The “West” tends to forget the fact that Islamic civilisation in Arab Andalusia was at its height many centuries before David Hume and John Locke, Diderot and Immanuel Kant wrote their epochal works.

For two centuries, Arab Andalusia was an incomparable centre of philosophical and scientific scholarship. Muslims, Jews and Christians held critical debates there on all sorts of issues, without fear of religious controversy. The Aristotelian tradition would probably have died out without their work. Dante and Nikolaus Cusanus, Giordano Bruno and Spinoza owe their Islamic teachers just as much as do modern astronomy, logic, optics, mathematics, medicine and not least poetry. As we all know, though, this heyday was not to last.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger

Perhaps one of the most important questions for the future of human society over the next few centuries can be phrased as follows: does the West represent the future of the Middle East, or does the Middle East represent the future of the West?

The modern technology and progress of the secular West and the backwards medieval societies of the Middle East are not static conditions. For centuries, the Islamic world was the center of history, scholarship, science, and religous tolerance, while the West was a rabble of feuding religious kingdoms where art and science were often labelled as heresies. Somehow, through the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, theological institutions lost their supremacy and eventually, a new age of development and discovery began. Meanwhile, the educated, multireligious societies of the Middle East slowly become poorer and degenerated into feuding factions where religious leaders called the shots. That is where things lie today.

The public debate on the topic of asking when will the Middle East modernize assumes the first half of my proposed question is the future—that the West’s enlightened rationalism will inevitably spread to all societies. We also tend to assume that the spread of knowledge, rationalism, technology and social growth would not come at our expense.

Yet is it not possible that, in the future, technological and economic innovation occurs in China, India, and the Middle East, making the West less relevant and poorer? And as the West becomes poorer, unitary religious authorities grow more powerful, such that centuries from now, Christian fundamentalists in the American interior call the shots in their provincial fiefdoms, while enlightened governments in the Middle East are the center of knowledge and power?

Sure, it sounds unlikely looking around the world today. It feels utterly impossible. But that’s essentially what happened to Western civilization about 1500 years ago, as a unified Roman Empire slowly broke up and shattered into countless waring kingdoms where the Pope in Rome manipulated the feuding kingdoms. And this view of the future was more generally discussed in The Illusion of the Progressive Trajectory, in which CA commenters overwhelmingly agreed with me that social progress is not an irreversible trend. What should we say of the benefits of the enlightenment? Which society will benefit in the future from secularism, science and technology?

When thinking about the Islamic world from the perspective of a Westerner, especially as I enjoy my oppulant lifestyle in Dubai and marvel how I live and work in an area that was a dry sand pit a decade ago, I find myself uncomfortable as I wonder to myself: do we represent their future, or do they represent ours?

Educate a boy and you educate only that boy, educate a girl and you educate her entire family.

— Sign in a new school for girls in Afghanistan, as reported by Irshad Manji in a speech at Tufts University, March 30, 2005 (cf. Breaking the Spell, pp. 411)

I speak with some level of qualification—as an underachieving law student who barely survived the nightmarish law school experience and yet managed to have a career (so far!) as a commercial lawyer—when I say that this piece in the LA Times by Mark Greenbaum is spot on. America has hundreds of thousands of lawyers, yet many tens of thousands who never find employment in practice, many thousands who were added to the unemployment roster over the past two years due to the sharp economic downturn, and yet the American Bar Assocation and numerous state legislatures are pushing to open even more law schools.

An abridged version of the article appears below. Every paragraph is basically enough to expand into an entire book chapter.

No more room at the bench
Mark Greenbaum

Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being “a good start”? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys…

From 2004 through 2008, the field grew less than 1% per year on average, going from 735,000 people making a living as attorneys to just 760,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics postulating that the field will grow at the same rate through 2016… the number of new positions is likely to be fewer than 30,000 per year. That is far fewer than what’s needed to accommodate the 45,000 juris doctors graduating from U.S. law schools each year.

Such debt would be manageable if a world of lucrative jobs awaited the newly minted attorneys, but this is not the case. A recent working paper by Herwig Schlunk of Vanderbilt Law School contends that with the exception of some of those at the best schools, going for a law degree is a bad investment and that most students will be “unlikely ever to dig themselves out from” under their debt. This problem is exacerbated by the existing law school system.

Despite the tough job market, new schools continue to sprout like weeds. Today there are 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S., with more on the way, as many have been awarded provisional accreditation. In California alone, there are 21 law schools that are either accredited or provisionally accredited, including the new one at UC Irvine.

The ABA has also refused to create and oversee an independent method of reporting graduate data. Postgraduate employment information generally provides the most useful facts for prospective students to study in deciding whether to go to law school.

In many cases, the data that schools now furnish are based on self-reported information, skewing the results because unemployed and low-paying grads are less likely to report back. Law schools do this because they want the rosiest picture possible for the influential rankings given by U.S. News & World Report. Despite its ample resources, the ABA has rebuffed calls to monitor the schools to get more accurate data, calling the existing framework an effective “honor system.”

Based on what happened with the accreditation task force, the ABA is not likely to force change; it is too intertwined with the law schools. ABA groups—such as the task force, which was chaired by a former dean—are stacked with school officials who have no incentive to change the status quo.

The author thinks the solution is to regulate and limit the power of the ABA in accrediting law schools, in a similar limitation on the influence of the bodies that oversea the medical profession, and maybe he’s right—although I tend to take a more cynical view and think that the complicity with the reckless expansion of the profession is far broader. (I’m looking at you, US state legistlatures!)

I’m going to repost as an independent post what I wrote as a comment on one of Chirol’s posts almost four years ago regarding languages, and what languages to learn. I was reminded of this topic because of Younghusband’s post on preparing your child for the ComingAnarchy, as I wrote my comment based on what languages I wanted my kids to study.

With regards to prioritizing language education, I consider five languages to be in the “first tier.” To rank them in general order of importance:

1. English (North America, Britain, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, most international cities: The international language, hands down.
2. Spanish (Spain, Latin America, large US cities): A language used broadly in the Western Hemisphere and increasingly in the United States.
3. Chinese (China, Singapore, elsewhere): Not yet used much outside China, but a language spoken by a billion people with real potential to become an international language in the 21st century.
4. French (France, much of Africa, Quebec, Iran): It’s international prestige is shrinking, but it remains popular in many former French colonies, and a vital language if you are working with any business that has any connection to France, due to the preference of the French to speak their own language.
5. Russian (Russia, former USSR, former satellites): The Russian language will shrink in importance as former satellites move to other, more international languages—Mongolia being one example. But for now, it remains the language of intercultural communication in places such as Kazakhstan and more useful than Turkish, which may well replace it in the coming decades.
   These languages have intercontinental importance. All but Russian will stay in the top tier for the rest of our lifetime.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bullshit Promises

Curtis Bridgeman
Florida State University – College of Law

Karen Sandrik
affiliation not provided to SSRN

September 2, 2008
FSU College of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 314

Abstract:
A few years ago, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published an essay provocatively entitled, “On Bullshit.” Convinced both that our society is laden with bullshit and that we nevertheless do not have a clear idea of what it is, Frankfurt set out to explain what bullshit is and to distinguish it from lying. While the liar seeks to lead his listener to a false belief, the bullshitter is unconcerned with truth altogether. Although the project sounds at first like the essence of philosophical navel-gazing, Frankfurt was trying to make an important point about how this indifference to truth has caused us to lose our way a bit in philosophical and political discourse.

In this project, we draw on Frankfurt’s work to point out a disturbing trend in contract law: the use of bullshit promises. Bullshit promises are promises that are in a certain sense insincere even though they are not lying promises, at least not in a sense that would be actionable under the tort of promissory fraud. Promissory fraud is available in cases where a party makes a promise that it has no intention to keep, and it does so in order to deceive the promisee about its intentions. But it is quite common today for parties, especially companies dealing with consumers, to make promises that are not lying promises in that the promisor is not concealing an intention not to perform, but that are nevertheless insincere. In such cases a party uses promissory language but elsewhere reserves the right not to perform, or to change the terms of performance unilaterally as it sees fit. Such promises are not necessarily lying, especially if the promisor does not at the time have a specific plan to change the terms, but they are usually bullshit. By simply leaving its options open a party can help itself to the benefits of promissory language without being subject to the norms associated with promising, in particular some sort of commitment to a particular course of action. The tort of promissory fraud as now applied is not able to address this problem, but we will suggest minor modifications in both contract and tort that should help. At the very least, it is time courts and commentators recognized the phenomenon of bullshit promises and the potential challenges they create.