Monthly Archives: March 2010

debating Bleak House

Steven Maloney has a thoughtful post about moral issues in Dickens’ Bleak House. He cites two of my posts on the same subject, so this is a bit of a back-and-forth. I would summarize my thoughts about the novel as follows:

1. Mrs. Jellyby illustrates how an author’s judgment of a character can be correct even though the same author’s choice of that character is problematic. I find Mrs. Jellyby awful, as does Dickens. She is callously unconcerned about her own family because she is obsessed with an obviously foolish charitable scheme in Africa, a place of which she knows nothing. No doubt there were women like that in Dickens’ day, when paths to national political and civic leadership were reserved for men. But bourgeois women were also struggling to play useful public roles despite a powerful cult of domesticity. Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch–for example–is a great soul largely squelched by her narrow opportunities for improving the world. So it bothers me that Dickens would choose to portray a woman who should just stop worrying about society and serve her family better.

Steven makes a fair point that a whole range of characters populates Bleak House, and both the men and women exhibit various levels of social and domestic responsibility. The fact that Messrs. Skimpole and Carstone are as irresponsible as Mrs. Jellyby reduces the misogyny of the novel. Yet there is no female character with any capacity for social improvement–despite the terrible needs that Dickens portrays–and that seems a flaw.

The general category that interests me here encompasses fictional characters who have genuine virtues or vices, but whose description reinforces a harmful stereotype.

2. I think that Bleak House is a nationalistic novel, encouraging readers to broaden their sympathies to encompass all Englishmen (while stopping at the coasts of England). That’s certainly not my favorite ethical stance, but it’s better than a narrower frame or a vacuous and sentimental concern for human beings in general. Such nationalism is a form of solidarity, not just empathy. Building the nation-state as a community of mutual concern was an arduous task that could still fail today. Bleak House (and the liberalism it represents) improved the world.

Steven makes an important observation about Mr. Skimpole, who professes literally not to understand his social obligations. That creates an interesting problem for moral assessment. I think Steven is right that Skimpole is ultimately a charlatan and his kind of non-understanding is either inexcusable or spurious.

I’ve written much more about the ethical interpretation of literature in Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

the press turns to explanation, after the decision is made

“American consumers, who spent a year watching Congress scratch and claw over sweeping health care legislation, can now try to figure out what the overhaul would mean for them.” — Tara Siegel Bernard, today’s New York Times.

Actually, the news media spent a year feeding American citizens a steady diet of stories about Congressional procedure, the possible impact of health-care reform on elections, and quotes that falsely described the bill or denounced its critics. Americans never showed any desire to watch Congress “scratch and claw.” They would have appreciated some information about what various legislative bills would do.

Now that the bill has passed, reporters finally feel an obligation to explain it. Bernard’s story lists the major provisions, although The Times also feels obliged to run a front-page “news analysis” of Obama’s alleged strategy (he cast a “bet that the Republicans … overplayed their hand”), a separate article about political fights to come, and a panoply of one-liners: “Freedom dies a little bit today …” “It is almost like the Salem Witch trials …” The ratio of substance to horse-race reporting remains low, but I predict that weekly news magazines and metropolitan dailies will begin to run helpful explanatory pieces.

The job of the press is not to tell us who won or lost, or how a bill will affect our votes in the next election. Its job is to give us information that we can combine with our values to reach judgments. Measured by that standard, the press failed spectacularly during the health care debate. Reporters are partly responsible for the public’s deep misunderstanding of the bill–although the Democratic leadership also did a poor job explaining it, and we citizens should bear some responsibility, too.

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist/blogger who studies such things, doubts that public misconceptions will dissipate any time soon. His research suggests that myths are stubborn and that efforts to correct them often backfire by inadvertently reinforcing the very misinformation that they seek to rebut.

As it must be, his work is based on data from the past, plus lab experiments. I think the health care situation may prove unusual, because (1) the legislation is momentous and will capture public attention, (2) the level of misinformation is striking, so there is lots of room for improvement, (3) people have incentives to learn what the bill means to them, (4) unless you are an ideologue, you have no motivation to reject positive information about the bill, and (5) trustworthy intermediaries, such as primary care physicians, have incentives to understand it and explain it accurately. I would be surprised if public understanding doesn’t rise.

But there I go, prognosticating about public opinion–just like a reporter. The important question is what the bill will actually do. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes to find out, if you don’t know already.

the changing politics of flagrant rights-violations

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman recently introduced the “Enemy Belligerent, Interrogation, Detention, and Prosecution Act of 2011” (PDF). This legislation would allow the executive branch to name any person (citizen or non-citizen, whether in the US or overseas) as a “high-value detainee” who can be held in military custody and interrogated without appeal and without Miranda rights. The act applies to anyone who “is suspected of engaging in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners through an act of terrorism, or by other means in violation of the laws of war, or of purposely and materially supporting such hostilities …” Criteria to be considered in deciding whether to throw someone in the brig include “potential threat,” “potential intelligence value,” and “such other matters as the President considers appropriate.” The Secretary of Defense and the Attorney General make the ultimate decision– except when they disagree, in which case the President decides.

I hope it goes without saying that this is execrable legislation, monarchical or even dictatorial in its essence, and an insult to the core principles of the United States Constitution. But what interests me is the politics.

Until 2008, only civil libertarians would have been alarmed by such a bill. They were a subset of the Democratic base, and their party did not control the executive branch. Right-wing anti-government libertarians were terrified of terrorists and highly trusting of the Bush administration; thus many (not all) of them would have supported the bill. And the mainstream voter didn’t care much about civil liberties. The political alignment favored legislation like this, although nothing as bad actually passed under George W. Bush.

Now we have a Tea Party movement composed of libertarian-leaning conservatives who are almost as afraid of the president as they are of terrorists. I think it would be easy to line them up against this bill. I’d use this line: “When President Obama and his Attorney General get really fed up with Glenn Beck, under this law, they can throw him in jail and there’s no appeal.” I know that President Obama would do no such thing. (And I know, just to be clear, that Glenn Beck is no terrorist.) But the Tea Partiers’ fear is real, and in this situation, it should create a majority coalition against arbitrary executive power.

what is a university?

I’m taking a training course for managers at Tufts, in which I learn techniques for assessing staff performance, mentoring, and so on. The idea is that Tufts University is a single entity that succeeds or fails as a whole. The job of managers is to maximize the degree to which all Tufts employees promote the organization’s success. We can use carrots and sticks–but also the softer skills that I’m learning in the course, such as how to give advice effectively. For anyone who has absorbed a dose of Foucault, these softer methods may seem the most troubling, because they promise to reshape people’s souls, not just their behavior, to fit the organization’s imperatives.

My value-judgment is less negative. Tufts is an entity–a nonprofit corporation–that charges nearly $50,000/year for its main service (undergraduate education) and is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Those of us who receive Tufts paychecks need to promote the valid goals of the university in an efficient way. We could call Tufts a “bureaucracy,” but that isn’t a term of abuse. Bureaucracies arise to reduce slack and get things done.

At the same time, Tufts is several other things:

It can be a seen as a partially democratic community, in which autonomous agents (especially faculty and students) make collective decisions after giving reasons in public. Hence the faculty “senate,” the student government, the newspaper, and the right of tenure, meant to protect freedom of speech. The Tufts community does not stand alone; faculty, in particular, also belong to disciplinary associations that are self-governing and quite powerful.

It can be seen as a zone of individual autonomy. An academic doesn’t want to be The Man (or Woman) in a Gray Flannel Suit. Academics set a high value on doing what they think is right in relation to their own readers, students, colleagues, and The Truth. Autonomy trades off against bureaucracy and also against democracy, since one’s colleagues may not know what is right.

It can be seen as a market competitor. Tufts is like a firm, competing with other universities (and some private companies) for faculty, students, grants, and contracts. Insofar as Tufts is a competitor, it must operate internally like a bureaucracy in order to ensure that its “agents”–faculty and staff–promote Tufts’ interests and not their own. But it is not autonomous. The market, not the Tufts administration, decides what to value. If, for example, a senior professor gets an offer from Brown, we must match it to hold onto her. So Brown has made a decision about our personnel.

Finally, Tufts can be seen as a collection of individual entrepreneurs who are maximizing their own salary, security, status, fame, and quality of life in a marketplace. They are expected to seek external offers, publish for international audiences, form teams with colleagues at other universities, and otherwise pursue their own market position.

I don’t actually believe that the ideals of democracy or autonomy can prevail, although they have some actual force and deserve moral respect. I think a university must be something of a bureaucracy and something of a platform for individual entrepreneurs. The hard part, for me, is when these competing values clash in borderline cases. For example, there may be a single process for evaluating, supporting, and disciplining all employees. But if the tenured faculty cannot actually be disciplined, the process is merely formal for them while it is highly consequential for receptionists and food workers. It is important to be clear about when we are each kind of institution, and why.

public deliberation news

In lieu of a substantive post on this busy day, some links about public deliberation … A new CIRCLE study finds that reorganizing a high school to encourage daily meetings about school policy boosted voluntary service. … The deliberative democracy field responds to the Coffee Party movement. … Detroit has a new plan for school reform that was developed in a highly deliberative way.