Are humans too bad to act justly?

Gornick has written a review, marked by genuine curiosity, of Sandel’s new book, Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? The book tours through the philosophical history of justice from the ancients to Rawls and beyond. Gornick, though, admits that she is a newcomer to the subject, and considers a general puzzle: how does all this theory square with the imperfection of the real world? More precisely, Gornick observes that for all the attempts that religious leaders and scholars have made to codify the norms of justice, real people tend to break the rules consistently.  She has her finger on an important problem in political philosophy and ethics, and one that often widens the gap between the theory of justice and practical matters like living a just life and creating a just community. The problem is moral psychology.

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Obligations in Afghanistan

In the current issue of the Boston Review, Nir Rosen argues that the counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy in Afghanistan is misguided and likely to fail.  Several respondents have varying analyses of Rosen’s piece: some agree with his conclusion but thinks he misses a few points; others claim that he is too pessimistic. Aziz Hakimi thinks Rosen is right to doubt the success of an American-lead COIN operation in Afghanistan, but claims that Rosen is wrong in marking Karzai’s government as illegitimate—there is hope for politics in Afghanistan, says Hakimi, as long as the central government devolves power to local officials. Hakimi, however, is not clear about what responsibilities the United States has in Afghanistan, if any. This omission clouds the discussion of what the United States should expect to accomplish in Afghanistan.

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Do soldiers believe in counterinsurgency tactics?

In the second of his two recent contributions to the Boston Review, Nir Rosen describes his experiences following a team of marines in Afghanistan who trained and fought alongside a force of Afghans. For most of the article, Rosen sticks to the facts and avoids drawing many explicit conclusions. However, it is reasonably clear that Rosen is skeptical of the ability of the US to succeed in Afghanistan, and he suggests several views in the article: first, it is misguided to optimistically compare the counterinsurgency (COIN) efforts in Afghanistan’s to those in Iraq, second, the state of Afghanistan’s police and armed forces is very poor, and third, the military does not fully support COIN. This last suggestion is unfair.

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The Charms and Troubles of Wikipeda

In Edit This Page, Evgeny Morozov recounts the history and evolution of Wikipedia as discussed by Andrew Lih in his book, “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia”. With compliments to Lih’s book, Morozov offers an insightful explanation of Wikipedia’s transition from the unfettered democracy of its early days to its current to a much more bureaucratic form, an inevitable transition, Morozov suggests, as the site grew and attracted a larger more diverse set of editors (not to mention many “vandals”). Yet he goes on to criticize Lih for failing to give a comprehensive philosophical explanation of why Wikipedia works. He then criticizes the site itself for an administrative structure that forces “subject experts . . . to engage in pointless intellectual debates with Wikipedia’s bureaucratic guardians, many of whom are persuaded only by hyperlinks, not cogent arguments.”

Morozov’s admonishment of Lih’s philosophical failings may be only a foil for his own failure to grasp the unique nature of Wikipedia. In his article The Charms of Wikipedia published in the New York Review of Books, Nicholson Baker captures the idiosyncrasies of Wikipedia and describes how it is precisely these idiosyncrasies that make the site such a dynamic and vital resource. Proving that one man’s flaws are another man’s charms, Baker explains that on Wikipedia “any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product.” This is not to say that Wikipedia’s founders did not aim to create an accurate source, they did. And while the information on Wikipedia is far from perfect, it is not so far from perfect to justify critics’ complaints (in her article on Wikipedia in the New Yorker, Stacy Schiff cites a Nature survey that found that Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Encyclopedia Britannica’s). Yet to focus too heavily on the question of Wikipedia’s accuracy distracts from the real beauty of Wikipedia, its cultural import. While Morozov may bemoan the insufficiency of the entry on nouvelle vague-director Claude Chabrol compared to that ofTransformers-director Michael Bay, he can’t deny the fact that most people in this country would probably rather watch a film starring Megan fox than Jean-Paul Belmondo. Yet with 13 million articles, Wikipedia is also a repository for people’s diverse and obscure interests. The cite could never be as extensive or as relevant as it is if it were bound to the same restrictive methodologies as more traditional encyclopedias. By preferencing online sources rather than library tomes, Wikipedia both reflects and perpetuates the fact the internet has spawned a generative, fundamentally populist form of knowledge-creation, one that is presently our greatest epistemological tool. To lament this fact as Morozov does is to be sorely out of touch with the contemporary society that Wikipedia reflects with both its methodology and its flaws.

Free Books and One Laptop Per Child

Brewster Kahle recently announced at the Boston Bookfair that his organization, the Internet Archive, was collaborating with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Foundation to provide the Internet Archive’s collection of 1.6 million e-books to users of the OLPC laptop at no cost. On May 15^th, 2008 the director of the OLPC announced that the organization would no longer only be using a distribution of the open-source operating system, Linux, but would instead be shipping some versions of the OLPC laptop with Windows as well. The decision prompted controversy within the organization, which had previously been committed to open-source software—that is, software whose code is available for public inspection, and which can be shared, altered, and re-distributed. Richard Stallman argued in the Boston Review’s 2008 Winter edition, that the inclusion of Windows constituted a violation of the organization’s commitment to open-source software. Read the rest of this entry »

Ezra Nawi Sentenced

As reported earlier, a judge found Ezra Nawi guilty of assaulting two members of the Israeli border police during the 2007 demolition of a Palestinian house. Nawi, a human rights activist, was finally sentenced on October 21. According to www.supportezra.net, Nawi will serve one month in prison and must pay a fine of 750 shekels, plus 500 shekels in compensation to each police officer involved. Additionally, Nawi will serve a six-month suspended sentence if arrested again within the next three years for  “unlawful assembly” or for “interfering with a policeman carrying out his duty.”

David Schulman notes in the aforementioned BR article, “[Nawi] will not be the first imprisoned for defending the defenseless.” Today we salute not only our veterans but peace activists who work to make suffering and war unnecessary. Read more about the current state of Israel’s peace movement in “Peace Out” by Helena Cobban, from the July/August 2009 issue of Boston Review.

Ezra Nawi’s Sentencing Postponed

In BR’s web-only feature, The Trial of Ezra Nawi, David Schulman reports that peace activist Ezra Nawi was scheduled for sentencing on September 21. According to Nawi’s support site, the sentencing has been postponed. Nawi faces incarceration for an act of civil disobedience in 2007: resisting Israeli border police who were bulldozing a Palestinian home in Um al-Kheir. BR will stay abreast of Nawi’s sentencing and notify readers once it is rescheduled.

Meanwhile, Obama’s meeting on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas reached no firm conclusion. Speaking to the UN, Obama insisted that peace negotiations should resume without preconditions–thereby sidestepping the Palestinian demand for a freeze on Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank. Obama impatiently pushes ahead, but might do well to consult another piece from the BR archive (one of my favorites): Joseph Levine’s History Matters, in which he dissects the historical claims and current status of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Contrary to the U.S.’s current easing up on Netanyahu, Levine asserts:

As the occupier and principal aggressor, Israel must demonstrate good faith by taking significant actions to meet Palestinian demands. If Israel does not enact such measures, then the world community, especially the United States and the United Nations—the external parties chiefly responsible for the terrible situation in the first place—must employ sanctions to ensure Israeli compliance.

Strong words, but I encourage you to read the rest of Levine’s argument and reflect as we wait for negotiations to commence.

Upstanding Citizens of United 93

Thinking back on eight years ago today, we invite you to delve into the BR archive and revisit Elaine Scarry’s “Citizenship in Emergency.” Scarry commemorates the superb citizenship demonstrated by passengers of United Flight 93, who rallied to our country’s defense in a way our leaders at the time proved incapable. In twenty-three minutes, United 93 passengers gathered information about events on the ground, deliberated a course of action, voted, and took action–all while communicating with loved ones and coming to terms with death.

While we reflect on the unprecedented tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, we are–all of us–responsible for our country’s defense, and for insuring that our systems of defense are enacted in the best way possible. With each anniversary, allow our remembrance to move us from mourning into action, strengthening our participatory democracy in honor of the egalitarian process utilized by the citizens of United 93.

For another in-depth look at defense and democracy, check out Elaine Scarry’s Who Defended the Country?, edited by our own Joshua Cohen and published by Beacon Press in 2003.

Boston Review: now worth 50 points!

BR recently got a shout-out from poet Steven D. Schroeder of St. Louis on his blog, Sturgeon’s Law.

Schroeder has decided that the best way to stay optimistic about the poetry business is

to regard it as a big game

and has set up a preliminary scoring system so that poets can keep track of “who’s winning.”

Apparently, winning the Discovery/Boston Review prize is worth 50 points!

That score puts us on par with The National Poetry Series, with getting a book published by a major university press or respected independent press, with inclusion in a Norton anthology or Best American Poetry, with having a poem published in The New Yorker, and with getting tenure as a professor in a top-tier program.

Thanks for the love, Steve. Good luck in the po-biz.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting those 50 points for yourself, make sure to late a look at the guidelines for the Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest – the deadline is January 15, 2010. Also, definitely check out last year’s winning poems:

• Briget Lowe’s “The Wild Boy of Aveyron Stands Up During a Dinner Arranged by the Doctor”
• Jynne Dilling Martin’s “Repercussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio”
• Jeffrey Schultz’s “J. Steals from the Rich and Uses the Money to Get Drunk Again”
• Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo’s “Bright Burial”

Minimum Wage Round-up

As an unsigned editorial in The New York Times pointed out today,

An estimated 2.8 million employees will get a raise on Friday, as the federal minimum wage rises from $6.55 an hour to $7.25. Another 1.6 million whose hourly pay hovers around $7.25 are also expected to get a boost as employers adjust their pay scales to the new minimum. The raise is badly needed. It is also wholly inadequate.

In honor of this much needed but totally insufficient increase in pay to much of low-wage America, here is a collection of past Boston Review articles that look at wages and inequality in the United States.

• Inequality Matters: Nancy Birdsall on globalization’s failure to “lift all boats.” (March/April 2007)




• American Sweatshops: Jennifer Freeman on organizing American workers in a global economy (Summer 2005)




• The American Jobs Machine: Erik Olin Wright and Rachel Dwyer take a close look at those left behind in the Clinton-era “jobs boom.” (December 2000/January 2001)




• For a Living Wage: Arnie Graf and Jonathan Lange examine the political reasons behind the decline in real wages (Summer 1997)




• Solving the New Inequality: Richard Freeman kicks off a New Democracy forum on economic disparities in the U.S., with responses by Frances Fox Piven, Heidi Hartmann, Paul Krugmann, Michael Piore, James Tobin, James Heckman, and Ernesto Cortes, and a reply to the responses from Freeman (December/January 1996-1997)