The Sporting Mind and the Secret of Basketball

David Brooks writes in today’s op-ed that sports provide useful analogies and metaphors for a liberal arts education. He describes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a German immigrant who discovered the power of sports-related metaphors in teaching his students sociology:

Rosenstock-Huessy began teaching at Harvard and converted his lectures into English. He noticed, though, that his students weren’t grasping his points. His language was not the problem, it was the allusions. He used literary and other allusions when he wanted to talk about ethics, community, mysticism and emotion. But none of the students seemed to get it. Then, after a few years, he switched to sports analogies. Suddenly, everything clicked.

“The world in which the American student who comes to me at about twenty years of age really has confidence in is the world of sport,” he would write. “This world encompasses all of his virtues and experiences, affection and interests; therefore, I have built my entire sociology around the experiences an American has in athletics and games.”

He then goes on to describe the specific ethical import of the American sporting culture, drawing on Duke University Professor Michael Allen Gillespie’s essay in the new book Debating Moral Education:

American sport teaches that effort leads to victory, a useful lesson in a work-oriented society. Sport also helps Americans navigate the tension between team loyalty and individual glory. . . Gillespie appreciates the way sports culture has influenced American students. It discourages whining, and rewards self-discipline. It teaches self-control and its own form of justice, which has a more powerful effect than anything taught in the classroom.

This reminds me of one of the major motifs in Bill Simmon’s Book of Basketball which I am slowly making my way through. This motif is what Simmons calls “the Secret:”

Year after year, 90 percent of NBA decision makers ignore The Secret or talk themselves into it not mattering that much. Fans overlook The Secret completely, as evidenced by the fact that, you know, it’s a secret (that’s why we live in a world where nine out of ten basketball fans probably think Shaquille O’Neal had a better career than Tim Duncan.) Nobody writes about The Secret because of a general lack of sophistication about basketball; even the latest “revolution” of basketball statistics centers more around evaluating players against one another over capturing their effect on a team (45).

So what is The Secret? It’s that stats matter, but in basketball, they are not of primary importance. Great players on paper do not leave great legacies or necessarily win championships (think Wilt vs. Russell). The Secret is that basketball is about being able to connect with your teammates, to play your role, to do your job, and to contribute to the harmony that is a team. More importantly, though, it is about pushing your team to its greatest possible level of excellence, year after year after year. Simmons writes,

Anyone can connect with their teammates for one season. Find that connection, cultivate it, win the title, maintain that connection, survive the inevitable land mines, fight off hungrier foes and keep coming back for more success . . . that’s being a champion. As Russell explains, “It’s much harder to keep a championship than to win one. After you’ve won once, some of the key figures are likely to grow dissatisfied with the role they play, so it’s harder to keep the tam focused on doing what it takes to win.” . . . Wilt captured one title (‘67) and was traded within fourteen months. He only cared about winning one title; defending it wasn’t as interesting, so he gravitated toward another challenge (leading the leaggue in assists). Meanwhile, Russell still ritually puked before big games in his thirteenth season. He had enough rings to fill both hands and it didn’t matter. He knew nothing else. . . Merely by being around Russell and feeding off his imense competitiveness, his teammates ended up caring just as much. You can’t stumble into that collective feeling, but when it happens–and it doesn’t happen often–you do anything to protect it. That’s what make great teams great. (51-53)

But Simmons admits that The Secret of basketball has its limits when applied to real life. Take David Robinson:

The same qualities that made [Robinson] a special person also limited his basketball ceiling. Robinson might have been his generation’s most intelligent player, the guy scoring 1310 on his SATs, playing the piano, and dabbling in naval science in his spare time. Do smarts matter on a basketball court? Not really. If anything, those extra brain cells wounded Robinson. . . A peaceful Christian who tried to find good in everyone, he lacked the requisite leadership skills–much less MJs “keep this up and I’m bringing you into the locker room, locking the door and beating the crap out of you” quality, for that matter–to handle Dennis Rodman as Rodman spiraled out of control and undermined San Antonio’s ‘95 playoff run. He never developed the same cutthroat attitude that defined Hakeem in his prime. It just wasn’t in him.(459)

The problem with sports metaphors is that sports are ultimately looking for a champion. There are certain character traits that a champion has which others should strive for, but what makes a champion different from the rest of us is that he would sacrifice anything to be on top, and we expect him to be on top. Nice guys very rarely win championships and when they do, we say that they won in spite of being nice (my husband is always saying this about Dwight Howard–he’s just too nice to win a championship).

So sports teach us a lot—-that winning is not an individual act of will but a team effort, that sacrifice is worthwhile, that pain is necessary for gain—-but sports don’t teach us to value niceness. They teach us to tolerate and respect niceness, but not root for it. At the end of the day, I bet more people are wearing Kobe jerseys than they are Howard jerseys. Allen Iverson is an All-Star this year, not because of talent but because of popularity. And I bet David Robinson is actively being forgotten in anyplace not named San Antonio. And its not because of winning. People don’t like Kobe and Iverson more because they win; they like them more because they have a meanness that seems a prerequisite to winning. And we respect that meanness, even if we know we can’t imitate it in ordinary life.

“I See You:” Avatar and Prudence

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen Avatar, don’t read this post.

People have had a lot to say about the movie Avatar—its pantheism, its overhanded critique of US foreign policy, its hodgepodge of superficial cultural references—but for me, the part of the movie that really stood out was in one of the final scenes where Neytiri, holding Jake in his vulnerable, clumsy, handicapped human form looks into his eyes and says, “I see you.” This motif is woven throughout the movie, as Jay Michelson of the Huffington Post explains:

In the Na’Vi cosmology, what’s really happening is the Ai’Wa in me is connecting with the Ai’Wa in you. This is echoed in their greeting, “I see you,” a direct translation of the Sanskrit Namaste, which means the same thing. (“Avatar” is also from the Sanskrit, though the film plays on the word’s two meanings of an image used in a role-playing game, and a deity appearing on Earth.) As the Na’Vi explain in the film, though, “I see you” doesn’t mean ordinary seeing – it, like Namaste, really means “the God in me sees the God in you.” I see Myself, in your eyes.

I don’t know anything about Sanskrit or the eastern religious traditions on which Cameron is drawing here, but I do know that this motif of “seeing” and its connection with right action and justice has an important foundation in the Thomistic tradition. As Josef Pieper writes in his beautiful little work The Four Cardinal Virtues, the virtue of prudence is the true perception of the way the world really is:

Man’s good actions take place in confrontation with reality. The goodness of concrete human action rests upon the transformation of the truth of real things; of the truth which must be won and perceived by regarding the ipsa res, reality itself.

Bill Mattison picks up the connection between prudence and seeing in his book Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues. Mattison describes an article by Lorraine Murray in America Magazine called “The Lady in the Mirror.” Murray writes,

I am obsessed with food, but I assure you that I am not fat. I wear a size 10, and the weight charts brand me as “average.” The trouble is that when I gaze into the mirror, a fat lady stares back. I know that I am supposed to be God’s beloved child and I know I should love my neighbor as myself. Problem is, I have such difficulty loving myself because I am always criticizing my body.

Mattison explains,

Given how Murray says she sees herself, it is less surprising that she agonizes over her weight. [Paul Waddell] describes the moral importance of how we see things and claims it is crucial that we have ‘truthful vision.’ Put simply, we cannot act rightly if we do not see rightly. If we do not have an accurate grasp of the way things are, it is impossible to act virtuously. . . Being a prudent person is what enables one to see rightly and translate that truthful vision into action.

In Avatar, Neytiri’s vision, or prudence, is already highly developed. At one point, right before she is about to kill Jake, a seed from the sacred tree of Ey’wa lands on her arm with the outstretched bow and arrow. Her eyes turn to the spirit and back to Jake. She does not yet know what she sees, but she knows that she sees him differently. A similar thing happens when they are arguing about who Jake is. Neytiri complains that she does not know him because she does not see him. At that moment, the same seeds collect all around Jake, covering him. Again, Neytiri’s vision changes. She begins to see Jake. And both times, this vision translates into right action. Neytiri knows the right thing to do because she sees rightly. This is prudence.

But Jake’s vision develops slowly over the film. He must learn to see the truth of reality, and only when he learns to see will he know the right way to act. What is unfortunate about the film is that it traces Jake learning how to see everything but himself. Jake learns to see the Na’Vi and their world rightly, and in turn he learns to treat them rightly. He learns to see Colonel Quaritch for who he really is, and accordingly, can treat him appropriately as an enemy and threat. But Jake never learns to see himself.

Let’s return to “The Lady in the Mirror.” Murray can’t see herself. She has a false vision of who she is, a fat person, and so she does not know how to act rightly. She diets obsessively, abuses herself with thoughts of guilt over an ice cream sundae or piece of fried fish, and looks loathingly at her reflection in the mirror. She can’t act rightly toward herself because she can’t see herself rightly.

Jake is similar. He sees himself as a crippled, as a deficient being because he does not have functional legs. The reason he consents to the colonel’s deal to spy on the Na’Vi, an unvirutous action, is precisely because he sees himself as deficient without his legs, and the colonel promises him “his legs back” if he carries out the mission successfully. If Jake saw himself as a complete and beautiful human being, even with non-functional legs, he would not have been so quick to agree to the colonel’s deal.

While Jake is learning to see the world of the Na’Vi rightly, he still isn’t learning to see himself rightly. His avatar is beautiful, athletic, powerful, and seemingly invulnerable. Indeed, Jake can hardly wait each time he is out of his avatar body to get back in “where things seem more real,” where he gets to lead the Na’Vi into battle, and conquer their great unconquerable mythical bird, and make love to one of the most powerful beautiful Na’Vi ladies.

But in the end, the real Jake is not his avatar. The real Jake is a man, unshaven and unkempt, without functional legs. And Neytiri sees this. As she holds the dying Jake, she tells him “I see you.” This is what love is. Love is not trying to change the other person, to make them perfect, or to focus on their weaknesses. Love is seeing a person for who they are and embracing that person.

But Jake has no such revelation at the end. He doesn’t ever get to look at himself and say “I see you.” He gets his avatar body back. And this is the most unfortunate part of the film. Jake shouldn’t get to have his avatar body at the end. He should have to live among the Na’Vi in his wheelchair, with his respiration mask. He should have to learn how to see himself just as he learned to see the Na’Vi. He should be able to look in the mirror in all of his weakness and vulnerability and say to himself, “I see you.”

Here in real life, we don’t get our avatars. It’s celebrity doppelganger week on Facebook and everybody is posting images of celebrities who they resemble, but in the end, everybody has to go back to being themselves. Murray doesn’t get the model-thin woman she wants to see when she looks at herself. She just gets Lorraine Murray, not a model, but not fat either. And if Murrary wants to be happy, she has to learn how to see herself. Only then will she be able to treat herself right. And this is the most disturbing thing about Avatar–in the end, it’s happy ending keeps us from taking off our 3D glasses, leaving the theater, and seeing the world as it really is, and seeing ourselves for what we really are.

The Problem With Scott Roeder’s Defense

In this article from Friday’s NYTimes, Scott Roeder, the man charged with the murder of George R. Tiller, one of the only doctors who performed late-term abortions in this country, took the stand in his own defense:

“I did what I thought was needed to be done to protect the children. I shot him,” he testified, adding at another point, “If I didn’t do it, the babies were going to die the next day.”

In other words, the circumstances justified an otherwise immoral action, because, the logic goes, if Mr. Roeder had not shot Tiller, more people would have died. This is what is called the “necessity defense.” The necessity defense must meet four requirements: First, there must be a threat to a third person. Second, the threat must be imminent. Third, the threat must be the result of an unlawful act. And fourth, the agent must be firm in his beliefs that he was acting out of necessity.

Criticism of the defense focused on whether or not the fetus counted as a third party. Regardless of whether you think that abortion involves taking the life of a human being (and EverydayThomist thinks it does), Mr. Roeder’s defense is unacceptable. He shot Dr. Tiller in front of his church. No pre-born children were in the process of being killed, nor were they going to be killed that day. The threat was not imminent.

Roeder’s move was a preemptive strike, one which assumed that Tiller would go into work the next day and continue conducting late term abortions. But the problem with preemptive strikes is (1) you cannot predict the future and know what Tiller is going to do the next day and (2) they are hardly ever a last resort.

Roeder’s motive to protect innocent lives could have been carried out in a way that did not involve taking the life of another, at least not at that moment. When Roeder acted, he was not defending the pre-born; he was simply shooting a man who had taken the lives of the pre-born in the past. He was shooting a man that he had planned to shoot for weeks.

The “imminent threat” requirement is an important one in cases like this. It rests on the assumption that life is precious, and should only be taken as a last resort, when there is no other possible way to achieve the intended goal of the protection of a third party. In EverydayThomist’s mind, this is why Scott Roeder’s defense fails.

Q. Is It Fitting For Someone to Drink Beer?

My friend passed this on to me, and I am passing it on to my readers in honor of the feast week of this blog’s beloved saint and patron. From the Generic Catholic Phorum:

Addendum to secunda secundae:

Q. Is it fitting for someone to drink beer?

Obj. 1 It seems that it is not fitting for anyone to drink beer. For, as Paul says, we ought not to live in orgies and drunkenness. (Rom 13:13) Now beer is known to produce drunkenness in the drinking agent. Therefore, no one should drink beer.

Obj. 2 Moreover, though drinking beer does achieve the proximate end of gladdening man’s heart as David says (Ps 104:15); its final end is a hangover. Now things are judged by the desirability of their final ends, and nobody wants a hangover. Therefore, it is not fitting to drink beer.

Obj. 3 Moreover, Dionysius writes God is perfect, man is not. Man made beer, but God made pot. (Celestial Hierarchies of Highness, 4:20) Now every rational creature ought to pursue the more perfect activity, according to its nature. Therefore, under the aspect of intoxicants, people ought to smoke pot rather than drink beer.

on the other hand Pabst is said to have won the blue ribbon at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Now nothing is awarded the blue ribbon unless it is considered good under some aspect. Now as we have read on the Budweiser can, beer is usually considered through its taste, smoothness, and drinkability. Thus there is some sense in which it is fitting and good to drink beer.

responsio: Both beer itself and the act of drinking beer are understood in multiple ways.

Beer itself is understood in three ways. First, beer can be understood under the aspect of cheapness. Here we have such understandings as Natural Light and the inaptly named Milwaukee’s Best. These substances, however, are not beer properly understood, but are merely the privation of the good beer that ought to be there. They are, therefore, a failure of actuality and hence are evil.

Second, beer is understood under the aspect of snobbery. Here we find many fancy and fruity beers that some of the great drunks of yore called “micro-brews.” These induce a vain discourse about beer in their consumers, leading to a foppish misuse of the faculty of speech.

Third, beer is understood in, as it were, a via media between these two extremes, in regular ordinary beers, like the Pabst Blue Ribbon mentioned above, which an ordinary person can drink without feeling like either some cheap college jarhead or fancy lad.

Furthermore, the drinking of the beer can be understood in two ways. First, beer can be drunk in a reckless fashion such as to lead to bravado, reckless bets, black eyes, waking up in the bushes, falling down stairs and fornication. In this sense, as the venerable Alvarus Pelagius has pointed out (De Planctu Ecclesiae, 173-174), beer drinking is a threat to the conscience and learning of our own students.

Second, beer drinking can be understood under a more responsible aspect, when it is done for the sake of simple conviviality and relaxation, and only leads to minor fights, accidents, and otherwise absurd but unimportant truth claims.

Therefore, when beer itself, understood under the third aspect above, is consumed according to this second manner, it is fitting for anyone to drink beer.

hence Ad 1. The solution to this difficulty is clear from what has been said. Beer, properly, consumed will not produce excessive drunkenness, or orgies in the proper sense.

Ad 2. From what has been said, it is clear that a hangover is not the true and proper end of drinking beer, though it is the end of those who drink the wrong beer in the wrong way.

Ad 3. Dionysius is speaking here of perfection from God’s perspective. It may be true that pot is a more perfect substance than beer, or indeed a more perfect creation. But this does not necessarily mean that, from the human perspective of party planning, ancillary activities to be enjoyed, and scruples about the civil law, beer may be a more perfect choice than pot in many particular cases.

What Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink Teaches About Virtue

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink provides an anecdotal account of how split-second decisions are made through a process Gladwell calls “rapid cognition” or “thin-slicing.” Gladwell distinguishes this type of rapid cognition from intuition, which he claims is more emotional, claiming that rapid cognition is a distinctly rational process, a type of thinking that simply movers a little faster than ordinary conscious and deliberate decision-making.

One of the most interesting parts of the book deals with first impressions about race, particularly those that happen at a subconscious level. In the chapter entitled “The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall for Dark, Handsome Men,” Gladwell describes the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT, developed by Anthony G. Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek, measures a person’s attitude on an unconscious level and the immediate and automatic associations a person makes before that person has time to think. In the IAT designed to examine automatic associations with race, a tested individual is timed to see how quickly they associate categories of good and bad adjectives with black and white faces. The test results reveal that the 80% of Americans more quickly pair words like “love,” “peace,” and “joy” with white faces and words like “terrible,” “evil,” and “failure” with black faces. The level of difference is a matter of microseconds, yet is still statistically significant.

What the IAT most significantly reveals is that unconscious attitudes and the behaviors which those attitudes give rise to may be completely incompatible with a person’s conscious values. Even those who consider themselves very enlightened in matters of race still overwhelmingly tend to have an implicit preference for whites. Gladwell himself, who is half-black, was found to have a “moderate automatic preference for whites.” As he notes in the chapter, he considers himself an enlightened and progressive individual on the matter of race relations, with a strong conviction that blacks and whites are equal. Gladwell’s point, however, is that just knowing of cognitively assenting to the idea that the two races are equal does not tell the whole story. He writes,

Our attitudes towards race and gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious level. These are what we choose to believe. . . . which we use to direct our behavior deliberately. . . . But the IAT measures something else, our attitude toward racism on an unconscious level. the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we have had time to think. We do not deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes . . . [and] we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our subconscious silently crunches all the data it has from all the experiences we’ve had the people we’ve met, the lessons we’ve learned, the books we’ve read, the movies we’ve seen . . .and it forms an opinion. That is what is coming out in the IAT. The disturbing thing about the IAT is that it shows us that our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated values.

The IAT does not just reveal what we subconsciously believe, which a virtue ethicist like myself would call a “disposition.” It is also a predictor of how we behave. A person with a subconscious preference for or dispositional tendency towards whites will in conversation lean in towards black people less, stutter more, and become visibly tenser. These subtle cues can have a major impact on our social engagements. Gladlwell cites law professor Ian Ayres’ study of racial discrimination by Chicago car dealers which found that car dealers gave the lowest initial offer to white men, and the highest initial offer to black men. Even after 40 minutes of negotiating, black car shoppers were still offered prices nearly $800 times higher than the initial offer made to white shoppers.

Much more disturbing is the discussion of Amadou Diallo, a black man who was shot 41 times by four cops who saw him standing on the street corner in the South Bronx late at night. Gladwell argues that these cops, though probably not explicitly or even consciously racist, displayed certain racially-motivated automatic implicit associations that caused them to make a prejudicial, and in this case, lethal split second decision:

The officers, observing Diallo on the stoop, sized him up and in that instant decided he looked suspicious. That was mistake number one. Then they backed the car up, and Diallou didn’t move. [Officer] Carroll later said that “amazed” him: How brazen was this man, who didn’t run at the sight of the police? Diallou wasn’t brazen. He was curious. That was mistake number two. Then Carroll and [officer] Murphy stepped toward Diallou on the stoop and watched him turn slightly to the side, and make a movement for his pocket. In that split second, they decided he was dangerous. But he was not. He was terrified. That was mistake number three.

Seven seconds later, Diallo was dead, shot 41 times, wallet in hand. When the four cops went to trial and were found “not guilty,” there were protests against what was widely perceived as a racial injustice. It seemed that these four cops were clearly guilty of overt racism that motivated them to shoot an innocent man. Gladwell, however, interprets the situation differently. He argues that these four cops, due to past experiences both personally and professionally with black people caused them to automatically and implicitly associate black people with danger, much more quickly than they might associate white people with a threat. These cops were habituated to automatically conclude that a black man in a dangerous New York neighborhood reaching into his pocket meant trouble, and their automatic implicit associations cost an innocent man his life. Gladwell’s point in describing these racial anecdotes is that even if we do not think of ourselves as racist, and even if our consciously held values hold that blacks and whites are equal, our split second decisions or “thin-slicing” activities, as Gladwell describes them, may indicate deep-seated, racist tendencies.

So what do we do about our subconscious, split-second tendencies to prefer whites over blacks? We cannot, as Gladwell argues, simply try to develop our conscious values. That is, we cannot just think more that blacks and whites are equal. Gladwell considers himself a consciously tolerant person and still, his IAT indicates an unconscious preference for white people.

“I’ve taken the race IAT on many occasions and the result always leaves me feeling a bit creepy. At the beginning of the test, you are asked what your feelings towards blacks and whites are. I answered, as I am sure most of you would, that I think of the two races as equal.”

Gladwell’s theory about rapid cognition or thin-slicing indicates that it is not enough to make certain conscious changes in attitudes or values, but must also acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter our subconscious, thereby undermining our conscious attitudes. Gladwell argues, however, that by taking control of the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, one can also control rapid cognition and prevent or lessen the mistakes made.

He suggests that we have a responsibility to not only alter our conscious values, but also to alter our environments in such a way to develop our rapid cognition to make the best possible split-second decisions. People’s results on the race IAT change if they expose themselves to images and verbal information about black people with positive connotations prior to taking the test. People who look at a picture or read a story about Martin Luther King, Jr. right before taking the IAT, for example, register much less implicit racial prejudice than other test takers. More practically, Gladwell suggests that putting ourselves in environments that expose us on a regular basis to racial minorities can alter our stereotypes of them and thus alter our unconscious automatic reactions to them. Thus, despite the fact that racial and other implicit attitudes operate on both a conscious and unconscious level, Gladwell seems to think that we are still morally accountable for even those automatic associations not governed by conscious choice.

Although Gladwell does address any theory of virtue or the moral psychology underlying a virtue ethic, his description of rapid cognition illustrates a remarkable parallel in contemporary psychology with what Aquinas calls a habit [habitus]. More remarkably, Gladwell inadvertently illustrates how habits—both good and bad—can be developed not through rational control over attitudes and behaviors, but by the subtle interaction between a person and her environment. Changing a bad habit, therefore, is not just about conscious effort. Any smoker can tell you this. A person who tries to quit smoking despite the fact that her friends are all smokers and much of her social engagements revolve around smoking is likely to be unsuccessful, no matter how hard she tries to change her habit. Rather, she must also change her environment. She must put herself in situations where she cannot reach for a cigarette for pleasure or stress-relief; she must surround herself with non-smokers, and engage in activities where smoking is contrary to enjoying the activity, like long bike rides. In short, developing virtue through habituation is as much about trying to make conscious dispositional changes as it is about putting ourselves into situations where we don’t need to try.

Additionally, if we take Gladwell’s book seriously, we must conclude that we are habituated in ways which we do not intend all the time. We may read fashion magazines and think that we approach these enlightened about body satisfaction and weight, but simply exposing ourselves to these magazines over and over again, whether we realize it or not, habituates us to associate beauty and desirability with thinness, as I wrote about here. We may think that we can watch overtly violent or sexually explicit films and not become influenced to be more violent or more lustful, but Gladwell’s research (and virtue ethics) says otherwise. We may live in an overwhelmingly white and middle-class neighborhood and think of ourselves as racially unprejudiced, but I bet the IAT would say otherwise. What Gladwell’s book teaches us is that our moral development is much more dynamic than we consciously recognize.

It’s the March for Life, not the March for Scott Brown

I didn’t get to attend the March for Life in Washington, DC this year, much as I would have liked to. Like any large-scale witness, the March for Life is a time not to debate the nuances of abortion politics and the various ways in which one can be “pro-life,” but is rather a time to collectively say “NO” to abortion. The March is a time to say one thing, and one thing only–that abortion is a grave evil, and we here who are participating are marching on behalf of the millions of unborn who have become victims of abortion.

On every other day of the year, anti-abortion advocates can adopt a more nuanced approach to the issue of abortion. On every other day of the year, anti-abortion advocates can get into debates about making abortion illegal vs. other legal tactics to minimize the number of abortions that take place. On every other day of the year, anti-abortion advocates can tone down their rhetoric, make concessions, and explore the connections between issues like access to health care, racial and gender discrimination, living wages, and abortion. But not today. Today, there are two answers–yes, or no, and today, and today only, anti-abortion advocates get to simply say “NO.”

Which is why I am disturbed to see, at least in the very preliminary media coverage of the March, to see the rhetoric of the March turning to Scott Brown and healthcare reform. From the Washington Post, for example:

Many at the rally cited the election of Republican Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts as sign of a shifting momentum to conservative causes like their own.

“Any people from Massachusetts here today?” asked U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of several members of congress who spoke a the rally on the Mall. “Thank you Massachusetts. Thank you for helping us kill the anti-life bill,” he said referring to the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate that will be broken once Brown is sworn in.

The issue of health care reform dominated the speeches and prayers blasted over loudspeakers at the protest. More than three decades since Roe v. Wade, the anti-abortion movement has been mobilized during the past year against the healthcare reform legislation.

Sure, I can see rallying speeches that reemphasize the point that any healthcare legislation that allocates federal funds for expanding abortion coverage is immoral. But Scott Brown, last I checked, wasn’t out there marching in the chilly mid-atlantic cold against abortion. In fact, the new junior senator from Massachusetts isn’t even pro-life. This is from his campaign website:

While this decision should ultimately be made by the woman in consultation with her doctor, I believe we need to reduce the number of abortions in America. I believe government has the responsibility to regulate in this area and I support parental consent and notification requirements and I oppose partial birth abortion. I also believe there are people of good will on both sides of the issue and we ought to work together to support and promote adoption as an alternative to abortion.

Scott Brown doesn’t oppose healthcare reform because it allocates federal funds for abortion; Scott Brown opposes healthcare reform because it is expensive:

I believe that all Americans deserve health care coverage, but I am opposed to the health care legislation that is under consideration in Congress and will vote against it. It will raise taxes, increase government spending and lower the quality of care, especially for elders on Medicare. I support strengthening the existing private market system with policies that will drive down costs and make it easier for people to purchase affordable insurance. In Massachusetts, I support the 2006 healthcare law that was successful in expanding coverage, but I also recognize that the state must now turn its attention to controlling costs.

The issue of healthcare reform and abortion is important, and it needs to be discussed. But giving speeches in support of Scott Brown complicates the simple message that the marchers should be trying to communicate, a message of simple opposition to abortion. It also opens them up to criticism from their opponents who can simply point to the fact that the man they support doesn’t actually support them. The March for Life shouldn’t be about Scott Brown, or about any congressional figure. It should be a march for the pre-born and those that remain unborn. The March for Life is supposed to be a simple, collective “NO,” to abortion; how about we keep it that way?

Your Local, Eco-Friendly Purchases Aren’t (Necessarily) Virtuous

My friend Matt passed this great article on to me, entitled “Buy Local, Act Evil: Can Organic Produce and Natural Shampoo Turn You Into a Heartless Jerk?” The author writes,

As the owner of several energy-efficient light bulbs and a recycled umbrella, I’m familiar with the critiques of “ethical consumption.” In some cases, it’s not clear that ostensibly green products are better for the environment. There’s also the risk that these lifestyle choices will make us complacent, sapping the drive to call senators and chain ourselves to coal plants. Tweaking your shopping list, the argument goes, is at best woefully insufficient and maybe even counterproductive.

But new research by Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto levels an even graver charge: that virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal. . .

. . .[T]he findings add to a growing body of research into a phenomenon known among social psychologists as “moral credentials” or “moral licensing.” Historically, psychologists viewed moral development as a steady progression toward more sophisticated decision-making. But an emerging school of thought stresses the capriciousness of moral responses. Several studies propose that the state of our self-image can directly influence our choices from moment to moment. When people have the chance to demonstrate their goodness, even in the most token of ways, they then feel free to relax their ethical standards.

This article illustrates the difference between an act-based and a virtue-based morality. According to an act-based morality, certain actions are right and wrong, and hence to be good, you simply need to perform the right actions and avoid the wrong actions. A virtue-based morality says that not only actions, but also dispositions or attitudes are necessary for an action to be good. In other words, it is not enough to simply do the right thing but you must also do it for the right reason.

When it comes to buying eco-friendly products, we assume that the act itself is virtuous. Clearly, a person who buys organic produce and local meat is better than a person who does not, right? But a virtue ethicist like myself would say that we need to look deeper and examine the motives and character from which our people are acting. Does the person buying organic and local really love the earth and want to do what is best for the environment, or are they just buying these products because they want to look good for their friends or because they want to feel good about themselves?

In general, I think that buying eco-friendly products only makes us virtuous if we do so mindfully, using our reason to examine and shape our inclinations. And we need to recognize that just because we decide to start buying eco-friendly products, these acts alone don’t immediately make us virtuous. Aristotle famously said that it takes more than one sparrow to make a spring, and so too, more than one act to make a virtue. Buying eco-friendly products is only truly virtuous if these actions proceed from a deliberate will motivated by love of the environment, ecological restraint, and moderation in consumption. And thus concludes the article:

Another strategy is to make worthy actions habitual. When volunteering at the soup kitchen—or turning off unused lights—becomes routine, you’ll stop basking in that halo every time. Cultural norms are also key. If everyone is driving a Prius and taking the stairs, I won’t feel so smug about doing the same. Now, for instance, I don’t feel heroic when I sort the paper and plastics and take the blue bin out to the curb. That’s just what people in my neighborhood do on Monday nights.

A decade or two ago, buying green products and other environmentalist measures might have just seemed idiosyncratic. Now such conduct is widely lauded—which is precisely why, according to researchers, it may be capable of producing this behavioral backlash. But, for the most part, it’s not yet a matter of course. What’s the lesson here? Let’s stop congratulating each other—and ourselves—for using nontoxic cleaning products and compost bins. After all, it’s really the least we can do.

The American Leviathan

In David Brooks’ op-ed yesterday, he compared Obama’s administration to Hobbes’ Leviathan:

[Obama] is no ideologue, but over the past year he has come to seem like the sovereign on the cover of “Leviathan” — the brain of the nation to which all the cells in the body and the nervous system must report and defer.

Americans, with their deep, vestigial sense of proportion, have reacted. The crucial movement came between April and June, when the president’s approval rating among independents fell by 15 percentage points and the percentage of independents who regarded him as liberal or very liberal rose by 18 points. Since then, the public has rejected any effort to centralize authority or increase the role of government. . .

. . . The American people are not always right, but their basic sense of equilibrium is worthy of the profoundest respect. President Obama has shown himself to be a fine administrator, but he erred in trying to make himself the irreplaceable man in nearly every sphere of public life. He erred in not sensing that even a pragmatic government could seem imperious and alarming.

Brooks says that the American people want a servant, not a Leviathan, but I think he’s wrong. The thing about Hobbes’ Leviathan is that it is a political theory which assumes that on their own, people will not be virtuous, and so they need a strong governmental power to check their vicious appetites and curb their selfish desires. The Leviathan image is a provocative one because it illustrates how the government has its “tentacles” in all spheres of society, controlling human affairs in order to prevent chaos from breaking out.

I don’t think that Scott Brown’s election yesterday is a vote against Leviathan, as Brooks seems to indicate, but rather against the effectiveness of this particular Leviathan. You see, the alternative to a Hobbesian political theory is a virtue-based theory in the vein of Aristotle and Aquinas which claims that the government has a positive role, not just to restrain the evil impulses of people, but also to foster their good inclinations and inculcate virtue. And Americans don’t want the government encouraging them to be good; they really just want the government to leave them alone to do what they want.

Take the healthcare debate. Healthcare in our country is in desperate need of reform largely because our system is bloated and our citizenry is unhealthy. Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts yesterday indicated that people don’t like the current attempts to initiate reform which mainly involves the Democratic congress throwing massive sums of money at the problem, probably raising taxes, and increasing the deficit. I’m with Brooks that this is a Leviathan-like solution. But Massachusetts voters weren’t opposing the solution yesterday, or the Leviathan behind it, but rather, I think, the cost.

The reason people in our country are unhealthy is not so much due to a lack of money, but rather a lack of good lifestyles. The diseases we face in this country are largely preventable—Type II diabetes, heart disease, complications related to obesity. Treating these conditions requires time, money, and resources that our system, no matter how big it is, simply cannot adequately provide. These are problems that are not going to be solved by expanding healthcare coverage. They are only going to be solved if Americans change their lifestyle.

This means that Americans would have to take the initiative to eat less, eat better, and to make physical activity a regular part of their lives. It would also require infrastructural changes like better school lunches with more fruits and veggies, better urban planning that would encourage walking by making parking and driving more expensive and more difficult, more grocery stores with fresh produce in poor, urban neighborhoods, and a whole host of other changes.

But most Americans don’t want to change their lifestyles, they just want to suffer less because of the implications of their lifestyle. And these are the exact vicious tendencies that Hobbes wanted to curb. He recognized what I think hold true in this country—if you leave people to their own devices, people suffer and chaos reigns.

As a Thomist, I think Hobbes was wrong in his anthropology. I do think that people have virtuous inclinations that need to be encouraged, and that the government should play more of a positive role in encouraging virtue than in restraining vice. But I also think that societies can become so vicious that the virtuous tendencies of people get squelched and vice rules. This is what I think American consumerism, globalism, and militarism has resulted in.

Brooks concludes:

If I were President Obama, I would spend the next year showing how government can serve a humble, helpful and supportive role to the central institutions of American life. Even in blue states like Massachusetts, voters want a government that is energetic but limited — a servant, not a leviathan.

Yes, Americans want a servant, a government that does exactly what they want and lets them do exactly what they want. And until Americans want to start doing the right thing—living temperately and moderately, curbing their excessive desires, caring more for their neighbors—Leviathan is all they are going to get.

Why be altruistic? Because it makes you happy.

One of the nice things about Aristotelian virtue ethics over a deontological or utilitarian moral theory is that morality is considered something natural to human beings, something intrinsic rather than extrinsically imposed. The virtue of temperance towards food, for example, is not something unnatural to human beings, meaning that in order to be temperate, one would have to overcome one’s human inclinations towards food, but is rather the natural way in which human beings are supposed to relate to food—not eating too much or too little, eating a variety of foods, eating at the right time in the right place, etc. Virtue then, rather than being contrary to inclination, can be considered the perfection of inclination.

An op-ed by Nicholas Kristoff in this weekend’s NYTimes illustrates this point nicely on the topic of altruism. Drawing off the work of Jonathan Haidt, Kristoff writes,

Happiness is tied to volunteering and to giving blood, and people with religious faith tend to be happier than those without. A solid marriage is linked to happiness, as is participation in social networks. And one study found that people who focus on achieving wealth and career advancement are less happy than those who focus on good works, religion or spirituality, or friends and family.

“Human beings are in some ways like bees,” Professor Haidt said. “We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives.” . . .

. . . Professor Haidt notes that one thing that can make a lasting difference to your contentment is to work with others on a cause larger than yourself.
I see that all the time. I interview people who were busy but reluctantly undertook some good cause because (sigh!) it was the right thing to do. Then they found that this “sacrifice” became a huge source of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Brain scans by neuroscientists confirm that altruism carries its own rewards. A team including Dr. Jorge Moll of the National Institutes of Health found that when a research subject was encouraged to think of giving money to a charity, parts of the brain lit up that are normally associated with selfish pleasures like eating or sex.
The implication is that we are hard-wired to be altruistic. To put it another way, it’s difficult for humans to be truly selfless, for generosity feels so good.

Unlike a deontological theory which says that we should give of our resources because we have an obligation to, or a utilitarian theory which says that we should give of our resources to maximize overall utility or societal contentment, it seems that empirical evidence is supporting the virtue perspective that we should give of our resources because we are inclined to do so. More specifically, human beings are created to share what they have, and doing so leads to their own happiness, in addition to the happiness of others.

Using Bill Simmons’ Book of Basketball to Understand Alasdair MacIntyre

At the most basic level, what is Alasdair MacIntyre arguing in the foundational essay of Intractable Disputes About the Natural Law? He says in the conclusion of his opening essay that he is not arguing that “Thomists have resources that should enable them to refute their opponents in way that are or should be compelling to any rational individual, whatever her or his standpoint” (51). But he goes on to say

I do indeed believe that Thomistic Aristotelionism provides us all a well-founded and rationally justified moral philosophy, but I also believe that in the forums of rational public debate, by the best standards available for such debate, it will often be unable to defeat its critics and opponent.

In short, MacIntyre thinks that his Thomistic rendition of the natural law can be rationally defended even if it isn’t persuasive to people who disagree.

To illuminate this concept, we might turn to the great sage Bill Simmons. In The Book of Basketball’s “Most Valuable Chapter,” Simmons outlines a theory for picking the MVP that includes four criteria. The fourth, Simmons explains thusly:

If you’re explaining your MVP pick to someone who has a favorite player in the race—a player that you didn’t pick—will he at least say something like, ‘Yeah, I don’t like it, but I can see how you arrived at that choice’?

Simmons goes on to explain that he added this fourth criterion after his ’08 MVP column in which he picked Garnett for the MVP according his original three criteria (KG transformed the Celtics defensively in a way no other player in the league could do, added new leadership and revived a floundering franchise, and spawned a 42-win turnaround), but was still criticized for favoring the hometeam over more objectively-qualified picks, i.e. CP3. Simmons concludes that in retrospect, Chris Paul was a more rational choice for MVP because he could be defended to a prejudiced party: “any Lakers fan would disagree with Paul over Kobe, but at the very least they would have understood the logic. They wouldn’t have agreed with it, but they would have understood it” (227).

And this, I take it, is what MacIntyre is saying the Aristotelian-Thomist natural law tradition provides us. It gives us rationally-defensible moral arguments that may not convince those in deep disagreement, like utilitarians, but at least they will be able to understand the logic. Don’t you love how basketball helps us understand philosophy better?