Readings

Are there really “laws of life”?

Posted onJuly 3, 2015July 4, 2015Authorumphrey

Zayda at Flathead Lake (Photo by Christa)

Reading David Brooks’ The Road to Character with high school students this summer, I find some of them can’t quite get their mind around the distinction between “moral realism” and “the ethics of authenticity.” The distinction is important, because Brooks’ argument is in favor of the former and in opposition to the latter. In various ways, he makes the point that part of living well is to respond to what’s out there–that some ways of life work better than others because they are are better fitted to reality–to things as they are.

The argument for authenticity usually assumes that what’s most important is that a person “be true to the self,” that we find the right way to act by consulting our passions and feelings. Brooks doubts that, arguing that it’s often more important that we restrain and control our passions and feelings. In this he follows ancient traditions–most notably Aristotle. For Aristotle, it’s possible to judge some societies as better than others, because it’s possible to grasp principles by which societies can be judged. This cannot be the case if whatever a culture deems is right is right, so that if Southerners thought slavery was moral, then it was okay “for them.” Not judging is central to the deconstructionist project.

Aristotle argued that the pursuit of truth is the attempt to align one’s thinking and acting with reality, which assumes there is a reality independent of people’s opinions. One can have the opinion that lying to get what you want is okay, but reality dictates that if you keep doing that others will figure out that you are dishonest and stop trusting you, which will reduce your power–your ability to get what you want. So “honesty is the best policy” is not just something some societies teach. It’s a moral reality that nobody can change.

Students keep drifting back to the idea that morality changes as society changes; therefore, there are no universals. So they don’t really follow the points Brooks is making. It’s okay to disagree with him, but an educated person should be able to understand him.

The idea of moral realism might be glimpsed in the traditional bits of wisdom encoded in proverbs and folk sayings. They are time-tested understandings of how things are, perceptions of wisdom–what John Templeton called the “Laws of Life.” There’s the “law of the harvest”: you reap what you sow. This is also described as “what goes around comes around” or summarized by the rule that “as ye judge ye shall be judged.”

Humanity has collected thousands of them:

It is better to love than to be loved.
Success is a journey, not a destination.
Enthusiasm is contagious (and nothing important is achieved without enthusiasm).
The borrower is a servant to the lender.
We find what we look for (good or evil).
Every ending is a beginning.
The way to fix bad things is to create good things.
Love is stronger than everything else.
You can’t solve a problem at the same level as the problem. You need to get above it.
The truth will make you free.
To find gold you need to search where the gold is.
Habit is the best servant, the worst master.
People are punished by their sins not for them.
Make yourself necessary and the world will feed you.
Luck favors the prepared.
Defeat isn’t bitter if you don’t swallow it.

These might be understood as descriptions of how things are rather than as social rules. This is familiar to people knowledgeable and the Biblical faiths. The Bible makes little distinction between wisdom and righteousness. Frederick Buechner once pointed out that

…the Bible is not first of all a book of moral truth. I would call it instead a book of truth about the way life is. Those strange old scriptures present life as having been ordered in a certain way, with certain laws as inextricably built into it as the law of gravity is built into the physical universe. When Jesus says that whoever would save his life will lose it and whoever loses his life will save it, surely he is not making a statement about how, morally speaking, life ought to be. Rather, he is making a statement about how life is. [Quoted by Alvin Plantinga]

Moral realism suggests simply that nature, including human nature, is governed by patterns that the perceptive observer can discern. To discern these patterns and to live in accordance with them is wisdom, according to Brooks and Aristotle. The philosopher Alvin Plantinga said, “Wisdom is a reality-based phenomenon. To be wise is to know reality, to discern it. A discerning person notices things, attends to things, picks up on things. He notices the difference between tolerance and forgiveness, pleasure and joy, sentimentality and compassion.”

Such people “accommodate themselves to reality,” said Plantinga. “They go with the flow. They tear along the perforated line. They attempt their harvests in season. Ordinary people proceed with such a program no matter whether they have derived their wisdom from scripture or from more general revelation.” Plantinga suggests we may pick up such truths from Proverbs or from paying attention to the world around us or possibly from a wise grandparent. But, he says, wherever we get them, the wise do what Brooks is suggesting–they adjust to reality, changing their own character to be more effective in the world as it actually is. They live by truths such as these:

The more you talk, the less people listen.
If your word is no good, people will not trust you and it is then useless to protest this fact.
Trying to cure distress with the same thing that caused it only makes matters worse.
If you refuse to work hard and take pains, you are unlikely to do much of any consequence.
Boasting of your accomplishments does not make people admire them. Boasting is vain in both senses of the word.
Envy of fat cats does not make them slimmer, and will anyhow rot your bones.
If you scratch certain itches, they just itch more.
Many valuable things, including happiness and deep sleep, come to us only if we do not try hard for them.

Reposted with revisions from The Good Place

Can we fight evil without imitating it?

Posted onNovember 26, 2014November 28, 2014Authorumphrey

A review of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay–Part 1

Katniss discovers a white rose, which, unlike the other flowers, has not wilted. It’s a message from President Snow, who cultivates the flower to mask the smell of blood. Flowers are ephemeral, symbolizing the hope of beauty. Now they have become ominous, unnaturally enduring.

Several critics have noted that although Mockingjay–Part 1 was largely exposition, lacking the action of the first two Hunger Games movies, they liked it anyway. It may be a satisfying art form for an age that often understands itself as poised in a pre-apocalyptic moment, dangling between the trouble we have known and a greater trouble that has to be coming. A film about the calm before a storm feels right.

But there’s more, I think. The real struggle we are engaged in will not be settled, this time, by missiles and bombs. Our disagreements are ontological and epistemological, so language is the arena in which this generation’s epic battle is being engaged. The Hunger Games gives that struggle accessible form by casting it as a war between Katniss’s impulse to love and Snow’s compulsion to control. The battle goes beyond physics–bullets and bombs–into the realm of spirit, and all outcomes at lower levels will fail to be decisive.

So some in the audience may want a story that moves beyond fighter jets and lasers. This third film centers on that contest between the President and the Mockingjay, and this penultimate chapter of their epic contest is waged in words and images. We stranded in a propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the Capitol’s subjects. To be sure, we see that we are fated to move quite beyond words into a bloodier realm of earthquake and thunder–there are constant skirmishes that leave fields strewn with corpses–but compared to earlier episodes the war is now waged in rhetoric. For the moment, antagonists struggle to give form, words and images, to our understanding of what is at stake, the meaning of good and evil.

The moral tone of the story has grown darker. Snow is clearly evil. Snow’s hypocrisy is vivid. The Capitol’s rhetoric about the common good and human flourishing is mere stratagem to perpetuate an oligarchy of masters who control a vast system of subjugation and poverty, where the suffering of individuals means nothing. Snow’s nihilism is total. Just before switching off the telescreen and pivoting to air strikes, he tells Katniss that “it is the things we love most that destroy us.” Love makes us vulnerable.

Yet hope abides, and Katniss bears hope’s burden. Her beauty inspires hope even after great disillusionment. Abernathy claims we need to see her without makeup, we need to go past appearance and manipulation. Her unfeigned moments of emotional candor keep the rebellion going. Her trainer, Haymitch Abernathy, makes explicit that contrived images lack the force of Katniss’s raw responses to horrors perpetrated by Snow’s military. He gets her out of the studio and to the front, where her image can be projected by capturing unstaged moments where her hatred of the Capitol is caught on camera in unscripted emotional outbursts. Authentic passion, not contrived images, are the keys to better propaganda. But, of course, it remains contrived propaganda.

How can we fight evil without imitating it? This story has been wildly popular with today’s youth, who sense that they are entangled in orchestrated contests with each other for advancement in a dark and hollow world void of ultimate meanings. The consequences of the games they must play are real enough, but winning is only a temporary reprieve in a larger game which no one wins.

The Hunger Games story takes place in the godless world of modern imagination–our world–a place in which human power is constrained mainly by the opposition of other human power. The Capitol’s tyranny is enforced by technology and propaganda, and the revolution can imagine no opposition but its own technology and its own propaganda. The film approaches transcendence only in moments when Katniss inspires hope that she represents another way. She resists the flat-souled utilitarianism of the advisers who would turn away from the plight of individuals to focus on the big battles. She demands that Peeta be pardoned and that a cat be tolerated, and she ignores attempts to discuss propaganda strategy in those moments when she is filled with sorrow for what has happened to the particular people she loves. She suggests a larger game, a different world. Eddy asks, “Are you here to fight with us?” “I am,” says Katniss. “I will.” And so we have hope.

Are love and authenticity enough? Or are they too vulnerable? When we learn that Peeta has been conditioned to hate Katniss, it seems that personal love has roots too shallow to survive the manipulations of evil. How can goodness win against a sadistic ruler who seeks ever more cruel modes of action, capable of feeling only the harshest and most primitive passions, a being nearly dead to all that makes life wonderful, committed to destroying whatever does not wither before his numb gaze, breeding deathless roses to mask the stench.

Does Katniss’s love draw on a power sufficient to restore a good order? Is the people’s faith in Katniss enough? Is there more?

A lot is at stake.

Badlands: life sans religion, sans philosophy

Posted onJune 22, 2014June 22, 2014Authorumphrey

Kit and Holly enact a fairy tale made entirely of cliches and self-approval. They are anti-heroes of the American type.

Terrence Malick’s Badlands works as a period piece for that post-Vietnam time of self-absorption and loss of moral clarity that also gave us Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde. But it’s not just a period piece—Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis are somewhat timeless in their possession by unfocused, impulsive desires that attach to people and events in the kaleidoscope moments of a journey from unclear beginning to unknown terminus, and they “think” about what is happening and what they are doing entirely by repeating slogans and catch phrases they’ve picked up from the cultural milieu around them. In other words, they are quite like many people you know.

Most of what they say has a self-forgiving quality; their parallel monologues form a series of incoherent verbal gestures that help them feel good about themselves. As they bounce from murder to murder, they continue believing they are “good” people, though they are not. They are very bad people. They are bundles of appetites, no better (or much different) than snakes swallowing live mice. People are endowed with a moral sense. They should develop it.

Simple people may be saved by a good heart, as with Forrest Gump. But desire is not wise or good, for most of us, without some education and discipline. More and more of us get our moral education from our folkways, and our folkways are becoming increasingly toxic for inarticulate people with inarticulate desires. Holly and Kit never have thoughts, properly speaking.

“It sent a chill down my spine,” said Holly. “Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment?” Her thinking never becomes more precise or more clear. “Kit never let on why he’d shot Cato. He said that just talking about it could bring us bad luck and that right now, we needed all the luck we could get.” That’s her “reflection” after one murder. About the next one, she observes: “He claimed that as long as you’re playing for keeps and the law is coming at ya, it’s considered OK to shoot all witnesses. You had to take the consequences, though, and not whine about it later. He never seemed like a violent person before, except for once, when he said he’d like to rub out a couple of guys whose names he didn’t care to mention. It all goes to show how you can know a person and not really know him at the same time.”

As for Kit, he segues from event to event, narrating his own story entirely in cliches and banalities. “Of course, uh, too bad about your dad. . .I can’t deny we’ve had fun though. . .it takes all kinds.” Nothing important can ever happen to him. He’s incapable of it.

Their moral sense has shrunk to effortless recitals of rationalizations—instead, they view life in aesthetic terms. Holly rejects the outlaw life because the wilderness is void of bright lights and pleasant food. Kit beams with a self-satisfied feeling of success when the officers escorting him to prison observe that he looks like James Dean.

The film endures because Malick is right about important things. He’s right about the woeful state of people whose minds are not enlivened by religion or enlightened by philosophy–in his stories, stupidity and evil are often kindred conditions. Malick’s films are frequently hideous, in precisely the way life among the folk is sometimes hideous.

Noah: a tawdry bit of pretention

Posted onApril 15, 2014April 15, 2014Authorumphrey

The film is an unimportant and uninteresting little story–a sort of anti-Jehovah propaganda piece blown up to pretentious scale by its grandiose budget.

One needn’t be particularly sensitive to notice that Aronofsky’s Noah is a dark story involving unlovely people in a desolate world. Russell Crowe plays Noah as a somewhat dull action hero, ready to brawl and knock heads–and for quite a while intent on murdering his own grandchildren. It’s not much of a story–neither interesting or ennobling.

No benevolent deity intent on bringing to pass an orderly world founded on love presides over this mess. Instead, the only deity in the story is a vengeful and sulking “Creator”–somewhat in the image of the hateful and lusty humans–who performs no miracles but offers instead magic tricks–such as encasing fallen angels in grotesque bodies of misshapen volcanic stone.

It’s a tawdry tale made of money and angst, but lacking in spiritual insight–or even much in the way of worldly wisdom. Brian Mattson gives a likely explanation for this unlikely disaster.

This is an age drawn toward apocalyptic stories, but for my money Walking Dead has a more interesting plot, deeper exploration of the human condition, more spiritual longing, and nicer people.

Literature never failed us; we abandoned it

Posted onNovember 3, 2013November 3, 2013Authorumphrey

The Detroit Public Schools Book Depository has been abandoned since a fire struck the building. It’s a metaphor.

Mark Bauerlein, English prof at Emory University, makes precisely the point that for me lies at the center of the big, slow-motion cultural conversation about the death of English as an academic discipline. Teachers who could have seen themselves as stewards of a great tradition, who could have served that tradition and young people by learning and passing on the best that has been said and done, instead began to fancy themselves as transformative intellectuals, possessors of precisely the verbal skills needed for success in a hyperpoliticized age. They talk about empowerment and skills and the future. They do not, often, talk in any intimate and profound way about particular works of literature, or what such works reveal about who and where we may be.

After summarizing a few of the many defenses made for the humanities of late, Bauerlein focuses on the important detail:

These statements and others on how the humanities foster critical thinking, cultivate Information Economy skills, help enact social change, resist utilitarianism in human affairs, etc., may be challenged in one aspect or another, but they are all reasonable and they pop up in education discussions all the time. Their commonplace status, however, shouldn’t obscure the fact that they share an extraordinary characteristic. It is a trait so simple and obvious, and so paradoxical, that one easily overlooks it, especially as these voices so earnestly endorse the humanities. The paradox is this: They affirm, extol, and sanctify the humanities, but they hardly ever mention any specific humanities content. The American Academy report terms the humanities “the keeper of the republic,” but the names Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Bernini, Leonardo, Gibbon, Austen, Beethoven, Monet, Twain, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Martha Graham never surface. In the Boston Globe (“Humanities: The Practical Degree,” June 21), Carlo Rotella claims that the humanities instill a “suite of talents” that include “assimilating and organizing large, complex bodies of information,” but he doesn’t tie that installation to any particular works of art. These pro-humanities documents drop a “Proust” and “Dickens” here and there, but little more. The works of the ages that fill actual humanities syllabi barely exist in these heartfelt defenses. Instead of highlighting assigned authors, artists, writings, and artworks, they signal what happens after the class ends: the moral, civic, and workplace outcomes.

Literature has obviously been in decline in schools for years–but there are signs it’s thriving outside the academy through new media such as the large catalog of downloadable audio lectures available from The Great Courses. There is a large audience–though not a universal one–for intelligent discourse about significant literary works.

This is not just bad for literature–it’s been a disaster for the culture, which is now trying to “humanize” young people with dismal programs such as the Positive Behavioral Interventions & Supports programs pushed by the USDE and adopted by many states, according to which the purpose of life is “success” understood mainly in materials terms and the method is compliance with authority. Low-level behavioral psychology (used to keep order in prisons and to train puppies) has become the official psychology, in many schools.

A lot has happened to American education in the past five or six decades, and there is no quick turnaround. What is not needed is a new national program, with workshop gurus and posters and buzzwords. The belief that widespread problems must lead to large-scale “solutions” is part of what ails us. What is needed are many individuals, spending time reading–thinking about current difficulties with the best authors of the past and present–and then discussing those particular works with others who are also responding to a troubled world by seeking deeper insight into history and human nature by regular engagement with the best books. It isn’t necessary that everyone do this, but it’s of vital importance that some do.

What does “The Butler” teach about America’s racial experience?

Posted onAugust 28, 2013August 28, 2013Authorumphrey

If there’s nothing higher than the White House, there’s little hope.

The Butler doesn’t extend beyond the “progressive narrative” of American history. In this narrative, racism is pervasive−the major theme of our national experience.

In our actual past, racism has always had to contend with the better angels of our nature. Martin Luther King, Jr.was pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and the power of his rhetoric is inseparable from the depth of his faith that racism is contrary to God’s will and thus doomed. When he said “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children,” he was not merely fashioning a trope. He was speaking truth, and he knew it was the white majority that he had to persuade and that most of them favored neither cruelty nor oppression.

Martin Luther King is present in The Butler, but the Christian tenor of his rhetoric is faint. He does defend the butler’s role to his son, who believes that angry political activism is the way to make progress. The King character points out that the domestic servant’s exemplification of service, effort, and restraint powerfully undermines racial stereotypes. He does not look down on the butler, as his son is wont to do.

It was Martin Luther King’s modeling of nonviolent and peaceful reconciliation that prepared the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act. “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he said. Such teaching was of a piece with his faith and hope: “When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! Free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'”

This was not Malcolm X’s message. which had more to do with anger and with victory than with love or transcendence: “Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor.” This derives from Marx. It’s the language of revolutionary ideology, dividing humanity into the classes of oppressor and oppressed. It’s the song of hatred and bitterness that King warned against.

In the actual past, it was King’s message of peace and brotherhood that prepared America to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, both of which were motivated by a vision of national unity. The political activism of Malcolm X was more useful for building a revolutionary army than for bringing a nation together. People had to choose between the two paths then just as they must now. The film, unfortunately, does not make the choice clear.

In Genesis, Joseph serves as a type of Christ. Sold into slavery, he served Pharaoh meticulously, in spite of his status as a despised minority. His patience and obedience in spite of brutal treatment positioned him to save the tribes of Israel and to ameliorate the harsh realities of this world. He foreshadowed what the Savior had to teach about oppression and brotherhood. He modeled the Christian way, which King profoundly understood.

The film generally leans a different way. In the end, the butler leaves his job at the White House and joins an angry protest movement−against Reagan, of all things. Reagan is presented, absurdly, as opposed to racial equality. This is done through cursory references to Apartheid in South Africa. The film uses the strained expedient of twisting Reagan’s opposition to communism into antagonism towards racial justice, ignoring the actual past, in which South Africa was infected with the same revolutionary ideology that moved Malcolm X.

In the film, enlightenment leads to street politics, serving up a vision of political activism as much of the meaning of goodness. The election of Barack Obama is presented as the apotheosis of our yearning for justice. Such is the progressive vision.

The Unwinding: an inner history of the new America by George Packer, review

Posted onJuly 23, 2013Authorumphrey

George Packer, author of “The Unwinding”–a study of ordinary Americans after the financial collapse of 2008.

The Unwinding by George Packer is a work of narrative journalism that is a lament that America resembles a “decadent kleptocracy” rather than a land of opportunity, its institutions and moral order in rapid decline. But it is also a call to action, though the call is embedded in the stories of its three main characters, each of whose world crumbles, and each of whom suffers loss and disillusionment, and each of whom finds a new place to stand, living out a stubborn refusal to be written off.

The stories of three ordinary Americans caught up in convulsive change are carefully reported. We get to know the hopes and dreams and failures of an Ohio factory worker, a political operative in the national arena and a Bible belt tobacco farmer. Their stories are interwoven with narrative portraits of larger players, such as Joe Biden, Newt Gingrich, Oprah Winfrey, Walmart founder Sam Walton, PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, and Colin Powell. The result is a complex and nuanced tapestry showing us a nation in decline–but one that has faced similar trouble in the past and found a new way forward.

From the Prologue:

No one can say when the unwinding began—when the coil that held Americans together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip first gave way. Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways—and at some moment the country, always the same country, crossed a line o! history and became irretrievably different.

If you were born around I960 or afterward, you have spent your adult life in the vertigo of that unwinding. You watched structures that had been in place before your birth collapse like pillars of salt across the vast visible landscape—the farms of the Carolina Piedmont, the factories of the Mahoning Valley, Florida subdivisions, California schools. And other things, harder to see but no less vital in supporting the order of everyday life, changed beyond recognition—ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York trading desks, manners and morals everywhere. When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.

True stories in an age of fictions

Posted onJune 23, 2013June 25, 2013Authorumphrey

“No society can be just or good that is built on falsehood.” Stanley Hauerwas

I spent some of the day outside reading Stanley Hauerwas. He deals with some of the same concepts as Alasdair MacIntyre–the connection between narrative and social ethics, for instance–but his style is simpler and less technical. I think high schoolers in an AP class could follow much of his thinking. His essay “A Story-Formed Community” lays out quite vividly some basic ideas about communities and politics that would be useful for young people to discuss, but the essay is organized as a reading of Watership Down, so some familiarity with that novel would help. I’ll watch the film version, which I’ve never seen. Maybe that would provide enough background, given that Hauerwas uses extensive re-telling of the story to make his points.

He uses the novel because “the best way to learn the significance of stories is by having our attention drawn to stories through a story.” The significance of stories, for a polity, is fundamental. Communities are founded on stories, and they sustain themselves as members tell their personal stories, finding how they fit within and extend the founding stories. Arguments and political discussions “are subordinate to the ability of a community to live and tell its stories.”

It’s a useful balance in an age awash in policy discussions and multi-step plans. The stories people tell and the stories they believe they are part of matter more than any number of contests between wonks. Who we are will shape what happens, and we are creatures formed and driven by stories.

A story is true to the extent that it can accommodate the pressures of actual events. Societies whose stories can no longer accommodate that pressure do not remain communities, though they may produce Potkemtin villages and other forms of seeming. Seeming is the first refuge of a scoundrel. Hauerwas contrasts the society of Russia under Stalin with communities formed and sustain by religion: “It is well-known that Stalin responded to Pius XII’s condemnation with the taunting question about how many divisions had the pope. Most assume that Stalin’s point is well taken, for without divisions the power of the church counts for nothing. Yet in spite of all appearances to the contrary, Stalin’s response masks the fundamental weakness of his position. A leadership that cannot stand the force of truth must always rely on armies.”

That’s quite true. Lying and deceiving are forms of weakness, and when leaders begin lying they also begin arranging stronger methods of control than persuasion. Audits, maybe. Inquisitions. “Peace is bult on truth,” said Hauerwas, “for order built on lies must resort ultimately to coercion.” I would be more optimistic about our future if Americans seemed more attentive, more outraged, at the steady stream of deceptions and misdirections flowing from the current administration.

Justice is based on truth, and freedom is based on justice. The only real defense good people usually have against bad people is the truth. Systems of justice are always systems of ascertaining the truth–of figuring out amid conflicting testimony what really happened, of unmasking liars and shedding light on deceptions. There’s no other way to work at getting the right things done. Creating fog and confusion is the stock in trade of criminals angling to get possession of other people’s property. They don’t care that if we can’t keep what we’ve made and acquired needed for the way of life we’ve chosen, if we can’t keep the place we’ve created for ourselve and our fellows, then we can’t stay free.

The president’s chronic deceptiveness is necessary because people would not tolerate his designs if they were clear–good and just people may still constitute a majority.

One thing to do, as we wait to see what happens, is to tell and discuss the stories that lie at the heart of the better world that we’ve seen, sometimes in true texts, sometimes in daily life. Ultimately, stories are more powerful than armies. Caesar and Napoleon had far less impact on the world than Buddha and Jesus. The best story wins.

The Lower Flathead River is a beautiful and useful book

Posted onNovember 12, 2012November 12, 2012Authorumphrey

The Flathead River, below Dixon–shot on a return trip from Seattle. Home at last.

I quite like The Lower Flathead River and find it an easier resource to use than some others because it’s less necessary to complicate simple ideas about the past presented more as heritage than as history. The primary sources don’t always point in the same direction. They are more true to the past, in the sense that there were never simple answers to the complexities people faced. The past, like the present, is rich with opportunities and with dangers, with good people and with mischievous people, and it’s often hard to discern what one should think, or where one should head.

People approach the past with many different purposes, and most people will find their purposes supported by some parts of this book–and most will also find their purposes undermined in some ways. I think that’s a good thing. I would like lots of people whose lives intertwine in this place to read this book. I think most of them will find themselves among folk that they recognize.

The book is a bit too real to support any but the most determined ideological thinking. What I mean by “ideological thinking” is simply the act of replacing reality with a simplified theory of reality, which one holds to even when the facts don’t support it. The books to read, on that topic, are Gulag Archipelago and The Roots of American Order. I think ideological thinking is a major problem in contemporary education–since I think to a great extent schools have suffered a sort of ideological capture.

Why deconstruction is a fool’s game

Posted onFebruary 12, 2012Authorumphrey

…A few hundred years after Socrates, a different teacher gave his students a rule to follow. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he said.

It seems simple enough. But of course, not everyone thought so.

There’s a guy in the crowd—maybe a student of Socrates’—we’re not told much about him except that he’s a lawyer. He wants things more precise. When should I love my neighbor? And exactly how much? There are dozens or hundreds of more or less unanswered questions we can ask about the teacher’s rule. Without more precision, how will I ever be certain where my neighbor ends and I begin?

This is the question the lawyer asks: “And who is my neighbor?”

Words can evoke realities that we can understand.

He wants a definition. Once he gets it, he can wrangle with it forever.

But the teacher knows all about that sort of thing, and he doesn’t answer with a definition. That way of knowing, he knows, can slip into the sophisticated form of ignorance common among lawyers. We can glimpse it in the story told about a lawyer riding through the country with a friend. They pass a herd of Holsteins. “Look at the spotted cows,” the friend comments. The lawyer looks. “Yes, ” he says. “They appear to be. On this side, at least.”

…When can we say we know, and how many ways can appearances lead us to wrong conclusions? There are always those who see that dark region as an opportunity. It’s no accident that the rise of the lawyerly class criminalizes society. The fact that proof is difficult works to the advantage of criminals. We make laws to constrain bad behavior, but we can always quibble over what the words mean, turning the law away from public meanings that citizens can discuss into scholarly disputations in which any understanding is tenuous and ephemeral enough for aggressors against the public good to inch forward, dissolving whatever obstructs their own will. In such a society, criminals prosper and piety dissolves, along with respect for authority, commitment to morality, and the struggle to reach high ideals.

If we are to be the sort of teachers our children need, we need to cultivate a simplicity in our stories and in our conduct that can only be achieved by people whose primary interest is to be good. We need to surround our young people with communities that care about one another and about fundamental human truths. We need to protect them from being too influenced by the lessons that bureaucracies sometimes teach, as when they reward self-interest, attention to appearances, and avoidance of risk.

When it comes to what to believe, we often make two opposite errors. First, we believe things without evidence. From malicious gossip to false history to pseudoscience, the willingness to believe and act on ideas without evidence is the source of endless misery and countless tragic wrecks in personal and national history.

But the opposite problem is just as dangerous: refusing to believe anything not yet proved, in spite of good evidence. Proof is frequently not available even though the need to act remains. The demand for proof is often a method of blocking the very demands that our sense of goodness places upon us. Questioning things can prevent some mistakes, but it can also interfere with grasping what is plain and simple.

So the teacher who knows that loving our neighbors would be a good thing deflects the lawyer’s question and instead of getting lost in wrangling tells a story. “A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves . . .” he begins.

When he finishes his story about a Samaritan and about several people who would not help him and about one who did, the teacher turns the question back to the lawyer. “Which of these,” he asks, “do you think was the man’s neighbor.”

“The one who helped,” the lawyer answers. He knows. If he did not want to know at least weakly he could have avoided the knowledge by the simplest act of will, but it is nonetheless encoded in the story in a way that any normal human can understand.

from Community-Centered Education: Teaching as a Craft of Place