Here is a thoughtful and interesting blog post. It's about what to do when people who you think should be on your side fail you - and who hasn't had that happen, on a national-politician scale, right on down to close family members - but also there is a list of ways to act when you've hurt someone's feelings through unthinking racism, sexism, whateverism. It's actually just a list of ways to act when you're having a conversation with someone whose experiences you don't share, starting with opening your ears and closing your mouth.

Frequently I read blogs written by people with whose politics I don't agree. I run across posts that have me rolling my eyes, of course, and I run across posts that cause me to think new thoughts, which is a major reason why I read those. I also run across posts that I think make excellent points, independently of any political content.

I think that in some ways white women make a bridge for privilege/non-privilege. Perhaps especially white women who were raised in the south and expected to be ladylike and not make waves. You can achieve, but you aren't supposed to make a big show or a spectacle of yourself. But in the workplace, achieving frequently isn't enough. You have to put yourself forward, even if it feels immodest or audacious or inappropriate or uncomfortable, and it's probably hard for certain segments of the population to understand that somebody could ever feel that way, let alone anticipate it, empathize, or know what to do about it.

I remember when we terminated the coworker I've written about before. He left a spot in the chemist rank, which we wanted to fill by promoting a black female technician named Libby. I'd worked with her while we were trying to save his job, and had discovered that she had chemist potential. Like most of our techs, she had a science degree, but more than that, she was very smart and curious and cared a lot about getting the job done right. But when I told Libby that the boss and I wanted her to apply for that job, she kept saying that she didn't want to do it. She didn't think she could do it, I thought, and I knew better. I kept encouraging her to put in for it, she kept not wanting to, and I finally told her - "you're doing the work, you might as well get the pay." That made sense, she applied, and we promoted her. (She turned out to be one of the most productive chemists we ever had, besides personality-wise being a pure delight to work with.)

All of the techs shared an office, sharing desks as people came and went on their shifts, but the chemists shared separate offices, two by two. The desk left by the man we terminated was in an office that he shared with another white male chemist, Randy. I told Libby to get her stuff and move into that desk, and once again, she held back. She would just stay with the techs - she would be more comfortable.

Now let me stop here and say that in a situation like this you have to be really almost a mind-reader. You can't bully people into leaving their comfort zone so far that they are stressed out and actually fail at what you're pushing them to do. On the other hand, some people have been trained to hold themselves back and if you care about them, you have to bust them out of that. One clue that I had was that Libby had told me that her mother had said she must major in education or social work - that "they" would never let her get anywhere with a degree in biology. She was surprised when we hired Libby on as a tech, and very surprised when we promoted her. "You be nice to those white folks," she told Libby, "they've been good to you." We aren't being nice, I told her, we promoted you because we thought you could do the job.

So I told her: "You have a chemist job. You get a chemist paycheck. You go to chemist meetings. You sit at a chemist desk. Get your stuff." She still didn't want to.

"Why not, for pete's sake?"

"Because Randy won't want me in there," she finally said.

"Why don't you think Randy will want you in there?" I asked.

Silence.

"Is it because Randy's white? You're prejudiced against Randy because he's white?"

"I'm not prejudiced!" Libby protested.

"Then get your stuff!"

So Libby moved into that office, and of course she and Randy got on like a house afire. He's a very nice person, easy to get along with. I wouldn't have put her in an office where anyone would have been ugly to her.

Was I bullying her? Probably. I don't know what to do in situations like that except to think with my head, and feel with my heart, and act, and hope for the best. And, as the writer of the linked blog post says, educate myself as much as possible as to how other people's experiences affect them, not expecting other people to be like me. Ignore the buzzwords that tell me I've left my comfort zone of political thought that I agree with, and have an open mind about stuff. It's not easy but you have to do it to be a righteous person, I reckon.

I want to talk about abortion again.
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I posted here in a blurb about embryonic stem cell research, how I arrived at my pro-life views from a scientific perspective. But there's a societal perspective too. Here is another mostly direct quote from a comment I've left elsewhere.

I think the abortion issue goes back to a fundamental lack of respect for human life and a reluctance to provide protection for helpless humans whose existence is inconvenient, and who we don't have to look at so we can disconnect our emotions (hearts). I think there is a continuum from a complacency about abortion, to babies getting knocked in the head or shaken for crying (see the occasional article in any urban newspaper), to toddlers being beaten to death over toilet training (ditto), to people being killed during robberies or drive-bys or just because someone thinks he's been "disrespected" as if lack of respect weren't the fundamental problem in the first place. I think when we made it legal for women to delete their unborn just because they didn't want them, we encouraged this whole domino effect thing.

Yes, I know people have always committed murder, and sadly, even murder of babies and children. But I really do think there is a culture of death and things are worse now than they were. For instance, when my daughter graduated from high school and went off to college in 2005, after a couple of months she remarked to me with some surprise that she hadn't seen any fights yet. I saw exactly one fight during my entire high school career, and that one was sponsored by a couple of teachers who were trying to settle a feud between two boys (no, it didn't work). Do you remember school shootings when you were a kid? I sure don't. I carried a pocket knife to school on occasion; no one cared about such things back then because they had no need to.

Why are people so violent nowadays? Is it the crap we see on TV all the time, and in the movies, and the music? Maybe, but I still draw a line from dehumanizing the unborn to devaluing all human life. Feel free to disagree. But this is where I stand.

(BTW, if anyone thinks this is exclusively a religious point of view - I personally know two atheists who oppose abortion: one because he thinks it is immoral, and one because he thinks it is bad for society.)

One of the things that so profoundly disappoints me about Pres. Obama's adamantly pro-choice view is the fact that statistically, black babies are almost four times as likely as white babies to be killed in the womb. From the Guttmacher Institute:

The overall abortion rate is 21 per 1,000 U.S. women (i.e., each year 2.1% of all women of reproductive age have an abortion). Black and Hispanic women have higher abortion rates than non-Hispanic white women do. (The rates are 49 per 1,000 and 33 per 1,000 among black and Hispanic women, respectively, vs. 13 per 1,000 among non-Hispanic white women.)

Is this in line with these statistics?

Racial differences exist, with blacks disproportionately represented among homicide victims and offenders

In 2005, homicide victimization rates for blacks were 6 times higher than the rates for whites.

Looks that way to me.

We have a black president. He has the bully pulpit and the unblinking attention of all kinds of people, but in particular young black folks. How wonderful if he would appeal to them: Let's stop killing each other and start valuing each other, starting with the most helpless and vulnerable: our brothers and sisters in the womb.

Joanne Jacobs: Can Obama help black boys?".

Black male students are lagging behind every other group, including their black sisters, writes Richard Whitmire in his farewell USA Today column. President Barack Obama will be a symbol of success, but will that be enough to help black boys succeed?

One of the commenters, a teacher in a gritty school, has this to say:


I have heard *#gger spoken between my black students for years and no amount of telling them to stop has stoppped it. Then Obama won.

The next day after the election I walked down the hall on the way to class and a group of black students were talking with each other. One kid says, “Did you see that *#gger the other night when…” when another black student in the group says, “Yo man, we can’t call each other that anymore!” i nearly jumped in thee air.

The rate of *#gger between students has dropped off at my school to the point that I haven’t heard it in the hallway for a long time now. I hope that this transfers to academics as well.

Obama could be the best thing to happen to these kids in a long time. Keeping my fingers crossed.

And there it is. All of that crap about how it's wrong for white people to use the n-word but not black people, or how among black people it's really a term of endearment, is demonstrably garbage. Regardless of who uses it, the word is a disrespectful put-down, implying that the person on the receiving end is a hopeless second-class loser. The fact that it is in such widespread use among certain portions of the black population is telling, I think, as is the fact that black folks who have it together dislike the word, don't use it, and don't want to hear it. Who worries about being disrespected, except for people who so profoundly lack self-respect that they have to make up the deficit with respect they get from others? See here and here for instance. And why would they lack self-respect? Because they belong to a group for which they lack respect. How toxic that is, and how ironic that black people who live "respectable" lives are accused of not keeping it real, i.e., not being authentically black. Maybe now things will turn around.

Chicagoboyz has a post up: Blinded By His Narrow Focus. It's about an article the blog author read, that seems to extrapolate conditions in a county in California to the rest of the country.

I started to comment on it and then realized that my comments were running too long, so I decided to park them here.

I lived in Memphis, TN from 1982 until last year. When my daughter was in first grade - that would have been in 1993 or so - there weren't very many Hispanics in Memphis. Her class studied Mexico during multicultural week. One of my coworkers, a Mexican-American, was kind enough to speak to her class and answer questions about Mexico because no one in the school had any direct experience. By the time she finished elementary school, there were a few Hispanic children in some of the classes. Not long after, a third to a half of the school was Hispanic. (This was a parochial school.) Memphis experienced a big demographic shift, during which we saw some things we were not used to seeing, including Hispanic-looking people standing around outside Home Depot. (I never inquired as to their immigration status.) Billboards, flyers, newspapers in Spanish appeared and then increased in number too. No one planned this or decided it should happen, it just happened

My point(s)?
1 - Nothing, NOTHING is static. It never was. Memphis was never frozen in time. The Hispanic demographic shift was visible because of the Spanish-language stuff, and the schools suddenly had to add a lot of ESL classes, sure. But busing for desegregation happened, white flight happened, etc., long before this. Also waves of immigrants from countries where they were fleeing oppression, so that certain parts of town began to see Vietnamese restaurants and grocery stores, and various things of that nature. You can't really pick a moment in the past and say "this is the real Memphis". The only constant is change, right? Xenophobes and other people who can't handle change are going to have heartburn but they can't stop the process.

2 - Nothing stays put, either. Today Marin County, CA, tomorrow Podunk, OH. I should say "nothing people-related". El Ninos aren't going to suddenly start causing drought in Texas and flooding in California. But there's not a wall up between California and Ohio so even though the article might not speak to conditions today, the blog post author might re-read it two or three years from now in a different light.

But I keep thinking about cells. Cells have membranes, not walls, so that things can move in and out of the cells as needed for the cells to survive. [Edited to add: some non-animal cells have walls, of course.] The movement in and out is strictly controlled. If a cell membrane is destroyed, the cell no longer has integrity and it can't function any longer. I think eventually the world will be like one big cell. This process started happening with pre-Roman Empire trade routes and really started accelerating with steam ships and railroads and trans-continental air travel, and the internet by which we can read newspapers in other countries and have conversation with their inhabitants; and NAFTA and free trade and all that other stuff. But we're not there yet, and I wonder what kind of cell membrane the USA really needs. Maybe I'm a xenophobe but I wonder if we've let our membrane weaken prematurely.*

When I think about all the illegal immigrants who come here to find work, and why it is that they can find it (because employers can sidestep OSHA regs and labor laws if they know their employees won't complain) I wonder about capitalism. I wonder if it's true, as Marx(?) said, that capitalism requires an underclass. First the US had slaves, then black people without civil rights, then when black people got the same rights that white people had, suddenly we needed a new class of people without rights. Is that it? Or is it not necessary except for those capitalists who want too much profit and are willing to break the law to get it? I bet Fred Smith and people of his ilk aren't hiring illegals, and they're not hurting. I've had to show proof of eligibility to work at every job that I remember filling out paperwork for.

Still, it seems that we must somehow want these people here, and in the status they have. If we truly didn't want them, we'd send them out and close our borders, right? Instead of discussing whether, for instance, they should get driver licenses and pay in-state tuition. But since they are here, why is it so hard for those who are self-supporting and law-abiding (as far as they can be) to be regularized? Is it just the usual lumbering monster of bureaucracy, or an inherent flaw in our political system? I wish I knew.

*To continue the membrane analogy - one could look at immigration or at occupation, as a kind of endosymbiosis. The idea of endosymbiosis is that some of the organelles in eukaryotic cells - mitochondria, chloroplasts in plant cells - started out as prokaryotes that moved into other cells either as parasites or as food, and because the larger cell offered some protection and the smaller cell offered energy, it stayed around and reproduced with the larger cell. There's some evidence to support this (mitochondria have their own ribosomes, which are like bacterial ribosomes, and they have their own DNA, which is configured like bacterial DNA, not the X and Y of eukaryotes' nuclear DNA). These things have evolved so that you can't independently culture the mitochondria or the chloroplasts; they can only function as part of the eukaryotic cell. The point is that it doesn't matter now whether the prokaryotes that gave rise to these organelles started out as food or as parasites; they are a vital part of the eukaryotes either way. In the same way, it hopefully doesn't matter whether an American's ancestors came here for a better life, or fleeing famine or oppression, or were brought here in chains - they should be able to both contribute to the "cell" and enjoy the "cell's" benefits, and see themselves and be seen as part of the larger whole. This is hopefully true of our Hispanic immigrants as well. They change us, we change them, and we all benefit.

Adapt or die, right?

Wesley J. Smith has a post on his blog, Secondhand Smoke, about abortion in Australia.

Australia: Abortion Through the Ninth Month--Culture of Death Brooks No Dissent

A new law out of the Australian state of Victoria must be discussed. First, it permits abortion through the ninth month, meaning that viable babies are subject to being killed, which is to say it gets close to the land of infanticide. Second, it requires all doctors to either do abortions, or if they have a moral objection, to find and refer to an abortion friendly doctor....

From the statute:

Part 2: (5): Termination of pregnancy by registered medical practitioner after 24 weeks:(1) A registered medical practitioner may perform an abortion on a woman who is more than 24 weeks pregnant only if the medical practitioner--(a) reasonably believes that the abortion is appropriate in all the circumstances; and (b) has consulted at least one other registered medical practitioner who also reasonably believes that the abortion is appropriate in all the circumstances.(2) In considering whether the abortion is appropriate in all the circumstances, a registered medical practitioner must have regard to--(a) all relevant medical circumstances; and (b) the woman's current and future physical, psychological and social circumstances.

The woman's future social circumstances?

Sometimes I actually am tempted to become an atheist. It would be so comforting to think that things like this really don't matter. Wouldn't it? That there will be no Day of Judgment? I read these things and in my mind I am hearing


Dies illa, dies irae,
calamitatis et miseriae,
dies magna et amara valde.

I think sometimes people make a distinction between "legal" and "moral" that simply isn't there. They tell you that you can't legislate morality. Well, of course you can. Murder is immoral, isn't it? Isn't it also illegal? It's wrong to steal. It's even wrong to cheat on your taxes, because you're making other people pay your share as well as their own.

I don't think law-abiding people refrain from acts like murder and theft solely because they happen to be illegal. I think they refrain because they're wrong.

What you can't legislate, sadly, is intelligence. But you can go a little way toward that, for example, by making it unlawful to transport a baby in a car unless it is in a carseat.

Erin says she thinks that Heather MacDonald, who suggests that the supposed pandemic of rape on college campuses could be drastically reduced if it were explained to girls that they should refrain from stupid behavior, is a pragmatist rather than a moralist. I think morals originate from pragmatism, actually.

Monnie asked her readers if God is a vengeful God.

I had a conversation with a Muslim coworker once. He was contemplating an interest-only loan for a house. This was before the housing crisis and I'd never heard of such a thing. It took me a moment to realize he was asking my opinion about the moral rightness rather than the financial advisability. I had never thought a Muslim would ask a non-Muslim's opinion about things like that - prejudice on my part, I admit. Anyway, he had almost enough money saved up to buy the house outright and what he wanted to do was to lock in the price of the house, pay this interest-only thing but regard it as rent, and then when he was ready, just pay cash and buy the house. Because Muslims aren't supposed to take loans that pay interest. He wanted to know what I thought about that

My first thought was that you can't fool God. He knows your heart.

"I know that," Mustapha said. "I'm not trying to fool God."

Then, I said, you should ask yourself what the point is here. Is God trying to keep you from getting in over your head? A loan that piles up interest too fast can be impossible to pay off and it can be a real bondage. Is this the issue? If so, and if you have every reason to believe that you can handle this thing and it will work out the way you think, then you should probably go ahead, I told him.

Because I don't think the rules are about God setting us up so he can smite us when we deviate from the path. I think the rules are there to keep us from getting hurt. It's the same with morals. People who refrain from casual sex with multiple partners can cross all kinds of unpleasant experiences off their list. People who refrain from gossip don't have workplace and family drama blow up in their faces - or at least, not from things they've said behind people's backs that got out. There's a reason for all those "thou shalt nots". One can heed them, or one can learn the hard way. Why re-invent the wheel over and over and over?

I remember that when F was very small she had a horrifying habit of running headlong through the house with her arms thrown behind her. Of course she fell and hurt herself all the time. I asked her repeatedly not to run in the house. Go outside and run. Still she did it, and she came to me howling with her bumps and bruises. One day I kind of lost my temper.

"Do you see me falling down all the time and hurting myself?"

"No," she bawled.

"What about Daddy? Do you see him falling down and hurting himself all the time?"

"No."

"Why do you suppose that is? Do you think it's because WE DON'T RUN IN THE HOUSE?"

Sniff.

"One of these days you are going to figure out for yourself why it is that I keep asking you not to run in the house. And that will be a happy day, because I won't have to listen to you crying because you fell down and hurt yourself."

Epiphany. The running in the house stopped forthwith.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction. Hear, my son, your father's instruction, and do not forsake your mother's teaching; indeed, they are a graceful wreath to your head, and ornaments about your neck." Proverbs 1:7-9

I had occasion today to remember one of the owners of a company I used to work for. It was a chemical company and the lab/engineering group owned by it did environmental work - hazardous waste site remediations, effluent monitoring and so forth.

When a sample is taken for environmental sampling, the clock starts ticking on the holding time. This is the amount of time you have to get the analysis done, and it varies by matrix (soil or water) and by analyte. If you miss the holding time, and the sample exceeds the cleanup criteria, that's not usually a big deal. But if the sample is clean, you can't use the results because it has expired, so to speak, and you can't say the concentration of your analytes didn't decrease over time. Typically, if holding times are missed because of negligence in the lab, the lab has to pay for resampling. If bulldozers and things have to be mobilized, this can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Shortly after I went to work for this company, one of the owners had a meeting with all of us. He passed out copies of an article for us to read, that described how upper-level people with an environmental lab somewhere faced criminal charges and jail time because they'd missed holding times on samples from a Superfund site and falsified dates to cover that up. Some people had left that lab and gone to work elsewhere, but the feds went after them. He passed that article out to tell us this:

"DON'T HELP ME. If you miss holding times and we have to pay for resampling, that's bad. But if you miss holding times and lie about it, and I go to jail, that's real bad. Don't miss holding times! But if you do, don't lie about it!"

He went on to tell us that no one in that company would ever ask us to lie about anything, and if we thought they had, we were mistaken.

Some time after this I happened to be at work on the weekend, and he was too. He saw that I was there and asked me to come to his office. It seemed that the city had asked us to start checking the effluent of the plant there in town for carbon tetrachloride, and there was a surprising amount; the company was having to pay fines. The chemist who did volatiles had just turned in some results, and there would be more fines. The owner asked me to check the data and I said I would. But as I put my hand on the door handle, he stopped me and said, "I have to say something."

"No, you don't," I thought, but I stopped and let him say it.

"I'm not asking you to help me here. I don't want you to 'fix' anything. If the number is in error I don't want to pay a fine. But if it's right, it's right."

"I understand," I said, and I went to the volatile lab.

I found the chromatogram and the calibration data, checked the peak integration and the spectrum, went all the way back to the preparation of the calibration standards, recalculated the curve, recalculated the data against a single point, even found the sample and reran it on the chance that the chemist had run the wrong sample. Finally I went back to the owner's office.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I can't find an error."

"Okay, thanks!" he said brightly.

Subsequently they found out where the carbon tet was coming from and fixed the problem.

And subsequent to all of that, this same owner promoted me, twice. He put me forward to be in the pilot group for the in-house management training program we had, and to be in some process development teams at the plant, which was extremely cool. If the chemical industry had not had a downturn in the '90's, and at the same time we had not finished the remediation of those hazardous waste sites, so that they had to cut the lab loose, I would happily have worked there forever.

The point is that this man set a standard for integrity that none of his employees had any excuse for not understanding. When people try to duck responsibility for what their underlings do I think about him, and about the fact that anybody who falsified anything at that workplace did it in direct, explicit violation of the standard he set. I've also thought about the importance of telling the truth, being aboveboard and transparent and all those inconvenient things. There is no job, and certainly there is no audit, accreditation, or anything else, that is worth more to me than my integrity. Jobs come and go but I'll always have myself. You have to watch that slippery slope because every boss is not as principled as this one. If your boss sees you let this little thing and that little thing slide, you have only yourself to blame if he puts you on the spot by asking you to do something you really don't think is right. If your boss sees you being compulsive about doing everything exactly right and by the book, redoing work if necessary, painstakingly investigating when things don't go right, telling the salesman the material just can't go out because the specifications aren't met, he knows better than to ask. So setting high standards for yourself and sticking to them makes everything easier in the long run. (I will say that I can't see my current boss asking me or anyone to do anything that's not right.)

I'm posting here a comment that I made on the bioethics blog I've posted about before. The post I commented on was about using embryonic stem cells to research Huntington disease. The poster indicated that she thought President Bush objects to this research because he imagines that babies are being stuffed into test tubes. In a comment responding to me she says that this was hyperbole but she still thinks he doesn't understand the development of a blastocyst. I left this comment for approval but I'm posting it here too because it occurs to me that on my very own blog I've never spelled out my thinking about this issue.

Ricki, I'm not sure he is not aware of the extent of development of a blastocyst, either.

Many people, me included, consider that life - that is, human life worthy of respect and protection - begins at conception. To explain this as briefly as possible, when I wanted to reach a conclusion about this, I thought that I needed to find a bright line between life/not life. I can't see acknowledging that an individual is a living human but that his life is without value if his death would be convenient for another individual. Fetal development occurs on a continuum. If one picks out an event such as the heart beginning to beat, (a) it doesn't immediately start beating the way a mature heart does, and (b) different individuals will hit that milestone at different times; you can't say "X happens at Y weeks" and cover every individual. You can see this by looking at premature babies. Some born at 30 weeks aren't ready and can't be saved, others do very well and later have no averse effects. So the trimester divisions don't make much sense either if you're looking for life/not life or viability. Birth isn't really a bright line either, which was confirmed for me when my daughter was born 3 weeks before her due date. That would have been 3 weeks that she was a human, when if I hadn't gone into labor early she would have been an amorphous clump of cells (bit of hyperbole there.) But going back all the way to ova and sperm, each gamete has the potential to become an infinite variety of humans depending on which gamete it finds to join with; or nothing at all if conception doesn't happen to occur. Once conception occurs, a unique individual exists who did not exist before. So there is my bright line. Some people think implantation is the magic moment, which makes a certain amount of sense because it's known that many, perhaps most, embryos don't implant, so it looks like "nature" views them as throwaways. I see that but it's not compelling to me. So for me, conception is it.

The point is, you absolutely do not have to agree with me. I will not think you are stupid or misinformed if you do not. On the other hand, the fact that I have this view that most likely differs from yours doesn't make me stupid or misinformed. If I skimmed your article and thought, "she doesn't care about helping sick people, she just wants any excuse to keep abortion legal" I would be wronging you, for one thing, but also denying myself an opportunity to check my conclusions and make sure they are still valid; something we should all do from time to time.

Sometimes when I read things that bioethicists write I think that their function is to find a way to rationalize whatever a doctor or scientist wants to do. I'm sure that's not fair but it's how they come across sometimes.

I remember that several years ago a woman whose father had Parkinson's wanted to be inseminated by him so that there would be a fetus closely related to him for a fetal tissue implant. This was turned down. For those of us who object to the harvesting of fetuses for their tissue on principle, it's a no-brainer anyway. For those who don't, it's hard to see what the objection is except that it seems icky. You bet it is, it's icky as hell, and it's the next logical step if we dehumanize unborn humans to this extent. One isn't supposed to say "nazi" because it's an overused cliche. So I'll mention the Japanese "doctors" who experimented on American POWs during WWII: to find out how much blood loss they could endure if it was replaced with seawater, for instance, or how much of their livers could be removed without killing them. Dehumanizing these people in the interest of learning things. What's the point in doing medical research, if people's lives don't matter anyway?

I think some people are distracted by the fact that the ESC and fetal tissue experiments are carried out in nice, clean labs by people with advanced degrees who wear white lab coats. How can you connect experiments on POWs with this? How can you extrapolate from attempts to research disease, to doctors like Mengele? Going back to what I posted earlier about "To Build a Fire", maybe this points out the importance of imagination, without which one can't see the big picture. You can't put blinders on and focus only on the need to do something about a specific disease without counting the cost. You can't look at what is happening in one isolated lab in 2008. You have to look at these things in the context of how they have been done before (i.e. what humans are capable of, which is why those of us who contemplate this weren't shocked by that woman who wanted to conceive her father's child) and therefore what they could lead to without meaningful regulations and guidelines. This is the only difference between doctors in Germany and Japan in the last century, and doctors here today. To be clear about what I'm saying here: all doctors in Germany and Japan were not engaged in these horrific things. Only a few were. But there's nothing, no "bright line", to really say that German or Japanese doctors in the 1940's were qualitatively different from doctors now to the extent that everything our doctors want to do is automatically ethical and defensible. You can't assume that intelligence and an advanced degree imply a well-developed conscience or that each individual researcher fully understands that "we can" does not imply "we should".

So these are my thoughts. As always, feel free to disagree.

I think sometimes about how people change, individually, and how society changes. Human nature doesn't change, does it? But things that are socially acceptable become less so, or more so, over time. Are we getting better? Is it better that we don't (usually) openly make fun of mentally retarded people, or hide them away in shame? Oh yes. On the other hand, parents of children with Down syndrome report being asked by complete strangers why they didn't abort them, as though they had a duty to do so. That's not better.

And one has to ask what society is, anyway. I tend to think we each have our own society: people we hang with, in real life or on the net, people whose opinions we read in the newspaper or whose shows we watch on TV. So whether violent video games, for instance, affect society probably depends on whose society we're talking about. Unless I am the victim of a violent criminal who took his inspiration from those games, they don't affect my society at all. Except insofar as I care about people I don't have dealings with, as I am supposed to do, and fret about their societies.

Anyway, one of the things I think about is the changing acceptability of words. The n-word comes to mind, of course. There is a book I really like: Twilight Sleep, by Edith Wharton, one of my favorite writers. One of the reasons I like her work is that she draws her characters so finely, and includes such detail in her stories, that you can pick up all kind of social nuances that have disappeared since her day. (An example is in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", which is one of the stories I linked to in my previous post. The exchange between Hartley, the lady's maid who narrates the story, and Mrs. Railton, neatly illustrates how each of these women know their "place", yet they appear to like each other. They are totally comfortable with social distinctions we don't have now.)

So in Twilight Sleep there is a fairly tragic character in Nona, Pauline's daughter. Nona at 19 is the conscience of the book. She's never had any real spiritual guidance from her mother, although her mother would argue that. She's left Nona to develop her own spiritual/ethical compass as best she can, and Nona has done pretty well; better perhaps than her mother would like. For instance, Nona doesn't see the social distinctions the way Pauline does. Pauline's secretary, Maisie, has a mother who develops cancer. Pauline sees this as an inconvenience for herself, although she tries to push this down, and generously offers to pay for all of Maisie's mother's care. But it's Nona who goes to the hospital and actually sits with Maisie, and holds her hand, while her mother has surgery. Pauline worries that Nona is just a little too good, really. Here:

Pauline turned a tender smile on her daughter. "It's so like you, Nona, to want to be with Maisie for the operation - so fine, dear."

Voice and smile were full of praise; yet behind the praise (Nona also knew) lurked the unformulated apprehension: "All this running after sick people and unhappy people - is it going to turn into a vocation?" Nothing could have been more distasteful to Mrs. Manford than the idea that her only daughter should be not only good, but merely good: like poor Agnes Heuston, say ... Nona could hear her mother murmuring, "I can't imagine where on earth she got it from," as if alluding to some physical defect unaccountable in the offspring of two superbly sound progenitors.

You see here that besides being empathetic with Maisie, Nona has more insight into Pauline's "unformulated apprehension" than even Pauline does.

Yet here is Nona out on a date: "Isn't there a rather good little Italian restaurant somewhere near here? And afterward there's that n--- dancing at the Housetop."

How jarring that is. One thinks that when this book was brought back into print they could have changed that line: "afterward there's jazz at the Housetop" for instance. Because if Nona were a girl of today she would bite her tongue off before she'd say that word. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how the corporate view of what is or is not acceptable changes.

Let me pause and say that of course one realizes this is fiction. At the same time, Nona is a very important character in the book, and her depiction has internal consistency throughout. If it had ever been brought to her attention that the n-word is rude and hurtful she would not have said it. Either it would not have been brought to her attention (very possible) or it simply was not the derogatory term then that it is now.

So the minor issue here is that one reads these books and is jarred by this kind of thing - Twilight Sleep also includes a much more problematic outburst of anti-Semitism by a less sympathetic character - and wonders whether the text should really be left as it is, which causes one to hesitate before recommending it to people it might upset.

The other issue, and the reason why these books should probably be left as they are, is that in many cases you kind of have to judge people and events by the standards of the day. Not every case, of course. Major things like murder and rape have always been wrong. And individuals or (hopefully) small groups always have and always will find ways to rationalize doing what they want to do, even when they know they're wrong. Use of words, though, don't you have to take that in context? There was a school somewhere that I read about a few weeks ago, that wasn't allowed to put on a play based on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians" because originally in England (never here) it was published as "Ten Little N---s". That was in 1932, as I recall. The story has nothing about black people in it. Isn't that a bit much?

Anyway, so acceptable use of words changes. Acceptable attitudes change - in "The Lady's Maid's Bell", Mrs. Railton notes that because Hartley can read aloud, she is educated above her station. I don't believe anyone would let that pass their lips today, but Hartley thinks nothing of it.

And we are reminded that well-meaning people have done things in the past that we reject now. The fact that they are now rejected doesn't necessarily mean that they were bad. The rejection itself may be a passing fad. Going back to mentally retarded people - look at the controversy over mainstreaming. Those children used to be excluded from regular classrooms. Then there was a push to mainstream absolutely all of them, because segregating them is BAD. But every now and then you run across the parent of a child with a severe mental handicap, or a teacher who has mainstreamed kids in her classroom, who question the wisdom of mainstreaming every single kid, or assert outright that some of them should not be mainstreamed. Segregating schools by race used to be wrong and bad, but we find Afro-centric schools springing up in places where the grownups are desperate to find some way of reaching the next generation of black kids. So I think it's useful to look at these things and separate out the things we have let go of, or need to let go of, because they're wrong; and things that we let go of that we need to bring back, like the idea that folks should get married before they start having kids, like they used to do.

When F was a little girl I gave her Little House books and Louisa May Alcott books to read along with her contemporary fiction. I wasn't trying to prepare her for life in the 19th century. I simply wanted her to have some perspective, to see that pop culture of today isn't all there is or has ever been, and to see that ideas like temperance and sexual morality didn't just spring up overnight among the people on the fringes of society. One of the ways I tried to be a bit proactive about helping her develop her own spiritual/ethical compass. Mine's still developing.

Tsiporah is turning 30. She has not met some of the goals she set for herself.

I wrote about setting S.M.A.R.T. goals here.

But I also think about a semi-autobiographical book I read once, that was set in a small town in Mississippi during the Depression. The family in the story, parents and two boys, were dirt-poor. The mom had two standards that she set for herself: She had to give her family biscuits, not cornbread, for breakfast each morning, and she had to iron their shirts and overalls before they wore them. (Ironing was done with metal flatirons that you heated on the stove, of course.) As long as she could do these things she felt that she could hold up her head. I think it was smart of this woman to attach her self-esteem to these things, which were mostly in her control, rather than to set her sights on things she couldn't have or do. And naturally, she was civilized in other ways: her sons had to be polite and respectful and use proper English, and so forth.

I don't know how possible it is to re-wire one's inner promptings. I am naturally a glass-half-full kind of person. I get down in the dumps every now and then but my spirit usually bobs back up like a piece of cork. Our income is a bit unsettled right now, although my job looks to be OK for the foreseeable future, i.e. the next few months at least. But every night that I lie down in my own bed, with food in my belly, my family OK, the cats OK, the bills paid, I think it was a good day. And we deliberately plan fun things to do, to make good memories and have something to talk about besides work and other grim stuff.

Anyway, happy birthday, Tsiporah. I think you'll look back on this time in your life and see that it was a time of personal growth and that you really were making progress toward your goals; slower than you would like, maybe, but unslacking and undeterred. And I hope you have lots of silly, happy memories of moments with your son and your friends.

Trying not to think too much about the VA Tech thing. I've looked at some pictures of some of the kids and profs and I've been sittin here crying.

So I'll post a little more about that other blog and what has irritated me about it. CF, I saw your comment on the quarantine post. Some things are just no-brainers, you'd think, and then you run across people who appear to have no brains.

So I saw an argument put forth by a person who is getting her master's in bioethics. The conversation was about abortion. After careful thought and consideration, I have determined that I am pro-life. I realize that some people will not agree with me, and that's cool. They don't have to. I don't have to agree with them, either. But some arguments are just dumb. Here's one: "We have de-linked sex and procreation."

Okay, it's true that with adequate birth control scrupulously applied, it's (mostly) possible to have sex without getting pregnant. It's also possible with IVF to get pregnant without having sex, although as many women know it's not always easy or ultimately possible for them. But the vast, overwhelming majority of people on this planet were conceived and gestated the old-fashioned way. The exceptions are a vanishingly small fraction of the population. And this will be true for the foreseeable future. If we had to depend on IVF and cloning to continue the species, we might as well just lie down and let the bears take over.

So you'd think that a person would realize the absurdity of that statement before it left her fingertips. I try not to talk down to people. It's rude and disrespectful, and it doesn't get me anywhere. But I would like to tell this person she needs to ramp up her BS detector so that when she hears claptrap like this in her bioethics classes she can recognize it for what it is.

Another person told me that the sex-love link is stronger than the sex-procreation link. Uh, try again.

The actual fact is that some of us (I don't want to say "we" because I hate those broad-brush mea culpas) have elevated the sex-gratification link over everything. And some of us think that we should be able to do whatever we want with no consequences - to us, at least; if there are consequences to other people - unborn people, for instance, or people who innocently go to the store and don't expect to be coughed on by an XDR-TB patient - well, that's their problem. It's usually children and immature teenagers that one would expect to think that they need to be able to do whatever they want, and that unwanted consequences are just not fair. Yet you see grown people saying that opposition to abortion is sexist because men don't get pregnant. Eventually most of us internalize the fact that we have to live in the world as it is.

Last week I read about a new strain of gonorrhea that is multiple-drug-resistant and that the doctors are having trouble figuring out how to treat. So the sex-STD link is strong and getting stronger.

Today on a whim R and I visited a different church. It's not a Baptist church (not that there would be anything wrong with that) but I heard a term I'd never heard before: "Particular Baptists". These are Baptists with a Calvinist streak, in that they believe in predestination: that is, that Jesus died to save only the elect. (Since a church member would not know whether or not another individual is a member of the elect, they are compelled to invite all to salvation.) In looking all this up, I ran across this list of all the different kinds of Baptists. I knew there were a bunch. I think of Baptists as arising from you're-not-the-boss-of-me Celts (although this may not be accurate) and that's why they tend to not have hierarchies. It's also why they have all these different subgroups. A very Baptist idea is "soul competence", that is, the ability of the believer to read and understand the Bible and not have to have a theologian explain it. So there are not set theological ideas handed down and dimly understood. I think that's a good thing, actually. Years and years ago I worked with an Egyptian Copt. He had some pamphlets written by an abbot in a Coptic monastery, which he lent to me because I was curious. One of them was about Christian unity. The writer said that it was a good thing that there are different kinds of churches, so that each believer can find one where he or she can most effectively worship, learn, and serve. He said that if people try to force unity they end up ignoring the things they have in common, which tend to be the important things, and focusing on the things they differ on, which are usually peripherals; and then if the groups get together, somebody had to compromise, which they may resent. Better for everybody to do his thing, so that at the proper time God can bring about real unity. That makes a lot of sense to me.

But the list of different kinds of Baptists reminds me of this: Our choir director told us that in one of his university music classes, they got partway into the semester and he told them he could list the students who grew up Baptist - and then he proceeded to do so. How did he know? They were the ones who always sang the repeats. And if you ever attended a Baptist church service and sang all 4,356 verses of "Just As I Am", you understand that. From my spot in the chancel on Sunday mornings I can look out and see the congregation. Once I saw a man who I knew to be a visitor, and I noticed that he was able to sing the hymns without referring to his hymnal; and that he seemed to know all the verses. "Oh, he's a Baptist," I thought. I told my mom about that later, and also that I noticed that as he sang he lifted one hand, palm up. "That's Free Will Baptist," she joked. And it might have been.

Briton32 sez:

"I think that there are just as many racist black people as there are white."

People who know me tend to confide in me, oddly enough, and ask me to help them understand stuff. Years ago I worked with a black woman named Tonya. She came in to work one day hopping mad, I knew because I could hear the tone of her voice as she complained to our coworkers, and eventually she came into my office and told me her story.

Tonya had gone to see a new doctor - a cardiologist, maybe - and the minute she walked in the door the receptionist snapped, "We don't take TennCare."

"I don't have TennCare," Tonya said, "I have insurance on my job." (By the way, other black coworkers have told the same story at different times.)

So in my office, Tonya asked, "Why did she say that to me?"

In answer, I told Tonya that while I do not see racists behind every tree, and while I think in general people are better off giving other people the benefit of the doubt, in this case it seemed pretty clear that the receptionist saw a black woman walk into the waiting room and thought "welfare queen". Racism, Tonya. Sorry you had to experience that.

"But the receptionist was black!" Tonya objected.

Okay, I know there is a school of thought that black people cannot be racists. I do not subscribe to it. I think there are no vices and no virtues that white people are capable of, that black people are not also capable of. (The CF and I talked about this concept last weekend, in terms of men and women.) To say otherwise is to reduce black people to the level of children or animals.

I've been struggling to find a definition of racism that works for me. What I've come up with so far can also apply to sexism, ageism, etc.

1 - A group of people is identified. This can be an arbitrary group, like "old folks", or a well-defined group, like "people over 65". So far we are OK.
2 - Attributes are assigned to the group. Now we are not OK, because -
3 - These attributes are now assumed to apply to members of the group without checking to see if they are appropriate or not.

And the attributes do not have to be negative. It is not negative, for instance, to have a sense of rhythm. Tell a black person that you are not surprised he is a good dancer b/c black people have rhythm, and see where that gets you. No one likes to be pigeonholed.

You can also be that way about a group of which you are a member; either because you think you are an exception, or because you label yourself too.

The reason I'm not happy with this definition is this: my FIL had a few dizzy spells a while back, and I recommended that he check with his doctor about his blood pressure medication. Because I've seen some "old folks" actually pass out due to the fact that as they aged, the medication became too much. Sure enough, when he complained to the doctor about his dizzyness, the doctor cut back his BP meds. We know that people start needing a little help with close-up vision starting at around age 40. That's not "ageist" is it? Is it racist to say that black women need to care for their hair differently than white women do?

Having trouble coming up with something that encompasses benign racism like the rhythm thing, but also allows for common sense.

I've been considering writing about the sermon I heard last Sunday. LaShawn Barber has an interesting post entitled "Has 'White Guilt' Run Its Course?" (no) and it and some of the comments have inspired me to go on and do it.

The sermon was given by one of the associate ministers, who happens to be the son of our senior minister. The title was "Why Diversity Matters" (and let me say parenthetically that I long for sermon titles like "Behaving Like a God-Fearing Person" and I may do something about that before long.) He started out by saying that Memphis is a segregated city and we need to stop being that way. Okay, well, from what I read Memphis is actually more integrated than most cities, but I made a conscious decision to keep an open mind and listen to what he had to say.

What he had to say was a resume of his own experiences. All of his schooling, K-12, was at private schools here that are mostly white, so he was surrounded, as he said, with "people like him". College, ditto. He never was around black people much, apparently, until he went to seminary in New Jersey and got a job at a church where, for the first time in his life, he was a racial minority. Apparently he got some kind of epiphany and has come back to get us all straightened out. Okay, maybe it's ugly of me to put it that way. I have PMS. Shoot me.

Here's the deal: My daughter went to a parochial school K-6. The school was about 50/50 black and white. I remember one year they had an overabundance of boys in her grade for some reason, and there were 4 black and 3 white girls in her class. Public magnet schools for 7-12, and these teetered on the 50/50 mark the whole time; by the time she graduated from high school, white kids were a slight minority at that school. Our neighborhood is probably roughly 50/50. A white family moves out and a black family moves in. A black family moves out and a white family moves in. F played with the black kid next door - they set up a space ship in the back yard, I remember. As for me, the overwhelming majority of the last 24 or so years I have worked at places where white people were in the minority.

And then there's F's friend, also a member of that church, who went to Central High School here in Memphis, and was part of the 13% of the student population that was white.

We don't need anybody lecturing us about how segregated we are, especially someone with the - I don't want to say "privileged" because, even though it was more expensive, it wasn't necessarily any better than my daughter's. But "elitist"? Is that what I mean? background that he stood up there and told us he had. I think he was projecting his experiences onto the rest of us white folks without stopping to ask himself whether his assumptions were valid. That's partly a sign of immaturity, but also there's this:

One of the commenters on LaShawn's post said that she thought liberal guilt was a sign of laziness. "It is so much less effort to make a big display of self-flagellation, and throw some money (other people’s money) around than to really engage with people. It is so much less effort than to follow Christ, in whom there is no Jew or Greek, no black or white, no free of slave." Is it laziness that this minister hasn't gotten to know the portion of the congregation that isn't "like him"? People who can't afford expensive clothes and ski trips and attend or send their kids to public schools? And ironically, now I am going to talk about the virtue of diversity: If you spend time at work or at school with people who are not "like you" then it becomes easier to leave your comfort zone and connect with those people; or maybe your comfort zone just becomes a lot larger.

Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve, had three articles on The Wall Street Journal online last week, dealing with IQ issues. I read The Bell Curve when it came out several years ago. At first I thought its arguments were fairly compelling, but when I reread them and compared them to my observations, I started seeing holes big enough to drive a truck through. There are a couple of interesting points in there, but there's a whole lot of dreck too.

I'll just mention one point here and probably have some more later. The book says that IQ is the best predictor of job performance, regardless of the job. Yes, on pages 78 and 79 of my hardback copy, the book says that even a busboy's job is done better by a busboy with a higher IQ. I've worked with people with IQs ranging from average to very high, and supervised a bunch of them over the years, and I draw a very different conclusion from my experiences. If I were hiring right now, and had access to the IQ scores of my candidates, (problematic here b/c I don't believe that IQ scores are always closely correlated to g due to text anxiety, etc.) and if I could pinpoint the minimal IQ that it would take to do the job, I might use those scores to identify a pool of candidates that I would be interested in. But for the next step, I would throw out the IQ scores and examine that pool of candidates for the important, make-or-break attributes: Can you show up for work every day? Get along with your coworkers? Take direction? Are you a team player? Do you shirk unpleasant tasks, or do you pull your weight? Are you curious enough to ask questions and learn more and more skills and help the group problem-solve, or do you just want to do your little tasks that you've picked out? Can you do things that seem stupid to you or that you don't understand the reason for, just because you're supposed to? (A big one in my field, always.) These things have little or nothing to do with IQ, and I say that because somehow the very smartest people I have worked with (smarter than me) have had their effectiveness in the workplace greatly diminished because of these. I've had to have two people I supervised fired over the years. (Only two, and that's probably because I'm too nice.) The second was a cut-and-dried case of falsifying, but the first was a person who was extremely bright, but who could not seem to exchange his internal requirements for external ones; that is, if a process struck him as being the right and appropriate thing to do, no one could convince him otherwise. You cannot have that in a regulated field like environmental chemistry. We couldn't get time considerations across to him either - like prioritizing work according to customer needs rather than what seemed to him the most elegant way. When he was let go, we replaced him with a woman who was much younger than he was, less experienced and less educated, and probably had less abstract intelligence, but she got in there and got the job done. Cared that it was done right, i.e., by the book, and on time. She was a much, much more valuable employee by anyone's measure. IQ by itself does nothing for the employer. I think having a high IQ is like having lots of money: you can spend it to do things that are fun and interesting, you can use it to benefit other people, or you can bury it in the back yard and forget you ever had it until it rots. Having it doesn't mean much, it's how it's focused and what you do with it.

And all of this seems pretty self-evident to me, which is one reason why I find The Bell Curve and the further writings of its surviving author so irritating.

OK, well, here's another one. Although the book is careful to point out that even if you know the average IQ of a particular population, you can't apply that to a specific member of the population, people do that anyway. So the book goes on and on about demographics and the reader is strongly tempted to think of people as members of a demographic, not as individuals. Some time ago I had a conversation on a message board with a person who told me that because I am from Mississippi, I am less likely to be literate. I couldn't convince him that because he was dealing with an individual, "less likely" or "more likely" was irrelevant; either I was literate or I was not. He insisted that he liked knowing things like that before he dealt with people because it saved time. Another person in the discussion said that that was about the clearest exposition of racism he'd ever seen - only it wasn't racism, of course, it was regionalism (I guess). Same concept. I think the demographic stuff could be of very limited use. For instance, if somehow you could know the average IQ score of the students in a particular school (and see my caveat above about that) you could predict the average scores of various standardized tests and compare your predictions to the actual scores to see if the school is doing an adequate job of educating that population. You would not know how the school is serving the kids at either end of the IQ range. You would certainly not know the capability of any particular child at that school. Unfortunately I think a lot of people do that "time saving" thing without even realizing it, and what a pernicious thing that is.

In Sunday School this morning we talked about faith. Among other things, we discussed how one maintains faith in God when really bad things happen. I remember that C.S. Lewis talked about that in terms of taking a cat to the vet; if I'm not mistaken, this is in A Grief Observed.

We took little Molly to the vet yesterday morning and had to leave her a couple of hours. Molly had a UTI several months ago, so when we feared that one of the cats was having symptoms of such we immediately decided to get Molly checked out. (That's the editorial "we" there, in case you are wondering.) It turns out that she's fine, to our relief. The vet tech said her urine was "beautiful" which I doubt was true in the aesthetic sense, but I know what she meant. But when we went to pick her up, it took them a while to bring her out. I think she was fighting them. Molly's pretty scrappy. One of the techs finally brought her out with a towel wrapped around her and covering her head.

"Don't make her look at dogs," I joked, some fine specimens just entering the waiting room. But the tech had no intention of trying to remove the towel from Molly and in fact, didn't want the towel back. Molly was growling until I took her in my arms and spoke to her. When she heard my voice, she pushed her head between my arm and my body and grew quiet. I held her like a baby all the way home as she burrowed as close to me as she could get.

The point of all of this is that you can't explain to a cat why you are taking her to the vet. If you tried for a million years, you could not make your cat understand. As Lewis put it, the cat cannot differentiate between the vet and the vivisectionist. From Molly's point of view we delivered her over to strangers, who frightened her and probably caused her some pain. Certainly they made her smell bad, no small consideration for a cat. But even though you know your cat can't understand why, you do what you have to do for your cat's sake, and hope that her love and trust are strong enough to overcome her anger and fear. And this is actually not a bad analogy for our inability to look at things from God's eternal perspective. I think that when we get to heaven, all kinds of things will become knowable to us. Paul said in I Cor. 13 that we have imperfect knowledge now but then we will see everything clearly.

Well, I am stunned.

I've long thought that people who support abortion, or rather that subset of such people who say there's nothing wrong with it (as distinct from those who admit that it's murder but support it anyway) show an extreme lack of logical thinking when they confer human status on a baby only after it's born - as if it might be a cat or a walrus beforehand. There's nothing magical about the birth process. It's not like a baby was a blob of featureless protoplasm that the magical act of birth put a human stamp on.

Now that idea is turned on its head. Doctors: let us kill disabled babies.

The college’s submission was also welcomed by John Harris, a member of the government’s Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at Manchester University. “We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth canal but not at the other?” he said.

One used to read about primitive cultures that exposed newborns who weren't perfect. One used to read about them in such a way that it was made clear that these were uncivilized and unenlightened people. Apparently those cultures are us.

God, forgive us. God, save us from ourselves.

This morning the preacher said (among other things) that you can't legislate morality. That statement is mildly irritating to me. I know what he meant, (and disagree with him on that particular issue,) but we legislate morality all the time. It's immoral to murder, steal, beat people up, abuse or neglect children, etc. It's even immoral to cheat the taxman so that other people have to pay your share. Taking this not-legislating-morality idea to an extreme causes you to end up with this: Teen nudity exposes town's bare-bone rules. According to CNN, teenagers in Brattleboro, VT have taken to public nudity and the town fathers are unsure about what, if anything, they can or should do about it. Is it not OK to set community standards for acceptable public behavior and codify them?

Poor F has had to submit to Lectures from me all her life. If I had had a blog while she was growing up I would have posted them too, because they are always about things I feel strongly about. The meaning of success, which I posted about earlier, was the subject of one of those lectures.

F said something the other day that reminded me of a screed that I subjected her to when she was in the 9th grade. She had to read several books for English, among them Jane Eyre and The Good Earth. Her English teacher, who I think had no sense at all (ask me sometime about the research paper assignment) asked this question about The Good Earth: Was Wang Lung a moral person? She asked this on a test, and the only acceptable answer was "Yes". I blew my stack when F told me this, and I told her that Wang Lung was not a moral person!

F thought that it was because he kept concubines in his later life. It turned out that she thought morals always have to do with sex, a notion I was glad to find out that she had so I could disabuse her of it. Morals have to do with judging that a particular behavior is right or wrong, independently of how we feel about it, whether we want to engage in it or not, what other people will think of it, or whether or not we will benefit from it. A moral person will not always do the right thing. He may try to find ways to rationalize what he does and convince himself that he's not in the wrong. But mostly he'll feel remorse when he leaves the path, and he'll try to straighten up, make restitution if possible, and resolve never to repeat the error.

Wang Lung, if you recall, had a daughter who was profoundly retarded. This was possibly due to the wretched famine that his family had to endure while she was in the womb and in the months following her birth. Wang Lung loved his daughter and felt compassion for her, so he made sure that she was taken care of. No one else cared whether she lived or died, not even her mother or her brothers, and certainly not the servants whose job it was to look after her physical needs. It's clear throughout the book that Wang Lung is a nice person who cares about others' feelings. He's obviously a warm-hearted, loving man. But if he had not loved his daughter, he would not have thought twice about letting her die from neglect. He regretted his family's lack of concern for her, but he didn't think they were bad people because they would have let this helpless innocent suffer. Right and wrong just didn't enter into it.

In contrast, Mr. Rochester of Jane Eyre hated his wife. He felt that he had been tricked into marrying her and that she had ruined his life. He began hating her even before her descent into madness. But he continued to see that she was cared for because it was the right thing to do. He made sure little Adele was taken care of for the same reason - he didn't spend a lot of time with her, so it was clear that he took little pleasure from her company, but he saw to it that she was well-clothed and fed and educated by people who were kind to her because he felt a sense of responsibility toward her. It was wrong of him to try to marry Jane without her knowing that it couldn't have been a legal marriage, and he knew that. But the thing is, no one would have known if he had walked away from his responsibilities. No one knew about his wife (except his brother-in-law) or would have known about Adele, who IIRC wasn't even his child. He didn't come across as a particularly religious person, so he didn't do what he did from fear of hellfire. So there wasn't a single reason for him to do these responsible things, up to and including risking his life in an attempt to save his wife when his house burned up, except that he felt that he should. And that makes Mr. Rochester a moral person.

Still with the Duke case. Which brings up echoes of Kobe Bryant, Mike Tyson, etc.

Some people wonder whether it is possible for a prostitute or a girl of lax morals to be raped. I have a couple of thoughts.

First, the personal responsibility thing is a real stumbling-block for some. Let's consider this scenario: I park my car in a public lot, leave an expensive laptop on the seat, and go off without locking my car doors. When I come back several hours later, the laptop is gone. Was I foolish in leaving the laptop unguarded? Absolutely. Was the thief wrong to take it? Amazingly, some would say that since I didn't lock the thing up, it was fair game and I have no grievance. Compare this to a different scenario, in which I lock the laptop in the car trunk when I think no one is looking, and the thief has to break into the trunk to take the laptop. In the second scenario I would deserve more sympathy and probably get more consideration from the police, but I don't think there is a difference in culpability for the thief. In both cases, he knew he was taking something that didn't belong to him. The fact of the matter is, that while theft is wrong and people shouldn't engage in it, if your laptop is stolen you won't have it anymore, so it behooves you to lock the thing up. And locking up your laptop isn't controversial or counterculture like acting like you have some morals is so most of us just secure our property without thinking much about it.

So consider a case in which a woman goes to a man's hotel room in the middle of the night, or contracts to strip at a party for money. Maybe she has it in the back of her mind that anything might happen, and maybe she's OK with that. Then if sex occurs, is it possible that it was rape? People say, what did she go there for? I've heard that over and over.

Here's an analogy that I find useful. Suppose that you decide that you want to do something to help the homeless. There's a homeless shelter down the street from your workplace, and you arrange to go there one afternoon and take a tour. If you like what you see, you're prepared to make a large donation. The people who run the shelter meet you at the door. They know what you're there for, and they very nicely start showing you around. Once you get well inside, though, they push you up against the wall, go through your pockets and take your wallet and your cell and PDA, grab the watch off your wrist, and then hustle you over to the front door and push you out into the street. Were you robbed? Well, what did you go in there for? You were probably going to give them some money anyway, right?

Not that I think this scenario describes the Duke case. If the reports are true that there's no DNA match and the timeline doesn't add up, I'm thinking this one was a false accusation. We'll see what happens when (if) it goes to trial.