I hate that name

 So I'm changing it. Haven't decided yet. Maybe just back to Brainmortgage. It still applies.

New digs

For anyone who comes across this and, seeing what I did on this blog, still wants to see what I'm writing now, please do check out "Scarce Resources" -- my dabbling in the world of Substack -- and I'm on Mastodon <@jeffreyfisher@tldr.nettime.org>.



Beyond that, I hope you are at least briefly diverted by what you find here.

Huh. Maybe I'll start blogging again. Something longer form than Twitter or Facebook (usually), but not on Huffpost or Medium, because for real.

It's been a long time, friends.

QOTD: Some Self-Indulgence on Derrida

(((living impossible lives; Marco Roth's paean/elegy/no-something-else to Derrida upon the latter's death in 2004; me and Derrida and Kierkegaard -- if you don't care about either me or Derrida, you will probably find this hopelessly boring; also some Badiou)))

I just stumbled across an essay from 2004 regarding Derrida's death. It's more memoir-ish than Derrida would write, but otherwise, he makes the appropriate derridean gestures. More than that, I appreciated much of what he said about Derrida and deconstruction.

Reading this essay was the first time since a course on Postmodern Theology in grad school (where we read Heidegger, Lévinas, Derrida -- and Mark C. Taylor) that I haven't felt essentially alone in my thinking about Derrida. And in the last sentence I quote (not the last of the essay), I feel as though someone has finally explained to me why I love Derrida (and, might I add, precisely what he has in common with Kierkegaard, whom I loved first), which had been a mystery, ultimately, even to me. 

I wanted to post it here partly because I know there are a few who will appreciate it, although perhaps in somewhat different ways than I myself do. But also because I think it sets up a way of understanding Badiou as filling the gap left by Derrida and Deleuze, and also as providing important -- even if problematic -- rejoinders to their work. When I finally cottoned onto Badiou, I immediately saw his work as an extension of what I had found compelling in the work of Derrida (and Deleuze, as well, more so in some ways, less in others). Clearly Derrida and Badiou were coming closer to each other toward the end of the former's life, and there is a note about this (or anyway something close to it) in The Logics of Worlds.

There's also something to be drawn from the full essay, not quoted here, about teaching. Not just in the story of Derrida's sporadic and horribly long "lectures" at the Haute École, but in the author's observation that where or who or what Derrida was could not "be transmitted." So then one wonders what the teaching part is, and I note that it is mainly in his reflections many years later that the author comes to understand things he learned way back when. Some he got then. Some he didn't get until now. Derrida was, you might say, a certain absence of a teacher. And that's the only clichéd deconstructive move I'm going to make. I leave the rest to Marco Roth, who said it all so much better -- and so much less in strained and painful imitation of Derrida -- than I imagine myself being able to do that I can only quote him for the real substance of this note.

http://nplusonemag.com/derrida-autothanatography

----

But now isn’t the time for such games. To do so would be disingenuous and accede too quickly to one of the charges often leveled against “Deconstruction”: sophistry, a fondness for the play of rhetoric and metaphor over truth, facts, and history. The charge, never just or fair though leveled by vocal supporters of justice and fairness, ignored that Deconstructionists were incredibly wary of saying aloud that they’d discovered a truth for fear that they’d uncovered another metaphor. The conviction that all was metaphor or trope could grow into arrogance, but more often bred a dull hesitancy about concluding. Old school literary critics always understood this, and so warned against Deconstruction as a school of resentment and its hermeneutics of suspicion. Neither poetry nor ‘hard’ philosophy, sharing aspects of both, Deconstruction is loved by neither.

[ . . . ]

The fashion for theory and the words “Orientalism” and “Deconstruction” was as much a result of intelligent, angry and alienated Americans fastening on to a promise without quite grasping the training and the commitment to lonely thinking through a fixed tradition required to make it a reality. Despite its rapid politicization, “theory” in America or la pensée 68 in France, was not going to change the world (if by world we mean government). Theory, however, could and did change individual lives. Briefly, it redeemed difficulty and especially a discomfort some people felt intuitively about subject and object, language and self. Those people who felt they stood on shaky foundations suddenly had a home for their native anti-foundationalism. They too could become theorists. Think of it as a job creation program for all intellectual nerds, outcasts and misfits, people whose kind of intelligence meant that they weren’t even comfortable around most other intelligent people. The betrayal by the American system of higher education of those who’d enrolled enthusiastically in these job placement programs is a sad but minor footnote to the history of the 1990s. I don’t mean the dwindling number of jobs for French, German, and philosophy PhDs or the corporatization of the University, although that’s part of it. The betrayal began before, when those who showed glimmers of interest in theory were led to think that their curiosity would be nurtured into knowledge by a series of occasional course offerings and visiting instructors who rarely stayed long enough to ground a program. Instead of finding themselves in an academy, however, these students found themselves in the agora, fighting for money, time, attention, and space against better organized guilds. Theory did not, in itself, corrupt the young. The siege mentality surrounding theorists and theory did.

[ . . . ]

In the institutionalization and translation of Derrida’s philosophy, something was always lost. A way of thinking that emphasized the singular and unrepeatable, the absent and the paradox could never offer the satisfaction that one was leading the good life, only that you and others were leading an impossible life. [emphasis added -- jf]

QOTD: Donna Haraway and blasphemy as faith

(((Donna Haraway and "A Cyborg Manifesto;" cyborgs and blasphemy; religion, faith, and irony.)))

I came back to this today as part of a(n e-mail) conversation I was having about feminism and freedom (I am resisting the urge to put that word in quotation marks). There's a particularly great line about "the fathers of illegitimate offspring [like cyborgs]" being "inessential" that I remembered and wanted to grab. But in the course of doing so, I found myself once again for the first time in a long time re-reading parts of the essay. The opening is, well, lovely. It could go on a religion blog, like that other one I'm working on, but not before that blog has established a character and voice of its own that is not just this blog somewhere else. So I'll put it here for now, because (a) it fits, and (b) it's time to also revive this one and start posting again. But I do a lot with irony in my classes, and it occurs to me that they really probably should read this, as difficult as it is. Maybe not in 100 courses, but in 200 and up they should try to wrestle with it.

This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

It could be taken as a reading of Colbert before Congress, come to think of it . . .

Money is not the way to motivate

(((Ayn Rand is wrong; more money does not lead to better performance in skilled work; autonomy, mastery, and making a contribution matter more.)))

American-style capitalism, particularly as it is instantiated in IP laws (see especially the DMCA), operates on the basic assumption that innovation only happens with the promise of a financial payoff. Never mind that money did not motivate Einstein to work out relativity, or Oppenheimer to develop the bomb. Why is it that we think the people who really do everything for money (if there even are such people) are the people we want making decisions?

In any case, Dan Pink has a really interesting, very short talk (animated by RSA), in which he makes the case that, when you put enough money on the table that work is no longer about money (a point you reach fairly quickly), then the other factors matter more: autonomy, mastery, and contributing to something bigger than yourself. I don't generally go in for the sort of stuff that Pink does, but there's something really interesting about this when I think of it in terms of those of us in academics. Specifically, we get scared and angry about financial insecurity; we do things often for the express purpose of getting more money, but that doesn't mean we do it completely or entirely well; we get frustrated at how undervalued we are by society, when no one expects doctors to work for peanuts, but we're supposed to because we "believe" in what we're doing. But the truth is, we keep doing it. For some of us, it's partly because we have no options. But I think Pink's analysis gets at the heart of the frustration of teachers when people who aren't us start trying to tell us how to do our jobs, as if our jobs are the kind of menial labor where an increase in pay would improve performance, but instead of increasing our pay, they take away our autonomy (teach these things, teach them this way), our mastery (no one *needs* mastery like you have, certainly not your students, and by the way, you're not any good at it and we're not going to pay you either money or respect for extending and maintaining your mastery), and our contributions (we in the humanities are a smaller and smaller and smaller part of even ostensibly "liberal" education, because we are not "practical" in that narrow utilitarian way).

If people want better schools, and I'm betting this applies in some way to K-12 also, stop telling us how to do our jobs. Stop making us feel incompetent or lazy for wanting some control over what we do, especially when you're going to hold us responsible for it. Stop treating education like a factory whose output is functional, healthy, normalized, trained-for-the-workforce-but-also-fully-actualized people. Not only are these contradictory sorts of goals, but people are not factory outputs, not widgets, not burgers, and not the customers who ordered the burgers or buy the widgets. Analogies of liberal education (which is to be distinguished from job training) to manufacturing or service utterly obscure the truly human aspects of the process.

And they only make us hate our jobs more, because it's not what we signed up for. It's not what we spent years in grad school for. And it's not what many of us are still paying off thousands of dollars of debt to have gotten.

Pushing NCLB for Higher Ed

(((Extending the principles of K-12 to college; soon also grad schools -- why not?; all the stifling institutional crap that makes our students so bad when they get to college is about to ruin their college educations, too.)))

A Chronicle article by the policy director of an education think tank makes the case that Obama's "Race to the Top" should be extended to colleges, including a set of 60 standardized credits-worth of courses at all public universities, which would be accepted at all public universities (of course, this would happen at the state level, but it would be mandated at the federal level, and would not at all mean that everyone essentially goes to the same university, wherever they are); annual "audits" of "student learning" which would be where colleges prove that (and what) their students are learning (since it's just like proving that you mop your restaurant floors properly, or that you pay your bills); and "work-force outcome" measurement, where you prove that your students get jobs and make money "in their fields," ('cause lit majors who don't go to grad school in lit are failures, and anyway the point of college is just to make money).

Part of his argument on standardization is that students transfer a lot, and "assemble" their degrees from a variety of institutions. But it's not at all clear to me why, if you want my institution's name on your degree, you shouldn't take most (I might go as high as 80%) of your courses at my institution. Am I the only one thinking of Sarah Palin, here? Also, this seems clearly built around support for online-only institutions.

Anyway, while there is much to dispute in the column, the real issue is efficiency. For some reason, we just cannot admit that liberal arts education is not technical training, and will not be efficient. Look at online courses, where students go at their own pace. This is only "efficient" in the sense that students have no instructor, and it requires that they take initiative and do actual work. Shoot, if my students would do that in my live classes, my classes would be more efficient, too, and students would actually get much, much more out of their interactions with me and their class-mates. The one up-side I see here is that students in online courses have no one but themselves to blame when they fail a class. That said, at least one purveyor of online courses has 24-hour live online tutors. In other words, pretty soon there will be no faculty jobs except at the elite institutions (where the value of such things is recognized and the people have money to pay for it -- in other words, for the privileged), and instead of teaching in a classroom, I'll have the instructional (not educational) equivalent of a tech support job.

QOTD: Parmenides Wasn't Stupid

(((Quote of the Day; the poetic and the mathematical; being and non-being; Parmenides; Lacan and the Pre-Socratics; Badiou on Lacan on etc.)))

Lacan sez in Encore (Badiou quoting Seminar XX page 22):

Fortunately, Parmenides actually wrote poems. Doesn't he use linguistic devices - the linguist's testimony takes precedence here - that closely resemble mathematical articulation, alternation after succession, framing after alternation? It is precisely because he was a poet that Parmenides says what he has to say to us in the least stupid of manners. Otherwise, the idea that being is and that nonbeing is not, I don't know what that means to you, but personally I find that stupid.

Of course, this very simple statement has consequences in Parmenides, consequences that make Parmenides an enemy of Badiou. But the point remains about the importance of the articulation, and this will then have to do with the distinction between knowledge and truth, between the banal (like, say, this post) and the revelatory (Parmenides), and then, still further, the poetic as a sort of precursor or movement in the direction of the matheme.

The Vatican Assimilates Marx

(((Marx turns out to have been pretty important, even from the point of view of Catholicism, which has traditionally not been so warm -- leaving aside, of course, a wing of the Society of Jesus.)))

I see that the Vatican has extended its recantation of past hostilities from Darwin to that other bete noir of contemporary piety, Karl Marx, the (grand)father of "godless" communism. Said The Times,

L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, said yesterday that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making.

Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote in an article that Marx’s work remained especially relevant today as mankind was seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. He also said that Marx’s theories may help to explain the enduring issue of income inequality within capitalist societies.

“We have to ask ourselves, with Marx, whether the forms of alienation of which he spoke have their origin in the capitalist system,” Professor Sans wrote. “If money as such does not multiply on its own, how are we to explain the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few?”

With Darwin, Galileo, and Oscar Wilde now in the fold, what's an atheist to do? Is there nothing that is incompatible with Catholicism? Maybe this is like the parable of the rich man's banquet . . . they're out in the streets dragging in the scientists and atheists and social delinquents. That'll do.

Mandating and Incentivizing Health Care

(((The logic of mandates and penalties in health insurance; it's really hilarious to be lectured on how the penalties actually have to mean something by industry representatives with actuaries who probably do those very calculations for every move these companies make.)))

Blue Cross/Blue Shield representative on Morning Edition this morning sounding all sternly maternal, pointing out that a mandate has to be a mandate, and if there's no penalty for not buying into the health care system, people will find it much more reasonable to pay some small fine than to pay what it takes to buy insurance.

Wait, you're saying small fines for breaking the laws, not abiding by guidelines, missing certain kinds of targets, and so on, those fines can be worth paying when you stand to pay less overall -- or even, let's say, make lots more money -- by going ahead and doing what you're not supposed to do?

Shocking. It's as if the private sector has thought about this before. And, well, it's like they've all become . . . socialists! Obama wins!

American Conservatism Lacks Political Imagination

(((Irving Kristol dies; who is left on the American right? cons and neo-cons; who's left on the American left?)))

Hey, it isn't me. I'm just quoting Irving Kristol:

Kristol adds, "American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left." He goes on, "If you read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."

As I noted in a comment on FB, it's not like there's a lot of imagination in the American left these days, which I am tempted to say (à la Badiou) is too dominated by party culture and party modes of thinking, when it's not dominated by the false hope of achieving its goals through the Dem party. But I'll admit I'm not prepared to elaborate on that stuff yet. That's coming when I get around to posting on The Meaning of Sarkozy.

Thanks to Doug for remembering this quote from this old but still very interesting essay of Corey Robin's.

Finding your way through (a) book(s)

(((Prep school ditches physical books in favor of digital "books;" what about the "geographical" aspects of reading?)))

A Boston Globe story about Cushing Academy ditching their library for some Kindles is making the rounds. There is, of course, much to quibble with in this decision, including this peculiar way of framing it:

“Instead of a traditional library with 20,000 books, we’re building a virtual library where students will have access to millions of books,’’ said Tracy, whose office shelves remain lined with books. “We see this as a model for the 21st-century school.’’

I really don't understand why "traditional library" and "virtual library" are mutually exclusive. Except, maybe, for bad pricing models.

My main reason for preferring to do my Serious Reading with books, rather than on my laptop or a reader, is that I have yet to find a reading device that lets me interact with the text in the same way that a book does. For the minimal cost of a pencil (or perhaps a Sharpie acid-free pen, ahem), I can react to the book in the book, including circling and drawing lines and writing notes, connecting notes to each other or places in the text, and connecting pieces of the text to each other. Some of this can be done digitally, but some of it so far cannot -- especially the drawing of lines.

But that is not going to be my Argument For Books.

My AFB is about geography.

Argument Part the First

When I read a physical text, I get a feel for where in the text something is, literally, physically, "geographically" where. I know it's at the beginning, the middle, the end, at the top of a page, on a "left-hand" page or a "right-hand" page, and so on. This physical, tactile aspect of reading contributes to memory, which a forthcoming post will say is essential to the very possibility of critical, analytical thinking. What I worry about with screen reading, and I do it all the time, by the way, is that this geographic aspect of reading gets lost, and then our reading bypasses a lot of the mental architecture we have for remembering things we've read. For shorter stuff, this "geographical" aspect doesn't matter -- there's not enough geography to the text. For War and Peace or Being and Time or The Odyssey, on the other hand? That said, this way of reading might suit many Christians in their approach to the Bible, where verses devoid of historical or textual context stand entirely alone, or, conversely, it is more important to look back at Zechariah to understand that passage in Matthew than to read the rest of the story in Matthew.

Argument Part the Second

Space is not only important in terms of one's interaction with a single book, but also in terms of one's interaction with multiple books or even texts of shorter length. Colleagues of mine recently expressed frustration at how little of a text they could see at once when they're writing (one of the reasons I sometimes compose online, but for my longer stuff I always edit a printed copy). This limitation applies in spades to working with multiple texts: there is nothing like working on a problem where you are dealing with multiple texts and/or multiple readings of those texts, and having the books spread out on a table or desk in front of you. This is just not the same as flipping between windows on screen, even though the screen in that case takes on a geographical element, and of course the idea of a desktop or of "screen real estate" uses spatial metaphors.

The problem is that there isn't enough space, and it's simply not malleable enough. It can't be. Why not? While in certain respects you could say that there are infinite dimensions in a computer screen, the truth is that, in terms of the ways humans process visual information, there are not. The visual information communicated by a single book in your hands, or by piles of books and articles and note papers strewn about a desk is richer and more intuitive, taking in the scene tells you about what you have in front of you without your even thinking about it.* How deep is a stack of windows on your computer? It could be a hundred, or it could be two, but how would you know? On a table, you just look, and you don't even think about it. The flattening effect of the screen is in this respect positively debilitating. And we know this, which is why people talk about screen real estate in the first place: we know it matters to have stuff spread out in front of you, rather than buried in a virtual pile. Programmers and designers want big monitors because they need to be able to see stuff easily and not always be shuffling windows from the front to the back -- or top to bottom -- note how there is no difference when we talk about computer screens. It's the simple difference between two and three physical -- not virtual -- dimensions.

I love my computers. Both of them. Couldn't live without them. But they are not replacements for books. And thinking about my comments above about editing, by the way, has me thinking about the effects of this spatial/geographical problem and blog posts . . .

* See the forthcoming post of an article from a cognitive scientist about human processing of information, and in particular the relation of thinking to memory. In short: we remember more than we think, and rely on memory more than we rely on "new" thinking, and even when we think, we think using stuff we remember. So, learning to think is not just a matter of learning "how to think", understood as some pure or abstract skill divorced from content. And content is not just a matter of having something to think about, but of having something to think with. Learning to think is, in fact, in no small part, learning content.

Active Learning is Passive, Too

(((The latest and greatest in ed theory; did anyone ever learn anything before there were education departments? I should note that when I say "our students" and "my students," below, I am speaking in very broad strokes, about students in general, not about any student or students in particular. The question here is pedagogy and how we ought to approach teaching our students. I was working on this before the semester started, so: emphatically not a response to any particular classroom experience.)))

I'm getting really sick and tired of the discourse and attitude around so-called "active learning." This latest shibboleth (although it is not terribly new, by the way) says "passive learning" is bad, and what we're doing if we lecture (which I actually almost never do, anyway, but I'm pretty good at it when I do) -- or, worse, if we don't do the spiffy in-class projects classified as "active" -- is relegate students to passivity, and, so, to not actually learning.

Maybe our students could learn to take in lectures and discussions ACTIVELY, so that, you know, they could ask questions. Why is a conversation or lecture passive? Because students let it be. I don't remember ever in my life listening to a lecture and not thinking about it, even if I thought it was crap. If I wasn't thinking about it, I wasn't listening to it. At all. I read the same way. Unless thinking is passive, there is an issue when "active learning" doesn't include "active listening."

Ah, but here is the problem. Our students approach listening exactly the same way they approach reading: passively. Reading is not supposed to be any work. Textbooks, alas, encourage this, and that is why I don't use them. I make my students buy and read real books. And as far as I can tell, they skim lectures, trying to figure out what the word or fact is that they're supposed to write down -- so they don't know at all how to parse discussion, for example, and in the case of lectures, they don't pay attention until they've heard a word or phrase that sounds like it ought to be written down . . . by which time, they will have missed everything or almost everything that makes said word or phrase meaningful. There are certainly poor lecturers in the world, but this does not make lectures as such the cause of passive listening. Passive listeners are the cause of passive listening; or my other (not mutually exclusive) pet theory is that this what they've been taught to do in middle school and high school. It's the same reason they always ask for "study guides," by which they mean lists of things they're supposed to memorize. They've been trained that they're going to be told what they have to "know" (="memorize"), and then they just have to jump through the hoops they've been told will be there (that's called "taking a test").

On the other side, I'm trying to figure out exactly what is "active" about "active learning" when students are running mazes we've designed for them. Sure they have to do stuff. I get that. They are supposed to "use" the stuff they "know" (although where content comes in is frankly not always clear), and of course the activities aren't supposed to be rat mazes. But what about students coming up with their own problems based on reading I give them? When and how do they learn to do that except by doing it? And why isn't that considered an "activity"?

Am I just being reactionary?

I want my students to learn lots of things, but the single most important thing I've seen is that students don't know how to read actively. That is the main thing I try to teach, I guess. And a lot of them hate it. But when they learn how to do it, they're then ready to actually start thinking and talking creatively about what they've read, past the first layer of understanding what they've read. They're ready to stop thinking that everything they read should be transparent and not cause confusion. They're past the point where they think that being confused is a bad thing, rather than a place you spend some time as part of the process of learning things. Indeed, if you keep learning, you spend a lot of time in confusion. If you're not confused at points, you're not being challenged by anything.

Or maybe I am just making that up. I certainly don't think it's the only thing they need to learn, or that everyone needs to teach this, or teach it the way I do. On the contrary. But I think I am pretty good at this stuff, and it gets under my skin that so many people think I am just that lazy about my teaching, or so disconnected from "the learning side" of teaching, that I need charts fit for sixth-graders and exercises designed to reveal to me my misconceptions that work as if they were designed for high-schoolers.

I can't help thinking that Socrates had no whiteboards and no PowerPoint (maybe that was his secret!). Siddhartha Gautama didn't distribute rubrics. Thomas Aquinas never passed out study guides before the disputatio.

Maybe here's the other thing, and maybe this for me has always been the hardest part of teaching, the tough nut to crack, the main thing I still think I work on: how do you teach students that sometimes there is no right answer, or no one right answer? How do you put them in a position to understand this? And then to start figuring what to do with it?

I teach a lot of religion, where you can imagine this kind of approach leads to a lot of anxiety and misunderstanding, and so I am very attuned to the finer points of managing it. But maybe that is something to pick up in a second post, where maybe I should also address the difficulty of making this point (about no right answer and what to do with it) in classrooms filled overwhelmingly with students convinced that "everyone has a right to their own opinion," by which they inevitably mean, "stop trying to persuade me of something other than what I already believe to be the case."

Parking in Boston

(((re-tweet, you might say: humor; this month in history; why not?)))

This month's historic dates from the Somerville (Boston-ish) Public Library. Turns out, Bostonians have been complaining about parking since, well, forever.

Quote of the Day: There is no such thing as the State

(((Auden; "September 1, 1939;" Badiou should have written about this, if he didn't, because it really is about communism; I've had it with Thatcher, too.)))

From "September 1, 1939," a poem Auden was "ashamed" of, the famous stanza he struck from at least one printing of it:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

I have written before of Badiou's view of the state, and in particular the communist negation of the state. Thatcher might have agreed (with Auden and Badiou) that there is no such thing as the state, but Auden insists that "no one exists alone." If Thatcher's "there are only individuals" means "there are only people who exist alone," then Auden, at least, knows she is wrong, that people being people live in communities. There is, he says, a human community, a community that is not "the State" (meaning not just national governments, but even local ones), the community in which we exist with other human beings. And whether you are the individual or the representative of the state, you face the same question, the same choice -- to live in that community, with others, or to die alone. This is, I think, the "one world" Badiou takes as a political principle. Not a statement of fact, but an assertion of principle. Whereas the State always presupposes its outside, presupposes (at least) two worlds (but probably really three -- the non-state governed by the state, and the Other State, both of which are threats to the order imposed/maintained by the state).

In one printed version of this poem, Auden rewrites the last line of the above stanza to read, "We must love one another, and die." If you read the whole poem, this makes sense, since it seems so much to be about how death is always with us. So the idea that we can escape death by loving one another is kind of ridiculous, at best, and "the romantic lie in the brain," at worst. But the point is still taken -- we must indeed love one another in order for us to live with each other, and so to live longer, better lives, even if not to become immortal.

Although perhaps, in a way, we become that, too, by loving one another. But that would be another post.

I am certain that I have seen or read (or both) Badiou discussing a part of an Auden poem. I can't find this reference and don't know if it's this poem. I kind of hope it is, since it fits and would slot right into the paper I am working on, but I also hope it's not, so that I can appear momentarily to be clever by making the connection. I'll follow up if I find it, but I would also be happy to have it pointed out to me. Actually, anything where Badiou discusses Auden at all would be helpful.

Religion in a Nutshell

(((evolutionary pychology and cognitive studies in religion summed up brilliantly in under two minutes by a stand-up comic; yes, it leaves out some nuance . . . emphasis on some.)))

Patton Oswalt has a brilliant little bit on the development of religion. Hmm, maybe I can embed it. I never tried that.

It worked!

Anyway, if you follow this, then you've finished about half my intro to religion course. And this is cheaper, although maybe not funnier. Ahem.

Aliens Are Not Running the NHS

(((Health care; UK's "orwellian" National Health Service, which is pretty good and which people generally like pretty well; Obama's plan not really comparable to the NHS, in the first place; the debate is not a rational one, anyway; the paranoid style in American politics.)))

Maybe this is why I've tuned out of politics for so long, now. Because it's just so inane. When Sarah Palin can get away with calling the NHS "evil," as if people in the UK wouldn't raise their hands and say, "hey, we can hear you over here." What was she thinking, that the oppressed sick of the UK would rise up and overthrow their Orwellian NHS overlords? "Mr. Brown, tear down these hospitals!" Now we know that everyone in the UK has been to Room 101, because it's clear that they have been brainwashed to think the NHS is good for them.

Unless they're actually right, of course.

But there is a nice collection of articles and op-eds in the Financial Times (that liberal rag) about the current debate in the US and in particular about the comparison of Obamacare (TM) to the NHS. In the latter, they note right off the bat that, on the one hand, Obama's plan is less "socialized" than the NHS (the government insurer won't run the hospitals), and on the other, that US health care is already more "socialized" than people seem to notice (Medicare and Medicaid). It's a very reasonable article.

Alas, as Edward Luce notes in his op-ed, "reasonable people might as well be living on Venus." Noting the conspiracy-prone nature of American politics, on vivid display at the town hall meetings and related protests, Luce concludes:

Their issues are diverse. But their sentiment is common: America’s constitution is being trashed by un-American values. Which brings us to another important strain in US politics that Mr Obama, along with other educated liberals, shares with the Clintons: the belief that the fight is won or lost over the quality of reason.

No amount of contrary evidence will puncture the view that Mr Obama plans to establish “death panels” that will decide which grannies get to live or die. Nor will reason counter the view that countries such as Canada and the UK push their weakest to the back of the queue. “Who will suffer the most when they ration care?” asked Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska on Thursday. “The sick, the elderly and the disabled, of course.”

Mr Obama’s proposals have many flaws. Reasonable people can disagree on whether the reforms would bring down the cost of healthcare, an overriding priority, or sufficiently expand coverage to include the uninsured, a twin, but not always compatible, goal. For all their impact, reasonable people may as well be living on Venus.

The multi-generation battle to reform healthcare will be won or lost over faith rather than reason. The more nuanced Mr Obama appears, the more frenzy it will provoke in his critics. The more he mentions his mother, denied healthcare by the insurance companies when she was dying of cancer, the more progress he will make. What happened to her was un-American, Mr Obama should say. Forget the details of healthcare reform. The side that identifies with American values will get the upper hand.

We can wish as much as we like that reason would win out in such things, but we ignore the fact that it won't at great peril. There is a price to pay for such naiveté, which is naive with respect to both the nature and the efficacy of rationality. Myself, I have not decided whether or not I am willing to pay it, or even whether it is my decision to make. But let's at least be honest about it (which may or may not be the "rational" thing to do).

Amazement at Tax Evasion in God's Creation

(((Dinosaur Adventure Land Creation Science theme park; tax evasion; is God a good employer?)))

Via BoingBoing, the Dinosaur Adventure Land theme park promoting so-called "creation science" is to be seized by the government in partial compensation for back taxes owed by its proprietor, Kent Hovind, who never paid nearly half a million dollars in taxes.

He was found guilty in November 2006 on 58 counts, including failure to pay employee taxes and making threats against investigators.The conviction culminated 17 years of Hovind sparring with the IRS. Saying he was employed by God and his ministers were not subject to payroll taxes, he claimed no income or property.

Hovind insists his park is not for "amusement," but "amazement":

Our funny and experienced guides will lead your family or group on the tour, declaring the works of the Lord and the words of the Lord.

DAL is not an amusement park, for “amuse” means “to not think,” and we want people to think. Rather, it is an amazement park. Come and stand amazed at the truths of the Creator and Savior of the world, Jesus Christ.

Personally, I'm amazed that God, as his employer, didn't get him a better lawyer, the best money (or eternal salvation) could buy. Maybe hovind didn't get that in his contract? Maybe it was a lawyer from Regent. But if God can't (or won't?) get you off the hook, maybe that says more about you and your pious crap than it does about any god there might (or might not) be?

I'm not sayin'. I'm just sayin'.

The Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy

(((Michele Bachmann is either completely certifiable or utterly cynical; intimations -- but not accusations! not at all! -- of sinister Dem plots to poison the US with swine flu.)))

This is hilarious, mainly because it seems right out of a segment of the Colbert Report: Minnesota Republican representative Michele Bachmann remarked on the "coincidence" that the last swine flu outbreak in the US also occurred in a Democratic administration.

Except, of course, that it didn't. It was the Ford administration (which the linked AP article helpfully notes).

So either she believes that all those Democrats are, as she called them to Chris Matthews, un-American, and so out to get America, to the point where she misremembers things so that they fit this twisted view of her political opponents, or she makes it up because she knows it gets her fans and she doesn't care that it's not true. Either way, it is Bad.

And for what it's worth, it's never occurred to me that someone like George Bush or Karl Rove hates America. They love it. It's just that most of what they love about it is what I hate about it.

Activist Judges Threaten CEO Compensation

(((Richard Posner as "activist judge;" the market is structurally incapable of setting CEO compensation and mutual fund fees; and this according to none other than Posner.)))

Eliot Spitzer (srsly?) has a piece in Slate examining Chicago School free-marketeer Richard Posner's comments in a recent decision:

In an opinion dissenting from the "denial of rehearing en banc"—a sequence of words only a lawyer could love—Posner wrote that there are growing indications that CEO compensation "is excessive because of the feeble incentives of board of directors to police compensation. … Directors are often CEOs of other companies and naturally think that CEOs should be well paid. And often they are picked by the CEO." He then examined the conflicts inherent in the process of CEO compensation determination, concluding that "[c]ompetition ... can't be counted on to solve the problem because the same structure of incentives operates on all large corporations and similar entities, including mutual funds" [emphasis added]. [ . . . ]

In other words, there is precisely no check within the market, because the people deciding how much the CEO should make are the same people who stand to gain if CEOs are highly valued, or -- dare I say it? -- overvalued.

Spitzer continues:

Posner concluded that while judges shouldn't directly review corporate salaries, evidence of unreasonable compensation could be evidence of a breach of fiduciary duty. Yes, these are legal words, but they reveal a remarkable conclusion—courts should take a hard look at private-compensation issues—and demonstrate how far, and rapidly, the world has shifted.

So in other words, the solution is for courts to keep an eye on the situation and to consider compensation and fees in the context of, or as aspects of, the fiduciary duties of governing boards. So here come the activist judges once again threatening the American way of life, at least, if that's understood as the right to marry only someone of the opposite sex, or the right to make as much money as you can legally convince someone to pay you.

Isn't it ironic, though, that the activist judge in this case is Judge Posner? It sounds so Adam Smith, so old school capitalist, so . . . moral. So much of the socialist objection to capitalism is the tendency to socialize costs while privatizing profits (see the bailout), but here's Posner acknowledging that it's not all about how much money you can make.

The Wikipedia page on the Chicago School quotes this interesting little snippet from Posner: "[the central] meaning of justice, perhaps the most common is – efficiency… [because] in a world of scarce resources waste should be regarded as immoral." We don't have to agree with this conception of justice to see that, in its terms, CEO compensation and mutual fund fees have become essentially wasteful and, hence, immoral. And that the inability of the market to account for this means that the market is, to that extent, inefficient and, well, yeah: immoral.