From time to time, my big sister, Barbara [Dr. Barbara Searle], makes reading recommendations to me. She is a demon reader, and regularly teaches courses on contemporary developments in molecular and evolutionary biology in the Washington, D. C. branch of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. [Barbara ended her long career as the Ombud of the World Bank, but back in the day, she took a doctorate in Biology at Harvard].
Her latest suggestion, which I am now reading, is Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, by Nick Lane. This, despite the jazzy title, is a dense, ferociously serious and detailed account of the most recent developments in biologists' efforts to understand the origins and development of cellular life [Eukaryotic life, for those who are technically inclined.] It would be absurd for me even to attempt the most general summary of the themes of the book, but there is one observation I would like to make about what I am learning.
As a consequence of half a century of brilliant, painstaking research, biologists now understand what goes in in living things right down to the molecular level. The difference between what they now know and what I learned as a student sixty years ago is so vast that it dwarfs recent developments in fields like physics. Lane is the author of a number of books [one of which I have in fact also read], and if you have the patience for it, it would be well worth your time and effort to spend some time with one of them.
Monday, 4 July 2011
Sunday, 3 July 2011
A GUEST POST BY ANGUS LANDER
Angus Lander triede to post this as a comment, but Blogger would not accept it, so he sent it to me as an email, and I am posting it here as a guest post, because I think it is quite interesting.
One aspect of the Section 4 debate that touches on a personal preoccupation of mine - the politics of originalism - and so interests me is how it looks like Jack Balkin (Yale), one of the architects of (what you might call) "leftwing originalism," is trying to use it as a testing ground for his (Faustian) efforts to co-opt originalism for the left.
See here: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/06/legislative-history-of-section-four-of.html
and
here: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-on-original-meaning-of-section.html
Context: Balkin spent a good bit of the early part of his career thinking about how constitutional ideas (and ideologies more generally) spread and take hold. His view is that a great deal of constitutional law is the product of political mobilizations in favor of (or against) one or another matrix of constitutional rhetoric. Unlike an older generation of constitutional doctrinalists - who believed that constitutional law unfolded from Supreme Court precedent, and so good constitutional lawyering involved careful attention to case law - Balkin thinks that good constitutional lawyering involves cunning manipulation of whatever mode of constitutional "reasoning" is [typically for political reasons] currently ascendant.
Originalism is that mode, so beginning in 2005 Balkin set about using originalist rhetoric to defend the constitutionality of Progressive results. He has so-far written originalist defenses of the right to choose, affirmative action, and the modern sweep of the Commerce Power [including the ACA].*
In 2008 he helped to found the Constitutional Accountability Center - a Progressive think tank cum public interest law firm dedicated to advancing Progressive arguments within an originalist framework - which just recently published a white paper (the first call-to-arms of its kind I know of) explicitly urging Progressives to rally 'round originalism, because, simplistic though its slogans be, it is now hegemonic [and "living constitutionalism" delegitimated]. (http://theusconstitution.org/blog.history/?p=2947)
Obviously I don't know what's inside Jack Balkin's head, but I think his efforts on Section 4 can be seen as an attempt to frame the issue early as a leftwing originalist one, and so to test the effectiveness, and up the profile, of his / the CAC's strategy. (This is possibly what Mark Tushnet means when he says that Section 4 is "the left's Heller" (http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-part-of-republican-form-of.html).)
Finally, FWIW, I have mixed feelings about the Balkin / CAC approach. On the one hand, I like watching Balkin beat-at-their-own-game (or at least tweak) the massively dishonest (though some of them do seem to have internalized their own talking points) rightwingers who tirelessly crank away inside the originalist noise machine. And he may well be correct that for Progressives to win the debate over the American constitutional "ethos" one needs to work within originalism (though I do wonder whether it is too late in the day to reinvent our understanding of the American founding as a Progressive moment). On the other hand, originalist rhetoric makes me uneasy because it is so obviously a tissue of fictions,** and also, as an abnegation of our responsibility to think through fundamental moral and political issues for ourselves (or at least a reinforcement of that abnegation), cowardly and repugnant.
* A great account of all this can be found in Northwestern LawProf Andrew Koppelman's
(tongue-in-cheek) article "Why Jack Balkin is Disgusting" (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1506506)
** The best exemplification I’ve come across of what happens when you do originalism seriously is in the early pages of JGA Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, where he describes how an originalist movement among Sixteenth Century (mainly) French jurists led them to conclude that the Justinian code was entirely unfit to govern in modern conditions. It is such a good exemplification because of the unimpeachable honesty of it all. The French jurists Pocock describes were, so it seems from his account, honest - they really wanted to figure out how to live by the Justinian code as it was originally understood. And Pockock himself was presumably honest - it's not as if he was writing a covert indictment of modern originalism because, in 1957, that didn't exist!
One aspect of the Section 4 debate that touches on a personal preoccupation of mine - the politics of originalism - and so interests me is how it looks like Jack Balkin (Yale), one of the architects of (what you might call) "leftwing originalism," is trying to use it as a testing ground for his (Faustian) efforts to co-opt originalism for the left.
See here: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/06/legislative-history-of-section-four-of.html
and
here: http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/07/more-on-original-meaning-of-section.html
Context: Balkin spent a good bit of the early part of his career thinking about how constitutional ideas (and ideologies more generally) spread and take hold. His view is that a great deal of constitutional law is the product of political mobilizations in favor of (or against) one or another matrix of constitutional rhetoric. Unlike an older generation of constitutional doctrinalists - who believed that constitutional law unfolded from Supreme Court precedent, and so good constitutional lawyering involved careful attention to case law - Balkin thinks that good constitutional lawyering involves cunning manipulation of whatever mode of constitutional "reasoning" is [typically for political reasons] currently ascendant.
Originalism is that mode, so beginning in 2005 Balkin set about using originalist rhetoric to defend the constitutionality of Progressive results. He has so-far written originalist defenses of the right to choose, affirmative action, and the modern sweep of the Commerce Power [including the ACA].*
In 2008 he helped to found the Constitutional Accountability Center - a Progressive think tank cum public interest law firm dedicated to advancing Progressive arguments within an originalist framework - which just recently published a white paper (the first call-to-arms of its kind I know of) explicitly urging Progressives to rally 'round originalism, because, simplistic though its slogans be, it is now hegemonic [and "living constitutionalism" delegitimated]. (http://theusconstitution.org/blog.history/?p=2947)
Obviously I don't know what's inside Jack Balkin's head, but I think his efforts on Section 4 can be seen as an attempt to frame the issue early as a leftwing originalist one, and so to test the effectiveness, and up the profile, of his / the CAC's strategy. (This is possibly what Mark Tushnet means when he says that Section 4 is "the left's Heller" (http://balkin.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-part-of-republican-form-of.html).)
Finally, FWIW, I have mixed feelings about the Balkin / CAC approach. On the one hand, I like watching Balkin beat-at-their-own-game (or at least tweak) the massively dishonest (though some of them do seem to have internalized their own talking points) rightwingers who tirelessly crank away inside the originalist noise machine. And he may well be correct that for Progressives to win the debate over the American constitutional "ethos" one needs to work within originalism (though I do wonder whether it is too late in the day to reinvent our understanding of the American founding as a Progressive moment). On the other hand, originalist rhetoric makes me uneasy because it is so obviously a tissue of fictions,** and also, as an abnegation of our responsibility to think through fundamental moral and political issues for ourselves (or at least a reinforcement of that abnegation), cowardly and repugnant.
* A great account of all this can be found in Northwestern LawProf Andrew Koppelman's
(tongue-in-cheek) article "Why Jack Balkin is Disgusting" (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1506506)
** The best exemplification I’ve come across of what happens when you do originalism seriously is in the early pages of JGA Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, where he describes how an originalist movement among Sixteenth Century (mainly) French jurists led them to conclude that the Justinian code was entirely unfit to govern in modern conditions. It is such a good exemplification because of the unimpeachable honesty of it all. The French jurists Pocock describes were, so it seems from his account, honest - they really wanted to figure out how to live by the Justinian code as it was originally understood. And Pockock himself was presumably honest - it's not as if he was writing a covert indictment of modern originalism because, in 1957, that didn't exist!
HOLIDAY HIATUS
In honor of the current three day weekend, I shall not post more parts of my current tutorial until Tuesday. I am ready to go, but I suspect my readers have other things to do. Apologies to the overseas contingent, for whom this is just an ordinary weekend. I shall try to find something suitably trivial to blog about, such as, for example, the rumors that Michele Bachmann's husband -- the "therapist" who works to "cure" gays -- is himself deeply closeted. Clearly, the excitement of The Fourth of July has addled my brain.
Saturday, 2 July 2011
MOVIE REVIEW
Yesterday, Susie and I went to the late afternoon showing of Larry Crowne, the new Tom Hanks Julia Roberts movie. I was strangely taken by the movie, partly, of course, because I like Hanks and Roberts. Julia Roberts has the ability that Audrey Hepburn had of going from plain to drop dead gorgeous in an instant, simply by smiling. But what entranced me about this very simple little film was the fact that it is almost the first to appear on the American screen that actually acknowledges what is happening in America right now to tens of millions of ordinary people.
Hanks plays an eager, energetic, committed WalMart worker [Walmart is thinly disguised as "UMart"] who, despite having been selected eight times as "employee of the month" is summarily fired one day because his lack of a college education makes him unsuitable for managerial advancement. [Some of you may recall that when I was blogging about the fact that only 30% of adult Americans have college degrees, I discovered, by some surfing, that WalMart does indeed make it clear on their website that absent some college your chances of becoming the manager of a WalMart store are just about nil.]
Larry Crowne, who did twenty years in the navy as a cook right out of high school, decides to go to college for the first time, and enrols at the local State College campus in several courses, one of which, on "Public Speaking," is taught by a stressed out Julia Roberts. [Hanks also enrols in Econ 1, taught in over the top fashion by none other than George Takei, the immortal Sulu on the original Star Trek.]
The plot is negligible. Hanks is forced to walk away from the mortgage on the house he ended up with after his divorce, since it is under water [i.e., worth less than the mortgage on it] and without a job he cannot afford the payments. He lands a job as a short order cook in a diner while continuing to take his courses at Mill Valley State.
No big surprises. Roberts gives him an A+ ["I am not an easy A", she tells him when he sees her in the diner, although she has already made it clear that in other ways she is in fact rather easy] , and the two of them end up in each other's arms, albeit rather clumsily, since they are both a bit over the hill.
What I liked about the film, aside from Roberts' smile, was the fact that it is totally and believably honest about its characters, neither of whom is destined for greatness or even distinction, but both of whom are utterly decent human beings.
There weren't many people in the theater. They were all at the showing of the new 3-D Transformers movie, which if I understand correctly is about giant kids' toys from outer space. I think if I were a movie director, I would be rather depressed.
Hanks plays an eager, energetic, committed WalMart worker [Walmart is thinly disguised as "UMart"] who, despite having been selected eight times as "employee of the month" is summarily fired one day because his lack of a college education makes him unsuitable for managerial advancement. [Some of you may recall that when I was blogging about the fact that only 30% of adult Americans have college degrees, I discovered, by some surfing, that WalMart does indeed make it clear on their website that absent some college your chances of becoming the manager of a WalMart store are just about nil.]
Larry Crowne, who did twenty years in the navy as a cook right out of high school, decides to go to college for the first time, and enrols at the local State College campus in several courses, one of which, on "Public Speaking," is taught by a stressed out Julia Roberts. [Hanks also enrols in Econ 1, taught in over the top fashion by none other than George Takei, the immortal Sulu on the original Star Trek.]
The plot is negligible. Hanks is forced to walk away from the mortgage on the house he ended up with after his divorce, since it is under water [i.e., worth less than the mortgage on it] and without a job he cannot afford the payments. He lands a job as a short order cook in a diner while continuing to take his courses at Mill Valley State.
No big surprises. Roberts gives him an A+ ["I am not an easy A", she tells him when he sees her in the diner, although she has already made it clear that in other ways she is in fact rather easy] , and the two of them end up in each other's arms, albeit rather clumsily, since they are both a bit over the hill.
What I liked about the film, aside from Roberts' smile, was the fact that it is totally and believably honest about its characters, neither of whom is destined for greatness or even distinction, but both of whom are utterly decent human beings.
There weren't many people in the theater. They were all at the showing of the new 3-D Transformers movie, which if I understand correctly is about giant kids' toys from outer space. I think if I were a movie director, I would be rather depressed.
AFRO-AMERICAN STUDIES: A TUTORIAL PART FIVE
[Once again, rather than reinvent the wheel, I am going to incorporate into this tutorial lengthy passages from my Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, this time from Chapter Three. In this way, perhaps, I will win more readers for portions of that book than the hard cover version ever enjoyed.]
When the English adventurers and colonists came to the Atlantic coast of what is now the
We live today in an America in which most of the very hardest physical labor has either been obviated by machinery or else exported to workers in other parts of the world, conveniently out of sight, so it is difficult for us to get an accurate sense of just how hard it was in the seventeenth century to turn virgin forest into farm land and pasture. Try to imagine what sort of job it would be to fell a large tree with hand axes and saws, and then to cut its roots and dig, pry, or drag out the stump. Even with draft animals, which were hardly in good supply in the early colonies, it is crushing work. One large field, cleared of trees and rocks, surrounded by a stone wall, and plowed for planting represented a kind and amount of labor that few people in twenty-first century
Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Raleigh, and the other well-born adventurers who sought to make their fortune in the
Why would an English man or woman voluntarily enter into what amounted to temporary slavery? Some of them did not do so voluntarily. They were coerced, or impressed, or offered indenture as an alternative to the gallows. But for many, even so dismal a prospect was preferable to the life that faced them in their native land. At least in this fabled
If the indentured servants survived the voyage to
The constant and insistent worry of the masters was how to extract from their servants the hard work that would make their investment profitable. Not surprisingly, the indentured servants frequently shirked the most painful of the work, running away, or even turning on their masters. The scanty law records tell many stories of servants who disappeared into the woods, or put down their tools once their masters were out of sight. The response of the masters was angry, frustrated, and incredibly harsh, at least by our modern standards. Whipping was commonplace, as was starvation. Servants were sometimes punished by having their ears cut off. Jacqueline Jones, in her brilliant book American Work, tells the story of "Alice Travellor, the mistress of a little girl named Elizabeth Bibby, [who] showed no remorse after hoisting the girl 'upp by a Tackle which they use to hang deare with', whipping her, holding her 'over the fyre threatening that she would burne her,' and beating her bloody.
Servitude was not an oddity or rarity in Colonial America. It was the norm. Most of the men, women, and children in the early colonies were unfree laborers of one sort or another. Freedom -- the legal right to live where one chose, marry whom one chose, work when and in what way one chose -- was the precious possession of the upper classes, and of very few others. From the very beginning, the American Story has been a story of bondage.
There is nothing unusual about this fact, of course. Bondage of one sort or another had for many centuries been the lot of most of the people living in
Thus far, we have been talking only about White people, but there were others here. There were the local inhabitants, whose wishes, needless to say, had not been consulted when the colonies were planted in their midst. The colonists vacillated between trying to establish friendly relations with the locals and trying to exterminate them. On occasion, their behavior was simply self-destructive. The local inhabitants, after all, had long ago figured out how to live with reasonable comfort in the forests along the Atlantic shore of
In the earliest days of some of the colonies, such as those in
A POTENTIAL GAME-CHANGER
Suddenly, without warning, after months of debate and recrimination over the issue of raising the debt ceiling, a radical new possibility has surfaced which, if embraced by Obama, would totally alter the entire economic and political playing field. It is now being suggested that the President does not need authorization by Congress to raise the debt ceiling and issue new Treasury securities, that indeed regardless of what Congress does he is required to do so! All of this rests on an obscure passage in the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, viz:
"Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."
As the text makes clear, this Article was added to deal with the potentially explosive question of debts of the Confederacy and the demand by former slave-owners for compensation for their "property." But in 1935, the United States Supreme Court, in a case actually having to do with debts the U. S. incurred while operating on the Gold Standard, took a quite expansive view of Article 4 [see Perry v. United States, 1935]. The court was actually split 4-4-1 on the correct resolution of the case and its implications, but at least eight of the nine justices were in agreement that the United States was absolutely required to meet its debt obligations. Now, I am no sort of Constitutional scholar at all, but it does seem to me that if the Congress and the President jointly have, through Act of Congress, spent certain monies, thereby committing the good faith and credit of the United States, then the Administration is constitutionally obligated to fulfill those commitments, regardless of whatever artificial ceiling that same Congress has imposed on the government's issuing of debt.
It takes no brains at all to see that if Obama were to invoke this power, all hell would break loose. He would almost certainly face impeachment in the House of Representatives, and win his case in the Senate. This would not be a nonsense impeachment over sexual peccadillo's, but a genuine Constitutional confrontation, and in my amateur opinion, Obama would be in the right.
We shall see.
"Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."
As the text makes clear, this Article was added to deal with the potentially explosive question of debts of the Confederacy and the demand by former slave-owners for compensation for their "property." But in 1935, the United States Supreme Court, in a case actually having to do with debts the U. S. incurred while operating on the Gold Standard, took a quite expansive view of Article 4 [see Perry v. United States, 1935]. The court was actually split 4-4-1 on the correct resolution of the case and its implications, but at least eight of the nine justices were in agreement that the United States was absolutely required to meet its debt obligations. Now, I am no sort of Constitutional scholar at all, but it does seem to me that if the Congress and the President jointly have, through Act of Congress, spent certain monies, thereby committing the good faith and credit of the United States, then the Administration is constitutionally obligated to fulfill those commitments, regardless of whatever artificial ceiling that same Congress has imposed on the government's issuing of debt.
It takes no brains at all to see that if Obama were to invoke this power, all hell would break loose. He would almost certainly face impeachment in the House of Representatives, and win his case in the Senate. This would not be a nonsense impeachment over sexual peccadillo's, but a genuine Constitutional confrontation, and in my amateur opinion, Obama would be in the right.
We shall see.
Friday, 1 July 2011
REPLY TO MARINUS
Sometimes, as I wrote my tutorials for this blog, I forget that the readership, however large or small it may be, is international. My overseas readers put up with my quite local commentary on the passing political scene with pretty good humor, I think, but every so often, I say something that really puzzles them, even though it may seem perfectly comprehensible to Americans. My discussion of the American belief that this nation was founded as the embodiment of an Idea is one such example. I imagine Americans are so accustomed to hearing this theme repeated in public speeches, school classrooms, and the media that they find nothing bizarre about it, even if [as I hope] they can be persuaded that it is false. But Marinus' reaction makes it clear that to the rest of the world, the notion may simply be incomprehensibly absurd.
Those of a philosophical bent might think to see the hand of an Idealist Hegelian working here, but that is not the source of the notion. Pretty clearly, its origins are religious. America, in the eyes of early settlers as well as subsequent inhabitants, is identified with The Promised Land of the Old Testament -- a land of milk and honey, promised by God to His chosen people. The secularization of this religious theme becomes the claim that America was founded as the embodiment of the Idea of Liberty.
One tends to forget how strong was the desire, in the early days of the Republic, for a New Beginning in a Virgin Land, unbeholden to the various European nations from which the White early settlers came. Indeed, as my former colleague Marc Shell has shown, at the time of the establishment of the United States, there were debates about what the national language should be. German had its partisans, along with Dutch, and of course English. There was a town that created an entirely new language, in the belief that the citizens of this new country should not even speak a language brought like baggage from the Old World.
To my foreign readers, I can only say: Trust me when I tell you that the alternative story I am going to spell out for you, developed by the new discipline of Afro-American Studies, even though it may strike you as self-evident, is so cognitively dissonant to Americans that it is almost impossible for it to get a sympathetic hearing even in politically progressive quarters. If I argue that America has not yet fulfilled its destiny by successfully embodying the Idea of Liberty in all of its institutions, progressives will nod sadly, while the rest of America will cross itself and mumble about socialism and Shariah Law. But if I say that America never was a country founded as the embodiment of the Idea of Liberty, even the most progressive listeners will recoil, convinced that I am somehow the enemy of progress and the fulfillment of the American dream, for if Freedom is not the essence of the American story, then on what basis can we fight for justice and equality?
"All politics are local," the great Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill famously observed. Perhaps all ideological delusions also are local.
Those of a philosophical bent might think to see the hand of an Idealist Hegelian working here, but that is not the source of the notion. Pretty clearly, its origins are religious. America, in the eyes of early settlers as well as subsequent inhabitants, is identified with The Promised Land of the Old Testament -- a land of milk and honey, promised by God to His chosen people. The secularization of this religious theme becomes the claim that America was founded as the embodiment of the Idea of Liberty.
One tends to forget how strong was the desire, in the early days of the Republic, for a New Beginning in a Virgin Land, unbeholden to the various European nations from which the White early settlers came. Indeed, as my former colleague Marc Shell has shown, at the time of the establishment of the United States, there were debates about what the national language should be. German had its partisans, along with Dutch, and of course English. There was a town that created an entirely new language, in the belief that the citizens of this new country should not even speak a language brought like baggage from the Old World.
To my foreign readers, I can only say: Trust me when I tell you that the alternative story I am going to spell out for you, developed by the new discipline of Afro-American Studies, even though it may strike you as self-evident, is so cognitively dissonant to Americans that it is almost impossible for it to get a sympathetic hearing even in politically progressive quarters. If I argue that America has not yet fulfilled its destiny by successfully embodying the Idea of Liberty in all of its institutions, progressives will nod sadly, while the rest of America will cross itself and mumble about socialism and Shariah Law. But if I say that America never was a country founded as the embodiment of the Idea of Liberty, even the most progressive listeners will recoil, convinced that I am somehow the enemy of progress and the fulfillment of the American dream, for if Freedom is not the essence of the American story, then on what basis can we fight for justice and equality?
"All politics are local," the great Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill famously observed. Perhaps all ideological delusions also are local.
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