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Weigel's Idea of a Well-Calibrated Moral Compass

George Weigel makes some recommendations for Christmas books today on First Things, and here's one of them:

Portrait of a Spy, by Daniel Silva (Harper): It’s hard not to get addicted to Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels of international skullduggery. James Bond and his supporting cast were cardboard cartoons compared to the fictional characters Dan Silva, a man with a well-calibrated moral compass, has created. 

Now, of course we shouldn't confuse the author Daniel Sliva with the fictional character Gabriel Allon, but if Silva actually approves of the things he has his character do, it's very disturbing that a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (Weigel) thinks Silva has a "well-calibrated moral compass." In the last Silva novel I read (and I confess I find them great thrillers), Allon invents his own "enhanced interrogation technique," which he calls "fire boarding." He has people tied to chairs and positions them in front of a fireplace with a roaring fire. He then tips them into the fireplace so their faces are directly in the flames. He makes sure, when he shoots and kills the first one to be fire boarded, that blood spatters all over the next candidate. I checked Amazon to see if any other readers were as disturbed as I was about this, and one reader puts it better and more succinctly than I can:

A trained assassin who executed six of the terrorists who killed Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Allon is certainly no stranger to killing, but the body count in this novel is higher than I can ever remember in this series, with many of the assassinations being done by Gabriel Allon himself. More than thirty violent deaths occur during the novel as Allon tries to save his own world from disaster. One scene of torture involving Allon ("fire-boarding") is so stomach-turning—and, frankly, so sadistic—that it has permanently affected my view of Allon as a "hero." Silva does a terrific job of depicting the inner torments that drive Allon to such extremes, but while some may justify this torture scene in terms of the ends justifying the means, I found it so over-the-top that I could no longer excuse Allon's brutal responses, even considering his extreme stress. 

Yes, Gabriel Allon has "inner torments," but they never seem to bother him enough for him to stop the torture and assassinations. The novels are great reads, but if Silva expects us to take Allon to be a hero whose methods are justified because they are all done for the state of Israel, I question the calibration of his moral compass. 

Twenty Examples of the Obama Administration Assault on Domestic Civil Liberties

Bill is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans.  He also serves as Associate Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He can be reached at Quigley77@gmail.com

 

The Obama administration has affirmed, continued and expanded almost all of the draconian domestic civil liberties intrusions pioneered under the Bush administration.  Here are twenty examples of serious assaults on the domestic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, the right to privacy, the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and freedom of conscience that have occurred since the Obama administration has assumed power.  Consider these and then decide if there is any fundamental difference between the Bush presidency and the Obama presidency in the area of domestic civil liberties.

 

 

Patriot Act

 

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

 

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

 

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration. 

 

Wiretaps

 

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

 

Criminalization of Speech

 

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet. 

 

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

 

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes. 

 

Top Secret America

 

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

 

Other Domestic Spying

 

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.  

 

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.   

 

Wikileaks

 

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks. 

 

Censorship of Books by the CIA

 

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11.   Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.  

 

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

 

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.   

 

Technological Spying

 

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

 

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from review

 

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.  

 

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal. 

 

Material Support

 

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy.   The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

 

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

 

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

 

Punishing Whistleblowers

 

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

 

Bradley Manning

 

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.          

 

Solitary Confinement

 

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

 

Special Administrative Measures

 

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring.   The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

 

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

 

+++++++++++++++++

 

 

Our Perverse First Amendment

In recent years the Supreme Court has ruled that depictions of animal cruelty packaged to entertain sadists, violent video games sold to children, the intentional infliction of emotional distress of mourners at military funerals, and unlimited spending by corporations in election campaigns are protected freedom of speech. But the Court has also ruled that sleeping in a park across from the White House as a part of a demonstration against the housing policies of the Federal Government is not protected under the First Amendment.

I do not believe demonstrators should have carte blanche to violate laws. I, for example, believe that the enforcement of anti-noise ordinances (for nighttime violations) in residential neighborhoods can appropriately be applied against demonstrators. (I doubt by the way that nightly drum beating in residential neighborhoods by demonstrators has helped their cause). But the enforcement of curfew ordinances or anti-sleeping measures against demonstrators seems to me to strike at the heart of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is run into the ground when it is called to serve the makers of violent video games, but the First Amendment is best interpreted to protect those who dissent against existing customs, habits, traditions, institutions, and authorities. Squelching these demonstrations is an exercise of naked power. It is undemocratic. It should be regarded as unconstitutional.

The Court imagines that the failure to protect demonstrators is justifiable because government is entitled to make reasonable time, place, and manner regulations. Leaving aside the preposterous deference that is paid to government officials when they invoke this doctrine, it is time to remember Justice Thurgood Marshall’s observation that, “The consistent imposition of silence [using time, place, and manner regulations] upon all may fulfill the dictates of an evenhanded content neutrality. But it offends our ‘profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’”

Socialist Experimentation in Richmond, California

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

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

By way of background, I proffer the following readings:

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

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

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

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

Herman Cain, Religion, and Money

The Wall Street Journal carried a front page story about Herman Cain last Friday. The Journal reported that Cain steered clear of the strife surrounding the civil rights movement including the killing of four black girls in a church bombing during his first semester in college. Cain remarked, “I wasn’t determined to make social change. I wanted to earn some change. I wanted to make some money.” The Journal refers to this as part of Cain’s “plain-spoken charm,” and continues to report that always going to church was a mainstay of Cain’s value system.  Perhaps we can be forgiven if we fail to see the charm in this or if we wonder just what church preached that people should go out and earn money rather than helping others. (In fairness, the prestige associated with making money and the all-consuming desire for it is not the exclusive province of Herman Cain).

I would have thought that a focus on money or the material was the antithesis of religion. Of course, we all focus on the material and are more self-absorbed than we should be. But this is a vice. It is not a virtue, let alone charming. I am reminded of an ideal explained by Yale theologian David Kelsey. He compares the astronomy of Ptolemy with the astronomy of Copernicus. Ptolemy thought earth was the center of the universe and all other entities revolved around it for its benefit. Copernicus showed that earth was one of many entities interrelated in a dynamic system that orbits around the sun. Kelsey argues that the ethical challenge is to move from a Ptolemaic vision of the self to a Copernican view. Easy, it is not. I doubt that many people fully get there. But, if the goal of life is money and power, Copernicus is out of sight.

"The rich get rich and the poor get laid off"

By Stewart Lansley.  [From the most recent issue of The Tablet:  The International Catholic Weekly (published in London):]

In the 1920s and 1930s the wealthy were prospering amid economic upheaval. With the same happening today, a new study of inequality argues that gaps in wealth are the cause of instability and are deeply damaging as well as unjust

Over two years before the current occupation by anti-capitalist protesters of nearby land, St Paul’s Cathedral was the scene of another event about the merits of contemporary capitalism – a spirited debate on the role of the growing income gap in market-led economies.

Sharing a platform with canon theologian Nicholas Sagovsky and then deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats Vince Cable, the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs and a former adviser to Mrs Thatcher, Brian Griffiths, defended higher inequality “as the way to achieve greater prosperity for all”.

Lord Griffiths was espousing one of the central claims of the still dominant free-market school: that the accumulation of large fortunes might bring a bigger divide, but, by encouraging business and wealth creation, it raises growth rates and makes everybody better off.

While recent years have seen several hard-hitting and hotly debated critiques of the growing divide, these have concentrated on issues of injustice. But another equally important, but largely ignored, issue is that of its impact on the way economies function.

Are Lord Griffiths and his co-believers right in claiming superior economic benefits from higher levels of inequality? The evidence suggests otherwise. The income gulf has soared, but without the promised pay-off of wider economic progress. On all measures of economic performance bar inflation, the post-1980 era of rising inequality has a much poorer record than the egalitarian post-war decades.

We Have Lost Our Democracy and Getting It Back Will Require More than Brave Young People Sleeping in Tents

I reported the other day here that even Gandhi came to the conclusion that mass strikes and boycotts were necessary in some circumstances to effect social change. Surely, in our country this is one of those times. One in three Americans are poor and unemployment exceeds 9%, but a party of traitors would rather sabotage the economy than do something to help them. Meanwhile, the Republicans spew out propaganda denying global warming (let alone presenting proposals to solve the problem), maintain that government should not spend any money except, of course, to build a moat or a wall along the Mexican border, pass laws designed to disenfranchise those who are unlikely to vote for them, protect the incomes of millionaires and billionaires, fight regulations designed to protect the health and safety of those Americans fortunate enough to have a job, and otherwise dance to the whims of business corporations in response to our system of legalized bribery. At the same time, the Democrats have given billions to banks without requiring that they loan money in ways that would help the economy. And they, with the Republicans, are responsible for the deregulation of the banks that led to the mess we are now in.

In this context, to complain that the Occupy movement needs specific proposals is laughable. We have a non-responsive government. Is there anyone who thinks that if the Occupy movement produced a five point proposal that our corporate lackeys in government would rush to adopt it?  Of course, there are obvious moves to be made (a constitutional amendment depriving corporations of their power would be at the top of the list), but what is needed is an even larger movement  demanding democracy .

Illegal Immigration, Re-Visioned

Free Speech for the Rich and Pepper Spray for the Poor

John Kenneth Galbreath famously remarked that the United States has socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. Now comes Robert Reich (robertreich.org) to argue that we have free speech for the rich and intimidation of the poor. After detailing the disproportionate power of the rich, Reich says, "Yet when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with all this, they’re told the First Amendment doesn’t apply. Instead, they’re treated as public nuisances – clubbed, pepper-sprayed, thrown out of public parks and evicted from public spaces.

"Across America, public officials are saying Occupiers have to go. Even in universities – where free speech is supposed to be sacrosanct – peaceful assembly is being met with clubs and pepper spray.  

"The First Amendment is being stood on its head. Money speaks, and an unlimited amount of it can now be spent bribing and cajoling politicians. Yet peaceful assembly is viewed as a public nuisance and removed by force."

Gandhi and the Ethics and Politics of Social Movements

I just finished Gandhi’s Political Philosophy by Bhiku Parekh, a book that appears in Patrick O’Donnell’s marvelous recommended reading list on Gandhi. See here. I picked this book because I am interested in the ethics and politics of social change, and I have read other good work by Parekh. The book is well worth reading (though it is out of print, so try your library). The book admirably traces Gandhi’s remarkable and inspiring religious and political views and the relationship between the two. Although Parekh is an admirer of Gandhi, he is critical as well.  Gandhi’s faith in the ultimate morality of human beings did not fully take into account the hard heartedness and sadistic character of all too many in power. He sometimes overestimated the role that moral suasion (as opposed to power) played in accomplishing the social change for which he pressed. And most disturbing to me, his account of the relationship between love and detachment wrongly criticized emotional attachments with other human beings.

But these criticisms are dwarfed by the power of Gandhi’s vision of Indian culture which he thought of in what we would now call multicultural terms, his emphasis on and discussion of the importance of spirituality and his criticism of the material, his penetrating criticism of the corrosive effect of unbridled capitalism on culture (particularly industrialization – though Parekh argues he goes too far with the latter), his perceptive (but exaggerated) analysis of the extent to which the dominators need the cooperation of the oppressed to succeed, his interesting analysis of the Divine  particularly the extent to which humans participate in the Divine, his fresh perspective on the importance of drawing from the best in each of the world religions while expressing support for the idea  persons do so from within their own traditions, and his amazing courage and commitment.

Gandhi came to believe that in some of his struggles that mass strikes and boycotts (but not violence) were needed to force oppressors to come to a moral reconsideration of their actions. Reinhold Niebuhr would have argued that to combat power abuse a countervailing source of power is needed and that Gandhi’s rallying of power accounted for his success.

I attended a panel this weekend at the American Academy of Religion that compared the gospel of love in the work of Walter Rauschenbusch, a key figure in the Social Gospel Movement in the United States, and arguments for the limits of love in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. Although Gandhi was not mentioned, I was struck by the similarities between Rauschenbusch and Gandhi and the extent to which the criticisms Niebuhr leveled at Rauschenbusch apply to Gandhi as well.  I was also struck by the relevance of the work of all three as applied to the ethics and politics of contemporary social movements.

The Study of Religions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

References & Further Reading:

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

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

Freud Among the Philosophers

This is the latest in a series of fairly short posts introducing Freudian psychoanalysis (see 1. here, 2. here, 3. here, 4. here, 5. here, 6. here, 7. here, 8. here, 9. here, and 10. here).

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

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

American Jews, Israel, and Palestine

[From Sightings, 11/17/11, published by the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago.]

Do We Stand Together? American Jewish Identity and Voices of Dissent

by Lilah Shapiro

In a recent article in the Jewish Weekly reflecting on the release of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a woman is quoted as saying that she envies Israelis because they have a country in which human life is so valued that they are willing to trade thousands of accused criminals to ensure the return of one man. The terms of Shalit's release, coupled with the recent campaign for Palestinian state recognition by the United Nations, and last month's UNESCO vote, have generated a renewed feeling of immediacy and urgency within the American Jewish community regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations and Israeli policy. Amongst American Jews there is a widespread interpretation and assertion that the brokering of Shalit's freedom stands to remind the world of that which is special and unique about Israel as a state founded on and ruled by Jewish values. But this line of reasoning is tenuous. While the Shalit deal has allowed Jews to publicly celebrate the extraordinary value placed on human life by Judaism and, in turn--so the argument goes--Israel, it has also invited comparisons of the Israeli government's treatment of its Jewish and Palestinian populations. Does Israel (and Judaism) place high value on all human life, or on Jewish life in particular? It is striking that many American Jews, who take great pride in their cultural relativism, outspokenness, and social justice orientation in other realms of their life, do not pose these and other important and self-defining questions. Rather they remain silent or stand firm in their public endorsement of the party line. This raises the question: Why are American Jews reluctant to publicly vocalize any critique of Israel?

The Distortion of Free Speech

In recent years the Supreme Court has protected depictions of animal cruelty, violent video games, and tobacco advertising all in the name of freedom of speech. It has protected unlimited corporate political spending on the same ground despite its undermining of America democracy.

Meanwhile lower courts are maintaining that the enforcement of curfew laws is more important than protecting protests aimed at criticizing our loss of democracy. Perhaps this is what our Constitution requires. If so, we need a new one.

Followup to Steve Shiffrin's Post Below

Steve's post below:  Compelling Tobacco Companies to Carry Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packages.

Here's what Milton scholar and law professor Stanley Fish has to say in his post "The Tobacco Horror Show," New York Times online, 11/14/11:

I’m sure you’ve noticed those TV ads for pharmaceutical products that include an incredibly long list of side effects and possible hazards recited by a cheerful voice as men and women are shown living the happy lives made possible by a drug that can inflict on them everything from bloating and joint pain to death. This combination of positive and negative communications is mandated by the government requirement that drug manufacturers must disclose all the risk factors attending the product they are hawking.

The result is what one might call the “battle of information.” The drug companies are providing information about the benefits of their product, and under duress (it would not be their choice to do this) they are also providing information about the dangers of that same product. It is their hope that the positive message will have more impact than the negative one, and that hope is supported by the fact that they get to tell their happy story in images (look what this drug can do for you), while the other, distressing story (hear what this drug can do to you) is conveyed by words. The companies are counting on the fact that not all information-delivery systems are equal and, as the old proverb goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

The same dynamics are on display in a case decided on Nov. 7 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, but the positions are reversed: it is the government that is deploying images and the drug companies — in this case tobacco companies — that are standing up for words.

The case — R. J. Reynolds et al v. United States Food and Drug Administration — concerns the F.D.A.’s plan to augment the textual warnings on cigarette packages with graphic color images, including diseased lungs, a cadaver on an autopsy table and a man blowing smoke from a hole in his throat. The tobacco companies requested an injunction on the implementation of the plan until certain constitutional matters could be resolved in the courts. They argued that the “mandatory graphic images unconstitutionally compel speech”; for were they in place every cigarette package would be a “mobile billboard” for a message the companies did not choose to proclaim, but one they were required to display and, in effect, pay for. (This of course would not be materially different from the list of risk factors drug manufacturers are required to insert in ads they pay for.)

The companies also claim that “the purpose and effect of the warnings is to drown out Plaintiff’s own constitutionally protected speech and replace it with the Government’s emotionally-charged anti-smoking message.” “Emotionally-charged” is the key phrase here. The companies do not object to particular images, but to the use of images at all because they speak to the emotions and, in this instance, are “designed to shock, disgust and frighten” rather than “provide purely factual and uncontroversial information.”

But is the producing of an effect, even of an effect that is visceral, unrelated to the communication of information? Maybe yes if we’re talking about a horror movie where the eliciting of shock, disgust and fear is the entire point. That’s what people go to horror movies for — to experience an emotional rollercoaster that is unattached to any cognitive message.

In the case of the tobacco warnings, however, the emotions intentionally produced by the graphic images bring a cognitive message home. It is in fact a horror-message — if you smoke, all kinds of horrible things are likely to happen to you — and it is the government’s judgment, expressed in its brief, that the print warnings we are now accustomed to have become “stale” and no longer “convey [the] relevant information in an effective way,” no longer, that is, convey the message.

Of course, the tobacco industry has lived with print warnings for a long time and is fully aware of how humdrum they have become. What alarms them is the specter (another kind of horror show) of warnings that might really convey the relevant information effectively. What alarms them is not that the proposed images distort the truth, but that they tell it. “Ultimately,” the government’s brief concludes, “plaintiff’s objection to the pictorial health warnings is not that they are false, but that they are true.”

Given that the conveying of true information about the risks of a legal product has been held constitutional even when the government burdens a manufacturer’s delivery of its message, one would have expected the government to prevail. But is does not. Judge Richard J. Leon issued the injunction sought by the tobacco companies and gave as a reason the illegitimacy of images as conveyers of information: “[T]he government’s emphasis on the images’ ability to provoke emotion strongly suggests that the government’s actual purpose is not to inform, but rather to advocate a change in consumer behavior.” And again, “the graphic warnings cross the line from information to advocacy.”

This is wrong in both directions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evangelical Christians and Foreign Aid

Sightings 11/14/2011

World Vision Foreign Aid

-- Martin E. Marty

    While polarization marks and blights politics in America today, and while popular culture, commerce, and religion are afflicted with the all-or-nothing ideologies and practices that prevent the citizenry from meeting the challenges which only intensify as seasons pass, here and there and now and then Sightings spies counter-signs. While the media focus on conflict among and within religious communities, those who take the longer view can find occasions for inspiration. That I so often find such signs in publications like The Economist or The Wall Street Journal surprises some readers and perhaps needs some explaining now and then.

    A half century ago the company of historians with whom I hung out began to speak of a “two-party system” in American Protestantism and, for that matter in Catholicism and other communities. Then and ever since, the parties kept redefining themselves, drawing revised lines, seeking and finding new causes, new enemies, and new friends. The lines hardened for decades when “the Christian Right” faced off against religious expressions of “the New Left.” My work often took me to places where expectations imprisoned imaginations. Sometimes invited to mainly-evangelical conferences, I would be introduced as “the non-evangelical guest at this year’s meeting.” I would remind others that, among other things, I was the only participant who belonged to a church body which had the word “evangelical” in its very name. Enough about that.

Times have changed. Today if one has a conference or project on worthwhile causes—the environment, health care, immigration, etc. etc.—one counts on leadership from among all ages, including camps named “evangelical,” an ever more diffuse company. I like to say that within Protestantism, the most creative and venturesome people came from “the left of the right and the right of the left—which is not the center.” The former group, thoroughly evangelical, ventures into the public sector on lines of engagement, not ideology. The latter, often called moderate or liberal or mainstream, draws on the historic and theological depths of their traditions. For the better.

    This week we’ll take an example from The Wall Street Journal, where Richard E. Stearns, president of World Vision USA, makes “The Evangelical Case for Foreign Aid.” In a time of budget-cutting and neo-isolation, Stearns properly points out that evangelicals had not been visible in religious coalitions to counter the push from many politicians who would eliminate programs to “reduce global poverty and hunger, saving millions of lives.” “But why,” asks Stearns, “are evangelical Christians largely absent from this religious coalition?” While evangelicals agree with others that responding to hunger and poverty is not a partisan but a moral issue, 56 percent of them, when polled by Pew, showed that evangelicals are most ready to oppose anti-hunger and anti-poverty programs, proposing that they should be first to go. They swallow misinformation about such programs.

    Awakened when he visited scenes of crisis—which are almost everywhere—Stearns came back and worked with World Vision and other such agencies to change evangelical minds and organizations and policies. He can point to progress, even as he chides the laggards. Something new is on the way. One hopes that similarly awakened and aroused leaders in similar groups also in Catholicism and other religious circles will keep reappraising their positions, revisiting their religious sources, and not worrying about lines drawn in the prime of “The Christian Right” and “the New Left.”

References

Richard E. Stearns, “Evangelicals and the Case for Foreign Aid,” The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2011.

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

Is Occupy Wall Street a New Kind of Social Movement?

Is Occupy Wall Street a completely new kind of movement? Yes it is, according to my colleague Sidney Tarrow in an essay in Foreign Affairs. Tarrow argues that is not a movement designed to serve specific constituencies with specific policy proposals like the Civil Rights Movement or the Tea Party Movement. Nor is it just an “emotional outcry” as Andrew Young claims. Rather Tarrow suggests Occupy Wall Street is an identity movement, a “We Are Here” movement. In that respect, he says the movement is like the early days of the feminist movement.

Tarrow is a long time expert on social movements, and I am not. But I do not think the “We Are here’ characterization captures the essence of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I may be projecting, but I believe that Occupy Wall Street stands for the proposition that the U.S. has become such a corpocracy that it is no longer a democracy. It is not that the demonstrators are there; it is that the public is no longer represented. From that perspective, Occupy Wall Street is of a piece with democracy movements around the world. (Hardt and Negri take this position in the first half of their essay in Foreign Affairs before meandering off into utopian discussion, see http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136399/michael-hardt-and-antonio-negri/the-fight-for-real-democracy-at-the-heart-of-occupy-wall-street) One major difference is that many of those movements have used violence to bring about change. The dilemma facing Occupy Wall Street is that violence will not be effective in the U.S. and specific proposals addressed to the federal government have little chance of being adopted and will not solve a structural problem.

One thing that all the demonstrators surely agree upon is that our system of campaign finance must be changed. There is public support for a constitutional amendment, but corporate power will mightily resist. Interestingly, a single conservative resignation from the Supreme Court could make a significant difference in this area. But it would be far better to have a constitutional amendment emerge from a bitter struggle. I do not see violence as a pragmatic option, but I do not see significant change taking place with the sweet voice of reason unaccompanied by unpleasant confrontation. The history of labor rights and civil rights shows the necessity for such confrontation. Tarrow suggests we may have reached the kind of constituent moment of strikes and demonstrations of the 1930’s that propelled us forward into the New Deal, but he observes that the economic conditions of the 1930’s were worse than they are now. Occupy Wall Street may fade away in the depths of winter.

But it will be back. It’s  greatest ally is the venality, greed, and stupidity of corporate America and its paid supporters in Congress. The clock is ticking.

 

Hermeneutic Considerations in Reading Freud

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

Occupy Wall Street in Historical Perspective: Demanding Democracy

I just read a quite interesting book by Marc Stears called Demanding Democracy: American Radicals in Search of a New Politics. It is not an unflawed book. Indeed, in one chapter it treats Arthur Schlesinger and other consensus liberals as if they were radicals. The book has some irritating exclusions (feminism gets short shrift ; ditto for the democratic socialists – communists are not treated, presumably because they are not demanding democracy).  For an excellent review that also recommends the book, but finds much to criticize, see Peter Dorman.

What I like about the book is its combination of history, political theory, and persistent themes in activist radical politics. It compares progressives, the C.I.O., the civil rights movement, and the SDS in an interesting way and ties the intellectual contributions of Niebuhr, Lippman, and Dewey to this history in an interesting way.

A central theme of the book is to explore the question of what tactics are ethical and practical to employ in a non-democratic society in an effort to get to a democratic society where such tactics would be out of bounds. Stears also usefully contrasts deliberative democrats, agonistic realists like William Connolly, (who believe conflict is ineradicable and there is no harmonized utopia at the end of the rainbow) and his democratic radicals.  Dorman criticizes the American focus of the book suggesting that it forfeits the richness of European comparisons. I am not bothered by this, but I am moved by Dorman to order up Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age by Dan Rodgers which apparently traces the influences of European thought .

Dorman liked the book because it put ‘60’s radicals in historical perspective. I like that as well, but I like the fact that the book offers a well written historical and theoretical perspective on the questions that confront the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Compelling Tobacco Companies to Carry Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packages

Yesterday, US District Court Judge Richard Leon ruled that an FDA regulation requiring that cigarette companies carry graphic images dramatizing the health risks on cigarette packages is probably unconstitutional. Renowned first amendment attorney Floyd Abrams, who argued the case for one of the major tobacco companies, hailed the decision on the free speech ground that government should not be able to compel companies to carry advocacy against their lawful products. Appearing on a Los Angeles public radio station with him, I argued that when 400,000 people die every year because of tobacco, adding more than seventy billion dollars of costs to our health system, government has a compelling interest in minimizing those costs, an interest that outweighs the free speech interest particularly since corporations deserve little protection, if any, and that commercial speech is low in the hierarchy of valued speech.  For an edited podcast of the broadcast, see http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2011/11/08/21315/graphics-cigarette-packages/

Polling Regarding Deliberate Republican Sabotage of the Economy

About  half of the country including a slight majority of independents believe that the Republicans have deliberately sabotaged the economy for partisan political gain. Talking Points Memo discusses various polls here. If the Republicans continue to block the President's employment proposals, I would expect those numbers to go up.

Israel: A Democratic & Jewish State?

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

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

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

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

Many implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy or a Jewish State?

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

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

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

Please see the entire article at Al Jazeera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

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

Image: A Zionist poster from the 1940s reads, “Buy Local Products,” referring to goods produced by Jews. (Israel MFA)

Feminism and What's the Program?

Asking what's the program of the occupy Wall Street demonstrators reminds me of similar questions asked of feminists. Catharine MacKinnon responded to that complaint in the Afterward of Feminism Unmodifed in an illuminating way: "Audiences want to hear of the design of life after male supremacy. or, after all this negative, what do I have to say positive. This requests a construction of a future in which the present does not exist, under existing conditions. It dreams that the mind were free and could, like Milton, make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. The procedure is: imagine the future you want, construct actions or legal rules or social practices as if we were already there, and that will get us from here to there. This magical approach to social change, which is methodologically liberal, lives entirely in the head . . . .

"Not to mention that to consider 'no more rape' as only a negative, no more than an absence, shows a real failure of imagination. Why does "out now' contain a sufficiently positive vision of the future for Vietnam and Nicaragua but not for women?"

Day of Judgment

“Don’t wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.”—Albert Camus (The Fall, 1956)

The Hungarian Crown, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of the Left

Kim Scheppele gave a wonderful talk at Cornell Monday on Hungarian law and politics. As she described it, the Crown of Saint Stephen is central to Hungarian politics and the interpretation of its meaning is fraught with toxicity from a progressive perspective.  Hungarian liberals and socialists reject the Crown as a relic of a monarchial past. But Scheppele argues that the Crown is too deeply embedded in the hearts of Hungarians to let conservative interpretations of it go unanswered. Her project is to argue that the Crown is imbedded in a far more progressive tradition than is traditionally understood.

My colleague Aziz Rana challenged her approach suggesting that the left was better off trashing the Crown as a basis for politics rather than fighting to reinterpret a symbol so heavily associated with authoritarian nationalism. My view is that there is political room for both internal interpretations of the Crown and external criticism of the Crown. Even though their political stances about  the Crown are different, liberal reformers and radical critics generally benefit from the presence of the other.

I think this is connected with a post by Mike Dorf on the Occupy Wall Street movement. He suggests that the criticism that the movement has no specific program assumes that the movement is a reform movement within the democratic system. But, he suggests, more plausibly that the movement denies we have a democracy and is a movement for democracy. So understood, Dorf maintains that the call for blueprints is as out of place as it would have been in discussing the protests in Tiananmen Square.

He continues to discuss where the movement might go and that is an interesting discussion. My point, however, is that the Occupy Wall Street movement need not develop specific proposals. Occupy Wall Street works hand in hand with liberal reformers. Without movement specifics, it is not difficult for others to imagine proposals that fit with its concerns including campaign finance reform, green policies and policies that help the poor and the middle class instead of the wealthy and the large corporations. Whether in Hungary or the United States, liberals benefit from a movement that outflanks them on the left.