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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Shannon Love’s recent effort on the cultural struggle between the pro-life ethic and those who belittle “breeders” seems to have gone far afield in comments.

I haven’t seen anybody actively angry with those who are biologically incapable of having children, yet several comments seem to accuse Shannon of doing exactly that when he says that childless couples are selfish. But it’s absurd to think that there’s only one type of childlessness. A little charity in reading would reduce the temperature of the conversation quite a bit. Instead of looking toward the personal, it might be much better to examine the problem through the lens of infrastructure.

Societies undertake tremendous expenditures in water, sewer, electricity, lighting, and transport in the expectation that a certain number of people are going to be around to use these systems for the long haul. If you wrong-size sewer lines and a town’s population shrinks below the effective minimum, you have to redo the entire sewer system’s piping or effectively lose public sanitation as there’s just not enough flow to keep things moving. The massive water tunnels of New York City were not built to last over a century without maintenance in order to satisfy the needs of the generation that built and paid for them.

Put simply, all that existing infrastructure represents the accumulated sacrifices of the generations that have come before us. It’s a sort of group project, a shared social contract that should not be thrown away, willy nilly based on a temporary fashion. In short, it’s the physical, enduring manifestation of our society.

Now there are other, softer, multi-generational institutions that are a bit more controversial. Social Security and other old-age pension schemes are largely inter-generational capital transfers that depend on having a certain birthrate to maintain sustainability. Were we all living in libertarian paradise, these sorts of political programs would not exist. Wake me up when we get to libertopia. In the real world, inter-generational transfer schemes are likely to be with us for a long time. They’re too reliable a way to assemble durable electoral coalitions for them to not be used again and again by ambitious politicians.

Now there have always been people who could not or would not participate in the creation of the next generation. The sterile, the ill, those who were incapable of the work of parenting, those called to specialty functions incompatible with child rearing generally contributed what they could to the raising and protecting of other people’s children and aided to the limits of their abilities society in its fight to progress and not regress across the generations.

Historically rarer was the happy to be childless who purposefully avoided being the helpful uncle, the adoptive mother, the spinster schoolteacher who educated the whole village or some other like role that may have been personally childless. Such people had historically been looked down on as wastrels, hedonists only looking toward their own pleasures. It’s a pretty recent phenomenon that such purposeful wallflowers in the multi-generational struggle to maintain and improve society hit a critical mass sufficient to create their own society with its own mores and prejudices, mores and prejudices that are actively hostile to the great project of keeping society alive into the next generation.

I have to say that I’m not at all fond of this new ideal, this dismissal of “breeders” as social inferiors who don’t appreciate the finer things in life and who supposedly whine for “subsidies” for children. The truth is that some economic goods have not been successfully monetized and payment for them remains collective and nonmonetary. The foresight to create physical infrastructure that you don’t personally have to pay to recreate each generation comes out of a multi-generational ethic that is incompatible with what I call wallflowers and Shannon called free riders. The benefits of that ethic are taking advantage of the artifacts of our forefathers. The cost is to repeat the process in our own generation. This is enforced via social pressure for the most part though the tax man and the law code do have their roles.

The wallflowers take the benefits of the multi-generational ethic without complaint and whine about the cost of continuing the project into the next generation, propagandizing and agitating for the project to end with their generation being the great winner, all gain with no pain. It’s selfish and ultimately destructive for our society to adopt that course but the wallflowers don’t care.

[ed note: Shannon’s a guy. I think I used to know that. I’m very sorry, gender corrected where appropriate]