Should we chase superstition and fear from our hearts?

"We should chase superstition and fear from our hearts, if we're going to survive and take levels of sanity higher."  This won't win any prizes for beautiful poetry, though it does scan perfectly well when sung by Andy Partridge.  At any rate, as I was listening to "Merely a Man" the other day (it appears on XTC's 1989 double-LP Orange and Lemons), I started to think less about the music (not their best, not their worst) and more about the sentiment expressed.

These questions took hold of me and refused to let go: Why does this sentiment seem particularly associated with self-proclaimed atheists and "free-thinkers"?  Why do we so rarely hear it expressed by the self-identified religious?

  

One possible answer: Religious folks share the sentiment, but simply don't think it gets at a serious problem.  While superstition and fear are not good things, godlessness and atheism are much worse.  We don't need to worry too much about the superstitious and fearful.  We can assume they're OK, as long as they're saying their prayers, receiving the sacraments, or whatever.  Even those who have a bad diet overall simply can't help but provide themselves with the nutrition they need for the general well-being of their organism. Superstition and fear, while not exactly praiseworthy things, pose no real threat to spiritual well-being.  The intellectual conscience is fine for those who want it.  But ultimately, it's optional.  It's not integral to piety.

This answer strikes me as hard to defend.  Consider the analogy to bodily health just invoked.  To slowly poison yourself through bad food and drink means that you will not feel as good as you should feel.  It entails that you will probably die an earlier death than you would like.  In matters of the spirit, things are much worse.  Any approach to God infected by superstition is likely to be a form of idolatry.  It will cause one to miss the mark altogether.

Some penetrating religious observers see the point. Pascal, for one, insists that genuine piety is different from superstition.  He notices that there are many who claim to believe, but do so out of superstition.  Indeed, he does not merely notice this, but uses it to support his claim that "there are few true Christians."  Or, as Nietzsche says in one place, in every religion the religious person is an exception.

So Pascal and Partridge agree (if only on this): we should chase superstition from our hearts.  But my original questions seem to re-emerge: why do religious folk seem generally not to be inspired by the sentiment?  Why do we so rarely hear it coming from them?  Why might an impartial observer conclude that those who concern themselves with superstition and fear as problems are more likely to be anti-religious than religious?

A second, darker answer suggests itself.  Many religious folk have a bad conscience about the whole matter.  In their quiet moments, they suspect that their own faith adds up to little more than fear and superstition.  The cry to "chase superstition and fear from our hearts" does not resonate, because it would mean to empty their own hearts.  Easier to go after other people, rather than worry about one's own darkness.

Is this answer correct?  I don't know.  Perhaps it applies to all of us some of the time, and some of us all of the time.

Here's a third possible answer (really a variant of the first): smart religious folk don't think too much these days about superstition, because they see that the alleged imperative to rid ourselves of superstition and fear is a bit old-fashioned.  However worked up those quaint Enlightenment folks might have been, we occupy a different historical moment.  For the most part, we've managed to let go of the worst superstitions, including the superstition that reasoned opposition to superstition will produce a more humane society.  As for the superstitions that remain, what harm do they do?  It's nice to have a bit of enchantment in our lives.  The real threat to our humanity, in any case, does not come not from the superstitious.  It arises from those who would mercilessly debunk anything and everything.

The last strand of this answer derives from a certain reading of C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.  Lewis is right, I think, to take aim at a certain kind of "debunker" who, whatever his intention, does not exactly succeed in producing better thinkers or better human beings.  Moreover, when Lewis calls for the "irrigation of deserts" against the tendency of the debunkers, he does not mean to suggest that deserts should be watered by superstition.  I can follow Lewis a good way down this path.  Nonetheless, the sense that in our present times, credulity and superstition are not much of a problem strikes me as mostly an error.  We have little interest in chasing superstition and fear from our hearts.  But is it really because there is nothing to chase away?

I don't pretend to have exhausted the possibilities.  I'm still wondering.  Feel free to wonder with me in the comments...

Snobbery and Playing God

Rick Santorum has accused Obama of snobbery for wanting every American to go to college. Much of the negative response concerns his rhetoric. The governor of my home state reflected the general mood with his "I wish he'd said it differently."

Perhaps, but I'm more interested in asking about the matter than the manner of what he said. Is it snobbish to want everyone to go to college?

Obama's plan for universal higher education would have been unthinkable in past centuries--for many reasons. Among those reasons was the widespread belief that not everyone belonged in the university, because it was in people's best interest not to quit the sphere into which they were born. Pretending that this system promoted a separate-but-equal system would be the height of bad faith, as separate-but-equal claims generally are. If any views about higher education qualify as snobbish, this one certainly does.

For the most part, such views are--thankfully--no longer live options. But how could their apparent opposite--the idea that everyone belongs in college--then be snobbish?

Because the truth of the matter is that some people go to college and some do not, and the desire for everyone to do so seems to imply that the first group, at least at the completion of their formal education, is somehow better or better off than the second.

By some standards--particularly those that are easy to measure--it is clear that college graduates are better off. Their lifetime earning is higher; their rate of unemployment is lower. Because these goods appeal to everyone, their value is difficult to question. But we do run into dangerous territory if we mean that college graduates are morally better, more excellent human beings, or members of a higher class defined by something other than earning potential.

Obama attempted to respond to this criticism by insisting that he did not mean that everyone needs a four-year degree. He intended his remarks to apply to technical training as well--the kind that might help those "decent men and women who go out and work hard every day," in Santorum's words, earn and keep gainful employment. He did not mean, in other words, that everyone needs the traditional liberal education associated with the four-year degree and that earlier, snobbish class system.

Fortunately, one is increasingly unlikely to acquire a liberal education at most four-year colleges.

It is worth asking, however, what such an education might liberate one from. At its best, it might liberate one from the kind of sentiment expressed in Santorum's following sentences, much neglected by the news reports:

"Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his."

This religious allusion is particularly odd. If we are already made in God's image, as I presume Santorum believes, do we need remaking in the image of fallen human beings instead? Putting that aside, ought parents to see their goal as reproducing images of themselves? Isn't the more loving and properly humble thing to hope and strive that your children might overcome your weaknesses, escape your faults, and excel your achievements?

Certainly, it is frightening to allow one's children to learn. Hoping for and encouraging their education raises the very real possibility that they may come to believe and embrace things that are foreign or even anathema to their parents.

There is nothing wrong with wanting your children to share your standards and convictions. There is something wrong with prioritizing sameness in itself over their development, or with closing oneself off to the possibility that they might grow to teach you that your standards and convictions are misguided. There is something more wrong about resenting your children if they choose to follow those standards in ways that you did not. The child of a lawyer may choose to pursue justice by living with the poor, and the child of a steel worker may choose to mold the world through the quite different honest hard work of a heart surgeon. Neither child would be the image of the parents. But if either parent responded to this situation by resenting her child's choices, the accusation of snobbery would be apt indeed.

One does not, indeed, need a formal education to come to these insights about human development. My father, who does not have a four-year degree, possesses them to the highest degree of anyone I have ever known. But again, liberal education at its best makes such insights available to some not so parentally blessed. Can everyone benefit from such an education? Is everyone capable of it?

This is a genuinely difficult question. I can only respond with the remark of one of my students on this topic:

"We have to hope so."

On Lenten Observance and the Labyrinth of the Heart

In Nietzsche's too-neglected essay, "Schopenhauer as Educator," he observes that "wherever there has been tyranny, there the solitary philosopher has been hated; for philosophy offers an asylum to a man into which no tyranny can force its way, the inward cave, the labyrinth of the heart."

This is a mournful, beautiful sentiment. Here is a man who knows that philosophy can indeed console--and a man whose forced solitude has often made consolation necessary.

It is, perhaps ironically, a sentiment appropriate for Ash Wednesday. Christ offers us the deepest consolation--a joy that can only be had after the cutting engagement with sin. And, at its best, the church provides the means for such consolation--forms and rituals that help bring our hearts, minds, and bodies into the necessary receptive stance.

I grew up in the Baptist church, and there are many things about that formation for which I will always be grateful. But my worship experience as a child lacked a deep sense of such rituals. And it lacked altogether a sense of the liturgical year beyond Christmas and Easter. Advent was a children's game involving calendars and festivity, and Lent was missing entirely.

Like many with this formation, I have treasured coming to know more liturgical traditions. The liturgy, at its best, provides words when words fail us. It is a sanctuary in the true sense--an asylum into which tyranny cannot force its way.

At its best. But it is all too easy to forget--perhaps because it seems so obvious--that forms can also be empty shells. Worse still, they can be sources of pride, thus contradicting everything this day is supposed to remind us of. Those of us walking around with ashes on our foreheads must ask ourselves: is this really humbling, or do I want people to know that I have observed the appropriate ritual today?

The form, the asylum, the sanctuary are all open spaces with walls--or perhaps cradles--around them. They are nothing unless filled with the inwardness of the labyrinthine hearts who realize how much they need them.

Anti-Gingrich Linguist Speaks Well. But Is He Smart?

"Gingrich's patterns of speech are largely analytically acute, and sometimes aesthetically interesting, but substantively, they are very often lacking," the linguist John McWhorter opines in the New Republic ("Words, Mere Words: Newt Gingrich Speaks Well. But Is He Smart?") Why does McWhorter say that Gingrich's patterns of speech" are "very often" lacking? Why not simply "often"? I am suspicious of a linguist whose use of "very" is so manifestly hackish.

And just what does it mean for speech patterns to be "substantively lacking"? An assertion or claim can be "substantively lacking" in several ways. A partial catalogue: (1) The claim is a tautology; (2) The claim cannot be falsified; (3) The claim involves circular reasoning; (4) The claim asserts that something is the case, when it is patently not the case; (5) The claim is a contradiction. But in what sense are "patterns of speech" substantively lacking? Speech patterns can be annoying, confusing, pedestrian, varied, pretentious, repetitive, etc. But "substantively lacking"? What's substantively lacking is that which is being patterned, not the pattern itself. (Here I'm speaking with McWhorter, granting him his distinction between "substance" and "package," or what would more standardly be called "content" and "form." In fact, the distinction's meaning and application is far from clear.) 

McWhorter continues: "Gingrich is sometimes so pleased with his uninterrupted stream of words, that he mistakes it for an actual flow of ideas." That one can use many words to say little is evident. But does Gingrich characteristically say nothing? Or is it that he says plenty of things, many of them objectionable? Does he have no ideas? Or does he have bad ones? I suspect that McWhorter wants to have it both ways. 

McWhorter is right to say that slangy talk may contain "sober reasoning." But the example that he gives (taken from W. Labov) does not establish the point. Far from containing "clear formal lines of logic," it's a morass. Consider the reconstruction:  

1. Everyone has a different idea of what God is like.

2. Therefore nobody knows that God really exists.

3. If there is heaven, it was made by God.

4. If God doesn’t exist, he couldn’t have made heaven.

5. Therefore heaven does not exist.

6. Therefore you can’t go to heaven.

(1) is questionable on two grounds: (a) That "everyone" has a different idea of what God is like is not plausible. Suppose there are multiple ideas.  But one per person ("everyone")? There are 6.8 billion people on the planet; there are not 6.8 billion ideas of God; (b) It's not even clear that there are multiple "ideas of God." There may be ideas that purport to represent God. But are they actually ideas of God? Or are they ideas of something which is taken to be God, but which is not God (rather, some idol)? I am inclined to say that properly speaking, there are no "ideas of God."

(2) is a gross non sequitur. To begin a sentence with "Therefore" has no tendency to ensure that it follows logically from the prior sentence. Even if (1) were true, (2) would not follow. Why should everyone having the same idea of God be a condition of knowing that God exists? Not everyone has the same idea of Newt Gingrich, but we know that he exists. In fact, there are plenty of people who have no idea of Newt Gingrich at all.

(3) is problematic, since it assumes that heaven is a "thing," something akin to an artifact. More seriously defective is the antecedent of (4). The claim "God doesn't exist" is flown in, as it were, with no justification at all. Even if (1) were true, and (2) were to follow from (1), the claim "God doesn't exist" is independent of (2). Why? Because (2) is a claim about the status of our knowledge, not about existence. What's needed is an additional claim about existence. Something like:

 (4a) God doesn't exist.

If (and only if) this is granted, then what follows from (4) and (4a) is (by modus ponens):

 (4b) God couldn't have made heaven.

Now we can use (4b) or an implication thereof, e.g. (4c) "heaven wasn't made by God" to perform modus tollens on (3), proving (5). But (4a) is crucial. Its gratuitous assumption shows that the argument does not operate along the "clear formal lines of logic." It is not, as it stands, an instance of "sober reasoning." On the contrary, it is both unsound and invalid. 

Back to McWhorter. He is clearly upset about Gingrich's disparaging comments on bilingual education. That Gingrich's comments on this topic might be unsubtle or ill-informed is entirely possible. I suspend judgment, at least for now; McWhorter himself acknowledges there is room for critique ("bilingual ed programs in the United States have not always been good"). But what explains McWhorter's willingness to perform induction on a sample of one? Suppose Gingrich is wrong about the particular issue of bilingual education. Does that establish that he generally "interprets his academic training as a way primarily to burnish his own ego—to confuse supporters into following him, rather than to clarify matters of importance"? It does not. My impression is that Gingrich commands an impressive amount of substantive knowledge in a range of policy domains, foreign and domestic. In my own observation, he's deployed that knowledge in attempts to clarify matters of importance, more so than most politicians. Do his attempts succeed? That's another question. But how should we react when a writer who uses his academic training to make a name for himself in popular journals of opinion presumes to accuse another person of using his academic training to "burnish his own ego"? My own reaction: laughter.

Laughter aside, a serious question remains. Is Gingrich ultimately just another ego-ridden demagogue who cares nothing for truth? Perhaps. I've been depressed about the leading lights of the GOP for some time now. But McWhorter's smug hit piece is poor evidence for the claim that Gingrich is "not smart."

Review of a new biography of Nietzsche

Young, Julian. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, xxxii + 649 pp.

A massive effort that combines biographical narrative with textual interpretation, Julian Young's new work on Nietzsche demands attention. This is due partly to the importance of its subject, and partly to the impression of thoroughness conveyed by the book's length. Though not without its flaws, Young's biography is worth reading for anyone who wants to enter more deeply into Nietzsche's life and work.

What makes Young's biography worth reading? It is written in an unpretentious style, refreshingly free from academic jargon. It contains a wealth of small but telling details about Nietzsche's life that, while not unattested by previous biographies, deserve to be better known than they are. For instance, after winning in 1885 a court settlement against his publisher and paying off his debts to bookstores, Nietzsche purchased and designed his father's tombstone, with a verse from 1 Corinthians inscribed on it ("Love never faileth") (9). This happened thirty-six years after his father died. Young admirably brings out Nietzsche's dedication to teaching his students, his determination to become (as he put it in a letter to Erwin Rohde) a "really practical teacher" (68). We learn that he even offered them five-course dinners at the end of the semester (102). One imagines that he cooked well; in 1876 or 1877, while living in Sorrento, he learned how to make risotto (293). Despite the blasts in his autobiography against coffee, he apparently frequented the Venetian open-air cafés in St. Mark's Square, where he "discovered Italian coffee to be the best in the world" (291). Writing from Sils Maria, Nietzsche asked his mother to send him a needle and thread, implying, as Young says, that he could "sew as well as cook" (317). Neither his disdain for the English nor his experimentalism stopped him from being brand-loyal to Horniman's English tea (454). He appears to have delighted in fan mail sent to him from Baltimore (322). In company he read aloud short stories by Mark Twain (166), whose "craziness" he professed to love "more than German cleverness" (236). Young's book is rich in such details. They serve to humanize the alternately forbidding and buffoonish figure that emerges from Nietzsche's autobiography.

Another primary strength of Young's book is its attention to the role of music in Nietzsche's life. Nietzsche loved music—to hear it, to compose it, to improvise at his piano. Months after his collapse, he continued to play beautifully, according to his friend Heinrich Köselitz (551-52). Though Nietzsche is often considered a poor composer, Young shows that the truth of this evaluation is hardly self-evident. It derives, he argues, in no small part from Hans von Bülow's graceless conjecture that Nietzsche's music was a joke, perhaps intended as a parody of "so-called music of the future" (154). Was von Bülow right about Nietzsche's lack of compositional talent? The reader can judge for himself, since Young provides not only his own assessment, but also links to recordings of Nietzsche's music on the book's Web site. While devoting appropriate attention to Nietzsche's conflicted relations with Wagner, Young shows that his musical horizons extended further. Nietzsche thought highly not only of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, and Mendelssohn, but also of his contemporary Brahms. As Young shows, he sought (fruitlessly) to convince Wagner of his validity and sent Brahms a copy of his "Hymn to Life." Brahms did not reciprocate Nietzsche's interest. Despite the extension of his interests beyond Wagner, Young concludes that Nietzsche was dominated by an "innate musical conservatism" (37, 496). Only a handful of composers were able to give him what he sought from music, "the experience of self-transcendence" (459).

The chapter on "Nietzsche's Circle of Women" is among the most valuable in the book. Young spends due time on his problematic relationships with his mother, his sister, and Lou Salomé. Going beyond these well-known figures in his life, Young shows that despite his anti-feminism, Nietzsche surrounded himself with a number of "feminist friends." To one such friend, Resa von Schirnhofer, he chose to communicate orally, in a manner she found "alien" and "terrifying," the doctrine of the eternal return, before resuming (as she says) "his normal way of speaking and usual self" (389). Beyond its amusement value, the vignette shows that in spite of his more notorious remarks, Nietzsche's emotions toward women were not confined to fear, anger and contempt. Well after he was rejected by Lou Salomé, Nietzsche actively sought women as interlocutors. Young shows in admirable detail the importance of von Schirnhofer, Malwida von Meysenbug, Helen Zimmern, Meta von Salis, and Helene Druskowicz for Nietzsche's life. Perhaps most important, Young concludes, is Cosima Wagner, his "ideal woman" with whom "four-handed piano playing and long metaphysical conversations were major elements in their relationship" (399). Given Nietzsche's love for Cosima to the very end, what explains his later tendency to emphasize his anti-feminist side? Young concludes that while Nietzsche treasured the company of educated, intelligent women, "what terrified him was women's access to power" (400). But why? Young's explanation seems less to solve the problem than to reinforce its difficulty.

As a guide to the events and people in Nietzsche's life, Young's book is reliable. Its interpretations of Nietzsche's texts are necessarily more controversial. Some of its attempts to describe and adjudicate controversies in Nietzsche interpretation are valuable. For instance, Young's assessment of Nietzsche's "perspectivism" and what it implies—and does not imply—is clear and balanced (473-76). Even if it unlikely to convince readers inclined to the "postmodern Nietzsche," it stands as a worthy contribution. Occasionally, however, the book proposes summaries that will leave serious readers unsatisfied, regardless of where they fall in the usual interpretive divides. Understandably enough, Young wants to give the reader new to Nietzsche an idea of each of his published works. Yet if there is any author whose writing defies brief summary, it is Nietzsche. This is particularly true of the middle period works, dominated by the aphorism. Young proposes to reduce the "central argument" of The Gay Science to "three stages" (327). The first stage Young describes as a "general theory of cultural 'health.'" Ought we to assume that such a general theory is possible? In Aphorism 120 of The Gay Science Nietzsche claims "there is no health as such, and all attempts to define a thing that way have been wretched failures." A reconstruction that begins with an assumption explicitly rejected in the very text under reconstruction is not promising. Perhaps one can point to other loci where Nietzsche accepts, or appears to accept, the assumption. Yet it remains antecedently improbable that the 383 aphorisms of the Gay Science, bookended on each side by a beguiling collection of rhymes, can be reduced to a tidy three-stage argument.

Fortunately, Young does not spend the bulk of his work trying to reduce labyrinthine works of aphorism to simple structures. Sometimes he attempts the course, potentially less hazardous, of interpreting a single aphorism. Though his comments are frequently insightful, he does not always escape the snares of superficial interpretation. Consider (for example) his handling of the difficult aphorism 344 of The Gay Science ("How we, too, are still pious"). Among the questions provoked by this aphorism are the following. If truth proves to be more harmful than useful, do we abandon truth, preferring what serves life? Or do we heroically strive after truth, whatever the disadvantages for life? Throughout his corpus Nietzsche raises this problem in a dozen ways. Does he resolve the problem? As far as I can tell, he does not draw any definitive conclusions. Yet Young finds in aphorism 344 of The Gay Science a neat solution to the problem. "Truth 'at any price' gives way to truth 'when the price is right'" (443). Truth only when the price is right? Surely this is more Bob Barker than Nietzsche.

Young performatively demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting Nietzsche's texts within the confines of a biography. He is typically on stronger ground when narrating Nietzsche's life, though not without making the occasional questionable inference. Addressing Nietzsche's descent into madness, Young admirably presents the traditional diagnosis of syphilis, along with a series of objections to the diagnosis. He then presents Leonard Sax's alternative diagnosis of a brain tumor on the right optic nerve, as well as some pointed objections to Sax. So far so good. But he proceeds to claim that since these two diagnoses are uncertain, "the most plausible conclusion appears to be that Nietzsche's madness was, in fact, a purely psychological condition" (562). Are no diagnoses other than these two possible? And just what would "purely psychological" mean to an author for whom the physiological and psychological are so deeply entwined? Of course Young is free to reject Nietzsche's own conception in favor of "pure psychology" divorced from anything bodily. But does this not amount to a rejection not only of Nietzsche, but of modern neuroscience? Certainly the latter would be puzzled by Young's idea that Nietzsche's condition, though plausibly described as "bipolar disorder with, in its later stages, psychotic features" (560), lacks any physiological basis.

That any book as long and ambitious as Young's would be entirely free from mistakes is unlikely. Many of these are minor, though the cumulative effect is one of annoyance. Some examples: misuse of the word "prevaricate" (258, 360); attribution of the words "adultery of the heart" to Jimmy Carter, as though Matthew 5:28 did not get there first (258); the "abolition of the metaphysical word" (242); the confusion of "venal sin" with "venial sin" (572). These small mistakes can be corrected in a second edition. Also requiring correction, as Young himself has acknowledged, is insufficient citation of a previous Nietzsche biography. Like many other biographers of well-known figures, Young depends on the work of writers before him. In a non-trivial number of places, Young's structure and wording are remarkably similar to passages in Curtis Cate's 2002 biography of Nietzsche, as Mark Anderson has documented in detail (Journal of Nietzsche Studies 42 [2011]). Young has replied to Anderson, admitting to "scholarly lapses" which he promises to correct in the next edition. Certainly Young's explanation of the lapses is plausible. Nonetheless the magnitude of his dependence on Cate's work, together with the lack of proper acknowledgment, must be noted as a defect of the book in its present state.

The complexities of Nietzsche's life and writings, not to mention the multiple relations between the life and the writings, render any biography of the man intensely problematic. Young's effort is no exception. It contains some superficial interpretations, questionable attempts to make Nietzsche timely, insufficient acknowledgment of a key source. Nonetheless, the book's virtues are sufficiently numerous and robust to make it well worth reading, despite its flaws. Any student of Nietzsche will want to own Young's book.

Some impertinent and irresponsible observations on the GOP debate

• Props to Rick Perry for giving Obama a sliver of credit in the death of Bin Laden. Except Perry doesn't know how to pronounce the word "props"! When he uttered the words "I give more props to those Navy Seals," he said "propes"—long o. The rest of the world says "props"—short o.

• The volume of applause for the large number of executions in Texas was just creepy. One need not be universally opposed to capital punishment to find the applause level weird.

• Speaking of weird, I think the prize must be given to Ron Paul, at least in terms of self-presentation. Did the stuff about the "fence" being used to "keep Americans in" come from left field? I'm inclined to think it came from no field at all. His performance confirmed that his candidacy is marginal and that he's a little nuts. (For what it's worth, I don't think one should judge libertarianism by Ron Paul.)

• Speaking of marginal candidates, there were no howlers from Michele Bachmann. I was hoping that she would say something comparable to her remark about our alleged fear of the "rise of the Soviet Union." I was disappointed.

• When I was in high school, I used to watch Newt Gingrich on C-SPAN give rousing speeches on economic policy to the camera. (Yes, that's the type of thing I did in high school, as those who knew me then can confirm.) I sort of miss old Newt. He ain't dumb. But he's not a serious candidate, though he is undeniably responsible for one of the best comic moments in contemporary politics. I mean, John Lithgow's ultra-dramatic reading of a press release from the Gingrich campaign.

• Jon Huntsman's experience with China is not trivial. I'm glad he brought it up. He struck me as sane, sober, reasonable. And he likes Captain Beefheart! Your mileage might vary, with both Huntsman and the Captain. (Though you can't really deny that the latter's a genius.)  

• About Mitt Romney, it was often quite difficult to see his eyes when he was speaking. More often than not, Romney works hard to connect what he says with the question that is actually posed. I admire this.  I doubt it will play in Peoria. Perry is savvier, I think, in taking the question as an occasion to say whatever he wants to say, in the manner that he wants to say it. One might think that avoiding questions is cowardly. But machismo suffices to override the perception of cowardice, even as it confirms its reality.

• Perry understands little about the practice of natural science. There is a sense in which he is correct to say that with respect to global warming, the "science is not settled." Natural science is never settled in any absolute sense. It is fallibilist. It is perpetually open to new findings, new evidence, new results, no matter how certain present claims may appear. (As my old professor Alasdair MacIntyre once said in class, if you want to study something that is really conclusive, go with trinitarian theology or art appreciation.) Moreover, if the term "settled" is to have any meaning at all in natural science, it does not mean "absolute unanimity." Natural science neither has nor demands total agreement.  There should always be contrarians to raise questions and push inquiry further. The term can only mean "substantive or overwhelming consensus" among natural scientists who are currently at work on the topic(s). Is there such a consensus among current scientists about global warming? That's the question—an empirical question which Perry notably avoided. It has nothing to do with whether "the science is settled" according to some fantastic standard to which practicing scientists never appeal.

• Perry understands even less about the history of natural science. The appeal to Galileo was inept and ignorant. Was it an off-the-cuff remark? A scripted line? The fruit of Perry's reading about the Galileo episode? (OK, I think we can eliminate that last option.)

• Perry has not an inkling of what the word "philosophical" means. But neither do the moderators. On this point, they're just as bad, and perhaps more damnably, since they are (one presumes) better educated. They seem to think that "philosophical" is a synonym for "general." It was amusing to hear them bat the word around.

• Summary judgment: Perry did plenty well for himself in this debate, if the criterion is appeal to the base. Those who think Perry "performed poorly" are using a criterion in which Perry himself has no interest.

Rick Perry: A Baconian Analysis

"Surely princes had need, in tender matters and ticklish times, to beware what they say; especially in these short speeches, which fly abroad like darts, and are thought to be shot out of their secret intentions.  For as for large discourses, they are flat things, and not so much noted."

These words come from Francis Bacon's "Of Seditions and Troubles" (thanks to M. for sharing them with me).  They seem apropos—stunningly apropos—in considering how to think about the "short speeches" that Rick Perry has been making.  Such speeches "fly abroad like darts."  Perry is quite an expert dart-tosser.  If Perry's darts about secession, treason, global warming, etc. are shot directly "out of his secret intentions," as Bacon suggests, they make him seem real, quite different from your usual scripted politician who cannot say anything until it has been tested on multiple focus-groups.  When Perry says that printing more money would be "treasonous," we should not be too quick to say, "Oh, that's just a rhetorical flourish, not to be taken literally."  On the contrary, it is a remarkably good guide to what he actually thinks.  Deep down, he probably believes that people whose ideas are different from his own are not merely misguided, but enemies worthy of being punished by death.  If he could get away with punishing his opponents—whom he seems to regard as his enemies—he probably would.

What of his "large discourses"?  There is his book, Fed Up, which I should probably read in order to form a fully responsible opinion about the man.  But I like Bacon's implication that the "short speeches" are not only as revealing as long discourses, but actually more revealing, of what the man actually thinks. One might object: perhaps there's far more to the man than what comes across in his "short speeches."  As a college student, he had the opportunity to cultivate the powers of his mind, developing habits of reading and reflection that inform his more nuanced assessments of the day's events.  Perhaps beneath Perry the dart-tosser lurks Perry the thoughtful contemplator.  But this would assume that he took his college education seriously.  Did he?  The evidence suggests that he did not.

Another objection: Aren't there people who perform poorly in school, but regret it later, wishing they'd made more of the opportunities they squandered?  I've known a few such people.  I admire them enormously. However lightly they took college, they grow up later.  They go back and read the authors they once ignored.  Their own experience has taught them the point of liberal education.  It's certainly possible that while Rick Perry did poorly as a student at Texas A&M, he proceeded to become an intellectual adult.  But did he?  Again, the evidence suggests that he did not.  Instead, he seems proudly to have carried the lack of respect for humane learning he had as an undergraduate into his later, "successful" years.

Near the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle says that the "young" are not the chronologically young, but those who are habitually led by their emotions. Regarding the things studied at universities, Perry seems to have been led by one emotion in particular, that of disdain.  This is unfortunate, since as Bacon's example shows, some things studied at universities are quite important for politics.