Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The Fake War on Terror, Part 411 (Leiter)

Crack security teams are protecting us from the threat of scary anti-fascist T-shirts in Arabic:

An architect of Iraqi descent has said he was forced to remove a T-shirt that bore the words "We will not be silent" before boarding a flight at New York.

Raed Jarrar said security officials warned him his clothing was offensive after he checked in for a JetBlue flight to California on 12 August.

Mr Jarrar said he was shocked such an action could be taken in the US....

Mr Jarrar's black cotton T-shirt bore the slogan in both Arabic and English.

He said he had cleared security at John F Kennedy airport for a flight back to his home in California when he was approached by two men who wanted to check his ID and boarding pass.

Mr Jarrar said he was told a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt - apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant - and asked him to remove it.   He refused, arguing that the slogan was not offensive and citing his constitutional rights to free expression.

Mr Jarrar later told a New York radio station: "I grew up and spent all my life living under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen.  But I'm shocked that they happened to me here, in the US...."

"We Will Not Be Silent" is a slogan adopted by opponents of the war in Iraq and other conflicts in the Middle East.

It is said to derive from the White Rose dissident group which opposed Nazi rule in Germany.

What's Next on the Freedom Agenda? (Edmundson)

The deadline set by the UN Security Council for Iran to cease uranium enrichment expires tonight.  Iran will not comply, that much is clear.  The rest is, well, foggy.  Is it the fog of impending war, or fog of some other kind?  Two illuminating interviews ran this afternoon on NPR's "Fresh Air."  One, with Joseph Cirincione of the Center for American Progress, afforded some historical perspective on the US involvement in Iran--beginning with the regime change accomplished in 1953 by the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected socialist Mossadegh and the installation of Shah Reza Pahlevi on the "peacock throne."  Did you know that the Shah got all manner of support and encouragement for the development of nuclear power, even after the Shah's secret pursuit of nuclear weaponry became known?  I didn't--but the Iranians do.  That, as Cirincione explains, is part of the reason why Iranians tend to support Ahmadinejad on the nuclear issue in spite of his evident faults.  It's called "nationalism."  A powerful human impulse, more so even than the one toward "Islamo-fascism."   

Cirincione also gives us insight into the conflict now dividing top Republicans.  One faction, which might be called "the NeoRealists," knows that the Iraq mess has to be faced, and that it limits rather than expands US options in the region.  (James Baker, consigliere to the Bush family, has enlisted a bipartisan panel (the "Iraq Study Group") that is busy putting together a salvage policy on Iraq.  Baker, naturally, has undertaken this with a view toward neutralizing the botched war as an issue that can hurt Republican candidates.)  The other faction used to enjoy being known--however wrongly--as NeoConservative.  Whereas the NeoRealists can tell the difference between nationalism and fascism, the thinkers formerly known as NeoConservative can't, or won't.  They want to play Churchill to the Democrats' Chamberlain--Hitler or no Hitler.

Terry Gross's companion interview with Michael Ledeen, tenant of the "Freedom" Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, confirms just about all of what Cirincone is concerned about.  According to Ledeen, Iran has been attacking the United States for the last 27 years (when Terry Gross asks him what he means by "attacking"--does he mean 9/11?--there is thoughtful silence).  Ledeen scolds the Bush Administration for dithering over Iran for six years instead of doing the virtuous thing--"virtuous" meaning manly, not maidenly, in his Straussian idiolect.  The only realistic option left now is--yes, you got it--regime change!  Speaking of woosie-ward lingustic creep, Ledeen wonders how this "NeoConservative" canard got started.  He gladly disavows the "conservative" in "NeoCon," and gushes that he's always been a (Neo)Revolutionary.  "Always!"  ("Tenured radical" had already been assigned.)

Meanwhile, the White House discloses that, now that Katrina is mission accompli, the President will be stumping the country to warn us again of the growing threat of Islamo-fascism.  "We are safer, but at increasing risk," as it were.  If this is any indication, the NeoRealists have failed in the struggle to control midterm election strategy.  Whether they have any control over war policy remains foggy.

Bush War Timeline: Lie by Lie (Leiter)

Informative resource here.  (Thanks to Alva Noe for the pointer.)

Presumably someone is working on the timeline of lies for the coming war of aggression against Iran.  I'll have more to say about that in the coming days.

UPDATE: This kind of propaganda is particularly ominous.

"Appeasement": The New Rhetorical Tack of the War-Mongers (Leiter)

Juan Cole (History, Michigan) has the right response.

UPDATE:  John Oberdiek (Law, Rutgers) points out this "unintentionally hilarious" headline at CNN.

Not Enough to Worry About? (Leiter)

"Imagine a black hole swallowing Earth, ending life in an instant. It's not only the stuff of pulp sci-fi novels but, scientists say, a looming possibility."  Details here.

Code from Berkeley to Rutgers

Alan Code, one of the leading scholars of ancient philosophy in the English-speaking world, who is currently at the University of California at Berkeley, has accepted appointment as Board of Governors Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, effective the fall of 2007.  That's both a significant loss for Berkeley and a major appointment for Rutgers, which will strengthen its presence in history of philosophy, especially ancient (Code will join Robert Bolton, a well-known scholar of ancient philosophy, who has been a long-time member of the Rutgers Department).

Who is Alexandra Heifetz and Why Does She Want to Smear a Nice Guy Like Me (and a Nice Field Like Philosophy)? (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT from July 11 for the benefit of those who missed it during the summer

N+1 is a new NYC-based publication that styles itself high-brow and left; I am told that kids just out of college hanging out in NYC read it, and read its website in particular.  It was one such reader, who actually knew something about philosophy, that tipped me off to this silly smear piece by an "intern" at the magazine named Alexandra Heifetz who, best I can tell, studied philosophy--or at least attended classes--at Northwestern. 

One can only hope that the other writers for this publication have a more favorable ratio of brains to bile than Ms. Heifetz. 

She starts out gushing about Alain Badiou (who would  presumably be humiliated by the mangling of his ideas by this 20-something know-nothing), and then shifts gears midway through:

In 1989, Brian Leiter, now an analytic philosopher and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, declared open war on continental philosophy by launching the Philosophical Gourmet Report. In the PGR, Leiter offered a ranking of the top philosophy programs in the US. At first hard copies of the rankings were distributed; then in 1996 the PGR went online. Geared toward prospective undergrads and based on the “quality of faculty” factor, the rankings were clearly, profoundly biased toward analytic programs. Some continental-leaning departments hung near the bottom of the list; most didn’t make it at all.

How is it that these silly people never seem to tire of the same lies and canards?  Nowhere in this smear piece is there any mention of the fact that I've written one book and edited three others on that paragon of "analytic" philosophy, Nietzsche; that I'm the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy; that easily available on-line information reveals that I've taught, over the past decade, graduate philosophy seminars on "The Continental Tradition," "Marx and Freud," "Nietzsche and Ethics," and "Nietzsche and Foucault," among other topics.  Of course, these facts--that is what they are--would spoil the story line for Ms. Heifetz.  So, too, would the facts about all the PGR Advisory Board members who work on Continental philosophy (Frederick Beiser, Michael Forster, Pierre Keller, Sebastian Gardner, Michael Rosen, Julian Young, Allen Wood):  clearly those folks, like me, have as their goal the destruction of study of the philosophy to which they have devoted major portions of their professional careers.

Alas, there is no bottom to dumb, so Ms. Heifetz continues:

On the PGR website, which is now very fancy, there’s a section called “Continental vs. Analytic Philosophy,” a concise version of the introduction Leiter wrote for the book A Future for Philosophy.

In fact, the argument of the introduction to The Future for Philosophy is different than the section in the PGR, which is left over from years ago, and which I'll revise this fall.  Of course, to know this you'd have to be able to read, or to understand what you read.  My guess is that the lazy Ms. Heifetz--who obviously isn't interested in any facts--simply didn't read the introduction.  But back to the smear:

Here he distinguishes between them as two styles of doing philosophy, rather than categories for the kind of books to be read:

Continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its “meaning”), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).

Leiter seems to think he’s dropping a bomb—note the disparagements of “obscure” and “loosely speaking”—but the house of philosophy had begun to self-destruct half a century before.

"Loosely speaking" is not a disparagement, it is a way of signalling to the reader that what follows is a bit general and imprecise, in this case, because brief.  Why Ms. Heifetz thinks that I think this is "dropping a bomb" is anyone's guess.

Since the 1950s analytic philosophers have made the same complaints: that continental philosophy has a messy literary quality, that it wastes time with “concepts-in-quotations,” and that it bothers itself with cultural things like genocide and the Internet. And yet, boom! Like a frantic seven-year-old, Leiter defends his kind of philosophy by pushing out people who don’t agree with him.

I, of course, did not say anything about messy literary quality, that is Ms. Heifetz's invention for purposes of her story line.  And one respect in which I think that section of the PGR is mistaken is precisely in mentioning "literary quality" at all:  there is precious little literary about Hegel's Science of Logic or Marx's Capital, let alone Husserl's Ideas.  And speaking of seven-year-olds, I think even mine knows that the Continental traditions in philosophy are not marked by concern for "genocide and the Internet," though at least this suggests Ms. Heifetz has read (or heard about) one book, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.  But all this is just a lead-in to her main "idea":

But what the continental has tried to preserve (and what the analytic has tried to run from) is a sense that, even while pursuing self-preservation, philosophers should never give up on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone.

Ignorance is bliss, and when it comes to philosophy, Ms. Heifetz is apparently ecstatic.  Her ignorance is palpable in two different directions here:  first, she thinks it is only "analytic philosophy" that neglects "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"; and second, she is utterly unaware of those English-speaking philosophers who address such issues. 

On the first point:  is it only the "analytics" (whoever they are) who allegedly gave up "on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone"?  How does Leibniz's Monadology fare by Ms. Heifetz's criterion?  What about Descartes's Meditations?  Husserl's Ideas?  Hegel's Logic?  Are these folks also "analytic" philosophers?  By Ms. Heifetz's "logic," they are. 

Here is a quote from the introduction I actually wrote to The Future for Philosophy which, if Ms. Heifetz had read it, might have made an impression on this naif:

“[P]hilosophy” has a currency in everyday parlance and ordinary self-reflection that “linguistics” or “sociology” or “anthropology” do not. One doesn’t need an advanced degree to have a “philosophy of life,” and this has bred an expectation, even among those with advanced degrees, that the discipline of philosophy ought to be continuous with ordinary attempts to forge a philosophy of life.

Most of philosophy, both contemporary and--importantly--historical, does not, alas, live up to this expectation. Earlier and contemporary philosophers worry, to be sure, about truth, knowledge, the just society, and morally right action, as well as the nature of science, beauty, death, law, goodness, rationality, and consciousness. From reflections on these worries one might even extract a “philosophy of life,” though it would hardly be obvious, on an initial reading of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, or Husserl that this is what they were after

It's not clear Ms. Heifetz even got through the "initial reading," given how she conceives of "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy:

The analytic philosopher takes his scalpel to the concept of democracy; the continental presents us with an account of the brutal pacification of the east.

Indeed, attention to "the brutal pacification of the east" is what makes Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger major figures in "Continental philosophy" (you missed that chapter in Being and Time?  You need to read as carefully as Ms. Heifetz).  It's not only, though, that it is false that figures in the Continental traditions are not interested in those technical questions of metaphysics and epistemology that Ms. Heifetz doesn't understand, it's also false that the folks Ms. Heifetz thinks of as "analytic" philosophers are not addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone":  what exactly does she think books like Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979) or Harry Frankfurt's The Reasons of Love (2004) are about?  Set theory?  The foundations of quantum mechanics? 

Find an educated layperson who has read any part of either the Nagel or Frankfurt books, as well as, say, the "Sense-Certainty" section of Hegel's Phenomenology or the "Introduction" Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and then ask Ms. Heifetz's childish question:  which of these philosophers are addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"?  The "Continental" philosophers won't win.  Again, from the actual introduction to The Future for Philosophy:

It is true, to be sure, that philosophy is now a “profession”—just like psychology, linguistics, sociology, physics, and mathematics—and it is also true that the discipline is often technical and unintelligible to the lay person. But only a complete ignorance of the history of philosophy could lead anyone to think that this supports a special complaint about contemporary philosophy: Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, among many other “greats,” are also technical and obscure to the lay person.  Yet no one, other than teenagers and anti-intellectuals, consider this an objection to their philosophy. As Timothy Williamson trenchantly puts it in his essay: “Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.”

But enough with silliness about philosophy, it's now time for Ms. Heifetz to misstate facts about the profession:

In universities with hard-core analytic cliques, like NYU or Princeton, continental philosophers end up outside of the philosophy department and find a home in comp lit, women’s, or African-American studies.

This will come as news to the tenured members of the NYU and Princeton departments whose work is centrally concerned with Continental philosophy, like Beatrice Longuenesse, John Richardson, and Alexander Nehamas.  When I pointed out this factual error--that is what it is, a factual error--to the alleged editor of this journal (a grad student in American Studies at Yale, where fact-checking apparently isn't required), he declined to correct it. 

Desperate, apparently, for validation, Ms. Heifetz even manages to drag the Heckling Campaign out of the attic, long after everyone, even Richard, tired of it--and, of course, without mentioning any of the rebuttals, or the fact that 98% of the profession didn't sign the petition, or that many of the signatories recanted, or that many of them now participate in the surveys, and on and on and on.

The total ignorance about Continental philosophy that is on display in this smear piece--and the total unwillingness to acknowledge the facts about my work on Continental philosophy and the extensive coverage of Continental philosophy in the PGR--has a simple explanation:  for this dispute is not about Continental philosophy at all.  "Continental" for these folks does not mean "Continental philosophy," as Ms. Heifetz's spectacularly ignorant remarks well illustrate:  she obviously hasn't a clue about the thinkers, ideas, and arguments that constitute the glorious traditions of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France over the last two hundred years.  "Continental," rather, is more of a non-cognitive term, expressing something like the following:  "yeah for left-wing opining about culture and politics, that's philosophy."  As readers know, I'm a big fan of left-wing opining, but it ain't philosophy, Continental or otherwise.  This juvenile usage of "Continental" is widespread, I fear, among those who are philosophically illiterate but fashion themselves culturally sophisticated.

A concluding thought:  I wonder whether any of the random morons in Cyberspace who have picked up Ms. Heifetz's smear piece will be any more interested in the facts than Ms. Heifetz?  I'm not optimistic.

Back to my blogging hiatus....

UPDATE:  Paul Schofield, a grad student at Harvard, writes:

I enjoyed today's blog post. I find the near universal misunderstanding of philosophy quite aggravating. You point to one camp, who thinks that philosophers have lost their way with silly technical questions. I have encountered these folks. But I also routinely encounter people who think that philosophy is "corrupted" by post-modernism, and are more than willing to lecture me about this "unfortunate" turn.

Not only that. People of a religious bent feel free to berate philosophy for being "atheistic." (Real philosophy was done by C.S Lewis, don't you know?) And non-philosophers show up at philosophy talks not to learn about what it is that we do, but to vocally object (during question time) to our entire discipline's way of doing things.

What is stunning is the confidence with which these opinions are asserted. When corrected by me- an actual grad student, in an actual philosophy department- I receive incredulous stares. This makes clearing up the mis-perceptions all but impossible.

Bacciagaluppi from Paris to Sydney

Guido Bacciagaluppi (philosophy of physics), currently at the Institue d'historie et de philosophie des sciences at des techniques in Paris, will join the Centre for Time in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney as a Senior Research Fellow later this fall.  Sydney, with Huw Price, Mark Colyvan, Paul Griffiths, and others, has now established itself as Australia's leading center for philosophy of science and cognate fields.

Triumphs of a Free Media, Part 18 (Leiter)

We certainly wouldn't want a pro-war Democrat facing meaningful opposition in a democratic society, now would we?

The cover story in the new issue of TIME, the flagship publication of the Time Warner media empire, informs readers that Hillary Clinton has "virtually nonexistent opposition for her senate seat...." 

[A]t another outpost of the Time Warner empire, decisions have been made that help ensure Sen. Clinton will have "virtually nonexistent opposition."  Time Warner's NY1 TV news channel ("the CNN of New York") adamantly refuses to host a Democratic New York Senate debate.  Despite protests over its decision, NY1 says it is giving incumbent Clinton a no-debate free pass because her antiwar challenger, union leader Jonathan Tasini, has not raised enough money; the channel arbitrarily set the bar at a half-million dollars.  This despite the fact that Tasini has reached 13% in polls....

Ironically, NY1 has already hosted and televised a Democratic New York gubernatorial debate between frontrunner Eliot Spitzer and a Democratic challenger who was at only 10% in the polls.  But that candidate had raised about $6 million....

Did I mention that Time Warner's PAC is one of the many corporate PACs that underwrites Hillary Clinton's reelection campaign against the "virtually nonexistent opposition"?...

In a New York Marist poll taken in July, 62% of Democrats said they were more likely to vote for a candidate who opposes the Iraq war vs. only 9% who said they were more likely to vote for an Iraq war supporter. Thank in part to big media, many New York Democrats don't know that Sen. Clinton has an antiwar opponent in the primary....

And despite a New York Times editorial this week chiding Hillary Clinton to explain her Iraq position in debate, don't count on her appearing this Sunday at a public forum in New York City titled "How To Get Out of Iraq."  She's been invited to participate, as have all New York senate candidates.  So far Sen. Clinton hasn't responded to the invitation, while Tasini has confirmed that he'll be there.  The forum features former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and myself.   

Ritter and McGovern are two experts whose assessments of the Iraq situation have been remarkably accurate and astute -- unlike the "experts" Sen. Clinton relied on when she voted to authorize the war and to support the ongoing occupation. 

If you are a New York voter, why not call Sen. Clinton's office at 212.688.6262 and politely encourage her to show up at this Sunday's event?  It takes place at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, starting at 7:00 PM.  (For more info, visit http://ustourofduty.org/)   

The July Marist poll asked registered voters in New York if the Iraq war should be a major or minor campaign issue.  62% said major, 23% said minor - with the margin even more lopsided among Democrats.  Yet as she campaigns around the state, Hillary Clinton treats Iraq as less than a minor issue.

If we had a free, robust and independent media, a candidate who flouts public opinion in such a manner would find it difficult to win reelection.

Ahmadinejad *Hearts* Bush (Nadelhoffer)

A recent report by the Chatham House--aka The Royal Institute of International Affairs--suggests that the quagmire the Bushies have created in Iraq has strengthened rather than weakened the Iranian leg of the so-called 'axis of evil' (see here).  Here are some noteworthy excerpts:

• "There is little doubt that Iran has been the chief beneficiary of the war on terror in the Middle East."
• "The United States, with coalition support, has eliminated two of Iran's regional rival governments - the Taliban in Afghanistan in November 2001 and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in April 2003 - but has failed to replace either with coherent and stable political structures."
• "The US-driven agenda for confronting Iran is severely compromised by the confident ease with which Iran sits in its region."

It appears that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--who is obviously smitten with our "freedom agenda"--owes our "war president" a thank-you card.  Ahmadinejad just needs to make sure he keeps it simple--everyone knows how poor Georgie has a hard time with big words and difficult concepts.  Perhaps the hardest concept of all for him to keep straight is "moral universalizability"--something he clearly never learned while cheer-leading at Yale. 

I suppose W should have spent less time doing cartwheels and learning secret handshakes with John Kerry and more time paying attention in political science, history, biology, English 101, and philosophy.  If he had, perhaps we would not be foolishly considering going to war with the very country we have strengthened by our already foolish war-mongering.

When Justice Crosses Borders (Nadelhoffer)

Yesterday there was an interesting article posted at Alternet by Jay Walljasper about the European  Court of Human Rights (see here).  Here is an excerpt:

Even more unique is the basic premise of the court: that individuals have the right to bring human-rights cases before these judges if they believe that justice has not been served in national courts -- even going so far as to challenge the rulings of their own governments. Equally startling is the way the court works: Judges from across Europe pass judgment on the actions or laws of a nation, and that nation must abide by their ruling. This seems astonishing in an era when the world's dominant power, the United States, acts as though it is not bound by any treaty or convention, and routinely defies judgments of international bodies.

As Walljasper points out, the ECHR has had a positive influence on Europe including:

1. "Abolishing the death penalty, based on 1983 and 2002 revisions of the European Convention on Human Rights."
2. "Confirming gay rights, based on judgments throwing out anti-sodomy laws in the UK and Ireland."
3. "Expanding freedom of the press, based on a Danish case where a reporter was charged with hate crimes simply for interviewing racist skinheads on television."
4. "Establishing the precedent that European nations will not extradite criminal suspects to the United States if those people face the death penalty in American courts."
5. "Outlawing excessive force by police, based on a French case."

If only America were equally committed to human rights, perhaps we, too, would be witnessing these kinds of positive moral trends.  Instead, we are still dragging our feet concerning joining yet another important world court--namely, the International Criminal Court.

You see, America is one of only 7 nations (China, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Qatar and Israel--quite illustrious moral company indeed!)--to vote against the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998.  American hostility towards the ICC only increased when Bush came to power in 2002.  As a result of American foot-dragging concerning the ICC--an expression of our unwillingness to be held to the same standard to which we hold other countries--we have ended up with "a two-tiered rule of law for the most serious international crimes: one that applies to U.S. nationals; another that applies to the rest of the world's citizens" (see here for details).

To see just how serious our government has been in their efforts to undermine the ICC, consider the American Servicemembers' Protection Act (ASPA), which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush on August of 2002. The major anti-ICC provisions in ASPA include:    

1. "a prohibition on U.S. cooperation with the ICC;"
2. "an 'invasion of the Hague' provision: authorizing the President to 'use all means necessary and appropriate' to free U.S. personnel (and certain allied personnel) detained or imprisoned by the ICC;"
3. "punishment for States that join the ICC treaty: refusing military aid to States' Parties to the treaty (except major U.S. allies);"
4. "a prohibition on U.S. participation in peacekeeping activities unless immunity from the ICC is guaranteed for U.S. personnel."

And to think that our fumbling and mumbling "war president" has the audacity to talk about his Orwellian "freedom agenda" (see here) and to brag about his purported goal of spreading democracy, liberty, and the rule of law throughout the Middle East. 

The Bushies no more want the rule of law in the Middle East than they want it here at home.  After all, when we are engaged in a "war" with both terrorists (see here) and Islamo-fascists (see here), who has time for the niceties of democracy--which we magically attempt to spread while side-stepping it all the while ourselves.  In this respect, the current administration is like an  incompetent parent--always admonishing others to do as we say, not as we do.  After all, when countries act like we do, they get branded as terrorists or threats to democracy.

*Cross-posted at truth to power

Some Law School News That Might Interest Some Philosophers (Leiter)

The other Brian Leiter has a couple of items that might interest some philosophy readers.  One is a list of visiting law professors at the very top law schools this coming academic year (which includes a few folks known to philosophically-minded readers, such as Martha Nussbaum, Cass Sunstein, Andrew Koppelman, and Leslie Green, among others); there is, as one can see, a very active "visiting professor" culture in American law schools.  The other is some new data on which schools produce the most clerks for Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.  The continuing rightward tilt of the Court is proving a boon for some conservative religious schools, like Notre Dame and BYU, that did not, historically, graduate many clerks.

Friday Poem: "Liberation Theology"

Liberation Theology

Open the gates and leave your life
Forget what you were taught to love
Close your ears to dalliances
Play and entertainment
Why pass your life at a child’s game
Surrounded by the doom of numbers
Walk out of your life as out of a cave
For although you were a stone
Now you are a flame

Put aside the language of death
And the silence of lost traces
Buried in the lined faces
In all those rain-soaked places
Where dark clouds descend like graces
And the wind turns the trees to shawls

Give up your hoarded places
Crushed into narrow spaces
Turning rehearsed pages
Among the frigid sons and daughters
Of ritual and sameness
Querulous as your losses

Escape this Arlington of aspiration
This wax museum of official dreams
The chill of  gauze cathedrals
Your fragile-fingered monuments
Money the incubus you invented
(Even now I hear it spending you)
Why dangle from time’s jaws
Say it was the wrong life
Or say it was not yours

Come then embrace refusal
At the place where history ends
Where all lies are revealed
No matter how hidden
All ways of life rejected without exception
Where the contented are tempted
And no nature is merely accepted
Here you will find dissatisfaction
And learn denial’s depths
You’ll have your fondest hopes to plunder
Your enemies will become your friends

8/25-10/25/97, 1/27-2/10/98, 3/6-3/7/98, 6/19/98, 9/18-9/19/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.

The War-Mongering on Iran (Leiter)

You will want to read historian Juan Cole's informative post about the Republican "report" on Iran intelligence.

Analytic vs. Continental (yet again) (J. Stanley)

In many of his posts about the matter, Brian argues that there is no such thing as analytic philosophy. In large part, I agree. Most of what is said about the putative difference is from an historical, sociological, and philosophical perspective, sheer nonsense (if Shoemaker is an analytic philosopher, so is Husserl). But I do think there is some difference between two kinds of something (there’s a bold claim for you). Soames attempts to make this distinction when he writes that analytic philosophy is characterized by “an elevation of the goals of truth and knowledge over inspiration, moral uplift, and spiritual comfort”. I reject Soames’s categorization, because it makes it sound like the options are to seek truth and knowledge or to find religion. I would rather mark it as the quite different distinction between, on the one hand, philosophy that treats phenomena apart from their cultural and historical context, versus philosophy that looks at phenomena mainly through an anthropological lens.

Here is a passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. It’s an early essay, written in 1916, and it is not one of Benjamin’s influential works. But it nicely illustrates the distinction I’m trying to make:

It is therefore the linguistic being of man to name things…Why name them? To whom does man communicate himself?...Before this question can be answered we must again inquire: how does man communicate himself? A profound distinction is to be made, a choice presented, in face of which an intrinsically false understanding of language is certain to give itself away…Anyone who believes that man communicates his mental being by names cannot also assume that it is his mental being that he communicates, for this does not happen through the names of things, that is, through the words by which he denotes a thing. And, equally, the advocate of such a view can only assume that man is communicating factual subject matter to other men, for that does happen through the word by which he denotes a thing. This view is the bourgeois conception of language, the invalidity and emptiness of which will become increasingly clear in what follows. It holds that the means of communication is the word, its object factual, its addressee a human being. The other conception of language, in contrast, knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication. It means: in naming the mental being of man communicates itself to God.

The rest of the essay consists of Benjamin’s explanation of the last line of the quote. Benjamin argues that the first two chapters of Genesis are meditations on the creative power of language; in the second chapter of Genesis, Adam provides THE name for each thing; he is not just arbitrarily and conventionally linking up sounds with things (“The human word is the name of things. Hence it is no longer conceivable, as the bourgeois view of language maintains, that the word has an accidental relation to its object, that it is a sign for things…agreed by some convention”). Benjamin is not silly enough to think that names are essential to things (“…the rejection of bourgeois by mystical linguistic theory equally rests on a misunderstanding. For according to mystical theory the word is simply the essence of the thing. That is incorrect, because the thing in itself has no word, being created from God’s word…”). He is clear that humans encounter objects, classify them according to their knowledge, and then give the objects names (only for God, or Adam before the Fall, is naming a creative act). The problem with the bourgeois picture of language is that it completely divorces naming from the creative act, thereby severing its connection to a certain kind of mystical power, which is reflected in our deepest myths.

So Benjamin isn’t at all confused about metaphysics or the problem of intentionality. He just finds no interest in the question of how, by the use of language, one person can communicate something about the world to another. What’s interesting to him is how language is represented in human mythology, and what that reveals to us about the cultural significance of our practice of naming. This kind of question is one that is not apt to be taken up by a philosopher in the analytic tradition. Someone in my tradition might say that the issues that interest Benjamin are questions of anthropology rather than philosophy. Someone in Benjamin’s tradition might say that the issues that interest me are bourgeois.

More on Bush, Iran and the "Nuclear Option" (Leiter)

Bill's excellent piece this morning on the latest war-mongering surrounding Iran brought to mind a post from last April that might also be of interest; from the end of that item:

Speaking of moral depravity and craven villainy, the other morning on National Public Radio (a "liberal" media outlet, as the ideologically deluded in America say) a reporter explained calmly that President Bush was "keeping all options on the table" with respect to Iran, including "a tactical nuclear strike." This latter "option" was mentioned without further comment, without pause, without any hint that the President of the United States had just been accused of contemplating a war crime of such extraordinary proportions that, if the world were not annihilated in the ensuing international conflagration, Bush would go down in history not simply as the worst President in American history, but as one of the great moral monsters in the history of humanity.  One imagines being in Germany circa 1938, listening to some stately radio newscaster reporting that "Hitler is keeping all options on the table" with respect to the Lebensraum problem, "including invading all neighboring nations" and "genocide of the Jews." 

"And now we turn to the sports news..."

Erich Fromm's idea of the "pathology of normalcy" seems the only apt characterization for this state of affairs.

All the Options Are On the Table (Edmundson)

As the fallout from the failed Israeli-US campaign in Lebanon spreads, the risk grows that it will become radioactive.  The ceasefire there is unstable; and Ahmadinejad's remarks about Israel could not be more obnoxious.  Now, Republicans in and close to the White House and Congress are demanding that the intelligence services produce a pretext for striking militarily at Iran, according to the New York Times (Aug. 24) "Some in G.O.P. Say Iran Threat Is Played Down."  It seems that the CIA and other US intelligence agencies are reluctant to shill for the neocons and Bush as they did in 2002.  The warmongers are livid:

“The people in the [intelligence] community are unwilling to make judgment calls and don’t know how to link anything together,” one senior United States official said. 

“We’re not in a court of law,” he said. “When they say there is ‘no evidence,’ you have to ask them what they mean, what is the meaning of the term ‘evidence’?”

In the same story, Newt Gingrich is reported to explain what "evidence" means:

“When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: ‘If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?’”

And, if North Korea had shipped them one last week...?  So, that's settled: there is evidence that Iran possesses weapons of mass destruction.  (Any questions?)  In any case, this administration prides itself on its unique understanding the nature of the post-9/11 world and the lesson of 9/11: "Take threats before they fully materialize."  And how to take the Iranian threat?  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Sept-Oct., 2006) reminds us of the following:

During an impromptu April 18 press conference, President George W. Bush was asked if his assertion that "all options are on the table" regarding Iran included the possibility of a nuclear strike. Bush reiterated, "All options are on the table. We want to solve this issue diplomatically, and we're working hard to do so." In no uncertain words, the president of the United States directly threatened Iran with a preemptive nuclear strike.

Working hard at diplomacy is not something this administration is likely to be remembered for.  Or is Bush's incuriosity and belligerence simply a tactic?  The Bulletin reminds us that there are many precedents for nuclear brinksmanship as a negotiating ploy:

Bush's statements regarding Iran are particularly reminiscent of a diplomatic strategy employed by President Richard Nixon known as the "madman theory." [1] 

Madman theory?  The footnote explains:

[1]  The theory was first made public by Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman. "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry--and he has his hand on the nuclear button'--and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace." H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978).

Hmmm....communism then, "Islamo-fascism" now (other fascisms being presumably benign).  The Bulletin story continues:

The madman theory, or, as Nixon and his chief of staff Bob Haldeman described it, "the principle of the threat of excessive force," was at the center of this strategy. "Nixon was convinced that his power would be enhanced if his opponents thought he might use excessive force, even nuclear force. That, coupled with his reputation for ruthlessness, he believed, would suggest that he was dangerously unpredictable" ....  As part of the strategy, underlings would transmit information to foreign officials saying that Nixon might be unstable or unpredictable and that unless concessions were made he might order the use of military force or even nuclear weapons. The entire effort was conducted in extreme secrecy with only a few U.S. officials even aware of it.

Reliance on a "principle of the threat of excessive force" might explain the extent of Israel's devastation of the civilian infrastucture of Lebanon.  (After all, following Warren Quinn, if you have the right to threaten (what some might think "excessive") force, you must have the right to use it.)  Moreover, the unguarded obnoxiousness of Bush's public conduct and the incoherent obsessiveness of his public utterances could be explained as calculated moves in a grand game.  A game, unfortunately, that two can play.  Come October, will Ahmadinejad have pulled the nuclear finger?

Soames on "Analytic Philosophy," and the Special Case of Philosophy of Law (Leiter)

I am grateful to Jason for calling attention to the lovely, lucid, and synoptic essay by Scott Soames (USC) on "Analytic Philosophy in America," which I read with appreciation yesterday evening.   I concur with Jason's recommendation that this is an essay that educated non-philosophers ought to read if they want to have an idea what has been going on the last 40-50 years in English-speaking philosophy (as Soames notes at the end, much of what he is describing is philosophy in the English-speaking world, not just philosophy in America).  That being said, I want to note one reservation and then raise one question.

The reservation is this:  the two pages on philosophy of law contain errors.    Soames is not a philosopher of law, and he quite reasonably gives most of his attention to developments in philosophy of language--given his own expertise and the importance of that field to the story he is telling.  But the errors in the two pages (pp. 28-29) on philosophy of law range from the minor to the fundamental, and they deserve flagging (and perhaps they can still be corrected).

On the rather minor end of the spectrum:  he compares the "revival" in political philosophy effectuated by Rawls and Nozick to the "revival" in philosophy of law effectuated by Dworkin.  But surely it was Hart who brought about the integration of jurisprudence into English-speaking philosophy generally, and rejuvenated philosophical interest in law; Dworkin, Feinberg, Raz, Finnis and others simply continued that development.  (One can acknowledge this point without agreeing with my stronger claim that the Dworkinian program is now discredited and defunct.)  Indeed, among philosophers who think about law, Raz's influence is far greater than Dworkin's.  Also, and even more minor, Soames describes Dworkin as "at New York University since 1994," when he joined the NYU faculty in the late 1970s (1977, according to the Directory of American Law Teachers).  (Perhaps 1994 is meant to be a reference to the date of his cross-appointment to the philosophy department.)

On the more important, substantive end of the spectrum:  Soames describes Hart's positivism as "a view according to which legal validity is, in the main, a matter of fidelity to the institutional sources of positive law, and, except at the margins, independent of substantive moral considerations."  Soames's gloss on Hart is a Razian one (no quarrel there, this is a survey piece, after all), but even on that gloss, it is no part of the positivist view that legal validity is ever a matter of "substantive moral considerations":  such considerations may influence how a judge decides cases, but they are not themselves criteria of legal validity.  This conflation (between criteria of legal validity and how judges ought to decide particular cases) suggests that Soames has simply adopted wholesale the confusion for which Dworkin is most famous (or infamous, as it were) among legal philosophers, namely, between the questions "what is law?" and "how ought a judge decide the case before him?"  This comes out even more clearly when Soames writes:

As opposed to this [the positivist view of legal validity], Dworkin argues for a theory of "constructive interpretation" in which there are no cases in which the contents of laws, and their applications to particular cases, are, in principle, entirely determined by the routine application of conventional, legal rules--independent of any moral assessment of the consequences of particular applications, and any judgment about how those consequences bear on the social purpose of the laws, and the intentions of those who enacted them. 

The bolded portion conflates the distinction, emphasized by Raz, between "pure" and "applied" legal statements:  that is, the distinction between "pure" statements like "character evidence is inadmissible in a civil trial to prove action in conformity therewith on a particular occasion" (which is a legally valid rule of evidence in the U.S.) and "applied" statements like "defendant's prior conduct reveals his habitual behavior, and so may be admitted into evidence."  Positivists are not committed to the view that applied legal statements are always "entirely determined by the routine application of conventional, legal rules," and Hart, of course, is explicit that there will be a range of cases where judges will have to exercise discretion. No positivist believes, either, that valid "pure" legal statements should be applied in particular cases without regard to "the consequences of particular applications."  To the extent that a judge has a duty to decide according to law, then the judge must apply the valid legal norms (those with the requisite institutional sources); but it is no part of the positivist thesis about legal validity to deny that in some cases, the duty to apply legally valid norms is, and ought to be, overriden by other equitable and moral considerations.

Soames then characterizes Dworkin's view of adjudication as follows:

Instead, all adjudication is seen as requiring the judge to weigh substantive moral concerns with existing legal history, so as to arrive at the most just and morally desirable principles for achieving the legitimate ends of law, while accomodating, so far is reasonably possible, the results of past decisions and existing legal practices.

The "instead" is misplaced, of course, since the positivist view of validity is not a theory of adjudication.

Now to the question.  As longtime readers know, I don't think "analytic philosophy" exists except as a kind of sociological artifact, and I don't think anyone can give a satisfactory account of it that isn't wildly over- or under-inclusive.  (See here for one of many discussions of this topic.)  In this regard, I was struck by Soames's gloss on page 6:

[I]t is important to remember that analytic philosophy is neither a fixed body of substantive doctrine, a precise methodology, nor a radical break with most traditional philosophy of the past--save for varieties of romanticism, theism, and absolute idealism.  Instead, it is a discrete historical tradition stemming from Frege, Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists, characterized by respect for science and common sense, belief in the relevance of logic and language for philosophy, emphasis on precision and clarity of argumentation, suspicion of a priori metaphysics, and elevation of the goals of truth and knowledge over inspiration, moral uplift, and spiritual comfort--plus a dose of professional specialization.

I assume most informed folks think Paul Churchland, John McDowell, Bernard Williams, Alvin Plantinga, Laurence BonJour, Hilary Putnam, George Bealer, and Christopher Peacocke are "analytic" philosophers, but doesn't each of them fail to fit one or more of the characteristics noted by Soames?  What do readers think?  Non-anonymous postings will, as usual, be strongly preferred.

China Acts on Funeral Strippers (Wolff)

From the BBC, via my colleague Michael Otsuka:

Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say. The once-common events are held to boost the number of mourners, as large crowds are seen as a mark of honour.

But the arrests, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, could signal the end of the rural tradition.

Local officials have since ordered a halt to "obscene performances" and say funeral plans have to be submitted in advance, Xinhua news agency said.

The arrests, in Donghai county, followed striptease acts at a farmer's funeral, the agency said.

Two hundred people were said to have attended the event, which was held on 16 August.

The Beijing News said the event was later revealed by a Chinese TV station. The leaders of five striptease troupes were held, it said, including two involved in the farmer's funeral.

"Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers," Xinhua agency said.

"Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured."

As well as ordering an end to the practice, officials have also said residents can report "funeral misdeeds" on a hotline, earning a reward for information.

Can this really be true, or has the international news media fallen for a hoax? (Reuters covered the story too.)

Intelligent cultural analysis welcome. Extra bonus points to anyone who can come up with an argument why such practices should not be tolerated, drawing only on premises to be found in standard liberal thought (i.e. no appeals to tradition, religion, or an unanalysed notion of dignity).

Soames on Analytic Philosophy in America (J. Stanley)

Scott Soames has just posted a paper about the development of analytic philosophy in America over the last century. It's enjoyable reading for everyone, but particularly recommended for non-philosophers who seek an account that is highly accurate and broad in scope about the sociological, historical, and philosophical developments that have led us to the current moment in analytic philosophy, both here and abroad.

Guyer on Kant in the Routledge Philosophers Series (Leiter)

I'm delighted to announce the newest volume in the Routledge Philosophers series that I edit:  Kant by Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania.  If Guyer is not the greatest living Kant scholar in the world, then he is one of just two or three philosophers who could justifiably lay claim to that distinction.  I'm optimistic this volume will become the authoritative introduction to Kant for this generation.

"From Legal Realism to Naturalized Jurisprudence" (Leiter)

I've posted the penultimate draft of the introduction to my collection of papers on Naturalizing Jurisprudence:  Essays on American Legal Realism and Naturalism in Legal Philosophy, which Oxford University Press will publish (simultaneously in both cloth and paper, happily) in 2007 (during the Spring, I hope).  The introduction, "From Legal Realism to Naturalized Jurisprudence," gives a general overview of the papers in the volume and the set of problems they address, and how they all hang together, more or less.  I've posted a short excerpt here.  The book will also include two new Postscripts responding to a variety of critics.

On Norman Geras and the proposition that "there was no persuasive moral case against the Iraq war" (Leiter)

Moving to front from earlier this summer...

NOTE:  I started writing this quite some time ago, but the prospect of my impending summer blogging hiatus inspired me to finish it.  Professor Geras, sadly, continues to shill for war.  More importantly, the argument of his discussed here is symptomatic of a kind of childish moral reasoning that seems to have taken hold of some otherwise intelligent people who still purport to be on the "left," and who, shall we say, "ought to know better."

============================

No doubt the right-wing war mongers in the blogosphere will be clucking about this latest embarrassing display by a man who claims to be on the left offering apologetics for the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq. (We've seen this before, sadly.) But let's look at the quality of argument on behalf of Professor Geras's breathtaking proposition that "there was no persuasive moral case against the Iraq war." (And do, when you have a moment, contrast Professor Geras's reasoning in support of this conclusion with Professor McMahan's, well, creditable moral case against the Iraq war; nothing Professor Geras says even touches these arguments.)

Here is the crux of Professor Geras's moral reasoning:

Whatever subsidiary reasons could have been - and in fact were - given for the war to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime, the most powerful reason in its favour was a simple one: the regime had been responsible for, it was daily adding to, and for all that anyone could reasonably expect, it would go on for the forseeable future adding to, an immensity of pain and grief, killing, torture and mutilation. It's been said before, including by me, and so I won't labour the point too much here; but this was not merely an unpleasant tyranny amongst many others - it was one of the very worst of recent times, with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on its hands, to say nothing of the lives torn and wrecked by it. Other things equal, there is no other moral option than to support the removal of such a regime if a removal is in the offing.

Is the principle "brutal regimes should be removed by force" morally defensible? It appears that the morally relevant consideration on offer is the protection of human life, and that the calculation is a consequentialist one, assumptions I am happy to grant. (That--as I imagine Professor Geras would agree--the Bush Administration was not motivated by the protection of human life would only be relevant if it was somehow connected to morally relevant consequences--about which more in a moment.)  So we can restate the fundamental moral principle here as follows: one ought to act so as to maximize the protection of human life and minimize the destruction of human life. And perhaps we should broaden the desireable consequence here from the mere protection of human life, to something like the protection of human well-being, so that the quality of life also matters. That this is Professor Geras's view is suggested by these additional remarks of his:

The sole convincing moral case against the war would have had to demonstrate, either for a certainty or else as being highly probable, that the consequences of a regime-change war by the coalition of the willing - a coalition that could, it should be noted, have been bigger but for the opposition to the war - must be a state of affairs even worse than the one the war was supposed to remedy.

Of course, the converse holds as well: namely, that the moral case for the war has to demonstrate, "either for a certainty or else as being highly probable, that the consequences of a regime-change war...must be a state of affairs" better than the current one. There is, unfortunately, not even the pretense of such a demonstration; indeed, the need for it is elided by childish analogies:

The house was on fire. No argument against trying to save the people in the house is worth a fig if it doesn't accept this fact honestly, and recognize that there is something considerable to be said for indeed trying to save these people.

When a house is on fire, though, dousing the house with enough water is guaranteed to put out the fire: of that, we can be certain (ceteris paribus, e.g., unless it is a grease fire). The question here is whether one can be certain, or even think it highly probable, that an invasion led by the United States will produce a better state of affairs (meaning maximizing the protection of human well-being, and minimizing the loss of life etc.) than the status quo--the status quo not being the Saddam regime that was capable of killing and maiming hundreds of thousands back when it was a U.S. client in the 1980s, but the decimated heinous regime whose capacity for the imposition of misery and death was dramatically less by 2003.  (Those with Kantian intuitions are probably getting nervous about the crassness of the way this tallying of corpses is being done, but I am granting to Professor Geras his consequentialist starting point, and the crassness is unavoidable. But before Professor Geras makes absurd pronouncements like there is no "creditable moral case" against the Iraq war, it might have occurred to him that some moral people think about moral questions deontologically.) 

Surely someone serious about this question--whether "one can be certain, or even think it highly probable, that an invasion led by the United States will produce a better state of affairs"--would have to factor in that (1) since the U.S. did not offer--until late in the day--humanitarian rationales for the war, but instead offered a(n admittedly absurd) rationale of (anticipatory) "self-defense," and, (2) since the actual motives for actions can be useful predictors of their likely consequences, especially in cases like this where the consequences are at least partially within the control of hte agent (i.e., a country that starts a war for humanitarian reasons might be expected to be concerned to produce humanitarian outcomes, whereas a country that launched a war for self-serving reasons is far more likely to be indifferent to the humanitarian catastrophes produced by the war and thus unmotivated to prevent them), then (3) it is surely "highly probable" that military action under these circumstances will not achieve humanitarian objectives given the inevitable human carnage, and social and economic disruption, that is attendant upon a military invasion of the scale and scope carried out by the U.S.

Of course, this argument already understates the sheer improbabilitiy of humanitarian consequences, since the most plausible account of U.S. motives for invading Iraq--fairly obvious beforehand, and noted by many different observers since--makes clear that concern for humanitarian results had nothing to do with this war of aggression.  Indeed, think about it for just one moment:  given the almost perfect multi-decade track record of the United States--including many individual members of its current Administration!--of staunch support around the globe for brutal oligarchies and tyrannies (including the Iraqi one during its worst crimes against the Kurds) whenever it was economically or strategically advantageous to do so, is it really at all credible to suppose that a war of aggression by the U.S. would have humantiarian consequences? 

To put this differently:  could Professor Geras really believe that it was "highly probable" that the inevitable human carnage, and socio-economic disruption, that results from war would be offset by humanitarian consequences when the instigator of the war neither professed concern for such consequences nor, on any credible account, had any interest in such consequences?   

If humanitarian consequences were an unlikely consequence of war, especially since it was launched by political leaders with no credible interest in such consequences, anti-humanitarian consequences were close to a certainty:  it is, after all, in the nature of war.  This was surely predictable in advance, and has been borne out by the parade of horribles with which every sentient person is now familiar.  Most of that was also surely "highly probable" in advance, and certainly far more probable than Professor Geras's Panglossian scenario. 

And yet this parade of horribles--the predictable carnage and socio-economic destruction attendant upon war--does not even include other consequences that someone serious about moral reasoning would have had to consider when contemplating the war of aggression against Iraq:  for example, the likelihood of civil war; the possibility that one out of three Iraqi children would end up malnourished; the situation of Iraqi women; the risk of civilian massacres and random killings of civilians by the invading forces (all events that were "highly probable," as Professor Geras would say, given the history, which should be familiar); and so on.

What is missing from Professor Geras's cavalier cheer-leading for wars of aggression is any sense of what actually happens in war, though the reminders are now everywhere.

And all this still does not touch upon further possibilities relevant to a serious consequentialist calculation, such as the damage to the already feeble international rule of law resulting from the illegal invasion, or the risk (and human consequences) of subsequent military actions against other nations by an emboldened American superpower--or other nations emulating U.S. conduct, were America to be successful in getting away with this war of aggression.

For argument's sake, let us suppose that--as incredible as it seems--the consequentialist argument could be sustained in support of the conclusion that brutal regimes should be removed by force. But who should remove them? (It goes without saying, I assume, that the fact that a particular state of affairs would be morally desireable does not impose on everyone the same obligation to bring it about.) Professor Geras? His children? Me? My children? What of the fact that those who "volunteered" for military service acted on the basis of an implicit promise that their lives would be endangered only when the security of the nation was at risk, not simply to promote human well-being across the globe? 

I suppose if there were even the slightest indication that Professor Geras had thought through any of the preceding, it would be possible to credit his reasoning as being serious. As it is, his basic claim--that the war was justified because the Hussein regime was heinous--is not a bit of moral reasoning, it is childish, but dangerous, posturing.

The American war of aggression against Iraq will surely be remembered as one of the great crimes at the dawn of the 21st century, one whose potentially catastrophic consequences for Iraq, for the Middle East, and for the world are likely to play out for decades to come.  It is hardly surprising that with the relentless beat of the war drums by the propaganda mills of the right that a large segment of the U.S. population should have thought the war justified.  It is more surprising that those who profess to have committed themselves to the life of the mind, individuals with the leisure to gather real information and evaluate and analyze it, should be so catastrophically and sanctimoniously wrong on such a simple issue, one on which there had been a fairly robust global consensus since the horrors of WWII:  wars of aggression are not justified.

A colleague in Britain called my attention some time ago to this article by Professor Geras in which, writing about others, he may have, tragically, anticipated his own transformation from a man and scholar of the left to an apologist for war crimes:

Times change and people change. Their ideas change; develop, progress—and regress. There can be gradual change within a more or less stable intellectual framework. And there can also be sharper breaks, mutations of outlook in which one thing is renounced and another embraced. But each person has to take his leave or make her peace, as the case may be, in a way conformable to his or her own sense of dignity.

Sometimes making peace with oneself, though, isn't good enough.

Could Mencken Write for a Newspaper Today? (Leiter)

Last week's item on "The Manchurian Clergyman" made me seek out one of my collections of the writings of H.L. Mencken, a man who might well take credit for the modern artform of "merciless rhetorical spankings of fanatics, villains, and ignoramuses."  But, I wonder, could Mencken write a column for a newspaper today in America?  Doubtful.  Consider this item that appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun on December 9, 1929:

The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected.  Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone.  All it accomplishes is (a) to throw a veil of sanctity about ideas that violate every intellectual decency, and (b) to make every theologian a sort of chartered libertine.  No doubt it is mainly to blame for the appalling slowness with which really sound notions make their way in the world....

There is, in fact, nothing about religious opinions that entitles them to any more respect than other opinions get.  On the contrary, they tend to be noticeably silly.  If you doubt it, then ask any pious fellow of your acquaintance to put what he believes into the form of an affidavit, and see how it reads...."I, John Doe, being duly sworn, do say that I believe that, at death, I shall turn into a verterbrate without substance, having neither weight, extent nor mass, but with all the intellectual powers and bodily sensations of an ordinary mammal;...and that, for the high crime and misdemeanor of having kissed my sister-in-law behind the door, with evil intent, I shall be boiled in molten sulphur for one billion calendar years...."

N0, there is nothing notably dignified about religious ideas.  They run, rather, to a peculiarly puerile and tedious kind of nonsense....One may forgive a Communist or a Single Taxer on the ground that there is something the matter with his ductless glands...[b]ut the average theologian is a hearty, red-faced, well-fed fellow with no discernible excuse in pathology.  He disseminates his blather, not innocently, like a philosopher, but maliciously, like a politician.

Or what of this from the Baltimore Evening Sun of June 29, 1925, regarding the Scopes trial:

Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge....

Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life. Certainly it cannot have gone unnoticed that their membership is recruited, in the overwhelming main, from the lower orders -- that no man of any education or other human dignity belongs to them. What they propose to do, at bottom and in brief, is to make the superior man infamous -- by mere abuse if it is sufficient, and if it is not, then by law....

The popularity of Fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex....But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.

Politics and the fine arts repeat the story. The issues that the former throw up are often so complex that, in the present state of human knowledge, they must remain impenetrable, even to the most enlightened men. How much easier to follow a mountebank with a shibboleth -- a Coolidge, a Wilson or a Roosevelt!

What all this amounts to is that the human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually antagonistic classes, almost two genera -- a small minority that plays with ideas and is capable of taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed against them, and against all who have traffic with them. The intellectual heritage of the race belongs to the minority, and to the minority only. The majority has no more to do with it than it has to do with ecclesiastic politics on Mars. In so far as that heritage is apprehended, it is viewed with enmity. But in the main it is not apprehended at all.

What is more disqualifying here from today's "polite" society, the contempt for religion or the unabashed illiberal elitism?  And did the greater acceptance accorded the latter 75 years ago explain why Mencken was accorded such latitude in dispensing the former in the pages of mainstream newspapers and magazines?  Interesting questions, I suppose, for someone better versed than I in American cultural and intellectual history. 

How Many Universities? Part 2 (Wolff)

Has Australian Education minister Julie Bishop been reading this blog? If so, she needs to read it more carefully. It has been reported in the THES (p. 11 of the print edition, August 18th) that she has argued recently that Australia needs only 12 universities, rather than its current 37. But with a population of about 20 million, Australia clearly needs 20 universities.

Bishop's argument is that Australia is spreading its resources too thinly to have the major global impact it ought to be able to achieve. Perhaps she has a point. In yet another survey of the world's leading Universities, from Newsweek, the highest placed Australian University is ANU, at 38, although there are, I think, 8 in the top 100.

Electrolux et Veritas (Edmundson)

If you happen to hear a "giant sucking sound," it could be emanating from the book-readin' contest (US News, Aug. 20) going on now between the President and his kabuki-demon brain, Karl Rove.  The tally so far is 60 books (estimated to amount to 27,000 pages) for the President to Rove's mere fifty.  The pages are flying but, why all the hifalutin'?  There is speculation that the White House is worried that the incumbent may be perceived as lacking the gravitas his office requires.  But is he not revered by the American public as an honest-to-gosh authentic backwoodsman, like Honest Abe?  Rove may figure that this cover is about to blow, due in part to exchanges like the following, from yesterday afternoon's hasty news conference:

QUESTION: And would you campaign against Senator Joe Lieberman, who's a Republican [sic] candidate (OFF-MIKE)?

BUSH: I'm going to stay out of Connecticut.

(LAUGHTER)

QUESTION: Mr. President, you were born there.

Oooowhh. (Colleged there too.)  Only a selection from the President's reading list appears in US News.  Biographies of baseball stars and other power figures are well represented: what, one can only wonder, was left out?  Rumors that Rove has been disqualified for counting fifty re-thumbings of The Concept of the Political as fifty books cannot be confirmed. 

Isn't this all PR, the product of anxiety that Bush, the 43d, may not make crack the US News top-100 presidencies?  White House spokesman Tony Snow says, No.

He's not a legacy guy.  It's not, "I've got to get this bill passed because it's important to my legacy."  He takes a longer view of things.

You know, not legacy, but longer-term stuff.  Do the reading.  But, lest his base get the idea that W. is going panty-waist on them, a "top insider" revealed the following to US News (Aug. 20: "Animal House in the West Wing"):

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

Things can't get much L'Etranger than that.

Was There Really a UK Terror Plot? (Leiter)

MOVING TO THE FRONT from Aug. 16:  see Update.

==================================

A former British Ambassador is skeptical:

I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.

So this, I believe, is the true story.

None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.

In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.

What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.

Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.

The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.

We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.

Comments are open for anyone who has more information that bears on the doubts raised here.  No anonymous postings.  As I am rather busy the next couple of days, comments that may take awhile to be approved.  Please be patient and post only once.

UPDATE:  This story from today's New York Times suggests Mr. Murray's skepticism was not entirely off the mark (it may yet turn out not to be off the mark at all):

Warning that Britain faced a “deadly” and “enduring” threat from terrorism, British authorities announced today that 11 of 23 people held in connection with a suspected plot to blow up America-bound planes would be formally charged with offenses that included planning to bomb the airliners and conspiracy to commit murder....

 

The decision to press formal charges came after days of growing public skepticism about the extent of the plot that the authorities announced on Aug. 10. At the time, the police warned that the purported conspirators had planned to commit mass murder on what one officer called an “unimaginable scale.”

On that day, the police rounded up most of the suspects in early morning raids, saying they had thwarted a plot to use liquid explosives to bomb airliners flying to the United States from London. At that time, investigators said that up to 10 airplanes might have been attacked.

Ms Hemming [the British prosecutor] said eight of the 11 suspects charged today were accused of conspiracy to commit murder and an offense under new counterterrorism laws of “preparing acts of terrorism.” The charges accused them of planning “to smuggle the component parts of improvised explosive devices onto aircraft and assemble and detonate them on board.”

The three other suspects were charged with lesser offenses under counterterrorism legislation dating to 2000, Ms Hemming said.

The nature