rhetoric over dialectic

I've been trying to think of a way of articulating a unity of the various currents which make societal discourse these days , such as it is, at the worst dangerous, at best irrelevant. It's not enough to identify the ills of the world, for the ingredients at work now have been among us all along, all through our past - the spinners of truth, the grabbers, the haters and the hatemongers, the fearful and those who manipulate their fears. And it has always been the case that we follow, inevitably, a course through history which again and again refuses to conform to our predictions of it, refuses to be the world which gets a little better, a little easier to be in, because we think we've made it better. we might have been right about that for awhile, it might have been better overnight, but tomorrow the problem changes into something else, something we haven't addressed or something that at first appears unamenable to improvement. But that is how history moves, it is how our lives move, and how reality unfolds moment to moment - one thing prompts reactions which cause a change to a third thing, and so on forever. And it's also how much of rational thought throughout history, including philosophy and science, proceeds -the smart guys call this the dialectic. The heirs of the Enlightenment called it progress. It was the means by which we moved from one problem, solved or not, to another; or one thought, logically met or not, to another, third thought. Underlying the dialectical method of thinking, however, required the rational good faith of the participants, a shared commitment to honesty in discourse, and of necessity a mutual absolute commitment to accepting the movement of the terms of discourse as logically compelled. Some of us liked to couch the terms of analysis as ideology - as reflective of a larger systemic conception; others liked to keep it on the empirical, the practical. But all, all who mattered, honored the terms - truth prevails, because truth needs no help, and if it's true it will be seen, known, as true. Both sides of the public debate argued different sides of agreed problems. That is no longer true. Now, what we read and hear in the public sphere is all just rhetoric, communicated in staccato fashion and designed to make a short-term impression, without regard to the larger framings of problems. There are many reasons - rapid communications, a distracted, lazy, largely contented public, and the appearance of opportunistic entertainers masquarading as political sages. But the most troubling reasons are 1) the failure of the commitment to honesty when voicing views for public consumption, and 2) the shift away from solving problems and towards simply being heard so the other guy won't be, for short-term gain. If one's purpose is nothing more than to "win the day", and the intended audience can be counted on to know not much more than what one says, then one can say anything and have a good chance that it will be accepted by somebody, maybe lots of somebodies. If one does this long and loud enough, one's intended audience truly becomes captive because it knows only that which you say, and before you know it, you have a political movement : witness the tea parties, townhall meetings, the bad dream that is Sarah Palin. Rhetoric has replaced dialectic as the means by which public discourse, and therefore history, moves.

Teaching logic in schools

If ever you could say that I am on a crusade about anything, it is that I think we should begin teaching logic and reasoning skills in our primary and secondary schools. The current political climate should be all the proof that we need to show that this country's reasoning skills are truly deficient. Frankie's point in response to an earlier post that anything can be reasoned is well taken. However, there is a significant difference between reasoning and reasoning well. We could do no better by our children than to teach them how to reason well.
The age of seven is considered to be the age of reason for the average child. Why do we wait until they are in college to even offer classes in these subjects? Why do we hide one of the greatest gifts of humanity from our children until their bad habits are already formed? Look at what it has done to our political atmosphere!
One thing in particular that really stands out in my mind is to show children the rigors of modern scientific inquiry. Reveal to them the extensive problems with measurement. Show them how many times measurements must be repeated in order to provide reliable data. Show the correlation between measurement, the number of trials and the margin for error. Show them how many factors must be considered before we can obtain reliable data. Teach them about controls and the necessary replication of experimental environments.
We have to teach our children how to analyze statistics. Teach them how to interpret statistics. Show them how misleading statistics can be. Try to teach them how to draw valid conclusions from the given statements. Consider the boon to society if everyone knew how to draw sound conclusions from a set of statements. No more effective snake oil salesmen, no more cult leaders!
We can offer mathematical logic lessons to those who are so inclined and verbal reasoning lessons to those who are inclined in that respect. But we should train all of our children in both. In short, we should teach them that verifiable truth is not easily obtained.
How do we go about this? First things first. Never lie to your children. Answer all of their questions honestly. Admit it when you don't know something because you certainly don't know everything. Do not teach your opinions and beliefs as though they were facts. START TEACHING BY EXAMPLE!

Stuck at home, sick. I had a huge headache yesterday and last night when I went to bed, I felt it creeping into my throat. Probably strep, maybe swine flu. I'll find out tomorrow morning. But there's something else that bothers me more than this illness.
I've been having an ongoing e-battle with a longtime friend of mine who has adopted the conservative manner of not allowing for differences of opinion. It was probably inevitable that our disputes would eventually drift into the abortion debate. According to him, abortion equals murder, and there are no exceptions. My best arguments may have opened a small crack in his defenses, but when I confronted him with the idea that even he may have fathered an unwanted child in his younger days, and that it was possible that one of his partners could have had an abortion without telling him, he ended the 'conversation'.
Like most young men, he, too, was driven by lust for sex. I'm pretty sure that he got his fair share, at the least. After hearing him criticize 'all those people overseas' for engaging in unprotected sex, I turned the point on him and his youthful adventures. I didn't call him a hypocrite, I was willing to let him explain himself out of his logical predicament. He declared himself possessed of a clear heart because he was ignorant of anyone else's wrongdoing. I responded that he may not have helped end one of these so called lives, but he could very well have started one. The phrase 'so-called lives' prompted the end of our discussion.
I should have known. He was always full of passionate intensity and loved to argue. But we had a lot of fun in high school and since then, too. Ironically, he was the person who got me started into hunting, and hunting is the one activity that I have utilized successfully to help me come to terms with the concepts of death and dying (in my own life at least).
About a year after I started hunting, I lost one of my brothers in a tragic work accident. I was devastated. But it was hunting that taught me that death isn't necessarily tragic in and of itself. At first, I was void of all feeling. I noticed it when I shot and wounded a squirrel and went over to end its suffering. Up til then, watching an animal in the throes of death was difficult for me. Finishing them off filled me with many uncomfortable doubts. On this day, soon after my brother's death, I felt nothing at all. I was in an emotional coma.
But eventually, I began to see death as a necessary thing for the furtherance of life, as an integral part of life itself. One could easily say that death feeds the beginning of life just as easily as saying that life feeds the beginning of death. They are the two sides of the same coin. When done correctly, hunting actually teaches an appreciation for all living things.
Stalking an animal in his environment is not easy. One gains respect for the prey and begins to understand the cycle of life and death as a beautiful thing. A good hunter never kills indiscriminately, and never lets a wounded animal suffer needlessly. A good hunter incorporates the wiles of his prey into his own personality. (Call me a squirrel and I won't be offended.) It is the very essence of totemic worship- you are what you eat. People throughout history, primitive and otherwise, have taken animals as symbols of the characteristics they most wish to own for themselves. (American bald eagles, Russian Kodiak bears, etc.) The origins of these anthropomorphic feelings are found in the stories of hunters.
I truly hope that my friend does not end our friendship because of our disagreement over the abortion issue. I confessed that I should like to see abortion end altogether, but I don't think it can happen without extensive education and advances in birth control. Women find themselves in a desperate situation and deserve our assistance, not our condemnation. What I'm afraid of is that the conservatives who spend all day hunting down progressive liberals will never gain any respect for their prey and will never learn anything of value from us. They are trying to kill us indiscriminately. We're not as easily taken down as they would like to think.

time for a change in war strategy

President Obama does not need my advice, certainly. He seems to be making all the right decisions, with a few exceptions (for example, calling the Cambridge cop's actions "stupid"). But I think he's headed for much the same trouble into which Bush blundered : fighting a war for political reasons. On reflection of the facts as they exist now, the U.S. does not need to fight a war in Afghanistan. It might have in 2001, when our enemy, bin Laden, was there, but not now, when he isn't. A war to make some other culture function according to our expectations is a losing enterprise, and that seems to be our war goal - to create a sustainable democratic government in a market-economic society. For the umpteenth time in history : it is their country, their society, their culture, their problems, not ours. Our goal is the same as it's always been - to protect ourselves. We do not need to fight endless wars overseas to do so, for taken to its logical extreme our current approach will necessitate war until there is no one left to be a potential terrorist. Good for the war economy, but that's all it's good for, because it's not good for protecting us.

ERIC LOUIS BLOUNT (ERNKY) 1958-2009

They buried Eric today. I wanted to speak at his funeral, but I didn't have anything ready to say. It began to come to me during the services. I knew Eric well and we had had lots of significant experiences alongside one another. After all, we did meet when he was six and I was seven and we had stayed in touch over the years.
There were three things that I especially wanted to say about Eric. First of all, he was absolutely fearless. He truly wasn't afraid of anything or anybody. That trait almost certainly led him into the trouble he had in his final years. A great number of people talk about their morality but don't actually do a whole lot about developing it. I think for Eric, most of his morality was wrapped up in that notion of courage. He pursued that virtue with a determination few people can summon. I feel safe in saying that he conquered whatever fears he may have had. For that alone, he deserves our admiration and respect. He was also a really funny guy with a great sense of humor.
One of the pastimes of many boys in south Louisiana is scooping bait with a net. You get a long handle scoop net, go to the closest drainage canal and use the net to catch your bait for fishing, usually minnows and crawfish. Eric and I would spend entire days scooping minnows and crawfish, and as our scooping skills increased, the variety of animals we caught also increased. Eventually, we would catch snakes, turtles, bullfrogs, eels, one small alligator, fish and other things I don't remember. The lure of broader horizons beckoned us farther and farther away from our neighborhood. Once, when we were about 10 and 11 years old, after scooping all along a ditch a few blocks from our houses, we found ourselves facing a culvert that went under the road. It was about four feet in diameter, twenty feet long, pitch black, and in our active imaginations, certainly full of large crawfish, bullfrogs, probably some big fish and many other such wonderful things. Eric didn't flinch. He took the net and methodically, thoroughly scooped the entire watercourse in that pitch black concrete pipe. Something big escaped from the net, (probably a bullfrog), but he did catch some good sized perch and some really big crawfish.
That success led him to immediately head to the other end of the canal where it went under Jefferson Hwy. This one was probably seventy-five feet long and open only on one end, which meant that he had to go in, turn around and come back, scooping all the while, which is equal to stirring up anything that might reside in there. He returned with a really big amphiuma eel, the weight of which led him to stop scooping because he obviously had a colossal haul, something big and trying to escape, something he couldn't see because of the darkness in that horrible place. That, my friend, shows some serious cajones for a ten year old boy. Trust me. They got bigger as he grew older.
Eric and Roger moved away from Louisiana for about ten years to go work as union welders in a few different big cities up north. When Eric came back, he bought a nice boat and we started fishing together again. Again, Eric and I went back to using nets to catch our bait, but now we had developed enough fishing skills to really catch a lot of fish when we got the right bait. That's when he introduced me to the wonderful world of pogies, the favorite food of speckled trout. He showed me how to recognize schools of pogies in the water and the right way to sneak up on them in the boat in order to throw a cast net on them. His confidence in using pogies for catching big trout was unshakeable. He was almost obsessed with catching them before we could go fishing. We would pass up the prime fishing time in the early morning, just to catch pogies. Enthusiasm like that for catching bait can best be described in one word: hopeful. He knew that if you put in the work to catch the pogies, you had good reason to believe that you would catch some big trout, and we did.
That was the Eric I remember: fearless, funny and hopeful. He may not have caught the great big trout of worldly success, but he had the right bait for it. His fishing days were cut too short.

Losing my Religion

You'd have been had pressed to find a more genuinely Catholic boy than myself as a young boy. How I later developed an antipathy toward religion would seem to be an impossibility if you could have seen into my heart and mind as a youngster. I have an idea about the development of the individual that revolves around formative moments- epiphanies, if you will- that steer an individual toward becoming who they are. The problem with epiphanies is that they require consciousness and the formative moments that I am talking about are not necessarily recognized by the individual as a great event at the time. However, it is something that the person will mark and remember, but not necessarily realize is as big an event in their lives at the time it occurs, as they will later recognize as something that helped make them what they are. The event I'm referring to in my life occurred when I was about eight years old.
I found out then that, according to Catholic doctrine, no one could go to heaven unless they were baptized in the church. The problem was that my best friends at the time, the Blount brothers Roger and Eric, were not Catholic, and were therefore ineligible for admission to heaven. I can clearly remember asking my mother, "What kind of heaven will it be if my friends aren't allowed to go?" My mother gave a perfectly catholic response: "They could be allowed in if they would only get baptized in the Catholic church." I accepted that answer and ran over to their house in order to convert my little Baptist friends as fast as I could, certainly to the chagrin of their parents. For their part, Roger and Eric responded with what amounted to a polite refusal. Although I didn't recognize it at the time, the sceptic in me was born right then and there. I didn't dwell on the issue, but it stuck with me. I hadn't begun questioning miracles yet, but I was kind of determined to find a way to get my friends into heaven.
In my teens, I began to recognize hypocrisy in some of the people who went to our church. Mentioning this to my father almost got me thrown out of the house. Then I began to have some serious doubts about the whole religion with a simple logical progression, grounded in the faith, that just didn't add up for me. If Jesus really was God, then he would know everything, including the future. That means that he would know that his actions would eventually lead to his crucifixion. Wouldn't this be suicide on his part? Wouldn't people be better off if they had a living god in their midst, teaching them on a daily basis, than they would be if he let himself be killed and left us just another ugly example of humanity's failings? The illusion began to crumble.
I needn't bother you with the remaining details of my personal spiritual growth. One of the cornerstones of my own current 'system', for the lack of a better word, is that no two people agree on everything, so a diversity of beliefs is a simple fact of life. Trying to force a person to believe anything is actually quite impossible, and rational discourse is the only way to find any common ground, however infrequently it may actually occur. Truth in dialogue, along with experience, are the only ways to find verifiable truth in this world. Honesty is not a policy, it is the only means to a worthy end. Suffice it to say that when I read Thomas Jefferson's quote that "I am of a sect by myself", I found a spiritual brother- one who would probably like me as a person and enjoy my company, but who would probably disapprove of some of my behaviors. Sort of like Frankie.

Finding my religion

It is appropriate now to describe how, for me, religious faith is now a part of me and hence a part of what appears here. I spent 35 years in a fairly constant argument with myself about the existence of God, and fairly consistently I had a hard time concluding God was there. The essential reason was personal : how can the sufferings and hardships of my life be justified if God created my life ? The facts of my life suggested to me that God didn't like me, much less love me as my catechism-limited Catholic upbringing would have it. No, I was content to see life through an imminently reasonable construction of logic and moral precepts sufficient in themselves. And as life progressed it seemed that everything could indeed be explained as a function of the extent to which I and others acted or failed to act in accordance with reason and conscience. I still think this is right. But what was missing, for me, was any real sense of joy in life. Rather, I could never understand the notion of "loving" oneself. I still don't. But in trying to learn how to live joyously, how to "love" myself and my life, it was pretty obvious that with just a few exceptions most of the people I knew who seemed to be content, even joyous, were those who believed in God. Maybe I was predisposed to think so because I had grown up in a largely Catholic world of parochial school and then Jesuit High School, where I learned to admire the academic rigor and disciplined thought of the priests. Indeed, maybe that's why my internal debate didn't simply end altogether when I first concluded, and then did so over and over again so many times for 35 years, that there simply was no God, no easy way to contextualize this life I was living. So, the bare threads of my theological self-dispute lingered on, parallel with the growing realization that my way of thinking - "reason plus conscience = good life" - was producing, with the passage of time and increasingly difficult challenges, the mentality that life was just something to be endured, and my task was to run out the clock. As my thinking became more desperate, so did my attempts at finding a remedy. As it occurred to me that following the road of living in "The World According To Frankie" was shaping up more and more as a dead-end; and also that despite my circumstances as a child, I'd never felt desperate or anything other than content and in control. So, more as an act of desperation than anything else, I decided to start going to church to see if any of the peace provided others there would help me. I did not go there looking for God, I went there looking for personal peace. What I found instead was the head and heart of my youth, of the person I was then, with all the potential of life before me rather than, as now, mostly behind me. And after I found that person there, only then did I start looking for God. But I didn't find him, probably because I was looking with my head, not my heart. My heart got involved on February 15, 2009, a Sunday afternoon after a Sunday morning spent at church. That afternoon, I learned that my son had been in a catastrophically violent auto accident - he'd run off the road at 80 mph, flipped in the air twice, then hit a tree sideways across the top of the hood with his body parallel to the ground and his head pointed arrow-like right into the tree, and he walked away from it, uninjured. As I studied the site and what remained of the wrecked car, it slowly dawned on me that there could be no real physical explanation for how he did not die on February 15. Something kept him alive, and if so then he was alive for a reason. The only rational, now, explanation I could come up with was that God did it, God kept him alive. And I felt this thought, I did not simply think it. I realized that for me to feel as I did, I believed in God. So, with the zeal of the convert, I immersed myself in trying to learn about God - I did not want to "cave" to my emotions, but rather I wanted to know what I felt, why I felt it, and whether I could intellectually support, with real internal integrity, such a radical repositioning on the central question of my, and everyone else's, existence. And the more I studied, the more I believed : the entire Christian faith is founded on the historical facts of Christ's life, death, and resurrection, as revealed in the New Testament. This was truly a 'revelation' to me, because as a Catholic born in the mid1950's I was completely ignorant of the Bible. As my faith has deepened, as my commitment to faith has become stronger, I have even experienced at times the joy I always thought was central to loving life. What I did not know but do now is that such joy is the joy of knowing that God is there. Here. In me. In everything and everybody, in all creation. And I think the task of life is to seek God, find him in life wherever he can be discerned. I am realizing that this is not easy, that like everything valuable in life it take much effort, and that I have been lucky to realize the importance of the search at all. But I am also realizing that if I put my head and heart to seeing him, he shows up every now and then, to let me know he's there. Maybe it is, as my friend has said, nothing more than wish fulfillment. But isn't that the nature of faith, anyway ?