As a long time listener of the podcast Very Bad Wizards, I purchased Tamler Sommers’ book Why Honor Matterswith a positive disposition toward the author but a negative one toward the focus of the book: honor and honor cultures. My moral/ethical leanings are shaped by a “dignity framework,” whether that be because of my upbringing as a Christian and the explorations in Christian theology that have indoctrinated me, or (and?) because of my attempt to develop a rational basis for my moral and ethical beliefs that don’t appeal to divine revelation (often a secular derivative of Christian morality, if I’m honest). Right or wrong, Christian morality is presented as emerging from the example of a man, Jesus, who appealed to dignity (by way of the imago dei) in the honor/shame culture of the Roman Empire, with obvious favoritism toward the former. Jesus suffered because of an honor culture (i.e. his Passion) but the Kingdom of God that he preached imagined the world as a dignity utopia. This paradigm makes honor cultures look archaic and unevolved.
Sommers’ book doesn’t abandon the value of dignity-based morality but instead sheds light on the strengths of honor-based morality that we have lost in societies that have abandoned an honor-shame structure. He doesn’t ignore that weaknesses of honor culture—for example, honor killings, cyclical revenge, and such. He builds a steel man for the values of honor culture that I found at time convincing and at other times at least worth pondering further. And this book knocked me off my high horse by putting a spotlight on where dignity culture has failed (e.g. the American justice system and our world’s largest prison population).
I was attracted to the book for a negative reason: I’ve begun to think, contrary to some, that we’re not a society that needs less shame but one that may need more of it. I don’t mean old school, religious, Puritan-style shame. But I do think that social media has revealed a side of us in “Western” culture that’s gotten very ugly. It’s individualism taken to its most absurd extreme. We do what we want and we don’t care who it impacts, as long as we enjoy it. I think there should be some shame in that. The flip side of this is that there needs to be more people who want to live honorable lives: who care about their name, their reputation, and that of those closest to them. (For example, I want the name “LePort” to mean something that it definitely hasn’t mean in previous generations, and I want it to be a good name that my son can proudly own.) If you’re generally interested in a philosopher making a defense of the strengths of honor-based morality, or if you’ve had a concern similar to my own, then I highly recommend this book. It’s well-written and its case is argued as about as good as anyone can argue for honor-based morality in our current context.
This week, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism”. I was struck by one line in particular. It reminded me of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” But Sartre’s version is framed existentially. He says (quoting from Macomber’s translation, p. 24), “…in creating the man each of us wills ourselves to be, there is not a single one of our actions that does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.”
If I understand existentialism, it doesn’t offer forth a strict, structured ethical system by which all must abide. But there is an ethic based in our freedom as humans and our responsibility for our actions. Sartre says that once we’re “cast into this world” against our choice—because we have no choice when it comes to our being born—we are “responsible for everything” we do (p. 29). We can’t blame our actions on others. We do them. Presumably, we do them with a sense of justification. We do them thinking they’re right to do. Sartre is convinced that no one acts thinking that their action is evil. “We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for any of us unless it is good for all.” This isn’t quite Kantian. We’re not making a choice with the Categorical Imperative in mind, explicitly. But we may be abiding by it implicitly. Because we think that if we can do it, humans should be able to do it. And if humans should be able to do it, then in essence, our actions tell everyone around us, whether or not we place them within a concrete ethical framework, that this is what we think is good and right. And whether we would want others to do what we’ve done is secondary to the fact that once we’ve done it, we suggest that humans can and should be able to do it, and if humans can and should be able to do as we’ve done, then this is what we deem acceptable for humans, as a whole. Even if we’re narcissistic enough to say that we alone should be able to act in a certain way, the reality is that we’re a human among humans, so the louder claim of our actions is “this is how humans should act”. We wouldn’t act as we do if we didn’t believe this.
Let me be brief (-ish) with this blog post. I’m preparing lessons for my new class, “Philosophy for Human Flourishing”. One of them will ask students to imagine themselves as a CEO of a pharmaceutical company that has the opportunity to make their company more efficient by implementing AI technology that promises to create more life-saving medicine quicker for cheaper. But this means laying off many of their employees. What should they do? I’ll break the class down into four groups, all responsible for making an argument from one of these four ethical paradigms: Aristotelean Virtue Ethics; Deontology; Utilitarianism; and Effective Altruism.
In preparation, I’ve been entertaining the arguments of the Effective Altruists and I find myself conflicted. (If Effective Altruism is new to you, here’s an introduction: Effective Altruism.org.) In short, Effective Altruism seems to universalize morality. It aims to be objective and rational, making moral decisions based on data. For example, many Effective Altruists, argue that while you could spend $1,000 on say a charity for researching glaucoma or for providing underprivileged students with sports equipment, you’re better off using that money for malaria nets, or vitamins, or vaccines, because charities that focus on these things save more lives. So, your charity is more effective. And following Peter Singer’s classical “Drowning Child Thought Experiment”, they argue that distance—geographic, in the original version, but even through time in some more recent versions—shouldn’t prevent you from saving a life. In other words, shared nationality doesn’t make someone more deserving. If you can save one American life with $1,000, but thirty in some country across the world, then you save the thirty. (This feels a little like the trolly problem.) There’s no denying that this is more “effective”. And it’s difficult to make the argument that something like shared nationality makes a life worth saving. This may be because I’m influenced by teachings like the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or because I fear the slippery slope of where such ideologies can lead, as various nationalist ideologies have shown us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries!
On the other hand, something feels off about Effective Altruism. Morality that lacks relationally feels…immoral. It seems weird to say no to the homeless person standing right in front of you, looking them in the eye while denying them help, because that money will go further if sent to someone on the other side of the world. Ethnocentrism, nationalism, and such ideologies are dangerous, but does that mean that there’s no place for preferring “closeness”, for lack of a better word. I won’t lie: I’d save my son before saving hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of kids on the other side of the world. In fact, in some sense, by raising a young American, and knowing the cost it’ll take to do so, I’ve already chosen to spend money and resources on his one life that theoretically could’ve saved many, many lives elsewhere. And I feel like this is the right thing to do; I feel like my obligation to my son is greater, by far, than my obligation to people elsewhere. Am I hypocritical for this? It’s something that I’m pondering.
Epictetus has a way of assessing what is valuable about our lives as humans that I find refreshing. In our society (I speak as an American), most people determine your greatness based on wealth and power. (Interestingly, many Americans also think of our society as a “Christian” one…but that’s another discussion altogether.) Rarely do we admire people for their virtues. Maybe we admire wealthy and powerful people who seem to have retain some virtue but our admiration of their virtue is secondary. We’re surprised that they have money, power, and character. But for Epictetus, as I wrote in the last post, there’s nothing about being wealthy that makes someone inherently great. If someone is wealthy, that’s just it: they have a lot of wealth. It tells us little about them as a human. The same is true of power.
Epictetus and Wealth Now Epictetus doesn’t seem to be one who would say that we should “eat the rich”. He wasn’t anti-wealth. Nor is he anti-power. It’s just that he didn’t see these things as the be-all, end-all of human value like we are taught in capitalist societies. Epictetus saw wealth and power as things that someone might have, mostly by means that are beyond their control (e.g. born into a certain family; right place, right time opportunities). He didn’t deny that people who want wealth must pursue it, so there’s definitely some minimal contribution of human agency. But it is very minimal. Every wealthy and powerful person arrives where they do not because of the power of their will but because many things beyond their control went their way.
Here is what Epictetus appears to think of the decision to pursue wealth and power with our limited agency: it’s just an exchange. We’re making the decision to trade certain things for others. The trades aren’t necessarily “good” or “bad” but merely preferential. Let me share some excerpts that will explain what I mean (and remember, I’m using Long’s translation).
Judgments, Motivations, Desires, and Aversions First, Epictetus warns us “if you desire any of the things that are not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate” (Section 2; Long, p. 9). Epictetus has stated already that the things that are up to us are judgments, motivations, desires, and aversions. In other words, our perspective on the world is our own; how we exist in the world is mostly outside of our control. Wealth and power aren’t judgments, motivations, desires, and aversions but we can judge that we want wealth and power, be motivated to attain it, desire it, and be averse to experiences like poverty and powerlessness. But the only real choice that we’re making that’s in our control is the choice to value what we value. We could choose to value other things, like peace, tranquility, happiness, etc., which are more easily accessible as states of mind.
What We Value Second, we must take responsibility for what we decide to value, knowing it could let us down if we fail to earn the wealth and power of which we dream. Epictetus says (Section 5; pp. 11, 13), “It is not things themselves that trouble people, but their opinion about things.” And “whenever we are frustrated, or troubled, or pained, let us never hold anyone responsible except for ourselves, meaning our own opinions.” With regard to what I’m saying here, if we pursue wealth and power and we fail, we have no one to blame for the fact that we invested so much of our emotion into those externals.
Entitled to Nothing Third, we should see nothing of this sort as owed to us. We are not entitled to wealth or power, no matter who we are. Epictetus reminds us (Section 11, p. 19), “Never say about anything, “I have lost it’; but say, ‘I have returned it’.” If we have wealth and power at one moment, and then we lose it at the next, it was never “ours”. We had it on loan. (More intensely, Epictetus says this about the death of a loved one like a spouse or a child, for even with regard to people that precious to us, he stands by his assertion that we must remember that we can’t control whether they are with us or not. This has been a harder teaching for me to accept but I’m still processing why I’m open to Epictetus’ posture toward wealth and power while much more resistant to his posture toward lost loved ones. That being said, in his era, life-spans were shorter and one was more accustom to experiencing the death of a spouse or a child than we are, so it was something with which a first century CE Roman had to learn to cope.)
Distrust Yourself Fourth, as I’ve discussed in another post (see “‘If people think you amount to something, distrust yourself'”), even if we pursue wealth and power, we should never allow ourselves to buy into our own hype. Epictetus writes in Section 13 (p. 21), “Even if some people think you are somebody, distrust yourself.” Oh that many of the world’s most wealthy, influential, and powerful people had an ounce of this self-awareness. Maybe to be a major player on the world stage like a Putin, or a Jinping, or a Trump, you have to have a level of narcissism that drives you to bulldoze forward no matter what but I don’t know that our world is better with such men in power. What if such men paused to have a moment of doubt as to whether they should be where they are, acting toward others as they do. Imagine.
Appearances Can Be Deceptive Fifth, Epictetus reminds us that people who have wealth and power may not be as satisfied as they appear. He writes in Section 19 (p. 29):
“When you see someone honored ahead of you or holding great power or being highly esteemed in another way, be careful never to be carried away by the impression and judge the person to be happy. For if the essence of goodness consists in things that are up to us, there is room for neither envy nor jealousy, and you yourself will not want to be a praetor or a senator of a consul, but to be free. The only way to achieve this is by despising the things that are not up to us.”
A modern example that stands out to me is Elon Musk. The man spends hours on “X/Twitter”. There are days he tweets over a hundred times.He’s reported to have a burner account to fight online with his enemies. His cult of personality leads some to worship him thinking that “he’s playing chess while everyone else is player checkers” but what’s his goal. He’s the wealthiest man in the world and clearly, that doesn’t satisfy. He has to ear of powerful politicians, but that doesn’t satisfy. I’m skeptical that he’s a man who can be satisfied and by this I mean that he’s a man who could embrace happiness, peace, and tranquility. He needs drama. He needs a fight. Clearly, he needs to be constantly distracted. The billions aren’t enough. Epictetus would remind us that we should be very careful when we become jealous of such people. Do we want their lives, really? If your happy, at all, then you may want a piece of his financial security but I guarantee that if a genie offered you the chance to swap places with him, you’d turn down the offer.
Satisfaction Starts Inside Sixth, this is because Epictetus believes that if you aren’t satisfied with yourself, there’s nothing wealth and power can provide you. In Section 23 (p. 33), he writes, “If you ever find yourself looking for outside approval in order to curry favor, you can be sure that you have lost your way.” And in Section 24, he says that we should not worry about living a life “without honor” in fear that we’ll be “a nobody everywhere”. Instead, we should embrace the reality that we “need to be somebody only in the things that are up to you, and in them you can be a top person” (p. 35). Personally, this means trying to be a good husband, father, and teacher. I don’t need to be somebody to many; I need to be much to a few.
Pursue Wealth, If You Can Preserve Honor, Integrity, and Moral Principles Seventh, Epictetus addressed whether we should seek wealth (and we can add power) so that we can support others, like our friends. His response (in Section 24; pp. 35, 37)?
“If I can get it and preserve my honor and integrity and moral principles, show me the way, and I will get it. But if you are asking me to lose the good things that are mine just for your to acquire things that are not good, you can see how unfair you are and how ungenerous. Would you rather have money or a trustworthy and honorable friend?”
Similarly, Epictetus sees this commitment to honor, integrity, and moral principles as a patriotic act that benefits one’s nation: “And if you were to supply your country with another trustworthy and honorable citizen, would you not being doing it a benefit?” If we sacrifice our values, Epictetus warns (p. 39), “…if you lose this character in wanting to benefit your country, and you end up dishonorable and untrustworthy, what benefit would you be?”
Weigh the Costs Finally, back to the most important point: all pursuits are exchanges. Epictetus advises (Section 29; p. 45):
“In every undertaking, examine its antecedents and their consequences, and only then proceed to the act itself. If you don’t do that, you will start enthusiastically, because you have not thought about any of the next stages; then, when difficulties appear, you will give up and be put to shame.”
He uses the example of somehow who wants to glory of being an Olympian. He doesn’t tell them that they can’t pursue this goal, but that they must count the cost of the exchange (p. 45):
“You must train, keep a strict diet, stay off pastries, submit to a regular regimen each day, summer or winter, drink no cold water and no wine except at appropriate times; in other words, you have to surrender yourself to the trainer just as you would the doctor. Then in the actual contest you have to dig in alongside the other contestants, and perhaps dislocate your hand or twist your ankle, swallow a lot sand, get flogged, and with all of this lose the fight”
Even if one is to commit to be a philosopher in the Stoic way, they must be prepared to lose some things in order to gain others; they must be prepared for certain hardships the lead to certain rewards. Life is about making decisions; it’s about exchanging this for that. “Think about all this then see whether you want to exchange it for calm, freedom, and tranquility” (p. 49).
In my next post, I’ll share some of Epictetus’ words about reputation and worrying about how others view us.
Now that the holidays are upon us, and for the first time I’m a parent, I’ve been thinking about a dilemma. How do I approach the topic of Santa Claus with my son? I can think of three possibilities with pros and cons.
Option #1: embrace the Santa Claus mythology until he’s older and then inform him that it’s just a story that we have to outgrow
Pros: He gets to experience the joy of modern Christmas mythology. This will make the season a lot of fun. It’ll prevent him from being the strange kid who “doesn’t believe in Santa”. Hence, it has a function for social bonding. Like all mythologies, it’s one he’ll outgrow and this process helps young minds realize that there’s a difference between the stories we tell and facts about the world. There’s a time for this but childhood doesn’t seem to be it. For example, it seems like a parent would be a killjoy if they made a point to tell their kid that every Disney character they see in the movies “isn’t real”. It seems like bad parenting to say, “Now, I know you’re enjoying Frozen but I need you to understand that Anna and Elsa aren’t real!”
Cons: It feels like you’re lying to your kid when you tell them that Santa is real. And eventually, you have to break it to them that you’ve been misleading them. I’ve heard that when I was a child I was quite upset by this revelation at first until my mother told me that it wouldn’t change the number of gifts I received. Apparently, Santa became irrelevant, quickly!
AI generated image via Canva using the prompt “Santa confused about whether he exists”
Option #2: embrace the Santa Claus mythology until he’s older and then invite him to join us in “being Santa” for others
Pros: Some friends of mine had a slightly different approach. When their kids grew older, they told them that “Santa” is basically a collective. (Kind of like my theory of “Banksy”.) And that their parents and grandparents were part of this collective. And now that the kid is old enough, they are welcomed into this secret society of doing good for others around the holiday and giving gifts as “Santa”. Currently, I’m leaning this direction.
Cons: It has the same cons as the previous option. I think it makes a softer break between mythology and fact though. In some sense, it shows mythology can be true if we live it.
Option #3: reject the Santa Claus mythology because it could be understood as lying to my kid
Pros: We don’t lie to our kid. We don’t have to have that conversation some day about how Santa isn’t real. We emphasize logical and scientific thinking instead of the mythological and superstitious thinking that some people take with them even into adulthood (e.g. immature expressions of religion).
Cons: Our son becomes “that kid” who tells other kids that Santa isn’t real. It will change the meaning of the season for our kid. It will prevent them from enjoying a shared mythology. It introduces them very early to the sad reality that many of us experience when we grow up: the world isn’t as enchanting as it seemed. It pushes them toward “scientism” which rarely is emotionally or socially satisfying unless you’re reactionary or Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
My son isn’t old enough for this to matter for a couple of years. But that doesn’t mean that my wife and I shouldn’t be thinking ahead. What did readers of this blog who were parents do? Would you do anything different in retrospect? Is there an option that I’m not considering.
Where I work, I’m part of an advisory cycle that sticks with the same students for their freshmen-sophomore years, then returns back to freshmen. I’m back to advising freshmen this year after finishing a two year cycle with my last group of now juniors. This has me thinking about what selection of courses I wish they were taking if I had the power to determine such things.
First, with regard to their English, Math, and Science classes, I wouldn’t make any changes. As far as I can tell, those department chairs have things handled and honestly, I don’t know enough about those disciplines to speak to how things should be. Our school has a structure called “core four” where each year they must take an English, History, Math, and Science class. Since students should have seven classes per semester, that takes three of the spaces.
Currently, we have a history sequence called “Global Studies I” and “Global Studies II” which are world history classes for freshmen and sophomores. A colleague of mine is teaching an elective this year on the Holocaust for juniors and seniors and he’s introducing them to historiography around the Holocaust and how to engage primary sources. This elective is great for theory and method. If it were up to me, “Global Studies I” would be more like that elective. The first semester may be a 10,000 foot overview of ancient history but the second semester should be theory and method. I’ve noticed that many high school students can’t articulate why we study history other than say, “avoiding the mistakes of the past”. This is one good reason but hardly the only reason. We need to teach students the “why and how” of history and not just the “what”. (As you can see, I’m impressed by what my colleague, a historian himself, is doing!)
That leaves three spaces for art and/or religion, a world language, an elective if they don’t take either their religion/art class, or if they’re in our Corps of Cadets, the class required to be involved. As with English, Math, and Science, I don’t have a strong opinion on what art class a student should take. Where I work, the world language option is Latin or Spanish. Obviously, depending on the student and their interests, they’ll do well to learn either of those.
This brings me to my arena: religion. In part, I’m happy to see that many freshmen take one of their two required semesters of religion, if not both. But there’s something that I’m more and more convinced, whether or not it fits under the umbrella of “religion” or not, would be even better for freshmen for at least one semester: a class on living the good life. In short, this would be a class focusing on what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, finding the highest good as a human. This would require a heavy dose of ethics, since, as Macklemore says in “Growing Up”: “The quickest way to happiness learning to be selfless/Ask more questions, talk about yourself less”. Thinking about others, which is a focus of ethics, is part of the path toward eudaimonia. But so is asking the question: what does it mean to be human? What are humans for?
Education in our capitalist society focuses a lot of how to give students the tools they need to succeed by the metrics of capitalist values but we fail to help students see that their value lies beyond this form of achievement. (I discuss this a bit in “Education as rooted innovation”.) We say this to them. For example, our chaplain says this to them every day in various ways in chapel. But do we give them the philosophical tools to help them evaluate their values in light of society’s values and how society values them? A class like this one would do that.
I’m one of those that thinks law students, biology majors, engineering students, etc., should take a class like this in college. Why? Because as we learned in the original Jurassic Park:
And we need to teach students to stop and think if they should. Will such and such a behavior be good for you and others? Will such and such a goal be good for you and others? If the college system won’t take on this challenge, then we must do so at the level of secondary education. (This is especially true in a school like mine that is tied to the Episcopal Church.) And we should do it as they begin high school so that they have the tools for self-evaluation, self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-acceptance from the beginning.
I live with a form of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I find Jesus of Nazareth to be the greatest moral exemplar, likely due to my upbringing, culture, and religion. On the other hand, I’m aware that his morality was shaped in a context very different from my own, most importantly as a first-century CE Jewish person living in Galilee and Judea, which was under Roman occupation, who held to an apocalyptic understanding of the world which from our perspective seems to have been somewhat misplaced. For this reason, mere parroting of Jesus’ ethics may not be wise for most of us, if such a thing is even possible. So, as a Christian, I try to ask myself what it means to live in some form of alignment with Jesus’ vision of the good, though a version of the vision that is applicable to the twenty-first century.
The tricky business here is that this kind of mindset often leads to Christianities that may as well abandon any affiliation with Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, I would say that most American Christianities function in complete independence from anything related to Jesus. His “Sermon on the Mount” is critiqued as “woke”. His ideas are rejected by Christians as impractical (should we really treat people who are poor that way?!). Therefore, the label “Christian” retains a cultural significance as one that secures some form of status but it has little to do with the person that “Christians” have called “Christ”.
There is a part of me that thinks that only certain radical groups, like Anabaptists/Mennonites (with their emphasis on non-violence and simplicity), or the Christianities practiced by the oppressed and marginalized, are worthy of being affiliated with Jesus. This would leave me on the outside looking in, sort of like Nicodemus in the first part of the Gospel of John. But this might not be a bad thing. It reminds me of the American author and poet, Maya Angelou. When she was asked if she was a Christian, she responded:
“I’m always amazed when people walk up to me and say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ I think, ‘Already? You already got it?’ I’m working at it, which means that I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being.”
The long history of Christianity has shown that the word can mean anything. Therefore, the label “Christian” can mean anything. Christians can support unjust imperial power. Christians can be violent. Christians can demonize people because of their ethnic identities (think of the centuries of persecution of the Jews). Christians can be as addicted to wealth (think of the Prosperity Gospel). Christians can be harmfully superstitious (think of the “Word of Faith” movement or popular forms of “spiritual warfare”). Many brush this off by saying something like “Christians aren’t perfect, only Christ is” but that’s an excuse for maintaining the cultural value of the label Christian without taking seriously the demand that this word should have upon our lives (think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship*).
I live in South Texas where being “Christian” is an important label. To respond as Maya Angelou did would earn you suspicion from many. But when I say I’m a Christian, I mean something like what she did: “I’m working at it”. And honestly, many of the people who quickly and definitively name themselves “Christian” are the type of people who make the word mostly meaningless. I think, “if you’re a Christian, then clearly being a Christian means nothing for the world”. But I also think this of myself: if I’m a Christian, then Christianity needs help. I guess the important difference is self-awareness.
This being said, I find that Jesus can remain a moral exemplar even if his apocalyptic vision of the Kingdom of God coming to earth seems to have missed the mark. (Whether there’s some eschatological truth to his vision is impossible to address because we can’t know that truth until the end of our lives or the end of human history, so I find that debate unhelpful except to give people a reason to maintain a certain form of Christianity, which is fine if that works for others.) Jesus remains the type of person who stood not only for the marginalized and oppressed but with them. He wanted to see people restored, healed, and whole. He wanted to see oppressors regain their humanity. And he refused to contribute to our cycle of violence when he was cornered. (Whether Jesus was ideologically pacifistic seems beside the point; that he refused to engage his enemies violently when it really mattered says what needs to be said.)
“The Death of Socrates” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
In Book II of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates is discussing the meaning of “justice” and what it means to be a “just person”. Is “justice” just a construct that the powerful use to justify themselves? Or is justice something objective that can be measured over against whether someone has power? Socrates says to his interlocutor Glaucon, that the truly just man will be just for justice’s sake, not for the appearance of justice since being just for the appearance of justice is being “just” in order to gain a reputation that can be used for selfish gain. Socrates proposes that the most just a person can be is “to be and not seem good” (p. 45 of Lee’s translation). He states:
“We must, indeed, not allow him to seem good, for if he does he will have all the reward and honours paid to the man who has a reputation for justice; and we shall not be able to tell whether his motive is love of justice or love of the rewards and honours.”
For Socrates, the only person who can be clearly just, is the one “we must strip…of everything except justice”. He continues:
“Our just man must have the worst of reputations for wrongdoing even though he has done no wrong, so that we can test his justice and see if it weakens in the face of unpopularity and all that goes with it; we shall give him an undeserved and life-long reputation for wickedness, and make him stick to his chosen course until death.”
It has been noted that Plato likely has Socrates in view. Socrates was charged by the Athenians for being “impious” and for “corrupting the youth”. In a sense, these charges were accurate but the question is whether or not Socrates’ “impiety” and “corruption” were clearly evils or just evils perceived by the misguided worldview of the Athenians. Plato’s views seem clear here.
Jesus was perceived by his followers in much the same way. In short, Jesus is presented as a just man who was unjustly condemned by an unjust society. In fact, Plato writes something that is hard for Christians to read without thinking about Jesus, even though it was written centuries before Jesus** (again, from Lee, p. 45):
“…the just man, as we have pictured him, will be scourged, tortured, and imprisoned, his eyes will be put out, and after enduring every humiliation he will be crucified (or “impaled” depending on the translation), and learn at last that one should want not to be, but to seem just”
With those words, Plato’s Socrates draws a line between true justice and seeming justice. Justice exists, though rare, in the form of people who are so just that they will die for justice rather than take the easy path. Now, in a sense, this helps me with the question of whether or not Jesus’ ethics are completely relativized by his apocalypticism. If we read Jesus’ actions through Plato, what matters is that this just man Jesus was not rescued by divine intervention but went to his grave refusing to muscle the “Kingdom of God” into existence, which would only contribute to the cycles of violence that consume us. He used what life he had to try to bring the “Kingdom of God” by means of healing, care, forgiveness, empowerment, etc.
From this perspective, people like Martin Luther King Jr. are Christians. On the other hand, I’m in a category with Maya Angelou: “I try to be as kind and fair and generous and respectful and courteous to every human being”. I fail but I try. And I think Jesus’ vision, as read through Plato, remains worth our effort even if, as Jesus’ crucifixion, Socrates’ trial, and Dr. King’s assassination (not to mention all the other innocents) teach us, most of us must settle with wanting to be just rather than achieving it. More precisely, we must settle with wanting to want to be just, since is Jesus, Socrates, King, etc., are the measure of a just person, I think many of us would prefer to never be truly tested.
*Sadly, the copy of this book that’s available on Amazon has a forward by Eric Metaxes, who embodies how worthless the label “Christian” can be.
As I’ve been asking myself (1) how I, as a father, want to teach my child about thoughtfulness and (2) how I, as a teacher, want to educate my students, I’ve been coming around to the idea that one way to engage younger mind with subjects that we think they should study is to package that subject in an accessible manner. By this, I mean teach them (A) a subject with which they’re less familiar through (B) a subject with which they have greater, and maybe more natural, familiarity. As I mentioned in a recent post (see “Sports and non-dualistic education”), as I reflect upon the adolescent version of myself—who was a mediocre student, at best—I recognize that one of the best ways to have engaged me would have been by connecting what we were learning to sports. I was obsessed with sports but not Algebra, or U.S. history. Yet it was sports that led me to be learn about Jesse Owens embarrassing Hitler, or where Baltimore is on a map, or how to calculate a batting average. For this reason, as I think about the need to teach my students the skills that will help them evaluate the wave upon wave of information that comes their way—how to be critical, skeptical even, before embracing something just because Google found it or because someone said it on TikTok—a conclusion that I’m tentatively reaching is that, for example, if I were to teach a philosophy class at my school in the future, a philosophy of sport would be the way to go. It would start with (B) sport, which matters to a majority of high schoolers, and then guide them to (A) the skills that philosophy can provide them.
As I’ve been reading on the philosophy of sport, one book that I finished recently is Stephen Mumford‘s A Philosopher Looks at Sport. It’s a small book (at 5 x 0.5 x 7.5 inches) and a short one (at about 133 pp. of content) but it’s very good. It built around six topics: physicality, competition, definition (of sport), spectacle, ethics, and inclusion. One of this main points is that we find joy in developing an ability and in displaying that ability. Sport is a venue for that development/display but it adds competition. Competition can be a negative thing but Mumford sees athletic competition as a sort of bubble where we can put forth a certain level of effort without the negative effects because ultimately, the goals are themselves “unimportant”. For example, if I were wrestling for a high school state title, it would matter to me, it would be important, but not in the same way as if I were wrestling a potential mugger or a wild animal that I encountered on a walk. The latter has my very life and well-being at stake in a way that sport doesn’t…or shouldn’t.
Once Mumford provides a working definition of sport, he addresses why we enjoy the spectacle of it all (which is very relevant right now as the Summer Olympics are in full swing) and he asks questions about the ethics of sport. Both of these topics are fascinating. I’ve long wondered to myself why I can spend a Sunday watching three or four NFL games and enjoy it. And the ethics section had me thinking about why we allow for certain things in sport (e.g. boxers pummeling each other) that we wouldn’t allow in general (boxing on the street is assault). Mumford addresses whether there is an “internalist” ethic that differs from the outside world or if the line between sport/not-sport is more porous.
Finally, his section on inclusion felt very relevant because as I was reading it, the ugly debate over Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif’s eligibility was reminding me that the Internet really does bring out some of our worst characteristics. We need to calmly and thoughtfully ponder the relationship between sport and gender and transgender athletes in a world that wants us to be reactionary and vitriolic. And with the Paralympics beginning, we should be cognizant of our thoughts around ability/disability and sport. Mumford addresses topics like these and this reinforces my first point. Sport may not be as high stakes as some things (e.g. the wars in Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine) but sport is a place where many high-stakes debates are magnified, including things like gender, ability, bodily objectification, fairness in pay, etc. These topics may be intimidating in themselves but studying them through the lens of sports can provide students with an otherwise unattainable accessibility and books like this one go a long way toward helping us in this endeavor.
Yesterday, I paired the Books of Daniel and Esther. Both are post-exilic writings set in the exile/diaspora. Both feature Jews who have found their way into the royal courts of Babylon and/or Persia. Both address the question of how true one must remain to their Jewishness to show fidelity to their god. In the Book of Daniel, characters such as Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego don’t compromise. They are willing to die/suffer rather than break their dietary laws, or worship other gods, or even take a break from worshipping their god. Esther and Mordecai hide Esther’s Jewish identity which includes eating Persian foods, having sex and marrying a Gentile, and who knows what else. Mordecai might be a little more like Daniel and friends when he refuses to bow to Haman but overall the ethics of the Book of Esther are less black-and-white than the Book of Daniel.
I ended class by having my students get together in a Google Meet and record their discussion where they argued for either the quasi-deontological (or divine command) approach of the Book of Daniel or the more consequentialist approach of the Book of Esther. One of my student leaders begun the conversation by asking who was ‘Team Esther’ or ‘Team Daniel’. So far, as I watch/grade the recordings, team Esther is winning (though there were a few pro-Daniel students).
What’s fascinating is to observe their reasoning. Some students say they’d be like Daniel depending on the context though if the context was that your life was at risk, they’d be more like Esther. One student pointed out that Esther never explicitly said she wasn’t a Jew (though it could be argued many would have accused her of not living like one), so she didn’t technically lie about this.
Another topic that caught my ear was the difference between how God’s presence is narrated in Daniel contrast with Esther. Famously, God speaks to Daniel in dream and visions. He intervenes miraculously. Esther is ambiguous about God’s presence. God is never named or directly mentioned. Some of the key turning points suggest to some readers that God’s in the background but God is never mentioned. I think that’s key. For some students, if God was performing the deeds like we read in Daniel, sure, they’d adopt his approach, but life seems to be more Esther-ish: whatever we might say about divine activity, it’s not clear when and where God acts.
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