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By Geoffrey Hosking

In many countries, including Britain, the Euro-elections in May showed that a substantial minority of voters are disillusioned with mainstream parties of both government and opposition. This result was widely anticipated, and all over Europe media commentators have been proclaiming that the public is losing trust in established politicians. Opinion polls certainly support this view, but what are they measuring when they ask questions about trust? It is a slippery concept which suggests very different things to different people. Social scientists cannot reach any kind of consensus on what it means, let alone on what might be undermining it. Yet most people would agree that some kind of trust in the political process is essential to a stable and prosperous society.

Social scientists have had trouble with the concept of trust because most of them attempt to reach an unambiguous definition of it, distinguishing it from all other concepts, and then apply it to all societies at different times and in different parts of the world. The results are unsatisfactory, and some are tempted to ditch the term altogether. Yet there self-evidently is such a thing as trust, and it plays a major role in our everyday life. Even if the word is often misused, we should not abandon it. My approach is different: I use the word as the focus of a semantic milieu which includes related concepts such as confidence, reliance, faith and belief, and then see how they work in practice in different historical settings.

The original impulse for Trust came from a specific historical setting: Russia during the 1990s. There I observed, at first hand, the impact on ordinary Russians of economic and political reforms inspired by Western example and in some cases directly imposed by the West. Those reforms rested on economic and political precepts derived from Western institutions and practices which dated back decades or even centuries – generating habits of mutual trust which had become so ingrained that we did not notice them anymore. In Russia those institutions and practices instead aroused wariness at first, then distrust, then resentment and even hatred of the West and its policies.

I learnt from that experience that much social solidarity derives from forms of mutual trust which are so unreflective that we are no longer aware of them. Trust does not always spring from conscious choice, as some social scientists affirm. On the contrary, some of its most important manifestations are unconscious. They are nevertheless definitely learned, not an instinctive part of human nature. It follows that forms of trust which we take for granted are not appropriate for all societies.

Despite these differences, human beings are by nature predisposed towards trust. Our ability to participate in society depends on trusting those around us unless there is strong evidence that we should not do so. We all seek to trust someone, even – perhaps especially – in what seem desperate situations. To live without trusting anyone or anything is intolerable; those who seek to mobilise trust are therefore working with the grain of human nature.

We also all need trust as a cognitive tool, to learn about the world around us. In childhood we take what our parents tell us on trust, whereas during adolescence we may well learn that some of it is untrue or inadequate. Learning to discriminate and to moderate both trust and distrust is extraordinarily difficult. The same applies in the natural sciences: we cannot replicate all experiments carried out in the past in order to check whether they are valid. We have trust most of what scientists tell us and integrate it into our world picture.

Because we all need trust so much, it tends to create a kind of herd instinct. We have a strong tendency to place our trust where those around us do so. As a senior figure in the Royal Bank of Scotland commented on the widespread profligacy which generated the 2008 financial crisis: “The problem is that in banks you have this kind of mentality, this kind of group-think, and people just keep going with what they know, and they don’t want to listen to bad news.”

Trust, then, is necessary both to avoid despair and to navigate our way through life, and it cannot always be based on what we know for certain. When we encounter unfamiliar people – and in the modern world this is a frequent experience – we usually begin by exercising an ‘advance’ of trust. If it is reciprocated, we can go on to form a fruitful relationship. But a lot depends on the nature and context of this first encounter. Does the other person speak in a familiar language, look reassuring and make gestures we can easily ‘read’? Trust is closely linked to identity – our sense of our own identity and of that of those around us.

On the whole the reason we tend to trust persons around us is because they are using symbolic systems similar to our own. To trust those whose systems are very different we have to make a conscious effort, and probably to make a tentative ‘advance’ of trust. This is the familiar problem of the ‘other’. Overcoming that initial distrust requires something close to a leap in the dark.

Whether we know it or not, we spend much of our social life as part of a trust network. Such networks can be very strong and supportive, but they also tend to erect around themselves rigid boundaries, across which distrust is projected. When two or more trust networks are in enmity with one another, an ‘advance’ of trust can only work satisfactorily if it proves possible to transform negative-sum games into positive-sum games. However, an outside threat helps two mutually distrusting networks to find common ground, settle at least some of their differences and work together to ward off the threat. When the threat is withdrawn, they may well resume their mutual enmity.

During the twentieth century the social sciences – and following them history – were mostly dominated by theories derived from the study of power and/or rational choice. We still talk glibly of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, without considering the kinds of social solidarity which underlie both forms of government. I believe we need to supplement political science with a kind of ‘trust science’, which studies people’s mutual sympathy, their lively and apparently ineradicable tendency to seek reciprocal relationships with one another, and also what happens when that tendency breaks down. It is supremely important to analyse forms of social solidarity which do not derive directly from power structures and/or rational choice. Among other things, such an analysis might help us to understand why certain forms of trust have become generally accepted in Western society, and why they are in crisis right now.

Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at University College London. A Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Doctor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was BBC Reith Lecturer in 1988. He has written numerous books on Russian history and culture, including Russian History: A Very Short Introduction and Trust: A History.

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Kent Jones is Professor of Economics at Babson College and the author of The Doha Blues: Institutional Crisis and Reform in the WTO.  The book highlights the real stumbling blocks to trade liberalization and highlights the way around them, in light of the collapse of the Doha Round.  Jones outlines the practical steps that must be taken before the World Trade Organization can achieve accord.  In the excerpt below, Jones begins to outline the problems the Doha negotiations have faced.

Why have the Doha negotiations been so painfully slow and unsuccessful so far?  A review of recent commentary and analysis seems to indicate that the difficulty has many roots, as shown by the following list of contributing factors:

1. -Multilateral trade negotiations have become too unwieldy to manage effectively. Membership in the GATT grew dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the WTO as of 2009 had 153 members, a large number to manage in a consensus-based decision process. In addition, the number of issues has grown with the expanded scope of the WTo coverage into agriculture, services, and “behind-the-border” trade issues.
2. -The single undertaking was a good idea in principle, but it doesn’t work in practice.  In order to provide the widest possible scope of trade-offs that would provide each member with a stake in the negotiating outcome, and to avoid the fragmentation of the GATT system of codes, the WTO was founded on the principle that “there is no agreement until everything is agreed.”  In conjunction with the unwieldy scope of membership and agenda issues indicated in the first item above, some argue that forcing the negotiating outcome into a single, balanced package for all members is virtually unachievable.
3. -The balance of power in trade negotiations has shifted in favor of large developing countries.  The United States and the European Union had dominated trade negotiations for many years, and while they remain the world’s leading traders (both in imports and exports), their relative importance in trade has diminished, and many faster-growing developing countries, such as India, Brazil, and China, are now asserting greater influence over the WTO negotiating process.
4. -The Doha Development Round was oversold as a trade negotiation to promote development. Leading developed countries agreed to present the Doha negotiations as a “development” round in order to provide developing countries with a strong incentive to participate.  Yet the WTO is not a development agency, even if it plays an important part in development.  It was impossible for the Doha Round to fulfill the expectations of a trade round presumably focused on development goals.
5. -Developing countries are “mad as hell” and won’t take it anymore.  In conjunction with the previous item, many developing countries were disappointed in the outcome of the Uruguay Round, in which they expected large gains from liberalization of textile and clothing trade in exchange for commitments on the protection of developed countries’ intellectual property and on other “behind the border issues.”  The delayed textile/clothing trade liberalization, in which China won the lion’s share of gains, combined with the potentially large costs of intellectual property protection and the financial cost of
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Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at health-care reform. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

After attempting a pivot to jobs, the Obama administration has realized that a hanging cadence on health-care will not do. Perhaps they should never have started it, but closure is what the administration now must have. An encore after the strident audacity of hope on health-care reform was temporarily dashed after the election of Scott Brown to the Senate.

In the immediate aftermath of that election, Democrats were in danger of exchanging over-confidence for excessive humility. After Obama’s historic election the year before and Arlen Specter’s party switch, Democrats were overtaken by hubris that Obama’s tune of change could be used to overturn Washington and to compel it toward a Progressive utopia. But just as Democrats were foolhardy to think that 60 votes in the Senate gave them invincible power, they somehow thought after the Massachusetts Senate election that 59 made them completely impotent.

In the media, we hear, conversely, about the conservative comeback in hyperbolic terms. On Saturday, Glenn Beck, not Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney, delivered the keynote speech in the largest annual conservative gathering, the CPAC conference. If Beck’s stardom exceeds that of the winner of the CPAC straw poll this year, Ron Paul, it is because the conservative movement, charged as it is, remains a movement in search of a leader. It is also a movement, as Beck’s criticism of Progressive Republicans in his speech reveals, which is not exactly in sync with the Republican party – the only machine capable of taking down liberal dreams.

And so a Democratic comeback on health-care reform is afoot. With one vote shy of a fillibuster-proof majority, Senator Harry Reid has opened the door to the Budget Reconciliaton process that more Progressive advocates of health-care reform like Governor Howard Dean have been pushing for a while. While it is not clear that there are 50 votes in the Senate for the public option, assuming that Vice-President Biden will cast the 51st, what is clear is that Democrats are much more likely to push through a liberal bill with the veto pivot sliding to the left by ten Senators.

In the White House too, we see a coordinated move to bring Reconciliation back as an option. Obama used his weekly address on Saturday to lay the ground work when he warned that “in time, we’ll see these skyrocketing health care costs become the single largest driver of our federal deficits.” He said this because in order to use Reconciliation, Democrats must show a relationship between health-care reform and balancing the federal budget.

No one in Washington believes that Thursday’s Health-care Summit will magically generate a consensus when in the past year there has been nothing but partisan bickering. If so, the President is not being naive, but signali

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he argues that the coverage of Balloon-Boy wasn’t all bad. See his previous OUPblogs here.

Last week, America came to a stand-still as we stood enraptured by television images of a runaway balloon carrying, so we thought, a six-year-old boy. Flimsy as the silver contraption appeared, we gladly suspended all disbelief that the balloon contained enough helium to be carrying a boy within so we could enjoy the side show. (Just as we did for Pixar’s animated movie, “Up,” which featured an old man who used balloons to move his house to a South American paradise.) So for almost two hours, most of the major news networks displaced all coverage of “hard” news to cover what Latimer County Sheriff Jim Alderman has now concluded to be a “publicity stunt.” And I’m going to argue that this was not a bad thing.

As the Balloon Boy story continued to dominate the weekend news cycle, the president and his advisers continued to deliberate on whether or not to send more troops into Afghanistan, and Senators worked behind the scenes to reconcile two different bills on healthcare. So let it be said that our “watchdog” media will switch its attention as soon as it is thrown an infotaining bone. But this is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we are clear-eyed about the media’s priorities. Instead, I think there is something strangely comforting that we allow ourselves such trivial pleasures. If we do not need an ever-vigilant watchdog, it is because we believe – by revealed preference – that government will mind government’s business, and we can tend to our own. Better no coverage of “hard” news than bad coverage, I say.

And this is exactly what the media did at least momentarily last week even as the President and Congress debated world and country-changing policies. Instead of another round of predictable punditry, or fact-checking of the CBO’s estimates of heath-care reform, we were fed images of a helium-filled balloon shaped like a UFO traversing the Colorado landscape. As we are with car chases, we, and therefore the media, were drawn to the balloon chase like flies are drawn to a light. We weren’t so much interested in the outcome – indeed knowledge of the outcome would have waken us up from our trance – as we were in the process, which was visually enrapturing.

For over a year we have watched a presidential campaign turn into a permanent campaign, and the American public is fatigued. We see this in Barack Obama’s dwindling approval numbers; and we also see it in our captivation by a drifting balloon. We are tired, and we are withdrawing from the public political sphere. The infotaining media detected this, and gave us a welcome reprieve.

And perhaps this is as it should be. Ours is a representative, and not a direct democracy. We vote and delegate; they, the elected officials, decide. The constitutional calendar is very clear that the people speak only every 2, 4, and 6 years. As far as the US constitution is concerned, our voices do not matter when we speak at any other time at the federal level. (Though our voices do matter at the state level where such devices as recall and refederanda are sanctioned by state constitutions.) If we didn’t believe this, than we have to deal with the conundrum that if last year’s elections were held in the second week of September, John McCain would have won. Clearly then, what you and I believed on November 4, 2008 matters much more than what you and I believe in October, 2009 (or September, 2008). Opinion polls may capture majority or minority sentiment at any moment in time, but these sentiments (should) have no import on constitutionally sanctioned officers exercising their delegated powers.

The deliberation of troop increases and health-care reform involve complex proceedings in closed-door war room meetings and conference committees reconciling details many Americans know and care little about. Such decisions make bad television, so maybe we shouldn’t try to force a message into an unreceptive genre lest we alter the message. Maybe those we put in charge should simply be let alone to do their job, for our constitution envisioned and sanctioned a low-effort, Rip Van Winkle approach to citizen participation. Sometimes we care a lot and we participate, but other times we tune out; and perhaps that is just as it should be. Last week, as we sat enraptured by the alleged antics of Balloon Boy, we embraced the implicit satisfactions of a representative democracy.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at the health-care debate. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As America goes into intensive partisan-battling mode this summer over health-care reform, it may be helpful for President Barack Obama and his advisers to sit back and understand the basis of the rage against their plan. An understanding of the resurrected ghosts of Anti-Federalism in today’s conservative movement may offer him some strategies for bringing the Republicans and Blue-Dog Democrats back to the discussion table.

The rage that is out there among conservatives may seem excessive and irrational to liberals, but it is based on an ancient American quarrel. The differences between the “Birthers” and angry town-hallers and Obama precede the Democratic and Republican parties; they precede the Progressive, the Whig, and the Jeffersonian-Republican Party. They were there from the beginning. For the biggest fault-line in American politics was also the first political debate Americans ever had between themselves. It was the debate between the Federalists and the Anti-federalists about the need for a consolidated federal government with expanded responsibilities.

In 1787 and 1788, Anti-Federalists hurled charges of despotism and tyranny against those who proposed the need for a stronger federal government with expanded responsibilities than was envisioned in the Articles of Confederation. Today, the analogous charges against the neo-Federalist Obama are of fascism and socialism. As Federalists reviled the Anti-federalists for their shameless populism, Obama has likened the angry protests staged by his health-care opponents as mob-like thuggery. Conservatives, in turn, have recoiled at liberal condescension; just as Anti-Federalists fulminated against the Federalist aristocracy.

The Anti-Federalists envisioned a small republic because they could not conceive of their representatives - sent far away into a distant capital and surrounded by the temptations of a metropole - would ably be able to represent their communities. The fear of the beltway and of faceless, remorseless bureaucrats directing the lives and livelihood of honest workers and farmers struck fear into the heart of every true republican (lowercase is advised), as it does the modern conservative. Death-panels weren’t the first Anti-Federalist conspiracy theory.

Today’s “birthers” and “enemies list” conspiracy theories are not new stories in themselves other than the fact that they reveal the visceral distrust conservatives have of Barack Obama, just as many Anti-Federalists turned (Jeffersonian) Republicans accused Alexander Hamilton of illicit connections with the mother country, England. Today’s “Tea Parties” are but the modern conservative articulation that they are, like the Anti-Federalists were, the true bearers of the “spirit of ‘76.’”

As Cecilia Kenyon observed decades ago, the Anti-Federalists were “men of little faith.” This characterization is both accurate and one-sided at the same time, so it is no surprise that contemporary Democrats have taken the same line of attack, calling Republicans the “party of ‘No.’” The Anti-Federalists, like today’s conservatives, cannot bring themselves to trust the federal government or Barack Obama. Conservatives are using “scare tactics” because they are scared.

But their fears are not entirely unfounded and certainly not illegitimate, because a measure of distrust of government is the first defense against tyranny and the first implement of liberty. Liberals who have been so quick to trust the federal government should not only have a look at Medicare and Social Security, but acknowledge the mere fact that with one half of the country unconvinced (legitimately or not), the country’s faith in its government has been and will almost always be a house divided. This is a given fact of a federal republic; it is the blessed curse that is America. That is why in all areas in which there is concurrent federal and state responsibility - such as in education and immigration policy - lines of authority and execution are invariably confused and American lags behind almost every other industrialized country. In areas in which federal prerogative is clear and settled - that is to say in areas in which the federal government acts like any other non-federal, centralized government in the world - such as in foreign policy, the president can typically act very quickly (if not too quickly).

The conservative grassroots movement (staged or not) is a real threat to Obama’s health-care plan. But if the movement doth protest too much, it should ironically also be a source of comfort to the president. That there is so much anxiety and push back suggests that conservatives feel genuinely threatened. With Democratic control of all branches of government (and the open possibility of passing the health-care bill via the reconciliation process which will only need a simple majority in the Senate), conservatives believe that the liberals can transform their America into something their parents and grandparents would no longer recognize.

Here then, is the lesson to be learned. If the president wants to get anything done - he must strike at the heart of the problem: it is one of a fundamental, thorough-going(dis)trust. Barack Obama must convince Republican and Blue-Dog dissenters that he is one of them. Bowing before foreign Sultans and mouthing off about racial profiling did not endear him to conservatives, who only want to feel assured that the president is for them, not against them. These are minor gestures, which is why it won’t be tremendously costly for the president to present them as a peace offering. And calling protesters to his health-care plan a “mob” is definitely not a peace offering. It invokes the very perception of condescension the Anti-Federalists felt in 1787, reinforcing the ancient and original “us” versus “them.” To unite the county, he must transcend not only party, but ideology, and history itself. Barack Obama must break the legacy and transcend the language of our 222-year-old, bimodal politics. Quite simply, he must convince conservatives that he too can feel, and talk, and protest, and hurt, and fear, and agitate like a latter-day Anti-Federalist; and he is no less intelligent, no less rational, no less compassionate, no less constructive,  and certainly no less American for trying to do so.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at reconciliation. See his previous OUPblogs here.

There is a lot of hushed talk about using the Reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform in the Congress these days, so Americans need to know something about this obscure parliamentary procedure, and what is at stake.

Reconciliation is an optional, deficit-reducing procedure that was created in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. The Reconciliation process is a two-stage process. First, Reconciliation directives must be included in the annual Budget Resolution (as they were in the 2010 Budget Resolution passed on April 29). These directives instruct the relevant Congressional committees to develop (in this case, health-care) legislation by a specific date (in this case, October 15) to meet certain spending or revenue targets. The instructed committees then send their legislative recommendations to their respective Budget Committees, who then package all recommendations into one omnibus Reconciliation bill. Enter Stage 2, when this bill is then considered on the floor of both chambers of Congress under expedited procedures; of greatest political note is the 20-hour limit on debate on any Reconciliation measure, which effectively strips the minority party of the filibustering option in the Senate. That means the Democrats can pass health-care reform with a simple majority.

But there is an attendant cost to the majority party for using Reconciliation. The Byrd rule, passed in 1985, sets out the rules for what Reconciliation can and cannot be used for. In particular, it specifies that Senators will be allowed to raise a point of order against “extraneous” provisions in a Reconciliation bill which, among other things, “would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure.” Critically, cloture must be invoked to overcome a point of order. So the filibuster power is back.

Here’s the bottom line. Since the Budget Act states that the Reconciliation measure covers the next ten years, the Byrd Rule had the effect of allowing a point of order to be raised against any spending increase (or tax cut) that does not contain a ten-year sunset provision. That’s why the Bush tax cuts, passed via the Reconciliation route in 2001, 2003, and 2005, had sunset provisions written into them. If Democrats use Reconciliation, they will get a health-care bill, but it will expire.

Now let’s talk politics. There’s a debate within the debate that only seasoned politicos know about. Since the actual benefits of Reconciliation are mixed - a health-care bill can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate but it must have a sunset provision - the real power of Reconciliation is not in its actual usage, but in the mere threat of its usage.

The benefits of issuing the threat of going the Reconciliation route are akin to the threat of a presidential veto. The threat of a presidential veto sets the boundaries of permissible legislative action; it lets Congress know what is out-of-the-question and therefore powerfully guides legislative outcomes in the direction of the president’s preferences. By letting it be known that they will resort to Reconciliation if they had to, Democrats in Congress are incentivizing Republicans to be part of the making of a bi-partisan bill rather than be shut out of a purely partisan one. In making the threat, Democrats are specifying the costs of Republican non-compliance to the tune of: “if we let you stay in the kitchen, at least you can determine some of the ingredients in the cake. Make us shut you out and you won’t have even the slightest say.”

Like the presidential veto, the power of Reconciliation is maximal at the level of a threat. For between the time a threat is issued and the time when a bill is passed (via Reconciliation or not), there is a powerful incentive for Republican Senators to come back to the bargaining table because there is the distinct possibility that they could be shut out. Reconciliation is the Democratic antidote to the Republican Party becoming the “Party of ‘No’” For if Republicans keep saying “No,” then they box themselves into the plea of Nolo Contendere.

That is why different spokespersons for the Democratic Party are keeping the Republicans guessing and making sporadic and cryptic references to the Reconciliation possibility. And Republicans are trying to minimize the power of the threat by characterizing it as a no-go “nuclear option.” Unfortunately for Republicans, theirs is an empty threat because there is no Mutually Assured Destruction in this asymmetric power situation, and it is both a legal and political fact that, as the White House says, the Reconciliation option “is out there.” It is a win-win situation for Democrats to issue the threat, for if Republicans are unmoved by the threat, Democrats could materialize the threat and get what they wanted having known that an effort at bipartisanship had failed anyway.

What is missed in the debate out there now is that the effect of Reconciliation is already underway, for its power lies in its threat.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at what happens when you judge too quickly. See his previous OUPblogs here.

In his press conference on July 22, President Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to call what the Cambridge police department did “stupid” was poor form. The president thought he was avoiding the hot spot when asked about the Gates arrest by saying that the controversy offered a “teachable moment.” But having admitted that he had imperfect knowledge of the facts, he went on and assumed that this particular incident invited a lesson about racial profiling and made the very indictment that his conversational segway was intended to avoid. In so doing, Obama confirmed conservatives’ belief that minorities love to whine about their beleaguered status (also another knee-jerk belief, incidentally) even if Obama could have made a case had he marshalled the evidence appropriately. Obama spoke like a liberal before he thought, and that was his mistake.

In so doing, he repeated the same mistake that Professor Gates made. Like Obama, Gates, too, jumped to the conclusion that Sgt Crowley was racist. I do not know if Sgt Crowley acted hastily in arresting the Professor for allegedly exhibiting “tumultous” behavior, so I won’t jump to conclusions but simply note my suspicion that there was probably a contest of egos on both sides. Those who have rushed to Crowley’s defense should ask themselves if they do not also have a knee-jerk reaction to give the benefit of the doubt to a law enforcement officer (or a soldier or a partisan affiliated with the Commander-in-Chief.)

Gates, Obama, and possibly Crowley were not the only people who have been jumping to conclusions, substituting unreflected intuition for a careful weighing of the evidence. Frank Luntz and his political students are encouraging Americans to become thoughtless automatons responding to carefully researched code words like “government takeover” and “health-care rationing.” The issue domain is different, but the error is the same.

It is very difficult to prove racial-profiling, for it demands an investigator to go inside the head of the alleged perpetrator. It is equally difficult to prove that the president’s and Democratic Congress’s plan for a “public option” is a precursor to a completely government-run health-care system. If it is not appropriate to rush to accuse someone of being racist, then it is at least premature to rush to accuse of someone of being socialist (assuming that that is a bad thing).

Those who are accusing Obama and Gates for rushing into judgment should look into the mirror to see if they too have not rushed to conclude that liberals are whiners and socialists who want a government takeover of health-care. At some level, we all have the instinct to cherry-pick the evidence to come to the conclusions we want.

Ideologies, like stereotypes, are cognitive cues or heuristics. They help us to “think” before we get the facts. They allow us to abdicate our duty to make sense of the world with our own independent judgment. They do the easy but intellectually dishonest work of guiding our reactions to the conclusions we want without us having to do the hard work of getting to know a person or a proposed policy before we came to a judgment. The people who are reinforcing such behavior in our politics are destroying our democracy and robbing us of our first freedom - the freedom of independent thought.

So the Gates controversy is a teaching moment, and the lesson is quite simple. Look before you leap; think before you conclude. It is probably the first lesson  of critical thinking, but two professors forgot it last week. If Obama wants us to learn this lesson, he should have been clearer about what the nature of his lapse was. It wasn’t that the president miscallibrated his words - for the question wasn’t about the intensity of what he said, but the very fact that he said something at all. Obama should have apologized for expressing what he felt and intuited without having first perused the evidence. If he had done that, he would have claimed the moral ground to shame some of his opponents in Congress into admitting that they too are doing the same thing in their knee-jerk opposition to what they call “Obamacare.”

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Obama’s health care debacle. See his previous OUPblogs here.

As the wise saying goes “if you’ve nothing good to say, don’t say anything.” But President Barack Obama went ahead anyway with a prime time press conference, and as Bill O’Reilly was right to observe on Wednesday night - he said practically nothing specific about what the shape of the health-care bill would look like and viewers were left scratching their heads.

President Obama wanted to let Congress take ownership of the bill, rather than hand them a fait accompli (as Hillary Clinton did back in 1993/4), I hear Democrats chant in his defense. But if Obama wants to stay on the side-lines, then he should do so consistently. Either be genuinely deferential to Congress and stay out of the picture until a consensus emerges, or take complete ownership of the agenda - don’t try to do both. Yet the president is back in the limelight doing prime-time press conferences, and attending town hall meetings in Cleveland and such. Obama should decide which way he wants to go. If he is the salesman-in-chief, then he has to have something to sell, if not his consumers would be left completely befuddled as to why he’s putting on a show for no particular reason at all.

Liberals are mad that Obama didn’t throw a few more punches at Republicans. I think many are unwilling to admit the more pointed fact that he just didn’t do a very good job at all, because he didn’t have much to say.

So Wednesday’s press conference was a squandered opportunity. We are not in 2008 anymore when Barack Obama would announce that he is giving a speech and the whole world would stop to listen. The clock is ticking on his presidential luster, and the next time he says “hey, listen to me,” it’s going to be that much harder.

Let us be clear why health-care reform has stalled, at least till the Fall. Because the Congress, and in particular the Senate Finance Committee could not agree on a way forward. I don’t see why the President and his advisers thought that a prime time press conference last Wednesday night would have gotten things moving. In fact it probably achieved the exact opposite, when we heard on Thursday morning from Senator Harry Reid that a Senate vote before the August recess would not be possible. The president’s time would have been better spent persuading his former colleagues up on the hill in private conversations to compromise on a bill. When they’ve got a bill and all/most are united, then go out and do the media blitzkrieg, by all means. Wednesday night just wasn’t the time for that.

So it looks like the Permanent Campaign is back. The President has chosen to go back to campaign mode, selling himself. Because without a specific plan to sell, all his public appearances amount to going public for the sake of going public. This strategy belies a serious misunderstanding of American politics. Personal approval ratings do not translate to public support for specific policy proposals (not that they were forthcoming) - the president should have known this by now. They barely even translate into congressional support for presidential policies.

This error - of going public with nothing specific to sell - was compounded, and probably encouraged, by a complete underestimation of the push back from the conservative wing of the Demcoratic party (the “Blue Dogs”) worried about spiraling deficits. These were the people Obama should have been talking to. And given he’s still out town hall-ing and speechifying, I’m not sure he fully understands what came over him.

To make matters worse, Obama had to pour fuel over the fire of the Henry Louis Gates controversy during the press conference, accusing the Cambridge police of of a “stupid” arrest when he had incomplete possession of the facts. Have something to say about anything all the time has become the rhetorical ethic of the modern presidency. Obama’s observance of this ethic was a disastrous distraction to what little point he had to make at his press conference. The news cycles are now spending more time covering the Gates controversy than they are covering the health-care debate.

I’m afraid to say - though this is water under the bridge - that Hillary Clinton would have known better. This week, for the first time in his fledgling presidency, Obama looked like a total novice in Washington. His 4th press conference was a waste of time, and probably the first time since Obama broke onto the national scene in 2004 that his rhetorical wizardry had fallen so flatly on death ears. He seems to have bought the bad conventional advice - whenever you’re in trouble, just go out and give a speech - wholesale. The president should take heed:

1. The public is less attentive between election years and he must have something meaningful to say if he wants to keep their attention.
2. Especially on a complex issue like health-care where there are too many details to cover, the media is much more likely to jump at an opportunity to take the path of least resistance to cover something juicier, like Henry Louis Gates and racial profiling.
2. Just because the public (still) loves Obama doesn’t mean that they will love what he is doing as president (and not as presidential candidate).
3. It is often more important to talk to members of Congress - the people who actually pass legislation - than to deliver speeches around the nation where the only tangible return of applause is a fleeting sense of psychic gratification that one is loved.

President Obama, it’s crunch time. Stop yakking.

James W. Ely Jr. is Milton R. Underwood Professor of Law and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. A legal historian and property rights expert, he is the editor (along with the late Kermit L. Hall) of the Second Edition of The Oxford Guide to United States Supreme Court Decisions, as well as the author of The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights, The Fuller Court: Justices, Rulings and Legacy and Railroads and American Law. He has served as an editor of both editions of The Oxford Companion to American Law. In the post below Ely looks at eminent domain reform.

Since World War II the Supreme Court has only infrequently addressed the constitutional rights of property owners. For the most part these cases, although of considerable interest to scholars, have passed beneath the radar screen of the public. The decision in Kelo v. City of New London (2005) was a conspicuous exception to this pattern, arousing widespread public dismay and disapproval. Eminent domain reform remains a matter of keen public interest. In 2008 California and Nevada voters adopted ballot initiatives dealing with eminent domain. In early 2009 the Governor of Texas urged further restrictions on taking private property for economic development purposes. In these remarks, I wish to focus on the legislative and judicial response to Kelo. To what extent have reform advocates been able to take advantage of Justice Stevens’s invitation to fashion restrictions on the exercise of eminent domain for economic development purposes?

The story at the federal level can be quickly told. The Supreme Court is unlikely to revisit the issue of “public use” and economic development takings in the foreseeable future. Lower federal courts have treated Kelo virtually foreclosing any room for a “public use” challenge to the exercise of eminent domain. Although the House of Representatives expressed its disagreement with Kelo by a large margin, there has been no effective congressional action to halt economic development takings. Nor is any such move likely in the present political climate. The Bush administration never demonstrated much sustained interest in the question. Neither of the 2008 presidential candidates prominently called for eminent domain reform. Consequently, for the immediate future any serious effort to check eminent domain abuse will take place at the state level.

In sharp contrast to the muted reaction at the federal level, there has been a great deal of activity in the states. This has taken the form of legislation, constitutional amendments, and decisions by state courts. It is not always easy to ascertain, however, whether this outpouring of legislation and judicial rulings amounts to meaningful limitations on the use of eminent domain or merely hortatory fluff.

By some estimates, 43 states have enacted new laws or adopted constitutional amendments aimed at preventing Kelo-type takings. Most of these reform measures have focused primarily on tightening the definition of “public use” to exclude economic development projects. It bears emphasis that 7 states, including Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York, have not enacted any laws limiting the exercise of eminent domain for economic development purposes. Among the jurisdictions that have passed such laws, the efficacy of these measures varies widely. Some appear to constitute genuine reform. Others afford virtually no additional protection for property owners and seem calculated to placate public opinion rather than to reign in the exercise of eminent domain.

Let us look first at the characteristics of legislation that provide substantially increased protection for property owners. The experience of Florida is instructive. In 2006 Florida legislators adopted a sweeping reform of eminent domain. The measure sharply curtailed the power of a condemning authority to convey property to a private entity. It further declared that eminent domain may not be utilized “for the purpose of abating or eliminating a public nuisance”, or “for the purpose of preventing or eliminating slum or blight conditions.” To eliminate any doubt, the statute stated that “the prevention or elimination of a slum area or blighted area . . . and the preservation or enhancement of the tax base are not public uses or purposes for which private property may be taken by eminent domain ….” Florida voters reinforced these limitations on eminent domain by adopting a constitutional amendment that prevents exceptions to the ban on transfers of acquired property to private parties unless passed by a three-fifths majority in the legislature. In short, Florida is among the states that have enacted sweeping bars to both economic development and blight takings.

At the other end of the spectrum, however, are state laws that do little to reign in eminent domain. The most common problem with post-Kelo reform laws is the failure to curtail blight takings. Under the banner of urban renewal, local governments made expansive use of eminent domain in the 1950s and 1960s to eliminate blighted areas. To the popular mind “blight” suggests a dilapidated neighborhood which poses health and safety risks. In fact, loose definitions of blight in many jurisdictions would allow government to acquire practically any property for redevelopment. Indeed, some states define blight in terms of any condition that impedes economic growth. Such a malleable concept of blight opens the way for government to circumvent legislative restrictions on private economic development takings. Some scholars contend that the notion of “blight” has lost any coherent meaning, and has become simply a pretext to justify eminent domain. As the distinction between slum removal and economic development grows progressively more fuzzy, it is essential that any legislation seeking to curtail economic development takings must also tighten the definition of blight.

Another problem with post-Kelo reform laws that purport to exclude economic development from the definition of “public use” is that in fact they leave open significant loopholes. Thus, a number of states, including Connecticut, Maine, and West Virginia, have enacted laws which halt economic development takings only if private advantage or enhancement of tax revenue is the “primary” or “sole” reason for the condemnation. Qualifiers such as “primary” mean that the prohibition will be easy to evade. Motives are notoriously difficult to assess. Local governments can readily assert that the takings at issue was designed to benefit the public.

Although the state legislative response to Kelo has been decidedly mixed, several state supreme courts have struck down the exercise of eminent domain for economic development purposes by private parties. For example, the Ohio and Oklahoma supreme courts have specifically rejected the reasoning in Kelo and construed their own state constitutions to afford greater protection of property owners against eminent domain.

Supreme Court rulings sometimes have the effect of putting long-ignored issues back in the spotlight. Perhaps the most significant impact of Kelo could be heightened public recognition of the need to safeguard property rights. One result of Kelo has been to restore the rights of property owners to public debate. This development may ultimately bear more fruit.

By Anatoly Liberman

Many thanks to those who commented on my recently published dictionary and to the listeners of MPR (“Midmorning News with Kerri Miller”). Some of the words about whose origin I was asked (copasetic and quiz among them) have been covered in my earlier posts, and I will not dwell on them again. But I hasten to undeceive our correspondent whose family believes that it invented the noun quiz: it did not. Quiz emerged in the 19^th century as university slang.

SPELLING REFORM. English is indeed a global language, but I fail to see a connection (suggested by our correspondent) between this fact and the conservative character of English spelling. If knock loses its k-, it will lose it globally, much to the world’s gratification. Consistent phonetic English spelling is a utopia. Vowels are realized differently in English dialects. This is the reason it would be better not to meddle with Mike, make, and so forth. But spelling till with one l, quake as kwake, dependent and redundant with -ent, etc. (the main thing is to define the scope of the etc.) won’t hurt anyone. Hence my suggestion to reform English spelling slowly and gingerly, rather than introducing revolutionary measures. The same hold for the etymological criterion. Words of Modern English cannot and should not reflect their past (we no longer speak Old English, do we?), but some morphological ties should probably be retained. This explains my proposal to drop k- in knock but not in know, for knock is isolated, whereas know is related to acknowledge (which I would prefer to spell aknowlege).

Fare fico ~ fare fiasco again. Words that sound alike and have a similar structure (so-called paronyms) are often confused and regularly affect one another’s meaning. My suspicion remains that, whatever the modern understanding of fare fico, it has nothing to do with the origin of fiasco. Is there an equivalent word to phallic to imply something that looks like female genitals? My experience tells me that there is a word for everything, but I am not aware of the female counterpart of phallic, and the reason it does not occur in dictionaries and thesauruses is easy to explain. Phallic was coined to be used in combinations like phallic figure and phallic cult. It is mostly an ethnographic term. Statues and figurines of fertility goddesses and of patronesses of sexual intercourse abound. They usually have many breasts or a conspicuously enlarged vulva. Apparently, a generic term like phallic for describing them is not needed, but I won’t be surprised if such an adjective lurks somewhere in the depths of the OED. Let us wait for the comments on this post.

The origin of jankety “in poor shape.” No slang or regional dictionary of Americanisms I have consulted features it, though the Internet produces the impression that the word is known to many. Perhaps it originated in Black English, but I have only anecdotal evidence to support this claim and can at best offer an intelligent guess about its sources. Janky “lousy, phony” exists too and shows that -et- in jankety is a suffix (jank-et-y, not janket-y), unless janky as a back formation of jankety. Almost all slang words with initial j- (jog, jerk, jig, and so forth) are expressive; many of them designate quick or abrupt movement. Equally expressive (sound symbolic rather than sound imitative) are some native words ending in -ank, for instance, crank, prank, and especially yank. Jank, which, like jerk and yank, may, as I have been told, mean “to pull violently,” aligns itself easily with them. Verbs meaning “to pull” often have gross sexual connotations, and jank “male groin area” confirms my conjecture that neither janky nor jankety was coined as an elegant word. Whether adjectives like rickety and junky have influenced the meaning of jankety cannot be decided, but such influences are not improbable. I should add that practically all the words mentioned above in connection with jankety are also of unknown or uncertain origin.

The phrase to go haywire. Sometimes we stumble across a word that seems to be yesterday’s slang, but it turns out to have been around for several centuries. In other cases a word that looks as though it has been in the language forever can be shown to have sprung up in recent times. To go haywire is such a familiar idiom that the date of its first occurrence in printed sources (1917) comes as a surprise. Haywire is indeed the wire used in hay bailing; hence its association with makeshift and insecure arrangements and its figurative meaning. Apparently, haywire is of American provenance. Push the envelope goes back to aviation slang. The original reference was to graphs of aerodynamic performance. How offensive is the British slang word pikey? In recent time this word has been used so loosely (not only for vagabonds but also for all kinds of outsiders) that it has nearly lost its negative connotations. But, obviously, if used about an Irishman or a Gypsy, it is an ethnic slur.

Drat “damn, darn it” is sometimes explained as od-rat, in which od is a euphemism for god (God without the initial consonant) plus rat, a dialectal variant of rot—not a particularly convincing etymology. Conversely, drot may be (G)od rot it! Drat has the doublet (d)rabbit (for example, rabbit the child! drabbit the girl!). This enigmatic drabbit was first traced to French rabattre “to beat down.” Its variant rat it! drat it! may have been due to rat substituted for rabbit. We do not know whether drat is a contraction of drabbit or drabbit is an extension of drat. Curses often contain disfigured words, for taboo and euphemisms play a significant role in them. As a result, their origin becomes hopelessly obscure.

Gallivanting. This seems to be a playful word, as Ernest Weekley put it: perhaps a blend of gallant and levant “to decamp, steal away, bolt.” But for some reason, it usually occurs in its participial form (gallivanting), a peculiarity that has never been explained. Some connection with gallant is probable.

Heebie-jeebies: “Coined by W.B. DeBeck (1890-1942), American cartoonist, in his comic strip Barney Google” (The New Oxford American Dictionary, Second Edition). Vet is a clipped form of veterinary (surgeon) (compare doc, prof, math, lab, etc. from doctor, professor, mathematics, and laboratory); hence the verb to vet “to subject to professional examination.”

Silly continues the phonetically regular form seely, with cognates in all the Old Germanic languages. Its original meaning was “blessed, happy.” It is amazing how many paths lead to the idea of stupidity. Someone who is happy is stupid (for what is there to be happy about?), and so is someone who thinks too much of himself (the Romance root of fool means “inflated”). The root of daft means “fitting” (consequently, too docile); by way of compensation, its doublet deft exists. The semantic base of words for “stupid” may be “stunned,” “pitiful,” “lacking support,” “unsociable,” “blissfully unaware of the surrounding world,” “too trustful,” “too accommodating.” You are damned if you are too friendly, and you are damned if you are a social moron. Language reflects this attitude most faithfully. In a tale well-known in the East, a boy, an old man, and a donkey go on their way. Whether the old man rides the donkey, with the boy following him on foot, or the boy rides, with the old man walking, or both ride or walk, or whether the old man carries the donkey on his back, those around mock them: every combination is wrong. Lief means “beloved, dear” (compare German lieb). The archaic phrase I would as lief can be glossed as “I would rather.”

I cannot say anything new on the word regionalism. It appears to have been coined some time around the eighties of the 19^th century by journalists, for the earliest citations are from newspapers. At that time regionalism meant only “localism” in politics. It gained popularity after World War I. As a linguistic term (“a local word or feature”) it does not antedate the fifties. Today regionalism is used widely, but the numerous spheres of application have not changed its original meaning.

Two phonetic questions. 1) Education pronounced as ejucation. The sound we hear at the beginning of the letter name u (it is called yod), when it follows t and d, tends to merge with them and produces ch and j. This is why we say picture and verdure the way we do. The same assimilation can be observed in living speech: did you and what you become diju and watchyou and even student sometimes sounds as s-chudent. A similar process can be observed when s, z and yod meet: note how most people pronounce bless you and as you like it. In very careful speech t, d, s, and z retain their individuality before the yod, so much so that snobs rhyme literature with pure. It follows that ejucation is admissible and does not betray the speakers’ lack of education. 2) Dwarfs versus dwarves. From Old English we inherited alternations of the shelf ~ shelves, wolf ~ wolves type. When r, rather that l, preceded f, as in scarf and dwarf, the alternation was the same, but its modern reflexes are inconsistent. It is due to chance that the British norm chose dwarfs, while Americans usually say dwarves. In British English, scarfs seems to be more common, while in America scarves predominates. Wharf and wharves have a similar distribution.

A RETROSPECT. 1) At some time, I cited an amazing number of verbs meaning “to beat, thrash.” A similar, but shorter, list from British dialects was offered in Notes and Queries for 1876. Here are five most colorful ones: mump, beneil, welt, twilt, and skelp. 2) I have a gnawing suspicion that some people do not read this blog or, if they do, refuse to profit by it. One of my posts was devoted, among other things, to the ugly fillers actually and you know. Could those in the highest echelons of society have missed that post? In any case, this is the exchange quoted in newspapers a few days ago. “In an interview last week with ABC, Ms. Bush [Laura Bush] said: ‘I think she probably meant ‘I’m more proud,’ you know, is what she really meant’… ‘…I was touched by it,’ Ms. Obama [Michelle Obama] said. ‘And that’s what I like about Laura Bush. You know, just calm, rational approach to these issues. And you know, I am taking some cues.’’’

Read the next gleanings on August 27.

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By Anatoly Liberman

At the beginning of June, on the technological campus of Coventry University the British Simplified Spelling Society, now called Spelling Society, with Simplified expunged from the title, celebrated its centennial (centenary). As the theme of the conference the organizers suggested “The Cost of English Spelling.” The society and its ally the American Literacy Council were founded at the peak of public interest in spelling reform. Between 1908 and 2008 many edifying publications came out, and some of the best linguists on both sides of the Atlantic showed the weakness of the arguments repeated again and again by the opponents of the reform. However, a century passed, and despite all those activities English spelling has undergone only a few cosmetic changes (like hyphenation in American English), so that there is nothing to celebrate. And yet there may be a glimmer of hope.

The cost of teaching English spelling is enormous. The money spent on drilling the most nonsensical rules in any modern European language and on remedial courses could have fed and educated a continent. (I have the statistics but will skip the numbers.) Although Spelling Society has lost the game, the world at large has not won it. The establishment refused to institute changes, and, as a result, speakers (native, immigrant, and foreign, both young and old) have become less proficient in reading and writing than ever. Now we are dealing with several generations of the illiterate offspring of illiterate parents.

Since the end of the Second World War life in the West has changed dramatically, partly for the better, partly for the worse. Today more than ever in the recent history of our civilization popular culture has the ascendancy over “high” culture. It is not only our age that witnesses the triumph of popular (low) culture: such is the law of all social development. If it were otherwise, we would still be wearing wigs and using declensions and conjugations of the type known from Latin. In language this trend can be observed in both big things and small. For example, the swift substitution of -s for -th (comes for cometh, and the like) signified the encroachment of vulgar speech on the time-honored literary norm. In Shakespeare’s plays, Falstaff’s boon companions use this ending. Even the Authorized Version of the Bible was unable to suppress this novelty. Today no one cometh and no one goeth.

In recent memory (George Babington Macaulay would have said within the memory of men still living) jeans with a prefabricated rent at the knee became fashionable and more expensive than elegant and unimpaired trousers (pants). The vilest language is allowed in songs, on the screen, and in printed production, whereas in 1908 one could not pronounce the words pregnant and underwear with women around. Highbrows made careers explaining to the eager public the profound goals of the hippies and the surpassing value of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road. Bras and ties were abolished along with other signs of bourgeois hypocrisy. Only our orthography stands like an impregnable rock in this ocean of change. But the “masses” did not remain indifferent to the preservation of this last relic of the past, and here I come to the subject of the moral cost inflicted on learners by conservative English spelling.

The first point on the list can be called serene resignation. When provoked by the most egregious misspellings in students’ papers, I chide the culprits gently (ever so gently), the answer usually is: “Oh, I know, I am an awful speller.” It is sad to teach people who have never taken geography at school or are, to quote one of my listeners, “lost in space and time” on hearing the word crusades, but the pilot will take passengers to their destination without asking them for directions, and the Middle Ages ended before we were born. In contrast, one has to write something all the time. Yet our orthography is such that people are happy to admit that they are dummies. A state-sponsored inferiority complex is a rather high moral cost for sticking to antiquated spelling.

Point two is the opposite of the previous one. The world in which college graduates are unable to distinguish between principle and principal and think that the past tense of lead is lead has produced its ugly antidote, namely the spelling bee. The contestants cram hundreds of useless words and come away empty-handed because in the last tour they may miss bogatyr “a Russian epic warrior” (the word is not in the memory of my computer). Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Russian fairy tales rather than wasting the brain cells on the words one will never see or use? It is an open secret that the most ambitious parents hire coaches to prepare their children for collecting bitter spelling honey. Prestige and prizes are involved in this losing game.

The masses, as I said, have been reduced to the state of blissful illiteracy and will support spelling reform. They have already abbreviated everything. University is simply U. I teach at the U. of M. (University of Minnesota), students in Salt Late City go to the U. of U. (the University of Utah), and if u (= you) want to move south, hire a truck with the sign “U Haul” (that is, “You Haul”) and go there (their) real quick. U Haul to the U. of U., jingling all the way! Text messaging (called texting in British English) and so-called emotics follow the same route. BRB “be right back” cannot be misspelled. Ads vacillate between two extremes: they play on fake nostalgia and invite us to visit their “shoppe,” as in good “olde” times, but also offer lite beer and donuts (curiously, dictionaries now recognize donut as a variant of doughnut—a revolution from below). Simplified spelling is with us, unless you have noticed it. If Spelling Society succeeds in harnessing the energy of popular culture and steers clear of its excesses, it may eventually turn the tide.

However, there is a fly in the ointment. The reformers have always tried to achieve all at once, forgetting the fact that educated people are averse to rapid shakeups of spelling. Any reform that writes giv and hav on its banner is doomed to failure: it will be rejected unanimously by the left and right. Initial changes should be almost surreptitious: first persuade the powers that be (I have no idea where, in the absence of language academies, such powers hide) to abolish the difference between till and until, spell and dispel. Then remove k- in knob and knock (but retain it in know, to preserve its union with acknowledge). Get rid of c in scythe, as well as in excellent, acquaint, and their likes. Dispense with final -b in dumb (pretend that it is a back formation of dummy) but retain it in numb and thumb because of their weakly sensed affinity with nimble and thimble. It is only the underhand “donut way” that may guarantee success: chip away at one word after another. The process will take several decades, if not longer, but, once people agree that change is needed, they will allow the reformers to introduce proksimity, telephone, and perhaps even krazy (not a Romance word!) and wipe out the difference between descendent and descendant.

Necessity has taught us to recycle all kinds of products. Pubs have gone smoke free. We are saving energy, albeit on a small scale. People do all such things, for they realize that they either comply or perish. There is no joy in raising children who know that they are dum(b) and see no means of improving their status. Nor do we want all words being reduced to capital letters. WBA (it will be awful). Investing money in teaching English spelling as it exists will have the same effect that investing millions in Soviet collective and state farms had. But drawing on the experience of that country, we should beware of repeating its other mistake. Post-communist reformers preached that one cannot jump over a chasm in two steps: democracy, market, and privatization—all overnight. A jump indeed presupposes a single effort. But why not build a bridge over a chasm? If spelling reform becomes reality, the English speaking world will emerge from a dark cell into dazzling daylight. This can be accomplished only by passing through many intermediate stages. Lite beer and donuts are the right sustenance on this way.

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Dr. Kristin Shrader-Frechette is the O’Neill Family Endowed Professor in the Department of Biological Science and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. In her most recent book, Taking Action Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health, she shows how campaign contributions, lobbyists and their control of media, advertisements, and PR can all conspire to manipulate scientific information, withhold data, cover-up pollution-related disease and death, and “capture” regulators. To circumvent this mis-information she urges citizens to become the change they seek. In the excerpt below Shrader-Frechette looks at public citizens can push for reforms.

…The first step, getting information about public-health threats, is both the easiest and the hardest… It is the easiest because it may require nothing beyond reading and thinking, something people can do daily. It is the hardest because…special interests sometimes distort available information. In addition, many citizens receive their information only from limited and perhaps biased sources. Often people fail to get opinions and evidence from the greatest variety of people and groups possible. Many citizens likewise have not made the lifestyle commitments necessary to remain informed about public health. Instead, they may spend too much time on activities like television. As a result, citizens may have a false complacency that allows unscrupulous groups to “whitewash” or “greenwash” their behavior. Whitewash of course, can arise from any agenda-driven groups-environmental organizations, churches, labor unions, corporations, and even government agencies. The greater the group’s economic or social power, the greater their potential threat to legitimate information-as the recent coverup of sexual predators in the Roman Catholic Church reveals…Because corporate groups donate about 80 percent of U.S. campaign contributions and spend about 100 times more dollars on scientific research than do environmental groups, their greater power and potential for abuse suggests that their behavior out to receive proportionate scrutiny from those seeking reliable information.

Cooperating with others is the second step… Cooperation is difficult because people frequently recognize its necessity only when they see some threat before them. Yet often no threat is obvious until after people have already cooperated and thus gained public-health information…One health related NGO is Bread For the World. Promoting food assistance and child immunization in developing nations, it offers “action kits” that show citizens how to support its food and public-health programs. It is a valuable source of both health information and cooperation. As this example suggests, however, cooperatively working with such an NGO is not merely a matter o paying annual dues or reading a book. It involves keeping informed, helping to educate others, and supporting ongoing group activities and meetings. It involves commitments of both time and money-organizing, leafleting, educating, canvassing, and other activities characteristic of deliberative democracy. Without cooperation through a variety of focused groups, like Bread For the World, it is difficult for citizens to obtain accurate information, to evaluate conflicting viewpoints, to succeed in alleviating societal problems, or to sustain and motivate their own efforts to do good. The reason? If the social model of gaining knowledge…is correct, cooperation and cognitive division of labor are necessary to make much information readily available. The U.S. founding fathers and mothers recognized this point and organized New England town meetings…Such cooperative ideals identify deliberative democracy not with structures or institutions but instead with processes of wide communication among various people and social sectors. These processes are necessary both to build democratic consensus and to debate and amend conflicting social proposals.

A third step…is evaluating health threats and alternative solutions to them. This likewise is something best achieved through open interaction with a variety of other people and points of view. Yet most citizens associate only with certain groups of people and typically hear only a few points of view. As a result, their evaluations of social problems are often incomplete. To understand public-health threats, people need to hear a diversity of opinions about them. they also need emotive, narrative, and scientific or factual understanding, as well as ongoing evaluation-vigilance and criticism…One way of exercising such vigilance, at least in scientific evaluation, is to look for the characteristic errors of private-interest science…Another way is to avoid acting on the basis of unevaluated opinions that have not survived the testing and analysis…This means that people..need to aim at evaluation that is open, transparent, empirical, accessible to all, and democrative…

Evaluation is particularly necessary if citizens who hope to reform life-threatening social institutions find themselves at odds with at least some members of those institutions. If they are eventually forced into whistle-blowing…or into civil disobedience…their actions will require special evaluation…

Most ethicists believe that whistleblowing is justified only if four conditions, analogous to those for civil disobediance, are met. (1) The policy seriously threatens the public. (2) It cannot be overturned within a reasonable period of time through normal, internal channels. (3) Whistleblowing is likely to be effective in overturning the policy. (4) The whistleblowing will not violate any higher ethical obligations. Failure to meet any of these conditions typically makes whistleblowing unethical. Often this means it is unfair to the accused or endangers the whistleblower.

Organized action, the fourth step… is a natural response to the three previous steps…because individuals acting alone often can do little to help correct public-health problems, concerted and well-organized collective action usually is necessary. That is why the 50,000-member American Public Health Association (APHA) encourages “work in coalition,” including “advocacy and litigation.” Through organizations like “public-interest law groups” APHA says citizens can help exercise their “maximum responsiblity” for public health. Explaining its activities on its website, the APHA says it “has been influencing policies and setting priorities in public health for over 125 years.” It claims to serve the public not only “through its scientific practice programs” but also through its “advocacy efforts.” Showing how such advocacy and organized action can help overcome citizens’ feelings of fustration and powerlessness….organized action must build on small wins and on personal transformation-working to become virtuous onself, to become the change one seeks. Because it is so easy for advocates and any special interests to fall into bias, however, it is important to evaluate all collective actions from alternative points of view. This includes evalutating different proposed beliefs and actions, including doing nothing. In fact, organized and enlightened responses to the responsibility arguement require ongoing and iterative evaluation of alternative perspectices and actions. This continuing evaluation is important to help make oganized action less self-serving and more affirming to those who have been disenfranchised. As philosophers Hilary Putnam and John Dewey recognized, evaluation also is necessary to keep collective policies and actions inclusive, participative, and objective.

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Liam Finn is a hoot.  His wooly face and sunglasses reminds me of Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson's character in The Royal Tenenbaums).  You hardly expect the music to come out of what appears to be a spry little mountain man.  But as was witnessed at the Portland Crowded House concert this summer, he's quite a live wire.  I'm really looking forward to his album, I'll Be Lightning, coming out in

In honor of the Split Enz reunion (yes, everyone's getting back together again), we're celebrating here on a jammed packed version of Tuesday Rocks. I couldn't decide on just one video for Split Enz because they are all fantastic songs and the videos are just priceless in their 1980s-eyebrow-wiggling-Neil-glory. So enjoy Split Enz! I Got You (yes, that's Neil in pseudo-clown-face makeup, isn't