Moral Health

For many, the idea of God’s existence flounders with the problem of evil.  You know the argument: How could an omniscient, omni-benevolent, and omnipotent God have created creatures, namely us human beings, who are capable of committing so much evil?  And the argument that human beings possess freewill does not seem to cut it.  After all, God has freewill and He does commit evil.  So why didn’t he create human beings who are rather like himself: equally free but not in the least bit inclined to commit evil?

Significantly, I am one of the few theists who does not quite hold that God is omnipotent.  And I actually think that the Bible itself lends some credence to this line of thought.  Recall the story of Job, where Satan challenges God.  It is striking that God does not just do away with Satan.  And in the New Testament, we are told that Satan is ultimately punished.  But once more, God does not just do away with Satan.  Of course, I am not God.  But I have always thought that if I were He, the existence of Satan would surely come to an end.  There would be no point in keeping around the very embodiment of evil, namely Satan himself.

But I want to talk about an entirely different matter in this blog-entry.  As is well-known, theology has always had some difficulty with human sexuality.  Every now and then I think to myself that if there is one kind of behavior more than any other that supports the view that human beings are creatures of evolution, it is the behavior of sex itself.

The issue is not that of being a prude about sex.  No, like any psychologically healthy being, I think to myself: Sex is good.  What I find intriguing, from the standpoint of a divine being bringing this sort of thing about, is how it all works.

Sex involves those body-parts that are used for the elimination of bodily waste.  And if one supposes that oral sex has much to commend it, then we end up with the quite fascinating arrangement where the body-part that is used for food consumption and the body-part that is used for the elimination of bodily waste make for a most marvelous coupling.

What?  How could a being understood as holy through and through—one taken to be holy in every possible way—have conceived of human beings in this way?  Surely, the argument from efficiency won’t do: “We have got these parts here for the elimination of bodily waste, we need to put them to further use; otherwise, they are being under-utilized.  So let’s facilitate a most fortuitous connection between this body part and the body part that is used for food consumption.”

Take deep kissing.  A defining feature of it is the exchange of spit.  It is amazing, is it not, just how much it matters how we describe things.  For if someone were to say “Here, I have got some spit, would you take it?,” we would surely suppose that the person is either joking or a complete idiot.  This is so even between lovers.  Nobody wants to be handed a cup of spit upon returning home.  And the explanation for this most surely is not that “It’s cold”, as we would not warm up to drinking our lover’s spit if it were heated up in the microwave, say  ! ! !

Yet, deep kissing is about exchanging spit if it is about anything at all.  No one claims that she or he has found a way to enjoy all the physical effects of deep kissing all the while avoiding all the spit.

So once again: Just how is that an entirely holy being managed to create a human body that is given to this sort of behavior?

Animals, of course, are a non-issue.  They do not have a conception of themselves.  Certainly, sanitation as we understand it does not exist among animals, as the animal behavior of licking themselves clean makes abundantly clear.

No doubt every human parent has used a little spit to remove a spot of a child’s face.  No such parent, however, has supposed that a spit-bath via the tongue would be the way to clean a child’s entire body.  Nor again do we think to clean ourselves in this way.  And guess what, this should come as no surprise.  Why?  Because we typically think of using our mouths to clean various areas of the body downright repulsive.

With sex, then, we do with our mouths under one description that which under a different description, namely washing our bodies, we would deem to be absolutely repulsive if we used our mouths.

From the standpoint of how we use our body parts, evolution makes infinitely more sense than the idea of a divine being fashioning the human body.  Built into evolution is a certain level of efficiency.  So it is not at all out of the question that some of the same body-parts might be used for both the elimination of bodily waste and intimate sexual behavior.  And as mere animals, the issue of spit as such is a non-issue.

I have just mentioned the word “intimate”.  And this further perplexes me from the standpoint of the human body being fashioned by God.

Nowadays, of course, it is understood by all save those afflicted with some form of moral rigor mortis that the height of intimacy occurs with sexual behavior.  But intimacy thus understood is a form of deep, deep affirmation.  It is a profound psychological act whereby we eliminate boundaries in order to achieve a depth of affirmation that cannot be achieved otherwise.  Under this description sex is most majestic.  And the idea of two beings becoming one, via the act of sex, waxes rhapsodic in our mind.

Alas, this ever so rhapsodic act almost seems to require a kind of schizophrenia on our part; and this is precisely because it involves the use of body-parts about which we conceive of as having quite radically different functions: the elimination of bodily waste, on the one hand, and food consumption, on the other.

It is difficult to imagine that an omniscient being thinking: “I have got it.  I have got a way to take human intimacy to unparalleled heights.  All we have to do is have the body-parts that are used for the elimination of bodily waste and the body-parts that are used for food consumption operate in tandem with one another during sex.”

This may reveal a failure of my imagination—a profound form of mental fatigue.  But I keep thinking to myself that a divine being whose powers are without limit would have hit upon a quite different approach to human intimacy.  I mean, if God indeed fashioned human beings in the way that we are, one has to ask: What was He thinking when He thought about human intimacy?”

So when I reflect upon the history of ideas, it is no mystery to me that some of the great religious thinkers had so much difficulty reconciling human sexual behavior with idea that human beings were fashioned by a holy being who possesses all power.  It is not much that they were prudes, as it is often thought nowadays.  Rather, it is that rightly saw how difficult it is to make sense of the idea that God himself created human beings with the very thought that the body parts should have the radically dual function that they have.  When one tries to makes sense of it all, one quite naturally asks: “What, on earth or in heaven’s name, was He thinking?”

Evolution, by contrast, is not a thinking entity.  It is not an entity at all.  It is a mindless process.  So the radically dual-function of bodily parts is no challenge to its efficacy at all, except that it is astounding that the majesty of it all operates only among human beings.

Is it right to suppose that God ought to have produced a quite different kind of human being?  Or, do we once more resort to “this is one of the mysteries of God?”  Alternatively, one could argue that the dual functionality of body-parts speaks to the extraordinary majesty of God, as it seems woefully unlikely that we human beings would have designed ourselves in this way.  But then talk of we human beings designing ourselves is already just so much nonsense, which might also be the case with this blog-entry.

Of course, I need not tell you that professors are human, too.  What I want to draw attention to, however, is one aspect of that humanity, namely the tendency to become bitter.  What might occasion bitterness on a professor’s part?  The answer is quite simple: The failure to achieve the academic heights dreamed about in graduate school.  Anyone professor who attended a high-powered graduate program dreamed of one day becoming one of the major trend-setters in her or his field: the subject of untold dissertations, journal articles, and even the chapters of books.

The academic world is an exceedingly competitive one, however; and most graduate students—even from high-powered graduate program—never go on to become one of the trend-setters in their field—a superstar in the field, as we say.  And it is this reality that is very fertile soil for the growth of bitterness on the part of professors.

Rather than accepting the fact that she or he will not become a major trend-setter in her or his field, the professor aches over the fact and starts blaming one thing or person and then another.  Worse, the professor may even fail to acknowledge that things are nonetheless going rather well in her or his career, although she or he is not a trend-setter.  After all, the choice is not to be a superstar or nothing at all. (more…)

So I asked my class: “What topic would you like to discuss next: Friendship or Affirmative action?”  The overwhelming majority voiced their preference for the former.  Now, the interesting question is: Why?  Since most of my students are white, one thought might be that most are racists and did not want to here anything about the demands of justice with regard to the wrongs committed in the past and what is owed to those who have been wronged.  Somehow, I do not think that this is the explanation.

Another explanation related to the one that I have just offered is that since I am a black, the last thing that most of my white students wanted was yet another upbraiding about how blacks have been the victims of injustices on the part of whites.  This is not altogether out of the question, since students do not know my views; and it would not be implausible, given the climate of campuses nowadays, to suppose that a black professor must certainly be in favor of affirmative action.  After all, a great many white professors profess to be in favor of affirmative action.  So surely a black professor must be.  Well, I do not think that this explanation is quite right, either.

The explanation that I shall offer for the preference of the topic of friendship over the topic of affirmative action is related to the first two in only a roundabout way.

The topic of affirmative action is a morally loaded subject, especially in university circles; and that typically precludes honest discussion of the sort that John Stuart Mill envisioned.  Even if no one quite says it outright, there is often lots and lots of innuendo to the effect that anyone who opposes affirmative action harbors racist sentiments.  And professors typically do nothing at all to dissuade students from entertaining such a view.

Friendship, by contrast, is a morally rich subject, but not a morally loaded one.  People can differ sharply about friendship without implying that the other is morally unfit in someway.  Inspiring thought and deep commitments can be expressed without being morally derisive of others.

A rich discussion of affirmative action is invariably combative; a rich discussion of friendship is more apt to be nurturing than not.

It is no secret that, under the guise of open discussion, classrooms in the university have in many cases become something akin to centers of indoctrination.  It is easy to miss this because calling someone a racist travels under the banner of free speech.

What is ignored is that the charge of racism has great rhetorical force; and only a most eloquent speaker is likely to be able to diffuse its force.  As a result, the charge of racism tends to be rather effective in silence people.  The charge of racism, whether just or not, amounts to a form of rhetorical coercion.

This, I think, lies at the heart of why so many students voiced a preference for the topic of friendship over that of affirmative action.

With the topic of friendship, students can freely express their differences and make mistakes in articulating their view without having to worry about being the object of what I have called rhetorical coercion.  And that can be a genuine learning experience.

Rhetorical coercion, by contrast, does not make for a genuine learning experience, however much note taking there might be.  Instead, rhetorical coercion occasions masterful memorization and regurgitation.  With these, we have only the appearance of learning—as opposed to genuine learning.

Again, with affirmative action there are only two relevant positions that a person can take: for or against.  Thus, the battle lines get drawn very quickly.  With friendship, on the other, there is a multitude of very interesting positions to be taken; and there are not really any battle lines.  Even if someone were to advance the view that friendship is very much overrated, this would not give rise to a sort of moral battle.  Many would no doubt disagree.  Just so, no one would resort to name calling.

My view, then, is that my students simply wanted to avoid a classroom experience that occasioned rhetorical coercion.

I can imagine someone intoning that I would most certainly not tolerate in the classroom a person defending the views of Nazism, and then noting that I would use all the rhetorical coercive force in my power to silence the person.  Well, that statement seems fair enough.

Still, I would have thought the appropriate parallel to Nazism is slavery ideology—and not the view that affirmative action is wrong.  Perhaps my imagination is a tad too active, but I can offhand think of numerous morally significant differences between someone who opposes affirmative action and someone who embraces slavery ideology.  I shall mention just one of them.

To believe in slavery ideology is to hold that one group of people should be subordinate to another.  Merely being opposed to affirmative action, however, entails nothing whatsoever of this sort.

There are indeed views not to be tolerated in the classroom.  Committed opposition to affirmative action, however, is a very long ways from falling into the category of being one such view.  Unfortunately, one would not necessarily know that from some of the rhetoric, encouraged or licensed by professors, that takes place in campus classrooms.

Coercive rhetoric?  The has become an art form in the classroom.  Here is another example.  Many of my non-religious colleagues make a point of speaking disparagingly about religion.  Why they almost make a feast out of doing so.  I am quite religious, as the saying goes.  Yet, I barely utter a word about the importance of religion to my students.  Allowing that both sides take themselves to be right, which approach constitutes being more open-minded?  You tell me.

It might be worth concluding this blog-entry by noting that I have not said a single word about what my view is regarding affirmative action or, for that matter, friendship.  But then this essay was never meant to be an excuse to take a stand on either issue, especially the first one.

So I asked my class: “What topic would you like to discuss next: Friendship or Affirmative action?”  The overwhelming majority voiced their preference for the former.  Now, the interesting question is: Why?  Since most of my students are white, one thought might be that most are racists and did not want to here anything about the demands of justice with regard to the wrongs committed in the past and what is owed to those who have been wronged.  Somehow, I do not think that this is the explanation.

Another explanation related to the one that I have just offered is that since I am a black, the last thing that most of my white students wanted was yet another upbraiding about how blacks have been the victims of injustices on the part of whites.  This is not altogether out of the question, since students do not know my views; and it would not be implausible, given the climate of campuses nowadays, to suppose that a black professor must certainly be in favor of affirmative action.  After all, a great many white professors profess to be in favor of affirmative action.  So surely a black professor must be.  Well, I do not think that this explanation is quite right, either.

The explanation that I shall offer for the preference of the topic of friendship over the topic of affirmative action is related to the first two in only a roundabout way.

The topic of affirmative action is a morally loaded subject, especially in university circles; and that typically precludes honest discussion of the sort that John Stuart Mill envisioned.  Even if no one quite says it outright, there is often lots and lots of innuendo to the effect that anyone who opposes affirmative action harbors racist sentiments.  And professors typically do nothing at all to dissuade students from entertaining such a view.

Friendship, by contrast, is a morally rich subject, but not a morally loaded one.  People can differ sharply about friendship without implying that the other is morally unfit in someway.  Inspiring thought and deep commitments can be expressed without being morally derisive of others.

A rich discussion of affirmative action is invariably combative; a rich discussion of friendship is more apt to be nurturing than not.

It is no secret that, under the guise of open discussion, classrooms in the university have in many cases become something akin to centers of indoctrination.  It is easy to miss this because calling someone a racist travels under the banner of free speech.

What is ignored is that the charge of racism has great rhetorical force; and only a most eloquent speaker is likely to be able to diffuse its force.  As a result, the charge of racism tends to be rather effective in silence people.  The charge of racism, whether just or not, amounts to a form of rhetorical coercion.

This, I think, lies at the heart of why so many students voiced a preference for the topic of friendship over that of affirmative action.

With the topic of friendship, students can freely express their differences and make mistakes in articulating their view without having to worry about being the object of what I have called rhetorical coercion.  And that can be a genuine learning experience.

Rhetorical coercion, by contrast, does not make for a genuine learning experience, however much note taking there might be.  Instead, rhetorical coercion occasions masterful memorization and regurgitation.  With these, we have only the appearance of learning—as opposed to genuine learning.

Again, with affirmative action there are only two relevant positions that a person can take: for or against.  Thus, the battle lines get drawn very quickly.  With friendship, on the other, there is a multitude of very interesting positions to be taken; and there are not really any battle lines.  Even if someone were to advance the view that friendship is very much overrated, this would not give rise to a sort of moral battle.  Many would no doubt disagree.  Just so, no one would resort to name calling.

My view, then, is that my students simply wanted to avoid a classroom experience that occasioned rhetorical coercion.

I can imagine someone intoning that I would most certainly not tolerate in the classroom a person defending the views of Nazism, and then noting that I would use all the rhetorical coercive force in my power to silence the person.  Well, that statement seems fair enough.

Still, I would have thought the appropriate parallel to Nazism is slavery ideology—and not the view that affirmative action is wrong.  Perhaps my imagination is a tad too active, but I can offhand think of numerous morally significant differences between someone who opposes affirmative action and someone who embraces slavery ideology.  I shall mention just one of them.

To believe in slavery ideology is to hold that one group of people should be subordinate to another.  Merely being opposed to affirmative action, however, entails nothing whatsoever of this sort.

There are indeed views not to be tolerated in the classroom.  Committed opposition to affirmative action, however, is a very long ways from falling into the category of being one such view.  Unfortunately, one would not necessarily know that from some of the rhetoric, encouraged or licensed by professors, that takes place in campus classrooms.

Coercive rhetoric?  The has become an art form in the classroom.  Here is another example.  Many of my non-religious colleagues make a point of speaking disparagingly about religion.  Why they almost make a feast out of doing so.  I am quite religious, as the saying goes.  Yet, I barely utter a word about the importance of religion to my students.  Allowing that both sides take themselves to be right, which approach constitutes being more open-minded?  You tell me.

It might be worth concluding this blog-entry by noting that I have not said a single word about what my view is regarding affirmative action or, for that matter, friendship.  But then this essay was never meant to be an excuse to take a stand on either issue, especially the first one.

Surprisingly, there appears to be a rather thin line between the ideal of women as equals and the ideal of women as sluts.  Indeed, it seems to me that in some circles there is no line there at all.  This is because for some the celebration of female equality is defined in terms of the freedom of women to be entirely slutty and so to be free of the so-called puritanical hang-ups that used to apply to women.  This line of thought is then supplemented by the idea that women should not be ashamed of their bodies, where not being ashamed of one’s body amounts to the same thing as flaunting it in every respect sexually.

Now, as an aside, it is intriguing to me that this is all countenanced as equality.  Exactly when has it been the case that men flaunted their bodies in public in an unabashedly sexual manner?  They do not do it now.  Nor have they done so in generations of the recent past.  It is true that once upon a time men were supposed to initiate romance and stuff like that.  But that idea, whether good or bad, is quite a long ways from flaunting one’s body in an unabashedly sexual manner.  And to this very day, I see no sign of such a thing on the part of men.

To be sure, men are more concerned these days with bodily appearances, and so with looking fit, than they were in years gone by.  It is simply false, however, that men are more given to flaunting their bodies in an unabashedly sexual manner.  If anything is true, male clothing (in the United States and Canada) has moved in the opposite direction: baggy shirts and pants have become increasingly de rigueur.  Moreover, a man in sufficiently tight-fitting attire is much more likely to be perceived as gay (or at least less masculine) by other men; and that, alone, is one reason why such attire is typically shunned by men.

So the rush on the part of many women to display their bodies is not at all about equality, since that is not what men do now or have done in the modern past.

Now, the observation of the preceding paragraph gets me back to my beginning remarks regarding women as equals and women as sluts.

If men went around dressing in such a way that their sexual arousal was apparent to all, I can imagine that a great many women would regard this as woefully inappropriate.  Indeed, I can even imagine some women characterizing such a behavior as a form of aggression.  The attire would be seen as contributing to men treating women as sex objects.

In the past a slut was understood to be a woman who was primarily interested in being seen as a sex object by men, and so who dressed in a provocative manner to accomplish that end.

The question is this: How has it turned out, with regard to the matter of being sexually provocative in attire, that we have decent and indecent standards of attire for men that are widely embraced, while equality on the part of women is often tied to setting aside standards of decency and indecency in attire for women?

More precisely, the question is this: How has it turned out that equality on the part of women has become so associated with unabashed expressions of sexuality in the attire that women wear?

We can all agree that the idea of a decent woman being clad in an ankle-length dress is absolutely passé.  And we can even allow that such a view of how women should dress was oppressive and sexist.  But how did we get from the rejection of that view to the idea that all most no standards apply to how women dress themselves?  Most significantly, the answer cannot be the desire to be equal with men, since there are now and has been for quite some time clear standards of decency for male attire.

In fact, even with the sagging baggy pants fashion which reveals the wearer’s boxer-shorts there is the simple truth that what gets revealed is a very well-defined part of an article of clothing, namely the waist-band of the boxers and an inch or two more, and not flesh itself.  This is as slutty as men are allowed to get in public, which pales in comparison to how slutty women are allowed to get.

But now notice something: If I am right that there is a difference between women and men in terms of decency with respect to attire, where increasingly women are jettisoning the idea of decency entirely, then we end up with the quite interesting conclusion that this time around it is women who are contributing to their being treated as sex objects by men.

I have yet to meet a decent man who did not distinguish between a woman who makes herself a sex object and one who does not.  I have yet to meet any man who did not distinguish between “getting some” for nothing and not doing so.  Once more, the irony here is that far from obliterating this very distinction so much of what passes for feminism has in fact reinforced it by insisting that the divide between decent and indecent standards for women’s attire is archaic.

Well, the simple truth is that standards of decent versus indecent attire for women will never be archaic for men.  And while it may not be politically correct to call a woman a slut and while every red-blooded male may be fixated with the appearance of more cleavage than clothing, men will always mark the difference between a woman who “gives it away” and one who does not.

It is quick to suppose that this is sexism.  But no: It is the standard of decency as it applies to women, which is not identical in its application to men.  With the male and the female, we have two quite bodily different forms.  It would be silly to think that standards of decency and indecency would apply in exactly the same way to both forms.  After all, they do not apply in exactly the same way with regard to either all males or all females.  Whether we are talking about females or males: decent attire for a young person can be quite inappropriate for a much older person; and attire for one body type may be ever so inappropriate for a quite different body type.

Although it goes without saying that the idea can be abused, the truth of the matter is that, in and of itself, the idea of attire that is becoming and unbecoming has nothing all to do with sexism.  Rather, it is inextricably tied to the idea of respect for the self.

So here is the quite fascinating surprise: It may very well be, when all is said and done, that there is an aspect of feminism that has contributed to men having less respect for women generally.  Women have missed this because men have learnt to be silent.  Alas, silence is a double-edge sword: Silence can certainly mean approval, but it can also mean contempt or resignation.  And when in the matter of romance silence means the latter, then the victory has been too costly.

For an interesting post that is related this one, if only obliquely, see:

“It Takes Two Parents to Raise a Successful, Functioning Child”

On her way to Selma (Alabama), presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to have found Jesus and a southern accent to boot.  Insofar as a human being can be said to have chameleon powers, surely this can be said of her.  Like me, you probably did not know that she could do a southern accident.  And I am equally certain that you did not know that she had deep religious convictions.  But at her speech in Selma, she found one of those old black gospel songs “I don’t feel no ways tired”; and with a southern accent she spoke one of the verses of that song.

Well, the blacks in the audience ate it up.  Never mind that it was painfully obvious that she was trying to mimic a southern accent; and never mind that it is abundantly clear that the words of that gospel song no more resonate with her life than they do with the life of an atheist.

In some circles, this is called hypocrisy.  On the one hand, there is the opaque hypocrite: someone who does not appear as a hypocrite in the eyes of others.  On the other, there is the transparent hypocrite: it is painfully obvious to all that the person is being hypocritical.  At her speech in Selma, only if she were clear glass could it have been more obvious that she was being hypocritical.

But it gets even worse: she was actually mocking her audience.  It is thing to support a cause and to be proud of what people have done in support of that cause.  It is quite another to adopt a mode of self-presentation that implies that there is no distinction between oneself and those who had suffered in support of that cause.

No matter how supportive a man might be of the anti-rape efforts of women, nothing on the face of this earth could justify his dressing like a woman in delivering a speech before an audience of women who have supported the anti-rape cause.  Again, it would never have occurred to gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews from Hitler’s army to present themselves as Jews in terms of attire and mannerisms.

True, they say that imitation is the highest form of flattery.  But there is a very thin line between imitating someone and mocking them.  And Hillary Rodham Clinton crossed that line.

At this juncture, it will no doubt seem that I merely want to excoriate Hillary Rodham Clinton.  But one would be wrong, as should become abundantly clear in what follows.

Now, what intrigues me in all of this is just how receptive her the audience of blacks were.  You could not pay me to applaud anyone who mocked my life and the lives of those who had struggled for a just cause.  Indeed, you could not even pay me to sit and listen to someone who did that.  My integrity and dignity would have compelled me to leave the room.

It is indeed quite amazing to me that blacks who seem to have trouble with a white who sings like Aretha Franklin have no trouble at all with a white who pretends to be cut from the mold of the black church.  Why, it is has taken years for white women to feel comfortable braiding their hair.  And that is just a hairstyle.

In this regard, a deeper blame attaches to the black audience.  After all, Hillary Rodham Clinton was merely playing her audience and she played the audience masterfully.  But my experience has been that people only do what they can think they can get away with doing.

Flirting is a case in point.  At the risk of sounding sexist, every man recognizes the difference between a woman with whom he can easily flirt and one who draws a quite immutable line in the sand.  And experience shows that when a woman does the latter, men will by large respect that line.  I am about as playful as they come, but there is no end to the sorts of things that I will absolutely not do because I am very clear about the moral and personal boundaries, not to be crossed, of those with whom I am interacting.

So where there are boundaries, respect for those boundaries typically follows in their wake.  As one can surmise, then, the real problem was not so much Hillary Rodham Clinton, but the blacks in her audience.

I mean she should not have behaved as she behaved in any case.  But the fact that her audience of blacks was receptive of her behavior reveals mountains about them; and what is reveled is a very, very long ways from being flattering.

There can be no justification for anyone abiding mocking behavior in order to get attention.  When I reflect upon the extraordinarily profound role that the black church played in the advancement of civil rights for blacks, it is despicable that blacks should tolerate anyone masquerading as if she or he had been a part of that struggle or had some legacy rights to that struggle.

I, myself, can only claim gratitude for what took place.  It would be fulsome of me to present myself as having gone through that struggle when the only claim that I have with regard to it is that of being one of its (intended) beneficiaries.

There is a dignity and an appreciation that is appropriate to that struggle and to the role that the black church played in it that absolutely demands the respect of all others, regardless of race or ethnicity.

It is my considered viewed that in effect the behavior of the audience of blacks in the face of Clinton’s manifest hypocrisy reveals to me that the members of that audience fail to have the respect that they should towards that experience.

In visiting Yaad Vashem in Israel or Auschwitz in Poland, one thinks of oneself as walking upon sacred ground.  No one, Jew or gentile gets to make a mockery of the moment while walking upon those grounds.  The civil rights struggle can be understood as a sacred period in American history.  No one is morally entitled to make a mockery of that history.  Not even blacks are entitled to do so in order to advance their self-interests.

You will notice at this point that I have said nothing at all regarding Hillary Clinton’s message.  Her actual message may very well be appropriate and to the point.  Her message could be the right message.  Presentation, however, reveals much about our character.

Hillary Clinton did not in her Selma address humble herself and speak of her profound admiration for those who gave in the successful attempt to reconfigure America.  She did not speak of her gratitude to those who made America a better place.  Nor, again, did she speak to her hope that all Americans would one day grasp the moral debt that they owe to those who gave so dearly of themselves in order to advance the cause of freedom for all.  What a majestic lecture that would have been.  And there is no doubt in my mind that, in giving such a lecture, she could have marvelously animated the blacks in the room—and rightly so.

But no, Hillary Rodham Clinton presented herself as one of the home-grown folks.  And the blacks in the audience was more than a little besotted with her doing so.

To close, I am reminded of the ever so poignant words of Martin Luther King: “A man can’t ride your back unless it is bent”.  Well, the blacks in the Selma audience roundly prostrated themselves, giving Clinton one of the political rides of her life upon their backs.  Clinton should be ashamed of herself, as there are some things that a decent person does not do even if she or can get away with doing them.

But the blacks who bent their backs have shown themselves fit for none other than unqualified moral opprobrium.  They modeled servility in the name of advancing their self-interests.  And there is nothing on the face of this earth that is morally redeeming about that.  And it doesn’t matter whether one is black or white.

We are quintessentially social creatures.  The sense of self that we have is not a matter of some immutable stuff that operates regardless of the circumstances of our social surroundings.  Quite the contrary, it turns out with rare exception that the sense of self that we have is ineluctably tied to our social surroundings.  Another of way of putting the preceding remarks is that there is no robust sense of “I” that unfolds regardless of the social circumstances in which we find ourselves.

No doubt there are exceptions here.  But the exceptions prove the rule.  If we look at history, we can see that most blacks during American slavery did not turn out to be a Frederick Douglass and that most women born in 1867 did not turn out to be a Marie Curie and that most Jews in the Holocaust did not turn out to be an Elie Wiesel.

Now, the social circumstances in which we find ourselves define the expectations of excellence that we have of ourselves; and any adequate account of the expectations of excellence that we have of ourselves also makes references to what counts as acceptable and unacceptable excuses for our inappropriate behavior.  There is an inverse relation between a robust self and acceptable excuses or the absence of excellent behavior: the more robust the self the fewer the acceptable excuses.

Needless to say, it is possible for the self to be robust along one dimension of excellence but not another.  So, a person could have a very robust self with respect to moral excellence but not intellectual excellence or conversely.  There are numerous instances where religious groups seem to satisfy the condition of having an extremely robust self in terms of moral excellence while setting intellectual excellence aside.  In so doing, they speak to the quite significant view that character is more fundamental than intellect.  Surely, there is something right about that.

Now, it is said the mark of any theory is its explanatory power.  I believe that the view that I have advanced has considerable explanatory power, as I shall now try to show.

It is no mystery that on any number fronts, society has become far more harsh than it used to be.  To take two obvious vectors: people are far less polite and considerate and respectful.

Everyone is in a hurry.  But it is not just that everyone is in a hurry; it is that everyone seems to think that her being in a hurry or his being in a hurry justifies crass indifference towards others.  Road rage is an example par excellence of this.  But it gets worse: road rage has been called a psychological disorder.  This is effectively to say that people cannot be held accountable for their road rage behavior.  People do not drive too fast.  Oh no, perish the thought.

People suffer from a psychological condition that impairs their ability to grasp that the speed with which they are driving is so great that they are thereby endangering the lives of other drivers.  And this impairment is no doubt owing to the inability of individuals to properly perceive the connection between the weight of their foot upon the gas peddle and the speed with which the car accelerates.

How could anyone be expected to grasp all of that?

A mere 30 years ago, it would have seemed downright absurd to just about anyone that “impolite driving” had anything to do with a condition from which people suffered.  In those days, people had a very simple name for speeding, namely: irresponsible behavior.  The significant point here is that calling road rage a condition constitutes turning irresponsible behavior into something that is excusable and engendering a set of expectations on the part of the members of society according to which it is unreasonable to expect people to exercise this level of control over their behavior.

Notice here that in chipping away at the robust self here we are systematically legitimating excuses.

As I have intimated on numerous occasions in various of my blog-entries, it is striking that blacks in the 50s and 60s made far more progress towards racial equality than contemporary blacks have made although on every conceivable account blacks in the 50s and 60s had far less than contemporary blacks have.

But the difference is this: Blacks in the 50s and 60s had a far more robust moral self than do contemporary blacks today.  Indeed, if anything is true, it is true that the moral self of society in general has become considerably less robust.

Just so, the black experience here offers a more profound insight than one might suppose.  For if I am right, then that experience shows that mere oppression is not necessarily incompatible with having a robust sense of moral self.  Or, to put the point the other way, it does not follow from the absence of oppression that a people thereby have a moral robust sense of moral self.  Indeed, I have already indicated that it is not just that blacks who have a less robust sense of moral self, this claim can be made of society-at-large.

It is not insignificant that this less robust sense of moral self in society seems to coincide with the decline of religion.  And here, too, the black experience is rather illuminating; for in the midst of racist oppression, religion played a most salubrious role in the lives of blacks, occasioning a most robust sense of moral self on the part of many blacks.

Drawing upon Freud, societal expectations give rise to internalized values.  What our parents expect of us invariably forms our values.  The expectations of society inform the attitudes of our parents.  To be sure, there is not a perfect fit here.  Rather, there is a considerable measure of congruence.  And we have to make adjustment for communities.  Some communities, such as the Amish, tend to be rather closed; and I have already mentioned, religious communities often provide a considerable measure of protection from “outside” influences.

At any event, the point is that it is very rare for persons to leap frog over the expectations of their parents and their community and their society.  So when we have a considerable congruence between these three with regard to moral and intellectual excellences, the only thing that we can reasonably expect is that the internalized values of folks will mirror the corresponding expectations of this triad.

If moral and intellectual excellences are downplayed because there is always a “good excuse” not to excel in these ways, then guess what, people will find always find a “good excuse” not to excel with regard to these matters.  That is, as the self is less robust with regard to these matters, then moral and intellectual excellences will wane.

Equality can be morally and intellectually bankrupt.  And it seems to me that modern democracy has given rise to precisely that.  Freedom shorn of moral and intellectual excellence is not virtuous; and calling such freedom democracy does not make it so.

We are quintessentially social creatures.  The sense of self that we have is not a matter of some immutable stuff that operates regardless of the circumstances of our social surroundings.  Quite the contrary, it turns out with rare exception that the sense of self that we have is ineluctably tied to our social surroundings.  Another of way of putting the preceding remarks is that there is no robust sense of “I” that unfolds regardless of the social circumstances in which we find ourselves.

No doubt there are exceptions here.  But the exceptions prove the rule.  If we look at history, we can see that most blacks during American slavery did not turn out to be a Frederick Douglass and that most women born in 1867 did not turn out to be a Marie Curie and that most Jews in the Holocaust did not turn out to be an Elie Wiesel.

Now, the social circumstances in which we find ourselves define the expectations of excellence that we have of ourselves; and any adequate account of the expectations of excellence that we have of ourselves also makes references to what counts as acceptable and unacceptable excuses for our inappropriate behavior.  There is an inverse relation between a robust self and acceptable excuses or the absence of excellent behavior: the more robust the self the fewer the acceptable excuses.

Needless to say, it is possible for the self to be robust along one dimension of excellence but not another.  So, a person could have a very robust self with respect to moral excellence but not intellectual excellence or conversely.  There are numerous instances where religious groups seem to satisfy the condition of having an extremely robust self in terms of moral excellence while setting intellectual excellence aside.  In so doing, they speak to the quite significant view that character is more fundamental than intellect.  Surely, there is something right about that.

Now, it is said the mark of any theory is its explanatory power.  I believe that the view that I have advanced has considerable explanatory power, as I shall now try to show.

It is no mystery that on any number fronts, society has become far more harsh than it used to be.  To take two obvious vectors: people are far less polite and considerate and respectful.

Everyone is in a hurry.  But it is not just that everyone is in a hurry; it is that everyone seems to think that her being in a hurry or his being in a hurry justifies crass indifference towards others.  Road rage is an example par excellence of this.  But it gets worse: road rage has been called a psychological disorder.  This is effectively to say that people cannot be held accountable for their road rage behavior.  People do not drive too fast.  Oh no, perish the thought.

People suffer from a psychological condition that impairs their ability to grasp that the speed with which they are driving is so great that they are thereby endangering the lives of other drivers.  And this impairment is no doubt owing to the inability of individuals to properly perceive the connection between the weight of their foot upon the gas peddle and the speed with which the car accelerates.

How could anyone be expected to grasp all of that?

A mere 30 years ago, it would have seemed downright absurd to just about anyone that “impolite driving” had anything to do with a condition from which people suffered.  In those days, people had a very simple name for speeding, namely: irresponsible behavior.  The significant point here is that calling road rage a condition constitutes turning irresponsible behavior into something that is excusable and engendering a set of expectations on the part of the members of society according to which it is unreasonable to expect people to exercise this level of control over their behavior.

Notice here that in chipping away at the robust self here we are systematically legitimating excuses.

As I have intimated on numerous occasions in various of my blog-entries, it is striking that blacks in the 50s and 60s made far more progress towards racial equality than contemporary blacks have made although on every conceivable account blacks in the 50s and 60s had far less than contemporary blacks have.

But the difference is this: Blacks in the 50s and 60s had a far more robust moral self than do contemporary blacks today.  Indeed, if anything is true, it is true that the moral self of society in general has become considerably less robust.

Just so, the black experience here offers a more profound insight than one might suppose.  For if I am right, then that experience shows that mere oppression is not necessarily incompatible with having a robust sense of moral self.  Or, to put the point the other way, it does not follow from the absence of oppression that a people thereby have a moral robust sense of moral self.  Indeed, I have already indicated that it is not just that blacks who have a less robust sense of moral self, this claim can be made of society-at-large.

It is not insignificant that this less robust sense of moral self in society seems to coincide with the decline of religion.  And here, too, the black experience is rather illuminating; for in the midst of racist oppression, religion played a most salubrious role in the lives of blacks, occasioning a most robust sense of moral self on the part of many blacks.

Drawing upon Freud, societal expectations give rise to internalized values.  What our parents expect of us invariably forms our values.  The expectations of society inform the attitudes of our parents.  To be sure, there is not a perfect fit here.  Rather, there is a considerable measure of congruence.  And we have to make adjustment for communities.  Some communities, such as the Amish, tend to be rather closed; and I have already mentioned, religious communities often provide a considerable measure of protection from “outside” influences.

At any event, the point is that it is very rare for persons to leap frog over the expectations of their parents and their community and their society.  So when we have a considerable congruence between these three with regard to moral and intellectual excellences, the only thing that we can reasonably expect is that the internalized values of folks will mirror the corresponding expectations of this triad.

If moral and intellectual excellences are downplayed because there is always a “good excuse” not to excel in these ways, then guess what, people will find always find a “good excuse” not to excel with regard to these matters.  That is, as the self is less robust with regard to these matters, then moral and intellectual excellences will wane.

Equality can be morally and intellectually bankrupt.  And it seems to me that modern democracy has given rise to precisely that.  Freedom shorn of moral and intellectual excellence is not virtuous; and calling such freedom democracy does not make it so.