By Kathy G.

The decision on the part of Washington University, the highly respected research university located in St. Louis, Missouri, to award an honorary degree to the odious Phyllis Schlafly is deeply distressing to me. One reason why is that this story has gotten nowhere near the attention it deserves, either from the mainstream media or from the left blogosphere (although there are a few blogs that, against the grain, have been on the case).

I think part of the problem is that, these days, many people have no idea who Phyllis Schlafly was and is. And, compounding that, a lot of folks don’t understand what awarding an honorary degree means. I will try to correct what I see as those lacunae, or misunderstandings, in this post (which I’ll warn you right here, is exceedingly long).

Let me start by posing a question: how would you feel if a great university decided to bestow its highest award — an honorary doctoral degree — on Ann Coulter? Or on Karl Rove? Well, the reprehensible Schlafly is very much their equivalent, as I’ll explain later.

Washington University has defended its outrageous decision to honor Schlafly with these disgusting weasel words:

Alumna Phyllis Schlafly’s articulation of her perspectives has been a significant part of American life during the last half of the 20th century and now the 21st century, serving as a lightning rod for vigorous debate on difficult issues where differences of opinion are profound and passionate. Not only should a university serve as a place where such discussions take place, but it may also choose to recognize those who provide leadership and articulation — both pro and con — on vital issues.

Well, yes, there can be doubt that Phyllis Schlafly has been a “significant part of American life,” that she has been a “lightning rod,” that she has shown “leadership.” As Alan Wolfe pointed out in a 2005 review of a biography about Schlafly that appeared in The New Republic (but which, unfortunately, is unavailable online, because the TNR archives are still screwed up, as they have been for about a year now):

If political influence consists in transforming this huge and cantankerous country in one’s preferred direction, Schlafly has to be regarded as one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the twentieth century. . . Had she never been born, the Constitution would now include an Equal Rights Amendment.

I am in complete agreement with Wolfe here — Phyllis Schlafly is indeed probably “one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the twentieth century.” That is a bitter and painful truth, but a truth nonetheless. Wolfe again:

Critchlow [author of the Schlafly biography Wolfe is reviewing] is right to insist on Schlafly’s influence–but influence is a neutral category. It may be a force for good or a force for ill, depending upon the ideas that animate it. Let it be said of Phyllis Schlafly that every idea she had was scatter-brained, dangerous, and hateful. The more influential she became, the worse off America became.

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The merchant banker Oliver Kamm has a “vicious little post”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/miliband-pre-et.html today attacking the memory of the late Ralph Miliband for a paper he published in 1980. Miliband, the father of the current British foreign secretary, was, of course, a Marxist theoretician and a member of the British new left for much of his life. As a member of that left, he authored many papers for journals like the _New Left Review_ and _Socialist Register_. And again, as a member of that new left, he had an ambivalent relationship to the Soviet bloc. On the one hand he lamented the lack of democracy in those countries; on the other he thought they had achieved various social gains. Well he was (largely) wrong about the latter, but 1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief. In fact, he shared it with people for whom Kamm now declares his admiration and support and who then wrote for those same journals. The difference is, of course, that they are alive and he is dead. Miliband cannot reconsider.

Kamm’s post attacks Miliband’s paper “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” (“Socialist Register, 1980”:http://socialistregister.com/node/22 ) on the grounds that he doesn’t think the crimes of Pol Pot were sufficient to justify the Vietnamese invasion. Reading the paper today, it has an odd and stilted feel: Miliband is wrestling with a set of issues and problems that seem deeply alien today. I think Miliband was wrong about that case, and badly so. But I presume (and hope) that he didn’t appreciate how horrific the Pol Pot regime had been, or didn’t believe all the reports. What the casual reader wouldn’t glean from reading Kamm’s nasty little post, though, is that the substance of Miliband’s article was an attack on the idea that the socialist ideal should be advanced by “socialist” states invading other countries. In other words, it was principally _an attack on the idea_ that socialists should support the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Miliband argues, correctly, that all that resulted from such interventions was alienation from the socialist cause, and the installation of weak puppet regimes without popular legitimacy. You’d never gather that from reading Kamm’s blog, though. He presents Miliband’s attack on Soviet tankism as an apologia for massacre. That wasn’t how it would have been read at the time. In fact, it isn’t how a fair-minded person would read it now.

Kevin Drum points to this piece by Michael Gerson, denying the existence of a Republican War on Science. As Drum points out, Gerson doesn’t even mention the major battlegrounds like global warming denialism, creationism and intelligent design, and the Gingrich-era shutdown of the Office of Technology Assessment, focusing on a much narrower set of issues including stem cell research and abortion.

Moreover far from refuting the claim of a war between Republicanism and science, Gerson spends most of the article fighting on the Republican side. Most obviously the obligatory, and in this case, lengthy discussion of eugenics, tied in Jonah Goldberg fashion to contemporary liberalism.

There’s an even more fundamental problem here. Gerson is so focused on the political/cultural/ethical war he is fighting that he doesn’t even consider the question of whether there are any scientific facts that might be relevant to the question.

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Dina has kindly posted a draft of a chapter that I wrote that is forthcoming in a volume on Philosophy in Schools. I wrote most of it a long time ago, when I was working at the Institute of Education, and involved in developing the Citizenship Education program there. Conversations with teachers, teacher educators, and researchers confirmed that a lot of teachers who would be leaned on to teach Citizenship Education lack the necessary confidence and resources to teach about controversial moral issues in a non-dogmatic way. This is not a criticism — it is what I heard from them, directly. It seemed to me that the experience of college-level philosophy teachers especially of service courses (such as my Contemporary Moral Issues course) might be useful for teachers to reflect on. What especially struck me at the time was that teachers did not have a lot of written material to read, either to prompt discussion in class or to help them prepare for managing such discussion. So the chapter linked to basically outlines the way that I tend to introduce my CMI course, and outlines a way of thinking about the values at stake in various debates, but then, at the end, gives very short (1500 words or so) accounts of some of the moral debates around two issues in bioethics — abortion, and designing children. I’ve copied the “designing children” section below the fold, but encourage teachers to read the whole thing.

A comment Dina made to me in an email — that she was preparing to use a thought experiment from my book Justice in class — prompted me to think it might be useful to collect a bunch of such precis in a single place, readily available on the web for any teacher who wanted to use them. I don’t mean to be prescriptive (though the chapter probably sounds that way) — I realise that the way I go about teaching these issues will work for some people, not for others — but it seems to me that if a teacher has an analytic turn of mind resources like these might be helpful. If I make any headway on developing such a resource I’ll let you know. Anyway, here’s the bit on designing children:

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By Kathy G.

The results of this new study on pain assessment by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and SUNY Stony Brook’s Arthur Stone are for the most part not particularly surprising. As it turns out, economic inequality impacts practically every dimension of human existence; even physical pain is unequally shared. For example, the Krueger/Stone study found that respondents with low socio-economic status experienced “significantly higher pain occurrences and severity.” For instance:

The average pain rating is twice as high for those in households with annual incomes below $30,000 as for those in households with incomes above $100,000.

And

Participants with less than a high school degree reported twice the average pain rating as did college graduates.

Occupational status seems to play an important role, given that

the average pain rating for blue collar workers is 1.00 during work and 0.84 during nonwork, and for white collar workers it is 0.61 during both work and non-work episodes.

And in an interview, Krueger said, “Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise,” he says. “At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work.” [click to continue…]

By Kathy G.

Well, what can I say? Henry has provided me with such a truly awesome intro that I can’t possibly hope to live up to it. But it does give me an additional incentive to do my best, which is what I’ll attempt to do.

Yesterday, following up on something Spencer Ackerman had posted, Matthew Yglesias wrote the following:

It’s really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it’s not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don’t like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.

I completely agree, and this gives me an excuse to bust out an argument that has long been marinating in the recesses of the ol’ cranium. It’s this: that America, the Mideast, and the world would have been better off if “the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military,” Raphael Patai’s racist tract The Arab Mind, had been taken off Pentagon reading lists, and been replaced with Edward Said’s Orientalism* instead. [click to continue…]

Surfing over to Charles Dodgson‘s site yesterday, I happened upon Elizabeth Warren’s lecture on the squeeze on the American middle class since the 1970s. Then you could bring up a family on one income; now you can’t. Then non-discretionary spending made up a smaller proportion of household spending; now, it dominates. Result: if a parent loses their job or gets sick, bankruptcy looms. I didn’t expect to sit watching a YouTube video for whole hour but I was riveted by the story Warren tells with the consumption statistics.

I was kind of reluctant to blog this too. After all, there are others at CT who do sociology or economics or family policy and I don’t do those things. And I’m not an American resident either. Still, it struck me as pretty compelling. I wonder how similar the change has been in the other OECD countries?

This post is to welcome the sort-of-pseudonymous ‘Kathy G,’ who will be joining us as a guestblogger for a week. I’ve known Kathy for a while – she’s doing a Ph.D. in public policy in the Chicago area, and has been blogging at “the G Spot”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/ for the last couple of months; “Ezra Klein”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=04&year=2008&base_name=psa_2 describes the G Spot as ‘the best new blog on the internets.’ I’d go even further and say that Kathy is the columnist whom the _New York Times_ needs to hire when it fires Bill Kristol’s ass, publicly apologizes for inflicting his vaporings on the American people, and promises to mend the error of its ways by starting to publish an honest-to-God leftie. Her blogging is a mixture of in-your-face feminism, economics empirical and theoretical, blistering takedowns of Maureen Dowd et al., and much else. Great to have her with us.

You can see how desperate I am for help by the use of the second word in the title of this post, which I’ve resisted until now.

I have offered to present a talk to a large conference audience in Adelaide, and intended to do it by videoconference, following several successful (and cheap!) presentations to seminar-size groups. But the conference of organizers have been quoted a cost of thousands of dollars to present the videoconference session. There are some obvious cheap alternatives like a pre-record, but I’d like to avoid these if possible. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could deliver a videoconference presentation, at reasonable cost to a large audience in a venue that isn’t specifically set up for this?

Among the depressing pieces of news from London this week (depressing except for opponents of organised sport, who have, more or less, been guaranteed that the 2012 Olympics will be a lot of fun) — a BNP candidate, Mr Richard Barnbrook, was elected to the Greater London Assembly. So, how should he be treated?

One option is what you might call the Vidal Sassoon treatment. This involves gathering together large numbers of trained killers and street-fighters, physically busting up meetings, and brutalising fascists whenever one bumps into them. In this documentary (still online, and well worth a listen), one member of the 43 Group recalls encountering one of the ideologues of the British Fascists on a bus, holding onto the bars, and kicking him off with the full force of his body. (A TV documentary is on youtube here, here, and here).

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I was pretty much stunned into silence by the proposal for a gasoline tax holiday put forward by John McCain and Hillary Clinton (not that it matters but I’m not clear which of them came up with it first – can anyone set me straight on this). I won’t bother repeating all the reasons why this is a terrible idea ( when Tom Friedman has your number, I’d say your number is up).

Just a couple of observations. First, I find it hard to see how anyone serious can support either McCain or Clinton after this.

Second, the fact that the proposal has lasted this long suggests to me that the chance of any serious US action on global warming after the election is not that great. Without the US, we won’t get anything from China and India either, so that means we’re setting course for disaster. Perhaps if Obama wins, he’ll be able to turn this around, but this episode has me very depressed.

It’s beginning to look as if the voters of London have taken it upon themselves to abolish the post of Mayor land themselves with Boris Johnson. A remarkable move: reject a manifestly competent (if not especially likeable) incumbent, and a manifestly decent challenger (who, in addition to being gay, is related to Hugh Paddick!), for… well, Boris Johnson. (See Martin O’ Neill for invective — I’m too bemused and detached myself). If this comes to pass, I would say that it should be the one positive note of the day for Gordon Brown. Ken Livingstone’s mayoralty was too independent from Labour for them to get any credit for anything he did well; whereas David Cameron has tied his flag to Boris’s mast. The post of Mayor has far too little power really to do London a lot of good, but it has enough to do it a lot of harm, and there’s every chance that a Johnson mayoralty will oblige, and the Tories will suffer. If this comes to pass, Cameron, not Brown, should be disappointed.

My colleague Lane Kenworthy is profiled this week at normblog. Lane’s blog, Consider the Evidence, is well worth your time.

Jerry Cohen valedictory lecture

Originally uploaded by Chris Bertram

Many of his friends. colleagues and former students were present at a wonderful performance from Jerry Cohen (G.A. Cohen) yesterday. Jerry is retiring as Chichele Professor and gave his valedictory lecture. Here Jerry recreates Isaiah Berlin explaining the influence of the altogether neglected Samuel von Pooped on the totally forgotten Herman von Supine.