human development
Andrew Gelman has a whole series of posts about the Human Development Index, which, as he points out, effectively equates development with income.
Leon Kass’s recent Jefferson Lecture serves as a welcome reminder that there are other kinds of “development.” Which is not to say that the monetary kind doesn't matter; only that it’s not the whole story of what it means to be human and what it means to be developed. Kass:
In summer 1965, interrupting my research, Amy and I went to Mississippi to do civil rights work. We lived with a farmer couple in rural Holmes County, in a house with no telephone, hot water, or indoor toilet. We visited many families in the community, participated in their activities, and helped with voter registration and other efforts to encourage the people to organize themselves in defense of their rights. This deeply moving experience changed my life, but not in the way I expected.
For on returning to Cambridge, I was nagged by a disparity I could not explain between the uneducated, poor black farmers in Mississippi and many of my privileged, highly educated graduate student friends at Harvard. A man of the left, I had unthinkingly held the Enlightenment view of the close connection between intellectual and moral virtue: education and progress in science and technology would overcome superstition, poverty, and misery, allowing human beings to become at last the morally superior creatures that only nature’s stinginess and religious or social oppression had kept them from being. Yet in Mississippi I saw people living honorably in perilous and meager circumstances, many of them illiterate, but sustained by religion, extended family, and community attachment, and by the pride of honest farming and homemaking. Indeed, they seemed to display more integrity, decency, and strength of character, and less self-absorption and self-indulgence, than did many of my high-minded Harvard friends who shared my progressive opinions. How could this be?
Hard to believe that the author of that passage also wrote this.
— dj · May 22, 08:33 PM · #
I’ve experienced both ends of the spectrum. From what I’ve seen, “self-absorption and self-indulgence” are human universals—they just manifest differently in different societies. Even the most self-effacing behavior is often about seeking a certain type of social approval.
Kass is familiar with the culture of Harvard intellectuals, so he knows when they are being snobbish and prideful. He doesn’t know where to look for these traits in the Mississippian communities, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. This is nothing more than grass-is-greenerism
— salacious · May 22, 09:14 PM · #
Outstanding lecture. Thanks, Alan.
— Kate Marie · May 22, 10:06 PM · #
Yeah, that would be this guy, Dr. Jacobs.
“Kass frequently makes his case using appeals to “human dignity” (and related expressions like “fundamental aspects of human existence” and “the central core of our humanity”). In an essay with the revealing title “L’Chaim and Its Limits, “ Kass voiced his frustration that the rabbis he spoke with just couldn’t see what was so terrible about technologies that would extend life, health, and fertility. “The desire to prolong youthfulness,” he wrote in reply, is “an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity.” The years that would be added to other people’s lives, he judged, were not worth living: “Would professional tennis players really enjoy playing 25 percent more games of tennis?” And, as empirical evidence that “mortality makes life matter,” he notes that the Greek gods lived “shallow and frivolous lives”—an example of his disconcerting habit of treating fiction as fact. (Kass cites Brave New World five times in his Dignity essay.)
Kass has a problem not just with longevity and health but with the modern conception of freedom. There is a “mortal danger,” he writes, in the notion “that a person has a right over his body, a right that allows him to do whatever he wants to do with it.” He is troubled by cosmetic surgery, by gender reassignment, and by women who postpone motherhood or choose to remain single in their twenties.“
Pretty soon there will be no one left in the GOP but insane-clown-fascism-shouters, crypto-neanderthal villagers with torches and pitchforks, and creepy old bioluddites.
Last one out, turn off the lights!
— matoko_chan · May 22, 11:06 PM · #
Great lecture, Dr. Jacobs. I enjoyed reading the whole lecture . . . the actual, specific lecture for which you provided a link. Magnificent.
Thanks again.
— Kate Marie · May 22, 11:30 PM · #
I just don’t think Thomas Jefferson would have cared much for Leon Kass. I sure don’t.
Part of your image problem is that you have become the anti-science party, and the perception that you are anti-science luddites is reinforced by people like Kass.
Also you get things like bible quotes being used to inform presidential policy, apparently a techinique employed both by Kass and Rumsfeld.
“…the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth….”
— matoko_chan · May 23, 02:29 AM · #
I guess Kass didn’t see these farmers eating ice cream.
— Mark in Houston · May 23, 10:35 PM · #
Meh, should’ve clicked through dj’s link before posting mine. But the point still stands.
— Mark in Houston · May 23, 11:02 PM · #
Blow gets it.
This what I have been saying.
This is what you guys should be talking about.
Not some creepy old bioluddite poseur.
Kass can only hurt you, like he hurt GW when he was the head of the Presidents Council on [Bioethics] Bioludditry.
— matoko_chan · May 24, 12:34 PM · #