Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Another letter from Notre Dame faculty opposing Judge Barrett's nomination on the merits

Here.  The earlier letter called on her to delay the process given the circumstances.  (That letter subsequently got some signatories from the law school; the new one does not appear to have law school signatories.)  Barring catastrophe, she will be confirmed, not because of her qualifications (which are shared by hundreds of others), but because of her ideology.  If the Democrats control government come January, they should implement various reforms, including adding seats to the Court, changing the rules on the votes needed to overturn legislation, and stripping the Court of jurisdiction of certain matters.  Enough is really enough.   The Republicans began earnest packing of the federal courts during the Obama Administration, when Senator McConnell not only blocked Judge Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court but blocked the nomination of many federal judges as well; it will be time for the Democrats to undo the damage.

Americans' engagement with the humanities during the pandemic

A new study from the AAAS, with some interesting results.  A bit further down the list was researching the ethical aspects of a choice--although it doesn't suggest the research was done with the help of philosophy.

(Thanks to Robert Townsend for the pointer.)

Maybe there will be a Democratic landslide...

...but not all indicators, if one looks closely, are good.

Notre Dame faculty (but none from the law school) call on Judge Barrett to step aside until after the election...

...for the good of the country.  She won't, of course.  First, she knows that if she were to withdraw, the Republicans would push through someone else.  Second, she believes that her approach to judicial decision-making is the correct one and ought to be on the Supreme Court.   Or, as a German philospher once remarked, life itself is the will to power.

1987 NYT editorial appeals to a "consensus among economists" that there should be no minimum wage

A good reminder for whom the NYT really speaks. 

(I saw this gem via Alex Gourevitch's FB page.)

A better take on Schadenfreude and Trump...

...from philosopher Susanna Siegel (Harvard).  She makes two important points:  first, that Schadenfreude is the standard operating device of the American right; and second, Schadenfreude is symptomatic of a dysfunctional democracy (and perhaps corrosive of a functional one).   There's a substantive and interesting rejoinder here, to which Professor Siegel responds in the comments at that blog.

A philosophy prof came up with the idea for the MacArthur "genius" [sic] grants

F. Champion Ward, who taught at Denison University and was also a protege of Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, entered the foundation world and seems to have come up with the idea for the now-mysterious MacArthur windfalls.  Given the Hutchins connection, he almost certainly thought these should be awards to recognize genuinely exceptional achievement. 

(Thanks to Sam Cowling for the pointer.)

 

This is what happens when you read too much Kant

You can't even enjoy your Schadenfreude when a wicked man falls ill.  Stuff like this is an embarrassment for philosophy; maybe it should be preached from the pulpit on Sundays, or revealed in the confession booth, but to pass it off as a philosophical "insight." Oy veh.

(Thanks to Henry Cohen for the pointer.)

ADDENDUM:  Also relevant.  The explanation, of course, is either that the Democrats don't really believe Trump is a fascist dictator wannabe or they don't want to alienate the many voters who don't view the monster-child that way.  (Thanks to S. Wallerstein for the pointer.)

This New England Journal of Medicine editorial would make a good opening statement at the "war crimes" trial for those politicians who failed us in the "war on COVID"

An excerpt:

Why has the United States handled this pandemic so badly? We have failed at almost every step. We had ample warning, but when the disease first arrived, we were incapable of testing effectively and couldn’t provide even the most basic personal protective equipment to health care workers and the general public. And we continue to be way behind the curve in testing. While the absolute numbers of tests have increased substantially, the more useful metric is the number of tests performed per infected person, a rate that puts us far down the international list, below such places as Kazakhstan, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, countries that cannot boast the biomedical infrastructure or the manufacturing capacity that we have.² Moreover, a lack of emphasis on developing capacity has meant that U.S. test results are often long delayed, rendering the results useless for disease control.

Some not-so-nobel Nobel Prize choices

This is amusing.

How a Justice Amy Coney Barrett would reshape the Supreme Court

There's a lot of commentary here, a lot of it fanciful, but Mark Tushnet (emeritus, Harvard Law) cuts to the chase and probably gets it right:

With a newly constituted Supreme Court, we’re not going to see dramatic changes in constitutional law within a year. But let’s assume the court stays the same for the next five years (perhaps with replacements for Justices Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas). Over that period, we can expect the court to hold race-based affirmative action unconstitutional in public universities and banned by statute for private colleges; uphold one or two newly enacted restrictions on access to abortion and then, toward the end of the period, overrule Roe v. Wade; and strike down some fairly restrictive regulations of gun ownership while upholding most of the more important restrictions. The court won’t retrench on the core of its gay rights holdings, but it will allow businesspeople who object for religious reasons to providing services to LGBTQ-plus people to avoid liability under antidiscrimination laws (more broadly than a court with a liberal majority would).

Tushnet also thinks a far right Court will push back on Democratic economic regulations, although he says, rightly, it will all depend on the details that can't be predicted in advance.

ADDENDUM:  Everything you wanted to know about Judge Barrett's scholarly and judicial work, courtesy of the Congressional Research Office.  (Thanks to Dean Rowan for the pointer.)

 

Conservatism, libertarianism, and progresssivism

Philosopher/lawyer Ken Levy (LSU) comments.  (It's wrong to lump socialism together with liberalism, as he does, but that's minor.)

Motivate the troops...

...with heavy metal.  Bizarre!

Fox defends against defamation suit by arguing that no "reasonable viewer" could take Tucker Carlson's statements seriously

Good to know!

The latest on Trump's health

Here from the NYT.  They now acknowledge that his oxygen levels had fallen and that he needed some supplemental oxygen, but now think he can be discharged soon.  This may all be true, but it also reminds me of my father's experience with Covid last April.   He was admitted April 8 but discharged about five days later, after the fever passed and his oxygen levels stabilized on a small amount of supplemental oxygen (he was 87, with underlying but stable COPD).  Within a few days of discharge, things got markedly worse, and he had to be re-admitted and he ultimately died from the effects of Covid.  I learned this roller-coaster pattern is not atypical:  initial illness/symptoms, improvement after a few days, and then around days 7-10, relapse. Perhaps Trump will be lucky, but presumably the doctors understand the risks.  If he is discharged tomorrow, say, and a week from now is still out of the hospital, then he will probably recover.

Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins should resign

As multiple news outlets are reporting, Rev. Jenkins tested positive for the coronavirus after attending last week's announcement of the nomination of former Notre Dame law professor (now Judge) Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.  Rev. Jenkins violated all the public health protocols that faculty and students at Notre Dame are expected to observe, most particularly, by not wearing a mask.  (By contrast, the Dean of Notre Dame's law school did wear a mask, while sitting right next to the President!)   You cannot demand compliance with public health protocols by your faculty, staff and students, and then flout those protocols yourself in such public fashion.  What an embarrassment; he should apologize and resign the Presidency and return to his role as a faculty member in the philosophy department.

UPDATE (October 4):  Some students are also calling for his resignation; they're correct.

Trump's COVID diagnosis

Trump is 74 and obese, two facts we do know about him, and that puts him at higher risk for complications and even death from COVID.  But counting in his favor is that he will presumably be able to get access to newer treatments, like antibody plasma from recovered patients.   Since he is purportedly asymptomatic today, it seems unlikely he would have been infectious at Tuesday's debate with Biden, since people with COVID are, from what I've read, only infectious in the 48-72 hours prior to the onset of symptoms.  But Biden is being tested as well, of course.

If a candidate for President becomes incapacitated (e.g., on a ventilator) or dies, what happens?  It can get quite messy, but here's an extended and informed discussion by election law experts.

It's hard for those of us living through this nightmare not to experience some Schadenfreude.  As a philosopher elsewhere wrote me this morning:  "The arc of the pandemic bends towards justice."   Given Trump's gross mismanagement of the pandemic, which has cost tens of thousands of people their lives, and millions of others suffering and misery, there is a kind of "justice" that it has now come back to bite him.  If he becomes seriously ill, it may give him a face-saving way to withdraw before his likely defeat.  But it may also plunge this dysfunctional country into further turmoil in ways none of us can yet anticipate.

UPDATE:  The latest this morning (9:30 am CST) is that Trump does have "mild symptoms" now, meaning that he may have been infectious on Tuesday.  What a mess.

ANOTHER:   So as of 11:30 am CST, roughly, the Bidens have tested negative.  Of course, false negatives are not uncommon, so we'll see.

Drudge Report had only 1.4 million unique visitors in August

That detail is buried in this NYT story (the subject of the latter was obviously lifted from this blog!).  According to my public stat counter, this blog had a quarter-million unique visits in August (and that was coming off my July hiatus when I only posted a few times), and 300,000 last month.  In a typical year, there are several months with 360,000 to 400,000 unique visits.  Somehow it seems like I should be a lot richer given these numbers!

The author lived through societal collapse (in his case, the Sri Lankan civil war)...

...and describes what it's like.  An excerpt:

I moved back to Sri Lanka in my twenties, just as the ceasefire fell apart. Do you know what it was like for me? Quite normal. I went to work, I went out, I dated. This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

I was looking through some old photos for this article and the mix is shocking to me now. Almost offensive. There’s a burnt body in front of my office. Then I’m playing Scrabble with friends. There’s bomb smoke rising in front of the mall. Then I’m at a concert. There’s a long line for gas. Then I’m at a nightclub. This is all within two weeks....

The truth about philanthropy

Some facts about where the money is going.   There should be no need for philanthropy; the state should impose an essentially confiscatory tax on all income and wealth above some appropriate threshhold ($10 million?  25 million?).  Then we could have a civilized society!

Annals of tunnel vision

A reader (who asked not to be identified for the obvious reasons) called this bizarre post by Twitter's favorite feminist philosopher to my attention:

Professor Manne is the proverbial "one trick" pony, but unfortunately, she doesn't recognize when the trick doesn't apply.  (We've seen this before.)  As commenters quickly pointed out, people had called for Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer to resign.   As others pointed out, Justice Scalia was only 68 when George W. Bush was re-elected; Justice Ginsburg was 79, when Barack Obama was re-elected, and Justice Ginsburg had a much worse history of health problems than Justice Scalia.

Manne's tunnel vision and tendency to do "philosophy by anecdote" are both usefully discussed in this review of her recent book Entitled (the review got a huge amount of Twitter attention after Manne had a tantrum about it, no doubt amplifying its effect significantly).  

Class and responses to Trump's rudeness and Biden's gaffes

In 2016, Democrats made the mistake of focusing on Trump's rude, crude and vulgar mouth (on display, I gather at last night's "debate" [sic], which apparently some sentient people actually watched!).  Alas, Democrats may be doing it again.   Many people don't care (and those who do aren't on the fence), which is rather important in an election!   This NYT piece from about a week ago, focusing on Biden not Trump, is instructive.  (Law professor Joan Williams addressed related issues a few years ago.)  It addresses the "cultural sensibilities" of voters in those "working-class Democratic communities that put Donald Trump over the top in 2016. They include more than 200 counties that supported Barack Obama twice before voting for Mr. Trump."  What these working class communities have in common--call it the "New Yorker sensibilty"--is that they respect those who stand up to insults and abuse, and punch back and punch hard ("don't take yourself so seriously" is foreign to those who have self-respect):

In the communities we visited, some of their most beloved Democratic politicians have a Trumpian sensibility: They are macho, quick to engage in political conflict and relentless counterpunchers. One is Ottumwa’s Jerry Parker, a former mayor and a current county supervisor. He supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 primaries; during one local primary meeting, he threatened to take a conflict with a Bernie Sanders supporter “outside.”

Similarly, Mayor Joe Polisena of Johnston is popular even though he is a self-described political “street fighter.” Mr. Polisena doesn’t hesitate to verbally rough up citizens who openly criticize his rule — during Town Council meetings, for example, he calls them “malcontents” and “misfits.”

People in these communities admire the president because he seems familiar. As someone in Johnston told us, Mr. Trump seems “more human, more like us, the working person.” Mr. Trump’s incessant counterpunching, called a sign of a thin skin by many observers in professional circles, is often interpreted as common in many working-class communities.

 

On "cancel culture" again, and a philosophy anecdote

Linguist John McWhorter (Columbia) takes another stab at the topic (earlier attempt here):

Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of “violence” that merits shaming and expulsion.

Skeptics have labeled this undertaking “cancel culture,” which of late has occasioned a pushback from its representatives. The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person’s existence—which tends to be impractical anyway— than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind....An indication of how deeply this frame of mind has penetrated many of our movers and shakers is that they tend to see this punishment clause as self-evidently just, as opposed to the novel, censorious addendum that it is.

Professor McWhorter goes on to review various examples of cancelings, successful and attempted.   One of his anecdotes concerns former philosophy PhD students:

I have heard from not one but two philosophy doctorates who left academia. One explained that he was driven out by the “accelerating creep of what felt to me a pretty stifling orthodoxy. The hiring market was dominated by a concern for diversity statements, the ability to teach fairly ideologically-slanted courses on philosophy and critical race theory or philosophy and gender, etc.; and more generally it felt progressively less like a profession where I could opt out of those trends while still being a competitive job applicant.”

There has certainly been a striking increase in job ads for philosophy of race and gender, but otherwise this may be a slight exaggeration about the state of the profession.  (After all, despite my "unwoke" condition, this is still the most heavily trafficked philosophy blog in the world--admittedly, a minority of the benighted "woke" read to get aggravated!). 

Many Hispanic voters do *not* view themselves as "people of color"

This is interesting, and a problem for the Democrats:

Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Certainly, we both once took that perspective for granted. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color....[The majority of Hispanics] rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

NY Times quietly revises a key claim of the 1619 project!

Good catch by the World Socialist Web Site!

(Thanks to Chris Morris for the pointer.)

 

The biggest threat to free speech on campus and academic freedom...

...consistently comes from the pro-Israel interest groups.  They are running scared because they realize that far too many of Israel's actions can not withstand public scrutiny.

Former Supreme Court clerks all love each other...

...as this recent endorsement of Judge Barrett reveals.

Breonna Taylor and George Floyd

The media, unfortunately, have linked these cases of police killings, even though they have almost nothing in common.  And now, unsurprisingly, a Louisville grand jury has failed to indict any of the officers involved in the no-knock raid that led to Ms. Taylor's death (by contrast, the officer that killed Mr. Floyd was quickly and rightly indicted, although he is planing an aggressive defense).  The failure to indict any officer for the killing of Ms. Taylor is unsurprising because:  (1) a judge had authorized the raid and the warrant to search the apartment because of Ms. Taylor's sometime-boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer, and (2) when the police entered the apartment, a different boyfriend (then at home with Ms. Taylor) fired on the police (he did not know they were police), wounding one officer; the police returned fire, resulting in Ms. Taylor's death.  On these facts, it's hard to see how any officer was culpable for Ms. Taylor's death.  Louisville subsequently banned no-knock raids, which undoubtedly contributed mightily to the cascading calamity resulting in her death.

A Hume scholar on Hume's racism

Philosopher Paul Russell (British Columbia/Lund) comments in The Scotsman.  In an e-mail to me (which he kindly gave permission to share), he observed:

Suffice it to say that Hume would have laughed at the resemblance between the sanctimonious moralism of this woke mob (who are tormenting him in death) and the crazy nuttiness of the Christian fanatics (who tormented him when he was alive) - they are very similar psychological types.

ADDENDUM:  And here's the petition that started it all.  The original proposal was to rename the tower after Julius Nyerere, but that didn't last long, as the petition organizer quickly did a mea culpa:

A previous iteration of this petition campaigned for the name to be changed to Julius Nyerere Tower. It has been brought to my attention by multiple students that Nyerere was harmful in his own ways, both through his ties to dictatorship and through his homophobia. This petition now only campaigns for the renaming of David Hume Tower. Thank you so much to the students who contacted me to educate me. I sincerely apologize for any harm I have caused.

Relax, you didn't cause any "harm", except ultimately to the reputation of the University of Edinburgh.

 

A sobering account of the nightmare that will begin on November 3 in the U.S....

...unless it's a Democratic landslide.

ADDENDUM:  What will bring any crisis to an end is that when the economic and market turmoil becomes too great, a message that will be communicated by members of the ruling class to their lackeys in the Senate and Congress--at that point, the Republicans will stop supporting Trump in his bid to hang on (assuming, of course, that it's a Biden victory, as expected).

What is court packing?

Since my e-mail "interview" with NPR is showing up in lots of stories, let me say a bit more.

"Court packing" is typically used to refer to FDR's proposal in the 1930s to expand the size of the Supreme Court, which had been holding New Deal legislation unconstitutional.  The idea was that FDR would add justices sympatico to the New Deal, and thus change the political leanings of the Court that would, in turn, influence its constitutional decisions.

FDR's proposed method of court packing was to expand the court, which would change a century-old norm governing the court's composition.  But the essence of court packing is not expanding the size of the court, it is changing the norms governing Supreme Court appointments for partisan ends:  you can do that by expanding the size of the Court, or you can do it, as Senator McConnell did in 2016, by denying a sitting President even a vote on his nominee for a vacancy on the Court, also a massive violation of an established norm.

Senator McConnell could, perhaps, have been trying to start a new norm, but now it's clear (if anyone had doubts) that was not what he was doing:  he wants to pack the court for partisan ends by adjusting the norms for appointments to suit his political preferences, one rule for 206 when a Democrat is President, another for 2020 when a Republican is President.

A question for readers: from feudalism to capitalism?

I know the standard Marxian story (as told by Marx!), but I'd be grateful for some guidance on literature by historians, Marxists or otherwise, especially about the transitions in very roughly the period of the 16th into the 18th-centuries:   the fall of feudalism and the remnants of the feudal order, and the gradual transitions towards the beginning of the industrial capitalist age.  (I'm less interested in the heyday of feudalism, say the 11th-14th centuries, so happy for references on the passing of that period as well.)   Essays or book recommendations welcome, as well as any comments you might have about the value of the work, the perspective it takes etc.  You should feel free to e-mail me at bleiter@uchicago.edu if you'd rather not post here.  Many thanks!

On the death of Justice Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS)

Her death is deeply unfortunate, not just for her family, but for the polity she served, and on many levels.

To start, it makes clear how perverse "life tenure" on SCOTUS has become when people live so long.  You can protect judges from political influence by giving them term-limited tenures that will extend beyond the terms of political actors:  in the U.S., that would be 15 or 20 years.  Many will complain, not unreasonably, that she should have stepped down during Obama's term.  In retrospect, she should have, but recall the Merrick Garland fiasco.

The real problem, of course, is that SCOTUS is a super-legislature--here is a popular explanation and a more jurisprudential one of this point--and so the prospect that a Democratic member of the super-legislture will be replaced by a Republican one is a serious matter.  The Nazi Senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, will surely try to ram one through, notwithstanding his obviously spurious claim last time around that the election should decide Justice Scalia's replacement (his absurd rationale for why Judge Garland of the DC Circuit, whom Obama nominated, should not be even considered).  If the Republicans succeed in appointing a new justice to the super-legislature, then in the next Democratic Administration (assuming there is one), SCOTUS membership will either be vastly expanded to counteract this reactionary court-packing or its jurisdiction will be stripped so that it becomes a less relevant super-legislature.

After Princeton President does ritual "mea culpa" for "systemic racism," U.S. Education Department announces investigation...

...since federal money, of which Princeton gets plenty, are conditioned on non-discriminatory practices by the receivnig institution.  Unfortuntely, President Eisgruber (who is, himself, a lawyer, but apparently didn't consult any in this instance) in his public statement a few weeks ago made a number of careless (and probably false) claims that, predictably, would invite scrutiny from an Education Department hostile to affirmative action and racial preferences; for example:

We must ask how Princeton can address systemic racism in the world, and we must also ask how to address it within our own community. That is true even though, for at least the past fifty years, this University has committed itself to becoming more inclusive....

Racism and the damage it does to people of color nevertheless persist at Princeton as in our society, sometimes by conscious intention but more often through unexamined assumptions and stereotypes, ignorance or insensitivity, and the systemic legacy of past decisions and policies....

[M]y Cabinet colleagues examined systems and practices covering all facets of the University....Much of this work is unglamorous, focused not on flashy symbols but on the nuts and bolts of University management. That is essential: to care about eradicating systemic racism, one has to care about systems...

All these statements are naturally read as saying that the current Princeton University suffers from various forms of racism.  The good, legal news for Princeton is that "systemic racism" isn't a legal category, so unless investigation turns up actual conscious discriminatory practices, nothing will come of this.  The law does not try to prohibit "systemic racism":  it prohibits intentional racial discrimination.*

Interview with Dutch publication about Trump

I talked with a reporter for the Dutch news magazine HP/De Tijd, some of this will make its way into a story they are running in October.  I'll post the full interview here, in case of it's of interest.  The reporter's questions are indented and numbered, my responses are prefaced by BL.

1. President Trump takes a clear and tough position in the debate about police brutality against African Americans and the demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement. He glorifies the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot two protesters in Kenosha. At the same time, he shifts the discussion about racism and police brutality against black Americans to a conversation about crime, violence and law and order. How remarkable is Trump's position in this debate?

BL:   Trump is a casual, rather than, ideological racist (Hitler was the latter).  Trump’s basic attitudes were shaped by his childhood in Queens (a section of New York City), which when he grew up was a largely white, middle- or lower-middle-class enclave (Trump himself was a child of privilege, but his attitudes are those of much of the milieu).  He learned instinctive support for police (and firemen and the military) and distrust of “coloreds” and “Negroes” who were disproportionately involved in crime.  (In the United States, the hit 1970s T.V. show “All in the Family” represents this outlook in the character Archie Bunker.)   What’s remarkable is only that Trump is President and says what he says out loud; millions of course believe the same.  While there are fewer “Archie Bunker’s” even in New York these days, there are still millions of white people still alive in the United States who grew up during the apartheid era in the American South, and they and sometimes their children harbor similar attitudes.

2. Does president Trumps position in the racism debate reflect the GOP’s point of view?

BL:  It does not represent the “official” position of the GOP, but ever since Richard Nixon, the GOP has tried to exploit white anxiety about crime, especially crime by non-whites.  Trump is more open and crude about it.

3. Taking such a strong stand in the racism debate, does the president have a clear vision in mind or can we speak of impulsive actions?

Climate change by county in the U.S.

Fascinating maps and data, by U.S. county.   Crudely, the South and the Southwest are in for trouble, the Midwest and Great Plains will fare better over the next 25-50 years.

Columbia Marching Band trolls the NY Times

Amazing.  The NYT will come to regret running this story, I suspect.

Why the right needs to pretend the "left" is more powerful than it really is

Political philosopher Lea Ypi (LSE) comments.  Her point about the Gramscian pedigree of the right's rhetorical strategy is amusing.  (Her focus is Britain, but most of the points apply in the U.S. too.)

Hume and Edinburgh, once again

A propos this, longtime reader Roger Albin (Medicine, Michigan) writes with apt observations that he kindly gave permission to share:

This would be the second time Hume is rejected by the University of Edinburgh.  Hume was denied a Chair at Edinburgh by some of the ideologically “woke” of his time, conservative clergy who suspected Hume of atheism.  Other than his short time as an undergraduate, Hume had no formal affiliation with Edinburgh.  Naming a building after Hume wasn’t an effort to honor Hume, it was an effort to have some of the luster of Hume’s reputation rub off on the University that rejected him.  Hume’s reputation loses nothing by this silly gesture and the University of Edinburgh is revealed as place that capitulates to fads.

How to evaluate history's heroes

Sensible comments from philosopher Steven Hales (Bloomsburg), and timely again given the Hume fiasco at Edinburgh.   From the concluding paragraphs of the essay:

Newton wrote to Robert Hooke that if he saw further than others it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. That was a medieval metaphor that went back to before the 12th century, when John of Salisbury wrote in his Metalogicon, “Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

Medieval humility has been inverted in the modern era with the hubris that we are moral giants on the shoulders of the dwarfs of the past, wicked dwarfs who deserve our eternal scorn. As we tear down more monuments to former heroes and erase their names from our buildings, we ought to think about their blameworthiness by the standards and expectations of their own era. Those supposed moral dwarfs we now decry may have been giants of their time. And you don’t have to be a scientist to know that even the largest persons look small when seen from a distance.

David Hume has now been "cancelled" at the University of Edinburgh

When I first saw this on social media, I thought it was a joke.  It's not.  If members of the Edinburgh philosophy department don't raise hell about this (some members are, alas, confirmed knuckleheads), then let's cancel them too!  Indeed, let's cancel the University of Edinburgh!  

What's bizarre about the mass delusion now gripping the Anglophone world, even outside the U.S., is that no one yet knows whether George Floyd was killed because he was Black, rather than poor, marginalized, and non-cooperative (which cops hate!), the factors that actually explain most police killings (race is largely an epiphenomenon). 

And what's even worse is that none of this has anything to do with Hume.  

Hume was a man of his time in some ways, but we don't read him to figure out whether we should invest in the slave trade.  We read him because he transcended his time, because he touched the fundamental questions about what it is to be a human being in the world:  what do we know, what should we value, what is there really?   In that regard, he is like Plato, the enemy of democracy, and Aristotle, the defender of slavery, as well as Hobbes, Kant, Marx and Nietzsche:   he speaks to all human beings, despite his parochial prejudices. 

That these analysts of human being should be erased from the landscape, because of their local prejudices, is a symptom of our times, not simply of the narcissistic stupidity of "identity politics" and the craven spinelessness of academic administrators, but, more importantly, of the reactionary forces of the moment which  will love nothing better than the erasure of the cosmopolitan ideals we have inherited:  the forces of reaction, after all, are committed to vindicating the local traditions and prejudices and customs.  They can happily join forces with the identity narcissists in eradicating those thinkers concerned with the human.

ADDENDUM:  Leave it to the Edinburgh knucklehead Aidan McGlynn to try to rationalize this.  Of course it's not strictly a "cancellation" (that's actually why I put it in quotes), since it didn't involve a living person losing their job, but it shares with that phenomenon the effort to demote someone's status in response to meritless mob outrage.  Nobody thought putting Hume's name on the building was an insult, obviously taking it off is meant to signal disapproval and demotion, even if it is, as McGlynn says irrelevantly, a "tall brown, tower block" .  (I wonder what the knucklehead's colleagues interested in Hume think about this?  Will the mob soon come for their seminars?)  Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam) points out the additional irony that the former "Hume Tower" will now be known simply as its address "40 George Square," after King George who opposed the abolition of slavery.  (ADDENDUM:   Enzo tells me now that, unlike the George Square in Glasgow, the one in Edinburgh is not named after the King.  That's fortunate considering Hume's new name!)

The end of the Chicago Palmer House hotel?

In olden times, the Central Division of the APA often held meetings at the Palmer House here in Chicago.  But the pandemic may have finished off the historic site.  Perhaps another hotel chain will acquire the property, but that seems unlikely under current circumstances.

"How the evangelical movement became Trump's 'bitch'"

Philosopher Michael Rea (Notre Dame) offers a plausible explanation.  (He also alludes in the article to an earlier  incident involving Richard Swinburne at a Society of Christian Philosophers event that we noted here.)

It's worth emphasizing that evangelical (indeed Republican) support for Trump is not instrumentally irrational.  He has, in fact, delivered on standard Republican agenda items:  e.g, conservative (sometimes reactionary) judges, tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy, undermining the Affordable Care Act (albeit failing to repeal it), and making it easier to discriminate against disfavored groups, like those who are transgender.  It is a mistake for Democrats to focus so relentlessly on his deformed personality and rude mouth, rather than the substance of his policies.

Ironically, the one issue on which Trump has not been a standard-issue Republican concerns international affairs:  he favors better relations with Russia, rather than hostility (his motivations for this are, to put it mildly, suspect, but the position is correct!); and he is adverse to putting U.S. soldiers into combat.   On these issues, he is, ironically enough, better than both the Republicans and the Democrats.

"Reasonably polarized"

Thoughts from philosopher Kevin Dorst (Oxford/Pittsburgh).  He writes: "The series will be the first pass at a book I've been working on for awhile, arguing that we should see polarization as due to largely rational processes. Basically, the claim is that we're all caught in a big epistemic tragedy of the commons where epistemically rational ways of processing ambiguous evidence lead to polarization."  One question I hope Professor Dorst will address is, if this is the explanation, why the epistemic tragedy of the commons is so much worse in the U.S. than many other affluent and nominally democratic nations.

Ibram Kendi eviscerated

This is a somewhat wild polemic, alternately perceptive and then baffling, but quite amusing as well.  An excerpt:

Ibram Kendi reasons through conservative ideologies such as Evangelical Christianity and Afrocentrism. His theories are a confused kaleidoscope of sociological nonsense and unverifiable historical claims.  His assertions have no resonance in the long history of antiracism scholarship, research, commentary and writing. Kendi fills the book with definitions. However, his definitions are not definitions at all, but mere tautologies, where he uses the term he’s defining in the definition, sometimes several times. He makes empirically unsubstantiated claims such as we’re all racists, including most Black people and Frederick Douglass and W.E.B Du Bois. He disconnects power relations from his understanding of racism; he separates racism from its economic foundations and from the exploitation of labor for profit; he uses the term inequity over structural, systemic and institutional racism....

Kendi was raised as an Evangelical Christian. Thinking through absolutes of, for instance, good and evil, God and the Devil, organizes his understanding of phenomena. Confession, the practice of atonement, admission of sin, recognizing you are a sinner and rejecting denial are Evangelical Christian tropes he draws on to understand racism. He applies these tropes to teaching others how to be anti-racists. While perhaps good for conservative Christian eschatology, it’s really bad for anti-racism scholarship and research.

How does this play out in Kendi’s intellectual practice? He says a racist is “One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.” And on the other side an antiracist is “One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their racist action or expressing an antiracist idea.” Stated in another way, good people are people who do good things and bad people do bad things....

Kenan Malik on "white privilege" and class

Sensible, as usual (he is responding to Chris "I make things up" Bertram:  in this case, Bertram invented a straw man position that no one holds, as Malik rightly notes).

Anti-racism is not what's needed in America

Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels take another stab at countering the mass delusion that has gripped the nominal "left" in America over the last few months; as they argue (correctly), " becauseracism is not the principal source of inequality today, antiracism functions more as a misdirection that justifies inequality than a strategy for eliminating it."   An excerpt (I've put a few bits in bold):

What we’re actually saying every time we insist that the basic inequality is between blacks and whites is that the only inequalities we care about are those produced by some form of discrimination—that inequality itself isn’t the problem, it’s only the inequalities produced by racism and sexism, etc. What disparity discourse tells us is that, if you have an economy that’s getting more and more unequal, that’s mainly generating jobs that don’t even pay a living wage, the problem we need to solve is not how to reduce that inequality and not how to make those jobs better but how to make sure that they aren’t disproportionately held by black and brown people....

Complaints about disproportionality are liberal math. And a politics centered on challenging disproportionality comes with the imprimatur of no less a Doctor of the Church of Left Neoliberalism than economist Paul Krugman, who asserted in his role as ideologist for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign that “horizontal” inequality, i.e., inequalities measured “between racially or culturally defined groups,” is what’s really important in America and dismissed Sen. Bernie Sanders’ elaborate program for social-democratic redistribution as “a pipe dream.”3

It’s the fixation on disproportionality that tells us the increasing wealth of the one percent would be OK if only there more black, brown, and LGBTQIA+ billionaires. And the fact that antiracism and antidiscrimination of all kinds would validate rather than undermine the stratification of wealth in American society is completely visible to those who currently possess that wealth—all the rich people eager to embark on a course of moral purification (antiracist training) but with no interest whatsoever in a politics (social-democratic redistribution) that would alter the material conditions that make them rich.

"Democratic Socialists of America" is not a Marxist organization...

...as the recent Reed Affair showed.  (Earlier coverage.)   Even so, DSA should do better.

Wide-ranging interview with Noam Chomsky...

...by Fabian Corver.  (Thanks to Mark Pavlick for the pointer.)

Informative piece on the history of police unions in the U.S....

...in The New Yorker.   I did not know that it was the victory of the teachers' union in the early 1960s in NYC that paved the way for the police to finally unionize effectively.  But I was particularly struck by this observation (which brought to mind something written a few years ago):

According to Paul Hirschfield, a Rutgers sociologist who has written about international law-enforcement practice, the difference [in rates of police killings in the U.S. vs. Europe] is partly in the basic work environment. “American police encounter conditions that are more like Latin America than northern Europe,” he told me. “These vast inequalities, the history of enslavement and conquest, a weak social safety net. The decentralization. Police are more likely to encounter civilians with firearms here...."

Discussion of "police reform" is a bit like the blather about "urban school reform," it largely avoids the actual issue that drives the problems (police killings, poor performance in urban public schools), since that actual issue would demand systematic changes that neither ruling class party cares to tackle.