Yesterday I was attending reunion activities at Swarthmore, my wife’s alma mater. She was there in the halcyon days of the sixties. Just after lunch the class met with a retiring philosophy professor, who had over the years, transformed from a fire breathing SDS advising radical to a far more conservative and clearly conflicted individual.
According to him we had, in the sixties, been trying to destroy all institutions, and he has since learned that some institutions are good, even if we can’t always understand why. He was making an essentially Burkean argument about tradition, some of which makes sense, but for the most part he was destroying a straw man. Of course we want to preserve worthwhile institutions. The heavy lifting comes in figuring out which are worthwhile and which need reform, alteration and yes, sometimes destruction. In any event, I don’t recall being all that interested in destroying institutions-I just wanted to end the war.
He lost the crowd for good when he came out against gay marriage, using the classic slippery slope argument, universally condemned by the better courts, and, one would hope, by the better philosophers. It ran somewhat as follows: Gay marriage leads ineluctably to polygamy, polyandry (which he seemed to imply was worse than polygamy), and some sort of group marriage for which there is presently no name. Thankfully, he didn’t see us rushing toward marriages with animals, at least not that I heard. This all seemed grounded in the assumption that the “institution” of marriage had hitherto been static, an ahistorical assumption of the first order.
My only attempt to join the conversation came when someone in the audience said it was time to start means testing Medicare. The philosopher immediately agreed that Medicare was an institution that should definitely be changed, and means testing was a good idea. Anyone who follows this issue knows that these suggestions come from the folks who are actually interested in destroying Medicare. The same argument is made about social security. My perspective was purely political-a means tested Medicare transforms a program with wide public support into a “welfare” program, that is immediately politically vulnerable. Anyone who doesn’t see that is naive. But I never got to speak, because someone from the back began giving a detailed and cogent rebuttal to the notion, from an economist’s perspective. That someone turned out to be Dean Baker, who blogs here, class of ’80, to whom I have often linked. He’s one of those Krugman-like economists to whom no one listens because he’s almost always right. I decided at that point to keep my mouth shut, but also to get a picture with him, which appears below.
So, that was sort of cool, and somewhat made up for having to sit there and steam while the professor bloviated.
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