Philosophy — Child's Play*

September 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I think that in no country in the civilized world is
less attention paid to philosophy than in the United States.

So wrote deTocqueville 175 years ago. Perhaps the converse is also true – that in no country is more attention paid to philosophy than in France. (Or is that the obverse? the transverse? the freeverse? I’d know if I’d ever taken a course in philosophy or logic, which, like a good American, I haven’t.)

I cited this French penchant for philosophy in a post a couple of years ago, where I also quoted Adam Gopnik’s speculation that French magazines might have “theory checkers” – he might just as well have said “philosophy checkers” or “logic checkers” – the way American publications have fact-checkers. “Just someone to make sure that all your premises agreed with your conclusions, that there aren’t any obvious errors of logic in your argument, that all your allusions flow together in a coherent stream—that kind of thing.”

It seems that in France, kids are weaned on philosophy. It’s as though they go straight from breast milk to Descartes (and St. Emilion). Here’s a photo taken by the wonderful water colorist Carol Gillott and posted on her Paris Breakfasts blog.



It’s from a display at the Paris Salon de Livre. The books, by Oscar Brenifier, are philosophy for kids. Savoir, C’est Quoi? Le Beau et l’Art, C’est Quoi? Moi, C’est Quoi? And so on.

The cover of Savoir, C'est Quoi promises “Six questions for juggling with ideas and looking behind appearances.” Questions like, “How do you know the universe exists?” and “Is it important to think [réfléchir]?”

In France, it seems, it’s important for kids to be exposed to ways of thinking like a grown-up, thinking seriously. In the US, we remain suspicious of philosophy, the love of thinking for its own sake.**


* The title is a variant on a cookbook for kids by Michel Oliver, La cuisine est un jeu d'enfants. Translating it as Cooking is Child’s Play just leads to too many obvious puns, especially now with “Julia and Julie” in the theaters. Like philosophy, cooking is something the French take seriously, and they convey that attitude to their children.

** Not completely. I should add that Montclair State for many years has had the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

The Good Wife

September 23, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“The Good Wife,” says the New York Times’s TV critic, “may turn out to be the best new drama.” If so, it had better figure out what’s foreground and what’s background.

The opening episode for the most part was straight Perry Mason. The DA has a slam-dunk murder case. The defendant’s lawyer finds that the case is even more hopeless than it seemed, but then she goes to work. Embarrassed in the early part of the trial by DA and judge, she comes back not only to make a fool of the DA’s team, not only to establish enough reasonable doubt for acquittal, but during cross-examination to reveal who the real murderer was. Yep, the defense lawyer solved the crime while the Law and Order set were pursuing the wrong person.

My objection (and I hope it’s sustained) is that the interesting stuff, and what apparently got the show on the air, has nothing to do with crimes and trials. Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margolies) is, as the title says, the good wife, not the good lawyer (though of course she’s a good lawyer too). She’s the good wife (the title drips with conflict if not irony) because she remains married to her husband, even though he is in prison following a politically charged sex scandal. You watch the show to see how Alicia copes with her snappish boss, also a woman (Christine Baransky channeling Sigourney Weaver in “Working Girl”), with her husband, her kids, the nasties in the DA’s office, and the rest. You don’t watch it to find out who shot JR.

No doubt, all these people will present Alicia with a host of problems, problems that she’ll survive and surmount, all the while solving crimes, winning cases, and wearing really nice clothes.

Dixie Land Looks Away

September 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“What’s with Mississippi? Is that, like, some other country?” a student once asked. She had been looking at data on the 50 states and noticed that on several of the variables, Mississippi ranked at the extreme.

I suppresed my Nina Simone bit, saying merely something like, “Well it’s not too different from some of the other Southern states.

But is the South, like, some other country?

Research on the US often splits the Region variable into two categories – South and nonSouth, and with good reason. It works.

Here’s a graph by Stephen Benen at Washington Monthly The data are from a recent Daily Kos poll, so it’s possible that the numbers tilt toward the Democrats. But that would not affect the differences among regions.

Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage reprints the graph and adds, “if I saw this type of regional distribution of support for a political party in a country like Slovakia, I would assume the party represented an ethnic minority.”

Among the citizens, the GOP may be the functional equivalent of an ethnic minority party. But it’s minority party with national power far beyond its electoral appeal. For starters, it effectively has veto power over national legislation, it controls the Supreme Court, it represents powerful economic interests, and it runs an entire TV network.

David Brooks Gets It Right (Just a Little)

September 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

From David Brooks’s column this morning

Op-Ed Columnist - No, It’s Not About Race - NYTimes.com via kwout

Of course he didn’t stop. Writing, I mean. He should have. Instead, Brooks went on to argue that the anti-Obama protests have nothing to do with race. That’s no doubt true of some of the protesters, maybe a majority.

But what about the ones who march under the flag of a country that fought a war against the United States of America and on the side of racism? They are a minority perhaps, but certainly not the fringe. They are numerous enough to have elected a Congressman like Joe Wilson, who fought to keep that flag flying above the Statehouse.

The anti-Obama protests are not about race in the same way that Prohibition was not about immigration and ethnicity. It’s about “small-town virtues and limited government” in the same way that Prohibition was about sobriety.

As I argued earlier (here), health care, bailouts, and other policies are convenient policy matters that the protesters have seized upon. What’s really at issue is their anguish at no longer running the show and their anger that they and others who look and think the way they do have lost their position of dominance. They feel that it is their country and that people who are not like them have taken it away. They consider the Obama presidency illegitimate. Which is maybe why their signs are about money, taxes, Freedom, abortion, and socialism. They say nothing about democracy, that nasty process that allowed this usurper to seize power via the sneaky tactic of getting the most votes.