Friday, June 4, 2004

ARTHUR SILBER: The History Americans Don't Want to Know

I have written about this general subject a number of times before (in the second half of this post, and in more detail in this one, for example), and here is Anne Applebaum on part of the history of World War II that most Americans either don't know, or don't want to be reminded of

Of course, the Warsaw uprising isn't as little known as all that: Survivors in Poland have been telling their stories for quite some time. But it is true that the story is little known in this country, and there are reasons for that: It wasn't a story our political leaders wanted to dwell on at the time, and it hasn't been one anyone in this wanted to talk much about since. Among other things, if we really absorbed its lessons, it would be difficult for Americans to feel quite so sentimental about World War II, and quite so nostalgic about the unshakable moral purpose for which it was supposedly fought.

For the story of the Warsaw uprising really is the story of the destruction of Poland's "greatest generation." ... "We believed so much in the West," one of the survivors wistfully told CNN.

But their assumption was incorrect. ...

The Poles were left to fight alone. In the battle, which lasted 63 days, more than 200,000 people died, among them most of the country's intellectual and leadership. The scale of the catastrophe, the psychological, physical and economic damage, is almost unimaginable. ...

For those tempted by the post-Vietnam nostalgia for the "good war" -- a nostalgia which seems to increase as things go badly in Iraq -- it's an unsettling story. But there are many such stories. No less terrible are the tales of the Allied troops who forced White Russians and Cossacks into trucks and returned them to the Soviet Union -- at Stalin's request -- where most were killed. Or the accounts of the mass arrests that accompanied the Soviet "liberation" of Central Europe, while we in the West officially looked away. One of the reasons the survivors in CNN's film speak such beautiful English is that they were all exiles, forced to live abroad after the war.

In fact, for millions of people, World War II had no happy ending. It had no ending at all. The liberation of one half of the European continent coincided with a new occupation for the other half. The camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were destroyed. Not that you would know it, listening to Americans reminisce about D-Day, or the children welcoming GIs in the streets, or the joyous return home. Perhaps there is no such thing as an entirely "good war" after all.

Posted by Arthur Silber at 9:49 PM | Comments (0)

PAT LYNCH: Betting on Racing, at Least

As Smarty Jones heads toward his date with destiny this weekend at Belmont Park in New York numerous sportswriters and pundits are bemoaning the "death" of horseracing in America. While it's clear that horseracing is not as popular as it once was, most of the arguments one hears about what's wrong with the sport have no grounding in reality.

See for example this piece in The New Republic on line. Many observers of this business falsely equate declines in attendance with impending doom, but this misses the point. Horseracing, like boxing before it, has an image problem that results from the lack of a central authority and a perception that gambling taints the sport (notice that most fights are held in Atlantic City or Las Vegas? Probably not because it's likely you aren't watching). And both sports do not have the fan bases they once did.

But sportswriters are missing something that's very important in both sports - money. There's still lots of it to go around. Note in the New Republic piece that fees for the breeding rights to Smarty Jones, should he win on Saturday, will be worth between 50 and 60 million. Professional soccer and tennis would give their right arms for money and fame worth that. These farm owners aren't morons. A lot of rich people want to play the horse game, and as long as they do, horseracing in this country will be fine.

Furthermore part of the problem with those attendance figures is that government has distorted the gambling market in this country. By sanctioning certain types of gambling (i.e. riverboat casinos) and not others (legal sports books) it has given the gambling consumer one choice - casinos. It doesn't allow the horsetracks to compete fairly like they could without government regulation of gambling.

If journalists could only understand that prices send signals and markets work we'd all be better off. Folks less familiar with markets would get better news and I'd be less frustrated reading the news. Pareto improvement in my dreams.

As for Smarty Jones, I'm just a casual horse fan, and I think Andrew Beyer is one of the better horseracing writers in America. He's picking Smarty Jones; of course he's a notoriously bad bettor in Triple Crown races. Rock Hard Ten, should he win, will certainly pay out better for the brave of heart. I'll be pulling for Smarty, but betting Rock Hard.

Posted by Pat Lynch at 4:24 PM | Comments (1)

DAVID T. BEITO: Blog Update: Site Feeds Now Provided to L & P Readers

Thanks to the computer gurus at HNN, we are now able to provide site feeds to our readers who use news aggregators to keep track of their favorite blogs. The address to link to is http://hnn.us/blogs/rss/4.xml and it is an RSS 2.0 feed.

Many bloggers use site feeds to check up quickly on regularly visited sites -- this should drive more linkage to L&P.;

Posted by David T. Beito at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

ARTHUR SILBER: When Life and Happiness Are Not Enough: The Tragedy of the Unborn Self

In his latest column, Justin Raimondo examines the gathering backlash against the neoconservatives' policies. At one point, Raimondo inquires into certain of the sources of the neoconservatives' goals, and he points to an extraordinarily revealing article by Corey Robin that I hadn't seen before.

Here are a few key excerpts from the Robin piece:

In 2000 I spent the tail end of the summer interviewing conservative patriarchs William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol. I was writing about the defections to the left of several younger right-wing intellectuals and wondered what the conservative movement's founding fathers thought of their wayward sons. But Buckley and Kristol were less interested in these ex-conservatives than they were in the sorry state of the movement and the uncertain fate of the United States as a global imperial power.

The end of communism and the triumph of capitalism, they suggested, were mixed blessings. Americans now possessed the most powerful empire in history. At the same time, they were possessed by one of the most anti-political ideologies in history: belief in the free market as a harmonious international order of voluntary exchange requiring little more from the state than the enforcement of laws and contracts. This ideology promoted self-interest over the national interest -- too bloodless a notion, Buckley and Kristol argued, upon which to found a national order, much less a global empire.

"The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market," Buckley told me, "is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." Kristol confessed to a yearning for an American empire: "What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"

But because of its devotion to prosperity, he added, the United States lacked the fortitude and vision to wield imperial power. "It's too bad," Kristol lamented. "I think it would be natural for the United States . . . to play a far more dominant role in world affairs. . . to command and to give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world -- Africa in particular -- where an authority willing to use troops can make . . . a healthy difference." But not with public discussion dominated by accountants. "There's the Republican Party tying itself into knots. Over what?" he said. "I think it's disgusting that . . . presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."

Robin then turns to the neoconservative reaction to 9/11, and the following paragraph is the key in many ways to the underlying phenomenon that concerns me here:

To understand this reaction to 9/11, we must examine the state of mind of American conservatives after the end of the Cold War. For neoconservatives, who had thrilled to the crusade against communism, all that was left of Ronald Reagan's legacy after the Cold War was a sunny entrepreneurialism, which found a welcome home in Bill Clinton's America. While neocons favor capitalism, they do not believe it is the highest achievement of civilization. Like their predecessors -- from Edmund Burke, Samuel Coleridge and Henry Adams to T.S. Eliot, Martin Heidegger and Michael Oakeshott -- today's conservatives prize mystery and vitality over calculation and technology. Such romantic sensibilities are inspired by questions of politics and, especially, of war. It is only natural, then, that the neocons would take up the call of empire, seeking a world that is about something more than money and markets.

As I noted in my earlier examination of Kristol's article "The Neoconservative Persuasion," a religious outlook permeates the neoconservative mindset; indeed, mysticism and faith are the foundation of the neoconservative perspective, in every important respect. The terms in which the dichotomy is presented by Robin reveal, once again, another variant of the mind-body dichotomy: the idea that there is an inherent conflict between man's mind or soul, which represents his "higher" aspirations, and man's body, which embodies the "lower" earthly realm, and which for reasons that are never named is markedly inferior and somehow unworthy. Thus, according to the neoconservatives, we need " a world that is about something more than money and markets" -- i.e., a world which is "aspirational" and devoted to some sort of "ideals," rather than merely being devoted to "money and markets," or in other words, to the life of man here on earth, dealing with such unworthy matters as goods and services.

But here is the key, which most people do not or will not grasp: when neoconservatives (and many others, including many liberals as well) deride "money and markets" and "mere" self-interest in this manner, what they are attacking is an individual's right to "mere" personal happiness. For such people, your own personal happiness is not enough to justify your existence: you need something more, something that will make your life "meaningful" and "important."

And that is where 9/11 comes in:

Immediately following 9/11, intellectuals, politicians and pundits seized upon the terrorist strikes as a deliverance from the miasma Buckley and Kristol had been criticizing. Even commentators on the left saw the attacks as stirring a sleeping nation; Frank Rich announced in the New York Times that "this week's nightmare, it's now clear, has awakened us from a frivolous if not decadent decade-long dream."

What was that dream? The dream of prosperity. During the 1990s, conversative David Brooks wrote in Newsweek, we "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, Jacuzzis and gas grills." This ethos had terrible consequences. It encouraged a "preoccupation with one's own petty affairs," Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times. It also had international repercussions. According to Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy, which made it "easier for someone like Osama bin Laden to rise up and say credibly, 'The Americans don't have the stomach to defend themselves. They won't take casualties to defend their interests. They are morally weak.'"

But after that day in September, the domestic scene was transformed. America was now "more mobilized, more conscious and therefore more alive," wrote Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times Magazine. Writers welcomed the moral electricity coursing through the body politic, restoring patriotism and bipartisan consensus.

Internationally, 9/11 forced the United States to reengage with the world, to assume the burden of empire without embarrassment or confusion. The mission of the United States was now clear to conservatives: to defend civilization and freedom against barbarism and terror. As Condoleezza Rice told Nicholas Lemann of the New Yorker, "I think the difficulty has passed in defining a role. I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen." An America thought to be lulled by the charms of the market was now willing to sustain casualties on behalf of a U.S.-led global order.

But what we see in the reaction of the hawks and the neoconservatives to 9/11, a reaction which includes their grand design of remaking the world one continent at a time, is something altogether different: their response is not directed only at eliminating the terrorist threat. Actually, the truth is even more dangerous than that: in the deepest sense, I do not think their response is genuinely dictated by that goal at all. Remember: as the Robin piece points out, the conservatives' dissatisfaction with a minimal government devoted "only" to enforcing laws and contracts, and which "merely" promotes "self-interest," long predated 9/11. They were aching and impatient to put a much larger plan into operation -- and 9/11 tragically became the perfect launching pad for their global design.

Robin provides even more evidence to support this view:

For some conservatives, Clinton's promotion of free trade and free markets was anathema. Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine -- all the comforts of bourgeois life -- they disdained Clinton for his pursuit of these very virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its sense of depth and political meaning. "In that age of peace and prosperity," Brooks would write, "the top sitcom was 'Seinfeld,' a show about nothing."

Robin then goes on to describe the desires of certain conservatives in terms which recall some of the rhetoric of the most despised dictators from history, including several of those from the twentieth century:

Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtu, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity. But there was another reason for the neocons' dissatisfaction. Clinton, they claimed, was reactive and haphazard rather than proactive and forceful.

Sept. 11 has given the neocons an opportunity to articulate, without embarrassment, the vision of imperial American power that they have been harboring for years. Unlike empires past, this one will be guided by a benevolent goal -- worldwide improvement -- and therefore will not generate the backlash previous empires have generated.

And, of course, none of these appeals of the hawks and those who share their vision would be complete without the call to sacrifice:

For the Kristol-Buckley model conservatives, this is a heady moment, when their ambivalence -- not about capitalism per se, but about the culture of capitalism, the elevation of buying and selling above political virtues such as heroism and struggle -- may finally be resolved. No longer hamstrung by the numbing politics of affluence, they believe they can count on the public to respond to calls of sacrifice and destiny. With danger and security the watchwords of the day, the country will be newly sanctified. The American empire, they hope, will allow America to have its market without being deadened by it.

The fact that the war against terrorism has not yet imposed the sacrifices on the population that normally accompany national crusades has provoked occasional bouts of concern among politicians and cultural elites. "The danger, over the long term," wrote the New York Times's R. W. Apple, "is loss of interest. With much of the war to be conducted out of plain sight by commandos, diplomats and intelligence agents, will a nation that has spent decades in easy self-indulgence stay focused?"

To which I would submit the only proper reply is: "Oh, really? Why? Who said so? My personal happiness is more than enough for me. Why isn't your own happiness good enough for you?" I'll come back to that question in a moment.

In fact, this search for a grand design by the neoconservatives goes back further than Robin's piece indicates. In the final part of my first foreign policy essay over a year ago, I wrote:

In the last 40 years, the Republicans and the Democrats have been slowly morphing into one undifferentiated whole. This process had been going on earlier, but in recent decades, it has accelerated significantly. Now both parties explicitly want and support a huge, oppressive regulatory state, and they argue over only which particular interests should be the beneficiaries of government favors. And, as is always the case, there is only one consistent loser: the average American taxpayer, who foots the bill for the entire pernicious enterprise, who is not "well-connected" and who has no special "interest group" to lobby on his behalf.

Moreover, just as the Republicans and the Democrats have become one nearly inseparable "big government" party, the Republicans -- and especially the neoconservatives (and now even some libertarians and Objectivists) -- have adopted the language of the progressives of the early twentieth century: these people now speak of "national greatness," and of our "mission" to spread our "democratic institutions" around the globe. And how are we to do this? In the manner proposed by the earlier progressives: by massive foreign intervention, to be supported and paid for by the American taxpayer -- and also to be paid for with the blood of Americans.

Now, you would think the fact that neoconservatives, libertarians and even Objectivists are now proudly proclaiming the slogans of those they used to deride would give them at least a moment's pause -- but it doesn't. Two unusually perceptive observers, Virginia Postrel and Jim Glassman, noted this phenomenon six years ago (highlights added) [Ed: I must now unfortunately add that it appears that neither Postrel nor Glassman at all appreciates the relevance of their earlier observations to the current foreign policy crisis]:

"How you feel about the state of 'conservatism,' and of the world, depends on what you want to conserve. Simply conserving free institutions--which define the neutral rules of the game--is not enough for many conservatives, who confuse small government with no government, and neutral government with vice.

"Freedom makes them very nervous. 'Wishing to be left alone is not a governing doctrine,' wrote William Kristol and David Brooks on this page [in the Wall Street Journal] two weeks ago. They offer their own governing doctrine, 'the appeal to American greatness'--a kind of wistful nationalism in search of a big project.

"Unfortunately, for them the Cold War is over. So what's a national-greatness government to do? It could go looking for the next war, hope for another Great Depression, or sponsor a trip to Neptune. Or, as we would prefer, it could step back and let the inventiveness, passion, imagination, and technological genius of Americans produce American greatness. Toward that end, government could start exercising some self-restraint: cutting taxes, regulating and spending less, treating its citizens as equals before the law. ...

"These conservatives view America's very creativity and exuberance a cause for dismay. Conserving free institutions doesn't satisfy their desire to discipline a rambunctuously productive country. Freedom makes them uncomfortable, because it entails a dynamic, open-ended future rather than prescribing a static, politically determined one. ...

"We now worry that the conservative movement has abandoned the ideal of conserving simple rules in favor of a governing doctrine indistinguishable from the manipulative statism of its opponents.

"Indeed, the pessimism of this weekend's international congress reflects the fear that Hayek attributed to conservatives. So does Messrs. Kristol and Brooks's proposed governing doctrine, which is best understood as William James's 'moral equivalent of war'--a desire to engineer a purpose for Americans who seem too dangerously decadent to be left to their own devices.

"But it's one thing to pursue genuine national interests through foreign policy, quite another to cook up schemes just to give government something to do and the American people something to rally around. Harking back to the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and New Republic co-founder Herbert Croly, Messrs. Kristol and Brooks seek the promise of American life in collective pursuits directed from Washington according to their own cultural prejudices. They have embraced Croly's claim that it is not enough to allow America's future to emerge 'merely by virtue of maintaining intact a set of political institutions and by the vigorous individual pursuit of private ends.' Or, as Mr. Brooks put it in the Standard, if Americans 'think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose.'"

Now, confronted by the threat of terrorism, conservatives, as well as many libertarians and Objectivists, have all jumped on the same bandwagon -- but now their program is not simply the "moral equivalent of war." They have an actual war -- and if we take them at their word, it is only the first of many.

These conservatives and all others who propose a series of wars to topple despotic regimes, to be followed by perhaps decades of nation-building so as to inculcate other countries with our "democratic institutions," are the Herbert Crolys of today: they endorse statism as a political philosophy, with an increasingly powerful central government dictating and intruding into more and more aspects of our lives.

I firmly believe that one of the major keys, if not the major key, can be found in the critically important work of Alice Miller, which work has been the basis for a long series of essays I have been writing, entitled "The Roots of Horror." (I will post later on Friday a summary entry, containing links to all the various parts of this essay.) At the beginning of Part III of that series, I summarized some of the major elements of Miller's theory (and it should be kept in mind that Miller refers to "poisonous pedagogy," by which she means the multitude of abuses that virtually all children are subjected to under current methods of child rearing, and many of those abuses need not be physical in nature at all):

[L]et me summarize my understanding of Miller's central argument. By demanding obedience above all from a child (whether by physical punishment, by psychological means, or through some combination of both), parents forbid the child from fostering an authentic sense of self. Because children are completely dependent on their parents, they dare not question their parents' goodness, or their "good intentions." As a result, when children are punished, even if they are punished for no reason or for a reason that makes no sense, they blame themselves and believe that the fault lies within them. In this way, the idealization of the authority figure is allowed to continue. In addition, the child cannot allow himself to experience fully his own pain, because that, too, might lead to questioning of his parents.

In this manner, the child is prevented from developing a genuine, authentic sense of self. As he grows older, this deadening of his soul desensitizes the child to the pain of others. Eventually, the maturing adult will seek to express his repressed anger on external targets, since he has never been allowed to experience and express it in ways that would not be destructive. By such means, the cycle of violence is continued into another generation (using "violence" in the broadest sense). One of the additional consequences is that the adult, who has never developed an authentic self, can easily transfer his idealization of his parents to a new authority figure. As Miller says:

"This perfect adaptation to society's norms--in other words, to what is called 'healthy normality'--carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. He has never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or to an ideology."

But here you have the deep tragedy which underlies the endless search for "meaning," and the inability of many neoconservatives (and many others, to be sure) to find fulfillment in "mere" personal happiness. Because autonomy in the sense discussed by Miller never existed for these people -- that is, because a genuine, authentic self was never allowed to develop -- such people have no self to be satisfied, or to be happy. The achievement of personal happiness, in the deepest sense, first requires the existence of a firsthand, genuine, vital self -- which both knows itself and knows those particular values which will lead to its happiness. But if that self was never allowed to be born in childhood, and if the adult is unable or unwilling to develop an authentic self later in life, genuine personal happiness is a phantasm that will never be actualized.

In such a case, the person will be driven to search for "mystery," "vitality," a great "crusade," or some version of "national greatness" -- and he will view with scorn such things as "markets," and the enforcement of laws and contracts, and peace, and prosperity. In this way, too, death, suffering and destruction become "romanticized" -- because they carry the promise of greater "meaning."

This underlying mechanism also explains two other related issues. The first is one I commented on in explaining why I was driven back to a consideration of Miller's work:

With regard to Miller's point that the idealization of authority figures is easily transferrable for those who have not been allowed to develop a true sense of self, events of the last few years have provided numerous examples. Let me emphasize one other point before moving on to some of the more notable ones. Nothing I am discussing here should be construed to mean that the ideas that people accept do not matter. In fact, as most of my writing here demonstrates, I view ideas, and whether they are true or false, as of critical importance. But the truly notable phenomenon is the following one: many of the ideas that people have accepted, in some cases even for thousands of years, can easily be shown to be wrong. So the obvious question arises: if the ideas are demonstrably wrong -- and as is often the case, when the consequences of certain ideas can easily be shown to be disastrous, and even horribly destructive -- why do people still cling to them so desperately, and absolutely refuse to give them up?

And this is where Miller's work is invaluable. Such tenacity in the face of overwhelming evidence cannot be explained simply by saying, "Well, they just refuse to think. They're evading." Obviously, certain people refuse to think at a certain point. But the question remains: Why? If one looks at the life histories of the great majority of people, keeping in mind Miller's work and her detailed personal histories of a number of individuals, the answer is clear: they dare not question the goodness of the authority figure, the dare not acknowledge the pain they have experienced as the direct result of the actions of the authority figure, and above all they dare not say: the authority figure is wrong. This underlying mechanism of obedience is set very, very early in life -- and the thought of dislodging it later on literally causes the adult to panic, in a sense that threatens his precarious (and false) sense of self. So the adult will do anything to avoid having to question the authority figure.

I think that cause is the one identified by Miller: that for far too many people, their genuine selves were never permitted to develop, and many of them are thus led to find meaning in domination, control, conquest, war, and death. It is almost as if, because they themselves were never born in the deepest, most meaningful sense, they are capable only of bringing suffering or death to others, thus reducing the rest of the world to the state of their own still-born souls.

The real tragedy today, of course, is that one of the ultimate causes of all these horrors has undoubtedly been identified -- but most people find the subject far too threatening and are unwilling even to discuss it. Thus the horrors continue, even into our own times -- and perhaps still further into the future.

And all that is required to stop those horrors is the willingness to see the truth, and to name it. Surely that can't be more difficult than to endure the death and destruction we continue to see, day after day after day. Can it?

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)

Posted by Arthur Silber at 4:52 AM | Comments (2)

Thursday, June 3, 2004

ARTHUR SILBER: Very Well Said

Since my time for blogging has been non-existent today, here's a lovely summation from Josh Marshall of the troubles justly visited upon the Bush administration at the moment:

Now [Tenet]'s the fall-guy for it all, in all likelihood made to take the fall by the true bad-actors.

Having said all that, beside the possibility that the White House's favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country's own spies, I'd say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine.

And to think these troubles might be just beginning...

Posted by Arthur Silber at 9:05 PM | Comments (0)

CHRIS MATTHEW SCIABARRA: Breaking News: The Cracker Jack Come Back!

Sometimes, it pays to stand up and fight for your principles! As I explained here, the New York Yankees thought they'd replace the sale of Cracker Jacks, at Yankee Stadium, with Crunch 'n Munch. I, along with thousands of other fans, protested this destruction of a noble baseball tradition, immortalized in "Take Me Out to the Ball Game."

Well, Cracker Jacks have returned to The Stadium by popular demand!

Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts, and a prize: That's what you get in Cracker Jack!

Bravo, Yanks!

Posted by Chris Matthew Sciabarra at 5:24 PM | Comments (0)

DAVID T. BEITO: Ray Bradbury is Hopping Mad at Michael Moore

He calls him an "asshole" (scroll down) for stealing his title and other offenses.

Posted by David T. Beito at 11:42 AM | Comments (4)

Wednesday, June 2, 2004

SHELDON RICHMAN: Ayn Rand Institute Wrong on Assisted Suicide

The heirs of Ayn Rand who congregate in Irvine, California, with Leonard Peikoff have blundered. In a news release titled “Assisted Suicide: A Moral Right,” the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) expressed relief that Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide (PAS) law survived a challenge from the Bush administration.” Thomas A. Bowden, an attorney and ARI senior writer, said:

The real issue is whether each individual lives by right, or only by society's permission. Sometimes happiness becomes impossible to attain, as in the case of a painful, terminal illness. The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. If society can require you to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.

Bowden is certainly right about that. The problem is that Oregon’s law does not embody the moral principle he describes. As the news release acknowledges, “Oregon's assisted suicide law permits terminally ill patients to ask their doctors for lethal doses of drugs, to be used, or not, by the patient at his own discretion” (emphasis added). Is that what advocates of self-ownership are fighting for: the “right” to ask one’s doctor for drugs with which to kill oneself? What if the doctor says no?

In fact, under the Oregon law the doctor has the authority to say no, which means this is not about individual rights but rather physician power. But why should physicians have such power? Suicide, after all, is a moral, not a medical, issue. As Thomas Szasz writes in Fatal Freedom: The Ethics and Politics of Suicide, “[T]he term ‘physician-assisted suicide’ is intrinsically mendacious. The physician is the principal, not the assistant. In the normal use of the English language, the person who assists another is the subordinate; the person whom he assists is his superior…. However, the physician engaging in PAS is superior to the patient: He determines who qualifies for the ‘treatment’ and prescribes the drug for it” (p. 65).

Speaking honestly, there is no right to assisted suicide (an oxymoron, Szasz writes). There is only the right to kill oneself. Once we're straight on that, we can see the problem clearly: the government prohibits nonphysicians from obtaining the means of painless, efficient suicide: namely drugs. Rather than coming to the defense of laws that give power to doctors, advocates of self-ownership and liberty should instead be calling for an end to all drug laws, including prescription laws.

Posted by Sheldon Richman at 6:50 PM | Comments (0)

CHRIS MATTHEW SCIABARRA: Academic Curricula: At War with Radical Thinking

A provocative article entitled "Colleges Must Reconstruct the Unity of Knowledge," written by Vartan Gregorian, appears in the June 5 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. In this essay, Gregorian gives voice to problems of compartmentalization and fragmentation in the academy that I have long emphasized.

Gregorian is president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and a former president of Brown University and the New York Public Library. He writes:

Today's students fulfill general-education requirements, take specialized courses in their majors, and fill out their schedule with some electives, but while college catalogs euphemistically describe this as a "curriculum," it is rarely more than a collection of courses, devoid of planning, context, and coherence. In fact, mass higher education is heading toward what I call the Home Depot approach to education, where there is no differentiation between consumption and digestion, or between information and learning, and no guidance—or even questioning—about what it means to be an educated and cultured person. Colleges are becoming academic superstores, vast collections of courses, stacked up like sinks and lumber for do-it-yourselfers to try to assemble on their own into a meaningful whole.

The fundamental problem underlying the disjointed curriculum is the fragmentation of knowledge itself. Higher education has atomized knowledge by dividing it into disciplines, subdisciplines, and sub-subdisciplines—breaking it up into smaller and smaller unconnected fragments of academic specialization, even as the world looks to colleges for help in integrating and synthesizing the exponential increases in information brought about by technological advances. The trend has serious ramifications. Understanding the nature of knowledge, its unity, its varieties, its limitations, and its uses and abuses is necessary for the success of our democracy. ...

We must reform higher education to reconstruct the unity and value of knowledge. While that may sound esoteric, especially to some outside the academy, it is really just shorthand for saying that the complexity of the world requires us to have a better understanding of the relationships and connections between all fields that intersect and overlap—economics and sociology, law and psychology, business and history, physics and medicine, anthropology and political science.

Gregorian is particularly concerned about the tendency toward "simplistic solutions" for complex problems, because each problem is often constituted by a cluster of problems, and "none ... can be tackled using linear or sequential methods." He goes on:

Yet such systemic thinking has been slow to catch on, even though the pitfalls of specialization have long been acknowledged and discussed. One reason is that, although the process of both growth and fragmentation of knowledge has been under way since the 17th century, it has snowballed in the last century. The scope and the intensity of specialization are such that scholars and scientists have great difficulty in keeping up with the important yet overwhelming amount of scholarly literature related to their subspecialties, not to mention their general disciplines. The triumph of the "monograph" or "scientific investigation" over synthesis has fractured the commonwealth of learning and undermined our sense of commitment to general understanding and integration of knowledge.

None of this is meant to disparage specialization; but specialization without "synthesis and systemic thinking" is a prescription for disaster. "Information—of all varieties, all levels of priority, and all without much context—is bombarding us from all directions all the time," Gregorian states. Indeed, those of us familiar with the liberal tradition have long appreciated F. A. Hayek's insight that the increasing complexity of society leads to an ever-increasing dispersal of information and knowledge; this knowledge is essentially dispersed, and reflected in the division and specialization of labor. But, as Gregorian insists, "the same information technologies that have been the driving force behind the explosion of information and its fragmentation also present us with profoundly integrative tools." We can see these tools at work in artificial intelligence, automated information-management systems, and electronic communications networks. Nevertheless, our computers will help us to integrate the data, but they are only as good as their human programmers. Gregorian quotes author and media critic Neil Postman: "The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking."

This is one of the important tasks of higher education, according to Gregorian. To not guide students toward synthesizing the disparate bits of knowledge is a colossal failure, "for history shows that humanity has a craving for wholeness." It's actually far more than a simple craving, however; "wholeness" or integration is a requirement of human cognition. And it is, in my view, a virtual requirement for radical social theorizing. More on that in a moment.

The lack of coherence and integration, claims Gregorian, leads some students to "esoteric ideas, cults, and extremist programs," which seem to provide the systematization that such students lack. This is rule not only by the collective, but also by the "expert," who becomes the leader. In a world of specialized knowledge, too many students defer to such "experts" and "abdicate judgment in favor of others' opinions. Unless we help our students acquire their own identity," Gregorian warns, "they will end up at the mercy of experts—or worse, at the mercy of charlatans posing as experts." Is it any wonder that some will be attracted to militant leaders, who adopt militant ideologies and theologies?

Gregorian urges educators to develop "coherence and integrity in our curricula," and the re-affirmation of a "liberal education ... to integrate learning and provide balance..." He urges multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary learning, where the "interconnectedness" of disciplines is stressed. He suggests the development of teacher training and "the joint appointment of faculty members to several departments." He emphasizes also the connections between "learning" and "doing"—between thought and action: the importance of field study; the integration of theory, application, and experience; the exploration of topics or problems "over a sustained period of time, using multiple approaches to explore and develop responses..."

In recognizing the division and specialization of labor and knowledge as central to the advancement of "the cause of civilization," Gregorian stresses "the creation of a balance between specialists and generalists." Such generalists, "trained in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences ... can help create a common discourse, a common vocabulary among the various disciplines." Ironically, "[s]ince our society respects specialists and suspects generalists," Gregorian cautions, "perhaps the way to solve the shortage of generalists is by creating a new specialty in synthesis and systems." Gregorian cites the words of noted philosopher and essayist José Ortega y Gasset:

The need to create sound synthesis and systemization of knowledge ... will call out a kind of scientific genius which hitherto has existed only as an aberration: the genius of integration. Of necessity, this means specialization, as all creative effort does, but this time, the [person] will be specializing in the construction of the whole.

Gregorian also reminds us of T.S. Eliot's comments on Dante's Inferno, where he suggests "that hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing." That is precisely the kind of hell that the modern curriculum is creating. In the end,

we need to understand where we were, where we are, and where we are going. The challenge for higher education, then, is not the choice between pure research and practical application but, rather, the integration and synthesis of compartmentalized knowledge. On our campuses, we must create an intellectual climate that encourages faculty members and students to make connections among seemingly disparate disciplines, discoveries, events, and trends—and to build bridges among them that benefit the understanding of us all.

What lessons can we draw from Gregorian's essay? Well, it's a lesson I've been teaching for more than twenty years and it is one that speaks to the essence of radical thinking.

It has long been said that to be radical is to grasp things by the root. And yet, those who are characterized as political radicals have been criticized by some for raising "serious questions about basic purpose and meaning in society," as political theorist Harlan Wilson puts it, that seem to lend themselves to "relatively simplistic and highly controlled" answers. For Wilson, those who attempt to go to the "root" assume there are roots and that it is possible to clearly identify "malignant" and "vicious" fundamentals that gloss over "interdependence and overlapping pluralities."

But an appreciation of social complexity must be fundamental to radical social theorizing. To be radical is not to offer canned solutions for context-less problems. It is the ability to examine the roots of social problems from different perspectives and on different levels of generality. It is the ability to situate each social problem within a larger system, across time. In seeking to change a society, we can never do one thing; we need to attack that society's problems across several dimensions. This "art of context-keeping," which is the essence of what I have called "dialectical thinking," is indispensable to radical analysis. As I write in Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism:

A new radicalism is first and foremost a new way of thinking. It demands that we explore the integrated principles, meaning, and promise of liberty. It demands that we ask, and answer, crucial questions about the context of liberty—those complex forces that generate, sustain, and nourish human freedom.

Some of my critics have argued that I've trivialized the nature of dialectics by identifying it with good, critical thinking. But Gregorian's article suggests that the modern curriculum militates against such "good, critical thinking," insofar as "good critical thinking" requires an awareness of context, of systematization and integration. When people are not trained to think systematically—worse: when they are trained to dis-integrate, to fragment, to atomize—they will not be apt to think of problems in their interconnections.

This has implications especially for a political process that institutionalizes ad hoc policy-making. Every piece of legislation is crafted by ad hoc considerations of pork-barreling privilege and interest-group pressure. It is as prevalent in the construction of foreign policy as it is in domestic policy. It is even etched into illusory dreams of "democratic nation-building," which focus on the external imposition of institutions or procedural rules without any appreciation of the complex personal and cultural forces that nourish and sustain them.

Let us be clear: The need for comprehensiveness in political thinking, just like the need for integration in the curriculum, is not a call for that equally illusory "synoptic" perspective that Hayek criticized as a vestige of rationalism. None of us stands like Archimedes from a synoptic vantage point to reconstruct the world in toto. All the more reason to investigate every problem from as many different perspectives and levels of generality as is humanly possible. That is the nature of radical thinking. Human survival depends on it.

Posted by Chris Matthew Sciabarra at 11:45 AM | Comments (1)

DAVID T. BEITO: Alabama Censorship Update

The Mobile Register (located three hours from Tuscaloosa) has provided an update of the continuing campaign of President Robert E. Witt of the University of Alabama to bar the Alabama Observer, the newspaper of the Alabama Scholars Association from the campus mail. The campaign began after the Observer published embarassing stories on grade inflation, attempts to ban political window displays, and other issues which the administration would prefer not to discuss:

"A national academic freedom organization is criticizing University of Alabama administrators for barring a conservative faculty group from using the campus mail system.

"UA's message is clear," said Greg Lukianoff, director of legal and public advocacy for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

"Criticism of UA President Robert E. Witt and his administration will not be tolerated and will be met by repression and censorship."

For the rest, see here (scroll down).

Meanwhile, the intrepid Gilbert Cruz, who covers the campus beat for the Tuscaloosa News and his best known for his front page story on "Bear" Bryant bobblehead dolls, has decided not to mention this controversy. Instead, he continues to write puff pieces on the dimensions of Shelby Hall and the closing of local record stores.

Posted by David T. Beito at 10:47 AM | Comments (0)

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