Familiarity with the canon

So there was a checklist:
[ ] Dead
[ ] White
[ ] European
[ ] Male
But those criteria do not get us to this list. What else?
[ ] Read by Thomas Jefferson (???)

Given that the board removed Thomas Jefferson (and the word “Enlightenment”) from this same list of philosophers, I doubt that is the criterion.

Is the inclusion of these philosophers supposed to be reassuring? To me it seems most likely that the schoolboard will neglect to teach the philosophers’ emphasis on equality, and only teach arguments for Christianity, arguments for a Christian state, and arguments for property rights as “a foundation of civil society”.

Maybe I’m being overly pessimistic, but it seems naive to assume that Texas will give the philosophers a fair and evenhanded treatment when they haven’t done so for much else.

I don’t know if it made it into the final version of the standards, but one of the “cultural figures” with whom students were supposed to be familiar was Tex Avery.

I’m guessing that they just saw “Tex” and approved him automatically.

“emphasizing that the content of these guidelines serves to enable students to “appreciate the basic democratic values of our state and nation.””

Williams misunderstands what the Texas State Board of Education means by democratic.

1. Texas has generally not strongly held democratic values in a meaningful sense over it’s history. The history of Texas actually is more of a tragedy of democracy: it’s history is more properly described as an oligarchic/tyrannical state using the word democracy as propaganda.
2. Notice that the Texas SBOE uses the word “appreciate” rather than such words as “understand” or “analyze”. Philosophers do not help you love actual political regimes (the philosophers seek the ideal regime, and actual regimes are very far from ideal regimes). The Texas SBOE does not want students to pursue knowledge about democracy, but wants to inject vulgar forms of patriotism. Aquinas is a hindrance to vulgar patriotism. Again, Texas selects propaganda for it’s oligarchic regime instead of democracy.

7: I think it’s only fair that you get to be in the canon if you’ve actually been canonised.

Aquinas is, as per usual, echoing Aristotle in his remarks about business. But aren’t they both wrong?

Business achievement, e.g. starting a company and making it successful, can be valuable in the same way as achievement in sports, e.g. winning five straight Wimbledons. The goal is intrinsically trivial, but if the process of achieving it is sufficiently difficult and requires sufficient skill and dedication, it can have lots of value.

There are lots of good criticisms of unbridled capitalism; this bit of Aquinas isn’t one of them.

11: not Saint-Just?

That kind of jejune, too-clever-by-half mockery from assistant professors leaves me cold.

Oh boy, are you on the wrong blog.
(sorry, couldn’t resist it)

Quo usque abutere patientiam nostram?! Alas, that’s all I can do from memory.

There are some also who, either from zeal in attending to their own business or through some sort of aversion to their fellow-men, claim that they are occupied solely with their own affairs, without seeming to themselves to be doing anyone any injury. But while they steer clear of the one kind of injustice, they fall into the other: they are traitors to social life, for they contribute to it none of their interest, none of their effort, none of their means. . . . for indeed it is not an easy matter to be really concerned with other people’s affairs; and yet in Terence’s play, we know, Chremes “thinks that nothing that concerns man is foreign to him.” Nevertheless, when things turn out for our own good or ill, we realize it more fully and feel it more deeply than when the same things happen to others and we see them only, as it were, in the far distance; and for this reason we judge their case differently from our own. It is, therefore, an excellent rule that they give who bid us not to do a thing, when there is a doubt whether it be right or wrong; for righteousness shines with a brilliance of its own, but doubt is a sign that we are thinking of a possible wrong. –Cicero, De officiis

y81,

That’s certainly true. The fact is that very few students, under any educational system whatever, will be able to deeply engage with ideas or texts of the complexity we’re talking about here. Plenty of Aquinas’ students at the University of Paris were far more interested in drinking, making connections, meeting women or fighting in taverns than studying with one of the greatest minds in human history who was standing right in front of them.

That said, Williams seems to be far too optimistic about what the Texas SBOE is intending. It is one thing if, no matter how buried or distorted, an educational system does try to educate (in the best senses) – or, perhaps, has the possibility or openness of pointing a few students in the right direction. It is entirely another thing to have an educational system that is explicitly designed to be propaganda – and further, is designed to train Texans into a future planned tyranny.

Williams’ point that all great minds are subversive is of course true. But, for one example (and people don’t generally know this), it was not very difficult in the USSR to read such writers as Aristotle. Aristotle is of course not particularly supportive of that regime. The freedom to read Aristotle in the USSR had no noticeable effect whatsoever on it’s political development. If schoolchildren in the USSR had had Aristotle included in their curriculum, Aristotle would likely have either no effect on them or even a negative effect.

@22: I’m curious who suggested basing a curriculum on Anne Hutchinson? I’ve never even heard of her.

I’m sure you wouldn’t be drawing one of those false equivalencies between things of vastly different real-life importance, now, would you?

@25: Hutchinson was in my daughter’s curriculum. Obviously, the curriculum wasn’t “based on” her; she wasn’t more than a minor note. I highly doubt that the Texas public high school curriculum is based on Aquinas, either, or that he actually gets more than five minutes of classroom time in four years of high school social studies.

Among the other things I highly doubt is that the Texas curriculum is designed to promote a “future planned tyranny.” It’s the usual monumental history, in which children learn that our statesmen are the wisest, our soldiers the bravest, our laws the most just, our women the most beautiful, etc. We learn the same stuff in NYC, except that the heroes and villains are slightly different, plus of course here it’s true.

Tex Avery…at least there’s one bright spot.

I had about as liberal a public school education as you could wish for — screenings of Roots and Eyes On the Prize, a big chunk of time in 5th and 7th grade focused on Native American history, lots of exhortations to think critically and do additional reading — and I can’t say much of it was very effective. I had to educate myself for the most part, about how the world has actually worked and what side my bread was buttered on. Run-ins with the assistant principal did much more for me in that respect than my 10th grade US History teacher’s somewhat unsettling obsession with James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny. This whole debate calls to mind the brief scenes in Dazed & Confused where the post-SDS high school teacher is regaling her class on the last day of school with stories about Chicago in ’68, and calls out after them “Okay guys, one more thing, this summer when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha, don’t forget what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact that a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, white males didn’t want to pay their taxes. ” And do they listen?

“It’s the usual monumental history, in which children learn that our statesmen are the wisest, our soldiers the bravest, our laws the most just, our women the most beautiful, etc.”

The Texas SBOE attempted to downgrade a previous focus on Thomas Jefferson, put in a requirement to study the gold standard, had a propaganda segment on how bad the UN is, removed multiple “wise statesmen” of Texas from study (because they were Hispanics) and inserted multiple segments where they propagandize against current US laws. Many of these changes have nothing to do with a glorification of Texas – Jefferson, the gold standard and the UN are not local Texas history.

… And the linked article also includes Voltaire:

Voltaire might find great supporters among those seeking to inject more Christianity into the curriculum

and then cites a Voltaire maxim, “Either Christianity should be renounced completely, or observed,” which pretty clearly carries the sense of “renounced completely.”

Say, y’know whom else they need in this curriculum? Leo Strauss! Persecution and the Art of Writing!

I doubt that the reading of dead, European males will be very deep. Expect the rehabilitation of Billy Sol Estes as cultural hero.

Impressive, Gene. y81 really should have checked “wikipedia before bragging about his latin.

So business people are amoral at best? That’s stupid and also a bit rich coming from academics whose livelihood is paid for by taxpayers money.

So the gold standard is just mandated, not part of an economics curriculum? There are going to be some very odd kids in Texas…

Going to be…?

Oh, so when the argument fails, it’s all a joke, including your #42 I presume. Be that as it may, unfortunately such childish views are all too common to be laughed off.

Back in my day, we learned about Avery the same way we learned about sex—by watching TV.

And there’s another thing I never thought of before. The space between getting home from school and dinner, for my generation, was all filled with Avery/Jones/Clampett et al. (along with, it must be said, a fair amount of dreck). Is this stuff accessible to kids today? (The point that it would be a preferable alternative to the Texas curriculum hardly needs making.)

Well, we don’t all have access to your angrily-redlined file of clippings, do we?

Yeah, of course, if I think that relying on the Council of Trent when it comes to economic matters is silly, it goes without saying that I must be a crank.

novakant’s resistance to irony is admirable but joking aside, another thing that is “all too common” is people claiming to follow the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth who think moral disapproval of wealth is silly. (That may or may not apply to novakant but it sure applies to 90% of the US right).

I am pleased to see that some CT commenters have developed such precise clairvoyance that they can read my tax return.

By my understanding quite a lot of tenured profs are well into the $100K/yr bracket, which makes them part of the ‘rich’ by any reasonable measure. So, your point was…?

Just trying to set the record straight.

Thanks for nothing. this is getting annoying but observe that both 41 and 42 used the term “amoral”, not “immoral”, implying precisely no moral conclusion. Language is so difficult, which is why we need those tough Texan curriculum standards so badly.

Language again. novakant asked whether “business people are amoral at best”, and alex replied that “Business competition is amoral at best, how could it be anything else?”. Look, most of us were having fun on this thread, until a few dead serious no kidding sort of guys arrived and gave us gems such as:

The Machiavellian businessman/statesman, is not literally “amoral”. He just pursues a more flexible (“ends justifies the means”) morality to serve the interests of corporation/state. That is his moral obligation, given his social role.

If we were in the mood, we could take that nonsense apart, but let us just assume you are joking, ok?

#63: Friedman was quite consistent and within his moral rights to urge businessmen to be profit-maximizing within the law. According to liberal economic theory this policy would maximise utility, which is the moral outcome.

That depends a great deal on the content of the law. If the law, for example, permits slavery, then this policy would produce the most profitable possible uses of slavery. That might indeed maximize utility — for the slaveowners. But it’s still not a moral outcome.

Indeed, that’s the point of declaring business competition amoral — if you want morality to emerge from your business sector, you have to inject it somewhere else, such as the law. Businesses will not, on their own initiative, engage in a moral restraint that is not imposed on them. That’s practically the definition of “amoral”.

Creating a legal regime that aligns businesses’ self-interest with positive social outcomes is one large-scale goal of a regulated-capitalist society.

chris, trying to argue rationally with somebody who can’t parse an English sentence into subject, verb and object?

alex kept digging in his hole by insisting that no businessmen qua businessman could be moral.

Except he didn’t say any of that but pointing that out will only trigger five more idiotic posts from Strocchi so let’s just roll our eyes.

thats a big “if” you quietly dropped in there

Compared to what? From my angle it looks like your comment 63 blithely assumes that *any* action that is legal is also moral, an assumption to which slavery is only one of the most obvious exceptions.

If there is some act which is simultaneously legal, profitable, and immoral, some business will engage in it, because it only cares about the first two traits. (Market competition will weed out their more scrupulous competitors — a dynamic that has played out numerous times in this and other societies.) Therefore, if you want to prevent businesses from engaging in immoral acts, you need to arrange your legal system so that they are illegal as well.

This is, of course, reckoning without illegal business, which isn’t even concerned with the legality of its actions except insofar as to try to reduce the risk and cost of having the law enforced on it (including by subverting the mechanism of law enforcement, if that’s cost-effective). But I assume Friedman didn’t suggest allowing the Mafia to freely pursue their own interests.

Since the great majority of economic activity is conducted by corporations, the statement that “business competition is amoral” is self-evidently true.

The first part of the sentence is not even true, and thus the conclusion is neither. And your average book publisher, restaurant owner or hairdresser has no interest in driving out all competition or maximizing profit at all costs, even if that was possible, which it isn’t. Rather they aim to provide a good product or service and cultivate longterm relationships with clients which will provide them with a sustainable livelihood.

roac, we don’t need to throw statistics around, the point was about the morality of people involved in business activity, so income or turnover are not really all that relevant

I take exception to Burritoboys flogging Mormonism as a fake religion; that is simply untrue in my extensive experience with the LDS faith in the Western US. Furthermore, in my time as a flunky in a Fortune 500 company it was clear that the LDS middle managers, who were typically held back from reaching the level their potential might have justified (even worse than the Jews sometimes were) were the most ethical guys around and the ones that more often than not were called on to fix messes made by higher fliers who lacked the ethics of the Mormons they had sailed past moving up the corporate ladder.

How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Firstly, the point was about business activity and the people involved in it being regarded as inherently disdainful. My point was that such beliefs are quite commonplace and wrong.

Secondly, while there might be some “greed is good” MBAs, generally they don’t teach that approach. And if all it took to succeed in business was being a greedy mofo, then it would be easy – it isn’t.

Thirdly, I’m not denying that there are business people narrowly focused on profit maximization and that they and the ideology they adhere to could be described as at best amoral – but that’s not the whole story.

@76: If you don’t like slavery as an example of legal immorality, what about tragedies of the commons? One of the US’s commons is being befouled right now, in a way that may or may not have been legal, but certainly resulted from the actual practices of an actual business. (Indeed, if they scoffed at the law in the pursuit of lower operating costs, doesn’t that only strengthen the case for their amorality?)

The self-interest of the business was clearly far removed from the interest of the general population in preserving the Gulf Coast. If there is no distinction between morality and self-interest, doesn’t that require the conclusion that it was moral to imperil the Gulf in order to lower operating costs by skimping on safety measures? That doesn’t sound like a very appealing moral system to me.

OTOH, if you think that was neither moral nor enlightenedly self-interested, then you have to face the problem that businesses actually guide their actions by self-interest *as they understand it*, and catastrophic blunders are par for the course, which rather eviscerates the claim of efficient optimization.

Further clarification by the guy who was holding up the straw man: For me this not even about economic theory; it’s about ethics.

I discovered as soon as I was old enough to think about it that I had a set of moral intuitions, a/k/a “conscience,” that prompted me in some situations to act in a way contrary to my obvious self-interest; and that when I complied I felt good, and when I didn’t, I felt bad. I was told at the time, and believed, that this disposition was implanted in me by God. I have had to give up on God since then, but I find that the intuitions have not changed.

I find moreover, by long experience, that roughly the same set of intuitions is widely though not universally shared, and that people tend generally to admire altruistic actions and condemn self-serving ones.

When people tell me that “conscience” is a delusion and a product of sloppy thinking, and that what I need is to read and reread the works of Ayn Rand until I have eradicated it, I say: No thank you, assuming the cure you prescribe is effective, I do not choose to undergo it (and not just because of the pain involved).

I do NOT believe that business people, taken as a group, have less effective consciences than other kinds of people. My experience suggests otherwise. What horrifies me, to say it again, is the doctrine that it’s OK to be altruistic on your own time, but in your capacity as a corporate manager, it is your sacred duty to extract the last penny from the widow and orphan. People do preach this (M. Friedman & R. Posner, for example), and other people do listen and subscribe (the commenters on Megan McArdle’s blog, for example).

The eponymous tragedy of the commons was mythical, at least for Britain where the story was first told. Precapitalist commons were invariably ‘stinted’, that is subject to constraints on the number of cattle that could be grazed.

The mythical tragedy was used to justify the actual seizure of the commons by capitalist landlords.

81.1 is right. Is 81.2 right, given that the concept dates (apparently) only to William Forster Lloyd in 1833, by which time enclosure had been going on for quite a long time?

I thought that inclosure was justified by “that’s some awfully nice land there, I want it”. What Pratchett would call the ancient legal doctrine of quocumque acquiris rapis.

I do NOT believe that business people, taken as a group, have less effective consciences than other kinds of people. My experience suggests otherwise.

Mine doesn’t. It depends somewhat on the line of business, but anyone who suggests that their company should refrain from a profitable act because they personally disapprove of that act tends not to get ahead in that business (and the same goes double for inter-business competition).

For example, Sam Walton’s conscience doesn’t stop him from imposing the infamously bad conditions of employment of many of his employees, or by engaging in coercive and in some cases blatantly illegal unionbusting to keep those conditions in place (and the concomitant political corruption so his company isn’t prosecuted for the illegal parts of its unionbusting strategies). I think it is likely that if it had, he wouldn’t have become as successful as he has (given the same amount of talent, starting capital, luck, etc.) for the simple reason that treating his employees decently would be more expensive, thus less profitable, thus leave less retained earnings to fuel the rampant expansion of his company.

P.S. In retrospect, “catastrophic blunder” was too charitable a way to describe Deepwater Horizon. Abandonment of safety standards constituted playing Russian Roulette with employees’ lives as well as the environment — and some of them lost. Similar remarks apply to the WV mine disaster, also caused by willful neglect of safety measures.

Probably true, but suggestions that a particular act, though perhaps profitable in the short term, will damage the company’s reputation for X (quality, honesty, etc.), or will jeopardize the company’s long-term relationship with Y (lenders, suppliers, etc.) are pretty common.

Do you really think that’s enough to encompass all important parts of morality? What about actions that harm someone who isn’t particularly important to the company’s bottom line, in an indirect, plausibly deniable way that the company expects to be able to obfuscate if necessary?

roac is correct in stating that “fiduciary duty” is taught to exclude consideration of morality. This was explicitly taught in my “trusts and estates” course in law school and I have no doubt it is still being taught.

Fiduciary duty is used as an excuse for behavior harmful to the world at large but is ignored when convenient. The huge payout to the CEO of Washington Mutual Bank comes to mind. Millions of dollars for tanking the company and leaving the stockholders with nothing.

@87: Do I actually believe that self-interest rightly understood is synonomous with morality? I have spent my whole life wrestling with that question, and don’t have a conclusive answer.

@88: “Let’s focus on the seller, shall we?”

OK, but we have to show that businessmen are more likely to sell useless products than are politicians to propose counterproductive laws (case in point: regulation of debit card interchange fees), or academics to propound worthless theories (case in point: dependency theory), or generals to employ losing strategies (I’m currently reading about Montcalm). Otherwise, we are only talking about the general run of human blindness and selfishness, not some amorality unique to business.

@90: The Walmart strategy you describe doesn’t strike me as immoral, anymore than it is immoral for Alex Rodriguez to use his hitting ability (which is greater than that of his competitors) to get lots of hits, or for Google to use its IPO proceeds (which reflect P/E ratios higher than most other companies) to finance R&D that might lead to new products, or for David Boies to use his ability as a litigator (which most lawyers can’t match) to win lots of cases.

So if this not about business people, why limit the argument to “business competition”? There are all sorts of other areas where competition can lead to unethical behaviour.

“Voltaire might find great supporters among those seeking to inject more Christianity into the curriculum”

haha, did they miss the whole ecrasez l’infame statement??

“The Canon” is the most subversive reading list one could ever come across. Tangentially, Plato is far more subversive than Derrida could ever hope to be.