Possible Worlds or the Common Good?

American Prospect Online - Party in Search of a Notion

The Democrats need to become the party of the common good. They need a simple organizing principle that is distinct from Republicans and that isn’t a reaction to the Republicans. They need to remember what made liberalism so successful from 1933 to 1966, that reciprocal arrangement of trust between state and nation. And they need to take the best parts of the rights tradition of liberalism and the best parts of the more recent responsibilities tradition and fuse them into a new philosophy that is both civic-republican and liberal -- that goes back to the kind of rhetoric Johnson used in 1964 and 1965, that attempts to enlist citizens in large projects to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits...The common good is common sense, and the historical time is right for it, for two reasons...By 2008, we will have lived through seven-plus years of an administration that has done almost nothing for the common good, that has unleashed the most rapacious social Darwinism we’ve seen in this country for at least 80 years, and that has catered to its interest groups far more, at once more obsequiously and more arrogantly, than even the Mondale-era Democrats did. Americans are, and will be, ready for something very different.

I'm taking an algebra course at our local community college these days, ostensibly because I need to learn enough math to read the literature in economics Ifor a research project on preference--and with only 2 years of high school math and none in college I have a long way to go. But the real reason is that I just want to learn math--partly because I just plain like it and partly because, bizarre as it may seem, I want it to be the case that I could have gone in for science--I want there to be a relatively nearby possible world where I am a chemist, a dentist or a veterinarian.

I have a powerful intuition that my actual well-being depends in part on the way it is for my counterparts at nearby possible worlds--the way things almost might have been for me. When I go through a check-out line or order something over the phone I am always struck by how easily it could have been me working at a boring job, trapped in a confined space scanning groceries or stuck in a carrel taking phone-orders, doing boring, repetitious tasks and living a lousy life. I escaped that kind of life by a fluke, by the skin of my teeth--the possible worlds where I am a supermarket checker or customer service representative, a data entry operator, waitress or bank teller, are only a hair's breadth away. What drives me morally, and politically, is my interest in making these worlds more remote by seeing to it that people, particularly women, have a wider range of opportunities and so a better chance to avoid those lousy jobs.

Other people seem to be driven by the same intuition the proximity of nasty possibilities. They contribute to disease charities not only because they imagine that they may get cancer or heart disease but because they have a sense that they easily could even if they actually don't. They contribute to charities that benefit crippled children because, even if their kids are healthy, they know that they could easily have had a crippled child. They recognize that worlds where they or their children are sick or crippled are close by and contribute to help out their nearby counterparts.

Anecdotal evidence at least suggests however that most don't notice their counterparts who are poor or who are stuck doing drudge work. They don't look at Walmart women and shudder, as I do, with the realization that they escaped that work and that life by the skin of their teeth, by pure dumb luck. In part it's a lack of imagination: they can't imagine what that life would be like--8 hours a day behind that check-stand in a noisy, ugly place, constantly exposed to the public, scanning that stuff, over and over and over again, with no way out, no way to achieve, nothing interesting to do, nothing to learn, nothing to figure out, making $8/hour, and then heading home to cook, clean and go to bed until it starts over again. In part it's the wildly unrealistic idea that people have a fair opportunity to avoid those bad lives and that they, regardless of their life circumstances, would have done better--and that is just false.

I don't trust sentiments about the common good--particularly given that many people simply cannot imagine what the lives of many of their fellow citizens are like and how little opportunity they have to escape. Politically, people vote for what they take to be their own interests, and the interests of people like themselves. To the extent that they are concerned about people who are less well off they regard that as the business of charity--pitching coins into the Salvation Army kettle or buying Food for All cards at the supermarket checkout. And even then their charitable efforts only extend to starving children and the destitute--not to the miserable women scanning their groceries.

Maybe I have a different take because I got beaten up. After high school, when I worked as a clerk-typist for a local bus company, I reflected and realized that by rights I belonged there: I was just a high school graduate (barely) with a D+ average and only 2 years of math--my qualifications were the same as, or worse than, anyone else's in that office. Every day when I came home my mother cheered me on and pushed me to go back: "Who ever heard of a girl that doesn't work?" Every day she, and the women I worked with told me "Who do you think you are," in those words and in other words. What makes you think that you can, or should, be doing anything other than this job? And I knew that they were right--the only thing that set me apart was that my mother had money and managed to buy me into an expensive college that specialized in nurturing rich underachievers.

So that I believe is the solution: to get it across to people how narrowly they escaped living rotten lives and the extent to which their escape was a matter of pure dumb luck--the luck of being born middle class, of being white and of being born on one side of the border rather than the other, the luck of having opportunities and second chances that most people don't get. This is the liberal political equivalent of Jonathan Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God": we are, all of us who are reasonably well off, suspended by a hair over that modal pit, separated by the narrowest logical space from the innumerable unhappy lives we might easily have had but for pure dumb luck. Who do we think we are?

The White Man's Burden

Western Civilization's Burden

Wow, this is a little weird but hit the link. I have to say I buy into this. And I'm also a great fan of Kipling's. What's the problem?

Segregation: you asked for it--you got it

AP Wire | 06/02/2006 | LA reporter allegedly attacked for investigating charter school

LOS ANGELES - Police were investigating a KABC-AM reporter's accusations that a man assaulted him and grabbed his tape recorder after he attempted to interview the principal of a charter school that a host at his radio station said was "openly segregationist." Reporter Sandy Wells was chased and tackled by the man Thursday after a school employee told him to leave Academia Semillas Del Pueblo campus east of downtown, said station spokesman Steve Sheldon...

The school came under scrutiny by KABC host Doug McIntyre after he received a tip from a listener...Sheldon said. The Web site for the school described it as a kindergarten through eighth grade public school "dedicated to providing urban children of immigrant native families an excellent education founded upon their own language, cultural values and global realities."..."It's exclusionary, it's separatist, it's openly segregationist," McIntyre told KABC-TV.

Here is the result of a bi-partisan effort by conservatives and liberals to promote segregation: a segregated "charter school" where poor Hispanic kids are taught Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico, that boasts the lowest scores on standardized tests in the whole school district.

The conservative media have gleefully picked up the story and are quite informative.RedState has an extensive account. But they strategically ignore the fact that this school is a conservative initiative: a charter school, publicly funded but free to run its own affairs without the interference of stifling government bureaucracy. This is part of the grander program to farm out public facilities and services--schools, clinics and prisons--to "faith-based" organizations and entrapeneurs. Now the conservatives are upset because tax payers' bucks are going to support this enterprise--I doubt that they'd be any happier if it were self-supporting.

But if the money comes from a conservative initiative, the ideology comes from fringe left identity politics packaged in the multicultural gobbledygook of the education industry:

Our vision of education emphasizes a student centered school society that cultivates academic excellence, talents, humanist ethics, positive culture, and social consciousness for students grades K-8 and their parents. Our pedagogy is meant to enrich the human capacity to transform our reality into one that is more just. We believe our school will be an integral member of a community, capable of providing learning and leadership opportunities to the entire community.

Ancestral Mexican schooling ethos embodied social ideals and appreciations intended to develop the child as a complete person. The indigenous heart of our vision is a repossession of an identity denied from our children in standard schools.

Here is a fruitful collaboration by the left and right to warehouse kids who have been written off, run by a cultural entrapeneur who has set himself up as a "community leader" to get funding. The state pays him to act as boss nigger keeping his "community" occupied and keeping their kids off the street so that they don't make trouble. Poor but ambitious immigrant parents sent their kids to this charter school rather than a conventional public school because the imagined that they'd get a better education. Everyone smiled indulgently and jollied them along because they knew these kids would never make it into the mainstream much less become doctors, engineers or accountants. At best, they would become "community leaders" and "community activists," scrounging grants from the multiculturalism industry to staff crappy little projects in the slums--payoffs by left and right segregationists to keep them away from white neighborhoods.

Everyone was happy because they know jolly well what works and wanted to avoid it at all costs: integration, achieved if necessary through school bussing. No one wants to read about the school bussing program in Raleigh, NC that boosted standardized test scores for poor black and Hispanic kids. After blacks in North Carolina and elsewhere in the south fought for integration, whites on the left and right were delighted to hear the headmaster/community-leader of this charter school in Los Angeles assure them that he "didn't want to drink from the White water fountain." And now blood-and-soil conservatives have a bonus: they point gleefully to the shenanigans at Academia Semillas Del Pueblo, where kids are taught to look forward to the Reconquista of the US Southwest, to make the case that Hispanic immigrants cannot or will not assimilate and are out to take over.

Most immigrants and minorities manage to avoid this crap, but some of the poorest and most naive and others who are just unlucky, get hamstrung between left and right segregationists, pushed by the left to preserve or invent their culture, language and cohesive "communities" and then slammed by the right for failing to assimilate. Multiculturalism at work

Bonhoeffer Redux: Time to Panic

Church seeks spirituality of youth . . . and doesn't like what it finds - Britain - Times Online

THE Church of England has debunked the widely held view that young people are spiritual seekers on a journey to find transcendent truths to fill the “God-shaped hole” within them. A report published by the Church today indicates that young people are quite happy with a life without God and prefer car boot sales to church...The authors began their work believing that even if the young had little knowledge of Christianity they would still have religious or spiritual yearnings. They were shocked to find that they did not...The researchers were also shocked to discover little sense of sin or fear of death. Nor did they find any Freudian guilt as a result of private sensual desires.

Bonhoeffer said it in Letters and Papers from Prison, c. 1943 so why are we surprised? There is no God-shaped hole--the bourgeois, at home in this world, happy with his family, his work and his hobbies, doesn't need, or want, religion. The Existentialist theologians who try to convince him that he's missing something are wrong, and moreover are trying to create sickness where there's health to conjure up more business for the church. That's a paraphrase because the quote is ungoogleable.

Here's a thesis with significant empirical support, not only in the sincere avowals of secular youth--Sinead Berrigan, 19: “I don’t believe in God and I think, to a certain extent, religions are a waste of time. I don’t like being told how to live by a set of religious rules. I just want to be happy”--but in the global theological landscape. Religion flourishes where people are poor and powerless, and withers away where they have decent this-worldly prospects.

Bonhoeffer's response was "religionless Christianity": we don't need God but God needs us--to suffer with him and work for him in the world. This inspired the Christian Left activism of the '60s in which I was indoctrinated. But I don't think that my mentors, or even Bonhoeffer himself realized the extent to which it undermined Christianity. Why should we work, suffer or sacrifice, as Bonhoeffer did? We have a dilemma. If the answer is in any sense religious, what's in it for me religiously? If there isn't a god who dispenses reward and punishment, why should I bother? If I don't get to enjoy religion--the art and mysticism--why should I bother? I've had this discussion with colleagues in theology who're into "liberation theology" and hold that the whole business is about forming "base communities" for Latin American peasants. Well that's very nice but I keep asking them if the kickback isn't Bach (I'm now listening to Bist Du Bei Mir) and high liturgy why should I bother? If the Church doesn't provide any reward, if you liberation theologians take away all the goodies of religion and then demand all the shit work, why should I comply?

On the other horn, if the impetus is secular--some impulse to promote the good for people, work for social justice, etc.--why should I bother with religion? Yes, Bonhoeffer, a moral hero, had a religious story to tell but lots of other moral heros who resisted the Nazis, hid Jews in their attics and took on risk to do the right thing out of common decency, didn't have religious stories to tell. So what is the point of introducing the religious story into this picture? There's the dilemma if you start with the Christian Left assumption that the whole business is geared up to promoting political action in the interests of social justice.

It was only much later in retrospect that I realized how fundamentally conservative these '60s "radical" clergy were. They were dealing with people who bought the idea that they should be nice for the Kingdom of God's sake but assumed that being nice consisted in contributing to charities, operating soup kitchens and sending condolence cards to the bereaved. The aim of these priests was to push the idea that being nice consisted also in marching in demonstrations, working politically to promote a more just society and boycotting non-union grapes. Well that's right, but it doesn't address the fundamental question of people like me who wonder why we should bother being nice in any way in the first place--or what doing the right thing, whatever it is, has to do with religion.

In their advice to the Church, the report’s authors say that the first thing to do is “avoid panic”

But why? Bonhoeffer was right: there is no God-shaped hole in people's lives. And no matter how much clergy nag and whine they are not going to convince anyone that there really is--that their this-worldly happiness is an illusion or that lives that are good by secular standards are really desperate and empty. The message of the Christian Left has no purchase on anyone who isn't already religious: dispensing with the metaphysics may be a relief for dutiful Christians who've had it beaten into them that in addition to all the obligations of niceness they have an even more stringent obligation to believe metaphysical claims that they find implausible, uninteresting or simply incomprehensible but it's not going to do anything for secular people who never felt that sense of doxastic obligation in the first place or persuade them to buy into the ethics game. There are too few aesthetes and history buffs like me to support the Church and most people who have the yen for romance, aesthetic experience and metaphysical thrills get their jollies elsewhere--in popular music, in science-fiction, fantasy and ghost stories, in computer games, and in New Age products.

Even if the Church, using all that data from surveys and focus groups could reconstruct itself to satisfy a wider range of consumer tastes--and it's very difficult to see what that reconstruction would look like--consumers wouldn't believe it: most wouldn't even notice. After a generation or two of secularism, the Church is so remote that it's off the radar screen. The secular world provides all the goods and services reasonably comfortable people in affluent countries want and there's no point in looking any further.

Time to panic.

Bravo, UMBC!

Why American College Students Hate Science - New York Times

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, opened for business in a former cow pasture not far from downtown just 40 years ago. Still in its infancy as universities go, U.M.B.C. is less well known than Maryland's venerable flagship campus at College Park or the blue-blooded giant Johns Hopkins. But the upstart campus in the pasture is rocking the house when it comes to the increasingly critical mission of turning American college students into scientists...

Initiated in 1989, U.M.B.C.'s Meyerhoff Scholars Program is so well known that the university no longer needs to recruit for it. High school counselors and teachers nominate about 1,900 students annually, mostly from Maryland, for merit-based scholarships. About 100 scholarships are offered, and of these about 50 are accepted. The new students are welcomed into a well-established community of scientists and scientists-to-be through a summer program that sets the stage for the next four years...

Critics have sometimes accused the Meyerhoff program of cherry-picking bright students who would perform spectacularly well wherever they went to school. But the numbers suggest that the school's instructional strategy makes a real difference. Meyerhoff students are twice as likely to earn undergraduate degrees in science or engineering as similar students who declined the scholarships and went to school elsewhere. Most significantly, students who completed the Meyerhoff program are 5.3 times as likely to enroll in graduate study as the students who said no and went elsewhere.

I'm a quasi-alumna. My degree is from Hopkins and I'm proud of it, but I took a linguistics course at UMBC and that was one of the best things that happened to me in grad school.

I've just finished my semester--triumphantly submitted my grades to the registrar's office a week before the due date, posted them at my class site, and ducked--set an auto-reply to email saying that I would be away and unable to check until the end of June. I will answer the phone in a thick generic accent: "Dr. ____? Yo no se, no comprendo. Ich spreche keine English. Je ne se quoi. You wanna Tony Soprano?"

The hardest thing about this business isn't teaching but complying with the rules and standards that stymie one in teaching, in particular the obligation to get a spread of grades and keep them low. Academia operates on the Signal Theory rather than the Human Capital Theory. Our aim is not to pump up that Human Capital but to rank students to that they can be assessed for the allocation of scarce goods. It's all like some parody of an undergraduate's worst nightmare:

Tee-hee-hee, Professor X--I only gave 3 A's this semester.

Chickenfeed, Professor Y--I didn't give any A's at all AND I flunked half the class.

[Professors X and Y in unison, beating their breasts and scratching their armpits] We're tough!!!

I don't doubt that we could do better if our aim was simply to teach, if college were on the model of Microsoft certification or music lessons, where the aim was simply to achieve a result. Years ago academics probably had that luxury. When I was growing up a college degree, regardless of major or grades, guaranteed a you perch in the middle class: a white-collar job if make and marriage to a white collar worker if female or at worst a teaching job. Now we're got to sort out the 10% or so that will get decent jobs and decent lives from the 15% who will go the death of a salesman and the rest who will wash out and subside into the working class.

You'd think it would be better in the sciences where the jobs are there and where the aim is to teach specific job-related skills. And this piece on UMBC suggests that it can be better. But it can't do better in my field where nothing I teach is of any direct relevance to what students will eventually do on the job. All I can do is certify that students are clever enough to do tricks--to do natural deduction derivations--and sufficiently literate, organized and intellectually acute to write decent philosophy papers. I'm stuck with this.

Of course I love what I do, and believe that it's worthwhile. Philosophy though is a luxury that few people can afford, least of all undergraduates working to get their credentials so that they can avoid grunt work and drudgery.

Slippery Slopes

Heaven Can Wait :: Dissent Spring 2006 Issue

Feldman, a professor at the New York University School of Law, suggests that more religious activities and expressions of faith should be permitted in public institutions but that no public money should be used to support religious institutions. In other words, let public school prayer alone but don’t spend public money on religious charter schools. What Feldman fails to recognize is that the Christian right’s drive for more publicly enshrined religious expression is inseparable from its demand for public financing of explicitly religious activities: the first is a stalking horse for the second.

Feldman also espouses the peculiar idea that religious minorities should not be bothered by explicitly Christian activities in tax-supported venues, say, the recitation of a prayer before a football game or the use of school facilities for Bible classes. He argues (a quote Kazin cites approvingly) that “there is nothing shameful or inherently disadvantageous in being a religious minority, so long as that minority is not subject to coercion or discrimination.”

There is something bizarrely ahistorical about the eagerness of certain Jewish intellectuals to proclaim their lack of discomfort in the presence of Christian symbols in public institutions. Their great-grandparents from Minsk and Pinsk knew better: the hairs on the backs of their necks would have prickled when they were invited to join public school classmates in singing carols about the birth of the little Lord Jesus.

The problem with slippery slopes is that there's no a priori method for determining which way is down hill or where to draw the bright line and dig in. Slippery slope arguments per se aren't fallacious--the slippery slope fallacy consists in ignoring the empirical premises they require or failing to support these premises.

Does Feldman "fail to recognize" that school prayer and other trivial religious ceremonies and symbols are "inseparable" from fundamentalist Christian's drive to get public funding for more substantive religious projects or does he disagree about the tilt of the slope and the suitable place to draw the bright line? Even if members of the religious right regard school prayer and the like as a stalking horse for the establishment of religion in some genuinely objectionable sense it doesn't follow that it will in fact make that more likely. It's an empirical question whether permitting trivial symbols and ceremonies will make it more likely or less likely that the Christian right can get through its theocratic agenda, or whether it will simply have no effect. There is no a priori reason to hold that the connection between these inherently harmless practices and those that impose a burden on religious minorities is "inevitable."

It is also hard to understand why Jewish intellectuals', or any other non-Christians', lack of discomfort in the presence of Christian symbols is "bizarrely ahistorical." What is ahistorical if anything is the idea the US in the 21st Century is in relevant respects like Eastern Europe in the 19th. There are important empirical questions here that are fudged under the rhetoric. Why would the Jews of Minsk and Pinsk get nervous if they were invited to sing Christmas carols? Was their worry that the display of Christian symbols was the means to rally the troops for a pogrom? Was it that it was part of a larger program to indoctrinate and convert them? Were they worried that they would simply find all the stuff so attractive that even without any evangelistic campaign they would be won over? Assuming that the Minskites and Pinskites had reason to worry about all these things, do members of religious minorities or secularists in the US now have reason to worry about any of them?

I don't see any pogroms, crusades or inquisitions in the offing. As far as evangelism goes many fundamentalists do imagine that religious symbols and ceremonies work ex opera operato: they have the idea that mere exposure to religious stuff can magically effect conversions--or at least soften up prospects. However one would assume that non-Christians don't believe in the magical efficacy of religious stuff or worry that they will be brain-zapped if they sing Christmas carols or look at the cross atop Mt. Soledad.

Is the real worry that there's religious stuff that operates naturalistically on individual's aesthetic sensibilities? That would be my concern if I wanted to raise my kid secular or non-Christian. If however the aim is to protect impressionable youngsters from the lure of religion then secularist parents should be careful to avoid exposing them to the Bach B Minor Mass, Paradise Lost, the Metaphysical poets and all decent religious art and church architecture. It's the religious products that have aesthetic merit, presented as culture objects, that are the most tempting--not prayer in the schools or Jehovah's Witnesses at the door. But to protect kids from this you have to knock out a huge hunk of the choral repertoire, stop teaching European art history prior to the Renaissance and much of Renaissance art history as well, avoid quite a few major literary works and ignore ecclesiastical architecture.

Is there something I'm missing here? During the campaign to remove crucifixes from the classrooms at my place a number of years ago the argument was that non-Catholics, particularly religious minorities, were offended, hurt and even panicked by them. This seemed pretty far-fetched to me but if in fact, as some of my colleagues claimed, Jews and Muslims had an immediate visceral reaction with flashbacks of the Inquisition and Crusades that might be a reason to take them down, just as there would be reason--though not IMHO compelling reason--to keep my cats indoors if their shit offends my neighbor. But Jacoby's complaint is that religious minorities aren't offended. She thinks that they should be--and should campaign vigorously to get all religious stuff, especially Christian stuff, removed from the public square because she is convinced that public religious expression will "inevitably" start the slide to coercion and discrimination against religious minorities, the dominance of the Christian right and theocracy.

But, as I've written in the margins of innumerable blue books--"evidence for this? argument for this?"

Darwinian non-voters

America's Scary Non-Voters :: thetyee.ca

[N]on-voters appear particularly attracted to things that give them "strong jolts of sensation" – extreme sports, gambling, realistic video games, and psychotropic drugs...Even more worrying, however, is the rise in the values that Adams categorizes as "Darwinism and exclusion." Those who embrace these values, he writes, demonstrate "a mindset that sees brutal competition as a natural, exhilarating, and even cleansing condition for human coexistence …a dog-eat-dog world in which winners win by any means necessary, including violence, and losers get what they deserve – and are unworthy of sympathy or help.

That's seems right--and it's depressing. Is it what's this younger generation coming to or is it just a feature of being young as such?

Probably the latter. That's the sexual meat market: "only the brave deserve the fair." Young males fight for dominance. The alpha males collect harems--the losers "get what they deserve." Women "get attention" so long as they're good for breeding--then get thrown away. That at least is my son's conjecture--that when women get old they bug their kids because they can't "get attention" anymore. Probably better for women since almost all women get their innings even if all eventually get thrown away whereas, in this state of nature, most males never even get a shot.

I suppose it's the more hopeful scenario because it suggests that people will grow out of it. BUT WHEN?

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The scapegoat - Los Angeles Times

THE UPROAR IN the Netherlands over its Somali-born member of parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is much more than a national controversy. It goes to the heart of the culture of appeasement that currently grips Europe... The failure goes far beyond the Netherlands and Hirsi Ali. Britain, Washington's principal ally in the war on terror, has succumbed to just the same cultural cringe. It allowed Islamist demonstrators to parade on the streets with placards proclaiming, "Death to the Infidel," and it even initially threatened to arrest those citizens who protested at such displays (it was subsequently shamed into arresting a demonstrator). Meanwhile, Tony Blair's government is inviting Muslim Brotherhood radicals into the heart of his administration in the hope of drawing the sting from the Islamist scorpion...This has produced a systematic appeasement of all minorities — racial, sexual and religious — in terror of vilification as racist, sexist or Islamophobic.

Well not exactly all minorities--just the ones that have financial clout or threaten violence. Middle-class gay males certainly get a hearing which is probably a good thing--we wouldn't have cared much about AIDS if it were just one of those nasty African diseases like malaria. And, of course, young lower-class males threatening violence always get a hearing, especially if gang leaders are clever enough to spin their activities ideologically as an uprising of the Oppressed. We're afraid of them. No worry about the veiled, sequestered Muslim women who Ayaan Hirsi Ali defended--they haven't got money and aren't likely to do damage.

As far as Hirsi Ali goes, she got too hot to handle. Once it became inconvenient to keep her safe, support peeled away and once she was vulnerable an opportunistic politician, playing to blood-and-soil racists who didn't want black people around, however integrated or assimilated, revoked her Dutch citizenship. That's politics though--and why I'm not in it.

The racist right wants people of color out, but the only socially acceptable way of putting that is by making noises about integration and assimilation--given the assumption that they cannot or will not assimilate. Anyone who genuinely supports integration and assimilation will be drawn into their orbit and, if she happens to be black like Hirsi Ali, will be spun off. The multicultural left isn't likely to be sympathetic either--after all this is politics: you have to make the right noises and, if black or brown, play the designated role of a "community leader" who is "representative" of the "community" and able to mollify the thugs, like Tony's friends in the Muslim Brotherhood.

I wonder how long before the American Enterprise Institute spins off Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Happy Birthday J. S. Mill!

Happy Birthday John Stuart Mill
The 19th-century British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was born 200 years ago today, and although he has been dead for more than 130 years, he still undeniably lives. His thoughts fashion our laws, enliven our scholarly debates and shape our political opinions. Best of all, his genius still inspires and provokes us.

As an undergraduate I had to take a required history of philosophy course that covered the territory from Kant to the turn of the 20th Century. Kant was ok, though it seemed to me needlessly complicated but the rest of the stuff was perfectly awful--except for Mill. When I told the instructor that I wanted to write my term paper on Mill he was disgusted: "You have been given Fichte and Schelling, Nietzshe and Kierkegaard, and yet you choose to write on Mill??!!?" he said. Needless to say, the only other philosopher in the 2 volume anthology we had who interested me was Mach--and he wasn't on the syllabus.

Cutting to the chase what always struck me, pace Plato, was the irreconcilable conflict between Beauty and Goodness. Butterflies and Wheels has a link to a piece by Scruton on Mill with the blurb "'Harm' doctrine has subverted laws founded in inherited sense of the sacred and prohibited." And that is it: utilitarianism, the harms principle, the whole Enlightenment package that Mill bought into, which I myself buy, is inimical to romantic notions of moral heroism and honor, of goodness as beauty and nobility. Goodness as Mill conceived of it is strenuous but practical and pedestrian--achieving the greatest good for the greatest number, not interfering with people who aren't interfering with that project, fighting the dead hand of tradition that imposes pointless constraints. The good people are the political activists, licking envelopes for the cause, and the humane technocrats making tedious adjustments in policy.

This is a tragedy. I understand the pull of Beauty, of heroism and honor, of the Great Chain of Being. I learnt about all this in English classes--Spenser and the Court of Glorianna, the Great Chain of Being, the juicy, religious, vermin-infested 17th Century, with the Metaphysical Poets, the hopelessly romantic Stuarts and all the baroque eccentricity of the old world expiring. Further back, I've read The Waning of the Middle Ages at least 20 times and thrilled to the introduction, describing a world where the colors were brighter, the emotions more intense, the rituals, hagiography and iconography of the Church dominated everyday life and everyone lived in a costume drama. It amazes me that the undergraduates I teach are completely cut off from this romance and that most people, apparently, aren't susceptible to the seduction of it: I am.

But it always struck me how costly that fantasy was--how the opulence of the high aristocracy ate up resources, how the Great Chain of Being cashed out for the bulk of the population who worked to eat and ate to work ground under the heel of their social betters higher up on the food chain, how notions of honor wasted people and wealth, how utterly constrained people were by the circumstances of their lives, how utterly unlovely it was on the ground.

That's where utilitarianism comes into the picture for me: better a population living in little boxes made out of ticky-tacky and spending their evenings vegging in front of the TV than a population of peasants in picturesque cottages without indoor plumbing drudging all their waking hours; better real opportunity for all to improve their lives than the Great Chain of Being where everyone knows his place; better a world tarmacked over, with clean water, medicine, food and clean cinderblock houses for everyone than an expensive fantasy at the cost of widespread human misery; better dishonor than death.

It's a horrible choice, but that is the choice for now.

Kids!!!--he wants to be a lawyer!

#2 Son has just announced that he wants to be a lawyer! We are very upset. Law is one of those overcrowded professions for people who can't do math. To get a job in these professions you have to get straight A's and hustle because anyone can do it but most people can't do it well. By contrast our engineering majors can get decent jobs as juniors with C averages. With math, if you can do it at all you're set.

This lead to a surprising dinner table conversation. After 30+ years of marriage I discovered that my husband would have gone into a humanities discipline even if he could handle the math for a science. This seems insane--or maybe it's a male-female issue.

I loved science as a kid--such as we got of it. I watched Mr. Wizard faithfully and did all the messy experiments in my mother's kitchen. What I really liked in high school were the labs which, to me, were like gym class--recreation. I caught on immediately how to peek though a microscope with one eye and use the other to do the drawing--and my sketches of dissected frogs were magnificent. What I really loved though was chemistry because it was tidy and organized--the periodic table, the equations. All of my experiments came out perfectly--I never had to repeat them or fudge. I still remember my lab partner's gratitude. I cried when I packed in the bunsen burner and flasks at the end of the year, knowing that I'd never do any science class again.

Truly, I don't believe that women go for humanities disciplines because they prefer them--I believe they go for them because, like me, they assume that they can't handle the math. That's why I went for philosophy--the most analytical and, in an extended sense, most scientific of humanities fields. I also like to fight so to that extent I can understand the appeal of law. I can certainly understand wanting to be a litigator on the Rumpole model--but not corporate law or scholarship.

Now I'm old, and I've lost my interest in science. When I read Scientific American on the plane to conferences I never read the physics article. I look at the splendid color pictures, and then read the econ article. Because of the way that my professional life has gone that's what interests me. I like the tidiness. Maybe that's why I like teaching logic so much. Still, when it comes to it I'm the perfect gut level philosopher because what I like to do and do best is to analyze, organize and fight.

But oh these kids, my kids. What do we do? My idea is simple: go for a math-intensive area--math, hard sciences, engineering or econ. That's what matters. Humanities disciplines, including philosophy, are like sports and other extra-curricular activities. They're good things, but they're luxuries--not what education should be about. So what do I say to my daughter, majoring in biology who doesn't much like it? It's tough and time consuming to get a science degree but if you don't you're pretty well worthless, out on the job market with all those other literati, just another woman applying for secretarial jobs.

Bush's Multiculturalist Immigration Policy

Border Illusions - New York Times

These are the people who say illegal border crossings must be stopped immediately, with military boots in the desert sand...America must send its overtaxed troops to the border right now, they say, so a swarm of ruthless, visa-less workers cannot bury our way of life under a relentless onslaught of hard work...The United States is not an Arab emirate. It does not ennoble our democratic experiment by importing a second-class society of worker bees who are vulnerable to exploitation and have little incentive to adopt our values. If there must be guest workers, there must also be a path so they, too, can seek citizenship if they choose. Mr. Bush last night specifically — and shamefully — urged that such a path be denied to temporary workers.

So here we have it: multiculturalism at work. The Bush plan, as the NYTimes editorial notes would not "put illegal workers on a path to assimilation and citizenship"--it would create an underclass of slaves and helots to do our dirty work who will always be separate and never equal, who will maintain their own culturally distinct communities in our midst, and be sent away before they have a chance to get uppity.

This should hardly be a surprise. Conservatives have always been multiculturalists: now they have their feet to the fire and have to come clean. Their worry isn't that immigrants will not assimilate but that they will.

On the May 1, the day of the immigrant boycott, there were crowds of immigrants, documented and undocumented, and their families surging through the streets, waving American flags and Mexican flags, singing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish. Some people were outraged by the Mexican flags and the Spanish version of the National Anthem--which isn't particularly singable in any language. But give me a break--this is the old time religion. Every tacky mail order house features ethnic products, IKEA flies the Swedish flag, St. Patrick's Day is a national obsession and everyone claims to be at least a little bit Irish. Hispanic immigrants and their children are just doing what every other group of immigrants have done: being American.

So here is the conservative multiculturalist agenda: "We don't want you here if you won't assimilate, but we don't want you here if you do assimilate." Simple constructive dilemma.

I'm trying to remember--how long did Sparta last before the helots revolted? Maybe that's not an issue--we're in a better position to run the system than the Spartans were. But the costs will be the same: an expanding military and paramilitary controlling the border and policing the "guest workers." More broadly, it undermines all the rhetoric about our interest in exporting "freedom" and "democracy," promoting our values and our way of life. We don't want to let people in to our country or to our culture, and we have no interest in enabling them to get the material goods that make our way of life possible. We want their sweat and their oil.

TV

I am not happy with the current Sopranos season, which has become moralistic. On yesterday's episode, Vito leaves his lover and heads back to New Jersey, shooting an innocent bystander along the way. The parallel is with Chris who cannot face the prospect of living like family he sees at the gas station. Running out of money, Vito cannot cope with the tedium of an honest handyman job and cuts out. The moral is that Mafiosi can get out but will not.

Meanwhile however Johnny Sack who cannot get out takes on a 15 year prison sentence to see to it that his fat wife is provided for. How does all this fly for Tony? I don't know--nothing has gelled yet. As for Carmella with her dumb little "spec house," I have no sympathy.

Big Love is doing a little better. After teasing us with the idea that polygamy isn't such a good thing--Nicki's bad behavior and Margene's childlishness--the family comes together. Nicki beats up on Barbara's bad big sister and Margene breaks up with the neighbor who is tempting her to pull out of the family. Unlike The Sopranos, Big Love isn't pandering to viewers' desires to get the moralistic story that a social arrangement of which we disapprove is bad, and will yield bad consequences for all concerned. At least not yet.

Good Neighbors

This is my blog so I can cry if I want to.

My neighbors, the Carlos's, object to my cats, Tom, Katherine (Kitty) and Little One, because they poop on their lawn and because Tom sprays their front door. They have put it to me that I should keep these cats locked up in my house--which is not feasible because they're old cats, accustomed to prowling and largely self supporting. I keep the door to our fenced yard open for Ducati, our chocolate lab, a.k.a. Britynic Cadbury of Bourneville but the cats can, and do, fly over the six foot fence and, in any case, when I've tried to confine them, retaliate. Cats are free--at least those like ours who aren't seriously domesticated and make their living eating birds.

Mr. Carlos has taken to pitching cat shit against the steps to our side door. Personally I do not believe that all this shit is ours and would be seriously interested in a DNA test. The neighborhood is full of feral cats. Moreover, some of the crap he's dumped at my side steps, in my opinion, isn't cat shit at all. My cats shit all over the kitchen and the the Carlos' turds by comparison are much bigger than any my cats can squeeze out. In short, I believe this is dog shit rather than cat shit. Some is petrified and covered with dirt: it is pretty clear to me that Carlos has been digging in his garden to find shit to deliver to my doorstep.

My family, characteristically, thinks it's all my fault. Sorry, I don't buy it. So, if anybody is reading this--is this my fault, dammit?

Straining at a gnat

Christian Foes of 'Da Vinci Code' Mull Tactics - New York Times

In "The Da Vinci Code," two sleuths uncover a conspiracy by the Catholic Church to conceal that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and that the myth of his divinity was written into the Bible at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. by the Roman emperor Constantine. "The Da Vinci Code" was marketed as fiction, but Mr. Brown said in a preface page that his descriptions of artwork, documents and rituals "are accurate." To be sure, there are many Christians who do not regard the book or the movie as a threat. But the outrage is widespread

There are innumerable reasons to doubt the truth of Christian, and more generally, theistic claims--and the hypothesis flown in The Da Vinci Code is among the least of them.

To me, as a recovering logical positivist, the Verificationist Challenge is the most personally compelling. As far as I can see, the world is exactly as it would be if there were no God. There is no compelling evidence for the occurrence of miracles or the power of petitionary prayer. Science is chugging along quite nicely, explaining more and more of what goes on, and it seems highly likely that everything that goes on and will go on is explicable in purely naturalistic terms. We don't need the God hypothesis--it has no implications for experience and is, therefore, neither verifiable nor falsifiable in experience.

Even if we stop short of concluding that theological claims are therefore meaningless, this effectively blocks theistic arguments that purport to be inferences to the best explanation. And that is devastating: short of arcane a priori arguments spinning off of the Ontological Argument, there is no reason to believe that God, or any supernatural entities, forces or states of affairs, exist.

Speculation about Jesus' sex life, the Church's concoction of Christological doctrines and the alleged cover-up are of negligible importance. Fantasies about Jesus dating from as early as the second century in gospels that didn't make it into the canon have always been flying around. Every undergraduate who takes a course in New Testament for general education credit--and passes--has learnt about them. Why are people surprised by the Da Vinci code? Every educated person knows, or should know, that doctrine developed over centuries: there is no high Christology in the Bible. Even in the Fourth Gospel it is simply not clear what kind of claims, if any, are being made about Christ's divinity. Anyone who reads the New Testament with reasonable care can make this out. And conspiracy theories about the Church's power politics and role in suppressing dissent are as old as the Church.

So why the surprise--and where's the beef? This is just more of the same, recycled for popular consumption. Jesus was an obscure figure of no interest to most of his contemporaries, so from the historical point of view we know very little about him. But the idea that he got to France and became the progenitor of the Mergovingian dynasty is almost as bizarre as the theory that he went to Tibet to found an esoteric tradition of Ascended Masters. You would think that fundamentalists would be more worried about the plausible story than by these implausible ones, viz. that Jesus was an obscure Palestinian Jew who became the hook for a Hellenistic mystery cult which, for a variety of mostly arbitrary reasons, beat out the competition.

What disturbs me most about this bruhaha is the extent to which any interesting story, however implausible, even if it is explicitly claimed to be a fiction, will fly. People apparently believe things just because they're there. When stories compete, they believe whichever one they find more interesting: beyond dull facts about middle-sized pieces of dry goods, truth is not at issue and it's all a crap-shoot--you buy what you like. Of course this is how religious seekers in the Hellenistic world made their doxastic decisions too: Jesus, Isis or the Elusinian Mysteries--what's more interesting? Why not try them all? Lots of people did. Constantine certainly did--with Christ and Sol Invictus as the leading contenders, until he became convinced that, for political purposes, it would be desirable to promote exclusive allegiance to the Jesus cult--suitably modified to encompass most of the attractive features of others that were operating at the time.

In once respect, the fundamentalists have done themselves in. By ignoring the theological controversies and the whole body of serious Biblical criticism, and by putting it out that the standard Jesus story is uncontroversial and so obvious that anyone who doubts is perverse, they've set themselves up for a situation where any competing hypothesis, however implausible or bizarre, knocks the socks off of people. You can certainly be orthodox without being in the least worried about the Da Vinci Code. It's the public's sheer ignorance about the Bible and church history that makes this silly fantasy a threat.

Is cultural membership a good or a bad?

I was taken aback reading an article on cultural exemptions and expensive tastes by a reference to Kymlicka who apparently suggests that cultural membership is a good and, indeed, on that is crucial for autonomy. I suppose I should read the book—I’m only starting on this research on multiculturalism in a serious way.

Nevertheless, to my untutored intuition, cultural membership is, at best, neutral and potentially bad. Cultural membership has to be distinguished from the consumption of cultural artifacts—cuisine, costume, arts and crafts, sports, and various practices. It’s good to have access to these items—the more ethnic restaurants and street festivals the better. But consuming the goods associated with a particular culture, however avidly or comprehensively, isn’t being a member of the culture. To be a member of a culture is a matter of behavior, social ties, and beliefs, in particular, beliefs about how people, at least people who you identify as fellow members of your culture, ought to behave.

Cultural membership is something people rarely think about. It’s like having a particular telephone number—assigned, immutable but for the most part trivial. Culture consists largely of innumerable trivial habits and practices: how close you stand when speaking to a person, whether nor not you queue and how strongly you feel about it, etc. As with telephone numbers, there’s nothing particularly good in cultural membership even though changing cultural membership is a hassle.

There are some less trivial features of cultural membership: the stories we know, and the history with which we identify. Last night I watched the nth costume drama on the life and times of Queen Elizabeth I. We all know this story in detail though with a lot of confusion—her various lovers, semi-lovers and marriage prospects, the ruffs and plucked eyebrows, the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish Armada and the “I, a weak woman” speech to rally the troops. On the American branch of the culture tree, we know about George Washington and the cherry tree, honest Abe walking through the snow to return a penny when he mistakenly overcharged someone, etc. Here again, even if it’s a hassle to change, one culture is as good as another: in becoming Americans, immigrants get loaded with the Queen Elizabeth, Geoge Washington and Abe Lincoln stories, and much, much more.

But there are also deep, non-trivial features of every culture that are positively detrimental to people’s interests—rules, role obligations and taboos. Every culture has them—but some have more than others. Some cultures are more constraining, make less room for individual differences, and treat deviants more harshly. Back on the Sopranos, Vito is on the lam in a cute little tourist town in Vermont because he knows that having discovered he’s gay his Mafia colleagues are out to whack him. No problem being gay in Vermont he discovers.

I gather from the article that cultural accommodations are supposed to be licensed in the interests of fairness to immigrants and cultural minorities so that they can retain the deep features of their cultures and maintain some sort of dual cultural membership. But why is this supposed to be a good for the individuals in question? We aren’t talking about ethnic cuisine here or even cultural stories—you don’t need to be a member of the culture to consume these goods. The deep features are the rules, role obligations and taboos—bads, not goods. And when it comes to immigrants and cultural minorities in open, tolerant, cosmopolitan societies, shedding cultural baggage is liberating even if it takes some effort to get over the hump. Vito resists and gets into a fistfight with his lover-to-be before letting go of the rules and taboos of the Mafia culture that hemmed him in.

Where's the outcry?

American Prospect Online - Fighting for Fair Treatment

In Memphis in 1997, Burlington Northern hired Sheila White to operate a forklift in its rail yard. The other employees, all men, were furious -- even though none of them had the qualifications to run the forklift -- because forklift driver was considered the plum job. White’s foreman and co-workers told her insistently that they didn’t think a woman should be working there in a rail yard.

Is it really possible that in 1997 people were still talking about “men’s jobs” and “women’s jobs”? Yes, it’s illegal. But forklift operator, a coveted blue-collar job that often pays more than ordinary factory or day laborer work, is widely considered a man’s job, and women are often told they can’t do it...

Employers are getting away with blatant sex discrimination because there’s no public outcry -- indeed, almost no public scrutiny at all. Think how easy it was for me to grab a good seat to hear Burlington Northern v. White, with two long empty rows of press seats behind me. Yes, it’s important that women have the right to decide what happens inside their uteruses. But it’s just as important that we be able to support ourselves. When will we start to care passionately about whether women are treated fairly on the job?

Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk. To rehearse the obvious, we the talkers--academics, journalists and political activists--don't know any forklift drivers and have never considered forklift driving as a career option. We've had abortions or know people who have or can imagine being in a circumstances where access to safe, legal abortion would be important for us, our daughters or people we know.

Of course it's important that women have the right to decide what happens inside their uteruses. But from the plain, crude utilitarian perspective it is, if anything more important to eliminate sex segregation in employment. Last time I looked, the index of sex segregation in the labor force was 60%, that is, to eliminate sex segregation in employment, 60% of working women would have to have to change jobs. I don't have disaggregated figures but it's a safe bet that jobs that don't take a college degree--the majority of jobs, and the ones that we, the talkers, don't notice--account for most of that figure. In any case, far more people suffer from the effects of sex segregation and the male-female wage gap, and including not only women but children living in poverty as a consequence, than will ever be directly effected by policies on abortion or, as noted in the article, the other liberal signature issue--gay rights. This isn't to say that progressives should drop these issues--but that they should pay more attention to bread-and-butter issues that aren't of immediate concern to their "base": the talkers.

I've just gotten back from a conference on discrimination at which participants addressed the question of what constituted (wrongful) discrimination. Most thought that this was a vexed question. I don't understand this skepticism: if a woman can't get a job driving a forklift, or having gotten one against the odds can't keep it because her forman and mates object to a woman doing a "man's job," that is discrimination. A slim majority argued that even if there was wrongful discrimination in employment, it would be wrong for the state to intervene. There were subtle reasons for this involving "rights."

It was actually one of the best conferences I've attended--and I'm a conference junkie. The discussion was terrific. But sometimes I felt that I was from a different moral universe. To me, as a consequentialist, the problem is obvious, even if the fix is difficult and complicated: lots of people are badly off because women can't get "men's jobs" and, to a lesser but not negligible extent, because men can't get some fairly desirable "women's jobs." The costs to people whose choices are restricted by this system is much greater than the benefits to clients, customers and co-workers who want people who do various jobs to look the part. The market isn't working so it needs to be fixed. The hard part is figuring out the most efficient way to do it or, realistically, to make some headway in that direction. Things will never be perfect, but they can be better. Why is this so hard to see?

The sense I got was, oh sure, if you're a Utilitarian its easy but let's see what we can make of the discrimination issue operating within a framework involving "rights," "autonomy" and that sort of thing. But why not turn this on its head: we know what discrimination is in central cases--we know the meaning even if we don't know the analysis--and we know it's wrong. Now let's come up with an ethical theory to explain why, and figure out how to fix it. Consequentialism does a really good job.

Next weekend I'll go to the local SWIP (Society for Women in Philosophy) conference where I will do another number, this time on multiculturalism, arguing again on consequentialist grounds that what Sen calls "plural monoculturalism," the "salad bowl" model, is a bad thing for the same reasons that Sen does: it restricts individual choice. Whereas I had fun at the discrimination conference, and get a fair hearing from rights-obsessed libertarians and deontologists, I have the sense that many members of SWIP don't want me there--when I arrive it's like "Oh, shit, here comes H. the Utilitarian." I go because I am very, very interested in feminist issues and related questions, like the multiculturalism question, because I want comments on papers I write on these issues, preferably hostile since those are in many respects the most helpful, and because this is the most accessible venue for discussing these issues. But I get panned for not being a real feminist--not only at SWIP meetings but in print: I discovered ex post facto that I'd been cited in a book on "backlash" as part of the backlash to feminist philosophy.

Well, why, dammit? From the practical point of view I am on board with the agenda. I argue for the elimination of sex roles. I argue for affirmative action, including hard quotas. I'm pro-choice and support equal treatment for gays, though these just aren't the burning issues for me. Increasingly, academic feminists--particularly in philosophy, have latched onto crazy theories to defend programs for promoting women's equality and this just plays into the hands of the opposition. I have data, I have arguments and I have a fairly respectable, if controversial, ethical framework to support feminist claims. Where's the beef?

The Euston Manifesto

The Euston Manifesto - Home

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values.

I've just signed the Euston Manifesto--do thou likewise (if you agree with the version of unrepentant liberalism represented on this blog).

In spite of the incompetence and corruption of the Bush regime, and popular disapproval, it is unlikely that Democrats in the US will benefit unless progressives commit to a reasonable, coherent political agenda and disabuse the American public of popular myths about liberalism.

In the US, the Left's agenda was set during the Vietnam era and remains inextricably linked with the anti-war movement and the cultural revolution of the period. To most Americans, Liberalism means playing Dove rather than Hawk in both foreign and domestic policy, denigrating America, and buying into the romantic cultural relativism that was popular amongst privileged undergraduates during the late '60s.

That is not what Liberalism is all about. The core value of Liberalism is the liberation of individuals from constraints imposed by race, sex, class and all unchosen circumstances that limit their options. I, and many other Liberals believe that, as a matter of empirical fact, the most effective way to achieve these ends is through social engineering, stringent, rigorously enforced government regulations prohibiting discrimination and a big government tax-and-spend welfare state. But whatever works is fine with me.

These ends are however inimical to cultural relativism. Traditional societies are racist, sexist and tribal--they severely restrict individuals' options on the basis of unchosen characteristics and circumstances of their lives. Such cultures are defective and the aim of Liberals should be to liberate individuals from them rather than to preserve them. These ends, moreover, license interference in the affairs of sovereign states. When dictatorial regimes violate the rights of their citizens or conduct genocides, intervention is warranted. War is a last resort but if that is the only way to stop such regimes from beating up on their citizens, so be it.

Some on the Left will take this as compromise, as Centrism, or even crypto-conservatism. Not. The aim of Liberalism is to promote individual wellbeing by eliminating poverty, expanding individual options and liberating individuals from the constraints imposed by defective cultures. If this means dismantling defective cultures and waging war against oppressive regimes then so be it. There is no compromise possible when it comes to individual wellbeing, no compromise or surrender when it comes to the promotion of the welfare state.

Next stop--Iran

The New Yorker: Fact

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.

Here we go again--though this time the plan seems to be a low-casualty air war (on the American side) with the use of tactical nuclear weapons to bust underground bunkers not ruled out. Is it sabre-rattling? A trial balloon to see if the American public are agreeable? Or is it, as the Iraq war was, a fait accompli?

It's not too hard to understand, really. Last night on the Sopranos, when Tony felt he was losing his grip, he beat up his young, buffbody guard just to show who the alpha male still was. When you're on this merry-go-round it's stay on top or get ground up in the machinery.

Bush got on and now there's no other way off. Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. A high-tech air war to take out the Iranian government and blast the country back to the stone age is about the only way he can win back his constituency and refurbish he legacy: George W. Bush--not a bungler after all but a homocidal lunatic. He has nothing to lose at this point and might as well go for broke.

And you know what? If he manages to get this show on the road Americans will love it. Journalists will film the mushroom clouds, brave bomber pilots will be interviewed on CNN, flags will wave and after a 3 week blitzkrieg, with Iran flattened, we'll have the decisive victory we thought we'd get in Iraq. The moral: no half-measures, don't expect the wogs to throw flowers at tanks driving through their streets--just blow the place up and be done with it.

Sopranos II: The Hotel California

EAGLES %u2014 ( Hotel California Lyrics )

On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night
There she stood in the doorway;
I heard the mission bell
And I was thinking to myself,
’this could be heaven or this could be hell’
Then she lit up a candle and she showed me the way
There were voices down the corridor,
I thought I heard them say...

Welcome to the hotel california
Such a lovely place
Such a lovely face
Plenty of room at the hotel california
Any time of year, you can find it here

Tony is comatose, in intensive care, dreaming of a stay in a California convention hotel. And will die--but not just yet. All bets are off but there's enough information now to make some educated guesses.

Predictably, AJ has gotten kicked out of college and, consistent with his character, tells Carmella about it just outside the ICU where she's spent the night. But now we also know how AJ will meet his end: on his shift with Tony (after he's been bullied and shamed into doing his duty), AJ announces that he's going after Junior to avenge the shooting. So the circle is complete and the parallel is perfect: Jackie, Rose, and Jackie, Jr.--Tony, Carmella and AJ--the mob boss, the widowed first lady, and the punk kid, too dumb and ironically too lacking in moral fiber to make it onto the first rung of organized crime. In case it isn't sufficiently obvious, recall Carmella's conversation with Rose in the hospital waiting room. Carmella makes excuses for AJ's behavior but Rose, always reliable, won't have it: AJ is a selfish brat. Carmella, who takes this as a criticism of her child-rearing practices makes a feeble attempt to suggest that she's reading Jackie's character onto AJ--but sees that that is quite accurate.

Tony will die. Gene's suicide set the theme:

You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!

And Carmella blurted out to the doctor, "Does he know that he's dying?--the fallacy of many questions. The seven souls in the intro to the first episode are leaving, the silver cord that attaches him to family, friends, work, world broken strand by strand. And at Gene's funeral--funerals are where a good deal of Family business gets done--the business is reconfigured to anticipate Tony's death. Silvio Dante passes out the new assignments and sets up Carmella's widows' pension.

But Tony can't die immediately because there isn't another male character that's sufficiently developed to carry the show for the rest of the season and the "bonus" episodes. So while Tony is on ice, while the strands are broken we have to detach from Tony and be drawn into one or more of the other male characters. I can't guess who it will be. Chris is the obvious candidate but in some respects the most difficult to draw us because we know so much about him from the outside.

There's also another literary problem here. We need time to develop sympathy for some other male character or characters so Tony has to stay on ice to keep us in. But so long as Tony is in hospital dying it's difficult, if not impossible, to play comedy. And for me, and probably a large minority of other viewers the chief appeal of the Sopranos was as a family sit-com. Surprisingly, reading some fan sites, most viewers are more interested in the crime drama and soap opera strands--which can play while Tony is in the ICU so the show can go on, but not hitting on all three cylinders.

Meanwhile, in this episode we've been with Tony in the Hotel California--initially, at least, such a lovely place--at a businessmen's convention in keeping with Tony's view of himself as a "captain of industry type" (as he puts it to Melfi on one occasion). The problem is that Tony isn't there. He's lost his identity kit and picked up a wallet and attache case that belong to one Kevin Finity--"Kev Infinity" as a guy in the bar puns or Kevin Finity. Definitely metaphysical. Tony has really lost his identity here--Kevin isn't even Italian and we remember the other vision of hell in the Sopranos, Chris's brief visit during which he discovers that hell is an Irish bar where every day is St. Patrick's Day. Chris is "just visiting" and we get the comic relief of Carmella's Prayer and her women's magazine notions about seeing the white light at the end of the tunnel. Nothing like that here.

The other parallel of course is Tony's dream episode when he sleeps at the Plaza. But this time there's no out--he can't make the morning call to Carmella, just as he couldn't complete the 911 call. And he is definitely losing it--slapped around by a Buddhist monk (the ultimate contrast--the mafia boss vs. the Buddhist monk), fallen down the stairs, told he has incipient Altzheimers, all themes wrapped around the goings on in the hospital room--the bald Asian doctor, Carmella's remarks about the MRI, Junior's dementia.

The Hotel California episode is worthy of Sartre or Camus. Tony falls in with a group of middle management/sales types--on a treadmill, selling junk, doing junk, going to glitzy hotels to drink and screw. In the booth at the bar the women, who he predictably tries to seduce, notes that they're all in the same club:

Mirrors on the ceiling,
The pink champagne on ice
And she said ’we are all just prisoners here, of our own device’

Now that the Sopranos is set to end there's no compelling reason for the writers to pull ratings so they can be as arty as they please, and that, I suspect, is what they will do--because this is the Great American Novel. Of course I have my own tastes--I think the other leading contender is the body of Updike's Rabbit books and stories, and for many of the same reasons.

So I predict that in due course, once the business has been reconfigured and other male characters have been adequately developed, Tony will die. I do hope that there won't be a pious episode posing ethical questions about removing life-support. There will be the mob funeral and, I'm almost certain Meadow's announcement of her pregnancy. Meadow is a good girl and a smart girl, but she doesn't have any real career plans or serious interests--doctor or lawyer, what's the diff? She'll marry Finn and do ok. Once Tony is out of the way the remaining episodes of the season will be business as usual under the new regime--including AJ's attempt to whack Junior and AJ's death. But, I believe, the 8 bonus episodes will be the Gottendammerung, the Twilight of the Mob. Hardly a happy ending since the FBI are the heavies.

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
’relax,’ said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can checkout any time you like,
But you can never leave!

Taliban at Yale

OpinionJournal - John Fund on the Trail

Never has an article made me blink with astonishment as much as when I read in yesterday's New York Times magazine that Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former ambassador-at-large for the Taliban, is now studying at Yale on a U.S. student visa. This is taking the obsession that U.S. universities have with promoting diversity a bit too far. Something is very wrong at our elite universities.

Oh, dear. When I was Mr. Hashemi's age I was a member of SDS and took part in an abortive plot to blow up the Pump House at Lake Forest College--a small, octagonal building at the campus edge of Faculty Circle. Since there was no ROTC program we planned to put up a sign saying "ROTC Building" first, and then blow it up. Fortunately, even though we knew a cooperative chemistry major who cooked meth, we couldn't find anyone willing or able to provide high explosives.

This was definitely small potatoes, but we were Cromwells guiltless our our country's blood. There just weren't any explosives to be had in the North Shore suburbs, or AK-47s. And, with GREs and LSATs in the offing our SDS chapter dissipated: we were, as some of the true believers complained, co-opted.

I'm all for co-optation. According to some ancient statistic I picked up, it costs more to sent a boy to Borstal (is there still such a thing?) than to Eton. The solution is obvious, although Borstal Boy Brendan Behan seems to have enjoyed his experience in the youth correctional system and writes of it with nostalgia reminiscent of Tom Brown's School Days. As for twenty-something terrorists, I'm all for sending them to Yale--or at least Lake Forest College--in the interests of strategic co-optation.

There are mad, bad people all over who can't be co-opted. But they don't get much of a following from people who have to prepare for the LSATs. Most of us are only moderately bad and, even if we wish it were otherwise, not mad at all. We're prudent, self-interested and corrupt: given the prospect of crass material comfort we wouldn't blow up an ornamental gazebo.

This is an extension of Jarad Dimond's Dangerous Idea that "tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war. Why is this idea dangerous?" asks Diamond.

Because too many people today believe that a reason not to mistreat tribal people is that they are too nice or wise or peaceful to do those evil things, which only we evil citizens of state governments do. The idea is dangerous because, if you believe that that's the reason not to mistreat tribal peoples, then proof of the idea's truth would suggest that it's OK to mistreat them. In fact, the evidence seems to me overwhelming that the dangerous idea is true. But we should treat other people well because of ethical reasons, not because of naïve anthropological theories that will almost surely prove false.

More generally, people who are badly off--poor, ignorant and oppressed--behave badly and, arguably, they behave badly because they are badly off. To cope with hard, brutal circumstances you have to be hard and brutal. The richer, more educated and more privileged people are the nicer they are--because they can afford to be, and because there are opportunity costs for bad behavior. So the solution, again, is obvious. Treat people well--not out of a smarmy sense of compassion, or because we think they're too nice or wise or peaceful to do evil things, but because it produces results. Prep school, not reform school; Yale, not Gitmo.

Sopranos Redux

OK. I was wrong. This was a very surprising episode and a good one because the writers resisted the impulse to turn it into a warmady: it was not soft.

The major plot which, presumably announces the theme for the season, was the impossibility of getting out. Tony will not release a minor character, who comes into an inheritance, from is mob obligations and the character, who it turns out has been ratting to the feds all along, squeezed between the mob, the cops and his family, hangs himself. It echoes the Adrianna theme: the feds lose an informant by turning the screws too tight.

it's the echoes of earlier episodes that make this series a cut above the usual and provide an aesthetic unity that make it, as I still believe, the Great American Novel. Carmella does lunch with Angie Bumpasera, widow of Pussy who's gotten whacked, and they compare their new cars. Carmella, impressed, asks Angie if she's bought the car herself and Angie, who doesn't get it, says that she paid cash because it was a better deal.

Recall the episodes following Pussy's whacking. Tony, in the finest traditions of the Mob, takes Angie on as a financial dependent, but gets angry when it turns out that she is driving a Cadillac while pleading poverty to Carmella. He smashes in the windows of her car and warns her that if she needs money he is the only legitimate source--she isn't to complain to Carmella or attempt, what he regards, as scams. Angie, who has been trying to pick up extra cash by passing out samples in the local supermarket, then persuades Tony to let her run Pussy's body shop, and does a decent job of it--such a decent job that she can buy her own car, and a very nice one at that, for cash, something Carmella envies.

Carmella's pseudo-business, financed by Tony, is not doing so well. In partnership with her father, she's built a "spec house" on a $600,000 lot in the woods where Tony buries his bodies. Predictably De Angelis pere has cut corners illegally expecting that that inspectors can be bought off and, it seems, they can't. Without being smarmy, there's a heavy moral message here: if you run an honest business, like Angie's body shop or Hesch's music business, even if you get help from the mob, you will get a car, or a horse farm, and do ok. If you run a pseudo-business or a front operation, like Carmella's construction business or Adrianna's night club, you will not do ok. The theme here should be the Mob and the Protestant Work Ethic.

There are other fascinating threads that will be picked up. Artie and Charmaign are getting back together, which I predicted. And I suspect that the deal is that Vesuvio will not be a front for the Mob. Then there is the solidarity of mob women theme--Carmella mending fences with both Angie and Ginny. I'm not terribly worried about Tony's being shot by Uncle Junior--he did dial 911 even if he didn't manage to say anything when they answered. The paramedics will come to the house, keep Tonly alive and get him to the hospital.

I'm more interested in Janice and Bobby. Bobby plays with model trains--wearing a train-drivers cap. Who's surprised? Janice, awful as ever, has had a baby. This is really, potentially at least, a story of redemption. I am still convinced that at the end, Tony will die (or less likely be incarcerated), the Jersey mob will collapse, and Bobby and Janice will walk out unscathed, possibly into a sitcom. Maybe because Janice, that perfectly appalling fat, curley-haired, redheaded, hippie bitch is a little bit of an alter ego but I'd also like to see Virtue triumph, and the only virtue left so far is Bobby.

Sopranos: The 6th Season

OK. I just finished grading my logic midterms and posting the grades. Now we can get down to serious business.

First of all, there should not be a sixth season of the Sopranos because the 5 seasons represent a perfect aesthetic unity and, in themselves, constitute the Great American Novel. The whacking of Adrianna was the perfect climax and the loose ends which anyone could pick up represented the perfect ending.

Here is now the system works. Adrianna, the epitome of virtue within the system had to be whacked because the idea of virtue-within-the-system is inconsistent. Meadow gets out. This is the Seventh Seal theme, the dance of death: Meadow and Finn are the young couple who will survive. As for the others there is no exit. They settle for their destiny. Carmella had a shot but there's no realistic chance: her only option is business as usual. Consider the reconcelliation scene: Tony promises to be more discrete about his indiscretions and gets her an Hermes scarf; then they go into the woods, where he dumps his bodies and plan a new house. And that is it: men provide money and protection; women put up with business as usual. It beats typing.

Now as to the new season. AJ will get whacked at some point though not initially I think. He can't get into college but he's too dumb to make it in the mob (as Tony confesses to Malfi on one occasion). There's nowhere for this character to go. This has been a theme since the beginning. This kid is initially nice but dumb. Carmella pushes him beyond his academic capabilities because college is the only way out of the family business--and both Carmella and Tony want their kids to escape. But pushing only makes AJ resentful and undermines any possibility of his getting into some legitimate career. Here is tragegy: the very efforts the Sopranos make to keep AJ from getting into the Mafia make it inevitable that he will get in--and get killed. I'm certain about this scenario. It's the only literary possibility for this character.

Junior. Probably the first episode will be Uncle Junior's funeral. Death by natural causes: Junior cheats the hangman. This isn't really inevitable, but there isn't much further to go with this character.

Nothing else is really motivated at this point. What I'm most interested in is the Bobby=Janice menage. Apart from the deceased Adrianna, Bobby is the only truly good person in the bunch. Like Tony he's a border crosser (on the model of Hermes, Persephone, and Heracles who can go to the Underworld and come back). In the Pine Barrens episode tough guys Pauli and Chrissy end up as desperate children, completely incompetent in South Jersey. They can't make it in the real world. Bobby, who's been through normal experiences like hunting with his Dad saves them.

Bobby's never even really done anything bad. His main job has been being Junior's caregiver. He never does violence: when we see him at work all he does is bully a guy at a bar into installing the mob's preferred candidate in a union position. Small potatoes.

The trouble is that no one in the mob can get out so to get Babby out the family has to collapse. Bobby is good so can't turn states evidence. As with Adrianna, being good in the mob is an impossible position: loyalty demands badness but disloyalty is itself bad. Ultimately Tony will get killed (or possibly sent to jail)--he can't get out. Then I think Bobby, who's small potatoes and not worth going after, will train to be a geriatric nurse. And he and Janice, incredibly, will survive. Janice is, after all, a surviver.

I think the last episode will be Tony's funeral and then, back at the Soprano's household, Carmella weeping in the kitchen while chopping vegetables, Meadow standing at her side mixing the dip tells her, shyly, that he's pregnant for a bitter-sweet ending. That, in any case, is the way it should be played.

I'm rushing to get this in before the first episode of the Sixth Season airs tomorrow. Remember--you heard it here first!

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . COVER STORY . Right to Live . August 26, 2005 | PBS
Leslie Burke took his case to court, asking that artificial nutrition and fluids not be withheld when he becomes incapacitated. A high court agreed, ruling that doctors must abide by the wishes of the patient if those wishes are expressed while the patient is still competent. Disabled rights groups cheered the verdict. Not so Britain's National Health Service, which must pay the bills; not so many doctors; and not so the General Medical Council, which appealed.

This is the stuff we need to hear. We'd like to believe that there was a pre-established harmony in these matters. That people who are inconvenient or expensive to maintain would want to be put down. The media run innumerable feel-good stories to soothe us and persuade us that what we want--to be rid of inconvenient people who impose an emotional burden on us and whose maintenance costs money--is in their interests as well as ours.

Sorry. Not so. I would trade the destruction of the entire universe for one more minute of survival, in any state whatsoever. That isn't a moral decision. It's a prudential decision--that is what I want and, I believe, getting what one wants, whatever it is, is the greatest good.

Now from the moral point of view, conflicting interests have to be traded off. Maybe it would not be the morally correct decision to keep Mr. Burke alive at the expense of the taxpayer. It certainly wouldn't be morally decent to trade the destruction of the entire universe for one more minute of my survival. Maybe it would be desirable to propagandize people into preferring to be put down when they are burdensome or expensive to maintain.

But let us at least be honest. We cannot assume that putting down people who are inconvenient or expensive is always in their interests. There is a conflict of interests between patients who want to survive and others on whom they impose a burden. Some patients may want to die. That's fine--pull their plugs or give them the wherewithall to suicide out. Others don't--let's not fool ourselves into thinking that they would be better off dead. Wellbeing is what one wants, whatever it is.

iPods, busywork and some reflections on altruism

I'm giving a midterm tomorrow so I've had some students in to see me. One, an ok and reasonably diligent one, came to my office plugged into her iPod and, after our discussion immediately pulled out the iPod to plug back in. I noted that my #2 son had the same model and we discussed its virtues. She said that she couldn't handle not having her iPod with her anymore--her music, she said, was her stream of consciousness and she felt naked without it. I supposed that I understood that but noted that when I'd tried using headphones it made me feel trapped and angry because I couldn't think about things. She said that she didn't want to think about things when she was out of class and needed her music because it filled her head.

De gustibus. It did seem crazy though. When I go to bed or have to take a long drive I like to have some project hanging or a question I'm interested in unsolved so that I have something to think about, something to entertain me. I can't imagine having this preference to have ones head filled with noise.

One thing I learnt though in my long and futile campaign to get ordained was that people have a variety of preferences, including some that I just couldn't figure. I discovered, for example, that among people who were involved in the Church there were a surprising number who had a taste to "do for" people, as they described it. They weren't Pharisees or hypocrites, they didn't just want to be seen to do good or only to seem to be good: they genuinely wanted to help. But on the other hand, they didn't just want things to be fixed or for people to be better off: they wanted people to be better off through their efforts and wanted to be needed.

And they didn't want to "do for" people because they were involved in the Church or because they thought there'd be any rewards for it in the here or hereafter. If anything, they got involved in the Church because it provided opportunities to "do for" people. In fact the whole operation seemed geared to provide opportunities, most of them bogus, for do-good work. When clergy talked about "empowering the laity" it meant providing busywork for laypeople to make them feel useful. The assumption was that lay people were so incompetent, unconfident and just lacking in the ability to organize any projects that they needed clergy to encourage them, give them direction and help them find projects to make them feel useful. It was infuriating--patronizing. Moreover I had to do all this stuff to build my ordination vita, and pretend I thought it was worthwhile.

The worst of it was the Daughters of the King. They prayed for people. Once a month on Saturday morning we met to to tweek the Prayer List, adding names for Healing and for Strength and Guidance, and dropping people who had either been sufficiently healed, strengthened or guided, or who had had their innings. Being cynical, part of the appeal was the gossip value, particularly for Strength and Guidance: the ladies liked chewing over all the details of people's diseases and personal problems. Still, that wasn't the whole of it: they really thought that they were doing a good job for people by setting up that prayer list and praying for them. What I really couldn't handle was the Prayer Chain. This was a round robin telephone call arrangement that was activated when any of the ladies got news of an urgent need to be prayed for. I would get a call and then have to call the next lady on the chain to pass on the the prayer request. And I prayed that I would get the answering machine. It was all, in a bizarre way, businesslike--launching into action and getting that praying done for the poor jerk whose case had been brought to the attention of the Daughters.

What was queer though, and not only about the Daughters, but about most of the women who were involved in these traditional church-lady activities was that they were more interested in what they thought they were accomplishing than in the intrinsic character of what they were doing. They would do any miserable shitwork if they thought it was going good--as they understood it. They counted the collection money, they organized fund-raisers, they worked in food pantries, they collected rags, junk and garbage for rummage sales, did every sort of miserable, boring, drudgery--and liked it because they thought they were being useful.

I just hated, hated the whole damn thing. I spent years trying to fit into this picture, to be a good person by these standards even though I didn't even believe that this was what being a good person was all about. It wasn't the metaphysical leap of faith I couldn't manage--because if the truth be told, even if I can't really give reasons, I buy the theology. But I do not buy the ethics: I do not believe that this taste for "doing for" people, for being useful, is intrinsically good and I am outraged that the Church not only promotes it, but flatters people for having it and identifies it as virtue.

I suppose in some circumstances cultivating this desire to be useful is a good thing: there is some shitwork that needs to be done. If you can get some people to do it for free and feel good about it that's fine. If you have a large population of women who have no disposable income or salable skills but lots of time on their hands it's worth squeezing all the work you can out of them however time-consuming--their time isn't worth anything and there are no opportunity costs. If an old lady spends 10 hours crocheting a tea cosy to sell at the Crafts Faire for $1.00 that's fine because there's nothing else she could be doing with those 10 hours. 10¢/hour is better than nothing/hour. If the Daughters of the King devote their time to maintaining a prayer list and running a prayer chain there's no loss because they don't have anything else to do that would either improve their lives or anyone else's. You fill your life with noise and busywork because there's nothing else, and something--anything--is better than nothing.

But when there are other possibilities, as there now are for most of us, that's another matter. Undergraduates don't have to fill their heads with noise: there are a billion things to think about and puzzles to solve, and they have the resources to plug into all this. Women don't have to spend their time organizing rummage sales or running prayer chains: there are a billion things they can do that are both more pleasurable and more productive. It isn't that thinking and puzzle solving are in some sense more virtuous or edifying than noise and busy work--they are simply more pleasurable, and usually more productive.

Abortion: The Unraveling Begins!

Balkinization

In response to the controversy over South Dakota's new law, three potential GOP candidates for President in 2008 have recently suggested they would sign a bill that banned almost all abortions:...A spokesperson said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would have signed the South Dakota legislation, "but [he] would also take the appropriate steps under state law -- in whatever state -- to ensure that the exceptions of rape, incest or life of the mother were included.

So much for McCain, the only viable Republican candidate for 2008 (so far).

Republicans have misjudged their base when it comes to the abortion issue: most Americans may want parental notification requirements for minors--because they want at least the illusion of control over their daughters' sexuality--but they don't want abortion to be unavailable for them. As an article in yesterday's NYTimes notes that parental notification rules don't decrease the rate of abortion. In fact as it turns out in quite a few cases it's parents who want their kids to have abortions:

some workers and doctors at abortion clinics said that the laws had little connection with the real lives of most teenagers, and that they more often saw parents pressing their daughters to have abortions than trying to stop them. And many teenagers say they never considered hiding their pregnancies or abortion plans from their mothers.

This is hardly surprising. Here is why:

All decent parents want their kids to have good lives. In the past the only feasible career option for most girls was marriage: to have a good life a girl had to snag a good-quality, high-yielding male. The only way to do this was to restrict sexual activity: if you can get the milk for free there's no point in buying the cow. So parents wanted the threat of having a child out of wedlock as a deterrent--to keep their daughters from being promiscuous or selling themselves cheap. Moreover, if abortion was unavailable it was possible to force a shotgun marriage as a last resort. That is why, in the past parents wanted abortion to be, for all practical purposes, unavailable to their daughters.

Now women can't make a full-time, permanent career of marriage. They can't manipulate men into guaranteeing permanent financial support by refusing to put out--and shotgun marriages are a thing of the past. Moreover women have other, often more desirable career options. Parents might want to have the illusion of control over their daughters' sexuality but they certainly don't want them stuck with babies that would interfere with their education or career plans. They might want some deterrent effect for religious reasons or to motivate girls to use birth control, so they might want a parental notification requirement to make getting an abortion embarrassing. But if a girl does get pregnant most wouldn't want her to have that baby and certainly wouldn't want her to keep it at the cost of her education and career prospects.

Simple, isn't it?

So, if McCain is nominated, and supports these restrictions on abortion, all the Democrats have to do is run a few vignettes showing Good Girls (and nowadays Good Girls have sex) being told that they can't get abortions.

Girl: But I can't marry Adam--I'm only 17, and I've just gotten accepted to Yale! And he's going to UCLA!

Doctor: Well, if you said it was rape we might be able to do something.

Mother: Are you kidding?

Doctor: Um, there is another possibility. You could say your father, um, molested you and then we could get a special dispensation for incest.

Father: %^&$^%$@#

Less is More

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Andrew Brown: When evolutionists attack

Dennett...is regarded as something of a demigod in the philosophical community. I think he finds it very difficult when people don't say to him, 'You were fantastic. Can I warm the bog seat for you before you take a crap?'

I can't remember if I made up the proverb, "You can't go wrong with a tautology" or if it's just an old chestnut like "One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens." Doesn't matter, because it's true: the less you say, the more likely you are to be right.

In the midst of the Clash of Civilizations and Evolution Wars, with anti-religious sentiment amongst secularists at a high water mark, Dennett has taken the opportunity of publishing an anti-religious book. Nothing particularly wrong with that--but don't let's pretend that it will stop Islamicist suicide bombers in their tracks or dissuade school board members from pushing to include Intelligent Design in the curriculum.

Ruse is right: "I think that you and Richard [Dawkins] are absolute disasters in the fight against intelligent design ... neither of you are willing to study Christianity seriously and to engage with the ideas - it is just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil, as Richard claims - more than this, we are in a fight, and we need to make allies in the fight, not simply alienate everyone of goodwill."

Anyone who is seriously interested in defending proper science teaching in the public schools should be making the case that Darwin's theory of evolution says less rather than more, in particular that it isn't inconsistent with religious belief. It's pretty clear that making the case that if you buy evolution you must reject religious belief will not convert anyone and will only induce the majority of religious believers to play modus tollens: "I'm a Christian, so I reject evolution." This is in fact why, shockingly, about half of Americans are skeptical about the theory of evolution. They're not Biblical literalists, they have no axes to grind but they're religious believers. The pope has declared that evolution is a scientific fact and not a mere theory, clergy from all mainline denominations have said the same, but the loudest voices, the ones they hear, are the voices of Fundamentalists and militant athiests with axes to grind who are at one in holding that religious belief is inconsistent with the theory of evolution.

The Confessing Church

The Gospel vs. H.R. 4437 - New York Times
It has been a long time since this country heard a call to organized lawbreaking on this big a scale. Cardinal Roger Mahony of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation's largest, urged parishioners on Ash Wednesday to devote the 40 days of Lent to fasting, prayer and reflection on the need for humane reform of immigration laws. If current efforts in Congress make it a felony to shield or offer support to illegal immigrants, Cardinal Mahony said, he will instruct his priests %u2014 and faithful lay Catholics %u2014 to defy the law.

Bravo! This is the real thing!