Morality and Philosphy

Ginny dredged up a lot of bad memories here from when I descended into the valley of the shadow of idiocy in grad school. At one point I wanted to go for a dual Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics / Literature (I hadn�t decided which) and Physical Chemistry, the idea being to get a job teaching both subjects at a small school. Don�t laugh. I got better (in the mental health sense). I dropped the humanities classes and got an MBA instead.

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For generations, fantasy literature had been thought of as a not-very-worthy genre. Lumped together with that, perhaps, are science fiction and superhero comics. However, all three have hit the big screens with astounding success in recent years. Fjordman has some ideas as to why that is:

Maybe I�m reading too much into it, but is the sudden reappearance of superheroes exemplified by Superman, Spider-Man and swarms of other similar characters a sign of a renewed sense of vulnerability and insecurity in the West following the Jihad attacks of 9/11? Another closely related meta-trend is the renewed popularity of fantasy literature. In online magazine The American Thinker, blogger Bookworm has some interesting comments to the surge in fantasy literature and some of the values we are presented there. J.K. Rowling�s enormously successful books about teenage wizard Harry Potter have been belittled as merely �silly books for children.� But as Bookworm notes, some of the later books such as Order of the Phoenix are much darker than its predecessors. It �centers on Harry�s desperate efforts to convince the Powers That Be that evil once again walks among them. Only with tremendous effort is he able to rally some believers to his side and prepare them for war.� Sounds familiar, doesn�t it?

Indeed it does! Fjordman also takes a shot at academics for their relativistic attitudes, by postulating how they might have psychoanalyzed the fantasy world:

In this age of Multiculturalism and cultural relativism, the only places we can identify evil and fight it are in fictional worlds, be that the Middle Earth of Tolkien or the Hogwarts of J.K. Rowling. Maybe that is why it is such a relief to visit them, if only for a few hours. In the real West, our Universities would advise us to negotiate with Sauron and identify his legitimate grievances. Our media would say that the real reason why the Orcs kill people is because they suffer from institutionalized racism and Orcophobia. We would all get sensitivity training, invite Orcs to settle in our major cities by the millions and teach our children about the richness of Orc culture.

Isn’t it our educated betters that first pooh-poohed the genre? Fortunately, all is not lost. After all, both J.R.R. Tolkien, and his colleague and compatriot C.S. Lewis, were academics themselves. Proof, perhaps, that in a world with many fake knock-offs and mediocre wannabes, there can still be found brilliant diamonds in the rough.

(Hat-tip: Mad Minerva)

[Cross-posted at Between Worlds]

Everyone keeps models in their head. It’s the way we humans make sense of the world. For simplicity’s sake, lets model the model as a linear equation. The crudest models have one term: X caused Y, x = y. This is the stuff of the moonbat right and left. War = oil, abortion = murder. As you work your way along the bell curve towards the center of mass, the models get a little more complicated. People add weights to the terms: 0.9*abortion = murder (for those who don’t feel that rape victims need to keep the child). As you work your way further up the bell curve, more sophisticated thinkers begin to add terms: 0.9 early stage abortion + 1.0 partial birth abortion = murder*.

People can even hold different models for different situations. For example, in my personal universe, 0.8 abortion = murder. Rape victims and mothers of grossly deformed fetuses are exempt in my personal morality. However, I also have an equation for public morality borne of my libertarian beliefs, and if x does not equal y in your world, have at it. Don’t expect me to pay for it, but I’m not going to stand outside your clinic and call you a murderer, either. Human life is too complex to apply simple models of morality to other people, they are for you own guidance in making choices in this world.

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We often quote Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” His site uses as its epigraph another argument: “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.”

But how is our awareness of such a truth likely to be revealed & implicitly acknowledged in our customs? (Or when such tendencies are reinforced, unfortunately, by other traditions and customs.) Perhaps we should accord the greatest of dignities to he who lets another keep his, even when that person risks his own pride & dignity (or perhaps we should say, apparent pride & dignity).

When General Robert E. Lee chose the task, as Fischer describes it, of “of training a new generation of southern leaders in his Stoic and Christian vision of liberty and self-mastery,” he described Washington College’s rule as simple: “We have but one rule here, and it is that every student must be a gentleman.” Lee’s definition of a “gentleman” remains the code of many and such values lie beneath the civil (generally) exchanges on this blog. Here it is:

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