Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Social Reality

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

What are Human Rights?

posted by Ken Taylor

Our question this week is  “What are human rights?” The American declaration of independence offers a compelling answer to that question so its the first place one might think to look of for a characterization of human rights.  It says in what I personally find stirring language that  “All men are created equal … they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

 The Declaration is rooted in the Enlightenment idea that every human being enjoys, just in virtue of being a human being, certain fundamental rights.  Of course, not every enlightenment thinker thought that rights were ‘god given,” as Jefferson seems to suggest.   That, however, raises the question that if fundamental rights are not god-given, where exactly do rights come from.  One could, I suppose think that rights are just “natural”  and intrinsic to what it is to be a human being.  Locke seems to have thought something like that.    No doubt during the episode we will explore alternative views about where rights come from and in virtue of what human enjoy various rights.  But I won’t try to get into that very much here.

 I should say  that not everything that is represented as a right, even a universal right could plausibly thought to be a “natural”  right, whatever exactly those are.   For example, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights  says that “the right to rest and leisure,  including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay” is a universal human right.   Paid holidays are certainly a good thing.  But it is at best debatable that the right to paid holidays is in, any plausible sense,  “universal.”  And it seems plainly false to say that such a right is somehow a natural or intrinsic right. 

 I don’t mean to be suggesting that employers have the right to work their employees to the bone, until they drop from exhaustion.  I’m just saying that we need to distinguish fundamental or intrinsic rights from socially or politically created rights.  Workers don’t have an intrinsic right to paid holidays.  But where certain laws and/or collective bargaining agreements are in place, they do have the right.

It can be a little bit tricky to draw the line between intrinsic rights and socially or politically constituted rights.   One’s first thought might that  intrinsic  or basic rights are rights that we enjoy independently of any laws, agreements or conventions.   Socially or politically created rights depend entirely on laws, agreements or conventions.    

 One problem with this attempt at line drawing,  however, is that  until people get together and empower duly appointed bodies to make laws prohibiting murder or slavery, it’s not even clear what it  would  even mean to say that people have a right to life or a right to liberty.   One wants to say, of course,  that even in an imagined “state of nature”  in which there is not yet a political or social order, it would be plain wrong for anybody or anything to deprive another of liberty or life.  There doesn’t need to be a system of laws or courts or even a system of social sanctions  in order for the deprivation of liberty of life to count as wrong.   Or so one might think. 

Perhaps.  But suppose that there were no society and no force of law to back up such claims about rights.   In such a situation if  someone had the power and desire to enslave you or kill you then they might just do so.  You could scream in foot-stomping protest, but without the backing of law and society and government, your protest would amount to no more than impotent screaming.    At a bare minimum,   without the backing of the state or at least civil society,  talk of rights may be ineffectual, even if not exactly meaningless.   Of course,  that is precisely the reason why Jefferson listed not just life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as fundament rights, but also the right to institute governments to secure such rights and even the right to rebel --  to alter or abolish governments that fail to secure fundamental rights.

But let’s  come at rights from a different angle for a second.  Consider two societies with two different sets of laws.  In one society, the law grants women full autonomy over their own bodies.  In the other, the law treats women as the sexual property of men.   Many of us will have the intuition that the second society has violated the fundamental human rights of its female citizens.  And in good Jeffersonian fashion we may conclude that any government that permits such violations ought to be “altered or abolished.”

But suppose that citizens of the relevant society by and large endorse the relevant laws and practices.  We can imagine that the men do so out of a crude kind of self-interest which they believe to be enhanced by the subjugation of women.  And we can imagine that the women either the lack either the power to change things or the will to change things – perhaps because of the cumulative effect of decades or centuries of  subjugation on their self conception.   What do we do when faced with what strikes us as such an obvious violation of human rights and human dignity?   Do we, as outsiders,  have the right to seek to alter or abolish the social system and/or oppressive government in the name of  protecting fundamental human rights and human dignity?   Or would an outsider’s attempt to alter the government of another society amount to cultural imperialism?

This, I think,  is a delicate question.  It’s one we intend to put to Helen Stacy, this week’s guest.  Helen is the author of Human Rights for the 21^st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture.  No doubt, she will have a lot to say about the complicated interaction of our conception of universal or fundamental human rights, and cultural diversity.   

The Post-Modern Family Values: Open Blog Entry

posted by Ken Taylor

It's pledge week on KALW, our host station.  And we're doing a live pledge show that will only be heard on that station and not on our affiliates  around the country.  But if you'd like to tune it, you can do so at 10am PST time, on KALW's Website  where the show is streamed live.   Join the conversation.   Of course, even if you can't hear a broadcast version of the show,  we will eventually put the streaming version up on our own  website, from which you can also purchase an downloadable version.

A couple of weeks ago, I started an open blog entry on pornography, so I thought I'd do the same for the Post-Modern Family.  Our guest today will be sociologist, Michael Rosenfeld, author of a The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions and the Changing American Family.   I've only read a bit of it,  but what I have read is fascinating.   He argues that increase in  same sex and interracial unions in America is due largely to the occurrence of a relatively new "life-stage"  -- the age of independence, he calls it -- during which young adults are single, co-mingled with one another in colleges, universities, and the work-force,  and, most importantly,  mostly free of their parents.   That's because more and more people go off to college in young adulthood, and go into the workforce at an age when earlier generations of their age cohort were living with or near their parents.  That gave earlier generations of parents more influence over their offsprings mate choices.   But that's been lost with the gradual rise of the age of independence as a distinctive life stage.    

As a sociological, demographic thesis this strikes me as extremely plausible and I doubt either John or I will challenge  Michael on that score.  But my question is what does this mean about the role of the family in society.   One used to think of a family as one of the primary means of transmitting values from generation to generation.   One might have thought, in fact, that that is one of the primary things that family is for.  Of course, it has other functions -- providing for its members daily material and psychological needs prime among them.   It also inculcates a system of binding ties between the old and the young such that the old care for the young in their age of dependency in such a way that the young feel permanently bound to the old and out of love and affection, more than mere "duty"  return the favor when the old are very old.    Families also traditionally provided central ingredients of our self-narratives -- the narratives in the telling of which we constitute ourselves thick identities, as particular people, with particular life stories. 

But can a family structure  which so radically weakens the normative ties between generations really do that identity constituting, value transmitting,  generation binding work? 

That's one of the questions I'd like to discuss with MIchael on the air.  

We'd love to have your input.    Leave a comment on this blog or call in or send us an e-mail.  

gotta run.

Philosophy Talk and the Ignorant NEH Panelist: A Rant!

posted by Ken Taylor

I don't usually rant.   I fancy myself a calm deliberate guy.   Not only do I play a dispassionate voice of reason on the radio,  I really do try to be a dispassionate voice of reason in my every day life.   I don't always succeed mind you.  But at least my heart's in the right place. 

But I've got to get something off my chest.  And what better place to do that than on a blog.  I wish I could do it anonymously, like so many do.  But I don't think that would work here.   So what's my beef?

It has to do with Philosophy Talk and the National Endowment for the Humanities.   In general,  i don't have a big problem with the NEH.  Actually,  I kind of like at least the idea of the NEH.   They've funded many worthwhile endeavors -- some of which have materially affected my own research. 

But I do have a bone to pick with them -- a bone I'd like to share with everybody who wishes Philosophy Talk well. We've applied to them five different times for various grants.  And five different times we've been turned down.  This time around, we were turned down -- rejected, refused, denied  (take your pick) -- for an America's Media Makers production grant.   The grant would have given us funds to produce a special 12 part series on the Philosophical Foundations of American Democracy.   

It would have been a fun series.   We would have done each  episode in front of a live audience at various venues around the country in Town Hall Format.  Sort of a Philosophy Talk takes Democracy on the road, kind of thing. 

The 12 episodes in the series would have covered a range of Philosophical topics designed to provide the American public with a deeper understanding of the problem and prospects of Democracy in the 21st Century.  Shows  would have been clustered around four broad themes.  

One theme was called American Political Philosophies.  Under this theme we proposed to do episodes on:  (a) Rawls, Justice, and Equal Opportunity:  (b)  Communitarianism;  (c)  Libertarianism and (d)  Neo-Conservativism & The Chicago School.   

Another theme  concerned Pluralism and its Challenges and included episodes on the struggle to rewrite the narrative of American history and contemporary challenges raised by Multiculturalism.   

A third theme would have concerned the idea of an educated and informed democratic citizenry and how to achieve it.   We intended to discuss the struggle over creation and evolution, and the role of the state in determining the content of an education more generally. The fourth theme was called something like "Our Brother's Keepers?  Individual rights and Public Responsibility."   We would have talked about a variety of things including whether money is speech, whether corporations are really persons,  what sorts of rights and responsibilities corporations have  to promote the social good.  We would also have done an episode on  religious freedom, religious conflict and  religious tolerance and the role of the state vs civil society in mediating these.  

Stuff like that.  Stuff that's at the core of trying to make democracy work in the 21st century. You could think this wouldn't make great radio.   You could also think that  even if it would make great radio, there isn't any audience for it.  You could even think that somehow the Philosophy Talk team was inadequate to the task.  

But it's hard to imagine being told that these topics were  "strange"  and "confused"  But get this.  That's just what one of the evaluators for the NEH did say.  I kid you not.  Here's a direct quote: 

The intellectual content of this proposal is strange. The philosophical foundations of American democracy are to be found in the philosophers that influenced the founding fathers as they created the Constitution. The foundations are not to be found in John Rawls and the Chicago Schoo. You could probably solve this problem by giving the project a new title, something like "philosophical ideas that influence American culture."

It is not clear what writing American history and multiculturalism have to do with philosophy--at least fundamental philosophy.

American education doesn't seem to be a philosophical question, although the founding fathers excepted an educated and informed citizenry. This seems to be a special question, rather than a foundational question.

Individual rights and public responsibility is an interesting question to which philosophers may have much to contribute, but it's not clear how this is the foundation of democracy.

It seems to me that the topics to be considered are rather traditional philosophical topics and it may be much more important to understand (even in philosophical terms) the processes that actually move and shake the country. It might be more important to deal with "the predator state" than with democracy, the public good, or education.

Let's just call this panelist, Panelist #4 -- cause that's how he/she is referred to in the materials we got back from the NEH explaining why our proposal was not fit to fund.   (Frankly, evaluator # 4 if you read this blog,  I wish you'd have courage enough to try and defend this dribble in a public forum.)  

Now I can accept rejection.  Believe me in both the businesses I am in -- radio and Academia -- one gets used to rejection and develops a thick skin pretty quickly.  If you don't, you just  go crazy.  So rejection is not the point.   I can deal with rejection.  Really!  I can!

But what I find  unfathomable is that anybody so ignorant could possibly be allowed to evaluate proposals of any kind for  the NEH.  Evaluator number 4 writes as if  philosophical thinking about the justification of the democratic political state began and ended in the 16th and 17th centuries, that nothing said or done since then adds to our understanding of the foundations of democracy, as if the founding fathers delivered to us our current democratic polity, and its complete philosophical justification, whole cloth.

I certainly wish Evaluator #4 would tell that to the hundreds or thousands of  scholars currently writing books and articles about the foundations of democracy.  He/she should tell them that it was all already said by Locke and Montesquieu. They should just stop wasting paper and killing trees. 

Just to carry on with the rant a tiny little bit more.   Again,  you might think the topics uninteresting, but to say that  "writing American history and multiculturalism"  have nothing to do with philosophy or the foundations of democracy is, well, extraordinarily ignorant again.     Not just we Americans, but peoples around the world, are faced with burning questions about whether and how there can be a shared democratic polity among people who are more or less divided and at odds with one another.   The question is one about what Philosophers like to call  "reasonable pluralism."  To be sure, the problem of developing a philosophical defense of a reasonable pluralism is indeed a problem with which our Founding Fathers, in their great but incomplete wisdom,  were hardly seized.  In their world   many, many voices were silenced, oppressed, etc.   But of course  the 20th century was massively seized with the problem of achieving a reasonable pluralism.  And no doubt the 21st century will also be.  Frankly,  it's hard for me to see what could be a more urgent topic of discussion for a radio program that purports to bring the resources of philosophy to greater public attention.

I'm  almost done with my rant. I swear. Indeed, I'm feeling calmer already. But I can't let this go without standing up for John Rawls and defending him against the claim that his work has nothing to do with the Philosophical Foundations of Democracy.

But on second thought.  I don't have to do that.  A former US President already did that.  I cite no lesser authority than former President William Jefferson Clinton, who awarded Rawls the National Humanities Medal in 1999.  I quote in full below  Clinton's citation of Rawls:

THE PRESIDENT: John Rawls is perhaps the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century. In 1971, when Hillary and I were in law school, we were among the millions moved by a remarkable books he wrote, "A Theory of Justice," that placed our rights to liberty and justice upon a strong and brilliant new foundation of reason.

Almost singlehandedly, John Rawls revived the disciplines of political and ethical philosophy with his argument that a society in which the most fortunate helped the least fortunate is not only a moral society, but a logical one. Just as impressively, he has helped a whole generation of learned Americans revive their faith in democracy itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, Margaret Rawls will accept the medal on behalf of her husband. 

Take that evaluator #4,  whoever you are.

We don't have much hope of changing the NEH's mind. I'm sure that if we apply a sixth time,  we'll get turned down a sixth time.     Plus,  I suppose everyone -- even someone as  ignorant as evaluator #4 -- is entitled to his/her opinion.   But I don't have to be happy that someone  so manifestly out of his/her depth sits in judgment of proposals to the NEH.  Do I? 

If I thought it would do any good,  I'd urge all right-thinking Philosophy Talk fans everywhere to write to the  Senior Program Officer for the Public Programs division of the NEH to urge that the Evaluator #4 on proposal TR50035,  be barred, on grounds of sheer ignorance,  from ever evaluating an NEH proposal again. 

But I'm not that bitter or vindictive.   I'm really not.   And rejection doesn't bother me -- much.

UPDATE:  Somebody pointed out that I left out the parts where panelist 4 (and also another panelist) call our proposal "confused."   But that's worth quoting too. So here is panelist 4's overall conclusion: 

The discussion convinced me that the content was confused and not terribly important to understanding democracy. 

Another panelist,  who was initially more favorably disposed to our proposal ended up confused too (and lowered our score):

Still confused on the content -- what is the role on the philosophy in the program? Are we learning philosophical approaches? Or basic philosophical ideas? How philosophy can help us in the present?

I have to admit that the last one really gets me.  Is there supposed to be some conflict between learning philosophical approaches, basic philosophical ideas, and showing that philosophy can be applied to present social problems?   How else would one imagine that we might go about trying to present philosophy to a non-philosophical audience?   Seriously,  would it even be possible to do one of these things without doing the other two?   Imagine that we tried to teach philosophical approaches without teaching philosophical ideas.  How would that even work?   And suppose we taught approaches and ideas,  but didn't try to show how philosophy can help us in the present. Then who would care?   Or suppose we tried to illustrate that philosophy had application to present problems and situations,  but we never said what a philosophical idea is or didn't try to show how philosophers approach problems.

In short this statement is sophomoric babble that shows as much seriousness of thought as one might expect from a casual conversation in a bar over too many beers.   That it is presented as some sort of criticism of our proposal is just astounding, utterly astounding.   That such nonsense could be utter as part of the NEH's supposedly "rigorous"  evaluation process is, well, both infuriating and depressing.

Separation of Powers and the Charismatic Presidency

posted by Ken Taylor

I wrote this entry when our Separation of Powers episode originally aired. I'm moving it up to the top since that episode is about to air again. I welcome further discusssion. KT

Later this morning, our episode "Power out of Balance? Exploring the Separation of Powers" will air. This epsiode was recorded back in July [of 2006] on Capitol Hill in a tiny little room in the basement of the building. Though the audience was small, they were quite engaged and engaging. We were there at the invitation of Congresswoman Anna Eshoo. We are most grateful to Congresswoman Eshoo for being our sponsor and for participating in the program. Our main guest during the program was Kathleen Sullivan. Kathleen was a terrific guest. They say that if the Democrats get to make a Supreme Court appointment anytime soon, Kathleen is high on the list of potential nominees. I can see why. She is very smart, very articulate, and has really deep knowledge of constitutional law. It was a pleasure having her as our guest. I've invited her to guest blog on the topic of separation of powers. But since she is a very busy woman, who knows if she'll take up the invitation. Anyway, I hope you enjoy listening to the program.

In the remainder of this post, I'll ruminate, just a little bit, on what's become of the separation of powers in our time.

The founding fathers in their considerable wisdom took the separation of powers to be a "bulwark of liberty." Indeed, they took the concentration of power into a single agency to be the very definition of tyranny. Conversely, they apparently believed that not just the formal separation of powers among the branches of the federal government and between the federal and state governments, but also what might be called the subsantive seperation of political interests to which the formally separated branches are asnwerable, was the key to a government that was unlikely to ever devolve into tyranny. By formally dividing the powers of government among competing branches and among the several states and the federal government and by making the various branches and and levels of government answerable to society in different ways that reflect different and competing constellations of "parts, interests, and classes of citizens," Madison seemd to believe, the government would incapable of trampling the rights of the citizens. Moreover, no ad hoc constellation of citizens would be able to sieze the powers of government and deploy them against the fundamental civil liberties of the remainder of the citizenry.

It's a nice sounding story, but I think the founders vastly overestimated the degree to which the formal separation of powers, even when conjoined with a substantive separation of interests, might suffice, on its own, to guard against tyranny and to protect civil liberties. This isn't a startling new inisght, of course. Jefferson saw the limits of merely procedural safe-guards to liberty right away and rightly insisted that an enumerated Bill of Rights be added to the constitution.

The founders lacked prescience on two particular fronts that have come to define the American political scene and that jointly conspire to make the formal separation of powers far less of a bulwark against tyranny than they imagined. First, the founding fathers failed to anticipate what I'll call the charismatic nature of the Presidency. Second, they failed to anticipate the extent to which partisan loyalty would come to trump institutional loyalty within the legislature. Let's consider the second thing first. The founders seemed to believe that Congress would be extremely jealous of its perogatives and would strongly resist the encroachment of the executive upon its domain. To some extent that has been true over the course of our history but mostly, it seems, at least to my non-expert eye, that Congress mostly resists encroachment when different parties control the executive and the legislative branches. When a single party controls both the executive and the legislative, partisan loyalty seems almost always to trump institutional loyalty. The current Republican House and Senate have been almost suppine in their obedience to the will of the President.

Why should that be? The answer has, I think, to do with the charismatic nature of the presidency in a time of modern communications. I'm not talking about the personal charisma of the any particular president. Many occupants of that office, including the current occupant, seem to me to be seriously charisma challenged. Indeed, it's something of a mystery how such a charismatic office has managed to have so many charisma challenged occupants.

By calling the presidency -- the office, not the occupant -- charismatic, I'm thinking about the power of the president to set the national agenda, to command national attention. The president's formal powers aren't really all that great in comparison with Congress. But the charismatic reach of the presidency far outstrips the charismatic reach of Congess. It's not just that the president speaks with a single (if sometimes incoherent and conflicted voice), while the legislature is a cacophony of competing voices. It's also the focus of the national media on every word and gesture of the president compared to its fairly shallow and desultory focus on the Congress. And it's also the fact that we spend millions and millions on seemingly endless presidential campaigns that seem largely designed to manufacture of exploit competing personality cults rather than competing subsantive agendas for action.

If you're an obscure member of congress trying to rise to greater national prominence, it's pretty hard to compete with the charisma of the presidency merely in the name of safeguarding the perogatives of the legislature. After all, if you are a member of the president's party you probably want most of what the president wants. So why insists on the perogatives of the legislature?

On the other hand, if your a member of the opposition party -- whether in the minority or the majority -- you do have some rationale, often considerable rationale --- for resisting. But not really because you are jealous as such of the perogatives of your branch. It's rather because you have allegiance to the competing party. Still when we have divided government, we get at least the shadow of what the Founders were after, because then we have not just the formal separation of powers but also the substantive diversion of interests that is nicely aligned with the formal separation of powers.

Of course, I haven't touched on the subject of the Supreme Court. But Kathleen Sullivan has a great deal to say about the court and its role in maintaining a balance between the executive and the legislative branches. I won't try to summarize what she has to say here. Instead, I'll urge you to check out the show -- which is about to begin right now.

I'm going to tune in via KALW's website. You could do the same.

Political Correctness and the Speech Fashion War

posted by Ken Taylor

It's been awhile since I've done this -- awakened at a god-awful hour on Sunday morning, to write a blog about an upcoming show. I hope I'm lucid.

Today's show is about the political correctness. Our guest is Leonard Steinhorn, author of a rousing defense of the baby boom generation, to which I proudly belong, called The Greater Generation. According to Steinhorn, we baby boomers were the leading edge of a great sea change for the better in America. Our age cohort almost single-handedly ended racism, sexism, and homophobia. We brought down corrupt and mendacious presidents. We ended a pointless and forlorn war. By elevating the sanctity and fragility of the environment to national consciousness, we brought to heel a kind of anything goes capitalism that saw our lakes and streams and air as just more commodities to be used up and discarded. We took the university by storm, first as students and then as faculty, helping to make them more than perpetuators of narrow privilege. We took the conformist, hierarchical and oppressive America bequeathed to us by our so-called greatest-generation forebears and shook it up root and branch and in the process gradually remade it into a more caring, progressive, egalitarian society.

Assuming that we boomers really do deserve all this praise, it's still fair to wonder what any of this has to do with political correctness. Well, I think it actually has a fair bit to do with at least the fate of the term 'politically correct' especially with the claiming, reclaiming and disclaiming of that somewhat odd phrase.

I say that the phrase 'politically correct' is an odd one because I don't think I've ever heard anyone use that phrase in a straight-forward and sincere manner. In my experience, people on the left tend to use the phrase mostly in a sort of self-mocking, tongue and cheek way, while people on the right tend to utter the phrase only in a sort of defiantly dismissive tone.

That's not to say that there aren't serious issues behind all this. One of them has to do with the both the decreasing prevalence of things like overt racism, sexism and homophobia. I'm not at all sure, to say the least, that sexism, racism and homophobia have really been decisively defeated in America. Steinhorn takes pains, though, to remind us just how sexist, racist and homophobic post WW II America really was. He is surely right that the world we live in today is nothing like that America. Thank god.

Still, though there are still people who hold views that those on the left might want to characterizes as racist, sexist, or homophobic a striking thing started happening sometimes in the mid-sixties. At some point it became highly unfashionable, at least in the circles in which I travel, to publicly express views that could be considered even mildly racist, sexist, or homophobic. And I don't think that's just a reflection of the narrowness of the circles in which I travel. What I find striking about this is that I believe that the pace of change in the fashionably expressible vastly outstripped the pace of substantive social change on the ground. The result was that many people probably found that they could not fashionably say what they actually thought, for fear of being labeled racist, sexist, or homophobic.

Let's distinguish two things here: (a) being racist, sexist, or homophobic; (b) being labeled racist, sexist, or homophobic. I take it that you can be labeled racist either correctly or incorrectly. But I also take it that you can fail to be labeled racist even though you are one.

Now if it's unfashionable to express certain views and if the cost of expressing such views is that you get labeled a racist, then if people care enough about what they are labeled, several things can happen. First, many racists may retain their racist views, but fail to express them, because they disvalue being labeled racists, even though they value being racists (and may even value expressing their views, but not enough to incur the cost of being labeled racist.) Second, some non-racists may fail to express their views because of the disvalue of being wrongly labeled racists. Third, some people who believe themselves not to be racists and who value the expressing their views, will pay the cost of being labeled racists, but will resent those who do the labeling.

If the left thought that victory in what we might call the speech fashion war really meant a substantive victory on the ground, then the left may have made a significant miscalculation. Making it unfashionable to say certain things -- which, for awhile at least, the left really did seem to have done -- doesn't ipso facto make it unfashionable to believe those things. I take that to be a pretty obvious point. But the thought may have been that by driving certain views, as it were, underground, you make it impossible to for the views to be publicly defended. And one might think that views that can't be publicly defended will ultimately wither away.

I'm not so sure. What can't be fashionably defended because it can't fashionably be said, can still be believed, and believed with great conviction and confidence. Rendering such views costly to express does not ipso facto render them costly to hold. Moreover, when a view held by many can't be fashionably expressed, one can't, I would think, really know whether the arguments on public offer that purport to refute the unexpressed views are actually being taken up and acknowledged by those who hold the underground beliefs. That is to say, the fashionable arguments on offer that parade as victorious may be enjoying an illusion of victory rather than the real thing.

I suspect that for at least some period in recent history, many people believed things that they thought couldn't fashionably be said. And I think some, especially on the left, may have once mistaken victory in, as it were, the speech fashion war for substantive victory on the ground. I think it no longer possible to make this mistake. Partly because the views that once looked to have been driven underground are now refusing to stay underground. That's part of an anti-political correctness backlash. But that, I think, is all to the good. What arguably lay behind the strategy of trying to eliminate certain attitudes by rendering the expression of those attitudes unfashionable was a quasi-whorfian hypothesis that that what can't be said can't be believed. But the whorfian hypothesis is false. And the strategy based on it only appeared to win the day.

There is much more to say. And certainly it could be said more clearly. But my juices are flowing at least. And I'm sure that after I'm exposed to John Perry and Leonard Steinhorn's arguments, I'll have completely changed my perspective.

What's on you Summer Reading list?

posted by Ken Taylor

On today's show, we'll be talking about books. The sun is out, the surf is up, and it's time to take to the beach, with a few good philosophical books in hand. We did a similar episode last year and it was fun. So we thought as the summer of 2007 approaches, we'd try it again.

OUr guest will be Danielle Marshall from Powell's City of Books in Portland Oregon. You may or may not have noticed that Powell's is now an official sponsor of Philosophy Talk. We're really pleased about this and are looking forward to along and fruitful partnership with Powells.

By the way, if you are in the Portland area, come and check us out week after next. We're going to be doing two events of there. On Wednesday evening, June 20th at 7:30, we'll being doing a live taping of the show at Powell's downtown store. Our guest will be the poet and philosopher Troy Jollimore, whose first book of poetry, Tom Thompson in Purgatory just won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. More details about that event are here.

The following evening, we'll be doing our show LIVE from the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting, Thursday evening at 8pm. This will give our Oregon area listeners a chance to interact with us live, rather than getting their usual re-broadcast version of the show. Our two guests for that epsiode will be Tom Cohart and Daniel Klein, authors of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Humor. Be sure to tune in and call-up, Oregon!

I have to admit to have slightly subversive intentions with regard to OPB. I very much want them to move us to Sunday's at 10am, so we can be live all over Oregon. They aren't likely to do it, but maybe by coming up and doing the show live just once, that can create a bottom-up groundswell of demand for more live episodes of Philosophy Talk.

In any case, do come and check us out at Powell's on Wednesday the 20th and tune in and call up to our live OPB broadcast on Thursday the 21st.

But back to our summer reading list.

Now I have to admit that most of my own summer reading, will not be reading for pure philosophcal pleasure. That's because I really MUST finish a book I've been working on for several years now that is WAY past due and get started on the next one, about which I have been thinking, speaking and teaching but not writing for the past several years. So most of my reading wil be directly related to those two tasks.

Still, I have thoughts both about what I would like to read myself this summer, if I were to be able to for pure philosophical pleasure and about what I might recommend to others to read who were looking for interesting philosophical reads.

Here are few things that I find intriguing. In some cases, I've actually begun the books. In other cases, I merely hope to some day relatively soon.

Two important philosophers, well worth reading, both of whom sometimes wrote for a wider audience, died recently. Richard Rorty and Robert Solomon. Rorty died just Friday morning. Solomon died a few months ago.

Solomon was a guest on Philosophy Talk awhile back talking about happines. We tried to get him on again, to talk about love or the emotions or existentialism. But schedules never clicked. Bob was a lucid and passionate writer. You should read something by him. He wrote many fine books, but one I like a lot is his book, About Love: Reinventing Romance for our Time.

Many regard Rorty as one the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. Though not many analtyic philosophers regard him that way, many non-philosophers do. I think the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Rorty was probably over-appreciated by non-philosophers and underappreciated by many philosophers. If you haven't read Rorty or haven't read him recently, you should pick up one of has many books or collections of essays. I just picked up two of them the other day. A collection he published back in 1999 called Philosophy and Social Hope which is, I think, his first collection of essays aimed at a "popular" audience and a more recent collection called Philosophy as Cultural Politics. This last one was published just this year, and is represented as the 4th volume of his philosophical papers. Perhaps the final thing that Rorty wrote, or really co-wrote , is What's the use of Truth? This very short book, which I haven't looked at yet, seems to be an exchange between the French analytic philosopher Pascal Engel and Rorty.

If you want to read a reasonably accessible book by an outstandingly good philosopher attacking Rorty's views on truth, see Paul Boghossian's book Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism

I've just looked up at the clock. Unfortunately, I really need to run. I've got to get to the studio. I've got lots more suggestions. I'll just type a few quickly without providing a lot of links. I'm about three chapters into The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It's an intriquing idea, and there's lots of insight there. But the style of the book is a little frustrating. Seems like a book that will be much talked about for awhile.

I'm a good way into Barack Obama's Tale's of my Father -- a really fascinating read about the constituting of a self, espeically a racial self. Obama is a very fine writer and a much more thoughtful than your average politician lets himself appear to be. You could read this book and then read Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity and/or Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and you would have had a great exploration of the dynamics of identity constitution from many different angles in many different voices.

Another a-typical politician that has something deeply philosophical to say is Al Gore. I've just picked up his book The Assault on Reason. I'm not that far into it yet. I've just skimmed a couple of chapters. But it seems to be written with passion and courage and clarity at first glance. I read a column of David Brooks criticizing Al Gore as some weird alien creature. But seems to me, we need more people like him in American poltics.

I also started Doug Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop. This looks like a typical Hofstadter book -- well written and witty, full of insight, but also not likely to satisfy the professional philosopher in me. Of course, that's not quite what he's trying to do with this book about the nature of the self. (Although he does say that he views this book as a "return" to philosophy on his part and he wants it to be convincing to professional philosophers of mind like me. We'll see. I'm only a few chapters into it and I'm reserving judgment.

If you want to read a more philosophically demanding book about the self, read The Situated Self by Jenann Ismael. Brilliant stuff -- it will be harder going than Hofstadter, admittedly, but it will be well worth the effort.

Anyway, I gotta go. Talk to you soon. Between you, Danielle, John and me, I'm sure we can come up with a dynamite summer reading list for the philosophically inclined.

Democracy and the Judiciary

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's episode is about the Judiciary and Democracy.  Our guest will be Larry Kramer,  Dean of the Stanford Law School.   We're really looking forward to having Larry as our guest.   Larry has been an agent of change since coming to Stanford.   It used to be that the law school barely cooperated with the rest of the University.  But under Larry's able leadership many good partnerships are being formed between Law and other arms of the university.  For example,  there are  now joint PhD-JD programs in a number of areas in the university,  including a joint Phd-JD in philosophy.   So all you inspiring Philosopher-Lawyer Kings out there put Stanford on your list of possible places to pursue your dreams.

Anyway,  on to the subject of today's show.   In one way,  it seems obvious that the  court system -- especially   judicial review of the acts of the legislative and executive branches of government -- is, in one way,   a bulwark of our constitutional democracy.   That was a point made clearly and forcefully by a past Dean of the Stanford Law School,  Kathleen Sullivan,  who was our guest on Capitol Hill when we did a show on Separation of Powers.   The court protects  certain minority rights from being trampled by the majority, protects the basic liberty and participatory rights of all,  and checks the excesses of the other branches of government.   That's all well and good and crucial for democratic self-grovernance.

So what's the issue about the courts at all?   Well, surely one issue is that the main means by which we the people can hold our government accountable is through the electoral process.  But judges, by and large,  do not serve at the pleasure of the people  I am not advocating that they should.  Indeed,  I despise judicial elections.   Here in California we have judicial elections for certain judges.  They are usually low key.   You hardly ever see the judges out actively campaigning for office.  Instead on our massive electoral guide,  you get their written statements.   And unless they've somehow been in the news for some other reason,  that's about all you learn about them. Still,  I almost always find their candidate statements repulsive, simple minded things,  designed to pander rather than to inform.    Elected judges become  pandering politician,  even if on a smaller scale.    So I prefer to see judges appointed rather than elected. Unelected is more likely to mean independent, especially where appointments are a joint responsibility and come with lifetime tenure.   

So what's the real problem?  Well, the  decisions of the Courts, especially the Supreme Court, have  had far reaching and often wrenching social consequence in recent and not so recent years.  Over the course of the last fifty years or so,  the Supreme Court has played a major role in the transformation of our social life.   With the stroke of a pen,  it struck down segregation in the schools,  placed severe limits on the regulation of abortion,  greatly altered the way police do their business, severely constrained  the extent to which affirmative action could be used to bring about a more inclusive society -- and on, and on, and on.   Whether you think these decisions were well-decided, from a legal constitutional perspective or not,  you have to admit that they were enormously consequential.  And the consequences were not all good.   

Indeed,  I submit that the courts are to some large measure responsible for the fractious and divided nature of our politics over the last 50 years.     That's because many on the losing side of some of the court's decisions  felt as though their opponents had won through the court system what they had no chance of winning through the political system.   And the losers organized themselves to try to seize the political process to gain back what they thought that had illegitimately loss.

Now I'm not saying  that the court was therefore always wrong to decide as it did or that the losers are right  to try to use the political process to undo what the court did by judicial fiat.   I'm just saying that when the court  is believed by many to have "usurped" the political process on behalf of a set of sectarian interests,   social and political turmoil is all but inevitable.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing.  As I say in this piece,  stability in the service of reaction   is no virtue,  instability in the service of progress  is no vice.   

Still,  I think there is something to the thought  that what the political process CAN decide, it really SHOULD  be left to decide, at least ceteris paribus.   Take the abortion issue.   It seems to me that if the question of abortion had been left entirely to the political process, we would by now have had a long settled and  reasonable compromise.   There would be some restrictions on abortion; these would vary from state to state, but it seems hardly likely that abortion would be flat-out illegal in all circumstances anywhere.    The compromise might not represent an equilibrium point.  We would probably find a certain ebb and flow in the restrictions that states place on abortion as social attitudes and mores evolve.   But what would be missing,  I think, is the current level of intensity and anger that certain parties currently bring to this issue. 

Again,  I'm not suggesting that the  threat of instability is always sufficient reason for the court to forbear deciding an issue.   Sometimes the court needs to, as it were, shake the society up and to serve as the leading edge of social progress.     But I don't think it can be denied that when it does so,  it may have massively destabilizing effects on the political system.   And those destabilizing effects may severely threaten the social progress the court aims to bring about.   No other institution has such a unique combination of powers  to, on the one hand,  effect, for good or ill, the political  process, but, on the other hand, to stand outside the political process, almost entirely unaccountable to the people at large.

Perhaps I'm wrog, but this strikes me as something of a paradox.    What do you think?  Have I missed something?

Legislating Values: A Reprise

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show is about Legislating Values.   Our guest is Congresswoman Anna Eshoo.   The episode was taped in front of  a live audience, at an event we called Backstage Live with Philosophy Talk.   It was a lot of fun.  I love doing the show in front of an audience.  The post below the fold is a repeat of the post I wrote back in April in advance of a Capitol Hill symposium on the topic of Legislating Values in which I was a participant.  Since we've got many new listeners and readers and since it's pertinent to today's show and since I'm lazy, I thought I'd bring it back up to the top of the blog.   I think I still believe everything I wrote back then.  But hey, this is a blog, anyway,  so it's alright to trot out less than fully developed ideas anyway. Right?

By the way, speaking of Capitol Hill,  the whole crew will be back in DC, probably in April, to do an actual  episode of Philosophy Talk from Capitol Hill, again in front of a live audience.   We're going to DC at the invitation of the Congresswoman, who liked the show so much that she insisted that we come and put a show on up on the Hill.  We're really honored to accept the invitation.

Speaking of taking the show on the road, before we go to  DC , we  head  up to Portland, where we'll do two shows.  The first one will be at the American Philosophical Association meeting, in front of an audience of our fellow professional philosophers.   Our guests will be  Brian Weatherson, Liz Harman, and, probably, some yet to be named third person.   The topic will be "The Future of Philosophy."  Come check us out if you're in Portland for the Pacific APA.  There will be food, drink, philosophy and radio.  We're hoping we can turn a room full of professional philosophers into accessible and engaging radio.   Wish us luck!

The second Portland episode will be produced at  the studios of Oregon Public Broadcasting, in front of an audience of their members.  It's highly probable that that episode will be produced for television, as well -- in the mode of Imus in the Morning on MSNBC or, heaven forbid,  Howard Stern. It should be fun.

Anyway, on to Legislating Values.

I've been invited to participate in a symposium on Capitol Hill on "Legislating Values: Setting Priorities for the 109 Congress."    The event is co-sponsored by Stanford University and the Economist Magazine.  The small audience of no more than 75 will consists primarily of Capitol Hill staffers, think tank types, some journalists, and some Stanford Alums.   It's a really short deal -- one hour.  So far,  my fellow panelists are Senator Joe Lieberman and Adrian Wooldrige of the Economist  Magazine, author of Right Nation. The organizers still hope to enlist the participation of a Republican member of either the House or the Senate.  So far, they've had no luck. [Update:  Senator Jeff Sessions has agreed to participate.]  It should be fun.   In a call with the organizers the other day,  I was asked the following question.  "Suppose you had the ear of a US Senator for an hour,  what would you want to tell him or her about legislating values?"   I thought I'd reflect just a little on that in this post.

My role in this symposium is not to be a policy advocate.   I certainly have my views and won't shy away from expressing them.  But I was asked to provide a more philosophical perspective by the organizers.  Since I'm neither a political philosopher nor an ethicist by trade,  I'm not sure exactly what they have in mind in inviting me.   I do sometimes play  a political philosopher and/or ethicist on the radio. Plus  if you scratch any philosopher just a little, you'll find the blood of a would-be Philosopher King coursing profusely through his/her veins.  I'm no exception.   So whatever they had in mind, I'm glad to oblige.

In the conference call mentioned above,  I was told that the issues that might be addressed included stem cell research,  the recent "values oriented"  presidential campaign,  Social Security, health care legislation, and national security issues.   Quite a list for a one hour symposium!  I was also warned that given the way that discussions on Capitol Hill sometimes go, some breaking news event could dominate the symposium and any well thought-out prepared remarks I wanted to make might simply have to be thrown out the window.

Anyway, here are some initial thoughts about the issues they put in front of me.  I'll take them in no particular order.  First, about the general topic of legislating values, it seems to me that because we live in a polity with plural and conflicting values  the national legislature ought to have a great deal of forbearance  when it comes to legislating values.  The legislature ought to be very very slow to ever impose one among the set of plural and conflicting values on the polity at large.    It ought especially refrain from imposing values on the polity at large when that imposition cannot be justified by appeal to so-called public reasons.    What exactly should count as a "public reason" is a matter of some contention.  To a first approximation,  by  a public reason, I mean a reason acceptable as a reason to any reasonable participant in public debate, independently of their differences in comprehensive moral outlooks.   A public reason should be recognizable as a reason to both a reasonable fundamentalist  and a reasonable secularist, for example.   There are some complications about this, but I won’t bother with them just now.

I don’t think the legislature is morally or rationally obligated to advance legislation only on the basis of public reasons.  One can, though, read the non-establishment clause of the constitution as  requiring legislation to have a basis in public reason.   But whatever the precise legalities,  I think there are very strong practical reasons for the legislature to refrain from adopting any narrowly sectarian rationale for its laws.   These have to do with stability and legitimacy.  In a democratic polity, the instruments of state power – especially the legislature and the executive – are simply there for the seizing by this party or that.  If the party that seizes the instruments of power today, feels entitled by its victory to impose a narrowly sectarian set of values on the polity at large, then the competing party that seizes the instruments of power tomorrow will feel entitled to undo that imposition and impose values of its own.   This seems to me a recipe for great social instability and for de-legitimization of the instruments of state power.

To get to a concrete issue, this means that the legislature ought not adopt a narrowly sectarian rationale for prohibiting, say, stem cell research.  You can imagine someone deeply believing, on religious grounds, that even the mere blastocyst is an ensouled human life, with full human dignity, fully deserving the protection of the law.   But that would stand as a reason to prohibit stem cell research only for someone who already adopted a certain narrowly sectarian moral outlook.    And so by my  lights that would be an illegitimate basis for public policy.   To those of us who don’t share the narrowly sectarian outlook,  a law based on that rationale alone would look more like a tyrannical imposition of a mere dogma.

I think it’s also worth thinking about the flip side of the question.  Suppose that a substantial number of our fellow citizens do believe, as a matter of fundamental conviction, that the blastocyst is an already ensouled human life, with full human dignity.  And suppose they believe this on dogmatic religious grounds.  What are they to say to a state that will take no official notice  of that conviction as a basis for public policy?   “Ah well,  we lose! Those are the breaks.”  Fat chance!  Especially  if that conviction is shared by millions of fellow citizens.  Those who hold such convictions would seem as entitled as anybody else to mobilize to change public policy.    Moreover,  some such convictions are  are tied to projects  that are deeply identity-constituting for those who hold them.   If I am a committed fundamentalist,  I do not regard my views about the sanctity of life as optional things that I may fairly be asked to abandon as the price of entry into the public square.   To abandon those convictions is to abandon my very identity.   

When the legislature legislates in ways that offends the most deeply held convictions of millions of citizens, especially when those convictions are tied to citizen’s identity constituting projects,  there loom very  real threats of instability and de-legitimization.  And this is so even if the identity constituting convictions cannot withstand the public reasons test.  That my reasons are not public, does not make them any less my reasons.   I would expect a state in which I am to have a stake to be responsive to my reasons, whether or not they are public reasons.  Of course, my reasons are not the only reasons.  But a state in which I must abandon reasons that are distinctively my own, that are partly constitutive of my most identity  constituting projects is not a state to which I can swear my deepest most enduring allegiance.

Let me hasten to add about the stability argument that I do not think that all instability is created equal.   The emancipation of the slaves, the end of Jim Crow Segregation, forced busing to achieve school integration, the enfranchisement of women, African Americans, and other minorities, all involved great social, cultural and political upheaval.  Many citizens objected strenuously to these changes.  Nonetheless, to the extent that state power was instrumental in bringing about these changes,  despite such determined resistance,  such exercises of  state power were, in my view, very good things.   Where would be now, if  arguments from  stability had won the day against the forces of social progress?

Still, it has to be  conceded that even now, sometimes many decades after the most heated debates have died down,  we still feel the reverberations in our unsettled and divided politics of bygone days of turmoil and upheaval.   Nonetheless,  it seems right to me that  stability in the service of reaction and repression is no virtue, instability in the service of progress no vice. 

Unfortunately, though, it’s hard to come up with any  principled basis for deciding just when the long term social benefits will outweigh the short or even  long term social costs.  This makes legislating values in a plural and conflicted social order an especially tricky thing.  The one thing that I think is necessary, though certainly not sufficient,  is a more enlightened and deliberative politics, a politics more firmly controlled by  the real stake holders – we the people – rather than by  a manipulative political class.

The political class in our country is really pretty astoundingly adept at manipulating and mobilizing certain voting blocks.  What the political class largely doesn’t do  very well, it seems to me, is to treat the people as the primary and essential  stake holders in the deliberative processes of democracy.  They come at us with phony issues that bear almost no connection to the hard choices that face us.  Hardly any campaign I have witness has ever even attempted  to lay out in an honest,  systematic and fair-minded way, the real issues that face us, the real cost and benefits of the alternatives available to us,  the real winners and losers.  One might hope to find the media stepping in to play this role, but  our  corporate news media has gone vapid in the extreme and  mostly focuses on pointless play by play.  Think of the most recent presidential campaign and consider the debate now raging about the future of Social Security.   What in that  campaign laid the groundwork for the current debate?  As far as I can tell nothing at all.   Bush’s strategy was to energize and mobilize certain constituencies on the basis of what seems to me an utterly phony set of values issues.  Kerry's strategy was, well, hard to fathom.   Once Bush had successfully used this cynical but effective technique to regain the stage,  we are confronted, almost out of nowhere,  with an attempt to radically alter Social Security.   In the process, we are  subjected to a stream of utterly misleading rhetoric about an impending crisis, rhetoric that construes Social Security as an investment vehicle rather than as a kind of social insurance.  Whatever your view about  Social Security, it’s hard to imagine any thinking reflective person having the feeling of being engaged as an equal stake holder rather than having the feeling of being manipulated and misled.

What seems to be saving the day and causing the outbreak of something like an  honest debate is the surprising refusal of the Democrats to cave any further.  Partly that is because there is really so little caving room left and so little politcal upside in further caving.  So suddenly they have  re-discovered a backbone of sorts and have rediscovered the virtues of principle over mere tactical positioning.  Add to that  the fact that the populace at large may have learned a lesson from the run up to the Iraq War.  Whether you believe the administration deliberately lied to us or was deluded by blind imperial ambition or merely  made a series of honest mistakes, it’s clear that the  justification originally offered for that war has turned completely  sour.  Too much of that sort of thing and even the grand  masters of manipulation start to lose credibility.

My point is that we urgently  need  a more honest, more deliberative  politics, a politics that  treats us all as real stakeholders, fully entitled to democratic participation, fully entitled to know the real costs and benefits of the alternatives available to us.    Partly because of the foibles of human reason and the perversions introduced into our system by concentrated power,  I am not entirely optimistic.   Americans like to believe that we have the best of everything: the most vibrant economy in the world, the fairest system of justice, the best health care system, and on and on.   The plain facts, hardly ever spoken of in our vapid  corporatized media,   often say  otherwise.  Our vibrant economy produces staggering inequalities between rich and poor. Our system of health insurance leaves tens of millions with  few options but to turn to emergency rooms, at great costs to all. We have incarcerated more people for more crimes for longer periods than any industrialized democracy in the world.  If we merely look around the world, we see that it need not be so.   Democratic societies have handled some of the same problems that we face with far less division, inequality and injustice.   Faced with these realities, however, many of us who are not imprisoned, who still have decent health care, or find ourselves on the upside of income inequality tend to construct comforting narratives that justify to us our own privileged position in the order of things.   That does not make us evil or pernicious.  It merely makes us human.  But it also  makes us ripe for the exploiting and manipulating by a set of concentrated interests,  fully invested in maintaining certain elements of the status quo.  Unfortunately,  these concentrated interests own a large chunk of our politics.  They are masters of manipulation and masters at mobilization on phony issues that don’t really get to the heart of the real issues we face together.  Until their death grip on our politics is broken,  many fundamental problems will, I fear,  go entirely unaddressed. 

The Language of Politics

posted by Ken Taylor

We had a fun show last week with Geoff Nunburg about the language of politics.   In a little bit,   I'll ruminate a bit more about the language of politics.

Since we're in the middle of the  pledge drive,   though,   I want a put in a brief   good word for KALW -- the innovative little station that could.   I really meant it  when I said on air that without the risk-taking and innovation that KALW brings to public radio, Philosophy Talk simply would not be happening.   I hate to say it - though it's probably  no secret -- but lots of public radio has turned really staid and highly risk averse.    KALW is an exception.   If you value risk-taking and innovation on the air,  you really should think about  giving  to this gem of a station.  They  really need you.   They  operate on a shoestring.  If you compare KALW's operating budget to a certain other public radio station that broadcasts out of San Francisco -- Bay Area folks,  you know which one I mean -- you'll be really amazed at the difference.   But for my money,  KALW beats that to remain nameless behemoth on the other side of town by a quite considerable margin when it comes to putting fresh and engaging stuff on the air.   Even if you don't live in the Bay Area, and listen to our archive over the Internet, think about giving to the station.   You can do so on-line here. 

By the way,   for a mere $50 pledge to the station,  you can witness Philosophy Talk in action on Sunday, November 6th at an event we're calling Backstage Live with Philosophy Talk.   We're going to put on a episode of Philosophy Talk in front of a live audience.  Instead of taking questions from callers, we'll take them from the audience.   We'll tape the episode and broadcast it on a later date.  We'll also have light food and drink available.  And you'll have a chance to mingle with the whole gang.  Come and be part of the fun.  Again,  all you need to do is  make a $50 donation to the station.

But back to the language of politics.

On the air, we didn't talk much about competing ways of "framing" the same issue.  George Lakoff has recently been arguing that the main reason that Democrats lose elections is that Republicans have been masters at framing the issues, while Democrats have not been.   We didn't get very deeply into this idea on the air.  Too bad, because Nunberg has some pretty interesting things to say  both about Lakoff's claims about framing in general and about Lakoff's particular suggestions about how certain issues might best be framed by the democrats.   

In one way, it seems to me right, maybe even trivially so,   that politics is bound to involve a lot of competition over ways of "framing"  a set of  policy choices.   There are two reasons for this -- one having to do with the nature of politics and the other having to do with just what we're doing when we're "framing" a set of issues.  Politics is about distributing benefits and burdens.  Somebody gets a benefit and somebody, possibly a distinct somebody,  has to bear  a burden.  That doesn't mean that  politics is necessarily a zero-sum game.  Sometimes we all win and sometimes we all lose. 

People  tend  to want to see their  benefits maximized and their  burdens diminished.  Lawrence Mitchell, who was our guest awhile back on our episode about corporations, described corporations as great "externalizing" engines.   I think he meant by that that  corporations are expert at pushing the social costs of what they do onto third parties.   Though corporations may be the most efficient and ruthless externalizers of all,  I don't think they're alone.   Indeed, we all want to push as much social costs as we can onto somebody else, while receiving as much social benefit as we possibly can.   Kant once held that  who "wills the end" necessarily "wills the means."   He seemed to think that willing the end without willing the means involves some kind of incoherence.   There may be something to Kant's thought, if we restrict ourselves just to ends that I must bring about tr

But what does this have to do with the war of the frames?  The answer, I think, is that   "framing" is really a matter of  representing, especially of representing in normatively laden terms.  When we frame the issues in competing ways we are, in effect, offering competing narratives about  who deserves to enjoy what benefits and  bear what burdens.   

I also think that  many of the narratives we tell ourselves are  thoroughly self-serving.  They represent us and ours as the deserving recipients of benefits and the undeserving recipients of burdens, while representing "the other"  as  the undeserving recipients of benefits and the deserving recipients of burdens.   A whole lot of politics involves a competition over normatively laden construals, I think.  And I suspect that often he who wins the battle over normative construal has gone a very long way toward winning the day. 

You might wonder whether there's an objective right and wrong in the battle over construals.   This is a tricky question.  Certainly, one can misconstrue and misrepresent all sorts of matters and one can do in service of some political agenda or other.  Take the so-called controversy over  natural selection vs  intelligent design. Every even marginally scientifically literate person knows,  or should know,  that  intelligent design is not a serious scientific hypothesis that  deserve to be taught in any science class anywhere.  But proponents of intelligent design in order to promote a certain anti-science, religiously inspired political agenda have "brilliantly" sought to "frame" intelligent design as a rival scientific hypothesis that deserves teaching along side natural selection and other naturalist mechanisms of evolution.   In this case,  we have a clear example of an attempt at framing that one might expect or at least may be  debunked merely by steadfastly drawing  public attention to the real scientific facts of the matter.  But even here that thought may be too hopeful.  The forces of darkness are so organized, determined, and entrenched in our political culture that they may win the battle over the construals despite the fact that the frame they seek to impose is a framework of misrepresentation and ignorance rather than truth and knowledge.   It is frightening that men who ought to know better -- Bill Frist, MD, to name just one  -- are now spouting this nonsense.

If it is politically difficult  to combat even an attempt at framing that rests on such  patent and pernicious falsehoods and misrepresentations what hope is there where the objective truth of the matter, if there is one,  is even harder to discern.  Indeed,  I have to admit that I tend to doubt that there are objective  facts of the matter about who  should pay what taxes, about when a fetus becomes a person deserving the protection of the law, and even about who is  entitled to "marry" whom?   What there are instead are competing normative frameworks that construe these matters in different terms and no external authority by which we may adjudicate which normative framework better gets at the truth of the matter.  To be sure,  our competing frameworks do sometimes give way to a more encompassing normative consensus.  This is what has happened at many moments of great social progress and enlightenment.  But there is no simple  recipe for making that happen. Certainly,  there is  no antecedent guarantee that it can be made to happen in every case.

So what does that mean about the language of politics?   Perhaps it means that political discourse will always suffer from a certain fragmentation and division.  Perhaps politics will always involve a battle of competing construals and frames.  We may be destined to often talk past and at each other, rather than to each other.   One can hope for a more deliberative politics in which we reason together about how to live our shared lives.  But that is really only a hope and one far from being realized at this particular moment in history.