Clemenza, consigliere to the Corleone family in the film "The Godfather" says to Michael after a mob war erupts: "Don't worry...these things happen...about every coupla years or so. It gets ridda the bad blood!" It appears our federal prosecutors list of over two dozen recent indictees in Illinois politics reveals the blood-letting is upon us. And, as all Illinoisans know, it has happened here before, and as a matter of fact, it will happen again. And... the melt down is at the same time a national one. Why?
Two reasons.
First, on the local level, Illinois history has ever and always been about bribery, real estate wheeling and dealing, the selling of offices, making big money, and taking advantage when you can. Recall Sandburg's poem about the brawling city of big shoulders. Illinois politics is the politics of Chicago. The players have always learned how to play the game in Chicago. Neigboring states like Wisconsin or Indiana have no such places as Chicago. Chicago, and hence Illinois, is the power bottleneck of the this entire nation. From the very beginning, by virtue of its location, it is strategic to the politics of transportation, manufacturing, commodities, and commerce -- all the sooty, dirty-hands work of our nation that New York is too cosmopolitan to stoop to, Los Angelas is too whacked out to recognize (except in the LAPD), and Washington D.C. needs. Political blood-letting takes place precisely for the same reasons as it once did among the crime families. Power gets lopsided -- somebody's cut is too big. Somebody has to take a fall.
Second, the blood-letting is part of the system itself. Right now, as in 1930, the average citizen has reason to doubt every banker, every broker, every politician, every CEO. Just as in the Great Depression, we have found out, in the words of Studs Terkel, that the "big boys ain't so bright" after all. It is natural to feel that our basic system has failed us once again. However, it would be the same were America socialist, communist, a monarchy, or even something else!
Greed runs in HUMAN cycles, regardless of governments, Greed and ethics run courses inverse to one another. A generation or two accomplishes marvelous feats and the wealth and power of their nation grows. They spoil their children, who then come to expect advantage and want even more wealth. The prevailing social culture of shared values slowly becomes replaced with individual greed, and competition for status and power. The media feed the frenzy with images of the super-rich. Entertainment lavishes billion dollar "salaries" on the sports gladiators of the day who may be too stupid to even graduate high school. It's OK though, it's a market...like everything is a market. Those who serve others become viewed as naive suckers who don't really rate: teachers, policemen, firemen, nurses. Religion sells itself out for a political stake, and leaders suddenly don't need to have divinity school credentials any longer. Race and ethnicity is about confrontation and jockeying for power. Media exhalts in reporting this circus, not the real news, and journalism itself starts to be about "marketing," which is even taught in public school. Presidents are elected on promises to special interests. The government thinks it can throw its weight around anywhere in the world and the result will be "shock and awe."
And so here we are again. It will all happen again in Illinois, and it will all happen again in this nation, regardless of whether our country's pitifully short flirtation with a republic/democracy actually lasts even ten percent as long as the empires of Egypt or Rome or England.
Truth is, we are all learning about ourselves, who WE are behind closed doors. "F" this, and "F" that; screw those people because I deserve more than they do; I should get seven figures because he is; I can run up the charges and tomorrow be damned; everybody cheats; I'm right and you're wrong; it's not gambling...it's "gaming"; everybody else is doing it; we deserve more because of a hundred past grievances I/we have decided exist; gimme, gimme, gimme more. And if I decide I have to have more, I will demand somebody just print up some more money and bail me out. And if they won't do it, I'll elect somebody like Rod, ....who will get it done for me!
Public school teachers, have been watching corruption creep for the past 30 years as their students and their spoiled Gen X and Gen Y parents demand high grades, sue more often, and shamelessly 'work' the schooling system. Cops have watched it infect public behavior. The coming decade of fall-out from corruption creep won't surprise any of them, although they, like all of us suckers, will be the ones hurt most.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
C.S. Lewis as a response to fear mongering
Maggie Gallagher's blog today was a tirade and a hand-wringing about the fact that new "research" shows us that "The Kids Are Not OK".
I share her concern for how difficult it is for any a\children to grow up in America. I hold all survey research in high dis-regard, however, because in a media soaked world, all children now consciously know how to use institutional survey interviewing to shock, call attention to what they guess other young people are doing, imitate the day's Hollywood star-behavior, and over-state their self-appealing "badness".
The problem is indeed one faced by us all: what is reality? And, if there is a shared reality, are there any indisputable laws of human nature that we must obey? However, she makes the tired old religionist mistake in interpreting the data of the research. It starts at the beginning of her thinking:
"The postmodernist myth is that we can dispense with a shared faith in objective moral truth. Can a whole society really discard old-fashioned norms that emphasize shared values and obligations -- such as marriage -- and instead become an America that prizes above all diversity, change, taboo-breaking and values-consumption, i.e., doing whatever you think works for you?"
What on earth is "objective moral truth?" Later we get her answer:
"... parents... are trying to instill "traditional" moral values in these highly untraditional times.
We know how hard it is for parents to raise children who postpone sexual gratification until marriage (or even adulthood). Now it appears there are a large number of other moral rules our children are failing to internalize, or at least realize. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal. How many of the other Ten Commandments are we prepared to jettison because, under postmodern conditions, transmitting these values is exceptionally difficult?"
Ahhh. Objective moral truth is the ten commandments! Now we get it! CHRISTIANS have objective moral truth, but nobody else does! I guess this is because all other religions and gods and codes are false!
I have news for you Ms. G,... and probably Uncle Rush, and Justice Scalia. Young people's values and behaviors are indeed a concern, but there is not one sacred answer.
We are better off seeking the moral truths that all of the world's religions and moral philosophies have in common. Actually, C.S. Lewis once did exactly this, in a vital essay that often was anthologized in high school literature texts... that is until the Christians drove it out. The essay is called "The Law of Human Nature" In it Lewis gives us all much firmer ground for thinking about and then guiding our youth.
Here is that essay:
"The Law of Human Nature"
From Mere Christianity by C S Lewis
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised. If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong - in other words, if there is no Law of Nature - what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money - the one you have almost forgotten - came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done - well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it - and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently. The truth is, we believe in decency so much - we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so - that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. *******
SO, the issue is not handing down the ten commandments to teens in America with accompanying threats and finger wagging, but instead to get them to consider exactly what Lewis considers, and help our society, which is NOT (by some Scalia-esque definition) Christian, figure out what the common moral ground of ALL faiths and beliefs is. I do not believe this kind of thinking will be hard at all for todays adolescents. In fact, I think they (including those who were 'researched') all in fact KNOW the "laws" of human nature, and are indeed quite clear about when they are violating those laws, and are also aware of the possible consequences of their actions! However, they also know that American politicians, businessmen and women, their own parents, many religionists, and nearly all celebrities want them to do as they say, not as they do. This is as it always has been, and we needn't be wringing our hands, but fostering the dialog, being sure not to close it down with the pleasant and instructive mythology of one particular type of religion. We could start by putting Lewis' essay back in our literature textbooks.
I share her concern for how difficult it is for any a\children to grow up in America. I hold all survey research in high dis-regard, however, because in a media soaked world, all children now consciously know how to use institutional survey interviewing to shock, call attention to what they guess other young people are doing, imitate the day's Hollywood star-behavior, and over-state their self-appealing "badness".
The problem is indeed one faced by us all: what is reality? And, if there is a shared reality, are there any indisputable laws of human nature that we must obey? However, she makes the tired old religionist mistake in interpreting the data of the research. It starts at the beginning of her thinking:
"The postmodernist myth is that we can dispense with a shared faith in objective moral truth. Can a whole society really discard old-fashioned norms that emphasize shared values and obligations -- such as marriage -- and instead become an America that prizes above all diversity, change, taboo-breaking and values-consumption, i.e., doing whatever you think works for you?"
What on earth is "objective moral truth?" Later we get her answer:
"... parents... are trying to instill "traditional" moral values in these highly untraditional times.
We know how hard it is for parents to raise children who postpone sexual gratification until marriage (or even adulthood). Now it appears there are a large number of other moral rules our children are failing to internalize, or at least realize. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not steal. How many of the other Ten Commandments are we prepared to jettison because, under postmodern conditions, transmitting these values is exceptionally difficult?"
Ahhh. Objective moral truth is the ten commandments! Now we get it! CHRISTIANS have objective moral truth, but nobody else does! I guess this is because all other religions and gods and codes are false!
I have news for you Ms. G,... and probably Uncle Rush, and Justice Scalia. Young people's values and behaviors are indeed a concern, but there is not one sacred answer.
We are better off seeking the moral truths that all of the world's religions and moral philosophies have in common. Actually, C.S. Lewis once did exactly this, in a vital essay that often was anthologized in high school literature texts... that is until the Christians drove it out. The essay is called "The Law of Human Nature" In it Lewis gives us all much firmer ground for thinking about and then guiding our youth.
Here is that essay:
"The Law of Human Nature"
From Mere Christianity by C S Lewis
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?' - 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: 'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the 'laws of nature' we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong 'the Law of Nature', they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it, just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as we did and ought to have practised. If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to - whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or every one. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties don't matter; but then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong - in other words, if there is no Law of Nature - what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money - the one you have almost forgotten - came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done - well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it - and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently. The truth is, we believe in decency so much - we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so - that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.
These, then, are the two points I wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in. *******
SO, the issue is not handing down the ten commandments to teens in America with accompanying threats and finger wagging, but instead to get them to consider exactly what Lewis considers, and help our society, which is NOT (by some Scalia-esque definition) Christian, figure out what the common moral ground of ALL faiths and beliefs is. I do not believe this kind of thinking will be hard at all for todays adolescents. In fact, I think they (including those who were 'researched') all in fact KNOW the "laws" of human nature, and are indeed quite clear about when they are violating those laws, and are also aware of the possible consequences of their actions! However, they also know that American politicians, businessmen and women, their own parents, many religionists, and nearly all celebrities want them to do as they say, not as they do. This is as it always has been, and we needn't be wringing our hands, but fostering the dialog, being sure not to close it down with the pleasant and instructive mythology of one particular type of religion. We could start by putting Lewis' essay back in our literature textbooks.
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