Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

relate to any given field—law, education, medicine, whatever—we need some fundamental principles we feel we can trust. We’ve reviewed the common available options—Kant’s imperative, Utilitarianism, R. M. Hare’s philosophy of (as we called it) ‘style,’ and so on—and we noted the limitations of each position. The fact, for instance, that Kant, if you were his dearest friend and you went to him asking him to hide you from the police—Kant, if he acted by his principles, would turn you in. What I’d like to do today is set out—or anyway begin to set out—a system that may prove less vulnerable to reasonable attack, anything short of, as we mentioned, an absolute attack, such as Nietzsche’s, though my approach, as you might expect, is Nietzchean”—he laughed formally—“a looking out from one window, then another.” He laughed again. “The position involves four basic areas of inquiry: One: What? Two: Why? How? Who? When? Where? Three: Foreseeable effects? and Four: Viable alternatives?” He glanced at Pinky Stearns, to his left—yellow-bearded, puffy-faced, leaning on his hand, lost in thought or private sorrow. Wolters, across from Mickelsson, was writing furiously in his notebook, his left hand half raised, palm out, begging Mickelsson not to go too fast. Janet Something sat sideways, leaning on her elbow, facing Mickelsson. She had no notebook. She smiled and waited. The bitch had read his book.

“Let’s begin with the ‘what,’ ” Mickelsson said. He glanced at the card. “The is is father to the ought; or, to put it another way, the moral judgment is about what befits or does not befit the personal situation as it really is. Let me give a rather quick and—admittedly—cheap example. A good deal of discussion of capitalism and socialism is lamed from the start by a failure to identify ‘what’ it is that is meant by capitalism and socialism. Professor Robert L. Heilbroner points out that in much that is said about capitalism, the explicit assumption is that the United States is the most typical capitalist nation. Thus, Paul Sweezy, the American Marxian critic, says that the United States is a capitalist society, the purest capitalist society that ever existed. …” He took off his glasses, more impediment than help, and held the card up closer. “But as Heilbroner says, it might well be argued that the United States is not a pure realization of capitalism but rather ‘a deformed variant, the product of special influences of continental isolation, vast wealth, an eighteenth-century structure of government, and the terrible presence of its inheritance of slavery—the last certainly not a “capitalist institution.” For ‘pure’ capitalism, we should perhaps look to Denmark, Norway, or New Zealand. Obviously, making those countries our model will affect all subsequent analysis of the political, economic, or moral dimensions of capitalism. We start with a different ‘what.’ ”

He set aside the notecard and glanced up at his students—all dutiful, most of them scribbling away like doomed prisoners writing for pardons they were sure they wouldn’t get. Janet Something hadn’t moved a muscle in all this time, staring at him with a slight, inscrutable smile. She was short and, more than that, built low. She was said to be a brownbelt in karate. Under her Oxford-cloth shirt she had, he imagined, voluminous steel tits. It crossed his mind (weirdly, for a quarter of a second) that he would like to be hit by her, even killed. They would be screwing. She would kill him the instant he came. The tall young woman with the Polish name and the hair drawn tight to her head, then frizzing out—she sat beside Janet—moved her left hand slowly back and forth, fanning away smoke from Mickelsson’s pipe and her classmates’ cigarettes. She seemed unhappy, dark circles under her eyes.

Guiltily, he turned to the next card.

“And obviously Russia is an equally dubious model of socialism,” he said. “I assume you’ve all read Marx—if you haven’t, please do! Anyway, you get the point. As the scholiasts liked to say, Ex falso sequitur quid-libet—that is, for those of you whose Latin is rusty”—mechanically, he smiled—” ‘From false premises anything can follow.’ As E. H. Hare points out—not to be confused with R. M.—a hundred years ago it was the established belief of the medical profession that masturbation was a frequent cause of mental disorder.” He glanced up, smiled again, then again looked down. “Explaining ‘what’ masturbation was, medical experts in those days claimed it was an activity that caused an increased flow of blood to the brain and thus was enervating in its effects. It was supposed to produce”—he drew the card closer—“ ‘seminal weakness, impotence, dysuria, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, not to mention senility, stupidity, melancholy, homosexuality, hysteria. …’ ” He let his voice trail off, deciding against reading the whole long list. He said, “This is obviously a dim view of ‘what’ masturbation is, not that any of us here would practice it.” No one laughed. “With such chaotic notions of the ‘what’ of masturbation—and thus as to what effects it could have—rational moral discourse on the subject was impossible.”

He turned to the next card. Wolters again held up his hand, his cigarette between two fingers, to slow him down. Obligingly, Mickelsson paused for a moment. The fat woman, Rachel Something, at the end of the table, next to Gail Edelman, jerked her ballpoint pen from the paper she’d been writing on, looked at it, then angrily shook it. She whispered something to Gail, who, with a glance at Mickelsson, bent down for her purse. Ah, poor miserable humanity, he thought, all this punishment—smoky rooms, broken pens, boring professors. … What crime could possibly warrant all this? He thought again, just for an instant, of the night when, on one of his walks, he’d stopped at Gail’s. He’d been somewhat drunk; she, surprised and nervous. Frightened, possibly? Had she thought he might, despite appearances, prove a rapist and murderer? In the apartment she lived in the ceilings were weirdly high, the wallpaper dark. The memory was