Socrates and Apollodorus

From Xenophon's Apology:

One of those present was Apollodorus, who was a great devotee of Socrates, but was not particularly bright. He said, 'But the most difficult thing for me to bear, Socrates, is that I see you being unjustly put to death.' Socrates (as the story goes) stroked Apollodorus' head and replied with a smile: 'You're a good friend, Apollodorus, but would you rather see me put to death justly or unjustly?'

[Xenophon, Conversations of Socrates, Tredennick & Waterfield, trs. Penguin (New York: 1990), p. 48.]

Experience and the Presidency

I was a bit exasperated by the attacks on Obama's 'inexperience', but didn't say anything about it because I thought it was inevitable that someone would eventually point out how utterly absurd it is as an argument. No one really did. And now that Palin is on the scene, we have long arguments of attrition in which Palinites and Obamans argue that the other is more inexperienced, and therefore less fit for office, arguments that have gone from absurd to straightforwardly stupid. It's playground politics, with both sides shouting "I know you are, but what am I?" at the top of their lungs. (It's curious, too, in that I hadn't realized Obama supporters were running him against Palin for Vice President rather than McCain for President.) I'd like to remind everyone of a few points that seem to be overlooked.

(1) If experience were such a key issue for the Presidency, we would expect second-term Presidents always to be better Presidents than first-term ones. After all, they have the maximum amount of experience possible not just with "national office" or "executive office" but with the Presidency itself. But in fact we do not see any such increase in quality. Second terms notoriously tend to fizzle and stutter. Second-term Presidents are regularly accused of not knowing their limits and of excessive confidence in their own ability to handle the problems faced by the country. Second-term Presidents stop making some kinds of mistakes, but always end up making new kinds of mistakes.

(2) Politics is extraordinarily scalable. The basic skills used by a successful small-town mayor and a state Governor are not fundamentally different: the politics of the two positions consists of exactly the same thing. There are really only four things you do in politics: sell, bully, bargain, and organize. The policies may change, as may the rules and the stakes; but the political skills, which are the greater part of what experience in politics actually brings, are pretty much the same everywhere. What is important is not experience but adaptability: i.e., the ability to adjust one's skills to new conditions and rules. This is one of the things of which we can sometimes get a rough idea by looking at the details of a candidate's experience; but looking at a candidate's experience in this way and trying to sum up their record simplistically as "Experienced Enough" or "Not Experienced Enough" are radically different things.

(3) The features of the President that you most want to avoid mistakes with are not the sorts of things for which experience is easy to obtain outside of the Presidency itself. Being a Senator or a Governor does not prepare you for carrying around the U.S. nuclear launch codes in your pocket. Nothing in the experience of either will be adequate preparation for what to do when you are faced with the question of how to respond, in military terms, to a terrorist attack on American soil. What you need in such circumstances is not experience but prudent judgment. This, too, is something of which one can sometimes get a rough idea by looking at someone's experience; but, again, this is not a question of being 'experienced enough' but of being able to handle new circumstances well. We shouldn't be looking for people who already know how to do everything important; we should be looking for people who have developed the ability to learn quickly how to swim when you throw them into new waters.

(4) James Buchanan was an astoundingly experienced candidate for President. He had served six years in the state legislature, ten years in the House, ten years in the Senate, eight years as ambassador, four years as Secretary of State. He lost against Abraham Lincoln, who had served eight years in state legislature and two in the House. I'm not sure we are really going to cry over that one. Woodrow Wilson's experience consisted of eight years as president of Princeton and two years as Governor of New Jersey. Grover Cleveland's consisted of several years as sheriff, a term as Mayor of Buffalo, and two years as Governor of New York. Given cases like these, one wants some sort of careful analysis of the role experience really does play in the Presidency. This is hard to do, but this interesting website makes a rough first attempt at it.

That's what that's called....

Only from my casual reading on the internet would I learn the meaning of "voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate".

The Most Radioactive College?

I was somewhat amused to find NMSU-Carlsbad listed on the Bad Education list (ht) as the "Most Radioactive," a designation due to WIPP, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, where nuclear waste (mostly in the form of gloves, clothes, tools, soil, and the like that has been contaminated by plutonium) sealed into drums is stored beneath 2000 feet of earth and salt beds. This, of course, has no real connection with this branch of New Mexico State University, and is a good 25 miles away in the middle of the desert; but, then, the list gives "members of the class of 2008 slept with an average of just 2.75 people" as a reason for classifying Harvard as "Most Overrated," so that tells you the tenor of the list.

What actually amused me more is that I graduated high school in Carlsbad, and so am quite familiar with 'Harvard on the hill', as the people there half-affectionately, half-sarcastically (or all-affectionately, or all-sarcastically, depending on their mood) call it. It's a branch of NMSU that's designed to function as a community college; it advertises itself as one and only offers smaller certification programs and two-year degrees. And, at least when I was there, it had a reputation for fulfilling that function quite well. I'm extraordinarily puzzled by the reference to "the cost of room and board"; as far as I am aware, NMSU-C has no student residences, precisely because it is a community college, and so does not charge room and board. But the authors of the list seem to have thought that NMSU-C was simply the NMSU, and thus a four-year college.

Ut Pictura Poesis

Hume, from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section III *:

All poetry, being a species of painting, brings us nearer to the objects than any other species of narration, throws a stronger light upon them, and delineates more distinctly those minute circumstances which, though to the historian they seem superfluous, serve mightily to enliven the imagery and gratify the fancy.

The claim that poetry is a species of painting is an allusion to a famous line by Horace: Ut pictura poesis (as with painting, so with poetry). It's found in the Ars Poetica:

Ut pictura poesis; erit quae, si propius stes,
te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes;
haec amat obscurum, uolet haec sub luce uideri,
iudicis argutum quae non formidat acumen;
haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit.

Here's a decent enough transmogrification into English rhyme:

Poems like pictures are; some charm when nigh,
Others at distance more delight your eye;
That loves the shade, this tempts a stronger light,
And challenges the critic's piercing sight:
That gives us pleasure for a single view;
And this, ten times repeated, still is new.

The analogy has influenced an immense amount of aesthetics, and did so particularly in the early modern period. (As I think Gilson notes, Horace's actual statement doesn't license any analogy between poetry and painting as arts; it's an analogy between reading of poetry and viewing of paintings -- that is, it is an analogy between the artistic criticism applicable to poetry and the artistic criticism applicable to painting. Some poems are to be read closely, some from afar; some look better in the shade, some under piercing examination; some are best as single shots, and some you can read again and again. But this is usually overlooked, and the analogy is taken to be between the arts.)

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* If you can't find it in your version, that's because your edition follows the 1777 (and thus final) edition of the Enquiry. Up until that edition, Hume included at the end of the section a series of "loose hints" that he said were "thrown together, in order to excite the curiosity of philosophers, and beget a suspicion at least, if not a full persuasion" that the principles in the section, on association of ideas, were true. The loose hints consist chiefly of using the principles to analyze epic poetry and its relation to history. Hume probably had these "loose hints" removed as being too much of a digression, and therefore a structural weakness in the section, but it's a fascinating discussion, one of Hume's most interesting.

Two Poem Drafts

How Strange Is That?

I felt I fell in love with you today; how strange is that?
Waiting for the bus, we stop and stay and chat,
then suddenly and subito my head is overturned,
unbalances my body and makes my heart to burn.
I'm not even sure I really caught your name!
Isn't this a strange, mischievous game,
where something so ungrounded and so swift
can throw everything off kilter like some new-born stellar rift!
That meeting you but once, but for a little while,
I am haunted by your eyes and the flashing of your smile!
That hardly knowing any part of you, nonetheless my brain
spins out imaginations as though your heart were known and gained!
But it all will come to nothing like the glory of the earth,
and if it pass away, what is this feeling worth?
It is a little fizzle, a little frenzy in heated brain,
and when it ever passes, nothing will remain
but a strange, wry self-suspicion and a memory that will fade
of a day that I was victim to fortune's careless play.

Somnus

Strange are the nights when one's drowses are fleeting,
Dancing swiftly across the brain like zephyrs,
Restless breezes displaced like nomad nations,
Vagrant wanderers floating down the rivers,
Homeless, friendless, and everywhere unsettled.
Can you catch the elusive god as evening
Shuffles over the swaying bridge of twilight?
Can you lay in your mind a trap, such ensnaring pitfall,
Even Somnus himself would find it a challenge?
No: for Sleep, who is like his friends, the Muses,
Like his brother, who gathers dying spirits,
Walks the path he elects and strikes whom he will.