Encyclopedia Hanasiana - Nobody likes the slush pile. Let's get rid of it.

Jim Hanas makes a seemingly radical suggestion (lets stop having literary journals with open calls or “slush piles”) that actually makes a lot of sense when you think about it. Sending a piece in in the hopes of getting it published is nerve wracking, and then the odds are that no one will read it once it gets published anyway, since the only ones who buy the journal are the people waiting for their piece to get published. So, what to do?

So let’s drop the pretense and kill the slush pile. Manuscripts considered by solicitation only. (As most of them are now anyway, let’s be honest.) How will writers and editors find each other then? Simple. Writers will put their work out—on blogs or in writing communities or wherever—and editors will find it.

He makes a strong argument that this could work.

For my part, I think it would make sense to pay for a monthly “list of important papers in your sub-discipline of philosophy.” I try looking at Reddit’s philosophy section sometimes, but basically it’s just not readable. The wisdom of the crowds doesn’t work when you’re looking for wisdom instead of distraction. On the other hand, I’ve never picked up an issue of Philosophy East-West and not been filled with the urge to add another 40 pages to my endlessly growing reading list. So, to me the future would be a well-curated blog behind a paywall that points to people’s articles which are hosted on the personal or university homepages of their authors. The articles themselves would be available to anyone for free, so if you find it on Google Scholar, you don’t have to be part of the existing university structure to get the privilege of reading it for less than $40 (which is seriously how much the average JSTOR article goes for by itself).

I don’t know if this is what’s really going to happen in the future, but it’s a direction I’d like to see things moving in.

Deborah Solomon interviews Ex-President Vincente Fox

What do you think Mexicans have contributed to American culture?

Oh, starting with Mexican food! The jalapeños and the tacos and the rest. I think they have contributed family values. And then we have our culture. When you were killing Indian Apaches there, we had built Mayan cities, the pyramids, Mexico City.

Vincente Fox is too kind. I would have said, “Starting alphabetically? Arizona….”

Cynic - The Paradox of Adversity

A good guest post over at Ta-Nahesi Coates’ blog:

Listen to the fabulously successful discuss their lives, and you’re almost certain to hear them attribute their eventual successes to the challenges that they first faced and overcame. Hardscrabble childhoods, menial jobs, discrimination, disabilities, doubt - these are the cliches of American autobiography. And few would trade away their triumphs in exchange for an easier path through life.

But take a look at their children. They don’t pick out failing schools for them to attend or arrange for them to spend their summers in difficult, dangerous, low-paying work. So if adversity paved the way to their own success, why don’t they replicate that adversity to give their offspring a similar advantage?

This reminds me of the furor over the “Wise Latina” comment of Sotomayor. If you read her actual speech, the point wasn’t that all Latinas/os are smarter than all Gringos. It’s that certain kinds of experience can be enriching if you can make it through them. I think that there’s a strong epistemological argument to be made for the importance of diversity of all kinds: sexual, racial, religious, and class based. Says Sotomayor:

Let us not forget that wise men like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Justice Cardozo voted on cases which upheld both sex and race discrimination in our society. Until 1972, no Supreme Court case ever upheld the claim of a woman in a gender discrimination case. I, like Professor Carter, believe that we should not be so myopic as to believe that others of different experiences or backgrounds are incapable of understanding the values and needs of people from a different group. Many are so capable. As Judge Cedarbaum pointed out to me, nine white men on the Supreme Court in the past have done so on many occasions and on many issues including Brown.

However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give.

Ross Douthat has also been writing a fair amount lately about the lack of diversity among elites:

This [the disadvantaging of lower class whites relative to other whites] was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

…

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

Anyway, moral of the story #1: most of the time you don’t want to come up hard, because coming up hard is hard. But if you can come up hard, it will give you a perspective that is valuable in life. Therefore, we should try to structure society so as to promote the viewpoints of those in a position to have learned the hard way.

Moral of the story #2: If you alienate certain segments of the population—even segments that are otherwise well off—it creates paranoia and conspiracy mindedness, so avoid doing so.

I recognize that there is a tension between #1 and #2, but I think it is possible to thread the needle.

Star-Advertiser - Hawaii supports regulating violent video game sales

Finishing off the videogame theme for tonight:

Hawaii has joined a growing list of states supporting a contested California law to ban the sale of violent video games to minors.

The other day, the topic was Analects 2.3 (“Lead the people with rules… and they will avoid punishments but be without shame,” &c.) and the importance of non–law-based social regulation. In the comments, Corey quoted A Man for All Seasons:

“What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

I think a case like this one is a good place to clarify my feelings about law. Roger Ames often remarks that the meaning of Analects 2.3 is that law is a last resort. Law is what we do when the other options on the table have failed.

So, if we look at the case of selling violent videogames to children, the question we need to have before we create a law is “Have non-legal remedies already failed or will they predictably fail?” I think the answer here is “No.” While it is true that the game industry has a completely unhealthy obsession with violence (among other means of corrupting the youth), that doesn’t mean that the law in question will help resolve the issue. Notice that the law only restricts the sale of games to minors, it does not prohibit the creation or distribution of games. However, in practice most major retailers already have a voluntary policy in place of restricting the sale of games rated MA and above. So, adding the proposed law would add more regulation without having much impact on the actual practices of retailers.

The danger here is that the law is being treated as a means of symbolic communication. “We think violent games are bad, so here’s something, even though it won’t change anything.” This is supposedly a conservative sentiment. However, the truly conservative thing to do is to be wary of the unnecessary wielding of the governmental power. We do not know what future laws today’s law will be taken as the precedent for. Games appear to be a new form of communication (“speech” in legal terms), so any new restriction on them needs to be motivated by something like the proverbial man shouting fire in a theater, least we open the door to restriction of the freedom of speech. In this case, however, we do not observe any empirical linkage between the popularity of violent games over the years 1970–2010 and the level of violent crime during those same years. Videogame usage has skyrocketed, but violent crime has mostly been going down since the end of the crack boom. Absent some more overt connection between games and social harms, the use of the law as a tool of symbolic chastisement is a dangerously frivolous way of expressing our disapproval of games. The sage does not speak unless he expects his words to be thereby realized.