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Some preferences and prejudices are so deeply ingrained that often we don’t even realize we are harboring them. And even if we are consciously aware of them, the correctness of our particular perspective on the matter seems so patently obvious that it doesn’t even occur to us that anyone else in the developed Western world could have a differing view, because, how could they? Why would they? They couldn’t, and they wouldn’t. Right?

When one is suddenly confronted with a radically differing view of something (regardless of, or perhaps because of however mundane it may be) that couldn’t possibly have a differing view, the shock of it rattles to the core. First, because you are caught off-guard - you can’t be prepared for something you didn’t know existed. Second, because without warning, you have an entirely different world view of the matter to contemplate. And in situations where the long-term, ruminating over it for years type of contemplation is not required, it still might be something that stops you in your tracks (literally), and demands that you drop whatever you’re doing and contemplate it right now.

One of my so-deeply ingrained-it’s-below-my-radar prejudices got hit with a brick recently on the seemingly mundane subject of teeth. It happened when I read a passage in a book about the late, great British cellist Jacqueline Du Pre.** In the Winter of 1967-68, Jackie’s sister, Hilary, relates that Jackie said the following while relating tales of her experiences giving concerts in America:

‘You know, Hil, I’m fascinated by American mouths’, she suddenly announced, changing the subject completely. ‘Rows of perfect teeth, set in a hideous grin and a gushing “aren’t we pals” expression.’
Her mouth stretched to reveal a mass of grinning teeth, as she pranced around the kitchen.

What?! A Brit making disparaging remarks about American teeth? Granted, the statement is mostly a reflection on the socio-cultural differences between the British and Americans, but it’s the physical appearance of our teeth that lends the genuine creepiness factor, not the behavior. That a British person would find one of our most prized physical characteristics to be the icing on the altogether off-putting cake that is an American never even entered my mind. The Brits don’t make fun of our teeth, we make fun of theirs. That’s the order of things.

Or so I thought.
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There are plenty of people more suited to direct political and social commentary than I am. I’m more of a “meta” guy, heavy on the philosophy and intellectualization, not so much on the direct assessments of political organizing and such.

This is not to say that news of the world doesn’t penetrate; it certainly does. I will however, persist in trying to get at the more meta aspects of it all, in part because someone should, and also because it’s my own style of psychic defense.

So, in that spirit, I offer a generalization that I formulated several years back, in talking to a friend I shan’t name about a subject that I shan’t divulge. But as a result of a series of conversations, I came to understand what I think is a worldview that is shared by a lot of people, maybe even a majority, when thinking about moral issues. It goes like this:

There are good people and there are bad people. It is the duty of good people to thwart and punish bad people. Anything that happens as a result is the fault of the bad people, not the good people, who are always blameless, because they are good, and have good intentions.

If I have this wrong, you won’t be able to find anyone who fits this description. Well, there is another possibility that I see no point in discussing.

Social Darwinism actually predates Darwin, Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” several years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. Spencer was more Lamarkian than Darwinian, actually, but “Social Darwinism” was the fittest catch phrase. Add the broth of 19th Century racial theories, and you have a truly toxic brew. Stephen J. Gould has suggested that an opposition to Social Darwinism was behind William Jennings Bryan’s opposition to biological Darwinism, and I find it plausible though there are those who disagree Gould’s suggestion would mean, among other things, that Bryan got another bum rap from history.

One of the funny-but-also-sad things I sometimes see are the bumper magnet decals that show a Darwin fish being eaten by a Jesus fish, seemingly suggesting that the car owner doesn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, but does believe in “survival of the fittest,” i.e. Social Darwinism. Certainly that is a general attitude from a good many people on the Right. Dog-eat-dog society, but let’s not consider the natural world as anything other than divinely planned. Well, that’s okay; dogs were intelligently designed.
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“We are in bondage to the law so that we might be free.”
Cicero (106-43 BC)

the law is a ass—a idiot.”
Mr. Bumble Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens

When I first conceived of this post, I was going to basically describe a great article by Kim Lane Scheppele, When the Law Doesn’t Count: The Rule of Law and Election 2000, in which in addition to providing a devastating critique of the actions of the Supremes and how they violated some of the basic tenets of the Rule of Law, describes how many countries with “horrors” in their past (Germany, Russia, various Eastern Europe countries) have included specific “Rule of Law” clauses in their constitutions. I was going to propose that the United States might profit from adding a similar amendment to our constitution. I still think that it is a great article, (Do read it, but be warned that it will infuriate you all over again. I found it via Lawyers, Guns and Money, which I found in turn via MB’s hockey blogging, which shows that though the wheels of blogging grind fast, they grind Non sequiturously) and such an amendment is still is probably a good idea for the US. However, after watching the various “Accountability Follies” that have played out over the last few months between Bushco and Congress, I am less sanguine about the capacity for any combination of mere words on parchment or paper to save us from ourselves, now or in the future - especially if those words are to be interpreted by the likes of the Roberts court. These days I am thinking more along the lines of what to do right now, because I think John Rogers got it exactly right in his L33T Justice post at Kung Fu Monkey :

They have found the “exploit” within the United States Government. As I watched Congressmen and Senators stumble and fumble and thrash, unable to bring to heel men and women who were plainly lying to them under oath, unable to eject from public office toadies of a boot-licking expertise unseen since Versailles, it struck me. The sheer, simple elegance of it. The “exploit”.
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Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was born in 1743 to Jean-Antoine Lavoisier, a prominent lawyer, and Emilie Punctis, who belonged to a rich and influential family, and who died when Antoine-Laurent was five years old. He was basically raised by his maiden aunt Mlle Constance Punctis, who arranged for his education at the College Mazarin, which was noted for its faculty of science.

Although young Antoine completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes, his true calling was in science. On the basis of his early scientific work, primarily in geology, he was elected at the age of 25—to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society.

In the same year as his election to the Academy, in order to finance his scientific research, he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a for profit (as you can see, “privatization” is hardly a new idea). A few years later he married the daughter of another “tax farmer.” Her name was Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, and she was not quite 14 at the time. Madame Lavoisier learned English, in order to translate the work of British chemists like Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish for her husband. She also studied art and engraving and illustrated Lavoisier’s scientific experiments.

Lavoisier has been called the “father of modern chemistry” for good reason. He established the principle of conservation of mass in chemistry and physics, and performed a series of experiments which, combined with the work of Priestly and Cavendish, overthrew the theory of phlogiston as an explanation of combustion, and thereafter the swept away the classical theory of the elements (earth, air, fire, and water). Lavoisier’s replacement table of the elements ran to some 33 “irreducible substances” most of which were what we today recognize as elements, such as mercury, sulfur, and oxygen, which he renamed from “dephlogistonized air.” He also performed such flashy experiments as demonstrating that diamond is made from carbon by burning one in an atmosphere of pure oxygen.

During the Reign of Terror in 1794, Antoine Lavoisier was arrested, along with 27 others, by the French Revolutionary Tribune for abusing the office of Ferme Générale by adulterating tobacco with water. They were guillotined the same day. When asked for his defense, Lavoisier is famously said to have remarked, “I am a scientist,” to which the tribunal replied, “The Revolution has no need of scientists.” Then “snick” went the head of Lavoisier.
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I have been asked to write something about Marxism today. This, I cannot do; while I consider myself a Marxist-Leninist (of vaguely Trotskyist persuasion), I am far from an expert on Marxist thought. As importantly, tiny as the community of self-identified Marxists in the US may be, the ideological variation is immense.

So this won’t be a What is to be done? post laying out some grand strategy for achieving revolution - I couldn’t really compete with Lenin anyway.

Instead I will do what I can: describe why I consider myself a Marxist, and what that means for my understanding of society as it is now, and for my convictions regarding what action that should be taken, and (as importantly) can be taken in the current situation - in the spirit of unity of theory and practice.

Material Relations of Production and Power

The very basis of Marxism is the identification of power relations in society as economic relations. Power lies with those that own the means of production; in a feudal society, this was arable land; in industrial capitalism, well, industrial capital. Today - that’s up for debate. In any event, the important fact for me is that political power lies with those that control the means of production. This leads me to reject the thesis that liberal capitalist democracy can ever be truly democratic.

Disenchantment with the influence of big business and money in the political process is of course widespread; however, it is an illusion to believe that this problem can be solved in a capitalist society. Only by attaining ownership of the means of production themselves can the people truly govern their own affairs.

Class War 1: Strengthening the Working Class at home.
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Very good question. No worries, I am not going to try and explain the end product of what I do. But how is it done? What does a mathematician do all day, or what do mathematicians do all day when they come together?

Well, first of all, all day is a strictly relative term. A famous mathematician once explained that he couldn’t do mathematics for more than six hours a day, and most of the time, this is true for most of us, at least while working alone. The rest of the time we while away reading, or running, or making music, or watching TV, or blogging - while somehow part of the brain keeps working, which can lead to a certain absentmindedness. Only when I am hot on a trail (sadly, a rare occurrence) will I completely concentrate on work for long periods of time - or when the work is strictly routine, like preparing classes, grading papers (an event all too common in my life), refereeing articles for academic journals or any of the other administrative and community duties that make up a large part of any academic’s day for at least nine months of the year.

Well, but what about the times I do work?
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By Bill Benzon

All’s not well in the world of cycling. The century-old Championship of Zurich was canceled in April for lack of sponsors. The Tour of Flanders saw a 77 percent drop in live attendance. The reason is obvious; doping scandals have all but ruined the credibility of the sport. Will baseball suffer the same fate? It’s anyone’s guess. It’s clear that there’s been a whole lot of juicin’ going on. Congress has held hearings, and drug testing was started two years ago, but no current big names have been caught. So it is still easy for fans to hide their heads in the same sand that’s been covering all those WMD’s in Iraq.

And then we have track and field and pro football, where testing programs have battered “plausible deniability” pretty badly.

But that’s not my game, bewailing the parlous moral state of athletic play. Not quite.

Why do so many of us find it so easy to think of juicing as cheating? It’s not as though chemical performance enhancement is confined to a small club that forbids it to others, thereby creating an unfair advantage for themselves. Any athlete can do it, and the pros have reasonable expectations that they’ll get good drugs and competent advice on how to use them. As far as I can tell, such judgments tend to be based on an intuitive sense of what is right and proper, what is natural. And juicing isn’t natural.

Consider a rather different example of unnatural sports preparation, vision enhancement through LASIK, laser surgery on the corneas. Back in 1999 Tiger Woods underwent LASIK surgery so that he had 20/15 vision, which is better than the 20/20 that is considered normal. Once Woods’ success validated the procedure many other golfers had it done as well. Athletes in other sports, such as baseball, have also had LASIK-enhanced vision. But no one has complained about this.

Why not?
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By Dr. Free Ride

On Memorial Day, because I really needed to do something beside grade papers for awhile, I decided to go to the nursery to buy some plants. First, though, because the kids (who had the day off from school) were actually entertaining themselves pretty well, I poured myself another coffee and decided to actually read some of the articles in The Nation issue on climate change.

Confronted with the news that jets are evil and carbon offsets probably don’t work as well as one might hope, I decided that there was no way in hell I should be driving (my hybrid) to the nursery. I consulted Google Maps and discovered that the nursery was precisely one mile from my house — a reasonable walk so long as I didn’t get a big bag of manure — and, surprisingly, that the “driving route” Google recommended (not the obvious driving route) would make a really nice walking route, as it skirted a park and followed streets lined with shade trees.

As I readied my wheeled urban grocery cart (sometimes referred to as “the old lady cart”), my six-year-old asked if she could walk with me, even though a mile sounded like a long distance to her. It was a beautiful day, and there was no particular place we had to be later, so I agreed.
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By Zeus

It occurred to me from my last post, that I (and other commentators), were starting from differing cultural and philosophical premises. A short historical summary of these premises is in order.

First there is the older, conservative notion of a society organized around hierarchical hereditary or “divinely-appointed” leadership. Here a society’s individuals vest their wills in a collective guided or managed by charismatic supernaturally “chosen” authorities and transmitted through, for instance, monarchies and institutions like the Catholic Church. Tending toward autocratic rule by its very nature (and possibly theocracy if the autocrat is “speaking for God”) this notion responds to threats to survival and fears of change by replying, “If only you listen to me, I will lead you, I will protect you from physical harm, I will give you meaning.” An excellent example is the Grand Inquisitor narrative in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamozov.
No one in the WAAGNFNP conversation really seems to support this premise, though I think that some aspects of conservative and/or classical thought ought to be preserved and taken up—honor, tradition, antiquity, ritual, virtue, etc.—in order to acknowledge our accountability to our own history and those who have gone before. In this sense, I am part “old school” conservative. However, I realize the danger of the conservative premise is real. It is a surprisingly small and fatal set of steps that may lead one from speaking WITH God, to speaking FOR God, to finally simply believing one IS God, infallible, chosen, and superior to the humanity.

Second, there is the innovative liberal Enlightenment response.
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