Wild Geese

By Mike Corey * Other Mike Corey Posts



Wild Geese.

Mary Oliver wrote about them once, or perhaps more than once, depending on whether or not the revisions--assuming there were any--count as separate writings. But in what that writing or those writings ultimately produced, Oliver touched on a notion that has resonated with me, as I imagine it would with most who come across it.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile, the world goes on.

These words have meant a great deal to me since I first came across them 5 1/2 years ago in a poetry class at Duke University. Their meaning is clear on the surface: Bad things happen to all of us as individuals, and though our worlds may slow down or come to a halt, the world in which we live does not. What it means beyond that is not a matter of right and wrong, but of how it matters to the reader.


Different authors may intend for different writings to mean certain things--or various things. Or nothing at all. Mark Twain once wondered why his writings and words had to mean anything beyond the superficial read. Ernest Hemingway, however, thought of his writings as an iceberg, with only the top 10% visible to the reader. The rest had to be sought out.


I wonder now, as a law student, if it is a good thing or a bad thing that these two views from two great American authors also happen to represent the two views of interpreting the law: the textualist and the liberal?


There are, I'm surprised to have found, many similarities in interpreting a novel and interpreting a court opinion. There is ambiguous language; there are ambiguous policy goals; there are questions of a book's impact; there are concerns that the masses will only learn of its content through a cursory description in the media; and fears that the purpose will be misconstrued by those desirous and capable of misusing it
Up until recently, I had believed that the glaring distinction between a novel and a judicial opinion was the absence of heart in the latter. But a "final lecture" from our contracts professor has me thinking otherwise.


I should not have been so foolish. As the son of an attorney who loved the law and the way he was able to help others with it--in building companies, non-profits and so forth in what ultimately became a growing city as a result--I should have known that, at least, those who practice law are not without heart. And yet, since his passing, my approach to the law has been one of reluctance, for fear that it would require me to adhere to the bottom line rather than the greater good.


Now 3/4 of the way through my first year of law school, I fear I had become robotic and unfeeling in my approach to studying, if nothing else. It's hard not to, I suppose. There is an unending downpour of reading material, or rules to memorize and applications to master; there are nothing but bottom lines in law school. But there are relationships, and not just between people. But between students and the law. I am hopeful, then, that mine has taken a leap forward.


The best lawyers, I know, are not necessarily the ones that left law school with the highest grades, but the ones that were best able to apply that which they learned--skills more so than rules--to the people they served after law school. The cold world requires a certain level of proven proficiency, of course, but once the foot is in the door, application is what matters. Some lawyers apply those skills to dollars and sense. In a way, I suppose we all do, no matter our profession: dollars and sense are along the continuum, at some point in that future. The butterfly, after all, still beats its wings; and the farthest star still moves, if ever so slightly.


But what of me? I've come to law school with a very specific person of enabling myself to better advance society through access to education, the goal of which is to make everything better for everyone. I look at the world and I am saddened by so much of what I see; and hopeful at so much else. And I know that better education can accomplish so much in righting the wrongs I see in the world. Such anger there is, such despair.


I want to be the the kind of lawyer, and use the law in such a way, so that the despair that comes to others does not render their worlds stopped, but helps them go on.

Contrasts

By ned * Other ned Posts

The song Taps has always struck me as too familiar.  Like Happy Birthday or the Jeopardy theme song, whatever delectable musical feast is behind it has been beaten to common mush. Overplayed in culture, when I hear the familiar melody I glaze over. Change my focus. Review tasks. Scan the crowd. Until it passes.  Perhaps with the exception of one time about a month ago.   

Given my grandfathers rank at the end of World War II, we could have had a gun salute if we wanted.  My family declined given how that might appear in the courtyard of a church closely woven into a suburban fabric.  We opted instead for an honor guard to ceremoniously fold the flag of a nation my grandfather cherished.  Opted to honor him with a lone trumpeter playing Taps.  Somehow that was fitting for a man rich in character but unencumbered by extravagance. 

As the trumpeter played, the richness of his tone matched the richness of color on his brass instrument as the sun bounced off the metal into the chapel.  The light highlighted something for me.  On display in Ohio in early March was an event that Northern California - for all its splendor - can never have.  I came to Ohio after one of the dreariest February's.  Central Ohio had more snow in February 2010 than in any other February in recorded history.

Yet, somehow, on the day of my short-notice flight home, the sun shone and never let up while I was there.  The contrast of seasonal change was startling.  Daffodils burst from the ground next to patches of melting snow. 

I always associated my grandfather with the spring.  His birthday is today, April 14th.  These new beginnings of spring give you bounce in your step and license to shed one layer of clothing with smug pride.  My grandfather did so at that opportunity and always enriched himself with the outdoors.  It is more than fitting too that Easter is the holiday of the spring.  The revolution of the climate during the season reminds us that change beyond what we immediately experience in the starkness of winter is possible.  By embracing spring, we better understand the limits observation alone can reveal to us.

The song Taps for my grandfather highlighted another contrast.  It is a surreal experience to be with someone as they take their last breath.  In embracing his passing, I came to a better understanding of life.  Its richness and wonder.  Even in the most common things. Common Songs. Common changes of the seasons. 

Progress Questioned?

By ned * Other ned Posts

Simply put, David Cross makes me laugh. From the envelop pushing skits of Mr. Show to the unwitting innuendo’s and “never nude”-ness of Tobias Funke, Cross has been pushing comedy irreverently forward for almost 20 years. On stage, his leftist charged, cynical, matter-of-fact stand up style even gets a chuckle from this right-of-center optimist.  Off stage, he pushes other comics to not simply appease the masses.   However, I might not fully agree with everything he says for reasons you might not expect.

“It was written thousands of years ago … when people were even dumber than we are today … Go outside and wait for the bars to empty out, watch Fox TV, and realize the Bible was written by people even dumber than these m&@#?+f&%$ers”

Religious commentary aside, statements like this seems like ideas more easily conveyed before 9/11, the rise of the War on Terror and the stock market challenges of the past months. The optimism and economic opportunities of the 90’s reaffirmed our belief in the progress of society. Since the Scientific Revolution, one could say Western Society has clung to the idea of Progress. Today must be better than yesterday or else we are failing as a society.  Underneath Cross's commentary is that assumption.

From my vantage point, our ideas on Progress are being re-evaluated on the whole. Recent socio-political events, economic recessions and environmental challenges call into question the path society is walking.  By reevaluating our current trajectory, it allows us to look on the past from a different perspective.  Several books of the past few years have spoken about the past with a degree of reverence and its people with appreciation that you certainly wouldn’t find in Heart of Darkness colonial times and perhaps not 1995.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamon takes a geographically deterministic view of how certain ideas and societies have come to dominate others. Implicit throughout the book is the idea that peoples of the past or of a less technological advanced state were not necessarily less bright. The ideas and resources that they had access to were just different. His studies of the remote peoples of Papau New Guinea revealed a society more cognizant of the nuances of nature than he would ever be. He was amazed at the intricacies of their understanding of their environment.

Karen Armstrong’s book the Case for God has a somewhat misleading title in that based on her logic God’s existence can likely never be rationally proved. Throughout the book she makes the argument that many of our current practices of religion have moved away from the role religion has played throughout our society. Her concepts are fairly complex. However, in a nutshell, she argues that religion through practice and ritual helps us to cope with inexplicable. Consequently, reason is inherently challenged when fulfilling the role of religion. Additionally, religion is ill-equipped to handle the investigations better left for reason. She argues that since the Scientific Revolution Western society has been looking to religion to help in the scientific dialogue when before distinct boundaries were made between mythos and logos. In a way, her book claims that our religion should to a degree look back to better fulfill its role for people.

Each of these books approaches past peoples with reverence. One might say that they are indirectly challenging the idea of progress. However, I believe humanity is continuing on a path of growth and improvement. Perhaps it is because I am the eternal optimist. Perhaps though it is because through this present lens we are now able to appreciate and learn from humanity’s past to improve our future. Jared Diamon and Karen Armstrong would presumably agree.

You Kant Do That on a Blog, Part III of III

By Observation Deck * Other Observation Desk Posts

As unbelievable as it sounds, I have survived my first semester of 1L year of law school – although barely. Even more unbelievably, I have returned to complete my tri-partide epic about Kant.

As promised, this part is supposed to be about applying Kant’s categorical imperative – but this may be a harder task even than understanding its philosophical underpinnings.

Let’s start with one hypothetical and go from there. I was riding home from work on the subway (some of you may know it as the “metro,” the “tube,” or even the “iron-bellied subterranean beast”) when some old lady gave me a really hard time about not giving up my seat to her. I have nothing against old ladies and the truth was that I didn’t see her. This got me thinking about whether Kant’s categorical imperative required me to give up my seat to this old lady. What immediately occurred to me was how complex an application of the categorical imperative would be in something as simple and mundane as this.

Let’s just start with the first formulation – that we should act “only according to that maxim whereby we can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Seems straightforward, doesn’t it? Not so fast. It seems that we may get conflicting answers depending on how we defined this “maxim.” For example, if I defined the maxim as “we should always yield our seat to someone older than us,” this would seem to require that I give up my seat to the old lady. But could I “universalize” this maxim? What if I were handicapped and there was a fully healthy, non-elderly person who just so happens to be older than me? Would I be required by my maxim to yield my seat to him? Doesn’t this seem a little intuitively strange – to require a handicapped person to yield his seat to a healthy person who happens to be older?

What about if I changed the maxim a little, say something like this – “we should always yield our seat to someone who is weaker than us.” This seems to work – I would be required to yield my seat to the old lady but not if I were handicapped or otherwise weaker than her. But there is still a problem -- what if we tried universalizing this maxim as Kant asks us to do? Wouldn’t everyone on the train be required to give their seat to someone who is weaker than them? So let’s say, I followed the maxim and gave the seat to the old lady, wouldn’t she also have the duty to look for someone else who may be even weaker than she were. If she found such a person and gave him/her her (I would use "that seat" to avoid the her her repetition) seat, wouldn’t that third person be required to look for a person even weaker than him/her? Wouldn’t this sort of degenerate into absurdity if everyone were required to look for a person weaker than them to give their seat to every time they wanted to sit down on the subway? It appears that universalizing this maxim leads to absurd results, something that would, under Kant, make the maxim void as a “universal law” for us to follow.

What about the second formulation – the requirement for us to only act in such a way that we “treat humanity, whether in our own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end? Let’s use the same seat-yielding example as above. At first, there doesn’t seem to be any problems. In yielding the seat, I am clearly acting in such as way that treats the old lady as an end in herself and not as a means to an end. Or am I?

Whenever we act, there may be a whole host of reasons, many of which we may not even recognize as reasons, that motivates us. In the example above, I might have acted to yield my seat because I felt guilty when she started asking for the seat. I might have acted because I didn’t want to get disproving stares from other passengers. I might have acted because I wanted to impress the cute girl sitting next to me. Or there may even be some motivation for yielding my seat that I myself am not aware of. If any of these ulterior reasons motivated me to yield my seat, wouldn’t I be using the old lady as a means to an end – to assuage my own guilt, avoid disapproval from other passengers, impress the cute girl, or some other end I desire that has nothing to do with the old lady or the yielding of the seat in themselves. This example isn’t specific to this situation either – nearly every decision I make can be motivated by any number of reasons. Therefore, applying Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative seems to ask us to consider our own thoughts and conform our decisions about when and how to act according to essentially subjective judgments. Yet this goes against the foundational principle of Kant’s categorical imperative – that morality – whether a particular action is justified – is inherently objective and not subjective. Hmmmmm…

That only leaves us with the third formulation. The problem is, I don’t think anyone understands what Kant means when he says that we should “act as if we were through our maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.” I think what Kant is trying to say is that we should try to universalize the action in question and see if this would lead to irrational, impossible, or self-contradicting results. Going once again back to our seating-yielding, I’ve already mentioned above one possible reason why universalizing the maxim may lead to absurd results. Looking at this problem, one might conclude that universalizing the maxim may be impossible and therefore that the maxim is therefore void under the third formulation.

Alternatively, however, one might also conclude that the practical concerns are not actually fatal – for example, we could still imagine a hypothetical system through which it would be very easy to figure out exactly who is weaker than whom and who should yield their seat to whom. Under such a hypothetical system, universalizing the maxim would not lead to impossible results and the maxim would thereby serve as a fine moral law for people to follow. This reveals another difficulty with applying Kant’s categorical imperative to real world decisions – people often differ on what they consider to be “impossible,” “irrational,” “self-contradicting,” or even what are “means” and what are “ends.” Kant’s moral philosophy fundamentally presupposes some singular objective benchmark at which all human beings can arrive through rational thought. The flaw with this assumption is that objective rational thought is often still dependent on subjective concepts or definitions – sure we may all rationally agree that the earth is “round,” but we may differ on what the definition of “round” is.

At the end of the day, I don’t really know how I feel about Kant’s categorical imperative. Part of me has been and will probably always be fascinated by its clarity, its simplicity, and its search for a unifying theory. But part of me also questions its inflexible obsession with absoluteness -- isn’t moral flexibility sometimes useful when circumstances change or arise to which we need to recalibrate our moral beliefs? I guess that’s the hallmark of a good philosophical theory – the fact that it never ceases to provoke more questions, push more boundaries, and demand more of the people that study it.

Oh, and I did not give up my seat to the old lady in the end, because I wanted to universalize this lesson – though duty may be sublime, a sense of entitlement is most definitely not.

Mountain Goats and the Economy

By CL * Other CL Posts

The video below is an interview between Stephen Colbert and John Darnielle, the singer/writer/main guy in The Mountain Goats, of which two parts caught my attention. The first was the "suicidal pride" (in Colbert's words) of mountain goats, in that many die attempting to jump across ravines that are significantly wider than they can jump. The second was Darnielle's discussion about finding hope in times of absolute desolation because, basically, there's nowhere to go but up.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
John Darnielle
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

The day after that interview aired, I received in the mail a copy of Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson's Summer of Fear (which is pretty awesome and you should buy it). The song Trap Door (embedded below) is an interesting counterpoint to Darnielle's statement above: it basically argues that things can always get worse; there's "a trapdoor in every rock bottom."



Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson - Trap Door from LaundroMatinee on Vimeo.

Thinking about these ideas, I thought back to my freshman year of college, when I broke my arm shortly after my birthday. I had a cast up to my elbow and was unable to write at all, and unable to type, eat, or do just about anything else at a normal speed. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a huge deal - I had no permanent injury or scar, and I didn't have any midterms or finals while the cast was on - but it still would have annoyed most people. After I had had it on for a few weeks, one of my friends pointed out that I seemed to be enjoying the experience, and wondered what was wrong with me.

I responded by saying that it was an opportunity to temporarily see things from a new perspective, and try something that I (hopefully) would never have to do again. In hindsight, I have no idea why it would be desirable to experience one-armed life. But the "new experience" thing, coupled with the fact that I really wasn't suffering very much, was enough to make me (sort of) enjoy it.

More generally, this got me thinking of a fairly simple model of personality profiles. In it, there are two basic states of reality: better than average, and worse than average. In each of these states, you can believe that (and act as though) the state will continue indefinitely, or you can believe that it will soon revert to the mean.

Putting it this way is a little bit different from the old glass half empty/glass half full dichotomy, in that, viewed this way, there are four possible personalities:

1. The Mountain Goat

This is the eternal optimist. Like the band's lyrics, they are comfortable with the knowledge that after a certain point, things can't get any worse and must get better. Like the animal, they can get overconfident and take excessive risks, which don't always end well. For an example, think of a typical eight-year-old...and be thankful that I didn't make a "kid" pun about it.

2. The Trapdoor

These people are the worriers. If things are going badly, they can probably get worse. If things are going well, they're bound to get worse. Lots of old people seem to think this way, which is hopefully not an inevitable result of the aging process.

3. Momentum-Conservers

The conservation of momentum is a physical law, as unavoidable as it is dependable. Some people extend that to their lives in general - if things are going badly, they're bound to get worse, and if they're going well, there's no way that's going to stop. It would be easy to say that these people have no perspective on things, or that they're just stupid. I'm not strongly inclined to disagree with either statement. A nicer way to put it may be that they give themselves too much credit when things are good and too much blame when things are bad, and as a result they think their current trajectory must continue. This profile fits the typical teenager pretty well.

4. Mean-Reverters

These people think things are going to revert to the mean sooner or later - if things are going badly, they're going to get better; if things are going very well, that's going to slow down at some point. I'm probably one of these, and if I thought there was a stronger argument that most middle-aged people think like this, I could have rewritten this whole post as an age-based thing.

************************************************************************

Unfortunately, the American economy seems to be driven by Momentum-Conservers, and we'd be much better off if the opposite were true and it were driven by Mean-Reverters.

During the internet bubble, day traders and professional analysts/stockpickers were amazed at how talented they were (and conveniently ignored the fact that everyone else was doing just as well as they were); many kept doubling their bets until everything started crashing. During the housing bubble, builders and brokers ceaselessly sped up construction until demand - clearly a factor outside their control - slowed, then they were left with acres of unsellable and/or unfinished inventory. In the run-up to the credit crunch, traders bundled mortgages together and somehow thought they could increase the expected return of a set of mortgages by combining them in a different way (note from anyone with a decent knowledge of statistics: you can't); their faith in their own mathematical skill was not enough to beat the laws of probability. In the last year or so, we've seen the flipside of this momentum-conserving belief: excessive pessimism when things aren't going well, and a feeling of hopelessness regarding the economy's short and long-term prospects.

The lesson in all this is that more temperance is needed: people shouldn't rush to throw all their assets at whatever sector of the economy is doing well (either by investing their life savings in tech stocks or by buying a house they can't afford) and companies and banks shouldn't overleverage* themselves just because they've done well recently.

*It's a little ironic that someone who went to law school - a choice, despite being made by many risk-averse people, that generally brings huge amounts of student loan debt in return for the promise of an unresaonably high salary - is advocating against excessive leverage.

**********************************************************************

As a side note, Daniel Kahneman and Noah Tversky's prospect theory - which is a foundation of behavioral economics and won them a Nobel Prize in economics - is centered on the idea that, from their current vantage point, people overweigh the risk of any loss and underweigh the possibility of any gain. This would mostly correspond to a trap door viewpoint above, though they go into much more detail and explain it (and its implications) much better than I could.

I Would Probably Be Better Off Just Linking to Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

By CL * Other CL Posts

Gail Collins wrote a column last weekend focusing on her Woodstock memories (to summarize: things went wrong, she didn't get to much music, she still had fun). At one point she writes:

The lesson I took away from it is that whenever anybody asks you to do something off the wall, you should really try to do it — unless it involves being unethical or a two-plane connection. You might not enjoy it while it’s going on, but somewhere down the line the anecdotes will always come in handy.

I think this is a great point (even if it's not entirely original), so I decided to expand on it, incompletely and inadequately, here. Because really, everyone knows that it's true, on some level. But what people don't seem to realize is that it goes beyond the relatively inconsequential decisions; it's true at almost every level, including major life decisions.

(This isn't to say that you should do what you don't want to do, or ignore risks. It's just that people discount too many options just because they're not commonly done, and when they go out on a limb just a bit, it ends up being worthwhile.)

It is most obvious on the micro level. I spent the last ten days in Chicago, and in the days after Lollapalooza I woke up each morning with a plan to pick a direction and walk in it until I found something interesting. I was rewarded with fighter jets overhead (which, in fairness, was more due to lucky timing than anything else), the record store from High Fidelity (the movie, obviously, not the book; I didn't walk to London), an appearance by LeBron James promoting a documentary about his high school team, and a field in the middle of the city with several horses in it. The same goes for getting adventurous with food: it's low-risk, low-reward; even if it works out badly you haven't lost much and it could be a good story.

Getting a bit more macro is more educational - decisions that could have some downside, such as being a waste of time and money. I have a group of close college friends that has become geographically dispersed, so we make efforts to take trips to various cities from time to time. Usually, these are popular destinations: Las Vegas, New York, New Orleans. Our best trip, however, was one of the first: Omaha.

It was my idea, and I'm proud of it. I had gone to school right outside of Omaha and had attended the College World Series a few times, and knew how much fun it was. I suggested it to the group, and the response was lukewarm at best. There was even an email chain shortly before the trip titled (paraphrasing) "are we really doing this?" But after three days, a handful of new friendships, several friendship-testing incidents, an epic battle between a sharpie and an unnamed friend's face, and about two innings of baseball actually watched, all involved considered it a huge success.

So even at the macro level, this "going off the beaten path is worth it" idea is fairly obvious. Here comes the point of this post, and the part that goes beyond the quote above: when it comes to major life decisions, if you're inclined to do something most people wouldn't do, you absolutely should do it.

My first and smaller example of this is the law firm at which I'll be working in a few months. My school's on-campus interview program had a fairly simple signup process: we each had 35 slots to use on the 100+ firms and locations that were conducting interviews. I knew I wanted to focus on New York and DC (I know, this part isn't very adventurous) and I wanted a firm I could be at least somewhat happy at. I went through the Vault guide and knocked out all the firms that seemed a bit too unfriendly, or intense, or whose descriptions sounded a bit desperate (certain code words made themselves obvious after reading a few firm profiles). Having knocked out the prestigious undesirables, I was left with fewer firms than there were bidding slots, including several firms I knew nothing about: their Vault profiles were thin, their web presences minimal, and their associate ranks to small to have produced enough former employees to give reliable information on any non-obvious downsides. I ended up having a great experience with the firm that I knew the least about, both in the interviews and as a summer associate, and would rather work there than anywhere else.

I know that doesn't seem like a very off-the-wall thing to do, but trust me: in the context of scared law students at a good school interviewing for jobs, with the first rumblings of the credit crunch being felt (I remember, in my first callback, asking several partners how they thought the firm would be affected, in comparison with others, when things came crashing down), it was not something many of my classmates would have done.

The best example in my life came from the decisions of my parents. Moving to the New York area has been fairly standard for Irish people for the last 150 (give or take a few) years. Moving to Indonesia, in the dying days of a violent 31-year dynasty? Not so much. Following that with a move to Nebraska, a state you know so little about that you assumed it would be just like New York? Again, not a typical move. And yet outside of the direct influence of my family, growing up in these two places - learning from the natives, seeing other values systems and ways of life, making entirely new groups of friends every few years - had more to do with making me who I am today than anything else. For those of you that don't know me, I am a HUGE fan of who I am today, and I say that in an only slightly ironic tone.

Had we not moved to Indonesia, I would not have spent my formative years waking up to the muezzin's call. I would not have had a loris living in my backyard. A sixth-grade trip to Borobudur was the source of two college papers, and my experiences in Indonesia in general were the background of my largest law school project, which singlehandedly supplied 13% of the footnotes published in my academic journal this year. (See, it's not just in blog posts that I overdo the explanatory parentheticals.)

Had we not moved to Nebraska, I would not have spent my high school years surrounded by four hundred acres of corn, in a school run by Benedictine monks. I may not have discovered running, which was a huge part of my life for about a decade. And I certainly wouldn't have found myself, as I did in June at a high school reunion, in an Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan making jokes about center-pivot irrigation.


Obviously this all needs some sort of caveat. Despite the examples above, I'm extremely risk-averse (a risk-averse lawyer? shocking!) and I love routine - I generally don't do something unplanned unless I'm told about it at least two days in advance, lest it disrupt my carefully-arranged workout, blog-reading (yes Ned, and blog-writing) and sleeping schedules. Which is why it's surprising, and maybe more persuasive, that I'm the one making this argument.

In any event, I have a few more months before I start work, and I hope to make some slightly irrational decisions between now and then that turn out to be great stories. There are already a few in the works. If any turn out to be both blog-appropriate and blogworthy, I'll pass them along.


**********************************************************

Sidenote: This is my return from a long, bar-exam-forced break. I'm still adjusting and haven't really worked out my post-bar schedule yet, but I will be posting more often. And in a move which will excite at least two people, the sonnets may soon return.

The GRE: Reflections on Academic Irrelevance

By RTTF * Others by RTTF

I recently began preparing to take the GRE, the great standard-bearer of graduate admissions. I was buzzing haplessly along when I stumbled upon the following analogy:

QUARRY: HUNT:

a) terminus: voyage

b) guerdon: repetition

c) accolade: campaign

d) epitome: culture

e) anomaly: puzzle

Now, I imagine many of you – like me – thought that 'quarry' was a stone pit, and so may be having difficulties solving this particular analogy. If not, bear with me as I enlighten my fellow philistines as to the more sophisticated definition of this fine word.

Quarry (kwor-ee)

Etymology: Middle English quirre, querre entrails of game given to the hounds, from Anglo-French cureie, quereie, from quir, cuir skin, hide (on which the entrails were placed), from Latin corium

Date:14th century

1: obsolete: a heap of the game killed in a hunt

2: game; specifically : game hunted with hawks

3: one that is sought or pursued : prey

Now, maybe I’m just bitter, but when did academic excellence require me to know about hawk- hunting? Is this the Graduate Record Exam -- or the Germanic Regent’s Exam? Am I applying to be an 18th-century Duke?

Granted, a person may know this word from reading Jane Austen novels or adventure books. And granted, I am now indebted to the GRE for enlightening me to an interesting double-meaning in the title of Morissey’s album You Are the Quarry which had hitherto gone unnoticed. But, while gleaning vocabulary from novels about landed gentry may be a contingent indicator of education, it seems absurd to presume any direct relationship between your general level of intelligence and knowing obscure -- and specialized --vocabulary. If we’re going Jane Austen, why not science fiction? Can we just have a whole section on words Kurt Vonnegut made up? Chrono-synclastic infundibulum, anyone?

More to the point, if we’re going to test for specialized knowledge, couldn’t it at least be knowledge that is relevant to today’s society? Why not test a person’s knowledge of slang, or street culture? May I suggest:

DUB SACK: POT

a) quart: milk

b) salary: money

c) forty: olde english

d) box: barrel

Now this is a good analogy. In order to get this right, you have to make the connection that not only is a ‘dub sack’ something that contains an amount of pot, but that the certain amount is not fixed by volume or quantity. Rather, it depends on the quality of weed, and current market conditions. Similarly, while a quart always contains the same amount of milk, the amount of money that is contained in a person’s salary is not fixed, but depends on the quality of the worker and the conditions of the market.

As a prospective candidate for a Sociology degree, I’m pretty sure the knowledge tested in this analogy will help me a little more than the word for the prey sought by hawk-hunters. And yes, Educational Testing Service, I am currently accepting job offers.

The sad part of this is that the specialization and disconnectedness from everyday life that is reflected in the GREs is an all-too-accurate indicator of the state of academia. Anyone who’s spent much time on the websites of our premier academic institutions knows that the bios of faculty and the curricula of courses can read like a catalogue of sub-fields and jargon. Which strikes me as self-defeating. The principle of specialization, just like comparative advantage, works on the assumption that people are working on what they're best at – and then sharing it. A company divides its work among specialists – and then puts it all together. But when the very language in which our 'knowledge specialists' are learning to express themselves is meaningless to anyone who doesn't share their specialty, interdisciplinary work becomes impossible. And here's a stoner thought if you ever need one: isn't, like, life interdisciplinary, man?

A few months ago the New York Times ran an op-ed in which a professor at Columbia suggested that academic departments be reorganized not around disciplines but around fundamental problems such as Time, Work, Media, Water, Mind, and Money. Then economists, philosophers, biologists, literary critics, psychologists and all the rest could teach – and gain – multiple perspectives on central problems in our lives. This professor points out that from a practical, problem-solving perspective, this is necessary. He notes for example that those who study religion and those who study international relations haven't really worked together before, and now might be the time to start.

The use of varying methodologies and sensibilities could make the humanities a little more rigorous, and the 'practical' subjects a little more, well, human. The first step in this is that academics learn to express themselves in ways that communicate their ideas, not just show off how terribly well-read they are. So if we want a society that makes decisions with its brain and not with its guts, we might want to start by getting its institutional head out of the hawk-hunting clouds.

You Kant Do That on a Blog, Part II of III

By Observation Deck * Other Observation Desk Posts

For You Kant Do That on a Blog, Part I, please go here.

When we last left our hero – Kant – he was stuck…

A murderer had asked him for the whereabouts of his next innocent victim. Kant knew that if he told the murderer where the victim was hiding, the victim would certainly be killed and he – Kant – would in effect be sending this victim to her death. But at the same time, if he did not tell the murder the victim’s hiding place, he would be lying.

Kant, as we know, draws his superpowers from the categorical imperative and the categorical imperative states BOTH that we should not murder AND that we should not lie.

Faced with this cosmic conundrum, what is our intrepid hero to do? Find out in this episode of You Kant Do That on a Blog, Part II…

Just when Kant finds himself trapped between the proverbial rock and a hard place – murder and lying – Kant’s super friend Captain Obvious arrives.

Captain Obvious argues: Not telling the murderer where the victim is hiding is not technically lying – it is merely withholding information (namely the whereabouts of the victim). There is a distinction between the two and therefore, Kant is saved from the challenge to his categorical imperative.

But Kant isn’t out of the woods – like in so many times in the past, Captain Obvious is half baked. The difference between lying and withholding information is only semantics (no matter how much Bill Clinton would like you to believe otherwise) and Kant would make no distinction between their moral content. In addition, the categorical imperative against lying would, when rigorously applied, also extend to a prohibition against the withholding of information.

Just then, Plausible Man shows up. He argues that telling the murderer where the victim is hiding does not amount to murder (in legal parlance this would be considered “accessory to murder” rather than murder itself) and therefore, the categorical imperative actually allows Kant to tell the murderer where the victim is hiding.

Close Plausible Man, but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. This still doesn’t get Kant out of his jam because it is once again a technicality and not a substantive argument. We can easily tweak our hypothetical so that the result of Kant telling the truth would be the active killing of another.

For example, we could imagine a scenario in which a person with a terrible heart condition asks Kant to tell her the truth about his family who was just killed in a car crash. The truth would cause her such emotional stress that she would certainly die from the news. This scenario would make Kant the “proximate cause” of another’s death and remove Plausible Man’s technicality argument.

No, the only person who can save Kant is himself; but does the categorical imperative give him enough power to get out of this jam? Interestingly, the scenario presented above – a murderer asking for the whereabouts of his next victim (aka “the inquiring murderer hypothetical”) – was actually posed to Kant by Swiss philosopher Benjamin Constant while Kant was still alive (albeit a 73-year-old curmudgeon). As you can imagine, it was a major philosophical challenge – as close as you’re ever going to get to a modern-day throw down between two 18th Century European philosophers.

To defend his moral philosophy against Constant’s attack, Kant actually wrote an essay called On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives in which he actually argues that the categorical imperative requires us to tell the hypothetical murderer the whereabouts of his next victim.

But this seems to run counter to everything our intuitions tell us – most people would probably rationally argue that, in the hypothetical of the inquiring murderer, the moral obligation is for us to NOT tell the truth. I guess a Kant defender would say that our intuitions are wrong and that the categorical imperative sometimes forces us to make moral decisions that run counter to our intuitions. But this seems like a cop out.

So how do we reconcile Kant’s moral framework with our intuitive belief that we ought to not tell the murderer the truth?

I believe the way to do this is to go back to Kant’s own writings in the Groundwork and look at what he says about the difference between perfect duties and imperfect duties.

According to the Groundwork, Kant defines perfect duties as those actions that, when evaluated according to the First Maxim, produce inherent contradictions. In other words, these are actions that cause inherent contradictions when they are rationally applied as universal laws.

For example, the murder is a perfect duty. If we ever tried to apply murder as a universal law, it would lead to an inherent contradiction. Murder presupposes life – namely that there are humans alive to murder and to be murdered. Yet if murder were applied as a universal law, then everyone would be dead and there would be nobody left to murder or to be murdered. It would be inherently contradictory to apply murder as a universal law because we cannot rationally conceive of a world where murder is universally allowed. Because we cannot rationally apply murder as a universal law, it is not permissible under the First Maxim.

Imperfect duties, on the other hand, are actions that, when evaluated according to the First Maxim, DO NOT produce inherent contradictions. Put it another way, these are actions that DO NOT cause inherent contradictions when they are rationally applied as universal laws.

Lying is an imperfect duty. If we tried to apply lying as a universal law, it would NOT lead to an inherent contradiction. Lying DOES NOT presuppose truth-telling – if everybody lied, one could still lie and not produce an untenable position. In fact, we can rationally conceive of a world where lying is universally allowed – it would be a world where everyone lied to everyone else.

But we might ask – if lying is an imperfect duty, then why should we not lie? The answer is – although we can rationally conceive of a world where lying is universally allowed, no one would rationally want to live in such a world. Despite the fact that universalizing lying is not inherently contradictory, lying still cannot be rationally applied as a universal law and therefore is still not permissible under the First Maxim.

The difference between perfect and imperfect duties is very, very subtle. Both of these duties are not permissible under the First Maxim because they cannot be rationally applied as universal laws. The difference is how we arrive at the conclusion that they cannot be rationally applied as universal laws.

In the case of a perfect duty (such as murder), we cannot even rationally conceive of a world where such an action were universally allowed because it would produce an inherent contradiction. And because we cannot even rationally conceive of a world where such an action were universally allowed, we cannot rationally apply it as a universal law. In the case of imperfect duties (such as lying), we CAN rationally conceive of a world where such an action were universally allowed. But because we would not rationally want to live in a world where such actions were universally allowed, we still cannot rationally apply it as a universal law.

The distance between perfect and imperfect duties may be very small, but there might just be enough space there for Kant to squeeze through to get of his predicament. Let us suppose that perfect duties take precedence over imperfect duties. Since the prohibition against murder is a perfect duty and the prohibition against lying is an imperfect duty, Kant would be allowed to lie in order to avoid committing murder.

Unfortunately, Kant is silent about all of this. His discussion of perfect and imperfect duties in the Groundwork does not cover whether one type of duty can supersede the other so there is no way of knowing if the exhaustive (and probably also exhausting) explanation above would actually sit well with Kant.

I would think that Kant would probably hesitate to endorse such an explanation, even if it succeeds in getting him out of the inquiring murderer hypothetical. Kant’s whole purpose in conceiving of the categorical imperative is to construct an absolute rather than framework for morality (such as the utilitarians). To then bring in the possibility – even the possibility – of certain duties trumping others would create a slippery slope which threatens to destroy the absolutist moral framework that Kant has so carefully constructed.

Constant’s inquiring murderer hypothetical is a real poison pill that presents a potentially lethal problem for Kant’s moral philosophy. The explanation that Kant gives in On a Supposed Right – that the categorical imperative requires us to tell the murderer the whereabouts of his victim – doesn’t seem to agree with our intuitive understanding of morality. I have tried to present a way of reconciling Kant’s moral framework with our intuitive morality – by separating murder and lying into perfect and imperfect duties, respectively. But even this leads to potential problems in that it fundamentally relies on a prioritization of perfect vis-à-vis imperfect duties that could plant a relativist seed that could threaten to take down Kant’s entire absolutist moral framework.

A sticky wicket to be sure, but we all knew that nothing about Kant was ever going to be easy or clear.

Alright, I am exhausted by all this heavy philosophical lifting. In the next installment, I will redirect attention to a simpler matter – applying Kant’s moral philosophy in the real world. This will probably be a feat somewhat akin to trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse.

Stay tuned.

In Which the Author Uses "The Arts" Loosely and Inconsistently

By Standard * Other Standard Posts

Several months ago, two members of the Georgia State Legislature created a minor stir when they took to the floor to announce a “ ‘grassroots’ effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex, and ‘queer theory.’ ” Their “grassroots” effort of course went nowhere, and, after several Georgia State Professors who had such expertise explained to the House Higher Education Committee that their research included AIDS epidemics and teenage attitudes towards oral sex, the House members claimed the media had blown the whole thing out of proportion. (You can find the article here.)

What interests me is not the media coverage, which was indeed abysmal—the initial article was misleadingly entitled “Steamy Sex Courses Fire GOP’s Ire,” and the reporter had not so much as made an effort to understand what “queer theory” might be—but rather the attitudes about higher education expressed by these House members (restated in the follow-up article).

“Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, and math,” said Representative Calvin Hill in a time of budget cuts (and here I am quoting the article’s indirect quotation of Hill), “universities should not offer classes that do not help students get jobs.”

The Humanities has always had a difficult time defending its role in higher education, but the current (and ongoing) budget crises of state governments have made matters worse. Alumni donate heavily to athletics, scientific and engineering research, and business schools, but neglect History, Political Science, Philosophy, and English. Taxpayers are generally not interested in Shakespeare. The state of Wisconsin, for example, has provided enough funding for my department to hire fewer than half the number of faculty members we have lost over the past three years.

Those who are critical of the Humanities have a point. Much of what I do as an academic is utterly useless. I spend months carefully crafting arguments about 400-year-old texts in the hopes that the one person who will read it—my professor—will like it. (Good, my professor will say, but not great. And then he or she will point out that someone else has already said more or less what I have said, except better.) The stakes will change as I move up in the ivory tower, but the size of my audience probably will not.

Why should the state pay for this type of research? Why should universities offer courses taught by these types of people—who clearly will not help anyone find a job?

Down with that upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie!

Yet a number of my fellow Around-the-Couch wordsmiths have attested to the value of their liberal arts educations. (Now may not be the best time to point out that a number of my fellow Around-the-Couch wordsmiths are—or at least were—unemployed.) In order to understand why the liberal arts may be worth saving, it might be helpful to consider the way in which Renaissance humanists—whose ideas were largely responsible for our notion of a “liberal arts” education—thought about the arts.

Unlike Kant, who would later argue that a work of art exists for our detached aesthetic contemplation and moral judgment (it’s much more complicated than that, I know), thinkers like Pico della Mirandola and Desiderius Erasmus thought of art in much more active terms: not only did art have a didactic (generally moral) and amusing purpose, but it actually acted upon its audience. Consider these lines about satire from Joseph Hall’s Virgidemiarum (1598):

The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,
That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,
And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily. (5.3.1-4)

What begins as metaphorical effect—the sting of a porcupine—becomes literal affect: reading a satire will make the reader feel ashamed, which is manifested in a physical response (the blush). Or consider Thomas Heywood’s remarks about the power of theater in his Apology for Actors (1612): “so bewitching a thing is lively and well-spirited action, that it hath power to new-mold the harts of the spectators, and fashion them to the shape of any noble and notable attempt.”

Critics of the arts during the Renaissance were the exact opposite of those represented by Representative Hill. Rather than finding the arts ineffective (for helping students get jobs), the arts threatened to be too effective—depictions of vice could lead the audience to emulate vice. In a Sermon at Paul’s Cross in 1577, for example, Thomas White suggested that “the cause of plagues is sinne, if you looke to it well: and the cause of sinne are playes: therefore the cause of plagues are playes.”

We all know the clichés that retain this understanding of the arts—“the pen is mightier than the sword,” for example—but when we think about art, most of us probably still side with Kant: we engage the work of art, not the other way around. But humanities classes demonstrate that the work of art—or the historical narrative, or the philosophical system, or the political argument, or anything that exists in the realm of ideas rather than fact—has the power to engage us: we are forced to think, to recognize that we think, to be critical of the way we think, and to understand that our way of thinking is not the only available way of thinking. These classes taught by experts in male prostitution, oral sex, “queer theory,” or that Upstart Crow Shake-scene can change the way we think—or even make us think for ourselves.

That may not help students find jobs, but somehow it still seems worth defending.

You Kant Do That on a Blog, Part I of III

By Observation Deck * Other Observation Desk Posts

Caveat emptor: the topic for the post below takes a while to flush out; so accordingly, this post will be the first of a series. If you are not interested in philosophy, feel free to read the other good commentators on this blog.

Josh Lyman: That’s Immanuel Kant. Every year a million freshman philosophy students read that sentence…
Donna Moss: And change their major?
- “Red Mass,” The West Wing

Of all the philosophers I read in college, I think the most enigmatic and the most rewarding would probably have to be Immanuel Kant. I found his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals to be particularly interesting and got almost immediately hooked on his ideas about morality being a categorical imperative. (To read more detail about the Categorical Imperative try here and here.)

If you don’t feel like reading either of these treatises, I don’t blame you. So at the risk of sounding like Teddy Tomba, I’ll very quickly summarize the salient details:

Kant’s moral philosophy is based on the belief that morality is completely detached from beliefs, facts, environments, causes, cost-benefit analyses, utility, and any other inherently conditional or subjective factors. For Kant, true moral action is entirely independent of consequences – the action is moral not because it is the means to a good end, it is good because it IS the end. Morality is that which is required by a free will – a will that is truly free from all external considerations and chooses of its own accord. Therefore, moral action is what the free will demands – it is a duty, an obligation, a commandment – that which Kant called the categorical imperative.

Are you ready to change your major yet? No?

So what is a categorical imperative? Kant is glad you asked.

He defines the categorical imperative as a series of three maxims (all of them are just different ways of saying the same thing):

Maxim 1: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Translation: Moral actions must be applicable universally for all person in all situations without leading to internal contradictions or rational inconsistencies.

Maxim 2: Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.
Translation: Moral actions must always treat other human beings as ends in themselves and never as a means to an end.

Maxim 3: Act as if you were always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends.
Translation: Although seemingly obtuse, I think this is also the most interesting of the three maxims. I believe what Kant is doing with this third maxim is actually closing a potential loophole – what if two people can rationally disagree on whether a particular course of action is moral or not? This would clearly create a huge problem for Kant because it would turn morality into something subjective, something dependent on something else – namely the intuitive belief system of an individual. Since Kant’s whole point is that morality is objective and independent of anything else, this is a major loophole he needs to plug. He does so (and beautifully, in my opinion) by formulating the third maxim to define moral actions as only those that people cannot truly rationally disagree on.

Are you still with me? Are you drooling on the keyboard because you’ve fallen asleep from boredom?

Still here eh? Perhaps whatever you are procrastinating doing is even more horrific than Kant (something pretty Kafka-esque I bet).

Alright, how about some examples? Kant gives a few in Groundwork, including the following two: lying and murder.

Using Kant’s logic, both of these would be immoral. Both cannot be rationally universalized.

If everybody lied, no one would believe anyone else. Would any person ever rational will such an outcome? Clearly not. Lying, therefore, violates the first maxim and is immoral.

Now, let’s look at murder. If everyone murdered, then everyone would kill everyone else. Once again, would any person ever rational will such an outcome? Clearly not. Murder, therefore, violates the first maxim and is immoral.

So far so good. Kant 1, Haters 0.

But not so fast; the haters are not done. What if, they ask, a murderer asks you for the whereabouts for his/her next victim? Is it morally justified to lie to him/her to save the victim (knowing that if you told the murderer, the victim would undoubtedly be dead)?

A real dilemma and one that I’ll tackle in the next episode…You Kant Do That on a Blog, Part II.

The End of the Individual

By Standard * Other Standard Posts

If a certain friend of mine had any idea I was writing a column with this title, he would declare that I had abandoned everything I have ever said to him.

He wouldn't be right, of course, because he's never right. (He really isn't ever right, but he knows he isn't right. He argues from whatever position seems convenient for his purposes - which are always to attack and humiliate me. That means he's always outside of the realm of right and wrong. He's a jerk.) I have, however, tended to defend the idea of the individual as such - that is, that an individual can and does exist, at least intellectually.

I don't have much at stake in individualism per se. What concerns me is actually the idea of authorship: because I have spent several years reading, thinking about, and writing about literature - and because I hope, in some small way, someday, if I can find the time, to write the greatest work of literature the world has ever known - I can't, like Barthes, declare the author to be dead. I can't even relegate the author to a faceless function, the way Foucault does.

I have argued against the idea that culture thinks us. I do think that most of what we say, do, believe, etc. is dictated to us by the ideology of the world that surrounds us, but I always want to carve out a tiny bit of space so that someone, somewhere - even if it is a select few favored by coincidences of time and place - can add something. Literature (and thought), I have argued, is ultimately palimpsestual: we are always scratching out and writing over what has been written before, but traces of the past keep bleeding back through.

All that being said, I'd like to suggest that the idea of the individual in society may be coming to an end.

Somewhere in the middle of the 80-page philosophical doctrine that John Galt sets forth in Atlast Shrugged - I am speaking of what might be the worst part of what might be the worst book ever written - he declares that in his political system, "every man will stand or fall, live or die by his rational judgment." This is the essence of Rand's argument: the collective cannot succeed unless the individual is allowed to succeed. The idea isn't originally Rand's; it's at the backbone of freemarket capitalism, and it's representative of the type of thought which has dominated American political thought and fiscal policy over the past generation.

I hope the recent mess on Wall Street demonstrates the weakness of that argument. I am not even referring to the "greed" of Wall Street, which politicians and 24-hour news networks have proclaimed as though they are were all surprised to discover that businesses were all out to make money - as though they had expected selfishness to play no part in self interest. Instead, I am referring to the powerlessness of individuals to sell goods and services without consumers who are successful enough to purchase them.

We are anything but independent or isolated. Whatever successes we have enjoyed have been in large measure due to the communities and institutions in which we have lived and learned. We are each something like a palimpsest: our own hard work builds on top of, but cannot efface, the hard work of those who have come before us. Our decisions and our actions, furthermore, cannot help but affect others around us.

We do not have the luxury of standing by, Galt-like, and watching the world around us fail. Like it or not, we're all in this together. The only way forward is to recognize ourselves for what we are - a body of many, a pluralized one that will live or die, stand or fall by our collective rational judgment.

The hope and unity Ned discovered at the inauguration - the collective spirit he hopes will endure even as he wants to protect the rights of the individual - is certainly a promising first step.