a small thing

I suppose, finally, that there is one point where I agree wholeheartedly with Terry Penner's Socratic views... on the subject of punishment.

When I lived in Slovakia, I worked in two different high schools (one Slovak-run, and one American-run) where the managers were fanatically devoted to the need to punish students who (in their view) behaved badly...

That fanaticism about the need for punishment indicates not an abiding commitment to moral principles, but, rather a deep fear that maybe morality isn't real or objective, but needs the support of sticks and stones.

I recall now, with sadness, a Slovak woman with a bureaucractic title who directed my attention to the young people moving boisterously in front of us, saying something like this; Just look at them, how they act! Isn't it obvious they need rules?

At the time I was engaged in a sort of negotiation with the school trying to get some money for my apartment, and out of fear that any dissent might affect those negotiations and simple cowardice I agreed with her... And the memory now of that assent reminds me of all that I've been through in a variety of degrading and demeaning employment contexts....I was too tired and too cowardly to speak the truth, that their chaotic excited behavior was lively and that life is good........and too big, too sprawling, too wild to ever allow itself to be hemmed in by petty rules.... and perhaps this pettiness that she so fervently demanded of me and the world was itself nothing more than a discomfort with life . . . or, one could say, a fear of freedom....