| twenty-one weeks without a post, my bad |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|07:28 pm] |
The pure, the bright, the beautiful
That stirred our hearts in youth,
The impulses to wordless prayer,
The streams of love and truth.
The longing after something lost,
The spirit's yearning cry;
The striving after better hopes,
These things can never die.
The timid hand stretched forth to aid
A brother in his need,
The kindly word in grief's dark hour
That proves a friend indeed.
The plea for mercy softly breath'd
When justice threatens nigh;
The sorrow of a contrite heart,
These things shall never die.
The memory of a clasping hand,
The pressure of a kiss,
And all the trifles sweet and frail
That makes up love's first bliss.
If with a firm, unchanging faith,
And holy trust and high,
Those hands have clasp'd, those lips have met,
These things shall never die.
The cruel and the bitter word
That wounded as it fell,
The chilling want of sympathy
We feel, but never tell.
The hard repulse that chills the heart,
Whose hopes were bounding high,
In an unfading record kept,
These things shall never die.
Let nothing pass, for every hand
Must find some work to do;
Lose not a chance to waken love,
Be firm and just and true.
So shall a light that cannot fade
Beam on thee from on high,
And angel voices say to thee,
These things shall never die.
~Sarah Doudney, "Imperishable"
(Often falsely attributed to Charles Dickens.
Nicely set to music by Lee Dengler; badly-sung performances can be watched on youtube.) |
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| Zitat |
[Jul. 5th, 2009|10:44 am] |
...im Leben eines Kindes hat das Banale Größe, es ist fremd, ohne Ordnung, immer tragisch. Auch ein Kind hat nie Feierabend als Kind; erst, wenn die "Ordnungsprinzipien" angenommen werden, fängt der Feierabend an...
~Heinrich Böll, Ansichten eines Clowns |
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| guest journaler #2 |
[Sep. 20th, 2008|09:02 am] |
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?
What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany's best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.
But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.
I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to "prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other." But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: "disgusts me" (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and "disgusts me less" (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).
For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can't find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel's definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).
This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.
The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel's description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. ("Your dog is family, and you just don't eat family.") From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder's ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.
( Read more... )
o.p. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html |
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| guest journaler |
[Sep. 10th, 2008|06:37 am] |
As I mentioned yesterday, I am going to focus this blog more on relating moral theory to action. The first action that I would recommend is to oppose acts that lead to the possibility of a Palin presidency. A person with good desires and true and complete beliefs would be adamantly opposed to any action that would put Palin a heartbeat away from being President.
The moral issue in this case is not that of Palin becoming President. The moral issue is that of a culture filled with people whose beliefs and desires are such that they are willing to support having Palin as President. To the degree that such people exist in our culture, to that degree our culture is not as good as it could be. In fact, to that degree, our culture is prone to doing things harmful to itself, and harmful to others.
Having said that, I immediately need to assert a couple of caveats that will be familiar to regular readers. There is a right to freedom of speech, and there is a right to freedom of religion (belief). However, these rights are not rights to immunity from criticism for what one says or what one believes. It is a right to freedom from violence. It is a right that permits others to say, "You are wrong," or even, "I will not vote for you or even do business with you." It is a right that prohibits others from picking up weapons and using them against the speaker or believer.
So, in speaking about reducing the number of people who would support having somebody like Palin in line to be President, I am speaking solely about using words and private actions for that purpose – respecting the rights to freedom of speech and of religion.
However, I am saying not only that it is permissible to aim words and private actions against those who would support having somebody like Palin in line to be President. I am saying that a good person would have reason to use those words and private actions against those who would support having somebody like Palin in line to be President.
Why would a good person oppose a Palin presidency?
Let's answer that question in terms of some of the buzz words that are being used in this campaign.
Change
Change is not automatically good. It depends on what one is changing from, and what one is changing to. In this case, we are talking about changing from the leadership of George Bush. The idea is that we need to change to something better, rather than stay the same.
In this case, Governor Palin is George Bush's ideological twin sister. She is a substantially ignorant religious fundamentalist who believes that she don’t need no book-learning because all she has to do is pray to Jesus and Jesus will tell her what he wants her to do.
We have a couple of examples Palin's ignorance.
Example 1: In a statement on whether she supports having ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance she said
If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance
Yet, "Under God" it was not having a pledge of allegiance at all that was good enough for the founding fathers. The founding fathers created an oath of office for those who won federal office. However, their oath makes no mention of God. Even the tag line, "so help me God" is a voluntary addendum not found in the Constitution. "Under God" did not exist until 1950s – the McCarthy era.
Example 2: When asked about the mortgage crisis and the fate of mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Palin said they had, "gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers." However, the fact is that these were both private companies. They were costing the taxpayer nothing. The federal takeover, on the other hand, was a move that will almost certainly cost the taxpayer several billion dollars. Palin, as President, would have to deal with the mortgage crisis. However, she does not even know the principle players or what they do.
Now, the McCain campaign team is working hard to coach Palin on what to say, and keeping her well protected from displaying her ignorance until then. Of course, they cannot make Palin smart in just a few days. They want to teach her to be a parrot, to memorize a few key phrases that she will utter whenever she hears certain key words spoken by a reporter or audience member.
Palin's moral failing in this case is her arrogance. Palin, more than anybody, should know how ignorant she is and that the office if President is no place for somebody with her level of ignorance. I know a lot of people who do not know the story of ‘under God’ in the Pledge or the nature of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Yet, they also do not consider themselves to be vice-Presidential material. They have a better sense of responsibility than that. They have a sense of moral responsibility to the country that Palin does not have.
"Put America First"
One of the Republican slogans on this election is "Put America First." It is a part of a campaign that paints anybody who does not vote Republican as un-American, as somebody who puts America second (or lower) relative to some other concern.
However, when the McCain campaign team selected Palin, they did not "Put America First." They put winning the election first.
A parent who puts his child first will demonstrate his concern for his child by putting himself at risk for the sake of giving the child an advantage. This is in contrast to the parent who puts himself first. You know this parent because he is willing to put his child at risk when doing so has a chance of buying him an advantage.
McCain decided to put America at risk of having an arrogant idiot serve as President, and did so for the sake of buying an advantage among female voters in this election.
Once upon a time, McCain would not have done such a thing. Once upon a time, McCain clearly did put his country first, and was willing to take risks in its defense. However, that McCain does not seem to be among us anymore. That McCain is gone, and in his place we see somebody who does not care about the risks he puts America in, as long as he can win the election.
Moral Action
The question of whether or not to vote for Palin is a political question. The question of whether or not to be the type of person who would vote for Palin (or put her in line to be President) is a moral question. The latter is a question of moral character, of the type of person one is.
People who would agree to put somebody as arrogant and ignorant as Palin in line to be President are not good for our country. They risk making our lives worse than those lives would otherwise be. We see the damage that the last Ignoramus in Chief has done – the desires that could have been fulfilled but which were thwarted instead because of the combination of his stupidity and his arrogance in believing that God or his gut will tell him all the right answers.
Avoiding another four years of similar (or worse) harms is reason enough to act to use our words and private actions to make sure the likes of Palin are not put in line to be President. Making America a better place gives us reason to use words and private actions to condemn anybody who would subject America and Americans to that type of risk.
That condemnation includes Presidential candidate John McCain and any private citizen who supports his choice.
~Alonzo Fyfe (o.p. here) |
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| It may be poor sportsmanship, but I was RIGHT |
[May. 10th, 2008|11:52 pm] |
Playing Scattergories tonight, an opponent tried to get two points for "equality equations", which I promptly shot down for being mathematically and linguistically redundant. Apparently some teachers actually use that term to contrast with "inequality equations", which I was taught in no uncertain terms is a contradiction in terms: if it has an equals sign, it is an equation; if it has >, <, or some variant thereof, it is an inequality.
I was accused of being a cocky douche when I claimed to have had some of the best math teachers in the world. I admit that might be an exaggeration (the beer was talking?), but it is not hyperbole if I limit the scope to the United States--my high school was, and may still be, the only one in the country to have two Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching winners.
So kiss my ass, y'all. |
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| psa |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|06:30 pm] |
Dear Friends,
You may be unaware that I suffer from seasonal allergies. Along with the usual sneezing and runny nose, my personal version of spring allergies also has the effect of making me highly irritable (translation: I act like a huge bitch) and volatile. As long as I am aware of the cause of my temperamentalness, I can usually keep it under control, but sometimes not. Typically, this manifests in uncharacteristic outbursts of cruel honesty--my diplomacy filter fails. I apologize in advance for any such lapses. I should be better by mid-April.
Love,
David |
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| bzzzzzzzzzz |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|02:48 pm] |
This morning I drove to Carrollton, GA to compete in state NATS (National Association of Teachers of Singing) student auditions. On the way, Smitha accidentally threw the directions, parking pass, and schedule out the window...luckily we were still on surface roads so she was able to hop out and rescue them.
I'll spare you a blow-by-blow of my performance only because the adrenaline rush kept me from forming coherent memories of the event. I will just say that I thought I sang pretty much as best I could. In the end, I scored one "excellent" and two "superior"s, and won third place in my category ("beginning adult men"). Yay? More importantly, I sang solo repertoire (Berg! Britten! Handel!) in front of real people and didn't fall on my face (though my legs did get shaky) or die. And I got a certificate to put on my fridge. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|10:43 pm] |
Welcome Morning
There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry 'hello there, Anne'
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.
All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean, though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
to a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
So, while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter in the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
The joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.
--Anne Sexton |
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khyrand's journal