This quote stuck out, as such tactics have been used often to evoke sympathies and sway public sentiment in the direction some people want to see it go, without always providing reasons nor respecting rules that allow for the pursuit of truth:
‘Sophistries and ruthless political pressure tactics of the sort just described succeed only when people let them succeed – when they let themselves be intimidated, when they acquiesce in the shaming and shunning of those who express unpopular views, when they enable the delegitimization of such views by treating them as something embarrassing, something to apologize for, something “hurtful,” etc. ‘
Comments are worth a read. Outbursts can damage a lot of decent work.
‘It doesn’t take a weatherman to tell which way public opinion blows. The huge uptick of support for same-sex marriage has been described as swift and broad, to which we can add, in all likelihood, lasting.
In my view, every time the defenders of the traditional view of marriage speak in public on behalf of a ban, they lose the support of neutral third parties. The problem is that they are trying to tell other people how they should lead their own lives, and are using the power of the state to do it. Their justifications are far from compelling. They talk about the need for procreation in marriage, though many straight married couples use contraceptives. They talk about the risks to parenting, when there is no evidence that suggests that gay and lesbian couples are worse parents, especially when compared to dysfunctional couples in traditional marriages or single parents of limited financial means. Their arguments against same-sex marriage thus fall flat to modern ears, so that the basic support for same-sex marriage only grows.’
Perhaps I’m more amenable than Epstein to laws stemming from the moral authority of those who remain principled actors upon religious belief (a less influential cohort in the higher rungs of American society these days). Like Epstein, however, I find many of the reasons such folks give lacking, and falling on deaf ears.
While I may not agree with the Catholic view of homosexuality and really would prefer a live and let live attitude with more freedom for more people, I also think when it comes to how people actually behave, the importance of limiting principles regarding power and authority and having well-reasoned laws etc., the religious view of human nature can be quite accurate.
This may well stem from my own flaws, so naturally, take such paragraphs with a grain of salt.
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If I understand Michael Sandel at the end of this video as part of his online Harvard lecture series ‘Justice’ correctly, perhaps there is no way to ultimately separate the teleological arguments (ends) from the practical ones: Questions about justice, law, civic duty and obligation to future generations; questions about people’s beliefs examined and unexamined, reasons carefully reasoned and reasons blindly followed, all will contribute to the kinds of laws we have on the books.
Personally, I don’t know anyone who isn’t full of ‘oughts’, guiding principles, things they know that ain’t so, cherished beliefs and conflicting commitments in life. To some extent, we’re all subject to sharing the prevailing opinions and ideas of the people we live around, even if those opinions aren’t enshrined in law nor shared by the majority. Ideas have a logic and consequences of their own.
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Two reasons put forward in defense of traditional marriage are as follows (part of a smaller religious minority at Harvard, it seems): For the sake of procreation and for the purpose of forming a union between man and woman.
Click through for the rest of the debate if you have the time.
As I suspect we’ve seen during the last few generations, the Catholic and more broadly Christian religious ideas woven into American culture, laws and institutions are much less woven than they have been.
Americans keep being assured of other teleological ends (progress, increasing tolerance and inclusion, ever-expanding freedom and rights etc.) but when it comes to how to live and be free, I’d rather observe what people do, not what they say, especially when they want/have power and authority.
Pretty much a straight-up account of how the virus is spreading and some of the people encountering it.
But, this being the New Yorker, ebola coverage is also geting political, as it’s clearly the other side making it political, not many folks at the New Yorker.
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Many reactions to the market are moral ones, from the anti-corporate, romantically primitive, ideological collectivists on the Left to the biblically inclined, revelatory faithful who clearly see in the teachings of Jesus Christ reasons to doubt:
‘Thus, Smith showed how the opulence and liberty of a commercial society would provide philosophers like Hume and himself with the intellectual commerce, the individual liberty, and the leisured independence necessary for living a philosophic life with their friends. Cropsey ignores all of this because it contradicts his argument that there is no place for the intellectual virtues of philosophy in Smith’s commercial society.’
Worth a read.
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From an emailer: Revisiting Martha Nussbaum’s paper on Judith Butler: ‘The Professor Of Parody‘
‘These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways. Such feminists therefore find comfort in the idea that the subversive use of words is still available to feminist intellectuals. Deprived of the hope of larger or more lasting changes, we can still perform our resistance by the reworking of verbal categories, and thus, at the margins, of the selves who are constituted by them.’
Perhaps way too much in the weeds for many regular readers, but there’s real work done in the piece. Have a go, oppressor.
‘So will Americans soon start clamoring for legalized prostitution? I doubt it, because it’s going to be very hard for people to stop looking down on those who buy and sell sex.’
Along the knife’s edge of sexual revolution can be found many an ideologue to whom the idea of liberation (sexual and otherwise) goes hand-in-hand with ideology. To them, your freedom to buy and sell sex would be part of a much larger project of ideological liberation from opposing historical forces and foes such as the Catholic church, the Puritan roots of America, the ‘Patriarchy,’ the squares, the bourgeoisie etc.
Apart from actual radicals, activists and ideologues, however, everyone’s got thoughts on prostitution. I’m guessing the idea of legalized prostitution is more popular amongst liberals and some libertarians, artists and the avant-garde, the younger generation and a steady band of older goats and ‘sex-positive’ types (my sympathies on your diagnosis). Perhaps feelings run highest amongst those with a personal stake in the matter, after all, dear reader, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
It’s a complicated issue.
This blog remains open to empirical arguments from the data, and well-reasoned debate, with a lot of skepticism.
Some years ago, Martha Nussbaum tried to bail-out Eliot Spitzer after he was caught visiting a prostitute while also being in charge of prosecuting prostitution laws:
“Spitzer’s offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations.”
Maybe the U.N. could have drafted a hooker human-rights charter to trump local laws?
As usual, this blog is concerned with the potential for Statism, the deployment of not just science but scientism, not just reasonable arguments but a lot of rationalism as well, with a slavish devotion to experts, a trendy desire to be like Europe, brochures and bureaucrats to fill the hole (ahem). Many secular humanist ideals are claimed to be universal ideals, which is enough to back our way into a lot of illiberal institutions.
There’s none quite so moralistic as those who’ve fought to overthrow some other forms of moral judgment.
On that note, here are some related videos for your viewing pleasure:
Did the 60’s counter-culture and the conservative counter-counter culture both win, in a sense?
Christopher Hitchens, William F. Buckley and Peter Robinson discuss below, including the sexual revolution:
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Here’s a good cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Boxer,’ which includes the lines:
‘Asking only workman’s wages I come looking for a job…but I get no offers…just a come-on from the whores on 7th avenue…’
Turns out Paul Simon was reading the Bible a lot while writing the lyrics.
E.O. Wilson is a popular biologist and naturalist, known particularly for his work with ants. Arnhart reviews:
‘To answer these fundamental questions about our human place in the cosmos, Edward O. Wilson suggests in his new book, we need to unify all our knowledge of nature by combining the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. Traditionally, we have looked to religion, philosophy, or the creative arts to answer these great questions. Wilson argues that these three ways to understand the human condition have failed. This leaves science–in its quest for a complete knowledge of nature–as the only way to understand the human story.’
That sounds extremely ambitious. Who needs religion, philosophy, or the creative arts when they don’t yield the same standard of knowledge Wilson is proposing?
Arnhart’s suggests looking to…philosophy:
‘If Wilson’s project for a Darwinian unification of knowledge is to succeed, it must revive that Aristotelian tradition of natural philosophy that includes Thomas Aquinas, Hume, and Adam Smith. Darwin understood himself as part of that intellectual tradition, particularly in adopting ideas from Hume and Smith about the natural moral sentiments. Even Darwin’s fundamental idea of the evolutionary emergence of life as an unintended order was derived from Smith and other Scottish philosophers’
So isn’t there a tension between Aristotelians and Platonists? If neo-Platonists give-up the World-Of-Forms as a source of transcendental knowledge, will they slip into the modern problem of nihilism?
Is Darwinism nihilism? If you are a Platonist, yes. If you are not a Platonist, no.
Most Platonists today are disappointed Platonists—people with Platonic expectations that are unfulfilled, because they accept Darwinian evolution as true, and therefore since all living forms have evolved, they cannot be eternal in conforming to Plato’s intelligible realm of eternal Ideas. If everything has evolved, this must include moral and political order, and thus there is no eternally unchanging Idea of the Good by which we can see absolute standards of right and wrong. Consequently, there are no moral absolutes, and we must accept moral relativism or nihilism. Darwinism is “true but deadly” (as Friedrich Nietzsche said). And thus these disappointed Platonists become nihilists.’
As always, worth a read. Below is Wilson briefly discussing the book on Charlie Rose:
***In the realm of political philosophy, for what it’s worth, many libertarians and liberaltarians in lieu of tracing the moral source of the laws back to a transcendent God (thus creating daylight between themselves and religious and often social conservatives), instead turn to the ‘classical’ liberalism of the Scottish Enlightenment: Hume’s empiricism and atheism, Smith’s invisible hand, and later Hayek’s adoption of Hume’s principle that the propositions of ethics cannot be proven.
-Now Daniel Dennett, philosopher, cognitive scientist, one of the New Atheists and Boston-based secularist responds to Wieseltier:
‘Pomposity can be amusing, but pomposity sitting like an oversized hat on top of fear is hilarious. Wieseltier is afraid that the humanities are being overrun by thinkers from outside, who dare to tackle their precious problems—or “problematics” to use the, um, technical term favored by many in the humanities. He is right to be afraid. It is true that there is a crowd of often overconfident scientists impatiently addressing the big questions with scant appreciation of the subtleties unearthed by philosophers and others in the humanities, but the way to deal constructively with this awkward influx is to join forces and educate them, not declare them out of bounds.’
Thought this would be timely with Eliot Spitzer now back in the news running for NYC comptroller (after that, the world). I’m not much of a feminist nor a Main Line (Philadelphia) liberal:
Martha Nussbaum writes:
“Spitzer’s offense was an offense against his family. It was not an offense against the public. If he broke any laws, these are laws that never should have existed and that have been repudiated by sensible nations.”
Well, Spitzer did use the laws to zealously prosecute sex rings as attorney general (an elected position) and was then caught using a sex ring and breaking those laws. Spitzer could have chosen not to violate the laws, or sought to amend them, but he did not. I agree that his family is suffering the most, but I’m not so sure that this didn’t constitute an offense to the public.
“What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values”
From the point of view of legality, I agree. Morally, that’s a different matter.
Generally, I think a libertarian defense of prostitution is a good one, which tries to open up our moral thinking into a net that would include sex as “work.” Nussbaum is urging a consideration of laws and ideas that focus valuable energy away from addressing other problems she defines quite well.
Personally, I’d like to think it’s possible to consider prostitution without the moral absolutism of Christian doctrine, but perhaps also without some of the limits of Nussbaum’s feminism and “value” speak she employs here.
Many prostitutes, for example, seem to have free will enough to choose to manipulate the lust and stupidity of their johns for their own gain. The instinct of disgust may be deeper than Christian moral doctrine, but also deeper than some of Nussbaum’s thinking as well.
Addition: One of the moral arguments for legalizing abortion was that it already was occurring anyways, in back alleys, and in some ways shares similarities with the idea of legalizing prostitution. Once legalized, there is some moral concern attached to the act of prostitution itself.
See Also: For a paler copy of Nussbaum’s arguments, see Natalie Angier’s Spitzer piece, which somehow uses science to justify its claims.
Originally, I had posted a piece on LACMA’s Levitated Mass, by the rather reclusive land artist, Michael Heizer. The installation is a 340-ton rock (‘megalith’) in front of the museum, suspended over a carved slot which is deepest below the rock, and which the public can pass under as they notice the many supposedly metaphysical contrasts it inspires (the tension between weight and lightness, nature and culture, solid and line etc). See the video above.
Presumably, your mind can think these thoughts, or it can think other thoughts. You can be in your own individualized space during this process, or you can consciously be in the space of others as people mill around in front of the museum, gathered around a large, suspended rock.
What did Heizer intend? What did he achieve technically? What role does the Levitated Mass have to play in the public life of Angelinos? Was LACMA’s presentation for commerce or contemplation?
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As Robert Hughes and others have noted, modern art has been trying to compete with radio, T.V. the movies, pop culture and often technology for its role as explainer and interpreter to the people, as central to their lives and to public life in order to pass on the core values of society. Yet, the artist has been an isolated figure, just outside of society, for much of the past few hundred years of Western Art. A process of individualization has occurred.
Does art have a role to play in morally improving you?
From LACMA’s site:
‘Taken whole, Levitated Mass speaks to the expanse of art history, from ancient traditions of creating artworks from megalithic stone, to modern forms of abstract geometries and cutting-edge feats of engineering.’
That’s a rather bold claim. It might be better to say that it’s one modern, individualized Western artist’s take on prehistoric stone structures, and other prehistoric projects from a primarily technical point of view, like Stonehenge or the Nazca lines in Peru.
Those old prehistoric structures that inspire him likely came with all sorts of ritualistic purpose, local gods, spiritual and transcendental claims, and potential human sacrifice and other barbarisms. See Werner Herzog’s “Cave Of Forgotten Dreams” for a similar meditation.
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As for Heizer, he’s been working since 1972 on a sculpture in the Eastern Nevada desert, which was originally called ‘Complex One.’ It’s morphed into his life’s work, called City. It’s very large. It can’t be moved. You can’t reproduce it. It represents a break from traditional sculpture. It can’t be put in a museum and it’s not clear that it has a function. See more on Hughes take on it from his series, “Shock Of The New” which includes some aerial shots (from 00:45 to 5:30):
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I have to confess that seeing that structure upon the wide open emptiness of Eastern Nevada is comforting for the familiarity it brings. It’s a little bit of order upon the unknown, and the design, or lack thereof (about which a man may wonder), within Nature herself. I think this is why a military installation out in the desert can captivate the imagination as it’s been known to in Hollywood and in the public mind (dreaming of aliens and conspiracies).
To expand on that theme, Wallace Stevens might shed some light. He was an American poet on the hinge between romanticism and modernism:
Anecdote of the Jar
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
What do you do with an uncivilized, wild land? Import European learning and literature “atop” it? Christian tradition and the Natural Law? Import the triumph of the Western mathematical sciences and technology? Import its movements of the arts and the individual artist?
You can’t help but do this.
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So, is modern art supposed to improve you morally?
What originally drew me to the piece was politics and arguments over the public square, not so much the art itself. There’s been some negative press about the Levitated Mass due to the spectacle of its presentation. They hauled the rock in from its quarry outside L.A. on a specially made (and expensive) vehicle and draped it in protective garb. This probably united people as much as anything else; witnessing the logistics of moving a huge rock such a distance.
With the current California budget crisis and California’s structural political problems, and the ways in which California and all that big dreaming has gone bust of late…does it really need another boondoggle?
What monument or ideas are those folks out in California gathering around anyways?
I think it’s important to highlight the gap between the achievement of the artist and those who would present that artist or his work to the public. There is harm either can do to the other, as it might make the artist’s work just another forgotten public sculpture or diminish his incentives. It might put taxpayers on the hook for something of questionable public value.
Trying to morally improve the public is what can give some people (I often think of NPR, many philanthropists, many a docent) a noble, if not righteous purpose in life. At some point, though, it can become an argument of “shoulds” and “oughts” and what is actually for the good of the public, and which ideals and people lead others in the public square, rather than one of art.
This seemed interesting, as it’s been true in my experience:
‘In order to function in a city a greater level of callousness seems necessary. Being parsimonious about your empathy makes the most sense for those who have a larger list of potential candidates for their empathy…’
Try to help everyone and you’ll get taken advantage of too, and be a sap, or a saint. Also:
‘The difference between pity and disgust is interesting. An elderly body is the fate of everyone and so far it can not be fixed. Becoming elderly is not seen as a moral failing. But becoming a drug addict (rightly or wrongly) is widely seen as a moral failing. It makes sense that people are more disgusted by those who make wrong moral choices.’
And 1st in the comments was this quotation about living in a city. It reminded me of my own experience:
‘Having walked the beat several times a week for several years, you begin to recognize faces, and that also changes you. You realize that the problem isn’t lack of resources; the problem is that the people misuse what they have. No amount of giving will fix that, so I no longer give. It’s not cost effective, and often counterproductive.
I think you should be free to give as you see fit, and it’s good to break the ice every now and again once you’ve put on a stoic face or developed a practical hardness because of the realities around you.
I’m a little skeptical of some of the interests potentially lined up at the nexus of psychology, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience as regards political philosophy…there’s a case to be made that these fields hold an appeal to many secular moralists and social engineers…but that’s also probably my own bias.
Morality in the emotions? Jesse Prinz argues that neuroscience and the cognitive sciences should move back toward British empiricism and David Hume…yet…with a defense of multiculturalism and Nietzsche thrown in: Another Note On Jesse Prinz’s “Constructive Sentimentalism”
Our author, Joe Carter, puts up an argument against Martha Nussbaum‘s work:
Those who reject the concept of the wisdom of repugnance must be prepared to deliver solid arguments against incest, bestiality, necrophilia, and other moral horrors that lie within the Pandora’s Box of taboo behaviors. If all ethical arguments must withstand the rigors of analytical reasoning then we will have to reject a great deal of our deepest moral presuppositions. Are we prepared to do that in order that radical individualism may advance unimpeded?
You’ve probably been hearing the slippery slope argument for a while, and may find the logic compelling. There is a deep debate here, about what moral-philosophical framework we use in order to base our moral thinking and thus our laws (Nussbaum isolates disgust from other emotions as particularly unreliable, and argues it does not justify moral censure through law). She offers her own framework as an alternative.
The church, and “subsidiarity”, as George defines it and makes the case (beginning at min 16:35), may be crucial in addressing the needs of people: as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a nation, while maintaining a focus on personal responsibility, economic opportunity, and perhaps preventing too much power from disassociating people from those they serve. George is philosophically deep and offers a reasonable, practical philosophy extending from Natural Law.
Cornel West is still, in my opinion,…Cornel West. He’s much concerned with poverty, black poverty, and the misery of poverty. He is often more politically and philosophically left though he runs pretty deep. He is an associative, literary/artistic type thinker, riffing, and in my opinion, a bit of a caricature of himself.
The two men work to find some common ground in this discussion. Interesting.
