Virtue Ethics

Aristotle's ethical theories involved, roughly, concepts of "virtue" and "fulfilling an intended function," or telos. Arete, or virtue, is simply the fulfillment of telos. Goodness, roughly the equivalent of arete, means that one must perform one's function. Aristotle defined man as a "rational animal," but I rather think that humans are social animals. The fulfillment of our telos is not in being solitary rational beings, but rather doing what is right (rational) by our fellow rational beings. In Kantian terms, we'd say that this means acting as a legislating member of the kingdom of ends. That's what bugs me so much about posts like the linked one, or Ayn Rand's awful notes on the "virtue" of selfishness.

Capitalist societies invariably produce this type of "me, me, me!" thinking, and people automatically project this failure to recognize their telos on to others. One might even say it is the same vein of wrongness as the doctrine of original sin, or the assumption of the same moral failings in others that are present in you. What a depressing and disheartening worldview, to assume that everyone you meet is morally depraved! It would take a beast of a man (hi, Al Plantinga!) to argue that all humans are morally depraved creatures.

Why go through such lengths to paint your fellow human beings in a bad light? Oh yes, because we're raised to think that life is a competitive, zero-sum game, and if someone else is making a gain, that means we must be losing something.

I often wonder about the inner, reflective lives of people that live under such worldviews. Do they experience joy? How could you? If, when you hear a Beethoven's symphony, your reaction is simply, "I wish I were as famous as Beethoven?" I see it all the time in friends, family and coworkers... they possess a defect, an inability to find true happiness in the happiness of others. Their words of, "Oh, I'm so happy for you!" are mere platitudes on an altar of social nicety. I long for a world where we might genuinely treat our neighbors as our filial relations, and not as our enemies.

Ostracism, or Why I Am Forever A Nerd

I don't know why I choose to live in places where I am alienated and ostracized.

I also don't know why this doesn't make me a better writer. I should be freakin' Kafka by now.

Let's go back to law school. I chose, against my better judgment, to attend a good school in the middle of a place that would never accept me. Alone among the people I knew at school, I didn't believe in God. I am not a Christian. I am not politically conservative or moderate; quite the opposite. I'm very leftist.

None of my professors were atheists or agnostics; most of them were practicing and active Christians. None of them were thinkers within the critical legal studies movement. In fact, my jurisprudence professor said the title "critical legal studies" was just a label made up by professors that couldn't get tenure so they'd have something to blame it on.

Discussing something like sociology or philosophy with my classmates, friends and coworkers would be impossible, not because they were incapable, but because the language I have learned to speak by studying things like political and social theory, metaphysics and epistemology is not a language shared between us. I relished my final year when I was given philosophical projects to work on because I got to engage with subject matter on a level I found intellectually fulfilling.

The more and more I consider it, I probably should have gone to get my PhD.

Except that would've seemed like a good idea in 2005, but a pretty damn poor one in 2009 in the middle of a recession. I make better money as a lawyer, unfortunately, than I ever would as a professor of philosophy. And as much as I hate to be so damn materialistic, I have to live and support a family.

I hate that I have to compromise, to choose between doing something I find challenging and intellectually fulfilling and doing something that I find professionally fulfilling and practical.

The only place I've ever felt at home is in Austin, surrounded by people that never felt the need to shut me out. I understand that people are often well-meaning and jovial, but the attitude I get constantly is, "your view is in the minority, so it's fine for you to talk about it, but not so much it makes us uncomfortable. We, on the other hand, can exist in an echo chamber of our own views and values quite constantly and never have to feel sorry for it because we outnumber you."

I don't think people consciously realize they do this; most people aren't malicious jerks. They just act that way. Everyone wants to surround themselves with at least some like-minded people, myself included.

I just can't find that place; or rather, I couldn't find gainful employment in that place and remain there. It's probably why I escape into an online world so often, where different things matter. Among certain social groups online, I can use a word like "privilege" or "subversion" and have it not only make sense, but engage in a fruitful discussion that challenges my ideas on a deeper level than, "hurr, you talk like a fag and your shit's all retarded."

Among others, the real world fades away and all we're left with is the desire to accomplish a common goal unrelated to any real-world pressure. Pure leisure; fantasy escapism of the highest degree.

I find myself more and more returning to old patterns of reading, writing and isolation, of turning myself away from everything I once found joyous and turning inward. The downside to this is that I am more critical of myself during such periods, and it's easy to let the ostracism get me down, make me upset, and react in ways I normally wouldn't.

I apologize if this seems odd, or childish, or self-indulgent. It's not; it's just a reflection of where I am at mentally. I get tired of it; I get tired of being the only one of my kind in certain spaces. I have a need for community the same as others, and as I grow more and more distant from those communities I am established in, by time or distance or thought, the worse off the isolation and ostracism get.

It's not that I want agreement, or accolade. In fact, I get sort of uncomfortable when that happens. I don't want people to recognize some sort of value in what I contribute, just... that someone else out there hears and understands.

This is the face of the enemy

I don't like teabaggers. I think libertarians are sociopaths. I think modern rightism/conservatism is a political ideology structured around racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and exploitation, dressed up in a veneer of "liberty" (which, of course, means the economic freedom of the privileged) and "individualism," which means being anti-social. It uses nationalism, xenophobia, and race-baiting as its tactics. Its humor is mean-spirited and vicious. Its socialization requires rigidly-defined social roles for different ethnicities, genders, etc. It resists or denigrates anything that challenges those roles.

Many would call me reactionary. They'd say that I'm misrepresenting the views of my opponents, painting them as a caricature.

This is not true; these picture were all taken at various teabagger, True American Patriot® rallies. You put one black man in the White House and the veneer of respectability drops away from the American right. "You lie!" becomes, "You lie, boy!" "It's our patriotic duty to resist!" becomes "I've read the Turner Diaries and I'm stockpiling."

But don't believe me. Here's the story in pictures.

Change is Coming

A review of the most recent postings at Think Progress reveals a cross-section of what exactly is wrong with modern American political discousre.

Aligned on one side are the somewhat nebbishy, aloof and in general intellectually capable liberals. They have a clear understanding of the issues and what's at stake, even if they tend to lack organization, passion and any true sense of what it would mean to accomplish a meaningful or radical political goal. They're always satisfied with half measures, because something that sounds like "health care reform" is a lot better than the status quo, even if they do shy away from such "socialist" ideals as providing basic health care for all citizens.

On the other side, we have an alliance of the strong-in-faith, the passionate, the vocal and organized mindless idiocy of the mob. The superrich and interested have been able to lead the working class, the underclass, and the rest of the masses piper-like to their own doom by playing on nationalism, xenophobia, and the ignorance instilled in a generation by anti-Soviet/anti-community propaganda to create a sense of national outrage. "America's enemies" from the past 100 years have flowed together into some sick amalgamation of evil, with little distinction being made between authoritarians, fascists and communists, despite the obvious and facial differences between these political ideologies.

All we need to know, the fomenters tell us, is that these ideas are corrupted by the insidious touch of foreign-ness, and that they belong to those hated Other groups like professors, intellectuals, or people from cosmopolitan cities on each coast.

Make no mistake: Jimmy Carter is correct. Racism, or more appropriately, privilege, is the root from which this twisted vine springs. For the first time in many decades, the momentum within society is present for a real, actual progressive step forward. The youth of America seem very socially-minded; even young evangelical Christians care more about "stewardship of the environment" and "ministering to the poor" than they do about their grandfather's hot-button issues of homosexuality, abortion, and prayer in school.

What we're seeing is, I hope, a final galvanization of the far right elements of society. They feel their age, their decrepitude. As the Reaper comes to their ranks more often, they realize their strangehold over rightist discourse in this country is evaporating. And those media players that make their livings off of pandering to the status quo seats (O'Reilly, Hannity, Beck, etc.) are feeling the pinch. I think that's the reason for the increase in volume and idiocy of their comments. They realize that the only ones left listening to them are the diehards, those with too much emotional investment or interest in their positions to be swayed by clear thinking. They don't need to make valid distinctions between fascism and socialism, because to their audience, these things are one and the same.

This afternoon, when I went to go pick up lunch, I noticed a bumper sticker affixed to the counter of the restaurant. It said, "When Obama lied, the economy died." It is obviously a parody of the "Bush lied, people died" version of the sticker. The difference in the sentiments is what is striking, moreso than their similiarity in tone and temper. For the leftist sticker, it's a reference to Bush and his administration stating a false case for a war in Iraq, a case the majority of us knew was false from the start. Every soldier that has died in Iraq, every civilian casualty, every innocent life lost was entirely preventable.

The rightist sticker bears no such demonstrable relation to reality. First, there is no clear reference to which lie, if any of Obama's it refers to. Second, the economy itself has been in a large-scale slump since immediately after the post-war period (around 1950). The economy of recent times peaked at the end of Clinton's tenure, maybe the first part of Bush's. The slow gradual slide into recession began around 2006 or 2007 by most estimates, but took a large plunge in 2008 when the housing, credit and investment bubbles burst. None of these were surprising; economists, no matter which school of thought they follow, all saw the writing on the wall. Only politicians and rubes had the luxury to act appalled and shocked. The trend is to paint with large strokes: conservatives don't care about human lives; liberals don't care about money.

The obvious implication of that statement is that conservatives do care about money, so much that their political slogans bemoan the death of the economy over the death of human beings, as if the two were commensurate.

Make no mistake: when true progressive measures like health care reform or environmental protections or something like the ERA gets blocked in Congress, it is interest that does it... money. We hear all the time about "special interest groups" from the likes of Glenn Beck and other pseudopopulist agitators, but we don't see the large hand of interest moving them. Lobbyist groups exist on all sides of the political spectrum, and they broker vast sums of money into power, because in a society like ours, an inbred cousin to the feudal system of medieval Europe, money has and always will translate into power. Money, reified and abstracted away from a simple analogy for trade purposes, has taken on status as the basic commodity of society. The rest of society is slowly shaping itself around a cult that worships small paper idols as gods.

But, as I said, this can't last forever. As the old guad dies off, and the young people take their places, the result is simple: old values die, new ones are born. The old guard may be galvanizing itself for a last stand, but it's hardness makes it brittle. It will crack, surely. The hypocrisy of its rhetoric, the flaws in its thinking, the privilege, the racism, the xenophobia, the nationalism, the stupidity... it can't last long. Progress is slow, but it is inexorable once it has begun. Whether it is slow and painless, or violent and painful, change is coming.

Attention: President Obama, Congressional Delegates, and the American Public

The only option to "fix" the American healthcare system is to make it universally-available to anyone that requires it, subsidized by the government, paid for by our taxes, and managed by boards elected from local communities with oversight by the federal government.

This is not a matter of policy. We are the only industrialized nation that does not have some form of universal health care. It is now a matter of ethics and simple humanity.

Anyone that resists this change must do so out of interest or false consciousness. There is no ethically-acceptable reason to wish to avoid such a system. Why should we allow those with an interest in profiting off our ill health to dictate our health decisions in a nominally free and democratic society? Why should we let the inheritors of the aristocracy continue their feudal notions of rule by divine right?

It's time to act.

Well!

It's nice to know that honestly stating your ties to Marxist groups disqualifies you for public service. I suppose the First Amendment matters only when you want to pray in school or hold a Klan rally.

Oh my

Free Republic loses its collective 'mind,' and yet is still proud of this fact.

Seriously... why does polite society tolerate this kind of stuff in the name of "free speech?" What ideas is this bringing to the marketplace? If you're going to criticize the president, do it for a valid reason! I know we made fun of Bush, called him Chimpy McFratboy, the First Buffoon, and so on... but really, racial stereotypes and outright falsity? I mean, Marxism? You chumps wouldn't know what to do if a real Marxist sat down with you and explained all the ways in which Obama's "capitalism-lite" isn't socialism. It may be as good as we have any right to hope for in the United States™, but it's still not socialism.