Reasonable accommodation hearings fact of the day

From the Gazette:

"When I face a Catholic priest or a Muslim mullah, I have the same fear as a gay man," he said in English - the first time anyone has addressed the commission in English. (Ten per cent of Gaspe residents have English as a mother tongue.)

I know that the hearings haven't reached Montreal yet, but I was still surprised by that. It's politic of anglophones to tread lightly in these debates about Quebec identity, but still.

Relatedly, it was pointed out to me yesterday that (mid-grant-application) I'd missed a big story last week: PQ leader Pauline Marois has declared that the solution to the difficulties exposed by the reasonable accommodation debate is... sovereignty!

Marois says the closely watched Bouchard-Taylor commission hearings on reasonable accomodation show that Quebecers are asking questions about their own identity and history.

"Quebecers need to make peace with themselves and get past the uncertainty surrounding their identity by creating their own country," Marois said.

Yes, I know what happens when your only policy is a hammer, but, c'mon. If you're in that position and you're confronted with a glass object that needs repair, you could at least maintain a decent silence instead of volunteering to give it a good whack. I'm sure it's a very nice hammer, and maybe it's the most important tool in the toolbox, but the world's a complex place and some things really aren't nails.

If Quebec were either thoroughly laique or thoroughly Catholic, then sovereignty would just expose religious minorities to a hostile, homogenous local majority. Sovereignty would solve the problem in the same way that it would solve the problem of the First Nations; the minority would have no chance, and the majority wouldn't have to be bothered listening anymore. Since Quebec continues to have a real identity divide-- laique/ Catholic, urban/ rural, etc., just like any healthy democratic society-- it might not turn out quite that way. Then again it might; after all, the great discovery of the past year is that the Catholic and laique voers can find common ground in excluding Muslims and Orthodox Jews. A sovereign Quebec would be dancing a delicate dance with its anglophone minority; a good round of bashing smaller and weaker minorities might be just the safe identity-building tonic that the nationalist doctor ordered.

Note that this doesn't mean sovereignty mightn't be justified all things considered (though I don't happen to think so). But we know enough about post-secession nation-building and the behavior of newly-more-ethnically-homogenous states to know that the majority's sudden mastery in its own house doesn't make it confident and therefore tolerant toward minorities. Quite the contrary. Now, to be fair, Marois didn't say that it would do so; she offered no guarantees about how the Quebecois identity struggle would be resolved. But either she's openly embracing the "there will be no problem, because there are more of us than of you" exclusionary path, or (more likely) she's wrongly (maybe sincerely, but still wrongly) suggesting that a sovereign people could get over its identity crisis and stop being so threatened by minorities. That's not how these things work...

'Never ever talk to reporters without a script' watch

via the Chronicle:

The dean of admissions at the University of Chicago recently told The Wall Street Journal that he would give Barack Obama’s two daughters “a break” in the admissions process, even though the presidential candidate has said that his girls “should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.”

Mr. Obama, who generally supports the use of race in college admissions decisions, made the remark earlier this year in response to a question from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about whether his daughters should be able to benefit from affirmative action when the time comes for them to go to college.

In the Journal story, Theodore A. O’Neill, the admissions dean at Chicago, touted improvements in the racial and gender diversity of the student body at his institution, where Mr. Obama was once a lecturer. (The university, the article said, used to be about two-thirds male and overwhelmingly white. Now the gender ratio is about even, and 7 percent of the student body is black, 9 percent is Hispanic, and 1 percent is American Indian.)

Mr. O’Neill was quoted as saying that he disagreed with Mr. Obama, a U.S. senator from Illinois, on the issue of his daughters and whether they should get a break in admissions decisions: “Those children, for all their privileges, will have interesting things to say about American society based on what I’m assuming their experiences are.” [emphasis added]

The legal need to justify affirmative action in terms of "diversity" and the educational benefits students outside the preferred groups leads to all sorts of rhetorical contortions, and that's far from the worst. But, geez. And it gets worse when you realize that the assumption would not be tested by seeing whether, say, an applicant had anything interesting to say about American society in an application essay, or asking about actual experiences. The assumption is both triggered and rendered unfalsifiable by the 'race' box checked off on the application form.

The clean-shaven life is not...

This is most entertaining.

We have a report of this exchange from antiquity, involving the Stoic Epictetus:

“Come now, Epictetus, take off your beard.”
– If I am a philosopher, I answer, I will not take it off.
“Then I will take off your head.”
– If that will do you any good, take it.

And John Sellars tells this story in his book on The Art of Living (2003, p.15):

“In AD 176 the Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius created four chairs of philosophy in Athens, one for each of the major schools. When, a few years later, the holder of the Peripatetic Chair died, two equally well qualified candidates applied for the post. One of the candidates, Diocles, was already very old so it seemed that his rival, Bagoas, would be sure to get the job. However, one of the selection committee objected to Bagoas on the grounds that he did not have [a] beard saying that, above all else, a philosopher should always have a long beard in order to inspire confidence in his students. Bagoas responded by saying that if philosophers are to be judged only by the length of their beards then perhaps the chair of Peripatetic philosophy should be given to a billy-goat. The matter was considered to be of such grave importance that it was referred to the highest authorities in Rome, presumably to the Emperor himself…”

Over the page, Sellars suggests that it was the mission of the three philosophers to Rome in 155 BCE which created the popular link between philosophers and beards. That was the famous occasion (which haunts Grotius scholarship down to the present day) when the Sceptic Carneades made a speech in favour of justice one day, and a speech against it the next, very much annoying Cato the Censor in the process. But these were bearded Greeks in clean-shaven Rome, and the Romans remembered the beards.

Y'know, that's actually believable. And funny.

There's more; read the whole thing.

Great moments in multiculturalism, continued

Women's group targets hijab, yarmulke

If the Quebec Council on the Status of Women has its way, teachers, doctors and anyone working in a public institution in this province would not be permitted to wear hijabs or yarmulkes.

The council is calling on the Quebec government to ban what it calls visible religious symbols.

While a crucifix or a Star of David on a necklace would be acceptable, council president Christiane Pelchat said, public employees should not be permitted to wear such overt symbols as the hijab, a head covering worn by Muslim women, or the yarmulke, a skullcap worn by Jewish men.

The council plans to argue for a ban on religious symbols before Quebec's roving commission on "reasonable accommodation" of immigrants and religious minorities.

The commission's hearings are to wrap up Nov. 30.

That would mean female Muslim teachers would not be allowed to wear a hijab in public schools, Pelchat said this week during a meeting with The Gazette's editorial board.

"Teachers are role models and they should be promoting equality between men and women," Pelchat said. "Because you prevent someone from wearing a hijab, it doesn't mean you are preventing them from believing."

Pelchat, a former Liberal MNA, said the council believes "a secular state promotes freedom of religion for all believers of various denominations."

The council also stated it believes the right to equality between men and women trumps the rights to freedom of religion.
[...]

The Quebec Council on the Status of Women is a 20-member body that advises the government on issues relating to women.

Announcing the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory

The Women and Politics and Foundations of Political Theory sections of the American Political Science Association and the Women’s Caucus for Political Science announce the Okin-Young Award in Feminist Political Theory. The award commemorates the scholarly, mentoring, and professional contributions of Susan Moller Okin and Iris Marion Young to the development of the field of feminist political theory. This annual award recognizes the best paper on feminist political theory published in an English language academic journal during the previous calendar year. Papers will be considered by self-nomination or nomination by other individuals. The award carries a cash award of $600. To be eligible, the article must have been published in 2007.

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2008. To be considered for the award, one copy of the article should be sent to each member of the award committee by mail or electronically as a PDF attachment:

Award committee chair:

Professor Nancy J. Hirschmann
Department of Political Science
The University of Pennsylvania
Stiteler Hall
Philadelphia, PA 19104
njh@sas.upenn.edu


Professor Kathy Ferguson
Department of Political Science
University of Hawai'i
640 Saunders Hall
2424 Maile Way
Honolulu, HI 96822
kferguso@hawaii.edu

Professor Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott
Eastern Michigan University
1525 Harding Road
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
joanna.v.scott@gmail.com

Hither and yon

Beginning today: The Plural States of Recognition, Montreal

This Saturday: CSPT: "Intellectual Foundings: J.G.A. Pocock and the Cambridge School", at Columbia.

Two weekends hence: Association for Political Theory, London, Ontario. (Time to make my travel arrangements...)

Two weekends after that: Immigration, Minorities, and Multiculturalism in Democracies, back here in Montreal.

Scholar-blogging
Dani Rodrik:

Going into this, my expectation was that blog popularity and scholarship would have little (or perhaps even a negative) correlation. After all, the skills of a blogger (writing quickly and well, working for short-term results, spending a lot of time reading and digesting others' work) are not necessarily those that a scholar who wants long-term impact needs to have. Plus, there is the time spent on the blog--which does mean less time for research. Remember the Acemoglu response: I am too darn busy writing research papers... And one can certainly be an excellent and popular blogger--providing stimulating commentary on others' work--without having large scholarly output or high impact.

And yet the correlation between how well one does on bloggership and on scholarship turns out to be positive and statistically highly significant. The rank correlation between the two is 0.27, and it is significant at the 99% level of confidence.

Too funny.

At Sean Carroll's Cosmic Variance: Academics: Still Totally Lame, a commentary on the Chronicle symposium on guilty pleasures.

Arrrgh! Stuff like that sets back the cause of academic non-geekiness for centuries!

The reading list

Actually, scratch that: immediately read upon receipt of the journal, and highly recommended.

Lee Ward, "Montesquieu on Federalism and Anglo-Gothic Constitutionalism," 37(4) Publius 551-77, 2007.

It's hard to be novel, correct, and concise in writing about Montesquieu; indeed, it's hard to be any two of those at the same time. This article manages all three.

Taylor speaks out

The latest from the Taylor-Bouchard commission:

'Who's to judge?' commission asks
Jeff Heinrich, The Gazette


A loquacious Charles Taylor made his daytime debut today at the Quebec "reasonable accommodations" commission her co-chairs with Gérard Bouchard - and waded right into the controversial debate over veils and kirpans.

His first interjection took the safe form of a series of questions, preserving the neutrality the commission is trying to maintain as it hears from Quebecers across the province on the touchy issue of religion in society.

"It's a question I've wanted to ask of many (people who've presented) briefs," Taylor told Argenteuil resident John Saywell, one of 30 residents who addressed the commission, whose 17-city tour made a stop in the Laurentians today and last night.

"You talked about religious symbols and what they mean - but who decides?" asked Taylor, a Montreal philosopher and author.

"For example, some say the kirpan is a knife and is therefore an instrument of violence. Some people think the hijab reflects a situation of inequality between men and women. Some people think the crucifix reflects the violence we're now up against.

"But who's to judge?" Taylor asked.

Sociological studies in France and elsewhere have shown that young Muslim women wear the veil for myriad reasons, he said. Some do it out of faith, some do it out of opposition to their non-practicing parents, some do it out of reaction against the secular society around them.

"Is it really possible in a free society that someone can define for me under law what a symbol means for me?" Taylor asked. "I ask the question: Is there not something profoundly (wrong) about saying we'll decide in the National Assembly that what a symbol means is such-and-such and that if you don't like it, shut up?"

Added Bouchard, a sociologist and historian: "Isn't it the right of a group to live on the margins of society?"

The discussion got crustier when Taylor confronted Lise Bourgault, mayor of Brownsburg-Chatham who also was a Conservative MP from 1984 to 1993. In her presentation, Bourgault called for religious clothes to be banned entirely in public, because for her, veiled women "project an image of oppression" and makes her more and more xenophobic.

"I go to the Adonis supermarket (in north-end Montreal), I see women in veils behind their husbands who are pushing the shopping cart. It goes against so many battles we won for the equality for the sexes," Bourgault said.

"Why do people feel so threatened?" Bouchard asked her.

"We're threatened by terrorist movements," the mayor replied.

"There's reason to be afraid, but we should be afraid in an intelligent way," Taylor shot back.

"I throw into question your reasoning."

Bouchard also had a comment.

"If the burqa starts making in-roads in Quebec," he told Bourgault, "I don't think you'd be among the first victims."

The chairmen were more gentle with Ste-Sophie resident Lidia Quintana, a Chilean immigrant. Her sister, Carmen, was a household name in Quebec in 1986 when she came here for lengthy medical treatment after being severely burned by Chilean troops under the Pinochet regime.

Carmen has since returned to Santiago. had three children and and teaches psychology at university. Lidia married a French-Canadian, had children of her own, and settled in the Laurentians 16 years ago. Today she said immigrants should try harder to adapt to Quebec society, especially by learning French, as she did.

And she said accommodations of a small number of religious minorities go too far. Quebec should draw up a "Charter of Rights and Responsibilties of Immigrants" for everyone to sign, "before this problem degenerates," she said to applause, evoking an idea others have brought up during the hearings as well.

"You talk about a moral contract," Taylor replied. "You don't think that goes both ways?" he asked.

"We've heard that sometimes a lack of integration makes people fall back on their closed group and a feeling of alienation. It seems there's a reciprocal relationship going on that doesn't always work," he said.

"It's not just about accommodations."

Hear, hear, though I fear that he will not be heard.

There's also an update to my previous post on the hearings.

Great moments in multiculturalism

From the latest Bouchard-Taylor commission hearings:

"It's really a mentality that's separate," St. Hippolyte resident Lise Casavant said of the Hasidism, adding that immigrants should sign a new Quebec citizenship charter "or choose another province," a sentiment several other speakers also evoked.

John Saywell, of Argenteuil, said when he hears a Hasidic Jewish leader speaking only in English on the TV news, he thinks it's wrong. The community should make the effort to speak French, he said.

And Lise Provencher, of St. Jerome, said immigrants are "buying their way in" to Quebec and that Jews are the worst because they're "the most powerful. ... It's always been said that the Jews are the trampoline of money in the world." After she spoke, the crowd applauded.

At the last round:

The Roman Catholic religion has played an important role in Quebec history and its imagery should remain in public institutions, said Saguenay Mayor Jean Tremblay at hearings into immigrant accommodation.

Catholicism is still very important for a majority of Quebecers and that heritage should be reflected in the public realm, he told the Bouchard-Taylor commission on Thursday.

"The Catholic religion is one of the nicest values we have in Quebec," the mayor declared at the second day of hearings in the Lac-Saint-Jean region, north of Quebec City.

Tremblay is one of a few mayors left in Quebec who still start council meetings with a prayer. He defended that practice.

"We are a little easy-going," he said. "When someone who represents three per cent of the population wants to do something, everyone bends. But when the mayor wants to say his prayer, we tell him to respect secular principles."[...]

Marcien Bisson, a retired Saguenay resident, suggested Quebec introduce a law to eliminate kosher foods he said are ubiquitous despite the province's small Jewish population.

Bisson also asked Quebec declare God's supremacy in order to respect the Canadian Constitution.

Monsieur le Maire and Monsieur Bisson, meet Ms. Asselin-Vaillancourt.

Allowing women to wear a veil in public is a major impediment to assimilation because it is a personal and political act, said Marthe Asselin-Vaillancourt, a feminist activist who works with a local retired persons' association.

"Wearing a veil does not encourage integration. It produces negative effects. It irritates and bothers people," she said.

Asselin-Vaillancourt suggested future immigrants to Quebec be well-informed about the province's values of secularity [laicite] and gender equality before they come to Canada.

"We have to send a clear message that when they choose Quebec, they are choosing and accepting to live in a society that supports equality between the sexes," she said.

NB: this is an important part of the dynamic that's being revealed through the commission hearings. The Herouxville norms wanted it both ways (Quebec is a laique society that respects its heritage with giant public crucifixes), but that doesn't entirely seem to be the norm. Both sides in the 40-year-old Quiet Revolution fight know that they're at an impasse and are frustrated with the status quo. And both sides are willing to take it out on religious minorities. The secularists don't like 'em because they have, and are public about, religions. And the old-line Catholics don't like 'em because, well, they're not Catholic, and they [further] undermine the old Catholic identity of the province. We can hear sweeping declarations one right after the other, each stated as if it were obvious fact and not frustrated aspiration: Quebec is laique. Quebec is Catholic. Both are offered as reasons not to accommodate religious minorities; but the reasons can't both be valid ones, and no one seems to point out that the divide itself undermines any claim that social policy should be made on the basis of the homogenous shared Quebecois values.

Update:
The CBC coverage has some other choice moments.

On Monday, the commission heard from several Quebecers who are upset about kosher foods. Many mass-produced packaged foods available in supermarkets are kosher, which means a rabbi supervised their preparation to ensure the products meet Jewish dietary laws.

Laurentians resident Émile Dion said that makes him angry because he believes the cost of getting a rabbi's blessing raises food prices by as much as 10 per cent. "Why should I pay 10 per cent more for the Jews?" he asked during his comments, which went on for several minutes. "It forces us to eat kosher, and I don't want to," he said in French.

Midway through Monday's hearings, commission co-chair Bouchard interrupted the comments to remind the audience that only about two per cent of Quebec's population is made up of Muslim and Jews.

"Do you see a certain disproportion there, between your concerns and the cause?" he asked in French.

Ten percent! And I'm pretty sure no one's forcing the gentleman to eat food with Jew-cooties in it; sausage remains readily available, and he can always combine his kosher milk with some kosher meat to keep them the cooties at bay.

[A bit of economics: in the wildly implausible situation in which the rabbinic approval added that much to the price of food, and given that kosher-observant Jews make up a tiny share of Quebec's population, there would be a massive, obvious opening for a producer who didn't get the approval and provided food for 10% less to the rest of us. Conversely, if the market-clearing price for a box of corn flakes really is $3.30 rather than $3, what makes you think that abolishing rabbinic approval would lead the producer to cut the price?]

I wish I had any idea whether the coverage of the hearings was representative of what's said at them, and more importantly just how unrepresentative people who sign up to speak at them (guaranteed to be the people with axes to grind, bees in their bonnets, and time on their hands to concoct elaborate theories-- ahem...) are of their regions' populations.

Since I noted last year...

that there were no academic humanists or social scientists among the new MacArthur Fellows, I thought I should note that this year there is one. "Jay Rubenstein, an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He is a medieval historian who illuminates how violent events such as the First Crusade are recorded and remembered by future generations."

Otherwise: hard scientists, artists, curators, activists, etc.

I hesitate to say this...

because there's an obvious sense in which Lee Bollinger is the hero of the hour, and has done exactly the right thing: invite, and criticize. Listen, but take the occasion to (in the most literal sense) speak truth to power. Make clear that an invitation does not honor the dishonorable, and is about the interests of the listeners not that of the speaker. For once in the life of a "petty and cruel dictator," let him sit and listen to open and truthful criticism. The offer of a faculty position to Kian Tajbakhsh was an especially great move.

but...

but I can't get over the sense that he did exactly the wrong thing. One can refuse to invite. One can invite, and treat courteously, while relying on the general principle that such an invitation does not imply endorsement of the views expressed. But I'm not sure that inviting-and-insulting is the right thing to do; I was astonished to find myself in a bit of sympathy with Ahmadinejad's objections in the name of hospitality. The rules of hospitality are of a very different kind from the rules of intellectual discourse and debate-- but they're old and deep rules, not conditional on the extramural behavior or character of the guest, and I'm very uncomfortable with seeing them thrown overboard.

On a more mundane level, this might not be good for the general ability of universities to host controversial speakers. Such speakers always know they may face student protest, but it is something else to know that you may be introduced with a ten-minute denunciation. And when Bollinger crossed from questions, however rhetorical, for Ahmadinejad to answer into such (accurate!) personal descriptions as "cruel and petty dictator" or "ridiculous" or "I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions"-- before Ahmadinejad had had the chance to say a word!-- it seems to me that he crossed the line into grave discourtesy,and may have seriously dampened the willingness of speakers to be hosted by universities where there views are likely to be disagreed with.

John Coatsworth's direct aggressive questioning of Ahmadinejad after the latter's remarks, and giving the latter a chance to respond, was terrific. Students openly laughing at Ahmadinejad when he said there was no homosexuality in Iran-- great. The guest who comes to a debate can be expected to debate, and the guest who makes a fool of himself can expect to be laughed at. But Bollinger's remarks seem different to me.

Again, no quarrel with a word Bollinger said; and he might have been spectacularly right to say it. But I'm not sure...

ASPLP/ Nomos: Loyalty

While the program isn't yet finalized, the schedule for the next American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy meeting, December 28-29 in Baltimore at APA, is online.

Of local interest

I'm told that the new Minor in Political Theory was approved by the final step of the Powers That Be last week. It will take a while for it to appear in the course catalog and so on, but if there are McGill undergraduates who want to pursue that minor, they should start planning on it rather than doing something else just because the minor isn't on the list yet.

To discuss what "planning on it" entails and what courses make up a minor in political theory, feel free to get in touch with me by e-mail.

Must... fight... urge...

to engage Ilya Somin in lengthy debate on federalism in Star Trek. (Via Amber Taylor. Much too much to do, yet urge is strangely strong...

But I will suggest that the arrangement is probably confederal rather than federal-- there's no case I can think of in which the UFP legislated in a way that reached directly onto the surface of the planets, as it were. The problem is that we see vanishingly little of the civilian-to-civilian interactions that would be needed to decide the case. It's hard to learn much about how confederal, federal, or centralized a system is by watching the activities of its centralized military...

Update: OK, one more thing. The comments thread at Volokh quickly spiraled into the old standbys of social-science-geekery-about-Star Trek-- the allegedly post-scarcity economy (unless you happen to be a dilithium miner) and foreign policy/ the Prime Directive. That's because Ilya gave a very quirky tongue-in-cheek resource-extraction account of what the UFP's internal structure was like, but partly because those are the things we know how to talk about. Ilya's actual question-- how, if at all, is the Federation federal?-- isn't a Prime Directive question, and is only very indirectly a latinum question...

Dworkin wins Holberg Prize

Via the Chronicle, this announcement:

The Ludvig Holberg Memorial fund was established in 2003 by the Norwegian Parliament. The Board of the Fund annually awards the Holberg International Memorial Prize for outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanitites, social sciences, law and theology. The prize for 2007 is NOK 4.5 million (approx. € 555,000/$750,000).

Holberg International Memorial Prize 2007: Ronald Dworkin

Ronald Dworkin has developed an original and highly influential legal theory grounding law in morality, characterized by a unique ability to tie together abstract philosophical ideas and arguments with concrete everyday concerns in law, morals, and politics.

Dworkin provides a balanced solution to the intractable controversy between the two major legal schools of the 20th century: legal positivism and natural law. He understands the legal system as consisting of rules as well as principles, the latter being of moral nature (Taking Rights Seriously, 1977). Values and purposes become an inherent part of propositions of law through the activity of interpretation. A connected, important concept is the integrity of law, which requires judges to assume that the law must be structured by a coherent set of principles about justice, fairness and due process. In order to treat each individual equally, these principles must be enforced anew in each and every case (Law's Empire, 1986). Dworkin's most famous and contested thesis, namely the "one right answer" or "best possible interpretation" theory belongs in this context.

Dworkin has elaborated a liberal egalitarian theory emphasizing equality of dignity and respect and devoted to the conviction that at the heart of any decent conception of justified political action lies the idea of individual human worth (Life's Dominion, 1993; Freedom's Law, 1996; Sovereign Virtue, 2000). In recent years, Dworkin has worked on the conflict between majoritarianism and moral principles in a polarized society (Is Democracy Possible Here?, 2006).

Dworkin's pioneering scholarly work has had world wide impact. He has also participated extensively in public debate of contemporary political and legal issues.

A fuller tribute to Dworkin's career is provided here by Emilios Christodoulidis; it includes the following, which seems a little odd in a citation for a scholarly award.

It would be doing Dworkin an injustice, however, if one were not to conclude with what is most distinctive about his work: that is the way in which his theory informs his political interventions and his life as public intellectual. He is a passionate teacher, as generations of students in Oxford, New York and London will testify. But he is also an intellectual ‘engagé’: indicatively only, he is famous for his defence of affirmative action programmes; for his stance against apartheid; and for his frequent interventions to protect free speech.

It is the latter that is today perhaps the most poignant. It is to Dworkin’s great credit that he has raised his voice eloquently and clearly against the American Academy’s dubious complicity with its Administration’s harsh and illiberal anti-terrorist ‘Patriot Act’ and executive measures and practices.

Wake me up...

when September ends.

Mind the gaps

Good gap-closing.

Bad gap-closing.

With regard to the latter: I think that as an adopted Montrealer I'm not supposed to say unkind things about Eric Gagne. Fortunately for me, the LGM crowd is not so constrained.

Can you believe the Red Sox still have the best record in the majors?

Evolution and morality...

in today's NYT.

It just so happens that I counted the ballots today, and "Evolution and Morality" will be the topic for the ASPLP meeting in 2008, and the volume of Nomos that will follow.

RIP

Via Neil Gaiman, Robert Jordan has died. A family statement is here.

Revealing my ignorance

Could one of my Canadian and/or Quebecois friends or readers explain to me what this means?

As well, Quebec is negotiating free trade with Ontario and a Canada-wide manpower mobility agreement.

"I like the idea a lot, this vision of establishing a new space for the free circulation and mobility of persons," Charest said.

What is the sense in which Quebec doesn't already have free trade with Ontario? And what is the sense in which persons qua laborers aren't free to move around Canada? Is the latter just about licensed professionals? What's the former about at all? I was under the rather strong impression that Canada was an internal single market...

On accommodation

My remarks at the "Reasonable Accommodation" panel on Friday follow.

Five minutes is too short a time for an argument, and accordingly I won’t offer one. Instead I’ll offer some observations and draw some distinctions—recognizing that the relevance of the distinctions rests in part on arguments I won’t have time to offer.

First observation: the debate about reasonable accommodation is normal politics. It is not a crisis. It does not, as some Anglophone Canadians seem ready to suppose, demonstrate some distinctive, deep, dyed-in-the-pur-laine racism of Quebec society. It is one of the recurring facts about normal democratic politics that there is a cleavage between relatively urban, wealthy, cosmopolitan, liberal, and highly-educated groups and relatively rural, working-class, conservative, and less-educated groups, especially on questions of internationalism, free trade, immigration, and multiculturalism. One often sees an elite consensus across the major left-right parties on those issues; that often creates an opening for a more-populist party to apparently come out of nowhere and give voice to rural and working-class frustrations; and inevitably the urban cosmopolitan elites are shocked. Herouxville and the rise of the ADQ represent something routine in constitutional democracies; they’re part of the give-and-take of democratic politics.

First distinction: Reasonable accommodation is not immigration, and neither is bilingualism. There have been deliberate attempts to blur all of these boundaries. But issues of reasonable accommodation do not arise only in the context of recent immigrants to Quebec or to Canada, and most immigrants raise no questions of reasonable accommodation. Questions of reasonable accommodation typically arise about religious minorities, some of whom like Orthodox Jews have been in Montreal for generations. Conversely, most immigrants to Quebec come from secular or Catholic backgrounds and never request anything that could be classed as reasonable accommodation. It is especially important not to run together either reasonable accommodation or immigration with bilingualism, as has sometimes been done. Multiculturalism is not a mere stalking horse for Anglophone Canada in Quebec. And it is dangerous, potentially explosive, to encourage Francophone Quebecois to take out generations of complicated relationships to Anglophone Canada on either immigrants or religious minorities.

Second observation: “reasonable accommodation” as a phrase shows the limits of linguistic tricks and framing devices in politics. “Reasonable accommodation” should be impossible to resist or deny; it’s got “reasonable” built right into the name! But of course it’s not. The large part of the population that knows it’s skeptical about multiculturalism won’t be fooled into changing its mind by being told ex ante that the accommodations are reasonable ones.

Second distinction, which follows: Not all accommodation is reasonable. Some accommodations are less-than-reasonable; some are forbidden by basic justice or human rights, for example. And some accommodations are more-than-reasonable; they are actually demanded by basic justice, religious freedom, and human rights. In the middle are all the complicated cases involving something more like manners than like justice. This is what’s most important, and where there’s the most work to be done. In many cases, when religious believers have a religious duty that conflicts with a relatively weaker obligation to the state, they have a basic right to accommodation. When their religious duty would prevent them from taking part in the public sphere—from serving in the Mounties or the military, from voting, from attending public schools, from being able to go to court—then liberal democracies have a very powerful reason in justice to make accommodation, to bring the minorities into the public sphere rather than ghettoizing them. And when the religion commands violence, whether against group members or against outsiders, it’s morally prohibited to bend the criminal law to accommodate them—and indeed no one in Canada to the best of my knowledge has tried to request such accommodation, though there are cases in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Agreeing on the easy cases seems not to be so easy. The Herouxville norms mixed together easy right answers, like no stoning of women, with spectacularly wrong answers, like an insistence that real Quebecois eat any kind of meat butchered any old way and therefore Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and vegetarians need not apply. But even with the easy right answers in place, there would be plenty of hard questions about manners. Many of these involve questions of seeing and being seen, and many involve sex and gender. The obligation to wear a headscarf or a yarmulke, the obligation to eat kosher or halal food, are from the state’s perspective self-regarding. They’re private rights. But all of the conflicts involving religious men seeing scantily clad women, or religious women being scantily clad, or men not shaking women’s hands in the workplace, or women wishing not to be examined by male doctors—these aren’t self-regarding. They involve sometimes-onerous requests that non-believers or believers in other religious change their own behavior. At the same time it’s not prohibited by justice for compromises to sometimes be made—though the compromises may well be irksome to both sides for a while.

Come to Montreal

The International Political Science Association is meeting in Montreal April 30 – May 2, 2008. This isn't one of their big triennial World Congresses, but a smaller International Conference. The Congresses only come to North America once a decade or so, though.

Montreal's lovely by then-- the snow will have been gone for weeks by that time, and spring will be in session.

Dependence day

There's been a lot of blogospheric chatter about this graph:



Radley Balko asked:

Perhaps someone on the left (or for that matter, the right--since they've mostly been in charge of the government the last six years) can explain why having more than half the country's income dependent on the government (and rising) is in any way a healthy development.

and Matthew Yglesias replied

I see a population that's a lot healthier, longer-lived, and better educated than the one of 1950; a population where radically fewer people suffer from severe economic deprivation in absolute terms even as millions of impoverished people form around the world have moved to our shores.

I also see a population that, as a result of prosperity, is aging and it's a society that's prosperous enough for elderly people to generally not work and where retirees are given some public-sector guarantees of health care and economic security in their golden years. Most of all, I see a society that's shown that both Marx and Hayek were wrong -- that there's no need for capitalism to entail the immiseration of the vast majority of the population, and no need for efforts to use the public sector to better the condition of the majority to lead to tyranny and Communism; it's a society of democratic capitalism and social insurance and, despite its problems, it's one of the very best places to live throughout the entire history of the world.

See also: Daniel Larison, Reihan Salam, Andrew Sullivan.

I haven't yet seen anyone look at the chart and say: "BS."

I'm pretty sure the magazine Insight is being treated as an authoritative source here, which is our first clue that we're looking at something less than especially rigorous social science. Second clue: Two lines that mirror one another perfectly, which is to say two categories that are being defined as mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive (they always sum to 100%). "Private workers" and "government beneficiaries" total to 100%-- according to the legend, "of the U.S. population"? Really? What about children? Stay-at-home parents or spouses? Unemployed workers living on savings? Retirees living on private pensions? I'm pretty sure that these categories are being constructed in something other than the usual way. Just by itself, the idea that "private workers" as a percentage of the U.S. population has fallen by almost half over the decades that women have roughly doubled their labor force participation rates doesn't pass the laugh test.

My guess? What we're looking at has a categories of "government beneficiaries" that was cobbled together by counting all prisoners, all government employees including military personnel, and all persons receiving Social Security, Medicare, any farm subsidy, any welfare program, or unemployment insurance. The category "private workers" was defined as (100%- that quantity). As the population ages, the number of people getting some combination of Social Security, Medicare, and VA benefits or military pensions has risen dramatically-- which tells us nothing about what proportion of their income comes from those sources. The prison population has steadily risen; but so has the number of different federal programs that some people get some bit of their income from. One doesn't cease to be a "private worker" because one also got an SBA loan, or unemployment benefits for a few weeks, or an interest subsidy on the student loans being repaid from the college degree several years ago. One can argue against all those programs, but not like this.

This graph is almost certainly a net subtraction from the knowledge in the world, and an uninteresting foundation for discussion about the role of the state in the economy.