Think a Second Time
by
Dennis Prager
Making an argument for ethical monotheism, Dennis Prager packs 46 essays between these covers. These essays can be divided into two categories: Easy issues and essays with weakly supported conclusions. Among the easy issues with easily supported conclusions are arguments on the terribleness of pacifism, the mistake of ad hominem attacks and the badness of psychologizing. It is not hard to figure out why this book is popular. It is an avuncular version of Dateline NBC. The title is ironic. Prager does not challenge much of conventional wisdom. Many of these claims are already beliefs most Americans hold, including myself.
This brand of feel-good ethics is still fighting the cold war, World War II, etc. never mind the threats from present day autocrats, ideologies and indifference. When people get blindsided by major evils, the followers of this stuff start throwing out false causes and blaming everyone but themselves. (Anyone for a little cultural warfare?) or if they are in personal crises mode, which almost never happens, start wondering, as Dosteyevsky put it: How can it be, I did everything so properly?
Here are some of the basic—very basic—ideas offered here: If you are dissatisfied with something in your life, do “whatever [uh-oh!] you can” to get it, or let it go. (I am beginning to like the teenage usage of the word whatever a whole lot more than the ultra-conservative usage.) Do not waste a retailer’s time if you have no interest in buying. A self-described moderate, Prager develops his own version of The Devil's Dictionary, except every term excoriates liberals, indicating how worthless the term moderate is.
Like much entertainment ultra-conservatism, this uses much ink getting fired up about peripheral issues: A stripper who stripper who strips for her dad on the Phil Donahue show is worse than a man who goes to a strip club because it is in public and has incestuous implications—good point, but it is still a trivial issue. The difference between private and public behavior is important-good point. A bad politician does more harm than all the strippers in America, he says-good point.
But how do we prevent bad politicians? Apparently, by emphasizing personal kindness, not “macro goodness” (meaning public affairs)-bad point. Miss Manners is ostensibly a better person than Winston Churchill. I, however, happen to believe that moral goodness is a much more complex matter than kindness. Many kind things result in huge evils.
Prager makes the noteworthy point that there are millions of worse things than hypocrisy, but he is mistaken in saying that only religious people can be called hypocrites and that deviation from religious rules makes one a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is not practicing what you preach, not violating the rules of others or your religious leaders. His essay does serve as a nifty counter to those who think the important goal in life is finding every trace of hypocrisy or the overzealous hypocrisy police who rarely distinguish between legitimate contradictions and illusory contradictions. (In our world promoting evil as good, then doing it, is much better for the public image than to be seen as a hypocrite on even trivial matters.)
Some of this almost looks recycled from Bertrand Russell, though Russell’s version is much better. Russell wrote: “Christians think the adulterer more wicked than the corrupt politician, though the latter does more harm... the medieval conception of virtue was wishy-washy, feeble and sentimental... Spaniards baptized Indian infants and dashed their brains out—securing that they would go to heaven.” Holiness served those who were morally impotent. The good person does good, argued Russell. He does not strive to "be" good. “Being” good means doing no good. Those who reform politics, argued Russell, are not accorded saint ship. Early Christians excoriated family affection. The result: Holiness served selfishness and asceticism. “Christ tells us to become children, but children can not understand calculus, currency or disease prevention.” Adults who become children get eaten or allow others to get eaten.
The anti-macro goodness crowd shoves important issues into oblivion using all-to-easy reasons:
· The bigger world is too heartless for me to bother
· I can have no influence.
· My trivial private actions ripple outward and change the world. (Anyone for an ethic of random acts of kindness?)
· They even pretend to be lone voices of sanity—as if the wacky macro masses were lining up outside stores to buy copies of policy journals.
Claiming that promiscuous heterosexual nonmarital sex is not wrong but a “Lower Ideal,” Prager makes a not good point. He says premarital sex is “Less Ideal,” and monogamous heterosexual sex is “The Ideal.” All other sex, he argues, is sinful or evil.
Prager defines holiness as the difference between human and animal behavior. Thus, if you imitate an animal to entertain a child and yourself, you may be unholy. If a bear defends its cubs and you defend your children, you may be unholy.
Along with the title, the other unexpected thing here is his claim to support the primacy of moral reasoning. This book is flat-out loaded with reasoning errors. If the author is serious about using moral reasoning as a catch phrase, he should upgrade the quality of his reading materials.
Lots of irrelevant, ad populum, inadequate expert, ad hominem, and unclear claims clutter this work, as well as jumbled issues, straw folks, bad definitions, missing quantifications and loads of problems with causal relationships. Prager calls for a one-year moratorium on motive ad hominems. It must have been a different year from his other essays. Most conspicuous, in an ostensibly ethical work, is the near absence of words such as benefit, harm, duty and rights. Unlike the hackneyed, reflexive glittering generalities and glittering demonizations found in other books, this is an original collection of glittering generalities and glittering demonizations.
Developing his own brand of nurture assumptions, Prager alleges parents can make their kids generally good by reducing emphasis on spankings, feelings, ridicule, romanticism, self-esteem, neediness, and macro goodness (public policies). Prager demands so much. It is tough keeping teenagers from going out and doing wacky things such as reading the Wilson Quarterly or helping Educate Girls Globally. The attractions of public policies are too much like Beatle mania or N’sync fever. Parents, he claims, should increase their emphasis on higher authorities, quantity time, kindness to grandparents, and personal goodness (meaning being nice).
He makes the good point that goodness (meaning character and I hope not niceness) is more important than art, law, literacy, religion, and a host of other things, though Prager’s narrow conception of character is seriously flawed. He is in good territory pointing out the rottenness of moral equivalence. Another good point: Self-pity is self-degrading.
This work includes an embarrassing radio exchange between Prager and a caller, a single, professional woman. Prager claims the woman should not have a child. He thinks he has proven his case using offal, irrelevancies and constant repetition of the would-be child’s right to a father-- an absolute rule apparently. (One rule of radio and television is to keep hitting opponents with the same sledgehammers, while maintaining authoritative visual images and vocalizations and avoiding pauses while doing so. In the mass media pauses do not make you look careful or thoughtful. They make you look stupid or confused. Unfortunately, battering rams of absolute rules are morally worse than stupid.) It is pathetic even by radio standards, but somehow Prager saw fit to include it as an “essay.” Prager has one thing is common with Ronald Dworkin and the other ultra-liberals he excoriates: He thinks his claims should serve as automatic trump cards. Prager accuses her of being selfish. Gee, call me crazy, but a life with a single professional in the U-S of A sounds much better than no life at all. If that is selfish, I hate to think what altruism is. There are worse things in life, the arguments in this book, to give one example. Prager says he feels her pain. It does not occur to him that his arguments are a pain.
If a thirty-year-old good, loving, healthy, professional single person has a child; it is not morally equivalent to a flaky, desperate, needy, untrained nineteen-year-old single parent having a baby. There is no good research that suggests a child from a well-off single parent will do any worse than a child from a similarly well-off two-parent family. The benefit the child gains from a life, the benefit the parent gains, and the benefits third parties gain, colossally outweigh whatever arguments neoconservatives concoct.
Television is bad, opines Prager, but fixable. If so, it has an incredibly long way to go. It appears to me that almost everything on TV is moral or esthetic refuse, as in at least 999 of 1000 broadcasts. In one of the better essays he points out how shallow TV news is and how biased it is. In particular he points out the narrowness of Israeli-Palestinian coverage.
Prager subscribes to the view that abstract arguments are not motivating and that abstract arguments do not change things. Like everyone else I have heard this view from, Prager does not bother to provide evidence to support this belief. (I must be some sort of nut. A good argument is much more motivating to me than watching Forrest Gump or being ordered around by "authorities." Of course, since philosophy has been all but banned from schools and the media, the lack of influence by philosophy is not surprising.
)
Pacifism, he splendidly points out, leads to more deaths—the deaths of those who do not deserve death. There is a big difference between justified killing and murder. In another of the better parts Prager also criticizes some of the pacifist, apathetic and anti-nomianist strands within Christianity.
This work is helpful in reminding us to avoid these:
· Fascism
· Communism
· Christian fundamentalism
· Muslim fundamentalism
· Blood tribalists
I was not planning on joining those groups anyway, and I doubt almost all prospective readers plan to either. Of course, Prager offers almost nothing on how to prevent zealotry.
This is not a moral philosophy as much as it is a comfortable pillow. Prager repackages what people already believe, including myself, and passes it off as a wondrous new philosophy of living. I mean, how many communists can there still be in the United States? It does not face pressing issues. It evades problems that might require a moral being to act with a minimum of beneficence.
Glib claims are delivered in rapid-fire fashion: “[T]he pursuit of profits is obviously value neutral.” Oh, really! Sort of like the way people claim science and technologies are value neutral. Prager draws us an “argument” data table with the bad, buzzword, straw person conclusions in one column and the good, buzzword conclusions in another column. To put it charitably, he argues that beliefs are the most important causal factors, which is true and has been well-established elsewhere. To put it uncharitably, he writes as if they were the only causal factors. He makes numerous appeals to inadequate experts, especially sacred texts.
Prager has ideas on men and women, too. He could be one of those stand-up comedians who say, “Men and women be different, maaaaaaan.” He claims boys and young men will listen to men, not women. Somewhere in the back of my mind I recall some military research that said airmen were most likely to listen to a women with a soothing, DJ-type voice, but I could be mistaken. I also vaguely remember seeing a meta-analysis of several dozen studies of gender and leader effectiveness and the analysis found only miniscule relationships between gender and leader effectiveness, but I could again be mistaken. He presents his sex ideas as if they were profound revelations that he invented, ignoring the fact that they are common.
Think a Second Time is part of the ultra-conservative self-esteem movement, though they do not use the word self-esteem. How could an ultra-conservative not feel good about her self after reading this book? Her beliefs are reaffirmed and almost no sacrifice is required. If you are looking for the ethical part in ethical monotheism, look elsewhere.
This book reminds me of the movie Clueless. The main character (Alicia Silverstone) was clearly clueless, and we were presented with a couch potato character (some guy) who supposedly represented wisdom because he watched CNN and read Nietzsche. Am I the only one who thinks he was clueless too? Prager, however, appears to think reading five newspapers a day makes one wise. You can be played just as easily with radio and newspapers as you can with TV.
This work is for work averse (read: lazy), middle-aged individuals who feel vague unease and want their own goodness reassured by having correct beliefs on minor, emotionalist issues such as the death penalty. Nearly a billion individuals are malnourished and millions of children die each year from easily preventable evils, yet according to Prager, one’s beliefs on the death penalty are the morality litmus test, perhaps because those other people are just a statistic and not a movie of the week candlelight vigil melodrama. The number of store clerks murdered every year out numbers the number of people killed by the death penalty, yet I have never heard anything about a save the clerks campaign. If the death penalty is a litmus test, it is a litmus test like euthanasia and genetically modified food are--morality by intuition, publicity and scare tactics.
Prager suggests that morality is more than a list of don’ts, yet he never argues that the reader do anything inspiring and important. The closest he comes is arguing for a human chain around a house. Whup-dee-do. Maybe the chain can link up with Hands Across America. One can read this and feel virtuous without having to do anything, except be nice. Sometimes it seems as if the "niceness" moralists are more opposed to social moralists than they are to various anti-moralities.
Think a Second Time contains a bad essay on extremism. He would have been better off writing
an essay on fanaticism. There is a big distinction to make between the two. Winston Churchill was an extremist. There's nothing wrong with extremism done for the right reasons. Some of the best people in the world are extremists and some of the worst are not extremists.
This is not a morality as much as it is an anti-morality. Combine the new virtue ethics with the new natural law ethics and this is what you get pop self-justification 101. They think they are being moral when they are mostly thinking up excuses to be indolent and excuses to take umbrage. Pragers followers probably sit at home feeling good about themselves because at least they are not some nutty left-wing cultural theorist, even when their characters are big, fat zeros. Moralists should determine which things are better and which are worse and to have the courage to tell the truth about these things. It is not the job of moralists to decide which things are easiest to believe and which are not and support the things that are easiest to believe.
Book review article by J.T. Fournier.
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