The Respect Deficit

Lucky him.  I haven't had a President I respected since JFK, and that was mainly because I was too young to know how bad he was.  Maybe I respected LBJ at first, for his Great Society programs and the Civil Rights Bill, but his foreign policy eventually outweighed those accomplishments.  I have some respect for Jimmy Carter, but only since he left office, so it doesn't count.

This doesn't mean I'm looking forward to the Trump regime, of course.  (Which I only mention because there are many people who assume that if you don't love Obama, you love Trump.  The Stupid has been very strong in the media, both corporate and social, these last few months.)  Trump will become President with a major respect deficit; he'll probably have to import it from China or something.

And really, shouldn't the person who posted the above lament respect Trump anyway once he becomes POTUS?  Aren't we supposed to respect the President?  Partisans always confuse respect for the office with respect for the person who occupies it.  Obama devotees were furious that Republicans drew the distinction, though the Republicans were just as incapable of doing so when a Republican was in the White House.  Some Democrats were even ready to defend George W. Bush against disrespect from Hugo Chavez, though; touching.  I was listening to Democracy Now! this morning, and some remarks by one interviewee reminded me that Dem loyalists were not only ready to overlook Benjamin Netanyahu's ongoing and explicit disrespect for Obama, they supported and agreed with it.  But it's pretty clear that we need to learn to distinguish respect for the office from respect for the office-holder, and that's not going to be easy for most people.

One symptomatic example of this confusion has been the #NotMyPresident bandwagon that some Americans are jumping onto.  This is a two-year-old's response: You're Not the Boss of Me!  More amusing in a twisted way, it's exactly what numerous Republicans said from November 2008.  Like it or not, and I don't like it either, Donald Trump is going to be the President of the United States starting tomorrow.  That makes him my president, your president, Garrison Keillor's president.  It's worth remembering Keillor went easier on George W. Bush, who was as weak as Trump in the things that matter to Keillor.  But Keillor still defended Bush's sweetheart-deal reading program for kids that mainly put federal money into the coffers of McGraw-Hill, without improving children's reading ability.

I am very happy that Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, though some Democrats were not, and even one of his subordinates went on the public record to disagree with the decision.  Does approving of certain isolated policies and actions of a president constitute respect?  I don't think so.  I've inveighed often against the cult of personality in politics, because it's anti-democratic and destructive, but it will probably always be with us.

P.S. Jon Schwarz linked to this article by William Greider from the Nation, trying to reassure us.  I think. 

The fright and gloom are understandable, but I have a hunch Donald Trump has already peaked. He won’t go away, of course—he will be Mr. President—but the air is already seeping out of Trump’s balloon. The president-elect has amassed a huge inventory of dubious promises, and I expect this powerhouse of American politics to get smaller and less influential as the broken promises pile up.

Pundits all across the political spectrum have been assuring us for the past year and a half that the Trump phenomenon was already over, that he couldn't possibly win the nomination or the election.  And here we are.  Far from reassured, I'm more worried than ever.  Could you guys please just ... stop?

What That Word It Means To Me

Disrespect invites disrespect, violence invites violence. When the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.

There's been a lot of predictable kvelling by liberals about Meryl Streep's denunciation of Donald Trump at the Golden Globes last night.  I haven't bothered to watch the video or read a full transcription, because frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.  Just as predictably, the Right has responded by telling Streep to shut up and act, though they're just fine with right-wing actors and other celebrities expressing their opinions.  As Glenn Greenwald tweeted today:

Why are actors less qualified to comment on political issues than, say, cable TV or talk radio hosts? Never understood this rationale.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 9, 2017

Of course, the content of actors' and other celebrities' opinions is open to criticism, just like cable TV or talk radio hosts, or corporate media pundits for that matter.  Someone posted a meme on Facebook quoting Streep's words that I quoted at the opening of this post, and I thought, Oh, really?  Where were you, Ms. Streep, when Barack Obama joked about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones?  When Obama and his toadies mocked gay people who protested in Washington about the antigay policies he clung to for most of his first term?  When they denounced his left-wing critics as "fucking retarded" and drug-addled losers?  When his goons were harassing and beating protesters at various public events?  When Obama was not just joking about killing people, but actually killing them, as he has been doing for his entire time in office?  Did it bother you when Obama bragged about being the first two-term war president?  Do you worry about the consequences of Obama's fondness for mass killing and high-tech violence, either directly or through proxies?

By all means, pick on Trump; he deserves it and will continue to deserve it.  But I'll reserve my respect for people who speak out against disrespect and violence committed by Democrats no less than Republicans.

Jeez, You Two, Get a Room!

I just saw a link to an interview President Obama gave to Bill Maher on religion in public life. As usual, Obama was vacuous and dishonest. He acknowledged that an atheist would have trouble being elected to public office in the US, and said that "we should foster a culture in which people’s private religious beliefs, including atheists and agnostics, are respected." This is the same kind of gaseous platitude he routinely uses to discuss gay people or feminism (or race, for that matter), and I'm not gratified.

I suppose the key word here was "private," since Obama himself has expressed disrespect for people's "private religious beliefs," presumably because those beliefs were publicly stated and acted on.  (Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi, for example, were nice guys but a couple of unrealistic idealists who didn't understand the cold hard facts of life as Obama does.  They didn't keep their religious beliefs "private" either.)  And most of Obama's fans do the same. So does Maher, whom I hold in contempt. (Why? Because he's contemptible.)  But no one is obligated, under either the First Amendment nor the more general principle of toleration, to respect anybody else's beliefs. Nor, under the same principles, is anyone obliged to keep their beliefs "private." (I'll start doing so when liberal Christians start.) What we are obliged to respect is people's right to hold beliefs and express them -- even publicly -- though we are free to disrespect and criticize them.  Maybe that's what he meant, but it's not what he said. Thanks, Mr. President, but no thanks.

I have the impression that when most people use the word "freedom," they're thinking of a comfortable and easy condition, perhaps because they're thinking of their own freedom, not of others'.  Living in a free society will be comfortable in some ways, but often very uncomfortable in others.  Not only you, but other people have the right to express their views, hold their opinions, and attend the church (or no church) of their choice.  And since other people's beliefs are often highly offensive, it can be uncomfortable not to be able to silence them.  But being uncomfortable won't kill you.

(And if anyone is distressed because I disrespected the sacred person of Our POTUS, I can only say that if he doesn't want to be criticized, he should keep his "private" opinions [and his religious beliefs, which he has often talked about in public] private.)

Trouble Ahead, Trouble Behind

There's been a flurry of attention over the weekend to a "welcome" letter sent to incoming freshmen by the University of Chicago, advising them that the institution's

commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

This set off a predictable storm of praise and criticism.  I'm going to focus on the criticism, though I might return to the praise another time.  (Or maybe I don't need to: John Scalzi wrote a pretty good post about it.)  I've written here before at length about "safe spaces," and will try not to repeat myself too much today.  But the criticism that I've seen has mostly been dreadful: intellectually and morally dishonest.

I'll begin by saying that I have reservations about Chicago's rejection of "the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."  As long as they're not explicitly called "safe spaces," such places are normal in intellectual circles.  I think that much of the panic about Creationism and Intelligent Design represents a desire to establish classrooms as just such "safe spaces," but for the Good Guys.  In practice, of course, certain ideas and perspectives are ruled out in advance in every classroom, if only because teaching the conflicts takes a lot of time.  But the phobic reaction of many secularists to religious ideas (or what they believe to be religious ideas) suggests that something else is going on, something less exalted, something like the very narrow-mindedness, fear of difference, and authoritarianism such people fondly assume themselves to be free of.  Roy Edroso posted on Tuesday about an antigay bigot's dismissal of "the 'born-this-way' myth," and rather quickly got tangled in his own rhetoric.  (I quit reading the comments after one regular jeered, inaccurately, at the Bible as a supposedly 4,000 year old work of Middle Eastern shepherds; they only got worse after that.)  Of course it's simply not debatable in Edroso's safe space whether sexual orientation is inborn, any more than the reverse is true in David French's safe space; and rationality quickly goes out the window if you question it.  But there are good reasons to question it, starting with the fact that the science doesn't work.  A reader wrote that despite everything, the idea that he was born gay has an emotional appeal.  I'm not sure what the appeal of the belief is, but whatever it is, it's emotional not rational.

But I digress.  I suppose I should do some investigation of whatever science is involved with emotional triggers, but a cursory look indicates that there isn't much, and what there is doesn't really conflict with the University of Chicago's stance as set out in their letter.  The people who are attacking Chicago seem to be using "trigger warning" extremely loosely at best.  This piece at the Huffington Post, for example, by their "Deputy Healthy Living Editor" (a title that alone inspires absolute confidence), relies on innuendo rather than reason:

In other words, students who may be susceptible to mental health issues, like post-traumatic stress disorder or panic disorders, are undeserving of a warning that a lecture or guest speaker may aggravate those issues or traumatic experiences.

Actually, no.  It could be argued that the letter itself is a trigger warning, that a liberal-arts education may "aggravate those issues or traumatic experiences."  But the writer offers no real evidence that such aggravation can be avoided by trigger warnings.  She claims that "research clearly shows that atmospheres that promote negative stereotypes can act as barriers to treatment, furthering stigma and causing additional psychological trauma."  The page she links to, however, doesn't really address what she says it does and doesn't support her argument (I'll be generous and call it that, though it's stretching the word absurdly to do so).  Later she writes:

Trigger warnings are potentially lifesaving for people who have dealt with traumas like sexual assault, hate crimes or violence. Eliminating these advisories and zones on campus suggests that someone should have to listen to someone who questions their humanity or experience.

No links there, and no evidence to back it up.  The inflationary rhetoric ("potentially lifesaving") doesn't help, and is no substitute for evidence.  As she then admits: "There is not much research on the effectiveness of advisories, but some experts do recommend that professors at least alert students of the content if it could be triggering."  Let me repeat that: There is not much research on the effectiveness of advisories; "some experts" recommend them anyway, but some experts can always be found to recommend anything you like.

Again:

Nearly 30 percent of students in 2014 reported experiencing a psychological health issue that negatively influenced their academic performance. Sexual assault ― which can lead to PTSD, among other conditions ― is also a prevalent issue. Approximately one in five women and one in 16 men will be sexually assaulted while in college.

And:

Research from the National Alliance on Mental Illness shows more than 60 percent of college students who dropped out did so because of a mental health issue, which includes cases like PTSD and trauma.

I've seen similar sloppy use of numbers in other posts about this matter.  Are trigger warnings needed by all those 30 percent of students?  Probably not.  "Psychological health issue" casts a very wide net. Sexual assault can "lead to PTSD" -- I don't doubt that, but how often does it do so, and how often will trigger warnings in class be "effective"?  How many of the "more than 60 percent of college students who dropped out because of a mental health issue" -- also a very wide net -- were actually affected by PTSD and trauma?  But 60 percent is a nice big number, very impressive if you don't care about anything but making an impression.  It's a very irresponsible piece of work, this article, and it's typical of the complaints and attacks I've been seeing about the U of Chicago today.

In the comments under John Scalzi's post, a pattern emerged: numerous people wrote about what they "thought" a safe space is, in their opinions.  (The same is true of "trigger warning."  Scalzi noticed what I had, that the U of Chicago letter was itself, effectively, a trigger warning, as are movie and television and other rating systems, according to the commonsense meaning of "trigger warning" these folks are working with.  I'm not sure, however, that they are the same thing.)  The trouble is that there is considerable disagreement about what a safe space (or a trigger warning) is or should be. As the therapist Walt Odets wrote (In the shadow of the epidemic: being HIV-negative in the age of AIDS [Duke UP, 1995]: 274f.):

In any well-run group, safety can only mean one thing: any expression of feelings or thoughts will be received and tolerated by the group, and an attempt will be made to honestly respond to it. This will be done without physical violence or undue emotional hurt to other members, and without abandonment of the group. This essential objective is most easily accomplished in a professionally facilitated therapy group, because the group leader will have the necessary skills to mediate and limit conflict to a safe and constructive level. When the idea of safety comes to mean, as it often does in poorly constructed therapy groups and many support groups, that members be polite and "non-judgmental" toward each other, then the prime therapeutic objectives are undermined. Interpersonal interaction -- as opposed to social form -- necessarily involves feelings and judgments about others, and unless they can be expressed and discussed truthfully, the group can provide neither insight nor the meaning that comes of bearing witness....

The function of a group is not to make members "feel better when they leave than when they came in," as one poorly supervised peer facilitator has routinely billed his weekly support group for San Francisco gay men. It is the function of a therapy group, like individual psychotherapy, to help people attain the insight that allows them to make themselves feel better.

As Odets's own complaint shows, though, his idea of safe space is not the only meaning in current use, even among professionals.  Whoever wrote the University of Chicago letter is evidently foggy about the meaning of the term, as of "trigger warning." When you factor in non-professionals, the sky is the limit.  (The same is true of other terms that have transitioned from jargon to mainstream discourse, like "microaggression.")  To me that's evidence that demands for trigger warnings and safe space tend to come from people who don't know what they're talking about.  It becomes pointless to argue about the "real" meaning of these terms when no one knows what they do mean, so one must look at what people think they mean by them, and what conditions and practices they are calling for.  The Huffington Post article, which is unfortunately typical of the critiques I've seen, indicates that there is some truth in the charge that advocates of "safe space" want to shut down intellectual freedom altogether (except for themselves of course).  They talk about "civility" (the word is in the U of Chicago letter, in fact) and "respect," but those qualities are conspicuously absent from their discourse.

But also from their opponents'.  As Scalzi tweeted (and quoted in his post), "The conservatives gloating about @uchicago's No' Safe Spaces' policy don't appear to think it will apply to them, too, the dear wee lads."  The reactions he got to that one from conservatives confirmed his point, though it was hardly news.  But that is one area where conservatives and non-conservatives stand together: Freedom of Speech for Me, But Not for Thee!

The HuffPost writer complains: "The problem with this interpretation of trigger warnings is that it presumes all participants have the same level of privilege."  "Privilege" is another of those wiggly, gaseous terms that gets misused a lot, I'm afraid.  I noticed when I first wrote about safe spaces that a lot of the discourse around them presumes levels of class privilege.  So, for instance, a young gay teacher-to-be denounced the word "gay" as "vulgar," and asserted that he wouldn't tolerate it in any class he taught.  Suppressing the "vulgar" means imposing a privileged, white middle-class standard of language.  Privilege isn't a simple linear scale of higher and lower, it's extremely complex and muddled: one can be privileged along one axis and de-privileged in another.  There's been a lot of criticism of the word "privilege" in some recent discussion, asserting that, say, working-poor whites in West Virginia don't have white privilege.  Of course they do, however much privilege they don't have.  But a college-educated person who presumes to lecture such people on their white privilege ignores his or her own privilege: privilege is always relative to your status and the status of the person you're dealing with.  If you want to communicate with and educate others, you will try to frame your message in such a way that they'll be able to hear it -- or to put it another way, speaking of white privilege to poor white trash sets off various triggers for them, and those who wave around "civility" and "respect" must be aware of and curb their own privilege first.

You Say "Tomato" and I'll Say "Sequester"

Robert Reich (economist and Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor) posted this on his Facebook page today:

Dinner last night with Alan Simpson (for those of you who don’t remember, he was a senator from Wyoming from 1979 to 1997, during which time he served as Republican whip and Assistant Republican Leader). Alan and I don’t see eye to eye on much of anything – figuratively or literally (he’s 6’7” tall). But he’s one of my best friends in the world. He’s witty, big-hearted, able to listen and willing to change his mind if he thinks he’s wrong, and incredibly generous. (He and his wife Ann trekked from Cody, Wyoming to San Francisco yesterday to help raise money so Jake Kornbluth, who directed "Inequality for All," and I can make more videos and films.)

Simpson and I respect each other’s different points of view, enjoy each other’s company, and laugh a lot. Why is it so impossibly difficult for Democrats and Republicans do this anymore?

This is the kind of thing that gives liberals a bad name. Simpson, for those of you who don't remember, was appointed (along with Democratic Senator Erskine Bowles) by President Obama to co-chair his Catfood Commission, intended to provide a rationale for the destruction of Social Security and other vital social programs in the name of lowering the Federal deficit.  Though on one level it failed -- the Commission couldn't muster the votes needed to ratify the desired conclusions -- on another level it succeeded, for the co-chairs wrote their own report, which President Obama and most other politicians and the corporate media media accepted as the "conclusions" of the Commission.  Despite this, "during the spring of 2012, a Budget Resolution based in part on the Simpson-Bowles plan was voted on in the House of Representatives. The plan was voted down 382-38" (via).  A later consequence was the "sequester," which imposed spending cuts that were deplored by just about everyone, including its chief architect.  As you can see, it's not so impossibly difficult for Democrats and Republicans to laugh together after all, as long as they're laughing at the plight of the general public under their policies.

But enough of the dead past.  Professor Reich is, I must say, confused.  No one is obligated to respect anyone else's point of view, only to respect their right to hold and express their point of view.  As the philosopher Paul Feyerabend put it,

Nor does one become illiberal when denying truth to a Puritan. Liberalism ... is a doctrine about institutions and not about individual beliefs. It does not regulate individual beliefs, it says that nothing may be excluded from the debate. A liberal is not a mealymouthed wishy-washy nobody who understands nothing and forgives everything, he is a man or a woman with occasionally quite strong and dogmatic beliefs among them the belief that ideas must not be removed by institutional means. Thus, being a liberal, I do not have to admit that Puritans have a chance of finding truth. All I am required to do is to let them have their say and not to stop them by institutional means. But of course I may write pamphlets against them and ridicule them for their strange opinions.

I don't consider myself a liberal except in the limited sense Feyerabend adumbrated here.  (It comes from his reply to criticism from his fellow-philosopher Ernest Gellner, which -- the reply, I mean -- was reprinted in Feyerabend's Science in a Free Society [Verso, 1978].)  Reich, however, does, and as a political scientist he should know better than his remarks indicate.

I myself have friends whose politics are sharply opposed to mine.  I don't pretend to respect their opinions, nor do I expect them to respect mine.  In general we agree to disagree, and if we enjoy each other's company we can agree not to discuss our differences.  This can become tiresome in time, and it has its perils.  The Peck's Bad Boy of academia, Stanley Fish, toured college campuses with the corrupt right-wing political hack Dinesh D'Souza in 1991-1992, debating Political Correctness and similar chimerae.  Fish remarked (I believe it was in the book where his half of the debate was published) that they got along well, to the extent that Fish danced at D'Souza's wedding.  That's touching, I guess, but Fish allowed their bud-ship to compromise his critical judgment, when a decade later he contributed a blurb to one of D'Souza's books, calling it "witty, informed, learned and lively," committing four errors in five words.

There have been quite a few famous odd-couple friendships that crossed political or other divides.  Hunter S. Thompson and Pat Buchanan were drinking buddies.  Need I mention James Carville and Mary Matalin?  The writer Brendan Gill and the academic Joseph Campbell were friends for many years despite Campbell's racism and anti-Semitism, though unlike Reich, Gill didn't feel obligated to respect his friend's point of view:

His bigotry with respect to Jews was of an equal odiousness [equal to the bigotry he displayed toward blacks, which included agitating -- unsuccessfully -- against their admission to the college where he taught] and seemingly uneradicable.  By the time I came to know him, he had learned to conceal a few of its grosser manifestations, but there can be no doubt that it existed ... He avoided manifesting his anti-Semitism in my presence in order to avoid my attacking him, but a friend we had in common told me that Campbell, proud to be a member of the New York Athletic Club, often recounted the tricky means by which Jews were prevented from becoming members.  This was ironic because, apparently unbeknownst to Campbell, the New York Athletic Club in earlier days had been every bit as violently opposed to Irish Catholics as to Jews.  Campbell's father had been in a position to arrange for his son to become a member only because, in the Great Depression, the club had come so close to bankruptcy that its WASP members had grudgingly consented to elect the first of an army of what they called "the Irish swine" [Gill, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others (Poseidon Press, 1990), 48-49; bold type mine].

I've shown insufficient respect to my own racist friends, which they reciprocated.  One, for example, a woman a few years younger than I who attended the same high school, was fond of posting racist memes on Facebook.  I criticized the memes, and her for posting them, to her indignation.  But we continued chatting with each other online, pleasantly enough, mostly about our respective sex lives.  I said I'd take her out to lunch the next time I came up that way.  Last winter she was in a terrible auto accident that nearly killed her, and the posting and the conversations stopped while she was in a coma in the hospital.  But a few weeks later, the racist postings resumed, and after some hesitation I decided that if she'd recovered enough to post this crap, she'd recovered enough to take heat for it.  She was, again, indignant: Why do you have to keep talking about politics? she demanded.  I replied that if she didn't want to talk about politics, she shouldn't post political stuff to her timeline.  She unfriended me, as did a mutual friend who said I was being mean to her and I needed to develop a sense of humor.  I have a sense of humor, but I was being mean to her, just as I'd be mean to anyone who talked about shooting Mexicans for the target practice.  Maybe Robert Reich wouldn't like my attitude, but it seems to me that not being mean is a two-way street.  I suppose that Simpson keeps his politics out of their socializing.  Since my friend refused to do so with me, I saw and see no reason to respect her point of view -- more important, no reason not to disagree with her.

This has some suggestive implications for some recent controversies, such as the protests against Condoleezza Rice's delivering a commencement address at Rutgers, which have engendered an ocean of crocodile tears about freedom of speech among the chattering classes.  (No doubt the same people who declared their intention to protest a commencement address by Eric Holder at a police academy in Oklahoma City, leading Holder to back out.  And no, I hadn't heard about it either, until I read the Los Angeles Times article I just linked to.  RWA1, for one, who was furious about the opposition to Rice's appearance, was silent about that one.)

How much respect am I obliged to give to people whose opinions I not only disagree with but oppose?  As I asked not long ago, must I vote for a Tea Party Republican political candidate just because he happens to be gay?  Are liberal-ish gay political groups required to endorse and support such a person, just because he happens to be gay?  Must I buy Condoleezza Rice's books just to show how even-handed and open I am to differing views?  How about the works of Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Ann Coulter?  Must I subscribe to, say, The National Review?  And if I must, aren't all the right-wingers I know obligated to subscribe to The Nation or In These Times, and to invite Eric Holder or Hillary Clinton to speak at their alma mater's commencement?  No, freedom of speech is all very well, but that would be going too far.

I do business with RWA1, despite his politics; I've even worked, part-time and irregularly, for him from time to time.  But I also disagree with him, as he disagrees with me.  I have no idea whether he respects me or my opinions; I know that I don't respect his.  I suppose there's some mutual personal respect, but that doesn't seem to oblige us to treat each other's politics with kid gloves.

On the other hand, the blogger Ampersand was upset during the Brendan Eich controversy when a new GMO-free grocery was targeted for boycott, because the owners had posted on their Facebook page that they opposed same-sex marriage and "one of the store’s co-owners linked to a libertarian article arguing that stores should have the legal right to refuse to serve gay customers."  It seems to me that since the owners took pains to state their beliefs publicly, it's acceptable for gay and pro-gay potential customers to react to those beliefs.  In particular, if the owners of a business declare publicly that they want the "right" not to serve me, I have the right to take them at their word, and not give them my business.  If they don't want my money, far be it from me to give it to them!

I haven't been able to find the comment by someone who attacked other people for seeking out people with unacceptable views to pick on.  This is a common distracting tactic, I've found.  But no one cornered the owners of that grocery and grilled them about the purity of their politics: they went out of their way to publicize their views.   What do same-sex marriage and sexual orientation have to do with running an organic food mart?  We queers are often accused of dragging our sexuality into everything, usually by people who are obsessed with our sexuality and won't shut up about it.  (We're also often accused of looking for bigotry.  Alas, we don't need to go looking for it -- it comes looking for us.)

Ampersand drew a distinction between choosing not to patronize a business whose owners have views one abhors (which is okay) and making others aware of the owners' abhorrent views and presenting a more or less united front of people who choose not to patronize that business (which is not okay); I'm having trouble grasping where the difference lies.  It's not as if we're talking about someone's personal, privately-held political beliefs; we're talking about someone's beliefs that they publicized on their business's Facebook page, thus advertising their politics along with their business.  It's they who chose to connect their business and their politics. Ampersand argued that a boycott is not a good way to persuade the owners that they're wrong; well, an antigay declaration on Facebook is not a good way to persuade potential customers to patronize one's business. One commenter complained that a boycott isn't meant to persuade but to coerce and punish; I think he's right, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a bad thing.  Again, Ampersand doesn't mind my taking my money elsewhere, and I wouldn't be doing that to persuade them either.

Along the same lines, am I being punitive if I run for office against an incumbent because of his or her policies?  Or even if I work in the campaign of their political opponent, or merely vote for someone else? Wouldn't I do better to try to persuade Alan Simpson or Hillary Clinton to change their views, instead of punishing them by throwing (or keeping) them out of office?  This may seem absurd, but remember the right-wingers who say exactly this about right-wing gay or female candidates: their critics and opponents are hypocrites who don't really believe in diversity, or we'd vote for them!  And it's not that far from the Dems who attacked Obama's left critics by accusing them of racism, of giving aid and comfort to the Rethugs, of not voting and of trying to stop others from voting.  I have no doubt that we'll see the same behavior in 2016 if Hillary Rodham Clinton runs for the Presidency.  The idea that one could vote for a candidate, perhaps as the lesser evil, yet still point out their faults, is unthinkable to party loyalists.  I think Reich is probably coming from a similar place.

I'm not sure there's a correct solution to this, in the same sense as the right answer to an arithmetical sum; we need to think about it, and discuss it, if possible with the people on the other side.  That's why it's bad when a Condoleezza Rice or a Brendan Eich or an Eric Holder refuses to engage in debate, just takes their ball and bat and runs home.  Luckily, the debate goes on anyway, without them.

What We Got Here Is a Failure to Communicate

I guess I'd better get back to work.  I recently read an intriguing little book called Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013) by Brian Leiter.  The title is a bit misleading, since it suggests that religion shouldn't be tolerated at all.  But Leiter's main question is whether religion should be singled out (as it is in the US) for special protection from state interference, compared to other claims of conscience.  He begins by citing a recent Canadian legal case involving a Sikh teenager who demanded that he should be allowed to carry his kirpan, the ceremonial dagger that every adult Sikh male is required to have on his person at all times, in school.  In the end the youth won his case.

But now suppose [Leiter continues] that our fourteen-year-old boy is not a Sikh but a boy from a rural family whose life "on the land" goes back many generations.  As in almost all cultures, this boy's community has rituals marking the arrival of maturity for males in that community.  A central one is the passing of a dagger or knife from father to son, across the generations.  To be a "man" at the age of thirteen or fourteen is to receive that dagger from one's father, just as he received it from his, and so on, stretching back for decades, perhaps centuries.  A boy's identity as a man his community turns on his always carrying the family knife, for it marks his maturity and his bond with the past.  There can be no doubt in this case about the conscientious obligation every boy of knife-bearing age feels to carry his knife with him, even in school.  And there can be no doubt that were his ability to carry his knife abridged, his identity as a man devoted to his community would be destroyed.

There is no Western democracy at present, in which the boy in our second scenario has prevailed or would prevail in a challenge to a general prohibition on the carrying of weapons in the school [2-3].

Leiter seems to overlook something here: the hypothetical second boy wouldn't be the only one wearing his family knife in school, and so he probably wouldn't have trouble as long as he lived in his ancestral community.  He'd only be prohibited from carrying it if his family moved to another community with different manhood rituals, much as the Sikh boy's family had done.

But the basic point is strong, especially since many religions -- at one time, all of them -- are about communities and their norms and rituals.  Israelite religion and Hinduism are well-known examples, but the same would be true of Greek and Roman paganism.  The rituals are often older than the myths that rationalize them.   At some point there emerged religions like Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, missionary religions that sought adherents in a variety of cultures.  But once transplanted, they often grafted on rituals of the old gods, like "Christmas" trees.  Leiter's second boy's knife is by older standards every bit as "religious" as a kirpan.

That doesn't undermine Leiter's argument, though, because in the modern West there is a distinction drawn between religion and other principles that guide conduct and demand adherence.  Why, Leiter asks, should this be so?  What makes religion so special, so privileged?  He never quite answers the question, but I think he'd agree that the burden of argument lies on the person who advocates special privilege for religious claims of conscience.  Along the way he grapples with the definition of religion, and mainly succeeds in showing that it's impossible to draw a sharp line between religion and non-religion, though I think he's satisfied with the distinction he draws.  (He puts a heavy emphasis on faith, construed as attachment to beliefs and demands of conscience that "do not answer ultimately to (or at the limit) to evidence and reason, as these are understood in other domains concerned with knowledge of the world" [34].  He admits that this isn't specific to religion -- for example, "We are, all us, in the grips of a multitude of false beliefs" [76],  though I'm not sure he fully recognizes how universal it is, especially in matters of morality.)

One of his most interesting discussions, to my mind, is on respect.  Philosophers recognize two main kinds of respect: the less demanding can be called "recognition respect," as when I respect your right to hold your beliefs even if I disagree with the beliefs themselves, and I recognize that they're important to you; the more demanding is "affirmation respect," as when I'm expected to agree that your beliefs are totally cool.  He quotes an article by the philosopher Simon Blackburn, who

tells the story of being invited to dinner at a colleague's home and then being asked to participate in a religious observance prior to dinner.  He declined, though his colleague said participating was merely a matter of showing "respect."  His host seems to have viewed this as a matter of simple recognition respect, but Blackburn interprets it (perhaps rightly) as something more:

I would not be expected to respect the beliefs of flat earthers or those of the people who believed that the Hale-Bopp comet was a recycling facility for dead Californians who killed themselves in order to join it.  Had my host stood up and asked me to toast the Hale-Bopp hopefuls, or to break bread or some such in token of fellowship with them, I would have been just as embarrassed and indeed angry.  I lament and regret the holding of such beliefs, and I despise the features of humanity that make them so common.  I wish people were different [74].

I must read Blackburn's paper, because it sounds to me as though he's confused about the distinction between respecting people's rights to hold their beliefs and respecting the beliefs himself; but his host appears to have been just as confused in the same way.  As Leiter later remarks, it's not clear that a Jewish shabbos prayer is on the same level as the Hale-Bopp cultists, but even so, if I'd been in Blackburn's shoes I wouldn't have been "embarrassed and indeed angry" when asked to participate, though I'd still have declined to do so.  Like a good many of my fellow atheists, Blackburn seems to overreact to other people's beliefs and practices even when they practice in their own homes.  I have been invited to meals where my hosts prayed before eating, and I simply sit quietly until they're done praying.  It is disrespectful of someone's unbelief to expect him or her to participate in one's ritual, though many spiritual tourists delight in doing so.  Politeness and respect -- recognition respect -- need to go in both directions.  Both Judaism and Christianity have traditions of martyrdom rather than participating in non-Yahwist rituals, like burning a pinch of incense before an image of Caesar.  C'mon, would it have killed them to show a little respect?  Blackburn complains about what he calls "respect creep," where "the request for thin toleration turns into a demand for more substantial respect, such as fellow-feeling, or esteem, and finally deference and reverence" (quoted by Leiter, 75), and that's a valid complaint, but I get the feeling he wants some respect creep in his own direction.  As I say, I'll have to read his paper.

But this anecdote shows just why even minimal recognition respect, let alone maximal affirmation respect, is problematical.  Blackburn's host refused to extend to him, as an unbeliever, the recognition respect necessary not to demand that he participate in prayer, and Blackburn seems to have overreacted to finding himself seated at a table with believers who, reasonably enough, expected to pray.  Did he expect them to go further, and forego the shabbos prayer because an apikoros was present?  I'd call that a failure in even "thin tolerance."

There's more to Why Tolerate Religion?, and I'll get back to it in due time.

Sock It to Me?

Funny thing: I don't remember Democrats showing George W. Bush some f*cking respect when he was President, and yet he was their President too.  There was the Chimp meme; there was the fake Nostradamus verse about the village idiot ascending to the seat of power; there was the fussing over his inability to say "nuclear"; and so much more. 

This isn't to deny that the output of the Republican hate machine exceeds the output of the Democratic hate machine in virulence, or that the Republican vitriol doesn't get an extra punch from racism.  It's just to say that if the President should be treated with respect (not to say reverence) simply because he's the President, then Obama fans are in no position to cast the first stone.

I don't think the Office of the Presidency should be reverenced, however, as I've said before.  The President isn't King -- though many Americans clearly miss having royalty -- and disrespect for the office isn't lèse majesté.

This bit from the Canadian political philosopher Michael Neumann is more relevant:

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.

So you could argue that the kind of abuse that Americans level at their presidents shouldn't be directed at anybody, but that goes against every tradition of political discourse and human interaction.  And few people really care about it except when a president they like is on the receiving end.  The attitude expressed in the image above would be more impressive if it came from a Republican, or if a Democrat spoke up during a Republican administration.

But Only God Can Make an Oaf

[I've continued this post since I posted it last night.]

Marilynne Robinson isn't totally useless, if only to argue with.  Yes, I'm still slogging through When I Was a Child I Read Books, and I'm now in the second essay, "Imagination and Community," which contains this nugget on page 24:

From time to time I, as a professor in a public university, receive a form from the legislature asking me to make an account of the hours I spend working. I think someone ought to send a form like that to the legislators. The comparison might be very interesting.

But you know, lots of people could have written that.  Having delivered herself of one pithy observation, Robinson returns to bloviating.  On the same page:

In fact, we in America have done pretty well.  By human standards, which admittedly are low.

Where will you find higher ones?  Among paramecia?  I suppose she means divine standards, since she goes on to prattle about the importance of "overlapping communities," but first she'd have to be able to find them.

I identify with my congregation, with my denomination, with Christianity, with the customs and institutions that express the human capacity for reverence, allowing for turbulence within these groups and phenomena.  Since we are human beings, turbulence is to be expected ... Those of us who accept a historical tradition find ourselves being burdened with its errors and excesses, especially when we are pressed to make some account of them.  I would suggest that those who reject the old traditions on those grounds are refusing to accept the fact that  the tragic mystery of human nature has by no means played itself out, and that wisdom, which is almost always another name for humility, lies in accepting one's inevitable share in human fallibility [26-27].

The trouble with reverence is that it's almost always selective.  The original Christian reverence, for example, entailed irreverence, to put it mildly, toward "the old traditions" of Judaism and the old gods of the "pagans."  In that respect, as I've suggested before, the scientistic secularists at whom Robinson looks down her nose are arguably the true heirs not just of the primitive Church but of the fire-and-brimstone revivalists of the glory days of American religion.  Like their religious predecessors, they take pleasure in knocking the stuffing out of Man's pretension: You think you're at the center of the universe? Ha! You think you're a special creation? Why, you're just descended from apes!  "The wisdom of the world is foolishness before God," Paul gloated in his first epistle to the Corinthians (3:19), as Robinson must surely know, and that quip doesn't stand alone in the New Testament.  He wasn't just talking about the worldly, but about "the Jews" to whom a crucified Messiah was a scandal (1 Corinthians 1:23).  Humility is in notably short supply in the early Christian writers, as is civility.  The first Christians gleefully threw out all kinds of traditions, which led to their being called atheists because they refused reverence to the old gods, and it wasn't for a century or more that some began to yearn for worldly philosophical respectability, and began mixing Plato into their theology.  Robinson tries to smooth out these little "turbulences" in the service of her agenda, but they're important.

Later in the essay she mentions the social movements of the Sixties, but she doesn't seem to want to remember how disruptive they were, how at odds with the sweet reasonableness and civility and humility she values -- to say nothing of reverence for old traditions.  "Just at that time the great social transformation began, set in motion by Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, which called into doubt the whole system of discrimination that had governed most lives, not only in America but throughout the world" (29).  Of course those "transformations" had begun long before, and it's no disparagement of Parks and King to point out that they didn't "set [them] in motion" but rode, like surfers, on waves that others had churned up.  For someone who claims to value learning, Robinson is notably and tendentiously ignorant about her subjects.  She really needs to attend to the beam in her own eye before poking at the specks in others'.

My own style of atheism avowedly steals from any older wisdom that looks helpful, whether it's called religious or not, since religion is a human invention, and I am heir to all human cultures, for better or worse.  (So are you.)  I agree with Robinson on the importance of humility, and I think that looking at what other human beings have said and thought and done will make you humble, because it's virtually impossible to find any bright new idea that wasn't thought of someone else before, probably a couple of thousand years ago.  On one hand, my predecessors' feet of clay entitle me to look at their works critically; on the other, they remind me that I'm human too, and as prone to embarrassing error.  Judge (as Walter Kaufmann modified Jesus' exhortation), so that you may be judged.