Civic Energies

Within a few hours of my last posting I started to wonder what the heck I was thinking of. I was half tempted to delete the entry altogether.

Now that Chris has commented on it though, I suppose I ought to think it through a bit. What do I mean by "civic energies"?

Worn Out?

These days, a passage from Rousseau's Social Contract keeps coming to mind.

Although a people can make itself free while it is still uncivilized, it cannot do so when its civil energies are worn out. Disturbances may then destroy a civil society without a revolution being able to restore it, so that as soon as the chains are broken, the state falls apart and exists no longer; then what is needed is a master, not a liberator. Free peoples, remember this maxim: liberty can be gained, but never regained.

Missionary Trouble

The other day I was in my home office when the doorbell rang. I looked out of the window and saw two older women in their Sunday best (it was a Saturday) coming up the driveway. I recognized them as half of a team of missionaries who come through the neighborhood every month or so; the other half of the team, being fleeter of foot, were already on the doorstep.

I ignored them. I returned to my computer, sat there working quietly, and ignored them.

Just last week, my valiant spouse wasted nearly an hour of her time in conversation with missionaries on our doorstep - whether it was the same group, I don't know. I was unwilling to follow her example.

It's not that I'm afraid to talk to missionaries. It's that I can no longer be bothered with them.

Nanotechnology

I found myself in a peculiar situation the other day. I had been asked to lead a brief discussion on "The Social and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology" at an event dubbed "Nanotech Day" - a meeting between researchers in a nanotech center at Georgia Tech and researchers from the CDC. The meeting turned out to be something like a four-hour, interactive infomercial.

Avoiding Tragedy . . . or Not?

I wrote in my last post that skepticism may be rooted in a desire to avoid tragedy, to the extent that tragedy is the product of stubbornly insisting on the universality and rightness (and righteousness) of what turns out always to be a partial and flawed view of the world.

There is a problem with the desire to avoid tragedy, of course: the easiest way to do it is to just not give a damn about anything. Historically, perhaps stereotypically, skepticism has always seemed to slide into quietism, complete passivity and indifference in the face of whatever happens. How do you know it matters, anyway?

Tragedy Revisited

My recent research into the notions of moral imagination and moral luck has led me to revise (slightly) my previous view of the use and misuse of the term "tragedy."

Err America

I have a secret vice, which is that I occasionally listen to Air America Radio. The experience is sometimes cathartic and often (and often unintentionally) comical, especially in times of great stress. I listened quite a lot during the run-up to the 2004 election, and once or twice a week since then.

Listening intermittently over the past week has helped me to crystallize some of my thoughts about what, exactly, is wrong with Air America. Ever since Vice President Cheney pulled the trigger last weekend, they - and I mean everyone on every show, from Jerry Springer to Janeane Garofalo to Randi Rhodes - have been in ecstasy. They've been howling about secrecy, riffing on the metaphorical connection between hunting accidents and foreign policy, spinning out salacious gossip about alleged affairs and binges of drinking and hunting, and indulging in that most popular of rhetorical tropes: the conspiracy theory.

Most of this is bullshit, in the precise, technical sense of the term (following Harry Frankfurt): utterances made with no regard for truth and at best a tenuous connection with reality.

More on Civic Skepticism

The lead editorial in tomorrow's New York Times is a systematic demolition of the Bush administration's alleged defense of domestic spying without a warrant. One point in particular echoes the point on civic skepticism I was making a few weeks ago.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

I have nothing to add.

Atheistic Zealotry

My local paper ran an AP story this morning about a peculiar legal action in Italy: 

An Italian judge heard arguments Friday on whether a small-town parish priest should stand trial for asserting that Jesus Christ existed.

Civic Skepticism

I'd like to, but I'll refrain from belaboring the argument against the current expansion of executive power in the government of the United States. Suffice it to say that we have a President who believes he is free to interpret laws even as he signs them, and free to break them when it suits his convenience as Commander in Chief. The President has a long and very public history of not paying attention to evidence or arguments that might count against his own beliefs about the world. He has also nominated to the Supreme Court a judge who has advocated for something called "the unitary executive."

All of this is a matter of public record.

Watching the trend toward greater executive power as it has unfolded over the last four or five years, all the while teaching and thinking about the bases of a legitimate political order, I've been struck by the degree to which the Constitution of the United States - and perhaps liberal democracy itself - is grounded in a kind of civic skepticism.

Consider the largely tacit argument for allowing the President to have more power: George W. Bush is a decent man, the argument runs, a fine and upstanding Christian conservative; we should trust him. In short, we should give him the benefit of the doubt. The President's opponents, on the other hand, are supposed to bear all the burdens of doubt: doubts about their intelligence, their claims to knowledge, their moral standards, their integrity, their support for the troops, their patriotism.

As an example, consider the ease with which the Adminstration appeals to strategic skepticism when it suits their purposes - shifting the burden of doubt onto others in the case of climate change, for example - all the while labeling as an enemy of liberty anyone who disagrees with the President on any other matter of policy.

It doesn't matter how trustworthy the President says he is. It doesn't even matter how trustworthy he seems to be. We have the right and the responsibility as citizens to doubt him on this point, and to keep him from overstepping the constitutional bounds of his office.

The whole point of our system of government is that we should not have to trust one individual, whether it's George III or George W. Bush. The United States is supposed to be a nation of laws, not of people, precisely in order to avoid the imposition of arbitrary power of any individual or group over any other individual or group.

I would certainly not be the first to say that dissent is the first right of a citizen in a democracy. I would add that a moderate sort of civic skepticism may be our first duty.