Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

German election results are encouraging

A full breakdown here:  the Greens and the Social Democrats both saw significant increases in their share of the vote, while the crypto-fascist AfD lost ground.  Some of the gains for the Greens probably came from losses for The Left, the democratic socialist party.   The Greens are not as progressive, but the Greens, thanks to their electoral gains, will have more impact this time around than either they or The Left had in the previous parliament.  Or so it looks to me, an outsider to German politics!  (Merkel's Christian Democrats are somewhat more conservative than the Social Democrats, but one should not look at German politics through an American lens:  most Christian Democrrats wouldn't be welcome in today's Republican Party in the U.S.)

What if the earth was cut in half?

I'm sure many readers have been worrying about this; remarkably, there's a site with an answer.

A. Philip Randolph and Vernon Jordan: an anecdote

A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979) was the great civil and labor rights leader of the last century, whom I've occasionally mentioned here before.  When I was a high school student, my father had given me a biography of Randolph by Jervis Anderson, which made a profound impression on me at the time:  this was a great man.  Randolph had organized, in the face of many obstacles, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the first half of the last century, a union that represented the overwhelmingly Black porters who tended to passengers on interstate trains (when trains were still the primary form of long distance transport).  During WWII, Randolph forced FDR to outlaw racial discrimination in the defense industries; after WWII, Randolph forced Truman to integrate the military.  He and Bayard Rustin, another great figure of the last century, organized the 1963 March on Washington, at which  Martin Luther King, Jr. made his famous "I have a dream" speech.  Randolph, like Rustin, always emphasized the intersection of labor and civil rights, a view that MLK came around too in the years proceeding his assassination. 

The philistinism of the philosophers

From an essay by philosopher Justin Smith (Paris VII):

The political philosopher Jake McNulty reminded me recently of a wonderful observation of Adorno’s: that it was not the artists with firm political convictions expressed through their art, such as Bertolt Brecht, who ended up truly revolutionizing their historical moment, but those such as Samuel Beckett, whose work is infinitely ambiguous, non-committal, and open to endless interpretation. The one gave us Tin Pan Alley retrofitted with revolutionary slogans, the other gave us his own sort of revolution. One fears that the closest thing we have to intellectuals today are so disengaged from even the ideal of an avant-garde that they know only how to scan a work for its manifest content, and thus today’s descendants of Brecht are deemed good because they are “on message”, while today’s descendants of Beckett, if there were any, would be deemed irresponsible for failing to state explicitly enough their commitment to antiracism.

"The Need for Socially Distanced Citizens"

Philosopher Robert Talisse (Vanderbilt) comments.

Classical violinist comes to the defense of Hendrix

God bless him.

Political orientation, science denial, and COVID vaccinations

Philosopher Adrian Bardon (Wake Forest) comments.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on the "1619 Project" and the muted professional response to it

We covered the response of historians to the 1619 Project extensively here--most of it occurring on the World Socialist Website, one of the few venues willing to seek out distinguished historians for comment.  The "Project" and its reception is the subject of this instructive essay by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz; some excerpts:

I began feeling uneasy a few minutes into reading the lead essay, by the project’s chief contributor, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, and then I read a key paragraph so fallacious and dogmatic that it hit me between the eyes. With a tone of absolute assurance, flagging the matter as crucial, the essay informed readers of what it called a „fact“ – a fact „conveniently left out of our founding mythology“ – specifically that „one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence“ from Britain „was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.“  I instantly wondered how anyone even lightly informed about the history of either slavery or the American Revolution , could write that sentence….

"Democrats Sick Of Being Blamed For Cowardice On Issues They Actually Just Don’t Care About"

The Onion, of course:

“I’ve had it with being labeled spineless simply because, at the end of the day, I really don’t give a shit whether we tax the rich to help poor families or hungry children or whatever,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), stressing that his complete lack of interest in passing tough regulations for the financial services industry, supporting a Green New Deal, and ending the War on Terror hardly meant he was weak-willed or timid. “That’s so unfair. If these were issues Democrats truly cared about, then we’d fight the Republicans tooth and nail on them. We’d even have the guts to risk the lucrative relationships we’ve formed with powerful corporations, defense contractors, and billionaire donors. But for something like an eviction moratorium, Medicare for all, or a fracking ban? No fucking way.”

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

After a decade of litigation, appeals court orders reinstatement of transgender professor who was victim of discrimination in tenure decision

The right outcome, but it sure took a long time!

The prudent wing of the ruling class behaving badly...

...or behaving, in any event, like the ruling class.  Greenwald rightly lambasts "the normalization of maskless elites attended to by faceless servants."

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Peter Boghossian's resignation from Portland State University

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 9--UPDATED WITH SOME MORE INFORMATION

Various readers sent me this letter from Professor Boghossian describing his alleged reasons for resigning.  If, in fact, he was treated in the ways described, that is pretty outrageous, but it would be good to have independent confirmation from another source.  (He has been an assistant professor since 2014, which is a rather long time at that rank, so it would be good to know what the story is with that as well.)  Some of the "illiberal" campus environment is obviously real at many places, although rarely to the extent he describes.   On the other hand, a professor at Portland State revealed in the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education that she literally has no idea what academic freedom is, so maybe things really are that bad there?

UPDATE (9/14/21):  A faculty member at Portland State writes with some useful context and perspective:

Peter was not a tenure-line faculty at PSU. PSU has an unusual status for non- t-t faculty that they can apply for the same titles as tenure-line faculty. I believe it was 2014 that he got that title (after having been an Instructor for I believe six years before that), but because he is not on the tenure track, he could have kept it indefinitely. In fact, he did decide to apply for promotion to "Associate Professor" last year, but was denied.

On mention of the N-word in a pedagogical context

Sensible analysis, as usual, from law professor Randall Kennedy (Harvard); an excerpt:

I am skeptical of some of the claims of hurt. I suspect that some of them are the product of learned strategic ripostes. It is now well known that in certain settings, particularly those that strive to be socially enlightened (like colleges and universities), you can effectively challenge speech to which you object by claiming not only that it is socially abhorrent (racist, sexist, transphobic, etc., etc., etc.) but that it makes you feel insulted, offended, or endangered.

"Against Effective Altruism"

Philosopher Alice Crary (New School/Oxford) comments. What Professor Crary calls "the institutional critique" is the really decisive one it seems to me; here is her useful summary of it:

This critique attacks effective altruists for operating with a damagingly narrow interpretation of the class of things that are assessable as right or wrong. It targets effective altruists’ tendency to focus on single actions and their proximate consequences and, more specifically, on simple interventions that reduce suffering in the short term. Advocates of the institutional critique are on the whole concerned to decry the neglect, on the part of EA, of coordinated sets of actions directed at changing social structures that reliably cause suffering. EA’s metrics are best suited to detect the short term impact of particular actions, so its tendency to discount the impact of coordinated actions can be seen as reflecting ‘measurability bias’. A leitmotif of the institutional critique of EA is that this bias is politically dangerous because it obscures the structural, political roots of global misery, thereby contributing to its reproduction by weakening existing political mechanisms for positive social change

9/11 Anniversary

It's 48 years since the events in Chile, and 20 years since the events in America.  I have vivid memories of the latter, none of the former.  I'll just post links to what I wrote on the 5th anniversary in 2006:  a personal recollection of that day which readers too young to remember the events may find interesting (I was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin on 9/11/2001); and some reflections on the catastrophic political and cultural fallout from the crimes of 9/11.  It's perhaps a good day to remember that George W. Bush was a far worse President than the otherwise appalling Donald Trump:  he inflicted death and suffering on millions and millions of people because of the criminal war of aggression against Iraq, which Bush's "bestiary of madmen" (as I used to call them) used 9/11 to justify.

Philosopher Peter Singer to donate all of $1 million prize to charities

This, of course, is what he should do, given his ideas and arguments, so kudos to him.  If he were not a proponent of "effective [i.e., measurable in the short-term] altruism," he might choose different beneficiaries for the money, but that's a separate debate.  

United States sues Texas, seeking an injunction of the anti-abortion legislation

A good move. 

Is radical political action like brain surgery or a landslide?

Robert Paul Wolff comments; an excerpt:

Let me begin with the distinction, which I am sure I have several times drawn before on this blog, between two very different images of progressive or transformative political action: brain surgery and a landslide. If you think that radical political action is like brain surgery, then you will suppose that it is a precise and delicate matter in which it is desperately important to perform the operation in precisely the correct manner – one wrong move can leave the patient paralyzed or, worse still, dead. For the past 200 years, a good deal of debate on the left seems to have been motivated by this image of political action. I saw this up close at the University of Massachusetts almost 50 years ago when five young Marxist economists were hired simultaneously into tenured positions in the economics department and almost immediately split into three factions.

Just when you thought the humanities were safe from postmodernism...

...along come the physicists to inform us there is no objective reality:

Nobel Prize-winner Eugene Wigner described a thought experiment in 1961 that highlighted an uncommon paradox of quantum mechanics. Specifically, it reveals the strangeness of the universe when two observers, like Wigner and his friend, observe two distinct realities....

In 2020, physicists realized that recent quantum technology advances had made it possible to create Wigner's Friend test in a real-world experiment. In essence, we can create different realities, and compare them in a lab to see if they can be reconciled, or cohere, in one system. And researcher Massimiliano Proietti of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, along with a handful of researchers, said they performed this long-awaited experiment for the first time: Creating distinct realities, compare-and-contrasting them, and discovering that they are, in fact, irreconcilable.

What did authoritarian rulers study at university?

Philosopher Paul Raymont took a look; law and engineering were popular, but there were a few who studied philosophy.

A PGR for classical pianists?

That's sort of what this is:  they asked 100 current leading pianists to name "the greatest" of "all time" (really meaning the last century or so).  There were a couple I was not familiar with, but what also makes it worth visitnig is that they  include video clips of each of the pianists on their "top 20" list.

The Texas assault on reproductive freedom, and the complicity of the super-legislature known as the Supreme Court

This is a good explanation by constitutional law expert Michael Dorf (Cornell) of how pernicious SCOTUS's latest move is.  This is a classic case of the super-legislature--in this case, five conservative Catholics--doing their best to undermine a right they do not support, a half-century of precedent be damned.  (The right was created by an earlier super-legislature, fortunately, a more progressive one, and also one that didn't need to eviscerate precedent to do so.)

On "cancel culture" and online mobs

A balanced assessment, related to a point we have made before:  the "sanctions" are often wildly disproportionate to the offenses.  An excerpt:

[T]he modern online public sphere, a place of rapid conclusions, rigid ideological prisms, and arguments of 280 characters, favors neither nuance nor ambiguity. Yet the values of that online sphere have come to dominate many American cultural institutions: universities, newspapers, foundations, museums. Heeding public demands for rapid retribution, they sometimes impose the equivalent of lifetime scarlet letters on people who have not been accused of anything remotely resembling a crime....

The torrential rains and flooding in NYC and surrounding areas

Simply wild video shots of what went on over the last 12-18 hours.

Bertrand Russell's Nobel Prize acceptance speech: on four important human desires

I came across this recently (given how much of it resonates with Nietzsche, one marvels at Russell's infamous hostility towards Nietzsche).  An excerpt:

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths....

[M]an differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. When the Arabs, who had been used to living sparingly on a few dates, acquired the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire, and dwelt in palaces of almost unbelievable luxury, they did not, on that account, become inactive. Hunger could no longer be a motive, for Greek slaves supplied them with exquisite viands at the slightest nod. But other desires kept them active: four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power....

Hope for America? Younger people are abandoning religion

The key facts (you can skip the author's "analysis," which obviously reflects his bias):  

Since 1988, the General Social Survey has been asking Americans of different ages what they believe about God. For decades, the answer did not change much. Around 70 percent of members of the Silent Generation said that they “know God really exists” and “have no doubts about it.” That same sentiment was shared by about 63 percent of baby boomers and Generation Xers.

"The whole country is the Reichstag"

A bracing essay from Adolph Reed, Jr., who really is our most astute socio-economic critic these days; a couple of excerpts, below, but I encourage folks to read it all.

The right-wing political alliance anchored by the Republican party and Trumpism coheres around a single concrete objective—taking absolute power in the U.S. as soon and as definitively as possible....

It wasn’t such a big step from Rick Santelli’s faux populist 2009 meltdown calling, from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, of all places, for a Tea Party rising to the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. McConnell’s openly declared strategy of stalemating Democratic initiatives of whatever sort made clear that the Republicans have no commitment to democratic government; every move they made was directed, consciously or not, toward takeover via putsch or putsch dressed up as election. The outcome of the 2000 presidential election was an early augury, as the George W. Bush campaign strongarmed a victory by means of actively partisan intervention by Katherine Harris, the Florida Secretary of State, mobilization of corporate goons to storm the Miami-Dade recount, and turning to a reactionary bloc of Supreme Court Justices to place a fig leaf of legitimacy onto theft of the election....

Some of the reactionary, authoritarian tendencies that condensed around Trump and Trumpism have been festering and growing in American politics at least since the end of World War II. First Barry Goldwater, then Ronald Reagan brought them out of the shadowy underworld populated by such groups as the John Birch Society, the World Anti-Communist League, various McCarthyite tendencies, Klansmen and other white supremacists, America Firsters, ultra-reactionary groups with ties to shadowy international entities like Operation Condor that has specialized in state-centered terror and death squads in Latin America and its equivalent in other regions, Christian Nationalists, anti-Semites and Islamophobes....  They’ve been joined in the Trump years by a cornucopia of more or less organized thugs, militant racists and misogynists, open fascists, reactionary libertarians, delusional conspiracists, damaged true believers, and utterly venal grifters—a category that cuts across all the others—and they’re bankrolled by the American equivalent of German Junkers....

There is no such thing as “right-wing populism;” it is an invention of bourgeois propagandists in the punditry and academy. Its principal intent is, on the domestic front, to discredit the left by association with a putatively dangerous irrationalism, e.g., by equating Sanders and Trump....

Martha Nussbaum's amicus brief in New York case in support of habeas corpus petition of elephant

Here.

Virtue signalling and public morality

Philosopher Anthony Appiah (NYU) and others discuss at IAITV.

Who is vaccinated against COVID and who is not?

Interesting poll (based on self-reports, however) of the demographic breakdown of those who say they have been vaccinated against COVID:

• Whites: 66 percent
• Blacks: 76 percent
• Latinos: 71 percent
• Urban residents: 79 percent
• Suburban residents: 67 percent
• Rural residents: 52 percent
• White evangelicals: 59 percent
• Democrats: 88 percent
• Independents: 60 percent
• Republicans: 55 percent
• Republicans who support Trump more than party: 46 percent
• Republicans who support party more than Trump: 62 percent
• Democratic Sanders-Warren voters: 88 percent
• Democratic Biden voters: 87 percent
• Biden voters in 2020 general election: 91 percent
• Trump voters in 2020 general election: 50 percent
• White non-college grads: 60 percent
• White college grads: 80 percent

 

Obama's birthday bash

Taibbi doesn't know much, but he can be amusingly scathing; to wit:

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides....

Wicked restaurant review (and avoid the Polo Lounge at the Dorchester Hotel!)

This one is a gem, and it's funny too.

ADDENDUM:  Philosopher Colin Macleod calls to my attention another amusingly blistering restaurant review!

Nina Turner did well among working-class Black voters in Cleveland and environs...

...which, according to this genius at Jacobin, shows that a progressive candidate can do well with working-class Black voters.  Not once does the author mention that Turner is Black, a rather large confounding variable.  These folks should read Achen and Bartels, Democracy for Realists.  As long as the Democratic party traffics in mindless identity politics, the economic identity that matters most will not become a locus for political mobilization.

Honesty on social media?

Philosopher Christian Miller (Wake Forest) comments.

The end of California?

Bacon may soon be unavailable in the state.

In Memoriam: Bob Moses (1935-2021)

One of the great figures of the Civil Rights movement, a man of extraordinary courage and moral clarity, Moses had studied philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student, before more pressing matters commanded his attention.   The NYT obituary is here.  Philosopher Michael Wedin (emeritus, UC Davis), who wrote me last night about his passing, kindly gave permission to share his remembrance:

Just to let you know that Bob Moses has died. It was the greatest privilege of my life to work with him in the summer of 1964 in Mississippi. The news has hit me hard, somehow I expected him to live forever. In the spring of 1964 we organized the "West Coast Civil Rights Conference" at Stanford -- sole purposes were to raise money for and recruit volunteers for the Mississippi summer project. We got MLK to keynote the thing and convinced Bob to come out, which he did by car with four of his field workers. King was the big name but the real draw was Bob Moses. Not prone to King's style of elevated rhetoric, Bob really just held a conversation with the audience. But it was riveting--five hundred in the auditorium and you could hear a pin drop. Did not talk much philosophy with him, but he did say he'd been working on Wittgenstein before he left Harvard for Mississippi. There we were involved in getting a Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation selected to challenge the regular group and the national meeting. Lost track of him after Mississippi but years later was informed by Hilary Putnam that he'd returned to Harvard to complete his Ph. D. and that Quine has given him all of his correspondence with Carnap. Won't even besgin to talk about his extraordinary work in the south.

The actual left in America has always supported robust civil liberties...

...unlike the New Infantilist left in the universities, on social media today, and even in some of the leftist media.  This piece is a useful reminder; an excerpt:

The founders of Dissent were fiercely anticommunist, yet you’ll find them repeatedly, heatedly, defending the free speech rights of Stalinists.

I’ll cite just one example. In an article about the state of liberalism in 1955, Irving Howe criticized Americans for Democratic Action for passing a resolution that supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals.” Why would Howe have objected to this? He objected because the ADA had changed the wording of a previous draft, which supported “the right to advocate unpopular political proposals, including communist ideas.” They’d taken out “including communist ideas.” In other words, he was attacking them for the failure to explicitly affirm the free speech rights of communists.

The early editors of Dissent, defending the free expression rights of a political group they loathed and feared, were in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg, who said, “Freedom is always and exclusively the freedom of the one who thinks differently . . . all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political life depends on it"....

Contemporary skepticism about the idea of free expression seems to rest on two pillars.

 

Adolph Reed on Robin DiAngelo and the political economy of "race" politics

Amusing interview; an excerpt:

Reed:  One of the interesting things I think that we’ve experienced over the last half century or so, and our reasons for this too and get into maybe, or maybe not maybe later, that racism as a category has expanded. The currency of what counts as racism has inflated like the Deutschmark in the late 1920s. So anything can be racist, and racism becomes the sole explanation, or sole explanatory category, for making sense of any inequality or seemingly inappropriate or unjustifiable inequality that involves black people or other non whites in any way....

Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality and inequality, even those inequalities that appear or the manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism… It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it....

The inflation of trauma

A former student, Mark Engleson, who is autistic, writes:

I recently got embroiled in a bit of go-round on Twitter (do not recommend). The background: the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts uses shock collars on autistic children to make them more compliant. The FDA tried to ban this use of the device, and a federal court threw it out.

On Twitter, someone posted a poll asking fellow autistics how traumatized they were by the knowledge that this is happening. I objected that this is a misunderstanding of trauma: the trauma here is clearly the children being shocked, not other people hearing about it. 

The problem with this language and this line of thought is that some went so far as to say that the problem with this whole situation is how it makes other autistics feel. Now, this situation disturbs me, but that's not why it's wrong: it's wrong because they're using shock collars on children. My feelings have nothing to do with it; if no one knew this was going on, it would still be horrific.

Alex Berenson, the world's dumbest journalist, redux

A good overview of the serial misinformation emanating from this malevolent buffoon, whom we've noted before.   Karl Kraus:  "No ideas the ability to express them:  that's a journalist!"

"The Edge of Democracy"

I recommend this Netflix documentary about the assault on democracy in the wake of Lula's social democratic revolution in Brazil, an assault that led to the rise of the fascist Bolsonaro.  I've been to Brazil several times, and have many academic friends there, so have followed these matters for awhile.  This documentary taught me a lot more.

Evanston public school teacher sues school district for race discrimination based on its curriculum and "anti-racist" [sic] training

A friend who is a Chicago lawyer sent me the complaint. Evanston is the town just north of Chicago, where Northwestern University is located.  The "training" and "teaching materials" described in this complaint are rather insane, and consistently confuse race with class in a way that will miseducate the students.  It is less clear to me how precisely the plaintiff has been injured, although the "hostile environment" claim may be the strongest.  It will be interesting to see what the courts do with this.

(As an aside:  while very little of the insane materials and training described in the complaint have anything to do with Critical Race Theory [CRT] as it evolved in Amercian law schools in the 1980s and 1990s, the connection to the hucksters Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi is clearer.  I'll say a bit more about CRT next week.)

Right-wing cancel culture watch: Scientific American removes pro-Palestinian opinion piece...

...by doctors lamenting the medical crisis wrought by the most recent Israeli bombardment of Gaza.  Suppression of speech critical of Israel and in support of the Palestinians has been the one consistent thread in "cancel culture" for decades now (recall Steven Salaita, Norman Finkelstein, etc.).  Scientific American has disgraced itself.

(Thanks to Fábio Shecaira for the pointer.)

The indictment of Trump Org CFO is not about "fringe benefits," but criminal "fraud"

An illuminating breakdown of how serious the allegations are by tax expert Daniel Shaviro (NYU).

Happy July 4th to my American readers!

Celebrate freedom, burn the flag.

The U.S. is a "young," not an "old," democracy

Apartheid was only dismantled in the U.S. a half-century ago, after all:

We sometimes brag that we are the world’s oldest democracy, and that is true enough in a technical sense. But if you use a more modern definition of democracy, one that includes voting rights for women and minorities as a prerequisite, then we are one of the world’s younger democracies.

“For me, as a democracy scholar, it’s ridiculous to say America is the oldest democracy in the world,” Lindberg said. “The U.S. did not become a democracy until at least after the civil rights movement in the ’60s. In that sense, it’s kind of a new democracy, like Portugal or Spain"....

Amartya Sen on India and the British Empire...

...in The Guardian.

Mari Mikkola (Amsterdam) talks about hate speech and pornography...

...at the Brain in a Vat podcast.

"Gender is not a spectrum"

Philosopher Rebecca Reilly-Cooper (Warwick) comments.

Female law student in Scotland "investigated" by her university but then cleared...

...for (you probably guessed) expressing views about women.

(Thanks to Cora Diamond for the pointer.)