Deathbed Confessions

Posted on August 22, 2012 by hessd

I’ve been thinking about deathbed confessions.  I’m feeling fine, thank you for asking, but I’ve begun to wonder what such a thing might mean.  The game, as I have heard it described in a hundred bad novels and maybe a few good ones, goes like this.  God is good-hearted and endlessly forgiving.  I live a life permeated by cruelty and greed—a life for which I deserve eternal punishment—but not to worry: at the last moment, I can confess my sins, receive absolution and gain everlasting bliss.  That’s how the game is played.

Crime show deathbed confessions are a lot easier.  I committed a crime but was never caught.  Someone else was convicted of the crime and is now in prison.  On my deathbed, I confess to the crime and give evidence that will cause the police to believe me and the court system to release the patsy who has been serving my time for me.  Except for the banality of the plot device, I’m fine with that as a practice.  The dying man provides information and the living use it to achieve a much-delayed justice.

The religious deathbed confessions are more troublesome.  I think that’s because I have a much less malleable notion of what prayer is.  Can you really pray what you want, when you want?  I don’t think so.  You can say the right words, of course, but does anyone think that the words and the prayer are the same thing?  Surely not.

A prayer is a meaning, an intention, and appeal, put into words.[1]  It’s the appeal which takes form as words that makes it a prayer.  It isn’t just the words.  So now the question for someone who has this game in mind is, “Are you really sure you can intend an appeal for mercy at just the right time?  I don’t know about you, but I have gone into a lot of situations hoping that I would have my heart in the right place—to truly hope, for instance, that a meeting I opposed would succeed—only to find that I was not able.  Inside, I still wanted the meeting to fail and for my own judgment to be vindicated.  If I was asked to give a welcoming speech, I am sure I would have said that we all hope for the success of this meeting.  But words are not intentions and whatever I said in the welcoming speech, I am NOT yearning for the success of the meeting.

So not only is it true that “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” but you can’t even always want what you want.  And if you can’t, then you can’t slip in a deathbed confession at just the right moment.  If there are any actual, as opposed to literary, persons who are counting on working this game, they might be advised to think it through a little more.

[1] Or not put into words.  Silent prayer is not hard to understand as a concept.

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Walter Possum’s Apprenticeship

Posted on August 20, 2012 by hessd

If our fathers are around, we learn from them.  That’s pretty much how it goes.  We learn good things and bad things.  We learn character and settled habits and gestures and verbal tics the father himself doesn’t even know about.

Today is an appreciation of a Russell Hoban book I have discovered only recently.[1]  I knew his stories about Frances the little badger, but apparently he warmed up on possums and Walter is a kind of early Frances.  The same wise father and nurturing mother and obnoxious younger sister are all there, but they are all possums.[2]

Here is the line I am aiming for: “Listen, Charlotte, I have something for you.”  How did we get to that line?

Charlotte is Walter’s obnoxious little sister.  On this day, she has been following Walter and his buddy Kenneth around and complaining that she is not allowed to join in the activities.  What Walter has for her is a very special stick.  It is special because Walter has decided it is special.  He decided that because he knew the trick he had in mind wouldn’t work unless Charlotte had some reason to believe it would work.

Here’s how the stick works.  It is a play-right-here stick.

 “What does it do?” says Charlotte.

 “Look,” said Walter, “you stick it in the dirt and then you look all around it and you find all kinds of things to look at so you can[3]play right here.” [Italics in the original]

Walter demonstrates.  He plants the stick in the ground, lies on the ground, and looks at the grass and dirt around the stick.  He sees an ant carrying a really huge bread crumb.  Charlotte tries it.  She sees a grasshopper.  She plays right here and Walter and Kenneth go off by themselves and play in an apple tree.

That may seem like a simple con job, but it is not.  It is a con job, certainly, but it is not simple.  That act is the first positive action Walter has taken toward anyone unless you count his tussling with Kenneth.  “Listen, Charlotte, I have something for you” is a new direction in Walter’s life.  It is proactive, imaginative, and generous.  Walter’s life is truly launched.  He is acting on the world and making it better.  And just a few pages ago, he was a bored little possum.

Today’s question is: How did Walter get to that place?  He learned from a master.  That is, after all, what apprentices do.[4]    In the story up to this point, Walter has been exactly the kind of nuisance to his father that Charlotte is to Walter.  Walter has “Nothing to Do” and believes, for reasons Hoban does not explain, but that will not be mysterious to any parent, that his father ought to do something about that.  But being a father, the father’s problem is not just to get Walter off his back for a little while, but to make Walter a master of the “Something to Do” skills.  That is what masters do for apprentices and, occasionally, fathers for sons.

How does he do that?  There are three steps.  In the first, he refused to own Walter’s problem.  The problem is never, of course, that there is nothing to do.  The problem is always that you are not interested in what there is to do.  Father gave Walter the task of raking leaves, in response of one of Walter’s complaints, but Walter discovered that “raking leaves is not really something to do.”

In the second, he gives Walter a magic stone that he found in the river the previous night.  It is magic for precisely the same reasons that Walter’s stick is magic: it won’t work if it isn’t magic.  It’s a “something to do” stone.  It always works if you use it correctly, but the stone, unlike the “play right here” stick, requires a little training.  The crucial aspect of the training is ruling out other explanations. 

The training in the use of the stone is step three.  Here’s what I mean.  When the stone doesn’t work, the reason is not to be sought in the intentions and desires of the user.  Nor is it to be sought in the inappropriate character of the activity itself.  That means that both “You shouldn’t want to do that” and “That’s not a good thing to do” are out.

We do not want to talk about things you want to do that you should not want to do.  You can’t focus on the stone and do that at the same time.  We do not want to talk about the inappropriateness of the activity.  You can’t focus on the stone and do that at the same time.  So the “right answer” is always something to do with the use of the stone.

I confess that this section of the story is the one I loved first.  The point Hoban makes here was the point I was trying to make in my doctoral dissertation, which was a good deal longer than Nothing to Do.  Look at how this gets done.

“Listen, Walter,” he said, “I have something for you.”

“What is it?” said Walter.

“It’s a something-to-do stone” said Father.

Everybody recognize the quote?  This act of Father’s is proactive, imaginative, and generous.  Sound familiar?  Here’s the training.  “You keep it in your pocket and when you have nothing to do, you rub it.  You have to look around and think while you’re rubbing it, and then the stone give you something to do.”

Walter rubs the stone and gets an idea.  He’s going to go into the living room and play with his erector set.  He knows very well that the reason he and Father and Charlotte are outside is that Mother is cleaning the house and no one is allowed to be there.  But, following the training rules, playing in the living room cannot be a bad thing to do and Walter cannot be a bad little possum for wanting to do it.  Those are, in my line of work, “causal attributions” and if you don’t block off the bad ones, you lose access to the good ones.

“You were too close to the house when you rubbed the stone,” says Father.  “Let’s try it again, further away.”  If Walter is to become a master in using the stone[5] bad choices need to be explained by how the stone works.  They cannot be explained by how bad the idea is or how perverse the chooser is.  IT’S ABOUT THE STONE, STUPID!

On his second try, Walter tries, “I want to go to the store and get a rubber ball so I can bounce it.”  That’s not good either, as Father explains, because it is a “costs money” thing to do.[6]  Again, there is nothing wrong with Walter’s intention and there is nothing wrong with the activity.  What is wrong is an improper use of the stone.

“That’s a costs-money thing to do,” said Father.  “You were standing too close to the pocket where I keep my money when you rubbed the stone.” IT’S ABOUT THE STONE, STUPID!

On Walter’s third try, he says, “I think I know where to find an old ball that I lost. I’ll go look for it.”  The stone works, you see.  He found the ball and played with it for a while.  When he got tired of bouncing the ball, he rubbed the stone again.  When you have nothing to do, remember, you rub the stone and look around and “it gives you something to do.”  That’s what makes it such a wonderful gift.  You don’t have to find something to do yourself.  It’s not bad to have nothing to do if you have a stone that will give you something to do.  You are not a bad little boy if you have nothing to do—if you have a stone that will give you something.  And if you use it properly—not too close the wallet, not too close to the house—it always works.

Those are the three steps.  Refuse to own the problem.  Give the magic stone.  Train the apprentice in the proper use of the stone.  That is how Walter came to learn how to use the stone and to trust the stone.

There is one other event, however.  Even when he can use the stone and can benefit from that use, Walter is still only a learner.  Father wants him to be a master, but to do that, Walter woulod have to see the process whole, the way Father saw it.  He would have to refuse to own someone else’s problem.  He would have to devise a magic gift.  He would have to train someone in the proper use of that gift.  He would have to do just what we saw him do when he saw the need, invented the play-right-here stick, and taught Charlotte how to use it.  Walter is going to have to say, “What was it that caused Father to invent the something-to-do stone and to endow it with magic properties?  Oh yeah.  It was me.  I kept pestering him.  Hey, I know what….”

I do have a private fantasy, though.  I don’t know anything at all about Charlotte.  I don’t know if she can get the hang of giving the magic gift.  But somewhere in her future, I want to hear her say to one of her friends, “Helen, I have something for you.”

 

 

[1] I’m thinking about his children’s books. This one is Nothing to Do. New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1964.   When he started writing adult fiction, he wrote some very hard-edged things, especially a post-apocalyptic novel called Ridley Walker.

[2] Opossum, actually. It is an Algonquin word meaning “white beast.”

[3] Note the verb.  With the stick, Charlotte CAN do this.  It is a newly opened ability.  The verb Walter chooses shows no interest in whether Charlotte wants to do this.

[4] Or disciples, if you want to follow the “learning” route rather than the “conquest” route.  Our word apprentice came mean “learner” only by means of a metaphorical extension..  The root is prehendere, “to seize.”  It came to mean “to seize with the mind,” i.e., to apprehend.  We can still see that in comprehend.  Disciple comes directly from discere, “to learn.”

[5] I’m thinking, maybe, lithotect.

[6] Giving kids money so they can “entertain themselves” is a common—probably an increasingly common—tactic of parenthood.  It carries several problems with it however.  If you are the source of the money, you are still the solver of the problem.  The child comes to you for money rather than for ideas.  That’s not much of an improvement.  The second is that it teaches the child that he is never short of imagination and resourcefulness, only of money.  That is not a useful lesson either.  If you teach those lessons, you are not a master and do not deserve an apprentice.

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The Mosque in Murfreesboro

Posted on August 15, 2012 by hessd

I tried to find a picture of Dan J. Qualls.  Here’s the way the New York Times described him

Only one opponent of the mosque came to voice his concerns at the opening [of the local mosque], a former auto plant worker wearing an “I Love Jesus” hat and a Ten Commandments shirt.

Then I decided it didn’t really need a picture; the words are pretty graphic.  Most of the people I talk to regularly would not wear either the shirt or the hat and most especially would not wear either in opposition to the opening of a non-Christian place of worship.  I wouldn’t either, of course.  That’s partly why I hang out with those people.

The easiest way to condemn Mr. Qualls is to call him a hypocrite, but I’m not sure that’s the best way to respond to his discontent.  The case for  comes from the hat and the shirt.  The Ten Commandments, for instance, comes from a tradition that is quite outspoken about the duty of hospitality, especially toward the stranger and the foreigner.  The closest Jesus ever came to Mr. Qualls confrontation with a mosque is probably his encounter with the Samaritan women given in the Gospel of John.  In that exchange, Jesus said, “Neither your religious traditions or ours are worth disputing over because God is in the process of moving the notion of “worship” to a level we have never even dreamed of.[1]

But a “hypocrite” is a play-actor.  It is a word from Greek theater (hypokritēs) and it means “playing a part.”  Jesus sometimes castigated the Pharisees for hypocrisy on the grounds that their religious observances were not genuine piety, but only good theater.  But what part is Mr. Qualls playing?  He said he heard about the opening of the mosque on the TV news and decided to “come out and represent the Christians.”  Is that a religious act?  Or is it more tribal or maybe ethnic.  It is a demographic group he is representing.  The teachings of his faith—either the hat or the shirt—seem beside the point.  He is there to represent the interests of his group, not the teachings of his group.

On the other hand, Mr. Qualls’s comment seems pretty small potatoes.  “My honest opinion is, I wish this wasn’t here.”  I’m OK with that.[2]

On the other hand, vandals have spray-painted “Not Welcome” on the construction signs and have set fire to some of the equipment.  At a public hearing, residents testified that Islam is “not a religion” and that Muslims are trying to overthrow the Constitution.  A local Republican candidate for Congress tied the center to Hamas, which is a terrorist organization and the freely elected government of Gaza. Robert E. Corlew III ruled that the county had not given sufficient notice of the public hearing and stopped the building permit.  The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro and the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department filed separate lawsuits asking the Corlew’s ruling be set aside. 

That’s what else was going on in Murfreesboro and it is what makes me think that Mr. Qualls lament—the ball cap and the tee shirt aside—is not what we have most to worry about.

 

 

[1] Had Jesus been speaking Arabic, rather than Aramaic, he would have said that this is something Allah was doing.  “Allah” is a linguistic marker, not a theological one.  “Allah” is the Arabic word for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

[2] The Constitution guarantees freedom of religious expression.  It does not specify that others need to be happy about it.

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Conscientious Objections to Instruction in Biology

Posted on August 10, 2012 by hessd

Somewhere, I read about a small political kerfuffle at the zoo in Topeka, Kansas.  Some religious conservatives took offense because the signs and displays at the zoo all took “the theory of evolution” for granted and they wanted “creationism” to be given equal time.  So they elected a majority of the board from their movement and began designing “creationist” displays.

The way I heard the story, every religious faith represented in the Topeka area showed up with its group’s creation myth.[1]  It turns out there are dozens of creation myths, even in an area where white Protestants are a substantial majority, and the zoo board had no way to accept some and reject others.  Verifiability is not the strong suite of creation myths, you see.  So the board gave up and I expect that if I visited the Topeka Zoo today, I would see evolution presupposed in the signs I read.

Two days ago, the voters of Missouri passed an amendment to their constitution.  It was not a squeaker.  Here’s a clip from Tuesday morning’s Kansas City Star: “With all but two precincts statewide counted, 779,628 voted yes on the measure and 162,404 voted no, roughly a 5-1 margin.”[2]

This was not good news for the Kansas City Star.  Here was their advice to Missourians about this measure:

 MISSOURI CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT 2

What it does: Unnecessarily reaffirms the right to prayer in public and private settings; requires schools to post the Bill of Rights; violates the Constitution by allowing sectarian prayer to open government meetings; allows public school students to not participate in instruction if they claim it violates their religious beliefs.

Our recommendation: An emphatic “NO.” Amendment 2 is unnecessary, would lead to costly litigation and cause problems in schools.

It might help us to know that this was marketed by its supporters as the “right to pray” amendment.  Anybody here opposed to students having the right to pray?  I thought not.

Notice, however, the phrasing of the Star’s description of the effects of the amendment: “allows public school students to not participate in instruction if they claim…”  No finding is needed, no task force is convened, no curriculum adjusted.   The student claims that some kind of instruction violates their religious beliefs.  I, myself, have serious religious objections to any math beyond algebra.  Higher math is a sin for the same reason raising the Tower of Babel to the heavens was a sin.  The heavens belong to God and “higher mathematics” is part of the all too human desire to put ourselves in God’s place.  Or so I could argue if I lived in Missouri.

All fun aside, the aim of this amendment is to excuse students who believe in creationism from instruction in evolutionism, i.e., in biology, geology, astronomy, comparative anthropology, and other disciplines.  Under the current conditions of mistrust, the old idea of curriculum as something that “broadens” the mind has become a gauntlet of conscientious objections.  Courses that once had integrity—the structure of the course moved from orientation to methods to principles to applications—will now be more like libraries.  You wander in and find the books that appeal to you.

This is to be lamented as a trend, it seems to me, but there are some practical considerations as well.  Presumably, the state and federal achievement measures will continue to ask what the students know about the fragments of biology, geology, astronomy, and comparative anthropology that they covered in their classes.  Will creationist answers be accepted as well as evolutionist answers?  Will the conscientious conservatives be tested on courses they have not taken?  Will the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the 5th and 14th amendments protect equally those who have learned secular biology and those who have learned what the religious objections are to secular biology?

When you get to the assessment phase, it seems to me, all the options are bad.  “Show me” what you know is the assessment end of the curriculum and I think the “Show me” state has just painted itself into a corner.

 

[1] Not using the word myth in any pejorative sense.  A myth is true or false in the same way “The Hound of the Baskervilles” is true or false.  It’s not a claim; it’s a narrative framework.

[2] I wish it had been closer because my brother and his wife live in Missouri and they wasted their day seeing medical people rather than voting on this amendment.  What I really wanted was for this amendment to have won by exactly two votes

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Chik-fil-A

Posted on August 8, 2012 by hessd

So here’s an interesting question: “Do we really want our political lives and our commercial lives to be so wholly intermeshed?”  It turns out that some do and some don’t. 

Here’s an answer that is closer to what it looks like where the boots are on the ground: “I don’t want our civic lives to be in constant turmoil, but it is only right that I retaliate as best I can against a firm that opposes my interests.”  That’s an answer both ugly and common, so let’s think about it a little.

The question comes from Jonathan Merritt, son of the former Southern Baptist Convention president, James Merritt.  Here is a small collection of answers.  I will prefix the answer to the question before the quote.  Gov. Thomas Menino of Boston, “(Yes) I urge you [Chick-fil-A] to back out of your plans to locate in Boston.”  Mayor Edwin Lee of San Francisco, “(Yes) Closest Chick-fil-A to San Francisco is 40 miles away and I strongly recommend that they not try to come any closer.”  The Reverend Billy Graham, “(Yes) As the son of a dairy farmer who milked many a cow, I plan to ‘Eat Mor Chikin’ and show my support by visiting Chick-fil-A on August 1.”[1]

Not much of a collection, is it?  Everyone seems to want to preserve the right to retaliate.  I’d like to put this non-debate in context.  The answer I provided above—it is only right that I retaliate as best I can—is a common answer, but I don’t think it is a good answer.  For one thing, no one thinks the level of public incivility we are experiencing is a good idea.  People do think, however, that the other side is doing it and so we have to do it too.  The effect on the present issue is what we focus on; the effect on the way we discuss politics in this country (the growing incivility) is in the background.  It is always in the background.  That is why we do what we do with our eyes on the present issue only.[2]

So my first point is that we are choosing “constant turmoil,” as I said above, without even noticing that it is not what we want.  Second, I would like to point out, as a liberal, that conservatives are always going to win an argument about morals.  There are more conservatives and moral issues are more highly salient, and they define morality as the good, itself, rather than as “freedom to choose,” which is the liberals’ notion of “morals.”

Dan Cathy, whose family owns Chick-fil-A, says he endorses “the biblical definition of the family unit.”  We could quibble, of course, about whether there is a biblical definition of the family unit and in what part of the Bible it might be found, but that’s not where I want to go.  I want to ask what the liberal definition of the family unit is and why it is good.  The answer, I think, is that we don’t have one and we don’t argue that it is good.  What we want to protect is freedom of choice—especially, in the present context, for gays and lesbians—and we think the question of whether it is “good” is beside the point once the “right to choose” has been granted.[3]  So my point, again, is that if the argument is about morals, the conservatives will win it.  For liberals to win it, it has to be about freedom of choice.

Third, this is not a freedom of speech case. It is not about Chik-fil-A’s notoriously bad spelling, as in the famous ad.  Chik-fil-A is not preaching about conservative issues like abortion and gay marriage; they are actively funding events and organizations that have the twin goals of making abortion unavailable and gay marriage illegal.  I think it would be a lot more direct to oppose each and every use of Chik-fil-A’s money for those purposes than to retaliate against the company.  Donating money to make abortions unavailable to women who want them, or whose doctors advise them, can reasonably be characterized as a restriction of freedom of choice.  Liberals are going to win a freedom of choice argument, provided it is about morals, say, rather than pollution.  When liberals go after the conservative companies like Chik-fil-A, they are shifting the argument back to morals, where we will lose.

Finally, there is the slippery slope argument.  I want to boycott Chik-fil-A because I don’t like what they do with their profits.  Fine.  Do you know what your life insurance company does with its profits?  Your dry cleaners?  Your running shoe manufacturer.  Do any of those guys pollute?  Pay their workers too little?  Maintain bank accounts in the Caymans?

That’s the slippery slope.  It is one thing to oppose a prominently political company like Chik-fil-A, but how do you draw the line so you don’t have to know just what the carbon footprint is, for instance, of anything your buy or the political investments of any firm you patronize.  I don’t know those things myself and I don’t want to have to learn them.  If Chik-fil-A makes a really good chicken sandwich and if I really like chicken sandwiches, then I have no problem at all about going there to get one.  If you have a problem with it, there are some questions about the products you buy and the firms you patronize that we are going to have to get into.

I know you don’t want that.

[1] The Reverend Doctor Graham has allowed his publicity machine to use an ambiguous pronoun.  That happens sometimes.  Did his father, the dairy farmer, milk a lot of cows?  Did he, the son of the dairy farmer, milk a lot of cows?  Both, probably, but you can’t tell from the statement.

[2] It is impossible in politics, as much as in ecology, to swoop in and change one thing, leaving everything else the same.  You kill a noxious pest—this is not a partisan reference—and you kill whatever ordinarily eats that noxious pest.

[3] Following the same logic, gun enthusiasts think gun-related homicides are beside the point once the right to own, carry, and use guns has been established.

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Guns and Politics

Posted on July 25, 2012 by hessd

A gunman stood up at a Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado and killed 12 people and injured 58 others–as many people as he could with the time he had and the arsenal he brought into the theater with him.  David Brooks’s response (here) comes down to this: “The crucial point is that the dynamics [of mass killings like this one and the others he cites] are internal, not external.”

Puh-leese!

Is there something we can do to better protect our citizens from the rapidly increasing chance that they will be slaughtered by someone with guns and grievances?  Brooks’s answer is yes: there are two things we can do.  First, we can have closer relationships with each other.

It’s probably a mistake to think that we can ever know what “caused” these rampages. But when you read through the assessments that have been done by the F.B.I., the Secret Service and various psychologists, you see certain common motifs.  Many of the killers had an exaggerated sense of their own significance, which, they felt, was not properly recognized by the rest of the world. Many suffered a grievous blow to their self-esteem — a lost job, a divorce or a school failure — and decided to strike back in some showy way.  Many had suffered from severe depression or had attempted suicide. Many lived solitary lives, but most shared their violent fantasies with at least one person before they committed their crimes.

I think it is a wonderful idea to be more social and inclusive, but here is what is not going to happen: we are not going to “recognize” the significance of these people in the way they think is deserved; we are not going to prevent grievous blows to their self-esteem; we are not going to prevent them from living “solitary lives;” we are not going to have everyone who hears a friend vent a violent fantasy contact the police.

We are, in short, not going to prevent people from having grievances.  But does that mean that we can do nothing to prevent these grievances from becoming the occasions for mass slaughter?  I don’t think it does mean that.  Brooks tries to show that there is nothing we can do by citing a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the effect that gun control laws are not effective.  I don’t think that works.  I haven’t seen the study he cites, but I’m pretty sure it compares states with stricter gun control laws to states with more lenient gun control laws.  I can see why no effect is shown in that comparison; indeed, it would be remarkable if any effect at all could be discovered.

Here’s another look.

The United States has by far the highest rate of gun deaths — murders, suicides and accidents — among the world’s 36 richest nations, a government study found.  The U.S. rate for gun deaths in 1994 was 14.24 per 100,000 people. Japan had the lowest rate, at .05 per 100,000. The study, done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is the first comprehensive international look at gun-related deaths. It was published Thursday in the International Journal of Epidemiology. 

This quotation and the next one can be seen here.

Maybe comparing economically developed nations with a lot of gun violence to similar countries with only a little would be a help.  Brooks tries to head that off by mentioning mass killers from elsewhere: Ernst Wagner in Germany (1913), Robert Steinäuser (Germany), and Anders Breivik (Norway).  These have nothing to do with aggregate statistics, as Brooks knows.  The figures for gun deaths per 100,000 of population are Norway 2.22, Germany 1.16, and the U. S. 9.46.  Does Brooks really think that the gun laws of these countries are unrelated to the rate of gun deaths?  I don’t think he does think that.

He might be thinking that it is the gun culture—not the laws—that account for such high homicide rates here in the United States.

The CDC would not speculate why the death rates varied, but other researchers said easy access to guns and society’s acceptance of violence are part of the problem in the United States. “If you have a country saturated with guns — available to people when they are intoxicated, angry or depressed — it’s not unusual guns will be used more often,” said Rebecca Peters, a Johns Hopkins University fellow specializing in gun violence. “This has to be treated as a public health emergency.”

Brooks and I know that you can’t change a cultural feature by making laws about it.  On the other hand, the laws are not irrelevant to the direction the culture takes.  Our “acceptance of violence” is part of the culture, as Rebecca Peters says, but the availability of guns is part of the politics.

Brooks’s second solution is to be more aggressive in our provision of “treatment options,” especially for young men.  I think that would help, but what is he thinking people are going to be “treated” for?  Massacring without a license?  Oh…wait.  You don’t have to have a license for that.  “Treated” doesn’t sound like prevention to me.

As long as we have angry loners with guns, we will have attention-seeking killings.  Nothing the government can do will directly affect how many people are angry.  Nothing the government can do will directly affect how many people are loners.  No one is going to murder a dozen people in a theater with a switchblade.

Any ideas, David?

 

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Public Porn

Posted on July 23, 2012 by hessd

The two most common responses I have heard to protests against pornography are these: a) it doesn’t hurt anybody and b) what they (the consumers of pornography) do in the privacy of their homes is nobody’s business. The New York Times this morning ran a story called, “He’s Watching That, In Public?”  You can see the whole article here.  There aren’t any pictures in the article, but I have added a few that I liked, as you see.

The best place to begin is the experience of Dawn Hawkins, executive director of a group called Morality in Media.  She was on a plane several months ago and noticed that the man in the row in front of her was engrossed in the images on his iPad.  These were images of naked women whipping each other.

He was consuming pornography “in public.”  What is public?  Let’s imagine that he was looking at these pictures on cards the size of playing cards and holding them discretely in his lap so that only he could see them.  That’s “public” in the sense that he is doing his viewing in a public place, but it is not “public” in the sense that it couldn’t be dealt with simply by not paying attention to it.  It is not different in kind, it seems to me, that his reading a pornographic novel.  On the other hand, let’s imagine that he was viewing these erotic flagellants on a 15 inch computer screen.  It’s going to take some effort “not to notice” for people in the periphery of the viewing area.  For the person in the next seat or in the several seats behind him, no effort is going to be enough.  I think that is “public” in another sense.

There are people who are going to want to treat this story as if pornography were wrong and should be prevented or punished.  I don’t know quite how I feel about pornography as a moral matter because I don’t really know (see option a, above) how directly people are affected by it.  I am going to treat it as an offense against one’s “fellows.”

One’s fellow what?  Well, in the San Francisco library people have been using the library computers to access pornography.  If this is a violation, it is a violation of their “fellow patrons.”  The library responded by putting plastic hoods over the monitors so only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen.

On the road in New Jersey, we are talking about one’s fellow travelers.[1]  State Senator Anthony Bucco has introduced a bill that would ban porno on seat-back DVD players.  These players are oriented so that other drivers could plausibly be distracted by them.  The people in what I called “the viewing area” on the plane are fellow travelers as well.

At the Café Ponte in San Francisco, where customers come to surf the web, they would be fellow diners (companion is the Latin version of that) and compotadors if they drank anything.[2]  Bruce Ponte, the owner, says “This is an internet café.  People come here to surf.  Am I supposed to do something about that?”

Let’s imagine that I have established that the public viewing of pornography—I have defined “public” as a viewing that can be avoided by one’s fellows only by heroic effort—as a bad thing.  What to do?  Dawn Hawkins complained about the fan of erotic flagellation on her place and was told by the flight attendant that he was powerless to force the man to stop.  That might be literally true—“forcing him”—but it seems reasonable that he was not powerless to ask him to stop.  The Association of Flight Attendants says that its members want to avoid offending passengers or playing the role of censors.  I’ll bet they do.  But if one of the people on the plane is doing something offensive, then people are being offended and the flight attendants are going to have to choose a course of action.

Starbucks, which always seems to find a way to manage these things, says it does not censor the use of its Wi-Fi, but it does reserve the right to ask someone not to view material that might offend patrons or employees.  That seems like a good approach to me, but let’s looks at one that is a lot better.

Lewis Goldberg, 42, a partner in an investor relations firm in New York, occasionally watches shows like “Mad Men” or “Game of Thrones” on his iPad when he works out at the gym. But he fast-forwards through sexual or particularly violent scenes.  “There’s a woman jogging behind me on the treadmill and I don’t want her to fall off,” he said. “I’m bringing my media into a public space, and it’s part of my responsibility in a civil society.”

That’s the approach the most sense to me.  It doesn’t ask why Goldberg is watching shows in public that have sexual or particularly violent scenes.[3]  It focuses on his sense that he has a responsibility to others and it gives as an instance one way he enact that responsibility.   And this is what conservatives always say.  If we have people of sensitivity and social responsibility, “fixers” will not have to be called in: not the library or the airlines and certainly not the legislator.  I’d have to say that in this case, it is the conservative stand on managing what “public” means that makes most sense to me.

 

[1] This is perhaps the most nearly innocuous use of “fellow traveler” I have ever seen.  When I was growing up, it was a very substantial political charge.

[2] I made than one up, but you have to admit it is plausible since potare = to drink and com- means “together.”  Companion uses the same prefix and substitutes panis = bread for the focus of the action.

[3] It is worth our while to pause to note which of those terms was thought to require the emphasis on an adverb.  Some societies, it seems likely, would have said violent or particularly sexual” instead.

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Dangerous Architectural Innovations

Posted on July 12, 2012 by hessd

Here’s what I learned today: “In architecture, the apse (Greek αψις (apsis), then Latin absis: “arch, vault”; sometimes written apsis; plural apses) is a semicircular recess covered with a hemispherical vault or semi-dome.”  That’s from Wikipedia.  Here’s what one of them looks like.

I looked this up because it occurred to me that from an engineering standpoint, building a dome like that our of large hard pieces of material–stone, probably– could be quite dangerous.  Very much of that stone falls on people, some of them are going to die.

So then I got to wondering if the expression “killer apse” (often misspelled) comes from these early architectural innovations.  Not very likely, I suppose.

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Boy-friendly Schools?

Posted on July 11, 2012 by hessd

So let’s talk about accountability and cooperativeness.  They’re good, right?  So if you built a set of institutions to teach little boys and little girls to be accountable and cooperative, that would be a step in the right direction.

This is a hard question; I am not going to pretend it is easy.  But consider: “independence” is good, too, and there is no way to reconcile independence with accountability.  Whoever you are accountable to is who you are not independent from.

That may seem obvious when put in that light, but it wasn’t obvious to any of the players in the story I am about to tell.  My first non-seasonal employment by the State of Oregon was by an agency called, at that time, the Oregon Educational Coordinating Commission (OECC).  We were created to serve the state by proposing statewide educational plans and to serve the legislature by advising them and, to a certain extent, doing studies that showed that what they wanted to do was a good idea.  We were, so the stories say, the legislators’ fair-haired boy.

By the time I arrived on the scene, we had lost a good deal of our popularity with the legislators and were very vulnerable to attack by agencies who would do better on their own programs if we were not there.  I didn’t see that we really had any weaknesses.  We were created to be an independent agency and were to be protected in that status by a legislature whose interests we served.

These hostile agencies, however, noticed something I had not.  They noticed that the newer legislators had not been party to the old understanding and were not eager to offer the OECC their protection.  This opened the door for an attack that led with this question, “Who are they (the OECC) accountable to?”  We didn’t catch the changed climate as fast as our opponents had, so we countered, “We are not supposed to be accountable; we are independent.”  It didn’t work and that’s how I learned that “accountable” and “independent” are mutually exclusive.

In the same way, cooperativeness is a good idea.  It is a good character trait, as anyone knows who has had to deal with uncooperative elementary and secondary students, and it is necessary if we are all going to get along with each other.  The Farmers and the Cowboys should be friends, after all.  Territory folks should stick together.  Territory folks should all be pals.

But, cooperativeness isn’t always a good idea and it is a better idea for some kinds of people that for others.  It is better for some kinds of tasks than for others.  Cooperativeness is “nicer,” of course, but “nice” doesn’t always get the job done and sometimes the job really needs to get done.  There are times, in summary, when you really need to stand with your own judgment rather than be accountable to others and there are times when you need to win, even though that requires that someone else lose.

David Brooks wrote about this dilemma in the New York Times on July 5. Here is the full column.  I think he and I might have some differences about definitions, but I am quite sure that he is right about the effect of the current school practices on boys.  From the torrent of lament about the declining ability of male students, this one was particularly startling: 11th-grade boys are now writing at the same level as 8th-grade girls.  Here is the challenge Brooks lays down.

Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but programs that work like boot camp.

It’s hard to be against “diversity,” isn’t it?  On the other hand, look at the sets of opposed values.  There’s cooperation v. competition.  That’s just a matter of definition if we are talking about persons, rather than groups.  Then there’s environmental virtues v. military virtues.  Who in the world thinks those are alternatives?  Then sharing v. winning and losing.  And finally, friendship circles v. boot camp.

Let’s divide those sets of terms so that we have “first term” values and “second term” values.  The first term values are cooperation, environmental virtues, sharing, and friendship circles. The second term values are competitiveness, military virtues, winning/losing, and boot camp. When I was in school, I was a boy (still am) and was much more comfortable with the first term in those sets than with the second term (still am).  So Brooks isn’t talking about all boys, but let’s give him a pass on the generality that “most boys” would benefit from the second term virtues

I taught in public schools for six years and I know a good deal more about faculty relations than Brooks does and I want to know how the first term teachers—cooperative, environmental, sharing, friendship circles—are going to relate to the second term teachers.  Abrupt and devastating moral condemnation, I would guess.  And you know how the second term teachers—the competitive, military, winning and losing, boot camp teachers—are going to respond.  Utter disdain would be my guess.

Now let’s look at it from the standpoint of the principal.  Every change-oriented principal I have ever known or heard of begins by telling the faculty what his or her vision is for “the new culture of the school” and for the “student outcomes” that are to be expected if everyone signs on.  Not everyone signs on.  The principal then sits down with the ones who won’t go along and tells them to start looking for a more compatible school, generally promising a very favorable recommendation if the search starts soon enough.

This new school culture will not be a mixture of the virtues Brooks has described.  The culture will choose what norms are good, what deviations from those norms are understandable in the short term, and which ones need to be condemned at every appearance.  That tells the teachers not only what to ask from the students, but how to respond to teachers who are emphasizing incompatible virtues.  It tells the cooperative teachers, in other words, how to nullify the major values of the teachers who emphasize military virtues.

Of course, everyone is in favor of “diversity,” but to a cooperative teacher, a boot camp cut throat, “winning is the only thing” teacher is a travesty and a disgrace.  Such a teacher is “too much diversity” or “the wrong kind of diversity” or something.  If school culture is set at the top, and it is, then “one culture schools” are what we will get.

Brooks doesn’t argue that we should have programs that are good for boys but not for girls.  He sees that the programs we have are better for girls and thinks there should be little enclaves of “boy friendly” teachers and curriculum.  I regret to say that the schools we now have are not “enclave friendly” and back when they were, it was because no one exercised any significant oversight of the faculty

Brooks’s one chance, and he doesn’t take it in this column, is to argue that the current arrangements are not good for girls either.  He needs to say that both boys and girls will be benefited by moving the school culture back in the direction a little more toughness.[1]  I would love to see the research on schools that have tried that.  I have never seen any and I don’t expect to.

 

[1] More like the way “school” is during recess.

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Building Abscission Layers

Posted on July 6, 2012 by hessd

For the last twenty years or so, I’ve been thinking about abscission layers.  I have read meticulous accounts of those layers and the processes that reliably produce them in biology texts where, after several readings, I thought I got the general idea.  I read those texts because it occurred to me that the “career” of a leaf and the career of a person like me had some similarities that might be clarified by a thoughtful analogy.  If you are going to work it out analogically, you need to get at least the rudiments of the science right.  That’s what the biology texts were for.

I’m picturing the red oak tree outside the bedroom window.  It’s a deciduous tree, so all the leaves fall off every winter.  Deciduous simply means “falls off.”  Every leaf that oak produces during the productive seasons needs to be connected to the tree so it can send back to tree system the energy it has produced and so it can be part of the complex internal communications system of the tree.  When it is done with all those things, it needs to fall off of the twig it was attached to and it needs to do so in a way that doesn’t leave a wound behind.  To get an idea of the difference, think of allowing the leaves to fall off naturally—just what “naturally” means is going to be explored in a moment—as opposed to just ripping the leaves off before they are “ready.”

Leaves fall off effortlessly and naturally.  They do that by developing abscission layers that look like this.  The action I am thinking about happens where the leaf stalk comes out of the stem.  It is the abscission layer that allows the leaf to fall off when it is time and the protective layer (cork) that allows the tree to be unharmed by the departure of the leaf.

That’s how the leaves do it; people, very often, do it differently.  Being attached to the stem is all we’ve ever known.  Through that stem we send the complete product of our working lives.  Through that stem we receive the nutrients we need and all the messages that the hormonal messengers bring us.  Then, one day, a message comes that we have never had before.  “Thanks for all the good work.  We couldn’t have survived without you and your colleagues.  But we are entering a period of rest and recovery and won’t need you any longer.”

At that point, the abscission layer begins to develop.  The leaf, which has worn the characteristic green (chlorophyll) coveralls since it was brand new on the job, takes the work clothes off and reveals the marvelous yellows and oranges and reds—carotenoids and anthocyanins– that go with its retirement.  Eventually the leaf drops off and leaves the tree safe from the water loss and the danger of infection that the tree would have experienced had the abscission layer not been formed—and leaves a space where a new working leaf can appear when business picks up again next spring.

My idea is that the way a leaf does it is a really good description of how we would do it ourselves if we were smart enough and good-hearted enough and brave enough.  But what the leaves do naturally, we must do intentionally.  We must be willing to receive the message that the tree is shutting down for a while.  Some people refuse to receive the message.  Some manage to suppress its plain meaning and many spend a good deal of money in the process.  We must deliberately set the appropriate processes going.  Abscission layers aren’t going to build themselves the way they do in leaves.  The protective layer that will protect the tree from the bad things that would otherwise happen in our absence will not build itself as it does in leaves.  Leaves know that there is a time to grow, a time to work, and a time to shut down and fall off.  People don’t always know that.

I’ve been looking at this process from the standpoint of the leaf, but now I want to switch to the standpoint of the tree.  Like most people in their seventies, I have had some experiences of loss and I have learned two things:  a) an attachment like an important relationship doesn’t just end at one time and b) there are better ways to manage the experience and worse ways.

My mother died 24 years ago, give or take a week.  In some ways, I knew right away what that would mean.  I knew, for instance, that I wouldn’t be talking to her on the phone any more, but I didn’t know that each of the ways we had known each other during my whole life would die a separate little death.  The joke we shared about the tag in my shirt is now a joke with no one to share it.  That leaf has fallen.  The form letters that served as “family letters” and which were redeemed by the personal notes she wrote on the bottom of the last page will not come any more.  That leaf has fallen, too.  The thousand childhood tricks by which I tried to avoid doing something I should have done are now gone, because only Mother appreciated them—an appreciation dimmed only slightly by her trying, and failing, to put on a stern face to lecture me about it.  All those leaves have fallen as well.

So it doesn’t happen all at once.  If you are going to manage all the abscission layers of all the leaves—not likely, really—you are going to have to prepare thoughtfully for the safe departure of each leaf.  And they don’t all happen at once.  We don’t leave our productive lives all at once; we don’t leave our social settings all at once; we don’t leave our various friendships, central and peripheral, all at once.  And each one of them needs to have a careful sealing off on the stem side and an effective breaking off (“deciduous,” remember) on the leaf side.  Bad things happen when those are not properly done.

So attachments don’t end all at once and if you are a person, rather than a leaf, the ending will require careful thought and consistent practice.  This brings us to the second point, which is that there are better ways and worse ways to do that.  We can take the end of our productive careers not as an appropriate and satisfying end—that is what the yellow, the orange, and the red mean to me—but as a renunciation of the value our work.  “After all I’ve done for you,” we say, “…now this!”    And we say, “No one really understood how important my work really was.  If the tree really understood how important my livelihood as a leaf is, it would postpone the slowdown until I was ready.”[1]  And, of course, “It isn’t fair!”

Other lives end the way a long-running Broadway play ends.  There is celebration and satisfaction.  It had a great run!  Everyone who has been part of that particular play is given a brief vision of the way their work has connected with the work of others they didn’t even know.  There are nostalgic retrospectives.  And then the scenery is put away for the last time and the actors and directors and producers and stagehands move on to the next project.

I know it is beyond me to accomplish this, but in my status as a tree, I do understand that my life has been made possible by the thousands upon thousands of contributions from the leaves that have provided the energy I needed to do what I have done.  I want to prepare for each of those separations with the appreciation they deserve and I want to protect my own life for the next round of productive work.  I don’t want ragged or thoughtless separations.  They hurt; and they run the risk of diseases I can’t afford.  And they aren’t necessary.

In my status as a leaf, I have only one abscission layer to manage.  I want to do it right because otherwise the tree to which[2] I have given the results of my whole working life will experience losses and risks I don’t want.  I want to get the news of the impending slowdown at the right time.  I want to know immediately what it means.  I want to start right away building the layers that will allow me to fall away without damage to the tree.  I want to display the beautiful colors of my life that were always there, beneath the green work coveralls.  I want the people who see those colors to enjoy them fully, even if they don’t know what they mean.  And then I want to fall off.  I know business is going to pick up again in a little bit and I want there to be room for the new guy to get to work when the time comes.

After Dad died, I sent Mother a picture of a leaf from the red oak in my lawn.  The colors were as rich as any the oak produced that year.  The abscission layer had been built.  The tree had been protected.  I knew that’s the way Mother understood that part of her life, so on the picture, I had a really good calligrapher write, “The leaf that wholly loves its Tree[3]/Will never know despair.” I knew she would know what that meant.

 

 

 

[1] Of course, a leaf that would say that would never be “ready.”

[2] From a theological standpoint, I get to say, “to Whom.”

[3] The capital T- in Tree makes the same point I made above in changing “to which” to “to Whom.”

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