Positive Liberty

I fear for the future of academia. It is an increasingly bureaucratized institution in which report-writing takes the place of learning and teaching.

The specific stimulus for this fear is my current task of preparing an “assessment protocol” for my department’s senior research seminar. The purpose for this is to satisfy demands of our accrediting agency, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC) of the North Central Association (one of the U.S.’s regional accrediting agencies). I believe in assessment. That is, I believe in periodically assessing any program to see if it’s cost/benefit ratio is positive, and to ensure that it’s net value is greater than the net value of an alternative program. That’s straightforward stuff from the policy analysis literature, and there’s really no sound argument against it.

But that’s not what we’re doing, that’s not what we’re being asked to do, and doing that wouldn’t satisfy what the HLC wants. Sigh. Continue Reading »

I’d like to thanks the folks over at the Infidel Guy for the interview. If you click on the website, you can listen to the show already. I liked the way it went; though I think I may need a new phone (I was talking on a 20 year old cord phone). I purposefully tried to talk loud and slow and you can hear almost everything I said. However I’m still not happy with the level of my voice. It’s not their fault. This was the first program I’ve done where they did a volume check before having me on.

“I’m ready for my close-up, Principle DeMille.”

It’s hardly a new observation that conservatives lack credibility on race. It’s not as if they deserve it. But I’m not with Matthew Yglesias here, either:

Dwight Eisenhower could see that [National Review’s disgusting, reprehensible, clearly racist position] was wrong and backed the ‘57 [civil rights] bill. But Ike was a RINO, the kind of person George Will would despise.

But that’s the past, of course, and we can’t hold Will personally responsible for the things his predecessors were saying fifty years ago. But here’s the question—how is it that I can’t recall an instance of Will waxing indignant about some instance of racism directed against an African-American or Latino in the United States? I don’t believe it’s my faulty memory. Instead, I believe it’s that the new “color blind” American right is not dramatically different from the old “black people shouldn’t be allowed to vote” American right from fifty years ago. It’s a movement that’s basically indifferent to the interests of non-whites and totally uninterested in the question of whether or not there’s unfair discrimination against minority groups in the United States.

Tarring George Will with a 50-year-old National Review piece because he’s not, of all things, an Eisenhower Republican, so — who knows — maybe he would oppose the 1957 Civil Rights Act — this seems a logical stretch to me. A better line of attack would be to note that Will admires Barry Goldwater, and Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Goldwater voted against ‘64 on constitutionalist grounds — because telling private businesses that they must not discriminate isn’t a power granted to the federal government. I think Goldwater was sincere on this. I think on the purely technical question, he was correct. I also think he didn’t have any racist motives. (Goldwater voted proudly in favor of ‘57.) But it’s possible to be sincere, and technically correct, and not a racist — and still be wrong.

There are two difficulties as I see it with Goldwater’s stance. First, it’s awfully convenient for racists, which is embarrassing to say the least. And second, it’s rather obviously possible for a law to do good on the whole, and to be almost entirely constitutional, even when some aspects of it are unconstitutional. I think that’s actually the case with ‘64.

One measure of sincerity for those saying “64 was unconstitutional” is to ask what other things they consider unconstitutional. If they have trouble naming more than a handful, then they begin to look less and less like strict constructionists, and more and more like racists taking any port in a storm. (I can name at least six cabinet agencies that I don’t think have even a remotely plausible constitutional justification. How about you?)

Goldwater may have been technically correct about a narrow constitutional issue, but he missed some far more important ones: ‘64 added some improper powers to the federal government (as if, in that year, this were some historical first). But it properly eliminated many, many other blatantly unconstitutional practices by federal, state, and local government. And while it infringed on the property rights of white racists, it also signaled to non-racists, both white and black, that their property rights might be safely exercised in the future, free from the mob violence of the supposedly civilized white South. On balance, this seems to have done more to further individual rights than to frustrate them.

I know, I know, it’s not easily reduced to a soundbite-sized judicial philosophy. But that’s really what I think. Which one is a worse abuse of American values? A racist being taken to court, given due process, and found guilty of violating a relatively well-defined law? Or a non-racist getting lynched for serving the wrong customers? And what if those are our only two choices? I know what I’d pick.

So Goldwater erred. But we’re still a long way from the loathsome National Review circa 1957:

The central question that emerges–and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by meerely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal–is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes–the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced ace. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes’, and intends to assert its own.

Disgusting. ‘64 was a tradeoff, but I think a very favorable one. Now if only conservatives would say so too.

On the Infidel Guy radio show tomorrow night at 8:00pm on of course, the Founding Fathers and religion. There are call in and chat opportunities as well.

Since 1999, The Infidel Guy show has brought you uninterrupted freethought and science-minded guests such as Michio Kaku, Dan Barker, Ken Miller, Michael Shermer, Asia Carrera, Richard Dawkins, Massimo Pigliucci, James Randi and many others.

I’m grateful to be interviewed on a show that has featured such distinguished guests!

At a meeting with some students back in the fall, I was asked what I expected now that the government was massively bailing out the American banking system.

“Corruption,” I answered. “This is a program so large, being implemented so fast, and with so little oversight, that favoritism is almost the only way to run it.”

Man I wish I had those words on video:

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm’s losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn’t meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye’s office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

Many lawmakers have worked to help home-state banks get federal money since the Treasury announced in October that it would invest up to $250 billion in healthy financial firms. But the Inouye inquiry stands apart because of the senator’s ties to Central Pacific. While at least 33 senators own shares in banks that got federal aid, a review of financial disclosures and records obtained from regulatory agencies shows no other instance of the office of a senator intervening on behalf of a bank in which he owned shares.

Perhaps this should wait until Christmas, but it popped into my head today, just as it has approximately once a week since last Christmas when I watched my wife perform in the musical version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

Scrooge, who hoards his money, is supposed to be the bad guy, and Mr. Fezziwig, who gives an annual holiday bash paid for out of his own pocket, is supposed to be a good guy. Yet later in the show, Fezziwig is penniless and goes to Scrooge for a loan.

Doesn’t that actually make Scrooge the admirable character?

I’m not interested in reading the book again, so can someone tell me if it’s the same in the book, or if the musical production differs?

Did Dickens really miss the point so badly (as he did in his attacks on utilitarianism), or is his book actually much more subtle than we have thought, being actually a mockery of spendthriftness?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m much more like Fezziwig than Scrooge. But still, what was there to admire in Fezziwig improvidently throwing parties as he spent himself into penury? And isn’t there something to admire in a person who is personally abstemious enough that he is able to loan to those who don’t have enough?

Does this make me a hard-harded right-winger?

Tags: Scrooge

The first Summertime Blues cover, from the psychedelic rock band Blue Cheer’s 1968 debut album, Vincebus Eruptum:

There’s a great but now mostly wrong anecdote in Hannah Arendt’s Truth and Politics:

During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the First World War. “What, in your opinion,” Clemenceau was asked, “will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied, “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.” [1]

Well. Tell that to Russia:

The Russian defence ministry posted a potentially inflammatory essay on its website which claimed Poland resisted Germany’s ultimatums in 1939 only because it “wanted to obtain the status of a great power”.

The lengthy diatribe, which is unlikely to be welcomed in Warsaw, also lashed out at Britain and France for giving the Poles “delusions of grandeur” by promising to intercede if the Nazis invaded.

“Anyone who has been minded to study the history of the Second World War knows it started because of Poland’s refusal to meet Germany’s requests,” the statement read. “The German demands were very modest. You could hardly call them unfounded.”

Appearing to take Germany’s demands at face value, the defence ministry insisted that the Nazis were interested only in building transport links across the Polish Corridor to East Prussia and assuming control of Gdansk, which had been designated as a free city at the time.

Western historians largely recognise that Poland would have lost its independence had it acceded to the demands, pointing to Hitler’s policies of Lebensbraum and the creation of a Greater Germany as evidence.

Germany invaded Poland on Sept 1, 1939, prompting the British Empire and France to declare war over the next two days. Germany and the Soviet Union then carved up Poland under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

And now we see how history is written. If only Poland had just let Germany and the Soviet Union divide it up, that whole World War II business might have been avoided. Shame, shame on you, Poland!

[1] Thanks to Eurozine for the cite. I’d remembered it as having been written “somewhere,” but theirs is the only Google reference to the original: “Truth and Politics” in Hannah Arendt Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1954) 239.

[Homosexuality] is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and, above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.

Some reactionary fundamentalist today? Nope. Time magazine, in 1966. Hilzoy writes,

For some reason, the tone in which this is written bothers me almost as much as the content: it’s somehow curdled. The condescension, the fake knowingness, the pervasive underlying “heh heh heh” — it sets my teeth on edge.

What we’re seeing here is the conventional wisdom of a very different set of conventions. It wasn’t trying too hard to make its arguments. It didn’t have to. I almost feel embarrassed for it in retrospect.

I feel the same way when I read about a lot of subjects — the drug laws, detainee treatment issues, and radical life extension come to mind right away. The conventional wisdom is often perfectly, utterly, absolutely wrong. Or at any rate, I can’t see it otherwise. And there is no reason to think that we live in a favored age, or that our own conventional wisdom has somehow done better.

A disposition — for or against change; liberal or conservative — is not an argument. Still, as far as I can tell, nearly all of our politics is dispositional. One person articulates a disposition; it resonates with others; deeds are done; time passes; the deeds acquire the aura of conventional wisdom; they are fawned over by people of a different disposition, who defend them not by articulating particularly strong arguments, but by expressing their dispositions. That’s part of why the conventional wisdom is still as embarrassing as ever.

Phase I: People build roads. Crashes happen, and people die.

Phase II: “Someone should do something!” The police set up traffic lights.

Phase III: Traffic lights do not always prevent people from dying. Indeed, almost no empirical data supported the introduction of traffic lights in the first place. But they were blinky and shiny and reassuring. Perhaps on that basis alone, they became ubiquitous.

True fact: Within a month, the world’s first traffic light had exploded and injured its operator.

Phase IV: Planners discover that when traffic lights are removed, accident rates plummet. As a nice added bonus, commute times get shorter.

Almost by counterweight, another set of experiments is done, this time with red light cameras. These cameras, we learned, actually increase the number of accidents.

Now, as we head toward Phase V, we’re certainly not trying to determine which intersections, if any, still need traffic lights, and which do not. That would be crazy. Phase V, near as I can tell, will involve setting up even more red light cameras.

At some point, obeying a set of contingent rules became more important than the goal for which the rules were written.

Because I’m abnormal, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about freeway interstate rest areas. One of the little joys of American federalism is that each state is responsible for the creation of rest stops on our national road system, so each does them just a bit differently from all the others. Back in the bad old days, when gas stations were merely gas stations and their “restrooms” were filthy cubbyholes around the back of the building, a rest area was a godsend to travelers. Continue Reading »

The fully syllabus is here; I’m updating it with links to each of the essays. Next on the list is Edward Bellamy’s utopian socialist novel Looking Backward, which you can read here online or buy here. I’m aiming to have this one done in July.

The answer is there is no clear cut answer; we probably will never know. When I wrote my “briefly noted” article for First Things on James H. Hutson’s quote book on the Founding & Religion I stated: Continue Reading »

Through Eddie Murphy; I’m not much of a fan of MJ’s music. Yes, he could sing; but I like harder stuff. I love Stevie Wonder. The two have similar voices. The difference in their styles is key.

Anyway I know my friend Ed Brayton disagrees on Eddie Murphy’s stand up comedic genius. I see it here: