Relevant Literature

Which piece of literature has had the largest effect in my life? Why?


My immediate reaction is to say Plato's Republic, hands down, but the Republic only gave me half of the story. Well. Two-thirds of it. The remaining third I got from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Plato's Republic taught me how to think, and the Nichomachean Ethics taught me how to act. I read both of these books in my junior year of high school, and they quite literally changed my life.

The different ways that people think are ridiculously diverse, and I have no idea how to characterize the way I thought before junior year. I took most things at face value, I made grand statements about things I understood very little of, and although I was very good at winning an argument, I thought winning was the point. Well, through Plato, I came to the realization that I'm probably wrong in just about everything I believe, and that it is counterproductive to assume that you know the answers to everything, or even anything. Plato sort of cut my knees out from under me, and forced me to rethink... well, everything. I was raised Christian, so of course, I knew I wasn't supposed to steal, or cheat, or do bad things, etc. But I didn't really *know* that. It was something my parents told me, it was something society expected of me, so I was happy to do it. But in high school, there are so many temptations, things your parents tell you to do, or, rather, not to do get harder and harder not to do. A lot of lines get real fuzzy. I was, intellectually and morally, in a very dangerous situation. One of the most important parts of my transformation of my mind, if you will, was my dad. I have always prided myself on having a good relationship with my parents, but during this whole episode, I realized a couple of things. My dad works for the justice department, and by the time I was in junior year, he had been doing the job he was being paid to do, as well as the job above him. The guy's job who was above him was to manage all of the people who did the job my dad did. Needless to say, my dad was a little overworked. In addition, my dad worked part-time at my high school, teaching the two-hour, philosophy/literature/history seminar that juniors take. So he was *really* overworked. Well, after a little while I realized that my dad had kept the teaching job, despite being overworked, because he wanted to be there to teach the stuff to me. Well, that made me realize, damn, it is this important to him that I understand the full impact of this stuff. Wow, this must be important. Well, it was. All of those things that I used to believe because I was told to believe them I now believe because I understand them, because I have worked through them myself. Lines still get fuzzy, but I have the tools to sharpen them again. Before, my soul was some concept that was important for some reason...yeah. Well, now it's something I think about daily, and its importance is central to my life. However, while working through the Republic made me realize the importance of my soul, and that I should always act justly, it did not tell me, in very much detail, how to act justly. From the Republic, I gained universal principles and the like, but day to day details were lacking. That is where Aristotle came in. Aristotle taught me gratitude, both to my parents, my school and, well, my nation. I can be quite cynical at times, and you will never see me up on a stage saying how great America is, I'm not an outspoken patriot, but I will forever be grateful for everything that the U.S. has made possible for me. So Aristotle gave me perspective, and understanding. Further, he taught me the true meaning of words like courage, justice and reason. We all know what justice is... but do we really? The number of things Plato and Aristotle made me really think about was astounding, and it was always remarkable to me that I could get so many answers from Plato, and yet Socrates, the actual speaker in the Republic, is forever the one asking the questions. He claims he knows nothing, yet everything I learned, I learned from him.

All in all, Aristotle and Plato saved me from a whole lot of mediocrity, and gave me a shot at real happiness. I even still read them, so not only have they had an impact on my life, but they continue to. I can usually get something new every time I read even bits and pieces. For a couple of guys who died 2400 years ago, they did a great job answering questions that we don't even think to ask anymore.

Alcohol

Should the drinking age be lowered to 18?

I am going to go ahead and say no. Let's look at why. First, let's look at the problems with the drinking age as it is now. One argument I have heard is as follows: People get their drivers license around the age of 16. They proceed to become adept at driving, and 5 years later, when they can drink, they are very confident in their driving ability, and thus they are not very careful, even without throwing alcohol into the mixture. At age 21, suddenly a door is opened and they can drink all they want. This sudden freedom, coupled with the years and years of hype about alcohol, tripled with their confidence in their driving ability all lead to serious car accidents. The reasoning is sound, but only if you intend to have the drinking age reduced to 14 or lower. Somehow, I don't think that would go over well with most parents. Now, as someone who is under the age of 21, lowering the drinking age would be pretty cool, but there are a number of reasons why it's impractical. First of all, in effect, it's pointless. The people who are the problem (i.e. the people who cause car accidents, do stupid things while drunk, etc.) are generally underage drinkers anyways. Making their drinking legal would only mean that their displays of drunken stupidity would be more public. Further, if the legal drinking age were reduced, then all of those 18-20 year-olds who actually obey the law would be free to drink, and you would only be adding to the percentage of the population that can do damage to themselves and others. So really, lowering the drinking age would have very little effect, other than allowing thousands of underage drinkers to continue practicing their craft with a clear conscience. Further, it would encourage them to go to even greater (and more public) lengths to see who can be the most idiotic drunk in the state. Even without all that, there is another problem. Right now, the legal drinking age is 21, yet there are thousands and thousands of 16-20 year-olds who drink anyway. If you reduce the drinking age by three years, then it follows that the actual drinking age would become 13 and up, instead of 16 and up. Of course, when dealing with something as complex as large populations and their drinking habits, the numbers probably don't work out that perfectly. Maybe the age would be 12 and up, or maybe it would be 14 and up, but the point is that the devil you know is better than the one you don't. That, of course, assumes that the motivation for changing the drinking age would be to reduce the number of alcohol related incidents. If the motivation is simply that you're underage and you want to drink legally, well, tough noogies. I would love to have a beer or two every once in a while as well, but the number of forseeable evils vastly outweighs our selfish desire to enjoy ourselves a bit. There are, however, plenty of exceptions.

Also, let us further examine the motivation of those who want the drinking age lowered. This really only applies in 42 states, but I think that's probably enough to make this relevant. 42 states allow underage drinking in private, non alcohol-selling residences with parental consent. If someone is so set on drinking alcohol outside of the presence of their parents that they want to change the legal drinking age, what reason is there to believe that they are being intelligent with their drinking? Yes, there are plenty of parents who refuse to allow their kid to drink alcohol under any circumstances, but most of the time there is a reason for that. Namely, the strength of the kid's common sense and reasoning ability.

In conclusion, it seems that it would be a bit pointless to lower the legal drinking age. The number of problems that it would cause outweighs the good it would do, if there actually is any positive good that it would do.

Belief or knowledge?

What do you think is more important: Developing beliefs or gaining knowledge? Why?



I think that the two are too important to say that one is better than the other. Belief without knowledge is useless, and knowledge without belief is extremely dangerous. Further, belief is based, in large part, on knowledge, so with no knowledge, belief cannot exist. For instance, Native Americans were not born believing in the spirits that inhabited the sun, the animals, the plants, etc. They observed that things were chaotic and harsh, and, in true human fashion, they used that knowledge to construct something out of the chaos that did make sense; there are spirits, some malevolent, some not, that inhabit things. In this way, they used their knowledge to construct belief. As for knowledge without belief, that is a dangerous combination. If someone has tremendous power, and they know everything there is to know about manipulating people and getting anything they want, but they do not have any sort of ethical code preventing him from abusing this knowledge, then everyone is in trouble. For instance, take corrupt politicians, dictators, and the like. They have tremendous power to do good, they know exactly how they can make peoples' lives better, but instead they cheat on their wives, take money under the table, or have their people murdered. Belief with limited knowledge is also dangerous. It is the cause of hate and the myriad of horrors that follow. It is very easy, when you are leading a cause, to feed your followers only part of the truth, and let them get angry over that. For instance, in a previous post, I discussed the amounts of money that professional athletes are paid. It would be quite easy to go get the statistics, show them to a bunch of people, get them all riled up over how grossly overpaid these people are, and start a movement that had the ultimate goal of stripping professional athletes of their excess wealth. Yet in doing so, the movement would effectively destroy the orphanage or school that athlete X built, and the children would end up on the street. It would end up closing down the dozens of soup kitchens funded by athletes Y and Z, causing hundreds of the homeless to go hungry. In the end, it would result in a number of horrors just so the ignorant jerk leading the movement, and the idiots following him, could feel better about their mediocrity. The better path, in my opinion, is to combine knowledge and belief, and allow the one to support the other. It is better to achieve a balance in your growth of belief and knowledge by allowing your belief to guide your knowledge, and further your desire for it, and allow your knowledge to support and strengthen your belief. The end result of this combination is understanding, and it is only this understanding that can end the numerous atrocities that people have been committing for thousands of years.

Fail

The question: Is it better to have tried and failed than to have not tried? Is it better to have loved and lost than to have never loved?

Now, being an unbelievably lazy person, I would love to say it is better to just not try. A lot of the time, that is what I end up doing, a lot of the time I'll settle for mediocrity simply because I do not feel motivated enough to make the extra effort. It would also make writing this blog a lot easier. Hurrah for laziness. However, if I were to say that, I would be lying, because that is not what I believe. First off, let us look at the benefits of not trying.......... Well, there really aren't any, are there? I suppose there aren't any downsides, either. If you don't put yourself out there emotionally, you can't get crushed. If you don't apply for the higher job, you can't feel bad if you don't get it. If you run away instead of standing and fighting, whatever the situation is, you can't get hurt. The thing is, at the root of all of these examples of not trying is fear. Fear of getting hurt, crushed, disappointed, etc. It seems to me that you can live without trying, but it will be a life lived in constant fear, which really is no life at all.


Now lets look at the benefits of trying and failing. I suppose it depends on what you are trying and failing to do, but there are some benefits that you gain in just about any situation. The first would be experience. If you fail, then you learn a couple of things that you should not do the next time you try. Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I have simply found a thousand ways that don't work." Further, my old violin teacher told me once that he hated it when people said "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." He told me that it should be changed to "If at first you don't succeed, try a different way." Running into a brick wall over and over again isn't going to get you to the other side. So in trying and failing, you learn what not to do next time, e.g. run head on into the brick wall. Next time, you might try going under, over or around the wall, and then you get to see what's on the other side. You can look around, and just about everything that we as a species have created is the product of trial and error. Very rarely does anything go perfectly on the first try. When someone sets out to create a great software program, he writes all the code, distributes it, and then he gets feedback. For a program like Windows Vista, the feedback is 99% negative. Seriously, the program is a nightmare. But the programmers take the feedback, revisit the code, and fix the problems. Maybe Vista is a bad example, since it's been out a few years and it's still a nightmare, but the point still stands, that very rarely does something good just happen, it almost always requires a great deal of work.

With something like a relationship, that work is constant. Sometimes relationships are easy, but the moment you stop trying, everything goes downhill. Sometimes it goes downhill anyway. And while there are always painful memories when a relationship ends, there are also good ones. I, for one, would say it's much better to have the good memories to smile about and the bad ones to learn from, than to have never tried, and wonder what might have been. In any situation you have the choice to act or not, and when you act, you learn. When you go passive, you stay the same person and there is no opportunity for personal growth. That's not to say it is always better to act, there are situations when it is far better to listen and observe, but in those situations where the only reason you have for not acting is that you are afraid then it is better to try and fail than to not try at all. And if you really think about it, if you don't try at all, then you still fail, only this way you can fool yourself into believing you didn't. When you try and fail, you learn something about whatever it is you're trying for. When you don't try, you fail not only at the thing you wanted, but at life. Sure, if you run away you can't die, but you can't live either.

Names

Talk about names--specifically your name and how it has shaped your life and if you believe it is the best name for you.  If you don't, why not?  And what name would you rather have?


I rather like my names, first, middle and last, and pretty much all for the same reasons. I have always liked conflict, battle and chaos. I love massive thunderstorms where you can literally feel the thunder shaking your bones. Sometimes when there is power and chaos all around you, that is the only time you can truly feel at peace. Maybe I'm weird, but I think it has a lot to do with the love of adventure that most everyone feels at some point in their lives. My favorite poem is Tennyson's "Ulysses," in large part because of its portrayal of that spirit of adventure. Odysseus (The Greek form of the name Ulysses) himself was quite the adventurer, and I always used to envy him for his name, which means "The Great Contender." It just seemed to me to be somewhat glorious, almost as if he could stand against the world, and hold his ground. Anyways, what does this have to do with names? I say I "used" to envy Odysseus his name, because that was before I considered my own names. Let's take my first name. Joshua. All of my siblings and I are named after people from the Christian Bible, and in this case, my namesake is the commander of the Israelite army, and over the course of his leadership, the Israelites are never beaten nor turned back, and always they remain oriented towards God. Under his leadership, the Israelites took the Promised Land. To use modern language, the man was a beast. Now let's take my middle name, Michael. This gets even better, as Michael the Archangel is, in the Catholic tradition, the field commander for the armies of God. It does not get much more glorious than that. Finally, let's look at my last name, Kelly. Joshua and Michael both have their origins in Hebrew, but as any Hebrew blood I might possibly have would come from centuries ago, I do not identify myself as Hebrew at all. Kelly, on the other hand, has distinctively Irish origins, and I have always been proud of my Irish heritage. The original Irish for the name Kelly comes from the name "O Ceallagh." Between Scottish, Irish and English, "Ceallaigh" can mean anything from "Bright-headed" to "One who frequents churches." There are, however, two particular meanings that I like, and those are "Warrior" and "Strife," and they tie into the meanings behind my first and middle names. Conflict, battle, adventure, all of these make me feel like I am a warrior, as if it is in my name and in my blood.


So all three of my names give me several important aspects of my identity, which are strength, and the courage to fight, as well as piety, and a love of God.

SAT/ACT

Are the SAT/ACT reliable representations of how freshman will perform in their first year of college?


I'm going to go ahead and start out by saying no. Multiple-choice question tests in general are unreliable. As my 7th grade Latin teacher was so fond of saying, as we prepared for the National Latin Exam, "A monkey could ace this thing." And it's true. Usually you are given 3-4 answers to choose from, so for each question you have about a 25% chance of getting it right if you just guess random answers. The probability that you will ace the test if there are 40 questions and you guess randomly for each one is very small, yet quite possible.
Further, the SAT is not a simple multiple choice test, it does some funky thing where you lose more points for answering wrong than you would for leaving the question blank. The result is that a family with excess money can spend thousands of dollars on tutors who teach their kid all of the little tricks for getting a few extra points, and in general, how to work the system. Thus someone with below average intelligence can easily get a much higher score on the SAT than a kid with above average intelligence, simply because he has been taught how the system works. This particular phenomenon is personal for me, since one such rich family stole one of my favorite high school teachers and paid him ridiculous sums of money to tutor their kids about how to work the SAT. We never got him back.

I suppose I have only answered a part of the question at this point, that is, no, the SAT/ACT are not reliable representations of the intelligence/reasoning ability of those who take it. People who get high scores might be dumb as a stone, while those with lower scores might be quite intelligent. As for whether the tests are reliable at predicting the academic performance of first year college students, again, I say no. I have at least two friends at Ithaca whose SAT scores were higher than mine, and yet their college GPA is far lower than mine. I watch them struggle in classes where I have very little trouble. Thus our relative SAT scores are unable to predict how we perform in our first year of college.

I do acknowledge that my data pool consists of only three people out of the many thousands of college students in the world. However, it is only an example of my point, and that is that any multiple-choice test, particularly one with easily manipulated factors, such as the SAT, is unreliable in determining how a student will fare in their first year of college. Also, the SAT only attempts to predict pure academic ability. It does not take into account the psychological effects of being effectively stripped of your family and friends and given a place to sleep in completely unfamiliar surroundings. It does not take into account the need to balance a social life with an academic life. It does not take into account the need to find a job, maintain it, and balance the time that takes with your social and academic life. Thus a kid with below average reasoning abilities might end up being a fantastic organizer, and thus get better scores on college tests because they get a good night's sleep every night, and they have general peace of mind and reduced stress.

In conclusion, I say once again that SAT scores are unreliable representations of how a student will do in their first year of college.

Is Torture Ever Justified

Is torture ever necessary? Is it ever considered justified?

Torture: the act of inflicting excruciating pain, as punishment or revenge, as a means of getting a confession or information, or for sheer cruelty.

Ooh. Tough topic. Here we go

Well, to start off I am just going to throw out my initial, gut feeling, and that is that no, torture cannot be justified. I suppose we will have to look at some scenarios to more completely examine the topic. First off, we will look at different levels of torture.

I will begin with less severe forms of torture. Chinese water torture seems to me to be not terribly severe. Now, before all you who may have experienced it tear my head off, let me qualify the statement. I have never undergone Chinese water torture. I am not very qualified to comment on it. However, I am doing the best I can. This type of torture is purely psychological, as I understand it. It seems that the way it works is that hearing that drop so consistently and over long periods of time just drives you nuts. However, I do not believe that the affects are in any way permanent, and there are several ways we experience it in daily life. For one, every morning, my alarm rings in the exact same way at the exact same time. And every morning, I wake in very nearly a murderous rage. I really need to change that ringtone. A child, when trying to get something from its mother will often say "mommy!" at the exact same pitch over and over and over...and over...and over again until the mother can not take it anymore and caves. Also, back to my own experience, on Saturdays, one of only two days a week when my alarm does NOT go off, I like to sleep until a ways into the afternoon. However, the doors in my dorm are quite loud when they are allowed to close by themselves, and the soundproofing in the building is a joke. Thus, every Saturday morning, the JERK down the hall goes in and out of his room over...and over...and over again. Needless to say, I feel like strangling him, throwing him off the roof, running him over with a car, and burning whatever is left.
These three examples seem to be similar to water torture, particularly the example of the child, and yet we do not try that child for psychological abuse, and the mother is not scarred for life. However, these are very light examples. To couple the water aspect with sleep deprivation and other such things can leave lasting psychological damage. So now it falls to us to examine the needs of a given situation. If the knowledge that we know someone ahs will immediately deliver thousands of people from certain and gruesome death, and the only way to get the information is by severe torture, such as waterboarding or the extreme version of Chinese water torture, then you may have an argument. However, I still can not condone such extreme methods. I would gladly beat the stuffing out of the man with my own two fists for being such a (Insert many nasty things). I could not permanently damage the man's psyche. But would he not deserve it, you may ask? I am sure that he would deserve it, yet I am not so prideful as to take it upon myself to render that judgment on him. I believe that whatever horror I inflicted on him would echo in my own soul, and in a way, damage me even more than I would be damaging him. To take it upon oneself to make the judgment of how much one human life, one soul, is worth when measured against other lives and souls is folly. In order to do so would be to quantify the soul, which I defy you to do. Assuming that it is possible to quantify the soul (Which I have to say it is not), and rejecting the case of divine revelation, to quantify the soul would require immense experience, knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge and experience aside, wisdom is the very thing that tells you not to try it.
         So ignoring the numerous minor tortures that people subject themselves and others to on a daily basis, and taking only the case of waterboarding and extreme water torture, I am going to stand by my original gut feeling. Under no circumstances is psychologically damaging or physically disfiguring torture justified. Furthermore, it is not necessary. Pain is not the only thing that can get someone to talk, there are any number of things that one can appeal to in another human being. Pain is simply the easiest. In the movie Body of Lies, Leonardo DiCaprio is a US intelligence agent in the middle east. He is stationed in Jordan, where he begins working with the Jordanian Head of Intelligence, Hani, the equivalent of the US CIA. In one scene, Hani shows DiCaprio the elegance with which he runs his operations. He captures a young man from an insurgent safe house. This is a young man that Hani has known since the man was a teenager. The man has not talked to his mother in a long time, and is currently running missions with terrorist insurgents. Hani hands the man a cell phone, and turns toward DiCaprio. He says that on the phone is the man's mother. She will say that she loves the gift and the note he sent her, and she is very happy to hear that he is shaping up to be a good young man, and has stopped running around with terrorists. She will say that she is proud of him and she loves him.
          The gifts and the note are not from the man. They are from Hani. After the man hangs up the phone, Hani turns to him and says that if he does not cooperate, his mother will learn the truth about him. You never see nor hear from the man again until the end of the movie, when it turns out that he is the one who gives up the information that leads to capturing the terrorist leader, and saving DiCaprio's life. This is in stark contrast to the less elegant, often brutal methods that DiCaprio's boss has him use most often, and in the end, it is far more effective. Hani did not appeal to the man's fear of pain, nor any of the baser, animal instincts in human nature. Hani appealed to the man's love for his mother. Love, not pain.