Month: December 2008

the hands have gone awol . . .

. . . I suspect a providential plot to force me to finish reading Dark Night of the Soul.  Your last Friday’s post is in progress (and halfway interesting– to me, at least), but no predictions on when I’ll have it up.  Will post an excuse on the other blog as needed.  If all else fails, have a good week.

Book, er, Podcast recommendation – Disability & Social Justice

It’s a quiet afternoon.  Big kids are at friends’ houses, the baby is napping, the house is all yours.  The kitchen could use some attention, but that’s never bothered you before.  What you need is to settle down in the recliner with a bag of chocolate chips and a philosophy podcast.

Specifically this one: Chris Tollefsen’s talk on Disability and Social Justice, given at Anselm College this fall.

Count me in the ranks of the philosophically ignorant.  Historically my efforts at studying the topic have been met with disaster.  (As certain of Dr. Tollefsen’s colleagues can attest, if they have not supressed the memory.)  And I’ll admit very plainly that there were bits of this talk where I just did my best to pay attention, and hope that sooner or later it would start making sense again.  Because I couldn’t follow all the references quickly enough — what I really needed was a transcript I could read slowly, but so far no luck searching the internet.  Have a tried contacting the author? Of course not.  That would be logical.  But next time I see him I’ll put in my request.  Honestly I hesitated to do so because I was concerned it would be either too difficult or not quite my thing, or both.   Didn’t want to bother a perfectly good philosopher just to satisfy my curiosity. But now I know better.   It was challenging for me to follow, but not too much to make it worth the effort.

So, if it isn’t too hard for me, it isn’t too hard for you, either.  Indeed since 80% of my readers are smarter than me, it should be a piece of cake for most of you, and the other one can manage at least as well as I did.  When it gets to a bit where you start to lose track of the ideas, just hang in there, because more good stuff is just around the corner.  Do allow a bit of time to listen, it is a fairly long talk.  And allow for some quiet, you need to be able to pay attention and think.

–> Handy tip:  The inaudibly asked questions (during the Q&A at the end) are all fairly long.  You can safely run your trash to the curb while you wait to hear Dr. Tollefsen’s reply, assuming your curb isn’t too far away.

So what’s in this podcast that makes it rate my monthly recommended reading (er, listening) post? If I understood him correctly (debatable point), his argument went something like this:

-Interdependence is normal for human beings.  The idea of ‘self-sufficiency’ cannot be applied to people in a meaningful way.

-We tend to think of government being a contract by and for citizens.  That is, people who are capable of consenting to their government and interacting with it.

-Not so.  Government exists to provide for the human needs that individuals and social groups (family, friends, church, etc.) are unable to provide themselves.  Think: protection from enemies, etc.

–> Government as a contract between citizens is a *form* of government, not the purpose of government.

-Understanding this gives us a more accurate way of addressing the needs of people who are disabled, who are dependent on others for care (for whatever reason), as well as those to whom the caregiving responsibilities fall.

Also in there: Why one of the legitimate roles of government is to provide a moral environment that promotes virtue.  (Answer: we are unable to do it for ourself.  We cannot individually create the environment in which we live, we need the cooperation of wider society).  And how this fits into the challenge of providing for the needs of caregivers and the cared-for.

Worth listening for: The comment on how providing for the needs of people with disabilities, caregivers, and others fits into the balance of providing for other legitimate demands on the government.  It’s quick and at the end, but provides some helpful perspective.

And much, much more.  Check it out.  Not just to see how badly I mangled a perfectly good philosophy lecture, but in order to enjoy the lecture itself.

Humor: How to Identify

In my goofing off I noticed a bit of discussion today about whether this weekend’s SNL was funny or  offensive.  Haven’t seen the episode, and have other more important internet laziness calling my attentions, so I won’t.  [Why would I want to watch something that a number of very sensible people tell me is objectionable, anyway?  When I could be reading more back-issues of Dr. Boli?  Pretty easy decision for me.]

All the same, as parents of an eight-year-old boy, the SuperHusband and I have had many opportunities to reflect on what does and does not constitute humor.  A few thoughts, not very well edited because my goofing-off time is coming to an end, and I want to just get the ideas out there today.  But here for you to ponder however confusedly, while I go make dinner and clean the house:

Humor is based on comparison. The comparison can come in many forms, but it is always there.  In a pun, it the similarity in sound between two words or phrases, combined with an apropos meaning given the context of the joke. (Why is the baker cruel? Because he whips the cream and beats the eggs.)  In slapstick humor, it is a comparison between what should have happened (walked through the door unharmed) and what did happen (a bucket of water fell on my head).   In satire, the comparison is built by taking what we know to be true about a person, and applying it in an extreme (play Sarah Palin as if she’s even flightier-sounding than she really is) or out of context (Bob Dole runs a daycare).

–> In order to understand a joke, one must be able to recognize the comparison.  This is why, say, philosophy jokes have a very limited audience.  They may be hilarious, but few audiences have the knowledge required in order to catch the comparison on which they hinge.  Usually, though, even when the audience doesn’t ‘get’ a joke (that would be me, listening to my peers tell philosophy jokes), they are merely puzzled, not offended.

So what distinguishes between a joke that is truly offensive, and one that really was funny, but the audience had no sense of humor?

Sore topics aren’t funny when the joke is told by the guilty party to the offended party.  Even if they are otherwise fair game. Double standard? No.  It’s a violation of the comparison rule.  It isn’t a joke if it is really happening, or likely to happen.

This poses a real problem for the modern satirist, as the things we joke about now seem to come true dreadfully quickly.  To review real quickly as we develop our main point, a couple of examples of possibly funny versus not funny, based not on teller, but on the premise that it isn’t a comparison if it is the literal truth:

Possibly funny: The CIA is going to subject captured enemy combatants  to Wheelock’s Latin in order to get them talk.    Not funny: ‘Jokes’ about actually torturing people, that are based on real torturers committing their real crimes on their real victims.

Possibly funny: Jokes about other species engaging in suicide.  Not funny: Most jokes about humans engaging in suicide.  (This used to be possibly funny, because it wasn’t true.  But now that large segments of the population have decided that suicide is acceptable — it isn’t — there are very few suicide jokes left.  None come to mind.  On the other hand, you can now joke about judges who declare people must stay alive until their natural death, since that is, sadly, now parody.  Hopefully only temporarily.)

So, getting back to our main issue: if I tell my eight-year-old, “Don’t touch my chocolate or I’m selling you to the salt mines”, it’s humor.  He knows I would never, ever, sell him to the salt mines.   But if I say, “Or no dessert for you,” it is not humor.  He knows that missing out on dessert is a very real possibility, based on his parents’ past behavior.

–> For this reason, parents who do sell their children to the salt mines have fewer humor options than average.  Virtue has its rewards.  Which leads to the next point:

Humor Depends on the Teller’s Credentials In most circles, one can safely tell accountant jokes, because there is very little anti-accountant persecution.  It is generally assumed the joke is well-meant poking of fun.  (Even though, in fact, most accountant jokes fall flat.  Not because accountants aren’t a lively bunch, full of interesting fodder for the satirist, but because the general public is woefully ignorant of the true esprit of the accountant, and tends to rely on the same tired and shallow assumptions decade in and decade out.  But lame humor is not necessarily offensive.  We’ll chuckle politely for you, or at least kind of twitch the lip a little to acknowledge you spoke.)

In contrast, when a group of people is subject to discrimination, hate, condescension, or other meanness in the wider society, it becomes necessary for the joke-teller to prove beyond all doubt that no derision is meant by the joke.  If this criteria can’t be meant, the joke is probably going to be received as offensive.  (This is a shame, because it deprives many innocent people of perfectly good humor.  But it is the reality all the same — our sins affect others more than we realize.)  So, for example, among southerners, humor about the idiosyncrasies of southern life is quite funny.  Told by a southerner to others? Still funny.  But told by damn Yankees people not from the south, the same jokes can be received as offensive, for there is a certain amount of cultural history that can leave one wondering whether the joke is meant as true humor, or as a veiled insult.

–> SNL treaded on dangerous ground, because they are part of a group known as the “mainstream media”.  And the mainstream media is notorious for producing all kinds of garbage that is offensive to people with disabilities (and thus to anyone with the ability to detect nonsense).  Therefore, if SNL meant to be genuinely funny, it had to prove beyond all doubt that it was not engaging in the same obnoxious blather that its colleagues churn out so regularly.

This phenomenon leads to a general rule, that one can only make fun of oneself and one’s own group.  This rule is not, however, strictly accurate. Both for the reason that a) it is possible to insult oneself and that b) it is possible to be a person of goodwill and good sense towards others.  So, even southern accountants can tell offensive southern accountant jokes (but not on this blog, I hope), and even non-southern, non-accountants can tell enjoyable southern accountant jokes.  (Don’t expect to see a compendium of such jokes published any time soon, however.)

All that said, certain groups of people have experienced such shoddy treatment at the hands of others that their sense of humor has been injured.   As it is not especially difficult to identify shoddy treatment present or past, it behooves others to be mindful of the lingering pain, and politely go find some other topic for one’s jokes.  Humor is part of the healing process, but humor inflicted from without is generally not the healing type.

What is especially egregious about the SNL fiasco?  Chances are the SNL writers didn’t even realize they were dealing with an easily-offended audience –> which is to say, with a group of people who has consistently received ill-treatment at the hands of wider society.

On the one hand, it’s a bizarre problem, given that eugenics movement and the ensuing marginalization of people with disabilities has been around for nearly a century and half now — plenty of time for an SNL writer to develop an awareness of the problem.  (And even, perhaps, to care enough about it to write some good satire on the topic.)  On the other hand, it proves the point: the whole complaint is that people with disabilities are marginalized in our society.   To the point that SNL doesn’t even know you’re there.  Let alone that you are mighty touchy just now.

–> Good humor requires you to know your topic.  Because humor depends on the comparison, an inaccurate comparison makes for poor humor.  Listen to a four-year-old try to tell a riddle. Very painful.  Poor child doesn’t quite know what a pun is yet, and therefore just tries for any random silly words that come to mind.  (Four-year-olds, on the other hand, understand slapstick quite well.)  And this same knowledge that makes for good humor is also what keeps you from being offensive, because you will know that you are dealing with a potentially sore topic.  The SNL writers offended because they tread on ground they didn’t know.

The good news is, this is knowable ground.  There are so many directions SNL could have taken the Paterson joke that would have been genuinely funny.  Funny in a way that resonated with the subject audience, and brought reality to tlhe attention of the general public.   Which is what good humor does.

Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine

Thanks to Happy Catholic for directing readers here.  Can’t believe I’ve been missing out all this time — not to worry, I’m increasingly caught up.  (With my internet reading.  Pile of papers under the desk is as unfiled as ever.)

 

Readers of this blog may also enjoy Dr. Boli’s links to his alter-ego’s non-humor blogs.  Patristics, Pittsburgh, The Grail Code, things like that.

Figuring Out What’s What in Medieval French

I’ve been reading The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow on and off for a while now.  Picked it up from the library about a year or so ago and never got past the introduction; got it out again recently, and have been browsing through it in spurts.  Pleasantly surprised tonight to discover I have one more renewal left before it goes back, so I may yet make some headway.

I should say right now that if you pick up this book, go straight to a chapter that interests you.  I had to slog through the introduction (I’m not saying *you* shouldn’t read it, just saying, don’t judge a book by its intro), but was rewarded in chapter one with a great lesson on the basics of what-was-what in medieval french languages.

So far I’m up to p. 100 in the cover-to-cover reading of the book, but I’ve also skipped ahead and read some bits farther along, and it was all good.  Assuming you have at least a smidgen of background on the topic, you can pretty safely just pick up and read wherever you like, and come away entertained and educated.  You do not, by the way, need to know French — English translations provided for all the non-obvious French words tossed out as linguistic examples, and some of the obvious ones, too.  (Say you couldn’t figure out that the word zéro meant, er, zero?  Don’t worry, there’s a translation there for you on p. 30.)

***

What struck me in reading the chapter on medieval ‘french’ is just how busy a time it was, linguistically.  By the year 800 a language distinct from latin had emerged, to the point that the church had to require homilies be given in the vernacular.  But this new language was both very local — not so much a unified language as a collection of more or less mutally understandable regional dialects — and vigorously international.  In addition to the exportation of Norman French to England with William the Conquerer, there was the development of the lingua franca, an italian-french dialect used in the mediterranean.

(Why did French become the, er, lingua franca of this region?  It was the dominant foreign culture.  Not unlike how the Amish call the rest of America ‘the English’, or a non-hispanic American might be called an ‘Anglo’, the Arabs apparently call all the crusaders, regardless of country of origin, ‘French’.)

–> And still more going on in addition to all that, over the five or so centuries that are especially middle of the middle ages.  Borrow the book and read Chapter 1 to get the introductory course.

There’s something worth understanding here.  When we think about language and geography and politics and culture, we Americans come from a perspective of a single highly standardized common language that has been fairly stable since as long as we can remember.  It is important in looking at medieval history and culture to understand that it was not this way then.  By getting a grasp of what was going on linguistically, we can avoid some common blunders in our historical analysis, and even hope to understand why certain elements of medieval society worked as they did.  Good stuff.  Well worth your time.

Rationing Health Care

I forget which of the several great blogs I owe thanks to for pointing me to Secondhand Smoke.  Good coverage of ethical issues, and over the past week there have been a few posts specifically on health care and end-of-life decisions.  Look here for a brief report about how the British healthcare system rations expensive medicines.  And here is an article about a family that wishes to dehydrate-to-death a family member who has become severely disabled by a stroke — of significant concern is the cost of nursing care for the patient.

I wanted to point out two issues that these articles raise:

First of all, making cost-versus-benefit decisions about medical care is normal and rational. Resources are limited, and both length and quality of life can be subject to opportunity costs. As a wife and mother, frankly I’m all about making this life’s inevitable suffering and end as frugal as possible.   There are times when my family’s money is better spent on some other purpose than my medical care.

Forgive me if I shock you, but shouldn’t my money be spent on my happiness?  If I find greater marginal utility in spending $10,000 on college tuition for my children, rather than on a year’s supply of a prescription drug of doubtful longterm benefit, do I not have the right to spend my money as I see fit?  If it is acceptable for me to give up my life of housewife luxury in order to toil away in a fluorescent-lit cubicle farm, in order to provide some perceived good for my children, am I not also allowed to give up that same number of days of housewife luxury, for the same benefit to my children, if instead of a cube farm I find myself suffering at home, or in purgatory, doing some kind of work arguably no less valuable than whatever clerical job I might have gotten in the first case?

So what’s wrong with a nationalized health care system making rationing decisions?  The same thing that would be wrong with a command economy telling me I am required to take that clerical job.  These are my decisions to make.   The catholic name for this principle is ‘subsidarity’.  From CCC 1883:

Socialization also presents dangers. Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

Any health care system that violates the principle of subsidarity — taking health care decisions out of the hands of the patient and making them subject to the preferences of the state — is not morally sound.

The second point that came to me, especially reading about the beleaguered stroke patient, is that we as a culture seem to have lost all concept of responsibility for caring for family members.  Let me be the first to say that I find nursing to be icky work.   There’s good reason I went into accounting and not health care.  I can barely stand to change my own kids’ diapers, why would I want to change anyone else’s?

But contemporary America has decided to completely forget about the work of caring for the helpless.  All those housewives who ‘don’t do anything’?  They’re, um, taking care of other people.

–> Ever notice that if you don’t take care of your own children, you have to pay other people to do it?  It’s because childcare is actual work.  Same story with making dinner, vacumning, cleaning toilets, all that stuff.  When people decry the ‘high cost of childcare’ I want to shake their shoulders.  Don’t you know that the nice lady who keeps your kids for you has to feed herself and her family, too?  There isn’t a ‘cheap’ method of caring for children.

And the same is true of nursing care.  Fine and good if you as a family have decided that expensive hospitalization and advanced medical procedures are not how you wish to spend your money for the care of ill family member.  But you can’t anymore decide that therefore *nobody* should feed the poor guy, just because you don’t want to pay someone to do it for you — anymore than you could decide that since daycare is so expensive, just leave the baby home alone and unfed while you go to work all day.

And now we’re back to subsidarity.  You can’t have it both ways.  Does the state have a responsibility to pay for the care of your children?  Then you have given up your right to decide how that child will be treated.  Does the state have a responsibility to care for your elderly, disabled, father?  Than you again have turned over your rights.  Because these are, fundamentally, your rights.  Your rights, and your responsibilities.

We are slipping more and more from the notion that the state has a legitimate role in assisting the most weak and vulnerable among us — the orphan, the childless elderly, the abandoned and helpless — to thinking that the state has the obligation to care for all of us.  It isn’t so.  What the state does for those most in need, it does on our behalf — the church, or some other private group or individual, could as easily do the same.  In a secular nation, it is not unreasonable that our government be a logical choice for representing us in these works of mercy.

But they are, all the same, our work.  Our responsibility.  We have a collective responsibility to the poor in our communities.  We have an individual responsibility for our own family members.  And claiming and fulfilling that responsibility is the only way we can hope to hold onto our freedom.  Which I suppose makes a homeschooling housewife a rather patriotic sort of worker.