327. Problems in Trying to Be Like Socrates

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From my reading of Plato's Dialogues I have concluded that to be like Socrates I must be (1) very careful about what I believe, (2) very careful about how I speak, and (3) very careful about how I live. Extraordinary care, rather than a particular belief, or produced speech, or adopted way of life, is the sine qua non. I have the feeling that many people, like me, want to be like Socrates, and that this will gain them the name "philosopher."

My own thought and experience have led me to conclude that meeting the above requirements is not humanly possible. The greater the care anybody takes the greater the difficulties he or she is going to raise. Though my experience is extensive and, I think, deep, my training in philosophy is well behind that of others who appear on this forum. I am interested in knowing whether or not I am right, and if not, where am I going wrong. Also in anything else that might help conceive, state, or solve the problem.

The problem is not meeting the three requirements individually; it's meeting them in combination. I don't see it as a logical or theoretical problem; I see it as a human one, arising in the world. And it is best displayed, I think, through personal narrative, a story of my own attempts to be a good follower of Socrates.

Begin with that care about belief. I was once very careful about my belief in God. I had reviewed the findings of the people I had carefully determined to be the most careful I could find, university professors. Their care forced me to discard every proposition requiring belief in God's existence. I believed that Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, cinched the case. Then I plunged into the world with my belief. I declared it at coffee hour after church. And the world spoke back. "Great Heavens, watch your words," said my wife on the way home. "You are going to hurt a lot of feelings. Nobody will sit next to you if you aren't more careful." I couldn't accuse my wife of carelessness. My extreme care had made me the careless one. And thrown me into painful conflict.

Reflection showed me that I had created the conflict by introducing requirement (3), being careful about how I lived. I had decided that to live the good life I had to join the human race. Living alone in my head or my office was not a good life. But the human race, I saw, lives in tribes and you can't join one without respecting tribal beliefs and speaking tribal words. I had joined the tribe of church-goers.

Belief-wise tribal words are careless words but speech-wise they're just what care requires. Is it possible to get one right without getting the other wrong? Well, in the coffee-hour case, apparently yes. Long-time members of this church, known to me to be non-believers, must get it right regularly. Nobody avoids sitting next to them. They maintain contact with the human race. They show no signs of pain or conflict. I just have to be like them.

What will it take? Tact, sensitivity, rhetorical skill, as my wife may point out. Acquire those and I'll have it right. Learning to take my wife's kind of care will solve my problem. I think I am capable of that.

But have I faced the problem in its entirety? Does my church coffee-hour take me deeply enough into the world? I don't know what I am capable of until I've been fully tested. On then to this, the toughest challenge I think I've faced. (And on with me, I hope, philosophers suspicious of personal narrative. I believe that I can't present the full problem, down in the world, without such narrative. Socrates didn't hesitate and neither will I.)

I am at a contemporary dinner party. I know that I have to take the kind of care my wife took with speech. And I can't give up the kind of care Socrates taught me. I still want to be a philosopher. I see that a more comprehensive kind of care will be required — to get my situation in the world right, to solve my problem, to lead the good life, an examined life — but I haven't learned to exercise that kind of care yet.

All right, at the table, questions of the day. Urgent questions. Is it true that blacks perform poorly in the classroom? Is it true that desire to perform well is not much encouraged by black parents? by fellow blacks in school? Is there a problem with black culture? I, careful as I can be, report as fact the findings of those people that , again, I have carefully determined to be the most careful I can find. So that we all can go on to the big question: What do blacks need to do to get out of the fix they're in? Over the horizon is the question, What can whites do to help? On the way home my wife tells me that my reported facts have hurt a lot of feelings and that I could wind up not being invited back.

She has shown me the prior problem. Before worrying about speech or belief you've got to worry about where you are, whether you're in a tribe or not, and if you are in a tribe, which one? On this night I, with all my learned skill, had gotten my tribe wrong and seriously underestimated tribal beliefs.

Now I came to that party thinking of the academic tribe, descended from the tribe of Socrates, as the tribeless tribe, or at least as the tribe that aspired to tribelessness, the one tribe that did so. That gave it an advantage in solving problems. Its members started with a more objective view of reality, where the causes of the problem were found. They avoided tribal distortions. Example: When they reported the percentage of blacks being incarcerated they included the percentages that give it meaning: the percentage of blacks in the population and the percentage of blacks committing crimes. Failure to do this distorted the picture, and revealed tribal interest.

Members of the academic tribe did not, in my mind, engage in war, cultural or physical, but messages from them could be very helpful to warring tribes in solving their problems. At the table I tried to deliver what I thought would be a helpful message because I wanted to live the good life. A good life to me was a life engagé.

Does the fact that the engagement failed here mean that such engagements will inevitably fail? No. The delivery was botched. Though I had taken account of who the audience was, and where they were, I had failed to take into account the times in which they and I were living, the when. This was the postmodern era. My tribeless tribe was being called "the tribe that kids themselves." Appeals to "reality" and "objectivity" were being denied. The message I was delivering had, in itself, insufficient weight to counter the weights — mainly the hurt to feelings — already against it.

So there's a problem prior to the prior problem. And I don't see a good solution, or at least one I am capable of. Yes, the objective message that hurts feelings may be just what warring tribes need, and yes, Socrates, the unexamined life is "not worth living," and yes, Max Beerbohm, the examined life "is no bowl of cherries either," but I'm a frail human being, and I'm not up to knowing everything I need to know about an era that will affect my message.

What I don't know is whether or not I am an exception, whether there are other human beings who can solve this problem. Until I know that I am not justified in concluding that meeting the requirements to be like Socrates, and be called a philosopher, is not humanly possible.

326. Socratism

What distinguished followers of Socrates, I once decided, was being very careful about what they believed.  That got them called philosophers.  I wanted to be a follower.  Then I saw that followers also had to be very careful about how they lived.  And then I saw that followers had to be very careful about how they spoke.  And finally I discovered that if you're too careful about these things you're going to have a devil of a time doing them in combination.

Take that care about belief.  You are so careful that you discard every proposition requiring belief in God's existence.  Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) has made a case that, you conclude, cannot be refuted.  You declare your conclusion at coffee hour after church.  "Great Heavens, watch your words," says your wife on the way home.  You are going to hurt a lot of feelings and get yourself kicked off the vestry if you aren't more careful.

And why are these two cares, about belief and speech, in conflict?  Because you decided that to live the good life you had to join the human race.  Living alone in your head or your office is not a good life.  But the human race lives in tribes and you can't join one without respecting tribal beliefs and speaking tribal words.

Belief-wise tribal words are careless words but speech-wise they're just the thing.  Can you get one right without getting the other wrong?  Only through fine adjustment, if at all.  Only with the greatest care.   Are you up to it?  Can you lead the examined life if you're not?  OK, here you go. 

You're at a dinner party.  Is it true that blacks perform poorly in the classroom?  Is it true that desire to perform well is not much encouraged by black parents? by fellow blacks in school?  Is there a problem with black culture?  You, careful as you can be, report the findings of people that you have carefully determined to be the most careful you can find, university professors.  So that you all can go on to the big question: What do blacks need to do to get out of the fix they're in?  Over the horizon is the question, What can whites do to help?  On the way home your wife tells you that you have hurt a lot of feelings and that you could wind up not being invited back.

So you see that you've got a prior problem.  Before worrying about speech or belief you've got to worry about where you are, whether you're in a tribe or not, and if you are in a tribe, which one?  You think you started in an academic tribe, which you think of as tribeless, and you think (because the good life is a life engagé) that the problem is to deliver a message, in this case a message presenting truths as objectively determined as human beings can make them.  That is, a message from scientists, our purest academics.  Just what warring tribes need.   And then you hear your tribeless tribe called "the tribe that kids themselves" and you realize you've got a problem prior to the prior problem.  Yes, the unexamined life is  "not worth living," and yes, Max Beerbohm, the examined life "is no bowl of cherries either," but jeez, you may not be up to this.

OK, pull back.  Take your pure academic, your scientist, down from his pedestal and put an orator on it, an expert in rhetoric, the art of care with people's feelings.  My Socratist friends will see an elevation of carelessness.  I see a necessary change in kinds of care.  I defy them.  "Yep, you got it right.  I'm going careless."

Then a voice: "And will you go careless any old way, any old time?"  That's Aristotle, thinking of everything, reducing your big talk again.  I have to admit that to be justifiably careless, as to be justifiably angry,  I've got to be careless "to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way."  For that I've got to pay close attention, and discriminate.  You know, be careful.  If I don't admit this I'm no longer in the Socratic circle at all.

What I have to keep in mind is the principle of due proportion.  Learned from a philosopher but taught most urgently in war, and most clearly in an amphibious landing.   A soldier's wedding ring catches on a metal fitting and tears his finger off as he leaps with his full-pack weight into an assault boat.  The officer in charge allows not a pause, not a deviation, in the forward movement of the landing.   We're late for the beach.  Late means the gunners behind the beach have time to get their heads up.  Possible slaughter.  Early means you're caught in the fire meant to suppress them.  Time is vital.  Pain in a boat, the agony now in the well, is peripheral.  Blood loss here is secondary, tertiary, exponentially tertiary, to what could be lost there — where the blood lost is itself secondary to the success of the assault, the accomplishment of the mission.  All in due proportion.

That's war.  New officers, recent civilians (think 1942), learn due proportion the hard way.  Marginalize what has to be marginalized, close your ears to peripheral noise, or else.  War is violent and awful, but it confirms what we (or maybe only close examiners) learn in the most peaceful life.  Fail to distinguish between a trivial and a non-trivial proof and you, mathematician, can waste a morning, a day, a week, a semester.  Care over the trivial is pedantry, and wastes life. 

You don't have to go to war or do proofs to learn due proportion.  Just take Freshman Composition.  Learn to delete whole paragraphs because they are immaterial to your case.  Develop a sense of relevance, an eye that discriminates.  Recognize a page that's been cleared of pedantry.   You'll make a fine officer.

Or, since due proportion is something you've really got to nail down, take an Interpretation of Poetry course.  What will this poem, this line, this image add to my understanding of life, and where the good is?   Is the line for the retina or the ear drum?  Or for the mind?  Is what I'm trying to understand vital or peripheral?  Or take a Criticism course.  Which brings the life-displaying poem closer, the heartfelt recommendation by your roommate or the microscopic analysis by the critic? the emphasis given by the reader or the bricolage offered by the theorist?  It's hard.  You go along marginalizing what you think has to be marginalized.  You note how it turns out.  You learn.

In an American Literature course you see how Captain Vere learned.  France, representing "unbridled and unbounded revolt," cannot be allowed to defeat England, representing "founded law and freedom defined."  That's vital.  Billy Budd's life, which must be taken if Vere's ship is not to contribute to that defeat, is marginal.  Billy is the figure writhing in the well of an LCVP.  Collateral damage.

The death of Socrates is collateral damage.  Preservation of the laws of Athens is vital.  Socrates' escape to avoid the legal sentence upon him, death, will undermine the laws.  Socrates chooses the vital and accepts his death as collateral.

Think you can avoid these difficult choices?  There's life, full of them, with labels you can barely read: "Probably leads to the good," "Tends toward the bad," "Could lead to the blessed," "Possibly leads to the cursed."  Think you can postpone them until you can read exactly, know certainly?  There's death, mortality, putting a limit on your time and ability, blurring your vision.  Your best result is only a probability, a hunch.  Not a proof but certainly not trivial.

So, to hang on to the engagement here, what's the lesson for today?  What are the choices my recent blog posts on black education point to?

Well, first, and in the end not least, there is the choice of whether or not to put quotation marks around the word "superior" in the expression, "superior Western civilization." Can I stand before my readers the way Edith Hall stood before  the readers of The New York Review (a fair sample of the Anglo intelligentsia), apologizing for what I teach? 

It depends on my audience.  With dinner-party guests the apologetic marks are OK.  Feelings are primary.  With anybody I'm teaching they're not OK.  With children they're obviously not OK.   Knowledge is primary, the surest knowledge, acquired the Western way.  The same with adults who are still children. 

How about visitors from developing nations, come to the West for a degree? multiplying the cultures represented in our classes and in our country.  Many of them, I find, are children with respect to Western civilization.  Nicholas Kristof's account (NYT, 2-21-16) of the education of Rafiullah Kakar confirms my finding.  Rafi's Pakistani mother sent him to a madrasa where he could memorize the entire Quran.  All he needed was an ear and a memory.  But Rafi, by a selection that seems almost miraculous, was introduced to Western education at a liberal arts college in South Dakota and his mind was changed.  He ended learning the highest degree of care in tutorials at Oxford. The minds of Pakistanis who came West to become doctors and engineers, he noted,  were not changed.  They had gained "the confidence of a university degree without the critical thinking that (ideally) comes from an acquaintance with the liberal arts."  That is to say, they were still children.

I teach (or taught) visiting students who are not engineers or doctors yet, and maybe won't be.  Lower level.  But Composition, so I have a chance with them.  Do I save their feelings?  "Your school, your madrasa, your way of doing things, your Muslim culture, your civilization, is as good as mine?" Let them go back home as innocent of critical thinking as Rafi's engineers were?  Stand before them, while they are here, as if I were ashamed of what I teach?  Ashamed of critical thinking? Not possible for an American teacher.  Screw the Anglo intelligentsia.

If I didn't believe that many blacks are still children I'd be making a whopping exception of blacks, since I believe that many adults of every other race are still children (see Post #1). But here in the United States the blacks who are still children are so much more a part of our future that their juvenility has to be a worry.  The fact that they are so much more in our face than the children of other races would itself make them a worry.  I mean hip-hop blacks, gangsta rap blacks, the ones I was listening to when I wrote Post 311, the ones Thomas Chatterton Williams had to rescue his education from at Georgetown University.  These juveniles have a lot of influence.  I think Williams' picture of them in Losing My Cool justifies my saying that.

And I've got to play my white teacher's part knowing they are there, children of a race my race has criminally abused.  And they know it.  I, teaching in Composition what distinguishes Western civilization, Socrates' way of gaining and using knowledge, am a criminal.  However I play it, my presentation has to acknowledge that.  But (here's the trick) in a way that lets me get the teaching done. 

I'll make a stab at it.  "OK, I'm a criminal.  But I'm a criminal bringing some gold for you."  I'll know I've succeeded when I hear them say, "Yeah, that's gold.  A superior metal."

That may not be the best play, or gamble, but I think it does the main thing, shift attention to the vital.  The what's taught rather than the teacher.  Get the marks of apology in the right place.

325. Arts Section vs. Science Times

The science section of the New York Times brings you up to date on the products of the kind of thinking I see as obligatory on followers of Socrates (academics, most clearly seen in scientists): the careful, skeptical reasoning that establishes reliable belief. 

The arts section brings you up to date on the products of the kind of thinking that for most of us makes life worth living and English professors worth hiring: the careful selection of parts of life that show how rich and stirring it is.  Imagining.  Most clearly seen in poets.

The news and editorial sections mainly show you the need for the first kind of thinking and the inadequacy of the second.  You put those sections down in the evening saying things like, "Goddamit, George Bush, make sure that belief in the existence of WMD is reliable" and "Ho there, John McCain, project the casualties in your intervention, compare them with those you'd intervene to stop, do the arithmetic."  Scientists do arithmetic.  Journalists, scientists working under a time constraint, give you good numbers and careful projections.

And because there is so much, visible from so many angles, to compare and calculate, they often leave you saying, "Oh, how complicated it all is!"  There are the Serbs doing all that damage in Kosovo.  How much damage in Belgrade will stop the damage in Kosovo?  OK, do it.  Oh my God we hit the Chinese embassy.   How soon will we hit a hospital?  Recalculate collateral damage.  Recalculate.

Poets — the term covers all storytellers and film-makers — are the darlings of the arts section but they are a danger in the world the news section reports on.  If they stir us enough (like with images of the collaterally wounded) we'll stop the bombing and let the wounding we wanted to stop go on — that wounding we were called on to stop, but which, at the moment, we have no stirring images of.  So we get a worse consequence than the collateral consequence of the primary consequence. Poets are so often, as the wise West-Winger in the TV program said, "new to consequences."

Collateral damage is a consequence of human inadequacy.  Our wartime Navy knew all about human inadequacy.  "Three percent never get the word," you were told the minute you started planning an operation.  Put a hundred boats in the water and three of them will be wandering around wondering where they are supposed to go.  Count on it.  The high purpose of the morning will leak away in the afternoon.

Write a law that requires all policing forces to treat all races and ethnicities the same and three percent are going to violate that law.  Count on it.  Somewhere in the United States there will be a Jefferson, Missouri, where the laws have changed but the men have not.

If you become a victim of men who violate the law what are the chances that you will accurately identify your victimizer?  Well, what are the chances that any of us will become a Socrates?  You know, see, under a death sentence, that you are "a victim not of laws but of men"?   How many victims of today will make that fine distinction and be at peace, as Socrates was in the Crito? 

Whatever the number, it is bound to be lower at times of pain and shock, as now with Ferguson and all the other displays of informal racism set before us on our screens.  Shock and pain bring forth poets, anecdotalists, like Ta-Nehisi Coates.  They make us who weren't there feel the pain, and see how we might have inflicted it, or, once, allowed by laws, did inflict it.  They provide material for those who work to change the laws.  And they work to change the men where it counts, inside.  That they also work less admirably — in moral upmanship, in guilt games, in Foucauldian power plays — does not diminish their accomplishment.  Poets are a help.  (See Post 321, on anecdotalists)

But they don't make the careful distinctions Socrates showed us how to make.  Coates, as his reviewer, Thomas Chatterton Williams pointed out (London Review of Books, 12-3-15), does not distinguish between behavior determined by white oppression and behavior determined by blacks themselves, nor, within white oppression, between morally fallible people and a morally culpable system — that is, between laws and men.

Williams, a black essayist living, like Coates, in Paris, does make those distinctions and, on questions like the disproportionate incarceration of blacks, is more the scientist.  Where Coates is simply indignant Williams cites a study (by Michael Javen Fortner, another black) showing that "working and middle-class black families for decades actively supported and sometimes participated in the implementation of many of the most notorious tough-on-crime measures that helped put the current US prison system in place."  Simple proportion, number of crimes to number in jail, but in the end, oh how complicated!   Williams the scientist asks, in the fraternal idiom, the vital question, "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?  This is a terrible question that any analysis of black life must eventually confront."  Coates the poet can't come close to such a question.  It would make his anecdotes less vivid, less stirring.

Stirring anecdotes are the enemies of due proportion.  In a news section that observes due proportion the vital will play big and the peripheral will play small.  Just the way they play in scientific analysis, where the distinction is vital academic business.  Collateral damage remains collateral.  Where the business is commercial or political — raising circulation figures, Nielsen ratings, or poll numbers — the collateral is promoted to the vital.  Donald Trump now leads in this promotion but Ta-Nehisi Coates, though not in Trump's class, is in the same business, rhetorical stirring.  Coates needs to suppress vital-peripheral proportioning in order to keep stirring what he's stirring.   It's the need that elsewhere puts Coates before Williams as a man "in ardent search of an affront."  

Passion got poets thrown out of Plato's Republic but passionate promoters of necessary revolutions, changers of bad laws, correctors of insidious attitudes, have an excuse.  It depends on what the times call for.  When revolutions succeed, laws are rectified and attitudes changed, the passionate lose their excuse, a question that immediately brings before us Ta-Nehisi Coates and his passionate book, his cri de coeur, Between the World and Me.  Has Coates lost his excuse?

Our answer will depend on how well we think the civil rights revolution succeeded, and the weight of that answer will depend on how well we distinguish the wrongs of laws from the wrongs of men. 

If you believe (as I do) that we are in the implementation phase of the civil rights revolution, which rectified the laws, then Coates can't be giving us what is called for in our time.  Cool problem-solving is called for.  What Williams is pointing us toward.  To me that means Western science.  What gives us, as its main gift to our daily lives, the solution to social, political, economic, practical problems.  Not the certain solution, not that ever, but the best solution possible to us in our time.  With careful Socratic, academic testing. 

We are so affluent in these solutions now that we forget how they are obtained.  Postmodern French philosophers, rolling since Pasteur in evidence-based benefits, have forgotten that there's a foundation for them, or even a need for a foundation.  We, with problems like low performance of blacks in school nagging us, are less likely to forget. 

It's clear to me that the solution of the performance problem lies in the application of and, most importantly, acceptance of the results of, scientific analysis.  If that analysis starts (as it is supposed to start) with  a realistic (some would say "unblinking") picture of the current state of affairs (some will say it's already started — in academic settings) it is bound to reach the point Williams foresees, where analysts will ask, "How much are blacks contributing to their own plight?"  Their answer, that result, when they give it, must be accepted as truth ("what has so far passed our most rigorous tests") by every follower of Socrates — which I take academics and want intellectuals to be.  That lets us go on, building from there.

Williams lets me imagine a common future; Coates does not.  With Williams I see a solid, cooperatively (though in the process painfully and shakily) built structure that will in the end hold the solution to the problem.  For Coates I see...what?  Nothing cooperative, certainly, nothing solid at the end.  Further cries of the heart, more sympathy maybe, changes in attitude that might gain better cooperation from whites, but not much cooperation, not much softening, on the black side.  Hardening rather.  There's that barrier between him and the world, built entirely by whites.  Why should he be expected to help tear it down?

So, throw him out of the Republic?  Not at all.  Attitudes, consciousness, still need to be changed, awareness expanded.  We can follow his success in the Arts Section, where I think his aspirations take him.  Williams' aspirations probably take him there too, but I think he'd like to see, certainly I'd like to see, results in the editorial section he could get some credit for.

What do we, citizens of a living republic, aspire to?  Continuation, I suppose, survival of the republic, in as lively a way as possible.  We can see how it's going each day in the news section.  Do we play no part?  Well, we cheer and we boo and we vote. 

And some of us play a larger part.  We sit on committees to advise on awards.  I see myself on one, selecting for the MacArthur.  It's going to Coates.  "No, no!  Give it to Williams!"  That's the modern equivalent of throwing Coates out of the Republic.  (Note:  Coates won his MacArthur in 2015, the year Between the World and Me won the National Book Award.)

324. Wonderful, Wonderful Western Civilization

Well, I can't tell you exactly what lets me come out with that "wonderful" but I can tell you what, after living through most of the century regarded as history's least wonderful (20 million killed in World War I, 60 million in World War II), makes it easier: lying on the floor with my feet up on the couch giving my back a treatment and falling asleep to whatever comes up on the random play of 74 pieces recorded on five CDs by the best musicians in the world.  One day the New Leipzig Bach Collegium doing  Pachelbel, another day the Orchestre National de France doing Bizet.

In the past only nobles and the richest merchants could be soothed as I am.  Think what it took: musicians trained and on call and supported between calls, calls to a special chamber, worked in by the palace architect to be close to the ailing king, but not too close, so that he could sleep while the musicians played on, piece after practiced piece until assured that the king was indeed asleep, then off to their stations awaiting the next call.  Me, I push a button and get the Budapest Strings and drift off.  If I wake there's Chopin, and on and on.  The CDs cost about $12 each and the player $32.95.

The historian Steven Radelet, in The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World (Simon and Schuster, 2015) "reckons that the past quarter century has seen the greatest advances in material well-being in the history of mankind," according to Richard N. Cooper, reviewing the book in the latest Foreign Affairs (1/2-16).  And my wife and I, adding all that we have seen since our childhood in the thirties — the great surge after World War II, the steady climb through the seventies and eighties, the tremendous surge since — would certainly testify to that reckoning.  Wealth passed from having a long automobile in the garage to having a second boat in the Caribbean.

But that's not the right measure.  The right measure is the advance in medicine that lets you see the ceiling fixture as you listen to Brahms on your back twenty years after the age at which you would have once gone blind and become unable to read your periodicals and share your thoughts instantly with your colleagues — and, along with pictures and funnies, your children and grandchildren.  Children and grandchildren, I might add, able to work in travels to different parts of the world within days of each other — South Africa, Languedoc, China, Central America, Viet Nam, anywhere in Europe or North America — and text their reactions, with photos and sometimes their own live faces, at any time.  None will die of small pox or be wasted by tuberculosis or be crippled by polio.

That lets me say "wonderful" and then Socrates makes me say "Western" since without him I don't think we'd have the scientific method — the step by step testing and building of reliable belief — that distinguishes this civilization from others.  And gives us our kind of universities, "academies."  (More on this in post 246, a little more in 154  and 245.)

No, imperialism and racism and genocides and arrogance don't (except in the eyes of those ignorant of world history) distinguish us.  Crimes (except in the eyes of those playing for the guilt advantage) don't distinguish us.  Cruelty to the weak doesn't distinguish us.  (Cruelty to the weak is a mark of the strong (us) and it may become criminal but it doesn't become a distinction until the weak display what they are capable of when they become strong.)

What's distinctive in us is our development of the instruments of criminality, or, I should say, our development of instruments among which those of criminality will necessarily be included.  Instruments are morally neutral, but that's so hard to remember when you're looking at the effect of cluster bombs, or nuclear weapons, or gas chambers.  These may have some culpability as temptations, and suggest a Satanic presence, but if they do it's the same one that cuts out cancers. 

This is not to say that there's no difference between the admiral lying off shore sending six-pounders through a native village and Albert Schweitzer bending over an operating table.  It's to say that instruments, cannon or scalpel, are not the proper objects of moral judgment.  Purposes are, choices are.  Which is to say that the African chief unable to use cannon or scalpel cannot (yet) be used for purposes of moral comparison, nor can his civilization.

All right, the admiral is happily taking part in a rapacious colonial takeover.  Though we cannot, looking at a world history full of such crimes, make a confident moral comparison, we can pronounce a confident moral judgment.  That stinks.  

But, maybe because we are Westerners, we have to submit to questioning by Socrates.  "Exactly what stinks?  The takeover?  Totally?"  We're off examining what Socrates is always forcing examination of, two-valued moral judgment.  It stinks or it doesn't.  Here one whiff and you've got it.  Ah yes,  imperialism.  At other times it will be a whiff of racism, or communism, or sexism.  Nazism fixed whiff-judgment for our century.  Oh ho, collaboration!  Adolf Hitler probably did more to encourage two-valued moral judgment than anybody in history.

But back to Socrates.  He's just asked, "Does the government set up by those engaged in the rapacious colonial takeover stink?"  And, looking at the British, we can't say Yes, stinks.  Not without saying Yes about the native "governments" their government replaced and most of those that would replace it.  Not without saying that efficiency, and order, and effort for the common good stink.  So yes, Socrates, the British had a superior ability to organize a government.  And the fact that they cited that ability to justify their takeovers does not negate the government's superiority or reduce its benefits.

And there, exhibited by the British example, is something that I think will hold up as a distinction of Western civilization: superior ability to organize a government, with a superior infrastructure following.  You know, a government that will work and keep on working as other governments, rising in other civilizations, do not.   A recent OpEd in the Times ("Why the Post Office Makes America Great," 1-3-16) by an immigrant from Turkey makes me think we've got something here.  One feature of her new society sums it all up for her: reliable mail service.  She marvels.  Imagine, standardized rates!  "You could just slap a stamp on your letter, drop it in a mailbox, and it would go to its destination."  Add packages and you see how Amazon and eBay are enabled.  "Dependable infrastructure," says Zeynep Tufekci,  "is magical not just because it works, but also because it allows innovation to thrive, including much of the Internet-based economy that has grown in the last decade."  I, looking at my grandchildren, one working out a dance, another composing music for an orchestra, would add that it allows creativity to thrive.

The thing about good, working infrastructure, Tufekci reminds us, is that it's boring.  "We get used to it and forget what a gift it truly is."  As, I would add, we get used to the other gifts of science and Socrates (oh so many posts here  — 84, 103, 107, 110, 120, 154), worked out over time.  You have to pinch yourself to see it or, like Tufekci, be newly arrived. 

I don't have to pinch myself because, looking at the ceiling fixture with this great sense of well-being, I am well aware of the gifts of science and rationality.   Without them no such well-being.  Why have I even bothered to make something of them, and argue for their importance?  Why haven't I just gone to sleep?

Because I have heard so many voices — of the Plato who made Socrates his mouthpiece, of world-scorning Christian saints, of German Idealists, of American Transcendentalists, of the great Emerson, of, oh, my own Sunday School teacher — cautioning me.  All delivering one message: your well-being, old man, is only material well-being.  The greater well-being is spiritual.  Your ceiling is very low. 

In my chastened state I turn my head away from the fixture. There at the side is the CD player, and further on the laptop.  Now I hear the most cutting voices of all, from the philosophers of my own century: “It is the preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly" (Bertrand Russell), and "Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology" (Martin Heidegger).

By now, though, I've learned to do some chastising myself.  "Hold on, you philosophers.  How sure are you of that word 'spiritual'?  Are you confident that it does not apply to the state my fourteen-year-old grandson is in when he hears the notes he dreamed coming out, on his composer's app, in the harmony he hoped for?  Oh, that's esthetic, you say.  Are you sure, sirs, that you can distinguish the esthetic from the spiritual?  Are you sure the word 'heavenly' is all wrong for that harmony?  If you are not, then maybe we can go on to your words 'free' and 'noble.'"

Note:  The words "spirit" and "spiritual" are discussed in Post 89.

323. Poem about How Hip-Hop Messes with Your Head

You've been looking and looking for something you could confidently call "barbaric" so you could make your point about civilization, that it needs a conception of the opposite,  and you've been wondering and wondering what hip-hop was, another gift from black culture like jazz or something darker, and you're terribly lost and then you hear "I ain't fuckin' wit' you you nigga bitch" and all becomes clear, it's "barbaric," dark as hell, and you've got hip-hop pegged and are about to draw the great lesson for our time that we can't let love you know of other races no matter how brotherly interfere with the advance of civilization when wham along comes this musical "Hamilton" that looks like maybe the peak of American civilization and it's put on by all kinds of people old-time Americans have had trouble loving and what are they doing but a better job of celebrating American civilization than anybody so far and godalmighty they're doing it in hip hop!

322. Poem about a Shit Storm of Emotion

which is what, according to Jenna Laurenzo, you feel when you're just coming out, and JamesMichael Nichols, Deputy Gay Voices Editor of the Huffington Post, says sure "the first time you hook up with someone of the same sex can be daunting" and I say I'll bet, thinking I'm such a long way from my Sunday School and then I watch Jenna's nine-minute movie and wow I'm feeling my own shit storm and maybe believe what Nichols said that it's "the beginning of a whole new way of being in the world" which with me would be a universe but the movie shows what Jenna claimed, the "universality " of some emotions, and I can understand shit storms of emotions a lot better than I can understand new ways of being-in-the-world in an authentic Heideggerian way but jeez did they have to put it that way to a guy used to "gales of passion" with Werther laughing and crying and falling on his knees and bedewing Charlotte's feet with a thousand tears or Grushenka covering her face with her hands, throwing herself onto the sofa, and sobbing like a child in front of Alyosha Karamatsov I mean that's my world and I'm not ready for Ahab going what apeshit when he sights the whale.

But seriously let's try to take Heidegger seriously and take "whole new way of being in the world" to include an expansion of your world like when you hear your father say "I don't want to embarrass Art by asking him; he can't do it and he doesn't want to turn me down" and you suddenly see a world peopled by creatures to whom embarrassing a friend is bad, not just smoking and drinking and swearing, or like when your Sunday School teacher asks if you love your brother why are you talking to him that way and you see creatures who hold themselves to their own premises and you're supposed to be one of them and again suddenly it's a much bigger world so I'm not such a long way from my Sunday School but still a way since expanding pleasures is not the same as expanding good though equally authentic and the question remains authentic what?

Note: The Nichols piece, with the movie, is found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/girl-night-stand

321. "Anecdotal," "Statistical," and the Force of Christian Love.

I know.  I know.  Anecdotal evidence is lousy evidence, taking you into a thicket of crappy fallacies — misleading vividness, hasty generalization, cherry picking, confirmation bias — and subject, oh so subject, to the availability heuristic.  Your logic teacher and your composition teacher will be all over you on it.  But lordy, it does work.  Oratorically, that is.

It worked that way on editors of the New York Times when they selected for the OpEd page a piece by black astrophysicist Jedidah C. Isler (12-17-15).  Their selection makes vivid the pain of a brilliant scholar reminded by Supreme Court justices of the supposed limitations of her race when right there, in front of everybody at her schools (and reading the OpEd piece) is an individual of possibly unlimited ability (Ph. D. at an Ivy League school, postdoc at Vanderbilt).

I can understand and sympathize with that anecdotal working until I get to Isler's general observation: "obviously black students march into classrooms all over this country and blow physical concepts out of the water."  Then the statistics kick in:  "In 2009, African-Americans [12 percent of the population] received 1 percent of degrees in science technologies, and 4 percent of degrees in math and statistics. Out of 5,048 PhDs awarded in the physical sciences, such as chemistry and physics, 89 went to African-Americans – less than 2 percent" (Huffpost Education, 10-24-11).

Anecdotes are good at showing us personal pain, statistics are good at showing us a national problem.  Anecdotes getting us to feel our fellow citizens' pain are needed to motivate us to do something about the problem, statistics are necessary to solve it, showing us what is working and what isn't.  They are most trustworthy in the hands of "academics" in the sense I have been plugging in this blog: followers of Socrates, multivocal testers, loving truth more than anything else.  Here that's scientists, following the method worked out, and remaining as objective (or, if preferred, "impartial," "disinterested") as they can.  Experience has shown that their way of thinking — statistical, analytical — gets more trustworthy results than the way of partisans and advocates.

We are living at a moment when black pain is most vividly before us, on television in the white police brutalities that have been exposed in such quick succession, and in books like Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, eloquent cries of pain and, sometimes, defiance.  And that vividness, so helpful in motivating us, is, more and more, holding us back in solving our problems.

You could see it first fifty years ago, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report on problems in black culture that, statistical and analytical, presenting facts and making careful conjectures about them, made a good start.  The reluctance verging on outrage with which the academy took up the problems, or, more precisely,  failed to take them up, can best be explained, I think, by unwillingness to cause pain, pain to a group so long pained, and pained by the group to which academics belonged.

Behind this unwillingness I see, even in those longest liberated from Christian belief, residual Christian love, the thing that, with the help of affluence, broke through in the Enlightenment (Post 308).

Christian love is one strong puppy; lose control of it and it will chew up your mind.  The head of the Episcopal Church in the U. S. lost control of it (momentarily we all hope) and brought every intellectual enemy of her religion his blackboard case.  The fortune teller in Acts 16:16-34 is different from us, her sermon went, but we must learn to love everybody who's different from us, without discrimination.  So, necessarily, love fortune-tellers without discriminating between them and prophets.  There goes distinction-making, a fundamental operation of the intellect, the one all rational human beings — including the embattled prophets trying to distinguish themselves from seers — depend on.  The congregation's mind is in shreds.  There's Nietzsche saying, "See!"

Put just a little of that into a university department and you don't make any progress solving the problem.  In sociology departments you don't even address it.  Fear of using hurtful language, everybody understands that, but fear of mentioning hurtful facts?  Sociology went forty years under "self-imposed censorship...on the subject of black culture" under that fear, fear, one presumes, of hurtful facts, hurtful statistics, hurtful analysis.  Orlando Patterson noticed this odd restriction (in The Cultural Matrix), and Thomas Chatterton Williams picked up on it (London Review, 12-3-15), but they, black thinkers both, are in the minority.

So much in the minority that when they ask a question in the old, free academic way it's like bells in the night.  "At what point might an oppressed group contribute — perhaps decisively — to its own plight?" (Williams).  There it is, the question timid whites have been circling for forty or more years, the question everybody needs to get to.  Damn the hurt.

And damn the love, the Christian love?  No, just keep control of that puppy.  There's a dangerous, tigerish force in it, a force that has to be managed carefully.  Aristotle, that pagan, shows the way.  He says that anyone can be charitable — that is, show love — "but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy."  You've got to use your head, and distinguish.

It's interesting to me that the rector in the Episcopal church I now attend, Lupton Abshire, quoted those very words in his sermon last Sunday.  What better occasion for a chorus on Christian love?  Merry Christmas!