ANOTHER STROLL DOWN MEMORY LANE

Since the comments section has turned briefly to the subject of Gilbert Ryle, I thought I would just note that the very first philosophy journal article I ever published was a 2 1/2 page note criticizing Ryle's treatment of something called "agitations" in his book Concept of Mind.  The note appeared in 1954, when I was just 20 years old, and was taken from my undergraduate honors thesis. It appeared in a well-known English philosophy journal called MIND, which was edited by Ryle himself. Ryle apparently was quite supportive of young philosophers and had no hesitation publishing things critical of what he had written. Somebody named Corbett responded with a comment and I got to write a 1 1/2 page reply, so there I was, barely old enough to vote with two publications to my credit. Needless to say, I was thrilled.

ANONYMITY

Late yesterday evening, Danny posted this comment: “But also, online harassment has been a huge topic of discussion right here in domestic America over the past few years, and indeed, I think of 'those who need more information on a given topic but don't want to be caught seeking out that information', and it occurs to me that most people actually fall into this group without realizing it. How would you feel if every single question of yours was tied to your real-life identity? Online anonymity isn't just for those who are up to no good. Or maybe put it as a question, do I *believe*, that the internet should not be anonymous? I think it's a very interesting topic to debate.”

 

It is indeed an interesting topic so let me talk about it for a bit. First of all, let us remember that for the overwhelming preponderance of the 200,000 years or so that human beings have existed, communication has been almost entirely face-to-face. To be sure, once writing was invented and became commonplace, it was possible to send anonymous communications – clay tablets without an identifying mark, papyrus unsigned, or after a while books published pseudonymously. And then there are ransom notes, death threats, shy love letters, that sort of thing. But that is not what we are talking about here.  It is the technology of digital communication, the Internet and the cloud, that raises the question in interesting ways.

 

Let us distinguish between asking a question or seeking information anonymously and making a positive or negative comment anonymously. The first, it seems to me, is entirely acceptable, but the second in my judgment is not, save in very special circumstances. Now mind, I do not have to put myself out there in a blog. It is my choice to do so because I am eager to communicate with people who might be interested in my opinions. If I cannot stand having somebody snark at me, I can just stop blogging. If I dislike disagreement, that is my problem, not the problem of the people who disagree with me. Nevertheless, I feel a certain disdain for folks who want to hide their identity while taking pot shots at those who express opinions and put their names on them.

 

I do not think I have made an anonymous comment in my life, at least not on purpose. Even when I have been asked to serve as a reader of a manuscript for a journal or book publisher, I have insisted that my name be revealed so that the author knows who is making the comments, especially when they are negative. Now, to be sure, I received a tenured professorship when I was 30 so for the last 57 years my income has been assured, but I started expressing my negative opinions about powerful people when I was 17 and it never occurred to me to conceal my identity for fear that I would suffer retribution. Indeed, even after I had tenure, I lost professorships three times because of my expressed political opinions. Nevertheless, in this world I am one of the privileged and I am well aware that I have been unusually protected from retaliation in my expression of unpopular opinions. If a reader of my blog were to write to me privately and explain why he or she was unwilling to risk coming out from behind the veil of anonymity on this blog, I would of course be understanding and accepting. But that is not the sort of thing we are talking about here.

 

One of the things that I find particularly striking is that digital communication, which feels anonymous, is in fact no more privae that broadcasting one’s opinions with a shortwave radio. To an extraordinary extent, the anonymity is a delusion.

 

Well, those are my first thoughts on the subject. I would be interested in what all you have to say. 

MEMORIES

Good to hear from Tom Weir, a UMass philosophy student in the first half of the 1970s. Tom, as I recall in one of my courses you wrote an impassioned discussion of the problem of the distribution of wealth around the world. It sounds to me as though you put your philosophy education to good use. Thank you for checking in.

I AM GETTING TIRED

Of brave souls who post snarky comments anonymously and then think that they have been daringly edgy. So, whoever it is who made the crack about "pearl clutching," why don't you come out from behind your mask, tell us who you are and what you do and what your history is, and then present us with your analysis, which I will put up as a guest post on this blog, opening it to comment and criticism. If you are willing to do that, then I will take you seriously and respond. Otherwise, get lost. 

THINGS TO LOOK FORWARD TO

It was already 70° when I started my morning walk today at 7 AM so instead of wearing my usual longsleeved turtleneck shirt, I put on a tatty old black T-shirt that I have had for 30 years and more. On the front is emblazoned a red star around which are inscribed the words SOCIAL THOUGHT AND POLITICAL ECONOMY. The shirt commemorates an undergraduate interdisciplinary program that I created at the University of Massachusetts when I joined the faculty there in 1971. UMass, which is big on acronyms, dubbed the program for purposes of its computer records as STPEC, which almost immediately came to be pronounced “stepick.”  

STPEC was intended by me as a left-wing version of SOCIAL STUDIES, the Harvard undergraduate interdisciplinary major of which I was the first head tutor in 1960 – 61. It was launched on a shoestring in 1973. It grew and flourished, most especially after I turned it over to Sara Lennox in 1980 when I moved to Boston so that my first wife could take up a professorship at MIT.  In two years, if my Parkinson’s will permit, I will travel to Amherst to take part in the 50^th anniversary celebration. Should theweather be mild enough, I may wear that old T-shirt

 

I have told the story of the creation of STPEC at some length in my autobiography and will not undertake to repeat myself here but there is one feature of the program of which I am especially proud and I thought I would take just a moment to talk about it.

 

As originally conceived, students in the program were to take a combination of courses drawn from the social sciences and humanities capped by a senior year two-semester seminar taught jointly by two faculty members drawn from different departments (thus guaranteeing that it would be “interdisciplinary.”) The first Senior Seminar was taught by myself and my friend and colleague William Connolly from Political Science. Excited by the opportunity, Bill and I went a little bit over the top and it was a very demanding seminar. Word got back to the juniors in the program who came to me rather nervously to say that they did not feel they were prepared for a seminar of this sort and wondered whether there was something I could arrange that would give them the background they needed. I responded by creating a junior year seminar. Several years later, that junior seminar was taught by Tracy Strong, whom I had recruited for the purpose from Mount Holyoke College. Tracy taught a rather demanding junior seminar and the sophomores in the program, hearing about it, came to me and said they did not think they were ready for such an experience. Once again I responded, this time by creating and teaching a new philosophy department course called Introduction to Social Philosophy.

 

Thus was born a tradition carried on by Sara Lennox, a tradition that I think may be unique in American higher education, of developing a major not by consulting the wishes and wisdom of professors but by responding to the needs and demands of students. It has been a long time since I have been in touch with the STPEC program, but I very much hope that it has, all these years later, retained this character.

READING THE TEA LEAVES

What follows is an exercise in armchair speculation. My speculation concerns the Joe Manchin problem. To keep this short I am going to assume that my blog readers understand what I mean by this phrase.

 

Let us begin by recognizing how extraordinary it is that Joe Manchin is in the Senate at all. He represents West Virginia, which went for Trump in 2020 by just under 40 points. If he were not in the Senate, the brilliant extraordinary victories of John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock would not have given the Democrats the control of the Senate that they now enjoy. So let us keep that in mind. There is no point beating up on poor Joe because he is not Bernie Sanders.  If he were even a moderate Democrat, he would not be a senator at all. The only question worth asking, it seems to me, is this: assuming that Joe Biden has a strategy for getting Manchin to agree in at least some cases to abrogate the filibuster, what is it?

 

There seem to me to be essentially three answers to my question and I really have no idea which one is correct. The first answer, which I passionately hope is wrong, is that Joe Biden is caught in a time warp and actually thinks that if he reaches out repeatedly to Republican senators and relies on his life of experience in that body, he can bring enough of them around so that he does not need to abrogate the filibuster.  If Biden believes that, we are all screwed, but his behavior thus far does not seem to suggest that he is genuinely in the grip of that fantasy.

 

The second answer, for which I think there is some significant evidence, is that Biden believes he can lead the Democrats to victory in 2022 and again in 2024 by delivering enough bread-and-butter legislation to win over large numbers of independents and moderate Republicans, thereby overcoming the voting obstacles that Republican legislatures are now putting in place to enable them to retain power with minority support in the electorate.  This is not a stupid belief on his part but I fear that it is wrong and I am apprehensive that that may be what explains his behavior with regard to Manchin.

 

The third answer is that he is playing a deep, complicated long game that goes something like this: he makes a great show of trying to work across the aisle on things like infrastructure, giving Manchin every opportunity to see such a strategy fail, patiently losing a series of legislative fights in the Senate, such as the inability to get 10 senators to agree to the establishment of a January 6 commission, until finally Manchin becomes exasperated with his good Republican friends, at which point Biden asks Manchin to agree to abrogate the filibuster for the voting rights and protection act, arguing that it is needed to preserve the possibility of the sort of bipartisan legislative work that Manchin cherishes.

 

If this is what Biden is doing – if the third answer is correct – then I think that may be our best chance to avoid the destruction of democracy that I fear.

 

As I say, I have absolutely no idea what is going on in Biden’s mind. I am convinced that he is not a fool. If the correct answer is the second then I am dismayed, because I fear that even success in passing extremely popular bread-and-butter legislation may not be enough to counteract the attempts now being made by the Republicans to dramatically suppress the Democratic vote. If the third answer is correct, then we can only wait and hope that his elaborate game with Manchin is successful.

 

In the meantime, the only thing that I and others like me can actually do as opposed to say is to give money and offer other forms of concrete support to local efforts to elect or reelect Democratic members of the House and Senate.

EV EN SO

I admit that I am not a laid-back sort of guy. I mean, after all, what eventually became my best-known book, In Defense of Anarchism, grew out of my desperate reaction to an anxiety attack I had that was triggered by an argument about nuclear weapons with Zbigniew Bzrezinski.  But the more I see, the more I fear that America is stumbling toward a full-scale political crisis that could, if it goes south, result in the end of what we call democracy here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.