Speaking of morning workouts, the city will be hosting several races in the not-too-distant future and, although I have no intention of paying the exorbitant entry fees, I have seen more people out and about in the early hours training. Mind you, this amounts to all of three people that I see only occasionally, but that's three more than I usually see. It's amusing to me, since I go out and run circles around these guys and I'm not even interested in doing these race events. I sometimes think that this is the difference between my motivation to run and other people: for most, the goal of running is to run the race; for me, running is living. I can forsake the race event, but I can never turn away from life.
Still, I admit that I can be very competitive. Like I said, I do run circles around these guys and, frankly, I get a bit of a kick out of it. In their defense, they're probably marathoners who would easily outlast me. Respect.
So what else has been going on? October began without much fanfare. Halloween is acknowledged in Hong Kong and some places use it as a publicity tool but even the US, wherein there is sometimes fierce opposition to referring to Halloween as a "holiday", treats the event with more prestige. All right, Carina and I will make our own Halloween, then...we just have to figure out what we'd like to do.
I ran my first "graded" tutorial sessions this week and, to my relief, they went pretty well. It's a very rewarding experience to teach others, especially since I feel like I'm really challenging and educating rather than simply droning on about my own ideas for hours on end. Most of my students are more than happy to participate and very candid in their responses. I have a few that I wish would be less reserved, but I don't want to dock points based on personality. I have the whole semester to evaluate them, so I'll see how they progress and then judge them from that vantage point.
This Thursday was also a great time for us. We had a "spirited" seminar concerning cosmopolitanism and liberal egalitarianism that gave us some interesting ideas about the current socio-political discourse that the world has engaged. It seems that equality is often cited as the core value of our discourse, but seldom is practiced. Capitalism is a wonderful example of this: ideally, everyone is on equal footing and then benefits based on his or her merit; any benefit coming from chance is somehow justified in this system as it could have just as easily befallen anyone else. Realists toward capitalism will dismiss this as rubbish, and probably rightfully so: it is hardly an egalitarian doctrine; simply claiming that all people theoretically have equal footing at the beginning is neither sufficient nor accurate. The same can likely be said for most institutions.
Mind you, this is not to suggest that egalitarianism is a total farce. On the contrary, it is something for which we can and probably should strive. At the same time, this should not preclude the real benefit that we do gain from inegalitarian treatment of others. I do not treat a rude person the same way that I treat a polite person; I do not, indeed cannot, love a complete stranger in the same way I do my wife. We are primates, limited in our ability to show concern and acknowledgement of others beyond a particular pool on some significant levels. Even if we could, it does not follow that we necessarily would or should. Should I love a murderer in the same way I love my brother?
Perhaps what we should offer to all humans is a kind of treatment in virtue of their being human; I would call this humaneness, as I suspect many would. I will treat humans humanely (perhaps humanly) and use this as the basis of my love and respect for all, while giving differentiated levels of love and respect based on particularities. I will hire the person best-suited to the job; I will love my family more than strangers. It seems inevitable, and it also does not preclude kindness toward those "outside" these special circles.
Some might suggest that this is evidence of a real egalitarianism, as I am treating all humans with a baseline of love and respect, but I would say that even this is inaccurate. I am simply treating all humans consistently, just as I would treat all horses consistently, or all trapezoids consistently. I may have a stable full of horses, but only a select few are of a temperament that is pleasing to me, and so I spend most of my time riding and caring for them. Nonetheless, I know that there is a particular way to treat horses, and so with this in mind I treat all of the horses similarly in this capacity. Even more basically, I treat all squares and squares and never as circles; to do otherwise is not only inconsistent, but geometrically wrong.
The point is that you can talk about things like human rights and policy without any reference to equality. As with justice, it's another one of those buzzword virtues that we constructed for political discourse. Of course it has great value, but that value does rest on something more basic.
Sorry for the mid-blog rant, but I've been very philosophical lately. With my thesis tightening up, I've decided to give a presentation on my research. I'll be doing a practice run in two weeks and I already have a presentation put-together. I still need to practice and make it look nice, but I think it's going to go well. After the dry run, I'll be giving a department seminar sometime in November. Wish me luck!
Today we've been mostly just resting and catching our breath. Like I said, it was a busy week and Carina has been smothered with work proofing and revising grant and visiting professor applications, as well as working on her behavior change project. With any luck I'll be getting much better at managing my temper over the next month. I'll let her add more description about that if she wants.
All right, we're off to destroy zombies with flaming peas and defeat golems with magic rings.
Much love,
Colin
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