Aztec moral philosophy

Life on the Slippery Earth, Aeon (July 3, 2018)

Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect

"A common saying among the Aztecs was that ‘the earth [tlalticpac] is slippery, slick’. Elsewhere, the meaning is clarified: ‘Perhaps at one time, one was of good life; later, he fell into some wrong, as if he had slipped in the mud.’ The Aztecs held, in short, that it’s unrealistic to think that anyone can lead a perfectly good life, one in which you never slip up. A better goal, then, is to try to lead a rooted life, which they called neltiliztli: literally, rootedness. In this kind of life, one is able to manage the mistakes and slip-ups well, rather than avoid them altogether. The reward is not happiness necessarily, but the promise of a worthwhile life."

"The Aztec’s answer is that virtuous actions follow the middle path, they strike the mean."

"Our actions are virtuous, then, when they are aptly expressed. This aptness of expression turns on the circumstances (eg, how formally we should dress), our social position (eg, male or female, commoner or noble), our social role (eg, warrior or physician), and whether we are performing a rite of a specific sort. A memorable example of this last kind concerns drunkenness. Public drunkenness was severely punished in Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire; for nobles, the penalty was death. But the elderly at a wedding were not only permitted, but expected to become drunk."

"Finally, the merchant ritual highlights something that has been implicit in my argument so far: namely that the excellence of practical reason or prudence (Greek: phronēsis) was not primarily a quality that individuals possessed. For Aristotle, for example, the phronimos is a rare person who could discern the right means of achieving ends. This explains why Aristotle thought that the best society was a monarchy that was ruled by a single and most wise man. The Aztecs, by contrast, thought that practical reason was best exercised in groups – and one finds evidence for this everywhere, from the merchant rites, to the choice of school for children, to the decisions of the king himself. Moreover, the Aztecs weren’t democratic about the matter. Rather than weigh all advice evenly, they gave greater weight in the deliberative process to those with the most practical experience (ixtlamatiliztli), who were often the elderly. This explains why the leader of the merchants asks the elderly men and women for advice, even though he is thought to be the principle trainer of the young."

"Virtue is thus fostered socially among the Aztecs throughout life. This begins in one’s early childhood, continues through formal education, advances in one’s profession where one is ‘refreshed’ by one’s peers, and is sustained by social rituals. Even the assessment of ‘the middle way’ remains a collective rather than personal effort, since it was believed that practical wisdom worked best in groups that placed a high value on the opinions of the most experienced members. The Aztecs thought all this because they believed that we humans lead lives on the slippery earth (tlaticpac). The best guard we have against this eventuality, then, is each other."

Some interesting things I've read in the first half of 2018

Published this year:  

Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health by Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, July/August 2018.  In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African-Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle shows why.

Joe and the Whale by Chelsea Murray in The Deep, June 2018.

Jeff Sessions is Killing Civil Rights by Vann Newkirk II in The Atlantic, June 2018.

To Be An Immigrant in Trump's America: A Theory of Animals by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Jezebel, June 2018.

The Ultimate Guide to Intermittent Fasting by Katie Heaney, The Cut, June 2018.

Stop Trying to Sell the Humanities by Stanley Fish, The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2018.

The Wounds of the Drone Warrior by Eyal Press, New York Times, June 2018.

Today’s Masculinity Is Stifling by Sarah Rich, The Atlantic, June 2018.

Design Thinking Is a Boondoggle by Lee Vinsel in The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2018.

The Ancient Myth of ‘Good Fences’ by Ingrid Rossellini in The New York Times,  May 2018.

The Reinvention of America by James Fallows, The Atlantic, May 2018.

Trump vs. the 'Deep State' by Eric Osnos in The New Yorker, May 2018.

LETTER TO AN ASPIRING INTELLECTUAL by Paul J. Griffiths, First Things, May 2018.

WHY I’M  GIVING UP ON PREVENTATIVE CARE by Barbara Ehrenreich in Literary Hub, April 2018.

Palantir Knows Everything About You by Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson in Bloomberg, April 2018.

James Mattis, A Warrior in Washington by Dexter Filkins in The New Yorker, asks "The former Marine Corps general spent four decades on the front lines. How will he lead the Department of Defense?" in March 2018.

McMaster and Commander by Patrick Radden Keefe in The New Yorker, asks "Can a national-security adviser retain his integrity if the President has none?" in April 2018.

Paul Manafort, American Hustler: The Plot Against America, by Franklin Foer in The Atlantic, March 2018.  Decades before he ran the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort’s pursuit of foreign cash and shady deals laid the groundwork for the corruption of Washington.

In Praise of A.D.H.D. by Leonard Mlodinow, New York Times, March 2018.

The Case Against Google by Charles Duhigg, New York Times, February 2018.

How to change the course of human history by David Graeber and David Wengrow in EuroZine, March 2018.

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated, interview with Professor James Scott about his new book, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Vox.com, April 2018.

Will Robots Set Us Free? by David Moscrop, Boston Review, February 2018.

The Amazing Story of the Russian Defector Who Changed his Mind by Jason Fagone, Washingtonian, February 2018.

Do You Believe Her Now? The Case for Impeaching Clarence Thomas by Jill Abramson, New York, February 2018.

The cult of Mary Beard, by Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian, January 2018.

Earlier stuff or re-reads:  

Millenials Are Screwed by Michael Hobbes, Huffington Post, December 2017.

It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read by Charles Chu in Medium.com, August 2017.

Is There Any Point to Protesting? by Nathan Heller in The New Yorker, August 2017.

The Fragile Generation by Jonathan Haidt in Spiked Review, September 2017.

Think Before You Give: Charity Should Be More Rational and Less Emotional by Maarten Boudry, Areo, September 2017.

YOU ARE THE PRODUCT by John Lancaster, London Review of Books, August 2017.

The white flight of Derek Black by Eli Saslow in The Washington Post, October 2016.

The Tyranny of the Ideal interview with philosopher Jerry Gaus in 3:AM, July 2016. 

Aches and Pains by Austin Baraki, Starting Strength, July 2016.

There’s No Such Thing as Free Will by Steven Cave, The Atlantic, June 2016.

Soldiers Have Used Drugs to Enhance Their Killing Capabilities in Basically Every War by Oscar Rickett, writing for Vice News, April 2016.

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nahesi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2014.

The Things That Carried Him by Chris Jones writing in Esquire, August 2010. Worth reading every Memorial Day.

The Agent (about Ali Soufan) by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, July 2006.  Read this as I was watching the new Hulu mini-series, "The Looming Tower" based on Wright's Pulitzer-winning book about "Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11."

Cosmopolitanism: How To Be a Citizen of the World by Julian Brookes in Mother Jones, an interview with Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in February 2006.

Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are by David McCullough, April 2005.

Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historynewsnetwork.org, May 2016.

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide? by Guenter Lewy, historynewsnetwork.org, September 2004.

1491 by Charles C. Mann in The Atlantic, March 2002. One of my favorite articles of all time. 

 America as a Gun Culture by Richard Hofstadter, American Heritage, October 1970.

Trump vs. the 'Deep State' by Eric Osnos in The New Yorker, May 2018.

Trump vs. the 'Deep State' by Eric Osnos in The New Yorker, May 2018.

"After sixteen months, Trump is on his third national-security adviser and his sixth communications director. Across the government, more than half of the six hundred and fifty-six most critical positions are still unfilled. “We’ve never seen vacancies at this scale,” Max Stier, the president and C.E.O. of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan group that works to make the government more effective, said. “Not anything close.”

"Some of the vacancies are deliberate. As a candidate, Trump promised to “cut so much your head will spin.” Amid a strong economy, large numbers of employees are opting to leave the government rather than serve it. In Trump’s first nine months, more than seventy-nine thousand full-time workers quit or retired—a forty-two-per-cent increase over that period in Obama’s Presidency. To Trump and his allies, the departures have been liberating, a purge of obstructionists. 

"Thus began the “spoils system,” in which a winning candidate dispensed most government jobs as gifts. It lasted until 1881, when President James Garfield was shot by a man who believed that he was due a diplomatic post as a reward for supporting Garfield’s campaign. In response, Congress created a civil service in which hiring was based on merit, in the belief that only a workforce free from political interference could earn public trust. To admirers, America’s civil service became the ballast in the ship of state, exemplified by the National Laboratories, Neil Armstrong, and generations of humble bureaucrats who banned unsafe medications, recalled defective motor vehicles, and monitored conditions at nursing homes. According to the Partnership for Public Service, the federal workforce has included at least sixty-nine winners of the Nobel Prize, most of them scientists with little public profile. All U.S. public servants are bound by an official code of ethics that demands “loyalty to . . . country above loyalty to persons, party or government department.”

"Advocates of limited government, Storrs notes, have long regarded the civil service as a “snivel service” of Ivy Leaguers, “a bureaucracy of short-haired women and long-haired men, bent on replacing the traditional American family.” In 1951, “Washington Confidential,” a best-seller by two journalists working for the conservative press mogul William Randolph Hearst, presented the civil service as a domain of “mediocrity and virtual anonymity,” in a city of “economic parasites.”

"Veteran U.S. diplomats say that the State Department is in its most diminished condition since the nineteen-fifties, when McCarthy called it a hotbed of “Communists and queers” and vowed to root out the “prancing mimics of the Moscow party line.” McEldowney, the retired Ambassador, said, “I believe to the depth of my being that by undermining our diplomatic capability we are putting our country at risk. Something awful is inevitably going to happen, and people will ask, ‘Where are the diplomats?’ And the tragic answer will have to be ‘We got rid of them in a fire sale.’ ”