What the Framers intended
After watching this humorous video on the diversity of opinion among members of the same religion, I got to thinking about how such a phenomenon applies more broadly to philosophy.
It’s true that in a medium like religious faith, it’s near impossible to tell who’s interpreting the moral, political, and historical claims of a particular tradition correctly. God tends, suspiciously, to agree with all of our personal opinions.
The same can be said for America’s Framers. Our nation is home to a wide variety of political philosophies, and I’d bet you would be hard-pressed to find many that don’t claim the Framers as tacit supporters. There’s a conservative Christian movement in Texas right now that aims to alter school curriculum and textbooks in order to teach children the true intent of the Founding Fathers – to create a strong, Christian nation that would carry out Jesus’s mandate on Earth. Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens insists that the Founders were Enlightenment Deists, committed only to a vague, secularized spirituality and interested in avoiding the interference of religion with politics, science, and ethics.
The “American Tradition,” like its religious counterparts, is as contested as it is loved.
-Colin
Happiness is an elephant
Penelope Trunk has a procrastination-friendly survey that seeks to determine whether readers value happiness or or having an interesting life more highly. While this distinction seems a bit arbitrary, the test links to multiple worthy pieces of happiness research.
What I find most interesting is that the happiest life, statistically, is a kind of red-state ideal. According to the research, happiness is positively correlated to:
- Willingness to pray
- Geographic proximity to family
- Whether your children go to the best schools (you are more likely to be happy if you do not care)
- Believing that Christmas is a national holiday
- Most obviously, whether you are a Republican
-John
Obama the dictator?
The use and abuse of executive power
On Friday The New York Times reported that the Obama Administration, faced with an uncooperative Congress, is looking into “a list of presidential executive orders and directives” to push its governing agenda forward. The article was, unsurprisingly, met with a barrage of criticism from the right. RedState writers suggested Obama was “dusting off his best Hugo Chavez imitation” and that his Administration had become a “DICTATORSHIP BY FIAT” (emphasis in original).
As The New York Times article notes, presidents can legally make policy without Congressional legislation “through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.” But just because a president can doesn’t mean a president should. So should Obama use his executive powers, like executive orders and directives?
The fragile limits of regional integration
Many have hailed the European Union as the new model for regional governance. But the sense of consent, common cause, and mutual obligation that holds a people together may be more important than many realize. Enter the curious case of Greece:
Here in Germany, opinion surveys show that two-thirds of the people oppose financial assistance for Greece. More ominously, a survey released Sunday by the newspaper Bild showed that a slight majority of Germans, 53 percent, said they favored expelling Greece from the euro group entirely if its mountain of debt threatened the stability of the currency union.
Some loyalties have not yet died, nor have others yet arisen.
-Sam
Should luge be cancelled?
Accounting for risk in sports.
The tragic death of young Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili during a practice on the eve of the 2010 Olympics has not only cast a dark pall over this year’s Winter Olympiad, it has also raised questions about a notoriously dangerous sport. While debates will rage on over whether host-nation Canada afforded foreign lugers ample practice time, or whether exposed steel beams ought to have been covered, the deeper question is how and to what extent we allow athletes to risk their bodies.
William James on war
Contemporary lessons for the Left?
In a famous 1906 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” William James argues that war, while absurd and irrational, ennobles and steels man’s character.
Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor – there isn’t a moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn’t tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another.
The virtues that prevail, it must be noted, are virtues anyhow, superiorities that count in peaceful as well as in military competition; but the strain is on them, being infinitely intenser in the latter case, makes war infinitely more searching as a trial. No ordeal is comparable to its winnowings. Its dread hammer is the welder of men into cohesive states, and nowhere but in such states can human nature adequately develop its capacity. The only alternative is “degeneration.”
Reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It’s profits are to the vanquished as well as to the victor; and quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic. Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities,” of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!
Kristol on “Don’t Ask”
Balancing liberalism and practical concerns
In a previous post Sam pondered whether the moral elements of the debate over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” were as decided as many liberal commentators seemed to assume. In this week’s Weekly Standard Bill Kristol deals with both the practicalities and normative questions surrounding DADT, arguing that now is not the right time to address the policy.
Kristol begins the piece by citing public opinion polls that show that Americans profess high levels of faith in the military, but we can only draw dubious conclusions from these findings given that a majority of Americans also favor repealing DADT. The crux of Kristol’s argument, though, rests on the assertion that Obama is promoting broad principles while overlooking real world concerns: Read more
Unholy holidays
Washington Post columnist Kevin Huffman thinks it’s time to put the kibosh on Valentine’s Day. Here’s why and here’s how:
Back in my high school days, students could order Valentine’s carnations for their love interests. The flowers were delivered with great fanfare in homeroom to the usual suspects (“Who, me? What a wonderful surprise!”). And all day long, couples toted around their precious flowers, while the rest of us carried the scent of rejection.
Of course, most of the lingering injustices of high school disappear as we march into adulthood. Unless you’re single on Valentine’s Day. From the floral deliveries in the office to the restaurants filled with couples, Valentine’s Day is like living in a John Hughes movie, a day-long ordeal of sitting in the bleachers watching the slow-dance.
Despite its sorry record and utter failure as a romantic vehicle, getting rid of Valentine’s Day is easier said than done. Much like the health-care system, Valentine’s Day has a large corporate constituency and a small group of ardent supporters. Still, I believe we owe it to future generations to try. My proposal: Let’s merge it with Presidents’ Day. Nobody gets fired up for P-Day any more, so let’s just have P-and-V-Day. Eventually, nobody will remember the purpose, and we all can enjoy a relaxing day off, free from unrealistic expectations and disillusionment — and FedEx deliveries of teddy bears in leather jackets.
Not to be rude, but this seems to say a lot more about some high school issues Huffman still needs to resolve than it does about the worth of a holiday. Of all the holiday debates, Valentine’s seems the most innocuous.
Is it mostly an industry ploy? Probably, but so are Mother’s Day and Father’s day, and those seem tolerable.
Is Valentine’s Day competing with some other more important celebration? Probably not.
Do high school Valentine’s Day activities arbitrarily exclude some students? Maybe, but I seem to remember everyone trading those little candy hearts–whether they shared a romantic link or not.
The emotional burdens imposed by Valentine’s Day on the single may be worth considering, especially because there are few spiritual or social goods associated with Valentine’s Day. But P and V Day just sounds stupid.
-Sam
Snownership
When you shovel a parking spot out of the snow, should you own it? Jonathan Chait discusses at TNR.
-Jake
Landlines, cell phones, and polls
Why my opinion has never mattered…
Here’s something nobody ever talks about, but nevertheless seems like it should be very important: Public opinion polls are almost all done by calling landlines. Do you own a landline? I don’t. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to name a friend in my generation who has one.
The demographic implications are pretty obvious – landline polls are likely to skew heavily toward older populations. Comparative studies show that landlines also favor females and whites. (So just replace the word “Americans” in poll results with “Elderly white women” and you’ll get a better picture)
This is a tough issue to get around, and understandably, polling companies have been quick to downplay its significance. Pew says that mobile-only and landline-only polls produce “virtually identical” results. But the same study they used to draw that conclusion provided the numbers that demonstrated the demographic gap described above. Mobile- and landline-based populations will likely converge on some issues, but certainly not all. Politically, it would seem to follow that polls err to the right.
In my view, the increasing scarcity of landlines poses a major obstacle to an already unreliable service; pollsters already have to worry about people without any phones, people who don’t answer phones, and people who aren’t sincere or who don’t understand the questions. Now, with some estimates suggesting that half of adults 30 years old and younger use only cell phones, we can be fairly certain that our voices just aren’t being represented.
It’s unlikely that polls will go away, however. I can’t imagine what the media and anyone with an agenda would do without them (and their infinite, and rather convenient, layers of interpretation).
On the bright side, polls are no more misleading than other mainstay methods of generalizing the “general will” (hat tip to Rousseau), such as, say, voting. The voting demographic is as small and unrepresentative as any, yet we don’t exactly stop political commentators mid-sentence and protest, “Well, technically, New Yorkers didn’t elect Senator Schumer, a relatively small number of voters in New York elected him.”
In other words, whether we’re talking about polls, elections, workers, readers, or viewers, we’re likely to be generalizing the views of a smaller subset onto a much larger population. We’re often reminded after references to the beloved “town hall” government of our Forefathers that civic participation was actually quite limited. Things may not have changed as much as we might like.
UPDATE – I’ve received some rebukes and note here that Gallup, for its part, claims that it’s known about this for years and is continually fixing the issue and including cell phones in their polls. This may be true, but if it wasn’t still a problem, they wouldn’t be calling for so much research on the topic. Someone call me and poll me so I can get over my skepticism.
-Colin
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