Dangerous Ideas

Dangerous Ideas

From a commenter at Ann Althouse: "Anyone else find it creepy that the new standard of what we may and may not say is: How will it affect the behavior of an obviously crazy person who may or may not hear it?"

The Virtues of Obedience

The Virtues of Obedience:

A great deal of discussion has arisen about the article "Why Chinese Mothers are Superior." Cassandra sent me an interesting response; here is another.

First of all, filial piety requires me to say that it should be obvious that Southern mothers are the most superior. I assume we all have such duties, so everyone gets to make a one-off statement of this type in the discussion below before we tackle the serious issues.

Issue number one: Does growing up under strongly directed authority limit your ability to be spontaneous as an adult? Shannon Love thinks so:

Noticeably excluded from her children’s activities is any kind of team activities. The secret of American’s collective success as a people is our ability to self-organize ourselves on both the small and large scale into highly effective teams. The relative inability to self-organize into teams is why China and some other cultures have lagged behind...

This was the Duke of Wellington's point when he spoke of Waterloo being won "on the playing fields of Eton." Nevertheless, I'm suspicious of it as deployed against China. The Chinese seem to have an excellent structure for forming themselves up into working teams. The problem China has had over the last fifty years has not been its inability to form such teams, but that the teams that form are culturally encoded to "look up" for direction, rather than to "look around." Thus, the Red Guards could appear throughout the urban regions in short order, and function effectively; the Communist party could rather quickly spread to control all aspects of life.

What hurt China was the lack of spontaneous systems of resistance to authority. It wasn't that they couldn't form spontaneous teams: it's that the teams that formed tended to point the same direction.

That may be a problem of this style of "leadership" (insofar as domineering counts as leadership). There is another problem with top-down direction, which is this one:

I once read somewhere that American conservatories graduate over 300 pianists a year, and I would guess that the fraction of them who go on to careers in classical music, other than giving lessons to the next generation who in turn won’t enter the field, must be very low. Chua is setting her kids up for failure; and if it’s argued that music lessons are a good in themselves, which they may be, why does Chua treat them like a matter of life or death, making her kids and herself miserable over them?

The chronic cycle of shortages and price-destroying-surpluses that plagues Communist-type systems arises from this feature. You don't have to be a Communist to suffer from it, though: all you have to be is a central planner. You and I and Bob can look around the world, and we all see basically the same problems (e.g., there is not sufficient wheat being produced). Thus, we all call for basically the same solutions. Six months or six years on, those solutions are now the problem: we all directed our systems to produce wheat, and now farmers can't make a living off the price of the stuff.

The first problem was that the people were starving; the new problem is that the farmers are. So we let some of the farmers do something else, and subsidize the rest: but we all do that, so that the supply of wheat suddenly drops sharply, while residual low prices cause it to vanish. Starvation again!

None of the decisions we've made are bad. In every case we've made precisely the right decision. Centralized planning has this negative quality, even when decision making is perfect. This is true for mothers as well: if every Chinese child is raised to play the violin, the marginal value of violin-playing is going to be even lower than it already happens to be.

You might argue that violin-playing is valuable in its own right, as a way of expanding the mind and developing its faculties. Very good! I agree. Music is a wonderful skill for just that reason. So, though, is drama, an activity that the self-described Chinese mother abhors:

Her scorn for drama takes on a sinister cast when we find out that her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, studied theater in the Drama Division of the Juilliard School from 1980 through 1982.

What does drama teach? Two things, chiefly: exposure to the plays of Sophocles or Shakespeare develops a deep capacity for understanding and sympathizing with humanity; while the experience of playing a role -- or, even more, of directing several actors each trying to play a different role -- develops the faculties of understanding human emotion. You are learning to convey it, but you are also learning how to read it from others. This can make communication easier, develop your ability to understand body language, and generally improve your ability to work with and care about others.

I think we should distinguish, again, between China and this particular "Chinese mother." Obviously the Chinese do not have any problem reading body language, or understanding the intricate unspoken signals at work in a social situation. They are excelled at this set of skills only by the Japanese, and only because the Japanese have a more homogeneous culture. I think this is more an eccentricity of this particular lady than it is a quality of "the Chinese," who love drama and have several fully-developed theatrical traditions of their own.

A generalized point, which seems to underlie the whole discussion: is it important to teach children to obey authority, or to resist authority and follow their own conscience? The answer is: "Yes." The skill that really needs to be taught, though, is the skill of distinguishing which of the two responses is appropriate in a given case. That judgment can be quite difficult to make; it's really what we were discussing in the post on violence and politics, the other day.

Privacy

Privacy

A neighbor sent me an alarmed email about a new site, www.spokeo.com, where you can type in a name and get all kinds of personal information. The email was wasted on me, because I never worry about privacy. I'm sure that anyone who can figure out anything important about me is someone I can afford to trust. If I worry about anything, it's that I'm too opaque.

For grins, though, I typed in my name. My correct address and phone number popped right up, and even my husband's name, but after that the accuracy fell off. The purported satellite view of my house was off by a half-mile or so. The reported value of my house was a serious laugh -- especially since that information is easily available in the online county real estate records. For some reason, the site reported that my household includes three people, including my husband's brother. Nothing so interesting going on here.

The site thinks my major hobbies are travel and cooking. OK, I'll buy the "cooking," but "travel"? Hardly anyone hates travel more than I do. I practically never travel.

I think the programs that sort through our electronic traces to discern our identities still need some work. The things that Amazon and Netflix come up with on their "stuff you might be interested in" pages are a hoot.

I couldn't think of a good image to accompany a post on privacy, so here's a cheerful picture of the fire we just lit, enabling us to deal with our sub-Arctic weather (actually just drifting below 40 before dawn for a few days). Yes, I know, the stockings are still hanging there. I'm getting to it.

"Let's Roll"

"Let's Roll"

No one actually said that, of course, but I take some comfort in reading that three men and one woman had the presence of mind to overpower Jared Loughner physically before he could reload. One man heard the gunshots from a neighboring Walgreens and must have been moving pretty fast, because he got there in time to be useful. He and a 74-year-old retired Army colonel each grabbed an arm and wrestled the gunman to the ground, just after someone whanged him with a folding chair. A 61-year-old woman who'd hit the deck after the first shots found that the gunman was now next to her on the ground, so she grabbed the magazine he was trying to reload with, while someone else grabbed the gun. Then she helped one of the men pin Loughner's legs down while the other two pinned his head and torso.

I'd have been happier if someone had returned fire, but this was decisive action for a group of Safeway shoppers taken completely by surprise.

A young man with medical experience provided some useful first aid, too.

Snowfall

Snowfall:

It's just starting here, but I hear reports of four inches closer to Atlanta. I spent the day sawing wood -- not to lay in firewood, which I have plenty of already, but to deal with trees likely to fall on the house in an ice storm. I think we should be set to ride this out with ease, now; though if we lose power, we'll be a long way from the top of anyone's agenda.

That's OK, though. It happens that I now have even more firewood. I wonder how many people with "useless" educations like mine know how to use and maintain a chainsaw, or split wood with a double-bit axe? More, I'd guess, than most would expect.

UPDATE: Looks like about an inch so far, as of 12:40 AM.

Politics & Violence

Politics & Violence:

I have written a small thing on the subject at BLACKFIVE.

Theory & Practice

Theory & Practice:

We all saw the strange rants about grammar yesterday, from the odd mind of the shooter. Apparently there's a guy named David Miller who concocted this basic theory, along with a fake language. He claims it is actually the only true language; he also claims he is King of Hawaii.

Philosophy of language does contain some genuine puzzles, but a few minutes' review suggests that none of them are going to be solved along Mr. Miller's route. In the meanwhile, I would like to note that 100% of court cases in which people have employed his methods have failed. This is my favorite:

Lindsay, who presented himself as David-Kevin: Lindsay, argued that he was not a "person" as defined by Canada's Income Tax Act. He said he had ceased to be a person in 1996. The judge refused to let Lindsay opt out of personhood.

Sometimes things sound so good in theory, and just don't work in practice. Here's a case where the theory is bad, too!

Rep Gif

Representative Giffords:

I imagine that we all wish the Honorable Representative Giffords a speedy and complete recovery.

VCDL notes: "There were reports that at least one citizen returned fire and that the murderer was caught and held by citizens. This was first reported by an Arizona paper and the Fox News story below alludes to it as well. The armed citizen(s) stopping the criminal has not been confirmed yet[.}"

A number of statements from elected officials denounce the shootings, stating that it is never legitimate to use violence against elected officials. One is not surprised at their concern.

A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

I recommend The Word Detective for his frequent columns about obscure word usage. If you subscribe, you get periodic emails that apparently include material that hasn't yet been posted on the blog. My December issue has been sitting in my inbox until I could find time to read it. I see that it contains a very useful suggestion how to make golf more interesting. The WD reports:

The late Hunter S. Thompson, in his last column for espn.com, announced his invention of a fascinating variant on the game, which he called "shotgun golf." It's a simple (but very loud) game for two players: one player, using a conventional club, lofts the ball toward the hole, while the other, using a twelve-gauge shotgun, attempts to blow the ball out of the air with buckshot.

December's Word Detective blog-post expresses the conventional surprise that Christmas is upon us. It seems like only yesterday, he says, that we took down the lights outside, but it was really back in May. Which reminds me that I have a tree to take down, as the NPH has been mentioning with increasing frequency lately. I'm very tempted to use the ill-gotten gains from my recent Herculean labors in the legal stables to hire a local teenager to pitch in with the wrapping and boxing of a million ornaments. Is that wrong?

Finally, in the spirit of attention-deficit entertainment, since I'm bouncing around this morning like a recently-freed pinball, here's the incomparable Firesign Theater in "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers," with the Fifty-Voice St. Louis Aquarium Choir. He's been up for a week, but he's coming down! And on the inside, it's delicious.

Arise Ye Dead

Arise Ye Dead

Boy, it's nice to rejoin the living. Lately even my dreams have been full of finicky footnotes to authority. I'm visiting websites I haven't even glanced at in almost a month.

Here's a link to one of those interesting time-lapse graphics about the birth and death of empires, via Assistant Village Idiot. (I see AVI also linked the "human shields" article, which lots of people have noticed at First Things.) The point of the empire map is to put Zionism into perspective, but I was also struck by how few empires in the last several thousand years have made any inroads into the Arabian peninsula.

I see that much of the country is expecting heavy snow again. Here, we'll probably just dip into the mid-30s for two or three days. Tomorrow night we're due for some kind of low-pressure system out of Mexico, which they think will put thunderstorms on top of us for eight hours straight overnight. Around dawn, the wind is forecast to shift from 15 mph out of the southeast to 18 mph out of the northwest, just as if a low-grade hurricane eye had passed over. We could sure use the rain. After a soggy summer we've had a dry fall and winter so far.

Human Shields

Human Shields

It was an "I am Spartacus" moment: Egyptian Muslims who were horrified by the recent attack on Coptic Christians showed up at their Christmas Eve mass services, sending the message that anyone who wanted to attack the Christians at their services would have to come through Muslim Egyptians to do it.

There are few things lower than using someone else as a human shield against his will, but few things more honorable than protecting an innocent victim with your own body. We're meant to make choices, and then to take the consequences of our choices onto ourselves.

H/t Lars Walker at Brandywine Books.

The Fifth

The Fifth:

We saw this performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a gymnasium in Hangzhou, China. They were very professional, and took no notice of their Chinese hosts not having the same concepts about turning off cell phones during the performance. At one point someone's dinner -- a still very much alive rabbit -- escaped across the stage, without the orchestra missing a beat.

Here is the fourth movement, which is my favorite.

100 Years

One Hundred Years:

Hail and praise the Colt 1911, one hundred years old this year.

I am sure that Doc Russia will be celebrating!

TSA Opt Out

The Great TSA Opt-Out:

Who was the genius who wrote this law?

Thanks to an “opt-out” provision written into the Act, these contracts are a viable alternative to the current federal screening workforce provided by TSA. Eighteen private contracts have already been awarded to various U.S. airports and heliports, working efficiently and safely for over five years.

That's some amazing foresight right there. The article mentions one Rep. John L. Mica (R-FL). If he's the responsible party, the hat's off to him.

More than the specific example, the basic concept looks very solid. Insofar as the Federal government employs or develops new internal police powers, give localities/states/airports the right to opt out of the 'protection.' That's a powerful hedge against these kinds of forces turning toward tyranny.

Useless

Useless:

An education shouldn't be useful, argues The Public Discourse.

For the most part, though, books and articles discussing what has gone wrong in the American universities appear to have done little to seriously investigate the ancient and medieval origins of universities themselves....

In Book VII of The Republic, Socrates defended knowledge as sought after “with a view to the beautiful and good,” contrasting someone who deals with numbers for the sake of buying and selling with one who contemplates the mystery of numbers themselves. Aristotle perpetuated this liberal tradition (as opposed to servile tradition), defining ‘liberal’ as “that which tends to enjoyment… where nothing accrues of consequence beyond the using.” Education’s end, for Aristotle, was the pleasure of knowing itself. Cicero agreed, adding that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake was “a condition of our happiness.” Such truth, he suggested, is the first thing pursued “as soon as we escape from the pressure of necessary cares.” This enterprise, as systematized by Marcus Varro and fortified by Augustine and Boethius, generated Western civilization’s curricular DNA, which we know as the liberal arts. Probably the best modern articulation of this tradition came with John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which—I am sorry to report—seems to have made no appearance at all in our current harping about the humanities. Newman, without requiring religious commitment, articulated the Socratic inheritance exquisitely:

Truth has two attributes—beauty and power; while Useful Knowledge is the possession of truth as powerful, Liberal Knowledge is the apprehension of it as beautiful....

Should this principle—knowledge for its own sake—be understood, the amount of time it takes to obtain a degree in the humanities comes into focus. Menand complains, “You can become a lawyer in three years, an M.D. in four years, and an M.D.-Ph.D. in six years, but the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities disciplines is nine years.” But it is here that the medieval perspective illuminates, making nearly a decade of study seem not ridiculous, but just about right.

If a decade of intense study produces nothing but enjoyment, then it is rightly priced at the cost of a hobby: people often pour endless hours and cash into hobbies for mere enjoyment.

However, it seems to me that we know the arts are greater than that. They may have no point other than seeking the true and the beautiful, but that is not to say that they are good for nothing. Indeed, the ancient and medieval tradition -- which seeks and believes it can find the True and the Beautiful -- proves to be good for everything.

This is because truth and beauty are "transcendentals," qualities that belong to all categories instead of one only. That is as much as to say that all the categories belong to them. To know something about the true and the beautiful is to know something about everything.

You will rarely find in history a man of great accomplishment who has not taken this road at least a little way.

"Well," you may say, "fine for the medieval mind, or the ancient one; they were fools who believed that we could actually get (at least closer to) the 'True' and the 'Beautiful.' Today, of course, we are smarter and know better!"

That points the way to a useless education. Notice that the difference is really a principle of faith.

Misconceptions

Medieval Misconceptions:

Yesterday both Dad29 and xkcd directed our attention to some documents that fight common misconceptions.

Dad29 points to Myths about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Myth.

xkcd pointed us to Wikipedia's List of common misconceptions, which includes several Medieval items.

Why does this matter, and how much? I would say it matters a great deal, because it alienates many today from one of the richest and most important parts of our Western tradition. A Christianity is much poorer if it is uninformed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, and so many others. A Western culture that loses the logic of Abelard, or the valor of Robert the Bruce, is likewise impoverished.

It is also less attractive to many, if they believe that Christianity or Medieval Europe had a history of hostility toward science. That is probably the most crucial misconception to fight.

On a slightly-related but more amusing note, my wife tells me that this reconstruction looks like me. Except, I hope, for the stupid expression.

Done it!

Ha-Ha!

I think that's done it!

You will notice a pair of icons, one red and one white, above and below the Chesterton poem on the head of the sidebar. Mouse over the red icon, and you return to the old burgundy scheme. Mouse over the white, and you shall have this scheme.

I have tried it in Chrome and IE, and it seems to work. T99, let me know if it works in Firefox; and if anyone has trouble with it, shout out.

Crunchy & Soft

Hard & Crunchy on the Outside, Soft & Chewy on the Inside

Like the old joke about the igloo. This article makes you wonder how long the tigers had been waiting for one of those morsels to step outside the bus.

Psalm 23:

Today is the day for the 23rd Psalm.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever. (KJV)

Poll

Time for a Poll:

Today's question: Is the philosophy of chivalry that I espouse misandrist or misogynist?

Misandrist or Misogynist?
	Misandrist! I mean, come on: "White Knight?"
	Misogynist! After all, chivalry is, like, sexist or something.
	Can't you be both? I think you hate everyone.
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