Author: Ophelia Benson

Richard Dawkins likes to outrage people. He’s not the only person in the world who likes to do that, in fact it’s just barely possible that there are one or two people connected with Butterflies and Wheels who don’t mind irritating. However that may be, Dawkins has done it again.

Evil is not an entity, not a spirit, not a force to be opposed and subdued. Evil is a miscellaneous collection of nasty things that nasty people do. There are nasty people in every country, stupid people, insane people, people who should never be allowed to get anywhere near power. Just killing nasty people doesn’t help: they will be replaced. We must try to tailor our institutions, our constitutions, our electoral systems, so as to minimise the chance that such people will rise to the top…And we democracies might look to our own vaunted institutions. Are they well designed to ensure that we don’t make disastrous mistakes when we choose our own leaders? Isn’t it, indeed, just such a mistake that has led us to this terrible pass?

Leaving aside what he says about the war in Iraq (because my colleague doesn’t agree with him on this point, while I think a thousand and one contradictory things), I do think he’s absolutely right about the US method of electing a president. We do keep electing shockingly embarrassingly unqualified people. I’ve often thought we ought to think about the UK system, where the parties choose the candidates and the voters choose between them. Here we choose the candidates ourselves and boy do we do a crap job of it. But then again maybe it wouldn’t help. Over there it seems to be accepted that a candidate with brains and skill and competence will be more electable than a bumbling inarticulate folksy mediocrity with ‘family values’, but here that is not the case. In the last election I heard with my own ears people rejoice at the fact that George Bush II was an ordinary guy just like the rest of us. Not, as Richard Dawkins points out, the way a CEO is chosen, so why this job? Who knows.

It’s not new though. We started off this way. There was much irrelevant nonsense in the very first election, Jefferson being slagged off as a Frenchified intellectual who had children by a slave concubine (which turned out to be true, confoundingly enough). Richard Hofstadter tells of the anti-intellectualism of the Jackson-Adams elections. We elected one military ‘hero’ after another, most of them with no civilian talent at all.

And yet this, as our folksy head of state keeps reminding the world, is the world’s only superpower. So the single most powerful human on the planet is chosen by a process that mingles elements of a high school popularity contest, an ad campaign for the newest most macho SUV, and good old-fashioned backroom bribery. It is a bit of a mismatch.

This review by Alan Wolfe is an odd mix of insight and blindness, shrewdness and obtuseness.

Wolfe makes some good points about the inherent difficulties of trying to make a progressive politics out of consumer movements, and about the value of thinking big when writing about history.

For the past two or three decades, historians have been studiously thinking small…As important as social history has been, however, it has also been mind-numbingly narrow in its evocation of detail and in its reluctance to consider the larger meanings of its findings. But Cohen thinks big…One hopes that her book will stimulate her colleagues to take similar risks, even the risk of emulating historians of previous generations whose efforts at intellectual synthesis and grand narrative are treated now with contempt by postmodern pygmies.

But there is also a passage where Wolfe draws a bizarre moral from the segmentation of U.S. consumer markets in the post World War II period.

In theory, consumption, whether we like it or not, ought to unify us, because we all become consumers of roughly similar goods. In reality, marketing specialists discovered in the postwar years that the best way to sell goods is to segment the audience that is buying them…Once again, consumption determined politics. We shopped alone before we bowled alone. Segmented into our zip codes, is it any wonder that our politics became so contentious and our unity around a common conception of the good so impossible?

What can he mean? U.S. politics didn’t ‘become’ contentious after WWII, they always have been. The Depression, WWI, strikes and riots, Wobblies and miners and anarchists, the 1890s, the 1850s, not to mention a contentious little item known as the Civil War. And then again what can he mean in any case? What would a non-contentious politics look like? An ant farm? Clone Nation? There is much to be said for communitarianism, solidarity, and such, but it has to be said with caution. How exactly does one distinguish between solidarity and group think, conformity, organization people in grey flannel suits, outer-directed suburban robots, the pressure of majority opinion that so worried de Tocqueville and Mill? The answer is not self-evident, and not easy.

And then there is the last paragraph, the grotesque last three sentences.

It was not just perversity that led Ralph Nader, a hero of Lizabeth Cohen’s youth, to work so hard on behalf of the Republican Party. He must have realized on some level–and if he did not, then consumers certainly did–that if small cars are unsafe at any speed, one ought to buy SUVs instead. And for that ignoble end, conservative Republicans are the ones to have in office.

That is such an odd thing to say that it actually fooled me, I thought for a minute that Nader had in literal fact been a Republican in some earlier phase. But no, it was merely yet another assertion that It Is Forbidden to vote for a new party, a principle that would have left Lincoln with little outlet for his talents. And what a ridiculous non-argument he presents for it! The SUV! Which took over the universe precisely in the years Clinton and Gore were in office. What did they ever do to push Detroit to engineer better gas mileage, or to change the law so that SUVs would have to meet the same standards that non-bloated cars do? Nothing! Not one thing! They went on bleating about the sacred freedoms of the consumer, that’s what they did, but we should have voted for Gore anyway, because…the SUV situation under Bush is just exactly as bad as it would be under Gore. Huh?

I have found something useful for philosophers to do!

Surprising news indeed, but take a look at this paragraph from Helen Salmon, student representative for the Stop the War Coalition.

Never in the field of writing about human confict, have so many bad argumentative moves been made in so short a paragraph. Let’s count!

1. The fact that the US and Britain were willing to back Saddam has no necessary bearing on whether their combined action in Iraq is a war for the liberation of the people of Iraq (they may simply have realised the error of their ways, for example).

2. War against weapons of mass destruction. Oh dear. The problem here is that Ms Salmon’s logic compels her to the conclusion that whether there is such a thing depends on how good people are at hiding these weapons. Bad regimes, good at hiding – no war against weapons of mass destruction. Bad regimes, bad at hiding – the war’s on!

3. Terrible logic in the next bit about North Korea. Indeed, it’s Stangroomesque in its awfulness! No more to be said, really.^*

So philosophers, the challenge for you, should you choose to accept it, is to teach this person to think. Scary, eh?!

*Yes, I know – that’s no kind of argument!