A very promising development in scholarship

Tonight, I'm finishing up a ton of paperwork that I'm behind on and I hear this really terrific show from Studio360, the late night NPR show about culture and society.

I love Studio360. They were the first to alert me to the monkey slam poetry video that lampoons the human race and how much it thinks it has evolved. Really creative stuff on this show.

Tonight, I was listening to this really terrific story on African Americans defying the politically correct push of the 1990's by the likes of August Wilson to only do African American roles and to embrace Shakespeare as their own and this really beautiful Shakespeare reading from Maya Angelo.

And then they bring on this really awesome and encouraging story about the most recent book by Yale law professor, Kenji Yoshino, called Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights.

Now, honestly, this is not the type of book that would usually get me excited. Law books, generally, have to be really rigorous and ready to go beyond the more narrow world of law and politics to seriously interest me since I think of too much of the law springs from a narrow world view that too often ignores the human consequences from its often lengthy and involved and far too often cold logic. Ronald Dworkin writes law work that I very much appreciate. As does Richard Posner. And what both of these writers and other law writers (Alan Dershowitz is someone I've grown up reading) have in common is that they go beyond the law to look at the human consequences of their thinking.

And listening to this Studio360 interview with Kenji Yoshino convinced me that this guy's book is well worth checking out, that he writes very much like me - with scholarship and personal sharing intertwined - and in a way that is really touching, that his thinking on matters of race, gender, and identity are really wise and not at all in line with the politically-correct identity politics that characterizes far too much of the thinking and writing in this area of political discussion, and that his ideas are some of the most remarkably consistent with my own that I have ever read.

And this dude is a law professor at Yale Law School.

I would say that's a very healthy development for the life in my own ideas and thinking.

I'm very excited to check this guy's book out at the book store the next time I happen by. It's been a long time since I read a book that said something genuinely new that I could shake my head in agreement with since this whole political period has been one long head nod amongst a lot of people saying the same thing without having to say much at all, really, in my view.

Who would have thought I would have found such a fellow traveler in a law school faculty?

I didn't. That's for sure.

And that is why this is such a promising development.

A welcome suprise.

Love,
Ben

Dissent

Do you know how hard it is to dissent from popular opinion that is socially, politically and legally enforced and pressured to the contrary to your thinking?

Really hard.

I may now and always be wrong, but not a goddamn soul can accuse me of cowardice, that's for goddamn sure.

And, yet, ironically, I am regularly thought of as just that.

Too soft. Too nice. Care too much.

And this is the first time in my life that I've ever been accused of not being rigorous enough. Physically lazy I have been many, many times in my life. Intellectually lazy is the last thing I ever thought I could be accused of, given how much people are constantly complaining about how I drone on and on about some complex line of reasoning about this matter or that.

I am learning that when people believe something strongly enough, they will believe a lot of things about you if you disagree.

I am learning what it means to be on the other side. On the other side of liberals. On the other side of conservatives. On the other side of Christians. On the other side of Muslims. On the other of whatever group sees itself as the righteous cause and the other group as the major obstacle to their prevailing ideals.

I am learning what it means to be on the other side of everyone.

It's a strange feeling for a guy who has largely fit in with almost every group I've ever belonged to because I'm such a nice guy, to now often not fit in because of what a nice guy I am.

All while I'm being pressured and bullied and having whatever view strikes whomever as righteous (preferably with some claim on legal backing, these days, even when those claims are, far too often, these days, in the school I work in, in contradiction with one another) being enforced on me by whomever they can get the backing to do just that.

I spent my whole youth resisting peer pressure only to face the by far hardest challenge to that capacity by adults engaging in a far more forceful peer pressure.

Ironic, isn't it?

Thank god they all really do have the right cause, because what would this world look like if everyone was going around pressuring one another for whatever cause they thought worthy.

Or maybe, sadly enough, that is what the world really looks like today.

Do you know how hard it is to dissent and resist that kind of pressure in the kind of climate where everyone is strong-arming for their point of view?

It's a real bitch is what it is.

You can accuse me of a lot of things. People regularly do. But being a coward isn't one of them.

And that is one of many, many things that people have thought about me during this period that they haven't thought about nearly enough.

Isn't it ironic that we keep rationalizing pressuring and bullying people to have right causes will out and yet so many consciences seem to survive intact despite that pressure?

That's a sign of the most fundamental strength that freedom affords liberal peoples and a liberal society that we all take for granted, no matter how much many of us have studied everything that our predecesors went through to teach us through our horrific historical experiences as much as through affirmatively taught values around the importance of conscience and free will.

Surely our consciences must expect that we square ourselves with the contradictions and the hypocrisy and the more honest reality of our talk and our action around the matter of force and rules and law. It is this weakness that terrorists and bullies play upon when they do their dirty work and exploit our fear that we are too weak.

We are too weak. We are too weak to be more honest with ourselves about who we really are. And once we can be more honest with ourselves about that matter and about where our hearts really lie around this matter of force - meaning, how we actually respond to force, not just as we grapple for a means to make others do as we desire - we will find that what we thought was weakness was actually our most powerful strength. We care as much as we do, we are as generous as we are, we are as forgiving as we are, we are as decent as we are because of how strong we are to do all of those things and how weak and tempting and little our more frail, petty, small, unforgiving and forceful, aggressive instincts actually serve us.

How much we care is our strength, not our weakness. Our weakness is our fear that we care too much. And it is a weakness that we are all too tempted by these days. And ironically, it is the this weakness that we most have in common with terrorists and dictators.

And the only true path of strength is taking seriously our need to give a shit about the world and about other people. And forgiving what aggressive, mean-spirited, rationalizing pricks we can often be. The only real strength for us, individually and as a culture of liberal democratic peoples is on the other side of that acknowledgement, forgiveness, and willingness to square our consciences with who we really are. We all need forgiveness. And far too many of us are far too reluctant to give it. And yet, ironically, they all need it. And that is the weakness we must face if we are to be strong and not just perpetually afraid, for good reason, that we are weak because we refuse to face the path of real strength.

That strength comes from our failures as much as from our successes, I am learning, from experience and from more honest reflection on the world. It will come slowly. But it will come. Because though weakness can be tempting, it cannot sustain us.

Only real strength can sustain us. And that is why our highest liberal values are our most enduring legacy. Because it is in our highest values that we find our most sustaining strengths.

Love,
Ben

Respect for the rule of law

I don't typically read Slate magazine, anymore, for the same reason I don't typically read the New Republic anymore: because they seem more polemic - smart polemic to be sure, but polemic nonetheless - than honest argument. I've learned more over the course of this war how that term is both meaningful and relative, though the relative distinctions are important to me, since neither of those liberal publications approach the intellectual integrity of liberal scholars like Joe Nye or Amartya Sen or Abraham Maslow.

But today I made an exception.

Jacob Weisberg did a very nice review of the most recent book by George Bush's favorite historian, Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900. If Weisberg is even half-way accurate in his review of Roberts' book, it looks like a terribly self-serving effort by a conservative to affirm a number of long-standing and currently popular conservative views of conservative leadership and the world rather than to critically examine history and the world - from a conservative perspective or otherwise - and to bring the best integrity from conservative ideas and thinking to that challenge.

And reading that review got me thinking.

I've been frustrated with how "the rule of law" has rationalized all kinds of pressure, bullying, control, various strains of self-righteous thinking about the world (with not-so-open hypocrisy about why various groups support certain freedoms that other groups oppose and why their assertions of "the rule of law" are genuine appeals to a "right application" of the rule of law, while applications by opponents are abrogations of important freedoms; the illegal immigration debate comes to mind, here, as does the Lewis Libby affair, in very recent political discussions).

I've been frustrated with how I believe the rule of law has been used to justify all kinds of intellectually dishonest arguments to favor various causes and how a debate and discussion about the how much respect really should be accorded the rule of law has been overrun by a popular notion of the rule of law being rationalized for purposes of political pressure rather than a more intellectually honest discussion of the rule of law.

But it occurred to me that I need to engage that discussion with more intellectual honesty, as well, genuinely engaging the issue of respect for the rule of law with the integrity that this principle has brought to a number of issues, even as I often disagree that the law should, ideally, be used to resolve so many such issues, and very strongly believe that the use of legal means of pressure and coercion are often counterproductive, unnecessarily disruptive and destructive of peoples' lives, do not resolve many of the issues that they are meant to resolve, and create enormous confusion about such questions amongst ordinary people and are often far too intrusive in the lives of ordinary people that very much undermines respect for authority and the law which is a necessary and important principle around the most serious questions that democratic people face.

I am a liberal in the tradition of John Stuart Mill with a much more square presumption that life amongst free peoples' should not be regulated, as much as possible, and that free peoples should find more mature and the least aggressive ways possible (even in the rarest of circumstances possible when aggression is or may be necessary), to resolve important differences between them.

I have always had a generally stronger respect for authority than most of my peers, I think, despite often many legitimate and other times many petty concerns and differences with authority figures and the application of rules and law. I have a much stronger respect for law and authority the older I get, despite so many situations where I think law and authority are overwrought and overused and undermine their own credibility amongst people, except in those situations where they want to impose on their neighbor or when law and authority are, as a matter of fact more than a matter of opinion, necessary to resolve matters of physical violence and aggression between people.

So much of my writing is written within that context and the context of a political period where "the rule of law" is rhetoric and propaganda as much as principle being used and rationalized to pressure for all sorts of causes, many of which positions are in contradiction, but where all of the parties involved claim "the rule of law" as their ally (very much like how God and the Church and other appeals to popular ideas have been used to rally support to various causes; the danger of which is that advocates become increasingly convinced that there is no need to question if they are right or might be wrong about the causes or solutions they advocate and only must marshall sufficient means of persuasion to convince others of the rightness of their cause, which stifles and undermines more honest intellectual differences, debate, and discussion).

But reading this review made me very glad that I've waited to write my first book about my ideas since it reminds me that alternative ideas, even if I think they are being used for less than utterly noble or honest reasons, need to be treated with the respect that they deserve. And the truth is that the rule of law is a principle that has done much good for humanity as it has tried to leave behind its more barbaric past. And that principle deserves an honest discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of our reverence for this principle, especially in a liberal democratic culture which rightly is committed to freedom and honesty as two of its highest principles, but which both are worthy of critical examination of how much we revere these principles as well.

Reverence and adherence to principle can be healthy. And it can be overwrought. And especially revering a principle that gives us power, control, or coercive or aggressive presumption over the lives of others is and always has been a very, very dangerous idea that has been responsible for most of history's most serious abuses, ugliness, and bad deeds. That is why liberal democratic societies do and should take freedom most seriously among its values and why this period is a regressive political era, I believe, in so many important ways.

Things for me to think about as I write this book.