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Twilight At Monticello

Last night I finished the new book on Thomas Jefferson, Twilight at Monticello by Alan Pell Crawford. It focuses on Jefferson’s retirement years and it’s a nice very readable, and in some places very insightful book with a lot of personal details that I had not known. The troubles with Jefferson’s son in law Thomas Mann Randolph and his grandson in law, Charles Bankhead were particularly distressing. Jefferson comes off as a doting grandfather and wildly impractical philosopher who could not resist spiraling blindly into more and more debt. One thing is certain: Jefferson could have used a second wife. Had he been married to someone who would have stood up to his spending, his fate would have been very, very different.

The most insightful part of the book is Crawford’s discussion of why Jefferson rejected the imprecations of Edward Coles to take a stand against slavery. As Crawford explains, Jefferson’s devotion to the philosophy of Stoicism in particular prejudiced him against moral heroism and leadership. By temperament, Jefferson was a shy man who did not like to be the one guy out front of a moral crusade. And his philosophical views absorbed this (or shaped it). This is reflected even in Jefferson’s views of Christianity—his Christianity was one of contemplative virtue, not of radical or messianic virtue. The idea of taking a bold and independent stand was, ironically, a very difficult thing for Jefferson. As Crawford writes,

Trained up in the early forms of utilitarianism, Jefferson believed for most of his life that the proper subject of ethics was the maximization of human happiness.  Happiness consists of tranquility of soul, which is achieved not by the heroic gesture but through prudent conduct.  Ethics, for Jefferson, was little more than the process by which the rational individual chooses the most commonsense course from among a finite set of options. By reducing morality to a matter of rational selection and removing it from the “Gothic” influences of religious faith and practice, Jefferson ruled out the bold, the adventurous, and the imaginative, by which great challenges, such as ending slavery, might be accomplished.

Of course I don’t think it’s true that a rational worldview necessarily leads to shunning the heroic gesture. But it is true that Jefferson’s views lacked the element of heroic individualism, and that’s more Stoic or Epicurean than “rational.” Ironically enough, heroic individualism would reassert itself in the closing years of Jefferson’s life with the rise of Romanticism—but of course that too would have awful side-effects in the plumped-up pseudo-nobility of the antebellum plantation aristocracy. In fact, the troubles of Jefferson’s declining years really seem like his rational life being swamped and slowly sunk in the rising sea of Romanticism, with its duels and its code of blood honor and whatnot. The Romanticism of Sir Walter Scott—on whom Mark Twain with good reason blamed the Civil War—would have struck Jefferson as manifestly absurd, but people gravitated to it because they craved the crusading spirit which the Enlightenment simply did not give them. It would be the task of rational philosophy in the years that followed to find a way of combining these two elements of rational contemplation and heroic action.

Anyway, it’s a good book and a very interesting focus on a part of Jefferson’s life that is almost always skimmed over by biographers.

First photos of Mercury's unseen face

NASA has released photos of the previously unseen side of Mercury. Very cool. (Note the weird error in the CNN story: "Mercury is the only planet in the solar system other than Earth to have a magnetosphere." Jupiter's magnetosphere is one of its coolest features. They mean it's the only inner planet with a magnetosphere.)

The real life Lives of Others

A chilling story on the Stasi, showing just how real The Lives of Others really is.

before it was disbanded, the Stasi shredded or ripped up about 5 percent of its files. That might not sound like much, but the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There's a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

In the chaos of the days leading up to the actual destruction of the wall and the fall of East Germany's communist government, frantic Stasi agents sent trucks full of documents to the Papierwolfs and Reisswolfs — literally "paper-wolves" and "rip-wolves," German for shredders. As pressure mounted, agents turned to office shredders, and when the motors burned out, they started tearing pages by hand — 45 million of them, ripped into approximately 600 million scraps of paper.

There's no way to know what bombshells those files hide. For a country still trying to come to terms with its role in World War II and its life under a totalitarian regime, that half-destroyed paperwork is a tantalizing secret.

Reason And Common Ground

My article “Reason And Common Ground: A Response to the Creationists’ ‘Neutrality’ Argument” will appear in the next issue of the Chapman Law Review, which subscribers should receive in the mail in a week or so. You can download it on SSRN. The article is a reply to a creationist article that the Chapman Law Review published last year, entitled “Evolution, Science, And Ideology: Why The Establishment Clause Requires Neutrality in Science Classes,” by Stephen W. Trask.

Here’s an excerpt from the opening of my article:

James Madison on misconstructions of the Constitution

Still more evidence of my belief that James Madison was the greatest political thinker of all time: his letter to Thomas Ritchie, Dec. 18, 1825, on the subject of “internal improvements”: that is, federally funded projects for creating roads, canals, and so forth. Madison, Jefferson, and others held that these projects were unconstitutional, and Thomas Ritchie had written to Madison to ask what could be done to stop such proposals. What about amending the Constitution to allow Congress to construct roads, for instance? Madison responded to him in this letter, which contains some observations that are fascinating in light of the subsequent history of the Constitution, as well as in light of Jefferson’s interest in nullification. The latter point is important because Madison sent a copy of this letter to Jefferson when Jefferson had started talking once more about perhaps using nullification or related doctrines against federal construction projects. This letter provides yet more evidence against the popular contention that Madison’s opposition to nullification in the 1830s was only a post-Jeffersonian innovation in Madison’s thought.

Charles V. Stuart

I've posted my biography of Charles V. Stuart (a revised version of the article that appeared in Liberty in July, 2005), on SSRN.

Legitimacy and judicial review

The exchange between Ilya Somin and Orin Kerr regarding judicial review seems to have come to an end, but I can’t let it pass without once more insisting on what I think is a fundamental point about the nature of judicial review and how it relates to political legitimacy. Kerr is wrong to say that “at bottom” the dispute is rooted in one’s comfort or discomfort with democracy. In fact, that is the very surface level. The dispute rests on the nature of democratic legitimacy. Somin rightly points to the Declaration of Independence as laying out the source of democratic legitimacy: democracy’s legitimacy derives from the individual rights which democracy is supposed to serve. The Declaration makes clear that rights come first, democracy second, and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the “right,”—even the “duty”—of the people “to throw off such Government.” The American Constitution is rooted in this understanding of government, so that the fundamental character of American law regards democratic legitimacy, or majoritarian legitimacy, as secondary and derived—from the basic premise of individual freedom. That is why the Constitution speaks of “depriving” people of rights or of their “retaining” rights.

"When The Saints Go Marching In" by Ollabelle

Link to me!

Thanks to Wendy McElroy for adding me to her blogroll. My policy is to add anyone to my blogroll who adds me to theirs, although I also will list other blogs that I think particularly interesting. So if you're a regular reader of Freespace, please put me on your dance card!

Casey Luskin abuses what little credibility he has

One thing that really pisses me off is when lawyers abuse their status as lawyers to frighten people without justification. Casey Luskin, whose ignorance and intellectual dishonesty have been repeatedly documented on Panda’s Thumb and elsewhere, did this in a particularly amusing way, as S.A. Smith of the ERV blog points out: suddenly, it appears, an ID spokesman is worried about copyright infringement.

Luskin wrote to defend himself against Les Lane, a retired virology professor who accurately noted that Luskin has dubious credentials—pointing out that he is “an attorney in good standing in the State of California” (oh, how impressive) and sending along a link to his state bar registration. (oh, lookee, I have one too!) Now, of course, if he had been trying only to substantiate his legal education he would have referred to his JD degree. But what he was really trying to do was intimidate a scientist who is critical of him and to get Lane to remove his photo from the page. Pure snippiness. Is there a better sign of immaturity—or of Luskin’s abuse of his position as an attorney? Rattling your little lawyer saber at people who are legitimately criticizing you is bad form, but entirely in character for Casey Luskin, and for creationists in general, who love to call their lawyers when their “theories” wilt.

Worse yet, there’s nothing at all wrong with Lane using Luskin’s photo, copyright or no copyright. Luskin is, of course, a public figure who has voluntarily injected himself into a matter of national public dispute, and people using his photograph are not profiting in any way from doing so—particularly because the blogger linked to Luskin’s home page! For those interested, here is the photograph of Casey Luskin, an attorney at law who not only routinely misleads the public on legal matters, and spouts off on subjects he knows nothing about, but also abuses his position of authority to scare people who are critical of his publicly expressed opinions on matters of public import. Please feel free to pass it along to anyone who would like to see it. If you’d like to sue me for it, Mr. Luskin, your process server can reach me at my office any time next week.

© somethingerother, Casey Luskin, used without permission. No claim to ownership of this copyright is asserted by the owner of this blog, because Casey’s a big scary lawyer and a real smart scientist.

Update: Joe McFaul gets into the nitty gritty a bit more. Let me clarify something regarding Luskin’s copyright claim. It is true that (assuming Luskin really did take that photo) he owns the copyright to it, and it is protected by copyright law. In fact, by reproducing his image below, I have “wilfully” reproduced copyrighted material without permission. However, there are two reasons why Luskin’s saber-rattling scares me not. First, Luskin is not damaged in any way; I’ve not profited in at all and do not seek to profit from reproducing his mug. He hasn’t been harmed. Of course, the copyright statutes would still allow Luskin to sue me for statutory damages regardless of his actual damages—and in fact, the law provides for $150,000 in statutory damages if the plaintiff can prove that the defendant wilfully violated his copyright! (This only applies, however, if Luskin traipses down to the copyright office and registered his copyrighted photo, which I doubt he’s done.) Second, and more importantly, my use of his photo is covered by the “fair use” doctrine as McFaul says. I’ve posted Luskin’s photo in connection with—and to protest—his abuse of his authority as an attorney to bully legitimate critics. I’ve done so not for commercial but for nonprofit educational purposes, and I certainly haven’t affected the “potential market” or the “value of” Luskin’s self-portraits. They’re not exactly selling like hotcakes over at Art.com.

That’s the copyright issue. But I also mentioned that Luskin has voluntarily injected himself into a matter of public dispute because a second issue would be his potential “privacy” rights. Reproducing a photo of a person can sometimes be a violation of privacy aside from copyright matters. But Luskin would be on even weaker ground there, since he is a limited public figure who is a legitimate subject of public debate.

I strongly suspect all of this would be over Luskin’s head, as he has not shown much of a noggin for such legal subtleties, but I thought I should clarify for the benefit of the other bloggers who are reproducing his lovely image.