(This is actually a post for Labor Day, although the connection to labor and working-class culture may not be immediately obvious.)

People sometimes say: “This artifact or text is worth your effort and attention. It is less accessible than some other works; it may take more effort to understand and appreciate. But it will make you a better person, or help you improve the world, or give you insight.”

This type of claim requires a justification because it is a proposal for how other people should allocate their time and effort. The justification can be an explicit argument that the work in question is valuable. Or it can be an interpretation, explanation, or reaction to the work that helps people to understand it. Understanding enables appreciation. Like any justification, it can fail because it was not a worthy claim in the first place, or because the reasons were weak, or because they fell on infertile soil.

To say that a given work deserves unusual effort puts that item in a special category. Even if you make such a claim in an informal and unpretentious way, you are suggesting a value-judgment and implying a rough ranking from better to worse.

We could have a culture in which many people frequently exchanged such claims, coming from diverse perspectives and advocating a wide range of cultural products. People would then allocate some of their time and effort to relatively challenging works because they had been persuaded that these items have special value. “High culture” would be the list of all the works that significant numbers of people appreciated in these ways.

And we do have that kind of culture. People exchange claims about value. Subcultures can be found that love almost any challenging form of culture you can think of. However, the dialogue about which works are especially worthy is constantly challenged–or even threatened–by several factors:

• The massive supply of culture that is profitable because it is addictive and easy to enjoy. (Believe me, I am addicted as anyone is.)
• A certain reluctance to accept that some works can be more worthy than others. This attitude has shaken the confidence of people, such as humanities professors, who might otherwise be more active proponents of challenging culture.
• The kind of defense of high culture that assumes it must be a traditional Eurocentric canon and that students should recognize a list of canonical authors without actually struggling with their works. In my own area of specialization, K-12 civic education, state standards often present long lists of names. Students are supposed to identify the word “locke” with a long-dead man who happened to believe in individual rights, as if that were a worthy learning objective. The backlash is inevitable.
• The dominant role that colleges and universities play in generating and consuming culture. Higher education has limitations: it serves mostly young adults, it has been assigned an economic function, and it is run by people (like me) who chose an academic path instead of another worthy vocation. Meanwhile, unions and other working-class organizations, religious denominations, small publishing houses and magazines, and other independent sources seem relatively weak.

In “Culture as Counterculture” (New Criterion, Sept. 2021), Adam Kirsch explains how we got to where we are.  I would start a bit earlier than he does and would propose a future phase, but steps 3 to 7 in the following summary match his account:

1. In aristocratic cultures, popularity indicates a lack of quality. Aristocrats gladly prefer to own unpopular things.
2. In democratic cultures, popular tastes gain influence and even authority.
3. As European cultures begin to democratize in the 1800s, people like Matthew Arnold, John Stewart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others–I would add the Uruguayan essayist Jose Enrique Rodo or the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore–argue that all citizens should have access to “the best which has been thought and said in the world” (Arnold). They hope that a classically educated public will govern better.
4. In the 1900s, industries and governments become increasingly effective at distributing mass-produced cultural products whose markets dwarf those for traditional high culture. Leftist critics like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Dwight Macdonald argue that mass audiences are being exploited and denied access to better works, which people would prefer if they had real access to them.
5. In the mid-1990s, many students are still required to study canonical works in schools, under the influence of Arnold and other Victorians. A common motif in youth-oriented pop culture becomes the rejection of that canon. “My heart’s beating rhythm / And my soul keeps singing the blues / Roll over Beethoven / Tell Tchaikovsky the news.”
6. In the wake of that revolt, some highly sophisticated critics argue in favor of pop culture and against status hierarchies. Kirsch’s example is Susan Sontag ‘s 1966 essay collection.
7. Mass-produced, for-profit popular culture keeps expanding while the market for traditional high culture continues to shrink. Sontag decides that pop culture is mainly individualistic and consumerist; she should have resisted it, but the battle is now lost. Genres like classical music are now countercultural niches, not even worth making fun of.

Today’s surviving proponents of high culture seem somewhat diverse philosophically. They include intellectual successors of Macdonald and Sontag, who still want students to read Kafka or the Bhagavad Gita to counteract consumerist capitalism, plus conservatives who want them to read Locke and Jefferson–or at least to know those names–in order to preserve traditional values. Their choice of texts overlaps more than you might think, but the whole group is small and ineffectual, vastly outnumbered by people who don’t see much value to the humanities in any form.

Or perhaps there are still several “high culture countercultures.” Perry Link writes, “Should we compare poetry across civilizations? If we do, classical Chinese poetry wins easily. The contest is almost unfair …” Some of my fellow Americans read classical Chinese verse in the original calligraphy. Likewise, the best poetry being written in English today may take the form of rap lyrics, and some people have highly discriminating, deeply informed knowledge of rap. One could add students of the Talmud or Islamic jurisprudence, jazz aficionados, serious fans of midcentury modernism, and more.

Still, even if we combined all the diverse countercultures devoted to demanding forms of excellence, they would be badly outnumbered.

I believe we can move from step 7 to another phase, when claims of excellence are more influential again. To get there, we will need “business models” (defined broadly) for creating, sharing, and evaluating excellent and demanding forms of culture outside the monopoly of the university. Federal subsidies could help, but I would not put all my eggs in a governmental basket. The goal is not just to make fine culture available–there is already more online than you could see or hear in a lifetime–but to help it to compete for attention in marketplaces like Spotify or Amazon.

Meanwhile, there is cultural work to do. We need more–and more diverse–people to make confident, compelling arguments that specific works will reward the hard work needed to understand them. Some artifacts and texts are better than others: that is the claim. A good life incorporates some of the best works. They do not all come from any particular genre, cultural context, or tradition. One of life’s great joys is finding new forms of excellence where you didn’t expect them. Yet we are surrounded by insidiously addictive but highly profitable mediocrity, and it is up to us to do better.

See also: separating populism from anti-intellectualism; the library of Albert Shanker; “a different Shakespeare from the one I love”; the state of the classics in 2050; and the future of classics.

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 1, 2021
CONTACT: Jen McAndrew
jennifer.mcandrew@tufts.edu | 617.627.2029

Tufts University students will soon have more opportunities to explore the complex relationships between faith and civic life in a religiously diverse world, thanks to a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations (AVDF). Building on its undergraduate Civic Studies major, the only one of its kind, Tufts University will launch a new interdisciplinary curriculum track in interfaith civic studies.  This two-year project represents an innovative collaboration between the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, Tufts’ School of Arts & Sciences Department of Religion, and the Tufts University Chaplaincy.

The AVDF grant will catalyze the development of a 6-course sequence in interfaith civic studies at Tufts, provide opportunities for faculty professional development and course design, support a cadre of new “student interfaith ambassadors,” and support a Resident Fellow to facilitate interdisciplinary, interfaith discussions at Tufts.

Peter Levine, Tisch College Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs, who is the lead principal investigator, notes, “Religious traditions, identities, institutions, and conflicts are central to civic life. This generous grant will allow Tufts to develop new insights about the relationships between faith and civic life and to educate students to be effective and ethical contributors in a religiously diverse world.”

Co-principal investigator Brian Hatcher, former Chair of the Department of Religion, adds, “The Department of Religion is excited to join with the Tufts Chaplaincy and Tisch College to develop this new initiative to promote Interfaith Studies at Tufts and Beyond. Thanks to the generous support of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, we hope to explore new avenues for integrating the academic study of religion with lived, practical approaches for promoting awareness, knowledge, and engagement among faith communities. Our aim is to help prepare students to address the challenges of interfaith collaboration and religious contestation and to find ways to foster reflection on the role of religion in civic life.”

University Chaplain and co-principal investigator Elyse Nelson Winger is committed to centering student voices in all phases of the initiative. She says, “I am thrilled that our students and University Chaplaincy team are a vital part of this new initiative.  Through experiential learning, community-building, and co-curricular programming, the Interfaith Ambassador Program will equip students from different religious, spiritual, and philosophical backgrounds to ‘live the questions’ most pertinent to interfaith engagement.” 

Jennifer Howe Peace, Senior Researcher at Tisch College and co-founder of the Interreligious/Interfaith Studies Program Unit at the American Academy of Religions, will work with colleagues across departments to design an introduction to interfaith civic studies course and coordinate the grant.  Peace comments, “Young people are eager to creatively tackle the dilemmas and opportunities of living in religiously diverse societies. This grant gives us an opportunity to harness the expertise already at Tufts to educate a new generation of civically-minded leaders with a nuanced understanding of interfaith relations.”

I have been offline because we’d been enjoying a lovely vacation in Amsterdam. While there, I read James C. Kennedy’s A Concise History of the Netherlands. His argument has general implications.

It’s an argument about why the Netherlands has been so successful–even an “enviable” country. Before addressing that question, we should acknowledge, as Kennedy does, that the Dutch participated actively and influentially in European imperialism, including the transatlantic slave trade. So their story is not entirely admirable–perhaps not mainly so. It is nevertheless an interesting question why the Dutch have frequently been more tolerant, free, equitable, and prosperous at home than their neighbors have been.

It’s common to claim that a long tradition of commercial acumen and mercantile values made the Dutch tolerant. They have been too busy to hate. But this is not really an explanation. For one thing, why were they often so good at commerce? Besides, are we sure that the causal arrow points from commercial interests to tolerance? Couldn’t a tolerant culture be good for business?

Kennedy offers a different explanation. He notes that it has typically been impossible for anyone to dominate the Low Countries. In the middle ages, the region was divided into many counties that fell within different duchies and kingdoms. It also developed many prosperous towns, which were profitable for their various feudal lords but hard to control. Later, the Reformation added several religious sects (Calvinists, Mennonites, Moravians, Anabaptists, Jews, and others, plus the many Catholics). The land has always been carved up by water, creating quite disparate regions. And after industrialization, the society split into multiple “pillars” (traditionalist Calvinist, Catholic, socialist), each with its own parties, schools, unions, and press–none strong enough to dominate the rest.

Yet the Netherlands has frequently faced grave threats: the French, the Hapsburgs, the English, and–always–the ocean. Thus the Dutch have been forced to coordinate or perish. Seeking a central authority to lead them, they broadly backed Philip the Good, the Duke of Burgundy, to acquire titles to their whole region. But Philip had to negotiate with the cities to rule, and his descendants, the Habsburg emperors, faced a successful revolt. Later, the Orangist faction favored rule by the House of Orange as a means to centralize, but they always faced effective opposition. Voluntary association has been more common.

What were the odds that the Dutch would survive as an independent country? Things looked bad in 1421, 1672, 1795, 1940, 1953. It is risky to generalize from one case that turned out successfully. Maybe other people did the same things but failed.

However, it looks as if voluntary coordination has been a learned skill in the Netherlands. The Dutch already founded an extraordinary array of philanthropic and municipal associations, guilds, almshouses, beguine-houses, etc., during late medieval times, to which they subsequently added the world’s first true corporation, a complex republican confederal government, councils of church elders and synods, and many other innovations in self-governance. In this context, tolerance can be seen as a mode of relating to other people when you need their cooperation but you cannot dominate them. Tolerance results from polycentricism. It comes with skills of self-governance and an ability to invent new mechanisms for cooperation.

See also: polycentricity: the case for a (very) mixed economy; the UK in a polycentric Europe; modus vivendi theory; how a mixed economy shapes our mentalities; what sustains free speech?; China teaches the value of political pluralism etc.

Good afternoon, friends. The newest Civics in Real Life looks at Afghanistan and the the US presence their over the past 20 years. We apologize for the delay in posting and hope to have it on Florida Citizen this weekend. Hope you find this useful! Click below for this Civics in Real Life resource.

Additional Civics in Real Life readings are available here. We expect to resume posting these there next week.

I am teaching this course again. Every year it changes, and this year I hope it changes a lot. Here’s what I said about this today, our first day of classes:

Any story about crime and punishment is bound to start with a few stylized facts. Until this year, I’ve started with the same number: 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, which is roughly seven times as many people as our peer nations would incarcerate if they had the same population we do. But last year something extraordinary happened: somewhere around 8% of those people were released and not replaced. We can’t be very exact because prisons across the country are not very careful about counting and reporting the number of people they imprison, but any way you slice it the pandemic has started an unprecedented process of decarceration that we’re going to be talking about throughout the semester.

I’m starting with that stat, but I could equally well start with another one: 

The FBI says that—during the first six months of this year—the number of murders in 22 cities increased by 16% compared to the same period in 2020 and by 42% compared to the first six months of 2019.

(cite)

Incarceration is down. Crime is up. Could there be a connection?

First, an interlude: when I taught this course in 2019, I had a student stand up about halfway through class and loudly leave, commenting “I thought this was going to be a course on Dostoevsky’s novel.” That’s a different class. And while I can tell you that there is almost certainly not a connection between decreasing incarceration and increasing violence, that’s not really what this class is about, either.

What we will do together if you continue in this class is somewhat different. I want to remind you about something literally academic: departments and disciplines. This is a philosophy class. And there’s a difference between how we approach a problem like mass incarceration in this department, compared to how it might be approached in a political science class, a psychology class, or a history class. I have colleagues and collaborators in all of those departments—as well as Theology, Linguistics, English, Biology, Sociology, and others—who apply their disciplinary approach to this issue. Meanwhile, we all are truly colleagues and collaborators: we work together, learn from each other, and read each other’s work.

So what I want you to think about—a little bit—is what the specifically philosophical approach to crime and punishment might be. 

One specifically philosophical approach is the analysis of concepts: 

• What is a crime? What is the relationship between crime and moral obligation? Is crime any violation of the criminal code? Or are some things outlined in the criminal code that shouldn’t be, and some things allowed by the code that ought to be criminal? 
• Is mens rea always required for something to be criminal? What about all the edge cases in mens rea—mental illness, youth, disability, and addictions—do they excuse otherwise criminal conduct? 
• What counts as legitimate punishment? Are capital punishment, torture, exile, incarceration, branding, public shaming, all legitimate? 
• What obligations do we have to those we punish? 
• What is punishment for, anyway?

I have lots of good things to read on all those questions, and lots of little lectures to give on the history of answers to these questions, and honestly I think we can’t avoid some of them. But I don’t think this is the only right way to do philosophy, and in this class I think it’s more important to start with the real questions we have about these issues and try to weave these questions into them. Maybe in the abstract caning is a potentially legitimate punishment—but in the US, given the strong association between torture and slavery, we can’t endorse it. 

Right now, today, we face multiple crises related to crime and punishment. And I believe we are obligated to think through what we are doing in response to those crises. I believe that sometimes the best philosophy on a specific question is done in some other department or discipline: the historians, psychologists, linguists, and sociologists are usually pretty good at some crucial philosophical steps that philosophers ourselves sometimes miss.

So I ask you: what questions are you bringing to the classroom?

As you can see, primed with those analytic questions, my students ended up sounding pretty analytic! (Also, my handwriting is atrocious.) My humble observation is that often five groups of questions and themes emerge when I teach this class:

1. What have we done? What is the current situation with prisons and policing? What are prisons like? What is it like to experience a violent crime? Who experiences that, and what do we do about it? What is it like to be stopped and frisked regularly? Does stopping and frisking millions of people every year reduce violence crime? What is it like to spend a month in prison? A year? The rest of your life?
2. How did we get here? What is the cause or causes of mass incarceration—in the United States, but also in some other countries? Is it entirely white supremacy? Is it the War of Drugs?
3. What should we hope for? Should we aim to abolish prisons and policing, or merely reform them? What are the alternatives? How do we enforce norms without an “or else”? What else has to change to change the legal punishment system?
4. What can we do about it right now? What are the most promising policies and practices for ending mass incarceration in the United States? Do we need legal reforms, mass movements and protest, cultural and spiritual renewal, an end to capitalism, or something else entirely?
5. What should we do with our anger, rage, and resentment?

Now look: we can’t duck the econometrics of crime and punishment. But we are going to ask some critical and philosophical questions about their methodologies.

I then led the class through some charts and graphs that debunk some of the major myths about mass incarceration in the US.

Next week? Danielle Allen’s Cuz. She’s a philosopher, after all!

Science is at the heart of several of our hardest issues, including COVID-19 and global warming. (And even race and policing.) While some Americans display “Science is real” yard signs on their front lawns, Dr. Fauci is the face of oppression for others.

The question of science is not simple.

On one hand …

What individuals think about matters like vaccination and climate change has consequences for everyone else. It can be hard to coexist with people whose beliefs seem fundamentally, even willfully, false.

Some findings are well-substantiated, e.g., that vaccines work and that human beings are causing the climate to heat up dangerously.

For any given question, there are better and worse methods of inquiry. If you want to know whether a vaccine works, a randomized, double-blind, controlled experiment is an excellent method. Google-searching to see what various “influencers” say … is not.

Science is a process of inquiry, not a set of truths. When scientific consensus shifts, that is a sign of learning, not an embarrassment.

The process of learning about COVID-19 has been extraordinarily fast and impressive. It is harder to assess the pace of learning about climate change, but we have learned how to learn a lot better than our ancestors could have done three or four centuries ago.

On the other hand …

No one obtains complex knowledge directly or alone. Science is a collective enterprise, deeply dependent on interpersonal trust. Even if you are an epidemiologist or a virologist, you can’t directly observe truths about COVID-19. You must trust data, instruments, protocols, metrics, and theoretical models that come from other people. For instance, you can only know what you’re seeing through an electron microscope because you trust that device and all the previous science that yielded it.

Science is a set of human institutions that confer power and status on some, while excluding others. Anyone with a doctorate has received a graduate education that cost someone hundreds of thousands of dollars. Americans rank physicians highest in status (7.6) out of hundreds of jobs. Physics professors and college presidents come next. Environmental scientists also rank high (6.5). But many Americans are in no position to obtain these jobs, and many may not want them. By the way, just 5 percent of physicians are Black, and 0.3 percent are Native American.

It is all very well to say “Trust the experts.” But the experts in foreign and defense policy bear responsibility for two disastrous wars since 2001. Experts in urban policy wrecked our cities’ cores by slicing highways through them and forcing people into segregated public housing. Medical experts described homosexuality as a pathology in the DSM until 1973. Some influential nutrition experts insisted that fats were bad and sugar was safe while being financed by the sugar industry.

People like me have deep personal reasons to give scientific institutions the benefit of the doubt. One of these institutions literally pays my comfortable salary. My parents, spouse, sibling, and children have been admitted, supported, and (in many cases) paid by universities. I live in a neighborhood dominated by people who have benefitted from the same institutions; it has good public schools, safe streets, and high property values. Many other people could not get into any of these institutions, or don’t want to get into them, or would not feel comfortable in them, or would not be valued by them. Trusting science comes naturally to me but has no natural appeal for many other human beings.

Partisan and ideological heuristics affect all of us. I find it very comfortable to decry Ron DeSantis’ handling of COVID-19 and to blame him for Florida’s current wave. That fits with what I want to think about Republicans, conservatives, etc. It is a lot less comfortable for me to consider why the highest cumulative per capita COVID rates are in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, while Florida ranks 26th and has (to date) just 62% the cumulative case rate of New Jersey. I don’t think the takeaway is that liberal policies have worsened COVID-19. (For one thing, Mississippi is close behind Massachusetts, and Vermont and Hawaii have done best of all.) But it is no more valid to infer that conservative policies are to blame.

As the last point suggests, there is much that we really do not understand, such as the reasons for the variation in COVID-19 outcomes by state or nation. If we knew the answer to that, it might help us to assess overall social systems. We are deeply divided about what kind of society we should live in, and science has not answered that question. It is not as useful as it could be for public debates, yet it should never provide the solutions, since we must reason about values as well as facts.

There is no such thing as value-neutral data. People always decide what to observe and measure and what to call the results. When I search Google Scholar for “school social distancing COVID,” I see the following keywords in the top results: school closure, workplace non-attendance, school lockdown, mental health, weight gain, nonessential workers, nonessential businesses, epidemic control, and mitigation strategies. Whether these are the most important topics, what is missing (race, for instance), and whether these factors are rightly named–these are value questions, not scientific ones. Besides, in many cases, the data come from mandatory reports, and what we require people to report is a value-judgment.

Finally, the methods that work best for evaluating the effects of a mass-produced chemical compounds, such as vaccines, may not work best for assessing many social, cultural, and moral issues. In many domains, positivist methods are too influential and not enough credibility is accorded to laypeople’s knowledge.

I agree with Jonathan Badger that the most prominent critics of science are not raising subtle points about the soft despotism of scientific institutions or the tension between expertise and democracy. Instead, they are making false statements with great certainty. That is a disgrace, but it doesn’t negate real questions about the role of science.

See also methods for engaged research; we should be debating the big social and political paradigms; what is Civic Science?; “Just teach the facts”; notes on the social role of science; etc.