100 Philosophical Works Meme

Brandon of Siris provides a variant of the various 100 Books memes that have wandered the blogsphere recently.

The basic idea was this: a list of a hundred books, each providing a relatively accessible portal to philosophy, likely to have something of interest to a very wide range of people, in order to encourage a wider reading in philosophy, and perhaps an interest in philosophy among those who might be turned off by anything too academic. So that constrained the list to philosophical works available in English, not too difficult to find (at least with a good library), not too overwhelming (e.g., not too long or too jargonish), potentially enjoyable to all sorts of people; there was also the constraint, considerably more limiting, that only books I'd read in some version or translation or other could be included, since only if I had read the book at least once, at some point, could I be sure it was a reasonable candidate for the list. I also tried to limit relatively recent philosophical work in order to compensate for the bias of recency. Also, with a few very readable exceptions, I have bypassed standard college course fare. The result was as follows, in no particular order. (I have linked to those available online in some form. Needless to say, and although some of the editions are quite good, this does not always or even usually indicate that this is the best edition available. The rest should be accessible through a descent university library or good bookstore. Also, it should go without saying, but might not, that inclusion on the list, while it shows that I think the work interesting, does not show that I necessarily agree with it in any way.) I have a defense of each one's deserving a place on this list, if you have any questions about a particular entry. Did I miss any good ones? Which ones have you read? If you were going to make your own list, what would be on it?

You can see why I find this irresistable...

Here's the list. I've bolded the one's that I've read:

1. Voltaire, Candide
2. Dante, Divine Comedy
3. Plato, Apology
4. Xenophon, Apology
5. Berkeley, Alciphron
6. Aquinas, Collationes super Credo in Deum
7. Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II
8. Scotus, A Treatise on God as First Principle
9. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
10. Descartes, Discourse on Method
11. Hume, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences"
12. O. K. Bouwsma, "Descartes' Evil Genius"
13. Gilson, Forms and Substances in the Arts
14. Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum
15. Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi; attr.), Zhuangzi
16. Fa-tsang, Treatise on the Golden Lion
17. Xuedoe/Yuanwu, The Blue Cliff Record
18. Sartre, No Exit
19. Chesterton, Manalive
20. Shaw, Saint Joan
21. Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy"
22. Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
23. Darwin, The Descent of Man
24. Kingsley, Hypatia
25. James, "The Will to Believe"
26. Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles"
27. Whewell, On the Principles of English University Education
28. Faraday, The Chemical History of a Candle
29. Masham, Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Virtuous Christian Life
30. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World
31. Lull, Book of the Gentile
32. Ibn Tufayl, Hayy ibn Yaqzan
33. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
34. Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel
35. Epictetus, Enchiridion
36. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
37. Johnson, The History of Rasselas
38. More, Utopia
39. Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
40. Bacon, Essays [I've read some, anyway]
41. Justin Martyr, First Apology
42. Minucius Felix, Octavius
43. O'Brien, The Third Policeman
44. ***, IV Maccabees
45. Langland, Piers Plowman
46. Lewis, Abolition of Man
47. ***, Cleanness
48. Mill, Utilitarianism
49. Anselm, On Freedom of Choice (PDF)
50. Abelard, Historia Calamitatum
51. Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy
52. Kant, "Perpetual Peace"
53. Cicero, De Officiis
54. Pascal, Pensées [I've read some not all]
55. Sun Tzu, The Art of War
56. Clausewitz, On War
57. Shelley, "Queen Mab"
58. Pope, An Essay on Man
59. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
60. Beattie, An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth
61. Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond
62. Casanova, History of My Life
63. Lucian, Hermotimus
64. Lorris/Meun, The Romance of the Rose
65. Sophocles, Antigone
66. Christine de Pisan, Book of the City of Ladies
67. Augustine, Confessions
68. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance (PDF)
69. Erasmus, The Praise of Folly
70. Abbott, Flatland
71. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
72. Gilman, Herland
73. Saadia, Beliefs and Opinions
74. Lessing & Mendelssohn, "Pope a Metaphysician!"
75. Hume, "A Dialogue"
76. Menkin, The Love of the Righteous
77. Lessing, Nathan the Wise
78. Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity
79. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
80. Eliot, Romola
81. Maritain, Theonas
82. ***, The Great Learning
83. Stapledon, Sirius
84. Eco, The Name of the Rose
85. Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen
86. Vico, De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time)
87. Fichte, The Vocation of Man
88. Edwards, Freedom of the Will
89. Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
90. Shaftesbury, "Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor" (PDF)
91. Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua
92. Dooyeweerd, In the Twilight of Western Thought
93. Kant, "On the Question: What is Enlightnment?"
94. Austen, Mansfield Park
95. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria
96. Duhem, German Science
97. Diderot, Rameau's Nephew
98. Dryden, Religio Laici
99. Chaucer, The Parson's Tale
100. Teresa of Avila, Life of Teresa of Avila, by Herself

Given that I don't reckon myself much of a philosopher, 20% probably isn't too bad. Most of the items I'd have to suggest probably fell under the "standard college fare" exclusion. I would have perhaps suggested the following:

Plato: Euthyphro, Phaedo, Republic
Aristotle: Ethics, Metaphysics
Aquinas: Selections from Summa
Anselm: Discourse on the Existence of God

But those are, of course, very, very standard. (What can I say, I guess I'm a standard sort of guy... )

I was glad to see that Lucretius made the list, as he's long been a favorite of mine.

I scored an unexpected point by having read Romance of the Rose -- though it strikes me as more interesting as a medieval cultural curiosity than as philosophy.

And I'm rather ashamed to admit that a few of the ones highlighted above, which I know that I read, I can recal virtually nothing about.

Public Service Announcement

For any forgetful Catholics out there (who are as bad at looking at calendars as I am): Tomorrow is The Assumption, holy day of obligation.

Murray on Testing Out Of College

Charles Murray has an instict for disruptive ideas. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, he had an editorial entitled "For Most People, College is a Waste of Time" in which he argued that the BA should be almost universally dropped as a job qualification and that instead there should be developed a set of comprehensive national tests (not national as in government administered, but nationally recognized like the CPA exam) in various subjects which would show to what degree people actually possessed skills or knowledge in certain areas.

The merits of a CPA-like certification exam apply to any college major for which the BA is now used as a job qualification. To name just some of them: criminal justice, social work, public administration and the many separate majors under the headings of business, computer science and education. Such majors accounted for almost two-thirds of the bachelor's degrees conferred in 2005. For that matter, certification tests can be used for purely academic disciplines. Why not present graduate schools with certifications in microbiology or economics -- and who cares if the applicants passed the exam after studying in the local public library?

Certification tests need not undermine the incentives to get a traditional liberal-arts education. If professional and graduate schools want students who have acquired one, all they need do is require certification scores in the appropriate disciplines. Students facing such requirements are likely to get a much better liberal education than even our most elite schools require now.

Certification tests will not get rid of the problems associated with differences in intellectual ability: People with high intellectual ability will still have an edge. Graduates of prestigious colleges will still, on average, have higher certification scores than people who have taken online courses -- just because prestigious colleges attract intellectually talented applicants.

But that's irrelevant to the larger issue. Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.

The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test -- as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.

Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

As with many disruptive ideas, this one has a lot of interesting elements, but it's hard to see how one gets there from here. One of the senses in which I consider myself a conservative is that it seems to me that large institutions (among which I would class our country's education and business infrastructures and cultures) do not tend to move in starkly new directions unless there is some sort of total collapse and rebuilding involved -- and total collapses are generally to be frowned upon.

Still, perhaps such a thing could be backdoored in, beginning rather like the GRE or G-MAT as something taken after college, but allowing those without an undergraduate degree to take it as well. Perhaps if it gained respect over time, the bachellor's degree would fade in importance compared to the tests.

However, I found myself thinking while reading the article that employers do not really treat the BA as a measure of competance anyway, except in a few fields such as engineering or if you're going on to get a graduate degree in the same topic. Even for a first job out of college one is invariably asked about experience: Show me something you've written. Do you have any examples of programs you've written? What's a site that you've designed? Describe an example of a situation in which you took leadership. Describe a time when you provided excellent customer service. Etc.

And most cynically of all: College is partly a way of keeping people under 22 out of the full time work force, while trying to encourage them to develop the ability to schedule their own time, work hard and live on their own. Sure it's silly to demand a BA or BS for many of the jobs for which it is listed as a requirement, but in many ways it's just a shorthand for: "We'd like somoene 22 or over with some degree of adult responsibility and work ethic."

Still, its a fascinating idea, and it makes me curious to read Murray's forthcoming book.

Well, To Tell the Truth...

Now that MrsDarwin has blown our cover with her hairstyle post from earlier today, I might as well go ahead and post a picture of us, now that I've worked on my look:



Sure, my ugly mug may not be much to look at under those golden locks, but MrsDarwin looks pretty spicy for 36 weeks pregnant, wouldn't you say, folks?

Hair today, gone tomorrow; or, It's a Mad Men World

NOTE: for all you blog-lines readers: THIS IS MRSDARWIN. Not Darwin. Due to a clerical error, this post appears under his name, but I, MrsDarwin, wrote it.

Hey media-savvy readers, anyone got a copy of last week's TV Guide with the Mad Men article? It's not that I want to read up on it (though I would be kind of curious to see the show sometime; maybe we'll get the first season from Netflix); it's that I want to get my hair cut like the dame in the photo. I could try printing it off, but I think actually having the magazine in hand will give the stylist a clearer image. That TV Guide was in stores yesterday; today not so much.

Drop me a line if you've got a copy you can send me.

Me being MrsDarwin, although I'm posting under Darwin's name by accident. No, he doesn't want a sixties bouffant hairdo -- that would be me, MrsDarwin.

Good Analysis on Brideshead Movie

Waugh's Brideshead Revisited has remained one of my favorite novels since I first read it, and the 1981 TV adaptation is, to my mind, one of the best adaptations of a novel to a screen medium that I have seen. Thus, I'm curious to see the new film adaptation, though from all that I've read I have no expectation of liking it at all. (Think of it as the literary equivalent of needing to go witness an execution.)

However, the movie has not yet made its way out to our region of Texas, and so thus far I am restricted to reviews. Of these, I'm surprised to say that by far the best review (in terms of assessing the book in a fashion I find accurate and discussing how the reviewer thinks the movie does and does not reflect that) is one that MrsDarwin found yesterday in Commonweal, of all places. (I believe that Sayers called the technique I use above "praising with faint damns".)

Though I don't think I've ever liked anything I've read in Commonweal before, this review strikes me as coming from someone who's understood both the literary and the Catholic elements of the novel very, very well. Which I'm sure says something or other about the importance of judging a work by what it is, rather than where it appears -- or as the Dutchess would say: "And the moral of that is..."

This 'n that with the Darwins

For those of you keeping score at home, today is one month from Baby Boy Darwin's due date. I've been going through a spurt of nesting energy (powered, no doubt, by Friday's impending 36-week deadline for having homebirth supplies in order). After five years here, we've replaced the disintegrating blinds in our bedroom. I've changed the a/c filters and vacuumed the fan blades, scrubbed the shower, and am eyeing the weekend sales for new towels. I have a washed stack of baby boy clothes that have nowhere to go. My baby shower is next weekend.

Oh, and after three fruitless attempts with the parish secretary, I finally went straight to Father, who had no problem in assuring me that we could count on our baptismal date. Lesson learned: following the rules is for schnooks; the only way to get things done is to pull strings. And for those who are feeling impeded, here are the relevant excerpts from canon law and the Catechism (my emphasis):

Can. 867 §1. Parents are obliged to take care that infants are baptized in the first few weeks; as soon as possible after the birth or even before it, they are to go to the pastor to request the sacrament for their child and to be prepared properly for it. (To the pastor, note; not to the secretary.)

1250 Born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin, children also have need of the new birth in Baptism to be freed from the power of darkness and brought into the realm of the freedom of the children of God, to which all men are called.⁵⁰ The sheer gratuitousness of the grace of salvation is particularly manifest in infant Baptism. The Church and the parents would deny a child the priceless grace of becoming a child of God were they not to confer Baptism shortly after birth.⁵¹

**********

The floor is also finished, and I'd love to post pictures except that in all the chaos we lost the cord to the digital camera. There are still some fiddly bits of trim to be nailed up, caulked, and painted (which means that there's still a stack of molding sitting on the living room floor), but overall, the house is getting back to usable condition. There's still some assorted furniture in random places. However, the important thing is that we have the couch back. One of the unexpectedly difficult parts of the flooring process was having nowhere to sit. And our books are slowly being reshelved, which means the bookcases look settled again and we can reclaim the bedroom floor space that the boxes occupied.

We've had a lot of people tell us, "Oh, we're thinking about putting down hardwood floor one day too!" Overall, we're quite glad we did it ourselves as we must have saved at least $4000 in labor costs, but here are some considerations for those thinking about undertaking the process.

1) How great a tolerance do you have for chaos? I don't mean clutter or even mess; I mean the house torn up for weeks on end, nothing accessible or where it should be, the dust and debris tracked all over, the bones of the house exposed. If you're one of those people who don't like their routine disrupted, this is not a job for you.

2) How well do you and your spouse work together? Darwin and I make a good team and find that we prefer to work on a huge job like this with each other rather than with outside help. We also don't carp and snipe at each other. However, if you and your spouse have even a mild tendency to pettiness, snapping, making biting remarks at each other's expense, or get moody, then don't jeopardize your marriage by throwing yourselves into a huge home renovation project from which you can't escape.

3) What about the children? Although our marriage didn't suffer, we did feel like our parenting slipped several notches. Although we tried to let the girls help with little tasks at their level, we were nervous and short-tempered with them underfoot. Although we had several generous friends take the girls for stretches, this kind of job goes much faster without the small fry getting into things. (Let's not even talk about my fears over the nail gun.) As neither of us have family living within a thousand miles, this was a more difficult and time-consuming job than it would have been with dedicated baby-sitting. Fortunately, the children are resilient and will probably remember this as a fun time when they got to play with scraps of wood and tear up the carpets with impunity.

4) Are you pregnant? Hey, I did my fair share, but moving around grew increasingly difficult -- not to mention the contraction scare at 30 weeks... The difficulty is not necessarily in getting down and doing the work, it's in getting up again. Some of my finishing work that involves dragging myself along the floor (caulking, painting) is looking rather onerous to me right now.

But! Although the floor ate our summer, we have a floor! And it looks pretty darn good. And I'd post pictures, but I can't find the cord to the camera...

Responsibilities We Should Be Glad Not To Have

Blackadder has about as good a set of posts as I've ever seen addressing the moral question of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from a contrarian position. (And Part II.)

This is a debate into which I generally refrain from inserting myself, in that there are three overall reactions that I have to the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan: I am glad that they successfully ended the war without the immense bloodshed (American and Japanese) that an invasion of the home islands would unquestionably have involved; I am deeply shocked and saddened at the incredible destruction that was wrecked upon a primarily civilian city (just as in the massive firebombings of both German and Japanese cities); and I am tremendously grateful not to be in the position having to make the decision that President Truman was confronted with.

There a certainly disturbing things which can be noted about the decision to drop the bomb on the particular targets that we did. Most especially of those that I have read, the desire of the targetting committee on the scientific side to pick a fairly untouched (thus, necessarily, militarily non-central) target in order to see clearly the effects of the bomb on a city.

There are also a number of other paths that were clearly considered, which might have been better than that which we eventually took. Blackadder links to primary source material about General Marshall's advocacy for using the bombs first against more exclusively military targets. And according to Truman's own diary, it was the intention to issue a warning to the civilian populace of the target city before dropping the bomb -- something which did not happen.

However at the same time, the very thing which makes alternative paths beguiling is that since they were not taken, we do not know what their results would have been. Thus, we can always allow ourselves to imagine that some alternative course would have had results as good as or better than what actually happened -- but we can never know.

While when I was younger I was a fairly vociferous defender of Truman's decision in regards to dropping the atomic bombs, I think I have lapsed into a position more of being willing neither to strongly endorse nor to condemn the decision.

Living, as we do, in a democracy, we rightly consider it our duty to consider the past and potential actions of our leaders and weigh their morality. And yet to the extent that we are a representative democracy, we still have leaders whose final duty it is to make certain decisions. Among those was Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan.

Had I been in Truman's place, I might have chosen differently than he did -- though without being in Truman's place and knowing what he did and did not know at the time, it's hard to say. Or perhaps, I would have acted as Truman said he did in his diaries -- which either because he was not fully informed of what was going on or because his wishes were not fully carried out do not fully match what did in the end happen. (See Blackadder's first post for quotes from Truman's diaries.) But more than anything else I'm simply glad that I do not have the burden of making the decision Truman was faced with -- knowing that hundreds of thousands of people would die in horrible ways whichever way he chose. To be a leader in time of crisis is a truly great burden, and if anything it has become more so as the size of nations has swelled into the hundreds of millions of souls and our technology has put more destruction in the hands of fewer people.

This is not to say that we can never judge the actions of our leaders. Some of their actions are clearly right or clearly wrong. But there are other choices, and this was one, which I in no way envy them.

In the Divine Comedy, Dante finds in Ante-Purgatory a valley full of famous rulers who are not yet ready to enter the active purgation of Mt. Purgatory itself. Their obstacle to holiness is that they have for too long focused on their energies on securing earthly safety and prosperity for their countries. It was, in Dante's view, a responsibility which was ordered to the good, but not the highest good. And so they waited in the outskirts of Purgatory until they were sufficiently recentered on the ultimate good to begin their journey upwards.

Faceless Conversations

Kyle of Postmodern Papist has a post about the facelessness of blogging, and how the sense that one is not talking to a "real person" with a face seems inevitably to lead some people to behave much more beligerantly in the blogsphere than they would in real life.

It was occurring to me the other day that my online activities tend to fill gaps that I experience, from time to time, in my face-to-face existence.

I'd spent a fair amount of time on the early text-only forums and in long term email discussions back in the early-to-mid-nineties, when I was in high school -- to a great extent because my closest friends (those I could have intellectual conversations with) had moved away. During college, I pretty much completely abandoned the internet. But then afterwards, I gradually found myself slipping back into the habit, first on various forums, and later in the blogsphere. MrsDarwin and I, of course, talk all the time, about many of the same topics that end up gracing these "pages". But as our growing family and that of our friends results in our often not getting the chance to get together with other adult friends for a couple weeks at a time, the desire to find other means of conversation is strong.

In this regard, the faceless medium can (with the moral discipline to avoid flamewars) be a benefit in that one is able to toss out subjects for discussion which would be considered rude or threatening among any but the most intimate friends in real life. And indeed, there is a pleasant real-life follow through to such discussions, in that on the occasions that we have had the chance to get together with other bloggers in person, conversation tends to be easy and free even for those who write frequently about their introversion.

Unions vs. Free Elections

Former Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern has an editorial in this weekend's Wall Street Journal in which he break with current Democratic party orthodoxy by opposing the Orwellianly named "Employee Free Choice Act":

The key provision of EFCA is a change in the mechanism by which unions are formed and recognized. Instead of a private election with a secret ballot overseen by an impartial federal board, union organizers would simply need to gather signatures from more than 50% of the employees in a workplace or bargaining unit, a system known as "card-check." There are many documented cases where workers have been pressured, harassed, tricked and intimidated into signing cards that have led to mandatory payment of dues.

Under EFCA, workers could lose the freedom to express their will in private, the right to make a decision without anyone peering over their shoulder, free from fear of reprisal.

There's no question that unions have done much good for this country. Their tenacious efforts have benefited millions of workers and helped build a strong middle class. They gave workers a new voice and pushed for laws that protect individuals from unfair treatment. They have been a friend to the Democratic Party, and so I oppose this legislation respectfully and with care.

To my friends supporting EFCA I say this: We cannot be a party that strips working Americans of the right to a secret-ballot election. We are the party that has always defended the rights of the working class. To fail to ensure the right to vote free of intimidation and coercion from all sides would be a betrayal of what we have always championed.

Reading McGovern's piece, it struck me that there are really two ways in which an election helps prevent the undue intimidation of those voting.

The secrecy of your ballot is one element, but so is the fact that the election is held on a single day, and is then over. With the secret ballot, the voter is free from the fear of being subject to the vengeance of either a sore loser or a winning faction eager to weed out the disloyal.

But the fact that there is a single election day where one is only asked for one's decision once is also a key element for keeping elections fair and free. Imagine if, in the presidential election, the supports of one candidate could follow you around for weeks or months asking you to sign the list of votes for their candidate of choice. You might refuse dozens of times, yet if one time you gave in through fear, frustration, or simply desire to be left alone, that would be the vote that counted, not the dozens of refusals.

Just as our constitution assured that we will not be tried again and again for the same crime until a jury can finally be badgered into convicting us, the fact that an election takes place at a specific instant in time grants us freedom from undue influence. One can arguably intimidate 50% of the voters, but it's hard to intimidate them all at the same time.

Now with 81% More Man!

It's Friday, so why not something useless and mildly fun while I finish my lunch?

Some clever fellow has put together a little script which checks your browser history against a list of major websites' readership gender ratios and then estimates the likelihood that you are male or female. I am, it seems, fairly male, though with a bit of a feminine side:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 19%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 81%



Site Male-Female Ratio
google.com 0.98
wikipedia.org 1.08
amazon.com 0.9
cnn.com 1.35
blogger.com 1.06
nytimes.com 1.13
dell.com 1.04
merriam-webster.com 0.89
census.gov 0.9
realclearpolitics.com 1.82
nationalreview.com 1.74
economist.com 1.47
txu.com 0.72

(It's rather slow running it in IE.) It probably says a lot about family economic profiles that the most female site I've visited is our utility company.

And while we're on the subject of gender and the internet, you've doubtless seen this cartoon before:



MrsDarwin says she's the voice from outside the panel. And indeed, sticking my finger in the dike of sanity to try to hold back the rising tide is one of my ever present vices.

Outrage is Not a Virtue

**Language Warning -- Discussion of the use of an Anglo-Saxon-derived crudity follows**

There's a line of thinking -- or perhaps I should say "feeling" -- out there derived from the George Carlin school of philosophy which takes pleasure from asserting things according to the formula: I don't know what's more fucked up about the world: the fact that with all our wealth there are millions of people in our country who can't get enough food to eat, or the fact that most of you are more upset by the fact I said "fuck" than that there are millions of people starving.

The idea is, I suppose, that the area of suffering being called out is so appauling that there's no point in discussing it politely -- the comfortable need to be shocked from their complacency and so offensiveness is needed in order to spark the outrage that will beget virtue.

Myself, I'm rather dubious of the idea that outrage is capable of begetting virtue. Outrage seems to find its natural outlet in hate -- in searching for the guilty and finding a way to punish them. Picking a topic from my own side of the political spectrum (which seems only fair, if I'm to attempt to be honest in my critique): Those who quickly themselves into a trembling fury over abortion are generally not able to make themselves truly useful in an kind of pro-life work. If you consider screaming "How many babies have you killed today?!?!" at an abortion clinic worker to constitute a worthwhile activity, you're unlikely to be able to muster the empathy and open-mindedness to work calmly and helpfully with a girl who comes to a crisis pregnancy center still divided in her mind as to whether she should have an abortion.

Part of this is because action begets emotion. When we shout or use profanity or violent imagery in our speech, that very action makes us angry. It makes our blood flow, our temperature rise, and it triggers our natural urge to fight, not to calmly explain or kindly help.

Outrage, and the ranting that stems from it, also tends to make us unattractive to others -- most particularly those who are not yet sure if they agree with us. When we talk with those we disagree with about that issues we consider vital, our desire should be that they convert, or at least come to understand that our viewpoint has real virtues to it. Accusing someone of being a Nazi, or hating the poor, or wanting to kill the unborn, or not caring about the born not only fails to achieve that, but it makes the listener less likely to pay any attention to what comes after.

Thus, outrage seldom achieves its theoretical object -- changing the other's mind. And it should be no source of pride in an of itself, because it gives nothing to alleviate the suffering one seeks to end. Returning to the example I provided at the beginning, it may be that millions of people going hungry is more shocking than the use of profanity, but since the use of profanity does nothing to feed the hungry, it's unclear how a world with a million hungry people is improved by declaring it "fucked up". A lack of food is made no better by removing civility as well.

Should have mentioned this at the time...

A few days ago, Sheila Kippley at NFP and More kicked off a series of posts for World Breastfeeding Week by reprinting a piece on contemplation I wrote shortly after my two-year-old was born.

Education and American Progress

Gene Expression Classic had a post last week linking to a David Brooks column about America's history of educational excellence, and it's leadership in the world economy. Brooks set the stage as follows:

Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years.

As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

This threatens the country’s long-term prospects. It also widens the gap between rich and poor. Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

Brooks goes on to discuss the "skills gap" which has allowed the US economy to continue becoming more and more productive, in great part as the result of technological innovation created and used by the educated elite. (Just under 30% of the US population aged 25-34 has a bachelor's degree or higher.) Brooks argues that the US educational system lost steam and direction in the 60s and 70s, resulting in our relative loss of global competitiveness since that time (the US remains one of the strongest economies in the world, but it's not as much stronger than the rest of the world as it used to be). I think his analysis on why this happened and what to do about it gets a bit more spotty, though:

...Using his own research, Heckman also concludes that high school graduation rates peaked in the U.S. in the late 1960s, at about 80 percent. Since then they have declined.

In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability. He uses common sense to intuit what these traits are, but on this subject economists have a lot to learn from developmental psychologists....

Brooks argues that for the long term, the "skills gap" is the largest single contributor to inequality and thus middle class angst, much more so than energy prices and globalization. However, since it's hard to fix the education system, no one is emphasizing it much, though he says:

...[I]t’s worth noting that both sides of this debate exist within the Democratic Party. The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant. If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research. (It probably helps that Obama and Heckman are nearly neighbors in Chicago). McCain’s policies seem largely oblivious to these findings. There’s some vague talk about school choice, but Republicans are inept when talking about human capital policies.

It seems to me that there's a serious lack of imagination here. If, as Brooks cites Heckman to say above, many of the educational/developmental problems that we're seeing appear by age five, it's hard to see how public education policies (including Obama's desire to have full 0-5 public education available) are going to make the difference. Public schools and public daycares (or private ones, come to that) are not well suited to forming the minds of those under five so that they will be good learners and stable personalities in the years to come. That's what families are for. So if we're seeing children who by age five are already seriously unsuited to learning and stability, what we're seeing is probably at least as much family and cultural break-down as an educational one.

TangoMan of Gene Expression points out that part of the problem in this regard may center around immigration.

Having an immigration policy which pulls in tens of millions of 6th grade educated, Spanish-speaking immigrants is a policy that creates inequality. Goldin and Katz would do well to control for immigrant status, legal and illegal, in the ranks of the low skilled.... [D]emography matters. When we celebrate diversity and when we hold all cultures to be equal then we discount the importance that cultural practices, traditions and views have on real world factors, like education and economic productivity. Heckman notes that "some children" benefit from family practices that promote human capital development, but that many don't. I'm willing to wager that racial and cultural factors correlate to a good deal of this disparity....It's fantasy to posit that the skills gap is independent of group measures of human capital stock. ParaPundit shows the dismal embrace of higher education by Hispanics even after 4 generations in the US.

This may be something of a factor, but frankly, there was plenty of immigration in the first half of the 20th century, and in the 19th, and those immigrants often had much less than a 6th grade education. But there is, clearly a stark difference. Schools thrived even among the immigrant communities (whether they were often seen as the means to improving your economic status) during the period that Brooks identifies as the boom time of American education and economic expansion. Not only the public schools, but the Catholic school system, Hebrew schools, etc.

Given the 60s/70s inflection point at which we seem to see a downturn in American education (and the appearance of the "skills gap") I can think of two clear areas for improvement:

Rediscovering Education -- By almost any standards, our public education system fell apart in the 70s. Educational theories came and went, and it became fashionable to suggest we should only teach what is "relevant" to students. Traditional ideas of the Three Rs and classical liberal education were left behind as wonky ideas ranging from the "new math" to "Afrocentric curriculums" were attempted. In many ways, the broader educational system has never recovered, in part because administrators and teachers are now almost all people who received non-educations back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And anyone who deals with todays college students can attest that 12 years of education often results in someone with no logical skills, poor reading comprehension, and no writing ability. And that's among the half of high school students who actually go on to attempt college! We desperately need a return to basics: reading, writing and arithmetic in the early grades; the liberal arts and sciences in the later grades.

The Family as Foundation -- Just as importantly, however, we need to develop the cultural understanding that parents and families hold the primary responsibility for educating their children. Much of the education, after age five or so, may often go on in schools with teachers, but parents are still responsible for providing children with the understanding that education is important and worth doing, and providing them with the family support, motivation and help to be successful in education.

And for too many people, the two income family in which both husband and wife have full time "fulfilling careers" while raising their children is not only the normative way of life, but the only imaginable way of life. Some families may have little choice in that matter, in that where they live and how much they earn require both parents to work. But there is, I think, a need to recenter cultural expectation (especially for the earliest years of a child's life) to see child rearing and early education as something that deserves the full time attention of a parent if at all possible. (Something which, at least in the corporate world that I find myself in from eight to six, seems an alien concept to many.) Professional help is all very well, but it can never be as personal and as concentrated as that of a parent or other relative.


Clearly, there's much room for improvement in US education, both culturally and institutionally. However, I'd disagree with Brooks as to where we need to look for solutions on the political spectrum. First of all, our biggest problems are cultural, not policy. And so the solutions we need most involve cultural change which can perhaps be advocated by politicians, but can certainly not be ennacted by them. Much though we often wish to solve our problems by simply electing some particular politician, I don't think this is one that politicians can solve for us. And to the extent that it is, I don't see an emphasis on parents taking primarily responsibility for education and a return to classic liberal education as being something we're going to see out of the Democratic party any time soon. Seeing as what we need in our education is a rollback of much of the progressive educational theory of the last fifty years, it would seem an odd thing to come from the left. Also, too many proposals from the left (and, indeed, from the mainstream right) put the focus on the professionals: testing, schools, public daycare and pre-K, etc. These might be nice-to-haves, but they do nothing either to change our understanding of what education is, or to bring families back to the center of education. That, indeed, seems to be something that simply does not fit in the current political axis -- and which is advocated by occasional voices of both the intellectual left and right, but few in the political or party establishment.

Finally, I think we may need to ask ourselves: At what point does a "skills gap" become inevitable? I'm sure that we can do a much, much better job at education and culture than we do now, but is there some point we could take our technology and economy to where a significant percentage of the population is simply not capable of keeping up?

I don't really want to think that, as I find the idea of IQ and objectively limited intelligence unappealing. I would prefer to think that everyone is capable of being highly intelligent and educated if given the right upbringing and education. And yet, I'm not sure that this tabula rasa view has support in reality. Is it possible that in a highly technological society a "skills gap" becomes inevitable at some point?

Book Stash

We had cleared the bookshelves during the recent floor upheaval, and so it seemed pointless to reduce the stalagmite of books forming on my bedside table. However, an earthquake of small feminine origin recently leveled the stack, and that in conjunction with the dust settling downstairs has convinced me that it's finally time to repatriate all the wanderers. Here's a view of the accumulated strata, from top layer down:

Bureaucratic hassles at the parish level: Baptismal edition

Here's the quiz of the day for Catholic parents: how long does it take you to schedule a baptism at your parish?

In the last months of my last pregnancy, I called up our parish to try and schedule the baptism. We had a tricksy time frame with godparents graduating from college and only having a few days of time overlap to be in the area, so I wanted to get in good and early. Baby was due in March, and we needed the baptism in May. The parish secretary said, "Oh no, we don't even have any classes available until June." No class, no baptism.

So I spoke with a priest who'd just been moved from our parish to a parish about 20 miles away, and he scheduled the baptism right then, over the phone, for the day we needed. We didn't have to take the baptism class, and I made sure I got the paperwork he needed to the office in good time.

Now it's time to schedule another baptism. As before, I'm starting before baby is born because it's very important to us to have the baptism as soon as possible. I'd like to do things the right way because Darwin is on parish council and it seems important to set an example, and yet I'm running into the same hassles. Seeing as once again both my godparents are coming in from out of state, it's important to me to be able to set a date as soon as possible, but one can't schedule the baptism until one's taken the class, which one can't even sign up for without the proper paperwork from the godparents, who need to know the baptism date so that they can take time off work and buy plane tickets... And then there's the issue of requiring a birth certificate, which, as I hope to have the baby baptized two weeks after the class (which we can't take until next month, four days before baby is due), is simply not going to be possible.

I appreciate the need to ensure that parents and godparents take their responsibilities seriously, and I can understand that our priest doesn't want to be granting exceptions left and right, but the laid-back time frame on which the parish seems to operate seems to de-emphasize the vital importance of baptism to a child's soul. I don't want to wait a year or six months or three months -- I want my child baptized right away. Even in these technologically advanced times, children can die unexpectedly. I'm not willing to take the chance of pushing out baptism until some parish bureaucrat has ticked off every last box on the checklist. For now I'm going to try and work with the system, but if takes pulling a few strings to ensure that my child's soul is cleansed of original sin as quickly as possible, then so be it.

UPDATE: You guys have some crazy stories in the comments, but I defy you to top Opinionated Homeschooler's anecdote:

But my friend got it worse from our parish. Her godparents, like all of her family, were Cuban refugees. They had no sacramental records, as Castro wasn't going to fax them over. The parish flat refused to allow them to stand as godparents. She is outraged to this day.

Please Apostacize Over Something Big

Over the last few weeks, I've run into a couple of online personalities who have declared themselves to be apostacizing over the Church's teaching on "pelvic issues" such as homosexuality and birth control. This has always bothered me a bit, but it took me a while to sort out exactly why.

As Christians and Catholics we believe some rather incredible things. We believe that the universe in all its beauty and vastness and order was created by God. We also believe that God created us in His image, making us rational creatures with immortal souls. We believe that we sinned and separated ourselves from God, and that to heal this rift between us and our maker, God became man and walked among us. We believe that God allowed himself to suffer and die a humiliating death on the cross, that He rose after three days to show us how he held power over sin and death, and that He gave a Church, guided by the Holy Spirit which preserves His teachings on Earth and provides us with the sacraments which nourish us with God's grace. We believe that we are called to live according to Christ's teachings and that by the act of uniting our wills with God we can be unit with him for eternity in heaven.

We claim to believe all these things, and we have before us the example of many holy men and women who have given their lives, either in service or in suffering and martyrdom, for the faith. By accepting these claims and beliefs, we unite ourselves with something beautiful and incredible, we claim membership in a Church that claims to have been founded by God and to be guided and preserved from error by Him. We pledge ourselves to hold these truths even unto death. And we are united through the Church with priest and religious who have given up the natural human cycle of family and reproduction in order to devote themselves entirely to God's work, to the next world.

If someone has truly accepted all these unlikely and radical beliefs, if someone is truly prepared to live the faith and if necessary die for the faith, does it make any sense at all to renounce it over its teachings about sexual morality?

If we have really believed all of these rather incredible things about God and His creation of the universe and incarnation and suffering and death and resurrection and founding of the Church, shouldn't we be prepared to sacrifice much more than our sexual ambitions for that belief?

The sad fact is, all too often we believe rather cheaply. What does it cost us to say or feel, "Oh yeah, I believe that." And yet if we really think about what a major act believing something such as the Catholic Faith is, we should consider believing in the Faith in the first place to be the great decision. And if we are ready to be serious about the idea that the Catholic Church teaches the truth, than living out that truth should seem a rather little thing compared to the grandeur of what we are asserting to be true.

Miracle Bleg

I know that there's a fairly detailed process, involving bringing in a couple of doctors to see if any strictly natural process is involved, for verifying medical miracles in regards to canonization. However, I'm having trouble finding detailed information about specific verified miracles. Does anyone know of a good online resource that provides a decent amount of detail on both the Vatican's verification process and some recent miracles that have been verified?

Giant Man-Eating Bugs Bore Me!

So we felt like watching a movie last night. This is an increasingly rare occurence, as we're usually too tired or preoccupied these days to tie up two hours of our precious free time post-girl-bedtime. But last night we tied up three hours watching King Kong, and all I can say is that Peter Jackson owes me back the extra hour with which he padded his bloated movie.

Peter Jackson does lavish spectacle well -- we've all seen Lord of the Rings. Perhaps he does better work when he's presented with a plot-heavy saga to whittle down into nine 0r so hours of screen time. But his King Kong is thirty minutes of plot jam-packed into three hours of increasingly distancing special effects extravaganza. A bit of action in a movie gets one's adrenaline pumping. Strata after strata of over-the-top dinosaur stampedes and ape chases and Kong fighting men and Kong fighting three dinosaurs at the same time with a girl in his hand! so ossified our suspension of disbelief that by the time giant insects and spiders and tapeworms were devouring our heroes and one guy was using a machine gun to shoot hordes of scorpions off another guy, we were yawning and checking the time. And this from the people who spent a tense half-hour in a stand-off with a single cockroach just hours earlier. (Now that was a situation with real dramatic potential.)

Oh Peter Jackson. What happened? I wanted to like your movie. But why the character development for the ship's crew who suddenly fall off the screen in the last hour? Where did all the natives of the island come from and disappear to? Why the massive and unneccesary plot holes in what should have been such a compact story? Why couldn't we see more of Colin Hanks' production assistant, who was the only character I cared about? How on earth can anyone make a movie that winds up with me skipping past a scene a guy being eaten by multiple huge tapeworms not because I'm horrified but because I'm numbed by the preceding interminable action sequences? The mind boggles.

Perhaps in my old age I'm getting jaded, but when I chose to spend an evening of my valuable spare time with a movie, I like to be entertained or challenged or at least somewhat involved. Is that too much to ask of the exact same production team that made Lord of the Rings?

Trickle Down Economics and Me

A couple weeks ago, MrsDarwin and I drove by the tea shop in the "old down town" of our area (a single street with difficult parking which is not within walking distance of anywhere and not easy to get to, but features a dozen picturesque old buildings on each side of the street and the public library down at the end) and saw that it was closing its physical premises and becoming an online-only business. "That's really too bad," we said. "It was nice to have a tea shop around here."

Of course, if all the people who thought the tea shop was nice were like us, it's no surprise that it closed. I went there once and spent about $50 buying MrsDarwin a tea pot and a variety of loose leaf teas for her birthday two years ago. MrsDarwin had stepped in a few times to meet someone over a pot of tea. Between the two of us we probably spent less than $100 there over the four years that it was there.

The difficulty, of course, is that one only needs to blow $25 on a tea pot every so often. And loose leaf tea (and theirs was rather expensive) is often more of a pain to deal with. So most of the time we just used the boxes of Twinings that we could pick up at the supermarket when we were doing all our other shopping. With friends like that, no wonder the tea shop decided to close its physical doors.

The term "trickle down economics" is mostly used for derisive purposes, and yet at root, there's a very real process that it describes. As we spend out money, we determine which businesses make money, and which don't. And that in turn determines which businesses expand, keep their current employees, and hire more, and which businesses lay off employees or close up entirely.

This idea that one is responsible, though one's spending habits, for other people's livelihoods is a bit hard for me, as I come from a background (and we maintain a family culture) which puts a fair amount of emphasis on thrift. As a family, we go out to dinner or order pizza perhaps once a month, and MrsDarwin and I make it out to have a "date night" dinner together at a nice restaurant perhaps five times a year. If these practices were universal, I'm assuming we'd have far, far fewer restaurants available to choose from -- because most would be out of business. Thus, our ability to go to restaurants at all is subsidized, in a sense, by those whose eating out habits we'd consider rather profligate.

In other cases, our spending habits to reflect more clearly the sort of economic landscape we'd like to see. We put a fair amount of money into used bookstores each year, and enough new books to give book publishers a boost as well. We eschew prepared food makers, but are willing to shell out money for artisanal cheeses, bakery breads, micro-brew beers and scotches and bourbons from small distilleries. On the other hand, there would be a lot fewer clothing makers if most people were like us. And fewer electronic gadgets.

Something that was striking me particularly the other day, however, was how our choices and preferences affect people who might hope to make their living working directly for you. For instance, I'm of a distinct minority among my co-workers in that I do not have a "yard guy" or yard service to cut my lawn, trim my trees and shrubbery, etc. I do all my own yard work, partly out of a conviction that a man should tend his own yard, and partly because I don't see the inconvenience of spending a couple of Saturday mornings a month working on the yard as something it's worth $80/mo or more to avoid. Similarly, we try to do all the home repairs and improvements possible ourselves. We've done all our own paining, installed our own hardwood floors and tile, etc.

I tend to think of this doing the work yourself rather than "making someone else do it" as showing a respect for hard work and getting things right -- and yet for those who seek to make their livings from doing yard work or installing floors, my preferences amount to denying them employment. When I install my own floors at the cost of my free time, I essentially insert myself into the labor market at a cost of 2 beers/day and thus drive out anyone who might have competed for me for my business.

Of course, I'm a minimal danger to the wider flooring industry, because knowing what hard work it is I'd never volunteer to do this kind of work for someone else -- except perhaps as an even exchange of my help on that for help on my own projects at some later date. But it did get me wondering if those who consider it immoral to pay less than a certain dollar amount per hour for a given type of work would consider my insistence on using free labor (and thus not hiring anyone) to be immorally denying to work to someone who needs the money. If it's wrong to hire a "scab" for lower wages instead of a union member, is it doubly wrong to get the work down without hiring anyone? (But then, it'd dangerous to try to predict what people one disagrees with would think: one is too tempted to make them look foolish since they look foolish to one.)