You read it here first.  Well, you might have read it here first.

So, Alan Wolfe reviews a book on the importance of Rauschenbusch.  He quotes Rorty:

The late Richard Rorty, a grandson of Rauschenbusch, is also heard from in this book; he points out, quite correctly, that until roughly the 1970s, his grandfather helped inspire whatever minimal welfare state the United States developed. Today, he writes, sounding a note little heard in the rest of the commentaries, “the likelihood that religion will play a significant role in the struggle for social justice seems smaller now than at any time since ‘Christianity and the Social Crisis’ was published.” Indeed, Rorty himself, a thoroughly secular philosopher and public intellectual, had more in common with Niebuhr than with Rauschenbusch. Both he and Niebuhr made the concept of irony central to their work. For the theologian, an ironic temperament should sensitize us to the fact that even if we long for the good, we may still commit the sin of pride, whereas for the philosopher, irony helps us understand that even if we want to be liberals, we cannot ground our liberal commitments on any firm foundations.

First Things has got some smart junior fellows.

The answer has to do with the significance of language itself. Language is the matrix in which the human mind creates and passes down its work. Knowledge, culture, human interaction—humanness itself—are possible only because of language. Each individual language, in turn, is a product of the particular minds that have learned, used, and changed it over centuries, and each language is unique in its ability to capture human expression.

In many instances, languages can be translated, but every speaker of more than one language knows that no such thing as a perfect translation exists. So, if languages are not interchangeable, and if they are crucial to understanding humanity, then Harrison is right—and we really should have people like him out in the field recording dying tongues, especially the smallest and most eccentric. We need to know about things like popungkoontam and duck creation stories, because without them we lack the information bound up in those languages.

To which the answer, of course, might be: So what? Who needs a term for a male domesticated reindeer, during the first mating season, which may be castrated, but even if not, will probably not be allowed to mate? (Döngür, as the Todzhu say.)

And yet endangered languages have often developed in small regions, with a small group of speakers. They contain intricate systems of classification specific to the life and surroundings of those speakers. Their folk taxonomies are built on observations accumulated over generations, and they can describe and classify, say, the eating habits of Amazonian birds or Hawaiian schools of fish in ways unknown and helpful to modern science. They can also be useful for pharmaceuticals: In 1990, drug companies made $85 billion in profits on medicines derived from plants first known to indigenous peoples for their healing properties.

More to the point, the taxonomic information in indigenous languages cannot easily be translated. As Harrison writes, “You cannot merely substitute labels or names from another language and hold on to all of the implicit, hidden knowledge that resides in a taxonomy or naming system.” The Danish naturalist Johan Christian Fabricius was more blunt: Nomina si pereunt, perit et cognitio rerum—If the names are lost, their understandings are lost as well.

For that matter, languages also contain counting systems, calendars, cartography, and duck creation stories—together with epic tales, songs, and poetry: an abundance of human culture. Take the epic tales of the Tuvans, from a part of Russia near Mongolia. My favorite begins with man out grazing his flock by a river. Standing on the bank, he sees a lung floating down the stream. He reaches for it with a stick, but the moment he touches the lung—poof!—it turns into a black monster, who ravages the man’s family and herds. In the end, though, the herder’s infant son kills the black monster with a toy axe, “and they live prosperously on the high grassy plains with their sheep and camel herds.”

It would be better, of course, to keep a language spoken, but at least people like Harrison are there to record as much as they can before a language dies. For beyond the local knowledge and epic stories they communicate, languages provide us with important linguistic data. Linguistics is not just about the study of syntactic structures and semantic meanings. It also serves as a means of looking into what makes us human.

If linguists are going to study languages, they need many samples, from the fullest possible spectrum. Indeed, endangered languages show the mind at work in unexpected and impressive ways.

In Sora, for instance—a language with 288,000 speakers in eastern India—many words can combine into a single word. At first the process might seem like compounding, the process that allows German to call Batman fledermausmann (flying mouse man). Speakers of Sora, however, do not compound their words. Instead, as Harrison puts it, “in Sora, verbs literally swallow other words like pythons, sucking them in by a process linguists call incorporation.”

Take popungkoontam, the word Harrison used on The Colbert Report. It’s not just a combination of words but one large verb based on the root verb poo-t. Thus poo–pung–koon –t–am, Stab + belly + knife + will + you. Even though Sora has no written form, we know that compounding takes place, not only because two nouns appear inside a verb, but also because poo, koon, and am are all shortened from their original forms.

Onomatopoeia provides another example. In Tuvan, speakers can make up their own onomatopoeia—and be understood. Pairs of consonants in Tuvan represent different kinds of sounds. So, for example, k and ng represent metallic ringing or impact sounds. High vowels, like the vowels in he and hay, represent rapid or high-pitched sounds, while low vowels, like the vowels in hah or hawk, represent slow or low-pitched sounds. So, Harrison writes, “Kongur is the sound of a big bell ringing or a large metal pipe striking an object. Kingir or küngür would be jangling stirrups or clanging keys, while kangyr might be a giant empty metal barrel rolling along. With eight vowels, Tuvan provides many possible combinations, and speakers can use and understand most of these combinations, even if they have never heard them used before.”

Each of these languages tells us something we didn’t know from English, Italian, Czech, or any other common language. Part of it is the local knowledge and the stories they contain. But the larger part is this: They reveal the different ways people can perceive and organize their world. Surely such insights into the human mind are worth some field time with a tape recorder.

Fight the power.

To that end, Bush’s chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has initiated a scheme to radically rewrite media ownership rules so that one corporation can own the daily newspapers, the weekly “alternative” newspaper, the city magazine, suburban publications, the eight largest radio stations, the dominant broadcast and cable television stations, popular internet news and calendar sites, billboards and concert halls in even the largest American city.

This “company-town” scheme, which would be achieved by lifting current limits on media cross-ownership, is the long-held dream of media moguls such as NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch and Tribune Company-buyer Sam Zell. With one FCC vote, media billionaires will be able to become media multi-billionaires by controlling the entire communications landscapes of major metropolitan areas — and by extension whole regions and states.

The mogul’s dream is the citizen’s nightmare. With this rewrite of the rules, local, state and national democratic processes would be run through the wringer of media monopolies designed to reap massive profits - while comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted in a manner that maintains the political and economic status quo. Basic liberties — freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom to petition for the redress of grievances — would exist largely within boundaries established and policied by local media managers.

What’s wrong with the very wealthy?

Nothin in itself.  The trick is creating laws that encourage good behaviour.  I’m not enough of an anarchist to believe that will actually happen on its own.  It’s a great idea, though.

Robert Frank reviews a book by Robert Reich called Supercapitalism.  It discusses something I talk about all the time: market limitations.

Reich, a public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and formerly President Clinton’s secretary of labor, is quick to concede that rising inequality, environmental degradation and a dysfunctional health care system are problems worth worrying about. But he argues that social critics are wrong to attribute them to increased greed and corruption. Today’s corporate and political leaders are no different, he says, from their earlier counterparts. What has changed is that new technology has made the economic environment dramatically more competitive.

As Adam Smith first described clearly, individuals who pursue only their own narrow interests in a competitive system often inadvertently create widespread social gains. But not always. Unlike many of his modern disciples, Smith was keenly aware of the invisible hand’s limitations. Individual and social interests often diverge, he realized, and in such cases, greater competition makes matters worse. If a firm can cut costs by removing the filter from its smokestack, for example, it will feel greater pressure to do so when competition intensifies.

If our social ills are indeed rooted in increased competition, our only recourse, Reich argues, is to change the rules. Denouncing greed is simply wasted energy. If we want less inequality, we must make taxes more progressive. If we want cleaner air and water, we must adopt more stringent environmental laws.

 So the trick is just changing laws and allows government to be at least somewhat independent from corporations?  How?  Campaign Finance Reform. 

Indeed, the main thrust of Reich’s argument is right on target. Those who seize their opportunities in highly competitive environments tend to survive and prosper. “To confuse greed with opportunity,” he writes, “is to confound desire with availability.”

It’s often useful to get angry when things aren’t going well. But moral outrage is counterproductive unless directed at the right targets. By focusing our attention on those who continue to block effective campaign finance reform, Reich shows that he can spot a worthy target when he sees one.

Amazing.

What is this crazytalk?

White House has to keep its e-mail.  Right.

Facciola’s report to the judge stems from a controversy dating back nearly two years over missing White House e-mails. An ethics advocacy group says the White House has deleted millions of e-mails and the private organization is suing the Executive Office of the President in an attempt to force the government to reconstruct any lost messages from backup tapes.

The group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, says it has been unable to get assurances from the White House that all backup tapes will be preserved. Nor is it clear whether some backup tapes have already been destroyed, or recycled, resulting in taping over messages that were already there.

The Federal Records Act and the President Records Act require that all e-mails be saved.

In a hearing before Facciola on Wednesday, the Justice Department argued strenuously against the course of action the magistrate ended up taking.

In an examination of why men and women age differently, Evolution is given way too much power.  It’s the problem with any totalizing theory: EVERYTHING can be explained.  Well, not really.   How is this falsifiable?  Is this the case in every society?  Might it be cultural that men act a certain way and then, in societies where men don’t act that way, they live the same length?  Aaargh.

But a more subtle effect may also be at work. Most students of ageing agree that an animal’s maximum lifespan is set by how long it can reasonably expect to escape predation, disease, accident and damaging aggression by others of its kind. If it will be killed quickly anyway, there is not much reason for evolution to divert scarce resources into keeping the machine in tip-top condition. Those resources should, instead, be devoted to reproduction. And the more threatening the outside world is, the shorter the maximum lifespan should be.

There is no reason why that logic should not work between the sexes as well as between species. And this is what Dr Clutton-Brock and Dr Isvaran seem to have found. The test is to identify a species that has made its environment so safe that most of its members die of old age, and see if the difference continues to exist. Fortunately, there is such a species: man.

Dr Clutton-Brock reckons that the sex difference in both human rates of ageing and in the usual age of death is an indicator that polygyny was the rule in humanity’s evolutionary past—as it still is, in some places. That may not please some feminists, but it could be the price women have paid for outliving their menfolk.

Well, okay.

Or maybe it is bedtime reading, for insomniacs. Unless one is an insomniac who reads for meaning, in which case one will be up all night. Clive James, the British cultural critic, is less than sympathetic to Benjamin and his influence: “Part of his sad fate has been to have his name bandied about the intellectual world without very many of its inhabitants being quite sure why, apart from the vague idea that he was a literary critic who somehow got beyond literary criticism: he got up into the realm of theory, where critics rank as philosophers if they are hard enough to read. Clever always, he was clear seldom: a handy combination of talents for attaining oracular status. More often mentioned than quoted, he has become a byword for multiplex cultural scope. But the unearned omniscience of postmodernism depends on its facility for connecting things without examining them, and the routine invocation of Benjamin as a precursor is symptomatic.” Perhaps so, but just think what “critical theory” would be if its practitioners did read him.