Monday, June 05, 2006
"Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you"
Over the weekend Andrea and I watched Stay, written by David Benioff and directed by Marc Forster. Actually, I watched it alone Saturday night after the kids went to bed, and then Ann and I watched it Sunday night. It's a creepy, thought-provoking, beautifully constructed film about the dream-world that exists between life and death. It's the thinking person's Sixth Sense. Rent it. Watch it. Think about it.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
The Failed Invasion of Iraq
Jason Zengerle at The Plank points out that Bill O’Reilly, of all people, has called the Iraq War not only a failure, but an avoidable failure. Zengerle draws a parallel between O’Reilly’s pronouncement and Walter Cronkite’s similar declaration during Vietnam:
The recent wave of unpleasant stories of massacres, alleged massacres, and casualties-by-mistake (including children) in Iraq, combined with Bush’s historically low approval ratings and the brink of some serious gains for the Democrats in November (despite their fundamental lack of “vision” and their reliance on the same corporate influence and cynical attitudes toward their constituents), reveal two important things about current public consciousness: First, the American public is perfectly capable of respecting and being concerned for U.S. troops, even in the midst of a near-universal consensus that this war was and is horribly, horribly wrong. This first fact is especially important because the war-borgs have traditionally relied on conflating “respect for our soldiers” with unquestioning support for “the mission.” There is nothing to suggest that this conflation is the least bit successful anymore, and considerable evidence that it is counterproductive. It’s irrefutably clear that we can love, honor, respect and even admire the heroism of rank-and-file military personnel, and even contextualize (if not forgive) criminal brutalities in their midst, while understanding that the fundamental blame for this fiasco rests with the ruling class (including opportunistic Democrats).
The second fact about public consciousness is that the Bush administration’s arrogance and incompetence have not only destroyed what little shallow support existed for this war, but also the support for any future military adventures, including those ostensibly required for fighting the eternal, unending War on Terror. Skepticism, mistrust, and contempt—which the ever-shrinking right translates as treason, are the new order of the day. We have entered a new period of rejectionist thinking where military deployment is concerned. And without the usual rhetorical tricks up their sleeves, the war-borgs will have a tough time remedying this. The space has at least opened up for alternative ways of thinking about global crises, mass brutalities, enemies and allies, and inequalities of power and economics. Whether such alternative visions will result in any coherent alternatives remains to be seen, but we should be neither ashamed nor embarrassed if we derive satisfaction from seeing the Bush administration collapse under the weight of its own cynicism and stupidity. We just have to keep in mind that such justified satisfaction is not enough to make the world a better place.
Those who lament that we could have done it differently, that there was a “winnable” way to invade, kill a bunch of evil people, and build a new country, are missing the point. The belief that some new kind of U.S. leaders could be elected, in the context of the present era, who could exercise military power responsibly, ethically, and competently, is at least as utopian as any of the allegedly deranged pipe-dreams of the peace movement.
One more thing: Those who continue to insist that "everyone" was wrong about Iraq's WMDs, those who continue to insist on giving Bush the benefit of the doubt, and maintaining that he was merely misled by other people's bad intelligence, need to first read and attempt to refute this fine article published by FAIR.
And this is the view of geopolitics from the ground:
After Walter Cronkite pronounced Vietnam a stalemate, LBJ famously told his aides, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
The recent wave of unpleasant stories of massacres, alleged massacres, and casualties-by-mistake (including children) in Iraq, combined with Bush’s historically low approval ratings and the brink of some serious gains for the Democrats in November (despite their fundamental lack of “vision” and their reliance on the same corporate influence and cynical attitudes toward their constituents), reveal two important things about current public consciousness: First, the American public is perfectly capable of respecting and being concerned for U.S. troops, even in the midst of a near-universal consensus that this war was and is horribly, horribly wrong. This first fact is especially important because the war-borgs have traditionally relied on conflating “respect for our soldiers” with unquestioning support for “the mission.” There is nothing to suggest that this conflation is the least bit successful anymore, and considerable evidence that it is counterproductive. It’s irrefutably clear that we can love, honor, respect and even admire the heroism of rank-and-file military personnel, and even contextualize (if not forgive) criminal brutalities in their midst, while understanding that the fundamental blame for this fiasco rests with the ruling class (including opportunistic Democrats).
The second fact about public consciousness is that the Bush administration’s arrogance and incompetence have not only destroyed what little shallow support existed for this war, but also the support for any future military adventures, including those ostensibly required for fighting the eternal, unending War on Terror. Skepticism, mistrust, and contempt—which the ever-shrinking right translates as treason, are the new order of the day. We have entered a new period of rejectionist thinking where military deployment is concerned. And without the usual rhetorical tricks up their sleeves, the war-borgs will have a tough time remedying this. The space has at least opened up for alternative ways of thinking about global crises, mass brutalities, enemies and allies, and inequalities of power and economics. Whether such alternative visions will result in any coherent alternatives remains to be seen, but we should be neither ashamed nor embarrassed if we derive satisfaction from seeing the Bush administration collapse under the weight of its own cynicism and stupidity. We just have to keep in mind that such justified satisfaction is not enough to make the world a better place.
Those who lament that we could have done it differently, that there was a “winnable” way to invade, kill a bunch of evil people, and build a new country, are missing the point. The belief that some new kind of U.S. leaders could be elected, in the context of the present era, who could exercise military power responsibly, ethically, and competently, is at least as utopian as any of the allegedly deranged pipe-dreams of the peace movement.
One more thing: Those who continue to insist that "everyone" was wrong about Iraq's WMDs, those who continue to insist on giving Bush the benefit of the doubt, and maintaining that he was merely misled by other people's bad intelligence, need to first read and attempt to refute this fine article published by FAIR.
And this is the view of geopolitics from the ground:
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Some recent photos
On the day of my father's funeral, we took a lot of pictures of the family. The first picture below is of Ann, Andrew, Abigail and me. The second one is of all my kids, Andrew, Abby, Stephen, Levi, and of course me.
Last week, the UW Board of Trustees honored Sara DeGroot, Chris Crowe, Brian DeLong and David Braz for their performances on the debate team this year. Although Braz looks like a serial killer in this picture, I'm still proud of him:
Last week, the UW Board of Trustees honored Sara DeGroot, Chris Crowe, Brian DeLong and David Braz for their performances on the debate team this year. Although Braz looks like a serial killer in this picture, I'm still proud of him:
Sunday, May 07, 2006
Eulogy for my Father
Thomas Alvah Stannard, July 7, 1932-April 29, 2006
Thank you all for coming today to celebrate the life of Tom Stannard.
My father was the first intellectual I ever knew. The definition of “intellectual” is “of or associated with or requiring the use of the mind,” and “a person who uses their mind creatively.” Also, it’s a word that’s been turned into a kind of insult for quite some time now. If you’re an “intellectual” that must mean you don’t believe in a higher power; it must mean you’re a subversive, you aren’t patriotic, or, above all, you think you’re better than everybody else. My father was none of these. He was spiritual. He was patriotic (although, as my father proved, being patriotic doesn’t mean agreeing with everything your government does). He certainly did not think he was better than anyone else. Tom Stannard devoted the better part of his life, in fact, to giving the gift of intellect to those members of society most likely to be written off by the elite: children, often poor children, children of immigrants, sometimes children of illegal immigrants. And in this time of national conversation over who is an “American” and who is entitled to social goods, it seems fitting to remember that my father, a teacher, may have had his opinions about national immigration policy, but as with all his political opinions, they were checked at his classroom door. When he walked into his class, the only thing he cared about was giving his students the gift of the mind—the invitation to a contemplative, intellectual life—which he believed was available to each and every human being if they wanted it. He did not believe only white, English-speaking people could receive such gifts, nor did he believe that you had to be wealthy, or have wealthy parents, to be able to understand and appreciate Shakespeare, Aristophanes, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Tom Stannard was a complex, sometimes paradoxical person in his life, but a very simple, single-minded person in the classroom: He wanted to take each set of kids he taught—white, Black, Asian, Latino, poor, or middle class—and help them become intellectuals. Help them appreciate books. Help them appreciate the ability of the mind, and the ability of humanity’s vast body of literature, to address the complex problems of everyday life and civilization.
My father gave me several unforgettable gifts. Two of them came in the form of books: A long time ago, he gave me the complete works of William Shakespeare. Dad was something of a Shakespeare-phile. One of the reasons he was so fascinated by Shakespeare was that “the Bard” was not a nobleman, not a university doctor, but a common, middle-class writer who ended up being the preeminent wordsmith of the English language. In fact, every once in a while you hear some cockeyed theory or another about how Shakespeare couldn’t have written as well as he did; it must have been some nobleman writing under a pseudonym. Dad and I talked about those theories once, and he answered them with that characteristic, unforgettable, sarcastic Tom Stannard disgust. You all know the kind of disgust I am talking about.
Because, as I said, Dad believed that the gifts of the mind were available to everyone. Shakespeare’s genius validated my father’s belief that no one was really better than anyone else. “We are all frail,” says Angelo in “Measure for Measure,” “frail” meaning prone to sin rather than ill of health. Or, following Antipholus in “The Comedy of Errors,” we are all merely drops of water, who find our significance in bonding with others:
“I to the world am like a drop of water,
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth
(Unseen, inquisitive), confounds himself.”
The second great gift my Dad gave me, more recently, was a complete collection of Arthur Connon Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories. Dad was a Sherlock Holmes fanatic and even when I was very small he would sit me in front of the television when a Holmes movie was on. For Sherlock Holmes, grand truths were found in small details, and no client’s story or personal tragedy was beneath the great detective’s concern. Those will always be virtues I associate with my father. Now, I have become a Holmes fan myself, and an image of my Dad is in every encounter I have with the great detective: Dad peers over my shoulder as I read, and his unforgettable impersonation of Holmes is the voice I hear when the great detective speaks. I can hear his voice when Doyle writes in “The Red-Headed League,” “My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplace of existence.” And, when Holmes, speaking of learning in “The Adventure of the Red Circle,” says “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.”
The third great gift I received from my Dad was to watch him teach, to sit in his classroom and see him work his magic with junior high students. I remember telling someone about my Dad and they said with awe, “junior high students! How did he do it?” I wish I knew. For a year, between jobs, I was a substitute teacher and I dreaded going to the middle schools. But Dad couldn’t have been any more comfortable. When I watched him, he held the class in rapt attention discussing metaphors, how to make imagery concrete, how to give words multiple meanings, how to make language beautiful. Tom Stannard believed in making words beautiful, and furthermore believed in sharing those gifts with a section of the population we would rather forget existed: junior high students in general, and in Dad’s career, economically and culturally marginalized students. Children of immigrants. My father, who was cynical about all politics, fought against the Immigration and Naturalization Service when they attempted to remove “illegal” children from his classroom. In his classroom, no one was “illegal.” He designed and implemented after-school programs for “latch-key” kids. He oversaw gifted and talented programs for students who did not have the economic and cultural privileges to access such programs as birthrights. This was his life, his greatest pride, the epitome of everything he stood for.
I am a teacher. I will spend my life trying to be half the teacher my father was.
So today I am celebrating the life of Tom Stannard, intellectual. But not the kind of intellectual who sits in an ivory tower and plays analytical games. Rather, a human being of modest background who believes the contemplative life is available to all human beings. It’s a lesson those of us in the education profession need to hear again and again. My father, who lived to tear down the hubris and self-righteousness of hypocrites everywhere, reserved his most poisonous venom for those who would arbitrarily place some humans on pedestals higher than others. His was a labor of love, and in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Helena declares:
“Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind.”
Thank you, Dad, for giving me the gift of a mind.
Friday, April 28, 2006
Deliberation, Democracy and Debate
Deliberation, Debate, and Democracy in the Academy and Beyond
By Matt Stannard, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Wyoming
Spring 2006 Faculty Senate Speaker Series Speech, April 18, 2006, Laramie Wyoming
I: Introduction: Deliberation and Debate as the Democratization of Truth
Within the Academy, the value of deliberation, and the importance of broad participation, is a tentatively accepted truth. Outside the Academy, pundits marvel and jeer at our obsession with "inclusion," an obsession they equate (or equivocate) with "political correctness" and "liberal guilt." Within the Academy, students, instructors, and thankfully sometimes even staff, push and politicize deliberation and inclusion. We mostly consider broad debate, public demonstrations, and the airing of collective opinions the mark of a mature and healthy institution. Outside the Academy, pundits shake their heads and warn parents that today’s colleges are hotbeds of radicalism. Our codes of academic freedom, the public pronouncements of our often-beleaguered administrators, our very syllabi, are full of phrases like "open debate," "responsible communication," and "marketplace of ideas." Outside the Academy, these phrases are seen as alternatively quaint and sinister.
But the Academy is not only under attack from "outsiders," and not merely because the post-September 11 world has given the nod to sterile and commodified forms of patriotic communication and safe, symbolic dissent. Both inside and outside college life, the value of discussion is increasingly under attack, under sabotage, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes violently, and the attackers are often not recognizable as such. We cower away from religious fanatics because we know they refuse to entertain the possibility of their incorrectness, but we fail to see our own failure to embrace the possibilities of our own incorrectness. We label other points of view "ideological" from vantage points we assume to be free of ideology, or we excuse our narrow-mindedness by telling ourselves that "ideology is inevitable." Part of this weakening of our commitment to open debate is our recent, seemingly liberating embrace of personal conviction over public deliberation, the self-comfort of personal narrative over the clumsy, awkward, and fallible attempt to forge consensus across the lines of identity and politics. The fetishization of personal conviction is no less threatening to the public forum than violent authoritarianism—both seek to render disagreement impossible, close off deliberation, and take us closer towards eventual, unnatural silence.
The alternative I would offer today is rooted in the communicative ethics of deliberation, and its academic embodiment is the practice of debate—both in competitive and non-competitive formats: debate as rule-based cooperative truth-generation. Deliberative ethics, following the communication theories of Jurgen Habermas, and the ethical theories of Emmanuel Levinas, among others, are ethics concerning how we collectively construct "truth" itself. What I am speaking of might be called the democratization of truth. Such talk is immensely unpopular on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
From one side, there is distrust of "democratization" and its accompanying "mob rule." Immediately, the thought that ontologies can be democratized raises the eyebrows of absolutists everywhere because who, really, would want truth left up to an angry, uninformed mob? The idea that our truth-systems can be democratized sounds suspiciously like relativism, radical subjectivism, and possibly even nihilism.
From another side, there is distrust of the term "truth," the assumption that it’s going to sound problematic no matter whether it has a big T or a little t. The collectivism of "democratized truth" threatens to assert a universality that has been out of fashion among the academic left for some time. After all, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and South Park have all taught us that there are a bunch of little stories, not one Grand Narrative—let alone one which asserts Grand Truth.
But both the academic right, with its stuffy, ontological authoritarianism, and the academic left, obsessed with identity politics and microdiscursive revolutions, are barking up the wrong tree where communicative ethics are concerned. This democratic system of thought, which I’ve come to discuss with you today, is grounded not in grand systems or deconstructive criticism, although both extremes are welcome to make their case in a democratic forum. Discursive democracy is, instead, grounded in the most primary of ethical concerns for the people around us. As such, it demands a listening that is wholly unfamiliar to the ideological battles taking place inside of academia, as well as among talking media heads, Clear Channel Communications, Congress, or campus demonstrations full of pie-throwing and shout-downs. What Habermas and others have in mind is a kind of communication where each affected person becomes a participant and co-creator of conclusions relevant to their lives; a communicative version of Marx’s dictum: from each according to ability, to each according to need.
Discursive democracy is both a way of thinking about problems—intellectual and otherwise—and a political rallying-cry that promises to turn ideological blinders into conversational openings. It’s a method of rhetorical and communication analysis, but also a tool for immediate social analysis with the potential to involve people from all walks of life.
I will ultimately conclude that deliberative ethics are a tool of social survival, a check against what Habermas calls the "colonization of the life-world," a condition we may already be in, that risks both small and big apocalypses with every passing day. But on the brighter side, I’ll also say a good deal about communication and ethics, and about how knowing a few basic things about communication has the potential to make us not only faithfully good communicators, but also to make us enjoy the existence of other people. After all, we owe them our very lives.
II: The Inevitable and Constitutive Others: Jurgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas on Communication
Communication theory begins with the axiom that other people are both inevitable and constitutive: Inevitable, because our very existence and identities are predicated on the existence of alterity, or other-ness, and constitutive because our personalities, thoughts, and projects are constructed by those other people and things. Because this is a foundational truth of communication theory, and not an unpleasant side-observation, the study of communication has always contained a subversive element that has served as a check against both the imperialism of metaphysics, and the nihilism of skepticism.
According to Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the original sin of Western philosophy is the assertion that the self is prior to the other, and the extension of that sin is the belief that ontology, the study of being, and metaphysics, the assertion of overarching systemic reality, are prior to our ethical relations with other people. Most traditional thinkers believe that we must first understand the nature of existence before we figure out how to respond to one another. Levinas disagrees. He says that the very formulations of ontologies and metaphysics are ethical acts, designed as responses to our encounters with other people. Hence, the ethical encounter is prior to ontology, and indeed all philosophy. Western philosophy has hitherto placed the self at the starting point: the subject is prior to the object. The "I" established by the Cartesian cogito is the ‘starting point’ for any kind of knowledge of the external world.
But instead, the other is actually prior to the self. Alterity, exteriority, is prior to one's construction of an interior self. Without alterity, we would not know that we exist. We have no sense of touch until we touch something, no sense of sight until we see something, no thoughts until things confront us to be thought on.
Ethically, the priority of the other over the self means that responsibility is inescapable. For Levinas, we're always responding, always responsible. A starving person asks you for food. There are a variety of ways to respond: You can feed that person; you can lecture them on the link between capitalism and poverty; you can lecture them on the importance of personal responsibility; you can lecture them on the Malthusian argument about overpopulation; or you can turn around and walk away from them as they starve to death. But all of these things are responses; it's impossible not to respond. You are linked to the fate of the other by virtue of the fact that the other makes a demand or request of you.
Levinas also believes that most "theories" ultimately fail because they serve as ways of attempting to avoid, rather than appropriately respond to, the ethical responsibility that comes from that basic encounter with the other. For example, utilitarianism means that some people (the minority) might get hurt, but we comfort ourselves by saying "well, within my framework, I still did the right thing." Likewise, deontology might hurt a lot of people, but we comfort ourselves by saying "well, we must do what is right even if people get hurt," etc. The orthodox Marxist reduces human suffering to historical materialism. The capitalist reduces it to analytic economic terms and an atomistic conception of personal freedom. The theologian reduces it to God's will and (perhaps) some kind of grand scheme of theodicy. And so on. All of these things are done with the sincere desire to "understand" the other, but they end up reducing the other-ness of the other to a comprehensive catalogue of a system. However inevitable or sometimes useful it may be, all systemic thinking fails at one point or another, because the other is infinite, and eludes totalization.
But the one "universal" condition Levinas does celebrate is that of communication. Shared understanding always fails at some degree, but the attempt to share understanding (and the concomitant attempt to manipulate and persuade) is inevitable. There are distinct ethical differences among various types of communication—for Levinas, a distinction (of which contemporary communication scholars should take note) between "the saying," communication which presupposes an ethical openness to the other, and "the said," which describes the closed, systemic pronouncement that the conversation is over.
For our purposes, deliberative ethics strives to keep the "saying" alive. But it also takes the step of striving to open up the "said" to democratic, participatory construction (which really means stripping the "said" of its authoritative permanence). This is where we enter the world of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and also where we learn something we may not have suspected before about skepticism and relativism.
Where Levinas and his family were victims of Nazism, Habermas was pulled into the Hitler Youth. Both thinkers emerged from the nightmare of Nazism deeply concerned about justification: Levinas with the ethical failure of metaphysics, Habermas with the absolute necessity of communicative rationality. If it sounds like these two concerns are in tension with one another, that’s understandable, because we have been taught to see absolutism and relativism as opposites. For Habermas, however, absolutism and relativism are two sides of the same coin: Both represent a failure to live up to the norm of communicative rationality. In the case of absolutism, communication is cut off in favor of authoritative pronouncements. In the case of relativism, rationality is abandoned, the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater. The Nazis were absolutists, but this absolutism rested on an abandonment of rational processes. In a world where we cannot arrive at truth through rational consensus, we are left with the will to power as the only possible determinant.
In modern society, that will to power is expressed as non-human, non-intentional forces. Habermas refers to this phenomenon as the "system" (impersonal forces) colonizing the "lifeworld" (shared, personal, intentional understanding between autonomous persons). Social life gradually depends more and more on what we perceive to be impersonal, systemic forces. Truth is imposed from above, disguised as necessity. Human beings lose themselves to the technologization and impersonal administration of a small elite. The chance of injustices being interrupted by disruptive intervention, protest, or revolution melts away.
In response, Habermas proposes a process of attempting to arrive at rational consensus through participatory deliberation. Although he is not the first thinker to put forward a consensus-based theory of truth (others who have done so include Charles Sanders Peirce and Thomas Kuhn), Habermas’s emphasis on the free participation of those affected by the establishment of truths makes his philosophy radically ethical in a manner which compliments Levinas’s deference to the other. "Communicative action" is Habermas’s term for the shared process of giving and criticizing reasons for holding or rejecting particular claims. In this deliberative process, all affected parties should have their say; all should be able to accept the reasons and the consequences of decisions, everyone must be allowed to introduce any argument they desire, and there is an expectation that everyone listen to and consider the arguments of others.
It is important to remember that Habermas is resisting both absolutism and relativism. He does not propose a communicative free-for-all. Rules are important, but it is equally important that the rules be co-created by the participants and not serve to preserve already-existing hierarchies. Methodology, science, and rationality are all important, but they must belong to the people rather than being imposed as a matter of metaphysical necessity from above. Norms, and truth itself, must be created from the ground up. In a dialogue with John Rawls, he writes:
Under the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice; and this should include mutual criticism of the appropriateness of the languages in terms of which situations and needs are interpreted. In the course of successfully taken abstractions, the core of generalizable interests can then emerge step by step.
As William Rehg writes: "The presumption here is that such cooperation requires the discussants to respect each other as responsible agents whose arguments and objections should be taken seriously."
III: The Academic and Political Project of Democratized Communication
If Habermas is right, and I obviously believe he is, then academics cannot afford to be insulated from the lives of ordinary working people, but must instead co-participate in some kind of empowerment for all, perhaps by facilitating schools, and I would suggest debate programs, as safe deliberation zones, which can in turn inform liberatory politics. Above all, a commitment to deliberative democracy means removing the stigma from disagreement and confrontation, and teaching all participants to be co-creators not only of the substance of debate, but the rulemaking of the conversational process itself. This debating can take place both inside and outside of schools.
A commitment to deliberative democracy means a commitment to privileging the process of deliberation over other processes in shaping political life. In other words, inclusive rather than restrictive voting rights, more candidates on TV and not less, more resources committed to education not fewer, erring on the side of freedom of speech rather than restrictions, and above all, an emphasis on and respect for the conversational process itself as an active, inclusive, organic field of political truth-building. A democratization, in other words, of the building of collective truth.
Sometimes this means conducting deliberative polls or favoring the referendum process. Other times it means making the political process more transparent, such as favoring open-door meetings and the like. Now, many people make pretty good arguments as to the imperfections of these policies. The referendum process can be co-opted, bought out; sometimes even openness is antithetical to transparency, since cynical politicians can take advantage of openness for their own publicity, and sometimes people need to deliberate in private.
But the great thing about deliberation as a commitment is that these criticisms can become part of the overall process of deliberative democracy. In a world where interested parties have the opportunity to speak and debate in good faith, we can criticize the referendum process, or explain why we can’t always have open meetings. We can debate the rules themselves, in other words, debate the process itself.
All of this suggests that, if deliberative ethics are an antidote to both authoritarianism and self-centeredness, we need more: More debate teams, more public discussion, more patient deliberation, more argument, more discourse, and more nurturing and promotion of the material entities that sustain them.
Some of the most articulate criticisms of competitive, switch-side academic debate come from the debate community itself. These criticisms have lately centered on things like the specialized and esoteric practices of debate, the under-representation of minorities in the activity, and the way in which debate practices feed, rather than fight, structures of domination. In other words, internal criticism of academic debate is very much like internal criticisms of the Academy in general: We’re too specialized, we’re too white, and we’re exploited by hegemonic institutions. All of these criticisms are true, and yet, paradoxically, it is our experience in debate, along with our experience in the critical thinking of university education, that teaches us how to articulate these arguments. The deliberative process is self-reflective and at least has the potential to be self-correcting.
I wish to focus on one such criticism: the argument that the discursive practices of academic debate are reappropriated in the service of American hegemony. This is the focus of an article by Darren Hicks and Ron Greene in last year’s Cultural Studies. It is one of the most comprehensive critical treatments of debating ever to appear in a non-specialized journal, and it is written from the perspective of two former debaters and debate coaches who are now leading scholars in the field of rhetoric. Hicks and Greene argue that switch-side debate, the practice of making students advocate views they do not believe, creates "exceptional subjects," and separates speech from personal agency and conviction. This separation from conviction is crucial for spreading a liberal-capitalist idea of "freedom" around the world, since "the ability to distance one’s judgment from one’s first order convictions secures the knowledge class’s professionalization." They conclude:
debating both sides helps liberalism to produce a governing field between a person's first order convictions and his/her commitment to the process norms of debate, discussion and persuasion. This field is then managed in and through the alteration of different communicative practices. The production and management of this field of governance allows liberalism to trade in cultural technologies in the global cosmopolitan marketplace at the same time as it creates a field of intervention to transform and change the world one subject (regime) at a time.
The main strength of Hicks and Greene's argument is their cooptation trope. Clearly, the "civic engagement" of academic debate can be, and is, exploited in the service of soft-power imperialism. Indeed, this is not merely done through the psychological conditioning of the student elite, but is often based on a literal, material connection, as when The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy think-tank with direct ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, directly recruits college debaters.
If it is indeed true that debate inevitably produces other-oriented deliberative discourse at the expense of students' confidence in their first-order convictions, this would indeed be a trade-off worth criticizing. In all fairness, Hicks and Greene do not overclaim their critique, and they take care to acknowledge the important ethical and cognitive virtues of deliberative debating. When represented as anything other than a political-ethical concern, however, Hicks and Greene's critique has several problems: First, as my colleague J.P. Lacy recently pointed out, it seems a tremendous causal (or even rhetorical) stretch to go from "debating both sides of an issue creates civic responsibility essential to liberal democracy" to "this civic responsibility upholds the worst forms of American exceptionalism."
Second, Hicks and Greene do not make any comparison of the potentially bad power of debate to any alternative. Their implied alternative, however, is a form of forensic speech that privileges personal conviction. The idea that students should be able to preserve their personal convictions at all costs seems far more immediately tyrannical, far more immediately damaging to either liberal or participatory democracy, than the ritualized requirements that students occasionally take the opposite side of what they believe.
Third, as I have suggested and will continue to suggest, while a debate project requiring participants to understand and often "speak for" opposing points of view may carry a great deal of liberal baggage, it is at its core a project more ethically deliberative than institutionally liberal. Where Hicks and Greene see debate producing "the liberal citizen-subject," I see debate at least having the potential to produce "the deliberative human being." The fact that some academic debaters are recruited by the CSIS and the CIA does not undermine this thesis. Absent healthy debate programs, these think-tanks and government agencies would still recruit what they saw as the best and brightest students. And absent a debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal rhetoric, those students would have little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas. Moreover, if we allow ourselves to believe that it is "culturally imperialist" to help other peoples build institutions of debate and deliberation, we not only ignore living political struggles that occur in every culture, but we fall victim to a dangerous ethnocentrism in holding that "they do not value deliberation like we do." If the argument is that our participation in fostering debate communities abroad greases the wheels of globalization, the correct response, in debate terminology, is that such globalization is non-unique, inevitable, and there is only a risk that collaborating across cultures in public debate and deliberation will foster resistance to domination—just as debate accomplishes wherever it goes. Indeed, Andy Wallace, in a recent article, suggests that Islamic fundamentalism is a byproduct of the colonization of the lifeworld of the Middle East; if this is true, then one solution would be to foster cross-cultural deliberation among people on both sides of the cultural divide willing to question their own preconceptions of the social good. Hicks and Greene might be correct insofar as elites in various cultures can either forbid or reappropriate deliberation, but for those outside of that institutional power, democratic discussion would have a positively subversive effect.
We can read such criticisms in two ways. The first way is as a warning: That we ought to remain cautious of how academic debate will be represented and deployed outside of the academy, in the ruthless political realm, by those who use it to dodge truthful assertions, by underrepresented groups, of instances of material injustice. In this sense, the fear is one of a "legalistic" evasion of substantive injustice by those privileging procedure over substance, a trained style over the primordial truth of marginalized groups.
I prefer that interpretation to the second one: That the switch-side, research-driven "game" of debate is politically bankrupt and should give way to several simultaneous zones of speech activism, where speakers can and should only fight for their own beliefs. As Gordon Mitchell of the University of Pittsburgh has pointed out, such balkanized speech will break down into several enclaves of speaking, each with its own political criteria for entry. In such a collection of impassable and unpermeable communities, those power relations, those material power entities, that evade political speech will remain unaccountable, will be given a "free pass" by the speech community, who will be so wrapped up in their own micropolitics, or so busy preaching to themselves and their choirs, that they will never understand or confront the rhetorical tropes used to mobilize both resources and true believers in the service of continued material domination. Habermas’s defense of the unfinished Enlightenment is my defense of academic debate: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, seek to expand this method of deliberation to those who will use it to liberate themselves, confront power, and create ethical, nonviolent patterns of problem resolution. If capitalism corrupts debate, well, then I say we save debate.
Which brings me to another important point, which I think we can draw from Hicks and Greene’s criticism: I would submit that the biggest danger we face is not in underestimating the power of debate. The danger lies in overestimating it, precisely because dictatorial tendencies of all stripes have never hesitated to shut down debate and crush dissent in the name of expediency. Academics, and particularly communication scholars, have a hard time understanding brutal, material power. We tend to think reason will prevail—or that if it doesn’t, we can explain its failure discursively. This blindness concerning materiality is precisely why deliberative politics must include the voices of the materially disadvantaged. It is why the "perspective of the oppressed" is not only morally necessary, but epistemologically necessary. Within Habermas’s communicative ethics is found both the classic Rawlsian test of how policies and arrangements affect the least advantaged members of society, and the Marxian imperative for emancipation from the artificial and enforced scarcity and silence of economics. This is vital to making what we do relevant—because even if democratic legitimacy depends on discursive justification, such justification occurs in a "dirty" material world, the "excrement" of which Marx wrote as a metaphor for the day-to-day material challenges of ordinary people. The aggregate of those material challenges constitutes the very conditions of humanity itself, and awareness of those conditions in their totality requires a commitment to deliberation in all levels of the social world.
The complexity and interdependence of human society, combined with the control of political decisionmaking—and political conversation itself—in the hands of fewer and fewer technological "experts," the gradual exhaustion of material resources and the organized circumvention of newer and more innovative resource development, places humanity, and perhaps all life on earth, in a precarious position. Where we need creativity and openness, we find rigid and closed non-solutions. Where we need masses of people to make concerned investments in their future, we find (understandable) alienation and even open hostility to political processes. The dominant classes manipulate ontology to their advantage: When humanity seeks meaning, the powerful offer up metaphysical hierarchies; when concerned masses come close to exposing the structural roots of systemic oppression, the powerful switch gears and promote localized, relativistic micronarratives that discourage different groups from finding common, perhaps "universal" interests.
Apocalyptic scenarios are themselves rhetorical tools, but that doesn’t mean they are bereft of material justification. The "flash-boom" of apocalyptic rhetoric isn’t out of the question, but it is also no less threatening merely as a metaphor for the slow death of humanity (and all living beings) through environmental degradation, the irradiation of the planet, or the descent into political and ethical barbarism. Indeed, these slow, deliberate scenarios ring more true than the flashpoint of quick Armageddon, but in the end the "fire or ice" question is moot, because the answers to those looming threats are still the same: The complexities of threats to our collective well-being require unifying perspectives based on diverse viewpoints, in the same way that the survival of ecosystems is dependent upon biological diversity. In Habermas’s language, we must fight the colonization of the lifeworld in order to survive at all, let alone to survive in a life with meaning. While certainly not the only way, the willingness to facilitate organized democratic deliberation, including encouraging participants to articulate views with which they may personally disagree, is one way to resist this colonization.
WORKS CITED
Abdel-Nour, Farid. "Farewell to Justification: Habermas, Human Rights, and Universalist Morality." Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (1): 73-96, 2004.
Edgar, Andrew. The Philosophy of Habermas. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005.
Gimmler, Antje. "The Discourse Ethics of Jurgen Habermas." No Date. 5 October, 2005..
Greene, Ronald Walter and Darrin Hicks. "Lost convictions: Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens." Cultural Studies 19(1):100-126, 2005.
Habermas, Jurgen. "Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls's Political Liberalism." Journal of Philosophy, March, 1995: 117-8.
Lacy, Jean-Paul. "Re: Re-Open The Debate About Switch-Side Debate," E-debate list serve, 13 April, 2006. 15 April, 2006..
Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Mitchell, Gordon. "Beyond the Daily Me." 2-4 August, 2004. 10 January, 2006..
Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Rehg, William. INSIGHT AND SOLIDARITY: THE DISCOURSE ETHICS OF JURGEN HABERMAS. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
"Center for Strategic and International Studies." Source Watch. No Date. 10 January, 2006..
Wallace, Andy. "Reason, Society and Religion: Reflections on 11 September from a Habermasian Perspective." Philosophy and Social Criticism 29(5): 491-516, 2003.
By Matt Stannard, Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Wyoming
Spring 2006 Faculty Senate Speaker Series Speech, April 18, 2006, Laramie Wyoming
I: Introduction: Deliberation and Debate as the Democratization of Truth
Within the Academy, the value of deliberation, and the importance of broad participation, is a tentatively accepted truth. Outside the Academy, pundits marvel and jeer at our obsession with "inclusion," an obsession they equate (or equivocate) with "political correctness" and "liberal guilt." Within the Academy, students, instructors, and thankfully sometimes even staff, push and politicize deliberation and inclusion. We mostly consider broad debate, public demonstrations, and the airing of collective opinions the mark of a mature and healthy institution. Outside the Academy, pundits shake their heads and warn parents that today’s colleges are hotbeds of radicalism. Our codes of academic freedom, the public pronouncements of our often-beleaguered administrators, our very syllabi, are full of phrases like "open debate," "responsible communication," and "marketplace of ideas." Outside the Academy, these phrases are seen as alternatively quaint and sinister.
But the Academy is not only under attack from "outsiders," and not merely because the post-September 11 world has given the nod to sterile and commodified forms of patriotic communication and safe, symbolic dissent. Both inside and outside college life, the value of discussion is increasingly under attack, under sabotage, sometimes unintentionally, sometimes violently, and the attackers are often not recognizable as such. We cower away from religious fanatics because we know they refuse to entertain the possibility of their incorrectness, but we fail to see our own failure to embrace the possibilities of our own incorrectness. We label other points of view "ideological" from vantage points we assume to be free of ideology, or we excuse our narrow-mindedness by telling ourselves that "ideology is inevitable." Part of this weakening of our commitment to open debate is our recent, seemingly liberating embrace of personal conviction over public deliberation, the self-comfort of personal narrative over the clumsy, awkward, and fallible attempt to forge consensus across the lines of identity and politics. The fetishization of personal conviction is no less threatening to the public forum than violent authoritarianism—both seek to render disagreement impossible, close off deliberation, and take us closer towards eventual, unnatural silence.
The alternative I would offer today is rooted in the communicative ethics of deliberation, and its academic embodiment is the practice of debate—both in competitive and non-competitive formats: debate as rule-based cooperative truth-generation. Deliberative ethics, following the communication theories of Jurgen Habermas, and the ethical theories of Emmanuel Levinas, among others, are ethics concerning how we collectively construct "truth" itself. What I am speaking of might be called the democratization of truth. Such talk is immensely unpopular on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
From one side, there is distrust of "democratization" and its accompanying "mob rule." Immediately, the thought that ontologies can be democratized raises the eyebrows of absolutists everywhere because who, really, would want truth left up to an angry, uninformed mob? The idea that our truth-systems can be democratized sounds suspiciously like relativism, radical subjectivism, and possibly even nihilism.
From another side, there is distrust of the term "truth," the assumption that it’s going to sound problematic no matter whether it has a big T or a little t. The collectivism of "democratized truth" threatens to assert a universality that has been out of fashion among the academic left for some time. After all, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and South Park have all taught us that there are a bunch of little stories, not one Grand Narrative—let alone one which asserts Grand Truth.
But both the academic right, with its stuffy, ontological authoritarianism, and the academic left, obsessed with identity politics and microdiscursive revolutions, are barking up the wrong tree where communicative ethics are concerned. This democratic system of thought, which I’ve come to discuss with you today, is grounded not in grand systems or deconstructive criticism, although both extremes are welcome to make their case in a democratic forum. Discursive democracy is, instead, grounded in the most primary of ethical concerns for the people around us. As such, it demands a listening that is wholly unfamiliar to the ideological battles taking place inside of academia, as well as among talking media heads, Clear Channel Communications, Congress, or campus demonstrations full of pie-throwing and shout-downs. What Habermas and others have in mind is a kind of communication where each affected person becomes a participant and co-creator of conclusions relevant to their lives; a communicative version of Marx’s dictum: from each according to ability, to each according to need.
Discursive democracy is both a way of thinking about problems—intellectual and otherwise—and a political rallying-cry that promises to turn ideological blinders into conversational openings. It’s a method of rhetorical and communication analysis, but also a tool for immediate social analysis with the potential to involve people from all walks of life.
I will ultimately conclude that deliberative ethics are a tool of social survival, a check against what Habermas calls the "colonization of the life-world," a condition we may already be in, that risks both small and big apocalypses with every passing day. But on the brighter side, I’ll also say a good deal about communication and ethics, and about how knowing a few basic things about communication has the potential to make us not only faithfully good communicators, but also to make us enjoy the existence of other people. After all, we owe them our very lives.
II: The Inevitable and Constitutive Others: Jurgen Habermas and Emmanuel Levinas on Communication
Communication theory begins with the axiom that other people are both inevitable and constitutive: Inevitable, because our very existence and identities are predicated on the existence of alterity, or other-ness, and constitutive because our personalities, thoughts, and projects are constructed by those other people and things. Because this is a foundational truth of communication theory, and not an unpleasant side-observation, the study of communication has always contained a subversive element that has served as a check against both the imperialism of metaphysics, and the nihilism of skepticism.
According to Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the original sin of Western philosophy is the assertion that the self is prior to the other, and the extension of that sin is the belief that ontology, the study of being, and metaphysics, the assertion of overarching systemic reality, are prior to our ethical relations with other people. Most traditional thinkers believe that we must first understand the nature of existence before we figure out how to respond to one another. Levinas disagrees. He says that the very formulations of ontologies and metaphysics are ethical acts, designed as responses to our encounters with other people. Hence, the ethical encounter is prior to ontology, and indeed all philosophy. Western philosophy has hitherto placed the self at the starting point: the subject is prior to the object. The "I" established by the Cartesian cogito is the ‘starting point’ for any kind of knowledge of the external world.
But instead, the other is actually prior to the self. Alterity, exteriority, is prior to one's construction of an interior self. Without alterity, we would not know that we exist. We have no sense of touch until we touch something, no sense of sight until we see something, no thoughts until things confront us to be thought on.
Ethically, the priority of the other over the self means that responsibility is inescapable. For Levinas, we're always responding, always responsible. A starving person asks you for food. There are a variety of ways to respond: You can feed that person; you can lecture them on the link between capitalism and poverty; you can lecture them on the importance of personal responsibility; you can lecture them on the Malthusian argument about overpopulation; or you can turn around and walk away from them as they starve to death. But all of these things are responses; it's impossible not to respond. You are linked to the fate of the other by virtue of the fact that the other makes a demand or request of you.
Levinas also believes that most "theories" ultimately fail because they serve as ways of attempting to avoid, rather than appropriately respond to, the ethical responsibility that comes from that basic encounter with the other. For example, utilitarianism means that some people (the minority) might get hurt, but we comfort ourselves by saying "well, within my framework, I still did the right thing." Likewise, deontology might hurt a lot of people, but we comfort ourselves by saying "well, we must do what is right even if people get hurt," etc. The orthodox Marxist reduces human suffering to historical materialism. The capitalist reduces it to analytic economic terms and an atomistic conception of personal freedom. The theologian reduces it to God's will and (perhaps) some kind of grand scheme of theodicy. And so on. All of these things are done with the sincere desire to "understand" the other, but they end up reducing the other-ness of the other to a comprehensive catalogue of a system. However inevitable or sometimes useful it may be, all systemic thinking fails at one point or another, because the other is infinite, and eludes totalization.
But the one "universal" condition Levinas does celebrate is that of communication. Shared understanding always fails at some degree, but the attempt to share understanding (and the concomitant attempt to manipulate and persuade) is inevitable. There are distinct ethical differences among various types of communication—for Levinas, a distinction (of which contemporary communication scholars should take note) between "the saying," communication which presupposes an ethical openness to the other, and "the said," which describes the closed, systemic pronouncement that the conversation is over.
For our purposes, deliberative ethics strives to keep the "saying" alive. But it also takes the step of striving to open up the "said" to democratic, participatory construction (which really means stripping the "said" of its authoritative permanence). This is where we enter the world of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, and also where we learn something we may not have suspected before about skepticism and relativism.
Where Levinas and his family were victims of Nazism, Habermas was pulled into the Hitler Youth. Both thinkers emerged from the nightmare of Nazism deeply concerned about justification: Levinas with the ethical failure of metaphysics, Habermas with the absolute necessity of communicative rationality. If it sounds like these two concerns are in tension with one another, that’s understandable, because we have been taught to see absolutism and relativism as opposites. For Habermas, however, absolutism and relativism are two sides of the same coin: Both represent a failure to live up to the norm of communicative rationality. In the case of absolutism, communication is cut off in favor of authoritative pronouncements. In the case of relativism, rationality is abandoned, the proverbial baby thrown out with the bathwater. The Nazis were absolutists, but this absolutism rested on an abandonment of rational processes. In a world where we cannot arrive at truth through rational consensus, we are left with the will to power as the only possible determinant.
In modern society, that will to power is expressed as non-human, non-intentional forces. Habermas refers to this phenomenon as the "system" (impersonal forces) colonizing the "lifeworld" (shared, personal, intentional understanding between autonomous persons). Social life gradually depends more and more on what we perceive to be impersonal, systemic forces. Truth is imposed from above, disguised as necessity. Human beings lose themselves to the technologization and impersonal administration of a small elite. The chance of injustices being interrupted by disruptive intervention, protest, or revolution melts away.
In response, Habermas proposes a process of attempting to arrive at rational consensus through participatory deliberation. Although he is not the first thinker to put forward a consensus-based theory of truth (others who have done so include Charles Sanders Peirce and Thomas Kuhn), Habermas’s emphasis on the free participation of those affected by the establishment of truths makes his philosophy radically ethical in a manner which compliments Levinas’s deference to the other. "Communicative action" is Habermas’s term for the shared process of giving and criticizing reasons for holding or rejecting particular claims. In this deliberative process, all affected parties should have their say; all should be able to accept the reasons and the consequences of decisions, everyone must be allowed to introduce any argument they desire, and there is an expectation that everyone listen to and consider the arguments of others.
It is important to remember that Habermas is resisting both absolutism and relativism. He does not propose a communicative free-for-all. Rules are important, but it is equally important that the rules be co-created by the participants and not serve to preserve already-existing hierarchies. Methodology, science, and rationality are all important, but they must belong to the people rather than being imposed as a matter of metaphysical necessity from above. Norms, and truth itself, must be created from the ground up. In a dialogue with John Rawls, he writes:
Under the pragmatic presuppositions of an inclusive and noncoercive rational discourse among free and equal participants, everyone is required to take the perspective of everyone else, and thus project herself into the understandings of self and world of all others; from this interlocking of perspectives there emerges an ideally extended we-perspective from which all can test in common whether they wish to make a controversial norm the basis of their shared practice; and this should include mutual criticism of the appropriateness of the languages in terms of which situations and needs are interpreted. In the course of successfully taken abstractions, the core of generalizable interests can then emerge step by step.
As William Rehg writes: "The presumption here is that such cooperation requires the discussants to respect each other as responsible agents whose arguments and objections should be taken seriously."
III: The Academic and Political Project of Democratized Communication
If Habermas is right, and I obviously believe he is, then academics cannot afford to be insulated from the lives of ordinary working people, but must instead co-participate in some kind of empowerment for all, perhaps by facilitating schools, and I would suggest debate programs, as safe deliberation zones, which can in turn inform liberatory politics. Above all, a commitment to deliberative democracy means removing the stigma from disagreement and confrontation, and teaching all participants to be co-creators not only of the substance of debate, but the rulemaking of the conversational process itself. This debating can take place both inside and outside of schools.
A commitment to deliberative democracy means a commitment to privileging the process of deliberation over other processes in shaping political life. In other words, inclusive rather than restrictive voting rights, more candidates on TV and not less, more resources committed to education not fewer, erring on the side of freedom of speech rather than restrictions, and above all, an emphasis on and respect for the conversational process itself as an active, inclusive, organic field of political truth-building. A democratization, in other words, of the building of collective truth.
Sometimes this means conducting deliberative polls or favoring the referendum process. Other times it means making the political process more transparent, such as favoring open-door meetings and the like. Now, many people make pretty good arguments as to the imperfections of these policies. The referendum process can be co-opted, bought out; sometimes even openness is antithetical to transparency, since cynical politicians can take advantage of openness for their own publicity, and sometimes people need to deliberate in private.
But the great thing about deliberation as a commitment is that these criticisms can become part of the overall process of deliberative democracy. In a world where interested parties have the opportunity to speak and debate in good faith, we can criticize the referendum process, or explain why we can’t always have open meetings. We can debate the rules themselves, in other words, debate the process itself.
All of this suggests that, if deliberative ethics are an antidote to both authoritarianism and self-centeredness, we need more: More debate teams, more public discussion, more patient deliberation, more argument, more discourse, and more nurturing and promotion of the material entities that sustain them.
Some of the most articulate criticisms of competitive, switch-side academic debate come from the debate community itself. These criticisms have lately centered on things like the specialized and esoteric practices of debate, the under-representation of minorities in the activity, and the way in which debate practices feed, rather than fight, structures of domination. In other words, internal criticism of academic debate is very much like internal criticisms of the Academy in general: We’re too specialized, we’re too white, and we’re exploited by hegemonic institutions. All of these criticisms are true, and yet, paradoxically, it is our experience in debate, along with our experience in the critical thinking of university education, that teaches us how to articulate these arguments. The deliberative process is self-reflective and at least has the potential to be self-correcting.
I wish to focus on one such criticism: the argument that the discursive practices of academic debate are reappropriated in the service of American hegemony. This is the focus of an article by Darren Hicks and Ron Greene in last year’s Cultural Studies. It is one of the most comprehensive critical treatments of debating ever to appear in a non-specialized journal, and it is written from the perspective of two former debaters and debate coaches who are now leading scholars in the field of rhetoric. Hicks and Greene argue that switch-side debate, the practice of making students advocate views they do not believe, creates "exceptional subjects," and separates speech from personal agency and conviction. This separation from conviction is crucial for spreading a liberal-capitalist idea of "freedom" around the world, since "the ability to distance one’s judgment from one’s first order convictions secures the knowledge class’s professionalization." They conclude:
debating both sides helps liberalism to produce a governing field between a person's first order convictions and his/her commitment to the process norms of debate, discussion and persuasion. This field is then managed in and through the alteration of different communicative practices. The production and management of this field of governance allows liberalism to trade in cultural technologies in the global cosmopolitan marketplace at the same time as it creates a field of intervention to transform and change the world one subject (regime) at a time.
The main strength of Hicks and Greene's argument is their cooptation trope. Clearly, the "civic engagement" of academic debate can be, and is, exploited in the service of soft-power imperialism. Indeed, this is not merely done through the psychological conditioning of the student elite, but is often based on a literal, material connection, as when The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a foreign policy think-tank with direct ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, directly recruits college debaters.
If it is indeed true that debate inevitably produces other-oriented deliberative discourse at the expense of students' confidence in their first-order convictions, this would indeed be a trade-off worth criticizing. In all fairness, Hicks and Greene do not overclaim their critique, and they take care to acknowledge the important ethical and cognitive virtues of deliberative debating. When represented as anything other than a political-ethical concern, however, Hicks and Greene's critique has several problems: First, as my colleague J.P. Lacy recently pointed out, it seems a tremendous causal (or even rhetorical) stretch to go from "debating both sides of an issue creates civic responsibility essential to liberal democracy" to "this civic responsibility upholds the worst forms of American exceptionalism."
Second, Hicks and Greene do not make any comparison of the potentially bad power of debate to any alternative. Their implied alternative, however, is a form of forensic speech that privileges personal conviction. The idea that students should be able to preserve their personal convictions at all costs seems far more immediately tyrannical, far more immediately damaging to either liberal or participatory democracy, than the ritualized requirements that students occasionally take the opposite side of what they believe.
Third, as I have suggested and will continue to suggest, while a debate project requiring participants to understand and often "speak for" opposing points of view may carry a great deal of liberal baggage, it is at its core a project more ethically deliberative than institutionally liberal. Where Hicks and Greene see debate producing "the liberal citizen-subject," I see debate at least having the potential to produce "the deliberative human being." The fact that some academic debaters are recruited by the CSIS and the CIA does not undermine this thesis. Absent healthy debate programs, these think-tanks and government agencies would still recruit what they saw as the best and brightest students. And absent a debate community that rewards anti-institutional political rhetoric as much as liberal rhetoric, those students would have little-to-no chance of being exposed to truly oppositional ideas. Moreover, if we allow ourselves to believe that it is "culturally imperialist" to help other peoples build institutions of debate and deliberation, we not only ignore living political struggles that occur in every culture, but we fall victim to a dangerous ethnocentrism in holding that "they do not value deliberation like we do." If the argument is that our participation in fostering debate communities abroad greases the wheels of globalization, the correct response, in debate terminology, is that such globalization is non-unique, inevitable, and there is only a risk that collaborating across cultures in public debate and deliberation will foster resistance to domination—just as debate accomplishes wherever it goes. Indeed, Andy Wallace, in a recent article, suggests that Islamic fundamentalism is a byproduct of the colonization of the lifeworld of the Middle East; if this is true, then one solution would be to foster cross-cultural deliberation among people on both sides of the cultural divide willing to question their own preconceptions of the social good. Hicks and Greene might be correct insofar as elites in various cultures can either forbid or reappropriate deliberation, but for those outside of that institutional power, democratic discussion would have a positively subversive effect.
We can read such criticisms in two ways. The first way is as a warning: That we ought to remain cautious of how academic debate will be represented and deployed outside of the academy, in the ruthless political realm, by those who use it to dodge truthful assertions, by underrepresented groups, of instances of material injustice. In this sense, the fear is one of a "legalistic" evasion of substantive injustice by those privileging procedure over substance, a trained style over the primordial truth of marginalized groups.
I prefer that interpretation to the second one: That the switch-side, research-driven "game" of debate is politically bankrupt and should give way to several simultaneous zones of speech activism, where speakers can and should only fight for their own beliefs. As Gordon Mitchell of the University of Pittsburgh has pointed out, such balkanized speech will break down into several enclaves of speaking, each with its own political criteria for entry. In such a collection of impassable and unpermeable communities, those power relations, those material power entities, that evade political speech will remain unaccountable, will be given a "free pass" by the speech community, who will be so wrapped up in their own micropolitics, or so busy preaching to themselves and their choirs, that they will never understand or confront the rhetorical tropes used to mobilize both resources and true believers in the service of continued material domination. Habermas’s defense of the unfinished Enlightenment is my defense of academic debate: Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, seek to expand this method of deliberation to those who will use it to liberate themselves, confront power, and create ethical, nonviolent patterns of problem resolution. If capitalism corrupts debate, well, then I say we save debate.
Which brings me to another important point, which I think we can draw from Hicks and Greene’s criticism: I would submit that the biggest danger we face is not in underestimating the power of debate. The danger lies in overestimating it, precisely because dictatorial tendencies of all stripes have never hesitated to shut down debate and crush dissent in the name of expediency. Academics, and particularly communication scholars, have a hard time understanding brutal, material power. We tend to think reason will prevail—or that if it doesn’t, we can explain its failure discursively. This blindness concerning materiality is precisely why deliberative politics must include the voices of the materially disadvantaged. It is why the "perspective of the oppressed" is not only morally necessary, but epistemologically necessary. Within Habermas’s communicative ethics is found both the classic Rawlsian test of how policies and arrangements affect the least advantaged members of society, and the Marxian imperative for emancipation from the artificial and enforced scarcity and silence of economics. This is vital to making what we do relevant—because even if democratic legitimacy depends on discursive justification, such justification occurs in a "dirty" material world, the "excrement" of which Marx wrote as a metaphor for the day-to-day material challenges of ordinary people. The aggregate of those material challenges constitutes the very conditions of humanity itself, and awareness of those conditions in their totality requires a commitment to deliberation in all levels of the social world.
The complexity and interdependence of human society, combined with the control of political decisionmaking—and political conversation itself—in the hands of fewer and fewer technological "experts," the gradual exhaustion of material resources and the organized circumvention of newer and more innovative resource development, places humanity, and perhaps all life on earth, in a precarious position. Where we need creativity and openness, we find rigid and closed non-solutions. Where we need masses of people to make concerned investments in their future, we find (understandable) alienation and even open hostility to political processes. The dominant classes manipulate ontology to their advantage: When humanity seeks meaning, the powerful offer up metaphysical hierarchies; when concerned masses come close to exposing the structural roots of systemic oppression, the powerful switch gears and promote localized, relativistic micronarratives that discourage different groups from finding common, perhaps "universal" interests.
Apocalyptic scenarios are themselves rhetorical tools, but that doesn’t mean they are bereft of material justification. The "flash-boom" of apocalyptic rhetoric isn’t out of the question, but it is also no less threatening merely as a metaphor for the slow death of humanity (and all living beings) through environmental degradation, the irradiation of the planet, or the descent into political and ethical barbarism. Indeed, these slow, deliberate scenarios ring more true than the flashpoint of quick Armageddon, but in the end the "fire or ice" question is moot, because the answers to those looming threats are still the same: The complexities of threats to our collective well-being require unifying perspectives based on diverse viewpoints, in the same way that the survival of ecosystems is dependent upon biological diversity. In Habermas’s language, we must fight the colonization of the lifeworld in order to survive at all, let alone to survive in a life with meaning. While certainly not the only way, the willingness to facilitate organized democratic deliberation, including encouraging participants to articulate views with which they may personally disagree, is one way to resist this colonization.
WORKS CITED
Abdel-Nour, Farid. "Farewell to Justification: Habermas, Human Rights, and Universalist Morality." Philosophy and Social Criticism 30 (1): 73-96, 2004.
Edgar, Andrew. The Philosophy of Habermas. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005.
Gimmler, Antje. "The Discourse Ethics of Jurgen Habermas." No Date. 5 October, 2005.
Greene, Ronald Walter and Darrin Hicks. "Lost convictions: Debating both sides and the ethical self-fashioning of liberal citizens." Cultural Studies 19(1):100-126, 2005.
Habermas, Jurgen. "Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls's Political Liberalism." Journal of Philosophy, March, 1995: 117-8.
Lacy, Jean-Paul. "Re: Re-Open The Debate About Switch-Side Debate," E-debate list serve, 13 April, 2006. 15 April, 2006.
Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Mitchell, Gordon. "Beyond the Daily Me." 2-4 August, 2004. 10 January, 2006.
Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
Rehg, William. INSIGHT AND SOLIDARITY: THE DISCOURSE ETHICS OF JURGEN HABERMAS. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
"Center for Strategic and International Studies." Source Watch. No Date. 10 January, 2006.
Wallace, Andy. "Reason, Society and Religion: Reflections on 11 September from a Habermasian Perspective." Philosophy and Social Criticism 29(5): 491-516, 2003.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Spintelligent Design Update
The Dover Area School Board now has to pay a million dollars in legal fees because of the foolishness and dishonesty of those members (all but one of whom are no longer on the Board) who tried to shove creationism down students' throats and then lied in court about their intentions in doing so.
It is likely that, in order to come up with that money (which is only half of the billable total, thanks to some generosity on the part of the law firm in question), the Board will either have to push for a tax increase, or make cuts. Given the political inviability of tax increases, program, salary and service cuts are much more likely, meaning that the damage to education facilitated by religious thugs is no longer confined to the intellectual and intangible alone. Now their destruction is material as well.
It is likely that, in order to come up with that money (which is only half of the billable total, thanks to some generosity on the part of the law firm in question), the Board will either have to push for a tax increase, or make cuts. Given the political inviability of tax increases, program, salary and service cuts are much more likely, meaning that the damage to education facilitated by religious thugs is no longer confined to the intellectual and intangible alone. Now their destruction is material as well.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Jay Bennish Update
Fortunately, it appears cooler heads have prevailed. I always suspected school admistrators, who knew Bennish had done nothing wrong, would let him back into the classroom with no discipline whatsoever. And he won't apologize. And he has nothing to apologize for. Bennish was engaging in the most time-proven learning technique ever deployed by good teachers: He was generating controversy in order to make students think.
He's not completely out of the woods...Republican members of Colorado's state board of education want his head. But they won't get it. Disciplining teachers is the province of local administrators. And Bennish hasn't violated any policies.
The warborgs who called for Bennish's lynching (and pretty much all of them did) kept repeating the extremely ignorant argument that what Bennish said had nothing to do with geography. Not so, I kept screaming. But this excellent editorial puts it better than I did:
The thing is, I'd go to the wall to defend this guy if he had been "guilty" of expressing leftist opinions in the classroom. As I opined earlier this week, right now there is absolutely no check on unfiltered super-pro-Bushite-patriotism in public school classrooms. There is no "balance" to restore, and I've yet to hear any conservatives with the proverbial walnuts to offer some argument saying that it's okay to shove rightist opinions down students' throats without allowing them to hear the other side (I have no doubt that's what most of them believe, but that lack of walnuts hinders their honesty on this point).
But the thing really is, I don't have to go to the wall to defend Jay Bennish. He wasn't doing what the warborgs said he was doing. He was, in fact, teaching. God bless him, and may he return to the classroom more enthusiastic and emboldened than ever.
He's not completely out of the woods...Republican members of Colorado's state board of education want his head. But they won't get it. Disciplining teachers is the province of local administrators. And Bennish hasn't violated any policies.
The warborgs who called for Bennish's lynching (and pretty much all of them did) kept repeating the extremely ignorant argument that what Bennish said had nothing to do with geography. Not so, I kept screaming. But this excellent editorial puts it better than I did:
This was the most common attack across the right-wing blogosphere and radio world—-that Bennish had no right to discuss geopolitics in a class on geopolitics.
After elementary school, geography moves beyond “name that country” map study. Geography is multidisciplinary. It explores, among other things, how and why countries came into existence, and it studies the continuing evolution of the earth’s political geography. Scholars earn doctorates in geography, not because they are extremely proficient with colored crayons or have memorized all of the world’s capitol cities but because they have endeavored to explain how we got to where we are and where, perhaps, we’re going.
Bennish teaches Accelerated World Geography, an honors class designed to prepare students for college. In his course syllabus, Bennish explains that his course will “look into the geographical—or spatial—relationships between human societies and cultures, the natural environment, and historical changes that have shaped the contemporary world. More than answering the question ‘what is where,’ this course adopts a conceptual approach to understanding and explaining the dynamic human and natural features of the earth’s surface.” Themes covered during the semester, he explains, include “population, religion, human rights, notions of development and underdevelopment, impact of colonialism historically and currently, sustainability, impacts of modernization on developing countries, globalization of economy and culture, political and international conflict, cultural diversity, and global environmental concerns.” In order to effectively teach this stuff, he explains, “A deeper understanding of current events from a historical and geographical perspective is imperative. Thus, timely issues and events in the news will be tied into the overall framework of the course.”
The thing is, I'd go to the wall to defend this guy if he had been "guilty" of expressing leftist opinions in the classroom. As I opined earlier this week, right now there is absolutely no check on unfiltered super-pro-Bushite-patriotism in public school classrooms. There is no "balance" to restore, and I've yet to hear any conservatives with the proverbial walnuts to offer some argument saying that it's okay to shove rightist opinions down students' throats without allowing them to hear the other side (I have no doubt that's what most of them believe, but that lack of walnuts hinders their honesty on this point).
But the thing really is, I don't have to go to the wall to defend Jay Bennish. He wasn't doing what the warborgs said he was doing. He was, in fact, teaching. God bless him, and may he return to the classroom more enthusiastic and emboldened than ever.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Obviously they want to combat the leftist bias in academia...
In Iraq, the military is blocking liberal web sites and allowing conservative ones.
Thanks to Amy for bringing this to my attention.
Thanks to Amy for bringing this to my attention.
Monday, March 06, 2006
More Sheehananigans
This morning AOL News led with "'Peace Mom' Still Campaigning Against War" complete with a poll (recording overwhelming disapproval of Cindy Sheehan) and an article summarizing why some people like her and others don't. The AOL polls, by the way, baffle me. They are admittedly self-selecting and only poll those with AOL accounts, but sometimes they turn up crazy rightward numbers and sometimes crazy leftward numbers.*
Occasionally the moderate mainstream media reports on something Sheehan is doing and they seem baffled. The right periodically trots her out for a ritual round of insults, some tasteful, others quite openly sexist, but all off the mark. The mainstream and conservative press and pundits still don't know how to talk to her, how to talk about her, how to listen to her, how to explain her, or how to silence her. Each and every criticism misses the mark. To really answer her, you'd have to defend not only the Iraq occupation, but also the decisionmaking process that preceded it, and in light of that reasoned defense, make whatever arguments about the "ethics of anti-war protest" you like. Her face and story (which, contrary to convoluted attempts to prove otherwise, has been consistent from the beginning) call into question the sacrifice of those we love for the sake of a cynical political process, and an illegitimate occupation, clumsily disguised as a righteous war. She is not "speaking for" Casey Sheehan. She is speaking her pain and universalizing it to the pain of everyone who loses someone they love in a process they had no voice in creating. So to really answer her, you'd also have to defend such a process.
And here is where the anti-Sheehanites (nice new word) show the only colors they can fly: If the war and its political process were ultimately, or even contingently defensible, far fewer otherwise decent pundits wouldn't feel the need to hurl the insults at her, question her sanity, or make the ethically incoherent claim that she shouldn't be speaking "for" her dead son. They wouldn't feel the need to call anyone's patriotism into question, insist that mothers be War Mothers, throw the "treason" bomb around, any of that. They would just make and defend their case. But making and defending cases through reasoned argument, the essence of even representative democracy, has been declared treasonous and out of fashion by the same people who then get upset when Sheehan then plays "dirty" by using her emotional existence as an argument.
And now, some bonus material:
The top five arguments against Cindy Sheehan:
1. She is unethically speaking in her son's name when he actually supported the war.
(Nope. She is exploiting her pain for a political cause, but not claiming to speak for anyone but herself and, perhaps, other mothers who lose children in war. More importantly, in speaking for herself, she is not attempting to silence anyone else, including the pro-war mothers who disagree with her. Others are free to disagree with her and she doesn't call them treasonous.)
2. She met with Hugo Chavez, who is a crazy leftist (and alleged antisemite)
(Irrelevant, unless you believe that only leftist activists should be condemned for meeting with alleged antisemites; and, the charges against Chavez are being disputed by, among others, the American Jewish Congress, the federation of Jewish groups in Venezuela, and most other Jews on the left.)
3. Everyone else in her family, including her ex-husband, Casey's father, disapprove of her behavior and support the war.
(Irrelevant. They are free to publicize their opinions, or not.)
4. She changed her story.
(Nope. Been there, refuted that, again and again.)
5. She is funded and influenced by leftist special interests.
(She is working with other groups. The influence is mutual. Some of them give her money. This is never a good argument for people on the right to be making.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This raises an important point: I am not arguing that Sheehan's tactics are universally effective, in some functional way that will result in her getting a majority of Americans to look at her in a favorable light. My argument about her message is twofold: First, it just isn't unethical. Second, it's very persuasive to some people, because of the way in which she universalizes the "private" suffering of motherhood. Even in a world of powerful counternarratives about mothers proud of their fighting soldier sons, Sheehan's message is at least equally powerful: These sons of whom we are so proud, what are they fighting for?
Occasionally the moderate mainstream media reports on something Sheehan is doing and they seem baffled. The right periodically trots her out for a ritual round of insults, some tasteful, others quite openly sexist, but all off the mark. The mainstream and conservative press and pundits still don't know how to talk to her, how to talk about her, how to listen to her, how to explain her, or how to silence her. Each and every criticism misses the mark. To really answer her, you'd have to defend not only the Iraq occupation, but also the decisionmaking process that preceded it, and in light of that reasoned defense, make whatever arguments about the "ethics of anti-war protest" you like. Her face and story (which, contrary to convoluted attempts to prove otherwise, has been consistent from the beginning) call into question the sacrifice of those we love for the sake of a cynical political process, and an illegitimate occupation, clumsily disguised as a righteous war. She is not "speaking for" Casey Sheehan. She is speaking her pain and universalizing it to the pain of everyone who loses someone they love in a process they had no voice in creating. So to really answer her, you'd also have to defend such a process.
And here is where the anti-Sheehanites (nice new word) show the only colors they can fly: If the war and its political process were ultimately, or even contingently defensible, far fewer otherwise decent pundits wouldn't feel the need to hurl the insults at her, question her sanity, or make the ethically incoherent claim that she shouldn't be speaking "for" her dead son. They wouldn't feel the need to call anyone's patriotism into question, insist that mothers be War Mothers, throw the "treason" bomb around, any of that. They would just make and defend their case. But making and defending cases through reasoned argument, the essence of even representative democracy, has been declared treasonous and out of fashion by the same people who then get upset when Sheehan then plays "dirty" by using her emotional existence as an argument.
And now, some bonus material:
The top five arguments against Cindy Sheehan:
1. She is unethically speaking in her son's name when he actually supported the war.
(Nope. She is exploiting her pain for a political cause, but not claiming to speak for anyone but herself and, perhaps, other mothers who lose children in war. More importantly, in speaking for herself, she is not attempting to silence anyone else, including the pro-war mothers who disagree with her. Others are free to disagree with her and she doesn't call them treasonous.)
2. She met with Hugo Chavez, who is a crazy leftist (and alleged antisemite)
(Irrelevant, unless you believe that only leftist activists should be condemned for meeting with alleged antisemites; and, the charges against Chavez are being disputed by, among others, the American Jewish Congress, the federation of Jewish groups in Venezuela, and most other Jews on the left.)
3. Everyone else in her family, including her ex-husband, Casey's father, disapprove of her behavior and support the war.
(Irrelevant. They are free to publicize their opinions, or not.)
4. She changed her story.
(Nope. Been there, refuted that, again and again.)
5. She is funded and influenced by leftist special interests.
(She is working with other groups. The influence is mutual. Some of them give her money. This is never a good argument for people on the right to be making.)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*This raises an important point: I am not arguing that Sheehan's tactics are universally effective, in some functional way that will result in her getting a majority of Americans to look at her in a favorable light. My argument about her message is twofold: First, it just isn't unethical. Second, it's very persuasive to some people, because of the way in which she universalizes the "private" suffering of motherhood. Even in a world of powerful counternarratives about mothers proud of their fighting soldier sons, Sheehan's message is at least equally powerful: These sons of whom we are so proud, what are they fighting for?
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Jay Bennish Case
Please tell me what this teacher did wrong. You can't, because whether your knowledge of his case is deep or shallow, you know he did nothing wrong. Even if you conclude he was one-sided in his views concerning capitalism, Bush, Iraq, torture, and WMD (concluding that means disregarding or minimizing the impact of his recorded statements that he was only giving this view to solicit open discussion and that he appreciated remarks to the contrary) that one-sidedness shouldn't get him fired as a high school teacher, period. In order for you to convince me that it should, I need the positive justification for it, as well as proof that the banning of high school teachers' one-sided politics will be applied equally to the pro-capitalist and/or pro-war sides. It won't be, or at least it hasn't been for the past oh, couple of hundred years, so unless your argument is that school administrators should allow only one side of the political spectrum (again, I'm going to need some positive justification)...well, you see where I'm going with this.
Now here's why it's important to defend this guy even if you're queasy about anti-war rhetoric in high school classrooms (you're only queasy because you know it almost never happens): If you have kids or are going to have kids, if you teach or know someone who does, imagine with me a world where Jay Bennishes did not exist, but teachers with a bias the other way did. The latter teachers will never be banned, because they can say their thing (in this context, go Bush!, yay Iraq war!, etc.) under the guise of patriotism. If we don't speak up for Jay Bennish now, it's going to make it easier to maintain the current role of schools as glorified baby sitters and ideology factories. The counter-tendency, of schools as places honing critical thinking and genuine life skills, is struggling to stay alive in the "war forever" culture of the current epoch. If Jay Bennish loses, that's one less breath for that counter-tendency. There's zero chance that if Jay Bennish loses this will validate the kind of balancing called for by some of the same people who complain about leftism in universities.
Sean Hannity's delight in the possibility of student tape recorder vigilantism is another reason we should all fight for Bennish:
Of course, there is no evidence indicating Bennish is afraid to debate his ideas in public (and in a fair debate he would give Hannity the country ass whippin Hannity calculatively avoids on his radio and TV shows). But my larger point is still the stakes in this fight: If Bennish loses, "balance" and "objectivity" and "fairness" don't win, not in the high schools. Silencing Bennish isn't a victory for balance. Instead, Hannity wins. Students tape-recording their teachers wins.
Speaking of which, I've seen and heard absolutely nothing about the Bennish case from the "academic freedom" outfits who bemoan "leftist" discourse in academia, but I know someone who's going to try to stir up that pot and when that happens I'll link to it.
Here's the deal: An injury to one really is an injury to all, and especially an injury like this one.
Now here's why it's important to defend this guy even if you're queasy about anti-war rhetoric in high school classrooms (you're only queasy because you know it almost never happens): If you have kids or are going to have kids, if you teach or know someone who does, imagine with me a world where Jay Bennishes did not exist, but teachers with a bias the other way did. The latter teachers will never be banned, because they can say their thing (in this context, go Bush!, yay Iraq war!, etc.) under the guise of patriotism. If we don't speak up for Jay Bennish now, it's going to make it easier to maintain the current role of schools as glorified baby sitters and ideology factories. The counter-tendency, of schools as places honing critical thinking and genuine life skills, is struggling to stay alive in the "war forever" culture of the current epoch. If Jay Bennish loses, that's one less breath for that counter-tendency. There's zero chance that if Jay Bennish loses this will validate the kind of balancing called for by some of the same people who complain about leftism in universities.
Sean Hannity's delight in the possibility of student tape recorder vigilantism is another reason we should all fight for Bennish:
Sean. I want to thank you for something, because kids have suffered under this indoctrination for years. I get tons of calls to my radio show, lots of letters about it. Now every left-wing teacher knows that there might be a Sean in their class that might be recording their statements. Now, if they are so confident to say it in front of a captive audience of students, young students, then they ought to be able to debate them publicly. So I want to applaud you. You may have done more for the educational system than anybody has done in years. And I say thank you.
Of course, there is no evidence indicating Bennish is afraid to debate his ideas in public (and in a fair debate he would give Hannity the country ass whippin Hannity calculatively avoids on his radio and TV shows). But my larger point is still the stakes in this fight: If Bennish loses, "balance" and "objectivity" and "fairness" don't win, not in the high schools. Silencing Bennish isn't a victory for balance. Instead, Hannity wins. Students tape-recording their teachers wins.
Speaking of which, I've seen and heard absolutely nothing about the Bennish case from the "academic freedom" outfits who bemoan "leftist" discourse in academia, but I know someone who's going to try to stir up that pot and when that happens I'll link to it.
Here's the deal: An injury to one really is an injury to all, and especially an injury like this one.
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Dixie Chicks: Vindicated, Never Silenced, Leaving Conservative Nashville in the Dust
They're about to release a new album, produced by Rick Rubin, the cat who saved Johnny Cash from those same Nashville corporate a-holes.
Moreover, we now know that, contrary to what puke-helmets like Bill O'Reilly claim, they were never seriously hurt by the weak, disingenuous "boycots" organized after Natalie Maines's remark about President Bush. Doesn't make the attempt to silence them excusable, but it does prove what I've been saying all along: conservative culture is a mile wide and an inch deep.
In fact, they not only have the last laugh, but a loud one at that: the country music establishment doesn't want to lose them, but they will; and the politically conservative foundation of the Nashville establishment is itself beginning to crack.
I eagerly await the release of the new album.
They're about to release a new album, produced by Rick Rubin, the cat who saved Johnny Cash from those same Nashville corporate a-holes.
Moreover, we now know that, contrary to what puke-helmets like Bill O'Reilly claim, they were never seriously hurt by the weak, disingenuous "boycots" organized after Natalie Maines's remark about President Bush. Doesn't make the attempt to silence them excusable, but it does prove what I've been saying all along: conservative culture is a mile wide and an inch deep.
In fact, they not only have the last laugh, but a loud one at that: the country music establishment doesn't want to lose them, but they will; and the politically conservative foundation of the Nashville establishment is itself beginning to crack.
I eagerly await the release of the new album.
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Be Careful What You Wish For, WSJ...
David Graeber replied to that idiotic Wall Street Journal editorial:
To the editor:
I am writing in response to your editorial of January 3rd ("Bourgeois Anarchy"). Charmed though I am to receive advice on anti-capitalist ethics from the Wall Street
Journal, I must draw attention to an error of fact. The first paragraph ends "Last spring, Yale denied him tenure." This is false. What happened was that the senior anthropology faculty attempted, and ultimately succeeded, in denying me what is
ordinarily a routine promotion, refusing to give any reasons for their decision, and thus cut me off from any possibility of even coming up for tenure. This decision was
extremely unusual, and the refusal to give a reason even more so. It sparked immediate protests by undergraduate and graduate students (not, initially, by me) that the real reasons were political in nature -- above all, that they had to do with my defense of a graduate student who the senior faculty had attempted to expel from the program because of her work as a union organizer.
I did submit a formal grievance. Battered by an unprecedented outpouring of outraged letters from across the discipline, the Yale administration eventually offered
a compromise -- a sabbatical -- if I dropped my complaint. On learning that a grievance committee would only be allowed to judge whether there had been a violation of formal process, would not have the power to reverse the decision, and
even if it were to find in my favor, would still never reveal the reasons for my original dismissal, I accepted the compromise.
As for the substance of your editorial: I must confess myself confused as to why accepting a job teaching and conducting research for an annual income roughly
equivalent to that of a train operator (at roughly twice the hours) qualifies me as a member of the employing class. Or is your real point to assert a more general principle: 'capitalism, love it or leave it'? If so, where exactly am I supposed to
go? Outer space? Do you really think all employees who don't share their employer's economic and political philosophy should be terminated? Actually, that might be an excellent idea, since it would instantly destroy capitalism. Be careful what you wish for.
Sincerely,
David Graeber
David Graeber replied to that idiotic Wall Street Journal editorial:
To the editor:
I am writing in response to your editorial of January 3rd ("Bourgeois Anarchy"). Charmed though I am to receive advice on anti-capitalist ethics from the Wall Street
Journal, I must draw attention to an error of fact. The first paragraph ends "Last spring, Yale denied him tenure." This is false. What happened was that the senior anthropology faculty attempted, and ultimately succeeded, in denying me what is
ordinarily a routine promotion, refusing to give any reasons for their decision, and thus cut me off from any possibility of even coming up for tenure. This decision was
extremely unusual, and the refusal to give a reason even more so. It sparked immediate protests by undergraduate and graduate students (not, initially, by me) that the real reasons were political in nature -- above all, that they had to do with my defense of a graduate student who the senior faculty had attempted to expel from the program because of her work as a union organizer.
I did submit a formal grievance. Battered by an unprecedented outpouring of outraged letters from across the discipline, the Yale administration eventually offered
a compromise -- a sabbatical -- if I dropped my complaint. On learning that a grievance committee would only be allowed to judge whether there had been a violation of formal process, would not have the power to reverse the decision, and
even if it were to find in my favor, would still never reveal the reasons for my original dismissal, I accepted the compromise.
As for the substance of your editorial: I must confess myself confused as to why accepting a job teaching and conducting research for an annual income roughly
equivalent to that of a train operator (at roughly twice the hours) qualifies me as a member of the employing class. Or is your real point to assert a more general principle: 'capitalism, love it or leave it'? If so, where exactly am I supposed to
go? Outer space? Do you really think all employees who don't share their employer's economic and political philosophy should be terminated? Actually, that might be an excellent idea, since it would instantly destroy capitalism. Be careful what you wish for.
Sincerely,
David Graeber
Monday, January 09, 2006
Methinks They Doth Protest Too Much
On January 3, the Wall Street Journal devoted one of its all-important house editorials, the smaller one in the middle, to a single human being, a person hitherto known only to some on the left, denied tenure.
The editorial, entitled "Bourgeois Anarchy," purportedly seeks to rebut David Graeber's suspicion (nothing more) that he was fired from Yale because of his political activism (Graeber is an anarchist and a member of the IWW), but since it's only a suspicion, there isn't much work to do on that front. So the editors spent roughly one fourth of the space of the column quoting from the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, emphasizing the passages about the workers and bosses having nothing in common and the repudiation of the wage system.
With the self-perceived, smirking cleverness of a pansy prep school debate team, the editorial goes on to ask why Graeber would even "covet" a bourgeois post like Yale, then answers its own question by saying "even anarchists have their bourgeois ambitions," then speculates that Yale's decision was not political.
Besides the obvious way in which the WSJ misunderstands the category "bourgeois," the entire editorial seems out-of-place, Even if it were a slow news day, that wouldn't explain why the WSJ chose to compose this mocking and meanspirited little column. Surely, I think, the folks at the WSJ can't feel threatened by the Wobblies...? And surely there are more pressing things to attack (through mockery or otherwise) than the IWW and a radical professor...?
Unless, of course, there is a lesson to be learned from Graeber's situation that the WSJ thinks we all should learn...?
On January 3, the Wall Street Journal devoted one of its all-important house editorials, the smaller one in the middle, to a single human being, a person hitherto known only to some on the left, denied tenure.
The editorial, entitled "Bourgeois Anarchy," purportedly seeks to rebut David Graeber's suspicion (nothing more) that he was fired from Yale because of his political activism (Graeber is an anarchist and a member of the IWW), but since it's only a suspicion, there isn't much work to do on that front. So the editors spent roughly one fourth of the space of the column quoting from the Preamble to the IWW Constitution, emphasizing the passages about the workers and bosses having nothing in common and the repudiation of the wage system.
With the self-perceived, smirking cleverness of a pansy prep school debate team, the editorial goes on to ask why Graeber would even "covet" a bourgeois post like Yale, then answers its own question by saying "even anarchists have their bourgeois ambitions," then speculates that Yale's decision was not political.
Besides the obvious way in which the WSJ misunderstands the category "bourgeois," the entire editorial seems out-of-place, Even if it were a slow news day, that wouldn't explain why the WSJ chose to compose this mocking and meanspirited little column. Surely, I think, the folks at the WSJ can't feel threatened by the Wobblies...? And surely there are more pressing things to attack (through mockery or otherwise) than the IWW and a radical professor...?
Unless, of course, there is a lesson to be learned from Graeber's situation that the WSJ thinks we all should learn...?
Saturday, January 07, 2006
Rest in Peace, Hugh Thompson, Jr.
Hugh Thompson, Jr. died yesterday of cancer at age 62. I'll bet many of you don't know who he was and what he did.
Thompson was a war hero, but not the kind you'd normally think of. And he never wanted to be one. Originally volunteering for the most thankless and luckless of duties (drawing enemy fire), Thompson eventually chose an even more dangerous task: stopping his fellow soldiers from massacring civilians.
"Thompson joined the US Navy in 1961, then US Army in 1966 and trained as a helicopter pilot. He volunteered for the Aerial Scout Unit and assigned to Task Force Barker to fly over Vietnamese forests and try to draw enemy fire, to pinpoint the location of troops...
"After coming across the dead bodies of Vietnamese civilians outside My Lai on March 16, 1968, Thompson set down their OH-23 and the three men [Thompson, Crew Chief Glenn Andreotta and Spc Lawrence Colburn] began setting green gas markers by the prone bodies of the Vietnamese civilians who appeared to still be alive. Returning to the helicopter however, they saw Captain Ernest Medina run forward and begin shooting the wounded who had been marked - and the three men moved their ship back over the village where Thompson confronted Lt. Stephen Brooks who was preparing to blow up a hut full of cowering and wounded Vietnamese; he left Andreotta and Colburn to cover the company with their heavy machine guns and orders to fire on any American who refused the orders to halt the massacre. (Needless to say, none of the officers dared to disobey him, although as a mere warrant officer, Thompson was outranked by the commissioned lieutenants.)
Thompson: Let's get these people out of this bunker and get 'em out of here.
Brooks: We'll get 'em out with hand grenades.
Thompson: I can do better than that. Keep your people in place. My guns are on you.
"Thompson then ordered two other helicopters (one piloted by Dan Millians) flying nearby to serve as a medevac for the 11 wounded Vietnamese. While flying away from the village, Andreotta spotted movement in an irrigation ditch, and the helicopter was again landed and a child was extracted from the bodies, and brought with the rest of the Vietnamese to the hospital at Quang Ngai.
"Thompson subsequently reported the massacre, whilst it was still occuring, to his superiors. The cease-fire order was then given."
(The above is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson,_Jr.)
"With Colburn and Andreotta providing cover – he told them to shoot the Americans if they opened fire – he coaxed the Vietnamese out of the bunker so they could be flown to safety...
"After the My Lai story broke, some Americans accused Thompson of treachery and called Lieut. William Calley, who led the massacre, a hero.
"In 1998, however, Thompson and his crew were awarded the Soldier's Medal, Andreotta posthumously. The medal is the highest U.S. honour for bravery not involving conflict with the enemy.
"The medal citation credited Thompson with saving at least 10 civilian lives directly and with taking back reports that led to a ceasefire order and ended the killings. He died Friday at a veterans hospital outside Washington.
"The only American punished for the massacre was Calley, who spent three years under house arrest before getting parole."
(The above is from http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/natio...ilot.html?print)
People on the left often malign military service and have a hard time viewing those who serve as heroes. It's one thing to express the view that the U.S. should never have gone into Vietnam. Fair enough. But given that the U.S. did go into Vietnam, imagine what would have happened if Hugh Thompson had not.
Hugh Thompson, Jr. died yesterday of cancer at age 62. I'll bet many of you don't know who he was and what he did.
Thompson was a war hero, but not the kind you'd normally think of. And he never wanted to be one. Originally volunteering for the most thankless and luckless of duties (drawing enemy fire), Thompson eventually chose an even more dangerous task: stopping his fellow soldiers from massacring civilians.
"Thompson joined the US Navy in 1961, then US Army in 1966 and trained as a helicopter pilot. He volunteered for the Aerial Scout Unit and assigned to Task Force Barker to fly over Vietnamese forests and try to draw enemy fire, to pinpoint the location of troops...
"After coming across the dead bodies of Vietnamese civilians outside My Lai on March 16, 1968, Thompson set down their OH-23 and the three men [Thompson, Crew Chief Glenn Andreotta and Spc Lawrence Colburn] began setting green gas markers by the prone bodies of the Vietnamese civilians who appeared to still be alive. Returning to the helicopter however, they saw Captain Ernest Medina run forward and begin shooting the wounded who had been marked - and the three men moved their ship back over the village where Thompson confronted Lt. Stephen Brooks who was preparing to blow up a hut full of cowering and wounded Vietnamese; he left Andreotta and Colburn to cover the company with their heavy machine guns and orders to fire on any American who refused the orders to halt the massacre. (Needless to say, none of the officers dared to disobey him, although as a mere warrant officer, Thompson was outranked by the commissioned lieutenants.)
Thompson: Let's get these people out of this bunker and get 'em out of here.
Brooks: We'll get 'em out with hand grenades.
Thompson: I can do better than that. Keep your people in place. My guns are on you.
"Thompson then ordered two other helicopters (one piloted by Dan Millians) flying nearby to serve as a medevac for the 11 wounded Vietnamese. While flying away from the village, Andreotta spotted movement in an irrigation ditch, and the helicopter was again landed and a child was extracted from the bodies, and brought with the rest of the Vietnamese to the hospital at Quang Ngai.
"Thompson subsequently reported the massacre, whilst it was still occuring, to his superiors. The cease-fire order was then given."
(The above is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson,_Jr.)
"With Colburn and Andreotta providing cover – he told them to shoot the Americans if they opened fire – he coaxed the Vietnamese out of the bunker so they could be flown to safety...
"After the My Lai story broke, some Americans accused Thompson of treachery and called Lieut. William Calley, who led the massacre, a hero.
"In 1998, however, Thompson and his crew were awarded the Soldier's Medal, Andreotta posthumously. The medal is the highest U.S. honour for bravery not involving conflict with the enemy.
"The medal citation credited Thompson with saving at least 10 civilian lives directly and with taking back reports that led to a ceasefire order and ended the killings. He died Friday at a veterans hospital outside Washington.
"The only American punished for the massacre was Calley, who spent three years under house arrest before getting parole."
(The above is from http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/natio...ilot.html?print)
People on the left often malign military service and have a hard time viewing those who serve as heroes. It's one thing to express the view that the U.S. should never have gone into Vietnam. Fair enough. But given that the U.S. did go into Vietnam, imagine what would have happened if Hugh Thompson had not.
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