Uncommon Denominator
The Newsletter of the Commonweal Institute
www.commonwealinstitute.org
-- Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible (1875)
CONTENTS
Talking Points: Paradise warmingWit 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 Montreal. Shortly after midnight on December 9, as delegates were hashing out ideas on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. -- joined by China, the world's other largest polluter -- threatened to pick up its toys and go home. A few changes in wording kept the American delegates on site, but the damage was done, and nothing came of the conference.
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 London Independent reported on Jan. 15: "Global warming is set to accelerate alarmingly because of a sharp jump in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. . . . Preliminary figures [from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] show that levels of the gas -- the main cause of climate change -- have risen abruptly in the past four years. Scientists fear that warming is entering a new phase, and may accelerate further."
Look around: record heat, record drought, more hurricanes, more intense hurricanes, islands in the Maldives evacuated, disappearing amphibious species, strange weather everywhere. Not the earth itself, but the earth's biosphere, which sustains all life, is hurtling toward potential catastrophe. Endless debate? No thank you. Action is the imperative, and preparation for a future that looks increasingly grim. What lies ahead could make the "war on terror" seem like a tragic diversion.
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 Milton's Satan beholds of the lost souls in hell, which "[l]ies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms / Of whirlwind and dire hail":
At certain revolutions all the damnedIt is time to conceive that fear; the day grows late.
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….
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 United States, it is our sad fate to find the conservative movement with its hands on just about every lever, and from the vantage point over here it looks like they're content to drive the car straight over the cliff. And meanwhile, too few people who really care about the issue seem willing to tell it like it is, afraid of being called "Chicken Littles." More accurate to call them Cassandras, unheeded prophets, and their detractors children of Nero, fiddling while Rome burns.
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
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."
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 United States, and it suggests that the conservative movement is seeking a new avenue of influence.
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 Pennsylvania state legislature, in a kind of fishing expedition, interrogated Temple University president David Adamany about alleged liberal bias at the school, despite the fact that no students have filed a complaint. Meanwhile, David Horowitz, a conservative activist based in California, has authored something called the "academic bill of rights," a measure he believes will make higher education more tolerant of conservatives, which is currently pending in several state legislatures.
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 Bob Jones University or Patrick Henry College.
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 Warren.Click here to read the whole article.
"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.'"
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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