Canadiana

The dandelions have returned. Fewer lawns are infested this year. Ours is one.

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More reading:

• Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End (her novel set in *ancient* Egypt)
• Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (supplement to MacIntyre’s book)
• George Grant, Lament for a Nation (see discussion, below)
• Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (for the group)
• Stefan Zweig, novellas: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past (they’re great)

Grant’s 1965 book, summarized here, deserves some comment. What is Canadianness? North American Britishness, is the core of Grant’s answer. That is, Britishness nurtured as a tradition of political distinctiveness from the USA, featuring, e.g., a more serious commitment to federalism, as involving better treatment of and greater autonomy for minorities. Alas, when Britain itself was pulled into the U.S.’s military-economic orbit, Canada was pulled in, too. Canadian businessmen sold out first. Politicians followed. Nuclear weapons were brought to Canadian soil. Canada effectively gave up its nationhood and became a satellite.

(Lately, of course, the pendulum has swung the other way.)

Here is a Canadian’s capsule summary, written two decades ago (scroll down the list to book no. 41):

Well, Canada is still here, but what, pray, is it? Grant wrote this brilliant, deep essay on the question in the early 1960s, in the aftermath of Diefenbaker’s political downfall. He wrote of a small “c” conservative society, respectful of tradition, that was disappearing under the pressure of continentalism. Forty years have passed, but Lament still speaks to us directly of important issues. It is a must-read for anyone interested in what might define a nation called Canada – especially given that the formula of “medicare with peacekeeping” is more glib than inspiring, and factually shaky as well.

Who in the U.S. knows about Prime Minister Diefenbaker? I’d guess less than one tenth of one percent (Canadian expats excepted). So, next month, I’ll read Desmond Morton’s Short History of Canada, which purports to make “acute observations on the Diefenbaker era.”

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Another item of Canadiana: The Peanut Butter Solution (1985). It has music by teenaged Céline Dion. We watched this bizarre movie as a family. I won’t say I didn’t like it – I did! – but it fed my suspicion that our admirable northern neighbors are, in fact, deranged.

Hoyle

Someday I’ll explain why, a decade or so ago, I resolved never to learn another brand-new board or card game – indeed, why I came to loathe the very idea of new games.

Tonight’s post is about why despite (or perhaps because of) this loathing, I bought The New Complete Hoyle, Revised (1991) at Goodwill.

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The book’s subtitle is: “The Authoritative Guide to the Official Rules of All Popular Games of Skill and Chance.”

All popular games. Of skill and chance.

Is this a literally true description of the book? No.

Was it true in 1991? No. There were other popular games than those in Hoyle.

The pretense of officiality also goes too far. See, for example, this admission:

The rules of Go differ somewhat in China, Korea, and Japan. Unfortunately they have not been codified even in Japan, where, in 1928, a championship tournament was interrupted and suspended for a month by a dispute over rules. A commission appointed to clarify the Japanese rules proposed a code in 1933, but it has not been generally adopted.

One might deplore the book’s exaggeration. On the other hand, one might admire its determination to establish a canon of games.

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Which brings me to what canonization is for.

Walk down any Walmart games aisle, or visit a specialty shop: new games proliferate like Hydra’s heads. This, at best, is a distraction from the sustained pursuit of excellence. At worst, it’s postmodern absurdity.

One is tempted to commit one of two opposing mistakes. The first is to renounce all gaming. This is the Charybdis of asceticism. The second is to try to keep up with new gaming. This is the Scylla of … well, probably not asceticism’s starkest opposites, wantonness and incontinence. It’s more like an arms race. Or like keeping up with the Joneses.

The sensible middle course is to choose just a few games and to stick with them. Here a canon of games is invaluable. It’s less good to practice something with no stock of wisdom built up around it. (I’m sure Alasdair MacIntyre would agree.)

Adhering to the canon ensures that one is communing, not only with today’s gamers, but also with those of the past, e.g. the Japanese who debated the rules of Go in 1928.

Hoyle is steeped in history, or aspires to be.

(Indeed, its stated pedigree is almost blasphemous:

The only truly immortal being on record is an Englishman named Edmond Hoyle, who was born in 1672 and buried in 1769 but who has never really died.

I imagine my pious grandfather, who refused to play cards, disapproving.)

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Suppose that one is nauseated by the uselessness of gaming and decides that total abstention is, after all, the way to go. Hoyle still is invaluable. What better tool is there for understanding scenes of gaming in old books? I’ve never actually played bridge, but (in some moods) my favorite Christie novel is Cards on the Table. Identifying the murderer in that book depends on knowing about bridge. Then there are the James Bond novels (Casino Royale, Goldfinger  … ). Even Austen’s and Pepys’s people are card fiends. A confirmed teetotaller probably should know a little about boozing, if only for literature’s sake.

R.I.P. Alasdair MacIntyre

Call me a casual fan: an embarrassing status to admit to in South Bend, where fans are rabid.

The only book by MacIntyre I’ve read, cover to cover, is After Virtue (summarized here). I’ll say this: the book has staying power. Bits of it recommend themselves repeatedly and in diverse contexts. Many bits are provocative. Many of the provocative bits are silly. More impressive, to me, are the book’s constructive attempts to reestablish contact with forgotten moral traditions; to say what virtues are; to sketch social conditions for tractable attributions of rightness; and to make room for pairs of genuine obligations that genuinely and tragically conflict (e.g., Antigone’s obligations to her brother and to her city).

I’ve read a number of MacIntyre’s papers. I prefer his writing in that less digressive format. (In books he’s relentlessly allusive, and one struggles to keep up with him.) I never set out to read any collection of his papers straight through (e.g., this one, this one, or this one); I’ve taken on his shorter writings “piecemeal,” as this or that issue has arisen. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” is justly famous. “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman, and Us” is a gem. (Whether the book-length treatment improves on it, I couldn’t say.) “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” which I haven’t read, is “the best starting point for contemporary ethics,” according to the tenth comment in this online discussion; “one might update [that essay] by replacing the name ‘Stalin’ with ‘Trump’.” (My reading group’s next meeting is “Trump Fest”: participants are to report on whatever they’ve chosen to read about Donald Trump. I wonder if it’d be beyond the pale to report on “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” instead.)

Some patriarchal thoughts

We never got around to painting the walls in our new house … which is just as well, since Samuel has been drawing on them with crayons.

I read somewhere that the “terrible twos” are a myth. Parents think that their two-year-olds behave worse than at other ages. Their observations confirm this because they already believe in the “terrible twos.” It’s a self-fulfilling hypothesis.

Let the debunking begin, I said. I was ready for Samuel to disprove the myth or at least move the needle in the opposite direction.

Alas, he has not done so.

To his credit, he improves in this or that respect every week. I tell him to put his blocks away, and he does. I tell him to move away from the TV and sit in his chair, and he does. He didn’t use to.

To his discredit, he finds new ways to misbehave. Indeed, he is openly rebellious.

I wonder what example he is setting for his brother.

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I was reading Locke’s First Treatise – his withering response to Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha – when I noticed that Peter Laslett’s editorial references to the latter are to an edition prepared by himself. That edition isn’t easy to find. The most readily available edition, not counting super-old scanned ones, is the Cambridge one; its back cover says:

Recent years have seen a great explosion of interest in women’s history, and in the history of the family and patriarchal attitudes – not least in seventeenth-century England. At that time patriarchalist thinking shaped English ideas not only about the family but also about society and the state. Many thinkers argued that the state should be seen as a family, and that the king held the powers of a father over his subjects. Fathers, they claimed, were not accountable to their wives or children, and the king was not accountable to the people. …

I don’t know if Laslett came to write about Locke because of a prior interest in Filmer; virtually every other scholar proceeds in the opposite direction. But Laslett does try to interpret Locke’s Treatises as a unified polemic against Filmer. And though I previously associated Laslett with Locke above all else, I learned today that his main achievement was a book called The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age. It begins with a discussion of seventeenth-century bakeries. The idea of the baker’s household or family and the idea of his bakery were nearly coextensive. Fathers ruled all. Workers not related by blood to the patriarch nevertheless received the same treatment his family members received. The baker’s young children were regarded as workers.

(Locke himself, who considered Filmer’s patriarchal argument to be an apology for near-universal slavery, thought that three-year-olds should be put to work.)

And yet, everyone in the household found something like contentment, or meaning, in his or her role.

(Of course, many in the household may have hoped that they, too, would climb the pyramid, becoming bakers or bakers’ wives.)

Viewed one way, the communal ethos was oppressive. Viewed another, it enabled freedom and fulfilment.

I daresay, the picture is pretty MacIntyrean. The book is called The World We Have Lost.

R.I.P. The Super League

The Super League is no more.

Fans protested; pundits criticized; politicians threatened. The English clubs withdrew. Other clubs withdrew.

(So much for the spiffy website.)

Now the clamor is for owners’ and sporting directors’ heads to roll.

Meanwhile, Florentino Pérez of Real Madrid continues to advocate for the Super League.

(The whole video is worth watching. This issue is so clear-cut, the pundits can’t say a wrong word: even terrible Alejandro Moreno delivers some nice zingers.)

European soccer will change, though. An overhaul of the UEFA Champions League was approved even before The Super League declared its intentions.

This video explains the changes:

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I should say a few things about my family, or at least about the boy. For several days, he has suffered from an ear infection. Sometimes he has been feverish. Today his mood was better, but he broke out in a rash: he appears to be allergic to his medicine.

We took him to Walmart for the first time since the pandemic began, and he was pretty amazed by everything.

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Oh, and I gave my last guest lecture on Alasdair MacIntyre. The students clearly were struggling to read all of After Virtue. Perhaps I ought to have refrained from mentioning other readings, so that the students could focus on getting through the book that had been assigned to them. But instead, I recommended a few shorter pieces that, realistically, they might digest by the end of the semester: “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” and “Politics, Philosophy, and the Common Good.” I think those essays display what is best about MacIntyre’s moral and political philosophy, more or less independently of his history of moral and political philosophy (which, tantalizing though it is, I am inclined to reject).

A tiring day

The lawn seems thicker this year. Some of its plant species are new; I wonder if this is good or bad. I mowed again yesterday and, in one hour, used two full tanks of gas.

This afternoon I gave the first of the two lectures on Alasdair MacIntyre. “You spoon-fed the students,” said my Uncle Tim. “Which was exactly what I wanted you to do.” The broth I spoon-fed them was pretty diluted. My seven-page handout was neither very comprehensive nor very detailed; even so, the writing of it felt like hard labor, and at class-time I was exhausted. So were the students, several of whom fell asleep.

I’m always reassured when students do this. The most gratifying teaching evaluation I ever received said that one half of the semester was “boring but very important”; it told me that I was doing something right.

My cousin Vickie, who has been looking after Samuel during these guest lectures, was unavailable today because she has contracted a disease. Her place was kindly taken by my Aunt Sally. When I got home, I received a report of the many activities that Samuel was encouraged to do.

The loneliest practices

I suppose Mishawaka could have another deep-freeze, what with it’s being April, but I’ve begun cutting the grass again. A week after the first mowing, the lawn has regrown so quickly that it looks like a jungle. Mowing is much easier this year, now that (a) I know better what I’m doing, and (b) I’m in better physical condition.

As my mower chews up the cud, I can’t help but to ruminate over After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. His theory of the virtues depends, in part, on the notion of a practice, which he defines as

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

By way of illustration, MacIntyre says – notoriously – that “bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is.”

I wonder if J.M. Coetzee is having a little fun with this statement when, in Summertime, he writes of himself –

week after week, using a shovel and a wheelbarrow, he mixes sand, stone, cement and water; block after block he pours liquid concrete and levels it. His back hurts, his arms and wrists are so stiff that he can barely hold a pen. Above all the labour bores him. Yet he is not unhappy. … In fact, once he forgets about the time he is giving up, the work begins to take on its own pleasure. There is such a thing as a well-laid slab whose well-laidness is plain for all to see

– and when, a little later in the book, he attempts to situate his own slab-laying within a cultural history.

I take it that if laying brick isn’t a practice but architecture is, then mowing the lawn isn’t a practice but lawnscaping is. (Surely, what Hank Hill and his neighbors do is a practice.) So, perhaps I’m engaged in a practice when (a) mowing “begins to take on its own pleasure” – when I derive satisfaction from going in straight lines, not damaging the grass, etc. – and (b), what arguably is more important for MacIntyre, I ask friends for advice about how to cut the grass.

More likely, though, for MacIntyre, what I’m doing is not a practice. This is because, for the most part, it’s only incidentally cooperative. I very well could mow my lawn (lay brick, etc.) – mindful of “goods internal to that form of activity” – in drastic isolation. To a considerable extent, because of COVID and because of who I am and the society in which I live, I have no other option than to realize these goods in isolation.

This is what Coetzee does when he lays concrete; this is what Coetzee’s Michael K does when he gardens clandestinely – at night, on an abandoned farm in the countryside (where “there is time for everything”). This, mostly, is what I do when I mow the lawn or study philosophy or the Bible. This is what my life has come to – where it was headed all along.

I reacquaint myself with MacIntyre

Well, the vaccination did give me aches, chills, etc. for much of Saturday. But by Easter morning I felt all better – except in my arm. I continue to have “pain at the injection site.”

I should have remembered, before I got the shot, that this area of my shoulder is where Samuel likes to rest his head.

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My Uncle Tim has asked me to give two more guest lectures. The topic is Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.

I can think of at least four other graduates of Bethel’s philosophy program who are better qualified to discuss this book. Still, I’m glad for the chance to reacquaint myself with it.

I now know more about the philosophers discussed therein, and so I grasp better what MacIntyre is saying.

(Famous last words.)

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Usually, I take my sweet time with any philosophical work longer than two or three chapters. I might spend a quarter of a year, or half of a year, or two or three years on something as long as After Virtue (which doesn’t even exceed 300 pages).

(Of course, I would also read other things during that time.)

This reading of the book will have taken just three weeks.

I’ll also have read several articles by or about MacIntyre – which is all to the good, except that I feel a little weary from having stuck so closely to one author, day after day after day. I keep on having to resist the temptation to read within fields that MacIntyre mentions but doesn’t discuss in detail. I’ve been gazing longingly at my books on social epistemology and free will; more generally, my appetite for studying the metaphysics of agency has been whetted again.

There is just too much to read.

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What my uncle’s students are making of After Virtue, I’m curious to find out. It can’t be easy going for them. Too many of the names, they won’t know from “Adam.”

Some polemical texts serve as good introductions to the ideas that those texts argue against. This is emphatically false of After Virtue.

If a student’s sole exposure to, e.g., John Rawls’s ideas is through this book, it will be very hard for him or her to give those ideas a fighting chance.

To be fair, if one’s sole exposure to Rawls’s ideas is through Rawls’s own books, it also may be hard to give those ideas a fighting chance, just because those books are so long, complex, and repetitive that it is hard to read them carefully.

I wouldn’t say the same about Rawls’s articles. Rawls’s ideas may be expressed canonically in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, but often they are more alluring, more clearly motivated, in his briefer, less rigorous statements.

To some extent, this also is true of MacIntyre’s writing. This summary of After Virtue should help the students.

But I do hope that they carefully read After Virtue’s chapter 14, “The Nature of the Virtues.” The book’s constructive proposal is much more interesting than its criticisms of rival philosophies.