Philosophy

A new series reflecting on how thoughtful lives happen

This new project is a series of video clips exploring the ways that various activities promote thought and life-long learning.

A new series reflecting on how thoughtful lives happen

This new project is a series of video clips exploring the ways that various activities promote thought and life-long learning.

A good philosophic children's book

The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick (New York: Scholastic Press, 2007)

The orphan boy Hugo endures a lonely and secret life, sleeping in a hidden room in the Paris train station, continuing his departed uncle's work of tending the station's 27 clocks from small dark tunnels in the walls. At the start of the book, he sneaks out to steal a mechanical mouse from a toy store. He is himself a mouse, a secret creature in inhabited spaces, and also mechanical - part of the mechanism of the station - a boy with a function but no life.

The young thief is caught and forced to show an old toymaker his precious notebook, drawings for repairing his mechanical man. This automaton, the only inheritance from Hugo's watchmaker father, is Hugo's great secret: a writing robot. He is working to repair it using the parts from the toyshop animals, hoping that it will write a note to "save his life."

The toymaker also has a secret, a terrible memory he wants to leave behind. He recognizes with some strange alarm the drawings in Hugo's notebook, and refuses to return it. Hugo is desperate to get it back, and the two artisans become locked together in a strange destiny: Hugo's secret and the old toymaker's secret are part of a large, wonderful, sad story that promises a brighter future for both of them, if they can just work out the mystery together.

This is how The Invention of Hugo Cabret begins. It is a demanding book, initiating the reader into a specific time and place, Paris in 1931, and into a set of unfamiliar ideas and metaphors. The young reader must learn his way around this world, and believe in it. The success of the Harry Potter books shows that quite young children relish the challenge of working within unfamiliar assumptions and languages, of following a long and intricate story. This novel builds on that insight.

There is an important difference between the dark Paris of Hugo Cabret and Harry Potter's school of sorcery. As the novel progresses, we learn that Hugo lives in a strange corner of the real world, not in some totally fantastic place. Hugo has stumbled into a fantastic story from real history; the old man from the toy store is one of the early geniuses of French silent film, from the days when filmmakers and toymakers were classed with magicians, because they made impossible things happen. The story begins with the texture of fantasy, but it moves ever closer to real history, ending with bibliography and web references. At the very end, we learn that the writing robot, which seems initially to be the most fantastic feature of the story, is one of many such automata built in the Nineteenth Century; several are on display in the Franklin Museum in Philadelphia. Thus, Selznick challenges the readers' certainty about where the line runs between fantasy and history, forcing them to ask, "What is possible?" - one of the oldest and best of the philosophic questions.

The form of the novel provokes another kind of question. On the opening page, the narrator tells the reader to think of the book as a movie. This is strange advice; we usually consider books and movies as very different media, for different audiences, at different levels of importance. But this is a movie/book, a sustained meditation on the power of movies and on the early experience of movies as magic, as doors into the world of dreams and unrealized possibility. The conversations between Hugo and the toymaker develop this idea in many dimensions.

However, Selznick's most striking reflection on the power of movies is built right into the structure of the book. The first few pages are like scenes from a silent movie: a trip through a train station, from the perspective of a boy hiding in the wall, peering out through the faces of clocks. Each moment in this journey is portrayed with great accuracy. Suddenly, the drawings stop, and we are confronted with pages of dense text, picking up the story just where the last drawing left it, carrying it on in lucid prose. This seamless alternation continues throughout the novel, leading us to insights and questions about how differently prose and pictures work. The pictures draw us in, convey immediate felt experience, but they are very slow. The prose provides a faster ride through the story, conveying interpretation and background impossible with pictures alone. And then, just when we are feeling starved for the feel of Hugo's life, another haunting sequence of pictures brings us back behind Hugo's eyes, in the dark passages of the station. We are made vividly aware that experience has both these dimensions, and that it needs both these media to come to full expression.

I imagine a young child encountering this book, following the trail of pictures, making up a story, and then running up against a page of beautifully printed prose. The child will naturally ask, "What do these strange marks mean? How are they going to help me understand this story?" That question is an entry point into the world of reading. Readers will keep asking it, all the rest of their lives. For asking that question well, and for many other gifts, lovers of literature have reason to thank Brian Selznick.

Teachable moments and the responsibility of journalists

Right now, lots of people are thinking about flooding in North Dakota. It is the perfect time to look at the dynamics of water on flat land, the efforts over the last twenty years to prevent flooding through construction of precautionary dams and catch basins, and the history of legislation and ordinances authorizing developments in low-lying areas. Right now, everybody’s looking, taking the time. Six months from now, the re-scheduled rodeo in the Fargo dome will be the big news.

What do we hear about, mostly? Exhausted people pass sandbags down a line, doing the best work they have ever done in their lives. People fear for their houses, are grateful for the support of their friends and neighbors and for the help of outsiders who donate their labor to the effort. This is genuinely something to celebrate, something people need to know about, for the good of their souls. Only a very brave, perhaps a very reckless, journalist would introduce doubt or despair into the story now. And objective, background, big-picture reporting often turns up the evidence for doubt and despair.

Nevertheless, it hit me wrong when, on the Newshour the other night, I saw the exhausted Fargo mayor interviewed about, essentially, physics: what happens to sandbags when they get cold. He didn’t know. Somebody at any one of 50 universities knows. It seems very likely that somebody someplace has been studying the physics of dams and sandbags, the dynamics of the northern rivers, disaster intervention strategies, legislation and lobbying around development projects in endangered areas -- for twenty years already. Imagine a world where journalists mobilized the scholars and scientists at our great institutions right away, when disasters happened, getting them into intense conversation about what is going on. Suppose they then reported that conversation as news. Maybe, in that world, the teachable moments wouldn’t go to waste. But, in that world, scholars would become, to their embarrassment, part of the story. Their pronouncements would affect the morale of the people filling sandbags. That’s indeed a great risk to take, when issues are not clear, when expert opinion has to be tentative, when morale matters.

On the other side, people on the sandbag lines keep saying, ‘We’ve been here before, lots of times.’ Until the heightened attention brought about by crises gets channeled into thought and imagination and reconstruction, the disasters will just keep coming.

When I think about the enormous public investment in university research, and when I reflect on the silence of university people in times of crisis – that is, in those times when new proposals would actually get a hearing, I think of Abraham Lincoln’s request to his general, something like, ‘If you are not going to use your army, may I borrow it?’

What the world needs now

The Obama administration faces several challenges all at once. I don’t know what it should do about any of them.

I think I know what devices are needed, to move forward. They don’t have a good common name; let’s call them rhetorics, for now.

Consider a strange fact: Americans would have rioted if the government had ordered that all working people rise one hour earlier, that businesses begin operations an hour earlier, on a specific day. This is intrusion at a level we’re just not ok with. But call it “Daylight Saving Time,” and people go along – some happily, some grumpily, but everybody takes the change as a fact of nature: when the robins return, we adjust our clocks.

Another fact: Americans would have seen government as caving in entirely to Lenin had anyone said, in the Roosevelt years, that a tax should be imposed on working people and businesses to provide a welfare fund for the elderly. But Social Security, an insurance program, was a different thing altogether. (How an insurance program without any mechanism for enforcing payments, essentially revocable at any time, differs from a welfare program, is a matter for philosophers to ponder, after they get done with angels and pins.)

A third fact, perhaps a bit more sinister: the watchdogs of basic civil liberties would have bellowed loudly, had the U.S. government announced that the televisions of the poorest Americans would be rendered useless, forcing them to seek out and install new technology in a time of economic distress. This would be seen as cutting to the heart of people’s right to know, to remain informed, to remain part of the national community. But, call it “digital conversion,” and most people see the move as a benign adjustment to changing technology.

It is too easy to respond to such examples by saying, “It’s all just propaganda – what Goebbels was up to, basically.” It isn’t all just propaganda. There are a variety of possible descriptions of every policy and initiative and course of action. Each illuminates some features and obscures others; each has a different feel, a different motivational power, a different inflection. To live in an uninflected world is like getting all one’s communication from a digital voice reader; meaning requires selection and emphasis. (Intelligence requires that one figure out what trade-offs are behind each selection, each emphasis.)

Politics is largely a matter of finding descriptions that people can live with in the long run. Ethics requires more: that the descriptions not make anything important disappear. What we need from our leaders, and what we can help to shape, in a democratic system, is an ethical politics containing the necessary rhetorics for moving forward from the current crises of meaning.

The Perils of Secession

When I hear the scornful response of some conservatives to Barack Obama's very risky proposals for fixing everything at once, I have two thoughts. One of them is funny. My old friend Wolfgang was once asked to talk a friend into a tight parking space. He kept saying, "Keep coming, you have plenty of room," until his friend rammed the car behind him. Then he announced, "You hit him; I'm going to go tell." Wolfgang was sometimes somewhat hard to love.

The other response begins with the word "secession." The critics have decided to secede for a while, to let the problem be his problem. On secession, there is a very nice remark in the preface to Louis Menand's book, The Metaphysical Club, on the secession of the South:

Secession allowed the North, for four years, to set the terms for national expansion without interference from the South, and the wartime Congress did not let the opportunity slip. The Congress was one of the most active in American history. It supported scientific training and research; it established the first system of national taxation and created the first significant national currency; it made possible the construction of public universities and the construction of the transcontinental railway. It turned the federal government into the legislative engine of social and economic progress....For more than thirty years, a strong central government protected and promoted the ascendance of industrial capitalism and the way of life associated with it -- the way of life we call "modern." (ix-x).

At this point, some of my progressive friends are saying, "Right on, Menand. They shot themselves in the foot again, those thick-headed conservatives. Barack's the new Lincoln, and he will preside over the new Lincolnization of the U.S. economy." But aren't the currently fashionable problems rooted exactly in decisions that were made very quickly back in the 1860s. Isn't the lesson here partly that powerful ideas need critical scrutiny and real debate? Those who secede do real harm by not being there to help think things through.

My spouse has proposed a new bumper sticker for the 21st Century, "What would grown ups do?"

Rick Warren and Obama

I admire very much a blog piece by David Quigg, “What Would Obama Do If Obama Were Mad at Obama About Rick Warren?�? Talk about defusing an issue by asking a good, weird question! He shows what thoughtful commentary might be like, commentary that makes people think.

On the Warren issue, I have a small thing to say. I am always looking for people significantly smarter than me. They give me hope, because I cannot see a way out of most of the problems I know about. The sign of somebody being smarter than me is that they do something that seems stupid, but looks less stupid, the more I look at it. This Warren invitation is that kind of a decision. Warren has to accept. It Warren accepts, he implicitly admits that there are points of connection between his views and those of Obama that outweigh the differences: he cannot give an invocation at the inaugural and thereafter claim that Obama is the anti-Christ. His followers will have trouble with that, also. So his only option is to accept and then to put distance between himself and Obama in the content of his invocation. But we know from the Wellstone memorial experience that partisan political rhetoric on unifying, sacred occasions is absolutely the wrong thing to do. It's suicide. So any distancing, within the invocation itself, will have to be very subtle. Shakespeare could pull it off; so could Lincoln.

A political chess move that can only go wrong if one’s opponent turns out to be Shakespeare or Lincoln is a pretty clever move.

Life-changing video - 2008

I am voting for these, for 2008, all from Youtube:

1. Warren Buffett did a talk to an MBA class a while back. The whole thing is up on Youtube in 10 minute segments. Segment 1, about his general approach to happiness and success, is comforting and inspiring.

2. This talk by a Nobel economics laureate, Daniel Kahneman, says very surprising things about happiness, making me realize that I think I know many things about happiness that just aren’t so.

3. Two Palestinian girls talk with great enthusiasm about being martyrs. It shows how kids are vulnerable to adults.

4. As an antidote to 3, here’s Tom Jackson, a philosophy for children teacher, talking about how he works.

A Story: Trying Out Political Ideals

I did an interview this week with Wendy Rahn, a U of MN political science professor who founded Survivors’ Studio, an exercise studio for women with cancer. This was a real challenge for her, on top of professional responsibilities and a family. What struck me in the interview though was not the idea of someone with a really cool, benevolent hobby, but rather the picture of someone who teaches every day about forms of cooperation, about the centrality of trust to human enterprises, about public solutions to private problems engaging in just the sort of enterprise that makes all those abstractions tangible, immediate, daily realities.

In the academic world, there is a space for community service on the professional resume. That has some effect on promotion and tenure decisions. But this is different: a project closely integrated with one’s academic work, giving dimension and ensuring accountability in a way not otherwise possible. I can imagine a funding source within the academic environment to make this kind of small scale project feasible, and to build practical experimentation into the overall projects of university teachers across a range of disciplines. This is an idea with the potential to transform departments and to shift public expectations of the academy.

For more on Wendy Rahn’s work, which includes a substantial public education component, go to http://studio.survivorstraining.org.

Could we just kind of not panic so much, maybe?

Intelligence is only occasionally about screaming. Mostly, it is about saying, “This is pretty much what a reasonable person would expect.�? The newspaper I read seems to me not to be setting a high enough standard for intelligence. It uses too many exclamation points. I can imagine a comparable paper charting the progress of a family’s year. “New car!�? “Bigger house!�? “Giant loan approved!�? “Caribbean Vacation!�? and then, three months later: “Big bills arrive!�? “Bank demands interest!�? “Credit cards maxed out!�? What’s wrong about these headlines is, in each case, the exclamation point. There was nothing particularly wonderful about the good things, and there is nothing particularly surprising about the bad things, and they are all tied together in one pretty understandable package, called causality.

No one who thought was ever much in awe of strategies like using up cheap, non-renewable energy sources, failing to clean up our ongoing environmental messes, making rich enemies, selling weapons indiscriminately, using low levels of antibiotics for relatively trivial purposes, and encouraging psychologies in which desires grow without limit. No one who thought thought those strategies could be pursued forever.

Some newspapers have in their titles the word “intelligencer.�? Could we please have one of those papers, locally or nationally, with all good speed? Why can’t a paper start from two messages: (1) what’s happening economically is no more shocking than death, or trees losing their leaves, or the tide washing away your sandcastle, and (2) people have the opportunity, at this moment in history, to build a national order, political and economic, that respects reality, that understands causes, that lives in the world instead of floating somewhere above it.

"Trust me; I'm not in jail yet."

Governor Blagojevich of Illinois is quoted in the Star Tribune (12/20/08, A-10) saying, “Afford me the same rights that you and your children have: the presumption of innocence.�? The context: he wants to remain in office until he is tried and convicted. He surely has the right not to be taken to some small windowless cell for an indeterminate time. He has the right not to be tortured and abused. He has the right to face the normal court system, not some special court constructed to ensure an easy conviction and to make appeal impossible. Those are important rights, as we have come to realize in the last few years. But he has no claim to remain in office. The standard is, at least: “Can he do the job adequately?�? For a job that can only be done by someone who has the trust and respect of many people, the widespread suspicion of serious wrongdoing disqualifies him, just by itself. Leave aside the question of guilt.

There may be jobs in the world that only a few people can do, so that those who control access to those offices have to tolerate all sorts of odd behavior, to get the talent required. A new governor is not in that position. Many people can do the job. Many people are eager to do the job.

Blagojevich’s statement is an example of a statement that cannot be allowed to stand as reasonable discourse; otherwise, our talk about very important matters will be poisoned. There is nothing more important in human life than the logic of “giving someone the benefit of the doubt,�? because any complex social system runs on trust. If we lose our way with respect to this topic, we lose our way practically in many areas of life.

Distant Early Warning - Wisdom Falls Like Dew From Heaven

Two examples:

1.On Monday, December 15, TPT in Minnesota aired “Torturing Democracy,�? an account of the use of torture by the United States government. The producer, and critics of U.S. policy, had hoped that this documentary would air before the November elections. Stephen Segwaller, the person in charge of programming at WNET, is quoted in the New York Times as saying, in response to such criticism, “I suspect that when we air it and other people air it there will be some criticism, attacking its motive rather than its content.�? Thank God for the audio recorder and the opportunity to hear people’s real words. Try living inside that sentence for a few minutes. Also consider how that sentence might have been crafted accurately, “Critics of an early airdate, before the election, will say that our motive was _____; critics of a late airdate, after the election, will say that our motive was _____.�? If you actually lay out those two criticisms, one may look stronger than the other. But the thing he said amalgamates all criticisms: “You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.�? The issue this evades: who’s doing the damning?

2.The documentary highlights the guidelines for torture, which have to do with avoiding certain horrific results – organ failure, death. One communication says, essentially, “If they die, you have gone too far.�? This is I think a basic error: guidelines have to be independent of their goals, otherwise they cease to be guidelines and become the advice, “Do what makes sense to you.�? Consider a book for bridge engineers that said, “Make sure the bridge doesn’t fall down unexpectedly.�? One wants help from experts to identify the early stages of catastrophe, so as to avoid catastrophe. This is a pretty elementary mistake – to undertake to provide guidelines and then, at the last minute, to pull up and not provide guidelines. People should be criticized for doing that, in authoritative memos.

I am sure that some people will be annoyed at this point, because they think that there is something terrible about guidelines for making people hurt, that the whole enterprise is devilish. It will seem trivial to worry about bad sentences, about incoherent memos, when lives and sanity are at stake. I want to say: it is very important to look at the particular moves by which the train derails, the moments at which something important is given up. The broader criticisms will come in hindsight only. At the moment that an event is unfolding, someone is confronted with a quote or a memo that feels funny, and has the choice of either worrying or not. That’s when something can still be done. It has to be one function of education to acquaint people with the feel of slipperiness, by a thousand examples. Unfortunately, we have a thousand examples in public life. (We likely speak a few, every day, also.)

Everybody repeat after me, “Sir, could you explain that once more. I don’t quite follow.�? This is not the bravest thing a person could say, but it might be just brave enough to stop a train that’s just starting up. I think it is important for ethics to highlight the possibility of slightly braver than ordinary actions, like asking for clarification.

In The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene pictures a priest about to be executed, having the thought, “It seemed to him at that moment that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint. It would only have needed a little self-restraint and a little courage.�?

One other point: there is such a thing as a moral community. People who run things have aides and advisers and deputies to help them not get caught up in intoxicating mistakes, to look for the slippage that suggests that something is about to go wrong.

Celebrating Thoughtful People: You Too Can Think for Yourself, Act With Insight and Care,and Maintain a Reflective Presence in a Crazy World

I did a paper for the 25th Anniversary Meeting of the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum, discussing possible new directions for their organization and for independent scholarship. Here is that paper: Download file

When things start to disappear alarmingly fast

The Strib and the New York Times reported, in a two day period, alarming declines in common birds, hunters and anglers, and arts critics. We have already heard about an alarming decrease in bees. A letter to the editor lamented the loss of all of the most seasoned human interest, general topic columnists at the Strib. Some of these declines have clear explanations. Others are puzzling to everybody.

As I hear such news, from different directions, I think of a line from chapter 46 of the Tao Te Ching: "When the Way rules the world, coach horses fertilize the fields; when the Way does not rule, war horses breed in the parks." (Blackney translation)

There's a tradition in ethics about finding and articulating a Way through life. The capital letters scare off contemporary philosophers, who focus in on smaller stretches of moral territory: what should we do about abortion, genetic engineering, the global economy. But there is this other tradition, which somehow promises to minimize unintended consequences, to be right in all directions, now and forever.

This isn't something we want to discard frivolously. We can land ourselves in deep misery by a string of individual decisions each of which makes some sense, taken by itself. We need information about how to get beyond that piece-by-piece ethics.

The loyal opposition -- a meditation for Lent

Reading McCullough’s long biography of Harry Truman, I remember Sally Field on “Inside the Actor’s Studio�? saying that, when she has to play an emotionally demanding role, she begins to hurt herself, early on, in ways that would seem perverse to anyone who isn’t an actor. That reminds me of a dancer’s motto: “Pain is your friend.�?

On McCullough’s account, Truman comes across as a decent, sane person who tried hard and accomplished a lot. But his job comes across as one in which pain is the occupant’s friend, and one wishes Truman had had ways of hurting himself more, about the second atom bomb, about the development of the hydrogen bomb. He knew something about this necessity; he kept in his desk drawer a brutal letter from the parents of a soldier killed in Korea. But the system he worked in worked against the work he needed to do. The opposition was programmatically opposed to him, the people who wrote to him were often absurdly narrow-minded and self-obsessed, and the press critics kept crossing the line from policy criticism to personal belittlement – just the sort of behavior that activates psychological defenses. There was no place for a consistently, routinely loyal opposition. I don’t mean by this: advisors who would speak their minds. I mean: someone of unquestioned loyalty with the job of waking up the President.

An example: McCullough reports a Truman statement on the first atom bomb, in which Truman is expressing the view that this could be imagined as a weapon against military targets, deployed in a way that limited civilian casualties. At other times, he knows that isn’t so, and says so. But this statement is a retreat into comfort.. Someone assigned to keep the President real would never let that statement pass. Perhaps temporary self-deception is permissible in some lines of work, but the President is obliged to hurt himself into full consciousness. Even the best, most decent, most fair-minded Presidents are so obliged. That’s the reason it is ok to capitalize “President.�? Maybe even Ordinary People have that obligation.

It is a mistake to equate inflicting pain with harm or with disloyalty. Actors know that. Political figures need to know that. Students need to know that. Critics need to know that. The necessity and matter-of-factness of pain, Sally Field’s “I’ve got this role; I’m going to have to start hurting myself,�? has to be built into our institutions and into our customary expectations, into our routines.