Monthly Archive for June, 2011

From Kelly Amis, 3 Quarks Daily

Michelle Alexander’s New York Times op-ed “In Prison Reform, Money Trumps Civil Rights” is a powerful and depressing assessment of why more Americans are suddenly waking up to our nation’s status as the world’s most prolific jailor (while the U.S. represents just 5% of the world’s population, we account for 25% of the incarcerated).

Alexander explains that while decades of social justice advocacy made scant progress towards eliminating the policies that land inordinate numbers of especially black and Hispanic U.S. citizens behind bars, today’s economic crisis is rousing unprecedented calls for prison reform. In other words, suddenly the price tag for maintaining a prison system bursting-at-the-seams with minority inmates is not worth the price tag.

The resulting interest convergence (in which formerly “tough on crime” policymakers are joining forces with social rights activists) may result in positive policy change, but I can’t help wondering if change will last if it’s not grounded in enlightened agreement about what is fair and just…and even “American”?

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A Conversation With Timothy D. Wilson from Edge…

One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it’s not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people’s heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they’re doing what they’re doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.

Introduction by Daniel Gilbert

Psychology has always had a love-hate relationship with the unconscious, but mainly hate. The unconscious was the cornerstone of Freud’s theories about the mind, but William James expressed the views of many early 20^th century scientists when he referred to it as “the sovereign means for believing what one likes in psychology, and for turning what might become a science into a tumbling-ground for whimsies.” James’s antipathy was contagious and his arguments won the day. The unconscious was banished to psychology’s basement for more than half a century.

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From the art of theory…

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, and is one of the most influential political theorists of our time. Jonathan Bruno and Jason Swadley sat down with him recently in Cambridge with 12 questions on the craft of political philosophy.

Art of Theory: What brought you to study political theory?

Michael Sandel: I began with an interest in politics. I was a political junkie as a kid, and still am. But it wasn’t until graduate school that I became interested in political philosophy as such. That’s where I first read Kant, and Kant I found terribly challenging and intriguing. I began graduate school in 1975. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice had come out four years earlier, so I read that for the first time in graduate school.

In fact, the first winter vacation in graduate school at Oxford—they had these six-week breaks between terms—I went with some friends to the south of Spain and took along a bunch of books and sat and read them: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, and Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Somehow Spain, which was a little less cold and damp than Oxford, was more conducive to reading.

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