Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

"In the shadow of Auschwitz"

Philosopher Jason Stanley comments.

Conscientious objection to providing medical services?

Philosopher Jerry Dworkin discusses.

Historian specializing in white supremacy responds to critiques of the NYT 1619 Project

Alex Lichtenstein (Indiana), the current editor of the American Historical Review, has penned a response, of sorts, to the various critiques of the 1619 Project.   Professor Lichtenstein's "work centers on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in societies shaped by white supremacy," which may explain his embarrassing sneering throughout at the Marxist interpretation of history in which class trumps race.  But putting that to one side, even Professor Lichtenstein admits:  " Frankly, I wish the AHR had published these interviews, and I hope they get wide circulation. Not for the critique of the 1619 Project itself, but because collectively they insist on the significance of historical context, the careful weighing of evidence, the necessity of understanding change over time, and the potential dangers of reductionism. I would urge anyone to read them."   His defense of the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones is a bit feeble, as anyone who compares his selective recounting (dare one say "spin"?) of the interviews with the actual interviews will see.   (Here, e.g., are the interviews with Oakes, McPherson, and Wood).   The one useful takeaway is that, at least according to Professor Lichtenstein, the teaching materials prepared by the NYT are not as one-sided and inaccurate as Hannah-Jones's lead essay.

Jimmy Swaggart and Mark Alfano: when the morally self-righteous are wicked

Philosopher Daniel Kaufman (Missouri State) comments.

Hillary Clinton really is an appalling shill for the prudent wing of the ruling class...

...as this makes clear.

ADDENDUM:  Some useful context.

And now: Rousseau on Twitter...

...with help from politcal theorist Boris Litvin (Stetson).

UPDATE:  And a skeptical response from a Rousseau scholar on Twitter.

Malik on Scruton...

...at The Guardian.  Of the various criticisms of Scruton, this seems to me the most measured and strongest version I've seen in the popular media.  (Here's an unmeasured critical comment:  a number of years ago, I picked up the new edition of Scruton's purported critique of "new left" thinkers.  It was sophomoric, almost beyond belief in how silly it was.   The contrast with his work in aesthetics was stunning.   Obviously, his political prejudices had a bad effect on his philosophical judgment.)

(Thanks to Phil Gasper for calling the Malik piece to my attention.)

Historian Clayborne Carson (Stanford) interviewed about the NYT 1619 Project and what is called the "Civil Rights Movement"

Here; an excerpt:

Q.  100 years after the Civil War this mass movement of very oppressed people takes place in the American South and then, as you said, it also grips the big cities. Why does it happen when it happens? Why in the 1960s?

A. ...Among the most important changes leading to the articulation of rights was the spread of literacy. As people became more literate it became harder to dominate them. Literacy in the African American tradition, from Frederick Douglass learning to read to Malcolm X being in jail and learning to read the dictionary—literacy is itself a freedom. One of the commonalities of oppressed people is that they get all of their information through people who dominate them.

For most of human history people never got more than 20 miles from where they were born. They knew very little of the world. There was no way of overcoming that until you could get to the point where you could read. That was often purposeful. Dominant people wanted to control information. You don’t want people working for you to know that they can walk 20 miles and find better conditions. Of course, you can also mystify them by religion and say, there’s this sacred book. You can’t read it, but I can interpret if for you, and tell you what your role in society is. So, literacy is huge.

A report from Australia about the bushfires ravaging the country

Michael Matthews, an Australian in Sydney and editor of the newsletter of The Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and Science Teaching, shares a personal account on p. 3 here.   (Thanks to Michael Ruse for the pointer.)

Speaking of people defamed by the media, let's not forget the horrendous treatment of Yale PhD student Sarah Braasch

We've noted before the raw deal Ms. Braasch got in the media in the misnamed "Napping while Black" story.  Particularly striking is that her exoneration by Yale from the charges of racially motivated harassment received almost no media coverage, even though the whole alleged story was supposed to be about racially motivated harassment and calling of the police.  As law professor Michael Simkovic put it, in writing about the Lessig defamation lawsuit against the NYT:

[T]he cartoonish fictionalized version of reality that some newspapers attempt to pass off as critical information is in reality little more than a sadistic form of entertainment--character assassination as sport. Worse than entertainment which acknowledges that it is fictional, exaggerated "news" uses real people as its sensationalized villains and callously hurts them in the process.

That is exactly what happened to Ms. Braasch.

Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig sues NYT for defamation

Good for him.   Given the terrible state of American law--which is more favorable to defamers than any other legal jurisdiction in a democratic society--he will have an uphill battle.

This sums up the latest melodrama involving the social parasites known as "the Royal Family"

Pretty funny too.

Another entry for the Black Book of capitalism...

...rising deaths by suicide and substance abuse in the working class.   As this account appears in the NYT, no discussion of actual causes and effects is permitted, thus we find this:

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

But that's because "both political parties" have been operating in the shadow of the Reagan Revolution from the neoliberal right that began in 1980, and that has gradually destroyed the FDR Presidency (and its consensus shared by both parties) that lasted from 1933 until 1980.  In 2016, we had the first real challenge to the neoliberal consensus in Bernie Sanders's candidacy for the Presidential nomination.  The future of this benighted country will depend upon whether Reagan's long reign is finally brought to an end.

Trump as symptom

This is very apt, from the platform of the Socialist Equality Party:

Though his bourgeois opponents portray him as a monster risen from hell, Trump—whose wealth is derived from decades of fraud in the financial, real estate, casino gambling and entertainment industries—is far better understood as the personification of the parasitism of the American ruling class and the criminality that pervades the operations of the entire system.

Stoicism as ideology

It makes its way to Silicon Valley.

(Thanks to David Zimmerman for the pointer.)

Living without smart phones

Students (prompted by their philosophy professor) write about their experience, and it's revealing.

(Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

Sarah Braasch v. Yale, redux

Sarah Brasch is the Yale philosophy PhD student who was the victim of a media mobbing after being framed as a "racist."  In order to clear her name, Ms. Braasch is trying to force Yale to release the Yale police recording of what actually transpired that evening; Yale, inexplicably and outrageously, is refusing.   Here is the brief by Ms. Braasch's lawyers in support of her FOIA request:

Download 2020.01.03 Braasch Post Hearing Brief F

You can contribute to help Ms. Braasch with her growing legal expenses here.  Remember, she is up against Yale University!

 

Another historian interviewed about the 1619 Project: Richard Carwardine (Oxford)

Here.  An excerpt:

I understand where this [1619] Project is coming from, politically and culturally. Of course, the economic well-being of the United States and the colonies that preceded it was constructed for over two-and-a-half centuries on the labor and sufferings of slaves; of course, like all entrenched wielders of power, the white political elite resisted efforts to yield up its privileges. But the idea that the 1619 Project’s lead essay is a rounded history of America—with relations between the races so stark and unyielding—I find quite shocking. I am troubled that this is designed to make its way into classrooms as the true story of the United States, because, as I say, it is so partial. It is also wrong in some fundamentals.

I’m all for recovering and celebrating the history of those whose voices have been historically muted and I certainly understand the concern of historians in recent times, black and white, that the black contribution to the United States has not been fully recognized. But the idea that the central, fundamental story of the United States is one of white racism and that black protest and rejection of white superiority has been the essential, indispensable driving force for change—which I take to be the central message of that lead essay—seems to me to be a preposterous and one-dimensional reading of the American past.

The decline of white Christianity in America

Interesting, and hopeful, especially since the biggest declines appear to be in the most conservative Christian sects; an excerpt:

I noted that the percentage of white Christians in the general population had dropped from 53 percent to 47 percent between 2010 and 2014 alone. Now, at the end of the decade, only 42 percent of Americans identify as white and Christian, representing a drop of 11 percentage points....

In addition to white American Christianity crossing the majority-minority threshold, the last decade also saw a particularly significant decline within one subgroup: white evangelicals. While the ranks of white mainline Protestants and white Catholics have been shrinking for decades, white evangelical Protestants had seemed immune to the forces eroding membership among other white Christian groups.

But since 2010, the number of white evangelical Protestants has dropped from 21 percent of the population to 15 percent. While white evangelical Protestants have enjoyed an outsized public presence over the last four years because of their predominance in President Donald Trump’s unshakeable base, it is notable that today they are actually roughly the same size as their white mainline Protestant cousins (15 percent vs. 16 percent, respectively).

Is this really the feminist interpretation of this story?

The NYT ran this very sad and moving story the other day:  a couple married a half-century, the husband devoted to his wife, even as Alzheimer's robs her of her sense of self and knowledge of her own family; he refuses help from his adult daughters, who are the main source for the story; finally, diagnosed (unbeknowst to his daughters) with metastatic cancers, the husband kills his wife and then himself.   The story provoked this reaction from Twitter's resident feminist philosopher.   I leave it for readers to ponder (and they might find interesting some of the Twitter pushback here from philosophers Michael Ostuka [LSE] and Lisa Shapiro [Simon Fraser], among others).

(Thanks to several readers who shared both the original story and this striking Twitter response.)

UPDATE:   From a philosopher elsewhere:  "Well, I guess one could argue both sides of the case, but interpreting the story in terms  of himpathy does not seem especially enriching.  If all one has is a hammer...."

A grim forecast for the UK under the Tories

Here.  The threat in England is actually worse than than in the US under Trump:  without a federal system, the check on centralized power is much less (contrast the U.S., where more than 100 million people live in solidly Democratic, anti-Trump states, with all branches of state government aligned against the Trump agenda); the universities (and even much of the major media) are still largely hostage to the public purse, and thus the malign plans of Tory bureaucrats; and the "unwritten Constitution" (combined with the supremacy of parliament in constituitional matters) depends far-too-heavily on informal norms of restraint by the legislative and executive branches which will be non-existent under Boris Johnson's regime.  

Bad times.

(Thanks to S. Wallerstein for the pointer.)

Non-sequitur watch, political science edition

Two British political scientists writing in the NYT about the "realignment" of British voters, in particular, the ability of the Tories to carry traditonal Labour strongholds in northern and central England:

Why is this happening? The popular answer on the left is that this is about economic insecurity, economic globalization and imports from China. But when you zoom in to look not just at areas but individual voters, attitudes toward immigration are in fact the strongest predictor of support for Brexit.

Britons’ anxieties about the pace and scale of immigration, something that Mr. Johnson pledged to restrict, lie at the heart of Britain’s political realignment; many voters are now putting their cultural preferences ahead of their once-tribal party political identities.

But why do voters have these attitudes towards immigration?  Are they just "brute"?  Or could they be a misguided response to economic insecurity and globalization?   The question doesn't appear to occur to the authors.

An entry for the Black Book of Capitalism

Here.  (Some background.)

(Thanks to Justin Schwartz for the pointer.)

Buffalo philosopher Newton Garver and "loyalty oaths"

I've been doing some research on the constitutional fate of the "loyalty oaths" in the various states (prompted by this), and discovered that longtime University at Buffalo philosophy faculty member Newton Garver was one of those who challenged, successfully, the constitutionality of New York's "loyalty oath" in a decision that paved the way for the California Supreme Court to find California's version also unconstitutional later the same year (1967).

Not even Karl Kraus could have imagined James Bennet, the NYT editorial page editor

This account is horrifying.  If the quotes are accurate, the man is both illiterate and an imbecile.  Here he is commenting on Brett Stephens, the worst NYT op-ed writer since Abe "I'm writing as bad as I can" Rosenthal:   "I just think he’s an exceptional writer and thinker.”   Only someone not familiar with writing or thinking could say this.

Historian Gordon Wood's response to the NYT's failure to take criticisms of the 1619 Project seriously

This is well-said; an excerpt:

I have no quarrel with the idea behind the project. Demonstrating the importance of slavery in the history of our country is essential and commendable. But that necessary and worthy goal will be seriously harmed if the facts in the project turn out to be wrong and the interpretations of events are deemed to be perverse and distorted. In the long run the Project will lose its credibility, standing, and persuasiveness with the nation as a whole. I fear that it will eventually hurt the cause rather than help it. We all want justice, but not at the expense of truth.

I have spent my career studying the American Revolution and cannot accept the view 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 don’t know of any colonist who said that they wanted independence in order to preserve their slaves. No colonist expressed alarm that the mother country was out to abolish slavery in 1776....

There is no evidence in 1776 of a rising movement to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, as the 1619 Project erroneously asserts, nor is there any evidence the British government was eager to do so....

How could slavery be worth preserving for someone like John Adams, who hated slavery and owned no slaves? If anyone in the Continental Congress was responsible for the Declaration of Independence, it was Adams. And much of our countrymen now know that from seeing the film of the musical “1776.” Ignoring his and other northerners’ roles in the decision for independence can only undermine the credibility of your project with the general public....

"Violence is sometimes the answer"

Obviously correct, as even the over-hyped "Founding Fathers" of the United States realized.

Nikole Hannah-Jones and Shell Oil

Now isn't this interesting.

A military veteran returns to college (at Yale) at age 52

This is a charming essay.  (Philosopher David Charles [Yale] also makes a brief appearance.)

An interview with Adolph Reed about the NYT 1619 Project

Here; this isn't the best interview I've read with him, but it has a few good points.  An excerpt:

Q. We’ve spoken to a number of leading historians, including James McPherson, James Oakes, Gordon Wood and Victoria Bynum, and Hannah-Jones launched into a Twitter tirade against them, dismissing them as “white historians.” She is not a historian, but she is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” just like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi have been in recent years.

A. I have spent most of my adult life trying to avoid the kind of old-fashioned Stalinist conspiracy theory, but it’s getting hard. My dad used to say that in one sense ideology is the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you want to believe with what advances your material interest.

And so I understand that the people of MacArthur, for instance, think they're doing something quite different. But when they look for voices, the voices that they look for are the voices that say ultimately, “Well it's a tragedy that's hopeless. We have to atone as individuals. Do whatever you can do to confront disparity.”

I've been joking for a number of years that here at Penn the university administration has three core values: Building the endowment, already at $16 billion. Buying up as much on the real estate as they can on both sides of the Schuylkill River. And diversity. And they're genuinely committed to all three of those because they think that part of their mission is to make the ruling class look like the photo of America.

I made a reference once to Coates being an autodidact, and what I meant by that was that he did not know history, that he’s not a historian. Kendi’s book, I don’t know anyone who has actually read it.

More than five million voters supported Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016

Who are they?  Not racists, obviously (hint:  racists don't vote for Black people for President).   Heavily union members, who felt economically vulnerable, and were less supportive of affirmative action than those who voted Democratic in both 2012 and 2016, but more supportive of it than those who voted Republican in both those elections.

(Thanks to Stefan Sciaraffa for mentioning this article on Facebook.)

The ruling class in America is getting a bit nervous...

...so they take to the op-ed page of the official organ of the prudent wing of their class.

Trump's impeachable crimes in the Ukraine affair

A useful catalogue from a lawyer who worked closely with Robert Mueller during the investigation of the alleged Russia ties.   This is not a close case, and the only partisan hackery is on the pro-Trump side.

Support the "Lincoln Project"

This is an effort by some hardcore Republicans and conservatives--people with actual principles, not the fascists posing as Republicans in Congress and on Fox--to hold accountable Trump's enablers in Congress and to defeat Trump's re-election.  They explain the project here.  I've donated and I hope you will too.

Today in Trump wickedness

Making it more difficult to maintain Social Security disability benefits.

An historian eviscerates Pinker's "Enlightenment" propaganda

This is amusing, and apt.

Identity politics and power

This essay is plainly on to something; an excerpt:

What if the people who speak in the language of identity politics were to recognize that their framework was the culturally dominant one? The one that helped you get into an elite college or win a coveted internship? If you spoke that language, you were working with dollars in a world of people who earned only rupees, or some other less valuable currency.

I’m not commenting on the accuracy or worth of wokeness. I’m commenting more on its increasing dominance in...the world bounded by players like Harvard and The New York Times.

Would the way wokeness navigated the world have to change if the self-understanding was that it was powerful rather than marginalized? What would it do to, say, the way the word “oppressed” was used? Or to how we understand call-out culture? What if the people doing the calling out and the canceling are viewed as the dominant ones beating up on the weak ones? What if the woke of the world were viewed as the bullies on the playground, filling the other kids with fear, beating someone up every couple of days with a call-out or a cancel in case anyone needed a reminder of their brute strength?

Isn’t it all about power?

There are many domains where this infantile pathology called "wokeness" still has no power, fortunately, but that may be changing.

Condolences to the United Kingdom

Rather bitter election results, which will no doubt produce lots of mostly baseless attributions of blame.   My British friends should read Achen and Bartels' book Democracy for Realists, written before Trump, but they got him and his effect on Republicans exactly right, but their evidence is not limited to the United States.   Many group identities in the U.K. are now tied to Brexit, and the Tories were the party of Brexit.  The smear campaign against Corbyn surely didn't help, but I would be surprised if evidence emerges that it played much of a role in this outcome.   The supremacy of Parliament, including in constitutional matters, bodes ill for the future now that the Conservatives have a commanding majority.

ADDENDUM:  Some of the charts here are revealing:  in particular, the collapse of the UKIP vote since 2015 basically tracks the gains for the Conservatives in 2019; it's a reasonable hypothesis those voters migrated to the Tories.

 

A friendlier take on the "1619 Project"

A relatively brief (15 minutes) interview with historian Eric Foner (Columbia).  It doesn't really engage any of the doubts raised by the other historians we have noted over the last week, but it captures pretty well my own initially favorable reaction to the series until I began reading the preceding interviews.

(Thanks to Barbara Herman for the pointer.)

Biologist Jerry Coyne on Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's paper on "white empiricism"

Professor Coyne is very patient in going through this stuff.  (We encountered Professor Prescod-Weinstein once before.  You can read her demand for honoraria here.)  An excerpt from near the end of Coyne's piece:

I am growing weary, for I have dissected papers like this before—papers on white glaciology, the racism of Pilates, lattes, and pumpkins, and so on. The difference here is that Prescod-Weinstein is a working physicist with respectable accomplishments in the field. It is a sad testimony to the power of ideology, though, that her interpretation of what science is has been so severely distorted by her anti-white feminism.  Instead of arguing, as I’ve said, on moral grounds, she argues that the objectivity of science itself is in conflict with the supposed dismissal of black women’s experiences of racism, and that such an attitude is not just racist but anti-science.

In view of the paucity of black women physicists with a Ph.D. (there have been only a few dozen in history), what should we do? I agree that there may be a problem here, and my solution is, as always, twofold. First, rectify any inequality of opportunity starting at the ground—the limited opportunities afforded to minorities by living conditions and poor schooling, themselves byproducts of racism. Second, for the time being practice a form of affirmative action, realizing that diversity in the physics community is an inherent good for several reasons (providing role models to eliminate roadblocks to opportunity, for one).

"Feminism for the 1%"

This is a smart essay. 

The author of the "1619 Project," Nikole Hannah-Jones...

...is a journalist (Karl Kraus, where are you?), not even an historian, and she puts on quite a display on Twitter (e.g., announcing that as a Black person in America she doesn't have to consider historians like James McPherson "preeminent").  Most striking is her main line of defense against the criticisms we've noted the last few days:  "there is no such thing as objective history so complaints that the 1619 is an illegitimate reframing of history deny that all history is framed."   There may be no uniquely correct account of historical events, but there are certainly better and worse ones, correct and incorrect ones, and the objections are that the 1619 Project makes a number of contentious, and indeed false, claims about the history.   It's hard to believe an imbecile like this is writing for the NYT.

(Thanks to a young philosopher on the job market for calling this to my attention.  Because of the culture of open debate and tolerance for competing views in academic philosophy, this student did not want to be named.)

It appears this fellow doesn't care for Boris Johnson

Very amusing and apt:

 

Historian James Oakes (CUNY) interviewed about the NYT "1619 Project"

Another illuminating interview; an excerpt:

Q. [A] point we made in our response to the 1619 Project, is that it dovetails also with the major political thrust of the Democratic Party, identity politics. And the claim that is made, and I think it’s almost become a commonplace, is that slavery is the uniquely American “original sin.”

A. Yes. “Original sin,” that’s one of them. The other is that slavery or racism is built into the DNA of America. These are really dangerous tropes. They’re not only ahistorical, they’re actually anti-historical. The function of those tropes is to deny change over time. It goes back to those analogies. They say, “look at how terribly black people were treated under slavery. And look at the incarceration rate for black people today. It’s the same thing.” Nothing changes. There has been no industrialization. There has been no Great Migration. We’re all in the same boat we were back then. And that’s what original sin is. It’s passed down. Every single generation is born with the same original sin. And the worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?

Who knew Lutherans were into "identity politics"?

Rev. Bruce Foster, a retired minister and a longtime reader of the blog, writes:

Your collection of responses to the 1619 nonsense at the Times is very useful. Of course if you weren’t an atheist but rather a member of a progressive Protestant church body all these arguments would be old hat to you. For at least five years my church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has constantly stressed that all white people are racists, racism is the original sin of the USA and that White Privilege (always capitalized) must be confessed. These are not items up for debate or even discussion. They are to be repeated with all the passion and conviction that once was used for the Nicene Creed.  Yes, there are some people who try to protest, but if they are lay people they are never listened to, and if they are pastors and annoy their bishops enough their next church will be in Twisted Walnut Iowa (with the added punishment of every four years having ten visits by the likes of Peter B or Kamala H). But in fact these threats are rarely needed. In place of Two Minutes of Hate we have communal confessions of our joint sins and everybody feels better for it.

"Nietzsche, Trump, and Brexit"

You probably weren't expecting to find those three items together, but they are put there by my friend the philosopher Ken Gemes (Birkbeck/London) in this interesting talk.   Note that the introduction is in German, but Gemes delivers the lecture in English.   I think he gets one thing wrong about Nietzsche:  the fundamental problem for human beings is to find a meaning for inevitable suffering, not to find a meaning simpliciter, as Gemes claims.

The perfect holiday gift for your wife

This is hysterical (inspired by this nonsense).

Historian Gordon Wood interviewed on the NYT "1619 Project"

Here.  The New York Times owes the public an apology. An excerpt:

Q. Let me begin by asking you your initial reaction to the 1619 Project. When did you learn about it?

A. Well, I was surprised when I opened my Sunday New York Times in August and found the magazine containing the project. I had no warning about this. I read the first essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which alleges that the Revolution occurred primarily because of the Americans’ desire to save their slaves. She claims the British were on the warpath against the slave trade and slavery and that rebellion was the only hope for American slavery. This made the American Revolution out to be like the Civil War, where the South seceded to save and protect slavery, and that the Americans 70 years earlier revolted to protect their institution of slavery. I just couldn’t believe this.

I was surprised, as many other people were, by the scope of this thing, especially since it’s going to become the basis for high school education and has the authority of the New York Times behind it, and yet it is so wrong in so many ways....

More on the NYT fraudulent "1619 Project": an interview with historian James McPherson

Also interesting; an excerpt:

Q. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the lead writer and leader of the 1619 Project, includes a statement in her essay—and I would say that this is the thesis of the project—that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country.”

A. Yes, I saw that too. It does not make very much sense to me. I suppose she’s using DNA metaphorically. She argues that racism is the central theme of American history. It is certainly part of the history. But again, I think it lacks context, lacks perspective on the entire course of slavery and how slavery began and how slavery in the United States was hardly unique. And racial convictions, or “anti-other” convictions, have been central to many societies.

But the idea that racism is a permanent condition, well that’s just not true. And it also doesn’t account for the countervailing tendencies in American history as well. Because opposition to slavery, and opposition to racism, has also been an important theme in American history.

An interesting interview with Adolph Reed...

...at Current Affairs.  As usual, his perspective is an important one.