I know it’s become standard fare for liberals to criticize Republicans for injustice. But I want to take a strong stand against this disgusting display, in which the Governor of Ohio, acting as a public official, told the world: “We want all the immigrants to come to Ohio, because we know how much they contribute to America!”
Notice that “all”? Kasich is edging for a monopoly. And that’s where I have to draw the line: this country was built on competitive federalism, and Ohio doesn’t have the right to all the DREAMers. Ohio should have to woo them the same as everybody else. Maryland has a right to DREAMers, too, and I’d argue we need them more.
Now I know many people will argue that Kasich is just engaging in salesmanship, a crucial part of the job as governor. He’s making a rhetorically strong pitch, not actually trying to use his office to allot an unfair advantage to his state. Maybe so. Donald Trump set off this absurd bidding war by changing the rules of the game in ending DACA. That was a dumb move, because now there’s a feeding frenzy as states compete to fill in the vacuum left by the federal government. Some states will win and some will lose. I think Congress should act to reset the playing field levelly, calm the market for the best and brightest citizens, workers, and entrepreneurs, by passing the DREAM Act.
Once they’re done, it’ll be time to deal with this gluttonous monster, Eli Bosnick:
Bosnick seems to think that his home state should get all the refugees, too. There are five million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war there, and the United States already has far fewer of them than we deserve.
Bosnick exacerbates the problem by bogarting the Syrian refugees for himself. Steve Jobs was a Syrian immigrant, and Bosnick is saying, basically, “I want all the iPhones!” (Which, to be absolutely honest, just isn’t quite as good of a get since Jobs died.) But that’s not the American Way! Americans should be able to all have an opportunity to resettle Syrian refugees through their churches, synogogues, and mosques! Matthew La Corte and David Bier have argued just that, and we should listen.
(I’m sorry for the uncharacteristic satire, but I don’t know how else to express the intensity of my anger and outrage. We all feel some issues so deeply that we can’t engage in careful policy arguments about them; this is one of my weaknesses. I can tell you about the economic impact on growth, the effect on employment for native-born, the benefits to the home country through remittances, but it just seems silly to make this fight about numbers. Immigration makes me feel practically biblical:
When the alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33-34)
But here’s something sort of rational: I’ll be voting on this policy. So far, Kasich is the only potential candidate for 2020 who has come out this strongly: that means that right now, Republican or not, he has my vote. (If Kamala Harris can get the DREAM Act passed, though, I’ll definitely reconsider. And if we can get serious action on refugees from some public official of any party, I’ll be sold.)
In the sciences, co-authorship is normal. In the humanities, it is uncommon. In philosophy, it is almost non-existent. (See chart.)[1] Yet philosophy is not without famous co-authors (e.g., Marx and Engels). What’s more, some monographs ought properly be considered co-authored, like John Stuart Mill’s collaborations with Harriet Taylor Mill: “when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence, in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen.”
There is little scholarship on co-authorship in philosophy, but a steady trickle of blog posts suggests that there is interest and anxiety on this point. (Helen de Cruz, Mark Zelcer, Robert Paul Wolff)
1. What is co-authorship generally?
Co-authorship in the sciences is ideally ruled by two rules rooted in a particular sociology of labs and research groups. First, co-authors contribute to the scholarly endeavor for a piece of publishable scholarship by planning, executing, or analyzing the results of some sort of research. Second, co-authors compose the written portion of the research, either collectively or through some division of labor.
Both of these ideals are violated, of course—there are plenty of massive multi-authored articles where scholars receive token authorship (gift authorship) or someone who made substantial contributions is not credited as an author (ghost authorship.) In that way, these are “endorsed” norms, not the “enforced” ones: violations abound and are even legitimated as common practice in some “big science” research areas. But this remains the practical ideal.
2. Why is co-authorship deprecated in philosophy?
Professional philosophers collaborate, usually through disputatious conversation, but usually not in a way that counts multiple thinkers as the author of a single paper. We are also much less likely to cite our peers than the agenda-setting papers in our sub-fields, especially as a part of a generic literature review. (See Kieran Healey’s data.) It is more common for close collaborators to co-edit than to co-author: for instance, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum famously created the “capabilities approach” together without co-authoring any of their foundational papers. They did, however, co-edit the seminal volume, The Quality of Life in 1993.
So while we do not imagine ourselves to be lone geniuses communing with the ancient canon, it is the case that many philosophical papers are projected as manifestos of a single principled thinker. Indeed, philosophers are particularly prone to a kind of “subauthorial collaboration” that is formalized in lavish acknowledgements in the text or an early footnote. (Cronin, Shaw, La Barre, 2003)
“This paper mostly presents the latest lessons I’ve learned from my students. Under the customs of the natural sciences, it should have been a joint paper, the coauthors being (in alphabetical order) John Collins, Ned Hall, myself [David Lewis], L.A. Paul, and Jonathan Schaffer. But under the customs of philosophy, a paper is expected to be not only a report of discoveries but a manifesto; and, happily, the five of us have by no means agreed upon a common party line.”[2]
Yet analytic philosophers often imagine themselves by analogy to the natural and social sciences, and American and continental philosophers increasingly emphasize the collaborative nature of our enterprise. Why, then, do we not use co-authorship more?
One obvious reason is the relative paucity of grants and research support compared to the natural and social sciences. Without an incentive to adopt the lab or research group model, most working philosophers are not members of a funded research unit with reporting requirements. Rigorous research is understood to support ‘research-led teaching,’ and so the single-author model is based primarily on the single-teacher model. We should thus expect the introduction of larger private grant-making institutions, like the Templeton Foundation and the Berggruen Institute, and public European grant agencies, to usher in an era of increasing research group size in philosophy, and the more frequent co-authorship.
We expect that new collaborative technologies will decrease the costs and difficulties of collaboration to the extent that philosophers will more often overcome them, even without any increased funding or benefits. Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, and simple Microsoft Office sharing, versioning, and commenting will all tend to ease the speed with which scholars of all varieties—including philosophers—create collaborative documents. Social media, chat programs, and email ease collaboration over distance to replicate the proximity by which labs and research groups co-compose.
Lastly, we might think of philosophical research as long-shot bets (Langhe and Schliesser, 2017) that explore concepts, methods, or techniques that may be generally applicable. As such, it will be difficult to trace any particular result in the world back to a paper or monograph, and it is preferable to have many such long-shot bets rather than focus the efforts and attention of a highly skilled research team on sequential elaboration of just one of these gambles. It will generally be better to encourage idiosyncratic work done by individuals and small teams in hopes that one of those bets pays off. In the age of increasingly easy collaboration some enduring, virtual small research teams will emerge without, hopefully, fully displacing lone wolfs and disputatious research groups.
3. What norms of co-authorship might philosophers embrace?
If philosophers do adopt co-authorship norms, which ones should we adopt?
We should start with the ideal of recognition of actual contribution to the research and knowing participation in the composition. Co-authorship should never be merely “honorary” inclusion for a member of a team or department who contributed to neither the research work nor the writing endeavor. However, the division of labor in some disciplines has the result of producing co-authored pieces where some credited contributors don’t even understand the paper they have helped to produce. Should we extend co-authorship to a student assistant who writes the literature review for a piece of research without understanding the rest of the paper? Should we accept co-authorship for a paper whose conclusions we do not endorse, if we supplied the formal modeling or computer code that underwrites it?
Our current professional ideal is consensus. On this ideal all authors must give credence to every jot and tittle of the work, even if their confidence varies slightly. Co-authorship in philosophy is stricter because philosophers can and should endorse all the claims, arguments, and conclusions of the paper. Papers can be thus be co-authored in philosophy when two or more researchers find a common interest, discuss it at great length, and truly co-compose the entire paper, contesting each argumentative move and turn of phrase until agreement is reached. As such, it should be very unlikely to see large groups of co-authors writing together, given the difficulty of producing such an exacting meeting of the minds, and we even look askance at philosophy papers co-authored by three or four scholars.
Another possibility is that philosophers working on closely-related research might try to divvy up the tasks in a field of research around some question such that only one or a few of the authors of a work understand the whole thing, while others are credited for their contributions without being “first” or “lead” author status. This requires trust in each other to handle sections of the paper that address relevant issues from their sub-fields; perhaps a paper that is 12,000 words long is written in two halves, with only the introduction and conclusion truly a joint project. On this ideal, co-authors retain to right to veto truly abhorrent claims made outside of their assigned sections, but only by threatening to dissolve the partnership. Otherwise, they can only register objections and hope to be heard.
A third possibility would be to follow the norm in law courts, where empaneled and en banc judges issue both dissenting opinions or in some cases join the majority in parts of their decision but not others, perhaps affirming the result but not all of the methods used to arrive at it. In such cases, a minority might dissent vehemently, while the court is understood to have rendered the opposite verdict: that minority dissent is clearly a separate research project in philosophical terms. They are not understood as co-authors of the majority opinion but as co-authors of a distinct opinion which did not win a majority of support. The more instructive question is what to do when judges affirm parts of the main decision but not all of it, and by analogy, situations where co-authors affirm parts of a research project but not all of it. Can it be possible for one of the co-authors to “sign on” to parts 1, 2, and 4 of a paper, while dissenting from arguments found in part 3 and in the conclusion? For example, in the past one of us has used a footnote to signal an alternative position from the one arrived at in the body of the paper.
A fourth possibility is majority voting. Bright, Dang, and Heesen (2017) argue that scientific work should aggregate researchers’ judgments. Claims and propositions should be made in a paper that receive the assent of the majority of the authors. One might well find oneself outvoted in some cases, and this would be fine so long as there was agreement that voting had not produced a contradictory or logically incoherent set of claims.
A fifth possibility would be a kind of deliberative dictatorship: a lead author could write a paper, assign sections for others to compose, and bounce ideas off of possible co-authors. At the conclusion, all participants who agreed with the final product could sign on as co-authors, while dissenters could produce their own dissenting papers to be published alongside. This is related to proposals that might allow peer reviewers to receive more recognition for their work as initial gatekeepers.
Could all of these modes of co-authorship flourish in philosophy? Are some of them inimical to the discipline?
4. Philosophers should co-author more of our work
Given the fact that some forms of collaborative recognition do exist, why suggest co-authorship as an alternative model for philosophy? Let’s start by dividing the reasons for co-authorship into roughly epistemic and roughly ethical categories, even if this is a division that is easily collapsed. Co-authored papers may simply be better for having multiple composers, readers, and researchers attached to them. The division of epistemic labor will often lead to better-written, more carefully crafted, or simply more copious publications: many minds make light work.
At the same time, co-authorship is partly about recognizing the contributions of our peers. In that sense, it is ethical. This is a weaker defense of co-authorship, since there are alternative methods for providing recognition. If a paper issues from a conversation with a colleague or a good objection raised at a conference or blog post, we philosophers would normally expect to mention that in a footnote, not to grant the colleague or objector co-authorship status. Philosophy papers are sometimes imagined to be the record of the thoughts or analysis of a single agent, and group agency seems much more difficult in these cases because we are so rarely in anything resembling agreement. We are rarely of a single mind, ourselves, so this is no big impediment, but this also ignores the fact that one can commit to a written product while having varying confidence in its disparate elements.
But there’s a significant ethical claim that might recommend co-authorship: the ideal of scholarly friendship. Co-authorship can be a way to channel professional philosophical relationships in productive ways, a norm for guiding conversations and arguments towards shared, potentially overlapping projects. There is independent reason to believe that shared projects are an intrinsic good tied closely to well-being. (Korsgaard, 1992) Thus we should, if possible, prefer to share the tasks associated with philosophical research with others, not just after publication but throughout the scholarly endeavor. Philosophical co-authorship is desirable just because philosophical friendship is desirable.
Shared projects are possible both between equals and between mentors and students. As such, co-authorship is a way to encourage productive collaboration within departments and with undergraduate and graduate students. In the pedagogy-first model of much philosophical research, departmental colleagues at most small schools should not co-author their research because this leads to overlapping areas of interest and knowledge. A department with only a handful of philosophers should instead hope that its faculty have as little in common as possible, even if they must share governance of their department and spend their careers working side-by-side. But if co-authorship underwrites philosophical friendship, then even a maximally pluralistic department should seek opportunities to co-create research, actively seeking agreement and shared methods, research areas, and conceptual terrain.
Like friends, co-authors need not agree on everything.[3] Finding some method for adjudicating those disagreements is important, but philosophical writing can encompass these minor dissents or majoritarian procedures, just as our departments do. The key is that the commitment to co-author—like the commitments of friendship—is a commitment to resolve disagreements using whatever methods are available. Friends do not obsess over decision-procedures, though we adopt them to ease tensions for the sake of shared projects. The same should go for co-authors.
Like friends, co-authors need not be equals. We see in the sciences that co-authorship allows a kind of scholarly mentorship, and in philosophy graduate students experience intense collaboration for the first time while writing their dissertation with a senior scholar. We even acknowledge that this is akin to co-authorship by treating dissertation advising as something close to co-authorship for some professional purposes.
More of this sort of mentorship should be encouraged. The practice of learning from another scholar does not end when a philosopher receives a PhD, and probably we shouldn’t pretend that it does. Perhaps newly-minted PhDs aren’t yet ready for the full burdens of a research program, or perhaps they would benefit from mentorship when they move on to a new research program. Or perhaps not: perhaps this would end with more domination by senior scholars, as the division of labor creates permanent hierarchies. But it’s not as if our current, academic political economy is hierarchy-free.
A final reason is merely accuracy: our authorial norms give a false idea of our practices to the rest of the academy. We should consider revising them to align ourselves with our fellow academics. Let’s not pretend that scholarly productivity metrics are irrelevant or that Deans do not look askance at our publication records compared to other disciplines.
[1] Despite the best efforts of some of the authors of this post!
It’s France’s fête nationale–Bastille Day–marking the storming of the Bastille Saint-Antoine. The crowd of revolutionaries were mostly looking for guns and ammunition held by the garrison of soldiers stationed there, but they also suspected that the prisoners were being tortured. (They weren’t.) Seven prisoners were freed that day: four forgers, two mentally-ill people, and one aristocrat.
In the US we should celebrate today as Prison Abolition Day.
I consider myself a prison abolitionist in the same way that Angela Davis is: I think the United States massively over-incarcerates its citizens, especially its Black citizens. I think that prisons ought to be spaces of education and care rather than domination. And I think that our communities must be redesigned to prevent the crimes for which we send people to prison.
In thinking specifically about the abolition of prisons using the approach of abolition democracy, we would propose the creation of using an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison, thereby helping to render the prison obsolete. There is a direct connection with slavery: when slavery was abolished black people were set free, but they lacked access to the material resources that would enable them to fashion new, free lives. Prisons have thrived over the last century precisely because of the absence of those resources and the persistence of some of the deep structures of slavery. They cannot, therefore, be eliminated unless new institutions and resources are made available to those communities that provide, in large part, the human beings that make up the prison population. (Abolition Democracy, pg. 96)
That’s still a lot of people, of course, but we currently incarcerate roughly seven times the global average of our population, without having seven times the crime. Our violent crime rate is on par with or even much lower than countries like the UK–though it’s true that our gun ownership rates make our assaults more often fatal murders–but we incarcerate many, many more people. So I propose we should start by aiming to shrink our prison population by 6/7s. This is an odd fraction, but it just represents the over-incarceration rate in the US compared to the rest of the world. It’s also deliberately a bit inexact: many countries have fewer than 100 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. Perhaps the US could achieve the lower, more civilized rates of incarceration found in Finland and Norway, over time, but in any case, 6/7s abolition strikes me as a good place to start.
Sometimes I hear from other prison abolitionists that this is still 1/7 too many. But I don’t really know what to make of this. The majority of American prisoners are incarcerated for violent crimes, and I don’t know what it means to wish for impunity or restorative justice in every such case. Surely some people deserve some punishment; all I ask is that we radically remake the entire carceral character of American life.
This means drastically lower sentences: closer to the sentences prisoners served in the 1970s than the ones they serve today. It means prosecuting fewer crimes, too. But it doesn’t mean sacrificing our safety: it means focusing policing and imprisonment on the kinds of wonkish policies that we know work, while reinvesting the savings from incarceration in social supports.
Of the seven prisoners at the Bastille, I propose that one–perhaps the stray aristocrat, the Comte de Solages, who some records suggest was a rapist and attempted murderer and whose noble birth very nearly granted him impunity–deserved to be there. For the sake of the other six, however, we must still storm the carceral state!
This is a part of a series on terms and concepts that I find particularly resonant.
We usually say that the fundamental rule of economics is scarcity: there are never enough widgets (food, housing, gadgets) to meet all the demand And even where we seem to be endowed with wealth, we still face opportunity costs for doing one thing rather than another: we have finite time and attention, and at a fundamental level we cannot both have the cake and eat it. Economists study the allocation of that scarcity and costly selection among those opportunities. Thus (in his famous call for the reintroduction of slavery in the Carribean) Thomas Carlyle called economics a dismal science, since it forced such unhappy choices upon us. All the more reason to explore alternative framings, just as George Bataille did in his book The Accursed Share.
Imagine you and your friends are splitting a pizza, and there is an extra piece. Who gets it? And what happens next? Perhaps it becomes the prize in a game of trivia. Perhaps the winner has a little extra energy, perhaps they get fat. Perhaps it goes to one of your friends who is pregnant, because she is “eating for two.” Perhaps the most popular or amusing member of the group gets it. Perhaps you decide to throw it out. If your group always gives the extra piece to the same person, though, patterns of preference emerge.
In George Bataille’s three volume The Accursed Share, he imagines a primitive subsistence society that gathers just a little more food or other basic goods than it needs: who gets the extra share? What do we do with the remainder? Bataille uses this simple concept to construct a remarkably compelling just-so story of the political economy of both inequality and culture. Even recognizing that it is a kind of ahistoric just-so story, I continue to find the “accursed share” deeply intriguing and I return to it often.
As a framework, it strikes me as particularly important for those who work on political economy, like an artist using a camera obscura to see a scene differently for more accurate drawing or painting. The “accursed share” allows us to rethink economic problems in terms of the distribution of the excess rather than scarcity. It takes the economist’s tool of limited resources and flips it on its head. As Bataille puts it: “it is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury,’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.” (pg. 12)
As he spins out the concept to apply it to historical and traditional societies like the Aztecs and Tibetans, or to 20th century questions of political economy, societies that find themselves with growing productivity and wealth become increasingly stressed by the excess. They often develop techniques for expending their growth, like potlatch gift ceremonies, monastic non-working sects, or invasion of other countries. Yet these are, fundamentally, coping strategies for a problem: there is more than enough to go around. And he claims that the modern industrial capitalism has broken all of these coping strategies by creating not just an excess but a growing one, a continual disruption that gets reinvested and accelerates the next crisis of extravagant, opulent luxury.
Luxury and Culture
On Bataille’s account, culture just is the by-product of the accursed share. As patterns of “who gets the surplus?” develop, societies produce not just subsistence but hierarchy, not just inequality but cultural justifications for that inequality.
In other times and places, societies cultivate a class of religious or scholarly ascetics to whom the “accursed share” is owed. Perhaps, as in Tibet, monks adopt ritualistic poverty alongside disciplined unproductivity: they beg for their meals and yet do nothing to participate in the agricultural labor that makes their meals possible. In this sense, the remaining share is “accursed,” but also blessed and sanctified.
On Bataille’s view, then, variations in culture are the product of the patterns in our distribution of the excess. In that sense, Bataille has a version of Tolstoy’s dictum: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” All subsistence societies are equal; richer societies develop patterns of inequality that make them distinct.
In a deeper sense, the allocation of the surplus is closely tied to meaning-making, as well as to status. Sometimes it is easier to simply burn the excess. But someone must do the burning, and esteem and status are be left over as a residue of that role (along with, perhaps, a few items or treats snatched from the fire before they are consumed.) Or the excess can be expended on a class of artists, who make art, music, or literature that aspires to be uselessly beautiful. (Some part of the excess might even be devoted to philosophers….)
Still, the remainder is a kind of live grenade in an egalitarian culture. It (and its recipient) is cursed unless it can be invested in increased productive capacities or expended harmlessly. Industrial innovations have historically been quite difficult, so instead the extra is given over to some class whose “true” purpose is to expend the remainder harmlessly in mere luxury, in the creation of beautiful things, in the telling of stories that bind the community together, or in the maintenance of norms of sexual abstention and productive authority.
The problem is that most of these “useless” projects find their way to a kind of usefulness: authority guides and directs labor efficiency; communities bound by solidarity better weather crisis and better plan for the future; beauty can motivate and inspire. The useless has a dangerous tendency to become useful, and even necessary.
The General Economy as Economic Existentialism
Bataille’s general economy is like a kind of metaphysical macroeconomics: it includes not just the financial economy but tries to be an economics of energy, time, attention, and lives itself. It’s supposed to capture the way that economic thinking can be applied to ecology and physics and art and pornography.
Perhaps this goes beyond mere accuracy, but there’s something temptingly provocative about his great insight that there is a convincing way to turn our protestations and anxieties of finitude and lack into realizable superabundance and excess. For Bataille himself, this was a reason to reject the instrumental attitude almost completely. He sees human reason and culture as servile to a base pragmatism that fails to take seriously the teleological issues with our efforts to perpetuate endless growth.
By focusing his “general economy” account on excesses instead of limits, Bataille flips the script of ordinary economics. The focus on “scarce resources” and “opportunity costs” tends to emphasize the idea that economics is about not having enough to go around: surpluses and profits then become a fortunate break from the unfortunate status quo. And yet a moment’s reflection shows that any stable economy has “enough” to sustain its current distribution. Certainly some people have better or worse lives, some people die later and others earlier. Infant mortality has been 50% in some places or 2% in others, but everyone dies eventually. It’s the patterns that matter, that mean something: it’s the patterns that make meanings. (And economics itself has tried to capture this insight with its work on signaling theory.)
Absent supply shocks an economy can plod along doing what it does in equilibrium, but the negative shocks (famine, plague, war, revolution) aren’t the only sort of shocks that should concern us. In fact, the positive shocks of population growth, the industrial revolution, the green agricultural revolution, and the digital revolution have shown themselves to be even more disruptive. When fewer workers can produce more stuff–but not yet enough to distribute it equally–what are we to do with the extra?
Often there’s something vaguely eroticized or pointedly orgiastic about efforts to expend the accursed share, Bataille argues, because the natural “primitive” response to plenitude is to have more babies. But societies usually learn that this kind of response to excess is not a good idea: when the accursed share is gone, there will be more people to feed and not enough to do it. Thus, eroticism–and indeed fetishes and perversions–are a “safer” alternative, culturally. Yet for cultures that are built on sexual propriety, this safety is also unsettling.
The Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution are supposed to have led to our downfall: the combination of normative thrift, sexual repression, and massively increased productivity created a massive and growing accursed share. In Bataille’s time it seemed that the most likely outcome of all that postponed saving and investment would be a final, self-destructive nuclear war! Bataille thus prescribed perversion and indolence as an alternative, which is why he was able to write provocative and gripping political economic theory as well as surreal fetishistic pornography. (Or perhaps because he felt driven to write both he found ways to meld them.)
I don’t see Bataille’s main value in his role as a romantic defender of uselessness, though he does help illustrate some of the consequences of that view. Instead, I find the concept of the accursed share most apt when we talk about wealthy societies that somehow, still, face budget crises or allocation problems. It’s never that there’s not enough: we’re well past “enough,” nor is “more” often the solution. We’re usually fighting over the particular patterns of excess and deficiency we’d like our society to embrace, and the fight itself is always one of those luxuries. So when we talk about wealth and inequality, I think it behooves us to keep the “accursed share” in the back of our minds.
On certain days of the year I return to readings of civic importance that suit that day. It’s a political parallel to the liturgical calendar, I suppose. So on Independence Day (July 4) I read the Declaration of Independence; on MLK Day (third Monday of January) I read one of his speeches; on Constitution Day (Sept 17) I read the Bill of Rights; and so on. Most of this is a habit that’s in my head, but I’ve decided to put together a calendar I can share with others, and I’d be glad to have your suggestions for what to add. My informal rules: (1) It should be short enough to read in a few minutes. (2) It should be a significant document that ought to be read by everyone at some point. (3) It should remind us of an important idea or event that is a legal or ethical or cultural landmark that has shaped our nation, and that should help us find our bearings when we lose sight of them.
If you have suggestions, I’d like to hear them. Don’t be bound by my rules, or by my nation and traditions. What would you include? What would you gladly read aloud with your neighbors each year on a certain date? Please include the date you’d set for the reading, and tell me why that date matters.
This is an obvious nod to the liturgical tradition in which a year’s worth of sacred texts and meditations are laid out for repeated reflection, with themes that build towards a traditions’ major holidays.
I have something like this practice, and indeed I think of Facebook as trying to establish personal liturgies through its continual reminder of photos and events from each day in past years. So here are some thoughts:
New Year’s Day (January 1st): I like to read and reflect on habit-formation at the beginning of the year, rather than jump into making resolutions. For instance, William James’ “Habit” from The Principles of Psychology.
Martin Luther King Day (Third Monday in January): Usually “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” though sometimes his last speech or his “Where do we go from here?” speech.
President’s Day (Third Monday in February): I don’t really celebrate this holiday, though for a while I liked to read the Farewell Address. It’d be a good day to read selected Federalist Papers (I’m a fan of #9 and #10.)
Holocaust Remembrance Day (Late April or early May. In 2017, it’s April 24th): Personally I think this is a good day to read Maus.
Early September (Often around September 11th): W. H. Auden’s “September 1st, 1939.”
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages
(I imagine the ironic points of light are muzzle flashes or bomb explosions exchanged by the putatively Just. The “irony” is that their violence is almost always unjust.)
Constitution Day (September 17th): This is the day to read as much of the constitution, including the Bill of Rights, as you can. But it’s also a good day to read Juan Linz’s “The Perils of Presidentialism.”
Election Season (Technically October and November, every two years. But when is it not election season?): The text that always inspires me during this period is Bruce Ackerman’s “The New Separation of Powers.” But that’s highly idiosyncratic.
Election Day (the first Tuesday after November 1st): Of course most of us spend this day reading exit polls. But perhaps it would be better to read the chapter in Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy on “Socialism and Democracy.” And perhaps Amartya Sen’s “Democracy as a Universal Human Value” would be even more appropriate.
Thanksgiving (Late November): In the US we have dual duties on this day: to remember our massacre and colonization of the indigenous peoples, and to practice gratitude with friends and family. So I propose: Robert Frost’s The Gift Outright and Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Apologetic History of the Indies. (I often post The Oatmeal’s comic on Las Casas to social media for a similar purpose.)
Christmas (December 25th): Like it or not, the US treats Christmas as a secular public holiday. And that means that everyone should watch It’s a Wonderful Life.
There are also irregular events that become opportunities for a civic liturgy. Like birth, marriage, and death, they don’t happen on a regular schedule but they deserve recognition in a civic liturgy.
This is far from a complete list. But I think the idea of a civic liturgy is an important one, and I’d like to see more work done filling in the calendar. A liturgy creates a shared set of texts, a shared opportunity for reflection, and perhaps even the preconditions for shared values. Join me, and David, won’t you?
(I’m going to keep coming back and updating this as I get new suggestions.)
Bosnick seems to think that his home state should get all the refugees, too. There are five million Syrian refugees fleeing the civil war there, and the United States already has far fewer of them than we deserve.
In the sciences, co-authorship is normal. In the humanities, it is uncommon. In philosophy, it is almost non-existent. (
That’s still a lot of people, of course, but we currently incarcerate roughly seven times the global average of our population, without having seven times the crime. Our violent crime rate is on par with or even much lower than countries like the UK–though it’s true that our gun ownership rates make our assaults more often fatal murders–but we incarcerate many, many more people. So I propose we should start by aiming to shrink our prison population by 6/7s. This is an odd fraction, but it just represents the over-incarceration rate in the US compared to the rest of the world. It’s also deliberately a bit inexact: many countries have fewer than 100 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants. Perhaps the US could achieve the lower, more civilized rates of incarceration found in Finland and Norway, over time, but in any case, 6/7s abolition strikes me as a good place to start.
