Philosophy On The Mesa

If you are over 40, or exceptionally musically literate, you will probably find this video hilarious.

If you are under 40, you may not get it; but that will be your loss.

There has been persistent controversy throughout this election cycle on the proper conduct of foreign policy vis a vis our “enemies”, with Obama expressing a willingness to talk to Iran about common interests in the Middle East and McCain promising to continue the Bush Administration’s policy of moral grandstanding (”they hate us for our freedom”), intimidation, and violence.

Time magazine’s recent cover story on Nelson Mandela’s 8 Lessons of Leadership is interesting for the light it casts on the kind of leader we need in perilous times. Imprisoned for 27 years in a South African prison for violent political activities directed against the apartheid regime, Mandela upon his release led the movement to liberate the country “from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite white and black, oppressor and oppressed, in a way that had never been done before”—through negotiation and reconciliation.

Among Mandela’s “lessons of leadership”, three in particular stand out:

Know your enemy–and learn about is favorite sport

Keep your friends close–and your rivals even closer

Nothing is black or white.

These are important because they encourage both an understanding of the kind of leverage needed for successful negotiation and the trust required to encourage people to take political risks. Most human beings (and nations) share common interests on which they are willing to act if we can get enough of these shared interests on the table, and there are sufficient assurances that they aren’t being suckered.

Mandela’s precepts are a far cry from the blustering blowhard Bush and his little sycophant McCain gleefully singing about bombing Iran. Both have exhibited stunning ignorance about the Middle East, a region that is so central to our interests. Of course, Bush has belatedly begun to change his tune, negotiating (finally) an agreement with North Korea on their nuclear weapons that essentially gets us back to the rapproachment negotiated by Clinton. In addition, the Bush Administration is proposing to open a limited diplomatic mission in Iran and appears to be moving precisely toward Obama’s position (now endorsed by the Iraqi leadership as well) of a phased, secure withdrawal from Iraq and greater attention to Afghanistan.

All this is to the good, but if we elect McCain we will have 4 or (perish the thought) 8 more years of a conservative cock strutting about the world stage trying to prove his manhood, while we wait for him to learn simple lessons about persuasion.

I often hear people claim that religion provides a foundation or framework for morality. Well, it certainly isn’t a sufficient condition.

Army Spc. Jeremy Hall was a practicing Baptist until he lost his faith while serving in Iraq.

“His sudden lack of faith, he said, cost him his military career and put his life at risk. Hall said his life was threatened by other troops and the military assigned a full-time bodyguard to protect him out of fear for his safety.”

I had thought that a good shepherd seeks out and encourages a lost sheep to return to the flock, if only to protect his investment. But I guess I was wrong. A good shepherd just shoots the lost sheep.

And then we have this little gem from the “inflatable crisis doll” file.

“Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn’t eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.

Catholics worldwide became furious.   

Webster’s friend, who didn’t want to show his face, said he took the Eucharist, to show him what it meant to Catholics.

Webster gave the wafer back, but the Catholic League, a national watchdog organization for Catholic rights claims that is not enough.

 ’We don’t know 100% what Mr. Cooks motivation was,” said Susan Fani a spokesperson with the local Catholic diocese.  “However, if anything were to qualify as a hate crime, to us this seems like this might be it.”’

Walking off with a symbolic cookie is a hate crime, even when the motivation isn’t clear?

“It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”

Stealing a symbolic cookie is like kidnapping?

To make matters worse, Catholics are so upset about this that Cook is now receiving death threats. Does this remind you of one of those other religions so often in the news?

But the story doesn’t end here, because inflatable dolls are just so attractive. The master of “inflatable doll outrage”, Bill Donahue President of the Catholic League, has weighed in:

“For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage–regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance–is beyond hate speech. That is why the UCF administration needs to act swiftly and decisively in seeing that justice is done. All options should be on the table, including expulsion.”

Intrepid blogger and biology professor P.Z. Meyers took Donahue and Catholics to task for turning cookie abuse into a hate crime, and now he is receiving death threats, while his university is receiving demands that Meyers be fired.

There are a lot of things I could say about this, but Myers is better at snark that I am, and I don’t want my President to receive demands for my dismissal.

 So let me just make a philosophical point. If a collection of ideas or commitments is to serve as a foundation or framework for moral conduct, it must provide its adherents with the proper motives for ethical conduct and a set of principles or narratives that enable people to make defensible judgments about the treatment of persons. If it doesn’t do this, it really can’t make a claim to be a foundation or framework for moral conduct.

There are some religious perspectives that, as foundations, are developing some very serious cracks.

My apologies for the lack of blog posts recently. A looming book deadline and a two-week vacation in Germany had me otherwise occupied.

Germany is a beautiful and interesting country—gorgeous countryside, impressive castles and churches that date back to the medieval period, and a 2000 year history well preserved in their museums.

But what Germans like to do most is party. Germany is awash in beer! In Munich at 10:00 A.M, during the week, every café or beer garden will be full of people indulging in their late morning snack—weisswurst ( a veal sausage) and weissbier (a wheat beer, also called hefeweizen). And a 2000 year history provides them with endless opportunities for anniversaries that require celebration. Every city we visited seemed to have an anniversary celebration in their city squares, which were closed to traffic and lined with booths selling—well, more beer.

Our visit coincided with the European soccer championships that they take very seriously and provide an additional excuse for more parties. Imagine the atmosphere of the Super Bowl, except there is a game every 2 or 3 days. So every 2 or 3 days is an occasion for much of the population to gather in brew houses with high definition TV and—drink more beer.

The primary function of beer is to wash down huge portions of as many kinds of animal fats as will fit on one plate. Of course, fat is where the flavor is so the food is delicious and well prepared. (I highly recommend the pig’s knuckle and the boiled beef with horseradish sauce.) But occasionally we had to seek refuge from the lipids in an Italian or Turkish restaurant. (There are many ethnic restaurants in Germany).

Despite the calories they consume, we saw few excessively overweight people. That is probably because there is seldom parking to be found, so any trip requires a good walk.

Of course, we were traveling with beer connoisseurs on a mission (at one point I think we visited 4 brew houses in 2 hours in search of the perfect pils) so perhaps the population we sampled was heavily biased. But the beer culture there is truly impressive.

We caught a break from the beer in Germany’s wine country. I have always enjoyed the countryside in the Napa Valley but it does not compare to the Rhine River Valley—miles of hillsides covered with grapes, gently sloping to the river’s edge, and dotted with medieval castles and quaint villages. The boat trip down the Rhine sipping a fine Reisling spatlese (yes beer was available as well) was one of the highlights of the trip.

One winery we visited (in Franconia) was located in a hospital! As you enter the lobby of the hospital, the first thing to draw your attention is a display in the center of the room advertising the wines available that season. Somehow, I cannot picture that display in the United States.

With all the drinking and celebration, you would think public intoxication would be a problem. But not so.  Despite the thousands of people milling about drinking beer at the anniversary celebrations, and after the soccer games when they were quite rowdy but not at all violent or destructive, we very seldom saw any police. In fact we went days without seeing a cop.

Germany’s reputation for order is well deserved. Even their drunks are well-behaved.

I heard an interesting analysis on Danish public radio the other day about the political impact of soccer. So, in fond recollection of our interesting baseball debate (archived), I thought I’d share some of those ideas with you. An author and soccer expert, Joakim Jakobsen, was interviewed about a recent book, in which he speculates that soccer has accomplished what the United Nations and the European Union have failed to achieve: creating a universal form of communication. According to the author, soccer comprises both analytical and emotional thinking, and everyone can relate to the analysis aspect as well as the emotional highs and lows. So here is my first problem with that analysis: I grew up with soccer being played all around me, but I don’t understand much about the game, and I really don’t feel any emotional pull (not like baseball, which I have learned to love). So, I guess I’m on the outside there, not even looking in. For another thing, the author presents a phenomenon that is typical outside of the U.S., so if soccer is destined to be the universal language of communication, it is still in our future, not in our present.

The next interesting idea expressed on the show was that the universality of the soccer “language” has a tilt toward nationalism: prominent as well as smaller or emerging nations find a new identity once their teams start doing well, internationally—case in point, Turkey in the current European Cup games. Sometimes this takes the shape of aggression, and sometimes it is channeled into more congenial forms, but either way I see it as a nice little paradox of universality vs. group spirit. Interestingly, the analysts who are praising soccer as a unifying global force have to concede that a certain kind of radical nationalism may be a side product of it—a side product that, more often than not, erupts in violence among the fans, with occasional fatalities.

So what say you? Are you soccer fans? Is soccer to you really a language that transcends borders? Do you feel emotionally connected to humanity when watching/playing soccer, in a way that doesn’t happen when you engage in golf, baseball, or basketball? Or is your sense of group identity enhanced, at the cost of global connectivity?  

An interesting case happening in Denmark: a religious organization (Faderhuset, the Father House, a Christian organization) has been reported as having encouraged its members to use physical violence and other harsh methods as the preferred form of discipline toward their children, based on selected quotes from the Bible. Cases are being investgated involving severe corporal punishment of small children. This in itself will make most of us cringe, but here comes the interesting moral issue: According to Danish law, corporal punishment of children is illegal (I haven’t checked what constitutes corporal punishment, but it sounds as if it is a very sweeping rule: no hitting, of any kind). But freedom of speech is also a very firmly established principle, as everyone knows who followed the “drawings” debacle. So what the legal system can do now is prosecute the individual parents for child abuse/neglect, but not the Fatherhus organization as such, because their “advice” to their members comes under freedom of speech and freedom of religion. So this becomes a question of moral responsibility rather than a legal issue: Should an organization that exercizes strong psychological influence on its members be held accountable for encouraging illegal activity, or should it be up to individuals whether they want to follow the “advice”? A question that reaches way beyond this particular case, and relates to cases of Internet websites advocating violence against certain people and groups.

There is a good deal of interest in evolutionary explanations of religious belief.  This research project is using computer simulations to mimic an evolutionary process.

The computer model begins with assumption that some people have a genetic disposition to communicate unverifiable information to others and then compares the reproductive success of people who communicate real information with those who pass on unreal information.

“Under most scenarios, “believers in the unreal” went extinct. But when Dow [the writer of the program] included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished. ”

‘” Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them,’ Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious”.

So what is this clear signal? Why would non-believers have been touched by the faith of the religious? Could it perhaps be the sense of psychological certainty possessed by believers, facing conditions of real uncertainty, that made non-believers willing to communicate with believers.

Earlier in the week 14-year old Heather D’Aoust, Scripps Ranch (north of San Diego), grabbed a claw hammer, attacked her mother, and succeeding in bludgeoning her so severely that she died the next day. If you go back a few days to a previous article, you’ll find that neighbors described the mother as devoted to her daughter, and that the daughter was a shy girl. Her father argued in court Thursday that his daughter is sick and needs help. However, the court decided to try her as an adult, with the possible sentence of 30 years in prison. The legal part of this story is a web of rules about charging juveniles as adults, and about criminal adults who are deemed to be mentally incompetent, but apparently there is some doubt about what might happen to a juvenile charged as an adult who is found to be mentally incompetent. In the article (link above) we hear from her father and her lawyer why she should be considered a child with a mental issue, but we hear very little about why the court made their decision, other than it was “closely examined,” and that 48 juveniles have been charged as adults by the court since 2001. The greater picture is that we have seen an increase over the last 15-20 years in the tendency to charge older children who commit serious crimes as adults, under the assumption that at that age they know “right from wrong,” and they should be held accountable (a deontological argument), and in addition, they are a danger to society (a utilitarian argument). Coincidentally, I read in a European newspaper that one of the large political parties is proposing a lowering of the age where kids can be charged as adults to 12-14, so as not to give young violent gang members a free pass. But I doubt that they intend to cast the net so wide that it covers family disputes with tragic endings.

So there really are two issues here: The general tendency of charging juveniles as adults, and Heather’s specific situation. Throw into the mix that some people suspect there is a political motive (“tough on crime”) behind the court’s decision. I’d hurry to say that what we, as readers, can glean from this can only be generalities, since we don’t know everything the court knows about Heather and the family dynamics (and whatever is irrelevant to the court is none of our business, anyway), and we may not know more until the preliminary hearing, supposedly in September.

Be that as it may, I’m interested in the principles involved: Should a juvenile be considered an adult by the sheer force of principle, due to the severity of her crime? Or should it be her underlying mindset that determines her court status? Her action shows a clear intent to harm—but is it the intent of a child, or an adult? Which leads to the general question what purpose punishment is supposed to serve; Heather’s father and her lawyer seem to think the main purpose is to rehabilitate her, but most people these days view punishment as a matter of (1) deterrence, (2) protection of the public, or (3) a simple matter of retribution. On the personal level, this is a tragic family situation. On the social level, it looks as if  it may become a case study that allows us to examine some of our basic assumptions about justice.

A democracy simply cannot function without an indepedent press, and any account of ethics in journalism begins with the responsibility to seek the truth.

When the history of the present decade is written, one of the most important episodes will be the failure of the press to challenge the Bush Administration’s  various deceptions and self-deceptions regarding the war in Iraq.

It has always been a bit of a puzzle why the press failed so miserably.

This week there has been a avalanche of information about this issue. Former Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s insider’s account of Bush’s dissembling is getting the most attention, but most of this we already know from other sources.

The more interesting story comes from various prominent members of the press corps who are finally discussing the kind of pressure they felt from their corporate masters.

Katie Couric reports pressure from  “the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of it.”

Jessica Yellin, currently at CNN and formerly employed by MSNBC, reported being “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation.”

As usual the fish rots from the head.

Is there any reason to continue getting news from mainstream media?

Here is a very short and very funny introduction to how our real estate and credit markets went bust.