Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Better start saying your prayers.

You’ve probably already heard, but in case you haven’t, Arlen Specter is going to be a Democrat.

My quick take is that, as far as passing legislation in this Congress goes, nothing too much changes. Even though, once Franken gets seated, there will be 60 Democrats or Democrat-affiliated votes in the Senate, that doesn’t mean that all those Senators are going to vote for whatever Harry Reid wants them to. Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh are still in that 60, and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe are still part of the last 40. So, the actual horse-trading, dealmaking and votecounting probably doesn’t change too much in the immediate future. And on EFCA specifically, the issue that probably drove Specterto the Democratic aisle, he’s already said that he won’t be flip-flip-flopping back to supporting it.

Specter’s switch seems to more of a very strong data point in an already robust and long term trend of the Republican Party getting smaller, more conservative and more responsive to its ideological grassroots. We already had a taste of this when Jim Jeffords switched sides, and since then, the Northeast has become nearly Republican free. Also, any Republican who’s considered to be a rising leader in the party, is, to a man, very much part of the grass roots, ideological base — with the exception of Jon Huntsman.

If the GOP responds to this at all rationally, perhaps they’ll realize that the Club for Growth, whose former president Pat Toomey’s primary challenge to Specter basically caused the switch, is basically just effective at eviscerating Republicans and thus electing Democrats. Moreover, they’ll figure out that, to survive as a party, they’ll have to tolerate their precious few blue state Senators not being rock-ribbed conservatives. For all the griping we Democrats do about Nelson and Bayh, you don’t see us supporting and encouraging primary challenges against them.

Now, if the behavior of John Cornyn, the Congressional leadership and the net roots of the party is any indication, this recognition probably won’t happen. Instead, as the Republican caucus shrinks, the conservatives will become even more influential and powerful, and there will even less chance of ideological or even just strategic moderation.

In almost two years of fairly regular blogging, I’ve waited for the day when Julian Sanchez uses something I wrote as a jumping off point for one of his consistently excellent philosophical thumbsuckers. And today, it happened! Please do check out his post, even apart from the fact that he namedrops me a couple of times, it’s actually quite good. There’s a lot of good stuff there, but his final point is worth repeating:

Civilian life affords us the luxury of a good deal of deontology—better to let ten guilty men go free, and so on.  In wartime, there’s almost overwhelming pressure to shift to consequentialist thinking… and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have leaders who remember to factor the other side’s population into the calculus.  And so we might think of the horror at torture as serving a kind of second-order function, quite apart from its intrinsic badness relative to other acts of war. It’s the marker we drop to say that even now, when the end is self-preservation, not all means are permitted.  It’s the boundary we treat as uncrossable not because we’re certain it traces the faultline between right and wrong, but because it’s our own defining border; because if we survived by erasing it, whatever survived would be a stranger in the mirror. Which, in his own way, is what Shep Smith was getting at. Probably Khalid Sheik Mohammed deserves to be waterboarded and worse. We do not deserve to become the country that does it to him.

Jamelle sat in on Eric Cantor’s meeting with UVA College Republicans and got a peek at what the GOP’s supposedly new strategy is:

I think this is pretty much the case; last week I dropped in on a meeting of U.Va’s College Republicans to check out House Minority Whip Eric Cantor’s remarks to the group, and while his talk was mostly boilerplate, I noticed he referred to President Obama in mostly conciliatory terms.  The only time he threw out the red meat was when he was talking about congressional Democrats; in those instances, he was a lot more willing to call out Democrats for “partisanship” or whatever else it is they call the actions of the majority party in a popularly elected legislature.  If this anecdote is any indication, then Fernholz is right: Republican leadership is beginning to realize that attacking Obama is a no win game, and that it might be better to frame themselves as opposing Nancy Pelosi and her minions (or something).

The thing is, I heard Paul Gigot, editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, making this same argument right around the time Obama was inagurated. It’s an appealing thing for Republicans to say. Obama is a smart, appealing, charismatic and most importantly, popular, leader in both America and abroad. Broadly opposing him, in saying that he, himself, is espeically bad, is obviously bad short-term politics. If you remember during the stimulus debate, some Republicans tried to place the blame on the stimulus getting no Republican support on the nasty partisan Congressional Democrats, who scuttled Obama’s plans for a bipartisan bill.

Of course, this approach to opposition, while sounding nice in theory, makes no sense when it comes to real policies. Sure, on the margins, there is some friction between the Congress’ goals and the President’s. Obama wants to move faster on cap-and-trade than Congress does, Congress wants to do more on pay controls for executives receiving government support and so on and so forth. But, on the big questions that people actually care about, Obama is doing Congress’ bidding and vice versa. Democrats have won two straight elections on a relatively simple policy platform that all the major stakeholders agree on — universal health care, some action on climate change, more federal education funding — and Republicans, nearly to a man, oppose all of these goals. As long as the gap between Obama’s big goals and Congresses’ is orders of magnitudes smaller than the gap between Obama and the GOP, any attempt to piggbyback on Obama’s popularity by opposing the Democratic Congress will fail.

Haiti is often represented in literature as a strange, alien place. Some of this representation takes the form of crude, stereotypical exploitation that most revels in this strangeness to make it look like as alien a place as possible. So, this would include most literary/cinematic depictions of voodoo or of local Haitian rites and traditions surrounding the dead. But this isn’t all just Orientalist (..or Caribbeanist) exoticism. Haiti really is a strange place. The modern nation was founded in the wake of the world’s only successful slave revolt, during which hundreds of thousands died in nearly orgiastic violence perpetrated by all sides. The conflict featured native and slave born black Haitians constantly switching their allegiances between the French Republic, the shite planters, the African born slaves and the dozens of factions that existed in each individual group. The revolution started almost spontaneously, after a rite where a group of slaves ceremonially slaughtered a pig and then rose up and brutally killed their masters. The leader of the initial revolt, Boukman, was executed by the French, but Haitans believed at the time — and still to this day — that he transformed into a bird or a fly and escaped. He was also believed to be able to communicate with animals.  After the Haitians successfully drove out the French, they quickly turned on each other and had to suffer the horrifying, macabre and authoritarian rule of Henri Christophe, who styled himself as European monarch and maintained the plantation economy that was the impetus of the initial revolt.

Since the revolt, the country was isolated by the rest of world, saw its natural environment destroyed as it tried to exploit less and less fertile land that had already been exhausted by sugar growing and has been poor and violent to this day. It’s a place that, by many accounts, where the past is still very much alive and haunts the present. That the local religion is very much concerned with the dead and their active roles in the lives of the living, only heightens the strange ahistoric nature of the island.

All of this talk of Haiti is just some throat clearing to discuss Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. Carpentier, himself a Cuban writer, was fascinated by the “marvelous real” in Haiti. By this, he meant how occurrences which many would describe as fantastic or magical were commonplace in Haiti and very much part of the fabric of life. His work is something of a precursor to Magical Realism, but is different in that Carpentier insists that there’s no magic or superstition involved, instead, his representation of Haiti is just a record of how Haiti really is.

The story, which roughly follows the experiences of a slave from before the initial rebellion in 1791 through Henri Christophe’s rule. There are excursions to Cuba, Europe, including some truely fantastic scenes featuring Josephine Bonaparte.

The book, which Andrew Seal expertly evokes in his short review/reflection, is simply stunning. A lesser author would get lost trying to actually explain the utter strangeness of Revolutionary post-Revolution Haiti or he would retreat into the consciousness of his relatively insignificant narrator and not every try to capture “the sense of a society seething with arcane energies, weird forces which can only be expressed in strange idioms.” But Carpentier can do just that, and his book contains so many blasts of “biblical thunder of the prose” that the reader not only doesn’t care that there’s little attempt at characterization,  exploration of anyone’s consciousness or plotting that makes much dramatic or literary sense. Instead, the book is almost journalistic in just how vivid and evocative it is.

Also, if we’re looking at books the same way Pierre Bayard does, then it’s a great chance to read some Magical Realist literature that all your Marquez-worshipping friends who cart around One Hundred Years of Solitude like a letter of introduction have probably never even heard of.

Despite the fact that I’m not an undergraduate there, I really do love UC Berkeley. Both my parents went there, I’ve been to a bunch of their football games, I live close to it and so on and so forth. Also, I’m an egalitarian liberal, so I’m double excited that Emmanuel Saez has won the John Bates Clark medal for being the best American economist under 40. The J.B.C.  medal is the second most prestigious award in economics, and is a very good predictor of future Nobel winners. Around 40% of the Clark winners have gone on to win Nobels. Also, unlike the Nobel, it’s only awarded every two years.

Saez is famous for his research on inequality. Basically, whenever you see a chart or graph or table tracking American income inequality, it’s based on research Saez did with his French college Thomas Piketty. As inequality has exploded since the late 70s, and especially in the past eight years, so has the relevance of Saez’s work. He’s certainly earned the honor.

It’s also a nice nod to UC Berkeley’s economics department. Academic economics is generally considered to be the domain of two institutions in Cambridge: M.I.T. and Harvard. Because of their prestige and proximity to the National Bureau of Economic Research, these two institutions get the vast majority of the best graduate students (nearly every academic economist you’ve heard of got their PhD at M.I.T. or Harvard) and a whole lot of the most prestigious economists end up at one of those two places. Berkeley, being the greatest public university in the world, also has a stellar economics department with some real world class talent (David Card, George Akerlof  and Christina Romer before she departed for D.C.), so it’s pretty cool that they’re getting some attention.

Econoblogging superstar Brad Delong, of course, is another sweet Cal economist.

As I’ve noted over and over again, torture seems to have an especially exalted place as being a real morally wrong, or at least used to, as opposed to, say, starting wars or killing civilians in them. It’s interesting just powerful this moral sentiment is, despite not being the product of real abstract moral reasoning. It seems that most of horror that the revelation of torture, and the entire  legal and political apparatus built up around it, has come from a very deep place, a place where even the question of whether or not torture is right or wrong is considered to be something of a category error or simple nonsense, like asking if 2+2 is equal to five.

I think that the most insightful piece written on our collective morality and the question of torture This point was made much more elegantly in a Times op-ed by Slavoj Zizek written when it was first revealed that Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was waterboarded. In that piece he made the argument that the occurrence of any debate over torture was a sign of a collective moral coarsening, that we were slipping back on a consensus made hundreds of years ago that torture was always wrong. The discussion of torture, the weighing of costs and benefits was the horrible result of  “those in power…literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone, to dampen and undo what is arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.”

So, we have a glass half-full situation. Our particular sentiment against torture is somewhat random and is the result of contingent historical facts and processes, but it’s a moral sensitivity that we have (or, sadly, had). So, we have to be a bit ironic in our condemnations of torture. By that, I mean not that we don’t actually think torture is wrong, but more that our utter and total revulsion against it, the bafflement we face when we see a public debate over its merits comes from the contingent and ultimately shallow (in the sense that they don’t reflect some great Platonic  truth) mores and values of the society that we happen to be born into. We should feel lucky that at least, at least, we have some collective moral sensitivity to torture. Some of us, like Shepard Smith, will have no need for irony, but for the rest of us, we’ll have to last keep this question in the back of our minds.

Also, everyone should check out Jamelle’s thoughts on the reprehensible Mike Goldfarb. Note the title of the post.

I actually wrote my previous post, “America and Torture,” last night. It just so happened that Andrew Sullivan, today, wrote a post glorifying Winston Churchill’s — and the Allies in general — refusal to use torture despite the truly horrifying consequences of insufficient intelligence about Nazi Germany’s actions. And while I think Churchill is a good example of how liberal societies have a very deeply entrenched cultural norm against torture, I can’t help but be a bit troubled by Sullivan’s view that the Bush administration’s actions are a huge break from the past.

One actually can not think of a better example than Churchill, or more generally, the Allies’ behavior in World War II. Sure, they eschewed torture because that’s what civilized nations do. But for some reason or another, there wasn’t a great cultural taboo against the mass slaughter of civilians, be it by air raid or by nuclear assault. Churchill, of course, was a great supporter of civilian bombing of Germany, especially of Dresden. Bush, for all his faults, never ordered area bombings of major Iraq or Afghani cities that had no military significance. So, for his tremendous faults when it comes to torture, Bush can be seen as something of an improvement over Churchill, Roosevelt et al.

I guess I’ll see it as a truely landmark moment when the killing of innocent civilians in war is seen as alien to the liberal tradition as the torture of hardened terrorists. Until then, I just hope that we remember that immorality in times of war didn’t start with the Bush administration.

The release of the torture memos, along with the slow trickle of evidence since Abu Ghraib which has definitively confirmed that the Bush Administration acted in violation of not only American and international law, but also of  traditions that have marked liberal, civilized societies for as long as they’ve existed, has greatly upset me. It made me upset not just because torture is a horrifyingly immoral thing to do, but because it was done, in one way or another, in my name, for my sake.

But I’m slightly uncomfortable with how the torture debate has unfolded, and here’s why — much of the most impassioned and instinctually persuasive condemnations of torture have not been from the basic perspective that “America does not torture.” Or, to make a maxim out of it, America is a good country and therefore acts accordingly.

There’s a reason I felt a special thrill when Shep Smith said this with such passion. As an American, I like to see it when people condemn immoral acts from that perspective. But I can’t help but be bothered by the  historical whitewashing that’s going on here. It’s true that the Bush administration broke with centuries of precedent and tradition when he allowed the CIA and the military to torture detainees. But the tradition that he parted with wasn’t a particularly proud one. Usually, we’ve left the horrifying atrocities to our allies or clients. To put it another way, America doesn’t torture, but its Central America allies did throughout the Cold War. Or, America doesn’t torture, it kills hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam. I could go on and on.

But it feels  wrong to bray about past American wrongdoing when the central moral dilemma of our time is accounting for our current and recent wrongdoing. I don’t want to lessen the horror of the war in Iraq or of the systematic torture regime the Bush Administration established. It may be that in an America where a righteous, near-Messianic self conception is an a priori commitment for anyone who, say, wants to become President or even a mainstream commentator on current affairs, the Shepherd Smith line is the best we hope for. Perhaps we have to do some strategic forgetting, so that we can create a viable consensus that the Bush years really were a descent into the Dark Side.

But it seems horribly ironic that, in a time when America has so obviously violated moral norms that, at least before 9/11, everyone agreed on, we’ve  gathered around the flag. For folks like Shepherd Smith and Andrew Sullivan, it seems like 9/11 was the first attack on America — a physical, muderous attack –and the institution of the Torture Regime was the second attack, an attack on our deepest values. And since these dual attacks seem to be understood roughly analgously ( I haven’t seen Andrew this impassioned since he called war opponents a fifth column), it makes sense that the response is basically the same.

I would hope that the torture episode would open the door to a more critical interrogation of America’s history, but it seems to have done exactly the opposite. Instead, the only way we can understand the profound evil at the heart of the Torture Regime is to imagine that nothing like it ever existed before. If only that were true.

Or the very deontological ethics of Shepherd Smith. I don’t much care which school he falls into, this video is  amazing. I’ll have something more substantive to say about his line of advocacy later, but for now, just watch this clip.

Wow. Just Wow. From the New York Times.

In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Over at the Corner, the former ambassador to Venezuela makes the case that all interaction with Hugo Chavez should be coup-based, as opposed to handshake based. Well, he doesn’t mention the oligarchical coup that he was so quick to support in 2002, but you really have to read in between the lines.

But more seriously, beyond the near-Talismanic power he attributes to Obama’s handshake with Chavez, this last paragraph is a pretty ridiculous bit of fear-mongering:

Too many of the participants at the Summit are “freely elected” yet engaged in undermining the very institutions of a democracy and in perpetuating themselves in power indefinitely. In varying degrees, Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, Honduras’s Manuel Zelaya, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa are abusing their presidential powers to change the rules of the game. They are all allies of Chávez in what he calls “21st-century socialism” which is what. So far, this socialism recalls nothing less that the beginning stages of the socialism which was established in the first half of the 20th century in Russia, Italy, and Germany. I doubt a U.S. president would have given a warm handshake to any of those leaders.

That “in varying degrees” bit does a lot of work for Reich. The short of it is that much of Latin America does not have the most robust democratic institutions, and so it’s easy for a popular, charismatic leader to slightly alter the rules of the game so as to accumulate more power for him and his supporters. It’s just that for most of Latin America’s history, it’s been right-wing, American supported, anti-communist leaders that have been doing this. But now as America has become at least tolerant of left wing regimes in Latin America (as opposed to just knocking them over), we have populist, left wing leaders doing the same thing. But I don’t really see how this is much of a problem vis a vis the United States.

On a macro level, Latin America has never been more liberal or democratic, and now that we don’t have the Cold War going and the even-slight prospect of a hostile superpower stocking up weapons in pliant regimes south of the Border, trying to pick winners or have a foreign policy that is significantly affected by whether or not, say, Ecuador has a right-wing or left-wing democratically elected leader is pretty silly.

Dylan Matthews has an impassioned blast against soi-disant liberals at institutions of higher education (in his case, Harvard) who are totally OK with having an endowment of tens of billions of dollars, and then, when that endowment falls to slightly fewer tens of billions of dollars, supporting the administration’s firing of staff and maintenance workers to help make up the short fall.

The way Dylan tells it, the administration looks especially bad because they have not been forthcoming about their financial situation and how much these layoffs are necessary to fill up in any shortfall or gap, or if the layoffs are the best way to do this, as opposed to cutting elsewhere. But simple accountability and transparency questions are not that  interesting — the obligations of these institutions are.

Dylan claims that, on a personal level, “choosing to use the privilege of a Harvard education not to make the world a better place but to personally enrich oneself is despicable, and students who do so should be ashamed of themselves and their life choices,” and so one wouldn’t be suprised that he thinks that Harvard has institution-wide obligations to the not-as-well-off. But I think the questions are a little bit more thorny than that.

Sure, at the margins, Harvard (and every other private university sloshing around in money), should avoid screwing over the people that work for them, and, in general, devote a rather large amount of their money to egalitarian measures like not firing their workers and being very generous with financial aid. This seems rather simple, but I’d be weary of trying to get at any larger principle here.

Dylan deals with the basic response that colleges are just that, colleges, not “welfare agencies” and so they shouldn’t have special obligations to pay their workers more or to not fire them when they determine they should, by saying that the line of argument would lead to the elimination of financial aid for poorer students. But I think one could easily reductio ad absurdum both ways here. If we imagined Harvard to be an institution with a ton of money and an obligation to use that money in a just, fair and egalitarian fashion, the institution would look nothing like it was today. It would take all the money devoted towards, say, the humanities, and plough it into either basic research about development problems (malaria, international child poverty and so on) or into advocacy for, say, massively liberalized immigration laws. But of course, this would never happen. As a college, it exists under a rather more general set of obligations to, well, educate people, produce respected scholarly research, perform an essential public service and so on.

I’m not saying I disagree with anything Dylan says in his post. Once again, insomuch as Harvard or any other non-profit can afford to pay their workers as generously and employ them for as long as possible, they certainly should, I just don’t think making overarching claims about what their obligations are to society as a whole is all that useful and quickly leads you into some pretty tricky quandaries.

PS – Here’s a quick example. Let’s say that Institution of Higher Learning X has 100,000 lying around. The students want it to fund a concert. So, what’s I.H.L. X to do? Should they use that money for a concert (let’s assume that they have all the financial aid money and what not they need) or should they hire, say, three more maintenance workers that they could use but don’t need. Let’s say you think they should hire the workers. I would think that you would then argue that they should hire low-income people, or pay their current workers more until the marginal cost of doing so is so high as to imperil their basic functions as a University. I’m not saying this situation is totally analagous to anything Harvard or any other school is going through, but it illuminates how tricky these questions can be.

I wrote a few months ago about a lecture by Jurgen Habermas’ that I attended. What struck me the most about the event was how peripheral anything Habermas had to actually say was to the event itself. Habermas is probably the most significant social theorist of the second half of the 20th century and, even in his old age, is a revered figure in the academic world. Despite the fact that his intellectual production has greatly slowed since 1992, when Between Fact and Norms was published, he has comfortably slid into the position of European Public Intellectual and all around wiseman. So, when he came to Northwestern, people were there to see Habermas, not the old German guy who was reading a paper in an impossibly thick German accent.

Earlier this week, I saw another academic megastar speak at N.U., Judith Butler. There is probably no academic on earth whose occasionally inaccessibility of her prose so contrasted with the fervor of her public reception. Ever since Gender Trouble, Butler has been just that, the social theorist who writes dense books interweaving just about every major Continental thinker along with a few Analytic ones, who managed to create an entire field of study, and become a figure that just about everyone has to deal with at one time or another. Sure, she is reviled by the crowd that loves to deride any academic work that involves more than there French names and sentences that go beyond four lines (and by Martha Nussbaum), but the scale of her influence is undeniable.

And so, when she came to Northwestern to present a paper she wrote on Arendt and Eichmann called “Keeping Company With Oneself,” there was an entire lecture hall of graduate students, faculty members and assorted gawkers wanting to hear what the Judith Butler had to say.

But the Judith Butler of Gender Trouble, of Bodies That Matter and Excitable Speech wasn’t there. The daring, innovative, even fun gender theorist who so delightfully raises the hackles of Camille Paglia, all the while throwing the occasional sentence that even her PhD readers couldn’t really understand was replaced by this calm, closely reasoned and serious political theorist.

This is the late Butler, the public intellectual, the one who is concerned with those topics that conservative, moderate and liberal critics of the academy always tell us that intellectuals should be concerned with. Here she is, performing a very close reading of a popular text that most politically minded intellectuals adore and wish they could ever write (all the while calling for intellectuals to do so), Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Sure, the sentences were dense, and she moved quickly (both physically and intellectually) from idea to idea, point to point, argument to argument. It’s no wonder that she’s stick thin, every reference to Kant and back to Arendt was accompanied by the requisite movements and flurries of her hands and arms.

And so the crowd, with eagerly laughed along with the utterly enamored graduate student who introduced Butler with his obviously prepared quip: “ladies and gentleman, and everyone else, Judith Butler,” was treated to three hours of back and forth on the question of who was reading Arendt correctly. And literally, reading Arendt correctly. One of the main points of contention, as best as I could tell, was two paragraphs where Arendt delivers her condemnation of Eichmann to death. Was she invoking state sovereignty in doing so, or was she calling on some sort of extra-sovereign, extra-legal authority to condemn Eichmann for his crime of “refusing to think.”?

And while these are interesting questions that will probably excite political and legal theorists for decades, they were not what the audience came for. They came for the Judith Butler show. So one can imagine the shock, even the icreduilty, when one of four respondents to Butler’s paper, Sussannah Gottlieb, spent ten minutes ripping into Butler, matching her for intensity, quickness and self assuredness.

Gottlieb, who oh-so-politely prefaced her remarks with “I only have ten minutes, so I have to be direct” reminded me of myself in a debate round. She had combined the competitor’s maxim of “I must win” with a dash of barely-revealed snarkiness, “can she really be serious?”

Another one of the respondents mixed in sharp, focused criticism with a little bit of personal offense. And you couldn’t blame them. Here was Judith Butler, an academic celebrity who is only taken seriously for her work on Arendt and political theory because of the fame she accrued in her work on gender. The other four respondents, on the other hand, were political theorists or literary scholars who had devoted the better part of their scholarship and careers to Arendt and yet were invited to play ensemble roles in the Judith Butler show. It’s hardly surprising that a touch of bitterness crept in.

So, how are we to evaluate these academic celebrities? Is it good that even people who are as supposedly high minded as graduate students and professors respond to someone at the peak of their field the same way music fans respond to Lil Wayne? (Oh my god, he’s playing guitar. Amazing!)

And although celebrity culture is hardly alien to our minds, the academic celebrity culture is still pretty weird. Butler’s lecture was held in the Technical Institute at N.U., which is cavernous, labyrinthine building that is the temporary home for Engineering students and premeds. The Indian graduate students who would peek in every few minutes, only to see a hall full of androgynously dressed 20 somethings listen to slight gray haired woman go on and on about “plurality” and “sovereignty,” were rightfully confused.

While it’s easy to be cynical about the reaction of the intellectual class to someone like Judith Butler, there are the simple facts of the situation. Because of just her name — her name and nothing else — some 300 listened to five intellectuals discuss an incredibly important thinker’s approach to an incredibly important question. If the survival of intellectual culture means indulging in our deep-seeded love of celebrity culture, then so be it.

Some of my thoughts on nuclear abolition — along with a corny Austin Powers reference — over at North by Northwestern.

Also, check out a review of Mark Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto.

Yep, these are my fellow Wildcats

No words.

Charles Morris, reviewing the late Father Richard John Neuhaus last book, makes an intersting claim about, well, the morals of moral philosophers:

Neuhaus notes in passing that the Prince­ton bioethicist Peter Singer was barred from speaking at German universities in 1989 because of his suggestion that “defective” children be destroyed during a trial period after their births. The lectures had been scheduled by moral philosophers, presumably ironists all, and they and many journals were outraged at the intrusion on academic freedom.

This is confused on a few levels, namely by blurring academic and intellectual pluralism with Rorty’s “irony.” The moral philosophers who arranged these lectures were not displaying any anti-foundationalism or Rortyean irony when they invited Peter Singer to speak. Instead, they were recognizing that it would probably be a good thing if a true giant in the field were invited to speak to students and academics. That’s simply academic and intellectual good practice — to give fellow intellectuals the space and time to express their views — and has little to do with issues of foundationalism and irony.

What Morris seems to be implying is that Rorty’s irony, his argument that nothing — including theories of morality, justice and so forth — has any intrinsic or essential character, and instead are just linguistic constructs that we happen to use, directly leads to the kind of calculative, de-emotionalized, insturmental utitlitarian ethics of Peter Singer.

This line of thought, however, doesn’t make much sense. Before being a utilitarian moral philosopher, Peter Singer is a moral philosopher, and his entire enterprise would be pointless if he didn’t believe that his own approach to ethics was objectively and discernibly better than alternative approaches.

Singer believes that moral philosophy is a worthwhile enterprise that can lead to hard, true answers and conclusions (namely, his own). Just because he does not have much use for the duty-based, deontological tradition that runs roughly from Socrates through Kant does not mean that Singer is an anti-foundationalist or an ironist. He just has a different approach to these questions of morality and ethics. Rorty, on the other hand, thinks that the entire exercise of trying to find final, definitive answers to these questions is pointless.

Even though some significant strains of Christian doctrine and practice are intertwined with America’s civic faith, Easter is always a reminder of how, well, Christian, Christianity is. Although the import of other Christian holidays — especially as celebrated in the US — can be easily secularized and appreciated by those that have no Christian faith, Easter remains inextricably religious. Easter means believing that, as John Updike put it, “if he rose at all/It was as His body.” And it’s not just the specific faith that makes Easter meaningful that can be alienating to non-Christians, but it’s secular, social and political history, in Europe especially, makes it an uncomfortable holiday for Jews especially. The story of Good Friday and Christ’s Passion, especially as told Medieval Germans and their modern day heirs, is many things, but for me, it is mostly a long reminder that Jews, acting as Jews, killed God. Easter Sunday itself isn’t as alienating, but its story of triumph and Resurrection was still necessitated by the actions of my people.

So, how to relate to Easter? Like the answer to so many of these tricky questions, the answer lies in reading Yeats. Not only is Easter 1916 a beautifully written and constructed poem, it’s a complex meditation on how an individual can be both horrifed by faith which leads to destructive actions, while at the same time being in awe of it. Here’s the poem:

I

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

II

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse.
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vain-glorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

III

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter, seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute change.
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim;
And a horse plashes within it
Where long-legged moor-hens dive
And hens to moor-cocks call.
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

IV

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Michelle Goldberg makes the interesting point that even though much of the concern over declining fertility rates is driven by conservative xenophobia and the illiberal view that women’s bodies are producers of stock for the State, that liberals shouldn’t be afraid to engage in the fertility debate because the solutions to declining fertility are policies liberals already support:

I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there’s so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn’t, because the only solutions to the problem are liberal ones! Basically, the societies where birthrates have plunged to dangerous levels – Russia, Catholic countries like Poland, Spain and Italy, as well as Japan and Singapore – are all places that make it very difficult for women to combine work and family. In countries that support working mothers, like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and France, birthrates are basically fine – they’re either just at replacement, or shrinking in a very slow, totally manageable way…In other words, the threat of population decline is one of the best arguments yet for socialized day care, family leave, and other dreamy Scandinavian-style policies. It’s a discussion we should welcome.

It’s weird that one even has to make an argument that a world without nuclear weapons would solve a major problem, namely, the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon, or even worse, an all out nuclear war. But here’s Anne Applebaum:

More to the point, nuclear weapons, while terrifying in the abstract, are not an immediate strategic threat to Europe or the United States—even from Iran. Biological weapons are potentially more lethal. Chemical weapons are far cheaper to produce. Within the United States, ordinary bombs and rogue airplanes have already caused plenty of damage.

Conventional weapons, meanwhile, have not gone out of fashion. The most recent use of military force in Europe—the Russian-Georgian conflict of last August—involved tanks and infantry, not nukes. Even if Russia sold its remaining nuclear weapons for scrap metal, Russia’s military would still pose a potential threat to its neighbors, just as a China without nukes could still invade Taiwan.

Ridding the world of nuclear weapons would be very nice, in other words, but on its own, it won’t alter the international balance of power, stop al-Qaida, or prevent large authoritarian states from invading their smaller neighbors. However unsuccessful it has been so far, the promotion of democracy around the world is, ultimately, the only way to achieve these goals. Besides, however much the French loved Michelle’s flowery dress, I’m not sure they have much interest in giving up their force de frappe. Ditto the British. And since they don’t pose a threat, to us or anyone else, it’s not clear to me why we should waste diplomatic capital trying to make them do so.

There’s a lot to deal with here.  First the general point, that nuclear weapons are only “terrifying in the abstract.” Yes, they indeed are, and it’s worth exploring just why they’re so terrifying. Nuclear weapons, which unlike chemical and biological weapons, have been masterfully designed and tested to maximize their potential to kill millions of weapons, are basically the only way that humans can cause planetary extinction, or short of that, the deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

It’s important to emphasize how many orders of mangitude worse a nuclear war could be than just about anything else. To compare the real, demonstrated risk of the destructive power of nukes to the totally hypothetical risk of widespread use of biological weapons is just irresponsible. The small risk of nuclear war should be intolerable — or at least Reagan (correctly) thought so.

But even if we assume that the risk of an all out nuclear war that kills most or all of the world’s population is basically zero, or so low that it isn’t worth factoring into our policy planning, there are still other risks from having such distended nuclear arsenals. For one, every nuclear weapon out there is a weapon that could be stolen by a terrorist group and detonated in a major Western city. If this happens, not only would the death scale be horrific, but America would probably cease to exist as a liberal democratic state and we would, in all likelihood, kill far more civilians in retaliation than were killed in the initial attack. And our weapons aren’t very secure, or, at least, considering their deadly potential, not secure enough. The US Air Force, to say nothing of the Russian or Pakistani armed forces, can’t keep perfect track of them.

Applebaum also argues that the push to get the West, or at least America, to unilaterally reduce the size of their arsenals is pointless, because Iran, North Korea et al won’t go along with it. But let’s look at why regimes who are developing nuclear arsenals are doing so. Pakistan has one to deter an invasion from India and to compete with them more generally. North Korea wants one to to deter a US invasion, and because of residual memory of Americans discussing the use of atomic weapons against North Korea and China during the Korean War, and Iran wants one because it sees what happens to Middle Eastern countries that America doesn’t like that do not have nukes (not to mention deterring Israel, which has a large, illegal nuclear arsenal). 

It’s actually easy to see how, one day, we could get Pakistan and India to put down their arms. Their main threat is from each other and so if neither of them had weapons, they could both be happy. As for North Korea, it would be much easier to put pressure on them if we demonstrated a real commitment to reducing our nuclear arsenal. Even though there are local factors that play into any countries choice to develop nuclear weapons, all these choices exist in a framework where the US, through the NPT, (along with the other 4 major nuclear powers), has said that no other countries should have nuclear weapons, and that the nuclear powers should make real steps towards getting rid of theirs. But we haven’t made real steps towards abolition recently, and proliferation has only quickened. These are not unrelated phenomena.

I guess all I’m trying to say is, yes, nuclear weapons are indeed dangerous and Obama should be commended for taking such a clear, bold stance on their eventual abolition. But hell, don’t ask me, just ask Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn.