The Necessity of Making Moral Distinctions

September 1, 2012 at 8:29 pm (Ethics)

In the late 90s I was reviewing a book on ageism that was so bad that I should, in retrospect, have begun the review as Dorothy Parker once began a review: “This book should not be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force.” Though missing that opportunity, I did find the book frightfully easy to excoriate, from its grammar to its multiple factual errors to its grave self-contradictions (was the editor simply asleep through the publication process?) to its offensive and puerile comparisons, which unintentionally illustrated the fallacy of moral equivalence. As an example of the last, the authors served up several comparisons of American ageism to Nazism: “The Jews are our misfortune, sloganeered the Nazis. The old are our misfortune, cry the not-so-old in America.” The authors lamented the “incarceration” of the old in nursing homes which represent a “final solution mentality” with the same function as “concentration camps everywhere.” Mining the theme for its full shock value, they suggested that “it is not unreasonable to speculate that our sciences of biology, psychology, and sociology could find justification for extermination of the old in the same manner as Hitler’s scientists found reason for exterminating the European Jews over half a century ago.” Even without dropping the wiggle words “not unreasonable,” “speculate,” and “could,” authors Ursula Adler Falk and Gerhard Falk’s intent is crystalline in its clarity: ageism is the moral equivalent of Nazism. We are invited to conjure images of evil-eyed, cackling, modern scientists spending their days in the lab bent on discovering the final solution for the extermination of the old.

This particular and most egregious assertion of moral equivalence can be easily rejected as outrageous by anyone with even a smattering of knowledge of the Holocaust and of ageism. It would hardly require an Auschwitz survivor to be repelled by the comparison. Here the equivalence is made in order to enshrine ageism with the moral gravitas and hideousness of the Holocaust, thus “elevating” ageism to a level of depravity almost unique in the annals of human degradation. (One must be careful here with that word “unique.” While the Holocaust holds pride of place in the modern imagination when it comes to institutional evil, we should not forget that both Stalin and Mao were each responsible for more actual deaths, certainly making the twentieth century unique in history for its grim necrology.) It may certainly be true that some things are, however, morally equivalent. Discernible differences may be so small that a rough equivalence can be justifiably argued. Additionally, we may need to wrestle with questions of degree or even opportunity, especially on matters of brutality and death: Was, for example, Cambodia’s Pol Pot the moral equivalent of Hitler on the fundamental question of presiding over a Holocaust—the same in kind, though lesser in degree? Probably so. But that caveat does not require that we abandon rationality in favor of doubtful equations.

The usage of moral equivalence—comparing two or more things and suggesting that there is no moral or ethical distinction to be made between them—is not always offered as a means of elevating or reducing one thing to the level of another, as in the case of the ageism authors. More often it is a device to imply that the common assumption of the moral superiority of one thing is a flawed assumption, and that in fact the two allegedly disparate items being compared are morally no different. Almost disdainfully, it asks, How could you possibly think that one of these things is better than the other when it is as plain as the nose on your face that they are the same, both equally mired in the mud? This equating occurs frequently among those disenchanted with politics, who justify their own disengagement by bemoaning that all politicians are the same and the parties are the same, wriggling and squirming for their own self-aggrandizement. Thus why bother to vote, since it makes no difference? The bankruptcy of this pitiable argument should be self-evident; but if not, one might ask the Mississippi black man of 1962 who was not allowed to vote if it makes a difference to him; or the woman of 1910 who had no vote if it makes a difference to her; or ask the historian if George McGovern and Richard Nixon had different agendas, or if Lincoln were a better president than Millard Fillmore.

Our current political campaign reveals how gravely polarized the electorate is, yet still there are many who accept the debased moral equivalence of the two candidates. USA Today, for example, recently editorialized that both candidates were equally guilty of lying about the other. As evidence, it offered a Romney ad that claimed that Obama would end any expectation of work requirements for getting welfare; then the editorial offered an Obama superpac ad that claimed Romney had killed a woman who lost her health insurance. The difference, barely acknowledged and relegated to insignificance by the author, was that the first was a Romney-endorsed ad, while the second was not an Obama ad at all, but a superpac ad supporting Obama, and by law not vetted by or coordinated with the President’s team. Aside from my own perception that the Romney campaign has been overtly mendacious (Obama “apologizes for our country” or the red-meat lies of Ryan’s acceptance speech) while Obama has not, the newspaper, in decrying the low tenor of the campaign, argued that both candidates were morally equivalent in their proclivity for lying.

Nor is academe exempt from the fallacy of moral equivalence. It has become quite fashionable in elevated academic circles to argue that cultural values are inherently equivalent, and that it is the apex of cultural narcissism to proclaim otherwise. This view is partly a laudable rejection of jingoism and American exceptionalism, partly a defensible embrace of egalitarianism, and largely a reaction to the colonial exploitation of indigenous peoples of Africa, India, and the Americas. In the colonial view, the exploitation (though not even recognized as such) was totally justified in the name of empire building and the grotesque and lachrymose self-pity of “the white man’s burden” in civilizing (read: exploiting and sometimes butchering) the benighted “savages.” One can still reject jingoism, embrace egalitarianism, and be justly repulsed by the sense of moral and cultural entitlement which animated colonial exploitation and yet not succumb to the postmodernist doctrine that cultural values and cultures themselves are inevitably morally equivalent.

Human aspirations may have a common foundation, but those aspirations may manifest themselves in very different societal and cultural outcomes, ranging from those in which a voice in how one is governed is a matter of theocratic superstition to those in which it is a matter of voting; from those in which the poorest of society are exploited to those in which the law insures some minimal livelihood; from those in which belief is a matter of coercion to those in which it is a matter of conscience; from those in which half the population are legally considered chattel to those in which no woman is forced to marry, forced to cover her face, prevented from driving, prevented from obtaining an education, prevented from speaking her mind, or prevented from holding any office. The proponents of the moral equivalence of cultures should live for a while in some of these other places, but if not that, at least listen to one who has, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali (cited in Christopher Hitchens’ collection of essays, Arguably), who concludes in her book Infidel what to many would be obvious: “I left the world of faith, of genital cutting and forced marriage for the world of reason and sexual emancipation. After making this voyage I know that one of these two worlds is simply better than the other. Not for its gaudy gadgetry, but for its fundamental values.” This is not the language of a postmodernist ideologue, but someone who speaks from “lived experience.”

In the fullness of infinite time and the grandness of infinite space, there may be nothing of substance to differentiate among the infinitesimally unimportant moral beliefs and actions of a few tribes of a single, short-lived, pathetic species infesting some dry corners of a tiny mote of rock floating around in a miniscule speck of a galaxy. In this cosmic view, Aristotle’s philosophy, Shakespeare’s plays, my death or yours—or, for that matter, the extinction of humankind—is of no more consequence than the death of a gnat. But in our quotidian lives, the ones in which we get up and go to work, shop at the grocery store or till our patch of land, kiss our spouses and hug our children, and find what happiness we may—in that life we do not dwell overmuch on the grandiose, or fret overlong on the eventual death throes of the sun our planet circles, or take that long, long, cosmic view of the insignificance of our species. Instead we live in the present and inhabit a wide, familiar, and often disturbing world of the relatively immediate and the more or less local. And in that world, differences can matter; and failing to make necessary moral distinctions is as simplistic as its opposite—seeing the world in black and white.

John Rachal
September 1, 2012

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Mr. Grant, Meet Mr. Twain

August 17, 2012 at 6:05 pm (Literary Criticism)

Our local library was having a book sale of some of its presumably surplus books, and for a song I picked up Mark Perry’s Grant and Twain, a dual biography of the title characters. While containing enough background to justify the increasingly popular dual biography classification, essentially the book focused on the period in which these two giants of nineteenth century America (though Twain lived until 1910) found their lives intersecting in the interest of literature and history. Perry centers his story on Twain’s tenacious efforts to get a very reluctant Grant to write his memoirs and the near herculean effort required of the dying general and president to do so. While Twain clearly wanted to be the publisher himself—his concern for business matters never being far out of mind—he admired Grant and genuinely felt that Grant’s narrative of the War, particularly given his role as the North’s overall military commander, would not only be handsomely profitable but historically necessary.

After Grant and his son were led into desperate financial straits by a smooth-talking business partner with a good eye for bad investments around 1883, Grant—who had nobly but unwisely given up his military retirement when he became president—was desperate to find a means to support his family and to pay his mounting debts. He thus came to see, with Twain’s and others’ urgings, the as yet unwritten memoirs as a means to his financial salvation. In the mean time, the devoted cigar-smoker was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer of the mouth, with the result that his writing became a painful race against death, which came in 1885. But as Lincoln had said over two decades earlier about this almost preternaturally calm and brave man, “he fights.” (Commander-in-Chief Lincoln had finally found his general, after sputtering attempts with three previous ones, including the vain, contumacious, and ultimately craven George McClellan, to whom Lincoln had tartly said that if the General wasn’t planning to use his army, then he, Lincoln, would like to borrow it.)

Grant, now slowly and painfully dying of cancer, contrived to live up to Lincoln’s appreciative “he fights.” With help from his son and some former military subordinates (one or two of whom had their own possibly competing memoirs), he wrote. His capable doctors managed to relieve his pain with laudanum applied to his tongue. He also dictated, but that became difficult, as did swallowing. Indeed, his doctors eventually attributed his actual death to starvation. He finished the second volume—his final campaign—a few weeks before his death.

I remember reading a single volume American Library version of his memoirs some twenty years ago and being surprised at its high literary quality. Twain noted this as well. But Perry’s dual biography fleshed out Grant’s war narrative handsomely, yielding an impression of a man of longstanding modest and calm demeanor in the face of both catastrophic military consequences and approaching and painful death. His lifelong love for his wife Julia (perfectly paralleled by Twain’s love for his wife Livy), as well as his concern for his personal integrity, particularly in terms of paying his debts and having it known that the prose was his alone, are deeply endearing qualities matched by his quiet courage and sheer doggedness. Though Grant’s less-than-successful presidency, ridiculed by the refined Henry Adams, was marked by scandal (though not his own) and has been seen by historians in stark and invidious contrast to his successful prosecution of the War, it is within bounds to speculate that the War would very likely have been further drawn out without him, and possibly might have turned out differently. Owing to his financial crisis, the importuning of Twain and others, his own integrity, his persistent anxiety for his family’s welfare, and his implacable tenacity allowing him to hold off death just long enough, he was able to leave us a historically necessary masterpiece in the genre of military memoirs.

John Rachal

August 17, 2012

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Scalia Considered

July 9, 2012 at 4:12 pm (Political Commentary)

Just when we thought it was safe to conclude that the Supreme Court is hopelessly partisan, Chief Justice Roberts deftly throws a few morsels to the Right but manages to defend the healthcare mandate as constitutional, not on the four liberal justices’ ground of Congress’s right to control commerce, but rather on the ground that the mandate is effectively a tax and Congress does have the right to tax. Thus the centerpiece of the law was preserved, and not by the vote of the usual swing-voter, Anthony Kennedy, but by the conservative, George Bush-appointed Chief Justice, John Roberts. This outcome, particularly with this unexpected alliance of Roberts and the four liberal justices, was predicted by virtually no one, least of all me, who assumed the usual politically dictated outcome of 5-4 against.

It was certainly refreshing to see the Court tack counter to expectation. The 2000 Bush v. Gore decision broke perfectly along party lines, giving the election to Bush despite—though this was outside the Court’s consideration—the election being the country’s fourth in which the fellow with the most votes did not become president. The execrable Citizens United case also broke along party lines, allowing elections to be determined by train loads of one hundred dollar bills collected from mega-rich anonymous donors seeking to buy an election, all on the specious ground that a corporation is a person, a citizen, and thus entitled to free speech. Wealthy people generally being Republicans, the decision has rightly been interpreted as more favorable to the GOP, and already in this election cycle millions upon millions have slipped in to Superpacs, mostly favoring Romney. Even John McCain excoriated this decision, a decision allowing democracy to come perilously close to simply being bought, particularly in elections below the presidential level.

But the healthcare decision went, in general, liberals’—and one might even say moderates’—way. The four liberals of the Court (Ginzburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor) voted predictably. Three of the five dependable conservatives (Thomas, Alito, and Scalia) did also. Kennedy, as usual, leaned right, though he does not always do so. The surprise was Roberts, always heretofore conservative. Among the plenitude of questions and implications the decision has for healthcare, it also raises the question of the influence of political affinity as the determiner of Court decisions. The healthcare decision notwithstanding, most decisions do seem to reflect the political orientations of the justices, however much we might wish otherwise. In all but the most obvious cases, a law’s constitutionality often evades the actual language of the Constitution, and depends instead upon the politically infused interpretations the justices offer of the Constitution. If this were not so, presumably it would be a total mystery to observers and commentators as to whether a controversial and especially politically-charged decision might be 9-0 for, or 9-0 against. Instead, we can generally predict eight of the votes. We know the political leanings of the justices, and on that basis we can with some likelihood determine how they will interpret the Constitution to arrive at the decision that comports with their politics.

What is interesting is that one of the justices, Antonin Scalia, takes strong exception to that, at least concerning his own decisions. I have now seen Scalia, the current Court’s longest serving justice, give two speeches. He is a charming and forceful speaker, devoted to the idea of “originalism,” a doctrine asserting that the only way to interpret the Constitution was by its “original intent,” which presumably can always be ascertained by a close reading. Scalia suggests that there are no legal questions—which he differentiates from moral questions—which cannot be interpreted within the purview of the Constitution; its principles are immutable whatever the ephemeral facts of any particular modern case might be. In contrast to originalism, he opposes the doctrine of the Constitution as a “living document,” a view he reviles on the premise that such a constitutional philosophy allows the meaning of the Constitution to change every few decades as social values evolve. Reasonably explicit in this argument is Scalia’s objection that the “living document” view inevitably invites politics into Court decisions, whereas originalism insures that decisions are safely insulated from politics since justices would rely only on the original intent of the framers.

Even aside from the highly suspect perspective that modern justices can derive the framers’ collective intent, the Scalia presumption that such derivations are immune to the political leanings of the interpreter is both naive and self-deceptive. Between the Constitution and a particular justice’s opinion is a layer of personal political conviction, a fact which every president nominating a justice and every senator voting on a nominee well knows. The most obvious evidence for this is found within Scalia’s own decisions—almost invariably conservative, at least when there is a conservative-liberal angle to the decision. Would, for example, the framers have endorsed the execution of child criminals—an issue the Supreme Court decided against a few years ago? How are we to decipher the framers’ intent on such a question? And in the absence of a clear constitutional prescription on a question, i.e., constitutional silence, isn’t trying to get into the minds of the framers and determine their intent at least as hazardous as relying on prevailing, rationally argued, ethical views? And by what consensus do we apotheosize the framers to such an extent that we assume their values and prescriptions, which were influenced by their cultural milieu just as ours are, to be infallible? The “father” of the Constitution, James Madison, apparently did not lose an excess of sleep over slavery, nor did he seem much troubled by excluding half the white population—women—from voting. So much for original intent of the framers. Those shortcomings were eventually “corrected” by amendments, and thus became constitutional, but those amendments were political products of their time and consequently clear evidence of an evolving, “living,” document. Why would the framers have inserted a mechanism for amendments if they did not wish to acknowledge the possibility of need for change, modification, or addition over time? The very fact that the framers provided that mechanism is itself evidence of their “original intent” that the document was a living document, to be amended as future generations saw fit.

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Obama’s Evolution–and Mine

May 27, 2012 at 3:48 pm (Ethics)

Recently the President of the United States weighed in on a social question unlikely to help his campaign but likely to improve his stock in the area of moral decision-making: Should gays and lesbians have the legal right to marry? He has previously endorsed civil unions, which even his opponent Mitt Romney seemed to do when he claimed in a 1994 letter to the pro-LBGT Log Cabin Club that his leadership would “establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens.” But marriage, even polygamous and sibling marriage, is a concept almost universally interpreted sociologically and historically as a sanctioned and often sanctified relationship between members of the opposite sex. As such, changing from accepting civil unions to accepting gay marriage is not an insignificant metamorphosis. Obama has stated that his thinking on the question was “evolving,” a term mildly derided by those who wrongly interpreted it as equivocating. But I fully understand his term, as my own view, which is not affected by the glare of a political campaign, has also evolved. Such an evolution, even had the President failed to take that last, huge step of endorsing gay marriage, reflects a mind willing to undertake moral questions and the internal wrestling they involve. Such wrestling, at least on this question, may be alien to both the gay man who cannot see how others should have any say in his marriage choices, as well as to the conservative who considers his values to be under assault. Neither of those individuals is likely to struggle with this moral question; their positions are hardened and intransigent. For the gay man, the central moral issue has to do with his equal rights; for the conservative, the central issue concerns the inviolable sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.

But for others, the lines are not so clearly drawn. In my own evolution, I have never had a problem with civil unions, but gay marriage did seem to contradict all the history and sociology that I know. It seemed an oxymoron: marriage by definition was a man-woman relationship. I was attached to traditional marriage by . . . tradition. And tradition should not be tossed aside carelessly. Nor are overdrawn analogues between the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement wholly persuasive; after all, gays as a group were never owned as slaves, nor did their status deprive them of their right to vote. But there are parallels, and the biggest one is the fundamental question of fairness and equal rights. And on that foundational question, the answer seems pretty clear: gay marriage is a legitimate rights question, and equal rights dictates that gays should be free to marry just as anyone else should be. Perhaps a more salient analogue would be marriage between men and women of different races. How many now, beyond the Kluxers, would make that illegal? And what would be the opposition to it, other than sheer racial prejudice and bankrupt illusions of racial purity?

The closest thing we have to a moral absolute in this world is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It is difficult to reconcile this highest of moral admonitions with opposition to gay marriage. How can I deny to others what I take for granted for myself? There is also the simple question, as my wife has reminded me, Who would it hurt? Well, of course it would hurt the sensibilities of those opposed, just as the right to vote for blacks and later for women offended many whites and men, respectively, who regarded suffrage as their personal property. But those offended whites’ and men’s rights were not infringed, whereas denial of gay marriage does infringe on the rights of gays.

In April of 1963, Martin Luther King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama. Many local pastors seemed to acknowledge the justice of his cause, but disapproved of his protests, imploring him to go slow, hoping that in the fullness of time his objectives might be achieved without confrontation. In a famous and lengthy letter, he courteously but forcefully explained to them why that course was not acceptable, noting that “the time is always ripe to do right.” So while there is little denying that the President was called out on his evolving view by his own Vice-President who endorsed gay marriage two days before in answer to a question, Obama could have claimed that he was still evolving. But just possibly, like King, he concluded that it is never the wrong time to do the right thing. His Vice-President’s forcing the issue does not diminish his own wrestling, nor the subtlety of a reflective mind capable of, and at least equally importantly, willing to confront moral questions which he found not amenable to simplistic rhetorical bromides. Given that at the time of his statement, a referendum in the campaign “battleground” state of North Carolina was overwhelmingly rejecting gay marriage, Obama’s taking a stand on an issue not likely to help him politically was a small but notable triumph of moral integrity over political expediency.

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So This Is Leadership

February 21, 2012 at 9:24 pm (Political Humor)

It is as if the Republican primary season is a kind of pageant of clowns paraded before us for our entertainment, until we realize that the person the Republicans eventually embrace could be the clown leading—so to speak—the free world. A few have already strutted their time upon the stage and made their inglorious, sometimes hilarious, exits. Mr. Pawlenty did not even make it to the first round, taking a roundhouse on the chin from pugilist and right winger extraordinaire Michele Bachman, who herself predicted victory in Iowa and came in about last, and soon slouched toward stage right. One wonders whether such impoverished prognosticating ability is the result of her living on another planet or simple lying. Rick Perry came as a whirlwind, and—oops—departed, tail tucked between his rear Texan legs, still trying to remember which departments he was going to get rid of. Oops—forgot. Why didn’t he take that high school debate class? Then it was Herman Cain capturing conservative hearts, answering any and all questions with 9-9-9—that is until the ghosts of sexual harassments and philanderings past rather literally disenchanted his previously charmed following. Gee, who would have thought that those little peccadilloes might come out if you were running for president? Jon Huntsman actually seemed to understand foreign policy and have a modicum of rationality, at least politically, and thus he was summarily dispatched as gravely unqualified.

As of mid-February, four still cling to hope and continue to slip and slide in the mud pit for our amusement. We may begin with Newt “Moonbeam” Gingrich’s lunacy, which is apparently quite literal. We can only hope that if his lunar colonizing fantasies should become public policy, he will be the first colonist to leave earth’s bonds and that he and Calista have a fine old time raising several litters of little Moonbeams, all joyfully setting high jump records among the craters. He will be on the dark side, naturally, where the prying eyes and chiding tongues of the fourth estate cannot go. But at least he’s a monogamist, serial though it may be. Poor old Mitt apparently believes…well, let’s just pass over that business about the angel and the ancient golden plates written in Egyptian that were dug up in Joseph Smith’s New York back yard a while back. Let’s move on to pandering, Mitt’s acknowledged forte. Mitt has raised pandering to such an art form that he has to ask his campaign manager every morning what state they are in so as to determine what his core beliefs are for the day. While courting those Michiganders, he sure wished he had not pontificated a couple of years ago about how GM should not have received a bailout—most of which it has now repaid—and should have been left to go bankrupt. As Master Chameleon, he’s hoping to slither and buy his way out of it. Go Super PAC! Soon he will be betting Rick Santorum $10,000 that he didn’t say it.

Meanwhile Santorum has made a religion of religiosity, and, to borrow from Twain, gives a fine speech where the truth is not a concern. Actually all three have a well-honed skill in that department. Santorum does not even need to express his opposition to abortion; he goes apoplectic just thinking about the evils of contraception—but of course he and the other Republicans don’t want the government in people’s personal lives. Rick’s view of contraception is reminiscent of Charles II’s observation that Roman Catholicism is no religion for a Christian. Santorum would be fine if we actually wanted to retreat to the fourteenth century. After all, the Inquisition and all those burnings at the stake had their good points. Dr. Paul, on the other hand, has studied the teachings of Dr. Mesmer and persuaded the adoring eyes of modern youth and other naïfs that reality is an illusion, and nirvana is inexpensive and just around the corner, if we will only get rid of the Fed.

I say let’s bring back monarchy.

John R. Rachal
February 21, 2012

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Oh, Mr. Republican! Over here!

November 14, 2011 at 8:07 pm (Political Humor)

Oh, Mr. Republican! Over here, please! I have a question! Why do you support the right of the uninsured free-rider to run or be carried to the hospital, incurring considerable health care costs, which the hospital simply passes on to you and me in the forms of higher hospital and insurance bills? Why does he get a free ride that I have to pay for? Wasn’t that exactly the reason that you and your fellow Republicans proposed the idea of the health care mandate back in the early 90s? Oh, Mr. Republican, please don’t turn away! Come back!

John Rachal

November 14, 2011

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The Perils of Discipleship

October 31, 2011 at 9:26 pm (Ethics)

In New Delhi, at the last residence of Mohandas Gandhi, there are concrete blocks about the size and shape of a human foot literally marking the hundred or so sandaled steps the Mahatma took from his room to the point of his 1948 assassination. With reverence and admiration, along with that characteristic poignancy of history that comes from standing in the very place where it occurred, I walked that same path during a 1989 trip to India. A little over a decade later I among others nominated this great man for Time’s “Person of the Century” (he was beaten out by Einstein). But facts—those “stubborn things” as our second president called them—as well as words have a way of illustrating the dangers of deification and the disappointments of true believers.

Christopher Hitchens, drawn to most forms of iconoclasm as a moth to the flame, reviews Joseph Lelyveld’s Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle With India, and the two of them offer a few object lessons to those prone to the allures of uncritical character apotheosis. No doubt many of Gandhi’s admirers have long qualified that admiration, as I have, with some reservation concerning his undiluted (one is tempted to say “militant”) pacifism, but Lelyveld’s book and Hitchens’ review provide much fodder for consideration of the limits of pacifism and, in the face of an unbridled, genocidal militarism, its dangerously suicidal fatuity. Lelyveld’s book provides a disturbing foundation, in the form of Gandhi’s own words, for the clichéd observation that what worked against British colonialism would have been a mere sandcastle against the tide of German National Socialism. Even allowing for the advantage of historical hindsight, the Mahatma’s disciple may be forgiven if the first crack in his reverence occurs when he reads Gandhi’s 1939 observation that “a single Jew standing up and refusing to bow to Hitler’s decrees” might “melt Hitler’s heart.” Well, yes, that incredibly brave Chinese student did for a few moments stop the tank; but apparently he was soon whisked away into that vast Chinese gulag never to be seen again. Gandhi’s suppositional Jew’s fate could hardly have been any more promising.

The second crack in the sub-continent’s marble man for the true believer might occur when he reads Gandhi’s personal letter to Hitler in that same year—the year of the invasion of Poland—beginning with the simultaneously sycophantic and condescending “My friend,” and asking the Fuhrer if he would “listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success?” One hopes that he could not possibly have been so naïve or other-worldly as to write the same letter two years later. Ever seeming to be oblivious to genocidal intentions, he advises a Chinese guest to “shame some Japanese” by adopting pacifism and civil disobedience, or satyagraha. (My father has a photo album from his service as a Marine in China in the late 30s, and one of its grim photos shows an execution: a Chinese head in the air as a Japanese soldier’s sword has just passed and done its gruesome work).

But Gandhi falls most precipitously from deity to mortal—and a disturbing mortality at that—when one reads that he encouraged the British to allow the Nazis to “take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself man, woman, and child to be slaughtered.” Reading such a chilling formula for ethereal transcendence over worldly materialism and physical survival, one steps back, aghast at seeing evil allowed to triumph so easily and be embraced with such equanimity. Is it reasonable—though reason seems to have nothing to do here with Gandhi’s foray into grim other-worldliness—to think that inviting slaughter and censuring all necessary forms of resistance to it is to preserve one’s own unblemished moral purity, or is it more reasonable to believe that allowing the slaughter is in fact to be culpable in it? Would the victim in such a case, though now satisfyingly sanctified, be wholly innocent in his own victimization? The essential quality of hubris is self-deception, and while there remains so incredibly much to admire in this great man, it seems not so wild a thought to see his hubris as both the cause and the effect of his chosen life of unrelenting renunciation.

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First Lecture, Last Year

August 20, 2011 at 1:47 am (Lagniappe)

Please indulge me for a little while, and just close your eyes, and imagine for about ten minutes the things that I will be telling you.

It is August 29, not 2011, but 1346. You are a student at the University of Bologna, in the north of what will become Italy, and it is the oldest university in the western world. The fact that you are here means that you are a white male, perhaps 16, whose father is either aristocracy, landed gentry, or a reasonably wealthy merchant.

The classroom is a little dark, the walls are made of stone, and there are several smells. Perhaps the most pungent is that of the large candles around the room, giving off their familiar aromas of wax and smoke. There is also the smell of body odor from all around, but you are used to it and you barely even notice it. In fact, you can even smell yourself. Your last bath was four days ago, about the normal interim. There is a slight odor of chamber pots from an adjoining room. You can smell a tincture of the dye of the linen of your clothes, which are a shift shirt and pants with buttons. You are probably not wearing any kind of underwear. Your new leather shoes, which were made to fit on either foot, are not long removed from the malodorous smells of the tannery, and, in order to impress, you have shined them with a little pig’s grease.

You are seated with other students on a smooth, well-worn wooden pew with no back rest, as Bologna students have been doing for almost three centuries. The great poet-scholar Petrarch may himself have sat on this very pew a mere twenty-six years ago, as might Dante before him. If you are fortunate, you have a quill pen, and of course a pen-knife for sharpening it, and there is an ink well on the long table in front of you and your fellow scholars for dipping the quill so that you may jot down some of the salient points of the professor. The fellow beside you is squinting at the professor, who appears a little blurry to him. Spectacles have just been invented but have not become widespread, and perhaps his eyes will not get too much worse for the 50 or so years he and you are likely to live. Of course that is only an average; the fact that you have survived the first two years of life, unlike three of your siblings, probably ups your chances to make it into your sixties. That is, of course, unless you succumb to any variety of diseases that the local doctor, known as a leech, cannot save you from by cutting your arm to allow the diseased blood to flow out, or by attaching several leeches to your skin to suck the blood out, or by applying several aromatic poultices to your head or abdomen. The leech also pulls teeth and cuts hair. He acquired his trade by being an apprentice, and like about 98% of Europe, he can neither read nor write, even his name, and he feels none the worse for it.

A little light comes into the room from windows, some of which even have glass. The tapping of mallet hitting chisel against stone and a little cursing from various workers are the main sounds wafting in through the window. Your professor is standing at his podium dressed in his full academic regalia. He is missing a few teeth—of course he has never actually brushed them in his life—and his breath is a little pungent, but his Latin is impeccable. He reads his lecture (naturally, since the word “lecture” is derived from Latin, “legere,” meaning “to read”). Your Latin, which you have acquired in schools called studia, is fairly good, and getting better. Still, in a moment of weakness, you wish he would just speak in some familiar dialect, but then you shake your head and realize that if he did so, the Polish, English, French, and German students scattered throughout the class probably could not understand him at all. Besides, anything of a scholarly nature would be written in Latin. The professor, like others at the university, teaches the entire curriculum; subject specialists will not come for centuries. He reads from a handwritten manuscript, since the printing press and printed material are still one hundred years in the future.

He is discussing one of the great debates of the day, transubstantiation, brilliantly explicating the fine points of whether the wine and bread of the Eucharist have been literally transformed into the body of Christ, or, instead, are symbolic of the body of Christ. You are particularly looking forward to his lectures later in the term concerning the question “if God is omniscient, knowing all the past, present and future, then isn’t man’s life and, most importantly, his salvation or damnation in the next life, pre-determined?” Or, on the other hand, if man’s will is free, how then can God be omniscient? There are other students in the room who have come all the way from England to the University of Bologna (a two month trip over questionable roads) just to hear him on this very question. His reputation is international. Using all three aspects of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, and logic—which is the first part of your curriculum, he will attempt to resolve that question in a way that amazingly preserves your free choice and simultaneously preserves God’s omniscience. Now that lecture will truly be worth hearing and understanding. Even more importantly, you hope to master the trivium and hone your Latin grammar and vocabulary, your rhetorical and persuasion skill, and your knowledge of logical reasoning that supports your persuasion skill, so that you also may enter these disputes and possibly even become one day a bishop in the church, or perhaps a professor and author yourself, exploring these vital metaphysical questions examining the fate of our souls in the next world. As the professor leaves—the only clock in town is on the church tower, and it’s not accurate, but who would know—his assistant takes questions.

Afterward you go to the modest home of a local town resident where you board, and have your usual evening meal of pork, bread, and soup, downed with wine or ale, either of which is more dependable than the water. A brown rat stares at you from a shelf in the kitchen before scurrying away at the approach of the house cat. Just at that moment, you bend over to scratch at the bite a flea just gave you on your ankle, not giving it a second thought. You have heard of plague before, but no one knows much of how it is transmitted, other than God’s will. It would not even occur to you that a flea bite is one means of transmission. But if that flea has bitten that rat, and if that rat was carrying plague transmitted by the flea, you could be one of the 25% of the population of Europe—one out of four—who will die a grim death from bubonic plague between 1346 and about 1360. Are you one of the lucky ones? After that flea bite, will you be dead in a week, or will you continue your studies, learn profound and esoteric things, graduate with your doctorate, and begin your rise in that tiny world of theological scholars and masters of the liberal arts?

Now you may open your eyes. Welcome to  Higher Education 711.

John Rachal
August 20, 2011

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Hiking to Snyder Lake

July 12, 2011 at 1:45 am (Travel)

After a good breakfast at Sykes, I left Kalispell for Glacier National Park about 8 a.m. My plan, subject to re-consideration, was to hike the Snyder Lake Trail, a nine mile “moderate” difficulty hike with an elevation gain of 2000 feet (for comparison, the Washington Monument is 550 feet high). I had previously noted that my Glacier Day Hikes book refused to give a difficulty level of “strenuous” to any pretentious little hike that did not involve at least 3000 feet of elevation gain, no matter the distance. Snyder Lake was a predicted 5-6 hour hike, and plenty enough to test me. I had avoided it two days earlier, largely because the book description specifically mentioned that one should be cautious in view of the fact that bears love parsnips, which abound on parts of the trail, and that the dense foliage at ground level at those parts could hide a bear a mere ten feet off the trail. I’m not partial to bears, and in fact they scare me, especially grizzlies. There are only a few hundred of the latter in the Park, which is big, and several thousands of people, and many of them are hiking. While seeing a black bear is not too unusual (we saw one dash with sobering dispatch across the road last year in east Glacier), grizzly encounters are almost negligible compared to the number of hikers in the Park over a summer. Still, “almost negligible” isn’t zero, and a tenderfoot such as myself tends to think about these things. Also, a mountain lion had been seen during the last few days at two locations, one where Val and I had been a few days before, and another sighting on the Sperry Trail, which one had to hike to get to the Snyder Lake trail. All the trailheads announce that you are entering grizzly country, and helpfully add that you should never hike alone. Then, just for icing on the cake, I heard on the radio driving the 30 miles to the Park that just the day before a couple had been attacked by a sow grizzly with two cubs in Yellowstone, and the man was killed. The woman had rolled in a ball and played dead. The bear picked her up by her backpack, then dropped her, and finally moved on. So this was all part of the “subject to re-consideration” aspect of my plan.

Aside from a fanny pack with two bottles of water and an apple, and a small backpack with my brand new Nikon camera with an 18-55 lens and a 55-300 lens, I was armed with a jingle bell attached to my bootstring, a walking stick, a Buck hunting knife, and a new can of bear spray. The knife was a touch ludicrous, whimsical almost, but the image of an annoyed bear on top of you conjures up all sorts of desperate and almost certainly unexecutable defensive fantasies. Still, you dream, and having a knife can’t hurt. Besides, a good blade can always come in handy. What about that guy who got his hand stuck under a boulder in the wilderness and had to decide between life and hand?

My whistle-thermometer-mini-light-compass-magnifying glass informs me that it is 70 degrees. Soon I’m off, with an intention of turning around at any point bear phobia takes over. There is no one else, and that is the most eerie part. I’m talking loudly, telling the bears I don’t need any today, singing “Dixie,” and generally appearing absurd to anyone who might have been around, but wasn’t. The trail is wide, with little underbrush here, and snakes its way upward through large spruce, cedar, and hemlock trees. This goes on for about an hour, and still not a soul. I pass the fork for the Mt. Brown Lookout trail entrance, which informs me that the summit is 3.7 miles up, for a total hike of eleven miles, and one that earns the honor of “strenuous.” Not today. Just beyond the fork, at 1.8 miles, the Snyder Lake trail also branches off the Sperry, with the lake 2.6 miles up. Well, no bears or mountain lions so far—only a huge mule deer right on the trail who moves off just enough to pose for me—so I keep walking up. Then, fairly soon, people! It was a work crew of four guys digging drainage ditches off the trail. I chatted for a minute or two, and apparently there was one soloist ahead of me. Then I asked, with studied aplomb, about bears in the area. Apparently, no big deal: “You’re probably more likely to see a mountain lion.” Oh! No problem then. In addition to shovels, they did have bear spray, which apparently is useful for anything that has eyes and breathes through a nose.

I move on, and probably around 3.5 miles am surprised by a man and a woman and their college-age, cross-country-skiing daughter coming up behind me, and they are moving out. I picked up my pace, which I had not thought doddering, and latched on and we chatted all the way to the lake. I never did actually know what parsnips looked like, but the ecosystem had changed as we had climbed, and the trail was often only fifteen or so inches wide. The ground-level foliage was thick and about waist-high. We crossed a short scree field of large and small rocks, and the trail was often muddy with small, two to six foot crystal streams crossing it. One couple was descending, either campers by the lake or the “soloist” mentioned by the work crew. We reached the lake, and were surrounded by tall, jagged, snow-patched mountains. We were also surrounded by mosquitoes who were thirsty and who had not read the warning labels on their anabolic steroid packages. Or perhaps they were a different species, mosquito montana giganticus. We took some photographs, at least when one of the mosquitoes wasn’t blocking our view, and then bid our goodbyes as they quickly started back down. I stayed and ate my apple and took some more photos, having decided that my fellow travelers might want some family time without a hanger-on, and that I was also more comfortable knowing that there were at least some others on the trail.

Hiking down does not get your heart rate up so much, nor do you need to breathe through your mouth after fifty feet, but it is not without challenge. Naturally you have to watch your step for all the rocks and unevenness in the trail, but depending on the steepness, it can put some stress on your knees, and your toes can jam up in your boots and hurt. This is why it’s wise to cut your toenails the night before a steep hike. One serious hiker I met on the descent told me he lost a toenail every summer. He was 65, looked 50 on a bad day, and did about three 10-12 mile hikes a week in the summer. He had planned to hike the Mt. Brown Lookout hike, but had missed the turn-off for it, and so would do Snyder Lake. He had done Mt. Brown the year before and said it was the hardest hike he had ever done. A youthful mule deer approached us warily on the trail before giving us wide berth, and then we parted. The trip down was pretty uneventful. Bear thoughts had receded. After four hours almost on the nose, I was sweaty and itchy, but pretty well satisfied.

John Rachal
July 12, 2011

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Jonathan Edwards, 18th Century Terrorist

June 19, 2011 at 1:43 am (Ethics)

A few weeks ago Baptist minister Rob Bell broke ranks with his flock and presumably the great majority of his denomination by writing a book in which he proclaimed that salvation is not a Christian prerogative only. He endured the appropriate vilification for this broad-minded transgression, including a chastising letter in USA Today in which Kathy McFarland observed that Jonathan Edwards, 18th century minister famous in particular for his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, “had it right.” It just so happened that I had re-read that sermon less than a year ago—but even in high school, God “hold[ing] you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider” over a flame, was memorable.

Edwards’ sermon might be more properly titled “Sinners in the Hands of a Solipsistic, Bloodthirsty, and Contemptible God.” Why, Reverend Edwards, is God so angry? Apparently, like some mewling child, he can’t tolerate not getting his way; he is outraged by anything less than total adoration and obeisance; he is furious that you might not fully appreciate his throwing you into a world in which the sole responsibility of his prized creations is to thank him for the privilege of adoring him. And if you, his wretched, undeserving creation, who never asked to be created, neglect to adequately perform this lifelong requirement of adulation, you are doomed to the literal flames for all time: you “must suffer it to all eternity.” Edwards’ cruel, vain God consigns you to “no end to this exquisite, horrible misery.” Nor are children exempted from the wrath that the Reverend so admires and justifies: “And you, children, who are unconverted, do not you know that you are going down to hell, to bear the dreadful wrath of that God, who is now angry with you every day and every night?” Yet still you have the chance, Edwards simultaneously coos and threatens, to appease this tyrant and avoid an infinity of flames for your few years of unbelief by divesting yourself of your capacity for rationality, by denying yourself and others freedom of thought, by choosing to live on your knees, and by choosing to worship and adore a monster. That is all that is required—no kindness to others, no virtue, no compassion, no forgiveness is necessary. All the monster requires is adoration, sycophancy, and hourly gratitude; and for their absence you will be tortured everlastingly, and out of all proportion to your crime.

Nor does Edwards’ God see himself as being under any obligation to keep his side of the bargain. As a Calvinist, Edwards subscribes to the view that the “elect” are saved from infinite torture through predestination, a decision his dice-throwing God made long before these few, fortunate souls were born—a doctrine, he claims elsewhere, which “appears exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet.” So the bargain God offers—I will not torture you endlessly provided that you surrender everything in order to meekly adore me—he can capriciously ignore after your lifetime of abject submission. You are not free to violate your agreement, but he is totally free to violate his and for no reason. He is entitled to be wholly arbitrary, throwing you into “hell’s wide gaping mouth” on a whim, no matter your lifetime of devoted servitude. Conveniently Edwards does not mention this in his sermon, cowing all his congregants into a false and corrupt bargain. As with the kidnaper who kills his victim after receiving the ransom, only one side is required to honor the agreement. Melville must have read this sermon. This was Ahab’s private war.

What honorable human could say such things to anyone, but especially children? Here lies evil; and if there were a hell, Edwards and all the legions of godly hate-mongers and fear-mongers of all faiths would be the first to feel the flames. No, Ms. McFarland, Edwards most certainly did not have it right.

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