Under the microscope

(Um, just a homeschooling post.  No deeper meaning.)

I’ve been planning school a month at  a time lately.  February went a little haywire, between guests, the flu, and the 6-week mark on the library cycle (all books to be returned).  So yesterday morning with life resuming a semblance of normalcy, had to figure out what to do about science.  Kids had really enjoyed the lab science feel to our Drop of Water study, and they’d been complaining about the endless animal research reports last fall, so I thought maybe it wasn’t the auspicious week to return to Zoo Pass Science Class.

Instead I announced that as soon as the kitchen table was clean after lunch, I’d pull out the microscopes.  We have one very nice low-power microscope that the SuperHusband acquired from work.  He had spied one sitting unused and unwanted in the lab, and in lieu of a bonus, asked his boss if he could have that instead.  The other is a hand-me-down from Ann Miko at Phos Hilarion, a good sturdy cast metal unit retired from a school science lab.

So science this week is this: You can look at anything you want under the microscopes.  Having them out for free use is turning out to be much more peaceful than having everyone gathered for one short class and having to fight for turns.

Kitchen table can be devoted to this because the weather is so nice this week.  We’re having meals and most homework outside at the picnic table.  I’ll be frank here: This is one of the primary reasons we homeschool.  Seriously.  Living in the south, our glorious summer days all come during the school year.  (In what gets called “summer” it’s one giant three-month-long sauna.)

So I was sitting outside yesterday, feeling like the luckiest person in the world (fairly accurate), and there was that little voice saying “Your children should be sitting inside under flourescent lights all day, because that’s how they’ll become prepared for the adult world”.   Because I guess people who do math in broad daylight are rank hedonists.

But people say this.  There’s this notion floating around that Children Must Suffer.  It is not enough to master the material, It Must Be Boring.  It is not enough to devote hours a day to schoolwork, it Must Be Done Someplace Unpleasant.  It is not enough to have a varied social life, There Must Be Bullies.

Now if there were something natural about spending large quantities of time sitting indoors under artificial lighting, I could be persuaded that the resistant child must be conformed to the human condition.  But given that long stretches sitting still, and long hours of daylight spent inside, are actually linked to health disorders?  It becomes a bit like insisting that because the child will likely one day work in the mines, he must be sent underground from the age of five so that he might become accustomed to the dark and damp and coal dust.

So that’s us.  Rank hedonists.  Happy Spring, southerners.

Meekness

I was pleased to see that in addition to Chelsea Zimmerman (put me in a paragraph with her any day), John Hathaway is on the undecided couch.  He ponders here and here, and then finally takes action in this letter.  This is one thing that I admire about John, even when it terrifies me: the man is not shy.  Just not.

But I’m definitely leaning toward the Tollefsen-Shea camp, not a surprise.  It fits too well.

Am I so meek?  I wish.  My specialty is doing things exactly the wrong way (even when I know better), and I’ve failed out of Meekness 101 more times than I care to count. Despite this, I have been wanting to write about Meekness for a while now, because if you’re a poly-sci/history type, you eventually figure out that the meek really do inherit the earth.

Here’s the tough part in making sense of it: In your brain when you hear the word “meek”, do you just swap in “weak” and think it means the same thing?  And maybe something about “shy as a mouse”, since mice are small and the word “mouse” starts with “m”?

[And maybe you add in something about being a peasant or something, because you think “humble” = “poor”.  Doesn’t work.  St. Thomas More was meek.  Wealthy, opinionated, but ultimately meek.]

What it really means is “mild of temper” (that’s not me) “long-suffering” (more not) and “patient under injuries” (nope, not that either).  And then we think of the Amish, who are famously meek.  So we think, oh, okay, meek = pacifist?  Maybe sometimes.  But a really good soldier is massively meek.  How else do you hold up under confusing orders, dangerous conditions, constant hardship, and just do what is asked no matter the personal cost?  That’s meek.

Public, peaceful resistance to brutal dictatorships?  That’s hardcore meekness.  (And not forgetting that yes there is a time and place to bear arms.  But remember those just war criteria?  “Some chance of success”?  Though it is just as bloody, sometimes peaceful resistance is the only moral option.  But much harder.  All the pain and suffering, maybe more, and none of the gratification of sticking it to your enemy, no matter how futile the effort.)

Anyhow, saying all that, the way I think it ties in to the recent internet excitement, is that maybe shy, weak, pro-lifers like myself need to work on our meekness a little more?  Not the fake-meekness that means ‘doing nothing’, but the real kind, which is doing what is right and what is necessary, no matter the cost.

I hate it when I post things like this.

 

Tollefsen Reply Discussion Thread

Chris Tollefsen’s reply is up, over at Public Discourse. Note about the reading level: I didn’t have to look up any words in the dictionary, which is pretty noteworthy.  But the crux paragraphs do require you to slow down and read carefully.  So don’t try to skim, you’ll just end up feeling really dumb or really resentful, depending on your disposition.

(Why yes, I did know he was going to link to this blog, he warned me a few days ago.  No, I did not know about any of the other contents of the reply until I read it this morning, other than that he promised to address the Nazi at the Door problem.  Which he does.)

So this is the thread for discussing the state of the debate as it stands today, if there’s anyone left who isn’t thoroughly bored or disgusted with the topic by now.  (And who has free time.  I’m fascinated by the problem, but I have other problems, such as long division, calling me today.)  I have not done a check for new posts elsewhere this morning, so by all means link to anything fresh that you think moves forward the discussion.

 

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Note to any new readers here: 1) Welcome! 2) Your first post or two gets automatically held for moderation.  I will try to check in periodically, and keep the spam folder empty as well, but we are actually having school today, so you take 2nd place to my darling children.  You knew that.  If your post is submerged in the ether for an unexpected amount of time, don’t assume it was due to any fault of your own.

Fr. L. on the gambling industry.

More yes.  This is all true.   Over the past dozen years I’ve spent a lot of time in Vegas.  I’m familiar with the city, inside and out.  (Surprise: I prefer “out”.  Red Rocks, to be precise.)

To Fr. Longenecker’s comments I’ll add that gambling generates no wealth.  It doesn’t feed, clothe or shelter any better than my sitting on the porch playing 3-men’s morris does so.  (Except, in that case, I get to spend time with my child, teach some strategy, get my rear whipped by a 4-year-old . . . yes, there is all that.  The bulk of casino gambling doesn’t even pretend to give us that much.)

Gambling does redistribute wealth.  If you need a method to get cash from the hands of wealthy private-jet owners into the hands of waitresses, well, yes, that is one way.  But what Fr. L says about the industry is absolutely true, including the addiction and family-destroying and saving-depleting bits.

He didn’t mention the associated crime, but you can count on that too.  When you take a whole bunch of people who want something for nothing and stick them all together in one place, it’s not exactly a surprise that greed crosses legal lines here and there.

–> This isn’t some fundamentalist getting his rear in a wad because you like to play poker with your friends.  It’s not about whether games of chance are somehow evil.

But when you pray that prayer about “lead me not into temptation”? It implies a responsibility to avoid leading your neighbor into temptation either.

You want investment?  Build a farm, or a factory.  A school even.  (Or, go crazy, send a guy to seminary.  That’s an investment.)  The gambling “industry” is not industry at all.  And you go there to spend your money, and end up spending yourself as well.

Should we argue about Live Action?

John McNichol, whose opinions I respect immensely, says lay off the criticism.  Peter Kreeft, not exactly a lightweight in the catholic moral thinking department, says you have to be pretty stupid not to recognize that what Live Action did was okay.  Francis Beckwith argues that while all lying is wrong, not all falsehoods are lies, as not all killing is murder.  Rahab is becoming a household name in the process.

I think Beckwith is on to the pivotal question.  But I don’t think the answer is obvious, and I think the firestorm in the catholic blogosphere is Exhibit A in proving my point.  When a whole host of professional catholics — intelligent, educated people who are in the business of explaining the catholic faith in their various ways —  cannot agree on a question, that tells me the answer is not yet clearly defined by the church.  And for that reason, it deserves debate.

Exhibit B is the stunning silence of the Catechism.  The church has managed to figure out two things for certain:

1) Lying is wrong.

2) You don’t have to tell everybody everything.

And that’s it.  Take a look at, say, murder or contraception, and you get lots of in’s and out’s.  This _____ is sinful, this ______ is not.   This ______ is horribly tempting but you mustn’t do it no matter what, even though you really really want to and we understand that it isn’t easy to resist.  The church is quite good about knowing all the crazy stuff we’ll think up, and heading off at the pass as many scenarios as possible.

–> It is no secret that people wonder how to handle all the situations where you might reasonably think lying is a legitimate solution.  And yet the church provides astonishingly little guidance.  The 8th commandment is apparently just not that well understood.

Which is par for the course.   Our understanding of the moral life develops over time.   Meanwhile, we argue.

***

There are a few arguments being thrown around though, that I think are a distraction.

You just know what the right thing to do is. This is Kreeft’s argugment, and an awful lot of people were no doubt thrilled to hear him say it.  I don’t think it holds.   In the face of tremendous danger in extreme situations (literally: the Nazi scenario), sincere Christians have followed their intuition and come to different answers.  Intuition is helpful, yes.  But firm moral principles are developed by starting with intuition, and seeing where it leads.  Not by sitting in the starting gate.

Lying is the only workable solution in certain situations. This is an argument about tactics.   Well, we can have a debate about tactics, but only after we know which are admissible and which are not.  If we know that lying is acceptable in ______ situation, we can proceed to the discussion of whether or not to use that particular tool.  Should I run or stand and fight?  It’s a discussion I can only have once I know that both running and fighting are legitimate choices.

Bible Heroes and Great Saints did it. People who don’t read the Bible talk about what a great collection of moral tales it contains.  So when I first started reading it, I was very confused.  Here’s what: Biography is not morality.  Biography tells me who did what.  It does not tell me whether everything my heroes ever did was in fact morally sound. Including the way they foiled the enemy this time or that.  We canonize saints without thereby proclaiming that their every action was objectively sinless.

But if you didn’t lie, horrible things would happen. I think this is where Beckwith and Tollefsen (who disagree with one another) are on the right track.  There are situations in the moral life where the only moral choice is the “no-win” — the one with disastrous consequences.  Is lying like apostasy?  Must we tell the truth at all cost, the way we must be willing to witness to Christ at all cost?  Or is lying like killing, where there are situations where it is an acceptable option?

–> The fact that horrible things will likely happen if you don’t lie, does not prove that lying is permitted.  (It does drastically lessen any potential culpability.)

[Kreeft agrees, by the way, that there are certain situations in which you must permit horrible things to happen to the people you ought to be protecting, because apostasy is worse than allowing that horrible suffering.  He doesn’t think lying ranks with apostasy.]

***

I was pretty happy with the Live Action videos when I saw them.  Horrified by what they uncovered, and thrilled that Live Action had the courage and cleverness to bring to light the evil going on.  It did not occur to me to question the methods — seemed, as many are saying, like a variation on the police tactics that catholics have not been questioning.  (Again, the silence of the Catechism is deafening.  And for my own part, in the ‘legitimate authority’ debate, when in doubt I tend to err on the side of giving rights to private citizens.)

And I agree with John McNichol that Lila Rose certainly doesn’t deserve to be singled out.  But I think this not only because, as JDM observes, she has more guts than all the internet critics combined, but also because it isn’t obvious that she’s doing anything wrong at all.  The church, it appears to me, is still way up in the air on this one.

And for that reason, I think we should argue.

History Repeats – Forced Sterilization

Chelsea at Reflections of a Paralytic reports on a UK case considering forced sterilization for a mentally-disabled woman.

The US has been there done that, and you can read all about it in this entirely secular book:  Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity By Harry Bruinius (Vintage, 2007).

Thought I had a review for you, but I can’t seem to find it.  But this blurb from a New Yorker review gives you the gist:

In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of sterilizing a twenty-one-year-old woman thought to be “feebleminded,” and Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority, “It is better for all the world, if . . . society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” This precedent led to the escalation of eugenics in the United States, and the coercive sterilization of more than sixty-five thousand people (many of whom were poor women). Bruinius deftly combines analysis of how the American quest for moral and social purity prepared people to accept pseudo-science as a basis for national policy with an account of the personal and intellectual development of eugenics’ most influential American advocates . . .

Highly recommend.  Really: Forced sterilization is a super bad idea.

 

Zombie Book Head’s Up

I suppose nearly everyone who reads here also reads at Happy Catholic, but if not, there’s a favorable review just posted for Karina Fabian’s new zombie-killer book.  In addition to being a friendly person who goes above and beyond to promote Catholic writers, Karina has a great sense of humor.  I’ve read one of her Dragoneye PI books, and found it very entertaining.  So there you go – Mardi Gras reading recommendations.

PS: Zombie book is not explicitly catholic, so suitable for general audiences who might not be comfortable with a super-catholic-y book.