Posts
Monday, May 2
bad conscience
Why David Horowitz is Wrong about "Balance" in the Academy
I did not know about David Horowitz's "academic bill of rights" when I began teaching my courses last fall, but even if I had, I would not have thought that I had anything to fear from it.
I teach religious studies at a public university in a conservative part of the nation -- not too different from the traditionally Republican state where I grew up. When I arrived here 16 years ago, I had no trouble adapting to the conservative religious background of many of my students. In graduate school I was more religiously and socially conservative than most of my fellow students. But although I have had my differences with liberals, I never felt that they forbade me to express an informed professional opinion. The chilling effect of today's conservative watchdogs is a much more serious matter.
Last semester I had my first significant falling-out with students, inspired -- I have no doubt -- by David Horowitz and his crusade against liberal bias in academe. Some of the students in my course on "Religion in American Culture" were upset that George M. Marsden's Religion and American Culture (2nd ed., Harcourt, 2001) and Randall Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey Into the Evangelical Subculture in America (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2000) were on the reading list. They felt that those two books were biased against evangelicals.
Marsden is a highly respected evangelical scholar, and Balmer's work on evangelicals has also been highly acclaimed. Although his religious affiliation is not as clear as Marsden's, I had never before heard complaints that he has been unfair to the evangelicals about whom he writes. I would have thought that the two scholars had impeccable credentials for inclusion in my course, but I now suspect that the objective, scholarly tone of the books upset my students.
I had also assigned some online readings about Christian Identity, a white-supremacist movement that considers Jews and anyone who is not white to belong to inferior races; believes that anything -- e.g., feminism and homosexuality -- not in accordance with traditional gender roles is sinful; and claims to be based on the Bible. Those readings were part of a series of items about Protestant, Catholic, Nation of Islam, American Indian, and other visions of America.
In the session that I had set aside for discussion of the Christian Identity readings, a student asked me if I would have included them had I known how many students believed in the movement. I had not expected many, if any, of my students to be affiliated with Christian Identity, so I had not prepared a response to that question. I think I said something to the effect that I did not fear for my life from the group because I was a white person who was neither a feminist nor a lesbian. (There have been reports of violence associated with Christian Identity.)
About two-thirds of my students did not return to class after that day, which was around the midpoint of the semester, except to take exams. Because I never had an opportunity to discuss the matter with the students who left, I don't know if they were members of Christian Identity, or if they simply believed that a movement that claimed to be based on the Bible could not be wrong. I had never had a large-scale problem with attendance before.
I had another problem with my course on the New Testament in the fall, also unprecedented in my teaching career. I had not included any discussion of homosexuality and the Bible in the syllabus, which was already crowded thanks to the requirements placed on general-education courses by the state Board of Regents, piled on top of the disciplinary imperative of explaining academic methods of studying the Bible and applying them to the New Testament. But when students requested that we take up homosexuality, I did what I normally do when students show a particular interest in something: I modified the syllabus to include it.
We read a Jewish scholar's interpretation of several passages in the Bible for a Jewish view on the subject. I invited a Reformed Church minister to speak to the students, and he explained why there is plenty of room for debate on the question of how Christians should respond to their homosexual brethren. It turned out, however, that at least one student had a specific book in mind for us to discuss: The Bible and Homosexual Practice (Abingdon Press, 2001), by Robert A.J. Gagnon.
Although the students realized they were not academically advanced enough to read the book on their own, they wanted to know what I thought about it. The semester was rapidly drawing to a close. Not having time to read the entire book, I promised to take a look at Gagnon's discussion of Romans 1:24-27, the most explicit and substantial discussion of homosexual behavior in the New Testament.
After I read that part of the book, I told the students that I thought the linguistic work was excellent, and that the linkage of Paul's views on homosexual behavior to his remarks on idolatry was brilliant. However, I did not think that Gagnon's argument would stand up for long.
I was about to explain why when I saw anger flash across several of the students' faces, and I realized that they thought my explanation was going to echo the beliefs of the minister they had already heard, whom they considered a liberal. So I simply said that anyone who wanted to know what flaws I saw in Gagnon's argument would have to come talk to me about that outside of class. No one did.
For the first time in my life, I felt as if I had to leave my commitment to the truth (which is what scholarship is all about!) at the door of the classroom. I didn't feel that I could tell my students they were wrong to avoid hearing my explanation -- in the current political climate, that would have been considered both anti-Republican and insulting to their conservative religious beliefs.
I have to believe that my students' behavior is a direct result of the new political climate on the campus that has been nurtured by the Horowitz "academic bill of rights," in cooperation with conservative media. I do not think that Horowitz intended those results. The problem is that students do not have the academic maturity to know how to use his document.
Nor do I see how they could have that maturity before completing a liberal-arts program of studies. Taking a smattering of liberal-arts courses, which is all that most students are required to do, does not give students the ability to detect bias in their professors or in what they read. Furthermore, many students take their definition of bias from conservative talk-radio shows and Fox News -- even people considered to be moderates from a liberal viewpoint seem biased from such conservative perspectives.
It seems that I must now bow to political or popular pressure because the ultimate judges of my professional expertise will not be my scholarly peers, but the public. And while members of the public and students may be able to judge many aspects of my teaching (that is why we have student evaluations of professors), they cannot judge whether I am teaching according to the best standards of the discipline.
Politics has always played a role on our campuses, but we are now experiencing a new form of political intrusion in academic life, and it is extremely dangerous. It has a direct impact on academic freedom because it threatens professors -- with the loss of the usual presumption that they are experts in their subject matter, or even with the loss of employment, if they do not agree with popular opinions.
That is too high a price for me to pay to keep my job, and I have resolved never again to bow to religious or political pressure in the classroom. In the future I will send students to the Internet to view authors' credentials. When I next teach the New Testament, I will use the disagreement between Gagnon and myself to demonstrate that scholarly debate -- unlike political debate, in which each side is expected to be partisan -- is a way of systematically testing the beliefs of both sides, and that my job is to critically assess all the arguments, from within my area of expertise.
Like many other academics, I have dedicated my life to the faithful transmission of the truth as best I can discern it. It makes me sick to my stomach to think of falsifying the truth, or even sacrificing my right to have an informed professional opinion.
Ann Marie B. Bahr is a professor of philosophy and religion at South Dakota State University. She is editor of Chelsea House's "Religions of the World" series and author of two books in the series, Christianity (2004) and Indigenous Religions (2005)
Sunday, May 1
Israel and Palestine and news
When people have strong, emotional attitudes, they project these attitudes onto other people - and particularly the news media.
To examine this phenomenon, I developed a videotape composed of actual footage of approximately equal amounts of violence committed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Pro-Israel partisans perceived the news was biased against Israel and in favor of the P.L.O. Palestinian activists believed the same news coverage was slanted against the P.L.O. and in favor of Israel. Colleagues at Stanford, New York University and the University of Wisconsin have reported similar results in studies of the Middle East and other controversial issues. They call this "hostile media bias."
What happens psychologically is that strong partisans "see" only those portions of the news that dispute their view of reality because this either attracts their attention, is intensely memorable or excites their emotions to a greater degree than media coverage that supports their worldview. The objective content of news remains elusive. Truth is in the eye of the media beholder.
RICHARD M. PERLOFF
Cleveland, April 27, 2005
The writer is the director of the School of Communication, Cleveland State University.
Thursday, April 28
Science as Woman's Work
Arleen Forsheit was deep into the intricacies of stoichiometry with her accelerated chemistry class one morning in January when the subject abruptly turned to the president of Harvard. He had said something about how "innate differences" kept women from excelling like men in math and science. "If that's true," one girl asked Dr. Forsheit, "then what are we doing here anyway?" To which the teacher replied, "It's not true."
As a scientist, Dr. Forsheit knew that words, however reassuring, were not enough. A hypothesis needed evidence, an assertion required proof. And what offered more proof than the scene unfolding before her amid the graduated cylinders, gas spigots and molecule models of her own lab. Nearly a dozen ninth graders, every one female, were mastering the mathematics of chemical equations, otherwise known as stoichiometry.
No place in America, perhaps, supplied a more forceful rejoinder to conventional assumptions about women and science than Marlborough School, a private all-female institution for Grades 7 through 12 in Los Angeles. Ninety percent of its 263 upper-school students take more than the two full years of science required for graduation, filling no less than eight physics classes and populating a coveted seminar known as Honors Research. They have gone on to major in sciences at Stanford, U.C.L.A., Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and, yes, Harvard.
At the same time that Marlborough dashes the thesis of the Harvard president, Lawrence H. Summers, though, it also recognizes that the gender imbalance in the sciences that led to his comments has been real and cannot be wished away with paeans to diversity. In a conscious, deliberate way, Marlborough set about in the last decade to alter its century-old reputation as a stronghold of the arts and humanities - women's work, academically speaking.
"We wanted to establish the expectation that in all ways the bar is high and that our girls can achieve in all areas," said Barbara Wagner, the head of school at Marlborough, who was a music teacher.
Dr. Forsheit put it similarly: "We wanted science to have the same mind share as humanities. We wanted girls to take the extra year of science the way they were already taking the extra year of history or foreign language."
To the task, Marlborough brought the obvious advantages of a well-endowed independent school: small class sizes, lofty admissions standards, wealthy alumni. Still, the school's achievements in science also must be understood as the result of a different factor: There are no boys at Marlborough to dominate, distract or intimidate smart girls.
With a dress code strong on khaki, navy and pleats, Marlborough has also made itself an island apart from the relentlessly materialistic and pervasively sexual popular culture manufactured practically next door by Southern California's entertainment industry.
In the single-sex environment, girls can be girlish and at the same time be brilliant. They can giggle and tug on split ends and speak in those sing-song Valley Girl cadences, all the while discoursing on such personal specialties as cognitive psychology, phytoplankton, Parkinson's disease and mother-infant attachment among gibbons.
"It's assumed every girl will take math and science, not just the special ones," said Jessica Friedland, a 17-year-old senior from Los Angeles who will enter Stanford in the fall. "It's always surprising to people from other schools. You can see the shrugging of the shoulders, the rolling of the eyes. I say, 'Why not take Physics C?' I was never a good speller, anyway."
Having come of age two generations earlier, Dr. Forsheit experienced a fiercer sort of resistance. The sole daughter of a New York truck driver with an eighth-grade education, she was informed by him that she could only attend college if it was free. Fortunately, Brooklyn College met the criteria, and from there she advanced to a master's degree in biology from Columbia, a doctorate in molecular biology from U.C.L.A. and a post-doctoral fellowship from the California Institute of Technology.
Along with diplomas, she collected indignities. A Columbia professor once predicted that she would bomb in physical chemistry. (She got an A.) A brother-in-law said of her Cal Tech position, "You took a job that should've gone to a man." A lack of child care forced her to leave research in the 1970's to raise her two children, both daughters.
ULTIMATELY, she enrolled them in Marlborough, and found her way into a part-time faculty position. At that point, in 1989, only 10 girls in the entire school took physics. When Ms. Wagner was appointed head of school soon after, though, Dr. Forsheit gained a potent ally and advocate in building up the science program.
Out went the traditional "layer-cake" approach to middle-school science - separate yearlong courses in life, earth and physical science - and in came integrated courses that emphasized laboratory work over lectures. During the 1990's, Marlborough raised $7 million to expand and update its science rooms. The number of science faculty members went from 6 to 10, half of them women.
Most important, in the ineffable way of such things, the communal culture of the school changed. High-end science became, well, cool. That was clearest of all in Dr. Forsheit's honors seminar, which pairs about 10 juniors and seniors with an individual mentor from a hospital or research center to conduct research.
Often, the Marlborough girls are six or eight years younger than even the greenest graduate student in the lab. Yet some, like Stephanie Dusaban, have closed much of the knowledge gap over the past year. Her project developing stem cells at the Saban Research Institute in Los Angeles helped persuade Cornell University not only to admit her but also to offer her $8,000 for research - the sort of incentive generally dangled in front of doctoral candidates, not incoming freshmen.
Tomorrow night, Dr. Forsheit's elite students will present their final projects to classmates, faculty members and parents. At Marlborough, the ritual is "the academic equivalent of a debutante ball," as the author Karen Stabiner writes in her 2003 book about single-sex education, "All Girls" (Riverhead Books).
Which does not mean that all of the spectators can fully appreciate the spectacle. "My parents read all of my research papers," said Meryl Holt, a 17-year-old senior choosing between Stanford and Harvard. "And they always say afterward: 'You know, Meryl, that's so great, so well-written. I don't know what a word of it meant.' "
Wednesday, April 27
TV makes you smarter - and fat people live longer
I'm still waiting for someone to bust the ridiculously self-serving "fat people live longer" meme going around...
Monday, April 25
Information Overload
Knowing When to Log Off
Wired campuses may be causing 'information overload'
David M. Levy, a computer scientist who loves technology and gets more than 100 e-mail messages a day, makes a point of unplugging from the Internet one day each week to clear his head. Even so, with all the e-mail messages flooding in, with academic blogs bursting with continuous debate, and with the hectic pace set by an increasingly wired world, Mr. Levy says he cannot help but feel an occasional sense of information overload.
And that, he says, is something to stop and think about.
Mr. Levy, a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, is one of many scholars trying to raise awareness of the negative impact of communication technologies on people's lives and work. They say the quality of research and teaching at colleges is at risk unless scholars develop strategies for better managing information, and for making time for extensive reading and contemplation.
"We're losing touch with the contemplative roots of scholarship, the reflective dimension," says Mr. Levy. "When you think that universities are meant to be in effect the think tanks for the culture, or at least one of the major forms of thinking, that strikes me as a very serious concern."
At Washington, Mr. Levy is working to create a laboratory to explore those issues, to be called the Center for Information and the Quality of Life. He received a $25,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to help plan the center, though he is still looking for support for its operation.
He and other scholars have already started a dialogue on the topic. Last year Mr. Levy organized a conference at the university called "Information, Silence, and Sanctuary" that brought together artists, philosophers, sociologists, and others, and was supported by the university and by grants from MacArthur and the National Science Foundation.
Mr. Levy hopes the conversations will grow into a new kind of movement focused on people's informational environments and on reducing data smog.
Scholars are beginning to realize "that our information ecology is endangered as well," says Mr. Levy. "We're just at the very beginning of even being clear about the nature of what the problems are."
'Not Anti-E-Mail'
Colleges were early in embracing the Internet and other communication technologies, and campuses remain some of the most wired environments anywhere. Although many professors say the Internet has enhanced their teaching and scholarship -- by better connecting them with colleagues around the world, by providing easier access to research materials, and by increasing contact with students -- it has also brought new challenges, such as keeping online tasks from becoming unwieldy.
"When I sit down at a conference or lunch with a colleague, there's a pretty good chance we'll talk about being overwhelmed by e-mail and what we're doing about it," says Buzz Alexander, an English professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. "I'm not anti-e-mail. I'm advantaged and disadvantaged by e-mail like everybody else."
On the syllabus for his course "What Is Literature?" he tells students not to contact him by e-mail. He says he tries to make sure he is available for one-on-one meetings to respond to any questions -- after class, during his office hours, or over coffee. "If they're in my office," he says, "I can say to them, 'How are you liking the course?' or 'How are things going?'" And he worries that he would not be able to keep up with a flood of e-mail questions from students who expect an instant response.
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence in environmental studies at Middlebury College, says the issue is more than just one of time management.
"There's the real danger that one is absorbing and responding to bursts of information, rather than having time to think," says Mr. McKibben, author of Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (Times Books, 2003). "What's only gradually becoming clear is not just a pragmatic drawback but an intellectual drawback to having so many trees that there's no possibility of seeing the forest."
He says he is not immune from feelings of information overload, and that he has tried to work out strategies for dealing with the flood of communication he gets each day. When he is working on a book or is near a deadline, for instance, he only checks his e-mail messages once a day, in the evening. And he uses a slow dial-up connection at home, even though he could afford a faster broadband service, so that he is less tempted to surf the Web.
"I think part of it is that my mind, and perhaps human minds in general, are geared toward novelty, and so it's difficult to discipline yourself to disregard each new incoming e-mail and each new incoming thing that you can instantly track down and print out," he says.
Some scholars worry that even tools meant to help home in on specific information could have a negative impact on research.
For instance, Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association and dean of library services at California State University at Fresno, wants to make sure students and professors do not become so enthralled with Google, which plans to scan millions of books and add them to its popular search engine, that they stop reading books the old-fashioned way.
"We all know that, in Googleworld, speed is of the essence, but it is not to most scholarly research in the real world," Mr. Gorman wrote in a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times. "Massive databases of digitized whole books, especially scholarly books, are expensive exercises in futility based on the staggering notion that, for the first time in history, one form of communication (electronic) will supplant and obliterate all previous forms."
In an interview, Mr. Gorman stressed that he is not against technology, and that he is a strong supporter of digital-library projects for special collections and rare materials. "I'm all in favor of technology being used wisely," he said. "My basic point is the best thing to do with a scholarly book is to sit and read it," rather than skim an excerpt that is revealed by a search engine. "A book is not just an accumulation of facts, it's an argument, a cumulative piece of knowledge, and is designed to be read sequentially."
Stopping to Think
Since students are generally even more wired than professors, some college officials think students should be encouraged to take some time away from computers, cellphones, and other communication devices.
"The amount of information that goes into a young person's head today is incredible," says David H. Landers, director of the student resource center at Saint Michael's College, in Colchester, Vt. His main concern is that students have replaced face-to-face contact with instant messaging and e-mail. "They're not going to have the same quality of interpersonal relations that will help them in a work environment," he argues.
He says colleges should encourage students to get involved in community projects where they see what life is like outside of their high-tech campus bubble. "We recognize technology," he says, "but we can't become slaves to it."
David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, took a novel approach to fighting overload in a class he taught called "Technology and Contemplation." He used a few minutes of each class session to have students meditate.
"If you stop talking and have people sit silently for five minutes, that's a good use of time because people are so stressed out," he says. "It really had a positive effect." He says he is no expert on meditation, and that the bulk of the class dealt with texts that looked at the differences and similarities between technical thinking and contemplative thinking. He tried the techniques with the support of a small grant from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, a secular nonprofit group.
Mr. Levy says his weekly day off from technology is part of his observation of the Jewish Sabbath (his wife is a rabbi), but that he recommends time away from computer monitors as a practice in itself. "I'm not suggesting that anyone else be Jewish," he says, "but rather if you think about the idea of the Sabbath, which is a time apart, a time to cultivate different qualities, that seems like a very important idea for our culture."
He says information overload is one aspect of a larger problem that includes "fragmented attention, busyness, and the speed-up of daily life."
"It isn't just the amount of information," he argues. "It's the expectation that we're going to go faster and faster and faster."
Arthur G. Zajonc, a physics professor at Amherst College who is also director of the academic program for the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, says many people take pride in replying to e-mail messages instantly, leading them to dash off terse, often uncivil, responses. He says he makes it a point to pause and rethink his outgoing e-mail messages for 30 seconds before sending them, to make sure he hasn't been overly curt. "Everything is so fast and also a little bit anonymous" with e-mail, he says. "So you have to pause to reflect on who this person is" that will be reading the message and how they might perceive it.
Broader Issues
Academics are not the only ones feeling overwhelmed, of course, and a growing number of researchers are looking at technology's impacts on the quality of life outside of colleges.
Norman H. Nie, director of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, at Stanford University, found in a recent survey that Internet use tends to cut into family time, and can lead to feelings of isolation. For the average respondent, an hour on the Internet reduced face-to-face time with family by 23.5 minutes per day, he says.
"It's not whether to use the Internet or not use the Internet," said Mr. Nie in an interview. "It's how much time we really spend on it. Time is a hydraulic system. If you spend two hours doing one thing, you can't spend it doing something else."
Mr. Nie admits to a fair amount of Internet use himself, and says he feels it has changed his habits, perhaps cutting into some leisure time.
Eric Brende became so fed up with technology that he quit his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology a few years ago to spend 18 months living with his wife in a rural farming community. (He wouldn't say where exactly to protect the identities of the people he wrote about.) He argues that the negative aspects of using technology have become so great that we would all be better off giving up nearly all modern devices -- including washing machines, lawn mowers, and cars. He published a book about his experiences and beliefs, called Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (HarperCollins, 2004).
He argues that living more simply actually yields more leisure time, and forces people to forge greater bonds with neighbors because of a greater need for cooperation (such as for the occasional barn raising). And he notes that not enough people are looking critically at the impact of technology. "Whatever impact it's having," he says, "people are overlooking the negative aspects of it, one of which is, I think, a loss of a sense of leisure and contemplation."
Mr. Brende, who now lives in St. Louis, has not completely switched off technology, though. He said in an interview that he occasionally checks e-mail messages at a nearby public library, and that he even has a cellphone, which helps him coordinate his work as a part-time bicycle-rickshaw driver. "You're not being disloyal to progress," he said, "by picking and choosing the kind of technology that best fits your needs."
Sunday, April 24
Where Is Liberal Passion?
The day after the presidential inauguration, a coalition of progressives carried a 70-foot replica of a human backbone to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Their point was well taken. The self-appointed party of the American left could learn from the opposition: Be more upright, less spineless.
Yet you might think that the backbone metaphor begs a question. You can't find the courage of your convictions if you lack real conviction in the first place. And as a group, blue-staters have been accused by friendly and not-so-friendly critics alike of being less than red-hot. They typically prize reason and deliberation; they are not gung-ho. They don't shout "bring it on"; they are suspicious of the blind emotion of tent revivals and military parades. They encourage thinking things through, getting a second opinion, and acknowledging the possibility that one can always be wrong. And that, some liberals worry, is just the problem.
The issue is consuming not just Democratic Party strategists. Political theorists, too, have begun a major rethinking of liberal theory. Take a look at this year's book catalogs, and you'll see the "L" word in numerous titles. Like as not, it's accompanied by words like "passion," "purpose," or "vision."
In different ways, liberals are asking: Could the very values they hold dear rob them of the requisite fire in the belly that conservatives, particularly social conservatives, seemingly have in abundance? Most liberals believe in equality of opportunity and resources, freedom for individuals to pursue their own vision of life, and tolerance toward those whose vision of the world is different from their own. Some of them, however, complain that in their eagerness to venerate their ideals, they too often undercut their ability to be politically effective. To put it in a nakedly partisan way, some liberals worry that Yeats was right: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
No one wrestles with that dilemma more than Michael Walzer. In his intriguing and intelligent Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale University Press, 2005), Walzer takes Yeats's warning as his touchstone as he presses his point from the left. Standard liberalism, he writes, is "an inadequate theory and a disabled political practice." It is inadequate, in part, because its values are not conducive to real conviction. It is disabled "because the social structures and political orders that sustain inequality cannot be actively opposed without a passionate intensity that liberals do not (for good reasons) want to acknowledge or accommodate."
As one of the most distinguished advocates of the communitarian critique of liberal theory, Walzer thinks that liberalism has a problem with passion because it ignores the politics of community. A typical picture of a liberal society is one formed on the basis of a rational contract, where social arrangements are made from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest. That, communitarians like Walzer point out, overlooks the fact that human beings' primary sources of value emerge from the communities to which we belong. Moreover, even in the shifting whirl of mobile Western economies, we don't choose most of our communities -- our family, our ethnicity, our religion; we get them handed to us.
By overlooking those facts, standard liberalism not only overplays the role of reason and autonomy in our lives, Walzer thinks, but also ends up being less egalitarian. If an individual's passions and values are formed in a community, then it is not just individuals who deserve equal respect and opportunity, but the communities themselves. Only by providing such respect -- and in some cases, actual financial support -- to traditional communities can we hope to encourage their members to fully participate in liberal civil society. In short, if it takes a village to raise a tolerant liberal citizen, then villages, not just villagers, deserve the support and the protection of the state.
Lefty communitarians are not alone in making that critique of liberalism. Social conservatives have long argued that progressive liberals, in trumpeting individual rights, ignore traditional communities as a source of value. That, after all, is the reasoning behind the president's faith-based social-services initiatives. The thought is that by supporting programs run by churches and synagogues, which are by nature embedded in communities, the community itself is better supported.
Maybe so. But as the neocons are well aware, traditional family values frequently clash with liberal values. That is not a problem for social conservatives, who often argue, for example, that we should ban same-sex marriage on the basis that it offends traditional morality. But it does present a problem for liberal communitarians like Walzer. Some traditional communities are rife with intolerant oppression -- precisely the sort of thing that enlightenment liberalism is presumably meant to combat. Surely liberals needn't tolerate intolerance.
Walzer valiantly attempts to deal with that concern. But in the end, his principle argument is resistible. Consider a hypothetical local religious community that does not value equal education for boys and girls. According to Walzer, if we are to compel our traditional community to educate its girls, we shouldn't appeal to individual rights; we should appeal to the pragmatic demands of citizenship. If a community wishes to participate in an egalitarian state, it must ensure that its members can be full citizens; among other things, that means that all of its children must read and write.
That argument makes sense as far as it goes. The question is whether it goes far enough. For one thing, it is not clear that the "pragmatic" demands of citizenship -- such as voting -- do absolutely require education, even if they are inestimably enriched by it. But even putting that aside, there are surely harms that an intolerant community can bring upon its members that are independent of the demands of citizenship. Even if we grant that citizenship requires equal literacy for the sexes, it doesn't obviously require that the sexes (or races, or ethnicities) be given equal opportunity to all levels of education -- or that communities recognize same-sex marriages, or that children be taught the theory of evolution instead of creationism. Those sorts of requirements only make sense when one sees the state -- as the liberal does -- as being in the job of ensuring that its citizens are free from explicit harms suffered when a community forces its values upon them. That doesn't deny that our values are shaped by our communities. It just rejects that such values are justified by their origin.
In my view, the reason that liberals are sometimes perceived as passionless isn't because liberal values are in need of a communitarian correction. The reason is that some liberals misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, their own values. In particular, they misunderstand their values in a way that has made them wary of describing their own moral position as true. And that is bad. For once you cease thinking of your values -- your fundamental moral beliefs -- as objectively true, it is hard to even think of them as values at all. And without political values, there simply is no place for political passion.
Two important liberal values, for example, are equality and tolerance. Liberals believe the state should treat its citizens with equal respect and therefore that the state -- and the individual citizens within that state -- should tolerate, as much as possible, a wide range of different ways of life. It is largely that emphasis on tolerance that sets liberals apart from social conservatives. Social conservatives believe that treating people with respect means treating them as they should be treated given the one true way people ought to live. If that is the Christian way, for example, then treating people with respect means treating them as equally subject to the values inherent in Christianity.
That point was most recently echoed in conservative commentaries on the Terri Schiavo case, but it emerged even more explicitly in the Rev. Bob Jones III's now-infamous open postelection letter to President Bush. As Jones wrote, "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn't deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet." The letter went on to urge the president to pass "legislation that is defined by biblical norm(s)," "to appoint many conservative judges," and "to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God."
In recoiling from that position, some left-leaning thinkers have argued that liberals need to adopt what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls an "ironic" attitude toward our own liberal principles. If we want to be truly tolerant, the thought goes, we need to stop seeing liberal views about equality and tolerance as objective moral truths. Instead, we should see them as morally neutral. Otherwise, we risk being intolerant about tolerance.
Tempting as it may sound to some, that line of reasoning is a mistake. It undermines liberalism's ability to galvanize passionate intensity. That is most obvious when liberal tolerance is defended, as it sometimes is in the popular news media, on the basis of naïve relativism: If different ways of life deserve equal respect, then all ways of life are equally good. The just state must remain neutral with regard to questions of how to live because there are no objectively true or false answers to such questions. So we should live and let live.
But relativistic liberalism is clearly a rational and political failure. It is a rational failure because its key inference is invalid. From the fact that many different forms of life deserve equal respect, it doesn't follow that we can't criticize some as being worse than others. It is a political failure because if every way of life is as good as any other, then what motivation does the liberal have for opposing the conservative's and trumpeting his or her own? It is hard to stand up and fight for a view that sees itself as no better than the opposition's. Passion has no foothold.
Bloodlessness is also the result of more philosophically sophisticated attempts to understand liberalism as morally neutral. The preeminent architect of contemporary American liberal thought, the late John Rawls, argued over the last decade and a half that tolerance demands that liberalism should be understood as a "political, not metaphysical" doctrine. That is, we should not defend liberal principles, such as the principle of tolerance itself, by asserting that they represent fundamental moral truths. Rather, Rawls said, in defending those principles and whatever follows from them -- for instance, a right to abortion, the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, etc. -- the liberal must appeal only to the uncontroversial popular consensus -- that is, "public reasons" that every reasonable person implicitly accepts. In short, since the liberal state must remain neutral among different conceptions of morality, liberal principles must themselves be justified in a way that is morally neutral and that all reasonable points of view can accept.
Rawls's position was complex, and he was certainly no relativist. But his understanding of tolerance was motivated by a related desire: to make liberal values somehow "float free" from any particular moral outlook. And that is troubling, for at least two reasons. The most obvious problem is that the idea that liberal principles are neutral among all "reasonable" points of view only makes sense if "reasonable" is defined in a distinctively liberal way. The less obvious problem is that were I to believe that my foundational liberal principles were already held by all reasonable people -- whether they know it or not -- it is difficult to see why I should bother to vigorously defend my principles. The battle, in effect, would already be won, so there would be little point in getting worked up about it. Again, passion drains away.
If we want to rediscover an intellectual foundation for liberal passion, then we need to forget about the beige of moral neutrality and favor the red of moral conviction. We need to remember that moral convictions are just that, beliefs that some political ideals are objectively better for society than others.
It is also worth remembering that lots of Americans already view liberals as full of passionate conviction. Take last fall's fight over gay marriage. Eleven states, it turned out, passed bans against same-sex marriage. Liberals -- rightly in my view -- protest that such bans treat citizens unequally and privilege one way of life over others. But to many, it is liberals who are pushing their values into other folks' faces. In the endearing language of talk radio, conservatives across the nation rally to prevent "activist liberal judges" from "imposing liberal values" and "special rights." In short, far from seeing liberalism as value-neutral -- Rawls's "political, not metaphysical" account of fair play -- those on the right see liberalism as a rival comprehensive morality, a rival way of life.
Conservatives are right about that. And there is no need for liberals to apologize for it. As philosophers like Joseph Raz have argued, liberalism isn't value-neutral, nor should it be. Liberal values like tolerance and equality are just that -- liberal values, neither merely "true for us" nor ethically inert. Rather, they are part of a particularly liberal ideal of the good life -- an abstract ideal but an ideal nonetheless. The progressive liberal believes that other things being equal, the state should respect our individual rights and tolerate different ways of living that don't violate others' rights. That means that progressive liberalism is not neutral among all ways of life. The progressive liberal is committed to opposing ways of life that value racial and sexual discrimination or collapse the separation between church and state. The progressive liberal believes that societies that sanction torture, or are intolerant toward gays, or allow their citizens to be economically exploited are, in those respects, worse societies.
As much as possible, liberals need to argue for their case, as Rawls has emphasized, by appealing to reasons shared by all. But they cannot assume that all of their liberal values will be so shared, even if some are. And that is not surprising -- democratic politics, after all, is aimed at getting others to see things your way. So, much as social conservatives do, we liberals need to stand up for our values and persuade others to share them. And we must do so by defending our theory in the way that one defends any theory: by arguing for its worth on its own terms and for the beneficial consequences it brings.
But what of passion? Walzer rightly claims that standard liberal theory has too often ignored the role involuntary associations like family, race, and religion play in shaping our identities and stirring our blood. But we wouldn't share emotional bonds with other group members if we didn't also share values. I've argued that liberals do share a set of values, and that passionate commitment to them -- including the values of equality and tolerance -- requires seeing them as objectively worth defending. But it is also worth remembering that values are not just crystalline principles, sparkling under the light of reason. To talk about my values is to talk about what I care about, what I admire, what I aim for, and what I want others to aim for as well: tolerance for a wide array of lifestyles, compassion for those less fortunate than we, and the moral courage to stand up for our rights and the rights of others. So far from being a cold theory of rational neutrality, progressive liberalism is a theory of value -- and theories of value are theories of what we care about.
Liberals favor reason and evenhandedness; they are tolerant; they believe in autonomy, individual rights, and equality. But they can and should be fervent in defending the truth of those ideals. Liberals have no inherent problem with passion. They just need to remember to keep passion alive, and not to waiver in the face of spirited opposition. They just need to remember their backbone.
Michael P. Lynch is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of True to Life: Why Truth Matters (MIT Press, 2004).
The Bulldog Pope
Sounds pretty good for our new Pope...
He meant it as a criticism.
In a book-length interview published in 1985 titled "The Ratzinger Report," he used a rigorously argued line of reasoning to support a doctrinal position that reverberates outside the church. He condemned abortion, contraception, homosexual relations, sex without marriage, "radical feminism" and transsexuality. The wrongness of those ideas all arise from the separation of sexuality from motherhood and marriage, he said.
Liberation theology of the 1980's, in which leftist clerics in Latin America argued for radical change in society to help the poor, was quashed. Bishops were chastised for straying, like Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle over his tolerant views on homosexuals. More than a dozen theologians, priests and bishops were punished for doctrinal error, and presumably, many other cases have not come to light. In 2000, he published a condemnation of the concept that other religions might be as valid as Catholicism.
Cardinal Ratzinger never displayed the same degree of interest in reconciling East and West in what John Paul II loved to describe as the "two lungs of Christianity." Mostly he was busy stamping out wisps of religious pluralism, most famously in 2000, when he published "Dominus Iesus" ("The Lord Jesus") , which condemned "relativistic theories" of religious pluralism and described other faiths as "gravely deficient."
The document was mostly aimed at reining in straying Catholic theologians like the Rev. Jacques Dupuis, a Belgian theologian who after teaching in India argued that other religions could also lead to salvation, but it offended religious leaders of almost every stripe. Jewish religious leaders in Rome boycotted several interfaith meetings in protest. Even some cardinals publicly questioned its tone and timing.
Saturday, April 23
Passing the Buck on Health Care
Passing the Buck
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The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?
An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck: trying to get someone else to pay the bills.
According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15 percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both public and private insurance are similar in other countries - but because we rely much more heavily than anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.
According to the health organization, the higher costs of private insurers are "mainly due to the extensive bureaucracy required to assess risk, rate premiums, design benefit packages and review, pay or refuse claims." Public insurance plans have far less bureaucracy because they don't try to screen out high-risk clients or charge them higher fees.
And the costs directly incurred by insurers are only half the story. Doctors "must hire office personnel just to deal with the insurance companies," Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker. "A well-run office can get the insurer's rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That's how a doctor makes money. ... It's a war with insurance, every step of the way."
Isn't competition supposed to make the private sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don't compete by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they "compete on the basis of risk selection" - that is, by turning away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.
Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn't go away. If individuals are poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.
So we've created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The resources spent by private insurers don't reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people and institutions. It's perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population, costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.
And the costs go beyond wasted money.
First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by firing workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends up paying the bills.
Second, Americans without insurance eventually receive medical care - but the operative word is "eventually." According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as the insured to postpone seeking care, fail to get needed care, leave prescriptions unfilled or skip recommended treatment. And many end up disabled - or die - because of these delays.
Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.
Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.
Friday, April 22
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" -Yeats
Where Is Liberal Passion?
The day after the presidential inauguration, a coalition of progressives carried a 70-foot replica of a human backbone to the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington. Their point was well taken. The self-appointed party of the American left could learn from the opposition: Be more upright, less spineless.
Yet you might think that the backbone metaphor begs a question. You can't find the courage of your convictions if you lack real conviction in the first place. And as a group, blue-staters have been accused by friendly and not-so-friendly critics alike of being less than red-hot. They typically prize reason and deliberation; they are not gung-ho. They don't shout "bring it on"; they are suspicious of the blind emotion of tent revivals and military parades. They encourage thinking things through, getting a second opinion, and acknowledging the possibility that one can always be wrong. And that, some liberals worry, is just the problem.
The issue is consuming not just Democratic Party strategists. Political theorists, too, have begun a major rethinking of liberal theory. Take a look at this year's book catalogs, and you'll see the "L" word in numerous titles. Like as not, it's accompanied by words like "passion," "purpose," or "vision."
In different ways, liberals are asking: Could the very values they hold dear rob them of the requisite fire in the belly that conservatives, particularly social conservatives, seemingly have in abundance? Most liberals believe in equality of opportunity and resources, freedom for individuals to pursue their own vision of life, and tolerance toward those whose vision of the world is different from their own. Some of them, however, complain that in their eagerness to venerate their ideals, they too often undercut their ability to be politically effective. To put it in a nakedly partisan way, some liberals worry that Yeats was right: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
No one wrestles with that dilemma more than Michael Walzer. In his intriguing and intelligent Politics and Passion: Toward a More Egalitarian Liberalism (Yale University Press, 2005), Walzer takes Yeats's warning as his touchstone as he presses his point from the left. Standard liberalism, he writes, is "an inadequate theory and a disabled political practice." It is inadequate, in part, because its values are not conducive to real conviction. It is disabled "because the social structures and political orders that sustain inequality cannot be actively opposed without a passionate intensity that liberals do not (for good reasons) want to acknowledge or accommodate."
As one of the most distinguished advocates of the communitarian critique of liberal theory, Walzer thinks that liberalism has a problem with passion because it ignores the politics of community. A typical picture of a liberal society is one formed on the basis of a rational contract, where social arrangements are made from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest. That, communitarians like Walzer point out, overlooks the fact that human beings' primary sources of value emerge from the communities to which we belong. Moreover, even in the shifting whirl of mobile Western economies, we don't choose most of our communities -- our family, our ethnicity, our religion; we get them handed to us.
By overlooking those facts, standard liberalism not only overplays the role of reason and autonomy in our lives, Walzer thinks, but also ends up being less egalitarian. If an individual's passions and values are formed in a community, then it is not just individuals who deserve equal respect and opportunity, but the communities themselves. Only by providing such respect -- and in some cases, actual financial support -- to traditional communities can we hope to encourage their members to fully participate in liberal civil society. In short, if it takes a village to raise a tolerant liberal citizen, then villages, not just villagers, deserve the support and the protection of the state.
Lefty communitarians are not alone in making that critique of liberalism. Social conservatives have long argued that progressive liberals, in trumpeting individual rights, ignore traditional communities as a source of value. That, after all, is the reasoning behind the president's faith-based social-services initiatives. The thought is that by supporting programs run by churches and synagogues, which are by nature embedded in communities, the community itself is better supported.
Maybe so. But as the neocons are well aware, traditional family values frequently clash with liberal values. That is not a problem for social conservatives, who often argue, for example, that we should ban same-sex marriage on the basis that it offends traditional morality. But it does present a problem for liberal communitarians like Walzer. Some traditional communities are rife with intolerant oppression -- precisely the sort of thing that enlightenment liberalism is presumably meant to combat. Surely liberals needn't tolerate intolerance.
Walzer valiantly attempts to deal with that concern. But in the end, his principle argument is resistible. Consider a hypothetical local religious community that does not value equal education for boys and girls. According to Walzer, if we are to compel our traditional community to educate its girls, we shouldn't appeal to individual rights; we should appeal to the pragmatic demands of citizenship. If a community wishes to participate in an egalitarian state, it must ensure that its members can be full citizens; among other things, that means that all of its children must read and write.
That argument makes sense as far as it goes. The question is whether it goes far enough. For one thing, it is not clear that the "pragmatic" demands of citizenship -- such as voting -- do absolutely require education, even if they are inestimably enriched by it. But even putting that aside, there are surely harms that an intolerant community can bring upon its members that are independent of the demands of citizenship. Even if we grant that citizenship requires equal literacy for the sexes, it doesn't obviously require that the sexes (or races, or ethnicities) be given equal opportunity to all levels of education -- or that communities recognize same-sex marriages, or that children be taught the theory of evolution instead of creationism. Those sorts of requirements only make sense when one sees the state -- as the liberal does -- as being in the job of ensuring that its citizens are free from explicit harms suffered when a community forces its values upon them. That doesn't deny that our values are shaped by our communities. It just rejects that such values are justified by their origin.
In my view, the reason that liberals are sometimes perceived as passionless isn't because liberal values are in need of a communitarian correction. The reason is that some liberals misunderstand, and therefore misrepresent, their own values. In particular, they misunderstand their values in a way that has made them wary of describing their own moral position as true. And that is bad. For once you cease thinking of your values -- your fundamental moral beliefs -- as objectively true, it is hard to even think of them as values at all. And without political values, there simply is no place for political passion.
Two important liberal values, for example, are equality and tolerance. Liberals believe the state should treat its citizens with equal respect and therefore that the state -- and the individual citizens within that state -- should tolerate, as much as possible, a wide range of different ways of life. It is largely that emphasis on tolerance that sets liberals apart from social conservatives. Social conservatives believe that treating people with respect means treating them as they should be treated given the one true way people ought to live. If that is the Christian way, for example, then treating people with respect means treating them as equally subject to the values inherent in Christianity.
That point was most recently echoed in conservative commentaries on the Terri Schiavo case, but it emerged even more explicitly in the Rev. Bob Jones III's now-infamous open postelection letter to President Bush. As Jones wrote, "In your re-election, God has graciously granted America -- though she doesn't deserve it -- a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate. We the people expect your voice to be like the clear and certain sound of a trumpet." The letter went on to urge the president to pass "legislation that is defined by biblical norm(s)," "to appoint many conservative judges," and "to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God."
In recoiling from that position, some left-leaning thinkers have argued that liberals need to adopt what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls an "ironic" attitude toward our own liberal principles. If we want to be truly tolerant, the thought goes, we need to stop seeing liberal views about equality and tolerance as objective moral truths. Instead, we should see them as morally neutral. Otherwise, we risk being intolerant about tolerance.
Tempting as it may sound to some, that line of reasoning is a mistake. It undermines liberalism's ability to galvanize passionate intensity. That is most obvious when liberal tolerance is defended, as it sometimes is in the popular news media, on the basis of naïve relativism: If different ways of life deserve equal respect, then all ways of life are equally good. The just state must remain neutral with regard to questions of how to live because there are no objectively true or false answers to such questions. So we should live and let live.
But relativistic liberalism is clearly a rational and political failure. It is a rational failure because its key inference is invalid. From the fact that many different forms of life deserve equal respect, it doesn't follow that we can't criticize some as being worse than others. It is a political failure because if every way of life is as good as any other, then what motivation does the liberal have for opposing the conservative's and trumpeting his or her own? It is hard to stand up and fight for a view that sees itself as no better than the opposition's. Passion has no foothold.
Bloodlessness is also the result of more philosophically sophisticated attempts to understand liberalism as morally neutral. The preeminent architect of contemporary American liberal thought, the late John Rawls, argued over the last decade and a half that tolerance demands that liberalism should be understood as a "political, not metaphysical" doctrine. That is, we should not defend liberal principles, such as the principle of tolerance itself, by asserting that they represent fundamental moral truths. Rather, Rawls said, in defending those principles and whatever follows from them -- for instance, a right to abortion, the constitutionality of same-sex marriage, etc. -- the liberal must appeal only to the uncontroversial popular consensus -- that is, "public reasons" that every reasonable person implicitly accepts. In short, since the liberal state must remain neutral among different conceptions of morality, liberal principles must themselves be justified in a way that is morally neutral and that all reasonable points of view can accept.
Rawls's position was complex, and he was certainly no relativist. But his understanding of tolerance was motivated by a related desire: to make liberal values somehow "float free" from any particular moral outlook. And that is troubling, for at least two reasons. The most obvious problem is that the idea that liberal principles are neutral among all "reasonable" points of view only makes sense if "reasonable" is defined in a distinctively liberal way. The less obvious problem is that were I to believe that my foundational liberal principles were already held by all reasonable people -- whether they know it or not -- it is difficult to see why I should bother to vigorously defend my principles. The battle, in effect, would already be won, so there would be little point in getting worked up about it. Again, passion drains away.
If we want to rediscover an intellectual foundation for liberal passion, then we need to forget about the beige of moral neutrality and favor the red of moral conviction. We need to remember that moral convictions are just that, beliefs that some political ideals are objectively better for society than others.
It is also worth remembering that lots of Americans already view liberals as full of passionate conviction. Take last fall's fight over gay marriage. Eleven states, it turned out, passed bans against same-sex marriage. Liberals -- rightly in my view -- protest that such bans treat citizens unequally and privilege one way of life over others. But to many, it is liberals who are pushing their values into other folks' faces. In the endearing language of talk radio, conservatives across the nation rally to prevent "activist liberal judges" from "imposing liberal values" and "special rights." In short, far from seeing liberalism as value-neutral -- Rawls's "political, not metaphysical" account of fair play -- those on the right see liberalism as a rival comprehensive morality, a rival way of life.
Conservatives are right about that. And there is no need for liberals to apologize for it. As philosophers like Joseph Raz have argued, liberalism isn't value-neutral, nor should it be. Liberal values like tolerance and equality are just that -- liberal values, neither merely "true for us" nor ethically inert. Rather, they are part of a particularly liberal ideal of the good life -- an abstract ideal but an ideal nonetheless. The progressive liberal believes that other things being equal, the state should respect our individual rights and tolerate different ways of living that don't violate others' rights. That means that progressive liberalism is not neutral among all ways of life. The progressive liberal is committed to opposing ways of life that value racial and sexual discrimination or collapse the separation between church and state. The progressive liberal believes that societies that sanction torture, or are intolerant toward gays, or allow their citizens to be economically exploited are, in those respects, worse societies.
As much as possible, liberals need to argue for their case, as Rawls has emphasized, by appealing to reasons shared by all. But they cannot assume that all of their liberal values will be so shared, even if some are. And that is not surprising -- democratic politics, after all, is aimed at getting others to see things your way. So, much as social conservatives do, we liberals need to stand up for our values and persuade others to share them. And we must do so by defending our theory in the way that one defends any theory: by arguing for its worth on its own terms and for the beneficial consequences it brings.
But what of passion? Walzer rightly claims that standard liberal theory has too often ignored the role involuntary associations like family, race, and religion play in shaping our identities and stirring our blood. But we wouldn't share emotional bonds with other group members if we didn't also share values. I've argued that liberals do share a set of values, and that passionate commitment to them -- including the values of equality and tolerance -- requires seeing them as objectively worth defending. But it is also worth remembering that values are not just crystalline principles, sparkling under the light of reason. To talk about my values is to talk about what I care about, what I admire, what I aim for, and what I want others to aim for as well: tolerance for a wide array of lifestyles, compassion for those less fortunate than we, and the moral courage to stand up for our rights and the rights of others. So far from being a cold theory of rational neutrality, progressive liberalism is a theory of value -- and theories of value are theories of what we care about.
Liberals favor reason and evenhandedness; they are tolerant; they believe in autonomy, individual rights, and equality. But they can and should be fervent in defending the truth of those ideals. Liberals have no inherent problem with passion. They just need to remember to keep passion alive, and not to waiver in the face of spirited opposition. They just need to remember their backbone.
Michael P. Lynch is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut and author of True to Life: Why Truth Matters (MIT Press, 2004).