college course, which is an interest fact in and of itself, at least to me.  I read almost no literature for the first time in a college course, because I was one of those people who read obsessively from a very early age.  I discovered Hemingway and the Lost Generation in junior high school, and I’d gone through most of the Greek dramatists at least once by the time I was fifteen.

But although I’d read Oedipus Tyrannus during the long run up to finally getting the hell out of the house and out of that town to what I hoped was real life, I’d never read Antigone.  That means I’ve never been able to read it without an official interpretation already in my head.

I don’t know if I’d have had the problems I’ve had with it if that hadn’t been the case.

The interpretation I was given in that college course matches the interpretations I have run into since over the years:  that the play is a dramatization of the clash of individual conscience and state authority. 

The plot goes, more or less, like this:  Oedipus is forced to leave town and give up his throne when the world (and he himself) learns that he has murdered his father and married his mother.

His two sons by that marriage fight over the throne left vacant, and the fight is won by the younger son, Eteocles.  The older son, Polyneices, refuses to accept this, and mounts an armed rebellion against Thebes.  The two brothers then kill each other on the battlefield, and their bodies lie out in the open air until some member of their family is willing to bury them.

Okay, actually, all that happens off stage and before the play starts.  The play actually starts with Creon–Oedipus’s brother in law, I think–taking over the throne and commanding that Eteocles’s body will be buried, but Polyneices’s body will not, and must be left outside to rot, becaue Polyneices had waged war against a legitimate king.

Antigone, the sister of the two dead brothers, takes offense at this, because proper burial was enormously important to Greek society, and to leave a body unburied was to dishonor not only the man but the family from which he came.

Okay, let me interject here.  One of the things that always bothered me about this play is the fact that worrying about unburied bodies in a family whose children were the result of mother-son incest is…ah…possibly disproportionate.

Anyway, Creon decrees that anybody caught even trying to bury Polyneices’s body will be put to death by being walled up alive.  Antigone goes off and does it anyway, and in due course in the play, she admits to her act (boasts of it, finally) and is in fact walled up.

After this, it gets a little complicated–complicated in a way that Sophocles likes to make things complicated.  Creon is told by Tiresias–the same blind seer who brought Oedipus to justice in the end–that the gods want Polyneices buried, and if he is not then Creons own son will die in punishment of Creons acts.  Creon then buries Polyneices again himself and goes to rescue Antigone, but Antigone turns out to have hanged herself in her prison, and the whole thing ends in tragedy.

If that last part seems a little confused and meandering, it always seemed much the same to me.  And I think it goes a long way in explaining why so many interpretations of the play have assumed that the issue here is Tyranny, in the person of  Creon, and the right of the individual conscience to resist it.

That was certainly the interpretation  Jean Annouilh used for his 1960s version of the play, in modern dress, that was later made into a television production with,  I think, Genevieve Bujold as  Antigone.  Creon was played as if he were Mussolini.

This is not surprising, really, because the right of individual conscience to resist and oppose tyranny was Annouilh’s constant subject.  It’s the foundation of his Becket, which is interesting.  The real Jean Annouilh would almost certainly have taken the other side in that debate if it had recurred in twentieth century France, but Becket’s resistance to state power was so important that Annouilh doesn’t seem to have bothered to examine the issue at hand.

For me, the odd thing about Annouilh’s Antigone is that I finished watching it firm in my conviction that it was Creon, not Antigone, who was right.  I’m as touchy about the uses of state power as anybody could be, but in Annouilh’s version I thought  Antigone’s position had very little to commend itself, and that she was acting like an adolescent.

There is, of course, no real way to see Creon as in the right in that play, in either version, if you assume that the play is about the individual conscience’s right and duty to resist the power of the state.

What MacIntyre did was to show me a possible alternative interpretation.   We think the play is about the right of individual conscience against the power of the state, he says, because we assume that somebody must be right and somebody must be wrong, that virtue requires clear and unambiguous and unconflicting rules for human behavior.

For Sophocles, however, the great tragedy of human life is precisely that the rules do conflict.  Each of us is “good” by virtue of whether or not we properly fulfill the roles assigned to us by birth and fortune, and if we all do that, we will inevitably clash.

Antigone is right to do what she does, and Creon is also right to do what he does.  Antigone is upholding piety.  Creon is upholding justice.  In this particular place at this particular time, these two virtues are in conflict–and there is no possible resolution.

When Creon finds that the gods want Polyneices’s buried, it isn’t because the gods think Antigone is right to do what she does and Creon is wrong, but simply because the god prefer it.  They come in to end the argument on Antigone’s side, but they do not thereby resolve the argument on Antigone’s side.

There is no resolution to the argument. 

I’ve been looking around to see if I can find any of my copies of this thing, or even a textbook which has it, because I’d like to reread it and see.  Without such a chance to recheck, though, this interpretation makes a lot more sense to me, given the content of the play itself and the narrative arc as it works itself out, than the interpretations I’d been given in college classrooms and that I have myself sometimes given as a teacher in those classrooms. 

In Greek society, MacIntyre says, human life is a struggle that always ends in defeat.  Sophocles’s interest in that struggle is to illuminate it and its conflicting demands on us, and finally to make us aware of that defeat.

The first thing to occur to me here is–no wonder Christianity went through Greece like wildfire.  

Whatever.  My thing on Antigone.  I’ll get to the social sciences later.

P.S.  Up on Arts and Letters Daily today was this article by Theodore Dalrymple on comments that go up on the Internet

       http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/58706/sec_id/58706

And I’ll have to admit, the funniest thing about it is the fact that you can leave comments.  But its an interesting issue, too, and does not hold true for the comments to this blog, for which I’m grateful.

P.P.S.  I find myself a little bemused by the comments on Band of Brothers.  I’m grateful for the input on things like the historical accuracy of the battles and the uniforms, but what I was really wondering was whether or not you guys thought the portrayal of the officers and enlisted men was good, bad, indifferent, accurate, inaccurate, whatever.

This may have something to do with the fact that I had just read the Sowell, which includes two chapters on “intellectuals and war,” and one of his big points had to do with the portrayal of soldiers in the media–as heroes in WWI, and then as victims, often mutual victims on both sides, on the other, and then (in Vietnam) as babykillers and worse. 

I am, I’ll admit, watching this series obsessively.  So it’s not that I don’t like it.  I just don’t know if the portrayal of the men and officers is as admirable as I think it is or if I’m just so used to military people being portrayed as wimps or nutcases that even sort-of good looks wonderful.

If that makes sense.

Well, first things first.

I’m not really talking or thinking or writing about all this stuff because I want to apply it to the contemporary world and construct some kind of universal moral code for all of us to follow.

Sometimes I like to think and write about this stuff because I just do–I like to know because it’s there to know.  Or at least investigate.

And I don’t really care whether or not people here and now would agree with me or not.   The status of truth, and of reality, is not dependent on its popularity.  If everybody on the planet thought the world was flat, it would still be round.

MacIntyre brings up some points that are interesting to me in and of themselves, both in his central argument and in some of the side issues he deals with.  This morning, about halfway through the book, I found the most coherent reading of Sophocles’s Antigone I’d ever seen, and it cleared up a lot about that play that had always puzzled me.  It also cleared up a lot about my response to that play in its various guises and versions and modern retellings.

I may actually get around to talking about that eventually.

For today, though:  aside from the differences in the premises and content of moral philosophy I’ve already been on about here, differences between the world before the Enlightenment and the world since, MacIntyre points out that there is a difference in the questions that philosophy was supposed to answer.

In the world before the Enlightenment, the question moral philosophy was supposed to answer was:  what kind of person should I be?

In the world since the Englightenment, the question moral philosophy was supposed to answer was:  what rules should I follow?

And even though it appears as if the first of those two questions should entail the second, it doesn’t quite, and the lack of the first question in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral philosophy causes a lot of problems in answering the question it did attempt to answer.

I feel like my tongue is turning into ribbons and bows.

And no, I’m not talking out loud here at the computer.  But you know what I mean.

What strikes me about this, though, is that, if there’s a single signature characteristic of twentieth and twenty-first century American life, it’s the idea that each of us can make ourselves into what we want to be. 

That is, that each of us can decide that we’d rather be very different than we are, and by hard work and perserverance change ourselves into whatever that is. 

And we mean that radically–we resist the idea that we have any inborn limitations at all.  Don’t like your sex?  We have sex-change operations.  Don’t like the way you talk?  We have speech therapists, accent training. 

There’s even an MTV reality show called Made on which teenagers who desperately want to be something they aren’t likely to be successful at get lots of help and coaching:  the fat, unatheletic girl who wants to be on the cheerleading team was the one I actually watched several episodes of.

It seems to me that in a culture so determined to have each of us be whatever we decide to be, there ought to be at least some examination of what kinds of things it would be a good idea to aspire to.  What kind of person should I be? sounds like it ought to be our central cultural question.

I don’t think it’s a question anybody asks, however, because we have resolved it, and not always tacitly, with the answer, “anything you really want.”

And we believe that even though we don’t actually believe it, if that makes any sense.  We would not think it was all right if somebody answered the question with “I want to be a pedophile” or “I want to be a cannibal” or “I want to bring National Socialism back to Europe.”

In the meantime, we do address the question of what rules I should follow, but we largely do it by saying that there should be as few rules as possible, close to none, because rules are inherently oppressive.  They’re just you imposing your religion/philosophy/whatever on me.

And we do all that while organizations both on and off college campuses campaign vigorously for a conception of the self as completely static in all kinds of ways–bound by race and sex and ethnicity in ways that we cannot escape.

In other words, the culture of autonomous individualism is getting increasingly incoherent, and what is incoherent is, in the long term, unstable.

All of which brings me back to the question that started me going on all this a few days ago:  is it possible to construct a single, universally applicable moral code founded, as Thomas Aquinas would have put it, on reason alone?

The question is:  is it possible?

It’s not:  would people accept it?

For the moment, I just want to know what’s true.

Spring Break starts on Monday.  That means that, as of Saturday, I have an entire ten days when I do not have to get up at three thirty in the morning even once.  I must be getting old.  I used to do that all the time.  Now, if I don’t get the extra hour, I’m grumpy.

Let me clarify something, to begin with.  When I said that the idea of the autonomous individual was necessary for the advancement of science on the scale we’ve seen it over the last two hundred years, I didn’t mean that scientists had to view human beings as autonomous individuals.

I meant scientists had to view themselves as autonomous individuals.

Those paradigm shifts are the ball game.  They occur seldom or never when people view themselves as embedded in webs of relation, because, historically, viewing oneself as so embedded has meant viewing oneself as required to show deference to those older and wiser than oneself.

The advancement of science requires people–most often fairly young people–who are willing to say, “look, old fogey, step aside, you’ve got this all wrong.”

A person in the middle Ages–or in Aristotle’s Athens–with such an attitude would have been viewed by his society as, at best, a barbarian.  At worst, he would have been labelled hopelessly and fatally corrupt. 

That was why it took so long to break away from Aristotelian natural science.  The old canard about how the Middle Ages simply “thought” about the natural world while in the late Renaissance and Enlightenment they started to experiment with it is false.  The Middle Ages saw a great deal of experimentation, including the first attempts at controlled experimentation, in science.

And if you can find one of those books that contain translations of scientific notebooks and observational diaries from the years around 1200 or so, you’ll be surprised at how meticulous those operations were and how carefully designed were some of the experiments.  

The problem was not lack of empirical research but the felt need to explain such research in Aristotelian terms–Aristotle was, after all, the master, and we were his students, and a good student does not contradict the master, because the master’s wisdom is (by definition) superior to his own.

Robert says that, even using functional or teleological definitions of the human, it would still be impossible to construct a moral code because we would still be fighting over the definition of “good.”

And all I can say is–no, we wouldn’t.

The entire idea of different and competing definitions of the good was alien to classical society and to Christian Medieval society both.  The two worlds didn’t even see themselves competing on that score.

There was a lot of argument between Christianity and Pagan culture, but none of it was over what was to be accepted as “good.”  Augustine was able to be a highly successful and highly productive Pagan philosopher and later Christian philosopher precisely because understanding of the morally good and morally right had more in common between the two cultures than at variance. 

On the subject of the human being defined by role and function, the two societies were virtually identical, and they were more like than unlike the societies of the East to which they had little or not access. 

What made a woman a good mother and a good daughter, what made a man a good father, a good husband and a good son, what made the man a good citizen or a good subject–these roles were considered immutable and fixed.  Study them and you could determine what actions were proper to each, and therefore determine what was morally right for you to do. 

As for teleological conceptions of the human being–well, there were certainly arguments over that.

Sort of.

It would seem, at least on the surface, that Christianity introduced a new and alien teleology into the Pagan world–and it did.

Sort of.

The thing is, if you look at the history of philosphy over time, what you see is that Christian belief added something to the classical understanding of the ancient world, but it did not reject the pagan understanding of what it meant to be moral.

That was why Christians were universally admitted to be morally exemplary by the pagans who met them, even the pagans who disagreed with them about things like the divinity of Christ or the need to cast away the worship of the old gods, or thought that they were all a pack of cultural barbarians. 

One Roman emperor after another after Nero exhorted Romans to commit themselves to charity as the Christians did.  Pagan society made giving charity a part of the definition of a morally good person, but the Christians not only gave charity, they gave it unconditionally even to people who didn’t “deserve” it by their behavior and they gave it without seeking praise for it.

In other words, Christian thinking added something to the already existing Pagan moral ideal of giving charity to the poor–it didn’t change Paganism from being a society with no such moral ideal into one that was.

Even the examples usually given as showing that the change to Christian morality was “radical” don’t pan out on deeper study.

There is, for instance, the common practice of infanticide throughout the Greek and Roman worlds.  A father, having absolute power over his family, could command that an infant be exposed on the mountainside if it was deformed, or if there was some other reason why he believed it should not live.

Peter Singer would have felt right at home.

But unlike Singer, the Greeks and the Romans did not think this was a morally good action.  They didn’t event think it was morally neutral.

They thought it was a necessary evil–that it was something that “ought” not to be done, but that circumstances demanded. 

Christianity didn’t change the power of fathers, or protest the nature of the patriarchal family.  (See Augustine’s Confessions–I think one of the more interesting studies somebody could do would be one into Augustine’s relationship with his father, a person he repeatedly refers to as “that man” throughout his autobiography. The Confessions provide the world’s first recorded protest against patriarchal right–not a small thing in the time it was written, and too big a thing for Augustine to realize where his thinking would lead to if he let it get there.)

Anyway, sorry for the aside.

Christianity didn’t change the power of fathers, or even seek to, and did not protest the nature of the patriarchal family.  What it did was add to the definition of a “good father” a few things that hadn’t been there before.

Those thing were not minor–the duty to care for all one’s children, even when circumstances meant that such care would bring the family to utter ruin ; the duty to “love they wife as thyself.”

These had enormous implications for the lives of children and wives in families, but they did not amount to a paradigm shift.

Of course, Robert is quite right.  I probably wouldn’t like much of what would result from a return to functional and teleological definitions of what it means to be a human being.

But the issue isn’t whether or not I’d like it.  The issue is whether or not MacIntyre is correct in saying that no moral system of any kind can be constructed or maintained without such definitions.

That is, if MacIntyre is right that no universally binding and universally understood moral code is possible in a world that defines the human as an autonomous individual.

I say the question is still open. 

It’s true we have maintained widely accepted ideas of the moral throughout three hundred years of the human being as autonomous individual.  MacIntyre would say we’ve done it by clinging to the rules of older moral codes while pretending that their foundation hasn’t be shot away.

And we’ve gotten to a point, now, where the fact that those foundations no longer exist has begun to matter.

But I’ve been at this long enough, and I have tea and and a free morning, so I’m going to go listen to some Medieval English ballads sung by the King’s Noyse. 

Like the Greeks, the Medieval English were really into weepies.

Okay, let me tell you how I got here.

I did intend to go to an Agatha Christie after I finished the Sowell book, but I ran into a snag.

Monday, I had to proctor two midterm exams.  That meant I had to sit in front of a classroom for more than a couple of hours straight, and all I can do when I sit in front of a classroom is read. 

An Agatha Christie is not a good choice for this, because I read her too fast.  I’d be done before I got to the middle of the second exam.  She’s not a good choice for this because she’s also too easy to read, in the sense that I don’t have to apply my full concentration, which is what I want to do when I’m being bored to death in front of a horde of panicking students.

I went looking through my TBR stack and came up with a book called After Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre.  It’s one of those books that I bought a few years ago because other people I read on a regular basis keep mentioning it.  In this case, other people on both sides of the present political/cultural divide keep mentioning it.  So I bought it at some point, and then I put it down, and kept circling it for a few years. 

It turned out to be just the kind of thing I was looking for for my exam day, so I picked it up and took it with me.  I was lucky enough to have a green highlighter in my purse, because I needed it.  It has a couple of really interesting ideas in it–already, and I’m only halfway through–but I thought I’d throw out one of them and see where it gets me.

First, though, I should explain that this is not a book of moral philosophy.  MacIntyre is not trying to enact or defend a moral ideal.  At least not yet. To this point, the book has been a project in philosophical criticism, and the criticism is directed at the Englightenment project to found a universally true and applicable moral code on Reason alone.

(I’m using “on Reason alone” here the way the phrase was used in the Middle Ages–to mean Reason without Revelation, not “just thinking” instead of “experimenting” or “collecting data.”  For the Middle Ages, Just Thinking and Experimenting and Collecting Data would all come under the category “by Reason alone,” since none of them required recourse to Scripture or the Magisterium.)

Anyway, the first of the interesting ideas MacIntyre comes up with is the possibility that part of the problem the Enlightenment has in its moral project comes from the fact that it does not define “human being” as it was defined consistently before that period.

The Middle Ages, MacIntyre says, and all the historical periods in the West before it, so the definition of “human being” to be like the definition of “watchmaker,’ say, or “dentist.”  That is, the definition was first and foremost a categorical one.

The Englightenment claims that “we can’t get an is from an ought,” as I see it often on the Web, but in fact we get “is” from “ought” all the time.  We can, for example, derive from the definition of “a barber” what a barber ought, and ought not, to do. 

For the Middle Ages, and for classical Athens and Rome, for Aquinas and Aristotle and Cicero, a “human being” was not an “individual,” radically alienated from all other individuals and existing as himself independently of them, but some set in a web of relationships–a mother, a daughter, a sister, a Roman, and on and on and on. 

And for each of these things, as for barbers, we know enough about the role involved to derive the ought from the is. 

It’s only when we begin to think of human beings as essentially alone and atomized, as existing independently of the roles he plays, that it becomes impossible to derive a moral code from our knowledge of what human beings are.

What’s more, the Middle Ages and before assumed that all things, human and otherwise, had “proper” ends.  A bicycle is built to ride on, and its “goodness” as a bicycle is defined by the end for which it was made.  You can use it as found art if you want to, but being useful as found art cannot make it a good bicycle.

So the other thing all the ages before the Enlightenment did was to assume that things existed for a reason, in that all things had a end towards which they were properly aimed–maybe it would be best defined as an ideal toward which they msut aspire in order to be a “good” whatever they are.

I’ve thought about what I known of the Middle Ages, and I’d say he’s right here in the way somebody like, say, Aquinas, or Peter Abelard, saw himself and his fellow human beings.  It kept reminding me of that old question and answer from the Baltimore Catechism of my childhood.

Why did God make you?  God made me to know Him, to love Him, to serve Him, and to be happy with Him in heaven.

It was a very teleological way to look at human beings–it doesn’t take much to derive a universally applicable moral code from an answer like that.

MacIntyre points out that this is not a matter of a difference between religiously based versus secularly based moral codes.  Aristotle and Plato devised secularly based moral codes, but those codes saw human beings in categorical and teleological terms, not as “individuals” the way the Enlightenment defined that term and we now useit. 

The split comes not with a change from religiously based societies to secularly based societies, but with a change from societies which saw the people in them as embedded in webs of functional relations and societies which see the people in them as existing alone and autonomous and both prior to and outside any such role functions.

This managed to unravel a couple of things for me that I’ve been thinking about for a long time, not the least why it is that Aristotle could write an Ethics that was morally compelling not only for the men and women of his own place and time but for people (like Aquinas) living a thousand years later under radically different circumxtances, but modern moral philosphers can’t seem to write two lines that even they themselves will take seriously three days later.

It also raised a question:  how much of modern science is dependent on the conception of human beings as autonomous individuals?

That is, how important is itto scientific thinking and discovery that scientists themselves should conceive of themselves this way?

I’m probably making a mess of this, as usual, but it occurs to me that if science is particular in its origins in Western civilization, so is the idea of the autonomous individual.  And science begins to succeed an a significant scale only after that idea enters the culture and becomes general.

If the two things are inextricably linked, we have a few problems.

The first is that there is no way for a scientific civilization to do without a generally accepted basic morality.  If it tries, it ends up–well, not all that scientific, for one thing.  Freud believed in a death wish.  The historyof the twentieth century looks like a civilizational death wish, and it almost always manifests itself as soceities claiming to be “scientific” by ditching morality altogether.  Thank  you, Uncle Joe.

The second is that, if MacIntyre is correct about the impossibility of founding a morality on reason starting with an assumption that human beings are autonomous individuals, and I’m right that you can’t have science without such an assumption, then the only real choice we would have would be living like Aquinas, without a lot of the scientific technology that makes my life plausible, or living like a Russian under Stalin.

And that seems to me so wrong–so obviously untrue–that I don’t  know where to start thinking about it.

But I’m glad I finally started reading this book.

Well, it’s about that time–midterms, I mean–for a little bitching, and so I’m going to bitch.

I got a paper this week than included the sentence, “Americans should be taught to know about world wars one, two and three.”

This was in a paper about what it means to be “educated,” in which I gave them the chance to outline what they themselves thought  people should know.  Forget all the things we talk about here, forget the decades-long argument about the nature of a university education, forget it all.  They could just outline what they thought was necessary to know and tell me whether or not they thought the knew it.

On one level, of course, the statement I quoted above is prescient–not because there is going to be a world war three, but because “knowing about” it, about the possibilities for it and the ways it can be avoided, probably is something everybody should know.

Which brings me to one of the things Sowell discusses in his book, and something that has intrigued me now for years.

Why are some people completely incapable of accepting the idea that people who say they intend to go to war and wipe everybody else off the earth probably mean they intend to go to war and wipe everybody else off the earth?

Sowell has been talking about the lead up to the second world war and the hystircal insistence on the part of the educated public opinion of the time that Hitler was only rearming the Rhineland because…well, because he was head of a nation that should be the equal of all other nations, and besides, he was afraid of France, and…

And Hitler kept telling everybody, quite plainly and without much in the way of subterfuge, that what he intended to do was rearm until he felt himself capable of winning a war, and then launching that war with an aim to take over most of the nations of Europe, especially France.

What is it, exactly, that makes so many people find it difficult to take people like this at their word?

The present day circumstance that I kept getting into arguments about is Iran, and once again I see the same thing:  the man keeps telling us what he wants, he keeps saying that he wants to wipe Israel off the map and that, in the future, Europe will have “to Islam.”  He is not being subtle about this and he is not being coy.

So why do so few people believe him?

And no, it’s not enough to say that the people who don’t believe him hate their own society, because even if they do, I’m pretty sure they aren’t interested in living with the reality of an Islamic victory in Europe.  They have to intention “to Islam.” 

And in spite of all the gobbledygook about “multiculturalism,” I don’t find these people to be particularly “multicultural.”  That is, their pronouncements on war and peace, international relations, or even the moral validity of the welfare state are not couched in relativistic terms. 

In almost every other area of disagreement between the modern day American “conservatives” and the modern day American “progressives” (we’re not saying liberal anymore–although why anybody who actually knew anything about the progressive movement would want to call herself a progressive is beyond me), the issues at hand are largely matters of options.

That is, if the progressives have control of the local public schools and you don’t like it, you can send your kids to private schools or homeschool.  If the conservatives have that control and you don’t like it, the same.

It’s annoying, and sometimes infuriating, to be forced to pay taxes to support bad public art, or to watch the local branch of the state university put on a production of The Vaginia Monologues or Corpus Christi, but in the end there are ways to counter such things, and a right to protest, and the supreme right to simply not pay attention. 

It’s annoying that in spite of everything you’ve supported for years on end, the local Christian school just insists on presenting Creationism as fact, or going to church, or any of the rest of it–but they’re not making you do it, and you can walk away from it if you want.

Okay, I’m pretty much saying here that the intensity of our culture wars have a lot in common with the intensity of faculty meetings–they are as virulent as they are at least in part because there’s very little at stake.  It’s a big country.  As long as nobody is making laws that stop me from pursuing happiness–would Jefferson be really mad at me if I called that following my bliss?–anyway, as long as I have the opt out, and I usually do, intracultural issues of this kind are open to flexible and varied solutions.

What Iran is threatening is not open to flexible or varied solutions.  In countries under Islamic religious rule, it’s not a matter of the gay couples living in San Francisco while the straight white Christian live in Little Rock.  Shari’a demands that people found practicing homosexual sex be put to death, that women not only be veiled but restricted from vast areas of education and endeavor, that free speech is to be defined as “the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari’ah”

In case you think I’m making that up, it comes from the Cairo Declaration on Human RIghts in Islam.  You can find the entire document here:

http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/cairodeclaration.html

which is the University of Minnesota site. 

But in case you haven’t noticed, that defines free speech as your freedom to speak in favor of what Islam already believes to be true, with no right to speak against it.

It’s very much like the definition of individual rights adopted by the Catholic Church in the Counterreformation.  Since “error has no rights,” you had the right to the freedom to join the Catholic Church and to speak in defense of her, but not the right to join other religions or speak against the Church, since those things were “errors,” and “error has no rights.”

At any rate, these things are not negligible.  It is not a matter of being uotraged that Sarah Palin’s book is making more money than yours.

One would think that people who are so passionate about their own rights when faced with blue laws or antiabortion protestors would be at least as outraged by the declaration of somebody like Ahmadinejad that he intends to build a nuclear missle program and make the world Islam. 

And lately he’s been showing everybody on the planet what he’s got, so that it isn’t as if he’s keeping it all a secret.

Of course, Hitler kept trying to show the world what he had, and journalists in France and England didn’t report it, because they were afraid it would lead to war.  So there’s that.

But then, just to get incoherent here and off the track of linear thought, some of what is going on in Europe lately is a little startling. 

There are neighborhoods in London where non-Islamic women feel compelled to wear a hajib when they go out because without one they are harrassed on the street and in danger of assault–and the police basically tell them, well, that’s what you have to do, they can’t protect you.

There are neighborhoods in Amsterdam where gay couples cannot go without fear of being assaulted, and situations in Sweden where the law looks the other way at honor killings because to do otherwise would be to impose cultural imperialism on immigrants.

It’s almost as if the real issue is not the proclaimed rights themselves, but the need to push back against opponents who seem to be weak and fall back from opponents who appear to be strong. 

I don’t know if that’s making any sense, either. 

Let’s just say that the more I look at this situation, the less I understand it.  I believe in the near-absolute freedom of speech, in the near-absolute right to the free practice of religion, in the separation of Church and State, in half a dozen things like that, and when I feel them threatened I fight like hell. 

“Multiculturalism” doesn’t cut it with me–I don’t think societies that execute people for being homosexual are just “different cultures.”  I think they’re wrong, period.  And although I am not in favor of invading them to get them to do it my way, I am in favor of making damned sure they can’t force me to do it theirs.

This seems to me to be a fairly consistent position.  And maybe it’s just my lack of imagination that means I find it impossible to understand how you go from “human rights are everything” to whatever is going on right no in regards to the reality of what Iran is presenting, or the reality to what those no-go zones in European cities are presenting. 

But here I am, and it’s Sunday, and I think I may listen to some opera, or maybe to Swan Lake.

I think the next thing I read is going to be off my stack of Agatha Christie novels.