Sunday, October 31, 2004

Princess Bride redux

Will Baude at Crescat Sententia praises the movie as well. One of the virtues of being a recent convert to value pluralism is that one can simply refuse to make up one's mind between Pricess Bride and Casablanca on the ground that their respective virtues are simply incommensurable.

Saturday, October 30, 2004

A dizzying intellect

I couldn't pass this up. Wonkette referencing one of my favorite movies of all time, The Princess Bride.
Ooops: He's alive. And he's condemning Bush. Which of course means that he wants Kerry to win. Unless he really wants Bush to win and is just by default endorsing Kerry in order to get people to vote for Bush out of spite. But then again, if we're smart enough to figure that out, then maybe Osama knows that, too and he really wants Kerry to win, and is endorsing Kerry so that people will at first learn toward voting for Bush but then think that's what Osama wants... So confusing. Clearly, we've fallen for one of the classic blunders, the most famous of which is: "Never get involved in a land war in Asia"; but only slightly less well known is this: "Do not read about goats when death is on the line."

Friday, October 29, 2004

Encyclopedic knowledge

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

One of my favorite online philosophy resources, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has recently had a surge of new entries. Of interest to political theorists are the articles on Hume's Moral Philosophy, Isaiah Berlin, and Game Theory and Ethics. Go browse!

Democracy fetishism

Glad to see that Fafblog! has taken up the use of "democracy fetishism." The Medium Lobster's take on it is not quite what I has in mind when I criticized democratic theorists like Wendy Brown at a recent Political Theory Workshop, but if it gets the meme going...

Thursday, October 28, 2004

The force of Christopher's convictions

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

I joint the chorus of consternation at Christopher Hitchens's schizophrenic endorsements. On 21 October, in the pages of The Nation—the magazine he left over its pacifist stance on Iraq—he endorsed Bush. Less a week later, in the pages of Slate, he is noted as a reluctant Kerry supporter.

Is CH trying to have it both ways? Or is he just unsteady in his convictions? After all, CH's convictions are often so forceful (not to say violent) that they're likely to throw anyone off-balance, even himself. But is the force of CH's conviction severable from the content of his ideas? And does it provide a clue to his ideological transition?

Read more!In the Nation piece, CH muses about his notorious newfound political alliance with the neocons in the Bush White House.
One of the editors of this magazine asked me if I would also say something about my personal evolution. I took him to mean: How do you like your new right-wing friends? In the space I have, I can only return the question. I prefer them to Pat Buchanan and Vladimir Putin and the cretinized British Conservative Party, or to the degraded, mendacious populism of Michael Moore, who compares the psychopathic murderers of Iraqis to the Minutemen.

CH's point is well taken. The trendy Left is all-too-fond of rationalizing unsavory alliances away. The trendy francophilic Left most of all. I suspect that this is due to a mistake about causation: upon witnessing a loud and violent revolt, the immediate presumption is that an equally voluminous injustice was its cause. But this conclusion is unwarranted. Even the oppressed can be immoderante in their demands and tactics. Perhaps the immoderates on the Left (and Right) are animically incapable of appreciating this, and it is left to us moderates to calmly think things through.

But I digress. The question of CH's political (d)evolution is the subject, and it leads to a more general meditation of partisan mutation. You see, I was a Marxist once, a long time ago. When looking back, I'm torn between Pablo Neruda's admonition that no one can look at misery in Latin America and not become a communist, and Dubbya's apologetic aphorism to the effect that "when we were young and irresponsible... we were young and irresponsible." In any case, and whatever its merits, I am not a Marxist any more, rather an eminently moderate left-liberal.

My intellectual journey, however, was tentative, deliberate, gradual. In high school, I was never a Stalinist, not even a Leninist, but a tame Eurocommunist at best. In my first year of college I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. Soon enough I happened upon Rawls's A Theory of Justice and didn't need socialism to justify my commitment to social justice. Thus, quietly, I settled into liberalism. Removing the last utopian barnacles off of my shell has been a bit more violent, but hasn't turned me away from what by now is a pretty steady course. I now have neither the momentum nor the desire to get to the right bank of the stream.

Contrast this voyage to that of CH and many neocons (David Horowitz most notably). Their transition away from the Left resembles a conversion; it is so sudden that it lands them on the opposite bank. Now, I don't pur Horowitz and CH in the same camp. I think CH can point to a long history of opposition to Saddam that grew out of his championing of the Kurdish cause. And his rejection of Islamo-fascism—and that is what Ba'athism is—is certainly correct. But he seems all too eager to join the neocon crusade. It is, after all, a sort of permanent revolution of the kind that would appeal to an old Trotskyite. And this is my point: that immoderation of ideals and of strategies characterizes both extremes of the political spectrum. It is easier for CH to crawl into bed with the Bushies than to parse out the soporific nuances of the liberal intelligentsia. It's not that he can't handle nuance, it's that he doesn't want to.

Which brings me to his inconsistent votes. The longer Nation piece, I'd wager, expresses CH's deep preference; the Slate blurb is a tease. But the words of that tease are important: Kerry's "election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq." He "should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty." CH wants the Democrats to convert too, and for that he needs them to go through a violent, traumatic experience. He doesn't want Kerry to win; he wants to turn Kerry into Bush, into a true-believer, a crusader, a man for whom resoluteness has replaced reflection. As with all radicals of the Left and Right, CH reserves his most bitter contempt for the moderate bourgeois intellectual.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

The fun fund!

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

A word of praise to the Liberty Fund, Inc.! Three days ago I ordered Michael Oakeshott's On History and Hobbes on Civil Association. Two days later they were waiting at my door. Granted, I'm in Chicago and they ship from Indianapolis, which is hardly a world away, but I've known merchants in the Windy City that take three times as long to get their wares out of the warehouse, let alone have them delivered. And Liberty Fund never charges shipping (at least in the US)!

The books are quality paperback editions, at a more than reasonable price. And the selection is delightful: lots and lots of classics of political and legal theory, more than a few of which are online. Go have a look, will you!

Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Poll-popping

Salon gives obsessive poll watchers a reality-check on the plethora of political polls. (You have to watch a short ad to read the article.)

Want the Cliff's Notes?

1. Pick your pollsters based on past performance. Past defined as the 2000 race, which may not be much to go on. Zogby, Democracy Corps, and Fox/Opinion Dynamics are the favorites. All were within half a percentage point of the actual result.

Whatever that was.

2. Watch the numbers for registered voters, not those for likely voters. Goes agaist common sense, doesn't it? But Salon says that "[e]ach poll has its own methodology for identifying likely voters, and the calculations are seldom transparent."

3. Watch Bush's approval numbers. An incumbent's approval number is usually their final share of the vote. Undecideds, as we're being told more and more nowdays, tend to break for the challenger.

4. Don't pay too much attention to the national numbers. Focus on the electoral college.

Until the election's over, in any case. Then you'll have just nine numbers to look at.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

A republic of letters?

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Letters like "A", "B", and "C" I mean. Over at Instapundit, the conversation over the typographical æsthetics of campaign logos continues. Pundits talking of typographic arts is, well... like artists talking about politics. Sincere, perhaps, but hardly erudite.

I refer you thus to the discussion on the typographic merits of the Kerry/Edwards and Bush/Cheney logos at Typographica, arguably the best of the typography blogs. You'll never kern Georgia the same way again. (It's for the screen, silly!)

Saturday, October 16, 2004

Fafblog! on desert

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

No, not John Rawls or David Miller, but the wise and mighty Fafblog! gives us the most thorough and convincing discussion on desert yet to appear in the annals of moral philosophy.

Here's a taste:
So some a you may not've noticed but the Red Sox have been playin the Yankees!

"Hooray!" says me wavin a bipartisan foam finger. "May the best team win."
"Nooooo!" says Giblets. "The Yankees suck and shall be doomed - ONE DAY - by a RIGHTEOUS GOD in whom Giblets believes VERY DEEPLY - to an eternity of HELLFIRE!"
"But Giblets how can the Yankees suck if they have beaten the Red Sox so many times?" says me.
"That is not what sucking means!" says Giblets. "Sucking is a moral property Fafnir! It does not reflect what the Yankees have done but what the Yankees intrinsically are. And they are intrinsically evil and suck!"

Where, oh where, would we be without Fafblog!?

Thursday, October 14, 2004

Formal punishment

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Andrew's post about juvenile executions (over at Political Arguments) reminded me of Olympe de Gouges argument in favor of the political rights of women. In Article 10 of her Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen she wrote:
No one is to be disquieted for his very basic opinions; woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum, provided that her demonstrations do not disturb the legally established public order.

Read more!The question is one of reciprocity, which may be taken in two ways: as a relation between citizens (I will uphold my duty insofar as others uphold theirs) and as a relation between right and duty (I will uphold my duty if my correlative right is recognized).

The latter is a formal constraint. It requires one who defends an action or practice to state how it configures an institution. It requires that the action of punishment, e.g. be stated, as Kant put it, as a maxim which may at the same time be proclaimed as universal law. Citizens, one could say, are called to "speak in laws."

But not only must each such law be sequentially proclaimed; the legal system in which it is situated must also be addressed. An action or practice, such as punishment, cannot be defended in isolation.

Now, there may be reasons to have different rights and duties obtain at different ages. I don't see too deep a problem with some age restrictions on elligibility for public office. The question is not about the substance of these restrictions, but about how they are defended. In the case of the execution of minors, I think Andrew's absolutely right. To punish a violator of the social contract without recognizing her to be a full contracting party strikes me as a practical contradicion.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Right-wing deconstruction

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

The coincidence of Derrida's death and Felix's post prompts the question: Is Straussianism right-wing deconstruction?

I won't presume to answer it. (Could it be answered?) But if there is such a thing as guilt by association, I would very much like to see these two tendencies linked in the popular mind.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

Foreign affairs

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Everyone's been linking to the Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy, and I won't be denied. Among the hundreds of foreign policy specialists who've signed "an open letter opposing the Bush administration's foreign policy and calling urgently for a change of course" are many from my current home, the University of Chicago.

On the errors of the Bush administration's foreign policy, I defer to the security specialists. But I must admit that the letter leaves me unsatisfied. It's true that it's not these scholars' job to judge the Iraq war on moral terms. But the conversation on the inappropriateness of the intervention seems incomplete. Oddly enough, liberals have clustered around the Realist camp, arguing against the war because it was costly, pointless, and harmed American interests. This has leftthe neocons in the Bush administration to make the moral case for intervention, replete with paeans to duty, sacrifice, and democratic peace. The two sides are talking past each other.

Read more!I'll allow, arguendo, that the war in Iraq was conceivably justifiable. But it was not justified. There is a world of difference between the two. Touting the fact—which no reasonable and decent person can deny—that Saddam Hussein was a bad man who should have been deposed, captured, and tried as an international criminal only carries the argument so far. It is also important that the war be actually justified in morally compelling terms, or at least that point to a morally compelling goal.

As such, this war was a missed opportunity. It was sold to the world and to the American people as a realist's war: preemptive or at least preventive, WMD's and all. That case proved to be false, and was questioned from the start. Only as an afterthought were Hussein's crimes against humanity mentioned, and only recently have they been highlighted in the government's case for a continued presence in the region.

But even if the removal of Hussein had been the war's objective, where would that have left us? If waging such a war defines a maxim, what are we at the same time proclaiming as a universal law? Neocon defenders of the war vociferously refuse the appeal to legality. "September 10 talk in a September 12 world." The war—all wars—are political, not legal, and the "War on Terror" was not a law-enforcement operation.

Indeed it was not. A law-enforcement operation requires that there be laws in place to be enforced. The Bush administration's recourse to the WMD justification was natural because only in the discourse of preemptive combat was there enough legal clarity to make a solid case for military action. There are other such discourses, but they were not so readily available. The discourse of genocide, for instance, is now being tested in Darfur. But mere dictatorship did not rise to a justiciable offense.

Yet, before Nurenberg, neither did genocide. Of course, World War Two was another realist's war; it was fought to contain an imperialist Germany, not to stop the Holocaust. And it's been persuasively argued that the legal precedent for the Nurenberg trials was tenuous at best. (The exchange on this matter between Lon Fuller and H.L.A. Hart is exemplary both for its rigor and candor.) Yet an act of illegality, or rather a-legality, was instrumental in crafting a legal order that, for once, recognized that there were moral limits to war and sovereignty and that human decency was the most basic and undeniable ground of political legitimacy. At Nurenberg not only were Nazi war criminals sent to jail or the gallows, but a whole institutional and legal structure put in place to address future war crimes and crimes against humanity.

An intervention in Iraq could have taken this route. Even an illegal operation, by international standards, could have redeemed itself by giving way to legal institutions to address future atrocities. The insistence of the political nature of the war in Iraq or of the "War on Terror" is not a principled position, but an excuse to keep American power unchecked. It leaves the United States with a much diminished moral arsenal. It is an invitation to ad hoc morality.

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Trans-Atlantic

Several websites, on both sides of the Atlantic, have pointed out that today is National Poetry Day in Britain. Good cosmopolitan that I am, I've decided to join the effort with a poem from Mario Benedetti (Uruguay, 1920— ). The title translates as "A Latin American 'Our Father' (Lord's Prayer)"

Un Padrenuestro Latinoamericano

Read more!Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos
con las golondrinas y los misiles
quiero que vuelvas antes de que olvides
como se llega al sur de Río Grande

Padre nuestro que estás en el exilio
casi nunca te acuerdas de los míos
de todos modos dondequiera que estés
santificado sea tu nombre
no quienes santifican en tu nombre
cerrando un ojo para no ver la uñas
sucias de la miseria

en agosto de mil novecientos sesenta
ya no sirve pedirte
venga a nos el tu reino
porque tu reino también está aquí abajo
metido en los rencores y en el miedo
en las vacilaciones y en la mugre
en la desilusión y en la modorra
en esta ansia de verte pese a todo

cuando hablaste del rico
la aguja y el camello
y te votamos todos
por unanimidad para la Gloria
también alzó su mano el indio silencioso
que te respetaba pero se resistía
a pensar hágase tu voluntad

sin embargo una vez cada
tanto tu voluntad se mezcla con la mía
la domina
la enciende
la duplica
más arduo es conocer cuál es mi voluntad
cuándo creo de veras lo que digo creer
así en tu omnipresencia como en mi soledad
así en la tierra como en el cielo
siempre
estaré más seguro de la tierra que piso
que del cielo intratable que me ignora

pero quién sabe
no voy a decidir
que tu poder se haga o deshaga
tu voluntad igual se está haciendo en el viento
en el Ande de nieve
en el pájaro que fecunda a su pájara
en los cancilleres que murmuran yes sir
en cada mano que se convierte en puño

claro no estoy seguro si me gusta el estilo
que tu voluntad elige para hacerse
lo digo con irreverencia y gratitud
dos emblemas que pronto serán la misma cosa
lo digo sobre todo pensando en el pan nuestro
de cada día y de cada pedacito de día

ayer nos lo quitaste
dánosle hoy
o al menos el derecho de darnos nuestro pan
no sólo el que era símbolo de Algo
sino el de miga y cáscara
el pan nuestro
ya que nos quedan pocas esperanzas y deudas
perdónanos si puedes nuestras deudas
pero no nos perdones la esperanza
no nos perdones nunca nuestros créditos

a más tardar mañana
saldremos a cobrar a los fallutos
tangibles y sonrientes forajidos
a los que tienen garras para el arpa
y un panamericano temblor con que se enjugan
la última escupida que cuelga de su rostro

poco importa que nuestros acreedores perdonen
así como nosotros
una vez
por error
perdonamos a nuestros deudores

todavía
nos deben como un siglo
de insomnios y garrote
como tres mil kilómetros de injurias
como veinte medallas a Somoza
como una sola Guatemala muerta

no nos dejes caer en la tentación
de olvidar o vender este pasado
o arrendar una sola hectárea de su olvido

ahora que es la hora de saber quiénes somos
y han de cruzar el río
el dólar y el amor contrarrembolso
arráncanos del alma el último mendigo
y líbranos de todo mal de conciencia
amén.

Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Going back to blogspot

I'm dangerously close to my 25Mb storage limit here at the University, so I'm moving the site back to blogspot.

Well, you wouldn't have that problem if you deleted an email once in a while. What do you think this is, gmail?

Whatever. Now that the ugly adverts have been replaced by that purty Bloggerbar, my æsthetic sensibility is less offended. The new address will be easier to remember: "pilcrowpress.blogspot.com". The RSS feed should be " http://pilcrowpress.blogspot.com/atom.xml".

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

Draft redux

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

The Washington Post has an article explaining the demise of the draft reinstatement bill.

Not the first draft, not the last?

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Josh Marshall, at Talking Points Memo, the bill to reinstate the military draft that Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has been pushing is coming to a vote.

The Republican leadership, however, has placed it in the "Suspension Calendar", which is apparently a fast-track, no debate process reserved for noncontroversial items (clarification will be appreciated). Rangel, at a press conference, is rightly indignant.

I won't debate the merits of the bill, since I haven't made up my mind about the concept of compulsory service. My antipathy to all things military—which seem to me incompatible with academic values, at the æsthetic level if nothing else—is somewhat attenuated by Rangel's inclussion of a non-martial civil service alternative.

Read more!Some policies seem valid or repugnant not in themselves, but in terms of the arguments used to justify them. An argument for the draft (or its equivalent) as an expression of love for one's country or as a method of national socialization disturbs me deeply. I have often said that I viscerally reject any political theory that requires me to love my fellow. I'll gladly give anyone their due, as a matter of justice, but solidarity as a normative principle is another story.

But this still leaves at least two other grounds for a compulsory civil service. On strict contractarian grounds, civil service can be conceived as a kind of lump-sum payment to the common pot for whatever benefits you drew from society from birth until adulthood. But why must the payment be made all at once and in so onerous a manner? There is no reason to suppose that could not contribute to society in a suitable way over the entire course of one's life. To think of the benefits of social cooperation as this kind of social debt gives the state too much of a claim on its citizens, a point raised by Jacob Levy some time ago (link forthcoming).

One remaining ground for a compulsory draft is that it distributes the burdens of social cooperation more fairly. Now, the validity of this argument depends on the underlying social conditions that make some groups (minorities, the poor) more likely to opt for military service, not because of a preference for whatever values such service encourages, but because they have no other viable options. I believe that, at the enlisted level at least, this is Rangel's motivation for the bill.

It was also, it is important to point out, John Rawls's motivation for opposing educational exemptions to the draft during the Vietnam War. Rawls was a child of privilege who had voluntarilly enlisted in the Navy during World War Two, as so many other men of wealth did during that period. But by the 1960s, he recognized, the well-to-do were not going off to war and educational exemptions allowed then to stay on friendly shores. Less privileged young men, who had not made it into college, could give no excuse and were sent to Vietnam. The very inequalities of educational achievement were compounded and reinforced by inequalities in military service. So Rawls fought to repeal educational exemptions just as he fought against the War.

The benefit of the distributive justification is that it does not commit one to an unqualified defense of compulsory military (or civil) service. To render such service justly voluntary one need only eliminate the injustices that make it a compulsory sub-optimal choice. If the military promotes genuine values, values that should be attractive to a significant segment of the population, then recruitment should reflect that. If recruitment falls off dramatically we would lament in vain the poor civic virtue of bourgeois children. Instead we should acknowledge that socially valuable work deserver to be rewarded, and match the incentive to make such sacrifice to the fact that, in the days of the waning nation-state, military duty is difficult, dangerous, and ever less glorious.

The curious genealogy of the New Man

Cross-posted at Political Arguments.

How did the Left give up on structural challenges to social injustice and turn to the moralistic condemnation of "greed" and the romanticized appeal to "solidarity"? The question is immediately provoked by a re-reading of G.A. Cohen's If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, but it really goes to the heart of the contemporary incarnation of the New Left of the 1960's. The anti-globalization crowd is the most glaring example. Regardless of the merit of their politics, why are they so often articulated as individual moral mandates, as opposed to calls for institutional change?

Read more!The argument that the problem of capitalism can be traced to the operation of the social structure, not to the sinful nature of human beings, was most famously advanced by Marx (although its antecedents are in Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville). Even in his early work (which, in my opinion, makes explicit the true motives for Marx's animosity towards capitalism, and thus gives the lie to his later disavowal of socialist morality) Marx traces the alienation of man-from-man, and the inability of human beings to achieve "species-being" to the structural requirements of rights, property, and the market. Change the structure, not the person, to achieve emancipation.

It was from Marx, and Marx's impact on the understanding of social injustice, that John Rawls must be seen to derive his claim that the relation among social institutions, not the actions of individuals, is the proper subject of social justice. Against this view stood a long tradition, traceable to Plato and Aristotle, that saw no sense in arguing for the virtue of social practices.

But today the attacks on Rawls's liberal egalitarianism come from the left, not the right. G.A. Cohen, Rawls's foremost critic on this account, recognizes the oddity of the political alignment. Cohen, of course, does not "give up" on social structure, but he complements it in a way that I find historically curious. In an interview for Imprints, he said,

I'm a little anxious about it, because I remember that one of the things for which I had contempt as a young Marxist was the view that socialism requires a transformation of the human heart. I now think that there is much truth in the Christian objection to Marxism that it does not address the problem of people's attitudes to one another at a deep enough level. There's only so far that you can go by having the optimal coercive structure for society. The problem of incentives, which is central to modern economic thinking about how to organise societies, proves that. The existence of that problem vindicates what I used to think was the namby-pamby claim that people's attitudes must change if we are to bring about a truly egalitarian society. The social designer with nothing but coercive mechanisms at his or her disposal cannot achieve equality.



I agree with Cohen on the confluence of Marxism and Christianity—though not on the broader claim that a reasonable degree of equality requires a pervasive social ethos. But I think that this confluence should cause "individualists" about justice to row back with full force and change streams.

Unless, of course, these are the waters that Marx was seeking. It is not a coincidence that all Marxist regimes, from the Siberian tundra to the beaches of Cuba, have sung loud praises to the "New Man" and have not hesitated to craft him through individual, not only institutional, coercion. But again, the Church also sang loud praises to the Saints by the soft light of the bonfires.

Political Arguments

Alfredo Perez, of the Political Theory Daily Review, has gotten a few of us together for a group blog: Political Arguments.

Peer pressure works like a charm on me, and I hope that this incentive makes me serious about updating my site more than onece every six months.

Is this a good or a bad thing? I mean, don't you have WORK to do?

In any case, any new post with even a tangential relation to political theory will probably appear there first, and be reposted here eventually. This will still be the place for nonsensical rambling and amateurish paeans to typography, at least until they start letting me post those there too.