Essentially Contested America

A new process of evaluation pervades the blogosphere boasting the ability to determine a blog’s “reading level.” The cite–The Blog Readability Test: What level of Education is Required to Understand Your Blog?–can, within seconds, classify the readability level of your blog from elementary school to genius. But what level of education is “genius”? “Genius” refers to innate intelligence, not educational accomplishments.

In any event, for what it’s worth, ECA has now achieved “the genius level.” Does this really mean that you must be a genius to read ECA? Clearly, the answer is “no’. So just what does this label mean? Is it just another example of an American (or perhaps natural) predilection to rank everything similar to an inveterate gamblers need to bet on everything? (I bet the water in that pot will boil in 90 seconds. Is it a bet?) Why can’t we be content with evaluating books, articles, blogs, and so forth for ourselves? Why do we need independent sources for such evaluations with results that are, for the most part, illusory? Evaluations of this sort are driven by either an empirical process or an evaluative one. However, results from the former are largely uninteresting; while results from the latter are usually essentially contested. The former approach yields uninteresting results because it is virtually impossible to devise an empirical standard tying empirical evidence to our considered intuitions of the value of a class of entities. Replacing our considered intuitions with the results of empirical inquiry tends to confuse two very different realms of discourse. This confusion tends to change the subject from a reflective normative intuitive one to a primarily empirical one. It’s difficult to find anyone who believes that evaluations can be reduced to descriptions, but the perceived significance of empirical inquiry seems to be gaining ground, especially in law. The relationship between the descriptive and normative realms of discourse and reasoning are inter-related in complex ways. But counting a blog’s topics or the level of the blog’s vocabulary is surely irrelevant to the normative worth of the blog. So let’s put away our ranking scales and enjoy making these decisions for ourselves if we need to make them at all. Much too much time is devoted to the results of these largely irrelevant studies. And their influence can alter the course of well-composed blogs that fail to exhibit the “appropriate” level of readability.

Credit for the Image

ECA was launched on 20 October 2006. Below are slightly modified versions of ECA’s first two posts designed to explain its central purpose(s).

The name of this blog derives from the work of the social theorist, W.B. Gallie, and the political philosopher, John Rawls. Gallie taught us that reasoning often founders on those essentially contested concepts central to arguing for practical conclusions, but which have different senses for different people or for the same people from different perspectives. Concepts such as “truth,” justice” and even perhaps “the American Way” may be embraced by everyone. Yet, when we base social policy or any practical judgment on these concepts, consensus is beyond reach. The reason? While everyone is committed to these concepts, their meaning is systematically ambiguous or essentially contested. And so, while these concepts are fundamental to our reasoning, since their meaning is essentially contested each of us will reach different conclusions based on the same concepts. Rawls taught us that reasonable disagreement is inevitable in a pluralist democracy because obstacles to consensus known as “the burdens of judgment” render consensus almost out of the question. How should we respond to the essential contestability of concepts and the burdens of judgment? Deliberatively! Pragmatically! We need to provide reasons for our conclusions, vigilantly check and re-check these reasons, take seriously the opposing conclusions of others, and with humility try to formulate the most comprehensive perspectives possible. At that time we will either have achieved consensus, or what is so much more likely, we will have refined our conflicts so that we understand just what is at stake.

[Added November 20, 2006] ECA has posted everyday since its inaugural post on October 20, 2006. One point of clarification: America is essentially contested, but ECA will not be exclusively devoted to essentially contested concepts or the burdens of judgments. ECA will take positions on controversial subjects and welcomes comments from readers having diametrically opposed views. ECA is designed to be a forum for examining important intellectual, legal, political, and culturally controversies, not by ad hominen arguments against those who have taken a stand on these controversies, but by backing up one’s position with the best arguments available.

Just what is the meaning(s) of America. The very concept–”the meaning of America”–has always been essentially contested, and no doubt will continue to be so. We all believe in freedom and equality. But then why do we disagree so stridently about public policy? Just what does America stand for if it stands for anything at all? Are we a libertarian nation, one that valorizes liberty to the exclusion of all other competing values? Or do we regard the well-being of others as central to our own happiness? Examining these choices, and a host of similar choices, will be one of this blog’s goal. More concretely, ECA is a vehicle for looking for the meaning of America in all its nobility and yes in all its malevolence.
To speak of “the meaning of America” doesn’t involve a commitment to meanings in one’s ontology. Rather, the call to discover America’s meaning is merely a pragmatic attempt to first identify those values which have driven American history. Once identified the next task is to determine whether these values are coherent, and if they are not coherent how to make them so. If coherence is illusory the final goal is to determine which values, if any, should be rejected. In the end, we might discover that the meaning of American consists of a set of incommensurable values that serve as the premises for fundamentally different ways of life. Each generation must engage in the quest to determine the meaning of America. It’s our turn now.

Check out Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the Right-Wing blogosphere. Then check out and bookmark Larry Johnson’s Blog. Larry Johnson is a former CIA operative who from the beginning of this dreadful post-911 horror has been a voice of reason and information in a hysterical, incoherent, duplicitous, media ultimately bent on perfunctorily supporting–through commission or omission–precisely what the administration says. One wonders where we would be today in Iraq–or whether we would be there at all–had the media done its job simply to probe the administration’s claims about Iraq’s alleged WMDs, Iraq in Niger, Iraq’s role in 911, mushroom clouds as the smoking gun, and other such willfully false declarations. The media should confess its dereliction which helped a bad situation become infinitely worse. Iraq was transformed from the stable evil of a brutal dictator (not a good thing to be sure), Saddam Hussein, to a situation of violent instability, from a brutally evil tyrant to a deathly civil war, an insurgency that will not cease, and an invitation to Al-Qaeda and other terrorists to join the chaos, perhaps permanently. George W. Bush did precisely what the bad guys wanted him to do enabled by effete political leaders and a media gone limp. Where were the journalists when American foreign policy needed them most?