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As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it. Havel

At 75, having lived a remarkably full and generous life, Vaclav Havel has died. (Other comments today.)
Instapundit links to Welch’s 2003 profile which ironically begins by discussing Havel’s sense of the moral rot of dishonesty within communism by referring to Orwell and Hitchens.

The richness of his vision comes through in one of the more superficial but certainly evocative sites, where this man of action demonstrates the power of the epigrammatic as well. But, while writing well, he also acted well: words of commitment amd acts of commitment.

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Our government department always celebrates Constitution Day and today (a bit late) they brought back one of their favorites, H. W. Brands. His talk was aimed at our students; he walked a quite straight line describing constitutional interpretations. I felt that noting the founders knew nothing of airplanes might be interesting, but is a straw man. Still, he kept his poise on that tightrope. He could aim a little higher, it seems to me, but no one can fault his passion and enthusiasm.

And I’m grateful, finding pleasure in “Capitalism, Democracy, and the Constitution” which noted that 1776 was the date of both “manifestos” – the Declaration of Independence and The Wealth of Nations. Each semester I yoke these (with religion and speech and the press) as part of the “open marketplace” with its confidence in the eventual and incremental wisdom of our nation. (Perhaps someone who puts on his biography that he spent some time traveling in the West selling cutlery is likely to see this juxtaposition in a way few others nominated for Pulitzers do.)

The Tea Party seems to signal, more than anything else, that old confidence in our nation’s ability, over the long term and given sufficient openness to experience, to find what works, what is, what is true.

The greatest problem with our popular culture is not that it is superficial – why wouldn’t it be? Nor that it is leftist – as irritating as that may be. It is because so much about it is designed to reduce that optimism, that strength, that willingness to test out experience, to be resolute. Our popular culture too often whines. I am slowly wending my way through The Federalist Papers (each year I start again, it seems to me); their attempt to understand human nature is a model of not only wisdom but far sightedness. However if our emphasis is not on the human nature we share but the factors we don’t, then such wisdom has less importance.

My husband argues that the Victorians did much to restrain man’s natural tendency toward violence and constrained it (and I suspect a good deal of sexual impulse) toward more productive ends. (I’ve long felt that such an approach to The Federalist Papers would be a worthy project; but then, I’ve also spent years arguing that someone should study Korbel and his diverse influence on his daughter and Condoleezza Rice. We all have our pet projects; mine, apparently, are ones neither I nor anyone else wants to domesticate.)

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An entertaining aspect of Perry’s entry has been commentary explaining Aggies (even in Texas, one says, Aggies are considered hicks;yuh think). As the t-sips describe the yell leaders and Aggies boast of National Merit scholars, true outsiders may not realize the Corps was compulsory for much of its first century. Today Perry was ably (or at least energetically) commended by a t-sipper (Plan 2) and poliltical rival. Perry’s a mensch Kinky Friedman concludes. Friedman’s style is discursive; he never edits a good one-liner. And he acknowledges that at this point he’d choose Charlie Sheen over Obama. Still the piece is affectionate and, in the end, forceful: “A still, small voice within keeps telling me that Rick Perry’s best day may yet be ahead of him, and so too, hopefully, will be America’s.” (With Kinky irony & sentiment are often paired.)

Mark Steyn, too, is a nail that hasn’t been hammered down – he, too, argues “that there are already too damn many laws, taxes, regulations, panels, committees, and bureaucrats.” (It’s about an hour.) He, too, sometimes sacrifices coherence for humor. But, in the end, his arguments for human rights and self-reliance, the core of After America, have a steady aim. His historical context is not the southwest but northeast; he chose the granite state and citizenship. And Steyn reminds us why someone – someone who thinks and someone who is a nail too stubborn to be hammered down – would choose what we too long took for granted.

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Arthur Herman’s How the Scots Invented the Modern World , in his description of Watts (“Practical Matters: Scots & Industry”) reminds us of that great industrial moment. In the “modern consciousness” was firmly “the idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before” (278). To create something new.

We might oppose that to the stimulus; Fitzgerald summed up the end of that old bubble in “Babylon Revisited”: “the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word dissipate – to dissipate into thin air; to make something of nothing.” But wasn’t the desire, always, of this politics to control others, not to create nor to make. And how many Middle Eastern palaces are likely to fall into ruin by the end of the next century. The self-indulgent life is often described as dissipated – but how much worse a dissipated culture.

Roy Lofquist’s point that space meant clans didn’t bump against each other may well be first cause of respect for others here; the building of the west by both north and south surely was helpful in healing those raw mid-nineteenth century wounds. But in the end, we were founded in the mercantile era and capitalism – which turns us to look at what we can do to please and entice another. Frances Hutcheson would argue as my more religious friends do – we serve ourselves by serving others. That felicity is enlarging. Our natural desire to extend our self – to create, to leave a mark – can come from good works and procreation and art. But it can also come from creating a business, creating a product. Ford’s desire to make a product all could buy was capitalist, creative, and productive. Building a bigger oven and planting more wheat is better than fighting over the pieces of one pie.

But that larger oven requires energy. The great truth is that materialism can destroy our spirit, but capitalism with its emphasis upon creativity derives from a vision that is a good deal less materialist than socialism. It encourages us to think of others. Those like Obama not only lead their countries into economic but also spiritual misery, offer a false “felicity” of security for the true “felicity” our founders described.

I finally read Witness. It has moments of real beauty and takes us into the mind of a man who found himself in that pietistic culture Hackett describes as characteristic of the middle states. Chambers doesn’t seem drawn to the exceptionalism of America as much as to a soulfulness he finds in religion, in farming, in honest and open communication with those he loves that he comes to see as characteristic of his native land – and not of his adopted and then rejected faith. It is the individual family, the love for his children that help him break with that ugly, false and materialistic religion.

But our modern Hisses would deny the good that came from men like Watts. Sometimes, one thinks, they would prefer the oppressive, short-lived, painful lives of 1000 to those of 2011. It is not materialism that they reject but creativity, pride, familial love. Certainly if we are starved for energy we will have been taken over by Luddites. And while the difference between the rich and poor in a desperate world may not be as monetarily great, this is a sad comment on what the best of lives in such circumstances would be.

After forty years, I have adopted the Texas vision – and it is drill, baby, drill. And hope commercial sources for other ways of energy can be energized and created as that drilling continues. Those Scotsmen had a hell of a lot right. And political freedom, spiritual freedom and market freedom are intertwined – when one is destroyed the others will be as well. In a free market, the oil drilled today will pay for the research needed tomorrow.

P.S.
So I continue and am struck by this description by the poet Robert Southey of Ellesmere Telford: “Telford’s is a happy life: everywhere making roads, building bridges, forming canals, and creating harbours – works of sure, solid, permanent utility. . . ” Herman goes on: “Permanent was right. More than 75 percent of Telford’s projects are still in operation to this day. it was a life’s work that flowed from a bottomless reservoir of creativity and self-confident energy.” (283) Herman’s joy and passion, generalization and detail, give someone like me, who teaches literature, a sense of context that explains (and celebrates) so much that led to our nation’s vision as much as characterized theirs. But the last chapters, that I tend to skim, describe the inventions that came because of the atmosphere those ideas created.

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Looking at the bridges from the Puritans to the American Enlightenment, I came upon this (probably read long ago by other Chicagoboyz). Internalizing (as much as universalizing) means a country of multiple religious beliefs can be tolerant without its citizens feeling that their souls are risked if this is the assumption. And proselytizing to save others’ souls will also be ones of arguments, examples, words rather than of intolerance. Of course, implicitly a religion with an external locus is less likely to be tolerant – nor feel toleration is good.

In the second place. The care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists only in outward force; but true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God. And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of anything by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.

Locke

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Women in the Republic of Virtue -
In revolutions, women tale up the flag and even the sceptre: every arm and voice is needed. So among the revolutionaries were the voices of women like Mercy Otis Warren. During the following years, women’s roles in the home as educators and molders was emphasized: a “republic of virtue” required both a knowledgeable and a moral public. Perhaps the most telling invasions of twentieth century tyrants were private – as the private became the public. That insertion appalls us, as the communist regime “becomes” family and church; the patriarch’s voice, visage enters the public’s mind, casting a weighty shadow. We think of the one-child rule of China, but the valuation was little different in the Communist underground in the west, encouraging promiscuity and devaluing marriage, denigrating child-bearing and emphasizing abortion.

Women and men both understand the public; both understand the private. But the private has long been women’s domain. When, as our current government does, a power demonstrates arrogance and pride that signals danger to the independence of that world, women may well feel it first. This may explain the large percentage of women in the tea party movement today. We appreciate the rule of law in setting boundaries, but also appreciate the role of boundaries in keeping out the public, the government.

Susan Ridley Sedgewick, writing almost two hundred years ago, would appreciate much. She had seen that limiting women’s roles to the private & domestic was costly in both personal, psychological ways and public, pragmatic ones. She could appreciate our roles today. But she also sees women in her time, centers of domesticity, as resting, not resigned. Linda K. Kerber, in Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America, quotes her “It has indeed been observed by foreigners, with some surprise, that females here are remarkably exempt from the care of the public weal; that they either know nothing or care little about subjects connected with it.’ . . . Visitors usually accounted for this lack of involvement by commenting that American women were straitened by domesticity.” A century later, a popular work would be The Servantless House – American women, from the beginning, were likely to be neither servants nor have them. Still, Sedgwick argues: “But there is a better reason. . . . Government here, though extending over all its protection and vigilance, is a guardian, not a spy. It does not rudely enter our houses, hearts, and consciences, . . . in codes of conscription, disabilities, and test-acts. . . [women] conceive themselves to have the best government in the world, because, in the main, – to use a female figure of speech – like a well made garment, it fits perfectly, and presses nowhere. But let this same garment give token of fracture, decay, or uneasy alteration, we should find their tongues move as quickly as their needles.” Kerber notes that “so long as the male political order refrained from direct pressure on the family, her argument implies,” (276) women will “masquerade” as weak; in times of need they will “take political positions, make their own judgment of the contending sides, risk their lives–emerge stronger and in control.”

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It is this single-minded pursuit of the irrelevant by the self-important that constitutes the greatest catastrophe of our time.

Of course, this week, the phrase “It’s not going to happen” clarified.

Jethro Gibbs’ laconic “Yah think.” (Foreign policy, domestic policy, life) works, too.

But the obvious may need saying – before it’s swamped by the irrelevant.

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I’d like to note some minor irritations. Few lead as voyeuristic a life as I do, often using pop culture as a gauge to my reality. I know that betokens superficiality. Well, so be it. I’ve wasted much life in front of television sets and reading murder mysteries. And Humphrey Bogart’s image moved through that life.

So I followed ALDaily’s link to an LRB review of Stefan Kanfer’s Tough Without a Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart. Apparently, for Jenny Diski, as for many of us, Humphrey Bogart was bigger than life. He died before I became a teen, but his old movies reran constantly on fifties’ television; when I started college, French directors, as Diski notes, led us back to him. I watched many yet again at Chicago’s Clark in the late sixties. Bogart merged with the heroes of hard boiled thrillers and then Camus as we started to take our intellectual lives more seriously.

Those movies, bigger than life, remain true in many ways. But that world tended, like the news of the eighties, to be partial. And part of me kept back. Growing up in fly-over territory and being patronized did that. Knowing Cuban, Latvian and Czech refugees did, too. In the Platte Valley, a respect for internationalism was interwoven with my parents’ strong allegiance to American exceptionalism. Rebellious and irritating as daughter, I never doubted my parents’ vision. It wasn’t that that drove me crazy.

So, I immersed myself in and enjoyed one world – The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books were joys, NPR’s morning and evening themes were welcomed. But I retained a sense of another place, another culture. Pat Schroeder’s willingness to destroy reputations after Tail Hook bothered me. I’d known male predators and Clarence Thomas in no way resembled them. Nina Totenberg lost credibility – as plagiarist, as victim of harassment, as objective reporter. And, then, Clinton looked into the camera and lied. Lying is human nature. But I don’t like it. And allegiance to “the women’s rights movement” disappeared when those who condemned Thomas cheered Clinton and Teddy Kennedy. Then came 9/11. This is a long way around, perhaps, but I wanted to try to explain why some of us were immersed in a world that referred to the Red Scare as an immense evil and we didn’t argue. We knew better. But no one wanted to defend McCarthy and our sympathies were stretched & theoretical when it came to the gulags. They wouldn’t touch the strongest, most luxurious, most free nation – we felt secure. And, we lived in a fog.

Reading Diski, though, I had a moment of irritation at myself as well as at her. Her experience was not exactly mine. She sees Casablanca as an example of nostalgia but I’ve always seen it as fitting well in 1943. Kanfer’s is perhaps more so. I, too, am constantly surprised by what passes for a leading man in modern movies – indeed, what passes for a man. Mark Harmon, now there’s a man. The small screen seems to me to “grow” men in a way that few modern movies do. But, fun as this kind of talk can be, that isn’t where I want to direct our attention – though it shows how distracting pop culture can be. Here is a paragraph that bothers her from Kanfer:

To be sure, if Humphrey and other First Amendment Committee members, and the studio heads, and the principal Wall Street investors in those studios had stood together in opposition to the so-called Inquisition in Eden, there might have been a chance to save the industry from the predators. That coalition never developed, however, and it is folly to assume that Humphrey Bogart should have sacrificed his reputation, standing mutely and obediently by as the Nineteen manipulated him for their own purposes.

Bogart took a stand – in many ways attractive, in many ways naïve. Diski quotes Kanfer (quoting Alistair Cooke – this is a pop culture rave, not scholarship): “Bogart was aghast to discover [that many of the protestors] were down-the-line communists coolly exploiting the protection of the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution. He had thought they were just freewheeling anarchists like himself.” Diski observes that that was where he differed from a character such as Harry Morgan, who would never have been “aghast” and that his later Photoplay article “I’m No Communist” tells us much that is not good about the period and the man. But why was such repulsion on his part wrong – should he have found that dishonesty attractive? She observes, “What is very strange is that Kanfer shrugs off one of the darkest and most disturbing episodes in American history.” She implies that Bogart blinked, but did he or does she today?

With historical perspective, the stranger attitude might be that that time of carefully vetted scripts, of dishonesty with one another and before those committees, of subtle and not so subtle propaganda was dark in a way (post Venona for instance) we now understand. A sense of the truth – who was using it and who abusing it – appears to be understood better by Bogart then than Diski now. It is no defense of McCarthy to note many lied and continued to lie, even while setting hounds on Elia Kazan until he died. And Hollywood, given to the grandiose gesture and inflated ego, argued they were for the “little people” with a narcissism that bleeds into hubris. This hubris, of course, undercuts the universalization and internalization, intrinsic to the beliefs that define the American experience. Our founders were more humble – a humility hard to find in those that mock them for the more particular characteristics then of their class and now of their race & sex. (Sentimentality may appear as sympathy, but it isn’t. And, indeed, it is often patronizing.)

And Diski, well, that’s the norm. Nora Ephron’s work is light, but who am I to belittle that? I may prefer the lightness of a different genre, but light has its virtues. And Ephron entertains. A few months ago, one of my husband’s colleagues, distressed at my cavalier dismissal of McCarthyism (in his world, that may well signal the loss of my soul), recommended Julie and Julia. That charming movie, he said, demonstrates how deeply McCarthyism reached into America: someone as benign as Paul Child was suspect. I dvred it and was not sorry. Julia Child was also larger than life – full of adventure and zest, as cook and as spy. And Julie – well, she too is beguiling. The movie demonstrates, as a friend observed, that the good-humored way to a man’s heart is through his stomach – two happy couples. Cooking and eating together – Child might be of more aid to marriage counselors than Freud.

Yes, Paul was hauled back to America for an ugly interrogation. We sympathize. How could we not? But I also dvred Jennet Conant on C-Span. Her talk, A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS, was overwhelmed by Jane Foster – who brought the Childs together. She had neither the competence nor discretion of the Childs, but she was attractive, and if not as intelligent as they, fluent in multiple languages and adventurous. Imaginative and a risk-taker, she was scandalous but sometimes effective. Conant is coy (buy the book, she tells us). A reviewer notes Foster was likely to take over any narration of those early years – entertaining then and on the page today. Both Childs liked her; indeed, only later when they were sent to China and she wasn’t, did they turn full gaze on one another, Julia early seeig Paul as the man she wanted and they became a great love match. They only relinked with Foster seven years later, in Paris in 1952, where she was married to a Russian (a marriage that may have begun much earlier, but the Childs hadn’t known).

Conant argues Foster’s disaffection after the war had to do with the way the American state department treated post-war Asia (and accepted our Allies’ mistreatment of these countries). Still, Haynes and Klehr note that the Venona documents place her as a Party member and conduit of information from the Dutch bureau in 1942 and 1943.

The Childs’ affection for this vivacious young woman, who served as a model for Julia as she broke through the shell of her conventional past and attracted Paul, was understandable and real. That they were not implicated but were accused is quite likely true as well. Nonetheless, such suspicion was not the result of McCarthyism run amuck. Her presence would have altered the focus the movie has on Julia as wife and as cook; it complicates if not undercuts the central love story. Aesthetically such editing was probably a wise choice. But it also, conveniently, slants the “witchhunt” in much simpler terms: ones our friend too easily accepted as ‘truth.” And it is not surprising that the daughter of two screenwriters, the wife of Carl Bernstein, would prefer history (and thus Hollywood) was seen as victim rather than enforcer.

These moments in pop culture seem distant from an acceptance of the science of Lysenko and the killing fields of Pol Pot and the Cultural Revolution of Mao. But it isn’t just the hundred million or so dead. It is life as well. One of my friends, an avid bridge player, noted that Stalin outlawed bridge. Ignoring that vision – the politicization on a scale we can’t imagine – accepts with insufficient sympathy wasted lives and minds, but may also lead to such policies here. That these unquestioned assumptions softened us for weak arguments has slowly come home to me.

Ignoring evil, real evil, leads to disproportion. Our inheritance is in danger. That, as much as the money gone that may bankrupt our country and burden our children, has been squandered. To appreciate the gift we have to understand the importance of universalization – the belief that all men possess inalienable rights, given by God, and intrinsic in our nature. We have to accept the freedom and burden of internalization – responsibility is a matter of guilt and not shame, of individual choice and not the pressures of others or of our society.

This summer I will try to make arguments that these values can be best preached in and absorbed by entering the wolds of the great English realists with their mundane communities in which individual choice looms large even when the choices themselves are small. And these values are argued and explained and considered in our own great and greatly self-conscious literature of that period.

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(Ramblings with no links)

Some definitions of the “American Dream” don’t comport with human nature but then fault America for not achieving a fantasy no one (no sane man would have) ever posited. But the essential American dream is of a society freely joined, each respectful of others but autonomous and fulfilled.

That society tests the workability of our theories of the good life. We, if often unconsciously, value natural law: the primacy of moral fulfillment of our nature. The thinkers who defined our culture and then our government often spoke of the great irony of power through submission, becoming our best selves by acknowledging larger powers. That is most efficient not when we are clapped in a theoretical or real prison, but by enlarging horizons and testing ideas – we learn humility through perspective & experience, we learn what works. The Puritans, not surprisingly, saw this in religious terms. Winthrop argues the test of their religious love for one another and their God: could they demonstrate a community bound by the ligaments of that love succeeds? If so, others might be persuaded; if they failed, certainly others would not choose their path.

Does it work? A century later, this guided Franklin’s experiments with bifocals and a government constrained by the Constitution. What works may be humbling – Lysenko was surely humbled when he found his ideas replaced. But it is also bracing.

Schiller of NPR speaks of American anti-intellectualism. But we were founded by the Puritans and our government structured by founders immersed in a uniquely American version of the Enlightenment. Benjamin Franklin distrusted pure Deism, the Founders believed in checks and balances, even the vague thinkers of Transcendentalism abandoned Brook Farm quickly. Looking at results isn’t anti-intellectual. It demonstrates respect for the power of an idea.

For instance, experience tells us our self-interest needs restraint but it has its uses. Our resilience, our responsibility for our own, our self-reliance–and yes, I’ve come to understand, our guns–would make a government-caused famine as in the Ukraine in the thirties or China from 1958-1962 difficult to enact. We’d refuse. Out of self interest, of course. But, first, because those ideas failed the great test – do they work? Even those of us remarkably stupid about science as a broader discipline have thoroughly integrated the scientific method into our thinking: what works its test. And the good life, we’ve found, values others’ lives & others’ autonomy, it builds our self-respect on our respect for others. Clearly neither factored in the great leaps of Russia and China, the programs of Germany and Cambodia. In general, statist governments don’t “work”. Still, Chavez listens and some closer to home are drawn to those old Sirens. But they aren’t seductive if we value what “works”. Then, their music is shrill and tinny.

Our current economic straits bring focus. Budgeting time or money clarifies priorities. We’ve known schools were failing – in minor and spectacular ways. As we listen to the litany of government mismanagement and replication on the nightly news, we are less surprised than awakened. We dozed, our attention elsewhere: we had life to do. In the early sixties my mother renewed her certificate to put me through college; every night she railed about her education classes. A couple of years later, in my first Kelly Girl jobs, I saw the difference between a government office & a private one. We all knew. Job security and job benefits were increasing exponentially in a Ponzi scheme right before us. We knew union deals were defensible in one-company towns where the factory-owner had all the cards and any increase in wages would limit his profits. But when the negotiators are a politician who gets votes and campaign contributions from employees who reap benefits and money, contracts entered with no one having the role of manufacturer – the ultimate source of income – the system corrupts.

Human engineers demonstrate a lack of moral imagination and ferocious inflexibility when faced with practical failures. People with theories are seldom immune to temptation: they want to mold rather than be molded. But power corrupts and an idealist with power becomes a tyrant. He fails to accept reality: the “otherness” of the other, an unmalleable world. Our social engineers are not unlike Lysenko. And not unlike him, they are dangerous when a government enforces their theories. Often, a theory fails because it can’t distinguish between truths that can’t budge and archaic understandings that can. The twentieth century denial of biology, of botany, of human nature led to democide of unimaginable dimensions but also to corruption. The belief that the real world & real people are constructions isn’t helpful.

Policies that ignore human nature fail. Unions began including their insurance companies as part of the deal. That doesn’t surprise. All of us have a bit of the grifter in us – when someone else is paying, we are all too likely to stay at a nicer hotel, eat a more expensive dinner. The vulgarity on display in Wisconsin and its arguments come from pride – self-righteous, certain they aren’t tainted by man’s nature. The radical & honest egalitarianism of our founders assumes none are immune. (Academics emphasize Washington’s flaws while ignoring his heroism in rising above the temptations of power; they don’t recognize that virtue so important in a republic.)

If traditionally we haven’t had much patience with theories unmoored from reality, we’ve loved innovation – in ideas and things, theories and techniques. Our experience and others’ – whether recorded in literature or history or even the daily news reports – give lessons. What worked and what didn’t helps us predict what will and won’t. That isn’t anti-intellectual, it just asks the intellectual for his bona fides.

I’m optimistic. Those sleepy students in my classes have potential. We may have been sleeping, but we are a giant. And a giant armed with that great criterion – does it work? – can always find a way.

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The Puritans begin each semester. Their beliefs and modes of thought foreshadow much that comes after. Their emphasis upon the word – understood, translated, interpreted – leads to reasoned argument; they do personal interpretation and respect biblical authority, they do introspection and encourage humility. These naturally lead to experimentation, scientific skepticism. How a Puritan – Cotton Mather – and a figure now seen as personifying the scientific method and American Enlightenment – Benjamin Franklin – reacted to the 1721 small pox epidemic in Boston is the subject of the short, quite readable The Pox and the Covenant by Tony Williams. The controversy over inoculation split the town, undercut the old traditions, and show us the universals that moved them and now move us. Reason, pride, passion, feeling for our fellows entered into a controvrsy which also challenges our assumptions, our sense of who Cotton Mather was and who Benjamin Franklin was.

The battle set authorities – scientific and religious – against one another. William Douglass, the most credentialed Boston doctor, countered Boylston, one of the most innovative of the American-trained practitioners. More important to our understanding of the period, perhaps, and to my lit class, it also set Cotton Mather (with his father Increase), the leading Puritan ministers, scholars and authorities of their day, against the Franklin brothers. The brilliant Benjamin was a mere apprentice but already the witty author of the Dogood letters. His brother, James, found that encouraging and exacerbating the controversy increased the popularity of the New England Courant, their new paper: what the Iran hostage crisis was for ABC’s nightly report, this battle was for the Frankllins.

Small pox – what it did to the indigenous people, how patients were treated, its effect on society – altered American history as much as any war. A book that discusses in mind-numbing detail small pox as scourge is Pox Americana by Elizabeth Fenn. The devastation that preceded the early English migration wiped out large percentages of the native population; it was less deadly to first generation Puritans because many came with immunity. It remained deadly to Indians and became deadly to those separated from Europe for a generation or more, who had not experienced its ravages – and thus become immunized.

Williams’ background is American Studies; mine is lit. I am somewhat curious what the real scientists on this blog think of the book (if they have read it). It certainly seems popularized, but it lays out the controversy clearly. And it gives us insight into that period – as the seventeenth century became the eighteenth and Enlightenment thinking permeated religious as well as political and economic theories.

Cotton Mather first learned of the efficacy of inoculation from an African slave. (Williams notes that Mather’s insistence upon the education and conversion of slaves, as well as their equality before God, led him to treat Onesimus’s description with respect.) Mather surveyed other Africans and heard similar stories. He was further convinced by an article in Philosophical Transactions (loaned him by the very William Douglass, a cosmopolitan Boston physician, who became his adversary). Dr. Emanuel Timonius, a fellow of the Royal Society in Constantinople, described the practice in Turkey. Soliciting and printing studies from far flung correspondents, the London Royal Society richly nourished an enlarging scientific community. These descriptions reinforced Mather’s belief disease was spread by “animalcules” – an embryonic germ theory. He convinced one of the most accomplished of the American-trained physicians of the time, Zabdiel Boylston, that the process might work. This was amidst the chaos of the 1721 epidemic. Bostonians, seeing so many among them dying, felt panic. This is not always the most receptive of mind sets. And inoculaton is a scary (and dangerous) procedure.

Douglass was a solid (and as he was quite proudly aware) credentialed scientist; his training was European and challenging. However, he was adamantly opposed to inoculation (apparently neither looking into the experience of Boylston’s patients nor the literature). Decades later, he would change his mind and become a practitioner himself. In 1721, however, he argued that insufficient care was being taken by a doctor he disparaged. And, further, that the process should not be considered seriously since it had been discovered and promoted by Africans and Muslims. His religious argument was fatalistic – obviously this scourge was God’s judgment. Indeed, he had many arguments. Mather and Boylston countered that God gave man reason to use and saving others’ lives was certainly God’s intention. And of course the great argument: it worked. The Franklins took delight in harassing those with power and encouraged controversy; soliciting papers that opposed inoculation, they found sarcasm & satire sold, as did hyperbole. Stoking the fire and encouraging opponents like Douglass developed a market for their fledgling newspaper.

Those of us familiar with contemporary debates on vaccinations, global warming, and various other controversies are struck again by the continuity of human nature. Douglass may have loaned Mather the journal earlier, but his arguments while partially over method, were assertions of authority. Boylston was a provincial; he was not. Turf protection can be the aim of authority. Mather demanded and generally was given the respect due one of the most intellectual and thoughtful ministers of the time; he was also, of course, a Mather. Pride (apportioned in varying amounts to Douglass, Boylston, Mather, the Franklin brothers) blurred reasoning. So did prejudice: Mather believed that he should be given more due as an authority & he was given to self-dramatization. However, the arguments from Douglass & the Franklins were often ad hominem and racist.

The Puritans prepared the ground for individualism, independent thinking, and the use of the scientific method. Some of them were scientists, by any definition of their time or ours. I am not. But I’ve come to respect their rigorous pursuit of knowledge and find their sense of the unity of experience and faith, analysis and observation powerful. Their respect for the truth ruled out ad hominem arguments – a rigor we seldom see today. Certainly, our celebrity-fed objections to vaccination today means we haven’t learned what Cotton Mather knew and Benjamin Franklin came to know – we need habitual patterns of thinking that encourage rationality. Our passion & pride are obstacles. Cotton Mather, willing to take on the anger directed at a process he firmly believed could save lives, appears as a man who risked status (and lost the core consensus regarding his authority). He was a hero; Douglass, the other physicians in town, the Franklins, all won – inoculations were forbidden. But Mather housed and Boylston inoculated those who chose that path – and these were saved when a large percentage of those who got small pox “the natural way” did not. Mather went against man’s law, firmly believing that saving lives was God’s law. And the risks were real: as Bostonians were whipped up by the pontifications of Douglass and the wit of the Franklins, the responses turned nasty. In the second year of the outbreak, an ineffectual bomb was thrown through a window in Mather’s home late at night. Death was averted when the fuse was knocked from the explosive as it hit the window.

Williams argues that the great loser in the controversy was the power of the covenant and respect for the church. Mather had risked his prestige on the importance of these inoculations in a controversy that moved out of his sphere of respect (not of knowledge, for Mather’s understanding of science put him at the forefront of his time.) On the other hand, the process itself won. Both Douglass and Benjamin Franklin came around to be eloquent advocates. They must also have realized their initial positions had consequences. Mather battled with himself, worried when it came close to home. But his son, reading his father’s arguments and fearing small pox, wanted the procedure. Mather thought about it, consulted his father, but chose to have it performed on the two children born too late to have been immunized by the last great outbreak. They lived. Franklin, on the other hand, poignantly, notes in his Autobiography that one of the great errata of his life was not inoculating his son, who died at 5 from small pox. These consequences are likely to have given Mather more comfort – and Franklin less – than the battle waged in public. In the public arena, certainly many lived because of inoculations and many died who might have been saved if the inoculations had been broadly instituted (or at least legal).

Shannon’s much more expert arguments for vaccinations have sometimes stirred the comments on this blog. And I’d like to note some interesting contemporary works that buttress his position: Seth Mnookin’s The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine. Another is Paul Offit’s Deadly Choices. Both demonstrate our quite understandable fear of and the strength of the argument for vaccines.

Here is a passage from the conclusion of Williams’ text that summarizes:

It was a Puritan minister and one lone doctor who stood up to the medical establishment and boldly continued the practice in the face of vehement medical and popular opposition. They defended their experiments with religious arguments steeped in the eighteenth-century natural law consistent with Puritan belief. But their arguments were primarily that inoculation was a sound and efficacious medical practice, and they followed the scientific method to test their theory.
 
It was the hidebound and haughty Dr. William Douglass who fought the practice tooth and nail, and a man of God who bravely proved that inoculation worked and saved many lives. Cotton Mather scorned those who clung tenaciously to their scientific presuppositions and refused to examine new views. He once criticized a Florentine scientist who declined to look through Galileo’s telescope because “he was afraid that then his eyes would from ocular demonstrations, make him stagger concerning the truth of Aristotle’s principles, which he was resolved he would never call in question.”
 
Indeed, we cannot escape the overwhelming evidence from this dramatic story that Douglass and most of Boston’s physicians acted unscientifically throughout the entire contest. They refused to examine evidence, withheld scientific literature that contradicted their arguments, manufactured testimony that they probably knew was false, argued from racist premises, and used personal attacks to defeat their opponents. Contrarily, Cotton Mather and Zabdiel Boylston examined the findings in scientific journals, confirmed them with those who knew about the procedure and tested the procedure repeatedly and successfully through experiments that proved their hypothesis. (208-209)

P.S.
Admittedly, I have little scientific background but I wander into this area to better understand the literature I teach. 1) The writers of 1850 can only be fully understood in the context of what went before – just as they help us see patterns as we look back. The writers of 1721 can only be understood by understanding their times better. 2) I like the Puritans. I think they were remarkable. And this incident, like so many others, shows that we have more to learn than condemn in their views and practices. 3) Most of my students are convinced that Europeans arrived, practiced germ warfare in a horrendous pattern, and decimated the Indian population. I don’t want to think that is true, but, then, I suspect that some do. The tales of infected blankets are legion. Fenn puts much of that argument to rest. Williams is more narrowly focused, but appears to do so as well. He does note Franklin’s satiric jab at the Mathers – perhaps inoculated soldiers could be sent to infect the Indians. I hope reading satire literally is not the basis of this prevalent belief – if so it is yet more proof that we are failing to teach close reading – and many are failing to do it. 4) Most of my students think that religion and science have always been at odds. This prevents them from understanding and appreciating a good many of these early writers.

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The Tea Parties were not violent. Mobs didn’t go after bankers with pitchforks. Instead of sending American Muslims off to interment camps, we tred so softly that 13 people lay dead at Fort Hood. When white slavery appeared encouraged at Acorn and Planned Parenthood, we did not shut our eyes. We wanted both closed down. We recognized the clear lack of justice in the principle of public sector unions; we cited human nature & the inevitable bloat. We saw as farce politicians/bureaucrats negotiating with unions to set deals that other parties – mainly the taxpayers – would have to pay. We understand the importance of the rule of law, of restraining our desire for money & power & sex.

Shortly after 9/11, I remember a discussion of the suspicion directed at Muslims; I believe it was on WSJ; the reports were of people who feared American xenophobia. And I remember the pleasure I took in Dorothy Rabinowitz’s strong statement – we don’t riot in the streets and go after “foreigners.” she said. Then, firmly, she said, “That’s not the way we act. We are Americans.” Much as history has proved Duranty’s assessment of communism and its citizens was bizarrely wrong, Howard Zinn’s (and I fear Obama’s) America is as much a fantasy as Duranty’s picture of Russia was. Those modern intellectuals are clearly projecting their own lust for power on others. They (like so many revolutionaries in the past) see themselves with clean hands & virtuous hearts, see themselves as answer. But their answers are not to rational questions nor do they arise from experience. We – the voting majority I expect – are not under any illusions that we (or any “they”) should be trusted with unchecked power – they understand man’s fallible nature. The radicals have little self-consciousness, little irony, and fewer doubts. But the majority have learned from experience and from history. And they demonstrate it day after day, beguiled occasionally by Ponzi schemes, but returning to common sense, self reliance, & affection for the other as well as for others. We understand class warfare and we feel disdain.

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Rick Perry is someone I have long underestimated; his policies have kept us in relatively safe economic order despite the effect of national energy policies on a state that makes much from oil and despite the fact that some of the highest rates of illegal immigration and drug wars are on our borders. Instapundit links his policy on education. Reining in academic bureacracies, perqs and salaries is not anti-intellectual. It is egalitarian. Expecting state colleges to prove the value of the credentials they “sell” is the responsibility of government regulation.

MLA has pioneered an accreditation of English speaking: trained listeners grade speakers on their mastery of English. This becomes a useful indicator of the student’s proficiency – one often hard to know from credit hours. (A similar pattern exists at here: the Spanish teachers found such varied levels of competency from similar credentials that they now administer their own tests and dialogues for appropriate placement.) Such accreditation can be done, even in the liberal arts.

Education is relatively simple unless we want to see it as a “life experience.” Higher education should be undertaken for one of two goals: 1) because a college is an efficient way to impart specific knowledge that can be used in practical ways (most often, on the job). 2) because someone really enjoys the life of the mind. The former may require some subsidies and perhaps loans are not a bad investment for doctors and engineers. I have no problem with the second; not too far into my graduate work, I realized that I was not likely to get a tenure-track position. I was making $2800 a year (even in 1971 that wasn’t much money) but I could support myself by teaching freshmen and sophomores while spending a good part of my time reading and writing. However, I also wanted children and so I eventually opted for a job of providing a needed service. Society should have no problem with the first, though considerable checks should be placed if society foots the bill. And it should discourage student loans. However, faculty that sees a two-class teaching load as onerus but pulls in 3-figure salaries may rationalize their usefulness, but I’m not sure if society needs to accept those rationalizatons. Certainly, the workers at Wal-Mart, whom these scholars often deride, should not have to support them – nor should the businessmen who work eighty-hour weeks. Rich or poor, others pay taxes which are used to support relatively easy lives, when these lives are not devoted to the training of these workers’ offspring.

I will acknowledge that any emphasis upon graduation rates seems to me to be a real moral hazard – we don’t need to graduate students who shouldn’t graduate; open admissions in schools like ours is a wonderful opportunity; graduation should be earned. Nor are admittance checks that weed out those who screwed up the first time around and are ready to do quite well a good thing. But this can be tweaked. Exit test standings would be a useful first step.

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This began as a comment and, given my extremely limited (nonexistent) expertise, it is rambling observations and questions – and if Michael & Madhu say I’ve got it wrong, well, I probably do.

Mental hospitals dotted the landscape in the 50′s and 60′s. That was another time: some of us got through college pulling night shifts at them. Psychiatric counseling was a rite of passage among the artsy. (Note Girl Interrupted and Emily Fox Gordon’s Mockingbird Years. ) Gordon treats that particular perspective with irony. But such approaches were not always helpful and certainly those public wards filled with the less affluent were sad and lifeless.

My understanding (Michael? Madhu?) was that a combination of many pressures cleared out those hospitals. The revolution in psychiatric drugs was one. Hospitals were expensive and shutting them down improved state budgets. A strong push from advocates for “patient’s rights” was one “cause” of 60’s empowerment. Making the choices voluntary meant few opted for such treatment. But those hospitals – better than they were decades before – were still awful.

Then the adults read Freud & we just acted it out. Karl Shapiro taught creative writing in the mid-sixties in Lincoln; on the first class day he held up One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, telling us the book got it right – he knew about the one on the edge of Lincoln. Actually by then lobotomies were few, but we knew what they were. My own life was too much in shambles to argue – I was working nights at that hospital. And frankly I had no idea what was going on outside my pretty peculiar world at that time. But that book was a force. And as the sixties went on, the potential problems of isolated institutions where some had great power over the quite vulnerable remained. Forman ‘s interpretation is political: his vision was clearly influenced by the Soviet use of psychiatry, but that didn’t mean in the less politicized world of American hospitals excesses didn’t remain.

The tension between individual & society’s rights are one of the great dilemmas: Should a community limit some because within them percolates a higher than average (if unpredictable) chance they pose harm? In the great dramas justice enters; but justice must involve the act and not the potential. Is stunting many lives because some might damage others fair? We think not. But the dilemma is no less real. We know that in our gut – Oedipus still has power because we understand the scapegoat story, we understand the restoration of order at the conclusion of classic tragedy with the banishment or sacrificial death of a flawed hero is stark. My friend teaches Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Remarkably responsive and loving, she says, why doesn’t someone scoop up the child and take it away. But it implies the tradeoffs are simpler than they generally are. When we see the slaughter at Safeway we remember that this particular tradeoff is not simple.

In 2007 a series of posts on the Volokh Conspiracy analyzed incarceration rates, prmpted by Bernard Honcourt’s “An Institutional Effect,”. He notes rates were relatively stable if mental hospital and prison populations were factored together. Stuart Benjamin then did a series of posts. His was not (and could not rationally be) an argument of cause and effect nor that those in prison were really mentally ill. Teaching at a minimum security prison for a while, I felt thrown back on the gray misery of my work forty years earlier. The shiny buffed floors, gray & colorless, spread before quite different people. My anecdotal observation was reinforced: mental hospitals disproportionately held middle-aged white women while prisons house disproportionately ethnic young men. Perhaps it says something about the amount of unpredictability a society can contain (both add to society’s chaos). Or perhaps it says nothing.

While some paranoids I know seem a bit edgier, they are also married & productive. Few are suicidal or homicidal. Deinstitutionalization may well be worth its costs. Or, perhaps, we could now diagnose more precisely. Or allow assessments prompted more often by others. If many are happier, others lead lives dramatically worse and more abused (as well as more abusive) than they would have in such facilities. And we don’t (can’t) isolate those who are truly (and obviously) homicidal.

Charging such acts to political discourse distracts from the consequences of policy. I’m not sure failed policy, but if we protected the individual liberty of the deranged less, some would be alive in West Virginia, in Huntsville, Alabama, and in Tucson. But many might be much worse off. It would not be an easy task to total the pluses and minuses, but it might be an honest one.

Political rhetoric? Well, this particular shooter appears as much loony left as loony right. If the left seems hypocritical in trying to make political gain, that is just what they do. But the truth is such a loon today when political discourse is important to us uses that vocabulary. Rants were often drawn from the Bible. Some use environmental terms & tropes. Loons become obsessed while others merely become interested. Among the Puritans such people killed others or committed suicide, quoting the Bible. But the Bible also pointed a way for many others to love one another. The Columbine massacre appeared to be acted out by teenagers using the rites and costumes of pop culture. It wasn’t that a Puritan ax-murderer like Jonathan Edwards’ uncle nor his other uncle who slit his own throat did so because they were Puritans. Because they were Puritans their fantasies were woven from Puritan tropes and vocabulary.

Post ScriptL:
While I was writing this, an e-mail discussion built among my friends. This isn’t surprising. We have been told that several people with significant problems are likely to appear in our classes. (A friend’s husband was getting quite violent threatening notes, but after he flunked the student at the big school he came over to our community college. There the student began to send threatening e-mails to one of my colleagues. The student’s sister is one of my daughter’s friends. They know their son has problems – but, they are also in a foreign country and don’t understand the system. Not that the rest of us do.) Not surprisingly, this is a problem we return to repeatedly at our division meetings and having guest speakers from counseling does little to reassure us. I suspect it is good we can’t arbitrarily throw such a student out, but some are (which one? we ask) ticking bombs. Here are the links my friends have been circulating: New York Times , Washington Post. I have my doubts that the mentally ill are a larger percentage of the student population than in our youth; we did, however, have a good deal fewer rights and a good deal less privacy.

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In the last 20 years, conservative ideas, including the value of all work, which binds us to each other through the strange beauty of commerce and voluntary exchange, have done more to turn around American cities than four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare entitlements, social programs, and public housing ever did. More than 10,000 minority males are alive in New York City today who would have been dead, had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early 1990s level. A policy triumph doesn’t get any more concrete than that.

Heather McDonald, “Restoring the Social Order,” City

A friend’s daughter sent this link – I’ve always admired City Magazine but been less diligent lately; I appreciate the prod. Commentary, too, has been looking back at Moynihan’s prescience and the drubbing he took.

We brought a politically eclectic group together for New Year’s Eve; one of my husband’s friends explained that he believed keeping the Bush tax cuts was a bad idea because he “cared for the poor,” I coldly observed that he thought he did. He’s retiring in his mid-seventies from a position as distinguished professor in accounting, having long argued for the VAT as well. He acknowledged that part of the charm of a variety of methods of taxation was that intertwined throughout the system they become more difficult to distinguish. His chief answer to social security is raising the age; my extremely conservative friend argued with him that works well for the people there (retiring at various stages in life), but not so well for manual laborers. She has drawn me to see this as a more complicated problem than I’d thought. (Those retiring at 70 and 75 at this gathering were quite healthy and likely to spend more years in retirement than people both she and he knew who did heavier work. I, too, thought raising the age was a good idea – and it is for people like us.) Conservatives are less likely to see such workers as the oppressed “other” but as colleagues & neighbors & employees. This leads to respect for individuals rather than sympathy for classes but it also encourages a better understanding. (As one of the women at church observed, you have to chat and even gossip a little – she seems incapable of critical gossip but is quite aware of others’ physical and spiritual pains – to really know how to help.) It will not surprise that almost everyone there was an academic. While I respect the accountant (he is knowledgeable, gave quite useful counsel when I had my business, and is a good man in many ways), his assurance can drive a listener wild.

I think it is best to grant people their intentions – they want children (not just their own floating in their twenties) but also poor children covered by health insurance, believe widows and orphans are the larger community’s responsibility (a belief that their policies made anachronistic). But such assumptions concede a high ground not truly theirs. I was drawn back to conservative principles in part because I was no longer able to keep cognitive dissonance at bay. Let’s be honest. These policies meant to do good haven’t just accidentally or as a by-product done bad – they arrive from flawed assumptions about society, capitalism, human nature, and of how respect for others is demonstrated. These assumptions assumed a house will stand in a hurricane even without rebar in its walls (or its levees). The rebar is, of course, self-reliance & strong families, transparent government & the rule of law. Rebar is gut-level respect for individual choices – not deciding out of some strange sympathy for the “people” that rebar is not necessary in their houses. The rebar is built of traditional, conventional, conservative, bourgeois values. It is built on the assumption that we are flawed people, likely to take the easy and sometimes the wrong way. But also that we have a warm spark within us that prompts us toward the transcendent, the warm, the loving & the productive. And we are happiest when we can express that spark and unhappiest when we give in to that darkness. A society in which we can accept – generally without thinking about it – the assurance of rebar leaves us free to become better people. If we are uncertain whether the walls will crumble around us, we aren’t protected from the elements within and without. We aren’t free.

Of course, narrow sympathies also forget who kills who, who rapes who, whose childhood is one of abuse when society falls apart. A modicum of sympathy for the victims brings home the power of McDonald’s point to the sympathetic heart as well as the rational head – the heart truly open.

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A&L is clothed in black. Denis Dutton did much to make the blogosphere a better and more thoughtful place. Obits here and here. The Art Instinct site blog; a presentation. Authors on Google gives us a sense of his own vision — one implied by A&L’s subtle and evenhanded framing. The Chronicle’s blog appreciation and comments. D. G. Myers gives a more heart-felt and warmly written obit. And at National Review.

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My husband and I both feel ill at ease in the churches we have been attending. His has become more evangelical, more charismatic. That is the wave of the present and it is likely to evoke in congregants a more passionate belief. But it is not his way. Even less is it mine. Mine is bloodless in its Christianity, dismissive of the church’s role in shaping values we hold dear. And politicized. My husband and I like and respect the people in the congregations. And we have a loyalty – his people were around in the Battle of White Mountain and my people arrived in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century from Wales and Scotland, Protestants to the core. He’s related by blood to many in his small congregation; I’m related in spirit – the church is like the church of my youth.

I’m not religious, as my friends and regular readers here know. But a few years ago my youngest daughter wanted to seek out a church “home” in which she might feel more comfortable than the church of her father. I remain in an ambiguous position: when we fill out the membership record each Sunday I follow the example of an older couple who described themselves as “regular visitors.” They’ve joined but I haven’t.

As is true of most of the old mainline denominations, the membership is older. The women are stylish – they retain that strong discipline that straightens hose, polishes shoes, sits upright. Coming out of that great sea change of the sixties, our generation has seldom disciplined ourselves as they did – men in suits and women “put together.” I hate to think we will be represented by the older people at San Francisco demonstrations – 75-year-olds in t-shirts and sloppy sweats, thin hair blowing in the wind. Going to church, I remembered the Sundays of my youth, my grandparents erect and carefully groomed, attentive and polite. And I saw it again in this church – and I wanted to follow these models – ones I had forgotten for most of my adult life. They might be appalled and certainly would not have run a business, as I often did, bare-footed nor blindly grab something from a closet on the way to work.

This sounds superficial. It isn’t – it is the outward show of self-discipline and respect for self, for society, for the church itself. It signals a quiet personal dignity. These aren’t flashy dressers; they are just adults and I really can no longer pretend I’m not an adult, as my last child sets out in the world and Social Security gives me dates – last year, next, down the road five or so – when I can start collecting.

My Sunday School class is more engaging than church – it is a classroom, which, after all, is my natural home. My rhythms are those of the school year; even in the 13 years I was neither student nor teacher, my business was dependent upon the waxing and waning that characterize the school calendar. And I’m used to thinking about words. So a class that emphasized the word felt good – challenging and interesting and I became at ease much faster than I would have thought.

And what a class it is! I’ve spoken here before of the remarkable World War II heroes in our midst. Coming from the strongly ethnic church of my husband’s faith and family, I looked at the Presbyterians in a new way – they, too, were ethnic. And the names in the directory were from the various strains that melded into my family. And a more gracious, loving group of people is hard to imagine. The member with whom I am most in disagreement has thanked me for coming; he and his wife have gone out of their way to welcome me – and, let’s face it, I’m not gracious; I persistently argue and criticize their opinions. The older couple –the “regular visitors” – turned out to be a charming analyst who warmly announced one Sunday that decades of listening to patients had led him to recognize love kept people sane, made marriages, was the message of the Bible, and the great good in this world. He returns to that observation, week after week. (Two members of the class were rigorously trained in psychology, but all bring a lifetime of observing, analyzing, and in most cases I would venture to say, loving human nature.)

But the class is riven – quietly, below the surface forcefully calmed by the strong hand of our teacher. The murmured disagreements are the usual ones – the extent (and truth) of global warming, the role of the government, Iraq and Afghanistan, taxes, the legitimacy of Palestinian complaints and Israel claims, the culpability of the church in slavery, the problems of the minimum wage. Always, he takes us back to the word and a Biblical context for it – and it alone. Some worry about how others use their land, others about how others use their money. Back we go to the verses and the millennia ago when they were written. I’m always struck by the certainty of some at the proper use of others’ resources – and how they might better control them. But our attention is drawn again to the beautiful old words and the great old narratives.

The minister, however, has taken to speaking from the pulpit about social issues – and in the tradition of so many of the mainline churches. Not too many weeks ago, he developed a strained and rather unenlightening comparison between Martin Luther and that great thinker, Cornel West. A friend’s daughter had heard the sermon and been shocked; I had been irritated but not paid sufficient attention. Reading it over (in the tradition of our denomination, the word of the sermon is treated with respect, copies are available to follow during the sermon itself and it is on the website) I found her wiser than I, despite my years. Quoting Cornel West at length is not likely to lead to a lucid message.

A couple of weeks ago, the last sermon I heard (and perhaps the last one I will hear) condemned the heartlessness of those who would vote not to extend unemployment insurance – holding the unemployed hostage for the sake of the wealthy. Members of the church developed an ad for Chet Edwards’ campaign and many in the church were quite active in his ultimately unsuccessful campaign. In his years in the House he had brought home considerable pork to this region. The argument in their ad – and one widely held in the congregation – was that he should be re-elected because he was good for the big school and the big school was good for our community. They argued that Flores, who replaced him, just didn’t care about the school. Of course this was not true since he, too, was a fervent former student. (Anyone not one would begin the race from pretty far back of the starting line.) Still Flores had a position more aligned with the Tea Party candidates. Of course, Edwards had seniority and this was not an argument without merit. We are pretty much a one-industry town and that industry is the university. Many of its projects are funded by the government; much of this is good – the green revolution came out of here and places like this one. People are alive today because of such research. But surely the best of these can be defended on their own merits.

More importantly, we might ask, who do we care about? Whose sense of proportion is humanitarian: The person who equates minimum wage with slavery? He who encourages others to find the self-sufficiency and pleasure of productive work or, he who, ignoring all the studies to the contrary, provides the honey pot trap of long-term unemployment compensation? Generosity with other’s money is not virtuous. And, perhaps most importantly, who is most interested in “fairness” – the person who, knowing full well the costs will hit somewhere – across the country or across time, prefers that others (almost surely in more desperate straits than those in our time and our place) should be taxed to make our lives easier, simply because our local rep had more seniority?

Clearly, some in the congregation see in these positions cognitive dissonance; others don’t. Sometimes we forget real people with real lives and real desires are taxed to support our projects. “I listen to NPR and I vote” may not seem absurd if you believe all have (or should have) your taste in music or politics or drama. But, I listen to CMT and I vote – does a Frank Sinatra fan need to pay for my love of Alan Jackson? Should I have to pay for a program of rap? When I listened to NPR for several hours a day, I did give – for years. And my business “donated” in exchange for on-air recognition. The church can make its choices and request help from its congregants, but I’m not impressed with its belief that its choices should be to take money from some other congregation to give to members of a third, and even less impressed with the argument others should be forced to support our congregants’ projects so they can fill the plates on Sunday. This doesn’t arise from the love about which the psychiatrist in our class speaks so eloquently. And it does remind me of a commandment we (including me, of course) too often forget – our natural tendency to covet doesn’t need encouragement.

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The “pursuit of happiness” isn’t mindless partying – at which my students are experts – but a life of productivity and energy, of fulfilling the potentials of the talents with which each is entrusted, as the Biblical parable goes. Does anyone think that the young man of the post below is fulfilling his potential? This is the right our society should give – to become not merely to be.

This semester I have a few students who don’t hand in work but attend with sufficient regularity that I don’t/can’t drop them. I don’t know what they are doing there. One student e-mailed me from the on-line class, terrified I’d drop her. She could, she said, afford an F; it was being dropped that worried her. So she has continued to mark herself as present each day on-line and not send me any work at all. She has her reasons. She wants to “be” a student – she doesn’t want to “become” one. Maybe she can “afford” it more easily because she doesn’t intend to build on her grades in a junior college but simply say she attended. Maybe she can “afford” it because she isn’t paying for it anyway.

She, like some of my on-site students, acts out a little drama in which they “are” students. This, like too much today, may be cargo cult thinking: hanging around our campus (virtual or real) means their wages will dramatically improve. Perhaps they believe the inflated values our politicians and educators place on college degrees; perhaps they are smart enough to suspect it isn’t the piece of paper but college that will make a difference. They just don’t know what “college” is. Or not. I suspect they are scamming someone – their parents, their government, their insurance companies, or, in some co-enrolled cases, their principals. Take your pick. But I’m wary of being a participant in these dramas, assigned a role they define as “teacher.” I didn’t sign up for some role in a con game.

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I set my students a minor task in rhetoric & comp: definition, narrated example. The terms were gendercide, feminization of American culture, and democide. When I defined them in a general way, my students posited reasons men drop out. One girl said they were lazy; another argued they were stupid. I looked at the boys; no argument there. What’s happening, I thought. Then, as they discussed organizational approaches, one said his topic was gendercide in Bosnia. I was surprised – most were looking at India and China.

The paper proved problematic. The most obvious flaw was the length of an interview with a woman in a refugee camp – the block quote took up most of his paper. A woman was interviewed who described the destruction of her village: the boys and men separated from women and children. Then, the women heard gunfire. The young boys came running, telling them “it was finished.” The women were ordered off to Albania. Spotty gunfire continued. The women were threatened; they started on their trek. The incident, of course, was representative not only of tragedies of that place and time, but eternal ones in war zones. At the end of America’s first war, King Philip was executed, his children and wife sold into slavery. But we don’t need much historical knowledge to recognize the pattern.

My student’s belief was that this described a society that wanted to rid itself of women and children so it could have a stronger, more educated workforce. Indeed, he observes “in the past, women were emotionally murdered because of the male dominant workforce.” In a flourish at the conclusion, he says we are learning women are capable and perhaps one will become president, perhaps the best president we’ve had. Transitions were less his strong suit than mine – and mine are often tenuous. And, well, sure. A woman and mother of three daughters doesn’t think we belong at the back of the bus – nor under a veil.

But the paper demonstrated two problems: what he has not been taught (nor by me, I guess) and, on the other hand, what he has been taught. Reading closely, understanding the context was not learned. Whether he merely cut and pasted this long passage or typed it over, his mind was not engaged. At our conference, I asked him what he thought the “shots” were all about. He looked at me blankly. The narrative – a truly gripping incident – had not constructed a reality in his mind. The power the woman’s anguished words captured had not reached him. I don’t think he’s a sociopath; he just, well, ignored words that would hit most of us in the gut. What does that say about our students’ relation to reading? Do they see it as unconnected to feeling? Or merely to reality? Perhaps this is the fruit of post-modernism – the word has died.

But he has learned, as well. He’s learned to see the world obsessively in terms of gender – just not his. And his conclusions arise from a limited understanding of war, of human nature. How do such students make sense of their experiences – give them context? He isn’t, I think, as stupid as this looks – he’s doing much better in science & math. I think he wanted a good grade (that he dropped indicates he hasn’t reached the level of apathy of some). He is probably lazy but not inordinately so, lacks perseverance but not much more than other students. He found a passage, he interpreted it as he thought I expected it interpreted. And now he has dropped.

I complained about the paper to a friend who had grown up in Lawrence, Kansas. She had, she said, naïvely as a child, played during her youthful recesses on the site of a similar massacre. As so often in history, the women and men were separated: men killed, women spared (if damaged beyond the imagination of we who have never lived in such war zones).

These seldom touch us, not in modern America. We forget. But we would best remember that the authority men have taken throughout the centuries comes not only from physical prowess but also because they will be the ones dead first – whether disproportionately on the Titanic or even among the Donner party. Man at his worst has always revealed man at his selfless best as well.

And our boys – they look at such a narrative and only find evidence of problems of the workplace and women’s rights. Have they been deprived of narratives: bad examples and good, manliness and cowardice, gallantry and rape? Do we train them in self-discipline and self-respect, appropriate humility and appropriate pride, respect for competence and courage? These are essentials in civilizing them, establishing a world in which they will become productive, useful, and, of course, happy.

Have we denied them the riches of our history, that enables us to interpret our own experiences with some perspective? Will the generations that follow have to painfully accumulate the understanding we’ve hoarded for millennia? We scoffed at tradition and ritual. They deserve a sceptical eye. But where did we get the notion we knew so much more than others learned from centuries of experience? And stranding the next generations in a desert, surrounded by institutions we razed, is that where we should leave them? Some are surprised at how quickly Beck’s recommendations hit the best seller lists – but isn’t that because a public that views the world as my student does has reached adulthood hungering for the stories most societies have told around the campfire, retold in the great epics of their civilizations, been a part of children’s literature and children’s education. Landmark books, such an important part of my childhood, are viewed with irony, Wilder’s tales with distaste. The public if not the schools understand the power of words and history to give perspective. The public, if not the schools, longs for its birthright.

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The mishandled and snarky firing of Juan Williams has been widely commented upon & here I do little but sum up. Companies may dismiss as they wish – I hesitated and was quite often wrong in doing so. But I was not supported by tax money; my complaints were of what someone had done, not what was thought. While I don’t intend to more than mention it in class, I hope our assignments will lead my students to a useful historical context. For anyone who doesn’t know of the incident or needs refreshing, 3 Youtubes: Juan Williams’ words, his response and Vivian Schiller’s definition of journalistic ethics & integrity.

Let’s review the controversy.

What Williams said many (most) feel. Of course, he wished he didn’t feel it. But the response was prompted by experience: not only was 9/11 done in the name of a religion, but so were a series of often incompetent but sometimes successful (think Fort Hood) efforts by Soldiers of Islam. In court and openly, perpetrators claim connections between these scattered events – the first shots in a coming religious war. To ignore that is to shut our eyes and ears. Only a society asleep, unconscious, dead – or purely ideological – could so discount experience. An unthinking mob may be a tool some desire, but this is not a virtuous desire. The motives behind such desires are perhaps most beautifully exemplified by Frederick Douglass, who counters our initial state (one the plantation owners desire to be life-long) with one of virility and manliness, characterized by restlessness, curiosity, independence, autonomy. Another 19th century writer, Thoreau, talks about the pleasure of a “fact.” When facts are taboo, so is thought.

Williams’ response was honest: asked if he meant something else, he said, no, he’d said what he meant. Of course, what is implicit is that he meant what a sentient being with appropriate instinctive responses feels. He wants to overcome those responses and see all humans as our brothers – as do all of us. But believers who say they want us to die make that more difficult – and when they say it is because of the beliefs they hold, we have a right to be wary of their beliefs. We can say they misunderstand their own religion – often a different one from ours or one they firmly hold when we hold none, so I have doubts about our authority – but such cool thinking trembles when faced by our passionate instincts.

That that religion is one firmly held by millions who do not want to kill us is also true. That is important in terms of the future, the potential for religious war, and how we treat our Muslim neighbors. It is, however, small solace to the family of a victim of these first shots nor are we really sure whether these more passive beliefs will prevail: its proponents seem less firm and certainly less ruthless than their jihadist fellow believers.

Transcending our instincts to love our neighbors & leave tribalism behind is one of the great arguments of the Judeo-Christian tradition; moving beyond tribalism to the rule of law is our great secular, civic and even spiritual goal. However, powerful reasons make it hard to overcome instincts – these loyalties give us the intense pleasure of our relationships with family and friends; indeed, we see them as integral to who we are. As important, they are designed to save us.

The firing is controversial; it is condemned because of many reasons; our first reactions were simple, later ones become more complex.

An immediate reaction is that NPR’s quite recent & lucrative connection with Soros is suspect; the inflow of Soros money has further compromised an already ideological and compromised news source. This is a man who appears to find our elections buyable, our news buyable – and, I would assume, our minds buyable. His carrot is large. We are quicker to impugn their motives if we have already become irritated with their stand; such a response may be petty, but it is a reasonable response. If we don’t think they can be bought – if we believe they have set a higher standard – the nearness of this bequest is still likely to make us uneasy.

Second, NPR is accountable to taxpayers as most other businesses are not: often they note a program is “taxpayer funded.” These are attached to programs most taxpayers do not watch, would not watch, and certainly wouldn’t fund. Taxpayers have neither a powerful stick nor a powerful carrot, but this may lead them to action since their frustration has long been building.

Third, the gratuitous observation that Williams needs to talk to his psychiatrist about his problem indicates a level of enforced group think we’ve long suspected at NPR, done with the snarkiness we have long expected from people of certain beliefs. It is not attractive. And it reminds us of when and where psychiatry enforced groupthink – not an admirable tradition.

But these three are small beside the fourth. This is the belief acted out here: groupthink should rid others of their beliefs, enforce acceptance of a consensus opinion, punish for wrongthought. The consensus need not be broad (here it is surely in a minority), but the consensus need only be of those in power. It arises from a remarkable certainty in the interpretation of experience. Doubts in a free society should not come from nihilism – it isn’t that there isn’t a truth – but rather of humility – we may not know it. We see in Schiller’s stance little humility and inappropriate certitude.

So, we come to my students.

My freshmen were given two major writing/arguing/research tasks, developed in three writing assignments. The first and third defined a specific right. For the first paper, they were to find a controversial example that exemplified the application of the right. Their third paper will discuss whether the application is appropriate/inappropriate; this can argue legality. At this point, their argument may assume legality, but then argue that an action is /is not productive or wise. Not surprisingly, many have chosen the mosque controversy but some have gone to Kelo, some “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, some Fred Phelps.

In an assignment designed to be written more quickly under greater time constraints, they have been asked to define gendercide, the feminization of American education, or democide, with examples. (The latter was added after only one person in two classes knew about the killing fields.) I have been grading these this weekend & will discuss both research topic & these papers in conferences.

The two topics are connected, of course. Students often conclude “We should never let this happen again” – and my response is that it has happened again and it will. How do we make it less likely to happen? To underline the importance of the open marketplace, they have read Jonathan Rauch’s “In Defense of Prejudice.” His contrarian title leads to a fervent argument for the open marketplace of ideas, the inadvisability as well as impossibility of ridding minds of thoughts. If our rights to physical protection are respected, then we don’t get into others’ minds, we don’t want to, we shouldn’t. Hate speech may be ugly and often dissenters are wrong. But allowing dissent encourages those dissenters who are right, encourages a distinction between theory and act that is important – and in some cases demonstrates a difference between theory and experience. Groupthink doesn’t lead to a productive society – why did East European scientists turn from biology under communism?

Control leads to mental dissonance – our lives themselves are discounted. Closing our mind to our own experiences is difficult and can only be done by a willful disregard for the experience and the interpretation of experiences by which we define ourselves. Free inquiry begins with questions, some of which may well assume falsehoods; truth is the product of free inquiry. As Jefferson observes

Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation. They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only.

Our founders understood human nature; Publius’ #10 defines factions – we might say the NPR faction and the Fox faction; the 90% who acknowledge fear of Muslims as they embark on a flight and the 10% who do not. And how would we remove the source of these factions? Madison notes the impossibility of reaching into us. Such uniformity requires “destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” His passionate argument notes

Liberty is to faction, what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be a lesser folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

And whose truth would we all believe? Clearly the executive at NPR believes she has special access to the appropriate, “right” response man must feel, but Publius knew

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves

That we are fired by self-interest is obvious; as Franklin observes after breaking his vegetarian habit (he contemplated his reasoning after smelling frying fish straight from the water): “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” Whether self-love defines a personal view as moral or altruistic or sensitive or practical, it is also motivated by less attractive human desires for sensual pleasures, power over others, or money. We generally find reasons for what we want rather than what we don’t. That isn’t wrong – it is human. But that we should express them and hear others’ opposing reasons is an important, central core value in the United States. Madison notes that: he observes that the purity of another’s motives should be less our concern than the strength of their arguments. Even if none have suspect motives, reasoning may be weak; those with the most suspect of motives may develop a well-reasoned argument.

But what reasoning is invoked in this argument? The NPR executive argues Juan Williams’ feelings – his responses to experience – are best shared with psychiatrists or publicists, best reshaped to “right think” and only held for reasons of financial gain. Such is the thinking of those Rauch defines as “purists” – only the greedy or crazy could disagree.

We saw many in the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first who want to exercise power over our interpretations of our experiences. That may be a lust for purism; indeed, they may fool themselves that it is because they have the truth. But the truth here was what a man felt. How can that be a truth someone else knows?

If it is truth they want, they should trust experience to prove it true. They should long for the truth to be certified by others’ experiences, others’ interpretations. That trust implies respect of others and humility toward our own understanding of truth. But such humility is not today’s virtue. Schiller’s smirk reveals pleasure. Indeed, feeling a power over the interpretation of others’ own experiences is seductive, for few powers are greater. And we can, I suppose, be thankful that such groupthink hasn’t yet reached the place where statues on street corners and portraits in our houses signal our experience’s interpretation by another’s mind & whims. But we, my students as they read, know that it has happened before and will again. And it is against that more than any other enemy that we should always be on our guard.

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I’m often critical of the big school – but where it is good, it is damn good. I always liked to hire e.t.s because they were generally a polite, hard working and practical lot. That was Hall’s major. But getting a copy job out on time isn’t the same as saving 33 miners; their “can do” does the little and it does the big. Here’s the story from a local perspective: Aggie Recalls. (Fox Interview, Old Ags)

First paragraph:
Gregory Hall fielded media interviews Wednesday, including one with CNN. He took a congratulatory call from Texas Gov. Rick Perry that began with “Howdy, Ag!” And he still had time for a three-hour class to help with his scheduled ordainment as a Catholic deacon in February.

These guys are spread around the world and a major reason American oil rigs and refineries are remarkably safe – remarkable to all but those who have no sense of how huge such a task is. And this is American pragmatism & idealism, blended at its best. It is the “west” Catton talks about when he contrasts Lee and Grant – seeing each as representative of a region’s best. And all the frontiers didn’t close, Turner aside, in 1890 – there’s the land, sea, and air.