Motus Mentis

In a comment to yesterday’s post on l’affaire Fluke-Limbaugh, I linked to a pair of blog posts by University of Rochester professor Steven Landsburg (sent my way by Dennis Mangan). In the first, Professor Landsburg wrote:

[W]hile Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position ”” which is what’s at issue here ”” deserves none whatseover. It deserves only to be ridiculed, mocked and jeered. To treat it with respect would be a travesty. I expect there are respectable arguments for subsidizing contraception (though I am skeptical that there are arguments sufficiently respectable to win me over), but Ms. Fluke made no such argument. All she said, in effect, was that she and others want contraception and they don’t want to pay for it.

To his credit, Rush stepped in to provide the requisite mockery. To his far greater credit, he did so with a spot-on analogy: If I can reasonably be required to pay for someone else’s sex life (absent any argument about externalities or other market failures), then I can reasonably demand to share in the benefits. His dense and humorless critics notwithstanding, I am 99% sure that Rush doesn’t actually advocate mandatory on-line sex videos. What he advocates is logical consistency and an appreciation for ethical symmetry. So do I. Color me jealous for not having thought of this analogy myself.

There’s one place where I part company with Rush, though: He wants to brand Ms. Fluke a “slut’ because, he says, she’s demanding to be paid for sex. There are two things wrong here. First, the word “slut’ connotes (to me at least) precisely the sort of joyous enthusiasm that would render payment superfluous. A far better word might have been “prostitute’ (or a five-letter synonym therefor), but that’s still wrong because Ms. Fluke is not in fact demanding to be paid for sex. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) She will, as I understand it, be having sex whether she gets paid or not. Her demand is to be paid. The right word for that is something much closer to “extortionist’. Or better yet, “extortionist with an overweening sense of entitlement’. Is there a single word for that?

But whether or not he chose the right word, what I just don’t get is why the pro-respect crowd is aiming all its fire at Rush. Which is more disrespectful ”” his harsh language or Sandra Fluke’s attempt to pick your pocket? That seems like a pretty clear call to me.

Our second link was to Professor Landsburg’s next post (brilliantly titled “Contraceptive Sponges — how I wish I’d thought of that one), in which he examines, quite fairly and dispassionately, I think, the arguments for and against publicly subsidized contraception. All in all, there was nothing in either of these to object to in a society that claims to value healthy debate, I think.

But in today’s Best of the Web, James Taranto informs us that the president of Rochester University, Joel Seligman, was “outraged” to read Professor Landsburg’s opinion, and expressed his anger in an official denunciation on University letterhead.

We should hardly be surprised any more (after, for example, the pillorying of Lawrence Summers for expressing a perfectly reasonable hypothesis) to see such a response from the administration of an American university these days; departures from liberal orthodoxy are clearly unwelcome. (It seems fiitting, too, that this item should come along just a day after this comment in one of our recent posts on this topic.) No big deal here, really, as far as the tenured Professor Landsburg is concerned — though, as Mr. Taranto points out, this will give untenured faculty pause next time they think about weighing in on a public controversy with a heterodox political opinion. Mr. Taranto quotes Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds, who in a post of his own wrote:

“Seligman’s statement will have, and might as well have been intended to have, a chilling effect on the speech of faculty who are less eminent than Steven Landsburg.”

Professor Landsburg responded with another post, published yesterday, in which he reposts both a statement he made to the press (apparently an academic supporting Rush in this brawl was so newsworthy that he was besieged with press inquiries) and his letter to Joel Seligman.

All in all, worthwhile reading, I think, and I applaud Professor Landsburg for his even-handed and thoughtful approach throughout, which should be a model for us all (myself included).

P.S. After writing this post I went over to Lawrence Auster’s place to see if he had responded to our One-Eyed Man’s comments, and saw that he was all over this UR story as well.

Here you go, folks: the live-tweeting of last night’s Park Slope Food Co-op meeting.

Last spring I wrote a brief post called Golden Mean, reproduced below in full:

If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on the other into tyranny.

In the first prong of this aphorism I was not talking about ‘negative’ rights, of the sort found in the Constitution, which boil down to particular variants of a more general right not to be interfered with by the government. I had in mind ‘positive’ rights — rights to goods that require expense and effort to provide — which necessarily involve a positive compulsion on someone’s part to provide them, effectively indenturing one segment of society to another. As more and more of these goods become mere entitlements, rather than rewards to be earned by productive labor, the burden upon the productive segment of society increases, even as that segment dwindles — and the nation sags toward impotent mediocrity.

Privileges, on the other hand, are by definition blessings that are granted from the seat of power to those who seek them. It is always and everywhere a hallmark of tyranny that all rights, even negative rights, become privileges granted at the whim of the tyrant.

It has become a talking point in this election season that in the name of “fairness”, the well-to-do must pay more to the government for the “privilege” of being American. The latest prominent official to make this argument was the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, in an interview last week.

In an opinion piece published today at the Wall Street Journal, former Federal Reserve governor Lawrence Lindsay pushes back. Read it here.

A while back, in a private correspondence with a conservative blogger about what the Left means when it talks about “social justice”, I wrote the following:

Daniel Dennett once wrote that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. The central principle of liberal “justice”, and of Rawlsian justice, is exactly that: to view the individual not as as an originating agent of free choices, with all the responsibility for the resulting outcomes that free choice entails — but rather as a social infinitesimal, whose freedom, and therefore personal responsibility, is diminished effectively to zero by the nexus of external causes in which he is embedded: racism, gender stereotypes, corporate greed, economic inequality, political favoritism, institutionalized (and even unconscious) prejudices, and so on.

Dennis Prager has said that “the bigger the State, the smaller the citizen”, but this goes even farther: at the logical endpoint of the liberal, Rawlsian view it is not until all intrinsic aspects of individual advantage have been externalized, and thereby compensated for in the social framework, that a truly ‘just’ society will have been achieved. If Smith is congenitally smarter, more future-oriented, and more industrious than Jones, then he will end up being better off than Jones. But behind the Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”, one cannot choose in advance what inborn advantages one will have, so by Rawls’s logic the just society must be one in which such natural inequalities cannot confer an advantage.

Ultimately, under such a philosophy the individual human being vanishes altogether.

I was reminded of this today when I ran across an item in the news about the poor woman who was brained a while ago by a shopping cart tossed off a shopping-mall balcony by two “teens”. The article, which you can read here, opens with the following sentence (my emphasis):

The husband of a Manhattan real-estate agent left with severe injuries after a shopping cart was dropped on her head from an East Harlem parking garage claims lax security caused the devastating accident.

That’s it: no human agency, no shred of responsibility ascribed to the attackers themselves for their brutal assault of an innocent woman. The whole thing just comes down to an “accident” due to “lax security” on the part of a corporate entity.

The individual human being vanishes altogether.

John Derbyshire commented, in last Friday’s Radio Derb podcast, on the Dharun Ravi trial getting underway today in New Jersey (this is the case in which a gay Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi killed himself some time after Mr. Ravi had secretly recorded Mr. Clementi kissing a male student in his dorm room).

The case appears to be a thoughtcrime persecution for which Mr. Clementi’s suicide was merely a trigger: Mr. Ravi, after all, is not charged with having caused Mr. Clementi’s death, and the prosecution is not allowed even to mention the suicide. I think we can rest assured, though, that this case wouldn’t be happening at all had Mr. Clementi not killed himself. So it seems, then, that what is on trial is the fact that this cruel and as-yet-unenlightened world is still a place that so chafes a young gay man’s sensitivities that he can no longer bear it — and Mr. Ravi, who is guilty of nothing more than a nasty college prank, is about to take the fall for all of us.

I will note in passing how handy the 1984 glossary, formerly a mere literary curiosity, has become these days.

Read Derb’s item here.

For his heresies, Patrick Buchanan has now officially been sacked by MSNBC. (I’ll confess that I’m surprised he lasted so long.)

He comments here.

From Tocqueville’s Democracy In America, 1840:

After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot break through to go beyond the crowd; it does not break wills, but it softens them, bends them and directs them; it rarely forces action, but it constantly opposes your acting; it does not destroy, it prevents birth; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always believed that this sort of servitude, regulated, mild and peaceful, of which I have just done the portrait, could be combined better than we imagine with some of the external forms of liberty, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

Here’s how it’s done.