… at the BBC, titled A New Citizenship, allow UD to pause in her daily irrepressible point-making and remind you why she does what she does on University Diaries. (“I do what I do, I think what I think, and to hell with the rest of it,” wrote Harold Brodkey in the last days of his life, in This Wild Darkness; “you don’t actually exist for me anyway — you’re all myths in my head.”) The lectures allow her to shut up for a moment about university coaches and university medical faculties and PowerPoint professors and laptop students so as to refresh your memory as to what ma blogue is all about.

Like Sandel — like Christopher Lasch, like John Kenneth Galbraith, like Mickey Kaus, like a lot of people — UD‘s distressed by what Sandel calls the drift “from having a market economy to being a market society.” Sandel argues that the post-communist triumphalism of American culture has meant a complacency about morality, about civic values that transcend materialism.

The public life of democratic societies is not going all that well… [T]he momentum and the appeal of markets [has made us forget that] norms matter. [The problem is that] markets leave their mark on social norms…

Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities…. How [do we] value [non-market] goods[?] [I have in mind things like] education…

These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. We have to debate the moral meaning of these goods, and the proper way of valuing them…. [We must] argue about the right way of valuing goods.

Sandel provides straightforward examples of public activities degraded by commodification — one of his examples, close to UD‘s heart, since she’s a longtime donor, is that of blood donation — but he also mentions education, a far more complex instance of civic decline.

Complex enough, in fact, to keep a blog devoted to the commercialization of universities — the transformation of endowments into hedge funds, complete with managers who, although they work at a non-profit institution, take home thirty million dollars a year; the transformation of campus athletics into a money-driven, money-losing corruption machine; the transformation of medical research into farcically compromised corporate hucksterism — very busy indeed.

I think it’s crucial, when talking and writing about the degradation of civic life into cynical materialism, to avoid platitudes. Not everything in America has declined in this way, and the problem with some writers on the subject (Lasch in particular) is that they exaggerate things. But if we confine ourselves to universities, if we irrepressibly focus on what they’re turning into, I think we make Sandel’s point for him. In abundance.

… is already notorious for his … unsavory legal and writing career… and, most recently, for his full-throated defense of female genital mutilation. He spends much of his distinguished-retirement time denying having taken part in an underage sex slave ring — indeed denying having had sex with one or more of said underage sex slaves. And here’s an updated snapshot from a life well-lived:

In 2015, the ABC News team of Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with [alleged sex slave Virginia] Giuffre. In a sequence of events confirmed by the network, producers paid for Giuffre and her family to fly from Colorado, where they lived, to New York City and put them up at the Ritz-Carlton hotel on Central Park South. Robach and her news crew interviewed Giuffre on tape for more than an hour about Epstein and his entourage.

“At the time, in 2015, Epstein was walking around a free man, comparing his criminal behavior to stealing a bagel,” Giuffre writes in an email to NPR. “I really wanted a spotlight shone on him and the others who acted with him and enabled his vile and shameless conduct against young girls and young women.”

“I viewed the ABC interview as a potential game-changer,” she writes. “Appearing on ABC with its wide viewership would have been the first time for me to speak out against the government for basically looking the other way and to describe the anger and betrayal victims felt.“

The story never aired. And Giuffre has said she was never directly told why.

ABC News would not detail its editorial choices.

One ABC News staffer with knowledge of events says the network received a call from one of Epstein’s top lawyers: Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz. And Giuffre and her lawyers placed great significance on that call.

Dershowitz had been part of the powerhouse legal team that earlier kept Epstein from facing serious federal charges in Florida, which also included former Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr and renowned Miami defense attorney Roy Black.

Dershowitz tells NPR he intervened after learning ABC was on the brink of broadcasting its interview with Giuffre. He says he believes he spoke with two producers and a lawyer within the same 24-hour period.

“I did not want to see [Giuffre’s] credibility enhanced by ABC,” Dershowitz says.

In a December 2014 court filing in another accuser’s lawsuit, Giuffre had alleged Dershowitz was among the prominent men Epstein had instructed her to have sex with when she was a teenager. In early 2015, Dershowitz had rejected her account out of hand in his own court filings. (The nature of his denials were such that Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation earlier this year. Dershowitz has asked the court to dismiss that lawsuit.)

I think we can all understand Dershowitz’s frantic desire to shut Giuffre up. He continues to try intimidation and lawsuits and all and he’s obviously had some success. Wonder for how much longer.

*****************

UPDATE: Mulling over Alan Dershowitz’s life, UD thinks he can continue to make a contribution to Harvard University by appearing… not as a guest lecturer, but as … a kind of exemplar… in Michael Sandel’s famous discussion of Kantian ethics. Students may gaze upon and ask questions of a human being who has, apparently all his life and quite consistently, used people as means rather than ends. If reports are to be believed, he has done this in a myriad of ways for sixty years to achieve the classic payoffs: money, sex, power.

Could Sandel coax him to speak honestly? I think yes. After all, he will die pretty soon (he’s eighty) and he’s basically gotten away with it, so you have to figure he’s proud. It can be done – a life of cruel self-seeking – and this is the moment, if there’s going to be a moment, when he takes a public victory lap.

… on it.

More broadly and less literally, Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales, describes her own currency:

If money were water, the contents of my wallet might have flowed through pure streams and filthy gutters, might be guilty, bloodstained, diseased. The pesos passed through the fingers of drug dealers and gunmen, maybe. The cheque could be traced from its innocent signatory back through bank, investor, to hedge funds, futures, skulduggery, I am sure. They are just paper promises, earned for writing, for reading, for teaching poetry. The coins we throw into the charity box have passed through the hands of saints and thieves, without a doubt.

Clarke’s capsule history of filthy lucre is part of an argument she’s making against some of the finalists in a poetry contest dropping out of consideration when they discovered the prize money came from a hedge fund.

Broadening out yet more the problem some people have with money, Philip Larkin writes that money is filthy because it “sings” the long human history of twisted compulsion, acquisitiveness, and grubbiness… Money is about our sad, grandiose, never fulfillable, and often intensely destructive dreams…

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

Spartan, dour Larkin would perhaps have agreed with spartan, dour Christopher Lasch that “Luxury is morally repugnant,” that in democracies there should be “a moral condemnation of great wealth.”

******************

So okay. But universities – like everyone and everything else – still need money, and most people believe that educating people and making research possible are good uses of it. That’s why universities get amazing tax breaks; but, again, the discomfort about immense accumulation and/or inappropriate use of university money is also why many people think continued tax breaks for multi-billionaire schools like Harvard and Princeton are wrong. It’s why some people are unhappy when billionaire alumni choose to direct hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to these same multi-billionaire schools. As Lasch suggests (other political theorists, like Michael Sandel, seem to agree), there’s something icky – something positively undemocratic – about grotesque huge personal fortunes and – in the case of universities – about grotesquely huge endowments.

And then there’s the problem of where university dollars come from. Apartheid South Africa was an overwhelmingly uncontroversial sort of divestment target, involving too many traces of cocaine, if you will, for many people to accept.

More subtle is the provenance of dollars from individuals like the Koch brothers, who hold libertarian, Tea Party-esque social and political views many people find repellent.

Catholic University has just accepted a million dollars from the Kochs to study that elusive and evanescent thing, “principled entrepreneurship.” A vocal group of Catholics has protested the gift, citing “the Kochs’s opposition to the expansion of Medicaid, hostility to public unions, and support for global warming denialists,” and pointing to the current Pope’s excoriation of “unfettered capitalism.”

Virtually all popes, far as I know, rail against unfettered capitalism, so that one (I’m sure Catholic U. has in the past taken lots of money from unfettered capitalists) doesn’t really fly; and libertarianism is certainly a respectable political position… Hell, all of the Koch’s positions, while maybe not smelling like a rose, are within the bounds of civil discourse.

You’re on safer ground when, as with apartheid, you look at what people and institutions actually do. So, for instance, when a Koch-funded group offered, a few years ago, to fund two economics professorships at Florida State University on the condition that people from the Koch-funded group get veto power over the appointments (the professors had to be sufficiently free-market and anti-regulatory in their orientation), a clear line was crossed. Similarly, also at FSU, “BB&T, the bank holding company, funds an ethics course on the condition that Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ be required reading.”

These two seem pretty obvious examples of outside groups using their money to influence what goes on in the classroom.

My July Fourth post on the burqa prompted thoughtful responses, one of which, from Anthony, I reproduce in full here, in order to try to respond to it in full.

As always, my comments are bracketed, and in blue.

Agreed on the duty of the state.  [UD wrote, in answer to Dance, another commenter, that “The state is under no compulsion to uncover the true feelings of every covered woman in its borders. It has a duty, rather, to understand its own founding principles, and to recognize and protect itself from gross insults to them.”]   France’s action, however, does nothing to accomplish that goal.  [Au contraire:  If the goal is for a state, and for citizens of a state, to understand more fully that state’s founding principles, then the French action so far — which involves strong statements against the burqa by the leader of the country, NOT its outlawing.  Yet. — has, it seems to me, done wonders to energize and clarify the state’s efforts, and its citizens’ efforts, to recognize what it means to live in a secular democratic republic.  If the burqa lies, as I believe it does, on the cutting edge of civic life; if it represents a line you do not cross if you are a democracy, then it’s very much to the good, very much accomplishing a great deal, that many people in France are talking about and taking negative positions on the burqa.] I’m not particularly persuaded by dueling NY Times op-ed pieces on the subject. Rather, I’d look to France’s own statements on what it stands for, and the effects of this policy on it, to determine how the current government is doing living up to the duty you correctly identify.  [The commenter will now analyze various founding statements having to do with French political identity.  This is an important feature of arguments about the burqa, but I would caution that much in global responses, not merely French, to the burqa, has to do with unwritten customs.  Allow me to quote from an opinion piece in Forbes:

“What if we were confronted, in our cities, by a neo-pagan cult with passionately held views that required all their votaries to walk around naked in our streets? No doubt after a hubbub of debate, largely stoked by loony freedom-of-speechers, we would soon arrest the cultists, wrap them in blankets and throw them in jail for indecent exposure.

But the questions will remain: Where do we get these notions of decency? With what right do we impose them on others? Why should our standards of dress trump those of the cultists? We may not resolve the matter intellectually, but this much, we will conclude, is clear: We do espouse a coherent set of rules about such things–at least we consider them coherent–and we are prepared to support them with legal sanctions. They may not be written into the Constitution, being largely a matter of self-evident cultural or civic or even moral norms, but we do stand by them.

… Yes our political traditions allow all manner of variegated freedoms of speech and action, but we do differentiate between the barbaric and the civilized. We are not only political animals. Our values do not end with those laid out in constitutions and bills of rights. In fact, one can argue that the U.S. Constitution does not comprise a morality in itself but rather lays down a framework that allows our actual code of values to operate, whether it’s one based on the Bible or Cartesian empiricism or a host of inherited cultural traditions.”]

[Back to the commenter now, and to my responses.]

For starters, France’s motto is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. This policy would seem in conflict with Liberty (as you’re removing the choice from the woman) and Equality (who else will be subject to similar attire-based restrictions?).  [On liberty:  I, and many people, believe that it is intellectually impossible to accept, outside of assuming a person is perverted, that the burqa is something a rational person, a citizen rather than a slave, freely chooses.   So I believe that there is no choice, outside of a preference for perverting oneself, in the wearing of a burqa.]   Fraternity (as long as we forgive the implicitly gendered language) is trickier. It will probably be a net win (greater sense of inclusion in the surrounding society), but don’t discount the effects of isolating the woman in question from her existing local/familial/religious community.  [One of strongest arguments against the burqa points to the fact that all democracies are open societies, in which freedom of assembly, and freedom to speak and act in conditions of human equality, are profoundly engrained, the very substance of our daily lives.  Total anonymity makes engagement in the civic realm largely impossible.  Not entirely, of course.  But largely.  And if a woman (recall that only women wear burqas) lives in a community that shuns her because she will not wear a burqa (by the way, the burqa has no religious grounding, so we cannot describe her shunning community as shunning her on the basis of religious grounds that the state must respect),  then she is in the unfortunate situation of living in a cult.  Plenty of people in democracies live in cults of various sorts, and we respect all sorts of anti-democratic behaviors from them within their cults.  We have, however, a lot to say about how they behave when they leave the compound gates.]

Okay, let’s set the catchy motto aside and look for something a bit more substantial. The relevant sections from Article 1 of France’s current constitution, as revised, read:

“[France] shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.”

This seems a pretty clear violation of respecting all beliefs, unless you’re going to assert that *no* woman wears the burqa by choice, which seems pretty bold. [I’ve always been bold.  Note that the language says we must respect all beliefs.  Not that we must respect all actions.]  I think we’re also looking at a pretty pronounced violation of the equality of religion; are we going to look at Christian nun’s habits? Is it just the veil that matters? It’s noteworthy that culture is not explicitly protected; I’m not sure if the authors made the common mistake of equating race with culture (hey, it was 1958) or made a more conscious decision; either way, trying to squeeze this into a cultural determinant with no religious component seems pretty sleazy.  [Once again, the full burqa has no religious component except perhaps in the minds of the people trying to enforce it.  Here we must make a distinction, as all states must, between moral relativism and tolerance.]

We can find similar problems in Article 5.

In the United States, when evaluating laws that potentially run afoul of things like First Amendment protections, the courts use the Least Restrictive Means test: assuming the desired goal is valid (in this case, presumably, “liberating” women forced to wear the burqa, which I’d certainly agree is a valid goal), is the proposed law the least restrictive means of arriving at that goal? Yes, that’s US not French law, and I’m [not] fluent enough with French constitutional law to know if they have anything equivalent, but the idea holds up well: faced with conflicting principles, are we doing the least damage to them possible?

I think it’s clear that in this case the answer is a resounding “no”. The problem here is not the garment, it’s the culture of forced anonymity that frequently accompanies it. No woman should be forced to wear a burqa, but it’s the forcing, not the burqa, that’s the problem. A solution which targeted the correct half of the situation – the verb, not the noun – would be both less restrictive and more effective.   [This would be very difficult to do, if I understand what the writer’s suggesting, since virtually all women in burqas will, when asked, assure an interviewer that they couldn’t be happier.]

I have absolutely no objection to the idea that many women are forced into clothing and lifestyle choices against their will. But where are the restrictions on stilettos and minis? I’ve heard more men tell their partners something akin to “wear something tight” than “wear this bed sheet”. Whereas the burqa can be (mis)used to anonymize, generalize, and neutralize a woman’s appearance and thus (arguably) a portion of her identity, the over-simplifying and hyper-sexualizing of her image caused by all manner of other fashion choices is no less damaging (arguably to herself and her peers).  [Here we really part ways.  Laws exist against nudity and offense to community values, etc.  The idea that there could be any equivalence in terms of self-degradation between tight clothes that reveal a good deal and the burqa, explicitly designed to annihilate a person, is unpersuasive.]

Do you really want the state getting into those decisions?  [Not necessarily.  I agree that laws banning the burqa are not such a great idea.  I do see  them in play, however, in countries like Turkey, and they seem to work just fine.  Yes, I’m aware Turkey has its traditions that make this law more easily assimilated into the population, perhaps.  Yet as with many laws that people have argued against on the basis of the horrid things they’ll bring about — Plenty of people anticipated fatal mayhem on airplanes when frantic smokers went mad after three hours without nicotine. — it’s usually the case that the laws settle in pretty smoothly.]

So. I’ve done anonymity and perversion. Why death? Because I’ve noticed, reading through scads of opinion pieces and comments about the burqa, that people keep referring to it as a death shroud.

I think there are many reasons why people like me respond very strongly to the burqa — why the leader of France, when he announces it’s not welcome on French soil, gets almost total and enthusiastic approbation from the French people. The burqa disturbs us very, very deeply, and we shouldn’t shrink away from the fact of that deep disturbance to some bogus neutral statecrafty attitude. We should, as Michael Sandel urges, feel that emotion, experience that moral outrage, take it seriously, consider it from all sides. The burqa is appalling because it is a pall. Because it carries among us the animated corpses of women who deserved a life. That is extremely demoralizing to have around, especially to have around young women just beginning to get a sense of their own power and possibilities in a democratic society.

So no. I’m not at all sure about the idea of outlawing the burqa. But I am sure that we should, when confronted with it, understand that it is an obscenity.

… to conclude my comments on Michael Sandel’s Reith Lectures. The final lecture took place on UD‘s campus, the immensely well-located George Washington University.

I found the lectures disappointing, pitched at too high a level of generality — almost at the level, at times, of platitudes. Sandel comes across as a careful, well-meaning, bland person; there’s no passion in his delivery, and no real effort to engage his audience polemically by saying things sharply, or in a way that deepens their controversial nature.

And in fact Sandel’s content is controversial, having at its core an attack on the still-dominant public policy regime in American and other governments, a regime in which the moral and spiritual questions inherent in complex and contested public issues (health care, the environment) are put aside in favor of bloodless technocratic solutions.

“The attempt to empty politics of moral controversy may seem to be a way of respecting our differences, but it is actually corrosive of democratic life.” The attempt to come up with morally neutral, cost/benefit responses to civic problems, Sandel insists, fails to solve them, because these are issues that transcend consumer preferences. Governments that treat us all simply like consumers with preferences fail to appeal to our civic instincts; yet without awakening those instincts, governments will never draw from us the sense of solidarity and urgency which alone can resolve these problems.

“Monetizing moves decisions from democratic politics to technicians… [The] spurious science of cost/benefit analysis … elevates technocratic decision making at the expense of democratic deliberation.”

[D]emocracy is about more than tweaking incentives in order to make markets work better… or maximizing GDP, or satisfying consumer preferences … [It’s] also about distributive justice; [and other values at the heart of democracy] … Why then have we drifted… away from older traditions of solidarity and civic virtue? …

Sandel concludes:

Think of the self not as a consumer but as a citizen…

[D]eliberation is about changing our ways of thinking, [not merely satisfying static desires.]… To get important things like health care for all, you need solidarity — a sense of the mutual responsibilities of citizenship… [To get environmental change, you] need to change people’s attitudes toward nature… [This is a] moral and spiritual project, not only an economic one…

On the question of distributive justice, Sandel notes the extreme income and wealth inequalities in the United States at the moment, and the attendant deterioration of public services (the very wealthy withdraw from these services socially and ultimately economically), as well as the disappearance of public places where Americans of very different backgrounds can mix as equals.

(On a parochial note, allow UD to say that the university fulfills two of Sandel’s requirements in a very important way: It provides a public space for the civic and civil deliberation that can change the way people think, or that can allow people to understand why they continue to think in the way they do; it also creates one of those public places Sandel has in mind, where economically and socially diverse people can come together and deliberate in a setting not about money, but, in this case, about quality of thought. It goes without saying that the online university can in no way be this public place.)

Sandel’s is an important argument that needs to be made as strongly as possible; yet his lectures, as I say, don’t seem adequate to the urgency of the matter.

***********************

A final thought:

Why not talk about Michael Jackson, or Bernard Madoff, or any of the money-grotesques that the very rich, hyper-privatized, morally neutral culture Sandel evokes has spawned? Jackson in particular embodies with chilling exactitude the withdrawn, opulent, heavily drugged life which might be seen as one endpoint of the civic regression Sandel’s worried about.

Jackson had in his house an anesthetic, propofol, so powerful and dangerous it’s only used in operating rooms. It doesn’t calm you and relieve pain; it puts you into a coma. It probably killed him. How did he get it?

Well, with enough money, you can get anything. And for whatever reason, in many cases, the more money people have, the more their desire is to withdraw. From civic and social life. From life itself, I guess. At five million dollars or so of wealth you’re comfortably numb; in the Jackson stratosphere, you’re – day after day – comfortably dead.

Sandel needs to grapple with the fact that Michael Jackson is an American hero.