Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

Click here to see Chris Hedges saying that Operation Rescue is an equivalent of al-Qaeda and that Christian universities that teach Creationism are the equivalent of Wahhabism. This is roughly the most inane thing I’ve seen in months, the sort of thing that you would expect to be uttered by some thoroughly addled conspiracy theorist. But, as it happens, Mr. Hedges is a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and author of the recent bestseller American Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America. Anyway, read the interview: if you can forget how depressing it is to see somebody so smart be so stupid, it’s kind of amusing to see him repeatedly make outrageous claims and then end up more or less admitting, when challenged, that he has no evidence for his assertions. And, clearly, there’s no need to waste your money on the book, if he can’t even come up with enough evidence to back up an assertion or two for an interview.

Sydney

Sydney

There’s an amusing article in The New York Times about an ostensible conflict between biologists and philosophers, sparked by findings of the beginnings of morality in primates. The stuff about the primates is quite interesting: all about chimpanzees drowning in efforts to save each other and other such noble behaviour. But I was getting ready to read what I thought might be an interesting challenge to my philosophical views, given promises early in the article about talk of biologists taking over the philosophers’ domain and so on. I thought the article might even be reasonably well-done, given that it’s by Nicholas Wade, a well-respected science reporter who specializes in precisely this sort of stuff. But either the reporting isn’t done very well or the biologists need to learn something about philosophy before they go making grand claims.

Permit me to pick on a few points. Primatologist Frans de Waal is apparently one of the biologists who conceives of himself as being in conflict with philosophers. One of the things he says that is supposed to somehow be a threat to philosophers is that ‘human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies’. I quake in my ethicist’s boots. Heaven forbid that something necessary to human morality be found elsewhere! And here I thought that all sorts of things were necessary to human morality (at least as we know it): brains, bodies, desires, environments, … wait, those are things that can be found all over the place. Alright, so I have absolutely no idea what the argument here is supposed to be. I can’t see how the fact that certain things present in monkeys are also necessary for human morality could possibly pose a threat to anything I believe.

Then, of course, there is the (in)famous is/ought gap. Judging from the article, all philosophers think that it is impossible to get from an ‘is’ to an ‘ought’. I thought quite a few philosophers had doubts about this. But never mind that for now. Here’s Dr. de Waal’s response to it: ‘I’m not sure how realistic the distinction is. Animals do have “oughts.” If a juvenile is in a fight, the mother must get up and defend her. Or in food sharing, animals do put pressure on each other, which is the first kind of “ought” situation’. (Sydney scratching his head here.) Again, how is this a response? How is pointing out that animals have oughts show that one can derive an ought from an is? Why shouldn’t I just thank Dr. de Waal for his intriguing information about primates and then move on my merry way, philosophizing as before?

I could point to some more responses that seem to have no relevance to the thing to which they are supposed to be responses, but I’ll quit boring you. Though I will note, that I was also puzzled by the report of a big conflict between biologists and philosophers. I thought Anglo-American philosophers were the most scientistic people on the planet, significantly more prostrate at the altars of science than scientists themselves (though philosophers generally seem to prefer the First Church of Physics to the Third Church of Quasi-science Biology). Some evidence of a weakened faith would strike me as good news.

Sydney

“A planned life is not worth living; a made bed is not worth having.”

The former is loosely attributed to Plato; the latter is Sydney’s contribution.

With sentiments like that, it’s a wonder Sydney and I share the same planet, much less the same house!

Erin

I decided I couldn’t face the young engineers who fill my class without doing my own taxes this year. Last year, Sydney and I had some messy stuff going on, but this year it seemed fairly straightforward. So my calculator and I got familiar once again. Adam, you still have my graphing calculator and I want it back sometime . . . perhaps before I kick the bucket? Think of it as a birthday present you know I’ll like.

I thought I would complete the online forms, but they quickly proved inept at understanding the intricacies of Sydney’s international status, so I’m filling out forms by hand, just as I’ve seen my dad do for many a year. I have to say, I managed to get through the federal forms in a nicer frame of mind than the one I usually see him in, but I’m guessing that not having kids, stocks, a house, or, well, many of life’s trappings make my job a lot easier than his. After all, the government isn’t particularly interested in our collection of books . . . and oh how different things would be if it were!

Erin

Kleine Gemeinde Mennonites (for those of you who don’t know, this would be the group from which I hark) typically take a pretty strong stand against any involvement in the state’s politics, noting that Jesus said ‘My Kingdom is not of this world’ (John 18:36). Experiences of being fiercely persecuted at the colluding hands of the church and state during the sixteenth-century didn’t encourage Mennonites to adopt a more integrationist model. In the twentieth century, of course, many Mennonite groups have changed their positions on these issues, and have become firmly enmeshed in the politics of earthly homelands. But the Kleine Gemeinde is a more traditional group that has resisted this trend (though my sense is that there sometimes was a bit of surreptitious voting going on).

Anyway, it’s sometimes amazing how far individuals can go from their backgrounds (I suppose some will think that my pursuit of a doctoral degree in philosophy is rather far itself). Cornelius Dueck, of the same community in Belize in which I was born, is now head of a new political party, the National Reform Party, in Belize that aims to shoulder aside the two dominant traditional parties. The party’s website is http://nrpbelize.org/. From growing up in a community that forbids voting to being the head of national political party …

A couple of observations. First, one might be forgiven for thinking the party looks more like a right-wing American Christian party than something that one would have expected to result from Mennonite values. Apparently one of their platform items is the reinstitution of capital punishment. Another is an emphatic pro-U.S. foreign policy and an equally emphatic anti-Chavez policy. The latter is fine with me; the former seems a bit more problematic. They also made a point of displaying an Israeli flag at the party’s launch. One notes that the peculiar eschatological views of certain conservative Christians in the U.S. are no longer restricted to influencing American politicians.

Mr. Cornelius Dueck, of course, is no longer a member of the Kleine Gemeinde Mennonite community. Indeed, he’s served for some time as pastor of one of the splinter groups serving disaffected members of my former community in Belize. Incidentally, most of these groups are heavily influenced by some group or other in the circus that constitutes American evangelicalism (‘circus’ here is not meant to imply that no members of the circus are sane, respectable groups that ought to be taken seriously), so perhaps the party’s platform is not entirely surprising. What I find curious is that the bio of Mr. Dueck on the party’s website is rather equivocal about his relationship to the Spanish Lookout Mennonite community. If your only source of information was this bio, you might well conclude that he is a prominent leader in the community, respected for his great contributions to the community and for his reforming efforts. But I suspect that the Kleine Gemeinde take on this would be rather different! But I suppose a story of abandoning a religious community to pursue a life that flies in the face of the community’s values would look out of place on the website of a conservative, Christian party.

Oh, in case you’re interested, the Mr. George Dueck listed as one of the six members of the Core Group that organized the party is my uncle. Perhaps I can move back to Belize and pursue a career in politics if philosophy turns out to be too unprofitable.

Sydney

My friend the Song Sparrow was back again and ate his fill while perching on my shoe. He (or she — they look the same) even chirped pleasantly a few times.

Sydney

I sowed two flats of peppers today, thereby officially starting the new garden season. A few days ago it really did feel like spring, though right now it definitely doesn’t. We’ve had quite a bit of snow in the last two days. But peppers need to be coddled inside for quite a while before they’re ready to face the real world — in a few months it will presumably be much too warm outside for me and just right for peppers.

The sad part is that we ate our last potatoes yesterday. Now I’m going to have to go back to buying second-rate potatoes — half of which will have been damaged during the mechanical harvesting process. To add insult to injury, I’ll have to pay around a dollar a pound for the miserable things. I think last I heard, farmers were getting about $7/cwt for potatoes. A more than 1300% markup from the farm gate to the retailer?! It’s the farmer that has to actually grow the things and deal with weather, pests, diseases, etc. As a former farm boy, I’m going to be seriously offended if anyone so much as suggests that the wholesalers and retailers who package the potatoes and have them sitting around for a while add more value to the product than the farmer who grew them. So my purchases of potatoes will come most grudgingly. As Erin can well attest.

And someday I will have a larger garden and a proper root cellar.

Sydney

This afternoon I swapped recipes with my friend Laura. Turns out her household and mine go in for the same kind of cooking: one-course meals that contain a number of spices and a variety of vegetables. How nice to benefit from her experimenting! Of course, a number of the recipes that I handed over to her were actually Sydney’s, which I admitted right upfront. But not all of them!

With a fistful of new recipes in hand and a spring break in which to experiment a bit (not to mention a paper to distract myself from writing), we may be looking at a record-breaking grocery run.

Erin

Now we have to see what we can make of it . . .

Erin

Today after coming home from teaching my section (the last thing I had to do before spring break), I decided to go out and feed birds for a while as a way to start relaxing after two of the more stressful weeks so far of my graduate student life. Two first experiences:

1) Usually I’m ready to go back inside before the feed in my hand is gone, but today I stayed long enough for the chickadees to clean out my hand. Well, not quite. There were plenty of millet seeds left. But chickadees don’t think much of low-fat diets. Sunflower seeds and peanuts are what they’re after. Anyway, after they’d carried off all the worthy items, a couple of chickadees decided that the thing to do would be to stand on my hand and peck it as hard as they could. For utterly harmless looking birds, they managed to give me some healthy jabs with rather sharp beaks. What I’m trying to figure out is what they were trying to accomplish. I didn’t think that the skin on my hand looked like a promising place for hidden seeds. But I’m also a bit reluctant to think chickadees smart enough to attribute intentional states to me of the sort that would be required if they thought that they were signalling to me that I needed to get more feed.

2) I also had a Song Sparrow perch on my foot for quite a while eating the millet seeds that the chickadees didn’t see fit to eat. Chickadees are brash birds that you can pretty easily get to come take feed from your hands, but this was the first non-chickadee that has dared to retrieve food from off of my body.

Sydney