As a Teacher, I like this...

...and as a parent, even better.
Dennis Prager on Self Esteem and Character.

A question.

I had occasion to revisit the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son Isaac the other day, and I didn't mind because the story is so haunting and so provocative.

Why did Abraham agree to this act?

Why was he so uncommunicative about it to his son and servant?

Did Isaac resist the final binding on the place of sacrifice?

Did Abraham ever have a doubt?

Why does God stay his hand only at the last second?

Did God have a doubt?

What is the lesson?  Does the lesson belong to the realm of faith as the absoluteness of abandonment to the will of the Other?  Or does the lesson belong to the realm of morals and the awakening of conscience to the true voice of God, who ultimately forbids barbarism and demands a prudent, orderly, civil and humane faith?

Universal or Parochial? An interesting study on the roots of moral reasoning.

There's a lot of talk today about how moral reasoning is a product either of genetics (sociobiology, etc.) or of cultural/social forces. The point is that we don't like the idea that people actually reason to universals or are capable of reasoning away or apart from the group's consensus. It appears from this Science News article that the debate may still remain open.

Why to read, and how to do it.

Richard Weaver is one of those Dangerous Writers. It's important to be careful and discerning as we make our way through his work. Plato, Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, Leo Strauss are among those authors who are perceptive and profound in their observations of human thought and culture. Here is a lengthy passage from the concluding chapter of Visions of Order, where he discusses human learning. (His idiom is mid-20th century, so please overlook the non-PC terminology, like "man".)

Now while man has many times claimed goodness arising from a divine connection and while he is given to erecting codes of ethics, he has committed the most abominable crimes and has visited every kind of suffering upon his fellows for an infinite variety of alleged reasons. He is passionate and unstable, sot that very little is required to set him on the warpath, even against his kith and kin. Most fearful of all to contemplate is his great power of self-deception. He often does things for reasons that are obscure to him, and undoubtedly many a person has led an entire life in ignorance of the mainspring of his own actions.

These things being so, nothing could be more proper to man than the study of himself, and it is important that this should be the deepest, freest and most imaginative that the most gifted individuals are capable of making. It should be a continuing, earnest examination of human life, with all its moods, impulses, choices of means, failures and successes, miseries and happinesses shown in concrete representation. The indispensable requirement, both for the creation and enjoyment of literature thus conceived, is a receptivity to the real image of man. The practical problem is how to restore that receptivity in the face of a barbarism nourished by the scientistic fallacies discussed earlier.

A simple illustration may make this clearer. Every teacher of experience knows that there is a type of student who resents the very idea of studying literature. This student hangs back or is even defiant because he senses that the study of literature demands a certain kind of intellectual and emotional response. We might say that it demands a sign of consent, almost like some religious sacraments. It requires of every man that he suppress at least part of his native barbarism and enter into rapport with the realm of value. The easier and more natural thing for him to do is to regard the work of literature with mingled contempt and truculence. For literature, at the same time it pleases those who accept it, imposes obligations; one does not enter into it and leave scot-free. In that important respect literature is further comparable with religion; it is not supposed to make us merely comfortable. This the wary barbarian (even in the form of the reluctant student) senses, and he may decide to persist in an obdurate barbarism. It is part of the barbarian's self-protection to reject cultivation. He may repel all influences that would mollify the attitude that keeps him narrow and destructive. Putting this in a figurative way, one might assert that men are not ready for literature until they have been "Christianized." By this I refer to the establishment of that "prejudice" Blackmur speaks of in Language as Gesture. They must give initial assent to certain propositions about man and the world. In no age are all men equally ready to give this assent, and in our age there are new active forces to persuade them against giving it. The barbarian's picture of the world is founded upon the simple adulation of force, direct ways of satisfying appetite, and generally the absence of any idea about human destiny. (Of course not all peoples who have been called barbarians fit this description.) When the barbarian is asked to respect things which rebuke, refine, and control these ideas, he is being asked to change his way of life. Hence the problem of conversion arises, which in the modern setting will have to be away from the idealization of physical comfort, from the view of life as the mere play of physical matter, and from the shortcutting of those processes around which cultured man weaves patterns of significance. It must be to a conversion to an awareness of the ethical and religious drama of every moment.

On the government health care debate--

I have not heard good answers to two issues:

[1] No one has given a definitive answer to the question of what would happen to a patient like one of my family members. He's 85 and in otherwise very robust health, but some weeks ago was diagnosed with an early stage lymphoma in the neighborhood of his sciatic nerve. Now his physician and the cancer specialist both agree and insist that, treated assertively, this is a very remediable condition, and he should have a normal quality of life once the tumor is reduced and eliminated. They've started some chemo treatments, and he has already responded very well. The question is whether, under the government plan, elderly persons like this will receive treatment at all. I have heard this asked a couple of times in interviews of administration officials and their fellow-travelers, and the answers are either to the effect that the respondent does not know this provision of the plan or that they can't talk about specific cases. That bothers me. What if I'm in that position one day?

[2] There is also a lot of temporizing and avoidance of the pro-life question. I don't want my tax money used to extinguish the very human lives of the unborn.

Until I have satisfactory answers to the above, I'm against that legislation from beginning to end. We can't put these issues in the hands of the eugenicists.

Miscellaneous

**The new Time Magazine (3/2/09) has "Best Actress" Kate Winslet on the cover. Shall we speculate a little? Why the putative Excellent Actress and not also the Actor? I'm sure they have their editorial preferences. Here's one theory: The reason there isn't an Actor is that they'd have to put You-Know-Who on the cover, again. Is it possible they couldn't bring themselves to do it?

**Stupid question of the week: Will the Illinois senatorial/office-peddling scandals ever end?

Most humbly, a prediction

First, check out today's headlines from CNS news--

Obama’s Stimulus Will Cause 'Lower Wages' for American Workers, Says Congressional Budget Office

Only 23 Percent of Stimulus Will be Spent This Fiscal Year, Congressional Budget Office Finds

Now, to me this bailout doesn't sound like very sound policy for relief that will be noticeable any time soon. It seems that the more effective help will more likely come from (a) last year's bailout distribution for financial institutions and (b) separate bills now being targeted at financers and troubled home owners. So, what, aside from the tax cuts, is the stimulus package for?

My guess: the ambiguity and corruption in that bill signed Tuesday during Mr. Obama's junket to Denver will cause much of the funding to be tied up in litigation and subject to criminal probes for a decade. (Hopefully) some of the folks who stand to gain the most and who voted for it will lose their offices as a result.

Here's a link to the Congressional Budget Office report: CBO analysis.

"The most moral army . . .

. . . in the world."

See here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/01/022466.php

I don't doubt the basic truth of this proposition for a second. As I write this, however, I hear some Palestinian representative on the Houston news talking about "a very large scale massacre." Of course, he had to look at his shoes as he said that.

Check their shoes.

That's how you know who's been too close to the manure pile. Today's NY Times suggests that Illinois representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., is the "Candidate 5" in the Blago corruption case.

Justice, love and forgiveness

Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has a very challenging comment on the senseless violence perpetrated by terror agents in Mumbai. He suggests that "forgiveness" is not the pure-and-simple right attitude regarding such actions. I'm not sure that his call for a stern attitude is best and most purely motivated by moral revulsion--although this sense deserves to be acknowledged. Retribution always must come from the positive sense of justice and by the ever-present need of civilized, peaceful society to protect itself from the acts of the truly evil and the merely lawless among us. I always have a right to sacrifice myself. I never have the right to tolerate conditions where the violent will violate the innocent. The Rabbi is correct in saying there is a need for the expression of just anger, and for a determined response; but all such expressions must be rightly motivated.

Work to do.

According to yesterday's Houston Chronicle, "Abortion [is] not main Issue for Catholics." The point of the article is that, according to a recently-commissioned poll, only 44 percent of Catholics consider abortion the main issue when they vote. The piece also notes that

• The Catholic hierarchy is beginning to respond to what has been a pretty laissez-faire sense that there is fundamental moral freedom for Catholics to vote as they please, based on practical political concerns and preferences. A growing number of the bishops, including Houston's Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, have begun to use some definitive language to describe the abortion issue as a genuine and foremost concern, because human life is a foundational right. [The bishops are taking their jobs as shepherds more seriously, responding to the sense of the global Church and a growing segment of the domestic faithful. Other clergy I have seen strong statements from recently are Cardinal Egan of New York City and Archbishop Chaput of Denver.]
• Church-going Catholics are expected to favor Republican candidates, while non-practitioners poll in favor of Democrats. Part of the secret to change, then, appears to be to get the faithful back into the pews on Sunday.
• In the interest of the "choice" position, there are now groups who, with pretense of broad acceptance as well as "legitimacy" within the community of Catholics, promulgate the position that it's OK to place the whole panoply of election issues in an equivalence with abortion. They say that as long as the party or candidate speaks for regulation of abortion access in some fashion (while apparently maintaining a "pro-choice" credibility), it is permissible to vote for that candidate over one who is clearly pro-life. This position purports that the abortion issue is lost anyway, so we should save whatever we can. [Take your pick: is this position venal? disingenuous? manipulated?]
  

For the Summer I Class

Here are the notes, as we march through them in class:

Intro/Chapter 1--

http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=df8n9qbt_169cv9vtf2n

Chapter 2--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_178c39jbbnk

Chapter 3--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_184cxfcv8dx

Chapter 4--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_185hpg873fk

Chapter 5--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_186c3b7pbcq

Chapter 6--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_187cs56vdgf

Chapter 7--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_195ghn42mdv

Chapter 8--

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=df8n9qbt_209tr5wssfd

Choosing boys over girls

Jeff Jacoby's analysis in today's Boston Globe is right on the mark, and has (as Secretary of State Kissinger once said) the added benefit of being true--based on some factual study. It is now a given that women around the world are using abortion--sometimes in response to government mandates to limit family size--to gender-select their children. However, they choose boys instead of girls with statistically significant regularity. I don't know the demographic mechanics of this, but it sounds like a disaster in the making. Jacoby worries that American women may be doing the same. I'm sure it proves nothing one way or the other, but I have known more than one family over the years whose sole reason for having that second, third or later child was that the earlier children were all girls.

I'll simply say that humankind's deeper moral intuitions, around which later codes of law are constructed, may embody serious truths. And truths will defeat ideology every time, in the long run. Facts are what remain, no matter how inconvenient they may seem to one's own prejudices or to the prevailing winds of opinion.

Another perhaps random thought: when I was young, the older ladies would say, upon hearing that so-and-so had had a male child, that it seemed there had been a lot of boys born lately. At that point, someone would take the cue and chime in: "Well, it looks like there's going to be a war." Is a tale told by old wives necessarily an old wives' tale?