Rote learning and democracy
At TNR, Martha Nussbaum takes Chinese and Singaporean education down a peg. She writes:
It is time to take off the rose-colored glasses. Singapore and China are terrible models of education for any nation that aspires to remain a pluralistic democracy. They have not succeeded on their own business-oriented terms, and they have energetically suppressed imagination and analysis when it comes to the future of the nation and the tough choices that lie before it. If we want to turn to Asia for models, there are better ones to be found: Korea’s humanistic liberal arts tradition, and the vision of Tagore and like-minded Indian educators.
-Jake
I, politician
Richard Cohen on Obama’s inscrutability
In the Washington Post Richard Cohen laments the obscurity of Obama’s politics and person, as if there were no distinction between the two, arguing that Obama’s guardedness derives from his father’s desertion and his separation from his mother when she twice moved to Indonesia. Surely there’s a necessary connection between one’s personal experience and their politics, but this seems to be taking it too far. Cohen writes:
Pragmatism is fine — as long as it is complicated by regret. But that indispensable wince is precisely what Obama doesn’t show. It is not essential that he get angry or cry. It is essential, though, that he show us who he is. As of now, we haven’t a clue.
There’s clearly something here, but it’s unclear what Cohen means by “show us who he is.” At its core, I think Cohen and others simply want to know Obama’s value priorities. But for a politician, that question is an interpretative one based on reading the tea leaves of his decisions, not on the way he does or does not ”wince” at the sight of an oil-covered bird or destroyed local economy. Cohen wants “a sign that this [oil] catastrophe meant something to Obama, that it was not merely another problem that had crossed his desk;” and then connects this seeming lack of concern to an argument that Obama’s pragmatic foreign policy is similarly amoral. If there’s no coherent theme to Obama’s policies, as Cohen argues, which probably is not true, then the there’s no coherent them to Obama’s policies. It’s doesn’t mean he’s obscure; it means he doesn’t have a clear, systematic, rigid political theory. That is the nature of pragmatism, especially one that deals with problems as they come. It provides useful ideological flexibility, but seemingly sacrifices any undying commit to any (cherished) principle. To throw some arm-chair psychoanalysis back at Cohen, he is projecting onto Obama, wanting the President to be something he’s not, asking him to have a holistic set of principles, when that’s not, I think, who he really is.
Share your toys…and your astronomy data?
The NYT discusses the debate over NASA scientists keeping their data to themselves.
-Jake
Violence and just borders in the Middle East
What does the flotilla incident mean for the Israel-Palestine border?
Many viewed the recent flotilla incident in the waters off of Gaza as relevant to larger questions about Israel’s legitimacy and what constitutes a just outcome to the peace process. This argument, whereby the legitimacy of Israel (or Palestine) depends upon their policies toward the other side, seems inappropriate. What makes a state legitimate? What should the borders be between two states? These are hard questions. Whatever the answers are, as a matter of political morality, I doubt that it includes much analysis of how one side treats the other.
Consider this example: People A have lived in and governed Land Area Q for 500 years. People B invade Q to exploit its natural resource and they push out People A. In their attempt to regain control, People A resort to tactics that threaten the innocent members of People B.
We don’t generally believe (I think) that the right of People A to their land would be affected. Their tactics may be unjust and reprehensible, but it seems they’re unrelated to the deeper question of who should live in and govern a land area. There may, in theory, be a breaking point, such that if People A aim to commit genocide against People B, we might conclude that they’ve lost all rights, including the right to rule Q. But even this is uncertain; it’s not as if the German people after WWII lost all their rights to control land, such that the French could justly take their land.
When thinking about the big questions on Israel from a moral perspective (e.g. what’s a just border?), it’s maybe irrelevant when and whether one side commit actions deemed inappropriate, unjust, egregious, etc. It’s surely relevant from a policy perspective, insofar as some actions may be better or worse for one’s desired end-game. And it’s relevant in regard to other moral questions about how people ought to treat each other in such a conflict.
Israeli issues
Tony Judt in the NYT has an interesting, wide-ranging piece on state legitimacy, democracy, state responsibility, and other similar issues as they relate to Israel.
-Jake
Who owns the news?
The FTC is mulling a “Drudge tax” on websites like The Drudge Report that aggregate newspaper links, which would require aggregators to pay the newspapers to link to articles.
Is this is a question of individual rights, whereby a newspaper as a matter of copyright law and morality ought to have some ownership over not only their articles, but also over links to their articles? Or is it merely a case of pure government intervention in the marketplace to prevent something bad from happening, considered from a broad, nation-wide, consequentialist perspective (e.g. the disappearance of newspapers)? Or maybe it’s both. Copyright as a field is interesting in the way that it balances individual ownership rights over one’s creative products with nation-wide, consequentialist concerns with other people having access to those products and promoting new innovations based upon the earlier work. It’s through this reasoning that copyrights exist, but only last for a limited period of time.
Here it seems to be much more about keeping the newspapers in business than protecting their ownership over links to their work. It’s not unattributed use of their work, merely links to their work. If the newspapers were flourishing, the notion that, as a matter of moral right, they should have ownership rights in links to their stories would hold even less water. And if their is such a moral (copy) right, then it would hold in that context, too.
As a matter of policy conceived holistically, with the special role the press plays in holding politicians accountable and serving as a place for reasoned discourse, it nevertheless seems like a good idea to provide newspapers with some such form of ownership rights. It’s a case of consequentialist concerns (e.g. it’s good for the country for newspapers to stay in business) demanding and creating individual rights (e.g. ownership rights in links to their stories).
-Jake
Money and guns
US complicity in Mexico
When we attempt to attribute responsibility for the world’s most severe problems, especially in the developing world, it’s difficult to see exactly how the causal links operate. Even though the US is the most powerful nation, its direct responsibility for these crises is almost always attenuated and complex. One can spin ridiculous, semi-conspiratorial arguments where the US stars as the final puppet master to anything corrupt and unjust in the developing world, but these are not to be taken seriously in my mind. There exists, however, at least one glaring exception: The civil violence between Mexican drug lords and the Mexican government.
Outside of military intervention, rarely ever is there such a clear case of one nation’s culpability in the domestic challenges of another. The drug lords exist to feed the US drug market. And they get their guns through the US weapons market. We give the bad guys their money by buying their drugs; and we sell them the guns that enable their continued existence. The causal line does not involve a Rube Goldberg story beginning with the practice of colonialism. Its clear, direct, and recent. If democratic nations can be considered as coherent entities able to bear moral responsibility, as I think they ought to be, this is a pretty easy case.
In short, the US bears some direct moral responsibility for a civil conflict that creeps very close to the status of existential crisis for Mexico. If we take our moral status seriously, its imperative we think hard and fast about how to stem the flow of our money and guns to some of the most vicious people in the world.
-Jake
Pauleoconservatism
At the NYT, Ross Douthat argues that rather than “libertarianism,” Ron and Rand Paul endorse a “paleoconservative” ideological mis-mash, one marked by the inherent problems of dogmatism.
-Jake
Primaries as partisan purifiers
A problem?
Last week’s round of upsets in Senate primary races was interpreted by many as the product of an anti-incumbent and -establishment mood. Maybe more than that, however, it was the standard result of primary voters rewarding those especially to the right or left. In the Kentucky Republican race, Rand Paul defeated Trey Grayson. In the Pennsylvania Democrat race, Joe Sestak defeated incumbent Arlen Specter. And incumbent Blanche Lincoln is in a runoff with Bill Halter for the Arkansas Democratic ticket. In all three cases, primary voters have punished the more “moderate” candidate.
Are these primary votes a good thing? Not every democracy has them.
Democracy seems to be in their favor, though. Rather than party insiders somewhat shadily selecting candidates and placing them in seats strategically, the members of the party themselves decide who shall represent their views.
Parties have an entrenched and often positive role in our system, as the sort of ideological categorical guides I discussed earlier, as a means of cooperation and organization, and as an additional systemic check (on each other). Related, they have an enormous amount of power. To leave the selection and placement of party candidates to a few unelected party leaders affords those people an undue amount of democratically unaccountable influence. And independent candidates, who have an difficult time fighting party machines, cannot be counted upon to check party leaders.
Also, primaries might afford the people an opportunity to escape the traditional, status quo views of party leaders (see Rand Paul).
Free speech and Islam
Pakistan expands internet censorship, including a outright ban on Youtube, after a court deems certain internet content contrary to Islamic law, like a Facebook page encouraging people to draw pictures of Mohammed. This reveals the obvious tension between certain interpretations of Islam and liberalism. The response might be that the court and the country support liberal freedoms, just not when they breach Islamic law. This is essentially a debate about of the fundamental sources and purposes of legitimate government; whether liberal freedoms are core of the whole point of government, whether they’re subordinate to religious values, or whether they’re just somewhat important values included in the bag of political concerns. It doesn’t get any deeper as a matter of political philosophy, which is something I always say about anything concerning Youtube and Facebook, especially in regard to that Youtube video where the dog says “I love you.”
-Jake
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