Glorfindel of Gondolin

Via Michael Froomkin comes this great piece from Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. Anyone doubting that we've made some progress in race relations should read some of these letters written by white Chicagoans during the civil rights era. Read their letters, feel their fear. (And note, please, how often their racism was defended by appeals to "property rights" and "freedom.")

Our history of racism makes it delicious that Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President. But his nomination is delicious for more reasons than just race. After so many years of ceding the nation's political culture to candidates who feel compelled to identify themselves with rural Texas or Arkansas or some other Southern locale, I'm thrilled that Obama's acknowledged political home base is the city of Chicago. And after so many years of ceding our political culture to the rednecks, it's refreshing that Obama is obviously an intellectual who couldn't bowl his way out of a paper bag. It's about time! Of course, all of this is useless if Obama loses to McCain, but I'm still hopeful that that won't happen.

Now, I shall set forth upon my cultural rant -- apologies in advance:

Start with politics. The free-market and social conservativism that dominates our political discourse needs to be checked. Our long love affair with conservatism has led to the middle class disappearing, our bridges collapsing, our cities drowning, and our civil liberties evaporating. Our military is in Iraq on false pretenses, waging a war of choice, and may now be settling in for the very long-term. These depressing political developments have been aided, if not caused, by a political culture that has privileged the yahoo and the redneck over the erudite, urbane, and intellectual.

What do I mean by that? Consider that for decades, politicians won by ridiculing "effete intellectuals" and more recently, "latte liberals." Reagan the Rancher beat Mondale the Minnesotan. Bush 41 beat Dukakis in part because the latter seemed more urbane, and thus more wimpy -- mostly because of that unfortunate tank helmet, but also because Dukakis looked like the product of civilized Massachusetts. Clinton turned the tables on the Republicans by being more rednecky than both Bush 41 and the witty but non-redneck Bob Dole. That Gore and Kerry both came close to beating the most anti-intellectual president ever suggested that our national infatuation with yahoos continued, but that it might have limits.

Conversely, I challenge you to name a successful national politician who won by casting his opponent as an uneducated redneck. Who mocked his opponent's Ford F150 with the gun rack. Who held up his Starbucks proudly while denouncing his opponent's preference for Diet Coke and fries.

I thought not. Intellectualism hasn't fared too well in American politics of late.

I'm not saying that the right wing doesn't have its share of intellectuals. In fact, the left has long envied the academic output of the partisan right even as they denounce the specific arguments for endless tax cuts as ideological extremism. Despite George W. Bush's appalling lack of curiosity and aggressive anti-intellectualism, the real damage of this presidency has been done by the highly-educated David Addingtons and John Yoos in the administration who use their skills to push pernicious policies: the "unitary executive", the GWOT, signing statements, deregulation and tax cuts. These days, everyone across the political spectrum wants their own Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation.

What I'm saying is that as we've been seduced by the politics of the right wing, we've also been seduced by the culture of the redneck. I don't think this is a coincidence. They often go hand-in-hand. The pejorative term "redneck" conjures up images of people more zealous about the literal truth of the Bible than about their own reason, more attached to their pickup truck than to the health of ANWR, more committed to their hatred for gays than to their appreciation of diversity. These are the cultural markers that right-wing Republicans have been celebrating for decades.

Moreover, these cultural markers are sadly much more visible in rural areas than they are in big cities. This site stereotypes the difference too much, but there's a core of truth to the general claim that liberalism flourishes in big cities and withers in the hinterlands. If you doubt this, look at the map: there aren't red and blue states; there are red rural areas and blue cities. John Kerry won every city in the country with more than 500,000 people.

Republican campaign success over the past twenty years has hewed more or less loosely to the formula: praise the the rural and the redneck, villify the educated and and the urban. Thankfully, things are changing. We'll have to see how Barack Obama does in November, but this time around, my money's on the intellectual guy from Chicago. Delicious.

Posted by Carey at 06:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

After eight years of George W. Bush, almost all of us want some kind of change. Unsurprisingly, then, Barack Obama’s campaign theme of change has been more successful than Clinton’s theme of experience. What surprises me is the number of Democrats who have voted for Hillary Clinton nevertheless. One frequently-offered explanation for why these voters have preferred “experience” to “change” is that they remember that things were better for them when Bill Clinton was president, and that their experience of change over the last decade has been mostly painful. This really doesn’t explain much, because many of Obama’s supporters can be described in exactly the same way.

Reading Richard Sennett’s book today, I found an explanation for Hillary’s appeal that makes more sense. It also suggests what Obama must do to appeal to many of Clinton’s supporters.

Sennett describes the new corporate culture that has exercised a disproportionately large influence on the rest of the economy and on politics. This celebrated “new economy” (so familiar to readers of Richard Friedman) puts a premium on short-term relationships and eschews continuity and stability. The days of lifelong employment at General Motors are gone, and with them any expectation that you can count on your employer for a pension and for health care. Firms that try to operate this way are ridiculed by investors as old-fashioned, and are the frequent targets of hostile takeover attempts. The goal for apostles of the “new economy” is to rebuild old stolid companies as a nimble, quick-footed enterprises that can respond quickly to changing markets, and are not weighed down by excessive commitments to particular products, workers, or worker benefits.

Older workers have experienced the transition from the old world of lifetime employment and generous pensions to the new world of temporary employment and no job security. These workers have moved over the course of a few decades from a world of mutual commitment between themselves and their employers to a world where there is no long-term commitment and stability is ridiculed in favor of fast-paced evolutionary change. These workers hear “change” and they don’t think merely of a change from the policies of George W. Bush; they think of the loss of stability and predictability that the new economy has unleashed. What these people want, and rightly so, is to slow this destructive change and to protect a world governed by commitments and characterized by long-term stability.

Younger workers, and to a large extent workers from the professional class who have tended to vote for Obama, haven’t had a similar experience. Either they’ve lived their entire work lives in the context of the new economy, or they’ve worked in jobs that haven’t yet been affected to the same extent by the new economy’s upheavals as the blue-collar jobs have been. For them, Obama’s call for change is nothing less than obvious -- of course we have to change what we’ve been doing under George W. Bush!

The question becomes whether Obama can make himself more appealing to Clinton’s older, whiter, more blue-collar supporters than John McCain can. I think he can if he decides to use the language of stability, safety, commitment, reliability, and trust in the context of the government’s relationship to them. He should remind voters that the Republicans are the ones most eager to extend the culture and values of the new economy into the public realm. The Republicans want to privatize Social Security. The Republicans want to make each individual fend for themselves when they get sick and need health care. The Republicans want to remake government in the image of the new lean, efficient, nimble, but commitment-free modern corporation that has so successfully shed jobs and pension commitments in the name of competitiveness and quick profit.

Obama obviously isn’t going to turn the clock back to 1955, but neither is Clinton. John McCain most certainly isn’t going to do it. Obama must persuade Clinton’s appalachian supporters that he values the kind of stability they’ve lost, and that he’s more likely than John McCain to preserve the reliability of the federal government and its ability to competently perform basic government functions.

Posted by Carey at 03:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Glenn Greenwald says he used to be a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. But he doesn't need that background to make the following obvious point:

. . . a court striking down a law supported by large majorities is not antithetical to our system of government. Such a judicial act is central to our system of government. That's because, strictly speaking, the U.S. is not a "democracy" as much as it a "constitutional republic," precisely because constitutional guarantees trump democratic majorities. This is all just seventh-grade civics. . . .

Posted by Carey at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hey Mom, look at this!

(I call out my mom because I always have my best discussions about gender differences with her. I'm pretty sure my mom will actually agree with this piece by Barbara Ehrenreich. Even if I'm still not sure whether she supported Obama or Clinton for the Democratic nomination.)

Hillary's Gift to Women

. . . . Biology conditions us in all kinds of ways we might not even be aware of yet. But virtue is always a choice.

Hillary Clinton smashed the myth of innate female moral superiority in the worst possible way -- by demonstrating female moral inferiority. We didn't really need her racial innuendos and free-floating bellicosity to establish that women aren't wimps. As a generation of young feminists realizes, the values once thought to be uniquely and genetically female -- such as compassion and an aversion to violence -- can be found in either sex, and sometimes it's a man who best upholds them.

Posted by Carey at 10:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The subtitle of Benjamin Barber's latest book hints at his dislike of consumerism. Frustrated with the ubiquitous glorfication of "the market" in our current political discourse, Barber asks the following almost rhetorical question:

"After all, when religion colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, we call the result theocracy; and when politics colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, we call the result tyranny. So why, it might be asked, when the marketplace -- with its insistent ideology of consumption and its dogged orthodoxy of spending -- colonizes every sector of what should be our multidimensional lives, do we call the result liberty?" [219-220]

Continue reading "Modern infantilism -- does Benjamin Barber have the solution?" »

Posted by Carey at 07:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

"Lost: tame bird. Will not bite! Cannot defend itself from dogs or cats. Please call for reward."

Flyers with this announcement went up on almost every lightpost and street sign in my neighborhood last week, accompanied by a black-and-white photo of a small bird with a longish beak. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the bird, and that makes me sad.

The silver lining in this lost-bird story is that people are capable of missing their pet bird. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the person who went to all the trouble to post all those reward flyers actually loved that little bird. People can be self-absorbed and destructive, but they can also be loving -- and it's probably a good thing to remind ourselves of this every once in a while.

So I thought about love as I walked home. I started thinking about those of us who are so convinced of the non-equivalence, moral and otherwise, of people and birds that they would interpret this love for a missing bird as evidence that people sometimes misplace their emotions, or (more generously) that people have such a surplus capacity for love that they can afford to squander it on a being that isn't somehow intrinsically worthy of it. These people might say that humans alone can validate another person's love and can sometimes compel it, but a mere bird can only be the indifferent target of irrational emotion.

Surely you know people that think like this. You might even think this way yourself. After all, it does make instinctive sense to think of human beings as special in many ways, including perhaps their "appropriateness" as objects of our love.

But how can we know enough to be sure of this? If we can be confident about anything in the world, I think that we can be most confident about our ignorance. Religions, it seems to me, exist because at some level we're aware that we have no idea what the hell we're all doing here, or why, or what the point of it all is. Religions exist because we humans feel profoundly uncomfortable with this ignorance, and we mostly prefer faith -- just a belief in something we're not logically or empirically compelled to believe in -- to raw blubbering ignorance. We're uncomfortable not knowing what happens to us after we die, so we make up a story and believe in it rather than live with uncomfortable ignorance. We don't know why we're here, so we put our faith in a religious story that tells us why we're here and what we're supposed to be doing.

I'm not arguing against faith. I'm just saying that I think the ideas and stories we have faith in, that we believe without compulsion, are things we create and are not given to us by God. No, scratch that. I'm saying that even if there's a God that has given us anything, it's too difficult to distinguish which of our many yearnings and wishes and beliefs are God-given and which are conjured up by ignorant people just like ourselves. We have to remember that although faith may be a good thing, it's definitely not knowledge.

So what does this have to do with a lost bird? Even if many of you would agree with me that faith isn't knowledge and that we're ignorant about a lot of things, I'm surprised how many of us will act as if they know that loving a bird is a slightly foolish thing to do. But if it's a noble thing to love another person, why is it foolish to love a bird? Or to put the same thing a different way, if loving a bird is foolish, then aren't we just as foolish when we love each other?

It seems to me that in the dark of our ignorance, we could be a bit more generous than that. As far as I know, love is a wonderful thing, and it doesn't have to be hoarded up as if it were in danger of running out. Moreover, birds are wonderful too, and there's no evidence that we squander our love if we give some of it to a bird. So for all you humans-are-the-only-worthy-beings people out there, you can put a cork in it.

I don't believe you.

Posted by Carey at 07:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Driving back from a trip to Kansas City the other day, we passed through Des Moines, Iowa, around lunchtime and started looking for a grocery store.

We looked, and looked some more. No grocery stores hove into view. We did see a lot of fast-food places on every commercial corner -- Boston Markets and burger places and mid-level suburban ubiquities like Appleby's and Carrabbas Italian Swill. But no grocery stores. There were single-family homes for blocks in every direction. Did the people who lived there never cook for themselves?

Finally, we stumbled into a neigborhood where a few "european-style" lofts were going up, and lo! A foofy grocery store appeared before us . It was the kind of place that hosts Rick Bayless of Topolobampo fame for a cooking seminar on Mexican food, and charges $120 per person for the privilege of attending. Evidently, enough of these people who live in trendy lofts still cook for themselves to support a local grocery store with an in-house fromageur who will apologize -- appropriately -- for the store's unfortunate inability to stock burrata.

It made me wonder: has home cooking become a fetish of the moneyed class? Does everyone else just buy their food indirectly from the megadistributor Sysco, via the line cooks at Macaroni Grill?

Posted by Carey at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

"In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth."

This article made me very, very sad.

Posted by Carey at 09:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Washington Post:

"If a bride has been told, repeatedly, that it costs nearly $28,000 to have a wedding, then she starts to think that spending nearly $28,000 on a wedding is just one of those things a person has to do, like writing a rent check every month or paying health insurance premiums. (Or she prides herself on being a budget bride and spending a mere $15,000 on the event.) She is less likely to reflect upon the fact that $28,000 would have more than covered a 10 percent down payment on the median purchase price of a house in 2005 and would cover the average cost to a family of a health insurance policy, at 2005 rates, for a decade. The bride who has been persuaded that $28,000 is a reasonable amount of money to spend on her wedding day is less likely to measure that total against the nation's median household income -- $42,389 in 2004 -- and reflect upon whether it is, in fact, reasonable for her or for anyone to spend the equivalent of seven and a half months of the average American's salary on one day's celebration."

Posted by Carey at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From the Washington Post, one of the best articles I've read in a long time.

"If we can't take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that -- then what else are we missing?"

Posted by Carey at 08:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's hard to resist an article with a lead like this: "There’s a case to be made that the single most intellectually and politically influential neighborhood in the United States is Chicago’s Hyde Park."

And it's a strong case, too -- Hyde Park is home to the BonJour Cafe's delicious belgian rolls, which have been winning the whole world over with their yummy goodness. But this article, surprisingly, is really about the Chicago School of economic thought, which has made the world's elite its bitch.

Fortunately, this isn't another paean to the ideological yumminess of free markets. Instead, the author says, "[f]or Thomas Friedman (and, indeed, [University of Chicago economics professor] Allen Sanderson), people can’t “disagree” with neo-classical economics. They can only fail to understand it." Which is the pithiest way of criticizing the Chicago school that there is.

All in all, this is a good read. Even if I am tired as all get-out from a long ER shift, and with sore feet to boot.

Posted by Carey at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I read Without Roots alongside Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism because they seemed to exemplify two common responses to the problem of cultural intolerance and violence. Appiah's book describes the familiar liberal response: we can avoid violence by recognizing that most differences between people aren't as serious as they seem, and by treating the differences that remain as irrelevant to the practical problem of living together. The book by Pera and Ratzinger promised to argue for some version of the cultural conservative's response: stable toleration requires that we all recognize some fundamental "moral essence" of humanity; the Christian tradition of Europe recognizes this moral essence; therefore the foundations of a stable, nonviolent society must somehow embrace our Judeo-Christian roots.

I'm not very sympathetic to the accretions of right-wing opinion that cling to the religious traditionalists like barnacles, but on one point at least, they're more effective than the liberals. The conservatives say that there are moral values that we must recognize as universal and superior to all others. Otherwise, our efforts at peaceful toleration will allow hideous evil to flourish. Toleration based on relativism rather than on absolute moral standards cannot recognize the evil of regimes like Mao's or Stalin's.

Liberals, of course, recognize that murder can't be tolerated, much less genocide. The problem is that liberal arguments aren't usually very good at explaining why. A morally crippled person, reading Kwame Anthony Appiah's arguments, might easily fail to see why a society or regime like Stalin's ought to be one of the "losers" when it conflicts with a regime or society that prohibits torturing political opponents in gulags. Appiah certainly doesn't give compelling reasons; he simply says that there will be winners and losers when irreconcilable values conflict, and that the losers won't be happy about it. The closest Appiah comes to actually giving a reason is when he says that some values (like not hurting others) are actually shared almost universally; the defenders of Hitler are not very numerous. But even if this is empirically true, Appiah can't give a reason why it's a good thing that this is true.

The problem that most liberals face, no matter how morally upstanding they may be, is that reasoned arguments are the most subtle and difficult means of distinguishing good from evil. I don't know whether there's a philosophical consensus about whether it's even possible to reason about the concepts of good and evil without resorting to non-rational discourse, such as the language of faith. But one thing's for sure: it's much, much easier to talk about good and evil in the language of faith and religion than it is to talk about these things using rational arguments. That's why most people who aren't moral philosophers in fact look to things other than reason when they make judgments about morality. Something's evil because the Bible or the Koran or their priest or their mother says it is, or beause it just is, period. No reasoned arguments necessary (or possible?).

This is why the conservatives are more effective than most liberals, at least on this question. Joseph Ratzinger can explicitly appeal to faith in order to say "this, my friends, is evil." Appiah perhaps ought to do this too, but his attachment to reason and fear of un-reason lead him to make hand-wavy gestures at the point when he wants to argue that some things just shouldn't be tolerated.

Ok, so on that much I think Without Roots is a better book than Appiah's, because it's more straightforward and honest. But what about the rest?

Pera and Ratzinger: Saving the world by invading Iraq and outlawing gay marriage

Joseph Ratzinger is, of course, the Pope, but he wrote these materials when he was merely one of the most influential thinkers high up in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Pera is an Italian politician, and one of the most interesting things about this book is to see how Ratzinger keeps his distance from politics, preferring to discuss ideas and issues in the abstract or in historical terms, while Pera is more willing to apply these ideas to practical policies. This dynamic is fascinating. Ratzinger alone is very measured, interesting, and even compelling. One can't help but admire his historical knowledge, and his tone is scholarly and pleasant. It's easy to simply think along with Ratzinger, but when you read Pera's contributions, you can no longer be a curious spectator. With Pera, you have to declare yourself as an ally or an enemy. And since Ratzinger nowhere says that he disagrees with Pera and often claims to agree with him, you realize that if ideas have consequences you'd better be either for Ratzinger or against him.

Here's what Ratzinger says: the history of Europe is a long, slow process of moving religion out of the public sphere -- Ratzinger wants to bring it back. The initial moves of this long process were good ones. In the Western Roman Empire, temporal power was divided from spiritual power, with the former resting with kings and the latter resting with the Pope. This was good because human pride makes absolute power too dangerous. It's not clear where along the road to the modern secular state Ratzinger thinks Europe ran off the tracks, but he certainly thinks it has done so by now. Today, Ratzinger says, Europe's "broad Christian consensus" is threatened. The modern European state has succumbed to a "hollow" belief in technology and progress as a secular substitute for spiritual values. Totalitarianism and dictatorship remain a real threat because the relativism that permitted the regimes of Stalin and Hitler is stronger than ever.

The proper response to this sorry trajectory is to ensure that any future European Constitution protects fundamental human rights as "values that take precedence over the jurisdiction of any state." Modern abominations such as cloning, "trafficking in organs for transplants," and gay marriage would be stopped in their tracks.

I'm sympathetic to Ratzinger's worries about an unbounded faith in technological progress. And he's surely right that without some absolute moral values that limit the permissible uses of new technologies, we will again have to confront massive horrors of the sort that we saw in the 20th century. I'm thinking here about, you know, mass genocide and nuclear annihilation. That's why it's so lame to end, as too many conservative screeds against secularism do, by trotting out organ transplants and gay marriage as the sort of horrors that should motivate us to change essential aspects of modern state power. Unless you're a believer in a very particular interpretation of a very particular bit of religious scripture, the threat of gay marriage is not going to chill you to the core.

It only gets worse when you read Marcello Pera's pieces. As a practicing Italian politician sympathetic to Ratzinger's views, Pera allows himself greater license to talk about specific political controversies. The war in Iraq is the best example. Pera praises the Bush Doctrine generally as a shining example of what a leader with moral convictions can do, and he praises the invasion of Iraq specifically as something Bush and the U.S., but not the hollow and hopelessly secular European states, had the courage to do. If it's true that Ratzinger's brand of moral absolutism would be reliably translated by politicians like Pera into policies like George W. Bush's, then I know where I stand. I'm against it, full stop.

Kwame Anthony Appiah's liberalism leads him to belittle people's cultural and religious convictions, but Pera and Ratzinger's religious convictions lead them to all but explictly reject toleration. We can believe in whatever we want, so long as we submit to the authority of leaders espousing the Christian (and specifically Catholic) religion. What else can Ratzinger mean when he chooses such a particular "evil" as gay marriage to condemn? It would be fine if, like Appiah but without Appiah's hemming and hawing, Ratzinger had espoused absolute moral values that could at least pretend to be universal.

Reading both of these books, I get the sense that any solution to the toleration problem is a fine balance between Appiah's toleration and Ratzinger and Pera's convictions. But I'm not optimistic that any one author or theorist will get it right. If we manage to achieve it in practice, it's going to be because both sides check each other's excesses.

Posted by Carey at 06:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Daniel Larison's post sets out, clearly and pithily, the reasons why we should worry about Mexican immigration.

I've linked to it because I'm not worried about the Mexicans, and it's because I don't think any of Larison's reasons give cause for alarm.

• Assimilation just isn't the problem Larison thinks it is. How exactly do we suffer if Mexicans remain "unassimilated?" i'm sure this doesn't hold true for Mr. Larison, but for many opponents of immigration, "assimilation" is a code word for not having to hear Spanish spoken on the street. One faces this problem in Europe, so it cannot be that this is a threat to our "European culture." What else can "assimilation" mean? That Mexicans won't soon be driving SUVs and shopping at WalMart like the rest of us? Even if this is true, which it isn't, both of these behaviors are salutary.
• Mr. Larison fears that large numbers of Mexicans won't adopt the "habits of the natives." Well, in some cases, that would be a bad thing -- but only when those habits are good ones. For neutral habits, like the preference among 50-something whites of European heritage for lime-green Izod golf shirts, or bad habits, like the preference among native 20-somethings to sit on their ass all day complaining about how no employer worthy of their great talent will hire them, rather than going out and getting a job, the refusal of Mexicans to adopt the local habits will benefit our great Nation.
• The most bizzare part of Mr. Larison's post, though, is its worries about democracy. I want to believe that it's saying this: that large numbers of immigrants unaccustomed to democracy threatens our own democratic traditions, which depend upon a cultural assumption that it's democracy or the highway. But it would be so much easier to read the post this way if there wasn't all that stuff in there about the new immigrants' self-interested preference for left-wing politics. If you're worried that the bill of rights and the protection of minorities will be trampled, that's one thing. But lovers of democracy, even "liberal democracy" (which I generously take to mean a democracy that preserves basic human rights), have nothing to fear from people of any background that prefer left-wing policies and candidates for office. The only people who have anything to fear from these are people that prefer right-wing policies. Don't try to misdescribe this as a fear for "liberal democracy."
• Even if everything Mr. Larison says about Mexican immigrants were true, these threats pale against the threats to our democracy and culture from other sources. The chief among these being, of course, globalized trade, the de facto rule of multinational corporations, and the strictly industrialist mindset that goes with this. It wasn't Mexicans who deprived Ms. Kelo and the citizens of New London, Connecticut, of their private property. It was a state apparatus bent on catering to the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Show me a concrete case where Mexican immigrants have eroded our respect for private property as much, and I'll reconsider my criticisms.

Posted by Carey at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last winter when I was in Hyde Park to interview for a residency spot, I stopped in at 57th Street Books and found two books on the front table. One was Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. The other was by Italian politician Marcello Pera and Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), entitled Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam.

I thought it would be fun to read them together. One offered "cosmopolitanism" as an antidote to the inevitable conflicts that arise in a globalized "world of strangers." The other saw a threat to "tolerance and civility among peoples of diverse convictions" in Europe's "apostasy toward . . . the spiritual roots of European civilization" as George Weigel's preface puts it. Nonviolent coexistence demands some degree of toleration, and toleration seems to demand that we embrace some kind of relativism. Could one really argue for a renewed commitment to religious values on the grounds that this apparent absolutism is more conducive to toleration than some form of relativism? This post addresses Appiah's book; I'lll talk about Pera and Ratzinger separately.

Anthony Appiah: Virginia Postrel on steroids

I admit that the comparison might not be entirely fair, but for the sake of brevity I'm going to call Kwame Anthony Appiah the thinking man's Virginia Postrel (or perhaps Thomas Friedman, if you prefer).

Appiah argues that we can't be cosmopolitans until we give substantial weight to our shared humanity, relative to the weight we give to our shared identity with our co-religionists, countrymen, or ethnic group. The "golden rule of cosmopolitanism" according to Appiah is something like the Roman playwright Terence's "I am human; nothing human is alien to me." When it comes to culture, we ought to recognize the empirical reality that there is no such thing as cultural purity. Every culture has been "contaminated" by others, whether by trade, migration, or Hollywood movies. "We do not need, have never needed, settled community, a homogenous system of values, in order to have a home. Cultural purity is an oxymoron."

This does not mean that there are no differences among peoples. In fact, the threat of cutural imperialism shouldn't be overstated, because even when the same television show is seen worldwide, different peoples have different reactions to it. Even when Coke is marketed around the world, local people often prefer local beverages when they're available. "And whatever loss of difference there has been, [people] are constantly inventing new forms of difference: new hairstyles, new slang, even, from time to time, new religions."

But if homogenization isn't a problem, why do so many people think that it is? According to Appiah, it's because they don't like change. "So why do people in [the world's villages] sometimes feel that their identity is threatened? Because the world, their world, is changing, and some of them don't like it."

Well, duh. It isn't that people don't like change per se; they don't like change that threatens their identity. The problem with all of this breezy talk about sources of conflict that, illusory or not, lead people to kill each other in mass numbers, is the same problem that Postrel and Friedman have also failed to solve. Appiah never takes the proper measure of the non-cosmopolitan's objections to our modern circumstances. You can see this when he equates threats to a person's identity with a mere distaste for change in general. These are clearly problems of a different order of magnitude. We can't conjure away the problem Postrel-style by describing millions of people who feel the need to kill or be killed in a war against modernity as merely stubborn.

Appiah also sets up an all-too common straw man to represent those who argue that elements of our tradition should be preserved. He speaks as if all these people simply want to foreclose choice, and force everyone to be small farmers. For instance (p. 103-4):

Above all, relationships are changing. When my father was young, a man in a village would farm some land that a chief had granted him, and his [family] would work it with him. If extra hands were needed in the harvest season, he would pay the migrant workers who came from the north. . . . Nowadays, everything has changed. Cocoa prices have not kept pace with the cost of living. Gas prices have made the trasportation of the crop more expensive. And there are new possibilities for the young in the towns, in other parts of the country, and in other parts of the world. Once, perhaps, you could have commanded your nephews and nieces to stay. Now they have the right to leave; in any case, you many not make enough to feed and clothe and educate them all. So the time of the successful farming family has gone; and those who were settled in that way of life are as sad to see it go as some of the American family farmers whose lands are being accumulated by giant agribusinesses. We can sympathize with them. But we cannot force their children to stay in the name of protecting their authentic culture; and we cannot afford to subsidize indefinitely thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity that no longer make economic sense.

I suspect that, if we were really more concerned about "freedom" than about defending modernity as such, we'd be willing to acknowledge that much of what young people do when they leave the family farm is done because there isn't any other real choice to make. Economic realities, to the extent that they make the family farm unprofitable, make moving to the cities a necessity and not a choice. Appiah (and Friedman) can argue that the family farm doesn't make economic sense, but they can't have it both ways and simultaneously claim that the abandonment of the farms is a glorious example of personal freedom.

The fact is that the modern economic realities that are condemning family farms in favor of global agribusiness are not natural events. We subsidize global agribusiness, not family farms. Much less do we subsidize "thousands of distinct islands of homogeneity," whatever that might mean.

Appiah does discuss more serious sources of conflict than changing hairstyles and new slang. He points out that the conflict in the United States between people who favor and who oppose legal abortion is not a conflict over fundamentally incompatible values. Instead, it's a conflict over how the shared values of life and freedom ought to be applied in a particular case. The conflict between observant Muslims and observant Jews wouldn't be as fierce if they didn't both share similar beliefs about the importance of Jerusalem. The resistance to British colonization of Ghana was fiercest among the most Westernized Ghanaians, who shared with the British the values of nationalism and self-determination.

Appiah comes close to acknowledging that when people disagree like this, reason will often fail. These differences don't arise because people aren't being reasonable. There are going to be winners and losers, and the losers will be very angry, and they may respond with violence. But I suspect that to just say this and stop would be to admit the defeat of cosmopolitanism, and Appiah is unwilling to do this explicitly. Instead, he turns quickly away from a discussion of winners and losers to a discussion of habit. He acknowledges the limits of reason: "I have learned in a life of university teaching and research that even the cleverest [why not simply "most intelligent"?] people are not easily shifted by reason alone. . . " The point of conversation and cultural interchange isn't to arrive at a consensus about values. "...[I]t's enough that it helps people get used to one another." End of chapter.

Sure, living with someone different teaches us about them and makes them less unfamiliar. But if Appiah wants to suggest also that it makes us more tolerant of them, he leaves it as merely a suggestion. Who wants to kill Iraqi Sunnis? Iraqi Shiites, not Alabama Baptists. Who routinely killed Irish Catholics? Irish Protestants, not Buddists in Japan. Will cosmopolitan cultural interchange lead to a safer and less violent "world of strangers?" Appiah doesn't argue convincingly that it will.

Posted by Carey at 06:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This story in the NYT made me realize that if I had to hire someone, I wouldn't hesitate to Google them if I had the time and the curiosity. If I found out that the candidate had a myspace page that typically looks something like this (sorry, Shelby, I just needed an example and your page came up), I suppose I'd flush their resume down the toilet too. Not for doing drugs or posting immature shit online (that's none of my business), but for being stupid enough to act as if they think the things they put online are private.

The one thing that troubled me about the NYT article, though, is the way employers are getting access to Facebook information:

Facebook, though, has separate requirements for different categories of users; college students must have a college e-mail address to register. Personal pages on Facebook are restricted to friends and others on the user's campus, leading many students to assume that they are relatively private.

But companies can gain access to the information in several ways. Employees who are recent graduates often retain their college e-mail addresses, which enables them to see pages. Sometimes, too, companies ask college students working as interns to perform online background checks, said Patricia Rose, the director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

In other words, new employees sell out their former classmates to their employers.

If the Facebook posters think what they've put online is any less private than a myspace page, they deserve what they get. But it's still disappointing to know that employers can co-opt their new employees so easily.

One of my supervisors during my law school years (who shall of course remain nameless) was a bit put out when I refused to use my summer Westlaw and Lexis passwords to do job-related legal research. I'm not usually a stickler for the rules, but I'd clearly agreed that I wouldn't use my personal summer access to Westlaw for my employer's benefit. I would have been even more reluctant to use my Facebook access (if I'd had it) to help my employer run background checks. That kind of thing feels groveling and supine to me. But there's no guarantee that even I -- hard as it may be to believe -- would always say no to these kinds of employer requests. What if I liked my boss and hated my ex-classmate? Then it'd be, "Sure, I'll dig up this guy's Facebook page for you. Heh heh."

The moral of the story, again, is if you don't want the whole world to read it, don't put it online. There's always an old classmate out there who's too eager to say "yes" to their boss.

Posted by Carey at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Corporate leaders are excited about a new "guest worker application" that will "help the U.S. with its current immigration crisis." In other words, they're looking forward to implanting radio frequency identification devices (RFIDs) into Mexican guest workers.

But there's really nothing to worry about here. “First and foremost, a VeriChip is not a locating device. VeriChip technology has no GPS capabilities whatsoever." That's a relief.

"It is simply a voluntary passive identification device that is only “awakened” by a proprietary scanner within a very short range of a few inches.” Well, when you put it like that, it doesn't seem so bad. In no time at all we'll be using them in our children (to prevent abductions), our employees (for employment-related uses only) and ourselves (to make things more convenient).

Nothing to worry about.

Posted by Carey at 03:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I heard about YouTube for the first time yesterday in an article from I forget where. Today, I went to the YouTube site and found this wonderful introduction: the Matt Hughes vs. Royce Gracie fight from UFC 60.

Spoilers below the fold.

Continue reading "I'm a YouTube fan now" »

Posted by Carey at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Remember those days in the schoolyard, when the little girl would show you hers and you'd reciprocate by showing her yours? That's a lot like the recent revelations of what's in Hillary Clinton's, George W. Bush's(by far the best list), and Condoleeza Rice's iPods. Faced with these titillating revelations, some people have graciously responded in kind.

It seems, too, that a lot of people feel the need to take sides in the Beatles/Stones war. I've never really cared much -- "norwegian wood" is great, and so is "street fighting man." I define my musical allegiances in other ways:

• Elvis Presley over Elvis Costello
  
• Bananarama over Cyndi Lauper
  
• Alice in Chains over Nirvana
  
• Real jazz over "smooth jazz"
  
• Phish over the Grateful Dead
  
• Dixie Chicks over Toby Kieth
  
• Neil Young over Lynyrd Skynyrd
  
• Neil Diamond over Barry Manilow
  
• Rush over Yes and Genesis (why people ever group these bands together is beyond me)

UPDATE: Heidi points out that I linked to the wrong list for our Prez. I knew it was too good to be true. Try this for George W. Bush's iPod.

Posted by Carey at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

On the interview trail for an emergency medicine residency spot, I was hit with a cold realization. My three blissful years of law school are coming to an end. It's time to go back to the world of medicine, and this means returning to an arena in which virtually every formal presentation is likely to be accompanied by PowerPoint slides.

I'm yawning with anticipation.

At the University of Michigan Law School, professors lecture with all the lights on, and they almost never use PowerPoint. This might surprise all those academic physicians out there who don't think it's possible to convey information without dimming the lights and firing up the projector. Dispite what many doctors seem to think, PowerPoint is not a required teaching tool. My roughly 400 or so classmates who've learned a lot of law over the past three years can all testify to that.

Lawyers do, occasionally, use PowerPoint in the courtroom. But the good ones don't let PowerPoint use them. TaxProfBlog has a post about how trial lawyer W. Mark Lanier -- the guy who persuaded a Texas jury to award his client $252 million in Vioxx suit against Merck -- hired a guy named Cliff Atkinson to help him with his PowerPoint slides. Atkinson is trying to do something about what he calls "PowerPoint fatigue" and TaxProf calls "the deadening sameness of Microsoft Corp.'s commonly used presentation software." This kind of language should rings a bell for a lot of emergency physicians and residents out there (for my sake).

My only worry is that Atkinson might not be quite radical enough. Sure, he talks a tough game. On page 14 of his 5 ways to reduce powerpoint overload (pdf), Atkinson says:

When you think you’re impressing people by putting everything you know on your PowerPoint slide, you’re actually doing the opposite by shutting down their cognitive processing. And when people are sitting there bored, they’re likely not thinking positive thoughts. When it comes to PowerPoint, less is more. . . ." (Emphasis mine.)

Posted by Carey at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via Prof. Bainbridge, Dan Oesterle distinguishes between national security and protectionism:

The argument against the Dubai acquisition is old fashioned protectionism in the guise of national security. National security is a legitimate concern and we should be able to block acquisitions in the name of national security but national security can also be a false front for raw protectionist sentiments. At issue here is, first, whether the national security concerns are legitimate and, second, the government's mechanism for deciding such cases [emphasis added].

President Bush himself takes a larger view of national security when he acknowledges that our dependence on foreign oil should be resisted. His call for fighting our addiction to oil is a national security argument. But it's also, simultaneously, a "protectionist" argument. Unfettered global trade, unbalanced by any prudent "protectionism" whatsoever, threatens our national security by leaving us utterly dependent on others for necessary goods and services.

Wendell Berry asks the questions that Oesterle doesn't:

We thus are elaborating a direct and surely a dangerous contradiction between our militant nationalism and our espousal of the the international "free market" ideology. How are we going to defend our freedoms (this is a question both for militarists and for pacifists) when we must import our necessities form international suppliers who have no concern or respect for our freedoms? What would happen if in the course of a war of national defense we were to be cut off from our foreign sources of supply? What would happen if, in a war of national defense, military necessity required us to attack or blockade our foreign suppliers? We have already fought one enrgy war allegedly in national defense. If our present policies continue, we may face wars for other commodities: food or water or shoes or steel or textiles [The Failure of War (1999)].

Posted by Carey at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in the middle ages, we were fond of explaining every problem by attributing it to God's will. That era is over, but we haven't abandoned our love of universal knee-jerk explanations for everything.

The New York Times has an article about the medical "misdiagnosis crisis" that resorts to our era's equivalent of God made me do it. Of course, I'm talking about "economic incentives."

Under the current medical system, doctors, nurses, lab technicians and hospital executives are not actually paid to come up with the right diagnosis. They are paid to perform tests and to do surgery and to dispense drugs.

There is no bonus for curing someone and no penalty for failing, except when the mistakes rise to the level of malpractice. So even though doctors can have the best intentions, they have little economic incentive to spend time double-checking their instincts, and hospitals have little incentive to give them the tools to do so.

While there may be some truth here, let's not forget that doctors are motivated by things other than money (although they sometimes make it difficult to convince others of this).

Posted by Carey at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week, a major study demonstrated that eating a low-fat diet doesn't lower the risk of heart disease and cancer. Greg Critser describes the health and dietary age that he hopes this study has helped to end:

In a sense, "the era" was neo-Galenic, by which I refer to the 2nd century physician who believed that all bodily ailments could be righted by balancing bodily humors with the right foods, bleeding and herbs. Such is the function — if not the stated intent — of our focus on finding and popularizing perfect dietary content. Right food, right bodily reaction, right health.

Bring back an old era — the Renaissance. And forget the tights and floppy hats. Let's look at how elites in another period of abundance and change thought about eating.

Posted by Carey at 07:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ezra Klein's got a good post about what he's calling "reverse-Dowdism": intelligent and highly-educated men choosing to date women who are their intellectual equals.

Like Ezra, I'm not sure where this trend leads, and I'm not sure of all the effects. It would seem to open up a lot more dating options for intelligent women, though.

Posted by Carey at 09:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's so much to say about this piece that I'm going to say very little, at least for now. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

Much of what's said here is complete bullshit, but the closing lines are spot-on:

I would not have drawn nor published these cartoons, but when the lines are drawn, I stand with Western freedom against traditional authority. I write these lines over a Carlsberg and shall drink no other lager until the boycott of Danish product ends.

Posted by Carey at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I grew up listening to Rush, so naturally I was interested in this LA Times piece about the disappearance of the rock drum solo.

Posted by Carey at 09:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (2)

Cass Sunstein has an interesting post about what happened in Boulder and Colorado Springs when citizens got together in each city to deliberate about three controversial issues: affirmative action, a treaty to control global warming, and same-sex civil unions.

Basically, deliberation decreased diversity among the participants, and it increased their extremism. Citizens in Boulder became more liberal, and citizens in Colorado Springs became more conservative.

(Note: I read Sunstein's post to distract me from the paper I'm trying to write about Wendell Berry and liberalism, so I'm sure that's why the post made me think of . . . liberalism!)

These worrisome-at-first-glance results force us to interrogate our faith that deliberation is always a good thing. Are moderate positions at a deliberative disadvantage in comparison to extreme positions? Do people's pre-deliberation beliefs sometimes make deliberations more or less valuable? Is the "best" democratic political outcome more likely if we deliberate before voting, or if we're just polled without a lot of discussion amongst ourselves?

We still need a lot of clarification about just what the experiment measured (E.g., how was "extremism" defined?) Already though, it prods us to think about the "ought" and the "is" of liberal democratic theory. We sometimes talk about liberalism, in which autonomous agents deliberate with each other in freely-chosen associations, as both an idealized picture of the way society ought to be, and as a description of the way real democracies actually operate. We ought to act this way (some liberals say) because it's the best way we have of finding the most legitimate or the "truest" answers without violence and bloodshed, and we in fact operate this way (some other liberals say) because citizens actually do limit their deliberative appeals to "public reasons."

If the deliberation in this experiment were indeed of the liberal sort, does the fact that they promoted extremism count as an argument against the value of liberal deliberation? If these deliberations didn't conform to the liberal ideal, how anomalous are they? Does this experiment suggest that we simply don't deliberate reasonably as often as some liberals think we do?

(Ok; back to Wendell Berry...)

Posted by Carey at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This article from the LA Times points out that almost half of the students entering Birmingham High School in Van Nuys don't graduate. The article goes on to ask: "What happened to the class of 2005? It is a question, not just for Birmingham, but for all American schools."

Whoa, wait a minute.

Before we assume that this is a "school problem" -- and open up the tired debates over parents failing to send their kids to school "ready to learn," teachers failing to motivate the laggards, kids watching too much TV instead of doing homework, and the state failing to provide enough money -- we ought to ask if this abysmal graduation rate is more than just a school problem.

We're fond of pointing out the miserable fate that awaits high-school dropouts, and the lesson we take away from these facts is that kids shouldn't drop out. That's fine, as far as it goes, but isn't there another lesson?

Consider: what does it say about our economy that even though half the kids in high school drop out without graduating, the good jobs that require a high-school education and much more are being filled nicely, thanks. There's no shortage of well-educated workers corresponding to the excess of kids who drop out of high school. Our economy is humming along, getting more efficient all the time. From an economic productivity standpoint, there's no problem at all.

Conclusion? Well, if I didn't know better, I'd have to say that we're suffering from an efficiency problem. The information economy doesn't actually need very many people, so we're going to have to think of something else to do with all these kids. Hmm, thinking, thinking.... Aha! I've heard the army is stretched a bit thin right now.

Posted by Carey at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

David Ignatius quotes Elizabeth Kolbert from her New Yorker piece: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

The fact (and I think it is a fact) that most people believe technological sophistication somehow leads us to make wise decisions ought to make us wonder: why do people think that?

What connection is there between technological know-how and wisdom, or even basic prudence? Answer: none at all.

Posted by Carey at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of the best things about writing a paper on Wendell Berry, which I'm doing now, is having to read Berry closely. It's really a joy.

Perhaps the biggest rhetorical strength of Berry's essays are also their biggest rhetorical weakness: they're very poetic (or impressionistic,or allegorical). They're not particularly analytical or explicit. On the one hand, this makes them very inspiring for someone like me who reads Berry sympathetically. On the other hand, someone who isn't inclined to give Berry the benefit of the doubt is likely to dismiss his work as devoid of solid argument and evidence.

What I'm finding, as I work on my paper about Berry's relationship to the political philosophy called liberalism, is that a close, analytical reading makes his essays really sparkle. There is really a lot of solid argument in them, but those arguments are delivered poetically, which means the reader has to contribute a lot of himself if he's going to see what the argument is.

For example, I think Berry makes a powerful argument that the modern way of seeing the world makes it very difficult to take responsibility for our actions, and because of this it's dangerous. Of course, what exactly this "modern worldview" is takes some teasing out. Think of the uncritical enthusiasm for technology, the myth that pursuit of self-interest benefits the community, and the belief that the future will be better than the past. The modern worldview has historically led us to denegrate the merely local. It has encouraged hyperspecialization over generalization. And these two things -- globalization and hyperspecialization -- prevent us from even knowing the effects of what we do, let alone taking responsibility for them.

It's a profound critique of the way we aspire to live, that I think is largely correct. Puzzling through all of this is really, really fun.

Posted by Carey at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blogging here hasn't been the top priority lately, as you can tell. I've been busy with end-of-semester work and with interviewing for residency programs. I'll be able to blog more regularly after about another week or so.

Even though I'm busy, I must point you to this article from the LA Times about day-care centers that care for children and the elderly both. It's pretty amazing that something like this would warrant a big newspaper article at all, but we've been sequestering people by age for quite a while now. A lot of us have forgotten what old people can do for the young, and vice-versa.

When I worked on an ambulance, we would often get called to these huge assisted-living complexes which felt to me like warehouses for old people. Those places were predictably depressing. I suppose we do it because it's more efficient, but it sure as hell isn't very joyous. The same thing is true, I suppose, of other communities segregated by age. Like, say, the neighborhood where I live in Ann Arbor. Everyone here's a young adult, so it's a more hoppin' place than some of those big retirement communities in Denver were. Even so, I think it'd be nice if we had a few more retirees living among us. For one thing, the neighborhood would almost certainly look less dumpy.

Anyway, the article made me smile, and I hope you'll take the time to read it.

Posted by Carey at 05:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Good manners are rare these days, says George Will, and I agree.

Maybe it's just easier to notice bad manners than good manners, but when Will talks about people with cell phones and iPods who act as if they're completely unaware of other people around them, it sounds familiar to me. Even more annoying than the iPod solipsists Will mentions are the folks who gather in groups of two or three or more for a leisurely conversation -- right in the middle of a narrow sidewalk, or in a crowded doorway. I used to commute to my job at a bookstore in Denver along a bike path downtown, and during the lunch hour there'd always be clusters of middle-aged office workers chatting it up as they sprawled out across the middle of the bike path. "Excuse me! Coming through!" Fucknuts.

So I agree that much with George Will, but no further. When Will gets around to the reasons for today's bad manners, I wonder if he's put his brain on autopilot: "But today's entitlement mentality, which is both a cause and a consequence of the welfare state, manifests itself in the attitude that it is all right to do whatever one has a right to do."

Hmm. The welfare state?

In Colorado Springs where I grew up, I met a lot of people who suffered from an "entitlement mentality." But they weren't all recipients of welfare state largesse like food stamps and Section 8 housing assistance. Most of the "entitled" people I met were the folks who complained the loudest about the "welfare state." The retired Air Force colonels with RVs in the driveway who felt entitled to be insulated from all the noises of rambunctious neighborhood kids, but who seemed to have forgotten that they'd chosen to live in a kid-friendly subdivision rather than on 50 acres of farmland. Or the local entrepreneur who owned an office-supply store and felt entitled to pay no taxes whatsoever because he'd earned that money "himself." Never mind that the stable and peaceful community that was a prerequisite for his store's flourishing depended upon social programs that went beyond just fire trucks and armed police officers to arrest shoplifters.

I don't think that people who talk too loud in restaurants or who congregate in doorways always do so because they feel entitled. But Will may be right that an "entitlement mentality" is to blame for people's unwillingness to take account of the people around them. What Will can't seem to recognize is that rabid conservatism can leave one feeling obnoxiously entitled, too.

Posted by Carey at 09:36 AM | Permalink |