August 2009

We’re happy to announce that Conor Foley will be guestblogging with us for a little while. Conor is an occasional commenter here at CT, and has extensive experience in working both for NGOs (Amnesty International, Liberty) and international organizations (the United Nations) on aid and human rights issues. He also has a strong and provocative take on the politics of human rights, best set out in his (in my opinion, excellent) recent book _The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War_ (Amazon, Powells, B&N). As “Michael Williams”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/26/humanrights-internationalaidanddevelopment describes the book:

Throughout the 1990s, the idea of humanitarian intervention rapidly gained in popularity in a world where the balance of power was suddenly no more. … Foley contends, … correctly, that this has set dangerous precedents. First of all, what right and responsibility do these various NGOs have in naming a conflict “genocide” or a “humanitarian disaster”? … here is also the issue of the role humanitarians play in actual conflicts. … Finally and perhaps most importantly, there is the issue of humanitarianism and legitimacy. Has humanitarianism become a way to legitimise and justify our interventions in the affairs of other states for ulterior motives?

Conor has interesting opinions on a whole variety of other topics. We’re happy to have him with us.

Following up our earlier reflections on genteel naming conventions, explored and expressed in the medium of webcomics: we note that this may be the greatest American Elf ever. However, there remains a question as to the absolute propriety of James Kochalka hereby ruining his older son’s chance ever to be President. (Then again, it’s a crap job.)

But you know what really makes me really proud? Not that I can write posts like this one, oh no. Rather, the Kochalka child in question has just invented a character named Mean Guy, who really does look quite mean. But my kid totally invented Mean Girl two years ago. Same look. And she has a rich, satisfying mythos to go with. Thus do I achieve through my children. (But I have a suspicion Eli Kochalka is better at video games than my daughter. She cannot steer a MarioKart to save her life, ye gods.)

Here’s a thought I’ve been meaning to write up for a while. This post has inspired me. Your opponent says healthcare reform will put us on the slippery slope to socialist soylent green serfdom. You reply by acknowledging the objection, in outline: ‘You’re worried Obama/liberals want something different from what they are willing to ask for, for fear that they would lose public support. You are also worried that what is being proposed may have bad, unintended consequences.’ (See if you can lock your interlocutor in on these two points. Which shouldn’t be hard. Now move on to step two.) ‘Fine. Suppose you’re right. Suppose they are lying, or half-lying. They don’t want the moderate stuff they say they want at all. They want something radical, or at least something more.’ (See if you can get agreement to that.) Also: ‘you are right. Something this big and sausage-like sure could work out badly in practice; that’s something to worry about.’ (Now you spring the trap.) ‘But suppose someone said these things and meant them. Suppose Obama were just the liberal he presents himself as. Call this guy Bizarro Obama if you want to emphasize that you aren’t fooled for a second into believing our Obama is this guy. Fine. Would you have any objection to Bizarro Obama – the actually just moderately liberal one? Also: suppose the policy worked more or less as proposed. Not perfectly. But suppose it didn’t just totally blow up. I know, I know, you don’t believe this policy will work. That’s fine. But suppose it did. Would you have a problem with that. If so, what’s the problem.’

Call these: sticky slope arguments – or – the argument from intended consequences. I think you see where I’m going with these names, and maybe you see as well why leading your opponent down this path might leave your opponent a bit deflated, rhetorically. Which might then be an opener for saner debate. [click to continue…]

Sometimes you make a picture that you feel like sharing. Quiet Sundays are a good time to do so. Here’s one. It’s a wall painting, taken in a small street in Utrecht, with a row of bicycles in front of the wall painting. I love wall paintings – I prefer poetry on walls and windows rather than in libraries, and art outside in public spaces rather than in musea (the metal flowers carved in the pavement around St. John’s College in Cambridge are another example that makes me happy). Enjoy.

Sorry, I forgot to get this started. But in truth, it was pretty much over by lunchtime on day one. Should Harmison ever play for England again? I’m certain that Bopara shouldn’t. Comment away!

Quite a few people have now posted about Jerry Cohen on the web. Notable amongst them are “Colin Farrelly”:http://colinfarrelly.blogspot.com/2009/08/ga-cohen-1941-2009.html , “Thom Brooks”:http://the-brooks-blog.blogspot.com/2009/08/obituary-g-cohen-1941-2009.html , “Ben Saunders”:http://bensaunders.blogspot.com/2009/08/death-g-cohen.html, “Chris”:http://virtualstoa.net/2009/08/05/dead-socialist-g-a-cohen-1941-2009/ “Brooke”:http://virtualstoa.net/2009/08/06/jerry-on-jerry/ , “Matthew Kramer”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/08/ga-cohen-a-tribute-by-matthew-kramer.html and “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/08/ga-cohen-19412009.html . I was also sent, by Maris Kopcke Tinture, a “link to a private recording she made of Jerry’s valedictory lecture from May 2008”:http://rapidshare.com/files/264780177/jerry_valedictory.m4a. The recording is imperfect and there is a chunk missing in the middle, but it is the only such recording to have surfaced.

(I also need to post a short note about use of my photos of the valedictory, since people have been taking them from my Flickr stream and using them without permission: they are not public domain. 1. Seek permission, which I will normally grant to any not-for-profit site unless I find the content objectionable. 2. Please attribute (this can be in as miniscule a text as you like). 3. If you are a commercial organization then we will need to come to an arrangement about a fee, which will be donated to an appropriate charity.)

In suggesting that ‘Horatio Wheatbender Filibuster’ would be a good name for an antique Senator, I was – I now realize (no doubt I was being subconsciously guided all the while) – nearly obedient to the dictates of The Book of Genteel Wherewithal.

‘Horatio’ is a Greek or Roman name that almost rhymes with ‘You’re boring us’. Check. And ‘bent wheat’ was, no doubt, the sort of thing 19th Century and earlier peoples put in baby food, to make sure the baby didn’t eat too much. I left out the hardship suffered by mariners. (Let’s add it in: Horatio Wheatbender Tunnybotham Filibuster.) And ‘filibuster’ is close to ‘noise made in anger’. I give myself 4 out of 5 stars for effort.

Yglesias and Drum had a back-and-forth about the constitutionality, morals and manners of the filibuster. I think more hay should be made of the fact that ‘filibuster’ does not, as one might expect, derive from the name of some thoroughly American, corn-stuffed, long-winded Senator from a nigh-unpopulated state. (‘The Senate now recognizes the honorable Horatio Wheatbender Filibuster, from the great state of …’) No, as wikipedia explains: “The term filibuster was first used in 1851. It was derived from the Spanish filibustero meaning pirate or freebooter. This term had in turn evolved from the French word flibustier, which itself evolved from the Dutch vrijbuiter (freebooter). This term was applied at the time to American adventurers, mostly from Southern states, who sought to overthrow the governments of Central American states, and was transferred to the users of the filibuster, seen as a tactic for pirating or hijacking debate.”

I think it’s remarkable that the name basically derives from a word for a crime. So I think the thing to do is tar the Republicans as soft on piracy. Basically.

On the other hand, here are some further literary notes on the wanderings of this word. El Filibusterismo is a famous novel by José Rizal, a 19th Century literary hero of the Philippines.

Here’s another quote from Wikipedia. Rizal explains what it means.

Rizal had to define the word filibustero to his German friend Ferdinand Blumentritt, who did not understand his use of the word in Noli Me Tangere [Rizal’s first novel]. In a letter, Rizal explained: “The word filibustero is little known in the Philippines. The masses do not know it yet. I heard it for the first time in 1872 when the tragic executions (of the Gomburza) took place. I still remember the panic that this word created. Our father forbade us to utter it, as well as the words Cavite, Jose Burgos (one of the executed priests), etc. The Manila newspapers and the Spaniards apply this word to one whom they want to make a revolutionary suspect. The Filipinos belonging to the educated class fear the reach of the word. It does not have the meaning of freebooters; it rather means a dangerous patriot who will soon be hanged or well, a presumptuous man.” By the end of the nineteenth century, the word filibustero had acquired the meaning “subversive” in the Philippines, hence the book is about subversion.

This is subversion with a positive connotation. I am sure we can all agree that sometimes this or that existing political order needs a spot of undermining. Still, it is at least a mild paradox that, in the U.S. Senate, subversion – the filibuster – is, technically, part of the established order of things. (Like in that Powerpuff Girls episode, “Bought and Scold” in which Princess gets her dad to buy the whole town, then makes crime legal.) Ah well.

Now, on to self-promotion. As you may be aware I just published an intro to Plato book, which (joy of joys!) you can read and download for free here (free! free!) I mention this in part just to beat the point to death, but in part to inform you that – although apparently Reason & Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato went from not-yet-released to temporarily out-of-stock on Amazon, without pausing to be actually purchasable, they actually had 15 or so copies. They just all sold. More are on the way. (Hey, it’s not quite Harry Potter, but I do have friends and family y’know.) What I am saying is: if you buy it, it will come. Pretty soon, too. And there’s something else as well. I would like people to be able to adopt it for course use. My publisher is the Asian branch of Pearson, so – if you are in North America – you might think it’s just too much hassle to get that in your bookstore, if even Amazon can’t seem to manage it. Well, email me. I talked to my publisher about the situation. There are stacks of books. If people want them, there ought to be a way to swing it. (I know, that’s probably not you. Still, it would pain me if anyone out there actually wanted to buy my book but reasoned that it was trans-pacifically unavailable.)

In other self-promotion news: if Plato isn’t your cup of tea, then maybe you would like this J&B post about the sexy sexy fonts of Squid and Owl. I think fonts are very sexy.

A few unsystematic thoughts about Jerry Cohen:

A friend called yesterday to tell me the news about Jerry Cohen and then I spent the day feeling disoriented, sad, confused, not really knowing what to feel or think. For me, and I’m sure, for many friends, colleagues and former students, Jerry was a constant presence. If I’m writing something I often hear Jerry’s voice telling me that I’m being evasive, that I’ve failed to explain a distinction, that such and such is “bullshit”, and so on. At the same time, Jerry was quite brilliant at striking the right balance between the discipline of following the argument where it leads and the importance of hanging onto one’s deepest convictions.

[click to continue…]

Below find the final contributions to the seminar on George Scialabba’s _What Are Intellectuals Good For?_ ( buy from Barnes and Noble – preferred option since it often runs reviews by George, Scott and others, and is actively recommending the book in its “excellent review section”:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/longlist.asp?cds2Pid=23991&linkid=1378512, Powells, Amazon) over the next few days. We’re really happy to have George with us – he is a frequent CT commenter, and, more importantly, one of the great public intellectuals of our time. A lot of the discussion will focus on the question of what role, if any, public intellectuals should play in modern culture.

The seminar is made publicly available under a Creative Commons license (see the PDF for details). All posts in the seminar are “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/george-scialabba-seminar/. Those who prefer to read the seminar as a PDF can find it “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/scialabba.pdf. Those who want to play with the TeX file can find it “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/scialabba1.tex. Those who prefer to work in Markdown can find it “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/scialabba.txt.

The non-CT authors:

_Russell Jacoby_ is professor of history at UCLA. He is the author of numerous books, most relevantly including _The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe_ (Powells, Amazon), and updated in his article, “Big Brains, Small Impact”:http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Brains-Small-Impact/11624 (available for free until very recently at the _Chronicle of Higher Education)

_Aaron Swartz_ was one of the founders of Reddit, helped write the simple markup language Markdown (which has been used to format this seminar) and is involved in sundry other causes and activities in the area where information technology and politics intersect.

_Rich Yeselson_ is a research coordinator in the Strategic Organizing Center of the labor federation, Change to Win, and the Zelig of the American intellectual left.

The previous symposium posts and comments are an embarrassment of riches. Doing them justice is out of the question, of course, but here goes.

[click to continue…]

I’ve been reading George’s essays for years, but it is only when one reads a large number of them together that one really sees the interconnections. His interests are diverse. Borges, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ notes that the critics of Tlön

often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…

George, when he dedicates the book to Chomsky, Rorty and Lasch, may seem to be doing something similar as an exercise in self-definition – what philosophy on earth might possibly unite these three? The careful reader will at least be able to discern the outlines of an answer to this question when she finishes reading this book. While this answer is not as much an abstract philosophy, as a carefully elaborated set of political and critical judgments, which are both attractive and useful. George’s lens upon the world reveals relationships that would otherwise remain occulted.

One of the themes running through these essays is the proper role of the the public intellectual. George would like public intellectuals to have two features – a grounding in literary culture and a real connection to political debate. As he notes, however, these two requirements are difficult to reconcile with each other in the modern world. This dilemma is described most clearly in one of the earlier essays in the book, “The Sealed Envelope”

[click to continue…]

Speaking of how the world needs many more assertive humanists to counter the seemingly irresistible forces of wingnuts and indifference, Chris Patten’s name is in the ring for Europe’s first proper foreign minister. The FT reports that Lord Patten is ‘not campaigning for the job, but would be very positive about it if approached’. Patten would do a superb job.

Patten’s thankless work on policing in Northern Ireland brought about a huge leap forward and must have required no small physical courage on his part. His stint as the last governor of Hong Kong got valuable concessions from the Chinese that someone more worried about their ego and reputation couldn’t have delivered. And Patten’s and Javier Solana’s outwardly amicable and respectful managing of their conflicting EU foreign policy roles in the early 2000’s is a credit to both. Patten is uniquely qualified to be the face (and the brains) of Europe’s foreign policy.

There are other good reasons, too. The FT points out David Cameron’s likely discomfort with a fellow Tory being in such a prominent EU role. Also, putting Patten in as Number 2 may make it all that much easier to refuse Tony Blair the top job. And Patten has proven he can actually do all the deal-making and consensus-building the job requires (even more reason why the member states should think of Patten for President of the union, not least to preserve their own sovereignty).

But here’s my reason. Sometimes the good guys should win. I want someone in the foreign policy job whose judgment, experience and, above all, integrity I respect. Someone who may disappoint in the particulars, but who is sound on the fundamentals. In both organizational and political life, I don’t want to believe that only the cynics and brown-nosers, the bullies and yes-men will come out on top. Patten is living proof that successful leaders can be deeply moral and highly effective. That’s something we can all aspire to.

And think about the book he would write afterward…

Full disclosure: I’ve met Lord Patten a few times at the 21st Century Trust, an organisation of which I’m a fellow and he is the Chair.

I got a call this morning to tell me that Jerry (G.A.) Cohen has died suddenly and unexpectedly of a massive stroke. I want to write an appreciation of him as a friend, mentor and philosopher in due course, but I’m too numb to do it at the moment. I know that his other friends, colleagues and fellow students of his feel the same acute sense of loss.