Media Nomad

Do You YuDo?

2010-01-28T08:22:00.000-08:00

I saw an infomercial on a DIY silk screening product this morning.

Of course, I wonder about the durability of the product and cost/hassle of getting replacement materials (if you don't use their ink and transparencies, you damage the machine), and the positioning of the product is hazy, somewhere between a craft tool and an actual piece of professional hardware.

Though I think this could be a good tool for individuals or small organizations that want/need to produce, say, between 10-20 items at a time, the amount of effort to produce those items seems to go beyond a simple hobby. And since small organizations may not have the time or the staff to devote to this stuff—even if I thought we could use it, I shudder to think about getting it for my work—many would still find it cheaper to outsource their silk screening.

Still, I thought it was interesting how they have a process of creating what is essentially a printing plate and then using it to apply ink to virtually anything, from shirts to shopping bags. If you're committed, for instance, you can create some effective business cards using paper stocks that would never fit through a laser printer.

Epideictic Rhetoric as Acknowledgement: Rhetorical Heroism and Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

2008-10-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

My presentation at this weekend's Pennsylvania Communication Association Conference at The Pennsylvania State University, Lehigh Valley.

Writing about a presidential campaign that is still unfolding is a risky business; every word can be construed as an endorsement of one kind or another. From the outset, let me say that this presentation’s interest in Barack Obama’s speech on race in America should not be taken as an endorsement of his candidacy. Rather, its interest emerges from the simple recognition that Obama’s rhetorical gifts—the likes of which American public discourse has not seen for decades—have drawn attention of many, and that this attention, as well as the considerable disagreement as to what those gifts mean, calls for critical assessment.

The day after Obama spoke in Philadelphia, the editorial board of the New York Times recognized his speech not only for its eloquence but also for its ability to acknowledge the complex reality of race in America. But how should we, as rhetorical scholars, regard his speech? What can it teach us?

This presentation is not a line-by-line analysis of the speech but a reflection on its philosophical and ethical significance, the work it does—or perhaps could be doing—to respond to the ethical call of the public sphere. Its work begins by categorizing Obama’s speech on race in terms of what Aristotle describes as epideictic, the ceremonial rhetoric of praise and blame. Such a categorization seems at first glance to be a strange one, since we are accustomed to seeing epideictic as a sort of catch-all category that deals with the fancy—and often empty—words spoken at ceremonial occasions.

Yet, in many ways, Obama’s speech, occasioned by the remarks of Geraldine Ferraro and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who in their various ways brought race to the foreground of his campaign, is indeed an example of epideictic rhetoric. While he certainly mentions his association with Wright and distances himself from his pastor’s controversial comments, Obama’s objective seems to be understanding and expanding the moral dwelling of American public life—what the Greeks would call its ethos—in light of the question of race. Obama seems less interested in exonerating himself or in offering policies to span the racial divide—activities that we would associate with forensic and legislative rhetoric, respectively—than he is in inviting both his critics and his supporters to a new and more constructive public conversation about an issue that continues to divide American public life.

In The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgement, Michael Hyde places this sort of communicative labor—what he describes as rhetorical home-making—under the category of epideictic. Epideictic, he contends, invites a community to participate in a new understanding of the world rewoven from its public traditions, sense of identity, and moral texture. Because of its capacity to broaden this public moral texture to include those who have been marginalized, Hyde places epideictic at the center of what he calls rhetorical acknowledgment.

Drawing both from the tradition of the Old Testament and from the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, rhetorical acknowledgement emerges from an existential, pre-communicative awareness of the suffering other: that in eating there are always those who go hungry, that when we belong there are those who will never “belong,” and that we are always our brother and sister’s keeper. To those who call “Where art thou?” in the dark, rhetorical acknowledgment, through the power of epideictic, constantly responds: “Here I am!”

Hyde believes that this epideictic of acknowledgement is a difficult road, carrying the constant risk of contradiction, conflict, and futility. He describes the willingness to embrace this risk as rhetorical heroism. A society without rhetorical heroes is for Hyde a society without an ethos, and a society without an ethos is a society without a home, unable to acknowledge its interconnectedness or articulate the moral obligations of its people to each other. As postmodern American society contends with the very homelessness that Hyde describes, his work encourages us to look for rhetorical heroes, not only in our politicians but also in ourselves.

Hyde’s emphasis on rhetorical acknowledgement and rhetorical heroism is important because it encourages us to encounter Obama’s speech on race on deeper philosophical ground, recognizing race as perhaps the greatest struggle for rhetorical acknowledgement in American history. W. E. B. Du Bois reminds us of how white Americans have struggled (and often failed) to recognize not only the humanity but also the very existence of persons who have lived behind the veil of their black skin, and how black Americans have struggled to articulate what this lack of acknowledgement, this invisibility, has meant.

In interesting ways, Obama enters—one might say embodies—this very crisis throughout his address. As someone with black skin, he identifies with those like Rev. Wright, who are frustrated and angry with American society’s inability to acknowledge America’s racial past. But as someone with a white grandmother who used racial slurs to condemn those who look exactly as he does, he recognizes that he cannot reject those who are frustrated with their own diminishing prospects in a globalized economy. In a Levinasian move, he embraces the contradiction inherent in this experience and, more important, refuses to resolve it. “These people are a part of me,” he says. “And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Here, Obama’s understanding of race in America (and, perhaps, America itself) is embedded in the acknowledgment of the existential contradictions inherent within the American experience: between black and white, individual and whole, freedom and responsibilty, self and other. In embracing these burdens, he invites a new political space defined not by cynicism and despair but by the audacity of hope, in which which our engagement with difference and the American Revolution are acknowledged as being one in the same. With Hyde as a guide, we might read the audacity of hope as the audacity of acknowledgement, a politics that begins in the heroic recognition of the contradictions inherent in a homeless world.

Obama’s speech did not, could not, “fix” American race relations, any more than it could lay the issue of race to rest within his own campaign. Yet, Hyde reminds us that to demand such results from rhetorical acknowledgement—or of epideictic, for that matter—is unrealistic. Rhetorical acknowledgement exists merely to open public spaces, and the glory of rhetorical heroism is not applause for the individual but for the tradition that is presented anew. Public life still requires us to enter those public spaces and engage that tradition in constructive ways. That is what forensic and legislative rhetoric are for, and it is unclear whether, for all Obama’s epideictic grandeur, he would be able to marshal those rhetorical resources as president. Yet, while people may disagree as to his candidacy, his speech on race shows the possibilities of epideictic for American public life. When the ethical call of the public sphere is one of homelessness and division, the epideictic of acknowledgement may invite a new beginning.

Palin as Rosie the Riveter?

2008-09-17T10:22:00.000-07:00

Some in the Republican Party contend that Sarah Palin is the poster child of feminism, the new, "real" face of blue-collar womanhood. And voilà, a button of the Alaska governor in the guise of Rosie the Riveter has appeared for sale on eBay. (Just like her jet!)

We'll just put aside the fact that she ran Alaska like a Queen Bee out of Mean Girls.

One can quibble that the Republicans' new-found concern for women's issues and sexist representations of women in the media seems, well, a bit cynical. But of course, we can't expect that the right's near-beatification of Palin (“She is anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage, anti-Big Oil, a lifetime member of the N.R.A., she hunts, she fishes — she is the perfect woman!” says an enthusiast in today's New York Times) would resonate with those who don't believe in beatification at all. (“Go back to the city, you liberal Communists!”)

But in keeping with the hagiography and iconography, I put together a draft of a new campaign poster that could turn the tide:

Will it all come down to Colorado?

2008-09-05T06:26:00.000-07:00

According to CBS News, McCain's post-convention bump now has him tied, 42 percent to 42 percent, with Obama. If the trend holds, we're looking once again at a nail-biter of an election.

But the CBS poll reflects only the national popular vote, which is, of course, completely meaningless in the American Electoral College. There, too, we're in for a ride.

Take, for instance, Karl Rove's recent breakdown of the swing states as of September 3:

Here, Obama leads 260 to 194 in the Electoral College, with only 84 electoral votes in play.

Assuming that the map stays as it is, the good news for Obama is that if he wins Ohio, Virginia, or Florida or a combination of New Hampshire and the states in the American West, he's in. But given this electoral map, McCain's choice of Palin starts to make sense. As a evangelical, frontier-state governor, she can campaign strongly in western states, and as a pro-life Christian feminist, she may be able to energize Christian conservatives in Ohio, Virginia, and Florida, perhaps enough to tip the scales away from Obama. That leaves only New Hampshire in the Obama column, which leaves him short.

The McCain-Palin strategy is this: Win by forcing Obama to lose. And it could pay off.

Take a look at today's electoral map from Politico.com, which has Obama winning the Electoral College 273-265:

Obama wins by losing every swing state except for New Hampshire and Colorado. This is a much different electoral map from the past, where states like Ohio and Florida decided the race, and it puts the DNC's decision to have the convention in Denver in a new light. The Democrats believe that Colorado, not Ohio, is going to decide the 2008 race for the White House. That's a bold strategy—probably depending primarily on the immigration issue—and it turns on a knife's edge, because Palin could campaign well among the state's evangelicals.

So it's going to be close. A nail-biter, decided late in the night, and perhaps early the following morning.

Obama's speech

2008-08-28T10:26:00.000-07:00

Obama's acceptance speech tonight at Invesco Field prompts two important questions:

Is it going to rain? (Luckily—and more than a few PR folks are going to be breathing a sigh of relief—no.)
Is it going to come off the way Obama wants it to? (A much more difficult question.)

As the New York Times reports, Obama wants the address to follow the example of John F. Kennedy's 1960 acceptance speech, which was also given outdoors at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (home of the USC Trojan football team). That address invited Americans to embark on a "New Frontier," a metaphor that defined his candidacy and the early 1960s.

Peter Gage, one of the Obama planners, said he studied photographs of Kennedy’s speech at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the only other such address to be held in an outdoor stadium in the modern television era.

Mr. Gage said the circular stage in Denver was inspired by Kennedy’s. A Sky Cam above the field will provide bird’s-eye views. Mr. Obama’s family will sit on seats on the floor before him, along with voters from swing states. The goal is to highlight ordinary people, and then mobilize them to work for the campaign.

Now that rain is out of the forecast, Obama's aides are buzzing about the technical details of the speech: Will it make Obama look elitist? Will the "Temple of Obama" backdrop constructed by party staffers to make him look "presidential" make him look narcissistic instead? Will he sound like he is talking out of a tin can? Will the strategy of having all of the people in the stadium send text messages—a tactic that seems too cute by half—crash the cell phone system?

The concern here is that the speech risks becoming a technical event instead of a rhetorical one. Is the Obama campaign as worried about what he will say in his speech as they are about packaging its scene? Certainly, the tone and presentation of the address are going to be essential to its reception—and a gaffe here would no doubt be serious and repeated throughout the campaign—but few remember what JFK looked like when he spoke. They remember what he said, how he captured the imagination of an uncertain, post-war America with a vision of a new possibilities, and how his speech transformed a presidency into Camelot.

Pittsburgh, the fifth-poorest city?

2008-08-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported today on the recent U.S. Census report that shows that Pittsburgh is the fifth-poorest city in the country, behind Detroit, Cleveland, Miami, and Buffalo.

Median income is $32,363, though this figure may be inflated because of the presence of wealthy neighborhoods. The national median income is $50,740, or a little over 1.5 times that of the typical Pittsburgher.

In an interesting example of how a statistical picture can change depending on the scope of the data surveyed, the Tribune-Review's article on the same census report completely omits the city's overall ranking in comparison to other major cities and instead looks at Allegheny County itself, where the median income has actually risen 3.3 percent since 2006 to $46,401.

Where the Post-Gazette finds despair in the wings:

"With $4-a-gallon milk prices and history-making high gas prices, we need policy makers to focus on health and economic policies that create jobs, reduce poverty and provide access to health care for all to strengthen families," said the Rev. Neil Harrison, executive director of Lutheran Advocacy Ministry in Pennsylvania.

The Tribune-Review finds reason to celebrate:

"I think it's generally good news for the region," said Harold Miller, president of Future Strategies, a Downtown management consulting firm.

While the median income remains above the 2008 federal poverty guidelines (and, in the case of Allegheny County, well above the poverty guidelines), the income figures don't look as good when compared to what Diana Pearce calls the “self-sufficiency standard”: the minimum income a household needs to live on its own without help from public or private charity.

While Pearce's measurements are subjective and controversial, they are important in establishing the gap between the desperately poor and what is often called "the working poor," the folks who work hard—often at more than one job—but are always falling behind. The 2008 version of her report for Pennsylvania suggests that while a single person with a child earning Pittsburgh's median income would be barely self-sufficient, anyone else would be struggling:

1 adult, 1 schoolage child: $31,075
1 adult, 1 preschooler, 1 schoolage child: $44,849
2 adults, 1 preschooler, 1 schoolage child: $49,573

In contrast, Allegheny County, with the exclusion of Pittsburgh, has much different—and much better—numbers:

1 adult, 1 schoolage child: $33,315
1 adult, 1 preschooler, 1 schoolage child: $46,184
2 adults, 1 preschooler, 1 schoolage child: $52,958

Taken together, the stories and statistics suggest an extraordinary and growing disconnect between the city and the surrounding county in terms of both economics and overall perspective: Residents of Ross Township, which borders the city, recently lost a bitter dispute over a housing development designed for people making $24,800 and $37,200 a year, which just so happens to be the income of the typical Pittsburgher. And the conflict between the city and the surrounding county is only likely to get worse as Pittsburgh gets poorer and looks to its region for help.

David Brooks gets it right

2008-08-26T08:34:00.000-07:00

Last week, as Michael Moore begged Caroline Kennedy to nominate herself as Obama's running mate, David Brooks hoped for Joe Biden. "Biden’s the one," he wrote. "The only question is whether Obama was wise and self-aware enough to know that." His hopes, of course, were confirmed, and while Brooks tends to be more conservative than Obama, Obama's decision to add Biden to the ticket may have earned him some begrudging respect.

The same seems to be true for this week, as the Democratic convention seeks to launch Obama down the road to the White House. While he recognizes Obama's dip in the polls, Brooks urges Obama not to give into the Democratic advice-mongers and chattering classes who want him to change directions. This is good advice, and not just because the same folks who are urging Obama to change are the same ones who sent Stevenson, Humphrey, McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry into the toilet. It's because Obama represents a completely different sort of politics:

At the core, Obama’s best message has always been this: He is unconnected with the tired old fights that constrict our politics. He is in tune with a new era. He has very little experience but a lot of potential. He does not have big achievements, but he is authentically the sort of person who emerges in a multicultural, globalized age. He is therefore naturally in step with the problems that will confront us in the years to come.

This is Obama's brand, and while Brooks may not buy into it, he understands its importance. The Clintons were candidates of late modernity, providing triangulating wonkish solutions to the American post-industrial bureaucracy. Obama is a postmodern candidate—Brooks says as much in calling him "the 21st century man"—and his candidacy's strength lies in the ways that it speaks to the new age of media and culture. Obama has such a following amoung younger Americans precisely because he emerges out of their cultural context, but this strength among younger voters can translate as a weakness for those who are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with what is often called "the postmodern turn," which is at once style-driven, image conscious, technologically saavy, and fluid.

For instance, the concern over establishing Obama's identity among voters—who he "is"—is in many ways an attempt to force a modern answer onto a postmodern question. Within a modern perspective, identity is a fixed issue and part and parcel with personhood. If one has no "identity," one is not a person, and to refuse to declare an identity seems both strange and disturbing. On the other hand, postmodernity rejects the notion of a fixed identity altogether and instead leaves it as a perpetually open question.

The slipperyness with which Obama treats his understanding of his own identity—it's unclear whether he himself knows who he "is"—reflects the postmodern milieu. To force an identity on him—whether it be a wonk, populist, or a fighter—as many Democratic pundits are doing is to provide a response that is, in many ways, culturally out of date. Postmodern politics is not concerned about identity but is constantly transcendent and constructive, acknowledging differences and seeking spaces of common ground. This is the politics that Obama owns, and this is the politics that he should pursue. As Brooks says:

So as I’m trying to measure the effectiveness of this convention, I’ll be jotting down a little minus mark every time I hear a theme that muddies that image. I’ll jot down a minus every time I hear the old class conflict, and the old culture war themes. I’ll jot down a minus when I see the old Bush obsession rearing its head, which is not part of his natural persona. I’ll write a demerit every time I hear the rich played off against the poor, undercutting Obama’s One America dream.

I’ll put a plus down every time a speaker says that McCain is a good man who happens to be out of step with the times. I’ll put a plus down every time a speaker says that a multipolar world demands a softer international touch. I’ll put a plus down when a speaker says the old free market policies worked fine in the 20th century, but no longer seem to be working today. These are arguments that reinforce Obama’s identity as a 21st-century man.

Brooks gave good marks for last night. Whether the rest of the convention will continue to play out that way is anyone's guess.

The coolness of civic republicanism

2008-08-25T07:56:00.000-07:00

Throughout the campaign, Barack Obama's critics and opponents have charged that his campaign is more about celebrity than substance. Clinton did so when she complained that his soaring rhetoric was really all fluff, and McCain did so when he compared Obama to Paris Hilton (and, perhaps not-so-accidentally, the anti-Christ).

From the perspective of many, the stigma of a celebrity candidacy is something to be overcome, and if celebrity is confused with stupidity or vacuousness—style over substance, as Cicero would put it—it certainly is. But over the weekend, Matt Bai in the New York Times Magazine suggested that celebrity and the presidency are not mutually exclusive.

Who’s to say that Americans are misguided for craving a little cool in their candidates? It’s not simply that ours is a country of celebrity-seeking robots (although there may be some truth to that as well). Perhaps it’s more that Americans are weary of a political system that has all but ground to a halt, and every four years they search for the galvanizing personality who stands a chance of dislodging it. The infatuation with star quality reflects, on some level, the yearning for the next Roosevelt (Theodore or Franklin) or Kennedy (John or Robert), some reformer with the dynamism and charisma to renew dialogue at home and kinships around the world, to tell us the truths we need to hear without telegraphing defeat.

Bai isn't describing something new but rather a fundamental aspect of the tradition of American political rhetoric that, in many ways, we have forgotten. Throughout the nineteenth century, American presidents and politicians—Abraham Lincoln, Daniel Webster, William Jennings Bryan—drew from the tradition of the rhetoric of the Roman Republic, particularly the rhetoric of Cicero. This rhetorical style, what Robert Hariman describes in terms of civic republicanism, idealized politicians who stood "in the breach" of history in the service of the republic.

The best politicians in the civic republican tradition (whether they were Cicero fighting to preserve Roman government against Ceasar's dictatorship, Lincoln defending the principles of the Union, Bryan trying to keep farmers from being crucified "upon a cross of gold" by the gold standard, or FDR flying to speak to the Democratic National Convention when getting on a plane was considered both unprecedented and dangerous) took on the status of cultural heroes, demigods in the political pantheon, the ultimate of "cool." Of course, civic republican orators, like all celebrities, certainly tended toward egocentrism—no one could have accused Cicero of humility, for instance—but theirs was an egocentrism with the country at heart.

So Obama's sweeping rhetorical prowess is in many ways actually the norm of American politics, not the exception. Celebrity has always been a part of American politics. If Obama stands out as unusual, it is because American presidents have moved away from the civic republican tradition, becoming more managerial and policy-centered instead. As long as Obama stands within the civic republican tradition—speaking to American ideals, bridging the gaps between ideological divisions, emphasizing substance instead of style—he should not be confused with another Paris Hilton or Britney Spears, as a "celebrity" in the crassest sense. Rather, he should be understood as following in a deeper American tradition in which sweeping, grand rhetoric was placed fully in the service of the republic. With Obama, the old has become new again.

Was Gorbachev right?

2008-08-22T10:32:00.000-07:00

On August 19, the New York Times published an essay by former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev on the West's—and particularly the Western media's—reaction to the Georgian crisis. He writes:

The news coverage has been far from fair and balanced, especially during the first days of the crisis. Tskhinvali was in smoking ruins and thousands of people were fleeing—before any Russian troops arrived. Yet Russia was already being accused of aggression; news reports were often an embarrassing recitation of the Georgian leader’s deceptive statements.

It is still not quite clear whether the West was aware of Mr. Saakashvili’s plans to invade South Ossetia, and this is a serious matter. What is clear is that Western assistance in training Georgian troops and shipping large supplies of arms had been pushing the region toward war rather than peace.

Of course, these are controversial words, and given what seemed to be the grossly disproportionate nature of the Russian response to the Georgian situation, Gorbachev seems at some level to be defending the indefensible. But judging from the reactions on the New York Times's website, the biggest problem with Gorbachev's argument from the American perspective is that he actually has a point.

While the Russian response indeed presents a variety of ethical problems from the perspective of just war theory, the fact remains that the Georgian government and its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, precipitated the conflict by attacking first. One can certainly argue that the Georgians could have been goaded or tricked by Russia into attacking, and this may have been the case. Nevertheless, it is the responsibility of any government to avoid senseless wars that it cannot ever hope to win, and even Georgia's allies in Europe are increasingly seeing Saakashvili's misadventure in South Ossetia as either grossly misinformed or galactically incompetent. The reluctance of American media to broach this topic is profoundly problematic, and Gorbachev is right in pointing it out.

Moreover, Gorbachev's column also reiterates the point that the American policy toward Russia has not gotten over the Cold War, ranging from being blatantly patronizing on the one hand (e.g., forcing American missile defense down the Russian's throats as if they didn't exist) to being unreflectively alarmist on the other (e.g., seeing Russia as a rogue nation bent on destabilizing the world). The New York Times today reports that the Russian bear is once again keeping Washington policy-makers up at nights.

Again, the United States may be perfectly warranted in responding as it has. Nevertheless, making Russia into a pariah state and placing it into the category of Iran, Syria, and others also seems to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy that doesn't give us many constructive policy options.

“Outrage is not a policy,” said Strobe Talbott, who was deputy secretary of state under President Clinton and is now the president of the Brookings Institution. “Worry is not a policy. Indignation is not a policy. Even though outrage, worry and indignation are all appropriate in this situation, they shouldn’t be mistaken for policy and they shouldn’t be mistaken for strategy.”

College education vs. certification

2008-08-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

College is expensive, and many students, educated at an ever-expanding network of traditional colleges, technical schools, online programs, and diploma mills, don't receive an education worth the extravagant amount of money that they pay. At least, this is what Charles Murray wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week.

Murray's solution: Certification exams to level the playing field, allowing students from a variety of educational backgrounds to verify that they have achieved the standard set of knowledge and skills necessary to participate in the economy.

For a neoliberal like Murray, who researches for the American Enterprise Institute, this is a shocking admission. No less than Milton Friedman rejected the idea of certification barriers as being economically inefficient, because they artificially restrict the supply of certified workers (e.g., lawyers) to a select few who have the wherewithal to cross the certification barriers. And by restricting supply, certification both raises the costs of those services and often forces those who are have not been certified but who are otherwise perfectly able to provide those services out of the market altogether.

Murray's point, of course, is not that certification is perfectly efficient but rather that it is more efficient than the experience of earning—or failing to earn—a bachelor's degree, which now serves as a highly variable (and, for Murray, often misleading) basic qualification for the job market.

Higher education does vary in quality, as do students. But does that mean that we need a certification system? Should the certification process be company-specific, industry-specific, or somehow controlled by the state? And what constitutes "certification" in the first place? Murray favors a nationalized approach:

No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

But when so many of the players would benefit, a market opportunity exists. If a high-profile testing company such as the Educational Testing Service were to reach a strategic decision to create definitive certification tests, it could coordinate with major employers, professional groups and nontraditional universities to make its tests the gold standard. A handful of key decisions could produce a tipping effect. Imagine if Microsoft announced it would henceforth require scores on a certain battery of certification tests from all of its programming applicants. Scores on that battery would acquire instant credibility for programming job applicants throughout the industry.

Yet, in making a proposal for nationalization, Murray is violating his own neoliberal logic. The strength of neoliberal economics is its recognition that the marketplace, not the state, needs to be in control of a people's economic destiny. Creating a series of nationalized tests would not reduce the educational bureaucracy but merely re-create it under a national banner. What is more, the decision as to what constitutes certification and education is removed from the hands of individuals and companies, and this presents significant problems in a diverse country that can't decide whether or not something like evolution should be taught.

What if one group objects to a particular body of knowledge as being immoral? What if a company's needs are different from the rest of the industry, requiring a more complex set of examinations? How will certification standards change? What would this mean for education itself, once it is pursued merely as a set of "skills" instead of an intrinsic pursuit of a well-rounded life? And how can we quantify "transferable skills" like organizational abilities, the ability to learn, or interpersonal sensitivity?

In addition, in citing Microsoft as an example, he ignores the ways that many companies, particularly in the technology sector, already police themselves through arduous interview processes and certification standards for their own products. This is the grassroots effort that a neoliberal would admire, because it preserves the freedom of individuals to choose how—or whether—to prepare themselves for work and of companies to decide what those qualifications should be.

Drafting Caroline Kennedy?

2008-08-20T06:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Michael Moore published an open letter to Caroline Kennedy, daughter of the late president and chair of Barack Obama's vice presidential search committee, beseeching her to "pull a Cheney" by tapping herself as veep.

For Moore, an Obama-Kennedy ticket is a deeply emotional issue, tied to his own populist vision of America. The other candidates—Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, and Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia—are too old school, and too responsible for voting for "that war," to be worthy of Obama's idealistic potential. In contrast, Kennedy, the last surviving link to the Camelot that was the Kennedy years, gives the ticket the idealistic power-punch Moore believes it needs.

What Obama needs is a vice presidential candidate who is NOT a professional politician, but someone who is well-known and beloved by people across the political spectrum; someone who, like Obama, spoke out against the war; someone who has a good and generous heart, who will be cheered by the rest of the world; someone whom we've known and loved and admired all our lives and who has dedicated her life to public service and to the greater good for all.

But there are several concerns with Moore's proposal:

Kennedy has to want to be vice president, and as Moore acknowledges, she has scrupulously avoided political life.
Obama is running for the presidency of the United States of America, not the United States of Michael Moore, which means that he is going to need to find a way to broaden his ticket. Of course, Moore's appeal may also reflect the concerns of the American Left, who have become worried that Obama may not be the liberal messiah they have been hoping for.
The Obama campaign is already a "dream ticket," regardless of whom he puts on the ballot. Putting Kennedy on a ticket that is already laden with the hopes and ideals of a generation would push it over the edge and run the risk of transforming Obama into another Adlai Stevenson. (Who, as the Clintons think, he may already be.)
Obama's choice should be a pragmatic decision that helps address his weaknesses.

All of these concerns are why the Vegas odds-makers aren't even mentioning Kennedy on their lists.

Personally, I think that the top three are all weak, though Tim Kaine—a change-oriented, moderate Catholic with some (but not much) executive experience—is probably the best of the three.

Though, I'm biased: My pick, since February, has been Bill Richardson.

Obama and McCain on a debate

2008-08-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

After a marathon session in which he viewed all 47 debates from both the Democratic and Republican primaries, the Atlantic's James Fallows has handicapped the fall debating season. In a general sense, here are the important conclusions one can draw from the piece:

First, the candidates' desire for exposure and the news media's desire for ratings created a viscious circle that created a carnivalesque atmosphere. Because neither party had an incumbent or an "heir apparent"—who would have both the incentive and the authority to keep primary debates to a minimum—all of the candidates in both parties were scrambling to get into as many forums as possible, both on network and cable news and on less traditional stages like Logo. And because there were so many competing programs, the journalists who served as debate moderators constantly had to push the envelope in their questions. Money quote:

The amazing part of this process was the sheer indignity of it. All eight of these people [the Democratic candidates] had been public officials. Odds were that one among them would be the next president of the United States. Yet they compliantly held up their hands like grade-schoolers or contestants on Fear Factor. While candidates are subjected to almost everything during a long primary season and are used to skepticism and outright hostility from the press, serving as game-show props represented something new.

Second, while Obama is a far weaker debater than he is an orator—“You’ve got to remember, he is a constitutional-law professor” says Newton Minow, the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission who had once hired Obama as a summer associate while a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin—he can get better and sharper given enough time. Indeed, Fallows points to 2004, in which Obama was relaxed and sharp during his Senate race against Alan Keyes, as showing Obama's potential. Money quote:

The Obama of 2004 didn’t spend much time on his now-familiar “new age of politics” theme (or need to). If asked about steel-industry jobs, tax rates, or the death penalty, he would address the specifics of those issues, without bothering to stress the need for Americans to bridge their partisan divides. Every now and then, he would make those larger points—after all, this was six weeks after his famous speech at the Democratic convention about moving past red states and blue states, to the United States of America. But they seemed incidental rather than central.

That previous Obama also sounded very little like a professor. With dismissive ease, he reeled off rebuttal points and identified errors as if he had been working in a courtroom rather than a classroom all his life. Keyes had said that Jesus Christ would not have voted for Obama. Obama was asked for his response: “Well, you know, my first reaction was, I actually wanted to find out who Mr. Keyes’s pollster was, because if I had the opportunity to talk to Jesus Christ, I’d be asking something much more important than this Senate race. I’d want to know whether I was going up, or down.”

All in all, Obama seemed in his element and having fun—two things no one has detected about his debate performances this past year.

Third, the presidential debates seem to be as much about style as they are about the ability to make arguments. This is a subtle point that Fallows seems to miss. Both George W. Bush and Obama made significant changes to their debating style when they entered the presidential race. Fallows notes that Bush was a "silver-tongued Texas politician" as governor who, as president, seemed to be afflicted by some sort of aphasia, in which he seemed to be consciously dumbing-down his debating style, perhaps to make his far-more skilled opponents look arrogant and elitist in the eyes of his working-class, Christian base. Similarly, Obama's debating has become much more serious as a presidential candidate, perhaps because he has framed his candidacy in such a serious, civic republican way.

Fallows believes that Obama has to come out like the relaxed firebrand that he was in 2004 to succeed in this year's debates, but this may backfire because it would play against his "brand." It may be better for him to play it cool, find ways to sharpen his answers, and rely on the fact that McCain is probably going to fare worse in the debates than he will.

The Daily Show

2008-08-18T07:33:00.000-07:00

This weekend, the New York Times ran an article by Michiko Kakutani on Jon Stewart and "The Daily Show," noting a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press that found he was tied with Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams, and Anderson Cooper as the fourth most admired newscaster in America.

Which should come as a surprise, since he isn't technically a newscaster, or even a journalist.

One can see the success and cultural importance of "The Daily Show" as signaling the death of serious journalism and the death of the American public discourse. Of course, there's some merit to these concerns, and Stewart would probably share them. But one can also see "The Daily Show" as reflective of a broader trend in cultural production and engagement. The state of American public discourse, in this view, isn't any worse than it has been in the past, but is merely changing, and in many ways "The Daily Show" can be viewed as a constructive response to these changes.

I say this for three reasons:

First, "The Daily Show," unlike the emotivistic exchanges that often dominate American popular culture, can be seen as operating from the same standpoint of humane cultural criticism that has been central to Western intellectual life since Montaigne. For example, "for all its eviscerations of the administration, 'The Daily Show' is animated not by partisanship but by a deep mistrust of all ideology," Kakutani writes. "A sane voice in a noisy red-blue echo chamber, Mr. Stewart displays an impatience with the platitudes of both the right and the left and a disdain for commentators who, as he made clear in a famous 2004 appearance on CNN’s 'Crossfire,' parrot party-line talking points and engage in knee-jerk shouting matches."

Stewart's commitment to constructive discourse—a commitment that allows him to say "why I grieve but why I don’t despair"—reflects a sentiment that Montaigne would share.

Second, "The Daily Show" reflects the ways that information needs are changing. "The Daily Show" is not a news program but a program in which information is discussed and made understandable. That "The Daily Show" is understood to be the only news source of many young Americans is a problem. But the program assumes that people already know the basic headlines; it fact, it wouldn't succeed as a comedy show if it didn't. Rather, it makes its money by condensing the echo chamber of contemporary media—from 15 TiVos, no less—into an intelligible, meaningful half-hour.

Third, "The Daily Show" shows that humor is a tool for the constructive engagement of social problems. Of course, laughter can sometimes be deconstructive and cynical, designed to humiliate the other or mask a sense of destructive bitterness. But Stewart's program works because it uses humor to ask questions about the constant stream of cultural production in which American life is situated. But Stewart's questions are more subtle and are interested in finding a place to stand within the confusion. Cynical humor laughs at the darkness, constructive humor seeks to find a foothold to climb out of it.

Speechless

2008-08-15T08:21:00.000-07:00

On August 2, someone posted a video of a verbal violence between the coach of the University of Pittsburgh debate team, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, and William Shanahan, the coach of the debate team at Fort Hays State University in Kansas.

According to the Post-Gazette, the melee ensued after Reid-Brinkley accused Shanahan of striking her from a judging panel because of her race. (Shanahan says that he did so because she gave low scores to his team in previous contests.) But instead of filing a protest through normal channels, Reid-Brinkley literally took it to the house.

It's unclear what is going to happen to either of these coaches. Unfortunately, the focus seems to be solely on Reid-Brinkley and not on Shanahan. (There is a viral video on YouTube calling on people to harass her and the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, but no such campaign targeting Shanahan.) [*See Below] Still, lots of thinks occur to me as I view this video:

This is humiliating to the entire discipline of communication and rhetorical studies. Reid-Brinkley and Shanahan come from two of the top departments in the field (Georgia and UT Austin, respectively), and Reid-Brinkley teaches in one of the top departments in the field. Quite simply, these people are supposed to reflect the best that the field has to offer, which scares me.
The discipline of debate and argumentation is not about winning arguments and tournaments. It's about learning how to make and defend arguments—especially difficult and controversial arguments—with respect and civility. Both instructors have failed in the most categorical way possible.
Having an advanced degree is not the same as having emotional maturity. In fact, graduate education may hinder people from developing the human skills necessary to survive in the world. (Incidentally, priestly formation in Catholicism emphasizes human formation in addition to pastoral, intellectual, and spiritual formation. Perhaps graduate education should similarly add human dimensions to its educational programs.)
There's an edited book in here somewhere. Scholars in the field need to engage this issue, not to condemn it but to find ways out of it.

* I stand corrected. The same folks have put out a video on Shanahan as well.

Corsi's confabulation

2008-08-14T06:16:00.000-07:00

Jerome Corsi, the author of the anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command, has written another book attacking Obama entitled Obama Nation, the title being a fairly unimaginative pun describing what he thinks an Obama presidency would be. (Lest anyone be confused, he explains the origins of this turn of phrase to you.)

But this book isn't anything like its predecessor. Nope. We know this because Corsi says so in his preface (reprinted on the New York Times website):

Any implication that this book is a “Swift Boat” book is not accurate in that John O’Neill and the other members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have had nothing to do with this book, its analysis and arguments, or my opposition to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

It's just "Swift Boat"-like.

As I thought about the appearance of Corsi's book, which I will never read, I thought about the problem of what philosopher Sissela Bok calls confabulations, stories where truth and lies are so closely interwoven that no one can tell the difference between the two.

In the case of Corsi's confabulation, he finds the hidden prejudices of his target audience (which, admittedly, aren't hard to spot) and then dumps so many disembodied "facts" on those prejudices that it's impossible for anyone to fact-check what he says. Of course, Corsi, whose academic pedigree is prominently displayed on the title, postures as if he is producing real research. "My intent in writing this book," he says, "is to fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references, so readers can determine for themselves the truth and validity of the factual claims." Yet, as with Unfit for Command, his narrative is full of cherry-picked quotations, innuendos, and bold-face lies.

Even so, the power of his story comes not from the fact that it "hangs together" (what rhetorical scholar Walter Fisher calls narrative coherence) under scrutiny, but from the fact that it coheres just enough that it plays into the biases the audience already brings to the text. For these folks, who are already pretty much convinced that Obama is a radical leftist and probably an Islamist Manchurian candidate to boot, Corsi's book will mysteriously "ring true" (the quality of narrative that Fisher describes as narrative fidelity). And therein lies its power.

From a public relations perspective, the problem with confabulations like this, whether they are called Unfit for Command or The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, is that they are the mutant viruses of public discourse. Once they are out in the public conversation—and especially when they are put in print in a best-selling book—they are often there to stay. You may be able to defeat them, but they will always come back in a different form. Obama's team is much more proactive than Kerry's was, but it's unclear how effective they will be.

Because high school is supposed to suck

2008-08-13T05:52:00.000-07:00

"The most time and cost efficient way of gaining a white person’s trust and friendship is to talk to them about their time in high school," says our resident authority on Stuff White People Like. "Virtually every white person you meet was a nerd in a high school—it it is how they were able to get into a good arts program and law school. As such, their memories of high school are painful, but not tragic since they were able to eventually find success in the real world. Exploiting this information is your one way to ticket into the heart of a white person."

But white folks have nothing on South Koreans. The cram culture of South Korean high schools, Choe Sang-Hun reports in the New York Times this morning, makes suicide the second highest cause of death among teens in that country. The South Korean college entrance exams are brutal, and because going to particular schools tracks a person for life, students face immense pressure to do well.

But if you don't get into the college of your choice, there's always SUPER CRAM SCHOOL! Which is like high school would be like if you were in prison, in the military, or a Republican:

Jongro [the school profiled in the piece] opened last year. Its four-story main building houses classrooms and dormitories, with eight beds per room. The school day begins at 6:30 a.m., when whistles pierce the quiet and teachers stride the hallways, shouting, “Wake up!”

After exercise and breakfast, the students are in their classrooms by 7:30, 30 per class. Each room includes a few music stands, for students who stand to keep from dozing.

A final roll call comes at 12:30 a.m., after which students may go to bed, unless they opt to cram more, until 2:00 a.m.

The routine relaxes on Saturday and Sunday, when students have an extra hour to sleep and two hours of free time. Every three weeks the students may leave the campus for two nights.

The curriculum has no room for romance. Notices enumerate the forbidden behavior: any conversation between boys and girls that is unrelated to study; exchanging romantic notes; hugging, hooking arms or other physical contact. Punishment includes cleaning a classroom or restroom or even expulsion.

Wimps. That's not what it was like in the good old days:

Kim Sung-woo, 32, who teaches at Jongro, remembered the even more spartan regimen of the cram school that he attended. In his day, he said, students desperate for a break slipped off campus at night by climbing walls topped with barbed wire. Corporal punishment was common.

Now that's an education.

Postmortem on Hillary

2008-08-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

Joshua Green of The Atlantic has written a postmortem on the Clinton campaign. It's fascinating reading, and it shows the ways that communication campaigns can explode. But it also affirms what I've thought for some time: that running for presidency itself is a far better display of presidential capacity than the specific policies that the candidate endorses or any perceived "experience" for the position. "Two things struck me right away," Green writes after reading the hoards of interoffice correspondence preserved by the senior campaign team.

The first was that, outward appearances notwithstanding, the campaign prepared a clear strategy and did considerable planning. It sweated the large themes (Clinton’s late-in-the-game emergence as a blue-collar champion had been the idea all along) and the small details (campaign staffers in Portland, Oregon, kept tabs on Monica Lewinsky, who lived there, to avoid any surprise encounters). The second was the thought: Wow, it was even worse than I’d imagined! The anger and toxic obsessions overwhelmed even the most reserved Beltway wise men. Surprisingly, Clinton herself, when pressed, was her own shrewdest strategist, a role that had never been her strong suit in the White House. But her advisers couldn’t execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other, and Clinton never forced a resolution. Major decisions would be put off for weeks until suddenly she would erupt, driving her staff to panic and misfire.

Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence—on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to “do the job from Day One.” In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel. What is clear from the internal documents is that Clinton’s loss derived not from any specific decision she made but rather from the preponderance of the many she did not make. Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.

Yet, I feel for Clinton and her team. They did have a plan, and it was a good plan. The problem was that it wasn't good enough, and no one could figure out how to crack the Obama code. (And to be fair, I'm not sure how I would have cracked the Obama code, either.) But in the moment of confusion, Clinton made the biggest mistake of all: She started beating her staff.

In the hours after she finished third in Iowa, on January 3, Clinton seized control of her campaign, even as her advisers continued fighting about whether to go negative. The next morning’s conference call began with awkward silence, and then Penn recapped the damage and mumbled something about how badly they’d been hurt by young voters.

Mustering enthusiasm, Clinton declared that the campaign was mistaken not to have competed harder for the youth vote and that—overruling her New Hampshire staff—she would take questions at town-hall meetings designed to draw comparative,” but not negative, contrasts with Obama. Hearing little response, Clinton began to grow angry, according to a participant’s notes. She complained of being outmaneuvered in Iowa and being painted as the establishment candidate. The race, she insisted, now had “three front-runners.” More silence ensued. “This has been a very instructive call, talking to myself,” she snapped, and hung up.

Not that the staff didn't deserve a beating, of course, but here they needed a sense of direction and leadership that only Clinton herself could have provided. She was the one who hired Mark Penn, she was the one who ultimately decided on the direction of the campaign, and she needed to be the one who righted it. But she didn't. And so she lost.

She could have won, but this campaign is not about competence in running the federal bureaucracy but about vision. Americans are uncertain about the new world where they now find themselves: a world of terrorism, a shrinking middle class, a plugger economy, and environmental uncertainty. They don't want a policy wonk who can give them better policy programs. They want a visionary who can help them understand what those policies and programs mean. Or, as Obama put it: “It’s true that speeches don’t solve all problems. But what is also true if we cannot inspire the country to believe again, it doesn’t matter how many policies and plans we have.”

Obama has given his vision, but McCain still hasn't. And if he can't, he'll have a Hillary problem, too.

Georgia on my mind

2008-08-11T06:57:00.000-07:00

Late last week, when fighting erupted between Russia and Georgia over the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, there were some concerns as to who, exactly, was the aggressor. Were Georgian forces moving into those regions to restore order, or were they, as the Russians claimed, perpetrating genocide? Or was Russia using humanitarian concerns as a pretext to force a democracy that was leaning too far to the West into subjugation?

The consensus (in the West, at least) seems to be that Russia is the aggressor—Russia has been overtly hostile to Georgia for years and has imposed sanctions, including natural gas, designed to starve the country into submission—but there seems to have been slow preparations for hostilities on both sides. Such preparation would account for how quickly hostilities rose to their current levels of violence.

If Georgia did prepare for—and perhaps even expected—conflict, this raises significant questions: If they had no hope of winning (other than by waging war to arouse the anger of the West), why did Georgia even consider military action as being a viable option in the first place? Is this a desperate act of a desperate people, or did the West promise to help?

In some ways, neither side seems to be fighting a purely just war. Of the two, of course, Russia has a much harder case to make, since Russia's sanctions could be considered an act of aggression, and their use of force seems far from proportionate. But while self-defense is certainly a just cause, it could be charged that Georgia provoked this attack, and if this is so, this raises significant problems, because just wars have to have a reasonable expectation of success. And given the significant civilian casualties, neither side seems to be showing the restraint necessary to limit civilian deaths.

Headlines:

Georgia Fight Spreads, Moscow Issues Ultimatum (NYT)
In Georgia and Russia, a Perfect Brew for a Blowup (NYT)
Taunting the Bear (NYT)
South Ossetian refugees head north to flee ruins of war (Guardian)
Russia criticises US for flying Georgian troops back from Iraq (Guardian)
Bush, Cheney Increasingly Critical of Russia Over Aggression in Georgia (Washington Post)

Heroes, justice and “The Dark Night”

2008-08-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

From the August 8, 2008 issue of the Pittsburgh Catholic:

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” says Harvey Dent, the Gotham district attorney and “white knight” of this summer’s blockbuster hit, “The Dark Knight.”

“The Dark Knight,” of course, is full of violence and disturbing imagery, and in no way can it be considered a Catholic film, or even a Christian film. Yet, as Dent’s words reflect, the film asks an important question: How can we live in a world where radical injustice flourishes?

The same question vexed the prophet Jeremiah as he looked at the corruption of ancient Israel. “Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem, look around and consider, search through her squares,” God says to him. “If you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city” (5:1).

The fact that Jerusalem fell during Jeremiah’s lifetime shows how well the prophet’s search went, but Jeremiah’s failure reflects the gravity of the Christian understanding of the problem of justice: Because no one is without sin, no one can be considered truly just.

But if no one is just, where does that leave us? Batman and the Joker offer two different responses. For the Joker, the fact that no one is perfect is a constant invitation to show how imperfect people are. Everything becomes an experiment, in which he searches “good” people for their fatal flaws and then uses those flaws to destroy them.

The Joker is the ultimate cynic. For him, the values that tie a society together are just a whitewashed façade begging to be destroyed. “I took Gotham’s white knight, and brought him down to our level. It wasn’t hard,” the Joker says with glee. “All it takes is a little … push.”

The Joker is a disturbing character, not only because of his cruelty and insanity but also because he represents an increasingly prevalent element in contemporary society.

This weekend the New York Times Magazine published an article about hackers whose misanthropic hatred leads them to use the Internet to explode other people’s lives. [See earlier post.] One young man, the article says, was molested as a child, and so he channels his rage by engaging in emotional violence—harassing the parents of deceased children, for instance—to show people how rotten he thinks they truly are.

He defends himself by saying that it’s just how he has fun. So what if people’s lives are destroyed? After all, didn’t those worthless hypocrites have it coming?

As the Joker would say, “Why so serious?”

Or as Bruce Wayne’s servant Alfred would say, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

On the other hand, Batman reflects another answer. For him, the fact that justice is so rare and easily lost makes it all the more precious. Justice is a cause to be served, not a set of meaningless hypocrisies meant to be destroyed.

Following the path of justice in a cynical society is never easy. Jeremiah was mocked, harassed, beaten, imprisoned, and thrown down a well and left to die. And in the film, Batman is shocked at the level of hostility that his pursuit of justice causes among the people of Gotham. Ironically, the just man, in going against the grain of an unjust society, may be considered to be the antithesis of justice.

Yet, for all the back-dealing politicians, self-serving journalists, and two-timing cops, the people of Gotham, in the end, prove themselves worthy of Batman’s trust. This is the moral turning point of the film, the reason why the Joker loses and Batman wins.

And perhaps this moment of hope is the film’s answer to Jeremiah’s challenge. People sin, but their sinfulness never annuls their human dignity. The just person survives in the hope that as long as they struggle for justice and do not fall prey to cynicism, even the worst among us may show their true beauty and dignity as children of God. And that true justice—perfect justice—is not of this world, but eternal life.

Well, that just ain't kosher!

2008-08-06T07:43:00.000-07:00

This past May, Federal immigration agents made headlines when they arrested, en masse, hundreds of illegal immigrants working at a kosher meat packing plant operated by Agriprocessors, Inc. In the weeks since, it's become clear that hiring illegal immigrants wasn't the only way that the company flouted the law. In fact, the labor conditions were so horrific that it's been called "a kosher 'Jungle,'" after the Upton Sinclair's socialist novel that aimed to play on American sympathies for the plight of labor but resulted in the Pure Food and Drug Act and Meat Inspection Act of 1906.

Working in an abattoir is never pretty, of course, but the working conditions here seemed to have been truly deplorable. "Children as young as 13 were said to be wielding knives on the killing floor," Shmuel Herzfeld writes in the New York Times today. "Some teenagers were working 17-hour shifts, six days a week." What is more, "the affidavit filed in the United States District Court of Northern Iowa," he continues, "alleges that an employee was physically abused by a rabbi on the floor of the plant."

All of this makes Herzfeld wonder: Is a plant that treats people this way truly kosher?

Within Jewish dietary law, the designation of "kosher" primarily applies to the selection and preparation of food. In a general sense, the rules are as follows:

Certain animals may not be eaten at all. This restriction includes the flesh, organs, eggs and milk of the forbidden animals.
Of the animals that may be eaten, the birds and mammals must be killed in accordance with Jewish law.
All blood must be drained from the meat or broiled out of it before it is eaten.
Certain parts of permitted animals may not be eaten.
Fruits and vegetables are permitted, but must be inspected for bugs
Meat (the flesh of birds and mammals) cannot be eaten with dairy. Fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables and grains can be eaten with either meat or dairy. (According to some views, fish may not be eaten with meat).
Utensils that have come into contact with meat may not be used with dairy, and vice versa. Utensils that have come into contact with non-kosher food may not be used with kosher food. This applies only where the contact occurred while the food was hot.
Grape products made by non-Jews may not be eaten.
There are a few other rules that are not universal.

Yet, in addition to these dietary laws, Herzfeld emphasizes that the kosher tradition is inseparable from a concern for social justice. "Yisroel Salanter, the great 19th-century rabbi, is famously believed to have refused to certify a matzo factory as kosher on the grounds that the workers were being treated unfairly," he writes. Consequently, "in addition to the hypocrisy of calling something kosher when it is being sold and produced in an unethical manner, we have to take into account disturbing information about the plant that has come to light."

In purely practical terms, he notes, this makes sense: After all, if people are willing to flout labor regulations, how do we know that they aren't playing fast and loose with kosher laws? And how can a rabbi concentrate on making sure everything is kosher when he's too busy beating up the staff?

But Herzfeld reminds us that the kosher preparation of food reflects deeper concerns that resist an assembly line's demand for calculation and efficiency or an agribusiness's desire for profitability. To be kosher is to stand within a tradition that affirms the intrinsic value of persons and recognizes that there is something more important in life than meat on a plate.

On being Byronic

2008-08-05T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic website has posted a 1953 article by Jacques Barzun on the relationship of the English Romantic poet Lord Byron to the adjective that bears his name. As it turns out, nailing down the relationship between how the real Lord Byron—who was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know," as Lady Catherine Lamb famously said—and our interpretation of him is just as difficult as finding out what, precisely, "Byronic" really means.

The great men of the past whose names have given an adjective to the language are by that very fact most vulnerable to the reductive treatment. Everybody knows what "Machiavellian" means, and "Rabelaisian"; everybody uses the terms "Platonic" and "Byronic" and relies on them to express certain commonplace notions in frequent use.

The matter-of-fact tone of Barzun's opening line reminded me that much has changed since 1953. "Machiavellian" and "Platonic" are still in much use, but "Rabelaisian"—meaning "a style of satirical humour characterized by exaggerated characters and coarse jokes"—is much less so, perhaps depending on whether one has read Bakhtin recently. And the fates have been even less kind to "Byronic." A quick Google definition search of the term yields only a single, decidedly unhelpful entry—"Lord Byron (as in Byronic hero)"—that suggests that the word is perhaps as ill-used as it is misunderstood.

One of the interesting things about this particular essay is its awareness of how the relationship between the signifier "Bryonic" and the poet that the term signifies is constantly complicated and multi-layered. Does it refer to a "concentrated mind, and high spirits, wit, daylight good sense, and a passion for truth—in short a unique discharge of intellectual vitality"? A romantic, melancholy disposition borne of privilege and boredom? An active life as "a noble outlaw"? A wanton, pansexual eroticism? A scandalous, misunderstood existence as a self-imposed outcast? A sense of cynicism borne of out of an experence of real—or imagined—tragedy?

Of course, anyone who has been through high school or watched teen programming recently recognizes the contours of the Byronic sensibility, even though the posturing and angst of adolescence is never directly attached to the term. What makes the Byronic sensibility interesting, though, is the way in which the term has transcended the narrow confines of a dictionary definition to become a sort of genre of its own. There is only one way to be Machivellian, Platonic, or Rabelaisian, but being Byronic is as varied and complex as one wants it to be. And Byron himself would not have wanted it any other way.

deeplydisturbing.org, .com, and .net

2008-08-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, the famous dystopian book (and later movie with Malcolm McDowell) about youth culture run amok, is one of the most disturbing takes on postmodern life, not just because its content is disturbing but also because it has proved remarkably prophetic. While we may not be obsessed with Beethoven ("Ludwig van, baby!"), there's a certain eerie similarity about the trends in violence and popular culture that Burgess depicts and contemporary life, such as the use of "manscara" in Great Britain.

Take, for instance, this graffiti that showed up spray-painted on the side of the Carnegie Library in Oakland:

Kinda funny, yes? Actually, vandalism is apparently the new poetry. The vandals have apparently read Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and it's on a library, so it's ironic, so I guess that makes it OK.

But perhaps the most disturbing trend is the growing presence of "trolls" on the web, people who perpetrate acts of emotional violence on the web for fun. As Mattathias Schwartz writes in The New York Times Magazine:

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

The nadsat of the troll culture is a language of mysanthropic hatred that finds its jouissance in cruelty. But it's all in fun, so that makes it OK, too:

Thirty-two years old, he works “typical Clark Kent I.T.” freelance jobs — Web design, programming — but his passion is trolling, “pushing peoples’ buttons.” Fortuny frames his acts of trolling as “experiments,” sociological inquiries into human behavior. In the fall of 2006, he posted a hoax ad on Craigslist, posing as a woman seeking a “str8 brutal dom muscular male.” More than 100 men responded. Fortuny posted their names, pictures, e-mail and phone numbers to his blog, dubbing the exposé “the Craigslist Experiment.” This made Fortuny the most prominent Internet villain in America until November 2007, when his fame was eclipsed by the Megan Meier MySpace suicide. Meier, a 13-year-old Missouri girl, hanged herself with a belt after receiving cruel messages from a boy she’d been flirting with on MySpace. The boy was not a real boy, investigators say, but the fictional creation of Lori Drew, the mother of one of Megan’s former friends. Drew later said she hoped to find out whether Megan was gossiping about her daughter. The story — respectable suburban wife uses Internet to torment teenage girl — was a media sensation.

Welcome to the new fun.

Harry Potter and Children's Orphanages

2008-08-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

There's a new Harry Potter book. Yesterday, in celebration of Harry's birthday, it was announced that The Tales of Beedle the Bard, complete with commentary by Aldus Dumbledore, will be sold to the general public, with proceeds benefiting J. K. Rowling's charity, Children's High Level Group.

This is a noteworthy event, not because of the publication of the book, but because it sheds light on the problem of institutionalized children in areas of Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, Moldova, the Czech Republic, Armenia, and Georgia. In those countries, child development services are lacking, and as those countries struggle economically, startling numbers of parents are finding it impossible to care for their children, particularly those with special needs.

The Children's High Level Group reports that 250,000 children, often from ethnic minorities, are abandoned every year by their parents across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Only 4 percent are actually "orphaned" in technical sense. Most are the victims of ethnic prejudice, economic hardship, or some significant disability that makes them impossible to care for, but they are victimized again once they enter the system.

"Many of these children have disabilities and handicaps, but often remain without any health or educational interventions," Children's High Level Group reports. "In some cases they do not receive basic services such as adequate food. Almost always they are without human or emotional contact and stimulation." They continue:

A recent study found that adults who had grown up in institutions were:
10 times more likely than the general population to be trafficked abroad for
the purposes of sexual exploitation;
30 times more likely to become an alcoholic;
45 times more likely to be unemployed or in insecure employment;
more than 100 times more likely to have a criminal record; and
500 times more likely to kill themselves

In many ways, the challenges that Rowling's charity are trying to address are the same types of concerns that the United States dealt with during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the problems of massive urbanization and industrialization left many children endangered. At first, civic institutions, particularly churches, were essential in providing the social safety net for children. In time, governmental agencies and non-profits began to take over those responsibilities.

Of course, the American system is far from perfect. But at least at the beginning, it had a moral and ethical framework that recognized the dignity of children and the importance of caring for their needs. The problem that Rowling's organization is attempting to address seems much more complex. Not only is it attempting to reform a system of child care that is horrific in its deprivations, but it is also trying to establish a basic sense of social obligation and acknowledgement of the needs of children in societies that have lost their moorings.

Newsflash: Music doesn't pay well

2008-07-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

"The economy can be a cruel mistress, particularly, it seems, to performing artists," an unfortunate academic with a doctorate in musical arts lamented today in the Chronicle of Higher Education website's Career Forum. "I'm tired of fighting with academe and performing at poorly run auditions, but I'm also tired of running around in circles."

Really? I wondered. I never knew!

The real world, of course, can indeed be a cruel teacher, but our intrepid writer perseveres. First taking a job—gasp!—as a temp and then—double gasp!—as, of all things—Wait for it! Wait for it!—a public school music teacher.

I had always thought of music education at the K-12 level as dull and unchallenging, work fit for music majors who couldn't cut it in performance, theory, or musicology. However, faced with a tanking economy and three empty years on the academic-job circuit, I'm learning to swallow my pride and re-evaluate being a schoolteacher. It's still not my idea of a great job, but again, it pays.

The horror. But then again, if you're too good for the idiots in "academe"—the elitist sobriquet for what most people call "college"—and all those orchestras that can't put together an audition process that meets your exacting standards, then teaching music to young people (which, incidentally, is what you should have been interested in doing as an academic) would seem like the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno.

(In the interest of full disclosure: My grandmother is a former music teacher, some of my best friends are music teachers, and I once considered becoming a music teacher myself, so I find the author's sense of disgust and frustration to be more than a little galling.)

One of the greatest problems with academics lies in an exaggerated sense of their own importance, the philosopher king-like sense of entitlement that takes the sorts of career travails most people have to deal with—being under-employed, working with people who aren't as smart as you, doing stupid office work, and so on—and blows them into galactic crises.

Difficulty in finding meaningful work is par for the course for gifted people with interests that don't match the norm. The challenge is finding ways to make the journey to that destination meaningful as well, particularly because you may never get there.

My vote is for Schopenhauer

2008-07-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

Beginning today and ending on August 5, the world's philosophers are converging on Seoul, South Korea, for the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophers, a gathering held every five years. Now, I'm used to hearing about philosophy conferences and symposia, where professional philosophers gather to share their latest work and learn from each other, but this is something different altogether, because a "congress" has governmental and legislative connotations.

And this, according to the World Congress of Philosophers website, is precisely what the event is about:

The first World Congress to be held in Asia, the Seoul Congress presents a clear invitation to rethink the nature, roles, and responsibilities of philosophy and of philosophers in the age of globalization. It is committed to paying heed to the problems, conflicts, inequalities, and injustices connected with the development of a planetary civilization that is at once multicultural and techno-scientific.

The topics are serious, and so is the intent. As Julian Baggini writes in the Guardian:

The official line seems to be that the world somehow needs philosophy if it is to deal with its great problems. In the first of four "congratulatory addresses," Han, the prime minister, said he thought it could help both environmental problems and the fight against terror. Lee Jang-moo, the president of Seoul National University, claimed it could teach us "the direction in which to steer the human destiny." Such hopes for philosophy are shared in high places: Koïchiro Matsuura, the director general of Unesco, told the congress, via video, about how Unesco was committed to fostering the teaching of philosophy around the world. He wasn't just being polite: Unesco even has a "philosophy strategy."

While we need, as Hannah Arendt aptly put it, "to think what we are doing" now more than ever, there is a sense of elitism here, a sense that philosophers, by their professional training, are entitled to speak and perhaps—as the name "congress" implies—even to rule. The philosopher king may be Plato's ideal, but it also suggests that ideas are somehow separate from the practice of daily life and from those not suitably "trained" to engage in complex thought.

But as anyone who studies rhetoric knows, ideas always have consequences, and people of all ages, educational levels, and IQs trade in ideas on a daily basis. To abstract intellectual life into the realm of the intelligensia both neglects this fact and, perhaps more important, keeps philosophers from learning about the fullness of the human experience—which, in the end, is ultimately what philosophy is about. Julian Baggini again:

If philosophy is indeed important, it is because it is not the preserve of philosophers. The professionalisation of the subject has disguised this once obvious fact. In the UK, for example, it is often thought philosophy is not an important part of the culture, but it's actually all over the place: in serious journalism, the work of thinktanks, and in ethics committees. It's just not usually called "philosophy." Indeed, if you want to be taken seriously, you'd be advised not to use the p-word at all. Oliver Letwin, for example, has a PhD in philosophy and has published a book on the subject, but he once told me in an interview that it would hinder, not help him, if more people knew this. (Sorry, Olly.)

So if we are to rethink philosophy, we should rethink first and foremost what it is and how it does and should inform wider debate. Those who have earned the title "philosopher" need to both accept that those who have not are equal participants in such a discussion, which also means being more willing to engage as equals in it.

Ode to Scrabulous

2008-07-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the law has caught up to Scrabulous, the free, on-line version of Scrabble currently played by as many as 594,000 people every day on the social networking site Facebook and ranked number 15 on PC World's 100 Best Products of 2008.

Hasbro, who owns the copyright to Scrabble in the United States and Canada, filed a lawsuit against the creators of the game, Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta, on July 24. This morning, American and Canadian visitors to Facebook expecting to play (yours truly included) found that their access had been blocked.

The story began in January of this year, when Hasbro approached Facebook and asked them to remove the application from the site. That strategy failed, since Scrabulous was neither developed nor owned by Facebook but merely placed there by the Agarwalla brothers like thousands of other applications posted to the site.

Scrabulous, like the millions of other applications floating around on the web, as something of an experiment. The only difference was its massive popularity. Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology correspondent, remarked in January that the Agarwallas were making something like $25,000 a month off of advertising revenues, and this success, while a pittance in comparison to the value of Facebook itself, was enough to spark the attention and the ire of Hasbro. "The early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing," wrote Cellan-Jones.

But the Scrabulous-Scrabble fight is more than a David-vs. Goliath story. It's about old media and new media technologies, and the ability of companies with popular traditional brands to maintain or even extend those brands in new media. In a way, the Hasbro lawsuit misses an opportunity to find new fans, create new markets, and sell more products. Hasbro shouldn't be suing Scrabulous. It should be buying it.

Reading in the age of the Internet

2008-07-28T06:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the New York Times published a feature article on the changing reading patterns of the younger generation.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

The issue isn't that young people aren't reading, but that they're reading in different ways.

Reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Whatever side one takes on the relationship between literacy and the Internet—and there is significant debate as to whether these young people are even "literate" at all—the changes that the Internet has brought to reading habits are here to stay, and they reflect more fundamental changes in what constitutes a "text."

In a world defined—some would say "disciplined"—by the technology of the printing press, the eye is taught to follow a line of printed words, one after the other, from beginning to end. But the Internet creates a new type of textuality defined by what the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls the rhizome. In botany, a "rhizome" is a root plant that creates dense networks of shoots and nodes. Unlike a tree, whose root structure is much more centralized and hierarchical, rhizomes are dynamic and decentralized. Instead of fulfilling a prearranged "plan," they "happen."

Deleuze and Félix Guattari's 1980 collaboration A Thousand Plateaus applied the rhizome to reading. Breaking with "arborescent" reading patterns, they used the metaphor to view texts not as linear arguments that need to be grounded and followed methodically from beginning to end but as dynamic entities that can be entered, understood, broken apart, and repackaged in a multitude of ways. In what would have been a radical move for the time, they remarked that their book wasn't intended to be read straight-through, and they invited readers to pick and choose what they wanted to read and discard the parts they didn't find useful.

Though they may not have known it at the time, Deleuze and Guattari were describing the cultural and intellectual condition of the Internet age, in which knowledge isn't created by a single author and centrally disseminated but is a common project built by many hands.

Of course, this transition is both a blessing and a curse. While the new intellectual culture of reading and textual engagement is dynamic and playful, it also runs the risk of losing track of its grounding. Part of the joy of traditional reading lies in the ways in which it forces readers to go through parts that are at first glance "unnecessary" or "boring" but contribute to the understanding of the whole. Deleuze and Guattari, grounded in the tradition of Western philosophy and metaphysics, may have found the rhizome a welcome release, but for a younger generation who may never sit down and read the ideas that they bounce back and forth on-line, the freedom of the rhizome may be experienced as a sort of intellectual chaos.

The tenuous, ebbing strength of the American Protestant mainline

2008-07-25T08:22:00.000-07:00

"America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian," Joseph Bottom writes in First Things. "A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets."

There was a time when American mainline Protestantism, with its simple, white wooden churches dotting the hillsides and its pleasant, optimistic theology, had a sense of givenness in American life. It provided the texture that grounded American life. Even if you didn't believe in it—if, say, you were a Catholic who always felt the need to prove oneself as "American enough," or if you were a Jew forced to celebrate Christmas through the magic of Technicolor—you couldn't help but be influenced in the civic traditions that it created.

In the preface of my copy of the Federalist Papers, Garry Wills notes that the Constitution reflects in many ways the Presbyterian—or, more properly, Calvinist—presuppositions of its writers. The system of checks and balances and the emphasis on procedure emerges from the acknowledgement that people's perpetual tendency toward corruption (the political equivalent of original sin) means that they can't be trusted to do the right thing by themselves. The Constitution is a minimalist endeavor that recognizes the latent self-interest in even the most well-meaning of political ideologies. As Reinhold Niebuhr noted, the irony of American history lies in the ability of Americans to do the wrong thing even as they seek to do the right one: Wars to make us "safer" end up making us less so, for instance, and political visions that would "end poverty" sometimes end up increasing the economic marginalization they aim to fight.

Mainline Protestantism promises a quiet, steady approach to public life, in which an awareness of the possibility of human evil is always realistically matched with an awareness of the redemptive possibility of human action. In the twentieth century, Bottom notes, this quiet, steady approach became increasingly confused, and he uses the current presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as an example:

To be saved, we need only to realize that God already loves us, just the way we are, Schori wrote in her 2006 book, A Wing and a Prayer. She’s not exactly wrong about God’s love, but, in Schori’s happy soteriology, such love demands from us no personal reformation, no individual guilt, no particular penance, and no precise dogma. All we have to do, to prove the redemption we already have, is support the political causes she approves. The mission of the church is to show forth God’s love by demanding inclusion and social justice. She often points to the United Nations as an example of God’s work in the world, and when she talks about the mission of the Episcopal Church, she typically identifies it with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals.

Her Yahweh, in other words, is a blend of Norman Vincent Peale and Dag Hammarskjöld.

Bottom decries the insouciant, and often elitist, leftward tilt of the mainline Protestant axis, but Ross Douthat, blogging on the website of The Atlantic Monthly, reminds us that the Christian left has no monopoly on Peale's thin theology of positive thinking. "Peale's heirs occupy the pulpits of what remains of the Protestant mainline, but they preach from the dais at numerous evangelical megachurches as well," he says. "The people who read Joel Osteen and Joyce Meyer and The Prayer of Jabez may be more politically conservative then the people who read A Wing and a Prayer, and read certain passages of Genesis and Leviticus more literally, but the theology they're imbibing is roughly the same sort of therapeutic mush."

American religion has always been thus: amorphous, tenuously grounded in spirituality over religion, always interested in the next big thing. While this has been its strength, it is also its weakness.

Are superhero films the westerns of the new millennium?

2008-07-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, A. O. Scott wonders whether the superhero genre—which has spawned five blockbusters so far this year—has almost run its course. And what with Seth Rogen, of all people, slotted to star as the Green Hornet in 2010, and the big screen adaptation of The Watchmen—the trailer of which I barely understood—set to open next year, he may be right.

I have a hunch, and perhaps a hope, that “Iron Man,” “Hancock” and “Dark Knight” together represent a peak, by which I mean not only a previously unattained level of quality and interest, but also the beginning of a decline. In their very different ways, these films discover the limits built into the superhero genre as it currently exists.

To tell the truth, in watching "The Dark Knight," I pitied Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, because it really seemed that any sequel, and there will undoubtedly be a sequel, to the film would be completely inadequate in comparison.

Scott's solution to the problem is to urge the genre to move away from the visual and into the moral. The endless cavalcade of action set pieces is tiring, he says, but what is more tiring is how stuffed each film is with themes and ideas that are superficially exposed but never sufficiently treated.

Instead the disappointment comes from the way the picture spells out lofty,serious themes and then ... spells them out again. What kind of hero do we need? Where is the line between justice and vengeance? How much autonomy should we sacrifice in the name of security? Is the taking of innocent life ever justified? These are all fascinating, even urgent questions, but stating them, as nearly every character in “The Dark Knight” does, sooner of later, is not the same as exploring them.

And yet stating such themes is as far as the current wave of superhero movies seems able or willing to go. The westerns of the 1940s and ’50s, obsessed with similar themes, were somehow able, at their best, as in John Ford’s “Searchers” and Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo,” to find ambiguities and tensions buried in their own rigid paradigms.

The difference between a classic western shown on AMC and films like the "Searchers" or "Unforgiven" lies in ability of the latter to understand the "rules" of their "game" to such a degree that, like jazz musicians, they find spaces for improvization and exploration. They understand convention—indeed, they have to know the conventions of the genre far more thoroughly than pictures that repeat them by rote—but are not bound slavishly to it.

And they can go deeper than other films because the vocabulary of the genre enables them to invite audiences to treat complex and often controversial problems. During the Iraq War, for instance, the new incarnation of Battlestar Galactica turned around the problem of suicide bombers and insurgency. Can superhero films, which are now almost as ubiquitous as westerns and space operas, manage the same transition?

Why would anyone get a Ph.D. in geography?

2008-07-23T06:22:00.000-07:00

I've been around academia for, well, a long time, but for some reason I never heard of graduate programs in geography until a few months ago. At the time, I thought that geography was something that you studied in grade school, so that you would remember where Uganda is on the map, in case you ever wanted to go there.

But in reality, geography is one of those hybrid social sciences that tries to get at the relationships among geographical place, environment, economics, and culture. It seeks to understand—in a general sense—how human life happens on earth and, drawing from this understanding, make practical proposals about how humans can live on earth in more sustainable ways.

People who study geography are interested in many things. The University of Iowa, for instance, has specializations in environmental studies (which blends the harder research of environmental sciences and economics and public policy), geographic information science, health, and international development.

Clark University in Massachusetts offers a broader set of offerings, including feminist geography (how the environment shapes the experiences and needs of women), global economic change, the relationship between the environment and development, urban development, political and cultural ecology (how cultures and political systems interact), and sustainability and natural resources, among other things.

I started thinking again about geography this morning, as I started to read Jeffrey Sachs's Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. Sachs works at The Earth Institute at Columbia University. Perusing the site shows geography in practice. The discipline of geography is more than finding blotches on a map; it is one of the most important, and perhaps neglected, fields today.

They don't call it SUNY Stoner Brook for nothing

2008-07-22T05:32:00.000-07:00

Apparently, a Ph.D. candidate somewhere at a division one research university has found that marijuana use is necessary, if not essential, for the successful completion of a doctorate.

I'm an analyst of imaginative literature instead of a producer of it. But I would lay claim to a modest form of drug-induced insight. For example, I took a demanding seminar in my first year of graduate school and wanted to impress my professor with a stellar paper.

Naturally, I came down with a bad case of writer's block shortly before the paper was due. For two hours I did nothing more than use the cut-and-paste function, treating my essay like a Rubik's Cube: "If I just move this section here, it will all make sense."
Finally I thought, "Screw this." I decided to shelve the project for a few hours and toked up instead. Of course I immediately began thinking about my paper again. But now it seemed like a privilege to consider economic globalization and its relation to British poetry. Instead of frantically rearranging sections of text, I started to imagine the theoretical basis of my essay in holistic terms, and saw a connection between arguments that I hadn't noticed before.

Now, I do remember that some of my best philosophy papers sounded as if I had dropped acid. (The first line from one of them: "Sometimes, when I'm watching television, the Gordon's Fisherman comes to visit me." I got an A.) But is marijuana really a study aid? Admittedly, the author has a point that, in some ways, his recreational drug use is perhaps less problematic than, say, binge drinking or ectsasy-fueled raves. Yet, he still seems just as neurotic:

I'm an insomniac who averages four to five hours of sleep a night. The best way to deal with a sleeping problem is with regular exercise. But it's nice to have a secret weapon to knock me out on days when I can't make it to the gym. I'm certainly better off than peers who have flirted with Xanax addictions, or who waste their stipends on genuinely worthless stuff like Ambien or Lunesta.

Is this really what it takes to "make it" in academics? If it is, doesn't that mean that academic life is somehow fundamentally broken, dysfunctional, and unhealthy? If so, what can be done to make academia more suitable for human habitation?

Another day, another rupee

2008-07-21T08:24:00.001-07:00

When I see photos like this, as I saw last week in the New York Times, I get nervous. No, the image isn't from the latest Batman or Indiana Jones movies but from Pakistan, which also happens to be on the way to something of an economic meltdown.

A key ally in the region, Pakistan is a desperately poor country—the story in the New York Times quotes a man who had just lost his life savings, which for him was about $4,175—but it has been growing steadily since a recession in 1951, most recently rate of about seven percent per year. However, the political dischord surrounding the government of Pervez Musharraf and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 rattled the economy greatly.

In January, Reuters reported that Pakistan's central bank downgraded its yearly projections for the country's economic growth from a robust 7.2 percent to somewhere between 6.6 and 7 percent. But the problem isn't simply short-term political termoil, because Pakistan's economy, like ours, is a consumer economy driven by credit. A few weeks after the Bhutto assassination, the Voice of America reported that:

Economist Qaisar Bengali says the strong performance was not sustainable, partly because on the consumer side of things, it was the result of easier bank credit. That made it possible for more people to borrow to buy big items such as cars. Bengali says when consumer financing is removed, bank profits decline, automobile sector growth declines, and gross domestic product growth declines.

Such reliance on credit means that the Pakistani economy is open to the same pressures that the American economy is. Even in January, Reuters reported that "the central bank also sounded a warning about the country's widening current account deficit and fiscal shortfall, saying they exposed the country to funding risks at a time when the U.S. subprime crisis was troubling global credit markets."

This suggests, once again, that the pocketbook issues of the American economy have implications for international security. But Time reports that for Pakistanis, the troubled economic forecast also suggests a staggering level of incompetence within the country's fragile coalition government.

Since the new government took office, there have been alarming levels of capital flight. Foreign investors began to pull out in the days after former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination. "But mainly it has been due to the weakening of the rupee," says M. Ziauddin, a specialist writer on economic affairs for Dawn newspapers. "People clearly wanted to save their dollars." "Right now there seems to be a crisis of confidence," says Nazar, the economic commentator. "There are serious questions about the leadership. The president is disinterested, and the political leadership [Zardari and Sharif] is out of the country. But it is also a question of competence. The crisis over the sacked judges [which sped protests that led to Musharraf's downfall] and the coalition's internal disputes have left the economy ignored."

As Musharraf clung onto power, I remember his saying that he mistrusted civilian governance because of the high levels of incompetence and corruption that were associated with the regimes of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. At the time, his comments were dismissed. But what if he was right?

In keeping with the opening of The Dark Knight

2008-07-18T06:45:00.000-07:00

Which Manohla Dargis loves ...

I have taken it upon myself to determine my true superhero identity through the scientifically validated instrument known as the Superhero Personality Test. Apparently, it has determined that I am The Flash—"fast, athletic and flirtatious"—though Spider-Man comes in at a close second.

The Flash 70%
Spider-Man 65%
Superman 60%
Green Lantern 60%
Robin 55%
Hulk 45%
Iron Man 40%
Batman 30%
Supergirl 30%
Catwoman 30%
Wonder Woman 20%

I'm actually surprised by this, because I've always had an affinity with Spider-Man's awkward geekyness. But then again, there's also my interest in constructive hermeneutics—the interpretation of texts—which in antiquity was closely associated with the Greek god Hermes, god of travelers, orators, athletics, magic, and, of course, flower arrangements.

That explains it.

Don't you make me plug in my toilet!

2008-07-17T13:21:00.000-07:00

The Post-Gazette had an article this week about a man in Cecil Township, Washington County, who is prepared to go to jail instead of plugging into the local sewer system.

In reading the article, I sympathized with the man, to a point. Should people be forced to buy into public utilities—often at great cost—that they do not want? Should I be forced to purchase cable, for instance, if I do not want to own a television? This is not necessarily an idle question, nor is it a wild libertarian one. As more and more people become sensitive to environmental concerns like energy usage and water conservation, they may choose to live "off the grid," not only to save money but also to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and seek a more environmentally sustainable means of living.

But there is another question, too. To what degree are persons obligated to support assets and programs that the community has undertaken for the common good? Electricity systems, sewage systems, and other utilities are expensive community assets that provide for the common good even if one does not want to use them. Even Mr. Williams, the curmudgeon in the story, benefits from the improvements to public health and property values that a sewage system provides. Is he, then, not obligated to support these initatives? What are his obligations, if any, to the common good of his neighbors, who don't want a septic system that could leak into their backyards?

It's all about the enthymemes

2008-07-16T05:54:00.000-07:00

When he wrote about rhetoric in ancient Greece, Aristotle noted that the most powerful forms of rhetorical reasoning took the form of what he called enthymemes (en-tha-MEEMs). An enthymeme is a syllogism in which one of the premises is suppressed and intuited by the audience.

For instance, while a traditional syllogism goes something like this:

Premise 1: Socrates is a human.
Premise 2: All humans die.
Conclusion: Socrates will die.

An enthymeme goes like this:

Premise: Socrates is a human.
Conclusion: Socrates will die.

The enthymeme is powerful because it incorporates the audience and their beliefs into the argument. In supplying the premise from their own understandings of what they believe or know to be true, the audience validates the argument as being "obvious." In recognizing this aspect of discourse, Aristotle was trying to account for how so many arguments seem "rational" and mysterious at the same time.

Aristotle's observations extend to other areas of discourse. Humor, for instance, is deeply enthymematic. Puns are funny because they depend on our previous knowledge of what the misused word should be. Observational humor is funny because quips about human experience depend on our common understanding of human existence. And so on.

But just as enythmemes explain why we should find something funny, they also show why we don't find something funny—or why something that is funny to someone can be offensive to another. Enthymemes work because, by definition, they presuppose a level of agreement between the speaker and the audience. If we don't share the language, we miss the puns. If we come from different social backgrounds or cultural expectations, we miss the joke. In controversial issues—particularly issues of race, sex, religion, and politics—the background of shared opinions and beliefs that humorous enthymemes assume is uncertain, and so would-be comedians need to take care in framing their jokes. That's the challenge and risk of being funny, and why high-profile comedians make the big bucks.

Which brings up the curious case of this week's cover of The New Yorker, which attempts to poke fun at the myths surrounding Barack Obama and his wife:

The cover created a firestorm of controversy, including denunciations by both candidates and a petition drive condemning the cover. In today's New York Times, Maureen Dowd thinks that this firestorm means that Obama can't take a joke, but something bigger than Obama's purported humorlessness may be in play.

Simply put, the folks at The New Yorker forgot to take enthymemes into account. They obviously don’t take those myths seriously—and I wouldn’t expect them to—but their New York parochialism perhaps led them to assume that no one takes those myths seriously. The "humor” of the cover depends on that assumption.

But the editors guessed wrong. The reaction from both the Obama and McCain camps suggests that those myths are far more serious and the assumptions that the white American public has about Obama are far more unsettled than the art editors at The New Yorker think. Indeed, Obama's race remains an issue for many white Americans, who are still confused as to whether or not Obama is a Christian or is or is not the anti-Christ. Rhetorically, that is the issue with the cover. As Aristotle would have reminded The New Yorker, it's all about the enthymemes.

You'll still know nothing 'bout me

2008-07-15T10:37:00.000-07:00

In the most recent issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Jeffrey Goldberg writes about having a recreational MRI to see how his brain was "mapped" or "wired." With his tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he writes of his concerns about having his reactions to various pictures recorded:

What if the sight of Golda Meir provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if the sight of David Ben-Gurion provoked feelings of sexual arousal? What if it turned out that I actually feel disgust at the sight of Bruce Springsteen? To think of all the money I’ve wasted on concert tickets and T-shirts. Most worrisome, of course, was the matter of my wife. Inappropriate activations could have lasting consequences.

Goldberg doesn't much to worry about, because it turns out that the findings of his little exercise are far from clear. While some results seem more obvious than others, the "facts" don't speak for themselves. Rather, they require interpretative intervention to become meaningful. A person has to insert himself or herself into the facts to explain what those facts mean, to transform the results from "data" to "knowledge." For instance, a picture of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad creates an unexplainably dramatic reaction, requiring a psychiatrist to search for an explanation.

“Perhaps you believe that the Israelis or the Americans have the situation under control and so you’re anticipating the day that he’s brought down.” He asked me some questions about my view of Jewish history, and then said: “You seem to believe that the Jewish people endure, that people who try to hurt the Jewish people ultimately fail. Therefore, you derive pleasure from believing that Ahmadinejad will also eventually fail. It’s very similar to the experiment with the monkey and the grape. It’s been shown that the monkey feels maximal reward not when he eats the grape but at the moment he’s sure it’s in his possession, ready to eat. That could explain your response to Ahmadinejad.”

Or whatever. The insertion of a person into the process instantly compromises it, because we're no longer talking about data in isolation but data that has become embedded in a web of human biases and understandings. Of course, the biases and understandings in question are those of an expert relying on a body of peer-reviewed scientific research, but they are still problematic because they are still mediated by human thought. In a nutshell, the lesson of Goldberg's experiment is that our thoughts and motivations are far less open to "impartial" scientific observation than one may think. In today's New York Times, David Brooks notes recent genetic research suggesting that there aren't DNA "triggers" for such things as happiness or aggression.

For a time, it seemed as if we were about to use the bright beam of science to illuminate the murky world of human action. Instead, as Turkheimer writes in his chapter in the book, “Wrestling With Behavioral Genetics,” science finds itself enmeshed with social science and the humanities in what researchers call the Gloomy Prospect, the ineffable mystery of why people do what they do.

I think Sting said it best:

Lay my head on the surgeon's table
Take my fingerprints if you are able
Pick my brains, pick my pockets
Steal my eyeballs and come back for the sockets
Run every kind of test from A to Z
And you'll still know nothing 'bout me

Run my name though your computer
Mention me in passing to your college tutor
Check my records, check my facts
Check if I paid my income tax
Pore over everything in my C.V.
But you'll still know nothing 'bout me
You'll still know nothing 'bout me

Fish's sense of intellectual wonder

2008-07-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

This year marks four centuries since the birth of John Milton, writer of Paradise Lost (synopsis; entire), and Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University and one of the most highly regarded Milton scholars in the world, still can't get enough of the poet whose work has been a constant source of intellectual wonder.

All of this was predicted in 1674 by Samuel Barrow who said to the future readers of the poem, “You who read “Paradise Lost”… what do you read but everything? This book contains all things and the origins of all things, and their destinies and final ends.” How did the world begin? Why were men and women created in the first place? How did evil come into the world? What were the causes of Adam’s and Eve’s Fall? If they could fall, were they not already fallen and isn’t God the cause? If God is the cause, and we are the heirs of the original sin, are we not absolved of the responsibility for the sins we commit? Can there be free will in a world presided over by an omniscient creator? Is the moral deck stacked? Is Satan a hero? A rebel? An apostate? An instrument of a Machiavellian and manipulative deity? Are women weaker and more vulnerable than men? Is Adam right to prefer Eve to God? What would you have done in his place? Wherever you step in the poetry, you will meet with something that asks you to take a stand, and when you do (you can’t help it) you will be enmeshed in the issues that are being dramatized.

In an academic world that is often driven by political posturing, rampant tenure-track careerism, and cynicism, Fish reminds us that wonder should be driving the pursuit of knowledge and higher education. Scholarship isn't about answers. It's about questions, questions that constantly ask us to see and hear in new ways.

So who wrote the serenity prayer

2008-07-11T11:26:00.000-07:00

A few years ago, I decided to lose an argument with a few folks who contended that the "Serenity Prayer" made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous was originally written by St. Francis of Assisi. The real author of the prayer, I knew, was Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the greatest Protestant intellectuals of the 20th Century, but for the sake of the general stability in the room—Franciscans can be quite territorial—I kept quiet.

Now, apparently I was wrong, too, or at least, not quite right. A scholar has found several similar prayers that were actually published prior to the "official" publication date of Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer in 1943. The various candidates:

The original, canonical form attributed to Niebuhr in 1943: "God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."

A prayer by Miss Mildred Pinkerton printed in the Syracuse Herald, January 16, 1936: "O God, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and insight to know the one from the other."

A prayer by Miss Constance Leigh, from the Hartford Courant, October 27, 1938: "I would in closing this brief report voice the hope that we may have the courage to change what should be altered, an understanding and serenity to face what cannot be changed, and the wisdom to recognize one from the other."

I get the point of the critics, but I don't know whether this changes anything. Niebuhr can still be credited with the particular linguistic formation that we canonically understand as the Serenity Prayer. Neither of the two "originals" are the same as the Serenity Prayer that many today recognize. In fact, while they share a similar structure, they lack the simplicity, grace, and power of Niebuhr's particular formulation. In this regard, we can say that Niebuhr indeed "authored" the prayer, in the same way that Henry Ford "invented" the assembly line, even though he incorporated the techniques from meat packing plants.

“Reinhold Niebuhr was a very honest person who was very forthright and modest about his role in the Serenity Prayer," said Fred R. Shapiro, the Yale librarian who found the two earlier versons. "My interpretation would be that he probably unconsciously adapted it from something that he had heard or read.”

Niebuhr may have borrowed the basic sentiment behind the other two prayers—though we would have to establish that he knew these prayers to determine whether he was truly inspired by them—or his prayer may simply reflect the intellectual and spiritual climate of American mainline Protestantism during the Depression and Second World War. (The latter may be more accurate.) But we shouldn't be surprised by this. There is no such thing as a "new idea," only old ideas that are used and reformulated to meet the needs of a particular time. This is what Niebuhr was doing, and we still do the same today.

Political update

2008-07-10T05:38:00.000-07:00

An interesting slide show of updates of Norman Rockwell's famous "Four Freedoms" paintings.

And the campaign quote of the day:

Mr. McCain’s campaign also faced criticism last month when his new Web site carried the slogan, “A Leader We Can Believe In,” seen as similar to Mr. Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In.” And House Republicans were embarrassed in May when it turned out their new catchphrase, “The Change You Deserve,” had been used to market an antidepressant drug.

Nice. Going well.

Health care economics—and ethics

2008-07-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Both John McCain and Barack Obama have presented their health care plans, both of which emphasize variations on a market-based approach. McCain's plan seems to emphasize tax credits supplemented by assistance to help high-risk patients gain insurance, while Obama's plan seems to provide a more controlled market in which insurance providers are required to insure high-risk patients and there is a broader safety net, particularly for children. But in many ways, the language that they use and their basic ideas—"portability," "prevention," "reducing costs," "streamlining"—are the same.

Of course, neither knows exactly how they will pay for the plans. The New York Times suggests that McCain's program will most likely cost more than he says it will, though Obama's is probably not any better.

In a significant book, Charles Dougherty has noted the ways in which health care economics is an ethical issue as well. That is, we need not only to understand the efficiency of the health care market but also the unexamined, and perhaps more fundamentally disturbing, ethical question that the American health care system often presupposes: Is health care a fundamental human right, and if so, what does that mean for the delivery and access of health care in the United States?

Dougherty examines a variety of perspectives, not to choose the "best" but to survey the options:

Utilitarianism: Is health care a means for ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of persons? If so, then the most aged and infirm must be allowed to die or perhaps euthanized.
Egalitarianism: Does the intrinsic value of human life require us to do absolutely everything to preserve and extend it? If so, then the health care system risks becoming bloated and unsustainable.
Libertarianism: Should people be allowed to exercise the maximum amount of freedom in making health care decisions through the development of a free market? If so, one should be prepared to live with inequalities in access that arise from mental deficiencies and economic disparities.
Contractarianism: Should the health care system emphasize a level of access to care that all reasonable persons believe to be "fair"? If so, one must commit oneself to an on-going discussion about what constitites "fair" in a pluralistic society that has shown itself to be unable to begin such a discussion on anything, let alone come to an agreement.

Two campaigns, two problems

2008-07-08T05:40:00.000-07:00

John McCain is shaking up his campaign team, and not a moment too soon, since he's been foundering for weeks, if not months. But before Republicans get psyched, they need to read this paragraph:

Mr. McCain is uncomfortable firing people or banishing them entirely. His orbit remains filled with people who have been demoted without being told they are being demoted, like Mr. Davis, who continues to hold the title of campaign manager even as Mr. Schmidt manages the campaign. Yet, Mr. McCain inspires uncommon loyalty in those who serve with him — hence the willingness of Mr. Murphy to consider coming back into the McCain campaign, despite his own rather brutal history of enmity with Mr. Davis.

Loyalty is a good thing, of course, but the hesitancy of McCain to take a direction—any direction—out of fear that it would alienate a staffer or close friend suggests executive weakness. Would he run the White House this way? That sort of management style is the stuff of Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, neither of whom are worth imitating.

On the other side, Bob Herbert suggests that Obama's new penchant for realism is sparking cynicism among those who bought into his idealism. This is a potential problem insofar as it seems to dampen the enthusiasm of Obama's supporters, enthusiasm that Obama is counting on to boost voter turnout in states where working class white voters distrust him.

Partly, the problem emerges from the way the Democratic party's long-held position as the party of idealistic identity politics. While this gets the faithful out, it's also a losing position. Clinton went one way. Obama is searching for another. He may not need to find that vision to win; McCain's mismanagement of his campaign may cede the field. But if he does, watch out.

Three days

2008-07-07T06:11:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, the New York Times reported on the discovery of a tablet—or, rather, the interpretation of a tablet that was bought about a decade ago—that suggests that the Christian tradition of the death and resurrection of the Jewish Messiah was neither as new nor as scandalous as previously thought.

Most likely discovered in the Dead Sea region, the tablet's authenticity is taken to be credible, and like the more famous Dead Sea Scrolls, which give us an idea of what a radical group of Jews called the Essenes were doing and thinking in the years around the birth of Jesus, it is thought to add to our understanding of the intellectual climate of the time.

The tablet, apparently written following the death of what a group of Jews thought as a candidate for their long-awaited Messiah, contains 87 lines of text, many of which are indecipherable or difficult to read. The English translation of the text (in Word) makes no effort to hide the difficulties in reading or in interpretation. The lines that are getting the most attention are the following:

19. In three days you shall know, that(?)\for(?) He said,
20. (namely,) yhwh the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Israel: The evil broke (down)
21. before justice.

as well as line 80:

To make his case about the importance of the stone, Mr. Knohl focuses especially on line 80, which begins clearly with the words “L’shloshet yamin,” meaning “in three days.” The next word of the line was deemed partially illegible by Ms. Yardeni and Mr. Elitzur, but Mr. Knohl, who is an expert on the language of the Bible and Talmud, says the word is “hayeh,” or “live” in the imperative. It has an unusual spelling, but it is one in keeping with the era.

Two more hard-to-read words come later, and Mr. Knohl said he believed that he had deciphered them as well, so that the line reads, “In three days you shall live, I, Gabriel, command you.”

The discovery and interpretation of the text is interesting, but the larger question is what these lines actually mean. Speaking conservatively, they suggest that the motif of a 3-day resurrection was part of the Jewish tradition, though how widespread this belief was is unclear. We shouldn't be surprised by this, since the Gospels draw heavily from the imagery of the Jewish prophets to show that Jesus was precisely who he said he was. (The Book of Jonah, for instance, also has the prophet in the belly of a whale for three days before he is spouted back on land.) As a result, this leads credence to the historical-political reading of the Gospels that many contemporary scholars support:

Mr. Knohl is part of a larger scholarly movement that focuses on the political atmosphere in Jesus’ day as an important explanation of that era’s messianic spirit. As he notes, after the death of Herod, Jewish rebels sought to throw off the yoke of the Rome-supported monarchy, so the rise of a major Jewish independence fighter could take on messianic overtones.

But if the idea of a resurrection was part of the Jewish canon before Jesus arrived, what accounts for the hostility and violence of the Jews toward the early church? Something deeper must have been going on. The early church, perhaps, was more than just literary tropes or a political cause.

David Horowitz is freaking out right now

2008-07-03T05:46:00.000-07:00

Because he won't know what to do with himself. After all, he has created a career fighting the activist counterculture academics of the 1960s, painting all of academe is a haven of iniquity and poststructuralist evil.

But this is all changing, the New York Times reports, as the vanguard of Baby Boomer intellectuals who teach in America's universities are nearing retirement age. "More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969," Patricia Cohen writes. "How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets."

In their place is a new crop of younger folks who, while still overwhelmingly liberal, are no where nearly as politically partisan and radical as their parents. Or in some cases, as the young academic quoted in the story says, their grandparents.

Could this mean a new trend in the perception and self-definition of American academia? Truly, the inexorable conflict between radical countercultural ideologies and the vitriolic, anti-intellectual, and often paranoid ravings of conservative critics had to end some time. But what will this new generation bring? Will they mark a return to the civic republican style of the nineteenth century, when academics sought to steep students in great ideas to allow them to enter the public sphere? Or will they bring a bureaucratized, intellectually safe, glorified-high-school-teacher sort of existence to an industry—and I do not shrink from calling it that—that is struggling to justify its existence and costliness?

The plugger economy

2008-07-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

Newsflash: The economy is tanking, but not tanking enough. The lingering recessionary tendency is more like a chronic back pain or knee injury that you need to take ibuprofen for. Sure, surgery might work, but know one knows what to do except wait it out and see if it works itself out on its own.

In reading the article, I began to wonder whether we're looking at a new type of economy, in which the fast times and fast fortunes of the technology markets are giving way to a slower sort of pace. It reminds me of Gary Brookins's cartoon Plugger, which "chronicles the hardworking people the world depends on . ... the 80 percent of humanity who unceremoniously keep plugging along."

Don't get me wrong. When the economy is bad, people hurt. But for the fat and happy, getting in touch with their inner plugger may not be a bad thing.

Favorite quote:

“Slowing wage growth and falling employment is absolutely toxic if your business is selling anything to consumers,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics.

Of course, he means businesses in the consumer product industry, but it's still kinda funny.

An election about big ideas

2008-07-01T05:44:00.001-07:00

Barack Obama is going after young evangelical Christians, the New York Times is reporting. McCain is not, or cannot. This may not hurt him, since many older conservative evangelicals will refuse to support Obama because of Obama's support of abortion rights, but Obama is looking for younger evangelicals, who are less interested in the hard-core Christian right—what Andrew Sullivan calls "Christianist"—point of view. But the support of this group is far less certain:

Gabe Lyons, founder of the Fermi Project, a nonprofit group that educates church and youth leaders about Christianity and society, said many young evangelicals from the left and right had been turned off to politics.

“Obama is doing a better job of talking about his religious views and values than John McCain is,” Mr. Lyons, 33, said. “The challenge is that the closer young evangelicals get to understanding his policies the more they will struggle with them and many will slowly back off because for them abortion is such a huge point.”

I don't know if Obama will be able to pick off many of these younger folks in the same way that he has other young people disaffected by politics. If he does, this will raise deeper concerns for older evangelicals about the power and sustainability of their movement. After a half century of moving into the culture, they may begin to wonder if they have been corrupted by it.

Bad economics as population control

2008-06-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting cover story over the weekend by Russell Shorto in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on the rapidly falling population in Europe. In a nutshell, the birthrate across Europe has dropped throughout the continent to well below what is considered to be the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children per woman. In southern and eastern Europe, the birth rate is 1.3 children per woman.

Demographers describe the new phenomenon as "lowest low" fertility rates. If the trend continues, Shorto suggests, Europe by midcentury will be a shadow of its former self, and the continent will have to confront a variety of daunting—and for some, disturbing—social and cultural changes. In a way, P. D. James's novel Children of Men, which was recently turned into a film starring Clive Owen, reflects the sense of apocalyptic crisis that is dawning upon the continent.

Depending on who you ask, any number factors are causing the decline. P. D. James's novel, unlike the film, draws deeply on Christian imagery to suggest that the falling birthrate is, at root, a spiritual problem. Indeed, as Shorto notes, many of Europe's Christians seem to agree:

After arguing for decades that the West had divorced itself from God and church and embraced a self-interested and ultimately self-destructive lifestyle, abetted above all by modern birth control, they feel statistically vindicated. “Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future,” Pope Benedict proclaimed in 2006. “Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present.”

Certainly, a sense of European spiritual malaise—a sense of meaninglessness, a sense of "why bother?"—could be at work here.

But what is interesting about Shorto's piece is that he suggests that there are other factors in play. While many women in Germany and Austria are indeed preferring to remain childless, many European women actually want to have more children than they currently have. "Women were asked how many children they would like to have," Shorto says, "the average result was 2.36—well above the replacement level and far above the rate anywhere in Europe. If women are having significantly fewer children than they want, there must be other forces at work."

What are these forces? Demographers are noticing is that childrearing is not only a spiritual question but is also an economic one. That is, the conditions of life are such that they are not permitting women to have the children that they want to have. The costs—not only the direct financial costs of raising a child but also the opportunity costs of staying out of the workforce and the relational costs that children bring to bear on the family—are prohibitively high.

Shorto notes that Scandanavia and the United States do not share in Europe's decline in birthrate, but for different reasons. Scandanavian countries have an extraordinary broad network of social welfare that eases the costs of childrearing. The United States, while far less extensive in its welfare system, is far more socially and relationally flexible.

So there would seem to be two models for achieving higher fertility: the neosocialist Scandinavian system and the laissez-faire American one. [Arnstein] Aassve [a Norwegian demographer] put it to me this way: “You might say that in order to promote fertility, your society needs to be generous or flexible. The U.S. isn’t very generous, but it is flexible. Italy is not generous in terms of social services and it’s not flexible. There is also a social stigma in countries like Italy, where it is seen as less socially accepted for women with children to work. In the U.S., that is very accepted.”

Shorto's article is important because it reminds us that societies need to find ways to permit women to have and welcome children, and that this effort is only partially a spiritual one.

McCain's comic book foreign policy

2008-06-27T07:36:00.000-07:00

Last night, I watched Matt Frei on BBC World News America interview Kori Schake, John McCain's Senior Foreign Policy Advisor, ostensibly to determine "her perspective on what policies would prevail in a McCain administration."

Schake, as one would expect, comes with significant foreign policy credentials, including a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and experience at both West Point and the Hoover Institution. So when the interview begain, I expected Condoleezza Rice, someone who could shoot down questions and issues with a laser-like intellect. But I was wrong.

Unfortunately, I can't find the interview anywhere online, but it was the strangest offering from a head wonk on a major party ticket that I have ever seen: moments of silence where I could almost hear crickets chirping, a proposal for a "League of Democracy" that sounds like something a high school freshman would steal from a comic book to fill out a term paper (Will Batman be a member?), and the stunning revelation that, and I quote, "we have to do something about the bad guys."

"Bad guys"? This foreign policy is straight from Saturday morning cartoons. Cobra Commander was a Bad Guy. The Peculiar Purple Pie Man was a Bad Guy. What to you call a serious threat to American foreign policy? The Guild of Calamitous Intent?

I don't think that it is a left-wing critique to say that McCain's entire campaign seems strangely lethargic and intellectually unexciting. We deserve better.

Bishop Zubik's pastoral

2008-06-27T07:31:00.000-07:00

Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh took time off from jury duty to issue his first pastoral letter this week, which I designed.

McCain's computer illiteracy

2008-06-26T07:12:00.000-07:00

Apparently, John McCain doesn't know how to use a computer. Matthew Yglesias finds this odd, contending that it reflects a profound ignorance about the driving force behind the world economy.

Naturally, the McCain campaign has leaped to his defense with eloquence. "You don’t necessarily have to use a computer to understand, you know, how it shapes the country," says Mark SooHoo, McCain's deputy e-campaign manager. "John McCain is aware of the Internet."

I have know idea what this means. I can be aware of the existence of things but not, you know, understand them, and I know of many people who know about computers but can't, you know, use them or understand what they're for. In fact, I have known many such people. Of course, some of these people are indeed quite competent, but they all share one defining characteristic: They are all old.

This little story may have little to say about McCain's character, knowledge of the world, or personal competence as president, but it says much about his age. In a time in which the nation is looking for someone to carry them into the future, a candidate who constantly shows his ties to the past is seriously weakened.

If McCain wants to win, he needs to stop this bleeding, you know, now.

Pro Publica

2008-06-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

Last night, The News Hour on PBS did a story on ProPublica, a non-profit news organization that provides pro bono investigative journalism to newspapers and other new media outlets that have had to lay off their reporting staffs because of budget cuts. News outlets, particularly newspapers, are struggling to meet their bottom lines, and so they are increasingly turning toward cheaper forms of news, like opinion journalism, that are much cheaper to produce than hiring a staff to do actual reporting. ProPublica is attempting to offer a higher-quality alternative.

In a way, ProPublica is attempting to fill a void that has often been filled by public relations organizations, who in their role as press agents have created, pitched, and placed news stories for years, often anonymously. In the 1980s, video news releases produced by public relations and advertising firms provided packaged stories to television news programs, and in recent years, governmental agencies have taken up the practice as well.

VNRs are a controversial practice. The stories may sometimes be good, but they typically offer a distinctly biased version of events. When they are placed in newscasts—often with neither unediting nor comment—viewers are often unable to tell the difference between slanted coverage and actual journalism. As a result, the increasingly widespread integration of news organizations and public relations firms often makes things easier for news providers but more difficult for news audiences.

Where does ProPublica fit in? When it debuted in 2007, the New York Times reported that while the staff was top-notch, it was created and supported by philanthropists with liberal connections. In addition, its mission announces a distinctly democratic—perhaps liberal—bias:

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. We strive to foster change through exposing exploitation of the weak by the strong and the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed in them.

Bias, of course, isn't a problem, since everyone has a bias. The problem is unannounced bias, in which biased coverage purports to be completely neutral. ProPublica will have to be careful in how it announces the investigative coverage it produces, not only for the sake of its own reputation but also for the industry as a whole. In a media landscape in which public relations firms, advertising agencies, activist groups, corporate communicators, and non-profit reporting organizations will increasingly compete with traditional news providers, perhaps ProPublica's greatest service will be to show how quality coverage should occur in a decentralized, chaotic, virtual world.

Pew Survey

2008-06-24T07:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released its latest Religious Landscape Survey. The survey, the New York Times reports, finds that Americans are deeply spiritual—that is, they report that they believe in God, pray regularly, and may even attend church—but are also inclusive and heterodox in their religious beliefs.

The rubber particularly meets the road when it comes to salvation. Americans, the survey suggests, are far more likely to believe in universal salvation instead of restricting salvation to their fellow believers. The Times reports:

The most significant contradictory belief the survey reveals has to do with salvation. Previous surveys have shown that Americans think a majority of their countrymen and women will go to heaven, and that the circle is wide, embracing minorities like Jews, Muslims and atheists. But the Pew survey goes further, showing that such views are held by those within major branches of Christianity and minority faiths, too.

In many ways, such findings are not new. American religion, despite its conservative undercurrents, has often been amorphous and inclusive. Bill Herberg, writing in the 1950s, observed that the religious divisions between Americans were eroding and merging into a single, corporate faith under the heading of the "Judeo-Christian tradition."

Of course, many religious people—particularly Jews—found Herberg's description of American religious life bland and amorphously syncretistic, but its assesment of the religious sentiment of American culture was remarkably accurate. Nevertheless, when Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, suggests that the survey suggests "that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view," he is not describing a new phenomenon but a much longer trend within American society.

The difference, perhaps, is that American religious life is moving away from the Judeo-Christian tradition into a much more complex synthesis, in which Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam are part of the equation. What this will mean—and how traditionalist Christians will deal with it—is yet to be determined.

Zimbabwe's Turn to the Dark Side

2008-06-23T11:36:00.000-07:00

When I learned this morning that Robert Mugabe's tactics of thuggery and violence had caused his opponent for the Zimbabwean presidency, Morgan Tsvangirai, to withdraw from the run-off election and go into hiding at the Dutch embassy, I was, like many people who have been following the election crisis, dubfounded, and I was even more disturbed when I saw a BBC broadcast showing armies of pro-Mugabe supporters with clubs and machetes walking through fields preparing to kill or maim anyone who did not support his tenuous hold on power.

Mugabe has completed his turn from from a Nelson Mandela-like figure to the African equivalent of Darth Vader. The question is what will happen next. The African leaders who are most able to exert pressure on Zimbabwe—particularly South Africa and Mozambique, because they control Zimbabwe's access to the sea—seem unwilling to do so. The New York Times, for instance, notes that South Africa has consitently opposed action by the United Nations Security Council, perhaps because it is concerned that any pressure on the regime could cause it to collapse completely, creating an even greater humanitarian crisis that would destabilize the entire region.

Yet, Brendan O’Neill, writing in Spiked, suggests the problem may not be the lack of outside involvement in Zimbabwe. Ironically, it may be just the opposite: The ardent support of Morgan Tsvangirai by outside governments has encouraged him to look outside the borders of Zimbabwe for support instead of developing a stronger grassroots network within the country. "The events of the past 24 hours demonstrate that Western governments’ relentless exploitation of the Zimbabwe crisis has helped to disenfranchise the Zimbabwean people," he write. "Literally. The logic of Western pressure has made the MDC reliant on the favour and flattery of external forces, rather than on the grit and the votes of its own mass support base."

In withdrawing from contention, Tsvangirai is trying to avoid further violence and possibly genocide. O'Neill, however, sees his actions as inappropriate. This is a time, he contends, in which the Zimbabwean people need to take matters into their own hands. But what does that mean? Is the opposition prepared for armed insurrection? Do they have enough guns? This is certainly what the Mugabe government is preparing for, as his supporters parade through the streets chanting, "Win or war!"

One of the most interesting and potentially important forces for change lies not with military action but with the country's Christian churches. The Tablet writes of Mugabe's struggles to control Christians in the country by encouraging them to become "truly Zimbabwean" or "patriotic." The Anglican Bishop of Harare has done so, though the Catholic Church, as well as other Protestant groups, have stood firm.

The importance of Zimbabwe's Christian churches should not be discounted. They provide a ready grassroots network as well as a moral vocabulary that can help them critique the ruling regime without descending into violence. Faith, not force, may yet hold the key to finding a solution to Zimbabwe's challenges before the nation's instability engulfs all of southern Africa.

Did the Irish save European civilization?

2008-06-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I met someone who worked for the European branch of the American Center for Law and Justice (Pat Robertson's answer to the ACLU). We chatted about his work, and he discussed his latest project, which, in a nutshell, amounted to the subversion of the European Union.

Dum. Dum. Dum.

The issue in question involved the Treaty of Lisbon, which was rejected last week by the Irish people. The Treaty, what the New York Times called "a painstakingly negotiated blueprint for consolidating the European Union’s power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy," was supposed to reform and solidify the governance of Europe. But for more conservatively minded folks, the Treaty's streamlining procedures also meant that member states would give up much of their control over legislation and regulations in the areas of health care and family life. (In other words, states would no longer be able to regulate abortion and gay marriage.)

The ECLJ brief details the concerns.

But while people may disagree with the ECLJ over the controversial moral issues involved, the serious questions about the approval process that they raise are significant. The major problem with the Treaty is that it amounts to a back-door approval of a European governing system without the democratic consent of the people. Ireland, because of its constitution, was the only member state of the European Union that actually voted on it. The 18 member states that already approved the Treaty did so through more diplomatic (that is, closed) means.

Of course, one can see the Lisbon Treaty as a procedural issue, something that ordinary people wouldn't care to understand or be bothered with. But is that any way to begin a government?

Xenophobic race-baiters, unite!

2008-06-18T12:28:00.000-07:00

A few months ago, after watching an insipid History Channel documentary on the anti-Christ of Revelations, it occurred to me that the fundamentalist description of the anti-Christ—that he would be charismatic, come from nowhere, inspire a devoted following that captivated the world, etc.—bore some serious resemblances to Barack Obama.

Of course, in no way, shape or form do I think such a portrayal of Obama is accurate. In fact, I think it is, in a word, kinda nuts and is driven not by religious conviction but out of a xenophobic fear of Obama's "Otherness"—i.e., his race, his name, his non-Western roots. In fact, one could see this xenophobic fear of Obama as reflecting a deeper racial prejudice that is no longer socially acceptable to air in public.

Anyway, when I noted the connection, I became curious, and so I Googled the phrase “obama antichrist” to see what the Religious Right was thinking about it. It turns out that the weblog Wonkette apparently did a similar search in October of 2006 and found only 16,000 pages on Google containing the two words. At the time, Dick Cheney was a far more popular target, with 169,000 pages. This was during the heated mid-term elections, which means that the epithet of "antichrist" was probably used by Democrats, not Republicans. The difference, of course, is that the use of the term by fundamentalist Christians is far more explosive.

The day of the Texas and Ohio primaries, things were far different. I Googled “obama antichrist” at about 9:00 in the morning and got 292,000 pages. Then, in preparing to email some friends about my find, I Googled it again at about 10:30 a.m. and got 382,000. Something, it seems, was brewing, and it has continued to brew.

Since then, the number of pages associating Barack Obama and the End of Days have ebbed and flowed with his chances. Today, when I searched the terms, the number surpassed one million for the first time.

Some of these pages are humorous ones, but many more, like this one, aren’t.

While this is far from a scientific survey, in many ways, the growth of the association between Barack Obama and the demonic on Google seems suggestive of a larger trend, particularly among Christian evangelicals, that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

This leads to some serious questions, not about the eschatological significance of Barack Obama—after all, the antichrist has been everyone from the pope to Colonel Sanders (whose chicken has to be demonic)—but about the tactics that the Religious Right could use later on during the general election. If you want to mobilize evangelical voters, and you don’t care how you do it, you can create a grassroots campaign naming him as the antichrist and warning about the demonic regime he will institute once elected. (This is not unusual. John Guest, the leader of a evangelical megachurch in Pittsburgh, where I live, called John Kerry “Satan’s candidate” in 2004.)

Time will tell.

Haunted by Google?

2008-06-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I received my copy of the June/July Edition of The Atlantic Monthly, arguably the best general interest magazine in the country. I was stunned to find out that the cover story was about the deleterious effects of Google on my cognitive capacities.

Nicholas Carr frets:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Googleplex is destroying cognition, in short, because it makes us intellectually lazy. We don't have to think as hard, so we don't.

To his credit, Carr recognizes that his concerns aren't new. In fact, they are precisely the same concerns that Plato had about writing.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

But Carr is still "haunted" by the horror of Google and Internet technology.

In reflecting on the article, I'm still puzzled. What in the world does this handwringing even mean? Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology always changes our understanding of ourselves in unexpected, even perverse ways. But that doesn't mean that we're all going to die. The underlying capacity of human beings--creativity, curiousity, ability to learn and adapt, etc.--won't change. So Google is making us think in different ways. In some ways, it will be better; in some ways, it will be worse.

It's not like a meteor is going to wipe out the planet. Oh. The Atlantic covered that last month.

Back On

2008-06-18T06:33:00.001-07:00

So I decided to start blogging again today. We'll see how this goes.

Debating ‘just war’ 60 years after Hiroshima

2005-08-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

A version of this article appeared in the July 29 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic.

Sixty years ago this August 6, an American bomber nicknamed the Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In bringing an end to the Second World War, atomic weapons forever changed how we think about war and peace.

September 11, 2001 was also a watershed moment. With the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States encountered a foe that didn’t flinch from killing civilians and used hatred as a rationale for such killing. That morning, Americans awoke to new kind of war.

The years since have seen American troops fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American Catholics, along with Christians and non-Christians the world over, have thought deeply and argued passionately about national security and the appropriateness of fighting wars in a modern age.

The debate isn’t over, nor should it be. But the Catholic just war tradition can offer a starting point for the road ahead.

Talking about war
In the millennium and a half since Saint Augustine started thinking about the Christian response to war, Christians have debated how, if ever, war could be just. More recently, thinkers of other traditions and perspectives have joined the “just war” tradition, resulting in an incredibly complex mix of positions.

Some thinkers on war, particularly since Hiroshima, believe that war is so intrinsically bad that no argument or situation can ever justify it. This perspective, called “pacifism,” advocates non-violent means of conflict resolution.

At the other end of the spectrum, “realists” see war as a part of the human condition. In a world of rogue states and lawlessness, realists emphasize power and pragmatism in dealing with threats. They reject pacifism as ineffective, and they may also tend to see the rights of others as irrelevant to a state’s need to protect itself.

The just war tradition strikes a delicate balance between pacifism and realism, and this balance is reflected in church teaching. “Respect for and development of human life require peace,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, but “peace is not merely the absence of war, and it is not limited to maintaining a balance of powers between adversaries” (2304).

Like pacifists, Christians working from just war theory pursue peace, but like realists, they also understand that they shouldn’t seek peace at any price. Just as there can be unjust wars, where states aggressively destroy their neighbors, there can also be unjust peaces, where a state stands by as innocent lives are destroyed.

Just war theory believes that peace requires Christians to work and struggle for justice, and it offers guidance in that struggle.

What makes a just war?Just war theory is based in prudence, or the virtue of thinking practically in the light of faith and reason. Instead of taking a blanket, yes-or-no approach to war, just war theory works by giving a series of conditions nations must meet before, during and after hostilities.

By using conditions and principles, just war theory helps Christians evaluate the real conditions in front of them and make practical decisions that have the best chance of protecting the common good.

Christians using just war principles can come to support some conflicts but not others. For instance, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops believed that the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan was justifiable but has strongly questioned the war in Iraq.

Though Christians of goodwill may disagree about how just war principles should be applied in a given case, just war theory provides a practical, yet faithful framework for understanding war.

Because just war theory believes that war should be avoided, the criteria for breaking the peace are rigorous and complex. Though the exact number of requirements can vary depending on the framework used, a nation typically has to meet six conditions.

The cause must be just. Just wars must have legitimate reasons, such as self-defense or protection of the innocent.

The nation must have the right intent. Just wars must be fought to keep the peace and further legitimate ends.

The nation declaring war must do so with proper authority. Just wars must be declared by governments that have the legitimate support of the people.

War must be the last resort. Just wars can occur only when every other avenue has failed.

The war must have some probability of succeeding. Just wars must have clear objectives that are attainable and understood at the outset.

The war must not make matters worse. Just wars must have real benefits that outweigh the costs in casualties and human suffering violence causes.

During war, warring nations must meet other requirements. They must be able to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants, and they must respond proportionately to their enemy. Once hostilities have ended, the only acceptable peace is a just peace, and warring nations should also provide humanitarian and other assistance to deal with the effects of violence.

At least, that’s what the ideal just war looks like on paper. Nevertheless, even nations that meet the tests of just war can find themselves in situations that push the boundaries.

New world, new realities
Beginning with the First World War, the realities of modern war have tested the limits of just war theory. Poison gas, biological warfare, nuclear weapons, “asymmetrical” guerilla wars and rising civilian death tolls have each, in their own way, challenged just war theory’s neat categories.

For many, the war on terrorism throws the categories of just war out the window or at least requires major revisions to the theory. The reasons behind their positions, however, vary depending on their political outlook.

Some Catholics will modify just war theory to defend a thoroughly pragmatic approach to the war on terror. Terrorists don’t play by just war’s rules, they argue, and adhering too strongly to the traditional just war principles is simply too dangerous for national security.

Others, pointing to John Paul II’s repeated denunciations of war, also tend to reject just war theory, but for opposite reasons. Citing the “culture of life” and the indiscriminate terror of modern war, they argue that pacifism, or at least an extremely stringent approach to just war, is the only legitimate Christian course.

As always, just war theory offers a middle road. But in the new war on terror, the road isn’t always clear.

Preemptive wars, like the current conflict in Iraq, are an outstanding question. Though it may seem necessary, what are the conditions that make preemptive war just? Even if a nation’s initial intentions are good, do good intentions outweigh the suffering war causes if the military intelligence is wrong? What if a preemptive war makes things worse?

Legitimate authority is another issue. Though the Catechism leaves the evaluation of a war’s justice “to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (2309), does it then give the government a “blank check” to pursue whatever course it deems necessary? What is the role of public opinion, or even international opinion, in recognizing a war’s legitimacy?

Catholic thinkers and others continue to wrestle with these and similar questions to craft a theory of just war that meets the post-September 11 reality.

“In this debate, the middle may turn out to be the cutting edge,” Jesuit Fr. Drew Christiansen, the editor of the Jesuit magazine America, has observed. “It is there we find people wrestling with the complexities of church teaching, rather than simply overthrowing the tradition or using theology to bless war as an instrument of policy.”

Post-Mortem

2004-11-10T10:07:00.000-08:00

It's official: The Democratic Party does not understand political discourse.

Note what I said. I'm not saying that they don't understand issues. Or media theory. Or public relations. Or grassroots organizing. I'm suggesting that amidst the recriminations and soul-searching, the Democratic Party needs to think about more than their strategies. They're going to need to do some thinking about how they communicate and what their communication needs to do.

What I'm suggesting requires a level of abstraction in thinking about the relationship between politics and culture. Communication creates culture. Politics generates communication. Politics shapes culture by communicating. That is why we study political messages and speeches, also called "political discourse."

One of the important things to understand about political discourse, though, is that it includes more than Crossfire or the editorial page of the New York Times. As University of Colorado professor Gerard Hauser has argued, political discourse is often "vernacular," meaning that occurs constantly and everywhere, from shopping malls to bumper stickers, as people come to terms with the events in their lives.

Of course, pollsters tell us that average Americans don't care about politics, except every four years or so, when they are coaxed up to the polls like so many sheep. Hauser, though, argues that the disengagement pollsters find comes from the fact that they only look at polls. His "vernacular voices" don’t speak in statistics.

When we step away from the polling, he says, and we look at homes and churches, Internet chat rooms, talk radio, Weblogs and scores of other situations, we find politics happening. Howard Dean understood this, but his campaign couldn’t translate it into action because the people he found weren’t reliable voters.

Nevertheless, Hauser’s disenfranchised publics are important. For decades, they have been arguing in barber shops about their leaders, like neglected children quarrelling over adults who ignore them. If they can be located and tapped, they represent an extraordinary reserve of political power.

This election spoke in a deeply vernacular voice. Here in Pittsburgh, I heard stories of people whose political yard signs were stolen and whose cars were vandalized because they had the wrong bumper sticker. Near the election, two boys were suspended for changing the sign in front of their school to support John Kerry. While rebellious, these stories reflect a passionate political sentiment we often miss. In a way, those petty crimes were politics in disguise.

It's not that campaign commercials and newspaper endorsements aren't important. Hauser argues that they are. It's just that, from Hauser's perspective, media events become artifacts regular people interpret alongside their conversations with the people they know. John Kerry's performance in the debates was important, but as it turned out, it was not enough because it spoke to the needs of the media elite and the educated classes who enjoy nuance, not the plain middle of America, who want to be spoken to simply.

George W. Bush's rhetorical strength is his ability to speak to plain people plainly. This ability is crucial because it is the language his public uses everyday. They are simple people who work and live and die in small towns with strong and simple values. They live by common sense.

I do not mean that Bush's supporters are unintelligent, nor do I mean that political discourse should speak to the lowest common denominator. Political communication, from the days of Aristotle, has always aimed at helping people make decisions about important, but often complicated, things. Rhetoric makes the ideal concrete, and the best rhetoric deals with complexity in ways regular people understand and experts respect. This is difficult, but not impossible. If the elite left finds Bush incapable of making a coherent argument, it could be because Bush is a rhetorical one-trick pony. It could also be because he isn't talking to them and never will.

Bush's public forms around values issues like abortion and homosexuality because those issues are incredibly concrete. Unlike economic issues, which seem these days to be like predicting the weather, abortion and gay rights deal with real people and real situations. Terrorism reflects real fear.

Kerry's strongest issue was the Iraq war. Iraq, at least in my conversations with the people I know, presented an extremely difficult problem, and if there wasn't a sense of unease at the beginning, there was one as time went on. This was also an incredibly concrete issue, and it will continue to be one as more and more Americans come to know people who are fighting and dying there.

The problem, though, was that Kerry never spoke about the war or anything else in a concrete way. Moreover, his silence and fumbling on moral issues--his incomprehensible response to the abortion question at the end of the second debate reflected this problem--also prohibited him from crystallizing into a candidate that people could understand and talk about. From the start, the campaign was a referendum ON Bush and ABOUT Bush but never FOR Kerry.

Early this summer, some friends asked me what Kerry needed to do to win. I said that he needed to tell an alternative story to the one that Bush was telling. Bush's campaign told a story of warfare against terrorism and other moral forces threatening civil society. His story percolated into a variety of forums: A prominent local pastor, I heard, preached that the election was a struggle for the fate of Western civilization and suggested that a vote for Kerry was essentially a vote for the anti-Christ.

Kerry's story had to deal with the same issues and deal with the same past. But it needed to move into a new direction toward hope. Now, I know that Kerry and Edwards both proclaimed that "Hope Was On The Way," but they never told anyone what that hope actually was. Hope was a term standing out there in space, a Platonic form caught in the ether. It lacked critical power. It never crystallized around an image that allowed them to address terrorism in a realistic way while dealing with education and fiscal responsibility and that still made us want to get out of bed in the morning. It never spoke any of the values of justice and equality that drove the Democratic Party throughout the middle of the twentieth century.

Instead, we got a media blitz featuring a tired hero from a war we would rather forget. Kerry based his campaign around an image shattered by Karl Rove in about five minutes, no matter how much lying took place. When the image was gone, there was nothing more to do, and Kerry's campaign sat in stunned silence for three months as Bush redefined him. Only Bush's poor performance in the debates deterred his reelection, but only among independents. Bush's plain-speaking public always distrusted those smart-talking Yalies anyway.

The issue for the Democratic Party in the next four years is to recover a sense of purpose and a sense of story. What are you for? Not what WERE you for, but what ARE you for? What is your vision of the future? How does this vision fit with the past? What are its roots in the present? What values do you offer? How to you integrate these values into an increasingly conservative culture? And how do you speak this plainly to people? How do you put this in people's hands so they can touch it and feel it? How do you make people passionate for you again?

I am not suggesting something pie-in-the-sky. The issues are already there: terrorism, freedom, poverty, racism, jobs, fair wages, the environment. The question now for the Democrats is finding a way of putting those problems together in a concrete way that makes sense to people, elites and non-elites alike.

I am, however, describing something incredibly difficult, which is probably the reason why the Democrats haven't been able to do it. Organized labor is in trouble. People have lost faith in Progress. The religious coalition that drove the civil rights movement and gave Democratic politics its moral high ground has been abandoned. Our society is far more conservative than it was twenty-five years ago. The budget deficit puts significant limitations on what we can actually do. And the leadership has no answers. Recent Democratic candidates have gotten by on co-opting Republican principles and renaming them as their own. Democrats who live out the stories of the past risk becoming things of the past.

Yet, the past has examples. I think of William Jennings Bryan, who talked to farmers about economics by talking about silver and gold. I remember reading about a Depression-era farm girl whose prized possession was an FDR button, because hearing his voice on the radio gave her hope. I think of JFK and RFK, who were able to give people a sense that their problems could be solved.

Heady stuff. Instead of polls and electioneering, the Democrats need to put the art back into political science. It's the vision, stupid. But it's more than a vision. It's a way of looking at and living in the world. It means finding the highest ideals of society and making them live again.

Priests explore ways to meet future needs

2004-10-13T05:36:00.000-07:00

Note: This piece was published in the October 8, 2004 edition of the Pittsburgh Catholic

At the opening of the triennial clergy convocation at the Oglebay Resort and Conference Center in Wheeling, W.Va., Sept. 27, Bishop Donald Wuerl addressed the challenges of serving the faithful as the number of priests declines.

The diocesan church, he said, must “re-dimension” the ministerial responsibilities of the priest in response to the circumstances of the present day.

“Re-dimensioning,” he said, will not involve radical change but rethinking the priest’s role in parishes based on church teaching, pastoral experience, the wisdom of the faithful and a deep devotion to the Eucharist.

Priests have always had to juggle expectations from parishioners, society and even themselves, Bishop Wuerl said. The current challenge for priests in Pittsburgh is finding new ways to balance those expectations while respecting the needs of priests during a time of change.

“We need to minister to our people, but we also have to care for one another,” he said. “We love our ministry, and we must recognize how we may best carry out our ministry while respecting our own human needs.”

The diocese has projected that only 240 of priests currently serving in the diocese will be in service in 2009. In 2010, there will be as many diocesan priests as the diocese has parishes.

The condition is unlikely to improve. Though four men were ordained in 2004 and 22 are in various stages of seminary formation, the ratio of priests to parishioners will continue to expand dramatically, increasing the pressure and stress on priests to meet ministerial needs.

As he urged continued prayer for vocations to the priesthood, Bishop Wuerl said the practical matter is meeting the needs of the faithful, which exist regardless of the number of priests. “Fewer priests,” he has emphasized, “does not mean less ministry.”

The diocese’s priests agree. Basic pastoral needs — like Masses and hospital visitations — are at the top of their priorities. The question is how those needs will be met, priests say, and this is where expectations may need to change.

One area of change is in priest assignments. The era of parishes with plenty of priests to go around is over, and priests in Pittsburgh are currently spread thin. In the diocese’s 215 parishes, 152 priests are solo pastors, with six priests assigned as administrators of multiple parishes. Of the remaining parishes, 47 have a pastor and parochial vicar, and only nine have a pastor and two parochial vicars.

Having fewer priests in parishes requires new expectations for priests and parishioners. Priests are incredibly busy, and parishioners have to recognize this fact. But priests also need to be free to move to where the need is greatest.

This past summer, the Priest Council recommended to Bishop Wuerl that no policy be enforced regarding how long a priest needs to be ordained as a requirement for becoming a pastor. Current policy states that a priest should be ordained at least eight years before receiving a pastorate. Changing that policy will give Bishop Wuerl more flexibility in determining when a priest is ready to become a pastor.

In a pastoral message in August, Bishop Wuerl said these changes mean priests may have to change assignments frequently, sometimes with little notice.

A larger area of change lies in meeting pastoral needs. In his address to the Sept. 27-30 clergy convocation, Bishop Wuerl said priests will need to transition from a purely pastoral into a more supervisory capacity.

Instead of handling ministry needs directly, he said, priests in the future could delegate pastoral responsibilities to an expanded pool of people. Laity, through the Institute for Ministries and other diocesan offices, could be equipped to take on more of the organizational and pastoral functions of parish life, as they have already done in catechetical, educational and youth ministries.

In the future, he said, parishes could also work together more, finding ways to share resources, hire personnel or coordinate Mass and confession schedules to ease the burden on priests.

Another source of help will be the permanent diaconate. Once the Vatican promulgates the new norms on the permanent diaconate, Bishop Wuerl said, the diocese will begin to call another class of deacons to share pastoral responsibilities with priests.

In his pastoral letter, “Envisioning Ministry for the Future,” published Sept. 17 in the Pittsburgh Catholic, Bishop Wuerl announced that through early 2005 parishes and deaneries throughout the diocese will be asked to recommend ways to meet pastoral needs with fewer priests.

Parishes and parish clusters will most likely use a combination of approaches depending on their unique ministry needs. They will need time to decide the direction they will take.

In addition, forming and training lay leadership takes time, and the ordination of a new class of deacons is still years away.

The diocesan-wide consultation will emphasize finding ways for priests, religious and laity to work together.

Though Bishop Wuerl emphasized the purpose and value of the priesthood in teaching and leading the church and in celebrating the sacraments, he also has been clear that religious women and men and laity will also have vital roles to play and vocations to discern.

Following the consultation, Bishop Wuerl intends to publish a pastoral letter providing direction for the future. In the meantime, the diocese will continue to communicate with the faithful through bulletin announcements and regular articles in the Pittsburgh Catholic.

Though the bishop does not dismiss the diocese’s challenges, his message is one of hope.

“This is our moment. In every age in the life of the church it has fallen to the faithful and clergy of that specific time to respond to the issues and circumstances of the hour,” he wrote in his September pastoral letter.

“Out of this will come, with God’s grace, a fruitful development that will only enrich this diocesan church and those whom we serve now and in the future.”

Luther and the Arrogance of Books

2004-09-27T13:06:00.000-07:00

In 1539, Martin Luther was asked to write the preface for a compilation of his German writings. Luther met the request, but reluctantly. As a matter of fact, he opposed the project altogether, in the hope, he said, of relegating his entire body of work to history’s dustbin.

My consolation is that, in time, my books will lie forgotten in the dust anyhow, especially if I (by God’s grace) have written anything good. … There is especially good hope of this, since it has begun to rain and snow books and teachers, many of which already lie there forgotten and moldering. Even their names are not remembered any more, despite their confident hope that they would eternally be on sale in the market and rule churches.

Where others might have indulged in one last swipe at their critics, Luther’s summation seems more like a denouement. Some may detect a note of mock humility here, but Luther was expressing real—but rather odd—concerns about his writings. He wasn’t concerned about what they said. He was concerned that they existed at all.

The most obvious reason for Luther’s concern is that he was worried his followers using his writings to develop a theological system codifying his message of grace alone, in effect creating a system about giving up systems. Yet, his statement also could be helpful in understanding what it means for Christians to write and the place writing should have in Christian intellectual life.

Luther was not the first to raise concerns about writing. Such reflection begins, as so much else, with Plato. In the middle of his Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates spin a tale of two Egyptian gods, Theuth and Thamus. Socrates begins his tale with Theuth, a Prometheus-like figure, bragging about writing, his latest invention for the benefit of humanity. Thamus, though, isn’t impressed. “This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” Thamus warns. “You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

As Eric Havelock has argued, Thamus reflects the uneasiness Plato felt as Greek society adopted the written word. Plato understood the benefits writing brought. Writing offered people the ability to think deeply, permitting high philosophy. It made Plato possible.

However, Plato also believed that writing had a cost. Since they could write things down, people wouldn’t need to remember anything. For the first time, knowing could be severed from the human body. Knowledge would be “out there” on the page, not in the knower’s mind. The text would take on a life of its own, and people would forget any other way of understanding.

The late Jesuit scholar Walter Ong’s history of the transition between speaking and writing, Orality and Literacy, echoes Plato’s concerns. Ong noticed disparities between cultures that primarily wrote and cultures that primarily spoke. Oral cultures know by feeling; literate cultures by reason. Oral cultures understand; literate cultures explain. Oral cultures are defined by their community; literate cultures by their isolation. And, like Plato, Ong suggested that for all writing’s benefits, something irreplaceable was lost in the transition from speaking to books: A different way of knowing that Western literate society, in its hubris, forgot ever existed.

Luther stood at the beginning of another chapter of the age of text. Less than a century before Luther wrote his preface, Gutenberg had invented the printing press. Now, for the first time, the Bible could be put into the hands of everyone. Mass movements could develop. Reformations could happen. If writing made Plato possible, printing made Luther possible.

The ability to print books, though, created an expectation to write books and, in turn, the lure of mass literary success. Writers could become “authors,” original thinkers who “owned” their ideas like property. There could be reputations, cash advances and tenure. Theologians in Luther’s day found the temptation too difficult to resist. Soon, they preened themselves over intellectual minutiae and reputations and wrote snarky reviews of anyone who dared contradict them. The act of writing became an end unto itself. Christian writers could, to borrow Thamus’s phrase, have a show of faith without the reality.

Luther couldn’t stomach the hypocrisy. Such writers, he wrote in the heat of early years of the Reformation, tortured believers with their petty systems and regulations. “The majority deals only with tomfoolery, teaching canon law, papal laws, human teaching, and their own statutes,” he wrote in 1521. “To these things they cling, these they keep, these they teach daily; and they no longer have an opportunity to know the truth.” Libraries became silent Towers of Babel. It would be better, he believed, if they stopped writing altogether.

Luther’s words could expose him to a charge of hypocrisy. Here he was, writing books about the dangers of writing books. However, Luther, like Plato, was after a different sort of understanding than writing alone could give, though he ended in a different place than Plato. Like Calvin, Luther believed that reading scripture correctly was a process guided by the Holy Spirit. “This Spirit can never be contained in any letter. It cannot be written, like the law, with ink, on stone, or in books,” he argued. “Instead, it is inscribed only in the heart.”

Scripture, Luther believed, gives witness to a Truth that lives in everything that exists, a Reality that transcends the marks on the page. We cannot confuse the text with the truth it reflects. No matter how glorious the prose, no matter how authoritative the argument, written words are but traces of a greater truth. For Luther, as for Plato, there was something else than the text, but writing constantly threatened to overstep itself. To forget this would make writing an idolatrous vanity, a flippant academic exercise of epigrams, posturing and twiddle over twaddle.

To resist these temptations, and for the sake of the Gospel, Luther urged his readers to disabuse themselves of their pretensions. “The longer you write and teach the less you will be pleased with yourself,” he concluded in his preface. “When you have reached this point, then do not be afraid to hope that you have begun to become a real theologian, who can teach not only the young and imperfect Christian, but also the maturing and perfect ones.” Christian writing, Luther believed, must never be about personal glory—about selling books and ruling churches—but about the Word itself, which both transcends every word the Christian writer pens.

Luther’s advice is potentially painful for Christian writers, yet also potentially liberating. In today’s publishing world, polemics have become commodities. Everywhere, we find Thomists and Chestertonians, Tillichians and Augustinians. As writers, we fall prey to the same temptations, stalk the same sorts of ideological territories and write the same snarky reviews our predecessors did. And the Gospel suffers for our arrogance. In Christian writing, Luther reminds us, only the Word is necessary. Everything else is so much dust.

Co-Opted

2004-09-21T09:40:00.000-07:00

From the 1860s to the early 1920s, Camilla Gray writes in her history of the Russian avant garde art community, a debate raged over what art should be, whom it should serve and where the artist should fit into society. There were two general positions on the matter. On one side, a crimson thread beginning with the group known as "The Wanderers" and ending with the Constructivists just after the Revolution believed that art existed for something beyond itself, that it should speak to and live within the context of human life. The opposite perspective, a white thread beginning with the wholistic artistic vision of a group known as the "World of Art" community and ending with the abstract Supremacists, believed that art was spiritual and that the artist's job was to bear witness to these highest ideals.

The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863-1992 (Thames and Hudson, 1986, 324 pp.) tells the story of how the crimson thread won. This edition, revised and enlarged from Gray's original 1962 manuscript, tells a story of how art in the modern world took its place in social change, then lost it in the agit-prop of Socialist Realism. Artists dropped their easels--and the idle speculation that took place there--to become industrial designers, creators of a futuristic aesthetic that melded people to machines.

The Marxist overtones in Gray's narrative, though unexplored, are clear. Marx believed that simply creating art for art's sake was unproductive labor because the artist would be simply a merchant of his or her produce and would exist outside the relationship of capital. The artist needed a job that would connect him or her to the material facts of economic life. The Constructivist aesthetic was a materialist aesthetic, which means that it dealt with the materials first and then explored the consequences of those materials. It created art from the bottom-up, using the mundane aspects and motifs of common life as the substance of expression and making stoves, coffee pots, buildings, clothes sites of artistic creativity. It explored the concrete functions of life and the relationships between flesh and steel. But ultimately, it required that the artist have something to do.

In a way, Gray's work suggests that the appeal of Communism among artists was not just ideological but existential. In the triumph of Communism, artists throughout Russia and the West found a purpose again.

In Communism they saw the answer to the sad isolation of the artist from society which the capitalist economy had introduced. In Russia, under this new-born regime, they felt a great experiment was being made in which, for the first time since the Middle Ages, the artist and his art were embodied in the make-up of common life, art was given a working job, and the artist considered a responsible member of society.

The times were heady. Just after the Revolution, during the period of heroic Communism, artists were grasping at ideas that were beyond their reach. Vladimir Tatlin's proposal for a Monument to the IIIrd International was perhaps the most expansive:

Tatlin's Monument was to be twice the height of the Empire State Building. It was to be executed in glass and iron. An iron spiral framework was to support a body consisting of a glass cylinder, a glass cone and a glass cube. This body was to be suspended on a dynamic asymmetrical axis, like a leaning Eiffel Tower, which would thus continue is spiral rhythm into space beyond. Such "movement" was not to be confined to the static design. The body of the Monument itself was literally going to move. The cylinder was to revolve on its axis once a year: the activities allocated to this portion of the building were lectures, conferences and congress meetings. The cone was to complete a revolution once a month and to house executive activities. The topmost cube was to complete a full turn on its axis once a day and to be an information centre. It was constantly to issue news bulletins, proclamations and manifestoes--by means of telegraph, telephone, radio and loudspeaker. A special feature was to be an open-air screen, lit up at night, which would constantly relay the latest news; a special projection was to be installed which in cloudy weather would throw words on the sky, announcing the motto for the day--"a particularly useful suggestion for the intemperate North."

Dealing with the material facts of existence did not mean relinquishing imagination, but channeling it towards revolution. And revolution, it seems, lay at the core of what these artists were about.

The fact that Gray begins her history two years after the liberation of the serfs in 1861 is important. The idea of a modern Russia seemed to be in the air, but no one seemed to know what it meant. A 1907 painting by Valentin Serov, Peter the First, seems to capture the spirit. This painting, drawn in a traditional representational style, shows the tzar striding against the wind as his retinue struggles to keep up. One gets the sense that Russia was--perhaps always has been--struggling against an invisible force pushing it back from the modern West, which it seems to want to be but never can be. The artists Gray depicts are similarly passionate, striking out against the world and themselves. Artists starved to death and engaged in fisticuffs. There is something passionate and violent here, a self yearning to break free. One can see Ayn Rand happening.

Though she died in Russia of hepatitis in 1971, Gray's book is important because of its comprehensive treatment of a period of Russian art history that is little understood. It is not without its defects, though some of these were beyond Gray's control. At the time, few good color images existed of many of the works she discussed, and little about the period has been published. As it admirably perseveres against these issues, however, Gray's brisk prose sometimes moves too briskly. She fails to offer a proper intellectual context, such as the relationship with Marxism, that would make the artists more intelligible.

In addition, the rejection of Constructivism in favor of Socialist Realism and the effects of that rejection on the artists who saw Communism with hopeful eyes is also neglected. This is an important question, because it speaks to the arts in our own time, when artists of all kinds have been incorporated into the relations of capital. What happens to art when it becomes a commodity, when it must become "useful"? What happens to artists when they face censorship, no matter how noble the reason? And human creativity? In finding a purpose and a paycheck, the artist runs the risk of losing her soul.

The Zombification of Cultural Criticism

2004-09-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

Found a fascinating piece today by James Heartfield in the on-line journal Spiked.

Heartfield's thesis is that the radical left's critique of the Bush administration's Iraqi escapades is based on Marxist terminology that doesn't fit anymore, largely because Marx's critical vocabulary is based on the idea of revolution, the imminent demise of capitalism and the movement toward a more just society. What Heartfield finds is instead the deployment of terms in the absence of any vision or hope for the future. The terms, Heartfield argues, have become "zombies" marching on without any context or meaning.

The historical order of the categories - 'primitive accumulation', free trade, imperialism - arises out of the analysis of the transient character of capitalism as a mode of social organisation. But today's critics have no real sense of transition, and consequently the categories all collapse into each other, losing their specificity. Categories that were developed to highlight the historical transience of capitalism are wrenched out of their context to perform a quite different service. Today they are used only to make a moral case against the presumed inequities of the system. So 'Free trade is imperialism' and the enforcement of copyright is 'the enclosure of the commons'. In the moral critique of imperialism, it is less important what comes after than that the critics demonstrate their ethical superiority in the present.

For all its style, the resulting rhetoric is as cynical and nihilistic as it is suspicious of power relations. It offers nothing but sound and fury. The stunning realization is that, for all its rhetoric, the left is bereft of any vision or critical vocabulary that would help us understand and meet the sociopolitical problems of the day. In fact, he concludes, the only people who seem to have a vision for the future are the people who want to kill us.

The crucial issue of the day is to develop a critical vocabulary different from either the nihilistic vocabulary of the past or the self-justifying status quo of the present. If John Kerry fails (as I think he probably will), it is because he has failed to understand this problem. In effect, he is attempting to fight a war by borrowing the opposition's weapons on alternate Tuesdays.

The political questions of the day are, unfortunately, not political in the way we are led to believe. The debate over capitalism is over, for better or for worse. Bureaucracies of corporate managers handle most of the decisions, and the media does its part to confuse and distract as it attempts to explain why the bureaucracy does what it does.

Our political questions, rather, lie at the level of meaning, basic understanding, value and agency. The issue is not changing the world, because the world is changing enough already, and we've convinced ourselves that there's nothing we can do about it. The issue is changing ourselves and finding a place where we can carve out meaning and develop a politics that makes sense to us.