“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.” C.S. Lewis
The above quote is from one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis. Even though he wrote those words over 50 years ago in England they still ring true for 21st Century America, perhaps now more than ever.
Let me offer an example, one taken from popular culture, on the TV show "Survivor". I seldom watch this show, but once in a while I’ll catch part of it. One thing that strikes me about it is that a person can make a promise to someone, shake hands on it, swear to God, or swear on their mother’s grave, or swear on anything you care to name, then go back on their word. Their excuse is always “I’m playing the game”, and the other surviving participants nod approvingly. How in the name of God did we ever reach a point where someone would give their word, on national TV, then immediately and intentionally break that word, also on national TV, and not become a social outcast? There was a time when someone who did such a thing would have been voted off the island at the very next tribal council and would have been a pariah when they returned home. As the young ape in the original Planet of the Apes movie asked, “What ever happened to honor?”
We’ve raised a generation of men who’ve been told that it’s entirely up to the woman whether she wants to bear a child, but if she does he’s totally financially responsible for that child for the next eighteen years. We wonder why there are so many men who consider their parental responsibilities to begin and end with mailing a child-support check. We’ve raised a generation of people who denigrate strength and heroism as “macho BS” then wonder why, when an emergency happens, there’s no one to hide behind. We’ve raised a generation of people who consider honor to be quaint, old fashioned, and out of vogue and wonder why we now have a generation of people who will lie, cheat and steal in order to get what they want. We’ve raised a generation of people who are told that their own self-esteem is the most important thing in the world and wonder why people are so selfish. We make light of marital vows and wonder why so many marriages end in divorce.
Perhaps I’m the dinosaur I’ve been accused of being. I believe that there’s a way to act toward others and most definitely a way not to act. To my immense shame I don’t always live up to that standard, but when I don’t the problem is with me, not with the standard. “If at first you don’t succeed, lower your standards” is the slogan of a person who will never accomplish anything, and it’s the slogan of a nation that’s in a downward spiral.
I try not to write these entries that identify a problem without offering a solution. In this case I'll start my solution with a reference to two more popular culture icons, two people who rank high on my list of annoying people but who, in this case, are dead right in what they say. These two people are Oprah and Dr Phil, they say these two things repeatedly, I don't know who said either first and I also don't really care. They say that (1) you teach people how to treat you and (2) when someone shows you what kind of person they are, believe them. If someone makes a promise to you and breaks it and their excuse amounts to "I wanted to" don't give them the chance to do it again. If a company does business with you dishonestly and says "That's just the way the business is" don't do any further business with them and insist that everyone you know avoid them. When your elected officials promise you something and do the exact opposite once their elected don't vote for them next time. People lie to us and cheat us because we've taught them that they can with impunity. It's about time to stop that. As always the solution begins with the individual. If I can quote one more cultural icon, John Wayne in "The Shootist" said "I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I expect the same from them." One could do worse than to live one's life by this standard.
Monday, January 30, 2006
Friday, January 20, 2006
Truce
Yesterday's media event was a new tape made by Osama Bin Laden and aired by Al-Jazeera (All Terrorism, All The Time). The voice on the tape apparently is that of Bin Laden, and in it he referred to the July 7 bombings in London. This surprised me since I thought he'd been turned into a pinkish mist a year or more ago and the only reason it hadn't been reported was that the Daisy Cutter bomb didn't leave enough to identify.
The big news here is twofold, one, he's promising more attacks and two, he's offering a truce. The first should come as no surprise, we know Al Qaeda wants to attack us, inflict more damage on us and kill more of our people. Honestly, there's nothing to see there.
The offer of a truce is interesting though. Since 9/11 he's been threatening to destroy the US, he's been saying that American troops would be running in disarray, driven by terrorists with the full support of God. He promised blood running in the streets and his followers climbing over the piled bodies of our soldiers to get at the survivors. Now he's offering a "truce", and I have have to wonder why.
Your average American is a fundamentally decent person. He or she doesn't want to spill other people's blood but they also know that sometimes people force you to choose between either hurting them or being hurt yourself. We also tend to be naive, we tend to think other people are also basically decent people, so our first impression may be to look at Bin Laden's offer of a truce as a means of preventing bloodshed on both sides. We may think he's decided he made his point, now let's all take our weapons, go home, and live in peace.
Such a policy would, I believe, be a disaster. Bin Laden is the same man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. In case you forgot, a group of young men armed with box cutters took over four jets and crashed them in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania killing a total of three thousand people who did nothing more than go to work that day or try to fly from one place to another. If these attacks don't show a complete and utter disregard for human life, ours or theirs, I don't know what does. If the terrorists really were winning (as he claims), he wouldn't be offering a truce, he'd be planning our total destruction.
I can think of only one reason for his offer, and that's that he knows that if we keep going as we are his terrorist organization will lose, utterly and completely. In the last four years we've killed or captured thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists, including many high up in their command structure. If we accept their truce we give them the time and opportunity to rebuild.
Another thing about Americans, we tend to take a short view. We decide to do something and we try to get it done next week. The longest-term goal I can recall was JFKs promise to land on the moon within a decade, for us ten years is long-range planning. The terrorists don't think that way, they have no problem waiting ten or twenty years for us to get complacent and for them to rebuild before they attack again. They WILL attack again, truce or no truce. Only one thing will prevent that, and that's eliminating terrorists. We've been doing a darn good job of that for the last four years.
So over the next days and weeks, when you hear people talking about a truce with the terrorists, you'll hear about how it'll prevent bloodshed. Ask how we'll verify that Al Qaeda is keeping that truce. After all, in a truce between two sides of a war each side makes sure the other knows they're keeping the truce and aren't just using it as a cover for preparing for a new attack. Do they plan to just take Osama's word for it? Do they trust him that much?
Yes, we're decent, and we can be naive. We don't have to be foolish, and I believe any talk of truce, any talk of any end to the War on Terror that doesn't end in total defeat of the terrorists is a mistake. Just as in World War II when the US would accept nothing but unconditional surrender from Japan, we can't afford to let this end until our mission is accomplished. That will happen when we say it will and not before.
The big news here is twofold, one, he's promising more attacks and two, he's offering a truce. The first should come as no surprise, we know Al Qaeda wants to attack us, inflict more damage on us and kill more of our people. Honestly, there's nothing to see there.
The offer of a truce is interesting though. Since 9/11 he's been threatening to destroy the US, he's been saying that American troops would be running in disarray, driven by terrorists with the full support of God. He promised blood running in the streets and his followers climbing over the piled bodies of our soldiers to get at the survivors. Now he's offering a "truce", and I have have to wonder why.
Your average American is a fundamentally decent person. He or she doesn't want to spill other people's blood but they also know that sometimes people force you to choose between either hurting them or being hurt yourself. We also tend to be naive, we tend to think other people are also basically decent people, so our first impression may be to look at Bin Laden's offer of a truce as a means of preventing bloodshed on both sides. We may think he's decided he made his point, now let's all take our weapons, go home, and live in peace.
Such a policy would, I believe, be a disaster. Bin Laden is the same man who ordered the 9/11 attacks. In case you forgot, a group of young men armed with box cutters took over four jets and crashed them in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania killing a total of three thousand people who did nothing more than go to work that day or try to fly from one place to another. If these attacks don't show a complete and utter disregard for human life, ours or theirs, I don't know what does. If the terrorists really were winning (as he claims), he wouldn't be offering a truce, he'd be planning our total destruction.
I can think of only one reason for his offer, and that's that he knows that if we keep going as we are his terrorist organization will lose, utterly and completely. In the last four years we've killed or captured thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists, including many high up in their command structure. If we accept their truce we give them the time and opportunity to rebuild.
Another thing about Americans, we tend to take a short view. We decide to do something and we try to get it done next week. The longest-term goal I can recall was JFKs promise to land on the moon within a decade, for us ten years is long-range planning. The terrorists don't think that way, they have no problem waiting ten or twenty years for us to get complacent and for them to rebuild before they attack again. They WILL attack again, truce or no truce. Only one thing will prevent that, and that's eliminating terrorists. We've been doing a darn good job of that for the last four years.
So over the next days and weeks, when you hear people talking about a truce with the terrorists, you'll hear about how it'll prevent bloodshed. Ask how we'll verify that Al Qaeda is keeping that truce. After all, in a truce between two sides of a war each side makes sure the other knows they're keeping the truce and aren't just using it as a cover for preparing for a new attack. Do they plan to just take Osama's word for it? Do they trust him that much?
Yes, we're decent, and we can be naive. We don't have to be foolish, and I believe any talk of truce, any talk of any end to the War on Terror that doesn't end in total defeat of the terrorists is a mistake. Just as in World War II when the US would accept nothing but unconditional surrender from Japan, we can't afford to let this end until our mission is accomplished. That will happen when we say it will and not before.
Friday, January 06, 2006
Philosophy
When I was in college I took three Philosophy courses, all taught by the same instructor. She was a dedicated Atheist, Communist, and Existentialist. I thought her insights into the Human Condition were just amazing. I thought the books she had us read were incredibly thought provoking (although I never completely accepted the Communist Manifesto as being the best way to handle economics). Now, twenty years later, I can see all this for what it was, namely baloney.
This is what happens in a college environment. You have a group of young people, with essentially no real-world experience. You add a group of older people with titles, letters after their names, and most importantly tenure. This second group generally has little more real-world experience than the first, but they've had the time to read a lot more. Group two then proceeds to fill group one's heads with all sorts of wonderful-sounding stuff, and group one lacks the discernment derived from experience to recognize the fallacy of what they're learning. The students lack the experience to question the underlying premises they're being fed, once those premises are accepted they'll fall for the rest of the philosophy. Anyone who's studied logic can tell you that if you start off with an incorrect premise you can prove anything at all.
This system is self-perpetuating. I was a Computer Science major, my goal was a job out in the real world. Had I been a Philosophy major (and I seriously considered a double major) my goal would probably have been a college teaching position. I would have simply moved up the Ivory Tower, from student to teacher, and helped to fill the next generation of young, inexperienced brains with nonsense. A percentage of them would also have become Philosophy teachers, and so on and so on and so on.
Don't get me wrong, we need Philosophy teachers. We don't want to raise generations of worker drones who know how to do their jobs and nothing else. I do, however, think Philosophy departments in general would be better off if the teachers had to apply their philosophies in the real-world day after day.
I had basically three classifications of teachers in my major and closely related subjects like Engineering. First, and decidedly in the minority, were those who had been teachers since they got out of school themselves. Second were people who studied their fields in school, then worked in the field for some time before semi-retiring to a full-time teaching position. Third were people who were currently employed full-time in their fields and were teaching part-time. Those last two categories were about equal in number. What this meant was that the majority of my teachers in my major had real-world experience. They knew what it meant to work late to find and correct a program problem. They knew what it was to have the phone ring at 2:00 AM because your program just bombed. They knew that all the wonderful theories in the world meant nothing until the program was thoroughly tested and debugged. They knew that if it hadn't been tested by definition it didn't work.
Communism, for instance, is a wonderful philosophy on paper. Everyone treated equally, everyone working for the common good. As Bill Whittle said though, it requires you to believe that the entire commune will turn out at midnight to search for the cow that no one owns when she gets lost in a snow storm. If you've never had to search for a cow in a snowstorm you might well believe such a thing, once you have you'll know better.
My Philosophy teacher often criticized my essays and papers for being too logical. I took as critical a look at the philosophy in question as my limited experience allowed. Looking back, it wasn't sufficiently critical, but you can't expect old heads on young shoulders. The majority of my course work was in a field where a misplaced comma could mean a long night of debugging, where hooking the circuit up to the 12 volt instead of the 5 volt power source could ruin your day, and where Murphy's law was always strictly enforced. Where the question was not whether something would break, but when and where it would break and how much damage it would do when it fell.
So I look around the laboratory that is our world. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, well I see a great many people holding on to failed beliefs and expecting them to work this time. Communism, Moral Relativism, Collectivism, Multiculturalism. They've all been tried and have failed, in some cases multiple times. If you make a wrong turn it's not "progress" to keep going in the wrong direction, you only make progress by going back to the last place where you were right.
Anything else is insanity.
This is what happens in a college environment. You have a group of young people, with essentially no real-world experience. You add a group of older people with titles, letters after their names, and most importantly tenure. This second group generally has little more real-world experience than the first, but they've had the time to read a lot more. Group two then proceeds to fill group one's heads with all sorts of wonderful-sounding stuff, and group one lacks the discernment derived from experience to recognize the fallacy of what they're learning. The students lack the experience to question the underlying premises they're being fed, once those premises are accepted they'll fall for the rest of the philosophy. Anyone who's studied logic can tell you that if you start off with an incorrect premise you can prove anything at all.
This system is self-perpetuating. I was a Computer Science major, my goal was a job out in the real world. Had I been a Philosophy major (and I seriously considered a double major) my goal would probably have been a college teaching position. I would have simply moved up the Ivory Tower, from student to teacher, and helped to fill the next generation of young, inexperienced brains with nonsense. A percentage of them would also have become Philosophy teachers, and so on and so on and so on.
Don't get me wrong, we need Philosophy teachers. We don't want to raise generations of worker drones who know how to do their jobs and nothing else. I do, however, think Philosophy departments in general would be better off if the teachers had to apply their philosophies in the real-world day after day.
I had basically three classifications of teachers in my major and closely related subjects like Engineering. First, and decidedly in the minority, were those who had been teachers since they got out of school themselves. Second were people who studied their fields in school, then worked in the field for some time before semi-retiring to a full-time teaching position. Third were people who were currently employed full-time in their fields and were teaching part-time. Those last two categories were about equal in number. What this meant was that the majority of my teachers in my major had real-world experience. They knew what it meant to work late to find and correct a program problem. They knew what it was to have the phone ring at 2:00 AM because your program just bombed. They knew that all the wonderful theories in the world meant nothing until the program was thoroughly tested and debugged. They knew that if it hadn't been tested by definition it didn't work.
Communism, for instance, is a wonderful philosophy on paper. Everyone treated equally, everyone working for the common good. As Bill Whittle said though, it requires you to believe that the entire commune will turn out at midnight to search for the cow that no one owns when she gets lost in a snow storm. If you've never had to search for a cow in a snowstorm you might well believe such a thing, once you have you'll know better.
My Philosophy teacher often criticized my essays and papers for being too logical. I took as critical a look at the philosophy in question as my limited experience allowed. Looking back, it wasn't sufficiently critical, but you can't expect old heads on young shoulders. The majority of my course work was in a field where a misplaced comma could mean a long night of debugging, where hooking the circuit up to the 12 volt instead of the 5 volt power source could ruin your day, and where Murphy's law was always strictly enforced. Where the question was not whether something would break, but when and where it would break and how much damage it would do when it fell.
So I look around the laboratory that is our world. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing and expecting different results, well I see a great many people holding on to failed beliefs and expecting them to work this time. Communism, Moral Relativism, Collectivism, Multiculturalism. They've all been tried and have failed, in some cases multiple times. If you make a wrong turn it's not "progress" to keep going in the wrong direction, you only make progress by going back to the last place where you were right.
Anything else is insanity.
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