All posts in category Periodical Notes

Tag, you’re Hitler

The 7 June 2010 issue of The Nation includes a review of some book about Ayn Rand.

The part of the review that I wanted to note came about halfway in, where the reviewer, Corey Robin, quotes some remarks from Hitler and Goebbels that sound eerily like things Rand and the heroes of her novels habitually said. Applying the Führerprinzip to the world of economics, Hitler in 1933 told an audience of business leaders:

Everything positive, good and valuable that has been achieved in the world in the field of economics or culture is solely attributable to the importance of personality…. All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the select few.

Robin has an easy time finding examples of Rand saying very similar things. Robin goes on:

If the first half of Hitler’s economic views celebrates the romantic genius of the individual industrialist, the second spells out the inegalitarian implications of the first. Once we recognize “the outstanding achievements of individuals,” Hitler says in Düsseldorf, we must conclude that “people are not of equal value or of equal importance.” Private property “can be morally and ethically justified only if [we] admit that men’s achievements are different.” An understanding of nature fosters a respect for the heroic individual, which fosters an appreciation of inequality in its most vicious guise. “The creative and decomposing forces in a people always fight against one another.”

Again, Robin can open Rand’s works almost at random and find passages that are almost identical to these translations.

Robin attributes these similarities to the common influence of Nietzsche on Rand and the Nazis. Certainly Rand did study Nietzsche’s works; and certainly there were periods when the Nazis tried to use Nietzsche’s name. But I think that there is a simpler explanation.

The Nazi party existed for about 25 years. It ruled Germany for half that period. During those years, Hitler, Goebbels, and the other Nazi princes made speeches and issued other public statements numerous enough to fill a library. That Robin can rummage through those countless pages and find a few remarks that sound eerily reminiscent of the works of Ayn Rand tells us nothing about Rand and next to nothing about the Nazis.

As a critique of Rand’s ideas, Robin’s argumentum ad Hitlerem is ludicrously unfair. As a way of playing a game with Rand and her acolytes, however, it can be justified by the old maxim “turnabout is fair play.” In 1963, Rand gave a speech titled “The Fascist New Frontier.” In this speech, she claimed that the strongest influence on the ideology of the administration of President John F. Kennedy was not Marx or Keynes or Harold Laski, as the president’s right-wing critics sometimes claimed, but that the Kennedy administration was a fascist group. To support this claim, she juxtaposed snippets of President Kennedy’s public statements with snippets of similar-sounding statements from Hitler, Goebbels, Mussolini, etc. So, if President Kennedy or his spokesmen said that ideological labels were of little importance, or that personal sacrifice was the index of patriotism, or that strong leadership is essential for national greatness, she would track down some remark from some Nazi or Fascist making the same point. That the Nazis and Fascists did not invent these ideas, that they have been commonplaces of political discussion for centuries and may very possibly be true, did not seem to her to matter very much. In Rand’s view of history, Naziism was simply an unfolding of ideas that were already fully developed in the philosophies of thinkers like Kant and Plato. So, the fact that an idea was familiar long before the end of the First World War doesn’t excuse it from being a symptom of Fascist orr Nazi ideology.

Robin’s invocation of Nietzsche may suggest a similar theory of history, but the rest of the piece shows a different view. Robin praises Aristotle at length:

Unlike Kant, the emblematic modern who claimed that the rightness of our deeds is determined solely by reason, unsullied by need, desire or interest, Aristotle rooted his ethics in human nature, in the habits and practices, the dispositions and tendencies, that make us happy and enable our flourishing. And where Kant believed that morality consists of austere rules, imposing unconditional duties upon us and requiring our most strenuous sacrifice, Aristotle located the ethical life in the virtues. These are qualities or states, somewhere between reason and emotion but combining elements of both, that carry and convey us, by the gentlest and subtlest of means, to the outer hills of good conduct. Once there, we are inspired and equipped to scale these lower heights, whence we move onto the higher reaches. A person who acts virtuously develops a nature that wants and is able to act virtuously and that finds happiness in virtue. That coincidence of thought and feeling, reason and desire, is achieved over a lifetime of virtuous deeds. Virtue, in other words, is less a codex of rules, which must be observed in the face of the self’s most violent opposition, than it is the food and fiber, the grease and gasoline, of a properly functioning soul.

So Robin praises Aristotle precisely for his sense of change and development, his attempt to explain how the same action or idea can have different significance in different circumstances. Robin thus jettisons the idea that gives Rand an excuse for her method of using quotations from historical villains to play “gotcha” with her adversaries. The comments Robin quotes may drip with menace when we reflect on their source; spoken by another person in another setting, the same words might be rather anodyne, or even true. For example, the claim that “Private property ‘can be morally and ethically justified only if [we] admit that men’s achievements are different'” would seem to be eminently defensible, even if words to that effect once appeared in a speech delivered by history’s least defensible man.

by acilius on May 26, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in The Nation

Tagged Argumentum ad Hitlerem, aristotle, Ayn Rand, Nietzsche, Virtue Ethics

Posted by acilius on May 26, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/26/tag-youre-hitler/

The Wrong Man?

I continue my attempt to catch up on “Periodicals Notes” with this bit about the May issue of The Atlantic.

The most widely discussed article in the issue was David Freed’s “The Wrong Man,” about Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. When several envelopes containing anthrax were sent to American politicians and journalists in the fall of 2001, the FBI investigated Dr Hatfill. The article makes it clear why; the anthrax in the envelopes came from Hatfill’s place of employment, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill was in Britain when one of the letters was mailed from Britain; he was in Florida when another letter was mailed from Florida. Most intriguingly, though Hatfill is an American he served in the Rhodesian army defending white minority rule in that African country in the 1970s. The unit in which Hatfill served, the Selous Scouts, operated in the area where a major anthrax outbreak killed more than 10,000 members of the tribes that most fiercely opposed white rule. Freed points out that “a majority of the soldiers in the Rhodesian army, and in Hatfill’s unit, were black”; he does not pause to acknowledge that a black citizen of Rhodesia might have had a different motivation for joining the Rhodesian army than would an American. Freed also says that “many well-respected scientists” concluded that the outbreak had an innocent explanation; this conclusion becomes a bit dubious when we see that a member of the Selous Scouts had been in the US Army’s elite Green Berets shortly before the outbreak and would wind up working at the Army’s chief bioweapons facility some years later. Freed asserts Hatfill’s innocence throughout the article, but succeeds in showing why the FBI originally suspected him and why some might suspect that the investigation may have been short-circuited to cover up high-level misdeeds in which he was involved.

Elsewhere in the issue, Jon Zobenica recommends two books as anitdotes to the myth that American soldiers were models of chivalry during World War Two, Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed. Leckie and Sledge both served in the Pacific as Marines, and neither man’s memoir gives an inch to romanticism or propaganda. These two books formed much of the basis for a recent TV drama about the war in the Pacific. Some commentators have praised the show for its gritty realism; having read the books, though, Zobenica can report that the producers sanitized the characters based on Sledge and Leckie in ways that the men never sanitized their own records.

by acilius on May 26, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in The Atlantic Monthly

Tagged anthrax, eugene sledge, hatfill, robert leckie

Posted by acilius on May 26, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/26/the-wrong-man/

Funny Times, June 2010

They haven’t posted the cover for this month’s Funny Times online yet, so I’ve put up this Keith Knight cartoon with a link to the magazine’s homepage.

Jon Winokur’s “Curmudgeon” quotes Emile Capouya on the high school teacher’s mission: “A high school teacher, after all, is a person deputized by the rest of us to explain to the young what sort of world they are living in, and to defend, if possible, the part their elders are playing in it.” That’s one of many reasons I rejoice in not being a high school teacher.

Matt Bors wonders what people really mean when they say “teach the controversy.”

Zippy the Pinhead wishes he could to travel back in time to the year 1885. He changes his mind when a disembodied head with a neatly waxed mustache announces that in that year, “schoolchildren were routinely flogged, pigs ran loose in th’ streets, and heroin was sold over the counter as ‘cough medicine.'” In related news, I now wish I could travel back in time to 1885.

Click on the image to the left to see a genuinely funny installment of This Modern World from April.

Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown calls on the state of Virginia to “Let Confederate History Month be the festival of self-loathing it should be.” I hold no brief for the Confederate States of America or for Virginia’s official commemoration of it, but I’m decidedly against all festivals of self-loathing. For one thing, self-loathing usually seems to be a form of narcissism. That same cartoon shows how that is. Dangle depicts a bunch of yahoos waving Confederate flags and exclaiming “We used to own human slaves.” Well, they didn’t, did they. Perhaps their great-great-great-grandparents owned human slaves, but a great-great-great-grandparent is after all a very distant relative. Beating yourself up over the misdeeds of someone so remote is merely a way of keeping attention focused on oneself rather than others. If your ancestors created a system that continues to privilege you and to do injustice to groups of which you are not a member, staging a festival of self-loathing may be the very worst thing you can do. Your privilege puts you in the spotlight, your self-loathing just keeps you there.

by acilius on May 25, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Comics, FunnyTimes

Tagged Emile Capouya, Keith Knight, matt bors, tom tomorrow, Troubletown

Posted by acilius on May 25, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/25/funny-times-june-2010/

The Nation, 31 May 2010

The cover story is an article about the new UK government, a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Like a column elsewhere in the issue, this article focuses on the differences in policy that have in the past separated the Conservative Party (aka “the Tories”) from the Liberal Democrats. Also like that column, it leaves unmentioned what seems to me the most noteworthy similarity between these two parties: neither has any chance of winning a majority in the House of Commons in any future election. The campaign just passed presented the Conservative Party with the most favorable circumstances imaginable. They were the chief opposition to a Labour government that had been in power for 13 years; the economy was in recession; Britain was involved in an unpopular war in Afghanistan; and the prime minister was Gordon Brown, who at times seemed to be deliberately trying to make it impossible for voters to support him. If, even with all those advantages combined, the Tories still failed to reach the 326 seat mark, then we can take it as settled once and for all that no possible conditions will ever allow them to form a government on their own.

For their part, the Liberal Democrats have spent decades clamoring for Britain to adopt a system of proportional representation. Though the pieces on the Tory-Liberal Democratic coalition in this issue focus on the supposedly incongruous nature of the coupling, it is clear that the adoption of such a system is now vital to the interest of the Conservative Party. First-past-the-post electoral systems generally give rise to competition between two major parties. These parties alternate in power. If the UK retains its first-past-the-post system of parliamentary representation, it will be only a matter of time before it returns to a situation in which two major parties contend for the majority in the House of Commons. The Conservative Party cannot contend for that majority; therefore, if the current system survives, the Tories will perish. While the Tories can never again be a majority party, they might very well hold on to their status as one of the biggest minority parties.

by acilius on May 25, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in The Nation

Tagged UK General Election

Posted by acilius on May 25, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/25/the-nation-31-may-2010/

The poisoned feast

A listening device

Like most publications produced on a tiny budget, Counterpunch is very uneven in quality. In April, for example, they came out with an issue that was mostly taken up with a monologue that their reporter JoAnn Wypijewski heard from some man she met while covering an anti-Obama rally. The monologue was an exposition of the man’s crude racism. When Wypijewski demurs from one of his antiblack tirades, he tells her that he isn’t surprised to hear that from a white woman, that the white race is destroying itself and so it only makes sense that she would seek to survive by giving her allegiance to “a savage race.” It went on and on in that vein. The conversation ended with the man giving Wypiejewski’s business card back to her because her name includes a sequence of letters that spells “Jew.” I suppose the point of giving so much space to this sort of garbage was to show that racism is alive and well in the USA and is an animating force on the political right. The editors may have decided to include some portions for comic relief; I must admit there were moments when Mrs Acilius and I laughed out loud at the man’s idiocy. Still, I can’t believe it is really necessary to give so much publicity to such foolish views.

The issue for 1-15 May is much better. There’s an interview with Michael Pollan, who has become well known as a critic of the way Americans now produce and consume food. The interview is excerpted from Kreisler’s new book Political Awakenings. The part that most stuck with me was Pollan’s identification of the four tenets of what he calls “the ideology of Nutritionism.” This ideology tells us, first, that “foods don’t matter, nutrients do”; second, that “you can divide the world into good and bad nutrients”; third, “if the important thing in food is a nutrient, and nutrients are invisible to normal people, you need experts to tell you how to eat”; fourth, “the whole point of eating is health.” To follow these doctrines is to be estranged from “our sense of eating as a complex social, as well as biological, phenomenon, involving community and identity and pleasure.” While a dish is defined as food because it is part of customs that bind people together, whether by eating in family groups or giving a meal to a guest or sharing a feast as a community, a chemical is defined a nutrient because of its role in the functioning of a single body. While food can excel aesthetically, and like other aesthetic experiences can always offer us something new to learn, a nutrient can only be judged by preset standards derived from medicine. While food is governed by cultural norms that have evolved over the millennia, nutrients are overseen by an infant science that has barely advanced beyond superstition. While the production of food is a process that has traditionally nourished both humans and soil, the extraction of nutrients depletes soil and pollutes the human body. I wonder if it would be helpful to go further than Pollan and to define food as a gift. A gift we receive from a host, from nature, from God; a gift we pass on to those with whom we share important bonds. Perhaps this sense of gift is the key to a truly healthy use of eating.

The other story in the issue is also an excerpt from another publication, this time from the Russian magazine Smena. Like Pollan’s interview, it tells of a corrupted gift, a poisoned feast. Igor Atamanenko gives us the story of a gift the United States Ambassador to the Soviet Union received from Stalin in 1943. It was a magnificently carved wooden piece depicting the Great Seal of the United States. The ambassador hung the piece in his private office. He and the next three to hold the post kept it there until 1952, periodically redecorating the office to highlight the extraordinary beauty of the carving. As it turns out, the carving enclosed an electronic listening device that gave Soviet State Security access to all of the ambassador’s conversations. The device was so sophisticated that when it was finally discovered, it took the Americans years to produce a working copy. As it turns out, the inventor responsible for this extraordinarily advanced listening device was none other than Lev Sergeyevich Termen, known to music-lovers in the West as Léon Theremin, inventor of a musical instrument that is played without being touched.

by acilius on May 24, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Counterpunch

Tagged michael pollan, theremin

Posted by acilius on May 24, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/24/the-poisoned-feast/

Funny Times, May 2010

It’s always been my habit to go to ground during the summers, so it isn’t much of a surprise that I’ve fallen behind in my “Periodicals Notes.” Not that anyone has complained, but I’ll be catching up a bit over the next few days. First up is May’s Funny Times.

There’s an installment of Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown that I thought was hilarious when it first appeared back in February. It’s about the political movement known as the “teabaggers,” Americans of a rightward bent who have been vocal about their opposition to the Obama administration. Dangle is mystified that the teabaggers have been the object of so much publicity. My favorite line from the comic is “600 people showed up for their convention. That’s almost as many as the Sheboygan High School science fair!”

Matt Bors has a good comic about privacy, I was reminded of it by this recent xkcd.

Jon Winokur’s “Curmudgeon” compiles quotes about money, including this from Brigid Brophy: “Whenever people say, ‘We mustn’t be sentimental,’ you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, ‘We must be realistic,’ they mean they are going to make money out of it.” Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, but she does have a point. So did Mary Gordon, when she wrote: “The use of money is the purest act of faith; no anchorite who has followed a vision into the desert has acted on an idea as far-fetched as our belief that if we put a dollar in a machine we will be drinking a Diet Coke in a minute.” Andrea Dworkin is a name you don’t expect to encounter in a humor column, but she’s here: “Money talks, but it speaks with a male voice.” Given Dworkin’s personal history as a woman who was once forced into sex work to escape an abusive partner, I can’t imagine laughing at that line, but I can certainly take it seriously.

Some would say that laughter is the ultimate form of seriousness. If so, Dave Maleckar’s “Hundred Word Rant” may have hit on a way to take sex work seriously. Arguing that people who like to cook should not open restaurants, he concludes thus: “You probably like sex, too. You may be very good at it. That doesn’t mean you should start doing it for money.”

by acilius on May 22, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Comics, FunnyTimes

Tagged Andrea Dworkin, Brigid Brophy, maleckar, Mary Gordon, matt bors, teabaggers, Troubletown, xkcd

Posted by acilius on May 22, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/22/funny-times-may-2010/

Discover Magazine, June 2010

I’d like to note two articles printed in the June issue of Discover magazine. One is a report by Douglas Fox on research into the hypothesis that the cause of schizophrenia is a childhood infection, as yet unspecified, that releases a retrovirus from human DNA and sends it to the brain, where it overstimulates neurons. This hypothesis has been gaining credibility in recent years, and some tentative steps have been made to sketch out the sort of treatments for schizophrenia that might become possible if it is fully established.

Another report is about the idea that “we have already found life on Mars.” Some of the tests the Viking probes ran on Martian soil indicated chemical processes like those which represent life on earth; because the samples were so different from life-bearing soil with which science was familiar in the mid-1970s, these results were generally dismissed at the time. Since then, extremophile organisms have been found that have led biologists to expand the range of conditions under which they can imagine life existing, and some biologists have therefore looked at the Viking results with new eyes.

by acilius on May 20, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Periodical Notes, Science

Tagged Discover Magazine, Mars, Schizophrenia

Posted by acilius on May 20, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/20/discover-magazine-june-2010/

Reason, madness, and the like

Adam Phillips reviews Gary Greenberg’s Manufacturing Depression, along the way quoting some memorable remarks and making intriguing remarks of his own. He mentions Alfred Adler’s practice of beginning a course of psychoanalysis by asking a patient, “What would you do if you were cured?” Adler would listen to the patient’s response, then say, “Well, go and do it.” Phillips points out that this practice suggests that mental illness is simply an obstacle to achieving goals that themselves need no explanation, simply a form of inefficiency. If to you this sounds like Max Weber’s description of rationality as an instrument that moderns use to achieve goals which they cannot subject to rational criticism, you’ll appreciate this quote from Weber: “Science presupposes that what is produced by scientific work should be important in the sense of being ‘worth knowing.’ And it is obvious that all our problems lie here, for this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means.” Phillips tells us that Greenberg sees mental illness quite differently than Adler did; in the course of his explanation of Greenberg’s view, he mentions D. W. Winnicott’s definition of madness as “the need to be believed.”

Phillips identifies Greenberg’s main interest as the way psychology and psychiatry have described depression and the economic interest this particular description serves. Phillips summarizes Greenberg’s arguments on this point and contrasts them with the radical anti-psychiatry of earlier decades, but he himself seems more interested in deep questions about the philosophy of science. For example, he writes:

Scientists sometimes want us to believe that the evidence speaks for itself, but evidence is never self-evident; people often disagree both about what counts as evidence and what evidence is evidence of. It is as though, now, the cult of evidence—of “evidence-based research”—is the only alternative to the cults of religion. But the sciences, like the arts, like religions, are forms of interpretation, of people making something out of their experience. And our ideas about health, mental or otherwise, are just another way of talking about what a good life is for us, what we can make of it and what we can’t.

The blurb for this review on the issue’s table of contents reads “Science can be disproved only by its own criteria; when it comes to mental illness, its own criteria are often insufficient.” Which is a strange thing to say- if the criteria of science are insufficient to disprove theories about mental illness, then how can those theories be called scientific? Be that as it may, the blurb is clearly not a fair summary of what Phillips is saying, or of the views he attributes to Greenberg.

by acilius on May 9, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in The Nation

Tagged D W Winnicott, Gary Greenberg, max weber, philosophy of science

Posted by acilius on May 9, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/09/reason-madness-and-the-like/

Chronicles, May 2010

Lots of fragments of interest in the latest issue of this ultra-conservative publication.

Editor Thomas Fleming writes a monthly column named “Perspective.” This name strikes me as hilarious, since of all the virtues Dr. Fleming* might claim, perspective is most definitely not one. This month’s entry is a temper tantrum stretching across two pages, most of it reading like something an angry 15 year old would write while threatening to drop out of high school. For example, he denounces as “worthless drones” a class of people including professionals “in counseling and sociology.” He also attacks “the madman Rousseau,” “the bilge written by these people” (“these people” being “child-savers” and “WASP do-gooders” like Horatio Alger and Jane Addams,) and pop star Shakira, “who has some strange aversion to being fully clad.” Moreover, he informs us that today, “the only possible justification for public education is that it is guaranteed to stunt the mental growth of children and corrupt their character.” Nor does he fail to include a remark, as cryptic as it is unpleasant, about “the degraded morality of urban African-Americans.” However, the last three paragraphs are worth quoting in extenso:

Human happiness is not a one-size-fits-all garment, and it is xenophobic to suppose that it is. This is what liberal philosophers are so fond of gabbling about- that the purpose of a liberal state is to make it possible for individuals to pursue their own life plans. Why does it always turn out that it has to be the life plan drawn up by a liberal philosopher, whether a leftist like Professor Rawls or a quondam libertarian like Professor Nozick? Why can’t they just mind their own business and leave other people to mind theirs?

If we can once realize that it is best to leave Haiti and Somalia alone, then we might begin to understand that we should also leave other people’s families alone. What is the alternative? If government officials and social workers have to tell parents when and where and how their children go to school, what sort of food they eat and TV they watch, what sort of sex education they receive, then not only those lawmakers and social workers but also the voters who give them power have to assume full responsibility for the outcomes.

We have to quit letting them- and ourselves- off the hook with the comforting language of unintended consequences. If I were to fire off a few rounds into a daycare center, I might have had no intention of killing any particular child, but when a child is dead, I am held responsible. But when government programs ruin the lives of millions of children, no on, it seems, is to be held accountable. It is American governments and their employees, the voters who put the legislators in office and the taxpayers who pay the bills- it is we, in other words, who are responsible.

The angry would-be dropout is detectable here as well, most obviously in the quality of imagination that reaches for a hypothetical and finds a massacre at a daycare center. Still, there’s much in it that’s worth pondering, as well.

The name of Dr Fleming’s column might be unintentionally funny. It isn’t the only department of Chronicles with a name that raises a smile. Chilton Williamson’s column is named “What’s Wrong with the World.” That sounds like a bit of a self-deprecating joke, as though Williamson were acknowledging that he might sound like a crank. This month’s installment begins with a remark Michael Foot made in 1983, the year the British Labour Party went into a general election under Foot’s leadership:

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and more crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth…

This quote headed the obituary of Foot in the New York Times. Williamson remarks that “One can- almost- hear the voice of Christ speaking those words, but He did not speak them, and they are not true, either in the political or the theological context.” In his theological mode, Williamson declares that charity, “even bureaucratic charity, is both a human obligation and a divine injunction, but man has many other things to be about in his Father’s house, some of them having value and validity equal to those on the agenda of the British Labour Party.” A literal application of Foot’s words would represent “the end of civilization, and civilization is a moral duty of mankind.”

I would like to add two objections of my own to Foot’s remarks. In the first place, there is not always another person available who is “weaker and hungrier, more battered and more crippled than ourselves.” Each of us is likely to be, at least occasionally, the weakest, hungriest, most battered, most disabled person whom we can reach. What good and great purpose can we have then? Does our life then become valuable only as a stage on which others can play the role of benefactor? The great-hearted Mr Foot can hardly have welcomed that conclusion, but what other implication could his remarks have, if we took them seriously?

Moreover, we are not at any time guaranteed to be in a position to provide for anyone else. If providing for “those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and more crippled than ourselves” is indeed “our only certain good and great purpose on earth,” then I suppose we would have to reform society so that each of us would be guaranteed the opportunity to do this on a regular basis. What keeps us from having these opportunities? Well, many things, many of them bad. People are cut off from each other, isolated, by inequality, fear, and other evils which we would of course hope to eliminate. But some of the people who are “weaker and hungrier, more battered and more crippled than ourselves” do not want our help. Some want to make their own way, and would heartily second Dr Fleming’s imprecations against counselors and social workers. Others are being supported by their families, or by particular friends and neighbors. Perhaps that support might strike us as meager, we might see an opportunity to improve on it. If we offered that improvement, we might meet with a firm refusal. The relationship the person has with his or her caregivers might be more important than the extra resources some charitable person, group, or institution could offer. If we were to take Foot’s words at face value and press their logical implications as far as they go, on what basis could we defend a needy person’s decision to refuse help from a stranger or a bureaucracy? If the “only certain good and great purpose” we have on earth is to provide for the needy, then what purpose could the needy have that would outweigh our intention to provide for them?

Again, I’m sure Michael Foot would not have rejoiced in forcing help on people who did not want it, or have thought for a moment that the most vulnerable person in a group was less capable of “good and great purpose” than the most privileged person. I’m not like Peter Hitchens’ more embarrassing brother, who was capable of writing a book arguing that because Mother Theresa had devoted herself to helping the poor, she was the “Ghoul of Calcutta” who would have lost her purpose in life if poverty were to vanish. What I’m saying , and what I take Williamson to be saying, is that Foot uttered a half-truth that could only get in his way as he tried to develop policy for a truly humane and compassionate society.

George McCartney liked the movie Hurt Locker; lots of people wrote him letters to explain why they didn’t. He responds to them with great great affability and some point. McCartney mentions that one character in the movie is named William James. McCartney claims that this name “playfully invokes America’s father of pragmatism, the psychologist who claimed that we should believe whatever is useful to believe.” This characterization of James’ view is unfair in much the same way that calling Mother Theresa the “Ghoul of Calcutta” is unfair. James did develop a concept of “prudential justification,” which he illustrated by saying that it is reasonable for a person who has to jump over a chasm to believe that s/he will succeed in making the jump, since any other belief would doom him or her. And of course he argued that we should evaluate ideas by their relevance to practical life. Taken together, these ideas raise the question of why we should not “believe whatever it is useful to believe”; James may have failed to answer this question. If so, he might have implied that we should believe whatever it is useful to believe, but he would no more have claimed this than Michael Foot would have claimed that we should disregard the wishes of weak, hungry, battered, disabled people whom it would gratify us to help.

*In 1973, Fleming earned a Ph. D. in Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

by acilius on May 5, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in Chronicles

Tagged ethics

Posted by acilius on May 5, 2010

https://losthunderlads.com/2010/05/05/chronicles-may-2010/

The Nation, 17 May 2010

A phrase I like to use is “moral reasoning.” What I mean by this is that there should be ways of thinking about moral questions that make it possible for people who disagree with each other to come together in conversation. In a society where people often find themselves poles apart about pressing issues of the day, merely agreeing to disagree is not always an option. And in a pluralistic society, approaches to morality that leave people with nothing to do but issue commands or strike poses won’t get us very far. Real conversation might. In some cases conversation makes it possible to find agreement, and in others it makes it possible to find peace amid disagreement. Of course, it’s far from certain that moral reasoning of the sort I would like to see become a universal habit is even possible, but I don’t think it’s been shown to be impossible. In fact, I suspect that I have engaged in it myself from time to time.

Historian Tony Judt doesn’t use the phrase “moral reasoning,” but he’s been thinking about the question. Here’s something he says in an interview from this issue of The Nation:

In my second marriage I was married to someone who was a very active American feminist and very anti the antiabortionists. I would find myself listening to her angrily say that abortion is a good thing and these people are crazed fascists and so on, and I’d think, This conversation is taking the wrong turn. What you have here are two powerfully held moral positions, incompatible socially, backed by different perspectives. But it’s not a question of one of them being immoral and the other being moral. What we need to learn to do is conduct substantive moral conversations as though they were part of public policy… Then you could learn to think of difficult moral issues as part of social policy rather than just screaming at each other from either side of a moral barrier. Then we could reintroduce what look like religious kinds of conversations into national social policy debates.

From Katha Pollitt’s column: “In the topsy-turvy world of the Christian right, any restrictions on their collective sectarian power [are] a denial of individual rights.” Pollitt frames her argument in legal terms, but one might say that she has identified a breakdown in moral reasoning. Americans who want to see a separation of church and state and those who want the state to subsidize some forms of religious expression can’t really talk about what they most care about when they talk with each other.

Stuart Klawans went to the Film Society of Lincoln Center‘s festival of Lebanese movies about the Civil War. I’ll list a few of these I want to remember for potential future viewing: Our Imprudent Wars (documentary, 1995); A Perfect Day (2005); Falafel (2006); and My Heart Beats Only for Her (2008.) He also mentions a couple of non-Lebanese movies, notably Bahman Ghobadi’s portrait of Tehran’s underground music scene, No One Knows About Persian Cats (2009.)