Moral Health

White guilt has become the catalyst fore self-annihilation.  As we all know, it is true that a great many white people in the United States will do just about anything to avoid being called racist.  It is equally true that a great many black people have turned abusing this label into a kind of performance art.  White politicians have learnt that there is no better way to appeal to black voters than to see racism at every term.  The most flagrant example of this in recent months is Hilary Clinton’s claim, before a predominantly black audience, that Republican leaders have run the House like a plantation.

To my mind, it is most offensive that she took blacks to be so guillible. And it is a pity that the black audience to which she spoke was so guillble.  Accordingly, I guess that what I ought say, then, is that it is a pity that Hilary Clinton exploited the gullibility of the black audience to which she spoke.  Once could ask, “What kind of moral example did she set in saying what she did?”  The answer is an abysmal one.  How does one play the game here.  Well, let us model the behavior of Hilary ! ! !  Then we wonder why young blacks do not have the respect that they should have for whites, no matter what whites do.  Of course, Madame Hilary cannot imagine that she might shoulder some responsibility here. (more…)

The happiest people on the face of this earth ought to be university professors.  For there is absolutely no one who can go on about the merits of rationality like these folks.  More to the point, there is no one who can be more dismissive of others on the grounds they are not acting rationally than professors at a university.  So judging from their “mouths”, you would think that they had an absolute lock on happiness.  Happiness here; happiness there; happiness everywhere.

And don’t get me started on the way in which professors at a university denigrate folks who believe in God, even many in religion departments do.  So, in particular, a one-to-one comparison between professors at a university and religious folks ought to turn up one college professor after another who is happier than the typical religious person.  But, of course, nothing of the sort is true.  Most religious people with all their irrationality, to hear college professors tell, are generally much, much happier than the torch bearers of rationality—college professors.

Now, to be sure, most professors will insist that religious folks are delusional and that their happiness is not true happiness.  After all, only rational folks of whom college professors are the archetype can be truly happiness.

But happiness is a very simple notion in that if a person acts happy and looks happy time and time again across a wide range of circumstances, then in the absence of a very long and unobvious story the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that he is happy.  Likewise, if a person acts in a grumpy manner and looks weary time and time again across a wide range of circumstances, then the only reasonable conclusion to draw is that he is unhappy.  Or so it is in the absence of a long and unobvious story.

If I wanted to show happiness to a Martian, I would pick a typical religious person any day over a typical college professor.  For what I see among college professors is meanness and anger and hostility and grumpiness and massive discontent.

What I do not see generally is a sense of joy and appreciation.  I do not anything that resembles self-contentment and inner-peace.

More poignantly, I do not see anything that would incline me to wish that my way of being in the world was like theirs.  I cannot think of a college professor whom I would hold up to my students as a beacon happiness.  Or let me put the point another way: I don’t recall ever hearing any student say that, in addition to professor’s Schmitt’s marvelous intellectual abilities, Schmitt seems so happy with herself or himself.

To be sure, professors have been known and admired for their intellectual agility and their command of this or that subject matter.  But professors are persons, too.  And admiring a professor for her or his intellectual gifts is no bearer to admiring her or him for the joie de vivre that the professor displays.  Nor is there any incompatibility between intellectual excellence and marvelous contentment.  Alas, the very point is that few, if any display that.

The point is particularly telling because many professors have tenure, which is life-time appointment, and are well-paid.  One would have thought that having very decent salary with a life-time appointment would have occasioned mountains of happiness.  To be sure, if one takes ones commitments seriously, being a professor can quite demanding.  Still, a well-paid life-time appointment is one incredibly security blanket.

So the fact that it is rare for anyone to speak of professors as happy is I believe rather telling.  Few, if any, would have any difficult grasping why a coal minor is disgruntled.  It is hard work that is often rather risky.  And there is sense in which it can be said that it is intrinsically rewarding.  Yet, I have met many a coal minor or assembly-line worker who strikes me as exuding more happiness or at least contentment than what I find among college professors.

My own view is this.  Professors are often too smart for their own good.  They have argued themselves out of appreciating the majesty and the wonder of life.  And I hold that there is an inevitable emptiness that invades a life when a person is no longer able to appreciate the majesty and wonder of life.

Undoubtedly, no adult can have the sense of wonderment that is characteristic of a child’s marvelously sense of discovery with respect to one thing and then another.  Yet, there is a profound lesson to be learnt from the child, namely that there is a joy that comes with wonderment that has no other equal life.

And I should like to think that wonderment and rationality are not at odds with one another but masterfully compliment one another, which is marvelously captured by the expression “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Day in and day out, I see wonderment in one thing and then another.  I see wonderment in the fact that we can be so different while doing exactly the same thing—speaking, for instance.  I marvel each day of my life at the fact that so much is revealed by so little, namely the eyes—and it is revealed so quickly.  The most furtive glance often tells more than a string of well formed sentences ever could.

As I write these words, there is in the Department of Political Science a picture of my former colleague Fred Frohock holding one of his grandchildren.  With his eyes closed, he is holding his grandchild against his chest.  But that simple gesture is none other than contentment personified.  And I marvel at the fact that I who was not there can see this majestic moment in a mere photograph.

I do not know how to account for all of this rationally.  I do not know how to explain how so little can mean so much.  But I do know that there is nothing irrational in recognizing the beauty and majesty of this fact.  There is nothing irrational in embracing it.  These simple things constitute one affirmation after the other that the whole is greater than the some of its parts.

We, if only we should attend to it, are surrounded by the majesty and beauty of reality.  A transcendent reality that gives a richness to life that defies rationality in the sense there is no way informative way to explain it.

Courage at its best is often none other than the willingness to try yet again what others have long since supposed was not rationally feasible.  There would be far fewer instances of this marvelous moral good if everyone simply followed the dictates of rationality alone.

And this brings me back to professors.  It is very telling that the most extraordinary instances of moral courage tend not come from those whose who have no shortage of claims to make about what is or is not rationally acceptable, namely professors.  Indeed, few professors have ever inspired courage.

This should come as no surprise.  Courage is rather like love.  It goes beyond what we can claim is warranted on purely rational grounds.  And the academy is rather schizophrenic about in just this matter.  For when we look at what is called for on purely rational grounds, it turns out that what we get is considerably less than the excellence of which we as human beings are capable.

Quite simply, humanity at its best has a transcendent character to it.  We are better off for recognizing it.  And we are too smart for our own good, when we insist upon being rational to the exclusion of the transcendental.

As just about everyone knows, there is a biblical text that claims it is better to give than to receive.  There are many explanations as to why this might be so.  For instance, it can be said that giving constitutes a moral power—a way in which individuals can affirm their wherewithal to do good notwithstanding the vicissitudes of life.  There is a lot to be said for this view.  For it seems to me that a sure indication that a person’s very soul has been vanquished is that the individual is no longer willing to do the good that she or he can do.  Worse, the individual no longer even sees the good that she or he can do.

Alas, I think that there is another explanation as to why it is better to give than to receive.  For one the most extraordinary indications of what a person is like is how the individual responds to the good that, with purity of heart, one freely does on the individual’s behalf.

For there is no greater indication of that person’s character is lacking than that the individual fails to be moved with appreciation by the good that another with purity of heart has done on her or his behalf.

This is why the gifts of children to their parents prove, at once, to be so powerful and so revealing.  The power of such gifts lies in the purity of heart that occasions them.  The 6-year old who draws mommy and daddy a tree or a house does so for no other reason than that she wants to do something nice for the two.  Ulterior motives, as such, are not operative.  The child is not thinking tat this or that picture will get me this or that benefit.  The child simply wants to do something nice for mommy and daddy.

In turn, the child’s pure unadulterated affection is precisely what moves the parents.  The picture represents a moral majesty that far exceeds anything that the lines on the paper could possibly represent and, thus, is entirely independent of whether the lines are flawless or not.  More than anything else, it is the thought that counts.

A child’s efforts represent the purest indication of goodwill precisely because ulterior motives as such are not operative.

As adults, it is easy enough to have well-formed ulterior and multiple motives for our behavior.  Indeed, we can sometimes deceive ourselves with regard to our motives.  It is easy enough to do something for another in the hopes of getting something in return or because doing so further facilitates future endeavors on our part.

But even with adults, where complexity abounds with respect to motives, it is nonetheless possible to do something for another that equals or sufficiently approximates the purity of goodwill that we find in a child’s act of kindness.  And while this may not always be clear, it turns out often enough that such instances are very, very clear.  And how a person responds in these instances is perhaps as revealing about a person as anything might be.

You see, even in the world of adulthood with all the complexity of motives that comes with being an adult, there will always be occasions when a person can bestow a good upon us when she or he has nothing whatsoever to gain by doing so or (to go in the other direction) nothing to lose by not doing so.

So if I am the kind of person who treats everything that you do for me as if it were something that you owe me, then you know that I am not a fully decent person, though I should never commit a murder or rob a bank.  Then you know that I would not make a good spouse or friend.  For no one is entitled to everything good thing that another does for her or him.

It is irrelevant that you can in fact give me all that I want.  For that does not make me entitled to it.  Accordingly, if you should give me all that I want, then that should occasion an everlasting gratitude on my part towards you.

Gratitude.  It is such a simple thing to express.  Yet, it means so much and it is indicative of so much.  Quite simply, it is indicative of moral decency.  Although that sounds ever so strong, it is in fact quite to the point.

Gratitude, after all, is precisely the response that is unquestionably appropriate when we are the object of another’s goodwill.  (I was going to saying “genuine goodwill”.  But we do not have goodwill in the first place, if it is not genuine.)

And it is striking just how easy it is to express gratitude.  Sometimes it comes in the form of a note.  Sometimes it comes in the form of a moment of awkwardness as when the person struggles to find some word that will do justice to the moment.  Sometimes it comes in the form of a tear or a gallant effort to hold back tears.

I now see that gratitude is one of the most of natural sentiments.  No one needs to learn how to express gratitude.  To be sure, persons can be wax eloquent in their doing so.  But the truth be told, it is very, very rare that we need an eloquent expression of gratitude in order to be profoundly moved by another’s gratitude.  In fact, it turns out that some of the most memorable expressions of gratitude are not so much eloquent as they are heartfelt.

Giving, then, is not just a moral power that we have which affirms that we have not been vanquished by evil, it is also a means by which we can discern whether or not another is a decent individual from the standpoint of making a good friend or spouse.

Giving is a way of expending ourselves on behalf of another.  Gratitude replenishes.  It is in this context that we might understand Frederic Douglass’s words that nothing reminded him more of the evil slavery than the base ingratitude on the part of slaveowners towards the slaves who lovingly cared for the children of the slaveowners.

It goes without saying that a loving commitment to the well-being of one’s child is not something that can be either purchased or commanded.  And it constitutes a giving of oneself that is, on conceivable accounts, absolutely extraordinary.  The absence of gratitude in a case such as this is a formidable sign of ingratitude—an unequivocally clear indication of moral indecency.

But the point holds with no less force outside of the context of slavery.  You want to know just how decent a person is.  Watch how the individual generally responds to expressions of pure goodwill towards her or him.  And that will invariably tell you all that you need to know.  There are no exceptions here.  For no one is too low or too high to express gratitude.  No one is too lacking in education or too learned to do so.  Genuine gratitude bespeaks a fundamental level of decency of character.  Its absence bespeaks a fundamental level of indecency.  There are no exceptions.

Such is the moral power of giving.  It is more of a window unto the soul than most of us would ever imagine—both for ourselves and the person who is the object of our giving.  For it is only giving with purity of heart that so sets the stage for determining something ever so profound about the character of the other.  Thus, giving at its best requires self-knowledge.

From time to time life serves us a very clear wake-up call.  I maintain that we have just been served such a wake-up call in the reaction to the remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI.  I have actually read the text of his lecture which is entitled: “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections”.  Indeed, I attach it for the readers of this blog-entry.  1) I doubt very seriously if most of the Muslims threatening and rioting and committing violence against churches have even read the text.  2) Liberals make light of religion all the time—especially Christianity.  Why, many of very own colleagues seem to think that people who are religious have been shortchanged with respect to their mental faculties.  But these very same liberals seem to think that we are not being sufficiently respectful of Islam.

The Vatican fears for the life of the Pope owing to a remark about the Prophet Mohammed.  It seems to me that the very same liberals who do not think twice about mocking Christianity ought to be more than a little annoyed at the nonsense on the part of Muslims who seem to think that it is their natural right to engage in rampages of destruction and violence when something is said about Islam that they do not like.  And it seems to me that liberals who tolerate this are not just misguided, but that they are waltzing with evil itself. (more…)

It takes a village to raise a child.  From what I have gathered, judging from what people actually do, this is an African proverb that everyone loves to cite but just about no one truly embraces—at least not nowadays.  Between such utterances like “You can’t judge me” and “It is none of your business what I do”, there is absolutely no reason to think that anyone nowadays truly believes this African proverb.

Why, what on earth does the proverb mean?  On a most minimal interpretation, it means parents are not enough; hence, people other than a child’s parents play a fundamental role in a child’s coming to have a decent moral character and ideals of excellence generally.  That is easy enough to say.  But then what on earth does that mean?

For some people, the proverb is an argument for placing children in daycare.  But I don’t think for a moment that the proverb was extolling the virtues of daycare centers; for I don’t think that there were any daycare centers around when this proverb came into being.

I am no authority on African villages.  But I would suspect that your typical African village that gave rise to the proverb under discussion was a small community in which nearly every knew one another and members frequently encountered one another—perhaps even on a daily basis in many instances.  Moreover, there was mutual trust and general good will between individuals and, guess what, there was a shared set of values.  And this meant that adults knew what to expect of one another, and so of one another’s children.  Every adult played a role in ensuring that the values of the community were upheld.

The nurturing village, then, was not about strangers being the basis for a child’s upbringing.  It was about people who were familiar to the child doing so.  What is more, the contribution of others in this regard was borne of love or fellow-feeling—something that no amount of money can purchase.

If I have the love of fellow-feeling for you and your family, then I will be motivated to do things on your behalf in ways that far exceed in anything that I might do if helping you were merely a form of employment.  I will be motivated to make sacrifices which, by definition, would not be a part of my job description.  In part, this is the difference between loving one’s job and seeing it merely as a means to having a pay check.  It is one thing to be committed to getting a pay check; it is quite another to be committed to your well-being.  It is wishful thinking to suppose that the former suffices to occasion the latter.  Not so.

The African proverb had nothing whatsoever to do with getting a paycheck.  For it would never have occurred to the denizens of this or that African village that the good of raising a child and being a role-model for her or him was something that could be relegated to a form of employment on the order of a human version of a drive-by car wash.

There is, to be sure, a difference between the love of one’s parents and the caring support of fellow-members of a village.  However, both have one thing in common, namely an interest in the child’s well-being that is borne purely of the heart.  Accordingly, parents could count on fellow members of the village to be thus motivated in both correcting their children and encouraging their children.  What is more, fellow-members of the village could count on parents to have thus understanding.  Against, this backdrop: non-parents could offer encouragement and constructive criticism.  They could even provide measured chastisement.

This is the social backdrop against which the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” is to be understood.  This social context, then, is not one where parents defend their children as being right no matter what.  It is not one where parents bristled at the thought of anyone offering constructive criticism of their children, to say nothing of actually chastising their children.

Nowadays, the situation is this.  On the one hand, children are raised to fear and distrust nearly every adult stranger.  On the other hand, teachers and mentors and members of the community are afraid to say anything critical or to offer any form of correction, lest they be sued or directly attacked by the child’s family.  Not only that, moral standards and ideals of excellence are seen as social relics of a past, and so need to be discarded.  Everyone knows nowadays that the smallest and most polite correction of someone else’s child, however warranted the correction, is apt to unleash the wrath of the child’s parents rather than an expression of appreciation for having corrected the child.  This most certainly is not the sentiment that gave rise to the African proverb.

So, unless I am missing something, it seems to me manifestly clear that we have destroyed whatever semblance of a village that could be effective in raising a child.  That is, we have destroyed the sentiments that would allow for any semblance of the virtues that was characteristic of the village.

Whatever else is true, the proverb did not think of parental love or the village as occasioning utter self-indulgence on the child’s part.  The village had a conception of the good; and the parents of the community, along with the help of their fellow-members of the village, saw to it that the children of the village embraced that conception of the good.  That was the proverb in action.

It might be supposed that I am surreptitiously inveighing against government programs.  Not really.  I am, in fact, drawing attention to something else.  The village that raises a child presupposes a certain kind of moral climate.  No matter how small or how large, a climate of vice will have deleterious effect upon the child, whereas a climate of moral and intellectual excellence will have a salubrious effect.

Again the village that raises a child presupposes both decency and trustworthiness on the part of the members of that community, as well as a public conception of the good that is widely embraced.  Government supported programs that do not embodies these virtues will not succeed in being any semblance of a village that makes a child’s life the richer for being a member of it.

Nothing on the face of this earth can replace love and goodwill and a widely embraced set of values.  The care be no doubt that the people of the various African villages that gave rise to the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” understood this rather like they understood that fishing and hunter was necessary in order to eat and to live.  Nowadays, we modern folks generally do not fish and hunt except for recreation.

Most unfortunately, it is also the case that we modern folks cannot seem to grasp the truth that without love and goodwill and a widely embraced set of values, we have no chance whatsoever of being a society that gives to our children the gifts of excellence, both moral and intellectual, that makes for a stable and good society in perpetuity.

It seems to me that only a fool would reject the principle of equal pay for equal work.  Likewise, if in fact a person actually does the job, then the issue of whether the individual can do the job is a settled matter.  Whatever the job might be: if a person measures up to the excellence required in order to do the job well, then it must be accepted that the individual can do the job well.  So, in this regard there is no one who is more of a staunch feminist than I am.

But equality is one thing.  Power is another.  And it seems to me of late that talk about gender equality on the part of some women is none other than a subterfuge for amassing power.  Indeed, if there is one sure sign that what we have is none other than pure ideology it is when one side is always right.  For how can it be that anyone is always right about anything?  I mean the simple truth is that we are not always right about ourselves.  So I cannot even begin to make sense of how it turns out that women are always right about women and that a man who should dare question what a woman thinks is wrong, if not altogether evil.

But if there is one area in which it seems to me manifestly clear that feminism is increasingly about none other than power rather than equality, it is in the area of children.

With regard to children, women have always had the upper-hand.  This is because the prevailing view has been that the mother is by nature the better parent.  So in a divorce, the woman was automatically awarded the children.  The man got to visit his own children.

Of course, I must acknowledge the reality that many women have been abandoned by the men who impregnated them.  There is no gainsaying the tremendous injustice that these women have endured.

But times have changed.  On the one hand, women are increasingly making it clear that they are just as capable as men of being indifferent to the well-being of their children.  On the other, the courts are making it increasingly more difficult for men to bail out.  What is more, and this gets to the very heart of the matter, more and more men want to be there for their children.  And there is the rub.

It turns out that when it comes to men having access to their children, there are way too many women who want to have it both ways.  Of course, they want the man to provide child-care payments.  After all, it is

his baby, as they are quick to remind him.  But at the very same time they seem to think that it is their right to limit the man’s access to his very own child.

I am hearing more and more stories of men who have to fight tooth and nail in order to obtain access to their children.  And guess what: the courts are slow to rule in favor of these men.  And therein lies my disgust with some of what feminism is about.  For somehow, it turns out that the woman has a kind of moral immunity in this regard.  The fact that she is keeping the child from having a rich interaction with her or his father is deemed of little or no significance.

Surely, this is a case of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The poignancy here lies in the fact some aspects of feminism has more or less made the man an accessory; for it is insisted by many that a child does not really need a dad.  Indeed, it is in the interest of woman having power to insist upon this; though, to be sure, they cannot manage without child-care support.

Now, there is a line of reasoning that goes like this: X has suffered enough at the hands of Y.  So it is now X’s turn to have X’s way with Y.  For X, we may substitute, for instance, women or blacks.  When there has been enough suffering on a group’s part, I can certainly manage to understand the occasional psychological appeal of this line of thought.  What I cannot understand, though, is actually embracing it.  For whatever this thought amounts to, it most certainly does not amount to either justice or a form of equality.  Why, this line of reasoning amounts to none other than revenge itself.

The feminism that I first encountered was about justice and equality.  Most assuredly, an aspect of feminism has mutated into a moral monster that is about extracting revenge and amassing power.

I have never met a child who did not want a father or a father figure in her or his life.  To be sure, there are children who get on in life without that.

But flourishing in spite of a psychological pain does not trivialize the reality of that pain.  There are woman who have gone on to do phenomenal things notwithstanding the fact that they were raped.  What hardly follows from this is that rape is not the horrible experience we rightly take to be.  What follows is that these women were blessed to be able to move on with their lives in truly remarkable ways.

Having a dad is rather like that.  People can get on without them.  But everyone wishes, albeit to varying degrees and in varying ways, that things were otherwise.

It is mean-spirited and ever so duplicitous of women to talk about equality between women and men, to insist that men step up to the plate and fulfill their financial obligations towards their children, and then to turn around and declare men irrelevant to the lives of their very children own.

Now, I am already in hot water for having asserted that every child wants a dad.  But we might notice something.  We should be very weary of our declarations about what is good for children, when there is a one-to-one alignment with our own interests as adults.  If it is really the child’s interests that we taking to heart, then it has to turn out that sometimes what is good for the child is out of step with what is good for ourselves.  That is what it means to take seriously the child or any other person as a separate moral entity.

There can be good reasons why children do not live with one parent or the other.  For there are many parents, both female and male, who are abusive.  Living with two parents of the same gender undoubtedly beats, living with an abusive parent regardless of the sex of the parent.  But do we ever have a good reason to deny a child access to a parent merely in the name of our own ideology?  The answer to that question most certainly has to be a resounding “No”.  And this essay is about that moral reality.

There is much about feminism that I roundly embrace.  The lives of all us are richer for the presence of women in walks of live from which they were once upon a time excluded.  Most importantly, the lives of women are richer.

But children should never be pawns in our political battles.  And for the record, I am quite consistent here.  I do not like it all when anti-abortionists have their children carrying or wearing anti-abortion placards just as I do not like it when those opposed to homosexuality have their children wearing or carrying placards denouncing homosexuality.

For me children are sacred.  And it follows from that simple truth that we must never, under any circumstances whatsoever, use children to gain political victories.  To the extent that various feminist quarters engage in that sort of behavior, then we have an aspect of feminism that is morally despicable, and so entirely unworthy of our respect.