Moral Health

In terms of an outward expression, there are few gestures that have greater moral gravity than appearing before the Wailing Wall wearing a yarmulke.  As the photo below indicates, this is precisely what Barack Obama did 23 July 2008.  As it turns out, we know the contents of the note and prayer that he wedged into the wall: “Give me the wisdom to do what is right and just”; “protect my family”.  I am so very happy that the contents of the note do now overshadow the symbolic significance of Obama’s appearing before the Wailing Wall.

Insofar as a public figure wanted to indicate that he or she had substantial pro-Israeli sentiments or, at the very least, pro-Jewish sentiments, the person could not pick a better way to do that without uttering a word than by appearing before the Wailing Wall wearing a yarmulke.  There are not enough words to do justice to the symbolic significance of that act.

Thus, Barack Obama’s views regarding the place of Israel in the Middle East appear to be more akin to President George Bush’s views than most individuals seem to realize.  In particular, Obama’s simple gesture of appearing before the Wailing Wall stands in very sharp contradistinction to former President Jimmy Carter’s words and deeds.

Yet, I suspect that many people would have thought that Obama’s views about the Middle East are much closer to Carter’s than to Bush’s.  I certainly had thought that.

Since we know that Obama is far from being an idiot, there are but two ways to read his behavior. (more…)

The very idea that gaining or losing weight is contagious is utterly preposterous.  At any rate, the way in which gaining or losing weight is contagious is rather like the way in which a smile is contagious.  So when a study by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, entitled “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years, appears in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (26 July 2007), which claims that gaining or losing weight is contagious, what we know is that this characterization is none other than a metaphorical way of speaking.  What we have here is not an instance of contagion, but something more pernicious, which I shall identify below.

What is true, of course, is that most of us are influenced significantly by the social network with which we identity.  This truth is quite significant.  However, this truth is a very long ways from being identical to the claim that gaining or losing weight is contagious.  Diseases can be contagious, patterns of behavior cannot be.

What concerns me is the language of the study.  Consider.  It is certainly true that I am more likely to laugh around friends who laugh a lot than around friends who frown a lot.  In that sense we can say, metaphorically, that laughing is contagious.  But wait a minute.  Suppose I join my friends for an evening out and they become horrendously drunk, whereas I remain sober.  In that drunken state, my friends witness a child being brutally beaten and start laughing uncontrollably.  Would their laughing excuse my laughing?  I should hope not.  If while fully sober, I also start laughing at the child being physically abused, then my behavior is without question morally despicable.  Suppose that in their drunken state my friends join in and start hitting the child.  If anything is true, it most certainly is true that my joining in would be utterly inexcusable.

The point of the preceding story is exceedingly simple: Immoral behavior on the part of our friends does not excuse morally inappropriate behavior on our part.  There is a term for this sort of independence.  It is called free will.  Admittedly, free admits of degrees.  There is a straightforward sense in which an entirely inebriated person has less free will.  And if I am bound and gagged, then my free will has been reduced even more.  I am even prepared to allows that certain sorts of mental states, such as severe depression may reduce a person’s free will.

But here is my question:

If all my friends are fat, exactly how is it supposed to follow that truth that I am now rather likely to become fat in a way that is analogous to the fatness on the part of my friends being contagious?

In what follows, I am now going to no doubt offend a few folks.  But let me admit at the outset that I am rather fortunate in that I have never really had to worry about being fat.  Indeed, I can in general take very little credit for being thin.  Well, perhaps that is not quite right.  My being thin is may be more tied to my lifestyle than first meets the eye.  I take the steps and I walk a lot.  As a matter of principle, I walk up the steps unless I am going pass the fifth floor.  Even in a steep public subway system such as the one found in Washington, D.C., I use the steps rather than follow the crowd and ride the escalator.  Nature may have given me an edge, but I have adopted quite a few modes of being in my life that reinforce the edge that nature has given to me.

So back to my question:

If all my friends are fat, exactly how is it supposed to follow that truth that I am now rather likely to become fat in a way that is analogous to the fatness on the part of my friends being contagious?

First of all, how often do we see a fat person and say to ourselves: “I sure as hell want to look like that fat person!”  Or, “If I could move like that fat person moves, I would be in 7th heaven!”  To be sure, I have seen a few heavy-set people who, as we say, know how to carry their weight.  But I have never looked upon such a person with envy, because I found the individual’s body-size to a model of what I might want in a body.  By contrast, I have seen a fair number of women look at me with considerable appreciation (which more than suffices to keep me walking up those steps).  I have seen a few women take give me that look of appreciation although I would hardly characterize myself as handsome.

This is why I have the question that I have.  To the put the question, another way: Why isn’t it that fat people repulse us rather than “cause” us to become fat?  The language is harsh, but it is very important to speak that way.  We may very well be—indeed, we should be—nice and kind and considerate to a person who is fat, but thinking that such a person is physically attractive seems rather implausible.

So if the study in the NEJM is correct, then what we are to believe is that being around fat people inclines us to acquire a body form that we actually find repulsive.

The thinking behind the study, by Christakis and Fowler, is presumably that what have here must constitute a contagion; otherwise, thin people who are around fat people would not become fat.

Alas, there is a much simpler explanation that draws its inspiration from Milgram’s classic work, Obedience to Authority, namely that human beings do not have the moral fiber that one would think they have, given how much they clamor for freedom; accordingly, we often use the unacceptable behavior of others as an excuse for like unacceptable behavior on our part.  Hence, the more fat people we associate with the more likely we are to excuse our becoming fat.  By contrast, if our friends become thin, then the more difficult it becomes to excuse our own behavior.  So we, too, become thin.

The explanation, in the end, is simply that we fail to take full responsibility for our own lives.  There is nothing remotely resembling any kind of causal relation between one person’s being fat and another person (a non-family member) being fat.  So we can’t possibly have a contagion in this sort of case.

Alas, if the study is right, then things simply do not bode well for democracy.  For what the study portends is that human beings are far more like lemmings than not, in that we follow others even when the course leads to our own demise.  Otherwise, no one should get fat owing merely to being around fat friends, precisely because there is nothing whatsoever about the behavior of fat friends that is even remotely appealing—if, that is, one is a healthy person who is not fat.  The language of “contagion” masks this insight.

There is not a single dimension of human behavior from sexual attraction to sheer movement that comes even remotely close to suggesting that being fat is the way to go.  What is more, no one goes to bed skinny and wakes up fat.  Accordingly, it is not as if there are not clear warning signs: like the entire former wardrobe no longer fits.  So if merely being around fat friends is all it takes to render us unable to control our becoming fat, then we human beings are indeed quite a pitiful species.

The NEJM study is a profound indictment of the lack of will on the part of human beings to pursue their own moral and physical well-being.  Most changes in life are not nearly as straightforward, on every dimension, as is becoming fat.  So if all it takes to lose our will to remain non-fat is being surrounded by fat friends, as the study suggests, then much of the moral behavior that we should exhibit towards one another has simply no chance at all of remaining a part of the social fabric of our lives.  That is what the study in the NEJM really shows.  And that is frightening.  Indeed, the proof of just how morally vapid we have become is that the authors of the study should characterize becoming fat as a contagion.

For the record, I understand that for some people there are significant health issues with respect to weight.  Nothing I have said is incompatible with or contravenes that truth.  But then for these people, although being fat is a medical problem, it is not at all about being fat being contagious.  Nothing I have said pertains to individuals with health problems of this nature.

American democracy has come to be about entitlements and only about entitlements.  Everyone is entitled to just about everything.  In particular, American democracy has come to be entirely shorn of gratitude.  I hold a very simple thesis, namely that democracy shown of gratitude will flounder.  This is because few things nourish a sense of community—fellow feeling, if you wlll—like gratitude.  Now, it might be thought that being rightly entitled to something excludes having gratitude for that the thing one receives.  Not so, however, as the case of parental love magnificently shows.

If there are any indisputable truths in a world of uncertainty and relativism, it is that parents ought to love their children and that children are entitled to being the undisputed object of the love of their parents.  Yet, if anything else is also true, it is that every child who has been the undisputed object of the love of her or his parents should have a deep and abiding sense of gratitude towards them.  When parental love it at its best, there may not be any form of gratitude that can rightly surpass it.  Once more, though, I point out that children are surely entitled to the love of their parents.

Democracy shorn of gratitude becomes a plethora of citizens who have little or no concern for one another accept for what they can get from others.  In this respect, the language of rights has done enormous damage to a sense of fellow-feeling.  For the language of rights have become synonymous with what people are owed, where the sense of being owed is privileged in a way that allows for no regard whatsoever for the goodwill with which people have served up what is owed.

Democracy without gratitude exemplifies what I call the manna-from-heaven mentality.  No one gives up something so that others may have something.  Rather, it all just falls from heaven.

A marvelous example of this is the claim on the part of some non-citizens that they have a right to become citizens of the United States, as if there is something called the government with endless resources.  Never mind that we are having trouble doing right by those who are already citizens.

Sometimes the elderly present themselves as if they have a right to anything and everything that they might need in terms of medical assistance.  Of course, any society should make an effort to help its elderly.  That truth, however, does not change the fact that helping the elderly means that some resources cannot go elsewhere. Even for the elderly, there are no funds that descend from the heavens.

This way of looking at things point to why a democracy at its best must also be one in which gratitude abounds.  For it is necessarily the case that decent law-abiding citizens sustain the well-being of other members of society.  Even those who merely “put up” with the laws are sustaining the well-being of others.  And sometimes in life, a person deserves a lot of credit for doing just that: “putting up” with the behavior or law in question.

The goodwill of citizens makes for a salubrious moral climate in which to live.  And things have gone terribly wrong when we have become so fixated with our own self-interests that we cannot see the goodwill of others.

Interestingly, teaching provides a marvelous example in this regard. Nothing is more obvious than that if a student earned an “A” for a course, then the instructor should give the student an “A” for the course.  Yet, there is all the difference in the world between an instructor took delight in the student’s learning and who was marvelously supportive and encouraging of the student, on the one hand, and an instructor who to no avail did everything permissible to see to it that the student would fail.  Gratitude is owed in the first case although the student earned the grade.

A society shorn of gratitude is a less decent society.  More importantly, it is a society that is less able to surmount the difficulties that confront it.  This is because from the outset people do not see one another as allies but as hostile competitors instead.

When we experience gratitude towards another we are motivated to act on that person’s behalf even we do not in any way have to do so.  There is a fundamental level with which we identify with that person.

The United States has become the land of rights-assertion.  We are owed one thing after another—almost as it were ours in the first place; and those who do not rush to give us what we take ourselves to be owed are bastards.  That is, in our characterization of that to which we have a right, we have deemed the other a hostile component.

It is a simple truth that people who have masterfully cultivated hostility towards one another are in no position at all to confront in a united way the problems that could be resolved if only people would work together in unison.  And while some problems can be solved through fierce competition, some of the deepest problems have their solution only in the unity that comes with fellow-feeling.  Defeating the Nazis, for instance, was not tied to fierce competition, but to nations working in unison with one another.

In one straightforward sense, gratitude is so much weaker than love.  Yet, like the warm sunlight that comes through a window, experiences of gratitude remain ever so memorable and always far more expansive.  It is not possible for everyone to have feelings of love for one another.  But universal gratitude, or something very close to that, is very much a possibility.

The America of John F. Kennefy spoke to that possibility.  By contrast, the American of the present has lost the will to speak to that possibility.  Doing so would resonate with so very few.  It is no wonder that America is floundering.

China is an economic power.  China also provides an extraordinary lesson to ethnic groups in the United States who are forever talking about being oppressed as victims of this or that form of racism.  China’s lesson is a very simple one: “Do you really wish that others who are not of “your kind” to take you seriously?  Well, it suffices to become an economic power with which “the other kind” must contend, and your wish will be fulfilled by “those others” in spite of themselves.  For you see, the rest of the world has to take China seriously whether the rest of the world wants to or not.  Both China and the rest of the world know precisely that.

I have no interest in arguing whether racism of this or that kind still exists in the United States.  As far as I can see all sorts of people dislike one another.  Blacks and Asians are not exactly blood brothers in spirit.  Cooperation between the two groups is virtually non-existent.  Blacks are jealous of Asians and Asians despise Blacks.  And while there is presumably some bond between Latinos and Blacks, that bond is more fragile than both sides seem willing to acknowledge.

If one takes Whites out of the picture entirely, there remains more than enough hostility between the remaining groups to keep everyone on edge. (more…)

The precipitous decline of America can attributed to many things.  One of them, as it happens, is equality.  Of course, there is no formal tension between equality and excellence.  However, the way in which these two vectors play themselves out in America is utterly devastating.  This is for two reasons.  One is that the mere charge of racism has come to be none other than an extremely powerful political and social tool that has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality of an actual act of racism.  And the related factor is that once this charge is made against an individual, then he or she is effectively defenseless even if the charge has no basis in reality.

Consequently, people have become so concerned with making sure that the charge of racism cannot be made against them that they will tolerate mediocrity rather than insist upon excellence.  This is because in the present politically correct social climate it is way too easy for the mere insistence upon excellence to be construed as having racist motives: The “You-would-not-have-criticized me-if-I-had-been-white” claim.  If one is the boss who is white how does one prove that such a claim is just so much nonsense?  The answer, quite frankly, is that with rare exception one cannot.  One such exception is that one has been publicly insistent upon the requirement in question and one has publicly criticized whites who have failed to meet that requirement.

Let it be the case, however, that a black or a Latino is doing something that is obviously wrong, but about which there has not been any public announcements, and a white criticizes that person.  Well, in that case all hell is apt to break out, because the white will invariably be seen as having acted from racist motives; and there is simply no way to diffuse things.  Herein lies the reason why excellence has taken a back seat to equality in America.  After all, anything other than praise of a black or a Latino by a white is apt to result in that white being called a racist by the person.  All that is needed is for the black or Latino to say “It just feels to me like that white person was being racist”.

In this regard, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have been key players in undermining excellence in America.  Anyone with an ounce of commonsense surely realizes that these two are more interested in maintaining their power base than promoting excellence among blacks.  And both of them use the charge of racism as none other than a way to do that.  The case of the three white guys at Duke University who were accused of raping a black woman stands as a most poignant case in point.  Sharpton and Jackson were no more interested in the facts of the case than I have been in becoming a cockroach.

We now know for a fact that the charge of rape was entirely without merit.  We also know for a fact that neither Sharpton nor Jackson have shown an ounce of remorse for the train wreck occasioned by them of the lives of the three young white men.  There is no indication whatsoever that either Sharpton or Jackson said to black communities: “We can’t let this sort of thing happen again”.

In this regard, I should also mention that white liberals are also a fundamental part of the problem.  For them, supporting the charge of racism, no matter how implausible it may be, is a kind of psychological redemption ticket—their way of proving to themselves that they are not racist.  Likewise, white liberals have never asked for any accountability with respect to the charge of racism; nor were they apologetic for riding the train that wrecked the lives of the three white Duke University students.  But, of course, white liberals always mean well no matter how much damage they manage to do; and we should not lose sight of that.

For all of his faults, this much is clear: When Martin Luther King made charges of racism, there was no doubt whatsoever that there actually was racism in place.  His charges of racism had credibility.  What is no longer the case nowadays is that charges of racism have credibility.

We had precisely this utter absence of credibility with the Keith Sampson matter in 2007, where a white man was accused of making blacks uncomfortable because he was reading a book about how the Fighting Irish defeated the KKK.  Duh?  A black woman made that charge; and it was upheld by the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI) affirmative action officer, who is also a black.  And once more, white liberal faculty members were essentially silent.  Is this not incredulous or what?

The Keith Sampson matter at IUPUI shows that the charge of racism can be made and entertained even when a white person is engaging behavior that is unequivocally the very opposite of racist behavior.  All it takes is for a black or a Latino to assert that she or he feels uncomfortable.

Against this social -backdrop, a white person would have to be a fool to insist upon excellence when it comes to a black or a Latino.  Insisting upon excellence would make about as much sense as putting one’s hand in a fire and hoping that one’s hand will not be burned.

Excellence is impossible if constructive criticism is ruled out of court.  And constructive criticism has floundered in the United States.  On the one hand, white people are rightly afraid of the charge of racism.  On the other hand, way too many black and Latino individuals seem to think that any criticism of them by another black or Latino shows a lack of solidarity with them on the part of the black or Latino.  Indeed, some would go so far as to accuse the person of being self-hating or harboring a desire to be white.

The issue is not whether racism in various forms of subtlety still exists.  We can assume that it does.  The problem, rather, is that nowadays there is next to no room for constructive criticism to be made by a white of a black or a Latino without the charge of racism being raised.  And one untoward consequence of this is that across the board the demand for excellence has been progressively receding into the background.  After all, if excellence cannot be demanded of one group, then why bother demanding it of another group?

Equality of shorn of excellence is utterly vapid and lacking in substance.  What it produces is not even a shadow of the better world for which folks like King hoped and struggled.  There is a very straightforward sense in which the black community is worse-off than it once was.  The argument of this essay can readily explain that fact.  No people can flourish in the absence of constructive self-criticism.  The rejection of the demand for excellence by whites as a form of racism has resulted in the absence of constructive self-criticism on the part of blacks.  This should come as no surprise.

Excellence has no skin color.  It can only be wrong for whites demand excellence of blacks if it is also wrong for blacks to engage in constructive self-criticism, and so for blacks to demand excellence of themselves.

And, of course, constructive self-criticism has become a precious commodity in general.  That is to be expected in a society that has made posturing about race far more important than occasioning the excellence of which human beings are capable.

Notice the following irony.  During slavery, whites claimed that blacks lacked the wherewithal to achieve the intellectual heights of which whites are capable.  No one dares make such a claim nowadays.  Instead, no one demands of blacks that they achieve the intellectual heights of which all human beings regardless of race are capable.  Slavery, then, was the absence of freedom and, to freedom’s absence, the absence of excellence.  The present is none other than the most poignant contrast of an abundance of freedom on the part of blacks coupled with a most flagrant absence of excellence.

A society whose citizens cannot demand excellence of one another regardless of race, color, or creed or whatever is a society that is fundamentally worse off for all regardless of race, color, or creed or whatever.  Make no mistake about it: That society is America.

There is simply no mystery that gas prices have soared.  However, our indignation to mounting gas prices is most inappropriate.  Here is why.  We have been willing to pay $1.50 for 16 ounces of water (which equals $12 for a gallon of water) and as much as $4 for a cup of Starbucks coffee (which equals $32 for coffee, assuming for the sake of argument 16 ounces a cup of coffee).  Now, think about it.  In view of these prices for water and coffee, why shouldn’t the purveyors of oil raise their prices?  After all, a gallon of gas at $5 per gallon is still cheaper than water purchased $1.50 for 16 ounces; and it is still cheaper than coffee purchased at $4 a cup.

Indeed, from the standpoint of simple rational reflection, the purveyors of oil would be fools not to raise their prices.  For we the consumer have shown ourselves to be utterly silly and thoughtless in our willingness to pay extraordinary prices 16 ounces of water of all things.  (more…)