The News

In my post last Friday, I provided a link to a column by Peggy Noonan in which she suggests that discontent in the United States (e.g., a recent "Gallup had a poll showing only 24% of Americans feel we're on the right track as a nation") is not strictly about the economy.  It is not even more broadly discontent with the culture.  It is, most basically, discontent with national character.  As evidence, she highlighted news stories from the past week.  These stories were variously alarming, shameful, embarrassing, and contemptible.  Her use of news stories as evidence for character evaluation brought to mind comments by James Q. Wilson.

Competition and Federalism

"Should governments — of nations, states and towns — compete like business rivals?"

This question opens Greg Mankiw's opinion piece in the Sunday, April 15, print edition of The New York Times.  The column reflects the Harvard professor's perspective, of course, but I found this a fairly even-handed discussion of the subject as it relates in particular to the matter of federalism.  And he approaches it in a somewhat novel way.  After explaining how competition among governments may benefit citizens, he summarizes the economic point in terms of political philosophy:

Whether competition among governments is good or bad comes down to the philosophical questions of what you want government to do and how much you fear government power. If the government’s job is merely to provide services, like roads, schools and courts, competition among governmental producers may be as good a discipline as competition among private producers. But if government’s job is also to remedy many of life’s inequities, you may want a stronger centralized government, unchecked by competition. 

What is noteworthy about this quote and the larger column is not that there exist philosophical differences about the purpose of governments.  Noteworthy, rather, is how the economic notion of competition serves as a helpful heuristic for understanding these political differences.  The point Mr. Mankiw is making is not about what sort of government sponsors a certain type of economic system.  That is well-worn.  His point, instead, it strikes me somewhat afresh, goes the other direction.  It is how one may apply an economic idea as a way of grasping something central about a certain political system.  In the present case, the political system in question is a federalist one, that is, one in which power is shared between a central, national government, on the one side, and discrete, state (and local) governments, on the other.

To be sure, that an economic system can throw light on a political system is not new (hence I say "somewhat novel").  You see that with rote rehearsals of Marxism all the time.  I had not seen it before applied to federalism per se.

Mr. Mankiw's full essay may be found here.

Turkle: "The Flight From Conversation"

The Sunday, April 22, opinion contribution in The New York Times by Sherry Turkle, "The Flight From Conversation," largely reproduces in writing main themes from her February TED talk, which I noted and provided a link to in a prior post.

(Recent, related posts are found here and here.)

The Cohabitation Effect

"The Downside of Cohabiting Before Marriage," as discussed by Meg Jay in the Sunday, April 15, edition of The New York Times:

Couples who cohabit before marriage (and especially before an engagement or an otherwise clear commitment) tend to be less satisfied with their marriages — and more likely to divorce — than couples who do not. These negative outcomes are called the cohabitation effect. ... at least some of the risks may lie in cohabitation itself.  ... Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean. ... Cohabitation is loaded with setup and switching costs.

The opinion piece is mostly descriptive based on Ms. Jay's clinical research and various published studies on the subject, including one in March by the Department of Health and Human Services.  She sketches a few suggestions to avoid the prevailing negative outcomes.

I took up the subject of marriage in the United States in two previous blog posts (on Feb. 22 and on Feb. 28).

Noonan: "America's Crisis of Character"

It has been a busy week for me, so, yes, here's a link to a column rather than a long reflection on virtue and character.  Peggy's Noonan's opinion piece in today's Wall Street Journal, "America's Crisis of Character," does not offer much in the way of prescriptions, but she is very astute at diagnosing -- assuming she is right -- a very large problem.

I've long thought that public dissatisfaction is about more than the economy, that it's also about our culture, or rather the flat, brute, highly sexualized thing we call our culture.

Now I'd go a step beyond that. I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.

Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

Diagnosis may be the first step of treatment.  For now, it will have to do.

"Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"

That is the question that Stephen Marche asks and seeks to answer in his article by the same name in the May issue of The Atlantic:  "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?"  The essay is in a similar vein to my two previous posts on new media (here and here).  And so it is worth drawing attention to it.  Among Mr. Marche's concluding thoughts are these:

Rising narcissism isn’t so much a trend as the trend behind all other trends. ... And loneliness and narcissism are intimately connected ... The connection is fundamental. Narcissism is the flip side of loneliness, and either condition is a fighting retreat from the messy reality of other people.

A considerable part of Facebook’s appeal stems from its miraculous fusion of distance with intimacy, or the illusion of distance with the illusion of intimacy. Our online communities become engines of self-image, and self-image becomes the engine of community. The real danger with Facebook is not that it allows us to isolate ourselves, but that by mixing our appetite for isolation with our vanity, it threatens to alter the very nature of solitude. ...

 ...the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.

These and related observations are not new to many of us.  But it is encouraging to see the more consistent highlighting of a real problem that is sometimes brushed off as Luddite lunacy.  Real relationships, self-reflection, salutary solitude, cultivation of confidants -- these are central to humanity and a healthy pursuit of life.  The substitution of these things through the use of technology is an important facet of contemporary life that we ignore to our peril. 

Turkle: "Connected, but alone?"

In private correspondence, a good friend pointed me to the recent TED talk by Sherry Turkle, "Connected, but alone?", which also dovetails with my recent post "Free Your Mind."   The MIT professor's thesis:  "Our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do; they change who we are" (at 2:36 minutes).

Ubiquitous and incessant texting, for example, creates the "illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship."  And "you can end up hiding from each other even as we are all constantly connected to each other" (at 5:02 ).  Why?  Because, as she explains more fully, "technology appeals to us most where we are most vulnerable. ... we're lonely but we are afraid of intimacy.  And so from social networks to social robots, we're designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship" (at 12:13 ).

Real relationships, including the art of personal conversation and self-reflection, are suffering:  "Human relationships are rich, and they're messy, and they're demanding.  And we clean them up with technology. ... we sacrifice conversation for mere connection" (at 7:10).  (A similar, if differently articulated, observation is made by Jonathan Franzen in his essay/address "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.")  Constant use of technology is, to restate Turkle's thesis, altering humanity, our self-conception of it, and ourselves (and our duties) as relational beings within it.  It is, in this sense, reshaping not just what we do as humans but who we are as humans, both individually and in community.

Ms. Turkle's most recent book, Alone Together:  Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, explores related ideas in more detail than her TED talk.  The book is  reviewed in The New York Times, and she was interviewed, among many appearances, on "The Colbert Report."  Her 20-minute TED talk, which includes some practical suggestions for navigating the technological/relational minefield, is embedded below.  And yes; it is okay to watch this engaging digital media video about the relational dangers of digital technology -- just not in board meetings, during family breakfast, or at a funeral.

Why Nations Fail

In a previous post, I provided a link to an interview with Daron Acemoglu in which he explains various theories about the causes of income inequality.  The MIT economics professor and his Harvard collaborator James A. Robinson have written a new, popularly-targeted book on the fate of nations, Why Nations Fail:  The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.  The book addresses a similar subject although in sweeping historical and global perspective  (why do some nations become richer and others do not?) , and the authors advance one model for understanding it (because some governments develop inclusive political and economic institutions rather than extractive ones).  William Easterly of the New York University reviews it here in the March 24 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

"Free your mind"

I have close friends who were assigning to their college students "unplugged" experiments years before it was fashionable to do so. 

Brann on studying the West

Eva Brann is not to be confused with Eva Braun. The latter, of course, was Adolf Hitler's companion. The former is the longest-serving tutor of St. John's College (Annapolis), where she has taught the school's great books curriculum since 1957. In this article, "The Great Tradition," she essays to answer the question: Why study the West?

Among the many points that Ms. Brann makes on the benefits of thoroughly studying the Western tradition, one is about intellectual, cultural, and personal empathy for others: "being rooted in one’s own [tradition] is practically a predicate for appreciating the ways of others as other, that is, of confronting these ways not in melding surrender, but in observant receptivity."

Professor Brann's prose does not always make for the easiest of reading, but it is candid. She eschews the common ways in which the value of a course of study is, these days, measured by its presumed utility. (Often it is the utility of future earnings power.) "Why must education be a means only instead of an end in itself?" she in effect asks. A fair question. But the importance of her point about empathy should not be missed.

It strikes me that in affirming liberal education as primarily an end in itself Ms. Brann actually spotlights it as perhaps a truly great means: liberal education in the Western tradition is, when pursued as its own end, a means to the virtuous goal of informed, civil, reflective, and reasoned understanding of those who differ from us. Such informed and patient empathy is currently in short supply.

If liberal education of the sort that Ms. Brann advocates as a goal itself also results in more and better practitioners of empathy, and if this is a prized value of our contemporary society, then why is this course of study in decline in American universities? If this sort of education, as the term itself suggests, "leads people out" of themselves into humane, heady, and heartfelt intercourse with others, then maybe promoting university curriculum in the Western tradition deserves to be reconsidered -- and, well, the study actually pursued.

Redefining Key Terms

Yesterday, in my post "What is judicial activism?" I suggested as fundamentally in error the President's argument that, if the Supreme Court's finds the recent health care law to be unconstitutional, its decision would be an instance of judicial activism.  I suggested that it would be an instance, rather, of judicial review:  the power accorded to the judiciary to determine the constitutionality -- and therefore legal validity -- of a statute, treaty, or action of the legislative and/or executive branches of government.

In this vein, I just ran across the April 2 online editorial in The New York Sun, "Ex Parte Obama."  It offers a different viewpoint from the administration's (and possibly establishment's) on the matter.  For that reason it is worth reading as part of the ongoing conversation about the comments made by the former professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  The question is whether the President is correct that judicial review (a government asset) is actually judicial activism (a government threat and rhetorical pejorative).

More basically, when do we redefine terms for our own political or personal purposes?  How should we argue and converse with others if we have a sincere concern for virtuous deportment?

For convenience, I reproduce the Sun's editorial in its entirety after the jump.

Scruton on Gratitude

In continuing to reflect on the differences between generosity and charity, which I discussed in a previous post, I recalled this somewhat related column from April 2010 by Roger Scruton on "Gratitude and Grace." 

Where I explored in my post the relationship between charity and generosity, Scruton probes the differences between receiving out of a sense of charity and receiving out of a sense of justice.  His point seems to be that receiving from charity typically results in gratitude; receiving from justice typically results in ingratitude because receiving is an expected right. 

In his view, society is increasingly not marked by gratitude.  As the arm of the state lengthens, as charity is replaced by justice, ingratitude grows.

Scruton's may be a view foreign to many of us, but it is worth considering.

Brooks on the future of virtue

David Brooks offers his reflections in today's The New York Times on the difficulty of consistently practicing virtue, of mastering excessively dangerous emotions, and of enduring suffering in life.  Not all will agree with his final four paragraphs.  He puts his finger, however, on some central and abiding subjects that often appear in this blog.

What is judicial activism?

According to today's news stories, the President cast a potential Supreme Court decision against the constitutionality of his signature health care law as an action that would be tantamount to "judicial activism."  Both The New York Times ("President Confident Health Law Will Stand," page A17) and The Wall Street Journal ("Obama Warns Supreme Court," page A1) report on the matter.

I do not know how the nine justices will rule on the pertinent matters before the court.  And I am as opposed as anyone in principle to "judicial activism."  But is it really proper to frame judicial activism as a court's deciding whether legislation passed by the Congress adheres to the limits on federal power relative to state power and individual liberty as set forth in the governing documents of a republic?  Is that what judicial activism is?  Isn't that just judicial review according to Marbury v. Madison (1803)?  Aren't courts supposed to do that?

Or is judicial activism merely the term that we use to disparage a court's (potentially) ruling on the constitutionality of a matter in a way that we don't like?