Reply to Michael Gerson's "What an Atheist Can't Answer"

Reply to Michael Gerson’s “What Atheists Can’t Answer”

In the spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas, which seems to be appropriate given both the subject and the reference made to him in the article, I’d like to write in the somewhat awkward but philosophically appealing structure of the early church father. This bit, however, I lament to say will not be in Latin, to the linguistic and thereby philosophical detriment of my argument.
Mr. Gerson’s Argument: Atheists cannot provide an argument for good moral action.
Because human nature is divided between good and bad instincts, we are constantly forced to choose between the two. All evidence (biological, chemical, social) supports the claim that we are divided, however no study presents any reason to therefore be good. No theory of long-term planning or scientific understanding can impel us to good behavior. No other idea or theory has so long and so profound a history or impelling people to act morally good than God.
1st Rebuttal: The sciences are more sophisticated and so are we for such simple distinctions.
While biological, chemical and social evidence certainly suggests that we are divided as to how we should act Mr. Gerson entirely avoids the most appropriate science to this discussion: metaphysics. Modern “Liberal” morality is based more on metaphysics than on biology or chemistry (and those arguments for moral action based on “evolution” or “childhood socializing” are generally porous and weak). Immanuel Kant is more responsible for affecting moral behavior than Darwin. Aristotle established a system of morality based on the hypothetical imperative of “the Good”. This argument was, as pointed out to me by Will, paraphrased with great faithfulness by the Apostle Paul. Aquinas, who referred to Aristotle as “The Philosopher”, took the hypothetical imperative of Aristotle and turned it towards God instead of the good. Kant, however, created a “categorical imperative”, an imperative that rested not on our desire for good or our belief in God, but rather in universal truths consistent with pure reason. It is the infallibility of “pure reason”, not the reasonableness of science that supports the claim that we need no hypothesis of truth, of goodness or of God. Kant is not saying, as far as I can tell, that we do not need God. I’m trying to flesh out an argument here for an atheist who could have a serious debate with a theist.
2nd Rebuttal: The real problem is not in atheism or theism.
Mr. Gerson quotes Chesterton at the beginning of his essay. The quotation presents a subtlety that he does not later explore, to the detriment of his argument. Chesterton’s observation that even blasphemy is, incidentally, tributary is very compelling in light of another observation by Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno argued that, in short, atheists are not a problem for true believers. True atheists, by ardently believing in the non-existence of God, incidentally become faithful, only they are slightly misguided. Because there is in fact no scientific argument that disproves the existence of God (God exists through faith, in faith not by virtue of anything else) the atheist must believe that God does not exist. Therefore, Unamuno (perhaps the most ardent Catholic since Aquinas) took little care to be enraged by “atheists”. The point of this subtlety for Chesterton and this argument of Unamuno is that the problem is apathy. The great leviathan which has forever plagued moral men and women has been apathy. Atheists, who try to think of reasonable, scientific arguments that we ought to be moral, are a blessing in light of the atheists and theists who don’t really care about morality either way.
Mr. Gerson says in the beginning of the article that “proving God’s existence in 750 words or fewer would daunt even Thomas Aquinas”. Perhaps his, and our, standards have been greatly lowered recently. William Blake did such a feat in twenty words.

On Walking

I’ve taken to walking most nights after dinner. As I eat generally around seven or eight o’clock, there remains anywhere between a half hour and an hour and a half before the sun sets and the air is still quite warm. Anyone who has any experience with a camera will tell you that dusk provides ideal lighting. It seems to me, although I have no technical proficiency in apertures and shutter-speeds and no serious knowledge on lighting scenarios, that this is because everything is illuminated from the side; shadows fall long on the ground instead of on the trees and buildings, signs and people. Colors are sharper while edges are softer. There is a perfect background against which to capture an image in light that pours in, softly filtered by the angle at which it slices through the atmosphere.
There is an acequia, otherwise known as a “ditch”, which runs perpendicular to the street on which I live a few hundred feet away from my front door. Santa Fe is high desert country. There is normally an inescapable dearth of water in the entirety of the city (and the rest of the state for that matter) which leaves the acequia, for most of the year, rather dry. Yet, this winter was wet and this spring has come and gone with even more rain and as I write this it is, in July, sprinkling outside. Thus, the acequia has been running at varying heights consistently since I moved in at the end of May. The running water, in conjunction with the aforementioned virtues of evening lighting, presents the most pleasant, subtly (and therefore inoffensively) pastoral setting for my newly discovered hobby.
For reasons that are too complicated and most disagreeable to enumerate here, I have been induced these past few weeks to walk alone. I have spent many mornings, afternoons and evenings in the company of only my own food, books and, on occasion, a glass of wine. It was in the restlessness of solitude that I was first moved to explore the extent of the neighborhood’s most salient natural wonder. I do not intend to demean the neighborhood by asserting that its most prominent feature is a seldom running creek, for even the less prominent features of the place are laudable, but I will insist upon emphasizing the absence of running water in the town (thereby the consistent water flow recently has been a distinguished blessing) and the unpretentious quaintness of the acequia (so naturally does it fit within the adobe walls of the houses around it and long grass alongside it) so as to illustrate its importance. My walks turn about the trickle or rush of water first upstream as I walk to the east and then downstream as I return home, catching the very end of the sunset.
I have only shared this activity with one companion. She is much older than I am and considerably shorter in height, but not on that account shorter in stature. Her name is Billie and her height, which might otherwise be a disadvantage, is for the walk along the acequia the very essence of advantage. Her head is situated perfectly at the average height of the flowers and bushes lining the water and she therefore has an intimate view of the water itself. She dutifully explores the surrounding flora (trees, bushes, flowers) and fauna (me) as we walk. She tends to take her time. I often forget to enjoy myself, lost in some thought and taking little notice of what is around me. She never wanders too far behind me (being less impatient, though I am learning from her to take just a little more time). We became acquainted through a house-sitting job. I needed to walk her and I had spent most every night walking along the acequia in my own neighborhood. Though I was a bit reluctant at first to share my most treasured moment of self indulgent brooding, I ultimately caved in and took her along to join me. She is cordial without pandering, reserved but not rude. Her atmosphere as she slides through the grass or trots along to catch up with me immediately provided no hindrance to my pensiveness but it did suggest a different, and very welcome, tone of thinking.
Of the fine things in life, good companionship may come a close second behind only perhaps love. And by love I mean the kind that inspires purpose in your life while simultaneously depriving it of any purpose but itself, the kind for which you do rash and radical things without any account or reason, the kind which employs the eloquence of poets because only such people have the mind to construct sentences on the occasion of such emotions. That kind of love is perhaps the greatest good. But that kind of love ultimately, in its consummation, prepares you for death. It allows you to release your self and your life and, in surrendering yourself to another, prepares you to die. Good companionship, however, prepares you for life. Good companionship brings your purpose close to you, turns your frivolity, your idleness, your daydreaming into purposeful, fulfilling moments. Activities that would be otherwise dull and pointless become integral to a happy day. Moments that otherwise seem ideal for melancholy become ideal for laughing.
The companionship with animals reminds us of nature, reminds us that we are not merely human, that we are not godly nor bestial but part of a continuous world. Our anthropomorphizing of animals may come from our egos but I would rather think that it comes from our desire to be a part of nature, to identify something outside of us with us and thereby to incorporate ourselves into it. It comes from the desire to share and Billie and my walks are testament to this. I don’t talk, she doesn’t bark. We smile and smell things together but we are too focused on each other to get distracted by other walkers. Her excitement is clear in her jumpy composure when we get into the truck; it is the only moment wherein she actually pushes me out of the way as she jumps into the cab. My excitement is, as far as I can tell, clear to her in my insistence in our going every night.
Were she to be able to speak, I don’t think that Billie would talk very much. I doubt that she would use words like “laudable” and “anthropomorphizing”. I would probably overcompensate for her age and demeanor by talking too much and embarrassing myself. Her despondence would most certainly irk me, and her jumping into the bathtub at the sound of thunder would probably be awkward for both of us were she to be a human being. Yet, I enjoy thinking that we could be rather different and that that might make our companionship, in its non-hypothetical, current status, all the more praiseworthy. She watches me, I watch her. She points out something in the brush, I point out something in the trees. Her concern for my wellbeing as we walk is a pleasant reminder that it is best, sometimes, not to walk alone.

Aristotle's "Magnanimous Man", Plato's "Great Souled Man", human manifestation of Aquinas' meeting of "Reason" and "Revelation"

On Casablanca

"Casablanca" may be the greatest film ever made. I have not seen many foreign films and I have only seen a little over a quarter of the AFI's 100 greatest films of all time. In fact, I tend to have poor taste in films and often indulge in movies that I find wholly uninteresting, and so I may be precisely the wrong person to write anything at all about film. I am, when it comes to movies, generally superficial, subjective, partisan and impatient. My scale of judgment consistently defies itself and one actor in one movie I'll like while in another I'll hate, one director's movie I'll admire, another I'll loathe. I also tend to judge every movie by it's cover or by whatever small, greatly insignificant but intriguing fact I find out about it. I shy away from "cult" classics because I can't stand the word "cult" and thus very reluctantly watched "Mad Max" (at the insistence of someone who thought that I would undoubtedly enjoy a movie merely for the fact that it included my name in the title-curious fact, there is another movie called simply "Max" which is about young Adolf Hitler trying to sell his paintings). I often try ardently to ascribe greatness to movies simply because they make me feel good, picking out the best parts and over thinking them until I've forgotten the rest of the very poor parts. Or I'll love a movie because I saw it with someone I love or enjoy and hate another movie because I was impatient or in a bad mood or I got tired reading subtitles or looking at someone in it.

Nonetheless, when I was a kid (all of this complicated system was being constructed) I gobbled movies up, I spent endless summer days escaping the dreadfully oppressive California heat curled up on the couch with the air-conditioner on, eating popcorn or ice cream watching and re watching "Tombstone" and all of the Indiana Jones movies. My mother, whose taste is significantly more refined than mine, would insist on our spending one day to watch all three "Star Wars" movies in a row; we'd unplug the phones and turn all the lights off and close all the curtains to make the living room as dark as possible and make what seemed like endless bowls of popcorn, devoting the better part of six hours to what I thought of as unbridled fun. I daydreamed about the rumored first three "Star Wars" movies when I was eight and salivated profusely in anticipation of not only six, but twelve straight hours of "Star Wars". I would actually have to get up early-not to do homework but-to watch movies. But when they came out and I watched them (despite scathing reviews) I was terribly unimpressed and hard as I tried I could find no way to make them any better than they were. The dream of half a day of movie was regained when, freshmen year, the extended versions of the "Lord of the Rings" came out the second they arrived at the school library I checked them all out and finally experienced twelve straight hours of movie-granted it was slightly different than I had imagined; there was beer instead of ice cream and a few breaks to perform minor obligations, like class and hundreds of pages of reading. I'm still recovering from how awful the new "Star Wars" films were (and are) and in silent protest Will and I must have seen "Empire Strikes Back" somewhere in the ballpark of twenty times in two years. No joke; we watched it as regularly as once a month, and if I exaggerate it is not because I got tired of it.

In short, I think I might be the most singularly unqualified movie reviewer. There is no education I can rely on; there are no principles or precedents I understand or can employ; there is in fact little other than intuition (which is perhaps entirely off-base) and taste (which smacks of anything but refined) and rambling words (which certainly do not do justice to my sentiments) that I can offer in a discourse on film. I begin this essay in such an awkward way in order to definitively establish my lack of wisdom on the subject of film. I would also like to add that, being 21 years old and having never been married, the brief digression on marriage is entirely a matter of speculation and a subject of which I claim no sapience. Any truth discovered therein is coincidental, however it is a subject I treat with the greatest sincerity and about which I have ruminated for many years. With all of this in mind, I would like to embark on a essay in an attempt to understand what might make "Casablanca" the greatest film ever made, or at least worthy of serious discourse.

"Casablanca", which is second behind Citizen Kane and immediately before The Godfather, is arguably the greatest "Hollywood" film of all time, a film that can be enjoyed academically as well as it can be entertaining. Citizen Kane is a great film, but it seems to me to be a film for films, too aware of itself to exist beyond its own story and its own legend. The Godfather (by this I mean 1 and 2, while the AFI indicates just 1; Godfather 2, the only sequel to appear on the list is at number 32) is also great but too epic to be a pure "Hollywood" film. The horse head scene in the beginning of the first film, I believe, decisively establishes this fact. "Casablanca", on the other hand, immediately establishes itself as a film with big stars, big ideas, big events, to be enjoyed within the spectrum great dramatic literature, while attempting to perfect the genre of dramatic film. Few films have such a fluid storyline which is demonstrated by one's ability to read the script like a book (it is in fact based on a play called "Everybody Goes to Rick's"). The storyline itself is augmented by the fact that so much of the dialogue in the movie (which mirrors the diverse setting of French Morocco in the throes of World War II) pertains to the many other characters that appear besides Rick and Ilsa. All of the political commentary, all of the social commentary provides the perfect backdrop for the action of their romance.

"Casablanca" sits in a funny category though, because of its romance. It is not a comedy because, by Shakespearean or Jane Austen standards, there is no marriage at the end. By Aristotelian standards, the characters are too important, to noble to be comedic characters. Yet, it seems neither to be a tragedy. There is no death at the end, except for the death of a Nazi Major who, given the partisanship of the film, deserves to die and is in fact killed by the film's hero. The Achilles heel of "Casablanca"'s hero does not kill him in the end, as would be expected by an ancient definition of heroism, and rather redeems him of any selfishness for which he might ultimately be judged. His tragic flaw, that he cannot be with the woman he loves, becomes the very inspiration of his nobility, the redemption of his character and of the character of his lover. Thus, we find in the climax that there is something both comedic and tragic. Rick enables the woman he loves, the one things that can make him happy and would seem to make her happy, to leave with her husband, to continue the journey they had been on when they first came to "Casablanca". The film's climax is filled with lines that, like the great lines of Shakespeare, have become common expressions. They present Rick's argument for staying in "Casablanca" and sending Ilsa away with Victor. I'll write out a small section if full:

Ilsa
You're saying this only to make me go.
Rick
I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll never regret it.
Ilsa
No.
Rick
Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
Ilsa
But what about us?
Rick
We'll always have Paris. We didn't have, we'd lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.
Ilsa
And I said I would never leave you.
Rick
And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going you can't follow. What I've got to do you can't be any part of. Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now...
Here's looking at you kid.

This dialogue weaves the irrational and extravagant feelings of love with the deep sense of duty and honor to which Rick ascribes himself and ascribes to others, even the woman who broke his heart. His actions are to the end of romance rather than self interest; the romance between Rick and Ilsa thrives on its impossibility, on their disparate lives, only congruous for brief moments under great strife. According to Denis de Rougemont in his 'Love in the Western World' romance, beginning with the tale of Tristan and Isolde, is defined by the polemical relationship of duty and passion; we have obligations, institutions, traditions that conflict with our greatest passions and that, while the obligations and traditions we have generally guide our life and give us meaning, love may be, as Swinburne puts it, the "one thread in life worth spinning, one sin worth sinning". Our metaphysics must allow us to be free enough to make and understand our decisions for our romance to be substantial, otherwise its tragic nature becomes null and the whole structure of the romantic story crumbles.
The institution of marriage exists as both a response to this phenomenon and also as a remedy for it. Marriage presupposes that we are romantic, that we believe that there is one person to whom we ought to devote ourselves. Marriage is in fact inspired by our romantic impulses and when wholly divorced from them (by way of overly emphasizing the economic benefits, the "reasonableness" of it and the social and emotional consistency it can provide) it becomes seriously marginalized. Marriage also attempts to resolve the inherent problem in our romantic impulse which is that eros, in its substance, is irrational, unreasonable and potentially destructive. Many ancients rendered eros as a madness or a sickness. Plato actually rendered eros necessary to philosophy, despite its potential craziness, and thereby integral to our study of politics. In Thucydides' The Peleponnesian War, Pericles identifies eros as necessary for good citizenship. But we see, most eloquently in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, that romance as a modern phenomenon is necessarily tragic. Even the youthful Romeo and Juliet insist on marriage as their necessary first step. The romance of Jane Austen novels, more morally Aristotelian and thus considerably less sexy than The Symposium or Shakespeare, exists only before there is marriage. in both Pride and Prejudice and Emma the entire romantic character of the books resides in the uncertainty of consummating desire. Once marriage becomes a reality, the books end. Even Jane Austen seems to see little "romantic" in married life. In fact, great swaths of modern literature have spent thousands of pages and hundreds of characters trying to understand the tension between the irrationality of eros and our desire to harness it indefinitely to one and only one particular person. It has hitherto found no resolution.

I digress for the sake of establishing marriage, not sex, as the most important consequence of eros. This I take to be the reason that great writers, like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, end romances with marriages and the greatest romantic comedies, The Philadelphia Story is perhaps the best example, end in marriage. Their insistence on marriage instead of vague or exciting commitment springs from a profound understanding of and belief in eros. It is not enough for them to leave us readers and watchers with the fact that two people love each other, they must act on their love, for the sake eros, for us to believe that eros can do more than cause conflict and pain and heartbreak.
The morality of "Casablanca" respects this view of eros, specifically as it pertains to marriage and thereby enables the two married people to stay together because it is a commitment for life and was only broken when one was (thought to be) dead. Rick both respects the romance on which marriage is founded, and the romance that stands at odds with marriage. He unravels their connection in the film's last scene. What he feels for Ilsa is exactly what would inspire him to marry her and exactly what renders him incapable of breaking her commitment to Victor. Romance is too great to be employed to anything other than love. Rick has too deep a wealth of feeling and too profound respect for human dignity as well as human frailty to allow his passions to drive his actions beyond the boundaries of what is good, what is fine, what is noble. Were Rick to feel otherwise, were he to misunderstand eros and fail to recognize its universality, were he to hold eros is less esteem, he would have left with Ilsa, or had her stay with him in "Casablanca". Rick's connections, his history and his savvy assure us that his second excuse (that were they to stay together they would die) is a poor one and thus we know that his insistence on Ilsa's staying with Victor is due to more serious concerns than inconvenience and deeper principles than happiness for its own sake.

Thus, "Casablanca" stands in a unique category, in the company of other great inquiries into the nature of love. It reminds us that we have no perfect solutions to our varying desires, that we have no chance of understanding happiness unless we afford ourselves the most earnest reflection and that happiness ought not to exist for it's own sake, but it serves to remind us of the good in ourselves and the good in others. If any of the characters are to be happy, they must be so in terms of the good, the good for themselves and the good for others. Eros will always be problem, but then again, it may also be the best solution.

Reply to Howard Zinn's "Are We Politicians or Citizens?"

Please read Howard Zinn's "Are We Politicians or Citizens?" before you read this. The article, which appeared in The Progressive and can be found online at www.progressive.org/zinn , is quite brief and will make this reply much more interesting to read.

Also, there are many Iraq statistics on www.About.com and at www.brookings.edu . I encourage anyone mildly interested to check out at least the first (it is much shorter). The information is stunning and heart-breaking. I sincerely hope that this reply is helpful to anyone interested in politics. Thank you.

The argument proposed in Howard Zinn's recent article "Are We Politicians or Citizens?" is summarized quite well by the article's seventh sentence: "When a social movement adopts the compromises of legislators, it has forgotten its role, which is to push and challenge the politicians, not to fall meekly behind them". This is an intriguing and appropriate claim given some of his examples and conversations I myself have had on the subject of politics. The general sense of "being reasonable" or "being rational" or "being realistic" pervades political discussions. What we can do constantly comes into conflict with what we ought to do. Fiat justitia, pereat mundis has no American equivalent. But if we are not Romans, neither are we Greeks. Our republicanism rests on our representation, consequences of the size of our country and the historic volatility of pure democracies (these are the two most prominent arguments in The Federalist Papers).
Ancient Greeks, having no variety in religion, nor any separation between their religious practices and their civic habits, lived generally by the custom of civic virtue; they were driven to act by what they "ought" to do, what they believed was right. And that opinion was subject to no mediator; the purity of their democracy resided in the assembly wherein politics was openly discussed. It was hostility discussed and subject to the tyranny of rhetoric which lead to great conflicts and the corruption of discourse as well as politics. Seeing this difficulty in Ancient Greek and Ancient Italian states, the framers of the Constitution and the Constitution's most eloquent advocates proposed a more moderate solution to the desire for freedom and independence; represent, in different ways, the potentially wavering and radical ideas of the people without sacrificing moderation. Thus, Howard Zinn is quite right; there are politicians who represent people, and there are people whom are represented. And if people benignly confess their opinions they will be poorly or falsely represented. If they have no opinions then politicians have no place in government. If their opinions are the same as politicians then there is no need for representation, the general will becomes naturally incorporated into politicians' understanding.
Yet, the article seems to drift between bold parallels and curious (and unexplained) evidence, both of which ultimately support the initial assertion tangentially at best. In effect, he brings up examples of both citizens acting like politicians and politicians acting like citizens and condemns the former and praises the later which means that everyone (politicians included) ought to act like citizens. Inasmuch as they represent citizens (which is part of his original claim, and what is enacted by the Constitution), politicians ought to think like citizens and act on their behalf before their own. That is why people elect them. But ought they be citizens who cannot compromise, who cannot moderate, who need mediators?
Much of the evidence is to the effect of defeating the honor and intellectual integrity of the "phased withdrawal" plan being considered by Congress. Here's the most intriguing and most convincing argument he proposes:
"Timetables for withdrawal are not only morally reprehensible in the case of a brutal occupation (would you give a thug who invaded your house, smashed everything in sight, and terrorized your children a timetable for withdrawal?) but logically nonsensical. If our troops are preventing civil war, helping people, controlling violence, then why withdraw at all? If they are in fact doing the opposite-provoking civil war, hurting people, perpetuating violence-they should withdraw as quickly as ships and planes can carry them home".
There are comprehensive polls provided by the Brookings Institution and About.com on Iraqi opinions. The opinion given by Howard Zinn in the first sentence of the paragraph above (the "morally reprehensible" part) agrees very well with what can be generally understood to be the Iraqi Sunni perspective (which represents less than 38% of the countries population) which overwhelmingly disapproves of the invasion, the occupation and the current Iraqi government. Two other groups, the Shia and the Kurds (the Shia are Arabic and thus ethnically similar to the Sunni while the Kurds are ethnically distinct from both, but religiously they are Shia) are more evenly divided, though a majority of those polled (53%, including all sectarian groups) believe that "security issues" are "the biggest problem facing Iraq as a whole". 26% responded that "political/military issues" were the biggest problem. Thus, an great majority (i.e. 81%) of those polled are concerned primarily with political, military and security issues, all of which are inescapably linked to one another. If one is failing, the rest too will fail. At present, all are failing. There have been some recent security successes in less-populated regions (and the Kurds seem to have had the most successful economic and military transition) but overall the evidence is to the contrary.
This digression is intended to shed some light on the complicated and contradictory opinions of the very distinct ethnic and sectarian groups in Iraq. I will return to the quotation, specifically, whether or not the argument for withdrawal is in fact "logically nonsensical".
It seems indelibly manifest that if the US troops were actually "preventing civil war", "helping" and "controlling violence" that they ought not to withdraw. There would, in that case, be no argument at all. Neither would there be an argument if US troops were doing the very opposite. However, the situation seems drastically more complex than to afford these two simple alternatives. This kind of distinction between a manifest good and a manifest bad (without any middle ground) is in fact precisely the kind of ideological scenario liberals (or "progressives") have been denouncing in the Bush Administration since the beginning of the war. There exists a debate not merely for the sake of politics as such (although that is lamentably a part) but in part because Iraqis disagree on how their country should be run. The political parties in Iraq are supported by unofficial militias which are run by sectarian groups; politicians gained support in elections due to the sponsorship of militias who helped garner votes in exchange for political support. This means that without any US Military or Coalition forces monitoring insurgent groups, unaccountable, nontransparent and violent militias will be the principle foundation of political parties. Many of the insurgents fighting strictly the US and Coalition forces are foreign nationals (from across the Persian Gulf) and/or are supported by Iran which openly states that it desires to see the US fail in Iraq. More Iraqi civilians have been attacked by insurgents (i.e. not the result of collateral damage of attacks on US troops) than US and Coalition troops consistently since 2003.
In a cycle of violence that has characterised Mesopotamia since the Abbasid Caliphate conquered it in the seventh century, Baghdad and its surrounding regions are today subject to constant conflict. This conflict will not cease with a withdrawal of US and Coalition forces, which is not to say that that is reason enough to remain in Iraq. The harrowing truth is that no one knows what would happen were we to withdraw immediately or in a year. Staying or leaving is a gamble for Iraqis and for all military forces in Iraq. The question then becomes, for citizens as well as politicians, how we can keep as many people alive as possible. Protesting against the occupation or against war in general will, at best, remove US and Coalition Troops from Iraq, but it makes no assurance whatsoever that the Iraqis who are killing other Iraqis for reasons that we, as westerners, do not understand will stop. I makes no assurance whatsoever that terrorists who have emmigrated to Iraq to kill Americans will be indefinitely deterred from killing other Americans in the future.
On the other hand, a total troop withdrawal could provide breathing room for Iraqi politics, which is desperately needed. A troop withdrawal could significantly reduce Iraqi civilian causalities (from accidental US Military action, from collateral from insurgent activity directed against the US Military). A Troop withdrawal would, obviously, end US and Coalition casualties. Or, as suggested above, it could do none of these things.
I opposed the proposal of "Operation Iraqi Freedom", I opposed the war itself and I have been profoundly infuriated by the way that reconstruction has been executed. I taught a history class to rising sixth graders two years ago during the summer and I focused the class, in part, on a comparison between reconstruction in the South after the Civil War and reconstruction in Iraq after "Operation Iraqi Freedom". As we read and wrote and debated we found that there were no clear answers in either situation unless we became rigid partisans. The reminder that we ought to be uncompromising in our core beliefs is very attractive to me until I think of those who believe that gay people don't deserve to participate equally in our society, until I think of those who believe that sentencing people to death is consistent with the aims of our penal system. Rather, we ought to be uncompromising in our pursuit of the truth, as citizens, as politicians and as human beings. We ought to let our perpetual search for the truth guide our minds and our hearts and the results of that search guide our beliefs without violence, as far as we can avoid it, and without disrespect or dishonor to all human beings.
Every war is, to some extent or another, criminal. This is the most salient argument of Zinn's article, and it is and argument that Thucydides made much more eloquently and much more earnestly over two thousand years ago. I am not sure of what the best course is to take with Iraq now. My inclination is to security; whatever will get Iraqi security forces most effective, most quickly is what we ought to do. Without any accountable, legitimate control of violence, innocent Iraqis will continue to die. We are in a position to help change their fate. It is no compromise to realize this.

Supply and Demand

I was in Zaragoza, Spain in March of 2003 at the beginning of the second Gulf War. There were protests every day for two months along Paseo de Independencia,the central street in the city on which our school was located, and often it would be so loud that we were forced to stop class and wait for the noise to quiet down. There were many slogans, many signs and many songs of protest throughout the city. One that most caught my eye was posted on a makeshift wall outside a federal building on Paseo de Independencia. It said, "Luchar para la paz es como follar para la virginidad", which translates to "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity". I was quite moved at the time, though I must confess that it was less for the reasonableness of the argument than for the mention of a mysterious, exciting activity in which, at sixteen, I had yet to take part.
The reasonableness of the phrase had seemed indelibly manifest then, but now seems a bit foggier (because, on top of missing the point entirely of the 2000 year history of scholarship on jus bellum, it assimilates ends and means in logical fallacy that the sinister Machiavelli would not even accept). I had not thought about that poster until I read an article about drug policing in Mexico recently. Newly elected President Felipe Calderon has attempted, in his first five months in office, to crack-down on drug trafficking throughout Mexico. This is a task by which a dictator would be flummoxed for many reasons. The most glaring reason is perhaps the fact that the demand on the side of Mexico's northern neighboor is leviathan. The US drug market is a stunning $10 billion. Mexico is now the main provider of cocaine to the US and, do to the eradication of many methanphedamine productions in the US, now a quickly growing provider of methanphedamine. Thirty thousand troops have been deployed in Calderon's attempt to cut out some of Mexico's drug production cancer. An addtional fifteen thousand civil-force troops(effectively a militia) have been added to a, to quote a US general who recently testified on Iraq, Syssiphian project. The rock may very well crush Calderon, but poltical defeat is nothing compared to the deaths of thousands of inoccent people and the potential drug addictions of many more.
What Calderon needs, which is also what the Iraqi government needs, is the command of violence. Neither he nor al-Maliki will be able to procure a monopoly, but each of them must fight for peace. James Madison, to paraphrase, said that if men were angels, then we would not need government and if men were governed by angels we would not need to write down our laws. His observation, characteristic of the underlying ernestly optimistic pessimism of the Federalist Papers, is one of the best arguments for the existence of political philosophy. Another optimistic pessimist, Montaigne, said in his first essay "By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same Ends" "truely man is a marvelously vain, diverse and undulating object", which is to say that our inconsistency is the cause of wonder, the inspiration for philosophy. It is probably fair to say that both would have a solution to the enormous drug problem plaguing both Mexico and the United States, although they would most likely have been antithetical. Madison's insistence on the strength of the federal government may have very well come into conflict with Montaigne's propensity to self-indulgence, even at the expense of his health. Both positions, however, when combined, provide the inherent problem in human government and a suggestion of a solution. We must try to act like angels in our governance, though, as angels, we sometimes must unfortunately be armed. In some cases we must be armed well, in order to "fight for peace". This becomes an immediate problem because the line between "fighting for peace" and "fighting for war" is, and has been throughout history, quite blurred. No slogan can capture it. No non-violent-resistence activist has found a solution to crazy people with huge guns and no intelligible system of morality. That is a truth as serious as it is depressing.
Thus, Calderon has been forced to fight for peace. The weight of guilt ought to fall, however, not only on the ones producing drugs but those using drugs. This is a problem though, as both parties already have an abnormal and ignoble moral system, and curing production is easier than curing consumption. But, they go hand in hand. Until the US stops importing and using billions of dollars of narcotics, innocent Mexicans and Americans will continue to die and both governments will be forced to fight for peace. The US has made the hill steeper. Mexico has made the rock heavier. Calderon's honorable and enormous effort cannot push it up alone.

On "Knocked Up"

I love self referencial writing. Few things are better than smart people indulging in how smart they are and then passing it off as art. It's beautiful. You might say that the entirety of Borges' witing is one big self reference, and thus, I eat it all up. Part of what made "Arrested Development" so funny, and so enjoyable, was its ability to take the substance of an old joke and reuse it fluidly into new dialogue so it became a new joke entirely (e.g. "No touching!", every scene with Franklin, GOB's perpetually failing magic act, Maybe and George Michael's unconventional relationship) all the while reminding you that they knew why the jokes were so funny. Almost everything that Bob Dylan does in "Don't Look Back" or maybe it's "No Direction Home"- either way, the one where he tours England with Joan Baez and Donovan- is some kind of self reference, some subtle or not too subtle way of indirectly bringing himself to the forefront of every conversation, interview or concert. Self-referencing is indulgence at its most eloquent, arrogance at its most delightful and, under the authority of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the most salient and defining characteristics of modern comedy.

This past weekend, I got my matinee on super heavy (popcorn, junior mints) and saw "Kocked Up", the most recent film by Judd Apatow (The "40 Year Old Virgin"), which is about...well the title pretty much sums it up. I turn to the most prominent self-referencial moment in the film. There is a scene where Ben Stone, the main character, is tripping on mushrooms in a hotel room in Las Vegas with his friend/girlfriend's sister's husband Pete. As he wriggles around on the bed he watches a scene from one of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, both starring Steve Martin, which are concerned primarily with the tials and tribulations of raising twelve children with Bonnie Hunt (or maybe there are just ten children, and so they are twelve in all. Who cares?). Ben Stone can't take it. The movie, surprisingly enough, makes him sicker than the mushrooms do, and it inspires an intense and absurdly revealing conversation between Ben and Pete (the latter of whom happens to be dutifly surveying the five completely different chairs the hotel room provides and is testing them all with striking diligence). We share Ben's feelings about "Cheaper by the Dozen"; Steve Martin's character, stalks his fourth or fifth daughter (which is maybe his seventh or eighth child) all the way into the movie theatre to spy on her on her first "date" because he somehow still has trouble understanding that she might someday require a little bit independence (not to mention a break from her family).
Rather, in "Knocked Up" we have two sincere and sincerely different people making a mistake and dealing with the surprising reality of giving birth and raising their first child. Both we and Ben Stone choose Ben Stone and Ben Stone's story because we are allowed to see into it, we see the immediate and overwhelming struggle that faces Ben and Alison.
The reality of their characters allows the film to be funny. As a perrenial slacker, Ben is charmingly undrepressed and unaffectedly sanguine about his vague future plans and uneventful past. Alison, on the contrary, works hard but has been given a cushion by virtue her beauty. Her future plans, while unexpressed, must be radically different than Ben's. A one-night-stand, provoked by too much alcohol and quickly forgotten becomes serious when she discovers that she is exactly what the film's title suggests. Their second date illustrates perfectly where they each stand with regard to one another as Alison reveals the reason why she's asked Ben out:

Alison: I'm Pregnant.

Ben: Fuck off!

Alison: What?

Ben: What?

There is no way to render this dialogue appropriately in text, so say it out loud, with a hesitation before each "what?" Not only are these lines delivered perfectly, in the film, not in your head, but they summarize succinctly the crux of their deliverers' problem. The simplest dialogue reveals precisely their characters and the central movement of the plot.
Comdey is hard to discuss because, if you're not funny when you talk about it, it's easy to miss the point (which is to laugh). It's also hard to discuss seriously because it's natural to begin by saying "Well, comedy aside..." so as to keep people listening in ernest. Neitzche says in 'Beyond Good and Evil' that when children play, they are serious about it. They have fun as though it were a duty to which they were excitedly obligated. He then says that we spend our adult lives trying to recall those moments, trying to find a way to be serious about fun again. Good comedy is, I believe, serious fun. Good comedy demands conversation because it opens our hearts and then tests our convictions and our comforts; it entices us with its fun and then brings to light events and feelings that are otherwise kept mum. Some feelings may need to be regulated, but until we find a way to communicate perfectly with one another, good comedy helps us understand and embrace our shortcomings and those of our loved ones. Just as good comedy demands conversation, our conversations should demand good comedy, and we should demand that Judd Apatow keep making movies.

north eugene, i wanna see you stomp--and shake it.

That was always my favorite cheer of the North Eugene High School cheerleaders. Today I was reading a policy proposal about school redistricting and the No Child Left Behind Act, and it made me think of that cheer.

"North Eugene! I wanna see you stomp--and shake it!"

North Eugene wasn't the best school in the district. In fact, it was the worst school in the district, and one of the worst in the state. We didn't have a lot of money, nor did we have the best teachers (though you'll never hear from me that I had bad teachers in high school--some of the truest and most lasting beliefs I have came from passionate, motivated teachers--people who believed in what they were doing, and believed in me), and the way the school was run sometimes leaned toward woeful incompetence. The school tried new and bizarre programs to get grants and help the students, but those bizarre programs inevitably failed, and in the years following my graduation, almost all of the good teachers left.

South Eugene High School, predictably on the other side of town, was the best school in the district, one of the best in the state and, according to Newsweek magazine, one of the best in the country. Many of my friends attended South Eugene, and they had that special air about them that kids in good public high schools tend to get. It's not snotty, it's not condescending, it's not a private-school white-blazer-with-navy-piping kind of attitude, but just a general aura of comfort and confidence. Kids at South took interesting courses from interesting people, they learned whatever language they were interested, they played music or painted and earned valuable credit for it. They built their own education, but not in the forced and pathetic way that North Eugene attempted, but in the natural, organic way that free-love educators think all school should be like.

They were better students with better educations than mine. I was lucky to be friends with them, because it gave me perspective into the nature of public education. I preferred my friends at South Eugene to mine at North Eugene because they were smarter and more interesting. I preferred them to my friends at Marist, the local private school, because they weren't complete tools. They didn't have the social imperative because their fathers owned successful chains of hardware stores or a lumber mill. They were just smart and interesting and ambitious. And because of the opportunities afforded to them at a good public high school, most of them moved on to college all around the world, where they'll meet other smart, interesting people and turn into successful, smart, interesting people.

It helps, of course, that the South Eugene district was an old, affluent, liberal part of town. It's where professors and writers and artists lived, its where the University of Oregon was. It had all the oldest and most beautiful homes in Eugene--not the gaudy McMansions that fed into the private school, but elegant, fascinating homes full of elegant, fascinating people.

So it'd be difficult to defend that my friends were interesting and successful because their high school was good.

It'd be more reasonable to say that their high school was good because my friends' parents wanted them to be interesting and successful.

That's where this policy initiative comes in.

As things stand now, taxpayers within a given school district pay taxes which go to schools within that district. Money from that large, district-wide pool is then given to individual schools according to many factors, including, the No Child Left Behind Act.

The No Child Left Behind Act was signed in 2001. It's basically an attempt to enforce accountability in public school teachers and staff for their students test scores and overall academic performance. Standardized tests are administered to students, and if after two years the scores don't improve, that school gets a yellow card. If after three years the scores still haven't improved, the school's funding is placed in serious jeopardy, and that school must offer tutoring programs.

If five years go by with no marked improvement, so starts what I call The Schoolpocalypse. The federal government steps in with the mandate to reorganize the school in order to make it function well. Programs get cancelled, programs get created, people lose their jobs, people get locked in closets, its crazy.

Now, like most education legislation, the No Child Left Behind laws are enforced in at the district- and, if necessary, the individual school-level. The problem is that all the funding comes from people in those districts, and, in large cities, there are good districts and bad districts.

The good districts are in rich neighborhoods, the bad districts are in poor neighborhoods, at least most of the time. What this means under the No Child Left Behind Act is that districts who start out at a disadvantage, with little money and even less parental involvement, are effectively punished for not getting blood from a stone, and driven further into the ground when the good teachers lose money and the good students lose morale, and leave for magnet/charter/private/better public schools. Meanwhile, the rich schools continue to thrive, and instead of bringing bad schools up, the No Child Left Behind Act drives them further down.
In a phrase from this particular policy initiative, "the good get better and the poor get poorer." (Incidentally, I think that's a great ten-word line).

Now, recent studies have been released to say that in the grand scheme of things, the No Child Left Behind Act has yielded positive results: in a word, test scores are going up.

People claim, however, that it's been the mediocre schools that have improved, leaving the truly horrifying schools in the lurch. Their scores have stayed largely the same and, since it's 2007 and we've come upon the first five-year benchmark since the NCLBA was first established in 2002, those schools are staring into the maw as we speak.

Under this proposed change to the No Child Left Behind Act, standards would be applied to Congressional districts, not school districts. A Congressional district is much bigger than a school district, and often subsumes several small districts. Therefore, if implemented, this redistricting would take into account good districts and bad districts, and compile them into a mean score. After that, those same actions would be taken under the No Child Left Behind Act to improve the schools in that congressional district.

Effectively, the better districts, and therefore the better schools, would be held accountable for the worse ones. Better staff, teachers, and students would be sent to different schools, I'd imagine, under some kind of "exchange" or "ambassador" program, and in order for the good schools to maintain their advantage, they would have to ensure the success of the poor schools.

This proposal strikes at the very heart of liberal social thought.

As it stood before the NCLBA, there were good schools, and there were bad schools, and mediocre schools. Then we drafted legislation to (hopefully) turn the bad and mediocre schools into good schools. According to some, we're actually bringing up the mediocre schools while making the bad schools worse.

What this policy initiative proposes, therefore, is to make all the schools a little more mediocre. It's a policy of redistribution--we give the bad schools resources from the good schools and, even though the good schools will become marginally worse, the bad schools will become markedly better. At least, that's what we hope.

That's the basic policy of socialism. Sacrifice quality for quantity. And I'm of the opinion that in some matters, like secondary education, that's precisely what needs to happen.

Because in secondary education, quality is not just a scale of funds, but a matter of opportunity. Students at poor, inner-city schools aren't given the proper opportunities for higher education. Many of these students don't know what it takes to go to college, don't know about financial aid, don't know that if they wanted to, they really could go to college and be successful.

Now, there are lots of reasons that they don't have this opportunity and, frankly, the biggest one is that they don't go to class, much less talk to college counselors. But I'm confident that with better staff and better resources for outreach, these poor schools could better inform their students that it's possible to attain higher education and, most of the time, that special opportunities exist for minorities and the poor.

To accomplish this task, staff and resources must be drafted from better schools and redistributed to worse ones. The money just doesn't exist otherwise.

It makes sense that this redistribution could accomplish that goal of ensuring that every student in America, every one, is given the opportunity to pursue higher education.

However, I don't think this same socialist tendency should be applied to higher education.

I'm willing to concede that good public high schools should dip a little in order to make the bad schools get better and provide the same opportunities. However, if we take this stance on secondary education, we cannot also claim that higher education is a right. The opportunity to get higher education is a right, but admissions guidelines should not have socialist tendencies.

I agree that if government is to control education for its citizens, then all citizens should be given the same opportunities. However, there's a reason that the United States has the universities in the world, and it's because not everybody can get into Yale or Cooper Union or MIT. We have maintained a merit-based education system because we believe that, frankly, getting into a good school should be about kicking ass and nothing else.

I maintain that only the best students should get into the best schools in America. And to be truly merit-based, we must abolish affirmative action in universities and we should abolish unfair legacy admissions to universities.

I don't want our colleges to be mediocre, and I don't want policy that encourages them to be so. But to justify that position, I must also maintain that every public school student should be given the same opportunities to kick ass. The government should be responsible for educating you well enough to get into school and giving you the information you need to go to school, but nothing else.

A little socialism, a little redistribution, is necessary to ensure that all citizens have the same rights and opportunities when it comes to their lower education. But it would be an immense failing to allow the quality of higher education to suffer for those who don't meet the standard. If we sacrifice the quality of lower education for the sake of equal opportunity, we are justified in demanding the utmost quality from those in higher education.

That way, as the North Eugene cheerleaders would say, everybody wins.

On Citation

My hope in contributing to this blog is that I can find a way to diversify my subject matter without compromising thoroughness, and, in turn, exhaustively explore arguments and works without sacrificing their sophistication. I am indebted to Will for starting this blog and I hope that if people enjoy it they will write, and if they don't they will write. I also hope Dave will make up for my dearth of humor. -Maxwell Kuhl

"I am not a Marxist."
-Karl Marx

I've been inspired to write, though I lament such ignoble inspiration, upon the reading of a series of egregiously misinterpreted and misquoted quotations in an essay I read recently on "Neo-Conservatives". Machiavelli is, understandably, given his tone and subject matter, almost exclusively quoted out of context (scholarly papers notwithstanding). My sense is that this is not so much the product of a failing on the part of his readers when they read a particular phrase or passage but rather that this is the result of the complexity and diversity of Machiavelli's opus.

The Discourses on Livy, which is much less frequently read than The Prince though longer and perhaps more integral to political philosophy than the latter, is divided into books and further into chapters, each of which have a title. The chapter titles range from the teetering-over-the-edge-of-absurd and ridiculous, such as "When You Are Going to Shoot a Man, Do Not Tell Him When You Ask Him for His Gun" to the elegantly subtle and philosophical "Men Can Be Deceived in General, but Not in Particulars" to the many profoundly scholarly chapters on the history of Roman and Venetian governments. Machiavelli's political philosophy is both sinister and benevolent, both savage and delicate, both sophisticated and blunt. His critique of the church is not merely the critique of Pope Julius II, nor of the Papacy in general. It extends to the very roots of Christianity, the contradicting statements Jesus Christ in the Gospel, and the relationship between ancient Greek virtue and Christian virtue. Take him merely as the founder of "realpolitik" or the architect of modern tyranny or the panderer to late Medieval princes and you reduce the breadth of his insight, the depth of his writing and the complex vicissitudes of his prolific career to one or two uninteresting, uninvestigated and unprofound turns of phrase which will, no doubt, prove a point, but they will prove a point that is equally uninteresting, uninvestigated and unprofound.

One of Machiavelli's least-know works is a short play, a comedy called "The Mandragola" wherein a young man named Callimaco returns to Florence from Paris upon hearing of the beauty of a Florentine woman named Lucrezia. He returns and sleeps with her through a series of dupes involving a friar, an Iago-esque friend and the disguise of a doctor. Ultimately everyone is subject to deceit and yet everyone has gained something. The characters are happy at the end having both deceived and been deceived. There are many disagreements as to whether the play ought to be taken as political allegory (with certain characters representing political and religious figures) or as a neoclassical comedy of errors. In either event, the play is so poignantly congruent with Machiavelli's other "political" works that it seems unreasonable not to consider it at least a philosophical aspect of his understanding of human nature. One possibility I would like to suggest is that "fraud" as such is not the end towards which the play drives. Happiness is the end, literally and figuratively, towards which Machiavelli's characters move. Their fraudulence is transparent and it does not hurt them. Safety is the end towards which the characters strive and safety is the end towards which Machiavelli's princes and republicans strive.

There are few consequences in "The Mandragola" but there are many and serious consequences in politics. "The Mandragola" is funny, it is a comedy because it takes the seriousness of fidelity and honor and science and religion and removes consequences; Machiavelli superimposes an absurd world onto one we think is reasonable and dignified and he reveals how complicated and absurd our "real" world is. Machiavelli pulls a similar trick in his political writings; he openly reveals unreasonable and ignoble acts on a world that seems much more pure than it is, thereby revealing a much more interesting and much more helpful insight about the state of political affairs.

I have not gone into great detail about Machiavelli's works (there are much better writings by much better writers on the subject) but I wish merely to provide some comments on the subject of Machiavelli's political thought so as to say, albeit indirectly, that we ought to be serious in our references, we ought to be scrupulous in our readings and we ought not to reduce the sophisticated history of serious, scholarly political thought to brief and out of context quotations, unless we wish posterity to do the same to us.

liberalism and liberalism

I'm on my second day at the Roosevelt Institution, the student-run think-tank with chapters in universities all across the country, 6,000 members nationwide, and national offices is Washington, DC.

My father would call Roosevelt "a bunch of lib[eral]s." Roosevelt calls itself "progressive," and its members "progressives." The difference between a liberal and a progressive is similar to the difference between the word "good" and the word "beneficial," or between the word "use" and the word "utilize." A liberal and a progressive are fundamentally the same thing: someone concerned with economic fairness, environmental protection, social awareness, and tolerance, manifested in and instituted by a strong, centralized federal government.

I think Josh Lyman said it the most succinctly: "We believe that government is a place where people can come together, and where no one gets left behind."

But due to our culture of televised derision, care of the merry-go-round of talking heads on CNN and MSNBC and Fox News, the word "liberal" has taken on the same kind of connotation as "oriental" or "shyster." In other words, "I know you're talking to me, but don't call me that."

Those fire-spitting conservatives, the Sean Hannitys and the Ann Coulters and, way back, the Rush Limbaughs, turned "liberal" into a four-letter word, not just to conservatives, but also to liberals themselves. Since the early '90s (and probably earlier), liberals have been painted as irrational, teary-eyed ninnies. Upon hearing the word "liberal," one imagines a bumper-stickered Volvo driven by a young woman. The woman is weeping hysterically because she just saw some roadkill, and so she can't properly pull her car into a space in the Whole Foods parking lot.

The Volvo is American politics. The Whole Foods parking lot is rational thought.

And, of course, liberals have painted conservatives as uneducated, gun-toting extremists with a fundamental disregard for their fellow-man.

The problem is that it’s not all that bad to be an uneducated, gun-toting extremist. Most John Wayne characters were uneducated, gun-toting extremists. So was Carl Weathers in Predator. I wouldn't appreciate being called uneducated or an extremist, but I wouldn't really cringe, either.

But nobody wants to be a ninny. Even ninnies don't want to be ninnies. That, one can only assume, is how they've become ninnies to begin with. So while Ted Nugent takes the "gun-toting extremist" epithet with a grain of salt, if not a prideful grin and a middle finger, liberals were slapped across the face with these derisive stereotypes, and began to run from themselves.

"I'm not a weeping Volvo," cries the environmentally sound, socially aware, demand-side federalist. "I'm not a liberal. Those bougie left-wing yuppies, they're the liberals. I'm legit. I'm MEAN for social awareness. I'm CRAZY for the environment. Those wishy-washy ninnies, they're not me. They're the liberals."

It could be that those bougie left-wing yuppies don't actually exist. It could be that liberals are liberals, and this movement away from "liberalism" is nothing but a knee-jerk "I'M NOT STUPID YOU'RE STUPID SHUT UP" reaction at just how efficiently and brilliantly mean the conservatives were in the 90s.

But whether its Yankees vs. Mets or Wizards vs. Bullets, its safe to say that there isn't a liberal in this country who wants to be called a liberal. "I'm not a liberal," they'll say, "I'm a progressive."

The word "progressive" refers to a largely reactionary phenomenon in American politics. Progressivism came about as a reaction to the darker side of American industry. It's true that the darker side of industry brought with it lasting problems (e.g. the need for legislated rights for workers, environmental policy, and corporate regulation), problems we must still address to this day. Progressives of that first generation could have called themselves liberals, but they didn't. Liberalism wasn't the right word to describe the movement. Liberal thought exists on the opposite side of the political spectrum as conservative thought. Liberals had the same goals (efficient self-governance) as conservatives, with differing opinions on how to achieve them.

Progressives, on the other hand, were demanding legislation to address new problems in new ways. Environmental protection and anti-trust laws were fresh ideas to deal with developing issues. So progressives aligned themselves with Democrats like FDR. In the hands of Roosevelt, progressive legislation addressed new problems and solved them, for better or worse.

I say "for better or worse" because those solutions themselves created new problems. The Social Security program, its cousins, and their collective bureaucracy were inherited by the post-Depression generations, and political affiliations divided according to opinions on those issues. Liberals supported government-funded programs and thought them necessary to the well-being of the country; conservatives stressed personal responsibility and a smaller government instead. Progressivism as a coherent movement became anachronistic, because a new status quo had been created. Conservatives went from keeping things how they were to keeping things how they used to be. And liberals found themselves playing defense.

The root of the word Liberalism is the Latin liberum, "free". This etymology is misleading, however, because liberalism doesn't hold as its core value human freedom, but rather free thought. Liberal politics, in fact, sometimes severely limit freedom in the most basic sense (most often of companies and the rich), and don't always guarantee the freedom of the poor or the oppressed, in that they can become dependant on government hand-outs and, in some perverted way, can become slaves to government legislation. That may not be the defining characteristic of liberal legislation, but its association with legislation is difficult to deny.

Liberalism is freedom of political thought. Conservatism has less risk (in that it preserves the status quo) but less potential for dramatically improving the lives of Americans. It is a political philosophy of security and rationality above all things. Liberalism, on the other hand, promotes shaping government policy to help and protect all people, even if it limits the freedom of some Americans.

That's where the question of reason comes in. Why should I be responsible for all these other people? Why should I give them my money? We live under the same flag, I found a way to earn this money, so why can't they? John Locke defined those impulses as the basis of political reason. To paraphrase Locke: "We're all looking out for number one, the things we like and the things we own--in a word, our freedom--and the necessity of government comes from a desire to protect ourselves."

J.J. Rousseau had a different formulation of things. Rousseau says that we have an impulse to protect and help our fellow-man. Further, according to Rousseau, that impulse is not an irrational instinct, but an expression of our most basic reason, or our rational faculty. The desire to help others, even at our own cost, is the rational quality of ethics. And the expression of that quality, typified in modern liberal political thought, is not irrational, at least in its purest form.

And in that way, the stereotype of the liberal ninny was always unfair, both for conservatives to spin out and for liberals to accept. But hopefully its more than self-reference that's changed on the Left--it's self-understanding. By calling themselves progressives instead of liberals, they're associating themselves more with Roosevelt than with Clinton. And by calling themselves progressive, they're concerning themselves more with creating good rules than with playing the game well.

The question, then, is whether there really are new problems enough to justify a legitimate progressive movement. If those problems don't exist, then it's just a name-change. If the change from liberal to progressive is, to quote Geoff Garin, a matter of framing, not a matter of ideas, then "progressive" just means "don't call me a liberal."

Its been said that what the Democrats have been lacking for the past eight years is a coherent vision for America, full of ideas and hope. As calls for ideas came from the top of the Democratic Party, liberals on the streets of America began to call themselves progressive. Democrats need ideas, and progressives should have them: I'm here at Roosevelt to find out if they do. I hope they do.

www.rooseveltinstitution.org

--Will Hollingsworth