The Judicial Meritocracy Marches Forward

Matt Yglesias says the only thing, I think, which really needs to be said about Elena Kagan's rise though the judicial hierarchy:

I think the clear similarity is between Kagan and John Roberts, both the very models of a modern Supreme Court justice. The key things you want in a justice are someone who is (a) young, (b) ideologically reliable, and (c) easily confirmable. That points to someone who, like Roberts/Kagan has had a meteoric career rise due to the deliberate patronage of powerful politicians without assembling much of a public record on contentious legal issues.

You might think, as I do, that this is a dumb system. If it were up to me, Supreme Court justices would serve fixed terms and the only people eligible for a nomination would be experienced appellate judges. But we have the dumb system we have, and Kagan is, like Roberts, a perfect candidate given the system....

When Roberts was put forward, you had certain BSy efforts to scrutinize his record or “temperament” and discover he was like such-and-such but it was perfectly obvious to anyone with common sense that he’d vote like an orthodox conservative Republican. Similarly, it’s perfectly obvious that Kagan will vote like a mainstream Democrat, with all the plusses and minuses that implies....[I]n principle it would be nice to see presidents nominate people with meaningful public records we can scrutinize, just as it would be nice for nominees to give real answers to questions at their hearings. But presidents and nominees respond to the incentives in our flawed, centuries-old system.

I'm not quite as cynical as Matt here--as I've argued before, I don't care for a politically powerful judiciary, as I see that as deeply undemocratic, and so frankly I'd rather it not be especially important that the people who end up on the court have extensive real-world judicial experience that we can all scrutinize, argue over, and presumably attempt to align with whatever political projects or goals we prefer. Given that what I'd really like to see is a judicial environment where the implications of Marbury v. Madison were radically limited and the Supreme Court was constitutionally obliged to play a far smaller role in our polity, the notion of having a Supreme Court justice whose exposure to the law is overwhelmingly academic doesn't necessarily bug me. [Slight update, 12:00pm CST: In other words, I'm not saying that I necessarily prefer nominees with slight or opaque records, but rather that I wish we lived in an environment where slight or opaque records would be something of a non-issue, because the Supreme Court wouldn’t be that powerful, rather than in the environment we actually live in wherein, because the SC is so powerful and politically contested, weak or opaque records become an actual political plus for strategic political operatives...or for that matter, who knows? Perhaps canny, ambitious lawyers themselves.]

But of course, these preferences of my own also lead me around to some of Matt's claims as well--the idea of fixed as opposed to lifetime terms, for example, makes good sense to me. And overall, what he says about the judicial meritocracy, and the exceptionally narrowing process it has on "good" candidates for the court, is simply dead accurate. In the end, Kagan, assuming she is confirmed (and she probably will be; you can't imagine that Obama's people hadn't already counted out all the votes as far as they possibly could into the future before they came to this decision), will be a reliable, smart, acceptable liberal voice. The last great surprise on the Supreme Court was David Souter; no one, of either party, very reasonably, wants to hand the keys to an institution this powerful (unfortunately) over to someone who isn't going to decide things about as predictably as reason allows. For those of us who want something different...well, the problem begins, as always, with the process and the context, not the candidates themselves.

The Passing of the Red Tory Moment (For Now)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Given enough time, anything--well, realistically speaking, almost anything--can happen in democratic politics, and so one probably shouldn't assume that the current election results from Britain definitively signal anything. However, I will bet on one thing: the notion that David Cameron's Conservatives could introduce anything remotely like some genuine Red Tory reforms is dead (at least for now).

As I suggested before, it's not clear to what extent the Conservatives ever were, in reality, committed to "associative communitarianism" and the like, or whether their "Big Society" notions did nothing more than just pay some lip service to Phillip Blond's ideas. But either way, we'll almost certainly not find out the truth now (much less find out the degree to which a modern liberal state, at least nominally committed to egalitarian welfare principles, could ever practically follow through on decentralizing, democratic reforms in the first place). As things stand this morning in Kansas (which is Friday afternoon in the UK), we have a messy hung parliament, and current Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown, knowing full well that his party is willing to promise much more in terms of the electoral reform which the Liberal Democrats want than Cameron's conservatives could, is (purposefully or not) pushing the Conservatives in very nearly exactly the manner least amenable to seeing any hypothetical Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government preserve even the least elements of Red Tory promises.

That's not to say that associative communitarianism isn't compatible with the proportional representation wanted by the Lib Dems; indeed, I've suggested before that moving away from the American electoral model would actually make various populist/democratic/communitarian political possibilities more likely further on down the road. But the more immediate problem is the broader demographics and interests of the Lib Dems: they are, by and large, very much the sort of socially liberal, fiscally conservative, libertarian-lite, environmentally-conscious elites which Mark Penn idolizes and Jonathan Chait and Ross Douthat properly mock. With the Lib Dems, the Conservatives would likely still not give more power to the EU, and would still likely try for some immigration reform. And true, the Lib Dems would keep the Conservatives' feet to the fire in regards to any welfare cuts. But serious reforms of Britain's corporate market and financial structure? A patient--and expensive--devolution of welfare responsibilities to local communities, with attendant democratic oversight? Not bloody likely.

And if that all falls apart? Then it is some other ramshackle coalition for the Conservatives, or a minority government, or it is Labor-Lib Dems doing the same. All of which have, from my point of view, any number of arguably defensible, even appealing compensations. But however you slice it, the as-yet-not-clearly-articulated Red Tory promise is definitely going to get pushed to the back burner, if not off the stove entirely.

Perhaps it's just as well; as I wrote yesterday, Blond's (and Cameron's, perhaps) reformist ideas need something more...well, more moral to them--a more broadly shared "religious" conception of what a polity and the government it creates has in common--if they're going to find a legitimate sphere to operate within. And that will likely take decades of time, both in government and out of it. Hopefully Blond, and others, will keep hammering away at Red Tory possibilities for a while. But in the meantime, no matter what happens in London over the next couple of days, I don't expect them to get a test drive.

Friday Morning Videos: "Man in Motion" (Special Graduation Edition!)

Tomorrow is commencement here at Friends University; it'll be my fourth commencement at Friends, signaling the longest I have ever taught at one place. And, just in case there is any doubt, as of now I hope it'll be the last place I ever teach as well, so I am looking forward to many more commencement ceremonies to come.

I like traditions and ceremonies, as is probably obvious to anyone who reads this blog. But this one seems particularly significant to me: this is the first time that I'll be watching students I have known for their entire university careers cross the stage and receive their diploma. Kids that I have known since they were freshman (some of them, anyway), now receiving their duly earned credentials and going forth, having completed the last of our culture's primary middle-class meritocratic obstacles, looking for what comes next. I went to college and graduate school for a total of eleven years myself, so four doesn't seem that long to me...but every year, there are kids and parents and friends with tears in their eyes, thinking that the previous four years have been difficult, precious, and transforming ones indeed. It'll be a fine thing to see that, maybe, in some students I have known all along.

So, graduation, which often means life changes, growing up, facing the unknown, leaving old friends, charting a new path, all that jazz. What better way to acknowledge that sobering, hopeful time than with a hammy, rousing, triumphant pop song ("I can see a new horizon, underneath the blazin' sky...") about a bunch of overly pretty, star-crossed college graduates facing the rest of their lives? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you John Parr. And to those folks I've gotten to know well over the past four years--Cole, Kathryn, and others--go forth and conquer! (And please, drive home safely.)

Big Societies, Christian Communities, and Tories (Red or Otherwise)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

I don't have anything intelligent to say about the election in Great Britain tomorrow (or, depending on when you see this, beginning in a few hours). The truth is that there are elements of the platforms all three parties that I find interesting, appealing, and that I--as a foreigner without a say in the election living 4500 miles away--I could legitimately imagine myself hoping for something from. Labor is, still, despite everything else, a party committed to egalitarianism; people whose intelligence and skill I like and admire are voting Labor, and that tells me something. The Liberal Democrats are the only party in a position to actually make electoral reform happen--and as I happen to like their proposed reforms (proportional representation just makes sense), I can see the point of treating this as "the election to change all elections." And then, well, there are the Conservatives. David Cameron has said and done some interesting things, but the most interesting of them all--associating the party with Phillip Blond's Red Toryism--has been only inconsistently embraced (if it's been embraced at all) by Cameron's Conservatives. And perhaps that's for the best, because I think Blond's ideas themselves need a little bit more work to be made into something that one could truly build a government (or at least a theory of governing) upon. In regards to that work...there, at least, I might have a few things to say.

For over a year now, ever since Blond's original Red Tory manifesto hit the internet and became required reading for a certain sort of conservative thinker (including myself), various communitarians and localists and traditionalists have been giving Blond a serious look. Front Porch Republic was, to some extent, a central figure in bringing Blond to the U.S. a couple of months ago, and it is at FPR that Blond's ideas have received some of their most intense comments and critiques. However, it seemed to me that the strongest consensus theme to come out of the period of intense consideration which followed his visit to America (see Rod Dreher, E.D. Kain, Lee McCracken, Daniel Larison, and more) might be best stated this way: Blond's--and Cameron's--vision of decentralizing the power of the British state, and empowering communities to have authority over (and take responsibility for) it, so as to make the defense and provision of welfare, equality, health and security less an elite bureaucratic task and more a democratic, associative, communitarian one, necessitates the existence of a sphere of authority and action within which those associations, and the money they would require to perform their tasks, could be located. What would be the substance of that sphere? It cannot be "the free market," because the financial realities of neoliberalism and globalization have made corporations the dominant players in that market, and corporate power is, as Blond rightly notes, no more friendly to democratic, associative, and local action than a centralized bureaucracy could be. It cannot be "society," despite Cameron's "Big Society" talk, because, as John Gray astutely observed in his review of Blond's book, a society that can recognize and organize within itself the norms and practices capable of taking on the tasks mentioned would have to be one which was in moral agreement on what constitutes a "norm," and modern liberal states like Britain, and the U.S., do not have that today:

The core of Blond's political thinking is a belief in an extra-human source of authority....Secularists will be horrified, but there are advantages in the return of theology. Much in recent discourse--not least the ideology of market fundamentalism--has consisted of faith masquerading as science. By re-linking political argument more explicitly with religion, Blond has usefully clarified the debate. Once again, though, he seems unaware of the difficulties of his position. Ours may be a post-secular society (I think so myself) but that is very different from reverting to any version of Christian orthodoxy....Today there is no possibility of reaching society-wide agreement on ultimate questions. Happily such agreement is not necessary, nor even desirable. No government can roll back modernity, and none should try.

So what does that leave us with in terms of finding a realm, a context, a sphere for reforming action, facing as we do on the one hand a desire to empower communities, localize wealth, preserve culture and revitalize democracy, but also facing on the other a world where the technology, mobility, diversity and opportunity which modernity provides is not seriously eschewed by much of anyone? It leaves us with, well, the modern liberal procedural state, that's what. (That is assuming that the socialist revolution and/or a peak-oil catastrophe doesn't dramatically change the world around us, but I assume neither of those will happen by tomorrow.) Ross Douthat had it (mostly) right: in our modern, complex, interdependent world, "government and civil society are so intertwined, in so many areas of the commonweal, that disentangling the one from the other requires a surgeon’s patience and finesse....Would-be decentralizers are forced to choose between the excruciatingly difficult task of turning a welfare state built by liberals to conservative ends...and the near-impossible task of straightforwardly cutting programs that their constituents--and, more importantly, their interest groups--have come to depend upon."

I would take exception only to Ross's framing of the problem in strictly liberal-conservative terminology; the whole point of trying to resurrect older labels--like "Red Tory"--is (for me, anyway) to disentagle communitarian, democratic, local, egalitarian, and culturally and socially conservative concerns from their debilitating rhetorical relationship with a fundamentally liberal way of conceiving of social life. Individuals can and do exist in and through communities, and those communities are capable of governance on behalf of collective goods. Still, the problem remains--since we are globalized, and we are liberated, and we are technologically advanced, and since are aren't going to back away from those realities anytime soon, from whence do those tools of governance come? From organized bureaucracies--and that means, from the government. A more communitarian ideology would, I think, better enable the transfer of power from bureaucratic agencies to more associative and democratic ones, and that is the real value of seeing Red Tory ideas taken seriously...but still, in the end, there must be some authority capable of making the transfer. And that is the real stumbling block for American "conservatives," so-called: they look back at Bush's "compassionate conservatism," his efforts at faith-based initiatives (a historical defense of such was much discussed and critiqued at Front Porch Republic), and they see failure, an over-reliance upon the state (whereas I would argue those were some of Bush's few successes). The struggle for Cameron's Conservatives, to whatever limited extent they really do want to take seriously Blond's ideas, is to figure out a way to conceive of the state as having the moral authority to play the distributor and reformer of power.

In a couple of recent posts, Camassia speculated on what has to be necessary for politics to have an "endpoint," to actually be "functioning," in the sense of contributing towards a particular moral goal. She wasn't making a connection with Cameron or Blond by any means, but her thoughts are relevant to present election all the same. If I might, perhaps unfairly, squish her posts together, she concludes:

The way that American politics are structured...assumes that [the] state can never really be an organic community--like an ant colony, or more to the point, a family--so if it appears to be unified, it is because one person or community is oppressing the others. So the best we can do is to minimize the damage of different communities living together, by containing their disputes within a nonviolent political structure. Sometimes, this can bring about agreements that benefit the majority of people. But it does seem to preclude the idea that America, or any nation-state, can find a lasting unity....If you take it as the natural and desirable condition that most people are going to pursue their own interests and those of their in-groups (however they might define them), where do you get the people who are going to selflessly and impartially guarantee that everyone is able to do so?

Cameron's "Big Society" is, despite its flaws, a worthy attempt to rhetorically struggle with the (to many, frustrating) reality that sometimes it is necessary for the state to act teleologically--especially in the case of an attempt to re-order the political and economic infrastructure of a society. I kind of suspect that, ultimately, Cameron, and Blond, are not quite up-front enough about this reality, though; perhaps because of the Conservatives usual corporate and free-market supporters, or perhaps for some other reason, they do not, on my reading of them, seem entirely capable of focusing properly, always shifting the fault for Britain's asocial individualism away towards those causes that seem least amenable to state action. But it is state action that will be necessary, and it will have to be a state capable of acting in the civic realm with a degree of real moral authority.

If anything, I think the Red Tory concept (wonderful as an ideal, less than wonderful as being currently pursued electorally, assuming it is being so pursued at all) has thus far gotten too far away from the radical orthodoxy roots of Blond's education. Of course, it's too much to ask any political party, any election, to create a civic religion from scratch...but I suspect that if any attempt to get beyond the liberal-conservative hegemony, and really explore a communitarian, Red Tory (or whatever) alternative is to be made plausible, it's going to have to develop hand in hand with a broadly Christian sense of responsibility and obligation, a sense that could enable the government to re-assess and re-apportion its own powers. Failing that, you're going to end up hoping that society will somehow be big enough, or the market will somehow be moral (or regulated!) enough, to make the localization and democratization you hope for a reality--and as worthy as such efforts may be, there's no promise they won't backfire, creating even more of exactly the sort of amoral, undemocratic bureaucracies that you wanted to get away from in the first place. So I suppose, were I British citizen, this is what my vote would come down to: would voting for Cameron begin the development of something that may take decades to really come to fruition? If he's not thinking as part of long-term civic transformation (and if that's not what Blond expects of him, assuming he expects anything at all), then I think I'd rather take my egalitarianism and/or electoral reform straight away, and leave my deeper thoughts and questions for the next campaign. Who knows? Maybe, by then, peak oil catastrophes and religious revivals will have this whole argument settled, and we'll be able to go on to other, better things.

Q: What Caused the Culture Wars? A: Globalization and the Pill

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Jonathan Rauch has written a fine article which presents a plausible Grand Unification Theory of the origins of "Red" and "Blue" America. It begins with the research of Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, a couple of family law professors, who themselves begin with the well-publicized fact that many of the states which contain populations most supportive of certain socially conservative values tend to also do very poorly at living those same values. As Rauch summarizes: "The country's lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts's enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections."

What to make of this contradiction between espoused "liberationist" values and lived "traditionalist" practices (and vice versa)? Rauch, summarizing Cahn and Carbone's research, reduces it to a bare-bones slogan: "In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families." But Rauch then puts some meat on the bones:

For generations, American family life was premised on two facts. First, sex makes babies. Second, low-skilled men, if they apply themselves, can expect to get a job, make a living, and support a family. Fact 1 gave rise to a strong linkage between sexual activity, marriage, and procreation. It was (and still is) difficult for teenagers and young adults to abstain from sex, so one important norm was not to have sex before marriage. If you did have premarital sex and conceived a child, you had to marry. Under those rules, families formed early, whether by choice or at the point of a shotgun. That was all right, however, because (Fact 2) the man could get a job and support the family, so the woman could probably stay home and raise the kids. Neither member of the couple had to have an extended education in order to succeed as spouse or parent....

That is what "families form adults" means. Many teenagers and young adults formed families before they reached maturity and then came to maturity precisely by shouldering family responsibilities. Immature choices and what were once euphemistically called "accidents" were a fact of life, but the unity of sex, marriage, and procreation, combined with the pressure not to divorce, turned childish errors into adult vocations.

But then along come two game-changers: the global information economy and the birth-control revolution. The postindustrial economy puts a premium on skill and cognitive ability....Blue-collar wages fall, so a factory job no longer cuts it--if, that is, you can even find a factory job. Meanwhile, birth control separates decisions about sex from decisions about parenthood, and the advent of effective female contraception lets men shift the moral responsibility for pregnancy to women, eroding the shotgun marriage. Divorce becomes easy to obtain and sheds its stigma....In this very different world, early family formation is often a calamity. It short-circuits skill acquisition by knocking one or both parents out of school. It carries a high penalty for immature marital judgment in the form of likely divorce. It leaves many young mothers, now bearing both the children and the cultural responsibility for pregnancy, without the option of ever marrying at all.

New norms arise for this environment, norms geared to prevent premature family formation....Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children. Red norms, on the other hand, create a quandary. They shun abortion (which is blue America's ultimate weapon against premature parenthood) and emphasize abstinence over contraception. But deferring sex in today's cultural environment, with its wide acceptance of premarital sex, is hard. Deferring sex and marriage until you get a college or graduate degree--until age 23 or 25 or beyond--is harder still...[And in] any case, for a lot of people, a graduate education or even a bachelor's degree is unrealistic. The injunction to delay family formation until you are 24 and finish your master's offers these people only cold comfort....

Moral traditionalism fails to prevent premarital sex and early childbirth. Births precipitate more early marriages and unwed parenthood. That, in turn, increases family breakdown while reducing education and earnings. "The consequential sense of failure increases the demands to constrain the popular culture--and blue family practices such as contraception and abortion--that undermines parental efforts to instill the right moral values in children," Cahn and Carbone say. "More sex prompts more sermons and more emphasis on abstinence." The cycle repeats. Culturally, economically, and politically, blue and red families drift further apart as their fortunes diverge.

This all makes good, if sobering, sense to me. What it leaves unexamined, though, is the impact of religion. To what degree is religious faith, or the lack thereof, a precipitating factor in this cycle, or just an additional variable? It would be easy, for example, for those critical of religion to fault it for refusing to acquiesce to and legitimize abortion, birth control, and pre-marital sex, and thus of obliging those who embrace such beliefs to remain locked into a model of family development which so often backfires when faced with a globalized economy which primarily rewards only the mobile and the meritocratically disciplined? But it seems to me just as likely that is was the lack of religious faith (and relatedly, a lack of strong family and/or community attachments) which kick-started the division in cultural norms in the first place. Absent communities ties or a sense of meaning which emphasized continuing attachments, a sense of literal (as well as economic) mobility results...and soon, whole generations of young people find themselves in environments where the "Blue" norms of economic advancement reign, and who would fault them for recognizing reality, and adapting their personal behavior accordingly? A few generations of this, and what do you have? Well, you have Massachusetts, where low-divorce traditionalism and a culture of liberationism co-exist.

Anyway, food for thought.

Political Theory Under a Microscope

I received my latest edition of PS: Political Science and Politics, the professional journal for the American Political Science Association, in the mail yesterday. Out of the three journals APSA publishes, PS is invariably the one I read the least of. American Political Science Review may or may not have scholarly articles I'm interested in, and Perspectives on Politics often has work which synthesizes interesting trends in the discipline, as well as publishing all the book reviews. But PS, overwhelmingly in my experience, addresses the teaching and internal mechanics of academic political science in ways that are of little or no relevance to me. First, I was trained in political theory at a school with strong focus on the Continental, as opposed to the Anglo-American, philosophical tradition, with the result that I'm an odd fit amongst both political theorists and political philosophers in the American academy. (See this old, thorough discussion by Jacob Levy of the various questions which this distinction gives rise to.) Second, today I have very modest intellectual ambitions; I teach at a 4-4 schedule at a small, Christian, liberal arts college, and am very happy here: the notion of trying to align my teaching and research agenda with the priorities of the discipline as they emerge from other, more dominant schools holds little appeal to me at all.

So why write about it at all? Two reasons. First, completely arbitrarily, this blog somehow managed to get listed by some online educator as one of the "50 Best Blogs for Political Science Students." Hooray! Silly as it is, that put me in a good mood. And so I took a look at the contents of the April issue of PS, discovered that it includes the results of a massive survey of political theorists, and realized that I had something to say about it, after all.

I remember this survey, and I remember people talking about it here and there. But this is the first time that I'd seen the whole package. (Even the stuff in PS is truncated, though; you can read the full results here.) I found myself ridiculously pleased and fascinated by some of the results. Sure, my graduate school of Catholic University only received 54 votes for the list of "Political Science Ph.D. Programs by the Quality of Political Theory Training They Offer," as opposed to Princeton having received 1013 votes (Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and Yale all also scored over 500 votes), but at least we beat George Mason. (Suckers!) It was fascinating that Review of Politics (which I have published in, twice!) was listed third, behind Political Theory and APSR, in the order of "Journals Related to Political Theory That Respondents Report Reading," beating out History of Political Thought, Polity, Philosophy and Public Affairs, and--this one really surprised me--even Ethics. The self-reporting of the "Length of Time Respondents Spent on Tenure-Track Job Market after Receiving Ph.D." was sobering, but confirmed my own experience: in our supposedly meritocratic, winner-take-all-and-the-bigger-programs-always-win job market--which is like most every other academic job market (at least amongst those in the humanities and social sciences)--if you don't find a job fresh out of your Ph.D. program (which 46% of respondents said they did), your odds of securing a position drop precipitously, deep into the single-digit percentage points. By the time you get to where I was in 2006, after having been on the job market for five years, if you're not seriously rethinking what you're doing and where you're applying (as I, blessedly, was helped to do), then you're toast.

The results I found most eyebrow-raising, though, were the list of influential scholars, both those with the "Greatest Impact on Political Theory in the Past 20 Years," and the ones "Whose Work Will Be Influential during the Next 20 Years." The John Rawls topped the first list, with almost twice as many votes as his nearest competitor (Jürgen Habermas), was no surprise. I was gratified, however, to find some of "my" people--folks that I read a great deal of in graduate school, and who continue to influence my thinking--placing in the top ten: Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor, Sheldon Wolin, and Hannah Arendt. Probably the stand-out discovery of both lists was William Connolly, a theorist who specializes in a wide variety of post-Nietzschean topics, looking at agonistic democracy, embodiment, and the like, a man whom I've met and been on a panel with once before, but can't claim to know well: he was placed by those surveyed in the top five in both categories. (Taylor was also highly placed on both lists, but not so high as Connolly.) It makes me think that I ought to take some time this summer to read some of Connolly's recent work. (Patchen Markell, a brilliant fellow whom I once argued with about Herder, came in first on the "future influence" list, which is, I suspect, both an accurate and much deserved acknowledgment; my choice of Jacob Levy, however, unfortunately seems to have missed the cut.)

Are all these lists silly? Of course they're silly, in the same way that snapshots are always, in a sense, silly: they grab a moment in time or thought, and present it for microscopic analysis and elaboration, as if some hidden meaning were to be found therein. With every snapshot there are multiple angles from which the picture could have been taken; with surveys, the same: why ask these questions instead of those? But to get in a huff about the implications of such questions (or missed questions, as the case may be) seems even more silly to me; in the responses to the survey which PS published, Jodi Dean (to be sure, a far smarter person than I) seems to me to take all the predictable postures, fearing that the implicit and controlling methodology of the survey "operationalizes" the "name game" in a way which will do neoliberal violence to the discipline's ability to ask "the classic questions of the best way to live," etc. To which I feel inclined to respond: if you want to address the real problems which class, citizen apathy, diversity, poverty, corporations, secularism, the media, family break-down, mobility, capitalism, etc., pose to the ability of teachers to do good work in the classroom, you could do it much more directly than by outing a professional survey as a supposed Fifth Column. I find Kenneth Ferguson's response only slightly better, but following the same line. Only Martha Ackelsberg, of all the respondents, does the reasonable thing when presented with data: drill down on its specifics, and re-arrange it to highlight matters which the original framing of the data failed to show. (Among other things, she breaks down the gender of all the respondents, with the results that on the aforementioned "influence" lists some names revealing move on up.)

In any case, this is all a bunch of ridiculously inside baseball, in so far as the bulk of the readers of this blog are concerned. Still, I actually had fun reading through my copy of PS last night. I suppose, even if I am, both by choice and by circumstance, somewhat out of the game, I can still take pleasure following the scores, the plays, and the players, just the same.

The Most Quoted Comedy of the Last Decade? Pikers...

The young, hip, smart bloggers at Lawyers, Guns, and Money--for whom I've expressed both admiration and envy before--are finding Beaks's belief that Anchorman was "the most quoted comedy of the last decade" to eminently plausible...yet are seeking rival nominations. To which I say...hmmph.

Let's not limit ourselves; let's go for the most quoted comedy ever, people. Not "movie," period (so, no Star Wars's Tashi station, no Princess Bride's land wars in Asia, none of that), but "comedy." I'll start us out, shall I?

"Lord loves a working man; don't trust whitey; see a doctor and get rid of it."

"You take drugs, Danny?"

"You might say we had a passion for shells. That's why we named the oil company after them."

"And stop calling me Shirley."

"Of course it isn't only physical! I deeply respect you as a human being!"

"Don't you blaspheme in here!"

"Riots in the streets, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!"

"Edwina's insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase."

"You can't dust for vomit."

And, of course...

"Splitter!"

Add to the list or contribute commentary, as you feel so inclined.

Friday Morning Videos: "Close to Me"

Damon, among others, has wondered why I still haven't done any videos by The Cure. Well, wonder no more.



Man, they're creepy. Cool, but creepy.

Thoughts on Teaching Wendell Berry

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Tuesday was the last meeting of an upper-level course I'd designed this semester on theories of political economy, titled Capitalism, Socialism, and Localism. The class went well for the most part, I think. I began with a general introduction to the historical roots of the modern marketplace, concentrating on Western Europe and the decline of the feudal order, the rise of centralized nation-states, and the conflicts and struggles which came along with those drawn-out, wrenching transformations (the peasant revolts England and Germany, the enclosure acts and rebellions, etc.). Then it was, to a degree, by the numbers: Rousseau, Smith, Bentham, Marx, Mill, Spencer, and then a rush of 20th-century theorists, economists, and activists: Keynes, Schumpeter, Hayek, Walzer, Cohen. Hayek (whom I'd never taught extensively before) went over very well with the students; Keynes too (though, of course, this video helped). But the fellow that I most wanted the students to really get, and which, I think, only a few of them did, and then only partly, was Wendell Berry.

I'm not terribly disappointed; I came to realize, as we plowed through the final weeks of the class, that most of the students were burned out from the large amounts of difficult reading that I'd given them. Moreover, introducing the ideas of Berry--who is first and foremost a localist and agrarian; beyond that, depending on how you read him, he's a bit of a distributist, pacifist, traditionalist, socialist, communitarian, anarchist, and New Deal Democrat as well--probably should have been to be set up better, perhaps by reading some of his fiction before examining his ideas. Because, kind of like starting off the whole parade of theorists with Rousseau, his view of the world presumes, or puts into question, or both, a huge range of values and beliefs, some of which your typical modern American university student fervently accepts, and some of which are so deeply embedded in our socio-economic and political order as to require some real excavation and imagination to even be able to present as issues of discussion.

For example, the very notion of "local knowledge." Living in Wichita, Kansas--which is a wonderful mid-sized city (Melissa and I love it here), not at all a busy, global cross-roads for business and innovation--I have a fair number of students with agricultural backgrounds, as well as a fair number of students who have roots in this part of the country going back a couple of generations or more. (Frequently, and not unexpectedly, these groups often overlap.) Sometimes I am able to get some of these students to nod their heads in recognition when I attempt to sketch out the kind of knowledge which being in a particular place, or inheriting a particular vocation, makes possible. Berry, of course, is not the first or the most philosophically eloquent of the defenders of traditions of local knowledge; I ended up making use of arguments drawn directly from the works of Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Polanyi to elaborate the idea of what it would mean--structurally, politically--to be able to make moral judgments about and exercise real responsibility over economic life...an idea which neither of those others, nor anyone else I am familiar with, has expressed with such fervor as Berry does in passages like this:

The dilemma of private economic responsibility, as I have said, is that we have allowed our suppliers to enlarge our economic boundaries so far that we cannot be responsible for our effects on the world. The only remedy for this that I can see is to draw in our economic boundaries, shorten our supply lines, so as to permit us literally to know where we are economically. The closer we live to the ground that we live from, the more we will know about our economic life, the more able we will be to take responsibility for it. The way to bring discipline into one's personal or household or community economy is to limit one's economic geography ("Conservation is Good Work," Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, p. 39).

Perhaps I managed to plant some seeds that will develop in years to come...but for the moment, the connection between knowledge and tradition and places and economies was just, I think, beyond my students' grasp: they are used to knowledge as a product, as expertise, as a credentialed matter which is locked into a scheme of individual experimentation, improvement, and choice. Even knowledge that is directly relevant to the preservation of small communities, or the defense of local economies, or the stewardship of the land is accepted by them, so far as I can tell, as a collection of methods and procedures and facts, all of which will be in fact even better served by expanding one's economic reach, because that will mean--or so they accept, and the essential functionings of the world they know do not prove them wrong--even more opportunities for experts and others to put that knowledge to work.

Of course part of this is that they are young, smart, but not, for the most part, religiously or philosophically serious kids; the basic awareness that some knowledge is, and should be, zuhanden, something lived and ready-to-hand--which, in turn, implies a necessary concern for the sort of life and work and economy which does not disrupt the conveying of such ready-handed knowledge--is something that perhaps will come to them with time, with marriage and children and adult responsibilities (assuming that is the path they choose--there's that word again!). But for our class, trying to carry these ideas over into the realm of political economy, attempting to make a point about limits, connecting the modern capitalist division of labor to the significance of what Berry recognizes as a "sort of divorce, in our economy, and therefore in our consciousness, between production and consumption" ("The Whole Horse," The Art of the Commonplace, p. 246)...well, it was a hard row to hoe. My student were older students, mostly, looking to graduate, looking to travel, looking to graduate school and leaving Wichita (Washington DC! Los Angeles!) and finding careers in law and entertainment and government work that will disconnect them entirely from the traditions of local knowledge of their home town...traditions that, for the most part, assuming they could even identify any such (and, to be fair to them, in the global economy of today, hardly any city of any size can long maintain any in the first place), struck them as nice enough...for the people who choose such things. But they won't be, probably, for them.

There was one element of our discussion about Berry that connected quite well though, I think. I took the students back to Plato, as the distinction he has Socrates make in The Republic between a simple city and a "feverish" one while discussing morality and justice (372a-373c). With a couple of exceptions they were all with Glaucon: Socrates first city was a pathetic, boring one, not one fit for individuals who want to live a life more fulfilling than that of animals. But many of them were caught, I think, as we saw where that change immediately led: to hunters, artists, nurses, nannies, hairdressers, barbers, poets, advertisers, actors, producers, prostitutes, savories, perfumes, incense, pastries, and more. This was the division of labor, in all its modern and complex--and, as Plato's language clearly implies, superficial and exploitive--glory. Berry's humble model for an agrarian economy may involve many unattractive things, in their view, but more than a few of them noticed that it would also mean the absence of certain kind of vicious and invasive busyness, a busyness which my female students, at least, recognize pretty well.



I've never hidden--either from my students, or on this blog--my contempt for a market which is "free" to align its avenues for the pursuit of profit so thoroughly at the expense of one half the population...the same half of the population which my four daughters are members of. The speaker here, Jean Kilbourne, is the author of Deadly Persuasion, a book which radically changed how my wife and I came to understand our responsibilities to our daughters in a media-drenched, borderline-pornographic, image-equals-virtue, everything-can-be-branded and anything-can-be-sold world. But the students didn't need any half-traditionalist, half-feminist rants from me to get the point. One thing that truly is a benefit to young people in our fast-paced, skeptical world: they know when they're being sold something, and they can recognize that much of that selling is not about making them better people, but rather just about making them even more dependent on those who will tell them what to buy and how to look. And with Wendell Berry, the man who begins the book I assigned to my students talking about "The Joys of Sales Resistance"...well, I think--or at least I hope--that on that lecture day, there was some real connection and learning after all.

Small Can Succeed

Can you ever hear the words "solidarity, flexibility, and entrepreneurship" in a single sentence? When the sentence is about a small, egalitarian, democratic, and highly profitable employee-owned, open-book business named SRC, you can.



(Hat tip: John Médaille.)