Mansfield on Obama
Generally, I respect Harvey C. Mansfield’s work on classical political theory, and think his attempts at contemporary cultural and political criticism are absurdly small-minded. His piece in The Weekly Standard on Obama’s non-partisanship is a mixture of the good Mansfield and the bad Mansfield, so I recommend it to fans of ambivalence. Here are some of the good parts:
One might call this sort of governing rational administration or rational control. It is government directed by reason that does not appeal to reason but rather to subrational motives that will lead people to do what is rational without their quite understanding what they are doing.
Here, Mansfield demonstrates his major concern, that we have not allowed this debate over health care to become a debate over the kind of regime we have and ought to have. He accuses Obama of ignoring principles in the name of principle, of resisting appeals to reason while attempting to govern rationally. I suspect that Mansfield is right, and even if I don’t seem to share his politics, I wonder what this form of rational irrationality portends for the future of American politics. read more…
I’ve just returned from the Understanding Humans through Neuroscience conference at the American Enterprise Institute, where I heard papers by Roger Scruton, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Stephen Morse. What struck me was how mired the three papers were in defending against a certain kind of agency-undermining determinism that few people take seriously any more. All of them were worried about the implications of this kind of case:
a 40-year-old man who inexplicably became a sexual impulsive with paedophilia. The patient had no prior history of sexual misconduct, but it was soon noted that he was frequenting prostitutes and that he attempted to molest his 12-year-old step-daughter. He was quickly reported to the local authorities, was found guilty of child molestation, and was sentenced to either attend a 12-step sexual addiction program or face jail. Despite a strong yearning not to go to prison, the patient could not inhibit his sexual impulses. It was soon discovered that the defendant had a large tumour pressing on his right orbitofrontal cortex (Figure 2). Upon the resection of the tumour, the patient’s sexual impulsiveness diminished. When the sexual impulsiveness later reappeared, a brain scan revealed that the tumour had grown back. A second resection of tumour again diminished the patient’s sexual impulsiveness [42].
This is basically an unrepeatable experiment in neuroanatomy, but for some reason folks in law really worry about it. read more…
Let’s get the jokes out of the way:
- “If corporations are people, do they get to vote?”
- “If corporations are people, can we start incarcerating them when they commit crimes?”
- “Does this mean I can marry my bank?”
- “Does charging a fee for incorporation constitute an unconstitutional violation of their reproductive rights?”
- “Thank God we’ve finally ended the scourge of anti-corporate discrimination!”
The New York Times apparently thinks that democracy is done for:
With a single, disastrous 5-to-4 ruling, the Supreme Court has thrust politics back to the robber-baron era of the 19th century. Disingenuously waving the flag of the First Amendment, the court’s conservative majority has paved the way for corporations to use their vast treasuries to overwhelm elections and intimidate elected officials into doing their bidding.
Okay, let’s tone down the rhetoric. Here’s the thing: corporations are people and have been since at least 1830, though chartered personhood seems to have operated as an implicit norm even before that:
The great object of an incorporation is to bestow the character and properties of individuality on a collective and changing body of men. This capacity is always given to such a body. Any privileges which may exempt it from the burdens common to individuals, do not flow necessarily from the charter, but must be expressed in it, or they do not exist.
Shakespeare’s Sister
The concluding paragraph of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own kinda gives me chills sometimes:
For my belief is that if we live another century or so—I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals—and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting–room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky. too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on our part, without that determination that when she is born again she shall find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would he impossible. But I maintain that she would come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.
Related: Lin Van Hek sings River of Life.
Earthquakes and Providence
My old boss Ted Kinnaman has a piece in the Huffington Post on Pat Robertson’s claim that Haitians deserved the recent earthquake because they made a pact with the devil in order free themselves from colonial slavery. Others have developed the historical case for such a pact. Where many have taken Robertson to task for misrepresenting Christianity, Ted notes that while none of us would like to admit it, this kind of ascription of responsibility for one’s own suffering is actually a traditional problem throughout Christian theology, and in theism in general:
[Robertson's] most fundamental intellectual commitment is to the existence of a good and all-powerful God. A good God cannot want people to suffer undeservedly, and an all-powerful God would not allow people to suffer undeservedly. Therefore any undeserved suffering is evidence that there is no such God. But since (he presumes) there is such a God, all human suffering must be deserved.
