Here's an article about the Auburn University Philosophy department in the New York Times Magazine. Feel free to post reactions here.
All posts by John Casey
Theory of negativity
Jamison Foser at Media Matters notices some very stunning idiocy and responds accordingly. He writes:
The Wisconsin Advertising Project looked at a single week's worth of ads in determining that 56 percent of McCain ads and 77 percent of Obama ads were "negative." Aside from the dangers in drawing conclusions from such a small sample of campaign ads, the findings are of limited value given that the project made no effort to assess the veracity or fairness of the ads in question. In fact, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the study counted any ad that so much as mentioned the opponent's name as "negative."
I suppose it might be mildly interesting to know that 56 percent of John McCain's ads mention Barack Obama, or that 77 percent of Obama's ads mention McCain. But it doesn't really tell us anything useful. How did they mention each other? Did the ads criticize policy positions or personality? Were they honest? The answers to those questions are essential to any meaningful assessment of the candidates' campaign tactics. (If you do find the project's findings compelling, you should keep in mind that in July, based on a much larger sample, the project found that more of McCain's ads were negative.)
Despite the study's failure to even attempt to assess the validity of the ads it declared "negative," several news organizations hyped the findings. Worse, some suggested the finding that more of Obama's ads have been negative undermines the recent conclusions of many impartial observers that the McCain campaign ads have been more dishonest than those of the Obama campaign.
The New York Post, for example, reported that the results of the study "clash with recent media coverage accusing McCain of distorting Obama's record in ads." Nonsense. That's like saying that the fact that this is September clashes with the fact that it is Friday.
Foser is right. This is what one would call a "category mistake." Also, I think I speak from experience that many people wrongly call anything critical an "attack" and assume that anything "negative" is wrong. Foser's whole piece is well worth reading, as always.
Good enough for Moses
Concern troll Michael Gerson last week whined about how liberals have made light of Sarah Palin's Pentecostalism. While's he's right that this might alienate religious people–the very same who brought you all things that are awesome (abolitionism and civil rights) and none of the things that are bad, (like colonialism, slavery, etc.)–whose votes the Democrats need this coming year.
It has been (correctly) pointed out elsewhere that his argument amounts to a straw man. No one has made fun of Palin's anything (her family, her religion). No one, that is, who represesents the Obama campaign or the Democratic party. If Gerson wants to be believed, he ought at least to have the honesty to name someone, someone representative (not Matt Damon) who is guilty of making light of Palin's religion. Saying "liberals" has a kind of Hannity/O'Reilly/Will kind of falsity about it, as if we're supposed to take his word for it, even though he is in many respects the ultimate partisan hack, as he was the former speechwriter for George W. Bush.
Not finished making stuff up (i.e., lying), Gerson continues sermonizing:
But it is the political effect of these attacks that must have Team McCain shouting and hollering with the joy of a frontier camp meeting. In general, liberal political and media elites demonstrate a religious diversity that runs the spectrum from secularism to liberal Episcopalianism — all the varied shades from violet to blue. Yet they assume their high church or Mencken-like disdain for religious enthusiasm is broadly shared. It was the sociologist Peter Berger who observed, "Puerto Ricans, Jews and Episcopalians each form around 2 percent of the American population. Guess which group does not think of itself as a minority."
This sounds like one of the perpetual and unfounded screeds about the evils of secularism one might hear at one's church when one goes once in a great while. It's a gross misrepresentation of liberalism, as Gerson knows, and a gross misrepresentation of secularism, as Gerson ought to know. Both of those misrepresentations, of course, amount to dishonest portrayals of one's interlocutor. Such behavior does not advance us on the road to understanding.
American idle
In the wake of David Brooks's critical piece on Sarah Palin, I was going to point out that perhaps I was wrong about the right wing pundit corps. Maybe they don't marshal any argument, however foolish, in support of their "guy," whoever their guy is, or however silly his policy prescriptions. That would have been fun to write, as I enjoy being wrong, despite what people may think. But then I run across this morning's George Will column. He's not pro-Palin, but that's not going to stop him from making a pitch for McCain. Well it's not really a pitch for McCain, since he doesn't mention any of McCain's numerous virtues or policy proposals as a reason to vote for him.
What worries George Will, reputedly some kind of libertarian, about a Democratic Presidency is the possibility of (a) an (unlikely I think) expansion of unionization, (b) universal health care, (c) (unlikely again) laws regarding political speech. As a rule, one ought to dismiss out of hand Will's characterization of these issues, as he is, unfortunately, a serial straw man constructor. Perhaps one might find better arguments against those things elsewhere. What's silly is that these three things pose such a danger to the country and liberty, that Will finds their possible vetoing sufficient reason to vote for McCain. I mean, as they say, come on you've got to be kidding me. This is all you have?
Well, in other ironic matters, there's this:
Palin is as bracing as an Arctic breeze and delightfully elicits the condescension of liberals whose enthusiasm for everyday middle-class Americans cannot survive an encounter with one. But the country's romance with her will, as romances do, cool somewhat, and even before November some new fad might distract a nation that loves "American Idol" for the metronomic regularity with which it discovers genius in persons hitherto unsuspected of it.
"Liberals," of course, are elitists–i.e., not "everyday middle-class Americans." Don't they, by the way, belong to unions? Unions like the ones whose expansion this piece claims to offer reason to oppose? Then of course the irony: George Will, cursing elitism, makes fun not only of what lots of people watch, but of their aesthetic judgments as well. But perhaps he never cursed elitism.
In a related matter–this is dumbfoundingly hilarious.
Posts blog posts
I normally don't read the Post's election blog posts primarily because they're blog posts, but this one from Sebastian Mallaby, "Obama's Faulty Logic," caught my eye. I thought, "perhaps someone has caught Obama in a crazy non sequitur I can talk about here."
Then I read it and it occured to me that Mallaby thinks logic means something else than I do. But that's interesting anyway, because I often wonder what people who haven't been teaching it for many years think it is (feel free to comment on that). When I use the term, I mean something rather specific. I mean to point out the part of an argument that takes one from one fact to another fact. This is what logicians call an "inference." Even though this has to do with the facts in some very important sense, one can isolate the inference and see it as part of a larger pattern, a scheme, or whatever, independent of the particular facts. To say someone has faulty logic, for me, means he endorses faulty inference patterns or schemes.
For Mallaby it means something like there's something wrong with the thinking without any specific attempt at a diagnosis. In this particular case, in fact, he just seems to think Obama has wrongly diagnosed the cause of the current financial crisis. That's fine–so long as he attempts to prove it (which, to my mind, he doesn't, but that's another matter). Then Mallaby, swinging about accusations of faulty logic, writes:
The regulation-versus-deregulation rhetoric is appealingly simple, and both parties abuse it. Republicans like to say they will get the economy going by cutting red tape. Democrats like to say that they will make the economy more stable by demanding rational oversight. Neither claim is worth much.
The Republicans fail to acknowledge that the easy economic gains from deregulation were exhausted more than two decades ago, when clearly destructive restrictions on competition in trucking, airlines and so on were scrapped by Carter and Reagan. The Democrats fail to acknowledge that there is a limit to what government oversight can do. Modern financial institutions are so complex that government inspectors are hard pressed to understand their trading strategies. That is why an outfit such as Citigroup, a deposit-taking institution theoretically overseen by multiple government bodies including the Fed, could park billions of dollars of toxic mortgage securities in off-balance-sheet vehicles, with nary a protest from regulators.
Yes, Wall Street's woes reflect greed and reckless borrowing. And yes, some regulatory reform is necessary. But you can't blame the mess on either political party — at least not if you want to remain honest.
It's staggering to say that more rational oversight wouldn't have helped. But it's silly to say that anyone, even Democrats, would argue that oversight would solve all problems. That, in fact, is a bit of a George Will style straw man–one which has the liberals demanding that the government will prevent every wrong if it's allowed to. Obviously some amount of nefarious activity will take place, and unless Obama says that the government will stop every problem, cure every sickness and so on, then Mallaby is making Obama's position more absurd than it needs to be.
It's fine, in other words, for Mallaby to correct Obama's assertions–that's his job, I think at least. But accusing him of faulty logic when he's not guilty of it–even in Mallaby's enlarged sense–doesn't help anyone.
Now you tell me
In today's New York Times David Brooks argues that Sarah Palin does not have the experience to be Vice President and therefore President. He joins a growing chorus (he says) of conservative pundits who make this argument. I can't say of course that I disagree with him or them. But my interest in punditry here has little to do with agreement or disagreement. For even in getting to this obvious conclusion, that Palin does not have the requisite experience to be a candidate for such an office, Brooks still encounters logical difficulty. He cannot escape what has become the single most defining rhetorical trope of his intellectual career–the dichotomy.
Brooks's dichotomies are not always fallacious ones–it's more often the case in fact that they are not. A false dichotomy, the reader may remember, suggests two radically opposed and exhaustive possibilities, one completely ridiculous, one your view, as a means of suggesting your view has a kind of deductive support. On further reflection, of course, one finds there are many shades of opposition to your view, so therefore the dichotomy, and the force it gives your position, is false. So, for instance, you either endorse constitutional overreach, or you support the enemy and are thus a traitor. Since one does not want to be a traitor, one finds one must support constitutional overreach. But then it occurs to one that maybe there are other alternatives to constitutional overreach, so one discovers the dichotomy is false. That's the fallacious false dichotomy. Don't get me wrong, Brooks does it a lot. Today, however, it just the rhetorically false dichotomy. He writes:
There was a time when conservatives did not argue about this. Conservatism was once a frankly elitist movement. Conservatives stood against radical egalitarianism and the destruction of rigorous standards. They stood up for classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence. Wisdom was acquired through immersion in the best that has been thought and said.
But, especially in America, there has always been a separate, populist, strain. For those in this school, book knowledge is suspect but practical knowledge is respected. The city is corrupting and the universities are kindergartens for overeducated fools.
The elitists favor sophistication, but the common-sense folk favor simplicity. The elitists favor deliberation, but the populists favor instinct.
This populist tendency produced the term-limits movement based on the belief that time in government destroys character but contact with grass-roots America gives one grounding in real life. And now it has produced Sarah Palin.
People may think this has a kind of sophistication to it–wow Brooks can really distill cultural, economic, and political tendencies can't he!–but it's rather a silly way of looking at complex historical, cultural, etc., phenomena. He has, in other words, just pulled this out of his ass. A minimum of inspection will reveal these things are hardly as opposed as he suggests–especially the small town/big city dichotomy.
Where he gets into logical trouble today is elsewhere, however. He continues the narrative that Democratic elites' main objection consists in the fact that Palin does not eat arugula:
Palin is the ultimate small-town renegade rising from the frontier to do battle with the corrupt establishment. Her followers take pride in the way she has aroused fear, hatred and panic in the minds of the liberal elite. The feminists declare that she’s not a real woman because she doesn’t hew to their rigid categories. People who’ve never been in a Wal-Mart think she is parochial because she has never summered in Tuscany.
Look at the condescension and snobbery oozing from elite quarters, her backers say. Look at the endless string of vicious, one-sided attacks in the news media. This is what elites produce. This is why regular people need to take control.
These two paragraphs distill the Palin/McCain campaign's political strategy: call everyone who disagrees with Sarah Palin a cultural elite, characterize the media as the enemy, and so forth. It's one massive straw man. But as long as they keep fighting it, the media will keep covering it, remarking on McCain's brilliant strategy in attacking the straw man, and in knocking him down, all the while they will keep asking why Obama can't get them interested in a real fight, and why this makes Obama weak.
But back to Brooks. Having repeated eight years' worth of straw men, he joins the opposition and claims their arguments, repeated anywhere and everywhere for the last eight plus years, as his own:
And there’s a serious argument here. In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.
But before I get to those, I should remark that the above argument would be a false dichotomy. There's an obvious middle ground between a separate class of executives and caricatured portraits of mountain folk. But I digress, back to Brooks's agreement with everything he has ridiculed:
I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.
And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.
Yes. And I think of all of the energetic sophistries Brooks has produced in favor of this ineptness.
Hope weaver
One definitive feature of the op-ed page is that you can say anything that might possibly remotely have a possibility of being someone's actual view–not that it has to be true, someone just has to believe that it could be. This, I think, is the only way one might explain Bill Kristol's latest piece. He writes:
Meanwhile, the Republican Party — which had nominated a Bush for president or vice president in six of the last seven elections — chose as its nominee a troublemaker who was George W. Bush’s main challenger in 2000 and his sharp critic for much of his administration. John McCain wasn’t on particularly good terms with either the G.O.P. establishment or the leaders of the conservative movement — yet he won. He then put on a Republican convention that barely acknowledged the existence of the current Republican administration.
And he chose as his running mate Sarah Palin, one of the least-known outsiders to be picked in modern times, and the first woman on a Republican ticket.
This in turn sent other establishments into a frenzy.
The media establishment was horrified. Its members expressed their disapproval. Palin became more popular. They got even more frustrated. And so we had the spectacle last week of ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student.
The campaign narrative that McCain–who voted with Bush 90 percent of the time and who vows to continue most if not all of Bush's disastrous policies–is a "troublemaker" is astoundingly false. Aside from the depressingly true remark at the end of the quoted passage, Palin also represents in every respect the hard right wing of the party–and she too embraces the glorious policies of that consummate outsider, the rebel from Texas, George W. Bush, current President of the United States.
Who cares
If we still wonder why our children isn't learning, we might also ask some why well-educated and rich adults can't seem to learn either. On that point, once again, George Will has found the root cause of educational success in the American inner city. What might it be? If you guessed, eliminate the teachers unions, you'd be right:
CRJHS can have its work program, its entirely college preparatory courses ("the old, dead white man's curriculum," says an English teacher cheerfully), its zero tolerance of disorder (from gang symbols down to chewing gum), its enforcement of decorum (couples dancing suggestively are told to "leave some space there for the Holy Spirit") and its requirement that every family pay something, if only as little as $25 a month. It can have all this because it is not shackled by bureaucracy or unions, as public schools are.
Cristo Rey can have all of this because it is a private, Catholic, school that can pick and choose its students. The ones not chosen end up somewhere else. Where do they go? Who will educate them? I think it's clear at this point that if you asked George Will he'd say: who cares.
Product Placement
Most people don't know what NATO is either (via Thinkprogress):
CROWLEY: I think, first of all, that in rural Missouri, where I grew up, they are not going to wake up tomorrow morning over their Rice Krispees and say she doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is. That's how these things play, the totality of these things play, what we choose to pull out played. And I think, honestly, people are going to see this through the prism of how they feel about Sarah Palin.
And this journalist is powerless to point out the ignorance of the Republican candidate for Vice President. But there are at least some critical pundits out there. To Paul Krugman, one might add Bob Herbert:
With most candidates for high public office, the question is whether one agrees with them on the major issues of the day. With Ms. Palin, it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing. She doesn’t appear to understand some of the most important issues.
“Do you believe in the Bush doctrine?” Mr. Gibson asked during the interview. Ms. Palin looked like an unprepared student who wanted nothing so much as to escape this encounter with the school principal.
Clueless, she asked, “In what respect, Charlie?”
“Well, what do you interpret it to be?” said Mr. Gibson.
“His worldview?” asked Ms. Palin.
Later, in the spin zones of cable TV, commentators repeatedly made the point that there are probably very few voters — some specifically mentioned “hockey moms” — who could explain the Bush doctrine. But that’s exactly the reason we have such long and intense campaigns. You want to find the individuals who best understand these issues, who will address them in sophisticated and creative ways that enhance the well-being of the nation.
The Bush doctrine, which flung open the doors to the catastrophe in Iraq, was such a fundamental aspect of the administration’s foreign policy that it staggers the imagination that we could have someone no further than a whisper away from the White House who doesn’t even know what it is.
You can’t imagine that John McCain or Barack Obama or Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Joe Lieberman would not know what the Bush doctrine is. But Sarah Palin? Absolutely clueless.
Herbert is right, of course. It's not just a question of experience–which she seems to lack. It's a question of basic knowledge. The last time we gave someone a pass for not knowing about the world, and not caring about his ignorance, we got into a huge mess.
UPDATE: Well silly me. Just as being is said in many ways, so Bushi Doctrina dicitur multipliciter!!!!. I don't know how Bush has been Latinized (it has of course), but the new defense is that Palin displayed preparation too vast for Gibson's simple-minded question:
Peter D. Feaver, who worked on the Bush national security strategy as a staff member on the National Security Council, said he has counted as many as seven distinct Bush doctrines. They include the president's second-term "freedom agenda"; the notion that states that harbor terrorists should be treated no differently than terrorists themselves; the willingness to use a "coalition of the willing" if the United Nations does not address threats; and the one Gibson was talking about — the doctrine of preemptive war.
Eat that with Rice Krispees Show-Me-Staters!
An Army of One
Perhaps I don't need to make the point (again) that there is essentially is no mainline liberal pundit army. There are liberal pundits, maybe lots of them, but they don't work with the kind of mission-oriented military discipline as their conservative counterparts. They're more likely, in fact, to criticize the liberal guy than to advance his arguments. For more on that, see here.
Having said that, all of the griping about Obama not being forceful enough in his response to McCain's sea of BS seems somewhat misplaced. Obama is only one guy. McCain is more than that. He has in the first place an army of pundits who will either repeat his talking points, or invent their own arguments to advance his cause, which they may see to some extent as their cause. While George Will, for instance, may not emphatically support McCain, he cares enough to argue that whether one is economically better off should not matter anymore as a reliable guide in the current election. It's a ridiculous argument, but it comes out just in time to support McCain and it seems in fact that Will thought it up all on his own. No one needs to tell him McCain needs help. On top of this pundit army, McCain also has a television network (Fox), and legions of well-disciplined bloggers.
On top of this, of course, Obama can't even count on the press. Here, for instance, is an actual exchange on the TV about the McCain campaign's tendancy to make stuff up:
ROBERTS: That would appear, Paul, to end any argument over whether or not she supported the bridge initially. But why can't Barack Obama make that point stick?
Roberts, a journalist, responsible for separating the true from the false, wonders why Obama can't make the point that the true and the false are different. That's Roberts job, at least in a normal world. What does Roberts say?
ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.
That's just nuts.
With that, when Paul Krugman, not a huge fan of Obama, says:
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, “Thanks, but no thanks” when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they’re all claims recently made by the McCain campaign — and they’re all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 — my first year at The Times — trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign’s claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
He's virtually alone. If Obama is having trouble, this is part of the reason why–there seems to be only one top shelf pundit making actual arguments in his favor.