Glorfindel of Gondolin

As is often the case, Glenn Greenwald's latest blog post must be read:

The New York Times' Eric Lichtblau has a long, prominent article today on the pending debate over FISA and telecom amnesty -- headlined: "Return to Old Spy Rules Is Seen as Deadline Nears" -- that features (and endorses) virtually every blatant falsehood that has distorted these spying issues from the beginning, and which is built on every shoddy journalistic practice that has made clear debate over these issues almost impossible. The article strongly suggests that a so-called "compromise" is imminent, a "compromise" which will deliver to the President virtually everything he seeks in the way of new warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom amnesty.

Posted by Carey at 02:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There's an excellent discussion going on over at Stanley Fish's NYT column about the role of political beliefs among college professors. I tend to agree with Fish. The University of Colorado's attempts to recruit conservative faculty members are misplaced and should embarrass all Coloradans.

In my own experience, I've found that a diversity of political views within the student body is far more important for a student's experience than that within the faculty. As Fish argues, most competent professors can and do bracket their own political views in the classroom. But students, in conversations outside of class, can't and shouldn't do the same thing. This means that if you're on a campus where 98 percent of your fellow students are liberal (or conservative), you're unlikely to encounter a serious challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy in your conversations at lunch and in the dorm.

I speak from experience. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I couldn't make any political statement wihout being strongly challenged by some fellow student who profoundly disagreed with me. After transferring to Reed College, all the students were so overwhelmingly liberal that my left-leaning statements were given a free pass, while my right-leaning statements were appropriately and skillfully attacked. Fifty percent* of the arguments that I would have had at Chicago, disappeared at Reed. I loved both schools, but the politically more diverse student body at Chicago made for a more interesting intellectual experience there.

As for the faculty at both schools, I couldn't tell a thing about their personal political beliefs from their classroom teaching.

*I like to think that orthodox liberals would strongly object to about half of my political positions.

Posted by Carey at 01:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

Here's a great post on the Daily Kos that sorts out the controversy over who's winning the popular vote.

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

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. . . .

Point taken, Mr. Greenwald. But to pick a small bone: seventh-grade civics like this died a quiet death sometime in the late 1970s.

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)

We hear people throwing around the word "hero" a lot these days, mostly in reference to our soldiers fighting in Iraq. Heroes these soldiers may be, but let's also recognize some other heroes serving our country, even if they aren't lauded by the Hugh Hewitts and Rush Limbaughs of the world. Heroes like the military lawyers and judges who aren't playing along with the system of kangaroo courts set up by the Bush administration to try convict prisoners at Guantanamo:

The Supreme Court, then, is hardly the only thing standing between the president and kangaroo convictions at Guantanamo. The truth is that the best thing the commissions have going for them right now are the lawyers and judges in uniform who have, albeit reluctantly, refused to play along. If they'd been out on the battlefield, they'd have killed any detainee they met as an enemy. But they're not willing to see them killed in the wake of a sham trial. That's not because they value the lives of terrorists over the lives of Americans or because they value legal formalism over the exigencies of war. It's because they come out of a long military tradition of legal integrity and independence. And much as it must pain them, this precludes them from being yes men for the Bush administration at the expense of the rule of law.

Posted by Carey at 10:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The New York Times editorializes about "how democracy is supposed to work":

In an interview with ABC’s “Good Morning America,” on Monday, Mr. Obama’s wife, Michelle, was asked if she would work to support Mrs. Clinton if she won. “I’d have to think about that,” she replied.

Mrs. Obama quickly got back on her talking points, stressing party unity. But her unguarded answer was similar to what we heard from Obama supporters in e-mail messages that we received after endorsing Mrs. Clinton. Many of those readers said they would not bother to vote if Mr. Obama lost the nomination. That is not the way democracy is supposed to work.

I agree with the Times that Obama supporters ought to support Clinton if (and it's a big, big if) she wins the nomination.

But the Times is wrong about democracy. This is exactly how democracy is "supposed to work." Voters can vote for whomever they want, for whatever reasons they want. They can choose not to vote at all. They can do whatever they want for reasons that don't make any sense at all.

In fact, this freedom of voters to behave irrationally is the strongest argument that's been made against democracy as a form of government. It's been the strongest argument against democracy for thousands of years.

The problem has always been that in a democracy, we defer to the will of the people. And the people, unlike philosopher-kings, can and often do act irrationally (insert snarky comment about the re-election of George W. Bush here).

Posted by Carey at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some musings about the pros and cons of libertarianism from Michael Kinsley:

Libertarians are quick to see hidden costs of ignoring libertarian principles and slow to see such costs in adhering to them. For example, Tucker Carlson reports in the Dec. 31 New Republic that Ron Paul wants to end the federal ban on unpasteurized milk. No one should want to drink unpasteurized milk, and almost no one does. Paul himself doesn't. But it bothers him that the government tells people they cannot do something they shouldn't do.Libertarians would say that if most people want pasteurized milk, the market will supply it. Firms will emerge to certify that milk has been pasteurized. These firms will compete, keeping them honest.

So yes, a Rube Goldberg contraption of capitalism could replace a straightforward government regulation. But what if you aren't interested in turning your grocery shopping into an ideological adventure? All that is lost by letting the government take care of it is the right of a few idiots to be idiots. That right deserves respect. But not much.

Libertarians have always struck me as kind of naive -- kind of like die-hard Tolkien fans who insist on dressing like elves and wondering why, really, we don't all just fight it out with swords to solve our problems.

I'm deeply sympathetic, yes. But I still think it's a bit naive.

Posted by Carey at 03:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The NYT has an article about the differences between the Democratic and Republican candidates on energy policy:

For Democrats, the goal of energy policy is largely about reducing oil consumption and has become inseparable from the goal of reducing the risk of climate change.

For the Republican candidates, energy policy is primarily about producing more energy at home — more oil and gas drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; more use of American coal to produce liquid fuel; and, as with Democrats, more renewable fuels like ethanol.

By contrast, all of the Democratic candidates would repeal billions of dollars in tax breaks for oil companies, spend billions more each year to develop alternative fuels, and require cars and trucks to be far more fuel-efficient.

Republicans: icky, sicky, throw-up politicians.

Posted by Carey at 02:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few supporters of congressman Ron Paul have discovered and responded to my posts about the libertarian presidential candidate. Since I linked to a popular DailyKos post suggesting that Paul was a racist, the least I can do is to point out two sources suggesting that he isn't -- see this and this.

If you're curious about Paul, read them all for yourself and make up your own mind.

Personally, I doubt that racism can fairly be attributed to Ron Paul.  I don't doubt that some of his supporters are racists -- Clinton and Obama and Giuliani almost certainly have their racist supporters, too -- but Paul seems like too much of a libertarian to be a racist himself.

However, racism is not my biggest problem with Ron Paul.  His libertarianism is.

Look, I don't disagree with libertarians that a large state can be dangerous.  It tries to monopolize the use of force, and its power is so great that it makes good sense to be afraid of it.  Yes, the state can never be compassionate, altruistic, or responsible in anything like the sense that an individual can be.  It's also true that an overly-large state can be an obstacle to responsible stewardship, because it substitutes an individual's direct control over some portion of his assets with a far less-direct political influence over how the state uses those assets that have been confiscated in taxes.

All of that, I get.  Libertarianism and agrarianism together have no use for an overweening, monstrous state.  (If they did, they'd be called "socialism" or "communism.")

But here is where I believe libertarianism and agrarianism part company: libertarianism picks out individual liberty from among the many human goods and holds it up as the preeminent end-in-itself.  Liberty trumps everything else.  Agrarianism holds that individual liberty must be balanced harmoniously with the health of the family, the community, and the place (or "the environment" if you prefer that term).  There is no trump; each conflict between human goods must be evaluated in the context of the particular circumstances applying at that time and place.

For libertarians, the only legitimate reason to constrain an individual's freedom of action is when that action hurts another person.  "Hurting another person" usually amounts to the same thing as reducing another person's freedom.  For the libertarian, this is the ultimate goal.  If there are pleasant side effects, then all the merrier for everyone, but the maximization of liberty is still the goal even if there are no pleasant side effects, or even if the side effects are unpleasant.

You can see this kind of thinking in Paul's response to his critics' charge that he's a racist:

The true antidote to racism is liberty. Liberty means having a limited, constitutional government devoted to the protection of individual rights rather than group claims. Liberty means free-market capitalism, which rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity. In a free market, businesses that discriminate lose customers, goodwill, and valuable employees – while rational businesses flourish by choosing the most qualified employees and selling to all willing buyers.

I'm not a racist, argues Paul, because I'd never advocate using the power of the state to constrain an individual's freedom because of their race.  The true libertarian cannot be a racist because racial discrimination conflicts with the ultimate goal of maximizing freedom.

Paul also claims that there are pleasant side effects when individuals are given the maximum amount of freedom possible, namely that racism withers away in an environment where the free market "rewards individual achievement and competence, not skin color, gender, or ethnicity."  David Bernstein's comments on this view demonstrate how myopic it is.  Paul, like many other libertarians, cannot account for private racism because of his idealized and fictional view of how the market works unencumbered by the state.  Whether anything about libertarianism compels this fictional view of the market is an interesting question.  But that's not the point here.

The point is that even if you were to convince Paul that this pleasant side effect of free market economics won't pan out, this wouldn't be sufficient in itself to change Paul's opposition to any state-organized efforts to fight racism.  Because Paul is a libertarian, you'd have to convince him that that racism has limited people's liberty to a greater extent than it would be limited by government intervention.  Goal #1, liberty, must be maximized at all costs, even if those costs include the indignity of overt racism, or racism's destructive effects on the community, or its harm to the non-human environment (if any).

Ditto for any other government policy -- environmental, financial, military.  And ditto for any level of government. The libertarian doesn't care whether the constraints on an individual's liberty comes from the U.N. or the feds or the state or the town council.  All of these are "collectivist" and as such are a potential enemy of freedom.

In fact, from an agrarian perspective, libertarianism's fatal weakness is that it's an industrial, one-size-fits-all ideology.  It's "industrial" because it claims to be applicable universally, in every time and place.  When libertarians make universal claims for the primacy of individual freedom over other human goods, they're ignoring local variations of opinion and taste much the same way the neocons ignored these things when they argued for invading Iraq.

Agrarians should also reject libertarianism because it reduces the complex features of a good human life to just one of those factors: liberty.  This is analogous to the difference between agrarian agriculture and industrial agriculture, where the latter reduces a complex activity dependent on a keen awareness of local variation to just three things: phosphorus, nitrogen, and potassium.  The failings of this reductivist approach to agriculture are clearly described by Michael Pollan in his Omnivore's Dilemma, and are recognized by successful farmers who reject the industrial model, like Joel Salatin.

Sure, the government might be "too big" right now. But the libertarian's answer to this problem is akin to the guy with the arthritic knee who says to himself, "if one Tylenol is good for my knee, the whole bottle of pills ought to be really great."  That's the kind of guy that dies of liver failure.  We may be choking on bureaucracy, but the libertarian's enthusiasm for the opposite extreme ought to scare us a little.

Posted by Carey at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You just knew this had to be a Daniel Larison post:

Geoffrey Wheatcroft has reminded us that we do not actually have either a functioning democratic or republican system, but instead suffer through a series of inept family-based cliques in a kakistocratic oligarchy (there are certainly no aristoi in our political class) in which connections are decisive and merit painfully irrelevant.  The latest example of this is the accession to the throne presidential campaign of Clinton.  In other words, things are running much as they have done for much of my lifetime (and almost certainly longer than that).  The idea that Bush-Clinton fatigue will set in among voters this time derives from the average pundit’s impatience with the dreariness of dynastic cycles and the continued belief that democracy results in generally better, more dynamic and less squalid government.  Our system keeps doing its best to prove that belief wrong, but it persists anyway.

"Kakistocratic."  I've been looking for a word like that for, oh, almost eight years now....

Posted by Carey at 10:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Agrarianism, like any other -ism, is shorthand for an enormous number of practices, ideas, and commitments. But if I were going to sum it up as briefly as possible, I might say that agrarianism is what happens when you take "responsibility" seriously. (You could make similarly suggestive but incomplete statements about other -isms, for example, that libertarianism is what you get when you take "freedom" seriously, or that fascism is what you get when you take "authority" seriously. Obviously a whole lot more needs to be said, but these statements are accurate and provocative starting points.)

Our non-agrarian society makes it very difficult to take full responsibility for what we do. According to the agrarian writer Wendell Berry,

When there is no reliable accounting and therefore no competent knowledge of the economic and ecological effects of our lives, we cannot live lives that are economically and ecologically responsible. [Berry, "The Whole Horse"]

Berry thinks that in modern society there is in fact "no reliable accounting," and "no competent knowledge" of what we are doing.

We are thus involved in a kind of lostness in which most people are participating more or less unconsciously in the destruction of the natural world, which is to say, the sources of their own lives.  They are doing this unconsciously because they see or do very little of the actual destruction themselves, and they don't know, because they have no way to learn, how they are involved. [Berry, "Two Minds"]

The reason that we "see or do very little of the actual destruction ourselves" is that the nature and scale of our work in the modern economy diffuse the effects of our actions over enormous distances and long time periods.  So enormous and so long, in fact, that we have almost no way of actually observing these effects and seeing that they are the results of what we've done.  We see the consequences only in the aggregate -- newspaper articles decrying rainforest destruction in Brazil, videos of starving sweatshop workers in Malaysia, lamentations for the disappearance of butterflies in Alabama.  And we wonder, from our kitchen tables in Chicago or Colorado, how any of that could possibly be connected to our own 45-mile commute in to work from the suburbs each day, or to our weekly trips with the kids to Wal-Mart for some of those low, low prices.  Even if we do make the imaginative leap required to believe that our spending money at Wal-Mart contributes incrementally to the abuse of child laborers halfway around the world, we'll find it hard to say that in any sense we're "responsible" for that outcome.  And even if we get that far, it's hard to convince ourselves to alter our comfortable behaviors for the sake of people we know only as abstractions and who we'll never meet, much less love.

It is different in a local (agrarian) economy.  When the local clothing store locks its workers, who are also your neighbors, in its stores overnight so that it can shave five cents off the price of a t-shirt, you're much more likely to see the connection between your patronage of that shop and the mistreatment of your neighbors.  You're much more likely to feel some responsibility for the person living across the street named Bob than you are for "malaysian sweatshop workers" in a nation you'd be hard pressed to find on a map.

There are many other examples implicating the deleterious effects of over-large scale and hyperspecialization on our capacity for taking responsibility.  Let's say you're a small-town lawyer.  You take a case defending the local factory from a lawsuit brought by its employees after an explosion that killed two workers and put five more in the hospital.  The same questions about whether it's ethical or not to take that case arise for the lawyer who works for a five-hundred person law firm representing a multinational company sued by the same workers, for the same explosion, in a state fifteen hundred miles away.  But the first lawyer is better able to take responsibility for his actions.  He lives close enough to the accident site to see what the damage has done.  He may know, as a citizen of the community, whether the factory owners have acted fairly or rapaciously in the past.  He is more likely to work on the whole case from start to finish than if he were an associate at a big firm, who may never actually meet the clients and whose participation may be limited only to drafting a few memos covering narrow aspects of the discovery in the case.  Both lawyers may decide to work on the case or not, but it's extremely unlikely that the big firm lawyer will really have taken responsibility for his decision.  How can he?  He can't see the effects of his work, and he has no real connection with the place that those effects are felt.  The same problems confront virtually all of us who work in the modern "global economy."

This need to take responsibility for our actions leads Rick Saenz to advocate dealing with righteous people that we've met and know well, and Wendell Berry to suggest that we broaden the context of our work by narrowing its scale.  This, and not some purely esthetic preference for small farms, is what lies behind the agrarian opposition to the global economy and the preference for the local.

Saenz goes further, in his post on "knowing your neighbors."  When I finished reading the post I found it hard to decide if I liked it enough to recommend it, or hated it enough to post an argument against it.  I suppose that it's both.

In the course of arguing that we ought to pay attention to the local landscape, Saenz also says that we shouldn't concern ourselves with the "affairs of nations and empires"; that we shouldn't bother to "form opinions about the causes of war and famines and prosperity and tyranny," and that we shouldn't "track natural disasters in far-off places."  Why?  Because we can't actually do anything about these things anyway, and any time spent paying attention to these things distracts us from paying proper attention to our local environment.

I disagree.

Someone less charitable than I could easily read Saenz as arguing against curiosity, and for a strictly instrumentalist use of our powers of perception and wonder -- "if we can't use information, we're better off not having it at all."  I won't do that.  But I think Saenz fails to understand that his own agrarian project is profoundly dependent upon our paying even closer attention to the news around the globe than most of us normally do.

If agrarianism is not simply to be just an esthetic preference, we have to make the effort to understand how we are responsible, by our participation in the modern economy, for things that we can't easily see or easily trace back to things that we've done.  The problem with globalization is that at the same time that it gives us each some small power to improve or degrade a landscape half a world away, it makes it extremely hard to see or know exactly what we're doing.  Those sweatshop laborers in Malaysia suffer what they suffer because we choose to buy their employers' products.  If we shop at Wal-Mart, we need to pay attention to the news from Malaysia or we are shirking our responsibility.  And even if, as Saenz suggests, we refuse to shop at Wal-Mart, we'll still need to understand what's going on in Malaysia.  Any close attention that we pay to our local environment will inexorably -- since we don't live in an agrarian economy, yet -- reveal that it is caught up in an economic system that ties it to Malaysia and other places.

Until we no longer live in a global economy (and I'm doubtful that this will ever happen), we will have to expend more -- not less -- effort at understanding the ties between our local place and places on the other side of the globe.  To use one of Saenz' examples: let's say your city council is about to "waste another few million of our tax dollars."  These days, that's likely to be because it's contemplating cutting a deal with BestBuy to level two or three square blocks of homes to make way for a new mega-store parking lot, or because it wants to let Kodak off the hook for millions of dollars of taxes to entice it to relocate locally rather than move to Malaysia where the government there is paying death squads to kill labor organizers in order to keep wages low.  No one who ignores, as Saenz suggests we do, the news from Malaysia is likely to really understand what their own local city council is doing.

The problem with globalization, as Wendell Berry tells us, is that it combines huge-scale activities with myopic vision.  The answer is not to increase our myopia.  To take proper responsibility means that we must make even more of an effort to understand what we're doing.  And even if, like Saenz suggests, we opt out of the global economy and try to do for ourselves, we will still find ourselves living in communities that are tied into the global economy (and even Saenz recognizes that this "opting-out" will often have to be done piecemeal).  Attention to the local demands that we pay attention to the global, or, as Wal-Mart would prefer it, we won't understand what's going on globally or locally.

Posted by Carey at 02:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

. . . in this editorial:

It was appalling to watch over the last few days as Congress — now led by Democrats — caved in to yet another unnecessary and dangerous expansion of President Bush’s powers, this time to spy on Americans in violation of basic constitutional rights.

Posted by Carey at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As this opinion piece from Charles Krauthammer demonstrates, Barack Obama's opponents are really grasping for straws. Now they're saying that Obama committed a gaffe by saying that he'd meet with foreign heads of state that we don't like. Krauthammer's explanation for why this is a gaffe is pretty weak.

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

This kind of thing is grist for my mill.

The more we know, the less likely we are to buy into the myth that the wealthy deserve all that they have, while the poor owe what little they have to handouts.

Posted by Carey at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If I were still in law school (and not post-call on the trauma service), this article from the novelist and occasional current-affairs commentator Mark Helprin would have provoked a long post many days ago: A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?

Helprin makes the provocative, because so seldom-heard, argument that copyright terms extending to 70 years after the death of the author just aren't long enough:

Congress is free to extend at will the term of copyright. It last did so in 1998, and should do so again, as far as it can throw. Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else? The answer is obvious, and transcends even justice. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.

This argument deserves a reasoned refutation instead of (in addition to?) a dismissive guffaw. Helprin has wandered off into cuckoo-land here, and if I weren't so sleep-deprived, I'd tell you now why I think so.

But alas, wisdom demands that I grab a beer, curl up in bed with my book for half an hour, and go to sleep. I'm back in the hospital again tomorrow....

Posted by Carey at 07:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know what this guy is talking about. For the past four years I, too, was one of America's young invincibles:

Andrew Kuo, a 29-year-old painter, told me he made a vow to be insured by the time he turned 30. “But that was when 30 seemed like a ways away,” he added. “Now I find myself making all these stupid calculations. Like, it would cost me around $3,000 a year to have insurance, right? Okay, isn’t that about what it would cost out of pocket if I broke my wrist? Chances are I’m not going to break my wrist once a year, so why not save the money for that onetime emergency?” Like many I spoke with, Kuo said he’d happily pay for insurance, if only the cost-benefit analysis tilted more in its favor. “What’s ironic is that I would never live without my cell phone, but I won’t consider buying health insurance. It sounds ridiculous to say that out loud, but the fact is insurance is just too expensive. If it was the same price as my phone”—$150 a month sounded reasonable to him—“I’d buy it in a second.”

Posted by Carey at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales is the 80th attorney general of the United States and if recent events in the law and at the Justice Department are any indication, he is rapidly staking a claim to being among the worst.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this series...

Posted by Carey at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the mail today was an envelope from Richard Krugman, chair of the AAMC and dean of my medical alma mater, the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

It contained good news and bad news. The good news: CU placed 15th among medical schools in the AAMCs ranking of NIH research expenditures, the school placed 4th among public medical schools in its research earnings, and the school just received a $6 million private research grant for a stem cell biology program. It sounds as if the medical school's budget is healthy, at least from a research perspective, and the state of Colorado ought to be proud of its accomplishments.

But, um... the bad news is that the state legislature continues to withhold its support from the school's educational mission. Less than 2% of its operating budget comes from the state, and because research dollars can't be used to support educational activities, tuition has increased to cover the shortfall. The average debt of CUs graduating students is now over $100,000 (although this is probably in line with the median debt of all public medical schools).*

I've posted about medical school tuition and debt before (1, 2). It is reasonable to assume that high med school debt makes primary care careers less attractive to new graduates relative to specialties like interventional cardiology (some studies cited here). Given that we all keep complaining about the rising costs of medical care, and that these costs are in part driven by an oversupply of high-cost specialist physicians relative to an undersupply of primary care doctors, high medical student debt should bother us.

The question we have to answer has never been whether or not to spend tax dollars on the public good called "physician training." Rather, the question is when should we pay, and how much. Right now, we've decided to pay later -- cutting funding for medical education up front and paying for the consequences of increased student debt at the end. We subsidize the medical care provided by high-cost specialists -- through medicaid, SCHIP programs, and tax breaks, among other things. We continue to contemplate some kind of national health care system. We fund loan-forgiveness programs for new graduates who elect primary care despite the relatively paltry incomes that these fields offer.

But we ought to wonder whether we might get a bigger bang for our buck if we paid more up-front to ensure that medical school tuition at public medical schools was reasonable. We might save a lot of money by eliminating the administrative waste that accompanies loan-forgiveness programs if new M.D.s didn't start out with staggering debt to begin with.

The letter I got from Dean Krugman says that a current student will call me soon to ask for my contribution to the school. I'm looking forward to talking with that student about some of these things, and about the new curriculum that (finally!) is in place at Colorado.

Here's some more materials about the debt issue from the AAMC.

* Jolly, P. Medical school tuition and young physician indebtedness. Health Aff. 2005; 24:527-35.

Posted by Carey at 09:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As you can see by the banner to the left, I'm excited about the possibility that Barack Obama might become the next President.

One reason that I like Obama is that he doesn't act like a partisan hack, even though he's clearly a forceful advocate for his positions. This comes through in the recollections of a former Harvard Law Review colleague (via Hugh Hewitt). When you consider how rare it is in the partisan blogosphere to read complementary pieces about one's ideological opponents, this one really stands out:

No doubt it’s a long, long road to The White House, even for politicians with significantly more experience than Illinois' junior senator. But many of the qualities that he manifested during our joint tenure on The Harvard Law Review help explain why so many enthusiastically contemplate the prospect that Barack Obama's journey to the Oval Office will be both a short and a successful one.

Posted by Carey at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Free speech" is universally acknowledged in this country to be a good thing, and it seems obvious that it is. Which probably explains why, when George Will wants to attack a proposed rule change making it easier for workers to join a union, he chooses to characterize the rule change that he doesn't like as an "assault on corporate speech." Will suggests by the accusation that the new rules would be un-American or vaguely unconstitutional, but the question for us is: is Will correct?

The House is scheduled to vote on a bill this week that would change the procedure for establishing unionized workplaces. Under the new rules, union representation would be established whenever a majority of workers sign a card declaring that they want a union. Currently, unionizing requires a formal secret-ballot election supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

I'm far from understanding all the subtleties of these proposed rule changes, but suffice it to say that union organizers think the new procedures will make it easier to organize workers (which is why they support them), and employers agree (which is why they oppose them). There are many arguments that can be made for and against the rule changes -- many involve the extent to which workers would be exposed to pressure from either employers or from union organizers; others involve the benefits and costs to our economy that a more unionized workforce would entail. George Will, however, knowing the power that the idea of "free speech" has in our country, chooses to attack the rule change as an "assault on corporate speech."

We should be suspicious of Will's argument, for many of the same reasons that this sentence of Will's just sounds odd: "[McCain-Feingold's] speech restrictions -- applauded as virtuous by the (exempt) media -- have legitimized talk about "drawing lines" to circumscribe the speech rights of entire categories of Americans, in this case employers."

Employers -- the "category of Americans" that Will has in mind -- apparently includes not just Bob Smith down the block who owns a plumbing supply company, but also PepsiCo and Wal-Mart. It's reasonable to ask whether the virtues of free speech enjoyed by individual citizens and human beings are equally as virtuous when applied to behemoth corporations that are "persons" in a legal sense only. Corporations are constructs formed for the sole purpose of concentrating more capital in one place than any single human being could ever possess, are non-existent apart from the hundreds of thousands of individual human beings that invest in and are employed by the corporation (all of whom presumably have opinions of their own that cannot be said to be Pepsi's "opinions"), and are, to the extent that we can speak of them as single entities, single-mindedly devoted to the pursuit of monetary profit to an extent far greater than any of the real human beings that collectively make it up. You shouldn't expect to reason with a corporation in the same way that you can reason with a human being. You can't "persuade" it like you can persuade the individual who may be its CEO.

It's a simple point, really. It's why we can call the same words uttered by our neighbor Fritz "persuasion," but when they're uttered by the Government we call it "propaganda." One of the reasons Americans love free speech so much is precisely because we think that allowing individuals to voice their opinions protects us from the overbearing influence of messages delivered from on high -- usually by the government. The question is, is "corporate speech" in the context of union organizing more like government propaganda or more like discussing the issues of the day with the lady who waits tables at Bennigan's? George Will may have a good point about the union organizing rules, but his equation of "corporate speech" with free speech generally is much more suspect.

Posted by Carey at 07:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)

Don't get me wrong -- Juan Cole is certainly an interesting and provocative blogger. But the only reason I can see for this obsessive preoccupation with his job applications in the National Review Online is that Cole's criticism of the Bush administration's middle east policies have struck a nerve with some of the more unhinged Bush apologists.

Or maybe it's the accusations that a "neoconservative cabal" has it in for Cole that has struck a nerve.

Or, maybe, it's just that National Review Online has such shitty journalistic standards that Jonah Goldberg isn't the only hack that NRO will publish. Think about it: here's a whole article about how Cole's becoming one of the four finalists for a professorship at Duke, after a search that "stretched across disciplines," somehow entitles Cole's critics to an "apology."

How utterly bizarre.

Posted by Carey at 09:41 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)

For a blessed two weeks, I'll be away from the city that I love, namely Chicago, on vacation to the land that I love and the region that I call home, namely the American West. Colorado first, then California. Can't wait to feel that dry air again.

Since I've gotta catch some Zs before my flight tomorrow, I won't say much about this piece by Sebastian Mallaby. Save to say that I viscerally disagree with every last thing in it.

Posted by Carey at 12:57 AM | 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.

Most of my friends who are sympathetic to my agrarian tendencies are also opponents of immigration from Mexico. Perhaps I'm dense, but I still fail to see any crisis here.

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

One of the reasons why I haven't been blogging recently, I think, has to do with my apartment. Right now, it hasn't got a lot of furniture, and I don't have a lamp for the table where I usually sit to work with my computer. The place just doesn't feel like home yet, so I've been spending most of my non-working time in coffeeshops. It's just been easier to sit and read, rather than blog.

But I've got to say something about the announcement that Ford is cutting production in the face of what it insists are surprisingly high gasoline prices. Surprising? The NYT times article appropriately quotes an analyst who ridicules that notion: "they might say nobody could see it coming; well, nobody but everyone in the world." This talk of "surprisingly" high gas prices is pure CYA from Ford.

But the real point I'd like to make is this: Ford's competitive disadvantage in the market for fuel-efficient cars is in part a product of its own success at resisting government regulation. It was Ford, and the other American carmakers, who have fought tooth and nail against any increase in the corporate average fuel economy (or CAFE) standards, and who have gotten what they've asked for from the compliant administration of George W. Bush. Now that gas is over $3 a gallon (not a surprising thing), the market is eating Ford's gas-guzzling fleet of pickups and SUVs alive. Ford would probably be in a better competitive position vis-a-vis Toyota if the government had gotten serious about improving domestic fuel efficiency.

Frankly, I laugh when I read about Ford's troubles selling cars. The problem is, it's no laughing matter for Ford's workers, who ought to worry about layoffs like Ford should have worried about higher gas prices. And next time, hopefully, the industry's anti-regulation lobbying efforts won't be so successful.

Posted by Carey at 02:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Says Mark Schmitt at The Decembrist:

"On reading this, my first reaction was that if the academic left can be a little wacky and irresponsible, the academic right is wacky and despicable."

I ask, why "despicable?" Oh, yeah -- Jean Bethke Elshtain and Leon Kass think we should withhold the rights and privileges of marriage from gay people, but they can't come up with any good arguments for their position. So they use bad arguments instead.

I laughed especially hard when I read this in Section I of their "Princeton Principles":

The health of marriage is particularly important in a free society such as our own, which depends upon citizens to govern their private lives and rear their children responsibly, so as to limit the scope, size, and power of the state.

Reconciling a social conservatism with an avowed preference for limited government can get kind of tricky sometimes. If you want to rely on the state to use its coercive power against unwelcome cultural developments, then you're not asking to limit the scope, size, and power of the state. You're just hijacking state power for your own cultural and religious ends.

Elsewhere in their "Princeton Principles," these leading right-wing academics say this:

Marriage is under attack conceptually, in university communities and other intellectual centers of influence. To defend marriage will require confronting these attacks, assessing their arguments, and correcting them where necessary. We are persuaded that the case for marriage can be made and won at the level of reason.

By which you apparently mean, not at the level of religious faith and preaching. Well, reason tells me that you still don't understand that there's a difference between "attacking marriage" and defending gay marriage. Marriage between men and women is harmed by infidelity, lack of commitment, dishonesty, and all the other things we already know about and, sadly, already succumb to. Fight against those things, if you want. You only distract the public from these very real evils by trying and failing to build a case that gay marriage somehow harms marriage in the way that dishonesty and infidelity do.

Nothing you say in your "Principles" is sufficient to justify the gender distinctions you're so eager to make. You could be honest at this point and just admit that you simply believe, based on religious or on some other faith-based grounds, that man/woman marriage is the only way to go. But "reason"? Call me a skeptic. If this argument was based on reason, I have faith that you could have come up with some more persuasive arguments by now.

Posted by Carey at 01:54 AM | Permalink |