God's Moral Experiment

Our friend Antonius over at Boring Diatribe has considered the current run of business and political scandals in a moral light, with a little help from the intelligent design folks, game theory, and the prisoner's dilemma. Worth your time to read.

His basic thesis is that morality does not necessarily arise from God or religion, but rather from the fact that in general, it's a more successful strategy for a society. Which reminded me of a paper I wrote in college that was a utilitarian analysis of the Ten Commandments. Indeed, given the time, place, and circumstances, those commandments were pretty useful guidelines for living. Later, in the New Testament, Jesus winnows it down to one commandment:

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. (Matthew 22:37-39 [King James Version])

I'll treat the first part below; the second, love thy neighbo(u)r as thyself, is clearly utilitarian in a Kantian way. That is to say, it depends on everyone buying into the same social contract. (Gallons of ink have been spent on his essay "On Lying," in which he posits a murderer asking you where to find the person he wants to murder, and explains why in that circumstance you still shouldn't lie.) If everyone treated other people as they would like to be treated themselves--from being polite to each other in public on up to helping each other in need--sure, the world would be a better place. (Other cultures and institutions and individuals have formulated this in different ways--"walk a mile in his moccasins," etc.--it's not unique to Christianity, no doubt because of its utility.)

But the fact is that even the best of us don't go through our day seeing every person as ourselves. And we certainly have hierarchies--family, friends, people like us (whether that means economically, racially, culturally, nationally, etc.), geographical proximity--of whom we are more likely to help. With limited resources, we have to make choices. Of course, if that commandment were a Kantian categorical imperative the duty of which is acknowledged by everyone, everyone would be giving something to the needy and no individual would have to give it all; for practical purposes, it would mean voluntary socialism. (I've said before that Christ was a liberal. Now the dirty secret is out: Christ was a socialist! Take that, right-wing so-called Christians!)

But we don't do that. Not just out of practical concerns, either. Everybody wants to be special--that's the competition part of evolution--in some respect, at some point. And we like some people more than others, and make choices accordingly. Hence, the need for a first commandment to enforce the second: God is bigger and better than you, and he's going to make you suffer if you don't behave.

Kant sought the moral authority in reason, but face it, only a small percentage of people have the luxury or and/or inclination for time examining the philosophy of morality, and even fewer make their daily choices in light of moral philosophy. Striking a little visceral fear of God into people is certainly a more practical--utilitarian--solution.

Which leads to the conclusion that religion is itself a utilitarian invention--a successful strategy, as Antonius might put it.

Does this in turn imply that God does not exist? Not necessarily. I think the premise of the utility of God's commandment is independent of whether it came from God or not.

But, like the categorical imperative, it falls down if everyone doesn't buy into it all the time. And given that the so-called Christians running our government are advocates of torture (thanks, Antonius and Reductio, for giving me so much to think about), even those who call themselves believers have lost the plot.

Hey, God, this experiment hasn't worked; what's your next hypothesis?

...Back to That Same Old Place...

...Sweet Home Chicago!

It's not the Cubs, but I'll take it.

A lot of outatowners are apparently baffled that there's another team in town, and all they care about is how this affects Cub fans. The Cub Reporter sets them straight. If you came here to find out how this Cub fan feels about the Sox winning the Series: I feel great.

I do not hate the White Sox. In fact, I'm quite fond of the White Sox. As I said the other day, the first professional baseball games I ever attended were White Sox games, at the real Comiskey, not that new ballpark that dared to call itself Comiskey--I've never been a fan of teams selling the right for a corporation to slap their name on a ballpark, but for that South Side ballpark not to call itself Comiskey anymore? I can live with that.

Grandpa and I would choose the Twi-night Doubleheaders. Even Grandma, who detested baseball--we took her once, and she cheered for the visiting Orioles the whole time just to tick us off--recognized the importance of getting the most baseball for our (no) money. Plus, there were usually fireworks after. Somewhat lame fireworks--consisting largely of wooden frames shaped like trains and things, with colored sparklers dotting them to make their shapes light up--as I recall, but still.

Sox fans weren't Cub haters back then, either. Or at least not haters of pizza named for a Cub third baseman. They used to sell Ron Santo Pizzas in the stands at Comiskey, and I always wanted to try one. But you didn't ask for things you didn't need in our family, so I never did ask Grandpa to buy me one. As a result, those pizzas held such an allure that even today, knowing they were probably soggy and tasteless, my mouth waters thinking about them.

I was sitting in Grandpa's chair tonight when the Sox won it. I tend to think he would have felt the same happiness for the Sox and his (adopted) home town, accompanied by the wistfulness of it not being the Cubs.

Sure, we on the South Side where I grew up had a bit of a chip on our shoulders, and it definitely felt like moving into a new social class to move to the North Side. (Never mind that I moved from a more affluent South Side neighborhood to a dump of an apartment on a dubious street on the North Side.) Is becoming a Cub fan putting on airs? (And cheering for the Sox this week hailing the bandwagon?) No. It isn't like that. I grew up connected, by way of Grandpa, to both teams. Because the Cubs were his number one team, so they ended up being mine.

I'm not the only one. NPR host Scott Simon's book Home and Away is his memoir told through the lens of the teams he's rooted for. Go get a copy and read it. It's a brilliant book. Although if you're a Chicago sports fan, you'll be really, really jealous of Simon.

I was living down the street from Wrigley Field when I organized a church outing to a Sox game. That was the year the Orioles--the ones Grandma rooted for, guaranteeing Grandpa and I would never, ever invite her to a ball game with us again, which was, I think, her intentiion--started the season by losing seventeen games in a row. They finally won one, over the Sox. The announcement I wrote for our priest to read that Sunday said: "We're organizing a group outing to the White Sox game next Sunday so we can honor them for their act of Christian charity toward the Orioles."

Hey, it got a laugh at the time.

Last time the Sox were in a World Series, I was two months old. (They lost to the Dodgers.) Last time they won one was the year Harry Caray was born. He was another guy who moved from the South Siders to the North Siders. I think it's gonna be a good year.

C'mon, Baby, Don'tcha Want to Go...

Playing "Sweet Home Chicago" here. It's not the Cubs (that would be a sign of the apocalypse; we've had enough of those, thank you) but it's a pennant and a World Series appearance for my home town. Last time that happened was in 1959.

September 22, 1959: The White Sox win the pennant with the defeat of the Cleveland Indians.

I was two months and three days old. My father didn't follow sports, and my mother, from England, was oblivious to baseball, so when Mayor Daley the First set off the air raid sirens to celebrate the White Sox winning the pennant, they had no
idea what was going on. My mother, walking down the street with me in her arms, knew what air raid sirens were, though: she'd been a little girl in London during the blitz. She searched the street for an air raid shelter, saw none, so she did as she'd been taught in London and nestled her baby--me--in the gutter, sheltering me with her body, until someone came along and told her there was no air raid.

The first ball games I ever attended were White Sox games. The Sox gave free tickets to kids who had perfect attendance and those on the honor roll. Most years, I qualified for both. Grandpa--the baseball fan in the family, and a Cub fan, which accounts for my ending up a Cub fan, too--and I always stopped at McGillicuddy's, across the street from Comiskey, before each game. He always had a Bud, and never asked what I wanted, simply ordered a 7-Up, because 7-Up was, in his view, what little girls drank. A lot of places would put a cherry in the 7-Up, but not McGillicuddy's. There, you drank your 7-Up straight.

Then Grandpa would let me give the tickets to the ticket-taker (they were my tickets, after all), and buy me a score card as we entered the park, which he taught me to fill in: "Draw another goose egg." Those were not great days for the Sox, but I have nothing but fond memories of those games. Which is why I'm not a Sox-hating Cub fan: the Cubs are my number one team, but unless they're playing each other, the Sox are my AL team.

So there has been a World Series in Chicago in my lifetime, barely. And now there's about to be another one--my only wish is that I could be there. You Chicago folks raise a glass for me, okay?

In Apollo We Trust

It just gave me chills to read this speech that was written in case the first astronauts to land on the moon ran into some sort of disaster. The eeriest part is the assumption not that they are dead but that they are stranded there, left to die. It's a realistic possibility of space exploration, and one that's been explored in plenty of science fiction stories, and certainly it was a possibility the Nixon White House had to be aware of and prepared for. Still, reading the actual words was disconcerting, as if I had momentarily slipped into an alternate reality wherein that was what had actually happened.

I think I feel this way because my childhood memories of the space program are of success. Three astronauts died in the Apollo program, but they died on the ground (in a fire), not in space (and that was well after the first moon landing). Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn . . . they went, as the TV show said, where no (American) man had gone before, and they came back to tell the tale. They were heroes, but I never doubted they would survive. We had faith in rockets, and rockets never betrayed that faith.

(The shuttle? More like an airplane. And we all know those fall out of the sky.)

I was in England, in the coastal village of Leigh-on-Sea, when the first human beings set foot on the moon. We watched it on the black-and-white TV in my aunt's front parlor, and my sister and I enjoyed a modicum of celebrity in the days following by the simple association of being the same nationality as the guys who were walking on another world. I sat on the floor in front of the set, and I remember starting to say something and being hushed. "Space travel--it's routine for these girls," my grandmother said. Yes. Exactly. Exciting, thrilling--but routine. We believed in astronauts and rockets, and we were never wrong to do so.

How devastating it would have been to me as a little girl who believed in rockets if that speech had been delivered. I can't even imagine it . . . or at least I don't want to.

Maybe this is part of why the recently announced plans for a Mars mission focus on an Apollo-like rocket. The people making these plans are, many of them, about my age or a little older. Maybe at some visceral level they too trust rockets.

By the way, I know you can name the two guys who walked on the moon (especially if you clicked the link and read the speech); do you remember the name of the guy who went all the way to lunar orbit, then waited in the orbiting Apollo spacecraft while his colleagues took off in the lunar module for the surface and a place in history? (I do, but I'm a space geek.)

Tink's Adventure in Heaven

Friends all know that we lost Ty the blogging kitten on Monday. Today Ty's sister Tink went to join her in kitty heaven. (Both died as a result of FIV, or feline AIDS.) I only knew these critters for a matter of weeks, but they carved themselves a very large place in my heart, and I miss them terribly.

Tink lived a lot of the time in Ty's shadow, but she was a sweet, feisty little kitten in her own right who loved to be my bluebird riding on my shoulder (or climb to the middle of my back and cling so we could play "Where Did Tinker Go?") and wrassle with her sister and/or a roll of paper towels, and stand guard on the top level of their kitten house defending it against all comers (i.e., Ty). Anyway, since Ty got to document all her adventures in her blog, I thought Tink should have a chance to have one special adventure of her own. This is Tinky-wink's final adventure:

I miss Ty. I came home from the hospital and she didn't.

And I haven't been feeling good, either. Not-Mom says I look like a stick figure of a kitten, and it hurts when she makes me eat, and when I try to poop, I cry because it hurts and there is blood. I like to cuddle with Not-Mom, though. We did that all day yesterday and today. Not-Mom cried a lot.

Then she and Uncle Pete took me in the car. We went to the hospital again. Our friend Adele kissed me, and then Not-Mom held me and kissed me for a long. long time while I got some shots that made me go to sleep. The last thing I remember is Not-Mom's hand under my face, stroking my cheek and telling me she loves me. I love her, too.

Then I woke up in a sunny garden. Before I could even look around, Ty had jumped on my tail. She looked all fat and sassy again. We wrassled and played in green grass, and then she showed me where we could eat all the tuna we wanted. I was afraid to eat, because eating had made me feel bad, but Ty said I should try it, so I did. And I felt good! (The tuna was extra-good, too!)

There were toys in the garden, and other cats besides Ty to play with. I met a black-and-white cat named Thomas. He said he knew all the good places to eat, and if I stuck with him, he would show me. I met a very big cat named Mr. Hobbes. He was very serious. He liked to sit on a big chair and read books. Mr. Hobbes is very smart. He looked down his nose at me, but when he figured out I wasn't Ty--I guess Ty walked up and bopped him in the nose when she met him; Ty doesn't like it when someone doesn't pay attention to her--he said I could come and learn things from him if I wanted. He called me his new protege. That was funny, because Not-Mom had always said she thought I would be Shawonie the upstairs cat's protege, and that Ty would be Turk the upstairs cat's protege. Was Mr. Hobbes an upstairs cat, too?

There were lots of other cats, too: I met Puff, and Diane, and Jasper (who is also new here and learning his way around, but he is much older than I am, so he arrived knowing stuff I didn't), and lots of others whose names I can't remember.

The toys were pretty cool, too. Ty and I played until we were very tired, and then we found a nice cozy blanket and curled up together to take a nap in the sun. When we woke up it was still sunny. Thomas told me it never gets dark in that part of the garden, but if you go just a little ways away, there is a part of the garden where it is always night, with bright stars and a full moon and a warm breeze. He said lots of cats like to play at night, and we could go there and have nighttime anytime we wanted. Ty and I do like to play at night--and I knew about the night garden before Ty did, even though I just got here!--so we went there. We got all rambunctious with a bunch of other kittens we met there. We played hide and seek and we snuck up on each other and jumped on each other's tails. It was very fun.

But something was still missing: Not-Mom. I went to Mr. Hobbes, because he knows lots of things and I am his protege, and asked him where I could find her. I told her what she looked like, and suddenly he got all quiet. He asked me all about her: what she liked to do, what she smelled like, what it felt like to cuddle against her chest. I told him, and he nodded very wisely. He licked my face and told me that he knew Not-Mom very well, and he loved her, too.

Mr. Hobbes told me to come with him, that there was someone I had to meet. Ty asked where we were going. Mr. Hobbes ignored her, but I told him that Ty loved Not-Mom too, and Not-Mom loved us both, so he said Ty could come with us, as long as she showed him proper respect. I nipped her butt to remind her to behave herself.

We climbed up a big hill at the edge of the garden. From the hill we could see people, and dogs, and other critters, and cats, too. Mr. Hobbes said that the day and night gardens were special for cats, but that there were lots of other places we could go, too. I kept looking at all the people, looking for Not-Mom, but I didn't see her. Mr. Hobbes told me not to worry, I would get to see her soon enough.

At the top of the hill was a person, but I couldn't make out who it was or anything, because there was a cloud of light that made everything all fuzzy. A hand reached out of the cloud and picked me up. I squeaked because I was scared, but a gentle voice told me it was okay, and soon I was doing one of my favorite things: sitting on someone's shoulder and being stroked.

The gentle voice told me Not-Mom would not be here for a while, but that I should wait for her, because when she came, she would very much want to see me. I wanted to go to Not-Mom right away, though! I cried because I wanted Not-Mom to cuddle me.

Do you want to see Not-Mom? the gentle voice asked me. I did. The voice said Mr. Hobbes could show me the way now. And the voice said that I was an angel now, but I said I already knew I was an angel because Not-Mom always called us her angel babies. Mr. Hobbes laughed at that--which was very strange, because he is so serious. He said now we could go back to the cat garden the easiest way. He ran to the edge of the top of the hill and leaped off--and he could fly! He told Ty and me to try it. Ty wanted to go first--she always wants to be first, so I let her. She jumped and flew! I jumped into the air after her. I am very good at jumping. I jumped very, very high.

Flying is fun! It is like riding on Not-Mom's shoulder, but without anything to hold on to, and you can go anywhere you want just by thinking it! When we flew through the air, I could see Ty's ears wiggle just like when we would drink from our bottle when we were small.

We flew back to the day garden with Mr. Hobbes. We rolled on the ground and romped and played after all the fun of flying. We ran and ate some tuna and some chicken--it was very yummy, and I could feel myself getting all round again. Not-Mom wouldn't call me a stick figure now!

Not-Mom. Hey, we were supposed to get to see Not-Mom. I went to find Mr. Hobbes in his big chair with his books. He said he had wondered when we would be ready.

I followed Mr. Hobbes under some bushes and along a very long path that was only wide enough for a cat. Ty followed, too. We found leaves and balls and stuff to play with along the way. Mr. Hobbes would wait for us, sighing, until we caught up.

At the end of the path there was a pink towel just like the one we had in our kitten house. Mr. Hobbes sat on the pink towel and told us to curl up there, too, and close our eyes. Ty and I snuggled into a pile of kitten. We were tired from our adventures.

But when we closed our eyes, I could see Not-Mom! She was sitting in the big yellow chair by the desk where we would play with the pens and the Slinky. Not-Mom was crying. I remembered how lonely I was alone at night after Ty went away, and I thought Not-Mom must be lonely, too. She told us there were upstairs cats, who we were going to meet one day if we got better, but there were no upstairs cats with Not-Mom in the yellow chair. It made us both very sad to see her cry.

Mr. Hobbes said he liked to visit Not-Mom when she was lying in her bed because he always liked to sleep next to her, but we could visit her anywhere we liked. He said she wouldn't be able to see us, but she would know we were there.

I jumped to her shoulder, just like I always have, and snuggled myself around the back of her neck. She cried even harder. Ty hopped into her lap, put her front paws on Not-Mom's arm and snuggled against her with her head in the crook of Not-Mom's elbow. We are here, we tried to tell her. We love you. I didn't think she could hear us, but then she whispered, "Oh my little kittens, I always love you." And we were very happy to know that she knew we were with her.

Mr. Hobbes said we could come back and watch her from the pink towel any time. She wouldn't always know we were there, but we could still be with her and watch over her. And just like the gentle voice, he said that Not-Mom would come join us one day, and that when that happened, our job was to cuddle her and welcome her, and we should always be ready for that day. He said that even if it was a long time away, we would still be kittens, and Not-Mom would for sure always love us.

We decided we would find some toys that Not-Mom would like to play with us with, like the Slinky, when she gets here. And I promised I will go to the pink towel place every day--I whispered it in Not-Mom's ear so she would know--so I can always be Not-Mom's kitten and she will always know that I am here, thinking of her, and waiting for her to cuddle me again.

God bless you, my little furry angel. I truly will always love you.

Read This Blog

This is the blog of one of my Clarion classmates. It is full of eclectic coolness, just like its author. And the picture looks just like her.