Monday, September 23, 2024
1955 An all male, all White jury found Roy Brant and John William Milam not guilty of the murder of Black teenager Emmett Till in Sumner, Mississippi; the two later sold an interview admitting to the murder
1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered US troops to support the integration of nine Black students at Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas
2020 President Donald Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the US November election at a White House press conference
In bed at 9, awake at 4:05 and lay in bed with memories of law school days (Mary Cook, Wally MacBain, Charlie Cantrell, Ray Klitzke, JDG and RJA, 'Uncle Bob', CWM, Mary Alice Hohmann, Bob Starz, Hal Jackson, Dolores McCrimmon and other long-term secretaries and librarians whose names I have sadly forgotten 😔, until 4:40. I let Lilly out around 5, gave her a beef jerky, and she repaired to her mattress in Geri's bedroom to continue her rest.
Prednisone, day 132, 7.5 mg., day 11. Prednisone at 5 a.m. with Dave's Bread. Yesterday my fresh supply of 270 2.5 mg., pills arrived from the VA. Morning meds at 6:15.
LTMW at 7:20 at an elegant young whitetail buck walking across our lawn, perhaps unsure of his yet small antlers, looking for a doe. Lilly of course is sharply barking while looking at him through a living room window. I'm glad she's inside not challenging a buck on the prowl to propagate his genes.
We all depend on trust, yet it works in tricky ways. On the one hand, we trust people who are guided by consistent ethical precepts. . . On the other hand, we’re turned off when people’s commitments seem calculated. The ascent of terms like “slacktivism,” “virtue signalling,” and “moral grandstanding” bespeaks a frustration with do-gooders motivated more by acclaim than by an internal moral compass. . . Moshe [Hoffman] argued that humans deal with this dilemma by adopting moral principles. Through learning or natural selection, or some combination, we’ve developed a paradoxical strategy for making friends. We devote ourselves to moral ends in order to garner trust. Which morals we espouse depend on whose trust we are courting. . .
. . . The motivations that we find so detestable—moral posturing for social rewards—may, in fact, be the hallmark of moral action. . . . . Not everyone in this field understands ethical behavior the way Moshe does. Still, they tend to employ a framework grounded in evolutionary theory—one that casts morality as a property of our primate brains and little else. Appeals to pure selflessness have become harder to defend, while a belief in objective moral truths—existing apart from our minds and discoverable through impartial judgment—has grown increasingly untenable.
How does one exist in a post-moral world? What do we do when the desire to be good is exposed as a self-serving performance and moral beliefs are recast as merely brain stuff? I responded by turning to a kind of nihilism, yet this is far from the only reaction. We could follow the Mentawai, favoring the language of transaction over virtue. Or we can carry on as if nothing has changed. Richard Joyce, in his new book, “Morality: From Error to Fiction,” advocates such an approach. His “moral fictionalism” entails maintaining our current way of talking while recognizing that a major benefit of this language is that it makes you likable, despite referring to nothing real. If you behave the way I did in grad school, going on about the theatre of morality, you will, he suggests, only attract censure and wariness. Better to blend in.
Intellectually, I find the proposal hard to swallow. The idea of cosplaying moral commitment for social acceptance would surely magnify whatever dissonance I already feel. Still, a decade after my first meeting with Moshe, experience forces me to acknowledge Joyce’s larger point. It’s easy to inhabit the fiction.
I still accept that I am a selfish organism produced by a cosmic mega-force, drifting around in a bedlam of energy and matter and, in most respects, not so very different from the beetles I scrutinized during that summer in Colorado. I still see the power in Moshe’s game-theory models. Traces of unease linger. But I no longer feel unmoored. A sense of meaning has reëstablished itself. Tressed, turbanned, and teetotalling, I am, at least by all appearances, still a good Sikh. . .
How much of what I do, write, or post online, is virtue-signaling and slacktivism? I'm not nearly as good a person as I pretend to be.None of us is, it seems. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. More to feel guilty about.😩😭😰
Anniversaries. I was 14 when fellow Chicagoan and fellow 14 year old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and his murderers were acquitted a month later by the all White jury. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka had been decided before the murder, but Jim Crow 'law' was in full force throughout America's South. I can't remember any case where an all White jury found a White defendant guilty of killing a Black victim, although I know some were later. KKK members and 'irregular' racists throughout the South could count on acquittals from all White juries in the states of the former Confederaciy. All White juries are still common in American criminal courts. Intentional exclusion of minorities from jury pools and trial juries is unconsitutional but the burden of proving discriminatiory intent is high and prosecutors can eaily find a non-discrimiatory pretext for excluding minoirites.
I was 16 years old and enrolled in the all White, Catholic, Leo High School when Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas Nationnal Guard to protect the 9 Black students who had the courage to enroll in Little Rock's Central High School, theretofore restricted to White students. Chicago schools, including and perhaps especially Catholic schools, were probably as segregated as any in the South. Who is my neighbor, Lord?
It was no surprise that Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. If he loses the 2024 election (please, Lord!), he'll do the same and probably prevail in the courts and perhaps in the House. We used to think that it was merely a cliché to say "democracy is fagile and needs to be protected." We now know better but it may be too late (and hat's assuming that what we have is really a democracy.)
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