The Death of Certainty II -- Who Owns Me?

Just in case anyone was wondering, I've now taken in three of Michael Sander's Harvard lectures on "Justice," and unless I missed something waiting for the HD video feed to buffer, the Almighty hasn't been referenced once in the search for undergraduate truth. (There's a reason why
they call them "wise fools.") I kept thinking Michael would lead them to at least refer to Jefferson's formulation, ("endowed by their Creator.."), but no such luck. Perhaps--that's where the course is going?

If we don't "own ourselves," who does? The Libertarian argument against progressive taxation is that it represents a theft of our labor, and thus a declaration of ownership by the taxing authority. The Libertarian conludes that unfair taxation is really slavery in disguise and that it violates our ownership of ourselves, but contemporary progressives know slavery is wrong, so they are forced to conclude we don't own ourselves. We are owned by "society." That should set off a few alarm bells, but the students never really could get beyond the concept of majority rule. Professor Sandel, in fact, brow-beat them if they intimated any problem with democracy. I guess he was trying to get them to challenge the limits of mob rule, but no one really seemed to have the answer: we do not own ourselves. How could we "own" ourselves when we we did nothing to create "ourselves?" How could a watch claim ownership of itself? Doesn't the clock-maker own the watch? Doesn't the weaver own the blanket? If the modern mind can't accept God as our owner, it needs to accept "society" as our owner, and the governing democratic arm of society, in these United States, is Congress.

Have you seen Congress lately?

No thanks.

More Funerals for Certainty

If you have an hour or so to spare, you might want to watch what the current crop of Harvard undergraduates are debating. In this WGBH/Harvard University production, professor Michel Sandel encourages the students to imagine themselves on a trolley car without brakes, heading for five rail workers, destined to die if the trolley car doesn't stop. Professor Sandel adds this twist: as trolley car drivers, they can choose to divert their car down a spur line and only kill one rail worker by changing course.

What do they do? Kill the five workers or kill the one worker?



The discussion all takes place in Sanders Theater, where the deep burgundy-brown weight of the walls and the ancient, vaulted light combine to make the participants look unequal to the question. (With a few exceptions, Harvard students don't seem to use the King's English, or marshal the great ideas with any precision these days.)

Professor Sandel is leading them all down the road to consideration of the famous case known as The Queen vs. Dudley and Stephens, the generic version of which has been standard fodder for values clarification courses in public high school. It involves the decision of a ship's captain--adrift in a life-boat after the loss of his ship--to kill an ailing orphan cabin boy, so as to feed the remainder of the crew.

Of course, these scenarios tend to involve endless nuance--did the cabin boy give his consent, would it have been more fair to "draw straws," would the trolley car scenario have been more fair if a fat guy had been pushed over a bridge to stop its progress? (This was literally Professor Sandel's invention, tempting us to wonder, was he inviting the students to conclude "fat people" are expendable?)



In only one instance did I see a student stand and say "murder is murder." Professor Sandel seemed to wax a little indignant at this point, if only for the sake of the drama, and he reminded the student that England was very sympathetic to the plight of the captain. The other lifeboat members, after all, had family waiting for them; the orphan had none. Wouldn't the sum total of happiness be increased by favoring the lives of those who had families?

The student didn't flinch. "That's the argument for street crime," he said. "You kill someone on the sidewalk to feed your family."



Unfortunately, this is about as close as any student got to the ten commandments, or any real sense of the axiomatic. One student did say, flat out, "you don't eat human beings," but most students gave what I would have to call technocratic formulations of maximized value, or sneaky narratives about how to avoid the question altogether.



In an 18th century version of the same exchange, a Harvard classroom full of future ministers and lawyers would make--without question--some reference to the Almighty. Someone would surely step forward with the bold pronouncement, "we have no authority to make such a decision" or "better all die than to remain alive without honor."



Perhaps that sense of the unquestioned--that moral stonewall between God's territory and our own--was behind the "murder is murder" comment, but few contemporary college students would dare even intimate they were leaning on eternal truth, much less mention God and man at Harvard, or Yale, or Stanford, or even Cal State San Bernardino. (We did have a young friend who mentioned Jesus at a local community college class, only to be threatened with an eye gouging by devout Muslims in the parking lot afterwards, but that's a different story.)

Some folks think that's all well and good. It's better to argue morality in purely secular terms, but there are some assumptions no one seems to be considering. At the beginning of the course, most of the students just assumed that preserving five lives was a good thing, even at the price of another. But the preservation of human life itself, is, arguably, a gift of our Judeo-Christian ancestors. Some cultures value life so little they throw virgins in Volcanoes and widows on funeral pyres.

What happens when the biblical assumptions are washed away by another generation of academics who think God's axioms are too quaint to acknowledge? What happens when technically educated but morally illiterate biologists run the world?



I guess that's already happening. We're letting Sacramento farmers starve in order to preserve a two inch minnow.



Welcome to the Brave New World. Good work, Harvard.

The Tedious Obligation of Repeating the Truth...

James Riley

The first lady took some grief this week, when she claimed her Olympic-pitching trip to Europe would constitute a "sacrifice." According to one source, the first lady enjoys the services of 30 staff members, five press secretaries, and several private chefs, so if you picture life at the White House, it's not so hard to see a first-class European vacation as something of a sacrifice. (I'm a bit of a home-body myself and I don't even have one press secretary.) Trying to convince the International Olympic Committee that gang-infested Chicago would be a great place for a peace-through-atheletics confab seems like a sacrifice to me as well--but the sacrifice would have more to do with self-respect than material comfort.



It calls to mind a sorry truth about economic policy debates: the people who are entrusted to make the decisions almost never feel their real world consequences. Fidel Castro has lived a life of lavish personal indulgence for nearly five decades, even as his people ration soap and mattresses. Kim Jong-il, North Korea's Marxist emperor-god, lives in what Time Magazine called a "seven story pleasure palace," complete with a wave-pool and motorized boogie boards and every instance of Western materialism you can nail to the walls or spread out over a wet bar.

Of course, extravagance of this sort is not just the province of the Marxist aristocracy. The old world nobility was pretty good at this too. Take a look at any pre-19th century prince, earl or even lowly baronet, and you'll see the rich oil colors of Rubens and Ramsay bathing the young princes in silk and silver.



Any economic system, in other words, can keep a few people in clover. The great irony is that socialism, and its evil sister Communism actually claim to be working on behalf of the masses--and their record is far worse than any monarchy you can imagine. Far from establishing an equal distribution of goods and services, Marxists concentrate wealth among the ruling elite and that ruling class can only remain in power through the kind of brutal suppression that would make a Russian Czar wince. Stalin made Adolph Hitler and the Spanish Inquisitors look like school yard bullies--killing or starving something like fifty million of his own people. Conversely, good old free market capitalism is far better at getting, and establishing a sturdy middle class--and this is really, really, really old news. When, François, Marquis de Barbé-Marbois traveled through American in 1777, he marveled at not being able to find any poor. With a low and easy tax burden, the people were free to feed themselves. It's elementary, Watson.



The tiring truth is that the American people have already learned this lesson, several times. (Sometimes I feel like a teacher with some very slow students.) Back in the sixties and seventies, there was a crypto-romance with socialism and I can remember the day when even the New Yorker admitted, in 1989, that communism was dead. The trophy socialist-states of Sweden and Norway were beginning to grind to a halt and Ronald Reagan had initiated a sustained recovery that turned into a boom, merely by giving the people their money back.



I remember this all clearly because for many years academic, media and union types branded you backward for questioning the great class-free dream of the socialist state. I can remember Ben Stein asking the simple question, towards the end of Jimmy Carter national malaise, why did Hollywood nearly always portray the businessman--the one who employs your kids--as the villain? Why was capitalism always the enemy, when, clearly it provided a better standard of living for more people than any other system yet known to man? The national flirtation with socialism is the macro-equivalent of a despondent man binging on comfort food or drugs. I can remember how sick America once was on this front. I can remember Nixon's wage and price controls. I can remember Jane Fonda sitting her skinny, ugly carcass down on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun. I can remember my junior high history teacher, lovingly talking up the Soviet model.

I remember how sick America really was.

So when the New Yorker admitted defeat, it was like a re-birth of the republic. Fresh air. Victory lap. Morning in America again. Every man tending his own vine in the new world. Freedom at last.

..So I hate the current turn of events, the fat, mental laziness of Michael Moore and Garrison Keillor and Rahm Immanuel. It's like explaining something for the ten millionth time to a rebellious child. It's like cleaning the back patio plate glass, only to find it all smudged up again. It's like a flu you've been through and can't shake.



Not this again.



I like history, but I hate repeating it.

Wants, Needs, Desires...and where Fall fits into that whole thing...

The Upper Pumpkin Patch September 30, 2009              

In college they made me read Sigmund Freud, and, even in college, where no one really thinks, I rebelled. Somewhere in the middle of "Civilization and its Discontents," I looked up from a colloquium I was assigned to lead, and I summarized the text by saying, "in this long, boring passage, Freud tells us everything he knows about the streets of Ancient Rome."

Almost everyone laughed, even the instructor. There was one little New Yorker, a child of Marxists, who scowled at me because I was trashing one of his household icons, but most reasonable people enjoyed hearing their own impressions confirmed. College students, in the last fifty years, are figuratively required to bow down and kiss the feet of Marx, Darwin and Freud--three of the biggest losers who ever graced the planet. I say "loser," not because their influence hasn't been substantial, but because their souls are so parched and their world is so relentlessly physical that you have a hard time imagining any of them with a grandchild on their knee. Their world, and the world they have created, is very cold.



A few days ago, a Facebook friend posted a link to a documentary * about a disciple (and relative) of Freud, Edward Bernays, who pioneered "public relations" in America and the concept of product placement in feature films. He was even credited with transforming the image of Calvin Coolidge by bringing celebrities to the White House. I guess his most dubious achievement was paving the way for female cigarette-smoking by re-branding the weed as a "torch of freedom" and linking it to female sufferage. (There was also the standard Freudian interpretation of cigarettes; it's not exactly a documentary for the little kids.) The grain of truth, by my take, in this world of smoke and mirrors is the notion that people don't always make decisions with their rational, thinking selves. They don't buy shoes based on how long the sole leather lasts but how the shoes make them feel about themselves.A 19th century advertisement, in other words, might talk about the shoes' comfort and reliability and workmanship. A 20th century ad will make you feel like a bold, independent romantic -- just because you purchased the right loafers.



Of course, Freud, made it a little more primal than that, but in one sense, whether you call our savage desires "Id" or "sin," it really isn't very innovative to say that we're a mix of motivations when it comes to what we buy--some lofty and some not so lofty. The fact that advertising is now talking to our underpants instead of our minds and hearts, isn't so much a sign of advertising getting more effective as it is an indication we're not the people our great great grandparents were. They could buy shoes based on craftsmanship; we buy them to join a club, and to show off our membership.



Truly, I spend a lot of time wondering how I can woo people up here. A business doesn't do anything, good or bad, until someone agrees to buy its product, so I don't apologize for my marketing obsession, but I think our place puts the lie to Freud and Bernays and the whole slew of Mad Men who think we can't sell anything unless a pretty girl is showing off her nylons. (God created pretty girls, and I have no objection to using them in an ad, but there's a difference between selling an indiscretion and selling a marriage.)



When I look at the pumpkin field up there, I see a marriage. I'm not sure how much time I would spend in a purely clinical explanation of the pumpkins' fiber content or their vitamin/mineral mix, or even how easy they are to carve. I do get it. We're selling sizzle along with the steak. I understand that people don't buy pumpkins on the basis of their chemical inventory, but I think it's a tad demeaning to turn people into pools of Freudian Id and sell to their death wish or their night terrors.

The reality is far different. Before the three stooges took over (Marx, Freud, and Darwin), scholars looked to the ancient texts for truth, and those texts told us,

"What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the angels; you crowned him with glory and honor and put everything under his feet." -- Hebrews 2:6-8

I suppose someone could reasonably ask, "when you sell corn on the cob from the barbecue, are you really selling something as abstract as 'honor?'' Or 'how is a purchasing a grilled cheese sandwich at the tavern connected to something as lofty as 'courage?'" How does walking around the pumpkin patch make you a little lower than the angels?



Well..try it some time, and I think you'll see it's not so outrageous at all. It certainly beats the way Freud would sell a day in the pumpkin patch.