Digressions&Impressions

On Kukathas' Liberalism and elite (capture) Theory

This is not because the characterization of political society Walzer offers is untrue to reality. Political society is a substantive community, for there is no such thing as a purely procedural association. And associations with long histories will invariably develop substantial norms, and acquire deep allegiances. And yet, this is not so different from international society and, more particularly, that form of international society that is an empire. Thirty years ago every Australian school child recognized Empire Day, and Australians generally celebrated their membership of the former British Empire. Today, almost all school children are entirely unaware it ever existed. The polity whose history is taught has been contracted in size, and the story itself is being retold to place it more securely in the Asia-Pacific region and to sever the ties with Europe. But this is nothing new. Very few countries were never parts of empires; and some have grown so large as to subsume the parts the empire occupied. In many of these political societies the polity is the product of domination rather than the construction of the people. Political societies are built by elites, often against the wishes of many.
Of course, smaller political orders—whether small empires or larger states—are more likely to develop distinctive and substantial common normative commitments than are larger ones. Other things being equal, they might also be less likely to be tolerant of dissenting practices or associations—though other things are seldom equal. But this does not alter the fact that many societies are very much like close-knit empires. Some are federations of states which retain a substantial measure of independence. Some states have so much independence that they hover on the brink of secession and independent nationhood. Which way matters go is a matter of contingency. In the end nations are not so much the product of a common history as the creators of one. And what is sometimes left unmentioned is that they might have been created very differently, since there is a great number of ways of combining peoples to make a political society—as is reflected in the frequency with which political boundaries change.--Chandran Kukathas (2003) The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and freedom, pp. 35-26 (emphases added).

Regular readers will have noticed that I have been reading and reflecting on Kukathas' philosophy. In the Liberal Archipelago, Kukathas identifies himself with the "the classical liberal tradition" (167) of which he is a pre-eminent theorist. Unlike most of who self-identify as 'classical liberals,' Kukathas is not obsessed with (free) markets. In fact, while I would describe The Liberal Archipelago as 'a quite Lockean work' -- with its emphasis on moral diversity, mutual toleration, the significance of conscience to it, and the focus on association and exit --, it does not obsess over property rights at all. And this hints at another important deviation by Kukathas from classical liberals, who inherit (recall) the assumption of harmony of interests from nineteenth century liberalism. At heart, Kukathas' position is straightforward: we inevitably disagree about moral matters and the relative rankings we give them, and so the best thing we can do is to associate generally with the like-minded and find a modus vivendi with those that are indifferent to us, or worse. The main proper function of the state is to facilitate such modus vivendi in order to instantiate a cosmopolitan ideal.

Now, much of The Liberal Archipelago engages in moral argument often through the lens of (or constrained by) feasibility to defend such modus vivendi. If you think this is too thin, then in the conclusion of the work, Kukathas concedes that "the point of theorising the liberal state in terms of an archipelago of loosely associated authorities, is not that this fully captures an actual liberal state, or perhaps even a possible liberal state, but that it identifies an important dimension of it— one which connects up with particular values end or concerns, even if it does not embrace every aspect of, or aspiration found within, the liberal state." Fair enough. My interest here is not, in the first instance, with that important dimension, but with a kind of recurring motif through the work on the nature of politics. For, to speak bluntly, Kukathas does not only repeatedly diagnose (perhaps with a hint of melancholy) rent-seeking behavior and elite capture by various social elites (as Marxists (recall) also emphasize), but at times he also slides into an elite theory of politics (that one may associate with names like Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Burnham, Aron, etc.--although none of them are mentioned in the book) The quoted passage above illustrates what I have in mind.

Now, Kukathas is not the first classical liberal with such a view of politics. And I think it is important to distinguish him, at once, from somebody like (the public choice theorist) Richard Wagner who doesn't only use such an elite theory of politics sociologically, but also (repeatedly) endorses (recall here) the idea (to put it politely) that eggs need to broken in order to make an omelet. (Non trivially Wagner also draws on Schmitt.) Kukathas is not inclined to do so because he quite clearly thinks that the means (e.g., broken eggs) fail to be justified by the ends, but also in virtue of the means tend to produce outcomes that are not worth having (indirectly they produce more broken eggs this is the Spinozism Kukathasendorses). So, let's stipulate Kukathas is primarily interested in the elite theory of politics as a descriptive or sociological theory.

The problem for a reader of Kukathas is that it's not clear how the normative project fits with his elite theory of politics. I have two related concerns. First, the kind of political society Kukathas advocates requires political agents with a great deal of skill to pacify social disagreements (and to set up institutions -- forms of federalism, power sharing, etc. -- that would facilitate this) and whose characteristic quality is to promote social restraint and mutual indifference. Second, it is not obvious elite agents (of the sort that Kukathas posits in his sociological theory of politics) have an interest in pursuing the ideal, or at the least the dimension of that ideal, that Kukathas' theory prescribes. This is something Kukathas repeatedly observes himself when looking at elite agents among minority groups throughout the book.

My concern is not that Kukathas lacks a theory of transition to get from a sub-par status quo to the more normatively better political place he advocates. (I do think that's a problem, too.) But rather, that even by his own lights there is no reason to think any political agent that really matters politically by his lights would pursue his ideal.

At this point, Kukathas or somebody invested in defending him, might say, look: just like free markets require a certain amount of restraint by elites not to meddle in them and to focus on the institutions (rule of law, anti-trust, human capital, etc.) to keep the market order going and growing, the liberal archipelago also requires, as Kukathas emphasis throughout, civility and some such such restraint (and background activity to promote it). Arguably something like this insight is the great truth in common preached by Mencius, Machiavelli and (Kukuthas' key thinker) Hume. As Foucault would note, with the eighteenth century this became a matter of scientific valediction. 

Now, I do not want to deny that this response is realistic (I included Machiavelli for a reason there); in practice such social restraint is sometimes visible temporarily in elites (because of domestic or international circumstances). The very mechanism that allows elites to benefit from the growing pie of a market order also allows them to benefit from the fruits of modus vivendi. But it also makes such elites sitting ducks politically when new upstarts come along to deny them these benefits. So,  a politics that requires elite self-restraint is, thus, inherently crisis ridden (as liberalism is), especially if (as Schumpeter and others have noted) the mechanism of elite selection in liberal democracy has little connection to the requirements on politics that follow from normative theory.  

Perhaps, the periods of lucky tranquility between crises is then the best one can hope for (qua liberal with realist sensibilities). 

On Comedians that Punch Down (Srinivasan/Cowen, and yes Chappelle)

One of the great jokes of the political circumstances of our age is that comedians are the great political commentators of the age. And while it would be silly to claim that David Letterman is solely responsible for the political ascendancy of Donald Trump, it's also true that he helped turn Trump from a New York city character into a national celebrity by repeatedly giving him space for -- I say this with the benefit of hindsight -- test-running his campaign massages. Belatedly, around 2010 Letterman himself grew uneasy about this, calling Trump a racist and sharply demarcating the "circus" (in which Letterman and Trump were both starring (ahh) freaks) from the political arena. The point of the contrast in Letterman's shtick then is to proclaim Trump unfit for office. (The interview with Dr. Phil is still worth re-watching; Jason Zinoman's 2017 New York Times article gives useful background, although does not mention Trump's role in the Central Park five.)

Letterman's underlying instinct that there is a contrast between comedy and politics is an important one. It's no less important than the difference between work-place harassment and comedy. What's  funny and worth having in one context, is oppressive in another.

I am thinking of these matters not just because Plato implies that Aristophanes is responsible for the accusation (and so eventual execution) of Socrates, or the predictable controversy about Dave Chappelle's latest special, and (recall) my struggle with the implications of my admiration for Norm Macdonald, but also because the topic frames the relatively recent, fascinating discussion (or interview) between Tyler Cowen and Amia Srinivasan. 

So, let's first look at how that exchange commences:

COWEN: You’ve described yourself as a utopian feminist. In your vision of utopian feminism, how much room is there for what I would call compartmentalization? Just to give a simple example, if you look at, say, stand-up comedy, a lot of it is sexist or racist, or even if it’s not, it’s perceived as such. What happens to that in the utopia? Do we just compartmentalize and let it continue? Or how do you treat it?

SRINIVASAN: I’m not sure about room for compartmentalization. I do think there’s a lot of room for context. For example, when you’re thinking about the violence in rap lyrics, an obsession that began in the conservative pearl-clutching in the ’80s, you’ve got to think about what those invocations of violence are doing performatively in a piece of art, that is, rap music. It’s not the same thing as someone standing up in the middle of the town square, trying to deliberately incite violence against people.

Not even speaking about the utopia, just speaking about how we should think about performative utterances right now, I think we need to address them with a great deal of contextual sensitivity and think about, in general, what is happening in these particular cases. What seems to be problematic might not be. But then, let’s be honest, if you’ve spent any time in a comedy club — and I recently did that when I was last in LA — there is just a lot of quite naked sexism there.

It’s pretty shocking — despite the fact of this feminist revolution in comedy — just how much stand-up comedy is really quite comedically boring and sexist. Now, there’s this question about — I take it that one of the thoughts you have is something like humor —

COWEN: Right, which has a brutal element to it. How humor fits into utopia is a long-standing puzzle because humor is often brutal, right?

SRINIVASAN: Yes. Look, I don’t think the utopia or the post-revolutionary world is a place without any form of brutality, and it’s certainly not a place without humor. It’s going to have disappointment and heartache and tragedy and tragicomedy. Human foibles will still exist. Heartbreak will exist. With all of those things, you have humor.

What is very limited is the thought — and I’m not suggesting that you’re advocating for this thought — but the thought that you basically need structures of organized political oppression like racism to have humor. The Greeks had humor without having racism. They had other systems of domination, but they had a great and advanced sense of humor, often directed at intellectuals and philosophers, who, I think, are often very much a worthy target.

I think there can be this view on which ending forms of domination and oppression somehow drains life of all that is special and textured about it: humor, love, intimacy, friendship. I just don’t think that’s true. I think, in fact, what the end of domination would do is release us more fully into the specific things that make human life worth living, including humor.

Now, it's quite possible that Cowen surprised Srinivasan with this line of questioning. I recently read (and discussed) Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, and, while she does self-describe as a 'utopian feminist,' and mentions Louis C.K's misdeeds, I don't recall comedy being especially important to her arguments. Having said that Cowen did his homework and seems to have been aware of the fact (as I was not) that Srinivasan has a serious background in theater (as she affirms later in the interview). I hope to return to the meat of the interview some other time.

I was, however, taken aback by Srinivasan's comments that I have just quoted. For, if a post-revolutionary world, feminist or not, cannot do without "brutality," then it is not obviously worth having. Of course, she leaves unclear what 'form of brutality' she foresees, and without further specification there is not much more to say here.*

Second, she thinks that "intellectuals and philosophers" are worthy targets of comedy. Since she is talking about ancient Greece, and is one of our leading philosophers, one might say she forfeits Plato's/Socrates' "ancient quarrel" (Republic, 607b) against Aristophanes on behalf of the rest of us. She does not explain why, but given her comments in context, I assume this is so because the "intellectuals and philosophers" are not at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy and, one might argue, can wield the pen (or feather/keyboard) as sharply as the comedian. I suspect, then, she thinks it's kind of a fair fight that old quarrel between philosophy and the comic poets.

Fair enough. Although it's worth noting -- as the fate of Socrates suggests --, it's not wholly a fair fight because the comedian can attract a much wider audience than the philosopher, and may well be much better at political and social rhetoric (this is one of the sub-themes of the Symposium, after all.) And the consequential afterlife of such public rhetoric can be quite unpredictable. Aristophanes' Clouds may well have been thought harmless to Socrates when it first was performed, but after a plague, disastrous imperial overreach, a civil war and murderous dictatorship, context shifted dramatically. I mention these historical facts because what Letterman himself clearly thought initially was harmless entertainment, became politically potent after a great financial meltdown and a bailout of the rich and connected.

So, lurking in Srinivasan's comments, which, as I suggested, may well be entirely improvised, is the idea that humor, even brutal humor, is fine as long as it does not reinforce a structural hierarchy of some sorts. In addition (I take this from what she says about rap), comedy should not incite violence. 

Now, one natural way to read Srinivasan is that while comedy may not be art (like some rap is), comedy is, in fact, self-justifying. It's just one of those things that make a good life good. And because I agree with her about this (that comedy is self-justifying), and her suggestion that even in a very well ordered (albeit brutal) society there would be comedy, I do not want to exaggerate our differences.

But it does not follow from this that in addition to being good in its own right, comedy serves no social purpose in a disordered, hierarchical society like ours. For, comedy also offers society a mirror, even if it is a crooked or distorted mirror. And, not unlike great utopian fiction, it reflects back to us -- in exaggerated fashion, perhaps, -- the way laws, norms, and mores operate and the effect of them on all of us or some of us. In fact, Aristophanes Lysistrata has an important role to play in combining comedy with the birth pangs of feminist utopianism (if I don't have enough street cred for you to say this, this is the place in which I invoke the authority of De Beauvoir). Much of the old Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central (now available on Netflix) was about offering society a mirror on racial relations that with the benefit of hindsight looks prescient in light of black lives matter. 

Of course, Chappelle's recent special on Netflix, taped in Detroit, has gotten a lot of attention for its explicitly pro-TERF stance and its many transphobic jokes (also a theme in his earlier 2019 special). But if you watch his shows, there is a broader more complicated position. I want to introduce my defense of that claim by first mentioning another theme unrelated to transgender issues. A set of Chappelle's jokes (this is in his earlier 2019 show) is about Michael Jackson's child victims. And some of the jokes clearly minimize the harm done to the children (and others suggest Chappelle does not believe all the allegations). But the set is itself explicitly framed by Chappelle mentioning the fact that 50% of the audience members have probably experienced sexual harassment or worse. And while each of his punchlines can be construed as a belittling of the problem, the overall point is that there is a horrid epidemic of sexual harassment (and it should not just focus on celebrities). 

I think something analogous happens with Chappelle's orientation toward transgender issues. This is an issue he has gotten flack for in the past, and some of that criticism is part of the narrative. (I don't mean to suggest he is fair to his critics or actually responds well to them.) So, for example, there is a series of jokes about how on a road-trip a car, which includes a transgender person (a 'T'), can't make bathroom stops in four states. What's interesting about these jokes is that Chappelle is clearly not at all oblivious to the fact that many states make it inordinately difficult to be transgender; and his sympathies are clearly with the transgender against the states that wish to police bathroom behavior. 

After watching Chappelle's special and his (2019) Sticks & Stones, it seems pretty obvious to me that his underlying political outlook is live and let live (as long as Chappelle can make fun of you). I don't know whether Srinivasan thinks Chappelle is one of the "boring" comedians, but plenty of his jokes are not just transphobic, but also sexist.** (He recycles and repackages Norm Macdonald's sexist jokes about the WNBA. He also repurchases MacDonald's Jacques de Gatineau joke which is not sexist at all.) It would be disingenuous to say that he is merely representing or providing a window on sexism in society. He is also reenacting it.

But I don't think Chappelle is reenacting his transphobia merely for the purpose of putting his finger in the eyes of his critics. For the recent special culminates in a narrative about his relationship to Daphne Dorman a transgender (part-time) comedian, who ended up committing suicide. What's interesting about the narrative is not that Dorman (and later her family) defended Chappelle or that Chappelle set up a trust fund for Dorman's daughter, or that he has had a transgender friend and offered her professional opportunities, or even that Chappelle thinks white transgenders use their racial privilege in ways he rejects. But rather that Chappelle hoped to speak with Dorfman's daughter someday and that he wants to say to her (and now I quote from memory) that he "knew her father. And he was a hell of a woman.” (See here for slightly different rendition.) And whatever else Chappelle is implying with this joke, he is telling his audience that if even a transphobe -- and if you listen to his set he does not present himself as a moral exemplar at all -- like him can recognize and see Daphne Dorman's gender, anyone can. The implicature of the special is, thus, that the transphobes who act on their transphobia politically and economically are the real problem, and that if one recognizes one's own imperfections one can rise above them.

For Chappelle, we are all flawed none of us is really without sin. And his best jokes (and impersonations) have or exhibit, and now I echo Norm Macdonald's considered views about all good comedy, compassion for their targets.

The underlying point is that by being the object of a joke one can also, simultaneously, be humanized. Of course, this is not always true. But even jokes that are experienced as offensive and entrenching subordination also bring the outcasts into the community and into a larger conversation. (This is Chappelle's own defense in the special.) Not all purported jokes or the sets they are part of do this, of course. And my judgment here is fallible. And I also don't think Chappelle's humor is always that funny. (I never found Chappelle's Show on Comedy Central especially funny, but I also recognize that this may be colored by the realization that people like me were its target! Yet, some of the sketches are etched in my memory.)

But let's say I am wrong about all of this. Maybe his transphobic stance (funny or not to some) is simply beyond the pale, and maybe there are no positive consequences from punching down at all in comedy.  I would still argue that when performing, comedians should have an artistic license to mock and insult on par with the academic freedom of academics in academic life. 

For, it's healthy for society to have a place where none of us is above the joke. I don't just think this because it creates a privileged space for politicized or social commentary and for presenting the effects of our follies and foibles. Because of workplace rules and polarization, there are, in fact, few places where controversial and potentially obnoxious views can be aired at all in relatively heterogeneous company (outside echo chambers). And it is not like comedians can say anything. They, too, are regulated by public opinion and the views of their audience. So, the social utility of comedy is not just that it offers us a window into (the effects of) a lot of our social norms and practices, but also that they do so -- despite audience fragmentation and filtering -- in a way that is accessible to a relatively heterogeneous (and potentially large) public. This is, after all, one of the reasons why despite their lack of authority, they are important politically. 

I have gone on longer than is typical in such a Digression. And this reflects my awareness that perhaps I am all wrong here. So, I should stop here. But I wanted to add two more thoughts.

First, at one point, in an interview I think with Larry King, Norman Macdonald says in self-effacing manner, that stand-up comedy is no art. And this may suggest that Srinivasan is right in her implied contrast between rap (an art) and comedy (not an art) in her response to Cowen quoted above. For, Macdonald says, art is capable of multiple interpretations, whereas the job of a stand-up comedian is to make a room or a TV audience have the same reaction at the same time. What's funny about the comment, of course, is that Macdonald was quite capable of generating multiple reactions to his jokes over time (in the same audience). So, comedy is art, after all, but can only show (not say) it. Many of Chappelle's stories and jokes, too, also have multiple layers to them. He is not just creating laughs, but he is also inviting multiple interpretations. (This also suggests I should not be too confident in my own!)

Second, my partial defense of the fruitfulness of even potentially offensive comedy presupposes that comedy knows its proper place and stays in its lane. But as Letterman discovered that assumption is naïve. When a clown is seen as a trickster or noble truth-teller, they can become quite powerful politically in times of instability even potential civil war. (For the contrast between a clown and trickers see this fine essay on Boris Johnson by Alan Finlayson.)  

My idea that comedy is an important social safety valve and sometimes an epistemically useful window in a democracy also entails that it may be socially dangerous (as dictators everywhere recognize). My cop-out response here is that thankfully Chappelle's critics have access to influential outlets so that their concerns are also heard. Unlike the popular representation of Mill (which, inspired by Jill Gordon, I don't think captures Mill's views), I doubt the truth prevails over time in the 'marketplace of ideas.' Rather, liberal democracy is also a project in forbearance in which we ought to try to minimize mutual inconvenience and harms. Comedy can produce genuine harms, but it also plays an indispensable social role in helping see a way beyond them.

 

 

 

David Hume, Intellectual Arbitrage, and the Grounds of True Freedom

On the other Hand, Learning has been as great a Loser by being shut up in Colleges and Cells, and secluded from the World and good Company. By that Means, every Thing of what we call Belles Lettres became totally barbarous, being cultivated by Men without any Taste of Life or Manners, and without that Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression, which can only be acquir'd by Conversation. Even Philosophy went to Wrack by this moaping recluse Method of Study, and became as chimerical in her Conclusions as she was unintelligible in her Stile and Manner of Delivery. And indeed, what cou'd be expected from Men who never consulted Experience in any of their Reasonings, or who never search'd for that Experience, where alone it is to be found, in common Life and Conversation?

'Tis with great Pleasure I observe, That Men of Letters, in this Age, have lost, in a great Measure, that Shyness and Bashfulness of Temper, which kept them at a Distance from Mankind; and, at the same Time, That Men of the World are proud of borrowing from Books their most agreeable Topics of Conversation. 'Tis to be hop'd, that this League betwixt the learned and conversible Worlds, which is so happily begun, will be still farther improv'd to their mutual Advantage; and to that End, I know nothing more advantageous than such Essays as these with which I endeavour to entertain the Public. In this View, I cannot but consider myself as a Kind of Resident or Ambassador from the Dominions of Learning to those of Conversation; and shall think it my constant Duty to promote a good Correspondence betwixt these two States, which have so great a Dependence on each other. I shall give Intelligence to the Learned of whatever passes in Company, and shall endeavour to import into Company whatever Commodities I find in my native Country proper for their Use and Entertainment. The Balance of Trade we need not be jealous of, nor will there be any Difficulty to preserve it on both Sides. The Materials of this Commerce must chiefly be furnish'd by Conversation and common Life: The manufacturing of them alone belongs to Learning.--David Hume "Of Essay-Writing"+

I quote from one of Hume's withdrawn essays. I was reminded of this essay by Emily Nacol's An Age of Risk; she makes the important point that Hume "frames this exchange as a risk-free, positive-sum one that issues in profit on both sides, in a metaphor that prefigures the kind of argument he will make about the positive-sum experience of free trade in his essays on commerce." (86-7) Today's digression is a further elucidation of this thought.

The title of Hume's essay may mislead those expecting instruction in writing essays. It's not a how-to, self-help manual of that kind. Rather, the official theme of the essay is to explain the utility or advantageousness of the genre. (I return to that below.) Much of the subtext of the essay is devoted to the explicit shaping of the judgment of his implied audience -- learned and conversable women -- into seeing how worthy his works (and works like it) are. And it is an open question how much of this is servility or (or commercially prudent) flattery, and how much of it is sincere (I return to this below.) This is a stark contrast to the more youthful Hume, who in the "advertisement" to the Treatise where he was more willing to claim that he allowed himself to be instructed by the judgment of his public ("the approbation of the public I consider as the greatest reward of my labours; but am determin'd to regard its judgment, whatever it be, as my best instruction.") Unfortunately "Of Essay-Writing" involves Hume in sexist stereotypes (some of which thinly disguised by attempts at wit), and so one hopes this is the reason why Hume thought it better to withdraw it.

On a different day I would reflect a bit more on how in the nature of a speech act of withdrawing a text in circulation, or not reprinting it in later editions of a text, in the age of printed and electronic publication. Doomed to failure, but, perhaps, not intending to fail. But here I want to focus on three of Hume's very striking claims. 

First, Hume views his essays as a form of what we would call arbitrage between two relatively closed domains: that of specialist learning and that of semi-public conversation (the "learned and conversible Worlds"). And Hume thinks this arbitrage is useful to both domains ("their mutual Advantage"). 

The question Hume leaves hanging is to what degree this arbitrage gives rise to a third domain. Now sometimes arbitrage does not give rise to anything new: it is merely a mechanism to facilitate commerce that would perhaps not happen or occur less efficiently (rapidly, etc.) without the arbitrage. But arbitrage can also generate new products; the instruments that facilitate trade (money, optical fiber cables, mammoth tankers, etc.) may themselves become thriving industries with their own technicians, after all.   

That a third domain is generated by Hume's arbitrage is partially obscured by the fact that in addition to commercial and economic tropes, Hume also uses language of diplomacy (in which he represents himself as an ambassador from the learned). Diplomats are primarily representatives and so it is unnatural to think of them as somehow productive of new kinds. But even Hume notes, explicitly, that diplomates generate treaties and federations ("League, offensive and defensive,") that may take on a life of their own.

So, Hume's essays are not merely arbitrage between other domains, they also are intended to help reinvigorate, perhaps constitute, the domain of what he calls "polite Writing" and Belles Lettres. That he sees his arbitrage activity as more than just facilitation of trade, is clear in that he hopes to shape the judgment of his audience of it. He is not asking his audience to become better judges of the world of learning -- they require his arbitrage for that! -- not better judges of the conversible world (whose criteria are immanent in common life). He does hope, of course, that his arbitrage will improve both domains, so indirectly criteria of judgment in these may be shaped by his activity.

As an aside, as regular readers know I am not un-attracted to the idea of philosophy as a form of intellectual arbitrage. (It's the kind of thing I associate with Liam Kofi Bright's writings bringing together formal tools with topics in fields previously unconnected.) One important difference since the time of Hume's writing is that (recall my musing on synthetic philosophy here; and here with a nod to Lewens) given the fracturing of the learned world into many esoteric domains, intellectual arbitrage can now take place among many specialist sciences as well as among the specialist sciences and the manifest image along many (to use Galison's phrase) trading zones.

So, with the growth of sciences arbitrage opportunities have grown, too. I leave it to a sociologist of science to formulate the law that accounts for the proportion of arbitrage to underlying intellectual developments!* Either way, Hume strikes me as an important role-model for the very possibility of intellectual arbitrage and theorizing about it. In particular, such arbitrage promotes a liberal civilization: one that ends the zero-sum cycle of winners and losers.

Second, Hume makes a striking, easily missed claim about the significance of conversation. It is necessary (can only be acquir'd) for the acquisition of "Liberty and Facility of Thought and Expression." I think Hume is here more radical than one may recognize. It is easy to assume for those shaped by Descartes' meditator, or the recurring image of an arm-chair in a quiet study found in philosophical writing, to assume that what the mind needs to be prepared for genuine ('facility') and independent ('liberty') thinking is a withdrawal from the noisiness of everyday and the stupidity of common sense and public opinion. 

And while Hume certainly allows that some thinking requires silence and withdrawal, the mind gets prepared for this by being socially engaged in discussion with others. We can see recognition of this insight in such institutions as the oxbridge high table, the public seminar, and the social club. Hume would certainly include the coffee house and dinner table in this category. It also follows that for Hume the world of learning is even in an intellectual sense not wholly self-sufficient.

Hume does not quite explain why the mind's emendation toward liberty has to be socially embedded. That's in part because here he does not explain what he means by liberty of thought (a phrase that echoes Cicero, Spinoza, and the freethinkers). Presumably the idea is that in conversation we are practiced in encountering the viewpoints of others on a variety of topics, of listening, and of sharpening our argumentative and rhetorical skills. Hume also seems to think that in conversation we are exposed to more variety of human life/experience. 

I could stop here. But I want to note a third feature. For Hume's claim echoes (recall) an important passage -- which he himself claims is free from "servility and flattery" -- in his dedication (to the tragedian Home) of his Four Dissertations:

Another instance of true liberty, of which antient times can alone afford us an example, is the liberty of thought, which engaged men of letters, however different in their abstract opinions, to maintain a mutual friendship and regard; and never to quarrel about principles, while they agreed in inclinations and manners. Science was often the subject of disputation, never of animosity. Cicero, an academic, addressed his philosophical treatises, sometimes to Brutus, a stoic; sometimes to Atticus, an epicurean.

Liberty of thought is characterized by the possibility of mutual friendship and conversation among those that may differ in ideology (abstract opinions). That is to say, liberty of thought is a virtue in the context of political and theoretical polarization. So, strikingly, the very social institution that make freedom of thought possible (conversation, itself (recall) the grounds of civilization) are also the site of its expression, while simultaneously vulnerable to implosion. 

The pandemic makes the effects of the absence of conversation visible. On a personal level it reduces a sense of connection (see this moving post by Helen de Cruz). But if Hume is right then one of the long-term social casualties of the past year is the absence of a fertilizer of freedom. But, perhaps, if i understand Hume correctly, the writing of essays, to engage in arbitrage, which involves finding the opportunity for mutual gain, presuppose some such liberty of thought and is intended to contribute to it. And so maybe we have others means to encourage it.

On George Stigler and the "Problem of the Negro"

The leaders of Negro thought in America have done the members of their race one substantial service and one much greater disservice. The service was to arouse discontent with the pace at which the social, political, and economic status of the Negro was rising. That the Negro has been becoming wealthier, better educated, more fully enfranchised, and less improperly treated by his white brethren is not seriously arguable. But the distance still to be covered is immense, and no man may say that the pace of 1940 or 1950 is the maximum that should be aimed at in raising the Negro's status.

Nor is the raising of discontent an easy or an uncourageous act. Long slumbering inequities become almost foreordained in their persistence, and a conscious and sustained and even dramatic challenge to the inequities is required. Nor will the leaders of the challenge, who disturb the comfortable flow of customary events, be treated with civility or respect—they are indeed deliberate trouble-makers.

For trouble is apparently the threshold of progress. A society does not respond quickly, or sometimes even at all, to calm rational arguments or to powerful ethical principles. The drama of personal injustice, the presence of devils (or at least of villains or prejudiced holders of privilege), full membership in the righteous, marching columns— these seem to be essential in any basic reform in the United States today (and perhaps in all countries always). So indignation must be produced, and remedies provided in catechism form.

Wrong Target

The great disservice of the leaders of Negro opinion was to direct the discontent at the white population. It was proper to demand political rights that only a majority could confer. It was proper to ask the white population to assist in the rise of the Negro—a small enough restitution for the unreversible [sic] mistakes of the past. Rut [sic] it was a terrible disservice to identify the white man as the main obstacle to the rise of the negro.

It was a disservice because it must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance of the white mean. [sic] Could the stream of demonstrations, growing in size and in insolence, approved or at least tolerated by the political, intellectual, and religious leaders of the nation, have any other message for a semi-literate Negro teenager in a slum, than that evil prejudice of the white man was the fundamental cause of his low estate? Was he to be a metaphysician, distinguishing carefully the demonstration of the principle of the dignity of all men from the proposition that every inadequacy of his life was due to white opposition?

But the disservice was terrible for a more dreadful reason: it was false as a guide to improvement. The past is not for us to relive, and no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end. The task of our time has been to make the Negro discontented with himself, not with the white man.

Educational Needs

Consider education. It would be easy to vote a Ph.D. for every young Negro in America—such a handsome restitution for past denial of educational rights! Good educational facilities, better facilities than whites have, are indeed a moral responsibility of the community to the Negro. The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth. Schools beyond any need can be built in a few years: the love of knowledge and the willingness to work hard and achieve it are the product of cultural evolution. The Negro leaders should be helping the emergence of this cultural tradition, when instead they are diverting Negro energies to better school buildings.

Inferior Workers

Consider employment. The Negro boy is excluded from many occupations by the varied barriers the prejudice can raise, and these must and will be struck down. But he is excluded from more occupations by his own inferiority as a orker, again on average. Lacking education, lacking a tenacity of purpose, lacking a willingness to work hard, he will not be an object of employers' competition. What leader of Negro thought is fostering the ancient virtues of diligence and honesty and loyalty? It is so much easier to seek quotas for Negroes,

Consider the Negro as a neighbor. He is frequently repelled and avoided by the white man, but is it only color prejudice? On the contrary, it is because the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group, and brings with its presence a rapid rise in crime and vandalism. No statutes, no sermons, no demonstrations, will obtain for the Negro the liking and respect that sober virtues commend. And the leaders of Negro thought: they blame the crime and immorality upon the slums and the low income— as if individual responsibility could be bought with a thousand dolllars a year.

It is not easy or popular to place the Negro's discontent upon himself. People will insist upon speaking of the previous or present faults of the white community, which numerous and deplorable—and now unimportant to the Negro problem. People will denounce any talk of the Negro's cultural and economic inferiority as racism, thinking no doubt that to ignore the heritage of past ignorance and vice and folly of the white man and the black man will eliminate the heritage.

One would think that the lesson of the Jews in America would have been taken somewhat more to heart. The Jewish immigrants were on average poor. with meagre education. and confronted by a vast panoply of prejudice. They brought with them precisely the virtues that should be instilled in the Negro: a veneration and irrepressible desire for learning; frugality; and respect for the civilization of the western world. They have prospered amazingly, not only economically but educationally and socially and culturally, and in the process have enriched and adorned our society., They are in the rapid process of losing their identity—at the present pace in a few generations wee shall all have a little, but only a little Jewish blood.

The direction of the Negro's discontent to himself is an unthankful task. How much easier to march on the mayor than to teach industry to a boy: how much simpler to keep the children home to coerce the school board than to instill in them a love of art and literature and science. The task does not allot a large role to the prominent leaders, and calls for different traits. Knowledge is more valuable than anger, and love more valuable than generosity in the task that faces us.

The leaders of Negro opinion are benevolent men, caught in the belief that the only arm of social improvement is the state. The Africans are poor and ignorant? Out with colonialism! The American Negro ids a lesser citizen? To the barricades! No—to the home and church and school.--G.J. Stigler (1965)* "The Problem of the Negro" New Guard, [HT Calvin Ter Beek via Brad deLong]

I am unsure when I first decided to try to face squarely the racist and eugenic elements in the authors I study. I do know that in the late 1990s, it was David M. Levy and Sandra Peart that repeatedly alerted me (and others) to the significance of these themes for the (joint and separate) history of economics and history of philosophy and that how this history is handled also matters to the future of these disciplines (and their interactions). So, alerted I increasingly started to notice eugenic and racialized themes in places I least expected when I was still a PhD student (e.g., Berkeley's Querist; young Neurath; Voltaire; Hume and Montesquieu; etc.) Over the years I have tried to alert my readers to these sordid facts and their conceptual and philosophical significance. 

Prompted by a chance encounter with Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman, I have also come to see that universities today struggle to own up to their eugenic past and ongoing eugenic commitments (recall here; here; here; here). I don't think that struggle is a contingent matter. By this I do not mean that universities today are primarily still interested in advancing racialized or cultural hierarchy -- although undoubtedly some faculty don't see why this would be problematic --, but rather that in the very ideas of bildung and emancipation, improvement of humans is baked in. This shows up in all kinds of ways in the  efforts of bio-medicine-technology at human enhancement. I don't need to remind my audience how frequent universities tie themselves in knots over their inability to convey a consistent approach to academic freedom and, say, minimum respect for all.

Even so, I was really shocked by Stigler's essay. (Stigler won a Nobel in economics in 1982.) I have frequently blogged and published in scholarly journals about Stigler and been reading him on and off for about twenty five years now. This is not a coincidence. Levy was one of George Stigler's few PhD students in the history of economics. And his son, Stephen Stigler (an eminent historian of statistics) was on faculty at Chicago. I remember my nervousness and pride when I took on the father's interpretation of Adam Smith in front of the very kind son (who since has given me permission to work with his father's archives and even checked his library on my behalf once). 

As an aside, I was in the audience, when Stephen Stigler presented a version of his interpretation of the debate between Pigou and Pearson to Chicago's philosophy department. The debate is of interest because of the way they handled what came known as the amalgamation or Simpson's paradox. But the background is the scientific status of eugenic ideas. Only later did I realize how much of modern statistics was developed to enhance or make rigorous eugenic reasoning. For a while I was very fond of Pigou until I realized how immersed in eugenics he really was, too.

Okay, let's turn to Stigler troubling piece. First, he starts by acknowledging that "calm rational arguments" and the enunciation of "powerful ethical principles" have little impact on public opinion and tend to be impotent in generating welcome, even necessary reform. Echoing Machiavelli, he recognizes

that dramatic challenge and turbulence may be required to prompt social reform. And Stigler here anticipates his later, more famous claim (that helped him win the Nobel) that to influence policy one must understand (recall) “the political forces which confine and direct policy.” Stigler clearly believes, with Madison, that politics is the realm of opinion. This is also evident in (the title of) his essays, in which he reflects on the relationship between economics and politics, The Economist as Preacher, and Other Essays.

But it does not follow that there is no method in the political madness. In fact, in one of his most famous papers, he explicitly rejects the then popular idea "that the political process defies rational explanation: "politics" is an imponderable, a constantly and unpredictably shifting mixture of forces of the most diverse nature, comprehending acts of great moral virtue (the emancipation of slaves) and of the most vulgar venality..."' (Note the example.)

Unlike other critics of the civil rights movement, Stigler is, thus, not tempted by tone-policing. Anticipating contemporary philosophers (who (recall) draw on Lorde; and here; here), he thinks indignation in public life may not just be fully justified, but also instrumentally necessary to produce reform. And, in fact, his idea of politics is not idealized at all. He fully expects that the "courageous" leaders of the civil rights movement will not be treated with "civility or respect." Given that he recognizes this, his use of "insolence" is odd to say the least.

But despite this stance, Stigler's attitude toward civil rights leader is not just unsympathetic, it's contemptuous (note the repeated "disservice"). This is all the more remarkable because Stigler does not deny that it is true that "the white man" is an "obstacle to the rise of the negro." Rather, he demands from the subordinated that they do not offend the sensitivities of the majority because it "must lead to hatred, and hatred to violence, and violence to the retardation of the mounting compassion and assistance." And the contempt here is not just for the civil rights leaders and their followers, but also for the non elite white majority. For it is assumed that their response to the truth must be hatred and violence. It does not occur to Stigler to explore that hatred and violence may be engineered by local white elites who fear that their power will be undermined. (This would fit his rent-seeking view of politics.)

At this point, I need to note something. Stigler's economics was, despite the clear political preference for free markets, in this period data-driven. His studies of monopoly and even the sociology of knowledge are data rich. His style of economics, especially in the 1940s-1960s, was neither like the highly mathematical work that was dominating general equilibrium modeling nor like the back of the envelope calculations of consumer surplus pioneered by his Chicago colleague Harberger. It was also little like the work he later did with Becker. So with that in mind, we can see how things go really off-rails, when Stigler notes that "no amount of restitution for past injustice by the white man could solve the basic problem of the Negro in America. That problem is that on average he lacks a desire to improve himself, and lacks a willingness to discipline himself to this end." 

First, as one of the pre-eminent historians of economics of his generation, Stigler was familiar with both Adam Smith's denunciations of slavery, and the 19th century debates in political economy over how to use compensation principles to rectify injustices.** So, it is astonishing that he takes for granted that restitution would not contribute greatly (let alone) solve the basic problem.

Second, and undeniably racist, he makes gross generalizations without any evidence about the psychological disposition of a whole population ("on average). Since Adam Smith is Stigler's hero, it is worth noting that for Smith it is axiomatic that there is "uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition, the principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived." And as I have noted elsewhere this is part of Smith's anti-hierarchical conception of human nature.

Third, since in the very period African-Americans were subject to violence while trying to access education, it is appalling to read Stigler assert that "The real task, however, is not to provide good schools and good teachers, but to create an unquenchable thirst for knowledge in the Negro youth." And no less appalling are the fact free claims that "the Negro family is, on average, a loose, morally lax, group." And so on. Whatever merit, if any, Stigler's underlying economic criticism of the solutions pursued by the leaders of the civil rights movement might have had, it is completely overshadowed by his willingness to engage in racialized stereotyping and victim blaming.+

Let me close. I was sincerely shocked when I read Stigler's essay. I want to explain why. This shock is, in part, because I intend to understand Chicago economics as opposed to the state-centric eugenics tendency they loath in Keynes (and Pigou). And, in part, because I understand them as heirs to the cosmopolitan and anti-racist tendencies evident in the founders of neoliberalism--many of them outspokenly antiracist (even if their modern critics tend to overlook this or very grudgingly acknowledge this). 

I am by no means an uncritical admire of Stigler in my own work. Despite admiring some of his sociology of knowledge, I have long argued he is partially response for the abuse of Kuhnian ideas as a means to silence alternative viewpoints in science. But because of his fondness of pithy phrases and institutional centrality, I have often used his writings (in this blog and my scholarship) to illustrate or illuminate debates within economics or in the philosophy of economics.  But this does not get to heart of the matter.

Stigler was (recall) centrally involved in articulating, the Kalven report, one of the most thoughtful reports on the mission of higher education and the role of academic freedom in it. (I have critically discussed this report in a number of blog posts.) This is somebody that clearly took his task as an educator seriously, and he wrote non trivially on the economics of education. Yet, when given the opportunity to educate the "Young Americans for Freedom" (The New Guard was its house organ, and the organization was influenced by  of William F. Buckley, Jr.), he pandered not their best instincts, but to their worst prejudices. 

[Guest Blogger Amy Olberding on] Corpse Display and Anger

[This is an invited guest post by Amy Olberding.--ES]

Eric’s recent post about anger and corpse display left me unsatisfied with how anger is typically and traditionally addressed.  There’s no tidy way to trace out the concatenation of ideas Eric’s post inspired – it starts with Xunzi talking about how to treat a corpse respectfully, turns then toward Plato considering Leontius’ viewing of a desecrated corpse and, more broadly, what looking at a desecrated corpse is meant to inspire, and then ends up at Agnes Callard on anger.  Maybe the simple explanation is this: display of desecrated corpses is an especially vivid case of human anger, and it often does interlock with moral sensibilities in curious ways.  As Eric notes, the display of the corpse summons the eye and then a response to what is seen.  Anger would standardly inform the reasoning to display the corpse in the first place, and some of that anger is likely meant to transmute and become the witness’ own.  So display of the desecrated corpse is clearly a case that invites consideration of anger. 

But maybe it’s also useful as a way to think about the limitations of our philosophical discussions of anger.  That, at least, is what occurs to me. 

Callard’s recent article divides philosophical accounts of anger into two broad types: pro-anger or anti-anger.  Both sides inevitably need more nuance than this.  Recognizing the moral perils of anger unchecked, the pro-anger advocates are left to argue for management and regulation, lest anger run away with us.  Likewise, recognizing anger’s motivating power where moral ills are concerned, the anti-anger advocates are left to argue that we still need (the far more bloodless) indignation to respond to injustices.  The “sides” here, Callard argues, inadvertently converge because both are trying to recognize a morally palatable anger (or anger-ish?) response when injustices demand some moral-emotive response.  They’re both engaging in moral reasoning that aims to tame and domesticate the wild in us – to encourage measured or regulated abhorrence at wrong without licensing the brute unreasoning stuff that inspires revenge and grudges.  Callard’s argument then pivots to considering the simpler, less attractive conclusion that efforts to purify anger overlook that anger’s impulses – revenge and grudges – are rationally justified. We are left then, with the conclusion that “anger implicates all of us in moral corruption.”  The purified forms of anger moral philosophers are ready to endorse are “a philosopher’s fiction” that work to “distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger, which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood.”

My concern, I suppose, is that it’s all a philosopher’s fiction – that the way philosophy’s methods typically oblige us to speak of anger clarify (if they do) because the phenomenon of anger is severed from other elements with which it may interlock.  This was Eric’s reservation too – if I can put what he said in my own idiom.  He is effectively arguing that we won’t get a satisfying account of anger if we neglect to register its social aspects.  State violence and social norms may have anger embedded in them and, indeed, it may be an important function in some norms that they transmit or summon anger in citizens.  This is why displaying a desecrated corpse to raise the “spirited” in witnesses can be important, in Eric’s example.  So, we might end up with philosophers’ fictions every time we analyze anger as a phenomenon of individual agents.  This was, I take it, Eric’s point.  Mine is similar:  Insofar as our accounts of anger conceptually isolate it from other emotions, they isolate our analyses from the world and from at least some of the people who exhibit anger. 

Because Eric was discussing corpse display, my thoughts turned to the corpse of Emmett Till, a young boy of 14 beaten, mutilated, and shot to death in 1955 by white men who justified their brutality by accusing him of flirting with a white woman.  When Emmett’s corpse was sent home from Mississippi, where he was murdered, to his mother in Chicago, she gave him an open coffin service so that his beaten, distorted, unrecognizable face was visible to all who came to mourn.  Mamie Till-Mobley deliberately displayed what had been done to her boy, displayed his battered dead body and, as Plato’s analysis might suggest, commanded the eyes of all upon him in a way that would summon in them emotional reactions kindred to her own.[1] 

Whatever a philosophical moral account of anger can do, I want it to explain Mamie Till-Mobley.  I am tempted even to say that Till-Mobley is my pre-theoretical constraint for an adequate account of moral anger, such that I take an analysis of anger that I cannot apply to Emmett Till’s mother to be missing something important.  And I don’t think most of our classical accounts or Callard’s can explain her well.  The trouble here, I think, is that we philosophically talk of anger in isolation.

Mamie Till-Mobley is not only angered, she is grieved.  Her action – displaying her son’s corpse – cannot be understood apart from both anger and grief, to an emotive response in which these are profoundly, inseparably joined.  To separate her anger from her grief, to analyze one without the other or lay claim to understanding one without the other would be, to borrow phrasing from Dostoyevsky, false to the fact.  Till-Mobley’s anger and grief are one body and they unite in the display of her son’s body.  Because of this, accounts of anger that seek calibrated, domesticated forms of anger or that would “dark side” our nature in anger just sit ill here.  There is nothing tame in Till-Mobley’s display of her son’s body – it is an action primevally wild and raw – but neither, I think, is there the moral corruption of which Callard speaks.  Contra Callard’s analysis, at least, I think Till-Mobley is exactly “responding rightly to being treated wrongly.”

Some angers are not unmixed but still fully, even emphatically, need to count as forms of anger morally necessary to consider.  Mamie Till-Mobley’s emotive range and reach, evident in the symbolic aching grief and anger in her son’s display, is richer than I think philosophical analysis gets. It is undeniably and potently anger but it’s not only anger, and that seems to me not only what we’re missing in such analyses, but thereby also what we risk missing in our moral-emotional civic cultivation.  To speak of what we ought do with and about anger, we have to speak about the rest with which it often comes – the grief.  What morally angers us can also and often grieve us.  Perhaps, even, what morally angers us ought to grieve us.  But highlighting that alignment changes the kinds of things we ought be saying about anger and, more particularly, anger at injustices.  The thing we call anger is a thing more complicated than “anger” captures.

The methodological claims I suppose are implicit in what I’m stumbling after here are three.  First, I often counterfactually wonder about how different our philosophical work would be were it not lodged too deeply in the traces of its past.  Western philosophical accounts of anger were inaugurated by men who took as their exemplars and standard-bearers for understanding the concept other men, typically men involved in martial contexts.  There is a lot of anger in the world that plainly is not this.  The world is also full of angry, heartbroken mothers.  Were they the original exemplars, I can’t help thinking the philosophical history of anger would look different. 

Second, when we seek to isolate discrete concepts in order to philosophically clarify a phenomenon, we often pre-emptively set aside too much of how the phenomenon operates in the world.  We end up with conceptually cleaner concepts, but lose the moral world we’re trying to track with them.  In short, it’s not obvious that the tidy concepts that make for good, focused, and clarifying philosophy map the messy world.  Anger treated apart from grief will only capture some of anger, and perhaps only the simplest, least experientially vexed kind. 

Finally, where moral improvement of the world is concerned, concepts that don’t answer to the mixed nature of human experience won’t be effective at steering that experience.  Presumably, the motivation for talking about anger at all is figuring out what to do about it and with it.  What to do about it, I hazard tentatively, might require talking about the stuff with which it mixes, all the stuff we’ve left aside to focus on anger alone – not just grief, but perhaps also disappointment.  I can’t defend this – here or even in my own head yet – but if it turned out that some moral anger inextricably involves a richer capacity for grief, we are unlikely to see that and thus to say it and make use of it.  I am quite tempted by the thought that were we more attuned to grief, our understandings of anger would be richer, better, and more useful.  But while anger and grief can be inseparably wedded in a person like Mamie Till-Mobley, our philosophical analyses of both anger and grief live in different conceptual worlds.  So we can’t explain her or direct well toward a world where responses like hers are understood, much less cultivated.

Amy Olberding on Politeness and (Individual and Social) Anger

Not letting fly with an uncivil rebuke also means I cannot as readily from such encounters---to stay civil is, more often to stay engaged. By trying to be well-disposed toward others, I try to preserve social connection, even when doing so is displeasing, alienating, and terrible. The defiant optimism underwriting this resolve would have me hold out hope that we will all be better for making such efforts, that we can find some fellow feeling, some scrap of shared humanity that will enable better (or at least not worse) forms of shared life. Amy Olberding (2019) The Wrong of Rudeness: LEarning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy, p. 152 (emphasis in original).

While I very much like Amy Olderding's internet persona, I was a bit apprehensive about reading her book. I had been convinced by Johnson and Kaziarian (remember NewAPPS?) that civility policing was a means for the powerful to police the vulnerable while they (the powerful) could simultaneously ignoring the real harms emanating from micro-aggressions (see here Bejan on Hobbes) and other forms of incitement by way of (to quote Mill, recall here and here) vituperative speech.

I was, thus, worried that Olberding's book would celebrate the virtues of decorum and thereby lecture others on how to play nice. Even so, I was also predisposed to like the book because I am committed to the idea that if there is any idea worth preserving from the nexus of practices and ideological concepts connected to the word 'civilization' that we, qua public facing philosophers, should keep the conversation, including silences and long-stutters, going.

From the start, Olberding disarms the reader by presenting herself as prone to rudeness, even enjoying it. And she also explicitly recognizes that in particular personal and political circumstances, "sometimes incivility will be the best course" even if, in a humane agent, "it will be tinged with regret and distress." (151) Sometimes incivility or righteous anger is the only response that accords with our own dignity and sense of injustice, even if we know that "abandoning good manners, of failing to try to be police, will magnify many social ills and inequalities." (46) There are plenty of tragic circumstances, where all options are subpar. So, I did not find much to disagree in the book, and much astuteness. In what follows, I reflect on a minor thread that runs through her argument.

One way Olberding understands anger is as a species of truth-telling. And so hiding anger is a means of disguising from others what we really feel. We become inauthentic. In addition, such self-policing can have two costly effects. First, it can take real self-undermining effort at psychological self-management in internalizing anger.  By contrast, as Olberding notes "deliberate rudeness provides the chance to set down the taxing burden of hiding what I really think or feel." (2) I return to this in the next paragraph. Second, by not making (to use language from Hume and Adam Smith) one's resentment felt at some social harm one can have a non-trivial negative impact on regulating norms of justice. Since justice is one of the few social institutions devoted to truth disguising or hiding it can can undermine its functioning. This is why I largely agree with Srinivasan's defense of righteous anger.

Now, Olberding notes that "to be polite...entails getting good at managing an internal economy of attention." (32) This is hard work and requires imitation and practice such that it becomes habitual. That is to say, in addition for there to be a social pay-off (in keeping conversation going, and creating possibility of fellow feeling), politeness has a personal pay-off: one becomes, as it were, better at concentrating, especially concentrating on  what really matters to oneself. (This can be articulated in terms of efficiency; but despite the use of 'economy' and Olberding's decision to treat "attention as a kind of currency," (32) I don't think that fits Olberding's confucian framework.) The key point is that attention is a scarce good, and that to maintain and focus it requires considerable skill.

There is something very important lurking here. But to unearth it means we need to challenge the idea that anger is fundamentally a form of truth-telling (although it can be that). A psychoanalytic commonplace is that anger or frustration is a way to disguise from oneself other uncomfortable feelings or an instance of what the freudians call displacement. I find this thought a useful starting point whenever I need to calm down or have managed to calm down from my anger or frustration! One does not have to buy into much of psychoanalysis to see that this can be a plausible mechanism in many circumstances, personal and political.So, anger then is not itself a form of truth-telling although it can be a significant clue for the existence of other problems (this idea can be found in Machiavelli, too). 

As the nod to Machiavelli implies this is not just an individual issue. The whole business model of contemporary social media and news organizations is to habitually induce anger in order to capture your eye balls. The economy of attention is guided by the skillful manipulation of our reactive attitudes without providing opportunity to (learn to) manage their proportionality with regard to their causes and the possible effects. The cumulative effect is a debilitating and infantile public culture.  

When anger is a (voluntary or involuntary) mechanism to disguise from oneself what one feels, it also prevents intimacy or connectedness with others. So, it can be a form of self-undermining at the individual or personal level. Insert your favorite saying of Yoda here. Of course, lecturing somebody who is angry that by being angry they are self-undermining socially or politically can be infuriating, especially when the causes of such anger are conveniently ignored!

The previous paragraphs are not really a criticism of Olberding. Because what she points to is that the practice of individual and social politeness is, in addition to some other benefits, a means to making space for allowing the sources of one's anger and frustration to become transparent to one's personal and social self/selves. So, politeness can be a means to facilitate norms and practices that are truth conductive. It is also, thus, a means of reorienting our attention to more skillful and wiser agency. 

 

On Callard on Taste, and Badness-promotion

We tend to think of aesthetic disputes as reflecting the least substantive differences between people—you like vanilla, I like chocolate, there’s no arguing over taste, let’s move on. But that point of view may be infected by the wishful thinking of backwards argumentation: given that there is no arguing over taste, those differences had better be unimportant. What if some of them are not?

Consider the fact that the most passionate friendships—those of youth—tend to coalesce around aesthetic passions: movies, music, comics, games. When you meet a stranger and you “click” with them, isn’t it very often because you liked the same book, or movie, or fell in love with the same city or language or artist? Consider real gift-giving, which involves pre-selecting the recipient, by contrast with the self-selection of “whoever might pass by and want it.” Meaningful, personalized gifts tend to succeed precisely when there is some shared aesthetic between the giver and recipient.

...It is striking that Socrates lumps together ethics and aesthetics as the two sources of strife.

The history of ethical thought is a record of the attempt to insert a wedge between those last two kinds of judgments. In both cases, we’ve worked to turn down the heat, but in the aesthetic case it’s by agreeing to disagree, whereas in the moral one it’s by way of the conceit that some kind of unified moral theory—be it Kantianism or Consequentialism—can serve as backdrop for adjudicating all disputes. We can just “weigh” the reasons and see who is “objectively” right and who is “objectively” wrong. In aesthetics we don’t need objectivity and in morality we can have it: strife solved.

I believe there is no scale that resolves all moral disagreements, and that it is not always possible to agree to disagree about the beautiful and the ugly. These claims are not unrelated to one another, or to the fact that the aesthetic and the moral are not as separate as we would like to believe.

I find guns ugly; the gun enthusiasts I know find them beautiful. I find meat delicious; many vegetarians I know have a distaste for it. Whether the ethics drives the aesthetics or vice versa, once they have fused it is to be expected that some of the recalcitrance of a person’s ethical “intuitions” will be due to the fact that they are also visceral aesthetic responses. We pick our friends as much by the contents of their playlists as the contents of their characters—perhaps because we see the contents of their playlists as a not insubstantial part of the contents of their characters.

It is, of course, ridiculous of me to hate the person who gave me that silly bowl, just as it is ridiculous of you to hate the bearded hipster, or the backwoods redneck, or the sleek businessman, or the unwashed hippie, or whichever “type” of person strikes you as having contemptibly bad taste. When political disputes fall along cultural and geographic lines, as they do in our country, it’s hard not to suspect that the divide is as much about aesthetics as about ethics.

The fact that at some fundamental level we remain on the same page—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, etc.—is not necessarily cause for much optimism. When it is in the aesthetic dimension that people drift apart from one another, the rift between them is not very amenable to rational persuasion. We Americans have become multiple nations in taste.

An aesthetic divide between two human beings is not trivial; it obstructs their ethical relations. The earth-mother aesthetic encoded in the belly bowl ran counter to my vision of parenting a newborn, which involved no breastfeeding, no cloth-diapering, no co-sleeping. If I leave that bowl in the entryway, I am doing so with the hopes of establishing an ethical connection—benefaction—to someone solely on the grounds of a fundamental aesthetic divide. The person who picks up such a bowl is a “different kind of person” from me. I have no doubt that, were I to meet her, I’d find some common ground, but one thing that can’t serve as that common ground is the fact that my trash is her treasure. Or so I saw it.

Ben saw things more amicably. While granting to me the existence of aesthetic divides so profound as to occasion moral offense, he didn’t think the tackiness of the bowl qualified. He asked me to take a step back: surely I wouldn’t want to live in a world of monolithic aesthetic taste. The plurality of aesthetic points of view is a product of the genuine diversity between human beings, and the fact that they are free to judge for themselves what appeals to them. It should occasion respect, not contempt.

But there is a fine line between respecting others’ right to their bad taste, and opting to participate in it. Ben saw that participation from a bird’s eye-view, as autonomy-promotion: helping people enjoy whatever they might like. I saw it from the ground-up, in terms of badness-promotion. The question here is the degree to which peoples’ inability to see eye-to-eye is itself something they can see eye-to-eye about. Is there a way to adjudicate this disagreement between Ben and me? Or is it a difference in taste?--Agnes Callard "Do you want my garbage?"  @The Point. [HT Dailynous]

Agnes Callard is a distinctive and ambitious, fresh voice writing for a wider audience without pandering to the "many." Since there are few of these in the profession, this is very welcome. I use 'ambitious' because she is willing, as the post above suggests, to present herself as speaking to and on behalf of a much larger national 'we' even if, perhaps, especially when, she is being a contrarian. This latter feature was on display in one of her other pieces this past week, which appeared in the New York Times, and (alas) got lots more attention (see for example here).

I thought her NYT piece conflated the pure (politics free) form of philosophy with the institution of professional philosophy where (what I call) a species of philosophical politics is inevitable even as a means to improve philosophy (for, an example, recall this post on David Lewis). In it, she also stipulates (without argument) that philosophical teaching/influencing is about bringing other "people to believe only what they, by their own lights, can see to be justified."  

Now, one feature of professional philosophy I am attracted to emotionally is our freedom to criticize. And when I reflected on today's Digression the nuggets in the previous paragraph where going to be its fuel. But I have come to think that our professional practices overvalue criticism and discourage us to seek out the lovely and handsome in other philosophers.* And, in fact, the part of me that admires Callard is not her persuasiveness, rhetorical or argumentative, if any, but her ability to raise significant questions in a playful-serious way.+ And she does so in virtue of her clear willingness not to see certain alternatives. 

Take, for example, the gun case. This will illustrate both what I mean by a willingness not to see (in this case, it's my limitation), and something about her ruling out. I can find guns aesthetically pleasing objects. The aesthetic involved is one my eighteenth century teachers would call 'fit.' Often it is not solely fit; the beautiful guns draw on other aesthetic features (including speed, a certain kind of faux sexuality, and shininess, precision, etc.). I do so by taking a certain stance toward guns; the one that screens off the gruesomeness of the effects. There is nothing ennobling about hunting or killing people. But I think it's possible, genuinely possible, to admire guns and wish to see them banned. Quite clearly, if I allowed myself to see the gruesomeness of the effect(s), the aesthetic valence of guns might, gestalt-like, change as it clearly does for Callard. But it is not impossible that the gruesomeness would (if one has a Goth sensibility) enhance the aesthetic value. After all, sometimes a joke is funny because it is, in part, in bad taste (for more reflections on that issue see here).

It is possible that the last two sentences reflect, as I imagine Callard would say, a defect of character (in me).  And what I like about her public persona is this very puritanical strain in her [to be contrasted with the amicable], which can be grounded in her sensibility of disgust (read the full essay to grasp what I am talking about it) and then seeks to justify the actions that follow from this sensibility (without, I note, trying to come to grips with her disgust).** I tend to find such sensibility comical in one off situations, yet when others aim to live up to it consistently (and so exhibit integrity), admirable, too. I think we can be plastic about our evaluative criteria depending on extremely minor variations in context. (So, yes, one can value another's integrity, while being a situationist oneself.) 

Of course, she may think the flaw in position may not be of character at all. She may think I mistakenly keep distinct, aesthetic and ethic, that are simply intertwined. (But my appeal to the aesthetic quality of the gruesome is meant to illustrate that I do no such thing.)

Even so, my preference for Callard is not just aesthetic, it's also substantive. She is right to call attention to the significance of aesthetics in our lives, our friendships, and our politics. For example, one cannot understand the grip Trump has on his followers if one ignores aesthetics (recall here and here).++  

She is right that the unwillingness to discuss taste is no evidence for its lack of significance in our lives. But it is surprising she does not note that the silence on difference of taste functions like a taboo (recal and here). As she recognizes it clearly prevents social conflict. And since she grants that it is very possible that aesthetic matters themselves are foundational, these conflicts could not be adjudicated by any arbiter. 

Or at least she invites us to consider that possibility. I am struck, amazed really, by the felt need of adjudication. If Ben and Agnes were in the situation in which a collective decision was necessary, then, indeed, adjudication would be required. But I don't see why one would have to force a decision, and not allow further discussion. 

What Callard does not seem to allow, perhaps cannot see, is that talking about differences in taste, to keep that conversation going despite one's differences (recall here and here) is itself, or can be, a joyful exercise. Adam Smith in presenting the exemplary nature of Hume's life, whose philosophical views he predicted would fail to persuade many, called this, with a nod to Addison and agreeing with Pope, a 'gaiety of temper.' It's an open question for me -- no really this is not an objection! -- if such a temper can facilitate Callard's wish to participate in badness-promotion. 

On Public Philosophy and Transgender Rights Campaign

During the past year professional philosophers have struggled with controversies pertaining to transgender issues (recall the Tuvel/Hypatia affaire here and here; and again involving language in journal articles [recall my piece on the open letter to the editors of PPR at Dailynous here;] the debate between Talia Mae Bettcher and Kathleen Stock;[1] the language of the APA philosophy blog [see Leiterreports]), etc. These debates have intersected with wider society and have even led to campaigns to to have faculty removed from their positions in the UK. While I am no friend of calls for civility in debate (recall this post among many), the way this debate is conducted is unedifying and I have already expressed despair that even the philosophers party to the debate seem to be unable to recognize explicitly each other's vulnerabilities. 

I start this post with two preliminary comments. First, as regular readers know, I support so-called public philosophy (recall; which comes in many varieties [see here]) and philosophical activism (which comes in many flavors and in support of many different kinds of causes) of society and the profession. I have long admired the service philosophy of Kristie Dotson (recall), Hugo Bedau's activism against the death penalty, and John Corvino's work on same-sex marriage. (I am sure readers can add to this list their own favorites.)* Such cause/ideal-promoting political activism is both self-justifying and a useful means of discovery of truth. While philosophy can benefit from a measure of distance, cool reflection, and impartiality, it's also the case that engagement with the messy details of lived experience and the arguments generated by political conflict can also be a useful constraint on and source of creativity for philosophical discovery of the nature and properties of an ideal. 

However, I have  long thought that it seems unwise, or at least imprudent, when philosophers qua being philosophers support active politicians and political parties. (That's compatible with doing so qua being citizens of a particular polity). It seems best if one's pursuit of truth and the good is not sullied by and subject to the many tactical compromises and fatal injustices that accompany political life pursued by imperfect beings like us. I rarely see philosophical excellence in support of a politician or party,+ and much that I find cringe-worthy.

Second, transgender people are subject to bigotry, discrimination, harassment, and violence. This is well documented in the UK and US. The evidence also suggests that many transgender victims are also (intersectionally) members of other historically discriminated minority groups, I assume here that the violence occurs in virtue of their being transgender, and that belonging to it means one belongs to (all other things being equal) a vulnerable category of people. So,

• I wholeheartedly support the campaign for transgender rights and protection under the law.***

Regular readers know (recall this post on MLK Jr.) that I also think that human imperfection, self-interest, and bigotry often undermine enforcement of the law and can even make the most beautifully written laws a tool of oppression. What's needed is, thus, also sufficient popular support or opinion and the right dispositions in favor of such rights. Political campaigns are, therefore, crucial to generate such support.** Of course, there is something of a paradox lurking here, because where such support exists the right would not be necessary.

One important feature of new rights is that the costs and (new) down-side risks of these need not be distributed evenly on the population. That's of special concern if these fall on other vulnerable groups. I understand the present campaign against trans rights, which includes some high profile self-described feminist philosophers -- where not informed by or leaning on bigotry -- as aiming to articulate some such risks to vulnerable women, especially those in prisons and among the homeless. I think such concerns eminently reasonable, but that's because there is a reasonable fear of violence and degradation within prisons and fear of violence against the homeless (see here). But rather than fighting transgender rights, the proper response to such concerns for the very vulnerable is, I would think, to join the coalition for thoroughgoing prison reform and better/more resources and conditions for the homeless.++ 

So my preliminaries have turned into a blog post, which was prompted by my momentary reconsideration of my stance on public philosophy.+++ It's true that there is no reason to believe that philosophical activism will always be beneficial. And I am reminded of the fact that even in the pre-internet age (which, let's stipulate, can make any bad thing worse), there was and never is a golden age of civility (as those of us old enough to recall philosophical debates over abortion, LGBTQ rights, or if one pays attention to debates over Zionism/BDS, etc.)---I have often remarked upon the fact that as a discipline we have an all-too-human fondness for philosophical debates as blood-sports and the delicious take-down.

It's a familiar fact that the pursuit of a worthy cause can turn into fanaticism and unpleasant and vindictive (moral) righteousness. And it is known that friends of worthy causes will find it difficult to condemn the excesses because they do not wish to be seen as undermining the worthy cause. For, it's also all-too-common that critics of the worthy cause will use such excesses as a tactic to undermine a cause, and shift debate away from consideration of the underlying evils. Savvy intellectuals recognize the temptation they may benefit from escalation and from hyping an otherwise unworthy critic, inviting abuse from their anonymous followers, with the cycle being renewed etc. And so it can often happen that wisdom is pushed aside or found crouching unnoticed in the margins of the arresting debates. 

In light of such facts people of good will may prefer to retreat to the ivory tower, and pursue their worthy work in undisturbed quiet. Others will note that these facts are part of the eternal return of life's carnival, and will will them...one tweet at a time eternally.  

 

 

On Solana's Civic Anarchism; or a liberalism for free spirits

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.--Valerie Solanas (1967) SCUM Manifesto [HT Petra Van Brabandt]

The second paragraph is so arresting, as revolutionary transitions are wont to be, that it is easy to overlook, or deliberately pass over, the first sentence of SCUM manifesto. To do so would miss the extraordinary ambition of the text: it aims to establish the conditions of life worth living within a true society. The whole text is structured around two kinds of societies; the false or unauthentic one -- denoted 'society'-- and the true one to come after the civic-minded females have done their revolutionary work. The manifesto sharply distinguishes among three stages: the boring status quo; the thrilling revolution, which makes possible, a grooving society (society is the repetition that holds the manifest together). But it does it in the name of life and (thrilling) civic-mindedness. 

For, a true "society" consists "of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other." Today I wish to articulate the nature of such a true society. In so doing, I pass over what is most exciting in her work: the critique of patriarchy, the unmasking of the art industry, the stinging attack on the corruption of science for life-destroying ends (go read SCUM Manifesto for yourself). This society, which is essentially "complete" and lacking competitive principles is anarchic in character without "a government, laws or leaders." Solanas associates philosophy, not unfairly, with pompous prattle, but she echoes (recall) Socrates' true city and Spinoza that the best political community is one with true companionship and no hierarchy (she also refers to it as "eternity and Utopia"). For in a true society, true community is possible: 

A true community consists of individuals -- not mere species members, not couples -- respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally -- free spirits in free relation to each other -- and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of `society' is the family; `hippies' say the tribe; no one says the individual.

I do not wish to irritate more radical readers of Solanas (they can console themselves that before long my type is dispensable), but what she advocates here is the liberal good life.* She just thinks that men as they have been bred are incapable of it. Of course, she is not a thoroughgoing liberal; she embraces illiberal even thrilling means to solve the transition problem. But in this she is little different than those liberals who pine for Enlightened despots to help escape the cul-de-sac that is everyday politics. 

The point for Solanas of stressing the individual is not to make possible possessive individualism, but to promote the better kind, "to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else." And "like conversation, love can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent groovy female females, since friendship is based upon respect, not contempt." Of course, the material conditions  for this better kind of individualism "requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship."

Not unlike Keynes, Solanas thinks the material conditions to make a true society possible are easily within reach. In fact, she advocates big data computing half a century before it became fashionable ("There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all.")

Before I close, I wish to prevent two misunderstandings: first, I do not mean to minimize Solanas's rejection of reform. Hers is a revolutionary program. As she writes, "SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it."**  The destruction is menacing for those attached to the status quo.

Second, I do not mean to suggest that for Solanas the best community is only love and conversation. Near the end of her manifesto, she points to a range of activities presupposed in it "to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world."

There is, thus, a lush gentility in Solanas's vision. In fact, it is so gentle that one wonders how the civic thrill-seekers will adjust to it once they can repose from their revolutionary work.  

On Taboos and Brutal Honesty; on the 'ídeals of academic liberalism' [long read, alas]

Are some ideas so offensive that they shouldn’t be engaged with? That question occupies scholars a lot these days, and tends to generate a predictably polarized set of responses — from those who opine that snowflake millennials are destroying free speech to those who call for the retraction of journal articles for ideological (among other) reasons. Meanwhile, I find myself lost somewhere in the middle, attempting to understand my own decisions...

An idealistic model of academic liberalism says that we should engage with all ideas, no matter what. Truth is its own defense! We have
nothing to fear from ideas, even those we find offensive! And so on. I would love it if this were true, but it has always seemed like nonsense to me.

Saying why, though, is tricky. It’s not merely that I’m confident the conclusion is false. I’m a philosopher — I spend lots of time entertaining ideas I’m pretty sure are false, and it’s part of the ethos of my discipline that this is a worthwhile activity. It’s also not that I think the conclusion is morally wrong or  could have morally bad consequences. That’s true of many ideas that are obviously  worth engaging with...
The pro-rape argument is different because I can’t see how the benefits of discussing it outweigh the harms. Perhaps the argument is clever or original, but let’s be honest — there’s a  limited amount of intellectual value in any one argument. If I want to take up a challenging and interesting argument, I can pick one of the thousands of other challenging, interesting arguments out there. So the benefits of engaging with a pro-rape argument are minimal. The harms, though, are not. Taking seriously an argument that justifies rape has the potential to cause intense pain to victims of rape, not to mention the potential to promote rape. Citing ideas, discussing them, responding to them is a type of scholarly currency. It’s academic signal-boosting...

Most people would, of course, be far too polite to say what Singer says. But Singer’s claims about  the comparative value of disabled lives follow naturally from the casual remarks that disabled people and caregivers hear all the time...
I seriously doubt that the well-intentioned people who say these things would endorse Singer’s conclusions. But Singer is right that his conclusions flow straightforwardly from these sorts of common claims. For this reason, I find myself strangely grateful for the brutal honesty of Peter Singer. He says explicitly what others only gesture at implicitly.
People worry that grappling with offensive views gives them undue legitimacy. But in the case of someone like Singer, those views have legitimacy whether or not I choose to engage with them. To state the obvious, the arguments of the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University are going to matter whether or not I pay attention to them. But more importantly, Singer’s views already have legitimacy because people will continue to think about disability in ways directly relevant to Singer’s arguments regardless of whether progressive academics decide those arguments are simply too offensive to be discussed. (After all, as Singer himself wryly notes, the sales of Practical Ethics tend to increase whenever there are calls to “no platform” his talks.) Even Singer’s views on infant euthanasia aren’t a dystopian  thought experiment. At least one major European country (The Netherlands) openly practices infanticide in some cases of disability.
...
As a full professor, I have an incredible amount of social privilege compared with most disabled people (large percentages of whom are unemployed and live below the poverty line)...Given all this, it’s hard for me to  justify the idea that I shouldn’t engage with Peter Singer. Do Singer’s views make me uncomfortable? Yes, deeply so. But probably not as uncomfortable as they make people living with spinabifida in the Netherlands, given the Netherlands’ policy on infant euthanasia in cases of spina bifida.

And unlike others more directly affected, it is literally my job to think and talk about difficult ideas. The discomfort and hurt when dealing with views like Singer’s are real. But if I’m unwilling to take on a measure of discomfort, given how much privilege I have and how little I have to lose, then I’m not sure I’m using the privilege of an academic life the way I ought to be.
The value of struggling with Singer’s ideas doesn’t negate the real and material costs, but it does offset them. And in a piece of utilitarian reasoning that Singer himself would approve of, to me the trade off seems worth it. Prejudice is often held subtly, implicitly, or without much  reflection. By giving us clear and well-defined arguments, thinkers like Singer lay bare the case  for views which many people hold. Once that case is laid out, it’s much easier to begin the work of pointing out its flaws.--Elizabeth Barnes "Arguments That Harm — and Why We Need Them" The Chronicle Review. [HT Liam Kofi Bright & Justin Weinberg @Dailynous.]

While there is a lot more to Barnes's article, the underlying argument has a few key components:

• (i) there is a cost-benefit analysis of both (a) engaging with particular position/speech and (b) the consequences of leaving some speech/idea unchallenged. Barnes notes (c) that the harms and benefits can fall unequally on society, on vulnerable populations, and individual academics. Conjoined with such cost-benefit analysis is the idea that
• (ii) there are opportunity costs in engaging with a project. Time and attention are scarce resources. So not all ideas can be engaged with it and engaging with some means that other perhaps worthier projects are potentially slowed down or prevented.
• (iii) There is path-dependency/historical legacy: some views are already in the culture and/or have legitimacy regardless of what philosophers do/say.
• (iv) Status plays a role in who puts a particular idea forth and who is worth responding to.
• (v) Professional philosophy is (in part) grappling with difficult (and false) ideas.
• (vi) Privilege or noblesse oblige creates a duty of taking on unpleasant tasks on behalf of (more vulnerable, less secure, etc.) others.
• (vii) Brutal honesty & clarity in arguments are taken as intellectual virtues such that flaws can be exposed.

Each of these steps is cashed out in subtle ways, so that there are a lot of moving but also mutually reinforcing parts in the argument. (That's not meant as a criticism.) It means one can accept Barnes’s conclusions without agreeing with all the moving parts, or demur from some of the conclusions and still accept most of the moving parts. (Again, that’s not a criticism.) There is also another principle which Barnes rejects (as ‘nonsense’):

• (viii) An ‘idealistic model of academic liberalism,’ which says that ‘we should engage with all ideas, no matter what.’

I also reject (viii; which to repeat, Barnes rejects). But I do so because it misrepresents liberalism and also academic liberalism. What I'd like to do here (and, perhaps another post) is ground my response to Barnes in our shared rejection of (viii) and embrace of (i) & (ii). But I will do so on liberal (even classically liberal) grounds and along the way say something about (v; vi; viii). What follows is not meant as a criticism of Barnes's engagement with Singer, but I wish to show that there is something to be said for non-engagement with offensive ideas, even the acceptance of taboos; undoubtedly that will not persuade many, but along the way I would also like to argue for shifting the burdens of who ought to respond to who around a bit (again on liberal grounds).

Liberalism, it’s true, has always been a theory that has been suspicious of government regulation of speech; but it also has been accommodating of exceptions to this (including ones relating to public health, the content of advertising, public safety, incitement to violence, etc.). Of course, the exceptions are contested and differ among broadly liberal jurisdictions and situated liberal political thought. But the exceptions are often motivated by other liberal commitments (including the harm principle (recall), commitments to equality and freedom, and public welfare).

More important, for present purposes, liberalism has also always been welcoming of non-governmental restrictions on speech. This is grounded in prudence, kindness, the harm principle, and the benefits of cooperation. This is so obvious that it is kind of weird philosophers keep forgetting it. For example, even in my famously forthright home-country of the Netherlands, brutal honesty is, in fact, not always encouraged say among business partners, friends, married couples, or teachers and students (more about that below). In ordinary life people everywhere routinely and completely un-problematically engage in self-censorship in all kinds of ways without thereby promoting falsehood or violating any tenet of liberalism. In fact, liberalism assumes that in pluralistic societies, we kind of adopt a live-and-let-live attitude in which we do not confront each other all the time with our sincerely held views. (That's also compatible with rejecting or embracing demands of public reason.) This means that we are expected to self-censor all the time in complex, liberal societies--it is no surprise that the weather, sports, and vapid celebrities are safe conversation starters.

Critics of liberalism, inspired by Foucault and Marcuse, have derogatory names – ‘disciplining,’ ‘bio-politics’ ‘repressive tolerance’ (etc.) -- for such self-censoring practices. And undoubtedly sometimes, perhaps often, the monitoring effects of public opinion, locally and nationally, can be stifling in ways that Mill already diagnosed and alerted us to. But at the same time, norms that restrict speech deemed imprudent or offensive have many positive effects, including reducing coordination costs, facilitating reliable expectations (crucial to justice), and facilitating exchange of ideas and goods. This is not a bug in liberalism, but a core feature of it. For liberalism does not treat speech as harmless or epi-phenomenal to social order—on the liberal view speech is constitutive of our political life (see Levy). But that also means that its impact on others is to be taken seriously; the harm principle is as deeply entrenched in liberalism as the suspicion of government regulation of speech. This is why liberals find nothing silly about concern over, say, systematic micro-aggression (recall here and here). From a liberal's perspective: just because one has a right to offend others does not mean one ought to be offensive.

It does not mean, of course, that such norms (including ones that regulate sexual affairs, dress-codes, civility etc.) can’t be interrogated or challenged [regular readers know (recall here and here) that, inspired by work of Ed Kazarian and Leigh Johnson, I am no friend of civility when it is imposed by institutions], but it does not follow that norms restricting speech are de facto illiberal. In fact, the liberal spirit encourages experimentation with different norms alongside a strong norm of individual responsibility. Obviously, that’s not the end of the matter; it’s quite clear that liberal political economy, and the profit motive (alongside political aspirations) in particular, have encouraged the media to promote all kinds of valuable forms of self-expression as well as irresponsible speech by individuals on social media and internet. This raises important and uncomfortable questions for liberalism and liberal democracy; but the response is not limited to faith in providence that in the long run speech works out fine.

As an aside, it's important that Barnes reminds the reader of the real world consequences of philosophical ideas. It's undoubtedly true that public policy in the Netherlands has a pro-eugenic bias*--one promoted, in fact, not so much by ethicists but by the medical community of OBGYN practitioners and pediatricians (although there is always an ethicists available to lend a hand) -- and that Dutch public policy on disability is problematic--in Holland disability is made invisible in lots of ways. But it's also the case that due to cheap and easy access to various forms of screening and abortion, "infant euthanasia in cases of spina bifida" (which is indeed allowed under the so-called Groningen protocol) is now de facto non-existent in the Netherlands because parents choose not to bring such infants to term.

Okay, let me return to the main argument. I have noted above that liberalism does not embrace (viii). The same is true for academic liberalism. Building on work by Jacob Levy (recall), I have argue that the mission of academic life and education is compatible with a whole range of limitations of speech. These limitations need not be uniform; they can be varied in the classroom, seminar settings, public debates, commencement addresses (etc.) and the particular local missions of the academic institutions. In fact, even universities that pride themselves on their freedom of thought are careful not to be seen as places where, say, astrology or Cartesian vortex theory and a whole bunch of other discarded or wacky ideas are discussed and debated in all seriousness. (That’s compatible with promoting scholarship about them!) Universities self-censor in the curriculum and are very attentive to reputational costs. The same is true of all kinds of noxious political ideas—a cranky professor with insipid views can be tolerated, of course, but colleagues and administrators are careful to avoid amplifying their platforms all the time. People exercise good judgment in these matters all the time. This – restraint and good judgment -- are not just compatible with academic liberalism; the whole point of liberalism is to promote institutions where individuals and communities can exercise good judgment. (Of course, one generation’s good judgment may well be the next generation’s discarded dogma.)

In fact, and this gets me to (v) academics of all disciplines recognize that (academic) taboos make progress possible (recall here; here, and here).+ Journals and disciplines often treat some issues as closed or not worth engaging with. Graduate advisors steer people away from unpromising projects all the time. As Kuhn taught philosophy, a paradigm may well include commitments that are only challenged in  extreme circumstances but otherwise ignored (and legitimately ignored according to standard Kuhnianism); I have expressed reservations about the legitimacy of ignoring objections or treating some heterodox views as worth excluding. But the practice exists widely. Professional philosophers ignore objections all the time (often based on considerations of status or of perceived signficance of the objection) including in Q&A. In fact, I have come to suspect that one way one becomes a high status professional philosopher is to learn to ignore smoothly objections from lower status peers rather than to try make sure that the best objection to one's views is jointly articulated. If you have never witnessed this, you probably engage in it yourself.:)

What does this amount to? Academic liberalism embraces the legitimacy of taboos and norms of responsible speech. More recent liberalism (thanks to work by Fricker, Dotson, etc.) is increasingly attentive to how the benefits and costs of speech are distributed; we frown on punching down and victim blaming; we worry about speech that puts further (social, political, and economic) burdens or opportunity costs on those that lack resources or skills; thanks to Heather Douglas we worry again about social consequences of even truthful scientific speech.

Let me now turn to (vii). Professional philosophy has been rather self-indulgent during the last century: leading journals have allowed and even rewarded (perhaps sincere) debate on infanticide, disenfranchisement, torture, etc.; our profession has lionized conceptions of international justice, technocratic solutions to environmental problems, and humanitarian interventions where the down-side risks of implementation are always put on (poorer, darker-skinned, etc.) folk who do not have a seat at the table (recall). When one complains about this, a philosopher's instinct is to claim that she has no responsibility for the application of her ideas--that entirely predictable misapplications of ideas are irrelevant to (core) philosophy. Cui Bono?

Our pedagogic practices have embraced the value of presenting carefully argued papers for morally shocking conclusions as a means to ‘stimulate conversation’ in the class room. Not unlike the media we often prefer to teach by way of polarized debate. It's such a pedagogic culture that welcomes the class room discussion of powerful arguments for awful conclusions. I could see why this is good training for future lawyers and top 20 philosophers; but it really is not a good training for citizenship or the art of living (even if it can be instrumentally useful at times); we learned from Eric Schwitzgebel it does not promote ethical behavior.   

We constantly forget it is not a virtue but a deformation of professional philosophy that it often accords so much respect to arguments and clarity that if one argues carefully one's views are taken seriously regardless of the social consequences of these views or, for that matter, the moral truth of these views. (Of course, if one thinks -- as I do not -- that only argument can establish a moral truth, so much the worse for you!) To note this is not to be a critic of argument (or a friend of Heidegger or poetic philosophy). But as Barnes notes often the only benefit of taking an argument seriously is one internal to the credit economy of the profession or the academy (iv). But no profession is self-justifying in that way. (That's to say I distinguish between the profession and philosophy.)

Barnes seems to think that because (recall (iii) & (vii)) Singer systematizes and articulates clearly what people already think in our culture (and that he has high status (iv)) his views on disability should be taken seriously. This I find very peculiar. Lots of ordinary views do not merit systematization or articulation. There is nothing wrong with ignoring ordinary folk's commitment to various forms of astrology and soothsaying; some of these have a great impact on people's moral lives. [And, yes, I am aware that Singer has been very important in teaching all of us the significance of animal welfare.] Lots of people are racists in various ways. What's the benefit of articulating the view in clear steps? Why should we grapple with racial eugenics (outside of its history and political economy)? There is no obligation to continue every debate with, say, Charles Murray, especially because he has never really responded to the important technical criticism of his work. Singer is, of course, a much better and more honest thinker than Murray. But given the distribution of power and resources, the responsibility to engage with critics and to prevent dangerous uptake of his ideas is clearly on Singer's side not the more vulnerable populations.

Let me close (for today). Barnes has every right to engage with Singer and she may well be right that good will come out of it. I wouldn't be surprised it will make her views (which, recall I admire)** more subtle and fine-grained. But I wonder why we really need to engage in intellectual activities that will continue to entrench his views on disability as central and worth grappling with when there is so much constructive and policy work to do.