June 2009

There are few philosophical issues or policy questions that are not also M.O.D.O.K jokes (as this round-up reminds me). For example, the gender issue raised, but hardly laid to rest, by my philosophy: mind and manners post is just the classic M.O.D.A.M. (Mental Organism Designed Only For Aggression) question. (What do we think an academic philosophy education is good for?) [click to continue…]

The strong showing in the EU elections by Sweden’s Pirate Party is the outcome of yet another Pyhrric victory for the strong IP movement, which succeeded, a couple of months ago in securing prison sentences for the Swedish operators of filesharing site Pirate Bay. This galvanised about 7 per cent of Swedish voters into supporting the Pirate Party, which reflects the typical feelings of Internet users: hostile to intrusive and aggressive IP, concerned about privacy for individuals and households, in favour of transparency for corporations and governments. These feelings are, of course, diametrically opposed to those of the elite groups that have historically driven policy on these issues. In the light of this public reaction, and the absence of any corresponding electoral support for the IP lobby, governments everywhere will think twice before endorsing criminal prosecution of IP violators.

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A more suitable pick for the Reith Lectures I cannot imagine. Sandel’s first lecture is online here, and if, like me, you’re pushed for time the transcript (with comments and questions from Ed Miliband, David Willetts, Baroness Williams, Oliver Kamm, and someone called Owen) is here. The bio for Sandel contains this surprise:

A more unusual claim to fame is that Professor Sandel is believed to be the inspiration for the nuclear power magnate Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons cartoon.

Anyway, feel free to discuss Sandel’s first lecture. Cohen seminar rules apply (i.e., read the bloody thing before commenting — unlike Cohen’s book its free, short, and an easy read).

The _Financial Times_ isn’t the leftiest of newspapers, but it is hard to argue with their “verdict”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4cd4fc48-5460-11de-a58d-00144feabdc0.html on the European Parliament elections:

The centre-right held its ground or advanced, both where it is in power and where it is in opposition. The mainstream left was decimated. This election shows that the social democratic parties have lost the will to govern. At a time when “the end of capitalism” is raised as a serious prospect, the parties whose historical mission was to replace capitalism with socialism offer no governing philosophy. Their anti-crisis policies are barely distinguishable from those of their rivals. The leadership crisis in several European socialist parties suggests their outdated ideas are matched by oversized egos.

Greens triumphed where the traditional left failed. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who knows a thing or two about critiques of capitalism, appealed to voters willing to consider fundamental social change. As one of few groups to fight on pan-European issues, the Greens also proved that not all voters are deaf to Europe-wide politics. But the crisis has most benefited the strand of the European right that was never against regulating the market economy. By arguing that the crisis is a result of excessive “Anglo-Saxon” policies, centre-right parties have presented themselves as the most trustworthy stewards of a safer, European-style capitalism. Voters agreed.

My own take on the failures of European social democracy a few months ago “was more or less identical”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/02/18/social-democrats-and-capitalism/. I’d love to be convinced that I was wrong though. Or, in the absence of a compelling counter-claim, at least get a better sense of why European social democratic parties have become empty shells. One first-approximation guess is that this had to do with the largely successful efforts by social democrat ‘reformers’ to replace the old anti-capitalist ideas and language with more market-friendly stuff, which succeeded just in time to leave these parties completely unprepared to deal with the demise of actually existing capitalism. A second is that current day social democrats are much less able than their 1930s-1950s predecessors to meld nationalism and market constraints. Other possible explanations?

I’m glad to see that Ed Whelan has “apologized”:http://bench.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjljOTg3NDY4ZWUzZWFkODliMzU4M2M3NGM5YTQ2N2Q, for having outed “Publius”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/06/stay-classy-ed-whelan.html. Bad that he did what he did – good that he apologized for it, and very straightforwardly too. Good also that so many conservatives came out swinging on the right side of this issue. But I actually think that “Michael Krauss”:http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/2009/06/blogging-ethics.php, professor at GMU’s law school and sometime blogger, was arguably worse behaved than Whelan over this. Whelan perhaps didn’t think through the possible consequences of outing an untenured legal academic. Krauss very clearly did think it through – and apparently wanted the worst to happen. At least, this seems to me to be the most reasonable reading of his expressed hope that “the South Texas tenure committee is watching and taking note.” To hope that a tenure committee will take note of a behaviour you are condemning is to hope that they will deny the responsible individual tenure for doing this (if there is a plausible alternative reading, I am not seeing it). Given that Krauss is himself a senior legal academic, whose opinion of aspiring professors may genuinely affect their chances of doing well, this is nasty and vindictive bullying, which has (to use his own words against him) “no redeeming argument.” Krauss should think through what he has said, take it back and publicly apologize.

Update: I see that Brian Leiter, whose many contributions to intellectual life include his “occasional interventions in this blog’s comment section”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/03/01/greatest-philosopher-of-the-twentieth-century/#comment-267599, is still “disinclined to apologize”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/06/who_is_juan_non.html for his aborted effort to out ‘Juan non-Volokh’ a few years back. The comparison is instructive.

Welcome to our guest, Michèle Lamont, whose book I have been intending to read because it sounds damned interesting. The topic of her first guest post (philosophy vs. theory) has been an abiding research and reading interest of mine. A quick point about pecking orders, in response to her post, then I’ll just plug my own stuff, what hey! (But first: Squid and Owl was good today, and highly relevant to the theme of this very post. Right, that’s out of the way.)

Lamont says there’s a question as to “whether philosophers [inhabitants of that cave known as the department of philosophy, that is] have intellectual/emotional dispositions that preclude free interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. Or whether they are too concerned with their own status or with making claims for philosophy as the queen of the disciplines (encompassing others) to be open to interchange (to be contrasted with top-down proselytizing).” Yes, that one does get asked, and her asking it has provoked the usual range of responses in comments. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!) But let me articulate what seems to me a fairly important sociological component to this ongoing interdisciplinary failure to communicate that actually tends to be overlooked – and is almost always funny. (So that’s two reasons not to overlook it.) Philosophers (by which I shall mean: typical inhabitants of the philosophy department) seem hyper-aggressive and bent on world domination because there is a style of debate in the philosophy department that is typically received as friendly and (personally) non-threatening by philosophers but typically received by non-philosophers in the humanities as the very opposite: namely, as unfriendly, an attempt to destroy, to humiliate, to silence, to cause the opponent to lose face in an intolerably grind-your-claims-into-sand fashion. (By the way, please note that I said ‘typical’. Yes, I know there will be counter-examples.) Who’s right? The question is ill-formed. It’s a cultural miscommunication. Maybe it’s easier to illustrate with a likely hypothetical. [click to continue…]

Thanks to Crooked Timber for this invitation to serve as guest blogger — it’s exciting.

To get us started, I  respond to the recent discussion here at Crooked Timber in response to <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/20/michele-lamont-on-philosophers”>Harry’s post</a>   prompted by what I write about philosophers in <a href=”http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LAMHOW.html”>How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment</a>.

1) What is a philosopher? Since weed was evoked in the thread, here is a sociological definition, which builds on Howard Becker’s famous 1963 paper “<a href=”http://www.jstor.org/pss/2771989″>On Becoming a Marijuana Smoker</a>”: Is recognized as a philosopher someone who labels himself and is labeled by others as such. No essentialism here. Only a social process of definition of identity, which is bounded by institutional constraints (e.g. whether one is paid to be a lecturer in philosophy), and by cultural/cognitive constraints as well (i.e. one has to have some knowledge of the disciplinary cannon). No need to be an innovator in the field, as the term generally encompasses consumers and diffusers.
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This week at CT we’re delighted to have Michèle Lamont as our guest. Michèle is Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies and Professor of Sociology and African and African American Studies at Harvard. She is also a former teacher of mine, though for some reason her faculty web page does not mention this. A main theme in her extensive body of scholarship has been the comparative study of the relationship between moralized concepts of worth and social hierarchies — her main work here are her first two books, Money, Manners and Morals: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class and The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration. Her new book, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, examines how quality and excellence are defined in the humanities and social sciences, by way of a study of the deliberation and negotiation of panel members as they award prestigious fellowships and awards.

Michèle’s work is always provocative and insightful, and I’m delighted that she’s agreed to join us for a while here.

That our group blog is named “Crooked Timber” is sometimes taken to suggest that we are all devotees of Isaiah Berlin, who popularized the phrase about the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ that our title riffs on. As it happens, we are no more all fans of Isaiah Berlin than we are fans of “Therapy?”:http://www.amazon.com/Crooked-Timber-Therapy/dp/B001PS0EZ2/henryfarrell-20 (I haven’t listened to them since Teethgrinder meself), but it probably behoves us to acknowledge that today is Berlin’s “hundredth birthday”:http://www.economist.com/theworldin/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12494599 (or rather would be, if he were still alive). Princeton University Press has The Crooked Timber of Humanity and various other titles “for sale here”:http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6265.html for thems that are interested.

This “FT article”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f4d18748-5232-11de-b986-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1 is the best piece I’ve seen on the intra-Europe battles over ECB policy, but it could go deeper still.

When Angela Merkel ended a long and otherwise unremarkable speech about economic policy this week with a vitriolic attack on the world’s three mightiest central banks, the German chancellor was writing a minor chapter of her country’s political history. No previous chancellor had dared attack their, and others’, central banks so frontally – saying the US Federal Reserve, Bank of England and European Central Bank should all row back on their unconventional recent ways of propping up economies. …

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Well someone had to use that headline first, so it might as well be me. Does anything demonstrate the desperation and vacuouseness of the Brown adminstration more than the “appointment”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/gordon-brown/5450671/Sir-Alan-Sugar-backs-resolute-Gordon-Brown.html of a former entrepreneur, turned property developer, turned reality-show compere as “enterprise Czar”? Actually, don’t answer that question, because lots of other things do. Despite a lifetime of voting Labour, I couldn’t bring myself to back them in the Euros (went for the Greens in the end, faute de mieux, since you ask). Maybe nothing can save Labour, but Alan “tm” Johnson might be their only chance. Brown needs to jump though.

At IHE, Scott Jaschik has a piece about a site that sells corrupted files to students as a way to get a few extra hours or days to finish an assignment. The idea is that the student submits a corrupted file, it takes the instructor a while to figure this out, in the meantime the student finishes the assignment.

Although I’ve never had students send me corrupted files, I’ve certainly had them supposedly send me attachments that weren’t there in reality. Of course, most people have, at one time or another, forgotten to attach a file to an email so it’s hard to assume it’s always intentional, but one wonders.

The piece made me reflect on what other excuses are emerging in the new digital environment that weren’t in vogue earlier. I’ve had students claim to have lost their Internet connection at home making it difficult to meet a deadline. While on the one hand, I tend to be skeptical of this, ISPs are sufficiently bad that it’s not completely implausible. What’s your favorite digital-era bogus excuse?

As a tribute to old excuses that presumably some still use, here’s a link to the “The Dead Grandmother/Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society” [or pdf] by Mike Adams in case there are people who haven’t seen it yet.

…Simon Singh is appealing the finding that he libeled the British Chiropractor Association by denying that chiropracticionariness is evidence-based medicine. (More details here). (Beware, Daniel — you’ll have the scientists suing you if you’re not careful). Fortunately, he has the greatest living Englishman on his side, so there is some hope that justice will be done.

The news that NICE has put acupuncture and chiropractic on the list of approved therapies for non-specific lower back pain has led to about the reactions you’d expect – back-slapping and high-fiving from the crystals and “life force” crowd, agonised complaining from the professional skeptics. But it’s actually a sign of something that ought to make us worry, not much but at least a little bit, about the way in which we’re doing medical science in this country.
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