“Modern celebrity culture is a terrible thing. I can hardly believe that my daughters, growing up two generations after the height of the women’s movement, should be exposed to relentless news about someone who happens to be thin, blond, rich, deliberately uneducated past high school, without any apparent interest in a regular job, and who intentionally acts dim and vapid in order to appear attractive. I sometimes feel as if we have slipped 50 years backward. [...]

“I recognize that my family and I are in some danger of being sucked into the celebrity culture. By definition, the presidential nominee of a major party is famous. In today’s climate, becoming famous means that suddenly the public is interested in our personal lives. I was never a celebrity until I ran for president. It is exciting for us, but also troubling. At some fundamental level, it feels wrong. [...]

“The government cannot ban or censor celebrity culture. It can support local civic engagement, education, and arts as alternatives. And our leaders can speak out against the culture. In this, I would gladly join my Republican opponent.”

It’s a good speech, though in reading it I found myself thinking mostly about why it would fail. People don’t like to be chastised for their recreational choices, when they feel most entitled and least beholden to moral demands. There’s a tremendous industry of professionals devoted to supplying their desired quota of drama and intrusive coverage of the celebrities, and that industry has a self-image and profits to defend.

The downside of celebrity culture is its exclusivity, which I think Peter Levine has dispatched handily in other postings. Though there is something radically egalitarian about putting average people through the celebrity gauntlet in various reality shows, there’s also something disappointing about the great influence that even minor notoriety and fame can grant. We don’t care about just anyone’s opinions, just as we don’t care about just anyone’s infidelities or weight issues.

Those who have been selected for attention gain a kind of capital they can spend politically, and that puts truly deliberative processes at risk. Kevin Powell is one example of this, but then, so is Sean Tevis. Even as we convince ourselves that we’re ‘keeping it real’ by attending to the real lives of some few stars and celebrities, we’re really raising those few above the mass, granting them respect and distinction in the name of equality. Celebrity culture has the strange capacity to twist the horizontal until it is vertical, such that we look at elites and see only leveling and authenticity. That’s a problem, and I doubt very much that a celebrity, even a scholar-cum-celebrity like Senator Obama, can solve it.

Worse yet, I’m not sure that he should. Celebrity culture is just the latest attempt to narrow the field of our attentions to see one thing clearly. We’re lucky, in some ways, that we now attend to the minutia of social life rather than the divine image or the natural world. This keeps us attuned to the needs and accomplishments of our fellow human beings and receptive to cruelty and bad judgment, whereas previously we seem to have organized our world around the divine or in superstitious attempts to garner scientific knowledge from aesthetic depictions of nature. At the end of the day, the majority of the gossip that celebrities both snark at and depend on is true, and that much truth is a major achievement, especially when it is regularly reported and sourced and fact-checked in a competitive environment of professionals seeking to get it first and get it right. And as we’ve seen repeatedly, gossip muckraking can easily become political whistleblowing in the right context, even as it also risks destroying the distinction between the two completely.

Some things I’m thinking about:

• Russia is at war with Georgia over a small breakaway province called South Ossetia. The New York Times has a fantastic background piece here that is also fantastically depressing. There’s a reason that we gave up on the one-to-one (-to-one) relationship between nations, peoples, and governments, and it’s tied to the horrors of that word ‘balkanization.’ What we’re looking at now may well be ‘caucasusization’ fueled by petrorubles and ethnic rivalries that were always simmering beneath the surface of the USSR. Or, you know, maybe I’m worrying too much because my wedding is already planned.
• If you trade in looks, then you’ll be glad to know that the New New Face costs $30,000. I can’t help thinking that I’ve never seen a good attempt to merge plastic surgery and unreasonable standards of personal beauty with discussions of Kant, the third Critique, and the question of pure formal purposiveness-without-purpose. Maybe Bourdieu? Perhaps somebody needs to write a paper on Boudieu contrasting his work in Distinction with his work in Masculine Domination.
• The new issue of The Good Society is out! My friend cowsandgraveyards and I are thrilled!
• Law School Faculty as Free Agents: Bad for legal education… bad for general education?

I don’t quite buy it. For one thing, this precise problem is at the heart of Derrida’s work: very nearly his entire professional life was devoted to supporting Heidegger’s attempt to collapse the distinction between the craft of philosophy and the craft of the history of philosophy. That said, I think Emelianov is right to ask “Who cares?” in response to such hand-waving at Derrida’s authorship, as if his very mention of a problem marked it irretrievably as his property. Perhaps a greater concern is that Emelianov leaves unspecified what he thinks the really good kind of thinking actually is. Constructing arguments sui generis, I suppose, but with regards to what? Judged by what critera? Yes, Derrida was interested in the relationship between reading philosophy, writing about philosophy, and doing philosophy. But no matter what he had to say on the matter, the real problem is that interpretation is in fact the heart of philosophical practice: interpretation of texts, problems, and arguments; interpretation of Being, being and the difference between them; interpretation of God, gods, and no gods; interpretation of the Other, others, and the other others; interpretation of the natural world, the social world, and the interaction between those; interpretation of freedom, power, and justice. In short, philosophy is the practice of making sense of the world we share, not because Derrida or Plato said so, but because that is what philosophers do or ought to do. They ought to do it because it needs doing and they seem to have a talent for it, because interpretation is better than innovation insofar as it preserves a relationship with truth and falsehood, fittingness and absurdity, whereas innovation and originality praises the new for its own sake. Moreover, this broad notion of interpretation is what we celebrate in the various thinkers to whom we grant ‘original’ status: their capacity to ‘get it right,’ where ‘it’ can be almost anything worth getting, and frequently we hadn’t thought we needed it until they suggested an interpretation whereby it can be gotten. As such, philosophy is hermeneutics, and studying texts is a pretty good way to get started on the path to philosophy-as-hermeneutics, even as it threatens to bog some philosophers down in specialization and repetition, like ants or factory workers.

Are there too many people studying the small portion of the world inscribed by Derrida and translated by his admirers? Certainly! Derrida burst onto the scene just as the American academy was expanding rapidly. Suddenly, for all sorts of institutional reasons, there was great demand for talented scholarship, great rewards to be reaped by those granted star academic status, and perhaps a little confusion and some French jargon helped to boost a few very excellent scholars ahead of their otherwise equally excellent competitors. As a result, some French names became sources of authority in CVs (and this is not only true for French names.) However unbalanced these historical contingencies may have made the faculty, there ought probably to be some Derrideans, people well-versed in the tradition of phenomenology after Husserl, the ontological turn in Heidegger, and the strong hermeneutic tradition in France and Germany. Derrida is about as worthwhile a read as Gadamer or Ricouer, and hopefully no one would deny that they are worth reading.

So let’s go back to the original story. Here’s how I prefer to tell it: those who study original thinkers often use the objects of their study as a springboard or provocation to their own original thinking. In other cases, the ‘assistant professors’ (in the pejorative Kierkegaardian sense) among us may be hiding a lack of talent under their banal recapitualations, or they may be suffering from forces beyond their control that repress the expression of original thoughts which they nonetheless have, and sometimes even mistakenly attribute to their heroic figure of study. What’s most important is that we all suffer from the institutional preference for famous proper names, which draws a talent pool primarily skilled at exegesis and hagiography, trains young scholars to specialize in exegesis and hagiography, and then primarily publishes material that is easily packaged and sold as exegesis and hagiography.

This is our twilight, the conversion of critical thinking and metaphysical abstraction into advertorial content for edutainment seminars. If the new capitalism is a lifestyle capitalism, then the study of the good life is just another product to be sold: in that hypothetical world, there’d be niche brands (Deleuze) luxury brands (Derrida) and off-brands for the budget conscious (Rorty). And even our conversation about Derrida being SO OVER is just a manifestation of market saturation, with new designers thinkers waiting in the wings to cure our ennui with some avant-garde, underground, truly (no seriously this time) countercultural philoso-styling. It’s scholarship as branding, philosophy as fashion, with a New! Fall! Line! every decade or so, the Latest! Parisian! Styles! available soon, and sooner to those who don’t need to wait for the translation. (Those lucky hipsters–I bet all the boys swoon with jealousy and/or lust at their inimitable cool.)

Philosophy is all that, ironically unironic in its acceptance of the marketing paradigm, of demographics (analytic, continental, feminist) and of name recognition, but it is also the craft of twisting free of the bullshit, stealing the distance and time needed to pause, think, and not buy anything or any idea.

“Oh!” you say. “AP sure has bought into that whole fantasy of radical passivity and ataraxia. Philosophy is the window-shopping of the soul, amiright? You think you’re looking, but you’re really just buying into the marketplace of ideas with your eyes.” No! I mean, yes, insofar as there’s an industry for inner peace and a factory somewhere that churns out self-help books on serenity, it’s true that capitalism can even commoditize the resistance to commodification. But still, no! We can still practice the techniques of freedom and that practice starts with solitude, withdrawal, contemplation, consideration, and critical insight.

“Ha!” you say. “So now you’re selling freedom and clarity, too? What are you, a Scientologist? Those are just illusions, ideological projections of an Enlightenment subjectivity that never was and never will be. It was a popular brand once, but retro items aren’t in this year ” But that’s just it: the Enlightenment was on to something. Progress in knowledge starts with a recognition of the limits of knowledge. One skeptical Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is worth a hundred rationalist Monadologies. So while I’d rather not be a telemarketer for Hume and Kant, it’s a hundred times better than becoming a spam-bot for their opposition. And ultimately Derrida was in the Critique camp, showing us the limits of our favorite certitudes, and at least at his best, giving good reasons for his positions and defending his claims. Since many of his claims were about reason-giving and claim-defending, his defenses and reasons were sometimes a little convoluted. But that’s precisely why we need exegetes… and also why Derrida scholarship need credible critics who charitably interpret, engage with, and dispatch his arguments when they are bad, wrong, irrelevant, or unhelpful. (This does already happen, by the way, but it’s still cautious and fleeting criticism, wary of transmuting hardwon authorial gold into straw with too trenchant or powerful an attack.) Without that, Derrida scholarship would be doomed… but I think that the field will move in that direction naturally as his friends, students, and lovers grow older. Like any Great Leader or Work of Art, the world returns to equilibrium as his charismatic spell fades and the enchantment of his aura wanes.

By all accounts, Dr. Peach was able to combine compassion and intelligence in a manner to which many people in my field aspire: to make curiosity political, to put passion for social justice to work in the classroom, to expose our young and largely sheltered students to society’s ills in a way that provokes thought and nurtures critical thinking. She was active in human rights scholarship and advocacy, especially the issues surrounding gender, violence, human trafficking, and sex work. She had a JD from NYU and a PhD from Indiana University in Bloomington, which i find particularly impressive because I’d love to be able to pursue a JD at some point. She perched herself at one small Archimidean point from which to allow the infinitely vulnerable and impotent activity of thinking to gain leverage, in a world where the ‘ought’ frequently scrambles for purchase on a slippery, self-satisfied ‘is.’ That’s worthy of celebration.

In Legislating Morality, Dr. Peach argues for a social self that grows into an autonomous liberal subject, following G. H. Mead’s transactional account of communal moral identity, and suggests that we ought to apply a modified Lemon test to judge religiously motivated legislation, presumptively invalidating statutes that are “alienating, exclusionary, coercive, and/or politically divisive,” unless they are narrowly tailored to achieve a secular purpose, in other words, unless they can weather a strict scrutiny test, which is usually reserved for race-based legislation, content-based restrictions on speech, and statutes with a religiously discriminatory effect. By applying the restriction to statutory intent, she expands the scope of the Lemon test radically to all those statutes where the secular justification is weak or pretextual and hides a deeply-held but hotly contested religious motivation. Thus, she would force the state to remain agnostic about metaphysical questions like the beginning of life or the membership of a marriage when it comes time to exercise the police power, rather than allow those questions to be resolved through majoritarian procedures like electoral selection of representatives. She thus offers a rights-based balancing test to what has largely emerged as a legitimacy question, but she grounds her claims in a philosophical account of moral development that is justified by the increased latitude she offers religiously-inflected deliberation. It’s one possible solution to a real conundrum in democratic institutional design: how are we to resolve conflicts in matters of conscience and moral intuition? This conundrum has since been taken up by the likes of Christopher Eberle, Stephen Macedo, Robert Talisse, and Martha Nussbaum in a tremendously productive flurry of articles and books, so in retrospect Dr. Peach’s work is quite prescient.

The Soviet Union had no Lech Walesas or Vaclav Havels. No former dissidents or prisoners became ministers or presidents in Moscow, in contrast to Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague. Instead, there was an internal bureaucratic shift in the Kremlin. “Reformers” defeated “hard-liners.” The Baltic countries and also—up to a point—Georgia were different, however, because in them dissidents did take office. In Moscow, it was a new cadre of bureaucrats that oversaw reforms. [...]

[....] Being anticommunist did not automatically mean being a democrat. The victorious anticommunist camps of 1989 were made up of democrats and liberals, social democrats and conservatives, nationalists and religious fundamentalists, anti-Russian chauvinists and—yes, frankly—semi-fascists and anti-Semites who sought to expiate (somewhat) their sordid pasts by posing as freedom lovers. [...]

[...]Enthusiasm for rapid marketization obscured the impact of reforms on social strata that would suffer from the abolition of some of the safety nets provided by communism: retirees, workers in rust-belt, Soviet-style industries, provincial residents. Not everyone was a winner in the postcommunist paradise.

Finally, there are no shortcuts to democracy. It does not emerge overnight, automatically, and it is not enough to have an elite committed to democracy and markets. After all, democracy in countries such as Britain and France took centuries, and the United States needed a civil war to abolish slavery and another century to enfranchise fully its black population. The political histories of Germany, Italy, and Spain show how complex, tortuous, and sometimes murderous the transformation toward democracy can be.

Since that WaPo evaluation, however, everyone has concluded that the strongest case is the case against her. That case is twofold. First, she doesn’t have the foreign policy experience necessary to counter-balance Obama’s domesticity (so therefore he should pick Wesley Clark or Colin Powell.) Second, choosing a white woman who’s not Hillary Clinton is a snub to Clinton’s supporters.

I just don’t understand this second point. If it’s true, it stikes me as bad judgment: Clinton’s supporters want to see a woman in the White House, presumably in part because there is a ‘glass ceiling’ preventing strong, intelligent women from becoming political and corporate executives, and they would like someone to break it. A woman VP is one step towards a woman President. Yet they’ve also declared that the ‘glass ceiling’ can only be broken by one woman, who rose to prominence in part because of the patronymic she shares with her husband. (Don’t get me wrong, Sebelius is no stranger to familial political connections: her father John J. Gilligan, was governor of Ohio. That said, she’s governor and the other Sebelius, her husband, is only a federal magistrate judge.) The sentiment that nominating Sebelius would be a betrayal suggests that Hillary Clinton’s efforts cannot be allowed to make a path for some other woman. If Clinton put 18 million cracks in the ceiling, no other woman is allowed to finally break through. So then it’s not about women as a class at all!

I must admit that I’m confused. It looks to me like either the pollsters and pundits got this one wrong, or the Clinton supporters did.

The first chapter is available online. Unfortunately, it starts with a fairly traditional critique of the media representations of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, turning the analytic techniques of the scholar on the mythologizing of that day. That work has already been done, and frankly, done better and with more care, in the months following that the attacks. However, the table of contents promises something more: an account of the subversion of democratic prospects and a form of market totalitarianism, a privatised, corporatised version of the pervasive bureaucratic power of totalitarian societies. It’s a story that’s easy to tell, mixing critiques of monopolistic corporate media and private pro-capitalist propaganda borrowed from Walter Lippmann and Noam Chomsky with a kind of post-9/11 Hart and Negri account of imperialism, terrorism, and the imagined might of a Superpower in a global economy. Maybe it’s good to have that all in one place, and so maybe Wolin is doing us a favor by offering his traditional systematic breadth for the contemporary world. Or, maybe my reading of the table of contents and the character of the reviews is off, and he’s doing something completely different.

Chalmers Johnson reviews it on truthdig, which suggests the audience is weighted more towards a general lefist audience (antiwar No Logo types) and less towards political theorists. I suppose that’s not inherently bad, but Wolin can be a little wifty when it comes to his policy/activism recommendations, and makes a better scholar than a political actor. Worse, he’s apparently trying to detail contemporary political options without the least understanding of the internet. I won’t run out and buy this one, but I look forward to a deluge of Wolin faddishness as it catches on, so I may end up looking at the rest of the chapters eventually. Meanwhile, I’ll spend some time with his Tocqueville book: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds. Some good stuff there!

to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States.

Thus, the legal question facing telecoms as they decided whether to help the administation spy on Americans was believed by many, including key legislators, to be a question of resolving a potential conflict between an old statute, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and a new and remarkably urgent statute authorizing war-in-practice-but-not-in-name, i.e. military force.

In that case, there would have been a genuine question for the telcos about what the right thing to do was: the right legal thing to do, and, despite the outrage, the right moral thing to do, since it’s implicitly immoral to retreat to legal abstractions when your countrymen are being attacked. If the question is merely post-9/11 and post-AUMF violations of FISA, it’s not clearcut, and the grant of immunity largely appears to respect the deeply ambiguous moral and legal choice the telcos made, and, moreover, were forced to make without vetting the question publicly or bringing in external legal counsel due to the supposed ’security’ concerns.

However, if the claims made by Nacchio and Qwest are true, then the Bush administration was building an extrajudicial wiretapping program almost from the moment it got into office, and with no specific legislation that even suggested the possibility of overriding FISA. That would be a case of more serious malfeasance, and it’s one that we might want to investigate further. Yet it’s hard to see how telecom immunity will assist that investigative goal. It’s one thing to say that we ought not to scapegoat the telecoms through civil liability for the executive’s crimes, but it would be nice to see the results of discovery in all those civil suits, which would presumably involve letters, memoranda of understanding, and minutes from meetings in which administration officials applied pressure to the telecoms to persuade them to break the law, without a terror attack on the horizon or any instigation but the 2000 election’s heavily contested change of regime.

What does it take for the massive federal bureaucracy to shift from a shaky mandate to the theory of the unified executive in so little time? What does it take to get massively cautious and litigation-shy telecommunication companies to sign on? What deals were struck? Who participated? Undoubtedly, these questions will loom larger when President Bush steps down and becomes the proper study of historians rather than journalists and bloggers. I’m sure American democracy will survive our brief flirtation with the Feurher principle. But as many people have pointed out, Congress declined to challenge the executive branch’s role in wiretapping with the new bill. In the process, they opening up major new loopholes for warrantless surveillance. Here’s the breakdown of changes, from Ketchup and Caviar:

It Eliminates the requirement that there be probable cause that a foreign target is a suspect of any kind — terrorist, criminal, ore “foreign agent.” They merely need be your French grandmother, as long as they are outside the United States and not a U.S. person, and if the government says wiretapping them is for the purpose of collecting “foreign intelligence information” (e.g., her Pommes Frites recipe)

It requires the cooperation of telecoms in these efforts

It eliminates of the need to specify a particular email address or phone number to be wiretapped

1-3 together imply that certifications of wiretapping on individuals is not the issue. The point is to use telecom cooperation to target large collections of data on communications between U.S. Persons and foreigners. This implies data mining — where, for instance, because a foreign target has communications passing through a given domestic switch, any communications (domestic or international) passing through that switch are subject to collection, analysis, and storage.  There are “minimization requirements” meant to ameliorate this, but it is unclear if they really help.

The compromise of domestic communications in (4) is exacerbated by the fact that targets need only be “reasonably believed” to be outside the U.S.

It includes only minimal court oversight — who it is that is subject to warrantless wiretapping will not be know to the FISA court; the government can wiretap before it court order is sought and continue to do so even if it is denied — during a lengthy appeal process.

Dr. Seuss’s protagonist, young Gerald McGrew, suffers none of his sophisticated contemporaries’s deadly contempt for life as it is, or for his social surroundings.  His opening words are, “It’s a pretty good zoo, and the fellow who runs it seems proud of it too.”  But McGrew imagines he could do better.   He would release the current animals and acquire creatures such as a ten-footed lion and a family of Lunks in a bucket from the wilds of Nantucket.   He dreams of zookeeper glory, when “the whole world will say, ‘Young McGrews’s made his mark. / He’s built a zoo better than Noah’s whole Ark!’”

McGrew’s bestiary comes from Linneas-knows-not-where, but surely Dr. Seuss has posed a good question.  If you ran the zoo, could you outdo McGrew?

It’s a nice conceit, although many of the authors have been grinding various axes with affirmative action, speech codes, or feminism and not really offering much of value. Some of them also offer some good sense alongside the bullshit. Anyway, it’s a fun game without any chance of changing anything, but if I somehow found myself Commissioner of all things post-secondary, well, here’s what I’d do:

If I ran American Higher Education…

…all libraries would allow coffee in spill-proof containers.

…all academic journals would be published on-line and freely available to the public.

…there would be Pell Grants for prisoners and incarcerated students would get quality faculty to teach them.

…there’d be no pro-male affirmative action. Women, who have higher scores and higher grades, would be admitted in numbers proportionate to their qualifications, not rejected to keep classes gender balanced.

…there’d be more, smaller schools rather than massive megaversities.

…charitable donations would not be tax-deductible unless used for scholarships, architecture, or books.

…schools would never pay for computer operating systems: Ubuntu or typewriters are fine, but no proprietary tech, especially if it’s donated to create path dependent consumers. (Computers and software have played a major role in hiking tuition and expending endowments in the last two decades.)

…there’d be no organized athletics.

…no course could count towards a degree unless taught by a Ph.D.

…graduate students would be students, not cheap labor. Grading and research assistance would not be available as a perk for talented researchers, and classes would have to be sized to be gradeable by a single person.

…every “full-time” faculty member would be required to teach at least four courses a year, regardless of endowed chairs or administrative tasks.

…full-time researchers would work for private scientific labs or political think tanks. Basic research would occur at these private labs but be publicly funded and results would be owned by the public. Faculty would be expected to go on sabbatical if they wanted to go work for one of these labs or think tanks, so no double-dipping. (I could go on, here, but the research university has really damaged higher ed in this country, as Eisenhower suggested it would: “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”)

…there’d be fewer administrators, and administrators would always answer to faculty, not vice versa.

…law school would only take two years, not three.

…medical education would proceed from nurse’s training or physician’s assistant training to medical school, and every MD would have to work as an RN or a PA before moving on.

…graduate students in the liberal arts and sciences would be required to teach high school students for a year in their subject area, after receiving a Masters but before going on to finish their Ph.D. (This is similar to the French system, and has the perk of creating a pool of better educated and more enthusiastic high school teachers, while supplying better prepared freshmen and making the last two years of high school worthwhile rather than a waste of everyone’s time.)

Anyway, I offer the challenge to my baker’s dozen of readers: how would you run the zoo if you were its keeper?

[UPDATE: In the interestes of transparency, I've been tinkering with some of the suggestions based on reader comments. Most notably, I got rid of a prohibition on fraternities and sororities, and changed a hard student-limit to a soft prescription for smaller schools.]