And Now For Something That Isn't The Constitutional Crisis

In my latest effort to avoid having to actually do my goddamn Procedure reading, I read this article about the problem with Malcolm Gladwell. It's very interesting stuff and I think I basically agree with its broad point, though I don't have any independence expertise with which to judge it. I do have one thought to add, though: Gladwell apparently claims that many dyslexic people become very successful (incontrovertibly true) and that, in fact, these people may become successful because of their dyslexia. The obvious rejoinder to the former claim is that it omits any discussion of, you know, proportionality: are "successful" people, whatever that means, more or less dyslexic than people in general? If, say, 3% of the population and 1% of "successful" people are dyslexic, then yes, dyslexia is not a total bar to "success," but it seems to be making it a lot harder. (No comment offered on whether this is because dyslexic people genuinely lack the capacity to be "successful" or because society unjustly places additional burdens in their way should they attempt to "succeed.") But that's not my point, because I think there's an even stronger response to be made to the second part of the claim.

Of course any dyslexic people who become successful will have become successful because of their dyslexia. Or, slightly more precisely, of course the path any successful dyslexic took to achieve their success will have been influenced by their disorder. If I put a roadblock up on your way to some destination, and you are thereby forced to take an alternate route but nonetheless reach your destination, then you took a successful path and I forced you to take it. Or, to use a perhaps more accurate metaphor, if you're wandering around in the fog and the dark with no idea of where you're trying to go, and I put a big ol' wall in front of you, maybe even a wall of infinite length that forecloses an entire portion of the world to you, and your further wanderings deposit you somewhere that's a very good place to be, it is entirely true that you reached that good destination because I obstructed you. So if there are extremely successful people who are dyslexic, then with every single one of them you will be able to tell a story of how their dyslexia shaped their lives in a way that led them to their successes. Tautologically. And because it's a tautology, it's uninteresting except as a matter of biography, in which context it could well be fascinating, or, perhaps, in the therapeutic context, i.e. in trying to help a further individual dyslexic person work on having a "successful" life despite their troubles. The societally interesting questions then become, okay, how does dyslexia affect the odds of becoming "successful," if you want to, and sure, is there some social value in having some people be successful in the different way that successful dyslexic people are successful?

Those are interesting questions and I might have more to say about this topic, but it's 1:06 a.m. and I have 30 pages of reading for a class that starts in all of seven hours, fourteen minutes, so I should stop writing and go do that. Yeah...

Truth and Morality

This is completely random, but I just stumbled across the following question left on a blackboard in the room where my Brown Dems meeting was held: "Are there any true moral statements?" Quite honestly, this strikes me as an exceedingly easy question to answer. It hinges entirely on whether or not one is willing to accept some sort of bedrock principle defining either Good or Bad in some way as the foundation of your system of morality. If you are (for instance, I'd say that "for sentient beings to be happy is good and for sentient beings to suffer is bad"), then there are plenty of moral statements that are true as a matter of logical deduction from that starting assumption. And it is an assumption, mind you: I don't think there is a way to construct a whole system of morality without making a decision about what sort of moral axiom you use, and rationality itself cannot provide that postulate. You can pick the principle I described as being my own above, or a different one. I could argue with you about it, but I don't think what I'd be appealing to was ultimately your rational side. I would be trying to convince you that your principle disagrees with my principle in cases where your deep-seated visceral reaction is that your principle gets it wrong.

And if you don't take some sort of bedrock moral assumption? Then what is there to say? If you don't define good or bad, then there is no good and no bad, and therefore no morality to talk about. If what this question really means is, can there be a system of morality that completes itself based solely on logic and empiricism, wholly without relying on the kind of assumption I'm describing, I think the answer is no. But I also don't think that's a problem, because it's really not that hard to just set some postulates. We do it all the time in math, and quite honestly we do it all the time in life generally (starting with the assumption that the world really exists, or at least that we should act as if it does).

Inequality

I've been reading, for my Modern Political Thought class, a book titled Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women?. It features a twenty-page essay by Susan Okin, essentially arguing that one particular kind of multiculturalism (the kind that wants to allow certain Groups rights to do things that others don't get to do) runs contrary to feminism. One person's reply and critique involved a considerable amount of the following kind of logic: "veils aren't specifically designed to restrict women's sexuality, they're part of a broader system for regulating and restricting the community's sexuality." That's ridiculous, and it reveals, I think, one of the dangers of a focus on inequality: there are, strictly speaking, two ways to remove it.