The Standard Reader

A Chapman University professor, Machan begins his slim volume on a strong note with a cogent critique of the philosophical underpinnings of animal-liberation philosophy. He makes the interesting point that to fabricate a moral equality between humans and animals, animal liberationists obsess on our similarities–such as that both humans and animals feel pain–when a proper and rational analysis would focus instead on our substantive and morally relevant differences. For example, only humans can “produce a culture of science, art, athletics.” We “alone have the capacity for free choice and the responsibility to act ethically.” Indeed, Machan asserts, “human agency” is “the sine qua non of moral worth.”

In contrast, animals live amorally. They may pursue interests, such as filling their bellies and protecting their young. But one cannot possess rights without assuming the concomitant obligation to respect the rights of others, which is totally beyond the ken of animals as they struggle to survive. Animal liberationists and radical environmentalists know this, of course, and so “don’t confront [animals] with any moral arguments [about their actions] no matter how politically incorrect the animals may be toward one another.”

Unfortunately, after a promising start, Machan turns to pushing his radical libertarian philosophy and veers badly off course. He agrees it is wrong to abuse animals but doubts that laws are the way to prevent such cruelty–because they will increase the power of bureaucrats to “run our lives.” But without laws, how could we prevent the horse from being whipped to death or the cat tortured for kicks? Machan believes it would be sufficient to accuse the abuser of a lack of moral character.

The book totally collapses when the author leaps head first into libertarian never-never land in discussing environmental issues. Decrying the “tragedy of the commons,” he argues that the government should “sell off” our unwisely held “common assets–lands, parks, beaches, buildings, forests, lakes, and such–to private parties.” Yes, Machan seriously believes that letting Bill Gates or others rich enough to buy Yellowstone, Central Park, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, or, for that matter, the neighborhood green would be a good thing by liberating our posterity from the burdensome costs of their maintenance. It is such a ridiculous notion–and one he supports with only the barest ideological assertions–that it is hard to take anything Machan writes thereafter seriously.

With radical animal liberationists and environmentalists increasingly impeding human welfare, a book that robustly defends human exceptionalism is sorely needed. But Machan’s hyper-libertarianism isn’t the answer. Indeed, his social Darwinist view of human community is as bad as the misanthropic philosophies he debunks.

—Wesley J. Smith

Eagle Dreams: Searching for Legends in Wild Mongolia by Stephen J. Bodio (Lyons, 216 pp., $22.95). Excerpted in the Atlantic Monthly in 2001, Bodio’s travelogue chronicles an expedition to Mongolia to hunt deer, wolves, and foxes–with eagles. He intersperses his recollections of exhilarating landscapes and breathtaking sportsmanship with the tiny details of the everyday life of people who have preserved the practice of hunting with eagles for centuries at the frozen frontier of western Mongolia. During a visit to a former black market, “a residue of old planned economy times,” the hunting party “stopped in front of hundreds of identical little books, each bound in faux red leather.” When asked about the books, their local companion replied that they are “‘the works of Lenin. There are too many in this country, from when the Russians were here. Now it is sold by weight, for toilet paper. We read Lenin’–he mimed study–‘and then we answer him,’ miming that. ‘Good quality too.'” A few pages later, the author proudly records that “eventually, I answered Lenin without bothering to read him.” Tidbits like this–and the clear explanations of the technical details of the hunt–will amply reward the reader who ventures into such odd literary territory.

—Katherine Mangu-Ward

America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education, edited by Richard D. Kahlenberg (Century Foundation, 199 pp., $14.95). With college costs rising, and a growing number of students taking more than four years to finish, we are rapidly approaching the advent of the quarter-million-dollar bachelor’s degree. This development could well begin to roll back the creeping gains in college matriculation rates we’ve seen over the past forty years, and it represents a real threat to national prosperity. Further, with more and more students graduating with enormous college debt, financing college has become a disincentive to marriage, family, home ownership, and future education–all with serious social costs. Hardest hit in this college-cost squeeze are the poor, who are deterred by education’s cost.

The culprits, according to America’s Untapped Resource, are federal college loan programs. These programs were meant to open the ivied gates to lower-income students, a Robin Hood effort to get the rich to subsidize the education of the poor. Instead, both the poor and the rich have ended up subsidizing the middle class. The rich will go to college regardless of the cost, but the infusion of free money into the system has inflated prices well beyond the means of many low-income students.

Meanwhile, the college admissions process has a built-in bias for middle- and high-income students whose families may become future donors, further reducing the aid available to well-prepared low-income students. The solution, according to America’s Untapped Resource, is economic affirmative action for the academically prepared low-income student, which would focus resources on kids who need them, and a college price tag that more accurately reflects the cost of a four-year education, rather than the present system of loans and other aid to cover the price inflation. Policymakers may also want to encourage no-frills universities that deliver a basic education in a limited number of subjects with few of the amenities that have turned many college campuses into four-year resorts–what community colleges were meant to be before they became job-training and remedial high-school programs. Any discussion of increasing low-income access to college has to start in grade school (as editor Richard Kahlenberg and his contributors recognize), where the college matriculation gap first takes shape. That particular gap continues to widen.

—Justin Torres

Affirmative Action Is Dead: Long Live Affirmative Action by Faye J. Crosby (Yale University Press, 331 pp., $30). Academics engaged in the debate over affirmative action and racial preferences typically put forth some form of the argument that the benefit outweighs the harm. But why, asks psychology professor Faye Crosby in Affirmative Action Is Dead, has it become a settled assumption that affirmative action is harmful, as a routine government function? Crosby insists that opposition to the correction of sex and race disparities in employment and college admissions arises not just from prejudice but from misinformation about how preferential-treatment programs operate. “Just teach people how affirmative action really operates, and controversy will die down,” she writes.

A few pages later, Crosby describes–favorably, of course–a set-aside program. In the 1994 auction of narrow-band radio licenses, businesses owned by women and minorities were allowed to purchase up to thirty licenses at half price. “The program was decried as a ‘huge giveaway,’ but appearances turned out to be deceptive. By opening license purchase to enhanced competition, the program actually forced nondesignated bidders to pay more than they had previously done. The result was a $45 million increase in government revenues.” In fact, few nondesignated businesses celebrated the increase in government revenue at their expense, and certainly many economists would disagree with Crosby’s set-asides as a boon to competition.

Crosby imagines the debilitating effects of stereotyping can be ameliorated–provided administrators constantly reassure beneficiaries that they were chosen solely for their abilities. Administrators also should make sure to justify affirmative action in terms of the benefits of diversity, to avoid messy questions of merit. How all this is not misinformation she does not explain.

Affirmative Action Is Dead makes strong points about public ignorance of the regulations that govern affirmative action, and the book’s discussion of psychological studies examining how preferential treatment affects individuals adds much-needed texture to the usual race-economics gloss. The glaring failure of the book, however, is its dismissive treatment of thoughtful critics of affirmative action. Indeed, Crosby seems to suggest, at one point, that Americans can oppose preferences only by harboring at least an unconscious racism.

—Beth Henary