The philosopher Charles Taylor was awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize of $1.5 million on Wednesday. I like it when good things happen to good people. I also like how Taylor questioned the very notion of the prize “for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” An intellectual might indeed wonder whether there are spiritual truths “out there” waiting to be discovered, but of course this is the raison d’etre that Sir John Templeton set up the prize. See the New York Times article in which Peter Steinfels writes, “Professor Taylor immediately noted that the idea of ‘discovery’ in spiritual matters was ‘an analogy to scientific discovery in chemistry, physics and so on.’ In answering a question later, he went further, worrying aloud that ‘the notion of discovery here by analogy with natural science a little bit falsifies the picture.’” No doubt.
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If you want to get a sense of what’s happening on the ground the world over, visit Global Voices online. It’s a metablog based at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. The content comes in from volunteer editors, themselves bloggers, from all over the world. Each editor “listens in” on the blogosphere in his or her part of the world and then sends in regular roundups of what bloggers are saying. Check out the regional roundups or just click on a country. This is a great way to hear how people are making sense of events the world over.
For example, read about how dismal the situation still is for women in Afghanistan or how the right to own property is doing better than the right to vote in China or the situation of street children in South Asia. The roundups also provide links directly to the blogs.
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I just came across this interview of a few months ago. Note some interesting comments about Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin…
Interview with Martha Nussbaum, “Philosophy and Public Life,” by Stelios Virvidakis for Eurozine
Political philosopher Martha Nussbaum discusses philosophy’s capacity to influence public life; the future of political liberalism and the role of the state; and her critique of radical feminist thinkers including Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.
Stelios Virvidakis: What do you think about the possibility of philosophy playing a more active role in public life, education, applied ethics, and so on?
Martha Nussbaum: There are many possibilities. And countries are very different. I find that the US is in a way one of the most difficult places for philosophy to play a public role because the media are so sensationalistic and so anti-intellectual. If I go to most countries in Europe I’ll have a much easier time publishing in a newspaper than I would in the US. The New York Times op-ed page is very dumbed down and I no longer even bother trying to get something published there because they don’t like anything that has a complicated argument. So I find the US very frustrating. At the other end of the spectrum…[continued here]
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Full disclosure: I have two immediate links to Karl Rove. First, I sat next to him at a meeting in Austin, Texas, in the late 1990s when he was the political mastermind behind Dubya’s governership of Texas. There were about eight people in the room. I don’t remember saying anything but “hello” to him. Second, there was once a small item in the Austin American Statesman noting that Karl and I were two new occasional guest hosts of a public affairs program on the local public television station. My interviewees included Richard Rorty and Ernie Cortes. I don’t think Karl ever interviewed any pragmatist philosophers or community organizers.
But enough about me. What about Karl? This morning’s New York Times has him linked to an “early query over dismissals” of U.S. attorneys. Yes, even before Alberto R. Gonzales showed up to take over the justice department, Karl Rove dropped by the office of a white house lawyer asking if it would be possible to start replacing some “underperforming” prosecutors. As Kyle Samson (a White House lawyer who later became Gonzales’ chief of staff and this week resigned), recounted in an email, “If Karl thinks there’s the political will to do it, then so do I.” In that email, Sampson also wrote, “The vast majority of U.S. Attorneys, 80-85 percent, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc.”
Get it? Doing a good job as a U.S. attorney, in their minds, equals being a “loyal Bushy.”
I’m hoping that, contra Rorty (see his “Solidarity or Objectivity” article in his collected papers), there’s got to be more to “doing a great job” than solidarity. Or perhaps, with Rorty, solidarity can be more than narrow factionalism. A measure for even political performance should be more than does it promote the values of me and mine, of my partisan faction, but whether it promotes something a little bigger than that. Maybe a U.S. attorney should be looking out for the larger aspirations of the U.S. (and I’m hoping these are something better than what we’ve seen lately) and not just the Bush clan?
Rove so far has deflected fall out from the Valerie Plame scandal. How’s he going to fare here?
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See also today’s Daily Kos
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A friend told me this morning that when he was in graduate school in public policy he mentioned to his advisor that he might opt for the concentration in public policy and democracy. His advisor advised him: “Don’t bother.”
“Is that because the school’s offerings in democracy were lame?” I asked. “Or because the idea he thought the idea was lame?”
The latter. Seems the adivsor didn’t see what democracy could possibly have to do with public policy.
This may be true in practice — but certainly not in theory (to turn a phrase of Kant’s).
If we want to take seriously democracy as a regulative idea — and I certainly do — then public policy should be grounded in an idea of democracy, at least if policy is not just for a public but in some way by a public.
Okay, maybe I am naive, the same way I was naive back when I enrolled in policy school, thinking that public policy might be something that actually has democratic, public aspirations. I was quickly disappointed, but my mission ever since has been to set this wrongheaded attitude right. Take that, Walter Lippmann.
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David Brooks is stealing my material — kind of. In a column titled, The Vanishing Neoliberal, Brooks argues that the good old days of the sharp-thinking neoliberal are vanishing in return for the bad old days of old liberalism. Oh, woe the demise of the neoliberals who, Brooks writes, “were liberal but not too liberal. They rejected interest-group politics and were suspcious of brain-dead unions. They tended to be hawkish on foreign policy, positive about capitalism,” and “reformist when it came to the welfare state.”* Yes, I remember those days, but I could have sworn neo-liberals were conservatives. Well, actually, I was always dumbfounded how “neo-liberals” were any kind of liberals at all.
I said Brooks was stealing my material. Two days ago at a philosophy meeting in South Carolina, I started off my talk as follows:
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Have you noticed that lately democracy is back in fashion? I mean, since the end of the Cold War? Prior to this new democratic era, the focus of theoretical and political debate was on things like socialism versus capitalism, free markets versus planned economies, negative versus positive liberty. Radicals were Marxists, liberals were progressives, progressives were communitarians, and conservatives were laissez-faire neo-liberals. The political spaces that seemed most important were governments and the economy. The idea of civil society was a throwback to Hegel, a quaint inconsequential idea of an inconsequential space.
But when the Wall fell, so too did the focus on government as the site where politics happens, for the curious thing about the end of the Cold War was that its seeds were in civil society, in organizations with names like “civic forum” in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Of course, it helped that the Soviet Union was crumbling and had pulled its tanks out of Eastern Europe. But it was now obvious that the “legitimation crisis” that Habermas and others had warned about capitalism was a much more severe crisis in communism such that a “people’s” government could fall simply with a civic association calling its bluff.
Now we are all democrats. But not all democrats under anything like one flag. Marxists became radical democrats, some progressives became liberal democrats, others, along with some communitarians, became deliberative democrats, and neo-liberals became patriots, who now in our time so love democracy that they are willing to invade and tear apart foreign countries in order to “democratize” them.***
So now I’m thinking, never mind what kind of liberal you are, what kind of democrat are you?
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*For the flow of my argument I cut out the Brooks’ phrase in his lament for the good old neo-liberal days. To wit: when they were “urbane but not militant on feminism and other social issues.” That’s right, we hate to see liberals in combat boots.
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Roundaboutly I discovered that an old friend is a blogger, and, small world, she just blogged about a panel I was on the other day, on ressentiment and pragmatism, but not about my talk, about my dear friend John Stuhr’s. Really, honestly, I don’t mind. No, no, not at all. Check it out.
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I think it’s safe to say, this day after Groundhog Day, that summer will be coming soon. In my part of the world, it was cloudy all day yesterday. No groundhog would see its shadow; winter will soon end.
More confirmation, this morning’s New York Times screams out, “Science Panel Says Global Warming is ‘Unequivocal’ — Cites Human Role — 3-year study foresees centuries of rising temperatures.” Above the fold on its first page, the Washington Post headline reads, “Humans Faulted for Global Warming.” The words and graphs are ominous. The Post’s Juliet Eilperin writes:
Declaring that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” the authors said in their “Summary for Policymakers” that even in the best-case scenario, temperatures are on track to cross a threshold to an unsustainable level. A rise of more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels would cause global effects — such as massive species extinctions and melting of ice sheets — that could be irreversible within a human lifetime. Under the most conservative IPCC scenario, the increase will be 4.5 degrees by 2100.
Much damage has already been done and the amount of greenhouse gases already in the environment will continue to wreak further havoc even if industrial countries stopped emitting gases tomorrow. Bush and company can’t deny the facts any more, but they are still dissembling and stalling, pretending that new technologies can fix the problem rather than taking responsibility and capping emissions now.
It’s easy to feel like the problem is too big to handle. But this isn’t daunting Howard Ruby, the chief executive of Oakwood Worldwide, who, according to another Washington Post article today, is encouraging conservation measures in all 40 of the rental complexes he owns in the U.S. and Canada. The Post’s Mike Salmon writes,
Oakwood’s chief executive, Howard Ruby, became an environmental evangelist after a cruise last year off the Norwegian coast where he saw the effects of warming temperatures on polar bears. His ship should have been dodging ice floes, but he saw open water everywhere. Just 500 miles from the North Pole, “there were no ice floes,” he said. With no ice, the polar bears have nothing to support their offshore fishing expeditions and are now in danger. “They’re dying fast,” he said.
Moved by the plight of the polar bears, Ruby started putting money into environmentally friendly plumbing and building materials and encouraging renters to do common-sense things to cut down on emissions. According to the Post, Ruby gives out a calendar that suggests things like limiting showers to five minutes, unplugging items when not being used, and other simple things, that if even 10 percent of his renters carry out, will reduce greenhouse gases by 1 million pounds.
Reportedly, many of his tenants are happy to cooperate. But some don’t see the point, including one woman that the Post says “didn’t buy the global warming concept,” and another at Oakwood Rosslyn who “said she thought the planet was destined to incinerate for religious reasons.”
So, dear readers, think on this. Reply with your thoughts: What’s the connection between the United States’ unwillingness to cap emissions and its frighteningly large percentage of religious fundamentalists who think we are all going to incinerate anyway?
God, if there be a god, save us from ourselves.
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In his opinion piece in todays’ Washington Post, conservative author Dinesh D’Souza responds to critics of his new book, The Enemy at Home.
Why the onslaught? Just this: In my book, published this month, I argue that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks. President Jimmy Carter’s withdrawal of support for the shah of Iran, for example, helped Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime come to power in Iran, thus giving radical Islamists control of a major state; and President Bill Clinton’s failure to respond to Islamic attacks confirmed bin Laden’s perceptions of U.S. weakness and emboldened him to strike on 9/11. I also argue that the policies that U.S. “progressives” promote around the world — including abortion rights, contraception for teenagers and gay rights — are viewed as an assault on traditional values by many cultures, and have contributed to the blowback of Islamic rage.
No stranger to criticism, D’Souza says critics are calling him and the book dangersous because his book “exposes something in the culture that some people are eager to keep hidden.”
And what is that? It is that the far left seems to hate Bush nearly as much as it hates bin Laden. Bin Laden may want sharia, or Islamic law, in Baghdad, they reason, but Bush wants sharia in Boston. Indeed, leftists routinely portray Bush’s war on terrorism as a battle of competing fundamentalisms, Islamic vs. Christian. It is Bush, more than bin Laden, they say, who threatens abortion rights and same-sex marriage and the entire social liberal agenda in the United States. So leftist activists such as Michael Moore and Howard Zinn and Cindy Sheehan seem willing to let the enemy win in Iraq so they can use that defeat in 2008 to rout Bush — their enemy at home.
When I began writing my new book, this concern was largely theoretical, because the left was outside the corridors of power. Now I fear that the extreme cultural left is whispering into the ears of the Democratic Congress. Cut off the funding. Block the increase in troops. Shut down Guantanamo Bay. Lose the war on terrorism — and blame Bush.
D’Souza denounces the supposedly far left for casting 9/11 and the ensuing war in Iraq as a clash of fundamentalisms. But it is hard to see what D’Souza is offering other than more fundamentalism. The problem, he suggests, is that the Muslim world — both mainstream and radical — is appalled at the West’s wanton ways, ways that have been supposedly encouraged, fostered, and exported by “the radical left.” I’ll let slide the massive dubiousness of this claim — it was Wall Street and the Pentagon that were struck, after all, not SoHo or Hollywood Boulevard. D’Souza wants us to believe that if our values were conservative and not profligate that we wouldn’t be seen as a threat to the conservative-and-not-profligate world of Islam.
I applaud Dinesh D’Souza for looking anew at “why they hate us.” We as a society dropped that question and went to war without any real scrutiny. But it’s wrong, I think, to think that “they” hate us because we are moderns and they are traditionalists. Or that the contemporary Islamic world is as traditional as he thinks it is. Much of the Muslim world is quite modern indeed. Even in some of the most rigid countries, including Iran, the people themselves are rather casual about religion. If the French scholar of Islam, Olivier Roy, is right, Islamic extremists are often well educated young people unmoored or alienated or expatriated from their own traditions, cultures, families, and nations who are romantically longing for an impossible universal brotherhood. Whatever cultural threat we pose to these people on the margins of their own society is something of history’s making, of unresolved trauma, not of the makings of Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, or Cindy Sheehan. Please.
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In his book Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism published in 1997 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Vamik Volkan describes the phenomenon of time collapse. It happened during the Serbian-Bosnian conflict when Christian Serbs mistook Bosnians for Turks — or really experienced Bosnians as Turks — and gruesomely sought revenge for wrongs committed centuries earlier. I think that during the Baathist rule over Iraq as well as just before Saddam Hussein’s execution the same thing occurred — when he warned his compatriots against the incursion of “Persians,” people who in fact were not Persian but Arab Shi’ites.
This phenomenon of time collapse is fascinating. Vokan describes it thus:
“Under normal conditions, with the passage of time, individuals mourn losses — of people, land, prestige — associated with past traumatic events and work through feelings of fear, helplessness, and humiliation. Mourning and working through the effects of an injury signify the gradual acceptance that a change has occurred. The ‘lost’ elements — a parent, a country — no longer exist in the present reality; they can no longer satisfy one’s wishes.”
Volkan notes that in situations in which people who were once enemies finally meet there is a time collapse, the stinging sensation in which something that occurred generations or even centuries earlier is immediately felt. Describing meetings arranged in the 1980s between Arabs and Israelis, Volkan writes: “The traumatic events…sounded as though they had occurred only the day before. The feelings about them were so fresh it was clear that genuine mourning for the losses associated with these events had not taken place. Furthermore, representatives of opposing groups acted as if they themselves had witnessed such events, even though some had taken place before they were born.”
“This is an example of time collapse,” Volkan writes, “in which the interpretations, fantasies and feelings about a past shared trauma commingle with those pertaining to a current situation. Under the influence of a time collapse, people may intellectually separate the past from the present one, but emotionally the two events are merged” (these quotes from pp. 34-35).
I recognize this phenomenon immediately. My mother is Greek, and I grew up hearing about centuries of subjugation by the Turks during the Ottoman Empire. My mother’s land, Crete, freed itself in the 19th century, but the wounds were still fresh a century later when I was a college student. In my early 20s I hadn’t yet read Foucault or Nietzsche or any postmodern theory that would give me pause about the discipline of “history,” but I was already acutely aware that there was always more than one story about what had occurred in the past, even about what occured five minutes ago. So I decided to take a course on the Ottoman Empire. The class met around a small conference table. Across from me during that first session was a very demure, beautiful young woman with thick wavy brown hair. We all introduced ourselves. And she introduced herself as Turkish. This was the first Turk I had ever met in my life. And immediately, without any conscious bidding or will, I was filled with dread and horror that here just two feet from me sat my enemy. The feeling was cognitively shocking. What was I thinking? But the feeling overwhelmed me. I was, now I know, experiencing a time collapse. I had been walking around all these years carrying the trauma of my ancestors, a trauma never worked through, a trauma that afflicted me even though I had never experienced it first hand.
This makes me wonder about what our country has unleashed in Iraq. The Sunni / Baathist antipathy to Shi’ism, to the the majority of Iraq is now grimly exploding. The ancient Arab strand of Shi’ism is being conflated with the Iranian “threat.” The holy lands of Iraq, so dear to all Muslims, are now contested territory for Islam itself. Iran has an interest in it. Arab Shi’ite culture, including the majority of the Iraqi people, have an interest in it. Sunnis have an interest in it. And here it all goes, imploding, time collapsing upon itself.
Reflect on this BBC report of Saddam Hussein’s last moments:
Dressed in a white shirt and dark suit and overcoat, he was handcuffed with his hands in front of him and carried a copy of the Koran in his hands, which he asked to be given to a friend.
A judge then read out the death sentence.
Judge Haddad described what happened next:
“One of the guards present asked Saddam Hussein whether he was afraid of dying.
Saddam’s reply was that ‘I spent my whole life fighting the infidels and the intruders’, and another guard asked him: ‘Why did you destroy Iraq and destroy us? You starved us and you allowed the Americans to occupy us.’
His reply was, ‘I destroyed the invaders and the Persians and I destroyed the enemies of Iraq… and I turned Iraq from poverty into wealth.’
Who were these “Persians” he “destroyed”? The Iranians? The Kurds? The majority Shi’ite population? I don’t know the answer, but I find the question thoroughly fascinating, appalling, and sad. This world of ours has much mourning to undergo.
This work of mourning will not be accomplished through war. War is just an “acting out” of trauma, not a way to work through it. War — especially war that is decidedly not in self-defense — is a repetition compulsion. And often what is perceived as “self-defense” is an instantiation of time collapse. I cannot begin to fathom the overdetermined status of the war in Iraq, how many traumas are overlaid on other traumas. But I can perceive this much: in the 15th century the West began to colonize the Americas just as the Ottomans conquered eastern Europe. My dear (in time-collapse-time) city of Constantinopoli was conquered by Turks who renamed it Istanbul (the short-hand Turkish way for saying “to the City” i-stin-mpoli — Constantinople was “the city” — tin poli — of that day as New York City is “the city” of our day). The Battle of Kosovo gets replayed hundreds of years later after the disintegration of Yugoslavia. These schisms and traumas and wounds over centuries, between brothers (in Islam), between cousins (in Serbia), between peoples (Europe, Americas, Arab, Persian, East, West), even “peoples of the Book” are endlessly reenacted so long as we do not meet with each other, so long as we do not sit two feet across a table from each other and try to fathom together what our peoples have undergone.
gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee 