128. Is Procreation Immoral?

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Who but a philosopher would ask a nerdy question like that? You know a question is nerdy when you try to answer it in your own regular-guy way. Say I, on my way to the marriage couch, am asked if I think my adding to the population of the earth is ethical. I'm stumped. "How does ethics get into it?" I wonder.

"Here's how," says Christine Overall, the first of three philosophers to speak in recent books (reviewed in the New Yorker, 4-9-12). "Your decision to have a child, generalized for your species, will, through either over-population or under-population, affect the happiness of all future children. Decisions that affect the happiness of others are ethical decisions" (extracted from the review).

Overall stimulates and expands my thinking, as regular guys count on nerds to do.  I hadn't thought about the over-population problem at all, at least with respect to my personal "decision." And over-population is just one of procreation's hazards. David Benatar ("Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence") shows me, through an argument I can almost follow, "that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad — a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pinprick — is worse than no life at all." My child could arrive in a one-pin paradise and still be worse off than if he hadn't been born.

Put Overall with Benatar and I'm thrown into a stew. Overall has taught me that I am ethically responsible for human beings that go onto any kind of planet. Benatar wants me to consider the candidates for occupancy of that planet, none of whom are born yet. Overall, I remember, said that "non-existent people have no moral standing." Does that take the "ethical" out of my choice? There I am, in the stew expert philosophers throw you in.

Now I think the better a reviewer (or teacher, or forum-presider) is at bringing philosophers together the hotter the stew is going to be and the more quickly you're going to be in it. With this reviewer, Elizabeth Kolbert, I get flame after flame and by the time the third philosopher, Bryan Caplan, enters I am really feeling the heat. Like the others Caplan thinks that "people need to think more seriously about the decision to have children." Seriousness to him, an economics professor, means careful, realistic calculation. You can see him at the board, drawing a graph. On the age scale his "pleasant number" (of children, for parents' pleaure) rises from one in the third decade of life to five in the seventh and beyond. He smoothes the curve, stands back, rubs his chin, checks with the class, and, for the rich, full life, goes for three. (While Kolbert, in the back of the room, bless her, is explaining to another regular babe that "kids are a pain in the ass when they're small.") Ah, but there's a hand. The over-population problem? Not to worry. "More people mean more ideas, the fuel of progress," says Professor Caplan.

It's hard to go deeply into an attractive subject without getting nerdy about it, I know, and English professors can be as nerdy as anybody, but their subject does do something for them that philosophy and economics just don't seem to do for these professors. It keeps them, through poems and stories, in touch with real life, messy life, the life regular people live. It's the life Overall and Benatar leave behind when they examine the claim that having a child will benefit (or harm) future generations. Regular people don't make such claims. Overall and Benatar are looking at graduate students around a seminar table. Apprentice nerds.

I know, they're doing that for the benefit of regular people, showing them how to "think more rigorously about the decision to have children" (Caplan) and that "morally rigorous analysis" (Overall) is what professors of ethics teach. I know that that's what academics generally do, teach rigor to the slack, and that it has many benefits. But it's often false to the real world, as it is here.

In the real world people can't see into the future clearly, and they, most of them, know it. So when a professor asks them, "Is procreation immoral?" (or, in their terms, "Is what I am about to do on the couch ethical?") they say something like this: "I know that there could be harm or benefit in what I am about to do but I just can't see how it will come. It's too far in the future and I don't have time to study it that much. So I'll leave it up to those responsible and the experts who advise them. They are my best guide. If they decide, when the time comes, that it's good for citizens to have or not have children I'll probably go along. In the meantime I'm not going to worry about it. I have too much else to worry about."

Stories and poems show how much else there is to worry about and how limited we are in dealing with it. They provide a constant correction to our tendencies to simplify and to over-presume — tendencies that appear clearly in the philosophers Kolbert has chosen. There's Caplan, reducing the good life to graphable numbers, there's Benatar removing common sense from his planet populators, there's Overall trusting a poll to gauge happiness, trusting happiness as a category. And there are all three, trusting that the human mind can adequately deal with these problems.

Poets show how complicated the problems are and some poets, older ones, show how foolish (or tragic) men can be if they presume that they have the power to solve them. Dante and Milton thought that presumption a sin, and had a name for it: intellectual pride.

This is not to set poets against philosophers. John Locke and John Milton warn against presumption in almost the same terms. Milton's finally wise Adam has learned that

     not to know at large of things remote

From use, obscure and subtle, but to know

That which before us lies in daily life,

Is the prime Wisdom.

Some things you have to leave to God, the angel Raphael has told him. "Be lowly wise."

That's just what Locke is saying, in philosopher's language:

Whereas, were the capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds between the enlightened and dark parts of things; between what is and what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.

Does Locke's nearby introduction of God, doing just what Milton's God does (giving mankind all they need for a good daily life), reduce the weight of this for contemporary philosophers? Will it do the same for their students, philosophy majors?  I mean, who on campus is better at doubting the existence of God?

If that's the case I think teachers and forum-organizers need to add more English majors to their stew. Since God fills most of what they read English majors have learned to separate questions of his wisdom from questions of his existence, and here questions of God's existence are clearly a distraction.  It's wisdom we're after.

125. Consistency in Joseph Heller

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"Joseph Heller consistent? The author of Catch-22? Nah, it was his inconsistency that made him famous. You never knew what Yossarian (his fictional double) was going to do. One day he was blacking out all the adjectives in enlisted men's letters, the next day all the articles. One day he was all for defeating Hitler and the next day he was deserting the Army and going to Sweden. That, random impulsiveness, is what made him so attractive — and got Catch-22 voted the seventh best novel of the 20th Century."

I know, but the consistency I am referring to is different from all that. It's a consistency of character. In Catch-22 Yossarian is a beast to women. They're either prim nurses you "grab by the snatch" or "wonderful tomatoes" you "should have been screwing." That's the way it is with his whole animal-house gang. Amusement when the nurse tries to get away and irritation when a fellow officer quits on a tomato without giving her to a buddy is all they feel. In a recent biography (Just One Catch: The Passionate Life of Joseph Heller, by Tracy Daugherty) we see that Heller was a beast to women all his life.

"You're taking the man to be the same as the fictional character."

Yes, just as his daughter Erica does in her recent book, Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller was Dad and Life was a Cath-22. To her he's Yossarian and he's got all Yossarian's callousness. She thinks she sees herself belittled in one of his books and asks, "How could you write about me that way?" "What makes you think you're interesting enough to write about?" he replies.

"But that's just his daughter's report, of one incident. It could be biased and the incident could be exceptional."

Could be, but then there's what he said to his wife when she asked him why, after 39 years of marriage, he was leaving her. "Because you are old and fat and ugly," he said. That's reported from outside, on good authority. What we see in the life is what we see in the novel: consistent, juvenile, '50s-male beastliness.

"OK, this novelist was a bastard. But that shouldn't disturb me. I'm an English professor, I know that a lot of novelists were bastards, and I know that that shouldn't make any difference in the value we put on their novels."

But this bastardly set of values is right in the novel, front and center, up for admiration.

"True, but they're expressed by a character who feels pity for all the prostitutes suffering at the hands of American soldiers in Rome, and for all the abused wives and children back home, and all the miserable people everywhere. Doesn't that make him a lesser bastard?"

No. It only makes him a contradictory bastard. If his humane feelings were genuine they'd be consistent. His expressions of pity, all in abstractions, all at a distance, are clearly phony. They make a claim for humanitarian credit that only sentimental people will honor — you know, people who don't care whether or not feelings are consistent, the ones who so love the feeling of the moment that they quit thinking.

"So all those professors who put Catch-22 on their reading lists, and made it the subject of symposia, and backed those who made it number seven, have quit thinking?"

They've quit thinking the way academics are supposed to think. Those who take Socrates as their model must always respect logical connections — part with whole, premise with conclusion, principle with practice, cause with effect, ends with means.

"Always?"

Always. Even as they teach literature. Poets claim to be "large," they "contain multitudes," and therefore, according to Walt Whitman, they can very well contradict themselves. Professors wanting to escape from logic can claim the poet's license, but they won't get it from Socrates. They know that. That's why they so often go to other philosophers.

"Who issues such licenses?"

Not scientific philosophers. Not British philosophers. Not continental philosophers, even — except maybe down at the tail end. Absurdists issue licenses. They're the ones English professors took Catch-22 to right away. If reason is "useless" and logic has been "dethroned" then you can go back to class with your license. If anybody objects let them go to Sartre and Camus, who will show them the larger (existential) permit.

"You mean English professors were still driving on those licenses in 2000, when they backed Catch 22 for seventh place?"

Who knows? You can see the beliefs implied by an intellectual's word-choice but that's a long way from guessing what's behind them. Thomas Powers writes (in the 8 March London Review) that Norman Podhoretz changed his mind about Catch-22 because it "had done 'moral, intellectual, and spiritual harm' by undermining support for American military endeavors Podhoretz happened to back." Happened to back. There's the belief: values are random, some backed by this person, others backed by that. No sign that values can be rationally ordered, no recognition that one of the values is the value of defeating Nazi Germany, nor that it might be a shared value, nor that there might be rational justification for it. It's just one of the values that Podhoretz, at the moment, happens to hold.

That's a pretty close fit with Yossarian's beliefs. And I think it's a close fit with the postmodern philosophies appealed to to defend those beliefs. I can see and know that. Whether Powers has those philosophies in mind, though, whether he would acknowledge and defend them in a classroom, that's something I don't know about him (or, indeed, about any of the public intellectuals writing in the LRB), and can only guess at.

110. Stripping the Vocabulary

Let's define the word "philosopher" and see how many words we can eliminate if we do it right. Start with this definition: "a person who is very careful about what he believes." That pretty well describes a scientist, doesn't it? What forces you to be more careful about your beliefs than the scientific method? So I'd say we can do without the separate word.

OK, but you've gotten rid of "scientist" by making "philosopher" pretty narrow. You've left out people who are very careful about values. We often call them "sages" or "wise men." Are we going to deny them your title?

Well, since I believe care is the most important thing I think we'd better give it to them. So let's say, "a philosopher is a person who is very careful about what he believes or values." If that's a sufficient compliment then there's no longer a need for "sage" or "wise man."

You're going to say, "what he believes or values"? Suppose one person values something so highly that to keep it he believes nonsense. Another person is very careful about what he values and is very careful about what he believes. Are you going to use the same compliment-word for both?

Yes, I'll just modify the word. The second person is a better philosopher.

Oh, oh, "better" and "worse." Stretch-words. Pretty soon you'll be calling any minimally careful person a philosopher.

Of course. That's the way to eliminate troublesome words. Like "scientist" and "scientific." Get rid of them and you'll no longer hear, "That's not "scientific"; you'll hear, "That's not very careful." Get rid of that other troublesome word, "religion," and you'll no longer hear that big trouble-maker, "That's not science, that's religion." People will more easily get down to the questions that need dealing with: Have we arrived at this belief carefully? And at this value? What needs to be balanced against what? People who do that are "better philosophers" than people who don't. "Better" is a good enough compliment. "Worse" is a good enough put-down. Care is the key.

Yes, look for care, but be careful. That person you see taking more care than anybody else may not be the greatest philosopher; he may just be the greatest pedant, scrutinizing little things while ignoring the big ones.

Like what?

Human limitations, human mortality. Only if you ignore your own mortality, and think you have all the time in the world, can you aim at perfection. Do that when your fellow mortals need your help and I'll call you a "finicky philosopher" — to specify your inferiority.

And to remove the word "pedant" from the vocabulary. But these mortals that need a philosopher's help, I suppose that that's because they themselves are not philosophers?

No, they are "hasty philosophers." Though they need the same thing, reliable knowledge, they don't have time to take the care scientists take. They have to settle for the good guess. Considering their number, and their influence (especially in democracies), and the terrible actions — lynchings, pogroms, foolish wars, genocides — they take when they act on unreliable knowledge, the best thing philosophers can do in the world is improve their guesswork.

You mean the best thing leisurely philosophers can do. You're calling everybody a philosopher.

OK, philosophers with leisure, the kind given them in universities, the place where they have the best opportunity to help the poor hasties, the guessers, the wanna-be-hafta-be scientists. If they don't help, they're "useless philosophers." If they interfere with the help, they're "dangerous philosophers."

I already know the "useless philosophers." They're the pedants. But who are the "dangerous philosophers"?

The dangerous philosophers are those pedants who undermine confidence in good guesswork by showing that its theoretical support is not perfect, or, worse, that there's no support at all. They are dangerous because if enough hasties lose their confidence there will be more lynchings, pogroms, foolish wars, and genocides than there would otherwise be.

Sounds terrible. How do you deal with such people? I'm ready to lynch them.

No, no, hah, hah. They live in universities, where all us leisurelies live. Threats appear in words and you hold them off with words. Here, speaking in the stripped-down vocabulary I'm trying to promote, you could only call the dangerous people "poor philosophers." You'd have to hope that that was enough of a put-down to discourage them.

75. What a Teacher Substitutes for Reality

Why do teachers have to find a substitute for reality? Because relativists have taken it away from them. (See Post #73.) No more real world, no more objective truth. Only representations and constructions.

What can they substitute? I, dealing in words, suggest "resistance." It's a word they can use without claiming any of that knowledge they're not supposed to have. All they claim to know is that there's something out there that has to be overcome before a student, or anybody, can reach his goals.

That's their expertise. Want to fly a kite? Run with it into the wind. Tie the bridle this way. Want to design kites? Here are the laws of aerodynamics. Want to read poems? Start by construing the sentences.

They don't need a name for the something out there that makes all this necessary. All they need is consistency in the resistance it offers. It does no good to teach kite-flying if aerodynamics varies from day to day.

Do they need to know why there is consistency? It doesn't appear so, yet such knowledge would be helpful — in the way that knowing why there is consistency in an aerodynamic resistance would be helpful (it lets you generalize at a higher level). But in teaching you always have to think about time constraints. Can we acquire this in a quarter? Ask that question about what's ultimately behind the consistency, or ultimately behind anything, and experience, university-wide, tells you no.

The criterion of helpfulness reduces the discussion-time for many subjects (metaphysics, theology) in our utilitarian courses. And it removes from the discussion those relativists who think that their choice of a representation or construction is unconstrained by reality — to use the old word for resistances. Those who think one representation of reality is as good as another are outside the circle. There's no point in their taking the course.

Note: I see that leaves me with a definition of reality. It's what relativists have to measure their representations and constructions against.

54. "The meaning of life"

"Don't say 'the meaning of life.' Say 'the purpose of life.' 'Meaning' is ambiguous. Sometimes it means 'signification' and sometimes it means 'purpose.' Applied to life it nearly always means 'purpose' but the other meaning creeps in and confuses things. There's enough confusion in discussions of the purpose of life without your adding to it."

My grandfather wasn't confused, and he talked about the "meaning of life" and he made very clear that it meant "urpose of life." He said it was to do God's will. Discussions with him were very short.

"And he could explain very clearly — maybe because he had a lot of help. Anybody who was in doubt about God's will could turn to the Bible, or the Catechism, or great poets like Dante and Milton."

I'm not in doubt about God's will; I'm in doubt about God. Take him away and you take his will out of the discussion. Yet thoughtful people keep talking and I want to listen to them. I hear the philosopher Philip Kitcher talk about a 'life without meaning' and the literary theorist Bruce Robbins talk about 'the malaise of meaninglessness' (both in the recent Joy of Secularism, Princeton UP) and I say, 'Yes, that's my life.' I need some help with it and they speak my language."

"I can see that, and I hope you'll forgive me for saying this harsh thing about it: it's the language of adolescence. In it the ambiguous word 'meaning' is used carelessly and the response to the removal of God is immature."

The carelessness I can see. Kitcher (or, more precisely, the people he's referring to) can't mean that life is without meaning. Not with reference to my life, or that of all the God-forsaken people I know. Dark clouds still mean rain, two fingers still mean a curve ball, a raised eyebrow from my spouse still means I'm talking too much. My life is full of that kind of meaning. He should have said what he meant: 'life without purpose." There's nothing in it to do what service to God did. But how is the response immature?

"It's emotional and unreasoned, as early responses to shock tend to be. Here it's the shock of God-loss. The mature response to that is not malaise but acceptance. The acceptance can be sad but it can't be indignant, as Camus was (Post #7), or complaining, as Shelley was. That’s childish and unrealistic. The adult looks at the astronomer's universe, or the geologist's earth, or the biologist's cell — all the things that are supposed to take away meaning — and says, "This is the way it is. I can't deny it." The teacher encouraging adulthood says, "Get used to it." The well-taught student says, "OK, we're 0-1 on their clean-up hitter and I'm signaling a high, inside fastball from a rookie pitcher. This next pitch is going to have a lot of meaning."

And you think that that is about all the meaning students can handle.

"No, I think that that is about all the meaning I can help them with in a discussion, or listening to one. For me ballpark meanings are enough; for others, maybe not."