Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
On a lighter note, Jack Handey’s “deep thoughts” are always useful axioms:
Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don’t know what your rights are, or who the person is you’re talking to. Then, on the way out, slam the door.
It is grading time; no posts but Herman Melville begins the climactic twenty-second chapter of Billy Budd:
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarkation few will undertake tho’ for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing namable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.Whether Captain Vere, as the Surgeon professionally and privately surmised, was really the sudden victim of any degree of aberration, one must determine for himself by such light as this narrative may afford.
And so, Vere argues Budd must hang; his innocence is something the martial law to which they are sworn cannot judge – it can only deal with the undeniable guilt of the act itself.
On the other hand, you may well wonder what appropriate justice applies to those who believe Emily Dickinson was strongly influenced by the second world war, that Margaret Fuller would be appalled by war, and that one of Hester Prynne’s problems was “that adultery thing.” I was lucky this semester – I had several not just good but exceptional students who seemed to love American lit. But my students as always were truly diverse.
“Having been a senator during 9/11, I understand the extraordinary horror of that kind of attack,” she said. “I think a president must move as swiftly as is prudent to retaliate. That doesn’t mean we go looking for other fights. Let’s focus on those who have attacked us and do everything we can to destroy them.”
Hillary Clinton
The problem is not and never has been that having good manners must interfere with acknowledging the truth. By suggesting that it is, one is pandering to the cretinous lack of judgment that falls into confusion or rage at social rules about “a time and a place for everything”. Thus the “love of truth” is mixed with and debased by the preening thuggery of “keepin’ it real”, as if Larry Summers’s attempting to open inquiry on the subject of sex differences in scientific aptitude is of a piece with some talk-radio boor’s trash-talk. Klavan is correct to say that there are things “greater than courtesy”. But if both Summers’s speculations about women in science, and insulting comments about someone’s appearance, accurately illustrate your definition of “discourtesy”, you’ve been spending too much time in lefty charm school.
I don’t think we’re going to advance the battle for “the preservation of Western rationalism and liberty” by accepting the “bad guys” confusion of courtesy with obsequiousness, with its concomitant confusion of real debate with consensus-seeking.
Just as instinct is older than custom and tradition, so then are the latter older than reason: custom and tradition stand between instinct and reason — logically, psychologically, temporally. They are due neither to what is sometimes called the unconscious, nor to intuition, nor to rational understanding. Though in a sense based on human experience in that they were shaped in the course of cultural evolution, they were not formed by drawing reasoned conclusions from certain facts or from an awareness that things behaved in a particular way. Though governed in our conduct by what we have learnt, we often do not know why we do what we do. Learnt moral rules, customs, progressively replaced innate responses, not because men recognized by reason that they were better but because they made possible the growth of an extended order exceeding anyone’s vision, in which more effective collaboration enabled its members, however blindly, to maintain more people and displace other groups.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
(I remembered this passage when reading Shannon’s prior post, entitled On Tradition.)