First Impressions – Au Revoir Les Enfants

Au Revoir Les Enfants tells the story of a boarding school’s struggle to keep three Jewish boys safe during the Nazi occupation of France.  The main plot line follows Julien Quentin, who develops from an intelligent but surly student at the school to a better, more ethical character who conceals one of the Jewish boys’ identities.

This plot alone makes for a mediocre movie, and mediocrity is the very worst that films concerning the Holocaust can worry about achieving.  Along the lines of Godwin’s Law, it is easy to invoke intense emotion over a charged subject, and so, little credit is due.

A more interesting theme did not fully emerge on first viewing: how does the placement of the film’s characters during the Holocaust contribute to their moral status?  Would we perceive the characters differently if we judged them only by their more mundane moral decisions?

Several examples may merit interesting discussion upon another viewing of the film:

1) Quentin: Quentin bullies other students.  He is curious, but too lazy and arrogant for his academic studies.  He views other talented students with hostility and jealousy.  In Au Revoir, his courage in facing the Nazi intruders redeems these flaws.  In the present day, perhaps every schoolyard bully would evince the same courage against Nazis.  But how many receive that chance?  Why should Quentin receive a higher judgment than the average bully, when his behavior differs only as a result of the caprice of time?

2) Père Jacques: The headmaster seems to run an indifferent school, with too many students, poorly supervised and disciplined.  Everything seems to be on the cheap.  In one moment, Quentin, looking at a fattening pig, remarks to the effect, “They’ll serve this on parents’ day, to give them the impression that we eat well.”  Would the stinginess and neglect of the headmaster be forgivable if he were not also a hero of the Holocaust?

3) Joseph: The kitchen helper is a mere boy, and takes abuse from the other boys because of his lowly status.  On the side, he sells items the students receive from their parents and gives them things they want instead.  When he is caught, he takes the fall.  Au Revoir leads us to condemn him because of his involvement with the Germans, but excluding this, one suspects that the beatings he receives would make him more a martyr than a traitor.

The debate over how circumstances affect a moral evaluation of these characters leads to quite an Aristotelian tangle (do actions matter, or intentions? etc.), but even if not morally enlightening, it is an interesting thought experiment.

Beyond merely contrasting transcendent moral characteristics with mundane ones, our thought experiment might also lead us to ask whether these transcendent characteristics outweigh the mundane ones.

For example, certainly Père Jacques’s heroism is laudable, and its cost is mortal.  But it is easy for a courageous man to exhibit courage when the situation clearly calls for it.  Transcendent struggles often have black and white answers.  What is murkier is how the père ought to act in day-to-day life.  Clearly he has a moral obligation to his students, to teach them, and raise them to be bright, principled, and capable youth.  But how hard must he try?  Must he spend every minute of every day on his task, or just a few?  Perhaps he should spend as many minutes as necessary to give the boys an average education.  But what if this number of minutes is impossibly hard to achieve?

In this character, as a man struggling, and perhaps failing, to overcome the banal challenges of everyday life, Père Jacques is much more familiar to us.  Perhaps many of us could hold our heads high in the face of the Gestapo.  But every man, staring down the barrel of a forty-hour week of drudgery and toil, from time to time turns on a subconscious cruise control, and fails to try his best.

And who knows what the consequences of such cruising might be?  Perhaps mundane moral failures differ from transcendent ones not in their consequences or importance, but only in their frequency.

Review – “Can’t Be Tamed” – Part 1

Where to begin?  In many ways, Miley Cyrus’s “Can’t Be Tamed” covers what, by the standards of our lightning-fast age, is very old ground.  A young pop diva clad in next to nothing bumping and grinding with a dance troupe while singing ambiguously sexual lyrics… the newest thing I saw was the special effects quality, which has mercifully improved from the days of “Oops, I Did It Again”.  Otherwise, change the words (including the pop star’s name), add a slight shift in theme, and this could be 2000.  Cyrus, after an abbreviated youth, is even being groomed to look like <Britney, Christina, Madonna, Go-on-a>.

So what’s new?  “Can’t Be Tamed” has received extraordinary media attention primarily, I think, because of Cyrus’s age, which is not yet the magical eighteen.  Prior to viewing the production, I had been misled by the blogosphere into thinking that there was some question as to whether the video is or is not age-appropriate.  If by “not age-appropriate” it is meant that the production is a bunch of suits marketing a seventeen-year-old girl’s body, then yes, it’s not age-appropriate.  As I watched the video, I couldn’t help wondering whether our culture has truly, finally, achieved decadence.

So what are the moral implications, vis-à-vis society, of this video?  (I have no idea what I’ll conclude.)

The proposition, by the opponents of a video like this, is that the sexual trafficking of a seventeen-year-old girl is wrong.  I think there are two lines of thought that commonly contribute to this proposition.  One (the “puritanical” proposition) is that sex, in all or most of its varieties, is inherently sordid, and that such trafficking as this video ought to be prohibited for the moral good of all concerned – producers, viewers, and diva.  The other (the “not-yet” proposition) is that, withholding judgment on the ultimate morality of sex, seventeen-year-olds do not possess the maturity, emotional stability, worldliness, or any of innumerable other qualities that are implicitly assumed to advance with age.

Let’s begin with the not-yet proposition, and defend it from some cheap attacks.  First, many will argue, the “not-yet” proposition is problematic because why should we say that eighteen-year-olds, but not seventeen-year-olds, have whatever qualities are necessary to make sexual decisions?  (An instance of the argument by degrees.)  And why assume that the advancement of these qualities is uniform?  Could not there be some who ought to be permitted to make such decisions earlier, and some later?  And what’s more, is there even broad societal consensus on what these qualities are?  Couldn’t we just call this an antiquated and unexamined tradition that Miley Cyrus, for one, can safely discard?

Let us propose that there is – yes, there is – a broad consensus on what some of these qualities might be, and a reason that they occur magically and exactly at eighteen for all men.  This is the notion of economic self-sufficiency.  There are many magical changes that occur at the age of eighteen, by virtue of laws having to do with wages, parental relations, taxes, criminal behavior, military service, etc. that treat eighteen-year-olds as adults but seventeen-year-olds as children.  Many – most – of these changes have nothing to do with sexual maturity, and we confess all of them to be arbitrary, but any discussion of sexual mores cannot escape these other laws as a backdrop.

But all we have really done here is punted the problem.  We have proven that there is an exact, defined difference between seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds that is not trivial (i.e. merely a tautology of their age), but we have based that proof on the existence of other arbitrary societal conventions that themselves are vulnerable to the argument by degrees.  So is there anything really magical about turning eighteen, that an enterprising crusader for sexual freedom, like Miley Cyrus, could not overturn?  I think even our most enterprising crusader would concede that infants are incapable of economic self-sufficiency, while the vast majority of forty-year-olds are self-sufficient.  To prevent the cruel economic usage of infants, which we almost universally condemn as violating the taboo against the exploitation of helpless humanity, we must have laws that decide who is self-sufficient and who is not.  Such laws cannot act on a case-by-case basis, because this would be prohibitively expensive.  They could act on a class-by-class basis, and classify individuals between zero and forty into multiple classes, some economically self-sufficient and some not.  This would appear to be the optimal solution, but it would probably be difficult to form a societal consensus on what the qualifications to enter into the self-sufficient class should be.  What’s more, in even today egalitarian society, such a practice would probably increase social stratification, which we deem repugnant.  (It is ironic that we should rely so much on our biases in a discussion of the sexual trafficking of children.).  In the absence of case-by-case treatment or class-by-class treatment, we are left with age-determinate universal treatment, or some system not relying on top-down determination of self-sufficiency.  The latter system would be sufficiently radical that we shall set its proponents aside as outside the sphere of our present discussion, for desiring to reform far more than sexual liberty.

Once we have arrived at age-determinate universal treatment, we are left only to quibble about the particular age at which people achieve economic self-sufficiency.  We assume that there is nothing logically impossible about that age being eighteen.

But the next objection to sexual liberty at eighteen also applies to economic liberty.  This is the argument that some achieve the qualities requisite for economic self-sufficiency far earlier than others.  Our logical demonstration that there ought to be a universal age of economic self-sufficiency would appear to preclude this argument, but perhaps the unfairness of such a system to those whom it oppresses, who possess all the prerequisites for freedom without its perquisites, is a persuasive argument against it.

In response to this, we would propose that the age at which economic self-sufficiency occurs follows a distribution heavily centered around a relatively narrow range of values, and that there may be numerous outliers.  Our task as legislators would be to select an age as the age of maturity that will give the overwhelming majority of citizens protection from exploitation before they are, in fact, economically self-sufficient, while letting a very few suffer from such exploitation because they are, in fact, not equipped to make their own decisions.  Those who are oppressed by the system for years, just like the few who are released prematurely, are the costs of justice and prosperity for the rest.  (Shockingly, I have written no post on the opposing positions on this problem presented in Crito and The Shawshank Redemption, but the case of the unjustly-treated individuals is itself a philosophical problem that we shall, again, set aside.  I have treated it extremely briefly here.)

We have now shown that there is a magical switch that does occur at eighteen, and that, logically speaking, this could maybe be justified, though we have not done so.  But is this related to sexual freedom?  To answer this, we must examine the qualities that could be requisite for sexual maturity.

Intellectual exhaustion sets in.  More later.  Who knew there was so much to say about such ephemeral strumpetry as Miley Cyrus?

The Prisoner: The General

“The General” is a broad-based satire of modern education. It mocks deconstruction and examines the shortcomings introduced into education by the necessity of educating huge numbers of people.

There is much in “The General” to suggest a desire for a return to a study of the classics and the Great Books.  In several places, “The General” criticizes modern education, represented by the Village’s Speedlearn program, as empty.  “Finding things a bit strange?” the Professor’s wife asks Number Six.  “That is the trouble,” he replies, “I can’t find anything at all.”  When he steals into her house, he enters a tastefully decorated room filled with draped busts.  One is inclined to suspect that they are Greek or Roman, but when Number Six removes the drapery, we are surprised to find that they are busts of the leaders of the Village.  In other words, the leaders of the modern educational movement idolize only themselves, and not the great thinkers of the past.  Finally, the question that Number Six uses to destroy the General (which turns out to be a computer) is simply “Why?”  He asserts that no machine can answer this question, nor any human.  All of these examples point to a thesis that education ought not merely to fill our heads with science and the sterile literature of today’s educated class, but instead to teach us true art, to expose us to things that stir the soul and suggest where we might find meaning.

One scene, in which Number Six inquires of the Professor’s wife why a student is standing on his head (“to gain a new perspective”) reminds us that satire of education is an old art.  Recall a similar scene from Aristophanes’ Clouds.  Strepsiades is examining Socrates’ “Thoughtery of wise souls”:

Strepsiades: …[W]hat are those fellows doing, bent all double?
Disciple: They are sounding the abysses of Tartarus.
Strepsiades: Why do their rumps point toward heaven?
Disciple: They’re being taught astronomy too.

The hollowness of modern education is further examined with “Speedlearning” itself.  Speedlearning’s motto is “100 percent entry, 100 percent pass.”  In just fifteen seconds, Speedlearning enables all of the citizens of the Village learn a complete college course in history, and they can then go about quoting to each other facts about the Boer Wars.  The knowledge turns out to be shallow, though; the citizens know the rote facts, but they attach no meaning to them.  When Number Twelve, a sneaky rebel, asks Number Six, who has just finished the Speedlearning course, “What was the Treaty of Adrianople?” Number Six responds “September, 1829″.  The students of Speedlearning are unable to adapt the facts they have learned to new situations.

I think there is much value in this satire.  We live in an amazing age.  The Earth is more populous than ever before, so much so that up to six percent of all people ever born are walking the Earth today.  Literacy and the availability of accumulated written wisdom are both more widespread, and reaching far greater absolute numbers of people, than at all previous points in history.  Despite all this, the student of history knows that the behavior of people today is not substantially different from the behavior of the uneducated masses of forgotten eras.  We are still subject to xenophobia, jingoism, manipulation, greed, and religion.  How can this be, given the nearly free availability of knowledge?  The failure cannot be in anything but the agents we have chosen to disperse that knowledge, educators who have seen fit to mock and destroy the accumulated wisdom of ages.

For those fortunate enough to have studied the classics, some secrets are known.  Plato could not teach us to be wise, but he at least filled us with a desire to be wise.  He could not teach us the truth, but he at least assured us that it existed.  What is the ignorance and denial of modern America but a complete escape from the desire to know, and the belief in absolute truth?  We see in the anti-intellectualism, the anti-scientific movement, and the race for wealth only the simple fact that people have not been taught to strive for goodness and wisdom.

The Prerogative To Kill

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and the vegetarians are out to make us feel guilty again.  Gary Steiner has just flayed the American conscience with a powerful op-ed piece in the New York Times advocating ethical veganism.

Is it wrong to kill?  Is it wrong to inflict suffering?  Philosophers advocating veganism typically start by asking one of these questions.  These are two very different questions, and will require two very different ways of saying “Definitely not.”

So is it wrong to kill?  The answer can’t be “Yes, always.”  Most of us would agree that a Mack truck should swerve and run over a fox if necessary to avoid plowing into a busload of little children.  Arguing by degrees, we might even conclude that the Mack truck should run over ten foxes, or the last fox in the world, to save one little child.

Implicit in any of these conclusions is the notion that life has value, and that killing should be avoided.  Why is this?  There are two radically different schools of thought to answer this question.  The first is the religious school: God says not to kill.  If we accept this idea, we may as well just go home; there’s no arguing with God.  The second school of thought says that life is an inherent good and should be preserved whenever possible.  Many proponents of this school – and we will follow them – would go so far as to say that human life is exceptionally valuable and worthy of preservation because of our capacity for abstract thought, or our ability to appreciate life, or a variety of other distinctions.  (There is a third school of thought, which suggests that the act of killing itself, as opposed to a “neutral” transition from life to death, is such a traumatic, jarring experience that it should always be avoided.  This school compounds the problems of killing and inflicting suffering, and for this reason is too complicated to deal with here.)

The “life has value” train of thought is the reason most people would have the Mack truck kill the fox instead of the busload of children.  “Life has value” is also the reason that killing animals for food, or even fun, could be morally justifiable.  What would happen if everyone in the world suddenly became a vegan?  The meat market would collapse and the brutal slaughter of animals would cease; farmers would feed their animals until they died natural, happy deaths; finally, the land would be used to plant hummus and tofu.  And there would be no more animals!  All of the animals that would have existed – that will exist, assuming we do not become vegan – would not be bred, would not experience life.  If life has value, if we wish to maximize life, we must argue forcefully for the continuation of animal slaughter.  The raison d’etre of the vast majority of domestic animals is industrial exploitation, and if this ceases, few, if any people will argue for the continued breeding of these animals simply for the sake of maximizing potential lives lived.  Continue exploitation, or accept that life is a secondary consideration to human convenience.

Another way of stating this argument is that because we give animals life, we should have the power to take that life away.  By logical extension, because a father or mother gives life to children, they should have the power to take that life away.  Indeed, in many ancient societies, infanticide was condoned, sometimes even encouraged.  As recently as the Roman Republic, the law permitted fathers the absolute power of life and death over their children – even their adult children.*

In modern society, we do not recognize this right of parents over the lives of their children.  The case for this could be made as follows: as soon as a person comes into existence, but not before,** he is endowed with a right to life.  In other words, because life has value, and because this person has life, we cannot – usually – take it away from him, thereby depriving him of this morally valuable thing that he has.

This argument does not supersede the argument that life has value and therefore we should be able to kill a fox to save children; rather, it is an extension of it.  Human life has such great moral importance, and therefore killing a human is such a great wrong, that we choose not to kill.  In essence, we give everyone a “free pass” from having their life judged insufficiently morally valuable to continue.  There are exceptions: suppose our speeding Mack truck had to choose between a busload of children and not a fox, but Hitler.  Almost everyone would choose to kill Hitler.  The reason we give all humans a free pass, a right to life, is that choices are almost never as clear-cut as choosing a busload of children’s lives over Hitler’s.  Even if we are in a situation where killing another person appears to offer substantial moral benefit to the universe, we usually consider the possibility that we are wrong, and by killing the person could merely be committing an enormous moral trespass, to be great enough that we choose not to kill.  Life has value, and therefore we choose never to reduce life by killing a person, despite merely potential future opportunities to increase life (or other moral goods) by doing so.

Phrased this way, two major differences emerge between killing a human and the ongoing industrial slaughter of animals.  First, the animals are not humans.  We ascribe moral value to their lives, perhaps even very great moral value, but we reserve the moral “free pass” for humans alone.  Second, since animals do not have a free pass, we have the ability to judge the moral value of their existence, and the conclusion, as described above, is unambiguously that these animals must die so that future animals can live.

What about suffering?  Is it okay to inflict suffering on animals so that we can eat them?  The arguments pertaining to killing apply analogously to suffering.  In broad strokes, there are situations where the infliction of suffering is justified.  One of these situations is when a little bit of suffering can be inflicted on one entity to avoid a lot of suffering for another.  In many cases, we exempt humans from such considerations because we believe human suffering to be an exceptionally great moral evil.  Animals do not get this free pass, and so when we judge whether their suffering is outweighed by the joy we generate through their exploitation, a case can be made that more joy is generated than suffering inflicted.

It is at this point in the argument that I think room for legitimate disagreement arises.  Most people assume the conclusion I just made, that the total human joy in eating is morally more valuable than whatever suffering animals experience during the course of their farming.  However, as the rising interest in free range meat shows, many people are beginning to question this assumption, or realize that animals are suffering considerably more for their enjoyment than previously thought.  I think the free range meat movement is proof that people are not “meat-crazed” egocentric hedonists, but rather utilitarians who place a high enough moral value on animal suffering that they are willing to pay to diminish it.

Free range meat has not taken over the market; clearly there is either disagreement about the precise moral value of animal suffering or about exactly how much the animals do suffer.  Whatever conclusion you have come to, happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy your turkey, whether it be free range or otherwise.  If you’re not eating a turkey, just think about all the animals that didn’t get born because of you.

[I can already hear the vegans screaming, "Yes, born to a life of suffering!"  That, alas, is where the argument gets extremely complicated.  But consider this: if you are a vegan, would you eat meat that had previously lived a brief but extremely happy life, and that resulted in more brief but happy lives following it?  If the answer is "No," then our disagreement does not lie in the complicated argument.]

*This page provides more information.

**Pro-life and pro-choice advocates, I think, are in substantial agreement here; their disagreement could probably be reduced to a debate about the precise moment when life begins, or the precise moment when the endowment with rights occurs, or in the worst case, the exact moment when the life becomes sufficiently human that the endowment with the right to life achieves moral importance surpassing the woman’s prerogative to do whatever she wants.

Story of Civilization – II.4.XXVI.i – II.Epilogue

In its final stages, the “Hellenistic era”, Greek civilization was expanded to the farthest reaches of the Mediterranean world by Alexander the Great.  Philosophy flourished in Athens until the conquest of all Greece by Rome.

It is one of Durant’s signal remarks that “a nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean”.  Ironically, the Stoic philosophy was a late development in Greek civilization, perhaps even the final product of Greek thought.

At first blush, Stoicism appears to be an attempt to live life according to reason, that is, to fill the vacuum that the sophists had left with their attack on religion with a natural ethic.  Upon further investigation, though, it appears that Stoicism is merely Hindu mysticism transmitted to the West.  Stoic metaphysics pictures the universe as the mind of some omnipresent God, with its laws and workings being His thoughts.  The individual ought to live his life in accordance with this cosmic stream of being.  Atman and Brahman anyone?  The tepid astemiousness and desire to escape pain by apathy and ultimately suicide echo the Indian mystic as much as Pythagoras’s doctrine of the transmigration of souls.

It seems to me, then, that Stoicism is at best a religion where “Reason”, whatever that is, is also the name of the God.  As Greek civilization suffered war after war, and conquest after conquest, perhaps people turned to this pseudo-religiosity to offer hope, much as they would soon turn to Christianity.

The pseudo-religious conclusions that spring from Stoic metaphysics wouldn’t be so bad if the metaphysics weren’t also total nonsense.  This is, unfortunately, the pitfalls of many of the early Greek systems of philosphy.  Things that in our time have well-understood explanations were in Greek times thought to be forever restricted to the realm of speculation.  The Stoic division of the universe into matter and Divine Mind (Logos, ether, fire, blah blah blah whatevery ou want to call it), with matter as the passive force and Logos as the active force could correspond roughly to our own concepts of matter and energy.  The problem is that the Greek concepts, vague and imprecise, do not offer the Greeks predictive power.  Instead, they offer what I would call speculative power.  The Greeks speculate that the soul is made of energy, and returns to the all-encompassing energy of the Universe, Logos, when the individual dies.  This could correspond roughly to our idea that thought is carried on by electrical currents and neurotransmitters, and that when we die, the energy in the molecules of our brain travels elsewhere… but in what sense was it ever really separated from the rest of the universe in the first place?  And why should we care?  The Greeks use speculative power to conclude that we must live in accordance with the Logos to which we shall return, but why would we ever want to live in accordance with energy as we now understand it?

In short, the Greeks wished to found a natural ethic based on their understanding of the world, but their attempt was flawed because they understood so little – or at least so little of the details of – the world around them.  Our improved understanding of the natural world has revealed the futility – at least the present futility – of attempting to infer a natural ethic as the Greeks wished to do, which is to say, an ethic explicitly, deductively, and objectively drawn from our understanding of nature.

Story of Civilization – II.3.XIV.iv.3 – II.3.XVI.iii

We pass from Greek art and architecture to Greek thought.  Chapter XVI is entitled “The Conflict of Philosophy and Religion”.  It is instructive to see that this conflict, which in the modern day is properly the conflict between science and religion, is as old as civilization.

Philosophy, in its proper application, is the study of the question “What should we do?”  Science is the study of the question “How should we do it?”.  In other words, philosophy tries to achieve an understanding of the human role in the world, while science is an attempt to gain predictive power of the world, and to use knowledge of the world to manipulate it toward the ends that philosophy discovers for us.

Philosophy and science are both in opposition to religion, which in its original incarnation, provided at once an answer to all of the questions that science and philosophy declined to answer.  Original religion provided metaphysics, or cosmology, to explain the world, and the belief in the supposed predictive power of such cosmologies was quite sincere.  Evidence of this exists in the numerous rituals and chicanery (that have thankfully diminished over the course of history) designed by priests to effect their ends, from exorcisms and prayers to rain dances, curses, and entrail-reading.  It is of course also the case that religion provided, at various points in history, arbitrary codes of ethics.

Science has been more successful in dislodging religion from its territory than has philosophy. Rarely do we hear religious apologists appealing to religion’s predictive power – at least over any events that any of us can have any knowledge of – or religion’s usefulness in explaining phenomena in a way superior to science.  Creationists and faith healers are rightly regarded as the lunatic fringe. Apologists more often appeal to the inadequacy of modern ethics.  “Do not discard religion,” they say, “for with0ut it, do you not fear how men will act?” This is probably bubkus, but it is not our goal here to resolve this question forever.

Rather, we wish to shed light on the current conflicts between science and religion, and to understand the visceral opposition of some segment of the public to scientific methods of inquiry, by analyzing the origin of these conflicts.  Perhaps one of the first philosophers to be persecuted for denying the gods was Anaxagoras, an Athenian tutor of Pericles, the great statesman.  He invented the idea of “Nous”, perhaps translated as “mind”, to explain the organization and behavior of all things.  He argued that the sun was not a god, but a red-hot rock, and sought natural explanations for many other phenomena previously explained by religion.  Anaxagoras’s ideas were satired and mocked to no end, and he was good-humoredly given the nickname “Nous”; perhaps all of this was fitting, given the lack of evidentiary support for his hypotheses.

Two things ended up getting Anaxagoras into trouble.  The first was that he was a friend of Pericles.  In one of the first recorded acts of hypocrisy and disingenuousness in history, the opponents of Pericles targeted Anaxagoras, because Pericles himself, by his popularity, was untouchable.  Anaxagoras’s impiety, which had previously been taken with good humor, or even lack of interest, became under the magnifying glass of Pericles’s enemies’ hatred, a source of frightful danger to the state.

This charge was not entirely unjust.  Just as in the case of Socrates, the skepticism of Anaxagoras was threatening, in a way, to the state.  Unlike the modern state, the Greek city-states, including Athens, were based explicitly on religion, a religion that was much more universal and ubiquitous than religion today.  Athens itself, the dwelling-place of Anaxagoras and home of Pericles, was named after Athena.  To insult the gods, or to undermine the population’s belief in them, was to physically threaten the state with the gods’ wrath, to destabilize the populace by delegitimizing the state itself, and ultimately, cf. Socrates, to corrupt the morals of the people.  It was not, to my knowledge, until Locke that a truly secular theory of state was created.

These facts suggest that the current conflict between religion and science is utterly useless.  In the first place, it is as disingenuous as the original attack on Anaxagoras.  The Republican leadership shamelessly applies wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage to mobilize a part of its base.  This characterization of Republican action rests not so much on the alleged unimportance of these issues according to Democrats, but on the relative lack of action by Republicans themselves when in power.  For six years the Republicans had both houses of Congress and the Presidency.  Are we any closer to outlawing abortion or gay marriage?  They clearly don’t give a damn.  [I'm being a bit sweeping here, but I'm too lazy to look up the facts.  Corrections are welcome.]

The second issue, Anaxagoras’s threat to the state, also illustrates the uselessness of the current conflicts.  Religion is not the basis of our state, does not legitimize it, regardless of how true it is that the founders recognized a universal God in their documents.  Whether we acknowledge God in the Pledge of Allegiance or on our coins, or whether we do not, in either case, it remains true that the government was established by the people, for the people, of the people… and this would cause most people to consider it a legitimate sovereignty even if God were to manifestly disappear in a puff of smoke.  To dispute God would not be threatening to the state, even if it were granted to be unpatriotic.

Story of Civilization – II.3.XIV.i – II.3.XIV.iv.3

Today’s reading covered Periclean sculpture and architecture.  Architecture was disappointing; I suspect that it cannot be appreciated without much more in the way of visuals.

Sculpture, however, was interesting.  It was in the Periclean age that sculpture first approached perfection.  By exploring variation of pose, movement, symmetry, and angle, Greek sculptors achieved considerably more verisimilitude than the stolid, heavy works of the Egyptians or Assyrians.

We are reminded that the Greeks painted many of their statues, and so these did not appear as stony monuments, but almost as vivid or lifelike as a wax model today.

The Greek sculptors were obsessed with the athlete as a subject, and devoted much of their sculpture to admiration of the athletic form in all its perfection.  Durant says something to the effect of “they painted men as they ought to be, as they wished them to be, rather than as they were”.

How inspiring it must have been to walk the streets of Greece.  One imagines that these stone and marble exemplars dotted every intersection, adorned the vestibule of every rich man’s house and shop.  Imagine how life would be if as we carried on our daily lives, Cato and Socrates and Charondas in all their glory sternly watched us.

For of course, if I could make a society, physical strength would be valued, but moral strength would be the greatest virtue, and these are the men I would post upon my street corners and temples.  Who could misbehave under Marcus Aurelius’s stern but benevolent eye?

Against Torture

In my writings on the right to bear arms, I’ve been hard on some of the writers at salon.com, so I thought I’d note that some actual thought is going on over there also.  Glenn Greenwald, here, provides an extremely good dissection of what was apparently a horrendous piece of journalism by the Washington Post.  The first half of Greenwald’s article is a frustrating argument against the contention of the Post article itself, that torture provided good information.  This part was frustrating to read, because it misses the obvious point that whatever information it provided, the torture was both illegal and immoral.  Fortunately, Greenwald eventually gets to this (more) important point in the second half, and provides us with some catharsis.

I mean seriously… torture is illegal… if you condone torture, you condone breaking the law, whenever, in your judgment, it’s okay to do so.  I mean, that’s basically the argument that the fascist talking heads are making: they think, that in their judgment, the ends justified the means, no matter how illegal and immoral the means were, so the rest of us can just shut the hell up.  Ergo, if any minority anywhere thinks any depraved, criminal act would benefit the majority of the nation, they should undertake it.  I heartily recommend Crito to any ignorant buffoon who doesn’t understand the idea that laws come before men.

Edit: I’ve been doing some thinking and it occurred to me that there is one aspect of this analysis that Greenwald overlooked.  The Post might not be writing this piece out of any desire to appear conservative or to support Dick Cheney… their true motive may be related to the fiction now vigorously pursued in our national dialogue that a “fair and balanced” debate will present two sides to every issue, no matter how factually incorrect or outrageous one of those sides will be.  In other words, the Post may be going out of its way to present a perspective on torture that appears to “balance” its generally “liberal” tilt, despite the fact that it understands – or at least believes – the piece to have little merit.  Gaaaaah.

On Executive Compensation – II

As the world economy continues to teeter on the brink of disaster, public outrage directs itself at wealthy financial executives.  These executives, it is said, have caused their companies to fail, but, by virtue of their companies being systemically essential, continue to receive bloated salaries through the largesse of the federal government.

In the latest episode of this saga, an AIG executive, Jake DeSantis, has publicly resigned with an op-ed letter to the New York Times.  In his letter, he offers what he imagines is a stirring defense of the many individuals in the financial industry who, believing themselves to be working under sacrosanct private contracts, have worked to resolve the economic mess without having played any role in its creatiaon.

A few points must be acknowledged.  First, Mr. DeSantis is correct that he was working under the sanctity of a private contract and that, so long as his firm remained solvent, it was the firm’s obligation to pay his bonus.  AIG was obligated to pay this bonus despite the fact that it received aid from the federal government to stay solvent.  It is true that if the company had gone bankrupt, he would not have received his bonus, but the company did not go bankrupt, and so he did receive his bonus, and all is right.  As I have argued previously, the government – and thereby the taxpayers’ – decision to bail out Mr. DeSantis’s firm is the reason that he was paid, and if they did not want his bonus paid, they should not have bailed out AIG.

Second, I certainly believe Mr. DeSantis and doubt that he played any role in the mortgage market, the credit default swap market, or any of the other precursors to the current disaster.  I even more strongly doubt that he had sufficient vision or intelligence to see beyond his own narrow field of finance and anticipate the impending disaster.  Finally, I most strongly doubt that Mr. DeSantis is any less talented than any of his colleagues; that is to say, the talent pool in the financial field is shallow enough that Mr. DeSantis’s lack of vision or intelligence is not individually damning, but a collective oversight of an entire profession, and so Mr. DeSantis’s bonus, by the meager standards of the day, was well-deserved.

Nonetheless, in the weeks since praising the Economist’s defense of Sir Fred Goodwin, I have wrestled with a great deal of disgust over not just the payment of these bonuses, but over the tone of moral righteousness that has been invoked by their recipients.  In general, these arguments – as summarized above – are logically correct, as far as they go.  The tone of moral righteousness is disgusting because these arguments do not go as far as they could.

An example of a logical extension to Mr. DeSantis’s argument might be as follows: You have received your payment in full.  We, the American taxpayers, do not want it back; we honor the fact that, when we became the owners of your firm, we agreed to uphold all of its contracts.  As the owners of your company, we, the taxpayers, are your employers.  It is the custom in our society for employers to have what is called “contact information” for their employees.  Please make available your home address and phone number to all of your employers.  (Though you have just resigned, we may have questions for you about the work you have done.)

Given the amount of popular (populist?) outrage over executive compensation, it is easy to imagine the sort of violence that might be perpetrated should the addresses of those executives receiving taxpayer-funded compensation be made public.  Would such violence be justice?  As an advocate of the rule of law, I cannot condone the murder of people who have never raised a  hand in violence; indeed, I would advocate the harshest penalties for anyone who committed such a crime.

Nonetheless, there is a certain justice in allowing a person to select his own fate; if financial executives believe that they are entitled to their bonuses, that their contracts are unchanged and their status as employees continues under the ownership of the taxpayers, they must accept that these employers, like their previous employers, have a right to certain information.  They must also accept whatever natural consequences follow from such a decision.

I suspect a few less executives would want to occupy the moral high ground if they acknowledged that it was soaked in blood.  In any case, I remain opposed to the principle of bailouts; the solution to the problem of executive compensation is to stop bailouts.  The solution I have proposed in this article is merely an attempt to remove from my ears the offensive moral cacophony coming from the likes of Jake DeSantis.

Praise of The Economist

Few individuals and few publications are true to their principles, especially as the obscuring fog of time contanstly enmeshes and ensnares.  The Economist is one of the few.  In an article last week, the Economist argued in defense of one Sir Fred Goodwin, an English peer who, after running his bank into the ground and causing it to be nationalized, retired early with a pension that in another time might have been called a golden parachute.  He will receive to the tune of 700,000 pounds sterling.

The Economist, while acknowledging Sir Fred’s seeming lack of moral sensibility, pointed out that he was – probably – legally entitled to the money under the terms of the contract under which he had been hired.  The Economist further pointed out that, should the British government choose to renege, every potentially controversial contract created in Great Britain in the future will carry a risk premium.  In other words, future golden parachutes will be even bigger, to compensate for the possibility that they may be arbitrarily dissolved by the government.

Freedom means many things.  One of the things it means is the freedom to do stupid things, and things injurious to the self.  The shareholders of Sir Fred’s bank chose to hire this incompetent man to ruin their business.  They have been justly punished by their business’s nationalization.  Now, the representatives of the people of England have chosen to pursue a certain course of action with respect to their newly-acquired bank, one they knew would result in the enrichment of Sir Fred.  Let the people be happy with their decision.  Perhaps if they had chosen another course – bankruptcy for Sir Fred’s bank? – the funds might not have been found to pay him.  But if they believe the solvency of his bank is essential to their prosperity, then they have bought that prosperity at the price of his enrichment.  They have gotten their just desserts, and the final dessert is the bitter pill of watching Sir Fred enter gilded retirement.