A Lament for 2020

Greed, Racism and Stupidity

            Because of COVID-19, Major League Baseball shut down in mid-March, about a week before the regular season was to begin.  Now, in early June, the owners and players are bickering about financial arrangements for a shortened season.  The general public scorns both sides equally: “billionaires squabbling with millionaires.”  More attentive baseball fans realize the story is more complicated than that.  Most baseball players are minor leaguers, unrepresented by the major league players association.  The millionaires (MLBPA) don’t defend the interests of minor league players against the billionaires (the owners).  So the owners are using the excuse of pandemic to greatly reduce the draft while eliminating a quarter of all affiliated minor league teams.  There’ll still be a few big signing bonuses for a few dozen top draft picks, but overall there will be fewer players in the system, and they will be paid less.

            One might think such greed on the part of the billionaires would be self-defeating.  After all, the quality of a baseball team depends on the talents of its players, and the cheapest way to develop and control baseball talent is to stock and train minor league teams.  The owners are betting that baseball talent will develop on its own through youth leagues and college teams and that they can still control the best players by drafting only the cream of the crop.  It may work.  After all, there are still lots of families willing to pay for the advanced youth leagues, camps, and all-star games where 17-20 year-olds pursue the dream.

            Unfortunately, American families able to pay for the baseball dream are mostly while, suburban, and middle-class.  Over the last three decades, fewer and fewer African Americans have made it to the big leagues.  Major League Baseball does have lots of minority players, but most of them are international players, especially from Latin America.  These players do not come into professional baseball through the draft.  Instead, teams sponsor baseball academies in the Dominican Republic and other countries, where they collect and develop talented players at far less cost than in minor league baseball in the United States.

            Until 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers, major league baseball discriminated openly against black players.  Now the discrimination is subtler, and the owners almost certainly don’t recognize it as discrimination.  Every owner would insist vehemently that he wants the best possible players on his team, and the major leagues sponsor programs to promote baseball in African American neighborhoods in many American cities.  (I speak of the “owner” for simplicity’s sake, when in fact many teams are owned by ownership groups.)

            The owners’ protestations are true, but they miss the point.  By cutting back on minor league baseball and reducing the draft, organized baseball saves money, but it pushes the cost of developing baseball talent onto families.  On average, African American families have lower incomes (and much lower wealth) than white Americans.  Organized baseball’s cost saving measure links up with America’s economic stratification to keep blacks out of baseball.  The owners don’t intend to discriminate against African Americans, but their policy has that effect.

            A week ago, on Memorial Day weekend, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck on a Minneapolis street.  Mr. Floyd had already been handcuffed and was not resisting, but the officer kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes.  The murder was recorded on cell phones by observers, who can be heard asking the officer to stop.  Mr. Floyd said that he couldn’t breathe and asked for mercy.  The police officer continued to kneel on Floyd’s neck for more than two minutes after Mr. Floyd ceased speaking.

            Floyd was black; the officer is white.  Three other officers were present and did nothing to stop the murder.  Two of them are white; one is Asian.  The officer who killed Floyd has been charged with murder and manslaughter; the other three have not yet been charged.

            Almost all Americans are outraged and saddened by the killing of George Floyd.  But like major league baseball owners, many white Americans can’t see that their policies contribute to racist results.  Every year police in America kill unarmed African American men, lots of them.  No one knows exactly how many, because few killings are recorded on cell phones, and sometimes police officers lie.  They say the victim was armed when he wasn’t.

            Protests against police racism have erupted in scores of American cities, day after day, since the murder of George Floyd.  Hundreds of thousands of people have cried out for justice and for change.  People want real change.  They want police to treat black Americans the same way they treat white Americans.

            Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters give effective cover to thousands of rioters and looters.  In city after city, peaceful protests have been hijacked by criminals; they bomb police cars, smash businesses, steal merchandise, and commit assaults and murders.  George Floyd’s family has called for the violence to stop, for the three unindicted officers to be arrested, and for people to go home. 

President Trump has derided governors who are “weak” for not “dominating” the protesters.

            The protests coincide with COVID-19.  Thousands of demonstrators, mostly young adults, have been screaming their frustration and anger while marching in massed groups.  Other than singing in a choir in a closed space like a church or shouting in a packed crowd at a baseball game, there is probably no better way to spread the corona virus than these protests.  Young adults may survive the upsurge in COVID-19 cases we expect.  More likely, the protests will kill the protesters’ grandparents.

            Stupidity reigns in the White House and on the street.

           

           

More Thoughts While Housebound

Education and Virtue

            The reported death toll from COVID-19 in the United States has climbed past 60,000, the highest number by far in any country in the world.  Without even checking, I suspect that some voices on the Internet will say this fact “proves” interesting conclusions: (a) the US health system is both too expensive and not as good as single-payer health systems, (b) the US was deliberately targeted by our enemies (probably China) who produced the virus in their secret labs, (c) President Trump’s dithering in January and February prevented us from responding quickly to the threat of pandemic, (d) God is punishing the US for its many sins, especially sexual sins, and (e) a skillful conspiracy of opportunistic terrorists spread the virus in the US.

            Obviously, not every purported implication of some fact really is an implication of that fact. 

            As I say, I haven’t surfed the web to see if all these ideas are out there.  It would be nice to be wrong.  Unfortunately, our ubiquitous web of electronic connections gives a platform for all sorts of tendentious, fallacious, and inaccurate statements.  And outright lies, of course.

            Everybody knows this.  Our world is so rife with contradictory claims that some people abandon the search for truth.  Or they become zealots for ideologically pure doctrine.  (Don’t let anyone make you doubt our cause!)  It doesn’t help when national leaders dismiss unwanted facts as “fake news.”  But the problem is far greater than one person or his influence.

            What should we do?  Many in my business (college professors, especially philosophers) have argued that the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation in our world, especially in social media, underscores the need for a liberal education.  We need to train young people to critically evaluate evidence, to recognize and reject fallacies, to understand the methods and procedures of science (statistical procedures in particular), and to become familiar with trustworthy sources of information.

            Notice my word: “train.”  It is not enough for a student (or professor, for that matter) to know about intellectual skills.  We need to practice them until they become habits, habits of the mind.  In other words, we need to grow into intellectual virtues.

            Education is not just about learning stuff.  It is about training persons in virtue.  It is important to insist on this point, because some educators fail to see it.  When they hear a phrase like “training students,” they immediately worry about indoctrinization.  They fear narrow-mindedness or rigid orthodoxy of any sort: political, religious or philosophical.  So they resist the call to promote intellectual virtue and they refuse to think of themselves as instructors in morality.

You see the irony, I hope.  Most educators who resist their role as moral teachers do so out of fear of intellectual vices.  The responsible way to reduce the vices of narrow-mindedness or credulity is to promote intellectual virtue.  I urge them to read Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, just one of dozens of books in the field.

It’s possible to avoid the self-contradictory thinking of the educator who fears intellectual vice so much that he refuses to promote virtue.  A hard-headed epistemic skeptic (Nietzsche comes to mind) could refuse to recognize either virtue or vice.  Education, he might say, is simply a game some of us play with words.  We use our “mobile army of metaphors” to do whatever we like, provided we can get away with it—that is, so long as the students will pay.  Of course, when Nietzsche says, “Let us be honest with ourselves”—which he does—he gives away the whole game.  The genuine skeptical educator would have to be more consistent than Friedrich Nietzsche.

Intellectual virtues are not just for students.  We all need to train ourselves in open-mindedness, persistence, firmness of belief, logical procedures, charity of interpretation, faith, and other intellectual virtues.

Are you surprised that I include faith among the virtues?  Read Why Faith is a Virtue.  In that book I argue that faith is a moral virtue, but it’s a very small step to including it among the intellectual virtues.  Or maybe it’s no step at all.  Linda Zagzebski argues that there is no real distinction between moral and intellectual virtues.  I suspect she’s right.

Trump might be right

Some Thoughts While Housebound

            A new coronavirus struck humanity late last year, so we call it COVID-19 to distinguish the disease from other illnesses caused by viruses in the coronavirus family.  The virus passes from infected persons to others via coughs, sneezes and touch.  A cough, for instance, leaves micro-droplets of fluid in the air, and the virus can live for hours, suspended in air, until someone breathes it in.  So the COVID-19 virus is highly communicable.

            Most infected people develop mild symptoms, and a significant percentage—perhaps as high as 15%—show no symptoms at all.  But for another significant percentage of infected people, as much as 20%, the disease requires hospitalization.  With good medical attention, most of the severely affected recover.  The death rate may be as low as 1 or 2%. 

            Problems arise because the disease is so easily spread.  When large numbers of people are infected, the number of people with severe symptoms overwhelms the medical system.  We have already seen, in Italy and Spain, terrible consequences.  There are not enough emergency rooms or life saving equipment such as ventilators, so many people die who could have been saved.  With a shortage of protective equipment (gowns, masks, etc.), medical personnel, catch the disease from their patients.

            Some governments were slow to recognize the crisis, but by now it is acknowledged worldwide.  We have no vaccine.  We have no drug proven to fight the disease.  So the main thing we can do is try to slow the spread of the virus.  Governments everywhere have ordered people to stay home except for those whose work is essential (medical people, grocery clerks, firefighters, etc.) or for essential trips (to buy food or medicine).

            The goal here is not to stop the disease.  Given how contagious it is, it is extremely likely that virtually the whole population will eventually be exposed to the virus.  COVID-19 will spread everywhere.  But if the disease spreads rapidly, we won’t have the hospital resources needed for huge numbers of people and many will needlessly die.  So around the world we are engaged in a desperate attempt to “flatten the curve.”

            Churches and schools are closed.  Restaurants offer take-out only.  Gyms, theatres, bars, physical therapy centers, and many other businesses are closed.  In the United States, about 10 million people have applied for unemployment in just two weeks.  Our unemployment rate, which was at a historically low number at the beginning of the year—roughly 3%—will rise to 15% or 20% or even higher.  We are entering an economic contraction greater than any since the worldwide depression of the 1930s.

            The US government has already responded to the economic crisis with mind-boggling spending.  The “CARES Act” authorizes $2.2 Trillion to give directly to individuals, finance loans to small business, and bailout big business.  The Federal Reserve has reduced interest rates to basically zero.  Everyone expects even further government spending to try to prop up the economy.  No one knows how effective these governmental actions will be.

            Researchers around the world are working frantically to develop a vaccine against COVID-19.  It will probably take from 12 to 18 months to find, test, and manufacture mass quantities of vaccine.  Until then, we “shelter in place” and practice “social distancing” to buy time for the hospitals and medical professionals.

            Health consequences have to be weighed against economic consequences.  We are entering an enormous economic downturn.  When poor people lose their jobs, they die.  A recession/depression kills through homelessness, mental distress, drug abuse, lack of access to medicine, and starvation.  So there is a tipping point—no one knows exactly—where the policies of keeping people home actually kill more through poverty than they save from disease.  At some point governments must encourage people to go back to work.

            When should that be?  I think the key variable is hospital capacity.  If we had an unlimited supply of good ER beds, with doctors and nurses to work them, and with an unlimited supply of ventilators, PPEs, and other supplies—if we had all those things—we wouldn’t need to practice social distancing.  Remember, this virus is so contagious that virtually everyone will be exposed to it sooner or later.  Without social distancing, the contagion would race through our population.  But with a “super-adequate” hospital situation, every severely sick person could still get the best care.

            Of course, we don’t have an unlimited supply of doctors, nurses, beds and machines.  Our hospital capacity is far less than we need.  But it is growing.  Industry is ramping up to produce massive amounts of ventilators, PPEs, and other necessaries.  All the while, most people who catch COVID-19 survive, and it seems that at least some of them do so because they develop sufficient antibodies to be relatively immune to the disease.  Taken as a whole, the population is slowly gaining immunity.

At some point, the increasing hospital capacity will catch up to the need.  This will happen at different times in different cities and state.  Governors and mayors will need to relax their social distancing rules.  Almost certainly, when a state reopens for business, there will be a new surge of COVID-19 cases, as previously unexposed people come into contact with the virus.  Even more certainly, state and city leaders will be criticized for relaxing their rules.  Such leaders need to state the case clearly that poverty can kill as certainly as a virus, though in different ways.

I’m not an economist.  Nevertheless, I think it would be disastrous to try to maintain “shelter in place” until a vaccine is ready.  Twelve months or longer of induced economic contraction would be a worldwide catastrophe killing millions.

Not Resuscitation, but . . .

Resurrection Life

            Last night I dreamed about Karen.  It’s been more than three years since she died.  I’ve been married—happily—to Sarah for more than a year.  The dream didn’t grow out of dissatisfaction with my situation.

            Admittedly, I don’t remember many of my dreams, so it’s possible I dream about Karen often.  But I don’t think so.  When I woke up I realized this dream illustrates an interesting philosophical/theological question.

            In the dream some small animal—a dog? cat? gopher?—somehow found a bit of Karen’s body and used that bit to reconstitute Karen.  (Bizarre?  Sure.  It was a dream.)  She was alive again, Karen just as she was fourteen months before her death!  (Another weird feature of dreams; somehow I knew it was fourteen months, not a year.)

            Karen was reading something; my “Last Walk” essays perhaps.  So Karen in the dream knew she was dying, knew when the doctor would tell her she was dying, and knew when she would die.  At the same stage in real life Karen knew none of that.  Back in 2015, fourteen months before she died, Karen’s doctors were pretty confident.

            So there she was—a resuscitated Karen, with more than a year to live.  But dream-Karen was unhappy.  I asked her: Didn’t she want to live?  Her answer: No, not like this.

            And there’s the question.  What do we want—what do Christians hope for—in the afterlife?

            In my dream, the magic happened by means of the little animal.  Dog, cat, or wombat doesn’t matter.  If you like, you can exchange the animal for a mad scientist, an extraterrestrial invader, or an angel.  In the TV series Stargate, the aliens had a sarcophagus machine that could restore dead bodies.  I’m not worried about the means; I’m interested in the results.  What do we want in an afterlife, if there is one?

            Christian theologians and Bible scholars insist that real Christian hope centers on resurrection.  The same power that raised Jesus from the grave can give life to our bodies too.  Of course, we will be changed; we will have “spiritual” bodies.  (See 1 Corinthians 15.)

            And that’s the problem with dream-Karen.  She was resuscitated, not resurrected.  Somehow the animal or magic had rebuilt her body as she was fourteen months before her death, cancer and all.  She was not changed.  She had to live her dying months all over again—only worse this time, since in the dream she knew what was going to happen.

            When I hope for resurrection, I hope for new life.  Not just “new life” in the abstract; I want to live.  I want to live with others, people I have known and especially Christ himself—I want community.  So, somehow, I hope that the real me, along with real others, will live again.  But I do not hope for resuscitation, a kind of bare-bones new life.  I want something better.

            The New Testament promises a new heaven and a new earth.  The community is symbolized as a city, the New Jerusalem.  Since God is an infinite being, I imagine we will be learning forever; our fellowship will be always deepening.

            Dream-Karen was right to reject resuscitation, even if she were to be resuscitated over and over.  Don’t misunderstand my point.  I am not saying our life now is valueless.  The life God has given us here and now in this world is a wonderful thing.  But Christian hope is not just for more years.  We would not be satisfied if alien machines or magic animals gave us an unlimited number of do-overs.  We want true resurrection, in which the power of God translates us into a new kind of life.

           

Proverbs

What Do Managers Do?

            In baseball, the manager wears a uniform much like the players wear, but he doesn’t pitch, hit or defend.  (In most cases; baseball history has had a few player-managers.)  The manager may instruct/train his players on baseball skills, but mostly he relies on coaches for that.  His main jobs are personnel related: he assigns player to places in the line-up to start the game, and he makes substitutions for hitters, defenders and pitchers.  Sometimes, consulting with his coaches, he makes strategic decisions, such as positioning defenders or intentionally walking an opposing hitter; on offense: stealing a base, the hit-and-run play, or bunting.  Of all these decisions, perhaps the most important are decisions about relief pitchers: which one and when.

            The managerial goal is often summarized this way.  Put players in positions where they are more likely to succeed.  To do this, the manager must weigh carefully his players’ abilities and the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing players.  Of course, it is the players who play the game, and the outcome depends mostly on their abilities.  If the manager does his job well, he can perhaps marginally increase the chances of winning.  It’s not much, but it’s important.  At least, we think so.  Since so much of the success or failure of a team rests on the highly-honed skills of the players, it’s very hard to determine how much a manager’s decisions contribute to wins and losses.

            Now let’s think not of baseball managers but of managers in general.  The first thing to notice about managers is their ubiquity.  Managers are everywhere.  We find them in the postal service, the navy, for profit corporations, hospitals, schools and colleges, the pastoral staff of churches, political parties, the local youth soccer league, United Nations agencies—in short, almost every human organization will have managers.  Sometimes managers are like the player-manager; they directly “do” whatever it is the organization seeks to do.  The postal manager may help sort the mail or deliver it.  But managers always have personnel tasks.  They make decisions about what other people are supposed to do.  “Decisions about what other people do” covers a lot of ground: managers hire and dismiss workers, they teach skills, they make and monitor budgets, they assign people to groups and sub-groups, they evaluate individuals’ performance, and much more.  Like the baseball manager, non-baseball managers seek to put their people in situations where they can succeed.  Of course, what counts as success varies widely from one organization to another.  The goals of Habitat for Humanity differ from Facebook’s.  Success for the Salvation Army is not like success for the U.S. Army. 

            Can a person learn how to be a manager?  Universities all across the country, including my own, offer classes in business management and/or organizational management.  (I’ve even taught such classes!  But that was long ago.) There has to be some sense in which management can be taught and learned.

            Alasdair MacIntyre says we ought to be skeptical of management science.  In After Virtue, one of the most influential books in philosophy of the last generation, he argues that our social sciences will never be able to predict the future.  First, we never know when a new scientific theory or concept will radically change our ideas about some subject.  (If, in 1880, someone had predicted that a new theory would emerge to unify Newtonian mechanics with recent experimental measurements of the speed of light by a theory of relativity, that person would not have predicted the theory; rather he would have invented it.)  Second, when an individual faces a certain decision and has not yet decided, she does not know what the decision will be.  Her close friend might be able to predict her decision, but the agent doesn’t yet know.  The close friend, until she decides how to respond, doesn’t yet know how she will respond.  And since our decisions influence later decisions, we can’t predict what will happen.  Third, we often don’t know what “game” we are playing when we make decisions.  We can buy board games or computer games and practice skills to win them; the games are well-defined.  But in the real world we often face situations that are not well-defined.  Two college students are talking.  Is their conversation a debate about politics, a diversion at a dinner party, a rehearsal of facts and strategies for a class examination, or a first move in courtship?  Could it be all of these at once?  Do the “players” know?  Fourth, events in the world are sometimes affected by sheer contingency.  Cosmic rays strike one person and cause cancer, but not another.  A butterfly flaps its wings . . .

            The upshot of MacIntyre’s argument is this.  There cannot ever be a social science that discovers law-like regularities (think: Boyle’s law of gases) that will allow predictions of human futures.  Therefore, managers do not have the “expertise” that would rationally justify the great power and authority they exercise in human organizations.  Nevertheless, all organizations must resort to managers.

            If managers don’t have expertise, they may have wisdom.  MacIntyre says managers invent proverbs to guide behavior, and sometimes they obey their proverbs.  For instance, a manager might believe (as is often claimed in management textbooks) that free and open communication within an organization will promote cooperation and creativity, and that cooperation and creativity will help the organization achieve its goals.  This belief is a proverb.  It is not law-like generalization based on repeatable experiments.  Nevertheless, the belief may contain wisdom, and managers who encourage free and open communication in their organizations may experience success. 

            Manager-leaders who act on wisdom from such proverbs are as good as it gets in organizations.  They cannot guarantee success.  Not even baseball managers can do that.

           

           

           

The Line

Good vs. Evil

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.                           ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

In the last year of World War 2, while serving in the Red Army, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn witnessed war crimes by Russian soldiers against Polish and German civilians.  It was “pay-back time” for atrocities committed by the Germans against Russians in 1941-1943.  For a time, Solzhenitsyn agreed.  But in early 1945 Solzhenitsyn wrote a letter to a friend condemning Russian crimes against civilians and criticizing the state, including the “boss” (Joseph Stalin), for not preventing them.  The letter was intercepted by the secret police, and Solzhenitsyn, though a decorated veteran, was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, followed by internal exile.  Solzhenitsyn’s experiences in prison, exile, and labor camp are reflected in many of his books: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), Cancer Ward (1968), The Gulag Archipelago (1973), and others.  It was during his years in captivity that Solzhenitsyn abandoned Marxism and embraced Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

A disillusioned soldier unjustly imprisoned; we might expect Solzhenitsyn to don the mantle of righteous indignation, to condemn his enemies, and to campaign for their destruction.  To be sure, his books do expose the heartless criminality of the Soviet system, and Solzhenitsyn freely criticized parties and states.  But Solzhenitsyn was not content to merely condemn the evils of others.  We who recognize the injustice of the other should also examine our own hearts.  If we refuse to admit our own sins, we deceive ourselves and increase the likelihood of new atrocities.

Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote about the line between good and evil presents a challenge to storytellers.  As we learned in middle school, good fiction requires “conflict” of one sort or another.  In a story, something has to happen.  The protagonist does something; she acts to achieve some goal or avoid some bad result, even if she acts in ignorance of her true situation.  In many stories, the conflict is obvious, a battle of good guys versus bad guys: sheriff against bandits, Odysseus versus the Cyclops, superhero against arch-villain, and so on.  The story ends with the death or elimination of the villain or (in tragedy) the death or elimination of the hero. 

Solzhenitsyn’s insight warns us that such stories are too simplistic.  Conflict doesn’t just happen between good and bad people (or classes or parties or states); the more important conflict often occurs within a person.  The challenge for the storyteller is to show “action” that is internal to a character, her struggle against temptation (or, conversely, her yielding to it).  How does one display the slow acquisition of good character or an equally gradual slide into viciousness? 

Iris Murdoch wrote that the moral life is not so much about decisions to act as it is about attention, seeing the world accurately.  “I can only act in a world that I can see.”  And Murdoch emphasized that paying attention takes effort; it is possible to see the world inaccurately, unjustly, egoistically.  In fact, Murdoch thought egocentricity was the natural default setting for human beings.  The battle to overcome it is central to moral improvement.  This, too, is a challenge to the storyteller.  How does an author show the interior life of a character?  How do we show what he sees and what he attends to?  It’s not impossible; great writers have done it.  But it’s hard—far harder than describing a chase, a battle, or even a quest.

I make no claim of success in this arena.  The characters in my stories exhibit vices and virtues, which they display in various actions.  My characters do things.  But it’s not clear that the line between good and evil lies within them; too often the line seems to fall between good guys and bad guys.  It remains my ambition to write good stories.  I’ll have to keep working at it.

A removal

Castles Disappears

    For four years a draft version of Castles, a science fiction novel, has occupied several pages on Story and Meaning.  I have deleted those pages.  So if you're looking for Castles here, you're out of luck.
     Never fear!  I deleted Castles because I am actively revising it, with help from my sister-in-law, Dawn Link.  I hope to announce later this year its publication.  If things go well, readers will have an actual book in their hands before long.