Blogcritics Author: JDCarmine

Satire: Crying for Comic Relief

JDCarmine — Wed, 6 Feb 2008 19:42:20 EST

There she goes again, it all depends on the meaning of "is."
No matter what the political interpretation, in comparison to a Greek play “Britney” is more likely a tragedy, “Hillary” more likely a comedy. Britney is a world-class performing athlete whose arrogance regarding her demonstrable and extraordinary dancing and singing abilities, her culture-altering beauty and her...

Satire: Republican Spoiler

JDCarmine — Fri, 1 Feb 2008 22:27:32 EST

What happened to Margaret Spellings glasses and why.
Most of you here are probably not Republicans. I am. So pay attention because I'm going to tell you our real strategy. Now that Kucinich is finally out of the race we have relaxed. I know you'd never have guessed, and that's just what we wanted. But I am sure you must have wondered why we spent most of our last big debate on January 24th...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

An Open Letter to Google: Google University on YouTube

JDCarmine — Wed, 7 Mar 2007 06:07:49 EST

Dear Google,I am the Director of the Philosophy Program at a one of the many little colleges recently retro-fitted to become a university in Western Pennsylvania. After 18 years of steadily teaching at a reputable little college, with the magic of our new university stature I suddenly found myself applying for, and receiving, tenure. My job and income are now secure. Gee, what an improvement for student-learning outcomes. So let me put my new tenure to use and see if it works. It is clear to me that post-secondary (College and University) undergraduate education both costs too much and the general quality is far from as good as it should be in light of the extortionate price students and their parents are forced to pay. According to the Pew Foundation funded American Institutes for Research 2006 study, “The National Survey of America’s College Students,” one half of four-year college graduates will not be able to articulate what I have so far written, much less grasp the basic argument of any article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education or, for that matter, any speech critical of post-secondary education delivered by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings herself. This means the majority of American college graduates are unable to figure out exactly how they, and their families, may have been gouged by their Alma Maters.According to the Study:• More than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.• Students in 2- and 4-year colleges have the greatest difficulty with quantitative literacy: approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have only Basic quantitative literacy. Basic skills are those necessary to compare ticket prices or calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad from a menu.If this study is accurate, and anecdotal evidence of graduating seniors certainly suggests it is, there is no just reason for any student to pay $100,000 (more than the cost of most homes in Western PA) for a four-year degree. Most disturbing, however, is the implication when looking at the power of compound interest: If the $100,000 spent on college were invested in a mutual fund instead, it would be worth vastly more than the $1million dollar increase in lifetime earning power a college education is alleged to be worth. If the money spent on a college education were invested in TIAA-CREF, where university employees invest their own retirement funds, by the time the student reached the age of retirement in 40 years that $100,000, at 10% per year, would be worth $4,525,925.56 -- in 50 years $11,739,085.29. Instead, what now happens is parents simply lose a hefty portion of their own retirement while footing the bill for their kids’ vastly over-priced college degrees. In a word, despite college propaganda to the contrary, at current rates, a four year degree at a typical college or university dramatically decreases a family’s overall lifetime wealth rather than increasing it. Consequently, it makes sense that for-profit institutions like Google, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles or even Starbucks, begin to consider applying for university accreditation, and offering degrees of their own. Clearly, well-run for-profits are vastly more economically efficient than any non-profit college or university. The efficiency is a consequence of following the basic economic principle that an informed consumer will always purchase the best value for the least money. I, like most parents, would happily send my children to Google University if I knew they would learn more there than at a higher priced university. And unlike non-profits where there is little incentive to quantify results for comparison shopping, profit-making institutions thrive on promoting their quantifiable successes. The best are quick to demonstrate why they are the best and thereby sell more. So, Google is ideally positioned to dominate the post-secondary education market, and do it without hiring a single tenured professor. Though once tenure protected the academic freedom of innovative faculty, tenure now only ensures the homogeneity of thought of those tenured. Tenure has itself now become an impediment to the novel ideas it was originally designed to protect. Google could escape the tenure trap by not hiring any faculty at all. Instead of hiring the faculty themselves, institutions like Google could simply purchase a vast library of taped, high quality, lectures given by academic super stars or other top performing teachers who are willing to sell series of their lectures (perhaps even receiving residuals if they really rock!). These professors would operate as free agents in a digital world of Professors Without Borders. As Jeffrey Toobin reports in New Yorker Magazine, Google has already started the process of digitizing all books published, and certainly that would include all filmed academic lectures. As a consequence, I would like to develop a trial philosophy class that will be offered on YouTube -- perhaps start with Philosophy and Theater or Introduction to Philosophy. My long term goal, however, is to develop, for lack of a better term, a Google University on YouTube Philosophy Major. My students at the brick and mortar university campus where I teach would be required to watch the lectures on YouTube and then submit papers in class. But all the class material would be available to the entire YouTube audience, and any institution that might want to use this class as part of their own curriculum would be free to. Yes, a free college class on YouTube, that’s my initial plan.If successful, perhaps other free-agent professors will follow, and once a sufficient number of competently taught, enjoyable, entertaining, college courses are provided for free, this could begin to break the de facto price fixing of the American post-secondary education cartel in league with their accrediting institutions. With the aid of Margaret Spellings, this college cartel has finally become vulnerable to the demands of the market place. Parents may soon finally compare educational products based on quantifiable outcomes, and buy a degree based on highest quality for lowest price. Google can easily deliver what the non-profits have so far refused to: the best education at the best price. Institutions, without the requisite faculty, like Google, Amazon or any various libraries and book stores, certainly could easily provide competently taught, college credit quality, courses on platforms like YouTube. Google’s purchase of YouTube, combined with the demands of out-priced parents and the pressure of the US Department of Education that post-secondary education finally provide quantifiable results, all coming together within in the last six months, shouts loud that the time for Professors Without Borders has arrived. I know for a fact that there are many many highly educated, highly competent, PhD, University and College faculty willing to work as free-agent professors for advanced education. I also know by hiring free-agent professors, Google would be capable of offering vastly more enjoyable, higher quality and less expensive college degrees than are currently available at other colleges and universities existing on line or in brick and mortar. With large enough numbers of students and high enough quality of professors’ lectures and the stellar name of Google to kick this off, the era of the ten dollar, accredited, 3-credit, college class is here. This after all is the real payoff of the computer age. Over a few tens of years those rare monster computers have now been reduced to a wallet-sized commonplace, the same should be so for the four-year degree, and Google can do it, Google should do it: a Harvard-quality undergraduate education on an iPod, while sipping espresso. It is entirely conceivable that libraries, book stores and coffee houses could offer degrees of their own using the lectures purchased and digitized by Google. Grading could easily be out-sourced inexpensively, done by professional graders in Bangalore or Beijing. After all, as Thomas Friedman made clear, the world really is flatter than we like to imagine. (Where do you think H&R Block sends overflow tax forms, Kansas? Not really.) Outsourcing grading to third party graders in Asia, would have the additional benefit of helping to eliminate grade inflation, since graders would have no professional incentive to please students with padded grades in order to keep their jobs. "Google University on YouTube at Starbucks in Barnes and Nobles," would not only reduce the cost of education to students, the competition between professors to produce the best lectures would create vastly superior lectures, and the competition between for-profit institutions in order to attract students would produce vastly better outcomes for students, and therefore would even help American corporations, like Google itself, who need highly competent employees.Please call me or write me or email me if you would like to discuss this further, or if you think I might be of help. If I keep writing things like this, the tenure thing may not really be as bullet proof as I am hoping; so I may soon REALLY need that job.Sincerely Yours,James D. Carmine, PhD(Free Agent Philosophy Professor; Professor Without Borders)Associate Professor of Philosophy

Thank God for Radical Islam!

JDCarmine — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 14:57:01 EDT

I know this is wrong on so many levels I cannot even begin to count them, but yes, as a Post Post-Modern Baby Boomer American philosopher fed up with the lisping, sighing prattle of delicate liberals and equally nauseated by the strident delusions of hell-fire Buchananites and his perpetually pissed off puritanical brethren all waiting to gloat when the rapture comes, I am oddly glad we are being forced to awaken from our cushy American delusions. Screw the rapture and screw the abortionists. This is tectonic. Fantasies about Wal-Mart, the glass ceiling, flat tax, and gay pride are not really much of a problem when you take a slightly broader view. Radical Islam has been pounding at the door for a while and we all really should have awakened from our dogmatic slumbers. Ladies and Gentlemen, Disney Land and Harvard will now be closing. Please return to the starry heavens above and the moral law within. This is the time for authentic philosophers and theologians to put down their otiose academic games and take gainful employment saving Western rights-based democracies. Liberals and Conservatives need not apply; you can keep on dreaming of social workers and heaven.Yes, the radical Islamists really do want to kill us, and the moderate Muslims, much like the Catholics, think our consumer culture is perverse which is why neither opposes too forcefully the violent Islamists, so long as they only blow up the icons, residents, and proselytizers of the Protestant consumer cultures of America and Europe. All our fulsome hand wringing and progressive sensibilities will not help us a jot until we actually decide who we are, morally that is. Yes, the big armies of the centuries have finally come out again; it's the Imams vs. the Popes. The Muslims and the Catholics, who together speak for nearly four billion people (more people than ten USA's), are now getting ready to go head-to-head again. This time it is not at all about terrorists killing consumerists. The Muslims, it seems, have also been killing Catholics as Catholics. These guys each know exactly who they are. They each really have moral clarity and have had moral clarity for around one-thousand five-hundred years. We spoiled puritanical Americans are merely their arrogant children; we are the small fry in the big one that is coming. After all, there is not much a few smart bombs or other fancy military toys can do to change the minds of the waves of billions and billions people who are intent on overthrowing Western Culture as their protesting children have recently conceived it. We Americans may have the best guns in the battle, but they have the divisions that count. The blunt reality is we really are not the dominant world power we imagine ourselves to be. Their divisions are fully composed of self-guided smart bombs, billions of humans guided by God in heaven above and crystal clear morality within. Our little bombs are only guided by littler satellites and our nukes have no clear targets. All we really have is Madonna, Fifty Cent, and Viacom.So yes, this certainly is a world war. Do not delude yourself for even a second. This is a world war like no other. This world war is the "World Moral War," the war for moral clarity on earth. The Pope's divisions beat the communist military handily, but it is not so clear they will beat the Muslim divisions so easily. The side with the toughest morality will win this war. We in the land of complaining Protestants, Busch Gardens, and imminent rapture have not got much of a horse in this race, yet. As a consequence, I fear that unless America is willing to define the moral core of liberal democracies, we whiners of the Mayflower will be entering a time that will be known as the twilight of liberal democracies. Hume is speaking my fellow philosophers. Muttering in your academic beds and prostrating yourselves for professorship will only leave your children dead. Philosophy is again relevant; the question is whether we philosophers are up to our duty to define a moral order of liberal democracy that can protect us in the moral wars ahead. Be sure, the frame of "warfare" is infinitely more apt than the politically correct frame of "nurturing families" sticky with cotton candy at the amusement park. There is no cotton candy in Mogadishu.

Rummy is Right: Don't Appease Fascists

JDCarmine — Sat, 2 Sep 2006 05:01:11 EDT

The Doctrine of Fascism, according to Benito Mussolini, among other things, entails a state transformed into a religion conjoined with a commitment to the utter abnegation of the individual, and particularly the individual will. The fascist is never an individual, but always a connected tentacle of some holy-yet-earthly state, and infused with that state’s generalized yearning to annihilate all those individual heretics who might oppose the religiosity of that state. All who are not tethered to that fascist state must therefore either die or soon become tethered. For the fascist, the state itself is the god to be both worshipped and obeyed.Jews, conservative Christians, and free market, individualistic Americans, however, are not easily tethered to the state itself as God. We believe in individual autonomy rather than divine coercion. We, or at least we who have not been gulled into the despair of American liberals -- for whom morality, beauty and even divinity itself are only manifestations of social and psychological determinism -- we American conservatives are optimists. And we still embrace liberal democracy, which is to say we American conservatives still believe in a free will. We who remain the unabashed enemies of fascism continue to believe in real choice, the choice of good and the choice of sin. We American conservatives embrace the will rather than hate it. That is what today’s fascists despise about liberal democracies and like about American liberals. American liberals despair since they have reduced the will to no more than a series of coerced responses to the stimuli of society and psychology. But Islamist fascists despise American conservatives because we conservative members of liberal democracies embrace free will and thus we embrace creativity materialized via free enterprise.Today’s fascists, on the other hand, who, this time around also happen to be Arab Islamists rather than German or Italian Christians, hate the will. They reject the individual’s ability to create the beautiful and the craven. For the fascist, the will of the state is identical to the will of the individual. And today’s Islamist fascists, like their fascist forefathers, would be more than pleased to convert us to their state will or kill us in order to crush our individual free will, the human essence we conservative members of liberal democracies still hold so dear. So the fascist state is not merely fundamentalist. Though fundamentalism may be a necessary condition for fascism, fundamentalism is certainly not a sufficient condition for fascism. Many who are fundamentalists are neither fascist nor dangerous nor even particularly frightening. Fundamentalist Christians, for example, believe the rest of us wrong, but they also believe we could choose to be right, if only we would. Born again Christians hold free will so dear, in fact, they even hold themselves individually responsible for their own birth. So, coerced submission to God is utterly rejected by fundamentalist Christians. Coerced love of God is equally rejected by fundamentalist Jews, and likely even by most fundamentalist Muslims. “Let there be no compulsion in religion: Truth stands out clear from Error: whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And God heareth and knoweth all things.” [Al-Qur’an 2:256] Yet more important, coerced submission, like coerced love, is utterly antithetical to liberal democracies including the theistic people, agnostic people, and even atheistic people thriving within liberal democracies. Fascism, on the other hand, is herd morality opposed to individual liberty. All is coercion. All is submission: love, morality, obedience, religion, and death. And the genocide of those heretical peoples, like the Jews, who refuse to be coerced, the destruction of those horrid people, like the Jews, who in any way admire the creativity of individual will is an absolute good for fascists. The fascist must crush the individual will and all who stand for the freedom of the individual will. For those who are opposed to the coerced religion of this fascist state, the Islamic fascist state, are those who also oppose the spirit of the Islamic fascist’s holiest of holies: the mystical melding of man and God into the state. Those who are opposed to this fascist worldview, however, those who embrace individual freedoms including, if not especially, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the marketplace of ideas must oppose this.So I agree with how conservatives frame this war. We are at war with Islamist fascists. But we are not at war with Muslim fundamentalists. This is rather a war between liberal democracies and a new oppressive variety of fascism. We are in a war to protect the freedom of the individual will from the coercion of the state. This is a war to allow each of us within all the families of liberal democracy to pursue the maximum creativity of our individual wills and let the fruits of our creativity whither or grow freely in the marketplace of ideas and things. This truly is the war of liberal democracy against the infinite despair of Islamist fascism. This is a war; therefore, that brooks no appeasement by the despairing American liberal, that defeatist psycho/social babbler.

The Democratic Party is the Mental Illness Party

JDCarmine — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:34:45 EDT

Though the cliché is that the Democrats need some big ideas, that they “need to stand for something”, this is actually false. The Democratic Party clearly does stand for something: they stand for the meek notion that psychotherapy and social psychology ought to be the engines behind all public policies. Arthur Brooks even appeals to psychologists to diagnose Republicans as once humorless whiny children. In a word, the Democratic Party has become the party of therapeutic intervention, whereas the Republican Party has become the party of moral and political philosophy. And in light of the Democratic Party’s recent history of political failure, if they genuinely want to change the course of American politics and maybe even win a few elections, they probably ought to reject the false gods of psychology, psychotherapy, and all other permutations of such un-testable ultra-soft sciences. Freud, after all, is dead, and DSM diagnoses by committee are absurd by any measure.Certainly liberal democracies, in the Jeffersonian and Lockean sense, tend to be skeptical of fundamentalist religious doctrines, but liberal democracies nevertheless run contrary to the Democrats’ psychological and sociological notions of accidental sin. To sin, in a true liberal democracy, requires the intent to sin. Republicans sin, plenty. Democrats never do. To sin requires a lapse of reason and a sense of individual honor diminished. Not so for the Democratic Party. For Democrats sin is impossible, there is only mental illness and social despair.America, however, is a liberal democracy, and Americans like to be honored for their freely chosen actions. We relish our ability to sin or not to sin, on purpose. We cherish our individual ability to change, even to revolt, if need be. We hold dear that our personal development of character is our individual responsibility and, more importantly, we take pride in our character so developed. We like the notion that we each must make ourselves into the people we will become. Americans, members of a liberal democracy as described by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man, thrive on their pursuit of Platonic thumos. Thumos is generally translated as “spiritedness” or the passion of one’s heart for just honor. But it is clearly meant by Plato as the intermediary component of our distinctly human psyche, between animal appetite and human reason. The human psyche loves with progressive sophistication: we love first with our stomachs, then with our hearts, and ultimately with our reason. Thumos is that amalgam of reasonably directed passion for personal recognition that drives the guardians of Plato’s Republic to want to fulfill their civic function precisely, honorably. Thumos then seems best understood as one’s personal desire for honor and glory in good accomplishments. There is no mystery that the recognition one receives for a job well done, the social recognition that brings about justifiable pride of accomplishment appeals to our sense of thumos. We want to succeed. As Fukuyama points out, we “struggle for recognition.” We yearn to be honored for our success. And we actively pursue the glory of a success that is earned. Yet, as Plato describes, the truly just individual recognizes that reason must guide thumos, and thumos must in turn guide appetite. Thumos is then the goal of appetitive desire, and yet thumos without the guidance of reason would be but tyrannical. No just soul wants mere glory; for the love for glory is but a transitory instrument for winning justifiable honor from those whose reason we truly respect. In the end we love the Good beyond even the chest satiated with thumos. The Democratic Party, however, has abandoned this spirited pursuit of honor, thumos. Whereas, at root the American psyche is Platonic, the Democratic Party’s psyche is a Freudian inversion. Democrats have placed appetite ahead of reason and conceived of reason as a pleading child before a cold patriarchal judge envisioned as some variety of super-ego-induced conscience. So, one must resign oneself to be a Democrat. One must resign one’s self to discontent within civilization. For the Democrats there are imagined giants in our souls like the imagined Anakim (Deut 1:28) that scared Moses into the desert for yet 40 more years. Psychological determinism cannot be beaten; there is no Promised Land of liberty for today’s Democrats, only sighing and recrimination and neverending sacrifice to sociological determinism. To be a Democrat, as they conceive of themselves, requires resignation to the plight of having a socially induced, socially designed, insurmountable psychology. We are individually helpless. Each of us is but the outcome of the consequences of the forces of history and politics upon our frail bodies and minds. The Democratic Party is the party of Fukuyama’s “Last Man,” that pathetic, shameless, prideless, genderless “person”. These are the “men without chests” (p.11) for whom resolving their socially induced mental illnesses are the only telos (function) left for their forlorn psyches. That is why sadness haunts Democrats so. Their sadness is their last delight.Reason, for the Democrat, has been reduced to a little ego navigating between the giants of Superego and Id. Their religion of social psychology thus undermines both authentic individual thumos and thereby individual moral character as well. For the Democrat there is no just pursuit of honor, no true thumos, merely a punitive psychosocial conscience and the requisite symptoms their quasi-scientists call ”ego defenses,” neuroses and mental illnesses. And so long as the Democratic Party continues their faithful embrace of their religion of psychology and the concomitant rejection of individual autonomy and individual pride that comes with autonomy, the Democratic Party will remain a party resigned to mental illness over moral autonomy.On the other hand, so long as Republicans refrain from descending into the social science quagmire and remain true to the big ideas of political and ethical philosophy - the perennial big ideas of the West - Republicans will, over time, continue to defeat the psychological ideologies of the Democrats. The ideas of philosophers like Plato, Locke, and Mill are timeless and pertinent. The trendy ideas of psychologists like Freud, Skinner, and neophyte Gilligan have all become laughable anachronisms in but decades or less after their arrival.The psychological despair of the Democratic Party became palpable for me in October 1991 during the Clarence Thomas hearings. Even as a pro-choice Democrat, I agreed with soon-to-be Justice Thomas that the Democrats were using Anita Hill as the rope for their “high-tech lynching.” During those hearings the Democratic Party had become something terrifying. This was not the party of individual freedom, as I had supposed. This was the party of paternalism. The Democratic Party had become the Mental Illness Party. They had given up reasoned morality in favor of deception on behalf of mental health. Anita Hill had allowed herself to be convinced that her mental health had been harmed by her brief time working with Clarence Thomas. Her bizarre pubic-hair-on-the-Coke-can story is akin to the sort of unverifiable recovered-memory hogwash psychotherapists regularly evoke and have often used to destroy the lives of innocent men and women. During the Clarence Thomas hearings it became clear the Democrats had replaced reasoned argument with a dangerous new attachment to the paternalism of psychotherapy. Psychotherapists easily justify both lying and coercion when they deem lying and coercion in the patient’s best interest. For the Democratic Party, Americans had become psychiatric patients. Moral intentionality had been usurped by mental illness. This was not merely a strategy for the Democrats: they bought it. To make their case during the Clarence Thomas hearings, Democrats brought a seething, mentally anguished, downright bizarre Anita Hill to testify. The Republicans brought legal scholars. At that point I became a Republican.

Essential Problems of Boys and Girls

JDCarmine — Tue, 30 May 2006 22:15:35 EDT

The problem with gender and sexual essentialisms is not whether or not there are essential differences between men and women, males and females. Certainly there are. The problem is the politics of determining the relative social value of these essential differences between the sexes. The problem is whether or not essential biological differences lead to essential differences between woman-people and man-people that lead to some people being presumed essentially better than others. If there are essential differences, the erroneous presumption made by gender feminists is that individual woman-people must be better at some things than individual man-people and vice versa. If essential differences between man-people and woman-people do exist then change is impossible for individuals, since the differences between woman-people and man-people are essential, like oxygen is essential to water and chlorine is essential to salt. And for the majority of human history essentialism has, in fact, been used to relegate individual women to a diminished social status. So gender feminists have every reason to be paranoid about essentialisms that may diminish women's social value. It is better to misrepresent essentialism, to the detriment of innocent boys, than take the risk of being intellectually honest. The problem of gender feminists' misrepresentation of essentialism is also one of degree. They wildly exaggerate essential differences. If woman-people are essentially different than man-people, the reality is that these differences are relatively minor and only show up statistically. The entire lunacy of the essentialism debate, as alluded to by Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys, hinges on an intentional misrepresentation of individuals as identical with the groups into which individuals are categorized. Certainly the gender categories of "man" and "woman" include many individuals who fit into these categories by definition alone. We need merely think of the difficulty of categorizing transgendered people to see how tenuous the man-people and woman-people categories can become.According to anthropologist Lionel Tiger, as quoted by Sommers, "Biology is not destiny, but it is a good statistical probability." As a consequence, the exaggerated essentialisms of Carol Gilligan and Sigmund Freud are more likely influenced by politics of power and gender dominance than scientifically responsible observations and statistics. For Gilligan, women are caring and men are not. For Freud, men's fear of castration and women's lack of that fear make men more morally astute. For both Gilligan and Freud the fanciful unobservable superego, as formed through the unique psycho-sexual development of boys and girls, is the essential cause of boys' or girls' moral superiority over the other. For Gilligan boys have cooties; for Freud girls do.The essentialisms of socio-biologist E.O. Wilson and once-Harvard-president Lawrence Summers, on the other hand, are statistical essences discovered by finding small patterns of variation between woman-people and man-people, culled from vast numbers of unique individuals, some of whom likely did not fit neatly into either category. Statistically speaking, testosterone laden individuals pursue advanced engineering degrees more frequently than estrogen laden individuals, and estrogen laden individuals pursue PhDs in literature more often than testosterone laden individuals do. But clearly there are many men and women in both fields. Men never get pregnant. Women do. But many men make great stay at home mothers and many women do not. Statistically however, women mostly mother and men mostly do not. So, though morphology is not destiny, male morphology certainly does provide an additional, and obvious, modicum of comfort when micturating in the woods. But that miniscule Freudian reality is not really enough to drive the gender-feminist pedagogy of Carol Gilliganians. To protect girls from the imagined horrors of masculinity, according to Sommers, paranoid gender feminists are intentionally mis-educating boys to become girls in all ways possible. Oh well, boys will be girls.

Student Bill of Rights, Yes!

JDCarmine — Wed, 10 May 2006 06:34:22 EDT

I have been a philosophy professor for about 27 years. In a nutshell, David Horowitz is right. We absolutely do need a Student Bill of Rights to ensure not just academic freedom, but reasonable discourse in general. As things are, with the ever-growing strength of Relativist Studies and all its permutations, the steady march forward of scientifically dubious Psychologies, and the leftist propaganda implicit in Service Learning curricula, PC hokum now tends to squelch logic and reasonable discourse on just about any day in the hallowed halls of the Humanities, in particular, and throughout the University in general. The more interesting question, though, is how this came to be. My sense is it occurred when Humanities professors -- Philosophy, Literature, and History -- abdicated their professional responsibility to teach and analyze great works on their own terms and began instead to yearn for the prestige they imagined existing in the Social Sciences. Suddenly we in the Humanities wanted to be scientists too, albeit pseudo-scientists, but scientists nonetheless. After Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud had proclaimed philosophy is praxis, God is dead, and morality is merely sublimation, we foolishly lost our way. After World War II and up until the advent of the Political Correctness revolution of the 1970's, the discipline of Philosophy, for example, had been reduced in most American universities to the analytic logic chopping of moral arguments, existential/phenomenological bewilderment and the spinning of Aristotelian metaphysical arguments for theologians in a godless world. All real social advancement appeared to be happening in the Sciences, even the limping Social Sciences.These were times of despair for the Humanities: "Why couldn't we be scientists like the Psychologists and Sociologists?" Then from the Social Sciences came structuralism, which allowed us in the Humanities to analyze all books in the context of linguistic structures rather than in terms of what the books actually said. But better was on the horizon. As if by magic, our final salvation arrived in the form of post-Freudian/post-structuralist/post-modernism. All books were now magically transformed into "texts" and all texts were meta-texts. Beyond all odds, we now believed we had been deigned "scientists." The world had become our oyster. Old Humanities had entered the game again and had become a new branch of Science: Subjectivist Science. We had some serious science work to do. In our newly deigned scientific minds, Humanities departments would root out all those silent social diseases. We would cure academia of the heartbreak of Phallo-logo-centrist, patriarchal, post-colonial, marginalizing oppressive Late Capitalism. Oh yes, now that we in the Humanities were scientists, too (even if only in our own minds), by golly, we were going to change some things. And we did.We teamed up with the Social Sciences and together became the self-officiated doctors and subjectivist scientists of social disorder. The 70's, 80's, and 90's had delivered the rebirth of Humanities. Anything could be science so long as we said it was. Since Knowledge itself was now defined as a cultural artifact, we believed we could even reject objective science itself in the name of our subjectivist scientific demonstrations of the oppressiveness of objective science to marginalized peoples and underrepresented genders. Now we in the Humanities, with the mercenary aid we had received from Psychology, the limping sister of Biology, could define and then enforce standards of mental and social health by our own dialogical methods. Even more important, with the patina of Psychology, we then began to enforce our politically correct standards through the strength of this new designation of Humanities as a subjective cultural "science." Now, in the Humanities, we too could diagnose social disease and discover new truths about poverty and gender and multiculturalism. As self-designated post-modern scientists, we in the Humanities could now find and define oppressed people any way we chose. No longer would we even have to read mere books. Oh no, not nearly science-y enough for us, now that we joined forces with the Social Sciences. We would now deconstruct "texts" with our new found voice, long silenced by the patriarchy. And as we worked our way into administrative positions, we soon began to dominate the very means of truth determination in the University. As Lawrence Summers discovered, we even began to use our special subjective post-modern science to squelch objective science. It didn't matter if planes designed by feminist epistemologists would never fly; they would be validated. After all, now we subjectivist scientists were the only scientists who had this new specialized ability to diagnose any text, every text, any thought, and every thought with some variety of mental/social illness. The patriarchy was everywhere and we would bring down the new hammer against them, the new Maleus Maleficarum.We in the Humanities had deified and begun to shamelessly worship the Social Sciences. As a consequence, Humanities professors gave up reading and struggling with great books in order to grasp the ideas actually written within them. Now, actually grasping content and engaging in pointed reasonable arguments about meaning and morality could be replaced by academic shunning, drive-by psychoanalysis, and the shrill ad hominem invective of paltry Humanities faculty striving to keep their newfound spot in their newly developed PC illusion of a social science. Once all books had been replaced by "texts," we too could imagine we were in the scientific business of textual analysis rather than our authentic professions of reading, writing and arguing about new ideas based on an honest appreciation of our cultural heritage. We in the Humanities had silently given up the free exchange of ideas in order to protect our new fantasy that we had the same sorts of inflexible truths we mistakenly imagined the real scientists to have. But unlike real science, where every hypothesis and every theory is only true insofar as it is yet unfalsified, we in the Humanities became intellectual fascists. Our absolute adherence to our favored ideologies was beyond mere objective truth. Our favored ideologies were subjectively true. Coercive dialogue had replaced honest dialectic. Disagreement was anathema. We now felt the truth, we loved the truth, and no argument could convince us otherwise. "Truth" in the Humanities had become the allegiance to the group and was determined by the group to which our allegiance was bound. The Humanities, as it attempted to transform itself into a species of Social Science, had become no less than an extremist religion. And like every extremist religion, the Humanities became oppressive, dangerous, and utterly self deceived. Rather than pointing out the incoherent confusion that oozes from the social sciences or attacking the Social Sciences for their paltry presumptions, we in the Humanities allied ourselves with the Social Sciences. In so doing, we betrayed our students and our genuine professions. We in the Humanities are, if nothing else, the guardians of our culture. When we became to be the PC hit squad for the Social Scientists, we betrayed the 4,000 years of Western culture entrusted to us.Still, I remain an optimist. The inexorable pitiless hand of real economic forces guarantees a change is on the horizon for the foppish presumptions of the PC Humanitarians, that one real Social Science will pay us our just deserts. PC will disappear once the students who have to pay about $200,000 for a four-year degree begin to choose not to pay the salaries of the PC black shirts by rejecting notoriously PC institutions in favor of intellectually honest colleges and universities. When the PC pushers got their degrees, they could work a summer job to pay for it. Not that many of them did, but they easily could have. Not so now. My students know this and they become less and less patient with PC hokum when they look at their astronomical debt and realize that, as they listen hour after hour about phallologocentrism, post-colonialism, victim feminism, and the patriarchy, this enlightened discourse is costing them around (at 120 credits or 40 classes for a BA degree, with about 36 actual teacher-contact hours per course per semester) oh, $140 per minute! I am certain PC Colleges and Universities across the nation are soon to get a real-life lesson in economics and it won't be altogether Marxist. $140 per minute for PC bullying is a bit more than the pathetic students the PC professors have deemed mentally/socially ill are going to pay. Either we in our fields stop the Politically Correct nonsense on our own or Humanities departments will simply disappear as those students who actually suffer to pay for our armchair indulgences, as well as our homes, simply stop buying our product.

What are You? Some Kind of Atheist?

JDCarmine — Fri, 7 Apr 2006 22:58:22 EDT

Yes I am some kind of an atheist. I am a skeptic. I simply do not hear the seductive songs of any gods these days. I have become wonderfully deaf to the myriad siren voices of our pop-pantheon: Neo-Marxism, Political Correctitude-ism, Gender Feminism, DSMIV-ism, even Neo-Conservatism. I also no longer hear the grand deep baritone of that big old daddy God: the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I am that kind of atheist who found that where there is God-talk, there are people with power lording that power over others they either pity or disdain. When I hear God-talk, I tend to hear more clearly these others, the unloved ones. And there are always the others. They are the outsiders and the uninvited. When I hear God-talk, I hear those who just don't get it - I hear the other-minded, the other-sided, the other-others. I hear the bad people, the demonized people. I hear those who either must be helped with this god, or must be crushed with this god's blessings. That is the kind of atheist I am. I don't hear the call of these gods. I really am one of those men who just don't get it. Anita Hill and N.O.W. - I just don't get it one little bit, but I certainly do understand it.Atheism is often misrepresented as a faith in the non-existence of God. That is not the sort of atheism I embrace. It is not a faith, and I am not a faithful atheist. Rather, I am an atheist who accepts that, as a human being, I have unavoidable and periodic mystical experiences of the infinitude of the universe and a periodic awesome feeling that I, as a smidgen among smidgens, somehow fit within this awesome infinitude. I am, I know, going to be all right regardless of how it all goes, including my own death and the death of all that I love. I also know and accept that all I love will, in time, be lost.This is mysticism, yes, but it is not evidence that there is some entity named "God." For my mystical experience is an internal emotion. And there is no evidence that my internal emotion correlates to anything externally real at all. The point is, "God" is a name that only names human desires, human confusion, and human hopefulness. "God" simply does not name anything beyond us humans. But does this mean we know all there is? Of course not. Does this mean our brains, grand as they seem to us, can grasp that which is beyond our grasp? Not at all, that is a contradiction. Still, God-talk remains people talk. So my atheism simply means that God-talk is empty talk, and what is, is, and if what is, is something one might actually name, it is beyond us, and it certainly would not answer to "God". Nothing about what is can be reasonably said. What does "God" mean? Nothing. Who does God name? No one. That is atheism.So, when we feel the mystical nudge of spirituality, that feeling gives us no evidence that "God" refers to anything we can say anything about. "God" refers only to our own personal hopefulness and justifies a concomitant desire to claim a divine right over others who call their personal hopefulness by the innumerable names within their own God-talk: Jesus, Mohammed, Zeus, Yahweh, Om, Isis, Zagreus, Agdistus, Heroin, Money, Atheism.It is important to note, however, that I reject agnosticism. I know that I know God names nothing and no one. No evidence can be produced that might suddenly force me to believe in God. God does not exist, and 2+2 will never equal 27. I am certain I know God is not the name of the ineffable apophatic mystery, nor is it Ayatollah Khomeini, Pat Robertson, Robert Spitzer, L. Ron Hubbard, Freud, Marx, or even Kim Gandy. People invent God; God does not invent people. The rest is unspeakable.

Scientology Vs Psychotherapy - Long Live South Park

JDCarmine — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 05:40:04 EST

Scientology vs. Psychotherapy is truly one of US pop culture's most delicious ironies. Stealing a phrase from Mark Russell referring to Democrats and Republicans, this really is a case of the "Brain Washed leading the Brain Dead." In politics however, it is hard to determine who is which. In the war of these two dominant US pop religions, Scientology and Psychotherapy, it is clear that the, uh well, perhaps it is not too clear which is which here either. Both could be as easily the brain dead or the brain washed and likely each is both. Clearly the brain disorders of scientology and psychotherapy are equally pseudo-scientific responses to the death of God that has been troubling the West since Nietzsche made that proclamation just prior to the 20th century. The death of God in the West is an historical fact. But it is not at all a statement about the existence of God. Whether or not God exists is a mystery beyond human certainty. But the death of God is a factual certainty about Western culture. By the beginning of the 20th century, God was nowhere to be found in any advanced thought outside of theology and, to a lesser degree, philosophy. God is nowhere a part of any legitimate science. Simultaneously the beginning of the 20th century marked a period of genocide like nothing the West could ever have imagined. This is exactly why Nietzsche's proclamation was so trenchant.Nietzsche warned us that the death of God was the beginning of a period of nihilism that would sweep across Europe. And it did just that: from the mass killing of the Armenian genocide through the horrors of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot, no less than 100 million human beings had been systematically annihilated in the name of the post-god religions. Our 21st century lunatic ululating murderers seem pretty tame by the standards of the 20th century. Of course, the 21st century is young, and Islamo-fascism is just beginning to build momentum, so who knows. Maybe Wahabist stupidity may turn out to be the genocidal equal of Marxism or Nazism. When God is dead, perhaps not actually anything is possible but wholesale genocide seems certain. Nevertheless, I find sheer pleasure in the conflict between psychobabble and Thetan babble. Both scientology and psychotherapy, like communism and for that matter PC feminism, are post-god religions. Thetans Thetans everywhere and not a drop of sense. Thychotherapy and Thientology. Yes it is the new Yahweh Superego vs. the new evil Prophet Xenu. But lest one thinks this comparison specious, merely remember both varieties of babble refer to the influence of past lives on present lives. Freud and his followers, in numerous works, ground the Oedipus complex in the pre-historic Primal Scene. Yes indeedy, when man was young, according to Freud et al, the sons got together murdered and ate the Primal Father in order to have primal Mom and her daughters. And this remains the source of our difficult object relations around Mommy and Daddy. As Freud writes in The Ego and the Id, we inherit past unconscious memories. In L. Ronny land there is the Xenu incident and various other horrible events from our past, the memory of which we genetically inherit, and for all but the most enlightened Thetans, like all but the most enlightened psycho-therapized, these memories remain submerged in, yet again, the Scientologist's version of the UNCONSCIOUS. Ooo ooo ooo, ghostly weirdness everywhere.