Lost Piece Volume III Issue I

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LOST PIECEan undergraduate journal of letters

VOLUME III, ISSUE IYouthful Musings

LOST PIECE: Volume III- Issue Ikg

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No part of this journal may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, record-ing, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the Editor–In–Chief except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. The works included in this journal are printed with explicit permission of their authors.

Lost Piece: An Undergraduate Journal of Letters The University of Notre Dame Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

an undergraduate journal of lettersgk



Editor-in-ChiefRebecca Roden

EditorsCarolyn GarciaThomas Graff

Gabriel McDonaldTaylor NutterAnthony PattiJames Schmidt

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Table of ContentsLost Piece: Volume III, Issue I

Something of a Mission StatementFrom the Editors ..........................................................................7

Meet the WritersLost Piece ......................................................................................9

Not Quite a Child AnymoreRebecca Roden ...............................................................................11

Youth RevisitedElizabeth Argue ............................................................................15

The Brown NightCarolyn Garcia ..............................................................................17

InarticulacyKatie Finley ..................................................................................21

Obsequious Child Taylor Nutter ................................................................................27

The VoidDaniel Kokotajlo ...........................................................................29

Not with a BangNick Brandt ..................................................................................37

Trees on the Margin of a StreamRenee Roden .................................................................................39

Russian RouletteChristina Mastrucci ......................................................................45

Resin ImmortalityClaire Kiernan ..............................................................................47

On Human Moral Development Gabriel McDonald ........................................................................49

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Something of a Mission StatementFrom the Editors

Lost Piece exists to facilitate undergraduate reading, discussion, and writing of an intellectual nature beyond course curriculum

and without distraction from the grade point average.

Lost Piece seeks to help undergraduates to comple-ment and even unify what they learn in their classes with

their own personally driven intellectual pursuits.

The goal of Lost Piece is to combat mediocrity in all things, and particularly in all things intellectual.

Lost Piece holds that the goods proper to intellec-tual activity are ends in and of themselves and are to be sought regardless of whatever recognitions may or

may not be extrinsically attached to such activity.

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Contribute to Lost Piece

Please consider writing—whether essay, poem, story, or what-have-you—for the Spring 2012 Semester of Lost Piece. Write what you think is pertinent to the life of a student, whatever that might be…

…Pose a question…

…Or offer an answer…

…Write at whatever length you need…

…But write well.

Submit your work to Rebecca Rodenat [email protected] by December 30th.

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Meet the Writers

The Program of Liberal Studies: So it turns out that PLS stu-dents don’t only like to talk about such trivial things as “free will” or “the meaning of life” as approached through the lens of certain Great Books, but they also like, even need, to engage ideas wherever they can find them. That’s why a few of them got together to watch movies every week, first as a social event and later more as a discussion group. They like to think they are staying true to the spirit of the word “seminar” (which literally means “seedbed”) by holding profound conversations on their own from which they hope to bear the fruits of new ideas, serious dialogue, and lasting friendships.

Istum: (Also called That Thing) Three years ago, a group of friends decided to get together every weekend to start a literary society. Its members include students from the Colleges of Arts and Letters, Science, and Engineering, but strangely none from the college of Business. They write, simply put, despite the obvious fact that they are only tyro writers, and they criticize each other’s writing as best they can. One of their goals is to bring back the essay (which literally means “an attempt”) as a form of writ-ing and as a rhetorical work of art. The group takes its name from one of Cicero’s orations.

These groups have contributed to the writing of the Fall 2011 Edition of Lost Piece. We encourage you, as an undergraduate, to contribute your writing to future editions whether individually or as part of any such intellectual society. You can send your writing and feedback to the editor at [email protected]. k

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T: T is a group of undergraduates who come together to discuss issues of importance, ranging from theology to philosophy to current issues in any and all fields. It is a casually struc-tured, socially engaging event that welcomes the opportunity to find both common ground and a multitude of opinions on topics. And they drink tea, too.

The Orestes Brownson Council: As a club, OBC is focused on better understanding the Catholic intellectual tradi-tion and its interaction with philosophy, politics, and culture. It takes its name from the American Catholic political thinker who is buried in the crypt of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Orestes Brownson.

Mustard:They are those strange ani-mals, the communal writers who never discovered that writing is a solitary activity. Sure, the poems and short stories happen on their own time (alone), but then they get together in the Gold Room to read and critique each others’ work - the Workshop. Mustard is a totally open creative writing club, and they invite everyone to join. Check them out on the 3rd floor of La Fortune every Wednesday at 9 PM, or email [email protected] for more information.

The Philosophy Club: The Philosophy Club is a group of a few dozen undergraduates who enjoy arguing, using big words, attempting to answer “life’s great questions,” asking more questions, and arguing.

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Not Quite a Child AnymoreAn Introduction

Maybe you remember these lines from the very final scene of C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader” as well . . . maybe because it touched your heart as much as mine. I recall feeling an intense sadness at Aslan’s proclamation—more than I thought my ten-year-old heart was capable of. How could he bar them from Narnia? How could he? The ending was not just bittersweet—it was really quite frightening. Lucy and Edmund were growing up, they were changing, and, in the process, they had to lose some very dear things. If I were Lucy in that story, Aslan might be telling me

the same thing: you cannot come back to Narnia. And at that time in my life, I didn’t want to let go of Narnia. Remember when you were ten, when you were just a little kid? How did you spend your days then? I know that, for me, it was all about the present moment. Life just was. I had no worries about the next day, or of time passing, or of being productive. Going to college? Having kids? Getting grey hair? Those were definitely things I did not realize would happen to me. I “knew” I was going to grow up and I thought about it sometimes (mostly in the context

“Dearest,” said Aslan very gently, “you and your brother will never come back to Narnia.”

“Oh, Aslan!!” said Edmund and Lucy both together in despairing voices.“You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close

to your own world now.”

Rebecca RodenClass of 2012 Editor-in-Chief

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of what I was going to name my hypothetical children and what movies I was going to star in) but I didn’t really know. I didn’t realize it. And I certainly didn’t waste my precious time contem-plating the fact that someday I was doing to die. Please. I had Candy Land to play. It is a very unique (and envi-able) fact that children live in (what seems to them) an immor-tal world. Death isn’t a reality yet. They have an infinity of time to be just as they are. Children are not practical or morbid. They do not “think ahead” in this sense or philosophize about the human condition. For them, life is all there is—it’s the only way things will ever be. Then, one day, things change. We cannot live in Narnia anymore—we are kicked out into the real world with all its anxieties and cares and aware-ness of passing time. We might even want to slow it down a bit, because with time comes more responsibilities and less fun, and (eventually) more wrinkles and

less hair. Now we are 18 or 20 or 22… and we are caught in a strange paradox. We still act like we are immortal, we still feel like we are immortal, but now, we know we aren’t. To live is to move toward death, and we will arrive there someday, perhaps earlier than we anticipate we will. We can spend our days immersed in our activities—just as immersed as we were when we dressed up and played house—but there is a new consciousness of what we are do-ing. Will we regret spending all that time in the library pouring over organic chemistry? Will we wish we’d traveled more, or spent more time with family, or read more? Will we be glad when we are eighty about that one summer when we watched every single Friends episode? Are we wasting our precious time? Subconsciously or consciously, we are all now struggling to reconcile our youth and im-mortality with our newfound realization of death. We still want to be children—and the

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fact is, we can still get away with it. Our responsibilities are not so bad, and playing hard is part of college. Aren’t we supposed to enjoy these last few years, just as children enjoy their childhood? Don’t “grownups” always tell us to love it while it lasts, for soon it will be gone and we will be chained to our desk and paying bills? But somewhere within us, I believe we sense that we can-not pretend we are immortal

anymore. It doesn’t seem like the right response—more like hid-ing our heads in the sand. We cannot accept the illusion that life will go on forever, but must realize we are slowly inching closer and closer to death. We cannot be like Susan Pevensie, who, in The Last Battle, did not return to Narnia because she was seeking another Narnia, a second childhood, when she was grownup:

“Oh, Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except ny-lons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on

being grownup.”

“Grown-up indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there

as long as she can.” The days take on a different flavor now, for there is a pressure to know that what we are doing is Important and Something We Won’t Regret. We have realized we don’t have all the time in the world—so are we spending it in

a way we will be glad we did in the end, when we are faced with eternity or nothingness, heaven or hell? I do not think many of us truly have an idea of how to answer all the questions we are confronted

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with, or how to make sense of our feelings of immortality and mortality. But our reflections upon these questions and our attempts to answer them keep showing up in our verbal and written words. Maybe they don’t completely surface. But they are there, just below the prose, hoping to be noticed. Hoping for someone to see what we are getting at. This issue of Lost Piece con-tains essays, poems, and fic-tion that reflect, explicitly or implicitly, about life and death, childhood and eternity. There are pieces that look back to childhood. Pieces that look forward to death. Pieces that try

to explain why we are here, or why we struggle to express all of these deep questions. I hope, dear readers, you will read and be reassured that, even if no one quite knows the an-swer, we all know the question. And maybe some of the answers, fears, and hopes that these writ-ers express will strike a chord within you. k

Thou little child, yet glorious in the mightOf heaven-born freedom on thy being’s height,Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?

Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,And custom lie upon thee with a weightHeavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

-William Wordsworth

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He stood blankly, scuffing his shoe, leaning on the red brick of Doyle’s Drug Store. I knew he was remembering. He used to pine for these breaks when we came, bursting with youth, to meet him on the street corner. We dreamt about the night to come, when the prospect of jazz lit our eyes and animated our swinging feet. The girls were beautiful, the men handsome, and the city swept up in a whirl of music and light and freedom. Buddy now stood alone out-side his father’s drugstore, the cracking red brick serving as the anchor in the storm. The music was sad now and dance was tire-some for sore feet. Girls brushed aside newfound beauty to help lonely mothers feed children and boys rushed into manhood, working alongside their fathers, scrounging for menial work. The

yoke of survival snuffed the fire of our generation. Sighing, Bud looked up and he caught my gaze. Our eyes met for a moment, that familiar smile stealing across his face, and I knew he was re-membering the night I wore my new green dress. It matched my eyes, he told me, and he held my waist as we danced. He took my hand and we stepped out of the club, young faces turned to the sky as we watched the stars, for-getting to ask them what would come. The music drifting on warm night air, the touch of our hands, and the sweet innocence of everlasting youth - it was all that mattered. It was 1929, the twenty-eighth of October. I looked away, brushing aside the memories of my fleet-ing youth. I hurriedly turned the corner, back turned on the past. Bud smiled sadly and as he opened the door,

Youth RevisitedA Story

Elizabeth ArgueClass of 2014Political Science and French Major

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his father looked up hopefully at the sound of the bell.k

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The Brown NightA Poem

Carolyn GarciaClass of 2012English Major

Où sont ces doulx plaisirs qu’au soir, sous la nuit brune,Les Muses me donnoient […] --Joachim du Bellay

I.Tonight is a sack of fragrant coffee beans:Slip your hand in and the cool capsules conform to crevasses of your fingersTonight is a walnut tableWith a patina of moonlight; tonight,Tonight the black of the void is tempered with tendernessThe night wraps you up in her long, brown hair

II.The taste of night is dark chocolateBitter sweet

III.I once spent three days and nights with four brown womenOne slender and dark as brown midnightThe other three round, light brown twilightI, beige sheep, grated carrots in their kitchenAnd sat at their table, ensconced in the warm brown eveningEating couscous with vegetable confetti And tawny pork chopsWhich basked on my plate in amber gravy

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IV.On your milky forearmMy eyes rested upon one brown freckleI wanted it to open up and flood the roomSo I could dive into it, and beSwallowed; I would becomeYour mujer morenaWith eyes like two cloves and cinnamon skin

V.Where are those sweet pleasures which at eventide, under the brown nightThe Muses would give to me, where indeedMy brown family is dispersedAnd here, in the sunless valleyBrown evenings blacken all too quickly

VI.Sepia sienna umberSlumber lumber thunder ponderHumor human hummus chick-Pea, my chick/pea soul

VII.Grandfather was MestizoBrown whitened by EuropeanMy father, ChicanoBrown whitened by AmericanI, beigeWhite whitened by whiteYearning for the brown welcome

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VIII.Let us worship the Brown Princess of NightThe Muse who shepherds us gentlyInto the foldOf her long velvet cloak k

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on behalf of all those who work to make Lost Piece happen...

eThanks For Reading

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I oftentimes find myself wildly gesticulating when trying to convey a particularly difficult idea – or pretty much any idea, really. Maybe you’re like me – you move your arms like a crazy person trying to trace out some imaginary space meant to sym-bolize an idea, or you attempt to evoke understanding of a feeling with elaborate hand movements. Or maybe you’re not – maybe you’re a wonderfully articulate and eloquent individual with no need for such silly gestures. Good for you – you deserve a pat on the back. Either way, I think most of us would be in agreement about the fact that there are some things – emotions, ideas, states of being – that words just cannot express – or at least, cannot ex-press in any intensity comparable to how we experience them.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand brings up this idea as she de-scribes her protagonist, Dagny, explaining that “she was making her way back toward the cab, feel-ing that she wanted to laugh, to kneel or to lift her arms, wishing she were able to release the thing she felt, knowing that it had no form of expression.” There are moments for each of us when we simply cannot put words to our experience – or at the very least, we cannot put words to it in any sort of rational, cohesive way. It’s not completely evident whether this is due to an inad-equacy in our language itself, or whether what we wish to express is too exuberant and ebullient to be contained in the little, restric-tive packet of a word; or maybe there are restrictive problems in both these areas. Either way, there is something that disallows the translation of certain aspects of our experience into words. This idea, voiced through

InarticulacyAn Essay

Katie FinleyClass of 2012Philosophy Club

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Dagny, that there is this ‘thing’ that she so longs to release, but cannot, can also be seen reflect-ed by many other well-known authors. For example, Emerson writes that “all men live by truth and stand in need of expres-sion. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret.” Emerson argues that this “uttering or expressing of our secret” is the lynchpin around which much of our lives revolve. But some of you might be thinking . . . “Painful secret”?? What is he talking about? . . . The only painful secret I can possibly think of that I have is related to what went down last Friday night. But . . . I don’t think that’s what he’s talking about . . . But I think if we really sit with this idea, we can all recall certain moments when we are overcome with some emotion, or with something we see in nature, or with an idea we suddenly un-derstand. And when this hap-pens, although we cherish these moments and sometimes hesitate

to share them with others, many times we just can’t keep it in. And this is where other modes of communication come in. Visual art, music, dance, poetry – all of these are potential forms of expression for these ‘inarticulate moments’ of ours. But how and why can these art forms be ways to communicate what we typi-cally find incommunicable? One might think that these forms of expression cannot really be used to convey an idea that can’t be conveyed through written prose. One reason for this doubt is often due to the prevalent idea that any sort of work of art like the ones mentioned is so inher-ently subjective that it couldn’t really succeed at conveying any concrete, objective idea or state of mind. For example, many will say that there are so many possible ways that you could interpret a work of (especially abstract or modern) art, that you can basically make it out to be anything that you want. However, I think that it is precisely this openness to

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because they are not simply a straightforward ‘visual transla-tion’ or even beautification or decoration of some idea, but rather they enable a much richer spectrum of meaning to be con-veyed. However, it is a mistake to jump from ‘spectrum of meaning’

and ‘multiple levels of interpreta-tion’ to assuming the meaning found in art is entirely subjective. The work of art above is per-haps a good illustration of this point. You could go through and write down words to describe the woman in the portrait: resigned,

multiple interpretations or levels of interpretation that make these art forms particularly suited to communication of exactly the kinds of ‘inarticulable’ things

that we’ve been talking about. Again, taking an example from visual artwork, I see this to be the case because the images that art presents have power precisely

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proud, longing, introspective, strong, reserved, penetrating – at least those are the words that come to mind when I view it. But even looking at those words, it seems as if some of the pairs are near opposites – resigned and strong? But I see both in the painting . . . how could that be? This is where the beauty of this ‘language’ comes in. You could write a hundred pages about this painting – trying to go into all the psychological intricacies conveyed through the different artistic techniques – but you would never be able to express exactly what this painting is trying to express. There is a feeling that is neither resigna-tion nor strength. This feeling is

somehow a fusion between all the different aspects of this painting that we can ‘name’, but none of the words encompass the mean-ing in anywhere near its entirety. The same is true for music –(in lieu of the typical classical music reference) go look up ‘Ocean’ by John Butler at Rothbury, turn the volume on your headphones all the way up, and listen. If you think that everything that’s ex-pressed in, and invoked through that glorious piece of music can be expressed through a writ-ten description and analysis of the song . . . well then you basically don’t have a soul. Here’s yet another example of what I mean – a few lines from Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale:

These lines are not only more emotionally evocative, but are also more truthful and ac-curate – undoubtedly better at portraying Keats’ thoughts and

feelings than a statement like “I sat listening to a Nightingale, and now I think it would be nice to die . . .” Even if someone went through and wrote reams

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a musèd rhyme, To take into the air my quiet breath”

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of analysis about Keats poetry, it would never convey as much as this little couplet does. And this is because much of Keats’ meaning is conveyed through the beauty, and multiple inter-pretations, and ambiguity and historically-packed meaning of his words. The fact that it is conveyed in this poetic, and less straightforward and blunt way, causes us to search for meaning – and through this searching, we are drawn into the text (or the painting or the song). We are drawn into the artist him-self, and are perhaps enabled to feel some shard of what he felt, through his artful expression. This is what art does, it does not present its meaning for us up front in a neat little packet, but instead it draws us in to the ex-perience of art, thereby allowing us to glean some of its meaning. Both ‘beauty’ and ‘art’ are hard to define concretely and precisely; instead, we seem to have and operate on an intui-tive, ‘deeper’ understanding of them. In a similar way to how

we understand the meaning of these terms, we understand art – through some sort of intuitive and personal experience. This is because art should not be seen as simply a more ‘flowery’ way of expressing what could be expressed through other means. Artists seek to express truth through their work, but in a way that is not simply a beautified philosophical treatise. Rather, they aim to express their truths through the beauty of their work, rather than having it simply serve an ornamental function. In a poem, each word carries along with it all the imagery, memories, and connections that are associated with it by the individual, but also by our culture as a whole – and this is because this is what the poet intends the words to be used as – as objects of beauty and sparks of meaning, rather than boxes intended to convey something precisely and directly. Similarly, the visual arts and music also serve to provide this ‘spark’ that enables the viewer to connect

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with it and experience it in a personal way that truly brings the meaning alive for them. So, although I can’t exactly create ‘works of art’ with my hands while crazily gesticulating in the air, perhaps some of what we convey through ‘talking with our hands’ – namely a deep need for some other form of expres-sion - is legitimate. Although I may not succeed most of the

time, it is one more example of how we naturally look for ways to express our somewhat inar-ticulate ideas and emotions. It leads me to wonder how much of everything that we say (or write) is a series of word boxes that we shove truly inarticulable thoughts, feelings, and ideas into, in order to present them more easily to others. Or, in the words of my homeboy Thoreau:

“The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.” k

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Obsequious ChildA Poem

Taylor NutterClass of 2014Philosophy Major

Obsequious childYou seep into

The fretful soot below With the ever withered tree

That breathes and takes a bowBeneath a skyWhich ever is

This and nothing moreAntiquated, reticent

A thing that does deplore k

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Daniel KokotajloClass of 2014Philosophy Club

The phrase “You should do X, if you want Y” can be taught or ex-plained fairly easily. For example, “If you do X, Y will happen” is built using only the concepts of “you,” “X,” “Y,” action, and the material conditional. (If -> then) But the phrase “You should do X” is harder to understand. How would a stranger to the concept be taught what it means? I’ve thought about it a lot and I still cannot express the concept in simple terms, or in terms that can be reduced down to simple terms. In fact, I cannot seem to express it without using terms that are equally mysterious- for example, “ought” and “right” and “good.” Meanwhile, there are those that say that “You should do X” means either “You should do X if you want Y, and I am assuming you want Y so I am not bothering to mention it” or “I want you to do

X.” Both of these interpretations can be expressed and explained quite easily. However, for most of my intellectual life I had a strong intuition that these explanations do not fit what is really meant by “You should do X.” And if they do not fit, then what does? Am I to be stuck with a concept that I use so much but cannot explain? If I cannot explain it, how can I be sure that it makes sense? I now think that my strong intuition was leading me on a wild goose chase. I used to have very different views about morality. I used to believe in something wonderful and transcendent and divinely logical that orders our decisions. Now I have, I think, come to a clearer understanding of things. I have decided that some ideas that seemed perfectly sensible were ac-tually nonsense, but made to seem real through constant use. I find it extremely difficult to argue my case, because I cannot name di-rectly that to which I am opposed.

The VoidAn Essay

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This means that I cannot attack it except indirectly, by offering an alternate theory. Accordingly, this paper first explores various notions or facts that I find es-sential to my new perspective on things, arguing for them as needed, and then concludes with a series of statements that attempt to describe said perspective. I’ve often been told that with-out God there can be no moral-ity and that without God the world would have no meaning. I have often heard the sentiment that if God were to be proven nonexistent, we all would and should be terribly depressed and possibly suicidal. As an atheist, hearing these things bothers me, but not, I think, for reasons that one might expect: I get the feeling that when people say those things they expect me to be bothered, and it is this expec-tation that bothers me, and not much else. One goal of this pa-per is to illustrate why this is so. The first and most impor-tant part of my perspective is the theory of language, truth,

and ideas on which it is built. I believe that all of language is convention, so to speak; all of our words are invented by us and used as labels for concepts. We are free to swap labels around amongst our concepts; we are free to coin new labels and use them in place of old ones. And of course we are free to con-ceive of whatever we can. Our concepts are what really matter; our concepts are what succeed or fail at representing reality. So when someone tells me that a world without God cannot have any objective morality in it, I do not know whether or not to be bothered until I know what they mean by “objective moral-ity.” If their concept of objective morality matches my concept of monkeys, then upon realizing this I would simply laugh and tell them that “objective moral-ity” can exist quite fine without God. If their concept of objective morality matches my concept of God, then upon realization I would raise my eyebrows quizzi-cally and wonder why they wasted

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breath on such an obvious and boring truth. (In this case perhaps their concept of God is not the same as my concept; perhaps I should not have assumed that it was.) And if their concept of objec-tive morality matches my concept of divine commandments, then I would also react quizzically. Of course there can be no divine com-mandments without the divine! A related concept, seemingly trivial but actually key, is that everything is the superlative of at least one adjective; to put it another way, everything is X-er than everything else. I think this can be proven: For any given thing with name X, coin a new adjective “X-y” with the meaning “closeness to X.” Various things are “X-er” than various other things if they are closer to X. X will be the closest thing to X, so X is X-est. “Closeness” is interpreted spatially for spatial objects, but for other cases one could invent a different measure/ranking system to use instead. For example, if you are awarding prizes to preschoolers for their finger-painting, and you

want to make sure that every child gets to be “first” in at least one category, you will be able to achieve your objective by giv-ing prizes out for superlatives in increasingly complicated and suspiciously specific categories. Now on to values and choices. I think that one needs both values/goals and beliefs to make a choice: Once you have values/goals you can weigh and rank different options and eventually choose one. If you have no beliefs then you will not have any options to rank. If you have beliefs but no values/goals, you will be able to comprehend the various options but you will not be able to choose any of them; you will be indiffer-ent between them. Thus you need values/goals and beliefs to make a choice, unless your idea of “choice” includes things done without de-liberation, like knee-jerk reactions. Moreover, to convince someone to believe something you must use premises and rules of derivation they accept. If you want to con-vince someone to change their actions or plans, you have to

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argue that their current plan or action is inferior to some other plan or action under their own system of values. If a Viking and a Libertarian are looting a store, explaining to them that the store is private prop-erty will stop the Libertarian but not the Viking, and telling them that there are villagers vulnerable to capture further down the block will stop the Viking but not the Libertarian. Additionally, I think that in order to have any values/goals at least one of them must be intrinsic. One cannot have an infinite chain of values; in order to value anything at all one must have at least one goal/value that is not part of a larger goal or value but is instead an end in itself. If you have several values/goals that are all means to achieving each other, then you have an infinite chain of sorts. Finally, I hold that our values are contingent. There is nothing that cannot be valued, there is nothing that cannot be ab-horred, and there is nothing that

cannot be ignored. For every X, there is a hypothetical being that values X, a hypothetical being that abhors X, and a hypotheti-cal being that is indifferent to X. This hypothetical being might not be human; I readily admit that it might be the case that in order to count as a human one must be physically incapable of valuing certain things, or even that one’s humanity causes one to value certain things. If this is so it does not detract from my point, because we are con-tingent beings, and so even if our values stem from our very natures, they are still contingent. By this I mean that even if all humans must necessarily value X, X is not necessarily valued, because it is possible that hu-mans would not exist. Besides, it is quite likely that humans can indeed value anything. The last and most complicated idea I wish to present here is built off of what I spoke about before, particularly off of my claims about labels and superlatives. I hope to illustrate what I mean succinctly

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in the following progression:

• Every action is justi-fied according to at least one scheme of values.

• Every value is justified accord-ing to at least one scheme or concept of justification.

• Every concept of justifica-tion is legitimate accord-ing to at least one scheme or concept of legitimacy.

• Every concept of legitimacy is [positive-sounding ad-jective] according to at least one scheme or con-cept of [same adjective]

• Every concept of [p-s adj.] is [new p-s adj.] accord-ing to at least one scheme or concept of [same new p-s adj.], ad infinitum.

Note: A scheme or concept of justification is a way of catego-rizing schemes of values along a scale, probably with certain schemes being classified as “ justified” or some related word, and probably with one particular scheme being the superlative. A

scheme or concept of legitimacy is the same thing except with schemes or concepts of justifica-tion in place of schemes of values, and the word legitimacy in place of the word justification. And so on and so forth with each ascend-ing layer in the infinite tower. In plainer language, what I mean by this is that when we say one option is best, we are implicitly invoking some sort of standard or scheme of values under which that option is the superlative. And if we identify and name that scheme of values, the question then arises why that scheme and not another? And so we rank various schemes accord-ing to a new meta-standard, a scheme of justification, and pick out our favored value system as the superlative. But then a new question arises about our meta-standard, and the cycle repeats until we give up. When we give up, we will be left with a long chain of reasons supporting our choice, reasons supporting our reasons, and so forth that ulti-mately terminates in something

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for which no reason is given, something that we just accept.

The idea, and the problem, is not that there is no one moral-ity, but that there are multiple moralities. Likewise there are multiple rationalities, multiple systems of justification, etc., so that in a sense everything is per-mitted, and yet at the same time they all of them depend on some unproven and optional axioms or other, so that in a sense noth-ing is permitted. Everything is the superlative of at least one adjective, and each adjective is also a thing, entitled to its own superlatives. So when we choose something, it is not because that something is the superlative in some category like “goodness,” but rather because we value that category more than the other categories. I believe that every-thing we do depends ultimately on us caring about certain ends, on us having certain intrinsic values/goals, and that our having those intrinsic values/goals is not solely the result of

any properties of those values/goals, but rather partly depen-dent on our own inner states. This works itself into ordinary life in the following manner: When someone says to me “X is immoral” I give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that their statement is true: that their concept of immorality is such that the adjective “immoral” accurately describes X. This does not necessarily, or even probably, lead to any change in action on my part, not even if I was wavering on the fence as to whether or not to do X. Because in all likelihood I do not care about what is immoral accord-ing to their concept; I have my own concepts, built to reflect my own values. When they say “X is immoral” they are saying that X is not in accordance with their values; in other words, that they do not want me to do X. If I value their friendship I will try to please them, but if I change my actions it will be because of that and not because of any great ethical conversion on my part.

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That is what I generally as-sume, but perhaps it is the case that they are trying to convince me to change my actions. If this is so then they are not going to get very far by using their own concept of morality; as I said above, they must convince me that changing my actions is more in accordance with my own values than I thought. To make this more vivid, imagine you are arguing with a philosophical Nazi about his policy of genocide. The two of you can’t agree over whether or not it is morally permissible; it is apparent that you each follow different standards of permis-sibility and have different con-cepts of morality. The Nazi sees that the two of you are getting nowhere, and so he ceases to claim that his actions are right, and instead calls them Schright. He explains to you what this new term means, and indeed you are forced to admit that the word is an accurate descriptor of his actions. Then he goes on to

say that he does not care about being right; he only cares about being Schright, just as you do not care about being Schright and only care about being Right. What can you say to him now? What possible argument could convince him to change his mind? Define Good and Right and Ought and all related terms however you will, he will simply not care about them, no matter how much he agrees that they apply. Even if God himself were to come down from the clouds and say “Nazi, you are being im-moral!” he could just say “Okay, sure, but I do not care, so long as I am still schmoral.” If God then went on to threaten the Nazi with eternal damnation, he might change his actions, but only if he values his own skin more than doing what is Schright. And who knows, he might be fervent enough to defy even God in the name of his moral code. Of course, this is not meant to at all imply that we are some-how restrained from using what physical force we have to stop

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the Nazi. We are well within our rights to do so. The fact that we are not within our Schrights has no power over us, as we do not care about Schrights. I hypothesize that a lot of what sustains and prolongs moral debate is the confusion that both of the following always hold: 1) All parties are thinking of the same concepts when they use words like “ought,” “right,” “should,” and “good.” 2) All parties value the achievement of those concepts. When we try to convince someone that he is do-ing something wrong, we often mistakenly think that 1) is true, and so we bring forth examples and reasons that quite clearly entail his wrongness in our minds, but not at all in his mind. And when we start defining our terms and explaining in detail what our idea of morality is, we fall into the error of 2) and act as if our opponent’s allegiances lie with the word itself rather than the concepts he values. I hypothesize that all talk about morality boils down to “I

want X,” “You think you want Y, but you really want X,” or “X is Z, did you know that? Tut tut, how interesting.” In fact, those three categories might very well describe everything we say and think, albeit in a roundabout way. (Technically speaking, every utterance can be translated into the third form, I think.) So that’s how I see things now; hopefully this essay has been able to sketch an accurate enough schematic. I honestly don’t know if this perspective of mine is bold and controversial or obvious and uncontested. If the former, then great, because what I have said here only skims the surface of what I could say on this topic, and I am still quite confident that I am right. If the latter, thenI will be disappointed, and a bit humbled at having taken so long and so much effort to understand what everyone else already knew, but neverthe-less glad to be able to rejoin society, so to speak, now that I have dispelled my phantom. k

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Bright autumn fades when harsh winter calls.

It is as it always will be,And forever shall be,World without end,Amen.

Peacetime yields to war,In one swooping act of gracious deference,It beckons fire, smoke, and pain,For that is the way it always is.

I am a young man,But in two years I could be a Second Lieutenant.This is the promise of the futureSo they say.

Why must youth ask for age?Or the rainbow for a storm?Unparalleled passing changeErupts the happy norm.

Blanketed by change,Driven by driving itself,

Not with a BangA Poem

Nick BrandtClass of 2012Program of Liberal Studies

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When in April, Spring resumesWhen in Spring, Life resumesWhen in Life, Death presumes

We aren’t moving, we are movement itself.World without end,Amen. k

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As soon as I read those words in Sophocles’ play Antigone, chills ran up and down my spine, and I instantly fell head over heels in love with the titular heroine, Antigone. I was swept up into the drama of this beautifully fierce, stern woman fighting tooth and nail for her brother’s honor. By uttering these wise and fateful words, Antigone is publicly declaring her own strength. She is issuing a bold challenge to Creon in the most audacious and public manner possible. Hers is not the wisest, nor maybe even the most loving course of action, but it creates thrilling drama. From the moment she sets foot onstage, Antigone is enamored with her own sensational crisis.

Because of her enthusiasm for her own saga, we, her audience, are caught up by the dazzling spectacle as well. Antigone exudes power and strength; she thirsts for a glorious deed to perform; a dramatic death to die; an outstanding undertak-ing that the whole world will hear of; she hungers for hot deeds “that chill the blood.” But Antigone fails to live up to her self-proclaimed vocation to love. Throughout Antigone, themes of life and death are prevalent. Ismene, Antigone’s sister, consistently chooses life, while Antigone embraces death. Antigone often harps on death and the deceased. She speaks of her brothers, her father and mother, her family who are all dead and gone. She often

Trees on the Margin of a StreamAn Essay

Renee RodenClass of 2014Program of Liberal Studies

“I am not made for hatred, but for love.”

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describes these dead as her wit-nesses. Ismene, on the other hand, is clearly more concerned about her sister—about her living family. She recounts with shame and hor-ror the stories of her father’s and mother’s death, and she calls her brothers wretched. Instead, Ismene is more concerned with Antigone’s life and well-being. Antigone herself makes it emphatically clear by declaring, “We both have made our choices: life, and death.” In the first scene of the play, Antigone, wrapped up in her righteous anger and her plans to restore Polyneices’ honor, ignores Ismene’s admonitions to prudence. As Ismene sees it, the only tan-gible outcome of Antigone’s rash law-breaking will be her own death. Antigone concedes that her act is folly, but she obstinately refuses to back down. She lashes out at her sister, “Your words have won their just reward: my hatred.” Ismene manages to take these wounding words in stride. She responds at the end of the scene: “Remember, though your act is foolish, that those who love

you do so with all their hearts.” Facing Creon, Antigone val-iantly declares, “I am not made for hatred, but for love.” While her act of service to her brother is certainly one of love, the hatred that she has demonstrated towards Ismene lessens the value of her words. Antigone grows hostile and frustrated with her sister in the first scene, and turns a deaf ear to Ismene’s genuinely concerned sisterly advice. When Ismene stands up to Creon with her sis-ter, Antigone brusquely brushes her aside. In fact, Antigone never truly demonstrates any love whatsoever towards Ismene. Although Antigone makes con-stant protestations of love for her dead brothers, she never men-tions her love for her living sister. But Ismene’s love for her sister is entire, unwavering, and selfless. When Creon condemns Antigone to death, Ismene is willing to share in her sister’s fate. While Antigone is still alive, Ismene fights for her and defends her. She tries to reason her out of her feckless endeavor to bury their brother.

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Despite her efforts, she only succeeds in angering her sister, but she responds to Antigone’s anger not with a curse, but with a blessing. Antigone accuses Ismene of loving only in words. But that is precisely the opposite of what Ismene does. Ismene supports Antigone and like the

most faithful of allies never stops fighting for her. She does not seek glory for herself, but rather the safety of her beloved sister. She demonstrates her own brand of redoubtable courage by hold-ing onto life, holding onto hope. Haemon, Antigone’s be-trothed, makes this metaphor:

Trees on the margin of a stream in winter:Those yielding to the flood save every twig,And those resisting perish root and branch.

These two trees paint a perfectly analogous picture to the two sisters. Ismene has the tender and firm resilience that endures against all odds. She is a tree that bends with the tide. She will not fight the flood, and she emerges unscathed, with every twig intact. She will emerge the victor. Antigone has the forti-tude to push back, to resist at all costs. According to Ferdinand Foch, Marshal of France, “The most powerful weapon is the human soul on fire.” Antigone’s soul is definitely on fire. She is dedicated to her cause, and will stop at nothing to accomplish

it. She is pure iron. Unbending, unyielding. Terrifyingly sure she is in the right. Tragically, her courage fails her. She snaps. Although Antigone has been racing towards death since the beginning of the play, when she finally arrives on death’s thresh-old her resolve weakens. She has lost the resolve that she once possessed. She mourns for herself as she approaches death. Her bravado has vanished. Antigone is truly afraid to die. She does not have the dignity to face an honor-able death. Although previously she dismissed Ismene’s offer to die with her, she now moans, “No

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fellowship have I; no others can share my doom.” Her short life concludes with suicide, the most hopeless of all deaths. A portrait of determined strength through-out the play, when Antigone finally reaches the denouement, she snaps under pressure. Even the strongest tree can crack. Antigone’s stubbornness and persistence serve her cause well, but inevitably lead to her own destruction. Her courage is com-mendable and impressive. But the raw passion of love, unchecked by wisdom, leads to folly. Boldly and fearlessly, she stands up to Creon and that enrages him all the more. Her refusal to back down or budge even the slightest inch causes him to question his kingly authority and his manhood. She is resolutely rooted in her cause; she will bury Polyneices, and absolutely noth-ing—neither an edict of the king nor the pleas of her sister—will stop her. Antigone will not be si-lenced; she will not hide in secrecy. Ismene’s resilient strength proves more enduring and coura-geous than the brittle force of

Antigone’s passion. Ismene alone emerges from the events of the play unscathed. Her brand of strength lacks the splendor, the dramatic attraction, and the gran-deur of Antigone’s bravado, yet her bravery rings true. Never does she renege on her word. She remains true to Antigone until the bitter end. She loves her sister with all her heart. She begs to die with her, to share in her fate. Ismene asks of Antigone, “What happiness can I have when you are gone?” When Antigone refuses to let her share in her death, Ismene fights for her sister’s life, with a love that endures tide and time. She is the bending tree that will not snap. Although she does not reap the glory and the fame that Antigone does, Ismene appears to be the stronger character. Antigone tells Ismene, “To love in words alone is not enough.” But Antigone is instructing her sister in a lesson that Ismene mastered before her. Ismene does not make any pretensions or any show; she is a much less public figure than Antigone.

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Her sister takes front and center; the fiery monologues are for Antigone, not Ismene. But the few words Ismene does utter paint the delicate portrait of a wise young woman, one who is loyal, brave and honest. Ismene rises to her sister’s challenge, and proves that she is indeed not made for hatred, but for love. k

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k k k

In the first several issues of the Fall 2011 volume of the Lost Piece, we will include several

selections by alumni, as a tribute to the class that began this journal.

k k k

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Russian RouletteA Poem

Christina MastrucciClass of 2011English Major

Love is nothing but a game you always lose.It is nothing more than check-mate, fold, a heavy noose.The pieces you stand always fall, not ‘cause you break rules, but ‘cause you don’t know the game at all.Two fools in a game is fair; they shoot in the dark ‘till chance decides.But you never fight the fool; you always play the king of tricks.You shake, you roll, you count the die…You wonder, “Who’s play-ing on the other side?”You strip the veil to find a face yet shut your eyes -- it ends the same, but you don’t want to learn ‘cause you can’t bear to seethose lonely letters: “M-E.” k

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Resin ImmortalityA Poem

Claire KiernanClass of 2011English Major

Amidst an amber glow, I walk insideAnd fix my gaze upon a dozen stares,

Each frozen fox with pale blue, glassy eyesImplores for freedom from this putrid air.

I stumble back and bump into a caseOf skeletons, the ossified remains

Of life, each blank skull drained of a face,Gone, like the blood that once filled their veins.

In life, these creatures moved about and changed;

In death, all are petrified in resin.Even the beetles lie artfully arranged

In sickening frames, all honor deadened.Yet, by the hand of the taxidermist,

The beauty of these creatures will persist. k

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It goes without saying that no abstract construct has had a more profound effect on human history than that of morality. In fact, I would identify it as the very reason humanity even has a history—when we think of history as necessarily being a sort of narrative—rather than just a sequence of isolated events, as is the case with ev-ery other species that has ever existed. I might even go so far as to argue that the notion of morality is what fundamen-tally distinguishes human beings from other animal life. The fact that the idea of mo-rality has had a dramatic impact on our species’ history, whether you agree with my assessment of its role or not, is uncontested. A subject I find much more interesting is the converse: how morality itself has been shaped

by human history. For reasons dealt with later this essay, that question was unposable until very recently, but thanks to the popularization of the reductiv-ist view of the world given to us by the Enlightenment, we now have the opportunity to step outside this once sacrosanct construction and analyze it from an objective standpoint. Thus I intend for this essay to be an investigation of how mo-rality has developed over the course of human history: where it came from, the transitional period at which we find our-selves now, and closing with a speculative look into the future.

What is Morality? A morality is a set of un-conditional imperatives. This very simple definition merits a good deal of explanation. An imperative in this sense is any

On Human Moral DevelopmentAn Essay

Gabriel McDonaldClass of 2012Philosophy Major

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statement of what should be the case, as opposed to descriptions of what is in fact the case. We most naturally think of impera-tives in the context of fulfilling conditions. For example, “You should tell me where you’re hid-ing your Jews if you want to live.” The imperative describes what we expect to be the case given a certain condition, but this is not a necessary consequence; it assumes a rational response to the condition, a response which is not taken as given. But mo-rality is based on the notion of unconditional imperatives, that is, “You should tell me where they are,” end. I make no claims as to what will happen if you don’t; it’s just a fact that you should. Morality I take to be nothing more than a collection of statements like these that are taken to be true. Nowadays we know, of course, what an absurd rape of reason it is to posit any such statements as “truths”—but this is the very underpinning of morality, and astonishing as it may sound, no civilization in

all human history has ever gone without making such claims. But these imperatives never come out of nowhere. The im-perative “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife” is a moral claim, but no one would accept it if given point blank. Imperatives always make appeals to values, in this case satisfaction with your own wife, your neighbor’s ex-clusive entitlement to desire for his wife, etc. This doesn’t really solve anything because no one is obligated to hold any given val-ues, but declaring something an objective value is for some reason more acceptable to people than stating an objective imperative.

A Brief History of Morality Every society in recorded his-tory has had what it considers to be objective values. Among the most important of these ultimate values throughout history have been: first physical strength and power, then intelligence and “rationality,” then the Christian paradigm of love and forgive-ness, and finally the modern

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liberal values of freedom and equality (notice how these have gotten more and more nebu-lous as history has progressed). But why do societies feel the need for “objective” values? All human beings have values and make their decisions based on those values. People form societies based on shared values but if their values at some later point come into conflict there can no longer be any cooperation and society falls apart. Therefore society can only function over a sustained period of time either through forced cooperation or by instilling the same values in all of its members. The former is not impossible but the dif-ficulties it raises are obvious. The latter is much more wel-coming. I don’t think it would be outrageously cynical to say that human values are very manipulable. Like desire itself, there is almost nothing natural or spontaneous about human values. Evolutionarily we tend to value our own pleasure and self-preservation, but human beings

can be trained to value literally anything, even to a greater ex-tent than those two basic drives (sadomasochism and suicide bombers are a fun example). Though this “training” often requires a lot of effort, there are a myriad ways to go about it, all of them ultimately based in this notion of indoctrination, which I hope can be divorced from its conspiratorial connotation in this context. By this I mean that people’s values are determined, more than anything else, by the environment in which they are immersed. We value first what our parents teach us to value, then what our circle of friends values, and finally what the current political climate wants us to value. Our values are not inborn, nor are they reflected upon and then cho-sen. They are absorbed, through contact with our environment. But despite this tendency people are not ants. They still usually require reasons for ac-cepting these values and that means that on some level they

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have to believe that these val-ues are not society’s subjective values, but objective facts. As human society moved further and further up from concrete, evolutionarily based values like survival and power and added more abstract values like “ratio-nality” and “virtue,”1 it became increasingly more likely that people would question these values and their beliefs about them, and one can clearly see that the alleged “objectivity” of values will fold without much questioning, so it was necessary to keep constructing defenses for it the further people dug. The obvious first refuge was supernaturalism: the authors of these values claimed that if people upheld these values they would attain some universally desired je-ne-sais-quoi, most likely in a hereafter where they would no longer be able to complain that they had been lied to, rewards like “happiness” and “heaven” (hilariously given no more detailed definitions than “the state everyone wants

to be in” and “the place every-one wants to go” respectively). That tended to shut people up pretty well, but then there came those nefarious bastards known as philosophers who felt they had to question absolutely every-thing, and they called hogwash to this whole supernaturalism thing. Usually society just took care of them by executing them (almost ubiquitously the punish-ment for defying the established religion), but for those who weren’t, a very amusing thing happened: they solved their own problem. Philosophers want objective values and stable so-cieties just as much as everyone else, so they were able to squelch their own fanatic skepticism by coming up with “philosophical” theories that rationally defended the “objectivity” of these values. Thus a whole new realm of philosophic inquiry was born, 1 Why a human society would adopt seemingly “unnatural” values is a ques-tion beyond the scope of this essay, but for those interested I would recom-mend Friedrich Nietzsche’s fascinat-ing analysis of this problem in On the Genealogy of Morality.

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namely ethics, a field which exists admittedly only to jus-tify our moral preconceptions. At first, the rest of society was indifferent to this project, since the philosophers were only do-ing this to solve a problem that nobody else had, but eventually the fad started to proliferate. I guess you could say there’s a little bit of the philosopher in all of us, because not too long after the Christian tradition took precedence, many of its leaders turned to philosophy to justify their supernaturalist ideas, real-izing that the “just believe it” option became progressively less popular as time went on. But they were fighting a losing battle. For a variety of reasons, starting around the 16th Century the value system associated with the dominant supernaturalist tradi-tion at the time—Christianity—was falling out of fashion and many wanted to change it, but modifying moral norms is ex-tremely difficult (I discuss moral evolution in more detail in the next section), so the reformatists

(i.e. the Enlightenment) de-cided that the best way to do this would be to get rid of the supernaturalism with its rigid moral commands and values, but keep the philosophical theories used to justify the “objectivity” of the underlying values. Thus moral philosophy migrated away from religion and tried to jus-tify ethical preconceptions using “rationality” alone, which failed abysmally, but it remains a testa-ment to the indomitable human ability to suspend disbelief that the belief in “objective” values stayed more or less intact despite the fact that today’s values are not only artificial but nonsensi-cal (“human rights”? “equal-ity”?) and are defended with irreducible non-arguments (“It’s just obvious that certain things are right and other wrong”). Then, at last, it happened. Confident that the new framework supporting our moral prejudices was sturdy, we kicked in the old one. Religion’s history was at an end, and now values are normally

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expected to be defended with “reason,” even by religious folk.

Morality in the 21st Century So where does that put us now? As I mentioned in passing, the issue of how moral systems are modified is a very interesting one and deserves a few words. What a society values changes significantly over time, usually due to economic reasons, so one would expect that its moral claims would change right along with them, but this leads to a difficult paradox: If we claim these values to be “objective” and “universal,” how do we account for them abruptly changing? If the economy warrants a specific emergency it’s usually possible to throw together a makeshift ex-ception clause which only holds together for as long as we need it, and then we retroactively dis-prove it. For example, according to the Christian moral tradition, we are to value the “dignity” of every human life and individual freedom, so it would be immoral for anyone to enslave another

person and treat him like a piece of property. This was, of course, held to be an “objective” truth, but then during the 17th and 18th Centuries, the European Christian nations, because of rapid industrial and colonial expansion, could only keep pace economically if they had a whole class of people to exploit for cheap labor. Their way around this was quite ingenious: They selected the group of people that were ideal for this role (Africans, they being the most underdeveloped civilization), identified an arbitrary physical characteristic and used it as the basis for a completely artificial construct known as “race” and then used this invention to justify the claim that the group they had chosen were not re-ally “human beings,” since they belonged to an inferior “race,” so the problem of offending their dignity was solved. They even topped it off with some ad hoc biblical justifications. This “mo-rality tweaking” phenomenon is usually tremendously difficult

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and has enormous historical consequences, but the slavery example is a remarkably clean one. They got their exception in speedily and without any hassle or protest, and then as soon as they no longer needed slaves they dropped the institution immediately, went right back to the system they had used before and even managed to pull off a flawless oh-my-god-how-could-we-do-that? to come out at the other end completely unscathed. The problem is that moral de-tours like this are almost never that smooth and efficient, and even that instance produced im-measurable historical repercus-sions. Though I think the above description of Europe’s “affair” with slavery is quite accurate, they did introduce the institu-tion to one of their colonies where the story turned much more brutal. I am referring, of course, to America. The agrar-ian southern part of the United States went on needing slavery to keep its economy in competition with the north, long after the

rest of the world had gone back to the old moral system, causing a serious moral dispute to erupt in America, culminating in war. Arguably worse, the notion of “race” invented by the British, though completely artificial and irrational, has inexplicably lingered to this day and has been a continual source of discrimina-tion, intellectual confusion and political opportunism. This is one possible explana-tion for the “nebulousness” that I mentioned earlier, the tendency that ultimate values have to become vaguer and vaguer as time goes on. The vaguer our principles are, the better we are able to fudge the results. For example, abortion has been con-sidered “immoral” for most of western history, but by the 1960’s humanity had reached the stage of modernization at which chil-drearing is no longer nearly as desirable as it once was. Yet the sex drive remains constant, so it becomes necessary for society to come up with a way to dispose of the unwanted side effects of

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sexual activity. Normally, this would be a serious problem, because it would seem absurd to say, “All this time we thought abortion was wrong, but then we woke up one morning and suddenly realized that we were mistaken all along. And just in time for the sexual revolution. What a coincidence.” But when our morality is based on fuzzy concepts like “human rights,” all we have to do when we want to amend our morality is take another look into the crystal ball of liberal values, where we can find whatever results we want. So thanks to this cute little Enlightenment flourish the last century has been one of the most morally tranquil periods in history, producing a diverse range of opinions on subjects like human equality, economic exploitation, and the value of human life, without eliciting vicious moral disputes. But every victory like this has its consequences, which can only be seen clearly if we look to the future.

The Shape of Things to Come Making a concept more and more amorphous can only have one inevitable destination: its elimination. Some believe the idea of morality totally van-ishing from human society is ludicrous, but to anyone who be-lieves morality still has a role to play in modern society, I say go watch The Hangover Part 2. The Enlightenment has brought us full circle, forcing us to question and whittle away at our moral framework until we finally make the realization that beneath all these elaborate structures there is ultimately just that empty “Thou shalt,” which we can obey or disobey as we will. So that is where our moral journey has brought us, and I’m hardly the first one to recognize this. But what really fascinates me is where we’re headed from here, and though I admit that there lies only speculation and conjecture, I don’t think that is wholly uninteresting philosophically.

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The key question, of course, is what society will do when we all realize that these “objective” moral claims are nonsense, the conclusion to which our scien-tific skepticism has led so many of us already and will inevitably bring all the rest. As mentioned already, these values are acquired through absorption rather than rational reflection, so even if we were all to conclude that the values we’ve had drilled into our heads have no reason to be there, I expect we would still hold onto them simply out of lethargy—because why make the effort to get rid of them? —much like a chicken that continues flailing about after its head has been lopped off. But inevitably there will come a moral crisis which will make us question our values. The question of overpopula-tion is an interesting one for me. It is a mathematical certainty that if earth’s population never stabilizes, there will come a time when there are not enough re-sources to sustain everyone. This is unarguably the worst possible

economic situation for the world and economics being their chief motivation, I take it as given that human societies will react to that situation long before it occurs, but it’s not clear when and how they will. The most basic forms of population control already in use like sterilization and crimi-nalizing multiple-child families don’t seem to be incredibly effective considering the expo-nential population growth rate, so I suspect something stronger will be required. My hope is that general enlightenment regarding the issue of objective morality will come soon enough that we will be able to react with what is, in my mind, clearly the most obvious and practi-cal solution: killing everyone below a certain poverty level, which would not only stabilize the population but eliminate poverty and world hunger, and since this sort of stabilization is a common value for every human society I would think it a logical move independent of any aim for population control.

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But clearly the headless chick-en has to die eventually. Respect for civil law and the desire to en-act laws in the first place is based in a general consensus regarding “justice” (a moral notion), so once that consensus is gone the only basis we have for law is the common desire for “order,” but the issue of what that constitutes and how to bring it about was too complicated even to keep primitive societies together all by itself. One interesting possibil-ity is that another moral order, one totally alien to the common western paradigm, will very suddenly overthrow the existing one and stop the downward mo-mentum of the Enlightenment. This is hardly an outlandish suggestion, as it very nearly happened around the midpoint of the 20th Century, when an ideology known as Nazism came from seemingly out of nowhere, totally antithetical to thousands of years of prevailing moral thought, yet in a few short years established its morality as the dominant one in a modernized

country and made serious prog-ress in establishing it in the rest of the world and replacing the current morality, but was nar-rowly stopped due to military inferiority. And so the idea that, in the future, such a moral sys-tem, based on what might strike us as totally arbitrary values like racism, contempt for the weak, and maintaining politi-cal structure through genocide, could become the prevailing moral thought in the world, un-contested except by sophists who write philosophical dissertations disproving it but then ignore their findings and go along with it anyway, is indeed very inter-esting. But what would charac-terize such a system and where it would come from we have no way of knowing for certain, so the subject is pure speculation. And even if such a system did come to establish itself as the ultimate moral authority, I’m forced to conclude that eventu-ally all such systems must have their Enlightenment and all of us must someday face the

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reality that if no value is objec-tive then no value exists, and all our efforts to build a society based on cooperation and mutu-ally pursuing collective human goals like knowledge and peace and making fancy toys like iPhones are ultimately based in a chimerical delusion. Because there are no human goals, there is in fact no humanity at all. We are only solitary, valueless individuals with warring desires, condemned to perform these pathetic social rituals for as long as we can delude ourselves into believing that something really does stand between us and the abyss, and then that final, laugh-able realization, after we at long last desultorily plunge the knife in our neck and end our misery on this indifferent planet for good, that we never had any rea-son to live on it to begin with. k

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Colophon:

This journal is compiled entirely from the works of undergraduate scholars at The University of Notre Dame.

The editors of Lost Piece: An Undergraduate Journal of Lettersextend their thanks to Dean John McGreevy and the College of Arts and Letters for their generous support of this journal.

Lost Piece is indebted to Dr. Cecilia Lucero for her invaluable assistance on behalf of The Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement.

Rebecca Roden, Editor-in-ChiefCarolyn Garcia, Thomas Graff, Gabriel McDonald, Taylor Nutter, Anthony Patti, and James Schmidt, Editors

Lost Piece was designed in Adobe InDesign, CS5; its body copy is set in 12 pt Adobe Caslon Pro.This publication was compiled by Rebecca Roden, ’12, [email protected] Cover, front and back, was designed by Nathalia Silvestre, ’14, [email protected]

Lost Piece Volume III Issue I

Documents

Transcript of Lost Piece Volume III Issue I