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.

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.

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.

Obama said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them.And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.”

“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Hillary said:

“Now, like some of you may have been, I was taken aback by the demeaning remarks Senator Obama made about people in small town America. Senator Obama’s remarks are elitist and they are out of touch. They are not reflective of the values and beliefs of Americans.”

So what message, exactly, is she sending? Is it that people should not feel bitter about the loss of economic prospects? I thought the Democratic message was they ought to be damned pissed about it.

Or is it that they have a right to be pissed but are perfectly justified in taking their frustration out on immigrants, gays, or whatever? But I thought the Democratic message was that we’ve had enough bigotry primed and pumped by politicians.

Or is it that people are pissed about the loss of economic prospects but never take it out on immigrants, gays or whatever? So where does the anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-trade sentiment come from then. Has it disappeared? I thought the Democrats portrayed themselves as the reality based community.

If Senator Clinton were a Republican I would know where this is coming from and what message was being sent. But I thought she was running on the Democratic ticket.

I have not been persuaded by “the tell Hillary it’s time to leave crowd”. She has a lot of support and the voting is not over.

But as I rummage through the pack on the back of Buridan’s Ass, I think I’ve come across the last straw.

Brian Boyd’s essay in the American Scholar on the evolutionary origin of art and narrative is speculative but nevertheless interesting on a variety of levels. He argues that art and storytelling are adaptations.

 “Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern…Our adult compulsion for the cognitive play of art—from tribal work songs to tradesmen’s transistors to urbanites’ iPods—allows us to extend and refine the neural pathways that produce and process pattern in sonic, visual, and kinetic modes, and especially in sociality.”

Art makes us smarter, as a species, because it enhances our capacity for complex pattern recognition. The cognitive play of art—both its production and consumption—influences differential survival rates thus conferring a reproductive advantage on those who participate.

And why do we engage in this cognitive play? In a word, pleasure.

It’s the pursuit of pleasure, at least of the kind that is produced by pattern recognition, that explains the emergence of human intelligence—so much for Plato’s campaign against artists and religion’s campaign against pleasure.

Perhaps this is what Mill had in mind when he argued that the higher pleasures are to be valued more highly than the lower pleasures.

I guess good sex guided by the Kama Sutra must be better than unaided good sex.

John Rawls was a baseball fan and, in a letter to a friend, gave an argument for why baseball is the best of all games. I agree with Rawls that baseball is the best of all games, but I don’t find his reasons persuasive.

Rawls’ reasons are: (1) the rules and physical dimensions of the field are perfectly adapted to baseball skills and capacities, (2) people of ordinary human proportion can play it, (3) All parts of the body are essential to playing the game, (4) all plays in the game are accessible to the spectators, (5) it is the only game where scoring is not done with the ball, thus requiring that spectators attend to more than one location during a play, and (6) there is no time limit, so there is always time for either team to win.

This is unpersuasive because (1) is true of all sports, (3) is true of most and (5) is necessary to watch any team sport if you want to really understand how a play is developing. (4) is simply false. Unless you are watching TV monitors receiving a signal from very well placed cameras, the intricacies of the most important and time consuming part of the game, the battle between the pitcher and hitter, are largely out of sight. (6) only occasionally adds drama to the game. Teams coming back to win in the final inning from a substantial deficit are rare. That leaves (2), which is true up to a point but hardly sufficient to support the “baseball is best” claim.

Why do I think baseball is the best game? I always thought that football was more fun to play. And I don’t like watching any sport–I ‘m too restless to be a spectator.

The thing about baseball is that, during the very long season, it is there everyday like an old and reliable friend. And unlike any other major sport, almost every dimension of this very complex game can be accurately represented by statistics. So a few minutes with a newspaper and some informative websites tells me exactly what happened in the 10-15 games played every day–I don’t have to watch.

It’s very efficient.