Ratio Juris

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part II)

2012-01-30T02:27:00.002-05:00

[The series was introduced in our prior post.]

‘[E]motions can reveal value that they contain. But in addition, people’s characters and their value can be revealed by emotions. [….] [E]motions reveal not just our values and evaluations but much of our interior and exterior worlds….’—Michael Stocker (with Elizabeth Hegeman)

‘Emotions may show valuings rather than value: how a person values something, not the value something has or the value the person takes it to have, Sometimes people have emotions that contain and reveal valuings, not values; and sometimes people have emotions that reveal a lack of valuing, even in the face of acknowledged value.’—Michael Stocker (with Elizabeth Hegeman)

Emotions can be evaluatively accurate and informative, therefore we can justly say that emotions are epistemologically important for evaluations and evaluative knowledge.

‘[T]he values and evaluations of one’s having or not having certain emotions, and of the ways one has or does not have them, are rarely, if ever, central to our important ethical works, and they are often enough not even mentioned, much less discussed, in those works [among a few notable exceptions, Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, 1970, is mentioned]. However, I do not think that their absence from our works on ethics shows that these issues lack importance. I think, rather, that it shows an important lack, and indeed something of a lack of importance, in our work in ethics.’—Michael Stocker (with Elizabeth Hegeman)

‘[We] should respect our emotional responses and listen to what they have to say to us and about us. But they are not the final arbiter: our emotional responses should be held for examination and reflection. Of course, this cannot be done from an emotionless, purely rational perspective, for there is no such standpoint, but it should be done in the light of reason and of our other emotional responses to the other things we value. And if this examination and reflections shows that our emotional responses are not appropriate, then the emotion should cease.’—Peter Goldie

‘Values enter into the very definition of what a fact is; the realm of facts cannot be defined or specified without utilizing certain values. Values enter into the process of knowing a fact; without utilizing or presupposing certain values, we cannot determine which is the realm of facts, we cannot know the real from the unreal.’—Robert Nozick

Rational acceptability in the natural sciences depends ‘on such cognitive virtues as “coherence” and “functional simplicity,” show[ing] that at least some value terms stand for properties of the things they are applied to, and not just for feelings of the person who uses the terms.’—Hilary Putnam

Our knowledge of the world presupposes values, indeed, what comes to count as the real world depends upon our values. This is evidenced in the ‘implicit standards and skills on the basis of which we decide whether someone is able to give a true, adequate, and perspicuous account of even the simplest perceptual facts…’—Hilary Putnam

‘[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence “The cat is on the mat.” If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions “cat,” “on,” and “mat”—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category “cat” because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species as given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category “mat” because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category “on” because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, “the cat is on the mat,” and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, “the cat is on the mat” would be as irrational as “the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76” would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (‘considerate,’ ‘selfish’). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.’—Hilary Putnam

‘There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between “facts” and “values”—and to draw it in such a way that “values” are put outside the realm of rational argument altogether. For one thing, it is much easier to say, “that’s a value judgment,” meaning, “that’s just a matter of subjective preference,” than to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination.’—Hilary Putnam

‘(1) In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not. [….] (2) Whether a statement is warranted or no is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted. (3) Our norms and standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time. (4) Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general. (5) Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility—are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards.’—Hilary Putnam

‘The moral life is not intermittent or specialised, it is not a peculiar or separate area of our existence…. [W]e are always deploying and directing our energy, refining it or blunting it, purifying it or corrupting it…. “Sensitivity” is a word which may be in place here…. Happenings in consciousness so vague as to be almost non-existent can have “moral colour”… (“But are you saying that every single second has a moral tag?” Yes, roughly.)’—Iris Murdoch

Because our states of consciousness and action presuppose perceptual (or epistemic) discrimination, any such discrimination is subject to moral evaluation.

‘The moral point is that “facts” are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways, various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being.’—Iris Murdoch

‘In recognizing the compelling power of values, and of logical principles (their normative, or what is sometimes called their ‘magnetic quality’), we humans are plainly recognizing something that goes beyond the observed facts of the natural world. And the theistic outlook now proposes to interpret these features as signifying the presence, beyond the empirical world, of a transcendent supernatural domain that is by its very nature normative—rational and moral. The two principal categories of the normative, the rational and the good, are features which traditional theology has held to apply to God in virtue of his very nature. God is goodness itself (Aquinas), he is the Logos—ultimate rationality (St. John). In short, beyond, or behind, the observable universe—the sequence of events that is simply one contingent happening after another—there is for the theist a domain of eternal value and reason, a domain that impinges on our empirical world, making us respond to something beyond the mere sequence brute facts. We human creatures (since we are ourselves rational and moral beings, at least in part) are responsive to reason and value, and in being so responsive we participate, however dimly, in the divine nature.’—John Cottingham

Facts & Values, Truth & Objectivity—An Introduction (Part I)

2012-01-28T09:04:00.001-05:00

The following are snippets from various philosophers representative, I believe, of their thoughts on facts and values, and questions of truth and objectivity.* I have occasionally interjected my own formulations based on their views. I hope these often provocative and perspicuous reflections will prod one into exploring the articles and books from which they were drawn as found in the list of “sources and further reading” appended to the end of the material (with Part III). It is there that you will find the various arguments and explanations that make full sense of these passages as found in their original context. Although I teach in a Philosophy Department, the bulk of my formal training is in the study of religions, thus I’m an autodidact and amateur when it comes to (especially ‘professional’) philosophy. I suspect that is the case with most of our readers. Nonetheless, lack of formal training in this regard should not preclude us from assiduously cultivating an ardent interest in philosophical topics, particularly those having to do with such conventional subject areas as metaphysics, ethics, epistemology, the philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, or, for example, questions of consciousness, “meaning,” beauty, value, objectivity, “the good,” and truth more generally.

* Please bear in mind that, as David Wiggins reminds us, the “fact-value” distinction is not identical to the “is-ought” or “is-must” distinction, even if on occasion they overlap.

[This introductory series will be in three parts.]

Value(s) ‘refer to what is worth having or being, taken purely for its own sake, or what is such that (taken by itself, apart from anything it causes) it is preferable that it exist rather than not exist.’—Joel Kupperman

Value means goodness as an end: that which is worthwhile or desirable for its own sake.

We choose or determine that there be values, that they exist, but their character is independent of us.

To judge that something is good is to judge that it is properly valued.

Values are ‘intrinsic goods’ that by their nature enhance a life, that make a fundamental and positive contribution to human flourishing (eudaimonia).

‘Most philosophers who have written on the question of what has intrinsic value have not been hedonists; like Plato and Aristotle, they have thought that something besides pleasure and pain has intrinsic value. One of the most comprehensive lists of intrinsic goods that anyone has suggested is that given by William Frankena (1908-1994). It is this: life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one’s own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor and esteem, etc. (Presumably a corresponding list of intrinsic evils could be provided.) Almost any philosopher who has ever addressed the question of what has intrinsic value will find his or her answer represented in some way by one or more items on Frankena’s list. (Frankena himself notes that he does not explicitly include in his list the communion with and love and knowledge of God that certain philosophers believe to be the highest good, since he takes them to fall under the headings of ‘knowledge’ and ‘love.’) One conspicuous omission from the list, however, is the increasingly popular view that certain environmental entities or qualities have intrinsic value (although Frankena may again assert that these are implicitly represented by one or more items already on the list). Some find intrinsic value, for example, in certain “natural” environments (wilderness untouched by human hand); some find it in certain animal species; and so on.’—Michael J. Zimmerman

‘That which is extrinsically good is good, not (insofar as its extrinsic value is concerned) for its own sake, but for the sake of something else to which it is related in some way. For example, the goodness of helping others in time of need is plausibly thought to be extrinsic (at least in part), being derivative (at least in part) from the goodness of something else, such as these people’s needs being satisfied, or their experiencing pleasure, to which helping them is related in some causal way.’—Michael J. Zimmerman

Value judgments are implicit in emotions and in judgments that at first glance may not appear evaluative. Emotional states often function as indicators of our scale of values, of our appreciation and awareness of values.

‘[W]e notice something marked in the intentional perceptions and the beliefs characteristic of the emotions: they are concerned with value, they see their object as invested with value or importance. [….] The value perceived in the object appears to be of a particular sort. It appears to make reference to the person’s own flourishing. The object of the emotion is seen as important for some role it plays in the person’s own life. […] Another way of putting this point…is that the emotions appear to be eudaimonistic, that is, concerned with the person’s flourishing. And thinking for a moment about ancient Greek eudaimonistic ethical theories will help us to start thinking about the geography of the emotional life. In a eudaimonistic ethical theory, the central question asked a person is, “How should a human being live?” The answer to that question is the person’s conception of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, a complete human life. A conception of eudaimonia is taken to be inclusive of all to which the agent ascribes intrinsic value: if one can show someone that she has omitted something without which she would not think her life complete, then that is a sufficient argument for the addition of the item in question. Now the important point is this: in a eudaimonistic theory, the actions, relations, and persons that are included in the conception are not all valued simply on account of some instrumental relation they bear to the agent’s satisfaction. This is a mistake commonly made about such theories, under the influence of Utilitarianism and the misleading use of “happiness” as a translation for eudaimonia. Not only virtuous actions but also mutual relations of civic or personal love and friendship, in which the object is loved and benefited for his or her own sake, can qualify as constituent parts of a person’s eudaimonia. On the other hand, they are valued as constituents of a life that is my life and not someone else’s, as my actions, as people who are in some relation with me. For example, an Aristotelian really pursues social justice as a good in its own right: that is why she has put it into her conception of eudaimonia. She doesn’t want just any old conception, she wants the one that values things aright, in the way that a human being ought to. Once she puts it into her conception, however, she both seeks the intrinsic good of justice and seeks to be a person who performs just actions for their own sake.’—Martha Nussbaum

‘In reflecting about how a human being should live, a person may commend some very general goals as good for human beings in general: for example, friendship, parental love, civic responsibility. But she will also deliberate about which more concrete specification of each of these general ends she will prefer; some of this work still involves asking which specifications are to be commended for human beings in general. At some point in the process, however, we get to items that are not commended for all human beings, but are just her own ways of realizing the general human ends in her situation and context. For example, if the general goal were artistic cultivation and performance, she might realize this by playing the clarinet, but she would believe that other human beings can equally well realize it by dancing, or singing, or playing the oboe.’—Martha Nussbaum

‘If we ask what most people value most, the answers will fall mainly under three headings: ongoing features of one’s life (e.g., love, sets of personal relationships, a sense of success or achievement), particular experiences (e.g., moments of heightened awareness, or of euphoria or ecstasy), or things (e.g., money, expensive or attractive objects—perhaps only as a means, but very possibly for their own sake as well)’.—Joel Kupperman

‘To see something (e.g., a set of experiences, a way of life) as having high value is often to be motivated to promote it for other people in general, or to make it available to the people one most cares about, or to have for oneself.’—Joel Kupperman

‘Value or preciousness of persons has a dual role in my interpersonal actions. Your value generates a moral claim or constraint on my behavior toward you; because of your value, others (including me) ought to behave toward you in some ways, not in others. Also, my value is expressed in how I am best off behaving, in the kind of behavior that should flow from a being with my value, in how that value is shown or maintained in action. My value fixes what behavior should flow from me; your value fixes what behavior should flow toward you. Value manifests itself as a push and as a pull.’—Robert Nozick

There is a value cost to immoral behavior: The immoral life is a less valuable life than the moral one. ‘The immoral person thinks…his immoral behavior costs him nothing. But that is not true; he pays the cost of having a less valuable existence. He pays that penalty, though he doesn’t feel it or care about it.’—Robert Nozick

Structurally speaking, intrinsic value appears to be characterized by some degree of organic unity in which such unity suggests that the value of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Values are abstract structures that can be realized in various ways. For instance, a work of music can exemplify and refer to values.

‘Values are to be brought about, maintained, saved from destruction, prized and valued (where this last is some descriptive term of psychology plus the theory of action).’ We ought to ‘care about, accept, support, affirm, encourage, protect, guard, praise, seek, embrace, serve, be drawn toward, be attracted by, aspire toward, strive to realize, foster, express, nurture, delight in, respect, be inspired by, take joy in, resonate with, be loyal to, be dedicated to, celebrate values. With the very highest values, we are to be elevated by, enthralled by, love, adore, revere, be exalted by be awed before, find ecstasy in these highest values.’—Robert Nozick

‘We are born, as social animals, into a cultural world of value and disvalue—a world where certain things matter, as harmful, dangerous, comforting, warming and so on. If we have been brought up in the right way, we will be disposed reliably to recognize these values and disvalues and to respond as we should: as Aristotle says: “at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, and in the right way.” And if this happens, then we will care in the right way about the things that matter: not simply caring for justice and kindness as if for some vague idea, but caring that particular people in particular circumstances are treated as they should be—with fairness, honesty and consideration, so that we get angry (justifiably angry) if this doesn’t happen. It will become “second nature” to have these responses, so that our own interests narrowly conceived, are quite naturally far from being our only consideration in deciding what to do. Being disposed reliably to be motivated by specifically other-regarding moral considerations is part of what it is to have a virtue.’—Peter Goldie

‘There are some individuals whose lives are infused by values, who pursue values with single-minded purity and intensity, who embody value to the greatest extent. These individuals glow with a special radiance. Epochal religious figures often have this quality. To be in their presence (or even to hear about them) is to be uplifted and drawn (at least temporarily) to pursue the best in oneself. There are less epochal figures as well, glowing with a special moral and value loveliness, whose presence uplifts us, whose example lures and inspires us.’— Robert Nozick

‘Values are organic unities; something is intrinsically valuable in accordance with its degree of organic unity. However, it does not follow that the realm of values itself exhibits high organic unity, that diverse and apparently conflicting values can be united in some higher unity or larger harmony. [Plato would say that the realm of values does exhibit a higher unity or harmony insofar as it is, in the beginning and in the end, so to speak, and to speak metaphysically, part of the Good.] The theme of the ineradicable plurality of values, of the conflict between different values that cannot all be realized, a theme presented in Antigone and later tragedies, has been subordinated in the history of philosophy to the theme or hope of the harmonious reconciliation of all values. Recently, however, the pluralism of values has received renewed attention.’ [This is true, but the pluralism of values does not rule out, in theory, the possible harmonious reconciliation of all values.] ’—Robert Nozick

‘A person who tracks bestness, who seeks value, will have to formulate her own package of value realization; she cannot simply “maximize” on the value dimension. This package need not be an aggregate, it can pattern and unify the diverse values it realizes. In thus patterning value, the person may emulate a previous pattern exhibited by a value exemplar, or described in some tradition, or she may create a new complex unity, sculpting the value contours of her life in an original, perhaps unique way. Some significant part of the vividness of characters we read about in fiction, history, or religious texts or scriptures is their individuality in (valuable) value contouring.’—Robert Nozick

‘We value being a unique self, and come therefore also to value the particular unique self someone is. Valuing that there is a unique self spills over to valuing, for itself, that unique self there is.’—Robert Nozick

‘[T]he perfectionist aspiration to self-development…to a harmoniously hierarchically ordered being [cf. here Plato’s distinguishing and ranking of the rational, spirited and appetitive parts of the soul]…[should not] be interpreted as a denigration of what one hopes to improve on or of others not so intent. If we are to strive for a state judged higher, then something also must be ranked lower: to judge something as less than the best need not involve any elitist contempt for it.’—Robert Nozick

‘It is not implausible to think we are elevated by others who are more developed than ourselves in their striving for harmonious hierarchical development and for a valuable life. We are aided and encouraged along our own path of development by their striving for self-development and purer feeling; contrast the effects on us of encountering those with a sour mixture of one-upmanship, self-aggrandizement, desire to dominate or destroy, and other festering emotions, the effects of wending our way and bending our attention, to their motivations and trajectories. Just as a cacophony of urban noise is an intrusion if your are trying to listen to a string quartet or compose your own, so a person in the course of his own self-improvement or development will want, if merely as a means, to help raise the developmental level of those around him (or else to move into an isolated community of like-spirited persons). He will want to help them along. Even if a person were able to maintain his level and rate of (spiritual) advance and development unperturbed by others around him [like Plotinus!], not dragged down by them no matter what their state, he would still lack the benefits of associating with others who are equally or more developed. First, there is the benefit of being helped along by good examples and good companions. We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed or lured or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. Second, there is the joy in encountering a like person, in the experience of the other and in the mutual recognition of the mutual joy. The most intense delights, surely, are these experiences, at least as they combine with, enrich, and transfigure other delights more frequently listed. One awful psychological deformity is the resentment of excellence, not merely the inability to delight or take pleasure in it—bad enough—but the envious desire for its absence. To avoid being the object of such envy, people will hide their own excellence and camouflage their delight in it. Not only does this deprive others of the encouragement of an example, and of the opportunity for happy mutual recognition, it also alters the person’s own experience. She does not simply feel the same delight only without expressing it; an unexpressed delight is not as delightful. Resentment and envy of moral and spiritual excellence is most awful. [….] At any rate, persons developing in value will not feel or dwell in such envy; they will seek out opportunities to share the joy of being on and moving along their path. They will aid others in their own (spiritual or developmental) advance, for the pleasure of their company. (In thus aiding, they will not focus their attention upon their own pleasure but rather upon what brings that pleasure—the developed state of the others.) There is a third reason for wanting other equally or more developed persons around: their appreciation is especially worth having. In a loving relationship with another adult, the worth of what they give, including themselves, depends partially upon their estimation of themselves—whether they give something they hold precious and valuable. [….] The developed or developing person will wish for like companions, for inspiring examples to aid him along his path, for joyous company, and for meaningful affirmation of his own worth. This is the opposite of the desire to be surrounded by submissive people less developed than oneself, the desire that they be less developed.’—Robert Nozick

‘The developed person will want to help perfect others; this is the most important aid he can give them. We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others flourish.—Robert Nozick

‘[T]he investigation into what is worth our caring about is a quest for self-understanding, an attempt to make sense of our own valuational responses to the world.’—Elizabeth Anderson

‘[P]eople interpret and justify their valuations by exchanging reasons for them with the aim of reaching a common point of view from which others can achieve and reflectively endorse one another’s valuations. To judge that one’s valuations make sense is to judge that they would be endorsed from that hypothetical point of view. To be rational is to be suitably responsive to reasons offered by those attempting to reach that point of view.’—Elizabeth Anderson

‘[T]he grounds of a person’s reflectively held values (if she has any) lie in her conceptions of what kind of person she ought to be, what kinds of character, attitudes, concerns, and commitments she should have. I call such self-conceptions ideals. Ideals are objects not merely of desire but of aspiration. [….] Ideals give us perspectives from which to articulate and scrutinize the way we value things.’—Elizabeth Anderson

‘[M]oral development leads to self-identification and autonomous, self-directed living, but is associative as an interdependence based in a division of labor with respect to the realization of values. The self-fulfilling life of each person requires more values than he or she personally realizes and is dependent upon other for these values. The principle of this form of association is the complementarity of perfected differences. Accordingly this meaning of “autonomy,” if the term is to be applicable, must be consistent with interdependence. [This] means, not total self-sufficiency, but determining for oneself what one’s contributions to others should be and what use to make of the values provided by the self-fulfilling lives of others. To follow the lead of another person in a matter he or she understands better than we is not a lapse from autonomy into heteronomy but a mark of wisdom. [….] [T]he self here is conceived of as a task, a piece of work, namely the work of self-actualization. And self-actualization is the progressive objectivizing of subjectivity, ex-pressing it into the world. This recognition exposes as a fallacy the modern use of “objective” and “subjective” as mutually exclusive categories. Every human impulse in subjective in its origin and objective in its intentional outcome, and because its outcome is within it implicitly from its inception, there is nothing in personhood that is ‘merely subjective,’ that is, subjective in the exclusive sense. Narcissism (with which individualism is sometimes charged) is a pathology that tries to amputate from subjectivity its objective issue. It is real enough, and was a propensity of some romantic individualisms that judged experience by the occasions it affords for the refinement of the individual’s sensibilities. But the supposition that individualism is narcissistic subjectivism represents (again) a failure to recognize divergent kinds of individualism. For eudaimonistic individualism, it is the responsibility of persons to actualize objective value in the world.’—David L. Norton

‘[People] differ in temperament, interests, intellectual ability, aspirations, natural bent, spiritual quests, and the kind of life they wish to lead. They diverge in the values they have and have different weightings for the values they share. (They wish to live in different climates—some in mountains, plains, deserts, seashores, cities, towns.) There is no reason to think that there is one community which will serve as ideal for all people and much reason to think that there is not. [….] For each person, so far as objective criteria of goodness can tell (insofar as these exist), there is a wide range of very different kinds of life that tie as best; no other is objectively better for him than any other one in this range, and no one within the range is objectively better than any other.’—Robert Nozick

‘[Moral values] refer to things we consider worth cherishing and realizing in our lives. Since judgments of worth are based on reasons, values are things we have good reasons to cherish, which in our well-considered views deserve our allegiance and ought to form part of the good life. Universal moral values are those we have good reasons to believe to be worthy of the allegiance of all human beings, and are in that sense universally valid or binding. Moral values are meant for beings like us and intended to regulate our lives. Reasons relevant to a discussion of them are therefore of several kinds, such as our assessment of our moral capacities, what we take to be our basic tendencies and limits, the likely consequences of pursuing certain values, their compatibility, the ease with which they can be combined into a coherent way of life, and the past and present experience of societies that lived by them.’—Bhikhu Parekh

A Revolutionary Spiritual Praxis

2012-01-24T03:20:00.005-05:00

Paul Wilson, translator of several of Václav Havel’s works, including his celebrated Letters to Olga (1983/1988), and one-time member of the underground band, The Plastic People of the Universe, has an eloquent and moving remembrance in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:

[….] “[Havel’s] vision [was] based on a democratic politics underpinned by a strong civil society and rooted in common decency, morality, and respect for the rule of law and human rights; a politics that sought to transcend racial, cultural, and religious differences by articulating a ‘moral minimum’ that Havel believed existed at the heart of most faiths and cultures and that would provide a basis for agreement and cooperation without sacrificing the unique gifts that each person, each culture, and each ‘sphere of civilization’ could bring to enrich modern life. [....]

Like many great Czechs before him, Havel insisted on the importance of truth, but with a difference. ‘Truth and love,’ he was fond of saying, ‘must prevail over lies and hatred.’ He was often ridiculed for what seemed like a Hallmark sentiment (‘Why love?’ people asked), but he defended the slogan by referring to one of his greatest insights: truth, by itself, is a malleable concept that depends for its truthfulness on who utters it, to whom it is said, and under what circumstances. As a playwright, Havel turned this insight into a dramatic device: in most of his plays, the main characters constantly lie to one another and to themselves, using words that, in other circumstances, would be perfectly truthful. Truth by itself is not enough: it needs a guarantor, someone to stand behind it. It must be uttered with no thought for gain, that is, in Havel’s words, with a love that seeks nothing for itself and everything for others.*

We are close to religious territory here, and indeed, in the week of leave-taking in Prague, I heard many discussions about Havel’s true beliefs. Was he a Catholic and, if not, was the high mass in St. Vitus’s Cathedral the right way to send him off? Yes, replied some, he had been raised a Catholic and been confirmed as a young man. Sister Veritas said she felt that Havel was “with God” more profoundly than many observant Catholics, but she admitted that he had neither asked for nor received the last rites before he died. One of his last conversations was with the Dalai Lama, whom he considered a spiritual guru. But in the circumstances, such questions seemed inconsequential, even scholastic. Havel was a deeply spiritual man who expressed his spirituality, if that is the right word, almost entirely through his actions in the world.” [….]

Hat tip to Mark Edwards, who let me know of this essay (I’ve yet to receive my hard copy of the NYRB) in his latest installment at Concurring Opinions: “Vaclav Havel, Part V: Prison, Torment and Temptation.”

Image: (Courtesy of the NYRB) Tomki Němec—Václav Havel visiting Ruzyně Prison, where he had once been incarcerated, Prague, March 1990.

On the Etiology of What Economically Ails Us (updated)

2012-01-22T13:05:00.001-05:00

At New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, Mark Lance writes:

“There is an important article in today’s NYT. What is fascinating about this account of Apple’s iphone production in Asia is not the usual left criticism of Asian working conditions. That is mentioned. Work is structured in an authoritarian manner, for low pay, and with long hours. But a good case is made here that this is not the main issue. Rather, the US simply lacks the economic and educational infrastructure to get the job done at all.

It would be nice if the NYT would delve into the causes of all this. They note that we lack the relevant numbers of workers with the relevant skills, that we lack huge amounts of manufacturing infrastructure, that what manufacturing we have has not kept up with the flexibility needed for 21st century production. They also note that a huge middle class that might have been trained in the relevant sorts of skills are employed in service, financial, and other auxilliary sectors of the economy. What they don’t mention is that public decisions led to this. There are no doubt many decisions over the last 40 years that left us in such a situation, but I’d like to highlight one: military spending. The US--especially since the second half of the Carter administration—has diverted enormous resources from civilian infrastructure to military spending, regularly spending more on its military than the rest of the world combined. One occasionally hears about how this level of spending contributes to deficits and wars, or how it facilitates imperialism and authoritarian regimes abroad, but far less does one hear about how it leads to a country that is incapable of producing actual goods.” [….] *

My response:

However sympathetic I am to the tenor and salutary intentions of this piece, I’m not sure that military spending, as unconscionable or unjustifiable as it may be, is responsible in the first instance for “a country that is incapable of producing actual goods.” And I truly doubt the veracity of the claim (or at least it’s arguable) that “the US simply lacks the economic and educational infrastructure to get the job done at all.” In any case, the National Security State that developed in the midst of material affluence after World War II in the form of “military-industrial complex” has not changed. What has changed, however, are the terms and conditions of capitalist globalization which, roughly, began to appear in the period between 1965 and 1973, that, as David Harvey explains in his seminal work, The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), “was one in which the inability of Fordism and Keynesianism to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism became more and more apparent.” In the early 1970s, we see the lineaments of a new capitalist logic of “flexible accumulation” (with regard to labor markets and processes, products and services, and patterns of consumption), a logic that in many ways is playing itself out today, one in which has helped to improve the quality of life (less true poverty, although recalcitrant forms of inequality) in many parts of the so-called developing world but has altered the terrain of capitalist democracies in the affluent Northern hemispheric countries.

If one accepts the principal parts of this historical narrative, as I do, than one is not at all surprised by current events and does not believe there’s too much national economies can do (e.g., by way of ‘public decisions’) in the present configuration of economic forces, to alter the course of events in any substantive and long-term fashion. At best perhaps, that is, with a renewed political will and courage, we can hope to salvage the welfare state (which may be why Tony Judt wrote, in Ill Fares the Land [2010], about the Left today simply ‘conserving valuable pasts’ with a ‘defensive’ Social Democratic project), but I fail to see how domestic politics (apart from ex post facto efforts at regulation) can constrain or alter rather uninhibited capital flows that make for the situation Lance describes. In other words, in the first place it’s a story about the logic of capitalist forces trumping democratic decision-making: after all, it’s often labor market conditions that determine where capital (so to speak) will concentrate itself. As Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers make plain in On Democracy (1983), the nature of “capitalist democracy” places structural constraints on both the articulation and satisfaction of interests within the system. With regard to the latter, for instance, and owing to their control of investment, “the satisfaction of the interests of capitalists is a necessary condition for the satisfaction of all other interests in the system,” which means “the welfare of workers remains structurally secondary to the welfare of capitalists,” a fact we conveniently forget in times of economic abundance and low unemployment but is resurrected in the wake of the cycles, crashes, and panics endemic to capitalism. The decisions of capitalists are directly responsible for the well-being of workers, and thus we see the “interests of capitalists appear as general interests of the society as a whole, [while] the interests of everyone else appear as merely particular, or ‘special.’”

Only when we’re able to transcend the socio-economic and political conditions intrinsic to “capitalist democracy” (today’s postmodernist neoliberalism) will we be able to imagine a world in which “public decisions” are no longer invariably distorted or trumped by the turbo-capitalist economic forces in the so-called private sector (an egregious euphemism). In any case, I don’t worry about us producing actual goods so much as our distributively unequal capacity to consume goods essential to the satisfaction of “basic needs” alongside the opulent displays of conspicuous consumption by the upper classes (the allure of which still shapes the dreams of many in the other classes). One world is being created, as Meghnad Desai reminds us, but by the forces of market-led globalization (hence the WTO is displacing the UN/IMF/World Bank as the premier institution for global governance). I’m not saying we shouldn’t, let alone can’t, alter our domestic economic priorities such that spending is directed toward things like infrastructural projects or even actual goods, but given the nature of the National Security State (see, for example, Gary Wills’ Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State [2010]), to which both major parties are committed, in conjunction with this latest phase of capitalist globalization, the prospects for same, alas, appear rather bleak: witness the dismantling of the liberal welfare regime in this country and the cumulatively corrosive assaults on European corporatist and social democratic welfare regimes. It seems we’re consigned to fighting, for the near term at least, purely rearguard actions.

* I've corrected a couple of typos in the original.

Update:

Correspondence with Mark Lance prompts me to further explain why that, even if one accepts the proposition “that there is a massive difference in both manufacturing infrastructure and level of manufacturing-relevant education between major Asian countries and the US,” which I do not, the cause of this cannot be explained by “public decisions,” foremost among them being the increased level of defense expenditures. First, as I say, I don’t believe there to be a “massive difference in both manufacturing infrastructure and level of manufacturing-relevant education between major Asian countries and the US,” even if there are significant differences and especially in certain manufacturing sectors. I don’t have the empirical evidence ready-at-hand but we can leave that disagreement to the side and for the sake of argument accept the proposition as true. Now, what explains it? I would argue that cumulative public decision making, involving defense expenditures or other legislative and public policy directives and initiatives with bearing on the economy are rather beside the point, or at least impotent in the face of the economic forces of the current phase of capitalist globalization.

Capital forces in the form of corporate decision-making, investment, the search for lower production and labor costs, and so on are global in nature: there’s nothing intrinsic to “Asian capitalism” that alters that fact. As long as labor market conditions (including fairly stable social conditions, and even authoritarian politics, and such things as corruption notwithstanding) are more favorable in Asian countries, capital will move there and in fact has moved there: it is that which accounts for disparity in manufacturing infrastructure. Capitalism has, of course, different conditions and effects across the globe, but those are tending toward a “leveling” on many fronts (for instance, and generally speaking, ‘our’ collective ‘affluence’ is diminishing, while ‘their’ well-being is increasing, even if there are some classes more than others that are the immediate and principal beneficiaries of increased capital flows). There’s a price to be paid for admitting more countries to the banquet of wealth-production, and capitalists cannot completely control the various markets or overcome competition, hence they’re driven to make profit and accumulate. It is that which is the principal causal variable in explaining the state of this country’s economy. Nation-state governments no longer control economies as they “did in the halcyon quarter-century of the Golden Age of capitalism.” In Desai’s words,

“The influence of capital—either as portfolio finance or as direct investment—the hegemony of financial markets, the increasing penetration of trade, have been experienced by all the worlds: First, Second and Third. Indeed, this numerical categorization is now otiose. The benefits and costs of capitalism fall symmetrically—though not equally—on all parts of the world. For the first time in two hundred years, the cradle of capitalism—the metropolis, the core—has as much to fear from the rapidity of change as does the periphery.”

It is precisely the effects and by-products of this “rapidity of change” that, in our case, has “[led] to a country that [may at times be] incapable of producing actual goods.” We have to remind ourselves why capitalists, in the form of transnational corporations or foreign direct investment and so forth, went abroad or to the “developing” world in the first place: in search of cheaper costs of production and labor most notably. So, even if, say, defense spending had not taken off as it did, even if it were considerably less than it is today (and some of that money were directed to education), I don’t see how this would have altered the fundamental thrust of the capitalist globalization. In terms of the affluent nation-states, the primary causal variable is found in the proposition that globalization has meant an international movement of goods, capital and labor which “has increased the inequality and/or volatility labor earnings in advanced industrial societies while constraining the ability of governments to tax the winners from globalization to compensate workers for their loss.” In the face of this basic economic fact, domestic governments are severely constrained in their economic decision-making.

Why does the threat of “capital strikes” remain an effective tool in wage negotiations? Because it’s a credible threat, one carried successfully carried out on occasion (both regionally on the domestic plane and globally) owing to increased capital mobility, and the principal reason workers are willing to make concessions at the bargaining table and accept a lower share of the rent. Absent a social democratic model of development in the Asian countries, I don’t see this situation changing. It’s the impact of globalization in the rich countries, in the form of capital mobility, that explains the decline of manufacturing infrastructure in this country and the rise of manufacturing infrastructure elsewhere, not the simply the cumulative historical impact of “public decisions,” about defense expenditures or other budgetary matters. The relatively free flow of goods, capital, and labor does “create opportunities for enhancing the welfare of the poor in poor and middle-income countries,” and that, I would think is a relatively good thing, despite the immediate impact of increased inequality and income insecurity found in the richer countries. It is therefore a good thing that we find an increased ability on the part of “developing” countries to export goods to the “developed” countries. It is therefore in many respects a good thing for people in these countries that transnational corporations are contributing to the development of an industrial infrastructure, even though their profit often represents merely the ability to take advantage of cheap wages and sub-standard working conditions. The increased rate of growth in foreign direct investment reflects the ability to exploit the comparative revenue-productivity of labor in the developing world, be it in Asia or elsewhere. I can’t fathom how any municipal legislation or policy initiative can alter these global economic trends and forces such that transnational firms, for example, come to decide to reverse their preferences on this score.

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 4)

2012-01-21T17:06:00.000-05:00

Please note: In the final installment of this series, I will attempt to highlight what I take to be the most compelling propositions of Coomaraswamy’s argument. I also hope to bring to the discussion later works in aesthetics and philosophy of art which treat some of the themes that concerned Coomaraswamy or capture some of the spirit of his critique of the condition of contemporary art and its foremost apologetic theories and ideologies that serve as both cause and effect of that condition (this being not so much the fault of art qua art, but something directly attributable to a post-modern civilizational ethos fashioned largely in the image of high technology and turbo-capitalism).

Here are Parts 1, 2, and 3.

“It is taken for granted that the artist is always working ‘for the good of the work to be done;’ from the coincidence of beauty with perfection it follows inevitably that his operation always tends to the production of a beautiful work. But this is a very different matter from saying that the artist has always in view to discover and communicate beauty. Beauty in the master craftsman’s atelier is not a final cause of the work to be done, but an inevitable accident. And for this reason, that the work of art is always occasional; it is the nature of a rational being to work for particular ends, whereas beauty is an indeterminate end; whether that artist is planning a picture, a song, or a city, he has in view to make the thing and nothing else. What the artist has in mind is to do the job ‘right,’ secundum rectam rationem artis: it is the philosopher who brings in the word ‘beautiful’ and expounds its conditions in terms of perfection, harmony, and clarity. A recognition of the fact that things can only be beautiful in kind, and not in one another’s kinds, and the conception of the formality of beauty, bring back again to the futility of a naturalistic art; the beauties of a living man and of a statue or stone man are different in kind and not interchangeable; the more we try to make the statue look like a man, the more we denature the stone and caricature the man. It is the form of a man in a nature of flesh that constitutes the beauty of this man; the form of a man in a nature of stone the beauty of the statue; and these two beauties are incompatible.

Beauty is, then, perfection apprehended as an attractive power; that aspect of the truth for example which moves the will to grapple with the theme to be communicated. In medieval phraseology, ‘beauty adds to the good an ordering to the cognitive faculty by which the good is known as such;’ ‘beauty has to do with cognition.’ [….] Beauty is at once a symptom and an invitation; as truth is apprehended by the intellect, so beauty moves the will; beauty is always ordered to reproduction, whether a physical generation or a spiritual regeneration. To think of beauty as a thing to be enjoyed apart from use is to be a naturalist, a fetishist, and an idolater. [….]

The intelligibility of traditional art does not depend on recognitions but, like that of script, on legibility. The characters in which this art is written are properly called symbols; when meaning has been forgotten or ignored and art exists only for the comfort of the eye, these become ‘art forms’ and are spoken of as ‘ornaments;’ we speak of ‘decorative’ values. Symbols in combination form an iconography or myth. Symbols are the universal language of art; an international language with merely dialectic variations, current once to all milieus and always intrinsically intelligible, though no longer understood by educated men, and only to be seen or heard in the art of peasants. The content of symbols is metaphysical. Whatever work of traditional art we consider, whether a crucifix, Ionic column, peasant embroidery, or trappings of a horse, or nursery tale, has still, or had, a meaning over and above what might be called the immediate value of the object as a source of pleasure or necessity of life. This implies for us that we cannot pretend to have accounted for the genesis of any such work of art until we have understood what it was for and what it was intended to mean. The symbolic forms, which we call ornaments because they are superstitious for us, are none the less the substance of the art before us; it is not enough to be able to use the terms of iconography freely and to be able to label our museum specimens correctly; to have understood them, we must understand the ultimate raison d’être of the iconography, just why it is and not otherwise.

Implicit in this symbolism lies what was equally for artist and patron the ultimately spiritual significance of the whole undertaking. The references of the symbolic forms are as precise as those of mathematics. The adequacy of the symbols being intrinsic, and not a matter of convention, the symbols correctly employed transmit from generation to generation a knowledge of cosmic analogies: as above, so below. Some of us still repeat the prayer, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The artist is constantly represented as imitating heavenly forms—‘the crafts such as building and carpentry which give matter in wrought forms…take their principles thence from the thinking there’ (Enneads, V. 9). The archetypal house, for example, repeats the architecture of the universe; a ground below, a space between, a vault above, in which there is an opening corresponding to the solar gateway by which one ‘escapes altogether’ out of time and space into an unconfined and timeless empyrean. Functional and symbolic values coincide; if there arises a column of smoke to the luffer above, this is not merely a convenience, but also a representation of the axis of the universe that pillars-apart heaven and earth, essence and nature, and is itself although without dimensions or consistency the adamantine principle and exemplary form of temporal and spatial extension and of all things situated in time or space. [….]

Let us now remind ourselves that the artist is also a man, and as a man responsible for all that his will consents to; ‘in order that a man may make right use of his art, he needs to have a virtue which will rectify his appetite.’ The man is responsible directly, as a murderer for example by intent if he consents to manufacture adulterated food, or drugs in excess of medical requirement; responsible as a promoter of loose living if he exhibits a pornographic picture (by which we mean of course something essentially salacious, preserving the distinction of ‘obscene’ from ‘erotic’); responsible spiritually if he is a sentimentalist or pseudo-mystic. [….] The doctrine of art for art’s sake implies…a sacrifice of humanity to art, of the whole to the part. It is significant that at the same time that individualistic tendencies are recognizable in the sphere of culture, in the other sphere of business and in the interest of profit most men are denied the opportunity of artistic operation altogether, or can function as responsible artists only in hours of leisure when they can pursue a ‘hobby’ or play games. [….]

Under present circumstances, then, art is by and large a luxury: a luxury that few can afford, and one that need not be overmuch lamented by those who cannot afford to buy. The same ‘art’ was once the principle of knowledge by which the means of life were produced, and the physical and spiritual needs of man were provided for. The whole man made by contemplation, and in making did not depart from himself. To resume all that has been said in a single statement—Art is a superstition; art was a way of life.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Iran, Israel, and Nuclear Weapons

2012-01-20T09:19:00.001-05:00

At Opinio Juris, Kevin Jon Heller writes:

“It’s difficult to accuse these guys of being soft on Tehran, so it’s hard to quibble with their conclusion:

The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb.

The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.

This statement simply reinforces my argument that killing the Iranian nuclear scientists was an act of terrorism under the Terrorist Bombing Convention. Although I think killing the scientists would have been illegal under IHRL [International Human Rights Law] even if they had been helping to build a nuclear weapon, given that by all accounts it still would have taken Iran years to complete it, the counterargument wouldn’t be completely unreasonable. But If Iran is not even trying to build a weapon at this point, as Israel has apparently concluded, it is simply impossible to argue that killing the scientists was lawful targeted killing under IHRL.”

My comment: And now we can move on to a discussion of Israel—alongside India and Pakistan—having never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Israel alone among nuclear-weapons states having never publicly acknowledged their nuclear arsenal nor openly demonstrated their nuclear capability. As Avner Cohen writes in The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (2010), “In Israel, to this day, the gap between nuclear conduct and basic democratic norms of open debate, the public’s right to know, public accountability, oversight, and transparency remains vast.”

A Model for Qur’ānic Interpretation & The Qur’ān: A Select Bibliography

2012-01-18T12:55:00.000-05:00

Perhaps some readers of Ratio Juris would be interested in this:
A Model for Qur'ānic Interpretation & The Qur'ān: A Select Bibliography

Martin Luther King, Jr.

2012-01-16T15:00:00.005-05:00

At Concurring Opinions, Frank Pasquale has kindly provided us with appropriate links in honor of today’s holiday in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Martin Luther King Day Links.

Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Intellectual Responsibility: The Playwright & The Philosopher

2012-01-15T12:02:00.002-05:00

Mark Edwards has a wonderful four-part (to date) series of posts on the late playwright, essayist and dissident intellectual Václav Havel ( (1936-2011) up at Concurring Opinions: Parts I, II, III, and IV. Havel was also the last president of Czechoslovakia (1989–1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). I wrote a memorial post on Havel here. “The Philosopher” in the title is Jan Patočka. (Yours truly comments on several of the posts.)

The image: On May 29, 1979, StB undertook a major police action against VONS members, subsequently ten of them were arrested and taken into custody. VONS is the Czech acronym for Výbor na obranu nespravedlivě stíhaných (Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted):

“The committee was founded on April 27, 1978, by a group of Charter 77 signatories with the aim of following cases of persons facing various forms of state persecution, from police harassment to unjust prosecution in courts of law. Its members helped individuals facing persecution with obtaining legal representation and acted as mediators in acquiring assistance of a financial or other nature. Observing legal formalities, they addressed their communiqués to the Czechoslovak authorities, calling on them to take steps to rectify injustices perpetrated against individuals in the cases monitored. They also passed reports on the cases monitored to entities and persons abroad, from where this information was reported back to Czechoslovakia via the radio stations Radio Free Europe, Voice of America and the BBC. A number of VONS members were persecuted by the police and justice system for their activities, the most well known case being the legal process against six of its members in 1979. The vast majority of VONS communiqués were published in the samizdat bulletin Informace o Chartě 77 (Information on Charter 77). The Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Persecuted was also active after November 1989, when it focused on amending the criminal code, calming the stormy situations in the prisons at the time, as well as, for example, on preparing a general amnesty and rehabilitation laws. Members of VONS also made efforts to purge the judiciary, but with minimal success. At their meeting of July 3, 1996, VONS members decided to suspend the activities of the committee for an indefinite period.”

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 3)

2012-01-07T02:24:00.000-05:00

Part 1 is here, and Part 2 here.

“Art can…be defined as the embodiment in material of a preconceived form. The artist’s operation is dual, in the first place intellectual or ‘free’ and in the second place manual and ‘servile.’ ‘To be properly expressed,’ as Eckhart says, ‘a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form.’ It is just as necessary that the idea of the work to be done should first of all be imagined in an imitable form as that the workman should command the technique by which this mental image can be imitated in the available material. ‘It is,’ as Augustine says, ‘by their ideas that we judge of what things ought to be like.’ A private property in ideas is inconceivable, since ideas have no existence apart from the intellect that entertains them and of which they are the forms; there cannot be an authorship of ideas, but only an entertainment, whether by one or many intellects is immaterial. It is not…in the themes of his work, that an artist’s intellectual operation is ‘free;’ the nature of the ideas to be expressed in art is predetermined by a traditional doctrine…. As Aristotle expresses it, the general end of art is the good of man. This is a matter of religious art only in this sense, that in a traditional society there is little or nothing than can properly be called secular;…no distinction can be drawn between the ideas expressed in the humblest peasant art of a given period and those expressed in the actually hieratic arts of the same period. We cannot too often repeat that the art of a traditional society…has fixed ends and ascertained means of production; art is a conscien[tiousness] about form, precisely as prudence is a conscie[tiousness] about conduct—a conscien[tiousness] in both senses of the world, i.e., both as rule and as awareness. [….]

Where an idea to be expressed remains the same throughout long sequences of stylistic variation, it is evident that this idea remains the motif or motivating power behind the work; the artist has worked throughout for the sake of the idea to be expressed, although expressing this idea always in his own way. The primary necessity is that he should really have entertained the idea and always visualized it in an imitable form; and this, implying an intellectual activity that must ever be renewed, is what we mean by originality as distinguished from novelty, and by power as distinguished from violence. It will readily be seen, then, that in concentrating our attention on the stylistic peculiarities of works of art, we are confining it to a consideration of accidents, and really only amusing ourselves with a psychological analysis of personalities; not by any means penetrating to what is constant and essential in the art itself. [….]

[T]he artist turns from intellectual to manual operation or vice versa at will, and when the work has been done, he judges its ‘truth’ by measuring the actual form of the artifact against the mental image of it and that was his before the work began and remains in his consciousness regardless of what may happen to the work itself. We can now perhaps begin to realize just what we have done in separating artist from craftsman and ‘fine’ from ‘applied’ art. We have assumed that there is one kind of man that can imagine, and another that cannot; or to speak more honestly, another kind whom we cannot afford, without doing hurt to business, to allow to imagine, and to whom we therefore permit a servile and imitative operation only. [….]

[W]e begin to see now why primitive and traditional and what we have described as normal art is ‘abstract;’ it is an imitation, not of a visible and transient appearance or ‘effect of light,’ but of an intelligible form which need no more resemble any natural object than a mathematical equation need look likes its locus in order to be ‘true.’ It is one thing to draw in linear rhythms and abstract light because one must; another thing for anyone who is not by nature and in the philosophical sense a realist, deliberately to cultivate an abstracted style. [….]

There is also a traditional doctrine of beauty. This theory of beauty is not developed with respect to artifacts alone, but universally. It is independent of taste, for it is recognized that at Augustine says, there are those who take pleasure in deformities. The word deformity is significant here, because it is precisely a formal beauty that is in question; and we must not forget that ‘formal’ includes the connotation ‘formative.’ The recognition of beauty depends on judgment, not sensation; the beauty of the aesthetic surfaces depending on their information, and not upon themselves. Everything, whether natural or artificial, is beautiful to the extent that it really is what it purports to be, and independently of all comparisons; or ugly to the extent that its own form is not expressed and realized in its tangible actuality. The work of art is beautiful, accordingly, in terms of perfection, or truth and aptitude….; whatever is inept or vague cannot be considered beautiful, however it may be valued by those who ‘know what they like.’ So far from that, the veritable connoisseur ‘likes what he knows;’ having fixed upon that course of art which is right, use has made it pleasant. Whatever is well and truly made, will be beautiful in kind because of its perfection.” [....] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Silence is Golden

2012-01-01T02:27:00.003-05:00

The following is by Pico Iyer in the New York Times:

[….] “In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book ‘The Shallows,’ in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. ‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,’ the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, ‘and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.’ He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that ‘the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.’ Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, ‘When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.’ Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that ‘Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,’ but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because ‘breaking news’ is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, ‘Dancing with the Stars’), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

Maybe that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an ‘Internet sabbath’ every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to ‘forget’ their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects ‘exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.’ More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are ‘inherently slow.’ The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.” [….] The rest of the essay is here.

* * * * * * *

Speaking of Pico, there’s notice of his new book on Graham Greene in the New York Times. As I note in the former link, I would unhesitatingly recommend anything written by him, but I especially look forward with relish to this book, having had several conversations with him about his (and now ‘our’) fondness for Greene. Buy from your local, independent bookseller if possible (so as to help them avoid the fate of my beloved Bodhi Tree Bookstore) but if not, see here.

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 2)

2011-12-30T01:44:00.001-05:00

“Let us now take for granted the historically normal and religiously orthodox view that, just as ethics is the ‘right way of doing things,’ so art is the ‘making well of whatever needs making,’ or simply ‘the right way of making things:’ and still addressing ourselves to those [who]…ask whether art is not after all a necessity.

A necessity is something that we cannot afford to do without, whatever its price. We cannot go into questions of price here, except to say that art need not be, and should not be expensive, except to the extent that costly materials are employed. It is at this point that the crucial question arises of manufacture for profit versus manufacture for use. It is because the idea of manufacture for profit is bound up with the currently accepted industrial sociology that things in general are not well made and therefore also not beautiful. It is the manufacturer’s interest to produce what we like, or can be induced to like, regardless of whether or not it will agree with us…. Manufacturers and other artists alike resort to advertisement; art is abundantly advertised in schools and colleges, by ‘Museums of Modern Art,’ and by art dealers; and artist and manufacturer both alike price their wares according to what the traffic will bear. [….] It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things approximate to their real value; and under these circumstances, when we pay for a work of art designed to serve a necessary purpose, we get our money’s worth; and the purpose being a necessary one, we must be able to afford to pay for the art, or else we are living below a normal human standard; as most men are now living, even the rich, if we consider quality rather than quantity. Needless to add that the workman is also victimised by a manufacture for profit; so that it has become a mockery to say to him that hours of work should be more enjoyable than hours of leisure….

Industry without art is brutality. Art is specifically human. None of those primitive peoples, past or present, whose culture we affect to despise and propose to amend, has dispensed with art; from the stone age onwards, everything made by man, under whatever conditions of hardship or poverty, has been made by art to serve a double purpose, at once utilitarian and ideological. It is we who, collectively speaking at least, command amply sufficient resources, who have first proposed to make a division of art, one sort to be barely utilitarian, the other luxurious, and altogether omitting what was once the highest function of art, to express and to communicate ideas. It is long since sculpture was thought of as the poor man’s ‘book.’ [….]

…[T]he whole business of ‘collecting’ and the ‘love of art’ are no more than a sentimental aberration and means of escape from the serious business of life.
…[M]erely to cultivate the higher things of life, if art be such, in hours of leisure to be obtained by a further substitution of mechanical for manual means of production, is as much a vanity as the cultivation of religion for religion’s sake on Sundays only could ever be; and…the pretensions of the modern artist are fundamentally wishful and egotistic. [….]

As to fame, it need only be pointed out that the greater part of the greatest art of the world has been produced anonymously, and that if any workman has only fame in view, ‘any proper man ought to be ashamed for good people to know this of him.’ And as to art, to say that the artist works for art is an abuse of language. Art is that by which a man works, supposing that he is in possession of his art and has the habit of his art; just as prudence or conscience is that by which he acts well. Art is no more the end of his work than prudence the end of his conduct.

It is only because under the conditions established in a system of production for profit rather than for use we have forgotten the meaning of the word ‘vocation,’ and think only in terms of ‘jobs,’ that such confusions as these are possible. The man who has a ‘job’ is working for ulterior motives, and may be quite indifferent to the quality of the product, for which he is not responsible; all that he wants in this case is to secure an adequate share of the expected profits. But one whose vocation is specific, that is to say who is naturally and constitutionally adapted to and trained in some one or another kind of making, even though he earns his living by this making, is really doing what he likes most; and if he is forced by circumstance to do some other kind of work, even though more highly paid, is actually unhappy. The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards to his relation to society the measure of his worth. It is precisely in this way that as Plato says, ‘more will be done, and with more ease, when everyone does but one thing, according to his genius; and this is justice to each man himself.’ It is the tragedy of a society industrially organized for profit that this justice to each man in himself is denied him; and that any such society literally and inevitably plays the Devil with the rest of the world.

The basic error in what we have called the illusion of culture is the assumption that art is something to be done by a special kind of man, and particularly that kind of man we call a genius. In direct opposition to this is the normal and humane view that art is simply the right way of making things, whether symphonies or airplanes. The normal view assumes, in other words, not that the artist is a special kind of man, but that every man who is not a mere idler and parasite is necessarily some special kind of artist, skilled and well contented in making or arranging of some one thing or another according to his constitution and training. [….]

What the class thinker who is not merely an underdog, but also a man, has a right to demand is…the opportunity to take as great a pleasure in doing whatever he does for hire, as he takes in his own garden or family life; what he should demand, in other words, is the opportunity to be an artist. No civilisation that can be accepted that denies him this.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?” (Part 1)

2011-12-29T02:08:00.000-05:00

“It seems to be a matter of general agreement at the present day that ‘Art’ is a part of the higher things of life, to be enjoyed in hours of leisure earned by other hours of inartistic ‘Work.’ We find accordingly as one of the most obvious characteristics of our culture a class division of artists from workmen, of those for example who paint on canvas from those who paint the walls of houses, and of those who handle the pen from those who handle the hammer. We are certainly not denying that there is a distinction of the contemplative from the active life, nor of free from servile operation: but mean to say that in our civilization we have in the first place made an absolute divorce of the contemplative from the active life, and in the second place substituted for the contemplative life an aesthetic life…. [….] In any case we have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent, categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art. [….]

Art having been abstracted from the general activity of making things for human use, material or spiritual, has come to mean for us the projection in a visible form of the feelings or reactions of the peculiarly-endowed personality of the artist, and especially of those most peculiarly-endowed personalities which we think of as ‘inspired’ or describe in terms of genius. Because the artistic genius is mysterious we, who accept the humbler status of the workman, have been only too willing to call the artist a ‘prophet,’ and in return for his ‘vision’ to allow him many privileges that a common man might hesitate to exercise. [….] Whereas it was once the highest purpose of life to achieve a freedom from oneself, it is now our will to secure the greatest possible measure of freedom for oneself, no matter what. [….]

Our theoretical knowledge of the material and technical bases of art, and of its actual forms, is encyclopedic; but we are either indifferent to its raison d’être and final cause, or find this reason and ultimate justification for the very existence of the work in the pleasure to be derived from its beauty by the patron. We say the patron; but under present conditions, it is oftener for his own than for the patron’s pleasure that the artist works; the perfect patron being nowadays, not the man who knows what he wants, but the man who is willing to commission the artist to do whatever he likes, and thus as we express it, ‘respects the freedom of the artist.’ The consumer, the man, is at the mercy of the manufacturer for pleasure (the ‘artist’) and manufacturer for profit (the ‘exploiter’) and these two are more nearly the same than we expect. [….]

It is one of the greatest counts against our civilization that the pleasures afforded by art, whether in the making or of subsequent appreciation, are not enjoyed or even supposed to be enjoyed by the workman at work. It is taken for granted that while at work we are doing what we like least, and while at play what we should wish to be doing all the time. And…it is not so shocking that the workman should be underpaid, as that he should not be able to delight as much in what he does for hire as in what he does by free choice. As Meister Eckhart says, ‘the craftsman like talking of his handicraft:’ but, the factory worker likes talking of the ball game! It is an inevitable consequence of production under such conditions that quality is sacrificed to quantity: an industry without art provides a necessary apparatus of existence: houses, clothing, frying pans, and so forth, but an apparatus lacking the essential characteristics of things made by art, the characteristics, viz., of beauty and significance. Hence we say that the life we call civilized is more nearly an animal and mechanical life than a human life; and that in all these respects it contrasts unfavourably with the life of savages, of American Indians for example, to whom it had never occurred that manufacture, the activity of making things for use, could ever be made an artless activity.”—Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (New York: Dover, 1956 [originally published in 1943 under the title, Why Exhibit Works of Art?])

Science & Religion: A Select Bibliography

2011-12-22T00:59:00.005-05:00

This is a slightly different version of a compilation I put together at the request of a colleague, so I thought I’d share it with our readers, some of whom, presumably, have an interest in the subject.

Barbour, Ian G. Issues in Science and Religion. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966.
Barbour, Ian G. Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
Barbour, Ian G. Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, revised ed., 1997.
Barbour, Ian G. When Science Meets Religion. New York: HarperCollins, 2000.
Brooke, John Hedley. Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Brooke, John and Geoffrey Cantor. Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 (1998).
Brooke, John Hedley and Ronald L. Numbers, eds. Science and Religion Around the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [contains an important chapter on ‘science and religion’]
Dixon, Thomas. Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Ferngren, Gary B., ed. Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. New York: Ballantine, 1999.
Harrison, Peter, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Haught, John F. Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Haught, John F. Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God and the Drama of Life. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.
Lopez, Donald S. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Plantinga, Alvin, “Religion and Science,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/religion-science/ .
Ruse, Michael. Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Stenmark, Mikael. Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.
Wallace, Allan B., ed. Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

Freud and the Philosophers

2011-12-20T02:31:00.000-05:00

“Virtually all those who are not ignorant of Freud or totally skeptical of his findings believe that he altered, radically altered, our conception of the mind. He effected a change of what we think we are like, and it was a big change. Astonishingly enough, it is philosophers who have been of all people slowest to recognize this fact. They have been slowest to recognize that this fact has anything to do with them.”—Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (1993): 91.

In addition to Wollheim himself (regrettably, no longer with us), among those I would count as exceptions to this generalization include Sebastian Gardner, the late David Sachs, Donald Levy, John Cottingham, Marcia Cavell,* the late Ilham Dilman, Jonathan Lear, Ernest Wallwork, John Deigh, and Jim Hopkins. I haven’t read much beyond his first book (only a few articles in edited volumes), but I was informed that Michael Stocker should be in this list as well and I agree.

* I'm not sure where Professor Cavell is currently teaching, it may be at U.C. Berkeley.

The Port Huron Statement at 50

2011-12-19T19:16:00.000-05:00

If any Ratio Juris readers of Leftist suasion like yours truly are in Southern California in February of 2012, I thought this conference here in Santa Barbara would be worth attending: The Port Huron Statement at 50 (!). I’ve put together some homework/background reading for those of you perhaps too young to be intimately acquainted or well-versed in this history. The Port Huron Statement, first published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) (the student Department of the League for Industrial Democracy) in 1962, is reprinted as the appendix in the Miller volume below.

Breines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989.
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-Ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Cohen, Robert and Reginald D. Zelnik, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching: mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980.
Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. New York: Bantam, 1987.
Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1987.
Miller, James. “Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.

Václav Havel & The Existential Revolution

2011-12-18T19:09:00.001-05:00

The playwright, essayist, and dissident, Václav Havel (1936-2011), died on Sunday. Havel was one of the foremost leaders of Czechoslovakia’s 1989 “Velvet Revolution,” the genesis of which was the invasion by the Soviet Union and four other Warsaw Pact states of the country in August 1968 so as to put a stop to its “popular experiment [in] reform socialism.” While the seeds of the nonviolent Velvet Revolution were planted during this particular revolt against Party-State Socialism, in the short term, the invasion was successful: “by 1970, Czechoslovakia had become one of the most rigidly orthodox states in the Soviet bloc.” One might reasonably conclude that nonviolent civil resistance clearly failed in this case, although it has been plausibly argued that the principle variables in determining the outcome were found in the orbit of “high politics,” the precise nature of the civil resistance possessing, therefore, little relevance to that outcome. Yet the commitment to nonviolent civil resistance did not disappear, even if the opposition’s strategies and tactics (exemplified by the Citizens’ Forum and The Public against Violence) differed this time ‘round. What is more, the geo-political circumstances had significantly changed for the better in the intervening period, and it may well have been this fact that was decisive in explaining the comparative success of the Velvet Revolution.

Havel did not simply oppose, with considerable courage, the post-totalitarian society’s structural and political constraints on “living within the truth,” nor was his conception of a nonviolent revolution solely social or political in essence or orientation. In his well-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless” (1978), Havel wrote of the need for broad “existential revolution” in the industrial and post-industrial nation-states of the Northern hemisphere. It is only upon the basis of such a revolution that can one hope to achieve a “generally ethical—and, of course ultimately a political—reconstitution of society.” Without here going into details, Havel’s conception of an existential revolution is uncannily similar in important respects to Rudolf Bahro’s largely cognitive conception of “general emancipation” first outlined in The Alternative in Eastern Europe (1978, published in German in 1977) and later articulated in a “deep ecology” and more explicitly spiritual framework (wherein the forces of reason are now ‘relativized’ in the ‘economy of consciousness’) after Bahro moved to West Germany and became a leading spokesperson for the “fundamentalist” faction of Die Grünen. Havel here outlines the necessity of an existential revolution, the basic premises of which should be attractive to those of us who identify with the “religious left:”

“What we call the consumer and industrial (or post-industrial) society, and Ortega y Gasset once understood as ‘the revolt of the masses,’ as well as the intellectual, moral, political and social misery in the world today: all of this is perhaps merely an aspect of the deep crisis in which humanity, dragged helplessly along by the automatism of global technological civilization, finds itself.

The post-totalitarian system is only one aspect—a particularly drastic aspect and thus all the more revealing of its real origins—of the general inability of modern humanity to be master of its own situation. The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization [what Rudolf Bahro, after Lewis Mumford, refers to as the ‘Megamachine’]. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of the general failure of modern humanity.

This planetary challenge to the position of human beings in the world is, of course, also taking place in the Western world, the only difference being the social and political forms it takes. [….] There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is, the democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world), for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.

[….] People are manipulated in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies. But this static conception of rigid, conceptually sloppy and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex forces of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulations and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself. [….] In a democracy, human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization [sic] or transcending concerns about their own personal survival to become proud and responsible members of the polis, making a genuine contribution to the creation of its destiny. [….]

Above all, any existential revolution should provide hope of a moral reconstitution of society, which means a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the ‘human order,’ which no political order can replace. A new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of ‘higher responsibility,’ a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community—these factors clearly indicate the direction in which we must go.

And the political consequences? Most probably they could be reflected in the constitution of structures that will derive from this ‘new spirit,’ from human factors rather than from a particular formalization of political relationships and guarantees. In other words, the issue is the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love. I believe in structures held together more by a commonly shared feeling of the importance of certain communities than by commonly shared ambitions directed ‘outward.’”

In a later piece, “Politics and Conscience” (1984)*, Havel writes in a Gandhian-like vein that he

“favour[s] ‘anti-political politics’ [which calls to mind the Hungarian writer György (George) Konrád’s Antipolitics (1984)] that is, politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.”

* This was intended for the University of Toulouse where Havel was to be awarded an honorary doctorate but was unable to attend.

References and Further Reading:

Bahro, Rudolf (David Fernbach, tr.). The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB, 1978.
Bahro, Rudolf. From Red to Green: Interviews with New Left Review. London: Verso Editions and NLB, 1984.
Bahro, Rudolf (Mary Tyler, tr.). Building the Green Movement. Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1986.
Bahro, Rudolf (David Clarke, tr., and Palden Jenkins, ed.). Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster: The Politics of World Transformation. Bath, UK: Gateway Books, 1994.
Garton Ash, Timothy. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. New York: Vintage, 3rd ed., 1999.
Havel, Václav (Jan Vladislav, ed.). Living in Truth. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Havel, Václav (Paul Wilson, tr.). Letters to Olga: June 1979—September 1982. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
Konrad, George (Richard E. Allen, tr.). Antipolitics: An Essay. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Williams, Kieran. “Civil Resistance in Czechoslovakia: From Soviet Invasion to ‘Velvet Revolution,’ 1968-89,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds. Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Nonviolent Action from Gandhi to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

George Whitman: communist, utopian, and humanist…and “the most un-phony person” (Update, Dec. 16)

2011-12-15T09:14:00.005-05:00

From the Los Angeles Times obituary:

“George Whitman, the legendary founder of the Paris bookshop and literary institution Shakespeare & Co., died Wednesday. He was 98.

The Left Bank bookshop was closed Wednesday, and a note on the door said Whitman had suffered a stroke a few months earlier. He ‘died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop,’ the letter said.

On Wednesday night, people stopped to leave notes, flowers and candles along the ground and covering the window of the shop, now run by his daughter, Sylvia. Many of them said the place had always been much more than a bookshop to them, but a second home. Literally.

Over the years, Whitman has sheltered about 50,000 young, struggling writer types for free, right in the shop if they needed a roof, wanted to save a franc, or just had ideas about books and a hankering for a certain bohemian way of life. All they had to do in exchange was work a few hours in the shop, write a one-page biography and provide their picture (an idea born out of Whitman’s attempt to appease French authorities who wanted to know more about the clandestine ‘hotel’ he was running on the left bank of the Seine River).

The shop has kept all the letters from past boarders, dubbed ‘Tumbleweeds’ by Whitman, and each one is a testament to how he changed their lives.

Pia Copper said Whitman hired her on the spot in 1994, and she stayed 10 years.

’He found so many young people who were lost, on drugs, totally hopeless, and they lived here. And there was no hard logic to it, other than: Give them a roof, and maybe part of the shop will rub off on them,’ Copper said.

Though eventually an economic success, attracting book lovers from all over the world and writers such as Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the running joke was that the place rarely actually did what a bookstore is supposed to do: Sell books.

And that was exactly how Whitman wanted it. He used to call Shakespeare & Co. ‘a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookshop,’ and in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said: ‘I never had any money, and never needed it. I’ve been a bum all my life.’

But Whitman was something of a wild-haired, and wild-mannered, king to those who knew him. The land he ruled, with its constant flow of lodgers and poets from all over the world, might as well have come out of the books he loved, and read so voraciously. (One per night.)

Inspired by Sylvia Beach’s famous Paris bookstore and publishing house, which closed during World War II, Whitman fashioned the 17th century, two-story apartment into a labyrinth of soft-lit, teetering bookshelves, winding stairs, a library, stacks of well-read Life magazines, and cushy benches that turned to beds at night for Tumbleweeds. Free tea and pancake brunches were served every weekend to anyone brave, or hungry enough. After brunch, the leftover, mysteriously thick pancake batter was used as glue to repair peeling floor rugs.

Whitman didn’t care much for supervising the young lodgers that passed through, but his temper could famously flare if a book was misplaced or an edition not shelved just so.

’He’s the most un-phony person,’ Sylvia Whitman, 30, said in an interview this year with The Times. He ‘says what he thinks, and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him. And it’s quite refreshing.’

He once threw a book out the second floor window at a customer below because he thought they might enjoy reading it. And he used to light people’s hair on fire to save them the trouble of paying for a haircut. After all, he had been using the same technique on himself for years.” [….]

And from the New York Times:

“More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, ‘I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.’

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,’ was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: ‘Give what you can, take what you need. George.’ By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.

Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed.

Mr. Whitman’s beacon and enduring influence was Walt Whitman (no relation), who also ran a bookstore, more than a century ago. In a pamphlet, Mr. Whitman wrote that he felt a kinship with the poet. ‘Perhaps no man liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman,’ he wrote, ‘and I at least aspire to the same modest attainment.’” [….]

Addenda: Professor Alice Woolley has kindly informed me of a book that some of us might enjoy: Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005).

One of my former classmates from high school (class of 1975!), Patrick J. Cain, an attorney in Los Angeles, sent the following picture of himself sitting outside Shakespeare & Co. holding a copy of Father Gregory Boyle’s Tatoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion (2010) which, it turns out, was penned by Patrick’s brother-in-law!

Group Identity, Agency & Collective Responsibility: A Select Bibliography

2011-12-03T22:18:00.001-05:00

This is the first draft of a compilation of book titles (in English) useful for delineating the contours of group identity, agency and collective responsibility in its various dimensions: metaphysical (and/or ontological), epistemic, psychosocial, moral, and legal. The list endeavors to represent the crème de la crème of the (fairly recent) relevant literature, so it’s not intended to be comprehensive, let alone exhaustive. I welcome suggestions for additional titles.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Bion, W.R. Experiences in Groups, and other papers. London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1961.
Brewer, Marilynn B. Intergroup Relations. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2nd ed., 2003.
Brown, Rupert. Group Processes: Dynamics Within and Between Groups. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2nd ed., 2000.
Burkitt, Ian. Social Selves: Theories of Self and Society. London: Sage, 2nd ed., 2008.
Cane, Peter. Responsibility in Law and Morality. Oxford, UK: Hart, 2002.
Casals, Neus Torbisco. Group Rights as Human Rights: a Liberal Approach to Multiculturalism. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2006.
Dalal. Farhad. Taking the Group Seriously: Towards a Post-Foulkesian Group Analytic Theory. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1998.
Erskine, Toni, ed. Can Institutions Have Responsibilities? Collective Moral Agency and International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
French, Peter A. Collective and Corporate Responsibility. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
Gilbert, Margaret. A Theory of Political Obligation: Membership, Commitment, and the Bonds of Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Goldman, Alvin I. Knowledge in a Social World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Goodin, Robert E. Protecting the Vulnerable: A Reanalysis of Our Social Responsibilities. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Goodin, Robert E. Utilitarianism as a Public Philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Graham, Keith. Practical Reasoning in a Social World: How We Act Together. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hinshelwood, R.D. What Happens in Groups: Psychoanalysis, the Individual, and the Community. London: Free Association Books, 1987.
Hogg, Michael A. and Scott Tindale, eds. Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Group Processes. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001.
Ingram, David. Group Rights: Reconciling Equality and Difference. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2000.
Isaacs, Tracy. Moral Responsibility in Collective Contexts. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Kakar, Sudhir. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Kernberg, Offo F. Ideology, Conflict, and Leadership in Groups and Organizations. New York: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Kutz, Christopher. Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
May, Larry. The Morality of Groups: Collective Responsibility, Group-Based Harm, Corporate Rights. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987.
May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
May, Larry. Crimes Against Humanity: A Normative Account. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
May, Larry and Stacey Hoffman, eds. Collective Responsibility: Five Decades of Debate in Theoretical and Applied Ethics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991.
McMahon, Christopher. Collective Rationality and Collective Reasoning. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Miller, Richard W. Globalizing Justice: The Ethics of Poverty and Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Miller, Seumas. The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Ruben, David-Hillel. The Metaphysics of the Social World. London: Routledge, 1985.
Schmitt, Frederick F., ed. Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Searle, John R. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press, 1995.
Tuomela, Raimo. The Importance of Us: A Philosophical Study of Basic Social Notions. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Sociality: The Shared Point of View. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Image: Vanessa Bell (née Stephen) (1879-1961) – c. 1943 The Memoir Club (National Portrait Gallery, London). The Memoir Club (Bloomsbury Group): Duncan Grant; Leonard Woolf; Vanessa Bell; Clive Bell; David Garnett; Baron Keynes; Lydia Lopokova; Sir Desmond MacCarthy; Mary MacCarthy; Quentin Bell; and E. M. Forster.

Anarchist-Inspired Socialist Experimentation in Richmond, California

2011-11-28T10:59:00.001-05:00

Along with “middle class radicalism” in Santa Monica (Mark E. Kamm), “progressive politics” in San Francisco (Richard L. DeLeon), and “the leftmost city” in Santa Cruz (Richard Gendron and G. William Domhoff), we now have an anarchist-inspired experiment in socialist cooperation in Richmond, California. Yet another reason for why I love my home state!

As the Los Angeles Times article explains, “The flurry of democratic enterprise has been guided by Mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a former schoolteacher who visited Mondragon, Spain, and recognized a possible path out of the poverty and unemployment that plague her city.”

By way of background, I proffer the following readings:

Cheney, George. Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressures at Mondragon (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1999).
Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (New York: Free Life Editions, 1974).
MacLeod, Greg. From Mondragon to America: Experiments in Community Economic Development (Sydney, Nova Scotia: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1997).
Morrison, Roy. We Build the Road as We Travel (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1991).
Thomas H. and C. Logan. Mondragon: An Economic Analysis (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982).
Whyte, William Foote and Kathleen King Whyte. Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

On some of the difficulties involved in assessing such experiments, please see the introductory essay by Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene to their edited volume, Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 1-35.

Addendum—I decided to add a few more titles by way of further (broader and deeper) historical and theoretical context:

Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes, and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979).
Clave, Pierre. The Progressive City: Planning and Participation, 1969-1984 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
Hine, Robert V. California’s Utopian Colonies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983 ed. [1953]).
Logan, John R. and Harvey L. Molotch. Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
Nichols, John. The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism (London: Verso, 2011).
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed. Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon—Vol. 1 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos (London: Verso, 2007).
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ed. Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon—Vol. 2 of Reinventing Social Emancipation: Toward New Manifestos (London: Verso, 2007).
Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

Allen Wood on Kantian Ethics

2011-11-27T09:01:00.001-05:00

There are a handful of more or less reliable interpreters of Kantian moral theory: Paul Guyer, Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgarrd, and Onora O’Neill are foremost among those I’m thinking of here. But there’s one expositer of Kant’s moral thinking that, for me at least, stands apart from the rest and that is Allen W. Wood. I’ve long relied for guidance in this regard on his book, Kant’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Several years ago, Wood penned another work, Kantian Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008) this time as an “attempt[] to sketch an ethical theory based on the principles found in the writings of Immanuel Kant,” and thus it is “not primarily a study of those writings but an attempt to develop out of Kant’s thought the most defensible theory possible on that basis,” not unlike what Jonathan Lear has done for Freudian psychoanalytic theory and praxis. The latter book is absolutely essential by way of dispelling recalcitrant misleading and incorrect interpretations of Kant’s ethical thought. For instance, Wood writes that

“Kant’s moral outlook is...fundamentally determined by a subtle, shrew, historically self-conscious (and characteristically Enlightenment) conception of human nature and human psychology that most treatments of Kantian ethics (even sympathetic ones) have largely overlooked. This side of Kant owes a great deal to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it belongs to a radical tradition in the social criticism of modernity whose later representatives include Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Karl Marx. The Kantian mistrust of our empirical desires reflects a Rousseauian picture of the way our natural desires have been influenced by the loss of innocence--the restless competitiveness—characteristic of human beings in the social condition, especially as found in the social inequalities of what Rousseau and Kant called the ‘civilized’ stage of human society but was later renamed ‘modern bourgeois society’ or ‘capitalism.’ Again, to miss this continuity is not only to misread Kant; it is badly to misread the history, and even the living reality, of the social order that is all around us. Kant’s famous mistrust of our empirical ‘inclinations’ is mistrust of ‘nature’ only insofar as our nature has been shaped by society. [....] [Thus our natural inclinations] become evil only insofar as vices have been ‘grafted onto them’ by an ‘invisible enemy, one who hides behind reason and is hence all the more dangerous.’ This enemy is competitiveness, social inequality, the passion for domination over others.”

Wood states that he’s changed his mind about a few facets of his earlier interpretation of Kant’s moral ideas, “especially regarding the aims of ethical theory and the Kantian conception of autonomy.” And important topics “that were much more briefly discussed, or not covered at all” in the earlier work, are now accorded whole chapters: “virtue, conscience, social justice, sex, punishment, lying, consequentialism, the personhood of persons, and the moral status of nonrational animals.”

The Study of Religions

2011-11-22T01:29:00.002-05:00

At Mirror of Justice, Marc DeGirolami has (yet again) an insightful post in which he writes of

“an essay by journalist Nathan Schneider [….] [that endeavors] to explain why religious studies is an important and useful field for the problems of our day. The strangest and most anachronistic argument…is that religious studies came into its own as an academic discipline pretty much as of 1963 with the US Supreme Court’s decision in Abington v. Schempp.

In Schempp, the issue was the constitutionality of daily devotional readings from the Bible in public schools. The Court held that the practice violated both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. In dicta, Justice Clark (writing for the majority) also said this:

‘In addition, it might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.’ (374 U.S. at 225)

What that has to do with the origins of the discipline of religious studies is mysterious to me. To be sure, the study of religion as a distinct discipline is of comparatively recent vintage. But it was going on at least a century or more before Justice Clark got around to writing the Schempp majority. Eminent and learned writers like Schleiermacher, and then later Troeltsch, Durkheim, Weber, and many others were writing about religion qua religion extensively. One might object that these are not American writers, but one could then point to Harvard comparative religion professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s magisterial The Meaning and End of Religion, first published in 1962, which paved the way for much of the religious studies scholarship that exists today (Smith was Canadian, but lived and wrote in the United States for a large part of his career). Or one could point to Mircea Eliade’s wonderful, The Sacred and the Profane (first published 1957). If people of Eliade’s and Smith’s stature had already by 1962 made a career of the study of religion, it suggests that religious studies was already a mature field of academic inquiry by the time Schempp rolled around. Even the structuralist cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss did his influential work in Tristes Tropiques before 1963. And we haven’t even talked about William James yet, writing way back when it was Holmes’s court and Justice Clark was barely born.

The other odd feature about relying on the Schempp dictum as a kind of foundational moment for the field of religious studies is that it assumes that academics take their cues about what is worth studying from the Supreme Court. That isn’t even true in law any more, let alone in other disciplines. The premise is that non-legal academics actually know about Supreme Court dicta, and that they care enough about it to fashion their scholarly pursuits in conformity with what the Court thinks is worth studying.

That seems to me to get things backwards. The Supreme Court is generally (and rightly) a follower, not a leader. It does not shape the culture, but instead perceives the social trends and tendencies of the culture and attempts to conform itself to them. That was the thesis of the historical jurisprudents of the early 20th century, and it strikes me as exactly right in this and many other circumstances in religion clause law.

If Justice Clark’s dicta demonstrates anything, it isn’t that all of a sudden the Court decided that it ought to provide intellectual room for religious studies scholars the world round by brilliantly conceiving the distinction between teaching religion as true and teaching about religion in academic fashion. It’s that the Court finally got around to perceiving, and recognizing in law, a distinction which was all around it in the academic customs and cultural mores of society that already existed.”

* * *

I’m in whole-hearted agreement with virtually everything Marc says above. I’d simply like to fill out his story of the intellectual antecedents and origins of the field in which I was trained, namely, “Religious Studies,” a discipline that is also known by other names: History of Religions, Comparative Study of Religions, Study of Religions, Comparative Philosophy….

Historical accounts of this disciplinary field of intellectual inquiry often go back, most importantly, to the pioneering research of Max Müller, in particular, his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873). Prior to Müller in the late eighteenth century, translations of classic religious texts from what we now term “Hinduism,” as well as the publication of Bopp’s comparative grammar of the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages in 1816, helped set the stage for the “scientific” study of religions (the meaning of the term Wissenschaft blurring the boundaries between what we think of as science today and the humanities).

The cultural climate for such studies in this country was created, as Eric J. Sharpe has noted, “by little groups of freethinkers, Unitarians, Transcendentalists and romantics” (they had an impact abroad as well). French and German historians would help to ground their more speculative, idiosyncratic, non-contextual and non-historical musings. Cross-disciplinary cognitive battles, raiding, and trading brought the study of folklore, mythology, phenomenology, and sociology more explicitly into the mix in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. During the latter part of this period, works by the likes of van Gennep, Durkheim, and Frazer came into prominence (with categories like ‘sacred’ and ‘profane,’ totemism, taboo).

In this country, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), was extremely significant in sowing seeds for the nascent discipline, as was Evelyn Underhill’s somewhat unwieldy but trailblazing study, Mysticism (1911). While in Europe, the academic field, recognized in the first instance as the “history of religions” received official recognition first in Switzerland (1877), in Holland soon thereafter, and then in France and Germany. The discipline developed comparatively late in the United States, although the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 had a lasting influence, in large measure owing to the impact of Swami Vivekananda’s appearance and lectures. Works in psychology by Jung and Freud of course were not long in making their impact across the pond (the former’s influence conspicuous in Eliade’s writings). The Eranos conferences (beginning in 1933) and subsequent publications have to be given some pride of place, for they reveal a “roll of honour of comparative religion, including as [they do]” Martin Buber, Joseph Campbell, Jean Daniélou, Mircea Eliade, Friedrich Heller, C.G. Jung, C.A.F. Rhys Davids, Gershom Scholem, D.T. Suzuki, Paul Tillich, Guiseppe Tucci, R.C. Zaehner, and Heinrich Zimmer! One book that might be singled out for its enormous influence on the discipline both here and abroad prior to those produced by such seminal figures as Mircea Eliade and W. Cantwell Smith, is Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917, translated into English in 1923).

I find myself extremely fortunate to have trained under some of the crème de la crème of the second generation of pioneers in our field: Raimundo Panikkar, Gerald James Larson, and Ninian Smart (alas, only Larson is still with us) (those associated with Harvard and the University of Chicago would cite others). By way of reiterating Marc’s conclusion, I can assure readers that in the field’s own narrative accounts of its history, Supreme Court cases are not to be heard.

References and Further Reading:

Clarke, J.J. Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter Between Asian and Western Thought. London: Routledge, 1997.
Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Flood, Gavin. Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion. London: Cassell, 1999.
Kellenberger, James. The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
Kitagawa, Joseph M. The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Larson, Gerald James and Eliot Deutsch, eds. Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy. Princeton, NL: Princeton University Press, 1988.
McEvilley, Thomas. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.
Panikkar, Raimundo. Myth, Faith, and Hermeneutics: Cross-Cultural Studies. New York: Paulist Press, 1979.
Rudolph, Kurt. Historical Fundamentals and the Study of Religions. New York: Macmillan, 1985.
Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975.
Smart, Ninian. The Science of Religion and the Sociology of Knowledge: Some Methodological Questions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Smart, Ninian. The Philosophy of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Smart, Ninian. Religion and the Western Mind. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.
Smart, Ninian (Oliver Leaman, ed.). World Philosophies. London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2008.
Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Image: My late teacher, mentor, and friend, Ninian Smart, a brilliant doyen in the comparative study of religious worldviews.

Freud Among the Philosophers

2011-11-20T20:28:00.003-05:00

This is the latest in a series of fairly brief posts dealing in one way or another with Freudian Psychoanalysis. Earlier posts are 1. here, 2. here, 3. here, 4. here, 5. here, 6, here, 7. here, 8. here, 9. here, and 10. here.

I’ve just finished reading, once again, Donald Levy’s Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). The following is a brief (evaluative) abstract:

Although Wittgenstein (pictured above) wrote comparatively little about Freudian psychoanalysis, his complex critical comments have been enormously influential. Donald Levy does a wonderful job of examining Wittgenstein’s assumptions and arguments, exposing his rather uncharitable understanding of psychoanalytic interpretation and the fundamental flaws of his critique (Freud thought to have succumbed to an untenable ‘reductionism’). In addition, he ably defends core Freudian ideas against less gifted philosophers: Alasdair MacIntyre, Karl Popper, and Frank Ciofi, for example. The second half of the book thoroughly exposes the glaring and not-so-obvious weaknesses of Adolf Grünbaum’s (pictured below) positivistically (with regard to the philosophy of science) inspired critique, based as it is on a rather niggardly conception of science (including a ‘false dichotomy’ between intra- and extra-clinical evidence) and an implausible rendering of Freud’s views on more or less axiomatic psychoanalytic propositions (in this case, Freud’s methods are not sufficiently ‘reductionist’). Of course Grünbaum’s argument has been dispatched with some force by others: David Sachs, Paul Robinson, and Sebastian Gardner come first to mind, but I think Levy’s analysis can justly lay claim to being the most definitive of the bunch.

Fundamental Features of Moral Psychology & Moral Responsibility from a Psychoanalytic Perspective

2011-11-15T08:12:00.001-05:00

“If we take the implications of psychoanalysis [for moral responsibility] seriously, we are responsible in several different ways for our multiply motivated conduct. We are responsible retrospectively, in the sense of deserving modest praise, reward, or punishment for what we have consciously intended, unless we have been impeded in our decision making or action by a mental aberration, such as an irresistible compulsion, neurotic conflict, or serious mental illness. There is nothing in psychoanalysis that refutes this ordinary, everyday meaning of moral responsibility for past actions.

What Freud teaches us is that because our actions are multiply motivated, their voluntary aspects tend to be mixed with behavior that is involuntary. [….] The ratio of the voluntary component of an action to its involuntary elements varies both among persons (in accordance with differences in basic personality configuration) and in the same person from moment to moment. Even in the relatively healthy individual, the fact that so much in the mind remains unconscious makes it exceedingly difficult to be confident that we know enough about an individual’s inner mental life to be sure about the degree to which an act is voluntary or involuntary. Nonetheless, Freud felt that in the absence of evidence of mental aberration, ordinary judgments of intentional actions normally suffice. ‘Actions and consciously expressed opinions are as a rule enough for practical purposes in judging men’s character.’

Psychoanalytic understanding would also have us be prospectively responsible for increasing our self-knowledge and gaining control over those unconscious motives that contribute, perhaps decisively, to our conduct. This is similar to the time-honored notion that a person must take responsibility for his own character, though psychoanalysis expands the realm with which one is morally charged to include typical unconscious motives, spontaneous reactions, and settled behavioral patterns that were previously consider beyond conscious control.* [….]

[There is thus another mode of retrospective moral responsibility, for psychoanalysis holds that we are responsible for actions that we did not consciously intend.] If, in acting as I consciously intend, I also do something harmful that I unconsciously wished to bring about without being aware of it, I am responsible—that is, I deserve some degree of disapprobation—for the desire to injure and for any actual deleterious consequences that my conduct may have inflicted, once the causal consequences of my unconscious mental states become clear, even if, before I acted, I did not know that I wanted to do anything injurious and therefore did not form a conscious intention to do it. Responsibility for unconsciously guided actions that do harm is justified because the behavior is in fact my own (it proceeded ‘out of me,’ not some alien force). The action was self-determining in the broader meaning that depth psychology confers on the term ‘self.’ Freud even holds that I have no real choice about accepting responsibility for past unconsciously motivated behavior. ‘I am somehow compelled to do so’ as soon as I am aware that actions proceeded out of me. I own the action retrospectively by sincerely acknowledging that I caused it to happen and by sincerely regretting that I did not know myself well enough to succeed in monitoring my motivation so as to prevent the injury from occurring. Such sincere regret normally entails prospective responsibility in that in the act of acknowledging my responsibility for the regretted behavior I commit myself to do what is necessary not to act out of such motives in the same way in the future.

Psychoanalysis more fully supports assigning moral responsibility in such instances than does the Western moral tradition generally, because it reveals that the person who acts thoughtlessly or without any conscious intention to do harm unconsciously ‘intends’—in the sense of ‘aims at’—these consequences. The harmful behavior, though thoughtless, was not a random compulsion that must remain forever outside the agent’s ability to control. Rather, it was motivated by unconscious reasons for action that should be understood as aspects of the ‘self’ that acts. If these motives have not been subjected to conscious guidance, they should have been or should be, and the agent should assume responsibility for what he or she has failed to accomplish in this regard, even though the failure may be perfectly understandable.

In using the term moral responsibility in several senses, and broadening its usual limitations, Freud generally avoids such terms as guilt, guilty, and morally blameworthy. This is not because he denies the appropriateness of what might be referred to as realistic remorse for actual misdeeds. To the contrary, Freud clearly differentiates the ego-based sentiment of remorse from irrational guilt. He is leery of the term guilt and its variants because it connotes [for him] an indiscriminate self-punishment that is often irrational either because it is excessively harsh in light of the actual deed or because it is triggered by mere fantasies. Terms like guilt and blame are also avoided by Freud because they tend to be used intrapsychically against the self in ways that end up being morally self-defeating. This is likely to happen because the belittling, disparaging, and condemning connotations of these terms in combination with the superego’s proclivity for applying them indiscriminately to the entire self tend to trigger self-defensiveness. And self-defensiveness functions intrapsychically as an obstacle to the very self-understanding that is essential to responsibility. The accused ego feels like a terribly naughty or totally bad child, and these feelings in turn fuel motives of denial, repression, and revenge, rather than honest self-scrutiny and efforts at self-improvement.”

*As Wallwork explains in a note, “This prospective responsibility for our character is one reason why we hold persons retrospectively responsible for certain acts they were powerless to change at the moment of acting. We think they had something to do with the development of the characteristic style of behavior out of which they acted. Even if they did not directly choose it, we consider it possible that they may have had a part in choosing to be unconscious of both it and behavioral consequences.” No doubt a genetic explanatory role for self-deception would be necessary to fill out the reasons why one has such prospective responsibility and can thus be held retrospectively responsible.

—Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991): 92-96

Hermeneutic Considerations in Reading Freud

2011-11-14T08:58:00.001-05:00

Freud stressed the need for psychoanalytic theory “to be filled out by research in such allied disciplines as neurophysiology, biology, normal psychiatry, academic psychology, sociology, and anthropology. [….] Psychoanalysis’s portrait of human nature thus encourages interdisciplinary bridge building among the several disciplines concerned with the study of human nature and behavior, including several of the humanities that deal with unconscious meaning, like literary criticism and aesthetics, at the same time it challenges most traditional views of human nature with its findings regarding unavowed impulses and processes, the persistence of infantile patterns in adult life, and unacknowledged defensive strategies.”

“Freud’s subtlety as a theorist is commonly missed by beginning students and some academic interpreters who are easily distracted by his penchant for dogmatic overstatements and what are by now archaic metaphors drawn form nineteenth-century physics and biology.”

Freud “repeatedly described the metapsychology as ‘tentative,’ ‘speculative,’ and ‘hypothetical,’ and even went so far as to call it a ‘phantasy,’ a ‘myth,’ a product of wish fulfillment on the part of its creator. [….] [The] side of Freud that works ‘closer to actual experience’ [….] is relatively free of the mechanistic and scientistic viewpoint of the metapsychology…. [All the same], Ricoeur is…right in insisting…that though imperfect, Freud’s metatheory nevertheless ‘preserves something essential,’ and that its economic, structuralist (id, ego, superego), and topographic (conscious, preconscious, unconscious) metaphors, while admittedly flawed, embody notions of the psyche that must be included in any adequate representation of psychoanalytic facts.”

“The Freud of materialistic reductionism and physicalist explanations thus exists side by side with the Freud who peppered his writings with quotations from Sophocles, Aeschylus and Homer, Euripedes and Virgil, the Bible, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, Goethe, Ibsen, and Dostoevsky in the belief that these literary greats captured both the essence of human experience and its depth-psychological explanation better than most academic psychologists.”

—Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)

Narratives and Sociological Framing of Social Protest on the Left: Toward a Democratically Motivated Critique of the Mass Media in the United States

2011-11-11T00:14:00.001-05:00

Alterman, Eric C. What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News. New York: Basic Books, 2003.
Bagdikian, Ben H. The New Media Monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004 ed.
Baker, C. Edwin. Advertising and a Democratic Press. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Baker, C. Edwin. Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Baker, C. Edwin. Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Bennett, W. Lance, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston. When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Chomsky, Noam. Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2nd ed., 2002.
Cockburn, Alexander and Jeffrey St. Clair. End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate. Oakland, CA: CounterPunch and AK Press, 2007.
Cook, Timothy E. Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 2005.
Dahlgren, Peter. Media and Political Engagement: Citizens, Communication and Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Davenport, Christian. Media Bias, Perspective, and State Repression: The Black Panther Party. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Gans, Herbert J. Democracy and the News. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Gitlin, Todd. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2003.
Herman, Edward S. Triumph of the Market: Essays on Economics, Politics, and the Media. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999.
Herman, Edward S. and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.
Herman, Edward S. and Robert W. McChesney. The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. London: Cassell, 1997.
Hunt, Darnell M. Screening the Los Angeles “Riots:” Race, Seeing, and Resistance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Iyengar, Shanto. Is Anyone Responsible? How Television Frames Political Issues. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Jenkins, Henry and David Thorburn, eds. Democracy and New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
Jones, Alex S. Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Keller, Perry. Liberal Democracy and the New Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Martin, Christopher R. Framed: Labor and the Corporate Media. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.
McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New York: The New Press, 2000.
McChesney, Robert W. The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008.
McChesney, Robert W. and John Nichols. The Death and Life of American Journalism. New York: Nation Books, 2010.
Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986.
Shiffrin, Steven H. Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Psyche & Spirituality

2011-11-01T01:06:00.003-04:00

“A spirituality that does not take into account and engage with the complexities and dynamic nature of the psyche, in which our bodily life plays such an important part, will fail to touch people who are not incurably romantic. It will remain, in the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s felicitous phrase, experience-distant rather than experience-near. Equally, a psychology that refuses to recognize the potentialities of the psyche, of its possible extension into the realm of the spirit, a psychology which contents itself with Freud’s healing offer of replacing hysterical misery with common unhappiness, does not provide enough emotional sustenance to modern man.”—Sudhir Kakar, from the introduction to his book, Mad and Divine: Spirit and Psyche in the Modern World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Aśoka, Buddhist Emperor of India

2011-10-24T03:06:00.001-04:00

The Indian emperor Aśoka (304-232 BCE) ruled the Mauryan Empire on the Indian subcontinent from c. 270-232 BCE. In addition to his appreciation of the need for religious toleration and heterodoxy, Ásoka “laid down what are perhaps the oldest rules for conducting debates and disputations, with the opponents being ‘duly honoured in every way and on all occasions,’” indeed, Amartya Sen suggests we view these as “a kind of ancient version of the nineteenth-century ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’” (Sen: xii-xiii and 16). His edicts gave shape to an understanding of the Dharma of Buddhism, meaning for him “a moral polity of active social concern, religious tolerance, ecological awareness, the observance of common ethical precepts, and the renunciation of war [the sound of drums becomes the sound of spiritual understanding, morality, and mind training—dharma—not war]:”

“In Pillar Edict VII, for example, he orders banyan trees and mango groves to be planted, resthouses to be built, and wells to be dug every half-mile along the roads. In Rock Edict I, he establishes an end to the killing and consumption of most animals in the royal kitchens. In Rock Edict II, he orders the provision of medical facilities for men and beasts. In Rock Edict III, he enjoins obedience to mother and father, generosity toward priests and ascetics, and frugality in spending. In Rock Edict V, he commissions officers to work for the welfare and happiness of the poor and aged. In Rock Edict VI, he declares his intention constantly to promote the welfare of all beings so as to pay off his debt to living creatures and to work for their happiness in this world and the next. And in Rock Edict XII, he honors men of all faiths.” (Strong: 4)

The “provision of medical facilities” finds Aśoka a “pioneer in creating hospitals for public use,” one of the Edicts stating these were also established “in the Hellenistic kingdoms—a claim that may sound implausible but has been plausibly defended on the basis of available evidence by Thomas McEvilley”* (Sen: 82-83).

Also among his edicts was the prohibition of animal sacrifice in votive offerings. In conjunction with Rock Edict II, medicinal herbs were distributed and planted, as were roots and fruits wherever they were lacking. And Rock Edict I effectively abolished hunting and fishing in the royal household.

Raghavan Iyer discusses the significance of Rock Edict XII:

“In India…the Emperor Aśoka in 250 BC was not only the first-known sovereign to exalt the virtues of tolerance and civility but also the first to enact religious toleration. Hinduism, which was sometimes messianic but never missionary until recent times, had been confronted by Buddhist religion, which was missionary but not messianic. Aśoka’s Twelfth Major Rock Edict was an earnest and thoughtful plea for toleration among the various sects of the day. Toleration was not passive sufferance but an active search for dialogue and concord, based upon the conviction that in the honoring of other sects lies the welfare and honor of one’s own. An individual or a group is enhanced by the display of active tolerance and genuine fellow feeling. Concord was regarded as universally meritorious and it was required that all sects should learn and benefit from each other.” (Iyer: 67)

With regard to the proposition that “all sects should learn and benefit from each other,” Aśoka employed a Jain-like approach to the rational and ethical assessment of religious beliefs and practices, refusing to endorse or dismiss a religious worldview in toto, preferring rather to examine its particular parts or facets, in the manner described here by the contemporary philosopher Hilary Putnam: “‘Is our own way of life right or wrong?’is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular feature of our way of life is right or wrong, and ‘Is our view of the world right or wrong?’ is a silly question, although it isn’t silly to ask if this or that particular belief is right or wrong.” And although he was a convert to Buddhism, Aśoka did not make Buddhism the official religion of the empire.

Aśoka’s concern with criminal justice led to the establishment of a “Ministry of Dhamma,” “through which he sought to prevent wrongful imprisonment and punishment, to free prisoners when appropriate, and to aid prisoners’ families if they were in need” (Harvey: 116).

While there was nothing novel in the regular circulation of imperial commands, “in his determination to achieve the maximum publicity for the new policy, and to ensure that its implementation would continue long after his own time, Aśoka caused many of his edicts to be inscribed on stone columns and on rocks at all the principal centers of his realm. No doubt he used more ephemeral media as well, but to us he has bequeathed his ideas in lasting form, many of his inscriptions remaining in their original places or in museums” (Warder: 237). Aśoka’s edicts were in stark contrast to the largely amoral maxims of political power found in Kautilya’s Arthaśāstra (‘Science of Wealth,’ i.e., politics and economics), the latter’s reflections on power and conceptions of raison d’état not dissimilar to those of Machiavelli and Hobbes in Western political philosophy.

* See McEvilley’s important book, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, 2002.

References & Further Reading

Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics: Foundations, Values, and Issues. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Hirakawa, Akira (Paul Groner, trans.). A History of Indian Buddhism: From Śākyamuni to Early Mahāyāna. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
Iyer, Raghavan. Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Nikam, N.A. and Richard P. McKeon, ed. and trans. The Edicts of Aśoka. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1959.
Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Thapar, Romila. Aśoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. New York: Oxford University Press, revised ed., 1998.
Warder, A.K. Indian Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass, 3rd ed., 2000.

Personal Identity: A Very Select Bibliography

2011-10-20T18:58:00.000-04:00

Albahari, Miri. Analytical Buddhism: The Two-Tiered Illusion of Self. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Baker, Lynne Rudder. Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Collins, Steven. Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Duerlinger, James. Indian Buddhist Theories of Persons: Vasubandhu’s ‘Refutation of the Theory of a Self.’ London: RoutledgeCurzon 2003.
Elster, Jon, ed. The Multiple Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Ganeri, Jonardon. The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Understanding Persons. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Lints, Richard, Michael S. Horton and Mark R. Talbot, eds. Personal Identity in Theological Perspective. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006.
Martin, Raymond and John Barresi, eds. Personal Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
Noonan, Harold W. Personal Identity. London: Routledge, 2nd ed., 2003.
Olson, Eric T. What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1984.
Perry, John. Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002.
Perry, John., ed. Personal Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 2008.
Shoemaker, Sydney. Identity, Cause, and Mind: Philosophical Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003 ed.
Siderits, Mark. Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.
Sorabji, Richard. Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Strawson, Galen. Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Strawson, Galen. The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Strawson, Galen. Locke on Personal Identity: Consciousness and Concernment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
Tallis, Raymond. The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Tallis, Raymond. I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
Unger, Peter. Identity, Consciousness and Value. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Velleman, J. David. Self to Self: Selected Essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Wilkes, Kathleen V. Real People: Personal Identity Without Thought Experiments. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Wollheim, Richard. The Thread of Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984.
Zahavi, Dan. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Neuromania & Darwinitis

2011-10-18T21:35:00.004-04:00

Highly recommended: Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, UK: Acumen, 2011).

For a short list of related titles in philosophy of mind (and a few in philosophy of science), please see this post from earlier in the year: Unfashionable Literature—or Swimming Against the Current—in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (and elsewhere): Mind is a Mind is a Mind, and not a Brain.

Religion and Politics in Modern Iran: A Select Bibliography

2011-10-16T02:06:00.000-04:00

I thought perhaps some readers might be interested in this manageable, English-language (books only) bibliography on "religion and politics" in modern Iran. I welcome suggestions for further titles.

Abdo, Geneive and Jonathan Lyons. Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First Century Iran. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2003.
Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran Between Two Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Abrahamian, Ervand. The Iranian Mojahedin. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Abrahamian, Ervand. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
Abrahamian, Ervand. Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Adelkhah, Fariba. Being Modern in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Adib-Mogahaddam, Arshin. Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic. London: Hurst Publishers, 2007.
Afary, Janet. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.
Afary, Janet. Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Afkhami, Mahnaz and Erika Friedl, eds. In the Eye of the Storm: Women in Post-Revolutionary Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
Afshari, Reza. Human Rights in Iran: The Abuse of Cultural Relativism. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Aghaie, Kamran Scot. The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004.
Aghaie, Kamran Scot. The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi‘i Islam. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005.
Akhavi, Shahrough. Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1980.
Algar, Hamid. The Islamic Revolution in Iran. London: Open Press, 1980.
Algar, Hamid. Religion and State in Iran 1785-1906: The Role of the Ulama in the Qajar Period. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.
Alizadeh, Parvin, ed. The Economy of Iran: The Dilemma of an Islamic State. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
Ansari, Ali M. Iran, Islam, and Democracy: The Politics of Managing Change. London: Chatham House, 2nd ed., 2006.
Ansari, Ali M. Modern Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After. London: Longman, 2003.
Arjomand, Said Amir. The Turban for the Crown: The Islamic Revolution in Iran. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Arjomand, Said Amir. After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Azimi, Fakhreddin. Iran: the Crisis of Democracy. London: I.B. Tauris, 1989.
Azimi, Fakhreddin. The Quest for Democracy in Iran: A Century of Struggle Against Authoritarian Rule. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Bakhash, Shaul. The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1990.
Baktiari, Bahman. Parliamentary Politics in Revolutionary Iran: The Institutionalization of Factional Politics. Gainseville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Barth, Frederik. Nomads of South Persia: The Basseri Tribe of the Khamseh Confederacy. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1961.
Bayat, Asef. Street Politics: Poor People’s Movements in Iran. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
Bayat, Asef. Workers and Revolution in Iran. London: Zed Books, 1987.
Bayat, Mangol. Iran’s First Revolution: Shi‘ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Behrooz, Maziar. Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
Bill, James A. The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
Bonine, Michael E. and Nikki R. Keddie, eds. Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1981.
Browne, Edward G. The Persian Revolution, 1905-1909. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1910.
Chehabi, H.E. Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
Cronin, Stephanie. The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926. London: I.B. Tauris, 1997.
Cronin, Stephanie. Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921-1941. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Cronin, Stephanie. Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns in Iran: Opposition, Protest and Revolt, 1921-1941. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Dabashi, Hamid. Iran, The Green Movement and the USA: The Fox and the Paradox. London: Zed Books, 2010.
Dabashi, Hamid. Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
Ebadi, Shirin (with Azadeh Moaveni). Iran Awakening. New York: Random House, 2007.
Ebadi, Shirin. Refugee Rights in Iran. London: Saqi Books, 2008.
Ebadi, Shirin. The Golden Cage: Three Brothers, Three Choices, One Destiny. Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press, 2011.
Ehteshami, Anoushiravan. After Khomeini: The Iranian Second Republic. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Esfandiari, Haleh. Reconstructed Lives: Women & Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Farsoun, Samih K. Iran: Political Culture in the Islamic Republic. London: Routledge, 1992.
Fischer, Michael M.J. Iran: from Religious Dispute to Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Foran, John. Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
Foran, John, ed. A Century of Revolution: Social Movements in Iran. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Ganji, Akbar. The Road to Democracy in Iran. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Gasiorowski, Mark. U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Ghani, Cyrus. Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.
Ghani, Cyrus. Iran and the West: A Critical Bibliography. London: Kegan Paul Int’l., 1987.
Gheissari, Ali. Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998.
Gheissari, Ali, ed. Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Graham, Robert. Iran: the Illusion of Power. London: Croom Helm, revised ed., 1979.
Hairi, Abdu’l-Hadi. Shī‘ism and Constitutionalism in Iran. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977.
Hashemi, Nader and Danny Postel, eds. The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2010.
Hooglund, Eric, ed. Twenty Years of Islamic Revolution: Political and Social Transition in Iran since 1979. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
Irfani, Shuroosh. Revolutionary Islam in Iran: Popular Liberation or Religious Dictatorship? London: Zed Books, 1983.
Kamrava, Mehran. Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Katouzian, Homa. Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran. London: I.B. Tauris, 1991.
Katouzian, Homa. The Political Economy of Modern Iran. London: Macmillan, 1981.
Kazemi, Farhad. Poverty and Revolution in Iran: The Migrant Poor, Urban Marginality, and Politics. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1981.
Keddie, Nikki R. Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution. Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1995.
Keddie, Nikki R. Iran: Religion, Politics and Society. London: Frank Cass, 1980.
Keddie, Nikki R. Religion and Rebellion in Iran: The Tobacco Protest of 1891-1892. London: Frank Cass, 1966.
Keddie, Nikki R. Roots of Revolution: An Interpretative History of Modern Iran. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Keddie, Nikki R. Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006 ed.
Keddie, Nikki R., ed. Religion and Politics in Iran: Shi‘ism from Quietism to Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Majd, Hooman. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran. New York: Anchor Books, 2009 ed.
Majd, Hooman. The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010.
Menashri, David. Post-Revolutionary Politics in Iran: Religion, Society and Power. London: Frank Cass & Co., 2001.
Milani, Mohsen M. The Making of Iran’s Islamic Revolution: From Monarchy to Islamic Republic. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, revised ed., 1994.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba. Islam and Gender: The Religious Debate in Contemporary Iran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Mir-Hosseini, Ziba and Richard Tapper. Islam and Democracy in Iran: Eshkevari and the Quest for Reform. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
Mirsepassi, Ali. Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Mirsepassi, Ali. Democracy in Modern Iran: Islam, Culture, and Political Change. New York: New York University Press, 2010.
Moaddel, Mansoor. Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Moghissi, Haideh. Populism and Feminism in Iran: Women’s Struggle in a Male-Defined Revolutionary Movement. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
Moslem, Mehdi. Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
Mottahedeh, Roy. The Mantle of the Prophet: Religion and Politics in Iran. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2000.
Nabavi, Negin. Intellectuals and the State in Iran: Politics, Discourse and the Dilemma of Authenticity. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Nabavi, Negin, ed. Intellectual Trends in 20th Century Iran. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Paidar, Parvin. Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Postel, Danny. Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism. Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2006.
Rajaee, Farhang, ed. The Iran-Iraq War: The Politics of Aggression. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993.
Rejali, Darius M. Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993.
Ringer, Monica M. Education, Religion, and the Discourse of Cultural Reform in Qajar Iran. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publ., 2000.
Sanasarian, Eliz. The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran: Mutiny, Appeasement, and Repression from 1900 to Khomeini. New York: Praeger, 1982.
Schirazi, Asghar (John O’Kane, trans.). The Constitution of Iran: Politics and the State in the Islamic Republic. London: I.B. Tauris, 1997.
Sick, Gary. All Fall Down: America's Tragic Encounter With Iran. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse.com, 2001 ed.
Takeyh, Ray. Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 2006.
Takeyh, Ray. Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of Ayatollahs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Vahdat, Farzin. God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.
van den Bos, Matthijs. Mystic Regimes: Sufism and the State in Iran, from the late Qajar Era to the Islamic Republic. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002.
Wright, Robin. The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran. New York: Vintage Books, 2001.

To Hell with Conflict Resolution

2011-10-15T18:51:00.002-04:00

…for that is the conclusion one might reasonably draw from the fact

“that Israel is moving forward with another large housing project on territory it seized during the 1967 Mideast war, unveiling plans to build 2,610 units in what critics say would be the first entirely new development on disputed Jerusalem land in 14 years.

The planned project, to be called Givat Hamatos, would expand the footprint of Jewish housing development into new areas, nearly cutting off Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem from West Bank communities. If built, the project would make it harder to create a Palestinian state with contiguous borders and a capital in East Jerusalem, opponents say.

‘This one is really bad,’ said Hagit Ofran of Peace Now, the Israeli anti-settlement group. ‘This would block the potential of a two-state solution.’

Peace Now said Givat Hamatos would be the first new Israeli development in the Jerusalem area since the creation Har Homa in 1997, which was approved by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term in office.

The project would isolate the Palestinian communities of Beit Safafa and Shurafat, which are considered to be part of East Jerusalem, from the West Bank city of Bethlehem. It would be built on land that Israel now considers to be part of southern Jerusalem. Palestinians and the international community never recognized the annexation and view the land as occupied West Bank territory.

Government officials emphasized that the project was still in the early stages of the approval process.

‘This proposal has been around for years and there has been no decision taken yet, either at the municipal level or the national level,’ said Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev.

Plans for Givat Hamatos were originally announced in 2008, but were shelved to allow for revisions. On Oct. 11, Jerusalem authorities quietly resubmitted the plans, starting the clock on a 60-day public comment period.

If the project is approved, groundbreaking would not be expected to take place for two years. Israel has said it needs to build new homes to meet growing demand around Jerusalem.

Palestinian officials said the proposal was a sign that Netanyahu is not serious about resuming peace talks and is thumbing his nose at the international community, which has repeatedly urged Israel to halt settlement construction.

The Mideast ‘quartet,’ consisting of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union, has called upon Palestinians and Israelis to refrain from provocative actions and return to the negotiating table by the end of the month.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Givat Hamatos proposal ‘makes a mockery of the quartet statement and other international efforts to bring about a just and lasting peace.’”

The rest of the article from the Los Angeles Times is here.

Image: A man works last month on a construction site in the Jerusalem-area Jewish settlement of Gilo, where 1,100 new housing units were approved by Israel last month. Plans for a new development nearby, to be called Givat Hamatos, foresee construction of 2,610 housing units. (Tara Todras-Whitehill, AP/September 27, 2011)

Why Israel Can’t Be a “Jewish State”

2011-10-03T09:51:00.002-04:00

The following is by Sari Nusseibeh, a professor of philosophy at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. (I have a few additional comments after his article and have appended a list of titles for ‘further reading.’):

“The Israeli government’s current mantra is that the Palestinians must recognise a ‘Jewish State.’ Of course, the Palestinians have clearly and repeatedly recognised the State of Israel as such in the 1993 Oslo Accords (which were based on an Israeli promise to establish a Palestinian state within five years—a promise now shattered) and many times since. Recently, however, Israeli leaders have dramatically and unilaterally moved the goal-posts and are now clamouring that Palestinians must recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State.’

In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry concluded that the demand for a ‘Jewish State’ was not part of the obligations of the Balfour Declaration or the British Mandate. Even in the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, when Zionists sought to ‘establish a home for the Jewish people,’ there was no reference of a ‘Jewish State.’ The Zionist Organisation preferred at first to use the description ‘Jewish homeland’ or ‘Jewish Commonwealth.’ Many pioneering Zionist leaders, such as Judah Magnes and Martin Buber also avoided the clear and explicit term ‘Jewish State’ for their project of a homeland for Jews, and preferred instead the concept of a democratic bi-national state.

Today, however, demands for a ‘Jewish State’ from Israeli politicians are growing without giving thought to what this might mean, and its supporters claim that it would be as natural as calling France a French State. However, if we consider the subject dispassionately, the idea of a ‘Jewish State’ is logically and morally problematic because of its legal, religious, historical and social implications. The implications of this term therefore need to be spelled out, and we are sure that once they are, most people—and most Israeli citizens, we trust—will not accept these implications.

Many implications

First, let us say that confusion immediately arises here because the term ‘Jewish’ can be applied both to the ancient race of Israelites and their descendants, as well as to those who believe in and practice the religion of Judaism. These generally overlap, but not always. For example, some ethnic Jews are atheists and there are converts to Judaism (leaving aside the question of whether these are accepted as such by Ultra-Orthodox Jews) who are not ethnic Jews.

Second, let us suggest also that having a modern nation-state being defined by one ethnicity or one religion is problematic in itself—if not inherently self-contradictory—because the modern nation-state as such is a temporal and civic institution, and because no state in the world is—or can be in practice—ethnically or religiously homogenous.

Third, recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ implies that Israel is, or should be, either a theocracy (if we take the word ‘Jewish’ to apply to the religion of Judaism) or an apartheid state (if we take the word ‘Jewish’ to apply to the ethnicity of Jews), or both, and in all of these cases, Israel is then no longer a democracy—something which has rightly been the pride of most Israelis since the country’s founding in 1948.

Fourth, at least one in five Israelis—20 per cent of the population, according to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics—is ethnically Arab (and are mostly either Muslim, Christian, Druze or Bahai), and recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ as such makes one-fifth of the population of Israel automatically strangers in their own native land and opens the door to legally reducing them, most undemocratically, to second-class citizens (or perhaps even stripping them of their citizenship and other rights)—something that no-one, much less a Palestinian leader, has a right to do.

Fifth, recognising a ‘Jewish State’ as such in Israel would mean legally that while Palestinians no longer have citizens’ rights there, any member of world Jewry outside of Israel (up to 10 million people perhaps), should be entitled to full citizens’ rights there, no matter wherever they may be in the world today and regardless of their current nationality. Indeed, Israel publicly admits that it does not hold the land for the benefit of its citizens but holds it, in trust, on behalf of the Jews of the world for all time. This is something that happens in practice, but that obviously Palestinians in the occupied territories—including Jerusalem—do not see as fair, especially as they are constantly forcibly evicted off their ancestral homeland by Israel to make way for foreign Jewish settlers, and because Palestinians in their diaspora are denied the same right to come and live.

Sixth, it means, before final status negotiations have even started, that Palestinians would have then given up the rights of about 7 million Palestinians in the diaspora to repatriation or compensation; 7 million Palestinians descended from the Palestinians who in 1900 lived in historical Palestine (i.e. what is now Israel, the West Bank including Jerusalem, and Gaza) and at that time made up 800,000 of its 840,000 inhabitants; and who were driven off their land through war, violent eviction or fear.

Seventh, recognising a ‘Jewish state’ in Israel—a state which purports to annex the whole of Jerusalem, East and West, and calls Jerusalem its “eternal, undivided capital” (as if the city, or even the world itself, were eternal; as if it were really undivided, and as if it actually were legally recognised by the international community as Israel’s capital)—means completely ignoring the fact that Jerusalem is as holy to 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims, as it is to 15-20 million Jews worldwide.

In other words, this would be to privilege Judaism above the religions of Christianity and Islam, whose adherents together comprise 55 per cent of the world’s population. Regrettably this is a narrative propagated even by renowned Jewish author and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who, on April 15, 2010, took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post and claimed that Jerusalem ‘is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Qur’an.’ Now we do not propose to speak for native Palestinian Arab Christians—except to say the that Jerusalem is quite obviously the city of Jesus Christ the Messiah—but as Muslims, we believe that Jerusalem is not the ‘third holiest city of Islam’ as is sometimes claimed, but simply one of Islam’s three holy cities. And, of course, despite what Mr Wiesel seems to believe, Jerusalem is indeed clearly referred to in the Holy Qur’an in Surat al-Isra’ (17:1):

Glorified be He Who transported His servant by night from the Inviolable Place of Worship to the Aqsa Place of Worship whose precincts We have blessed, that We might show him of Our tokens! Lo! He, only He, is the Hearer, the Seer.

Moreover, Muslims wanting to take a similar, religiously exclusive narrative, could point out that while Jerusalem is mentioned 600 times in the Bible, it is not mentioned once in the Torah as such—a fact that any Biblical Concordance will easily confirm. Of course we do, however, recognise the importance of the land of Israel in the religion of Judaism—this is even mentioned in the Qur’an, 5:21—we only ask that the Israeli government reciprocate this courtesy and allow Muslims to speak for themselves in expressing what they consider, and have always considered, as holy to them.

There is another reason, more serious than all of the seven mentioned above, why Palestinian leaders—and indeed no responsible person—can morally recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ as such. It has to do with the very Covenant of God in the Bible with Ancient Israelites of the promise of a homeland for Jews. God says to Abraham in the Bible:

On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: ‘To your descendants I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates - the Kenites, the Kenezzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.’ (Genesis, 15:18-21; NKJ)

The ancient Israelites then go on to possess this land in the time of Moses, upon God’s command, as follows:

‘When the LORD your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the LORD your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them.’ (Deuteronomy, 7:1-2; NKJ)

‘Hear, O Israel: You are to cross over the Jordan today, and go in to dispossess nations greater and mightier than yourself, cities great and fortified up to heaven, a people great and tall, the descendants of the Anakim, whom you know, and of whom you heard it said: 'Who can stand before the descendants of Anak?' Therefore understand today that the LORD your God is He who goes over before you as a consuming fire. He will destroy them and bring them down before you; so you shall drive them out and destroy them quickly, as the LORD has said to you.’ (Deuteronomy, 9:1-4; NKJ)

The fate of many of the original inhabitants is then as follows:

And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey, with the edge of the sword. (Joshua, 6:21; NKJ)

And this continues even later on in time, as follows:

Samuel also said to Saul: ‘The LORD sent me to anoint you king over His people, over Israel. Now therefore, heed the voice of the words of the LORD. Thus says the LORD of hosts: “I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”’ (1 Samuel, 15:1-3; NKJ)

Now it is very easy to cherry-pick quotes from scripture permitting or enjoining violence. One could cite, out of context, verses such as the ‘sword verse’ in the Holy Qur’an:

Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and establish prayer and pay the alms, then leave their way free. God is Forgiving, Merciful. (Al-Tawbah, 9:5) [….]

Democracy or a Jewish State?

…[I]t remains true that, in the Old Testament, God commands the Jewish state in the land of Israel to come into being through warfare and violent dispossession of the original inhabitants. Moreover, this command has its roots in the very Covenant of God with Abraham (or rather ‘Abram’ at that time) in the Bible and it thus forms one of the core tenets of Judaism as such, at least as we understand it. No one then can blame Palestinians and descendents of the ancient Canaanites, Jebusites and others who inhabited the land before the Ancient Israelites (as seen in the Bible itself) for a little trepidation as regards what recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ means for them, particularly to certain Orthodox and Ultra Orthodox Jews. No one then can blame Palestinians for asking if recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ means recognising the legitimacy of offensive warfare or violence against them by Israel to take what remains of Palestine from them.

We need hardly say that this comes against a background where every day the Israeli settler movement is grabbing more land in the West Bank and Jerusalem (there are now 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank alone)—aided, abetted, funded and empowered by the current Israeli government - and throwing or forcing more and more Palestinians out, in so many different ways that it would take volumes to describe. [….]

So, rather than demand that Palestinians recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ as such—adding ‘beyond chutzpah’ to insult and injury—we offer the suggestion that Israeli leaders ask instead that Palestinians recognise Israel (proper) as a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism, and whose majority is Jewish. Many states (including Israel’s neighbours Jordan and Egypt, and countries such as Greece) have their official religion as Christianity or Islam (but grant equal civil rights to all citizens) and there is no reason why Israeli Jews should not want the religion of their state to be officially Jewish.” [….]

Please see the entire article at Al Jazeera.

Aharon Barak writes in The Judge in a Democracy (2006) that “Israel was founded as the state of the Jewish people.” The founding of not a few nation-states on along exclusivist ethnic and/or religious principles is similar in this regard, but what is more troubling is what follows from this historical premise, namely, an axiomatic “constitutional premise:” “The reason for the existence of the State of Israel is its existence as a Jewish state. That character is central to its existence, and it is ‘an axiom of the state.’ It is a ‘fundamental principle of our law and our system.’ We therefore cannot allow a list or an individual seeking to negate this reason and this foundation to participate in elections.” This goes far beyond requiring would-be electoral participants to recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist, for it excludes participants who would seek to put all religious and other worldviews on equal footing with Judaism vis-à-vis the democratic character of the nation-state of Israel.

Needless to say, Israel’s so-called demographic problem renders this amended (in 1992) Basic Law (as interpreted and applied by the Supreme Court) a pragmatic contradiction. Concrete “facts on the ground,” implications, and consequences are not lacking: pervasive discrimination against Arab citizens, the political role of religion, the blurring of the state’s geography, including the military control and settlement of territory in the West Bank and Gaza (e.g., roughly ‘60 percent of the West Bank is now held by Israeli Jews as private, state, or military land,’ and segregation is very real for Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Jews, Russian immigrants, and Palestinian Arabs, among others). And this should not prevent us from acknowledging whenever and wherever we discern democratic principles and practices belonging to the state of Israel.

What it troubling, however, is the legislative, political and cultural licensing of the notion that one cannot sufficiently separate, in the case of Israel, the “Jewish” from “the democratic,” hence even well-motivated or well-meaning criticisms of the Jewish nature of the state are seen as equivalent to, indeed, are in fact reduced to, “attacks on democracy.” The Judaization of Israel should therefore remain an important concern for all who cherish the democratic elements of this particular State, especially in light of what has been tellingly christened the “Arab demographic danger” and the resistance of Palestinians to a particular government’s agenda and policies, including those of the IDF.

In several and important respects, Israel can be described as a democracy, but it has some distance to go in ridding itself of those Zionist features that have come to be indissolubly associated with Israel insofar as it is at the same time (normatively) described as a Jewish state. Note that I’m not making the claim that all those who historically identified with Zionism were Jewish in the religious sense, they were not, but those who favored a more messianic-like understanding of Zionism were front and center among the founders of the state of Israel and have remained the ideological pool from which its political leadership has been drawn. This is made clear in Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion (2005), for in the end, there turned out to be very little difference between secular and religious Zionists: both imbued nationalism with a messianic strain, for leaders like Weizmann “merely displaced” the “false messianic hope” they avowedly “relinquished.” Indeed, “the language of secular Zionism bears the traces and scars of a messianic narrative that it barely seeks, or fails, to repress.” An exemplar here is David Ben-Gurion: “A secular Jew, like so many of the key figures in the early political history of Zionism, Ben-Gurion bequeathed to Israel in his rhetoric the messianic destiny of the nation-in-waiting,” as the “language of salvation and redemption saturates...[his] prose.” One disturbing consequence: “Under pressure of the biblical narrative, two thousand years of history fall into the dust,” one reason why Palestine, to the Zionists, was a “land without a people” (when confronted with unavoidable empirical evidence to the contrary, ‘ethnic cleasing’ became the norm: cf. Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006). Ben-Gurion understood the implications: “We must create a majority in the Land of Israel in the next twenty years.” Is it any wonder that, today, Israel’s “demographic problem” is both a manifest and latent cause of so much political and cultural anxiety? Alas, “Messianism, as unconscious inspiration, is in the air and soil of Israel.”

In Value, Respect, and Attachment (2001), Joseph Raz attempts to explain the underlying principled and rational interpretation of Barak’s characterization of Israel as a “Jewish state:”

“An Israeli Basic Law declares that the State of Israel is a Jewish state. Israeli courts struggled with the implications of the law for their practice. The president of the Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Barak, said that a Jewish state means a state which embraces the values which Judaism gave the world, namely (and I quote) ‘the love of mankind, the sanctity of life, social justice, equity, protecting human dignity, the rule of law over the legislature, etc.’ I think that he gave the statute the only acceptable interpretation. Notice that in the same sense France too can be a Jewish state. It too can embrace the values which Judaism gave to the world.... Indeed, it may well be said that in that sense no state can be a morally good state unless it is a Jewish state. Does that show that Barak adopted the wrong interpretation? Did he not empty that article in the law of all meaning? No and yes. He did empty the law of meaning, but it was the right thing to do. It would be wrong to suppose that on top of following justice, equity, dignity, and other universal values, Israeli law should follow some additional specifically Jewish values, which may conflict with justice or other values, and compromise them.”

Unfortunately, the fact that the wording of the law remains on the books, means it is always liable to an interpretation other than that provided by the former President of the Supreme Court of Israel. Indeed, if the law is thereby emptied of all meaning, why not change it? The plain meaning of the language here is not at all conducive to the secular apologetic gloss, indeed, it implicates the centrality of “specifically Jewish values” in the State by its inclusion and non-Jews can be forgiven for understanding it in just that fashion.

Further Reading:

Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971.
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim. Palestinian Rights: Affirmation and Denial. Wilmette, IL: Medina Press, 1982.
Abu-Lughod, Ibrahim, ed. The Arab-Israeli Confrontation of June 1967: An Arab Perspective. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970.
Alam, M. Shahid. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Aruri, Naseer H. Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003.
Aruri, Naseer H., ed. Occupation: Israel Over Palestine. London: Zed Books, 1984.
Asali, Kamil J., ed. Jerusalem in History. New York: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2000. ]
Barghouti, Omar. BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions—The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2011.
Benvenisti, Eyal. Legal Dualism: The Absorption of the Occupied Territories into Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
Benvenisti, Eyal. The International Law of Occupation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Black, Edwin. The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. New York: Basic Books, 2001. ed.
Bowen, Stephen, ed. Human Rights, Self-Determination, and Political Change in the Occupied Territories. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1997.
Boyle, Francis A. Palestine, Palestinians, and International Law. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003.
Chomsky, Noam. The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999 ed.
Chomsky, Noam. Middle East Illusions. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.
Farsoun, Samih K. (with Christian E. Zacharia). Palestine and the Palestinians. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.
Finkelstein, Norman G.. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. London: Verso, 1995.
Finkelstein, Norman G. Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008 ed.
Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
Friedman, Robert I. Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settler Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992.
Gans, Chaim. A Just Zionism: On the Morality of the Jewish State. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Glass, Charles. “The Great Lie,” London Review of Books, Vol. 22, No. 23, 30 November 2000.
Glass, Charles. “Balfour, Weizmann and the Creation of Israel,” London Review of Books, Vol. 23, No. 11, 7 June 2001.
Gordon, Neve. Israel’s Occupation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008.
Gorenberg, Gershom. The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977. New York: Times Books, 2006.
Hadawi, Sami. Bitter Harvest: A Modern History of Palestine. New York: Olive Branch Press, 1989.
Hajjar, Lisa. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. London: University of California Press, 2005.
Kattan, Victor. From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1891-1949. London: Pluto Press, 2009.
Kattan, Victor, ed. The Palestine Question in International Law. London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006.
Kimmerling, Baruch. Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics. Berkeley, CA; University of California Press, 1983.
Kimmerling, Baruch. Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians. London: Verso, 2003.
Kimmerling, Baruch and Joel S. Migdal. The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
King, Mary Elizabeth. A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. New York: Nation Books, 2007.
Krämer, Gudrun. A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Kretzmer, David. The Occupation of Justice: The Supreme Court of Israel and the Occupied Territories. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002.
Laor, Yitzhak. The Myth of Liberal Zionism. London: Verso, 2009.
Lustik, Ian. Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980.
Makdisi, Saree. Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2008.
Maoz, Zeev. Defending the Holy Land: A Critical Analysis of Israel’s Security and Foreign Policy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
Marmor, Andrei, “Entitlement to Land and the Right of Return: An Embarrassing Challenge for Liberal Zionism” (2003), USC Law and Public Policy Research Paper, No. 03-17. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=424622
Masalha, Nur. The Politics of Denial: Israel and the Palestinian Refugee Problem. London: Pluto, 2003.
Masalha, Nur. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology, and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine. London: Zed Books, 2007.
Mearsheimer, John J. and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
Pappé, Ilan, ed. The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Peleg, Ilan. Human Rights in the West Bank and Gaza: Legacy and Politics. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995.
Quigley, John. The Statehood of Palestine: International Law in the Middle East Conflict. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Rodinson, Maxime. Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? New York: Anchor Foundation/Pathfinder, 1973.
Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Question of Zion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007 ed.
Rose, John. The Myths of Zionism. London: Pluto Press, 2004.
Ross, Dennis. The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Said, Edward W. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Vintage Books, 2001 ed.
Said, Edward W. and Christopher Hitchens, eds. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question. London: Verso, 1988.
Shlaim, Avi. Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations. London: Verso, 2009.
Slater, Jerome. “What Went Wrong? The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 116, No. 2 (Summer 2001), pp. 171-199.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, 2007.
Wheatcroft, Geoffrey. The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma. New York: Perseus, 1996.
Yiftachel, Oren. Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Zertal, Idith and Akiva Eldar. Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. New York: The Nation Books, 2007.

Jonathan Lear on the Science of Subjectivity (and the modern ‘therapy of desire’)

2011-09-27T08:03:00.000-04:00

“The idea of a science of subjectivity seems, at first, paradoxical: how could there be an objective study of subjectivity? And yet, Freud realized, there had to be such a study if we were to understand human existence. For human reality is significantly constituted by subjectivity: what it is to be a person is shaped by what it is like for that person to be. The meanings, emotions and desires alive in a person’s soul [psyche] play a crucial role in determining who that person is. There cannot, then, be a science of human life without its including subjectivity within its scope. That is not easy to do. For, as Freud realized, the deeper meanings which shape a person’s soul and structure his outlook are not immediately available to his awareness. A person is, by his nature, out of touch with his own subjectivity. [….] The only way to get at these deeper meanings is through a peculiar human interaction, the like of which never before existed in the world. It is in the structured setting of a psychoanalytic therapy that the deeper strata of a person’s subjectivity emerge.

If this is so, the conception of science into which Freud was born and to which he tenaciously adhered must be inadequate for the study of human life. For that conception requires that an observer remain detached from and non-intrusive with respect to the reality he is observing. This is a conception of observation that has worked out in the study of purely physical objects. There was no question of trying to capture the subjectivity of those objects: they had none. And the demand that an observer be detached gave content to the idea that he was investigating a reality that exists independently of the investigation. Now, the analytic situation is, of its essence, therapeutic. There have been no interesting psychoanalytic observations of human nature that have not arisen out of an attempt to ease human suffering. Analytic therapy demands that the analyst embody a unique blend of empathy, sympathy and distance. Psychoanalysis is nothing if not a (special) emotional relationship between analyst and analysand.

[….] As a practitioner, [Freud] was a therapist who helped himself to empathic understanding; as a theorist, he tried to fit psychoanalysis into the scientific image of his day. He never came to grips with the full force of the idea of a science of subjectivity. Neither have we. And that is why…most criticisms and defenses of the validity of psychoanalysis are beside the point. For this point cannot be to show that psychoanalysis does or does not conform to this or that model of science. A more promising strategy is to say that the idea of a science of subjective reality is so new that we do not have any fixed model to which it should conform. Indeed, the idea of a science of subjectivity—like the idea of the unconscious mental—is at first so strange as to seem almost a contradiction in terms. If one listens carefully, one can hear the faint echoes of Viennese professors proving the unconscious mental absurd: ‘The mental,’ I hear them saying, ‘must be conscious!’ Rather than take up a similarly antiquated stand with respect to the ideas of our time, we should leave ourselves open to the possibility of a science of subjectivity. Antecedently to the working out of psychoanalysis, we have little idea of what it would be to study subjectivity objectively. If we can conceive of psychoanalysis as a science of the first person, the I, we must conceive of Freud as standing at the beginning of this science, not at its end.”—Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Examination of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1990)

The schizoid, borderline, and narcissistic analysand of our time and place

2011-09-27T01:53:00.003-04:00

“As a rule, today’s patients do not simply present classically neurotic problems of an oedipal nature. Rather, they present the kind of problems which have come to be labeled schizoid, borderline, and narcissistic. For whatever reasons, problems of self and object relations—experienced as feelings of meaninglessness, feelings of emptiness, pervasive depression, lack of sustaining interests, goals, ideals, and values, and feelings of unrelatedness—are the overwhelming predominant symptoms in today’s modal patient. Furthermore, since as early as 1954, Winnicott warned young analysts that they would be unlikely to be seeing many classically neurotic patients in their practices, it is clear that we are witnessing a phenomenon of some duration.”—Morris N. Eagle in Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation (1984)

Image: Kathe Kollwitz, Die Witwe I (The Widow I), 1922-3.

Socio-Political Conflict Resolution & Nonviolence: A Select Bibliography and Historical Exemplum

2011-09-18T23:18:00.000-04:00

Preface

What follows is by way of an introduction to whet your appetite for the subject matter covered in our latest compilation in the Online Research Bibliographies series: Socio-Political Conflict and Nonviolence. I had originally intended to post this bibliography and essay in honor and celebration of May Day, as “the exemplum” outlines the nonviolent theory and praxis exemplified by KOR, the Workers’ Defense Committee (later: Komitet Samoobrony Społecznej KOR/Social Self-Defense Committee, KSS-‘KOR’) in Poland that played a direct “service” role in the emergence of Solidarity (or Solidarność, the first non-Communist party-controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact countries) in 1980. Perhaps more importantly, KOR represented a new philosophy and political strategy for the democratic opposition that was at once revolutionary and reformist: the former insofar as it made a deliberate break with the primary modes of civil resistance in Polish history in its rejection of political violence and corresponding fidelity to principles of truth (cf. the idea of ‘living in truth’ that became prominent among opposition intellectuals like Václav Havel, Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik) and nonviolence (in Gandhian terms, ‘satyā’ and ‘ahimsa’). The “reformist” character of the democratic opposition refers to its means and methods (thus not its theoretical cast or social vision), which were predominantly gradual and piecemeal, including a commitment to the “self-organization” of civil society (what in Gandhi’s doctrine of satyāgraha was termed the ‘Constructive Programme’). In many and important respects, KOR incarnated the political cultural logic and virtues of what has been called Poland’s “Self-limiting Revolution.” This was the first of several nonviolent “revolutions” (e.g., the ‘Velvet’ Revolution in Czechoslovakia) that culminated in a series of roundtable talks that began in 1989 and took place in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Hungary, and Poland. The “roundtable talks” in these countries was responsible for the negotiated breakdown of (and thus peaceful transition from) Party-State Communism (as Jon Elster notes, the regimes in the GDR and Czechoslovakia were crumbling before the talks began). (In what follows, I don’t mean to slight the structural catalytic or precipitating role played by the policies and reforms initiated through Mikhail Gorbachev’s political doctrines of perestroika and glasnost.)

The “new opposition” that formed in Poland in the 1970s was not entirely novel and thus there was an historical tilling of the soil for civil resistance and nonviolent politics: from the Polish October of 1956 and the Club of the Crooked Circle (Klub Krzywego Koła, 1955-1962), to Jacek Kuroń and Karl Modzelewski’s “Open Letter to the Party” (for which they were both imprisoned) and the “Letter of 34”in 1964, and the “unstructured strike” by predominantly women workers in the textile factories at Łódź in 1971, Poland was not without its fair share of historical examples of nonviolent civil resistance and opposition politics. Indeed, vast underground publishing networks, self-education societies (e.g., the ‘Flying University’ or Uniwersytet Latający, revived in 1977), cultural clubs and networks thoughout the arts, a “second economy” with its grey-black market, all of this and more existed prior to Poland’s nonviolent (i.e., ‘bloodless,’ ‘self-limiting,’ and ‘looking glass’) social revolution. With regard to groups and events that acted as precursors to KOR in particular, we learn from Jan Jósef Lipski’s invaluable study that in addition to some of the above, we can count dissident lawyers, writers and scholars; the Club of the Seekers of Contradiction; “Walterites” (pupils of Jacek Kuroń: ‘the nom de guerre of General Karol Świerczewski, the “General Walter” of the Spanish Civil War, and thus they identified themselves ideologically with the communist tradition’); the “Commandos” (‘the name was forged in the cell of the Polish United Workers (PUWP) party at Warsaw University’); the March 1968 student protests (including the few protests that followed the invasion of Czechoslovakia); the Scouts of Black Troop No. 1 and the Band of Vagabonds; students and young university graduates associated with the Warsaw Club of Catholic Intelligentsia (KIK); Ruch (Movement); the trial of the “Tatra Mountaineers” (several young people arrested in 1969 for ‘having organized, in collaboration with some Czechs, the smuggling of copies of Paris Kultura into Poland by way of Czecholslovakia and across the Tatra Mountains’); sundry ‘minigroups’ of associates and sympathizers; the “Letter of 66” (also mistakenly known as the ‘Letter of 59’) signed by intellectuals and artists protesting changes in the Constitution of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL) (the Diet passed the constitutional amendments of February 10, 1976); and, as “the final act of the opposition by intellectuals before the creation of KOR was a letter of Edward Lipiński to Edward Gierek” (First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party from 1970-1980). In the words of Jan Josef Lipski, this letter, “which contained a many-sided critique of the system of governing and warned of catastrophe, became an important factor influencing the formation of a new social consciousness among the intelligentsia, and many of the ideas it contained were to enter into the standard repertoire of later attempts to forumlate a program.”

According to Lipski, KOR had a considerable impact on the course of events in Poland, an impact constrained by its numerical strength and by the “tremendous inertia of the system.” Moreover, the government “limited its repsonse to the activities of KOR to restraints and repressions,” and KOR stood out among other weaker if not smaller and less successful opposition groups (despite their ‘not inconsiderable’ and ‘on the whole positive’ achievements), so much so that “KOR created not only an original model of opposition but above all it was unrivaled in its actions, which extended from help for the workers in 1976, through the periodical Robotnik (The Worker) and the Initiating Committees of the Free Trade Unions (KZ WZZ), and eventually to Solidarity.” KOR’s “social service” role ended with the formation of Solidarity in
September 1980, formally dissolving itself the following year.

KOR: An Historical and Sociological Exemplum of the Theory and Praxis of Nonviolence

In his book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (1995), Charles M. Payne shares Bob Moses’s understanding of the civil right movement as characterized by two forms of collective praxis and liberation: a “community-mobilizing” form and a “community-organizing” form. The latter was, and is, a necessary and but not always a sufficient condition of the former. It is not always sufficient insofar as community or social movement mobilization frequently requires a precipitating catalytic incident or event that serves as the tipping-point for people to step out of the routine of daily work and life and risk involvement in “history-making” species of collective action. Both forms of collective praxis occur on the terrain of civil society as the site of hegemonic struggles to capture the hearts and minds of individuals as part of a Gramscian (or Gramscian-like) “war of position” inspired by democratic values and principles that, ideally, rely on means and types of collective action in harmony with those values and principles and the short-term goals and long-term ends they necessitate. Those committed to the theory and praxis of nonviolence believe they’ve found the types and means of action best suited to, that is, in most harmony with, such emancipatory democratic values and principles. Albeit with some notable exceptions (e.g., Aldon Morris’ 1984 study, Origin of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communites Organizing for Change), narratives of the civil rights movement privilege “community-mobilizing,” and it is the form of collective action called to mind by “popular memory and the only part of the movement that has attracted scholarly attention,” understandable in part owing to the mass media’s focus on “large-scale, relatively short-term public events,” on historical display in “the tradition of Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington…[and] best symbolized by the work of Martin Luther King.”[1] Not in the foreground and klieg lights of mass media, but setting the stage as it were for such mass mobilization and social protest is the “community organizing” tradition that is the subject matter of Payne’s indispensable work. In this lesser-known tradition of nonviolent democratic praxis, there’s a “greater emphasis on the long-term development of leadership in ordinary men and women, a tradition best epitomized” by Bob Moses himself, but also such remarkable individual as Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Fannie Lou Hamer.[2]

More generally, Payne informs us that “We do not ordinarily realize how much the well-publicized activism of the sixties depended on the efforts of older activists who worked in obscurity throughout the 1940s and 1950s.”[3] Similar stories can be told elsewhere, as in the case of the “Self-limiting” and Velvet Revolutions in East-Central Europe, for example the forms of nonviolent action community organizing and social resistance that took place in the nooks and crannies of civil society in Poland as a necessary condition for the eventual emergence of Solidarity as both a “trade union” and wider social movement, the principal collective actor in the country’s “evolutionary” or “self-limiting” revolution.[4] Of course that revolution cannot be explained without an appreciation of the structural role of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union that began in 1985, but the comparative success of Solidarity cannot be accounted for without an understanding of such underground and above ground phenomena as the “Flying University” (TKN) or the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR), the latter founded in support of striking Polish workers in 1976. Aleksander Smolar provides us with an introduction to this Polish variation on community organizing that set the stage for the country’s nonviolent and thus “self-limiting” social revolution and from which I will quote at length, for it enables us to see what occurs when nonviolent democratic and emancipatory struggles “from below” transcend the barriers between “making history” and the living of daily life among members of the lower and middles classes of civil society. Speaking first of KOR, Smolar says

“The very creation of an organization independent from the authorities and functioning openly was a bold political act. The following months witnessed the emergence of different opposition groups, one of which was characteristically named the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights (ROPCiO), as well as the publication of illegal periodicals and books. It is estimated that between 1976 and 1980, the opposition numbered several thousand persons. It was composed overwhelmingly of the intelligentsia and students, assisted by a few individual priests and members of religious orders; the institutional hierarchy of the Church did not officially affirm its attitude toward initiatives of this sort, either for or against. Only with time did the groups in question manage to make their way—albeit on a small scale—into the countryside.”[5]

Later the Catholic Church did play a pivotal part vis-à-vis the Party-State in Poland in protecting the social resistance and nonviolent politics coming to fruition in the fragile but expanding terrain of Polish civil society. But what I want to highlight here is the nature of revolutionary leadership and the role played by only a few corresponding organized groups engaged in both legal and illegal (yet not unethical) activities, a leadership that articulated a moral and political philosophy as the very marrow of its nonviolent political strategy. This revolutionary leadership was composed of what in Eastern and Central Europe—as well as the Soviet Union—is termed the “intelligentsia” or what we more commonly refer to as intellectuals. As Rudolf Bahro reminds us, even Lenin made his appeals in revolutionary Russia not to the workers as such, but to those capable of leading the workers, for “instead of appealing to the working class as a whole...[Lenin] appealed to the most enlightened elements in Russia, meaning the most advanced (most cultivated, most intellectualized) workers and to the minority of intellectuals and specialists inspired by the revolution. [....] The workers—individual exceptions apart—were never Marxist in the strict sense. Marxism is a theory based on the existence of the working class, but it is not the theory of the working class.”[6] Bahro elaborates:

“[I]n no known historical case did the first creative impulse in ideas and organization proceed from the masses; the trade unions do not anticipate any new civilization. The political workers’ movement was itself founded by declassed bourgeois intellectuals, which in no way means that the most active proletarian elements did not soon come to play a role of their own in the socialist parties and tend themselves to become intellectuals.”[7]

Marxist and post-Marxist writing on intellectuals tends to equivocate between (or simply conflate) the notion of intellectuals as a sociological and descriptive category and the meaning of the term in a normative sense. We’re not assuming intellectuals invariably form a united class of sorts destined for the sort of leadership role Bahro alludes to here, indeed, for it is often the case that only a very small number of intellectuals summon up the requisite moral motivation for revolutionary politics, one reason why Sartre was compelled to make his famous public “Plea for Intellectuals” in Japan in 1965.[8] Most intellectuals are not naturally inclined, given their location and status in the existing socio-economic order, to make what Sartre called a “a concrete and unconditioned alignment with the actions of the underprivileged classes.” And in outlining the central role of intellectual leadership in nonviolent revolutionary politics we need not subscribe to a strict Leninist interpretation of this “vanguardist” model of revolutionary politics, especially insofar as it clashes with democratic means and methods, but it would be foolish to deny the truths inherent in the vanguardist model in as much as it represents a recognition of the necessary role of formal and informal leadership in nonviolent reformists and revolutionary politics. In particular, we’re speaking here of the role of what James MacGregor Burns memorably described as “transformative leadership” (in contrast to the ‘transactional’ type common to conventional power politics), using Mahatma Gandhi by way of exemplifying this particular type of intellectual leadership:

“Transforming leadership ultimately becomes moral in that it raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both. Perhaps the best modern example is Gandhi, who aroused and elevated the hopes and demands of millions of Indians and whose life and personality were enhanced in the process. Transcending leadership is dynamic leadership in the sense that the leaders throw themselves into a relationship with followers who will feel ‘elevated’ by it and often become more active themselves—thereby creating a new cadre of leaders [these are what Gramsci termed ‘organic intellectuals’] . [….] Leaders are taskmasters and goal setters, but they and their followers share a particular space and time, a particular set of motivations and values. [….] The problem for them as educators, as leaders, is not to promote narrow, egocentric self-actualization but to extend awareness of human needs and the means of gratifying them, to improve the larger social situation for which educators or leaders have responsibility and over which they have power. Is it too much to believe that it is ‘the grand goal of all leadership—to help create or maintain the social harbors for these personal islands?’ Gandhi almost perfectly exemplifies this…. The transforming leader taps the needs and raises the aspirations and helps shape the values—and hence mobilizes the potential—of followers.

Transforming leadership is elevating. It is moral but not moralistic. Leaders engage with followers, but from higher levels of morality; in the enmeshing of goals and values both leaders and followers are raised to more principled levels of judgment. Leaders most effectively ‘connect with’ followers from a level of morality only one stage higher than that of the followers, but moral leaders who act at much higher levels—Gandhi, for example—relate to followers at all levels either heorically or through the founding of mass movements that provide linkages between persons at various levels of morality and sharply increase the moral impact of the transforming leader. Much of this kind of elevating leadership asks sacrifices from followers rather than merely promising them goods.”[9]

Raghavan Iyer has well captured Gandhi’s own conception of social and political “transformative” leadership, of the role, if you will, of nonviolent vanguardist intellectuals. Gandhi realized that “Revolutions are the work of comparatively small groups of men who concentrate all their energies to the task:”

“Gandhi’s pleas for heroism in society involved him in the recognition of the need for inspired leadership in political and social activity and the role of small groups as pioneers and pathfinders, but also in a stout refusal to distinguish sharply between the elect and the masses. ‘All cannot be leaders, but all can be bearers,’ he declared in 1921. Courage, endurance, fearlessness and above all self-sacrifice are the qualities required of our leaders. ‘A person belonging to the suppressed classes exhibiting these qualities in their fullness would certainly be able to lead the nation; whereas the most finished orator, if he has not got these qualities, must fail.’ In well-ordered organizations, leaders are elected, he said, for convenience of work, not for extraordinary merit. A leader is only first among equals. Someone may be put first, but he is no stronger than the weakest link in the chain. And yet the true leader shows his capacity to assume heavy burdens of responsibility by taking upon himself the errors and failings of those weaker than he is, and if necessary atoning for them and using them as the basis of his own self-examination.”[10]

Owing to his introduction of the aśrama or monastic ideal into politics (which entails the moral if not spiritual ‘purification’ of conventional power politics or Realpolitik), Gandhi elaborated fairly stringent standards for any would-be satyāgrahi (that is, the practitioner of satyāgraha, literally, ‘holding on to Truth,’ therefore, one who is bound to ‘truth-force or soul-force; Gandhi importantly distinguished his nonviolent doctrine of satyāgraha from conceptions of ‘passive resistance’) including, most controversially, “the taking of vows as the necessary means to self-purification and self-discipline.”[11] And the practice of satyāgraha is further distinguished from the closely connected notions of civil disobedience and noncooperation: while it underpins his particular formulations of civil disobedience and noncooperation, it is at the same time much broader in meaning, entailing as it does the idea of a “constructive program” (In the words of a recent Egyptian activist: ‘The real politics start after the demonstrations end.’) the patient building of alternative forms of social association, instititutions, and ways of life in civil society by way of lessening dependence on the State: think here, for example, of the “co-ops, communes, and collectives” of the 1960s and ‘70s in the United States, some of which continue into our own time (e.g., food co-operatives and free clinics); of CORE, the Highlander Folk School, Citizenship Schools, and SNCC during the struggle for civil rights; of the praxis of the comunidades de base inspired by Liberation Theology in Latin America; of the aforementioned Flying Universities and KOR in Poland as well as samizdat across the countries of the Soviet bloc; of the formation of the Citizens Forum and The Public against Violence in Czechoslovakia during the Velvet Revolution of 1989; of the new social movements (e.g., the April 6th movement), NGOs, lawyers’ associations, trade unions, the counter-cultural role of music and poetry and the arts generally, the self-discipline and self-organization of the masses in Tahrir Square[13], and the prefigurative function earlier played by the Kifaya movement, in Egypt’s recent revolution; of the Internet cafes as seedbeds and greenhouses for political dialogue and debate, the men and women marching and protesting side-by-side, in Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution.

As should be clear from Gandhi’s nonviolent campaigns, satyāgraha should not be viewed simply as the political prerogative of those few individuals in possession of the requisite virtues of ethical leadership—of moral and spiritual charisma—and the uncommon capacity for self-suffering (tapas), for its efficacy, in the end, is judged by its capacity to move others, both one’s opponents as well as the public, and this occurs in circumstances in which appeals to reason simpliciter fall on deaf ears for reason often is, as Hume famously claimed, the “slave of the passions,” at least in the sense that one’s well established or otherwise intransigent convictions are rarely altered by rational argument, for in such cases the head depends on a prior movement of the heart:

“Although Gandhi sometimes formulated the doctrine of satyāgraha in a typically individualist fashion, he was fully aware that it was dependent in practice upon the sanction, not only of individual conscience (satyā) and ahimsa [nonviolence] but also of public opinion. ‘An awakened and intelligent public opinion is the most potent weapon of the satyāgrahi.’ He must first mobilize public opinion against the evil which he is out to eradicate, by means of a wide intensive agitation. When public opinion is sufficiently roused against a social abuse, ‘even the tallest will not dare to practise or openly lend support to it.’ [Like Socrates,] Gandhi refused to set up the demos as a demi-god and he could recognize no higher court of appeal than ‘the Court of conscience.’ And yet he was willing to see that the success of the satyāgrahi’s efforts must necessarily depend not merely on the appeal to his own conscience but even more on the awakening of the slumbering conscience of a large number of people, and ultimately, the stifled conscience of those responsible for enacting or administering unjust laws and social abuses.

In its appeal to public opinion, to the prevailing or potential respect in society for satyā and ahimsa [truth and nonviolence], and to the moral sensitivity of those whose acts are being challenged, satyāgraha differs from the methods of rational persuasion and violent action chiefly in its unique reliance upon tapas or self-suffering. Gandhi argued that experience has shown that mere appeal to [the faculty of] reason produces no effect upon those who have settled convictions. ‘The eyes of their understanding are opened not by argument, but by the suffering of the satyāgrahi. The satyāgrahi tries to reach the reason through the heart. The method of reaching the heart is to awaken public opinion. Public opinion, for which one cares, is a mightier force than gunpowder.’”[12]

As Iyer proceeds to explain, this is not an argument for the abdication of reason although Gandhi did value nonviolence and love more than reason. The turn to satyāgraha is only justified when reason has failed, where attempts at rational persuasion have no effect, in cases where one has exhausted, insofar as is practically reasonable, legalistic arguments and conventional avenues for change. The purpose in all cases remains to both convert and convince one’s opponent.

Returning to Smolar’s discussion of the leaders of Poland’s self-limiting revolution: while the new social resistance that broke out in 1976 was not a direct result of actions or public proclamations of the Catholic Church, the Church in Poland did, in time, transform the historic Polish culture of resistance into one no longer eager or content to resort to violence, indeed, both intellectuals and the masses at large came to decisively reject violent methods of social and political change, a belief that was not the sole or necessary conclusion of political realism or expediency in the shadow of Soviet domination:

“The Catholic Church in Poland, traditionally powerful, naturally fulfilled some of the functions of an opposition, in a system based on the omnipotence of a single [political] party. First and foremost, the Church was an independent moral universe of free speech and free ideas. But it also presented a consistent message of nonviolence, especially following the tragedy of the Second World War. [….] The authority of the Catholic Church in Poland, already very strong, was reinforced when the archbishop of Kraków, Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, became John Paul II in 1978. His philosophy and his strategic vision for the transformation of Poland can be summarized in a passage often cited by him, and by Solidarity’s martyr priest, Father Jerzy Popieluszko: ‘Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.’”[13]

The Church’s position on this score, and John Paul II’s exhortations in particular, affirm a Gandhian-like commitment to absolute nonviolence (not surprisingly, Gandhi regarded Jesus as the very embodiment of the true satyāgrahi) or, put differently, an “absolute moral rejection of all political violence.”

We’re now prepared to introduce the intellectual vanguard of the nonviolent democratic opposition in Poland, incarnate in both individual leaders and groups like KOR. It was KOR that played, in Jan Jósef Lipski’s words, a “service role” in the building of Solidarity, only to dissolve when it had played out its part on the larger dramatic political stage of a new and powerful opposition social movement. The deliberate means and methods of this de facto intellectual vanguard exemplified Burn’s criteria for transformative leadership:

“The strategy formulated by the leading figures of the democratic opposition, notably by Jacek Kuroń and Adam Michnik, can be summed up in a few sentences. Its first principle was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s and Václav Havel’s ‘living in truth.’ Refusing to live in the ‘Big Lie’ was, in terms of a famous essay by Havel, the basis of ‘the power of the powerless.’ Beyond the moral value of such a demand, it was a way of delegitimizing public life built on a lie and on an imposed official definition of reality. The idea of ‘living in truth’ became the foundation of the new opposition in the whole communist world. With the collapse of the informational monopoly of the state, the opposition started to play an ever more important cognitive, moral, and indirectly political role.

The second key principle of the new opposition was the self-organization of society. This ‘civil society’ strategy opposed the reconstruction of social ties to an official policy of atomization and political control of society. The new peaceful programme of social and political resistance was summed up in Jacek Kurón’s appeal to protesters” ‘set up your own committees instead of burning down party committees.’ (In 1970-1, protesting shipyard workers on the Baltic coast had set fire to communist party offices.) He expressed the idea of a necessary self-organization of society, independent from the state and, if necessary, against it. Every genuine social organization, every demonstration of mutual trust and of solidarity in society, has value in itself as a way of reconstructing a human universe. The mainstream of the opposition was deliberately and profoundly anti-political. Faced with the strategic choice described by Adam Michnik in his letter from prison, the answer of the opposition was clear. The objective was not to defeat the ruling power but to progressively liberate society from its control.

The third leading principle was insistence on strict respect for the law: ‘the conspicuous exercise of rights’ in the words of János Kis, a leader of the Hungarian opposition. The constitution, international standards (including the 1975 Helsinki agreements), and domestic law became efficient arms of resistance. The authorities were criticized not on the basis of their own ideology—as was common in the ‘revisionist’ opposition of the 1950s and 1960s—but by reference to universal moral and legal norms, which had been formally accepted by the communist authorities themselves.

The new strategy of the opposition relied on the assumption that the emergence of an archipelago of new islands of autonomy would be gradual and sufficiently limited so as not to push the communist authorities to a confrontation. It aimed at exploiting the possible interest of the authorities in tolerating the ‘lesser evil’ of an enlarged sphere of social autonomy, thus avoiding a perhaps bloody full-scale confrontation with the emergent opposition and its likely domestically and internationally negative effects. The dilemma facing the government was either to clamp down with all the coercive power necessary in order to eradicate dissidence, which it had all the instruments to do, or to accommodate itself to the fact that it was progressively losing control over a renascent civil society.”[14] [emphasis added]

Each of the three principles above is uncannily close to the basic values and principles that fueled Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy and praxis of nonviolence. The first, an absolute and unswerving commitment to the principle of truth in the social and political realm, was critical to Gandhi’s bold attempt to destroy long-standing and fairly rigid if not calcified (doctrinal and actual) boundaries “between public and private morals, religious values and political norms, ethical principles and political expediency.”[15] It is perhaps easier to discern the problems associated with such boundaries in non-democratic or would-be totalitarian societies wherein the painting of an abstract picture in one’s private studio or the reading of an Orwell novel on a bus may be deemed acts politically hostile or subversive vis-à-vis the State and its legitimating political ideology. Under such oppressive conditions, the ethical values of private life and the intimate realm cannot but have political ramifications and implications, for the nature of “the political” as defined (in a de jure and de facto sense) by the organs of the State sucks the air of freedom out of the social spaces of associated and communal living that give meaning to civil society. While KOR activists appear to have had a sophisticated grasp of the possible and actual strategic logic of nonviolent conflict, their belief in and commitment to nonviolence was ethical and principled (or creedal), meaning theirs was not solely a choice of pure expediency, preference for a tactical rule, or a contingent strategic choice dictated by the political environment (one more or less common to life within Party-State Communist regimes of East-Central Europe during the Cold War). As we learn from Jan Jósef Lipski’s seminal “emic” or participatory historical study, KOR: Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981 (1985), “Perhaps on no other issue did KOR exhibit so deeply the influence of Christian ethics.”[16] To be sure, there are more than a few influential formulations of Christian ethics that assume or endorse the doctrine of double moral standards, or “the common contention that there are two levels or types or structures of morality, one for the individual in his private life and in his immediate surroundings, the other for political and collective conduct.”[17] From Thomas Aquinas to Reinhold Niebuhr, prudential politica adapts the natural law to raison d’état such that “politics may be subordinated, but must not become subservient, to morals.”[18] But KOR intellectuals like Jacek Kuroń invoked Christian ethics by way of proclaiming their decisive rejection of the doctrine of double moral standards, as we see in Likpski’s summary of salient points from Kuroń’s essay, “A Christian Without God” (published in Znak under the pen name Elżbieta Borucka): “His far-reaching acceptance of the principles of Christian ethics, his rejection of ethical relativism and view of ethical principles as if they were transcendent, and his refusal to make a distinction between the ethics of public life and the ethics of private life—all this made Kuroń into one of the most ‘Christian’ of those who do not accept the Christian faith, and yet he was representative of his ideological milieu.”[19] Kuroń, a lifelong Marxist, or at least a lifelong independent socialist thinker and activist was, as Lipski notes, representative in this regard of a majority of non-religious members of KOR. And this deliberate adoption of a Christian ethos by the non-Communist Polish Left was evidence of an increasing rapprochement with the Church that began early on under the Gierek regime. In effect, the Left abandoned, in the words of Timothy Garton Ash, “the outdated stereotypes of the bigoted nationalist, ‘reactionary,’ anti-Semitic Church (which lived on as a terrible phantom in the mind of the Western Left).”[20] Indeed, by 1979 there existed “the embryo of that tacit alliance of workers, intelligentsia, and Church unprecedented in Polish history, unique in the Soviet bloc, and unseen in the West, which was to grow into Solidarity.”[21]

The Polish Left that led KOR was aiming, like Gandhi, to “spiritualize” politics in a manner focused more broadly on religious values than religious beliefs, a focus transparent in the title of Kuroń’s essay above. Within this conception, the (suppressive) “power” of conventional politics is distinguished from what Gandhi termed “sattvic” politics, that is, a politics oriented toward “truth,” “goodness,” and “purity,” (the meaning of sattva). A cardinal principle of this kind of politics is nonviolence. And for both Gandhi and KOR, one consequence of this conception of power is a concentration on the actual or latent (or possible) power that lies in the hands of the masses, viewed as inversely proportional to the socio-economic and political power that depends on coercion and forms of hierarchy today largely exercised by and intrinsic to the State and capitalist corporations. In its suppressive forms, such power rules out, inhibits, or corrodes democratic expression and participation. Members of KOR exemplified tapas in their service of humanity as a result of their belief in, and commitment to, truth and nonviolence as ultimate values and guiding principles of political praxis. The men and women of KOR took a principled and concrete stand against State terror and lawlessness, while “giv[ing] help to the persecuted” and “present[ing] the truth to society, countering the lies of propaganda.”[22] In the manner of the satyāgrahi, members of KOR made dramatic and urgent appeals to the consciences of their fellow citizens, appeals which also served to create structures and sentiments of human cooperation and solidarity based on trust, humility, and even agape or eros. They courageously assumed the risks of harassment, beatings, unemployment, imprisonment, and even death as part of their open and legal social, economic, and political activities on behalf of workers and their families. The lawyers, academics, writers, literary critics, editors, economists, scientists, priests, and other intelligentsia fashioned the social relief, social welfare, and social defense work of KOR so as to give priority those people most in need of immediate help (e.g., those imprisoned, without income, harmed by the security forces, or in need of legal assistance): “money, advice, legal or medical aid, a job or sometimes simply moral support.”[23]

This brings us to the second principle of KOR and the nonviolent democratic opposition generally in Poland, namely, the commitment to the “self-organization” of civil society so as to establish its relative and democratically-grounded independence from the coercive power of the State. For Gandhi, this ambitious and long-range task fell under the heading of the “Constructive Programme,” a necessary and increasingly more important complement to the individual and collective acts of civil resistance (primarily forms of non-cooperation and civil disobedience). At least one by-product or spillover effect of such a constructive program was thought by Gandhi to include the development of the capacity and “quality required for non-violent responsible government.”[24] In a 1941 pamphlet on the Constructive Programme, Gandhi spelled out its purposes and goals (specific of course to the Indian subcontinent), thus attention and energy were to be directed to “the need for working together toward communal unity, the removal of untouchability, a program of adult education and village improvement, peasant uplift and the development of nonviolent labor unions, economic and social equality, decentralized economic production and distribution through promotion of cottage and small-scale industries, and the abolition of various social evils.”[25] It is clear that the nature of such constructive programs will vary in content owing to the requisite sensitivity to time and place, although they may share subscription to fundamental principles, say, of freedom, equality, and social justice. Although KOR’s foremost purpose was in meeting the aforementioned urgent needs of suffering or injured workers and those dependent on them, its avowed long-range goal “was to stimulate new centers of autonomous activity in a variety of areas and a variety of social groups independent of KOR,”[26] a goal markedly achieved in part with the formation of Solidarność (Solidarity), in the provision of direct or indirect inspiration for sundry religious, student and peasant groups and committees, and the publication of political and cultural periodicals outside the aegis of the Party-State.

The third and final principle cited by Smolar that compares favorably with Gandhi’s moral and political philosophy was the insistence on legality (assuming here its democratic and constitutional character), inclusive of the moral and legal norms enshrined in municipal and international legal instruments. KOR’s efforts in support of workers were scrupulously legal in as much as they were sanctioned “by the the international agreements ratified by the People’s Republic of Poland, including the Final Act of the Helsinki Conference and the Polish Constitution, as well as other laws.”[27] While KOR never applied for “offical permission to act” through legal registration, it was able to invoke an

“old but still valid law from the 1930s which allowed for the formation of committees devoted to relief actions (aid to flood or fire victims, for example), and such committees did not have to be registered. In addition, KOR had only one characteristic of an organizaton: members. It had no by-laws or statutes, no chairmen, no membership fees. There was also a legal loophole: any group attempting to register becomes illegal if it is denied registration, and any further activity by such an organization is then subject to criminal sanctions. This is not the case for organizations that simply neglect to register, and which are then subject only to administrative sanctions. In this, and in all similar cases, KOR knew very well that repression (or the lack of it) would depend solely on the degree of self-confidence felt by the authorities, and not on the law; but KOR wanted to have the law on its side as far as possible.”[28]

This emphasis on legality, and the value therefore of having “law on one’s side,” was given principled expression and reaffirmation in the stated aims of the newly christened Social Self-Defense Committee, or (KSS)-KOR, in September 1977:
1. To struggle against repressions used for reasons of conscience, politics, religion, or race, and to give aid for those persecuted for these reasons.
2. To struggle against violations of the rule of law, and to help those who have been wronged.
3. To fight for the institutional protection of civil rights and freedoms.
4. To support and defend all social initiatives aiming to realize Human and Civil Rights.[29]

Gandhi found much to criticize in European legal systems but we should recall his training as a barrister in England, where he was called to the Bar in 1891. Although his time in South Africa and later leadership of the struggle for Indian independence found him frequently assuming the standpoint of the rebel if not (nonviolent) revolutionary, thereby inclining him toward the moral sensibilities and political temperament of the philosophical anarchist, he often asserted in word and demonstrated in deed the moral and political values associated with the democratic rule of law, respect for which was fundamental to his theoretical conceptions of civil resistance and civil disobedience. While Gandhi thought non-cooperation could be safely practiced by and was readily available to the masses, he believed civil disobedience was best employed “only as a last resort and by a select few—at any rate in the beginning.”[30] One reason the satyāgrahi’s criteria for and conditions of civil disobedience are more stringent than those for the many forms of non-cooperation is that the former, for Gandhi, is predicated upon a prior “habit of willing obedience to laws without fear of their sanctions.”[31] In fact, Gandhi says, “disobedience of a particular rule assumes a willing acceptance of the sanction provided for its breach.”[32] In sum, Gandhi believed that “Civil disobedience presupposes scrupulous and willing observance of all law which do not hurt the moral sense or violated individual conscience.”[33] Alongside the aforementioned anarchist sensibilities, Gandhi upheld the Liberal’s respect for the rule of law, which is premised upon according metaphysical and moral priority to the individual qua individual, one deserving of the dignity and possessed of the self-respect intrinsic to the notion of moral autonomy. For Gandhi, a basic moral duty follows from these axiomatic premises: a sacred duty to ascertain the proper conditions of political and legal loyalty and support. Gandhi believed that “most men do not understand the complicated machinery of government,” including a failure to appreciate the fact “that every citizen silently but nevertheless surely sustains the government of the day in ways in which he has no knowledge,” a belief of Gandhi’s in many respects similar to that found among the political philosophers of post-structuralist anarchism.[34] Bhikhu Parekh explains Gandhi’s understanding of the citizen’s moral duty with regard to the State and its laws:

“When a law was just, a citizen had a ‘sacred duty’ to give it his fullest co-operation and ‘willing and spontaneous obedience.’ The duty has a dual basis. As a moral being he had a general duty to do or support good. And as a citizen he had a specific moral duty to help sustain the community into which he was born and rooted, by which he was profoundly shaped, whose benefits he had enjoyed and to whose members he was bound by ties of mutual expectation [essentially the argument of the personified Laws in the Crito]. If a law was unjust or morally unacceptable, he had the opposite duty. To obey it was to ‘participate in evil’ and to incur moral responsibility for its consequences. It was ‘mere superstition’ and an attitude worthy only of a ‘slave’ to think that all laws, however unjust, deserved to be obeyed or that a citizen was somehow exempt from the duty to judge every law before obeying it.

Gandhi agreed that a law could not be judged in isolation from the general character of the state concerned. If the state was ‘intrinsically’ or ‘mainly’ good, it deserved the fullest co-operation of its citizens and its occasional ‘lapses’ should not be judged too harshly. All men made mistakes and no citizen had a right to magnify those of the state. Furthermore a good state was unlikely to want to act badly, and deserved the benefit of the doubt. Again, the state represented ‘compulsory co-operation’ and no-one could be its member on his own terms.”[35]

Postscript
In a timely, original, and important social scientific study, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011), Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan come to the following conclusions:

First, “that historically, nonviolent resistance campaigns have been more effective in achieving their goals than violent resistance campaigns. This has been true even under conditions in which most people would expect nonviolent resistance to be futile, including situations in which dissent is typically met with harsh regime repression.”

Second, “the historical success of nonviolent campaigns is explained by the fact that the physical, moral, and informational barriers to participation in nonviolent campaigns are substantially lower than in violent campaigns in given comparable circumstances.”

Chenoweth and Stephan make explicit the error of drawing a further but unwarranted inference from their findings, namely, “that just because a campaign is nonviolent does not guarantee its success. [….] Rather, the ability of the campaign to make strategic adjustments to changing conditions is crucial to its success, whether it is nonviolent or violent.”

These arguments do not account for the specific moral and political motivations of leading actors involved in nonviolent resistance campaigns. In other words, it may very well turn out to be the case that a principled commitment to nonviolence is what sustains (in the face of repression and violence) those involved in nonviolent resistance campaigns, in addition to, or apart from, a belief in the strategic efficacy of nonviolence. Indeed, it may turn out to be the case that such a belief (and principled commitment in praxis) is on the order of wishful thinking in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In other words, a creedal belief in the value and (eventual) success of nonviolent action may provide the requisite motivation to sustain actors in protracted social conflict and campaigns of nonviolent resistance, thereby directly contributing to their effectiveness and enhancing their probability of success. The corresponding question being whether or not simple belief in the strategic effectiveness of nonviolence or the adoption of nonviolence as a policy or tactic is sufficient to motivate a devoted cadre to persevere in the cause and throughout the course of such resistance campaigns.

Notes:
[1] Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995: 3.
[2] Ibid., 3-4.
[3] Ibid., 29.
[4] Please see Timothy Garton Ash, The Polish Revolution: Solidarity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 3rd ed., 2002, and the articles by Aleksander Smolar, Mark Kramer, Kieran Williams, and Charles S. Maier, in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
[5] Aleksander Smolar, “Towards ‘Self-limiting Revolution:” Poland, 1970-1989,” in Roberts and Ash, eds. (above): 132.
[6] Rudolf Bahro (David Fernbach, tr.),The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB, 1978: 196-197.
[7] Ibid., 149.
[8] Jean-Paul Sartre (John Mathew, tr.), Between Existentialism and Marxism. New York: Morrow Quill, 1979 (first English translation, New Left Books, 1974).
[9] James MacGregor Burns, Leadership. New York: Harper, 1978: 4, 20, 448, 455. I came across this in Dennis Dalton’s Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993: 191-194.
[10] Raghavan Iyer, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983 (first edition, Oxford University Press, 1973): 139.
[11] Ibid., 73.
[12] Ibid., 286-287.
[13] Smolar in Roberts and Ash, eds., 129-130.
[14] Ibid., 132-133.
[15] Iyer, 40.
[16] Jan Jósef Lipski (Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore, tr.), KOR: Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985: 71.
[17] Iyer, 58.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Lipski, 75.
[20] Ash, 23.
[21] Ibid., 27.
[22] Lipski, 42.
[23] Ibid., 62.
[24] Gandhi quoted in Iyer, 306.
[25] Ibid., 306-307.
[26] Lipski, 64.
[27] Ibid., 45.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid., 200.
[30] Iyer, 245.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 276.
[33] Ibid., 247. Bhikhu Parekh provides a succinct summary of the Gandhian justificatory conditions of and criteria for civil disobedience: “After taking full account of its general character, the views of the majority and his own fallibility, a citizen might decide that he could not in good conscience obey a particular law. If this was how he felt, he had a duty to disobey it on two conditions. First, his disobedience should be ‘civil,’ that is, it should be public and non-violent; he should show why he finds the law unacceptable and how it violates his integrity or truth; he should be prepared to enter into an open-minded dialogue with the government and his fellow-citizens and to accept an honourable compromise; and he should voluntarily submit himself to the prescribed punishment. Second, he should have earned the adhikār or moral right to disobey the law. Civil disobedience or non-cooperation with an otherwise good government was a serious matter with potentially grave consequences and required mature deliberation. Only those were entitled to resort to it who had as a rule obeyed its laws, demonstrated their loyalty to the state and proved their moral maturity by not turning every disagreement into a matter of principle.” See Parekh (below): 125-126.
[34] Please see, Todd May, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.
[35] Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989: 124-125.

References & Further Reading:

Ash, Timothy Garton. The Polish Revolution: Solidarity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 3rd ed., 2002 (Penguin Books, 1999).
Ash, Timothy Garton. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Bahro, Rudolf (David Fernbach, tr.). The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: NLB, 1978.
Bernard, Michael H. The Origins of Democratization in Poland. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Brown, Judith M. Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989.
Brown, Judith M. and Anthony Parel, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Gandhi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Chenoweth, Erica and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Dalton, Dennis. Mahatma Gandhi: Nonviolent Power in Action. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
Elster, Jon, ed. The Roundtable Talks and the Breakdown of Communism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Havel, Václav (Paul Wilson, ed.). Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
Havel, Václav, et al. (John Keane, ed.). The Power of the Powerless. London: Hutchinson, 1985.
Havel, Václav, et al. (Jan Vladislav, ed.). Václav Havel or Living in Truth (Twenty-two essays published on the occasion of the award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel). London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
Iyer, Raghavan N. The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi. Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983 (1st ed., 1973, Oxford University Press).
Kaufman-Lacusta, Maxine (with contributions by others). Refusing to Be Enemies: Palestinian and Israeli Nonviolent Resistance to the Israeli Occupation. Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2011.
Konrád, György (George) (Richard E. Allen, tr.). Antipolitics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
Lipski, Jan Jósef (Olga Amsterdamska and Gene M. Moore, tr.). KOR: Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland, 1976-1981. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
Michnik, Adam (Maya Latynski, tr.). Letters from Prison and Other Essays. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985.
Michnik, Adam (David Ost, tr. and ed.). The Church and the Left. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: The Free Press, 1984.
Ost, David. Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990.
Parekh, Bhikhu. Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989.
Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
Raina, Peter. Political Opposition in Poland: 1954-1977. London: Poets and Painters Press, 1977.
Roberts, Adam and Timothy Garton Ash, eds. Civil Resistance and Power Politics: The Experience of Non-Violent Action from Gandhi to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Smolar, Aleksander. “Towards ‘Self-limiting Revolution:’ Poland, 1970-1989,” in Roberts and Ash (above), 2009: 127-143.
Staniszkis, Jadwiga. Poland’s Self-Limiting Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Stephan, Maria J., ed. Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization, and Governance in the Middle East. New York: Palgarave Macmillan, 2009.
Touraine, Alain, et al. (David Denby, tr.). Solidarity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

An Incipient Science of Subjectivity: Folk-Psychology and the Power of Psychoanalysis

2011-09-11T11:38:00.002-04:00

“Psychoanalysis is arguably the single most important intellectual development of the twentieth century. Comparable to the theory of evolution in the controversy it has caused and continues to cause, psychoanalysis informs part of our daily discourse in a way that evolution has never done. Terms such as unconscious, repressed, ego, ambivalent, complex, projection, denial, and double-bind enter into our every walk of life whenever people talk about mental states and the reasons for human actions. Psychoanalytic language and concepts have been integrated into Western culture through novels, poetry, drama and film, literary and film criticism. [….]

After more than a century of work, psychoanalysis emerged with the richest systematic description of inner experience that the Western world has produced. Its theories spanned such fundamental matters as sex, love, and death; childhood, parenting, and family; cruelty, fear, jealousy, envy, and hate; identity, conscience, and character; desire and mourning. In addition, a new social space has been created for the in-depth examination of mental life through use of methods that might mitigate psychic suffering. And, yet, these ideas were not timeless truths, immune to social flux. Psychoanalysis took root in western and central Europe, and that culture permeated its logic and assumptions. Once transplanted to foreign lands, it was inevitable that this body of knowledge would in part be remade.”—Joseph Schwartz, Cassandra’s Daughter: A History of Psychoanalysis (1999)

“So far our opposition to the claim that psychology can be a science on the order of physics, or even biology, has turned on the nature of folk-psychological explanation. So now that claim might shift ground, contending that folk psychology is just, as Freud thought, a temporary expedient which can be gotten rid of without loss someday. Loss of what, to whom? The obvious answer is: of everything that interests us as persons, as members of a world in which marrying, feeling guilty, promising, disavowing and repressing, committing murder, joining the baseball team, believing that the earth is round, and so on, have the importance they do. These are things we want to understand about our enemies and friends; and such a project necessarily invokes mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions. [….] Of actions it is both explanatory and constitutive. If our interest is in what Oedipus meant to us, or what Maisie knew, or what Little Hans saw, then nothing but the language of mind will satisfy. Reductionists refer disparagingly to reason-explanations as ‘folk-psychology.’ But if reduction isn’t possible, then folk psychology is the best we can do, and good enough. [….]

So long as psychoanalysis hopes to understand human actions, it will always be, and must be, an interpretive discipline. It will attempt to find out what we have meant by what we have said, and what obscure desires, what strange beliefs—yet beliefs and desires for all that—give both cause and sense, or reason for, our more-or-less intentional doings. The so-called hermeneuticists are wrong in saying that interpretations do not uncover links that are causal in nature; but they are right in insisting our explanations of actions are interpretations, and that as such they can be incorporated only in a ‘softer’ science than physics.

One of the things that psychoanalysis means in calling itself a science is that analyst and patient may make genuine discoveries about how the patient sees things, what she wants, phantasizes, believes, remembers, and so on, consciously and unconsciously. [….] [T]he very possibility of one person’s interpreting another rests on the fact that they share norms, many beliefs and desires, and a material world in common. Interpretation is not ‘subjective’ in a sense that leaves truth up for grabs, or that makes it merely a matter of one person’s opinion, or that potentially places all narratives on an equal footing. If ‘objectivity’ describes what is in the public domain and intelligible according to norms that are also public, then human thought and behavior can be understood only on the assumption that they, together with our interpretations of them, are objective in this sense. [….]

…[E]ven when [Freud] was wrong, he was unfailingly interesting, as a philosopher as well as a psychologist.”—Marcia Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy (1993)

The Social Democracy of Red Vienna & the “Intellectual Communism” of the Psychoanalytic Salon

2011-09-08T19:25:00.003-04:00

“Social democracy offered one possible solution to the problematic social place of psychoanalysis. [That problematic ‘place’ was due largely to the ‘fact that all of Freud’s early associates were Jewish,’ bearing in mind that ‘Jews were the radical “other” in European life of the period.’] Austrian socialism opposed anti-Semitism and was less economistic and more oriented toward cultural questions than most socialist traditions. Many of the original figures in Freud’s circle [i.e. the Wednesday Psychological Society] were Social Democrats. [….] Many analytic patients were also socialists. Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.) translated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman into German and founded the Jewish Women’s Union (Jüdischer Frauenbund), Emma Eckstein (Irma) was an associate of Karl Kautsky, the leader of the Social Democrats, and the sister of Therese Shlesinger, a Social Democrat who was one of the first female members of Parliament. [….]

In fact, autodidacticism and countercultural pursuits were combined with a socialist sensibility in early psychoanalysis. Discussions at the Wednesday-night meetings ranged over such topics as Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, the woman question, the psychology of Marxism, and the sexual enlightenment of children. As in his university course, Freud required every member to participate in discussion, the order determined by choosing slips from an urn. Ideas were deemed to be communal property, to be used without citation. This they called ‘intellectual communism.’”—Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004): 70-71.

Psychoanalysis as the “first great theory and practice of personal life”

2011-09-07T17:53:00.008-04:00

Psychoanalysis accorded psychological, moral, and cultural legitimacy to the “experience of having an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor.” It therefore built upon the notion of moral autonomy, widening it to encompass the spheres of “creativity, happiness, and love.” By a theory and praxis of personal life, we mean reference to an “historically specific experience of singularity and interiority, one that was sociologically grounded in [processes of modernity]....” It served to free individuals from unconscious images of oppressive authority rooted in the family and gave plausible substance to the notion of a personal unconscious.

“Far from seeking to return a disturbed individual to a preexisting order, as the shaman, healer, or priest did, [Freud] formulated the analytic project as a personal and provisional hermeneutic of self-discovery, one that a psychoanalyst could facilitate but not control. In this way, he gave expression to possibilities of individuality, authenticity, and freedom that had only recently emerged, and opened the way to a new understanding of social life.”

While psychoanalysis was historically liable to suffer through “the familiar Weberian cycle of idealization, rebellion, dissemination, institutionalization, and routinization,” “in its heyday men and women used it to complicate, deepen and radicalize the three emancipatory promises of modernity,” namely, autonomy, woman’s equality, and democracy. These promises were not merely utopian, for capitalism’s contribution to mass culture, leisure time, and the possibilities of a personal life represented the economic and material conditions that enabled their fulfillment even as—then as well as today—“the same historical forces that produced the aspiration toward individuality were undermining its social prerequisites.”

At its best, psychoanalysis consisted of three intertwined threads: “a quasi-therapeutic medical practice, a theory of cultural hermeneutics, and an ethic of personal self-exploration, one that was imbued with the devotion of a calling.” The emancipatory strength of these threads was clearly visible in its continental European birthplace,* while the geo-political conditions and cultural climate that later characterized post-war England and the United States served, generally (thus with exceptions), to unravel, fray and thus weaken the emancipatory character of psychoanalysis, in part as a result of the wholesale professional medicalization of psychotherapy and the ideological psychologization of conventional forms of authority, rendering psychoanalysis prone to exploitation as a tool of social control of one kind or another.—The quoted material is from, and the inspiration for this post provided by, Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (2004).

* As Zaretsky notes, “By 1940, the psychoanalytic community in continental Europe had been wiped out.”

The Discomforting Demands of Psychoanalysis: one step backwards so as to take two steps forward*

2011-09-04T17:15:00.008-04:00

“[Patients] want help, to feel better, to be happier. Psychoanalysis, however, is often not quite what they had in mind. For one, it takes a long time. Also, it costs them a lot. The cost issue is interesting—actually, psychoanalysis is not particularly costly. It is rather that unlike most therapies or treatments in our society, patients have to bear the cost personally. Managed care organizations and insurance companies don’t like to pay psychoanalysts’ bills. Even more important for patients, however, it often seems as if psychoanalysis isn’t even designed to help them. Patients want answers, whereas psychoanalysts ask questions. Patients want advice, but psychoanalysts are trained not to give advice. Patients want support and love. Psychoanalysis offers interpretation and insight. Patients want to feel better; analysts talk about character change.”—Robert Michels, M.D., (Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine, and University Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University)

* Or the deferred gratification and economies of scale in self-realization.

Source: Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch, eds., Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Addendum: Regarding Michels’ first point, namely, that psychoanalysis “takes a long time,” it’s interesting to recall, with Paul Robinson, Freud’s later views on this topic. Freud in fact became quite pessimistic about the prospects of “success” for analytic therapy, hence the melancholy tone and telling title of his 1937 essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” wherein Freud “reveals grave doubts about the thoroughness and durability of analytic cures. Analysis, the essay concurs, cannot guarantee that the patient won’t suffer recurrence of his affliction, any more than it can provide immunization against the outbreak of a different neurosis.” “Mental illness,” writes Robinson, “now appears to Freud more elusive and intractable than ever before. Analysis, accordingly, becomes ‘an interminable task.’” Patients, on the other hand, are expecting to contract for a (once and for all) cure of what ails them.

Miscellany

2011-09-01T20:17:00.005-04:00

For one reason or another, noteworthy articles, posts, and books (otherwise, sans any common theme or point):

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, once more, on target: An Undeserved Attack on the ‘Undeserving Poor.’

New books by and an interview with UCLA historian James L. Gelvin from Jadaliyya: The Modern Middle East & The Arab Uprisings.

From Waging Nonviolence, Libya’s Revolution: A Model for the Region?

Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Richard J. McNally, What Is Mental Illness? Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Although it’s been out a few years, I’ve just gotten ‘round to reading this: Loïs Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.

My cyberspace friend Kevin Jon Heller (Opinio Juris and University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School) has just published The Nuremberg Trials and the Origins of International Criminal Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

The Wonder That Is India (with apologies to A.L. Basham): The typewriter lives on in India.

Enjoy!

Crime & Punishment: A Gandhian Perspective

2011-08-31T04:10:00.011-04:00

I’ve been re-thinking my views on punishment of late, although the tentative and inchoate nature of these thoughts prompt me (for now at least) to refrain from sharing them, even in a blog post.[1] However, having recently posted on the Gandhian take (by way of Bhikhu Parekh) on classical Liberal—and capitalist—ownership and private property, I thought to share his ideas on crime and punishment as well. Once more we’ll rely on Parekh’s well-crafted summary.[2]

Three areas in particular in which Gandhi highlighted the indissoluble connection between violence and the modern State: war, the exploitative economic system, and the punishment of crime.[3] The violence in these three cases is also conspicuous for being tolerated by elites and masses alike. We’ll concern ourselves with the last. As you’ll see in the bracketed comments, I’m not too fond of the use Gandhi makes of an analogy between disease and crime (owing to his indiscriminately moralistic approach to the former), however much something might be learned from the comparison. Nevertheless, we should not permit problems with that analogy to detract us from a fair consideration of his views on crime and punishment.

“Gandhi was disturbed by the ‘silent’ and largely invisible but extensive violence daily committed by the state without a murmur of protest, namely the prisons. His views on the subject were derived not only from his theory of non-violence but also from his reflections on what imprisonment had done to him, to his political colleagues and the ordinary criminals who sometimes shared prisons with him during his nearly six years of incarceration in India and seven months in South Africa.

For Gandhi, there were only crimes, not criminals. To describe a man as a criminal was to imply that criminality was inherent in his nature and that he was nothing more than a criminal. A man committing a crime did not necessarily have a criminal disposition, both because an isolated act did not signify a pattern, and also because a crime was often the result of a number of factors only marginally related to the agent’s character. Even if he was in the habit of committing crimes, he did not cease to be a human being endowed with a moral and spiritual nature. He was always more than and must be separated from his actions and tendencies. While his crimes should be condemned and punished, he deserved to be treated with the respect and love due to a fellow human being. Rather than brutalise and degrade him, punishment should help him reclaim his humanity. Men were responsible for one another, and if one of them turned delinquent, the rest could not disown their equal responsibility for his behavior. Even as he must search his conscience, they must probe theirs.

Gandhi detected a deep contradiction between modern society’s attitudes to disease and crime. It viewed disease with a solicitous concern bordering on indulgence and devoted vast resources to inventing new drugs, instruments, more effective forms of treating and acquiring greater knowledge of the human body. Diseases owed their origins to such causes as overeating, unbalanced diet, bad habits, consumption of alcohol, excessive stress and strain and an undisciplined life, all of which were moral lapses showing weak will-power and bad judgment. [Needless to say, Gandhi’s views here are quite radical and probably unacceptable to most of us insofar as we recognize that at least some diseases have a not insignificant genetic component or may arise, as it were, unbidden (as when, in the jargon of pop psychology, ‘bad things’ happen to ‘good people’). Furthermore, his view cannot accommodate the cases of infants and young children afflicted by diseases through no fault or lapse—moral or otherwise—of their own. That said, there’s a fair amount of truth to this picture, as seen in the case of at least some health problems: cancer, heart disease, stroke, and Type 2 diabetes, for example. Yet even this truth takes insufficient cognizance of the role of socio-economic environmental factors in affecting behavioral problems ostensibly caused by bad habits, poor judgment, or weakness of will.] Society, however, attached no opprobrium to and imposed no punishment on them, and took no steps to strengthen the intellectual and moral fibre of those involved. [Again, in the time elapsed since Gandhi composed his thoughts on this topic, things have in fact changed, at least in this country, as opprobrium and informal sanctions are in place with regard, for example, to morbid obesity, the eating of “junk food,” smoking, and excessive drinking, although the social messages in toto are undoubtedly “mixed” and contradictory in the face, for instance, of mass media entertainment and advertising. This serves to weaken the strength of Gandhi’s analogical comparison between disease and crime.] By contrast, it treated crime with the greatest of severity. Even when petty and inadvertent, it condemned it in the strongest terms and punished it in a demeaning and degrading manner. Society devoted little attention to exploring effective ways of eradicating it, and continued with the same old method of imprisonment which not only did not reduce but even increased the incidence of crime.

For Gandhi there was no real difference between crime and disease. Both, alike, displayed poor self-discipline and a lack of social responsibility and concern for others, both were avoidable and both cost society a great deal of money. There was no reason to tolerate one and condemn the other or to treat one with indulgence and the other with severity. [….] Even as modern medical science pampered the body, encouraged self-indulgence, weakened self-control and allowed disease to continue unabated, the modern prison brutalised its inmates, weakened their self-respect and encouraged the recurrence of crime. [….]

For Gandhi crime was a moral lapse, a ‘disease’ [in a metaphorical sense], not the normal condition of a human soul. Most men never committed crimes, and those who did generally refrained from doing so when treated with love and understanding. In his view, man committed crimes for one of three reasons: first, to secure the basic needs of life; second, a weak will and the inability to resist temptation; and third, in rare cases ill-will or malevolence. In the first case, crime was a product of poverty, and in the other two bad social and economic conditions and poor upbringing. For Gandhi will-power and self-discipline were not natural endowments but products of upbringing and the dominant social ethos. As for malevolence it too was not natural to man, for even the most hardened and vicious criminals loved someone, at least their parents, wives, husbands, children or animals, and the question was one of widening the range of their capacity for love and goodwill. [I suspect Gandhi ignored or wildly underestimated the occurrence of psychopathic behavior.] Since crime was basically a ‘product of social organisation,’ it could be very considerably minimised by appropriately changing the latter.

[Imprisonment, Gandhi believed], was generally inspired by the spirit of retribution which was morally unworthy of and reduced the state to the level of its temporarily deviant member. It provoked the spirit of vengeance in the prisoner and perpetuated the vicious cycle of violence. Above all, it never solved the basic problem of reducing the incidence of crime in the long term. Once behind bars a man was generally ‘lost to society for ever.’ He rarely came out reformed but often worse. In locking him up the state did violence to and even killed the human being in him, a crime often worse than the one committed by him. Gandhi pleaded that a state calling itself civilised must put an end to the system of daily dehumanising and brutalising its members and find less violent and inhuman ways of coping with crime, even if that involved taking calculated risks and making bold experiments. He observed:

Quite a few people say and believe that many children have been reformed through beating. It is this belief which is responsible for the increasing burden of sin in the world at present. The use of force is soul-destroying and it affects not only the person who uses it but also his descendants and the environment as a whole. We should examine the total effect of the use of force, and that over a long period of time. The use of force has continued over a long period of time, but we do not find that those things against which force has been employed have been destroyed. Formerly there used to be heavy punishments for theft. It is the opinion of all expert observers that heavy punishments have not stopped thefts. As the punishments began to be tempered with mercy, the number of thefts declined.

Until such time as an alternative to prisons was found—and Gandhi confessed that he had not yet been able to come up with one—much could be done to improve them. The most important change should be at the level of attitude. We should see them as places for reforming, not punishing people. Since they could not be reformed unless kept under constant supervision, their movements had to be restricted. Even as keeping patients in hospitals or quarantining those suffering from infectious diseases was not imprisonment, keeping those guilty of crime in reformative institutions for the required period of time was not so either. [….] In his view much could be achieved if ‘prisons’ were to become workshops-cum-educational institutions encouraging their inmates in constructive and socially useful activities, providing for their moral education and building up their self-respect, sense of social responsibility and character. He thought they were more likely to be reformed if trusted and provided with privacy, a decent environment, healthy diet, proper rest and civilised relations with each other and their wardens. Every social order successfully moulded the character of its members along the desired lines. There was no reason why the ‘prisons’ could not learn from its methods and achieve the same results.”

Notes:
[1] I’ve been inspired most recently and in part, by Ted Honderich’s book, Punishment: The Supposed Justifications Revisited (London: Pluto Press, 5th edition, 2006). See too this earlier post on “Crime and Unusual Punishments.” I’ve since updated (and divided into two parts: 1. criminal law, and 2. punishment and prisons) my bibliography for “criminal law, punishment and prisons” and will send it along upon request.
[2] Bhikhu Parekh, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
[3] Far and away the most analytically satisfying and thorough treatment of Gandhi’s understanding of violence and nonviolence remains Raghavan Iyer’s formidable study, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Santa Barbara, CA: Concord Grove Press, 2nd ed., 1983, 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 1973). An introduction to basic literature on Gandhi's life and work is found here.

[cross-posted at ReligiousLeftLaw.com]

Private Property & Ownership: The Gandhian Critique

2011-08-28T12:41:00.006-04:00

The following is Bhikhu Parekh’s pithy introduction to Gandhi’s critique of the Liberal—and capitalist—conception of private property and ownership:

“The logic of private property was logically incoherent for two reasons. First, there was no logical basis on which a man could claim exclusive ownership of the products of his labour. Born a debtor, he remained one all his life. His powers, capacities, character and energies were all socially derived, and hence not his private property but a social trust to be responsibly used for the well-being of his fellow-men. Second, the efforts of countless men and women flowed into one another to produce even a simple object, rendering it impossible to demarcate the distinctive contribution of each. Their efforts further occurred within the context of the established social order whose silent and unnoticed but vital contribution could not be ignored either. [….]

For Gandhi private property was subversive of the social order because it conflicted with the fundamental principles underlying and sustaining it. The customs, values, traditions, ways of life and thought, habits, language and educational, and other institutions constituting a social order were created by the quiet co-operation and the anonymous sacrifices of countless men and women over several generations, none of whom asked for or could ever receive reward for all their efforts. And their integrity was preserved by every citizen using them in a morally responsible manner. Every social order was thus of necessity a co-operative enterprise created and sustained by the spirit of sharing, mutual concern, self-sacrifice and yajna [‘sacrifice’ generally]. And its moral and cultural capital, available by its very nature to all its members as freely as the air they breathed, constituted their collective and common heritage to be lovingly cherished and enriched. The institution of private property rested on the opposite principles and breathed a very different spirit. It stressed selfishness, aggression, exclusive ownership, narrow individualism, a reward for every effort made, possessiveness and a right to do what one liked with one’s property. It was hardly surprising, Gandhi argued, that its domination in the modern age should have atomized and culturally impoverished society and undermined the basic conditions of human development.”

See Parekh’s book, Gandhi’s Political Philosophy: A Critical Examination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,1989): 134-135.

Image: The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City (‘Making a Fresco’) (1931) is one of four murals in the Bay Area painted by Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886-1957).

Raising the flag

2011-08-22T08:21:00.006-04:00

Tripoli, Berlin, Iwo Jima:

The “Truncated Autonomy” of Raz’s Liberal Perfectionism

2011-08-20T10:10:00.011-04:00

The most explicit and thorough statement of Joseph Raz’s intriguing theory of “liberal perfectionism” is found in his invaluable book, The Morality of Freedom (1986) wherein “the end of liberal political morality is the good of an autonomous moral life.” In Constitutional Goods (2004) Alan Brudner proffers a succinct formulation of Razian liberal perfectionism:

“Autonomy…is essential to well-being, since personally endorsing one’s goods is essential to one’s deriving fulfillment from pursuing and accomplishing them. Because, moreover, the achievement of autonomy depends on the existence of a public culture offering a wide array of valuable pursuits, it is a common good requiring state action to realize it.”

But Brudner identifies, by my lights, a significant shortcoming in Raz’s formalist conception of autonomy that leaves us with a rather attenuated form of perfectionism: “Raz argues that, although a morally valuable goal is one that truly conduces to well-being, an agent can find valuable only what is socially valued.” Brudner labels this the “social dependency thesis,” as it relies on a formalist rendering of autonomy effectively “empty of specific content” insofar as it is without criteria whereby to independently (i.e., autonomously) assess the notion of well-being. His critique is as follows:

“This thesis implies that the ideal of well-being is attainable only in a well-ordered society where the available options are indeed morally valuable, for only there are the conventional fetters to well-being overcome. However, even in a well-ordered society, the social dependency thesis can avoid moral conventionalism only if it is possible for an agent to value a goal because it is independently valuable and not simply because it is socially valued. Raz affirms this possibility. He argues that goals are adopted because they are thought to serve well-being, and it is possible to have true and false beliefs about whether they do because well-being is distinguished from contentment. Yet that there is a distinction between the valued and the valuable will not by itself save moral autonomy from the clutches of the social dependency thesis. An agent will not be able to distinguish a false social belief about the goals that conduce to well-being from a true one unless he or she has an independent conception of what well-being is—independent, that is, of social opinion. If she does, it is difficult to see why the social dependency thesis should be true; but if she does not, then she will be dependent on social opinion after all. Raz himself offers no such independent conception, or rather he offers a circular and decidedly unhelpful one. Well-being, he says, consists in the successful pursuit of morally valuable ends, and a morally valuable end is one that conduces to well-being. But then the agent, who can value only what is socially valued and who has no way of connecting socially valued ends to a non-circular criterion of the morally valuable is effectively left with a morality of convention.”

Thus, writes Brudner, “Raz’s perfectionism, in failing to generate a rational content and scheme of fundamental ends, is not perfectionist enough given its commitment to autonomy.” Or, in other words, a formalistic conception of autonomy leaves us with an attenuated perfectionism. This may be analogous to, if not perhaps in some ways connected with, Isaiah Berlin’s influential (or infamous) analysis of freedom, at least as discussed by Jon Elster in Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (1983). Indeed, it might be the case that Raz is assuming or perhaps influenced by Berlin’s (or something akin to Berlin’s) understanding of freedom:

“What is freedom, freedom tout court, being a free man? We may distinguish between two extreme answers to this question. One is that freedom consists simply in being free to do what one wants to do, irrespective of the genesis of the wants. In a well-known passage Isaiah Berlin argues against this notion of freedom: ‘If degrees of freedom were a function of the satisfaction of desires, I could increase freedom as effectively by eliminating desires as by satisfying them; I could render men (including myself) free by conditioning them into losing the original desire which I have decided not to satisfy.’ And this, in his view, is unacceptable. By this argument Berlin was led to the other extreme in the spectrum of definitions of freedom: ‘It is the actual doors that are open that determine the extent of someone’s freedom, and not his own preferences.’ Freedom is measured by the number and importance of the doors and the extent to which they are open [one might say this is Berlin’s version of the ‘social dependency thesis’]. Disregarding the last clause, which appears to conflate formal freedom and real ability, this means that freedom is measured by the number and non-subjective importance of the things one is free to do [emphasis added]. True, Berlin suggests that the notion of importance should also take account of the centrality of freedoms to the individual, but this would seem to smuggle in preferences again, contrary to his main intention. Importance, in his view, must be divorced from the individual’s own evaluation of importance.”

It seems Raz’s notion of autonomy is predicated upon or at least endorses Berlin’s understanding of freedom although Raz is, to be sure, sensitive to a welfarist conception of the satisfaction of desires or the value of individual preferences. As Elster explains, the degree of freedom depends on the number and importance of the things one (i) is free to do and (ii) autonomously wants to do.” The social dependency thesis appears in the end to make (ii) wholly dependent on or a function of (i) such that, for example, it’s irrelevant that I may “live in a society that offers me a great many important opportunities, which do not at all overlap with what I want to do.” Raz needs a more robust or substantive conception of autonomy that is able to invoke, as it were, independent criteria of “the good” or “the good life” which, in turn, allow for truly free individual judgment and assessment. The social dependency thesis and corresponding lack of an independent criterion or criteria of the good (or self-fulfillment) or what Brudner terms a “rational content and scheme of fundamental ends,” preclude full appreciation of the fact that “it is better to desire things because they are desirable than to do so because they are available,” or at least precludes the would-be autonomous person from knowing whether or not her choices are wholly determined by the latter condition. Perhaps, for example, I have inordinate desires for consumption based on the (possibly false) belief that it promotes happiness or well-being: how do I know that my desires are not shaped by the fact that I live in a society which provides a plethora of opportunities for consumption, the socially regnant or widespread de facto or default belief being that a life of consumption is conducive to or promotes well-being?

As Elster writes elsewhere, liberalism, in our case Razian perfectionist liberalism, “neglects the endogeneity of preferences. Liberalism advocates the free choice of life-style, but it forgets that the choice is to a large extent preempted by the social environment in which people grow up and live,” a social environment today that is defined by the ethos of the latest form of capitalism.* We might consider the possibility that there exists a space that might be carved out betwixt and between the liberalism of a capitalist democracy compatible with the truncated autonomy of Razian perfectionism, and a dictatorially or unduly paternalist (i.e. externally) imposed conception of the good life. Elster argues this space can be defined by a form of individual and collective self-paternalism: “If people do not want to have the preferences they have, they can take steps—individually or collectively—to change them.” Does the apparent widespread preference for (or belief in the good of) a life of consumption rule out the possibility of generating truly independent or substantively autonomous conceptions, and the preference for same, of the good life (Marxist or otherwise)? What steps might we take to generate truly autonomous conceptions of the good life (and preferences for same) beyond conceptions of welfare, well-being or happiness yoked largely to a life of consumption (including aesthetic pleasures and entertainment as well as material goods in the ordinary sense)? What might religious worldviews contribute to our understanding of the contours of “the good life?”

*See Elster's chapter, “Self-realisation in work and politics; the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Image: Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of (Earthly) Delights (c. 1500)

Saving Capitalism from Itself

2011-08-12T11:04:00.003-04:00

The remarkable reformer, lawyer, and jurist, Louis D. Brandeis,* attempted to persuade the partisans of plutocracy that it was in their best interests to reform capitalism if they were concerned to save it: “the great captains of industry and of finance,” he warned them “…are the chief makers of socialism.” And of course Brandeis himself did much to humanize (in the broadest sense) capitalism in the first decades of the last century. But the truth of his rhetorical warning is an open question: does the behavior of corporate and finance capitalists contribute to rendering socialist theories and practices more palatable to masses experiencing the sudden thwarting of both their needs and fantasies? Is floundering in the conditions of material uncertainty and psychological insecurity conducive to rendering hearts and minds more receptive to utopian visions and radical socio-economic reforms and experimentation of socialist pedigree?

* See Melvin I. Urofsky’s biography, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life. New York: Pantheon Books, 2009.

American Violet: A Criminal Justice Story

2011-08-07T23:26:00.006-04:00

The American criminal justice system is so dysfunctional that it presents well-intentioned people with a dilemma. Should good people cooperate with it? [….] My experiences as a prosecutor persuade me that prosecutors are more part of the problem than the solution. Many mean well, but the “lock ‘em up” culture is so pervasive that it defeats even people with the best of intentions.--Paul Butler[1]

The following is from the Wikipedia entry (notes and some links omitted) on a must-see film: American Violet. The movie is based on a true story. While it’s been out for a couple of years, we just got ‘round to viewing it on Sunday.

Plot
Set in the midst of the 2000 presidential election, American Violet tells the story of Dee Roberts (Nicole Beharie), a 24 year-old African-American single mother of four, living in a small Texas town (based after Hearne, Texas where the real incident took place). One day, while Dee is working a shift at the local diner, the powerful local district attorney (Michael O’Keefe) leads a drug bust, sweeping Dee’s housing project. Police drag Dee from work in handcuffs, dumping her in the women’s county prison. Indicted based on the uncorroborated word of a single and dubious police informant facing his own drug charges, Dee soon discovers she has been charged as a drug dealer.

Even though Dee has no prior drug record and no drugs were found on her in the raid or any subsequent searches, she is offered a hellish choice: plead guilty and go home as a convicted felon or remain in prison and fight the charges thus, jeopardizing her custody and risking a long prison sentence. Despite the urgings of her mother (Alfre Woodard), and with her freedom and the custody of her children at stake, she chooses to fight the district attorney. Dee works with an ACLU attorney (Tim Blake Nelson) and a former local narcotics officer (Will Patton) to take on the Texas justice system.

Historical Basis
The film is based on the civil rights lawsuit Regina Kelly v. John Paschall, filed on behalf of 15 African-American residents of Hearne, Texas who were indicted in November 2000 on drug charges after being rounded up in a series of drug sweeps the ACLU referred to as “paramilitary.” The lawsuit accused Paschall and the South Central Texas Narcotics Task Force of conducting racially motivated drug sweeps for more than 15 years in Hearne. In 2005, the ACLU and Robertson County settled and the plaintiffs agreed to dismiss the individuals named in the suit, including Paschall. The fictional Harmon County represents Robertson County, Texas, where John Paschall continues to serve as District Attorney. Regina Kelly continued to live in Hearne, Texas until 2009.

Comment:

Among the many issues raised by the film (e.g.: racism, poverty, the war on drugs, prosecutorial discretion), one has to do with what happens when poor people are charged with crimes in our criminal justice system. As Deborah Rhode forthrightly notes in her important book, Access to Justice (2004), the constitutional right to effective counsel[2] in criminal cases, “in practice…makes a mockery of formal guarantees.” The current structure of indigent defense gives, in other words, pride of place to ineffective representation. Thus, what Anthony Lewis wrote in Gideon’s Trumpet (1964) remains as true today as when it was first written:

“It will be an enormous social task to bring to life the dream of Gideon v. Wainwright [372 U.S. 335 (1963)]—the dream of a vast, diverse country in which every man charged with crime will be capably defended, no matter what his economic circumstance, and in which the lawyer representing him will do so proudly, without resentment at an unfair burden, sure of the support needed to make an adequate defense.”

Notes:

[1] A “Hip-Hop Theory of [Criminal] Justice” is outlined in chapter 7 (123-145) of Butler’s book (see ‘Essential Reading’ below). For a critique from the perspective of what purports to be a more accurate account of such a “theory,” see the student Note, “This is Real Hip-Hop…,” from the Georgetown Law Journal, 99.4 (2011): 1179-1225.

[2] Keeping in mind that even “grossly incompetent lawyering,” as Monroe Freedman says, “is not enough to establish ineffective counsel.” The current criminal justice system—especially for poor people—is, in Freedman’s pithy characterization, “unethical, unconstitutional, and intolerably cruel.”

Essential Reading:

Abramsky, Sasha (2007) American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Alexander, Michelle (2010) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.

Banner, Stuart (2002) The Death Penalty: An American History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Paul (2009) Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice. New York: The New Press.

Cole, David (1999) No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System. New York: The Free Press.

Cusac, Anne-Marie (2009) Cruel and Unusual Punishment: The Culture of Punishment in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Davis, Angela J. (2007) Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. New York: Oxford University Press.

Garland, David (2010) Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Irwin, John (2004) The Warehouse Prison: Disposal of the New Dangerous Class. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Publ.

Mauer, Marc (2nd ed., 2006) Race to Incarcerate. New York: The Free Press.

Mello, Michael A. (1997) Dead Wrong: A Death Row Lawyer Speaks Out Against Capital Punishment. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Ogletree, Charles J., Jr. and Austin Sarat, eds. (2006) From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and the Death Penalty in America. New York: New York University Press.

Patillo, Mary, David Weiman and Bruce Western, eds. (2004) Imprisoning America: The Social Effects of Mass Incarceration. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publ.

Perkinson, Robert (2010) Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Rhode, Deborah L. (2004) Access to Justice. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rhodes, Lorna A. (2004) Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Scheck, Barry, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer (2000) Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted. New York: Doubleday.

Tonry, Michael (1996) Malign Neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America. New York: Oxford University Press.

Western, Bruce (2006) Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation Publ.

The Smithian Categorical Imperative

2011-08-07T02:28:00.003-04:00

The formulation of the Smithian Categorical Imperative is an attempt by the late Neil MacCormick in his last book, Practical Reason in Law and Morality (2008: 57-62) to combine Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” with the Kantian “categorical imperative:”

“Enter as fully as you can into the feelings of everyone directly involved in or affected by an incident or relationship, and impartially form a maxim of judgment about what is right that all could accept if they were committed to maintaining mutual beliefs setting a common standard of approval and disapproval among themselves.”

Subsidiary Imperative:

“Act in accordance with that impartial judgment of what is right to do in respect of the given incident or relationship.”

The Ego, Vulnerability, & the Circumscription of Reason

2011-08-03T09:57:00.014-04:00

The following passages are from John Cottingham’s, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reasons and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). I find them utterly persuasive on all counts and thus believe these propositions spell out at least one way we might take seriously the slogan that “the personal is political.” As such, they should be axiomatic to any Left-inspired emancipatory project.

“The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to loss, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence [dukkha] as the Buddhists have it. And unless moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [‘spiritual exercises’ as found, for example, among the Stoics and monastic and mystical traditions] that enables us to come to terms with it.”

“Before we can begin on the project of seeing how we should live, we first have to embark on the task of trying to understand ourselves. That much, at least, is fully in accord with a long classical tradition stretching from the famous injunction at Delphi right down to Pope’s Essay on Man: “Know then thyself.” But what is new is the insistence that the process has to begin with an attempt to come to terms with the darker side of our nature—the side which is not revealed by simple introspection and rational weighing of ‘what on balance we most want,’ but which will be grasped only at the end of a long process of recovery, rehabilitating those parts of the self which are initially submerged beneath the level of ordinary everyday awareness.”

“The problem of mastering, or at least accommodating, the passions was seen in both Greek and in early modern ethics as absolutely central to philosophy’s goal of teaching us how to live. But the solutions offered by both of these earlier systems were defective in important respects, and…the defects only begin to be remedied with the development of the unconscious—the notion that important parts of the self are not fully transparent to the deliberations of reason.”

Cottingham turns, rightly I think, to psychoanalytic theory to transcend (aufheben) the Enlightenment trajectory (with Greek pedigree) of a purely ratiocentric philosophy and ethics, endeavoring “to uncover the seeds of an approach which comes to terms with the incapacity of controlling reason to settle the conditions for human well-being, while at the same time not abandoning the values of systematic analysis and rational reflection [which are, of course, intrinsic to psychoanalytic theory and practice].”

For further reading, see here (this list has since been updated and I can send it along upon request).

Image: Freud’s psychoanalytic couch at the Freud Museum in London.

Perfectionist Liberalism & Social(ist) Democracy

2011-07-29T04:52:00.004-04:00

Against the idea of force, the force of ideas.
—Austro-Marxist aphorism

In dark times, that is, with the evisceration of a public culture suitable for establishing and encouraging the necessary conditions of personal autonomy, it might help to remind ourselves of the following basic premises of “perfectionist liberalism:”

“The life of the autonomous person is distinctive not by what it is, but by how it came to be what it is. It is marked by the fact that it could have been otherwise and became what it is through the choices of that person. It is marked by the fact that the autonomous agent had many options which he rejected. To show that a person had an autonomous life, we have to look not only at him but also his environment. One is autonomous only if one lives in an environment rich with possibilities. Concern with autonomy is concern with the environment.

The environment determines whether one has the conditions of autonomy and it is the conditions of autonomy which are, up to a point, the charge of political institutions. Governments cannot make people have a flourishing autonomous life. That is up to each one to see to himself. But governments can help put people in conditions where they are able to have that kind of life by protecting and promoting the creation of the environment which makes such a life a possibility. Toleration as respect for individual freedom not only is consistent with, it in fact requires concern for and involvement with others. [….]

The availability of options depends in part on private goods…. But options also depend on public goods, which are available to all and serve all. Public goods lie at the foundation of most options. Options are to a considerable degree socially defined. [….] The conditions of autonomy require an environment rich in possibilities. In that they require an appropriate public culture, for it is the public culture which to a considerable degree determines the nature and quality of the opportunities available to a society. But to the extent that the conditions of autonomy require a suitable public culture, they depend on the common good, that is, on a good which if available to one is available to all and whose benefits can be had by all without competition or conflict.”—Joseph Raz, Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics (1994): 121-122.

Indeed, this is why I stubbornly retain a perhaps inordinate but unashamedly wistful fondness for “Red Vienna.” The Viennese Social Democrats assiduously, and in large measure successfully, cultivated a public culture and common good as necessary conditions for personal autonomy. As Helmut Gruber concludes in Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (1991),

“…[D]espite serious practical failings, red Vienna succeeded as no other metropolis had in improvising and innovating social reforms and cultural activities for its working class within the political limits of a polity hostile to such efforts. The SDAP [Austrian Socialist party or Austro-Marxist Party, also known as the Viennese Social Democratic Workers’ Party] cultural preparation for a socialist future in the present was unique. It went beyond traditional social democratic reform legislation in seeking to encompass the Viennese working class through an intricate network of party cultural organizations and activities that had both an educational content and symbolic force. While critical of the conception and execution of this program, one still marvels at the daring vision, for instance, of the public housing palaces as total worker environments containing laundries, bathhouses, kindergartens, libraries, meeting rooms, swimming pools, cooperative stores, youth and mothers’ consultation clinics, and much more. The purpose of these enclaves was to provide the workers with a setting for the ‘political culture’—the Austromarxist special formula leading to the maturation of the working class—through which the consciousness necessary for the creation of the ‘neue Menschen’ could be instilled.”

Criminal Procedure in a Constitutional Democracy

2011-07-27T05:29:00.005-04:00

§ 94. The person charged is entitled to have the assistance of a defence counsel of his own choice at every stage of the case. He shall be so informed. The court may allow the person charged to have his defence conducted by more than one counsel.—From Norway’s Criminal Procedure Act of 1981.

At The Faculty Lounge, Bridget Crawford has a post on the lawyer who has agreed to represent Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian suspect who apparently has confessed to the bombing in downtown Oslo and the shooting spree that soon followed at the island summer camp, terrorist acts that claimed the lives of 76 individuals. Crawford transcribed a portion of the interview with the defense counsel, Geir Lippestad, part of which follows:

“For several hours he hesitated and discussed with friends and family whether to defend a man who only hours early had massacred 68 young people on a summer holiday island. But in the end his civic instincts trumped his initial horror. ‘I believe that the legal system is very important in a democracy and someone has to do this job,’ he told reporters this afternoon.”

Herewith my comment to her post:

Indeed, and let’s hope people do not draw any inferences about the lawyer based on the charges against his client (as happened in the case of lawyers who did pro bono work for accused terrorists detained at Guantanamo). Contrary to what some prominent legal ethicists believe, I don’t think lawyers should be praised or blamed for exercising their professional discretion with regard to whom they decide to represent. As Brad Wendel has argued, “the lawyer should be seen as endorsing more general political values embodied in the legal system,” and Geir Lippestad’s rationale for agreeing to represent Breivik is evidence of his more-than-verbal appreciation of the value of that endorsement [Crawford views this decision in term of ‘moral mettle.’] All defendants are entitled to due process and unqualifiedly deserving to be treated with dignity. As Joseph Raz explains in Ethics in the Public Domain (1994), “When people are called upon to make substantial sacrifices in the name of one of the fundamental civil and political rights of an individual, this is not because in some matters the interest of the individual or the respect due to the individual prevails over the interest of the collectivity or the majority. It is because by protecting the right of that individual one protects the common good and is thus serving the interest of the majority.”

The “common good” in this instance are the rules of criminal procedure in the legal system of a constitutional democracy which, by definition, is committed to democratic law-making (be it constitutional, statutory, common, administrative or regulatory) and the “rule of law” generally.

Please note: Strictly speaking, Norway is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of government, while its constitution is correctly characterized as “democratic,” hence the title of the post.

Time again to waste incumbents with wasted votes?

2011-07-26T17:17:00.002-04:00

Partisan bickering over the federal debt ceiling makes me nostalgic for this moment in American political history, which I witnessed as a resident of Minnesota and helped effect in 1998 as a voter disgusted with both major political parties:

Has the time come for a truly durable third party? Thomas Friedman speaks longingly of the prospect that we might yet witness the rise of the radical center. Nate Silver speculates that popular frustration with the two-party system may have reached a historically significant high-water mark:

A credible independent bid for the presidency is always a long-shot, but might be more viable under these conditions. Or we may simply see a genuine anti-incumbent wave — a much-discussed phenomenon that has rarely occurred in practice — with significant numbers of elected officials in both parties losing office. It is not out of the question that Democrats could lose the White House but take back control of the House of Representatives.

I have long wished that the United States could find a way to break free of its suffocating political duopoly. It's high time to get past first past the bloody post. There's no time like the present, or the 2012 elections, to waste incumbents with wasted votes.

The Economics of Unhappiness: A Syllabus

2011-07-26T04:20:00.017-04:00

I want to thank, first, John Quiggin, whose original post at Crooked Timber (April 12, 2011): “Towards an economics of unhappiness,” provide the inspiration for the following compilation. Second, thanks to Chris Bertram (another CT blogger) for suggesting some titles. As to the reason for assembling a list of readings on the “economics of unhappiness” instead of its converse, see Quiggin’s article below, although I’ve included works on the “economics of happiness” as well, the former necessarily implying some sense or understanding of the meaning of the latter (or, at minimum, a sense of what happiness simpliciter is or might be).

Introduction

The selections from Amartya Sen, Robert E. Lane, and Daniel M. Haybron below this introduction are by a way of a “groundwork” to the readings, perhaps exposing several presuppositions in the course of outlining fundamental (arguable if not controversial) economic, moral, and psychological (prima facie, not perfectly consistent) assumptions central to the motivation for composing this list. “Social democratic” and neo-Keynesian approach to our current economic woes strikes me as clearly preferable to both elitist economic proposals of neo-liberal pedigree and wildly implausible—because naïve and fantastic—yet vaguely populist libertarian yearnings. And yet I take to heart the following remarks from Ian Shapiro:

“The ambiguous moral status of Keynesianism and welfare economics has always inhered in the fact that they appeal to the short-term interests of the disadvantaged (such as unemployed workers and firms on the verge of bankruptcy during recessions) by ensuring subsistence, creating employment, and expanding credit, yet these policies are geared in the medium term to sustaining the system which generates those very disadvantages—hence the ironic force of Joan Robinson’s quip that the one thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited at all.” (Ian Shapiro, The Evolution of Rights in Liberal Theory, 1986: 152-153)

In other words, we need to ask if Keynesian and welfare economics is capable of accomplishing what the New Deal and World War II did in the last century, namely, saving capitalism from itself. The manias, crashes, and panics endemic to capitalist cycles (Meghnad Desai) have heretofore been subject to (i.e., tempered or tamed by) Keynesian and conventional or neo-classical economic discipline, but one wonders if the combined effects of global economic consolidation and environmental degradation are creating conditions that render obsolete calcified models of neo-classical economic growth and capital accumulation. To be sure, in several important yet under-appreciated ways, the World Trade Organization (WTO), as an institution of global economic governance, represents economic and political progress (as Desai points out, its ‘structure is the most egalitarian of any of the international institutions—one country one vote’). Are the IMF and the World Bank amenable to truly social democratic-like economic reform? Can existing global institutions become susceptible to democratic transformation while a significant number of member states in the world system remain internally authoritarian? In short, is it possible to achieve a globally egalitarian (neo-) Keynesian Golden Age? Poverty remains recalcitrant in several regions of the world while regional and global inequality is increasing, economic facts we might grant without in any way diminishing the historic significance of capitalism for wealth creation (and thus betterment of standards of living if not quality of life indices). Are we, at last, reaching the structural limits of capitalist economic logic? Have we exhausted the economic—and, yes, moral—virtues of the neo-classical economic worldview? Or, are we merely at the lowest ebb of an economic cycle that will be cured by some fortuitous combination of conventional and creative politico-economic policies crafted by prudent democratic leaders of countries North and South? Is this a propitious time for seriously contemplating the imminent dissolution of the “aristocracy of capital” and the “economization of social relations?” Is the time ripe for (re)articulation of the authority of the Good by way of abandoning the capitalist criteria for market success? Are we prepared to break, once and for all, the structural socio-economic and political constraints of “capitalist democracy?” Must the welfare of the many and their generalizable interests remain subordinate to the welfare of capitalists and their particular or special interests? Are the interests of working people fated to be canalized into the exclusive pursuit of economic advantage? Must labor markets remain plagued by the material uncertainties and insecurities intrinsic to the private control of investment within the terms of finance capitalism?

The distorted and artificial needs and the individually and socially harmful desires generated by hyper-industrialized casino capitalism finds the masses in a state in which they feel an overwhelming need to be psychologically indemnified by the possession and consumption of as many goods and services as possible, in a socio-economic world in which conspicuous consumption exists side-by-side with absolute and relative poverty. In such a system capitalists are thus, at least psychologically speaking, every much victims as are the workers and the unemployed. Capitalist democracy remains committed to the aristocracy of Capital, meaning that, in the end, the special interests of capitalists trump generalizable interests tied to the common good, while economic insecurity compels workers to canalize their interests in the struggle for higher wages or short-term material gain. The aristocracy of Capital finds workers dehumanized insofar as they’re indemnified by the false promises of conspicuous consumption and irresponsible affluence, utterly distorting the pursuit of happiness and the potential of individuals for uniquely realizing values and manifesting virtues.

Can we, instead, accord socio-economic primacy to creating the necessary (and thus not necessarily sufficient) conditions for generalizing psychological and moral individuation or self-realization? Assuming the capacity to meet basic material human needs, can we resort to criteria associated with the recognition and fulfillment of our moral and spiritual needs by way of the regulation of economic life and therefore the subordination of economic life to the goals of establishing the conditions necessary for generalizing the pursuit of self-actualization or self-realization in a psychological, moral and spiritual sense, for generalizing the innate incentive toward worthy living, for generalizing, within the constraints of dignity and self-respect (as Dworkin says), the capacity for realization of what it means to live worthy lives? As John Dewey said, “Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society.”

Economic, Moral, and Psychological Groundwork

“It is useful to distinguish between two different criticisms that can be made of welfarism, and in particular of taking utility to be the only source of value. First, it can be argued that utility is, at best, a reflection of a person’s well-being, but the person’s success cannot be judged exclusively in terms of his or her well-being (even if social success is judged entirely by the constituent individual successes). A person may value the promotion of certain causes and the occurrence of certain things, even thought the importance that is attached to these developments are not reflected by the advancement of his or her well-being, if any, that they respectively cause. Second, it can be disputed that personal well-being is best seen as utility rather than in some other terms.

We can see the person, in terms of agency, recognizing and respecting his or her ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc., and we can also see the person in terms of well-being, which too calls for attention. This dichotomy is lost in a model of exclusively self-interested motivation, in which a person’s agency must be entirely geared to his own well-being. [….]

Respecting the agency aspect points to the appropriateness of going beyond a person’s well-being into his or her valuations, commitments, etc., but the necessity of assessing these valuations, commitments, etc. is not eliminated by the mere acceptance of that appropriateness. [….] [E]ven though ‘the use of ones agency is, in an important sense,’ a matter for oneself to judge,’ ‘the need for careful assessment of aims, objectives, allegiances, etc., and of the conception of the good, may be important and exacting’ [Sen here quotes from his previous works]. [….]

To judge the well-being of a person exclusively in the metric of happiness or desire-fulfilment has some obvious limitations. These limitations are particularly damaging in the context of interpersonal comparisons of well-being, since the extent of happiness reflects what one can expect and how the social ‘deal’ seems in comparison with that. A person who has had a life of misfortune, with very little opportunities, and rather little hope, may be more easily reconciled to deprivations than others reared in more fortunate and affluent circumstances. The metric of happiness may, therefore, distort the extent of deprivation, in a specific and biased way. The hopeless beggar, the precarious landless labourer, the dominated housewife, the hardened unemployed or the over-exhausted coolie may all take pleasures in small mercies, and manage to suppress intense suffering for the necessity of continuing survival, but it would be ethically deeply mistaken to attach a correspondingly small value to the loss of their well-being because of this survival strategy. The same problem arises with the other interpretation of utility, namely, desire-fulfilment, since the hopelessly deprived lack the courage to desire much, and their deprivations are muted and deadened in the scale of desire-fulfilment. [….]

Well-being is ultimately a matter of valuation, and while happiness and the fulfillment of desire may well be valuable for the person’s well-being, they cannot—on their own or even together—adequately reflect the value of well-being. [….] It is, therefore, arguable that since the claim of utility to be the only source of value rests allegedly on identifying utility with well-being, it can be criticized both:
1. on the ground that well-being is not only the only thing that is valuable;
2. on the ground that utility does not adequately represent well-being.
In so far as we are concerned with people’s achievements, in making ethical judgment, utility achievement may well be partial, inadequate and misleading.”—Amartya Sen
* * *
“…[L]et me state at the outset that I do not think that hedonic criteria are enough for evaluating the good society. For one thing, pursuit of happiness without pursuit of another goal is impossible or at least self-defeating. The very logic of happiness, then, implies that there is something else worth pursuing whose pursuit or attainment is itself a source of happiness. [….] Others may have different candidates, but I find it convenient and fruitful to think of the following coordinate, ultimate goods as a trinity: subjective well-being, human development (including virtue), and justice, no one of which may be resolved into or subordinated under another. [….]

Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign government’s of people’s own choosing. The haunting spirit is manifold: a postwar decline in the United States in people who report themselves as happy, a rising tide in all advanced societies of clinical depression and dysphoria (especially among the young), increasing distrust of each other and of political and other institutions, declining belief that the lot of the average man is getting better, a tragic erosion of family solidarity and community integration together with an apparent decline in warm, intimate relations among friends.”

“How account for this combination of growing unhappiness and depression, interpersonal and institutional distrust, and weakened companionship in advanced market democracies, in which people are, with important exceptions, reasonably well-off? The populations of these countries do not press against their resources; they can expect to live longer than their parents, and their old age is reasonably protected; there is (still) a safety net to catch them if they lose their jobs or become ill; their children are not likely to die in childhood, and these children have available to them more educational facilities than were available to their parents; they do not live in police states but rather have some assurance of due process of law; and they are offered reasonably adequate opportunities to participate in political decisions affecting their own fates.”
“…[P]eople are not very good judges of how, even within the private sphere of their own lives, to increase, let alone maximize, their happiness. It is not just that they are embedded in an economistic culture that misleads them, or even that they are governed by misleading ideologies; rather, the problem is that people often choose of their own accord paths that do not lead to their well-being: they escalate their standards in proportion to their improved circumstances, choose short-run benefits that incur greater long-term costs, fear and avoid the means to their preferred ends, infer from early failures an unwarranted and disabling incompetence.”—Robert E. Lane
* * *
“The United States is by a wide margin, among the most affluent nations in human history, and many Americans enjoy unprecedented freedom to shape their lives—for those individuals, a great success in moral and economic terms. Yet no one ever accused us of ‘knowing how to live.’ This is perhaps because, arguably, we don’t. Surveys find an overwhelming majority of Americans reporting that Americans have badly placed priorities. And there is no evidence that Americans grew any happier over the recent decades that witnessed astonishing growth in material standards of living. Self-reported happiness has remained essentially flat, while rates of suicide, depression, and other pathologies have soared.

Concurrently with these developments, and not coincidentally, we have entered what biologist E.O. Wilson calls, for obvious reasons, the Century of the Environment. In coming to grips with that problem, we may have to make significant adjustments in how we live. Surely one part of the equation is coming to a better understanding of human well-being and what we need to flourish. For we need to figure out how to get the most benefit from the least amount of resources, and knowing only the economic side of the equation is not likely to cut it. The daily energy requirements for has historically—well, for ninety-plus percent of human history—been under 5,000 calories. Today’s American lifestyle requires the resources of a large community at around 260,000 calories, leaving an ecological footprint nearly twice that of our European counterparts, and several times the global average. Our consumption habits resemble those of a French monarch more than anything our relations a couple of generations back would have recognized. Some two billion people in China and India are striving mightily to achieve the same. Technological innovation can do a lot to reduce the number and impact of those calories, but we are not likely to get very far if we persist in the notion that our goal is to liberate ourselves from constraint as much as our morality allows, commanding as many resources as possible. If the massively resourced life is not quite as beneficial as we thought, or even proves sometimes to be counterproductive, that would be useful to know. Maybe we could adjust our goals to yield a good quality of life without leaving our descendants a thermally reconstituted planet of weeds and dust.”

“For we cannot assume that people’s choices, even when self-interested, will track their interests. It is perfectly possible that people seeking fulfilling lives will freely choose, en masse, to live in distinctly unfulfilling ways. And even if they do end up better off on the whole than they were before, the price of those gains may be far higher than they realize. Second, and most importantly: a people armed with nothing better than a smiley-face psychology doesn’t stand a chance of answering these sorts of questions.”

“The modern era’s overriding preoccupation, arguably, has been the betterment of the human condition, inarguably, a noble aim. Yet the real focus has been on our material conditions, with far less attention paid to the question of how we are living and what our way of life does for us, or to us. Once it has well enough satisfied the basic constraints of morality, the chief question facing any civilization is: do its members enjoy a reasonable level of well-being? We probably won’t get much of an answer to this question if we simply ask what they have got. For human well-being mostly depends not on what people have but, among other things, on what they do with what they’ve got. A better question, arguably, is this: do they live in a sensible manner? A decent response to this question will require us to understand whether their way of life suits their natures. And central to that project, surely, will be seeing whether their way of life conduces to their flourishing psychologically. If a civilization cannot muster a reasonably affirmative answer to this question, then we might reconsider whether it is properly called ‘civilized.’ For if people do not flourish psychologically, they do not flourish. Period. It is with the psychology, I would suggest, that the really interesting story about the flourishing of these creatures lies.”

“…[I]ndividuals’ evaluations of their own lives, at least insofar as they take the form of life satisfaction attitudes, do not carry the kind of authority they are widely believed to have. On the one hand, it is doubtful how well grounded the typical person’s assessments of her life will normally be. Even given a few minutes’ reflection, most of us are unlikely to bring all our important priorities to mind, as well as all the important facts about our lives. We forget things or, being caught up in our current pursuits, lose perspective. At such times—which is to say, most of the time—our assessments of our lives will not have the kind of authority we imagine they possess in those rare moments of clarity, where we can review our lives in broad perspective and with full awareness of what we really care about, such as on the deathbed. Well-being, even for the subjectivist, is hardly transparent to the individual whose welfare is in question. On the other hand, even the best-grounded evaluations of our lives will offer problematic information about how well our lives are going for us, since they are not simply announcements about well-being. Since the act of evaluating one’s life itself has ethical dimensions, and since we enjoy wide latitude to assess our lives in various ways relative to what we care about, our attitudes toward our lives will not straightforwardly express how well our lives in fact are going for us.

We ignore these points at our peril. It is commonly thought that someone’s being satisfied with her life creates a presumption that her life is, in fact, going well for her. But most people, in most places, are satisfied with their lives. In some places satisfaction may be near universal. This may lead most people to conclude that they are in fact doing pretty well, yielding perhaps a remarkably contented race. Maybe the conclusion is true; but what if it is not? As Wittgenstein shows us, life has to be pretty grim for a person not to have good reasons for being satisfied with it. (It sure beats the alternative.) Many people may reasonably be satisfied with lives that are not, by anyone’s standards, going well at all. If so, it would be a grave mistake to take their assessments—or our own—as final in matters of personal welfare.”

“The pursuit of happiness is not easy. Given that the basic conditions of our lives, and the way we live, are so heavily dependent on our social environment, we may want to look more closely at the societal dimensions of the question. [….] Even if we are suspicious of using policy instruments to promote happiness, we might at least consider the limits of individual effort, and the importance of context, in shaping how happy we are. Take, for example, recent initiatives to develop and teach methods by which people can make themselves happier. Such efforts can produce very real benefits, and in fact many of the ancients were in a version of same business. While there are legitimate worries about such techniques sometimes reducing to cheap spiritual analgesics, I see no reason why this cannot be avoided. A more interesting question, it seems to me, is how far individual efforts like this are likely to improve human well-being on a broad scale. If the problem lies chiefly in the way you live, and this in turn depends heavily on the kind of society you inhabit, then positive thinking techniques and the like are only going to get you so far.”

“…[H]uman flourishing depends substantially on the verdicts of our emotional natures, to a significant extent independently of what we think about our lives. There is a large part of well-being, in short, that hinges on matters of sentiment, needing no stamp of approval from reason. Of course I have not denied an important role for reason in a fuller account of well-being, so that a complete view would likely have both sentimentalist and rationalist elements (in contrast, say, to hedonism, which in its canonical forms is a wholly sentimentalist approach). Nor have I suggested that reason and sentiment can be wholly separated; perhaps sentiment always has some rational element and vice versa. But it does appear that our reflective judgments do not bear the sort of authority regarding our welfare that many of us take them to. [….]

While moderns have been right to place psychological states like happiness at the center of well-being, the character and value of these states is surprisingly elusive. We should not assume that matters of personal welfare are at all transparent to the individual. The potential for error is great. Indeed, it should by now be easy at least to imagine people settling, en masse, for unfulfilling lives. The question now is whether, given the facts of human nature, such a result is anything more than a bare possibility.”

“…[The spirit of the modern age appear to be] a spirit of optimism about the individual pursuit of well-being, founded in Enlightenment trust of the individual and her powers of reason. Since ‘Enlightenment optimism’ is vague, additionally encompassing epistemological and historical views, and since the optimism in question concerns the effects of certain freedoms associated with liberalism on well-being, I [earlier] called it liberal optimism. Liberals need not be optimists in the present sense; besides weakened forms of liberal optimism there is room for liberal pessimism as well as, in between, what we might call liberal sobriety. Yet one does not often hear it suggested that the ideal of empowered and unfettered living is, from a prudential standpoint, a bad thing, or merely the least bad option of a sorry lot. You certainly won’t hear it from many economists.

Liberal optimism is clearly appealing, but it rests on some non-trivial assumptions. Here I want to consider the plausibility of liberal optimism’s chief psychological doctrine, which I will the Aptitude assumption. Roughly, Aptitude maintains that human psychology is well-adapted to environments offering individuals a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as they wish. We have the psychological endowments needed to do well, indeed best, in such environments by choosing lives for ourselves that meet our needs.

[….] [R]ecent work in empirical psychology…raises significant doubts about Aptitude. This research challenges Aptitude via a Systematic Imprudence thesis:
Human beings are systematically prone to make a wide range of serious errors in matters of personal welfare. These errors are weighty enough to substantially compromise the expected lifetime well-being for individuals possessing a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as they wish, even under reasonably favorable conditions (education, etc.). [….]

…[T]he individualized pursuit of well-being is probably substantially undercut by systematic tendencies toward imprudence: the Systematic Imprudence thesis is very likely true. This in turns suggests that a key assumption of liberal optimism, Aptitude, may well prove to be false. I will not be claiming that the Aptitude assumption is in fact false or unwarranted. The point is rather that we should take this possibility seriously. The truth of Aptitude should be considered an open question. A secondary aim is to sharpen our grasp of the remarkably bold psychological assumptions underlying much modern thought about human nature, the good life, and the good society. [….]

Perhaps liberal optimism’s psychological assumptions will turn out not only to be wrong, but really wrong. We may, in the fullness of time, conclude that our civilization is founded on a fundamentally mistaken view of human nature and what we need to flourish. As if a misguided zoo established a habitat for tigers with the idea that they were dealing with dingoes. The correct response to such a discovery would not, in the first instance, be to pore over our tax and regulatory schemes in the hopes of correcting for this or that cognitive bias. We should want, rather, to rethink how it makes sense for creatures like us to live.”

“Perhaps it would help to clarify the state’s moral purposes were we to emphasize, among our basic entitlements, our right to the pursuit of unhappiness.”—Daniel M. Haybron

The Syllabus:

· Bartolini, Stefano. “Beyond Accumulation and Technical Progress: Negative Externalities as an Engine of Economic Growth.” Available: http://www.econpol.unisi.it/bartolini/papers/pub2/WP%20SIENA.pdf
· Bartolini, Stefano. Manifesto for Happiness: Shifting Society from Money to Well-Being. This is the partial English translation of an Italian book: Manifesto per la Felicità: Come Passare dalla Società del Ben-Avere a quella del Ben-Essere. Donzelli: Roma, 2010.
· Bruni, Luigino and Pier Luigi Porta, eds. Economics of Happiness. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2007.
· Cohen, G.A. “Use-value, Exchange-value, and Contemporary Capitalism,” in his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000 ed.: 297-325.
· Dasgupta, Partha. An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
· Elster, Jon. “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
· Frey. Bruno S. Happiness: A Revolution in Economics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
· Frey, Bruno S. and Alois Stutzer. Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Human Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
· Gorz, André (Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner, tr.). Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso, 1989.
· Haybron, Daniel M. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
· Hirsch, Fred. Social Limits to Growth. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977.
· Kahneman, Daniel, Ed Diener, and Norbert Schwarz, eds. Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003.
· Lane, Robert E. The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
· Mishan, E.J. The Costs of Economic Growth. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1993.
· Parijs, Philippe van. “In defence of abundance,” in Marxism Recycled. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993: 211-232.
· Parijs, Philippe van. Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) Can Justify Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
· Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2nd ed., 2001.
· Quiggin, John. “The Economics of Unhappiness,” The Chronicle Review, May 22, 2011. Available: http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/127580/
· Satz, Debra. Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
· Schor, Juliet B. The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
· Schor, Juliet B. The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
· Schor, Juliet B. Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. New York: The Penguin Press, 2010.
· Scitovsky, Tibor. The Joyless Economy: The Psychology of Human Satisfaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 ed. (1976).
· Sedlacek, Tomas. Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
· Sen, Amartya. Ethics and Economics. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1987.
· Sen, Amartya. “Conceptualizing and Measuring Poverty,” in David B. Grusky and Ravi Kanbur, eds. Poverty and Inequality. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006: 30-46.
· Sombart, Werner. “The Sociology of Capitalism,” in Hendrik M. Ruitenbeck, ed., Varieties of Classic Social Theory. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963.
· Xenos, Nicholas. Scarcity and Modernity. London: Routledge, 1989.

I welcome suggestions for additional titles.