Giving money & power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys - P.J. O'Rourke
Now the brave actions of a coward are very valuable in psychological novels and are always extremely valuable to the man who performs them, but they are not valuable to the public who, season in and season out, pay to see a bullfighter. All they do is give that bullfighter a seeming value which he does not have.
- Ernest Hemingway, Death In The Afternoon
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One can argue that, in the end, the British Empire did Britain surprisingly little good. Other European countries that had pathetic or nonexistent empires, such as Italy, have recently surpassed England in standard of living and other measure of economic well-being. Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it. Whether or not this is the case, it is quite obvious from looking at the cable-laying industry that the Victorian practice of sending British people all over the planet is now paying them back handsomely.
- Neal Stephenson, Mother Earth Mother Board.
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I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture – a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die.
- David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again
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I’m enamored of my kindle; I take it everywhere and read voraciously. And the device automatically annotates clippings and comments I make on the various pieces that cross the screen. I recently stumbled onto this trove of half-baked thoughts, pithy jokes, petty jabs, and snippets of moving writing. I’m going to start sharing these, mostly without commentary, under the category label “Quotations”. The idea is ‘here is a bit of something that made me think, or that I thought someone, somewhere, would like”. They’re not like status updates, and they’re not all sentiments I endorse. Just stuff that’s interesting. I hope you all enjoy.
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Terry Pratchett is the best. And the tumblr feed “What Discworld Taught Me” is worth checking out for quotable bits and bites.
In an effort to appear more “conservative” than Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum stole headlines by promising that his administration would attempt to heavily regulate the pornography industry. In the parlance of executive action, Rick’s War on Porn was born. Now this is just begging for endless and endlessly childish puns, but for once I’m going to skip that. Instead, I’d like to sidestep the debate about porn itself, for this question: are moral legislations/regulations a “conservative” activity?
In Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court case striking down Texas’ anti-sodomy law, Justice Scalia’s dissent warned that the case could be the “end of all morals legislation”. That particular doom hasn’t yet come down upon us, but I wish it would.
One could argue that government is fundamentally a- or im- moral, which raises the old ends-means argument. On the other hand, one might say that an immoral act which produces a more moral result is our best response to the arbitrary dings and dent of an indifferent and cruel world. Thus, fighting arbitrary wrongs with small doses of righteousness is not only a worthy act, but a type of governmentally moral imperative.
These arguments aren’t productive, and interesting only in a college-dorm-philosophy way; that is, not at all to anyone sober.
Instead, let’s ask “why are morals so important?” Every day, everyone has to ask themselves serious questions about what is good and right and just, and try to live up to the answers they find. Generally, we can’t agree on where these determinations come from; God, a moral code, natural justice, the Tao, or whatever. But people find the strength and inspiration to embody their personal conception of ‘good’ in a variety of places.
What’s important about this is that people do this themselves. The moral actions, that is, the actions that show moral character or moral activity, the locus of the morality, is in making those choices. In choosing what to do and say, how to be, and thereby shaping the next set of decisions, people create the future with their choices in the past.
Using the government to make moral decisions for people abridges their ability to be agents of moral action. In a nightmare world where Santorum is President, he’d pursue a policy to make the world more “moral”, while stripping morality from America’s people.
Morality seems, like most human activities, to be bottom-up. What do you think? Can you make someone else good? Can the government?
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