What the People “Want” November 11, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: modern conservatism, performative contradictions
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Interpreting the results of the recent election as a mandate is not only risky but logically impossible. From Ed Kilgore:
Frightened by joblessness, “the American people” rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn’t block.
In philosophy, we call theseperformative contradictions. As assertions, contradictions are meaningless in that they express no coherent idea. But as signals of irrationality they could not be more clear.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Intellectual Giants November 10, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: climate change, John Shimkus, modern conservatism
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House Republicans are deciding who should be chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.
Apparently a leading candidate for the job is John Shimkus Republican from Illinois who thinks:
(1) We don’t have to do anything about climate change because the Bible says God promised not to destroy the world again after Noah’s flood.
(2) We shouldn’t reduce carbon emissions because it would be “taking away plant food.”
(3) “Today we have 388 parts per million in the atmosphere. I believe in the days of the dinosaurs, where we had the most flora and fauna, we were probably at 4,000 parts per million. There is a theological debate that this a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon.”
(4) “When we breath in, we breath oxygen. When we breath out, we breath out carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is not a toxic emittent.”
This is the sort of person we depend on to solve the variety of problems this country confronts.
That Shimkus is a candidate for this committee tells us a lot about the intellectual capabilities of congressional Republicans and the people who put them in office.
It also tells us something about our increasingly slim chances of surviving for another century.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
This Is What They Get Paid For November 9, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.add a comment
According to the standard Washington narrative, repeated ad nauseum by commentators on cable news and the fish-wrap, was that Democrats over-reached during their time in power, passing lots of legislation that the public didn’t like, and and thus were defeated in the midterm elections.
And the Washington press corps had one question repeatedly on their minds—Was it worth it?
I doubt that “over-reach” explains the defeat. If the economy were humming along we wouldn’t be having this discussion. But besides that, the question “Was it worth it?” is a strange one to be asking a politician in a democracy.
William Saletan in Slate had the best take on this:
“[I]f health care did cost the party its majority, so what? The bill was more important than the election.”
Politicians have tried and failed for decades to enact universal health care. This time, they succeeded. In 2008, Democrats won the presidency and both houses of Congress, and by the thinnest of margins, they rammed a bill through. They weren’t going to get another opportunity for a very long time. It cost them their majority, and it was worth it.
And that’s not counting financial regulation, economic stimulus, college lending reform, and all the other bills that became law under Pelosi. So spare me the tears and gloating about her so-called failure. If John Boehner is speaker of the House for the next 20 years, he’ll be lucky to match her achievements. [...]
It’s funny, in a twisted way, to read all the post-election complaints that Democrats lost because they thought only of themselves. Even the chief operating officer of the party’s leading think tank, the Center for American Progress, says Obama failed to convince Americans “that he knows their jobs are as important as his.” That’s too bad, because Obama, Pelosi, and their congressional allies proved just the opposite. They risked their jobs — and in many cases lost them — to pass the health care bill. The elections were a painful defeat, and you can argue that the bill was misguided. But Democrats didn’t lose the most important battle of 2010. They won it.
When I vote for politicians, I expect them to do what is best for the country; not whatever will keep them in power. Democrats ran on a platform that included health care reform as a priority; to not pass it would have been a breach of trust.
Call me old fashioned, but I thought the point of getting elected is to try to make a difference. Acquiring power just for the sake of having it is hollow exercise in vanity. Once in a great while, officials have an opportunity to use their power to improve the lives of their fellow citizens and make the country considerably better off.
I get the sense this week that some would have counseled Democrats to let the opportunity pass for the sake of their careers. “We didn’t do much,” Dems could say this week, “but at least we’re still in charge.”
What nonsense.
Democrats started 2009 with an abundance of political capital, which they proceeded to invest. The efforts didn’t pay off on Tuesday, but the dividends for the country will be felt for years.
The question “Was it worth it?’ just misses the point—which is what one would expect from the institution formerly known as “journalism”.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The Emperor’s Feast November 8, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Culture, Dwight Furrow's Posts, Food and Drink.Tags: Apicius, Dairy Management
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From the famed cookbook of Apicius, (A Roman cookbook from the 4th Century)
The proposed menu for a banquet:
APPETIZERS
Jellyfish and eggs; sow’s udders stuffed with salted sea urchins; patina of brains cooked with milk and eggs; boiled tree fungi with peppered fish-fat sauce; sea urchins with spices, honey, oil and egg sauce
MAIN COURSES
Fallow deer roasted with onion sauce, rue, Jericho dates, raisins, oil and honey; boiled ostrich with sweet sauce; turtle dove boiled in its feathers; roast parrot; dormice stuffed with pork and pine kernels; ham boiled with figs and bay leaves, rubbed with honey, baked in pastry crust; flamingo bioled with dates.
DESSERTS
Fricassee of roses with pastry; stoned dates stuffed with nuts and pine kernels, fried in honey; hot African sweet-wine cakes, with honey. (h/t Brian Leiter)
Does anyone know where I can get sow’s udder in San Diego?
Meanwhile back in the contemporary world, empire just isn’t what it used to be.
From Talking Points Memo:
The Cheese Industrial Complex
Here’s an article in the Times that is both disturbing and oddly comic, if darkly so. The US government is now making a major push to combat obesity. It’s the First Lady’s big cause. But for years Americans have been moving away from full-fat to reduced fat or skim milks. And this has created a surplus of whole milk and milk fat.
So what to do? While trying to get Americans to reduce fat intake and eat better, the USDA has also created a marketing arm called ‘Dairy Management’ which has the job of teaming with companies to find ways to get more cheese into consumers’ diets.
The story in the lede is about how ‘Dairy Management’ helped Dominos overcome sagging pizza sales by introducing pizzas with 40% more cheese. It’s been a rousing success and sales have doubled.
Is this progress?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
A Lost Generation? November 4, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: John Judis, Mitch McConnell, President Obama
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What this election suggests to me is that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced. America emerged from the Civil War, the depression of the 1890s, World War I, and the Great Depression and World War II stronger than ever—with a more buoyant economy and greater international standing. A large part of the reason was the political system’s ability to provide the leadership the country needed. But what this election suggests to me is that this may no longer be the case.
[…] The Republicans may not have a mandate to repeal health care, but they do have one to cut spending. Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program. Republicans will accede to tax cuts, especially if they are skewed toward the wealthy, but tax cuts can be saved rather than spent. They won’t halt the slowdown. Which leads me to expect that the slowdown will continue—with disastrous results for the country.
And that is not the whole of it. As Judis points out, new industries, the only exit strategy from economic stagnation, will require government seed money that the Republicans will block. Legislation to mitigate global warming will not pass. Budget deficits will skyrocket because tax cuts will be the only legislation that will get through Congress.
The most telling story was the contrast between Obama’s speech yesterday and the remarks of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell today.
While a contrite Obama extended a cooperative hand to the GOP, and suggested a willingness to compromise on everything from tax cuts to energy policy to health care, McConnell simply asserted that the aim of the GOP over the next two years is to make Obama a one-term President. From Steve Benen:
At President Obama’s press conference yesterday, he used the word “compromise” three times. The phrase “common ground” came up an additional three times. The president referenced working “together” 11 times. When ABC’s Jake Tapper, in the context of the debate over tax policy, asked, “So you’re willing to negotiate?” the president replied, “Absolutely.”
All of this sounded quite reasonable. But what I can only hope is that Obama and his team realize that Republican leaders have plans for the next Congress, and “reasonable” isn’t on the menu.
There’s been some talk lately about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) conceding that the “single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Let’s not forget, though, he keeps saying it.
The only objective the GOP has is political, to regain the White House in 2012. They have no plans to help anyone but their financial supporters.
The U.S. is a very large and dynamic country with tremendous wealth and human resources. But no amount of wealth or resources will be sufficient if we ignore reality. Politics in a democracy is not a game of winners and losers but a mechanism for developing strategies to confront problems. A country that ignores facts, ignores history, and fails to grasp the scope and nature of its challenges will never meet them; decline is inevitable.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
So What Happened On Tuesday? November 4, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, ethics of care, politics.Tags: liberalism and morality, President Obama, reviving the left
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The short answer is that lots of people lost their homes, their jobs, and their security for the future. The Democrats promised to give them some relief and they didn’t deliver—the public resents that. Since there is only one other party on offer, they chose Republicans.
People who feel resentful are not inclined to coolly assimilate the fact that Democrats made things less worse or that Republican free market radicalism cost them their well-being in the first place. The attention span of American voters can be measured in minutes. If nothing else, the GOP has proven that if you are going to fail, fail so spectacularly that the other team can’t fix it in the short run.
Here are a few facts that the majority of the voting public apparently don’t know:
We now have a health care system that insures thirty million more Americans than were insured before Obama took office, substantial tax cuts for middle-class Americans, a bailout of Wall St. from which the public will make a profit, a massive economic stimulus that saved millions of jobs, and an economy that has grown for the past four quarters. The calamitous job losses that characterized the end of the Bush Administration have ended and corporate profits are again on the rise.
But a recent poll shows that by a margin of two-to-one, those most likely to vote believe taxes have increased, the economy has shrunk, and the billions of dollars of bailout money will never be recovered.
As usual, Democrats made the mistake of thinking that if they play fair and do a competent job of managing the bureaucracy and the policy apparatus of government, the public will reward them with approval. But the voting public looks at politics as a morality play, not a policy seminar. The optics of bailing out Wall St. and Detroit while ignoring homeowners, small business owners, and construction workers cannot be changed by earnest management. Especially when Democrats themselves have a reputation for being handmaidens of casino capitalism and corporate welfare. Passing much needed health care reform is laudable but its benefits are too long term to affect this burgeoning resentment in the short term.
The GOP are masters at manipulating resentful, myopic, low-information voters; the Democrats wouldn’t know resentment if it bit them in the ass. (Oh. It did. We will see what they have learned)
At the close of the Bush Administration I published a book, Reviving the Left, in which I argued four claims: (1) Voters respond to underlying value systems, not policy proposals; (2) conservatism despite its superficial moral appeal is a form of nihilism, (3) managerial, interest group liberalism, because it refuses to articulate a competing value system, is ineffective as a political ideology; and (4) liberalism can be revived only by adopting a grassroots-fueled ethic of care that emphasizes our moral obligations to each other.
This election season tends to confirm all four propositions. Obama had to bail out the banks to maintain some semblance of a financial system. Had he shown the same care for homeowners and workers I wouldn’t be writing this today.
Although his campaign was vague enough to raise doubts, I had some hope that Obama understood (1), would fight to make (2) clear to the public, recognized the limits of managerial liberalism, and would begin the process of transforming liberalism into a viable political force with a powerful moral appeal. None of this has come to pass. My biggest disappointment is the utter collapse of the grassroots, youth-fueled organization that played such a role in his election. Democratic indifference toward that movement was obvious this election season. According to Ed Kilgore, “As Voters under 30 dropped from 18% of the electorate to 11%; African-Americans from 13% to 10%, and Hispanics from 9% to 8%. Meanwhile, voters over 65, the one age category carried by John McCain, increased from 16% of the electorate to 23%.”
Can we turn this around? I suppose hope springs eternal. Hope is by nature resistant to evidence but susceptible to vanity.
But without hope one has nothing.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
The New Barbarians November 2, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: Conservative Values, Ted Nugent
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Tuesday’s election will put conservatives back in power at least in the House and in many state governorships.
I haven’t had time to absorb exit polls and results, but now is a good time to remind readers of the kind of people who now have power and influence and can claim to speak for America.
First up is Republican “strategist” Jack Burkman on a recent talk show defending U.S. foreign policy under George Bush. I don’t think I have seen a better example of the thuggish, rank immorality that passed for leadership just a few years ago. The other guests on the talk show can’t seem to decide whether they should laugh or throw a tantrum.
Next up, Alex Pareene at Salon gives out awards for the best race-baiting ads of the happily concluded election season.
[…] California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman wins an honorary Baity for putting the border fence in her ads, then lying about it, then running a Spanish-language ad claiming that she’s against the Arizona immigration law.
Next up: Nevada’s Sharron Angle, who just may defeat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, despite the fact that basically everyone acknowledges that she’s crazy. Angle shot out to an early lead with her “Thanks, Pal” ad explaining how much Harry Reid loves Mexicans, who are scary. […]
You’ll note that happy, white college graduates are compared to young Latino men in backwards baseball caps. Reid wants to give the Mexican ones in-state college tuition, which is for some reason horrible, because we must never allow immigrants to go to college.
And it goes down hill from there. The article and accompanying 16 videos provide a litany of brutal anti-Muslim, anti-Mexican screed pandering to every imaginable racial fear lurking in the electorate this year.
And this article would not be complete without a quote from conservative activist and former rock “star” Ted Nugent speaking at a rally for West Virginia Republican John Raese:
God bless the attitude. I love your attitude. I got some spirit going wild out there today. You’re really turning me on. But here’s how you will win, and if you don’t do this, you’ll lose and Nancy Pelosi will keep her puppet. Here’s how you fumigate the rats . . . If each of you don’t get an army of voters to get John Raese to go to Washington and fix it, if each of you don’t get all your friends, all your co-workers, all your neighbors, everybody in your life, you cannot relax between now and Tuesday. You might not even want to sleep. You might want to realize that it’s not good over bad. It’s good over evil.‘
Here is the video via Juan Cole:
As Juan Cole notes:
Nugent’s rhetorical technique is to dehumanize his opponents. Pelosi does not have a political ally but a “puppet.” The Democratic representatives are not humans, but “rats.” He is talking about Al Franken, John Dingell, and Nancy Pelosi. They are rodents and ‘varmints.’ He even uses the language of mass murder against them. He calls for them to be ‘fumigated.’ That the Democratic Party is the party of urban ethnic minorities, of Italian and Polish Catholics, of Jews, of Latinos and African-Americans, and that Nugent was demonizing them before an all-white rally in West Virginia, underlines the ethnic tensions on which he was implicitly playing, and in that context his imagery of extermination is extremely smelly.
Nugent contrasts the vermin in Congress to an imagined organic community of hunters, church-goers, and bowlers, who must mobilize as an “army.” The use of fascist imagery, of solidarity-producing activities producing a martial commitment, is striking. Only about 4 percent of Americans hunt, and only ten percent fish. Less than a third regularly go to church. The organic army he is raising is clearly white, relatively well off, unusually religious, and able to afford rural estates. (Nugent was born and raised in old, white, industrial Detroit but now lives on a farm, from which he did a reality show for clueless city-slickers such as his teenaged self had been).
His flourish is to end on an ominous black and white note. The political battle, he says, is not a matter of choosing good over bad. It is good over evil.
Nugent is a horrible human being, perhaps not all there. He told a British journalist of Iraq in 2006, “Our failure has been not to Nagasaki them.”
American Democracy will not survive if we continue to put people who hold these views in office.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
A Delusional Rally to Restore Sanity October 31, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, politics.Tags: John Stewart, Rally to Restore Sanity, Stephen Colbert
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Scott McLemee’s discussion on the eve of the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear cites some disturbing survey results from Susan Herbst’s Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics.
[…]Herbst reports from a survey of university students in Georgia that she and her colleagues conducted in 2008-9. Their findings suggest a pervasive dread of argument as such, at least in public settings.
She writes that “72 percent of students agreed that it was very important for them always to feel comfortable in class,” with “only 7 percent believing comfort not to be an issue.” She calls this “evidence for at least one factor underlying the student anxiety that we find: Feeling comfortable and unthreatened intellectually is a value many students share.”
McClamee comments:
To think or believe something is a strictly personal matter. Hence pursuing an argument is taken as very nearly an act of aggression. Herbst cites interview data suggesting that some students regard it is almost impossible to persuade other people of anything. (This is, of course, a self-fulfilling attitude.) “Contrary to the image of college being a place to ‘find oneself’ and learn from others,” she writes, “a number of students saw the campus as just the opposite – a place where already formed citizens clash, stay with like-minded others, or avoid politics altogether.”
Regarding the Stewart/Colbert rally, he concludes:
But the anti-ideological spirit of the event is a dead end. The attitude that it’s better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor — this is not civility. It’s timidity.
“Here we are now, entertain us” was a great lyric for a song. As a political slogan, it is decidedly wanting. If someone onstage wants to make Saturday’s rally meaningful, perhaps it would be worth quoting the old Wobbly humorist T-Bone Slim: “Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack.”
Juan Cole’s post-mortem on the rally is entirely correct:
Stewart’s was a gentle ‘can’t we all get along’? plea. It at times seemed to echo Barack Obama’s increasingly naive-sounding 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention about the lack of difference between blue and red America.
I am sympathetic to Stewart’s amazement and disapproval of where political exaggerations in the hothouse petrie dish of 24/7 cable “news” may be taking us.
But with all due respect, I think Stewart’s statement mistook the problems as being solely ones of rhetorical imagery. The 80 percent in America have been royally screwed over for 40 years now. They’ve been deprived of a real share in our increasing national wealth, with wages and compensation having been kept down, in part by massive union-busting. They were robbed of whatever little progress they had made by corrupt or greedy unregulated bankers and financiers,who were mostly bailed out with the people’s money. The “tax cuts” of this century were actually a massive transfer of wealth to the ultra-wealthy. As a result of these transfers, the wealth of the 400 billionaires and the more hundreds of near-billionaires, has increased exponentially since the Reagan tax cuts. And, when the voting public finally seemed to have woken up to the scam, the Right wing deployed phony racial and cultural issues to rile up “whites” to make sure they are kept down and the great billionaire bank robbery can continue. At the same time, much of the wealth at the top derives from environmentally ruinous activities, such as exploitation of hydrocarbons or depleting the oceans of life, or mountain-top removal mining, or selling people cigarettes and other carcinogens, or mounting private security armies for deployment in the country’s ever-increasing war zones. The outcome, over the coming decades, of growing inequality and growing environmental degradation, could be catastrophic.
Me, I worry about whether the Republic can survive a situation in which 1 percent of the population has over 40% of the privately owned financial wealth, or in which they take home a sixth of the nation’s income every year. I worry about tens of millions of unemployed, thrown out of work by deregulation and high-level criminality, and millions more of the working poor barely making ends meet. I worry about the end of commercial fishing and the droughts and dust bowls of climate change. And I think those things are worth getting a little hot under the collar about, and that what politics is is a way of attributing positive and negative traits to political ideas and officials, and making these judgments accessible to the public through affect. I don’t think climate-change deniers, anti-science ignoramuses, or laissez-faire capitalists who screw up the economy and put millions out of work are “nice.” And while I do believe we have to convince them and their followers they are wrong with reasoned democratic discourse, I think some snark and outrage is entirely called for.
Conservative politician and media figure Pat Buchanan announced to the 1992 Republican convention that we are in a “cultural war for the soul of America.”
18 years later, liberals are still not taking his words seriously. Until we recognize we are in a battle, not a seminar room, liberalism will continue to get kicked around by conservative bullies.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
Is Climate Change an Ethical Issue? October 28, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Ethics, Philosophy.2 comments
Last week I linked to an article by David Roberts at Grist who argued that although the majority of Americans think climate change is happening and is a threat, most people are not angry about it or motivated to do much about. So the intensity is on the side of those who deny climate change.
Very few of those who correctly believe that climate change is happening are pissed about it. More like “concerned,” the way people are concerned about homelessness or poverty in Africa, like, y’know, somebody (else) should really do something about that. Few write letters to legislators or hassle them about it in town halls. Almost no one will change their vote over it. No legislator stands to be primaried or driven from office over it.
In other words, all the intensity, and thus all the political risk, is on one side. For the political landscape to change in coming years, what’s needed is not a massive education campaign — though it certainly couldn’t hurt! — but a shift in the balance of intensity. The question is how to reduce the intensity of denialists and increase the intensity of climate hawks.
But, in the end, Roberts was optimistic because he thinks generational change will replace the denialists with armies of young, committed environmentalists that will gradually shift the debate in favor of mitigating climate change.
I am not as optimistic as Roberts because I think climate change, from the standpoint of ordinary moral agents (i.e. non-philosophers) is not easily conceptualized as a moral issue.
By “ethics” or “morality”, I am referring to the actions I ought to take as an individual.
With regard to the causes of the predicted harms of climate change, the contributions of individuals are tiny, the actions that lead to climate change are otherwise innocent—they don’t involve any sort of obvious wrongdoing—and the effects of each individual’s actions are displaced over vast amounts of space and time. It is not obvious then how an individual is responsible for the harm, so it isn’t obvious why individuals have a responsibility to do anything about it.
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, even if we felt an obligation as individuals to do something about climate change, there is very little we can do about it. Because our contribution as individuals is so inconsequential, any reduction we initiate with regard to our personal discharge of CO2 will also be inconsequential as well.
So, in other words, we have a very big collective action problem on our hands. I can do nothing to solve climate change on my own. And in the absence of global consensus among governments to take action in consort to solve the problem, which in the current political environment seems implausible, I as an individual can do very little.
As a result, people don’t see climate change as an ethical problem. It may be an engineering problem or a technological challenge, or a political problem for governments to solve, but not an urgent ethical problem that demands individuals take action.
The question is can philosophy help to conceptualize climate change more clearly. Do any of our moral theories explain why climate change ought to be a moral issue?
I think the answer is no if we consider only traditional moral theories. I will have more to say about this next week.
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
More on the Crisis in the Humanities October 28, 2010
Posted by Dwight Furrow in Dwight Furrow's Posts, Education, Philosophy.Tags: Humanities, Jean -Luc Nancy
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The threatened closing of foreign language departments at SUNY Albany (following threats to philosophy programs in the U.K and the U.S) has received a good deal of discussion in the blogosphere. (Including here) Highly regarded French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy contributed these particularly pithy remarks:
So the choice is between getting rid of French and getting rid of philosophy? What a great alternative!
A choice between removing the liver or the lungs. Stomach or heart. Eyes or ears. How about that?
Someone needs to invent a kind of instruction that is, first, strictly monolingual — because everything can be translated into English, can’t it? — and also one from which all questioning (for example, of what “translation” means, both in general and in terms of this or that specific language) has been completely eliminated. A single language alone, cleansed of the bugs of reflection, would make the perfect university subject: smooth, harmonious, easily submitted to pedagogical control.
It’s time to propose getting rid of both French and philosophy, and, for that matter, all related subjects, like Latin, psychoanalysis, Italian, Spanish, literary theory, Russian, or history. Perhaps it would be wise to put in their place, as mandatory course offerings, some programming languages (e.g. Java), and also commercial Chinese and technical Hindi — at least until these languages have been completely transcribed into English. (Unless it is the opposite that comes to pass.)
Anyway, let us teach what is displayed on billboards and stock market monitors. Nothing else!
Courage, comrades: a new world is being born!
[tr. J. K. Cohen/H. Saussy]
The corporatization of the university and the commercialization of every aspect of life continues apace enabled by greed-as-a-virtue conservatives and a timorous, ineffectual liberalism powerless to arrest it’s advance.
A new world is being born indeed. But is it one that humans will inhabit?
Dwight Furrow is author of
Reviving the Left: The Need to Restore Liberal Values in America
For political commentary by Dwight Furrow visit: www.revivingliberalism.com
