Let’s give virtue a hand

In our high schools and colleges you will often find that the BMOC (Big Man on Campus) is a student engaged in the central attraction of that institution. On the campus where football is king the BMOC is a football player, on the campus where basketball is king the BMOC is a basketball player, on the campus where scholarship is king the BMOC—wait a minute, who ever heard of a campus where scholarship is king. This is, perhaps, a slight exaggeration, I am sure such a campus must exist, somewhere.

In the 1920s the campuses where “the most far-reaching revolution of the twentieth century was born in an idyll: a picturesque park in Copenhagen, a quiet side street in Berne, the shore of the island of Heligoland, the meadows and tree-shaded river at Cambridge, the…� In these European campuses the young geniuses of physics, the BMOCs of the century, gave birth to “the tremendous transformation of the scientific view of Nature could only be compared with the change of outlook brought about by Copernicus.� The age of the atom was midwifed by this small group of geniuses.

If a high school or college were to shift emphasis from football to basketball, over night the BMOC would change. I think that we Americans, and probably others, need to shift emphasis from what Kuhn identified as Normal Science to those domains of knowledge that are commonly called the Social Sciences. Physicists have been our BMOC but I claim that we need to develop a climate that fosters public concern upon matters that are identified as virtue.

Virtue, according to John Dewey, is “Every natural capacity, every talent or ability, whether of inquiring mind, of gentle affection, or of executive skill, becomes a virtue when it is turned to account in supporting or extending the fabric of social values�. In other words, the virtuous person is s/he who directs a personal talent toward the betterment of the community.

I am informed by Ernest Becker that many social scientists have accepted the notion that ‘value judgments’ or ‘moral questions’ are rationally undecidable. As such, most social theorists “simply assume that any agent, who acts on the basis of a moral principle, or a social norm, is not rationally justified in doing so. This is what underlies the widespread tendency among social theorists to assume that instrumental action is the only form of rational action, and that norm-governed action must have some kind of nonrational source, such as conditioning, socialization, or habit.�

I am not schooled in the social sciences but I have spent some time trying to learn these ideas about which the social sciences deal. I know enough about these matters to conclude that our society needs to put much greater emphasis in these domains of knowledge. Our focus seems to be entirely on the natural sciences and that emphasis is reveled in the success of these sciences. However I think we overemphasize the natural sciences at the expense of the social sciences.

I think that society needs to reevaluate our value systems in order to create a consensus about how to reevaluate our value systems, i.e. we need to make social scientists our new BMOCs. What do you think?

One cannot simply will society into conforming to ones own beliefs as to what should have emphasis placed upon it. Your talking about changing the entire way in which society works. While possible, it requires vast resources or a very resourceful man (like Mahatma Ghandi)

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Margaret Mead/

you can rationalize your values and morals, but this is only for the sake of conscious acceptance. The source of our values and morals comes from an unconscious source that is inaccessible to our consciousness, since our values and morals are intimately tied in with our will and motivation, which also have non-rational sources. This has been known for a long time. The values of society are those that the strong impose on the weak.


I don't. What do you mean by "we" here? You mean "you" and the people you come in contact with? Surely there are people who specialize in this sort of thing, like social scientists. Are you saying they deserve more recognition or publicity? If everyone felt this way, then newspapers would get feedback to that effect, and there would be more social scientists in the newspaper. But this isn't the case, so the question is, why should people care about overemphasizing social science when social scientist's ideas are easily accessible through a variety of sources? The reason you feel social science deserves more emphasis is because you happen to be interested in it now, but a month or two from now, when your interests shift to field X, you'll be saying that field X should be emphasized more. So what's your point here?

[quote name='kortikal' date='Oct 30, 2007, 07:42 PM' post='84813']
[quote name='coberst' post='84775' date='Oct 30, 2007, 03:02 AM'] So what's your point here?
[/quote]


My point is that we have constructed a culture that has focused far too much of its intellectual curiosity and energy upon developing technology and far too little upon solving our problems relating to how we can live together.

We have the brain power to have a much better culture than we now have. It appears to me that if we do not quickly redistribute our intellectual energy our civilization cannot endure another 200 years.

Intelligence is not just determined by dna, it is also dependent upon environmental factors. If you dont believe me, look up feral children. Intelligence is a really tough area to have indepth discussions about because nobody has really settled on what intelligence actually is.

There are IQ tests but there is also a lot of issues with those tests and how they score so called intelligence. When you think about it, we may be the dumbest creatures to walk the earth. I mean we KNOW we are destroying our environment - the very thing that keeps us alive, yet we continue to do it. I mean, for all our accomplishments, we dont even have the willpower to stop our own greedy nature from killing that which gives us life.

At least the so called lesser animals are smart enough to not kill their own ecosystems.