Children and Moral Reasoning

You can learn a lot about what is right or wrong by attempting to explain things to your children.

My children have begun to learn about the civil rights struggle of African-Americans.  It is bittersweet because on the one hand the history presents a good way to learn about justice.  On the other, it awakens racial awareness in them that was not really there before.  I regret that children have to learn about such things.  Sometimes, I fantasize that we could all wake up with no knowledge of the past of racial slavery or segregation.  Of course, it is probably better to remember mistakes so as not to repeat them.

In any case, as Andrew and Grace learn about these matters, they ask questions of their mother and me.  They would like an explanation for the wrongs that were committed.  They have also wanted to understand what happened with the American Indians and the Trail of Tears.  

(I will admit that I was anxious to learn from my son whether he knew anything more about Andrew Jackson than that he authored the evil of the Trail of Tears.  In my effort the flesh things out, I even looked up the lyrics to The Battle of New Orleans on my iPhone and then sang them to the family at the dinner table.)

When you start to try to answer those questions, it is very simple, indeed, to see who was right and who was wrong.  White Europeans imposed themselves on the natives of this land with a substantial amount of force and fraud.  The same general group engaged in a vicious chattel slavery and a massively inhumane slave trade.  The moral lines assert themselves quite easily (thus demonstrating the silliness of relativism).  The stronger people dehumanized the weaker ones and found a way to justify getting what they wanted.  

And what is really suggestive for our view of current controversies is that I felt the same sort of tension winding up as I tried to explain abortion to my son.     

 

 

Should Evangelicals Give Up on Christian Politics?

The University Bookman asked me to review D.G. Hart’s book on how evangelicals have subverted conservative politics.  While I appreciate his strength of mind and his craft, I disagree with his thesis that striving for something like a biblical politics is a non-starter.  Here’s a clip:

As a professor at a Christian college, I must cede to Hart and his argument in this excellent and provocative book that many of us do live and work inside a movement aimed at extending the lordship of Jesus Christ to politics and every other endeavor of human life. Certainly, I can understand how many Christian political ideas and efforts add up to a “betrayal” of conservatism as Hart sees it. But the call to evangelicals to give up this task of developing a Christian politics and attempting to bring it into being through persuasion, office-seeking, and other work is unlikely to succeed.

 

The first major barrier is the immense effort (specifically of the last quarter century) that has gone into encouraging Christians to “think Christianly” about every area of their lives, including politics. The second barrier is the related lack of desire that evangelicals have to return to something like the early Falwellian position that the church has no business encouraging activism with regard to matters of domestic (such as race) or international policy (such as the Cold War). That form of church-state separation looks in the rear-view mirror very much like the pitiable refuge of those who were more concerned about intra-congregation conflict than with calling for righteous action.

 

While Hart likely does not intend to frame exactly this message, in some ways the very civil and erudite complaint against overly ambitious Christian politics comes across as a call for Christians to subordinate their faith (or at least a prominent interpretation thereof) to conservatism. He seems to be encouraging a political secularism of the right at exactly the time when Christians have been working vigorously to do away with it as an excuse for not bringing ideas from the church into the public square.

You can read the whole thing here.

What Do I Read?

A young person just asked me what I read. Interesting question.

I rotate through a variety of different magazines. Favorites include First Things, Touchstone, Christianity Today, Fortune, BusinessWeek, The New Atlantis, The City, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, National Review, and Kiplingers. A publication I would like to read, but haven’t gotten around to other than the occasional web read is City Journal.

With regard to books, my favorite author of fiction is Walker Percy.  I am also very fond of Lars Walker’s work.  My  tastes are eclectic, but I tend to gravitate toward mysteries and the old pulp action stuff, like from Robert E. Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs.  My son has gotten me back into comic books.  We’ve been reading through huge sections of the Avengers series.

On the non-fiction side, Whittaker Chambers’ Witness may be the best single book I ever read.  I have a mini-obsession with Peter Drucker’s books.  I am currently reading through the volumes I think of as having to do with social thought, but he was mostly associated with management.  I love lots of different political thinkers:  Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Locke, Rousseau, Paine, de Tocqueville, Sandel, Nozick, MacIntyre.  Hadley Arkes is really great, too.

I used to be a great reader of many websites.  You could count on me reading American Spectator, National Review, Weekly Standard, and Christianity Today online with great regularity.  With the popularization of Facebook and Twitter, I find that I spend a lot more time reading things other people point out to me.  I have come to count on Real Clear Politics a lot more, though.

UPDATE:  I should add that I read the Bible, too.  In recent years, I have felt much more strongly that is important to do so.  Before, I felt secure in my sense that I understood the basic message and what it is all about, but I came under conviction that it makes no sense to examine all kinds of other texts closely and not to spend more time on the single most important text.

“Love Makes Me Rather Terrible . . .”: A Review of Troll Valley by Lars Walker

My primary complaint with Lars Walker is that I have read all of his books.  He set his hook deep with Year of the Warrior.  I have hungered for more ever since.

Lars wrote his first three books (Year of the Warrior, Wolf Time, and Blood and Judgment) for the well-known sci-fi and fantasy publisher Baen Books.  I’m not sure that Baen ever really knew how to market Lars’ work.  Still, he has a growing cult following.  I am convinced there is money to be made in buying the rights to his work from Baen.

He wrote a fourth volume for Nordskog (a sequel to Year of the Warrior called West Oversea).  I heartily recommend them all, though Year is my personal favorite.  I have read from it to stunned silence from underclassmen and professors alike.  The book has impact.  Gene Veith prefers Wolf Time.

Now, Lars has bravely taken the path of writing a book directly for Amazon and the other ebook formats.  Troll Valley is available for a mere $2.99 at Amazon.  I happily loaded it on my kindle and read it like some guilty pleasure which would occasionally turn my emotions inside out.

The story revolves around a young man named Chris Anderson.  He is the grandchild of Norwegian immigrants living in Minnesota in the early 20th century.  There are three outstanding facts about Chris.  He has a deformed arm he bitterly compares to a duck’s wing.  He has an honest-to-goodness fairy godmother (it is she who is made terrible by her love for him).  And when he feels angry, inferior, or threatened, strange things happen.  Though it sounds like it, this book is not for children.  

I am not enough of a student of literature to say what genre this book fits into, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would call it something like Christian magical realism.  Lars has a special gift for writing engrossing stories which also contain many lessons, most of them about the faith.  

I urge you to start reading the books written by this talented and wise man.  Troll Valley at $2.99 is not a bad place to start.

A Son Speaks to His Non-Famous Author Father

My short introduction to political thought will come out this summer.  Andrew (9) had some concerns.

Andrew:  Did you dedicate this book to me and Grace like you did the first one?

Me:  No, I dedicated this one to your mommy.  You’ve already had your dedication.

Andrew:  Yeah, but nobody at my school knows about your first book.  (He is referring to The End of Secularism.)

Me:  Well, the book wasn’t written for elementary school children.

Andrew:  None of my teachers know about it either.

Symmetry and Beauty

I read sometime ago that people’s perception of beauty in others has a lot to do with symmetry.  Sadly, I must report that I am sorely lacking by this reckoning.

My hairline has receded asymmetrically.  It goes further back on the right side than on the left.

One of my hips is higher than the other.

My smile is crooked and my canine teeth are almost vampire long.

I find it almost impossible to sit still and have a tendency to draw one leg up under me so as create a slanted look.

One eye is almost always more open than the other.

Amazingly, none of this bothers me terribly much,  for which I thank God for giving me perspective and my beautiful wife for possessing the feminine virtue of looking beneath the surface in evaluating a mate.

The Future of Higher Education

A colleague and I went to a presentation by Apple Computer on using their technology in higher education.  They showed us some things I’d seen before such as lectures by some of the most famous professors online for anyone to see.  My colleague was stunned and began to develop a view that higher education as we know it is over.  After all, if anyone can have access to the substance of an ultra-fine education whenever they want it, why have a multitude of institutions doing the work separately across the land?

I am less sure than my colleague that the revolution is on the horizon.  There are several reasons.  Just because someone can witness all the lectures from Verygood business school does not make them a Verygood business grad.  They don’t necessarily have the scores to get into Verygood business.  They won’t have spent a few years interacting with students in Verygood business.  Nor will they have had their work evaluated by Verygood business professors over a period of years.  If access to content were the whole ball game, then the profusion of good public libraries in the twentieth century would have spelled the end of higher education.  Content is NOT king in higher education.  Part of the answer is that education is about more than the information a professor can convey in a series of lectures.  Grades matter.  Class dynamics matter.  Class participation matters. Interaction with the professor matters.  Community matters.

The basic question remains, though.  Why can’t I just watch all the Verygood business lectures and then do my own homegrown projects and show up for a job interview with a portfolio I have compiled?  Isn’t it true that in the past many lawyers simply studied on their own and then took the bar?

Better yet, why don’t employers create their own schools to teach exactly what they want and then recruit students out of high school to attend?  Why doesn’t Apple have an Apple Institute full of teachers of all things relevant to making Apple great and profitable?

The answer on both counts is that the current system makes life easier for employers.  Sure, human resources departments could look at the entirely self-taught individual’s portfolio and try to make a judgment as to his or her skill.  But it is much easier (and you will never go broke betting on easy) to find a recognizable credential and filter out the ones who have it for further consideration.  College and university degrees provide a time-saving way to evaluate large numbers of applicants.  The same is true of a law school class rank, for example.  A firm might weed people out by considering only graduates in the top 15% of their class.

And why doesn’t Apple run its own college or school?  Why should the shareholders of Apple foot the bill for such an exercise when they can sit back and wait for lots of promising young people to graduate (at their own expense) so they can skim the cream with no more cost than what it takes to recruit and evaluate?

No, higher education is not dead simply because the content is easy to access for potential do-it-yourselfers.  Nor is it going to be replaced by expensive institutes run by employers for employers.  They would rather students pay and they pick the winners afterwards.

The Peter Drucker You Never Knew

Most readers will recognize Peter Drucker’s name as the author of many books about management.  The Austrian immigrant was revered in that field and sold millions of books.  Few realize, though, that his academic training was actually in international law and that he moved toward business out of his conviction that management is a liberal art.  I have embarked upon a research project to read and understand his social thought.  In the process of reading his first book, The End of Economic Man, I have run into many gems, including this one:

Realization of freedom and equality was first sought in the spiritual sphere.  The creed that all mean are equal in the world beyond and free to decide their fate in the other world by their actions and thoughts in this one, which, accordingly, is but a preparation for the real life, may have been only an attempt to keep the masses down, as the eighteenth century and the Marxists assert.  But to the people in the eleventh or in the thirteenth century the promise was real.  That every Last Judgment at a church door shows popes, bishops, and kings in damnation was not just the romantic fantasy of a rebellious stonemason.  It was a real and truthful expression of that epoch of our history which projected freedom and equality into the spiritual sphere.

This is not the stuff of The Effective Executive, but it is great stuff.

Huntsman’s Team on Why He Lost

Press secretary Tim Miller gives the answer, “Mitt Romney beat us,” and then goes on to explain the things Mitt Romney has done well.  That’s fine.  Mitt Romney probably has been a better candidate this time than in 2008, but the answer regarding Huntsman’s own campaign is far from sufficient.

It is probably too soon for a post-mortem from a member of the team, but at some point I would like to see one of them explain how it is that a successful governor with a strong record managed to be the ONLY candidate in the race who failed to get a turn in the spotlight.  We have seen Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain earn serious consideration and high poll numbers.  Santorum and Gingrich have both mounted threats to Romney, despite seemingly being finished as office-holders.  And yet, Jon Huntsman, a man with a terrific resume’ and a solid record, was scarcely able to beat the margin of error.

Why?  I think the answer is that he gave off the wrong signals right from the beginning.  Huntsman was asked about matters such as climate change and evolution.  His answers gave the clear impression that he felt conservative voters have failed to comprehend the rationality and power of science, thus demonstrating that he apparently buys into the standard narrative of the conservative idiot.  Voters will never choose the man who appears to hold them in contempt.

He could have held exactly the same opinions he has, but addressed the matter differently.  For example, he could have said that he understands the evidence regarding climate change and thinks the primary question for non-scientists is what it all means.  Much of the resistance regarding climate change arguments is not so much to the idea of it as to the question of what should be done.  The wall begins to rise when the globo-catastrophists list their very expensive demands.  Huntsman should have turned the question to those issues rather than making acceptance or denial of climate change the issue.  With regard to evolution, Huntsman should have likewlse turned the question to the implications.

A second, though less significant answer, is that Huntsman missed his one big opportunity to make an impression on voters.  After coming in third in New Hampshire and getting prime time air to give a speech, Huntsman failed to have any kind of compelling message ready.  When Rick Santorum made his big splash in Iowa, he spoke without notes to massive effect.  He was ready.  Huntsman’s “ticket to ride” speech left his audience wanting more.

Barack Obama: Mayor of Portlandia

The president has ruled against granting permission to build the Keystone Pipeline in the United States.  In so doing, he makes a decision against the oil of our friendly, democratic, and peaceful neighbors to the north and for the oil of tyrants in the Middle East and a dictator in Venezuela.

Perhaps more important, he has decided against using the North American energy revolution to rebuild the economy.  You need real businesses to provide real jobs.  You also happen to need real businesses and real jobs to fund government jobs and the welfare state.

Instead, our president acts as though he is the mayor of Portlandia where young people go to retire and the unemployment problem has been solved by paying citizens to finish each other’s sentences.

Reflections on the Occupy Movement

As a college professor, I find myself frequently thinking about the Occupy movement.  Though the absolute numbers of participants are not large, it is clear that the general sentiment of disillusionment and anger has tendrils which spread into the general population of young people.  I would like to explore the question of whether they have a point and how we should think about it.

Getting the Bill for the Six Parties Ahead of You

There are many good reasons for the young to be frustrated.  First, they are coming to adulthood at a time when older generations have taken a course of action that damaged their own prospects.  Large corporations have been severely hindered by old agreements to provide for workers after retirement.  The CEO of General Motors, prior to his dismissal, complained that he felt he was running a health insurance company rather than a car company.  Many of the great old corporations have struggled against massive legacy costs of this type.  Who gained?  The old management gained because they were able to reduce wages in exchange for costs they could put off well into the future.  The old workers gained because they have secured a right to benefits which run for decades beyond their last day of labor.  Old labor gained.  Old management gained.  Who is left with the check?  Later generations must pay the bill in terms of reduced competitive capability for the enterprises and less money to invest on growth.  Resources which flow to those who ran things decades ago are unavailable to the rising cohort.  The more pensions, the more health insurance legacies, the less which can be used for building strong companies today.  Labor and management conspired to make the future pay.

Our elected officials have done the same thing, ultimately.  We have financed government at a level beyond our willingness to pay for it and thus have racked up debt which grows prodigiously.  The young realize that while entitlement after entitlement accrued to their elders, they will be expected to pay for those programs while suffering great pessimism over whether they will ever enjoy the fruits of them.  Just as with corporations, the government officials and their constituents (the management and labor, so to speak) have conspired to postpone costs into the future.  The young are supposed to look hopefully into the future.  But how can they do so when it has been loaded with debt like some ill-fated corporate spin-off?

The Psychological Terror of Being Young

One of the great difficulties of being a young person just out of college like many of the Occupy protesters is that one’s personal future is very much in doubt.  Right up until the end of college, the young person has been on an escalator that is going somewhere.  Preschool to kindergarten to elementary school to middle school to high school and then to college.  It is all easy to understand and the next steps are clear.  But what to do at the end of the escalator?  There are some programs which seem to feed people right along into another series of escalators, such as teaching, nursing, medical school, maybe accounting, but many others lead to a more open future with widely variable outcomes.  What of the English major or the student of history who does not go into graduate study?  What does an art major do?  How about the dramatic pupil, the communication arts scholar?  For these students, there is no continuing escalator.

When I got out of college in 1992, I could not simply enter an academy of government service and get an assignment.  Interestingly, I tried to do something like that.  I obtained a master’s degree in public administration with the sole goal of getting into the Presidential Management Internship which would feed me right into a government agency.  Despite being at the top of my class, I did not get the appointment.   The uncertainty of my future terrified me.  I spent the next several years of my life trying to figure out what to do and where to go.  I earned a law degree and a Ph.D.  Only then did I find my own path.  During those years of confusion and wilderness, how I envied those with sure paths.  I raged at the way my own life circumstances had left me without the kind of parental connections or other favorable breaks which could start me in a career.  I am sure that many young people in the Occupy movement share those feelings.

I went through all of that in the era of relatively inexpensive tuition.  Thanks to scholarships and help from the parents (mainly at the undergrad level), I escaped with very little debt.  For the average Occupy protester, student debt is a very substantial part of the grievance.

Being Prepared for Reality

There is an indictment to be delivered on those of us in the college game.  Generally speaking, we don’t prepare students mentally for the end of the escalator.  We need to impress upon them that getting the credential of a bachelor’s degree and completing a program of study is just the base level in the process of getting a job.  Very few people come out of college ready to do the jobs they plan to get.  College does not train most students for a job in the way a trade school might.  Instead, college signals employers that a particular student has a degree of competence, can receive and complete assignments, and is used to showing up at a given place at a given time in some kind of routine way.  The college program is a foundation.  But during college, the student needs to be looking well beyond just passing classes.

Throughout, a young person should be thinking in the manner of the old Evangelism Explosion which queried individuals as to what they would say when God asked them, “Why should I let you in my heaven?”  Except, in our scenario, the question from the employer is, “Why should I give you a job with my company?”  If your only answer is that you have completed a course of study at a university and have no experience or no special skill to offer, then you are not a very attractive candidate.  You need to have completed your course of study AND know how to write really well AND be able to analyze problems AND come up with good solutions AND have some basic quantitative skills AND be computer literate AND have cultivated habits of lifetime learning AND have reasonably good social skills AND be opportunistic about finding work and delivering results.

Until a young person starts to understand just how steep the wall is that they face before they become attractive to an employer, they will mostly be bewildered as to why things aren’t working out.  But think about it from the employer’s side of things.  They can either pay you a salary or spend that money on facilities, technology, profit for investors, making a product better for customers, or any number of other items which may be more attractive than  hiring an inexperienced young person.  Being a warm body with a nice credential doesn’t work well unless the economy is smoking hot, as with the dot.com boom.

And, by the way, the economy is not smoking hot, nor does it show signs of being smoking hot any time in the near future.  As to why, please see the first section on getting the bill for the six parties ahead of you.

Conclusion

The solution to the fiscal problem is not to make sure that the government increases its budget to spend a lot more on young people to go along with the very large (and unsustainable) amount we spend on older people.  Rather, the solution is to reverse the bad habits.  Corporations have been hard at work for years getting younger employees on the 401k train rather than on pensions.  Governments will need to do the same thing.  Pensions are not a sustainable model for a population like ours that barely replaces itself.  Neither do they make much sense when people may live as many decades after working as they spent working.

The solution to the problem of being young and uncertain is to do a better job of preparing young people for the end of the escalator.  The old join a corporation and spend forty years there and then get a pension model is finished.  Whoever embraces it will be defeated economically by those who do not.  Everyone must be an entrepreneur of their own skills and abilities.  If you aren’t prepared to do that, then find one of the few remaining escalators left which run all the way to retirement.

Giving a Speech: Read or Speak without Notes?

During the past few years, I have had the opportunity to give many speeches and lectures.  I wrestled with the question of whether to speak without notes, to speak from an outline, or to speak from a prepared text.  Having done all three, I have come down squarely on the side of speaking from a prepared text.

Most people, I think, intuitively disagree with that answer.  So, let me explain.

When people speak without notes, they have a great tendency to repeat themselves, to lose the organizational structure of what they are saying, or even to get stuck in pauses as they compose on the fly what they are going to say next.  They will also find it very difficult to hit a specific time for the speech with an appropriate introduction and conclusion.  There are people who can do it, but they are few and far between.  When speaking, the only people who should go without notes are the very best.  It’s like golf.  Most of us should punch a shot from the woods right back into the fairway rather than trying to play a line drive through the trees toward the hole.

Speaking with notes is better, but the problems of timing and composing on the fly still exist.  Ditto with repetition.  It is very hard to control these things without a ton of practice.  And I’m not sure how many of us have hours and hours to spend attempting to memorize a speech.  The time could be better spent on superior composition and crafting the message.

Speaking from a prepared text solves a lot of problems.  You will have organized it perfectly because you have written it and can easily read what you have written to see if it is clear and gets the message across.  It is easy to see if the speech matches the time allotted because you can simply time yourself in a run-through.  You won’t repeat yourself because you will be able to read the speech and see if you are repeating yourself.

Some are unconvinced because they can remember the horrible experience of watching someone read a speech.  And yes, it can be quite awful.  That is why a person who reads a speech must be able to look up frequently, vary the pitch, and provide emphasis where it is needed.  I have watched a recording of myself reading a speech.  It has become so natural for me that I do not look like a reader.

But the clincher for me is that William F. Buckley read his speeches (as he detailed in Cruising Speed).  He was an outstanding speaker.  Buckley insisted on a Q & A after each speech so the audience would see that he was capable of holding his own without a text.

A Six Year Old’s Theology of Bullying

The public schools are going all out to stop bullying these days.  My children both attend a public elementary school, so I hear a lot about it.  

Yesterday, though, my six year old daughter put together what she is hearing in school with what she has learned about the Christian faith.  I was astonished and touched by the truth and clarity of it.

Sitting across the kitchen table while I read and she did her homework, she said, “You shouldn’t be a bully because God didn’t make you to be mean to people. He made you so people wouldn’t be lonely.”