(via the Guardian) Evidently, documents have surfaced that show that Israel offered to sell the Apartheid regime in South Africa the bomb in the mid 1970s.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Save Middlesex Philosophy
In light of what's happening at Middlesex University in the UK (read about it here and here), I thought I would re-post the following. It's no less relevant now than it was a couple of months ago.
===
We must adapt universities (and perhaps thought itself) to the demands of contemporary capitalism. That's Mark C. Taylor's thesis, anyway, in his recent addition to the trash-heap of shoddy Op/Ed's published by the NyTimes.
Taylor's entire approach proceeds by uncritically (or worse, unknowingly) accepting the demands and coordinates of contemporary capitalism. Little is said explicitly about the role of the university in society or the way in which current university arrangements and departments are the sedimentation of past (and ongoing) economic and political struggles. It is entirely unclear whether Taylor even grasps that there really is this thing, capitalism, out there in the world and that the university is located within a society structured in this way. Yet, at every step in his essay, capitalism is there implicitly giving force to the demands and imperatives he puts forward.
The university, he warns in a moment of anti-intellectualism, is "producing products for which there are no markets." Let's pick this sentence apart. First of all, why should we accept that the aim of graduate education in universities is primarily to produce products, and moreover why should the goal or function of universities be to sculpt these sorts of products in a way that accords with the demands of multinational capitalism? Why not ask instead, as any critical intellectual must, what is it about our society (and the role of intellectuals and institutions of higher learning within them) such that there isn't a "high demand" for much of what intellectuals do? Why not critically 'deconstruct' the social/political functioning of the markets in question, rather than taking them as given? And where's the argument for why intellectuals must subordinate themselves to capitalist markets at all?
If critical thought brushes against the grain of the official justification of the dominant order, Taylor's approach is decidedly uncritical.
What's abundantly clear throughout Taylor's piece is that he has little grasp of how economic and political power is diffused throughout contemporary US universities or what place they have in society more broadly. Quoting an obscure bit from a minor Kant text, as he does in a particularly pedantic moment in the essay, isn't going to cut it. Since when is Kant (writing in 1789 in Taylor's example) the authority on 'mass' anything? Taylor lambastes his colleagues for studying Duns Scotus, but nonetheless cites a quote from Kant that's meant to pertain to the particulars of a topic about which Kant couldn't have said anything interesting since he died long before the coordinates of mass markets and multinational capitalism came to define social life. (I'm hardly saying we've nothing to learn from Kant in navigating contemporary states of affairs, but let's not pretend he got the last word on mass market culture or finance capital).
To be sure, it might sound as though Taylor really does have economic matters in focus since he often mentions the fact that colleges and universities are facing an economic crisis. But he offers no analysis of why there is a crisis. Nor does he ever consider the ways in which the sources of funding for universities might affect the way that they function. In short, he offers no analysis of the role institutions of higher learning play in contemporary capitalist societies.
It's a pity he doesn't inquire as to why his Religion department, for instance, has 10 measly faculty members while the economics department probably has 25-30. Or ask why does the business school get oodles of cash while the humanities wither? Contrary to Taylor's favored mode of explanation, the answer to these questions has little to do with the dispositions and predilections of academics, but rather with the place of intellectual life within contemporary societies ruled largely by the demands of profit margins. As far as I can tell, Taylor is either painfully ignorant of this relationship, or chooses to remain silent on the central problem of intellectual life today.
Why should Universities simply accept the cuts that are being implemented? Why not fight them? Taylor assumes they are as natural as the onset of spring weather, as when he asks "why not adapt?" But why should intellectuals, who are employed precisely to think outside of the boxes of balance sheets and quarterly dividends, adapt to such a state of affairs? Why should knowledge itself be subordinated to the narrow demands of a system that values everything instrumentally insofar as it produces profit?
Of course, there are many nuanced points to make about the problematic (and arbitrary) nature of departmental distinctions and how they obscure the sort of interdisciplinary work that challenges prevailing assumptions rather than taking them as immovable starting points (e.g. try talking about commodity fetishism to an economics department in the US). But Taylor doesn't really have anything to say here that is interesting or helpful. Suggesting that we create a "Water Studies" program isn't anything but an exemplification of his ignorance of all the concrete, institutional and economic conditions that impact the university in contemporary societies. How will changed curricula impact the money that universities get? How will, for example, making all departments fair game for abolition not simply expose them to the punishing logic of neoliberalism (i.e. keep only those disciplines which are 'useful' or are amenable to capitalism and profit-maximization)? Also, who will get to decide what all of these 'problem-oriented' disciplines will be? State legislatures doing the 'regulating' that Taylor speaks so highly of (without filling out in concrete terms)? Back in the 1960s, those on the Left used to critically engage the University itself as an 'ideological state apparatus' and make radical calls for the democratic self-management of universities by faculty and students (i.e. not by a caste of administrative bureaucrats and ex-capitalists). But Taylor seems to be saying instead: "embrace the role of ideological state apparatus and don't ask too many pesky questions about this role."
An example of this tendency is when Taylor proposes that "consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses". But why should we, as critical intellectuals, accept that 'real life' is merely a matter of adopting a post at any old business? Its only for the neoliberal that 'real life' consists of the fluctuations of finance markets and the demands of corporate capitalism. Taylor appears quite happy to enlist himself up with this way of proceeding. Why not, alternatively, challenge the existing order rather than lapping it up as given?
Taylor's pot-shots at tenure seem like little more than anti-intellectual posturing, a favorite hat of academics writing nonsense about academia in the NyTimes (see: Stanley Fish).
Consider his suggestions: Mandatory retirement and the abolishment of tenure. How about crushing what few graduate student unions there are as well! Let's subject all of those lazy academics to market forces! He seems to completely misunderstand the fact that tenure is primarily about the relationship of the intellectual to society, and its justification is largely political. What alternative does he offer that serves this purpose? None. He only takes shots at older academics who crowd out younger ones by maintaining their posts for a long time. This is a problem, to be sure, but it is completely unclear why the facile proposals of ending tenure and enforcing retirement are warranted as solutions. What about Eric Hobsbawm, for example, who is in his 80s but has been publishing important books like crazy for the last 10 years? Should he be forced into retirement and stripped of tenure? What about Habermas? Should he get booted from his university post in Frankfurt because he's quite old, even though he continues to write dense philosophical texts as well as teach and lecture?
Taylor's suggestions belong at a Religion departmental meeting, not in print. Certainly not in the NYTimes
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Nice article skewering decifit-hawking
Read the article here.
What's all this "we" when people talk about the deficit? It's not as though Goldman Sachs talks in terms of "we" when they're deciding how to divide up quarterly profits. As Joel Geier put it in a recent ISR article, "The debt bubble has not be solved, it has merely been transferred from private hands to the state... The state nationalized private capitalist debt". Large capitalist firms externalized the costs of their risky speculative behaviors by moving their toxic assets from their rolls to the state. But they sure aren't externalizing their profits any time soon.
It's not as though there isn't lots of wealth in this society: the annual amount spent "rescuing" ailing financial institutions on the one hand, and in useless foreign occupation and war on the other, is enough to fully fund, many times over, things lie single-payer, plug state budget shortfalls, etc.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Obama is the DLC Democrat Par Excellence
This was penned right after Obama won the election. It's incredible how closely his administration has followed the DLC line put forward by Galston.
It's almost as though they took Galston's advice and implemented it 100%.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Return of Eugenics
I'm only writing this post because my genes are configured in a particular way. At least that's the view of the social world that we get from crude, pseudo-scientific bullshit like the views pedaled in this article on marriage.
What is scientific about the suggestions and innuendo in this article? I'm not sure. Science proceeds by putting forward hypotheses, while attempting to show that the available evidence is explained well by these hypotheses. What reasons have we to think that immutable facts of our genetic makeup explain social phenomena? Very few. It's rather obvious to anyone doing serious work in social science or psychology that the pseudo-scientific speculation pedaled in books like The Selfish Gene is false. It is also worth pointing out that even the connection between behavior and "breed" in dogs is not well-understood by scientists. If pressed, any of the charlatans penning "pop-science" books on the tight connection between genes and social phenomena will concede that what they're saying is wild speculation.
But there are more important questions to ask here. In particular, what is it about our society that makes eugenic views so convenient and apparently plausible? We must keep in mind here that the current vogue of eugenics and genetic-determinist ideas about social/political phenomena has nothing to do with evidence or facts.
Genetic-determinist "theories" are simple and easy to state. They are free of the complications that, sorry to say, are in fact parts of social phenomena. But most importantly, these ideas fit neatly and cleanly into existing configurations of power. There is no friction between them and the status quo.
Thus we find these "theories" in popular outlets like the NYTimes because they are ways of making sense of the social world that suggest that things are as they should be. The message is clear: if we're hardwired to be racists... why struggle against such things? If certain "races" are genetically predisposed to behave in certain ways... why aim for political equality? If women are genetically hardwired such that they are deferential and conventionally "feminine", then why criticize existing gender norms and hierarchies? This could go on and on.
I don't think that therapists and psychoanalysts have been wrong to focus on family history and other contingent features of a life when interpreting drives, desires and neuroses. Nor have social theorists been wrong to focus on big structural features of societies when they think about institutions like marriage and how they change over time.
It is far from obvious to me that considerations of this sort should be alien to an examination of "marriage stability". Are we to think that, for example, severe economic hardship has no real implications for the stability of a marriage?
Moreover, political theorists and historians have not been wrong to examine the ways in which changes in societies, political configurations and so on often track political struggles directed towards changing them. The Womens' Movement of the 60s and 70s, for example, radically changed the way that Americans think about heterosexual marriage relations. Moreover, the black liberation struggles of the 1950s and 60s shattered a certain configuration of power in the South that was basically a form of apartheid. Of course, racism and sexual oppression still persist in potent forms, but it is undeniable that things have changed quite a bit since the suffocating conformism and patriarchy of the 1950s. And, most importantly, the reason they changed had to do with active political struggles on the part of the oppressed, NOT genetic configurations causing people to act in certain ways rather than others.
But if you accept the genetic-determinist story... why struggle? Why think that social relations could change? If the genetic-determinist account tries to say that can also explain why people struggle against certain configurations of power, then it just looks entirely ad hoc and incapable of being falsified. This brings out, I think, just how speculative and underspecified these approaches are and, thus, why they are so dangerous. They can give a "scientific" veneer of credibility to whatever you like: racism, sexism, you name it.
I'm not suggesting that there aren't any facts about human psychology or behavior that derive from natural features of our constitution. On the contrary- we have certain naturally given capacities in virtue of which we are human. But our faculties and capacities include the ability to reflect on reasons for which we act, and to choose whether or not to endorse such reasons.
Having a set of capacities and faculties that are natural in no way entails that our behavior must be regular and predictable, or worse, determined (without our knowing it) by our genetic makeup. On the contrary- human behaviors are malleable: we adapt to different environments and change as a result of those environments. That is, after all, what the content of evolutionary theory actually is: random mutations render certain organisms more fit in a particular environment, and if that environment changes, they may no longer be as fit, and hence, as favorably placed to reproduce. It is not as though the environment is "determined" by the genes themselves.
But again, I must stress the non-scientific character of the "sociobiology" or "genetic-determinist" phenomenon in recent years. It is not a full-fledged scientific research program: it is window-dressing for the status quo. It is a set of ideas that purport to show that all is well in the world and that it couldn't be otherwise. Ideology is at its strongest when it convinces people that contingent, malleable features of social life are inevitable and natural. Why think of resisting what could not be changed?
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Friday, April 30, 2010
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Traditional Embrace and Sexism
From Elizabeth Anderson's Value and Ethics in Economics (p.18):
"West European and North American societies lack adequate normative vehicles for expressing heterosexual affection on egalitarian terms, although many members of these societies seek to establish loving relationships on such terms. Norms for bodily contact between heterosexual lovers- for example, that the man may express his affection by wrapping his arm around his lover, or by leading her on the dance floor- also express a status hierarchy in which the man is the protector and leader, the woman the dependent follower" (Anderson cites Tannen (1990) here).
Saturday, April 24, 2010
"Our Founding Fathers"
(I read about the following in Ahmed Shawki's Black Liberation and Socialism):
James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both expressed misgivings (and sometimes rhetorical opposition) to the institution of slavery. There was even some disagreement about the issue of slavery among the US ruling class in the 1790s.
But despite the personal misgivings either Madison or Jefferson may or may not have had, their rationale for upholding slavery as a national economic institution could not be clearer. As Jefferson saw it, the "cost" of abolishing slavery was much higher than whatever "benefits" it might provide for the ruling class. He writes: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation on the other".
James Madison, likewise, declared that slavery was a "moral, political and economical evil". But Madison didn't stop there, he quickly followed up with qualifications. Despite this evil, he argued, "there could be much improvement" in slave culture, "particularly where slaves are held in small numbers by good masters and managers". More importantly, he added, the "costs" outweighed the "benefits" for the ruling class.
If there were no slaves, Madison asked, "will you [i.e. members of the ruling class] cultivate the land yourself? Then beware of the difficulty of procuring faithful and complying laborers. Will you dispose of its leases? Ask those who have made the experiment what sort of tenants are to be found where an ownership of the soil is so attainable".
Note the dispassionate, cold, calculating character of the arguments. They acknowledge that the enslavement of human beings is morally repugnant... but their final arguments have nothing whatsoever to do with human beings. Their resting argument could be expressed in quantitative terms, with numbers and equations. Concern for human beings as such doesn't enter into their calculations at all.
The Jefferson/Madisonian reasoning seems to be this. "We" (i.e. the ruling class) would like to maintain our ruling status. In order to do this, we need to find a way to best invest our present holdings such that we can get steady, maximally large returns. "Procuring faithful and complying laborers" is difficult to do. Hence we should maintain the institution of slavery in order to secure a steady source of profits and power.
This instrumentalizing, objectifying way of thinking about human beings characteristic of industrial capitalism (what Lukacs and others came to call "reification"), was what Martin Luther King, Jr. was picking up when he said:
When I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are tied together...A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will "thingify" them, make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments... and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together. What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say "America, you must be born again!".
Friday, April 16, 2010
Arundhati Roy Interview on the Struggles in Central India
(again, via Lenin's Tomb): read/view more here.
No Less True in the USA
(via Lenin's Tomb) Labour's spending cuts pledge: "We'll cut your throat slowly, the others will cut your head off."
Nice, isn't it? It accurately describes the difference between the Democrats and Republicans here. On the one hand, we have a purportedly "progressive" party that cuts us into pieces slowly (or quickly in some cases)... and an opposing party that always goes straight for the beheading.
Sunday, April 11, 2010
Bernard Williams on the Idea of Equality
I recently read Bernard Williams's classic essay "The Idea of Equality" and thought I would share what I took away from it.
In my view, the clear upshot of the essay is that most of the usual objections to equality rely upon misconceptions about what equality requires. It seems to me that there are two objections in particular that the essay shows to be unfounded. The first holds that the idea of equality is absurd (since "people are not, in fact, equal"), the second that equality is trivial (because "the mere fact that we're all human doesn't entail any political vision whatever").
The familiar right-wing mantra about equality is that "it's just a fact that people are different in their abilities, so egalitarian politics is fundamentally misconceived." In other words: "people aren't created equal... they have different amounts of talent and ability, and political claims to equality simply ignore this fact". This is more of a card-trick than an argument.
It's an open question what exactly the fact of human differences in talent actually means. I would say that the range of different abilities between us are rather small in proportion to what we share in common. But even the standard deviation is quite large, you cannot unproblematically move from observing certain inequalities (be they social or "natural") to the claim that these inequalities should be the justification for social/political hierarchies. That's a bait and switch.
A statement to the effect that people are not equal in abilities, say, does not entail that people should not be morally or politically equal. By moral or political equality, I mean the kind of equality wherein all people, insofar as they are people, are owed equal consideration or are owed equal standing (or an equal voice) in matters of politics, law, and so on. If you disagree, then you should have no problem saying that people who are extraordinarily good at tennis, say, should have more votes than others who aren't so talented. It's not even clear that such a claim would make sense. Quite obviously, one kind of inequality simply doesn't follow from the other.
So, when egalitarians claim that all people are equal, they are not saying that all people are "equal in their skill, intelligence, strength or virtue". Instead, as Williams makes clear, the egalitarian claim is that all people are equal insofar as they are all people: "it is their common humanity that constitutes their equality".
Now this might strike you as trivially true. But I am with Williams in thinking that this claim still has unrealized critical potential.
For example, when Williams wrote this article (in the late 50s/early 60s) it was quite obviously not a trivial political claim (and, I would add, it is still non-trivial). As he himself points out, the deep-seated racial injustice of Jim Crow in the US was basically premised on the idea that black people were not people in the full sense. This is why the slogan "I am a man" had such critical bite and emancipatory power.
And this is only one example. History (as well as the present global order) is littered with hierarchical social formations in which political arrangements systematically neglected this obvious common humanity between people by treating some as though they didn't possess certain human capacities (e.g. the ability to speak a language, use tools, live in societies, feel pain and affection, the capacity for creativity, virtue and so on) that we all obviously possess.
And we should understand the arguments against common humanity for what they are: irrational rationalizations or ad hoc apologetics for political domination. That is, they aren't well-thought-through moral or political theories: they are merely window-dressing for domination and hierarchy. Thus, in the face of such views, it is surely not trivial to reassert the "apparent platitude that all people are, in fact, human".
But if we all share a common humanity, what would it mean to respect someone as a common human being? What political content does this claim have?
Let's consider first what it wouldn't mean. To respect (or relate to) someone merely as an occupant of a certain given social role, status or title would not yet be to respect them as a person. This technical or professional attitude or way of seeing others is deeply flawed and limiting: whereas this attitude regards others solely in terms of titles of this kind, a "human approach would regard others as persons who happen to have a certain title (among others), willingly, unwillingly, through lack of alternatives, with pride, etc." Respecting people as fellow human beings would not be to regard them "merely under professional, social or technical titles, but with consideration of their own views and purposes". In other words, the human approach "enjoins us not to let our fundamental attitudes toward others be dictated by the criteria of technical success or social position, and not to take them at the value carried by these titles and the structures in which these titles place them".
Now you might be tempted to read this suggestion to take a more "human approach" as implying that we should try to see other people and the roles they occupy from the "others' point of view", i.e. in light of their "own views and purposes". But this line of reasoning is fraught with difficulty. As Williams points out:"there are forms of exploiting men [sic] or degrading them which would be thought to be excluded by these notions, but which cannot be excluded merely by considering how the exploited or degraded men [sic] see the situation. For it is precisely a mark of extreme exploitation or degradation that those who suffer it do not see themselves differently from the ways that they are seen by the exploiters... they may in some cases acquiesce passively in the role for which they have been cast".
This is consonant with Malcolm X's powerful challenge to black people in the early 1960s: "who taught you to hate yourself?". The idea was that black people had, over time, come to internalize white supremacist norms in such a way that they needed to be cognitively liberated from an entire way of seeing the world that tended to justify (rather than resist) the white power structure. The same could be said about the way that women may internalize or are socialized into accept certain oppressive social roles that serve to maintain their continued oppression. In both cases, it is a condition of emancipation that the oppressed throw off the conceptual framework they've inherited from oppressive social conditions.
Williams argues here that "we evidently need something more than the precept that one should restrict and try to understand another man's [sic] consciousness of his [sic] own activities; it is also that one may not suppress or destroy that consciousness".
All of us, all human beings, are potentially conscious of how social structure influences our ideas about our role in society. But not everyone, as a matter of fact, is actually conscious in this way (this is why "consciousness raising" is an intelligible political activity). As Williams points out:"it is precisely one element in the notion of exploitation that such consciousness can be decreased by social action and the environment; we may add that it can similarly be increased... all human beings are capable of reflectively standing back from the roles and positions in which they are cast; and this reflective consciousness may be enhanced or diminished by their social condition".
One way that hierarchical political arrangements are maintained is by the idea of necessity: "the oppressed are made to believe that it is somehow foreordained or inevitable that there should be these orders; and this idea of necessity must be eventually undermined by the growth of people's reflective consciousness about their role, still more when it is combined with the thought that what they and the others have always thought about their roles in the system was the product of the social system itself".
From here Williams goes on to discuss what this understanding of equality would be mean if applied to basic social and economic institutions. Here again, Williams helpfully demolishes some conceptual confusions that often allow the Right to strawperson arguments for increased social/economic equality.
First, Williams starts off with a distinction between (1) inequality of need, and (2) inequality of merit, and thus: (1') goods demanded by need and (2') goods that can be earned by merit. Goods of the second sort typically have a competitive aspect lacking in the case of the first sort of goods that correspond to needs.
The example of (1) that Williams examines is the case of need for medical treatment. Williams holds that the structure of social institutions involved in delivering health care should be organized in such a way as to fulfill this basic function: the only proper ground of distribution of medical care is ill health, which is to say need.
Yet in many societies (e.g. the US, in spite of recent "reform") the possession of sufficient amounts of money becomes a necessary condition of actually receiving treatment. Williams argues that this is irrational. The good in question, medical care, is not like a trophy or a medal for winning a competition. It is indexed to human needs, and it does not make any sense whatsoever to ration medical care according to competitive ideas such as "merit" or "financial achievement" that are alleged to attach to the wealthy (side note: I register my skepticism that the wealthy and powerful are wealthy and powerful merely because of "merit").
Why is it irrational to structure health care institutions in this way? Because, Williams argues, this way of structuring health care (according to "merit") is not appropriate to the sort of thing health care is. We don't think of health care as a luxury, or privilege, or trophy-like achievement. That's simply not the sort of thing it is. If you want to understand the sort of good that medical care is, if you want to understand its proper function, you wouldn't think of it in the same way that we think of goods such as winning the Pulitzer Prize, for example. Medical care simply isn't the same sort of thing as a trophy or medal. Medical treatment attaches to human need, not to merit or competitive norms that we attach to, say, a bicycle race. The upshot is that we should organize health care institutions according to rational principles, viz. according to principles appropriate to the kind of good that medical care is.
The operative idea here is that there are different kinds of goods, and they should be distributed with these differences in mind. Conceptual clarity here helps to demolish the dismissive (and rather obtuse) attitude towards equality harbored by those on the Right. There are at least three kinds of goods relevant to our discussion here:
Importantly, the aim of these distinctions is to demolish the following Right wing "argument":The Left argues that everyone should have medical care and education, but that's like saying everyone should be allowed to win the Nobel Prize. It's just a fact that there are going to be winners and losers, and therefore we shouldn't try to secure, for example, health care for all.
It should be clear now why this "argument" is invalid: it conflates different kinds of goods and suggests (falsely) that medical treatment is the a similar good to winning a gold medal in the Olympics. There is no tension in thinking that, on the one hand, gold medals should be awarded on the basis of athletic achievement in a competition, and on the other that access to medical care should be distributed merely according to need. They are vastly different kinds of goods. And to think that they're the same is either to do something disingenuous and sneaky, or it's to be wildly mistaken about the sorts of things that gold medals and medical treatment are.
We need to distribute and value goods according to the sorts of good that they are. We should not assume that the exchange-value logic of capitalists markets is the only kind of value there is. Often this form of evaluation is totally inappropriate to many things we value (e.g. friendship, love, and so forth).
This mistake is submitted to severe scrutiny in Elizabeth Anderson's excellent Value in Ethics and Economics (Harvard: 1993). Her argument is that we value different things in different ways, according to the features of the thing in question. It would thus be a serious mistake to assume, as economists often do, that we value all things in precisely the same way (i.e. as satisfying mathematically equivalent "consumer preferences").
Thus Anderson attacks this way of thinking (common on the Right) that assumes that value is univocal and may be commonly measured by cash value. Different goods, Anderson argues, "differ in kind and quality: they differ not only in how much we should value them, but in how we should value them". Anderson thus concludes that everything shouldn't be put up for sale: universal commodification is irrational.
Consider the following example. Treating something like a commodity means asserting that its value can be expressed in a price. But this evaluative attitude is not appropriate to everything: we don't think its appropriate to put human beings up for sale because this fails to properly value them. Assigning exchange-values to human beings misunderstands what human beings are. Assigning a price to human life doesn't merely undervalue human beings: it misvalues them.
There are numerous other examples. Education, we tend to think, is a "primary social good" of the Rawlsian sort if there ever was one: education is something that every person wants, whatever else it is that they may want. And if that's true of the sort of thing it is, then it would be absurd to think that education should be commodified and subject to market forces. This would be misunderstand the kind of thing education is: education is not like an iphone or a luxury item. Assigning a market price to education and rationing it according to ability to pay is to misvalue education. Education is not a commodity, and thinking of it in these terms is to systematically distort its significance.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Notes on inclusive, egalitarian email attachment practices
Most people, understandably, simply default to whatever software happens to be installed on the computer they've purchased. So, when attaching documents in emails or circulating files of some sort or other, most of us just send out the default document type (no matter who the audience is).
But I want to suggest that we should be more conscious of what we're doing in these cases.
First of all, think about this. Say you have a brand new Macbook. If you simply default to whatever is standard on your computer, you are, in effect, demanding that everyone own the same computer as you.
One example is the "docx" format that is now becoming standard for new versions of Word.
If you send an attachment that is in this format to 100 people, for example, you're basically discriminating against people who don't have newer computers or the newest software. Of course, Microsoft is pleased with this exclusivity. But if you're an egalitarian you shouldn't have the same priorities as Microsoft and Apple.
There are plenty of other examples.
But in general, we should favor alternatives in order to not to reproduce the pressures to purchase expensive, unnecessary software that helps massive corporations make profits.
Try to send things in widely-available, free formats that do not require up-to-date, expensive, exclusive software. Don't require that everyone on the receiving end buy the newest products from Microsoft. Don't assume that everyone has a nice and new a computer as you do.
Send .pdfs. Send information in the body of emails as plain text.
(There are free, open-source word processors (e.g. Open Office) which have .pdf -exporters if you don't have a program that does this).
Think of others before you click "send".
Friday, April 2, 2010
No real choice
Sound familiar?
"The ping-pong of buzzwords and soundbites, the hunt for gaffes, the formulaic promises to "listen," the gurgle of briefings and punditry: the dismal spectacle has become familiar. For all its democratic claims, the election campaign serves mainly to obscure the truths about our unequal, unsustainable society. Its salient feature is the absence of real choice. Everything else flows from that."
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