David Brooks has a column today about the problem of American decline and the need both for government and private intervention to improve the situation. It's a generally unremarkable column but this paragraph toward the end caught my eye:
Finally, there is the problem of the social fabric. Segmented societies do not thrive, nor do ones, like ours, with diminishing social trust. Nanny-state government may have helped undermine personal responsibility and the social fabric, but that doesn’t mean the older habits and arrangements will magically regrow simply by reducing government’s role. For example, there has been a tragic rise in single parenthood, across all ethnic groups, but family structures won’t spontaneously regenerate without some serious activism, from both religious and community groups and government agencies.
The call for government and religious/community groups to engage in "serious activism" to regenerate the "social fabric" of the family left me with this question. If we are interested in this kind of re-generation in order to solve what Brooks sees as the problem of "segmented societies," don't we also have to have a fairly firm idea of what we mean by the family? If there is disagreement -- perhaps even deep and irreconcilable conflict -- among government agencies, religious, community, and other groups about what a socially healthful family structure looks like, why should Brooks predict that activism from all of these quarters to re-generate the family as a social structure would serve to alleviate the problem of the "segmentation," and possible fragmentation, of America? Wouldn't exactly the opposite be true -- that as groups with increasingly different ideas about the healthy family become more active in expounding their respective views, social and cultural segmentation would increase?
[Please restrict comments to the specific point of the post, and not to the underlying merits of the competing visions.] X-posted, CLR Forum
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
This controversy hit extremely close to my home. A fight broke out yesterday at Rye Playland Park when a number of Muslim women were told by park staff members that they would not be permitted to wear their head scarves on certain rides. The park had received a number of Muslim visitors who were celebrating the end of Ramadan. A scuffle broke out after the refusal to allow some of the women to ride without removing their hijabs, and there was also some kind of report that a park employee touched one of the women.
The park has a safety policy against the wearing of any "headgear." I've been to Playland a number of times with my own family, and I've been required to take off my hat when I went on some of the faster rides.
What makes this a possible constitutional question is that Playland Park is government owned and operated. It is, in fact, the only such amusement park in the United States! But I cannot see any way in which, should a law suit be brought against Westchester County, the plaintiffs would win. This policy is clearly a law of general application, it is not targeted at any group, and it is overwhelmingly justified by serious safety concerns. The rides to which the policy applies (and those that the Muslim customers report being barred from riding) are extremely fast moving and jerky (I hate "Crazy Mouse" for this reason). Any First Amendment claim would almost surely fail. A sad episode nonetheless.
(Picture of the wonderful 1929 "Dragon Coaster" at Rye Playland Park) (x-posted CLR Forum)
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Jacques Lacan's famous discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis as a form of talking cure, in which the analyst is able to shape the meanings of the subject's hangups and mental infirmities, came to my mind during the recent exchange between Rick, Paul, Rob, and others (see below) on the issue of quizzing political candidates about how their religious beliefs will affect their decisions. Yesterday, as my colleague Mark Movsesian notes, Ross Douthat had a column on the issue, with a number of interesting recommendations for journalists.
But I had a thought that may strike some here as perhaps a little heterodox. I want to make a point in (partial, limited) defense of the Rortian "religion as conversation-stopper" view (which Rorty only really very partially revised after an elegant intervention by Jeffrey Stout a few years ago).
Continue reading
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Mood music by Matthew Arnold for this soppingly bleak day.
Hayeswater
A region desolate and wild.
Black, chafing water: and afloat,
And lonely as a truant child
In a waste wood, a single boat:
No mast, no sails are set thereon;
It moves, but never moveth on:
And welters like a human thing
Amid the wild waves weltering.
Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,
Far down the torrent cleaves its way:
In front the dumb rock rises steep,
A fretted wall of blue and grey;
Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone
With many a wild weed overgrown:
All else, black water: and afloat,
One rood from shore, that single boat.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Catholic readers who are interested in issues of criminal responsibility should be paying attention to the work of Stephen Morse. One kind of currently fashionable criticism of the idea of criminal responsibility comes from those who are interested in applying the insights of neuroscience and genetics to criminal law, in some cases ostensibly to make the larger claim that we ought no longer to rely on ideas of moral blame in criminal law; human behavior is sufficiently biologically determined that the law ought to move beyond primitive ideas of mens rea.
In this little article, Professor Morse briefly states the case against this position. These debates are obviously not new; in fact, it's interesting to me that they tend to recur in different forms across time. Indeed, it was Morse who first brought to my attention that Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (I know, I know...one-track mind) convincingly took the view that Morse now champions (with appropriate changes for contemporary circumstances, of course), in this excellent short piece.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Readers at MOJ who are interested in constitutional theory will find Lee Strang's new article, Originalism and the Aristotelian Tradition: Virtue's Home in Originalism, well worth reading and thinking about. As Prof. Strang says in the introduction, current influential originalist approaches tend to favor deontological (e.g., Randy Barnett) or consequentialist (e.g., John McGinnis & Michael Rappaport) underlying moral justifications. Strang's is the first direct effort (so far as I know) to connect virtue ethics and originalism (Larry Solum has been ploughing both of these fields independently but not, I don't believe, together).
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
I am pleased to announce the launch of CLR Forum, the new on-line resource of the Center for Law and Religion (CLR) at St. John’s University School of Law. CLR Forum is a source of information and commentary for scholars and others who are interested in law and religion. It offers the following features:
- Scholarship Roundup -- a comprehensive compilation of new law and religion scholarship, including:
Articles – recently published U.S., foreign, and comparative articles;
Books – the newest books in law and religion; and
Conferences – a list of upcoming conferences.
- Links – a helpful list of links to law and religion research centers, blogs, and religion news sites.
To find out more about CLR Forum, click here for a message from the CLR’s director, Mark Movsesian. You can also follow CLR Forum on Facebook and Twitter.
Mark and I hope this will be a useful resource for folks interested in these issues, and we are eager to know what you think. Please contact us to share your thoughts.
