weirdly inept

In the October issue of Commonweal, I consider the complexity surrounding “weird” in American political culture. On the one hand, “weird” is a favorite attack against bizarre MAGA Republicans. On the other, it’s the proud self-branding of diverse, liberal-leaning Austin. What separates the interestingly weird from the dangerously weird, especially when it comes to politics?

To answer this question, I turn to the rhetorical and political thought of Cicero and Machiavelli, both of whom take an interest in the “push and pull between individual conviction and social pressure” and warn against a kind of “obstinate weirdness”:

Instead of flattening Machiavelli into an apologist for thoughtless immorality, we should see him as a realist grappling with “necessity.” It’s a theme that resurfaces in his Discourses on Livy, where he argues that “the reason why men are sometimes unfortunate, sometimes fortunate, depends upon whether their behavior is in conformity with the times.” While the vocabulary is different, his arguments here should sound familiar even to those who just learned their first lessons of ancient rhetorical theory in the preceding paragraphs. Whether Machiavelli speaks of “necessity” or “the times” or “fortune,” he persistently urges rulers to adjust their political calculus—and their moral scruple—to fit their circumstances. In short, leaders need to abide by a realist politics of decorum.

To borrow a phrase from Kamala Harris, Machiavelli did not just fall out of a coconut tree. Specialists in the classical tradition have long noticed, as Michelle Zerba explains, “the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.” The ideas of rhetorical “propriety”—attention to “circumstance,” a sense of the aptum, a knack for fitting the occasion—permeate his political and ethical maxims. When Machiavelli writes, “It is necessary that [a prince] should have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the changing circumstances command him,” he has simply taken to heart Cicero’s “universal rule, in oratory as in life,” to consider the moment. Cicero, of course, was chiefly interested in an apt turn of phrase, while Machiavelli was also interested in the apt turn of a dagger.

Launching from this ancient tradition, I draw on Isaiah Berlin’s reading of Machiavelli as a theorist of democratic accommodation and negotiation. He explains how people and princes “gradually [come] to see merits in diversity, and so [become] sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.” We should not be surprised, I conclude, to see how “the very politician celebrated for his attacks on weirdness has also reminded us to ‘mind your own damn business.’”

Head over to Commonweal‘s site to read the rest.

September 27, 2024

learning to be fair

My book Learning to Be Fair: Equity from Classical Philosophy to Contemporary Politics will arrive on bookstore and library shelves on December 10, and it’s now available for pre-order at your favorite retailers, including Bookshop.org and Amazon. Here’s the jacket blurb for a quick overview:

The language of “equity” saturates our contemporary culture. Human-resources departments lead workshops on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Progressive politicians advocate for “equity” in novel programs for housing and healthcare while their conservative counterparts decry “equity” as a revolutionary rejection of traditional notions of equality and freedom. By excavating texts from antiquity to the modern age, Learning to Be Fair undercuts the supposed novelty of “equity” and anchors it in the foundations of Western philosophy. Despite its newfound popularity (or infamy), in fact, the concept of equity stands as one of the oldest, most durable, and often most paradoxical principles of ethical and political thought. In Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara draws out the ancient origins of equity in classical Greek and Roman authors and traces their influence on lawyers, philosophers, America’s Founding Fathers, and even our contemporary culture. He shows how this history connects current debates about the role of equity to long-standing, unsettled questions about equality before the law and the possibility of teaching people to be good.

I’m happy to have had the opportunity to dig into this contentious terminology and provide some clarity about how and why we struggle with the ancient and modern ideas of fairness, equality, and the law. Here’s what some early readers have said:

This marvelously balanced, penetrating, and eminently readable interdisciplinary study of “equity” deftly grapples with the historical and linguistic complexity in the use of the word, and brings much-needed light into overheated contemporary debates about how to foster equity and equality in various cultural settings. The volume would be a welcome guide and companion not just for academics and students seeking to better understand the concept, but also for administrators, policymakers and legal professionals grappling with practical questions of when and how to bend the rules and for what purpose.
—Amy Uelmen, director for mission and ministry, Georgetown University Law Center, and lecturer in religion and professional life, Georgetown University

With impressive historical knowledge and moral insight, McNamara helps us move beyond the narrow confines of procedural justice to consider questions of substantive fairness. He shows us how the venerable concept of equity can provide guidance not only for today, but also for the future of our diverse and pluralistic societies.
—Cathleen Kaveny, Libby Professor of Law and Theology, Boston College

With Learning to Be Fair, Charles McNamara offers timely assistance to readers at every level who are struggling to understand the roots and sources of our present-day conversations about equity in the workplace, on our campuses, and in public life. Written in an accessible way that spares no effort to explore the richness of how our civilization came to understand and value equity, McNamara’s book belongs in the board room as much as the classroom. Every reader could profit from Learning to Be Fair as a guide to navigate these challenging conversations today–conversations McNamara assures us are as ancient as they are contemporary.
—Steven P. Millies, professor of public theology and director of the Bernardin Center, Catholic Theological Union

August 22, 2024

course correction at nyt

We’re in a tumultuous time in higher ed, so it’s as important as ever to keep facts straight about campus life and classroom culture. I’m happy to have had an opportunity to help with that effort—at least as much as one can in 200 tightly edited words—in the New York Times this weekend by giving some first-hand perspective on how undergraduates are taught at Columbia, where student protests have been especially contentious.

Ross Douthat recently argued that undergraduates at Columbia cultivate a “narrow list of outlets for [their] world-changing energy” through superficial, blinkered coursework in the school’s Core Curriculum. Amazingly, his column includes no accounts from flesh-and-blood instructors or students or … anyone. It’s instead built upon a glance at a reading list and an imagined method of indoctrination where students are compelled to agree with a course’s required texts.

I taught twenty semesters of Contemporary Civilzation (or “CC”) during my years at the Columbia Core, and my students were almost universally hard-working, independent-thinking, insightful, creative adults. They did not (and instructors did not), as Ross alleges, use the course as an opportunity to “simplify and flatten history” around the platitudes of contemporary political culture.

In Ross’s view, students in CC are brainwashed into marching in the streets for “decolonization” and “liberation” and “climate justice” and so on. Simply put, his view of undergraduate education is a fabrication—one I never encountered in Columbia’s Core. In my vast experience, students would use our authors as tools for interrogating the ideas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. For instance, they would regularly criticize Frantz Fanon’s call for anticolonial, revolutionary violence as an echo of earlier justifications for bloodshed. Some would see it as a new version of Plato’s arguments for infanticide in The Republic in the name of “justice”; or perhaps as a new version of Machiavelli’s apology for self-serving assassinations in The Prince in the name of virtù; or perhaps as a new version of European conquistadors’ slaughter of Mesoamericans in the name of “civilization”; or perhaps as a new version of Robespierre’s defense of executions during the French Revolution in the name of “equality.” The list goes on and on and on.

Of course, some students—perhaps building on the American Revolutionary documents we read together—would find something compelling in Fanon’s call to meet violence with violence and to use any means necessary for the goals of national liberation and autonomy. Those conversations entailed productive disagreements about when, why, and against whom violence is (ever) justified in the pursuit of desired political ends. Perhaps in light of our own increasingly violent politics in the US, we should all be considering these questions more urgently. But to maintain that undergraduates thoughtlessly parrot propaganda that has been ideologically curated for them by the faculty—it’s simply unmoored from reality.

In the same column, Ross asks why students aren’t reading books about the “technological or spiritual aspects of the present,” but if he had talked to just one CC instructor, he would have found that dozens teach Freud’s critiques of technological progress in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” If he had picked up the phone only once, he would have discovered that Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was a required text in the previous iteration of the CC reading list. (Hardly a monolith of “progressive preoccupations,” that reading list also included Carl Schmitt!) Over and above its fundamental mischaracterization of how undergraduate seminars are run, the column is based on sloppy reporting.

As someone who teaches occasional classes at Yale, which draws from a similar student population, Ross certainly grasps that Columbia’s undergraduates are—by and large—sharp, intellectually honest grown-ups. They are not indoctrinated political operatives as they are regularly portrayed in the media. Instead of pushing bad-faith caricatures of people like his students and colleagues in New Haven, he should entertain the possibility that it’s his views that have been simplified and flattened around the unhistorical preoccupations of his own political wing.

May 11, 2024