Leonard Schapiro on Stalin:

The true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.

From Booker Rising, a moderate-conservative black blog:

“Jim Crow violated the 1st Amendment (freedom of association, freedom of speech), 14th Amendment (equal protection) and 15th Amendment (voting rights). Jim Crow also empowered states to interfere with the rights of Southern whites who wanted to open their businesses, etc. to blacks. many tried to do so and met state and private repercussions. Is this not initiation of force by the state, abuse of power? Or is there an exemption when it happens to black folks? The Act, through the pre-existing interstate commerce clause in the U.S. Constitution, enforced laws already on the books.

The arguments of many white libertarians rings quite hollow to those of us whose relatives actually experienced Jim Crow. Physical assault and violated private property rights (and local government wouldn’t enforce the law), and yet what do many white libertarians have to say here but “too bad”? Or did “states’ rights” override our families’ individual freedom and private property rights because of our race and because federal government didn’t do it?”

Will comment on this later. I think that what white libs defend might be what they consider overreaching (legally) in the Civil Rights Act, whereas black libs are looking at the reality of Jim Crow. There should have been a way to enforce the  laws (and stop the oppression)  in the states outside the commerce clause…

Leslie Marsh, a social theorist and cognitive scientist, has this from Oakeshott at manwithoutqualities:

“Oakeshott (1983: 94) characteristically offers a brilliant analysis of the problem which he calls the ‘dry wall theory’. Keeping in mind Pedach’s and Walbank’s account of historical development, Oakeshott believes that though historical events are not themselves contingent, they are related to one another contingently. When a historian assembles a passage of antecedent events to compose a subsequent, he builds what in the countryside is called a ‘dry wall’: the stones (that is, the antecedent events) which compose the wall (that is, the subsequent event) are joined and held together, not by mortar, but in terms of their shapes. The wall therefore has no premeditated design; it is what its components, in touching constitute. There is a circumstantial relationship, an evidential contiguity, not in terms of causality, family resemblance, design etc. These circumstantial relationships do not themselves constitute historically significant relationships.

So when a historian employs the language of causality, what he ought to be referring to is this contingent circumstantial relationship. A historical past, composed conceptually of contiguous historical events has no place for extrinsic general terms of relationship – the glue of normality or the cement of general causes’ – neither Polybius’ tyche, Pedach’s intentionality, Walbank’s interpretation of aitiai, nor a Hempelian deductive-nomological conditions are valid analyses for historical explanation. And further, Chance as an exemplar of the purely external, cannot be a genuinely causal relationship and is therefore insignificant. To reiterate: Oakeshott (1983: 83) writes that ‘when a historian invokes a notion of ‘causality’ what he is in fact doing is utilizing a rhetorical expression meaning no more than ‘noteworthy antecedents’ and no ‘law(s)’ are involved…..”

My Comment:

Think of it like this. Things happen – wars are fought, empires are built, roads laid, constitutions written and kings assassinated…the fodder of history. Now, in telling this story, historians try to expain things by pointing out when they think one of those events has “caused” the other.

They mean ’cause’ either in the sense that ‘x’ preceded ‘y’ and ‘y’ couldn’t have happened without ‘x’, or sometimes they mean it in a more universal sense, such that whenever ‘x’ occurs, ‘y’ is bound to – but then they run into the problem I had with Nussbaum’s explanation of Hindu fundamentalism — nice theory, but it gets in the way of too many facts.

So, then you’re left with what’s called “contingency” – which in this specialized usage is the idea that things aren’t pre-determined, that they don’t have to happen; they have the freedom to not happen.

But, Oakeshott is also saying – and I agree – that the events themselves can’t be the result of “chance” – even though their relation to each other might look like it does from our vantage point as historians
Let’s say that three people were standing around a pool and throwing rubber ducks of different colors – red, blue, and green – into it. Soon there are 15 rubber ducks floating around.

Now the ducks didn’t show up there by chance. So, someone who didn’t know anything about how they got there would be making a big mistake if he looked at the ducks and thought they had got there accidentally. But, he would also be making a mistake if he read too much into the patterns of color the ducks made bobbing around in the water.

Well – that’s a rough example. Another way of saying it would be that history shows patterns on the surface which are deceptive, since the shapes that make up the pattern are actually thrown up from below the surface or above it..

My question: how can you trust the facts of a scholar who isn’t above twisting words to suit her purposes under oath?

Here’s the case, as described by Gerald Bradley, “In the Case of Martha Nussbaum,” in First Things in 1994.
Mind you, I sympathize with Nussbaum’s goal, but at least according to this account (which I tend to believe going by other things I’ve read of hers), her methods are wrong.

The Bradley piece is interesting because it makes a broader argument — that a lot of scholarship in the humanities today is actually advocacy and more like a lawyer’s brief than scholarship. And that’s tainted everything else in academics.

Bradley’s first example, omitted here, is the erroneous use of historical evidence in court to make it seem as if most nineteenth-century feminists did not support laws restricting access to abortion, whereas – says Bradley, referencing author James Mohr, cited by Professor Sylvia Law in the 1989 Webster case – they did.

Now here’s the excerpt, which deals with Colorado’s Amendment 2, which would have prohibited laws making gays a protected minority.

Note, this does not mean that gays would have been declared non-persons, as some said at the time. But it would have allowed, say, a private landlord who objected to homosexuality to not rent to gay couples. The question before the court was whether a law like that affirmed a mere prejudice or whether it was rooted in non-religious philosophical principles as well. That’s the “rational basis” test in law. Classical texts were brought in to court to figure out if pre-Christian Greeks like Plato and Aristotle (that is, pagans) had objections to homosexuality. (I can’t assess the argument myself, so I am going by Bradley’s assessment).

For the amendment, John Finnis, an Oxford moral philosopher, said the pagans did object. Against it, Nussbaum tried to argue that it was only the Christians who did.

For the amendment to be struck down (and minority classification supported), a simple disgreement with Finnis was not enough. The amendment (opposing minority classification) would stand still stand, for it now had a “rational basis,” i.e., it wasn’t mere prejudice at work. The issue was debatable.

But it was just this diversity of rational opinion that Nussbaum needed to eliminate to overturn the amendment:

“Nussbaum tried to destroy Finnis’ contentions by saying that his moral argument was a sectarian Catholic view without foundation in the secular and rational “natural law” views of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. She rejected Finnis’ appeal to Plato on the ground that it relied on English translations which falsified Plato’s texts. In reality, she maintained, neither Socrates nor Plato nor Aristotle had moral objections to homosexual conduct that did not involve coercion, prostitution, or the seduction of students. She repeatedly drew attention to her mastery of the classical languages and intimate familiarity with the classical texts, implying (falsely) that Finnis has access to classical writers only in translation. She went on: “I have to say that Finnis is no classicist. He’s a distinguished philosopher and religious authority, but he has no training in classics, and he has access to the ancient texts only through translations. He’s made a pretty cursory examination even of those. . . .”

Robert George of Princeton then gave evidence contending that the translations which Finnis had quoted were confirmed by translations of the same passages given by classicists accepted by Nussbaum as highly authoritative. Such classicists include Sir Kenneth Dover, the author of the leading book on Greek homosexuality and, according to Nussbaum herself, a “giant” in the field. Moreover, George argued that Nussbaum had misrepresented both Dover and Finnis. The decisive engagement was joined.

On the last day of the trial, Nussbaum filed an affidavit in which twenty-four single-spaced pages are devoted to these issues. On the same day, Finnis filled an affidavit of twenty-four double-spaced pages in rebuttal of Nussbaum’s oral testimony. George filed a short affidavit rebutting points made against his testimony in the first twelve paragraphs of Nussbaum’s affidavit. She had sent him those (but only those) paragraphs the previous day, together with a letter demanding that he retract his claims that she had misrepresented Finnis and Dover.

Nussbaum made some rather remarkable statements in court…….

“Nussbaum went on to claim that “in the thousands of occasions of its occurrence in the language,” “the word” does not once convey any nuance of wrongdoing. By “the word,” she meant tolmao in its various forms (for she had just referred to “Plato’s use of the word” in “many passages,” and the form tolmema itself occurs but once in Plato). She failed to inform the court that the very dictionary that she was citing (like its authoritative successor) indicates that tolmao‘s primary meanings include: “to have the courage, hardihood, effrontery, cruelty, or the grace, patience to do a thing in spite of any natural feeling.” (Emphasis added.)Nussbaum asserted the non-pejorative (“morally neutral”) character of all the “thousands of occasions of its [tolmao’s] occurrence in the language,” and appealed to the “many passages” where “Plato’s use strongly connotes approval.” What she withheld from the court is the elementary information that, in Plato’s Laws alone, about two- thirds of the uses of tolmao are manifestly pejorative, and many spectacularly so. For instance, the term signifies for Plato the depraved and abandoned shamelessness exemplified in such enormities as slaughtering one’s own mother, father, or brother, or robbing temples (all of which, according to Plato, deserve the gravest penalties, including death), as well as (just a few pages after Laws 636) the more generic shamelessness involved in saying, permitting, or doing what is shameful (aischron) (Laws 649d).

These matters were not belabored by the witnesses as some fascinating but arcane academic dispute, as Jeffrey Rosen’s account of the trial in The New Republic implied. This is no more a haggle about a word than the question of whether Tonya Harding knew about the Kerrigan assault “before” or “after” it took place is a trivial matter of what time it happened to be. It is noteworthy that neither Nussbaum nor the other participants knew then that Judge Bayless would not in the end rule on the “rational basis” question. (It may even be that his reticence to do so owed something to the dispute I am describing.) Whether Nussbaum could show that Finnis’ classical scholarship was distorted by his Catholic commitments was likely to be a critical part of the anticipated decision.

The Amendment 2 episode raises, as did the historians’ brief in Webster, the important question of ethical standards for academic participation in public policy debates. The question has yet to receive the attention from academics that it deserves. Nussbaum seems to have backed off her early demand for a retraction from Robert George. After Finnis devastatingly exposed her claims, she began to paint the whole affair as a good faith dispute among scholars.

But the Amendment 2 trial was not a scholarly disagreement. It was a matter of what it means to be and to hold oneself out as a scholar. More particularly, when one holds oneself out to public authority as a scholarly expert, does one forswear dissembling and distortion however deeply one desires to advance a cause? The link between behavior of the sort engaged in by Mohr and Nussbaum and the phenomenon of “political correctness” in the academic world is well worth considering. One can only imagine the fate of a historian who did what Mohr did as part of an effort not to support “abortion rights” but to protect fetal rights, or the fate of a philosopher who did what Nussbaum did not to advance the cause of the homosexual movement but to oppose it. Something in the academy has gone radically wrong.”

Gerard V. Bradley is a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

My Comment:

As evidence that this isn’t an isolated incident in Nussbaum’s career, here’s a piece by the always funny Camille Paglia on the subject of Nussbaum’s ability to get onto the career-track side of any argument – over-praising queer theorists when needed and beating them up (verbally, I mean) when the fickle winds of academe shift.

(Full disclosure: In general, I support whatever it is that gay rights advocates want for themselves — civil unions, church weddings, the whole catastrophe of modern marriage…they’re welcome to it. I just don’t want them to add the category of “homophobia” to the growing list of thought crimes awaiting, first, the censor and then, I suppose, involuntary drug therapy if not actual electroshock…)

My point in all this is that some scholars (like Nussbaum), seem to feel qualified to tell people what constitutes a “good” for them, with the “police powers” of the U.S. state to back them up. (Well – maybe I should qualify this, because she’s rightly questioned the use of economic sanctions against countries which violate human rights. Still, she’s also played a role in the World Bank and from there to the Euston Manifesto might be only a step…)

In their minds they’re always on the side of the angels, so they feel justified in distorting history, whether in their books – as in this new one on India – or in the courtroom, as here.
I might sympathize with the substance of her positions, but her manner of proceding simply doesn’t meet the test of scholarship, or in this case, even of ordinary ethics.

Update:

I should clarify that as a libertarian who thinks that trading is the best route to peace, I am on principle opposed to economic blockades and sanctions against any country (that includes China, Cuba, South Africa, Israel, Iraq). I think too many innocent people would suffer for their governments’ bad actions. On the other hand, I do support targeted boycotts or censure of companies (since their employees can always work elsewhere and have some say in the matter), individual universities, politicians and journalists (who have a special responsibility to be truthful and speak out about abuses).

Here, I am trying to use libertarian principles in making the distinction. It’s not easy to renounce your citizenship and become a citizen elsewhere. It is relatively easy (although still hard, I admit) to change jobs. Besides, when countries suffer economic blockades, critics of the government also suffer and find it harder to organize resistance. The government itself begins to enjoy the support of its citizens when it’s attacked with trade sanctions – as was the case with Iraq. Saddam just got more popular. Very often the most reactionary elements end up being strengthened, as also happened in Iraq. In general, trade sanctions tend to move people closer to war.

Said with Shaw’s usual sardonic good sense (no libertarian he, but this quote is good):

“What people call goodness has to be kept in check just as carefully as what they call badness; for the human constitution will not stand very much of either without serious psychological mischief, ending in insanity or crime. The fact that the insanity may be privileged, as Savonarola’s was up to the point of wrecking the social life of Florence, does not alter the case. We always hesitate to treat a dangerously good man as a lunatic because he may turn out to be a prophet in the true sense: that is, a man of exceptional sanity who is in the right when we are in the wrong. However necessary it may have been to get rid of Savonarola, it was foolish to poison Socrates and burn St. Joan of Arc. But it is none the less necessary to take a firm stand against the monstrous proposition that because certain attitudes and sentiments may be heroic and admirable at some momentous crisis, they should or can be maintained at the same pitch continuously through life. A life spent in prayer and alms giving is really as insane as a life spent in cursing and picking pockets: the effect of everybody doing it would be equally disastrous….”

More here in the Preface to Getting Married.

That relates to my older Sobran post. And it’s where I part company with someone like Singer, although I think, as a practical matter, it would be good to emulate his personal actions. But as a theory, I am not so convinced that giving away money to the third world (and I am from it) is the best (or only) way to do good. Visiting your elderly parents in a nursing home is just as important, morally. I don’t think you can quantify a moral act quite as finely as Singer does. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to make the system fairer, but we should be a little cautious. The universe may know a few things about what is fair that we don’t.

Some would say this is anti-political and a way of co-opting any energy you have to change the status-quo. A typical ‘either-or’ confusion. You are far more likely to do “positive” good in your immediate community, because you know more about it and can see the results – good or bad – with your own eyes. That’s not so when it comes to doing good in situations and for people you don’t know closely.
However, “negative” good – such as, preventing or fighting against one party forcing or defrauding another – eg.  bombing civilians, or starting unjust wars, or misleading consumers, or denying workers’ right to associate, manipulating existing laws to siphon off public funds – ARE the ‘right’ sort of do-gooding, because they are battling a violation of our minimal protections of life, liberty and property.

Let’s just say that preoccupation with people too far from the circle we really understand tends to go awry beyond a circumscibed number of actions. We don’t really see the results — which often aren’t as good as we think. In fact, a healthy self-involvement and refusal to get involved in miseries we didn’t create might be a good thing. For a start, it would stop us creating some more of those miseries.

There should be a sort of Hippocratic Oath for do-gooding.

First, do no harm.That’s true with individuals, for sure. Trying too hard to be angels, they usually end up less than human. And it’s ten times worse with the do-gooders who run the state and need an empire to do their bit for humanity — until humanity’s had enough.

That said, I’ll be back tomorrow, with more of my own do-gooding….

Here’s philosopher Pete Singer calling Nussbaum out in a different context (not so different really) on just what I was talking about, her value-laden approach (meaning, biased in favor of what she thinks is good) — which she disguises as neutrality:

“For the substantial proportion of natural law theorists who work within the Roman Catholic tradition, the assumption of a divine creator poses no problem. But to the others, and indeed to anyone who has accepts a modern scientific view of our origins, the problem is insoluble, for evolutionary theory breaks the link between what is natural and what is good. Nature, understood in evolutionary terms, carries no moral value.”

Translated, that means the only way you can justify believing ‘x’ or ‘y’ is a “good thing” that everyone ought to have more of, is if you have a belief that can’t actually be explained by science…at least, not science as it is now.

Since it’s only your own belief, that leaves in you in a bit of a bind as to how to convince other people of it. Which means that when Ms. Nussbaum tells you that the law needs to achieve “x” social good, she’s really telling you her belief, not stating some immutable truth. Sigh.

Of course, we should struggle for what we consider “good.” On our own time and money (I am big on being scrupulous with OPM…Other People’s Money, whether that other person is a worker or a CEO).

But, we shouldn’t force people (through the state) to buy our theories of the good. They might have their own opinions. Beyond certain minimal things like life, liberty and property, people should be free to pursue what they want and do it whichever way they want, with the abilities they have. If that ends up leading to inequalities, so be it. (Here – I am not talking about current inequities caused by war, fraud, and force — that’s a corruption of the process and the inequality that comes out of that is wrong).

But absent fraud or force, I am OK with differences. Quotas don’t fit that minimal approach. They’re someone’s idea of what proportion of men and women, or ethnic groups, or whatever else needs to be represented in some activity.

Singer goes on:

“Though Nussbaum explicitly rejects the view that what is natural is good, she nevertheless comes perilously close to it when she speaks of the value of animals “flourishing.” This is a term often used by advocates of the natural law tradition [Elizabeth Anscombe is a notable example], because it combines a biological idea with evaluative overtones. If we define “flourishing” in a biological sense, than a man who has the means to acquire and maintain a harem of women who proceed to bear him dozens of children, is as flourishing as anyone can be. So, for that matter, are the women fortunate enough to be selected for the pampered and secure life child-bearing that membership of a strong, wealthy man’s harem involves. If we deny that such men and women are flourishing, we are introducing evaluations that need to be explained….”

Atta boy, Pete….Well said.
By the way, that doesn’t mean Singer is some kind of hard-hearted brute…he gives away 20% of his money to third-world children – but note, it’s his money…)

More here in “A Response to Martha Nussbaum”