The Wood between the Worlds
Friday, April 09, 2004
There was a one-day strike of adjunct (temporary, non-tenure-track) faculty this week. The graduate student TA union, although contractually forbidden to go on sympathy strikes, did anyway. The buildings were picketed and many classes were shifted off-campus, despite that too being prohibited. I went in of course, and really was not given too much trouble by the picketers, although I had also taken care to pick a back service entrance that would have only a couple of picketers. Not toweringly courageous but a quiet life is worth something.
The department was pretty much empty; two other students came in, including one brave TA who taught his classes that day, but most of the professors stayed away as well. I was spotted, I found out today, and so took a minor grilling from one of the more enthusiastic girls. If that's as bad as things get, then really there'll be little enough cost. It does remind me that the biggest union supporters and the union founders are all women, and men on the whole seem much more skeptical. Of course there were men picketing, so it wasn't a clean break, but it was still pretty marked.
Anyway, the really wonderful part was what one group of picketers was chanting. I don't know whether this university goes in more for chanting than most, but it seems a necessary part of any crazy demonstrations. It was call-and-response style again. I wish I could write in the infantile, sing-song tone, but if you put a rising accent on the italicized words it should be about right; two stress accents per line.
Leader (pointing at building):
This side, bosses' side.
All:
This side, bosses' side.
Leader (pointing at picketers):
This side, workers' side.
All:
This side, workers' side.
Leader:
This is the picket line.
All:
This is the picket line.
Then repeated, because of course if it's good to chant once, it's good to chant about a hundred times in a row.
If only you could have seen the sleek, well-fed middle-class protesters, many dressed expensively. This was clearly a public act of shared fantasy, playing at being laborers oppressed by the top-hatted bosses.
While it is true that the faculty in question are payed poorly ($20k/year), their wage scarcely measures their privilege and comfort. In part that's because they come from the middle class to start with, and in part because few enough of them are the primary wage earners. Then too, they have one of the softest jobs available.
But above all, the wildly exaggerated Manichaeism of "This side bosses' side/This side workers' side" is far more black-and-white, dualistic, simplistic, etc., than I have ever heard from conservatives. It's fortunate that I have the press to tell me that conservatives are the simple-minded dualists, since I'd definitely never discover that on my own.
Flory
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
I forgot. Here are three Spanish blogs that should be useful to know about:
BloJJ
Iberian Notes
LibertadDigital
Flory
OK, the rate of posts is going to drop to one every few weeks between now and April 30th; it's astonishing how heavy the load is becoming. But once I clear finals week (which may mean as early as April 22-24th) I hope to make up for it.
I wasn't going to post about politics, except where events involved one or more of the three putative reasons for this blog, but I think the recent events in Spain deserve a couple of sentences, at least.
First, what an appalling disaster. If only the word "tragedy" had any weight left in it, since this is truly one. Not only is 200 (and 1,400 injured!) absolutely an awful total, relative to Spain's population, about 40m, the bombing was roughly equivalent to half the Sept. 11 total. An attack of such a magnitude has its own horror.
Second, thank God Sept. 11 was not an election year. It is not possible to predict what would have happened if an attack like that had preceded the election. Bush already failed to carry the popular vote; even worse, think what the 2000 post-election legal and media battle would have been like if the NYT were still running obituaries for victims and identification of bodies was still continuing and making news. Actually, I can't imagine it.
With luck, Americans would have reacted as they did. All but the radical left were brought back to the patriotism that, lacking as we do any ethnic bond, is the essence of American identity. Rather than being worse, the post-election problems could have been handled in the context of a temporarily re-awakened sense of civic responsibility. Such events have brought out an element of greatness in far less promising men than Gore.
On the other hand, in Spain the Socialist party won by about two million votes. There were also two million first-time voters. As in America, routine non-voters tend leftward. I think it is very wrong to accuse the Spanish of cowardice; nearly half of the voters even in record turnout voted for Aznar's PP, a very high total in a parliamentary system. And those PSOE (Socialist) voters who were committed to the party beforehand may be guilty of a great deal because of their commitment to a disastrous political philosophy, but I don't really see how they could be considered cowardly for not changing their vote. Of course they should have seen what not changing would mean, but there was little time and anyway socialists are not noted for their tight connection to reality.
(Which reminds me that there are flyers up at the university calling for "A Better World: It Can Happen" and pointing out that in this current, inferior world the rich capitalists still live off the labor of the worker. The accompanying cartoon is hilarious, of a hugely fat man in 1920s-ish fancy dress, sitting on the bowed backs of four workers, drawn in classic Soviet style, with the mighty thews and the overalls. So in case anyone was missing the subtext to post-Soviet leftist politics, the promise is still of a Better World and that doesn't just mean trying for better laws or courts or zoning regulations, but a change in the nature of reality. How would someone who thinks like that even be able to think about the likely terrorist interpretation of his vote?)
Even in the 1990s dreamtime, when most people acted and voted as if history had ended (in the Fukuyama sense), Jesse Ventura was able to win Minnesota's governorship by bringing in routine non-voters, especially the young. He turned out to be just what he looked like, a total disaster, and in the next election, the regular voters voted him out. Not only had he been a disaster but of course one of the things about routine non-voters is that they will not be likely to vote again, let alone twice in succession, once that immediate stimulus is gone. (Novelty and action-figure ads in Ventura's case.)
Scarcely 50% of the electorate in America votes, even in tight presidential elections. Every single regular voter in America could respond to terrorist attacks by voting to support the current president, whoever it was, yet not ensure his victory. The Spanish voters were subjected to several days of appalling propaganda by a press that hated the PP government intensely and that terribly misrepresented the facts. Our press might act better; would you bet on it? And of course not every single voter would switch to support Bush; a good quarter to a third of committed Democrats think Bush is a criminal and a liar, and even simply a murderer.
In other words, every responsible person with even a moderate level of knowledge, both liberal and conservative, could vote the right way, yet America could produce a "cowardly" result. That's the problem with calling Spain cowardly. It's also the problem with mass enfranchisement. People with no stake in society, and this is not a surprise, invest no effort in learning about the surrounding society and have no serious interest in its future. They know nothing, have no experience in learning what is needed, and I very much doubt could ever be counted on to come to the right conclusion about a political matter at the very moment that they would be full of the strongest civic feeling they'd ever had in their lives.
Of course I'm just assuming that the new Spanish voters were typical in being urban, young, ignorantly cynical, propertyless, unmarried, etc. If someone can find otherwise I'll be interested to see it, but what I've read suggests this is right. At any rate, this sort of thing is why I think suffrage ought to require some evidence of civic involvement. Not a lot, just a bit. One way would be to raise the age of enfranchisement to 30, or at least to the historical 25. Age is a proxy for civic involvement since most people end up married or at least significantly connected, through land or business, to the rest of society. Since the average age at first marriage is 27 for women and 29 for men, 30 would be a very simple way to skew the electorate towards people who are beginning to think responsibly. Other ways, such as requiring the voter to present at least one of a marriage license, a property deed, or a business license, would be even stronger but much more complicated to implement. It's not going to happen of course, and I don't waste much time wishing it would, but I do think people ought to think through just what it means to vote and why voting matters at all. After all, the Soviets voted, men and women, young and old, every single one.
John Flory
P.S. Don Gately asks about women's suffrage. First, I don't actually think women should be denied the vote and I never have; what I've said is, and this is true so far as I know, that no one has ever re-visited the claims made by those opposed to it before the amendment was ratified. In fact admitting women to the vote has made a huge difference; no Democrat has won a majority of the men's vote in the presidential election since 1960. More women than men (here, in Britain, and in Spain) believe in pre-emptive capitulation to terrorists, to such an extent that while men's support for various military actions often hits the 60% level, women's remains in the 40s. This is mostly, I think, a result of the far lower interest in national and especially international affairs that most, not all, women evidence. On the other hand, the same studies that have confirmed that women are primarily interested in local (city and county) politics have confirmed that men tend to know less about and to be less interested in local politics. In addition, women come later to any political interest at all. Politically aware ordinary guys (as opposed to activists) are not the majority but are still common even in their early 20s. This isn't true for women. So for me it's not a matter of sex but age, with women simply showing the effect of age more strongly.
Lastly, Don asks if women were enfranchised at any point before the 18th Amendment. The answer is, yes, because in some states before about 1830 the vote was based on property only. Laws at the time (very wrongly) made it extremely difficult for women to hold property, but when it did happen, they could end up with the vote. Again, this was only in a few states and only for a fairly brief period, and ironically women's (accidental) suffrage was snuffed out in the course of extending suffrage to all free men. I don't know whether women had ever voted in other countries; probably not, since I can't think of any other candidate than revolutionary France. They very well could have there, I don't know.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
Sorry, I forgot to mention that there is particular significance to poisons and potions: they were mixed up with witchcraft, which was wicked, dangerous, and frightening. Nefas, the Romans would say: unlawful, wicked, sinful, obscene. Still, ancient medicine included medicinal drinks as well as pills, unguents, poultices, and (ugh) suppositories, and I have no idea how proper medicinal drinks were distinguished from witches' potions.
Flory
It turns out Orwell was pro-life for non-religious reasons also.
It's an interesting article, although one very small criticism is that the Hippocratic Oath did not necessarily forbid abortion itself. I've been reading John Riddle's book on ancient and medieval contraceptive and abortifacient means, and one of his points is that the oath refers explicitly to giving a "drug" (it could also be rendered "poison" or even "potion") to cause an abortion. I think that probably implies that abortion itself was forbidden, but Riddle does show that other parts of the Hippocratic corpus provide instruction on abortion. The ancients mostly seem to have taken the oath to mean that all abortion was forbidden, and one possibility that Riddle does not address is that the Hippocratic instruction on abortion was for use as a desperate measure. In another place Riddle does grant that some ancients did make exceptional provision for abortion when the mother's life was at risk.
In any case, the safest thing to say about the Hippocratic Oath is that for nearly its entire history it has been interpreted as forbidding abortion, so at least it is descriptive of the Western medical tradition, both before and after the rise of Christianity.
Flory
Thursday, February 19, 2004
In response to a recent, particularly evil murder--of two policemen during a traffic stop--a bill has been proposed to restore capital punishment for some forms of first degree murder. I hadn't realized that capital punishment was not a penalty for murder in this state. I'm resisting using words like "legalizing," because of course any constitutionally acceptable punishment is legal in principle; all that would be changed is whether it would be a sentencing option. It seems to me to be absurd to speak of prohibiting or legalizing an action that only the state can ever take, and which is in fact the single action that uniquely distinguishes the state from all other institutions.
To "ban" capital punishment is only for the state to say that it will decline to execute murderers, no matter how savage, but that it retains (as it must) the right of capital punishment. Rioters, looters, people who threaten policemen, even trespassers in highly protected areas; all are rightly at risk of summary capital punishment. And if the risk of an innocent man being executed for first degree murder worries someone, how much more worrying it must be to him to think of police swat teams armed with automatic weapons. That's a form of capital punishment far less discriminate than lethal injection and one permitting no appeals. As far as risks go, it is nearly certain that the government executed more innocents in Randy Weaver's cabin than it has through the legal process in the last forty years.
OK, conspiracy check: of course nothing more went on in that case than the unhappy combination of a crossgrained, half-nuts survivalist and a hugely arrogant and over-militarized federal law enforcement system. I hate having to give any disclaimer, but certain things pick up a color unrelated to the facts, and this is one.
In any case, the state may restore capital punishment to the sentencing options for some murders. And, naturally, Catholics are trying to stop it. Putting the many good arguments for the use of capital punishment aside, and passing over just how unconcerned Catholics were about a culture of death when they treated Protestants as Texans treat spareribs, the really contemptible thing about Catholic opposition is summed up in their opening paragraph:
The Michigan Catholic Conference today announced its resounding opposition to a proposed constitutional amendment that would reinstate the death penalty in Michigan. On the issue of capital punishment, as with abortion or assisted suicide, the Catholic Church has consistently advocated against the use of lethal means to solve social issues.Oh, of course, abortion is just like executing someone who shot two policemen. It's not really any wonder that the vast majority of Catholics aren't serious about abortion, if the problem with it is only that it's the wrong way to go about "solving social issues." The Catholic position is morally vacuous, laughably incoherent, and depraved in its consequences, since it obscures the real moral problems present in abortion and simultaneously ensures that more murderers will kill again.
But at least it's infallibly depraved. That's just like virtue, as Bellarmine said.
Flory
P.S. I hope you admired my use of preterition--it's a low rhetorical figure, but extremely fun to use.
Sunday, February 15, 2004
Another article about "intellectual diversity" in the universities.
Intellectual diversity is a lousy idea, of course; for hiring faculty, the only difference that should matter is the specialty of the prospective faculty member. It's good to have Latinists and Hellenists, specialists in later and earlier works, in prose and poetry, and so on. It's idiotic to say that there is any intrinsic value at all in having a wide variation in political opinions. If it would be good to add registered Republicans, wouldn't it be even more diverse and even better also to have Communists, America-Firsters, neo-nazis, and any freelance nuts who wander by?
The real problem is that hiring blatantly prefers leftists as leftists. My university just went through a round of hiring, and as a graduate student I took a small part in the selection. The graduate students discussed the candidates, who had given lectures and met us less formally, and then voted by show of hands. Of the four candidates, two were hip young leftist women, whose "theory" influenced scholarship was still connected with reality; one was a pleasant young woman whose method was much more traditional and who didn't give any indications of her politics; and one was an ill-mannered older woman, whose theory of female power hardly concealed the holes in her argument.
The first thing to notice is that they were all women. It is not the case that nearly all classics graduate students are female; the departments I've seen are about evenly split. The first non-academic hiring criterion then was clearly that the new professor be a woman. That kind of thing is a given, though.
The discussion, however, was surprising. The pleasant young woman was highly praised for her pleasantness, openness, poise, and resourcefulness, and scarcely criticized. The harsh older woman was just as strongly condemned for being the opposite in every way. From a couple of the battier students, she did win some praise for her aggressive use of theory. Of the remaining two, one was liked but dismissed as a lightweight, while the other was explicitly praised for her importation of leftist politics into her scholarship. One graduate student even portrayed her as an anti-Victor Davis Hanson. The quality of her scholarship was hardly discussed. She won the vote by a very wide margin, while the pleasant, competent, non-political candidate came second with a handful of votes.
The graduate student vote isn't decisive, but it has a little influence; more important, it's reasonable to think that it won't be too different from what the younger faculty do. Political viewpoint was not the only criterion, but it was so present in the whole discussion that it is all but impossible to imagine a non-leftist winning. And an actual conservative, like VDH, should he by some error make it to that stage, would be roasted alive. Even keeping silent about politics is not very helpful; the second-place candidate was almost certainly at least a Democrat, but they were looking for strong professional commitment to politics.
By the way, "theory" is the general name for applying ideology to a subject. "Good use of theory" or "Showed a sound grasp of theory" means that some ideology (Marxist, feminist, etc.), mixed with deconstructionism or the like, controls the person's scholarship. One history professor last year mentioned in passing that some of the oddities of a book we'd just read resulted from the author's desire to eliminate free markets from Roman history. This wasn't a criticism, just an idiosyncrasy to be noted. Also I should add that I really dislike VDH, whose writing is like a thick slice of soap.
Flory
Tuesday, February 10, 2004
As a sort of post script, I have to say that one reason I have had less than expected to post about the university is that all the people I know are civil. Their beliefs are pretty wild, but I have yet to meet anyone who goes straight to hands-over-the-head, tear-down-society madness in the way that many, many people in the SF Bay area do. Sure, absolutely every professor insults Bush in class at least once a week, but they do it much more calmly.
Once in Palo Alto I provoked a room full of co-workers into (honestly) hands above the head frenzies of Bush hatred just by mentioning his name. I haven't seen anything like that here. (I admit that I treasure this memory--now that I'm free of it all.)
Flory
There was a heavy snowfall of Latin in the area last week; it blocked the door and I've only just now been able to get out.
You may have heard about the Georgia DOE's plan to drop the word "evolution" from its curriculum. The stated intention was to help some students overcome their reaction to the word itself, and in that way to help them learn about modern biology and evolution. This is possibly a bit silly, as all euphemisms are, but just about perfectly anodyne. Evolutionists, that is to say, people for whom evolution is not merely true, but is the Truth, reacted violently. The reliable knucklehead Carter jumped in, showing a spark wholly lacking when he was dealing with, say, Iranian terrorists. Among other things, he said
There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith.Well, fine, we all knew Carter was, not a stupid man, but a badly deranged one. These comments hardly compare to his writing speeches for Yasser Arafat and providing him image tips.
But a Californian acquaintance was excited by the story into emailing several people about Carter's getting it right for once. I finally pointed out the obvious, and got back a fire-breathing response that, among other frothy berserknesses, demanded that control of Georgia's schools be taken away from Georgia. He was maniacal throughout, but this exchange (forgive me for pasting in email) sums it up:
>> The question is not what the political or social
>> climate in Georgia is; it is whether the science of
>> biology is to be taught as it is supposed
>> to be taught, with its entire lexicon intact and
>> unmodified by school administrators.
>
>> There's really no room for compromise on this issue.
>> Historically speaking, the creationists have always
>> been extremely excited when the
>> door of the public schools is opened for them. As
>> far as I'm concerned, the public schools need to
>> pull that particular door shut and brick it.
> This is what I mean about the evolutionary fringe
> having trouble with a free society. I know that no
> one else's most serious beliefs ever seem as serious
> as one's own, but trust me, it takes just as much
> effort for me to accept compromises on abortion as it
> would for you (if you ever did) to accept compromises
> on evolution. Yet accepting the fact of compromise is
> the absolute requirement for politics, and politics,
> despised though it is, is what distinguishes all the
> forms of free societies from those societies where
> there are no compromises, only pure clean orders.
I confess to being completely baffled by this paragraph. "This is what
I mean about the evolutionary fringe having trouble with a free
society." What, exactly, does that mean? I don't know how much (if any)
scientific training you have, John, but I can assure you that
virtually 100% of practicing biologists regard evolution as a fact.
There are theories concerning how evolution occurred, but there is no
serious doubt that it did occur.
Quotes from me in green, from him in blue.
For the last few days I've been trying to decide what to do; I wasn't done, but I couldn't handle another blast of his distinctive blend of patronizing and boasting (cf. "I don't know how much..."). I'd be sure to reply with something that I'd regret, eventually. But it also seems pretty weak to respond here where he can't reply. My consolation is that, based on many other experiences with him, I can be sure he wouldn't understand or even listen. His idea of argumentation is to demand, "Evidence. Logic. Consistency. Explanatory power." while at the same time neglecting even to read what he's objecting to.
So, with that half-hearted disclaimer out of the way, now the quotes. For the purpose of this argument, I'm willing simply to concede that the Georgia DOE was conspiring to teach that the earth is flat. It wasn't, of course, and in fact was trying to further acceptance of the substance of evolution, but for this purpose I don't care. The problem is that a free society requires compromise, even on important things. More than that, these compromises will often be in the direction of something false.
It is the fanatic who says, "That I am right absolves me of all demands of civil society." In truth, his one correct belief is irrelevant, because he exalts a far worse error: the principle that there is anything whatsoever that absolves a man of his duty to engage in civil society through politics, that is, through persuasion and compromise.
My acquaintance proved, as ever, completely incapable of distinguishing the objective truth value of his belief on the single point of evolution from the status of his belief in a free society. It was, as I thought it would be, impossible for him to accept that other people might hold as tightly to a belief in another area as he does to evolution, and that the objective truth value of those beliefs cannot be allowed to outweigh the great goal of freedom, the attempt to maintain a peaceful life both for the zealots and for the rest of us. But, he says, I'm right, I'm right, I'm right.
Well, as those kooky kids say, whatever.
Flory
