Monthly Archives: August 2011

three ways to distinguish good and bad

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Here are three ways to color a map of the world:

1. Put dots on all the places (including seas) whose names you happen to like. That will produce a random-looking pattern. If people want to know whether the dots are in the correct locations, or why they are where they are, they must ask you, because the only truth is in your head–it is your set of preferences.

2. Color according to a rule, principle, or algorithm. A simple example would be: color everything above the half-way line. More complicated rules would produce much more complex patterns, even fractals. The colored map might be useful as a visual representation, but if there were any questions about what should be shaded or why, one would consult the rule. The words and/or numbers would be more precise than the map.

3. Color significant areas on the map, such as North America. This region could be described in words (a continent of approximately 25 million square miles wholly situated in the Western and Northern hemispheres. Its eastern littoral is predominantly a plain bordered by a mountain range that parallels the coast. A peninsula descends from the bottom. Etc.). It could also be defined by a kind of rule: any location reachable by land from Chicago, IL, without crossing an isthmus, plus some neighboring islands. Such rules and descriptions can be illuminating, but they only partially describe the truth, which is in the world. The fullest description is a detailed map.

Now imagine that instead of coloring a map of the world, we are looking at a map of all the actual and potential actions (or situations), and our task is to color the good ones (or the right or just ones). Our choice of methods resembles the three above.

1a. If you are a moral subjectivist or relativist, you think that the choice of what to color is a matter of private opinion. Even if people tend to cluster their dots within regular-looking shapes, and even if many people color the map the same way, the truth is in their heads, not on the map.

2a. If you subscribe to one of the classical philosophical schools, such as Kantianism or utilitarianism, you believe that the map should be colored using a rule or set of rules. Indeed, the map is not terribly useful because the rules will give you more accurate and reliable answers. One would check the rule to see if the map were accurate, not vice-versa.

3a. If you are a particularist, you believe that there is an objective difference between right and wrong–like the very important distinction between North America and the Atlantic Ocean. (There may also be some borderline cases and objectively gray areas.) The difference between right and wrong can be described in words, but any combination of words simplifies the reality, which is in the world, not in our heads. The shape of the good is complex because it consists of various institutions, norms, concepts, practices, and ways of life that have evolved over long history without conscious design. You must explore reality to know what is good and bad, but other explorers’ accounts and maps are valuable.

For what it’s worth, I think the reality is a combination of 2a and 3a. Rules mark valid moral distinctions in basic, elemental situations–for instance, is it right to kill?–but in dealing with evolved institutions, the rules no longer mark the important boundaries. In a similar way, part of the border between the United States and Canada is defined by a horizontal line (the distance from the North Pole), but part of the border follows the winding course of rivers and lakes. These bodies of water lie where they are because of the uniform laws of physics, but their evolution is so old and so often influenced by exogenous factors that the laws cannot tell us where we will find them. Note that defining our borders in two ways produces no contradiction. The boundary is straight in some places, winding in others.

Compare Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 18: “Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.”

Implications: To know the good, it is helpful to study and critically investigate moral principles, such as those analyzed in philosophy. That method may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. We must also explore and describe reality and form moral judgments of it. That is something that people do in ordinary life, but its academic corollaries are in fields like history, anthropology, and literary criticism. (For an argument that those disciplines should be more explicitly moral, please see my Reforming the Humanities.)

the Oxford Handbook of Civil Society

Coming very soon: the Oxford Handbook of Civil Society, edited by MichOxford Handbook of Civil Societyael Edwards. As the blurb says, “In the past two decades, ‘civil society’ has become a central organizing concept in the social sciences. Occupying the middle ground between the state and private life, the civil sphere encompasses everything from associations to protests to church groups to nongovernmental organizations.”

The Handbook provides 38 chapters, including Theda Skocpol on “Civil Society in the United States,” Nina Eliasoph on “Civil Society and Civility,” Craig Calhoun on “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” Harry Boyte on “Civil Society and Public Work,” Mark E. Warren on “Civil Society and Democracy,” and me on “Civic Knowledge.” I have mentioned authors whose work I happen to know especially well, but of equal importance are the chapters on civil society in other parts of the world. The price is steep at $150, but you can recommend that your friendly librarian order it from Oxford University Press.

Saul Bellow, Herzog

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Saul Bellow’s Herzog, which I finished yesterday, was written four years before I was born. I can almost recall its time–or at least relive it vicariously through my parents, who were, like the characters in the novel, a Jewish historian of European ideas and his wife, living in an old house a few hundred miles from Manhattan. It was a decade when Freud and Marx still reigned, when readers wrestled with metaphysical issues by constructing grand accounts of cultural history, stories that had Christianity, Romanticism, idealism, and nihilism as their protagonists. Like Herzog, you might buy paperback Schopenhauers and Spenglers in the bargain bin at Walgreens and try to put them into some kind of order. You didn’t worry much about jobs, tenure, or publication, but intellectual work seemed consequential when the old mores were collapsing, East and West were divided by ideology, and the Shoah was still a memory, even for the young.

It was the end of the Modern period, post-modernism just beginning to stir in France. Bellow has the Modernist’s disdain for novelistic conventions. Quite a bit happens in Herzog–two divorces, a rape, a car crash, an arrest–but Bellow refuses to tell it in a linear way that might build suspense. To withhold information about the conclusion until the end of the story would be like using the sonata form in music: old-fashioned. Instead, Bellow’s narrator strives for pure description, voice, character, and ideas.

The novel is also a period piece in its problematic attitudes toward women, Blacks, and Puerto-Ricans. Of course, we don’t know if those are Bellow’s views or the narrator’s. In fact, my biggest question about Herzog is whether we are dealing with an unreliable narrative voice. The back cover of my copy tells me that Herzog is “truly an Everyman for our time.” Everyman is a sympathetic figure, and one might like the cuckolded, naive, high-strung and sensitive Moses E. Herzog. Or one might doubt his self-presentation. Consider this rather typical passage:

Then he ran the water in the sink. The crude oval of the basin was smooth and beautiful in the gray light. He touched the almost homogeneous whiteness with his fngertips and breathed in the water odors and the subtle stink rising from the waste pipe. Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is ….

As he was doing this, it occurred to him that this going into the bathroom to pull himself together was one of his habits. He seemed to feel that he was more effective, more master of himself. In fact, he remembered, for a few weeks in Ludeyville he required Madeleine to make love on the bathroom floor. She complied, but he could see when he lay down on the old tiles that she was in a rage. Much good could come of that. This is how the all-powerful human intellect employs itself when it has no real occupation. And now he pictured the November rain dropping from the sky on the half-painted house in Ludeyville. The sumacs spilled the red Chinese paper of their leaves ….

I draw attention to the sentence about the bathroom floor, almost hidden near the beginning of a long paragraph of nostalgia and reverie. Madeleine is the ex-wife whom Herzog hates and fears. Here is a hint that he abused her cruelly in the rustic house to which he had dragged her. By the end of the novel, I found myself caring about Herzog and hoping that he would not harm himself. But if we view him as neither good nor reliable, the text becomes considerably more interesting. (By the way, I know a little about Saul Bellow the man and do not particularly like what I know; but that ought to be irrelevant to our judgment of Moses Herzog.)