How could you not love that face?

Don’t worry, I’m not going all gushy on myself. Nor do I expect you to.

So one of the things I do to escape from stress is to read about the history of philosophy. So far I have a rough knowledge of Western thought from the Greeks up through about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and a couple bits of Muslim, Indian, and Chinese philosophy from various parts of history.

Anyway, I was reading about John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265 – 1308) in Frederick Copleston’s masterpiece, and I came across the following provocative passage:

Scotus often gave a peculiar stamp or emphasis to the elements he adopted from tradition. Thus in his treatment of the relation of the will to intellect he emphasized freedom rather than love, though he held, it is true, to the superiority of love to knowledge….

This helped me to articulate something I’ve known for some time but have never quite managed to say clearly.

Let me ask you a question. What does your will do? What is the action of your will? What is its purpose?

Okay, that was three questions, or at least, three ways of asking one question. Sorry about that. But I hope you have an answer.

I’m guessing your answer is something like, “My will chooses things. It’s purpose is to choose freely, to be free.” And that is a typical modern answer. In fact, in the twenty-first century, it’s hard to consider that there might be another way to answer the question.

But, as you might guess if you’ve read enough of this blog, the medievals would have answered very differently. They would have said, the act of the will is to love, that is, to pursue what is good. And they would have had almost as much trouble understanding our emphasis on freedom as we have understanding their emphasis on the necessity of choosing good.

Getting medieval on you

Here’s how it works, from a medieval point of view: the human mind has certain powers or “faculties” that perform different tasks. The senses apprehend particular objects – colors, textures, sounds, etc. – and understand the objects of the physical world. The intellect apprehends the essence of those objects, that is, it understands that this four-legged yapping creature is in some way the same kind of thing as that four-legged yapping creature; they are both dogs, even though they are distinct individuals. In other words, the intellect sees the nature of a thing.

The intellect also sees the implications of nature. Just as it makes connections between individual things in the physical world, it makes connections between ideas. This aspect of the intellect is called reason, and it allows us to form an argument and to examine our ideas logically. The intellect is able to evaluate both things in the world and ideas in our minds.

Now, both the senses and the intellect have a power that the medievals called “appetites”. The appetite of the senses is, well, the things we call appetites today: desires for things like food, pleasure, comfort. Sensible appetites motivate us to pursue sensible goods. The intellectual appetite, though, motivates us to pursue intellectual goods, like truth and beauty and the common welfare of society. This appetite is the will. The will, by its very nature as an appetite, is necessarily ordered toward choosing good things. In fact, it was taken for granted in ancient and medieval times that we are incapable of choosing evil for its own sake; it is impossible to choose anything unless we see something good in it.

In other words, to know something, anything, led immediately to a desire for the good of that thing. That’s the sense in which to know me – or anyone else, for that matter – is to love me.

Freedom!

But because the will is a power of the intellect, it is able to use rational argument and to see different ways of achieving the good that it necessarily desires. This power is called liberum arbitrium, which is Latin for “free choice” but has traditionally been translated “free will.” It is the ability to choose the means to pursue the good.

For example, it is good for me to be healthy. One necessary aspect of health is regular exercise. But there are lots of ways to exercise: I could ride a bicycle, do pilates, swim laps in a pool, lift weights, take a walk with a friend, and so on. My will is bound to desire health; unless I’m obtuse, I recognize that exercise is necessary to health, but I’m free to choose how I’ll go about getting exercise based on what I enjoy, and what works best for my body type.

I’m also free to choose some other aspect of health as more important, such as getting my diet under control or making my sleep schedule regular. Maybe I need to focus on mental health before physical health. And maybe I’ve twisted my understanding of health so much that all I see is the need for pleasure and comfort. The point is, the will seeks what is good; freedom seeks the ways to achieve that good.

That’s how the medievals saw things, up until John Duns Scotus. Since then, the idea has been growing that freedom, rather than love of the good, is central to the will. It wasn’t long before people began to claim that the will could choose either good or evil with equal freedom, even though the only way medieval people could see to choose something evil was if the will was bound by a kind of slavery. Eventually, the idea that civil laws, and even moral teaching, would try to impose goodness on the will became repugnant to the ideal of freedom. Freedom was exalted as the highest value, even over good.

I can see some reasons for this line of argument; it’s not entirely irrational. But I think it makes a small mistake at the beginning, and leads to disastrous consequences. Freedom cannot itself be good without being one good among many; and freedom is not the standard or definition of good. Rather, the only way freedom can truly be free is to place itself at the service of love.

Where to begin...?

As a sophomore in college, I had a single dorm room. No roommate. A space entirely my own. And I remember that, after the first ten minutes, it terrified me. I don’t think I ever finished entirely unpacking.

I had no one to tell me where my things were supposed to go.

I know that most normal people – you do realize I’m rather abnormal, I hope – would feel the thrill of freedom and the drive to creativity in deciding for themselves where their own things should go. But I was very caught up in a way of thinking limited to “right” and “wrong,” that had no room for “good” and its chums “better” and “best”.

It was actually the required class on Western Civilization that woke me up, or started to. The prof was describing the ancient and medieval notion that has come to be called “the great chain of being,” essentially that everything in the universe has a fixed place on a strict linear hierarchy, like rungs on a ladder, with “prime matter” at the bottom and God at the top.

It seemed obvious to me that, while a linear hierarchy is one way of organizing and relating the various things in the universe, it’s probably not the most useful. There are different kinds of order, and different kinds of relationship between things. Therefore, it didn’t surprise me when, years later, I discovered that great thinkers in ancient and medieval times held a much more subtle and nuanced view than that simplified and dumbed-down notion.

What did surprise me was how long it took me to apply my insight to my own life and behavior.

Clean your room, young man!

I’ve been living in my current apartment for about six months now, and I’m still not entirely unpacked. I have boxes and crates stacked against the wall, waiting for me to decide where to put their contents. Some of these boxes have remained unopened for the past couple moves I’ve made. This is because there’s a part of me that’s still afraid to put something in the wrong spot.

This fear is, I know, entirely unrealistic. It is stuck in a misunderstanding, or maybe a misapprehension, about freedom and order.

Order is nothing other than the relationship of things to each other. How I decide to order something, whether it’s the files in a cabinet or the furniture in a room or the tasks on my to-do list, depends on the relationships I’m looking at. With files, my goal is quick and easy access to information; the relationships I’m looking for are based on the use of the information I’m filing away. For example, bills and receipts go together, and letters from friends go together, and owners manuals and warranties go together.

Relationships between furniture, on the other hand, is based on the relationships I hope to develop between the people using the furniture. I like open rooms, where everyone can see and communicate with everybody else. There’s a part of me that wants to maximize open floor space, but a friend pointed out that putting some furniture pieces at an angle – even though it cut off a square foot-and-a-half in the corner, provided better sight lines for people sitting in chairs and on the sofa.

My to-do list actually benefits from a strictly linear ordering: first this, next that, third something else, and think twice before re-ordering the list. That’s because many activities, in reality, require something else to come first. It’s linear because the relationships are based in the uncompromising march of time.

Order provides the structure for free action. If my files are organized, I’m more free to find the information I want; if my furniture (and my to-do list) is well ordered, it’s easier to have fun with my friends.

Fear of punishment and fear of chaos

So order is both something that I create from and for myself, because it depends on the relationships I’m choosing to look at, and something that is independent of me, because those relationships are based in something real and objective.

This is normal and reasonable and helpful to me. Why, then, do I have such a fear of both aspects of order? Why am I afraid both that I’ll have to decide what to do, and that someone else will impose a decision on me?

I’m sure there are plenty of psychological reasons and childhood traumas that might explain the origin of my fears. But those don’t matter very much. What matters is, replacing my false view of order with a true one. And that is done one act at a time.

Fiction as a “virtual reality”

We're in trouble now!

This is a little off topic for the blog, but what the heck: it’s only a blog after all. In addition to this blog, I’m a fiction writer as well. Being both neurotic and an introvert, I spend way too much time interrogating myself about whether it’s good or realistic or productive or whatever to write stories.

This is how I justify it to myself. I hope that my justification has some basis in reality.

The reason I am so obsessed with stories – both reading or watching them and writing them myself – is that my whole perspective on the world is profoundly shaped by the stories I believe in. So, for most of my youth, my paradigm for reality was Star Wars. I saw everything through the lens of The Force. Later, I discovered Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which I have found to be a far superior guide to reality than Lucas’ mess. Still later, a friend introduced me to the romances of Jane Austen, which provide a profound counterpoint to Tolkien’s vision.

Light fare, perhaps? Yes, perhaps. But, for good or ill, these are the stories that have largely shaped my understanding of the world.

And I’m convinced that it cannot be any other way. It seems to me that stories are a necessary part of human life, and of learning how to be human.

The plotline of life

The primary way we learn anything, of course, is through direct experience. Ouch! That burner is hot! But what happens in that moment of experience?

I’ve had many friends tell me how their awareness of a particular cause or passion woke up through an experience. They suddenly realized that there are millions of poor and suffering people in the world, or that problems can be solved by engineering solutions, or that someone really does love them after all. As soon as they describe the event, they spin it into a story: this understanding of the world shapes their own character. It becomes a plot twist in their own life.

And what changes in that moment? What is realized, or learned, or discovered? It is a new way of viewing the world as a whole. It is like putting on glasses and realizing for the first time just how blurred your vision had been. Objects come into focus, and distinctions become clear.

And, seeing clearly, you are now free to act.

Virtual reality and vicarious experience

Now obviously there are limits to any one person’s experience. For example, I don’t remember ever burning my finger on the stove top. But I watched my older brother do so, and I learned from watching him. In a way, I made his experience my own.

Learning from someone’s example is a kind of second-hand experience. It may not be my exact prescription, but it helps me see much better than I could before. And it saves me from some of the worse consequences of my blindness.

Now, what’s interesting is that it doesn’t seem to matter a great deal whether that second-hand experience is factual or fictional. Many a child has been inspired to honesty by the story of George Washington’s refusal to lie about cutting down a cherry tree, despite the (at best) questionable historicity of the tale.

What matters is that I am able to make the story my own somehow, that my experience of the story becomes a genuine part of my experience of life. So, as I said, Star Wars gave me a heroic lens to view my own life that appeared to be so far from the “bright center” of the universe. It opened my eyes to powers beyond my ability to understand, and to the requirement for those powers to be used for good.

Problems arose, of course, when I discovered that The Force was not in any significant sense real. I don’t mean the fantasy elements of it; a mere child can see through that. I mean that The Force ultimately contradicts itself: it seems impersonal, yet it has a guiding quality; the difference between the “good side” and the “dark side” seems to “depend greatly upon one’s point of view,” yet it is imperative to resist the draw of darkness.

In other words, Star Wars gave me a better lens than I had, but it still left me blind in some very important parts of life.

The importance of good stories

Reality is the ultimate test of all worldviews, whether gained from personal experience or through the virtual reality of a story. I cling to the lens I found in Jane Austen’s work because she sees aspects of the world that, as a twenty-first century American male, I literally cannot see. She reveals a spot as invisible to me as the back of my head, and enables me to see that aspect of the world in my own family and friends. On the other hand, I find most romances (of page or screen) actually raise obstacles to understanding the people in my life.

I try to be discerning in what I read and watch. I try even harder to be discerning in what I write. My goal is to write stories that draw people more deeply into reality rather than distracting from its difficulty.

Use with caution. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!

Hat tip to Mark, who’s forgotten more about the internet than I’ll ever know.

"And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood..."

Discernment is the process of seeing something more clearly. The reason to see something more clearly is to know how to act toward whatever is seen.

Pretty simple, right?

It’s one of those “easier said than done” things. There are two obstacles, at least two that I’ve encountered in my own life:

1. Admitting that I don’t see things very clearly to begin with
2. Actually acting on what I’ve discovered to be true

Seeing clearly

In terms of virtues, discernment falls under the virtue of prudence or wisdom: it is the skill of looking closely at oneself and the world to find a clear understanding of what one is to do.

There are other aspects of prudence, too. There is simple education about basic moral principles; there is memory, which allows us to learn from our experiences; there is thoughtful consideration of implications and consequences.

But discernment is, in a way, the act that brings those all together in a concrete situation. Here and now, with these people and in these circumstances – what is really going on and, therefore, what is the good that I should pursue.

As a semi-functioning egomaniac, I tend to assume that I’m the smartest person in the room, and that whatever I think or feel is pretty equivalent to absolute truth. I need to remind myself that there are other perspectives than my own, and that there are significant limits to the information I have. I have to do the basic work of checking things out, asking challenging questions, and making sure that my decisions conform to reality rather than trying to conform reality to my opinions.

It’s not even that big a blow to my ego, if I’m diligent about it. I don’t have to assume that I’m always wrong; I just have to avoid assuming that I’m always right. I have to remember that I have only part of the picture, and that it’s okay to have to work a little to find out the truth.

Actions speak louder than words

As difficult as it sometimes is to figure out what’s going on, and to decide how to act, the real challenge for me is putting that decision into practice. Here, the virtues required are temperance and fortitude, aka, self-control and courage.

I think the reason is that I’m an introvert and a writer. I live in my head, and I work through words. The thing about thoughts and words is that they’re very safe. I can change my mind. I can revise a sentence. But I can’t take back the past. I can’t undo some action I’ve committed, even if it’s so small as saying something out loud. And that incredible impact that even the smallest action can have terrifies me.

It terrifies me into the fantasy that inaction is somehow better or safer than taking some positive action. I flee into the self-indulgent comforts of laziness or gluttony or some other distraction from my cowardice. In other words, my failure at courage leads directly to a failure at self-control.

And it even leads to a failure at prudence: because the only way to really learn from my mistakes is to have mistakes to learn from.

Discernment leading to decision

So I have to be careful both to take the time needed to make a good decision, to gather as much relevant information as I can, but also not to stall or delay in acting on a decision, with the excuse that “I’m still discerning.”

This is true in small decisions (like prioritizing today’s to-do list) and in major life decisions (like whether to marry or what career to pursue). Major decisions may require more time or effort spent in discernment, but the discernment always leads to a decision. A discernment that is meandering toward ambiguity is, by definition, going in the wrong direction.

Like all virtue, discernment is about reality: seeing reality clearly, and acting accordingly.

Being a Catholic, and a fan of Gaudi’s architecture, the inaccuracy and bias in these stories is blatant and obvious to me.

If that’s how they report on stuff I know something about, why should I trust them on stuff I don’t know anything about? That’s why I’m always looking for accurate sources of information.

By the way, check out the pix of the building itself available at Wikimedia Commons. That’s where I found this one:

For me? Aw, you shouldn't have!

I had one of those “a-ha” moments over the weekend. I was thinking about words, as I often do, and I was trying to find a way to articulate the difference between recognizing life (or a friend or a privilege or whatever) as a gift and taking life for granted. And I realized, the phrases look roughly identical.

A grant, after all, is a kind of gift. It is something given to me by someone else.

So I started exploring whether there are any words we use for that sense of entitlement we call “taking something for granted” that don’t in fact refer to receiving something from someone else. Even the word “entitlement” refers to the granting of “title” or ownership of something by whomever has the authority to give it. The only words I could think of are words like “possession” or “ownership”, which really don’t convey the kind of presumptuous attitude I’m trying to describe.

Maybe presumption is itself the word I’m looking for. It literally means “taking something before,” that is, before it is given. It is taking something as if it had been granted, even when it has not. And that’s where the problematic attitude lies: it’s a lack of recognition that something is genuinely a gift. It’s the idea that I am completely and independently capable of getting everything I want or need entirely on my own without any help from anyone else ever. Ultimately, that attitude is founded on falsehood.

Gratitude: recognition of my need for others

I’m concerned about this attitude because it’s one I struggle with all the time myself. I remember as a child needing to be told to say “thank you” at Christmas or on my birthday, and thinking that I didn’t really feel grateful. I felt like I deserved the toys, or maybe even deserved better loot than I’d got. So I went through the motions and held onto presumption in my heart.

But that led me to a bitter and lonely place. I alienated many of my friends. And then something rather odd happened: when a friend did show a kindness to me, even a tiny one, I found myself utterly overwhelmed with gratitude far out of proportion to their act. It was as if all that repressed recognition of others’ gifts to me came bursting out at once. So then I had friends saying, “Enough thank yous, already! It was really nothing!”

Well, it wasn’t nothing. But it also wasn’t the thing I was most grateful for: I was most grateful for the ability to acknowledge my dependence on other people.

My illusion of fierce independence had been (and still is, in parts of my life) a kind of cage that kept me from the real world as it actually is, and from connecting to the real people who live in it. So finding a way to relate – simply by acknowledging the relationship – was a tremendous good that I could never have simply acquired for myself. I am glad my mother taught me how to say “thank you” all those years ago.

Gratitude and justice

It’s interesting that Thomas Aquinas lists gratitude as part of the virtue of justice, while generosity or giving gifts is part of the virtue of charity or love. That is, even though gifts are given freely, the acknowledgment of the gift is something owed by duty.

At first, this seems odd, and a little bit like extortion. But my own experience shows me why it’s a matter of justice. To refuse to acknowledge the gift and the giver is to deny the reality that I have received something I could not have without that other person.

I could not have received life without my parents. I could not have received friendship without my friends. Even in relationships where there is a “business” aspect, there also is a gift; I could not have received my education without my teachers’ willingness to give what they also had received. Gratitude, giving thanks for what has been granted, is simply a matter of seeing reality for what it is.

Not actually all that logical

My good friend Amy said:

The problem here is that you can’t teach people how to think. Not, at least, without heading straight long into [indoctrination] schools (Communist, Nazi, etc). Not a soul on the planet will tell you they don’t know how to think, even if their life is a long string of screw ups. And who gets to judge whose thinking is “right”? (After all everyone must think to act, even if poorly.) Other than practical matters of social order and universal natural law, I think humans might be best to leave that judgment to God.

There’s a lot going on it that. I replied that you can teach people how to be critical or rigorous in their thought, and she replied:

Of course you can teach someone the rules of logic. Notice however, they are your (or someone elses) rules of logic. … You can ask others questions, but by definition these must come from your cultural background. And the act of questioning to find “weaknesses in thought” creates a framework that suggests that you may have a superior line of thinking from the get go. … All people think spontaneously and creatively on their own. It maybe that their illogical or weak thinking is simply something that you don’t understand or agree with. Very dangerous stuff, this “logical” thinking.

Dangerous stuff!

I fully agree that thinking is dangerous stuff. It’s far too dangerous to leave children in ignorance about it.

As Amy says, we think spontaneously and creatively. We can’t help but think. We are, by nature, rational animals; Homo sapiens literally means “wise man”; thinking is what defines our species. But thinking is an ability like all our other natural abilities: walking, for example, or eating, or communicating. But all of these require, not just natural ability, but a certain learning as well. We assist children in learning how to walk, we encourage and correct them. If someone shows great ability, we train them into athletes. We refine and strengthen our natural ability through instruction and training.

Likewise, we introduce different foods to children, and teach them what is food and what is not, and continue to refine our tastes into adulthood. And, while the instinct and need to communicate is innate, it is only through learning the “artificial” structures of language that we are able to actually make ourselves known to others, or to know them ourselves.

Thinking is the same way: the rules of logic are like the rules of walking or the rules of digestion. They are discovered rather than made up. Logic is the science that shows how thought works, and is able to analyze whether a conclusion really does follow from a premise. People don’t have to know the rules of logic in order to think, but they will think more easily and avoid more pitfalls if they know where the pitfalls and obstacles are.

Beyond logic … there be dragons!

There are lots of ways of thinking that don’t fit neatly into the forms of a syllogism or the structures that logic uses to describe thought. There are lots of sentences that don’t fit neatly into a grammatical diagram, and grammatical diagrams are far from the easiest way to communicate; yet grammar is a tool to help us understand speech; and logic is a tool to help us understand thought.

Logic helps us test and understand whether the questions we ask are limited to our cultural background, or whether they speak to something universally human. Logic helps us discover whether a line of thinking has problems or contradictions, that is, weaknesses. Logic, far from being “your” rules or “someone’s” rules, are our rules. They are ways of bridging the gaps that appear when we disagree or don’t understand someone else.

When we let go of logic, then there is nothing to bridge the gaps. All we have left is, “Well, I disagree,” and there’s no possibility of further communication. That person who says something I don’t understand may be a friend or an enemy, but I have no way of knowing. We may agree or disagree, but I have a hard time figuring that out unless we can examine our thoughts and find out where they are similar, where they are different, and where either of us may be making mistakes. The person I’m arguing with may be a dragon or may be a knight in shining armor, but without logic, I have no way of finding the truth.

The truth will make you free

And this, I think reaches the foundation of Amy’s assertion. She says:

George Lucas got it dead on with the line “The Truth very much depends on your point of view”

Taken to its extreme, (which is what we have in today’s realm of “identity politics” and “advocacy journalism” and so on,) this is an utter denial of the existence of truth or of our ability to think about it.

Our perception of the truth depends on our point of view. The truth itself, reality itself, does not. We can be wrong about the truth. This is why we need tools like logic (and grammar, and physics, and economics, and so on) to keep us honest, to keep us grounded in reality. My point of view is limited, and fallible. My culture’s point of view is biased and historically conditioned. But points of view can be tested, and taught to connect to reality. Reality, truth, is the only real basis we have for speaking and working with each other.

Gossip is for the birds

The Harvard Business Review interviews Professor Joe Labianca about a study in which he found that gossip was neither counterproductive nor unprofessional.

This goes against conventional wisdom, and a number of managers have commented that the study is bosh. But it’s always good to give someone the benefit of the doubt till you know all the facts. So the first thing to ask is, what was the gossip they were looking at? How did they define it?

Prof. Labianca says:

Gossip is merely the exchange of information between two people about a third, absent person.

Now, given that definition, I can understand how he came to his findings. I doubt there are very many conversations that don’t, at some point, involve some absent person. I wonder if he included performance review discussions or anything said in the HR department as “gossip?”

In fact, what Prof. Labianca is talking about is a form of social networking (to use contemporary jargon), though he certainly will get more attention for calling it gossip. His findings indicate that people who engage in this sort of interaction are perceived as more influential, and also have a greater understanding of the social dynamics in the workplace. This seems to me about the same as saying that people who drink water quench their thirst.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, one of the great benefits of science is that it allows us a way to question conventional wisdom, to challenge our assumptions, and therefore to get at the truth.

My only problem, really, is with the word “gossip” being used to describe this broad area of interactions.

The dirt on gossip

Words do matter. “Gossip” – a wonderful Old English word that comes from the word for a godparent – has held the meaning of idle or frivolous talk since the sixteenth century, and specifically the meaning of baseless rumor since 1811. It is that “baseless rumor” sense that gives the word a negative connotation, and rightly so. Spreading rumors about others is an attack on their dignity, and is simply unjust.

In other words, gossip is always “unprofessional” because the distinguishing feature is injustice. What turns a conversation from “sharing” to “gossip” is when someone tells some unfounded opinion or story about someone else. The basis of gossip is exactly prejudice, judging a person before (pre-) knowing the truth about them.

Is gossip good?

Even so, it would not surprise me that people who engage in gossip – even according to my more restricted definition – are seen as more influential, or that they have a better sense of the social dynamics of the workplace. They may, in a strictly economic sense, be more efficient workers.

Why? Because their focus is on the various relationships in the workplace. They may be speculating without basis, but the very fact that they spend time thinking such things through gives them an insight into what’s going on. It also gives other people the impression that they know what’s going on, and therefore have greater influence.

But this insight and influence, even if it is genuine, comes at the cost of their humanity. It requires a basic disrespect for the reputation and dignity of whomever they are gossiping about. In the long term, the attempt to make connections by gossiping actually leads to an inability to relate honestly with other people.

In short, even the claim of efficiency is groundless. Gossip simply is a bad habit, a vice. And the solution is to practice treating other people with greater respect and honor, just as you would want them to treat you.

We're history!

Before I got sidetracked by technical wonkiness, I was reading over a bundle of articles spawned by an opinion piece that Princeton professor of philosophy Kwame Anthony Appiah published in the Washington Post. He asked the big ol’ question: What will future generations condemn us for?

He lists four contenders, and challenges others to add to it. His list:

1. Prisons: way too many prisoners in America, and conditions are inhumane
2. Industrial meat production: eew
3. Institutional and isolating treatment of the elderly: we’re lacking in filial responsibility
4. Environmental destruction: especially desertification

Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan take up his challenge, adding:

5. Abortion (Douthat)
6. Any meat consumption at all (Douthat)
7. Therapy for homosexuals (Sullivan)
8. Torture under Bush and Cheney (Sullivan)

Will Wilkinson notes that all these “predictions” line up pretty well with the author’s current political or moral standards; therefore, they have no predictive value in themselves. He adds:

If we don’t assume that history is a story of progressive evolution, we could ask a different but parallel question. Which of today’s practices would our ancestors condemn? This is a much easier question, because we know what they did condemn. The harder related question is why it is that we are so sure that we know better than they did, and that our grandchildren will know better than we do.

And Tyler Cowen offers:

I would suggest an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion.

Prof. Appiah (who seems enamored of lists) does lay out his criteria for predicting barbaric practices:

1. First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn’t emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.
2. Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, “We’ve always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?”)
3. And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they’re complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn’t think about what made those goods possible. That’s why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

Now, as much fun as it is to list off the worst moral outrages of our time, I think it’s much more important to look at the criteria we use to make moral judgments. After all, it’s possible to be right about one or two issues without having solid principles; but then what do you do when you’re faced with a new moral conundrum? Take a poll?

So, taking Prof. Appiah’s list as a starting point, I’d note that his first criterion is a non-starter: the moral conversation has been underway for millennia, and there’s nothing new under the sun.

His third criterion is a great analysis of shame as both a personal and social phenomenon. Shame avoids the reality of its own guilt. Well noted.

But his second criterion really shocked me. Let me repeat it:

defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity.

Can you guess the portion I object to?

Human nature is the foundation of morality

It is literally nonsense to say that an argument based on “human nature” is not a “moral” argument. There is no moral argument that is not based on human nature, because morality is exactly about human actions. The entire notion of “good” or “right”, morally speaking, is about what is “good for a person” or “right for a person”.

Now, I am guessing that he was objecting to arguments against homosexual behavior which claim that it is unnatural; he states his horror at past punishments of homosexuals. Or perhaps he was objecting to arguments against abortion which claim that the baby is a human person from the moment of conception; though he doesn’t mention abortion in the article.

But the single issue he mentions that doesn’t fit the stereotype of “liberal” or “academic” agendas is the isolation of the elderly. And his argument suddenly becomes personal – that is, it becomes about persons, about human beings, and what is fitting to their nature.

It is undignified for people to abandon the members of their own family. It is inhuman to go off on vacation and let your grandmother die of heat exhaustion. It is unconscionable for a society to neglect those who have given their lives to build up that society.

Why?

Because it is part of human nature to be interdependent, to be social, to live in families and communities where we support one another.

Otherwise, without an idea of human nature, why should we be outraged at all by the mistreatment of our elderly?

Future shock

Now, the whole reason to ask what the future may think of us is to open up a new perspective on what we are doing now. It’s a way of asking, what’s the moral thing to do right now?

I would suggest that the reason we treat our elderly (and our prisoners and our animals and our environment … and, for that matter, our employees or employers and our neighbors and immigrants and so on) with neglect or even disdain is that we have uprooted ourselves from human nature in our approach to morality.

We have replaced human nature with “utility” or “efficiency” or “profit” or some other mechanical notion that treats people like things, that objectifies them. I don’t think we have to wait for tomorrow to condemn such an attitude. I think we condemn ourselves if we maintain it.