May 17, 2013, 9:11 am
by Paul Krugman
That 90s Show
I picked a good week to be away — and I am still away, mostly, although playing a bit of hooky on the notebook right now. For it has been the week of OBAMA SCANDALS, nonstop.
Except it seems that there weren’t actually any scandals, just the usual confusion and low-level mistakes that happen all the time, in any administration.
Does the evaporation of the scandals matter? I don’t know. Unfortunately, I remember the early Clinton years, when ridiculous stuff — restructuring at the White House travel office, for God’s sake, and a money-losing land deal — led to years of front-page headlines, endless investigations,and nothing at all in the form of proven Clinton wrongdoing. If the press decide that scandals are going to be the topic, the absence of actual scandals may not matter.
Oh, and the ongoing disaster of economic policy? Boooring.
.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Thursday, May 16, 2013
About Grad School
April 23, 2013
The Impossible Decision
Posted by Joshua Rothman12756Print More Share
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Graduate students are always thinking about the pleasures and travails of grad school, and springtime is a period of especially intense reflection. It’s in the spring, often in March and April, that undergraduates receive their acceptance letters. When that happens, they turn to their teachers, many of them graduate students, for advice. They ask the dreaded, complicated, inevitable question: To go, or not to go?
Answering that question is not easy. For graduate students, being consulted about grad school is a little like starring in one of those “Up” documentaries (“28 Up,” ideally; “35 Up,” in some cases). Your students do the work of Michael Apted, the series’s laconic director, asking all sorts of tough, personal questions. They push you to think about the success and failure of your life projects; to decide whether or not you are happy; to guess what the future holds; to consider your life on a decades-long scale. This particular spring, the whole conversation has been enriched by writers from around the Web, who have weighed in on the pros and cons of graduate school, especially in the humanities. In addition to the usual terrifying articles in the advice section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a pair of pieces in Slate—“Thesis Hatement,” by Rebecca Schuman, and “Thesis Defense” by Katie Roiphe—have sparked many thoughtful responses from bloggers and journalists. It’s as though a virtual symposium has been convened.
I’m a former humanities graduate student myself—I went to grad school in English from 2003 through 2011 before becoming a journalist, and am still working nights on my dissertation—and I’m impressed by the clarity of the opinions these essays express. (Rebecca Schuman: “Don’t do it. Just don’t”; Katie Roiphe: “It gives you a habit of intellectual isolation that is… useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.”) I can’t muster up that clarity myself, though. I’m very glad that I went to graduate school—my life would be different, and definitely worse, without it. But when I’m asked to give students advice about what they should do, I’m stumped. Over time, I’ve come to feel that giving good advice about graduate school is impossible. It’s like giving people advice about whether they should have children, or move to New York, or join the Army, or go to seminary.
Maybe I’ve been in school too long; doctoral study has a way of turning your head into a never-ending seminar, and I’m now capable of having complicated, inconclusive thoughts about nearly any subject. But advice helps people when they are making rational decisions, and the decision to go to grad school in English is essentially irrational. In fact, it’s representative of a whole class of decisions that bring you face to face with the basic unknowability and uncertainty of life.
To begin with, the grad-school decision is hard in all sorts of perfectly ordinary ways. One of them is sample bias. If you’re an undergrad, then most of the grad students you know are hopeful about their careers, and all of the professors you know are successful; it’s a biased sample. Read the harrowing collection of letters from current and former grad students published in the Chronicle, and you encounter the same problem: the letters are written by the kinds of people who read the Chronicle, in response to an article about the horrors of grad school. They, too, are writing out of their personal experiences. It’s pretty much impossible to get an impartial opinion.
Last week, one of my college friends, who now manages vast sums at a hedge fund, visited me. He’s the most rational person I know, so I asked him how he would go about deciding whether to go to grad school in a discipline like English or comparative literature. He dealt immediately with the sample bias problem by turning toward statistics. His first step, he said, would be to ignore the stories of individual grad students, both good and bad. Their experiences are too variable and path-dependent, and their stories are too likely to assume an unwarranted weight in our minds. Instead, he said, he would focus on the “base rates”: that is, on the numbers that give you a broad statistical picture of outcomes from graduate school in the humanities. What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) To make a rational decision, he told me, you have to see the big picture, because your experience is likely to be typical, rather than exceptional. “If you take a broader view of the profession,” he told me, “it seems like a terrible idea to go to graduate school.”
Perhaps that’s the rational conclusion, but, if so, it’s beset on all sides by confounding little puzzles; they act like streams that divert and weaken the river of rational thought. Graduate school, for example, is a one-time-only offer. Very few people start doctoral programs later in life. If you pass it up, you pass it up forever. Given that, isn’t walking away actually the rash decision? (This kind of thinking is a subspecies of the habit of mind psychologists call loss aversion: once you have something, it’s very hard to give it up; if you get into grad school, it’s very hard not to go.) And then there’s the fact that graduate school, no matter how bad an idea it might be in the long term, is almost always fulfilling and worthwhile in the short term. As our conversation continued, my friend was struck by this. “How many people get paid to read what they want to read,” he asked, “and study what they want to study?” He paused. ”If I got into a really good program, I would probably go.”
Thinking about grad school this way is confusing, but it’s confusing in a mundane, dependable way; you’re still thinking about pros and cons, about arguments for and against a course of action. Continue to think about grad school, though, and you’ll enter the realm of the simply unknowable. The conflicting reports you’ll hear from different graduate students speak to the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of judging lengthy experiences. What does it mean to say that a decade of your life is good or bad? That it was worthwhile, or a waste of time? Barring some Proustian effort of recollection, a long period of years, with its vast range of experiences and incidents, simply can’t be judged all at once. The best we can do is use what psychologists call “heuristics”: mental shortcuts that help us draw conclusions quickly.
One of the more well-understood heuristics is called the “peak-end rule.” We tend to judge long experiences (vacations, say) by averaging, more or less, the most intense moment and the end. So a grad student’s account of grad school might not be truly representative of what went on; it might merely combine the best (or worst) with how it all turned out. The most wonderful students will be averaged with the grind of the dissertation; that glorious summer spent reading Kant will be balanced against the horrors of the job market. Essentially, peak-end is an algorithm; it grades graduate school in the same way a software program grades an essay. Sure, a judgment is produced, but it’s only meaningful in a vague, approximate way. At the same time, it raises an important conceptual question: What makes an experience worthwhile? Is it the quality of the experience as it’s happening, or as it’s remembered? Could the stress and anxiety of grad school fade, leaving only the learning behind? (One hopes that the opposite won’t happen.) Perhaps one might say of graduate school what Aeneas said of his struggles: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Today’s unhappiness might be forgotten later, or judged enriching in other ways.
This kind of thinking, in turn, makes you wonder about the larger purpose of graduate school in the humanities—about the role it assumes in one’s life. To some degree, going to graduate school is a career decision. But it’s also a life decision. It may be, therefore, that even older graduate students are too young to offer their opinions on graduate school. Ten years is a long time, but it’s still only part of a whole. The value of grad school hinges, to a large extent, on what comes next. The fact that what comes next is, increasingly, unclear—that many graduate students don’t go into academia, but pursue other jobs—might only mean that a greater proportion of the value of graduate school must be revealed with time. Grad school might be best understood as what George Eliot, at the end of “Middlemarch,” calls a “fragment of a life,” and
the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.
You never know how things will turn out. Experiences accrued in one currency can be changed into another. Ambition today can fund tranquility tomorrow; fear today can be a comfort later on. Or the reverse.
The breadth of grad school, in other words—the sheer number of years it encompasses—makes it hard to think about. But, finally, it’s challenging because of its depth, too. Grad school is a life-changing commitment: less like taking a new job and more like moving, for the entirety of your twenties, to a new country. (That’s true, I think, even for undergraduates: grad school is different from college.) Grad school will shape your schedule, your interests, your reading, your values, your friends. Ultimately, it will shape your identity. That makes it difficult to know, in advance, whether you’ll thrive, and difficult to say, afterward, what you would have been like without it.
The philosopher L. A. Paul, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes these sorts of big life decisions eloquently in a forthcoming paper; she calls them “epistemically transformative” decisions. Sometimes, you can’t know what something is like until you try it. You can’t know what Vegemite tastes like, for example, until you try Vegemite; you can’t know what having children will be like until you have children. You can guess what these things will be like; you can ask people; you can draw up lists of pros and cons; but, at the end of the day, “without having the experience itself” you “cannot even have an approximate idea as to what it is like to have that experience.” That’s because you won’t just be having the experience; the experience will be changing you. On the other side, you will be a different kind of person. Making such a decision, you will always be uninformed.
We don’t, Paul writes, really have a good way to talk about these kinds of life-changing decisions, but we still make them. It’s hard to say how, exactly, we do it. All she can say is that, in order to make them, we have to do something a little crazy; we have to cast aside “the modern upper middle class conception of self-realization [that] involves the notion that one achieves a kind of maximal self-fulfillment through making rational choices about the sort of person one wants to be.” From this point of view, when you contemplate grad school, you’re like Marlow, in “Heart of Darkness,” when he is travelling up-river to find Kurtz. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship,” Conrad writes,
is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’
We make these decisions, I suspect, not because we’re rational, but because we’re curious. We want to know. This seems especially true about graduate school. It’s designed, after all, for curious people—for people who like knowing things. They are exactly the people most likely to be drawn in by that whispered “Come and find out.”
In a narrow sense, of course, there’s nothing about these skeptical thoughts that should stop me from giving advice about graduate school. And when students ask me, I do have things to say. I point them to data, like the chart published in The Atlantic last week, which shows the declining reliance of universities on tenured faculty. And I tell my own story, which is overwhelmingly positive. I may not have finished (yet), and, like any grad student, I had my moments of panic. But I loved graduate school, and I miss it. In particular, I miss the conversations. Talking with my students, I found and expressed my best self. The office hours I spent in conversation with my professors stand out, even years later, as extraordinary experiences. I wish that everyone I know could have them, too.
But, talking to my students, I’m aware that there are too many unknowns. There are too many ways in which a person can be disappointed or fulfilled. It’s too unclear what happiness is. It’s too uncertain how the study of art, literature, and ideas fits into it all. (I’ve never forgotten the moment, in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” when Herzog thinks, “Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. I even know which ones”; Herzog knows everything except how to live and do good. And yet what he knows is so extraordinary. As a grad student, I led a fascinating and, obviously, somewhat ironic discussion of that quote.) And, finally, life is too variable, and subject to too many influences. A person’s life, Eliot writes, also at the end of “Middlemarch,” is
the mixed result of young and noble impulses struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.
I’ll give advice about grad school if you ask me to, and I’m happy to share my experiences. But these bigger mysteries make the grad-school decision harder. They take a career conundrum and elevate it into an existential quandary. In the end, I feel just as ignorant as my curious, intelligent, inexperienced students. All I really want to say is, good luck.
The Impossible Decision
Posted by Joshua Rothman12756Print More Share
Close TumblrReddit Linked In Email
Graduate students are always thinking about the pleasures and travails of grad school, and springtime is a period of especially intense reflection. It’s in the spring, often in March and April, that undergraduates receive their acceptance letters. When that happens, they turn to their teachers, many of them graduate students, for advice. They ask the dreaded, complicated, inevitable question: To go, or not to go?
Answering that question is not easy. For graduate students, being consulted about grad school is a little like starring in one of those “Up” documentaries (“28 Up,” ideally; “35 Up,” in some cases). Your students do the work of Michael Apted, the series’s laconic director, asking all sorts of tough, personal questions. They push you to think about the success and failure of your life projects; to decide whether or not you are happy; to guess what the future holds; to consider your life on a decades-long scale. This particular spring, the whole conversation has been enriched by writers from around the Web, who have weighed in on the pros and cons of graduate school, especially in the humanities. In addition to the usual terrifying articles in the advice section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, a pair of pieces in Slate—“Thesis Hatement,” by Rebecca Schuman, and “Thesis Defense” by Katie Roiphe—have sparked many thoughtful responses from bloggers and journalists. It’s as though a virtual symposium has been convened.
I’m a former humanities graduate student myself—I went to grad school in English from 2003 through 2011 before becoming a journalist, and am still working nights on my dissertation—and I’m impressed by the clarity of the opinions these essays express. (Rebecca Schuman: “Don’t do it. Just don’t”; Katie Roiphe: “It gives you a habit of intellectual isolation that is… useful, bracing, that gives you strength and originality.”) I can’t muster up that clarity myself, though. I’m very glad that I went to graduate school—my life would be different, and definitely worse, without it. But when I’m asked to give students advice about what they should do, I’m stumped. Over time, I’ve come to feel that giving good advice about graduate school is impossible. It’s like giving people advice about whether they should have children, or move to New York, or join the Army, or go to seminary.
Maybe I’ve been in school too long; doctoral study has a way of turning your head into a never-ending seminar, and I’m now capable of having complicated, inconclusive thoughts about nearly any subject. But advice helps people when they are making rational decisions, and the decision to go to grad school in English is essentially irrational. In fact, it’s representative of a whole class of decisions that bring you face to face with the basic unknowability and uncertainty of life.
To begin with, the grad-school decision is hard in all sorts of perfectly ordinary ways. One of them is sample bias. If you’re an undergrad, then most of the grad students you know are hopeful about their careers, and all of the professors you know are successful; it’s a biased sample. Read the harrowing collection of letters from current and former grad students published in the Chronicle, and you encounter the same problem: the letters are written by the kinds of people who read the Chronicle, in response to an article about the horrors of grad school. They, too, are writing out of their personal experiences. It’s pretty much impossible to get an impartial opinion.
Last week, one of my college friends, who now manages vast sums at a hedge fund, visited me. He’s the most rational person I know, so I asked him how he would go about deciding whether to go to grad school in a discipline like English or comparative literature. He dealt immediately with the sample bias problem by turning toward statistics. His first step, he said, would be to ignore the stories of individual grad students, both good and bad. Their experiences are too variable and path-dependent, and their stories are too likely to assume an unwarranted weight in our minds. Instead, he said, he would focus on the “base rates”: that is, on the numbers that give you a broad statistical picture of outcomes from graduate school in the humanities. What percentage of graduate students end up with tenure? (About one in four.) How much more unhappy are graduate students than other people? (About fifty-four per cent of graduate students report feeling so depressed they have “a hard time functioning,” as opposed to ten per cent of the general population.) To make a rational decision, he told me, you have to see the big picture, because your experience is likely to be typical, rather than exceptional. “If you take a broader view of the profession,” he told me, “it seems like a terrible idea to go to graduate school.”
Perhaps that’s the rational conclusion, but, if so, it’s beset on all sides by confounding little puzzles; they act like streams that divert and weaken the river of rational thought. Graduate school, for example, is a one-time-only offer. Very few people start doctoral programs later in life. If you pass it up, you pass it up forever. Given that, isn’t walking away actually the rash decision? (This kind of thinking is a subspecies of the habit of mind psychologists call loss aversion: once you have something, it’s very hard to give it up; if you get into grad school, it’s very hard not to go.) And then there’s the fact that graduate school, no matter how bad an idea it might be in the long term, is almost always fulfilling and worthwhile in the short term. As our conversation continued, my friend was struck by this. “How many people get paid to read what they want to read,” he asked, “and study what they want to study?” He paused. ”If I got into a really good program, I would probably go.”
Thinking about grad school this way is confusing, but it’s confusing in a mundane, dependable way; you’re still thinking about pros and cons, about arguments for and against a course of action. Continue to think about grad school, though, and you’ll enter the realm of the simply unknowable. The conflicting reports you’ll hear from different graduate students speak to the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility, of judging lengthy experiences. What does it mean to say that a decade of your life is good or bad? That it was worthwhile, or a waste of time? Barring some Proustian effort of recollection, a long period of years, with its vast range of experiences and incidents, simply can’t be judged all at once. The best we can do is use what psychologists call “heuristics”: mental shortcuts that help us draw conclusions quickly.
One of the more well-understood heuristics is called the “peak-end rule.” We tend to judge long experiences (vacations, say) by averaging, more or less, the most intense moment and the end. So a grad student’s account of grad school might not be truly representative of what went on; it might merely combine the best (or worst) with how it all turned out. The most wonderful students will be averaged with the grind of the dissertation; that glorious summer spent reading Kant will be balanced against the horrors of the job market. Essentially, peak-end is an algorithm; it grades graduate school in the same way a software program grades an essay. Sure, a judgment is produced, but it’s only meaningful in a vague, approximate way. At the same time, it raises an important conceptual question: What makes an experience worthwhile? Is it the quality of the experience as it’s happening, or as it’s remembered? Could the stress and anxiety of grad school fade, leaving only the learning behind? (One hopes that the opposite won’t happen.) Perhaps one might say of graduate school what Aeneas said of his struggles: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.” Today’s unhappiness might be forgotten later, or judged enriching in other ways.
This kind of thinking, in turn, makes you wonder about the larger purpose of graduate school in the humanities—about the role it assumes in one’s life. To some degree, going to graduate school is a career decision. But it’s also a life decision. It may be, therefore, that even older graduate students are too young to offer their opinions on graduate school. Ten years is a long time, but it’s still only part of a whole. The value of grad school hinges, to a large extent, on what comes next. The fact that what comes next is, increasingly, unclear—that many graduate students don’t go into academia, but pursue other jobs—might only mean that a greater proportion of the value of graduate school must be revealed with time. Grad school might be best understood as what George Eliot, at the end of “Middlemarch,” calls a “fragment of a life,” and
the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.
You never know how things will turn out. Experiences accrued in one currency can be changed into another. Ambition today can fund tranquility tomorrow; fear today can be a comfort later on. Or the reverse.
The breadth of grad school, in other words—the sheer number of years it encompasses—makes it hard to think about. But, finally, it’s challenging because of its depth, too. Grad school is a life-changing commitment: less like taking a new job and more like moving, for the entirety of your twenties, to a new country. (That’s true, I think, even for undergraduates: grad school is different from college.) Grad school will shape your schedule, your interests, your reading, your values, your friends. Ultimately, it will shape your identity. That makes it difficult to know, in advance, whether you’ll thrive, and difficult to say, afterward, what you would have been like without it.
The philosopher L. A. Paul, who teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describes these sorts of big life decisions eloquently in a forthcoming paper; she calls them “epistemically transformative” decisions. Sometimes, you can’t know what something is like until you try it. You can’t know what Vegemite tastes like, for example, until you try Vegemite; you can’t know what having children will be like until you have children. You can guess what these things will be like; you can ask people; you can draw up lists of pros and cons; but, at the end of the day, “without having the experience itself” you “cannot even have an approximate idea as to what it is like to have that experience.” That’s because you won’t just be having the experience; the experience will be changing you. On the other side, you will be a different kind of person. Making such a decision, you will always be uninformed.
We don’t, Paul writes, really have a good way to talk about these kinds of life-changing decisions, but we still make them. It’s hard to say how, exactly, we do it. All she can say is that, in order to make them, we have to do something a little crazy; we have to cast aside “the modern upper middle class conception of self-realization [that] involves the notion that one achieves a kind of maximal self-fulfillment through making rational choices about the sort of person one wants to be.” From this point of view, when you contemplate grad school, you’re like Marlow, in “Heart of Darkness,” when he is travelling up-river to find Kurtz. “Watching a coast as it slips by the ship,” Conrad writes,
is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’
We make these decisions, I suspect, not because we’re rational, but because we’re curious. We want to know. This seems especially true about graduate school. It’s designed, after all, for curious people—for people who like knowing things. They are exactly the people most likely to be drawn in by that whispered “Come and find out.”
In a narrow sense, of course, there’s nothing about these skeptical thoughts that should stop me from giving advice about graduate school. And when students ask me, I do have things to say. I point them to data, like the chart published in The Atlantic last week, which shows the declining reliance of universities on tenured faculty. And I tell my own story, which is overwhelmingly positive. I may not have finished (yet), and, like any grad student, I had my moments of panic. But I loved graduate school, and I miss it. In particular, I miss the conversations. Talking with my students, I found and expressed my best self. The office hours I spent in conversation with my professors stand out, even years later, as extraordinary experiences. I wish that everyone I know could have them, too.
But, talking to my students, I’m aware that there are too many unknowns. There are too many ways in which a person can be disappointed or fulfilled. It’s too unclear what happiness is. It’s too uncertain how the study of art, literature, and ideas fits into it all. (I’ve never forgotten the moment, in Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” when Herzog thinks, “Much of my life has been spent in the effort to live by more coherent ideas. I even know which ones”; Herzog knows everything except how to live and do good. And yet what he knows is so extraordinary. As a grad student, I led a fascinating and, obviously, somewhat ironic discussion of that quote.) And, finally, life is too variable, and subject to too many influences. A person’s life, Eliot writes, also at the end of “Middlemarch,” is
the mixed result of young and noble impulses struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.
I’ll give advice about grad school if you ask me to, and I’m happy to share my experiences. But these bigger mysteries make the grad-school decision harder. They take a career conundrum and elevate it into an existential quandary. In the end, I feel just as ignorant as my curious, intelligent, inexperienced students. All I really want to say is, good luck.
About Frankenstein
Enlightened monsters
by Michael Saler
Roseanne Montillo
THE LADY AND HER MONSTERS
A tale of dissections, real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the creation of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece
336pp. William Morrow. $26.99.
978 0 06 202581 4
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
THE ANNOTATED FRANKENSTEIN
Edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao
400pp. Belknap Press. £22.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 05552 0
Published: 13 May 2013
T he child may be father to the man, but how did a girl become mother to the monster? We continue to ask that of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) before she turned twenty. It is a startling work from someone so young, combining profound philosophic disquisitions with melodramatic blood and thunder. Some see it as the first science fiction novel, but as Roseanne Montillo shows in The Lady and Her Monsters, Shelley’s narrative of a scientist’s quest to discover and harness the “principle of life” was less an extrapolation into the future than a faithful representation of contemporary practices. Indeed, Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror novels about modernity, directly confronting the instabilities provoked by the scientific, Industrial and French Revolutions. Shelley seemed predestined for this task: she was the daughter of the Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin and the radical critic and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The novel’s power stems from its young author’s often ambivalent wrestling with Enlightenment and Romantic responses to modernity, as well as her own traumas involving issues such as parenting and childbirth. (Her mother died eleven days after giving birth to her, and Shelley herself lost her first child shortly before commencing the book.)
Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror novels about modernity
Montillo’s narrative history of Frankenstein gestures at its philosophical dimensions, but is more interested in coupling Shelley’s biography with the wider scientific and medical contexts of the period. Her book is gripping, as she is drawn to the many sensationalistic aspects surrounding Frankenstein’s gestation and Shelley’s tempestuous, often tragic, life. She details how Victor Frankenstein’s ambition to discover the secret of existence mirrored the aims of contemporary natural philosophers no less than ancient alchemists. In the late eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani’s demonstrations that dead frogs’ legs twitched when stimulated by electric currents led to attempts to resuscitate corpses by similar means. Shelley was familiar with “galvanism” through the intellectuals who visited her father, such as the chemist Humphry Davy, as well as through Percy Shelley, an enthusiast of both contemporary science and ancient alchemy. (Most undergraduates have messy rooms, but Percy turned his at Oxford into a messy laboratory. A friend charitably explained that “the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to re-create primeval chaos”.) To pursue these experiments in re-animation, physicians required corpses, which were in short supply owing to strict legal regulations. Body-snatching consequently became a lucrative profession, its seedy practitioners awaiting commissions at pubs like the Fortune of War, located near Shelley’s home on Skinner Street. As Montillo reveals, the pillaging of fresh bodies could be stymied by popular deterrents to grave-robbing, ranging from iron cages surrounding coffins to explosive booby traps. Montillo also discusses more proactive figures like Burke and Hare, who avoided the fuss of grave-robbing by the simple expedient of murder. Their solution, soon adopted by other “burkers”, convinced legislators to make legitimate corpses easier to obtain in 1832.
Montillo’s eye for ghoulish detail spices an already potent brew. One set piece involves the cause of Mary Wollstonecraft’s fatal infection, at the hands of the doctor who delivered her daughter. At other times, however, Montillo’s prose shifts from Grand Guignol to soap opera. Lord Byron, we are informed, “was never amused by woman’s antics or their girly talk, and even less by their suggestive smiles and batting eyelashes”. Her book is no more sophisticated as literary criticism. It’s hard to reconcile Montillo’s early, simplistic assertion that Frankenstein “creates a soulless automaton” with her somewhat more nuanced description of the loquacious and sensitive monster later. The Lady and Her Monsters is an enjoyable introduction to Frankenstein, but largely a superficial one. It whets the appetite for a more sustained engagement with the novel’s complexities.
The Annotated Frankenstein is an ideal vehicle for this purpose; it should appeal to scholars familiar with the novel as well as those exploring it for the first time. The editors, Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao, situate the novel in its philosophical, literary, biographical and historical contexts, and provide apt illustrations and useful appendices (including examinations of the revised edition of 1831 and a timeline which juxtaposes the novel’s episodes with concurrent historical events). Its expansive, cream-coloured pages and generous margins render the volume a world unto itself, while emphasizing the worldly issues Shelley addressed in her uncanny tale.
In contrast to Montillo’s focus on the sensational and macabre, Wolfson and Levao show that the first edition of Frankenstein of 1818 was packaged as a philosophic novel. Published anonymously, and dedicated to William Godwin, it features more references to the Prometheus legend and Paradise Lost than to such Gothic tropes as perverse sexuality and spectral hauntings. The monster may be stitched together from human and animal parts, yet he is more memorable for being an autodidact who pleads for affection: “his humanity is the most surprising, most disturbing, and ultimately most moving aspect of his character”. When he is viciously rejected, the monster engages in a murderous rampage – but Shelley blames this on his egotistic creator and an uncaring society that refuses to empathize with a suffering fellow “creature”.
Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution
As the editors note, Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution. Conservatives likened the Revolution to a monster created by Enlightenment rationalism, whereas radicals perceived it as a justified response to a monstrous ancien régime. The novel raised questions about social justice and reciprocal obligations in a modern, secular age, in the process also condemning slavery. In addition, Shelley criticized gender relations, just as her mother had done in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Frankenstein’s creation of life was not simply an act of scientific hubris, but an exposé of patriarchy. By arrogating the creation of life solely to himself, Frankenstein’s deed of giving birth results in the death of everyone he loved, culminating in his own mortal struggle with his creation in the sterile frigidity of the Arctic.
The first edition of this rich and ambiguous work didn’t fly off the shelves. But it was resurrected in 1823 – this time published under its author’s name – as a result of a popular stage adaptation that promoted the monster rather than the philosophy. Shelley herself pursued this lucrative strategy in her “Introduction” to a revised edition of the novel in 1831, which immediately became a bestseller. Here she situated the work’s genesis in the ghost-story tradition, recalling the summer of 1816 when she joined a party visiting Lord Byron in Switzerland. After several dark and stormy nights spent reading ghost stories, Byron suggested they write their own. Shelley retrospectively claimed she intended to write one that would “awaken thrilling horror”.
The 1831 edition was no longer dedicated to her father the Enlightenment philosopher. Instead, it featured the first book illustration of the nameless “monster”. Shelley bid her “hideous progeny go forth and prosper”, which it did, especially after the release of James Whale’s film version in 1931. Boris Karloff delivered a poignant performance as the monster, now saddled with a “criminal brain” and rendered inarticulate. Shelley’s confrontation with modernity was briefly effaced: but it would never remain buried for long.
Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book, As If: Modern enchantment and the literary prehistory of virtual reality, was named one of the best books of 2012 by the Huffington Post.
by Michael Saler
Roseanne Montillo
THE LADY AND HER MONSTERS
A tale of dissections, real-life Dr. Frankensteins, and the creation of Mary Shelley’s masterpiece
336pp. William Morrow. $26.99.
978 0 06 202581 4
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
THE ANNOTATED FRANKENSTEIN
Edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao
400pp. Belknap Press. £22.95 (US $29.95).
978 0 674 05552 0
Published: 13 May 2013
T he child may be father to the man, but how did a girl become mother to the monster? We continue to ask that of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818) before she turned twenty. It is a startling work from someone so young, combining profound philosophic disquisitions with melodramatic blood and thunder. Some see it as the first science fiction novel, but as Roseanne Montillo shows in The Lady and Her Monsters, Shelley’s narrative of a scientist’s quest to discover and harness the “principle of life” was less an extrapolation into the future than a faithful representation of contemporary practices. Indeed, Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror novels about modernity, directly confronting the instabilities provoked by the scientific, Industrial and French Revolutions. Shelley seemed predestined for this task: she was the daughter of the Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin and the radical critic and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The novel’s power stems from its young author’s often ambivalent wrestling with Enlightenment and Romantic responses to modernity, as well as her own traumas involving issues such as parenting and childbirth. (Her mother died eleven days after giving birth to her, and Shelley herself lost her first child shortly before commencing the book.)
Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror novels about modernity
Montillo’s narrative history of Frankenstein gestures at its philosophical dimensions, but is more interested in coupling Shelley’s biography with the wider scientific and medical contexts of the period. Her book is gripping, as she is drawn to the many sensationalistic aspects surrounding Frankenstein’s gestation and Shelley’s tempestuous, often tragic, life. She details how Victor Frankenstein’s ambition to discover the secret of existence mirrored the aims of contemporary natural philosophers no less than ancient alchemists. In the late eighteenth century, Luigi Galvani’s demonstrations that dead frogs’ legs twitched when stimulated by electric currents led to attempts to resuscitate corpses by similar means. Shelley was familiar with “galvanism” through the intellectuals who visited her father, such as the chemist Humphry Davy, as well as through Percy Shelley, an enthusiast of both contemporary science and ancient alchemy. (Most undergraduates have messy rooms, but Percy turned his at Oxford into a messy laboratory. A friend charitably explained that “the young chemist, in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to re-create primeval chaos”.) To pursue these experiments in re-animation, physicians required corpses, which were in short supply owing to strict legal regulations. Body-snatching consequently became a lucrative profession, its seedy practitioners awaiting commissions at pubs like the Fortune of War, located near Shelley’s home on Skinner Street. As Montillo reveals, the pillaging of fresh bodies could be stymied by popular deterrents to grave-robbing, ranging from iron cages surrounding coffins to explosive booby traps. Montillo also discusses more proactive figures like Burke and Hare, who avoided the fuss of grave-robbing by the simple expedient of murder. Their solution, soon adopted by other “burkers”, convinced legislators to make legitimate corpses easier to obtain in 1832.
Montillo’s eye for ghoulish detail spices an already potent brew. One set piece involves the cause of Mary Wollstonecraft’s fatal infection, at the hands of the doctor who delivered her daughter. At other times, however, Montillo’s prose shifts from Grand Guignol to soap opera. Lord Byron, we are informed, “was never amused by woman’s antics or their girly talk, and even less by their suggestive smiles and batting eyelashes”. Her book is no more sophisticated as literary criticism. It’s hard to reconcile Montillo’s early, simplistic assertion that Frankenstein “creates a soulless automaton” with her somewhat more nuanced description of the loquacious and sensitive monster later. The Lady and Her Monsters is an enjoyable introduction to Frankenstein, but largely a superficial one. It whets the appetite for a more sustained engagement with the novel’s complexities.
The Annotated Frankenstein is an ideal vehicle for this purpose; it should appeal to scholars familiar with the novel as well as those exploring it for the first time. The editors, Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao, situate the novel in its philosophical, literary, biographical and historical contexts, and provide apt illustrations and useful appendices (including examinations of the revised edition of 1831 and a timeline which juxtaposes the novel’s episodes with concurrent historical events). Its expansive, cream-coloured pages and generous margins render the volume a world unto itself, while emphasizing the worldly issues Shelley addressed in her uncanny tale.
In contrast to Montillo’s focus on the sensational and macabre, Wolfson and Levao show that the first edition of Frankenstein of 1818 was packaged as a philosophic novel. Published anonymously, and dedicated to William Godwin, it features more references to the Prometheus legend and Paradise Lost than to such Gothic tropes as perverse sexuality and spectral hauntings. The monster may be stitched together from human and animal parts, yet he is more memorable for being an autodidact who pleads for affection: “his humanity is the most surprising, most disturbing, and ultimately most moving aspect of his character”. When he is viciously rejected, the monster engages in a murderous rampage – but Shelley blames this on his egotistic creator and an uncaring society that refuses to empathize with a suffering fellow “creature”.
Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution
As the editors note, Shelley’s contemporaries would have associated the monster’s terror with the Terror of the French Revolution. Conservatives likened the Revolution to a monster created by Enlightenment rationalism, whereas radicals perceived it as a justified response to a monstrous ancien régime. The novel raised questions about social justice and reciprocal obligations in a modern, secular age, in the process also condemning slavery. In addition, Shelley criticized gender relations, just as her mother had done in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Frankenstein’s creation of life was not simply an act of scientific hubris, but an exposé of patriarchy. By arrogating the creation of life solely to himself, Frankenstein’s deed of giving birth results in the death of everyone he loved, culminating in his own mortal struggle with his creation in the sterile frigidity of the Arctic.
The first edition of this rich and ambiguous work didn’t fly off the shelves. But it was resurrected in 1823 – this time published under its author’s name – as a result of a popular stage adaptation that promoted the monster rather than the philosophy. Shelley herself pursued this lucrative strategy in her “Introduction” to a revised edition of the novel in 1831, which immediately became a bestseller. Here she situated the work’s genesis in the ghost-story tradition, recalling the summer of 1816 when she joined a party visiting Lord Byron in Switzerland. After several dark and stormy nights spent reading ghost stories, Byron suggested they write their own. Shelley retrospectively claimed she intended to write one that would “awaken thrilling horror”.
The 1831 edition was no longer dedicated to her father the Enlightenment philosopher. Instead, it featured the first book illustration of the nameless “monster”. Shelley bid her “hideous progeny go forth and prosper”, which it did, especially after the release of James Whale’s film version in 1931. Boris Karloff delivered a poignant performance as the monster, now saddled with a “criminal brain” and rendered inarticulate. Shelley’s confrontation with modernity was briefly effaced: but it would never remain buried for long.
Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book, As If: Modern enchantment and the literary prehistory of virtual reality, was named one of the best books of 2012 by the Huffington Post.
The Scandal Cloud
How Obama Can Escape the Scandal CloudBy Jonathan Chait
0 40 Share on emailThe cloud of scandal is hard to escape — mainly because they tend to be large and amorphous, like, you know, clouds. The scandal cloud formed, as I argued today, because three events came together in just the right sequence so as to create the impression that we had “three Obama scandals” when, in reality, we have somewhere between zero and one.
The Benghazi scandal was considered a non-scandal, and would still be considered one, if not for some erroneous reporting by Jonathan Karl that set off the entire cycle. The only thing that happened here is a bunch of agencies that were confused about events tried to agree among themselves. Jake Tapper, who broke the story that refuted the erroneous report, notes:
There were internal disagreements within the CIA about a number of issues, including whether the attack was a pre-planned act of terror or the result of spontaneous demonstrations because of similar protests in Cairo over an anti-Muslim video produced in the United States.
The IRS story is likewise looking less and less like a scandal, too. Noam Scheiber smartly points out that the IRS didn’t so much single out conservative groups as conservative groups singled themselves out by applying en masse for tax-exempt status: “So the crime here had nothing to do with 'targeting' conservatives. The targeting was effectively done by the conservative groups themselves.” It’s obviously vital for the IRS to develop ideologically neutral criteria to enforce its guidelines for what is a tax-exempt group. But plenty of liberal groups were targeted as well. The IRS may have gotten its response to the tea-party-application wave wrong, but it was not indicative of a general bias against the right, and it was a low-level failure.
As they attract more and more scrutiny, the Benghazi and the IRS stories both look increasingly benign. Reporters like Ben Smith, John Harris, and Alexander Burns have heroically attempted to justify lumping these incidents together as “scandals” with the common theme of dangerous big government overreach. One could no less persuasively lump them into the “narrative” of government employees making good-faith efforts to undertake difficult judgments in the face of implacable partisan opposition exploiting raging paranoia.
The task for Obama is to disentangle the various stories, to break them down into individual, fact-based questions rather than nebulous accusations. The key here is the third story, the Department of Justice’s snooping of phone records of the Associated Press. This is the third, legitimate piece that is currently propping up the other two rapidly deflating elements of the “scandal” troika.
The oddity is that the snooping story, while extremely serious, is probably not a “scandal” as we normally understand it. It’s a policy dispute, like when the Environmental Protection Agency decides to regulate or not regulate carbon dioxide, and policy disputes can be important.
And here the Obama administration has found itself on the wrong political side of an issue whose political calculus has suddenly inverted. For most of the administration, Obama’s main political goal required guarding against the accusation of doing too little to fight terrorism. Moving too far right would earn him only the scorn of a handful of liberals, while moving too far left risked setting off a far more dangerous narrative pressed first by Hillary Clinton, then more vigorously by John McCain, and continued by Republicans through the Benghazi episode — the foreign policy weakling, naïve or even sympathetic to the dangers of Islamic terrorism.
I have no idea to what extent political calculations drove the administration’s policies on civil liberties. I suspect it was quite a bit, but as I noted earlier, the issue is not my specialty. What I do know is that Obama’s strongest political maneuver at the moment would be to shore up his civil libertarian credentials. He did announce support for a shield law today — but, as Sam Stein and Zach Carter point out, the proposed law would not necessarily have prevented the most recent abuse. Going further is not merely a policy imperative but Obama’s best way to path out of a minor political crisis.
0 40 Share on emailThe cloud of scandal is hard to escape — mainly because they tend to be large and amorphous, like, you know, clouds. The scandal cloud formed, as I argued today, because three events came together in just the right sequence so as to create the impression that we had “three Obama scandals” when, in reality, we have somewhere between zero and one.
The Benghazi scandal was considered a non-scandal, and would still be considered one, if not for some erroneous reporting by Jonathan Karl that set off the entire cycle. The only thing that happened here is a bunch of agencies that were confused about events tried to agree among themselves. Jake Tapper, who broke the story that refuted the erroneous report, notes:
There were internal disagreements within the CIA about a number of issues, including whether the attack was a pre-planned act of terror or the result of spontaneous demonstrations because of similar protests in Cairo over an anti-Muslim video produced in the United States.
The IRS story is likewise looking less and less like a scandal, too. Noam Scheiber smartly points out that the IRS didn’t so much single out conservative groups as conservative groups singled themselves out by applying en masse for tax-exempt status: “So the crime here had nothing to do with 'targeting' conservatives. The targeting was effectively done by the conservative groups themselves.” It’s obviously vital for the IRS to develop ideologically neutral criteria to enforce its guidelines for what is a tax-exempt group. But plenty of liberal groups were targeted as well. The IRS may have gotten its response to the tea-party-application wave wrong, but it was not indicative of a general bias against the right, and it was a low-level failure.
As they attract more and more scrutiny, the Benghazi and the IRS stories both look increasingly benign. Reporters like Ben Smith, John Harris, and Alexander Burns have heroically attempted to justify lumping these incidents together as “scandals” with the common theme of dangerous big government overreach. One could no less persuasively lump them into the “narrative” of government employees making good-faith efforts to undertake difficult judgments in the face of implacable partisan opposition exploiting raging paranoia.
The task for Obama is to disentangle the various stories, to break them down into individual, fact-based questions rather than nebulous accusations. The key here is the third story, the Department of Justice’s snooping of phone records of the Associated Press. This is the third, legitimate piece that is currently propping up the other two rapidly deflating elements of the “scandal” troika.
The oddity is that the snooping story, while extremely serious, is probably not a “scandal” as we normally understand it. It’s a policy dispute, like when the Environmental Protection Agency decides to regulate or not regulate carbon dioxide, and policy disputes can be important.
And here the Obama administration has found itself on the wrong political side of an issue whose political calculus has suddenly inverted. For most of the administration, Obama’s main political goal required guarding against the accusation of doing too little to fight terrorism. Moving too far right would earn him only the scorn of a handful of liberals, while moving too far left risked setting off a far more dangerous narrative pressed first by Hillary Clinton, then more vigorously by John McCain, and continued by Republicans through the Benghazi episode — the foreign policy weakling, naïve or even sympathetic to the dangers of Islamic terrorism.
I have no idea to what extent political calculations drove the administration’s policies on civil liberties. I suspect it was quite a bit, but as I noted earlier, the issue is not my specialty. What I do know is that Obama’s strongest political maneuver at the moment would be to shore up his civil libertarian credentials. He did announce support for a shield law today — but, as Sam Stein and Zach Carter point out, the proposed law would not necessarily have prevented the most recent abuse. Going further is not merely a policy imperative but Obama’s best way to path out of a minor political crisis.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Thomas Jefferson & Early American History
Normally my mind jumps from one thing to another. Right now I am trying to stay focused on Jefferson and early American history.
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Michael Sandel Talks
by Michael Sandel and AC Grayling / May 10, 2013 / 4 Comments
On Wednesday night (8th May), Prospect hosted an evening of conversation between Michael Sandel and AC Grayling at the Royal Geographical Society in London.
AC Grayling: You were brought up mainly in California, educated at Brandeis and then at Oxford. You were a Rhodes scholar there and stayed on for your doctorate, and you were supervised for your doctoral studies by Charles Taylor. What influence still persists from your time talking to Charles Taylor?
Michael Sandel: I had a wonderful time at Oxford and Charles was at the centre of a small but compelling group of heterodox, moral and political philosophers who stood outside the then mainstream of purely analytic philosophy, which was largely utilitarian.
I came late to philosophy—I had studied politics as an undergraduate. So I was first enticed, almost forced, to study Kant by Alan Montefiore. Then after I had done that, with Charles I studied Aristotle and Hegel, and then with Stuart Hampshire, Spinoza. All of these thinkers were in a way counter-cultural, at odds with the mainstream.
I found it all fascinating, and the influence this had on me was to question some of the overly individualistic assumptions that informed contemporary moral and political philosophy, including those of Rawls. Also, to question the idea that debates about justice and rights can be neutral with respect to conceptions of the good life.
Grayling: I know you don’t like the label “communitarian” but that is of course one that’s associated with Charles Taylor’s views. You did mention the overly individualistic view of things. This is tremendously important because a large part of what you’ve thought, especially in talking about the marketisation of our society, has really been a lament for the sense of community.
So there is a sense that the label, although you don’t quite like it, does somewhat describe the position you come from—and it would be a Charles Taylor sort of position.
Sandel: The reason I’m a bit uneasy about the communitarian label is that it’s sometimes thought to stand for the idea that whatever values happen to prevail in any given community at any given time are the right ones, the ones that should be enshrined in law. And I don’t think that.
There is a sense, you’re quite right, that the term fits. But it’s in the sense that suggests that it’s not reasonable, it’s not possible in some cases, and not desirable in others, to try to reason about justice or rights or the good society by stepping back from the particular identities that shape citizens.
Grayling: You urged against Rawls’s idea that somehow you could think about how you would like to see society organised if you were ignorant of where you would be in society. Your point is you can’t start from there—you’ve got to start from where you are located.
This is a theme in a great deal of what you have written and said. It naturally enough raises questions in the minds of those who do have an interest in conceptions of autonomy, individual liberty and the rest, that they lie in tension with the idea that we are already connected and, to use a wonderful word coined by Bishop Berkeley, embrangled in society.
How are we going to deal with the difficulty that there seems to be an irresolvable conflict between, on the one hand, the interests that individuals have in their own lives and projects and so on, and these commitments that they cannot escape from?
Sandel: Well this is a question that goes right to the heart of what Sophron called the liberal communitarian debate. I’m very much in favour of rights and liberty and freedom. The question is how to define our rights, the rights that matter and should be protected, and how to define what it means to be free.
Take the right of freedom of speech. There are some who say that the moral basis of freedom of speech is that government should be neutral with respect to the content of people’s speech and respect the fact that it is the speech of a freely choosing self.
I would put the case of freedom of speech differently. It deserves special protection for two reasons. First, respecting freedom of speech is essential to democratic life. Democratic life matters not just because it satisfies individual preferences, but because it makes us better. It enables us to develop our human capacities more fully if we participate in self-government and deliberate about important public questions.
The second reason goes beyond civic virtue and suggests that we are free when we actively participate in public deliberation and develop the full range of our human faculties. So you might call this an Aristotelian defence of freedom of speech because it does refer to a certain conception of the good life and maybe even virtue.
Grayling: The way you set that up is that the reason central civil liberties like freedom of speech matter is that it makes for a good society, that if people are fully participating, are fully informed and take part in the conversation then society will flourish as a result.
Sandel: And they will be better individuals.
Grayling: Some people could read Aristotle as saying that it’s better that society is good so that individuals within it can flourish. In other words, the direction of emphasis is towards the flourishing of the individual. Whereas the other direction of emphasis is to accord individuals these civil liberties so that society can be a good one. I’m wondering which direction we’re moving in with you.
Sandel: I see those two considerations as reciprocally constitutive. They’re mutually dependent because the way in which participating in self-government helps the individual is not just that it’s an instrument to enable each individual to have a say and therefore get what he or she wants from public policy. The activity itself is character building. When we concern ourselves with public affairs, and when we take responsibility for the fate of the community as a whole, we exercise human faculties that would otherwise lie dormant.
Grayling: I’m very sympathetic to that view but I can hear two different kinds of critics responding to it. One critic might say that the best kind of society from the point of view of the individual flourishing is the minimalist society. This might be your bog standard Republican who wants government to get out of the way.
In the other direction you might have someone say that a good society is one that compensates for the failings of the individuals within in it. Famously, Churchill said democracy was the least bad of a lot of bad systems. But he also said that the strongest argument against democracy was two minutes of conversation with any voter.
Sandel: He might have said two minutes of conversation with any politician.
Grayling: Even better. So you have two different criticisms that would say this reciprocal constitution could fail in either direction.
Sandel: It could. I think the real test about what kind of liberty one adheres to is whether one thinks that part of the rationale of politics and political participation is to form our characters and to make us better than we would otherwise be. That’s why I admit that this account of liberty does rest on a contestable account of human flourishing and virtue.
Grayling: That’s very interesting. We must come back to it because of course in your discussion of the marketisation of society in What Money Can’t Buy, you end by pointing out how corrupting of our civic life it would be if everything could be bought or sold.
Before we do, the motivation for what you say in that argument is predicated on the disenchantment you have with economics and economists. Perhaps you could explain what it is about them that has made you fed up.
Sandel: Some of my best friends are economists. When I started graduate school, I started out thinking I would do PPE and study philosophy and economics since I’d studied politics before. My project with economics was to see if I could include within the economic model a concern for equality, or whether equality as a normative consideration had to be brought in from outside those models. So I strayed from that project, although I feel like I’ve come back to it, in a way, 35 years later.
In the old days, back with Adam Smith and the classical economists, economics was understood, I think rightly, as a branch of moral and political philosophy. In the 20th century, economics established itself as an autonomous discipline and presented itself as a value-neutral science of social life and human behaviour. This is how economics is largely taught today.
I think it’s a mistake to view economics as a science. When economics concerns itself with traditional economic topics, such as employment, inflation, how to avoid recession, foreign trade, banks and stocks, then it is easy enough to see how it’s possible to think of economics that way. But when economics enlarges it’s ambition and undertakes to explain the whole of life, then I think it’s less and less plausible to think of it as a value-neutral science.
When economic reasoning and markets govern not just things like toasters and cars but family life, personal relations, health, education and civic life—when economics tries to explain and inform every domain of life—then it has to enter into morally contestable choices, although it does so often without fully owning up to it.
Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they don’t touch or taint the goods they exchange, and this may be true enough if we’re talking about material goods. If you give me a flat-screen television or sell me one, the flat-screen television will work just as well either way. But the same may not be true when it comes to using market mechanisms or cash incentives, for example, to motivate young students to study harder. Cash for good grades or high test scores—many US schools districts have tried this as an experiment. In Dallas, Texas they pay eight-year-olds $2 for each book they read. From the standpoint of traditional economic analysis, the only test is: does it work? Does the number of books read increase? What has actually happened is that the grades have not increased in most of these experiments.
But the real question is: what lesson is being taught by offering cash for grades or studying? My worry is that the lesson being taught is that reading is a chore, the kind of work to be done for money. And if that’s what’s being taught, the market mechanism is not neutral—it changes the meaning of the activity and crowds out attitudes and norms that we care about.
Grayling: However much economics tries to portray itself as value-neutral it isn’t, because another thing you’re concerned about is that economics assumes that consenting adults are the party to these deals they make with one another. So if I want you to advertise my book and I pay you enough to have it written on your forehead, that would be an example where the question of analysis would be, “is the person renting out their forehead coerced by their economic circumstances?” This is something that makes you anxious.
Sandel: There are two objections I would raise. One of them is exactly as you say. We need to ask whether the people entering into these deals are acting truly voluntarily or are they in effect coerced by the necessity of their circumstances. This is a question that arises in debates about whether there should be a free global market for organs for transplantation—kidneys, for example.
But I also worry on another, independent ground. Even if it is voluntary rather than through economic desperation, there is the question of whether the tattoo ad on the forehead is degrading. It’s a question that arises classically in debates about prostitution. There’s the worry about coercion, or implicit coercion. But even if that objection is met there’s still the question of whether it’s morally objectionable because it’s degrading.
Grayling: Paying somebody to wait in line for you, for example, for a congressional hearing. This doesn’t do anyone any harm and this is someone who might need some money. Certainly, people who are drawn into sex work, that’s troubling—but it’s not always easy to draw a line. Drawing a line involves some kind of value judgement and then the inevitable question arises: whose values? And I take it part of your answer is that it’s got to be our values, that somehow we have to reinvigorate a conversation in society about what’s acceptable and what isn’t. The big question is, how the heck do we do that?
Sandel: What makes the argument from corruption or degradation more difficult than the argument from coercion is that it raises precisely this question: whose values should inform us when figuring out what’s degrading and what isn’t?
The objection to paid line standing does involve the degradation argument, the idea of it being demeaning, but not necessarily in the case of it being demeaning of the person who has the job. Here it’s different from the tattoo or the surrogate mother. It’s demeaning of the institution of the government that allows this kind of ticket touting to govern access to Congress or Parliament or the Supreme Court. It’s demeaning of representative government to put access up for auction in this way.
We’ve seen these long queues where people pay for someone to get them the first new iPad or iPhone. I think that’s different, because that’s a commercial product. You’ll then say, “OK but that restates precisely the question as it’s a value judgement.” I agree it is and you rightly want to know whose judgement should govern. I would say ours, but the hard question is how should we reflect on those values?
If we take the arguments from degradation or corruption seriously, as I think we have to if we are to define the moral limits of markets, we have to reason together in public about the right way to value goods, whether the goods at stake are the integrity and dignity of the human person or the proper way of governing access to institutions that represent government.
Grayling: There’s an obvious connection between your interest in the concept of justice and these issues. Questions about what’s just have always been front and centre of the great moral arguments. What do you take those forms of justice to be? Is it distributive or is it some other conception?
Sandel: Justice is an important virtue of social institutions. I don’t think it’s the only virtue—there are other virtues to do with community, fellow feeling, solidarity, self-government, the scope for and the quality of public deliberation, all of which may have some bearing on justice, but which may also have independent moral importance.
Part of my argument in the book on justice and the book on markets is that we can’t entirely discuss these sets of questions independently of one another. What counts as a good society unavoidably embroils us in questions of virtue and the good life. It can’t altogether be separated from whether the distribution of incoming wealth and power and opportunity in that society is fair, even recognising that fairness isn’t the only thing that matters.
Grayling: Your lectures at Harvard have famously become available to everyone in the world online. MOOCs [massive open online courses] look as thought they’re going to transform education worldwide.
But there has been a push back on two fronts. One is that if these massive courses have tens of thousands of students taking them, and they do essays, there just aren’t enough professors to go around to mark them, so they’re graded by software. So there’s one question mark that pops up in people’s minds: is being taught by a computer OK?
Then the second thing is you’ve been challenged recently by an entire philosophy department at San Jose State University, who said, “you’re just about to put us out of a job because if our college just has your lectures online, they won’t need us.”
Where is higher education going?
Sandel: As an experiment we put my justice course online and on television globally a few years ago, just to see what might happen and what might be the educational uses of this new technology.
The effect was beyond anything we could have imagined. They tell us that tens of millions of people have been watching them. For me, the most rewarding part of the experiment is simply providing free and global access to the Harvard classroom, or to any classroom, so that anyone, anywhere, including someone in an Indian village or in a remote part of China or Africa who has access to the internet, can see it and can hear about Aristotle and John Stuart Mill, follow the lectures and engage in the online discussion if they want to. For me it’s a way of giving expression to the idea that higher education should be seen and treated as a public resource and not as a private privilege.
But as far as the push back, I would emphasise that I don’t think an online course can replace the experience of students and teachers gathered in person and deliberating together as part of an academic community. And I hope that even financially pressed colleges and universities won’t assume that it can.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
Question: You’re probably aware, Michael, that there’s been much discussion in political circles recently with respect to the morality of tax avoidance. What answer would you give to this issue?
Sandel: I’m against tax avoidance. I think that countries need to work together to find ways to reduce tax havens that drain important resources from the public treasuries of societies that have democratically enacted certain tax rates and tax laws.
Secret banking arrangements in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland and elsewhere provide a way for people to evade taxes. Some of the tax avoidance is done through loopholes that are in the tax codes itself. I think both forms are objectionable, not only because they exacerbate the budget crises, indeed the austerity and the pain that governments struggle with when they lack the resources that they would otherwise have under the law, but also because I think it’s a kind of civic corruption.
We should find a way collectively and globally of cracking down on that, and preventing that, because it’s corrosive of a democratic civic life. It’s not just a loss to the treasury.
Question: What part of equality do you espouse: equality of outcome or equality of opportunity? How does your view of equality relate to your notion of justice?
Sandel: Equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are often thought to be the two alternative ways of conceiving equality, and I’m not sure they fully capture the range of possibilities. I would be for a third kind of equality that might be described as equality of condition.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that men and women from different social backgrounds and different walks of life inhabit a common life, enough so that they realise that we are all in a common project. Just how much equality is necessary for that is a qualitative judgment.
To what extent do we have common spaces and public places that gather people together, that provide people access to the fundamental prerequisites of a good life? My worry is that against the background of rising inequality over the last three decades, allowing markets to dominate more and more aspects of life is corrupting that commonality. We find that people of affluence and people of modest means increasingly lead separate lives. We live and work and shop and play in different places. Our children go to different schools. This isn’t good for democracy and I don’t think, ultimately, that it’s a satisfying way to live, even for those of us who may inhabit the more privileged places of social life.
Question: Bearing in mind the abuses that took place in the run-up to the credit crunch, at what point do imbalances in information between market participants lead to markets becoming unacceptable?
Sandel: Privilege of access and privilege of information did play a role in the run-up to the financial crisis. One of the things that’s striking in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that despite the virtual meltdown of the global financial system, we have not really had a fundamental debate about the proper role of money and markets in our societies.
I think most of us expected that the financial crash would mark the end of an era of market triumphalism that goes back to the early 80s. An era defined by the faith that markets and market mechanisms are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. And although we had some debates about regulation of the financial industry, we didn’t really go beyond that. The market faith has had a remarkable staying power, even after the financial crisis, and I think it’s interesting to try to figure out why, and also an important question for our public life.
Question: Women do a lot of the unpaid work in society. I’ve tried to come up with how we could change society so that women are not taken advantage of. The market seems to be the only answer because it would put a value on their work. But I worry a lot about going down this road, because of the moral consequences and the limits of markets. How, other than a transaction that puts value and worth on something like childcare, can we address such an issue?
Sandel: It’s a great question, and not an easy one to answer because, as you say, much of what is traditionally regarded as women’s work is not commodified. In a market-driven society like ours, work that is not rewarded with money tends to be undervalued and unappreciated. And so there’s the temptation to think, just as you suggest, that commodifying what is traditionally regarded as women’s work in the household is a liberating alternative.
And yet we see marketising and commodifying roles to do with care, including care of children and care of the elderly. Those tend to be jobs that are poorly paid, and in fact are paid far out of proportion to what their moral importance suggests they should be paid. So it could be that simply commodifying what is traditionally regarded as women’s work would not solve the fundamental problem, which is that the roles of care are not sufficiently recognised, appreciated and rewarded in our society.
The real question is: how can we change that? Whether women perform those roles or men perform those roles, we need a public debate about it, because simply commodifying care-giving roles may perpetuate and entrench the under-appreciation of those roles if they are not remunerated in a way that indicates their true importance.
The appeal of the market faith isn’t just that markets deliver higher GDP or economic efficiency. The deeper appeal is that markets seem to be value-neutral ways of deciding social questions. They seem to spare us democratic citizens the hard work of reasoning together about contested values and judgments about the good life, and questions of care and their importance go directly to the question of the good life, and how we should value social roles.
We should resist the temptation to think that we can outsource moral judgment and civic judgment to markets. And that means that we need to grapple directly, not only as philosophers, but also in public life and in public discourse, with the hard questions, Anthony [Grayling], that you are putting to me: Is there a right way of valuing this or that good? And if there is, how can we possibly decide together, when we live in pluralist societies where we disagree about the good life, and virtue and how to value goods?
It is a mistake to think that leaving these questions to markets will leave them undecided. Instead, as we’ve seen, that will decide them for us, and that’s why we need to find our way to a morally more robust, admittedly more demanding, form of public discourse. Not because we’ll agree, but because it will engage more directly with the questions we have to decide if we’re to take democratic citizenship seriously. And it will also enable us to keep markets in their proper place.
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Charles Taylor: The Canadian philosopher has worked out an exceptionally rich analysis of the modern self. He is the most important and interesting philosopher writing in English today, says Ben Rogers
Richard Rorty: He was arguably the most influential philosopher of our time: a radical American who is against war in Iraq – and against truth, reason and science. Yet his radicalism turns out to be oddly disarming, argues Simon Blackburn
Who was John Rawls?: The reclusive philosopher revived liberal political philosophy with A Theory of Justice. Ben Rogers looks at why he wrote it
Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson: Wittgenstein’s philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times. Ray Monk explains why his thought is still relevant
Thomas Nagel is not crazy: The philosopher Thomas Nagel thinks the materialist scientific worldview cannot explain consciousness, says Malcolm Thorndike Nicholson. Is he right?
About Gatsby/Momma Tried
."That leaves only me to blame cause Momma tried"
-Merle Haggard
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Hank Henley, Lorna Wood, Lucy Horsley Lewis and 5 others like this..Donna Eads Shiver Your mom did a great job!
3 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1..Lucy Horsley Lewis Should not have denied her teaching :)3 hours ago · Unlike · 1..Fred Hudson So did Pearl.
3 hours ago · Like..
Write a comment.....Fred Hudson
Yesterday
.Another Gatsby movie? My response is WHY? I didn't see the last one in 1974 and I won't see this one. The world needs another Gatsby movie like it needs more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I am not a Fitzgerald fanatic, but I have read the novel 4 times and expect to read it again. No movie can replicate Fitzgerald's incandescent prose. No pseudo sophisticated plot and character analysis can dilute the sheer exhilaration and pleasure of the prose. Movie-makers: Please leave my Gatsby alone!
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Lynne Maki and Mike Denison like this..View 7 more comments..Fred Hudson If you say so, hoss.
18 hours ago · Like..Jody Britt Words are words, pictures are pictures, and the Twains shall never meet...
18 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson Jay wouldn't say "hoss," but the folks in Andalusia would.
18 hours ago · Edited · Like..Jody Britt They would probably say, "son."
-Merle Haggard
Like · · Promote · Share.
Hank Henley, Lorna Wood, Lucy Horsley Lewis and 5 others like this..Donna Eads Shiver Your mom did a great job!
3 hours ago via mobile · Unlike · 1..Lucy Horsley Lewis Should not have denied her teaching :)3 hours ago · Unlike · 1..Fred Hudson So did Pearl.
3 hours ago · Like..
Write a comment.....Fred Hudson
Yesterday
.Another Gatsby movie? My response is WHY? I didn't see the last one in 1974 and I won't see this one. The world needs another Gatsby movie like it needs more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I am not a Fitzgerald fanatic, but I have read the novel 4 times and expect to read it again. No movie can replicate Fitzgerald's incandescent prose. No pseudo sophisticated plot and character analysis can dilute the sheer exhilaration and pleasure of the prose. Movie-makers: Please leave my Gatsby alone!
Like · · Promote · Share.
Lynne Maki and Mike Denison like this..View 7 more comments..Fred Hudson If you say so, hoss.
18 hours ago · Like..Jody Britt Words are words, pictures are pictures, and the Twains shall never meet...
18 hours ago · Like..Fred Hudson Jay wouldn't say "hoss," but the folks in Andalusia would.
18 hours ago · Edited · Like..Jody Britt They would probably say, "son."
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