Author: paulschumaker34

The roots of my pluralism

~ paulschumaker34

With his appreciation of the many good things in life and the conflicting views among people about the best principles for living a good life, and with his advocacy of moderation in the pursuit of various conflicting ideals, Aristotle was perhaps the leading ancient inspiration for pluralism. But prior to understanding Aristotle, pluralist sensibilities were instilled in me.

During the basketball season, the local newspaper ran stories about the upcoming games of the Appleton High School Terrors, and these stories usually focused on a particular member of the team, with his photo accompanying the story. When I was featured, the caption read, “Paul Schumaker, the most versatile Terror.” That seemed accurate, if a bit generous. I certainly was not a great shooter, rebounder, defender, penetrator, or passer, but I could do each of things reasonably well. I grasped “versatile” as a reasonable characterization of my identity. While in college, I encountered the theory that some early success plays a huge role in people’s development, and I realized that being recognized as versatile back in high school had prompted me to want to become more versatile in all things.

In college, I double majored. I was initially an economics major, as I wanted to ensure that I had sufficient marketable skills to live a comfortable life. But then I also became a philosophy major, as Professor Burrell mentored me and stressed the importance of being “a Renaissance man.” He taught the limits of being an “economic man” and having material comforts, and so prompted me to explore various conceptions of the good society and the good life. Just before graduating from Beloit College, I was dumbfounded when a group of faculty congratulated me on being elected to Phi Beta Kappa. How was that possible? I was a good but not a great student, and my GPA was just above the cutoff line for admission to this honorary society. “Well, yes,” I was told, “but you had a very well-rounded set of experiences and interests here at Beloit that we thought merited this recognition.” Sweet, but again, generous.

I had been accepted to pursue graduate work in economics at the University of Wisconsin, but I wasn’t all that eager to focus on economics. Then I learned that it was possible for me to enter other graduate programs at UW, as long as such departments would have me. I spent a couple of days in Madison, visiting with chairs and directors of graduate studies in the departments of economics, philosophy, history, sociology, and (finally) political science. None seemed too eager to have me, until the chair of political science said, “Well, you have almost no background in poli sci, but I like your economics and philosophy. You’d be a good experiment. Why don’t we give it a shot for a semester or two and see how you do?” I did well enough that they offered me full funding as a trainee in methodology beginning the next year. So I became very busy trying to catch up on the basics of American and international politics, as well as trying to master quantitative analysis and econometrics. But I missed philosophy, and thus decided to treat myself by taking one course in political theory every semester, even though I had been led to believe that jobs in theory were scarce and, perhaps, non-existent.

While at UW, I had married and, imbued with some feminist sensibilities, I had promised my wife that I would pump gas if necessary in Lawrence, while she finished her graduate studies at the University of Kansas. But hoping for some sort of academic position, I sent out applications to various universities and colleges throughout Kansas and Missouri, packaging myself as an Americanist and methodologist.  I was invited to interview at KU for, of all things, a job in (empirical) political theory. This was beyond my wildest dreams. Despite believing that no such job was available anywhere, I was being offered a job focusing on my primary interest in my ideal location. During the interview, I asked how they had picked me out given how I advertised myself. The chair said, “Your transcript revealed that you were duplicitous, that your true love was political theory.” Sweet!  My diverse interests again paid off.

Not that the Political Science Department at KU provided an ideal job. The Department was not highly regarded in the national political science ratings. Its faculty was comprised of some very nice folks, but they tended to be pretty focused on their teaching responsibilities and seemed rather parochial. As I was receiving tenure, my wife was completing her Ph.D. and getting a job at KU. In those days, it was unusual for an academic couple to get employment at the same institution, so I realized that it would be better for me to try to improve the department I was in, rather than seek a better job elsewhere. I was asked to be Associate Chair of the Department with most of my responsibilities in the area of faculty recruitment. Within a few years, we managed to improve our faculty significantly, and I was widely viewed as the heir apparent to chair the Department. But after four years of administrative service, I realized I wanted to disperse my energies, devote much more time to teaching, research, and fathering my young sons. I realized that advancing to the higher realms of my profession required specialization and focus, but I saw myself as a generalist who wanted to understand and experience life broadly.

Before turning 40, I knew I was some sort of pluralist, and that this orientation would mark my professional career in teaching, research, and administrative service, and that it would also mark my life beyond academia. It remained to work out more clearly what it meant to be a pluralist. As I began my career, the profession was searching for a comprehensive approach for understanding politics; to be a true scientific discipline it was thought by many scholars in the field that a paradigm was needed, and pluralism enjoyed the status as a leading contender to be the empirical theory of politics. But criticisms of the leading formulations of pluralism were plentiful, and many, if not most, political scientists abandoned pluralism. Given my predispositions and investments in pluralist perspectives, I thought it should be saved, even if that required its undergoing significant revisions.

Reflections on my birth

~ paulschumaker34

On the evening of July 27, 1946, the NTF (the Natural Talent Fairy, sometimes known as God) made a fateful mistake. The NTF’s job is to distribute various natural talents to newborns, just as the tooth fairy puts dimes under the pillows of kids when they lose their baby teeth. Of course, the NTF’s job is much more important than that of the tooth fairy; that’s why he is often referred to as the Supreme Being.

Anyway, the NTF is not as omniscient and infallible as sometimes alleged. He thought that Paul Schumaker was due to be born on August 10, and was unaware that Paul had popped out of his mother Ruth’s womb two weeks early. He learned of Paul’s early arrival only when he stopped by Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital (in Appleton Wisconsin) a few hours later to bestow his planned endowments on Charles McKee. However, before he saw Chuck, who was emerging into this world from the womb of a joyful Betty, he noticed Paul being suckled by the exhausted Ruth. He was aghast by his mistake, as he knew it was already too late to provide Paul with his allotment of natural talents. Since Paul had already been part of the social world for six hours, any talents that he might acquire would not be gifts from God, but rather would have to be earned. The NTF thus made two decisions. First, he decided to compensate Paul for his lack of natural talent by giving him generous amounts of determination, discipline, and spunk. Second, when Chuck gave out his first cry of life, the NTF gave him the talents intended for Paul, as well as those that he had planned to give Chuck. Chuck got a double-dose of talents, so to speak.

These events explain much about Paul and Chuck, especially their political views. Both became bleeding-heart liberals. Both adopted the belief that those having undeserved natural disadvantages (e.g., those born with mental or physical handicaps) or being raised in adverse social conditions (e.g., those subject to social prejudices or living in poverty) should be compensated for their limitations. They came to believe that the broader political communities to which they belonged had moral and political obligations to provide public assistance to the disadvantaged.

Realizing that he had been gypped in the natural talent lottery, Paul thought that the only way he could live a good life was for the beliefs of bleeding-heart liberalism to be widely embraced in the broader community. Only then would the public accept their responsibilities to help him survive with his limited talents and, more importantly, to assist all those who unluckily had been born with undeserved genetic limitations or raised in undeserved difficult conditions. Paul used his discipline and determination to become a professor of political theory who taught his students the importance of empathy for the disadvantaged, whether that be expressed in the public philosophies of liberalism, socialism, or (compassionate) conservatism. In his mind, he was able to live a decent life as a public servant educating youth about moral and political theory – even if some right-wingers criticized such work as corrupting the minds of our gullible youth. More libertarian students thought Paul was too partisan because the theories he emphasized assumed it was legitimate to tax and otherwise regulate the behavior of the well-off to provide public assistance to the poorly endowed. Paul thus had to monitor many classroom debates over whether acquired riches were primarily a function of efforts, ambitions, and good choices that merited great wealth for some or whether they were a result of unmerited luck in the distribution of natural and social inheritances.

Chuck came to realize that he had received far more than his fair share of natural talents. Among the talents bestowed on him on that fateful July 28 morning were the perceptiveness and intelligence to realize that his talents were unearned and undeserved; they were simply gifts that God had luckily bestowed upon him. He thus put his talents to work in the service of the public good (earning the gratitude of thousands of ailing patients) and social justice (becoming an outspoken adherent to bleeding-heart liberalism).

As a footnote, it can be observed that Chuck was always a bit pissed that Paul arrived two weeks early, besting him in the “race to life.” He thus decided to use some of his talents thereafter to best Paul in the “races of life.” Being kind-hearted, however, Chuck used his superior talents in ways that benefitted Paul.

Upon beating out Paul for the position of point guard on the Appleton High School Terrors, Chuck decided to always play basketball with reckless abandon, knowing that if and when he got into foul trouble, Paul would be given the opportunity to bring his limited talent but extensive spunk to his role as 6th man on the team, and make some modest contributions to the many victories enjoyed by the team. This role had the subsequent importance of instilling in Paul an appreciation of communitarian moral and political philosophy as an important compliment to liberalism. Paul realized that he was not just liberalism’s atomistic individual or “unencumbered self,” a free agent in pursuit of his personal autonomy and well-being. He came to realize that a good life could be had only when people identify with the communities to which they belong, accept their roles in these communities, and discharge to the best of their abilities their responsibilities to the common good and to their fellow citizens.

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Chuck convinced Chip, Rick, and I to ride our bikes across Iowa during the 2013 Ragbrai

In subsequent years, Chuck made it a habit to prod Paul into joining him in various new sporting endeavors that Chuck had already mastered, ensuring his emerging victorious in subsequent competitions in roller-blading, cross-country skiing, sail-boarding, biking, pickelball and other games whose names can’t even be remembered. But, Paul accepted such subordination because political theory had taught him that there were no injustices in unequal outcomes that derived from activities undertaken under rules to which he had fully and genuinely consented and that benefitted the least advantaged. Despite the many losses he suffered and his hopes for more equal results, he was being given access to new activities that contributed to his happiness, health, and having a good life.