Gay marriage and all that stuff

What's Their Real Problem With Gay Marriage? (It's the Gay Part) - New York Times

''Lifestyle'' is a buzzword in conservative Christian circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that homosexuality is not an innate condition but a hedonistic way of living, one devoted to partying, drugs and wanton sex that ends, often, in illness and early death...As the landscape of fear fills in, the picture comes into view. It is Hieronymus Bosch's ''Garden of Earthly Delights,'' a phantasmagoria of sin and a complete breakdown of the social order.

Remarkably, after producing a great deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting that religion per se isn't the source of anti-gay sentiment the author piously concludes that it is the source of anti-gay sentiment.

Anti-gay activists want exactly the same thing that gay activists want--basic respect and support for the life they choose to live. For the past 30 years they haven't been getting it and this NYTimes article is more of the same. The cues are hard to miss--from the description of the Family Research Council's headquarters in a "small but grandiose building" that looks as if it might have been the "onetime home of Rutherford B. Hayes or some other historical personage heavy with Victorian-era dignity" but turns out to have been built in 1996, to the rendition of anti-gay activist Laura Clark's tacky tract house in Catonsville replete with "wall-to-wall carpeting and hand-me-down furnishings." (Locals will appreciate the reference to Catonsville and Towson State, from which Laura dropped out).

The Clark's counterparts, lesbian couple Lisa Polyak and Bita Deane have hardwood floors covered with Oriental rugs and we know that if they were entertaining they wouldn't set out a buffet like the one Laura arranged for the author--"sliced lunch meats, hamburger buns, tomato and onion slices, bowls of pretzels and chips, cookies and several two-quart plastic bottles of soda"--reminiscent of a picture of Judy Agnew the Times ran long ago that showed her standing in front of an open refrigerator door holding a bowl of jello. I wonder if Laura, who has certainly read the article, gets it. I strongly suspect she does, even if she wouldn't admit it.

I'm ambivalent and, as they say, conflicted about all this. On the one hand I wonder why, even if Laura has to live in Catonsville, she can't at least strip off the wall-to-wall carpeting and get some Oriental rugs. They aren't that expensive at IKEA (and even in Baltimore there is an IKEA). And if she's doing a spread for a NYTimes reporter, why can't she hit the gourmet section at Giant and get something a little more tasty than hamburger buns and potato chips.

On the other hand. Laura likes her wall-to-wall carpeting--makes a good play area for the kids and resists stains--and pretzels, chips and cookies are what her family and friends like to eat. She likes being a housewife and homeschooling her kids. Her traditional suburban family likes being a traditional suburban family--she and her husband glory in their four kids on the porch "riding tricycles and training-wheeled bicycles in a tight circle around the adults, bashing into one another, performing for their parents and the visitor."

I've always been ambivalent: I wanted that kind of life, what I thought of as a "real Dick and Jane family" and I got it--with modifications. It seemed like an impossible dream. No one I knew in my 20s seriously considered the possibility of getting married much less having children--and most never did. No one wanted to live in the burbs--it was something they dreaded, something they were afraid they would envelop them against their will--and any sort of religious involvement was simply off the map.

I can empathize with the Clarks' worries. They sense, with good reason, that people with prestige and power are contemptuous of them or at the very least regard them as anthropological specimens--when, after reporting on the Clarks, Shorto visits the Polyak-Deane menage we get the sense that he's come back from an expedition to another country, where he's extended himself to take the local culture on its own terms, and can now relax. They also worry, with less reason, that the "lifestyle" they like and believe to be good will disappear--they imagine a chaotic, competitive, sexual free-for-all, all the world turned into the beach on Spring Break, the Garden of Earthly Delights. I can understand that too: I'm all for earthly delights but in large doses they're stressful and boring. No one wants to trade in that sexual meat market indefinitely. It's like the bazaars I've been to in Kenya and China--interesting to try out but I wouldn't want to spend my time fighting off sales people and haggling on a regular basis.

I suppose I'm intrigued by the Cultural Divide because I recognize it in my own soul. I'm every bit as awful as that NYTimes reporter--I see the Clarks and their friends as anthropological specimens and I see their culture as exotic. In fact I'm worse because I've tried to go native, or at least to fake it. And I couldn't cut it, maybe because at bottom I don't like it. I'm intrigued by the aesthetic surface--the happy families in the park, the church ice cream social, driving the kids around in a van and seeing myself as a soccer mom, the world of sunshine, the sitcom world. But I don't like real guts of the culture: the boring conversation, conventions, restrictions, boring busy work, sex roles, and pure tedium.

I don't see any resolution in the offing. This culture, like all "traditional societies" is crumby, but it isn't without value and if it disappears something will be lost, just as something will be lost if tribal warrior societies in the Muslim world disintegrate--as we can only hope they do. Of course the alternative isn't the Garden of Earthly Delights though you won't be able to convince conservatives in Catonsville or Kabul of that. But it will still be a world that's more homogeneous, colder and duller.

But there is no free ride. You can't have individualism, opportunity, freedom and equity in a traditional society; you can't have self-critical reflection or serious education. Maybe in the end to come to terms with it is just to recognize there there is something of value there while at the same time facing the fact that the costs greatly outweigh the benefits.

Congratulations, Elizabeth!

Happy day! Our daughter, Elizabeth graduated from high school today and is now, God help us, an undergraduate! She has a wonderful life ahead of her--majoring in biology.

The ceremony, in the Hilltop High School football field, was an American classic--a grand civic ritual with local politicians, speechifying, awards, brass band playing the Star Spangled Banner, and bleachers full of relatives with cameras, flowers and helium balloons. It was glorious!

After the graduation we went to the Tango Grill, Elizabeth's choice and the best restaurant in town. I don't want to eat for at least 3 days. And when we got back the house was in order--the dog hadn't eaten any books. Good.

Truly, this is as good as it gets!

Middle-Brow and Proud

Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack - New York Times

Back in the late 1950's and early 1960's, middlebrow culture, which is really high-toned popular culture, was thriving in America. There was still a sense that culture is good for your character, and that a respectable person should spend time absorbing the best that has been thought and said... Today more people go to college. They may be assigned Rimbaud or Faulkner or even Hemingway. But somehow in adulthood, they tend to have less interest in that stuff than readers 40 years ago.

The trouble with social conservatives like Brooks is they look back decades rather than centuries.

Brooks imagines that middle-brow culture was killed by snarky, supercillious intellectuals with the collaboration of a self-indulgent, self-absorbed middle-class public who resisted Victorian moralizing about the edifying character of Great Art. Intellectuals despised the bourgeois and the bourgeois for their part were no longer willing to take their medicine.

Au contraire. It was the Victorian moralists and their successors who made "appreciation" a moral duty who killed middle-brow.

When it came to music at least there was no cultural divide in the 18th century. Parishioners at Thomaskirche wet their pants weekly listening to Old Bach's productions. Vivaldi is so accessible that even now everyone just plain likes it--until they learn that it's "classical music." Anyone who hears Mozart or Hayden without prejudice just likes it--that's that: if you get chocolate, you like the taste. It produces pleasure because we're wired up to like it.

It was the moralizers who trained the public not to like it by drawing a line between high art, a bitter pill that had to be swallowed, and popular culture. If you tell a kid he can't have his broccoli until he finishes his dessert, every last bit of it, it's obvious what's going to happen.

"Good taste" not only in art but in food, wine and manners has always had snob appeal and arivistes have always cultivated it. There was no moralism in that--the aim was prestige and ultimately pleasure. Snobbery doesn't kill pleasure, but moralism does. Wine-snobbery was never worked over by moralists so it remains accessible; music-snobbery was thoroughly moralized, closing off an avenue to supreme pleasure for the bulk of the population. Maybe this is what the moralizers were after in the end: eliminating all near occasions of pleasure.

Now things have turned around in an interesting way and old snobberies have become new moralisms. Food-snobbery in particular has been moralized. More generally the focus of the new moralism is the package of goods that are supposed to contribute to a "healthy lifestyle": exercise, "healthy" food and various forms of abstinence. The process is the same: the preoccupations of the elite are interpreted as exercises of virtue and snobbery morphs into moralism. Maybe it's a consequence of self-deception: no one wants to admit that they eat miserable food and recycle because it's fashionable or that they exercise and diet because they want to look good.

However we may be coming full cycle. Liking "classical music" is now neither fashionable nor virtuous. In fact it's distinctly unfashionable: admitting that you listen to it marks you as a naive striver because the assumption is that you must be motivated by unfashionable moralistic concerns. A taste for the Canon, in music or any of the arts is now popularly perceived as gauche. The snob appeal is gone and the moral appeal has all but disappeared.

So I can confess that I sit on my butt listening to the local classical music station XLNC out of Tijuana all day. They play all and only safe middle-brow canonical works--musical chocolate and McDonalds. They just finished the Polevetsian Dances--who can resist "Stranger in Paradise"? They play snippets of Carmina Burana every 45 minutes. I could use a little more Haydn, and more string quartets, but on the whole the selection suits me. By the way, they're running a pledge drive--please contribute so that they reach their goal, shut up with these disruptive solicitations and get back to the music.

So ironically nostalgic moralizers like Brooks who look back to the glory days of the 1950s, may be doing us a service. The Canon will become fashionably retro. People will consume Haydn string quartets as a guilty pleasure, like fast food, and take perverse pride in supporting XLNC and PBS. And as lit-crit departments push Theory and post-colonialist literature undergraduates will sneak off to read Jane Austin for fun. As moralism about the good things in life burns itself out people we could be looking at a new era of self-indulgence and aesthetic pleasure: hedonists gorging on the Canon while the moralizers spend their spare time sorting their trash for recycling.

Sex and Religion

ACLU: Fed Chastity Program Ringed with Religion

What's so bad about this chastity? They say that a conservative is a liberal with a daughter in high school--and that's me.

Personally, I have never known anyone who felt guilty about having too much sex with too many people or enjoying it too much. From the age of 16 I've lived in a world where sex was de rigeur and your value as a human being depended on having as much as possible with the greatest possible number of partners and enjoying it. For me, marriage at 22 was a relief: I could stop gun-notching, get out of the rat race and get fat.

Yesterday was my wedding anniversary and I'm very happy being married. Here I am married so I don't have to keep working to get a date every Saturday night and I have three children to prove that I wasn't too ugly to get sex.

And what's wrong with this program? No one is being indoctrinated other than the converted: kids from fundamentalist homes get the Jesus talk; others absent themselves. And even if they got the Jesus talk, would they pay attention? Why should we think--as the fundamentalists apparently do--that these fundamentalist noises are so potent that anyone tuning in will be converted?

BS falls from the air: TV commercials, political propaganda, ads in mags and ads online, spam, spam, spam and spam. We swim in it, breathe it, imbibe it and are largely immune to it. Why worry if Jesus stuff is in the mix? It's all more of the same and no one takes any of it seriously.

Just the facts

Crumbs for Africa - New York Times

According to a poll, most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends...just 0.16 percent of its national income to help poor countries, despite signing a United Nations declaration three years ago in which rich countries agreed to increase their aid to 0.7 percent by 2015. Since then, Britain, France and Germany have all announced plans for how to get to 0.7 percent; America has not. The piddling amount Mr. Bush announced yesterday is not even 0.007 percent.

Since November all the liberal rags I regularly read have been agonizing to figure out what spin "progressives" should adopt to get a crack at an election victory the next time around. Get religion or don't get religion? Reclaim the Center or play to the base? How to appeal to Joe Sixpack and the Soccer Moms, who to run and how to groom him or her, how to promote the Nurturing Parent over the Strict Father, how to play it.

I have a novel idea--cheaper than focus groups and effective. Get out the facts. Most Americans believe that we are spending almost a quarter of GDP on foreign aid; we aren't. Over a third of Americans believe that they are either amongst the richest 1% of Americans or will be within their lifetimes. Most believe that the rate of violent crime is rising; in fact, it's fallen steadily over the past 15 years. Most believe, falsely, that the "death tax" prevents owners of family farms and small businesses from passing down their farms and business to their children.

A picture of the Great American Illusion emerges. We believe that we are among the richest people in by far the richest and most generous nation on earth. We believe that in spite of our generosity, bad guys here and abroad are out to get us because they envy our wealth and freedom, and are viciously ungrateful for our largesse. We believe that we are a nation of shopkeepers and family farmers who, by dint of honesty and hard work, have achieved fabulous wealth and have nothing to fear but big government looking to take it away and give it to welfare mothers and terrorists.

What to do. Here's a thought: let progressives sponsor "citizenship" contests for elementary school students on the model of spelling bees at which questions about the household income of the richest 1% of Americans, the crime rate and the percentage of GDP going to foreign aid would figure. Nothing partisan about that: just the facts.

When our kid John was in elementary school he won a contest sponsored by a local veteran's group for writing an essay in response to the question, "Where would we be without the Declaration of Independence?" John argued that we'd be much better off without it because we'd be a Commonwealth Country like Canada, would have a socialist welfare state including the National Health, and more efficient toilets like the ones in his grandparents home in Swindon with the tank 8 feet off the floor and a chain to pull.

You can't lose with the facts.

Conservative Multiculturalism

When I was an undergraduate, most of my friends were convinced that lower class people were in every respect better and more interesting than their families and friends: they were, in the adolescent parlance of the day, "real."

I knew that reality very well and my aim was to get as far away from it as possible. My childhood friends' mothers drudged in housedresses all day and at dinnertime leaned out of the door and yelled for them at the top of their lungs--"An-thon-EEEEEEEEE"!!! Their fathers beat them. The adults in their lives were were ignorant, brutal, crude, dull, bigoted, cynical and fatalistic. They took it for granted that everything was corrupt--and regarded that as normal, immutable and ok. In their world, the only sin was stepping out of bounds and there were 1000 unwritten rules setting those bounds, all of them arbitrary and strictly enforced.

My college friends however wanted to be working class and lead the Revolution of the Proletariat: they read Marcuse, joined the IWW, and pretended to be poor. Most played at it for a year or two; some dropped out of school and achieved authentic downward mobility; none did anything that actually benefitted the working class. Playing at poverty doesn't benefit the poor; joining the working class doesn't make working class people, who want nothing more than to get out or at least to get their children out, better off. Professing admiration for their culture, emulating them and attempting to enter their world does nothing for them.

I think I get George W. Bush's redneck fantasy. Like my college friends, Dubya was a patrician who wanted to be a regular guy: he was simply more astute. There were no working class intellectuals in the US reading Marx or Marcuse and planning class warfare, singing old union songs or affirming solidarity with the International Workers of the World. American working stiffs believed that God, guns and guts made America great, promoted militarism and domestic get-tough policies, despised intellectuals and their subtleties, drove SUVs, hated big government, were proudly inarticulate and, when they spoke, had bad accents.

Dubya got it right and the masses loved him for it. But he didn't do any better for them than we did. The trade-off was the same: trade real benefits for psychological goods--material improvement, economic security and exit opportunities, for cultural affirmation. It was the same old multicultural story: you beat us--don't try to join us; we love your culture--don't ask to belong to ours.

The Heroic Age

Starting on my light summer reading I've been at Thomas Cahill's pop history of Greece, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea.

Cahill begins with a rhapsody on the Illiad including quotes of the juiciest passages. It's hard not to be moved by Achilles rage and Hector's death, the pathos of Priam begging for his body and the tragedy of Troy.

But what is really going on here? Essentially gang warfare over a woman--blood and guts tricked out with burnished helmets and shields, violence and plunder in the name of honor, Iphagenia sacrificed like a child caught in a drive-by shooting. This is East LA in the high literary style. Homer worked with the materials at hand, and what he had was a brutal slave society that glorified violence and waste.

I understand it and am moved by it, this world of high drama at high stakes, honor, achievement, sacrifice and revenge. I can see myself in the fight. But the story under the literary surface always intrudes: butchery and waste.

Nowadays most people have better things to do and satisfy that yen for honor, violence and romance in art and sport. The Heroic Age only survives on the margins, in urban ghettos and the Third World--the global slum. We can read about in in detail and see it in high definition--suicide bombers, ghetto youths, white supremists: these are Homer's heroes.

There's no mystery why people do violence--it's what people like to do, and will do if there are no opportunity costs. The idea that their behavior has to be explained by reference to ideology, religious zeal, poverty, nationalism or even tribal loyalty gets it exactly backwards: these are rationalizations after the fact. I suspect that people who think senseless violence demands an explanation have never read Homer or else that they're so denatured or self-deceived that they don't recognize the impulse in themselves.

People want to fight, and that is what they'll do unless they have something better to do.

The Third Rail: Stem Cells and Social Security

Bush Would Veto House Bill On Stem Cells - New York Times

When it comes to stem cell research conservative politicians can't win. Most Americans, including religious conservatives, have little sympathy for embryos and much as their leaders hint that at a nightmarish future in which soulless zombies are cloned for spare parts, they are not impressed.

Spokesmen for the Religious Right have to take a conservative line on stem cell research to appear consistent, cover their tracks and maintain their alliance with conservative Catholics. Their constituents however are not on board.

The Catholic Church has a coherent if not entirely plausible position on these matters teased out of subtle Thomistic doctrines and a long tradition of casuistry--and its position on stem cell research is part of a "seamless garment" which includes opposition the death penalty and a body of teachings on social justice that makes conservatives gag. When Catholics talk about the "Culture of Life" they mean it.

Most conservative Protestants, "values voters" and their right-wing camp followers do not. They have no interest in the rights of fetuses, much less stem cells: they want restrictions on the availability of abortion because they want to deter people, particularly young girls, from having sex--or at the very least to discourage casual, recreational sex. But the conservative leadership doesn't dare admit it so they're obliged to cover their tracks by claiming a commitment to the Culture of Life and taking on commitments to unpopular views on euthanasia and stem cell research.

Stem cell research forces conservatives hand in much the way that Social Security does. Very few Americans have any serious interest in an "ownership society" or believe that the government should cut public services and income transfers as such. They just want to see to it that benefits do not go to the undeserving poor--particularly the non-white undeserving poor. They firmly believe that the respectable elderly should live well.

No conservative politician dares to articulate the de facto conservative creed and very few of their followers can admit it, even to themselves. Who wants to confess: "We believe that people should have less sex. We believe that the government should support parents' efforts to control their adolescent children and, in particular, see to it that there are penalties for sexual activity. We believe that people should live in the style to which they're accustomed, that actors, pop musicians and athletes should be fabulously wealthy so that we can admire their excess, that the poor here and abroad should work hard and live meager lives because they're used to it, and that the respectable middle-class should own their own homes with the full complement of motor vehicles and household appliances. We look for the life of the world to come, where all adults are straight and married with children, where men do men's work and women do women's work, where everyone plays their designated role and everything looks right. Amen."

How Family Circle Messed Up My Family

Family Circle Total Know-How Archive

I caved in and bought the latest issue of Family Circle from the supermarket check-out rack: I couldn't resist the "The Whole Family Guide to Getting Organized" advertised on the cover.

I've been reading Family Circle, Women's Day and, less often, other women's magazines since the age of 11, devouring the Helpful Hints and features on decorating, cleaning and organizing. About two years ago I decided to kick the habit: the decorating schemes were never to my taste; the tips on household organization and maintenance were always the same and never worked.

This month's feature (not yet online) was no surprise:

Clean-sweep as a family Each night before bedtime, clutter-bust for 15 minutes. To avoid arguments, take turns choosing the pick-up music (Dad's Otis Redding or Junior's Jay-Z) and race to see how much debris can be raked before the song is over.

I don't know who Otis Redding is much less Jay-Z. I've tried to stage these communal clean-up projects and got nothing but resentment. Are there really women out there who get their family picking up clutter to music as a jolly bedtime routine?

Share chores with neighbors Child care, bulk grocery shopping, even lawn-mowing during vacations can be rotated with neighbors to save time and build your community network.

Where are these bucolic villages where neighbors chat over the backyard fence and exchange chores? I've never even borrowed a cup of sugar, or known anyone who has. I know people want to live this way and believe that they should--I certainly do--but does anyone really?

Hire a local student Have him run occasional errands for you--the small expense may turn out to be a big bargain.

Where is this pool of students available for baby-sitting, errands and other casual work? Students old enough to work are flipping burgers or, in the case of the girls who live next door, selling Avon.

Forget about Martha Stewart, the impossible ideal: does anyone really live according to Family Circle standards--covering coffee cans with contact-paper, cutting up greeting cards with pinking sheers to make gift tags or using egg cartons and shoe boxes for 100 different purposes? I used to save egg cartons and tried to use them to organize paper clips, screws and "other small items" as recommended but it made a complete mess. Now that we have curbside recycling I feel a little less guilty about trashing those coffee cans, egg cartons and margarine tubs, but I still feel inadequate.

Some of the projects featured in Family Circie are clearly idiotic. Every year or so they run a story on women who save thousands of dollars on groceries by couponing. Typically, they feature a Couponing Queen who spends a year clipping coupons from packages and women's magazines, maintains elaborate coupon files, meets with other couponers from her neighborhood weekly to trade coupons and then (with the author of the article in tow) uses her coupons to buy $500 worth of brand name groceries for pocket change. Why on earth would anyone do this? Anyone who can tolerate this kind of drudgery could make lots more money as a secretary--part-time.

Still I worked hard and unsuccessfully to achieve the Family Circle lifestyle--with disastrous results. My husband was chronically furious about my household organization schemes and attempts to save money; my kids have never forgiven me.

Three years ago I gave up. Now I never even ask anyone to pick up or flush after themselves much less help with the housework--they never did, and now at least they don't yell at me. I don't try to save money: I buy whatever the kids want immediately, no questions asked. It's depressing: one of the central goals in my life since I was a child was to have a beautiful, completely organized house and to save as much money as possible. At least I have my job, which I like.

Does anyone ever manage to follow the recommendations in women's magazines? Are there really women out there who make the egg carton system work? Who make monthly menu-plans or freeze the week's meals in advance? Who have family calendars with schedules and assigned chores that people actually do stuck to their refrigerator doors? Who are they? Where are they? How do they do it?

Wow I am done!

I have sent off a revision of a paper due tomorrow and cleared my email box, commenting on second, third and fourth drafts of term papers. I've been at this for three weeks now since getting back from my last conference. I did 4 conferences in 5 weeks and have been catching up ever since. I'm not going to do that again.

Not exactly done though...the term papers will be coming in tomorrow and I give logic exams on Thursday and the Tuesday after. Oops--just got some more term papers. I'm too wiped out now to do anything seriously productive so I've been commenting on more student papers, running errands and sorting things out. Tomorrow exam week office hours, department meeting, and I start on a paper I have to get in for a May 25 deadline. Another for June 15. Then back to the book and all summer to do research!

This is the best job in the world! After 22 years I still can't believe I'm working. I can get almost any paper online. I download the pdf's, open on one side of the screen and on the other side take notes, and write papers. Every month I get notice that a paycheck has been direct deposited to my account. I still can't imagine why. I'm not punching a clock--other than teaching classes 9 hours a week and keeping my office hours. I'm not typing and filing or scanning people's groceries. I set my own goals, prepare my own classes, read papers, go to conferences and write--I'm not stuck in an office sorting paper clips to look busy, waiting for the end of the day. There's something to see when I'm done. I'm not doing repetitious tasks. I'm not bored. How can this be work?

One of those counterfactuals...

I wish I knew what conservatives believed would happen if liberals had their way--and I would be most grateful if someone would tell me. In fairness, I should give an account of what I think would happen if conservatives were able to push through their agenda.

Suppose that conservatives had a free hand and reorganized things in the US so that there would be less bureaucracy and regulation, lower taxes and less support for public services, and much of what government delivers in other affluent countries would be the responsibility of individuals, families, churches and other private organizations.

Life would be much, much riskier: the kinds of lives we lived would depend far more on dumb luck. The luck of the draw--whether we were born rich or poor, black or white, male or female, smart or dumb, able or disabled--would play a greater role in determining our lot in life and at every stage of our lives we would be vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Those of us who could afford it would be able to save or to buy into insurance schemes to protect ourselves, but the ability to afford these hedges would itself be a matter of dumb luck.

If conservatives have their way, most of us will be more dependent on the good will of others. Workers will depend on the good will of employers for reasonable wages and decent working conditions, and employers who are morally committed to treating their employees decently will find it hard to compete: nice guys will finish last, and the Walmart model will triumph. The elderly will depend on their children for housing and financial support and the poor will depend on the voluntary contributions and support of those who are better off.

Public facilities will become a last resort for the poor. Outside of wealthy suburbs, where very few of us can afford to live, public schools will become charity institutions for the destitute and near-destitute. As middle class parents opt out of the system, public schools will increasingly become holding tanks for the "unsalvageable."

Society will become increasingly fragmented and tribal. The rich will live in gated communities patrolled by private security guards, send their children to private schools, generate their own electricity and drink bottled water as they do in other Third World countries. The white working class, attracted by affordable, segregated housing will increasingly migrate to exurban boom towns floating on a low-wage, low-skilled service economy (like Surprise, Arizona). Urban areas will become the exclusive property of the very rich and the very poor--the urban elite, gay and straight, who neither marry nor are given in marriage, living and working in glitzy high-rises, in a world without children, surrounded by squalid slums where the non-white underclass, new immigrants, and all the disabled, chronically ill and elderly who have no families to look after them, live in fear of violence and crime.

As opportunities and support services for women diminish, educated women married to high-earning upper middle class men, who can afford to stay home, will drop out of the labor force. At the same time, as wages and benefits for working class males decline, more working class women will be squeezed out of the home and forced into dead-end pink collar shit work in the expanding service sector. More women on net will enter the labor force but sex-segregation and the wage gap will increase as women become a permanent class of drudge workers.

On the bright side, as we become poorer, less educated and willing to accept less desirable work at lower wages, off-shoring and out-sourcing will decline. Firms, both domestic and foreign, will increasingly exploit cheap, largely female labor to do tedious tasks for low pay. Maquilladoras will move across the border to the US, sweatshops will flourish and Indian firms will contract work to American call centers. The declining dollar and exports of sweatshop products will diminish our trade deficit and, as we take our place in the Third World, people in other poor countries may resent us less and even forgive us.

Kansas Again

The New York Review of Books: What's the Matter with Liberals?

Conservatives generally regard class as an unacceptable topic when the subject is economics—trade, deregulation, shifting the tax burden, expressing worshipful awe for the microchip, etc. But define politics as culture, and class instantly becomes for them the very blood and bone of public discourse. Indeed, from George Wallace to George W. Bush, a class-based backlash against the perceived arrogance of liberalism has been one of their most powerful weapons. Workerist in its rhetoric but royalist in its economic effects, this backlash is in no way embarrassed by its contradictions. It understands itself as an uprising of the little people even when its leaders, in control of all three branches of government, cut taxes on stock dividends and turn the screws on the bankrupt. It mobilizes angry voters by the millions, despite the patent unwinnability of many of its crusades. And from the busing riots of the Seventies to the culture wars of our own time, the backlash has been ignored, downplayed, or misunderstood by liberals.

Would Frank's prescription, putting the bread and butter issues on the table and going back to the old time religion work for Democrats? I wish it would because I'm a leftist Democrat with little sympathy for centrism, but I doubt it: working class conservatives may be prepared to trade off their economic interests for their agenda on "values"--or even for lip service to their agenda.

What is going on here? I can only speculate because it's exceedingly difficult to get straight answers with Culture Wars in full swing. I suspect that working class conservatives are motivated largely by fatalism, cynicism and fear.

Working class conservatives are fatalistic. They do not believe that anything can make them more secure. Unemployment, catastrophic illness and bankruptcy happen--nothing can change that. The best you can hope is that your family, neighbors and church will help you out if they do. Schemes to avert these natural and inevitable catastrophies, particularly government schemes, are ineffective, expensive and only make things worse.

Working class voters are cynical. They believe that their taxes are tribute to Big Men who line their own pockets and use the excess to provide patronage for bureaucrats, sycophantic lawyers and academics, and the urban underclass. They do not believe that they benefit from the money they pay in taxes and regard tax cuts as pure profit.

Most of all, working class Americans are scared of crime, violence and chaos. They're scared of foreign powers stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and terrorists out to do violence and destroy their way of life. They're scared of the urban underclass who, if not controlled by cops, prisons and tough treatment will rape, pillage and riot in the streets. They're scared of their own kids who if not disciplined and protected will turn the world into a simulacrum of the beach at Spring Break and destroy themselves with drink, drugs and promiscuity. They live in an island of calm and cleanliness surrounded by a sea of filth, violence and disorder: they want guns to defend themselves, cops and the military to keep the bad guys away and religion to keep everyone in line. Any softness or compromise or deviation from the Rules, can open the floodgates.

Maybe I'm off base on this. If so I'd like to know.

If however I'm right then Thomas Frank's solution is not likely to work and winning the working class back to the Democratic Party will be much more difficult. They will have to be persuaded that it is possible to provide people with economic security and the guarantee of a minimally decent life, that tax money provides goods and services that benefit them and that they don't have to support harsh treatment, military operations and religious puritanism to live decent, happy, safe lives.

American Jihad

The New York Times > Washington > Frist Set to Use Religious Stage on Judicial Issue

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees...The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

As a child I learnt about the Scopes Monkey Trial, along with the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, the assassination of President Lincoln and the bombing of Pearl Harbor at my mother's knee. Thanks to Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, Elmer Gantry was a cultural icon and the war between fundamentalist demogogues with their rural white trash constituency and civilized, educated, humane Americans was a recurrent theme. I never knew any fundamentalists as a child and no one I knew knew any: they were mythological beasts.

Everyone was of course religious, but the going religion was the Religion of Ike: Catholic, Jewish or Mainline Protestant, different denominations were just a matter of family tradition and personal style--and it didn't matter what you believed as long as you "lived right."

With this heritage, Americans will not go for the current regime's jihad. In a tight race, where Americans' view on substantive policy issues are in the balance and Republicans can play to the gallery with the cult of personality, the fundamentalists can tip the race. But if Republican policies are unacceptable, as they are on Social Security, and they can't produce a candidate with more eye-appeal than his Democratic rival, the white trash vote will not give them a majority. The repugnance for white trash fundamentalist demagogues is broad and deep: we don't want Elmer Gantry.

Unless, of course, the Democrats blow it in an effort to play to what they take to be their base: a small minority of elite urban Americans who are overtly hostile to religion in any form, however innocuous, and see no difference between Methodists who go to church for the sake of their children, cafeteria Catholics who buy what they like or liberal Episcopalians like me and fundamentalists on jihad.

It just isn't that hard. Democratic candidates don't have to make noises about their deeply held personal religious convictions or claim to be born again or promise to block the teaching of evolution in the public schools or to impose further restrictions on the availability of abortion. They only have to affirm their belief that religion is generally a good thing, that there are objective standards for right and wrong (without saying what they are), and that interpreting separation of Church and State to mean that kids can't sing Christmas carols in school is simply silly.

On the way back from my last conference I read Madeleine Albright's memoir, Madame Secretary on the plane. Marrying into the Albright family she joins the Episcopal Church but confesses that she finds it difficult to give up the kind of piety she grew up with as a Catholic--the rosary and devotion to the Virgin Mary, etc. When she learns that her grandparents were Jewish, and that three were killed in the Holocaust, she's confused and notes that she doesn't go to church as often as she used to, but that she does make a point of going on Christmas and Easter. This is the kind of story Americans can understand and the kind of religious conviction, however minimal, with which they can sympathize--the sort of story Democratic candidates should tell.

Beyond Universal Wimpery
Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (A Progressive Guide to Action) by George Lakoff, reviewed by The Atlantic Monthly

America, now more than ever, needs a vibrant, viable, progressive alternative. The challenge to liberals, then, isn't to reify their differences with a mythical red America and its strict daddies but, rather, to find common ground. Perhaps they ought to start by taking their own sermons about diversity a good deal more seriously. Diversity should be much, much more than a code word for racial affirmative action. It also entails, as Potter and Heath argue, "[making] peace with mass society" and learning to live with what the philosopher John Rawls called "the fact of pluralism." Modern America is large and, yes, diverse enough that it's absolute folly to think some sort of progressive or nurturant world view can -- or should -- become majoritarian. Who would want that sort of conformity in any case? "We need to learn to live with disagreement -- not just superficial disagreement, but deep disagreement, about the things that matter most to us," Heath and Potter conclude.

The trick of effective politics -- as opposed to thinly disguised self-affirming psychotherapy and aesthetically gratifying rebel poses -- is precisely to unite people with different views, values, and families around programs, candidates, and campaigns on which they can reach some consensus, however minimal. Before liberals and progressives dash out with their new vocabulary to try to convince others of the righteousness of their values, they might consider spending some time listening to others instead.

When I read read about this Lakoff stuff I wonder why I'm a liberal. I find the idea of "nurturance" sickening. I have no interest in preserving the environment except to the extent that it suits human interests. As regards foreign policy I am a hawk: though I regarded our adventure in Iraq as thoroughly unmotivated, I thought it might have been a good idea to intervene in Liberia--and think it would be a very good idea to show some muscle in dealing with Sudan.

But then I remember: oh, yes, I'm a woman. On the conservative scheme, I don't get to do self-interest, greed and competitiveness or the Strict Parent either. As a conservative I'd have to do care, nurturance and psychobabble anyway because I'm a woman--so I might as well be liberal. Maybe someday liberals will catch on to the idea that the aim isn't to valorize stereotypical femininity and promote it for men as well as women but, among other things, to give women a chance to be self-interested, greedy and competitive, and to do guy stuff.

Until then it might be worthwhile to recognize that the important issues on the table are not matters of taste, religious conviction or personal style but Social Security, foreign policy, minimum wage, and a variety of other issues that have nothing to do with Lakoff's five minute ideas.

Angelides for Governor!

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb
Phil Angelides looks like a nerd. Gangly and elongated, earnest in manner, liberal in politics, he is in almost every way the polar opposite of the current governor of California -- whom, Angelides announced yesterday, he is seeking to replace in next year's gubernatorial election...Emboldened by the Democrats' provisional success in warding off Bush's Social Security privatization proposal, Angelides intends to tap into California voters' historical commitment -- only sporadically in evidence in recent decades -- to public investment in schools, roads and the like, and their willingness to finance those investments with progressive taxation...If he can persuade state voters to agree with him, next year's election could tell a story in which Arnold never intended to appear: Revenge of the Nerds.

I went to a breakfast for Democratic Party faithful last week at which Angelides appeared--and he was good. The ritual display of wife and daughters, who seemed nice enough, wasn't particularly impressive and his attempts at homeletic passion were unconvincing, but his message was clear and correct.

The gubinatorial election in California, he said, was not about potholes or public utilities. It was a referendum on ideology--it put the question to California voters, and to the American public, whether they supported the current administration's social Darwinist policies. Republicans promoted the doctrine that pumping more money in at the top, through tax-breaks for the richest Americans, would trickle down and make everyone better off--in fact the gap between rich and poor was widening, services aimed at enabling the poor to better themselves were being starved and the state was going deeper into debt. California was the richest state in the richest nation on earth and could afford to provide real opportunities and a decent life for all. It didn't have to be like this.

Will he say this if, and when, he's nominated and speaking to the general public rather than the party faithful? Or will he display his daughters and pictures of his Greek immigrant grandparents and leave it at that?

At our last family table talk Paul argued that there was a conspiracy to make Americans stupid. Politicians by and large certainly think we're stupid, and act on the assumption that we can't follow even the simplest arguments or understand what is in our interests. So far it looks as if they've been right--but that is in large part because until recently Democrats haven't had the guts to explain why the conservative agenda was not in our interests--how taxes fund public services we depend on, how cuts to funding in education raise tuition and restrict access to state colleges, how benefits to corporations percolate up rather than trickling down.

I hope Angelides gets the nomination and had the guts to say to the public what he said at the breakfast last week in addition to displaying his wife and daughters and showing pictures of his Greek immigrant grandparents. This isn't to say that I wasn't taken by the Greek connection: last year, at the Democratic State Convention his party had the best Greek food. Xairete!

If you want to quote me...

It's always flattering when people pick up pieces from The Enlightenment Project and post them elsewhere on the web. But I would appreciate it if, in doing that, you post them anonymously or under my initials, as I do on this blog--or else ask permission.

I operate this blog anonymously because the pieces I write, often controversial and polemical if not flat out nasty, are my views as an individual and should not be taken as reflecting either the views of my employer or my commitments as a member of my profession.

So I hope that, in the interests of avoiding confusion, if you pick up any pieces from The Enlightenment Project you either post them anonymously or ask permission to use my name.

Put your money where your mouth is

Hotel Labor Advisor

Conference season is here and I, like most other members of my tribe, go academic meetings at convention hotels to mouthe--to present papers, eat, drink and talk.

This year it turns out that the convention hotel for my professional society's conference is involved in a labor dispute. With the convention two weeks away it's too late to move the meetings but many of us are doing what we can to see to it that the hotel doesn't benefit from our business any more than necessary. I'll be canceling my reservation and moving to a "safe" hotel nearby.

The hotel workers' union maintains a list of hotels that are safe from labor disputes here. I wish I'd found out about this sooner!

This site is a good resource of you're on board with unrepentant liberalism and I urge you to check it out if you're looking for a hotel or making plans for a meeting.

Anglican Schism

BBC NEWS | UK | Analysis: Anglican schism nears reality

To Liberal Episcopal Clergy:

OK, jackasses, I bet you didn't expect this 15 or so years ago when you decided that it was time to teach us, the laity, the proper enlightened views about sexuality.

Everything had gone so well in your project to educate us until then. First you shoved that stinking piece of shit, the 1979 Prayer Book, down our throats. Then you pushed through women's ordination (which I enthusiastically supported). You thought you had the routine down pat--it was just a matter of Using Psychology: workshops with relating games and small group sessions, politicking to get the vote through--then a little sympathy and pastoral smarm for the disgruntled, putting out small fires here and there and waiting it out until the we got used to the latest innovation so that you could move on to the next project.

You arrogant, patronizing jerks just never got the idea that you weren't the lettered gentlemen of your parishes and dioceses, the intelligencia surrounded by a lay peasantry. It never even occurred to you that any of us could have principled objections to your views or rationally considered objections to your policies--you were firmly convinced that any dissatisfaction on our part was merely a result of prejudice or irrational resistance to change, which you could overcome through group dynamics techniques, wheedling and manipulation. Surprise!

Of course it won't make a bit of difference if there is some sort of schism in the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church will continue on its slow but inexorable decline--no slower or faster than it would otherwise have done--churches will waddle through that stinking shit liturgy every week and the Church Pension Fund will remain solvent so I doubt that you'll be losing any sleep over it.

My Day Job

Sometimes I take a break from blogging and do philosophy. Currently my big research interest is preference--my agenda is defending a version of preferentism that I've contrived. I hold that a person's well-being is a function of his Sen-Capability of satisfying actual and nearby possible-preferences. I'm developing a little number on this. An agent's capabilty set and his preference set are both fuzzy sets: the extent to which an item is included in either corresponds to the "distance" of the possible worlds at which the agent gets it and wants it respectively where things are gotten and wanted to degrees between 0 and 1. Can get to the highest degree is what I actually get and can want to the highest degree is what I actually want so getting what I actually want, preference satisfaction, maxes out. However, being able to get what I might, but don't actually want, also contributes to my well-being. Every person has a two-dimensional transworld preference-satisfaction profile and his well-being at any world comes from values of that profile at the world in question.

That is the gist of what I'm working out but I won't say any more because it could turn out to be complete garbage. I'm not afraid someone will "steal my ideas." When I worked in publishing wannabe authors were always afraid of this, as if "ideas" were worth anything. They aren't. What matters is the technical details, the engineering--ideas are a dime a dozen.

But why preference for me as the fundamental ethical idea? I suppose because for me the moral universe revolves around being constrained, being chronically frustrated, fighting to get what I wanted and to avoid being forced into places I didn't want to be am I was constrained, accumulating security and bargaining chips to avoid being locked into a situation where I'm constrained, can't get what I want and am forced to do what I don't want. For me it's all about having possibilities, real options: being able to do what I want to do, go where I want to go and not being locked into a confined space, being forced to do drudge work or punch a clock and make the busy work last until it was time to punch out.

I have a visceral aversion to "virtue ethics" and all high-flown notions of the good life. Virtue ethics is fundamenally aristocratic: Athenian gentlemen living on the proceeds of their estates with slaves to do for them never worried about being constrained, getting stuck with drudge work or punching the clock: they could afford to concern themselves with cultivating virtue. What appalling, hypocritical snobbery--the elite cultivating a luxury good that only they could afford and then condemning the masses for not managing it. Deontological ethics aren't much better: when they aren't in the business of exhorting everyone to do the duties of the station to which God has called them they have nothing to say about the viciousness of constraint. Neither of them account for the full horribleness of the lives most people live or the injustice of it. Leave aside the worst cases, the people in the developing world who are sick and starving: in the US if you have the shitty luck to be born female and working class unless you fight for all you're worth you will be trapped for most of your day doing drudge work, punching the clock, being confined, and then you will go home and cook and clean and fall asleep.

Don't give me this crap about virtue or duty, all very well for the privileged few who don't have to worry about accumulating the bargaining chips to be safe from those lives of drudgery and constraint. I fought with all I had to get into a situation where I was safe from having to work at jobs like that and live that kind of life--don't give me that high-falluting crap.

Military Privatization

The New York Times > Washington > Bush Unveils Budget That Favors Security Over Social Spending

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 - President Bush sent Congress a 2006 budget of just under $2.6 trillion today, laying out a politically ambitious blueprint for slashing many domestic programs while raising spending on the military and homeland security.

It looks like Dubya has gotten it ass-backwards again. The vision is to pump public money into military and security programs while privitizing social spending. Why not vice versa?

We could cut the deficit by privatizing the military and homeland security, freeing up more public money for social programs and so run a welfare state without wimping out on world domination. By cutting taxes that now go to finance the military, citizens would have the resources to raise private armies to promote their agendas. If conservatives are right, private enterprise armies would be cheaper and more efficient than any traditional government run military--and since, on my proposal, state funded social programs would be expanded, they would not need to offer generous education benefits to recruits: higher education would be guaranteed to all qualified applicants so working class students would not need to join the military to get money for college.

In addition, private armies could focus on their freely chosen goals without fudging to sell their agendas to the wider American public. Faith-based groups could send crusaders to convert infidels by the sword; entrepreneurs interested in plunder could raise armies of mercenaries to rape and pillage. Under this scheme we would probably have even more warfare than we currently have and get a bigger bang for the buck.

As for homeland security, we have already gone quite a ways toward privatization already, with gated communities and private security guards. With tax money that would have gone to Homeland Security available to citizens to use as they saw fit, individuals could form vigilante committees, buy high-tech weapons and build fortresses for themselves and their retainers.

It could work. Feudalism, after all, had quite a run. On the current scheme however the majority of the population would not be impoverished serfs but prosperous, productive citizens enjoying the benefits of a welfare state while warlords and their private armies went on foreign adventures with embedded reporters providing TV entertainment for the citizenry at home.

Question Time

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb

The emotional power of the Bush doctrine...almost eclipsed the president's pitch to privatize Social Security. Nothing about the pitch was surprising -- not his claim that the system was “headed toward bankruptcy,” not his dwelling on private accounts rather then the cutbacks in Social Security payments, not his emphasis on previous Democratic proposals to alter the system. What surprised, and delighted, were the cries of “no!” from the Democratic side of the aisle as Bush predicted the system's coming insolvency. For a moment, Congress sounded like Parliament; for a moment, the Democrats sounded like an opposition party.

Back when the matchless Margaret Thatcher was PM we used to watch Question Time regularly. Tony can't, or won't, shout as loudly, and doesn't have what my voice teacher called cut but it's still a good show, with sagging MPs lolling on the green leather benches, rousing themselves to grunt approbation or shout, "hear, hear!"

I wonder why we don't do it that way. It isn't that our politicians put on a show for the benefit of their constituencies--the Brits put on a show too, but one that's intended to appeal to different tastes. So the question is why the difference in tastes? We don't expect politicians to make sense or even to simulate making sense. We expect rhetorical muzak from politicians who are groomed, trained and scripted--and look groomed, trained and scripted. Could a Dubya, or a Schwartzenegger, be elected to high political office in the UK, or India--or Afghanistan?

Maybe we put up with it because of our cynicism about the role of government and the political process. We expect candidates to be appropriately branded and packaged. We expect the standard slogans: we don't pay any attention to them but it would be jarring if they weren't there. We don't seriously believe there are any real differences amongst the various products.

Pray, bretheren, that Democratic politicians have finally figured out that consumer research, focus groups and improved packaging won't boost their market share and that they are prepared to start behaving like like an opposition party.

English

Pure trivial speculation while walking the dog...

How come the primary adjectival forms of (what as a rank amateur I'd guess to be) Anglo-Saxon nouns are Latin--and in addition there are Anglo-Saxon adjectival forms that are colored or metaphorical? The pattern seems systematic for some of the most common nouns: hand-manual-handy; smell-olefactory-smelly.Sometimes one Anglo-Saxon noun picks up more than one highly colored adjective in addition to the primary, colorless Latin adjective: home-domestic-homey, homely, homelike; taste-gustatory-tastey, tasteful.

Maybe it was like this: there was a good, solid homey Anglo-Saxon noun and its corresponding adjective. Over the years the adjectival form picked up color and metaphorical meanings, sometimes even to the point where the original meaning was obliterated. "Homey" didn't just mean pertaining to the home any more and "homely" didn't mean pertaining to the home at all. So those Latin adjectives, like "domestic" got pulled in to fill the gap, to be colorless adjectival forms.

Maybe it went the other way around too. The Latin adjectives, because they were initially unfamiliar, were perceived as colorless. They didn't have the color for native Anglo-Saxon speakers that they would have had for native Latin or French speakers. So when they came into the language, the freed up the original adjectival forms for other jobs.

If I had to invent a language it wouldn't have been English, with minimal grammar and maximal vocabulary, nuance and idiom to compensate for it, unsystematic and impossible to spell. I would have invented Spanish (Is Spanish authentically an "easy language" or is it just easy for native English-speakers and, presumably, speakers of Romance languages?) Good thing English is my mother tongue--I could never have learnt it.

Bravo, Iraq!

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iraq election log: 30 January 2005

I'm not going to be one of those liberal bloggers who grinch the Iraq election. If you want to get an earful of that, start here. There is no doubt that democracy is a good thing, and that the election is a good thing--most Iraqis certainly think so. Here are some links to blogs. Here's a site linking to some Kurdish blogs). And here's a good one from London, were Pakistani, Palestinian and Algerian Muslims tried to intimidate Iraqi ex-pats going to the polls.

It looks like voter turnout in Iraq is comparable to what we get in the US--where cities don't have to be locked down on election day. On the other hand I'm not overly optimistic. Democracy by itself doesn't fix violence, poverty, ignorance and bigotry. After the first blush of enthusiasm there will be more violence and grinding disappointment. But it will be worth it, I think, because democracy is a good thing that changes people's way of viewing the world and their place in it.

Bush, riding the crest of the wave, is on TV making noises about decent Iraqis' victory over the "thugs." I just hope it doesn't carry his domestic agenda through: "democracy is good, therefore we should privatize Social Security." Then again, Winston Churchill was booted out after WWII, and this animal is no Churchill.

But "thugs" they are, those angry young men we dignify as "insurgents." The recipe is always the same: where there's poverty, misery and oppression, there will be cadres of young men eager to do violence; they can be used by ideologues and by self-serving politicians. The fatal mistake is to imagine that they, the "Street," are the authentic voice of the people.

We played this scenario out 40 years ago when the received view was that the Black Panthers were the authentic voice of black Americans, that the NAACP had sold out, and that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were Uncle Toms. (I'm proud to say that my name is inscribed on the Rosa Parks Wall of Tolerance maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center--hit the link and contribute!). It plays out if we imagine that IRA "militants" are the authentic voice of the Irish people. It plays out whenever we reflexively take the position that whatever is countercultural is good and that the rhetoric of freedom, democracy and liberation is nothing more than a cover for racism and oppression.

How do we, as liberals, shake off the burden of this perennial adolescence, the rhetoric of revolution, radical chic and facile adolescent cynicism?

Trust

Academic Integrity Workshop Day 2. This was even better than Day 1. We had a presentation on TurnItIn.com, an online service that maintains a burgeoning database of potential cheat materials against which we could check student papers.

Some of us (including myself) were thrilled; others, faculty as well as students, were horrified. We had a lively discussion of the respective merits of Hobbesian cynicism vs. Trust and the macroscopic projection of our microcosmic views when it came to politics and world affairs: strong military and cops to beat up the Bad Guys vs. Trust and Niceness. Needless to say I was for the military, cops and turnitin.com.

Meanwhile those of us who'd brought our laptops were cruising around the internet looking at the turnitin.com site, the Rutgers Academic Integrity site recommended by the presenter and, in my case morningstar.com. I was checking to see whether turnitin.com was public so that I could buy stock in it. It isn't--yet. But I'll sock in bucks as soon as I can.

There were significant differences by department in our attitude to this item. English, which had been offered access to turnitin as a pilot project were not enthusiastic. In one sense they were the ideal subjects to test it: they assigned the most papers and were most directly concerned with assessing student writing. But they were also by and large Luddites who didn't like the idea of having students submit papers electronically and, quite apart from moral qualms about the cynicism inherent in the project, were uneasy about the technical issues. Theology was ambivalent. Turnitin was a nasty, cynical thing: G. said, it could also be used for pedagogical rather than punitive purposes to teach students how to cite references properly but I thought this was a little self-deceptive or disingenuous. As I pointed out to Fr. R. on our break, "Hey, you guys believe in Original Sin, right?"

I don't understand why trust, or faith, is supposed to be a virtue. It's simply an empirical conjecture about how people are likely to behave, and I do not understand why it is supposed to be a good thing to guess, a priori, that people will behave well rather than badly. I've been to quite a number of retreats and other programs where participants were supposed to fall backwards into the arms of others there to catch them. I could never understand the point of this exercise: of course, given the set up, it was highly probable that we would be caught. It does not follow that it is likely we would be caught in ordinary life situations and, as a matter of empirical fact, it seems highly unlikely. What is the point of attempting to instill empirically false beliefs? Even if we recognize that people are not likely to be kind and decent to us, or to catch us when we fall, it doesn't follow that we shouldn't do what we can to be kind, decent and fair to others.

Currently the received wisdom seems to be that Liberals believe that people are inherently good so that Trust is warranted while Conservatives believe that people are fundamentally bad so that it takes soldiers, copes and coercion to keep a lid on things. I'd with the Conservatives when it comes to their pessimistic view of human nature and views about the importance of coercion. What I don't understand is how this supports their views on domestic policy. If people are fundamentally bad, as I believe, employers will certainly exploit their employees because they can, men will beat their wives because they're bigger and stronger and none of us will contribute substantially to take care of people who can't take care of themselves. We're bigots and selfish jerks because our nature is fallen but our rational nature, imagio dei, isn't wholly corrupted, so we can see what we are and establish schemes to circumvent our sinfulness--coercive taxation and the welfare state.

Academic Integrity

I've just spent come back from the first day of a 2-day workshop at school on cheating which was actually quite interesting. Tomorrow the real good stuff: www.turnitin.com and other technical devices for catching cheaters.

I've never cheated. I've been to Traffic School 11 times for speeding and committed a variety of other sins--I am, after all, a Utilitarian. But I've never plagiarized, copied or done any of the stuff which, according to the presentations, the majority of students currently do. First, it never occurred to me until late in my undergraduate career when someone stole one of my papers (Mill on phenomenalism) for the fraternity files. Secondly, I knew I could write a better paper than anything I could buy or steal. Thirdly, I just liked playing the Game: I wanted to do the stuff, I liked writing and competing. I'm trying to remember now, but I just can't remember anything I didn't like in college. The closest I can come is a psych course but even there I liked the stuff on perception.

There were a number of students at this affair and one of their chief complaints was that they had to take general education courses that had nothing to do with their future lives or careers. These, they said, were the courses in which students were most likely to cheat. True: I teach those courses, in particular the most hated of all undergraduate requirements and my favorite: logic.

But remembering my undergraduate career, I loved these irrelevant courses. Career preparation is what you have to do; courses that are irrelevant are gravy. I objected to the science requirement because I had a misguided notion that college should make me a cultivated person on the model of 19th century graduates of Oxbridge colleges--and that didn't include science. But I had to take 3 quarters of biology and I loved it. I must have because I remember all about adp/atp cycles, chlorophyl, the structure of the cell, and especially the stuff on genetics. I loved the labs especially: we typed our blood (I'm AB+), grew yeast cells and charted their growth on semi-log graph paper and did an experiment where we hooked ourselves up to machines monitoring heartbeat, respiration etc. while pedaling stationary bicycles. What's not to like?

I think it's the inverse Tom Sawyer Principle: make out drudgery, whitewashing a fence, as a treat and people will like it; make out education as a series of hoops to jump through, something they have to do, and they'll hate and resent it--and cheat.

Plato at Stanford

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

I'm jazzed. I'm preparing my analytic philosophy course, cruising around the web looking for stuff and one thing leads to another. This is what it was like for me as an undergraduate when I spent days surfing the library but in excelsis because I can hit links to anything, get everything I want. It's like some fantasy pig heaven of instant gratification--think "macademia nuts," Haydn's Emperor Quartet," "red Mazda Miata convertable" or whatever you please and it instantly materializes for your pleasure.

I was preparing my lecture on the JTB account of knowledge and wanted something on blindsight. Does a reliably blindsighted individual know what he takes himself to be guessing at? This and other good stuff comes through David Chalmers' splendid website. For fun, especially good for pedagogical purposes, the link to disorders of consciousness (scroll down) including blindsight, face blindness, synesthesia and the like is a blast.

But as everyone knows the Empyrian Ninth Heaven of the Beatific Vision in philosophical cyberspace is the Stanford Encyclopedia at Philosophy at plato.stanford.edu, everything with links to everything, omnipotent, omniscient and if not omnibenevolent as good as it gets in one place. In principle, any literate person with a computer and internet connection could get a complete philosophical education browsing and following links. So far it's free and I've contributed to keep it that way.

It's hard to express the wonder that hits me occasionally at living in this intellectual pig heaven, not just SEP but all the stuff out there that anyone can grab without sounding like a complete ass. Get a life--sex, parties, travel, whatever. But this is like preaching that drugs are an "escape" and that anyone who had a satisfactory real life wouldn't need to escape. Complete baloney--recreational drugs are just more. Intellectual activity is more too--not a replacement for sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, but more good stuff. And when I have a little time I'm going to explore this also. Music is more too--I'm listening to Pictures on Exhibition (orchestral version) now. There doesn't seem to be any point to not listening to music all the time.

Back to work--yum!

Social Security

Doing my public duty to spread the word, and to spread the spreading of the word on Social Security to any bloggers around, I'm linking this piece from the American Prospect headed Attention, Bloggers

American Prospect Online - ViewWeb

In Buying Into Failure Paul Krugman notes that in attempting to privatize Social Security the US is following the lead of the UK and Chile. I don't know much about Chile but my mother-in-law is an old age pensioner in the UK and it doesn't look like the system is working. She even made it into the local paper in an article on the difficulties old age pensioners in the area are facing with rising costs and inadequate benefits.
It's ironic that the Cato Institute to which Krugman alludes has eliminated talk about Social Security "privatization" in favor or talk about Social Security "choice" because as her savings get eaten up she doesn't have many choices.

I'd like to have some choices when I get old. The notion that security is a trade-off for choice is flat-out wrong: security is a pre-requisite for choice, for effective freedom and willingness to undertake risk. Here for example is an article citing the "cushion hypothesis" to explain why Chinese, contrary to popular stereotypes, are more likely to take risks than Americans. The author notes:

"people in a collectivist society may be more likely to receive help if they are in need. As a result, the adverse outcome of a risky option may not seem as severe to them. They appear to be less risk averse. People in a collectivist culture feel that they are 'cushioned' in case they fall, which is why we call it the cushion hypothesis."

In some countries, individuals are cushioned by government safety nets; in others by extended families and community networks. In the US, we have very little cushioning of either sort. We fantasize a world of close-knit families, neighborly neighbors and communities that take care of their own, but it just isn't so and unraveling government safety nets isn't going to make it so. To have that fantasy world, even if it were a good thing, we'd need to have a higher marriage rate and larger families, we'd have to get women out of the labor force to care for the elderly, and we'd have to stay put geographically to keep extended families and communities together.

Even if that were feasible, I don't find it a very attractive picture: I would not want to be dependent on filial piety, neighborliness or community spirit. Pettit in a defense of Sen suggests, plausibly, that "capability" or effective freedom requires that the satisfaction of our preferences not be "context dependent," that it not depend upon the preferences of others. In any case, I'm a nasty cuss and think I would make out much better getting social security checks direct deposited into my bank account than I would relying on the good will of family, neighbors or community.

Moral Clarity

The New York Times > Magazine > The Way We Live Now: The Moral Cataclysm

Bush's call for moral clarity may be a travesty of both words, but it speaks to a genuine need. People want it so badly that they are willing to project it where it's lacking -- or settle for moral simplicity instead. And we are right to beware of simplicity that offers feel-good kitsch and frank manipulation in place of moral reflection. But it would be wrong to reject moral sentiment just because it can be misused.

Most people, including most academics outside of philosophy, don't know that there's such a thing as ethics. They assume that there are, on the one hand, codes of conduct--professional ethics for various disciplines and theological ethics for different religions--and on the other hand murkey sentimentality. "Moral clarity" is a matter of buying a code of conduct with clear, simple rules--all else is sentimentality. Professional ethics only concern behavior on the job; for an overarching code of conduct we look to religion. Sentimentality may soften the edges of our commitment to a code of conduct in an agreeable and appropriate way but without commitment to a code of conduct we are left with mud, murk and moral relativism.

This isn't a conjecture. We discovered this in a class 2 years ago when, after years of hearing undergraduates use the words "ethics" and "morality" in funny ways I decided to ask the class whether they thought ethics and morality were different and, if so, what the difference was. The consensus that they did was overwhelming so in standard professorial manner I wrote "ethics" and "morality" on the board and asked the class to characterize what they thought these two concepts were all about.

The consensus was again overwhelming and almost perfectly reflected the consensus of non-philosophers at a workshop on "ethics across the curriculum" that I'd attended a few weeks earlier. "Ethics" was, students agreed, "rational" and could be articulated; "morality" was a matter of feeling and couldn't be articulated much less argued for. Ethics, they agreed, should govern our conduct in business, the professions and public life: there were rules for doctors, lawyers, managers and politicians and they should be followed. Morality was for private life and should govern life in the family and among friends. Most were skeptical about about religious ethics though and thought that religion, to the extent that it was of any interest at all, was about morality and had no place in business or public life.

Some of the more astute students then took the next step and opined that the problem with Liberals was that they were sentimental, short-sighted and confused ethics with morality. If an employee was incompetent but had a wife and seven children to support, Morality said you should keep him on but Ethics said you had to fire him: liberals just didn't understand that managers had an ethical obligation to produce results and that firms had a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits. It was the same in public life: Liberals just didn't realize that if you taxed the pants off of people to provide for the poor it would undermine incentives, lower GDP and make everyone worse off; they also didn't realize that there were Bad Guys out there who would beat us up if we didn't have jails, armies and get-tough policies. Charity was terribly important--around the edges to heal the wounds--but couldn't be central without disastrous results.

This reminded me of one of C. S. Lewis' Narnia books where, after the boys are issued with weapons to fight for righteousness, Lucy is given a box of elixers with supernaturally curative powers because it's unseemly for women to fight. (I detest C. S. Lewis) The idea now was that guys, both male and female, fight the good fight in management, the professions and public life--girls, both male and female, follow after healing, salving wounds and dispensing charity. When Tsunamis strike the girls come out with their magic healing medicine boxes. If the Market beats people down they operate little charities and faith-based initiatives to make their people's lives better. That's compassionate convervatism. But woe to all if we let the compassion, the woman business, take over.

We ground our teeth and thought, you wait, you just wait. "We" isn't royal, or authorial or any figure of speech but the plain English first person plural: this was a team taught course I did with a colleague in econ. One of my colleagues at my first job, at Northern Illinois University, recalled going to dos with Gustav Bergmann who would lie on his back on the floor with a bottle of beer on his belly and who, listening to the paper a miserable junior colleague was reading would chant, "You wait, you just wait" before beating the crap out of the miserable untenured victim or grad student. I do this myself to the best of my ability.

We didn't convert most students, which wasn't the aim, but we got across the idea that the views they opposed weren't just naive and couldn't simply be dismissed: conservative views can't simply be dismissed, liberal views can't simply be dismissed and addressing that question of how to live ones life is hard, takes some time and thinking about. Most Americans don't seem to get this and it's a stinking shame that most colleges don't require a course in ethics to get students clear about how to deal with this stuff. That required ethics course is part of the Catholic tradition and, contrary to what parents think, at most places it isn't a matter of telling students that they shouldn't screw around. They get the real thing. I'm a pariah at my place because I have a big mouth but I'm happy and proud to teach at a Catholic college.

Buying a Meal Ticket

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Men Just Want Mommy

"Powerful women are at a disadvantage in the marriage market because men may prefer to marry less-accomplished women." Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them....there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own."...smart men with demanding jobs would rather have old-fashioned wives, like their mums, than equals. The study found that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to get married, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise. So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

As with all sociobiological explanations there's probably something to it but it misses the point. With every 16 point rise in IQ there's that much less reason for women to get married--particularly since men look for ego-stroking and support services. When I was growing up the only way to get a place of your own was by getting married. The only alternative was to be an old maid schoolteacher and take care of your aging parents until they died and you inherited the house. When I was an undergraduate, Miss Cowler, the English professor who instilled my lifelong passion for the Enlightenment (which she, and everyone else at the time called "The Eighteenth Century") invited me to her house for drinks. I still remember the beautiful cylindrical glasses with false bottoms in which she served liqueurs and my amazement at the fact that she, an unmarried women, actually lived in a house on her own. I thought there was some law against it.

My mother's view was that a man was, as she put it, a "meal ticket." You got married to get a house of your own and a man to pay the mortgage, take out the trash and do odd jobs. It was also the ticket out of the labor force, where there were no options for women other than dead-end drudgery at low wages. As my mother said of my cousin Joan, who had taught elementary school, "she couldn't stand dealing with those 30 little stinkers so she got pregnant as soon as possible." Coming from this I wondered why any woman who could get a good job and make enough money to buy a house, get nice liqueur glasses, and pay for handyman services, would get married.

It always amazed me that feminists by and large bought into the male picture of the traditional arrangement according to which women were subservient and oppressed. According to the traditional female picture men were dumb animals with strong backs and weak brains whom women manipulated. My mother told me the story of a remote ancestor, apparently domiciled in Silas Marner country around the time of the Industrial Revolution. He had a loom in his cottage which he worked lying on the floor underneath it. When he tried to come up for a break, pulling backward to sit up, his wife would grab him by the ankles, drag him back under the loom and force him to keep working. Did traditional men ever get the idea that traditional women were using them---flattering their vanity, soothing their egos and providing small services in order to get houses of their own, financial support and household maintenance? Did they ever realize that it was traditional women, not feminists, who were contemptuous of them?

I don't practice what I preach--married very young and now married for 32 years, I wanted a relationship with someone I could talk to and a real Dick-and-Jane family in the suburbs--and I fell in love. But none of my friends are married. Why bother? If you have a decent job and aren't looking for a bail out, if you can buy a house on your own salary and afford to hire a handyman, if you can get the things you want without sucking up, playing games, flattering and doing little services for a male companion, why bother?

Why Teaching is No Fun

I've just finished preparing my Analytic Philosophy class for Spring. Teaching this course is a kick because I relive my philosophical youth, particularly when I reread papers from time time when Analytic Philosophy was young. I've been sneaking around the Web peeking at other people's syllabi for comparable courses and it seems that we all do what we like--I seem to like reading Russell more than most.

But the constraints imposed by the students I have to deal with and the System in which we operate make teaching miserable. In part it's because I'm female, physically unprepossessing and peculiar: if I don't work very hard to assert authority and display organization I will be treated as a buffoon--a funny fat little women, a figure of fun. Other faculty can afford to be laid back but I can't: I have to exert myself to the fullest to act "professional" since I don't "look professional." Once I've established myself, after a few class meetings, I can let go a little--in fact I sometimes let go a lot sometimes and enjoy myself, but I always have to work at maintaining order and structure. My appearance is against me and I don't have the social skills to "facilitate" discussions or use any of the gimmicks we're encouraged to try, so I lecture, keep strictly on track, and do everything I can to avoid the appearance of "disorganization."

But it's not just me. The System makes things difficult because the brute fact is that the university is both an educational institution and a screening agency for employment and admission to professional programs. I have to grade students, and because they know that they are there to get their credentials, I have to establish a clear scheme for assessing them and rigidly stick by it. This year, after agonizing, I've decided to grade them on the basis of a term paper and objective type quizzes to see that they're keeping up with the reading. I haven't yet decided how many quizzes or how much they'll count and here I have to figure in a number of factors: I have to weigh my own view that these quizzes are a waste of my time and theirs against their interest in not having everything hang on one term paper; I have to have enough quizzes and have them at set times to please students; I have to work at these quizzes to make them good, to see to it that they aren't a complete waste of time.

I wish I could give students collaborative projects but grading them is a hassle. I wish I could give them take-home tests: I have a stock of very clever, juicy questions and I'm interested in seeing how students answer them. It would be wonderful if students would get together and discuss these questions--that's what philosophy is all about. But they won't discuss them unless they're a graded assignment and if they are I have to worry about collaboration: what is legitimate and what isn't? what do I say to students who've worked on a question together and come up with substantially the same answer but where it's clear that one student engaged with the material and understood what was going on while the others parroted snatches of the solution without understanding it? Furthermore, because the university is an employment agency I have to rank students and get a spread of grades: I have to make sure that some students do badly.

So I'll give true/false and multiple-choice tests where students can't complain about the grades and I'll weight them heavily enough to please students who don't like writing essays. I'll restrict topics for the term paper and impose mickey mouse rules about it to make it harder for them to cheat. By the time students get their grades they'll be home on vacation and less likely to give me a hard time: they can't complain about the grades for objective type tests and they won't complain about the grade for their paper so I'll be off the hook. Pedagogically, this stinks. But I will do it so that I can get this crap off my back so that I have some chance to talk about Russell, Ayer and Quine, about Skepticism about the External World, Puzzle Cases of Personal Identity, Twin Earth and all the things that interest me and got me into philosophy in the first place.

I'm fed up with the whole thing. I love my field: I would gladly learn and gladly teach but the System makes it difficult. My son is now in college and convinced that faculty are out to beat up on students. I've talked to other students who believe that faculty really like to lecture, don't want to hear what they have to say, don't want to engage in discussion. Hardly. We're all of us caught in an evil net

La Religione Diffusa

WorldWide Religious News

Paul Ginsborg, a prominent historian of Italy, described the overall atmosphere, in Italian, as "la religione diffusa." The religion of everyone or, in his loose translation, "It's in the air."...Crucifixes may hang in public schools, but without the heavy political overtones that come with displays of, say, the Ten Commandments in public places in America..."Everybody thinks that the pope is the only moral figure in my country as far as war and social justice go," said Emma Bonino, a leader of the Radical Party, who spearheaded the campaign to legalize abortion in the 1970's. "But on personal behavior, meaning sex, meaning divorce, meaning motherhood and pregnancy, people frankly do not care.

For the past decade or so I've been following Culture Wars in the US and the debate about homosexuality in the Episcopal Church in particular which, so far, has culminated in the Eames Report. I even published a paper on this myself.

Liberals in the Episcopal Church feel that it is terribly important for the Church as an institution to affirm, officially, that homosexual activity is morally ok. I don't really understand why. Episcopalians have never paid any attention to the Church's official views on "personal behavior" and no one else has every really paid any attention to the Episcopal Church. The whole program has the Quixotic air of a campaign to get the Roman Catholic Church to reverse its position on birth control. Apart from a few eccentric enthusiasts for "natural family planning" no Catholic takes it seriously. Lay Catholics don't take it seriously and know that priests don't take it seriously; priests know that lay Catholics don't take it seriously and know that lay Catholics know that they don't take it seriously either. Everyone knows that the Vatican will keep making noises about it, and other matters of "personal behavior," because it's part of the routine--but everyone knows that no one takes it seriously and that objecting to it is just silly.

Episcopalians, though, are Protestants--indeed, the "P" in "WASP." (If you don't believe it or were told in Confirmation Class that the Reformation in England never really happened see The Stripping of the Altars) Protestants believe that everything in religion should be taken seriously and that anything that isn't is sheer hypocracy or superstition.

In the Episcopal Church, as it had become, it just wouldn't do to view the official doctrines about homosexuality as silly stuff that no one took seriously, like the RC Church's official position on contraception. People who didn't buy it felt that they had to see to it that it was officially repudiated. It wouldn't do to simply to ignore the official position on sexual conduct as one of those silly things that no one took seriously and that everyone knew no one took seriously--if it was wrong it had to be expunged and officially repudiated, whatever the cost.

This seemed to me preposterous. Tony Soprano and his associates never felt that they needed clergy approval for operating protection rackets and whacking people in order to be Catholic. All religions have lots of doctrines and rules on the books. Some, like rules against killing are sensible and most people are on board with them; others, like prohibitions on artificial contraception are completely silly and virtually no one takes them seriously. No one has to take the official doctrines and rules, whether sensible or silly, seriously to belong to a religion: you go through the motions, buy what you like, take what you want and do as you please. That is la religione diffusa.

The Episcopal Church's crusade to recognize homosexuality as officially ok was arrogant, pointless and, like the recent campaign for gay marriage, largely counterproductive. Among coastal elites--the Episcopal Church's (admittedly shrinking) "base"--homosexuality wasn't an issue and, within the Church, the traditional prohibition was not taken any more seriously than the official ban on pre-marital sex or the official ban on "artificial" birth control in the Catholic Church. There's no patching it up now that the issue is out on the table. It won't collapse the Anglican Church: it will simply erode it a little bit faster than the normal course of events would have done, cost more money and make people angrier.

What would have happened if 40 years ago the Episcopal Church had simply continued with business as usual--cranking out Elizabethan liturgy and maintaining phony gothic churches as settings for fancy weddings? What if it hadn't done folk masses in the '60s or liturgical revision in the '70s, ordained women or blessed same sex unions? It would certainly have declined because, much as it eats me, the Episcopal Church could never be a vehicle of the religione diffusa that I envied in the Mediterranean Folk Catholicism I knew as a child or the medieval fantasy of Chaucer's Merry England I entertained as an undergraduate. Great Pan is dead, the semi-pagan folk Christianity I admired is on the way out and the religion of self-conscious conviction and intentional commitment is on the rise. And the US represents the world-wide norm--outside of Italy apparently--where religion is taken seriously or not at all, which, unfortunately, for me means not at all.