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"During the years of struggle the Bible was both a tool of oppression and liberation."

Sightings  9/30/2010

Reading the Bible in South Africa

-- James Hoke

The 2010 FIFA World Cup demonstrated the unity and capability of the new South Africa. Despite doubts and negative press from around the world, South Africa rose to the occasion by producing stunning new soccer stadiums, making its streets safe and accessible, hosting big-screen match viewings and fan parties, and creating an environment that welcomed thousands of enthusiastic guests for an entire month. Even before the final match, the success of the World Cup could be seen in hundreds of vuvuzelas blasting in the streets. South Africans of every race united in support of their team, their country, and their continent.

Unfortunately, in the aftermath of the World Cup the problems of economic disparity which had been forgotten during the month-long soccer party began to resurface. For years politicians claimed that the World Cup would boost South Africa’s economy and create many new job opportunities. However unemployed women and men in kwaMpumuza, a township on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg, complain that the World Cup had not improved their employment status. The majority of poor South Africans have not felt an economic boost caused by the World Cup.

In the face of large-scale unemployment in many townships, tensions have arisen between unemployed South Africans and refugees and immigrants from other African nations. In the days following the World Cup immigrants reported being threatened with violence if they did not leave immediately; they were told that since the World Cup was over, it was time for all foreigners to go home. Several violent attacks attributed to xenophobia were reported in newspapers. The government believed this to be merely rumors designed to discredit the country’s positive post-World Cup image.

People of faith in South Africa expressed outrage against the violence and the government’s response to it. On Nelson Mandela’s birthday one week after the World Cup ended, a large group marched outside St. George’s Cathedral in Cape Town saying “NO” to xenophobia. But the issues that undergird this outbreak require more sustained reflection and response from South African Christians. A critical question facing the post-apartheid Church is how the Bible will be read and interpreted in the public sphere. Despite the vast political and economic changes that South Africa experienced after the end of apartheid and the first free elections held in 1994, the majority of black South Africans who lived in desperate poverty before liberation have seen few changes in their daily lives.

During the years of struggle the Bible was both a tool of oppression and liberation. In the struggle for liberation groups found that reading the Bible and articulating their theologies from the context of life under apartheid fueled their political motivations. Post-liberation, many churches and groups have found difficulty articulating a similar message in a new context. The new government has publicly celebrated that churches can return to focusing on spiritual and moral concerns, leaving political and economic issues to the state. Lacking direction and resources, many churches have done just this, while other groups have ceased to exist.

How the Bible is interpreted in South Africa’s new context will significantly influence the long-term outcomes of the economic issues previously described. If the Bible is only read for moral guidance on spiritual issues, then these questions will dominate public discourse while economic disparity will continue to be ignored.

One method of reading that seeks to confront these issues is the method of Contextual Bible Studies, developed by Gerald West, a biblical scholar at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg. Taking a common interest and respect for biblical texts as a starting point, socially engaged biblical scholars like West read with poor and marginalized communities, empowering them to read and interpret the Bible from their own experiences. Reading from their own context allows readers to articulate their own theologies that represent the liberating message of the Bible (often in economic, in addition to spiritual, terms) instead of only espousing inherited interpretations that do not apply to the current context. This process begins to make readers aware of their own interpretation skills and empowers them with the confidence to act for change. The Bible’s message can be a catalyst for new and creative actions which could allow South African Christians to confront problems of poverty, unemployment, and xenophobia in the public sphere.

References

Celia W. Dugger, “Wage Laws Squeeze South Africa’s Poor.” The New York Times, September 26, 2010.

Gerald West. The Academy of the Poor: Towards a Dialogical Reading of the Bible. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 2003.

Gerald West. “Kairos 2000: Moving Beyond Church Theology.” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 108 (Nov 2000): 55-78.

Gerald West, ed. Reading Other-Wise: Socially Engaged Biblical Scholars Reading with Their Local Communities. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007.

James Hoke is a third year Masters of Divinity student focusing on New Testament and feminist/queer biblical interpretation. He received an International Ministry Grant from the Divinity School to investigate Contextual Biblical Interpretation in South Africa this summer.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Supreme Court Power, The New Deal, and Corporate Free Speech

Rick Pildes has an essay (here) which he discusses at Balkinization. The essay argues that the Court has more power to act in countermajoritarian ways than previously supposed. One of the most surprising points made in the essay (a point drawn from the book he is reviewing, Supreme Power by Jeff Shesol) is how much Roosevelt suffered by taking on the Court. As Pildes argues, “[C]onsider the aftermath of the confrontation: who won the Court-packing fight? The conventional wisdom among constitutional academics, focused narrowly on the Court itself, is that FDR lost the battle, but won the war, since the Court (assisted by 7 FDR appointments between 1937-43), acceded to the New Deal’s constitutionality. But FDR’s legislative assault on the Court destroyed his political coalition, in Congress and nationally, and ended his ability to enact major domestic policy legislation, despite his huge electoral triumph in 1936. As a Fortune magazine poll in July 1937 put it: ‘The Supreme Court struggle had cut into the President’s popularity as no other issue ever had.’ National health-care, the next major item on FDR’s agenda, faded away. The progressive domestic policy agenda did not recover until 1964. Reflecting back, FDR’s second Vice President, Henry Wallace, observed: ‘The whole New Deal really went up in smoke as a result of the Supreme Court fight.’ No rational politician, looking back at FDR’s attempt to bring the Court into line, other than through the ordinary appointments process, is likely to repeat FDR’s efforts.”

Pildes concludes in his essay that taking on the Court for its corporate free speech decision could be risky. But there is a difference (I doubt Pildes would contest this) between trying to regulate the Court directly and going after the substance of the issue considered. I personally think that the Citizens United decision deserves a constitutional amendment in response, an amendment designed to restore democracy by limiting the power of corporations. The difficulty is not that this would be perceived as attacking the Court, but that the same corporate forces probably have the power to block the amendment. Nonetheless, pursuit of the amendment is a worhtwhile political fight and even if it did not directly succeed, it could place pressure for other productive measures.

Rowan Williams and Gay Bishops

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in an interview with the London Times, stated that he favored the accepting of gay bishops, but indicated that the tradition was to insist on celebacy for them. See http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/archbishop_of_canterbury/rowan_williams_no_problem_with, html, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/25/rowan-williams-backs-gay-bishops, http://www.episcopalchurch.org/81808_124764_ENG_HTM.htm

Within the Anglican Communion, this will arouse orthodox fury and trigger liberal criticism (for not being prophetic enough). It has been reported that Williams passed on the question whether he would like to see the Anglican Communion get past this prohibition. I do not think sufficient attention has been given to the fact that he also said, "We’re in the middle of vastly difficult conversations about it, and I don’t want to put thumbs on scales." I would have expected him to uphold the reigning perspective in the Anglican Church as opposed to that taken by the Episcopal Church. Looking at this from a long range perspective, his reluctance to do so puts a slight weight on the scales in the Episcopal direction.

If I understand the current Anglican position, it seems unstable. Same sex relations are not condemned among lay persons. Heterosexual relations are open to the clergy including Bishops. But same sex relations are not open to Bishops. Progressive roads are sometimes forged by compromises like these.

Post-Academic "Big Science"

 

In the 1940s Robert Merton proposed the “prescriptions, proscriptions, preferences and permissions” that scientists come to feel bound to, the core of the scientific ethos if you will, were more or less captured by five fundamental norms or regulative principles: Communalism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, Originality, and Scepticism (CUDOS). John Ziman argues that these norms no longer properly describe the ethos of what he terms “post-academic science” or what others call “Big Science.” In other words, (academic) science in roughly the last third of the twentieth century underwent “a radical, irreversible, worldwide transformation in the way that [it] is organized, managed and performed.” Of course this transformation was not absolute, thus we can speak of both continuities and differences between that sort of science which was formally and informally guided by CUDOS norms and post-academic and post-industrial science. Ziman contends this more straightforwardly industrial (and now highly technological and market-oriented) post-academic science is best understood by way of its alternative set of regulative principles or social norms (as Ziman explains, social and epistemic norms are closely bound up with each other):

”Very schematically, industrial science is Proprietary, Local, Authoritarian, Commissioned, and Expert. It produces proprietary knowledge that is not necessarily made public. It is focused on local technical problems rather than on general understanding. Industrial researchers act under managed authority rather than as individuals. Their research is commissioned to achieve practical goals, rather than undertaken in the pursuit of knowledge. They are employed as expert problem-solvers, rather than for their personal creativity. It is no accident, moreover, that these attributes spell out ‘PLACE.’ That, rather than ‘CUDOS,’ is what you get for doing good industrial science.”

Moreover,

“post-academic science is under pressure to give more obvious value for money. Many features of the new mode of knowledge production have arisen ‘in the context of application’—that is, in the course of research on technological, environmental, medical or societal problems. More generally, science is being pressed into the service of the nation as the driving force in the national R & D system, a wealth-creating techno-scientific motor for the whole economy.”

In other words, utility and market imperatives fuel the ethos and practice of contemporary science to a degree unprecedented in the history of science. As Richard C. Lewontin notes in Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (1991), science is “guided by and directed by those forces in the world that have control over money and time.” Symptomatic of such control is Lewontin’s anecdotal observation that “No prominent molecular biologist of my acquaintance is without a financial stake in the biotechnology business.” Ziman explains how deeply this new ethos has been inscribed in the practice of scientific research:

“...[A]s researchers become more dependent on project grants, the ‘Matthew Effect’ is enhanced. Competition for real money takes precedence over competition for scientific credibility as the driving force of science. With so many researchers relying completely on research grants or contracts for their personal livelihood, winning these become an end in itself. Research groups are transformed into small business enterprises. The metaphorical forum of scientific opinion is turned into an actual market in research sciences.”

Ziman provides us with a bounty of reasons for thinking deeply about the vulnerability of scientists to “the demands of their paymasters,” be they of private provenance or the product of the State’s “science policy.” 

Reference [sic] & Further Reading:

• Amadae, S.M. Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
• Annas, George J. Some Choice: Law, Medicine, and the Market. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
• Brody, Howard. Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession, and the Pharmaceutical Industry. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.
• Chomsky, Noam, et al. The Cold War & The University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York: The New Press, 1997.
• Dupré, John. Human Nature and the Limits of Science. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 2001.
• Elliott, Carl. White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2007.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Questioning Technology. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• Fisher, Jill A. Medical Research for Hire: The Political Economy of Pharmaceutical Research Trials. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009.
• Fuller, Steve. The Governance of Science. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2000.
• Hacking, Ian. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
• Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: Basic Books, 2000 ed. (1987).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.
• LaFollette, Hugh and Niall Shanks. Brute Science: Dilemmas of Animal Experimentation. London: Routledge, 1996.
• McCloskey, Donald N. The Rhetoric of Economics. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
• McCloskey, Donald N. Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
• Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Limits of Science. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.
• Sadler, John Z., ed. Descriptions and Prescriptions: Values, Mental Disorders, and the DSMs. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.  
• Shrader-Frechette, K.S. Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991.
• Shrader-Frechette, Kristin. Ethics of Scientific Research. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994.  
• Simpson, Christopher, ed. Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War. New York: The New Press, 1998.
• Winner, Langdon. The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
•  Ziman, John. Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

My bibliography for Science & Technology.

The Florida ‘Gay Adoption’ Case and the Political Morality of Liberal Democracy

Some RLL readers may be interested in this, which I just posted to SSRN:

Abstract:

On September 22, 2010, Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal – an intermediate appellate court – affirmed a ruling by a Florida trial court that a Florida statute banning adoption by homosexuals violates the Florida constitution. As it happens, the ruling by the Florida trial court was the principal subject of the Conclusion to my recent book, The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010). In the Conclusion, I wrote:

_________________________

 

The Florida law not only violates the political morality of liberal democracy. The law – according to which, again, no one otherwise eligible to adopt under Florida law ‘may adopt if that person is a homosexual’ – is unconstitutional. The law is unconstitutional even from the perspective of Thayerian deference: Given the robust social-scientific consensus that has emerged to the effect that parenting by homosexuals is no less healthy for children – no less in the ‘best interests’ of children – than parenting by heterosexuals, Judge Lederman was right to conclude that no lawmaker could any longer plausibly think that the Florida law serves a legitimate governmental interest.

Sometimes a court’s rejection of a constitutional challenge to a law is not merely incorrect; sometimes it is shameful. So shameful as to later warrant both embarrassment and apology. Two infamous examples:

1. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of a constitutional challenge to a law requiring racially segregated ('separate but equal') railroad accommodations.

2. In Korematsu v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of a constitutional challenge to the forced relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry, many of whom were American citizens, from their homes on the west coast of the United States to internment camps, during World War II.

By the time this book has been published, Judge Lederman’s constitutional ruling may have been reversed by the Florida Supreme Court. If so, that reversal – that rejection of the constitutional challenge to the Florida adoption law – will be not merely incorrect; it will be shameful. So shameful as to later warrant both embarrassment and apology.

_________________________

 

For those who may be interested, this posting to SSRN--downloadable here--includes the entire Conclusion to my book and also the recent decision of Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal.

 

Corporate Political Spending and Disclosure Laws

How do you get around the corporate free speech case? One approach is to amend the Constitution. Another is to require shareholder approval for political expenditures. These measures would require enormous cultivation to create the political will. But requiring disclosure would not be difficult in a remotely moral world. Corporations (and wealthy businessmen) partly in order to escape consumer retaliation are giving money through associations with benign sounding names.  See an account of this in the state of Washington.

The disclosure laws are not entirely toothless. So we have learned that Target gave money to a gubernatorial candidate who opposes same sex marriage (see http://www.religiousleftlaw.com/2010/08/moveon-target-and-our-corrupted-public-sphere.html) and that AT&T gives money to the Tea Party (http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2010/07/members-of-tea-party-caucus-major-r.html), and we can react with the distribution of our dollars if we wish. But we could learn a lot more with better laws and, if we choose to disassociate from corporations who do not advance the public interest, we would have the information to do so.

"America’s Decline in Church Attendance," by Martin Marty

Sightings  9/26/2010

Pope Benedict XVI has expressed grave concern over the decline of church participation in Western Europe. His trip to the UK last week provided opportunities for him to address it. Most commentators in religious and secular communications found almost nothing that he said or did which might help reverse the downward trends. The fact that large crowds appeared at several of his appearances did not impress them; throngs line up for popes as celebrities. I’ve asked after each of Pope John Paul’s travels, which often drew masses of young people: did his Pope-mobiled words and gestures, eloquent though they be, lead any young man to enter the seminary ranks with intention to become ordained? Did mass attendance swell a month or a year later? Maybe the answer is yes, but it’s hard to find evidence.

Observation of the North American scene and data gathered by many polling agencies provide a cause for separating this continent’s milder declines from the plot which defines Europe today. So sudden have been the marked trends showing disaffection that leaders have not internalized the evidence. Exceptions? Yes, for now, Latino/a Roman Catholics sign up enough to keep the Catholic rolls deceptively high, if only relatively. For now, some astute, market-oriented mega-churches keep prospering, though even among them opinion-pollers and people-counters see signs which prompt concern.

Those who do care and who set out to address the issue of decline begin in a state of alarm. I was recently on a panel with an official who knew all about weapons of mass destruction, from nukes to germ-warfare capsules. Someone asked, “Knowing all that, how do you sleep?” He answered, “I sleep like a baby—for fifteen minutes, and then I wake up crying.” But sleeping or crying does not help and will not help people who seek to address the issues signified in the trends.

Some graphs and paragraphs in Lovett H. Weems, Jr.’s Christian Century show that from 1994 to 2000, two of four studied mainline Protestant church bodies showed modest gains and two others saw only modest losses. But from 2001 to 2008 the “growing” United Methodist Church saw the greatest plunge (-17.86%), and its losses were almost matched in the other three. Disconcerting to church-growth experts was Weems’s note that in the earlier decade, greatest growth was among the largest local churches—but that in the more recent decade, the largest among them suffered most decline.

Some readers may wonder why in columns like this, which are to be about “public religion,” we talk about church and synagogue (etc.) attendance and participation--aren’t their institutions part of “private religion?” Emphatically no. They are the bearers of traditions, the living expositors of sacred texts, the tellers of stories, the troop-suppliers for voluntary activities, the shapers of values fought over in the political realms.

Why are they declining? Certainly not because a few atheists write best-sellers. I always look for the simplest causes, such as rejection of drab and conflicted congregations and denominations. Or changes in habits. I watch the ten thousands running past in Sunday marathons or heading to the kids’ soccer games and recall that their grandparents and parents kept the key weekend times and places open for sacred encounters. Oh, and “being spiritual” is not going to help keep the stories, the language of ethics, and the pool of volunteers thriving. Their disappearance has consequences.

References

Lovett H. Weems, Jr. “No Shows: The Decline in Worship Attendance.” The Christian Century, September 22, 2010.

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Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

The Rich Man and Lazarus

Ad Dominum has a set of interesting reflections on the gospel passage involving the rich man and Lazarus including this writing of St. John Chrysostom:

Do you want to show honor to Christ’s Body? Don’t despise it when it is naked. Don’t honor it with silks here in the church while outside you leave it shivering with cold and naked. For he who said: “This is my body,” ratifying it with his words, is the same who said: “You saw me hungry and gave me no food,” and also: “What you did not do for one of these little ones, you did not do for me.” Here Christ’s body has no need of clothing but of souls that are pure; there it needs plenty of care… God has no need of golden vessels but of golden hearts.

I don’t say this to stop you making religious donations, but I hold that at the same time – and even beforehand – alms should be made… What profit is there in Christ’s table being covered with golden vessels while he himself is dying of hunger? Begin by feeding the hungry and, with what remains, decorate his altar. Are you going to fashion a golden chalice but not give “a cup of cold water?” Think, too, that it is a question of Christ as he goes about, a wanderer, a stranger, without shelter. Whereas you, who failed to welcome him, decorate the floor, the walls, the capitals of the pillars! You fix up lamps with silver chains but don’t care to notice how he is chained up in prison. I’m not saying this to hold you back from carrying out such deeds of generosity, but I beg you to accompany them – or rather, precede them – with these other charitable works… Therefore, when you decorate the church, don’t forget your brother in distress since he is a temple and more precious than anything.

St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Saint Matthew’s Gospel

Habermas, Rawls, and the Impossibility of Legitimacy

Jurgen Habermas and others have a new book: An Awareness of What is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Secular Age. Habermas has an essay with the same title as the book. Others respond. In an argument long of importance to Habermas (and to Rawls)(though of side importance in this essay), Habermas argues that it is not enough for a state to have a modus vivendi, it must have a "mode of legitimacy founded on convictions. . . . Instead of grudging accommodation to externally imposed constraints, the content of religion must open itself up to the normatively grounded expectation that it should recognize for reasons of its own the neutrality of the state toward worldviews."

I think this shows the impossibility of legitimation. Many religions are opposed to the neutrality of the state toward worldviews in the sense Habermas intends. They may even feel obligated to capture the state for religious purposes. Habermas' argument for legitimacy simply does not speak to their theology. Rawls tries to solve this problem by characterizing such religions as politically "unreasonable." In doing so, he adopts an external point of view in establishing legitimacy. I do not believe Rawls' argument succeeds either (to make it work he would have to be right about public reason) - although I agree that religions should not be entitled to capture the state.

Finally, as I argue in Dissent, Injustice, and the Meanings of America, in large scale societies, hierarchies are so inevitably self serving and corrupt that no government is likely to be legitimate even if they purport to operate on theoretical principle that would otherwise legitimate a state. In my view, the United States with its large population of poor people, its corporate power,  and its massive inequality (both economically and in forms of personal identity) can hardly be described as a legitimate government. This does not mean a revolution would make things better (I do not believe it would); it does mean that there are parts of American law that deserve to be obeyed, not out of respect, but out of prudence.

Corporate Domination of our Institutions But Movement to the Left in Many Areas

I have two readings to recommend today: a reading of near despair and a reading of hope. The reading of near despair is by Chris Hedges from Tikkun. He argues that all of the major institutions of our society are controlled by corporate money and is pessimistic about the possibility of changing this through ordinary electoral politics. Tikkun believes that Hedges’ view is too pessimistic but thinks that he has much of importance to say.

The other reading is by Chris Bowers on Alternet entitled 4 Signs the Country is Actually Moving to the Left. It is not surprising that he is able to gather data showing sharply increased acceptance of interracial marriage and gay marriage, a declining gender gap, and increased acceptance of marijuana though all of the data is interesting. The most surprising conclusion is that public sector social investment as a percentage of GDP is the highest it has ever been. Well worth reading.

Fear, Fuzz, and 'Uncertainty'

By Bob Hockett (cross-posted at Dorf on Law)

I wonder whether, like Neil Buchanan (see last Friday's great post at Dorf on Law) and me, you who are reading this post have noticed the frequency with which a new word appears to be finding its way into the public statements of Republicans and their wealthy clients these days.  The word is 'uncertainty.'

Wednesday morning one week ago I heard the representative of a trade group, who is lobbying for the repeal of certain regulatory paperwork requirements to which some businesses are subject, employ the 'u' word in justifying the sought repeal.  Businesses, he said, were faced with 'uncertainty' insofar as they had to fill out such forms, which is unfortunate indeed during slump times when firms are still hesitant about new investment outlays and hiring, and when banks are in any case hoarding.

The weekend immediately preceding that Wednesday, I heard House Minority Leader Boehner employ the same word in attempting to justify new lower tax rates for millionaires and billionaires.  Allowing the astonishingly large 2001 Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires to lapse early next year as the 2001 legislation itself mandated, he claimed, would induce 'uncertainty' among business executives, which would be unfortunate indeed during slump times when firms are still hesitant about new investment outlays and hiring, and when banks are in any case hoarding.

Prior to that weekend, I heard many additional uses of the 'u' word from other Republicans and their clients, in each case to justify some benefit -- either in pecuniary or in regulation-evasive form -- for millionaires, billionaires, or 'small businesses.'  Neil this past Friday catalogued some from this past summer.  Hmm, I wonder, what -- apart from the government to the wealthy, per these Republicans' wishes -- gives?

To be perfectly candid, my first, albeit naive and fleeting reaction upon hearing the word 'uncertainty' employed with such abandon by Republicans was something on the order of, 'wow, this is welcome news!'  For, as many of us who have sought to diagnose either or both the nation's recent financial woes and its continuing economic slump have been arguing, our financial markets and our macroeconomy are very Keynesian things: 'Keynes Chapter 12,' or 'Knightian' uncertainty as distinguished from actuarial risk is by far their most salient characteristic in times of boom and in times of bust.  And many mistakes made by Republicans and 'moderate' Democrats alike where the regulation of financial markets and the framing of fiscal and monetary policy are concerned, for their part, are attributable precisely to these people's not having hewed to, or in most cases so much as noticed, the distinction.  (For more on its significance, see my post here in September of last year, on Keynes, Richard Posner, and James Dean.)

The false belief that rational expectations on the part of economic actors -- which might indeed be formed and acted upon by most -- are always accompanied by a capacity to assign determinate probabilities to all future contigencies, for example, seems to have led most Republicans and many Democrats to think silly things.  (See the aforementioned post.)  They appear to have supposed, for example, that bubbles and busts in financial markets are incompatible with individual rationality and informational efficiency in those markets.  And they have sometimes suggested that sundry monetary and even fiscal policy changes are doomed to ineffectuality simply by dint of affected parties' capacity precisely to anticipate, calculate, and 'discount' -- that is, in this case, to sidestep or otherwise neutralize -- with precision all effects of those changes in advance.  A favorite trope, that one, of those who brouht you the so-called 'rational expectations revolution' in macroeconomic 'thought' late in the 20th century.  Such suggestions have proved erroneous precisely by dint of their resting upon the conflation of uncertainty with actuarial risk.

Against this backdrop, then, it naturally seemed good news, at least at first, that Republicans were now embracing the category of Knightian uncertainty -- particularly as their party had conspicuously embraced the thinking of the aforementioned 'rational expectations' types in the 1970s and especially '80s.  So 'if only,' one thought, 'Alan Greenspan and his acolytes had discovered the "u" word ten or more years ago!  But better late than never.' 

And yet now comes a puzzle:  Uncertainty, or even risk for that matter, seems to have no application what ever to the Bush millionaire/billionair tax cuts, as Neil nicely brought out last week.  Nor does it seem to have much if any bearing on regulatory paperwork.  After all, what could be more certain, or even more measurable, than the changes long set -- set for ten years! -- to take place in the taxes owed by millionaires and billionaires come 2011?  And what could be less uncertain than what is required, in the way of paperwork, by legally prescribed boilerplate forms?  In view of the manifest determinacy and long-anticipated occurrence of these now finally imminent occurrences, the affixing of the predicate 'uncertain' to them by Republicans right now seems initially curious indeed.  Is it just a case of poor word-choice?

I think, sad to say, that there might be a better explanation.  The first clue emerges when we recall certain rhetorical and related political strategies characteristic of the Bush campaign in 2000.  Further, supporting clues emerge when we turn then to political strategies employed by both the Bush administration and the Republican Congressional caucus, from about 2002 through 2008.  Here is the tentative story, which I admit to be merely conjectural for now:

To begin with, first recall a puzzling exchange that occurred during the first Bush-Gore presidential debate in the autumn of 2000.  In discussing candidate Bush's then-proposed massive tax cut plan and Social Security privatization scheme, Gore cited the recklessness of both proposals, and provided precise CBO estimates of the likely fiscal and budgetary impact of the tax cut plan in particular.  Bush for his part had no rebuttal at all.  He offered no reason to doubt the budget projections, and offered no contrary figures of his own.  Instead he said, simply, 'fuzzy math,' while wearing one of the more fuzzy expressions I've ever seen on a human face.  (He proved capable of continuing to wear it for many years thereafter.)

In thinking about Bush's surprisingly weak response (even for  Bush) at the time, it occurred to me that what Bush was doing was probably no more than acting upon a very well Rove-calculated strategy.  The aim, I hypothesized, was effectively to 'implant,' by suggestion, a perception of fuzziness or indeterminacy in the minds of debate viewers, whom Rove probably had (not implausibly) guessed were innumerate and readily manipulable where attitudes toward budget projections were concerned.  'Get Bush conclusorily to ascribe fuzziness and look puzzled himself,' I surmised Rove to have probably calculated, 'and you will effectively exploit viewers' mirror neurons and get them to experience something like fuzziness and indeterminacy, and thus to discount Gore's knock-down argument.'  How I then yearned for a 'Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy' moment -- in this case, some such rejoinder from Gore as 'the arithmetic's clear, Mr. Governor, any fuzz here is strictly in your confused head.'

My provisional interpretation of the bizarre 'fuzzy math' trope later found what struck me as corroboration in the subsequent strategy of global warming skeptics and their deep pocketed petroleum-extracting sponsors, to finance and promote sundry self-styled 'studies' purporting to show that the case for climate change is still undecided and up for grabs.  Make it look as if there's still real 'debate,' on this question, as Neil has noted these people to reason, and you will induce in them doubt and uncertainty about what to believe, hence induce them to fall back on stasis.  For one tends, where there's doubt, simply to keep doing what's been done -- a Burkean variation on the tendency that Keynes noted on all of our parts to assume, absent affirmative reason to the contrary, that tomorrow will be more or less much like today.

So here is my conjecture about Republicans' recent discovery of the 'u' word: I'll bet the Republicans are now acting, pursuant to deliberate strategy, to instill the uncertainty they pretend attaches to expiring millionaire/billionaire tax cuts and to all forms of externality-preventive regulation.  They're aiming to do so, in part, just as Rove did  in programming Bush to say 'fuzzy math' and look, well, fuzzy-faced in that first debate.  That is, again, by 'communicating' (in the 'communicable disease' sense) or inducing that sense of uncertainty by suggestion, in effect commandeering our mirror neurons -- the things that lead us to smile when we see smiling, to tear up when we see weeping, and to fear when we see others fearing -- to manipulate our very perceptions and mood. 

Republicans also appear to be aiming to do this -- to foment slump-sustaining uncertainty -- by another, by now more familiar and complementary means.  That is by randomly obstructing most pending recovery-facilitative legislation, while occasionally letting some through.  For erratic governance of course does constitute a ground for uncertainty.  The party of 'no' is in this sense holding our economic recovery hostage. 

Why would Republicans do this?  I can see two related possible reasons:  First, as Mike and I have discussed together in recent days, by so doing the Republicans can (falsely) attribute the uncertainty that many now Keyesianly -- and rightly -- blame for our ongoing hording and slump, to what are quite unrelated factors that the Republicans are bent upon changing for reasons having nothing to do with the health of the economy.  Tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, for example, only fuel speculative bubbles, not real investment or economic growth.  For millionaires and billionaires manifest very low marginal propensities to consume.  But Republicans nevertheless have other reasons to channel money to these -- their bankrollers -- notwithstanding their harm to the broader economy.

Second, by actually causing, instilling or fomenting continuing uncertainty, hence continued economic slump, Republicans can enhance their own electoral prospects.  That is the case precisely by dint of the public's oft-encountered Pavlovian tendency (itself actively encouraged by Republicans but also by others when out of power) to blame whoever is currently in the White House for the economy's current performance.

If I am right about this, then Republicans effectively just are the disease for which they puport to be offering a 'cure,' as Karl Krauss might have put it.  They are the cause of continuing slump-protracting uncertainty, hence the cause of continuing slump.  And that is a shame -- not to mention a dangerous game.  It is even more dangerous, in view of the present state our economy, than was Bush's bizarre claim in 2005 that the Social Security trust fund required privatization because it contained 'only IOUs.'  As if Federal Reserve notes -- yep, dollar bills -- didn't themselves rest on trust for their value, and as if U.S. Treasury bills had not long been the gold standard, virtually equivalent to cash, where safe investment vehicles are concerned.

Is my conjecture correct, then?  Are the Republicans in fact aiming to cause the very uncertainty -- and with it the very dangers -- that they ridiculously attribute to long-anticipated phase-outs to destructive and budget-busting millionaire/billionaire tax cuts from 2001, and to familiar boilerplate regulatory requirements?  Well, one reason to think so is the obvious implausibility just mentioned -- that of the link they attempt to draw between continuing uncertainty on the one hand, and the tax cut phase-out and regulatory boilerplate on the other.  Another reason to think so is the Republicans' regular resort to fear -- 'terrorism uncertainty,' let's call it -- as a political strategy from 2001 through 2008.  Against that recent historical backdrop, the Republicans' late discovery of Knightian uncertainty looks simply to be a retooling of the by now shop-worn terrorist fear strategy for use in the economic domain, capitalizing on the recent rediscovery of the wisdom of Keynes in so doing to boot.  Surely it isn't implausible to hypothesize some such strategy as this on the part of the Republican party.  If you are finally learning that 'it's the economy, stupid,' after all, but at the same time are still inclined to appeal to anger, fear, and others of our baser attributes rather than to hope, charity, and solidarity, then inducing Knightian uncertainty is for you.  It is your Terror Paranoia 2.0.

However plausible my conjecture, though, the real clincher -- what would make clearest of all that the Republicans are up to what I'm supposing -- would be our finding another nice memo from Frank Luntz.  Mr. Luntz, recall, is the current crown prince of negative Pavlovian political strategy among the Republicans, whom we've found occasion to notice before here at DoL.  Just as Luntz counseled Republicans simply to repeat, over and over and over again, the word 'takeover' in connection with health insurance reform, and then the word 'bailout' in connection with finance-regulatory reform, he might well have counseled, in a similar memorandum, that Republicans now begin to incant the 'u' word over and over and over again in connection with millionaire/billionaire tax cuts, as well as with all forms of externality-preventing regulation.  Let us, then, look for this memo.  It's virtually certain to be out there!

And while we are searching, as an antidote to this latest round of Republican anger-, fear-, and 'uncertainty'-mongering, let us recall the level headed wisdom of this great Republican of the not so distant past, who acted to calm the nation at another time of politically prompted paranoia:  .  And let us remember the wisdom of this great Democrat as well, who presided the last time we lived through economic times like those we're now seeing.  When he said that all we have to fear is fear itself, he wasn't just playing on words.  He meant it.  Contrast that with today's Republicans, who seem to fear, most of all, that you won't be afraid come November.

Steve Smith Responds

Steve Smith has responded to my posts here and here. His response was tucked away as a comment, but I thought I would reproduce it here. Here is what he says:

"I thank Steve for his perceptive comments on my book. Naturally, I thought the first post (with its claims that the book is intelligent, a joy to read, etc.,) was especially perceptive, but in fact there’s not much in this second, more critical post that I disagree with either. More specifically . . . .

"Steve is surely right that American public and political discourse is not thoroughly secularized. There are forces and influences, both legal and cultural, that try to make the discourse more secular, and there are domains (e.g., the academy) that are pretty thoroughly secular. But there are also religious voices, and they keep breaking in. I like Fred Gedicks’s description:
"It is as if public religious discourse were driven into the mountains by public secularism, which then decided that it was not worth the trouble to complete the messy task of total eradication. As a result, religious discourse now makes periodic, guerilla-like forays into the public domain of secular neutrality."

"Steve is surely right as well that religious discourse (and of course there are lots of different kinds of religious discourse, just as there are different kinds of secular discourse) has its own challenges and problems. Two obvious ones are these: the problem of truth/believability, and what is sometimes called the Euthyphro problem. And there are plenty of others. I acknowledge this fact in the book, but the book isn’t about the problems of religious discourse. (Every once in a while I start a project attempting to address the problems of religious discourse but in the end desist, leaving those problems to theologians and philosophers of religion. Since I make my living by teaching and writing about constitutional law and theory, I can’t as easily do that with matters of secular discourse.)

"My own view is that the most fruitful results often come from an interaction between kinds of discourse, or different worldviews. A little book by Charles Taylor called "A Catholic Modernity" argues that Christianity benefitted from its encounter with the Enlightenment. And I think that through much of American history, we have been blessed by a healthy interaction between religious and more secular perspectives. In recent decades this collaboration has suffered, I believe, in part because of the legal and cultural influences that have tried to keep religious perspectives out. As a result, even when religious voices enter the conversation, there tend to be more suspicion and incomprehension than real engagement. One hope I had in writing Disenchantment was to do a bit to overcome that divide."

A Role for Hamas in the Peace Process?

 

 

At The Huffington Post, Alon Ben-Meir argues for the inclusion of Hamas in the current negotiations toward peace:

 

“The negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority can potentially succeed, but such a success cannot be sustained unless Hamas is brought into the political process in some capacity. Concessions made or breakthroughs achieved must represent the majority of the electorates, as there can be no lasting peaceful solution without recreating a unified Palestinian polity in the West Bank and Gaza. The Arab states should therefore heed President Obama’s call to meaningfully contribute to the peace process by pressing Hamas to renounce violence and accept the principles of the Arab Peace Initiative as a common frame of reference for advancing Palestinian unity and a comprehensive resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel must accept that Hamas is a reality, which it cannot simply wish away. Hamas’ participation is essential, not only because it is in control of Gaza, but also because it represents a disciplined grassroots movement with a substantial social, political and security apparatus. To be sure, Hamas is a radical militant organization, yet it wields too much influence over its followers—and over the Gaza Strip—to be discounted. While Israel will continue to defend its citizens, Hamas—as an ideology—cannot be removed completely by military force, and ignoring Hamas has not been a successful strategy to marginalize it. Thus far, Hamas’ political participation has been conditional upon its acceptance of the Quartet’s three conditions: recognize Israel, renounce terrorism and accept prior Israeli-Palestinian agreements. Hamas’ leadership has refused to do so and is unlikely to comply any time soon, perhaps with the exception of adhering to a non-violent atmosphere.”

 

The rest of this surprisingly sensible essay, “Hamas Must Play a Role in the Two-State Solution,” is here.

Secualr Discourse, Religious Discourse, and Steven Smith

Last week I highly recommended (here) Steve Smith’s new book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. I do, however, have some significant disagreements. Smith believes that the problems he associates with secular discourse can be remedied by opening up our public discourse to religion. I certainly agree that American universities would have thicker, richer discussions if theologians were part of the discussion. Indeed, the exclusion of religion is part of a larger problem which is the extent to which disciplines seeking to be scientific crowd out normative questions or marginalize those who engage in normative issues, or reduce all normative questions to some form of cost benefit analysis, or treat them exclusively from a philosophical perspective or in legal language.

I do not agree that our public political discourse lacks religious voices. American academics debate about public reason, but American public discourse has always included religious voices. One of the strongest arguments against Rawls in my view is that the public reason doctrine is utterly impractical. Religion will never be absent from public discourse. From the perspective of the left, for example, if the religious right is to use religious arguments, the left must criticize their politics and their theology, not chide them for having bad manners in bringing religious into public life and engaging in public religious silence.

Although I think that religious discourse adds much of importance to political life and could add much to university life, I think that if Smith applied the same rhetorical weapons he applies to secular discourse against religious discourse, similar results would follow. Smith could easily demonstrate that religious discourse is indeterminate and that people smuggle assumptions from elsewhere into their religious arguments. Smith criticizes Nussbaum for the indeterminancy of a concept like human flourishing. But in the moral and political realm there are dozens of questions about human flourishing that turn out to be the same whether human dignity arises from our being created in the image of God or from more mystical support. In the end, I think Smith looks for arguments that cannot be rejected in public discourse. Those arguments in my view are rarely available.



Visit to Auschwitz and Dachau

Hannah Rosenthal
   Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism 

Rashad Hussain
   Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference 

Maltese Newspaper L-Orizzont

September 16, 2010

---

Joining eight imams in prayer at Dachau concentration camp was a powerful experience and a profound show of faith and solidarity with the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. This event took place even as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia spread across the world. For these eight religious leaders, the future will be shaped by a shared understanding of the past, not by the prejudice of the present. As representatives of government and communities we joined these clerics to bear witness to the horror and tragedy of the Holocaust and reaffirm the pledge - “never again.”

This unusual study tour of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps was initiated and led by an Orthodox Jew, sponsored by a German think tank on interreligious values and attended by eight American imams from varying backgrounds – including many who were educated in systems where the history of the Holocaust is not taught.

Marshall Breger, a Catholic University Law Professor and leader of the expedition, explained that the impetus behind the effort is to address, head-on, the denial of the Holocaust that is part of growing anti-Semitism in Muslim communities. His goal, one which we share, is to educate those who might not have the kind of knowledge we have about the Holocaust; to promote understanding; and even change.

As the group started into the camp it was clear that this was a remarkable moment in history. Together, we listened as survivors bravely shared their horrific experiences of discrimination, suffering and loss. Together, we watched as Max Mannheimer, a survivor of both Auschwiz and Dachau, rolled back his sleeve to show the tattoo permanently marked on his arm.

Walking down the train tracks from the Judenrampe to the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria, many remarked that they were not observing the sites as Muslims, Jews, or religious leaders, but as parents who could relate the horror of being separated from their children. Here, the words of Imam Muzammil Siddiqi rang true, “We came here to understand the pain of the Jewish community. This is in order to improve relationships because you cannot build relationships with people unless you know what they’ve been through.”

Determined to share this message of mutual understanding, the imams had this to say in a historic joint statement:

“…We condemn any attempts to deny this historical reality (of the Holocaust) and declare such denials or any justification of this tragedy as against the Islamic code of ethics. We condemn anti-Semitism in any form. No creation of Almighty God should face discrimination based on his or her faith or religious conviction…”

We are deeply aware of the growing anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hatred, rhetoric and bigotry that have blossomed worldwide. We believe, as our delegation does, that now more than ever people of faith must stand together for truth. As the Qu’ran says, we must “stand up firmly for justice” and the Torah tells us “Justice, justice shall you pursue.”

We honor this remarkable experience by talking about it as clearly and definitively as possible. As President Obama forcefully stated in his address before Muslim communities around the world, Holocaust denial “is baseless, it is ignorant, and it is hateful.” We must advance the universal message that such evil and darkness can only occur when people choose not to confront it. We will discuss this shared narrative among Jewish and Muslim people with the hope that our futures will hold more understanding and partnership.

We went to Germany and Poland to see Dachau and Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps. We stood together bearing witness to the most sinister and evil chapter of history, to the unthinkable deeds of governments, to the silence of so many, and to the willingness of those who became the executioners. We affirmed that education and dialogue are necessary first steps to overcome bigotry and ignorance. We expressed shared understanding of the dangers of ongoing polarization between Muslim and Jewish communities.

We came away with a new commitment to promote peace, understanding, respect, and empathy among our communities. We will provide leadership, foster partnerships and build collaborative efforts around combating anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. We are encouraged by this and other examples of interfaith collaboration developed organically through the vision and commitment of civil society and religious leaders. We thank the Konrad Adenaur Foundation for making this experience possible.

Salaam and Shalom,

Hannah Rosenthal
U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism

Rashad Hussain
U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference

Islam & Justice: Propaedeutic

Justice, ‘adl (related to haqq—‘right,’ qist—‘equity,’ sidq—‘truth,’ and ihsān—‘virtue’ or ‘beneficence’), is one of the foremost themes in the Qur’ān, indeed, it is part of the metaphysical rationale for creation: “God created the heavens and earth for a purpose: to reward each soul [i.e. provide just recompense] according to its deeds. They will not be wronged” (45: 22). Mankind alone is responsible for whatever justice—or injustice—is in the world (10: 44). Divine justice is more than a quid pro quo exchange, at least with regard to merit- or desert-based principles, for God “doubles any good deed and gives a tremendous reward of His own” (4: 40). Several moral values and virtues (e.g., fairness, temperance, honesty) are implicitly or explicitly integral to the objective concept of justice in the Qur’ān and are, in turn, said to be ingrained in the human soul (91: 8 and 9: 7-10), a microcosmic fact in keeping with the macrocosmic or metaphysical harmony that finds justice serving as a  “self-subsistent” principle reverberating throughout all of creation. Furthermore, the Qur’ān (5: 48) “recognizes the universality and objective nature of moral virtue (‘goodness’), which transcends different religions and…admonishes human beings ‘to be forward in good work,’ hold[ing] them accountable for their deeds regardless of their religious differences” (Sachedina 1988: 122-123).

The Qur’ānic concern for justice reiterates one of the fundamental demands (as ‘righteousness’) made by God upon man in revelations to the prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The fact that the Qur’ān often refers to terms such as ‘adl (equitable, just), ihsān (beneficence) and ma‘rūf (a generally accepted good) without defining them, suggests a relation to justice prior to the Qur’ānic revelations, thereby re-affirming its importance and reminding its readers of the continuity with earlier revelations (for relevant pre-Islamic yet non-revelatory conceptions of justice, see the poems and proverbs regarding several types of justice respectively in Bailey 1991 and 2004). Moreover, this pre- and extra-Qur’ānic reference to justice can also be inferred from the fact that mankind is endowed with a universal and objective moral nature or fitra (incipient or dispositional moral and spiritual awareness). It is fitra that forms the objective basis for the equal treatment of all human beings, linking natural law, human nature, and the divine command to build a just society. Perhaps the quintessential articulation of the importance of justice in the Qur’ān is found in 4: 135:

You who believe, uphold justice and bear witness to God, even if it is against yourselves, your parents, or your close relatives. Whether the person is rich or poor, God can best take care of both. Refrain from following your own desire, so that you can act justly—if you distort or neglect justice, God is fully aware of what you do.

The call to justice is complemented by numerous admonitions against injustice in the Qur’ān.

‘Adl, a noun, comes from the verb ‘adala, which means, among other things, to straighten or modify; to depart or deflect from one (presumably wrong) path to the other (presumably right one) [cf. Q1: 17 on ‘the Straight Path,’ al-sirāt al-mustaqīm, and the literal meaning of sharī‘ah as ‘the way or path’ to water]; to equalize; and to balance, weigh, or be in equilibrium. Among the numerous suggestive synonyms we cite nasīb and qist, rightful share; qistās and mīzān, scale; and taqwīm, straightening. Other synonyms imply the classical Greek virtue sōphrosynē: temperance, harmony, self-mastery, and with respect to action: balance, proportionality and judiciousness, or the Aristotelian principle of the (Golden) Mean between extremes. The semantically rich metaphorical image of “the scale” (mīzān) is used in the Qur’ān with reference to divine justice on the Day of Judgment (yawm ad-Din).

Divine justice by definition perfect, eternal and ideal, we are urged to make every effort to approximate and reflect this metaphysical fact (a capacity owing to fitra), reward or punishment in the next life allotted in accordance with the sincerity and strength of our endeavors to instantiate this divine (ideal) model, one reason for the association of justice with ihsān, beneficence or moral excellence, that is, doing the utmost good. The imperative of justice is both an individual and collective obligation for Muslims, so that while we may distinguish between personal and political virtues, they are necessarily tied together. Mohammad Hashim Kemali provides a succinct summary:

Justice is generally understood to mean ‘putting everything in its rightful place,’ and in the context of Sharī‘ah as ‘giving everyone his or her entitlement.’ Islam’s unqualified commitment to impartial justice is manifested in numerous places in the Qur’ān. We also note the Qur’ānic conception of justice is neither rigid nor rule-bound but open to a variety of considerations. This can be seen in various places in the text of such concepts as ma‘rūf (decent, fair, customary) and ihsān (equity, the doing of good) next to ‘adl (justice). The Qur’ān and Sunnah also integrate intuitive insight (firāsah) and considerations of a just policy (siyāsah shar‘iyyah) into its vision of justice. Moreover, Sharī‘ah validates ijtihād bi’l-ra’y (opinion-based legal judgement) as a basis of adjudication in the absence of a clear text. When the judge adjudicates on the basis of ijtihād, he relies not only on his understanding of Sharī‘ah but also his conscience, insight and experience. This is equivalent to saying that equity and fairness constitute important ingredients of both ijtihād and ‘adl in Islam. (Kamali 2008: 199-200)

The Prophet Muhammad appears to have had a keen sense of justice, publicizing widespread inequity and oppression in and around Mecca: a new if not stricter standard of justice was needed to address questions of fairness and exploitation not beholden to tribal status and the privileges of wealth. Whatever dimensions of justice were part of the bedouin ethic of muruwwa in the Jahiliyya, they precipitously declined in the time and place of Muhammad, hence the Meccan revelations regarding the treatment of orphans and the plight of the poor. The Qur’ān evidences the urgency of addressing issues that fall under the rubric of socio-economic or distributive justice, rebuking those who have greedily consumed their inheritance while loving wealth “with a passion” (89: 19-20). Moreover, the enshrinement of zakāt (alms-giving) as the third pillar of practice in Islam makes this duty integral to Muslim identity, effectively institutionalizing a “right” for the needy and deprived to a share in the community’s wealth: no longer would the provision of basic material needs be at the whim or discretion of tribal chiefs. In addition to this compulsory obligation, Muslims of sufficient means are expected to practice voluntary charitable giving (sadaqah). The Qur’ān’s ill-understood opposition to usury (ribā) further illustrates the attempt to deal with problems of distributive justice (as Rosen remarks, the term ‘more accurately refers to any form of unjust enrichment’).

Historically, questions of political justice were first broached in the Khārijite opposition to the Umayyad caliphate. The Khārijites invoked the doctrine of qadar (power; free will, thus the corollary proposition that each individual is responsible for his or her acts) against the Umayyad rulers’ attempt to legitimize their rule through the principles of ijma‘ (consensus, agreement) and bay‘ah (oath of allegiance), fortified with the theological doctrine of jabr (lit., compulsion; predestination; here in the sense that Umayyad rule was seen as ordained by God). The “absolute justice of God” was one of the five tenets of Mu‘tazilite kalām (theology), unremarkable as such until we learn that it was bound up with debates over the nature of evil and injustice, including the metaphysical and ethical scope of man’s free agency. The Mu‘tazilites even took to referring to themselves as “The People of Justice and Unity.” The pursuit and realization of justice for the Mu‘tazilah was both determined and constrained by the powers of reason (‘aql).

”The Father of Arab Philosophy” and Islam’s first significant philosopher, Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. c. 866) held justice to be the central virtue owing to its balancing and coordinating functions vis-à-vis other (principally classical Greek) virtues, thereby demonstrating the integration of Peripatetic and Neoplatonic ideas into a distinctively Islamic philosophy. Islam’s first truly systematic philosopher, al-Fārābī (c. 870-950), envisioned the ideal Islamic polity portioning such goods as security, wealth, honor and dignity according to a desert principle of distributive justice. Rational justice, formulated in terms of a social contract theory inspired by Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as well as the Islamic sciences generally, was the center point of Ibn Sina’s (Avicenna) (979-1037) political scheme to secure the common welfare from a pool of basic resources. For Ibn Rushd (Averroes) (1126-1198), justice is the sum and highest of all virtues of man as a citizen of the polity. Furthermore, it inheres in the fulfillment of role responsibilities and duties in a social division of labor structured according to the standards and strictures of philosophy (falsafah). While some virtues, like wisdom and courage, are class-specific, justice is pertinent to all citizens, provided they perform the vocation for which they are fitted “by nature.”

Justice in jurisprudential terms entails in the first instance equal treatment of all before the law (fiqh). With the sharī‘ah as lodestar (i.e., God’s Will in ideal and abstract form), both ethics and law in Islam approach justice through the doctrinal formula of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” (al-amr bi’l-ma‘rūf wa’l-nahy ‘an al-munkar). In short, fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), as the human endeavor to understand and interpret God’s Will, is a system of ethico-legal obligation formulated in imperative or obligatory (amr) and prohibitive (nahy) terms, with all human actions exhaustively classified as mandatory (fard or wājib), encouraged (mustahabb or mandūb), permissible (halāl or mubāh), discouraged (makrūh), or forbidden (harām). Historically, procedural justice in Islam tends toward a communalist conception of personalism and a virtue ethical conception rather than corporatist and administrative principles insofar as trust is placed in the “just judge” or “just witness,” transcending the judicial system as such. In other words, the status and personal qualities of juridical actors are paramount and this might be charitably described as one of the implications of a religious formulation of virtue jurisprudence.

The Islamic modernism or “reformism”of a Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849-1905) or a Muhammad Rashīd Ridā (1865-1935) devotes more attention to issues of individual freedom and national self-determination than institutional and public policy questions regarding the mechanics of distributive justice. Exemplified in the works of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), the Nahdah’s (renaissance; rebirth) second generation of Muslim intellectuals (i.e. after World War II) brought back to the political and economic foreground pressing questions of distributive justice, albeit in a manner that lacked the complete historical compass, ethical range, and philosophical depth of earlier theological and jurisprudential discussions. Most recently, Muslim scholars have persuasively argued for the relevance of Islamic conceptions of justice and jurisprudence to the ideals and values intrinsic to international human rights, such rights being the primary means for realizing and exploring principles of international or cosmopolitan justice. The Islamist social organization and political party Hizbullāh in Lebanon, and what might be called its Sunni counterpart Hamas in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, have made the pursuit of social justice a religious obligation central to their welfare work and political platforms. In Turkey, we find the (post-?) Islamist Justice and Development Party (AK Party) proclaiming (in its political program) a commitment to laws “based on [the] fundamentals of universal justice and human rights.”

 

References & Further Reading:

• Abou El Fadl, Khaled. Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2001.
• Baderin, Mashood A. International Human Rights and Islamic Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Bailey, Clinton. Bedouin Poetry from Sinai and the Negev: Mirror of a Culture. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Bailey, Clinton. A Culture of Desert Survival: Bedouin Proverbs from Sinai and the Negev. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
• Cook, Michael. Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
• Emon, Anver M. Islamic Natural Law Theories. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Hashmi, Sohail H., ed. Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
• Hourani, Albert. Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798-1939. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983 ed.
• Hourani, George F. Islamic Rationalism: The Ethics of ‛Abd al-Jabbār. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Kamali, Mohammad Hashim. Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence. Cambridge, UK: The Islamic Texts Society, revised ed., 2000.
• Kamali, Mohammad Hashim. Freedom, Equality and Justice in Islam. Cambridge, UK: Islamic Texts Society, 2002.
• Kamali, Mohammad Hashim. Shari’ah Law: An Introduction. Oxford, England: Oneworld, 2008.
• Kelsay, John. Arguing the Just War in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• Khadduri, Majid. The Islamic Conception of Justice. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
• Lakhani, M. Ali, Reza Shah-Kazemi and Leonard Lewinsohn. The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam: The Teachings of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom/North Vancouver, BC: Sacred Web Publ., 2006.
• Martin, Richard C. and Mark R. Woodward (with Dwi S. Atmaja). Defenders of Reason in Islam: Mu‘tazilism from Medieval School to Modern Symbol. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 1997.
• Mayer, Ann Elizabeth. Islam and Human Rights: Tradition and Politics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 3rd ed., 1999. 
• Peters, Rudolph Peters. Crime and Punishment in Islamic Law. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Rosen, Lawrence. The Justice of Islam. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Sabet, Amr G.E. Islam and the Political: Theory, Governance and International Relations. London: Pluto Press, 2008.
• Sachedina, Abdulaziz Abdulhussein. The Just Ruler in Shi‛ite Islam: The Comprehensive Authority of the Jurist in Imamite Jurisprudence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988.
• Said, Abdul Aziz, Nathan C. Funk and Ayse S. Kadayifci, eds. Peace and Conflict Resolution in Islam: Precept and Practice. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2001.
• Wolfson, Harry A. The Philosophy of the Kalām. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

   

  An earlier version of the above was published in Juan E. Campo, ed., Encyclopedia of Islam (New York: Facts on File/Checkmark Books, 2009): 416-418.

The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse I

I recently finished Steve Smith's new book, The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse (Harvard University Press 2010). The book argues that our secular discourse is insufficiently rich and that it lacks authenticity. He maintains that the purported bases for decisions rely on unstated assumptions that are smuggled into the decision making process. He has chapters focusing on legal discourse with the right to die issue at the forefront, the liberal harm principle of Mill and Joel Feinberg, the discourse of religious freedom with an extended discussion of the history of the secular and criticism of the jurisprudence of Eisgruber and Sager as well as Laycock, the capabilities approach of Martha Nussbaum situated in a discussion of Carl Becker's lectures on the Heavenly City of the Secular Philosophers, a chapter on philosophy of science with extended and approving views of Joe Vining's work, and a discussion of how religious discourse can enrich public political discourse as well as discourse in universities.

The book is well written, smart, interesting throughout, generally quite fair, accessible to scholars and students alike, and a joy to read. It is especially heartening to read a book by a legal scholar who is so widely read and commands the materials he has read with such subtlety. I highly recommend the book.

Particularly given that Smith and I have very different political views and that I am attracted to the views of both Mill and Nussbaum (though Smith and I both reject the doctrine of public reason and I find his discussion of Mill and Nussbaum to be particularly strong), no one should be surprised that I have criticisms and thoughts inspired by the book, but I will save those for a subsequent post. 

“Peace Talks:” Ongoing Masquerade, Another Photo Opportunity? A Miracle?

At New Left Project, there’s a timely and important interview with Gideon Levy, prominent Israeli journalist and member of the Ha’aretz editorial board. His most recent book is The Punishment of Gaza (Verso, 2010):

 

“For decades Gideon Levy has used the platform provided by the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz to shine a light on the brutal realities of Israel’s occupation. His journalism, along with that of his colleague Amira Hass, has been an invaluable resource not only for Israeli readers but, through the Ha’aretz website, for international audiences seeking an informed and humane Israeli perspective on the conflict. It would be difficult to overstate how isolated Levy is within his own society, an isolation that increased over the past decade as Israeli public opinion stampeded to the right. He has described elsewhere how Ha’aretz keeps a thick folder of subscription cancellations from readers outraged by his articles. Despite this hostility, his critique of Israeli policies has become more, not less, radical over time.”

From the interview:

Would you accept the label ‘anti-Zionist’ to characterise your views?

It depends what is ‘Zionism.’ Because Zionism is a very fluid concept – who can define what is Zionism? If Zionism means the right of the Jews to have a state, I am a Zionist. If Zionism means occupation, I’m an anti-Zionist. So I never know how to answer this question. If Zionism means to have a Jewish state at the expense of being a democratic state, then I am anti-Zionist, because I truly believe those two definitions are contradictory – ‘Jewish’ and ‘democratic’. For me, Israel should be a democratic state.

So would it be right to say that you support a state for Jews, but not a ‘Jewish state’ in the sense of a state that artificially maintains a Jewish majority?

Absolutely. It should be a state for Jews that will be a just state, a democratic state, and if there will be a Palestinian majority, there will be a Palestinian majority. The idea is that Jews have to have their place, but it can’t be exclusively theirs, because this land is not exclusively theirs.

 

The entire interview is here.

Rabbis for Human Rights

In an interesting video report, here, NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof looks at Rabbis for Human Rights, who "are a voice of conscience in the West Bank, protecting Palestinian farmers from some hostile Jewish settlers."

Is Meat Apparel Offensive? If So, Are Leather-Bound Bibles?

As someone whose law school was recently compared to this artist by the Wall Street Journal -- here: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/02/03/the-cornell-law-mystery-continues-or-why-cls-is-like-lady-gaga/ -- I suppose I am under something akin to a fiduciary duty to learn more about Lady What's-Her-Name.  But alas, I doubt I could pick her out of a lineup that included herself, Brittney Spears, Madonna, or even Debbie Harry in some of her past guises.  

As it happens, I often am plagued by this problem, and in a much more general way, where celebrity is concerned.  In the past, for example, I have wondered 'just what's the difference between Rob Lowe, Matthew Broderick, and Tom Cruise, anyway' or  even among Lee Iacocca, Ed McMahon, and Helmut Kohl for that matter.  Incessantly assaulted by their vaguely cross-reminiscent images as I've been, I have done what I suppose any creature with limited RAM would do: I've made them share memory space, so as to leave room for other fare.

This tendency of mine, I admit, might be partly the product of a hermit's or nerd's or curmudgeon's sensibility.  After all, is there really any doubt that Helmut Kohl and Ed McMahon were not the same person?  They didn't even occupy similar roles, for heaven's sake!  But at least where the celebrities in question are celebrated for little more than their 'fashion statements,' I think my lumping of folk together might be pardonable.  For it does seem that most who are known for these things tend to recycle earlier such 'statements' all of the time.  They invite assimilation to others. 

At last night's Video Music Awards (VMA), for example, a number of notables whom I've never happened to note or notice before evidently wore something called 'garbage bag dresses' -- outfits made to look like large black plastic refuse bags, as if the wearers had been dressed by the 'Man from Glad.'  See, e.g., here: http://celebs.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474978515060 .  And so, well, 'how delightfully nostalgic,' I thought upon hearing about this today.  For I recall reading, in a memoir of hip 1970s New York, that Debbie Harry used to wear something like this, fashioned in her case of real garbage bags, at Max's Kansas City on Park Avenue during what was one of the coolest periods in recent history.  (Here's a somewhat disppointingly glitzed version of the outfit as she wore it on a British television program in the 1980s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYON9Uv9MBU .)  And those were times that I sometimes wish that I could have been part of.  (Steve's and Eduardo's and my colleague Kevin Clermont, I am told, used to attend some of Andy Warhol's factory events, at which the Velvets played and Gerard Malanga and Edie Sedgwick danced like ecstatic lunatics.  (Here's what it would have looked like to Kevin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNwp4nNTeJg&feature=related .)  Yet another respect in which I can only envy, never equal, the man!)   

Most talk of last night's VMA fashion, however, has centered not around garbage bag apparel, but yet another fashion statement on the part of the aforementioned Lady What's-Her-Name -- in this case, a 'meat dress.'  Here are two images: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/13/lady-gagas-meat-dress-photos_n_714117.html . 

My first thought upon hearing this today was, 'hey, that's my idea!'  The reason, you see, is that some bandmate/artist friends and I, during the brief period that we were sort of 'cool,' conceived a music video back in the 90s in which we would wear something we called (simulated) 'meat bikinis.'  And, wouldn't you know, it turns out that Lady What's-Her-Name has worn one of those too, on the cover of some version of Vogue magazine: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/07/lady-gagas-meat-bikini-vogue-hommes_n_707357.html . 

Apart from feeling a bit robbed, however, I didn't take any offense at this 'statement.'  Yet others have.  If you click on the link just prior to the last, for example, you will note that HuffPo is polling readers on the matter, a majority of whom thus far are deeming the outfit 'offensive' rather than 'awesome.'  (I'd simply call it 'bloody,' and perhaps a bit more 'fatty' than I'd have thought a modern fashion-conscious celebrity to be comfortable with.)

What I can't quite figure out is, why is it that so many evidently find Ms. Gaga's outfit offensive?  Do not scores of millions of Americans, day after day, wear meat jackets, meat shoes, meat watchbands, and the like?  Don't others sit daily on meat seats when driving their expensive sportscars, read meat-bound Bibles and other holy books, and, of course, consume meat meals all the time?  If so, then don't most Americans do daily more or less the same thing that Ms. G did last night, only moreso and more regularly?  Is there any more distinction between her and us than there is between Mickey Rourke and Bruce Willis?

One possible distinction between Lady G and others was proposed by Mike Dorf today in an email conversation with Sherry Colb, moi, and a number of other conscientious objectors to animal exploitation.  It is that the objectors might be objecting to the sheer waste involved in Ms. G's couture, which waste they do not perceive in their own consumption of animal products -- since we all must, after all, dine and protect ourselves from the elements.  

I think Mike's conjecture quite as plausible as it is characteristically charitable.  But I can't help but think there's another element at work here as well:  Perhaps those who object to Ms. G-g's apparel are especially disturbed by the waste it involves precisely because it occasions their (at least subconsciously) noticing the waste involved in their own practices.  For, as Mike also suggested in the mentioned conversation today, as well as in earlier weblog posts of his own, to kill our fellow creatures for clothing and nourishment is itself wasteful, not to mention unhealthy, inasmuch as we're able to nourish and clothe ourselves now without resort to such expedients.

Perhaps some such thought-provocation as this is what Lady G had in mind in her choice of apparel last night.  Certainly it is what my band/artist friends and I had in mind with the video I mentioned -- though in this case the point was to drive home not only the animal-exploitation 'message,' but also a more general woman- and even humanity-exploitation message that magazine cover and mass media life-culture had brought to our not very subtle young minds.  (We were great fans of Guy Debord's situationist manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle, and convinced that mondern American life had become little more than a bad television program with lots of canned laugh-tracks, baddabooms, impossibly emaciated barely clad women, and comical 'tragedies' such as the fraying of a family's shag carpet, or the falling and breaking of a lava lamp.) 

As it happens, though, I doubt that any of this is what Ms. Gaga had in mind.  But who cares?  If the apparel gets people to thinking, or to confronting their own less-shocking-only-because-more-familiar practices, it will have served a useful purpose.  And that is surely one function of art.  Ms. G's is a lumpen, mass-marketed sort of art, to be sure, but a 'prole art threat' is no less potentially salutary for that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvG5fUDTaFc&feature=related .          

   

Is Pope Benedict Irrelevant?

[From today's "5 Best Columns from The Atlantic Wire":]

Stephen Wall on Pope Benedict's Irrelevance  As the Pope makes his way to Britain this week, the Financial Times contributor notes that the words and gestures of the papacy are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the modern world. This did not have to be so. After Pope John Paul's death in 2005, the Catholic Church had a critical decision to make: choose a successor who would appeal to non-Catholics, or satisfy the core believers by choosing a conservative steward. They made a "huge mistake," declares Wall, by choosing Cardinal Ratzinger: "He has also proved to be uncharismatic, accident-prone, unable to grasp the extent of the Church’s lost credibility." To have any hope of reaching non-Catholics, the church needs to "accept that it does not have a monopoly on truth, that individuals have their own values, that a changing moral code is a normal part of social evolution." This is not likely to occur, says Wall.

[Alas, FT.com articles are only available to registered users and subscribers.]

Hamas & Terrorism

 

 

I’ll preface my comments by stating categorically that I’m opposed to terrorism. And it’s clear that Hamas has resorted to acts of terrorism in its defense of Palestinians and its struggle for collective self-determination on their behalf. But to look at Hamas as a terrorist organization simpliciter strikes me as singularly unhelpful and unduly reductionist. Why? Because much of what Hamas as an organization and religious and political movement does falls well outside the scope of terrorism, one reason it has been able to garner widespread electoral support. And we might consider precisely why Hamas has resorted to acts of terrorism when it otherwise exhibits rationality as a collective actor, at least from the vantage points provided by political science and sociology. Given the striking asymmetrical nature of the conflict with the state of Israel, and the early use of such acts in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it’s quite understandable why members of Hamas thought it necessary to resort to this kind of political violence: it proved successful in the past in bringing attention to the Palestinian cause and did not preclude the PLO’s eventual official recognition as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.” And of course the PLO itself would come to formally “reject violence and terrorism.” Keeping acts of terrorism in historical and political perspective enables one to sympathize with Hamas while at the same time appreciating what might be done to prompt Hamas to forswear resort to such tactics, which is not the same as refusing to use violence as a justified means of individual and collective self-defense (as in the Just War tradition or as similarly sanctioned within Islamic legal traditions under the rubric of ‘jihad’).

 

Part of the aforementioned historical and political perspective involves an appreciation of the fact that states, notably the United States, have themselves engaged in acts of what we rightly call “State terrorism,” as in the indiscriminate firebombing and dropping of nuclear weapons on Japanese cities during World War II or in the illegal bombing of Cambodia (and Laos) during the Vietnam war, terrrorist acts of a wholly different order of moral magnitude than anything done imagined by Hamas or any other Palestinian group or faction for that matter. Of course, as our parents taught us, “two wrongs don’t make a right,” but it helps make transparent the hypocrisy and self-righteousness that are part and parcel of the condemnation of Hamas by outside parties. Indeed, let’s recall the fact that the “founding fathers” of Israel introduced novel forms of terrorism into the Middle East conflict and relied on egregious acts of “ethnic cleansing,” forms of violence that directly contributed to the success of the Zionist and colonialist settler project that led to the state of Israel.

 

Speaking of Hamas simply and dismissively as a terrorist organization makes it difficult to appreciate the significance of the following propositions:

 

1. Respected researchers in and outside Israel have thoroughly documented and explained how “Hamas is neither anti-modern or anti-democratic, nor inherently anti-Western.”
2. Hamas recognizes the significance and relative authority of popular mandates.
3. Like other rational collective actors, Hamas has historically been open and responsive to contractualist or quid pro quo bargaining and negotiations with the state of Israel, to which Israel has repeatedly responded with disdain and dismissal, topped off with on ongoing assassination campaign of its key leaders.
4. Hamas’ ability to inflict violence is an important source of its political authority (recall that States are frequently defined by their de jure or de facto monopoly on the means of violence and that Hamas is fighting for recognition of a right to collective self-determination which, in our time and place, takes the form of a State). “While this capacity for violence provides important symbolic capital for Hamas as a whole, the majority of its political leaders derive the bulk of their authority from other sources—increasing the possibility of a transformation away form violence if Hamas members believe their basic security will be guaranteed through different means.”
5. With regard to democratic and especially electoral politics (e.g., the municipal and legislative elections of 2004-2006), Hamas has made cross-ideological alliances and the bulk of its “election manifesto reads like that of any ‘secular’ political party.” As part of their decision to participate in electoral politics Hamas fielded “candidates with political and administrative, rather than paramilitary experience, [which] suggests that it recognizes that political capital in the domestic arena is derived from having non-violent, administrative skills and professional expertise than from a career in the resistance.”
6. Hamas has repeatedly demonstrated a “readiness to make alliances, even with those who support a two-state solution and co-existence with Israel,” a fact that “further underlines that Hamas is not fanatical and incapable of compromise, but pragmatic.”
7. Hamas leaders, notably Khalid Misha’al, have repeatedly stated they would not object to a two-state solution were the terms favorable to the “will of the people” (‘During the 2006 election campaign, senior Hamas legislative candidates Hasan Yousef and Muhammad Abu Tair categorized negotiations with Israel concerning a two-state solution as legitimate if they were both “in the interest of the people” and “presented to the new parliament,” the embodiment of the popular will.’) and their willingness to abide by a long-term hudna or truce (several decades, the terms of which would be renewable), evidences a de facto recognition of the state of Israel. Hamas is hardly prepared to pronounce a de-jure like or principled recognition until such time as Israel is willing to grant the collective right of self-determination to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (note again the logic of reciprocity).

Again, nothing said here prevents us from affirming our categorical moral, political, and legal rejection of terrorist acts, yet it should enable us to see why focusing exclusively on such acts inhibits our ability to contribute to the conditions that will enable Hamas to see the futility and folly of terrorism. Dismissals and condemnations come all too easy when unaccompanied by any meaningful acts by powerful outside parties to help alter the dynamics of the conflict in way that would put Hamas and other Palestinian groups on equal footing with the state of Israel so as to help create the propitious conditions of a meaningful negotiated resolution to the conflict, one that minimally entails full and formal recognition of the collective rights of self-determination for the Palestinians.

 

Hamas has abided by a number of ceasefires, both declared and de facto. And how did Israel, the U.S. and even the European states respond? How did these parties respond to Hamas’ considerable investment in democratic principles and procedures? And so forth and so on. As recent historical narratives will attest, acts of political terrorism are clearly acts of desperation and when otherwise rational collective political actors resort to same it’s possible if not probable that changing socio-political conditions can move these actors to abandon such immoral and illegal tactics and rely on more conventional means of resolving political conflict.

 

References and 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.
• Anderson, Sean K. Historical Dictionary of Terrorism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2^nd ed., 2009.
• Aranson, Geoffrey. Israel, Palestinians and the Intifada: Creating Facts on the West Bank. London: Kegan Paul International, 1990.
• Aruri, Naseer H. Dishonest Broker: The Role of the United States in Palestine and Israel. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003.
• Atran, Scott. “Genesis of Suicide Terrorism,” Science (March 2003) Vol. 299: 1534-1539.
• Atran, Scott. “Who Becomes a Terrorist Today?” Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. II, 5 (March 2008): 3-10.
• Baroud, Ramzy. The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle. London: Pluto Press, 2006.
• Baroud, Ramzy. My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza’s Untold Story. London: Pluto Press, 2010.
• Beinin, Joel and Rebecca L. Stein, eds. The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, with the Middle East Research and Information Project, 2006.
• 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.
• Bianchi, Andrea, ed. Enforcing International Law Norms Against Terrorism. Portland, OR: Hart, 2004.
• Bongar, Bruce, et al., eds. The Psychology of Terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Coady, C.A.J. “The Morality of Terrorism,” Philosophy, 60 (1985): 47-69.
• Coady, C.A.J. “Terrorism and Innocence,” Journal of Ethics, 8 (2004): 37–58.
• Coady, C.A.J. Morality and Political Violence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
• 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.
• Cobban, Helena. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation: People, Power and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Corlett, J. Angelo. Terrorism: A Philosophical Analysis. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003.
• Cypel, Sylvain. Walled: Israeli Society at an Impasse. New York: Other Press, 2006.
• Finkelstein, Norman G.. Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. London: Verso, 1995.
• Frey, R.G. and Christopher W. Morris, eds. Violence, Terrorism and Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Gambetta, Diego, ed. Making Sense of Suicide Missions. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• Gareau, Frederick H. State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism. Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2004.
• Ginbar, Yuval. Why Not Torture Terrorists? Moral, Practical, and Legal Aspects of the “Ticking Bomb” Justification of Torture. 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.
• Gunning, Jeroen. Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
• 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.
• Higgins, Rosalyn and Maurice Flory, eds. Terrorism and International Law. London: Routledge, 1997.
• Honderich, Ted. Terrorism for Humanity: Inquiries in Political Philosophy. London: Pluto Press, revised ed., 2003.
• Honderich, Ted. After the Terror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003 ed.
• Kassimeris, George, ed. Playing Politics with Terrorism: A User’s Guide. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
• 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.
• Khan, L. Ali. A Theory of International Terrorism: Understanding Islamic Militancy. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2006.
• 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.
• 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 Myths of Liberal Zionism. London: Verso, 2009.
• Law, Stephen, ed. Israel, Palestine and Terror. London: Continuum, 2008.
• 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.
• Masalha, Nur. A Land Without People: Israel, Transfer and the Palestinians. London: Faber and Faber, 1997.
• 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.
• Miller, Seumas. Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
• Mishal, Shaul and Reuben Aharoni. Speaking Stones: Communiques from the Intifada Underground. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994.
• Mishal, Shaul and Avraham Sela. The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
• Moghaddam, Fathali M. From the Terrorists’ Point of View. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International/Greenwood, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
• Pappé, Ilan, ed. The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.
• Primoratz, Igor, ed. Terrorism: The Philosophical Issues. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
• Primoratz, Igor, “Terrorism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2007/entries/terrorism/  
• Richardson, Louise. What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. New York: Random House, 2006.
• Ruthven, Malise. “The Rise of the Muslim Terrorists,” The New York Review of Books, (Vol. LV, No. 9), May 29, 2008. Available: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21438 
• Saul, Ben. Defining “Terrorism” in International Law. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Sayigh, Yezid. Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Seigman, Henry. “Is ‘Moral Equivalency’ Really So Wrong?” Los Angeles Times, June 18, 2006.
• 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.
• Sterba, James P., ed. Terrorism and International Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Tamimi, Azzam. Hamas: A History from Within. Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2007.
• Waldron, Jeremy. “Civilians, Terrorism, and Deadly Serious Conventions,” (February 19, 2009). Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1346360
• Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London: Verso, 2007.
• Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor. Terrorism and Collective Responsibility. London: Routledge, 1992.
• Younis, Mona N. Liberation and Democratization: The South African and Palestinian National Movements. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
• 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.

Jack Balkin's Reflections on Hate Speech

Jack Balkin has an extremely interesting post at Balkinization in which he emphasizes the role of the market in combating the kind of hate speech deployed by Pastor Jones. He contrasts Europe's tendency to regulate hate speech  by law with the U.S. tendency to use social pressures to limit such speech.

In reflecting on this, I am led to the view that neither the market nor a legal regime are terribly effective in dealing with hate speech. I am persuaded by Paul Krugman's claim in The Conscience of a Liberal that the Republicans use of race in many campaigns over decades has been a crucial factor in their rise to power (although he argues in the book that racism is on the decline and argues that the demographics are moving against the future success of such appeals).

At the same time any hate speech legislation with a prayer of passing would strike at speech far narrower than that employed by Republicans over the years. I think it is an interesting question whether narrowly crafted hate speech legislation would be effective and contribute to a decline of racism or whether it would tend to legitimize speech that did not follow within its scope and discourage public criticism. I once argued that hate speech legislation would be counterproductive because of the racist character of our society. I continue to believe the latter is true, but I am less confident in my judgment about the consequences that would follow from such legislation. I am inclined to think that hate speech codes on college campuses might be valuable in supporting dignity and equality and that the free speech values implicated are marginal.

Rights, Constitutions, Courts

Some RLL readers may be interested in this, which I just posted to SSRN.  Here's the abstract:

1. Why entrench certain rights - certain rights of the sort we today call human rights - in a constitution, rather than solely in legislation?

2. We could sensibly entrench such rights in a constitution without empowering courts to enforce the rights. Albert Venn Dicey, in An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885), wrote : “The restrictions placed on the action of the legislature under the French constitution are not in reality laws, since they are not rules which in the last resort will be enforced by the courts. Their true character is that of maxims of political morality, which derive whatever strength they possess from being formally inscribed in the constitution, and from the resulting support of public opinion.” Even if courts are not empowered to protect them (and, indeed, even if courts are so empowered), constitutionally entrenched human rights - qua “maxims of political morality” - can serve as shared, fundamental grounds of political-moral judgment in a political community. So, why empower courts to enforce - and therefore to interpret - constitutionally entrenched rights?

3. If the judiciary is to be empowered to enforce constitutionally entrenched rights, how great a power should it have? The power to have the last - the ultimate - word, overrulable only by constitutional amendment or by the judiciary itself? (I have called this the power of judicial ultimacy.) Or the power to have only the penultimate word, overridable by legislation? (I have called this the power of judicial penultimacy.) Or some even lesser power? We see the power of judicial ultimacy exercised in the United States, by the federal judiciary, and the power of judicial penultimacy exercised in (for example) Canada. We see an even lesser power exercised in the United Kingdom, under the Human Rights Act of 1998.

4. Given that, for better or worse, the U.S. Supreme Court exercises the power of judicial ultimacy, should it exercise that power deferentially, along the lines recommended by James Bradley Thayer in his classic essay “The Origin and Scope of the American Doctrine of Constitutional Law” (1893)? Or should it exercise the power nondeferentially? Should Thayerian deference be at least the default position - with exceptions for certain categories of cases? What categories?

5. What does it mean to “interpret” the Constitution. What should it mean?

I address these five sets of questions - some at greater length than others - in this writing, which is drawn from my book, The Political Morality of Liberal Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Downloadable here:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=1674754.

Recommended Reading: "Is This America?"

[Nicholas Kristof's op-ed in today's NYT:]

For a glimpse of how venomous and debased the discourse about Islam has become, consider a blog post in The New Republic this month. Written by Martin Peretz, the magazine’s editor in chief, it asserted: “Frankly, Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims.”

Mr. Peretz added: “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”

Thus a prominent American commentator, in a magazine long associated with tolerance, ponders whether Muslims should be afforded constitutional freedoms. Is it possible to imagine the same kind of casual slur tossed off about blacks or Jews? How do America’s nearly seven million American Muslims feel when their faith is denounced as barbaric?

This is one of those times that test our values, a bit like the shameful interning of Japanese-Americans during World War II, or the disgraceful refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe.

It would have been natural for this test to have come right after 9/11, but it was forestalled because President George W. Bush pushed back at his conservative ranks and repeatedly warned Americans not to confuse Al Qaeda with Islam.

Now that Mr. Bush is no longer in the White House, nativists are back on the warpath. Some opponents of President Obama are circulating bald-faced lies about him that are also scurrilous attacks on Islam itself. One e-mail bouncing around falsely accuses Mr. Obama of lying and adds, “His Muslim faith says it’s okay to lie.”

Or there’s the e-mail I received the other day from a relative, declaring: “President Obama has directed the United States Postal Service to remember and honor the Eid Muslim holiday season with a new commemorative 44 cent first class holiday postage stamp.” In fact, it was President Bush’s administration that first issued the Eid stamp in 2001 and that issued new versions after that.

Astonishingly, a Newsweek poll finds that 52 percent of Republicans believe that it is “definitely true” or “probably true” that “Barack Obama sympathizes with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” So a majority of Republicans think that our president wants to impose Islamic law worldwide.

That kind of extremism undermines our democracy, risks violence and empowers jihadis.

Newsweek quoted a Taliban operative, Zabihullah, about opposition to the mosque near ground zero: “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor. It’s providing us with more recruits, donations and popular support.” Mr. Zabihullah added, “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get.”

In America, bigoted comments about Islam often seem to come from people who have never visited a mosque and know few if any Muslims. In their ignorance, they mirror the anti-Semitism that I hear in Muslim countries from people who have never met a Jew.

One American university professor wrote to me that “every Muslim in the world” believes that the proposed Manhattan Islamic center would symbolize triumph over America. That reminded me of Pakistanis who used to tell me that “every Jew” knew of 9/11 in advance, so that none died in the World Trade Center.

It is perfectly reasonable for critics to point to the shortcomings of Islam or any other religion. There should be more outrage, for example, about the mistreatment of women in many Islamic countries, or the oppression of religious minorities like Christians and Ahmadis in Pakistan.

Europe is alarmed that Muslim immigrants have not assimilated well, resulting in tolerance of intolerance, and pockets of wife-beating, forced marriage, homophobia and female genital mutilation. Those are legitimate concerns, but sweeping denunciations of any religious group constitute dangerous bigotry.

If this is a testing time, then some have passed with flying colors. Hats off to a rabbinical student in Massachusetts, Rachel Barenblat, who raised money to replace prayer rugs that a drunken intruder had urinated on at a mosque. She told me that she quickly raised more than $1,100 from Jews and Christians alike.

Above all, bravo to those Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders who jointly denounced what they called “the anti-Muslim frenzy.”

“We know what it is like when people have attacked us physically, have attacked us verbally, and others have remained silent,” said Rabbi David Saperstein. “It cannot happen here in America in 2010.”

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick put it this way: “This is not America. America was not built on hate.”

“Shame on you,” the Rev. Richard Cizik, a leading evangelical Christian, said to those castigating Islam. “You bring dishonor to the name of Jesus Christ. You directly disobey his commandment to love your neighbor.”

Amen.

Pastor Terry Jones and President Obama

Charles Lane in the Washington Post argues that President Obama should not have put pressure on Pastor Jones to terminate his plans to burn copies of the Koran. Obama's worry is that a bonfire of this character would trigger Muslim violence. Lane thinks instead that Obama should have condemned the Pastor's actions and envouraged Muslims everywhere not to engage in reactive violence. Lane thinks that Obama should have celebrated the First Amendment right to engage in speech condemned by the majority.

Lane does not maintain that Obama has violated the First Amendment by his speech. My own view is that Obama should spend more time condemning Republicans for turning Muslims into scapegoats in order to curry political advantage. But I cannot resist saying that Obama's continued war in Afghanistan has done more to antagonize Muslims than Pastor Jones could ever do. Obama is not in any position to try to lead Muslims around the world to forgo reactive violence.

Reflecting on the Sabbath

The Christian Century has a review of a new book by Judith Shulevitz entitled The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time. The author is ambivalent about the Sabbath. The review describes the book as a "wide-ranging investigation of the Sabbath with stories of her own persistent struggle." The book covers not only standard religious sources, but also Hannah Arendt, romantic poets, and Stalin. The review by Dorothy Bass concludes that the book is an important contribution to the literature on the Sabbath and an important reflection on religious life itself. Bass hopes that the honesty of the author about her ambivalence toward the Sabbath will inspire similar honesty in her readers "as we help one another to discern the contours of faithful living in the information age."

Among other things, I try to follow the practice of engaging in spiritual reading on the Sabbath. But I have never read material about the Sabbath on the Sabbath. I am not sure whether it is better to read this book as a preparation for the Sabbath or whether reflecting on the Sabbath on the Sabbath in this way makes sense (but I share Shulevitz's sense that getting caught up in rules about the Sabbath is not spiritually productive). I am sure that I want to read this book. 

The Religious Right is Not Dead

The Religious Right stalled many years ago in recruiting new members (just about the time that the media began to notice its existence); it has not fared well in the last two elections; its agenda is of no interest to the present Congress; and the Tea Party has stolen its headlines. But, beneath the national radar it is  engaged in heady duty activity to help the Republican Party. You can find a special report at Americans United. 

Inequality, Asset Price Bubbles, and Depressions

It's great to be reminded of Steve's terrific post on inequality from this past July.  I want in particular to recommend the double-issue of The Nation that Steve cited that month.  It is available here: http://www.thenation.com/article/36894/inequality-america .  In addition to Reich's piece, there are thoughtul pieces by Dean Baker, Jeff Madrick, and others.

Reich's mention of a possible link between growing wealth- and income-inequality on the one hand, and asset price bubbles and busts -- hence recessions and depressions -- on the other, is especially worth noting and exploring.  Two old acquaintances of mine, Dave Moss at the Harvard Business School, and Richard Freeman with Harvard's Economics Department and NBER, have in separate empirical studies found a pronounced correlation between wealth- and income-inequality on the one hand, and financial asset price bubbles and busts on the other hand.  The link is robust across continents and centuries. 

The mechanisms that Moss and Freeman posit to account for the correlations, however, I think inadequate.  They speculate that as the rich grow richer, they are able to procure laxer and laxer regulation of financial markets.  While there is doubtless some truth in that, I think the story inadequate because I don't think asset price bubbles are the product of lax regulation so much as they are the product of central banks' and other government organs' failure to recognize the sense in which bubbles and bursts are collective action problems, and their consequent failure to use monetary and tax policy, respectively, to address those problems on behalf of the collectivity.  (I've harped on this point before, and linked to some articles I've written on it, so I won't harp much now.) 

If I am right about this, then the role that wealth- and income-inequality play is that of instigating and fueling the collective action problem that is the asset price bubble itself.  More specifically, the story is a Keynesian one, in which greater wealth yields a diminishing marginal propensity to consume and a correspondingly higher marginal propensity either to invest or to speculate.  The first of those developments of course yields lower consumer demand and hence lower working class incomes and growing consumer debt meant to maintain purchasing power.  The second for its part yields hyperinflation in financial asset markets -- a vicious cycle of price rises that can only be slowed either by (a) higher interest rates or tightened money supplies that risk worsening the lower consumer demand and lower working class income problems, or (b) higher capital gains taxes that tamp down the incentives of rich speculators to speculate and at any rate channel the 'winnings' to the general public. 

A colleague and I are now at work on an empirical project aimed to test this hypothesis.  Details to come.  But what can be said even now is that it is somewhat suprising that so few seem thus far to have considered this proposed mechanism.  Reich in this respect represents a refreshing change of pace.  Thanks again to Steve for drawing our attention to him. 

Andrew Bacevich and the Limits of American Military Power

Alternet has an interesting interview with Andrew Bacevich about his new book Washington Rules. Bacevich served twenty-three years in the U.S. army and is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His previous book is The New American Militarism. The book includes a stinging defense of our defense policy. Bacevich maintains: “The notion that we should take seriously the ambitions of Osama Bin Laden to create a new caliphate, uniting the entire Islamic world under his control, is preposterous. He’s no more likely to create a new caliphate than I am to become the next pope in Rome. The threat ought to have been categorized, and today should be categorized, as a form of international criminal conspiracy: a kind of Mafia that derives a certain amount of its energy by perverting a religious tradition. And the proper response to an international criminal conspiracy is an international police effort.

“Our approach -- President Bush’s approach now continued in Afghanistan by President Obama, which emphasizes invading, occupying and then trying to transform countries -- doesn’t work, costs way too much money, expends far too many American lives, and at the end of the day probably serves more than anything else to simply exacerbate the number of people who see us as infidels and occupiers.”

Bacevich has interesting things to say about why we pursue this policy of folly and he regards Obama as more morally culpable than Bush. The interview is well worth reading.

 

God''s Presence, Civil Religion, and Summer Reading

Many of the contributors at the Immanent Frame were asked to comment on their summer reading. Their responses are well worth reading – many good suggestions. One of the books I enjoyed the most this summer is An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Taylor Brown. The book details the many ways we encounter God (or should encounter God if we pay attention) in places far beyond the walls of a church building. Stephen H. Webb traces God’s presence in a different way in a 2004 book: American Providence. Webb thinks that God works through history and that God is working through the U.S. to promote democracy around the world.

I think liberal theology must settle on a less confident view of how God works in human history. It is quite difficult for me to accept Webb’s sunny view of the U.S. role in the world. Indeed, I find Noam Chomsky’s characterization of the U.S. role to be far more compelling. Another reaction I had to Webb’s book is that the link of God to American Providence is a part of what the Republicans are offering up as a part of our civil religion. This led me to explore Robert Bellah’s essays on civil religion (in the Robert Bellah Reader) where I discovered that it was a major point of his initial essay on civil religion and many of his subsequent essays to combat the kind of views entertained by Webb. For me, at least, Bellah’s essays are a joy to read. Similarly, Sidney Mead’s The Nation With the Soul of a Church is an oldie, but goodie in that it has insightful things to say about the role of civil religion in democratic life.

A Great Ecumenical Theologian, Raimon Panikkar, Has Died

If you're not familiar with Panikkar, a Roman Catholic priest, take the time to read his obituary in today's New York Times. Here is a link to Pannikkar's Gifford Lectures, published last year as The Rhythm of Being.

Catholics, the Non-Religious, and Demographics

One striking set of facts discussed in the forthcoming book American Grace is that the three largest groups with attitudes about religion in the U.S. are first, Catholics; second, those who are not religious (17%); and third, those who have left the Catholic Church (10%, the second and third groups overlap to some extent). The Catholic Church's preminent position in size has been maintained despite a large loss of members primarily because of the influx of Latinos (due to immigration and population growth). Latino(a) Catholics are understudied.

The second group is particularly attractive to young people. According to Putnam and Campbell, the attraction of young people to the second group is primarily a backlash against the religious right. The young associate religion with the political right. Although the religious right stopped growing many years ago, attention to the religious right did not; indeed, it pretty much started about the time the religious right stopped growing. The authors see the young as a fertile group that could be attracted to the religious left and discuss various efforts to attract that group including those by the emerging church movement.

Amazing Grace

I am at the Political Science conference. I attended a panel on a forthcoming book on the sociology of religion by Robert Putnam and David Campbell called American Grace. Suffice it to say it will be a must read for us all: a long book packed with findings and insight about religion in America. One of the disturbing findings (at least to me) is that politics determines one’s religious beliefs, not the other way around. I wondered if a primary conception of God as loving or one of judgment (of course, the two are not mutually exclusive could explain a significant portion of the difference in attitudes). Putnam said they asked and it explained very little (though I think those differences might be important factors in people’s minds with different views as to what it means to be a God of love).

Putnam did say that the love/judgment attitude about God is related to trust. If you regard God primarily as a God of love, you are more likely to trust people; less so if you regard God primarily as a God of judgment.

Sufi Poetry—1

 

  

“The Arabic world abounds with poetry festivals. Iran’s heritage of great love poetry is close on the lips and in the hearts of a large percentage of Iranians. Throughout much of the classical Islamic world, poetry is at the center of cultural life.”—Michael Sells

 

Having completed our propaedeutic for poetry and Islam, in this series of posts I’ll share some representative poems from the Islamic mystical tradition, that is, Sufism. These will be prefaced by introductory biographical sketches designed in part to shed light on the specific subject matter of the poems. Ideally, of course, one would have some familiarity with the Islamic religious tradition generally and Sufism in particular, yet it’s often been said these poems can be appreciated and enjoyed absent such knowledge, if only because they are constructed from words possessing both an indispensable exoteric or outward (zāhir) meaning and an esoteric or inward (bātin) meaning, a contrast that should not be construed as simply coextensive with the difference between the literal and the figurative. All the same, I believe the ideal reader will benefit from an acquaintance with a handful of essential Islamic terms and a basic Sufi vocabulary.

Our poems are in English translation (largely from Arabic and Persian) and it therefore seems appropriate to say a thing or two about issues invariably raised with the translation of literature and especially poetry. Here I’ll defer to the sensitive and sensible observations of the Palestinian poet, translator, and critic, Salma Khadra Jayyusi. In introducing her edited volume, Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology (1987), Jayyusi is rightly impressed by “how very similar poetries are, and how unprejudiced and competent poets easily assimilate and interpret the verse of other poets of a completely different language and culture. In this sense it is possible to say that poetry has many tongues but a single language.” Nevertheless,

 

“Some critics believe that since perfect equivalence in translation is not attainable, there is no point in attempting the task of translation at all. But what a loss it would be if no one could come to know the great poets of the human race who wrote in languages different from their own! In most cases, the only way to read the poetry of other cultures is through the medium of translation. This makes the task of translation not only a major aesthetic undertaking, but also a crucial cultural responsibility: poetry is the main vehicle for expressing the emotional experience of a people, and for revealing their deeper consciousness of the world, and it may bring the reader into a more intimate knowledge of other people’s actual life situations. [Poetry is thus like mythic literature or modern fiction, all of which communicate truths of a kind and different kinds of truth having to do with the human condition, questions of value and meaning, and the motley nature of the human character.]  If we think about it, even when poets read a foreign poetry directly in its original tongue, they tend to go through a process of translation in order to benefit from this poetry in their own work. What usually happens is that they translate this poetry in their own minds, often as they are reading it. In short, the process of translation goes on, in one way or another, all the time.”

 

The following will suffice as an introduction to a few fundamental Sufi concepts:

 

The Sufi Path has been described by some as primarily “a path of love,” one in which “the human soul searches out God, and if the grace of God falls upon the searcher, then he or she finds fanā’ (annihilation)  in God and ultimately baqā’ [‘abiding’] or eternal existence in the consciousness of God” (Jamal, tr. and ed. 2009: xx). I’m inclined to disagree with arguments on behalf of the primacy of love in Sufism, however accurate the definitions here of fanā’ and baqā’.  Fortunately, I can appeal to one of the foremost experts on Sufism in our time, the Iranian born Islamic philosopher, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, for a different characterization, one that posits instead the primacy of “gnosis,” all the while recognizing a prominent role for love in Islamic spirituality:

 

“According to Sufism, the supreme goal of human life is to attain Truth, which is also Reality, the source of all reality, and whose attainment, as also stated by Christ, makes us free, delivering us from the bondage of ignorance. Although deeply involved with love, and also on a certain level with action, Sufism is at the highest level a path of knowledge (ma‘rifah in Arabic and ‘irfān in Persian), a knowledge that is illuminative and unitive, a knowledge whose highest object is the Truth as such, that is, God, and subsequently the knowledge of things in relation to God. [….] The knowledge of the Truth is like the light of the sun while love is like the heat that always accompanies that light” (Nasr 2007: 30).

 

And now we can proceed to account for the relation between the attainment of fanā’ and baqā’ and this Truth, this Reality, or God. Fanā’ is the spiritual experience of loss of individual identity or sense of self in the unity and oneness (tawhīd) of God. God is, so to speak, and in the end, the only (or ultimate) Reality. Fanā suggests the end of purely individual awareness, a condition later symbolized with the metaphor of the Black Light, “the light of bewilderment; when the divine light fully appears in the mystic’s consciousness, all things disappear instead of remaining visible (medieval and Renaissance mystics in Germany would speak of the überhelle Nacht). Such is the experience of fanā’—a blackout of everything until the mystic perceives that this blackness is ‘in reality the very light of the Absolute-as-such’…” (Schimmel 1975: 144). Baqā, on the other hand, “refers to the paradoxical experience of surviving an encounter with the divine,” an encounter which results in the utter effacement of individual identity (Renard: 21) (in which case we might ask, ‘who’ or ‘what’ is having the mystical experience?), and is seen as the complementary correlative of fanā. Such subsistence in God finds the soul “travers[ing] ever new abysses of the fathomless divine being, of which no tongue can speak” (Schimmel 1975: 306), reminding us of what philosophers of mysticism have labeled “pure consciousness events” (PCE), the alleged “’emptying out’ by a subject of all experiential content and phenomenological qualities, including concepts, thoughts, sense perception, and sensuous images” (Gerome Gellman), as well as the theological rationale for apophatic mysticism.  Nasr proffers the following description: “to be fully human is to realize our perfect solitude and to remove the veil of separative existence through spiritual practice so that God, transcendent and immanent within us, can utter ‘I’” (Nasr: 13).

Subsistence in God has also been defined as “the annihilation of annihilation” (fanā’ al-fanā’). It is just this pinnacle of mystical experience that is said to be responsible for spontaneous ecstatic utterances (shathīyāt) on the order of Hallāj’s notorious proclamation, “I am the Truth.” Nasr explains: “It is through al-fanā’ that human beings gain the ‘Truth of Certainty’ (haqq al-yaqīn). The person in whom such a truth has become all-pervasive is called muhaqqiq, literally, the person in whom Truth has become realized [This sounds remarkably similar to Gandhi’s unconventional conception of avatāra in Hinduism, which is traditionally understood to mean a divine ‘descent’ or ‘incarnation,’ but which Gandhi interpreted to indicate man’s wish to become like God. In the words of Margaret Chatterjee’s discussion of Gandhi’s account, ‘It is possible for every human being to become perfect, as God is, and it is necessary for us to aspire towards it.’] ; this person has become embellished with the Qualities of God…” (Nasr: 135-136). The Qualities of God are equivalent to the “names of God” as well as the “character traits” (akhlāq) of God, as in the hadīth attributed to the Prophet: “Assume the character traits of God” (takhallaqū bi akhlāq). And yet “these states are granted only to the saintly and God-graced few. For most, the Path is a path of loving God through his manifestations [what Hindus call ‘bhakti yoga,’ the path of love and devotion to God most accessible to the masses, the path of knowledge or wisdom, jñāna yoga, being the prerogative of the few]. This is the message Sufism conveys to the common believer: love God, love God’s creation and praise Him and remember Him all the time” (Jamal: xx). Profane or romantic love, that is, the “love of created things” (‘ishq-e majāzī), while in the end illusory, is no less important insofar as it can prepare one for and thus serve as a bridge to true love, that is, the love of God.

 

Rābi`a al-`Adawīyya, our first poet, was born in Basra, the city of date palm forests and salt marshes at the head of the Persian Gulf, in 95/714 or 99/717-8. She died in the former garrison town in 185/801. Rābi`a represents the pinnacle of the Basran tradition of women’s ascetic spirituality within Islam. Within Sufism, she is one of the (if not the) earliest exponents and dramatic exemplars of “love-mysticism.” As John Renard notes in his Historical Dictionary of Sufism (2005), “She is one of the few women who consistently merited a place in hagiographic anthologies over the centuries.”

Aptly described as an “ascetic of extreme otherworldliness” (Smith 2001: 105), Rābi`a’s life was bound by an ascetic triune of prayer, poverty (faqr) and seclusion that encompassed the threefold prescription of Sufi conduct: “little food, little sleep, little talk.” Her uncompromising and lifelong ascetic regimen required periodic desert sojourns and the construction of a simple hut for devotional retreat. She defined for the Sufi novice the requisite path of renunciation, the underlying rationale for which is a single-minded and wholehearted love (mahabba) of God.

Physically frail and frequently ill, Rābi`a was no less renowned for the rigors of her asceticism (both ill-health and longevity have been attributed to her vigilant asceticism!). She is reputed to have refused several offers of marriage, preferring the celibate life. Although no school was founded in her name, women and more often men, came for spiritual advice and instruction in deference to her informal mastery of early Sufi doctrine and practice.

The picture of a “highly-strung and emotional recluse” painted by an early biographer suffers in comparison with Sulamī’s portrait of her in his Dhikr an-niswa al-muta `abbidāt as sūfiyyāt (Memorial of Female Sufi Devotees) as “a rational and disciplined teacher who demonstrates her mastery of important mystical states, such as truthfulness (sidq), self-criticism (muhāsaba), spiritual intoxication (sukr), love for God (mahabba), and gnosis (ma`rifa)” (Cornell 1999: 62).

No matter how wondrous, God’s works are but veils obscuring His beauty and essence, obstacles in the way of eventual union of the lover with the Beloved. Thus Rābi`a’s conception of repentance (tawba) is more than mere remorse for sinning and the corresponding resolve to sin no more: repentance denotes the determination to turn away from all save God. Yet, perchance paradoxically, for Rābi`a tawba is a “gift [of grace] from God.” As such, it is a prelude to or necessary condition for a host of psycho-spiritual virtues and emotional dispositions; but most importantly, tawba allows for the abnegation of personal will in the will of God (theologically derived from tawhīd, the acknowledgement and awareness of the oneness of God). In addition to the longing of the lover for the Beloved (shawq), or the yearning of the soul purged of nafs (baser passions, selfish desires) to experience intimacy with God (uns), Rābi`a’s love mysticism therefore entails utter acquiescence of the lover in the will of the Beloved (ridā’, lit. contentment or satisfaction). Not surprisingly, ridā’ signifies God’s satisfaction with his loving servant’s obedience, which is metaphysically if not logically prior to the subjective experience of ridā’, that is, the lover’s contentment with her lot in life, her share of misfortune, adversity or suffering. Like the God of the Hebrew Bible, Rābi`a’s God is a jealous God “who will suffer none to share with Him that love which is due to Him alone” (Smith 2001: 131), hence the prohibition of idolatry (shirk in Islam, the theological converse of tawhīd). Finally, disinterested love of God means the obedient servant is ideally motivated by neither hope for eternal reward (Paradise), nor fear of eternal punishment (Hell). In a theistic variant of Euthyphro’s question, Rābi`a asks, “Even if Heaven or Hell were not, does it not behove us to obey Him?”

While a foretaste of the union of the lover with the Beloved is possible in this vale of tears, only death can bring about kashf, the final unveiling of the Beloved to his lover(s). And it is thus mahabba that, in the end, makes possible knowledge (ma`rifa) of God. Ascetic practice serves both to heighten the sense of separation from, and intensify the longing for, the Beloved: acute awareness of the sin of separation assuming the form of grief and sorrow in Basran mysticism. Such lamentation was often vividly expressed—Rābi`a included—through incessant weeping (bukā’), the prolonged practice of which sometimes led to blindness (Cornell 1991: 61).

Although love for the Creator turned her away from love of created things, she faced her separation from the Beloved with a patience (sabr) and gratitude (shukr) that transcended any feelings of grief and sorrow, befitting one enthralled by a vision of eventual union with the Divine.

Rābi`a’s poetry illustrates the fact the “early Sufis were mystics and philosophers first and poets second. Their greatness, in other words, lies not in their poetry but in their lives and utterances” (Mahmood Jamal). Most Sufis would no doubt prefer to be remembered for “their lives and utterances,” but several later Sufis, most conspicuously and deservedly, Rūmī, are best known in the first instance as poets.

 

You Have Infused My Being

You have infused my being

Through and through,

As an intimate friend must

Always do.

So when I speak I speak of only You

And when silent, I yearn for You.

 

If I worship You*

O Lord, if I worship You

Because of fear of hell

Then burn me in hell.

If I worship You

Because I desire paradise

Then exclude me from paradise.

But if I worship You

For Yourself alone

Then deny me not

Your eternal beauty.

 

My Rest is in My Solitude

Brethren, my rest is in my solitude,

And my Beloved is ever in my presence.

Nothing for me will do but love of Him;

By love of Him I am tested in this world.

Whereso I be I contemplate His beauty;

He is my prayer-niche; He mine orient is.

Died I of love and found not His acceptance,

Of mankind I most wretched, woe were me!

Heart’s mediciner, Thou All of longing, grant

Union with Thee; ‘twill cure to the depth.

O Thou, ever my joy, my life, from Thee

Is mine existence and mine ecstasy.

From all creation I have turned away

For union with Thee mine utmost end.

            (Martin Lings, tr.)

 

In My Soul

In my soul

there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church

where I kneel.

Prayer should bring us to an altar where no walls or names exist.

Is there not a region of love where the sovereignty is

illumined nothing,

where ecstasy gets poured into itself

and becomes lost,

where this wing is fully alive

but has no mind or body?

In my soul

there is a temple, a shrine, a mosque, a church

that dissolve,

that dissolve in God

            (Daniel Ladinsky, tr.)

 

*This poem is virtually identical to a prayer attributed to St. Francis Xavier, which I discovered in reading James Kellenberger’s discussion of motives for religious belief in The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (1985: 125). Unfortunately, Kellenberger does not provide us with a reference. Another version, much longer, but containing the same religious sentiment regarding heaven and hell, is found here. Many of the poems of Rābi`a have not been authenticated, so it’s possible that this is properly attributed to St. Francis Xavier, however, he lived and died in the sixteenth century (and visited parts of the Islamic world in his extenstive missionary travels) and Rābi`a in the ninth, so perhaps the borrowing runs in the other direction. I’ve yet to come across any discussion of this in the scholarship on Rābi`a.

 

References:

· Cornell, Rkia E., tr. Early Sufi Women—Dhikr an-niswa al-muta `abbidat as sufiyyat, by Abu `Abd ar-Rahman as-Sulami. Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 1999.

· Jamal, Mahmood (tr. and ed.). Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi. London: Penguin Classics/Books, 2009.

· Jayyusi, Salma Khadra, ed. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

· Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. New York: HarperOne, 2007.

· Renard, John. Historical Dictionary of Sufism. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. 

· el-Sakkani, Widad. First Among Sufis: The Life and Thought of Rabia al-Adawiyya, the Woman Saint of Basra. London: Octagon Press, 1982.

· Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975.

· Smith, Margaret. Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rābi`a and Other Women Mystics in Islam. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2001.