Harry

Laura berates her readers for not coming up with America’s most popular Cookbook author in response to her plea for good cookbooks. Unlike Laura, I rarely get recipes from the internet. Sometimes I make them up; other times I reverse engineer them (upcoming later this week; my reverse engineered recipe for Tesco’s fresh pesto). My own favourite cookbook of all is out of print: Katie Stewart’s wonderful Times Cookery Book; my mum gave me the more beaten up of her two copies a few years ago and I treasure it no end. But the best internet recommendation I got was in this thread; cranky observer recommended Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. She leads you through both the stages and the science of baking good cakes; I’ve yet to have a failure. Better still is The Bread Bible; again, she shows how you to deal with yeast and flour, and tells you enough of the science to instill the necessary patience. I have had failures with this, but not many, and because the book is so well designed I’ve actually learned from the failures!.

Sue Gerhardt’s Why Love Matters (UK) has gotten less attention than it should have in the US, and almost none in the blogosphere as far as I can tell (even on the “mommy blogs”). I want to prompt some interest in it, and also to see whether anyone else who has read it has the reactions I do (or can point me to good critiques). Gerhardt is a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in working with parents (and especially mothers) of young children. When I started reading about child development I was struck by how much attention is given the cognitive and physical development, and how little to emotional health and development. Why Love Matters is the best I’ve found on emotional development. It’s a primer on the current science of brain development in the early years, looking at how well that work confirms various assumptions that therapists make about the importance of early attachment for emotional regulation. From what I can judge Gerhardt is supremely careful about her presentation of the science; where it clearly supports her therapeutic approach she says so, where it is merely suggestive her presentation is honest about that.

[Update: Sue Gerhardt’s comment at 46 below answers a lot of questions people have had — I’ll quote some of it at the end of the post]
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Congratulations to our own Jon Mandle on the publication of his new book Global Justice (UK). It’s part of Polity’s Key Concepts series, which is aimed at the textbook market, and presents contemporary debates about concepts in the social sciences in a widely accessible way. It’s remarkably difficult to write such books (as I know only too well) especially, I think, for philosophers whose disciplinary training does not include such things as literature reviews, but focusses immediately on assessing the quality of arguments and offering one’s own. Jon’s book is a terrific success. He manages to render all the main positions in the various philosophical debates about global justice; to relate them to the public political debates about aid and trade; and to develop a distinctive argument of his own, elaborating and defending a moderate cosmopolitanism that conditions redistributive obligations on the fact that there is a global basic structure. The prose is careful but sparse; none of our regular readers will find it inaccessible, but even the most expert in the field will learn something from it quite apart from finding it an excellent text book, perhaps accompanied by The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism.

The book reinforces the impression I got at a conference Jon and I recently attended together that part (but only part) of the explanation of the contemporary interest in global justice and cosmopolitianism is that almost all the interesting issues in political theory come together in this topic. The book covers questions of obligation and legitimacy, identity, distributive justice, the subject of justice, rights, and the foundations of political principles, as well as addressing some essential questions in meta-ethics. Buy it now!

One thing might surprise some readers, though probably not the political philosophers/theorists. In his final chapter Jon offers a qualifiedly positive evaluation of the economic globalisation we have been experiencing over the past couple of decades, and many of his qualifications are anti-protectionist rather than anti-trade. My impression is that Jon’s judgments are part of something not far from being a consensus left-liberal political theorists working on global justice; a consensus which departs from the views of free-market ideologues, but is very far from the anti-globalisation position that I think some of our more conservative and libertarian readers sometimes assume that strongly egalitarian theorists hold.

Jason Stanley has an interesting and thoughtful post contrasting his father’s generation of academics with his own (which is, I think, roughly mine). His observation is that his father and his father’s colleagues exhibited much more rootedness in their institution and the communities surrounding them than he feels our generation does, and he also thinks that his father’s generation were more detached from or at odds with the mainstream culture. Peter Levine (who grew up with Jason, apparently, what a small world this is, especially given that they are 2 of the handful of people I ever link to) has an equally thoughtful follow up post, claiming that these changes are rooted in changes in the society as a whole, and wisely warning against the status competition which they both think is unhealthily present in academic life. I’m still not sure what I make of Jason’s original claim; the first post made me realise that most of what I know about Jason’s father’s generation of American academics is drawn from early Alison Lurie and Philip Roth novels, consumed before I moved to the States, and anyway not necessarily reliable sociology. But I suspect the contrast is overdrawn, and that academics have always been more in tune with the mainstream culture than they would like to think they are.

Update: on the grounds that you can discuss it over at Peter’s or Leiter’s blogs and that any further comments could only spoil the aesthetic delight below, I’ve closed comments.

David Beito reminds conservatives that they can’t always get what they want. Apparently Michelle Malkin complained vociferously about a math teacher at Bellvue Community College asking the following question:

“Condoleezza holds a watermelon just over the edge of the roof of the 300-foot Federal Building, and tosses it up with a velocity of 20 feet per second.”

As a result of the campaign by Malkin and others the teacher was upbraided, the President of the College expanded the administrative staff dealing with diversity issues and the consequence of the whole thing has been a nice bounty for another diversity expert:

In response to Malkin’s campaign, Bellevue College not only has given the diversity police more monitoring authority over the curriculum and personnel evaluations, but will hire the notorious Glenn Singleton to conduct ideologically one-sided training for faculty and staff. Apparently, it will be mandatory.

(Readers with long memories will know that I am less than enamoured with Singleton’s trainings).

David Horowitz take note!

Via Norm, a very interesting article by Max Hastings, arguing that if Britain had been invaded by the Nazis the British would have behaved much as the French did:

Most of France’s “haves” collaborated not willingly, but in the face of perceived necessity. The bourgeois classes allowed their view to be determined by law-and-order arguments, which possess even greater force in war than in peace. Sabotage provoked murderous reprisals upon the innocent. Surely, people said, it is in the interests of the community that we behave in such a way as to be spared killings and confiscations, when daily existence is harsh enough already.

Resistance, confined to a small minority until 1944, was dominated by what middle-class people would categorise as “the awkward squad”: teachers and unionists (many of them leftists), young mavericks, communist activists, journalists, peasants: in short, little people.

All this, I think, would have applied equally in a German-occupied Britain.

Hastings commends Eden’s statement, when asked to comment on the behaviour of the French during the war, that “It would be impertinent for any country that has never suffered occupation to pass judgment on one that did.” We’d all do well to reflect on that brilliantly diplomatic, and true, comment. Hastings concludes that

Némirovsky’s great novel paints a portrait of a society that did not conduct itself with conspicuous courage or honour. I am doubtful, however, that we would have done much better.

I can think of only one piece of counter-evidence, which I can’t link to because my googling skills aren’t up to it, but I undertsand that as soon as the war began the British government started to train a secret domestic guerrilla army in preparation for invasion, comprised of conscription-age men who were (because of their age) regarded throughout the war (and until the end of the 50-year embargo on the confidential records) as conscientious objectors. But this is slim evidence (made even slimmer by my inability to cite it: did I dream that I heard a Radio 4 documentary about them?)

Talking of Eden, I recently read Kenneth Harris’s wonderful biography of Attlee (prompted by being fascinated by the role Attlee plays in Five Days in London: May 1940).

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Mustafa Barghouti, who is Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative, and was recently elected to the Palestinian parliament as an independent, is in Madison at the Havens Center. His first talk (yesterday) is already on the web (audio); my guess is that today’s talk will be up within 24 hours.

Havens Center talks are now routinely recorded and made available on the web, so you might be interested to check out the list here. Two that I would particularly recommend are our own Chris Bertram, and also Richard Miller, both on global justice issues.

Peter Levine has a post objecting to my argument in chapter 6 of On Education that schools should not teach patriotism. Peter makes the case for patriotism (understood as “love of country”) being a legitimate feeling in itself, and that it has various instrumental benefits, in particular that it encourages citizens to participate in the affairs of the nation, and that it can play an important role in moral development, training the sentiments to attach beyond the confines of those we are immediately attached to, and therefore helping our characters to learn the virtue of impartial justice. (See also, Sigal Ben-Porath’s nice new book, Citizenship under Fire : Democratic Education in Times of Conflict ). He then tackles two of the main arguments I make against teaching patriotism; that if its agencies promote love of country the state interferes with the development of authentic, legitimacy-producing, consent, and that using, say, History teaching to produce patriotism can conflict with other more academic goals of History teaching (like, e.g., getting the students to learn the truth!). He points out that learning the full truth about Rosa Parks’s involvement in politics can increase one’s sense of attachment to the nation (as it did his) and describes an interesting hands on history project with black students in a local school which was aimed in part at cementing their attachment to their own communities.

Peter’s post is lengthy (if concise), and rather than reproduce it I’ll assume that readers have followed the link and done the reading. Here’s my response:

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A long promised post for one of our readers in a bi-national marriage.

Use a soft whole grain bread. Spread crunchy natural peanut butter thickly on the first slice. Spread a sweet or medium lime pickle thinly on top. Cover with the second slice of bread.

This is an incredibly annoying recipe because I have been unable to find a really good peanut butter anywhere in the UK, or a really good mild lime pickle in the US (Pataks is occasionally find-able here, but frankly nothing beats Marks and Spencer). Still, if you can find the ingredients, enjoy it.

Update: if, like jr, you’ve no idea what lime pickle is, here’s a recipe and picture. Now it occurs to me I could make my own; has anyone reverse-engineered the Marks and Spencer recipe?

I apologise in advance for lowering the tone, but I have recently discovered in myself a hitherto unimaginable and frankly rather disturbing liking for 70’s rock. I sometimes blame Steve Harley, but its not really his fault. It all began with me whimsically picking up The Best of the Seventies, and then only listening to it for reasons referred to in this long dead, but maybe worth-glancing-at, thread.

Prog rock, folk rock, glam rock (of the less cerebral variety (Slade rather than Bowie)), you name it, it seems to have infiltrated my consciousness, 30 years late (not disco or punk, which I did register at the time, hating one and liking the other). I’ve been using boxed sets such as Ars Longa Vita Brevis, Time Machine, and Strangely Strange but Oddly Normal to feed my habit, using them as samplers for observing a strange but oddly congenial world. I am too young to have listened to this stuff first time round (born 1963, and came late to contemporary music, around the time of TRB), and would have scoffed at it at the time, but there you go. The Move and The Strawbs are particular favourites at the moment.

Arbitrage?

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A graduate student asked me the other day for some summer reading suggestions; must-read articles in political philosophy from the past 25-30 years. I was a bit shocked at how narrow my list was (though I did leave off a bunch of papers that I knew he’d already read, and that would have broadened my list a bit), and I thought it would be a nice exercise for the political philosophers who read CT; suggest one or two papers from the past 30 years that you think everyone who wants to write a dissertation in the area of political philosophy reasonably broadly conceived should have read. Do not suggest your own papers unless you are dead or plan to be by the summer. I’ll follow up with an eccentrically chosen list of 10 , with the best links I can manage.

There’s a very interesting conversation going on at Leiter’s site (post by Jason Stanley) about the purpose of the academic discipline of Philosophy. The title is a giveaway (In Defence of Baroque Specialization). Jason says:

a university’s primary mission should be to advance the disciplines it represents. In short, a university should seek to promote work that will give that university prestige in the future and not in the present. So, a university’s mission with regard to its philosophy department should be to support those who are attempting to formulate new positions and arguments, rather than those who seek contemporary relevance.

I agree that this is part of the university’s mission. A good university wants to promote work of lasting importance. But that is only part of what it does, or should do. Very few scholars are going to contribute in a discernable way to that part of the mission (not me, not most of the people who think of themselves as at or somewhere near the top of their disciplines at any given time), and in the long run we’re all dead anyway. Furthermore, we have no reason at all to want Universities to promote their own, individual, reputations, except in so far as some sort of reputational competition helps to advance the other fundamental goals of the institution of academia.

Another part of the University’s mission is to contribute, right now and in the near future, to the intellectual life of the larger community; if universities don’t do that, who will?

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I’ve promised to give a talk at the local High School on the pre-history of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This is something I know a depressingly large amount about, not least from endless listening to the nostalgia strands on BBC7. But I wouldn’t have agreed to give a talk on it but for the delightful discovery that there are surviving episodes of both the immediate predecessor shows, Do Not Adjust Your Set and At Last the 1948 Show (Region 1, NTSC, believe it or not: Brits here and here). 1948 is more like Monty Python, not quite as good but containing, for example, the original version of the 4 Yorkshiremen sketch (with Marty Feldman!). DNAYS, though, is wonderful. It was a kid’s show, with Idle, Jones, Palin, David Jason, and Denise Coffey, and the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band appearing in various roles as well as themselves. The legend is that they did whatever they wanted because the kiddie-time slot meant that the executives didn’t bother to watch (those were the days!). I’d heard a great deal about it, and have long owned the album from the show (but the more or less complete bonzos is a better deal and contains Tadpoles), but I always imagined that it was lost to posterity. Wrong. 9 episodes survive and they are, really, exactly as the legend suggests. In fact, apart from not being in colour, they have aged better than Monty Python itself. The sketches are shorter, better structured, end with punch-lines, and the sense of anarchy is more palpable. You can see them enjoying themselves, and there is no sense, as there is in the later Pythons, that they are straining rather to get a laugh. The other marvel, though, is seeing the late lamented Viv Stanshall perform; I’ve always preferred Neil Innes to Stanshall, in the same way that I prefer McCartney to Lennon, but Stanshall commands the screen whenever he is on it. Brilliant. The local high school kids have a treat in store.

Peter Levine has a nice essay on the contemporary school reform strategies being pursued at the Federal level in the US. Like me he is more well disposed to many of the levers being used than most of the left; as he says:

It’s important to think about incentives; that’s one of the main themes of modern social science. Asking schools to educate better (or differently) without changing their incentives won’t work.

But he points out what seems right once it is pointed out that many reformers evince a startling lack of interest in what is actually going on in schools:

Politicians and policymakers now show an extraordinary lack of interest in the “what” and “who” questions. They seem to agree with the economist Gary Becker about the futility of looking inside schools: “What survives in a competitive environment is not perfect evidence, but it is much better evidence on what is effective than attempts to evaluate the internal structure of organizations. This is true whether the competition applies to steel, education, or even the market for ideas.”

He goes on to criticise the reformers for, in effect, neglecting the collateral effects of their reforms. The incentives are changed, and the outputs that we measure (test scores) are not the only important, or even the most important, outputs of education. Many of the important outputs can only be assessed very roughly, and even to do it roughyl you have to look into the schools themselves (one of several good reasons why the UK has long used an inspection regime).

I’m not going to defend the reformers, because I think Peter is right; but I will note that most of the conservative opponents of reform (those who oppose the current battery of reform ideas without offering serious and thought-out alternatives), although they talk about what goes on in schools, do not often offer suggestions for how the democratic public that is supposed to deliberate about schools is going to find out anything about what goes on in them.