Vinteuil

2003-02-01T20:54:00.000-05:00

PROFESSOR CRISPY LOSES IT

The new semester has left me little time for the life of the mind. But once again the local email discussion list has goaded me into action. This time, someone posted a column on affirmative action by Crispin Sartwell, a professional philosopher whose work I read with occasional interest and amusement. This time I was interested, but not amused.

Sartwell says that this is what conservatives believe about affirmative action:

(1) “[T]here is a hierarchy of human quality [or merit], and in principle we could rank Americans from 1…to 275 million…and hence determine their just desserts.”

(2) “[H]uman merit can be measured by...SAT scores.”

(3) “There is a hierarchy of institutions, and where you end up in this hierarchy determines your prospects as well as defining your essential value as a human being.”

(4) “Affirmative action is tantamount to apartheid or Jim Crow, and those who oppose it have assumed the mantle of Martin Luther King, who said that people should be judged by the quality of their characters and not the color of their skin. The advocates of affirmative action are bigots who are asserting race privilege.”

He concludes: “if we're going to have this debate, it had better rise to a higher level, because so far the arguments against affirmative action have been dishonest, vicious, and fallacious. Come up with something better or shut up.”

* * * * * * * *

Sometimes, when I read stuff like this, I wonder why I even try to participate in public debate. What’s the use? It simply doesn’t seem to matter what you say. Your opponents won’t listen to you. They don’t think you’re worth listening to. They would rather argue with some imaginary evil demon of their own creation. And they expect you to play along with their tawdry fantasy. Who needs it? Who needs to be smeared and shat on so that self-deceiving ideologues can preen in public?

Many conservatives have thought and written about affirmative action. Some of their arguments are stronger, some are weaker. But none have argued for (1), (2), or (3) above. Not one, not ever. The reason is simple: because they do not believe such things. Not one, not ever. Sartwell provides not a single quotation in support of his vicious and calculated slander. He can’t. There aren’t any. He names six names: George Bush, John Ashcroft, Anne Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, Michelle Malkin, Pat Buchanan. Not the names I would choose to represent conservatism on this issue, but let that pass. Even granting his list of enemies, he has no case. If you doubt me, do your own research. I have. All six are innocent as charged. They do not say such things because they do not believe them. Sartwell is lying. He has allowed ideology to turn him into a liar.

Or is it ideology? Maybe it’s money. Maybe he just figures that this is the sort of thing editorial page editors will want to buy. I hope that’s not it.

And what about (4)? Many conservatives do indeed argue “that people should be judged by the quality of their characters and not the color of their skin.” And they do indeed believe that affirmative action, as actually practiced, often violates this principle.

Here is Sartwell’s rebuttal:

“[T]he whining of people who have been oppressors for centuries should be the occasion for summary execution. That black people have been enslaved, lynched, exploited, despised, impoverished, imprisoned is actual injustice. That Suzy Creamcheese has to go to Michigan State instead of Michigan because Michigan admitted a black person with lower SATs is nothing. Really. Nothing. If you make these things equivalent in your arguments, you are either being entirely disingenuous, or you are so deluded in your privilege, your empty rhetoric, and your slavish worship of institutions that you have become deeply evil without noticing it.”

Now this is rather like arguing that Palestinians on the West Bank have no right to complain about the Israeli settlement policy because, after all, the Holocaust was worse. It is a weak argument, and it does not become any stronger because Sartwell throws around words like “disingenuous,” “deluded,” “empty,” “slavish,” and “evil,” and suggests that those who feel differently from him are “whining” and ought to be shot.

I have never mistaken Sartwell for a subtle or careful thinker. But I used to think he was an honest one.

2003-01-18T12:38:00.000-05:00

THE SAD THING

The local community email discussion list has been buzzing with antiwar hysteria lately. The usual nonsense: this is all about oil, etc. I was trying to mind my own business and stay out of it. I mean, who has time? But when somebody posted with approval John Le Carré's London Times column (see below) I just lost patience and wrote up a reply. Another afternoon, gone forever. For what it’s worth, here’s what I said:

There’s quite a bit of publicly available information about the Bush administration’s Iraq policy and the reasoning behind it. What it all comes down to is this:

(1) There are lots of terrorists in the world who would stop at nothing to slaughter as many American civilians as they possibly could.

(2) There are a few “rogue” states which share the terrorists’ attitude toward America and which also possess, or are trying to acquire, weapons of mass destruction. These states include Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

(3) If the terrorists ever got together with the rogue states, they might well pull off an atrocity even worse than 9/11—for example, a smallpox epidemic, or a “dirty bomb” in downtown Washington, D.C.

(4) Given the limitations of intelligence gathering, if we wait for conclusive proof of particular plots before we act, sooner or later the bad guys will succeed. But that cannot be allowed to happen. Therefore, we must adopt a proactive approach.

(5) In the first place, we must hunt down and kill or capture terrorists. Unfortunately, to do this effectively we may have to relax some of our usual civil liberties protections (but only very slightly—nothing remotely comparable to FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II).

(6) In the second place, we must intimidate or overthrow the leadership of the worst of the “rogue” states. In some cases, that may mean preemptive war.

(7) North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and the regime is clearly mad enough to use them. So we must tread very cautiously there.

(8) Iran is riven by internal dissent. The mullahs may well fall of their own accord. So hands off—for the moment, at least.

(9) Iraq, on the other hand, is a proven aggressor that does not yet have nuclear weapons, but is actively trying to acquire them. It is weak enough to overthrow at relatively little risk to ourselves. A successful war there would also have a chilling effect on lesser threats like Syria, the Sudan, the PLO, etc. Moreover, the human rights situation in Iraq is so dreadful that a war of liberation would actually help Iraqi civilians more than it would harm them (just like in Afghanistan).

Now obviously there are debatable points in this line of thought. What are the potential benefits of any given relaxation in civil liberties? Are they worth it? How must our moral outlook change to accommodate preemptive war? Is that a change we want to make? What will a war cost in innocent Iraqi civilian lives? What will it take to give the Iraqi people freedom and prosperity after Saddam Hussein is gone? Are we prepared to pay the price? Would a successful war in Iraq be more likely to “chill” or to enrage other Arab peoples and their rulers? And so on.

The sad thing is, much of the left is too lazy and/or stupid to engage in the intellectual heavy lifting necessary to pursue such questions seriously. Instead, they prefer to spin conspiracy theories.

To wit:

(1) George W. Bush’s wealthy friends in the Texas oil industry have long wanted to seize control of the Middle Eastern oil supply, for purposes of personal enrichment.

(2) Meanwhile, a cabal of wealthy American Jews whose primary loyalty is to Israel is determined to exterminate the Palestinians and to squelch any manifestation of Arab freedom and independence.

(3) At the same time, a vast right wing-conspiracy of wealthy fundamentalist Christian zealots longs to rob Americans of their historic civil liberties and to transform the nation into a fascist theocracy where dissent and abortion will be punishable by torture and death.

(4) All three groups can further their aims through a trumped-up war on terrorism, on Iraq, etc.

(5) So these nefarious powers conspired to place the easily manipulable dolt George W. Bush on the throne (as it were). (Fortuitously, he even has a personal score to settle against Saddam Hussein.)

(6) 9/11 provided the excuse and the public support necessary to put the whole conspiracy into motion.

(7) –And, by the way, isn’t that convenient? Maybe—just maybe—Bush et al planned the whole thing—or, at least, knew about it ahead of time but let it happen, because they realized that it would line their pockets

This conspiracy theory is supported by the following evidence:

(1) George W. Bush and Dick Cheney used to be in the oil business.

(2) Some Jewish neo-conservatives are vocal supporters of both Israel and the G.O.P.

(3) Many conservative Christians believe that abortion is wrong and should be forbidden by law.

(4) George W. Bush’s S.A.T. scores (566 verbal, 640 math) place him in only the top 16% of college-bound seniors, and about the top 5% of all students nationwide. In other words, he’s a “moron” according to the modern left (which, in all other contexts, denies that S.A.T. scores mean anything whatsover).

(5) Last time around, Bush Sr., at Colin Powell’s urging, failed to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Hussein later attempted to have the elder Bush assassinated. So Dubbyah probably dislikes him (assuming that he has normal human feelings).

(6) 9/11 was preceded by a number of rather routine intelligence failures, most of which took place before the younger Bush took office.

Sorry, no number 7.

I’m afraid that’s it. The gigantic, obvious, yawning gulf between the conspiracy theory and the actual “evidence” that “supports” it is filled up with a steaming pile of rhetorical…uh…compost. (Let’s keep this a family site!)

I always used to think of conservatives as stupid (but often right) and liberals as smart (but often wrong). But the longer I watch the left wallow in this paltry and asinine fantasy, the more convinced I become that the tables have turned—with a vengeance. The *right* may or may not be *right* about Iraq and the war on terrorism. But at least they have interesting and intelligent things to say about it. The John Le Carré's and Gore Vidal’s of the world do not. They cannot be argued with. They can only be laughed at.

2003-01-15T21:56:00.000-05:00

SILLY OLD FOOL

In sheer idiocy per square inch, John Le Carré's column in the London Times today suffers few rivals. Gore Vidal, perhaps. But somehow Le Carré feels even stupider—maybe because of his customary drab prose style.

So why are some people quoting this pretentious git as if he were some sort of moral authority?

In the bad old days of the cold war, he was satisfied with fashionable moral equivalence: America no better than Soviet Russia. Now he has moved on to the equally fashionable moral inversion of our own day: America worse than Islamofascism.

Not that this comes as a surprise. When the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering the death of Salman Rushdie in 1989, John Le Carré sided with the mullahs.

"Great religions," he announced, "may [not] be insulted with impunity."

Of course, we always knew that Le Carré was a trashy writer. Somewhere between Stephen King and Tom Clancy.

What the Rushdie affair revealed was that he was also a moral half-wit.

His latest reveals him as a prematurely senile old fool.

He wouldn't last five minutes in a serious argument with the editorial board of the Washington Post.

And I don't even LIKE the Washington Post.

2003-01-13T19:22:00.000-05:00

HEROISM VS. EGOISM I

Brink Lindsey—one of the best libertarian thinkers and writers—raises some hard question for libertarians—especially those who base their ethics on the pursuit of individual self-interest and their politics on the pursuit of national self-interest.

What about times which call for heroic self-sacrifice?

As Lindsey observes:

“Theories of morality based on rational self-interest run in to trouble on the question of heroism. We all recognize the moral grandeur of those who risk or lay down their lives to save others. Who, for example, could be so obtuse as to find moral fault with the firefighters of 9/11?”

But how can a libertarian who bases his moral theory on the rational pursuit of self-interest countenance such self-sacrifice?

Lindsey moves on to suggest that the threat posed by terror-states like Iraq and North Korea calls for just such heroic self-sacrifice:

“…mustn’t we recognize that statesmanship cannot be reduced to calculations of interest – that it requires, at critical junctures, some unflinching commitment to virtue? And that virtue in such cases consists of refusal to back down in the face of a predator’s threats?”

At least, I think that Iraq, North Korea, and such like are what he has in mind here. I’m not sure. And if he is suggesting that, I’m not sure whether or not he’s right. (Would an attack on Iraq really involve some huge national self-sacrifice?)

But, be that as it may, the theoretical question interests me: is heroic self-sacrifice compatible with the pursuit of self-interest?

Those who come by their libertarianism by way of Ayn Rand have a particularly hard time with this question. Skeptics of objectivist egoism will relentlessly confront them with cases where the only alternative to self-sacrifice is disaster. Since egoism seems to preclude self-sacrifice, mustn’t the objectivist choose disaster? But doesn’t this prove that this version of libertarianism is both ignoble and impractical?

Q. E. D.

Favorite cases of this sort tend prominently to feature either lifeboats or foxholes.

THE LIFEBOAT: You are an unattached libertarian with no dependents and no remarkable personal gifts or accomplishments. You are stranded at sea in a lifeboat with Mother Theresa, Albert Einstein, the captain of the Harvard crew team, and a mother of six young children who is also a concert pianist. The captain of the crew team can row you all to safety, but there is only enough food to last for four. If no one goes overboard, all will starve before reaching land. What should you do?

THE FOXHOLE: You are, once more, a rather ordinary libertarian with no family ties. While fighting on the right side in a just war, you find yourself trapped in a foxhole with a half-dozen buddies, each more brilliant and talented than the last, and each possessed of numerous dependents: young children, elderly parents, etc. Someone throws a live grenade into the midst of your buddies. You are far enough away that, if you run for it, you can escape without injury. But you are close enough that you can throw yourself on the grenade, absorb the explosion, and save your buddies. If you run, they will all be killed. What should you do?

The egoist has three possible responses to such cases.

The first is to dismiss them as unrealistic. Hard cases, after all, make for bad law. The plausibility of an ethical view should be judged by how successfully it deals with the world as it is—not some philosopher’s fantasy land of perpetual emergency.

But such a response fails to appreciate the purpose of such problem cases. They are not supposed to be “realistic.” They are supposed to clarify concepts and reveal implications. They are like frictionless planes in physics. There has never been a real frictionless plane in the world as it is, and there will never be one. But just try to teach mechanics without them! Even if they only exist in imagination, they are essential for explaining physical theory. Just so, cases like the lifeboat and the foxhole may not tell us much about real life, but they tell us a lot about the differences between ethical theories and thereby help us do choose the right one.

The egoist’s second possible response is to bite the bullet and choose self-preservation. After all, what good does it do you if the worthies in the lifeboat or your buddies in the foxhole survive, if you’re not there to see it? Surely people who call for self-sacrifice in such situations are merely engaging in cheap moral exhibitionism. They wouldn’t really do it, would they? More likely, they would gang up on Mother Theresa and push her overboard. At least the egoist is honest about what he would do.

While this response has a certain cynical integrity, it is not the sort of thing that is likely to win friends or influence people. Perhaps only a few of us really have it in us to play the hero when heroism is called for. But more than a few of us would at least want to try, and would see little appeal in a moral theory that told us we shouldn’t bother. Such a position would seem, as I said above, both ignoble and, from all but the narrowest point of view, impractical.

So the egoist is likely to resort to the third possible response: that, contrary to appearances, self-sacrifice in an emergency can serve one’s self-interest. One can take a selfish pleasure in the act of saving others so great that it outweighs one’s whole future. So one jumps overboard, or throws oneself on the grenade, with a smile in one’s heart and a song on one’s lips.

At which point the cynics on the other side will begin to suspect that it is they who are witnessing an exercise in “cheap moral exhibitionism.” Who does the egoist think he is fooling, anyway? He was more believable—and possibly even more likable—when he defended pushing Mother Theresa overboard. Turnabout may be fair play, but this is ridiculous.

Brink Lindsey himself has doubts about this response:

“[C]an heroic acts be explained by self-interest? The only way to even try is to argue that a person’s self-interest must be understood broadly to include a compelling interest in being a virtuous person; accordingly, it can be “selfish,” in some expansive sense, to put one’s physical well-being at mortal risk in the service of a worthy cause.”

Lindsey doubts whether such an argument “can be made to work.” Even if it can, he concludes that “morality cannot be reduced to calculations of self-interest. Instead, self-interest reduces to considerations of virtue.”

So must libertarians—or, at any rate, most libertarians, those who defend the moral legitimacy of the pursuit of self-interest—give it up? Must they admit that, under certain circumstances, self-interest must yield to the common good (or to “virtue”)?

But then why not under all circumstances?

If libertarians concede this point, I think they give up their main claim to philosophical fame. All that would be left would be a purely empirical claim, to the effect that, most of the time, the common interest is served when people are allowed to pursue their own interests. In other words, they would be left with Adam Smith and his heirs: the logic choppers would pass from the scene and the number crunchers would inherit the tradition.

Sigh.

Fortunately for egoist libertarians, I think that there’s a way out of this problem. It all depends on what you mean by “self-interest.” Should we understand it in terms of pleasure, or in terms of desire? This seemingly trivial technical issue turns out to be crucial…

But all that must wait until I have another moment to post.

2003-01-05T12:24:00.000-05:00

SOMETHING DEEP

I’m glad to see that my friend Tom G. Palmer agrees with me about the relative merits of the new Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. Two Towers good, Chamber of Secrets bad.

Which reminds me. I was going to defend the proposition that Tolkien was on to something deep—something that transcends mere politics.

So here goes.

First, let’s return (for a moment) to the issue of Tolkien’s alleged racism. If you do a Google search on “Tolkien Racism” you will come up with more than 5,000 hits—so this would seem to be a going concern.

But it’s a mistaken concern—unless you’re worried about anti-German racism. For the bad guys in The Lord of the Rings are, quite obviously, Germans. The First World War was a formative influence in Tolkien’s life. Black Africa (despite his South African origins) was not. The aggressive, regimented, machinery-loving Orcs have much in common with stereotypical Huns and little in common with stereotypical Africans. End of story.

So why are the Orcs so often “black?” Because that is the traditional color of evil, dummy! Should Tolkien have made them orange, instead? Please keep in mind that he was not living in the age of dopey P.C. It would never have occurred to him that anyone would think he was out to stigmatize sub-Saharan Africans. He had other, and bigger, fish to fry.

What about the “Southrons?”

(a) In World War I, The Ottoman Empire allied itself with the Central Powers.

(b) Tolkien consistently treats his proto-Arabs as innocent dupes, worthy of sympathy.

So, to conclude, if you must read real life back into Tolkien’s story, against his wishes, it should be the First World War—not British colonialism, imperialism, and racism.

But, as Hannibal Lecter would say: “that is incidental.”

A more to-the-point criticism of Tolkien would be that his moral—as opposed to racial—landscape is too black and white. It’s not that he’s racist—it’s that he’s simplistic. The good guys are perfectly good, the bad guys are perfectly awful, and there’s nothing and nobody in between.

This feeds into the penny-in-the-slot charge that The Lord of the Rings is merely an overgrown exercise in cheap “escapism.” It offers its readers an easy escape from the real world of moral doubt and complexity into a fantasy land of comforting certainty. The worry is that naïve readers might try to import that comforting certainty back into the real world, with potentially disastrous consequences—viz., certain conservatives who look at Iraq and see Mordor.

(Or is that Morrrrrdor?)

In short, doubters will think that Tolkien’s “secondary creation” feeds into something crude and retrograde in our nature that ought to be discouraged.

This objection is not just incidental. Unlike the charge of racism, it at least takes note of a genuine and significant feature of the book: the lack of moral ambiguity. Nevertheless, qua objection, it’s mistaken.

To understand why, let’s go back for a moment to the Harry Potter stories—which really are, so far as I can tell, exercises in escapism, pure and simple.

Harry quite literally “escapes” an annoying set of relatives through the sudden and unexpected discovery of magical powers. Any reasonably intelligent and sensitive young person will identify with him. Who hasn’t daydreamed of such an escape? It’s part and parcel of being a kid. The Harry Potter books shamelessly cater to that innocent wish.

True, there are dangers for Harry to face in his new life. But unlike his foster family, they’re lively and colorful, and he can always count on the powers necessary to face them showing up at just the right moment. All perfectly harmless—and all kid’s stuff. (If it weren’t just kid’s stuff, it wouldn’t be perfectly harmless anymore.)

Now compare Frodo’s situation. Through pure luck, he, too, unexpectedly stumbles on magical powers (not in himself, but in the ring). But there the similarities end. For Frodo’s bit of luck is not good, but bad. Disastrously bad. The ring does not save him from everyday life—it robs him of it. It thrusts him suddenly into the burdensome world of moral responsibility. It demands that he give up everything he cares about to do his duty. Can he do it? Will he do it? Can or will anyone ever do the right thing, simply because it is the right thing, when deprived of any possible personal interest in doing it?

Everything in Frodo’s story is calculated to point this problem as acutely as possible. The stakes are large (saving the world, more or less) but Frodo’s chances are small (he has only a “fool’s hope” of success). His path will be long and painful and will test his rather ordinary physical and emotional capacities to their limits and beyond. Even if he succeeds, the attempt will almost certainly cost him his life. At the end, there will be no glory. No yachts or dancing girls. No heavenly reward. So he must save the world, but not for himself. He can’t palm the job off on someone else, because no one else is either willing or better able to do it. (Some are all too ready to take the ring—but not to destroy it). It’s almost cruel the way Tolkien paints him into the corner. The author makes his duty perfectly clear, but systematically deprives him of any selfish motive for doing it.

Now this is an interesting moral situation. In fact, it might be the most interesting moral situation there is. (Immanuel Kant seems to have thought so.) It is the heart of Tolkien’s story—and there is nothing simplistic about his treatment of it. On the contrary: his portrayal of Frodo’s response to the moral challenge that confronts him is both subtle and plausible. It is also quite ambiguous. In the end, does Frodo do his duty or not? This is not an easy question to answer.

To introduce shades of moral gray into the representation of the orcs or the elves would merely cloud the issue. Frodo’s duty must be unambiguous. If Sauron had legitimate grievances, or if Aragorn were merely an imperialist war-monger, the focus would shift from ethics to epistemology: from “how do I do what’s right?” to “how do I know what’s right?” The latter may be an interesting issue—but it is not Tolkien’s issue. Why should it be?

I suppose one could still make out a case that the book is “escapist.” But if so, it’s escapism of a peculiar sort. While the Harry Potter books appeal to the childish desire to be somebody special, The Lord of the Rings appeals to almost the opposite desire: the desire for commitment to a cause greater than oneself. Perhaps that is why it seems to make its strongest appeal to adolescents, the best of whom are highly susceptible to a longing for moral commitment.

Maybe that longing is merely another form of escapism—and a potentially dangerous one at that. Historically minded adults have every reason to view it with suspicion.

And yet, there’s good in it. Isn’t there?

2003-01-01T17:56:00.000-05:00

CHILDREN AND CLONES AND OTHER LIVING THINGS

The Raelian clone story has everyone dusting off old arguments, for and against, and giving them another trot around the track. Someone on “The Corner” at National Review Online recommended a piece by Ramesh Ponnuru that offers a “non-theological” argument against therapeutic cloning. It’s old (from last August) but worth responding to, especially since at least some conservatives apparently still find it persuasive.

Ponnuru’s main argument goes like this:

(1) “…the early embryo is a living member of the human species…”
(2) “…all entities that meet this description have intrinsic worth such that it is wrong intentionally to destroy them.”

Ponnuru does not spell out the various supplementary premises necessary to support his implied conclusion (that therapeutic cloning is wrong) but I suppose they are clear enough.

Another thing he doesn’t spell out is that his argument applies equally to therapeutic cloning and to any form of abortion whatsoever. So if we outlaw cloning, on these grounds, we must also outlaw all abortion—from the moment of conception on.

Fair enough—just so long as everyone understands that point.

Ponnuru rightly recognizes that the sticking point for most cloning enthusiasts will be his second premise: that all living members of the human species have intrinsic worth, etc. His opponents will simply deny this.

Rather than defend the premise directly, Ponnuru shifts the burden of proof to the other side. If mere humanity isn’t enough for intrinsic worth, then what is? He mentions several possibilities but finds them all wanting:

“The candidates most commonly proposed…are consciousness, mental functioning, making choices, and the like. But if the right to life is tied too closely to these characteristics, it is not only embryonic human beings that will be found not to deserve protection. Infants lack the immediately exercisable capacity for mental functioning as well. So do the comatose and the severely retarded, not to mention people who are sleeping.

“Also: Since the acquired characteristics on which human rights are said to hinge typically come in varying and continuous degrees, it is hard to see why human beings should be considered equal in their rights.”

So if mental functioning, say, were a precondition for intrinsic moral worth, then smart people would have a greater right to life than stupid people, and we would all lose the right to life every time we fell asleep.

Ponnuru is right to think that this is an effective reductio of any position that makes intrinsic moral worth dependent on some “immediately exercisable capacity.” Moreover, his opponents cannot get around the objection by leaving out the phrase “immediately exercisable.” If they try to rescue the sleeping by pointing out that they will have the capacity in question when they wake up, Ponnuru can simply point out that an early embryo will have the same capacity when it develops. If they complain that it takes much longer for an embryo to develop than for a sleeper to wake up, Ponnuru can resort to the case of the comatose. Suppose someone is in a coma from which he is very likely to awake, but only after a lapse of—to choose a number at random—nine months. Would we pull the plug? Surely not. So why are we so ready to sacrifice the embryo?

Defenders of cloning (and garden variety abortion) need a better argument. Luckily for them, they have one. It depends on the idea of a threshold.

A threshold is like a hoop you have to jump through before you can move on to a new level. Once you jump through that hoop, you’re on that new level, no matter what happens next. Maybe you could never do it again. Maybe you couldn’t even come close. But once is enough: you’ll never be the same person again.

Thresholds play a large and familiar role in all our lives. Once you’ve graduated high school, you’re a high school graduate—even if you’ve forgotten everything by the time you get your diploma. Once you’ve passed the bar exam, you’re a lawyer. Once you survive internship, you’re a doctor. And you stay that way, come what may.

Is it crazy to think that humanity is like that, too? That there is a threshold, somewhere, beyond which you count, morally speaking? Even if you later fall asleep, or into a coma?

I don’t know what the threshold should be: ability to think? to suffer? to care whether you live or die? But whatever it is, I’m pretty sure that blastocysts have not crossed it yet.

At any rate, such a position immediately answers both of Ponnuru’s serious objections.

Sleepers and the comatose may not be thinking now, but they have long since earned their stripes. Early embryos have not. That is a big moral difference. In fact, it is all the difference.

Moreover, “having crossed the threshold” is not a matter of degree. Either you have or you haven’t. So there is no room here for some to be more equal than others. You don't have to be an elitist to defend therapeutic cloning.

Ramesh Ponnuru needs to think again.

2002-12-30T11:53:00.000-05:00

WHAT CLANCY MEANT

Andrew Sullivan rightly commends a short memoir of a trip to Jerusalem by our finest living playwright, David Mamet. It’s a wonderful piece, but it includes what seems to be an unfair criticism of (not our finest living) novelist, Tom Clancy.

Mamet takes umbrage at a passage in Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon, in which an "American operative," "rightfully...horrified" by the "Chinese custom...of female infanticide," remarks that "if it were the Jews, the world would be Up in Arms."

"What can he mean?" asks Mamet, before trying out a couple of interpretations that would attribute to Clancy anti-Semitic intentions.

But presumably what Clancy meant was that if it were the Jews who were practicing infanticide, the world would be horrified--yet they look the other way when the Chinese do it. In other words, Clancy is not expressing anti-Semitism, but pointing it out—and rightly so. One could even go further, and observe that the world (especially the Arab world) habitually makes up lies about Jewish infanticide in order to justify its hatred, yet ignores well-attested evidence of actual infanticide amongst other peoples.

In this case, at least, I think Clancy can plead "not guilty."

2002-12-28T15:41:00.000-05:00

BOYS AND GIRLS

My friend Jay Manifold calls my post about young “Percy” (Archives, 21st December) an inadvertent argument for gender-segregated classrooms.

Maybe. I’m not sure.

No doubt one reason that some boys behave badly in school is because girls are there. On the one hand, the presence of a female audience can inspire the worst sort of typically male dominant-aggressive behaviors, aimed at fellow students and teachers alike. It’s hard for boys to learn anything when they’re too busy struggling over who gets to be the alpha-male. On the other hand, some guys just have a hard time keeping their eyes, their minds, and their hands off the ladies. Maybe if the girls were elsewhere, in a classroom (or a school) of their own, the boys would be less disruptive and less distracted.

But such a scheme could backfire. Dominant-aggressive behavior is an inescapable male reality. Men are status seekers and hierarchy builders by nature, whether or not women are around to watch. If anything, girls may put a damper on some of the cruder methods by which boys seek status among other boys. For example, most girls tend to take a rather dim view of spit-ball wars and farting contests—two all time male favorites, either of which can quickly reduce the best laid lesson plan to rubble. When girls are around, boys are at least a bit more likely to seek status in less disgusting ways. In rare cases, they might even want to show off how smart they are and how much they know.

In rare cases.

This is why the first thing I do when I get a new class roster is to count the number of girls on it. The more the better. Nothing makes my heart sink faster than a class full of boys. (Since I mostly teach remedial courses, my heart sinks pretty fast pretty often when the new rosters come out, for such courses tend to be overwhelmingly male.)

As for those boys who find in girls not so much an inspiration to mischief as an irresistible distraction, they would probably benefit the most from gender-segregated schooling. But this is a much smaller group than the mischief-makers, and much less troublesome, both to themselves and to others.

All in all, I wouldn’t mind putting girls and boys in different classes or in different schools—but only so long as I get to teach the girls. I pity whoever gets stuck with the boys. And I pity even more the smart and interesting boys, trapped there in the zoo with the animals. For there are always a few bright and promising guys who actually belong in school and who could benefit from it—much more than they do, in fact, were they and their interests not overwhelmed by the exigencies imposed by the Percy’s of this world.

So no. The point of my anecdote was not that boys and girls should be educated separately, but that some boys (and some girls) should not be in school at all. It does them no good, and they do their classmates no good. They would be better off, and we would all be better off, if they were out of school and onto the job market as quickly as possible. For they need an education in the realities of survival far more than they need an education in elementary algebra.

But instead of getting these kids out of the classroom, we have made them the focus of the classroom. It’s insane. Yet it’s apparently unstoppable. Neither left nor right seems prepared to face the facts about them. The left still believes that enough money could prepare them all for a nice liberal arts college. The right still believes that weaker teacher’s unions, tougher testing standards, and a morning prayer or two would fix everything.

And neither left nor right is willing to deal honestly with the fact that they are disproportionately (I mean, really disproportionately) African-American.

(They are also, of course, disproportionately male—but nobody seems to worry much about that.)

Until all this changes, public debate about education will remain, quite simply, beside the point.

Oh, well. Let all that be as it may. In the meantime, I must get back to begging Percy--and Bobby—to help me help them.

2002-12-27T09:37:00.000-05:00

PETER JACKSON’S TWO TOWERS VS. TOLKIEN’S: SOME SPOILERS

At its best, Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers is better than his film of The Fellowship of the Ring; at its worst, it’s worse.

Gollum and the ents are better realized than I would have thought possible—true to the book yet never ridiculous or embarrassing. Gollum’s incessant babble could have been risible in a bad way. Talking trees could have been even worse. But in the event, both are so appealing that one would like to see more of them.

On the other hand, Aragorn’s tumble off a cliff and subsequent miraculous survival is both stupid and pointless. One recovery from a near death experience is enough for any movie; Aragorn’s comes way too soon after Gandalf’s, and is way too similar, for comfort. The idea seems to be to provide occasion for a flashback to Rivendell and Arwen, but that flashback is itself unnecessary: it tells us nothing new and impedes the progress of the story. I would gladly trade the whole sequence for more about the ents.

The same goes for the later scene with Faramir, Frodo, and Sam in Osgiliath. For dramatic purposes, it’s not a bad idea to make Faramir a more dynamic character than he is in the book. So by all means start him out like his brother, determined to bring the ring back to Minas Tirith, and then give him a change of heart. But the change has to be dramatically convincing—and here it’s just not. Frodo nearly hands the ring over to the enemy and suddenly Faramir decides to send him on his way.

Come again?

If anything, Faramir should be surer than ever that Frodo is not to be trusted with so great a responsibility. At this point, I think the director has sacrificed plausibility to a cool visual (and, make no mistake about it, Frodo’s face to face encounter with the winged ringwraith is a cool visual). That sacrifice is among the endemic mistakes of present day movie making, aimed as it is at juvenile tastes. They should have stuck with Tolkien on this one.

2002-12-21T20:08:00.000-05:00

MIRABILE DICTU

So the Republicans got it right, for once. They may even have improved their position, by forcefully repudiating even the appearance of nostalgia for the bad old days of legally enforced segregation.

But will they go on to claim the moral high ground of principled color-blindness? Or will they persist in the path of least resistance: goals, time-tables, set-asides—in short, the whole, dreadful, dishonest farce of affirmative action? My hopes are not high. For that would mean facing some facts about the way the world is that we all wish would just go away.

That’ll be the day.

Let me tell you about Percy (as I’ll call him). He’s one of my students. He’s black. He’s one of only three black students out of the eighty-odd in this year’s eighth grade class. (Ours is a small, rural district.) All three are boys. Percy is the best student of the three. Unlike the other two, he stands at least some chance of passing the semester, and the year, and going on to the ninth grade.

But it’s not going to be easy.

The problem isn’t stupidity. Percy isn’t stupid. Nor is it lack of encouragement. On the contrary: Percy gets more encouragement then just about anybody. He is one of those borderline cases on whom we focus all our efforts. The entire curriculum is structured to accommodate his capacities. If he wanted to, he could ace ever assignment and every test.

But he doesn’t want to.

The real problem, as Percy’s football coach told me one day, is that Percy is “too cool for school.”

Percy is natural eighth grade aristocracy—quite literally, you might say, for he was the popular choice of his class for appointment to this year’s homecoming court (yes, we still have homecoming court, here in the middle of nowhere.) He plays all the sports. He dates the girl with the biggest…uh…tracts of land. (She covers all her binders with blurbs written in whiteout about how cool Percy is, how sexy Percy is, and how squiffy Percy makes her feel.) He is as proud as a grand duchess—and he treats his teachers with the disdain that a grand duchess reserves for her overly forward social inferiors.

It’s hard to describe this believably to anyone who hasn’t been there. Every day, we beg Percy to work—or, at least, to try. And every day he spurns us, with his elegantly cloven hooves. In reading class, last week, we asked Percy to take his turn reading aloud for the class. Percy was ready for us. Percy let us have it.

First, he bugged his eyes out, in mock shock—as if to say, “Excuse me, are you addressing ME, sir? How dare you, sir? The presumption! To even imagine that I might have been paying attention to you!”

Sympathetic titters fill the classroom. Percy glances around, acknowledging his many admirers with a smirk. (Parenthetically, I must thank Percy for teaching me what a “smirk” is. I had always wondered. Now I know.)

We open his book for him, and show him the place. He reads, haltingly, in a voice the size of a mouse…

And so it goes. Every day. The wind and the rain. For the rain it raineth every day.

The only cloud that Percy can see on his horizon is that his participation in sports depends on passing (however barely) his classes. So, once each term, he must come in after hours and condescend to allow his teachers to steer him through just enough retakes of failed worksheets and quizzes to pull out that magical D-minus.

Absent his usual audience, he manages well enough.

He offers us no thanks, of course.

But we’re used to that.

Needless to say, there are some other clouds looming on Percy’s horizon that he doesn’t see coming. In fact, he can look forward to some very heavy weather indeed. While his athletic gifts, such as they are, may be adequate to earn the momentary admiration of the local girls, they will not be attracting the attention of any major league scouts. In fact, they will not even get him in to any of the nearby junior colleges. Five years from now he will find himself quite suddenly past his prime, and with very limited options.

He will be looking for someone (other than himself) to blame.

Who do you suppose it will be?

So this is where the issues get nasty. What are the roots of Percy’s failure?

Conservatives will instinctively suspect incompetent and indifferent teachers, protected by their nefarious unions. But this is not true. Percy’s teachers are both competent and caring. I know. I’m there with them. I’m one of them. And besides—Virginia isn’t a union state.

Liberals, on the other hand, will point to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and ongoing discrimination. But this won’t do either. The first two are simply too remote to have any bearing. What do slavery and Jim Crow have to do with this strutting peacock? One might as well try to explain me in terms of my exploited Yorkshire coal-miner ancestors.

And as for ongoing discrimination, it’s essentially nonexistent. This is not to say that there’s no racial prejudice here—of course there is. But it persists mainly at the bottom of the white-trash barrel, amongst the half-dozen hard-core red necks that everybody laughs at—whose bigotry even adds luster to the mystique of being black. Believe me: it’s a universally recognized honor to be despised by these guys. Amongst those whose opinion counts, black is cool. Way cool.

Come to think of it, the “legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” play a role not unlike that of the “ongoing discrimination” of the rednecks. Their direct causal effects on young black males like Percy are so attenuated as to render them almost nugatory. But their indirect effects are another matter entirely. For American slavery and the Jim Crow laws are the two most popular topics in the world of “education” today. They are brought up everywhere and all the time—not only in English and History, where there is sometimes good reason, but even in Math and Science, where any marginally relevant historical figure who suffered from either can be counted on to show up in a side-bar.

All of which merely adds to Percy’s excess of smug self-satisfaction. He seems to identify with these victims of innocence abused, even though he is neither the one nor the other. In imagination, he transforms his recalcitrance into innocence, and the desperate attempts of his teachers to teach him something into abuse.

I mentioned above Percy’s “participation” in Reading class. The particular story we were reading that day was the story of the abolitionist Grimké sisters. This seemed to interest him more than usual—as well it might. After all: this was a bit of his very own enabling myth of victimization. Alas, one passage, at least, seemed entirely lost on him. One of the most moving episodes in the story of the Grimké sisters tells how they taught their slaves to read, secretly and at night—for law and custom forbade it. This was a heroic act of liberation from the oppression of enforced illiteracy. Ironically, Percy sees himself as a victim in the tradition of the slaves, not because we forbid him to read, but because we ask him to do so. Such is the flexibility of conscience.

But if neither the inadequacies of the educational system nor the weight of America’s racist past are responsible for Percy’s failures, then what is?

Consider another of my students. Bobby is a good friend of Percy’s, and similar in many respects. He is popular, a great favorite with the girls, stylishly decked out in the highest of middle school fashion, and quite full of himself. And he, too, is a terrible student.

When the day of reckoning comes, no one will rush to make excuses for Bobby. Few will hesitate to ascribe his failures to his nature and to the bad choices he has made. After all—as a white guy, didn’t he enjoy every advantage that life could offer?

But Percy is as much a victim of his own nature and his own bad choices as Bobby! The impulses that drive them both to ruin are among the commonplace temptations of human nature and character.

Why do these impulses predominate in some, but not in others? One might as well ask why some puppies out of the same litter are friendly while others are shy. Welcome to natural variation.

When people think about the members of their own families, they have no trouble recognizing the role that natural differences in temperament play in shaping each individual destiny. They need to recognize that the same point holds true of others of all races. Whether people succeed or fail, chances are it has more to do with their own individual natures and decisions than with anything else. And no scheme of the state is ever likely to change that. No goal, timetable, or set-aside will ever get Percy to prefer academic accomplishment and the recognition of adults to the cheaper and flashier admiration of his peers. That’s just what he’s like.

Faced with the fact of natural differences and inequalities, politicians—indeed, we all—have a choice to make. One choice is to insist on strictly impartial procedures that may lead to wildly unequal outcomes, not only for different individuals, but for different races as well—simply accepting those unequal outcomes as facts of life. Those who make this choice must be prepared to be denounced as racists, as surely as if they pined for separate water fountains and blacks in the back of the bus. The other choice is to go on treating inequality as a moral crisis for which someone must be blamed and punished, generation after generation. Those who make this choice will enjoy all the pleasures of righteous indignation while at the same time enhancing their career opportunities. Let bureaucracy thrive! For a politician, this is not a tough choice.

I would like to think that the Republicans, with Trent Lott out of the way, could look into the possibilities for a bit of benign neglect on the racial front. But like I say: my hopes are not high.

2002-12-13T18:18:00.000-05:00

RACE AND THE REPUBLICANS

Between the two of them, George W. Bush and Trent Lott seem bent on giving us the worst of all possible worlds, when it comes to racial issues.

So what else is new? This is, after all, the Stupid Party.

On the one hand, thanks to Bush, we will have racial preferences, as far as the eye can see. On the other hand, thanks to Lott, we will have the foul and lingering taint of segregationism clinging to the president’s party. In fact, we will have the former in payment for the latter. Michelle Malkin gets this exactly right.

Lost in the shuffle will be the last chance for a truly principled Republican position on race: justice blind (as justice must be) to color. What a betrayal! Here I cannot improve on David Frum’s summary:

"The political right has been battling against racial preferences, set-asides, and quotas for close to three decades now. Over the course of that fight, conservatives have articulated a clear and consistent message of equal justice regardless of race. That message has become a central defining principle of the conservative movement, and the people who have championed that message – Ward Connerly, Clarence Thomas, Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, Bradford Reynolds, the Institute for Justice, William Bennett, John McWhorter, and so many others – have become conservative heroes and sometimes conservative martyrs."

Neither the president nor the majority leader seems to appreciate any of this. What hope is there?

2002-12-11T20:16:00.000-05:00

INTERPRETING ISLAM

Since 9-11, commentators in the West have been ferreting around in Islamic history and doctrine in search of copy for their newspaper columns, political speeches, sermons, and so forth. Those who have done so with a mind to convict—i.e., to portray Islam and its founder as inherently violent and irrational—have found plenty to confirm their darkest suspicions. Among other things, Mohammed’s relentless persecution of the Jews makes for reading that is as unpleasant as it is engrossing. Such revelations have led to some harsh words, culminating, most notoriously, in Jerry Falwell’s injudicious (but not indefensible) characterization of Mohammed as a “terrorist”

The administration has been quick to repudiate such notions. George W. Bush never misses an opportunity to insist that “Islam means peace,” and that the beliefs of Osama Bin Laden and his ilk are perversions of the true doctrine of the prophet. But few take these presidential professions of faith very seriously—partly because they seem to be based more on optimism than on scholarship, but even more because there are such obvious political motives behind them. Why alienate either Muslim-Americans or, more importantly, potential allies in the “war on terror” (or on Saddam Hussein) by making an unnecessary issue out of a few unsavory passages in some medieval documents?

Lately, though, a more sophisticated objection to amateur Western criticism of Islam has emerged. What business have we—so the objection runs—to set ourselves up as critics of this deeply foreign tradition? We who are ignorant both of the original language of the Koran, Sunna, Hadith, etc., and of the interpretive tradition that has grown up around them for more than a thousand years? We should simply cut it out and leave the interpretation of Islam to Muslim scholars.

I think that this is a mistake. It is not a stupid mistake, but it is a mistake nonetheless. To see why, simply apply the same idea to Christianity. Should the interpretation of Christian scripture be forbidden to anyone who has not mastered Aramaic? Or who is not a graduate of a theological seminary? Have Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims no right to read and comment on the gospels or the Pauline epistles? These questions answer themselves. And they answer themselves: NO.

Five hundred years ago, this might have been a live issue. The Church might well have preferred that the interpretation of scripture be left in the capable hands of priests with a smattering of Latin (not the original language, but at least a dead one!). But surely today we can recognize this as a recipe for intellectual and spiritual tyranny.

Keep in mind that books like the Bible and the Koran are texts of a very special sort. They are not, primarily, occasions for scholarly exegesis. The Gospel According to Matthew is not Finnegan’s Wake. These are texts that recommend themselves to, and demand the attention of, ordinary people. They purport to tell us all how to live our lives. But a text that makes demands on even the simplest peasant had better be reasonably accessible even to the simplest peasant. If it can only be understood by scholars, then it has already failed of its purpose—especially since the scholars will ALWAYS disagree.

Admittedly, the community of the faithful working within an ancient interpretive tradition has an advantage when it comes to figuring out the odd detail. They have familiarity with relevant context on their side. But they may suffer from a crucial disadvantage when it comes to the big picture, for they labor under a potentially crippling regulative assumption: that the faith they seek to interpret must be the truth. This gives them an incentive to distort, whenever the apparent meaning of the text is too inconvenient. And there is no distortion, however perverse, that a sufficiently elastic interpretive strategy cannot countenance. Thus, for example, does jihad become a purely internal struggle for selflessness, or something equally innocuous. Welcome to the wonderful world of religious apologetics.

Unbelievers labor under no such guiding premise. They are free to register the obvious and let the chips fall where they may. This is not to say that every interpretation of Islamic history and doctrine offered up by a Western amateur must be right. But it is to say that the proper response to their mistakes is to explain, in detail, where they have gone wrong. It simply will not do to claim that they have no right to an opinion. Islam has intruded itself forcibly into all our lives. We didn’t ask it to. That gives us the right to ask some tough questions and to seek our own answers.

2002-12-10T18:20:00.000-05:00

HARRY POTTER, PETER PARKER

Just sat through the new Harry Potter film—more’s the pity. How is it possible for corporate “art” to go so badly wrong? Didn’t they screen this ahead of time for the appropriate focus groups? Even some of the dimmer bulbs in my eighth-grade science classes are pronouncing this effort “stupid.” And right they are. Let us count the ways…

On second thought, let’s not count the ways. It’s already way past my bedtime. So let’s settle for a single example. About five hours into the movie, this Tom Riddle guy has Harry at his mercy in the very heart of the eponymous “chamber of secrets.” And what does he proceed to do? He tells all!

Holy tired cliché, Batman!

Suddenly, you’re transported back to the days of comic-book yore, where the villain can’t help explaining his super-genius before dunking the hero in a giant vat of acid, or launching him on a one-way trip to the asteroid belt—or whatever.

Now I don’t want to be too harsh. This is a perfectly respectable—even time honored—device. But there’s just one problem: the explanation has to make sense—and fast! Otherwise, the audience is left completely unsatisfied. And that, I’m afraid, is the case here. Mr. Riddle’s explanation is completely indigestible, in the allotted time—at least for those of us who haven’t already read the book. The result is that, just when one should be luxuriating in a sense of completion and fulfillment, one is instead left scratching one’s head and asking: huh???

And besides—the phoenix looks awful.

And another thing…(I know, I said “a single example.” But I lied.) I had hoped that this second installment would fix one of the main things that bothered me about the first movie, but it didn’t. In fact, it actually made things worse. When, if ever, will Harry start succeeding primarily through his own efforts and choices, and not simply out of luck? When will he stop discovering hidden abilities that he never earned, or even knew he had?

This time around, he suddenly finds that he can talk to snakes in their own language. Last time it was his inborn mastery of broomstick riding and golden snitch chasing—to say nothing of the great, overarching lucky stroke of them all: the wizardly heritage that rescues him from the humble hell of his home life in the first place. Harry always seems to be escaping difficult situations out of more or less Pure Dumb Luck.

Back when I was a kid, this would not have worried me. After all: it’s the classic adolescent fantasy at the heart of many a comic book. What kid doesn’t long to be someone special, contrary to all appearances? And what kid understands that such distinction has to be fought for? The fantasy of effortlessly attained transcendence of one’s essential ordinariness captures the childish imagination like nothing else. Shameless catering to this dream made Spiderman the comic book di tutti comic books for more than a generation. Harry Potter is turning out to be just as shameless—and just as successful. He is the Peter Parker of our time.

Except that Peter Parker was better—in at least a couple of ways. For one thing, he wasn’t just anybody. He was a math-science nerd! He was a smart kid who liked to use his brain. Harry Potter, by contrast, to judge by the movies, is distinguished by nothing other than an unusually annoying foster family.

Much more importantly, Peter Parker discovers early on an element of moral seriousness that seems to elude Harry Potter. He faces, quite explicitly, the problem of how to use his newfound power: for personal gain, or for the betterment of all?

First, Peter makes the wrong choice. He let’s a bad guy get away—for what would it profit him to stop the guy? The very same bad guy proceeds to murder his beloved uncle and guardian. Peter learns his lesson and resolves to fight all evil, no matter who, what, when, where, or why.

The whole situation is absurdly contrived—as if this were a comic book, or something! Yet it is the foundation of Spiderman’s mystique. He’s not just some lucky guy.

I hope Harry Potter won’t go on seeming like that’s all he is. Maybe he doesn’t seem that way in the books. But so far, in the movies, he does.

2002-12-08T17:43:00.000-05:00

TTT

With The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers about to come out, Tolkien hype and counter-hype are in full swing. A cover story in Time breathlessly informs us that the film version of the battle of Helm’s Deep is the greatest thing since—well, since the last AOL/Time-Warner blockbuster (New Line is one of theirs). On the other hand, in a follow-up story on the current fashion for fantasy, the same magazine expresses some misgivings, both aesthetic and ethical. In particular, they note that, from a p.c. point of view, the story is “toxic.” And they are not alone in this discovery. In fact, the point is kind of hard to ignore. Few and uninteresting women, bad guys whose degree of wickedness seems to be directly proportional to the darkness of their skin, all good coming from the North and the West of proto-Europe while all evil emanates from the East and the South, etc. Isn’t Tolkien just a thinly veiled apologist for the British imperialism, colonialism, and racism of his day? And doesn’t present-day enthusiasm for his work represent nothing more than unhealthy nostalgia for the same?

The question makes me uncomfortable. I’m not worried about the female thing. In Jane Austen, the interesting characters are girls. In Tolkien they’re boys. So what? Jane Austen was a girl, and Tolkien was a boy. Both write about what they know about. And if there’s anything history tells us, it’s that boys don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout girls. But the East and South/dark complexion thing does worry me a bit. And the movie makes things worse, by giving the orcs what look like dreadlocks. So let the record show…I am uncomfortable!

And yet, and yet…

In the end, I cannot see The Lord of the Rings as an exercise in imperialist, capitalist apologetics.

For what is it that distinguishes Tolkien’s villains, first and foremost, above all else? It is not the color of their skins, but, rather, their attitude towards industrialization. Orcs love it, Hobbits (at least, good Hobbits) hate it. Orcs, whether in the book or the movie, seem to have a natural predilection for the “dark, satanic mills.“ Hobbits, on the other hand, prefer shrubbery.

How to fit this into the imperialist allegory? I just can’t do it. Is there any sense in which Araby and Black Africa threaten to impose ugly modernity upon an unwilling, bucolic West?

Let’s face it—something has gone wrong with this picture.

If anyone should find Tolkien worrisome reading, it is Libertarians—especially those with a weakness for Ayn Rand. Yet, in my experience, these are precisely the people who love the book best!!!

Which suggests to me that Tolkien was on to something. Something deep. Something that transcends mere politics. More later.

2002-12-07T17:47:00.000-05:00

ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES

Here it is, nearly a year since George W. Bush got his way on education reform, and some conservative commentators still have absolutely nothing new to say about the subject. Many seem locked into the same critique of public education that they have been offering up since—well, ever since I can remember. I think its time for something a little more radical.

The traditional conservative critique pushes three main points:

(1) Public education just doesn’t seem to educate—I mean, really educate—much of anybody.
(2) This is partly because the all-powerful teacher’s unions protect incompetent teachers at all costs.
(3) But it’s mostly because the educational establishment favors political correctness over mastery of subject area (be it readin,’ writin,’ ‘rithmetic, or whatever) for both teachers and students.

So we get endless complaints about books and teachers that and who indoctrinate their students in, say, environmentalist dogma at the expense of scientific skepticism.

After a little over a year teaching in a public high school in rural Virginia, I’m disinclined to argue with the first point. Our seniors emerge from twelve years of “education” knowing remarkably little of any kind, and hardly anything that remotely resembles what I would call real education.

But I see little merit in the second and third points. Virginia isn’t a union state, but I doubt whether that makes much difference. So far as I can tell, there isn’t much incompetence here for a union to protect. On the contrary: my colleagues seem more or less uniformly knowledgeable and hardworking. As for p.c., it’s just not a factor. Sure, some of my fellow teachers are dyed-in-the-wool liberals, and sure, the textbooks are filled with all these annoying sidebars about the contributions of women and people of color and the like—but we’re all way too busy teaching the basics for any of that stuff to intrude much.

And yet, as I say, little real education seems to be happening here. Why?

The real problem lies deeper than the conservative critique admits. It lies in the very nature of universal public education as such. My colleagues and I don’t really educate people because that’s not really our job—a fact revealed in the structure of incentives that faces teachers and administrators alike.

If I inspire in one of my brighter students a love for Dante, then my colleagues and supervisors might well think that’s lovely—but they won’t lose any sleep over it if I fail, or if I don’t even try. For they have more urgent things to worry about. In particular, if more than a handful of my not-so-bright students cannot figure out whether 6/7 is greater than 1 or less than 1, and if that leads them to fail their state exams (Virginia’s “Standards of Learning, ” or S.O.L. Tests), then there will be hell to pay—for the very accreditation of the school depends on students passing these tests in sufficient numbers.

What this means in practice is that my colleagues and I must spend virtually all of our time and energy on those of our students who simply defy any attempt to convince them that there is a difference between a numerator and a denominator, or that five is a greater number than negative ten, etc. If you’ve been out of high school for a while, you probably don’t realize just how many such students there are, or what utter hell it is to try to teach them anything—and I do mean anything. Hell for all concerned: for us, for them, and, above all, for the smart and motivated students who must tread water while we harangue the recalcitrant for the tenth time about something that the attentive picked up the first time around. But what can we do? Word has come down from on high: No Child Left Behind.

Ridiculous and pointless as it may seem, this is what the public schools are for, now. The top seventy percent will manage on their own. The bottom ten percent are hopeless no matter what we do. We are here for that slow but salvageable group in between. We must drag them and ourselves over the coals until they pull out their D. And that is a full-time job—as well as a sadly unrewarding one. Believe me, I would infinitely rather be showing the best and the brightest kids how to tackle Homer and Shakespeare. But who’s going to pay anyone to do that?

I don’t know whether there’s any political hay to be made out of all this, for either left or right. In fact, I think that it results from a sort of unintended conspiracy between them both. The left insists that education be universal, and the right insists that a diploma should actually mean something. Put these two goals together, and you get the situation as it now exists: America sacrifices real education for those who want it and can achieve it to the perverse project of putting the unwilling and the unable through a few useless motions. A project that achieves its full flower in the slogan “No Child Left Behind”—which is merely a euphemism for LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR.