Today, the Chinese put a man in space. US newspapers explain that the Communist Party is trying to establish China as a great power?rich and technologically advanced?and to impress its own people. Much the same was said about America’s motivations for the Apollo Project. Allegedly, presidents Kennedy and Johnson sent people into space to impress the world with the superiority of democracy and capitalism. I don’t know if this is the best historical explanation. However, assuming that NASA was created for propaganda purposes, that doesn’t strike me as the worst thing. Our system was superior to the Communist alternative, and demonstrating its success may have been worthwhile. Space travel was harmless; it had some scientific value; and the symbolism was cosmopolitan or humanistic as well as nationalistic. (“One great step for mankind ….”) To be sure, we could have spent the money impressing the world by reducing misery and diseases. In fact, we did launch the War on Poverty and the War on Cancer in the same era, only to falter in the eighties. We also fought a shooting war in Vietnam that didn’t work out too well. In that context, the Apollo project seems reasonably honorable to me, even if it was primarily for show. Similarly, the Chinese space program is not as wise as spending the same money on poverty-reduction; but it’s far better than showing off by invading Taiwan or testing new nuclear weapons (the approach India has chosen).
Author Archives: Peter Levine
the evils of “districting”
I think that the process for drawing legislative districts is the single worst feature of US democracy today, worse than the scandalous campaign finance system. Politicians have drawn congressional districts so that fewer than 50 out of 435 are at all competitive. This means that in the remaining 385 districts, there really isn’t any point to voting. That’s one reason why turnout is so low. Meanwhile, incumbents in uncompetitive seats are not accountable to the voters for anything but the grossest misbehavior. Nor is there any public political debate in these districts. As a result, Americans tend to see disagreement as something that only arises far away in Washington; they interpret it as a sign that professional politicians love to argue instead of solve problems. Citizens don’t realize that we Americans have real disagreements that need to be addressed.
conservatives on campus
David Brooks’ Sept. 27th New York Times column, “Lonely Campus Voices” claimed that conservative graduate students face job discrimination, mainly because of the topics they prefer to study (e.g., warfare instead of social history; Churchill instead of Ghandi). These students can’t survive in academia, although some make their way successfully in Washington. My favorite line was at the end: “Last week the professors at Harvard’s government department reviewed the placement records of last year’s doctoral students. Two had not been able to find academic jobs, both of them [students of the conservative scholar Harvey Mansfield]. ‘Well,’ Mansfield quipped, ‘I guess they’ll have to go to Washington and run the country.'”
new work on the commons
I have just posted two new articles about the idea of a “commons.” Both are defenses of a particular position, which I would summarize as follows: The Internet should be an open arena for creators to make and give away digital material. That is how the Net was born; but this commons ideal is now under serious threat from government censorship and especially from corporate control of the Internet’s “architecture” and intellectual property. So far, my argument is completely indebted to work by Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, David Bollier, and Yochai Benkler, among others. I add the view that we won’t ever succeed in protecting the commons through legislation, court decisions, or clever software that circumvents corporate or state control. We need formal associations of citizens who have personal experience with the new digital media and commitment to using it for civic purposes. In “Building the E-Commons,” The Good Society, vol. 11, no. 3 (2002), pp. 1-9, I discuss one such association and then move to a general argument for the “associational commons” as our ideal. In “A Movement for the Commons?” The Responsive Community, vol. 13, no. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 28-39, I start with the legal battle over intellectual property, and again conclude that we need citizens’ associations to protect and enrich the commons.
how senior scholars get published
Months ago, a colleague in another department told me that his chair was pressing the faculty to submit more articles to peer-reviewed journals, because that’s good for a department’s reputation. “Who does that?” the colleague said; “I’m always busy writing articles that my friends have asked me to contribute.” I took this as evidence of a kind of corruption in higher education. Scholars of my generation don’t have friends who run journals or edit prominent books. So they compete with one another for the few genuinely open publication slots. Only the ones who frequently succeed in publishing get tenure. Meanwhile, the senior faculty who sit on their tenure committees lengthen their resumes with non-reviewed articles that they write for one another.
This sounds bitter, but it doesn’t reflect a personal complaint. I’ve been very fortunate with easy opportunities for publication. I’m just angry on behalf of other people my age and younger.