Monthly Archives: October 2004

memories of high school

I graduated from high school two years after A Nation at Risk (1983). Although my friends and I had some fine teachers, the curriculum and standards were pretty slack back then. As I recall, we rarely had to bring homework home; it could be done during the lunch break. However, there were two good things about my schools in Syracuse, NY. First, the population was split almost exactly 50/50 between African Americans and Whites. That was fairly unusual in those days, and extremely rare today. Last year, I helped some students in Maryland to conduct an oral history of race in their high school, and they found that the late-70s was the high point of integration.

Secondly, I had several friends and classmates who were intensely intellectual, and specifically interested in the moral aspects of politics and public policy. In addition to me, three others are philosophy professors today, one is an economist who teaches public policy, and one is a lawyer who writes about American history. We wasted plenty of time back then, but we also spent some of the hours that today we’d have to devote to homework reading good books for fun and arguing about what we’d read.

We mostly read different things, of course. But philosophy of science was popular, and most of us read Thomas Kuhn and Douglas Hofstadter (Godel, Escher, Bach and The Mind’s I). I think the most popular fiction included Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and anti-totalitarian political novels by Koestler, Malraux, and Orwell. More than one of us read Solzhenitsyn, although I certainly didn’t finish any of his novels. Mid-twentieth century American fiction was still influential: Faulkner and Hemmingway, especially. I read a lot of Freud’s case studies. I didn’t read much political commentary, but others subscribed to The New Republic and everyone read the New York Times, although I cannot remember how regularly.

Five years later, I enrolled at Oxford for a doctorate and discovered that the University offered very few graduate seminars, no qualifying papers, and no exams. However, there were many intense graduate students, and we organized ourselves in informal seminars. Once again, I missed the benefits of a rigorous and demanding curriculum, but found that free time can be deeply educational if your fellow students push you.

why the questions were good in Friday’s debate

Commentators are saying that the Missouri citizens who asked the questions last Friday did a good job. They tend to note this with a tone of pleased surprise or patriotic piety. (“You see, ordinary American folks can do almost as well as professional reporters when the stakes are high.”) My take is different. I think ordinary people will almost always ask better questions than professional journalists, not because Americans are particularly thoughtful and well-informed, but because reporters have been trained to avoid the most obvious–yet vital–questions.

It’s extremely useful to ask candidates what they would do about a given problem in the future. This type of question is hard but obviously fair. It elicits information about knowledge and competence, values and priorities, and policy choices–in short, the “merits and measures” of public figures (to quote James Madison about what the press should report).

I count eight questions asked last Friday that were essentially about future policies. (Several more touched on the future while also mentioning character or past decisions.) In contrast, when President Bush gave an extremely rare White House press conference last April, the professional reporters who confronted him asked virtually nothing about current or future policies. Instead, they asked questions about the President’s personality that cemented their reputation as the hostile “liberal media” without actually giving Bush any difficulty at all. If you are asked, in effect, “Why are you so stupid?” then you don’t have to show any knowledge or address any difficult problems. You can just say something polite but forceful, and the reporter will look rude and biased.

It doesn’t occur to ordinary people to ask that kind of question. And the reason is fairly simple. They are trying to make up their minds about whom they should choose in November. Thus they need to know about candidates’ “merits and measures”–period. In contrast, journalists are trying to tell a story about the electoral conflict, the horse-race. For them, the interesting questions are: Who’s down and who’s up? How will candidate A reply to the charge made by candidate B? What tactic will A use? How does he intend to campaign from now on? What does he say about B?

A question or two of this type would be OK, but reporters’ relentless attention to the horse-race cheapens politics, lets incumbents off the hook, and makes professional journalists distinctly worse than other people at conducting political interviews.

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Derrida (the death of the author)

Jacques Derrida died on Friday. All the obituaries I have seen have fundamentally mischaracterized his thought and the movement he inspired, ?deconstruction.? (The Times gets the biographical facts right but avoids defining deconstruction by stressing its obscurity.) I found Derrida annoying when, as an undergraduate, I watched him sign students? t-shirts and then cross out his name to put it ?under erasure.? I criticized him in my Nietzsche and the Modern Crisis of the Humanities (pp. 175-181). After I finished that book in 1992, I ignored him. So did many others, for he became increasingly irrelevant?a fate that may have bothered him much more than angry criticism. So I don?t think much of Derrida; but we ought to associate his name with views that he actually held, not with the vaguely Marxist (materialist and historicist) opinions that are often pinned on him.

Derrida claimed that certain prejudices, which he called ?logocentric,? are to be found in ?all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading or interpretation? [Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), p. 46.] These prejudices include a preference for the world over language, for reality over fiction, for sounds over letters, for the signified over the signifier, and for masculinity over femininity. A classic deconstructionist reading of a text involves (a) demonstrating that the text presumes these dichotomies and (b) calling the distinctions and value-judgments into question. For instance, one might very plausibly argue that Dante combines irrationality, verbosity, femininity, and falsehood in the figure of Francesca da Rimini, whereas God is male, rational, silent, and true. Drawing attention to this dichotomy would be deconstructionist criticism.

Derrida went beyond standard deconstruction, however?starting at the latest with Glas (1974). He knew that any argument against logocentrism would itself be logocentric, just because it would be an argument. He wanted to get outside a form of thinking that was, according to him, universal. To achieve ?exorbitant? effects (ones that went outside the normal orbit), he played with styles of writing. For example, Glas consists of two parallel columns, one inspired by Hegel and the other by Genet. Hegel was a great systematic thinker who could incorporate all alternative views within his comprehensive system. Criticizing Hegel would be playing the philosopher?s own game. So Derrida analyzed a completely different author in the same book, discussed disgusting bodily functions, stretched puns beyond any reasonable limit, and said, in effect, ?Philosophize this.?

Everything depends upon the universality of the ?logocentric? prejudices that Derrida identified. If they are omnipresent and important, then Derrida was engaged in a radical project of some interest (but of doubtful value). I think, however, that calling the West ?logocentric? was a massive oversimplification. There are binary oppositions in our thinking, but also trinities and unities. Some of us believe that written text is merely a representation of sounds, which are ?primary?; but others disagree. If the thinking of the West is deeply diverse, then there is no way out of its ?orbit.? In that case, Derrida invented a rather easy game for himself: escaping prejudices that plenty of people had always disagreed with. Some deconstructionist readings are trenchant and plausible, but Derrida?s own works mainly look ridiculous.

Jack Balkin has a nicer take, as does Michael B?rub?.

should the draft be an issue?

In our recent poll with MTV (pdf), we found that 78% of young Americans oppose a draft, but 32% think there probably will be one. Graffiti and posters on my campus suggest that there is a pretty widespread rumor that Congress is considering a conscription bill. The root of the rumors may be Rep. Charlie Rangel’s legislation to start a draft. Rangel is a liberal dove who sees universal conscription as a way to spread the burden of war to wealthy people and reduce the chances of foreign interventions. Republicans scheduled a vote on Rangel’s bill on Tuesday so that they could kill it (in a 401-2 vote) and try to end the draft rumors.

I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, young people have concerns about a possible draft, and those concerns are not foolish. If politicians seriously debated the issue of conscription (and more generally, who should serve in uniform), they would respond to young people’s concerns and perhaps increase their interest in politics. Furthermore, there are serious arguments in favor of conscription, as summarized in my Institute’s Quarterly (pdf).

On the other hand, I personally believe that there is zero chance of a draft. I know that the Pentagon is having difficulty meeting its recruitment targets, but only by a few thousand people. There are 3.5 million 18-year-olds. To increase recruitment by drafting a large proportion of the young population makes no sense. To draft only one in fifty thousand would create a “negative lottery” and undermine morale in the military and society at large. It would be far cheaper to increase the bonuses for signing up or lower the eligibility requirements a notch. To be sure, we could face a draft after a massive terrorist attack on US soil; but then conscription would be the least of our problems.

I’m somewhat unwilling to respond to youth concerns by demanding a public discussion of the draft, if there is no real prospect of conscription.

(Rock the Vote has been pushing the issue, but in a generally responsible way. See this page.)

Update: Matthew Yglesias cites even higher levels of concern about the draft among young people (51%) than we found and argues that there’s a real risk of conscription if Bush is reelected. Yglesias is young enough to be called up, so no wonder he’s worried.

the importance of being honest

Popular opinion holds that politicians are liars–generally. In my view, however, the Bush administration is different. They have repeatedly made extremely important claims that were false. In some cases, such as when they claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, I suspect that they were wrong at first, rather than mendacious. However, they failed to investigate and then correct the record, and this showed a damaging and blatant disrespect for truth.

So how is an opponent to respond? One answer is: fight fire with fire. It is crucial to defeat a reckeless and feckless incumbent, so you have to be extremely critical. Voters aren’t well-informed or sophisticated, so you must make your accusations simple and dramatic. People don’t believe politicians; they discount everything they hear by 50%; so you’d better inflate your claims.

I don’t know whether anyone really believes this answer, but I certainly disagree with it. I think a challenger in 2004 stands to gain enormously by developing a reputation for scrupulous honesty. The Bush administration has made so many grievous mistakes and misjudgments that there are plenty of accurate charges that one can launch. However, if you make an issue out of the incumbents’ dishonesty, then you must look like Abe Lincoln yourself, or else the “honesty issue” will become muddy. Even in our cynical age, some national politicians (Tsongas, McCain) have built reputations for truth-telling. In addition to being smart politics, there would be great civic advantages to a strategy of honesty that began to restore public trust in politics and government.

So why do Kerry-Edwards make factually dubious claims? Why do they say that we’re spending $200 billion on Iraq? Using a figure of $157 billion would have exactly the same political impact, and it would have the advantage of being true. Why did Senator Kerry claim that “The President hasn’t put one nickel … into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems”? Funding for this category of work has been terribly inadequate, but quite far above one nickel. ($115 million seems to be a better estimate.) Why do they claim that Vice President Cheney has benefited financially from contracts with Halliburton made during the Bush Administration? There are countless other charges to be made against Cheney and Halliburton that happen to be true. Finally (to consider a more subtle issue), why do they say repeatedly that casualties are increasing by the month in Iraq? This is literally true but misleading, since casualties were higher several months ago. It would work just as well to cite the total number of US dead and wounded.

I do not imagine that millions of people were visiting sites like www.factcheck.org until Dick Cheney tried to send them there. But if such neutral referees consistently gave a candidate good marks for honesty and accuracy, I think that impression would gradually get across in the mass media.

In short, I wish that Kerry-Edwards had hired professional fact-checkers and let them edit every speech, ad, and set of talking-points. By now, the Democrats would be perceived as considerably more honest than the incumbents, and that would count in November.

Update: The Decembrist complains about the equal treatment that Cheney and Edwards have received in the press, and asks: “Why couldn’t the headline be, ‘Cheney Tells Dozens of Whoppers’? Because that is the story, and the glib journalistic clich? of ‘both sides stretch the truth’ merely obscures the actual story.” I think the most accurate overall assessment would be: “Bush and Cheney tell massive and consequential lies, while Kerry and Edwards (who are not yet responsible for defending an incumbent administration) frequently resort to exaggerations and half-truths.” If this is the reality, then it’s no surprise that the actual headlines read “both sides stretch the truth.” Kerry and Edwards could have avoided those headlines (and still have won their debates) if only they had been scrupulous.