the state of nature

theatlantic: The Worst Cities For College-Educated Women Trying...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 14:25:58 -0500

The Worst Cities For College-Educated Women Trying to Find a Decent Date

Are you a young, college-educated woman? Are you looking to settle down one day with a young, college-educated man? A word of advice: Stay away from Sarasota, Florida.

A graph naturalizing heterosexuality among the college educated.

Hanging with Smarties Ups GPA The researchers found that those...

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 01:47:00 -0500

Hanging with Smarties Ups GPA

The researchers found that those students whose friends were outshining them academically tended to improve their grades over the year. Whereas those who were hanging out with academic underachievers let their grades slide. So, go ahead. Befriend a brainiac. You might just learn something.

What was I writing about?

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 21:16:00 -0500

Results of a recent study of synesthesia — a concept that is perhaps more fun to think about than it is productive to study — suggest that this phenomenon (“a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway”) is important for the study of learning. Imagine being basically traumatized into involuntarily remembering every bit of your chemistry textbook cover to cover :::shivers:::

Although learning is compatible with synesthesia as a perceptual phenomenon, most synesthetes probably do not learn their synesthetic correspondences from some external object present in childhood. This fact could reasonably be taken to suggest that this type of learning is irrelevant to understanding synesthesia. However, considered from a different perspective, learning is the defining characteristic of synesthesia. As noted, synesthetes experience a fixed and automatic synesthetic response to some stimuli. These responses across many types of synesthesia do not appear to be entirely random, but alignable with choices made by nonsynesthetes.

The researchers find the results “consistent with a role for perception in synesthetic experience”:

The two ideas are made compatible by positing that the learned associations between stimulus and response are highly detailed and automatically triggered, two important characteristics for giving a representation a perceptual quality. These associations may be determined by internal or external contingencies, though we emphasize that external contingencies are not sufficient to produce synesthesia, which is likely dependent on genetic factors.

And on that note, such recollections are perhaps not so easy to navigate. Sometimes they require the writing of lengthy books like Swann’s Way by the famous synesthete, the blanket-wearing, bed bug, Marcel Proust who wrote (in French):

[…] soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?

Proust died in 1922 of pneumonia while in the process of editing scrupulously his most remembered work—a point that I think critics like Nabokov must mention. What is my point? I don’t have one…I’ve just been wasting your time, basically.

He makes it look like it’s natural.

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 08:45:15 -0500

He makes it look like it’s natural.

Bought: Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the finest writing from a century of film

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:03:00 -0500

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body.It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

~Winston Churchill

Just bought Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the finest writing from a century of film for just about nothing at half priced books. I have decided to teach myself about film. One thing though, is film criticism …”natural”…? The fundamental nature or function of storytelling (to “societies”) is clear—and storytelling is perhaps a little more natural than criticism aimed at storytelling.

Though not at all prior to the founding of civil society, Aristotle’s Poetics seems to support, if not the fundamental nature or “naturalness” of criticism, at least its ancientness.

Relatedly, what about film criticism? I imagine it would be something more like criticism of visual art which also has its ancient practitioners.

I think that claim is interesting but way too strong—it is like saying that one can think reflexively about art in terms of reception by an audience of onlookers without, in turn, thinking about WHO comprises its audience. Indeed, criticism seems to presuppose civil society—at least the pre-governmental community that Locke preferred to imagine. Does it follow from this speculative detour I’ve taken that art criticism and private property are friends? Perhaps not.

theatlantic: Why the ‘Citizen Militia’ Theory Is the Worst...

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:53:42 -0500

theatlantic:

Why the ‘Citizen Militia’ Theory Is the Worst Pro-Gun Argument Ever

The history of the postbellum South offers another cautionary story of unregulated and extra-legal political violence. The founders of the Ku Klux Klan purported to be defending the rights of the white community against the tyranny of illegitimate Reconstruction governments, black enfranchisement, and federal military occupation. And for several years, the Klan used this rationale to carry out a gruesome campaign of systematic violence, murder, and political intimidation.

War, particularly civil war, is by its nature violent. Official state armies are not immune from the tendency to inflict unjustified violence on civilians. But in America today, this prospect is far more remote, and far less terrifying, than the notion of armed citizens striking out against a perceived enemy, answering to no authority other than their own individual prejudices and passions.

Read more. [Image: Flickr]

Drunken tumblr phone post…bear with me as I Swype this out…ever notice that Swype is awesome at spelling “Swype” and basically nothing else? Anyway, Edmund Morgan notes in his book /Inventing the People/ that the yeoman farmer/militia man was a legal fiction that seemed to merge political/property interest with cost efficiency. Combined with inherited, English distrust of formal standing/professional armies, the efficacy of militia was actually one of the most tenuous fictions as George Washington had the privilege of learning first hand…it was a realistic worry that the militia would be terrible at putting down domestic rebellions as they would be more likely to support popular issues like…the overturning of contract obligations. For that reason, the myth of the militia was more pleasing in theory than in reality…oy

Photo

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 12:29:01 -0500

theatlantic: ‘I’m a White Girl’: Why ‘Girls’ Won’t Ever...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 09:29:39 -0500

theatlantic:

‘I’m a White Girl’: Why ‘Girls’ Won’t Ever Overcome Its Racial Problem

Those who don’t get it will, for the most part, continue to not get it. The truth, distasteful as it may be to those who imagine that we live in a “post-racial” era or believe it’s small-minded to apply identity politics to art, is that we still haven’t reached a point in our history at which the discrepancies between the way people of different races (or genders or religions or sexual orientations) experience life are negligible.

Read more. [Image: HBO]

How did I miss this guy? Amazing. “Tifa” (FF7 Rap)...

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 10:26:45 -0500

How did I miss this guy? Amazing.

“Tifa” (FF7 Rap) - Random (Mega Ran) and Lost Perception (by Mega Ran)

Anti-Googlers, "Utilitarianism," Technology Bugbears, Apocalypse Now

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 09:46:00 -0500

”[…O]ur brains might be subtly rewired, leading to a younger generation less and less capable of thinking deep thoughts. ‘What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence, […] The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.’”

“Defenders of Google say it frees up people’s brains for more important stuff than data entry and retrieval. ‘Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a sign of intelligence, but a side-show act,” wrote Alex Halavais of the Association of Internet Researchers in that same symposium in response to Carr’s lament. Once your mind is clear of actual facts, goes his argument, you have room for sophisticated analysis and problem-solving. […]”

“Googling has, arguably, made Millennials less able than any previous group of twenty-somethings to retain information. Recent research suggests that they use Google as a sort of auxiliary memory. In 2011 a team of psychologists led by Betsy Sparrow of Columbia gave 60 undergrads a bunch of trivia (on the order of ‘an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain’) and asked them to type all forty factoids into a computer. Half were told that the file containing these facts would be accessible later; half were told the file would be erased. On a subsequent test of memory, the ones who thought everything would be erased remembered much more. When they believed their document would be saved, Sparrow found, they didn’t bother remembering it; they figured they could always find it (or, as it’s called outside the lab, Google it) when they needed to.”

Not sure which suggestion is more interesting, the possibility that “utilitarian thinking” could result from internet browsing or that Google is a kind of prosthetic memory.The first, strongish and mainly rhetorical claim about utilitarian thought made me think that I would really like to treat that concept rigorously and do a little comparative analysis. That’s not going to happen but, to do so, I would probably have to take seriously the relatively simple concept (as these oldish knee-jerk thinkers have not) of utilitarianism, often identified with the English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham.

The utilitarianism of Bentham might be reduced somewhat to a couple relatively general maxims, the first of which is that calculations of utility or what is “useful” ought always to have as their outcome the minimization of pain and the maximization of pleasure. The logic produces interesting results when we think about life in civil society. For instance, it can be said that it is not law or any other collection of highfalutin, abstract principles but only “utility” that makes contracts/promises binding. That is, we honor our promises only if they are useful. Presumably, we also make them for that reason alone.

Though I ought to spend more time trimming this concept to fit with that of the anti-Googlers, I’ll just aim it clumsily at the notion that the internets “shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence.” If we extend the most charity to this notion, and understand the use of “utility” to be more than a vague, rhetorical gesture toward wearisome and easy, anti-capitalist critiques of Bentham’s thinking, we come up with the need to decide whether reading or studying should be process or ends oriented. That is, should we be required to read the end of the book by going through the front of the thing or should we be required to read was might be deemed the useless beginning and middle in order to get to the end. Process is certainly less efficient and possibly more enriching but by no means does it always produce great answers. Ends-oriented efficiency, on the other hand, may certainly produce a lack of encyclopaedic richness in our intelligences.

I can’t say which is better, process or efficiency, but I do think that the metaphors of breadth and depth fuck some of our thinking up. What does it mean to read for breadth as a utilitarian? Does it simply mean reading the conclusions of 4 books rather than reading one book deeply? Which of those readers will have the narrower mind? My money is on the later jack ass who sits around reading one nonsensical excursion of Derrida like 5 times (the number of readings I gave Archive Fever…:/) rather than the conclusions of 2 books on Greek customs and 3 books on anthropology and legal positivism. By the way, I think most scholars right now are something like a friend of mine (a tenured professor) who, while scanning the “useful” parts of several books in a tier one university copy room once said to me, “well you only need the introduction anyway—it’s the only useful part.” Lastly, are the anti-Googlers against indexes as well? I for one often abuse indexes.

I really like hearing from those constantly ruffled technological immigrants. As a young person (which is how I continue to refer to myself as I creep through my early 30s) I do enjoy being able to chortle about all the bewildered 50+ people who can’t figure out the new fashions. I would also like to add that hipsters are stupid with their stupid iphones and ipods. What the hell does all that crap do anyway? It’s gonna rot their brains.

After reading the SA article/review I quote at the very top of this post, I found myself thinking about a funny little RAND report from 1985 [1] in which analyst, Norman Shapiro provided a much needed ethical bulwark against the oncoming threat of email—ooooooo! In his report, Shaprio offers that:

”[…E]lectronic mail is a fundamentally new medium. It is very different from telephone calls, interoffice memos, written letters, and face-to-face conversations. It has different uses and a different etiquette, borrowing in many cases from familiar ways of communicating, but permuting the rules in the process.” […C]ertain behavior in dealing with electronic mail can have useful or adverse effects on the society as a whole and its members [and…] certain standard social norms must be reinterpreted and extended to cover this quite novel medium.”

”[…W]ith the new power of electronic mail comes the need for responsibility in using that power. We can all enjoy the power and benefit from it if we find new forms of behavior — even etiquette — that are appropriate. The alternative is a rising tide of irrelevant messages and electronic junk mail that will turn off most thoughtful users. By evolving a set of guidelines such as those presented here, we can all use the incredible power of the medium and benefit from it.”

If you like this post you can click the like button and I’ll get that shit in my inbox. Huzzah!

[1] “Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail” by Norman Z. Shapiro and Robert H. Anderson. RAND (July 1985)

It seems like everyone has forgotten Santa since then but I...

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 08:05:29 -0500

It seems like everyone has

forgotten Santa

since then

but I stopped believing []

Santa long ago…

Rethinking the Classic ‘Obedience’ Studies

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 03:09:00 -0500

Rethinking the Classic ‘Obedience’ Studies:

These reluctant sadists kept “torturing” in response to appeals that they were doing important scientific work—work that would ultimately benefit mankind. Looked at in this way, it wasn’t some inherent evil or conformism that drove them forward, but rather a misplaced sense of idealism.

[…]

So we may not be inherently evil, but it appears many of us can be enticed into believing that a heinous act is, in fact, good and necessary. Perhaps the real lesson of these startling experiments is the importance of learning how to think critically.

The most effective antidote to evil may be rigorous skepticism.

In this OYEZ “Conversation With Justice Elena...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:10:00 -0500

In this OYEZ “Conversation With Justice Elena Kagan,” Kagan says some interesting things about education. Overall, Kagan is a somewhat liberal-minded figure. This is somewhat evident in her position on civil rights and the environment. She opposes don’t-ask-don’t-tell though she probably couldn’t have landed on the Supreme Court had she not sworn to defend it as current law….likewise she defends (as law but perhaps not as just) the Defense of Marriage Act which upholds a view of separate state sovereignty that allows states to reject the validity of same-sex marriages contracted in more permissive states. She reads the 1st Amendment as offering protection for anti-gay picketers at funerals (see Westboro Baptist Church funeral picketing). Kagan admitted that citizens should be allowed to sue for harm caused by global warming and she actually established the environmental law program at Harvard. In addition, she also has something to offer teachers.

Kagan’s opinions about the convergence of her pedagogy and her persona as an opinion writing justice on the bench were most interesting. She says, more or less, that both lesson planning and opinion writing present the challenge of communicating something about which you know more than your audience. I of course thought about how to subject content to a more easily digestible theme or a form but I know that opinion writing—which adopts rhetorical goals that are very different from the rhetorical goals of a classroom—is often fairly complex and in some sense “transactional.” That is, opinions in forums such as the Supreme Court, so clearly accountable to a constituency, are often written to accomplish some direct aim that is distinct from communication or education. I would say that justification and public policy is the fundamental rhetorical goal of a supreme court decision; education or compelling an audience to incorporate education as a personal or moral value is the rhetorical goal of a lesson plan. Though compelling an audience to value education is similar to compelling an audience to obey the law, I do think that there is quite a bit of distance between the aims of “didacticism” in the former case and “justification” in the latter.

Interpretation and one possible account of the norms beneath commands...

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 10:19:00 -0500

My last short post got me itching to write about the excavation of interpretive norms. Whenever I think about the norms under law—for instance, the potential norm that finds repugnant the “conflict of interest” under the Constitution’s Article 1, Section 3—I think about Hans Kelsen’s pleasing-to-the-mind notion of the grundnorm or the “basic law.” For Kelsen, this is the substrate always beneath commands and, by implication, interpretations. If the are such things as grundnorms, then Interpretations ought to be careful to foreground the imposition of artificial norms.

By the foregrounding of artificial norms I don’t mean that there are such things as norm to discover that are distinct from the interpreter’s bias but merely that we ought to be as conscious as possible about where our interpretations begin and the preferred interpretations of other readers—for instance, of dominant groups—end. For instance, the imposition of the a communication norm in much new reconstructive literature on the rules of public forums is presented with an explicit reconstructive purpose—to posit the fundamental goal of communication in order to shape the procedures of forums and make them more democratic. That is, communication for communication theorists suggests that interpretive norms might actually be sharpened for constituents and supported by popular consent.

Bear with me as this gets weird(er). Shoshana Felman’s application of psychoanalytic theory to the Simpson verdict in The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (2002) is something like the artificial imposition of a technical psychoanalytic norm with the goal of truth or diagnosis rather than some more sharply defined goal. Specifically, Felman argues that the verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial can be interpreted as being deeply inflected by a division in the not so perfect or coherent public opinion that ought to be described through a diagnostic psychoanalytic frame. Importantly, Felman’s reconstructions of the Simpson verdict are presented as a discovery, moving from the particular to the universal, from the public reception of the Rodney King case, the general political climate in North America, and her analysis of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata to the general notion that the verdict was a means of appeasing the black community, still sensitive after the Rodney King verdict. Felman’s conclusions appear to be derived from the convergence of the flotsam of these facets and particularly from the content and the print history of a literary work, The Kreutzer Sonata. Consequently, Felman discovers a norm underneath the Simpson verdict: the aversion to stories of domestic abuse, or the fear of implication.

Felman’s discovery masquerades as something like what HLA Hart offers (1962) in an attempt to illustrate the thinking of (brilliant) legal theorist Hans Kelsen. Hart describes this process of discovery, a trajectory from particular to universal as the paraphrasing of the basic norm of a “somewhat stupid” (which must be Hart’s way of saying disorganized) German who is afraid of fire. “Whenever he sees anything inflammable lying around,” Hart describes, “he orders the prisoners to pick it up. Day in and day out he stomps round the camp shouting in German ‘pick up that box,’ ‘pick up that paper,’ ‘pick up that bundle of straw.’ The [English] interpreter dutifully barks out the English equivalent and then one day being a man of superior intelligence adds on his own motion ‘and pick up all inflammable material.’” After pick up all inflammable material is translated back into German for the benefit of Hart’s stomping German speaker he says “[g]ood: that is exactly what I would have said; only I couldn’t think of the right words. What a fine interpreter you are!” Though the commands of Hart’s stomping German might be interpreted under the broader norm pick up all inflammable material, we might also search for a higher and more elusive description of the norm, namely, fear of fire just as Felman (as would Freud) discovered fear of implication under the Simpson verdict. Said differently, it could be the case that the psychological fact of fear is the point at which legal analysis should begin, though verdicts, legal institutions and fictional works—all generally communications—might generate many more psychological and social norms than fear or aversion to something. That is, different from the accounts of communication theorists, and Felman, scholars ought to be on the lookout for new and interesting basic or public norms.

Is There a Constitution in This Text?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:48:00 -0500

Is There a Constitution in This Text? :

The first declares that the “Vice President of the United States shall be the President of the Senate.” The second reads, “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice will preside.”

It doesn’t say why. But the reason, says Amar, emerges “upon a moment’s reflection.” Even though “these words say nothing explicit about the vice president … it quickly dawns on us that the central purpose of the passage was to oust the vice president from the chair … in presidential impeachment trials”; for were he not so ousted, “the vice president would have an intolerable conflict of interest” given that in the event of a conviction, he would ascend to the presidency.

[…]

If there is a list, it is one that keeps expanding in the face of new phenomena and new fact situations, in response to which the project at once reaffirms itself and adds to its storehouse of rules and principles, most of them unwritten. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts no matter how many of its parts have been enumerated; and any effort to enumerate them will always be outrun by the generative power of the whole and will quickly turn a “terse text” (Amar’s phrase) like the Constitution into a monster that, in Chief Justice Marshall’s words, has “the prolixity of a legal code.” Explicitness, it turns out, is not a possible human achievement, which is no big deal because communication and understanding do not require it.

Should the tacit proposition that Ammar assumes be read as presupposing — as did Coke in Thomas Bonham v College of Physicians or Dr. Bonham’s Case — that such a “conflict of interest” is “intolerable,” or as Coke might say, “repugnant”? That is, is the concept of the unwritten constitution simply a way of describing the presupposition of norms that we or a justice deems consistent with “American-style democracy”?

"…is a gay fish."

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 09:37:00 -0500

““…is a gay fish.””

Dude, seriously: what isn't about the state of nature?

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 17:53:52 -0500

On validity and racism...

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 17:38:00 -0500

In a recent staff meeting for instructors, several of my colleagues debated the usefulness of teaching argument to first year college students. I prefer to say “argument” rather than “logic” because our debate was by no means about the (symbolic) logic that one might find listed among the prerequisites for an undergraduate pursuing a philosophy degree. Instead, the logic we discussed began and ended at the most basic syllogism and might be more accurately called rhetoric…though the inclusion of rhetoric as a separate field in the trivium, comprised of logic, rhetoric, and grammar, only makes what I’ve said confusing…. SQUIRREL!

…at any rate, someone introduced the notion that we ought to teach logic because it can be pressed into the service of the generally liberal politics that our discipline has adopted. The way this was worded, however, made my skin crawl just a bit. The claim went something like: “well, if the argument is well made then there’s no way it could be racist.” I paused a little while I turned over in my mind this somewhat absurd and irksomely romantic articulation of logic—suddenly converted into a sublime phenomenon. After some discussion, I intervened with: “well, in my class—where I teach argument form—I’ve read quite a few valid racist arguments.” A well meaning colleague of mine suddenly affected horror at the notion that an argument that is also racist could be valid. Specifically, she said something like: “how can you say that a racist argument could ever be valid!?”

I answered, in brief, with a short bit on how awesome it would be if in our classroom discussions about “argument” we also found time to teach the difference between validity and soundness. This, I gushed (while trying to ignore the hate beams striking the side of my face from my aforementioned well meaning colleague) would shift our discussions about racist arguments away from the nebulous “is this/are you racist” to “is this argument valid but not sound?” ”Why?” “If this argument is both valid and racist, what is the premise makes it so (i.e. claims of biological essentialism, nineteenth century theology, social Darwinism)?” “If you think the argument is also sound, what (racist) presuppositions are ghosting around outside of its formalized moves?”

For instance, on the topic of presuppositions, Chief Justice Justice Roger B. Taney once stupidly and bigotedly assumed in Dred Scott v. Sandford that blacks in America could never be citizens because the framers did not have them in mind when “citizen” was penned into the founding documents. Presupposed here is the “originalist” notion held by the originalist school of constitutional interpretation: interpretation should reach for the original or intended meaning of the word or sentence interpreted. In Taney’s understanding, blacks:

[W]ere not intended to be included, under the word “citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.

Without this originalist premise, the argument loses its force—though there are other more blaring problems with Dred Scott v. Sandford. We might sketch the claim like so:

1. Under the original and intended meaning of “citizen” in the Constitution, you are not a US “citizen” unless you are white;

2. blacks are not white;

———-

3.: black people in America are not (can never be) the “citizens” referred to and guaranteed rights in the US Constitution.

If it is not the case that we can imagine the premises of this argument to be true while the conclusion (black people in America cannot be guaranteed the status of citizens by the Constitution) is false, then the argument is valid (or internally cohernet). However, by simply changing our deference for one school of interpretation we might easily imagine a situation in which the above is either unsound or invalid. For instance, denying the truth of premise (1) and assuming that we cannot know the intentions of the framers or that the truth of (1) is perhaps impossible to prove makes the argument unsound and also precludes a certain mode of interpretation. Rather, admit the obvious impossibility of knowing the intention of the framers and assume that the Constitution was for this reason meant by its framers to be read as a living document containing words that accommodate new exigencies. The importance of (1-3), we might say, is presupposed in the implicit notion that: the original or intended meaning of the word or sentence interpreted is the correct meaning. Defeating or questioning Taney’s originalism or imagining the paramountcy of a different school of interpretation changes everything.

To find the argument invalid (which really means that I could have articulated it better) we might say that although the founding fathers indeed had the intention expressed as “you are not a citizen unless you are white” in (1), (and taking (2) as literally and obviously true), the denial of originalism nevertheless allows that (3) is false because it does not follow from (1-2). Specifically, (3) does not follow from (1) because the original intentions of the framers can have no effect on who is and who is not granted the rights of citizenship under the constitution. Denying the originalist presupposition makes (1) irrelevant to the later status of citizenship for blacks in the context of Taney’s court.

Another, slightly more insidious assumption is embedded in Taney’s overturning of the Missouri Compromise in what was only the second ever instance of judicial review in history. In Dred Scott, Taney notes that in the only places blacks are mentioned in the Constitution, they are referred to “as property and [it is] the duty of the Government to protect it; no other power, in relation to this race, is to be found in the Constitution […]. The Government of the United States had no right to interfere for any other purpose but that of protecting the rights of the owner, leaving it altogether with the several States to deal with this race […] as each State may think justice, humanity, and the interests and safety of society, require.” Using judicial review to protect the right to property sounds at first blush to be a commendable way to maintain a stable legal order. Yet, in this scenario, people are converted into (presumed to be) property and their servitude is protected by the Constitution.

My point in all of this is that arguments may seem perfectly peachy if we are constrained by or unable to transcend our bigotted horizons/presuppositions. It is usually the case (I often presuppose) that if you have bigotted horizons it is only because you have been unable to transcend them. Attempting to make as transparent as possible every speciously valid argument (like Taney’s) requires that we emphasize the importance of argument. We must not valorize/enchant or demonize argument like a bunch of morons. I think that this kind of emphasis—challenging as it may be for both instructors and students—is a great way to question the constraining assumptions of our day in the classroom.

I am really more ambitious than I ought to be...

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:01:00 -0500

…and so I will unapologetically keep the silly, somewhat heavy handed title of my tumblr page while only inconsistently discussing ridiculous naturalized assumptions that are often narrowly related to the tradition of social contract theory.

http://www.lols4.me/bambi-meets-godzilla_4540.html

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 09:46:01 -0400

http://www.lols4.me/bambi-meets-godzilla_4540.html