Vol. 4 No. 9 (January 2006)
Uncommon Denominator
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
"The
freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next."
-- Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible (1875)
CONTENTS
Talking
Points:
Wit and Wisdom: The President's resolutions
Eye on the Right: Accrediting the accreditors
Quoted! Ralph Reed to Jack Abramoff
Featured Article: Drifters on the Supreme Court
Happenings: Monthly round-up
Endorsements: Joan Blades
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a
contributor
TALKING POINTS
With every passing month, it gets harder to see the United States's refusal to address the problem of global
warming as anything other than craven prostitution to the fossil fuel
industry, a betrayal of future generations, and a suicidal commitment to the
status quo. The most recent affront came at last month's international talks on
climate change in
Adding insult to injury, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli
offered this defense of the American position, almost surreal in its
disingenuousness:
"If you want to talk about global consciousness, I'd say there's one
country that is focused on action, that is focused on dialogue, that is focused
on cooperation, and that is focused on helping the developing world, and that's
the United States."
Ereli's comments bring to mind Emerson's acid
criticism of Senator Daniel Webster, who compromised his principles by helping
to draft the grand 1850 compromise on slavery. "The word 'liberty' in the
mouth of Mr. Webster," Emerson said, "sounds like
the word 'love' in the mouth of a courtesan." Change "liberty"
to "global consciousness" and Webster to Ereli,
and the criticism holds.
For the distressing facts are as follows. In
the past five years, the United States has stymied every reasonable effort to
curb greenhouse gases; has shortchanged R&D in alternative energies and
green technologies; has loosened or refused to enforce regulations on the coal
and oil industries; has refused to cooperate with other advanced nations on
global warming or energy policy; has refused to put forward alternative ideas
to Kyoto as promised; has refused, in fact, to put forward any ideas at all;
has cancelled the Deep Space Climate Observatory, which would have provided
crucial information about planetary weather; has refused to call for even the
slightest increase in emissions standards; and has refused to encourage responsible
living but rather dismissed environmentalism as a mere "sign of personal
virtue."
The year 2001, when the forces of anti-environmentalism came to Washington,
may be remembered as a turning point in global history, a moment when a
window of opportunity began to close irrevocably. Despite all the political
dithering, the scientific consensus is increasingly clear and increasingly
disturbing: global warming is a real and growing threat, a "gathering
threat" as President Bush or Donald Rumsfeld
might say.
As the
Look around: record heat, record drought, more hurricanes, more intense
hurricanes, islands in the
Let's ask some of the hard questions. Let's really look it in the face. How far
can it go? How far ahead can we imagine the consequences of runaway global
warming? At what point will the system start to break down, and what will we do
then? The political and economic structures that we take for granted will find
it very hard to function in the face of massive meteorological disruption. By
how many hundreds of millions, or even billions, will the human population
contract? Whatever people may think, life makes no guarantees, human life
included. What kind of latter-day Dark Ages are we headed for? What scraps of
civilization will survive such an environmental apocalypse? One can imagine
scenarios that resemble the most extravagant science fiction, scenarios in
which the remnants of humanity retreat into vast underground complexes, as
extreme storms rage overhead, ecosystems fail across the globe, and the world
is given over to the few insect species that can survive the heat. What dark
depths of human nature will be revealed as the competition for resources grows
more intense, and as civic order begins to give way? We would do well to
contemplate what
At certain revolutions all
the damned
Are brought; and feel by turns the bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,
>From beds of raging fire to starve in ice
Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine
Immovable, infixed, and frozen round,
Periods of time; thence hurried back to fire….
A universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived….
It
is time to conceive that fear; the day grows late.
With every passing month, global warming becomes more of a moral and
spiritual issue in addition to a political one, more a test of humanity's
deepest consciousness and a call to our higher faculties. It needs
therefore to be addressed in the most expansive possible terms, not just as a
technical matter involving carbon-trading, arctic ice-packs, and so forth, but
as the profoundest question of our love of life itself. Will we succumb to
short-sighted materialism and our animal desires, or will we get our act
together and show that humanity truly deserves its pride in itself?
All of us bear some of the responsibility, but some, let it be said, bear more
than others. The much vaunted "wisdom of the American people" needs
to start showing itself much more than it has so far. With great privilege
comes great responsibility, and Americans - with all their education, their
wealth, and indeed their cultural experience with environmentalism - have
absolutely no excuse to avoid taking the lead on global warming. Who among us
would prefer to stick their head in the sand, complacent, uninformed, and
irresponsible, rather than look the truth in the face? Let them answer for
themselves. But above all, it is the political class, leaders from all
different countries who hold the levers of power, who bear the greatest
responsibility. In the
Religious conservatives might want to reread the first and last books of the
Bible, Genesis and Revelation, with all this in mind. Humanity has not just
sampled the fruit of the tree of knowledge, we are gobbling it down greedily,
juice running down our chins, despite mounting evidence and ample warning about
global warming, and whether out of complacency, greed or some other failing, it
could all amount to the same thing in the end: the loss of our happy green
Eden. And when we must all pay the piper, whom will future generations blame in
their grief and rage? Certainly not the environmentalists, but rather the greedheads, the powerful, the captains of industry, who
could have made a difference but refused, who chose to look the other way, who
"repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship
devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which
neither can see, nor hear, nor walk." The "Left Behind" crowd,
including some of our own political leaders, who would seem to welcome the
apocalypse, have no cause for such smug assurance in their righteousness. The
fires wait for them, too.
Perhaps that's too harsh. Maybe the bill won't come due as soon, or as
drastically, as we think. But fewer and fewer scientists express such a
sanguine attitude. Indeed, no less an authority on the issue than James
Lovelock, who in the 1960s formulated the Gaia hypothesis about earth's
self-regulating interconnectedness, is sounding the alarm as urgently as
possible. In his forthcoming book, The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock argues
that no longer should we simply try to stop global warming, but start preparing
for the worst case scenario: "We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of
change and realise how little time is left to act,
and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they
have to sustain civilisation for as long as they
can."
WIT AND WISDOM
Top Ten George W. Bush New Year's Resolutions
10. Fewer decisions based on
wild, drunken hunches
9. Have N.S.A. find out what really happened between Nick and Jessica
8. Stop using Situation Room monitors to play X-Box 360
7. More C-SPAN, less "Yes, Dear"
6. Team up with leading scientists to make Cheetos
even cheesier
5. Capture and bring to justice King Kong
4. Beat the twins at beer pong
3. Respond to reporters' questions with, "Bitch, don't go there"
2. Scale back on grueling 12-hour work week
1. "Who needs resolutons? Everythng
is fine."
-- The Late Show with David Letterman (Jan. 2,
2006)
EYE ON THE RIGHT
In an easily-overlooked, bureaucratic-sounding Jan. 6 article, the Chronicle
of Higher Education reported the following:
"A committee that advises the U.S. Department of Education on
accreditation has recommended that the government suspend recognition of the
American Academy for Liberal Education for accrediting any new institutions or
programs until it comes into compliance with federal requirements. . . . An
Education Department report accused the academy of a 'lackadaisical approach to
compliance' with the requirement, even after several requests by department
officials."
What matters about this seemingly minor contretemps is that the American
Academy for Liberal Education (AALE) is a conservative outfit, founded
about 12 years ago, that specializes in accrediting conservative and religious
colleges, such as Ave Maria College and Thomas Aquinas College, or university
programs at such institutions as Baylor University. Currently, there are six
major regional accrediting institutions, all of them secular and non-political,
that play a crucial role in American higher education by reviewing whether the
education that a college provides meets certain basic intellectual and
pedagogical standards. Accreditation is necessary not only for good education
and for the public reputation of a school, but in order for that school to
receive any money from the federal government.
What we would like to take for granted, of course, is that the accreditors themselves are responsible organizations whose
judgments are impartial, professional, and politically neutral. This,
unfortunately, does not characterize the AALE, whose ideological slant is given
away by the fact that it has received substantial funding from the
arch-conservative Olin Foundation, which has been a major contributor to
right-wing causes, scholars, and institutions ranging from Robert Bork and
Allan Bloom to the Heritage Foundation and Phyllis Schalfly's
Eagle Foundation.
The scrape over AALE, therefore, points toward the bigger picture regarding
the politics of education in the
The Right has been up in arms for decades over what they see as the domination
of American universities by what they see as the leftist intelligentsia. In
particular, conservatives oppose the two major trends in higher education of
the last 30 years: ethnic and curricular diversity, and (to a lesser extent)
scientific secularism. They tend to paint the relative liberalism of American
colleges and universities (most professors do not identify themselves as
conservatives) as some kind of political conspiracy, rather than as a
reflection of conservatives' own shortcomings. Conservative applicants to
faculty positions at serious universities often fail to find employment not
because of political bias against them, but because their work does not
sufficiently embody the values of free inquiry, tolerance, and objectivity that
we associate with higher learning in our post-medieval world. Just look at the
debate over intelligent design, a losing cause if ever there was one. The world
has changed, knowledge advances, intellectual paradigms have shifted, and
scholars who refuse to keep up will be sailing against a strong headwind.
Instead, the frustrated conservative movement has pursued an array of
strategies designed to regain some influence within the academy: organizing
speakers' events, offering scholarships to conservative students, providing
funding with strings attached, grooming conservative students for admission to
professional post-graduate programs, and so on. Pressure tactics have also made
an appearance. Just this month, a conservative-dominated committee of the
So the AALE kerfuffle suggests what the
accrediting tactic is really all about: giving the stamp of approval to schools
that teach conservative ideas, whether or not those schools would pass muster
otherwise. As with the rise of the home-school movement and Christian
academies as alternatives to public education, the conservative accrediting
strategy is a roundabout, even devious, way of opting out of the educational
mainstream. It is also analogous to conservative efforts to amend the
Constitution on such issues as flag-burning and gay marriage. Such amendments
would represent an end-run around both legislatures and courts, since they
would by definition establish the law of the land, virtually beyond retraction.
Similarly, if the movement can get conservative and religious schools
accredited, they'll not have to worry about whether the quality of research or
teaching meets nationally accepted standards.
There is a bitter irony here. The conservatives' attack on liberal education in
general, and the accrediting strategy in particular is
presented as a defense of standards against the encroachments of
multiculturalism and "political correctness," and against an erosion
of respect for the Western tradition. But it is really a devious way of
avoiding the standards that conservatives don't like, standards which
intelligent design, for example, does not even come close to meeting. Indeed,
that gets to exactly the reason why the Department of Education committee
recommended suspending recognition of AALE -- because it wasn't requiring
schools to demonstrate that they had sufficiently assessed what students had
learned.
This political approach to education is part of a broader social trend, and it
reflects an interesting split in how the two sides of the political spectrum
have spent their intellectual energy over recent decades. During the 1960s and
70s, liberals began moving into academia in larger numbers, while conservative
intellectualism found its primary home in think tanks such as the Heritage
Foundation and the Cato Institute. Ever since, we've had to listen to a lot of
celebrating on the right about conservatives winning "the war of
ideas." The problem with this view, however, is that while conservatives
have had much success promoting their ideas among politicians and "on the
street," so to speak, they have not won the war of ideas as it is
practiced at the highest levels. In large measure, that's because, while
the conservative think tanks are devoted primiarly to
ideological battles, the university is still committed to standards such as
peer review, testability, accountability, and the free exchange of ideas. Those
standards, and the values that lie behind them, do not thrive at places like
It's nice to know, therefore, that someone is accrediting the accreditors. Let's keep it that way.
QUOTED!
"I need to start humping in corporate accounts! . . . I'm counting on you
to help me with some contacts." -- Ralph Reed, former executive
director of the Christian Coalition and current candidate for lieutenant
governor of Georgia, in a 1998 email to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, as quoted in the Washington Post
FEATURED ARTICLE
The following is an excerpt from Jon D. Hanson and
Adam Benforado's "The Drifters: Why the
Supreme Court Makes Justices More Liberal," which appears in the
January/February 2006 issue of Boston Review. It falls into the
"please-please-please-be-true-when-it-comes-to-Alito"
category.
"When Justices
William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor left the bench last year,
conservatives were in an anxious mood: though pleased at the prospect of
shifting the Supreme Court to the right, they were worried by the record of
past Republican appointments. The refrain in conservative commentary, repeated
with special intensity during the Harriet Miers
affair, was: Not another Souter. Not another Kennedy. Not another O'Connor. And
they might have added: Not another Blackmun. Not another Stevens. Not another
"They were right to be concerned. While there have been a number of
relatively reliable conservative justices over the years-Antonin
Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Rehnquist being prime examples-and some important
right-shifting exceptions-notably Felix Frankfurter, appointed by Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and Byron White, appointed by John F. Kennedy-the tendency in recent
decades to drift leftward has been strong enough to gain both popular and
scholarly attention. Indeed, Larry J. Sabato, the
director of the University of Virginia Center for
Politics, has suggested that about one quarter of confirmed nominees over the
last half century have wound up 'evolving from conservative to moderate or
liberal.'"
Click here to read
the whole article.
HAPPENINGS
Radio interview -- On December 22, 2005, CI President Leonard Salle was
interviewed on air by Gardner Goldsmith of WNTK, New London, NH, (99.7 FM)
& WUVR (1490 AM) regarding current national issues, including taxation and
immigration.
Environmental leadership training -- On January 13, Katherine Forrest
was trainer at a workshop titled "Being Effective at Persuasive
Communication." This event was part of a day-long program on how to work
with government, in the Be the Change Environmental Leadership Program of
Acterra, a California-based environmental
organization. The workshop participants, all of whom had developed proposals
for new environmental programs, were preparing for the next steps in promoting
their ideas.
ENDORSEMENTS
"Quality information is the basis on which all good policy must be built.
Commonweal Institute's mission,
to research, educate and
communicate on issues of importance, is key for policymakers and activists
alike." -- Joan Blades, Co-Founder, Moveon.org
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