Slouching toward ModNov training

I can’t wait till next week, when my mind won’t feel so much like leftover broccoli soup. I’ve had to catch up on so many things at the DJ that I’ve barely treaded water anywhere else. This can’t keep up, I would imagine. I’ll get back to the correct speed and back on top of things soon, and life will go on accordingly. At least I hope so.

I’m starting to direct what little thinking I have available to the issues of how to start off novices in the world of ModNov. I’ll probably do some cross-posting over there, but needless to say, it is an issue of timely necessity, given that we will all have novices in about a month or so. Aside from topic-specific stuff, which wouldn’t come until a little later in the process, it’s not so much creating new curriculum as sorting and organizing the old curriculum in light of ModNov. Last year, thanks to the Fat Man on the Trolley resolution, I started with morality, which appeals to me on some levels (absent ModNov), because people generally have given at least some thought to the concepts of right and wrong by the time they’re high school freshmen, but I don’t think that makes sense in a vacuum, much less with civil disobedience. Do we not challenge the rule of law through civil disobedience, and by it place our own relativistic view of the world higher than the world’s view of the world? If you look at it that way, the rule of law is a much more difficult concept than the rule of relativistic self, and requires more explanation. That explanation goes directly to the creation of society, and thus the social contract. That is, why do we create a society? Then, what happens when we disagree with the society we’ve created? This order sounds right to me.

Speaking of which, the CatNats arguers on a right to health care often simply stated that because the classic constructs of rights protected by soc con did not include health care, therefore there was no such right. As I understand it, John Locke had really good coverage from his AARP supplemental plan, which is why he didn’t make it life, liberty, property and health care (at least except for preexisting conditions; this was the olden days after all). Anyhow, this kind of dogmaticism is probably why classic ethical training in LD has gotten a bad rap. We don’t believe things because Locke (or Rousseau or Kant or Rawls or the Old Baudleroo) said them; Locke (et alia) said them because they believed them. Philosophy is like mathematics: abstract constructs for understanding the real world. At the point at which philosophy is taken as reality, it’s not philosophy anymore.

I think I need another vacation…