David Rieff wrote an important article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine entitled, “Were Sanctions Right?” Rieff quotes Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who says that the sanctions “worked in the sense that [Saddam] was never able to rebuild his conventional army. When the war started, the Iraqi Army had no more than one-third of the strength it had possessed at the beginning of the first gulf war. But imagine that there had been no sanctions. Is it reasonable to suppose that the weakened Iraqi Army we just faced would have been so weak? I doubt it.”
Author Archives: Peter Levine
liberalism and republicanism in the classroom
I’m just back from Chestertown, MD (a really nice colonial town
where George Washington slept a lot). I was there to teach some elementary-through-high-school
teachers about classical liberalism versus civic republicanism. The teachers are
folks who use the "We the People Program" produced by the Center
for Civic Education; this is their state summer institute. They seemed to
be pretty interested in the subject, although like all Americans they find it
easier to grasp liberalism than civic republicanism. This is interesting (to them
as well as me), since many of the motivations behind public education are civic
republican rather than liberal. That is: a pure liberal may worry that making
children into good citizens is "mind control" and represents illicit
state support for a particular form of life, whereas a civic republican says that
good government rests on active, engaged citizens—and civic engagement is
inherently good. Social studies teachers are in the business of making good citizens,
yet they are instinctively philosophical liberals. The tension or irony is not
lost on them.
save Americorps!
Steve Culbertson of Youth
Service America is circulating this message:
If you can
only make one call today, call the White House (202-456-1414) and inform them
what the supplemental funding to avoid drastic cuts to AmeriCorps this
year means to you, your program, and your community.
The House and Senatehave only until tomorrow (Friday) to compromise on the details of the supplemental
legislation before the House leaves for its August recess.
If the House
and Senate conferees do not meet to iron out the details of the FY03 emergency
supplemental (where the Senate included $100 million for AmeriCorps), before they
leave for recess, hundreds of programs will be forced to close their doors.
Agencies
and nonprofits in every state will lose their ability to serve hundreds of thousands
of individuals in communities across the country. Programs will lose their private
sector support and community relationships that they have built over the past
decade. Thousands of AmeriCorps recruits will turned away from serving their country.
I
attended a forum today on the same issue, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.
Many of the nation’s leaders in service-learning attended. Some believe that the
financial crisis of AmeriCorps has a silver lining: the service movement is organizing,
recruiting allies (including friends among conservatives and business leaders),
and learning that it has clout.
Incidentally, I thought that Rep. Chris
Shays (Republican of Connecticut) chose to make a fairly sharp and explicit attack
on Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX), in defending AmeriCorps. (Armey, he said, "simply
hasn’t walked in someone else’s moccasins.") He also argued for more diverse
congressional districts, as a way to increase Republicans’ sensitivity to minorities.
civic engagement in “the projects”
I was in New York City today, meeting with people who help young
people play serious roles in HUD’s HOPE VI program. This is the program
that tears down very troubled federal housing projects—usually dense clusters
of crime-ridden high-rises—and replaces them with more dispersed, small-scale,
economically diverse housing. In quite a few HOPE VI sites across the country,
young people from "the projects" are participating in planning, mapping
assets, or starting "social entrepreneurship programs" such as micro-businesses
and farmers markets. These are powerful stories and there’s a lot of potential
for more good work in HOPE VI sites.
against intuitionism
I’m
still in Indianapolis at the Kettering Foundation
retreat. Meanwhile, here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately:
Most
moral philosophers appeal to intuitions as the test of an argument’s validity.
At the same time, they presume that our moral judgments should conform to clear,
general rules or principles. An important function of modern moral philosophy
is to improve our intuitions by making them more clear, general, and consistent.
This
methodology can be attacked on two fronts. From one side, those who admire the
rich, complex, and ambiguous vocabulary that has evolved within our culture over
time may resist the effort to reform traditional moral reasoning in this particular
way.
As J.L. Austin wrote: "Our common stock of words embodies all
the distinctions men have found worth drawing, and all the connexions they have
found worth marking, in the lifetime of many generations." Thus there is
a lot of wisdom contained in the vague and morally indeterminate vocabulary that
ordinary language gives us. Words like "love" introduce complex and
not entirely predictable penumbra of allusions, implications, and connotations.
Barely conscious images of concrete events from history, literature, and our personal
lives may flit through our heads when someone uses words. Everyone may recall
a somewhat different set of such images, sometimes with contrary moral implications.
This array of sometimes inconsistent references is problematic if we prize clarity.
Hence moral theorists attempt to excise overly vague terms or to stipulate clear
meanings. But the complexity and vagueness of words is beneficial (rather than
problematic) if human beings have embodied in their language real family resemblances
and real ambiguities. There really are curries, and it would reduce our understanding
of food to ban the word "curry" for vagueness or to define it arbitrarily.
Likewise, there really is "love," and it would impoverish our grasp
of moral issues to try to reason without this concept or to define it in such
a way that it shed its complex and ambiguous connotations, some of which derive
from profound works of poetry, drama, and fiction.
The methods of modern
philosophy can be attacked on another flank, too. Instead of saying that philosophers
are too eager to improve our intuitions, we could say that they respect intuitions
too much. For classical pagans and medieval Christians alike, the test
of a moral judgment was not intuition; it was whether the judgment was consistent
with the end or purpose of human life. However, modern moral philosophers deny
that there is a knowable telos for human beings. Philosophers (as Alasdair
MacIntyre argues) are therefore thrown back on intuition as the test of truth.
Even moral realists, who believe that there is a moral truth independent of human
knowledge, must still rely on our intuitions as the best evidence of truth. But
this is something of a scandal, because no one thinks that intuitions are reliable.
It is unlikely that we were built with internal meters that accurately measure
morality.