Well, I’m back!
My silence for the past three weeks was because I was in Sri Lanka (the land of my birth and where some of my family still resides,) during the first two weeks of June, and then spent a few days in England on my return trip. During my time in Sri Lanka, there were some contrasts with life in the US that struck me that I will post about this week. These are not the obvious contrasts about wealth and lifestyles but more subtle ones.
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According to John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice we have to get together once and for all and make the rules of operation without knowing our particular situation. (See here, here, and here for previous postings on this topic.) And once we make the rules, and then lift the veil of ignorance and find out our particular situation (our gender, age, abilities, skills, talents, health, community, position in society, wealth, income, educational qualifications, level of authority and power, etc.), we are not allowed to renegotiate to get more favorable terms for us. This restriction is important since it ensures that careful deliberation goes into making sure that the rules created are perceived as fair by all.
Let’s work through a specific simple case. People who are generally law-abiding would like to see laws and enforcement mechanisms that ensure their own safety and security and protect their property. If I belong to that category, I might want to advocate stern penalties (fines, imprisonment, harsh prison conditions, torture, even death) for law-breakers. But there is no guarantee that once the veil of ignorance is lifted, that I (for example) will be in the category of law-abiding people. It may turn out that I am actually a crook or have criminal intentions. Normally we would try and exclude crooks from the decision-making process because we have decided that they do not deserve the same rights as law-abiding people. But the veil of ignorance means that we cannot exclude people we disagree with in the rule-making process. I have to consider such possibilities as well when we agree to the rules.
So it is in my interest to make sure that the penalties for law-breaking are not too severe, since there is a chance that I may have to suffer them. Does this mean that crooks will prefer to opt for no penalties at all? No, because even crooks can function effectively only if they are the exception, if there is a general level of law-abiding behavior. After all, the executives who looted Enron and Tyco and caused thousands of people to lose all their savings could only do this because almost everyone else was behaving fairly honestly. This is why crooks can stash their stolen money in off-shore bank accounts and retrieve it later. If the officials in the off-shore banks were also crooks, the stolen money would not be ‘safe.’ Also if the other employees in your own company were not honest, the company would not make the amount of money that makes it worthwhile for you to steal it.
Even petty thieves could not function if everyone around them was also stealing from everyone else with no restriction. And since there is no guarantee that I will be the toughest crook around to fend off the other thieves, allowing for a totally lawless society could result in a terrible situation for me personally if it turns out (once the veil is lifted) that I am not very bright or strong or am clumsy with weapons. After all, there is no guarantee that I will be a skillful crook. An incompetent crook in a lawless society would fare much worse than one in a law-abiding society.
So it is in the interests of even crooks to create rules that encourage and reward honest behavior while ensuring reasonable treatment for law-breakers, just in case they get caught. So the two extremes (law abiding and honest people on the one hand, and crooks on the other) both have an interest in creating rules that balance the interests of both, since no one knows where they personally will end up.
What of the situation that triggered this series of posts, that of gay rights coming into conflict with certain interpretations of religions? Since the rules do not allow you to specify particulars, you cannot say (for example) that the Bible must be the basis for policy decisions. You would have to allow for the possibility for any religious text or that no religious text can form the basis. In other words, if the rules are to allow primacy for religion-based laws, you have to allow for the possibility that once the veil is lifted, you might end up as a Buddhist in a Judaism-based state or a Christian in a Hinduism-based state or you might be a gay person in an Islam-based state. If that should turn out to be the case, would you be content with the result?
Allowing for religious views to be the basis of regulating the private lives of individuals in a society also means allowing for the possibility that we might end up in a society run by groups like the now-defunct Shaker Christian sect, which advocated strict celibacy among its members. Of course, such a society would not likely last very long for obvious reasons (and the Shakers did, in fact, eventually disappear), but would we be willing to allow for this possibility?
Clearly the fact we could end up in any of these situations and have to live with it should cause us to think very carefully about what exactly are the rules of societal regulation that are important to us. I don’t know what specific resolution will be arrived at using the veil of ignorance to address the problem of gay rights and religious opposition to homosexuality. But what I am suggesting is that that is the way we have to address problems such as these if we are to not to just continue to talk through each other, simply asserting our preferences based on our situation and repeating the same arguments.
In some ways, what Rawls is suggesting is that we need to get in the habit of seeing what the world looks like through the eyes of others who may be quite different from us, and ask ourselves whether we would still see the world to as fair from that vantage point. It also requires us to think in terms of universal principles as opposed to principles based on the beliefs and practices of specific groups.
Thinking in this way is hard to do but needs to be done if we are to have any hope of overcoming the differences in policy preferences created by the huge diversity that exists amongst us.
Now clearly those who believe that their vision of God is the right one, and/or their particular religious or secular text is the only source of authority, are going to find it hard to deal with Rawls’ insistence that no identifiable and named groups can be used in formulating the rules. If you believe (for example) that Islam is the one true religion and that the Qu’ran (or Koran) has to be the basis of civil law, I cannot see how you can accept the ‘veil of ignorance’ principle (unless I am missing something). But rejecting this principle also means rejecting the idea of ‘justice as fairness,’ and dooms us to never-ending conflict because people who feel they are being unfairly treated will eventually rise up against their oppressors.
POST SCRIPT
There is an interesting article by Steven Pinker titled Sniffing out the Gay Gene that is well worth reading. I came across it in the excellent blog run by The Center for Genetics Research Ethics and Law.
In the previous posting we saw how people tend to advocate policies based on their own particular background, situation, or preferences, and this necessarily results in perceptions of unfairness over the decisions made.
The key to understanding Rawls’ idea of ‘justice as fairness’ is that people perceive fairness in terms of the process by which results are achieved, not in terms of the actual outcomes of the process. When children play a game and at the end, one child complains that it was not fair, it usually means that the child feels that the rules of operation were either violated or exploited unethically, not that the child should not have lost (unless we are talking about a really spoiled child who feels entitled to always win).
So what Rawls is saying in his A Theory of Justice is that we need to collectively determine the rules by which decisions affecting all of society are arrived at, so that whatever results from that decision making process, everyone will accept that it is fair, although we may not agree with any given decision.
Rawls argues that the essential ingredient to achieving this fairness in process is the ‘veil of ignorance’ under which everyone who is involved in creating the rules (known as the ‘persons in the original position’) operates. What he means by this is:
First of all, no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status; nor does he know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence and strength, and the like. Nor, again, does anyone know his conception of the good, the particulars of his rational plan of life, or even the special features of psychology such as his aversion to risk or liability to optimism or pessimism. More than this, I assume that the parties do not know the particular circumstances of their own society. That is, they do not know its particular economic or political situation, or the level of civilization and culture it has been able to achieve. The persons in the original position have no information as to which generation they belong. (p. 118)
The veil of ignorance only excludes particular knowledge about the state of individuals or societies. It allows for the kind of general information needed to make meaningful decisions.
It is taken for granted, however, that they know the general facts about human society. They understand political affairs and the principles of economic theory; they know the basis of social organization and the laws of human psychology. Indeed, the parties are presumed to know whatever general facts affect the choice of the principles of justice. (p. 119)
The rules which are arrived at cannot involve identifiable persons or groups or create special exemptions for such groups. For example, if one is making rules about religion, one cannot create rules that apply to a named religious group. You cannot say, for example, that a particular rule will be applied only if the majority of the population (once the veil of ignorance is lifted) turns out to be Christian (or Hindu or whatever.) You cannot also make rules dependent on what the particular situation of a named individual turns out to be. So you cannot say, for example, that the rule of free health care being available to all only kicks in if person X turns out to be sickly.
How would this work in practice? I will see in the next posting by applying it to special cases, including that involving the rights of gays.
The previous post that dealt with Dominionist’s negative views towards gays generated an interesting set of comments that frame nicely the kinds of problems we face when we try to arrive at rules for society that we can all live by and perceive as fair. (I will defer the planned posts on the religious opposition to Darwin to address this question first.)
In those comments, Joe’s understanding of Christianity leads him to think of homosexual behavior as sinful although he is not hostile to gays as people, drawing a parallel between the way that we can view alcoholism as bad while not thinking of alcoholics as evil people. Katie’s interpretation of Christianity, on the other hand, leads her to being a passionate supporter of gay rights. Aaron is an atheist, and Christianity-based arguments don’t have much sway with him. And, of course, there is a huge range of beliefs that span these three particular viewpoints. So how does one arrive at public policies that can be accepted as fair by everyone, not just with regard to gay rights, but in all aspects of public life?
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Oddly enough, just after posting two consecutive days on David Horowitz’s cheap shots against academics, yesterday I received the latest (May 6, 2005) issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education which featured a long cover story on him. (For someone who is constantly whining about not getting enough attention from academia, Horowitz seems to be extraordinarily successful in getting publications such as this to cover him and his ideas. See Michael Berube’s blog for a response.)
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I have been puzzled by the vehemence of Horowitz’s attacks on the academic life. After all, his accusations of faculty laziness are contradicted by actual studies. Jerry A. Jacobs (of the University of Pennsylvania) in his Presidential Address to the Eastern Sociological Society in February 2003 (and published in Sociological Forum, vol. 19, #1, February 2004), points out that college faculty work an average of nearly 55 hours per week. By contrast, professionals in other fields or managers worked nine hours per week less than college professors. His study also found that professors report that they feel constantly under stress of work-related pressures.
Of course each profession has its share of people like Wally (the character in the Dilbert comic strip) who do the minimum amount of work expected of them. I am sure academia has its representatives, though I am hard pressed to think of a single one of my colleagues in my whole academic career who comes anywhere close to the Beetle Bailey-like stereotype that Horowitz alleges is the norm.
I do not expect Horowitz to change his message simply because actual data contradicts him. As Graham Larkin (a professor of Fine Arts at Stanford University) points out in his article David Horowitz’s War on Rational Discourse that appeared in the April 25, 2005 issue of Inside Higher Ed, facts have never been an impediment to his diatribes. Horowitz’s strategy is to simply repeat things over and over again, even if they have been refuted. Since he is extremely well paid by a host of wealthy right-wing foundations that support organizations that provide him with platforms to keep him in the public view, his charges gain publicity well out of proportion to their actual merit or even their truth content.
It is easy to dismiss Horowitz as a crackpot who uses inflammatory rhetoric to get publicity. But somehow that seems insufficient to me. There is a vehemence to his attacks on academics that seem to require explanation beyond simple ignorance or that he is so naïve that he does not actually understand what a university is all about and about the extent of faculty work outside the classroom.
It is Michael Berube who, I think, nails the best possible reason for Horowitz’s bizarre attacks on college faculty. Berube teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State and writes with a style and wit that I can only envy. Check out his blog to see what I mean.
In his essay Why Horowitz Hates Professors, Berube writes:
I think we’re finally getting to the real reason David hates professors so much. It has nothing to do with our salaries or our working hours: he hates our freedom. Horowitz knows perfectly well that I can criticize the Cockburns and Churchills to my left and the Beinarts and Elshtains to my right any old time I choose, and that at the end of the day I’ll still have a job – whereas he has to answer to all his many masters, fetching and rolling over whenever they blow that special wingnut whistle that only far-right lackeys can hear. It’s not a very dignified way to live, and surely it takes its toll on a person’s sense of self-respect.
Berube is right. Academics have the freedom, as long as they are not being outright offensive or advocating criminal activity or bringing dishonor to their institutions, to take positions on any subject, generally without fear of retribution from their universities. I can support evolution one day and, if I find some convincing reason to switch my views, I can oppose it the next. I can even switch my views without any reason at all, just for the fun of it, and the only loss I suffer is to my credibility. But people like Horowitz have no such freedom. They have to be very sensitive to what their paymasters want and take exactly that line or they get thrown out on their ear.
Actually, this thesis might explain a lot of the animosity that the Third-Tier Punditâ„¢ class have towards academics. All these commentators (and even reporters for the media) have a good sense of what their employers expect from them. It is the very predictability of their stances that gives them access to the media. If they start taking contrary position and become ideologically unpredictable, they risk losing their jobs. The Coulters, Malkins, and Goldbergs of the world cannot (for example) go beyond extremely mild criticisms of Bush or the Iraq war (even if they wanted to) because to do so would be career suicide.
It is true that there exists a doctrinaire left whose people also have similar constraints but those people do not have mainstream access, and most people have never heard of them. Most of the well-known people who are considered left wing by the mainstream media (such as Paul Krugman) are not as constrained in their views, because there is no equivalent to the scale of the right-wing foundations.
But academics (like Krugman) and more recently independent bloggers have no such constraints. It is because of this very lack of ideological oversight that universities can create new knowledge. It enables faculty and students to explore new ideas wherever it might take them. We are hired for our knowledge in physics or history or law, not for our ideological bent. But we also are expected to be public citizens and contribute to society, and this enables us to take stands on issues that may not be directly related to our academic research interests.
So is Horowitz’s crusade driven by faculty envy, as Berube suggests? It makes sense to me. Because even as college professors complain about the amount of work they have to do, I know very few who would switch out of this life and do something else. This is because the faculty life is, in fact, a great life. Horowitz thinks that we enjoy it because we can goof off. But only a person who hates his or her own job will have such a view of what constitutes an ideal working life. An ideal job is when what we do as work is what we would do for pleasure. And that is what draws people to teaching.
Those of us in academia think it is a great life despite the workload because it is rewarding to grapple with ideas, it is stimulating to work with students who look at things in fresh ways, it is gratifying to solve a research problem, it is exhilarating to publish articles and papers and books and feel that one is contributing to the store of the world’s knowledge.
We love our work and cannot imagine doing anything else. And, best of all, we can say what we honestly think about the important issues of the day. This must drive people like Horowitz crazy, and the result is not pretty.
Regular readers of this blog know that David Horowitz has been behind efforts to introduce the so-called Academic Bill of Rights, allegedly to “protect” college students from academic bullying by their professors. He has been going around the country, speaking on college campuses and to state legislatures, trying to place limits on what professors can and cannot say. In the process, he has also attacked what he considers the laziness of the academic life.
Horowitz resorts to his usual over-the-top rhetoric. He accuses faculty as follows: “Shiftless, lazy good-for-nothings? Try the richly paid leftist professors securely ensconced in their irrelevant ivory towers” and again “You teach on average two courses and spend six hours a week in class. You work eight months out of the year and have four months paid vacation. And every seven years you get ten months paid vacation.”
Such utterances perpetuate a strong misunderstanding about the nature of a university and of what faculty do. People who say such things see it only as a place where the only worthwhile activities occur in the classroom, and even then, they see the process of teaching very narrowly, as that of transmitting information. Hence they are baffled that college professors seem to spend so little time in the classroom, and see the whole thing as some kind of boondoggle.
People who think like this overlook the fact that faculty are not hired just to transmit knowledge. They are also hired to create new knowledge. Indeed that is one of the key functions of all universities, but especially research universities. This requires faculty to learn, and to keep on learning all their lives, and this requires time more than anything else.
It is for this same reason (that learning takes time) that students can get a degree without spending more that 15 hours or so per week actually in class, along with long summer breaks. This enables them to think and read and discuss ideas. (This is why I am always concerned about those students at Case who have double- and triple-majors and throw in a couple of minors as well. I admire their ambition, energy, and work ethic but am concerned that in the process of accumulating credit hours, they don’t have time to reflect on their learning, to toy with new ideas, and hence are not learning deeply enough.) So the logical end point of Horowitz’s claim should be that college students too are not spending enough time in class and are also “shiftless, lazy good for nothings.”
Universities have been the source of much of the new knowledge that has revolutionized our world. And the reason that they have been able to do so is because its faculty have been given the time to generate new ideas and put them to use. In Bertholt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo Galileo himself complains to his university chancellor that he was teaching so much that he did not have time to learn.
My father worked in a bank all his life. On his desk he had an ‘in’ box and an ‘out’ box. He would pretty much spend each day reading and signing off on papers, transferring them from the in to the out, and then he would go home, his work for the day done. His work was well defined and a ‘hard day’s work’ meant that he had been kept busy all day.
A faculty member’s life does not have that same daily rhythm. Faculty members also have things that they need to do each day (prepare for class, teach, grade papers, attend meetings, write committee reports, talk with students and respond to their emails). But these things come in waves and they have other duties that cannot be done in a nine-to-five time frame (such as write a book or research paper, solve a problem, prepare research proposals, do research). These things are carried around in their minds all the time. The stereotype of the ‘absent-minded professor’ has a kernel of truth but it is not that the professor is actually forgetful. It is that he or she is always thinking about the ideas of their discipline, wrestling with them, sorting them out, and this process is so engrossing that it can often drive other concerns from their minds. When I am working on a book or article, I can assure you that it is almost a full-time, 24/7 preoccupation. I think about it as I am going to sleep and it is the first thing in my mind when I wake up.
The difference is that most academics do not see this as ‘work’, if by that we mean doing something at the expense of something else that we’d rather do. We tend to love our ‘work’. This is what we live for and enjoy.
And perhaps, as we shall see in a later posting, this is what Horowitz really finds offensive about academics.
I have not posted anything so far on the big story that seems to be consuming the whole country, which is the sad, sad case of Terri Schiavo. This is partly because I intended this blog to be more concerned with reflections on slower-moving themes, and not consist of commentary on current events (which other people have the time to do much better), and partly because I felt that there was nothing that I could say that would add anything of value to the substance of the case. I have no moral or ethical wisdom to offer that would help people decide what should be done with the feeding tube.
But the non-substantive issue that depresses me most about the Schiavo case, and caused me to break my self-imposed silence, is the public circus that it has become. I can completely understand the grief that the immediate members of the family must be experiencing. This is an awful situation and as far as I can see, there is no ‘right’ answer to this problem. Whatever the outcome, there is not going to be a victory or a defeat for anyone, and no right or wrong.
While we can try and wrap this event up in big, overarching issues of national importance or see matters of grand principle, at its core it is just the sad story of a family tragedy. As such it is something that the immediate family has to come to terms with, with whatever help and strength that they can get from their close friends, the medical community and, as a last resort, the law. What surprises me that so many people who have little or no connection to the family have got so passionately involved.
I am fortunate that I have never had to make a decision that directly affected the life or death of a human being, especially someone close to me. Making that kind of decision about my much-loved dog caused me so much grief that I don’t even like to speculate about it happening to people that I care about.
I think that it is very risky to predict what one would do if placed in the kind of situation faced by Terri Schiavo’s family. I think none of us really knows until we are actually in that situation, because it is so extreme, so far removed from what we have experienced before, that hypothetical speculations are useless in such cases. I would like to think that, finding myself in such a situation, I would behave bravely, nobly, and selflessly, but I really cannot know in advance. This is why I refrain from judging the people directly involved in the Schiavo case or other cases like that.
I have only sympathy for the members of families who grapple with end-of-life questions for their loved ones. If any friend of mine had to make such a decision, I would simply stand by them and accept whatever decision they made, without urging them on or trying to tell them what to do, because the last thing that grief-stricken people need is gratuitous advice coming at them all the time from all directions. The rest of us should simply be thankful that we do not have to make the kinds of agonizing decisions that they must make.
If Terri Schiavo’s parents were my friends, I would accept their decision in their time of need. If her husband were my friend, I would accept his decision too, even though what he has decided is the opposite of what his parents have decided. The reason for my apparent indecisiveness is because I cannot know what either of them should do since I am not sure that I know what I would do if I were in their shoes. But since neither are my friends, I would just leave them alone to let them work their way through this with their real friends and their doctors, without the intense media scrutiny they are currently experiencing.
I also have nothing but respect for those doctors (and judges and juries) who are required to be involved in such decisions. It cannot be easy to do so and the fact that they have been put in this unpleasant position should make us refrain from criticizing them just because they make decisions with which we do not agree.
In cases like that of Terri Schiavo, there is enough tragedy and sadness to go around without it also becoming a media circus. The best thing we can do may be to just leave the family alone.
POST SCRIPT
The invaluable Juan Cole has a very interesting post on how the mixing of public advocacy with private lives in the Schiavo case has disturbing parallels with cases that have occurred in the Muslim world, where fundamentalist clerics have used that mixing to interfere in the private lives of private citizens. That posting is a must-read.
I apologize for the length of this post but I felt a responsibility (especially since I had a role in creating this rolling snowball) to provide a fairly comprehensive update on the convoluted, strange, and suddenly fast-moving, saga of David Horowitz, the organization he founded called Students for Academic Freedom (SAF), and the college professor who allegedly asked his class to write a mid-term essay on “Why George Bush is a war criminal,” and then gave an F grade to a student who had been offended by the assignment and had instead turned in one on “Why Saddam Hussein is a war criminal.”
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It’s time to play another game of The questions not asked. This is where we examine the reporting of some news event and try and identify the obvious questions that should have been posed by the media, or the context that should have been provided to better understand the event, but wasn’t.
Today’s example is taken from a speech given by George W. Bush on March 8, 2005 and reported in the Houston Chronicle.
“The time has come for Syria to fully implement Security Council Resolution 1559,” Bush told a largely military audience at the National Defense University. “All Syrian military forces and intelligence personnel must withdraw before the Lebanese elections for those elections to be free and fair.”
…
Bush, in a speech touting progress toward democracy in the broader Middle East, did not say what might follow failure to comply.
At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan also left the question open. “If they don’t follow through on their international obligations, then, obviously, you have to look at what the next steps are,” McClellan said.
So what questions were not posed? What context was not provided?
One immediate answer is to compare the situations in Lebanon and Iraq. How can Bush say that the Lebanese elections cannot be free and fair because of the presence of 14,000 Syrian troops there, when ten times that many US troops were present in Iraq during that election in January, but those elections were praised?
But that question was not asked, the context not provided.
But there is another obvious angle to this particular case that was also overlooked, and that is the way in which UN resolutions are used selectively to justify US policy decisions.
UN resolutions routinely call, among other things, for the withdrawal of foreign troops from other countries. And given that the UN is, for want of anything better, the closest thing we have to providing a global consensus, such resolutions should be taken seriously.
But this is not the first time that UN resolutions calling for the withdrawal of occupying troops to be withdrawn have been defied. For example, Stephen Zunes, professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco in his article US Double Standards in the October 22, 2002 issue of The Nation magazine says that more than ninety UN resolutions are currently being violated, and the vast majority of the violations are by countries closely allied with the US. He says:
For example, in 1975, after Morocco’s invasion of Western Sahara and Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, the Security Council passed a series of resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal. However, then-US ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick Moynihan bragged that “the Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. The task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success.” East Timor finally won its freedom in 1999. Moroccan forces still occupy Western Sahara. Meanwhile, Turkey remains in violation of Security Council Resolution 353 and more than a score of resolutions calling for its withdrawal from northern Cyprus, which Turkey, a NATO ally, invaded in 1974.
The most extensive violator of Security Council resolutions is Israel. Israel’s refusal to respond positively to the formal acceptance this past March by the Arab League of the land-for-peace formula put forward in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 arguably puts Israel in violation of these resolutions, long seen as the basis for Middle East peace. More clearly, Israel has defied Resolutions 267, 271 and 298, which demand that it rescind its annexation of greater East Jerusalem, as well as dozens of other resolutions insisting that Israel cease its violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, such as deportations, demolition of homes, collective punishment and seizure of private property. Unlike some of the hypocritical and meanspirited resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly, like the now-rescinded 1975 resolution equating Zionism with racism, these Security Council resolutions are well grounded in international law and were passed with US support or abstention. Security Council Resolutions 446, 452 and 465 require that Israel evacuate all its illegal settlements on occupied Arab lands.
All the UN resolution pointed to be Zunes are very serious and are much older that the resolution 1559 being used against Syria, so that these violations are long standing. All this information is in the public record. Any reasonably competent journalist should know it and, when the administration (and this is done by both Republican and Democratic administrations) cynically invokes UN resolutions selectively to achieve narrow political ends, should be able to pose the relevant question of why only some UN resolutions have to be followed while others ignored.
But the mainstream journalists don’t do this. One question is why. But the more important question is, since they don’t do their job, what can we do to make up for it?