Eric Hoffer

George Packer, in The Fall of Conservatism, reminds us of the great wisdom of ex-longshoreman Eric Hoffer, who said:

"Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation."

Ice Cream Cones

Leon Kass was chairman of George W's Council on Bioethics from 2002-2005. Recently an NPR broadcast made reference to a report of Dr. Kass in which he took issue with the civility of eating ice cream cones. Somehow, I found this shockingly trivial in the face of the uncivilized behavior we have had to endure under the Bush Regime, and it set me off to find the quote. I was surprised to learn that it appeared in a publication of Dr. Kass dating from 1999, and had been originally picked up on Classicalvalues.com in July 2003.

Dr. Kass is described in Wikipedia as vigorously opposed to progress in the fields of therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research, and finds wisdom in the Book of Genesis. Kass makes the claim that reason or science cannot provide "moral and political standards sufficient for governing civic life and of guiding the proper use of power and technique." Kass expresses a strong belief that the potential of biological science is limited and will never provide answers to certain questions. 

This has apparently not stood in the way of Dr. Kass expressing his strongly held views on the ingestion of ice cream, so I thought it was worth repeating his cone pronouncement. 

"Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone --a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.
I fear I may by this remark lose the sympathy of many reader, people who will condescendingly regard as quaint or even priggish the view that eating in the street is for dogs. Modern America's rising tide of informality has already washed out many long-standing traditions -- their reasons long before forgotten -- that served well to regulate the boundary between public and private; and in many quarters complete shamelessness is treated as proof of genuine liberation from the allegedly arbitrary constraints of manners. To cite one small example: yawning with uncovered mouth. Not just the uneducated rustic but children of the cultural elite are now regularly seen yawning openly in public (not so much brazenly or forgetfully as indifferently and "naturally"), unaware that it is an embarrassment to human self-command to be caught in the grip of involuntary bodily movements (like sneezing, belching, and hiccuping and even the involuntary bodily display of embarrassment itself, blushing). But eating on the street -- even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no other time to eat -- displays in fact precisely such lack of self-control: It beckons enslavement to the belly. Hunger must be sated now; it cannot wait. Though the walking street eater still moves in the direction of his vision, he shows himself as a being led by his appetites. Lacking utensils for cutting and lifting to mouth, he will often be seen using his teeth for tearing off chewable portions, just like any animal. Eating on the run does not even allow the human way of enjoying one's food, for it is more like simple fueling; it is hard to savor or even to know what one is eating when the main point is to hurriedly fill the belly, now running on empty. This doglike feeding, if one must engage in it, ought to be kept from public view, where, even if WE feel no shame, others are compelled to witness our shameful behavior." – Kass, Leon: The Hungry Soul at 148-149. (University of Chicago Press, 1994, 1999)

All this being said, he could have spent a little more time considering the ethics of enhanced interrogation techniques or invasions of privacy in the name of the so-called "War on Terror," which has had the perverse effect of terrorizing this observer.

Bert and Ernie

Has this thing gone to far?

Hillary Deathwatch

Just to give Slate some more web time.