Hamas in Palestine

A sad day for dialogue from Guardian Unlimited: News blog: "Comments have been closed on this entry. We automatically close entries to new comments after 2 days to prevent comment spam, or we may have deemed this particular entry unsuitable for open comments. However, you can still make your opinion known by writing on your own weblog, and linking to this page: our system will pick it up."

Ok--pick it up. I don't get this whole Middle East thing. Couldn't we have fixed it --at least before things got this bad--by just sending money? We must have committed scads more to arming Israel, fighting in Iraq, doing all this, then we would have had to spend if we just razed the entire Middle East and turned it into a California style suburb, like Eastlake, Chula Vista?

It's really very simple: send in a crew, build lots of stucco houses and give them to people. Just give them away. Build good maccadam roads. Build an industrial park and bribe multinationals to set up housekeeping with the promise of zero taxes, cheap labor and a batallion of Marines to provide security. Build schools, staff them and pay teachers; build hospitals and pay doctors and nurses. Fix the electricity grid, build sewers, provide telephone service and cable TV. Spend whatever it takes to turn Palestinean territory into a middle class American suburb, give it to the Palestineans and keep pumping in money to keep it going until the local economy is kick started. We fucked up--we pay. And it can't be any more expensive, either in terms of money or in human costs, than dealing with perpetual hostilities in the middle east.

Would people go for this? Would they abandon their native culture to live like Californians or set aside their legitimate grievances at being pushed off their ancestral lands? Jesus Christ of course they would. Can anyone be so stupid to imagine that any rational human being would prefer living in a shitty mudbrick hovel in a refugee camp for whatever reason to enjoying these creature comforts? Can anyone be so besotted with romantic multiculturalist notions as to believe that they would prefer cultivating their ancestral olive groves, transporting their produce to market the backs on donkeys and pooping in pit latrines? Only affluent Americans who have never been without indoor plumbing would even consider the possibility.

Then there is Plan B, which would be even cheaper. Give all Palestineans displaced by--let's be honest--Jewish white settlers, green cards and airlift them to the US. We fucked up--we supported the last colonialist program, we fix it. Would all those Palestineans affiliate with terrorist organizations, work to undermine the US government and to restore the Cailephate? ARE YOU KIDDING??!!?

Is multiculturalism good for anyone?

Veil and a warning

The mysterious death of Samira Munir, a Norwegian politician, in Oslo comes as a chilling deterrent to Muslim women who speak out about the violence against women in their communities in the West

For the past few months I've been working on a project on multiculturalism so I collect articles like this one, describing pressure on assimilated women of Muslim origin in the West from their families and local ethnic communities to behave themselves.

There are usually a number of extraneous issues that muddy the waters--intergenerational conflicts between immigrant parents and their European children, the universal desire of parents to control and protect their children (particularly adolescent girls) and the universal desire of adolescents not to be controlled or protected. In one of the muddiest cases of all in response to the French headscarf ban the poster children of the protest were Lila and Alma Levy, teenage daughters of a Jewish lawyer, who donned the hajib to make a countercultural fashion statement and achieved their 15 minutes of fame on the international stage.

There are certainly people who, like Lila and Alma, can capitalize on multiculturalism. Nevertheless, even if some people can capitalize on multiculturalism I argue that it is a bad thing because it promotes ethnic identities that are ascribed, socially salient and scripted and so restricts individual liberty. First, ethnic identity is ascribed: even where it is invisible, it is unchosen and immutable. It limits people's choice, their ability to choose their affiliations, and when it is visible, as it is for black and brown people, it is all the more restrictive. Visible minorities are not only stuck with an ethnic identity--they are stuck with others identifying them with their assigned group.

Secondly, ethnic identity is socially salient. Ethnic identities are associated with a wide range of personal characteristics--beliefs, character traits, interests, aptitudes and behaviors--in a way that, e.g. handedness, eye color and other traits are not. People who are tagged with an ethnic or racial identity are expected to possess these traits and have to fight their way through these expectations to be seen as the individuals they are.

Finally, racial and ethnic identities are scripted. They are not only associated with a package of personal characteristics that ethnically identified individuals are thought to have--they carry scripts for how such individuals are supposed to behave and impose role obligations. Ethnically identified individuals who are unwilling or unable to act their assigned scripts, or who attempt to opt out of their ascribed ethnic identities, are punished--whether mildly, by being castigated as self-hating oreos, coconuts, bananas or apples (black, brown, yellow or red on the outside--white on the inside) or severely, by being threatened, beaten up or killed.

Liberal societies are in a bind. By accommodating the interests of individuals who want to capitalize on ethnicity they thwart the interests of those who want out. Apart from a few individuals like Lila and Alma who are playing at ethnicity for fun however most who capitalize on ethnicity do so because they can't shed it. I'm a 50 year old immigrant from Algeria. I can't speak decent French and can't get a job here. I live in this cite on public assistance and outside I get treated like dirt: I'm at the bottom of the heap. But in my apartment I'm the paterfamilias: I still have the authority over my wife and children that my culture underwrites so I have an interest in maintaining that culture. I'm his 18 year old son. I speak perfect French but I can't get a legitimate job anyway because I'm brown. But at least I can boss and beat up women because that's my cultural perogative so I have an interest in maintaining that culture. I don't have any future so I don't have anything to lose: might as well have fun now, burn some cars. And when I do I get on TV.

Practically speaking, I don't know how this can be fixed, how you can give that 50 year old immigrant a stake in the dominant culture. I don't even know how you give the lads a stake in the dominant culture--though affirmative action might help. But as an empirical conjecture I am absolutely certain that if assimilation is really feasible for most immigrants in affluent Western countries most will choose it.

David Brooks on Values

Dollars and Sense - New York Times

David Brooks, in todays NYTimes Op-Ed quotes "liberal economist Stephen Rose" for remarking that "It is an occupational hazard of those with big hearts to overestimate the share of the population that is economically distressed." Rose concluded that only 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor — a percentage that is "probably much smaller than most progressive commentators would estimate."

Let's see: that's over 23% of the total population (which includes more women than men) of the richest nation on earth living in poverty. This may be fewer than "most progressive commentators" would estimate--though I doubt it--but it's a much, much higher percentage of the total population living in poverty than in other affluent country.

Rose calculated the household incomes for people between 26 and 59 and found that the average annual family income is somewhere around $63,000 a year — an impressive figure.

That's average not median. The average is yanked up by a very small number of Americans with ultra-bananas-high incomes. The median income of Americans is significantly lower and comparable to the median income for citizens of Eurosocialist demmocracies where you do not have anything close to 23% of the population living in poverty.
I wonder whether, given decreasing marginal utility, bliss of the few in that long, skinny tail in the income distribution sets off the misery of the 23+% in the big, fat hunk of curve at the bottom.

Then there is that very significant discrepancy between the poverty figures for men and women. The figures remember are based on on family income rather than individual earnings so it's not likely that it's wholly a consequence of married women's choices to stay home with the kids.

If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing.

Of course. You can't make the kind of bucks guys make so you depend on financial support from a husband to maintain that middle-class lifestyle. You need that guy as a meal ticket. Moreover the pink-collar drudge work you do in the service sector isn't very likely to be outsourced anyway.

If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization.

I have a daughter and don't worry at all. If she gets pregnant she'll get an abortion and get on with her life. It's underclass girls who carry their pregnancies to term and--this is a CHOICE--keep their babies, because for them there are no opportunity costs. Sooner or later they'll be working at Walmart--delaying childbearing and child rearing doesn't pay for them. And guys in their social group aren't the marrying kind.

I don't really understand why Brooks seems to believe that the facts he cites--the 23+% poverty rate and the substantial discrepancy in rates of poverty between men and women are supposed to promote the conservative cause. These figures suggest that we should support income transfers and social programs to lift people out of poverty and affirmative action to minimize the ongoing discrimination in employment that puts women at such a serious economic disadvantage.

The "values" that these statistics reflect make me want to move somewhere else. They reflect a social Darwinist free-for-all, without security, where everyone has to fight to keep their heads above water and where, even if we manage that we work for weeks longer per year than citizens of other affluent countries to maintain the same standard of living. Civilization as I understand it means security so that we don't have to fight continually to survive and push others down so that we can make the grab for scarce goods. Most importantly, it means minimizing drudgery so that we have time for "liberal pursuits"--for poetry, music and art, for learning of every sort, for all the good things of high culture. We're becoming less and less civilized by these standards--we spend longer hours at work and then buy more crap because we don't have the education or leisure to appreciate the finer things that make life worthwhile.

This is my country, my native land. "America the Beautiful" gets me all choked up. That's one I haven't heard recently though, possibly because, especially after Katerina, the line about alabaster cities gleaming undimmed by human tears is an embarrassment. I don't want to live in a place where there are beggars at every freeway exit and supermarket door and where the bulk of the population who aren't begging drudge away their days so that they can buy SUVs and garbage, where half the population is functionally illiterate and the majority can't read music.

I'm not a heretic!

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451. Chalcedon compliant 100% Pelagianism 75% Modalism 75% Apollanarian 50% Nestorianism 42% Monophysitism 42% Gnosticism 33% Socinianism 25% Monarchianism 25% Arianism 25% Albigensianism 17% Adoptionist 17% Donatism 0% Docetism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

...but I do seem to be, um, a Satanist

You scored as Satanism. Your beliefs most closely resemble those of Satanism! Before you scream, do a bit of research on it. To be a Satanist, you don't actually have to believe in Satan. Satanism generally focuses upon the spiritual advancement of the self, rather than upon submission to a deity or a set of moral codes. Do some research if you immediately think of the satanic cult stereotype. Your beliefs may also resemble those of earth-based religions such as paganism. Satanism 79% agnosticism 63% Islam 50% Christianity 50% atheism 46% Paganism 42% Hinduism 33% Buddhism 29% Judaism 21% Which religion is the right one for you? (new version) created with QuizFarm.com

Liberals--meet the working class!

American Prospect Online - Just What Is the Working Class?

[F]ully 29 percent of voters have some college education but no degree, slightly outnumbering those with a bachelor’s degree or more. The “some college” group was, according to 2004 exit polls, the educational cohort in which Bush achieved his best performance. Thus, the conservative inclinations of the educationally defined working class are largely attributable to the sentiments of its best-educated members...In whatever sense working-class conservatism is real, it is a phenomenon of middle-income -- or slightly richer -- whites, with attendant consequences for political strategy. People in this range don’t benefit from Republican economic policies oriented toward tax cuts for the very rich, but neither have they felt the sting of Republican budget cuts that have been targeted at the truly poor. Consequently, winning their votes will probably require something beyond crass appeals to alleged economic self-interest, whether or not these are coupled with moves to the right on other issues.

Vance Packard got it right about class in The Status Seekers. I read the book about 30 years ago but it left a lasting impression because it was one of those books you read when you are very young which, in a striking way, explains life and leaves you with a permanent template for fitting in all future experiences.

According to Packard's taxonomy there were 5 classes in American society. At the top a small ultra-rich, ultra-elite; at the bottom a small underclass consisting of people who were in one way or another dysfunctional and either living on the street or close to it. In the middle, the interesting part, there were: the lower class (working poor), the lower middle class (working class) and the upper middle class.

The great divide was between the Upper and Lower Middle Class which, Packard compared to the bright line between officers and enlisted personnel. The lower classes could aspire to the lower middle class but only an exceptional few could make it across the line. The divide wasn't one of income either because, on Packard's classification lots of Lower Middle Class people were earning lots more than lots of Upper Middle Class people--these were the days when unionized blue collar jobs were plentiful and paid well. But everyone knew where the line was--it was the line that's now marked by the divide between college graduation and some-college-no-degree.

Packard's characterization of the Lower Middle Class, it's folkways and distinctive virtues was dead on. The characteristic virtue of the class system's "noncoms" as he called them, was discipline: following and enforcing the rules, keeping their noses clean and maintaining order. That was how they rose through the ranks to get where they were. They were the steady workers, the churchgoers, the sober, self-disciplined family men who didn't blow their paychecks on drink, gambling or cheap women and the housewives who diligently saved money, supervised their children and ran orderly households.

Discipline, order, cleanliness, obedience, thrift, hard work and diligence were their success strategy. And they were wedded to these virtues because they were painfully aware of what was for them the alternative: poverty, debt, squalor, insecurity--the vices and miseries of the social layer immediately beneath them who played Gin Alley to their Beer Street. They believed in self-reliance and desert because by their own efforts, they had achieved all the success for which they could hope. Their great fear was disorder because they were painfully aware that their position was both privileged and precarious: slacking off, letting go, taking to drink or disobeying the rules would get them busted to private.

These social noncoms, understandably, hated us, life's junior officers. They had worked their way up through the ranks by hard work, self-discipline and sacrifice; we, in virtue of inherited wealth and privilege, got in a notch above them. We had everything they had and more without working or sacrificing for it. We could get away with virtually anything. We didn't follow the rules but weren't punished. We didn't work. We went to fancy colleges, used drugs, dreamed, played at revolution, broke the rules, screwed up in every way that would land them in the gutter but were bailed out at every turn. Even worse, we made no secret of despising their most fundamental values--self-discipline, obedience and order--and were intent on undermining the social practices that kept chaos at bay. Worse still, we admired the layers below them, the trailer trash and slum-dwellers, and pushed for policies to benefit the undeserving poor at their expense.

Now Matthew Yglesias notes, correctly, that these are the people liberals need to win over--not the true working poor who are more solidly democratic than ever. But I cannot imagine how. Even if conservative policies that benefit the ultra-rich don't help them, the classic liberal-socialist economic agenda geared to promoting the interests of the underclass and working poor will not help them either. Contrary to the Thomas Frank thesis they are not voting against their economic interests and they are not rabid Fundamentalists intent on establishing a theocracy. They want Beer Street--a clean, disciplined, orderly, safe world where hard work and good behavior pay off. Who doesn't?

Reflecting, I ask myself why I don't--or at least why I don't go with their program. And my answer--which would never fly politically in the US--is that by knocking a little wealth off the top we can make everyone upper middle class.

I suppose what drives me morally isn't either compassion or guilt but outrage at arbitrariness, inefficiency and waste. It was a arbitrary that I got pulled out of the office where I worked after high school and sent to college where I could take classes that interested me, argue about politics and philosophy in the coffee shop, lie on the grass writing papers and doing logic problems and ride my bike while the other girls in that office were trapped there all day doing repetitious, mind-killing drudge work. It was inefficient and wasteful that their lives were so crumby when creaming a little off of the top, where it would hardly be missed, could make their lives so much better. They weren't the underclass or the truly poor: they were the respectable lower middle class--girls only a year or two older than me but married, working to help save for down payments on houses before they could quit to have babies, older ladies who'd gone back to work to help put their kids through college. I listened to their conversation and got a sense of how perfectly awful their lives were--how constrained and dull, without aspirations, without any possibility of real achievement, without even any serious interests--just working hard, saving money and following the rules.

It isn't lives of the truly poor that make this whole system offensive. They can do better and someone should probably give them a kick in the pants. What makes it offensive is that, realistically, if you are not born into the officer class and are not spectacularly smart--much smarter than I am--the best you can do is the life these lower middle class women lived.

Affirmative Action: Poisoning the Wells

I don't do informal fallacies so I'm not sure whether this is the tag for the fallacy that appears in these two articles on affirmative action and assisted suicide.

In the first, the author argues that since the "role model" argument for affirmative action is unsound and therefore that affirmative action is unwarrented. In the second the editorial writer from the NYTimes applauds the Supreme Court for supporting the Oregon law premitting assisted suicide on the grounds that assisted suicide is opposed by the Bush administration invoking a conservative Christian ideology.

The gist of both is that because a given argument for a thesis is bad the thesis is bad and that, whatever you call it, is a fallacy. Even though the role model argument for affirmative action is, as the author notes, baloney, there are good and, I believe, compelling arguments for affirmative action as the only practical means for counteracting ongoing discrimination. There are also good, though I'm not sure whether compelling arguments, against assisted suicide that do not assume any religious doctrines, namely that if the practice is legal and socially acceptable, patients who do not want to suicide out will be under pressure from over-burdened families and medical personnel allocating scarce resources.

From the logical point of view, piling up bad arguments for a thesis shouldn't make any difference. From the rhetorical point of view it undermines credibility. The remarkable thing is that politically savvy operators, who are not logically fastidious but interested in persuasion by fair means or foul, pile up bad arguments in support of the positions they want to push. In camera they may discuss the legitimate reasons for the policies they want to push but in public they throw in the kitchen sink--every bad argument, every sentimentality, every myth that they believe will promote their agenda. Invariably this program undermines credibility.

Members of racial and ethnic minorities do not have anything special to offer as faculty members. They are not needed as "role models." "Diversity" in schools or workplaces is of absolutely no value: the business of these institutions would go just as well if they were staffed entirely by white, Anglo males. Women do not have anything special to contribute to the workplace; they do not have distinctive "management styles" that make it in any firm's interest to hare them for management positions.

The purpose of affirmative action and equal opportunity policies is to counteract ongoing discrimination, to benefit women and members of minorities who would otherwise be excluded or treated unfairly. It would be nice if that were a win-win situation but it is not: it is a win-tie situation where employers are required to adopt practices that benefit women and minorities but do not either harm or benefit them. It is hard to sell these policies by appeal to fairness, which is their true justification, because employers are self-interested but the Good Lie that "diversity" is good for colleges, schools and firms has worn thin, obscures the real. compelling arguments for maintaining them and undermines the credibility of supporters.

Life As Good As It Gets

I’m sitting in a corner of my porch, on the north side where it wraps around the front of my house, barely visible from the street behind the trees on my lawn and the massively untidy bougainvilla in full flower that is invading. I am having an illegal cigarette out here (I officially quit last August) to facilitate revisions to a paper I’ve had quasi-accepted by a journal. I am drawing wifi from the house.

My bike is here, locked to the porch rail, and the bike pump in which I invested that has a special fitting for skinny racing-bike tires (my bike is a very elegant looking, ultra-slim, drop-handle bar racing bike that’s even lighter than the usual because it’s extra small). It’s splendidly sunny and I’d estimate in the ‘60s, most of the foliage is green and even the hanging baskets at the front of the porch are in flower: there are some advantages to living in Southern California. I’ve locked the gate from the back yard so that my dog (chocolate lab) can’t bug me but I go in every once and a while to scratch him and tell him what a good retriever he is—which he appreciates. The birds are singing—and my cats are lurking in the undergrowth…waiting.

I probably won’t work out today. But I hope I will get to playing the piano a little and going through the French learning program I have on my computer.

About 30 years ago I resolved that I would never get used to how good things were when they got good or forget how bad they could be and, laus deo, I never have. The simple fact of being able to organize my days as I choose, to do what is in effect piece work rather than punching a clock, being stuck in a place looking busy when there’s nothing to do, is about 80% of what makes it as good as it gets. The rest is probably evenly divided between my computer, my papers, my bike, my house, my family and my animals.

That’s about it: no moral to this story. I can’t fathom what more anyone could want, except possibly an additional lab and more cats.

Tribalism as a Prisoner's Dilemma

It would be a salutory effort to look over the wars, revolutions and civil strife of the last sixty years and see how many of the participants got an outcome (taking account of war casualties and so on) better than the worst they could conceivably have obtained through negotiation and peaceful agitation. Given the massively negative-sum nature of war, I suspect the answer is “Few, if any”

Reflecting on the outbreak of peace in Aceh (and ongoing war in Sri Lanka), John Quiggan over at Crooked Timber asks whether war is worth it--and concludes, unsurprisingly, that it is not. That may be true enough but it's a separate question whether rational players can risk negotiation, peace-making, cooperation and other less costly policies where tribal patronage systems are entrenched.

In the tribal patronage system everyone takes care of his own--and no one takes care of anyone else. If members of your tribe are in power you, your family, and your village, get jobs, roads and other amenities; if members of competing tribes are in power you get nothing and on the worst case scenario, you and your kin are vulnerable to ethnic cleansing.

You cannot choose your tribe or opt out of the tribal system. Even if you are a liberal cosmopolitan by conviction, you will be identified as a Hutu or Tutsi, Serb, Croat or Bosnian, Sunni, Shi'ite or Kurd, Irish Catholic or Protestant and you will benefit from the system or lose out accordingly. So even if you are a liberal cosmopolitan, because you know the system is entrenched, and know that everyone else knows it too, as a rational chooser you are going to vote for your tribesmates and, if necessary, fight to see to it that they get into power. So will other rational choosers, by the same reasoning, even if they are liberal cosmopolitans too and would rather cooperate.

Sometimes, when the current tinpot dictator's regime gets too bad it becomes worthwhile for members of different tribes to form coalitions to get him out. But such coalitions are short-lived because the ethnic card is always in play. Once coalitions achieve their immediate ends it is played and it's back to business as usual.

I grew up in New Jersey under this tribal system where everyone took care of their own and no took care of anyone else or expected to be taken care of by anyone else. It was bliss to leave, to go to school in the Midwest, where at least some things were open and above board, where there weren't 1000 unwritten rules to negotiate or no-go areas to avoid, where there was at least the pretense of fairness and public-spiritedness. I never had any sympathy for my classmates who deplored the white bread homogeneity of the Midwest and effused about the wonderful local color of ethnic neighborhoods. It's all very nice to visit those Little Italys and Chinatowns to the extent that they're theme parks for the tourist trade, but real ethnicity, real tribalism is the root of most, if not all, evil. All that local color and ethnic food, both here and abroad, aren't worth it.

I'm not cut out for politics

After Alito's Testimony, Democrats Still Dislike Him but Can't Stop Him - New York Times

I don't understand why Democrats, are fighting the Alito nomination or more generally why, as a contributor and supporter, I get a dozen emails a day urging me to fight in every trivial skirmish and support every lost cause against Republicans. I do not understand why the Democratic party insiders who set this policy or the midlevel functionaries who send me email haven't figured out how to choose their battles. Alito will get through. Everyone, including the Democrats who are grandstanding at his hearing, knows this guy will get in. What is the point? I'm sure Republicans are doing the same thing--I just don't get Republican email.

All this constant skirmishing over trivial issues, dead issues, lost causes and proposals that aren't really objectionable except insofar as they're supported by Republicans just gives people--especially young people like my kids (biological and pedagogical)--the idea that partisanship is no more than tribalism, that there is no real difference between Republicans and Democrats and that politicians are all just after power. It destroys faith in the political process and alienates the best people so that the whole business of politics becomes increasingly a game for power brokers and politicians on the take, with expensive variety shows to "energize" the base.

My (biological) kids are Greens--throwing energy into a heat sink. My students for the most part haven't got a clue and don't care. A few, the smartest, are libertarian-style conservatives because they're convinced that liberals are well-meaning but naive mush-heads. Years ago, teaching "social ethics" we got into a discussion of the controversy over Nestles' program to push baby formula in third world countries. A student patiently explained to me that Nestles couldn't just give away baby formula to poor women though maybe there should be charities to help them pay for it--and was amazed when I explained what breasts were for and how they worked.

Arrrrgh--I could scream! I wish there were a viable third party too. But because of the way the American system operates their can't be. Maybe the best thing would be to throw my energy into working for voting reform to break the two major parties lock on power--which, of course, insures that voting reform has no more chance than a third party. Maybe I should collaborate with my son the mathematician to evangelize for Condorcet voting--the geeks love it.

Every four years, with minor festivals in between, we're treated to this circus--debates, conventions, giant potlaches, speechifying, grandstanding, smear campaigns, focus groups, politicians groomed and trained--the utterly vacuous Bush parroting his tag lines and the utterly insincere Kerry in his hunting outfit dragging a dead goose out of the woods to show the rednecks he was ok with guns. They treat us like idiots. Behind the scenes there are issues and ideologies on the table but they assume we're too dumb to understand so this is the crap we get.

It isn't just politics either--it seems like every damned institution and organization--businesses, schools, churches, what have you--operates on the assumption that people can't grasp even the most elementary abstractions, can't follow the simplest arguments, don't care about facts, have no principles, are incapable of critical reflection and only respond to sound bytes, manipulation, cheerleading and noise. And they imagine that "using psychology"--formerly Rhetoric, now Communications--is tremendously clever and sophisticated. I am swamped, drowning in this bs. Well, at least I can teach Logic!

China: The American Dream

American Prospect Online - The China Path: "It%u2019s true that democracy needs capitalism. Try to come up with the name of a single democracy in the world that doesn%u2019t have a capitalist economy. For democracy to function there must be centers of power outside of government. Capitalism decentralizes economic power, and thereby provides the private ground in which democracy can take root.

But China shows that the reverse may not be true -- capitalism doesn%u2019t need democracy."

I went a conference in China a year ago last summer and it was perfectly awful. We climbed the Great Wall of China, visited the Forbidden City, toured the Panda preserve and cruised down the Yang-Tze; we stayed in glitzy hotels and flew out of a glitzy airport built to impress businessmen and tourists with money. But I didn't feel good until we landed in Tokyo.

It wasn't the absence of democracy that made the place oppressive but the absence of even the most minimal amenities of a welfare state. Nothing was free--not education, not health care. Students competed fiercely for spaces in universities and those who couldn't pay the fees threw themselves in front of trains because without the credentials for admission to the urban elite, life was hell. Rural life was miserable, factory workers toiled at the most miserable jobs in the worst of conditions for a pittance, families were relocated at the government's discretion. In Beijing, the masses drudged all their waking hours: service workers in the tourist hotels where we stayed counted themselves lucky to be able to make their living pandering to rich American tourists like me, fetching and carrying; the rest worked from dawn into the night digging, building, hauling, sweeping, selling, eking out a living. Their industriousness made me sick.

My colleagues worried about academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. I couldn't imagine what good democracy or any of these freedoms would do for anyone given that they were stuck drudging all their waking hours to pump up GDP and create glitz to attract foreign investment and the tourist trade. I wondered what the agenda was: to sacrifice a generation, or two or three, in order to get rich enough so that they could run a proper socialist welfare state where people didn't have to spend all their waking hours working or, more likely, to squeeze every last drop of sweat out of every citizen indefinitely to create more wealth.

This is the American dream--endless, backbreaking, mind-killing work to create wealth that no one has the leisure to enjoy and growing the economy keep down unemployment so that everyone will have the privilege of doing endless, backbreaking, mind-killing drudge-work until they're incapacitated. I can't think of anything closer to the popular picture of hell--shoveling coal into furnaces forever and ever, without any end and without any rest.

Reich is right, of course: capitalism isn't what it's cracked up to be. But I don't see why democracy is supposed to be so great either. What's important is leisure: the only freedom that really matters is freedom from work.

Does religion exist?

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Belief systems

There is no more a thing called religion that can be studied than there is a thing called life. In particular, there is no definition that will encompass religion and exclude everything that is not religion. The chief reason why people can never say that religion is "really" anything else is that it isn't, really, anything to start with.

Reading further it turns out that Andrew Brown's thesis is less apocalyptic: he argues that religion is, at best, a "family resemblance" notion so that attempts to find an essence characteristic of all the phenomena we ordinarily classify as religion are doomed to failure.

I'm not so sure. Here is a minimalist analysis of religion that I'd argue, applies to all central cases of religion, excludes all beliefs and practices that are clearly not religion and explains why the borderline cases are borderline. So try this: a religion consists of

(1) The belief that there is some supernatural reality
(2) A cult--public, private or both.
(3) The belief that there is some causal connection between the supernatural reality and the cult.

Each of these conditions is itself minimal, e.g. the "supernatural reality" in question can be anything from a theistic god with psychological states who acts in the world to an impersonal, transcendental something-I-know-not-what to a conglomerate of ancestors, daimons, faeries and godlets. It also doesn't include any ethical dimension which from our prejudice in favor of "Great World Religions" is usually thought to be central but, insofar as we want a criterion that everything we commonly understand as religion will satisfy, doesn't figure.

Counterexamples anyone?

Every religion I can think of satisfies these conditions. Atheistic versions of Hinduism and Buddhism for example recognize some supernatural something or other and recommend meditation and cultic activities as a means to get in touch with it. Borderline cases are borderline because they satisfy one condition but not the others. Neoplatonism, with its elaborate theology, isn't a central case of religion because it doesn't involve any cultic activity though if you regard it as the ideology of late Greco-Roman paganism the combination of Neoplatonic theology and pagan sacrifices and other cultic activities clearly is a religion. The North Korean dear leader cult isn't a religion because, even though it involves cultic activities, it doesn't involve any beliefs in the supernatural.

Ok? Objections? So that's religion: not as big a deal as most people think and something we can all enjoy even if we don't believe in the supernatural even in the most minimal sense.

By laying too much on religion, we're destroying it. By insisting not only on supernatural belief but ethical commitment for religious participation we dissuade people from participating in the cult: so the churches close, the myths die, the ceremonies fall into disuse, the processions stop, the hymns are forgotten--everything that matters about religion disappears and the world is a poorer, duller place.

Feminist methodology vs. feminist content

exogenous preference - Google Search

Here's a nice article by Ingrid Robeyns posing the question of whether there is a distinctively feminist economic methodology. It also poses the question, at a higher level of abstraction, of whether for any academic enterprise "Feminist X," what we are, or should, be talking about is the X study of issues that concern women or a peculiarly feminist (non-androcentric or womanly) way of doing X.

I'm inclined to go for the former. I don't know that much about econ (when I created this blog I subtitled it to reflect my hope to make it a group blog that included economists) but when it comes to my field I'm firmly committed to the idea that there is no distinctively feminist (or non-androcentric or womanly) way of doing philosophy. Feminist philosophy means (1) picking up philosophically interesting issues that have been ignored because they were "women's issues" and (2) arguing against biased, sexist views.

The paradigm of feminist philosophy is Judith Jarvis Thompson's classic article "In Defense of Abortion." Here is a very philosophically interesting issue, one that hits central areas in metaphysics like the problem of personal identity and in ethics, that didn't get much attention earlier because it was a woman's issue. Thompson, an excellent, mainline analytic philosopher write the classic article--so classic that if you google you won't even be able to find it because it's buried under secondary literature and links to student plagiarism services that produce term papers on it.

There is an even more abstract issue: for any disadvantaged group, X, does fairness to x people mean changing the system to operate in a way that's more conducive to (what are taken to be) x people's culture, interests, values, ways of thinking or does it mean fixing the system so that (1) we recognize the disadvantages x people are at, the discrimination they face, etc. and (2) working to fix things so that x's can plug into the niches formerly reserved for white males.

Here again, I go with the latter interpretation. When I was in SDS as an undergraduate we had a discussion about this and I was booed off the floor by someone who asked rhetorically, "Would you just want them to have color TV sets?" Of course I would--because that's what "they" and most other people want. I hit the same wall later when I was involved in the movement to promote women's ordination in the Episcopal Church and comrades in arms asserted that the aim was not to "plug women into the same roles men had occupied" but to work for structural change.

Well, structural change is all very well but when it comes to improving the situation of members of disadantaged groups per se that is just a matter of removing the disadvantages that prevent them from getting what members of advantaged groups get, i.e. leveling the playing field so that women and members of racial minorities, can occupy the same roles that white males do--however good or bad those roles might be.

Latte-drinking Liberal Hypocrites

In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts - New York Times

The Bloomberg administration's efforts to invest immense attention and resources on low-income students in low-performing schools are causing growing anxiety among parents from middle-class strongholds who worry that the emphasis is coming at their children's expense...

Take Heidi Vayer, a former public school teacher and guidance counselor. She decided to remove her two daughters this year from public school in District 2 on the East Side of Manhattan and enrolled them instead in an independent school, Friends Seminary. "I didn't see things getting better," Ms. Vayer said. "The school increased class sizes, and I felt no attention was being paid to middle-class students who were there."

Here's a nice story from the NYTimes about what happens when a school system makes a serious effort to improve lower class children's academic performance: upper middle class parents, predictably, pull their kids out. Who's surprised if white working class parents who can't afford to buy their kids out of the system

When my daughter went to the local public high school, from which less than a quarter of students continued on to college, even though her performance in elementary school was mediocre, she was magically tracked to AP classes and propelled into the local elite world-ranked state university. I'm not complaining but I do wonder if had something to do with the fact that she is blonde and a native English speaker. The same thing happened to me--even though my performance in elementary school was dismal and I was, in addition, what was known as a "discipline problem." Somehow all the classes I ended up in, apart from gym, were populated by students from my elementary school and the one other "good" school in town.

Now I am pretty smart and so is my daughter. But I find it hard to believe there there weren't quite a few kids who were just as smart relegated to the academic lumpen proletariat. Of course not all lower class kids were dumped--the very good children, the hard-working, motivated kids who were not "discipline problems" probably got through the class filter. But I don't have the slightest doubt that lower class kids who, like me, were "underachievers" never got the second, and third, and nth chances that I got.

I know very well why I'm not behind that check-out counter, why don't spend my days at a terminal inputting data, why I'm not stuck doing drudge work. I detest the system that traps people in these jobs not because I feel compassion for them--I don't like people like them--but because I know how easily I could have been in their position and because I know how completely arbitrary it is that my life is good and their lives are miserable.

Maybe we'd do better pushing this line rather than trying to promote compassion. Compassion is episodic and unreliable: it kicks in when we see flood victims clinging to the roofs of their houses but evaporates when we have to deal with refugees packed into squalid shelters. Compassion is selective: it attaches to pretty children and the "deserving poor" but not to the masses of miserable people who are unattractive and unpleasant to deal with. Compassion is seasonal: after an annual Santa Claus rally, when the Salvation Army buckets come out and the NYTimes runs stories about the 100 Neediest cases, it tanks. In any case, no one really feels very much compassion most of the time--in fact the natural human tendency is to be repelled by people who are badly off.

The real, reliable motivator of social improvement is the proximity of possible worlds where one could have been very much worse off. The way to get people motivated is to repeat, incessantly "that could easily have been you"--to rub in the fact that most of us who are better off escaped drudge work and poverty by sheer dumb luck, that our children are in those AP classes that interface seamlessly with the best universities by sheer dumb luck and to remind them also that even if they have escaped for now, in a society without safety nets, they and their children are always vulnerable. We need to display the momentum mori, the skull on the desk as a meditation object--pictures of supermarket checkers, of women inputting data at terminals, of sweat shop workers, with our faces edited in.

The fault is in our stars...not in ourselves

Adaptive Preference (pdf file)

I am now finishing the 9th or so revision of a paper on "adaptive preference" in response to comments from half a dozen referees which has morphed from a snappy little APA number to a 29 page monster. The original short version is linked.

I argue against Martha Nussbaum and others who cite cases where, allegedly, deprived individuals' adapt their preferences to their circumstances such that satisfying them does not benefit them as counterexamples to informed preference accounts of wellbeing. But leave the details aside--what vexes me at the gut level about Nussbaum's argument is the idea--which figures in a variety of contexts--that we do ourselves in: that we miss out on getting what is best for us because we are brainwashed, psychologically damaged, neurotic, self-defeating or simply confused, that correcting the external conditions of our lives will not by itself make things better, that we need consciousness-raising and therapy.

This is a pernicious lie. It is a lie because it suggests that a relatively rare pathology is the norm. There are some people whose problems are psychological--schizophrenics who are too flipped out to hold down a job or function socially and mental defectives who are just too dumb. But they can't be helped by talk therapy or consciousness raising anyway. For the rest of us, all that's required for the good life are the externals--money, leisure and entertainment.

However we have been bamboozled by the literati and the therapy industry, and convinced that the externals are not enough--that money can't buy happiness, that getting what we want will turn into dust in our mouths, that human beings by their nature are on a quest for Meaning and, perhaps most importantly, that the very idea that the simple, obvious material goods are either necessary or sufficient for the good life is hopelessly crude and naive. At the perfectly awful college for rich underachievers I attended we were constantly taught that divine discontent was noble, that crude materialism was bad, and that the goodies we had were "empty." We were encouraged to "find ourselves" rather than making decisions about further education and employment. We were coddled and petted, given extensions, incompletes and sympathy by faculty when we complained about broken relationships, writing blocks or identity crises, and taught to look down on blue collar kids going to state factory schools for mere job training.

Rhetoric aside, thinking about this as I revise my paper, rereading stories about illiterate, impoverished Indian women who would be delighted to have clean water, micro-credit loans to set up micro-businesses and primary school education for their children I am furious at the decadent rich kids I went to school with, striving after the wind, dissatisfied with goods beyond the wildest dreams of most of the human race, and worst of all, congratulating themselves on their dissatisfaction, on their superior virtue and discernment. And I'm furious at myself too because I was one of those kids--worrying about the Meaning of Life, whining for incompletes and congratulating myself.

I hope I know better now. I have everything I've ever wanted, everything that by my lights matters: a secure, interesting job; a beautiful house; leisure; the opportunity to travel; enough money to get pretty much anything I seriously want; a husband and children; and a really nice computer. That is it--that is all there is to life and it's good enough. The only serious moral problem in the universe is seeing to it that everyone gets that good stuff and the only tragedy is that we die and so can't enjoy it forever. The fault is in our stars: fix the external circumstances of peoples lives, get them that stuff and nothing else matters.

American Religion: Pagans wanted

Incredibly, I was interviewed for a radio show a few days ago--and asked to comment on why Americans are so very, very religious and how this ultra-religiousity shapes American politics and policy. Now, in the throes of espirit d’escallier I think I’ve got it.

From my professional perspective, as a philosopher, the core religious issues are metaphysical ones: questions about the existence and nature of God and post-mortem survival. So, in the standard philosophy of religion class we trot undergraduates through the classic arguments for and against the existence of God—Ontological, Cosmological, Teleological and Religious Experience vs. Problem of Evil and Verificationist Challenge—and material on the problem of personal identity that figures in discussions of the possibility of resurrection and disembodied existence. Then, insofar as we’re interested in Christianity in particular there are additional goodies: logic puzzles concerning the doctrine of the Trinity (my personal favorite) and worries about the idea of Incarnation.

We don’t have anything to say about ethics when it comes to philosophy of religion courses—that’s for ethics courses, of course. We might have something to say about miracles, because Hume did and if Hume was interested in a problem guaranteed it is philosophically interesting. But we don’t seriously believe that it’s of any real religious importance whether miracles, including the Virgin Birth and others reported in the Bible, really occurred. Religion from this perspective is essentially a matter of ontology—like the problem of universals: ethical and empirical issues, if they figure at all, are strictly peripheral. That is Phil 112, Philosophy of Religion, 3 units, term paper and 2 blue books, satisfies a humanities requirement—enjoy.

But that is not the way in which most people, religious or secular, view religion. For them the strictly metaphysical issues are not of primary importance. Religion is a total package, including a roster of empirical claims, and perhaps even more importantly, a vision of the Good Life and a variety of moral and political agendas. God and post-mortem survival come along with the package.

Americans are more sympathetic to the Package than Europeans but I doubt that this is because they’re less inclined to tough-minded empiricism. According to the figures I was looking at, from about a dozen websites which vary widely, averaging out, about 85% of Americans believe in God while only a bare majority of Brits do. But it turns out the percentage of Brits who believe in ghosts is significantly higher than the percentage who believe in God. Now it would be interesting to compare the difference in the percentage of Americans and Europeans who profess belief in God with the difference, if any, in the percentage of Americans and Europeans who believe in flakey nonsense—astrology, ghosts, “alternative” medicine, UFO abductions, reincarnation or generic spirituality. When I have time I’ll get the figures. But my guess is that the gap, if any, when it comes to beliefs about flakey nonsense is narrower than the God gap.

If this is so then my thesis is confirmed: Americans are no more religious in the Phil 112 sense than anyone else. Rather, for some complicated historical and cultural reasons, we are more likely to buy the vision of the Good Life associated with religious belief and the ethical and political agendas that go along with it than Europeans are. We buy into ontological and empirical claims, which we don’t really care about one way or the other, because they are part of the Package. In particular, my conjecture is that we distrust institutions, especially government, and are more likely than citizens of other affluent industrialized nations to believe that without religion people will run amok. We are more frightened of chaos breaking in than people in other affluent countries and more worried about violence; we place a higher value on self-discipline and are much more likely than Europeans to believe that religion is the most effective mechanism of social control.

Those of us who don’t buy this vision of the Good Life and the socio-political agenda are disinclined to buy the ontological claims—and are, by and large, unsympathetic to religion as such insofar as we regard it as a program for pushing through this agenda. So we run crusades against hill shrines, Christmas crèches in parks, and all the outward and visible signs of Christianity to stop what we see as creeping theocracy, a program to install Christian shari’a, suppress personal freedom—particularly freedom of sexual self-expression—and push through an ultra-conservative socio-political agenda.

Now I guess that what I myself am is an agnostic Christian pagan. When it comes to empirical claims, I do not believe anything different from what any convinced atheist believes. I do not believe in miracles—not because I think that anomalies are impossible but because I don’t believe that there is any compelling evidence that such events have occurred. I have no sympathy for any distinctively Christian ethic: I am a utilitarian. I detest the political agenda of the Religious Right. I think that questions about the existence of God are philosophically interesting but don’t see any compelling reason to believe that God exists—or doesn’t exist. If I have to jump one way or the other I’ll jump for theism though because of plausibility arguments from religious experience. I hope that by the time I am old I will have convinced myself that I shall survive bodily death but I am not counting on it.

But I really, really like religion. I like the philosophical puzzles, particularly the doctrine of the Trinity, and I simply love the stuff of religion—the mysticism and the art. From my Phil 112 perspective, none of this is any more threatening or indicative of a large-scale socio-political agenda than Buddha statues in Chinese restaurants or “God bless you” when we sneeze. Religion at its core is just metaphysics and has no more import for ethics, politics or social arrangements than speculative doctrines about the ontological status of numbers or disputes about whether time travel is logically possible.

Religious myth, symbol, ceremony, custom and decor are cultural products which, along with their secular counterparts—patriotic parades and fireworks displays, birthdays, weddings, and other potlatches, secular holidays and all the rituals surrounding the cult of professional sport—make life enjoyable. The more the better. The myths, ceremonies and symbols of Christianity predominate because they are the part of our culture, in the way that Thanksgiving, Halloween and Super Bowl Sunday are. For religious believers, that is people who buy the metaphysical claims, they express religious sentiments; for others they are just entertainment. Everyone can play: no one is excluded unless they choose to exclude themselves (in the spirit of puritanical killjoys who object to beauty pageants because they “objectify” women or to contact sports and computer games because they glorify violence).

My current preoccupation is the history of Late Antiquity. This ‘world full of gods’ appeals to me—this world of countless gods and cults, domestic and foreign, where some believe, some half-believe and some do not believe at all, where it is not clear whether a given deity is understood as an intelligent being or causally efficacous individual of any other sort, an abstract philosophical principle or a metaphorical figure, and where it does not really matter. That is what I wish the world were—a world where all the rich stuff of Christianity played the role of the myth, ritual and symbol of Mediterranean paganism from which it descended.

It’s a trite romantic fantasy, in the spirit of Santayana—who got it dead right about American religion and character in The Last Puritan and entertained similar fantasies about culture Catholicism: “There is no God, and Mary is His Mother.”

Bush: The Speech, the War and the Hurricane

Bush, Saying U.S. Is Winning, Asks Patience on Iraq - New York Times

Nothing new in Bush’s speech this evening…at least nothing besides the admission that he screwed up. His groomers and trainers have finally got it across to him that strategic withdrawl is in order, time to admit that the intelligence was botched, that there were no WMD and, oh yes, that he’d been spying on American citizens since 9/11. It was, of course, a nuanced confession, not the blubbering 12-step repentance that may come later—after he leaves office. Just a little flutter to see if admitting fallibility wins sympathy or is perceived as a sign of weakness.

On substantive issues however it was the old time religion: the bad guys are out to get us and we have to get them first, and get them where they are so that they can’t get us at home. There was the same ritualized invocation of 9/11 and the fudge on the distinction between the Iraq program and the “war on terrorism,” pious remarks about spreading freedom and democracy, and best wishes for Christmas and Hanukah.

The confession—too little too late—will not make any difference because no one really cared about Weapons of Mass Destruction in the first place—any more than they cared about whether Reuben “Hurricane” Carter, a black boxer unjustly convicted of murder in my home town was really guilty of the triple murder for which he was sent to prison. The bottom line was that Carter was a big, tough black man and so a danger to the community. If he really killed those 3 guys, that was good: it justified us in putting him away. If he didn’t, that was also ok because he got put away anyhow.

No one really cared whether Iraq had WMD. The bottom line was that there were big tough guys who, if not exactly black weren’t quite white and were out to get us. If there were WMDs in Iraq that was good: it justified going over and getting them before they got us. If there weren’t, that was ok too because we would get them anyhow. One way or another, our leader was a Big Man who would hang tough and protect us.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t even deal with Hurricane Katrina.

What could he have done? Maybe, remembering film clips of Ike’s “I will go to Korea” speech, admit that the whole Iraq affair was a hopeless quagmire, announce that he would go to Iraq, negotiate with all parties, partition the country and fix the mess. If this miserable little shit had any real guts, beyond the scripted cinema variety it took to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier and announce “mission accomplished,” he would play it straight for once, put his life and legacy on the line and make a real attempt to fix what he broke. But he will not. If the Democrats want a successful candidate for the next election they will pick one who will.

I don’t care about this war because I don’t care about foreign policy. Wars come and go. War by its nature is bad and it’s a judgment call whether, for any given war, the good outweighs the bad or vice versa. But I find the utter gutlessness of Americans appalling: the gutlessness of Americans agonizing about crime in the streets and terrorist threats from abroad, locking up bad guys and locking themselves into gated communities if they can afford it, obsessing about dirt, germs, food additives, bird flu, porno on the internet, bullies in the schools, and anything that could conceivably offend anyone and the gutlessness of American politicians testing the waters, consulting focus groups, sampling polls and running chicken-shit from anything that could jeopardize their careers, reputations or physical safety.

One always feels reticent about expressing such sentiments if one hasn't been tested and, being a women (of a certain age), I wasn't: I was never in the military. But I swear by Jesus Christ that "I, a weak woman" could do better than these miserable wimps.

Academic Freedom

Keep 'Adam and Steve' Out of His In-Box. Is That So Hateful? - New York Times

Mr. Daniel, who repairs printers at William Paterson University and also takes courses toward a master's degree there, was reading his e-mail before work on March 8 when he came upon a message sent in connection with Women's History Month announcing the showing of a film, "Ruthie and Connie: Every Room in the House." Mr. Daniel, 63, who has been a Muslim since the 1970's, had no interest in the film. He believes his religion condemns homosexuality. So following the instructions, he sent a reply to the e-mail address of Arlene Holpp Scala, chairwoman of the department of women's studies.

"Do not send me any mail about 'Connie and Sally' and 'Adam and Steve.' These are perversions," he wrote. "The absence of God in higher education brings on confusion. That is why in these classes the Creator of the heavens and the earth is never mentioned."

Two days later, Dr. Scala filed a complaint with officials at William Paterson. It read: "Mr. Daniel's message to me sounds threatening and in violation of our University's nondiscrimination policy. I don't want to feel threatened at my place of work when I send out announcements about events that address lesbian issues." She said Mr. Daniel should be informed that he had violated university policy and that she was not sure what else should be done to censure him and "make me feel I am working in a safe environment."

What, if anything, was in this stupid woman's head? What on earth did she think that she, chair of an academic department--if you can call "woman's studies" an academic discipline--stood to gain by going after a computer tech on staff? I've seen comparable things happen and I'm baffled. It looks like you get some sort of prestige by demonstrating how weak and sensitive you are, how scared you are for your personal safety, and how loudly you can whine.

Dr. Scala, I suspect, was playing Let's Pretend. A cloistered (and I'd bet tenured) academic, she imagined herself a foot soldier in the feminist movement, a powerless woman working in a hostile environment, surrounded by big, hairy, threatening males out to get her, daring to assert herself and striking a blow for the sisterhood. And, of course, it must have been sweet to punish someone who held views with which she disagreed, particularly someone whom she believed could not fight back--makes me wonder how she deals with students who are foolish enough to take her courses and argue against the party line.

Mr. Daniel (who, being a competent technician, is probably just smarter than Dr. Scala) won his case. But I find it outrageous that silly asses like Dr. Scala can make frivolous complaints that jeopardize the livelihood of innocent parties without any adverse consequences.

Mediocre Affirmative Action Candidates

Conservatism and the pursuit of excellence

At our last dinner table conversation, my husband wondered why Bush nominated Harriet Meiers when it was so predictable that she would go down in flames.

This one is a no-brainer: the aim was to discredit affirmative action and make it politically feasible to appoint a white male. We do this in Academia all the time.

Faced with a hiring decision, colleagues piously proclaim that we will of course do everything we can to find a qualified woman. So, e.g. on one occasion we decided to open the search to candidates with an interest in philosophy of law as well as business ethics since, as one colleague noted, this would be more likely to attract women ("because, you know, you think of women more in connection with, like, LA Law and Allie McBeal than with business").

Then we sort through candidates' files and conduct interviews, carefully weeding out the strongest female candidates on the grounds that given affirmative action policies they can get any jobs they want so we don't have a chance of getting them. Then we make the final decision, considering the pool of mediocre female candidates left and a few slightly better than mediocre male candidates. We bewail the fact that in spite of all our efforts to get a good female candidate we just have the "usual roster of weak women."

At this point, we congratulate ourselves on having tried our best--tailoring the job description to "feminine interests" and interviewing a preponderance of female applicants (except, or course, the ones with whom we wouldn't have a chance). We have the paper work to show that the female candidates that got to the interview stage are, by any criteria, less qualified than the male candidates and, crying crocodile tears, offer the job to a white male.

Let's face it, my male colleagues say: women are just mediocre. Where there's smoke there's fire--that's why you see so few women at the top, as CEOs of fortune 500 companies or in prestigeous academic positions, and why with all the affirmative action pressures we've been under for the last few decades you still don't get women at the top. Look at us: we did everything we could to get a qualified woman but the women we interviewed were just not competitive.

Charity Ends At Home

What Is Charity? - New York Times

[T]he nonprofit sector has drifted from core notions of charity...Only a sliver of giving to churches is spent on social services. Last year, of the 14 gifts that exceeded $100 million, only one - a $1.5 billion bequest to the Salvation Army from Joan B. Kroc, the widow of the founder of McDonald's - went to a human services organization, Forbes magazine says.

"In general, philanthropy seems to have stopped talking about poverty and race," said Jan Masaoka, executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, which tries to strengthen charities. Small groups still get funding, but the sector "in some ways has retreated from taking on poverty in a larger-scale, more direct way."

If there's one thing that's true, it's that people give to people because they have a personal connection to the place they're giving to, and people who have personal connections to human service organizations are not usually people with money...People who grew up in comfortable, clean, prosperous suburbs have just never had as much familiarity with how many others live.

I grew up in a clean, prosperous neighborhood and, in any case, am no great philanthropist. But I have a vivid, if perversely selective, imagination. I can't imagine being sick so I don't give a cent to "charities" concerned with health care or medical research. But I can easily imagine being poor or being a member of a visible minority. So I give the lousy little amount of money I give to: the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Fund for an Open Society and and UNICEF and these days I've had a blast giving people virtual farm animals from the Heifer Project as gifts. The the cow I gave my son and his bride as a wedding present, the pigs, goats and chickens I've given to friends, and the swarm of bees I sent to my mother-in-law go to people in developing countries who know how to deal with them.

So I just thought I'd advertise a little. I don't know how many people visit my blog, but I thought I'd put up these convenient links in case you have some disposable income. BTW the Canadian Harambee Education Society is also a terrific deal: for $340 American money you can send a girl in Kenya or Uganda through high school.

It's not virtue that drives me but the vividness of modality that comes from reading too much David Lewis, and the lively sense that these possible worlds where I'm poor and have no options are just a hair's breadth away. I go into Walmart and see the women working there at pink-collar shit jobs for minimum wage, going mad doing miserable drudge work all day and living in poverty, and it always strikes me in the most vivid way how I escaped that by the skin of my teeth and pure dumb luck--how easily I could have been one or them, or someone who couldn't even get a job at Walmart. I see beggars at freeway exits and always think of how easily that could have been me, standing there all day with a cardboard sign, bored out of my head while the cars go past blasting me with exhaust fumes, with nowhere to go, nothing to do and no way out.

I'm writing now on preference and well-being. My intuitions may be screwy but I have the vivid sense that I'm actually less well off myself because possible worlds like this are so close by. So I give money and do what I can to fix the safety nets that cushion me from those possible worlds. It's hard to explain this gut-level fear: as a tenured professor I know there's no chance I'll end up working at Walmart or begging at a freeway exit, and there is sure no way that I'm going to wake up black one day. But this is all vivid and close to me.

DNA [Daily News & Analysis] - Opinion - Why is Paris burning?

"France took many immigrants from its former colonies, especially from Algeria and several African and Arab countries and refrained from providing any state help to uphold their unique cultures. Au contraire, it frowned on any display of cultural separateness, as was evident from the banning of the hijab (and, it may be pointed out, the turban, the crucifix and several other overt religious symbols) from state-run schools. All of this sounds noble and egalitarian, but in practice, France's non-white populations have found that they have the worst of both worlds. They have neither benefited from any affirmative action, which would guarantee them some jobs, nor managed to merge with the national social, cultural, political and most important, economic mainstream. Many of them live in high-rise ghettos with pathetic living conditions and high unemployment"

Well, bravo. This piece from an Indian publication gets it right and says it succinctly.