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Link Biscuits: 1.12.10

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 23:01
  • E.J. Dionne, Symposium: Intellectuals and their America: "In a democracy, political engagement is an act of patriotism, a declaration of faith in the judgment of one’s fellow citizens and thus, ultimately, in one’s nation. Michael Walzer is right that the truly effective social critics are embedded in their societies and operate at least as much out of love as from alienation. And love is usually dominant. In The Company of Critics, Walzer quotes the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik: “A movement that does not honor society’s constant values is not sufficiently mature to undertake the reshaping of that society.” Walzer draws the right conclusion: “Criticism is most powerful . . . when it gives voice to the common complaints of the people or elucidates the values that underlie those complaints.” Note the twin obligations Walzer imposes on the critic: the democratic obligation to voice “common complaints” and the intellectual obligation to elucidate values. The latter can be quite subversive of accepted understandings, exposing as it typically does the ways in which a society ignores or violates the values it claims as its bedrock. Few leaders better embodied the patriotism inherent in embedded criticism than Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. Both drew on the insistence of the nation’s founding document that all men are created equal to launch social and political movements that revolutionized the country."
  • The Guardian, A Pilot's Life: Exhausting Hours for Meagre Wages: "Anyone waiting for their underpants to be checked knows that the glamour went out of flying years ago. But nowhere has the cachet fallen so far as in the US, where pilots on commuter airlines responsible for more than half the country's flights now earn pitifully low salaries for long, unsocial hours. "
  • Lee Drutman, What Came First: Conservatism or Status Quo?: "Miriam Matthews, a doctoral candidate in social psychology at the Claremont Graduate University, Shana Levin, an associate profess of psychology at Claremont McKenna College, and Jim Sidanius, a professor of psychology and African-American studies at Harvard University, have found evidence that both general feelings of threat and specific anxiety about other ethnic groups sometimes do lead individuals to embrace two tenets of political conservatism — support for the status quo and a belief that there is a natural social hierarchy to society. These tenets provide a salve for uncertainties and anxieties by offering a belief system in which there is a strong order to things."