Saint Socrates Society

For some time I have been meaning to write a review of my now not so new bicycle.  This week is ‘bike to work week’ around the country, so it seemed like a good occasion.  Read on for my full review of my Giant Seek 2 commuter bike.

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The priority deadline for applications has passed but funding exists for more students.  Until that funding is exhausted, the application process will be a rolling one.  Apply as soon as you can!

Click here for more information.

Charles Wheelan offers some advice to graduates in this piece called “10 things your commencement speaker won’t tell you.”

Some highlights:

“1. Your time in fraternity basements was well spent. The same goes for the time you spent playing intramural sports, working on the school newspaper or just hanging with friends. Research tells us that one of the most important causal factors associated with happiness and well-being is your meaningful connections with other human beings. Look around today. Certainly one benchmark of your postgraduation success should be how many of these people are still your close friends in 10 or 20 years.

3. Don’t make the world worse. I know that I’m supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I’m going to lower the bar here: Just don’t use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already. And if you really want to cause social mayhem, it helps to have an Ivy League degree. You are smart and motivated and creative. Everyone will tell you that you can change the world. They are right, but remember that “changing the world” also can include things like skirting financial regulations and selling unhealthy foods to increasingly obese children. I am not asking you to cure cancer. I am just asking you not to spread it.

10. Don’t try to be great. Being great involves luck and other circumstances beyond your control. The less you think about being great, the more likely it is to happen. And if it doesn’t, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being solid.”

Call for applications:

Students are invited to apply for the fall 2012 Saint Socrates Society reading group.  This fall we will be discussing a collection of books on the topic “Education and its Ends.”  The meeting time for the fall 2012 group will be every Tuesday from 3:00-4:15pm.

We will read works from selected authors including Josef Pieper, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Allen Bloom, Martha Nussbaum, and Mortimer Adler.  Participants will post weekly reading reflections on the blog and participate in weekly discussions on the assigned readings.  While the reading group does not count for USU credit, students may get Honors credit through an Honors Contract.

More information about the reading group, expectations of students, and the reading list for this fall can be found at the website saintsocratessociety.com under the “About the Saint Socrates Society” link.

Patronage:

Thanks to the generous support of the USU Honors Program, students will receive their program books for free.

Application process:

Students of sufficient intellectual maturity who are eager to read, think, and discuss a challenging set of texts concerned with human questions can apply.

Applications should be submitted via email to harrison.kleiner@usu.edu.  Include as attachments to the email:
- A resume.  Your resume must include the following items: your contact information (phone, email, address); academic year; major; GPA; academic achievements; extra-curricular activities; the name and email address of a USU faculty member who can be contacted for a reference.
- Submit a list of at least 3 books that have helped to shape your self-understanding.

Finalists will be interviewed by a team composed of Dr. Harrison Kleiner and at least one other USU faculty member.

The priority deadline for applications has passed.  Until funding is exhausted, the application process will be a rolling one (apply as soon as you can).

If you have any questions, contact Dr. Harrison Kleiner (harrison.kleiner@usu.edu).

Some of my students signed up a few weeks ago for an extra credit project.  The project required them to stay away from glowing screens (cell phones, television, facebook, twitter, etc) for two weeks.

Of 150 students, 53 signed up for the 2 week project.  But only 18 of those students were willing to stick it out for the full 2 weeks.  Those that completed the task wrote up a brief reflection on their experience.

A few common themes kept coming up.  Almost all of the students reported getting quite a lot more homework done.  Most also reported getting more sleep, since around 9 or 10pm they were cut off from the glowing screens of television or facebook that might have kept them occupied for a few hours.

Everyone spoke of how difficult it was to connect with their friends.  You could sense, in their reflections, the lonely desperation of people who cannot find anyone to be with for dinner or that gnawing feeling teens feel when they think they are missing out on some special social event.  Rather more worryingly, several expressed difficulty “dealing with myself and others” (as one person put it).  They felt insecure, sort of lost and dearly missed the escape afforded them by earbuds.

The overall response split about in half as to whether they wanted to change their behavior in the future.  About half found the experience “liberating” and expressed a desire to sustain that as much as possible.  The other half could not wait to get plugged back in.  In a lesson that we do not do what we really want, most who experienced it as a liberation said that, despite this, they quickly turned back to their old ways.

Reading over the reflections has actually softened my view on these social technologies.  I used to be simply against them, though I confess my opposition was mostly blind (in that I don’t myself text, facebook, etc).  I now see that these technologies can be genuine instrumental goods.  At a large school or for people living far from their friends, these social technologies can be  a valuable means to the end of community.  (In fact, after years of holding out I joined Facebook!).

But my worries remain.  The means can be confused with the end, and I do suspect that many use social technologies as a replacement for real human contact and community rather than a way of creating it.  For example, one student noted that his girlfriend thought he had broken up with her, which makes me wonder how much time they actually spend together.  And several students noticed how when they are with people, no one is really present (they had not noticed this before since they have been absently present themselves before).  And it appears that many use it as a kind of crutch so they can avoid themselves and others.  In this, important parts of the human condition seem to be lost – the silence of a walk, the sounds that travel with being around others, etc.  This article discusses this loss in greater detail.  This all makes me wonder if the distractions from the human condition are an important cause in the apparent downturn of interest in humanistic studies and liberal education.  Hard to be compelled by perennial great questions when you are too distracted to think about them.

Here are a few representative selections from the student reflections:

“Another difficulty with the assignment, I was very used to walking through campus with my earphones. The first two days, I felt very uncomfortable walking without my earphones.  I felt like a small piece of forgotten shoji that was thrown to the side by accident. Every person on the street seems to be rushing somewhere or they were standing in big groups and laughing loudly. When I passed those big groups, I would have a big paranoid moment, where I would think they were looking at me and making fun of me. Hence, it was a very uncomfortable feeling. Although, I adjusted to walking without my earphones after a couple of days, I personally would prefer walking with my music and ignoring the rest of the world without worries about what other people might be thinking about me.”

“I could probably survive without facebook. However, I need an instant messenger to contact my family or talk to my friends in Mongolia, Malaysia and Germany etc. If technology did not exist, I would not be able to communicate with them and stay in touch and be good friends as we are now.”

“An earphone allows me to feel less insecure and makes my days pass faster. “

“It was somewhat depressing. People forget how to communicate in person so I missed out on some events and a lot of people thought I was mad at them by the end of this assignment.”

“At first I would always feel a little annoyed not being able to listen to my favorite music. For about two minutes I walked feeling bitter about the assignment. In boredom I would then search for something to think about. Always I would find something and my mind would wonder on topics from family, my future, current events, etc. By the time I got home, I found it hard to stop thinking and focus on homework of other tasks. This new routine walking home made me realize there are many things that require my careful thought and attention that I am usually ignoring.”

“Honestly, it was hell. i hated not being able to just text my roommates and see when we were going to dinner or ask my friends if they were coming over. i hated not being able to look up random questions i had on google, i hated not being able to listen to my ipod when i was walking home but very very very  most i missed movies. all my friends and roommates would be downstairs laughing and eating and watching a movie and i had to go upstairs and read war and peace. it was terrible. and i am so less motivated to do my homework because i feel like i have been working hard all day and there is nothing i can do to relax because EVERYTHING requires so much mental work. which does mean that i was more tired at night because i had spent the WHOLE day thinking. i basically loathed those 2 weeks.”

“It turned out that it was a lot harder than I had anticipated. I found myself just sitting in my apartment trying to think of things to do when I wasn’t working or doing homework. I ended up taking a lot of walks, keeping up on cleaning my apartment, and even went grocery shopping more than usual even when I just needed something little.”

“The downside was that I ended up spending a lot of money.  Free time leads to wanting to buy books and card games.  The plus side of this is that there is more quality conversation when playing card games than when trying to play video games as a group.  I picked up a leather-bound copy of the Candide and had to talk myself out of buying about 6 more of different titles.  Also, with the asking questions, it’s extremely frustrating not to have Google around.”

“Towards the end I seemed to have been closer to myself.  I know that sounds weird, but I learned I could entertain myself without video games or the drama on facebook.  I made inner peace with myself.  Or so it seemed.  The day I got my electronics back I went right back into my old habits.”

“I talked to new people on the bus and gained a lot of insight, with an i pod or phone attached to my body I would of never been able to have those conversations.”

“I got my friends together to play cards one night and this is what I observed: there were about eight of us present, two laptops on the table (one playing music, the other half heartily displaying an unread e-textbook that needed studying), seven phones were in hand and being checked at any given moment, and have you ever noticed how annoying it is when you’re trying to talk to someone and their face is glued to their phone? Every moment had to in conversation with some person that wasn’t even present, no one (besides myself) was really in that moment, hanging out with their friends – they were talking to everyone else in the world, thinking of something else, doing something else. As a generation I think we’re losing that human connection that once was so precious and so common. The ability to sit out on your front lawn and talk to your neighbors as they came by, the ability to just talk to those people around you as you walk to some class on campus together, the ability to appreciate silence in a hectic life.”

“I thought it was going to be a piece of cake. To my surprise, it ended up being two of the most depressing weeks of my college experience. I never realized how truly addicted we are to technology in everything we do. I would find myself sitting alone in my room night after night while my friends were out to the movies or playing Wii across the hall. I couldn’t even distract myself by creeping on other people’s Facebook photos. More often than not, I was completely and utterly cut off from all forms of human contact. I felt like such a loner. I never grasped how dependent I am on technology to entertain myself. Texting, Facebook, movies, and video games played a much larger role in my day to day routine than I ever really realized. Refraining from using it not only limited my electronic communication and interactions, but my face to face communication and interactions as well. It was an eye-opening experience which I am glad to have gotten out of the way. “

A cool interactive site that lets you get some perspective on the size of the universe.

G.K. Chesteron on booze.

An excellent essay called “Labor, Leisure, and Liberal Education” by Mortimer Adler.

An embarrassing moment for the smuggest man in the world, Richard Dawkins.  He was on a BBC radio program debating religion.  Dawkins suggested that many self-identifying Christians are “not really Christian at all” and that an “astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book of the New Testament.”  Supposing this is true, this purportedly shows that they are not really what they say they are since they don’t know the basics of their beliefs.  But in a fabulous turn-about, Fraser asked Dawkins for the full title of the Origin of Species and Dawkins – “high pope of darwinism” – cannot come up with it.  I guess, by Dawkins own reasoning, that Dawkins is not then a Darwinian atheist.

As this article points out, “the atheist army is led by an embarrassingly feeble general.  The arrogance and intolerance of the atheists, exemplified by Prof Dawkins, is their Achilles’ heel.”

Speaking of Dawkins, here is a video of Dawkins and Peter Singer thinking through the issue of infanticide.  This is the where utilitarianism invariably leads – to sentimentalism.  Now Dawkins finds infanticide to be unobjectionable “strictly morally” but is willing to at least give “consideration” to someone who disagrees.  Honestly, how morally obnoxious of a claim must these “intellectuals” make before people stop taking them seriously?

This piece considers a recent Journal of Medical Ethics article that argues that “post birth abortion” (that is, infanticide) is not only permissible but is sometimes good.

This article talks about how scientism, materialism, and utilitarianism always travel together.

An old professor of mine from college named William Carroll discusses the metaphysical errors of many of our contemporary physicists.  Another piece by Dr. Carroll on Aquinas and the Big Band that is worth a read here.

JC Sanders also offers a nice review of the creation debate here.

Congressman Hank Johnson apparently thinks islands can “tip over” if the weight on the island is not evenly distributed.

A Penn study suggests that we have written off the effectiveness of abstinence only education rather too quickly.

Chesterton and the art of living well in a time of crisis.

Cardinal Dolan’s “Seven givens and seven oughts” of Catholic social teaching.  And here is another informative piece on the two foundational principles of Catholic social thought – solidarity and subsidiarity.

A wonderful Lenten sermon by John Henry Newman.

R.R. Reno on “Relativism’s Moral Mission.”

An astonishing video using the latest imaging from conception to birth.

Why philosophers get bad press.

My mentor in graduate school, Peter Kreeft, shares his conversion story here.

A checklist for heresies.

Apparently contraception is such an unalloyed good for women that any suggestion  that it is immoral amounts to a “war on women.”  I cannot but help but think that the claim that those who disapprove of the birth control pill want to “deprive women of health care” is an intentional mischaracterization.  It is plainly false that the Catholic Church refuses “health care to women”, as is now being so frequently charged.  The birth control pill is not, in its most common use, a medicine that is meant to treat a medical problem.  The capacity to become pregnant is not an disease that needs to be treated.

Yes, the pill does have medicinal uses and it is used, relatively rarely, for medicinal ends.  But Humanae Vitae is clear that those medical uses are legitimate.  “15. On the other hand, the Church does not consider at all illicit the use of those therapeutic means necessary to cure bodily diseases, even if a foreseeable impediment to procreation should result there from—provided such impediment is not directly intended for any motive whatsoever.”  In other words, if a woman needs the pill for a legitimate medical reason (treatment of uterine fibroid tumors, etc), a Catholic hospital or insurer would provide that care.  In that case, the contraceptive effects of the pill would be an unintended “double effect” and so morally licit.  So there plainly is no “war on women’s health” being waged here. What self-insuring Catholic entities simply wish to do is to refuse to pay for non-medicinal “lifestyle” uses of birth control that it deems intrinsically wrong.

For those readers willing to question the conventional “wisdom” about the good of contraception, I would encourage you to read “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae” by Mary Eberstadt.  She appeals to evidence from social science (noting that many of those doing the studies are likely secularists) to show that the predictions in HV that the pill would have demonstrably negative effects on children and society have come true – more infidelity, less marriage, more single-mother households, more abortion.  In a way this is not surprising.  The pill is arguably one of the most significant inventions in the human history.  It is a social-cultural game changer on a scale I suspect we do not yet grasp.  And, as it turns out, it was not for the good.

More on the public debate over the HHS contraception mandate:

The media has happily repeated without investigation the claim that “98% of Catholic women use birth control.”  This statistic is seriously misleading.  The Washington Post gave it a 2 Pinocchio rating.

Hadley Arkes weighs in on the contraception mandate.

This article discusses the long history of Christian objections to contraception.  Howard Kainz weighs in as well.

Fr. Robert Barron discusses secularism and the HHS mandate.

George Weigel calls the HHS mandate “soft totalitarianism” in this First Things piece.