Gina’s post about David O’Brien’s chapter in The Art of Teaching Philosophy reminded me that I should tell you about the class our department (Philosophy) has for all beginning Teaching Assistants (beginning at Madison, whether or not they have already taught elsewhere). The focus is pretty relentlessly practical: providing them with strategies, techniques, and advice that will enable them to do better instruction in discussion sections. We do readings that we think will help them reflect on their teaching, but discussions of those readings are designed display the strategies and techniques we are trying to teach them. We also spend a fair amount of time trouble-shooting problems that they encounter over the course of the semester. And the instructor observes one section from each TA and gives feedback to them (fire-walled from any evaluation, to encourage honesty and authenticity).

Last week colleagues on the instructional resource team in our college asked me to give them a short document listing the 5 or 6 things I most wanted every TA to know and know how to do by the end of the semester and having written it, I thought it might be useful to post it here: feel free to direct your new, or not new, TAs to it (it should be useful whatever their discipline). Obviously it draws on and links to things I’ve posted here on CT over the years. And it is not supposed to be exhaustive: it’s just what I happened to prioritize when they asked me to give them something. Here goes:

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“To promote open inquiry and free, market-based technological progress, you need an open society, not one founded on the enemy principle. The understandable desire to escape criticism, misunderstanding, and the frustrations of ordinary politics does not entail the radical remaking of the global geoeconomic order to confound the New York Times and its allies. The cult of progress and the technocapital singularity are Hayek’s “religion of the engineers” with the valences reversed—so that markets and AI rather than the state become the objects of worship. Over the last few years, Silicon Valley thinking has gotten drunk on its own business model, in a feedback loop in which wild premises feed into wilder assertions and then back. It’s time to sober up.”

Some critics of Silicon Valley might find the piece not critical enough, but it is not written for them. The intuition behind it, correct or incorrect, is that a better Silicon Valley right is possible – and a piece explaining why in an uncompromising but not completely inimical way, written for a journal like American Affairs, is more likely to push a few people in this direction than a jeremiad. Two minor corrections. One error crept in through editing – the Dread Pirate Roberts’ efforts to hire hitmen were not what led to the Silk Road’s demise. The other was present from the beginning – “Balaji”’s surname is Srinivasan, not Srinavasan. And if you want more on the “technocapital singularity,” this piece for the Economist and this, right here on this Substack might be helpful. You’ll find little enough in the American Affairs piece, which mostly focuses on the politics of business models.

Enough – read the article!

This is a midsummer short and light hearted post, but I find that Summer is often the time when I am most reminded of my bodily existence, and of how naïve us philosophers are in forgetting (de facto, if not in principle) how much our thoughts and beliefs are embedded in our bodily experience. Indeed,often caused by our bodies. [click to continue…]

Henry James: girl, you are so cool and smart, and well-dressed, and beautiful. And I mean this in the least-sexual, but not sassy-gay-best-friend way, exactly, but more like just, your good friend who is also gay? And do you know, that guy is the worst. The worst. I feel like someone should leave you a ton of money but you’re not too sad he died, either? But then, like, never get involved with this guy. Him either. I don’t even now why you attract these people. Gorl, I’m serious, just look at him. I’m embarrassed to be a dude right now, except that I don’t even feel a kinship with these guys who are tbh wildly unlikeable. I don’t know how they keep getting in my novels when I’d rather just sit here with you on this sofa, which has olive green, cut-velvet chevrons, with pillows of pale chintz, and there are flowers gleaming out in the dusk, and collections on the wall of birds and books and shells–it’s pretty cute actually, but what I’m saying is that I’d rather hang out with you, you’re great. You’re fine! I’d rather hang out with Undine Spragg than these guys, actually, and she’s not even my person. People say she’s awful but I’m just like, get that bag! I’m not just for women’s rights, I’m here for women’s wrongs!

This devastatingly accurate portrait of Henry James speaking to his female characters is brought to you by Belle Waring. Now please enjoy this video by Chris Fleming. If you don’t watch at least three-quarters of the way through I will come to your home and personally draw a small circle on one of your interior door jambs with an industrial-strength sharpie. It will never come off. If you own your house, then you will have to paint and the colors won’t match even if you saved some of the original paint for this purpose (though, well-played). If you rent then too bad for you, I guess.

Why is this the wrong size? I don’t know and I can’t fix it either. I tried for minimum 38 seconds to do something but it didn’t work. I guess it’ll just jonk up the sidebar for a short time, sorry gang.

The value of individualism often comes up in attempts to make sense of the elusiveness of women’s empowerment. “Investing in women” has not uniformly yielded either the quick reduction in women’s poverty or the decrease in women’s adherence to sexist norms or deference to men policymakers had hoped it would. Of course, this is partly caused by the flawed equation of income with empowerment, which I have discussed at length elsewhere.

But it is often argued that women in the global South, and in South Asia in particular, do not have enough of a sense of themselves as individuals to want to form their “own” values or separate from the household (see, for example, the work of Veena Das and Naila Kabeer). I have always thought that there is something right about these claims.

At the same time, most of these claims about individualism are made in a course-grained way that is philosophically unsatisfying—and politically objectionable. The idea that South Asian women do not have their “own” values, in addition to serving as a justification for disrespect from political institutions, has always seemed to me to be downright implausible. After all, one has to know that one is separate from another person in order to make sacrifices for them, and many norms of femininity valorize self-sacrifice.

Soledad Artiz Prillaman’s wonderful book, The Patriarchal Political Order, is a gem for gender and development thinkers, because of the tools it provides for thinking beyond this course-grained individual/community opposition. The book is based on six years of qualitative and quantitative research across five districts in the Indian state of Madya Pradesh. (The dataset it is based on is itself a gem, but that’s for another time!)

Prillaman’s theory of women’s political agency is basically as follows: the fundamental unit of Indian political life is the household. The default setting for women is to participate in politics only by voting, and by expressing the same preferences through their votes that the senior men in their households do. This tendency can be understood is often an expression of self-interest within the status quo. Serving the interests of more powerful members of the household protects women’s access to goods that can be secured within the household, including protection from violence. It can also serve women’s interests outside of the household, insofar as women’s interests that can be secured by changes outside the household often align with those of their family members (women and men both, for example, might benefit from the presence of a new road nearby, or from a powerful family member getting a government contract).

Participation in microcredit self-help groups, according to Prillaman, causes women’s nonvoting political participation to increase. This happens because of the social connections women generate in these groups. Women talking to other women increases the salience of gender-based interests (like domestic violence) in their minds. It increased their skills at speaking in groups. And it decreased the costs of collective action, both by reducing startup costs (the self-help group is already there) and by spreading out potential punishments. And there are definitely punishments. Women in these groups experience backlash and violence, but they are less vulnerable collectively than they might otherwise be alone.

Okay, back to individualism. Prillaman’s analysis is particularly valuable, because it is fine-grained in a way that allows us to think more carefully about the values of individualism and community in women’s lives.

First, it specifies that what women gain is autonomy from the household where this is understood as a) the ability to conceive interests not shared with the household as capable of being politically pursued, and b) the ability to participate in political life independently from other members of the household. The rest of Prillaman’s analysis makes clear that autonomy from the household is not the same thing as what philosophers would call “personal autonomy.” Since Prillaman accepts that women’s default behavior is self-interested and reflective, she does not have to claim that their ability to have and reflect on desires, or even their ability to identify desires as their own, is impeded by the status quo. (Though she as not as consistent as a philosopher might like about the use of the term “autonomy.”)

Second, because she emphasizes that autonomy from the household can be expressed and developed through immersion in women’s groups, she offers a view that values something like autonomy while avoiding some of the troublesome implications of more mainstream views about women’s empowerment. As Kabeer has noted across her work, women in what she calls “corporate societies” may not value—and may have good reasons not to value—”striking out” on their own. This is often thought to be a strike against autonomy, and it probably is, but we need to get clearer about what form of autonomy it is a strike against.

Prillaman helps us see how joining a group can increase one’s autonomy; one develops an enhanced sense of what one wants and desires, and an enhanced ability to achieve these wants and desires, through involvement with supportive others.  It also makes clear why gender and development theorists shouldn’t jettison the value of autonomy, and adjacent values like political agency, altogether. Not every collectivity will equally be a place where women’s values are respected or cultivated, or one that makes action that realizes the more aspirational among these values likely to be effective.

… at least in the “Anglosphere”

One of the striking features of the racist riots in Britain has been the wide spread of ages among those (nearly all men) convicted so far[1]. This is unusual, since criminal violence of all kinds is most commonly associated with young men. And it’s a counter-example to what has become a standard talking point.

The belief that young men have shifted strongly to the right and far-right has become a background assumption for lots of political journalism. But there’s plenty of evidence that, in Britain and other English-speaking countries[2], both young men and young women are more likely to support left and centre-left parties. The recent UK election gives a striking example

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The age gradient here is stunning. That probably reflects the division over Brexit a disaster inflicted on the young, primarily by nostalgic retirees (the vast majority of this group voted for Tories/Reform in 2024). If you squint you can see a slightly larger gender gap among young voters than in older cohorts. But, as is true elsewhere, this reflects a leftward shift among young women, rather than a move to the right by men.
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As requested by a couple of commenters, I’ve created a separate thread to discuss the issues raised by commenter “closet conservative” in response to my post on US academia. I’ll moderate, but not participate

I spent yesterday evening watching Agnieszka Holland’s remarkable film “Green Border” which has just been released to streaming in the UK after spending about 30 seconds in cinemas. The episode that provides the film’s context is the 2021 decision of Alexander Lukashenko, dictator of Belarus and Putin’s puppet, to make use of refugees as a weapon against “the West” by opening up a route for them from Turkey and then shipping them to the border with Poland and, hence, the European Union, where they might hope to claim asylum. The refugees themselves are blameless in all this, and we first see the main family on the flight, Syrians, full of optimism and hoping, that unlike in Turkey they will be able to get their children into school. But what happens is that they are driven to the border by the Belarussians and pushed over into inhospitable forest in winter and then, when discovered by the Poles, brutally pushed back across, through and sometimes over the razor wire that marks the frontier. Stranded in this zone, more and more of them succumb to cold, hunger, injury and disease.

The focus of the film is distributed among various characters: a Polish border guard and his heavily pregnant partner (which mirrors the condition of several refugees); a Polish psychologist and widow to Covid, who lives near the border and responds to cries she hears late at night; the Syrian family and the English-speaking Afghan woman who attaches herself to them and whose brother worked with Polish forces in Afghanistan; and the activists, riven by disagreements.
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Earlier this week, I received my contributor copy of The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch.[1] It’s an exciting book, and I’m proud to have gotten to contribute to it. My chapter on advising graduate students about teaching was coauthored with an excellent teacher (and researcher), a near-former grad student, Britta Clark.

I’m eager to read all the chapters. Welch often likened the book to a series “hallway chats,” or unplanned encounters in the hallway when a colleague tells you about a new teaching strategy she’s trying out. I’ve walked away from many such chats with great new ideas to adopt, and I know I’ll get a lot out of reading this.

I also know I won’t go in order. When the book arrived, I skipped straight to David O’Brien’s chapter on “Teaching with Puzzles.” O’Brien is a thoughtful, imaginative teacher and a wonderful writer, so I knew the chapter would be great. But I was inspired to start with his chapter by something else I’d been reading. I got an early look at Anthony Laden’s new book, Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. I’ll write more about it once it’s published later this year.[2] But I’m going spoil one tiny morsel by writing about it now, because it struck a chord and—along with O’Brien’s chapter—motivated me to try something new.

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Often on a Friday evening, we order a curry from our local “Indian” takeaway. They deliver, but it is easier and quicker for me to walk round and collect, and, anyway, I enjoy chatting to the guy behind the counter. He’s a Man United fan, I’m Liverpool, so we have some banter with a bit of an edge to it. Well, we started on the football, and he noted the lack of summer signings by my team, but we quickly got on to the news: “It’s been a horrible week”. And it certainly has, with race riots and anti-Muslim pogroms in various British cities, egged on by right-wing pundits and politicians “just asking questions” in the context of inflammatory disinformation and with Elon Musk making ignorant predictions of civil war while retweeting Islamophobes.

My interlocutor, born and bred in the UK, told me that it was the first time he had felt uncomfortable and anxious in this country and that many “ethnics” as he referred to people like himself, had chosen to work from home on Wednesday rather than risk being caught on the street. But he told me he’d left work early, just to be safe (thereby telling me that he works two jobs). But he told me, also, that he was encouraged and felt better, thanks to the massive counter-demonstrations in Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle, Walthamstow that night, which told him that the far right are a minority and that most people oppose them and which seem to have stemmed the violence, for now. On the other hand, he said, it was one thing to live in a diverse and left-leaning city like Bristol and quite another to be in Hartlepool or Sunderland where the “ethnics” are isolated and heavily outnumbered by their white compatriots and, consequently, feel more scared and vulnerable. (We then went on to discuss the overthrow of the Bangladesh government, of which he approved.)

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of the failures of imagination on the part of the the new Labour government, who are certainly the secondary target of far-right violence. Making the round of the studios yesterday, the Paymaster General, Nick Thomas-Symonds, urged people not to join counter-demonstrations, because the police were under strain and should be left to do their job. (It was a message that actually differed from that of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who thanked the counter-demonstrators.) The government wants to put the far-right violence down by co-ordinated riot policing and then swift judgements and tough sentences: “the full force of the law” as every official spokesperson robotically repeats. Well, I’ve no objection to to the fascists and their criminal hangers on getting it good and hard. But that state response doesn’t answer to the need my friend has for him and his family to feel good about their fellow citizens and that’s actually the role that mass counter-protests against the fascists can play: we, a mixed, diverse crowd are the people and they, the violent racists, do not speak to to concerns of “ordinary people” as they claim. The police and the courts are no substitute for popular mobilisation in defeating the racists and assuring members of minorities that they too are a part of us. Labour leaders, managerial and authoritarian by temperament, just can’t see that. They’ll talk about “integration strategies”, for which meagre funding may be available, but the best integration comes from people feeling safe and confident in one another.

I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.

The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.

But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are openly anti-science on a wide range of issues, notably including climate science, evolution and vaccination.
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