There’s reality-based and there’s smug-based. Today, I was defining terms used often by Americans around the founding. (Doing an on-line course has forced me to be more precise and less airy – perhaps bullshitty is the appropriate word – than on-site teaching.) Googling “human nature”, the Merriam-Webster definition, first used in the 1500’s arises: “the nature of humans; especially : the fundamental dispositions and traits of humans.” Good enough. It linked the lengthier Britannica definition. This begins with the simplified traditional question: is man intrinsically selfish and competitive – as Hobbes and Locke would argue – or intrinsically social and altruistic – as Durkheim and Marx would argue. So this is how some saw (see) the divisions – such stark simplicity! Ah, some care and love humans; others don’t. The scripts and asides in class and subtle accusations in arguments write themselves. So, I tartly framed this for my students, observing that those who see man as altruistic have certainly proved it by murdering a hundred million of them in the last century.
Morality and Philosphy
Happy May Day
I just watched a documentary on Stalin which showed a old Ukrainian woman telling the story of the horrors her family faced when Stalin pushed them onto the collectives, stole their grain and sold it abroad to fund his industrial dreams.
She said that their house had the only nearby well and neighbors came there to fetch water. No one had any food. Everyone was starving.
Her mother had three children. The youngest was a boy around five. He had taken ill so they had put him in the warmest place, a bunk bed over the stove. The mother had nothing to feed her children save a single turnip. She boiled it up and divided it between the two oldest children. The youngest child, smelling the turnip from his bed over the stove ask for some. The woman refused. The child climbed down from his sick bed, crying, grabbing at her skirts and begging for just a bite of turnip. Seeing this, the neighbors told the woman to give the starving child just a bite of turnip.
“No,” she said, “I have to save the food for my healthy children.”
Hearing this, the boy sagged. He gave up begging and weeping bitterly, struggled back into his bed. He cried until he died the next day.
When a child dies slowly, such as from starvation, they often begin to make a particular rhythmic, low, mewing cry in their final hours.
Upcoming Events at The Men’s Leadership Forum of Chicago
There are two good events scheduled for the The Men’s Leadership Forum of Chicago:
Brian J. Gail, will speak about his novel Fatherless, on March 18, 2010.
Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago will be speaking about his new book, The Difference God Makes: A Catholic Vision of Faith, Communion, and Culture, on May 6, 2010.
Both events will be at 7:30 a.m. at the University Club of Chicago.
Register here if you are interested.
I will be at both of these events.
Why? Did They Have a Spare One Laying Around?
When I told my son that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize he at first thought I was joking. When I told him they really did he said, “Why? Did they have a spare one laying around?”
Never has any Nobel Peace Prize winner done so little to deserve what used to be an honor. It is especially ridiculous given his utter lack of accomplishments as President (as lampooned by this SNL skit).
As a sociological/psychological phenomenon, the awarding of the prize is especially revealing given that the nomination deadline for this year’s prize was February 1st. That’s right, Obama was nominated for the Peace Prize when he had been in office for only two weeks!. This award reveals the left’s love of fantasy over reality. Leftists all over the world have created a massive fantasy construction based around Obama being the mythic hero who will save the world by virtue of his being a superman who transcends the grubby vices that the rest of us wallow in. It’s like he’s cast as the uberhero in the pseudo-intellectual’s version of World of Warcraft and the geeks from Norway just logged on.
Put starkly, Obama is not an extraordinary or accomplished individual in the domain of American politics. He has never accomplished anything of note apart from winning various offices. Instead, his entire career has been to serve as a living symbol of other people’s moral evolution. That is why he is President of the United States and that is why he got the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize committee is using Obama to demonstrate their own righteousness. They have no interest in rewarding actual accomplishment because for them, as leftists, simply believing in the fantasy of a better world is just as virtuous as actually making the world a better place.
I Want to Be Like Norm
This panel below is from a the web comic “Escape From Terra”. It’s a pretty good hard science fiction story which examines how a libertarian/anarchist society might function in space. The centeral conflict revolves around those in space trying to keep their freedoms in the face of ever-present encroachment from the statist world-government of Earth (it’s modelled on the EU).
In the story, two pilots deliver a chunk of a comet to a self-made billionaire who is hiding out on his own little artificial habitat. The billionaire has to hide because he keeps creating disruptive technologies that empower ordinary people to live their lives independently of the state, and the government doesn’t like that — to the point it wants to see him dead.
In this panel, the billionaire explains his motivations:
[Source]
Every geek in the world should strive to emulate the late Norman Borlaug. Geeks and business people have done more good for the world than all the politicians and wannabe-politicians combined.
In 1969, the people who changed the world for the better weren’t left-wing, pro-communist-victory “activists” but the engineers and scientists who landed men on the moon and fired up the first two nodes of the Internet. People who view “progress” in terms of politics first and foremost have done far more harm than good. Yet, as the comic points out, we know their names while the names of those who made our lives so much better are erased from common history .
People in the developed world (and increasingly the rest of the world as well) have lives of physical comfort, social equality and political freedom mostly because of the efforts of geeks like Borlaug who use knowledge and hard work to turn dirt and water into happiness.
When artists whip out posters of people like Borloug instead of the glorious leader du jour, we will know we have become a truly wise civilization.