On the Education of the Passions

This is something that lurks behind what I'm interested in, and I think there's a whole other scholarly literature out there of which my ignorance is even more profound. But let us say that a good deal of (political) philosophy seems to turn on what you consider to be a ruling passion - Hobbesian fear, Smithian self-love - and other philosophies (natural law) argue for passions both natural and therefore correct/well-ordered. Much else turns on the proper objects of love - God, nation, family, virtue, honor - and therefore a great deal turns on how to educate the passions - how to control fear and self-love, how to inspire particular sorts of love. Education of the passions is the counterpart of the education of character - your passions are your character. Some debates are between the passionate and those who would deny the passions - where futile denial and successful denial present differing horrors. (See endless dull perorations in Star Trek.) While I have expressed the conservative variant of this critique on a number of occasions, and do generally believe it, I note that both conservatives and liberals express variants of it, identifying themselves with the properly passionate, and their opponents with the coldbloodedly inhuman. So it should be taken with a grain of salt. Another debate, perhaps less straw-mannish, grants passions their place, but differs on the method of education, and the precise objects of education. For a first generalization: one line of division is between "Deweyans" who think of passions/character as inborn and individual, and who think education should be devoted to drawing forth these diverse and individual passions, and - conservatives, shall we say? - who prize particular passions and objects of passions, wish every child/person to possess them, and educate passions for shared virtues/objects rather than to polish individual passions. A rather profound debate, but one that consensually acknowledges the value of the education of the passions.

This all tangentially related to Robert Stacy McCain's post a few days ago on meritocracy, where he talks about the obnoxious temperament of the meritocrats. (And by-the-by raises as a corollary the idea that meritocracy would be far more tolerable if the meritocrats were less full of themselves.) "Temperament," I think, is another way of talking about character and passions. One critique of the meritocrats is that they are not judged by the education of their passions - all facts, no virtue. Another would be that they have the wrong passions knocked into them - a passion for "social justice" and the like, which seems to be an updated version of Lady Bountiful self-importance, but at least has the saving grace of being a passion, and one that aims to be unselfish. Anyway, I think you can fold in the meritocracy debate into the education of the passions debate.

On Writing Encyclopedia Articles

Reading three books is a reasonable basis for writing several hundred words.

A Food Mystery, or, Is Alpheus Going to Die?

Two days ago, I cooked a rather complex dish -- orange chicken -- that I've had great success with before. Yesterday evening, Arethusa and I ate some of it. I was disappointed by the flavor: it should have been sweet, but instead I found it quite bitter. In fact, a bitter aftertaste lingered in the back of my mouth long after I was finished eating.

I tried to figure out what I had done wrong with the recipe, but nothing seemed to explain the unpleasant taste. Arethusa said she hadn't noticed anything unusual; I was surprised but ascribed this either to a desire to spare my feelings or to her taste buds not being very delicate.

Later, I noticed the same bitterness, and especially the same bitter aftertaste, filling the back of my mouth after everything I ate. At first I ignored it, figuring it must be the aftereffects of the orange chicken.

By this evening, though, I was becoming alarmed. I turned to the internet for a quickie diagnosis, prepared for liver failure, or a brain tumor, or God knows what. (To Arethusa's credit, it never occurred to me that she might have poisoned me.)

On the world wide web, I found the answer to the mystery...sort of. It turns out I'm not alone. Around noon yesterday, I had snacked on some pine nuts. And, since last winter, symptoms identical to mine have been affecting people who eat pine nuts imported from China:

Those who found out about pine mouth via the internet were the lucky ones.

Others sought medical help and were sent for blood tests or liver scans, while some approached their dentist to see if mercury was leaking from their fillings [a broken filling had actually become Alpheus's favored hypothesis].

Home remedies recommended by sufferers include drinking liquid aloe vera and taking activated charcoal tablets (charcoal is often used as a detox in cases of drug overdose).

So what's actually happening here? And should we be worried?

Well, should we? It turns out nobody really knows. On the one hand, it's not like China has a great record in the food safety department recently. On the other hand, no actual contamination of the pine nuts has been identified. So on the whole things are looking up.

But -- and this is my justification for blogging about this -- the bitter taste I'm experiencing right now is pretty disgusting. I love pine nuts, but I think it's going to be a while before I eat them again. At a minimum, I'd advise anyone who reads this to check the source of the nuts they eat. Apparently, "pine nut mouth" can last up to two weeks.

It looks like I'm in for yucky days ahead. On the bright side, maybe I'll lose a couple of pounds.

The Shepherds Have Not Read Gadamer

I can't help but wonder what Withywindle thinks about this. Is it legitimate for shepherds to use pebbles in a bucket to keep track of their sheep? Or are they engaging in sophistries?

A sample:

Mark’s face turns stern. “Now,” he cries, “now you see the danger of the road you walk! Once you say that some people’s pebbles are magical and some are not, your pride will consume you! You will think yourself superior to all others, and so fall! Many throughout history have tortured and murdered because they thought their own pebbles supreme!” A tinge of condescension enters Mark’s voice. “Worshipping a level of pebbles as ‘magical’ implies that there’s an absolute pebble level in a Supreme Bucket. Nobody believes in a Supreme Bucket these days.”

“One,” I say. “Sheep are not absolute pebbles. Two, I don’t think my bucket actually contains the sheep. Three, I don’t worship my bucket level as perfect – I adjust it sometimes – and I do that because I care about the sheep.”

“Besides,” says Autrey, “someone who believes that possessing absolute pebbles would license torture and murder, is making a mistake that has nothing to do with buckets. You’re solving the wrong problem.”

Read the whole thing...unless you were already bored by this debate months ago.

You Heard It Here First

Hot Air asks, "Who Would Want to Squeeze David Brooks's thigh?"

Devotees of A&J will remember that we answered that question here months ago.

Since we can post again

Just a brief web-link, to the silliness in Albany. It seems the Democrats control the State Senate again, our long local nightmare is over, darn it, and treason prospers remarkably well.

Test

Little Do They Know

I saw this on Drudge:

The Karimojong [a people of Eastern Uganda] blame the spell of calamities like drought and disease to the "angry gods". Little do they know that their area is suffering the consequences of a larger problem, climate change.

I was reminded, as I so often am, of the words of Steve Martin as Theodoric of York:

"You know, medicine is not an exact science, but we are learning all the time. Why, just fifty years ago, they thought a disease like your daughter's was caused by demonic possession or witchcraft. But nowadays we know that Isabelle is suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors, perhaps caused by a toad or a small dwarf living in her stomach."

World's Tallest Female Econoblogger?

It's like a challenge or something. Like I have to start wearing lingerie,* put on high heels,** take a class in economics,*** and start blogging.**** All at the same time.*****

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* - Done that. College, Halloween party.

** - Done that. Ditto.

*** - Done that. Freshman year.

**** - Done that. Here.

***** - Sadly, no. But soon! You will know when I have added "World's Tallest Female Econoblogger" to the masthead of A & J. Plus beefcake pics of Peter Suderman.

On Wilentz's Lincoln

Sean Wilentz has a long book review up on a variety of recent Lincoln books, encapsulating his own view of Lincoln. It's worth reading - and worth keeping in mind Wilentz's Democratic proclivities (scroll down through the posts), past and present, and his specifically Clintonian, anti-Obama commitments. Wilentz argues for a very political Lincoln, not a saint or a rhetorician or a man of letters - The historical Lincoln disappears and a wishful fantasy takes his place, symbolizing a politics that has been cleansed and redeemed, which is to say a politics that is unreal - a politics constructed out of words, just words. Exit Obama, bleeding from a gut-wound. Overall, I tend to agree with Wilentz on the importance of politics, although I worry that too great an appreciation of hard-nosedness leads you to a perverse love of hardnosedness for its own sake - eventually, a love of brutality for its own sake that gets you, as Orwell noted, to the Stalin-worshippers among the intelligentsia. (Wilentz praises Obama for being an adept practitioner of Chicago machine politics.) So Wilentz's Lincoln may be a bit too Clintonian. He's also a man rather indebted to Andy Jackson - not surprising, given Wilentz's own interest, surely not false, but I suspect Wilentz of being unable to admire a Republican except as a Democrat in disguise.

Wilentz also, of course, is a cheerleader for Jacksonian radical white democracy - a cheerleader in the sense that while he doesn't admire the racialism as such, he thinks that to condemn Jacksonianism from modern racial points of view is to chuck out a vital democratic and radical part of the American heritage. To speak nothing of the gross ahistoricity in condemning Americans of the 1830s or 1860s for not being paragons of the 2000s. Hence the most savage fire in his review is reserved for the racial myopics - and in particular Henry Louis Gates, who appears to have committed gross historical malpractice in his Lincoln on Race & Slavery. If you read any part of this review, read the destruction of Gates. A sample:

Along with his co-editor, Donald Yacovone, Gates has chosen seventy writings by Lincoln on the subjects of slavery and race, and reprinted either their key passages or the entire document. Thanks to the Internet, this compilation could not have taken up too much time or energy: if you go to the online edition of Lincoln's collected works and enter the word "slavery" into the site's simple search engine, all but a few of the book's documents instantly appear, in chronological order, along with a few dozen more, all ready for downloading. Gates and Yacovone do provide headnotes, which the printed and online full editions of the collected works lack--a useful service, even though the information provided is not entirely accurate.

It just gets better from there.

Wilentz's refers to the anti-political, pure-essence left as latter-day Mugwumps - he can think of no worse epithet than to associate them with goo-goo Republicans. Of course, conservatives have a long standing tradition of criticizing the left as Gnostics, eschaton-immanentizers, tying their ideology and their anti-political stance together. Wilentz clearly wants to avoid making that connection (Does he know the critique exists? It's possible not.), and "Mugwumpery" is a useful rhetorical device to avoid it. The logic of his critique, however, indicates him as a possible successor to Eugene Genovese, another historian of the left poised to head right. You heard it here first.

The review also has lengthy information about Lincoln, and books on Lincoln; always worth reading in its own right. But Wilentz is worth some discussion in his own right.

Knowledge of War

I read Barack Obama's 1983 article in the Columbia student newspaper with great interest. My first reaction was to wonder (not for the first time) whether good writing necessarily implies clear thinking. For an undergraduate, Obama writes pretty well (though the article needed more proofreading than it got*). But his ideas are nothing special. In fact, the whole essay is really just a series of unexplored assumptions, some of which stand up poorly in the face of history.

I hardly need to mention that it was Ronald Reagan, not the antiwar and nuclear freeze groups with whom young Obama sympathizes, who was right about how to achieve substantial arms reductions. The idea that the Soviets would be more willing to abandon the arms race if they found it less profitable to continue building their nuclear arsenal was never particularly dumb or counterintuitive, but in the early '80s much of the left treated it as unworthy of serious discussion. I wonder if Obama would be willing to admit today that it was Reagan, and not his detractors, who had the best solution to the nightmare of Mutually Assured Destruction?

Obama also takes it for granted that people's willingness to risk war automatically diminishes as they become more aware of the suffering and ugliness that war entails. At least this point of view is more generous than more recent critiques of the neocons: the "chickenhawk" argument held that supporters of the Iraq War wanted to send others to fight while being too cowardly to face the pains and dangers of war themselves. Charging people with naïvité is less offensive than charging them with a cynical selfishness and disregard for their fellow men.

Still, I think the assumption that experience of war and pacifism go hand in hand deserves more careful consideration than it's gotten. For much of history, and throughout much of the world, virtually every man of a certain age had a pretty good idea of what war meant. On the whole, I don't think it made them less prone to engage in it.

Granted, many of the societies I'm thinking of knew nothing but war, and many decisions to go to war reflected the interest of a sovereign rather than the wishes of his people. But even the assemblies of the Greek states were, by our standards, surprisingly eager to undertake hostilities. The Athenians, dying in droves, dragged out the Peloponnesian War to the bitter end and were ready to resume hostilities at the drop of a hat ten years later. Without broad popular support from the men who had to do the fighting, Rome could never have waged some of its wars so fiercely and relentlessly.

I think it's true that people who have it good -- prosperous burghers, people who see in war only the destruction of their livelihoods -- are much more hesitant to go to war and are probably even more hesitant if they don't underestimate war's awfulness. On the other hand, it's possible that the experience of war inures some folks to its rigors and horrors. Death and bloodshed aren't equally terrifying to everyone, and I suspect there are may be more people than we realize who thrive in war but wilt in peace. Among soldiers, most seem to be Shermans ("There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all hell.") but there are some Pattons too ("God help me, I do love it so."). More importantly, Sherman's grasp of the inherent dreadfulness of war didn't make him any less fierce in waging it. The direct experience of war creates surprisingy few actual pacifists. I don't have much doubt that a President McCain would be more willing to go to war than President Obama.

I'm not saying any of this to minimize how terrible war is. I only want to question the assumption that willingness to wage war is necessarily a product of insensitivity or lack of awareness. Besides, reliance on that supposition should prompt a counterargument: if you're against military action in a particular case, have you considered the costs of peace? Television gave us a pretty good idea of the carnage of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, but it hasn't done as good a job of making people aware of the evils against which those wars were directed. Admittedly, it would have been hard to foresee the scope of the genocides in Southeast Asia, but I'm not sure why it's been so easy for us to forget the terrible things Saddam Hussein did before the U.S. finally decided to take him down. Whenever I heard the claim that no one who hadn't actually served in uniform could legitimately voice support for the Iraq War, I was tempted to respond that by that logic nobody who hadn't lived under a murdering dictator could legitimately speak in opposition to it.

I really don't want to be too hard on the twenty-one year old Obama. His article is probably more reflective than the one most of his peers would have written on the same topic. Obama poses important questions: Is the nuclear freeze movement just a fad? Is it possible to talk about arms control without reference to political and economic contexts?

In the end, though, I think it's probably too optimistic -- and too simplistic -- to say that greater understanding of war necessarily makes us less willing to engage in it. The world is more complicated, and tragic, than that.

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*Also, nobody should ever use the word "enchance," especially right after "in order to."

Bad Ideas

Alpheus: Hey, we could have our own little Michael Jackson memorial service right here. We could light candles, and play his albums --

Arethusa: Can we take Demerol and invite the neighborhood children over for tickle fights?

Alpheus: Um, sure....

On Vetoes

Because peer review is a peculiar beast, I have been reading Antonio Negri's Insurgencies - florid, turgid, yet occasionally insightful. He makes me mull the connection between states rights/nullification, gun rights, and jury nullification. All have to do with the ability to veto government by withdrawing from it - the first as a state, the second individually, the third as a jury. It seems to me that, having crushed states rights during the Civil War, gun rights and jury nullification become more important as the last bulwarks of vetoing liberty against government - that the increased emphasis on gun rights and jury nullification is a natural result of the collapse of states rights.

Melancholy Conservatives

John Derbyshire proclaims himself a pessimist conservative; Irving Kristol says he is an optimist conservative. The pessimist looks back to a golden age; the optimist forward to one. I plump for the melancholy conservative - one who sees no golden age before or behind, who thinks he can make the present sparkle golden for a while, but knows time takes away, with youth, life, and joy, all golden ages too. Shine, perishing Republic, forsooth.