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Saturday, August 31, 2013
SELF-RESTRAINT IN THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH
Friday, August 30, 2013
OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ISN'T BUSH ADMINISTRATION, STILL ONE PAUSES WHEN ...
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LINCOLN'S GIFTS
John Burt, Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2013) ("Lincoln provides a model for moral agency in a complex world in which one must make one's way among various half-understood alternatives, none of which leave one's hand very clean. This tragic sensibility differentiates Lincoln from figures like Emerson, Thoreau, and Parker, who had a clearer vision of the moral stakes involved than Lincoln himself did but who also sometimes showed that moral narcissism, that inability to conceive the humanity of one's opponents, that comes from being on the right side. . . . Next to both Emerson and Hawthorne, Lincoln's virtues shine out, especially his mysterious ability to retain the power of acting, sometimes in a ruthless and violent way, while never losing sight both of the moral compromises of his own position and of the moral humanity of his enemies. Lincoln had that hardest to understand of gifts, the ability to fight a great war without self-delusion, without self-congratulation, without truculent self-righteousness, and, most of all, without destroying through uncritical love the values in whose name he waged the war." Id. at 25. "If it is the sacred right of individuals to exercise their choice in markets, and if any restraint upon that right is tyranny, then indeed what does prevent the reestablishment of the slave trade? Certainly not market forces. For even when both the United States and Britain treated engaging in the African slave trade as a capital offense, as piracy, in the words of the 1820 U.S. law against it, the slave trade was lucrative enough that captains from New York and Portland were willing to take part in it. Market fundamentalism really does come down to a version of the claim that justice is really only the will of the stronger, in that it places something other than practical reason at the center of the moral life. An in treating the slavery question as something to be resolved by something other than practical reason, by market forces, Douglas abetted, although he probably did not intend to do so, the triumph of market fundamentalism over moral agency." Id. at 84.) .
Thursday, August 29, 2013
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
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Wednesday, August 28, 2013
"ON THE DARK UNDERSIDE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM"
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned and 'empire for liberty' populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves. River of Dark Dreams places the Cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery an its role in U.S. expansion, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War." "Walter Johnson deftly trace the connections between the planters' pro-slavery ideology, Atlantic commodity markets, and Southern schemes for global ascendancy. Using slave narratives, popular literature, legal records, and personal correspondence, he recreates the harrowing details of daily life under cotton's dark dominion. We meet the confidence men and gamblers who made the Valley shimmer with promise, the slave dealers, steamboat captains, and merchants who supplied the markets, the planters who wrung their civilization out of the minds and bodies of their human property, and the true believers who threatened the Union by trying to expand the Cotton Kingdom on a global scale." "But at the center of the story Johnson tells are the enslaved people who pulled down the forests, planted the fields, picked the cotton--who labored, suffered, and resisted on the dark underside of the American dream.").
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
BIRTH OUGHT NOT BE FATE!!: "PREDISTRIBUTION, NOT REDISTRIBUTION"
James J. Heckman, Giving Kids a Fair Chance (A Boston Review Books) (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: MIT Press, 2013) ("The accident of birth is a principal source of inequality in America today. American society is dividing into skilled and unskilled, and the roots of this division lie in early childhood experiences. Kids born into disadvantaged environments are at much greater risk of being unskilled, having low lifetime earnings, and facing a range of personal and social troubles, including poor health, teen pregnancy, and crime. While we celebrate equality of opportunity, we live in a society in which birth is becoming fate." "This powerful impact o birth on life chances is bad for individuals born into disadvantage. And it is bad for American society. We are losing out on the potential contributions of large numbers of our citizens." Id. at 3. "There are many calls to redistribute income to address poverty and promote social mobility. The thrust of much recent work is that while redistribution surely reduces social inequality at a point in time, it does not, by itself, improve long-term social mobility or inclusion. This essay shows that predistribution--improving the early lives of disadvantage children--is far more effective than simple redistribution in promoting social inclusion, and, at the same time, at promoting economic efficiency and workforce productivity. Predistribution policies are both fair and economically efficient." Id. at 38).
Monday, August 26, 2013
THE DEVELOPMENT AND PURSUIT OF ANTISLAVERY POLICY IN THE UNITED STATES
James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865 (New York & London: Norton, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "[Freedom National] shatters the widespread conviction that the Civil War was first and foremost a war to restore the Union and only gradually, when it became a military necessity, a war to end slavery. These two aims--'Liberty and Union, one and insepaable'--were intertwined in Republican policy from the very start of the war." "By the summer of 1861 the federal government invoked military authority to begin freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines in the disloyal South. In the loyal Border States the Republicans tried coaxing officials into gradual abolition with promises of compensation and the colonization abroad of freed blacks. James Oakes shows that Lincoln's landmark 1863 proclamation marked neither the beginning nor the end of emancipation: it triggered a more aggressive phase of military emancipation, sending Union soldiers onto plantations to entice slaves away and enlist the men in the army. But slavery proved deeply entrenched, with slaveholders determined to re-enslave freedmen left behind the shifting Union lines. Lincoln feared that the war could end in Union victory with slavery still intact. The Thirteenth Amendment that so succinctly abolished slavery was no formality: it was the final act in a saga of immense war, social upheaval, and determined political leadership." From the text: "What-if history is always a tricky business, but in this case Lincoln and the Republicans laid the alternative scenario for us. They believed that if George B. McClellan, the Democratic candidate, were elected president in 1864, the Confederacy would still be defeated but slavery would survive the war. The mass emancipations of 1865 would not have happened. A President McClellan would not have required the defeated Confederate states to abolish slavery as a condition for readmission to the Union. There would have been no Thirteenth Amendment, and without it control over slavery would have reverted to the states where the slaveholders made it clear that even in defeat they would hold on to slavery forever if they could. If that happened there's no telling when, if ever, slavery would have ended in the United States. Who knows what would have happened to slavery in Cuba and Brazil? If the Republicans had not succeeded in making freedom national, we might not even be talking about the Age of Emancipation." Id. at xxiv.).
Saturday, August 24, 2013
AMERICAN FREEDOM IS A VERY RELATIVE TERM
Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution (New York: Viking, 2013) ("Years later, one of the militiamen who participated in the events of that day [i.e., the Battle of Lexington] insisted that it wasn't the Tea Act or the Boston Port Bill or any of the Coercive Acts that made them take up arms against the regulars: no, it was much simpler than that. 'We always had been free, and we meant to be free always.' the veteran remembered. '[Those redcoats] didn't mean we should.' It was a sense of freedom strengthened by the knowledge that to the west and north, and to the east in Maine, lay a wilderness that their children could one day go to as their forefathers had done when they first sailed for the New World. Nothing like this was available to the future generations of Europe. It was a sense of promise that made the militiamen's resolve to oppose these troops all the more powerful." But to say that a love of democratic ideals had inspired these country people to take up arms against the regulars is to misrepresent the reality of the revolutionary movement. Freedom was for these militiamen a very relative term. As for their Puritan ancestors, it applied only to those who were just like them. Enslaved African Americans, Indians, women, Catholics, and especially British loyalists were not worthy to the same freedoms they enjoyed. It did not seen a contradiction to these men that standing among them that night was the thirty-four-year-old enslaved African American Prince Estabrook, owned by town selectman and justice of the peace Benjamin Estabrook." "While [British General] Gage had honored the civil liberties of the patriots, the patriots had refused to respect the rights of those with whom they did not agree, and loyalists had been sometimes brutally suppressed throughout Massachusetts. The Revolution, if it was to succeed, would do so not because the patriots had right on their side but because they--rather than Gage and the loyalists--had the power to intimidate those around them into doing what they wanted. As one of Gage's officers observed, 'The argument which the rebels employ to oblige everyone to do what they wish, is to threaten to announce them to the people as Enemies of Liberty, and everyone bends.' Not since the Salem witch trial had New Englanders lived with such certainty and fear, depending on which side of the issue they found themselves." Id. at 120-121. Is it not still the case that if you want to politically undermine a person, a group, or an point of view, one of the most common American tactics is by labeling such persons and points of view as 'unAmerican' or 'unpatriotic'? Or in the case of corporate politics, labeling the person as 'disgruntalled'? Americans are entitled to freedom of thought, freedom of expression, free to pursue their happiness provided, of course, their thoughts, expression and idea of happiness is the same as their neighbors. "It was not for [John Quincy Adams] to spout purple platitudes about men like Joseph Warren who had died so that they could all be free. It was up to him, who as a seven-year-old boy had watched and wept beside his thirty-year-old mother, to continue what the doctor had helped to begin." "'My life must be militant to its close,' he wrote, and on that evening in June 1843, as he turned to walk to to the home he had inherited from his father, he was still spoiling for a fight." Id. at 295.).
Thursday, August 22, 2013
GERMAN EUROPE?
Ulrich Beck, German Europe, translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, England, and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013) ("everyone knows what that risk is but to utter it is to violate a taboo. That fact is that Europe has become German. Nobody intended this to happen, but, in the light of the possible collapse of the euro, Germany has 'slipped' into the role of the decisive political power in Europe. Timothy Garton Ash summed up the situation in February 2012. 'In 1953 the novelist Thomas Mann appealed to an audience of students in Hamburg to strive for "not a German Europe but a European Germany." This stirring pledge was endlessly repeated at the time of German unification. Today we have a variation that few foresaw: a European Germany in a German Europe.'" Id. at vii-viii.).
R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer--and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples--in human history. With the assistance of the British, Soviet, and U.S. governments, millions of German-speaking civilians living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the parts of eastern Germany assigned to Poland were driven out of their homes and deposited amid the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. Millions more, who had fled the advancing Red Army in the final months of the war, were prevented from returning to their places of origin, and became lifelong exiles. Others again were forcibly removed from Yugoslavia and Romania, although the Allies had never sanctioned deportations form those countries. Altogether, the expulsion operation permanently displaced at least 12 million people, and perhaps as many as 14 million. Most of these were women and children under the age of sixteen, the smallest cohort of those affected were adult males. These expulsions were accomplished with and accompanied by great violence. Tens and possibly hundreds of thousands lost their lives through ill-treatment, starvation, and disease while detained in camps before their departure--often, like Auschwitz I, the same concentration camps used by the Germans during the Second World War. Many more perished on expulsion trains, locked in freight wagons without food, water, or heating during journeys to Germany that sometimes took weeks; or died by the roadside while being driven on foot to the borders. The death rate continued to mount in Germany itself, as homeless expellees succumbed to hypothermia, malnutrition, and other effects of their ordeal. Calculating the scale of the mortality remains a source of great controversy today, but estimates of 500,000 deaths at the lower end of the spectrum, and as many as 1.5 million at the highest, are consistent with the evidence as it exists at present. Much more research will have to be carried out before the range can be narrowed to a figure that can be cited with reasonable confidence." "On the most optimistic interpretation, nonetheless, the expulsions were an immense manmade catastrophe, o a scale to put the suffering that occurred as a result of the 'ethinic cleansings' in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s in the shade. They took place without any attempt at concealment, under the eyes of tens of thousands of journalists, diplomats, relief workers, and other observers with access to modern communications, in the middle of the world's most crowd continent. Yet they aroused little attention at the time. ..." Id, at 1-2. "Probably the most damaging consequences of the expulsions, though, were the aspects that could not be quantified. In each of the expelling countries, the removal of the Germans had made necessary the suspension of any concept of human rights and the rule of law. Arbitrary decrees had proclaimed entire categories of people top be, as a group of American critics put it, 'men without the Rights of Man.' By administrative fiat, individuals were deprived of property, bodily integrity, liberty, and life itself. The exercise of 'surplus cruelty' in the accomplishment of the goal of national cleansing--even against the most helpless or unresisting of victims--was deemed a positive good, a demonstration of patriotic commitment, or a necessary catharsis. Knowledge if these abuses was concealed or denied, not just by the state but by ordinary citizens,,who in this way assume a degree of complicity, however remote, in what was being done in their names. The culture of the lie, as a means of assuaging or deadening individual consciences no less than as an instrument of official policy, was allowed to prevail. And even after the supposed defeat of the totalitarian heresy epitomized by the Nazis, entire societies continued to be reinforced in the belief that immensely complex political and social problems, developed over centuries, could be banished at a stroke by the adoption of radial solutions involving massive amounts of violence. The supposition that all these things could be directed against a single group of perceived enemies and them never again resorted to for any other purpose, that afterwards it would be possible to return to a peaceful ordered existence in which individual rights would once more be upheld and respected, would prove to be the mot delusional aspect of the entire tragic episode." Id. at 227-228. Please read this book! It rips the mask off our faces and exposes our potential for rationalizing our evilness.).
Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("This book shows that the principal security issues faced by Europeans have remained remarkably constant over the centuries. The concepts, if not the language, of encirclement, buffers, balancing, failed states and pre-emption; the dream of empire and the quest for security; the centrality of Germany as the semi-conductor linking the various parts of the European balances; the balance between liberty and authority; the tension between consultation and efficiency; the connection between foreign and domestic policy; the tension between ideology and reason of state; the phenomena of popular hubris and national performance anxiety; the clash of civilizations, and the growth of toleration--all those themes have preoccupied statesmen and world leaders (insofar as these were not one and the same) from the mid fifteenth century to the present. This book, in short, is about the immediacy of the past." Id. at xxvii-xxviii. "This book began with the call to rally 'Christendom' in the mid fifteenth century as it struggles to meet the Ottoman challenge. It argues that Europeans have only ever experienced that unity in the face of an external or internal threat, for example against Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin. It follows that only a major external threat will unite Europeans today. Will this take the form of a confrontation with Mr. Putin's Russia, perhaps over the Baltic states, Belarus or Ukraine? Will it be a showdown with the Islamist caliphate in the Middle East or on the 'home front' of western societies? Or will it be with China as it expands into areas of vital interest to Europe and becomes an ever more severe ideological challenge? Will the Union meet thee threats by expanding east and south until it hits natural geographical or impermeable political borders. Will the 'lands between', in Ukraine and Belarus, be absorbed to end instability and pre-empt their subversion by Moscow. Above all, will the European Union become a more cohesive international actor, particularly in the military sphere. Will its army and navy serve as the 'school of the Untion'? Or will Europeans duck these challenges, retreat into themselves and even split apart? If that happens, history will judge the European Union an expensive youthful prank which the continent played in its dotage, marking the completion rather than the starting point of a great-power project." Id. at 533-534. Well worth the read!).
R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer--and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples--in human history. With the assistance of the British, Soviet, and U.S. governments, millions of German-speaking civilians living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the parts of eastern Germany assigned to Poland were driven out of their homes and deposited amid the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. Millions more, who had fled the advancing Red Army in the final months of the war, were prevented from returning to their places of origin, and became lifelong exiles. Others again were forcibly removed from Yugoslavia and Romania, although the Allies had never sanctioned deportations form those countries. Altogether, the expulsion operation permanently displaced at least 12 million people, and perhaps as many as 14 million. Most of these were women and children under the age of sixteen, the smallest cohort of those affected were adult males. These expulsions were accomplished with and accompanied by great violence. Tens and possibly hundreds of thousands lost their lives through ill-treatment, starvation, and disease while detained in camps before their departure--often, like Auschwitz I, the same concentration camps used by the Germans during the Second World War. Many more perished on expulsion trains, locked in freight wagons without food, water, or heating during journeys to Germany that sometimes took weeks; or died by the roadside while being driven on foot to the borders. The death rate continued to mount in Germany itself, as homeless expellees succumbed to hypothermia, malnutrition, and other effects of their ordeal. Calculating the scale of the mortality remains a source of great controversy today, but estimates of 500,000 deaths at the lower end of the spectrum, and as many as 1.5 million at the highest, are consistent with the evidence as it exists at present. Much more research will have to be carried out before the range can be narrowed to a figure that can be cited with reasonable confidence." "On the most optimistic interpretation, nonetheless, the expulsions were an immense manmade catastrophe, o a scale to put the suffering that occurred as a result of the 'ethinic cleansings' in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s in the shade. They took place without any attempt at concealment, under the eyes of tens of thousands of journalists, diplomats, relief workers, and other observers with access to modern communications, in the middle of the world's most crowd continent. Yet they aroused little attention at the time. ..." Id, at 1-2. "Probably the most damaging consequences of the expulsions, though, were the aspects that could not be quantified. In each of the expelling countries, the removal of the Germans had made necessary the suspension of any concept of human rights and the rule of law. Arbitrary decrees had proclaimed entire categories of people top be, as a group of American critics put it, 'men without the Rights of Man.' By administrative fiat, individuals were deprived of property, bodily integrity, liberty, and life itself. The exercise of 'surplus cruelty' in the accomplishment of the goal of national cleansing--even against the most helpless or unresisting of victims--was deemed a positive good, a demonstration of patriotic commitment, or a necessary catharsis. Knowledge if these abuses was concealed or denied, not just by the state but by ordinary citizens,,who in this way assume a degree of complicity, however remote, in what was being done in their names. The culture of the lie, as a means of assuaging or deadening individual consciences no less than as an instrument of official policy, was allowed to prevail. And even after the supposed defeat of the totalitarian heresy epitomized by the Nazis, entire societies continued to be reinforced in the belief that immensely complex political and social problems, developed over centuries, could be banished at a stroke by the adoption of radial solutions involving massive amounts of violence. The supposition that all these things could be directed against a single group of perceived enemies and them never again resorted to for any other purpose, that afterwards it would be possible to return to a peaceful ordered existence in which individual rights would once more be upheld and respected, would prove to be the mot delusional aspect of the entire tragic episode." Id. at 227-228. Please read this book! It rips the mask off our faces and exposes our potential for rationalizing our evilness.).
Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("This book shows that the principal security issues faced by Europeans have remained remarkably constant over the centuries. The concepts, if not the language, of encirclement, buffers, balancing, failed states and pre-emption; the dream of empire and the quest for security; the centrality of Germany as the semi-conductor linking the various parts of the European balances; the balance between liberty and authority; the tension between consultation and efficiency; the connection between foreign and domestic policy; the tension between ideology and reason of state; the phenomena of popular hubris and national performance anxiety; the clash of civilizations, and the growth of toleration--all those themes have preoccupied statesmen and world leaders (insofar as these were not one and the same) from the mid fifteenth century to the present. This book, in short, is about the immediacy of the past." Id. at xxvii-xxviii. "This book began with the call to rally 'Christendom' in the mid fifteenth century as it struggles to meet the Ottoman challenge. It argues that Europeans have only ever experienced that unity in the face of an external or internal threat, for example against Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin. It follows that only a major external threat will unite Europeans today. Will this take the form of a confrontation with Mr. Putin's Russia, perhaps over the Baltic states, Belarus or Ukraine? Will it be a showdown with the Islamist caliphate in the Middle East or on the 'home front' of western societies? Or will it be with China as it expands into areas of vital interest to Europe and becomes an ever more severe ideological challenge? Will the Union meet thee threats by expanding east and south until it hits natural geographical or impermeable political borders. Will the 'lands between', in Ukraine and Belarus, be absorbed to end instability and pre-empt their subversion by Moscow. Above all, will the European Union become a more cohesive international actor, particularly in the military sphere. Will its army and navy serve as the 'school of the Untion'? Or will Europeans duck these challenges, retreat into themselves and even split apart? If that happens, history will judge the European Union an expensive youthful prank which the continent played in its dotage, marking the completion rather than the starting point of a great-power project." Id. at 533-534. Well worth the read!).
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
TRAGEDY, THEN FARCE, THEN ....WHAT?
Lea Carpenter, Eleven Days: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2013) ("When Jason asked, 'What's incentive alignment?' he got a lecture about the fog of war, and about math, how math made Western Front attrition rates mean something and formed the philosophies of men in Ford C-suites who once ran the world. The lecture ended with an 0-6 saying, 'But math can conflate success and activity, you know what I mean?' And while Jason thought about that, the officer said, 'Let me put it like this: If history repeats itself a second time, what do you call the thing that follows tragedy and farce?'" Id. at 152.).
Monday, August 19, 2013
THE PROSPECTS AND ECONOMICS OF DIGITAL-AGE EDUCATION
William G. Bowen in collaboration with Kelly A. Lack, Higher Education in the Digital Age (New York, Princeton & Ann Arbor: Ithaka; Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2013) ("The proposition is known to this day in the literature as the 'cost disease.' The basic idea is simple: in labor-intensive industries such as the performing arts and education, there is less opportunity than in other sectors to increase productivity by, for example, substituting capital for labor. Yet markets dictate that, over time, wages for comparably qualified individuals have to increase at roughly the same rate in all industries. As a result, unit labor cost must be expected to rise faster in the performing art and education than in the economy overall." Id. at 3-4.).
Saturday, August 17, 2013
TWO KINDS OF HAPPINESS
Nikolai Leskov, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Knopf, 2013) (From 'Deathless Golovan': "'But on account of him they deprived themselves of all their happiness!' 'That depends on what you consider happiness: there's righteous happiness, and there's sinful happiness. Righteous happiness doesn't step over anybody, sinful happiness steps over everything. They loved the former better than the latter . . ." Id. at 276, 318-319.).
Friday, August 16, 2013
HAPPINESS IS NOT AN IMMUTABLE CONDITION
Leszek Kolakowski, Is God Happy: Selected Essays, introduced and translated from the Polish by Agnieska Kolakowska (New York: Basic Books, 2013) (From 'Is God Happy?': "Can Nirvana be described as a state of happiness? [] Some theologians have argued that we can speak of God only by negation: by saying what He is not. Similarly, perhaps we cannot know what Nirvana is and can only say what it is not. Yet it is hard to be satisfied with mere negation; we would like to say something more. And assuming that we are allowed to say something about what it is to be in a state of Nirvana, the hardest question is this: is a person in this state aware of the world around him? If not--if he is completely detached from life on earth--what kind of reality is he a part of? And if he is aware of the world of our experience, he must also be aware of evil, and of suffering. But is it possible to be aware of evil and suffering and still be perfectly happy? [] Both Buddhism and Christianity suggest that the ultimate liberation of the soul is also perfect serenity: total peace of the spirit. And perfect serenity is tantamount to perfect immutability. But if my spirit is in a state of immutability, so that nothing can influence it, my happiness will be like the happiness of a stone. Do we really want to say that a stone is the perfect embodiment o salvation and Nirvana?" "Since being truly human involves the ability to feel compassion, to participate in the pain and joy of others, the young Siddhartha could have been happy, or rather could have enjoyed his illusion of happiness, only as a result of his ignorance. In our world that kind of happiness is possible only for children, and then only for some children: for a child under five, say, in a loving family, with no experience of great pain or death among those close to him. Perhaps a child can be happy in the sense which I am considering here. Above the age of five we are probably too old for happiness. We can, of course, experience transient pleasure, moments of wonderment and great enchantment, even ecstatic feelings of unity with God and the Universe; we can know love and joy. But happiness as an immutable condition is not accessible to us, except perhaps in the very rare cases of true mystics. That is the human condition..." Id. at 211, 212-213.).
Thursday, August 15, 2013
SUGGESTED HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL READINGS FOR LAW STUDENTS
James Barilla, My Backyard Jungle: The Adventures of an Urban Wildlife Lover Who Turned His Yard into Habitat and Learned to Live with It (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013).
Subhankar Banerjee, ed., Artic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).
Akiko Busch, The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, illustrated by Debby Cotter Kaspari (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("How we have become estranged from place is well documented; it has become part of our cultural profile. The Census Bureau reports that one in six Americans moves each year. And certainly where we live, local newspapers have all but banished. As the postal service continues to be besieged by fiscal troubles, small post offices across rural America close, another landmark of community gone. Regional architecture exists largely as nostalgic remnants; the mom-and-pop store on the corner has long been replaced by a national franchise with a generic metallic mansard roof that could just as well be in Wisconsin or California. Communications technology, for all its miracles of connectivity, can further dilute our sense of place; because cell phones, text messages, email, and Skype all facilitate our route away from where we happen to be, it is easy for our allegiance to where we are now to fray. And global positioning systems readjust our spatial frame of reference. Whereas a conventional map situates the user within given landmarks and boundaries, with the user shifting position as passage is made across the printed page, global positioning systems place the viewer at the center of the screen. The relocation diminishes our sense of geographical context, undermining our ability to form the cognitive maps of place that traditional printed roadmaps help us to build. 'Break you GPS, and you may find yourself lost,' says one psychologist studying how our sense of space is affected by this technology." "Ecopsychology is a branch of psychology that suggests there is a connection between the health of the individual and the health of the natural world; that the psyche needs the textures, rhythms, and cycles of the natural world to remain intact; and that when the relationship between the human mind and nature has broken down, a pathology results." Id. at 133-14.).
Melanie Challenger, On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012).
George Church & Ed Begis, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In Regenesis, Church and Regis explore the possibilities--and perils--of the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, in which living organisms are selectively altered by modifying substantial portions of their genomes, allows for the creation of entirely new species of organisms. Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future. Indeed as Church and Regis show, it even enable us to revisit crucial points in the evolution of life and, though, synthetic biological techniques, chose different paths from those nature originally took." Also, listen to Loudon Wainwright III's song "1994"; it is on the Grown Man cd.).
Peter Crane, Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot, with a foreword by Peter Raven (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("The international approach that resulted in the CBD [Convention on Biological Diversity], with its parochial emphasis on benefits and commoditization, brings into sharp focus fundamental questions about our currently unsatisfactory relationship with the natural world. Does it really make sense to try to manage the global environment on a country-by-country basis? Are we comfortable with a view that so clearly asserts that nature is simply there for human benefit? Is it morally or ethically right for the demands of people always to trump long-term survival of species of plants and animals? And is it really in our long-term interest to further extend our hegemony over nature? The ways in which such questions are answered will be important for the future of all of humanity. If we take a broader view of the history of our planet, and recognize that we have evolved over millennia as part of complex global system of which we still have only limited knowledge, placing humans so explicitly at the center seems arrogant, shortsighted. It might also be risky. To borrow a phrase from my friend Paul Falkowski, 'Our destiny lies in understanding that humility leads to enlightenment and that hubris leads to extinction.'" Id. at 271.).
Peter Dauvergne & Jane Lister, Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: MIT Press, 2013) ("What we call 'eco-business'--taking over the idea of sustainability and turning it into a tool of business control and growth that projects an image of corporate social responsibility--is proving to be a powerful strategy for corporations in a rapidly globalizing economy marked by financial turmoil and a need for continual strategic repositioning. It is also enhancing the credibility and influence of these companies in states, in civil society, in supply chains, and in retail markets. And it is shifting the balance of power within the global political arena from states as the central rule makers and enforcers of environmental goals toward big-brand retailers and manufacturers acting to use 'sustainability' to protect their private interests." Id. at 2. "Can eco-business halt the rise and the harmful social consequences of global ecological loss? The answer is this book is a forceful 'no.' Eco-business is fundamentally aiming for sustainability of big business, not sustainability of people and the planet. It is not about absolute limits to natural resources or waste sinks; nor is it about the security of communities or family businesses. [I]t is largely about more efficiently controlling supply chains and effectively navigating a globalizing world economy to increase brand consumption." Id. at 2-3.).
Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "This book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have failed and before the end of the century Earth is now projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question, 'can the crisis be avoided?' has been superseded by a more chilling one, 'what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?' And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within and outside the scientific community, is to seize control of the climate of Earth itself." "Clive Hamilton begins by exploring the range of technologies now being developed in the field of geoengineering--the intentional, enduring, large-scale manipulation of Earth's climate system. He lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the extent of vested interests linking researchers, venture capitalists and corporations. He examines what it means for human beings to be making plans to control the planet's atmosphere, probes the uneasiness we feel with the notion of exercising technological mastery over nature, and challenges the ways we think about ourselves and our place in the natural world.").
Dieter Helm, The Carbon Crunch: How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong--and How to Fix it (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("I have written this book because in almost a quarter of a century virtually nothing of substance has been achieved in addressing climate change." Id. at ix. "How then do we persuade people that they must cut back on their consumption, and do so in ways sufficient to fund all the investments required to tackle climate change? We cannot avoid the costs ultimately falling on the public--as taxpayers or consumers. That cost is the (global) damage their carbon consumption causes. Economists tend to be very keen on introducing a carbon price to reflect this damage. The case is extremely powerful. The price influences the choices every household, business and government makes. It has a substitution effect (it incentivizes us to switch away from carbon-intensive goods) and an income effect (it reduces our ability to consume). It allows the market to find the cheapest ways of reducing emissions, free from all the lobbying and vested interests; and it bears down on governments when they are foolish enough to try to pick winners. There is no hiding from price." Id. at 214.).
Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2013) ("[B]eyond particular cases or practices, the intersection of race, law, and commerce in the domain of biomedicine have broader political implications for how we, as a society, conceive and approach health disparities and racial injustice. Racial disparities in health are real and significant. Their causes are complex and varied. Do genes play a role? Yes, certainly; genes play a role in just about everything having to do with health. If we are interested in genetics, the question is (or should be): 'What role do genes play in disparities relative to other forces such as social conditions, environment, economics status, political power, etc.?' Posed in that manner, it is clear that while genetics may play a very significant role in many diseases, it plays a diminishingly small role in actual health disparities. Yet, one corollary of race-specific medicine has been a concerted drive to locate the causes of disparities at the molecular level in the purportedly defective genes of racialized individuals. The implications of this focus are many. Most immediately, it diverts attention and resources away from the broader social and political causes of disparities that are deeply embedded in our nation's troubled history of racial injustice. It promises a neat technological fix for what are inescapably difficult (and messy) problems of racism, political power, and socioeconomic status." Id. at 18-19.).
Stephen R. Kellert, Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("Unfortunately, modern society has become adversarial in its relationship to nature. This antagonism has engendered an array of profound environmental and social challenges: large-scale loss of biological diversity, widespread resource depletion, extensive chemical pollution, degradation of the atmosphere and the specter of catastrophic climate change, and a host of related health and quality of life problems--even a crisis of the human spirit. These challenge have been spawned by a contemporary society that has lost its bearing in relation to the world beyond itself." Id. at xi.).
Barbara J. King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013).
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, edited by Curt Meine (New York: Library of America, 2013) (From A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There: "I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land. Signatures of course differ, whether written with axe or pen, and this is as it should be." Id. at 1, 63. From "The Conservative Ethic": "The complexity of cooperative mechanisms increased with population density, and with the efficiency of tools...." "At a certain stage of complexity, the human community found expediency-yardsticks no longer sufficient. One by one it has evolved and superimposed upon them a set of ethical yardsticks. The first ethics dealt with the relationship between individuals.... Later accretions dealt with the relationship between the individual and society. Christianity tries to integrate the individual to society. Democracy to integrate social organization to the individual." "There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relationship to land and to the non-human animals and plants which grow upon it. Land . . . is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations." "The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if we read evolution correctly, an ecological possibility" Id. at 325, 325-326. From "Selected Letters": "Have you seen the article 'Eagle Shooting in Alaska' in the February, 1935, Rifleman? I have just read it, and I confess to a feeling of sadness that a man like Mr. Burch, evidently a keen, intelligent, and decent sportsman in other respects, should be naive enough to boast about his wholesale killing of eagles as 'the purest of all rifle sports.' [] My main plea, however, is that young enthusiants like Mr. Burch take time off to do some straight old-fashined thinking on the ethics of owning and shooting guns. I would infinitely rather that Mr. Burch shoot the vases off my mantelpiece than the eagles out of my Alaska. I have a part ownership in both. That the Alaska Game Commission elects to put a bounty on the eagle, and not on the vase, has nothing to do with the sportsmanship of either action." Id. at 701, 790-791.).
Gerald Markowitz & David Rosner, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press; New York: Milbank Memorial Fund, 2003) (This book "attempts to show how, in the case of lead, growing scientific understanding of the effects of the grand experiment has to the 'Lead Wars' of the title--sharp contests among advocates for children's well-being, the lead industry and other interests that have played out in federal, state, and local government; the media; the courts; and the university. These contests have involved everything from the meaning of disease, primary prevention, and abatement to who should bear responsibility for risk and poisoning in the nation. For a century, children, poisoned primarily by leaded gasoline fumes and lead paint in their homes, have borne the overwhelming burden of this grand experiment in the form of permanent brain damage, school failure, loss of intelligence, and even death." "In these contests over lead exposure the public health profession has played a critical role, and it accordingly has a prominent position in this book; the struggles within it offer a microcosm of the contending forces as they have played out in the larger society over how best to regulate our environment and how to protect our children. [T]he lead industry ensured that children would be forced, as one physician put it, 'to live in a lead world.' But the task of protecting children was left to a public health profession divided within itself that, despite some remarkable successes, has neither the resources nor the authority to do what's needed on its own. The remedies that do exist have so far proven to be politically unfeasible. In the meantime, the nation continue to sacrifice thousands of children yearly, deeming them not worthy of our protection." Id. at xvi.).
John McPhee, Oranges (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, 2000).
David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York & London: Norton, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "The next big murderous [Can diseases be 'murderous? What kind of mens rea is a disease capable?] human pandemic, the one that kills us in millions, will be caused by a new disease--new to humans, anyway. The bug that's responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it won't come from outer space. Odds are that the killer pathogen--most likely a virus--will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal." "In this age of speedy travel between dense human populations, an emerging disease can go global in hours. But where and how will it start? Recent outbreaks offers some guidance, and so Quammen traces the origins of Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza, Lyme disease, and other bizarre cases of spillover, including the grim, unexpected story of how AIDS began from a single Cameroonian chimpanzee.).
Subhankar Banerjee, ed., Artic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).
Akiko Busch, The Incidental Steward: Reflections on Citizen Science, illustrated by Debby Cotter Kaspari (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("How we have become estranged from place is well documented; it has become part of our cultural profile. The Census Bureau reports that one in six Americans moves each year. And certainly where we live, local newspapers have all but banished. As the postal service continues to be besieged by fiscal troubles, small post offices across rural America close, another landmark of community gone. Regional architecture exists largely as nostalgic remnants; the mom-and-pop store on the corner has long been replaced by a national franchise with a generic metallic mansard roof that could just as well be in Wisconsin or California. Communications technology, for all its miracles of connectivity, can further dilute our sense of place; because cell phones, text messages, email, and Skype all facilitate our route away from where we happen to be, it is easy for our allegiance to where we are now to fray. And global positioning systems readjust our spatial frame of reference. Whereas a conventional map situates the user within given landmarks and boundaries, with the user shifting position as passage is made across the printed page, global positioning systems place the viewer at the center of the screen. The relocation diminishes our sense of geographical context, undermining our ability to form the cognitive maps of place that traditional printed roadmaps help us to build. 'Break you GPS, and you may find yourself lost,' says one psychologist studying how our sense of space is affected by this technology." "Ecopsychology is a branch of psychology that suggests there is a connection between the health of the individual and the health of the natural world; that the psyche needs the textures, rhythms, and cycles of the natural world to remain intact; and that when the relationship between the human mind and nature has broken down, a pathology results." Id. at 133-14.).
Melanie Challenger, On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012).
George Church & Ed Begis, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves (New York: Basic Books, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "In Regenesis, Church and Regis explore the possibilities--and perils--of the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology, in which living organisms are selectively altered by modifying substantial portions of their genomes, allows for the creation of entirely new species of organisms. Until now, nature has been the exclusive arbiter of life, death, and evolution; with synthetic biology, we now have the potential to write our own biological future. Indeed as Church and Regis show, it even enable us to revisit crucial points in the evolution of life and, though, synthetic biological techniques, chose different paths from those nature originally took." Also, listen to Loudon Wainwright III's song "1994"; it is on the Grown Man cd.).
Peter Crane, Ginkgo: The Tree That Time Forgot, with a foreword by Peter Raven (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("The international approach that resulted in the CBD [Convention on Biological Diversity], with its parochial emphasis on benefits and commoditization, brings into sharp focus fundamental questions about our currently unsatisfactory relationship with the natural world. Does it really make sense to try to manage the global environment on a country-by-country basis? Are we comfortable with a view that so clearly asserts that nature is simply there for human benefit? Is it morally or ethically right for the demands of people always to trump long-term survival of species of plants and animals? And is it really in our long-term interest to further extend our hegemony over nature? The ways in which such questions are answered will be important for the future of all of humanity. If we take a broader view of the history of our planet, and recognize that we have evolved over millennia as part of complex global system of which we still have only limited knowledge, placing humans so explicitly at the center seems arrogant, shortsighted. It might also be risky. To borrow a phrase from my friend Paul Falkowski, 'Our destiny lies in understanding that humility leads to enlightenment and that hubris leads to extinction.'" Id. at 271.).
Peter Dauvergne & Jane Lister, Eco-Business: A Big-Brand Takeover of Sustainability (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: MIT Press, 2013) ("What we call 'eco-business'--taking over the idea of sustainability and turning it into a tool of business control and growth that projects an image of corporate social responsibility--is proving to be a powerful strategy for corporations in a rapidly globalizing economy marked by financial turmoil and a need for continual strategic repositioning. It is also enhancing the credibility and influence of these companies in states, in civil society, in supply chains, and in retail markets. And it is shifting the balance of power within the global political arena from states as the central rule makers and enforcers of environmental goals toward big-brand retailers and manufacturers acting to use 'sustainability' to protect their private interests." Id. at 2. "Can eco-business halt the rise and the harmful social consequences of global ecological loss? The answer is this book is a forceful 'no.' Eco-business is fundamentally aiming for sustainability of big business, not sustainability of people and the planet. It is not about absolute limits to natural resources or waste sinks; nor is it about the security of communities or family businesses. [I]t is largely about more efficiently controlling supply chains and effectively navigating a globalizing world economy to increase brand consumption." Id. at 2-3.).
Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "This book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have failed and before the end of the century Earth is now projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question, 'can the crisis be avoided?' has been superseded by a more chilling one, 'what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?' And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within and outside the scientific community, is to seize control of the climate of Earth itself." "Clive Hamilton begins by exploring the range of technologies now being developed in the field of geoengineering--the intentional, enduring, large-scale manipulation of Earth's climate system. He lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the extent of vested interests linking researchers, venture capitalists and corporations. He examines what it means for human beings to be making plans to control the planet's atmosphere, probes the uneasiness we feel with the notion of exercising technological mastery over nature, and challenges the ways we think about ourselves and our place in the natural world.").
Dieter Helm, The Carbon Crunch: How We're Getting Climate Change Wrong--and How to Fix it (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2013) ("I have written this book because in almost a quarter of a century virtually nothing of substance has been achieved in addressing climate change." Id. at ix. "How then do we persuade people that they must cut back on their consumption, and do so in ways sufficient to fund all the investments required to tackle climate change? We cannot avoid the costs ultimately falling on the public--as taxpayers or consumers. That cost is the (global) damage their carbon consumption causes. Economists tend to be very keen on introducing a carbon price to reflect this damage. The case is extremely powerful. The price influences the choices every household, business and government makes. It has a substitution effect (it incentivizes us to switch away from carbon-intensive goods) and an income effect (it reduces our ability to consume). It allows the market to find the cheapest ways of reducing emissions, free from all the lobbying and vested interests; and it bears down on governments when they are foolish enough to try to pick winners. There is no hiding from price." Id. at 214.).
Jonathan Kahn, Race in a Bottle: The Story of BiDil and Racialized Medicine in a Post-Genomic Age (New York: Columbia U. Press, 2013) ("[B]eyond particular cases or practices, the intersection of race, law, and commerce in the domain of biomedicine have broader political implications for how we, as a society, conceive and approach health disparities and racial injustice. Racial disparities in health are real and significant. Their causes are complex and varied. Do genes play a role? Yes, certainly; genes play a role in just about everything having to do with health. If we are interested in genetics, the question is (or should be): 'What role do genes play in disparities relative to other forces such as social conditions, environment, economics status, political power, etc.?' Posed in that manner, it is clear that while genetics may play a very significant role in many diseases, it plays a diminishingly small role in actual health disparities. Yet, one corollary of race-specific medicine has been a concerted drive to locate the causes of disparities at the molecular level in the purportedly defective genes of racialized individuals. The implications of this focus are many. Most immediately, it diverts attention and resources away from the broader social and political causes of disparities that are deeply embedded in our nation's troubled history of racial injustice. It promises a neat technological fix for what are inescapably difficult (and messy) problems of racism, political power, and socioeconomic status." Id. at 18-19.).
Stephen R. Kellert, Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("Unfortunately, modern society has become adversarial in its relationship to nature. This antagonism has engendered an array of profound environmental and social challenges: large-scale loss of biological diversity, widespread resource depletion, extensive chemical pollution, degradation of the atmosphere and the specter of catastrophic climate change, and a host of related health and quality of life problems--even a crisis of the human spirit. These challenge have been spawned by a contemporary society that has lost its bearing in relation to the world beyond itself." Id. at xi.).
Barbara J. King, How Animals Grieve (Chicago & London: U. of Chicago Press, 2013).
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation, edited by Curt Meine (New York: Library of America, 2013) (From A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There: "I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe. It is a matter of what a man thinks about while chopping, or while deciding what to chop. A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land. Signatures of course differ, whether written with axe or pen, and this is as it should be." Id. at 1, 63. From "The Conservative Ethic": "The complexity of cooperative mechanisms increased with population density, and with the efficiency of tools...." "At a certain stage of complexity, the human community found expediency-yardsticks no longer sufficient. One by one it has evolved and superimposed upon them a set of ethical yardsticks. The first ethics dealt with the relationship between individuals.... Later accretions dealt with the relationship between the individual and society. Christianity tries to integrate the individual to society. Democracy to integrate social organization to the individual." "There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relationship to land and to the non-human animals and plants which grow upon it. Land . . . is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations." "The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if we read evolution correctly, an ecological possibility" Id. at 325, 325-326. From "Selected Letters": "Have you seen the article 'Eagle Shooting in Alaska' in the February, 1935, Rifleman? I have just read it, and I confess to a feeling of sadness that a man like Mr. Burch, evidently a keen, intelligent, and decent sportsman in other respects, should be naive enough to boast about his wholesale killing of eagles as 'the purest of all rifle sports.' [] My main plea, however, is that young enthusiants like Mr. Burch take time off to do some straight old-fashined thinking on the ethics of owning and shooting guns. I would infinitely rather that Mr. Burch shoot the vases off my mantelpiece than the eagles out of my Alaska. I have a part ownership in both. That the Alaska Game Commission elects to put a bounty on the eagle, and not on the vase, has nothing to do with the sportsmanship of either action." Id. at 701, 790-791.).
Gerald Markowitz & David Rosner, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children (Berkeley & Los Angeles: U. of California Press; New York: Milbank Memorial Fund, 2003) (This book "attempts to show how, in the case of lead, growing scientific understanding of the effects of the grand experiment has to the 'Lead Wars' of the title--sharp contests among advocates for children's well-being, the lead industry and other interests that have played out in federal, state, and local government; the media; the courts; and the university. These contests have involved everything from the meaning of disease, primary prevention, and abatement to who should bear responsibility for risk and poisoning in the nation. For a century, children, poisoned primarily by leaded gasoline fumes and lead paint in their homes, have borne the overwhelming burden of this grand experiment in the form of permanent brain damage, school failure, loss of intelligence, and even death." "In these contests over lead exposure the public health profession has played a critical role, and it accordingly has a prominent position in this book; the struggles within it offer a microcosm of the contending forces as they have played out in the larger society over how best to regulate our environment and how to protect our children. [T]he lead industry ensured that children would be forced, as one physician put it, 'to live in a lead world.' But the task of protecting children was left to a public health profession divided within itself that, despite some remarkable successes, has neither the resources nor the authority to do what's needed on its own. The remedies that do exist have so far proven to be politically unfeasible. In the meantime, the nation continue to sacrifice thousands of children yearly, deeming them not worthy of our protection." Id. at xvi.).
John McPhee, Oranges (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966, 2000).
David Quammen, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (New York & London: Norton, 2012) (From the bookjacket: "The next big murderous [Can diseases be 'murderous? What kind of mens rea is a disease capable?] human pandemic, the one that kills us in millions, will be caused by a new disease--new to humans, anyway. The bug that's responsible will be strange, unfamiliar, but it won't come from outer space. Odds are that the killer pathogen--most likely a virus--will spill over into humans from a nonhuman animal." "In this age of speedy travel between dense human populations, an emerging disease can go global in hours. But where and how will it start? Recent outbreaks offers some guidance, and so Quammen traces the origins of Ebola, Marburg, SARS, avian influenza, Lyme disease, and other bizarre cases of spillover, including the grim, unexpected story of how AIDS began from a single Cameroonian chimpanzee.).
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
THINGS TO BEAR IN MIND AS A NEW ACADEMIC YEAR BEGINS!
Gordon Johnson, University Politics: F. M. Cornford's Cambridge and His Advice to the Young Academic Politician containing the complete text of Cornford's 'Microcosmographia Academica' (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1994) (From F. M. Cornford's 'Microcosmographia Academica': "A Conservative Liberal is a broad-minded man, who thinks that something ought to be done, only not anything that anyone now desires, but something which was not done in 1881-82." "A Liberal Conservative is a broad-minded man, who thinks that something ought to be done, only not anything that anyone now desires; and that most things which were done in 1881-82 ought to be undone." The men of both these parties are alike in being open to conviction; but so many convictions have already got inside, that it is very difficult to find the opening. They swell in the Valley of Indecision." Id. at 95. "There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing." "The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do. But then, of course, comes the difficulty of making sure that it is right." "Even a little knowledge of ethical theory will suffice to convince you that all important questions are so complicated, and the results of any course of action are so difficult to foresee, that certainty, or even probability, is seldom, if ever, attainable. It follows at once that the only justifiable attitude of mind is suspense of judgment; and this attitude, besides being peculiarly congenial to the academic temperament, has the advantage of being comparatively easy to attain. There remains the duty of persuading others to be equally judicious, and to refrain from plunging into reckless courses which might lead them Heaven now whither. At this point the arguments for doing nothing come in; for it is a mere theorist's paradox that doing nothing has just as many consequences as doing something. It is obvious that inaction can have no consequences at all." Id. at 104. "The Principle of the Wedge is that you should not act justly for fear of raising expectations that you may act still more justly in the future--expectations which you are afraid you will not have the courage to satisfy. A little reflection will make it evident that the Wedge argument implies admission that the persons who use it cannot prove that the action is not just. If they could, that would be the sole and sufficient reason for not doing it, and this argument would be superfluous." Id. at 105. "The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action, which is not customary, either is wrong, or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time. [] If this consideration is not decisive, it may be reinforced by the Fair Trial Argument--'Give the present system a Fair Trial.' [] Another argument is that 'the Time is not Ripe.' The Principle of Unripe Time is that people should not do at the present moment what they think right at that moment, because the moment at which they think it right has not yet arrived. But the unripeness of the time will, in some cases, be found to lie in the Bugbear, 'What Dr.------ will say,' Time, by the way, is like the medlar: it has a trick of going rotten before it is is ripe." Id. at 105. Conservative Liberal Obstructionist Arguments: "'The present measure would block the way for a far more sweeping reform.' [] This argument may safely be combined with the Wedge argument: 'If we grant this, it will be impossible to stop short.' [] Another argument is that 'the machinery for effecting the proposed objects already exists.' This should be urged in cases where the existing machinery has never worked, and is now so rusty that there is no chance of it being set in motion. When this is ascertained, it is safe to add 'it is fr better that all reform should come within'; and to throw in a reference to the Principle of Washing Linen. This principle is that it is better never to wash your linen if you cannot do it without anyone knowing that you are so cleanly. [] The third accepted means of obstruction is the Alternative Proposal. This is a form of Red Herring. As soon as three or more alternatives are in the field, there is pretty sure to be a majority against any one of them, and nothing will be done." Id. at 106. Liberal Conservative Obstructionist Arguments: "Liberal Conservative Obstruction is less argumentative and leans to invective, It is particularly fond of the last Ditch and the Wild Cat. [] The Last Ditch is the Safe Side, considered as a place which you may safely threaten to die in. You are not likely to die there prematurely; for, to judge by the look of the inhabitants, the climate of the Safe Side conduces to longevity. If you did die, nobody would much mind; but the threat may frighten the for a moment. [] 'Wild Cat' an epithet applicable to persons who bring forward a scheme unanimously agreed upon by experts after a two years' exhaustive consideration of thirty-five or more alternative proposals. In its wider use it applies to all idea which were not familiar in 1881. [] The Argument, 'that you remember exactly the same proposal being rejected in 1867,' is a very strong one in itself; but its defect is that it appeals only to those who also remember the year 1867 with affectionate interest, and, moreover, are unaware that any change has occurred since then. There are such people, but they are lamentably few; and some even of them are no longer Young Men in a Hurry, and can be trusted to be on the Safe Side in any case. So this argument seldom carries its proper weight. [] When other methods of obstruction fail, you should have recourse to Wasting Time; for, although it is recognized in academic circles that time in general is of no value, considerable importance is attached to tea-time. and by deferring this, you may exasperate any body of men to the point of voting against anything. The simplest method is Boring. talk slowly and indistinctly, at a little distance from the point, No academic person is ever vote into the chair until he has reached an age which he has forgotten the meaning of the world 'irrelevant'; and you will be allowed to go on, until everyone is the room will vote with you sooner than hear your voice another minute. Then you should move for adjournment. Motions for adjournment, made less than fifteen minute before tea-time or any subsequent moment, are always carried." Id. at 107. Tomorrow, as I sit all day in a law "faculty retreat" I will will amuse myself by keeping a scorecard as to who engages in the moves, tactics and arguments, etc., which Cornford has so aptly described. It would be more entertaining were the faculty comprised of a few 'Young men in a Hurry': "A Young Man in a Hurry is a narrow-minded and ridiculously youthful prig, who is inexperienced enough to imagine that something might be done before very long, and even to suggest definite things. His most dangerous defect being want of experience, everything should be done to prevent him from taking any part in affairs. He may be known by his propensity to organise societies for the purpose of making silk purses out of sows' ears. This tendency is not so dangerous as it might seem; for it may be observed that the sows, after taking their washing with a grunt or two, trundle back unharmed to the wallow; and the purse-market is quoted as firm. The Young Man in a Hurry is afflicted with a conscience, which is apt to break out, like the measles, in patches. To listen to him, you would think he united the virtues of a Brutus to the passion for lost causes of a Cato; he has not learnt that most of his causes are lost by letting the Cato out of the bag, instead of tying him firmly and sitting on him, as experienced people do." Id. at 95-96. On my part, however, I plan to sit quietly with both my eyes and mouth shut tightly!!).
Monday, August 12, 2013
ARTICULATING PAIN
During this morning's walk, came across the following written, in chalk, on the pavement:
"R7,
You said
you 'sucked
@ walking away',
But I have not
seen you walk
by, I have
not seen you
walk up.
M5"
There is a lot of pain in East Rock!
"R7,
You said
you 'sucked
@ walking away',
But I have not
seen you walk
by, I have
not seen you
walk up.
M5"
There is a lot of pain in East Rock!
KAIZEN, OR CONSTANT IMPROVEMENT
Hirishi Mikitani, Market Place 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) ("In general, people have quite a bit of room for improvement. Most people are not working at full capacity. Most have a store of undeveloped skills. Perhaps they have never been pushed or encouraged to explore their limits. Perhaps it never occurred to them to try. Many people are satisfied if they meet the standards set for them by their teachers, their families, or their work supervisors. Many assume that once they have graduated from school and secured a job, their efforts have paid off. But what if they undertook an attitude of kaizen? What if each individual looked within himself and made a commitment to constant improvement?" "This is a concept that really excites me, because I believe there is so much untapped potential in people. Asking someone to become a genius overnight is not reasonable. But if you told that person, 'Improve a little bit every day,' what would those results look like over the course of a year? Ten years? An entire career? The difference is staggering." "You can look at this from a mathematical point of view. Calculate a daily increase of 1 percent for one year: 1.01 to the 365th power. The answer is 37.78. Even if you could only achieve 1 percent improvement each day--1 percent kaizen per day--at the end of one year, your result is over thirty-seven times better than when you started." "I once heard this story: A man in search of wisdom opened a book from a sword-fighting school of the Edo Period (1603-1868). Inside, there was just one phrase: 'Myself of today will triumph over myself of yesterday.' This is a beautifully distilled vision of kaizen. The goal is not to be great overnight, but to be better each day, knowing that this accumulation of improvements is the path to success." Id. at 106-107. I once worked in banking. On the operations side there was considerable data-entry work, e.g., keypunching data from payments received in customers' lockboxes. A form of kaizen was practiced there: The goal was not to eliminate all keypunching errors in data entry. Rather the goal was to move from 1 error per 1,000 keystroke, to 1 error per, say, 1,100 keystrokes. Once that was accomplished, the goal was to move from 1 error per 1,100 keystrokes to 1 error per 1,200 keystrokes. The goal was not perfection, no errors period; rather the goal was a smaller percentage of errors.).
Saturday, August 10, 2013
LOUISE GLUCK
Louise Gluck, Poems 1962-2012 (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux/ Ecco, 2012) (From "Child Crying Out": "The soul is silent / If it speaks at all / it speaks in dreams." Id. at 232, 232.).
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
IS AMERICA'S DECLINE THE RESULT, IN PART, OF HAVING SPARTA, NOT ATHENS, AS ITS UTOPIAN MODEL?
Paul Cartledge, The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece (Woodstock & New York: Overlook Press, 2003) ("Sparta was the original utopia (Thomas More, who coined the word Utopia in 1516, had Sparta very centrally in mind), but it was an authoritarian , hierarchical and repressive utopia, not a utopia of liberal creativity and free expression. The principal focus of the community was the use of war for self-preservation and the domination of others. Unlike other Greek cities, which satisfied there hunger for land by exporting population to form new 'colonial' cities among non-Greek 'natives', the Spartans attacked, subdued or enslaved their fellow-Greek neighbors in the southern Peloponnese." "The image or mirage of Sparta is therefore at least ambivalent and double-faceted. Against the positive image of the Spartans' uplifting warrior ideal of collective self-sacrifice, emblematized in the Thermophlae story, had to be pitted their lack of high cultural achievement, their refusal for the most part of open government, both at home and abroad, and their brutally efficient suppression for several centuries of a whole enslaved Greek people." Id. at 24-25. Think of all the war-metaphors federal, state and local governments, plus the so-called intellectual class, use: war on drugs, war on crime, war on poverty, fight again (war on) obesity, fight against (war on cancer, heart disease, aging, or whatever, cultural wars, gender wars, class war, economic warfare, trade wars, etc.).
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
THE GREAT UNRAVELING OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
Charles LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy (New York: The Penguin Press, 2013) ("Once the nation's richest city, Detroit is now its poorest. It is the country's illiteracy and dropout capital, where children must leave their books at school and bring toilet paper from home. It is the unemployment capital, where half the adult population does not work at a consistent job. There are firemen with no boots, cops with no cars, teachers with no pencils, city council members with telephones tapped by the FBI, and too many grandmothers with no tears left to give." But Detroit can no longer be ignored, because what happened here is happening out there. Neighborhoods from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Miami are blighted with empty homes and people with idle hands. Americans are swimming in debt, and the prospects of servicing the debt grows slimmer by the day as good-paying jobs continue to evaporate or relocate to foreign lands. Economists talk about the inevitable turnaround. But standing here in Michigan, it seems to me that the fundamentals are no longer there to make the good life." "Go ahead and laugh at Detroit. Because you are laughing at yourself." "In cities and towns across the country, whole factories are auctioned off. Men with trucks haul away tool-and-die machines, aluminum siding, hoists, drinking fountains. It is the ripping out of the country's mechanical heart right before our eyes." "A newly hired autoworker will earn $14 an hour. This, adjusted for inflation, is three cents less than what Henry Ford was paying in 1914 when he announced the $5 day. And, of course, Ford isn't hiring. Come to Detroit, drive the empty, shattered boulevard, and the decrepitude of the place all rolls out in a numb, continuous fact. After enough hours staring into it, it starts to appear normal. Average. Everyday." Id. at 5-6. Yes, this is the New Normal. The New America!).
George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("After almost a decade in politics, [Jeff Connaughton] was thirty-six and broke, renting a modest apartment in Virginia. In December 1995, he took a job as a junior associate with Covington & Burling, a top Washington law firm. If he made partner, he'd become a millionaire." "He hated the work. A minute ago he'd been briefing the president and battling Congress, and now he was literally on his knees, sifting through fifty boxes of documents one page at a time doing an attorney-client privilege review, or stuck at his desk, writing memos on behalf of a a silver mine that was polluting groundwater in Idaho. As far as Connaughton was concerned, the firm was just churning the client for billable hours. He did research on another case in which the plaintiff had been moving bottles of acid with a forklift, accidentally broke some bottles, and burned most of his body as he repeatedly slipped into the acid. Covington was representing the company." ''I hope you're asking me to research whether there's enough money in the world to compensate this man,' Connaughtion told the partner who gave him the assignment. 'No, I'm not,' the partner replied." Id. at 118. From the bookjacket: "American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George packer . . . tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. [] The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date." Before reading Packer's latest, I had been reflecting on the unraveling of the so-called "American Dream." Take a look around! Who delivers your newspaper in the morning? Once upon a time a neighborhood kid, a paperboy--and sometimes a papergirl--would walk around the neighborhood delivering the newspapers. Now it is some grownup, driving a car. Who cuts your grass, weeds your garden, rake the leaves in the fall, washes your windows, and performs minor chores around your house? You don't do these. Your own kids don't do these. Rather, you have a lawn care service to mow, weed, and rake your 200-square-feet patch of grass. Professional window washers now clean your windows. When adults have as their professions performing tasks that teenagers use to do, call it what you will, but don't call it progress and don't deny the unraveling of the American Dream. What remains is a dimmer dream, a reduced America.).
Lisa Prevost, Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "Towns with strict zoning are the best towns, aren't they? They're all about preserving local 'character,' protecting the natural environment, and maintaining attractive neighborhoods. Right?" "In this bold challenge to conventional wisdom, Lisa Prevost strips away the quaint facades of these desirable towns to reveal the uglier impulses behind their proud allegiance to local control. These eye-opening stories illustrate the outrageous lengths to which town leaders and affluent residents will go to prohibit housing that might attract the 'wrong' sort of people. Prevost takes readers to a rural second-home community that is so restrictive that its celebrity residents may soon outnumber its children, to a struggling fishing village as it rises up against farmworker housing open to Latino immigrants, and to a northern lake community that brazenly deems itself out of bounds to apartment dwellers. From blueberry barrens of Down East to the Gold Coast of Connecticut, these stories show how communities have seemingly cast aside the all-American credo of 'opportunity for all' in favor of 'I was here first.'" "Prevost links this 'every town for itself' mentality to a host of regional afflictions, including a shrinking population of young adults, ugly sprawl, unbearable highway congestion, and widening disparities in income and educational achievement. Snob Zones warns that this pattern of exclusion is unsustainable and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be a community in post-recession America.").
Roxana Robinson, Sparta: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("They lived right on the edge, those lawn guys. It was like being in a revolution, coming here illegally. No language, no green cards, always at risk, in fear but determined to work. People claimed they were taking jobs from Americans, but that was bullshit. Americans wouldn't take those jobs. Those jobs were too menial for people living the American dream, which they did by playing video games and drinking beer. Americans hired these guys to mow their lawns and then complained abut illegal aliens. He thought of Ali and the grimy men lined up in the clearing room." Id. at 335.).
George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (New York: Farar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("After almost a decade in politics, [Jeff Connaughton] was thirty-six and broke, renting a modest apartment in Virginia. In December 1995, he took a job as a junior associate with Covington & Burling, a top Washington law firm. If he made partner, he'd become a millionaire." "He hated the work. A minute ago he'd been briefing the president and battling Congress, and now he was literally on his knees, sifting through fifty boxes of documents one page at a time doing an attorney-client privilege review, or stuck at his desk, writing memos on behalf of a a silver mine that was polluting groundwater in Idaho. As far as Connaughton was concerned, the firm was just churning the client for billable hours. He did research on another case in which the plaintiff had been moving bottles of acid with a forklift, accidentally broke some bottles, and burned most of his body as he repeatedly slipped into the acid. Covington was representing the company." ''I hope you're asking me to research whether there's enough money in the world to compensate this man,' Connaughtion told the partner who gave him the assignment. 'No, I'm not,' the partner replied." Id. at 118. From the bookjacket: "American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George packer . . . tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. [] The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date." Before reading Packer's latest, I had been reflecting on the unraveling of the so-called "American Dream." Take a look around! Who delivers your newspaper in the morning? Once upon a time a neighborhood kid, a paperboy--and sometimes a papergirl--would walk around the neighborhood delivering the newspapers. Now it is some grownup, driving a car. Who cuts your grass, weeds your garden, rake the leaves in the fall, washes your windows, and performs minor chores around your house? You don't do these. Your own kids don't do these. Rather, you have a lawn care service to mow, weed, and rake your 200-square-feet patch of grass. Professional window washers now clean your windows. When adults have as their professions performing tasks that teenagers use to do, call it what you will, but don't call it progress and don't deny the unraveling of the American Dream. What remains is a dimmer dream, a reduced America.).
Lisa Prevost, Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013) (From the bookjacket: "Towns with strict zoning are the best towns, aren't they? They're all about preserving local 'character,' protecting the natural environment, and maintaining attractive neighborhoods. Right?" "In this bold challenge to conventional wisdom, Lisa Prevost strips away the quaint facades of these desirable towns to reveal the uglier impulses behind their proud allegiance to local control. These eye-opening stories illustrate the outrageous lengths to which town leaders and affluent residents will go to prohibit housing that might attract the 'wrong' sort of people. Prevost takes readers to a rural second-home community that is so restrictive that its celebrity residents may soon outnumber its children, to a struggling fishing village as it rises up against farmworker housing open to Latino immigrants, and to a northern lake community that brazenly deems itself out of bounds to apartment dwellers. From blueberry barrens of Down East to the Gold Coast of Connecticut, these stories show how communities have seemingly cast aside the all-American credo of 'opportunity for all' in favor of 'I was here first.'" "Prevost links this 'every town for itself' mentality to a host of regional afflictions, including a shrinking population of young adults, ugly sprawl, unbearable highway congestion, and widening disparities in income and educational achievement. Snob Zones warns that this pattern of exclusion is unsustainable and raises thought-provoking questions about what it means to be a community in post-recession America.").
Roxana Robinson, Sparta: A Novel (New York: Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) ("They lived right on the edge, those lawn guys. It was like being in a revolution, coming here illegally. No language, no green cards, always at risk, in fear but determined to work. People claimed they were taking jobs from Americans, but that was bullshit. Americans wouldn't take those jobs. Those jobs were too menial for people living the American dream, which they did by playing video games and drinking beer. Americans hired these guys to mow their lawns and then complained abut illegal aliens. He thought of Ali and the grimy men lined up in the clearing room." Id. at 335.).
Saturday, August 3, 2013
AUSTER AND COETZEE
Paul Auster & J. M. Coetzee, Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (New York: Viking, 2013) (Auster to Coetzee, January 10, 2009: "What I am saying, I suppose, is that there are things that happen to us in the real world that resemble fiction. And if fiction turns out to be real, then perhaps we have to rethink out definition of reality." Id. at 35, 36. Auster to Coetzee, September 29, 2009: "We live in an age of endless writing workshops, graduate writing programs (imagine getting a degree in writing), there are more poets per square inch than ever before, more poetry magazines, more books of poetry (99% of them published by microscopic small presses), poetry slams, performance poets, cowboy poets--and yet, for all this activity, little of note is being written. The burning ideas that fueled the innovations of the early modernists seems to have been extinguished. No one believes that poetry (or art) can change the world anymore. No one is on a holy mission. Poets are everywhere now, but they talk only to each other." Id. at 89, 90-91. Coetzee to Auster, October 14, 2009: "Something happened, it seems to me, in the late 1970s or early 1980s as a result of which the arts yielded up their leading role in our inner life. I am quite prepared to give heed to diagnoses of what happened between then and now that have a political or economics or even world-historical character; but I do nevertheless feel that there was a general failure among writers and artists to resist the challenge to their leading role, and that we are poorer today for that failure." Id. at 96, 98. Auster to Coetzee, November 12, 2010: "The 'mean vision' you talk about has been with us a lot longer than since 1970, I'm afraid. And contrary to the view I held when I was young--that people vote out of economic self-interest--I have now come to feel that many voters' choices are entirely irrational--or ideological, even if that ideology goes against their economic well-being. In 1984, during the Reagan's reelection campaign, I was going somewhere in a Brooklyn car service. The driver, who had been a welder at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, had lost his job when the union he belonged to was crushed by management. I said to him: ''You can thank Reagan for that--the greatest union-busting president in history.' And he replied" 'Maybe so, but I'm voting for him anyway.' 'Why in the world would you do that?' I asked. His answer: Because I don't want to see the fucking Commies take over South America.' An indelible moment in my political education. It was men like this, I imagine, who voted Hitler into power in 1933." Id. at 195, 196-197.).
Thursday, August 1, 2013
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