Photos from the book signing at Square Books

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

Thanks to Daniel Perea for snapping these pictures at the book signing on Wednesday (September 9th, 2015)! Daniel kindly agreed to let me have the copyright for the images (Weber, 2015). Please do not use these without permission. Visit my contact page and drop me a line if you’d like to use one, especially for press or promotional purposes for future events. Thank you, Daniel!

I also want to thank Cody Morrison and Square Books for being great hosts. It was a wonderful first book signing experience. I’m honored and was very grateful and encouraged to see a number of nice folks brave the weather to hear about Uniting Mississippi. I’m pleased to report that we sold all but two copies, though one of those remaining is now gone. Square Books has one left as I write this, though a new shipment will be there soon. I’ll head over at some point soon to sign those, as one of the really cool things about real, brick and mortar bookstores like Square Books, and about literary towns like Oxford, is that authors sign books here and you can get your new book already signed by the author. You can’t do that on the forest-river-yellow Web site site. Thanks again, Square Books!

Daniel Perea took these photos at my book signing for 'Uniting Mississippi,' held at Square Books.

Photo of Weber signing a book for Mrs. Gray in Oxford, MS.

To learn more about the book, visit my page for Uniting Mississippi. If you’d like to support local bookstores like Square Books, you can order your copy on their Web site here:

Buy ‘Uniting Mississippi’ from Square Books

You can also see a brochure about the book here:

Printable Adobe PDF Brochure for ‘Uniting Mississippi’

Reflections & Call for a Moment of Silence for September 11, 2001

Posted on September 11, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

I remember vividly how weird a morning it was on September 11, 2001. At the time, I was living in Nashville, heading to work at a downtown law firm. I learned that year why I didn’t want to be a lawyer. That morning was unusual, because I didn’t usually turn on the radio until I got in the car on my way in to work. That morning I did, though. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was something confusing about New York City.

Never before had I felt America stand still. It was eerie. Not knowing yet quite what was going on, I went to work, still feeling concerned and confused.

I grew up in the New York City area. People there were and are friends of mine. They’re not just American friends. The United Nations in the U.S. is centered in New York, not D.C. So diplomats from all over the world are there and were threatened too. New York City is also the landing pad for so many people who come to the United States, furthermore. It is a place that for so long was unique. It is such an icon for the country, as we are not a land of one ethnicity, race, or religion. America is an idea about how different people who want freedom can live together and govern themselves.

I don’t want to be too romantic. I live in a town that was the last battleground of the Civil War, resisting the integration of my university. People around this state were lynched in large numbers for the sake, explicitly stated, of white supremacy. Still, New York City is a symbol. It is a place people want to be. The best of so many things are or go there. It is a port. It has been an entryway into freedom for so many people. My own mother came to the U.S. through New York. It wasn’t to flee the tyranny of the French, of course, but even I am just a first generation American — on my mother’s side, at least.

One of my early memories from growing up was visiting the Twin Towers when my grandparents had come to visit from Iowa. There were a few generations of Americans in my family on Dad’s side. To many, the towers symbolized trade, given their name and purpose. They were also seen negatively by others as a symbol of American expansion around the world, and of modernism that radical conservatives rejected. A “radical conservative” sounds like an oxymoron, like an impossibility. If only it were.

White House photo of President Bush at a mosque, taken by Eric Draper, 2001.

White House photo by Eric Draper.

I wanted to take a moment to think about that day, to think about all the people who were killed. I want to think about all the people who gave their lives trying to save others. I also want to remind people on the Right and on the Left of the highest point that I admire most in President George W. Bush’s presidency. When people think about 9/11 and it’s aftermath, many people are still furious at Bush. I am not talking about any of those causes or conflicts. I am no defender of torture and I find base the attempt to deny some of what Americans did as something other than torture years later.

At the same time, we need to notice not only when people do wrong, but also when there are shining moments that get covered up, justifiably or not. Attending to high points reminds us what to strive for. The New York Times reported on Bush’s speech at a mosque a few days after September 11th, calling his words “eloquent.” Here’s their piece on Bush’s speech. If you haven’t read it, here is the transcript of Bush’s speech.

When President Obama says similar things, apparently he’s wrong about them, according to an op-ed in the Denver Post. Nonsense. There’s a nice PBS piece asking which President said it, Bush or Obama, about Islam. We need cooler heads, especially today.

If my title for this post is confusing, that’s because I’m not being very silent now. Actually, the point of it is to encourage others to do what I did with my class yesterday. The thing about September 11th is that no part of America said “New York was attacked,” to then go about their business, as if it had nothing to do with them. We can be so divided as a nation, and polarization can be one of our biggest problems. On September 11th, however, not only did all Americans feel for one another as a nation attacked. The rest of the world felt solidarity and felt attacked. “We are all Americans,” said Le Monde (“Nous Sommes Tous Américains“). It is important to remember how and when people felt extraordinary solidarity with the victims of a brutal attack.

Yesterday in my Philosophy of Leadership class, we took a few moments to be silent, to think about that day. Some prayed. All were thoughtful. We were silent together and we remembered.

Philosophy Lies at the Heart of Mississippi Education Debate

Posted on September 6, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

Originally published in The Clarion Ledger, September 6, 2015, 2C

Click here for a full-sized Adobe PDF scan of the artile.

Click for a printable PDF scan.

Mississippians have been entangled in a deep philosophical debate about education funding for months, though attention has focused largely on technical details. Ballot initiative 42 that will be decided this November asks: “Should the state be required to provide for the support of an adequate and efficient system of free public schools?” If voters pass the initiative, they would be demanding an amendment to the state Constitution making that requirement explicit.

People who want voters to choose “yes” explain that such a requirement should be enforceable in the courts. Without that, a parent would have no recourse when his or her child must attend a chronically underfunded and failing school.

In their involvement of the courts, the proponents of 42 have made a crucial move for taking Mississippians’ educational obligation seriously. As the Legislature has continually failed to fund education even to the level of basic adequacy, the proponents of 42 are right to demand a check on that negligence.

The Legislature proposed an alternate initiative, 42A, which asks: “Shall the Legislature be required to provide for the establishment and support of an effective system of free public schools?” On the surface, that sounds sensible, as it is the Legislature’s responsibility to allocate proper funding. If we obligate the state instead, however, then it makes sense that the courts would be able to protect citizens’ rights, forcing the state to fulfill its obligations. 42A omits reference to the courts and calls for an “effective system of free public schools upon such conditions and limitations as the Legislature may prescribe.”

The problem people have is with the Legislature. We have had budget surpluses and contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to a rainy day fund. Officials have additionally been proposing tax cuts. At the same time, the Legislature continues to severely underfund public education.

The critics of 42A are on to something when they point out that the Legislature already has the control that the alternate initiative has in mind.* 42A amounts to a rejection of the idea that the Legislature should be checked and held accountable in the courts when it fails to fully fund education. In that sense, it denies that the people of Mississippi have a real obligation to provide access to an adequate education for all our citizens.

Given the confusing technical details of the two proposals, it is vital that we consider seriously whether and why we have the obligation that 42 suggests. That philosophical question is crucial, since if we have such an obligation, it cannot be optional and contingent on the Legislature’s fluctuating will.

When the state has an obligation, citizens have corresponding rights. If we believe we have an obligation to provide access to an adequate education, we must give people a meaningful mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligation.

No one has seriously denied the idea implicit in initiative 42 — that the citizens of Mississippi should support and provide access to a free and adequate public education for all of our young people. We should consider the question for the sake of argument, however, because it illustrates why 42A falls short of meaningful reform. What reasons can we give to an imagined skeptic of our obligation to provide adequate, if not good or excellent, public education?

There are many reasons, but four stand out:

• Self-governance requires education. According to Thomas Jefferson, education is essential for democracy. It is necessary for wise governance, for peace, and for political legitimacy.

• Education for all is a requirement of equal citizenship. Mississippi has a troubled history. Today, reasonable and responsible officials rightly explain that those parts of our history are not what Mississippi values anymore. After James Craig Anderson was killed in a racially motivated murder in Jackson, U.S. Attorney John Downy argued that “the actions of these defendants who have pled guilty… do not represent the values of Mississippi in 2012.” I agree. At the same time, in the 44 Mississippi school districts that were labeled “dropout factories” in 2007, only a small portion of the students we were failing were white. Overwhelmingly those schools are made up student bodies 75-100 percent of which are minority kids.

• Inadequate education is one of the most powerful forms of oppression. Eighty percent of people incarcerated in the U.S. have not graduated from high school. As so many of our schools have been failing or at-risk of failing, we have been perpetuating the history that we say we want to leave behind. Republicans and Democrats from all over Mississippi are sick and tired of these impediments to the state’s progress. Educational failure is one of our most obstructive problems. To redress our history of injustice and our present challenges, we must stop accepting gross inadequacy that systematically holds our citizens back and reaps division, rather than unity.

• Expectations of responsibility depend upon personal development. In America and especially in Mississippi, we value personal responsibility. At the same time, we don’t demand rent from babies. We know that personal responsibility and self-respect are developed over time and through education. If we expect people to prize freedom and independence, we cannot assume that citizens are born as responsible adults. In youth, we are all dependent and in need of an education.

Education is both a necessity for democracy and a value in itself. If our government is intended to protect the pursuit of happiness, that protection must be extended to everyone. If we are obligated to ensure that all Mississippians are afforded at least an adequate education, furthermore, then we must provide the people with a mechanism for recourse when the state fails to fulfill its obligations. Rights and obligations are not optional, which is why we need the courts for their enforcement. That is also why 42 could lead to real progress in education and why we must choose it instead of more of the same failure.

Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of “Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South” (Sept. 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Twitter @EricTWeber.

For a week or two, The Clarion Ledger will have the text version of the article on their Web site here.

* The original article included a next sentence here that was edited in such a way that did not capture what was intended. I have omitted the new version from the text here. You can still see it in the scan, however.

One Amazing Benefit Social Media Brought this Scholar

Posted on August 31, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

This past week, I finally hung a light that I got as a gift last year over my favorite painting. The story is worth sharing, I believe, because it has to do with my most rewarding benefit I’ve received from social media activity as a scholar. Another reason it is personally meaningful is that it marks the conclusion of a promise I made.

In late 2013, my book, Democracy and Leadership, was published. I had looked far and wide for the right image for the cover. My first publisher put out my first two books without giving me a choice about the cover. So, while I appreciate that one shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, I’ve heard enough people do it to be eager for a say in its design. I wanted to find just the right image to capture what I’m up to in the book. I’d hoped it could be a pretty painting somehow, featuring a context for leadership, but somehow highlighting the people more than the politician.

I did a ton of searching online and came across Ashley Cecil’s work. Check it out. When I found the painting above online, I loved it instantly. My publisher for the work, Lexington Books, had a cover template that would maximize space for a cover image, which is the one I picked. With that template, furthermore, I was able to frame the image such that you know there’s a “Politician at a Podium” (the title of the piece) — at least you see the podium — yet he isn’t the focus of the image on the cover.

I was delighted when Ashley permitted me to use the image on the cover of the book. Of course, I had only seen a high quality photo of the painting online. She had sold the painting a few years back. That said, I spread the word about the book a bit online, and per our agreement, I sent Ashley a copy of it. When she got it, Ashley put a post on her Web site about the book, as not every artist has his or her work on a book cover.

Social media offers us powerful tools. People who love Ashley’s work, as I do, follow her blog, and one collector saw the post where she announced that her painting was now cover art. The collector who bought that painting years ago saw her post. Kentucky attorney John Rogers contacted me, I believe via Twitter. He showed me a photo of the painting and said that he thought I should have it. I told him I’d obviously send him a copy of the book. All he asked was that I share with him a picture of the painting once I’d gotten it up on the wall. True story. It continues to mean a lot to me, every time I see it, in fact.

A puff pastry, to symbolize a "puff" piece.

A pastry-style puff piece. lol.

People can be very cynical about humanity sometimes, what with the news we hear about politics & violence. We sometimes call happy stories “puff” pieces, with little substance and thus little meaning. I think that this story resists that label for two reasons. The first is that while there are costs and reasons to worry about some elements of social media, it is easy to overlook how they can connect people with kindness and goodwill across distance. It helps to know that not everyone is a “troll” or a credit card predator. The second reason is that as a scholar who’s trying in modest ways to put work out there, to let people know what I’m doing, I’m so glad to know that some people see it and are encouraging.

Once again, I can’t thank you enough, John. The painting means a lot, and so does your kindness and encouragement.

On my old blog, which I’m putting out to pasture now that I have my new designed, I had written about this story, calling it “‘My Coolest Internet Experience,’ or ‘People Can Be Remarkably Kind’.” Here’s the content of that post:

‘My Coolest Internet Experience,’ or ‘People Can Be Remarkably Kind’

Saturday, February 15, 2014

I’ve always been somewhat optimistic. There are limits to what we can control, which we need to be stoic about, but positive thinking makes a difference within those limits. When we see daily reports about crimes or read books and watch television shows about crooks and drug dealers, it’s no surprise that some folks come to feel cynical about people. I’m happy to report that this week I’ve had my coolest Internet experience ever, which confirmed my feeling that people can be profoundly kind.

With all of the silly and crazy Internet tools we have available (see the absurd variety hereabove), we can spend a lot of time spreading the word about issues we care about or projects we’re working on, while none of our individual tweets or posts seem to be particularly effectual. I’ll write about the several interesting opportunities and connections I’ve made through these channels in some other post, but I have to say something here about an amazing experience I’ve had this week.

Thumbnail photo of the cover of 'Democracy and Leadership,' bearing Ashley Cecil's painting, "Politician at a Podium."

My 2013 book, Democracy and Leadership: On Pragmatism and Virtue, came out with a publisher that permitted me to pick and design the cover, from a few possible form templates. The talented Ashley Cecil‘s beautiful painting is on the cover, as you may already know (it’s on right here). To spread the word about the book, I posted on these various Internet channels, including on a new Facebook Author page — why not?

I have friends with nearly 1,000 “likes” on their author pages, which is great. It’s a way of reaching lots of friends and interested audiences when you’ve got something you feel needs to be said. My own page today has a modest 247 “likes,” but I’m just getting started.

As I was spreading the word about the release of the book and creating the Facebook page, Ashley Cecil posted an announcement about the release of the book on her Web site. Some of Ashley’s fans and art collectors connected with my Facebook page. That’s how I came into contact with John Rogers, an attorney and art collector from Glasgow, Kentucky. It turns out that John was the art collector who had bought Ashley’s painting.

Obviously John and I have sympathetic taste, because when I was looking for cover art — and I searched quite a bit — I knew instantly that this was the painting I wanted for the cover, if I could make it work out. John asked me how I had come across the painting. Though I had looked through various databases of art (paintings and photographs), starting with works in the public domain, I eventually stumbled across Ashley’s painting by wading deep through search term results that I found on Images.Google.com.

While it’s fun to connect with an art collector with sympathetic taste, the story gets better. John wrote me (via Facebook message) to say that he thought that I should have the painting.

I couldn’t believe it.

Art collectors sometimes invest in works that they hope to sell later for a profit. For me, the painting has great sentimental value, because it’s the beautiful first artwork that I’ve been able to select for a book cover. In addition, the book was 4 years in the making and was a lot of hard work, so the artwork is seriously meaningful to me.

At the same time, my university has granted me a sabbatical to write my next book. You can either accept full-pay for one semester, or you can take the same funds divided over the course of a full year. More than a year ago, I discussed this with my wonderful wife Annie (yesterday was Valentine’s Day, I should note), and she agreed that time is the hardest thing to come by. So, we trimmed expenses, saved up for about a year, and now we’ve made it so that I can take this full year to write. It also means that I can’t get into art collection… Certainly not for a while, anyway.

I didn’t see John’s generosity coming. And remember, I’m one of the optimists out there.

Three days after John’s message, the painting arrived — on Valentine’s Day, no less. Here it is on our kitchen table:

This is a large photo of Ashley Cecil's original painting, "Politician at a Podium."

The painting is 8″ by 10″ and is going to go up in my office at work. It is not only the artwork that an artist first gave me permission to use on a book cover. It is also the first such work that I also now own. I’m still somewhat in disbelief about John’s magnanimity. I believe that people are largely very good and sympathetic with others when not conditioned otherwise in some way. That doesn’t capture just how friendly and giving people can be, though.

Therefore, this blogpost — and a copy of Democracy and Leadership soon to be in the mail — is dedicated to John Rogers of Glasgow, Kentucky, for showing me just how remarkably kind people can be, especially to a stranger several states away. Thank you so much, John, for your generous gift, and thanks to Ashley for creating this piece and allowing me to use it for the book.

I can’t thank you enough, John.

“A Historical Mandate for Expanding Broadband Internet Infrastructure” (2010)

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

I wrote and published this piece in 2010 and have meant to come back to it. It looks at the arguments that were given on the issue of government postal roads and offices, when the Founders were drafting the U.S. Constitution. They believed that the immediate and free flow of information is essential to the proper functioning of a democratic government. You cannot get more immediate than internet communication.

The idea that the government would be involved in that, rather than only private industry, at least in setting the basic foundation for free-flowing communications, was thought essential. Otherwise it would be very cheap to communicate within a city, but very expensive for those who lived in rural areas, like where I live, in Mississippi.

Check it out. Guess who makes an appearance in the paper — none other than a young then-Congressman Trent Lott (I work with the Lott Institute), who was the moderate voice in a discussion with American Enterprise Institute representatives. The AEI folks felt quite sure that private industry was all that was needed. Lott was forward thinking, even, suggesting in the 1970s (!) that the post office should be looking into electronic communication. They did not do that, unlike France, and look at where our postal services are compared to the French – or trust me, the latter’s faring far better. They’re even looking into drone delivery services.

The topic of this paper is important to me, as it attends to an area in which we might build up American infrastructure in a way that is enabling of business and democratic communication. Keep in mind that many private businesses — newspapers — wanted the post office mail for free! Yes, read the paper. Mailing letters, catalogs, and payments, enables business, even if it takes some government regulation of part of a market — postal communication — to do so.

When I delivered this paper years ago at the Policy Studies Organization’s Dupont Summit conference in Washington, D.C., a representative from the American Enterprise Institute, whom I won’t name, told me that I had convinced him, which was a nice compliment. “It’s in the Constitution,” he said. Indeed, there’s a Constitutional basis for public investment in improving our infrastructure.

Read the paper on Academia.edu

Citation

Weber, Eric Thomas. “A Historical Mandate to Expand Broadband Internet Infrastructure.” Review of Policy Research 27, Issue 5 (2010): 681-689.

Interview on Practical Philosophy in Berlin

Posted on August 20, 2015 by ETW

Professor Chris Skowronski, Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at Opole University, Poland, interviewed me at the Berlin Practical Philosophy International Forum conference on August 13, 2015.

If you can’t see this video in your RSS reader or email, then click here.

I’m grateful to Chris and to Maja Niestroj for the interview, the video, and the hospitality while I was in Berlin. It was a great conference on a wonderful public philosophy, Dr. John Lachs, who has been my mentor in philosophy since around 1998 or 1999.

5 Reasons Scholars Need Facebook Author Pages

Posted on August 19, 2015 by ETW

Scholars tend to be shy or humble, often going to great lengths to avoid anything that might smack of self-promotion or over-confidence. There’s good reason for this. The academy trains you to be skeptical, to demand evidence, and to be reserved about matters that you’ve not yet carefully considered.

There are two troubling consequences of this phenomenon, however. The first is captured in one of Bertrand Russel’s famous sayings. In New Hopes for a Changing World, he wrote that

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

It’s a riff on William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” where he writes that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

In other words, self-doubt and the training for skepticism, so vital to good philosophy, can lead scholars not to speak up, while so many ignorant voices cry. If scholars are waiting for certainty, we’ll never hear from them. This is one of the troubling dangers.

The second consequence ultimately results from the first: scholars who don’t speak up get frustrated that no one pays attention to or wants to support what they do.

It is more important than ever for scholars to speak up, to get our ideas out there for the public to read and engage. The good news is that there are exciting opportunities and new tools now for doing that.

News outlets more than ever before are receptive to scholars’ writings, especially if they don’t have to pay for them. It is reasonable to complain about that, but many of us in higher education have salaries already — no, not all. Those many fortunate people who are afforded some time and incredible intellectual resources (colleagues, libraries, databases, etc.), however, can and ought to see their privilege as a responsibility.

While scholars can engage folks through news media, we shouldn’t overlook social media. Even with our 200-2,000 connections, social media messages spread like ripples. We can affect our culture by speaking up. That said, sometimes we want our personal lives to be separate from our public or professional lives.

Scholars would be wise, therefore, to suspend their typical discomfort with the idea of self-promotion for a minute and make a Facebook author page. Why? Here are 5 reasons:

You’ve gotta keep’em separated — Students. You often do not want your students to read messages that are for your friends and family only. A Facebook author page allows them to follow that content without “friending” you.
You can spare uninterested friends and family. Facebook is a great place to share pictures of your children and other personal relations or content. You often don’t want to share your public messages with folks who would prefer only to see pictures of your kids.
You shouldn’t hide your work. Your author page is an obvious place to post information about your own writings, and folks who want to learn about what you study and get your book will look there.
If you don’t build your platform, no one will hear you. If and when you want to write for wider audiences, you need a platform from which you reach readers. Literary agents and book publishers can no longer evaluate proposals only on their own merits. They want to know that you can speak to an audience and that you have a platform from which you can reach them. A Facebook author page is part of that platform.
You really believe in what you do.It isn’t arrogant or pompous. If you’re doing it right, it isn’t even about you. Ok, look, the Web is much more interesting with pictures, so don’t be shy — put yours up there. Newspapers and others want a photo to include next to an article they publish of yours, so realize that and be ok with having your photo(s) there. That said, why do you do this work? It’s because you care about what you study — you believe the ideas to be genuinely important. If that’s true; if you do think that what you study matters; if you have some small part to contribute to public debate, then you are acting for others when you make sure that your ideas get heard.

So, go forth and be heard!

Who are your favorite examples of scholars with great platforms, modelling great public intellectual leadership?

Message me or tweet me about that on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Delusions of Genocide & the Real Thing

Posted on August 16, 2015 by ETW

On returning home from Germany, I was startled to hear a voicemail from a white supremacist campaigning for President. It repeated the old trope that there is a genocide being perpetrated on the white race. In the United States, we often throw around words like “Nazi” and “genocide.” Seinfeld’s funny “Soup Nazi” story is one thing, but ridiculous demonizing of political opposition is another. The Iowa Tea Party offered one blatant example, but so do national commentators warning of “liberal fascism” or labeling conservatives “Nazis.” We should sober up and remember what real genocide looks like.

Some of the ovens made to dispose of bodies at the Dachau concentration camp.

In Democracy and Leadership, one of the key virtues of democratic leadership I wrote about is moderation. Today people so often dismiss moderation, seeing it as a weakness of will, as a lack of principled character. I find that view tragic, as it inspires such polarization that even the Federal government was shut down in 2013, despite the fact that the world is watching and the credit rating for U.S. debt was downgraded in 2011. Unstable societies are risky investments, as are unjust societies.

Moderation proves to be one of the deepest challenges for democratic societies, I argued more recently in my forthcoming Uniting Mississippi. Moderation is the virtue that aims to achieve unity. If you can’t moderate differences, unified groups tear apart and become several, rather than one. At the same time, of course, there can be delusional, hateful, or simply ridiculous ideas about unity. One of them is the white supremacist’s outlook.

The white supremacist thinks that there’s a need for greater unity among white people as a race. It is one thing when a group has systematically been targeted and oppressed, such as in slavery, the Holocaust, or Apartheid. Such group solidarity in those conditions is understandable, for people need to express pride and unity in their identities as survivors of horrible atrocities and continuing prejudice. Even in such cases, however, no reasonable group calls for purity of its race. Only white supremacists believe that interracial marriage is a threat to a race.

A little over a week ago, I had the sobering opportunity to visit a real genocidal institution. The Dachau concentration camp was built for holding around 5-6 thousand imprisoned workers. By the end of World War II, it held 32,000. To deal with the mass of people and to quell their number, the Germans had created gas chambers, which could kill large groups at once. To avoid resistance to entering the gas chamber at Dachau, the Germans had labeled the door “Brausebad” – “Shower.”

Once people were killed, they were moved to the ovens, photographed in the featured image above. Part of what was so disturbing in all of this was the thoughtful reasoning that went into controlling people and disposing of them. To convince people that the “Brausebad” really was a shower, and not a gas chamber, the Nazis had installed false shower heads. For the visitors like myself, the covers were removed from many of the shower heads, revealing a closed cone above. There was no water pipe. This was simply the illusion meant to make it easier to slaughter people. Here is a photo of the covered and uncovered shower heads, side by side:

Having visited the truly disturbing and sobering Dachau camp, all I could think was that the white supremacists campaigning for President are tragically misguided and absurd. Some people are so lacking in sense that they actually believe that white folks are under threat as a group. The level of such nonsense is deeply saddening.

The call I received was eerie, partly because the voice didn’t sound quite right. It was a woman’s voice, and it was somewhat realistic, but you could tell that the message was one of those recordings generated by a computer voice – just a pretty good one. It read a message that began with formulaic language I have received before from white supremacists. It said that there are countries for these kinds of people and those, so there should also be countries for white people.

Adding to the absurdity of the call is the fact that the United States is a highly religious country. In fact, the Ku Klux Klan now denies that it is a hate group. They have long called themselves Christians. It is long past time to remind people that such views call for seeing all people as kin, as children of the same God. Using the Christian religion in service of hate or disunity is a gross perversion, yet as I have argued, even in the most religious state in the U.S., Mississippians are recalcitrant even when religious leaders call for progress and unity.

We need to take the aim of unity seriously. We need to stop using demonizing language lightly and foolishly. We also need more people to see the effects of such crazy polarization and disunity, which have led even to campaigns for the Presidency from white supremacists. We don’t need delusions of genocide, when there are disturbing and tragic examples of the real thing.

To close, I thought about sharing with you a photo of a mountain of dead, skeleton-thin bodies. Instead, I’ll leave you with a photo I snapped at the Jewish memorial at Dachau, which was immensely beautiful and moving for me.

“Converging on Culture”

Posted on August 1, 2015 by Eric Thomas Weber

Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture’s Role in Justice

This piece, published in 2014, represents an important early step in a book project in progress, titled A Culture of Justice.

Abstract

In this essay, I review the writings of three philosophers whose work con-verges on the insight that we must attend to and reconstruct culture for the sake of justice. John Rawls, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty help show some of the ways in which culture can enable or undermine the pursuit of justice. They also oﬀer resources for identifying tools for addressing the cultural impediments to justice. I reveal insights and challenges in Rawls’s philosophy as well as tools and solutions for building on and addressing them in Dewey’sand Rorty’s philosophy.

Read the paper on Academia.edu

Citation

Weber, Eric Thomas. “Converging on Culture: Rorty, Rawls, and Dewey on Culture’s Role in Justice.” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 22, Issue 2 (2014): 231-261.

Racism Defies the “Greatest Commandment”

Posted on July 30, 2015 by ETW

Eric Thomas Weber, first published on The Second Breakdown, July 30, 2015.

In July 2015, University of Mississippi graduate, Adebanke Alabi invited me to comment on race and the Church for a series on her blog. The following is my piece, originally published on her page and reposted here with permission.

Preface: I am grateful to Adebanke (Buki) Alabi for calling me to comment on race and Christianity for the readers of her blog, The Second Breakdown: My Thoughts on Jesus and His Church.

Mississippi is still home to obstinate racism, even while in 2014 Gallup found it to be the most religious state in the United States. The vast majority of the 44 failing school districts’ enrollments in the state are majority- to almost totally made up of African American students. Some districts have been accused of not having desegregated. We have seen symbolic racism at the University of Mississippi, as well as troubling direct confrontations. Some young people planned and executed a racially motivated murder a few years ago in Jackson, MS.

Despite all of these disturbing cases of racism in Mississippi, many citizens and public officials continue to resist change even to symbols of racism. I have argued that falsely romanticizing heritage does us harm and that symbols, like the Confederate Battle Flag featured in the canton of MS’s state flag, contribute to the perpetuation of racism and injustice. What has gotten very little attention is the tragic inconsistency between the religious beliefs people say that they hold dear and the contradictory behaviors that we see here in Mississippi.

In a passage from the Republic, Plato’s Socrates tells us that leaders must convince their people that we are all born of the earth, children of the same parent – a mother, according to the story. When threats to security arise, if people do not care sufficiently about their neighbors, they will fail to act in others’ defense. Kinship motivates us to take care of our children and our brothers and sisters. People thinking of each other as kin is one of the most important needs for a society’s safety and unity, he argues. He thought the story was a lie, but a necessary one. Christians today do not think it is a lie, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory confirms humanity’s common kinship.

Plato lived about 400 years before Christ. When we look to the Christian religion, we see a related social aim to the kinship that Socrates called for. A basic Christian belief is that human beings are all children of the same parent – in this case, a Father. One might think that the belief that we are all brothers and sisters would motivate Christians to treat others accordingly.

People are very good at finding ways around what they ought to do, however. Some people divide humanity into categories of those who are fallen and those who are elect or saved. If there are children of God in one community, what do we call people from another community or belief system? Galatians 3:26 explains that people are all children of God in their shared faith in Christ. If that is true, does that mean that nonbelievers or those who profess different faiths are not children of God? That is not logically necessary: “All things red have color” doesn’t imply that other things don’t also have color.

Many Christians treat others in ways that are not neighborly, even in deeply religious places. The tragedy of this fact is that people in Mississippi share many religious beliefs – that we are all children of the same Father. In their faith in Christ, Scripture says, they should all see each other as children of God.

For many, the core of the Christian religion can be distilled, as Jesus is said to have done in Matthew 22:35-40, Mark 12:28-31, and Luke 10:25-28, into the Greatest Commandment, which has two parts. In addition to loving God, the first element, which people proclaim in word so commonly, Jesus calls for loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. This second element is far less often extolled in word, and evidence in deeds illustrates blatant defiance of the commandment.

It is time to call people out on this gross contradiction. How in a place like Mississippi people can resist symbolic change, let alone progress in deeds, even with respect to a symbol of the state’s defense of slavery, while claiming to be Christians, is deeply distressing. Some public figures recognize this and have courageously called for progress. It is time others who profess their faith own up to what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself.

Dr. Eric Thomas Weber is associate professor of Public Policy Leadership at the University of Mississippi and author of four books, including Uniting Mississippi: Democracy and Leadership in the South (forthcoming in September 2015). He is representing only his own point of view. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter @erictweber.

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