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Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Urge to Stay | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Urge to Stay | TomDispatch
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Urge to Stay
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on April 24, 2010, Printed on April 27, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175238/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’m heading off for a week’s vacation Sunday. I’ll be largely, it not totally, off-line, so don’t expect answers to emails or requests until May begins. Nonetheless, this site will continue on its usual schedule. I’ve prepared ahead and Associate Editor Andy Kroll will be at the helm of the ship (kayak?) of TomDispatch. On Tuesday afternoon, expect a Noam Chomsky piece and on Thursday, a TD surprise. Tom]
Yes, We Could... Get Out!
Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.
Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.
Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you.
It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.
It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.
It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield.
The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country -- the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing.
Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.
Vietnam and Afghanistan
Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly.
And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious. There’s always some reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).
The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it.
It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.
Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously -- including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.
Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn't end.
And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country.
We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go.
A Brief History of American Withdrawal
Of course, there’s a small problem here. All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw -- not really, not from either region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands.
And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea.
Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the U.S. either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.
A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of “people power” (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. ("We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base," he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.
Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run" charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere.
In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains. Already, the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying Washington to establish “an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is quoted as saying. “I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”)
If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the mega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre U.S. embassy built along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At present, it’s the largest “embassy” on the planet and represents something new in “diplomacy,” being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not.
In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future “embassy” personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1.875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country.
Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not, rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the “civilian surge”; nor, for instance, the special $10 million “pool” of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend “winning hearts and minds.”
Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.
Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better sooner.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.
[Note of thanks: I found a brief commentary TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz sent around of particular interest in thinking about this piece. Let me just add that the offhand comments of my friend Jim Peck often bear fruit in pieces like this, and the daily news summaries and updates from Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz are a constant help. A bow to all three of them.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Urge to Stay
By Tom Engelhardt
Posted on April 24, 2010, Printed on April 27, 2010
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175238/
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: I’m heading off for a week’s vacation Sunday. I’ll be largely, it not totally, off-line, so don’t expect answers to emails or requests until May begins. Nonetheless, this site will continue on its usual schedule. I’ve prepared ahead and Associate Editor Andy Kroll will be at the helm of the ship (kayak?) of TomDispatch. On Tuesday afternoon, expect a Noam Chomsky piece and on Thursday, a TD surprise. Tom]
Yes, We Could... Get Out!
Why We Won’t Leave Afghanistan or Iraq
By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, we could. No kidding. We really could withdraw our massive armies, now close to 200,000 troops combined, from Afghanistan and Iraq (and that’s not even counting our similarly large stealth army of private contractors, which helps keep the true size of our double occupations in the shadows). We could undoubtedly withdraw them all reasonably quickly and reasonably painlessly.
Not that you would know it from listening to the debates in Washington or catching the mainstream news. There, withdrawal, when discussed at all, seems like an undertaking beyond the waking imagination. In Iraq alone, all those bases to dismantle and millions of pieces of equipment to send home in a draw-down operation worthy of years of intensive effort, the sort of thing that makes the desperate British evacuation from Dunkirk in World War II look like a Sunday stroll in the park. And that’s only the technical side of the matter.
Then there’s the conviction that anything but a withdrawal that would make molasses in January look like the hare of Aesopian fable -- at least two years in Iraq, five to ten in Afghanistan -- would endanger the planet itself, or at least its most important country: us. Without our eternally steadying hand, the Iraqis and Afghans, it’s taken for granted, would be lost. Without the help of U.S. forces, for example, would the Maliki government ever have been able to announce the death of the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq? Not likely, whereas the U.S. has knocked off its leadership twice, first in 2006, and again, evidently, last week.
Of course, before our troops entered Baghdad in 2003 and the American occupation of that country began, there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. But that’s a distant past not worth bringing up. And forget as well the fact that our invasions and wars have proven thunderously destructive, bringing chaos, misery, and death in their wake, and turning, for instance, the health care system of Iraq, once considered an advanced country in the Arab world, into a disaster zone(that -- it goes without saying -- only we Americans are now equipped to properly fix). Similarly, while regularly knocking off Afghan civilians at checkpoints on their roads and in their homes, at their celebrations and at work, we ignore the fact that our invasion and occupation opened the way for the transformation of Afghanistan into the first all-drug-crop agricultural nation and so the planet's premier narco-nation. It’s not just that the country now has an almost total monopoly on growing opium poppies (hence heroin), but according to the latest U.N. report, it’s now cornering the hashish market as well. That’s diversification for you.
It’s a record to stand on and, evidently, to stay on, even to expand on. We’re like the famed guest who came to dinner, broke a leg, wouldn’t leave, and promptly took over the lives of the entire household. Only in our case, we arrived, broke someone else’s leg, and then insisted we had to stay and break many more legs, lest the world become a far more terrible place.
It’s known and accepted in Washington that, if we were to leave Afghanistan precipitously, the Taliban would take over, al-Qaeda would be back big time in no time, and then more of our giant buildings would obviously bite the dust. And yet, the longer we’ve stayed and the more we’ve surged, the more resurgent the Taliban has become, the more territory this minority insurgency has spread into. If we stay long enough, we may, in fact, create the majority insurgency we claim to fear.
It’s common wisdom in the U.S. that, before we pull our military out, Afghanistan, like Iraq, must be secured as a stable enough ally, as well as at least a fragile junior democracy, which consigns real departure to some distant horizon. And that sense of time may help explain the desire of U.S. officials to hinder Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban and other rebel factions now. Washington, it seems, favors a “reconciliation process” that will last years and only begin after the U.S. military seizes the high ground on the battlefield.
The reality that dare not speak its name in Washington is this: no matter what might happen in an Afghanistan that lacked us -- whether (as in the 1990s) the various factions there leaped for each other’s throats, or the Taliban established significant control, though (as in the 1990s) not over the whole country -- the stakes for Americans would be minor in nature. Not that anyone of significance here would say such a thing.
Tell me, what kind of a stake could Americans really have in one of the most impoverished lands on the planet, about as distant from us as could be imagined, geographically, culturally, and religiously? Yet, as if to defy commonsense, we’ve been fighting there -- by proxy and directly -- on and off for 30 years now with no end in sight.
Most Americans evidently remain convinced that “safe haven” there was the key to al-Qaeda’s success, and that Afghanistan was the only place in which that organization could conceivably have planned 9/11, even though perfectly real planning also took place in Hamburg, Germany, which we neither bombed nor invaded.
In a future in which our surging armies actually succeeded in controlling Afghanistan and denying it to al-Qaeda, what about Somalia, Yemen, or, for that matter, England? It’s now conveniently forgotten that the first, nearly successful attempt to take down one of the World Trade Center towers in 1993 was planned in the wilds of New Jersey. Had the Bush administration been paying the slightest attention on September 10, 2001, or had reasonable precautions been taken, including locking the doors of airplane cockpits, 9/11 and so the invasion of Afghanistan would have been relegated to the far-fetched plot of some Tom Clancy novel.
Vietnam and Afghanistan
Have you noticed, by the way, that there’s always some obstacle in the path of withdrawal? Right now, in Iraq, it’s the aftermath of the March 7th election, hailed as proof that we brought democracy to the Middle East and so, whatever our missteps, did the right thing. As it happens, the election, as many predicted at the time, has led to a potentially explosive gridlock and has yet to come close to resulting in a new governing coalition. With violence on the rise, we’re told, the planned drawdown of American troops to the 50,000 level by August is imperiled. Already, the process, despite repeated assurances, seems to be proceeding slowly.
And yet, the thought that an American withdrawal should be held hostage to events among Iraqis all these years later, seems curious. There’s always some reason to hesitate -- and it never has to do with us. Withdrawal would undoubtedly be far less of a brain-twister if Washington simply committed itself wholeheartedly to getting out, and if it stopped convincing itself that the presence of the U.S. military in distant lands was essential to a better world (and, of course, to a controlling position on planet Earth).
The annals of history are well stocked with countries which invaded and occupied other lands and then left, often ingloriously and under intense pressure. But they did it.
It’s worth remembering that, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army collapsed and we essentially fled the country, we abandoned staggering amounts of equipment there. Helicopters were pushed over the sides of aircraft carriers to make space; barrels of money were burned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon; military bases as large as anything we’ve built in Iraq or Afghanistan fell into North Vietnamese hands; and South Vietnamese allies were deserted in the panic of the moment. Nonetheless, when there was no choice, we got out. Not elegantly, not nicely, not thoughtfully, not helpfully, but out.
Keep in mind that, then too, disaster was predicted for the planet, should we withdraw precipitously -- including rolling communist takeovers of country after country, the loss of “credibility” for the American superpower, and a murderous bloodbath in Vietnam itself. All were not only predicted by Washington’s Cassandras, but endlessly cited in the war years as reasons not to leave. And yet here was the shock that somehow never registered among all the so-called lessons of Vietnam: nothing of that sort happened afterwards.
Today, Vietnam is a reasonably prosperous land with friendly relations with its former enemy, the United States. After Vietnam, no other “dominos” fell and there was no bloodbath in that country. Of course, it could have been different -- and elsewhere, sometimes, it has been. But even when local skies darken, the world doesn't end.
And here’s the truth of the matter: the world won’t end, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, not in the United States, if we end our wars and withdraw. The sky won’t fall, even if the U.S. gets out reasonably quickly, even if subsequently blood is spilled and things don’t go well in either country.
We got our troops there remarkably quickly. We’re quite capable of removing them at a similar pace. We could, that is, leave. There are, undoubtedly, better and worse ways of doing this, ways that would further penalize the societies we’ve invaded, and ways that might be of some use to them, but either way we could go.
A Brief History of American Withdrawal
Of course, there’s a small problem here. All evidence indicates that Washington doesn’t want to withdraw -- not really, not from either region. It has no interest in divesting itself of the global control-and-influence business, or of the military-power racket. That’s hardly surprising since we’re talking about a great imperial power and control (or at least imagined control) over the planet’s strategic oil lands.
And then there’s another factor to consider: habit. Over the decades, Washington has gotten used to staying. The U.S. has long been big on arriving, but not much for departure. After all, 65 years later, striking numbers of American forces are still garrisoning the two major defeated nations of World War II, Germany and Japan. We still have about three dozen military bases on the modest-sized Japanese island of Okinawa, and are at this very moment fighting tooth and nail, diplomatically speaking, not to be forced to abandon one of them. The Korean War was suspended in an armistice 57 years ago and, again, striking numbers of American troops still garrison South Korea.
Similarly, to skip a few decades, after the Serbian air campaign of the late 1990s, the U.S. built-up the enormous Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo with its seven-mile perimeter, and we’re still there. After Gulf War I, the U.S. either built or built up military bases and other facilities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, as well as the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. And it’s never stopped building up its facilities throughout the Gulf region. In this sense, leaving Iraq, to the extent we do, is not quite as significant a matter as sometimes imagined, strategically speaking. It’s not as if the U.S. military were taking off for Dubuque.
A history of American withdrawal would prove a brief book indeed. Other than Vietnam, the U.S. military withdrew from the Philippines under the pressure of “people power” (and a local volcano) in the early 1990s, and from Saudi Arabia, in part under the pressure of Osama bin Laden. In both countries, however, it has retained or regained a foothold in recent years. President Ronald Reagan pulled American troops out of Lebanon after a devastating 1983 suicide truck bombing of a Marines barracks there, and the president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, functionally expelled the U.S. from Manta Air Base in 2008 when he refused to renew its lease. ("We'll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami -- an Ecuadorian base," he said slyly.) And there were a few places like the island of Grenada, invaded in 1983, that simply mattered too little to Washington to stay.
Unfortunately, whatever the administration, the urge to stay has seemed a constant. It’s evidently written into Washington’s DNA and embedded deep in domestic politics where sure-to-come "cut and run" charges and blame for "losing" Iraq or Afghanistan would cow any administration. Not surprisingly, when you look behind the main news stories in both Iraq and Afghanistan, you can see signs of the urge to stay everywhere.
In Iraq, while President Obama has committed himself to the withdrawal of American troops by the end of 2011, plenty of wiggle room remains. Already, the New York Times reports, General Ray Odierno, commander of U.S. forces in that country, is lobbying Washington to establish “an Office of Military Cooperation within the American Embassy in Baghdad to sustain the relationship after... Dec. 31, 2011.” (“We have to stay committed to this past 2011,” Odierno is quoted as saying. “I believe the administration knows that. I believe that they have to do that in order to see this through to the end. It’s important to recognize that just because U.S. soldiers leave, Iraq is not finished.”)
If you want a true gauge of American withdrawal, keep your eye on the mega-bases the Pentagon has built in Iraq since 2003, especially gigantic Balad Air Base (since the Iraqis will not, by the end of 2011, have a real air force of their own), and perhaps Camp Victory, the vast, ill-named U.S. base and command center abutting Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital. Keep an eye as well on the 104-acre U.S. embassy built along the Tigris River in downtown Baghdad. At present, it’s the largest “embassy” on the planet and represents something new in “diplomacy,” being essentially a military-base-cum-command-and-control-center for the region. It is clearly going nowhere, withdrawal or not.
In fact, recent reports indicate that in the near future “embassy” personnel, including police trainers, military officials connected to that Office of Coordination, spies, U.S. advisors attached to various Iraqi ministries, and the like, may be more than doubled from the present staggering staff level of 1,400 to 3,000 or above. (The embassy, by the way, has requested $1.875 billion for its operations in fiscal year 2011, and that was assuming a staffing level of only 1,400.) Realistically, as long as such an embassy remains at Ground Zero Iraq, we will not have withdrawn from that country.
Similarly, we have a giant U.S. embassy in Kabul (being expanded) and another mega-embassy being built in the Pakistani capital Islamabad. These are not, rest assured, signs of departure. Nor is the fact that in Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything war-connected seems to be surging, even if in ways often not noticed here. President Obama’s surge decision has been described largely in terms of those 30,000-odd extra troops he’s sending in, not in terms of the shadow army of 30,000 or more extra private contractors taking on various military roles (and dying off the books in striking numbers); nor the extra contingent of CIA types and the escalating drone war they are overseeing in the Pakistani tribal borderlands; nor the quiet doubling of Special Operations units assigned to hunt down the Taliban leadership; nor the extra State department officials for the “civilian surge”; nor, for instance, the special $10 million “pool” of funds that up to 120 U.S. Special Operations forces, already in those borderlands training the paramilitary Pakistani Frontier Corps, may soon have available to spend “winning hearts and minds.”
Perhaps it’s historically accurate to say that great powers generally leave home, head elsewhere armed to the teeth, and then experience the urge to stay. With our trillion-dollar-plus wars and yearly trillion-dollar-plus national-security budget, there’s a lot at stake in staying, and undoubtedly in fighting two, three, many Afghanistans (and Iraqs) in the years to come.
Sooner or later, we will leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s too late in the history of this planet to occupy them forever and a day. Better sooner.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. His latest book, The American Way of War (Haymarket Books), will be published in June.
[Note of thanks: I found a brief commentary TomDispatch regular Michael Schwartz sent around of particular interest in thinking about this piece. Let me just add that the offhand comments of my friend Jim Peck often bear fruit in pieces like this, and the daily news summaries and updates from Antiwar.com’s Jason Ditz are a constant help. A bow to all three of them.]
Copyright 2010 Tom Engelhardt
Monday, 26 April 2010
Karl Rove, Lifelong Gay-Baiter | The New Republic
Karl Rove, Lifelong Gay-Baiter | The New Republic
In the course of discussing with Sam Tanenhaus his book The Death of Conservatism (an expansion of this essay he wrote for TNR), Reihan Salam claims in passing
Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I'm sure he found distasteful.
Andrew Sullivan pounces
Rove thought this was a distraction? From his realignment? Does Reihan recall the kind of politics Rove cut his teeth on in the South? Gay-baiting was one critical part of his strategy for realignment.
Andrew doesn't cite it, but the best piece on the subject (at least of which I'm aware) was written by Josh Green in November 2004, at Andrew's current (and Reihan's former) home The Atlantic. Indeed, reading it anew, I'm still shocked by some of the details. In the 2004 context that Reihan was specifically referencing, Green singles out gay marriage as an issue that others in the GOP feared Rove was overplaying, thanks to his long experience in Texas: "Several consultants pointed to the issue of gay marriage, which one described as a perfect Texas wedge issue.... But he doubted that the issue would have the same effect in the less conservative battleground states that are expected to decide this election."
But this is really nothing compared to the gay smears in which Rove had long specialized:
One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents.... [O]ften a Rove campaign questions an opponent's sexual orientation. Bush's 1994 race against Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record—when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs.
Another example of Rove's methods involves a former ally of Rove's from Texas, John Weaver, who, coincidentally, managed McCain's bid in 2000. Many Republican operatives in Texas tell the story of another close race of sorts: a competition in the 1980s to become the dominant Republican consultant in Texas.... Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver's star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove's top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won't reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain's 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether.
Remarkably, it gets worse still. In 1994, Mark Kennedy was an Alabama Democrat who had the temerity to beat one of Rove's clients in a race for a judgeship. Here's what happened afterward:
When [Kennedy's] term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization....
Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."
Another "distraction" that Karl Rove found "distasteful"? I think not.
In the course of discussing with Sam Tanenhaus his book The Death of Conservatism (an expansion of this essay he wrote for TNR), Reihan Salam claims in passing
Karl Rove never imagined that opposition to same-sex marriage would cement a permanent Republican majority. It was a distraction that I'm sure he found distasteful.
Andrew Sullivan pounces
Rove thought this was a distraction? From his realignment? Does Reihan recall the kind of politics Rove cut his teeth on in the South? Gay-baiting was one critical part of his strategy for realignment.
Andrew doesn't cite it, but the best piece on the subject (at least of which I'm aware) was written by Josh Green in November 2004, at Andrew's current (and Reihan's former) home The Atlantic. Indeed, reading it anew, I'm still shocked by some of the details. In the 2004 context that Reihan was specifically referencing, Green singles out gay marriage as an issue that others in the GOP feared Rove was overplaying, thanks to his long experience in Texas: "Several consultants pointed to the issue of gay marriage, which one described as a perfect Texas wedge issue.... But he doubted that the issue would have the same effect in the less conservative battleground states that are expected to decide this election."
But this is really nothing compared to the gay smears in which Rove had long specialized:
One constant throughout his career is the prevalence of whisper campaigns against opponents.... [O]ften a Rove campaign questions an opponent's sexual orientation. Bush's 1994 race against Ann Richards featured a rumor that she was a lesbian, along with a rare instance of such a tactic's making it into the public record—when a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself, perhaps inadvertently, to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs.
Another example of Rove's methods involves a former ally of Rove's from Texas, John Weaver, who, coincidentally, managed McCain's bid in 2000. Many Republican operatives in Texas tell the story of another close race of sorts: a competition in the 1980s to become the dominant Republican consultant in Texas.... Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver's star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove's top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won't reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain's 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether.
Remarkably, it gets worse still. In 1994, Mark Kennedy was an Alabama Democrat who had the temerity to beat one of Rove's clients in a race for a judgeship. Here's what happened afterward:
When [Kennedy's] term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization....
Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."
Another "distraction" that Karl Rove found "distasteful"? I think not.
Should geoengineering tests be governed by the principles of medical ethics?
Print
Mother Earth Has a Fever
Should geoengineering tests be governed by the principles of medical ethics?
By Eli Kintisch
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 9:41 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, Calif., in a very deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms, and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It's unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars—the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out—established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.
The planners of Asilomar II, as they called it, hoped to accomplish much the same for potentially dangerous experiments in geoengineering. Instead of devising new medical treatments for people, the scientists involved in planet-hacking research are after novel ways to treat the Earth. The analogy of global warming to a curable disease was central to the discussions at the meeting. Climate scientist Steve Schneider of Stanford talked about administering "planetary methadone to get over our carbon addiction." Others debated what "doses" of geoengineering would be necessary. Most crucially, the thinkers at Asilomar focused on the idea that medical ethics might provide a framework for balancing the risks and benefits of all this new research.
What would it mean to apply the established principles of biomedical research to the nascent field of geoengineering? The ethicists at Asilomar—particularly David Winickoff from Berkeley and David Morrow from the University of Chicago—began with three pillars laid out in the landmark 1979 Belmont Report. The first, respect for persons, says that biomedical scientists should obtain "informed consent" from their test subjects. The second, beneficence, requires that scientists assess the risks and benefits of a given test before they start. The third, justice, invokes the rights of research subjects to whatever medical advances result from the testing. (The people who are placed at risk should be the same ones who might benefit from a successful result.)
Then Winickoff and Morrow proposed applying the Belmont principles to the study of the most aggressive forms of geoengineering—the ones that would block out the sun like a volcanic eruption, with a spray of sulfur or other particles into the stratosphere. Before we could embark on a radical intervention like that, we'd need to run smaller-scale tests that might themselves pose a risk to the environment. In much the way that a clinical drug trial might produce adverse reactions, so might a real-world trial of, say, the Pinatubo Option. Instead of causing organ failure or death in its subjects, a botched course of geoengineering might damage the ozone layer or reduce rainfall.
The problem, admitted the ethicists, is how to go about applying the Belmont rules outside of medicine. In clinical drug trials, researchers obtain consent from discrete individuals, and they can precisely define the worse-case outcome (like death). But a trial run of hazing up the stratosphere wouldn't affect specific, identifiable people in any one town, city, or state. The climate is interconnected in many ways, some still mysterious to scientists, and so the risks of even a small-scale test in a particular location might apply across the globe. If everyone on Earth could be affected, how do you figure out whom to ask for informed consent?
One possibility would be to require that all nations of the world agree ahead of time on any tests of consequence. To many gathered at Asilomar, however, this seemed naive; speakers repeatedly invoked the failure of all-inclusive talks to cut global carbon emissions, and it would presumably be much tougher to secure an agreement on work that might damage crop yields or open a hole in the ozone. A more pragmatic approach would be to set up something like a U.N. Planet Hacking Security Council, comprising 15 or so powerful nations whose oversight of research tests would take into account the concerns of a broad swath of countries. But that undemocratic approach would surely face howls of protest.
The principle of beneficence may be just as difficult to follow. Under the Belmont guidelines, doctors must balance the particular risks of a clinical trial with the potential benefit to any individual who might participate. Since it would be impossible to make such a calculation for every person on Earth, planet-hackers could at best choose the experiments that minimize harm to the most vulnerable communities—like people living on the coasts of Southeast Asia. But we may not know enough about the risks of geoengineering to make any such credible calculation when the time comes. Consider the Pinatubo Option, by which scientists would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Putting particles in the stratosphere could reduce the total amount of energy that strikes the Earth. Some climate modelers say this would disrupt rainfall by reducing moisture in the atmosphere obtained by evaporation. Others say that geoengineering droughts and famines would be less harmful than those caused by unchecked warming. Right now, no one can agree on the nature of the risks, let alone the degree to which they would apply to particular communities.
And what about justice? Among the disruptions that could result from testing the Pinatubo Option is a weakening of the Asian monsoon, a source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India. Those in developing countries will "eat the risk" of geoengineering trials, shouted one of the climate scientists at Asilomar during his presentation. If representatives from just a small set of countries were appointed as doctors to the planet, then the less powerful nations might end up as the world's guinea pigs. Of course, the citizens of those nations also would seem to have the most to lose from uninterrupted global warming. These two dangers would have to be measured one against the other—and compensation as part of the experimental program could be one way of making tests more fair.
If medical ethics aren't quite up to the task of guiding our forays into geoengineering, what other sort of principles should we keep in mind? One important danger to be aware of is the moral hazard that might come with successful trials. That's the idea that protective circumstances or actions can encourage people to take undue risks—government insurance of banks led to risky investments that caused the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s, for example. Moral hazard looms particularly large for geoengineering studies since medium-scale field tests could prematurely give us the sense that we have a low-cost technical fix for global warming, no emissions cuts needed. (Moral hazard isn't quite as potent in medical research. The availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs may well discourage people from maintaining healthy diets, but it's unlikely that mere clinical trials would have the same effect.)
Another ethical principle that might apply to geoengineering is minimization—the idea that, a priori, it's better to tinker at the smallest-possible scale necessary to answer vital scientific questions. This notion comes from the ethics of animal experimentation; now we might apply it to planetary systems and the environment more broadly. Up until now, the medical ethics frame for geoengineering has guided discussions of how geoengineering might affect people in various countries. Perhaps we should be talking about how it affects the planet itself.
By that token, we might gain something by thinking of the Earth as a patient on its own terms. The rules and regulations we come up with for tests of geoengineering should take into account the way those experiments might affect ecosystems and nonhuman animals, both under threat from warming. And so maybe the most famous piece of medical ethics ought to apply: the Hippocratic Oath. "First, do no harm" is the crux of the original, but an updated version exhorts doctors to avoid "the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism." The climate crisis may force us to act despite myriad ethical challenges, for our benefit and for the planet's.
Mother Earth Has a Fever
Should geoengineering tests be governed by the principles of medical ethics?
By Eli Kintisch
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 9:41 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, Calif., in a very deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms, and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It's unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars—the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out—established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.
The planners of Asilomar II, as they called it, hoped to accomplish much the same for potentially dangerous experiments in geoengineering. Instead of devising new medical treatments for people, the scientists involved in planet-hacking research are after novel ways to treat the Earth. The analogy of global warming to a curable disease was central to the discussions at the meeting. Climate scientist Steve Schneider of Stanford talked about administering "planetary methadone to get over our carbon addiction." Others debated what "doses" of geoengineering would be necessary. Most crucially, the thinkers at Asilomar focused on the idea that medical ethics might provide a framework for balancing the risks and benefits of all this new research.
What would it mean to apply the established principles of biomedical research to the nascent field of geoengineering? The ethicists at Asilomar—particularly David Winickoff from Berkeley and David Morrow from the University of Chicago—began with three pillars laid out in the landmark 1979 Belmont Report. The first, respect for persons, says that biomedical scientists should obtain "informed consent" from their test subjects. The second, beneficence, requires that scientists assess the risks and benefits of a given test before they start. The third, justice, invokes the rights of research subjects to whatever medical advances result from the testing. (The people who are placed at risk should be the same ones who might benefit from a successful result.)
Then Winickoff and Morrow proposed applying the Belmont principles to the study of the most aggressive forms of geoengineering—the ones that would block out the sun like a volcanic eruption, with a spray of sulfur or other particles into the stratosphere. Before we could embark on a radical intervention like that, we'd need to run smaller-scale tests that might themselves pose a risk to the environment. In much the way that a clinical drug trial might produce adverse reactions, so might a real-world trial of, say, the Pinatubo Option. Instead of causing organ failure or death in its subjects, a botched course of geoengineering might damage the ozone layer or reduce rainfall.
The problem, admitted the ethicists, is how to go about applying the Belmont rules outside of medicine. In clinical drug trials, researchers obtain consent from discrete individuals, and they can precisely define the worse-case outcome (like death). But a trial run of hazing up the stratosphere wouldn't affect specific, identifiable people in any one town, city, or state. The climate is interconnected in many ways, some still mysterious to scientists, and so the risks of even a small-scale test in a particular location might apply across the globe. If everyone on Earth could be affected, how do you figure out whom to ask for informed consent?
One possibility would be to require that all nations of the world agree ahead of time on any tests of consequence. To many gathered at Asilomar, however, this seemed naive; speakers repeatedly invoked the failure of all-inclusive talks to cut global carbon emissions, and it would presumably be much tougher to secure an agreement on work that might damage crop yields or open a hole in the ozone. A more pragmatic approach would be to set up something like a U.N. Planet Hacking Security Council, comprising 15 or so powerful nations whose oversight of research tests would take into account the concerns of a broad swath of countries. But that undemocratic approach would surely face howls of protest.
The principle of beneficence may be just as difficult to follow. Under the Belmont guidelines, doctors must balance the particular risks of a clinical trial with the potential benefit to any individual who might participate. Since it would be impossible to make such a calculation for every person on Earth, planet-hackers could at best choose the experiments that minimize harm to the most vulnerable communities—like people living on the coasts of Southeast Asia. But we may not know enough about the risks of geoengineering to make any such credible calculation when the time comes. Consider the Pinatubo Option, by which scientists would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Putting particles in the stratosphere could reduce the total amount of energy that strikes the Earth. Some climate modelers say this would disrupt rainfall by reducing moisture in the atmosphere obtained by evaporation. Others say that geoengineering droughts and famines would be less harmful than those caused by unchecked warming. Right now, no one can agree on the nature of the risks, let alone the degree to which they would apply to particular communities.
And what about justice? Among the disruptions that could result from testing the Pinatubo Option is a weakening of the Asian monsoon, a source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India. Those in developing countries will "eat the risk" of geoengineering trials, shouted one of the climate scientists at Asilomar during his presentation. If representatives from just a small set of countries were appointed as doctors to the planet, then the less powerful nations might end up as the world's guinea pigs. Of course, the citizens of those nations also would seem to have the most to lose from uninterrupted global warming. These two dangers would have to be measured one against the other—and compensation as part of the experimental program could be one way of making tests more fair.
If medical ethics aren't quite up to the task of guiding our forays into geoengineering, what other sort of principles should we keep in mind? One important danger to be aware of is the moral hazard that might come with successful trials. That's the idea that protective circumstances or actions can encourage people to take undue risks—government insurance of banks led to risky investments that caused the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s, for example. Moral hazard looms particularly large for geoengineering studies since medium-scale field tests could prematurely give us the sense that we have a low-cost technical fix for global warming, no emissions cuts needed. (Moral hazard isn't quite as potent in medical research. The availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs may well discourage people from maintaining healthy diets, but it's unlikely that mere clinical trials would have the same effect.)
Another ethical principle that might apply to geoengineering is minimization—the idea that, a priori, it's better to tinker at the smallest-possible scale necessary to answer vital scientific questions. This notion comes from the ethics of animal experimentation; now we might apply it to planetary systems and the environment more broadly. Up until now, the medical ethics frame for geoengineering has guided discussions of how geoengineering might affect people in various countries. Perhaps we should be talking about how it affects the planet itself.
By that token, we might gain something by thinking of the Earth as a patient on its own terms. The rules and regulations we come up with for tests of geoengineering should take into account the way those experiments might affect ecosystems and nonhuman animals, both under threat from warming. And so maybe the most famous piece of medical ethics ought to apply: the Hippocratic Oath. "First, do no harm" is the crux of the original, but an updated version exhorts doctors to avoid "the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism." The climate crisis may force us to act despite myriad ethical challenges, for our benefit and for the planet's.
Quote: John Muir: Temple Trees
A.Word.A.Day --achates: "A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)"
A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)"
A.Word.A.Day --pygmalionism
A.Word.A.Day --pygmalionism: "One of the primary tests of the mood of a society at any given time is whether its comfortable people tend to identify, psychologically, with the power and achievements of the very successful or with the needs and sufferings of the underprivileged. -Richard Hofstadter, historian (1916-1970)"
FOXNews.com - Panel on President's Push for Wall Street Reform - Special Report w/ Bret Baier
FOXNews.com - Panel on President's Push for Wall Street Reform - Special Report w/ Bret Baier
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There is a legitimate debate taking place about how best to ensure taxpayers are held harmless in this process. And that is a legitimate debate, and I encourage that debate.
But what is not legitimate is to suggest somehow the legislation being proposed is going to encourage future taxpayer bailouts as some have claimed. That makes for a good sound bite but it's not factually accurate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRET BAIER, ANCHOR: President Obama pitching his financial regulation overhaul at Cooper Union College in lower Manhattan today as the Senate, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he is plowing ahead no matter what toward a vote on financial regulatory reform. And the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell saying shouldn't we understand what is in this? There are a lot of potential consequences for small banks and lending institutions. Let's take our time to reach a bipartisan agreement.
That is what we're dealing with. Let's bring in the panel, Steve Hayes, senior writer for the Weekly Standard; Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio; and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. Charles?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I am glad you played the package from the president's speech. We knew what the content was, but I was intrigued and appalled by the tone of the speech and the rhetoric in the sound bite.
The way, and he has done this before — he tries to denigrate, cast- out, and de-legitimize any argument against his. And here he is talking about that it's not legitimate even to suggest that the bill he is supporting might encourage a bailout. It's certainly possible there had been strong, very good economists and others who have argue because of the provisions in the ball, and one in particular, where a treasury has the right to designate any entity, private entity a systemic risk and then to immediately, even without Congress approving and appropriating money to guarantee all the bad loans, that is an invitation to a bailout.
Now the president could argue otherwise, but to say that to raise the issue is illegitimate is simply appalling. What he is doing here is he is making a lot of provisions that will be changing a very complex financial system. At least have the intellectual honesty to admit you can't predict all the outcomes. The president has a tick in which he presents himself as having this sort of academic, reasonable discourse, but it really has inside of it a sharp edge of partisanship. He won the presidency. That gives him a big house, a lot of power, and a fabulous airplane, but does it not make him the arbiter of American political discourse.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: There is a legitimate debate taking place about how best to ensure taxpayers are held harmless in this process. And that is a legitimate debate, and I encourage that debate.
But what is not legitimate is to suggest somehow the legislation being proposed is going to encourage future taxpayer bailouts as some have claimed. That makes for a good sound bite but it's not factually accurate.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRET BAIER, ANCHOR: President Obama pitching his financial regulation overhaul at Cooper Union College in lower Manhattan today as the Senate, the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says he is plowing ahead no matter what toward a vote on financial regulatory reform. And the Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell saying shouldn't we understand what is in this? There are a lot of potential consequences for small banks and lending institutions. Let's take our time to reach a bipartisan agreement.
That is what we're dealing with. Let's bring in the panel, Steve Hayes, senior writer for the Weekly Standard; Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio; and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. Charles?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I am glad you played the package from the president's speech. We knew what the content was, but I was intrigued and appalled by the tone of the speech and the rhetoric in the sound bite.
The way, and he has done this before — he tries to denigrate, cast- out, and de-legitimize any argument against his. And here he is talking about that it's not legitimate even to suggest that the bill he is supporting might encourage a bailout. It's certainly possible there had been strong, very good economists and others who have argue because of the provisions in the ball, and one in particular, where a treasury has the right to designate any entity, private entity a systemic risk and then to immediately, even without Congress approving and appropriating money to guarantee all the bad loans, that is an invitation to a bailout.
Now the president could argue otherwise, but to say that to raise the issue is illegitimate is simply appalling. What he is doing here is he is making a lot of provisions that will be changing a very complex financial system. At least have the intellectual honesty to admit you can't predict all the outcomes. The president has a tick in which he presents himself as having this sort of academic, reasonable discourse, but it really has inside of it a sharp edge of partisanship. He won the presidency. That gives him a big house, a lot of power, and a fabulous airplane, but does it not make him the arbiter of American political discourse.
Sunday, 25 April 2010
Mother Earth Has a Fever - Should Geoengineering Tests be Governed by the Principles of Medical Ethics?
CLIMATE DESK
By Eli Kintisch
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 9:41 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, Calif., in a very deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms, and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It's unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars—the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out—established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.
The planners of Asilomar II, as they called it, hoped to accomplish much the same for potentially dangerous experiments in geoengineering. Instead of devising new medical treatments for people, the scientists involved in planet-hacking research are after novel ways to treat the Earth. The analogy of global warming to a curable disease was central to the discussions at the meeting. Climate scientist Steve Schneider of Stanford talked about administering "planetary methadone to get over our carbon addiction." Others debated what "doses" of geoengineering would be necessary. Most crucially, the thinkers at Asilomar focused on the idea that medical ethics might provide a framework for balancing the risks and benefits of all this new research.
What would it mean to apply the established principles of biomedical research to the nascent field of geoengineering? The ethicists at Asilomar—particularly David Winickoff from Berkeley and David Morrow from the University of Chicago—began with three pillars laid out in the landmark 1979 Belmont Report. The first, respect for persons, says that biomedical scientists should obtain "informed consent" from their test subjects. The second, beneficence, requires that scientists assess the risks and benefits of a given test before they start. The third, justice, invokes the rights of research subjects to whatever medical advances result from the testing. (The people who are placed at risk should be the same ones who might benefit from a successful result.)
Then Winickoff and Morrow proposed applying the Belmont principles to the study of the most aggressive forms of geoengineering—the ones that would block out the sun like a volcanic eruption, with a spray of sulfur or other particles into the stratosphere. Before we could embark on a radical intervention like that, we'd need to run smaller-scale tests that might themselves pose a risk to the environment. In much the way that a clinical drug trial might produce adverse reactions, so might a real-world trial of, say, the Pinatubo Option. Instead of causing organ failure or death in its subjects, a botched course of geoengineering might damage the ozone layer or reduce rainfall.
The problem, admitted the ethicists, is how to go about applying the Belmont rules outside of medicine. In clinical drug trials, researchers obtain consent from discrete individuals, and they can precisely define the worse-case outcome (like death). But a trial run of hazing up the stratosphere wouldn't affect specific, identifiable people in any one town, city, or state. The climate is interconnected in many ways, some still mysterious to scientists, and so the risks of even a small-scale test in a particular location might apply across the globe. If everyone on Earth could be affected, how do you figure out whom to ask for informed consent?
One possibility would be to require that all nations of the world agree ahead of time on any tests of consequence. To many gathered at Asilomar, however, this seemed naive; speakers repeatedly invoked the failure of all-inclusive talks to cut global carbon emissions, and it would presumably be much tougher to secure an agreement on work that might damage crop yields or open a hole in the ozone. A more pragmatic approach would be to set up something like a U.N. Planet Hacking Security Council, comprising 15 or so powerful nations whose oversight of research tests would take into account the concerns of a broad swath of countries. But that undemocratic approach would surely face howls of protest.
The principle of beneficence may be just as difficult to follow. Under the Belmont guidelines, doctors must balance the particular risks of a clinical trial with the potential benefit to any individual who might participate. Since it would be impossible to make such a calculation for every person on Earth, planet-hackers could at best choose the experiments that minimize harm to the most vulnerable communities—like people living on the coasts of Southeast Asia. But we may not know enough about the risks of geoengineering to make any such credible calculation when the time comes. Consider the Pinatubo Option, by which scientists would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Putting particles in the stratosphere could reduce the total amount of energy that strikes the Earth. Some climate modelers say this would disrupt rainfall by reducing moisture in the atmosphere obtained by evaporation. Others say that geoengineering droughts and famines would be less harmful than those caused by unchecked warming. Right now, no one can agree on the nature of the risks, let alone the degree to which they would apply to particular communities.
And what about justice? Among the disruptions that could result from testing the Pinatubo Option is a weakening of the Asian monsoon, a source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India. Those in developing countries will "eat the risk" of geoengineering trials, shouted one of the climate scientists at Asilomar during his presentation. If representatives from just a small set of countries were appointed as doctors to the planet, then the less powerful nations might end up as the world's guinea pigs. Of course, the citizens of those nations also would seem to have the most to lose from uninterrupted global warming. These two dangers would have to be measured one against the other—and compensation as part of the experimental program could be one way of making tests more fair.
If medical ethics aren't quite up to the task of guiding our forays into geoengineering, what other sort of principles should we keep in mind? One important danger to be aware of is the moral hazard that might come with successful trials. That's the idea that protective circumstances or actions can encourage people to take undue risks—government insurance of banks led to risky investments that caused the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s, for example. Moral hazard looms particularly large for geoengineering studies since medium-scale field tests could prematurely give us the sense that we have a low-cost technical fix for global warming, no emissions cuts needed. (Moral hazard isn't quite as potent in medical research. The availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs may well discourage people from maintaining healthy diets, but it's unlikely that mere clinical trials would have the same effect.)
Another ethical principle that might apply to geoengineering is minimization—the idea that, a priori, it's better to tinker at the smallest-possible scale necessary to answer vital scientific questions. This notion comes from the ethics of animal experimentation; now we might apply it to planetary systems and the environment more broadly. Up until now, the medical ethics frame for geoengineering has guided discussions of how geoengineering might affect people in various countries. Perhaps we should be talking about how it affects the planet itself.
By that token, we might gain something by thinking of the Earth as a patient on its own terms. The rules and regulations we come up with for tests of geoengineering should take into account the way those experiments might affect ecosystems and nonhuman animals, both under threat from warming. And so maybe the most famous piece of medical ethics ought to apply: the Hippocratic Oath. "First, do no harm" is the crux of the original, but an updated version exhorts doctors to avoid "the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism." The climate crisis may force us to act despite myriad ethical challenges, for our benefit and for the planet's.
This story was produced by Slate for the Climate Desk collaboration.
By Eli Kintisch
Posted Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 9:41 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nearly 200 scientists from 14 countries met last month at the famed Asilomar retreat center outside Monterey, Calif., in a very deliberate bid to make history. Their five-day meeting focused on setting up voluntary ground rules for research into cloud-brightening, giant algae blooms, and other massive-scale interventions to cool the planet. It's unclear how significant the meeting will turn out to be, but the intent of its organizers was unmistakable: By choosing Asilomar, they hoped to summon the spirit of a groundbreaking meeting of biologists that took place on the same site in 1975. Back then, scientists with bushy sideburns and split collars—the forefathers of the molecular revolution, it turned out—established principles for the safe and ethical study of deadly pathogens.
The planners of Asilomar II, as they called it, hoped to accomplish much the same for potentially dangerous experiments in geoengineering. Instead of devising new medical treatments for people, the scientists involved in planet-hacking research are after novel ways to treat the Earth. The analogy of global warming to a curable disease was central to the discussions at the meeting. Climate scientist Steve Schneider of Stanford talked about administering "planetary methadone to get over our carbon addiction." Others debated what "doses" of geoengineering would be necessary. Most crucially, the thinkers at Asilomar focused on the idea that medical ethics might provide a framework for balancing the risks and benefits of all this new research.
What would it mean to apply the established principles of biomedical research to the nascent field of geoengineering? The ethicists at Asilomar—particularly David Winickoff from Berkeley and David Morrow from the University of Chicago—began with three pillars laid out in the landmark 1979 Belmont Report. The first, respect for persons, says that biomedical scientists should obtain "informed consent" from their test subjects. The second, beneficence, requires that scientists assess the risks and benefits of a given test before they start. The third, justice, invokes the rights of research subjects to whatever medical advances result from the testing. (The people who are placed at risk should be the same ones who might benefit from a successful result.)
Then Winickoff and Morrow proposed applying the Belmont principles to the study of the most aggressive forms of geoengineering—the ones that would block out the sun like a volcanic eruption, with a spray of sulfur or other particles into the stratosphere. Before we could embark on a radical intervention like that, we'd need to run smaller-scale tests that might themselves pose a risk to the environment. In much the way that a clinical drug trial might produce adverse reactions, so might a real-world trial of, say, the Pinatubo Option. Instead of causing organ failure or death in its subjects, a botched course of geoengineering might damage the ozone layer or reduce rainfall.
The problem, admitted the ethicists, is how to go about applying the Belmont rules outside of medicine. In clinical drug trials, researchers obtain consent from discrete individuals, and they can precisely define the worse-case outcome (like death). But a trial run of hazing up the stratosphere wouldn't affect specific, identifiable people in any one town, city, or state. The climate is interconnected in many ways, some still mysterious to scientists, and so the risks of even a small-scale test in a particular location might apply across the globe. If everyone on Earth could be affected, how do you figure out whom to ask for informed consent?
One possibility would be to require that all nations of the world agree ahead of time on any tests of consequence. To many gathered at Asilomar, however, this seemed naive; speakers repeatedly invoked the failure of all-inclusive talks to cut global carbon emissions, and it would presumably be much tougher to secure an agreement on work that might damage crop yields or open a hole in the ozone. A more pragmatic approach would be to set up something like a U.N. Planet Hacking Security Council, comprising 15 or so powerful nations whose oversight of research tests would take into account the concerns of a broad swath of countries. But that undemocratic approach would surely face howls of protest.
The principle of beneficence may be just as difficult to follow. Under the Belmont guidelines, doctors must balance the particular risks of a clinical trial with the potential benefit to any individual who might participate. Since it would be impossible to make such a calculation for every person on Earth, planet-hackers could at best choose the experiments that minimize harm to the most vulnerable communities—like people living on the coasts of Southeast Asia. But we may not know enough about the risks of geoengineering to make any such credible calculation when the time comes. Consider the Pinatubo Option, by which scientists would mimic the cooling effect of volcanoes. Putting particles in the stratosphere could reduce the total amount of energy that strikes the Earth. Some climate modelers say this would disrupt rainfall by reducing moisture in the atmosphere obtained by evaporation. Others say that geoengineering droughts and famines would be less harmful than those caused by unchecked warming. Right now, no one can agree on the nature of the risks, let alone the degree to which they would apply to particular communities.
And what about justice? Among the disruptions that could result from testing the Pinatubo Option is a weakening of the Asian monsoon, a source of water for hundreds of millions of people in India. Those in developing countries will "eat the risk" of geoengineering trials, shouted one of the climate scientists at Asilomar during his presentation. If representatives from just a small set of countries were appointed as doctors to the planet, then the less powerful nations might end up as the world's guinea pigs. Of course, the citizens of those nations also would seem to have the most to lose from uninterrupted global warming. These two dangers would have to be measured one against the other—and compensation as part of the experimental program could be one way of making tests more fair.
If medical ethics aren't quite up to the task of guiding our forays into geoengineering, what other sort of principles should we keep in mind? One important danger to be aware of is the moral hazard that might come with successful trials. That's the idea that protective circumstances or actions can encourage people to take undue risks—government insurance of banks led to risky investments that caused the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s, for example. Moral hazard looms particularly large for geoengineering studies since medium-scale field tests could prematurely give us the sense that we have a low-cost technical fix for global warming, no emissions cuts needed. (Moral hazard isn't quite as potent in medical research. The availability of cholesterol-lowering drugs may well discourage people from maintaining healthy diets, but it's unlikely that mere clinical trials would have the same effect.)
Another ethical principle that might apply to geoengineering is minimization—the idea that, a priori, it's better to tinker at the smallest-possible scale necessary to answer vital scientific questions. This notion comes from the ethics of animal experimentation; now we might apply it to planetary systems and the environment more broadly. Up until now, the medical ethics frame for geoengineering has guided discussions of how geoengineering might affect people in various countries. Perhaps we should be talking about how it affects the planet itself.
By that token, we might gain something by thinking of the Earth as a patient on its own terms. The rules and regulations we come up with for tests of geoengineering should take into account the way those experiments might affect ecosystems and nonhuman animals, both under threat from warming. And so maybe the most famous piece of medical ethics ought to apply: the Hippocratic Oath. "First, do no harm" is the crux of the original, but an updated version exhorts doctors to avoid "the twin traps of overtreatment and therapeutic nihilism." The climate crisis may force us to act despite myriad ethical challenges, for our benefit and for the planet's.
This story was produced by Slate for the Climate Desk collaboration.
Saturday, 24 April 2010
The Examined Life, Age 8
Philosophical reasoning taught in the second grade. - NYTimes.com
[See also the Teaching Children Philosophy wiki and this interview with Thomas Wartenberg.]
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
“We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.”
He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late.
Professor Lipman’s view opposed that of the child-development theorist Jean Piaget, who asserted that children under 12 were not capable of abstract reasoning. He and others, including Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”
In 1974, Professor Lipman, now 87, started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, which has since developed curriculum materials that have been translated into more than 40 languages and used in more than 60 countries. But American public schools have been slow to embrace philosophy for children; while outreach programs are offered by a handful of universities — among them the University of Washington andCalifornia State University, Long Beach — many school officials either find the subject too intimidating or believe it does not fit with the test-driven culture of public education these days.
“Our current educational system is about standards and efficiency,” says Joe Oyler, programs coordinator for the institute at Montclair State. “It’s not fast and it’s not clean. We help children become comfortable with ambiguity and responding to it, so it’s tough to fit in.”
Ms. Runquist's students managed to fit philosophy in between writing and science. This was their sixth lesson of the year, and by now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.
Most of the young philosophers had no problem with the boy using the tree’s shade. But they were divided on the apples, which the boy sold, the branches, which he used to build a house, and the trunk, which he carved into a boat.
“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.
“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.
Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.
“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.
Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.
“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”
This gave his classmates pause.
Professor Wartenberg and students use eight picture books to introduce children to the major fields of philosophy, including aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of the mind.
With Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Together,” in which Frog and Toad try to determine whether they can be brave and scared at the same time, the pupils examine the nature of courage — one of Aristotle’s central virtues. With Bernard Wiseman’s “Morris the Moose,” about a moose who mistakenly assumes all his friends are also moose, they consider how someone can maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence. And with Peter Catalanotto’s “Emily’s Art,” about a talented young artist who loses a contest, they debate whether there can be objective standards for evaluating works of art.
“The world is a puzzling place and when you’re young it doesn’t make sense,” Professor Wartenberg says. “What you’re giving them is the sort of skills to learn how to think about these things.”
Professor Wartenberg has written a book, “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), to spread his experiment to more elementary schools. His focus is on teaching undergraduate philosophy students how to work with children, and his decade-old course at Mount Holyoke, “Teaching Children Philosophy,” has led many of his students to pursue careers in early-childhood education.
“A lot of them don’t know what to do after college,” he says. “If they want to do something with philosophy, this opens up an avenue.”
Professor Wartenberg also says that philosophy lessons can improve reading comprehension and other skills that children need to meet state-imposed curriculum standards and excel on standardized tests. With a grant from the Squire Family Foundation, which promotes the teaching of ethics and philosophy, he is assessing whether his program helps in the development of argument and other skills.
“It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” he says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”
But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.
“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”
Abby Goodnough is the Boston bureau chief of The Times.
[See also the Teaching Children Philosophy wiki and this interview with Thomas Wartenberg.]
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
“We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.”
He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late.
Professor Lipman’s view opposed that of the child-development theorist Jean Piaget, who asserted that children under 12 were not capable of abstract reasoning. He and others, including Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”
In 1974, Professor Lipman, now 87, started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, which has since developed curriculum materials that have been translated into more than 40 languages and used in more than 60 countries. But American public schools have been slow to embrace philosophy for children; while outreach programs are offered by a handful of universities — among them the University of Washington andCalifornia State University, Long Beach — many school officials either find the subject too intimidating or believe it does not fit with the test-driven culture of public education these days.
“Our current educational system is about standards and efficiency,” says Joe Oyler, programs coordinator for the institute at Montclair State. “It’s not fast and it’s not clean. We help children become comfortable with ambiguity and responding to it, so it’s tough to fit in.”
Ms. Runquist's students managed to fit philosophy in between writing and science. This was their sixth lesson of the year, and by now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.
Most of the young philosophers had no problem with the boy using the tree’s shade. But they were divided on the apples, which the boy sold, the branches, which he used to build a house, and the trunk, which he carved into a boat.
“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.
“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.
Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.
“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.
Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.
“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”
This gave his classmates pause.
Professor Wartenberg and students use eight picture books to introduce children to the major fields of philosophy, including aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of the mind.
With Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Together,” in which Frog and Toad try to determine whether they can be brave and scared at the same time, the pupils examine the nature of courage — one of Aristotle’s central virtues. With Bernard Wiseman’s “Morris the Moose,” about a moose who mistakenly assumes all his friends are also moose, they consider how someone can maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence. And with Peter Catalanotto’s “Emily’s Art,” about a talented young artist who loses a contest, they debate whether there can be objective standards for evaluating works of art.
“The world is a puzzling place and when you’re young it doesn’t make sense,” Professor Wartenberg says. “What you’re giving them is the sort of skills to learn how to think about these things.”
Professor Wartenberg has written a book, “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), to spread his experiment to more elementary schools. His focus is on teaching undergraduate philosophy students how to work with children, and his decade-old course at Mount Holyoke, “Teaching Children Philosophy,” has led many of his students to pursue careers in early-childhood education.
“A lot of them don’t know what to do after college,” he says. “If they want to do something with philosophy, this opens up an avenue.”
Professor Wartenberg also says that philosophy lessons can improve reading comprehension and other skills that children need to meet state-imposed curriculum standards and excel on standardized tests. With a grant from the Squire Family Foundation, which promotes the teaching of ethics and philosophy, he is assessing whether his program helps in the development of argument and other skills.
“It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” he says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”
But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.
“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”
Abby Goodnough is the Boston bureau chief of The Times.
Wright: A Short History of Progress
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. --George Santayana
Cassandra is the patron saint of paranoids. Possessed from early youth with the gift of prophecy, she repelled the advances of Apollo, who took his revenge by decreeing that no one would ever again believe her. (It happens to sexual victims all the time.) A modern Cassandra needs no curse other than the blind optimism that surrounds us from birth, endlessly implanting the sacred message that there’s nothing wrong with the world that can’t be cured by runaway consumption fed by market-driven technology, from which everyone benefits. We call it progress.
Ronald Wright’s history of this delusion makes him a Cassandra for the 21st century. Delivered as the 2004 Massey Lectures for Canadian radio and published in the UK by Cannongate, A Short History of Progress is short indeed, but it is densely packed. In a mere 132 pages plus discursive notes and bibliography, Wright demonstrates that the greed propelling us towards the destruction of the earth’s precarious ecostructure has been the dominant human motivation from the very beginning of history, leading to the collapse of each succeeding civilization. The Noble Savage living in harmony with his environment is an eccentric, the product of a static society ripe for absorption by a more agressive neighbor. Wright may not yet qualify as a paranoid, but he meets William Burroughs’ trenchant prerequisite which he once revealed to me over a bottle of wine in Aix en Provence: “a person who is in possession of all the facts”.
Short as the book is, its essential points can be summarized even more succinctly. Wright is both an archaeologist and an anthropologist, bringing these two disciplines synergistically together. The archaeological record, he explains, is “perhaps the best tool we have for looking ahead, because it provides a deep reading of the direction and momentum of our course through time.”
Our “10,000-year experiment of the settled life” has been charactarized by environmental destruction and economic inequality. Wright's narrative starts with the “towns and villages that sprang up in a dozen farming heartlands around the world after the last ice age.” These early outposts of civilization were essentially egalitarian, like the hunter-gatherer societies before them. Their inhabitants “worked at similar tasks and had a comparable standard of living”, those with more wealth usually feeling an “obligation to share” with the less fortunate.
As disparities in wealth and power arose, the sense of obligation diminished. This bifurcation first occurred “in the Neolithic villages of the Middle East,” in the Sumerian empire centered around Ur and Uruk. Here we find evidence of what would become a recurring pattern.
Civilizations, he writes, get caught in “progress traps.” “A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea, but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea.” The society begins to exhaust its natural resources—woods, water, and topsoil. Finally there is “no room left to raise production or absorb the shock of natural fluctuations.” To survive, they take out “new loans from nature and humanity.” But in the end nature forecloses, “with erosion, crop failure, famine, disease.”
This first instance was in the land that today makes up southern Iraq. The Sumerians stripped away their woods, leaving their flood plain vulnerable to “inundations much fiercer and more deadly than they would otherwise have been.” Over several hundred years, the land became salty from constant water evaporation and begin “to turn against the tillers,” leading ultimately to the collapse of Sumerian civilization. A few of its great cities “struggled on as villages, but most were utterly abandoned.” The land never recovered; much of modern Iraq's formerly irrigated land remains saline, “sour and barren…a desert of their making.”
Plus ça change... “Each time history repeats itself,” Wright quotes wryly from a graffiti slogan, “the price goes up.” He summarizes the spiral progression thusly:
In civilizations, population always grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply, and all civilizations become hierarchical -- the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around...Human inability to foresee or watch out for long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the evolutionary social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer. [The masses] may suffer stoically for a while, but sooner or later the ruler's relationship with heaven is exposed as a delusion or a lie, [whereupon] the temples are looted, the statues thrown down, the barbarians welcomed, and the emperor's naked rump is last seen fleeing through a palace window.
Wright takes us through successive sequences of wealth concentration and environmental degradation, including the native civilizations of North and South America, on which he has written extensively. (He has an M.A. from Cambridge in archeology and anthropology and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.) The final cycle, in which we are currently embedded, includes the half-millennium expansion of the major countries of Western Europe, whose techno-economic structure has gradually come to embrace the entire globe. It might well have worn itself out but for the discovery and pillaging of two continents to the west, subsequently named North and South America.
Five hundred years ago, civilization in this “new world” was highly advanced, and its easy “conquest” was only possible because of the devastation caused by smallpox and other diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity:
[By 1500] all temperate zones of the US were thickly settled by farming peoples. When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, the Indians had died out so recently that the whites found empty cabins, winter corn, and cleared fields—'widowed acres'—waiting for their use: a foretoken of the colonists' parasitic advance across the continent. "Europeans did not find a wilderness here", US historian Francis Jennings has written, "they made one".
This wilderness-making is documented in detail in Wright’s earlier and weightier history, Stolen Continents: The Indian Story.
The exported wealth accumulated from monumental theft consisted not merely of precious metals and raw materials, but of agricultural products and practices which saved the thinly stretched food supplies of Europe:
Beside their effect on diet, the new crops brought a dramatic rise in output—in Africa and Asia, as well as in Europe. Maize and potatoes are about twice as productive as wheat and barley, needing only half the land and workforce to yield the same amount of food. Populations rose and large numbers of people left the farm, generating labor surpluses from Britain to the Gold Coast. In the north these people ended up in mills and factories, while in Africa they became foreign exchange[i.e. slaves] for manufactured goods, especially guns.
Modern capitalism “lures us onward, insisting that the economy is infinite and that sharing therefore is irrelevant.” We have indeed expanded our economies, but not to the benefit of the masses—the income gap is increasing exponentially. In the last century, the world's population has multiplied four-fold and the world's economic output (and therefore its drain on the earth’s resources) forty-fold. Thus, if the global gap between rich and poor had merely remained at late Victorian proportions, all human beings today “would be ten times better off” now than they were then. But over the last century, the gap between rich and poor has massively widened. Today, the number of people living in abject poverty worldwide actually exceeds the total number of people alive a century ago.
We have a “great advantage” over previous civilizations that have collapsed. We know from history that we need to “set economic limits and live within natural ones.” But knowledge, alas, does not automatically translate into action. In the West there was progressive social legislation growing out of the sufferings of the Great Depression and World War II, but recent world leaders have done their best to tear it apart at the behest of the multinational corporations that are the primary beneficiaries of so-called free enterprise. This “revolt against redistribution” — a revolt that has dominated the global economic scene since the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher — “is killing civilization from ghetto to rainforest.”
Humanism and rationality, insofar as they have had any influence on public polity, would seem to be momentary aberrations in the long struggle for domination and survival. Dave Pollard summarizes Wright’s bleakly Darwinian conclusions with stunning clarity:
Wright describes human society-building as steeped in violence, genocide and savagery, and demonstrates that evolutionary success of human cultures has been proportional to their readiness and willingness to exterminate or subjugate 'competitors' (plants, animals, other human cultures and members of their own culture) with deliberate, zealous and ruthless barbarity. The consequence is that human evolution has self-selected for savagery and bred compassion out of the gene pool, and has consistently provided the most ruthless members of our society (psychopaths, megalomaniacs, war-mongers and power-crazies) the method, the motive and the opportunity to seize control and establish rigid and vicious hierarchies that entrench and reinforce extreme inequality, holding power by the threat of violence (sacrificing subordinates in wars and in prisons to keep others in line) and anchoring their authority by claims of divine right.
§
Ronald Wright threatens to make Cassandras of us all. In every news report we hear echoes of the destructive contradictions that have given rise to his mordant analysis. On the one hand, scientists tell us that the earth’s physical resources are nearing exhaustion and that pollution and/or global warming will be the death of us. On the other, economists, politicians and plutocrats unite in proclaiming that the only thing that will save the world from fiscal disaster is the perpetual expansion of the global economy by means of ever-increasing production—the very cause of our ecological crisis. There are loud echoes of late Mayan decadence:
[T]hey dug in their heels and carried on doing what they had always done, only more so. Their solution was higher pyramids, more power to the kings, harder work for the masses, more foreign wars. In modern terms, the Maya elite became extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.
Even if by some miracle our rulers were to read and respond to the writing on the wall, there are Third World countries, exploited by the West into higher productivity, who now demand their turn at the trough. This cut-throat competition is at the expense of labourers everywhere—under the manipulated terms of “free trade”, workers in the West must compete hour-for-hour and dollar-for-dollar with virtual slaves trapped in sub-Dickensian poverty.
Agriculture has always been a potentially dangerous and self-contradictory solution to the problem of human sustenance. After a brief century in which factory farming gradually improved the diet of the poor, the multinational food industry has now become a primary impetus towards overpopulation, obesity, pollution and greenhouse gasses. Wright refers to it as a “runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem…The food crisis…has merely been postponed by switching to hybrid seed and chemical farming, at great cost to soil health and plant diversity.” And now the burgeoning Third World is placing demands on the agricultural ecostructure that go far beyond any that our planet has yet experienced.
China was long blessed with virtual food self-sufficiency, but since 1995 it has lost more than 6m hectares of arable land to cities, factories, roads and deserts—an area three times the size of Wales. To make up the lack it has gone abroad, especially to Brazil in search of soya. As a result, during this same ten-year period satellite images reveal that the Amazon rain forest has shrunk by 1.7m hectares each year, an annual loss almost the size of Israel. This has enabled Brazilian soya exports to China to increase by a staggering 10,685%—and the end is not yet in sight. “There is no such thing as sustainable management of forests. It is all predatory,” says Nielson Vieira of Ibama, the Brazilian state environmental agency. “All we can do is minimize the damage.” And this is to feed what is still a predominantly vegetarian society—heaven help us when China, like all prosperous countries before it, turns massively carnivore!
Radical ecological reform, long dismissed as a starry-eyed fantasy, is beginning to look like the only game in town. As fertile soil and unpolluted water grow ever scarcer, sustainable agriculture begins to appear more realistic than the unsustainable norm. Greenland’s glacier is approaching irreversible meltdown, which would raise the sea level by twenty feet, wiping out low-lying coastal cities; this would also endanger the Gulf stream, threatening Britain with permafrost. Antidotes have been proposed, such as capping worldwide greenhouse gas production and allocating rights on a per capita basis (Contraction and Convergence). Something along those lines had better be agreed on and implemented quickly. After the Kyoto marriage of convenience, the runaway wedding coach is speeding down the slope, the occupants blithely confident that some undiscovered new technology will accelerate them unharmed through the crash barrier. Hurtling towards imminent disaster, their optimistic cry is, “We’re all right so far!”
Ronald Wright’s seminal diatribe has been favourably noted in several scholarly websites, but there has been no proper coverage in the media; it seems to have escaped their notice, gone over their heads or been deemed too hot to handle. (The Guardian gave it three column inches in the middle of an “Et Cetera” column, more than half of which was a snivelling complaint about the paper it was printed on.) If there is intelligent life out there observing us, they will have shelved a copy of Ronald Wright’s little tract next to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “What fools these mortals be!”
©2005 John Whiting
Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, Edinburgh, Cannongate, 2005, £12.99, ISBN 1 84195 711 9
"Food Inc." A film by Robert Kenner.
"Food Inc." A film by Robert Kenner.
It’s not just the Food, it’s the Inc.
In disenchanted America, muckraking documentaries are hot box office. After Michael Moore blazed the trail, the food-related films McLibel, Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation followed. The latest, Food Inc., has topped them all—immediately after the DVD was released on Amazon, it even outsold the Hollywood blockbusters. And now it's up for an Academy Award.
Most of the discussion about the film on both sides of the Atlantic has centered on nutrition and animal welfare, but the sub-plot goes beyond food production and consumption to the very heart of the country’s legal and political structure. Says director Robert Kenner in an interview for The Ecologist:
I realised it was not a film about food, it was a film about rights. Seeing how food products now have more rights than individuals - that was more frightening than seeing how the food was produced.
This point seems to have escaped reviewers in Britain, many of whom complained that the film only told them what they already knew. But the real message lies in the tightrope that Kenner had to walk in order to convey the information:
I realised the system was off limits. Ultimately in the US food products have started to have more rights than individuals. There are laws in place to protect companies - known as 'veggie libel' laws - that stop you from insulting a product or endangering profits of a corporation. . . I ended up spending more on legal fees on this film than the past 15 films combined - times three!
Some reviewers, together with establishment organizations such as the Farmers’ Union, also dismissed the film as American scaremongering, but Kenner is firm in his rebuttal:
This is not a film about the US. I thought of filming in other countries and you could have been told the exact same story. It might have started in the US, but it is spreading. It's starting to happen here and it happens in Asia.
In fact, the American industrial pig farmer Smithfield has opened plants in Romania and Poland that legally export to all of the EU (as documented in another scary documentary, Pig Business). And then there are all those thousands of Indonesian chickens that end up in everybody’s fast food lunch. As for the legal aspects, Kenner was well aware that Britain is a world centre of “libel tourism”:
The irony is that it's more frightening to talk about it here than in the States.
Huge success in America has helped to launch the film in Britain with an impetus it would not otherwise have had. This is not just another foodie TV programme following in the footsteps of Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, but a feature film that will continue to be seen by millions on both sides of the Atlantic, both in the cinema and on DVD.
Early attention was virtually assured by Kenner’s brilliant decision to ask Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to jointly narrate it. Both have long been at the top of the best seller list of campaigning food books and both were so lacking in vanity and greed as to readily accept equal billing. Their only complaint, Kenner said half-jokingly, was that they weren’t given a script but had to put it in their own words. Their veracity comes across in a direct and spontaneous delivery that never smacks of the teleprompter.
Whether the film will have a lasting effect is another matter. In a recent American documentary, Daniel Ellsberg tells the sensational story of his leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Its saddest moment is when he says that one of the lessons he learned about his fellow countrymen came when, even after they had learned that President Nixon (like Presidents Johnson and Kennedy before him) had repeatedly lied to them about the Vietnam War, they resoundingly re-elected him. As Santayana wryly remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
©2010 John Whiting
It’s not just the Food, it’s the Inc.
In disenchanted America, muckraking documentaries are hot box office. After Michael Moore blazed the trail, the food-related films McLibel, Supersize Me and Fast Food Nation followed. The latest, Food Inc., has topped them all—immediately after the DVD was released on Amazon, it even outsold the Hollywood blockbusters. And now it's up for an Academy Award.
Most of the discussion about the film on both sides of the Atlantic has centered on nutrition and animal welfare, but the sub-plot goes beyond food production and consumption to the very heart of the country’s legal and political structure. Says director Robert Kenner in an interview for The Ecologist:
I realised it was not a film about food, it was a film about rights. Seeing how food products now have more rights than individuals - that was more frightening than seeing how the food was produced.
This point seems to have escaped reviewers in Britain, many of whom complained that the film only told them what they already knew. But the real message lies in the tightrope that Kenner had to walk in order to convey the information:
I realised the system was off limits. Ultimately in the US food products have started to have more rights than individuals. There are laws in place to protect companies - known as 'veggie libel' laws - that stop you from insulting a product or endangering profits of a corporation. . . I ended up spending more on legal fees on this film than the past 15 films combined - times three!
Some reviewers, together with establishment organizations such as the Farmers’ Union, also dismissed the film as American scaremongering, but Kenner is firm in his rebuttal:
This is not a film about the US. I thought of filming in other countries and you could have been told the exact same story. It might have started in the US, but it is spreading. It's starting to happen here and it happens in Asia.
In fact, the American industrial pig farmer Smithfield has opened plants in Romania and Poland that legally export to all of the EU (as documented in another scary documentary, Pig Business). And then there are all those thousands of Indonesian chickens that end up in everybody’s fast food lunch. As for the legal aspects, Kenner was well aware that Britain is a world centre of “libel tourism”:
The irony is that it's more frightening to talk about it here than in the States.
Huge success in America has helped to launch the film in Britain with an impetus it would not otherwise have had. This is not just another foodie TV programme following in the footsteps of Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall, but a feature film that will continue to be seen by millions on both sides of the Atlantic, both in the cinema and on DVD.
Early attention was virtually assured by Kenner’s brilliant decision to ask Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to jointly narrate it. Both have long been at the top of the best seller list of campaigning food books and both were so lacking in vanity and greed as to readily accept equal billing. Their only complaint, Kenner said half-jokingly, was that they weren’t given a script but had to put it in their own words. Their veracity comes across in a direct and spontaneous delivery that never smacks of the teleprompter.
Whether the film will have a lasting effect is another matter. In a recent American documentary, Daniel Ellsberg tells the sensational story of his leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Its saddest moment is when he says that one of the lessons he learned about his fellow countrymen came when, even after they had learned that President Nixon (like Presidents Johnson and Kennedy before him) had repeatedly lied to them about the Vietnam War, they resoundingly re-elected him. As Santayana wryly remarked, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
©2010 John Whiting
Philosophical reasoning taught in the second grade. - NYTimes.com
Philosophical reasoning taught in the second grade. - NYTimes.com
April 8, 2010
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
“We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.”
He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late.
Professor Lipman’s view opposed that of the child-development theorist Jean Piaget, who asserted that children under 12 were not capable of abstract reasoning. He and others, including Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”
In 1974, Professor Lipman, now 87, started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, which has since developed curriculum materials that have been translated into more than 40 languages and used in more than 60 countries. But American public schools have been slow to embrace philosophy for children; while outreach programs are offered by a handful of universities — among them the University of Washington andCalifornia State University, Long Beach — many school officials either find the subject too intimidating or believe it does not fit with the test-driven culture of public education these days.
“Our current educational system is about standards and efficiency,” says Joe Oyler, programs coordinator for the institute at Montclair State. “It’s not fast and it’s not clean. We help children become comfortable with ambiguity and responding to it, so it’s tough to fit in.”
Ms. Runquist's students managed to fit philosophy in between writing and science. This was their sixth lesson of the year, and by now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.
Most of the young philosophers had no problem with the boy using the tree’s shade. But they were divided on the apples, which the boy sold, the branches, which he used to build a house, and the trunk, which he carved into a boat.
“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.
“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.
Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.
“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.
Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.
“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”
This gave his classmates pause.
Professor Wartenberg and students use eight picture books to introduce children to the major fields of philosophy, including aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of the mind.
With Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Together,” in which Frog and Toad try to determine whether they can be brave and scared at the same time, the pupils examine the nature of courage — one of Aristotle’s central virtues. With Bernard Wiseman’s “Morris the Moose,” about a moose who mistakenly assumes all his friends are also moose, they consider how someone can maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence. And with Peter Catalanotto’s “Emily’s Art,” about a talented young artist who loses a contest, they debate whether there can be objective standards for evaluating works of art.
“The world is a puzzling place and when you’re young it doesn’t make sense,” Professor Wartenberg says. “What you’re giving them is the sort of skills to learn how to think about these things.”
Professor Wartenberg has written a book, “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), to spread his experiment to more elementary schools. His focus is on teaching undergraduate philosophy students how to work with children, and his decade-old course at Mount Holyoke, “Teaching Children Philosophy,” has led many of his students to pursue careers in early-childhood education.
“A lot of them don’t know what to do after college,” he says. “If they want to do something with philosophy, this opens up an avenue.”
Professor Wartenberg also says that philosophy lessons can improve reading comprehension and other skills that children need to meet state-imposed curriculum standards and excel on standardized tests. With a grant from the Squire Family Foundation, which promotes the teaching of ethics and philosophy, he is assessing whether his program helps in the development of argument and other skills.
“It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” he says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”
But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.
“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”
Abby Goodnough is the Boston bureau chief of The Times.
April 8, 2010
The Examined Life, Age 8
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
A few times each month, second graders at a charter school in Springfield, Mass., take time from math and reading to engage in philosophical debate. There is no mention of Hegel or Descartes, no study of syllogism or solipsism. Instead, Prof. Thomas E. Wartenberg and his undergraduate students from nearby Mount Holyoke College use classic children’s books to raise philosophical questions, which the young students then dissect with the vigor of the ancient Greeks.
“A lot of people try to make philosophy into an elitist discipline,” says Professor Wartenberg, who has been visiting the school, the Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School of Excellence, since 2007. “But everyone is interested in basic philosophical ideas; they’re the most basic questions we have about the world.”
One afternoon this winter, the students in Christina Runquist’s classroom read Shel Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” about a tree that surrenders its shade, fruit, branches and finally its trunk to a boy it has befriended. The college students led the discussion that followed — on environmental ethics, or “how we should treat natural objects,” as Professor Wartenberg puts it — with a series of questions, starting with whether the boy was wrong to take so much from the tree.
“We don’t actually try to convince them that trees deserve respect,” he says, “but ask them, ‘What do you think?’ We’re trying to get them engaged in the practice of doing philosophy, versus trying to teach them, say, what Descartes thought about something.”
He is not the first philosopher to work with children. In the 1970s, Matthew Lipman, then a professor at Columbia University, argued that children could think abstractly at an early age and that philosophical questioning could help them develop reasoning skills. It was the Vietnam era, and Professor Lipman believed that many Americans were too accepting of authoritative answers and slow to reason for themselves — by college, he feared, it would be too late.
Professor Lipman’s view opposed that of the child-development theorist Jean Piaget, who asserted that children under 12 were not capable of abstract reasoning. He and others, including Gareth Matthews, a professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that their curiosity and sense of wonder make children ripe for philosophic inquiry.
“The world is new to them and they want to figure things out,” says Professor Matthews, who has written extensively about children and philosophy. “Young children very often engage in reasoning that professional philosophers can recognize as philosophical, but typically their parents or teachers don’t react in a way that encourages them. They might say, ‘That’s cute,’ but they don’t engage the children in thinking further about whatever the issue is.”
In 1974, Professor Lipman, now 87, started the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children at Montclair State University, which has since developed curriculum materials that have been translated into more than 40 languages and used in more than 60 countries. But American public schools have been slow to embrace philosophy for children; while outreach programs are offered by a handful of universities — among them the University of Washington andCalifornia State University, Long Beach — many school officials either find the subject too intimidating or believe it does not fit with the test-driven culture of public education these days.
“Our current educational system is about standards and efficiency,” says Joe Oyler, programs coordinator for the institute at Montclair State. “It’s not fast and it’s not clean. We help children become comfortable with ambiguity and responding to it, so it’s tough to fit in.”
Ms. Runquist's students managed to fit philosophy in between writing and science. This was their sixth lesson of the year, and by now they knew the drill: deciding whether or not they agreed with each question; thinking about why or why not; explaining why or why not; and respecting what their classmates said.
Most of the young philosophers had no problem with the boy using the tree’s shade. But they were divided on the apples, which the boy sold, the branches, which he used to build a house, and the trunk, which he carved into a boat.
“It’s only a tree,” Justin said with a shrug.
“The tree has feelings!” Keyshawn replied.
Some reasoned that even if the tree wanted the boy to have its apples and branches, there might be unforeseen consequences.
“If they take the tree’s trunk, um, the tree’s not going to live,” said Nyasia.
Isaiah was among only a few pupils who said they would treat an inanimate object differently from a human friend.
“Say me and a rock was a friend,” he said. “It would be different, because a rock can’t move. And it can’t look around.”
This gave his classmates pause.
Professor Wartenberg and students use eight picture books to introduce children to the major fields of philosophy, including aesthetics, ethics, metaphysics, social and political philosophy and philosophy of the mind.
With Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad Together,” in which Frog and Toad try to determine whether they can be brave and scared at the same time, the pupils examine the nature of courage — one of Aristotle’s central virtues. With Bernard Wiseman’s “Morris the Moose,” about a moose who mistakenly assumes all his friends are also moose, they consider how someone can maintain a belief in the face of contrary evidence. And with Peter Catalanotto’s “Emily’s Art,” about a talented young artist who loses a contest, they debate whether there can be objective standards for evaluating works of art.
“The world is a puzzling place and when you’re young it doesn’t make sense,” Professor Wartenberg says. “What you’re giving them is the sort of skills to learn how to think about these things.”
Professor Wartenberg has written a book, “Big Ideas for Little Kids: Teaching Philosophy Through Children’s Literature” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), to spread his experiment to more elementary schools. His focus is on teaching undergraduate philosophy students how to work with children, and his decade-old course at Mount Holyoke, “Teaching Children Philosophy,” has led many of his students to pursue careers in early-childhood education.
“A lot of them don’t know what to do after college,” he says. “If they want to do something with philosophy, this opens up an avenue.”
Professor Wartenberg also says that philosophy lessons can improve reading comprehension and other skills that children need to meet state-imposed curriculum standards and excel on standardized tests. With a grant from the Squire Family Foundation, which promotes the teaching of ethics and philosophy, he is assessing whether his program helps in the development of argument and other skills.
“It’s giving kids a way to figure out what they think, support their own views and reason with one another,” he says. “So I can’t imagine this isn’t helping them on standardized tests.”
But the pupils in Ms. Runquist’s class said they liked philosophy because it involved reading good books and expressing themselves.
“We can say things about what we believe and stuff,” a girl named Autumn said. “It’s what we feel and what we think.”
Abby Goodnough is the Boston bureau chief of The Times.
Thursday, 22 April 2010
Rise of the Corporate Court: How the Supreme Court is Putting Businesses First | People For the American Way
Rise of the Corporate Court: How the Supreme Court is Putting Businesses First | People For the American Way
...
What is striking today, however, is how often the Roberts Court, like its predecessor the Rehnquist Court, hands down counter-intuitive 5-4 victories to corporations by ignoring clear precedents, twisting statutory language and distorting legislative intent. From labor and workplace law to environmental law, from consumer regulation to tort law and the all-important election law, the conservative-tilting Court has reached out to enshrine and elevate the power of business corporations --what some people have begun to call "corporate Americans"--over the rights of the old-fashioned human beings called citizens.
...
This was the working assumption of not only progressive justices but deeply conservative ones who were faithful to the text of the Constitution and not under the spell of corporate power. Chief Justice John Marshall, the great hero of prior generations of judicial conservatives, wrote in the Dartmouth College21 case that: "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it . . ."22
In our time, Justice Byron White pointed out that we endow private corporations with all kinds of legal benefits—"limited liability, perpetual life, and the accumulation, distribution and taxation of assets"—in order to "strengthen the economy generally." But a corporation thus endowed by the state is placed "in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process." The state, he argued, has a compelling interest in "preventing institutions which have been permitted to amass wealth as a result of special advantages extended by the State for certain economic purposes from using that wealth to acquire an unfair advantage in the political process. . ."23
Justice White then delivered the key principle that ought to control our constitutional understanding of the corporation's political ambitions: "The state need not permit its own creation to consume it."
...
Rehnquist embraced Chief Justice Marshall's statement that a "corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law," and aggressively questioned theories of the "personhood" of the corporation. He wrote that he could not see why "liberties of political expression" are "necessary to effectuate the purposes for which States permit commercial corporations to exist. . . . Indeed, the States might reasonably fear that the corporation would use its economic power to obtain further benefits beyond those already bestowed."26
...
What is striking today, however, is how often the Roberts Court, like its predecessor the Rehnquist Court, hands down counter-intuitive 5-4 victories to corporations by ignoring clear precedents, twisting statutory language and distorting legislative intent. From labor and workplace law to environmental law, from consumer regulation to tort law and the all-important election law, the conservative-tilting Court has reached out to enshrine and elevate the power of business corporations --what some people have begun to call "corporate Americans"--over the rights of the old-fashioned human beings called citizens.
...
This was the working assumption of not only progressive justices but deeply conservative ones who were faithful to the text of the Constitution and not under the spell of corporate power. Chief Justice John Marshall, the great hero of prior generations of judicial conservatives, wrote in the Dartmouth College21 case that: "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible and existing only in contemplation of law. Being the mere creature of law, it possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it . . ."22
In our time, Justice Byron White pointed out that we endow private corporations with all kinds of legal benefits—"limited liability, perpetual life, and the accumulation, distribution and taxation of assets"—in order to "strengthen the economy generally." But a corporation thus endowed by the state is placed "in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process." The state, he argued, has a compelling interest in "preventing institutions which have been permitted to amass wealth as a result of special advantages extended by the State for certain economic purposes from using that wealth to acquire an unfair advantage in the political process. . ."23
Justice White then delivered the key principle that ought to control our constitutional understanding of the corporation's political ambitions: "The state need not permit its own creation to consume it."
...
Rehnquist embraced Chief Justice Marshall's statement that a "corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law," and aggressively questioned theories of the "personhood" of the corporation. He wrote that he could not see why "liberties of political expression" are "necessary to effectuate the purposes for which States permit commercial corporations to exist. . . . Indeed, the States might reasonably fear that the corporation would use its economic power to obtain further benefits beyond those already bestowed."26
AlterNet: 7 Tricks Teabaggers Will Use to Conceal Their Extreme Right-Wing Beliefs
AlterNet: 7 Tricks Teabaggers Will Use to Conceal Their Extreme Right-Wing Beliefs
7 Tricks Teabaggers Will Use to Conceal Their Extreme Right-Wing Beliefs
By Christopher Deis, AlterNet
Posted on April 21, 2010, Printed on April 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146555/
While they can be disparaged as being narrow minded ideologues possessed of an authoritarian personality, conservatives in the U.S.--and the extreme right wing that has now become the center of the GOP--have long been masters of using emotional and moral appeals to motivate their public. While the Democrats are hamstrung by an issues-based approach to politics, conservatives have mastered the art of creating an alternate world of political facts and reason (enabled by the right-wing media echo chamber) where the reality based community need not tread.
This week the note being struck is that liberal infiltrators (in the guise of "agent provocateurs") are targeting the Tea Parties in order to smear and discredit them. Without any factual substantiation (and ignoring the racist, bigoted and violent rhetoric common a Tea Party gatherings) the Right has tried to reframe the narrative that surrounds the tea baggers. Now, freed from any responsibility for their own actions, the Tea Parties can point to some imagined villain as being responsible for all things disruptive and violent at their protests.
This frees the tea baggers from any measure of responsibility for their deeds: if someone has a racist sign he/she is an infiltrator; if someone spits on a black congressman "they aren't really one of us" (or alternatively John Lewis was not spat upon because there is no "proof" save for eyewitness accounts); if someone incites violence "he isn't a tea bagger, it must be a crazy progressive." Not surprisingly, rather than expose this quackery, most in the media are repeating these narratives without critical intervention or comment.
My claim is not that provocation by liberal instigators is an impossibility. No, the rebuttal should be "so what?" With all of the evidence of how central white racial animus and hostility are to the Tea Party movement, what else could the infiltrators possibly do? What other bad behavior--short of bombings, shootings and other wanton acts of violence--could they possibly provoke the tea baggers into committing?
An appeal to the "liberals as infiltrators strategy" is also doubly effective because it inverts the political landscape by making the Tea Parties into victims of Jim Crow 2.0 and Barack Obama's America--those liberals who despise "the patriots" and the good white folk who only want to exercise their First Amendment rights against an "oppressive" and "tyrannical" regime that practices "reverse discrimination" and "pays too much attention" to black people's needs.
The Right has upped the ante. Not content with displacing responsibility onto "liberals" and "progressives" for the brigands in their midst, the Tea Parties are now trying to take the moral high ground as the party of diversity and tolerance. To that end, the tea baggers and their right-wing media arm have been circulating a video of a confrontation between a Tea Party member and an alleged white supremacist. Here the tea bagger confronts the white supremacist and condemns him.
While doing so, the Tea Party activist is sticking to a clear script: "The Tea Parties are not racist," "racism has no place with the Tea Parties" and "the Tea Party does not concern itself with race." In one two-minute clip, the Tea Party has created a counter-narrative with compelling soundbites that runs explicitly counter to the popular understanding that the tea baggers are racist xenophobes.
It is also a classic false flag operation. In intelligence and military circles these tactics involve the use of subterfuge and trickery (thus the allusion to a ship flying a "false flag") to create a pretext for military intervention or regime change, for framing events in the service of your own agenda, or more simply for making the public believe that X is occurring when it is in reality Y.
In keeping with this strategy, the "white supremacist" in question (and there will be other videos of similar events released soon...you can mark my words) is a Tea Party activist. He is playing the role of the devil in their midst, a cancer to be conveniently exorcised as a way for the Tea Parties to demonstrate their love of diversity and colorblind politics. It is ironic then that the Tea Parties and the Right are sounding an alarm regarding the use of dirty tricks by the Left (conservatives such as Beck and Limbaugh assert that the progressives are masters of subterfuge and disruption). In the United States the truth has been that through programs such as Cointelpro, the forces of elite power and conservatism have spied on, disrupted, discredited, harassed and even killed members of left-leaning organizations.
The repackaging of the Tea Parties as tolerant and inclusive political organizations is happening as we speak. It will continue from its own momentum regardless of the facts on the ground. In much the same way that Dr. King has been reimagined by conservatives to be a Republican (notice how Glenn Beck, the Pied Piper of the Tea Parties, is increasingly appropriating both the language and symbolism of the Civil Rights Movement), the tea baggers will be depicted as forces of American virtue and pluralism. As this false flag operation continues to develop, here are a few things to watch for in the upcoming weeks:
More coverage of the "racial diversity" of the Tea Parties. Expect to see the same talking heads and black and brown apologists trotted out on the major networks;
The discussion of agent provocateurs will take on the weight of fact as opposed to speculation;
There will be more videos of white supremacists, nativists and overt "Birthers" being thrown out of Tea Party rallies;
Simultaneously, there will be a great deal of attention paid to "incidents" in which Palin supporters and tea baggers are assaulted by "anti-Tea Party" forces and "agents of the Obama regime";
The right-wing media frame will continue to emphasize their longstanding narrative that conservatives and "real Americans" are "victims" of the Left and progressives;
Similar to what happened with the ACORN pimp and prostitute scandal (a fraud staged by Breitbart and company), the efforts to "infiltrate" the Tea Parties will be exposed as events planned by the Right;
Loose lips sink ships: one of the "white supremacist" or other "agent provocateurs" will admit that they are on the payroll of someone semi-connected (for reasons of plausible deniability) to the right-wing media and/or political establishment.
Your predictions and thoughts? Pray tell, what does your crystal ball reveal for these coming weeks?
Christopher Deis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His work has appeared in the Chicago Defender, the Washington Post's Web site the Root, Culture Kitchen and Popmatters. He is a 2009-2010 visiting faculty member in the Department of Political Science at DePaul University.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146555/
7 Tricks Teabaggers Will Use to Conceal Their Extreme Right-Wing Beliefs
By Christopher Deis, AlterNet
Posted on April 21, 2010, Printed on April 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146555/
While they can be disparaged as being narrow minded ideologues possessed of an authoritarian personality, conservatives in the U.S.--and the extreme right wing that has now become the center of the GOP--have long been masters of using emotional and moral appeals to motivate their public. While the Democrats are hamstrung by an issues-based approach to politics, conservatives have mastered the art of creating an alternate world of political facts and reason (enabled by the right-wing media echo chamber) where the reality based community need not tread.
This week the note being struck is that liberal infiltrators (in the guise of "agent provocateurs") are targeting the Tea Parties in order to smear and discredit them. Without any factual substantiation (and ignoring the racist, bigoted and violent rhetoric common a Tea Party gatherings) the Right has tried to reframe the narrative that surrounds the tea baggers. Now, freed from any responsibility for their own actions, the Tea Parties can point to some imagined villain as being responsible for all things disruptive and violent at their protests.
This frees the tea baggers from any measure of responsibility for their deeds: if someone has a racist sign he/she is an infiltrator; if someone spits on a black congressman "they aren't really one of us" (or alternatively John Lewis was not spat upon because there is no "proof" save for eyewitness accounts); if someone incites violence "he isn't a tea bagger, it must be a crazy progressive." Not surprisingly, rather than expose this quackery, most in the media are repeating these narratives without critical intervention or comment.
My claim is not that provocation by liberal instigators is an impossibility. No, the rebuttal should be "so what?" With all of the evidence of how central white racial animus and hostility are to the Tea Party movement, what else could the infiltrators possibly do? What other bad behavior--short of bombings, shootings and other wanton acts of violence--could they possibly provoke the tea baggers into committing?
An appeal to the "liberals as infiltrators strategy" is also doubly effective because it inverts the political landscape by making the Tea Parties into victims of Jim Crow 2.0 and Barack Obama's America--those liberals who despise "the patriots" and the good white folk who only want to exercise their First Amendment rights against an "oppressive" and "tyrannical" regime that practices "reverse discrimination" and "pays too much attention" to black people's needs.
The Right has upped the ante. Not content with displacing responsibility onto "liberals" and "progressives" for the brigands in their midst, the Tea Parties are now trying to take the moral high ground as the party of diversity and tolerance. To that end, the tea baggers and their right-wing media arm have been circulating a video of a confrontation between a Tea Party member and an alleged white supremacist. Here the tea bagger confronts the white supremacist and condemns him.
While doing so, the Tea Party activist is sticking to a clear script: "The Tea Parties are not racist," "racism has no place with the Tea Parties" and "the Tea Party does not concern itself with race." In one two-minute clip, the Tea Party has created a counter-narrative with compelling soundbites that runs explicitly counter to the popular understanding that the tea baggers are racist xenophobes.
It is also a classic false flag operation. In intelligence and military circles these tactics involve the use of subterfuge and trickery (thus the allusion to a ship flying a "false flag") to create a pretext for military intervention or regime change, for framing events in the service of your own agenda, or more simply for making the public believe that X is occurring when it is in reality Y.
In keeping with this strategy, the "white supremacist" in question (and there will be other videos of similar events released soon...you can mark my words) is a Tea Party activist. He is playing the role of the devil in their midst, a cancer to be conveniently exorcised as a way for the Tea Parties to demonstrate their love of diversity and colorblind politics. It is ironic then that the Tea Parties and the Right are sounding an alarm regarding the use of dirty tricks by the Left (conservatives such as Beck and Limbaugh assert that the progressives are masters of subterfuge and disruption). In the United States the truth has been that through programs such as Cointelpro, the forces of elite power and conservatism have spied on, disrupted, discredited, harassed and even killed members of left-leaning organizations.
The repackaging of the Tea Parties as tolerant and inclusive political organizations is happening as we speak. It will continue from its own momentum regardless of the facts on the ground. In much the same way that Dr. King has been reimagined by conservatives to be a Republican (notice how Glenn Beck, the Pied Piper of the Tea Parties, is increasingly appropriating both the language and symbolism of the Civil Rights Movement), the tea baggers will be depicted as forces of American virtue and pluralism. As this false flag operation continues to develop, here are a few things to watch for in the upcoming weeks:
More coverage of the "racial diversity" of the Tea Parties. Expect to see the same talking heads and black and brown apologists trotted out on the major networks;
The discussion of agent provocateurs will take on the weight of fact as opposed to speculation;
There will be more videos of white supremacists, nativists and overt "Birthers" being thrown out of Tea Party rallies;
Simultaneously, there will be a great deal of attention paid to "incidents" in which Palin supporters and tea baggers are assaulted by "anti-Tea Party" forces and "agents of the Obama regime";
The right-wing media frame will continue to emphasize their longstanding narrative that conservatives and "real Americans" are "victims" of the Left and progressives;
Similar to what happened with the ACORN pimp and prostitute scandal (a fraud staged by Breitbart and company), the efforts to "infiltrate" the Tea Parties will be exposed as events planned by the Right;
Loose lips sink ships: one of the "white supremacist" or other "agent provocateurs" will admit that they are on the payroll of someone semi-connected (for reasons of plausible deniability) to the right-wing media and/or political establishment.
Your predictions and thoughts? Pray tell, what does your crystal ball reveal for these coming weeks?
Christopher Deis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His work has appeared in the Chicago Defender, the Washington Post's Web site the Root, Culture Kitchen and Popmatters. He is a 2009-2010 visiting faculty member in the Department of Political Science at DePaul University.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/146555/
AlterNet: Facing the Threat from the Far Right, Noam Chomsky Says He 'Has Never Seen Anything Like This'
AlterNet: Facing the Threat from the Far Right, Noam Chomsky Says He 'Has Never Seen Anything Like This'
Facing the Threat from the Far Right, Noam Chomsky Says He 'Has Never Seen Anything Like This'
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on April 19, 2010, Printed on April 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146523/
This article first appeared on TruthDig.
Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
Chomsky has, more than any other American intellectual, charted the downward spiral of the American political and economic system, in works such as “On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures,” “Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture,” “A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West,” “Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky,” “Manufacturing Consent” and “Letters From Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda.” He reminds us that genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive. It challenges cultural and political assumptions. It critiques structures. It is relentlessly self-critical. It implodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression. And it makes the powerful, as well as their liberal apologists, deeply uncomfortable.
Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor’s note: To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, click here, here, here and here.]
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.
“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”
“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”
Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.
“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever been lost.”
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Facing the Threat from the Far Right, Noam Chomsky Says He 'Has Never Seen Anything Like This'
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on April 19, 2010, Printed on April 22, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/146523/
This article first appeared on TruthDig.
Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect. He curtly dismisses our two-party system as a mirage orchestrated by the corporate state, excoriates the liberal intelligentsia for being fops and courtiers and describes the drivel of the commercial media as a form of “brainwashing.” And as our nation’s most prescient critic of unregulated capitalism, globalization and the poison of empire, he enters his 81st year warning us that we have little time left to save our anemic democracy.
“It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,” Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. “The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.”
“The United States is extremely lucky that no honest, charismatic figure has arisen,” Chomsky went on. “Every charismatic figure is such an obvious crook that he destroys himself, like McCarthy or Nixon or the evangelist preachers. If somebody comes along who is charismatic and honest this country is in real trouble because of the frustration, disillusionment, the justified anger and the absence of any coherent response. What are people supposed to think if someone says ‘I have got an answer, we have an enemy’? There it was the Jews. Here it will be the illegal immigrants and the blacks. We will be told that white males are a persecuted minority. We will be told we have to defend ourselves and the honor of the nation. Military force will be exalted. People will be beaten up. This could become an overwhelming force. And if it happens it will be more dangerous than Germany. The United States is the world power. Germany was powerful but had more powerful antagonists. I don’t think all this is very far away. If the polls are accurate it is not the Republicans but the right-wing Republicans, the crazed Republicans, who will sweep the next election.”
“I have never seen anything like this in my lifetime,” Chomsky added. “I am old enough to remember the 1930s. My whole family was unemployed. There were far more desperate conditions than today. But it was hopeful. People had hope. The CIO was organizing. No one wants to say it anymore but the Communist Party was the spearhead for labor and civil rights organizing. Even things like giving my unemployed seamstress aunt a week in the country. It was a life. There is nothing like that now. The mood of the country is frightening. The level of anger, frustration and hatred of institutions is not organized in a constructive way. It is going off into self-destructive fantasies.”
“I listen to talk radio,” Chomsky said. “I don’t want to hear Rush Limbaugh. I want to hear the people calling in. They are like [suicide pilot] Joe Stack. What is happening to me? I have done all the right things. I am a God-fearing Christian. I work hard for my family. I have a gun. I believe in the values of the country and my life is collapsing.”
Chomsky has, more than any other American intellectual, charted the downward spiral of the American political and economic system, in works such as “On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures,” “Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture,” “A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West,” “Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky,” “Manufacturing Consent” and “Letters From Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda.” He reminds us that genuine intellectual inquiry is always subversive. It challenges cultural and political assumptions. It critiques structures. It is relentlessly self-critical. It implodes the self-indulgent myths and stereotypes we use to elevate ourselves and ignore our complicity in acts of violence and oppression. And it makes the powerful, as well as their liberal apologists, deeply uncomfortable.
Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the press, the universities and the political system who serve as a smoke screen for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud. And this is why Chomsky is hated, and perhaps feared, more among liberal elites than among the right wing he also excoriates. When Christopher Hitchens decided to become a windup doll for the Bush administration after the attacks of 9/11, one of the first things he did was write a vicious article attacking Chomsky. Hitchens, unlike most of those he served, knew which intellectual in America mattered. [Editor’s note: To see some of the articles in the 2001 exchanges between Hitchens and Chomsky, click here, here, here and here.]
“I don’t bother writing about Fox News,” Chomsky said. “It is too easy. What I talk about are the liberal intellectuals, the ones who portray themselves and perceive themselves as challenging power, as courageous, as standing up for truth and justice. They are basically the guardians of the faith. They set the limits. They tell us how far we can go. They say, ‘Look how courageous I am.’ But do not go one millimeter beyond that. At least for the educated sectors, they are the most dangerous in supporting power.”
Chomsky, because he steps outside of every group and eschews all ideologies, has been crucial to American discourse for decades, from his work on the Vietnam War to his criticisms of the Obama administration. He stubbornly maintains his position as an iconoclast, one who distrusts power in any form.
“Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity,” said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein. “They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, ‘my kingdom is not of this world.’ Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.”
“Some of Chomsky’s books will consist of things like analyzing the misrepresentations of the Arias plan in Central America, and he will devote 200 pages to it,” Finkelstein said. “And two years later, who will have heard of Oscar Arias? It causes you to wonder would Chomsky have been wiser to write things on a grander scale, things with a more enduring quality so that you read them forty or sixty years later. This is what Russell did in books like ‘Marriage and Morals.’ Can you even read any longer what Chomsky wrote on Vietnam and Central America? The answer has to often be no. This tells you something about him. He is not writing for ego. If he were writing for ego he would have written in a grand style that would have buttressed his legacy. He is writing because he wants to effect political change. He cares about the lives of people and there the details count. He is trying to refute the daily lies spewed out by the establishment media. He could have devoted his time to writing philosophical treatises that would have endured like Kant or Russell. But he invested in the tiny details which make a difference to win a political battle.”
“I try to encourage people to think for themselves, to question standard assumptions,” Chomsky said when asked about his goals. “Don’t take assumptions for granted. Begin by taking a skeptical attitude toward anything that is conventional wisdom. Make it justify itself. It usually can’t. Be willing to ask questions about what is taken for granted. Try to think things through for yourself. There is plenty of information. You have got to learn how to judge, evaluate and compare it with other things. You have to take some things on trust or you can’t survive. But if there is something significant and important don’t take it on trust. As soon as you read anything that is anonymous you should immediately distrust it. If you read in the newspapers that Iran is defying the international community, ask who is the international community? India is opposed to sanctions. China is opposed to sanctions. Brazil is opposed to sanctions. The Non-Aligned Movement is vigorously opposed to sanctions and has been for years. Who is the international community? It is Washington and anyone who happens to agree with it. You can figure that out, but you have to do work. It is the same on issue after issue.”
Chomsky’s courage to speak on behalf of those, such as the Palestinians, whose suffering is often minimized or ignored in mass culture, holds up the possibility of the moral life. And, perhaps even more than his scholarship, his example of intellectual and moral independence sustains all who defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.
“I cannot tell you how many people, myself included, and this is not hyperbole, whose lives were changed by him,” said Finkelstein, who has been driven out of several university posts for his intellectual courage and independence. “Were it not for Chomsky I would have long ago succumbed. I was beaten and battered in my professional life. It was only the knowledge that one of the greatest minds in human history has faith in me that compensates for this constant, relentless and vicious battering. There are many people who are considered nonentities, the so-called little people of this world, who suddenly get an e-mail from Noam Chomsky. It breathes new life into you. Chomsky has stirred many, many people to realize a level of their potential that would forever been lost.”
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute. He writes a regular column for TruthDig every Monday. His latest book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
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