No more money for you, Harvard!

Posted on June 6, 2025 by hessd

On April 11, three representatives of the Trump Administration wrote a letter to the president of Harvard, laying out the new requirements Harvard would be required to meet. If you treat the letter only on the level of the language it uses, it is hard to take seriously.

I am sure that if the Trump administration is allowed to mobilize the financial, legal, and regulatory pressures they threaten, it will be easier to take the treat seriously. The language, not so much.

This post is made up of quotations from the letter, which I will put in italics, and some comments of my own.

The letter is signed by Josh Gruenbaum, of the General Services Administration; Sean R Keveny, Acting General Counsel Department of Health and Human Services: and Thomas E. Wheeler, Acting General Counsel, Department of Education. No one you have ever heard of is listed as a signatory.

Here are some of the highlights of the letter.

The United States has invested in Harvard University’s operations because of the value to the country of scholarly discovery and academic excellence.

Then, three sentences later:

Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment.

Fortunately, there is a ready solution.

By August 2025, Harvard must make meaningful governance reform and restructuring to make possible major change consistent with this letter, including: fostering clear lines of authority and accountability; empowering tenured professors and senior leadership, and, from among the tenured professoriate and senior leadership, exclusively those most devoted to the scholarly mission of the University and committed to the changes indicated in this letter;

Let’s just pause to see what we have so far. The U. S. Government has discovered that Harvard is an exemplar of scholarly discovery and academic excellence and that is why the government has invested so much money in the university. Harvard has recently stumbled, however, both intellectually and in what the letter calls “civil rights conditions.”

The university.must therefore reform, changing its governance practices and promoting to leadership those professors who will be most committed to “the changes indicated in this letter.”

Let’s do admissions next.

By August 2025, the University must adopt and implement merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof, throughout its undergraduate program, each graduate program individually, each of its professional schools, and other programs.

And to ensure that Harvard is doing it right:

All admissions data shall be shared with the federal government and subjected to a comprehensive audit by the federal government… including information about rejected and admitted students broken down by race, color, national origin, grade point average, and performance on standardized tests—during the period in which reforms are being implemented, which shall be at least until the end of 2028.

Finally, there is the matter of reforming schools or departments that have succumbed to ideological capture or, in fact, to any biases at all.

By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit those programs and departments that most fuel antisemitic harassment or reflect ideological capture.including…the Divinity School.

The Trump administration knows it can count on opposition from the best established universities and it has chosen Harvard as it’s favorite bad example. Whenever the letter refers to “the federal government,” I think we should translate that into the values clearly espoused the Project 2025 or, more briefly, whatever institutions have recently riled Trump’s anger.

All it takes is a specification of just why “the United States” has been investing its money in Harvard. That is followed by an unsubstantiated charge that Harvard has lately been failing to meet those conditions. Then, finally, Harvard is to cease immediately using its judgment about what kind of education it wants to provide for the students it admits and turn that job over to the federal government for their quarterly review.

My favorite part of that is their singling out the Harvard Divinity School for special attention. Could it be that the Divinity School is not displaying the “viewpoint diversity” that could be required of them by an administration more committed to fairness? It’s hard to say.

Again, the threat may be real. The language makes it hard to take it seriously.

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An American Government of One Branch

Posted on June 1, 2025 by hessd

Let’s begin with just what to call this part of the Project 2025 Report (hereafter the Report) of the Heritage Foundation, a well-known conservative think tank.  The Report calls it “The Executive Office of the President of the United States.”  Simon Pierce has written a critique of the Report, called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  In his critique, he calls this section,  “Expansion of Presidential Powers.”  As you see, I have called it “American Government.”  My reasoning is very straightforward.  The Report sees the President as the American Government.

You might miss some reference to other familiar institutions such as the Congress and the Supreme Court.  The Report criticizes these institutions, but only as asides.  In this section, as I will show, the government is the President and the job of the President is to serve the People.  (Caps in both cases are deliberate.)

I will be taking quotations from Pierce.  He says that the Report says such and such on page 43 and I take him at his word.  The few times I went to the Report to check for myself, he was correct, so I stopped checking.

Here is what the Report says on page 43 in the section Pierce titles Expansion of Presidential Powers.”

“The President must set and enforce a plan for the executive branch.  Sadly, however, the President today assumes office to find a sprawling federal bureaucracy that all too often is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences—or, worse yet, the policy plans and preferences of a radical, supposedly “woke” faction of the country.  The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.”  (I have put the last sentence in bold font because Pierce put it in bold font.)

The error in this section is so large and so grievous that it is hard not to be drawn away into what means might be employed to put it into practice.  The error is that there are two actors in American government.  There are the People (capital P) and the President.  The People may or may not have preferences.  The Report doesn’t say.  They are, rather, the recipients of the actions taken by the President “on their behalf.”

The preferences of the American people are famously diverse. Like every citizenry everywhere, they want lots of government services and low taxes.  Ordinarily, debates take place within the presumed framework of the Constitution and one set of policy preferences is traded off against another.  

That is not the problem as the Report sees it so we would expect that the solutions they propose will be in line with the way they see the problem.  The problems they identify are “a sprawling federal bureaucracy” which is carrying out its own policy plans and preferences or, possibly the policy plans and preferences of a radical, “woke” faction of the country.

There are two kinds of difficulties here.  The first is that the bureaucracy has its own plans, presumably plans that will benefit the patrons of whichever bureau proposed them.  The second is that even if the bureaucracy is being guided by the people, the people they are being guided by are the wrong people.  Those people are “a faction,” they are radical, and they are “woke.”  The bureaucracy should, therefore, not be guided by them.

At this point, the casual reader desperately misses any reference to the Congress, the body to which the Constitution gives the task of enacting those policy plans and preferences and, by the way, of funding them as well.  The President has the job of enforcing the laws the Congress passes and even if, as is often alleged, the Congress simply passes the legislation the “sprawling federal bureaucracy” asks them to pass, still, the point where changes need to be made is with the Congress, not with the bureaus.

But if American government is, as in the quote above, made up of the President, then Congress need not be consulted.  The President understands what will benefit the American people and is free to act on their behalf.  “On their behalf,” it goes without saying, as the President sees things.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Lives v Souls

Posted on May 30, 2025 by hessd

Simon Pierce has done us the favor of collecting substantial parts of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and commenting on them. [1] My own interest here is to look at the relationship between the recommendations made by the Project (hereafter, the Report) and the perspective in which those recommendations appears to be most at home.

I am beginning with a section Pierce calls “Christian Nationalism.”  Here is a quotation that appears on page 453 of the Report.

For example, how much risk mitigation is worth the price of shutting down churches on the holiest day of the Christian calendar and far beyond, as happened in 2020? What is the proper balance between lives saved and souls saved?” The CDC has no business making such inherently political (and often unconstitutional) assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.

We have here, two questions and a declaration.  The first question has to do with the proper balance between lives saved and souls saved.  The second question provides the context for that clearly unanswerable question.  It says that mitigating risk [the reference is to the risk of exposure to COVID 19] may be a good thing, but it must be balanced off against the closure of churches.  We’ll get to the declaration later.

The Report, in posing the question in the form that they do, appear to believe that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can know whether there are souls; what will happen to them if they are not saved, and the role that the churches play in saving them.  How the CDC could be thought to know those things escapes me and the idea that they should lay down the requirements for the proper treatment of souls is even more bizarre.

There appears to be a call for balancing.  On the one side, we have souls saved; on the other, we should, in all fairness, have “lives saved.”  We do not, of course.  On the other hand side we have only an amount of “risk mitigation.”  If you think that is a less political formulation, I suggest that you try to call up a protest banner reading “Increase Risk Mitigation Among Our Black Citizens.”  So we do not have, in this paragraph the call we ought to have that the government decide wisely between saving lives and saving souls.

That option is rejected in several ways by what I referred to above as the declaration.  It is: “The CDC has no business making such inherently political assessments and should be required by law to stay in its lane.”

I agree with the Report that requiring public institutions to close during the worst of the pandemic is political.  The CDC is a political body and doing what it can to save lives is part of their mandate.  It did not have, the last time I looked, [2] a similar mandate for souls and if it did have, it would need some public process for deciding between the merits of the two.

The call, then, that the CDC be required by law to “stay in its lane” would be a call for it to save the lives it can without coming into conflict with Christian organizations who have access to national power.  The “lane” of the CDC could be defined as being medical rather than political, which I am sure is what the Report had in mind.  But when the question is whether Christians ought to be allowed to infect their neighbors as they please provided they can continue to gather in churches, the idea that the CDC ought to stay in its lane, does not seem to be an idea Americans generally would warm to.

[1]. Pierce’s book is called Project 2025: A Mandate for Authoritarian Leadership.  It was published by the author in 2025.

[2] These things have been changing rapidly and I have not looked today.

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The art of walking downstairs

Posted on May 24, 2025 by hessd

I recently watched a young waitress bring a dish of food down the stairs to a friend of mine who was waiting at the bottom.  Walking down the stairs carrying the food would have been a high risk endeavor for my friend, and, frankly, for me, too.  The waitress skipped nimbly down the stairs, handed the plate to my friend, and walked lightly back up to the top.

It was impressive and I thought as I watched her that I “appreciated” her grace, much the way I would have appreciated the balance and control of a ballerina.  I didn’t really enjoy it though.  I’ll tell you what I enjoy. I enjoy the way I go down the stairs.

Very likely, I never had the waitress’s agility, but if a old person had been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for her food and if anyone had asked me to take it down to her, I would have done it casually and comfortably, without a second thought.

It has been a long time since I have taken a physical action without a second thought.

On the other hand, I really enjoy the way I go down the stairs.  The way I go down is the result of one adjustment after another and as I perform this feat, I assess and celebrate every layer of the process.  I have had to learn them, you see, and one has been built on top of another so that I am independently conscious of every layer as if I were an anthropologist of my own performance. 

I stand as erect as I can, for instance, so that leaning forward doesn’t put undue stress on my knees.  That’s the most recent innovation; the top layer.  Just below that is “reaching with my hips.”  Many years ago, when I first tried race walking, I got shin splints every time I trained.  That was when I learned that you reach forward independently with each hip as you walk.  It isn’t that hard, once you get the hang of it, but then you have to pay attention all the time or you will go back to regular walking.

When I am walking down stairs, I reach forward and down with my left hip, then with my right hip.  I can very nearly put my foot on the step below without bending my knees at all.  Then I reach with each foot, left right left, to touch the step below before I put any weight on it.

I have no idea at all what it looks like, of course.  I suppose it looks like an old man perilously navigating a stairway. [1]. But, I feel the artistry of it.  I feel a really good foot placement and a smooth extension of one hip, then the other.  I reach with the foot to touch the step.  Then I recover and do it all again.  And again.  A performance only I can truly appreciate and I do.

[1]. All this is on the way down.  Up is not a problem as long as my quads and my gluts hold up and they are good and strong.

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Reading the Bible as a Christian Scholar

Posted on April 4, 2025 by hessd

My apologies to my non- and anti-religious friends.  I have some of each and value them greatly.  The apologies are only for choosing a title that is misleading.  I want to argue that “Christian” in the title is not a very useful word.

The two kinds of reading I have seen actually practiced are commonly, if not accurately, called “devotional” and “scholarly.”  There is a third kind, but I will argue against this third kind even before I try to explain the other two.  The third kind is thought to be “reading for application,” as if the reading you do will convey to you what actions you should be taking as a result of the reading.

I have two arguments against that idea.  The first is that there are no clear lines of action indicated by whatever scripture you might select for your study.  The specific actions that are urged in scripture are imbedded in the context of the time and do not apply clearly to our time.  What does “Do not swear at all” mean in a culture like ours in which “swearing” means something neither Moses nor Matthew ever considered?  And the general directions, like “love your neighbor as yourself” don’t say how to go about that.  In many cases, you must love the persons themselves or the group that they are currently damaging.  Not both.  What to do?

What the followers of such an emphasis do actually do, in fact, is to superimpose their sense of what needs to be done and claim the general mandate—often “love your neighbor,” seldom “never charge interest to a member of your tribe.”  The things you come up with to do may very well be good things to do, but they are not to be decided upon by deriving them from the Bible.  I will make one exception to that before I finish.

Devotional Reading

Devotional reading—mistakenly called “devotional study” sometimes—is a way of reading the Bible for the purpose of generating certain feelings that are expected and valued.  I don’t have a criticism of that practice on the grounds that it is harmful.  And if it sustains the Christian life of the people who are participating in it, then it provides a positive service for them.  The argument on their behalf would have to be that feeling the ways the devotional reading cause you to feel are valuable in themselves and productive of Christian thoughts, feelings, and actions.

My argument against it is that it presupposes the meaning of the texts being studied.  You can argue that “it really means what it means to me” but there is no way to verify, even within the person, that it will “mean” the same thing from one time to another.  And of course, if the text has different and irreconcilable meanings to different members of the group, then one of two paths will be taken.  All can agree that there is no agreed upon meaning or that the meaning I locate is right and the one you locate is wrong.

Or, if you are reading the devotional thoughts of an author, you can all agree that what he thinks the passage means is what it really means.  You can, of course, argue that he is right about some things and wrong about others, at which point all the old arguments break out.

The presuppositions of such a study direct our attention to how the passages chosen make us feel and away from the text itself.  What we might mean by “the text itself” will be explored when we look at the scholarly approach, but certainly it will need to take into account when it was written, by whom, to whom, and why.  When the argument leads to a satisfactory account of why the author wrote it the way he did, we have arrived.

Scholarly Reading

The presuppositions of scholarly study direct our attention to what the author meant to say.  We look at the text, to the extent we are able, as the author does.  A point needs to be made; certain tools and sources are available; when the right choices are made, the best case possible is presented.  Raymond Brown, in his writings and lectures, makes the point that the Synoptic writers place Jesus’ “cleansing” of the Temple in Jerusalem at the end of the ministry and make it part of the increasing conflict with the authorities.  John places the same event at the beginning of the ministry and treats it as one of the signs that the spiritually perceptive will understand, viz. that Jesus himself is the Temple, the Sacred Space.

The Synoptics put it where they put it to tell the story they are trying to tell; John puts it where he puts it to tell the story he is trying to tell.  The scholarly study does not ask when Jesus actually did it [1] but what the various authors are trying to achieve.  “Does this do the trick?” we might ask.  “What would work better?”

In a recent study of Galatians, I ran across the work of J. Louis Martyn, who gives Paul’s opponents a good solid case.  Paul was outraged by the effects of their work—Martyn calls them “the Teachers” rather than the more common “Judaizers.”  It is easy to see why he would be upset.   On the other hand, he may also have been angry because they were pointing to weak spots in his ministry.  If both cases are made—one directly taught by scripture, the other broadly implied by scripture—wouldn’t a better understanding of the situation in Galatia come from understanding both of them?

The scholarly study is oriented toward how we can best understand the material.  It passes by the question of how reading this passage makes me feel.  On the other hand, the devotional study presupposes that there is something significant in the story; something I should pay close attention to.  The scholarly study might arrive at that by the time it is done.  You do spend a lot of your time reading about the teachings of Jesus and the dilemmas of Paul.  Those stories provide a context for your thought and it is hard to imagine that they do not have an effect.  It is hard also to imagine just what the effect is.

The picture that caught my eye at the beginning of this journey is that the presuppositions of these two ways of approaching the Bible might be complementary.  I’ve never seen it done that way.  I’m not sure I would recognize it if I saw it.  But I am intrigued by thinking that presupposing personal meaning on the one side and seeking the best understanding of the passage on the other, might complement each other.

[1] They might ask what evidence there is that he ever did it at all.

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Screwtape 3:16. Really.

Posted on March 17, 2025 by hessd

If you are willing to put up with a paragraph of so of apologetic throat-clearing, I will tell you why I chose this odd title for today’s post.

I appreciate now in a way it had not occurred to me to appreciate before that the verse numbers in any Bible that has them are much more aligned to the text than the Screwtape number I am going to use as if they were an alternative source of opinion.  For instance, John 3:16 in the Bible I use most looks like this. “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  It is not a complete thought, really, because it requires the context of the verses before and after, but just by itself, it says something and I take it that that was one of the goals of the people who invented “verses.” [1]

Screwtape 3:16 is not nearly as complete.  It reads on the page I am using “…practice self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those…”. Even more than John 3:16, this fragment would benefit from context.  The immediate context is provided by lines 15–18, which read

15.You must bring him to a condition in which he can practice self 

16. examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about 

17. himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the 

18  same house with him or worked in the same office.

You can see, in the context of Screwtape 3:16, that an idea is being expressed, as odd as it must surely seem to people who don’t remember that Screwtape is a devil, in fact a very senior devil. [2]

How do we get a Screwtape 3:16?  The idea is very simple.  C. S. Lewis’s book, The Screwtape Letters, contains 31 separate letters. [3] and if you put a line number to every line, you will see that line 16 of Letter 3 could plausibly be referred to as Screwtape 3:16, borrowing the colon which I suppose Stevens invented for his arrangement of verses.

It is actually a little more complicated than that because just what line is numbered 16 will depend on the size of the margins, the size of the font, and the style of the font.  I am using Times font, size 15, with one inch page margins on each side.  I am aware that changing any of those would change what words appear on what line and if I attract colleagues to this project, we will need to agree on those three constraints.

Since The Screwtape Letters takes on the perspective of a devil, we would expect that if a topic is addressed by a biblical passage and also by a diabolical passage, that the categories, the vocabulary, and the causal relations, would all be different.  They really aren’t.

Anyone who has tried to live a principled and honorable life—in the context of this debate, we may abbreviate this as “a Christian life”—knows that you go through periods where this kind of life seems natural and almost easy.  Then there are periods where it seems nonsensical and therefore very difficult.  I am going to offer some comments from Paul, the Apostle and from Screwtape the Devil on that topic.  With any luck at all, I will then point out how similar they are (not denying the differences) and I will be done for the day.

Screwtape calls it “the Law of Undulation” and in Letter 8, he explains it this way.  Here are lines 8—13.  That gives me the chance to point directly to this passage as Screwtape 8:8—13

“Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?  Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.”.

Romans 8:5—8, by a lovely coincidence, says nearly the same thing.

5 “Those who are living by their natural inclinations have their minds on the things human nature desires; those who live in the Spirit have their minds on spiritual things. 6 And human nature has nothing to look forward to but death, while the Spirit looks forward to life and peace, 7 because the outlook of disordered human nature is opposed to God, since it does not submit to God’s Law, and indeed it cannot, 8 and those who live by their natural inclinations can never be pleasing to God.”

Now.  Does this work in any practical way?  No, of course not.  To use this kind of comparison, you would need a Bible divided into chapters and verses and a set of the Letters, divided into letters and numbered lines.  Everybody has access to the former; only the group studying Screwtape has the latter.  So it is a very narrow effort, as it should be.  And I am doing the work of standardizing the line organization and numbering, which gets onerous at times.  On the other hand, I get to cite Screwtape 8:8—13, from which I take more pleasure than a well-balanced person would allow himself.

Even so, it is hard not to notice the similarity.  Paul is deeply committed to what he, in this passage, calls “having the mind on spiritual things.”  Screwtape sees that same reality as his deepest danger, which is why he counsels his pupil, Wormwood, to press the Patient to feel the frustration and give up on the whole “religious thing.”  The two authors see, in other words, the same reality.  Paul counsels supporting it (Romans 8:6b), where Screwtape counsels using it to destroy the Patient (Screwtape 8:35—36) and in 8:47, identifies the limits God must face. [4] 

For fans of C. S. Lewis and his treasure of diabolical advice, this whole exercise is a romp.

[1]. Robert Stevens, who goes by several other names, in 1551.  Surely there are books about just how he went about his work.  How, for instance did “Jesus wept” come to be a “verse?”

[2]. And, as C. S. Lewis, the creator of Screwtape, could not resist adding, “very low in the Lowerarchy.”

[3]. Actually only thirty and a half.  He inadvertently changed into the shape of a giant toad in the middle of one of them and needed to have another devil finish it for him.

[4]. I know I’m cheating here because I have not appended the line-numbered letters as I would have to in a study essay.  I just wanted to use the parallel citations.  Screwtape 8:35—36 reads, “We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons.” And 8:47 reads, “He cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

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The Watcher has a better idea

Posted on March 7, 2025 by hessd

In an email to a friend this morning, I wrote “interested” when I had intended to write “interest.”  The sentence contained the phrase, “your interest has outlasted…”

I noted it because the Watcher (that’s what I call the alien intelligence they have attached to my word processing program) put a dotted red line under “your.”  My guess is that It wanted me to write “you’re” because it is more likely that I would want to say “you’re interested” than that I would say “your interested.”  Certainly It is right about that, but the mistake wasn’t a bad contraction of “you are,” it was a typo of “interest.”

That’s not a simple typo repair.  If I had written “gimnasium” instead of “gymnasium,” It would catch the mistake and correct it.  I would have to see the correction being made just to know what had happened.  If, on the other hand, I had been trying to distinguish the uses of what we currently call a gymnasium from the much broader set of uses that Hellenistic gymnasium has under the generals of Alexander the Great, I might very well have tried to flag that distinction by referring to the modern kind as “merely a gimnasium,” and not really a “gymnasium.”

There are two issues here.  The first is that I sometimes make words up in order to help me make a point.  I have no objection when It calls those to my attention.  In It’s world, it is much more likely that I have made a mistake than that I am inventing a new spelling or a new form of a word in order to make a point.  For many years, I used the “word” maleficiaries in Public Policy classes to distinguish them from beneficiaries.  I explained what I was doing and why when I first made the distinction, and it lasted for the whole term.  There may have been some eye rolling toward the end of the term.

The first issue is this.  I think It should call my attention to a nonstandard use and assume, if I don’t go back and fix it, that I want it the way it was.  When it does that, I feel that it has performed a service for me.

The other issue is that sometimes It just won’t let go.  I could even go back and instruct It to “learn” that spelling (which seems too much, to me) but to do that, I would have to have it stable on the page, and sometimes that is a struggle.  There is a literary device I have needed to refer to from time to time.  It is called “chiasm.”  I had to fight to get that one.  I reiterated the spelling I wanted many times. Finally, I slapped a “learn this spelling” order on It and proceeded.  That being done, today’s use of “chiasm” created not so much as a murmur.

And It was right today, in suspecting that there was something wrong with the expression “your interested.”  It guessed the wrong thing, but it gave me a chance to go back and fix it.  But what happens when It develops a sense of acceptable grammar and I have to fight it to say what I want to say in the tone I want to use.  Then what?

Does anyone think It will tire of the game before I do?  Is there any way to instruct It to give me a little more freedom as a creator of messages?  I’m really not sure.

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The World of Mr. Hugo

Posted on February 17, 2025 by hessd

I have been attracted today by a character created by Simon Van Booy in his The Illusion of Separateness.  We never learn the character’s name.  As a German soldier, then a former German soldier he is referred to as A.  When he is cared for after he is shot, they know nothing about him except that he has a book in his pocket by Victor Hugo so they call him Mr. Hugo.

Mr. Hugo as we come to know him is shaped by his long hospitalization, then years living on the street, and finally some years as a janitor.  His life has not led him to expect much and he takes in small pleasures that have intrigued me.  From the hospital, they sent him to Gare du Nord, a transit station in the north part of Paris.  At night he listens to the signboards change and he calls it “the applause of falling letters.” Just right.

He refers to the coming of the morning after a long cold night as “the armor of dawn” and says it brought relief.  He slept under the bridges in the summer.  He says, “It was cool in the summer with my back against the stone.  I didn’t mind being alone.  I watched all.  I listened.  Slept.  Felt okay if I never woke up.”

He is offered a chance to live in California by a man who is now a famous film director, but who was a broken 14 year old boy in London when he knew Mr. Hugo.  He likes the idea of living in a sunny climate, but he frets over what he will miss if he leaves London.  He would miss, for instance the names scratched into the glass of the back window of the bus he takes on Tuesdays.  Then, he says, he would not know that: Daz luvz Ram or that Gareth is a Twat or that Lizzie is a slag.  It is hard for him to leave, not really knowing.

A reviewer from the Wall Street Journal says that Simon van Booy “deftly portrays his characters’ raw emotions.”  His treatment of Mr. Hugo is very simple and it moved me.

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Just lucky, I guess

Posted on January 8, 2025 by hessd

I’ve been noticing the way some very accomplished people attribute their accomplishments to luck and I’ve gotten to wondering whether that is a good idea.

At the personal level, I suppose it doesn’t do very much harm.  It isn’t really permissible to say—however obviously true it might be—that the skill you have learned or the job you have mastered are the result of persistent and disciplined effort.  So long as everyone knows how hard you have worked at it, they will hear your demurrals as simple modesty.

At the societal level, I think it is catastrophically bad.  You can, naturally, go wrong on either direction, but if I were to evaluate a society that accounts for successes by attributing them to hard work and compare it to a society that believes, really believes, that the successes are the result of luck, I would choose the former.

If people believe that they are accountable for the quality of their work and are rewarded for it, it is reasonable to think that there will be more hard work on the part of more people.  On the other hand, it is also true that some people are born with disadvantages, and hard work is not going to do the whole job for them.  Every society with an interest in “fairness” has to recognize that the starting line is not at the same place for all the competitors.

Liberals have done quite a bit of work to fix that.  The idea is that if it is a race, every competitor ought to have an equal chance of winning it.  It’s a nice thought, but genetic endowment and family background and educational quality are all against it.  Those things cannot be standardized across a society and they are not fair.

We have moved, as a result, in the direction of calling “privileged” those who have the fewest or the least prominent disabilities.  It is true that some are born with better chances of success in life than others, but it is also true that “privileged” takes away any recognition of the work that is needed to turn that initial advantage into something valuable that belongs to the person.

And on the other side, we have moved in the direction of calling people who have not achieved success for one reason or another—I have argued already that there are the two kinds of reasons—“marginalized” or, more bluntly, “victims.”  There are several things wrong with these terms as I see it.  One is that both identify the least successful people as being the victims of someone or some group.  That is clear in “victim,” a term which first referred to a sacrificial animal and which has not moved very far in the interim.  It is not quite as clear in “marginalized” except that the “-ized” part identifies it as the work of someone else.  Without it, it would just be “marginal.”

From the standpoint of social justice, the case can be made that everyone ought to have the resources they need to thrive.  Karl Marx states that quite clearly.  From the standpoint of the language we choose to describe who deserves what in our society, there is no point in hiding from the fact that any position of initial advantage can be squandered by failures of understanding and effort.  Likewise, nearly any position of initial disadvantage can improved by consistent and careful effort.

That isn’t going to change very much, but it will keep people who have labored long and hard to achieve success from being required to attribute it to luck.  It might also keep people who have squandered every opportunity to improve their position from claiming that they have been “marginalized” by someone.

That’s a small change.  It will not achieve social justice.  It might, however, help us gain back a little control of what we can say about what we have done or have failed to do with our lives and that seems worth doing.

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The Experience of Decline

Posted on December 24, 2024 by hessd

I remember using the argument that people should not be worried about me—and that I should not be worried either—because I was “on track.”  My wife had died of cancer and I was done with all the busywork associated with a death and now it was just me and getting on with my life.  As I pictured it, it was going to get worse for awhile and then it was going to start getting better.  That was the “track.”  And as long as I was on track, moving—even as things were getting worse—toward the time when things would be getting better, then things were “bad” but not worth worrying about.

I was in my mid-60s then.  I am in my mid-80s now and I am losing abilities I once took for granted.  So what I want to know, as I look at this process, is whether I am on track.  You wouldn’t think, would you, that because life ends in death, there would be a good way to approach it and a bad way, but anyone who lives in a community of old people, as I do, knows that is not the case.

I want to consider here the process by which I experience the loss of my abilities.  The first step is becoming aware of them.  So long as you are performing them well, there is no reason to pay any attention to them at all.  I remember, for instance, that in the late 1970s, I was involved in a project that required running a lot of miles every week.  Because I got behind, I added a daily three-mile run before breakfast.  I never really liked it, but I never wondered whether I could do it.  That was presupposed.

The disappearance of presupposed abilities has been the biggest surprise of getting old.  It is not (yet) the inability to do things—running is the major exception—but the inability to count on those things without thought.  I could give a lot of examples, of course, but it was the sequence of experiences that caught my imagination  today, and the next stage in the sequence is doing it carefully rather than casually.  You can still do it, but you stop and prepare; and then do it more carefully.

And, when you have to stop and think about it, you begin to wonder what will happen when even thoughtful care does not come to your rescue.  I continued running long after a more prudent man would have stopped by running the first two miles 18 steps at a time.  I would start to get a little foggy in about 18 steps, so I would walk for 18 steps and then run for another 18.  I would keep this up until whatever system needed to come on line had arrived and then I ran naturally and without stopping for the rest of the route, whatever that was.

In the next phase, you begin to substitute different activities that provide some of the same benefits.  In my case, that was walking, first, and after a few years, bicycling.  In these substitutions, the distance covered changes a good deal with no significance at all.  It is the benefits to the body and the costs to the body that matter.

That being the case, the phase of careful substitution of one activity for another comes to an end, and we move next into the reduction of the activity.  I do the same things—again, running is the exception—but I do less of them and I do them more slowly.

The drawback to the sequence I have just described is that they all have to do with “activities” as I thought of them when I was young.  But the things you have to begin to think carefully about are not all activities.  There is the matter of staying conscious, for instance.  That meets the standard of assumed competence, just as the activities did.  Who does not start out on an activity, be it as routine as a trip to the supermarket, without presupposing that he can do it without passing out?

On the other hand, if you have had the experience and the inconvenience of passing out now and again, for reasons still unexplained, you begin to scan your body and mind for signs that might be precursors.  You become “sensitive” until it borders on vivid imagination.  You don’t need to know just how they are related to the likelihood of syncope. [1]. The same is true of vertigo.  If the precursors suggest you might have to cope with vertigo, [2] you are thoughtful in the same way and possibly even choose not to try an activity at all.

That brings me to the last phase of the sequence, which is marked by being perpetually cowed and fearful at one end of the spectrum and completely foolhardy and brash at the other.  It is possible to build a way of living life as an old person that is marked by timidity and decline.  These traits are not marked so much by the way they constrict your choices, but by the way you think about them.  If you are foolhardy, you attempt thing you probably ought not try at all and wind up either calling for someone to come and rescue you or having extended conversations with the EMTs who came when someone called them.  Foolhardy in this sense is not good—even beyond the obvious drawback of it’s being expensive.  If, on they other hand, you are cowed and timid, you pass up a lot of things you could otherwise do and you become a weight that everyone else in your group will have to take turns carrying.

I would like to come to the end of this sequence by doing boldly all the things I can still do.  I want to be careful, but I don’t want to be timid.  I want to live in the constrained environment of my declining mind and my declining body by doing boldly all the things I can get away with still doing.  I will not do them, as I once did, thoughtlessly.  I will stop and calculate the costs to myself and to others, but I think I would like to launch out confidently whenever I think I can cover the cost.

I once came across a study of the uses of schools that were not longer needed for the school age population.  I am sure it was a good study.  I borrowed some of the examples for a smaller paper I was working on at the time myself. [3] But I remember it mainly because of the title, which I thought was both descriptive and witty.  It was called “Rising Above Decline.”

I think that is what I want to aim for.

[1]  I have learned a lot of medical terms I earlier had no use for at all.

[2]. The prevailing use of that term among the medical people I see is that it in not the name of an illness; it is the name of a collection of symptoms.  The adjective form “vertiginous” is often convenient.

[3]. With the proper citations, of course.

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