gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee

The Economy’s Hall of Mirrors

November 20, 2008

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Dear Reader,

Help me understand what’s going on here. Since the beginning of the year the S & P Index has lost nearly 50 percent of its value. And it still seems like it’s only downhill from here. How can this be?

I hate to echo the words of the failed Republican candidate John McCain, but I just have to. Come on, honestly, aren’t the fundamentals of our economy strong — at least if those fundamentals primarily mean productivity? Has the world’s productive capacities shrunk 50 percent in the course of a year? Of course not. If stuff is being produced, and the people producing it are also consumers, aren’t there enough goodies to go around? If consumers weren’t spooked, and if their credit wasn’t tightened, would they be any less acquisitive? I think not. If we were in a drought or some other calamity and unable to produce, I’d understand the collapse, but fundamentally we still have the same amount of goodies and roughly the same relations of production as we had a year ago. So what gives?

I think there are three real reasons for the economic disaster: an economic system that betted on and built itself up on a lot of bad home loans, the caving of this system, and then the resulting credit crunch. All these problems seem to emerge from extreme carelessness in extending credit. In the old days, the problem would have been localized, with irresponsible lenders holding the bag for having given credit to uncreditworthy borrowers. But in a globalized and extremely intertwined economy, that problem exponentially reverberated throughout the whole system.

Still, isn’t the problem just that we have a lot of banks now holding a lot of houses, and yes houses that may have been overvalued?

It’s hard to say, though, what the proper value of anything is other than what people are willing to pay. So I don’t really buy that all these subprime loans were a problem of a housing bubble. If the loans had been made responsibly, there’s no reason that housing values wouldn’t have held and continue to increase.

It feels like the end of a boxing match, with both boxers having been so slammed around that they’re both delirious and sinking, when in reality all parties are really strong.

In the meantime, though everyone is spooked and everything keeps crashing. Is the economy merely and only a mirage, a matter of perception, illusion, and fancy? It seems like it doesn’t really matter that people have the resources to buy stuff and companies have the resources to produce the stuff that people want. I’d really like a new Mac (the one I’m typing on is a few years old) and I do have the money in the bank to buy one, but damn if I’m going to. And that’s only because everyone else if freaking out, so I do, too.

Perhaps the other problem is credit itself coupled with the push to buy as much as you can manage to borrow and the disincentive to sock the savings away. Perhaps what we have is an unsustainable system coming home to roost. We have an economy that thrives when people buy beyond their means. But if they keep buying beyond their means and there’s a hiccup of any sort, the whole hall of mirrors splinters into fragments of glass.
Democracy’s Good Name

November 6, 2008

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Not so long ago it seemed that every progressive person I knew who was over 55 years old was majorly depressed about the state of democracy. It seemed that what George W. Bush had done to democracy’s good name was irreversible. The war in Iraq, the ill will between reds and blues, the destruction of the social safety net: it all seemed totally dire. And that was before the economy caved in.

I’m too much of an optimist to despair, so I just hung in there. And then Barack Obama comes along and starts to give people hope that yes we can save democracy’s good name, that yes we can change this country. And yesterday morning we woke up saying not only “yes, we can,” but “yes, we did.” I’ve been to three parties already and even those who’d been most depressed are giddy with delight and optimism.

Now Obama has a lot to live up to. But I think we need to realize that he’s an emblem, and if he were to “save democracy” then we’re not talking about democracy. Democracy is rule by the people, not rule by a really good guy, no matter how good the guy.

I live outside D.C. and we’re all aflutter around here about what the new government is going to look like. This is fun talk over a beer with friends. But we’re not talking about democracy, not really.

What’s the meaning of democracy? Democracy means a culture in which all who are affected by common matters have a hand and a voice in shaping common matters. That need not mean that everything is decided by referendum but that public matters are matters for public discussion, deliberation, decision in a deep and fundamental way, namely in sensing that what we say matters and then acting accordingly.

With his community organizer background, I think Obama would agree. Let’s hope he’ll govern in a way that allows space for democracy. But for democracy to happen we have to step up and step into that space and continue to take ownership over what happens in public life.
From Student to Scholar

October 23, 2008

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I know there are more pressing matters in the world today, but I want to spread the word about a little book I just read, having picked it up from the Columbia University Press table at the SPEP meeting last week. (That’s the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy — doesn’t exactly slip off the tongue like “SPEP”.) The book is From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor. I think it’s safe to say that I’ve already traversed this path, but I still tend to wonder whether I missed anything along the road. Having finished the book, I can say “no,” nothing new here. But that is only because I had a lot of excellent advice along the way, and I was outgoing enough to network a lot, and had enough hubris to try to publish with great publishing houses (like Columbia). I think a lot of others never learned these lessons, or learned them too late, and many graduate students are just beginning on the road. For all those just beginning or still at the early stages prior to tenure, I highly recommend Cahn’s book. For those who mentor graduate students and junior faculty, I recommend that they read this as well.

It’s a pleasant, short read at under 100 pages. The ten chapters are these:

1. Graduate School

2. The Dissertation

3. Networking

4. The First Interview

5. Dramatis Personae

6. The Second Interview

7. Tenure

8. Teaching

9. Service

10. Research

and then a finale and an epilogue.

It’s a good read, chalk full of sage advice on how to navigate the journey successfully from someone who made it all the way to being provost at CUNY.

This blog of mine gets lots of hits from people curious about the rankings of philosophy departments. If you are a student worried about your future, hell bent on picking the right graduate school that will ease your path, I suggest that you worry less about the rankings, focus more on finding the place that will prepare you to do what you love, look for faculty members whose work you admire, and buy and consult regularly Steven Cahn’s fabulous little book.
Politics of Attack

October 8, 2008

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Today’s New York Times lead editorial echoes what I’ve been thinking about the ugly turn in the presidential campaign. I’m not going to try to say it better, so I’ll just quote the whole piece. (I hope the lawyers don’t come after me.)

It is a sorry fact of American political life that campaigns get ugly, often in their final weeks. But Senator John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin have been running one of the most appalling campaigns we can remember.

They have gone far beyond the usual fare of quotes taken out of context and distortions of an opponent’s record — into the dark territory of race-baiting and xenophobia. Senator Barack Obama has taken some cheap shots at Mr. McCain, but there is no comparison.

Despite the occasional slip (referring to Mr. Obama’s “cronies” and calling him “that one”), Mr. McCain tried to take a higher road in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. It was hard to keep track of the number of times he referred to his audience as “my friends.” But apart from promising to buy up troubled mortgages as president, he offered no real answers for how he plans to solve the country’s deep economic crisis. He is unable or unwilling to admit that the Republican assault on regulation was to blame.

Ninety minutes of forced cordiality did not erase the dismal ugliness of his campaign in recent weeks, nor did it leave us with much hope that he would not just return to the same dismal ugliness on Wednesday.

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. “This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America,” Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin’s new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama’s ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she’s done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers — and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, “sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country.”

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled “kill him!” as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Mr. McCain’s aides haven’t even tried to hide their cynical tactics, saying they were “going negative” in hopes of shifting attention away from the financial crisis — and by implication Mr. McCain’s stumbling response.

We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.

And the tactic of guilt by association is perplexing, since Mr. McCain has his own list of political associates he would rather forget. We were disappointed to see the Obama campaign air an ad (held for just this occasion) reminding voters of Mr. McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five savings-and-loan debacle, for which he was reprimanded by the Senate. That episode at least bears on Mr. McCain’s claims to be the morally pure candidate and his argument that he alone is capable of doing away with greed, fraud and abuse.

In a way, we should not be surprised that Mr. McCain has stooped so low, since the debate showed once again that he has little else to talk about. He long ago abandoned his signature issues of immigration reform and global warming; his talk of “victory” in Iraq has little to offer a war-weary nation; and his Reagan-inspired ideology of starving government and shredding regulation lies in tatters on Wall Street.

But surely, Mr. McCain and his team can come up with a better answer to that problem than inciting more division, anger and hatred.
Political Illogic 101

October 6, 2008

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In Philosophy 101 one of the first things we teach is logic, along with logical fallacies. Here’s the big one we’re starting to see in this presidential campaign, as well as in some comments on this very blog (especially regarding Barack’s Mother): guilt by association. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ” Guilt by association is a version of the ad hominem fallacy in which a person is said to be guilty of error because of the group he or she associates with. ” In response to my Barack’s Mother post, one person noted that Obama’s mother once went to a school where she was taught by a couple of Communists. Merde! I have no idea if this is true. But for the sake of argument, suppose it is. So what? The implication is that this association was more than coincidental but said something sinister about her parents’ character (in sending her to that school) and about the kind of person she would become.

My seventh grade teacher was a right-wing kook who imagined Communist conspiracies around every corner. Does this make me a right-wing kook?

At a meeting in 1996 attended by about eight people, I sat next to Karl Rove. I didn’t stand up and denounce him and disassociate myself from him and all the nefarious things he would later do. Even more “damning,” he and I were both occasional guest hosts of a public affairs program in Austin, TX. Does this make me like Karl Rove? Or does it mean that I moved in some of the same circles as he did and was being polite?

As we enter the final month of the campaign, we’re already starting to get this kind of ridiculous, ugly politics fueled by this logical fallacy. Palin, the attack dog, is already putting it out there: Obama knew Ayers; Ayers was a terrorist; therefore Obama is somehow tainted, suspicious, and dangerous. Any freshman college student can spot the fallacy. Will the American people?

Notice that the fallacy is employed to divert attention from the real issues. There is plenty to talk about: the effects of deregulation, the economy, foreign policy, energy, to name a few; and there are real differences in the two tickets’ positions. Can we talk about those please?

It’s also employed to provide cover for racist fears. How many times have I heard people say, “I just don’t trust him” even when they cannot articulate a single reason for this fear? Guilt-by-association provides a pseudo-justification for distrust, a way of avoiding examining our own psyches and complicated histories.
VP Debate Gets Real

October 2, 2008

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The vice-presidential candidate debate was really interesting — not that anything suprising was said, but for what it revealed. A potential weakness in such a debate is the policy differences within a party’s own ticket. There’s a real difference between Palin and McCain on capping emmissions, civil unions, and ideology, and Palin generally skirted the question. Most of the night she dodged questions, whereas Biden flat out denied that there was any real policy differences between Obama and Biden.

With her lack of expertise and experience, Palin continuously fell back on old Reagan-style ideology. Biden was able to get into real details as well as pitch his message to middle-class America. The larger story going on here is how the two parties’ ideologies connect, or fail to connect, with middle America.
The Real Political Impasse

September 19, 2008

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I had lunch yesterday with my colleague Sara Cobb and one of the things we talked about was how to theorize what happens when people with radically different worldviews begin to fathom the other. She and I are both familiar with successful processes that bring about this change, but we wondered aloud about how to understand theoretically what is happening. I ventured that one thing that seems to happen is that one or more parties will begin to see something amiss in their previous perceptions. The other, who at first seemed to be, for example, someone with alien values and beliefs, suddenly comes into focus as someone with understandable motivations and aspirations. Another thing that seems to happen is that one party will begin to realize that there is a differend at work in the conversation, that a term is being used in totally different ways by the different parties. Part of the task of working through an impasse is to recognize the impasse. In both examples, parties need not get to agreement on solutions; change begins to happen when they start to see the flaws in their initial perceptions.

In the midst of this election, there’s no shortage of impasses between worldviews. As a holder of a blue worldview, the red one looks foreign. I can’t help but think that a supporter of the McCain-Palin ticket is either a creationist or willing to look the other way for the sake of other conservative values, perhaps faith, a free market, apple pie? (The free market part isn’t flying well this week when the Republican executive branch is nationalizing industries!) I know several McCain-Palin supporters who oppose Palin’s extreme views, but have McCain placards in their yard anyway, including two of my gay neighbors. What are they thinking? I don’t want to ask, because I want to stay friendly with these neighbors. (The other 98% of my neighborhood has Obama placards, so the McCain supporters are being plenty brave.) But I really want to know. I’d like to talk about it.

I have had one real conversation with a conservative, Catholic friend. She says she doesn’t like Republicans these days, but she just doesn’t trust Obama either. She’ll vote for McCain, because he’s “her people.” She cares about faith, and she cares about science. She’s pro-life, but she also supports choice. Obama’s not “her people”; she just doesn’t trust him.

I want to ask, but I let the conversation end, what makes someone “your people”? What are the values you care about? Who best embodies them? One conservative blogger has come around and decided that McCain’s no conservative, so he’s going for Obama. Check out his blog here.

The labels get in the way. The issues, the things we care about, need to come to the fore. And we need to find ways to talk across all these differences about the things that matter to us. We need to talk first about what kind of country we want to have, and only after that can we have a real conversation about this election.
Palin Right and Wrong

September 5, 2008

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There’s plenty to complain about Sarah Palin and her views on politics and campaigning. Yesterday I mentioned her insulting views about community organizing. The blogger Brendan Skwire relates a couple of terrific and hilarious anecdotes about calling McCain campaign headquarters to inquire about Palin’s views on community organizers such as the founding fathers and contemporary American volunteers. This criticism is right on.

But another kind of criticism is circulating, and it is totally wrongheaded: that’s the one that says she’s the mother of five, including a child with special needs, so she shouldn’t be running for office. She should be tending her flock. Sally Quinn was mouthing that criticism this morning on CNN: since women often end up with more parenting tasks than men, Palin should be ready to do so. This line of argument is offensive to women, and it is ridden with terrible logic. It may be so that women find themselves taking on more than their share. But this does not mean that they should continue to do so. I would have thought that by now no self-respecting political commentator — and especially no woman — would trot out an argument like that.

Let’s stick to the real issues. There are plenty of them.
Fighting Words

September 4, 2008

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I could barely stand listening to Sarah Palin last night. After a week of high ideas, we get a week of snide mockery. As an antidote, I just listened to one of the speeches I missed during the Democratic Convention, Michelle Obama’s, where she talks at length about her husband’s distinction between the world as it is and the world as it should be. Too often we settle for the difference between the two, but as Barack said, and Michelle remembers, we shouldn’t. We should fight to make the world the way it should be.

I like this kind of fighting. It’s what is otherwise known as ethics, what we in philosophy teach as moral philosophy. In my own work I take ethics to be a performative practice aimed at bringing about a better world. What we take to be “better” isn’t based on moral foundations but on our real, lived aspirations; what we hope would be a more decent and humane world, a world we’d like to bring about and belong to. It’s always to easy to settle for and try to make the best of the world that is. If everyone is out to make a buck, why shouldn’t I. If people have low ideals, why not do the same. To hold out for the world as it ought to be is to fight what is. Let’s fight what be and work for what ought to be. This is the same impetus that Christine Korsgaard noted in Kant’s moral philosophy, the same that motivates Levinas, the same that seems to motivate Barack Obama. It’s not about fighting the power — power is good when we can put it to good use — it’s about fighting the status quo.

Sarah Palin’s speech was also filled with fighting words; but her enemy wasn’t injustice but “their opponents.” All her vitriol was aimed at belittling everything that happened at the Democratic Convention, including the insulting claim that elected officials do more to create change than community organizers do. There was precious little in her speech that explained what she thought would be a better world, what she was ready to have a servant’s heart for. She didn’t mention the specifics, but note that they include teaching creationism, banning a woman’s right to choose whether or not to have an abortion, and exploiting Alaska’s natural resources, even more than McCain has been willing to do.

As for her jab at community organizers, excuse me. When was the last time that officials did anything without either (1) thinking about how it would play with the public or (2) acting because of public pressure? I wouldn’t mind elected officials who acted independently for the public good. I’d just like to see some.

The Republicans are coming on strong accusing the Democratic nominee’s camp of all the usual democratic sins (taxes, spending, big gov) never mind that none of this is part of the Dem’s platform. I wish Obama and company would fight back stronger. So far their language is that the Republicans are disparaging the American people. No, they’re disparaging Obama. It’s time to come back at that.
Summertime

August 13, 2008

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I seem to slack off on blogging in the summer. Good thing this isn’t a job. I’ve spent most of the summer at home at the computer, at the pool, with the kids, doing a little writing, random reading, following the Olympics, going to the gym, cringing at McCain’s ads, hoping Barack can live up to the hype and be what we hope he can be, going for walks, and looking forward to the fall when I’ll be on sabbatical, of sorts, working on my next book.

I notice that certain of my former posts continue to get lots of hits. One set is about philosophy rankings. Clearly there’s a lot of angst out there about what the best graduate schools are for doctoral work in philosophy. Hey, follow your dream, and follow the people you want to study with. Another is my old post about Barack Obama’s mother. Occasionally I’ll get a comment from some right-winger who wants to paint her as a runaway mom who sloughed off her motherly responsibilities, never mind that Obama states in his autobiography that he chose to stay in Hawaii with his grandparents to attend high school there, a very nice high school indeed.

So while I’ve been absent from posting, the blog continues to have some use. By the end of August I will probably start posting again more regularly. Until then, enjoy the sun.