The message I got from David Held’s lecture tonight was something akin to this: there are liberals and there are social democrats. Liberals are clearly bad and no different than neo-cons. Social democrats believe in something like capitalistic socialism. What this means is that we’ll have really good, really fair markets, but we’ll also have education and healthcare. And it’d be nice if we had clean air too. The problem, however, is that while we have laws, they don’t really work. What we really need, then, are more laws; laws that work. Markets should be connected to laws; the environment should be connected to laws; and the environment should be connected to markets, too. Asks a precocious undergrad, “But, Prof. Held, all this is obvious and the information is easily available. How do we make them get interested?” The answer was crystal clear: “With more democracy.” (No discussion, as one might suspect, on the relation between either law and force or democracy and force.)
With the exception of making a joke about Canadians at the start of his lecture and adding North Korea to his list of states that might cause problems with nuclear weapons, the lecture was read, word for word, (well, not read; he knew all the words), and it is still available here.
Fairer, more “social democratic” comments later.
2 Comments
Fairer, more “social democratic” comments later
Please do post these. I have no interest in actually reading the lecture; but I am interested in your comments on it.
So, you’d prefer I’d do the hard work. About twenty minutes in, I passed a note to the guy beside me (we attend these things together so we can pass notes of this sort – how juvenile) saying, “I stopped reading the lecture at this paragraph.” At the end, he passed me a note, “This is the final paragraph.” It put us to sleep, to say the least. The saddest thing, however, was that so many people were taking copious notes – pages and pages – and nodding in agreement. “Democracy is good” – yes, yes, nod, nod – “because it is legitimate” – yes, yes, nod, nod – “even if it doesn’t always work” – yes, yes, nod, nod.
This “practical” or “policy” style scholarship is dreadfully boring and nothing different from what you can read in the newspaper. And people eat this shit up!
Post a Comment