UP@NIGHT

In the New York Times on Sunday, January 24, 2010, Thomas Friedman writes in his piece, “More (Steve) Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” about programs that can be helpful in getting the economy moving.  For example,

Obama should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start-up companies that won’t just give us temporary highway jobs, but lasting good jobs that keep America on the cutting edge. The best way to counter the Tea Party movement, which is all about stopping things, is with an Innovation Movement, which is all about starting things.

Fine.  Let’s support programs that can provide education and opportunity.  But Friedman also gives the president some advice.

Well, here’s my free advice to Obama, post-Massachusetts. If you think that the right response is to unleash a populist backlash against bankers, you’re wrong. Please, please re-regulate the banks in a smart way. But remember: in the long run, Americans don’t rally to angry politicians. They do not bring out the best in us. We rally to inspirational, hopeful ones. They bring out the best in us. And right now we need to be at our best.

This is a bad piece of political advice.  It pretends that one can decontextualize a politician’s responses and hides behind the phrase “in the long run” in order to do so.  President Franklin Roosevelt sounded pretty angry when he spoke to the nation about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—you remember, “a date which will live in infamy.”  And then there was his cousin, Theodore.  He got pretty angry at those old monopolies in order to help pass some progressive anti-trust laws.  In general, can you imagine how the American people would react if an American president did not get angry at a perceived threat, domestic or foreign, to the well-being of the nation?

To say that Americans don’t rally in the long run to angry politicians is one of those innocuous truisms that mean little in the real political world, for everything depends on what one means by “the long run.”  (As Keynes said, “in the long run we’ll all be dead.”)  In the short run, and medium runs, the American people surely do rally to an angry president, as long as they can connect with the anger.  They also rally to presidents who know when to get angry and when to be inspirational.  (Presumably this would mean getting angry on and off, so it would sort of be in the long run.)  Oh, yes, and then there are those presidential moments that combine anger and inspiration.

Since the statement about anger is so obviously off the mark and hackneyed, one might be inclined to look for some other motivation for Friedman tossing it out.  Here’s my guess.  Friedman is scared that if Obama goes too far in attacking the bankers a rift may develop between his administration and the wonderful world of capital.  And then America may find itself falling behind foreign nations in the new flat world of economic competition that we face.  According to Friedman, entrepreneurs, who at some point will require capital, are the movers and shakers in this world, and it will be a pretty scary place for those places and persons who aren’t on board in terms of the new world order.

But back home, in the meantime, Obama only gets to use the bully pulpit with one hand tied behind his back while he is trying to back Wall Street down.  (Note Machiavelli here: it is better that the prince be loved and feared.)  Friedman wants Obama to re-regulate the banks.  In the real world of American politics just how is he supposed to accomplish this without some heavy duty support in Congress?  And given the special interests standing in the way of reforms, you can kiss them good-bye if the American people don’t get sufficiently excited about the issue to get their representatives worried about reelection.

I have a piece of advice for Mr. Friedman and I hope that he won’t mind.  It is in the spirit of his advice to the president:  Don’t worry!  Obama won’t forget about being loved over the long run.

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UPDATE, January 27, 2010

For readers who may have felt that I was being a bit unfair to Friedman by claiming that he may have been motivated by fear, I suggest that you check out his column today, “Adult’s Only, Please.” Here is an excerpt.  Catch the last line.   (He does acknowledge that Obama might be justified in being a bit peeved by the way some on Wall Street have behaved, but hey, just let’s not make them too angry.  And if you do, well, you are not being an adult, which of course Friedman is.)

Lately, we’ve seen an explosion of situational thinking. I support the broad proposals President Obama put forth last week to prevent banks from becoming too big to fail and to protect taxpayers from banks that get in trouble by speculating and then expect us to bail them out. But the way the president unveiled his proposals — “if those folks want a fight, it’s a fight I’m ready to have” — left me feeling as though he was looking for a way to bash the banks right after the Democrats’ loss in Massachusetts, in order to score a few cheap political points more than to initiate a serious national discussion about an incredibly complex issue.

President Obama is so much better when he takes a heated, knotty issue, like civil rights or banking reform, and talks to the country like adults. He is so much better at making us smarter than angrier. Going to war with the banks for a quick political sugar high after an electoral loss will just work against him and us. It will spook the banks into lending even less and slow the recovery even more.

I am a professor by trade.  I like the idea of making people smarter (or perhaps I should say, better educated), especially over the long run.  But I think we all know the danger of coming off like a professor discussing fire codes while the house is burning down.

Photo Brendan

William James………………………Teabaggers

Compromise is at the heart of American politics; yield in order to gain.  Politicians and citizens compromise because self-interest demands that they do so.  But at times they also compromise because they come to see the other person’s point of view.  Or as Obama likes to put it, they stand inside the other guy’s shoes.  This doesn’t necessarily mean, as Bill Clinton was so fond of saying, that I feel your pain.  We don’t have to go this far to see the other person’s point of view, although sometimes we might.  We just have to be willing to engage in an imaginative act that allows us to step outside of our comfort zone.  Functioning democracies depend on this ability.  Without it they descend into gridlock, civil strife, and even civil war.

However, sometimes we can’t empathize with others.  Not, for example, because they are hardened criminals whose ways are simply unacceptable, but because the ways in which other people understand and experience the world are beyond our powers of imaginative reconstruction.  Our failure here is not due to a lack of good will.  It relates to a distinction that the philosopher William James makes in his essay, “A Will to Believe,” between two kinds of hypotheses: living and dead.  That the earth is round is a living hypothesis for most every American in 2010.  That the earth is flat is a dead one.   This was not always true.  For much of human history the opposite was the case.  Today there are those for whom God is a living hypothesis, and the Deity is a vital and accepted feature of their experience.  But others, convinced atheists, can make no connection with this hypothesis.  They do not experience God as a living hypothesis and no amount of arguing or cajoling will change their minds.  Agnostics on the other hand experience God as a living hypothesis, but they also experience the notion that there is no God in a similar fashion.  They have what James calls an option: a choice between two living hypothesis, although it is possible that they may never choose.

How then does this relate to Obama and health care?  Obama is a savvy politician, who is both politically and philosophically pragmatic.  This doesn’t mean that he is without values.  It means that he thinks about their realization in terms of what will work.  And this may mean modifying his goals, compromising if necessary on his goals, in order to create some reform.  Obama is also a storyteller, one who understands that storytelling requires being able to see different points of view.  As a storyteller he appreciates the importance of empathy in the go of human life.  It wasn’t accidental that he spoke of it when he nominated Judge Sotomayor.  And he has also spoken about empathy as a lesson that he learned from his mother.  That he can listen and stand inside the other guy’s shoes is one of his strengths as a storyteller and as a politician.  Empathy, no doubt, can be an important tool in a politician’s toolkit.  But it can also be an Achilles heal.

Obama made several tactical judgments on how best to pass health care legislation.  One of them, however, was not actually a tactical judgment, although it could be read this way.  It was actually an assumption.  He believed (at times) that his use of empathy would be reciprocated by the opposition.  Obama has an unusual ability to empathize with others.  It is natural for him to take the perspective of others.  He assumed too much, or had too much faith, in the opposition possessing a comparable skill.  Although he certainly understood that powerful special interests  would be aligned against him, he appears to have forgotten how James’s notion of live and dead hypothesis could come into play.

There are forces out there, forces for whom the idea that the federal government can be a force for good is a dead hypothesis.  The birthers and teabaggers fall into such a camp.  It is not that they merely have firm convictions or values.  It is that the hypothesis that the federal government can be a force for good is simply not a part of their repertoire.  It is a dead hypothesis.  There are Republicans in Congress who believe this.  And there are also Republicans in Congress who need to pretend to believe it so that they can get reelected.   A fatal brew for a reformist president whose natural inclination is to try to compromise with the opposition, and who was once convinced that a cooperative bipartisan approach to health care would carry the day.

So where does this leave Obama?  Of course he knew that his initiatives would give raise to strong opposition.  But there is a difference between strong opposition and folks like the teabaggers.  There will be no compromising with those for whom health care reform is part of the dead hypothesis of “the good federal government.”  Resurrecting the federal government for them is like resurrecting God for the confirmed atheist.   And there will be no compromising with those who have been captured by them or their ilk.  They will hold their ground on every new initiative, and they will carry along the entire GOP, unless the self-interest of (some) Republicans leads the party in another direction.  (Pay attention here to how Brown handles himself in Massachusetts.)

It’s not that Obama doesn’t know this.  Yet he has been hesitant to acknowledge the limits of empathy and compromise, not just intellectually but perhaps more importantly emotionally.   The paradox here is that recognizing the limits of empathy and compromise may very well lead to substantial movement on legislation that Obama supports.  The savvy politician in him knows this.  It’s going to have  to bring the storyteller along, at least for now.  There will always be times for tales.

Most Americans generally shy away from absolutes.  They don’t like to think of themselves as driven by dead hypothesis.  Most Americans are more like agnostics than atheists or the religious when it comes to the federal government, ready to shift one way or the other depending on circumstance.  They will become (temporary) believers if they are given something that they believe will work.  Give them a reason to believe that the federal government can be an active and helpful feature of their lives and they will take it.  Give them a reason to believe the opposite, and they will, at least for the time being.  Regarding health care, Obama’s rhetorical task is clear.  He must help make (temporary) believers of the agnostics with regard to the federal government.

Here you have Professor Irving Fisher after the 1929 Market Crash explaining that stocks were not actually too high; it was just that people were going into debt in order to invest.  Right and wrong.  Stocks were too high and there was too much investment that involved debt.

And here we are eighty years later and we all know who took on too much debt in order to make bundles of money.  How come you didn’t you listen to Professor Fisher, financial wizards of Wall Street?  Perhaps because you were able to take the money and run?  (Or not even run.  Just wait for another bonus as the smoke cleared.)

(UPI Photo/Alexis C. Glenn)

Wall Street……………………….Henry Adams

Yes, it is certainly easy to be a Monday morning quarterback once the game is over.  But the game is far from over for the Democrats and Obama.   Brown’s victory in Massachusetts—won in part because Obama supporters sat out the election or actually voted for Brown because they were upset about Obama not being progressive enough on health care—is indeed the proverbial wake-up call.  Obama now knows that his administration is going to have to take a more political turn.  What does this mean?   Harnessing the populism that propelled Brown and Obama into office.  Of course those who supported them aren’t all the same populists, but there is an overlap.

People feel ripped off and they should.   They have been ripped off by Wall Street and now they are worried that the government will rip them off with new health care legislation.  That the former is true, and the latter is not, makes little difference to current politics.  What should have happened, and what now must happen, is that Obama must harness the outrage against Wall Street into outrage about how the insurance companies have ripped people off and will continue to do so unless stopped.  This doesn’t require that Obama become a flaming radical.  But it does require that he worry less about what the big bad banking system will do to us if we don’t cater to its wishes.

American capitalism will not go down the tubes if we make prudent decisions about what banks can and can not invest in.  It’s now clear, once again, that commercial banks that take deposits should not become investment houses.  This was the law of the land for more than sixty years until Republican Senator Gramm, and Republican Representatives Leach and Bliley, helped change things in 1999 with the the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.   While there are of course numerous reasons for why stocks are not worth any more today than they were back in 1999, it does seem that GLB’s legislation has not helped to protect us from bad times.  As a matter of fact, it undoubtedly was a major factor in the banking crisis.

No doubt Obama was worried that if he didn’t cater to the banks the American economy would recover more slowly.  But the political risk, and the risk to our economy in the future, is simply too great now not to harness the populist sentiment in the country.   And you know Americans have had a long distrust of bankers.  Writing at the turn of the twentieth-century about his reaction to bankers in the 1860′s, Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, said the following.  (He speaks about himself in the third person.)

He [McCulloch] was a banker, and towards bankers Adams felt the narrow prejudice which the serf feels to his overseer; for he knew he must obey, and he knew that the helpless showed only their helplessness when they tempered obedience by mockery.   The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter XVI

So enough jokes on late night TV and more teeth in actual measures to reign in the fat cats, especially since the Supreme Court has decided to make money the undeniable king of our future elections by unleashing corporate wealth to finance elections.

And Adams would have a warning for Obama as he proceeds.

The most troublesome task of a reform President was that of bringing the Senate back to decency.  The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter XVII

Albert Einstein……………………………………………………John Dewey

Well, it turns out that while physicists and poets can kiss their most productive years good-bye when they are barely out of adolescence, philosophers and other types of humanists just keep ticking…peaking in their late 40′s and 50′s but with hardly any drop off after that.  At least so says Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC-Davis.  The lead on this comes from a post on Andrew Sullivan’s site today,“The Age of Brilliance.”

Sullivan quotes a piece by Jonah Lehrer:

While physics, math and poetry are dominated by brash youth, many other fields are more amenable to middle age. (Simonton’s list includes domains such as “novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine”.) He argues that these fields show a very different creative curve, with a “a leisurely rise giving way a comparatively late peak, in the late 40s or even 50s chronologically, with a minimal if not largely absent drop-off afterward” (italics added).

Do I believe it?  I guess it depends on how one measures “productivity,” among other factors.  But it’s nice to know that one researcher in this area thinks that the twilight years can still be golden years for those engaged in studying philosophy or writing novels.  (But then again, there are poets who have done their best work later in life.  Perhaps we shouldn’t leave it to psychologists to evaluate these matters.)

Btw, John Dewey was in his mid-seventies when he wrote and published Art As Experience, which is considered by many to be one of his most important books.  He published his, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, a work of more than 500 pages, when he was nearly 80.  Einstein, best work in his 20′s through his mid-30′s.

Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) versus The University of Louisiana, Lafayette (President Joseph E. Savoie)

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Adios Plato, and Aristotle, and Kant, and Hegel, and Dewey, etc.   I heard the news, today, oh boy.    According to the New York Times article, “Making College ‘Relevant’,”

The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.

So you’re not impressed.  Who cares about some backwater school in the state that elected Bobby Jindal its governor.   Perhaps, dear reader, there are some facts that you should know about The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, for they may reveal how serious the situation is for philosophy and philosophy majors.   Fall enrollment was 16,320 at Lafayette, according to its web site.  Also, according to its web site:

• The University of Louisiana at Lafayette owns a total of about 1,400 acres. Its main campus consists of 137 acres; the athletic complex and Cajundome sit on 243 acres; University Research Park has 148 acres; the Center for Ecology and Environmental Technology has 51 acres; and the Equine Center is comprised of 100 acres.
• UL Lafayette has a 600-acre farm/renewable resources laboratory with a 30-acre pond for crawfish and catfish culture in Cade, La.
• The Carnegie Foundation has designated UL Lafayette as a “Research University with High Research Activity.” That puts UL Lafayette in the same category as Clemson, Auburn and Baylor universities. The only other Louisiana institution in the same category is the University of New Orleans.
• The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
• UL Lafayette offers 78 undergraduate degree programs.

And it’s not as if the regents for the University care only about crawfish and catfish ponds and not philosophy.  According to the Times:

When Louisiana’s regents voted to eliminate the philosophy major last spring, they agreed with faculty members that the subject is “a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and science institution.” But they noted that, on average, 3.4 students had graduated as philosophy majors in the previous five years; in 2008, there were none. “One cannot help but recognize that philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students,” the board concluded.

As a former chair of philosophy departments, and currently director of a Liberal Arts program, I can tell you that it would be rough to defend a major, any major, if there weren’t any majors.  But here’s the thing.  I simply can’t fathom how a campus with over 16,000 students did not have one philosophy major graduating in 2008.  Usually universities offer dual majors and some students interested in philosophy take advantage of this opportunity.  Also, philosophy is often the major of choice for students hoping to go on to law school.  (None in Lafayette?)  So either philosophy is on its death bed, which might be possible, and/or the people in Lafayette simply aren’t working very hard or in the right way to produce majors.  (I counted four full-time faculty members in Lafayette’s Philosophy Department, which works out to approximately one philosophy professor for every 4,000 students.  I can see that this is an institution that has worked diligently to make philosophy available to its students.)

And what about Michigan State?  Well, it’s in Michigan, a state whose economy is currently as cold as its winters.   (Aristotle claims that we turn to the study of philosophy only when the necessities of life have been addressed.  Or in Feuerbach’s words, “Eat first, philosophize later.”) But the problem is not just down in Lafayette or up in Michigan.

I recently attended the Eastern Division Meeting of The American Philosophical Association and can report that things are indeed bleak in philosophy on the job front, that is, if you wish to become a professor of philosophy.  And this is especially true for young people.   Typically a very large number, if not the majority, of graduate students on the market gather for job interviews at this meeting.   It is as much a professional gathering as it is a jobs fair.  But fair it is not.  The swings in our economy can make the conference feel more like Vegas in any given year than a symposium at Oxford.

I have no doubt that other liberal arts disciplines have seen a serious decline in new positions this year.  Why should large swaths of academia be any different from the rest of the economy?  But liberal arts majors should not despair, for the vast majority of them will never seek employment as professors.  (And even those who want to become professors should remember that the market does change, even if it’s rarely very good, as it was in the 1960′s.)   It seems that what we have been hearing for years–namely, that the liberal arts supply critical skills and tools that many employers appear to want–remains true.  This too is spelled out in the article.

There’s evidence, though, that employers also don’t want students specializing too soon. The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”

It’s possible that these prospective employers were telling the researchers what they wanted to hear, but for many good reasons, I think not.  The fact is that the skills listed above are crucial to many, if not most, of the better paying jobs that will be available in the coming years.  (Just speak with well-placed business executives and ask how important communication skills are for good positions in their companies.)

Of course none of this addresses the intrinsic value of studying the liberal arts, often something that people learn to appreciate only when they grow older (as the Times article points out).  In this regard there is some good news for liberal arts and philosophy types: it seems that a lot of current students are interested in developing a meaningful philosophy of life.  The author of the Times article, Kate Zernike, uses a UCLA survey to show how in the last four decades finances have become more important to entering freshmen than philosophical questions.  But I prefer to see the glass half full.  After years of being socialized into a hyper consumer based economy, almost half of the freshmen are still interested developing a meaningful philosophy of life.

Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.

As a professor of liberal arts and philosophy, I’ll gladly take 48% and run with it…..

Nostradamus  Vs.  UP@NIGHT No Contest

It has been over a year and a half since I began UP@NIGHT and my career as a pundit, for lack of a more refined label.  I suppose part of the challenge was to see how a philosopher by trade might do in the prediction business.  How I would stack up against the pundits in the media.  You know, mano a mano.

I thought that it would be fitting and fair to readers, and myself, to look at blogs in which I predicted the outcome of events in the political world to see if my track record was any good.  Low and behold, I discovered that if I had been a betting man, I could have made some good money.  So, without further ado, and no false modesty, here are the predictions.  Roll Over Nostradamus.

The titles are linked to the original blogs.

Correct Predictions: