The Holocaust in Context

John's done an excellent job debunking Goldhagen's thesis. Leaving aside the details of John's critique (which Christopher Browning addresses in his latest book on The Origins of the Final Solution), Goldhagen is guilty of several fallacies of causation outlined by David Hackett Fischer in his wonderful little treatise Historians' Fallacies. The first is the reductive fallacy, by which a complex event (in this case, the Final Solution) is reduced to a simplistic explanation (virulent anti-Semitism). The second and related fallacy is the fallacy of responsibility as cause, which Fischer describes as "merging two different questions and demanding a single answer: 'How did it happen?' and 'Who is to blame?'" Ideologies in themselves, however hateful they are, are not the causes of great historical events (although they may be sufficient to explain individual actions); it is when these ideologies find expression in the institutions of power that things happen.

Why, then, do we "privilege" (to use a piece of contemporary jargon) the Holocaust over all other historical examples of mass killling? John suggests that there are many more "relevant" instances to study for the purpose of "moral instruction," and proceeds to rattle off a few of them: extermination of the native Americans (North and South), Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sudan. He could have added Cambodia, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Stalinist Russia, et al.

I'm not sure what John means by "relevant." If relevance is related to closeness in time, then the example of the native Americans doesn't seem that relevant; if it means culturally, then the examples of Rwanda and Sudan don't really matter to Americans or the West. As for me, while I regard all these examples as essential, I do think the Holocaust has a special (not in a moral sense) place in the historical consciousness of the West, and let me explain why.

To begin with, the Holocaust involved the Jewish people, and they occupy a special place in the history of the West. No historical group, at least within Western history broadly conceived, can claim to have been persecuted in the ways that the Jews were for several thousand years.

The Holocaust was also part of a larger historical picture in its time, by which I mean of course WWII. If the Great War was pointless in its destruction, WWII -- leaving aside the temporary alliance between the Allies and Soviet Russia -- was imbued from the start with a strong moral purpose: the destruction of fascism. The Holocaust did not take place in deepest Africa, and it did not involve the peoples of a single country in the way that the Cultural Revolution did. It took place within the context of the largest war the world has (not just had) ever known.

And third, it took place in Germany, the great hope for the (old) new world order envisioned by Wilson and the League of Nations; the home of Goethe, Kant, Schiller, Hegel, and Ranke. How could a distinguished nation commit such an atrocity? This is the question that all historians of the Holocaust ask themselves. Goldhagen is content to dehumanize all Germans as absolutely committed to the killing of all Jews; by contrast, as Christopher Browning describes in Ordinary Men, most Germans were not by instinct or by custom killers. The Nazis, as many have pointed out, were men of culture, not illiterate Cambodian peasants or Rwandan tribesmen.

Finally, the nature of the genocide committed by the Nazis was distinctively modern. While it may be true that most Jews died of starvation and disease, there is no denying that the form of genocide "perfected" by the Nazis was unique to history. The Nazis turned killing into an industry, impersonal and mechanized.


Posted by kungfuzi at 10:26 PM | |

 
Holocaust: Hype and Misrepresentations

This also could have been titled “Against All Ignorance” or “The Holocaust.” But I’m really not that pretentious.

I. Any decent person should know about the Holocaust.

At the risk of callously treating an extremely sensitive question, I ask "Why?" The supposed knowledge of the Holocaust that we educated have is oftentimes inaccurate re-tellings of Second World War history. I agree that Auschwitz represents many of the inchoate pathologies of some Western ideals and concepts. I do not believe, however, that the superficial, inaccurate, frustrating discourses and invocations concerning the Holocaust in any way add to a person's intellectual or moral well-being.

Most persons who profess opinions about the Holocaust oftentimes do so from the standpoint of moral superiority, whether that of a professional or lay person. In much of the armchair scholarship surrounding Holocaust studies, most narratives and hypotheses about why the Holocaust happened (it would be more accurate to say why the Nazis believed the mass extermination of many of peoples of Europe was strategically necessary and justified) begin from the standpoint of assuming that the Nazis, Germans, or Hitler wanted to annihilate every last Jew from the earth. (To be fair, there is a lot of literature, that I will quote here, that does not make this erroneous assumption.) This article of faith is a largely incorrect, if popular, assumption. I wish to correct these false beliefs and then propose an actual model for the remembrance of the Holocaust.

Jonah Goldhagen provides an excellent example of a problematic analysis of the Holocaust in his book suggestively titled Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Goldhagen, in analyzing the Holocaust in comparative perspective, often wrote of the German “willingness to kill” Jews during World War Two. For him, the preceding Holocaust scholarship’s inability to describe adequately why the Holocaust happened in Germany obscures the obvious and underlying German hatred of Jews. He begins: “[Other explanations of the Holocaust] ignore, deny, or radically minimize the importance of Nazi…ideology, moral values, and [their] conception of the victims for engendering” a basic desire to hate and kill Jews. (13) Goldhagen’s theory, in contrast, comments on the deep nature of German anti-Semitism to explain the Holocaust: “the perpetrators, ‘ordinary Germans’ were animated by anti-Semitism, by a particular type of anti-Semitism that led them to conclude the Jews ought to die.” (14, emphasis in the original) The German hatred of the Jews had become so great, and his opinions of the Jew so low, that the Holocaust was the only possible answer available to the German Jewish Question. “Simply put, the perpetrators, having consulted their own convictions and morality, and having judged the mass annihilation of the Jews to be right, did not want to say “no” [to genocide].” (19) Goldhagen puts much effort in trying to prove that the Germans were particularly anti-Semitic to the point of requiring the eradication of the Jewish race. For him, the conflict between German and Jews began in the early pre-school propaganda of children’s books, “The Devil is the father of the Jew”, and ended in the morbid oblivion of the abattoir. Moreover, even though “the Jews of Germany…wanted nothing more than to be good Germans” and the “Eastern European Jewry [was extremely] Germanophil[ic]”, in his mind it was not surprising, in retrospect, to have observed the Nazi mass slaughter because “the will for the comprehensive killing of Jews in all lands” was a result of the race hatred of divided German society. (414)

There are two problems with casting the Holocaust in this light. The first is that nearly 72% of Germany's Jews, through institutionalized discrimination and cultural intimidation, were forced to emigrate before the Germans initiated World War Two. (Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, 14.) The second problems involves the curious little fact that the mass annihilation of European Jews, as opposed to merely German Jews, or, on the other hand, all Jews, did not begin until 1941.

The German government targeted Jews because it genuinely believed that the Jewish people, as a political-biological entity, posed an actual threat to the German national future in the form of Marxist-Communism, on the one hand, and as a degrader of that pure Aryan blood, on the other. Hitler warns in Mein Kampf : “If, with the help of his Marxist creed, the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.” (300) With such rabid, delusional, and psychotic anti-Semitism—from which a large number of our European counterparts currently suffer to a lesser degree—it is quite logical to intuit how the Nazis could be responsible for the murder of so many Jews. Though logical, the mass murder of Jews was not the sole option for the Nazi. In fact, it was not even the first option.

The first option chosen by the rabidly anti-Semitic Third Reich was that of institutionalized legal and cultural discrimination. In order to protect those Germans from the Jews, the Reich abolished Jewish political and economic rights. Exclusion of Jews from service in the government, the practice of medicine, participation in the academy, and the holding of any positions of power and influence become commonplace in pre-war Germany. The ban on German-Jewish intermarriage flowed naturally from the aforementioned cases of discrimination. Forced emigration became the immediate aim of the German government after all the institutional discrimination was in place. The SS Security Service memorandum nicely summarizes early German Jewish policy: “the aim of Jewish policy must be the complete emigration of the Jews…[T]he life opportunities of the Jews have to be restricted, not only in economic terms. To them Germany must become a country without a future, in which the old generation may die off with what still remains for it, but in which the young generation should find it impossible to live, so that the incentive to emigrate is constantly in force.” (Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 201) This policy was so successful that almost three-quarters of Germany’s Jewish population emigrated to safety from that totalitarian nightmare. By 1942, however, Germany began on a campaign to mass exterminate many of the Jews. Why? There are three pieces of evidence which I believe addressed my second question.

First, the success of the German blitzkrieg across Europe brought millions of Jews, enemy combatants in their eyes, under its control. The amount of energy needed to convince Germany’s relatively small number of Jews to emigrate would have been insufficient to have dealt with the millions now on their hands. The refusal of other European (and American) nations to accept more Jewish refugees, combined with the lack of places to which Germany could deport Jews, created many logistical problems for the Nazi bureaucracy. Himmler, the architect and guardian of Nazi deportation policies, drafted a statement in 1940 stating: “I hope to completely erase the concept of the Jews through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere…[H]owever cruel and tragic…this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of people out of inner conviction as un-German and impossible.” (Browning, Nazi Resettlement Policy, 3-27, emphasis added.) A few months later Himmler clarified: “biological extermination…is undiginified for the German people as a civilized nation.” After the German victory, “we will impose the condition on the enemy powers that the holds of their ships be used to transport the Jews along with their belongings to Madagascar or elsewhere.” (Browning, Nazi Resettlement Policy. 16-17; Gotz Aly, Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, 3)

Mass extermination was “practical” for two reasons. First, the Germans were used to destroying entire civilian populations for logistical reasons. In France and some areas of Eastern Europe the Germans limited their killing to exterminating rivals and rebels whereas in the areas of Eastern Europe that had been designated Lebensraum entire populations were destroyed or depopulated. Accordingly, Nazi rule exposed “all of them to alien rule, and some to deportation, terror, and mass murder. Very, very few people wanted the Germans there, regardless of how they conducted themselves under occupation.” (Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History ,426) Michael Burleigh further noted that the future German plans toward France and the western countries were extremely destructive. “Hitler was interested in German dominance of the continent, with a view to exploiting its resources for his great schemes in the East, not in some sort of amicable partnership….At the height of their power the Nazi leaders were contemplating the disappearance of some of Europe’s smaller states and the drastic attenuation of France herself, which they regarded as the hereditary foe, lynchpin of Versailles, and a source of democratic ideals which they had just comprehensively vanquished.” (Burleigh, 426) Second, the Germans had already effectively emptied Germany of the mentally ill and deformed. Adapting gas chambers and methods of extermination to the most recent problem was a small technocratic challenge, easily overcome by the German bureaucracy. By the end of 1942, Germany had already murdered about two-thirds of the Jews, roughly 3.8 million, that it was going to murder under the Final Solution. (We also still have to deal with the fact that a large number of Jews who died during the Holocaust, whom I included in this estimate anyway, did not die from shooting, hanging, phenol injection, or gassing but rather from sickness, disease, undernourishment, and hyperexplotation. If we were to speak of Jewish deaths in the same method by which we speak of aboriginal deaths in the Americans during the Spanish conquest, these would not count toward the Holocaust total.)

This knowledge about the historical events surrounding that infamous mass murder in no way benefits the average person. Why is it that we should remember the Holocaust and treat it so sacrosanct? There are many more relevant historical mass killings that the Brits, or anyone else for that matter, could look to for moral instruction. The genocides of the Native American tribes, the destruction of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, the mass killing within the Yugoslavian civil wars of succession, that bloody episode in Rwanda, or, even more recently, that tired little conflict in the Sudan would all be appropriate topics about which to scold persons for their lack of knowledge. An episode in Germany that reduced the population of Europe by hardly 1% over the period of years 1939-1945, though polemicized, infamous, and an article of faith for many, isn’t really that relevant in the grand scheme of things.

II. The Comparison of The Intifadah to the policies of the Thrid Reich is wrong-headed, and, above that, stupid.

Arthur Chrenkoff opines: “Where does one even begin to tackle this sort of absurdity? That if there is "not much of a difference" between the Second World War and the Second Intifada, where are today's concentration camps, where is Auschwitz, where are the gas chambers and the crematoria, where are the mass graves, where are the Einsatzgruppen and the SS? Or maybe it's not that Germans don't know what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians - maybe they don't know what their own grandfathers have done to the Jews? Maybe Germans think that the Holocaust consisted of Wehrmacht shooting a few Jewish kids throwing stones at the Panther tanks, or Luftwaffe taking out a Jewish Fighting Organisation leader in retaliation for a suicide attack on a Munich beerhall?”

I agree with Chrenkoff that the Israelis are not fighting a war of extermination against the Palestinian people. I, however, would like to ask Chrenkoff if drawing comparisons between “the Second World War and the Second Intifada” are as “absurd” as he would like them to be. For instance, the discrimination and disenfranchisement of Israeli Arabs in Israel’s 50 plus years of existence has been comparable to Nazi disenfranchisement of Jews before it starting killing them. The expulsion of Arabs in the Arab-Israeli wars, the encourage emigration that is still an official Israeli policy, and the confiscation of Arab possessions during this conflicts is not dissimilar from pre-war Nazi policies. The once active settler policies of various Israeli governments, both right and left until Sharon, after the 1967 Six Day War, is eerily similar to the German settler policies unleashed on Eastern and Western Europeans during the Second World War. Moreover, the explicit preference given to Jews worldwide, similar to the German preference given to Germans in all lands, smacks of the Nazi past.

Let me be clear here. I am not arguing, as it is fashionable to do these days, that the Jewish state will be setting up death camps anytime soon. I, however, see the almost mutually exclusive tensions generated by the two pillars of Israel: of being a democracy for the Jews. Almost as problematic as the conservative Christian notion of salvation for all persons (excepts prostitutes, liberals, Jews, gays, etc), the Zionist idea of a democratic state for Jews, built in land which, until recently has not had a Jewish majority for some millennia, suffers from the centrifugal forces of inclusion (democracy) and exclusion(ethnicity/religion). As a Zionist myself, I struggle with how Israel should keep its Jewish majority and remain democratic in the face of a demographic shift against its ideal. Lesser regimes would have engaged in mass killing in the face of organized para-military resistance and a population explosion of an “enemy nation.” Comparisons to the Nazi past are not only relevant, but necessary, that Israel may guard her heart against the seductive strategic logic of mass killing.

III. What exactly did we mean when we said "Never Again"?

The world made a pledge to “never again” let the Holocaust happen. “Never again” has turned into an almost universal expectation that every person should actively and consciously recall the gruesomeness of the Holocaust to prevent future genocides. In so far as the world has stood by time and time again when multiple mass killings explode around the globe since World War Two—in communist states starving their people to death between purges, in fundamentalist terror in the Middle East, in anti-colonial revolutionary struggles, in Western armed interventions into other states, in anti-communist liquidations, in counterguerrilla operations, and in ethnic conflicts—I am starting to believe that the promise was actually “Never again in 1942 will we allow Germany to kill Jews.”

Valentino proposes a solution to this mess: “Only by comparing the Holocaust to other episodes of mass killing can we asses its significance. Only by understanding its similarities and differences can we draw lessons from the Holocaust that might help us prevent or limit this kind of violence in the future. Indeed, the contribution that studying the Holocaust can make to the understanding of genocide and mass killing in general is one of the most important reasons why honor our obligation to never forget it.”

Elie Wiesel: “I have tried to keep memory alive, I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.” We should remember the Holocaust, then, in so far as it helps us to understand the mass terror that mass murder unleashes upon the world, whether by Western governments in poorly planned interventions and calculated hate, or by political instability. Jean Baudrillard: “Forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself.”


Posted by John Stevenson at 6:00 PM | |

 
Grhh

Victor Davis Hanson is coming to Dartmouth. To debate Ron Edsforth. I am mightily pissed not to be there. Grhh.

Update: so too is Daniel Pipes (see right column). I wonder if he's debating Gene Garthwaite? Probably not.

Grhh.

Posted by kungfuzi at 7:00 PM | |

 
More historical relativism

A poll taken some weeks ago in England found that 50% of Englishmen hadn't heard of Auschwitz. As I said back then, the result wouldn't be that bad if a substantial portion of the ignorant had heard of the Holocaust.

The result of this latest poll, however, is harder to cast in a decent light. According to the University of Bielefeld in Germany, 51% of pollsters "said that there is not much of a difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today and what the Nazis did to the Jews during the Holocaust...The survey also found that 68 percent of Germans believe that Israel is waging a 'war of extermination' against the Palestinians."

Arthur Chrenkoff expresses my concerns quite well, so you should just read him.

Posted by kungfuzi at 5:58 PM | |

 
Books (again)

Dan Drezner asks, "what books are you embarrassed not to have read?"

There are really too many to list. Like several of Drezner's commenters, I haven't read Thucydides. As someone interested in history, I haven't read Herodotus or most of Gibbon. Ditto most of Aristotle (Poetics aside), most of Plato (The Republic aside), Kant, Nietzsche, and just about all modern philosophers. As an English major whose interest in literature has diminished somewhat lately, I'll admit to not having read War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Don Quixote (managed only 300 pages), Bleak House, Middlemarch, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and all of Faulkner. Oh, and despite attending an evangelical school for 10 years, my knowledge of the Bible is shoddy. Don't even get started on non-Western stuff.

Posted by kungfuzi at 10:15 PM | |

 
State of The Nation

No sooner has Peter Beinart exhorted the left to get serious about the war against militant Islam, a massive article appears in The Nation to prove him, well, correct. Among the twenty-something odd contributors surveyed,
only Michael Lind gets it:

And in a world in which the greatest threat to civilization is the religious right of the Muslim countries, much of the left persists in treating the United States as an evil empire and American patriotism as a variant of fascism.

American progressivism, in its present form, is as obsolete in the twenty-first century as the agrarian populists were in the twentieth. If you can't adapt to the times, good intentions will get you nowhere. Ask the shade of William Jennings Bryan.

One other guy talks about the "moral imperative to ending the Bush war in Iraq," but offers no ideas on how to deal with al-Qaeda. The others, by contrast, are content to cast their eyes elsewhere and offer vague generalizations about the need for change and social justice: reform Social Security (Theda Skocpol); "strengthen institutions that provide the social basis for progressive politics" (Eric Foner); create "a new civil rights movement, a mobilization against the Bush regime, against its nascent totalitarianism, with marches on Washington that will stir the dormant American conscience" (Dartmouth's Susannah Heschel); make human rights "a reality for all" (Mary Robinson); win the Hispanic vote (several contributors); "use our blue-state haven [New York] as a laboratory to grow new alternative policies" (Bertha Lewis and Bob Master); "[attack] the dog-eat-dog ideological assumptions of the new corporate state that now dominate American politics. With our bare hands" (Dan Carter); and so on.

Then there's the usual warning about incipient fascism (NYU professor Troy Duster), and the revelation that "Kerry got beaten in Ohio partly by a nefarious plan that denied Democratic precincts an adequate supply of voting machines." The author of that last statement also encourages the left to "Demonize the Republicans for opposing recounts, suppressing voters and installing insecure e-voting systems with proprietary software owned by partisan companies."

Democrats, liberals, leftists - you can and have to do better than this. (Thank God for Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Brad Plumer.)

Posted by kungfuzi at 10:09 PM | |

 
Who should blog?

When the intranet's down, the bloggers go out to town...

Kevin Drum, at the end of a post on the much-hyped but hitherto non-existent Becker-Posner blog, wonders who we'd like to see blogging. He proposes Richard Dawkins, but his commentators have taken the liberty to include a few dead people as well.

Christopher Hitchens would be a fabulous choice, for temperamental reasons alone (not to mention his intellect). I can imagine him having a comments section that he actually participates in.

Posted by kungfuzi at 10:27 PM | |

 
Auschwitz? What's that?

A poll has found that 50% of Britons have never heard of Auschwitz. Without wanting to make excuses for such gross historical ignorance, I wonder how many of these people have never heard of the Holocaust? That would appear to be the more salient question.

Posted by kungfuzi at 8:58 PM | |

 
Half-Life 2: Adjectives fail me

Blogging has been scarce for the past week because of Half-Life 2, which is quite possibly the best-looking game ever made. See for yourself. I played Doom 3 when it came out and the visual contrast between the two games could not be more significant. The latter features miles of claustrophobic corridors, fantastically rendered, but all identical: I recall very few scenes that stood out, save for maybe the Hell level and some of the final levels. HL2, by contrast, has both spectacular outdoor vistas and realistic indoor scenes. The water effects and texture work are amazing.

HL2 also plays fantastically. The story, while not developed as fully as it should be (even by the end), is detailed and engrossing (and scary). The characters are nearly life-like thanks to detailed facial modelling - they roll their eyes, shrug their shoulders, and express anger and sadness. The levels are varied and feature all manner of interesting puzzles and challenges. Speakking of which, I have to mention the game's physics engine and the gravity gun that relies on it. There's nothing quite like picking up a sawblade and slicing through a couple of zombies, without having to expend any precious shotgun ammunition. Or, at one moment on Highway 17, picking up a giant metal container with a crane and using it to bludgeon hapless Combine soldiers.

Again, the contrast to Doom 3 could not be greater. In Doom, all you did was move from room to room, shoot whatever was in there, open a locked door or two, and so on. There was no variety in the gameplay, and the monsters you faced became predictable after a while. HL2 confronts the gamer with all sorts of interesting scripted scenarios. Early in the game, without a weapon, you have to run away from the pursuing Combine. Later on, while cruising Highway 17, you face off against a Combine dropship that has to be taken down with a rocket launcher. In the prison, you have to defend your position from waves of Combine soldiers with stationary turrets. There aren't any boss fights in the game (unlike in Doom 3), but this is only slightly disappointing. The last few levels are pretty cool nonetheless.

As I've run out of adjectives, I'll stop here, and get back to regular blogging shortly.


Posted by kungfuzi at 11:56 PM | |

 
Moore of the Same, or can the left Move On?

* Note to self: worse title ever!

Peter Beinart has a must-read article on the challenge liberals and Democrats face in the aftermath of Bush's re-election. It's quite simple really, as Andrew Sullivan, OxBlog, and others - even Jonah Goldberg - have been saying: is the left willing to discard its negative critique of the Bush administration adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan in favor of a foreign policy that takes seriously the threat of militant Islam? In other words, is the Democratic Party willing to do to Michael Moore what it did to Henry Wallace in 1947 - cast him by the wayside? Says Beinart:

Most Democrats agree with [Moore] about the Iraq war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: "There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"

[...]

What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.

Beinart has some equally strong words for MoveOn.org (which as Tim Blair points out, should really be renamed "RemainFixated.org"), whose founder Eli Pariser, when asked at an anti-war rally why he was sharing the stage with ANSWER and other apologists for dictators, said "I'm personally against defending Slobodan Milosevic and calling North Korea a socialist heaven, but it's just not relevant right now."

Beinart then proceeds to sketch a framework for anti-totalitarian liberalism based on an even more ambitious American foreign policy: one that would involve not just killing terrorists, but also nation-building - something Beinart argues the Republicans, for all their talk about promoting freedom abroad, are still instinctually suspicious of. Hmmm. I agree on the importance of nation-building. I just don't know if the "deep-seated opposition to foreign aid and nation-building" on the Right is as strong as it once was (i.e. during the Cold War). Beinart is good at quoting Moore and MoveOn, but he can't seem to find a single quote from a representative Republican or conservative who's skeptical of nation-building. (And no, John Derbyshire and Pat Buchanan don't count.) In fact, it seems to me that a great many conservatives these days are quite supportive of nation-building. And if there is inherent conservative skepticism to foreign aid, it sure wasn't manifested in the $87 billion loan package approved by the House and Senate last year. It seems to me that Beinart is confusing intentions and consequences. He should read Arthur Chrenkoff.

Still, Beinart's lack of evidence on this point doesn't detract from what is a splendid and important piece. Read the whole thing!

Updates:

Responses from Andrew Sullivan ("the essay we've been waiting for"), Jonah Goldberg ("a wonderful, heartfelt, tough-minded, morally and politically serious wake-up call"), Kevin Drum ("What he really needs to write is a prequel to his current piece, one that presents the core argument itself: namely, why defeating Islamic totalitarianism should be a core liberal issue."), and Matt Yglesias ("I wouldn't put nearly as much weight on dovish sentiments within the base as Beinart does.").

Posted by kungfuzi at 11:55 PM | |

 
New blog II

Nobel laureate Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner have a blog. Nothing there yet, but expect good things to come of it.


Posted by kungfuzi at 8:01 PM | |

 
New blog

Brad Plumer '03, now of Mother Jones, has a blog (well, he's had it for a few months now). Brad's one of the smartest and most well-read people I've run across, as his considered and detailed posts suggest. Check him out.


Posted by kungfuzi at 5:11 AM | |

 
"Special circumstances"

It's time to turn our attention once again to my dear old country. A recent report by Reporters without Borders has ranked Singapore 147th out of 167 countries in a list of global press freedoms, behind such specimens of enlightened thought as the Palestinian Authority, Liberia, and Kyrgyzstan. (A similar list by Freedom House has us slightly better at 135th out of 193.) For a country whose GDP per capita is 29th out of 231, this is really not good at all.

Typically, the government is protesting - and typically, doing a bad job at it. The Information Minister says that the Reporters Without Borders index "is based largely on a different media model which favours the advocacy and adversarial role of the press." By contrast, "We have a different media model in Singapore...This model has evolved out of our special circumstances and has enabled our media to contribute to nation building."

Of course, the whole point of a global ranking system is that it has to employ the same criteria across the board. "Special circumstances" of the sort the Information Minister mentions can't be taken into account, particularly if the alternative model proposes a "different media model." Otherwise, what's the point of a unified ranking systems? Perhaps Singapore would prefer to be compared to countries like North Korea and Iran that would have similar views on the role of media in society. (NB: I'm not drawing a moral equivalence here between my country and North Korea.)

In fact, if you look at these comments in a slightly different light, you'll notice that the Information Minister, in setting out to refute these claims, merely lends weight to the argument that Singaporeans enjoy very little press freedom. He says quite clearly that the media contributes to nation building in Singapore, that it has to be sensitive to the government's interests. If so, then the media ain't free, because freedom of the press means, by any reasonable standards, the freedom to pursue truth and fairness without having to worry about political pressures. It would have been more honest of the Information Minister to admit that Singapore employs a different media model, and therefore deserves its low ranking.

Posted by kungfuzi at 12:18 AM | |

 
The Academic Imagination

Mark Bauerlein (who debated James Panero today) has a must-read piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education on liberal academia. Sample:

The first protocol of academic society might be called the Common Assumption. The assumption is that all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals. Liberalism at humanities meetings serves the same purpose that scientific method does at science assemblies. It provides a base of accord. The Assumption proves correct often enough for it to join other forms of trust that enable collegial events. A fellowship is intimated, and members may speak their minds without worrying about justifying basic beliefs or curbing emotions.

Bashing the academy for its left-leaning tendencies has been a cottage industry for some time, but to date no one, whether inside or outside academia, seems to have found a reasonable approach to enhancing intellectual diversity on campus. Conservative professors like Harvey Mansfield at Harvard and Robert George at Princeton seem content to let things be and play the role of the lone maverick. The folks at Campus Watch aren't going to achieve their goal of injecting sense into Middle Eastern Studies by publishing dossiers of "errant" professors on their pages (a practice that's since been discontinued). David Horowitz's activism looks similarly doomed to aggravate rather than result in reform. Writes Bauerlein,

That doesn't mean establishing affirmative action for conservative scholars or encouraging greater market forces in education -- which violate conservative values as much as they do liberal values. Rather, it calls for academics to recognize that a one-party campus is bad for the intellectual health of everyone. Groupthink is an anti-intellectual condition, ironically seductive in that the more one feels at ease with compatriots, the more one's mind narrows. The great liberal John Stuart Mill identified its insulating effect as a failure of imagination: "They have never thrown themselves into the mental condition of those who think differently from them." With adversaries so few and opposing ideas so disposable, a reverse advantage sets in. The majority expands its power throughout the institution, but its thinking grows routine and parochial. The minority is excluded, but its thinking is tested and toughened. Being the lone dissenter in a colloquy, one learns to acquire sure facts, crisp arguments, and a thick skin.

Bauerlein doesn't actually offer any specific prescriptions, but his approach is essentially correct. Conservatives have to stop whining and ridiculing liberal professors, no matter how silly things get. Those outside academia need to engage sensible leftist professors, not all of whom are somewhere to the left of Che Guevara. Those inside academia (especially those with tenure) need to do the same, both in private and in public. Conservative students ought not to be afraid to speak out -- respectfully -- against professors whom they disagree politically with, and more of their kind should be encouraged to pursue tenure-track positions in the humanities and social sciences.


Posted by kungfuzi at 3:00 AM | |

 
The Election

More coming from me on the election soon. However, I would just like to note a few things from the outset for some of my very confused liberal and conservative friends at the moment.

1. This is election is not the end of the world as we know it. Unlike what you hear from the embittered members of the opposition party, or from the triumphalist Bill Bennects of the world, the election of President Bush with solid Republican majorities in both houses is not going to so completely transform the American landscape that fleeing to Canada will be a necessity. The Republican is not going to legislate 'proper morality' into the American people.

2. The Democratic party is not the party that a majority of Americans would vote for if they weren't being duped by Republicans. Higher turnout in the electorate did not necessarily mean a Kerry victory, nor are millions of persons voting "against their interests" when they cast their votes for President Bush. The Dems do not have the philosophical and moral superiority to Republicans that the masses are just missing. Any advice given by any person telling the Dems that the reasons they lost is because they aren't liberal enough (far left), or have the right ideas but need to dumb them down/ dress them up for the general population (DLC), is just wrong.

3. The election was not inevitable. It literally came down to Ohio, and regardless of the spin to the contrary, the nation is quite "divided." The Democrats are just as confused as now as they would be if Kerry had won. The "anyone but Bush" strategy isn't really a viable, though cogent, strategy if the Democrats want to re-emerge as a major player in national politics. The outcome of the election was never even clear or inevitable.


Posted by John Stevenson at 10:51 AM | |

 
Tom Wolfe

I'm not the biggest fan of contemporary fiction, but am willing to make the exception for books like Tom Wolfe's upcoming I Am Charlotte Simmons. If only because 1) the book sounds suspiciously similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (which I have read), right down to the "roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition" that serve as the setting for Wolfe's novel; and 2) Wolfe's a man after my own heart:

So what is it about his liberal neighbours and fellow diners in his adoptive New York that Wolfe cannot abide? "I cannot stand the lock-step among everyone in my particular world. They all do the same thing, without variation. It gets so boring. There is something in me that particularly wants it registered that I am not one of them."

I'm not from New York, and don't live in a particularly liberal world at the moment, but the pleasure that one gets from standing up to conformity and conformism is too great to be discounted.

Posted by kungfuzi at 11:34 PM | |

 
Translator, please

At first, I thought this op-ed (in response to this article) was in jest. Then I realized the writer was being dead serious. Quote:

I cannot understand, however, how an instructional program geared ultimately toward a male assessment of adequacy accelerates a program whereby women recapture their own agency for self-definition within the means of institutional construction.

Oh dear oh dear...

Posted by kungfuzi at 7:52 PM | |

 
Catcher in the Rye - overrated

I read Catcher in the Rye quite some time ago, but I recall being distinctly unimpressed by it. Holden did not come across as a likeable or sympathetic character, and Salinger's prose struck me as prosaic at best. I'm glad that I've found a fellow traveler in Jonathan Yardley:

Viewed from the vantage point of half a century, the novel raises more questions than it answers. Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as "a symbol of purity and sensitivity" (as "The Oxford Companion to American Literature" puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

Thank you, Mr. Yardley.

Posted by kungfuzi at 7:07 PM | |

 
Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy

If you haven't bookmarked PoliticalTheory.info, you should. They link to many articles that Arts & Letters Daily doesn't, like this lengthy and fascinating piece on Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy by Tod Lindberg of the Policy Review. It's a great introduction not just to Neoconservatism and liberalism, but to political philosophy as well.

Posted by kungfuzi at 6:45 PM | |

 
Stanley Fish at Dartmouth

First I miss Andrew Sullivan's appearance, and now I can only read about a panel discussion featuring Stanley Fish that rapidly degenerated into a shouting match thanks to Roger Masters, James Murphy, Irene Kacandes, and one of the Review's favorite professors, Don Pease. Why? Did Fish accuse Dartmouth's professors of being anti-American Communist treehuggers? Actually, all that Fish proposed was that professors ought to leave their subjective opinions about topics within their field of expertise out of the classroom. "Come to class, keep up in your discipline, correct your papers, keep office hours, and that's it," he said. Dartmouth's faculty reacted in outrage. After all, said Kacandes, "We must leave the idea of professors as disseminators of truth behind."

I actually think that our Dartmouth professors, their rudeness aside, have a point. Not having been there, I can't contextualize this statement as well as I wish I could, but I very much doubt that Kacandes is denying that there's no such thing as truth. No, she's simply arguing for a more expanded definition of humanities professors' responsibilities to encompass discussion and the exchange of opinions. I'm pretty sure Fish agrees with this. He teaches literature, for goodness sake! He pioneered Reader-Response Theory and the notion of "interpretative communities"!

No, the real point of contention between Fish and the Dartmouth professors was not between facts and opinions, but between opinions and opinions. That is to say, should professors attempt to "change the world" by drawing out the wider socio-political implications of their scholarship? Fish has argued in the past that Theory has no consequences in the sense that it cannot direct practice by providing a general account of interpretation and meaning. As such, as he said at Dartmouth, "Our job is not to change the world but to analyze it." From the standpoint of history, his circumscription of Theory's applicability (which is itself a Theory) is simply wrong, given the proliferation of very consequential totalizing ideologies throughout the 20th century.

As for his exhortation to teach without seeking to change the world, I can sympathize. Roger Masters, as a friend of mine attests, spoke at length about silicoflourides in freshman seminar on Machiavelli, presumably because, as he said to Fish, "[the professor] has a moral obligation to do something about [a finding or opinion that would have a profound effect on society]." Now I know that Masters has done pioneering work on politics and biology. But is it professional for him to spend so much time in an introductory course on Machiavelli discussing his pet topic? I don't think so. There are of course many more egregious examples around. Put it this way: if a student comes out of a class knowing more about a professor's political views than the subject material, it's time to take some of Fish's advice to heart.

Posted by kungfuzi at 1:57 AM | |

 
Jacques Derrida, dead at 74


Posted by kungfuzi at 6:30 AM | |

 
Memo to John

Look, I know you're desperately unhappy at the state of the American political scene, but would you stop using the blog to promote your 2020 Presidential Campaign!!

Posted by kungfuzi at 8:43 PM | |

 
Voting Strategy 2004

This is where I tell you how you should vote. Yes, I know it's amazingly pretentious but in this election we are casting our votes for millions of persons who, with bated breath and benign indifference, need us to be both responsible and informed. This is a vote that will determine the course of the nation and comes at a critical moment in international affairs.

I. Your BallotFor President: John Kerry
For Vice-President: Write-In, John McCain
For the House: A thrid-party Candidate (but not the Greens)
For the Senate: Any Republican who isn't a racist or a homophobe

II. The Reasons (or the argument that John Kerry would make were he intelligent)

A. Foreign PolicyBush has been simply disastrous for our country's reputation. With resolve, he has blundered from one mess to another like an unfettered bovine on a grassy plain. To his credit, he did correctly identify the reality of international terrorism, and, correctly (much to the chagrin of some of more leftist friends) invade Afghanistan. However, the understaffing of Afghanistan, the wild goose chase in Iraq, the president's refusing to apologize, his casual and cocky dismissal of Kyoto, the ICC, and the ABM treaty all show that resolve and bravado are for naught when misinformation and untruths abound.

That being said, Iraq is the main front in the war on terror, and, I seriously doubt Kerry's resolve to see it through and Bush's ability to carry it out intelligently. The fact of the matter is, as I have said here, liberals inside Iraq have a greater hope for a post-tyranical liberal government on September 11, 2004 than they had on September 11, 2000. Will Kerry's internationalism rebuild Iraq and address the structural inequalities within the international market? Maybe. Will a president who is incapable of seeing, let's forget about admiting, his own errors (being president is "hard work") sucessfully re-oreint American policy after the meandaring, vapid compromises of Clinton? Absolutely not.

B. The Supreme Court
There will probably be many resignations over the next presidential term. Having a split government will promote more moderate justices willing to make the compromises necessary in a multicultural democracy.

C. Domestic Economic Policy
Bush's unrestrained spending, combined with lower taxes, has bankrupted the government. We need the fiscal restraint that real Republicans and Liberatarains offer in the Senate and the House. However, we need to send a message to Mr. Bush that we, the voters, find it unacceptable what he has done.

D. Why Third Party?
We, as the voters of America, need to send a message to Washington that if the two-party system continues to offer us uninspiring choices for leadership, we will turn to alternative sources for our inspiration.


Posted by John Stevenson at 8:42 PM | |

 
Butts back blogging

Dartobserver member, op-ed columnist for The D, and fellow Alpha Thetian Rob Butts is now blogging full time at Rockyblog. (Thanks to Professor Samwick for reminding me to visit Rockyblog again.)

Posted by kungfuzi at 8:31 PM | |

 
Vice-Presidential Debates

Much better than the presidential debates. I was working at the library and had to unforunately watch the debates on my laptop. I also have the personal misfortune of having to listen to one of the most vile men in politics, McAuliffe, ramble on about how Cheney looked like an "angry" old man.

::sigh:: Terry just needs to admit that the Kerry-Edwards administration is headed in many wrong directions simulteanously. Whereas the Bush-Cheney administration has been a disaster and an embarrasment for America and the world, Edward's poor grasp of the relevant issues: how No Child Left Behind Works, the liberation of Afghanistan, tax cuts for small business owners, and the continuing importance of supporting globalization (including outsourcing "our" jobs) amazed me. While both of the potential vice-presidents were much more articulate and knowledgeable than their bosses whose lines they must support, Edwards (one of the best lawyers in America) was incapable of defending Kerry's plan.

That being said Cheney dropped the ball on the issue of a non-discriminatory marriage laws. Edwards eloquently articulated an acceptable seperate-but-equal clause, and, correctly, accused the Bush Administration of threatning to manipulate the Constitution for political purposes. (Cheney is too ashamed of his own daughter to embrace her, and her identity, in public. His daughter is running his campaign.) Cheney merely thanked Edwards for his kind words about his family.

Unsuprisingly, both candidates are wrong on this issue. Gays and lesbians should not be forced to live under a seperate but equal social regime in the United States. All unions, with the aim of staying together for life, possess equal moral worth and should be accorded the same levels of recognition and rights. As such, similar to the issue of voting and civil rights for blacks where discrimination at the state and local levels had become instituionalized to the point of seeming normal and ubiquitous, equal marriage should be a federal issue. Because no other states will recognize the couples who are married in Masschusetts, the federal government owes these unions equal respect and should nationalize the civil ideal of equality and recognition. Persons who don't believe that this should be a federal issue, or don't believe in the importance of access to civil marriage being open to all consenting adults monogamous unions, are wrong and have missed the boat.

However, in the course of two years (of watching the two year dominance of the GOP on the hill), I've swung from genuinely curious about what Republicans can do for America to genuinely afraid that the GOP was losing any hopes of liberalizing and forgetting its tenuous, and silly, alliance with social conservatives. The Democratic primaries frightened me with megalomaniacs like Dean running against confused protectionists like , but I did have options as I was able to cast my vote for Kucinich. (It boggles my mind the idea that anyone would have supported these persons at anytime.) Two weeks ago, due to lack of paying attention really, I fervently was a Kerry-supporter, and, having been asked about my domestic political leanings by some 08s and attempting to talk some Republican supporters out of voting for Bush-Cheney 04, I decided to due some research on Kerry-Edwards. This research has not only led to a much less fervent support of Mr.. Kerry, but the most intense bout of political/personal depression since the aftermath of election 2000 and the decision in 2003 to invade Iraq. How could both major political parties of the US be committed to its destruction through an awful combination of naiveté, ignorance, and wrong ideas? Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we have to wait 16 years before the Dartmouth takeover of Washington will commence.


Posted by John Stevenson at 8:09 PM | |

 
Andrew Samwick has a blog!

Dartmouth economics professor and Rocky Director Andrew Samwick has entered the blogosphere. (Hat-tip: Power Line.) Time to update the blogroll (again).

Which Dartmouth faculty member will be next?

Update: The D has coverage here. Can't they find a better epithet for Sullivan than "essayist"? (Well yes, he does write essays, but surely "political pundit" would be better?) Oh, and that's surely John Stevenson in the picture, doing his best to enhance his visibility on campus. No excuses for not writing that report now, John...

Posted by kungfuzi at 8:35 PM | |

 
Andrew Sullivan@Dartmouth

He'll be watching the debate and commenting on it. Why didn't I hang around at Dartmouth longer?

Posted by kungfuzi at 5:22 PM | |

 
SELF-PROMOTION: Hey, it's yet another blog.

SNARKSMITH: a blog covering the latest in Pop Culture, Literature, Art, Politics, Etc.

Of the billions of websites on the Internet these days, only a few hundred million are devoted to our brand of urbane scribbling.

Let's see... If you're feeling charitable in the manner of a Miramax sales pitch, you might say we're an Arts & Letters Daily meets Andrew Sullivan meets Gawkeresque phenomenon. You know, sui generis in that established winning formula kind of way. Less charitable in the manner of Zagat's during Restaurant Week: "If 'taste' is not a 'consideration,' you could do a lot 'worse' than this murky Irish stew of indefinite 'ingredient'; strange and 'forbidding' at first, but made with just enough 'concern for human consumption,' not to 'kill' you."

Such hot bloggable topics include:

-- Does New York City need a convention center or a declaration of independence?

-- What's Billy Bragg's postpunk English music got to do with Colin MacInnes' postwar English fiction?

-- Is Dale Peck hacking away at the ramparts of good criticism or giving great hermeneutic?

-- Howard Zinn's limbic populism: Destroying the study of American history or what?

From Michael Moore's lowest common denominator to Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin's highest uncommon literary friendship... From Kurdish rights to James Woodish insights... From the window to the wall / 'Til the sweat... well, you know the rest.

Snarksmith: (ahem) a link-and-fisk boullaibaise everyone should sample at least twice at the cyber-planetary potluck.

Snarksmith.

Editors: Michael Weiss (mike@snarksmith.com), Nicolas Duquette (nic@snarksmith.com)

Posted by Anonymous at 5:10 PM | |

 
Choices? You call these choices? or You've Got to be Kidding, Right?

Well, I should be doing work right now but I have band practice in a few minutes so I decided to procrastinate and read the news. Occasionally I read op.eds to remind myself why I skip to the international news section of the paper or read the BBC; our choice in the election is, and never has been, as clear as we have like to pretend. I do desperately miss the sweet blissful days of ignorance when I could have opinions without apology and casually dismissed which ever party I didn't like. The loss of naiveté breads nuance and now every time I turn around, I want to slap any one of candidates at any given time on any given issue. Sullivan perhaps summed up my position best: "The notion that the vote this year is obvious does indeed understate the complexity of the decision. Resolve versus indecision? Or incompetence versus a new path?"

However, in the course of two years (of watching the two year dominance of the GOP on the hill), I've swung from genuinely curious to genuinely afraid that the GOP was losing any hopes of liberalizing and forgetting its tenuous, and silly, alliance with social conservatives. The Democratic primaries frightened me with megalomaniacs like Dean running against confused protectionists like , but I did have options as I was able to cast my vote for Kucinich. (It boggles my mind the idea that anyone would have supported these persons at anytime.) Two weeks ago, due to lack of paying attention really, I fervently was a Kerry-supporter, and, having been asked about my domestic political leanings by some 08s and attempting to talk some Republican supporters out of voting for Bush-Cheney 04, I decided to due some research on Kerry-Edwards. This research has not only led to a much less fervent support of Mr.. Kerry, but the most intense bout of political/personal depression since the aftermath of election 2000 and the decision in 2003 to invade Iraq. How could both major political parties of the US be committed to its destruction through an awful combination of naiveté, ignorance, and wrong ideas? Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we have to wait 16 years before the Dartmouth takeover of Washington will commence.

Posted by John Stevenson at 12:34 PM | |

 
Readings

• Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. Stylish and straightforward narrative history of the British Empire from colonial America to the handover of Hong Kong. Remarkably, James manages to write about such a political and politicized phenomenon without ever coming across as ideologically biased. The characters and events carry the show -- as well they should. If you're looking for an introductory text on the Empire, get this instead of Niall's Ferguson's flashy tome.
  

• Frances B. Yates, The Art of Memory. This one's for more advanced readers (any book in which the footnotes frequently take up more space than the text is), but I recommend it nonetheless for the sheer depth and diversity of its historical insights. Yates traces the development of the art of memory from its origins in classical Greece to the Enlightenment, and along the way supplies new and genuinely compelling interpretations of, inter alia, Dante's Divine Comedy, medieval Gothic architecture, and Scholasticism.

• Garrett Mattingly, The Armada. History as it should be -- as a form of literature. Who am I to disagree with Simon Schama?
  

• Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The "essay" (in the author's own words) that has come to define our views of the Italian Renaissance. Though superceded in terms of scholarly insight by more recent works, Burckhardt's exuberant, sweeping prose remains unsurpassed, and his views continue to command the attention of all who might enter the field of Renaissance studies. (See Peter Burke's recent introductory text to see what I mean.)

I await John's review of Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History with bated breath...


Posted by kungfuzi at 8:21 PM | |

 
Tech Tip of the Day

If you haven't already, go download Mozilla Firefox and make it your default browser. It's smaller, faster, and more secure than Internet Explorer (which you should still keep around for Windows Update). FiringSquad reports that over a million people have already made the switch only six days after its first preview release.


Posted by kungfuzi at 4:14 AM | |

 
The hobgoblin of little minds, or why it's okay to change your mind

If you've taken the time to read John's lengthy posts from two to three months ago, you may have noticed that his positions on certain issues -- perhaps even his fundamental outlook on the world -- have changed. On Iraq, for instance, he now seems to appreciate the human rights factor more -- to the extent that he's agitating for intervention in Sudan. (I'm sure Professor Means was more persuasive on this point than I was!) Meanwhile, he's also gone from being a committed Republican to a self-described "center-leftist" who's critical of both Bush and Kerry (as I think most sensible people are). As the man himself writes, much to the surprise of others, "Antiracism, antidiscrimination, elitism, vegetarianism, a concern for injustice, and feminism are just a few of the values I have appropriated from my classes." (I've always wondered which class put him off meat, but that's a separate issue.) He's read more, thought about the issues in light of this extra reading, and has changed his mind here and there. That's fine, even admirable. Far too many people graduate from college not only thinking that they know everything, but believing that they know everything the proper way.

Now contrast John's intellectual evolution (John, please correct me if I've misrepresented you) with the approaches of both Presidential candidates. (It's an unfair comparison, of course -- most non-scientific comparisons are to an extent.) Kerry changes his mind too much, and seemingly without reason. I've tried tracing the development of his thinking on Iraq, but admit to being quite confused. Now it's okay for him to change his mind, but he should at least be honest about it, instead of pretending that he's been consistent all this while. I actually think that this will help his election chances among hawkish liberals in particular, many of whom, while unhappy about Bush's domestic policies, are prepared to prioritize the war on terrorism over gay marriage.

Bush by contrast comes across simply as stubborn. Things are not going swimmingly in Iraq. This need not count against Bush if he's willing to inject a little honesty into his public statements, and more importantly, ensure that the necessary changes are being made behind the scenes. I can't see the former happening -- especially with the elections six weeks away -- and I've no inside information on the latter. (But hey, Mark Steyn is comparing Iraq to Surrey: "In two-thirds of the country, municipal government has been rebuilt, business is good, restaurants are open, life is as jolly as it has been in living memory.")

Posted by kungfuzi at 8:32 PM | |

 
Stop whining!

Prof. Jere Daniell, who recently retired from the History Department, and who taught me an invaluable lesson in writing good historical prose, will tell you if you go and speak to him (and you should take up the Review's suggestion and do so) that there's a culture of complaint at Dartmouth. Everyone -- left or right -- likes complaining, he says, and there's no point in doing so. More often than not, you can't do anything about whatever you're complaining about; persisting in your course of action will only make you more quick-tempered and less likely to have a sense of humor. History has this effect on many of its elder practicioners, I suppose. Jacques Barzun says the same thing in a wonderful little essay entitled "Toward a Fateful Serenity" (it's the first essay in The Jacques Barzun Reader):

History is concrete and complex; everything in it is individual and entangled. Reading it, mulling it over does not weaken concern with the present, but it brings detachment from the immediate and thus cures "the jumps" -- seeing every untoward event as menacing, every success or defeat as permanent, every opponent as a monster of error.

Joe Rago -- who is a History major (and a very good one at that: I read several of his papers that he submitted for publication in the Dartmouth History and Classics Journal, and I know that he's writing a thesis this year) -- seems to have imbibed some of this spirit, as his refreshing op-ed in the freshman issue of the Review suggests. By all means have opinions and be skeptical: but be prepared to engage in "robust, intelligent criticism—the reasoned exercise of judgment, discrimination, and taste." I couldn't agree more with this non-partisan statement.

Now if only this praiseworthy attitude could rub off on some of his writers. And, to be fair, on the Free Press's as well.

Posted by kungfuzi at 6:55 AM | |

 
Pleasing Pease?

I note with great concern that Donald Pease is all of a sudden among the Review's "Best Professors at Dartmouth." How on earth did that happen? Last year, he was in the other category, thanks to yours truly. This is what the Review says about him this year:

Pease is a leading Americanist and a highly respected scholar in the field of American Studies.His dense lecture style takes some getting used to, but if you’re able to get beneath his jargon there’s something deep and profound to be had.

And this is what was said last year:

Several years ago, Professor Pease was mentioned in Philosophy and Literature's annual Bad Writing Contest for the following sentence: "When interpreted from within the ideal space of the myth-symbol school, Americanist masterworks legitimized hegemonic understanding of American history expressively totalized in the metanarrative that had been reconstructed out of (or more accurately read into) these masterworks." He lectures like that, too.

So all of a sudden there's something "deep and profound" beneath sentences like the above? All it says, if I'm not wrong, is that "The greatest works of American literature have helped to institutionalize a particular view of American history." Which, given the historical contexts of such works as The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick (check out those details on whaling), should come as no surprise to anyone. (I'm less clear about what the "myth-symbol school" is.)

When I took his class on American Drama (it's too big, the plays are boring and largely unimportant, and Bill Cook redeems only half of it), I didn't find anything significant underpinning his meandering, incoherent, unstructured lectures. If anything, he took relatively simple concepts and drenched them in so much postmodernese as to frighten away all but the most ardent English or Drama majors. This is not a rant against literary theory per se -- take English 15 with Peter Travis if you are serious about your English major -- but a criticism of one man's utterly ineffective teaching style. It's also highly unusual for a conservative publication to excuse bad writing and speaking -- especially postmodernese -- in the belief that something meaningful lies beneath it. (Skim this essay to see what I mean -- the Review and TNC usually concur on matters cultural.) Of course, I'm not demanding that the Review toe any particular party line, but I am surprised, and would be very interested to talk to the person who penned that blurb.

NB: International students will find me endorsing Pease heartily in a particular brochure that you get before coming to Dartmouth. I've since changed my views, and am prepared to acknowledge that, and apologize profusely for encouraging any undergraduates to take Pease's classes.


Posted by kungfuzi at 6:16 AM | |

 
Wright's Convocation Speech

Jim Wright's address to the 08s (08s!) can be read here. I'm actually fairly impressed by what he said -- apart from last excerpt:

• Life is full of stresses and tensions, and kindred souls - those who share with you a set of experiences, a common background, similar ambitions for life, tastes in music, literature, movies, recreational activities, common political values or religious beliefs - these are comforting and supportive friends. But education finally needs to be more than simply comforting and merely reinforcing. Reach beyond your circle of comfort.
  

• The free expression of ideas is a bedrock principle, even though not all that is thought or said is equally valid or true. The corollary of the freedom of speech is the freedom to criticize that which is said. And sometimes this freedom to disagree becomes an obligation. If politeness and civility and mutual respect form the basis of our community, so too do engagement and debate and, assuredly, disagreement.

• You are also for the most part incredibly polite. This is a good thing, but politeness and tolerance need not lead to a sort of intellectual or moral relativism that discourages you from challenging ideas with which you disagree.

• Discussions and calculations about red states and blue states, about tactics and polls, about funds raised and spent, about personal biography - as well as vicious smears that are cloaked in the wink of innuendo - these reduce the great issues of a great republic to a board game. The loser will not be one or another candidate. We shall all lose, because we will have allowed ourselves to be distracted from matters of substance.

So far, so good. (Cliches abound, but that's to be expected.) I appreciate that he mentioned "political values" as a component of diversity, and that he's standing up to "intellectual or moral relativism" (but see Matthew Yglesias's critique of the concept here). As for his foray into the current Presidential campaign, one need only look around (see this post by Andrew Sullivan, for instance). Now the question of course when push comes to shove -- when someone or some group tests the limits of acceptable discourse -- will Wright hold true to these words, or will he give excuses? The last quote raises some doubts as to whether free speech will come up tops:

• We are sustained by vigorous discourse, as well as by respect and civility. Now, your right to challenge these values, or any others, is clear. But as president I assume the obligation to define and defend them and to protect here a learning community that welcomes us all - a community where, regardless of our race or gender or sexual orientation, we are all respected and valued and one in which different political and religious views are encouraged.

I'm all for civility, and happen to think that there's not enough of it going around. But I'm wary when Wright says that he's going to define respect and civility "to protect here a learning community that welcomes us all - a community where, regardless of our race or gender or sexual orientation." There's much potential for abuse here. I'm wondering if it'd be feasible for these standards to be defined by the community itself. After all, they're the ones who are affected by them, not Wright himself. But how would that be done?

That's a hypothetical question, of course, since defining the limits of discourse is one of those prerogatives that no leader of whatever political or ideological persuasion, and in whatever context, would willingly cede. In any case, despite what the Review might say, Wright is not a bad president, and Dartmouth is not UC Berkeley. Sure, Dartmouth may have speech codes, but you don't find it on the front pages of FIRE or NoIndoctrination.org (correct me if I'm wrong), and Wright doesn't find himself in the headlines for trying to close down student government. From the few times I've met and interacted with him, he doesn't come across as a wild-eyed partisan. Take the SLI, for instance. When was the last time we heard about that? It's long since lost any meaning and direction. Dartmouth's frats are scarcely worse off than they were five years ago, give or take a few traditions like Psi U's keg jump. And conservative views are fairly prominent -- relatively speaking -- within the community -- go to World Affairs Council or PoliTalk, for instance; or talk to Douglas Irwin, Andrew Samwick, Allan Stam, or Allen Koop in the faculty.Things really aren't that bad, and Wright's rhetoric -- which will hopefully translate into reality -- is evidence of that.


Posted by kungfuzi at 4:40 AM | |

 
Midnight Dispatch: Right of Refusal?

I was a supporter of Sharon from the beginning, back when protests in front of Collis left associate professors of religion confessing their shame of supporting Israel next to fervent, if ill-informed, senior colleagues of mine who have since gone off to medical school. Back when it was fashionable to regurgitate the fashionably correct and ubiquitous condemnations of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon's “history” as a mass murderer and a genocidal maniac in response to the equally strident and obnoxious "pro"-Israel lobby, I expressed public joy that Sharon was the sitting prime minister in Jerusalem and foretold that he would in fact have both the courage and fortitude to bully the professional political hacks of the Knesset into a peace process and into dismantling the settlements. Given Sharon's enthusiasm in supporting his buddy Menachem Begin as housing minister, making a well-timed phone call to then Prime Minister Begin at Camp David supporting an exchange of the Sinai for peace, I knew that this old warrior, whose disastrous intervention into a messy Lebanese civil war as defense minister almost chased him from public life forever, was the one who could make peace.

Mocked by Ha'aretz and detested by the European public intellectuals, this pariah politician rebuilt the Likud party that would ultimately become as much of stumbling block to him as the universal hatred of the political left. Sharon admitted recently, as reported by Ha'aretz, "I may have been mistaken in going to the [Likud party] referendum. But the question now is whether to endanger Israel with a severe political crisis with the United States that will bring about an immediate political decline...What is happening now is not an argument between me and [Netanyahu]. The issue on the table now is us versus the U.S. I want to warn those comrades who seek to exploit this hour of crisis to advance their personal political agendas. As one who established the Likud and rehabilitated it from 19 to 38 seats, there is no one in this room to whom the Likud is dearer than to me. The Likud is dear to us - but Israel is dearer."

The problems threatening to rend Israel asunder, of refuseniks, of national conscience, of the entire national project as a whole, jumped to the forefront of my consciousness, from the depths to which I had relegated them after vowing to never again address the "Israel Question" after the incivility of the entire affair from my first two years in college, after considering the two drafts of bills before the House and Senate today concerning [mandatory] national service. Many soldiers, of whom one expects adherence to the socialized and ingrained law of obedience to superior officers in most circumstances, have refused to serve in Israel's current day colonialist project (of which Sharon was a, if not the, major architect). In a nation whose founders’ consciousnesses were galvanized and forged during an era of the Soviet and Nazi determination to extinguish all occurrences of religiocultural and biological Jewishness, respectively, one would expect its citizens to be extra sensitive to any politico-military apparatus, like the German SA, and, in some cases the IDF units deployed in the territories, whose existence is a daily reminder of the sub-human status of the person brutalized by such a regime. Viewed in this light, the refuseniks, by opting out of the banalizing boot of occupation, grant voice and visibility to the victims of a necessary Israeli national project. However, given this courage when the national apparatus is handling a class of person deemed alien and type-casted as hostile, what shall become of the military when Prime Minister Sharon deploys it against the profound beliefs of many of its citizens, the other great Satan in this conflict, the "settlers"?

How many speakers invited to campus to speak on the Israel question, solidly on the left as many of them happen to be, unctuously preached to the collegiate choir "Israel must dismantle the settlements"? As political, moral, and strategic necessity, this is statement is quite true; there is no reasonable person on either "side" of this question who believes in the defensibility of the settlements. What is always left unspecified by such speakers, reveling as they are in being part of the moral majority, is the actual implementation of this idea in reality and the affect it would have on the Israeli national consciousness. The precedent set by such act of political boldness-- of a government forcibly relocating its most fanatical citizens, acting against massive protests, and facing a potentially huge level of conscious objectors-- would not be negligible. Such an action raises a whole host of questions, the foremost being: when ordered to do so should a soldier act against a fellow citizen?

If we learned anything from witnessing the universally condemned horrors of the Nazi regime, or of the totalitarian terror inside the Soviet Union (with whom a number of academics sympathized at the time), it should be this: soldiers, when asked by superior officers to execute an order against a non-combatant, especially a fellow-citizen, has a moral obligation to disobey. I have seen evidence in international newspapers and on private websites that rightist opposition to Sharon has invoked this legacy of the obligation to opt-out (they are, of course, silent on the question of their complicity with the maw of the occupation) through the rhetoric familiar to us: evacuating the settlements is population transfer, a crime against humanity, an illegal military order with a black flag waving over it. Legality aside (I believe that the Israeli Supreme Court has not permitted Israeli law to have dominion over the territories), when substantial portions of the Israeli and international left have been explicitly or implicitly legitimizing political refusal to obey military orders they have used a similar method of political argument in pseudo-legal dress (i.e the international illegality of the Israeli occupation).

In the back of our minds, I think that we always knew that a day would come when an Israeli government would have to decide to evacuate and dismantle the physical manifestations of its colonialism, the settlements, against the wishes of its settler-citizens. Soldiers and policemen would have to execute this decision, many of them in contravention of their own beliefs and conscience, going against the ethical idea of non-violence against fellow-citizens that is the essence of the post-Nazi nationalist project. When the debate in Israel inexorably turns toward the question of the duty of persons in uniform to obey orders concerning the evacuation of the settlements, what will those intellectuals who glorified and praised the refuseniks of the left have to say? The simple answer that the just beliefs of leftists justify refusal and the unjust beliefs of rightists do not will not suffice. The questions of who will protect the Jewish nation from external enemies in the face of often hostile world-- the Middle East is a rough neighborhood--- when any objector is allowed to refuse and is praised for this refusal is a compelling problem indeed.

This debate, seemingly in the obscure province of Israel, a state that most people are content to forget is attempting to negotiate its problematic existence, will have great relevance for American students if Congress passes S89 and HR163, the Universal National Service Act of 2003, which would reinstate the military draft in the Spring of 2005 without exemptions for students or women. Maybe the debate in Israel is not so obscure after all. Given that many of us have strong objections about what the military is and isn't doing (though I have come around on the Iraq question), and about the social and moral contexts of hegemonic projection of military power in an age of unipolarity, what shall we do when are called to serve a country that we are proud to be in but often ashamed to be associated with?

Princeton, NJ 2004

Posted by John Stevenson at 10:00 PM | |

 
This is just hilarious

Man watches porn on first floor Berry. Best quote: "Don't yuck someone else's yum."

Posted by kungfuzi at 5:23 PM | |

 
Miscites et al.

Tim Waligore asked for a clarification of my Benhabib quote in my latest post. In reference to these sentences: "This brings me to a practical application of what I have learned. The College can, and should, ban speech that injures the quality of life and the total community environment of learning. Since we as individuals are, as political theorist Benhabib notes, situated among many webs of interlocution and various communities of language and socializing, we as individuals, and the College as an institutional authority, have the responsibility to censor and punish speech-acts, which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" Tim responded:

In Seyla Benhabib's book The Claims of Culture, Benhabib says she agrees with Charles Taylor that our selves are situated among many webs of interlocution. BUT Benhabib says that, from that fact, she does not think it follows that that the government should single out one of those indenties and it give specific institutional recognition and protection to it. At least in the context of society as a whole, Benhabib makes it clear that she is more interested in our identities being contested in the institutions of civil society, rather than through state enforcement. Granted, I haven't read everything Seyla Benhabib wrote, and she may in fact be in favor of 'speech codes.' But simply because we publically negotiate and contest our identities does not entail that the nearest institution should be empowered to regulate identity. Stevenson can make whatever argument he wants; I just don't think it's Benhabib's argument and I'd like him to tell me at least where he got it from.

I cited Benhabib, who was quoting/agreeing with Taylor but I didn't remember that at the time, to argue that we are situated selves, with multi-faceted identities. I cited her to show that individuals are complex situated selves and that the content-neutral idea of free speech as freedom of expression being defended in the D, rather than free speech as a tool toward small-e enlightenment, been offered by myself did not sufficiently recognize the potential for speech-acts to injure parts of a persons identity. I tried to make clear, and may have failed, that any defense of free speech, in my mind, needed some mechanism by which it could punish hateful, harmful speech, and promote constructive, pedagogical speech. I did not want the "nearest institution...to regulate identity" projects as a whole but to be in a position to punish and regulate exceedingly harmful discourses.

I did not cite her to say that the college should single out any one identity to which it grants special protection/recognition. No where did I state that Jewish persons needed some special protection from hate-speech. I am unclear on where Benhabib falls on the issue. My invocation of her should not implicated in my argument for "speech codes" (that label in and of itself is problematic). It's just that I was relying on her for a specific conception of identity, which she herself was appropriating from Taylor, and wanted to mention my indebtedness to her on that front. Starting from the Benhabibian/Taylorian conception of the situated self, I conclude that speech which "by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace" is not speech that should be eligible for protection under the banner of free speech. The wording of the latter half of the sentence I pulled from my notes on a US supreme court case 315 US somewhere between 570 and 573. My notes have the quote as follows: "There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem...insulting or fighting words which [cause] injury or (garbled) breach of the peace." In retrospect, I should work quotes around the latter half of the sentence and send that off to the D. (It has been edited on this site.)

Posted by John Stevenson at 7:13 PM | |

 
In Need of Discrimination: Watching What You Say

[fired this off to the editor after reading Gago's piece on the D on Tues]

Both Bruce Gago in "Freedom of Hate Speech?" and Chaplain Richard R. Crocker in "Faith Under Fire" have written to the editor of the(Every-other Daily) D to comment on the debate concerning whether the College should censure Al-Nur for hosting/entertaining, on its website, anti-Semitic interpretations of the Qu'ran. I will summarize the twin positions of Messrs Gago and Chaplain to demonstrate the misguidedness of their views.

For Gago, controversy creates a space where "logic, reason, and open debate" adjudicates among competing claims. For the College to do so, through juridical means, would unnecessarily abridge and burden the climate of free speech, which Bruce implies in his rhetorical question is the "fundamental raison d'etre" of the university. The idea that the College should censor any speech at all, as provocatively implied in that firebrand closing of his with its deliberate employment of the word "hate",--"sanctions against any organization or student that expresses speech, be it hateful or controversial, would undermine the most elemental tenets of human expression and university education"--is a heretical doctrine and should never be consider by educated folk. (Educated folk are, of course, those lovely souls of wit and learning who utilize the holy trinity of "logic, reason, and open debate.")

The Chaplain is as devoted to the unquestioned place of "free speech" as Gago but pads his view by adding in the oft-neglected dimension of tone, encapsulated in the word "civility”, which Bruce overlooks. (Bruce apparently believes that screaming matches, with a little reason et al., will produce learning and knowledge. I beg to differ.) Chaplain Crocker offers that while "freedom of expression is essential in an academic community", participants and interlocutors should "always try to cultivate and maintain an attitude of respect toward those who may disagree." Moreover, religious groups have a special burden in the verbal competition of ideas for they should “take leadership in protesting...when such expressions cease to be objects of inquiry and are instead used to threaten individuals or groups. Being a responsible member of a pluralistic educational community requires that while our beliefs differ, we express those beliefs in a way that honors the dignity of those who disagree with them."

Both Gago and Crocker believe that free speech is a good, administrative bodies should be neutral to the content of the speech, and Chaplain Crocker adds, participants must keep the medium of delivery nice. I take issue with the idea that entities like the College must be neutral to the content of speech simply because it is speech and is thus declared, by fiat, "free". Why should we conflate "hate" speech with a discourse of learning? Bruce offers that the most fundamental tenet of a university education is the freedom to express. I suggest, in contra, that the *actual* fundament of a liberal education is the cultivation of discrimination-- that is, the increasing ability to discern between the good and the bad and preparation for the ability to choose conceptions of the good life that does not unnecessarily burden others by its existence.

The College does not simply import hundreds of incoming first years to the sanctuary of Hanover to simply allow them speak. The College requires classes, and encourages each individual to shape her mind through the distributive requirements system. It is particularly in the social sciences and the humanities that we learn how to identify what is good and what is bad. (Unfortunately, the sciences and engineering departments often have curricula that are devoid of normative content. This is, of course, unsurprising given how much of their funding comes from places like the Department of Defense and other assorted institutions of war making. In fact, most of the products of the science and engineering departments scoff at the idea that they should think critically about what scientific research means-- but I digress.) Through these classes, we explore the conceptual frameworks that will govern our outlook as persons and citizens, and leave a huge imprint on our scholarly undergraduate work. Antiracism, antidiscrimination, elitism, vegetarianism, a concern for injustice, and feminism are just a few of the values I have appropriated from my classes. None of these values suggests "content-neutral" thinking; in fact, my values specifically dictate that when one hears an offensive or incorrect proposition that has found a new interlocutor with which to have a Socratic dialogue.

This brings me to a practical application of what I have learned. The College can, and should, ban speech that injures the quality of life and the total community environment of learning. Since we as individuals are, as political theorist Benhabib notes, situated among many webs of interlocution and various communities of language and socializing, we as individuals, and the College as an institutional authority, have the responsibility to censor and punish speech-acts. The Supreme Court best defined those acts as those "which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." That responsibility is not simply the Chaplain's injunction to be nice, but also forces us to ensure *what* we say is not injurious before we determine *how* we are going to say it.

My conception of what speech means in the context of a liberal education would be allow a controversy that causes learning, and allow us to condemn the speech of a fraternity and possibly censor Al-Nur. It would force members of various communities of discourse to consider more carefully the content and application of their ideas. This is not to lead to political correctness, for I lambaste such things often, but means to serve as a major corrective to those who doubt the importance of group identity and self-respect.

Any person should have been offended and have wanted to act against what was found on Al-Nur's website. I do not know what the College will do to Al-Nur, if anything, but it is important that we defend the right of the College to do so. I close with an observation of Justice Frankfurter: a person's "job and [her] educational opportunities and the dignity afforded him may depend as much on the reputation of the racial and religious group to which [she] willy-nilly belongs, as on his own merits."

Posted by John Stevenson at 7:51 PM | |