250. To Arms, America, Against the Boko Haram!

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You know my kind.  Every time our president gestures toward action abroad we start yelling, "Hold back! Hold back!"  Well, it's time to change.  With these guys who, because little girls are trying to get a Western education, kidnap them and try to sell them, with these guys I say go all out. 

Sic the CIA on them, drop SEALs on them, grind them with your boots (there, on the ground), drone them, bomb them, make grease spots of them.  Anything to get those girls back.  And if you wipe out their culture in the process it's OK with me.

That's the passion of it.  Here's the reason: you can be a hero in the world's eyes and you've got nothing to lose. The deed can be done without any of the hazards of any of the other interventions we've feared or experienced. e

First, you're not going to get bogged down.  Not in Nigeria.  It's a friendly country.  And these guys have no constituency there, not any that counts.  Nigeria is nothing like Viet Nam or Iraq or Somalia or the Balkans.

Second, you're not going to get any flak from the American people.  On Twitter they're going nuts for action already. 

Third, you're not going to get any clucks from foreign heads of state.  Their people are out-twittering the Americans.  No intelligent leader is going to go against a Twitter-tide like the one moving now.

Fourth, and best of all, you're not going to get any flak from Congressmen.  Not any that won't take down their own planes.  Say you do all the stuff the opposing party loves to show shock at, like breaking your word and putting American boots on the ground.   Weren't those troops you sent there?  Did you lie about their presence?  Or did you simply rename them, as "advisers" and "trainers"?  Did you COVER UP?

"Yes, I did.  To save the girls.  And I did it the way you have to do such things these days," admits Obama, less tersely.

Can you picture a Republican getting huffy?  "Well, I certainly wouldn't have done such things."  Can't you hear the twitter?  "What kind of naive idealists speak for this party?  Are they afraid of dirtying their hands in a good cause? Do they think saving little girls is not good?"  Republicans, Republicans, will be coming off as wimps.  Heartless wimps.  They're not going to let that happen.

Of course you have to do this with the permission of the Nigerian government.  Will you get that permission in an open and upright manner?  Will you exceed its terms?  Will you cover up your maneuvers and excesses in dealing with them?  Maybe.  But have no fear.  When he's riding a Twitter-tide a politician can do practically anything.

If you're in doubt, picture the Congressional hearing.  "Did you get clear permission from the Nigerian government to do this?"

"Well, yes and no." 

"Aha," thinks the Congressman, "we've got a cover-up." 

Let him think it.  You need think only of the birds on Twitter: "Screw permission.  Get those girls."

249. Baseball and Life. Again.

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Last night Zack Cozart is on third in the ninth, score tied, two out.  The batter, Heisey, bunts.  Cozart doesn't go for home. He would probably have been thrown out.

Cozart is a man who doesn't know how to live.  If he had been such a man he would have understood that you don't make choices in life according to whether you will succeed or fail, that probability, but according to whether your chances of failure or success are better than those in your other choices. 

You can distinguish between players by whether they know how to live or not, and you can distinguish between spectators on the same grounds.  Say Cozart goes for home and gets thrown out.  "Idiot," says the fan ignorant of life.  "Everybody could see how slim his chances were."

The fan is like the historian who blames a general for entering a battle he clearly has a good chance of losing.  "He did the wrong thing."  Good historians, like good fans, look at all the options.  They know that you can't make a right-wrong call just by what you see, the results.  You have to imagine the things you can't see. 

OK, there's Cozart on third.  Let's make him a wiser Cozart, a philosopher.  He thinks through that section of life that lies ahead.  What will he do in each eventuality?  A bunt with two out is unlikely, but a good base runner will figure everything in — so that he doesn't have to hesitate when the moment comes.

  Wise man Cozart will crank in his chances of making it.  Say he figures that they are one in four.  That means, among other things, that three out of four times fans will be crying, "Idiot!"  But, being a philosopher, Cozart ignores the multitude.  He sees that his lot in life is to be standing on third with the winning run for a team that has had a terrible time scoring runs, and that the weakest hitters in that team's batting order, Soto and Barnhart, are coming up after him.  Say that he figures their chances of hitting him in, if he stays on third, are at best one in five.

Philosopher Cozart takes his lead at peace with himself.  Unless the ball is dumped in front of the catcher, or bunted hard at the pitcher, he will go.  Without hesitation.  A 25% chance is better than a 20% chance.  And if he's thrown out he will walk back to the dugout still at peace, knowing he did the right thing.  Whatever he's hearing from the stands.

As it played out, Cozart remained at third, the next batter struck out, and the Reds lost in the twelfth inning a game they could have won in the ninth.  The bunt was perfect, the third baseman was surprised, and the Boston announcers thought that Cozart had a very good chance of making it.

If the Reds miss the playoffs by one game we'll remember this.  It's the pain of being a baseball fan who sees his team playing for him, giving him success or failure.  And who does that fan want out there?  Only philosophers.  One Zack Cozart and there goes the whole season.

248. "Check your privilege"

 
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How put-downs change!  Especially in political discussions.  In the forties, in the student joints around Tulane, a big one was, "Are you home?"  It suggested that you hadn't been following the train of argument.  "Is your brain in gear?  Are you keeping up with the rest of us?"  There you were, the only one too dumb to see that Socialist contradictions could only lead to....

In our decade, in the joints around Princeton, the big one, apparently, is "Check your privilege" (see NYT 5-3-14).  It suggests that you look into your attitudes.  Are your statements tainted by your class or race status?  There you are, too biased to be trusted.

I know how easy it is to read great sea-changes in a little flotsam washed up on shore but here I think we've got something.  Princeton has given us a clue to what happened, what most deeply happened, in American college classrooms in the decades leading up to ours: the ideal of objectivity was replaced.  By an ideal of goodness.  It was better to be morally upright than to be intellectually sound.  Facts became less important than attitudes.  If there are sea-changes in education, that's a sea-change.

Students get their notions of what's cool, intellectually, from their profs, and in 1946 the profs behind the coolest intellectuals at Tulane, those from New York, were not far to seek.  They were Morris Cohen, of CCNY, and Ernest Nagel, graduate of CCNY (who went on to Columbia), authors of the textbook Introduction to Logic and the Scientific Method.  If you wanted to dispute the finer points of cool, the justification for a put-down, you could go through that book:

  Bob says, "That's just what you'd expect a plantation-owner to say." 

"Whoa," says Nathan.  "Definitely not cool.  Look, here it is.  Argumentum ad hominem. "

As a matter of fact, there was a plantation owner (or member of a plantation-owning family) among the arguing leftists at Tulane, Al Maund, whose radical novel, The Big Boxcar, I notice, has just been reprinted by the University of Illinois Press.  I can imagine trying to put him down in the 2014 way.  Remember, you're idealizing the proletariat, so it would come out as, "Check your lack of privilege."  Say that to an Old Leftist who has just nailed down the case against Norman Thomas's social program and your irrelevance silences the table.  Who cares about Al's proletarian credentials?  Anybody home up there?

Who are the profs behind the students who argue politics today, as at Princeton?  I can't identify their persons but I have already (in Post 97) categorized them.  They're in a class with the Smothers brother who, to the statement, "Your shirttail is out," replied, "Why do you hate me?"  They put attitude ahead of fact.  What your words show about you — your values, your politics — is more important than what they refer to.  Measure a prof's distance from Tom Smothers and you've measured, inversely, his responsibility for today's undergraduate cool.

It doesn't have to be a prof, though.  Consider Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.  She (see Post 207) gives you the easiest measurement you could make.  She blesses a woman in the Bible (Acts 16:16-34) simply because she is different.  Ignoring the fact that the woman is a fortune-teller and a vessel of demons, a person we disapprove of, a person presented for our disapproval, she turns our disapproval into a moral deficiency, making it part of our "long history of discounting and devaluing difference, finding it offensive or even evil."  That's about as close to Tom "Attitude is All" Smothers as you can get.

Schori has a better justification for her position than profs do, though.  She's a Christian preacher, and Christian preachers, moving out from the Sermon on the Mount, are bound to put values ahead of facts.  The kingdom of God is within you.  That's her tradition.  The prof's tradition, up to now, has been to put facts ahead of attitudes.

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So, no sea-change up in the pulpit.  But a sea-change at the lectern.  And the interesting thing is, we're winding up with very much the same thing, judging by the behavior of the audience.  How did it happen, in a few decades, that pulpit and lectern drew so close to each other?  How did we reach the point where, sometimes, we have a hard time distinguishing a prof from a preacher?  Culture warriors on the right have been asking that question for some time, and here we see what they're talking about.