Moral Courage and Civility

Here follow some words from the book which, given our lost sense of security and innocence in light of Pearl Harbor II of Sept. 11, 2001, turns out to have a more pressing relevance than it had when I wrote it a couple of years ago

Yale Kamisar: Up Close and Personal

Yale is larger than life. And so was his damn crim pro casebook. My first experience of Kamisar was lugging that casebook around in law school. Everyone complained. It outweighed other casebooks by 3-5 pounds on average. Like everything Yale wrote, it was thorough and also featured many excerpts from Kamisar\u27s writings. I must admit they were a pleasure and they stood out like a sore thumb from usual law school fare-for their passion, of course. But mostly because they were so well written. The good writing won me to his cause: yea beleaguered suspect, boo cops

Hatred

Hatred, the noun, and to hate, the verb, do not completely coincide in their semantic ranges. Hatred carries with it more intensity and greater seriousness than many of our most common uses of the verb. Hatred is unlikely to apply aptly to one’s feelings about broccoli, though it would be perfectly normal to register one’s aversion to it by saying ‘I hate broccoli’. In daily speech, hate can be used to indicate a fairly strong but not very serious aversion to a film, novel, or food, all the way to desiring, with varying seriousness, the extermination of an entire people. The word hate can thus mark a powerful moral/immoral *sentiment, or merely register a negative *preference. In this it tracks Latin usage, where the verb, odi, and the noun odium, can be used to register both simple version and also an intense passion of all-consuming detestation

Review of Culture and History in Medieval Iceland

It is a common dysfunction of scholars, particularly medieval historians, to fear grand syntheses and all-encompassing explanations. This is less frequently a disease among anthroplogists, and in fact in anthropologists of a structural bent there is no reticence whatsoever, but positive delight in the big, the general, the quasi- and the just plain theoretical. And in the best French tradition they often construct their models per ecartant les faits. Kirsten Hastrup is a structuralist more influenced by Levi-Strauss than Evans-Pritchard; she is also a trained anthropologist. This is both good and bad news. The Icelandic materials are as well suited as any to historical ethnography and anthropological analysis, especially given the convergence of Icelandic and anthropological obsessions with genealogy and kinship. The types of questions anthropologists tend to ask, with the solid focus they usually bring to their materials, are just what Old Icelandic studies need. Literary scholars and traditional historians can only benefit from the methodological cross-fertilization. Kirsten Hastrup\u27s new book will serve the dual purpose of introducing scholars of medieval Iceland and Old Norse to anthropological literature and anthropologists to the world of the medieval Icelanders

Ordeal in Iceland

Ordeal holds a strange fascination with us. It appalls and intrigues. We marvel at the mentality of those cultures that officialize it; we feel a sense of horror as we imagine ourselves intimately involved with boiling water or glowing irons. And we don\u27t feel up to it. So our terror and cowardice becomes their brutality and irrationality. I am not about to urge to reinstitution of ordeals, although most practicing lawyers will tell you that that is still what going to law is, a crapshoot they say. What I want to do is call attention to the difficulty of not being either contemptuous or romantic about the customs of others that shock us or amuse us

\u27I Can Take a Hint\u27: Social Ineptitude, Embarrassment, and the King of Comedy

The phrase I can take a hint, when said seriously, contains its own denial. It reveals that the speaker has not been very adept at recognizing the hints already given, nor very graceful about not making a scene once he has recognized them. Its very utterance has the effect of punishing the hint-giver by making her hint fail as a hint. The truly successful hint works by gaining its end with no extra awkwardness added to the social encounter. The good hint should be barely perceived by the person toward whom it is directed. We could even say that it should not really become a part of his active consciousness. It should simply trigger a sense that it\u27s time to go or that the line he is pursuing needs to be terminated. The good hint achieves the invisibility of the natural

Clint Eastwood and Equity: Popular Culture\u27s Theory of Revenge

Revenge is not a publicly admissible motive for individual action. Church, state, and reason all line up against it. Officially revenge is thus sinful to the theologian, illegal to the prince, and irrational to the economist (it defies the rule of sunk costs). Order and peace depend upon its extirpation; salvation and rational political and economic arrangements on its denial. The official antivengeance discourse has a long history even preceding the Stoics, taken up and elaborated by medieval churchmen and later by the architects of state building

Deceit in War and Trade

This chapter offers “a genealogy on deceit in war and trade”. It starts with deceit in Ovid and the Old Testament and works its way all the way up to the present day, considering the deceptions of such famous tricksters as Odysseus, David, the Vikings, Machiavelli, William the Conqueror, even Montaigne. It then considers the practices of some famous deceivers in contemporary business culture, such as Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Koslowski, and Kenneth Lay

Is a Gift Forever?

What are the rules regarding gifts you receive? Can you give them away? If so, must you conceal that you have done so from the original giver? Or is there a statute of limitations, after which any right the original giver has to feel wronged or to burden you with guilt for undervaluing it by giving it away rightly expires? Even an heirloom might exhaust its sacredness. Sometimes the sacred has a half-life, as might be the case, for instance, with your grandmother’s dining set. Can the giver ask for his gifts back if you try to give them away? Might he be able to sue to recover it? Can he justly hate you for giving it away, feel wronged? Does it matter whether the gift was the initiatory gift, the one that started it all, or that it was a payback for a prior gift, or that it was a closing gift, a gift to send someone on their way never to return, as were the swords and cloaks Norwegian kings gave to departing Icelanders? Are there differ- ent rules for different kinds of gifts, a sword by one rule, a cloak or an ox or an axe by another

Focus on Faculty

Of late my interests, by free association and devious paths, have shifted to the emotions, especially those passions that accompany our moral and social failures