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Why the NFL kneeling ban is especially bad: five things that aren't reasons, and one thing that is.

The NFL's decision to fine teams when a player kneels during the national anthem is a particularly bad policy, one that the American public  should strongly oppose.

Let's be clear on the reason for its particular badness, and why it particularly deserves our scorn.

 

Photo: Keith Allison

I give you:  five things that are not reasons, and one thing that is.

 

(1) Has the policy earned our particular scorn because it requires certain players to violate their own consciences, by making them express a certain message even if they do not agree with the message?

No. 

This cannot be the reason, because it's not quite accurate.  Under the new rule, players are permitted to remain in the locker room during the national anthem.  The NFL says they will not punish its employees merely for declining to participate in the NFL's preferred expressive act.  The punishment is exacted only if the employees engage in a particular different expressive act.   The employees are not required to express the NFL's message; they are, rather, forbidden to express a different one.  

Is there a categorical difference?  Coming from my philosophical background, I say yes.  The duty to speak the truth, like any positive duty, does not compel us at every moment; for proportionate reasons, we sometimes rightly refrain from speaking and acting in truth.  This is different from our duty not to tell lies, which is always in force.  The players are not, technically, compelled to violate their consciences, because they are not compelled to engage in the NFL's preferred expression.  It would be a different matter if the rules did not permit players to abstain; but they do.

That permission to abstain outright from appearing during the anthem also probably sufficiently (under employment law) accommodates players who might have a religious objection to honoring the flag.

We shall have to look for another reason.

 

(2 )Has it earned particular scorn because it violates the players' First Amendment rights?  

No. It does not violate them.

The First Amendment protects us from government-compelled speech (including acts that signify meaning, like "stand and show respect.")  The NFL is not the government, and so the First Amendment doesn't constrain it, but rather protects it as it protects all our businesses and employers.  Private entities, such as the NFL, cannot violate the First Amendment by requiring a certain kind of speech as a condition of employment, nor by prohibiting a certain kind of speech.  So even if the rules did compel the players to be on the field standing during the anthem, it would not be a violation of the First Amendment.

 

(3) Even if the NFL has benefited from taxation structures and public funds?

No.  It does suggest a means by which the scorning public can react by withdrawing government support or by making that support conditional on different behavior; but government support doesn't turn them into the government.  And so the special indignation that Americans should properly have towards First Amendment violators is still not in play.

This isn't the reason.

 

(4) Has it earned particular scorn because the policy is an example of bad faith on the part of management in a labor dispute?  

No. 

It's still unclear whether any aspects of the NFL's policy violates the collective bargaining agreement.   The players are unionized, and the union can make use of an established process to challenge perceived violations.   In this sense, it's no different from any other rules that an employer may try to push through only to find later that the collective bargaining agreement will not permit it; and perhaps, even if challenged, the policy will be upheld.  Furthermore, if it is upheld, the players have another recourse: can bring the issue to the table the next time collective bargaining begins.   So:  this isn't the reason why we should be particularly scornful of this rule.

 

(5) Has it earned our scorn because it represents a kind of retribution for unpopular or offensive speech?   

No.  The mere fact that it is retribution for speech is not enough to earn most people's scorn.

It would seem that m0st of us do not scorn people who exact retribution from speakers on account of disliking the speech, provided that the retribution is itself legal.  Recall this xkcd cartoon, which by all accounts was shared by people across the political spectrum:

This cartoon clearly asserts, and even honors, a right of private actors to exact retribution for speech that the private actors view as wrong.

The value expressed by the cartoon, like so many clearly stated values, cuts multiple ways.  Just as I don't have to listen to or host speech that I think is bullshit---just as I have a moral right and a First Amendment right to react honestly with my own speech and meaningful acts --- the NFL has that, too.  The NFL doesn't have to listen to what protesting players say; it doesn't have to host them while they say it.  They are not shielded from criticism of their protests, nor from financial consequences; they may be yelled at, boycotted, fired; if the NFL thinks they are being assholes, the NFL gets to show them the door.  

No, in fact, the NFL, like any other business, is itself protected by the First Amendment.  They get to send the message they want to send.  That's their right of expression.

The NFL's policy is an expressive act.  The primary effect of its permitting players only a single visible response to the United States flag and national anthem is not, actually, to silence the players.   I mean, they're trying to, but not very effectively. 

No, the primary effect of this policy is the promulgation of a specific message that the NFL itself wants to express.

And that's where we come to the reason why the NFL policy deserves our particular scorn:

 

The reason the NFL policy deserves our particular scorn is because of the content of the NFL's own message.

By enacting this policy, the NFL says:

• There is only one way to love, to will good for, to be grateful for, this country. 
• There is only one way to respond to a symbol that represents the country's values.
• Only uncritical love for the republic counts as respect, or as patriotic, or as honorable.
• To peacefully demonstrate a desire for justice for all fails to respect the republic for which it stands.

And there's something especially bad about this message.

It is not just a political message.

It is an anti-American message.  

It is uniquely anathema to fundamental American values.

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Indeed, employers have the right to send all sorts of messages.   They can and do send messages that are false, dangerous, harmful, or downright evil.  It happens all the time.   Of course, the thing about merely bad speech is that honest people can honestly disagree about what constitutes bad speech.  Some businesses say things that I think are good and other reasonable people, who come at life from a direction different from mine, think are wrong.  Other businesses say things that I think are wrong and other reasonable people think are good.   I can object, using my own speech.  They can object, using theirs.  This is, generally, okay, and consistent with the fundamental values on which the nation was founded.  It is one of the ways that we give and take and push and pull against one another's ideas, a way we come to some equilibria where we can live next to one another in relative peace and freedom to go our own ways.

But---and I get to say this, because it's my thought---

This message? It is not okay, and it is fundamentally un-American, precisely because it attempts to claim monopoly over American-ness.

The NFL is trying to speak for the whole country, and trying to say what love of the country means, and how it must be expressed.

It's trying to control the narrative about how to love, and how not to love, the United States.

And it's using the symbol of the entire United States to do it.

They are trying to enact a lie in my name, and in the name of everyone in the country.

I say we should not leave the NFL's message unchallenged. 

I say we should start showing them the door.

 

 

(Photo of San Francisco 49ers kneeling by Keith Allison under a Creative Commons license.)

Language teaching milestone, and musings on teaching what you aren't qualified for.

A Milestone, upon which I will give my two cents:

On Friday, I wrote and hit "Send" on the very last assignment for the fourth year of high school Latin, at least for this particular cohort.

I've been teaching Latin to a small group that included my oldest and H's oldest since they were about nine years old.  (I started with my oldest when he was seven; here's the proof.)  I can barely believe that after this week I won't be sending them any more assignments.

I didn't take Latin in high school or college. I majored in engineering, not classics. I was an absolute beginner when we started, just like them---with the advantage that I had plenty of experience learning one language, namely French. 

But I got a couple of kids all the way from beginner stuff through high school Latin IV, by dint of staying a few steps ahead ahead of them in homeschool curricula, and searching for things I didn't know whenever I realized I needed more information. 

And, of course, by buying books.

Behold, most of the books I used (or at least bought) over the years to teach myself and the kids (that's an aluminum meter stick in the picture for scale):

(Not shown:  books that fell apart, books I couldn't find this morning, books still in my teenager's school bag, online resources that didn't cost me anything, and a few months' subscription to https://aeneid.co/ .)

Now the money question:  Did I do an adequate job?

Did I satisfy the relevant goals and purposes of learning a foreign language in high school?  (See here for a discussion.)

Did they learn it well, compared to how they might have done in an institutional school?

Well, I wasn't able to talk either of them into taking the AP^® Latin exam, but they did sit for the National Latin Exam every year and always scored pretty close to the national "par"; a couple of times one or the other earned a certificate or a medal by scoring above average.  If either of them ever sits for a placement test for college, I'll let you know.

Their grammar work definitely interlaced with their work in English grammar and rhetoric, and their studies of literature, culture, and history interlaced with the heavily-classical program of literature study that H. designed for them.  (Ninth-grade English literature was practically all ancient authors, plus Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.).

At the advanced levels, they translated and read a lot of Caesar, read a big chunk of Vergil, and dabbled in the translation and reading of an assortment of other writers:  off the top of my head:  Horace, Catullus, Ovid, Pliny, Eutropius, probably a dozen more.  They liked some more than others.  

Both are thinking seriously about college-level language study now:

• My son has already corresponded with freshman advisors and decided that if he has to take any language in college, he'll start with a 200-level Latin class that provides a comprehensive grammar review followed by studying Ovid's Metamorphoses, which we've only dabbled in at home.  

• H's son is studying modern Italian on his own and hopes to continue.   Motivation?  A beloved uncle has married an Italian citizen and moved to Sardinia to start a family.  He's already remarked on the head start that Latin gave him for this.

Finally---I can't be sure of this, because they are kind young men who don't complain to me much---but I think they enjoyed themselves.

I definitely enjoyed myself.

+ + +

Anyway, all this is to say: There's this idea that you have to know a subject to teach a subject. Sometimes that's true; but another way is for a lead-learner to set the pace and learn alongside the other students. 

(Psst:  Eventually, the boys got better at parts of it than I did.  They spent much more time doing homework problems; I could cheat with the answer key.)

Let me be clear:  I had a lot of advantages that not everyone would have here:

• It helps to be interested in the subject.
• It helps to have experience with self-teaching.  (I do.)
• It helps to be motivated to help the kids succeed.
• It helps to be rich in resources, time, and connections, all of which I have the privilege of enjoying.  (How much do you think those books cost me, in money and time?  How many of my friends who have studied Latin or classics do you think I reached out to for a question now and again?)

I would never call it an easy way to do things.

But I'd also never call it impossible, at least not with sufficient support.  And don't forget, you always get to ask for help.

If you get a takeaway from this, here's what I suggest: Don't talk, ever, as if it's necessary to hold an external qualification in x, y, or z to help your kid learn it at home.

Don't say it about yourself, and don't say it about other people.

Seriously:  I never want to hear you say "Oh, I'm not qualified" or "Do you really think you're qualified?"

There may be obstacles, but there's no reason to add to them by giving voice, unnecessarily, to a certainty of failure that isn't certain at all.

(Behold the closeups you're going to ask me for.  Left to right:)

 

 

 

 

Bots, trolls, and my fellow Americans.

One of the things that's bothered me since the rise of Trumpism:   I feel I've lost contact with a part of my identity that was dear to me, lost touch with a deeply held value.  

I value this:  I desire to take people at their word.  I don't want to have a strawman image in my head of the people that I disagree with on this issue or that.  I want to understand their arguments on their own terms.  I want to begin with the assumption that my political opponents are sincere; that their beliefs are based on values that I can respect, even if they are different from mine; that everyone has a story that is worth listening to; that people may have different priorities from me, but nearly everyone wants some vision of good to prevail.

I try not to be naive.  Sometimes the values and priorities people have are wrong, worthy of opposition.  Often people say and do things that are very, very wrong.  But the people themselves are worthy of consideration, compassion, and---well---of being taken seriously.  If I didn't think so, what would be the point of engaging, of trying to win people over?

I've always tried to make sure that I stated opposing opinions as fairly as possible, in the same words that the holders of those opinions would use for themselves.  I've always tried to deal with people in terms that they and I can agree on.  Above all, I've always tried to avoid dismissing people as beyond hope.  Everyone, I thought, has some hope of being reached, either with logic or with compassion.

I mean, there's a point beyond which you stop trying, to protect yourself and to save your energies for where they might do some good.  But still you try, at least a little, or at least you try to salvage that hope in human nature.

+ + +

Trumpism, I confess, has destroyed some of that in me.  I have lost all capacity to give any benefit of the doubt to, say, evangelical Trump supporters, or the purportedly conservative commentators who used to give the appearance of caring about classical liberalism, civil liberties, and subsidiarity.  Not to mention the xenophobia, racism, and venom spewed towards immigrants of all types.  I can't find compassion in me for any of that.  I can't see a perspective in which I share any real values with any of these people, even in the most obscured and smudged and tattered way.

And I feel, in that, that it's me who's lost something.  It's troubling.  I don't want to be in a situation where I have lost so much hope in any of my fellow citizens.  It's like we don't belong to the same country.

+ + +

Which is why I sense an odd sort of hope in the news that our various organizations and social media platforms had been infiltrated by foreign agents intent on sowing discord.

The odd sort of hope comes in this:   I have a new way to think better thoughts about my fellow Americans.  

It's very odd because once upon a time, I found hope by assuming that people who expressed wrongheaded opinions were sincere, if misguided.

Now I can find hope by assuming that people who express wrongheaded opinions are not sincere at all.

I find that as I tool around Twitter or idly click through the comments section in newspapers, the dumbest and vilest opinions no longer bother me because I assume that they have been produced in a St. Petersburg troll factory with the blinds over the windows, or generated by some bot programmer's machine learning algorithm.

I don't have to worry that a significant fraction of my fellow Americans are completely unhinged, because I can merely assume that the totally unhinged messages don't come from Americans at all.  I don't have to despair at being unable to detect good will, because I can simply assume that there is no one of good will behind the messages.  There are only algorithms, and pieces of silver. 

This assumption makes them easy to ignore.  And it has mostly done away with my despair about the condition of the American people (although I am concerned about the impact of said bots on the electorate).  

If this vile opinion is probably not real, but is generated by a bot, then I don't have to feel sick that my fellow citizens are holding it.  

I suppose some of them might be unusually gullible Americans, who are only parroting things they learned from troll farms and bots.  I can't get too upset about gullible people.  I can feel hypothetically sorry for these hypothetical real Americans who are generating multiply-exclamation-pointed, red-hatted tirades.  But I also can't tell them apart from the bots. 

And I'm not about to waste my time and compassion on bots.

+ + +

I feel like I'm missing something somewhere.  Messages are coming in.   Messages of ignorance and wrong.   If a human being were saying such things, it would be worthy of engagement and rebuttal, worthy of trying to seek someone's conversion of heart.   But it turns out that only some fraction of the messages are coming from real humans who could potentially be reached by a reply.  The rest are generated by a machine or by an industry.  Is it our duty to reach back with compassion or not?  Does it depend on what fraction of the messengers are human? 

Maybe I should go watch Blade Runner again.  Perhaps I'll get some moral clarity.

 

Pronouns in the Divine Mercy chaplet.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the mercy-related problem of, so to speak, "meeting people where they are."  About one dilemma of the good news:  some demands of Christian life are scary, off-putting, downright repugnant at times.  Certainly from outside, but I've felt that way from the inside from time to time too.  So how do we attract and welcome people, exercise the hospitality and mercy we are commanded to do, avoid hurting people or driving them away, and yet, be honest and not lie about the difficulties?  We know we must reject lies and reject everything that separates human beings from God; we must not do so by rejecting human beings, or provoking them.   "The truth hurts" is the world's saying, not ours. 

It is an old problem, tackled by saints and yet not solved; a problem that reinvents itself in every place and time.  So even though it's the saints' problem it's our problem too.  We can all try to approach it and yet be doing new work.  

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It's been a long time since I made it to any Saturday-morning mass, let alone a first Saturday, so I was glad this past weekend to be entirely free.  I carried some special intentions for old friends having hard times, and one of the children's rosaries hooked away from its thumbtack on the schoolroom bulletin board, to the parish thirty blocks south where daily mass happens on Saturday.  

I got there near the end of the rosary but before the Chaplet of Divine Mercy.  And found myself, as I recited along with the parishioners, thinking about the first-person pronouns in the CDM.  I copied them down in my notebook after the chaplet, while I waited for mass to start.  Let me show you what I mean:

Eternal Father, 

I offer You the body and blood, soul and divinity of Your dearly beloved son, our Lord, Jesus Christ,

in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

 

So what I was asking myself is:  Who is "I?"  Who is "us" and is it the same "us" to whom belong "our" sins?  

Who is "the whole world?"  Is that the same "us" or is it actually a "them?"  Or is "us" a part of "the whole world?"

+ + +

One of the beauties of communal prayers, like this one, with agreed-upon texts, is that they can and do have slightly different meanings inside the heads of all the individual people who say them.  But I want to be clear about what they mean inside my own head.  I want them to be real words, not just my mouth moving in agreed-upon patterns.  So I think about those words and sometimes form theories about them.  Even the pronouns.

(If you like this sort of thing, here's a guest-post I did for Jen Fulwiler some years ago.  Good times.)

 So let's get started, and why not start with the first person.  I'm not exactly taking these phrases in order as they appear in the poem, by the way, but more in the order in which they came to my mind.

1.  "I" offer

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the "I" refers to the person speaking the prayer.  For now let's just note that it's an "I" not a "we," although later we'll speak of "us" and not "we."  The agent of the offering-sentence is an individual, not a collective, despite the fact that the Chaplet is very often a communal prayer, and it has a very communal-prayer feel to it if you ask me.  The sense of community comes out the most when it is recited -- even alone -- at 3 p.m., the "hour of mercy," the time when the Church especially invites us to recite it.  So at that hour one knows that one is among many with the same, or similar, intention.  And yet we do not say, "we offer you."  I offer you.   This offering is a personal offering.  I offer the part that I possess in myself, however much or little that may be.  It is not, so to speak, pooled, at least not at the moment that I offer it.

2.  ...[to] "You"

Is "You" God?  Yes, but more precisely, "You" is another "first person" -- in this case the first person of the Trinity, the Father, and precisely, distinct from the Son and from the Holy Spirit.   This is made obvious by the first two words of the prayer.  The Father is the one whose will Jesus does on earth, and the one to whom he makes offering of himself on the cross.  So when "I offer" the offering mentioned in the prayer, "I" make that offering to the same Person.  

3.  ...in atonement for "our" sins and those of the whole world"

This sentence makes it clear that "I" am making an offering not just for myself, but for others.  In fact I am making the offering on behalf of everybody ("the whole world.")  

But here is a curious puzzle.  As long as this offering is meant to make atonement for everybody, why do we not just say "...in atonement for the sins of the whole world?"  Why is there an "us" and a "them" of sorts here, or if not that, at least an "us" and a wider "us?"  

I see two possibilities.  Either we are meant to make a sort of mental distinction between "us/our" and "the whole world," or we are meant to make a distinction  between the "our sins" and "those [sins] of the whole world."    The prayer makes it clear that everybody's sins demand atonement, "ours" as well as "the whole world's," but why the distinction?  Who is "us?"

Before embarking on this contemplation, my mental picture of the "us" had been framed by my habit of reciting the CDM mainly in community, like I was doing on Saturday with other parishioners before Mass.  I had been picturing the "us" as "all the people here in this room with me, all of us here together reciting in this place."  "The whole world" then, must have meant to me "everybody outside this room."  And it may be an acceptable interpretation of the phrase; I don't know.  

 But it breaks down for me a bit when I remember that the chaplet is not only to be said in community, but also alone.  So I'm inclined to think that "our" is more expansive than "the people in this room."   Fortunately there is another clue...

 

4.  "our" Lord, Jesus Christ 

Here at least, "our" is apparently those of us of whom it may be said, Jesus Christ is Lord.  The phrase "our Lord" is an appositive; it mentions a second time and renames "Your dearly beloved Son;" it is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.  One of its purposes is apparently to stress that Jesus is "our" Lord.  So going out on a limb here and assuming that the two "our"s have the same antecedent:  the "we" is the set of all faithful Christians, all those who recognize Jesus and sincerely call him Lord and try however imperfectly to follow His commands.   I tend to think that here we can interpret the set relatively broadly and not restrict it to Christians who are visibly members of the Catholic Church; I think there's room for discussion there.

So what does that get us?  Well, I think it means that "the whole world" refers to all the other people who don't call Jesus Lord for one reason or another, and possibly some people who do call Jesus Lord but insincerely or with an entirely wrong idea about who Jesus is or what Lord means.  Roughly, Christians and non-Christians, or followers of Christ and others, or the Church and people outside the Church (with perhaps some acknowledgment that there may be folks who are really in the Church but only God knows it).  This does jibe pretty well, incidentally, with Scripture tending to contrast "the world" with Christ.

And the salient point here is that "I" am making this offering in atonement for the sins of Christians, and, apparently equally, for the sins of everybody else.

 

5.  Have mercy on "us" and on the whole world

I don't need to belabor the point again, so I'll just note that the distinction between "us" and "the whole world" is significant enough to make it twice.  I think this underscores that it's a real distinction.  "I" ask for mercy for "us" and for all the other people too.

 + + +

All this being said, let's come back to "I" in the context of exactly what it is that "I" am offering.

 

6.  the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity

It's meditating on the meaning of this that got me thinking about this at all.  How can "I" offer this, which is basically "Himself," what Jesus offered on the cross?  I know how Jesus could do it; it was His to give.   I know (sort of) how a priest at Mass does it:  He is alter Christus and makes the offering in persona Christi.  What is it for someone like me to offer these back to the Father?

The way I figure it is that "I" can offer the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Christ only because I somehow possess it -- and the way I possess it is through having received it the Eucharist.

I freely admit that I may have worked it out wrong, but the Eucharist itself only remains literally with a person for a short time after Communion.  So one possible meaning here is that each of us makes this offering by dedicating the fruits of the Eucharist that he has received to do God's work and God's will; another is to consecrate the graces the Christian has received from it back to God, which may mean, so to speak, allowing God to redistribute or enact them for His good will and not specifically the good of the person making the offering.  

+ + +

The latter possibility, I clearly came up with under the influence of the idea of Marian consecration, and perhaps it's mixed up too much, so let's explore the first option:  That "I" offer the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, by dedicating the fruits of the Eucharist that I have received outside myself somehow.

The fruits of the Eucharist are said to be seven (cf. the Catechism, ¶1391--1398; scroll down from this link to the section):

• augments our union with Christ
• separates us from sin
• preserves us from future mortal sin
• wipes away venial sins (specifically, by strengthening our charity)
• makes the Church
• commits us to the poor
• signifies our unity

There are many, many people who in their circumstances do not or cannot receive the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity.   But the whole world can receive its fruits, no matter who they are or what their circumstances.

God can increase and make full any person's knowledge of and union with Christ.

God can detach any person from whatever sins trouble them.

God can wipe away any person's venial sins.

God can preserve any person from mortal sin.

God's power and mercy can incorporate anyone God chooses into the mystical body of Christ.

God can turn any heart toward the poor.

God can, someday, unite any person at all to the rest of us in the gift and sign of the Eucharist, and grant to any person the possession, not just of its fruits, but of the Eucharist itself.

+ + +

I think that when "I" am offering to God the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, I am saying:  You, Father, may take these fruits back from me, and spread them around to everyone; or at least, I say to you, God, that the fruits you have given me through the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, help me to use these fruits for the good of everyone else.  To realize these fruits for the people who (though they cannot yet receive the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity) may yet receive its fruits, by my words and actions.

By the works, you may say, of mercy.

The offering makes atonement, and enacts mercy, at the same time.  Atonement requires a sacrifice, and the sacrifice that the Chaplet enacts is a commitment to turn the great gift of the Eucharist outward, not keep its fruits just for myself, but actively work toward their wider distribution.

 

 

The fundamental vision of the human person.

I'm thinking these days that it rarely makes sense for Catholics, even dialogue-minded ones, to engage -- on the specific details of any controversial issue -- with the average person who holds the mainstream accepted view. 

I say "average person" for a reason, to exclude a special case where it does make sense.

If the two interlocutors, are good friends, if they respect each other, if there is a spirit of mutual curiosity, if each is willing to say things like "Gosh, I don't know the answer to that one" and "You know, that is a really good point," and "You might be right about that," if they can spend an entertaining evening buying one another drinks and having what used to be known as a good argument -- well, a lot of things are possible.  And even if nobody's mind is changed the world becomes an incrementally better place at the end of such an evening, because two people met, grappled with truth, understood each other a bit more.  

The reason that works, and why it can make for such a satisfying way to spend one's leisure time, is that it involves treating one's opponent as a fellow human being -- not as a symbol of Everything That's Wrong With The World Today.  As a person, not as a thing.

Not to be destroyed; not to be manipulated; not to be owned (or pwned); not to be used; not to be discarded; because, not a thing, but a person.

+ + +

People are people, and not things.  This is a good thing to remember when we do engage with the mainstream; and it ought to be easy to remember, because this is exactly the firm ground that we need to retreat to and stand on.  People are people, and not things.

This is the unshakeable platform on which all of the complicated details are built, every way in which the Catholic vision of What People Can and Cannot Do To And With Each Other differs from the mainstream one.  The structure atop this platform can appear awkward and gangly and intricate, like a child's jungle gym.  The structure is built upon the platform, not the other way around.   It's possible to start in one place, follow it back to its origins where it is rooted in the base, and from there work your way back up to any other spot; or to zoom out and take in the whole as a coherent structure.  It is all connected.  

But that's asking a lot of somebody who encounters you on Twitter, or for a couple of hours at a family picnic.  To put it bluntly, most people just are not going to go there.  Following you all the way down that structure is something that real friends and fellow-thinkers might be reasonably expected to do.  The reality is that we cannot expect it from most people.  Scoring points in an argument with a bigot is fun and memorable; reading lengthy quotes from Thomas Aquinas is not attractive. You can't dissuade somebody from going cow-tipping by inviting them to a lecture on bovine physiognomy instead.

Some people who think more about thinking than I do have offered detailed philosophical reasons for the mutual incoherence.  It may be simpler to observe that the Catholic worldview and the jumble of popular public worldview start from different assumptions, postulates if you will.  A less optimistic view is that the popular public worldview does not hold to any one set of assumptions, leaping to whatever is the most useful at the time.  Of course, that view is consistent with the notion that there is no "popular public worldview" to engage with; there are only individual human persons, none of whom are symbolically representative of anything, and who must be engaged with one at a time.

+ + +

And so, because we want to engage with people as people and not as symbols, we have to accept that often we won't be able to usefully engage on the specifics.  A lot of public discourse is completely dominated by utilitarianism or sentimentality (sometimes both at the same time), neither of which are compatible with the Catholic vision of the human person.    

It would actually be refreshing to meet someone, discuss the politics of the day, and hear her say "Well, actually, I subscribe to the philosophy that the most moral action is always the one that maximizes the total amount of happiness and decreases the amount of suffering in the world."   Or perhaps, "I hold that the best moral guide is one's feelings:  the moral action in any unpleasant situation is the one that relieves the actor's feelings of discomfort and dissonance and produces soothing feelings of satisfaction and catharsis."  One might disagree with such people, ideally at great length and over a few drinks, exploring each one's structure all over from the ground up, and trying to understand how they all fit together, testing the parts for soundness.

This doesn't seem to happen very often on Twitter.

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I propose a retreat to the fundamentals -- this fundamental vision of the human person, articulated by Karol Wojtyla in Love and Responsibility, a notion upon which that same man as Pope John Paul II would build most of his Christian anthropology known as the Theology of the Body:

A human person is "a good toward which the only adequate response is love."

This notion is itself rooted in the Christian understanding of God and nature, so it isn't absolutely fundamental itself.  It is, I believe, as far back down the structure  as we can go without being forced to debate the nature of God or pit holy books against one another.  But it is fundamental to us in the sense that it is really not up for debate.  

It is also a useful foundation because, I believe, it commands a certain amount of respect in the abstract.  So even someone who rejects it in specific instances (How can you say that we have to respond in love to that monstrous child-murderer?  He doesn't deserve love from us!) can be persuaded that it is a reasonable philosophy to start from, or perhaps an ideal to strive for even if it is terribly impractical.  A die-hard positivist may reject it, but most people we may speak with are not die-hard anything.

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That statement of the human person sounds good to a lot of people, and a very large number of them might say they agree with it, when asked.  But the meaning to which they are agreeing depends very much on their definition of the two key terms in that statement:

1. human person
2. love

And this is a place where we have a chance to make some commentary that might shed light.   Because very often, our differences have to do not with people rejecting the statement that a human person is a good to which the only adequate response is love, but with people 

1. excluding some humans from personhood (either because they do not meet some criterion for inclusion, or because they have committed some act which has revoked their status) 
2. using a different definition of "love" 

 

We can anticipate #1 by changing "human person" to "human being;" we regard the one as identical to the other, even if others do not, and do not believe that a human's personhood can be revoked.  We can anticipate #2 (which is entirely understandable given the vagaries of the English language) by being more specific up front, combining John Paul II with Thomas Aquinas:

A human being is a good toward which the only adequate response is agape-love, that is, "willing the good of the other."

That is grammatically clunky, so

The only adequate response to any human being is to will his or her good.

From there we can derive almost everything there is to say about how human beings should behave towards one another and with one another.  It does remain to point out that by "good" we must emphasize "ultimate (eternal) good," but this never excludes willing temporal good as well.

It doesn't mean that there will never be moral dilemmas; it does mean that we can't resolve them by retreating to utilitarianism or to sentimentality, but instead have to work to resolve problems where the good of one "other" appears to conflict with the good of another "other."  Sometimes a larger perspective is needed.

Anyway, the statement above is not what you would call an argument-winner.  It invites discussion from the interested, maybe.  It does not solve policy problems all by itself, but then, neither does anyone else.  It is mainly about how people treat each other, not how social policy is constructed; social policy could be judged in its light, by considering whether it encourages or discourages people from willing each other's good, but it won't provide answers on its own.

  It has the advantage of being true, and easy to remember.  It will not steer you wrong, either as an argument --- or as a style of argument, which might even be more important as we navigate the world of ideas, which is only an oblique way of saying the world of human persons.

Silent is deadly.

"People talk about racism and "reverse racism," but if you’re a white lady like me, what you get to see most is not incidents of probable racism against any particular person, but all those things white people say and do when they’re left unsupervised."

--Jen Fitz, writing here at Sticking the Corners

+ + +

 

"This is where the party ends."

-- They Might Be Giants, "Your Racist Friend" (Flood, 1990)

 

+ + +

The following is not a question of equivalencies. It is a question of consistency.

+ + +

Catholics who try to be faithful to the Church's teachings speak and write a great deal about sending messages with our actions.

To make an example of current events: It's not a simple matter for Catholics to decide whether to attend a ceremony celebrating a sexual union (of any kind) that we know isn't a valid marriage. Even if everyone knows our beliefs -- we aren't supposed to leave people confused in any way about what we stand for. We may not say a word; but our silent presence may be taken as assent and acceptance; in fact it is a kind of assent and acceptance.

Conservative Catholics know this. Liberal Catholics know it too. We each of us, if we have integrity, behave accordingly, maybe with some internal struggle, to send the message we believe we should send, by providing or withholding our presence.

+ + +

Silent presence happens in other contexts, too, where actors wish to promote a view of human nature that is patently opposed to the teaching of Christ.

And by "contexts" I mean holiday dinners with relatives, meetings with co-workers, drinks with your buddies; and by "a view of human nature that is patently opposed to the teaching of Christ" I mean all sorts of notions that are contrary to human dignity.

Notions that entire groups of people deserve blame for the actions of some of their members.

Notions that individuals can be judged by the characteristics of a group.

Notions that demeaning language -- objectifying language -- mocking language -- language that fails to treat persons as individuals, individually redeemed by Christ, individual agents working toward their own salvation in the context of the world -- is harmless if none of its targets are there to hear it.

Are we sending a message that might confuse people into thinking that, because we are there, we agree? Are we endorsing this language without meaning to?

+ + +

I have been the nice white lady standing uncomfortably -- and yet silently -- in the presence of another who is telling a story about Those Blacks, You Know How They Are. I have stayed in the meeting when the female speaker makes the crack about how a bunch of women will not be able to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. I have done the thing where you don't laugh at the disgusting joke about gay people, or whomever -- the thing where you remain silent, because it's polite and you have reasons not to cause a scene, and maybe the teller will notice that you don't, actually, think it's funny -- but it is, in the end, the "thing" where you remain.

Silently, but you remain.

That too, my friends, is sending a message of acceptance. Acceptance of a seriously distorted view of human nature and of human dignity. Acceptance that is in no way reconcilable with the teaching of Christ.

The teaching of Christ is the teaching that welcomes the stranger, the person who is different, frightening, repulsive.

Welcoming the stranger is, as the nation learned to its grief in Charleston this week, not without personal risk.

+ + +

I had a moment of clarity around Christmas, as often happens around the holidays, when I found myself in a Nice White People situation. The kind where a forceful, humorous personality, the life of the party, feels himself safe, among people who will not challenge him. He's just messing around, after all! It's just a joke! And in this case, the joke involved dehumanizing slurs directed at gay people.

(But he has Democrat cred! Everyone knows he is a supporter of gay rights! Of same sex marriage and antidiscrimination statutes! ... Nonetheless, I am here to tell you that on occasion such people will still, if they are among a safe crowd, tell crude and dehumanizing jokes. I don't understand it, but it is true.)

I must have stood by silently a thousand times before, in this and other situations. It is not my job to set people on the right path. I may be opinionated, and I am free with my opinions on this blog, but I am not eloquent on the spot. I am reluctant to make trouble, at least when it comes to people that I have to get along with in the future for some reason.

The difference this time is that in the circle, in the conversation, in the party, I was standing, a drink in my hand, right next to my two oldest sons.

I heard the slur.

I saw my teenaged son look away, down into his Coke.

And in that moment -- and hours later, too -- I understood that I had been placed in a position where silently remaining was not acceptable, and that to silently remain would be a direct violation of my duty towards the young people in my family. The people I am charged with raising, and teaching.

+ + +

This is where the party ends

I can't stand here listening to you

And your racist friend.

I know politics bore you,

But I feel like a hypocrite talking to you

And your racist friend.

+ + +

Like I said, I am not eloquent on the spot. So I didn't speak up, not then.

But I let the expression of contempt and disgust play across my face. It was real, not faked. I don't have much of a poker face anyway.

And I left the room. (Yeah, I know. My kids were still there in the room, with the joke hanging in the air like the smell of a fart.)

And I did not look the speaker in the eye again. And he knew I was not looking him in the eye.

+ + +

That night I dreamed I was driving a car on an empty road, and up ahead curious clouds roiled into the sky. I was studying them and wondering what they were, wondering if a thunderstorm was brewing, when -- too late -- I realized I was driving straight toward a towering cloud of volcanic ash, and it was pouring over the road in front of me, obliterating everything in its path. I swerved the car to the right, I felt my body thrown to the side by the force of the turn, and the wall of ash flooded over my car and into the windows, snaring the tires, dragging my car along with it, enclosing me in darkness, suffocating me.

I woke up still suffocated.

I got up out of the bed, leaving Mark sleeping beside the baby. I went downstairs and found my boys and I told them: Last night you heard some vile language about people who don't deserve to be talked about in that way. I want you to know that it wasn't right. No matter who says it, it isn't right for people to use language like that about other human beings.

They listened to me with serious faces. "We know," they said.

"I know you know," I said. "And I also want you to know that I didn't say anything about it last night because didn't know how to respond last night. But that I am going to respond now, and I am going to let that person know that I do not want him to talk that way where you kids can hear."

And then I went upstairs and I wrote an email, and I hit Send.

+ + +

It was the loveliest party that I ever attended

If anything was broken, I'm sure it could be mended

My head can't tolerate this bobbing and pretending

Listening to some bullet-head and the madness that he's saying.

+ + +

So it's like this. I am one of those people who has no sense of humor. I am unacceptably self-righteous. There is no getting around it.

God give me the courage never to find that crap funny ever again. God give me the courage, if not to speak up, then to leave the room, again, and again, and again.

+ + +

Sometimes, Nice White People get together and they say objectifying things that they think are harmless. I think they think they are harmless because everyone else in the room is also a Nice White Person. Or occasionally it is Nice Straight People. Sometimes it is A Bunch Of Great Guys. Occasionally it is women objectifying women, not always Those Other Women either, believe you me; I have been in these rooms.

No one whose feelings might be hurt is there. Ergo hurt hasn't happened, right?

 This is wrong. Because

    (a) it normalizes the objectification of human beings,

    (b) it is always an offense against human beings because it is an offense against truth, and

    (c) sometimes the Nice White People who can hear are not, in fact, particularly nice. Sometimes they are disturbed people. Sometimes they are impressionable because they are young. Sometimes they are vulnerable. Sometimes they are vile racists who add what they hear to their experiences that tell them racism isn't so vile, that they are among friends even in their vile racism.

+ + +

Serious Catholics know that silent presence sends a message of acceptance and assent. We know this!

We know it is important not to confuse people about the truth.

Can we just try not to leave them confused about all the truths as well? Like the truth that a human being is an entity to which the only appropriate response is love? And that dehumanizing use (as the butt of a joke, as a scapegoat, as an outlet for sexual urges, as a political point, as a means to an end) is never the right response?

Why are we only worried about confusing people about part of the Christian message? Can we come up with a way to make it not at all confusing that we believe in charity towards all?

Out through the kitchen, to the bedroom, to the hallway

Your friend apologized, said he could see it my way

He let the contents of the bottle do the thinking

Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding.

+ + +

My heart is heavy this week. Pray for Charleston, and give thanks for people who welcome the stranger and who will go on welcoming the stranger, in everything they say and in everything they don't say.

 

 

 

-----

*Since this was first posted I elected to adjust slightly the wording in the paragraph about ceremonies, to reflect the fact that, while there's plenty of advice to be had out there, and maybe individual bishops have advised their faithful on it, I don't know of any explicit direction in Catholic doctrine stating what particular Catholics must do or not do with respect to social invitations, the circumstances of which can vary greatly.  It's not a matter to take lightly, but as far as I can tell, it remains a matter of conscience.  Everyone, however, appears to agree that the reason it is not to be taken lightly is because presence speaks.

Taking notes; and the photo shoot of the saints.

Today was the first day that I had to scrape ice off the windshield. I got up at 7:30 so I could grab a cup of coffee before heading off to the 9:00 Mass for the Feast of All Saints.

In our archdiocese, the obligation tis lifted when the feast day falls on a Saturday or Monday, so I took the opportunity to go to Mass all by myself, and relished it. It is rare that I manage to get to Mass both on All Saints' and on All Souls'.

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Recently, as the 4yo gets closer to being a 5yo and easier to handle, and as Mark has been taking over more of the duty of carrying the baby around during Mass, I have found myself less frequently occupied with childminding and more often with my hands free. I've started doing something I have long thought about doing but worried about how it might look: Taking notes in Mass, at least during the homily.

I spent more than half my life as a student, you know, and I am a note-taker: pen on real paper, the sort that draws circles around important words, adds lots of arrows to connect ideas, goes back and finds the main points and numbers them. I listen so much better with a writing instrument in my hand, and I retain so much more -- even if I never go back to those notes again -- if I once write the information down. Not to mention that the task of catching the important parts, distilling them into bits concise enough to keep up, and recording them -- a survival skill I worked on for years and years -- focuses me on the words instead of the little distractions of my mind and body -- what else I have to do today, what on earth I am going to say to so-and-so the next time we talk, when I will be able to have lunch.

I decided all of a sudden that I don't care if anyone looks at me funny during Mass. I have a little notepad in my bag anyway, and I started pulling it out at homily time (sometimes during the readings if something in the readings strikes me) and taking notes.

It's made a lot of difference in my ability to take what I hear, find something fruitful in it, and carry it around in my mind -- out of the church and into the places where I can actually put it into practice. Also, it's easier to discuss it with Mark or with the kids later, because -- what's new -- I remember it more than five minutes after Mass is over.

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I really liked an image that our pastor used in his homily this morning. Children getting ready for picture day at school often protest at the dressy clothes and the sitting still; but when we are older, and it is time for us to pose for a group picture for some club or association or even friendship that we are happy to belong to, we don't want to stand out as the guy who doesn't seem to belong; we want to fit in, are eager to show through our image, our appearance and our expression, that we belong to this and it belongs to us. It is not superficial if the desire to be a part of the group is real.

Putting on saintliness here on earth is like that, because we belong already to the friendship and association of all the saints.

The notion of standing in rows and saying Cheese with my friends here on earth, and with St Therese and St Paul and St Josemaria and St Thomas and St Gianna and St Andrew and all the rest, just has tickled me all morning.

So. I am glad I wrote it down, because otherwise I might have been thinking about lunch instead.

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Using persons as rhetorical means to an end.

The smart but acerbic Mark Shea has posted, believe it or not, an apology for his tone and attitude in writing in recent months. It's a beautiful example of a real-not-fake apology, and I am probably not the only person who is glad to see it; Shea is usually, I think, correct, but sometimes I can't stand to read him even when I agree with him because, well, he can be mean. Smart, but dismissive. So I am glad to see this apology, and sincerely wish him fruitfulness in his efforts to respect persons more.

I wanted to highlight part of it, which I think is a good statement of an error that many persons fall into when they write or post about politics (or entertainment or economics, for that matter). It has to do with the notion of "using persons as means to ends," which in Catholic moral theology is an absolute no-no. (It is probably also forbidden in other systems of ethics, and should be in more, as it's more protective of the weak than is your standard Golden-Rule-driven system). A pithy way of putting the same principle is "The opposite of love is not hate; it's use. The opposite of loving a person is using a person."

Mr. Shea writes that he has a strong compulsion to fight against any notion of reducing persons to a means to an end, and yet he himself is guilty of the same crime in the rhetorical arena:

Observant readers will grasp that this has more than a little to do with my intensely strong reaction to the notion of using people as means to ends–as though the person himself is merely a tool. Hence my intense reactions to such questions as abortion, torture and the whole Live Action thing[*], all of which involve reducing people to things or means to an end.

But there’s a bitter irony in all that too... I really saw this weekend that I have myself long had a habit of reducing other people to means to ends, depersonalizing them, and treating them with little or no respect. It works this way:

If I am arguing with somebody who seems to me to merely be in intellectual error..., I will treat that one with respect. But when I feel as though I am engaged with somebody who is wilfully refusing to get the point, I will generally reach a point where I decide “Okay, you refuse to listen honestly or reply honestly, so I will henceforth respond to you only for the sake of those third party bystanders watching the conversation who will listen. You have just been reduced to a Thing: a means to the end of talking to them.”

In addition, my attitude toward Public Figures is much the same. I tend not to see them as human beings, but as sort of semi-fictional characters. People who don’t fully exist but who are In the News and therefore symbols or representatives of ideas.

That last bit is significant: the Public Figure as a nonperson, someone who has surrendered part of his or her humanity. It is so common that we hardly think about it. Sometimes it may be naturally necessary, a simple consequence of being in the public eye; for example, our legal system literally strips public figures of some of the privacy and defamation protections that "private citizens" enjoy. That may be necessary to balance their rights against the rights of a free press in a country that highly values freedom of speech and information. But it's not generally necessary for individuals to treat public figures as nonpersons.

It's so very difficult, though, to avoid seeing them -- and using them -- as mere symbols. Look at the vitriol people spew towards political candidates from the party they oppose (yes, indeedy, it goes both ways). Spend a few minutes reviewing political posts from your friends on Facebook and ask yourself, "is the subject of this post being used as a means to score a political point?" Has your friend reduced a public figure's personality to the content of one statement or one political position? Has your friend extrapolated the figure's entire intellectual or moral character from the content of one political position? Is your friend mocking a politician or celebrity in a way that offends human dignity -- denying the individual humanity of members of a group because of their sex, sexuality, race, religion, or class? Has your friend singled out a particularly unattractive individual as a convenient representative for a whole group of people? Has your friend perpetuated an assumption of malicious intent behind an act, when a benevolent interpretation is far more likely to be accurate?

Yeah, I am seeing a lot of that. And over the past year or so, I have developed more and more distaste for it to the point that I don't enjoy posting anything with political content. I rarely even openly criticize them, because in social media, to criticize is to widen the audience (my followers see what I reply to on Twitter, my friends see whatever I comment on in Facebook).

It's surprisingly difficult to criticize public figures for their political stance without falling into the easy habits of mockery and, well, using people.

And yet, political speech is important speech, and moral speech is one of the duties of the Christian. So how do you post anything at all that involves a public figure without using him or her as a means to an end?

I think one important principle is to restrict your criticism to actions, behavior, and decisions without trying to see into someone's heart and criticize his character. Christians ought to be much better at this than the average person, and much better than we are. My observation is that it's very common for the general public to conflate identity and behavior, but we have a long tradition of distinguishing between "sinner" and "sin." We fall into this error too, and we need to catch it and root it out wherever it exists. It's difficult, because for various reasons right now, the conventional wisdom is extremely suspicious of the notion that it's even possible to "hate the sin and love the sinner;" right now, for instance, Catholics are engaged in defense of our beliefs about marriage, and a large number of people have an interest in portraying us as holding those beliefs not because of our theological convictions about marriage as an image of the life-giving reciprocal self-gift that is the relationship between Christ and the Church (pfft! who can follow all that?), but because the Catholic Church "hates gays."

Another principle is to take care with adjectives that modify the person rather than their actions, statements,or positions. This is one of my pet peeves. I occasionally follow a group blog about Catholicism in American Culture, but have mostly stopped reading it because one of the bloggers thinks it's fun to repeatedly refer to a particular Democratic politician as a "worthless hack." I don't care how odious her political positions are, and I don't care how intellectually vapid her justifications are for what she does. No one has any business describing any other human being with an adjective like "worthless," and for a Catholic blogging as a Catholic to do so is an offense against God to whom we are all beloved. Period.

Rooting out depersonalizing adjectives while still making a legitimate point is largely a matter of recasting the sentence. Does it sound like there's not much difference between "Smith is disgusting" and "Smith disgusts me?" Still, the first is a statement about Smith and the second a statement about your feelings toward Smith; the latter's more defensible, and represents a rhetorical habit that holds the line against depersonalizing adjectives. Still better, if it's an accurate characterization, would be something like "When I heard about Smith's vote on the House bill, I felt disgusted." To write something like this reminds you not to let your feelings generalize from action to person. If you find yourself disgusted by a person -- that is to say, by the sum total of all that they are -- then you have a beam in your eye.

I don't think the prohibition against using persons as means to an end entirely rules out satire as a rhetorical tool, but satire must be deployed carefully lest it devolve into dehumanizing mockery. We have a long history of trenchant political cartoons that make their point concisely by depicting real persons (or groups of persons) in symbolic or representational ways; by extrapolating certain general conclusions from specific statements; and by isolating specific political positions while at the same time putting a face to them. The same kinds of shorthand are at play in circulating memes and carefully selected unattractive photos. When is this okay and when is it not?

Unfortunately, I think a good deal of it has to do with how skilled you are at making your precise point. Let's say that you wish to make a point of your opinion that a certain politician's well-received statement "A," if taken to a logical conclusion, leads to the statement "B" which would not be so popular; you hope to show that holding "A" is equivalent to holding "B" and thereby convince many people to reject "A" who wouldn't otherwise see the connection. You have a tough line to walk: you need to show that the politician's position on "A" is consistent with "B," without actually mischaracterizing him as explicitly stating "B." Political cartoonists get a certain amount of leeway, I think, because we're supposed to understand that a cartoon is a form of shorthand. But the line can be tricky to draw. Take this cartoon that appeared in the Sacramento Bee soon after the still-under-investigation ammonium nitrate explosion in West, Texas:

 

The point of the cartoon is clear: Texas Governor Rick Perry promotes industrial deregulation as a means to encouraging economic development, but deregulation can reduce industrial safety and perhaps lead to incidents like large facility explosions (coming so soon after the explosion in West, the unstated implication is that loose industrial regulations may have been a factor).

Now I happen to lean toward erring on the side of deregulation in a poor economy, I support the notion of states being able to set some of their own levels of regulation according to local needs, and until the investigation is complete I am reluctant to jump to conclusions about whether the West explosion points to a need to tighten Texas's safety rules. That is to say, I ought not be inclined to cut this cartoon any slack. But I happen to think this is a well-crafted cartoon that makes its point very effectively. I think it follows the general tradition of political cartoon shorthand, arguing that the logical conclusion of reducing regulation is accepting more risk of industrial disasters.

But it's not so clear-cut. Other people (not surprisingly, including Gov. Perry) argued that the cartoon is beyond the pale: that it exploited the victims of the West explosion to make a political point, "mocking the tragic deaths of my fellow Texans and our fellow Americans." You could also argue that it is unfair to Governor Perry, if you think that it implies that Perry approves of industrial disasters; here's an example of another artist's cartoon that I think does cross that line.

The SacBee cartoonist, Jack Ohman, defended the cartoon, writing, "My job... is to be provocative." I think he's right, but we have to ask what the political cartoonist is supposed to provoke. Second thoughts about previously unexamined opinions? Yes. Dehumanizing or false beliefs about a person or persons? No.

+ + +

So how do we push back against dehumanizing political speech? The first step is, as always, attention to the beam in our own eyes -- the kind of self-examination and purging to which Mark Shea has just vowed to recommit himself. Refuse to return a blow for a blow, and commit yourself to scrupulous attention to the ethics of your own writings.

Only then can you turn your attention to charitable correction of others' failings. And even then, you have to distinguish between the bad thing So-and-so said, and the badness of So-and-so himself.

One principle is to remember to push back against dehumanizing remarks from the people on "your side" just as fervently as you would push back against similar remarks from the people on "the other side." Maybe more fervently, because the argument might carry more weight coming from you.

As much as I would like to, incidentally, I can't give up on anyone; can't roll my eyes and sigh, "You just can't argue with him." It comes down to that theological virtue we call Hope: no person is beyond reach. On the other hand, I might well be the worst person to try to reach a particular individual, so interactions with other's errors mean constant discernment of whether my decision not to engage is correct (because what I'll choose to say is unlikely to make things better) or cowardly (because I've given up on their ability to see reason at all). It's not easy, but then, staying true to truth often isn't.

 

 

 

__________

[*]Footnote for those who aren't familiar with this reference. "The whole Live Action thing" refers to the "stings" carried out in Planned Parenthood offices by the group Live Action, in which a young woman posing as a client who sought an abortion tried to catch PP workers violating the law; for example, she might pose as an underage girl pregnant by an older man. Shea has argued forcefully against these and other tactics that rely on deception to produce bad publicity.

 

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First principles of good rhetoric (good meaning "good.")

In the last post, I responded to Melanie on the topic of rhetoric.  GeekLady asked in the comments to Melanie's post,

I’m interested in the rhetorical part myself, but completely unqualified to even muse on it.  My education was very weak in the area of writing in general, much less writing persuasively…

This is actually one of my biggest homeschooling concerns - effective writing is not taught in schools, and I’m not (currently) qualified to teach it myself, so how do I remedy David’s future schooling?  

I'm not sure either, but let's speculate!

(The timing is actually great, because H. and I have recently re-aligned our plans for teaching writing to the oldest kids, to include some more direct how-do-you-form-a-coherent-argument instruction.  We're not claiming to be experts in rhetoric, just in what our kids need, but we -- both instinctive argument-crafters -- are trying to figure out exactly what instruction they need, and give it to them.  Example here of an engaging lesson plan that H. came up with recently.)

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The title of this post is meant to express my desire to formulate a moral rhetoric, not merely an effective rhetoric.

Rhetoric that is good, in the moral sense, must:

• seek to express arguments that are true
• seek to understand both arguments that are true and arguments that are false
• serve ends that are good, not bad
• treat persons with the respect and love that is due to persons 

I'm a bit redundant here.  The last is a subset of the first, since to treat persons as people, not objects -- to refuse to use a person as the means to an end -- to respect persons -- is, implicitly, to express the truth about persons.

But let's take these things one at a time.

1.  Express arguments that are true.

What's the point of writing, or speaking, anything if you don't have something to say?  And what's the point of saying something that isn't true?   A moral rhetoric rejects lying and deceit in all its forms.

 

2.  Understand both arguments that are true and arguments that are false.

I take it for granted that rhetoric is receptive as well as expressive; and of course, it's a skill that must be taught, and it's hard to learn how to express arguments without learning how to understand them.  In a moral rhetoric, even though you must strive to express only true arguments, you must strive to understand the intended logic behind false ones as well, so that you can spot error and deceit.  A moral rhetorician should be able to construct false arguments (not the same as going out and arguing them to people, and therefore not a violation of #1) for several reasons:  

• first, to test true arguments and thereby sharpening them; 
• second, in order to effectively counter them during a true argument; 
• third, in order to express the truth of the opponent's personhood, by giving their argument the respect it is due as the product of a worthy adversary, striving in charity to understand the opposing argument in the same way that one hopes one's own argument will be understood.

 

3.  Serve ends that are good.

Certain truths need not be expressed at all times, in all places, to all people, and in all manners.  ("The right to the communication of the truth is not unconditional" -- CCC 2488.)  

Boasting isn't part of a moral rhetoric.  Neither is detraction, which seeks maliciously to damage another's reputation.  Certain material is rightly confidential.  And "everyone should observe an appropriate reserve concerning persons' private lives" (CCC 2492).

Furthermore, the efforts of rhetoric should be turned where they can do good, and not where they might do evil.  True and non-confidential arguments could carefully be selected from among many possible true arguments to do evil -- for instance, intentionally to whip a mob into a frenzy of violence, or to induce policymakers to rank a certain threat greater than it is, or to draw attention away from some other thing that justice demands be acted upon.  Even true rhetoric is a tool that may be wielded to harmful ends.  

"The good and safety of others, respect for privacy, and the common good are sufficient reasons for being silent about what ought not be known or for making use of a discreet language. The duty to avoid scandal often commands strict discretion. No one is bound to reveal the truth to someone who does not have the right to know it." -- CCC 2489

 

4.  Treat persons with the respect and love that they are due as persons.

Again, this is really a special case of the first injunction to express the truth:  our rhetoric, if it is to be a moral rhetoric, must implicitly express the truth about the human person, by refusing to treat persons as objects.

Let me break this down into the first person, the second person, and the third person.  We must treat as real human beings the person who is speaking; the persons who are spoken to (i.e., the interlocutor and the audience); and the persons who are spoken about.

Our moral rhetoric cannot concede our own humanity.  We cannot, for example, consent to be treated as an object; we don't have the right to.

Our moral rhetoric must respect our audience and our opponents as persons.  We must not condescend to them or assume that they lack intelligence or moral character.  Here the Catechism sums up nicely our duty to even our opponents, in part by quoting yet another deviously rhetorical Jesuit:

"Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury.  He becomes guilty.... of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation,the moral fault of a neighbor.   To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor's thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way:

Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another's statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands it. And if the latter understands it badly, let the former correct him with love. If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved.

 (St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises)

 

 

Our moral rhetoric must not use persons as means to a rhetorical end.  Here's a sad observation about many of us who know better than to use a human being as a machine to produce output, or as a toy to produce pleasure:   We remain eager to use a real human being in our speech.  

We use them as a caricature in our arguments to produce rhetorical effect, or as a character in our stories to produce entertainment.

This isn't moral.  When we tell a story or offer an example that includes another human being, we must always strive to do so in a way that respects that person.  Would they rightly object to being used as an example?  Are we telling the whole story?  Are we telling the story in a way that respects their autonomy?

Recently on FB I came across a blog post that gives a good example of the immoral use, in rhetoric, of a human being as a caricature -- it will serve as a blatant example of something that we should be on our guard against.  

Unfortunately, many instances of using persons as means to a rhetorical end are more subtle -- and extremely tempting, especially when we think our side is right.

 

So that's a start on a good rhetoric:  (1) seek to argue true things, (2) seek to understand arguments both true and false,  (3) serve good ends rather than bad ones, and (4) treat persons as persons.

 

An effective rhetoric that is also good?  Will have to wait for another post.  (I hope it isn't long before I think up something worthwhile to say.)

Some beautiful writing on language.

From Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic.

The back story on this is that for some months, TNC -- whose story is worth reading, by the way -- I highly recommend his memoir The Beautiful Struggle -- has been learning French for the first time.  Not without some struggle that he's chronicled on the blog, in many good posts about language and how, in learning a new language, you craft a new sort of identity for yourself.  

I wish there was a single link to the entire series of posts dealing with language, but I can't find one, so this Google search will have to do:  site:theatlantic.com ta-nehisi coates french 

The last few posts have been the interior commentary while traveling for the first time to Paris.  I'm loving them, because they are more than a travelogue, they are an extended commentary on the existential  questions raised by the experience of speaking a new language and being a new kind of "other." n Here they are:

I.  Jeudi

 

At 8:45 I will board a ship. It will punch through the sky. At some point, God willing, that ship will emerge over airspace far from the beloved West Baltimore of my youth.

Something is happening in this world. I think of my grandfather, lecturing from the daily newspaper, drowning in alcohol, addicted to violence. I think of my father, working all summer as a child, saving his funds for a collection of recordings that promised to teach him French. He didn't learn French, but he learned to compel his son to want to learn French. I think of my grandmother pushing up from the Eastern Shore of Maryland raising three daughters in the projects, somehow sending them all to college.

I think of what these folks might have been had they not lived in world intolerant of black ambition. The world has changed....

Je ne sais pas. What I know is I live in a time that people who made me possible only dreamed of.   And then yesterday I almost lost it all....

 

 

II.  Vendredi

I have come to regard anyone who speaks more than one language as the bearer of great and unearned power. You say bilingualism and I imagine ice sleds, healing factors and flight. In New York, I am surrounded by the secret schoolmen of Salem. They speak and and my fingers dabble at the inhibitor collars. 

I am deep in my dark and twisted lab. I am building a machine of fantastic power and awesome savoir-faire. Soon I shall flip a switch, and all those who laughed at my "Parlay-vouz" and "Jay Nay Say Pahs" shall turn, light leaping from them into the cone of my terrible device. Then they will stagger before brilliant me, blinking and depowered. For now I just murmur "Mutie scum" under my breath and bide my time. 

I am in Geneva, like the only human on Asteroid M. They told me that the people would switch to English as soon as they heard my French. But this only happens when we are discussing money.

 

III. Samedi

 I walked to a pâtisserie, ordered a pain au chocolat and a coffee (it's becoming a ritual) and thought mostly of my wife. I was watching the people come and go. I was watching the children here, lost in their strange freedom unlike anything I've ever known. They range the city--embracing, grazing, laughing. 

When I was a kid in West Baltimore the cops called this loitering. Childhood was a suspect class always bordering on the edge of the criminal. You play football on the traffic island and the cops chase you off. Never mind that it's the only long patch of green in your neighborhood. You fly your kites from the second level of Mondawmin Mall and the les gendarmes are in effect. Go back to watching the Wonder Years and dreaming.  You nail a crate to a telephone pole, because all the courts near you have been stripped. The city doesn't send people to repair the courts, but to tear down your crate. 

Perhaps somewhere in Paris it is the same. But what I have seen is a place with a different sense of the Public, with children loosed in such a way that I have not seen even in wealthy areas....

 

IV.   Dimanche

A month ago I was giving a talk at a college where someone asked my why it was wrong for white people to use the word "nigger" in a friendly way. I responded, as I always do, by pointing out that the names people use depend on their relations. That I should not expect to call another man's wife "honey" by pointing out that he calls her the same thing. That my wife and her friends use the word "bitch" between them, but that is not a name I should expect (or want) to employ. That whatever they say, I have no desire to address my gay friends as queer. If you respect the humanity of black people, then you respect that they get to do what other humans do--ironically employ epithets in a communal way.

But walking through le jardin, I saw the problem from another angle....

I'm looking forward to more of this.