know of course that Mr. David Duke is persona non gratae on college campuses.  Still, I have a pretty good imagination; and I have always imagined a great debate between me and David Duke.  As is well known, Duke was at one point in time the personification of the idea that blacks and other minorities are intellectually inferior.  It is, obviously, a good thing that universities reject that view. 

The mistake, of course, is in supposing that the rejection of that view entails precluding all public forums at the university that might involve David Duke or, in general, a debate of that view.  Not so, however. 

I suggest that nothing would be more in keeping with the idea that all are equal than a masterful debate with David Duke or others of his persuasion.  Not because this would be tantamount to giving Duke a hearing.  But because it would give scholars the opportunity to show that David Duke’s views are utterly bankrupt.  And I maintained that seeing such a thing demonstrated through reasoned argument would be an absolutely wonderful and affirming experience for all. 

You see, I hold the very simple view that nothing beats experience.  To be sure, there is nothing to be said for experiencing some thing.  For instance, I have never had a bone in my body broken.  And, quite frankly, I am not going to do anything to help matters along in this regard.  I most certainly am not going to do so that I may understand more fully the suffering of those who have suffered a broken bone. 

Anyways, the point is not simply that nothing beats experience.  Rather, the point is that nothing beats the experience of excellence.  People can go around saying “I can do anything” or “I can be anything I want to be”.  This they can do until the cows come home, or whatever it is that cows do that makes the expression relevant here.  But such utterances are no substitute for actual instances of success.  Indeed, they become rather hallow in the absence of actual instances of success.  Nothing affirms one’s belief that one can perform an excellence like an unequivocal display of excellence on one’s part. 

This truth points to why we must be so judicious with praise.  For we deflate its value if we offer high praise for anything that a person might do.  There is, to be sure, the wrong of with holding praise where praise is due.  Alas, this wrong is not corrected by praising a person no matter what. 

Coming back to David Duke, I find that I am becoming increasingly cynical.  For instance, I am less persuaded than I used to be that people actually believe what they say.  David Duke is no dummy.  Hitler was no dummy.  Holding a morally reprehensible view does not suffice to make one intellectually bereft.

This is why I maintain that those who hold such views should be publicly debated.  That said, I want to acknowledge Mr. Brian Romm’s point. 

What I take to be appropriate is not a shouting match where, say, liberal college students drown out every word that Duke utters with their boos.  There would be nothing to be said for bringing Duke to a campus for that.  One could simply show a picture of him or a film of him speaking.  And in turn folks could boo his image to their hearts content. 

The truth, though, is that boos do not constitute an argument.  Accordingly, there really is a limit to how much satisfaction we should take in them.  Indeed, I worry when we take too much satisfaction in our booing another.  For I wonder whether our booing is masking a painfully reality, namely that we do not have in our intellectual arsenal the arguments that are necessary to show that the individual’s point of view—say, David Duke’s position—is intellectually bankrupt. 

The kernel of racism is the view that blacks are intellectually inferior.  Accordingly, what would be far more affirming of the intellectual equality of blacks than booing him is blacks marshalling or witnessing the marshalling of compelling arguments against his view. 

If this is right, then there is a most important respect in which contemporary liberalism is failing minorities.  Indeed, it may be more of the problem than not. 

We know that it is possible for parents to be over-protective.  This does not mean that the parents are not well-intentioned.  Rather, it points to the truth that their good intentions are not by themselves sufficient.  Good intentions are not sufficient in other aspects of life as well. 

I believe in equality.  And I believe that I can out argue David Duke any day of the week.  I believe that I can do so squarely and fairly.  Thus, I do not need boos from the audience as a crutch.  Not only that, I maintain that my belief in equality would be rather vapid if I were not willing to debate in a fair manner a person like David Duke. 

If I am even remotely right, then a most point truth is that college campuses have been more than a little over-protective of minorities.  Campuses have become an environment in which people pat themselves on the back for all having the same views and for vituperatively denouncing those do who do not embrace their views.  While this may feel good to others, this mindset has continuously left me feeling empty.  We all believe in equality.  And we spend next to no time earnestly presenting the other side so that its weaknesses can be revealed.

This is precisely why a debate with David Duke or someone like him is so very important in the struggle for equality.  And, of course, this applies with equal force to all aspects of that struggle: women versus men; Asians versus non-Jews.  And so on.  Mill’s point, quite simply, is that the best proof that the other side holds a mistaken view is that we can show that its best arguments are unsatisfactory.  And in order to do that precisely what we may need is our worse enemy rather than our best friend. 

The argument of this essay makes explicit a view that Mill presumably held, namely that in adequately arguing against the best views that the opposition can present we provide ourselves with a most profound measure of affirmation both morally and psychologically (or both).  This is because we are no longer merely telling ourselves that this or that view is intellectually bankrupt.  No, we have moved way beyond that; for we have then experienced the view as being intellectually bankrupt precisely because the arguments of the view’s most articulate have been shown to be inadequate right before our very eyes.  That would be a majestic moment that no amount of booing can produce, as I assume Brian Romm so nicely grasped. 

Thus, a most poignant question arises: Are we up to the task?  Once upon a time, I would have thought that the answer was obviously an affirmative one.  However, we have become a boo-based culture.  Accordingly, it is no longer clear to me that we are.

aving children is one thing; truly caring for them another.   If the novel, Sophie’s Choice, is any indication of real parental love, then a certain attitude prevalent in society is woefully misguided.  .  Perhaps it is just a fantasy.  But the idea is extraordinarily profound and moving, namely that a mother’s love is so great that she would rather die herself than see her children harmed.  In the Old Testament, there is the story of two female prostitutes claiming that a child is theirs (I King 3: 16-28).  King Solomon orders the child cut in half.  One woman continues clamoring for the child; the other is willing to give up the child so that he may live.  Solomon orders the child given to the latter woman. 

His reasoning was rather simple: A mother’s love is so altruistic that she would rather see her child alive and well than dead, even if seeing the child remain alive meant that he would be raised by another woman.  There is no gainsaying the power of Solomon’s point.  Surely no mother would rather see her child dead. 

The relevance of these introductory remarks is this: We live in a culture that has become a little too besotted with the idea that blood is thicker than water—so much so that parents themselves are prepared to harm their children. 

Every now and then, I am tempted to recant the central thesis of my recent book, The Family and the Political Self, which is that parents are fundamentally motivated by altruism.  I am tempted because so often nowadays parents seem more self-centered than altruistic.  What gets in the way of my giving in this temptation is that I can see that society has played a major role in cultivating rather indefensible and implausible attitudes. 

For instance, no one in her or his right mind believes that women are exactly alike except for differences with a few plumbing parts.  Thus, the idea of a wrestling team that includes both females and males is just repulsive.  Wrestlers sometimes grab one another’s crotch in order to execute a given maneuver.  There is no way for a man to grab a woman’s crotch or conversely without there being sexual overtones.  And this is to say nothing of the general differential between a woman and a man with respect to physical strength. 

An example of a different sort that is also mind-boggling is the phenomenon of parents forgetting their infant and leaving the child in the car—sometimes resulting in the very death of the child.  But there is a respect in which things gets worse; for many people sympathize with the parents.  By contrast, I have trouble distinguishing between leaving one’s child in a car and leaving one’s child at home alone, where the result is in each case the death of the child.  How is that we do not have equally despicable negligence in both case? 

As the title of this entry suggests, my concern is with adoption.  I am troubled by the case where courts order an adopted child return to a biological parent after a bond of attachment has been in place between the child and his or her adopted parents for a sustained period of time—say two or more years. 

The most notorious case happened relatively recently when Evan Scott was --ordered in December of 2004 -- returned to his biological mother.  He was being returned at the age of 4 years, after having lived with the Scott family his entire life.  What troubles me even more is that the biological parents should be willing to harm their child in this way. 

Every theory of psychology that we know of makes it abundantly clear that Evan Scott would be scarred by the transfer.  And what I am unable to fathom is how the biological parents could have insisted upon the transfer given the knowledge that doing so would significantly scar the child. 

As one might gather Evan Scott was the victim of a struggle between his two unmarried biological parents.  Each was more concerned with acting out of spite to hurt the other than doing what would be in Evan Scott’s best interest.  As is so often the case nowadays, children are but pawns in a battle that is not about them at all.  Why, often enough there is not even the pretense of doing what is in the best interest of the child.

Evan’s biological father was an abusive man who had recently served prison time, and who had batter the biological mother.  And the biological mother had no real interest in the child. 

In the end, the judge ordered the Scott family to give Evan Scott to his biological mother.  It is arguable that the judge had no choice.  But I am not so sure about this.  Why?  Because the judge had ruled against the biological father in favor of the biological mother.  Presumably, he thought the former was unfit.  He most certainly could have thought the same about the latter. 

Every time, I reflect upon this case I ask myself how exactly did the biological mother take Evan away from his parents when the pain that the “transfer” was causing was visibly evident upon his famous.  What does it take to be an unfit parent?  Significantly, the answer can be breathtakingly simple: It suffices that the individual is indifferent to the pain that one is knowingly causing one’s child to suffer.  This is the point of the story of King Solomon. 

To be sure, there is a difference between physical harm and psychological harm.  But we know that psychological harm is indeed real and completely devastating.  Taking a child from the only parents that he has known for the entire three years of his life is tantamount to inflicting sustained psychological cruelty upon the child.  Suppose that a child’s parents made him take all her meals alone in the basement.  This would be a form of cruelty—a case of subjecting a child to psychological trauma—that would justify removing the child from the home. 

The saying is that blood is thicker than water.  But this is just so much nonsense.  What turns out to be thicker than water are the bonds of attachment that are forged and sustained.  This had better be the case; for what is marriage but two unrelated people forging their lives together forever.  Two accept this truth regarding marriage, as indeed we do, while ignoring the reality of the extraordinary bond that had been forged between Evan Scott and the parents who adopted him is sheer hypocrisy.  For to accept the truth of the bond of marriage is already to concede that blood all by itself is not thicker than water.  And it is that truth that should have stayed the judge’s hand in the case of Evan Scott. 

Had Evan been a dog, no doubt the judge would have given more to thought to interest of the animal than to the concern of its original owners.  I would that this were obviously a very bad joke.  But I am afraid not.

s everyone knows, diversity is all the rage on college campuses.  Indeed, to hear some people tell it, diversity is more important than education itself.  Now, the most obvious question on the face of this earth is following: How did it come to pass that diversity became more important than education at, of all places, colleges and universities.  This ought to be an oxymoron: rather like saying that the point of going swimming is to stay dry or that one is fasting in order to feel full or that one is buying useless things in order to practice spending money.

As is so often the case in life, a good thing seems to have gone awry.  Diversity?  Fine.  But it should not be placed above education.  It has become to be this way owing to the rhetorical force of the charge of racism.  If you can call my mom a slut, I can perhaps do you one better.  I can’t.  But I am sure that someone can.  But if a minority, especially a black, calls a white person a racist: well, there is next to nothing that the white can do to diffuse the charge.  And therein lies the problem. 

f there was one lesson more than any other that we learn from Aldous Huxley masterful book, Brave New World, it is that happiness and human dignity are two fundamentally different goods; and, moreover, it turns out that happiness shorn of dignity is a most pitiful state of affairs.  Of course, precisely what made the novel such an extraordinary fantasy when it was written is the very fact that the very idea of severing happiness from human dignity seemed to be just that: a pure fantasy. 

To be sure, there were the isolated cases of someone on drugs who had those marvelous temporary highs.  But that took place against a seemingly immutable backdrop of two convictions.  One was that such a way of being was unacceptable.  The other was that only people who were in some way indecent or irresponsible did such a thing.  Induced happiness, if you will, was seen to be a sham precisely because it did not flow from the dignity of the person. 

John Stuart Mill thought it obvious that it was better to be an unhappy human being than a satisfied pig.  And while philosophers have come up with clever ways to challenge Mill’s statement, the truth of the matter is that it still strikes a most responsive chord with us.  Why, it is inconceivable that a sane human being would, via a gene transformation machine, choose to be a pig in order to have the pleasure of wallowing in mud all way, whilst giving no thought at all to tomorrow. 

We may want a carefree life, but we want it as a human being and not as a pig.  And that was Mill’s very simple and ever so immutable point. 

Now here is the problem: No one would choose give up dignity for happiness, where this is a matter of going directly, in say 24 hours, from a state of affairs with dignity to a state of affairs that offers happiness without dignity.  The same holds for getting old.  No sane person would choose today to be elderly tomorrow.  Yet, we do become older.  Not only that we prefer doing so to the alternative, namely dying.

Here is where Brave New World becomes haunting.  Granted that we would never choose an immediate exchange of dignity for happiness.  The question, though, is this: Might we increasingly make choices that in effect constitute an exchange of dignity for happiness?  That is, might we unwittingly exchange dignity for liberty?  Not all at once, but bit by bit by bit. 

The answer, I am afraid, is an affirmative one.

Consider this.  I find that I have come to accept the reality that when I make a phone call to a large business, I shall begin the matter by first listening to a machine and then either punching in numbers or giving verbal answers to the questions that the machine poses to me.  I have learnt that there often maneuvers that make it possible to bypass the machine.  Alas, I have also learnt that in some cases I cannot do so. 

So there I am having a “conversation” of sorts with a machine.  Today, this matter continues to rub me the wrong way.  But what particularly bothers me is my speculation regarding the future, namely that increasingly I shall be having “conversations” with a machine in order to get things that I want or need. 

Then I consider that the point shall come when I, too, am no longer bothered by the fact that I am having a “conversation” with a machine. 

But now add to the above scenarios robots that can provide basic customer service at the grocery story: say, grocery-robot can give me a fresh piece of chicken or a half-pound of the cheese that I want. 

My view of this is that the backdrop of human dignity, as I shall say, has been diminished.  In one respect, service without a human being is no less service, as one has gotten just what one wanted.  The advantage is that one avoids the downside of human contact: the short-temperedness or rudeness or whatever.  But the other side, however, is that such service is entirely shorn of any and all potential for human warmth.  There is not even the potential for a smile or a pleasant exchange.  There is no possibility for anything to happen that would make one’s day a better day. 

Person-to-person service can have many drawbacks.  After all, it is true enough that there are times when we don’t want to have conversation or to put on a “happy face”.  Just so, service that is provided entirely by machines leaves no possibility whatsoever for an unexpected moment of affirmation that lifts one’s very soul.  And human dignity is inextricably tied to those moments. 

And when we have become so habituated to service by machines, then will pills that give us the “mood” we need or want for the moment seem abhorrent?  I think not.  Quite the contrary, in a world where service is provided by machines, pills that give us the “mood” we need or want for the moment will very much strike as a very appropriate way of dealing with our reality. 

And there you have it.  I have without much effort at all described a world in which, bit by bit, dignity has been exchanged for happiness.  I maintain that I could not have done that were it not the case that a certain kind of trajectory is already in place.  We are already becoming use to efficiency replacing human contact; and mood-altering drugs are already a part of life, as the drugs of ritalin and prozac make so poignantly clear.  Where this will end is not clear to anyone. 

Increasingly, momentary happiness is easy enough to attain.  Yet, the happiness seems to have no meaning to it.  Not only that, the happiness seems not to come from within the individual but to be ineliminably tied to some external thing.  This, I suggest, is happiness shorn of dignity. 

The shadowy monster that made Brave New World so haunting has left the pages of this wonderful classic, and has taken up lodging among us. 

No doubt that there are many morals to be drawn from all of this, but one of them is surely the following: It is possible for so many of us to become what just about none of us want to, become because we pay so little attention to the details of the journey we are making called life. 

begin with a most controversial social claim: As equality between women and men has increased, the result has been an imbalance of power in the social realm that favors women.  I have already argued on a previous occasion that there is an asymmetry between women and men regarding the matter of sex in that consent does work for women that it does not do for men.  In a just world, this is how it should be.  But, as I shall try to illustrate in what follows, this reality has some rather fascinating implications in terms of male attitudes.  A caveat is in order, namely that the remarks that follow do not pertain to the issue of same sex couples.

As everyone knows, there are women take it upon themselves to have a child and to raise that child on their own.  Nowadays, this is easy enough for women to do without even having sex.  They need only to avail themselves of a sperm bank and the method of in vitro fertilization.  What intrigues me is how silent many men are about this.  Let me explain.

Can a woman raise a child without a man?  Absolutely.  Can a man raise a child without a woman?  Absolutely.  But these truths notwithstanding, I have yet to met a child who did not want a mother or a father.  Of course, a parent can die.  However, I think it is one thing to say to one’s child that the other parent died; whereas it is quite another to say to the child that one did not think that another parent was necessary in the first place.  Hence, it was planned from the outset that the child would not have a father. 

As I have said, I have yet to meet a child who did not want to have a father.  So it intrigues me that so many men are silent about women choosing to have a child with the very idea that there would not be a father around. 

Here is another matter about which the silence on the part of men greatly intrigues me.  Many of the men I know have opinions about all sorts of things, including things about which they know very little.  Male bravado has supplied many a premise to an argument.  Yet, regarding the matter of abortion, many of these very same men sheepishly defer to women, contending that it is entirely a woman’s choice.  It is too obvious for words that this line of thought works only if from the outset one holds that the fetus is not a person.  The argument most certainly cannot be that whether the fetus is a person or not (or has any moral standing at all) is simply a matter of what the woman wants it to have. 

I could easily accepts this silence—this sheepish deference, if you will—from the reticent male who does not have an opinion about much of anything save the manifestly obvious—say, he maintains that one is likely to get wet if one walks in the rain without any form of protection.  But as I have said, I have seen this deference on the part of males who have no shortage of opinions about all sorts of things, including things about which they know next to nothing.

Needless to say, when sheepish deference is out of character, it requires an explanation. 

Most of us want social acceptance or, in any case, we wish to avoid being socially ostracized.  Accordingly, most of us play to our social environment.  So for instance a great many whites these days use the term “African-American” rather than “black” because they perceive that doing so makes it less likely that they will be the object of opprobrium on the part of blacks.  This is especially so on most college campuses, where whites understand that they can be deemed racist without doing anything all that could be properly characterized as racist.  Indeed, they can be racist even if they give the shirt off their back to help a black.  For that gesture could just be some form of racist paternalism!

Well, sex is very, very, very important to men.  And in this regard, most men want to be on the good side of women.  This alone suffices to give many men a reason to espouse views that women regard as utterly essential to taking women seriously as women.

One can see where I am going with this.  And I can hear the excoriating criticisms now.  But remember the point about blacks and whites that I made just two paragraphs earlier.  To allow the truth of that point is already to concede that people adjust their behavior to fit the social expectations of their environment. 

Needless to say, it would be utterly stunning if only whites did this.  There is nothing at all about the nature of men that precludes such behavior on the part of men.  And I have offered a very good reason for men to adjust their views in order to placate women. 

Nowadays, abortion is seen by many women as a fundamental right.  And respect for that right is held by such women as a sine qua non to regarding them as self-respecting human beings who are capable of determining their own destiny. 

The right to abortion is seen as a corollary of the more general view that women have a right to do with their body as they please.  From this right, both the right to have children with the intention of their not being a father in the picture and right to have an abortion are thought to flow. 

There is, in fact, a disanalogy between women and men, on the one hand, and blacks and whites, on the other.  A white may choose not to associate with blacks on the grounds that the “price of admission” is too high.  Socially both groups can get along pretty well without one another. 

Not so with women and men.  Or so it is given the assumption of heterosexuality.  Incontestably, the following hold: (1) With regard to sex, the unvarnished truth is that women have the power.  (2) The desire for sexual pleasure is pretty much without parallel.  (3) Therefore, men are in a subordinate position with regard to the possibility of getting consensual sex from women.  (4) It is no surprise, then, that men sheepishly defer to women regarding matters of reproduction.  After all, what reason is there on the face of this earth for a man to think that he is entitled to an opinion regarding the moral status of a fetus?  Ask the typical college male (who wants to get laid during the weekend); and he will resoundingly answer: None. 

I would that this answer were a short-hand way of saying that as he considers the biological facts, these facts support the view that the fetus has no moral standing at all.  Alas, I have yet to hear this.